http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,56-2001381260,00.html

exert > Mr Blair’s most valuable stopover may have been his last, the meeting in Genoa in which he sought to mend fences with Italy after its exclusion from last month’s “summit” of Britain, France and Germany. The use of that meeting lay in its tacit
admission of the need for the players most ready to work with the United States to co-ordinate their actions outside the consensual European Union context. To exclude Italy was unnecessary and wrong. <<<<

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 02 2001
Leading article
The Blair shuttle
And some diplomatic thoughts from Dr Kissinger Tony Blair has put the best gloss on what can hardly have been a pleasant trip. After a series of difficult meetings in the Middle East, none of them with men with whom he feels much shared affection, the Prime Minister is left to insist that it is
better to “get your hands dirty” than do nothing.

We hope that he is right. Someone in this conflict without front lines has to take on the hardest cases. The Prime Minister rightly senses that part of his value to President Bush is that of conduit, even of lightning conductor. He has been helped in his role by a powerful personal conviction that truth must grapple with falsehood to prevail and that civilised values, when delivered with his own brand of
charm, have the best possible chance of prevailing.

His aim was to speed up the diplomatic momentum and not to “let events be driven by extremists”. No one can fault his courage. But he has risked a good deal.

In Damascus, his first port of call, Mr Blair may think he secured private assurances from Bashar Assad about curbing the terrorist organisations that Syria harbours. What Arab audiences saw was a British Prime Minister taking a public
drubbing from the neophyte leader, much his junior, of a disreputable country whose importance in the Middle Eastern equation derives solely from its capacity to destabilise. To be seen to get nowhere is dangerous. Mr Blair appears like a
driven man. He needs to be sure that he is husbanding his authority — and that of the United Kingdom — for times that may be harder than these.

In Saudi Arabia he found greater resolve than expected. After what initially resembled a collective nervous breakdown, the House of Saud has begun to see how best to survive the terrorist threat which its nervous toleration, even
encouragement, of Islamist extremists has brought down on it. This is by asserting traditional orthodoxy against the usurping of Islam for violent political ends. In Jordan too, King Abdullah now berates terrorists for “trying to hijack our religion”. Mr Blair’s urging of Muslim leaders to take a clear stand against extremism is finding a more receptive audience than it did. And in Israel Ariel Sharon’s reference
to “painful compromise” was designed to put a more positive gloss on his assertion that Israel’s current tactics are necessary to its survival.

Mr Blair’s most valuable stopover may have been his last, the meeting in Genoa in which he sought to mend fences with Italy after its exclusion from last month’s “summit” of Britain, France and Germany. The use of that meeting lay in its tacit
admission of the need for the players most ready to work with the United States to co-ordinate their actions outside the consensual European Union context. To exclude Italy was unnecessary and wrong.

There is a wider strategic picture against which Mr Blair’s endeavours must be set. A sketch of it was provided this week by Henry Kissinger’s thoughtful Ruttenberg Lecture. The Middle East’s anxious rulers must be persuaded that the terrorist threat is not the weather of the future. That can be done only if they are convinced that the spokes of the American umbrella are strong enough to withstand the
storm.

The road to a safer world curves not through a southern arc but a northerly one. September’s tragedy, Dr Kissinger observes, has ended a time of indolent self-satisfaction in America, united it even more strongly than did Pearl Harbor and made possible, provided that the campaign against terrorism is pursued with exemplary vigour, the forging of a new “community of nations” able to defend the institutions of freedom. An à la carte coalition can serve for now; but the broader task of restoring order to the world requires refashioned structures of security.

Nato, given a reinvigorated strategic content, will form an inner ring. But Russia, whose modernising ambitions give it the same interests as the West in asserting the rule of law, must be brought into a more formal and frequent nexus of strategic co-ordination than now exists. There are values of civilised society; it is not an arrogance to assert them, but a necessity. Their defence requires a calculated mixture of discipline and decisiveness, considered risktaking and imaginative caution that has been little mastered by leaders in the post-Cold War years