LONDON: For those who say they simply cannot fathom Tony Blair’s apparently willing subservience to George Bush’s Washington, his speech to this week’s joint session of the US Congress offers a clue. Mr Blair sees the world not as it is but as he thinks it should be.

His motivation is as much moral and emotional as it is intellectual. “I feel a most urgent sense of mission about today’s world,” he told America’s leaders. “We are bound together as never before... (but) the danger is disorder”.

Terrorism was the principal threat, he said, encouraging chaos and perpetuating injustice. To defeat it by delivering freedom and prosperity to countries that live in “shadow and darkness” was the primary task for 21st-century leaders, working together, not in competition.

Mr Blair understands post-imperial Britain’s limitations; in a sense, Britain is no longer big enough for him. So, in pursuit of his global mission, he looks to America, the predominant power, to lead the vital charge. “Destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time,” he told his audience.

Mr Blair’s good intentions are indisputable, his faith is plain. But his analysis, by starting in the wrong place, leads him to the wrong conclusions. History was not somehow begun again on September 11, 2001, by a single event in a single country. Terrorism is not the sudden cause but the long-standing symptom of injustice. If a third of the planet lives in poverty, if millions suffer under dictatorship, as he says, it is because the wealthiest nations, especially the US, are prepared to tolerate such a situation and, worse, exacerbate it by their selfish policies.

In the world as it is, as opposed to the Blair world of should be’s, the Bush administration’s unrelenting pursuit of national interest, its frequent, bullying use of military force, its contemptuous, divisive attitude towards Europe and the UN, and its narrow, ideological outlook render this US government the least fitted in living memory to take up the task defined by Mr Blair. Thus “our job” is not so much to back Mr Bush as to restrain him. To borrow an American phrase, wake up, Tony, and smell the coffee.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.