Special Relationship

One question raised by this headache-inducing White House "Fact (sic) Sheet" on Tony Blair's speech is whether Bush and Blair's spinners cooperated on producing it, as the underlying issue is whether Blair intended to float any new policy proposals in the speech. For one thing, Blair clearly directed more attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict than warranted by Bush's non-existent efforts in that area, so it wouldn't look good if the White House spinners are now claiming -- as they seem to be doing -- that he said nothing new.

UPDATE 27 NOVEMBER: There's an odd subtext to the reaction to Blair's speech which was noted a couple of weeks ago in a New York Times article about the US-Israel relationship --

So Israel has another worry: that Mr. Bush will try to build an anti-Iran coalition by pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.

In September, Israel was abuzz over a speech by an American official that got little coverage in the American news media. Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to Ms. Rice, had addressed the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, considered sympathetic to Israel’s interests, on “Building Security in the Broader Middle East.”

Mr. Zelikow, in the last of 10 points, suggested that to build a coalition to deal with Iran, the United States needed to make progress on solving the Arab-Israeli dispute.

“For the Arab moderates and for the Europeans, some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is just a sine qua non for their ability to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of other things that we care about,” he said.

The message seemed perfectly clear to Israelis: the Bush administration would demand Israeli concessions on the Palestinian issue to hold together an American-led coalition on Iran. American officials were quick to insist that there was no change in American policy, and that Mr. Zelikow was speaking on his own.

Note that Zelikow's sentiments -- portrayed by the White House as freelancing -- are identical to what Blair said ("we should start with Israel/Palestine. That is the core"), which in turn the White House says corresponds to the position of George Bush.