By: KENNETH MAXWELL 

Folha de S. Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2  

The messianic Tony Blair leaves office on 27th June and will be succeeded by his long time finance minister, former friend and long term rival, the very uncharismatic Mr. Gordon Brown, a man the British public respects but does not like.

The weary public reaction to the outgoing British prime minister's overly long and embarrassing goodbye junket around carefully selected spots in Africa only served to demonstrate that he had long lost the goodwill of the British people. His recent approval ratings stand at 28%.

Predictably, like wounded and rejected leaders before him, Blair blamed the "feral"press for his troubles. He should have blamed his American friend, the self proclaimed "war president", George W. Bush, whose own ratings in the opinion polls in the US are a dismal 29%, a mere one percentage point higher than Mr Blair's in the UK.

The root cause of the unpopularity of both leaders is, of course, the war in Iraq.
Blair's fate historically will be very similar in all probability to that of the American president Lyndon B Johnson. Like Prime Minister Blair, President Johnson was a masterful and instinctive politician and a centrist reformer who knew how to work the political system to get things done. And, like Blair, Johnson achieved great reforms on the domestic front; peace in northern Ireland in the case of Blair.

Yet historically, Blair like Johnson, will be forever identified with a disastrous war.
And for Blair it is much worse. Johnson inherited the Vietnam war others had begun, The Iraq war was a "war of choice," and a war where the public, and the Parliament in the UK, and the Congress in the USA, were deliberately mislead in order to justify military intervention.

So Blair will be stuck weather he likes it or not with his cartoonist image as "Bush's poodle". He will be seen as the critical enabler for Iraq, whereas he might have been the only world leader with the intelligence. the special access, the credibility, and the eloquence and capacity to restrain the Iraq misadventure at birth.

But Blair did not restrain; he advocated for war; and he still thinks even now he was right to have done so. As a consequence, Tony Blair's exit from the world stage next week, despite the bravura and farewell trips to Africa, is in reality sadly self deluded.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.