Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader, by Philip Stephens. Viking, 288 pages, $25.95.

The Point of Departure , by Robin Cook. Simon and Schuster, 384 pages, $27.

Two years ago, Tony Blair's standing could scarcely have been higher-a liberal national leader prepared to make common cause with an ultra-conservative American President in the face of the new and menacing threat of terrorism. His alliance with Bill Clinton had segued seamlessly into an alliance with George W. Bush, his new best friend. Different political traditions and countries could and should unite before a common foe.

Today, Mr. Blair is paying a steep price for those heady days. Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which allegedly presented such a serious and immediate threat to British and American interests, have proved to be nonexistent. The inability to win a second U.N. resolution in the spring of 2003 to justify the Iraq war, brushed aside at the time as an inconvenience, is now beginning to recoil on both the U.S. and U.K. The two countries launched an illegal war, not even justified on its own terms, that has led them into a bloody and deepening morass. A critical mass of Mr. Blair's own party is so outraged that his own political position is gravely weakened: He would not now be able to deliver similar support for his trans-Atlantic ally, and his capacity to execute his own domestic program is endangered. The Iraq policy is and was an epic political miscalculation-yet this from Britain's most-successful-ever Labor politician. Why?

This is the conundrum addressed by Philip Stevens, associate editor and lead political columnist of the Financial Times , in his new book, Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader . The portentous title gives the game away: Though clear-eyed about his hero's failings, Mr. Stevens admires Mr. Blair. The British leader is right to think that the new 21st-century security risk is terrorism and right to worry that access to rogue states' armory of weapons of mass destruction will give terrorists the weapons they need. Mr. Blair, writes Mr. Stevens, was making public and private pronouncements along these lines well before Sept. 11, and he didn't believe that the Anglo-American policy of Iraqi containment was working. When George Bush declared his war on terrorism, Mr. Blair was already fully on board, and it was never going to take much to persuade him to up the ante on Saddam Hussein.

Where he differed with Mr. Bush was not the ends, but the means. Mr. Blair is a believer in interdependence as a human, social and moral reality; his Christianity drives and is driven by this belief-and it informs his social as much as his security policy. It is why he's on the left rather than the right. Thus, while Mr. Blair wants to be as tough on the Taliban and Saddam Hussein as Mr. Bush, he instinctively wants to construct international alliances of interdependence to execute the job. As a lawyer, he knows the importance of legality; he's a master of those turns of phrase which can keep a politician on the right side of the law (a tactic he prefers by far to rewriting the law unilaterally or ignoring it altogether).

What Mr. Blair wanted was to reconstruct with Mr. Bush the alliance that Mr. Bush's father had built (aided and abetted by British Prime Minister John Major) after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990. Desert Storm was legal, backed by U.N. resolutions, and the enormous cost of the exercise was shared by countries as disparate as Saudi Arabia and Japan. The military burden was shared, too. Interdependence meant accepting constraints, but it meant legality and a shared burden-priceless assets. Mr. Blair embraced Mr. Bush's objective, but-as Mr. Stevens reads it-the British prime minister wanted to achieve that objective the smart way.

Unfortunately, Mr. Blair overestimated his own powers of persuasion and underestimated the implacable opposition of two men: Dick Cheney and Jacques Chirac. Vice President Cheney doesn't believe in interdependence as a value, and he certainly doesn't believe that the U.S. needs to accept interdependence in its foreign and security policy. In his view, the U.S. is the sole great power and has an obligation to itself to call the shots in its own best interests-and its own best interests can never, as a matter of principle, involve taking into account any other power's interests or sensibilities (unless they happen to suit the U.S.). Mr. Cheney, with his ally Mr. Rumsfeld, had no intention of building legitimacy through the U.N. or burden-sharing; that might constrain U.S. autonomy of action. If the British prime minister wanted to sell America's wars and join in of his own volition, that was fine but not essential. What was essential was the exercise of American will.

The Cheney-Rumsfeld axis never gave Mr. Blair-or Secretary of State Colin Powell-the chance to maneuver France and Germany-and, with them, the moderate Arab states-into a broad-based coalition. (Only the willing were welcome to join in, not the reluctant or the cautious.) Moreover, intra-European politics in the six months up to March 2003 made Mr. Chirac more and more unwilling to offer Mr. Blair the coup of French support for a second U.N. resolution.

In the book's most devastating revelation, Mr. Stevens relates how details of private conversations held by the French president and uncovered by British intelligence showed that Mr. Chirac wanted to recover leadership of the European Union from the British. Gerhard Schröder had unexpectedly won the German election (with Mr. Blair's backing) and hoped that Mr. Blair could rebuild bridges for Germany with the U.S. despite Mr. Schröder's anti-American election rhetoric. In French eyes, what was emerging was a potential British-German alliance running Europe and acting in concert with Washington. Mr. Blair had to be blocked. Mr. Chirac, Mr. Blair came to believe, was "out to get him." The French president threw his weight behind German doubts over the war, wooed Mr. Schröder and then declared his opposition to war in Iraq under any circumstances. The chances of winning a second U.N. resolution collapsed. Messrs. Cheney and Chirac between them had ditched Tony Blair, and made an interdependent response to terrorism impossible. Blair may have lost, but it was a noble, if doomed, effort.

It's a great story, and Mr. Stevens tells it with élan. I'm convinced that he accurately depicts the positions of the dramatis personae, and Tony Blair's true intentions, too. Mr. Stevens' description of how Mr. Blair came to hold his values, and how they informed his radical reform of the Labor Party, is also, I think, accurate and insightful-and without that background, it's impossible to understand why Mr. Blair was so ready to form his alliance with Mr. Bush.

It's difficult at this point, to dispute that the foremost security threat of the 21st century comes from international terrorism. But as former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook argues in The Point of Departure , his insider's account of events leading up to the invasion of Iraq, it rather matters whether Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and thus actually constituted a potential terrorist threat. Until he resigned in protest from Mr. Blair's government, Mr. Cook was a cabinet member with a ringside seat at the drama. He points out that any genuine international alliance of interdependence would necessarily have wanted to assure itself, before invading Iraq, that Mr. Hussein did possess the weapons in question-and would not have set an arbitrary deadline to discover the fact.

Mr. Stevens says that Mr. Blair did tell Mr. Bush that this delay would be a consequence of a second U.N. resolution-and that Mr. Bush gave his verbal agreement. The trouble was (as Mr. Bush knew), British diplomacy would be undermined by an inexorable and manifest reality: America was going to war anyway. Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld had said that U.S. troops had to move in during the first quarter of 2003, and Mr. Blair had agreed that if America went in, Britain would join as well. And the reason for that was that British and American intelligence was convinced-without the need for further U.N. searches-that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Or, more sinisterly, that it didn't matter what Saddam possessed; what mattered was that America should act and install a democratic regime in Iraq, whatever the pretext. The Middle Eastern "swamp" had to be drained-and the place to begin was Iraq. Great Powers, after all, make the weather.

In which case, the whole Blair worldview, as presented by Mr. Stevens, has a massive flaw: You can't separate means and ends. Interdependence is not just a means that allows you to do what you wanted to do anyway; it will also adjust the end to be achieved. If the process had shown that Saddam did not have W.M.D., then that judgment would had to have been respected. The problem was that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair never intended to allow such a judgment to be made. Mr. Blair, despite his values and his rhetoric, thus became an adjunct to America's pre-emptive unilateralism.

He deceived himself and others. As Mr. Cook argues, he allowed his belief in Britain's alliance with America to trump his belief in interdependence. Tony Blair would have better served his beliefs, his party and the national interest (and, in the long run, Britain's friendship with the U.S.) had he put interdependence before realpolitik. Between them, Messrs. Cook and Stevens give us the best account of why he failed to do that.

Will Hutton is a columnist for the London Observer .

Why, oh why, is this savvy politician, this "third way" enthusiast, this friend of Bill Clinton, so hot to join forces with George W. Bush and his band of ultra-conservatives when the political risk is great and growing?

Theories abound. As he likes to say when his motives are questioned (it's for oil, his critics charge, or to preserve the "special relationship," or because he and George pray together, or because he craves the international spotlight, or because he's a wannabe Gladstonian liberal)-as he likes to say, it's worse than that. He believes passionately that Saddam Hussein cannot be allowed to continue to govern Iraq, and that if it takes force to remove him, so be it. He believes what he's doing is right.

I think we should take him at his word-with these few caveats. Watch Tony Blair carefully, watch him smile blamelessly and protest that he believes in what he's doing, and you'll see deepening gullies on his face that betray the enormous strain he's under. Consider, also, that Mr. Blair has won two landslide general-election victories, subdued the notoriously fractious Labour Party and governed successfully for six years-all of which requires political guile, a talent for measuring political risk and a certain ruthlessness. And for all his bellicose language, he and George Bush are not and can never be ideological bedfellows. His ideas are different and so is his sensibility; sooner or later, those differences will out. So, once again, why?

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a product of three key influences: the British private-school system, the Church of England and the British legal system. Young Tony was educated at Fettes in Scotland, a classic "public school." Fettes and the more famous schools of its kind-Eton, Winchester, Westminster-do not simply offer a first-class education; they also confer self-belief, remove self-doubt and provide a passport to the pinnacles of the British class system. Those fortunate enough to attend know that they are part of a caste destined to lead, whatever career they may choose-politics, rock 'n' roll, finance, the British army. Only one successful leader of the Labour party-Harold Wilson-was not privately educated. Even in these supposedly democratic and egalitarian times, Mr. Blair's education, his "public school" manner and his acquired self-confidence, still hugely count in Britain.

Young Tony Blair put his absence of self-doubt and assured self-belief not in the service of conservative politics, where it sits more naturally, but progressive politics. For this, the explanation lies with Britain's state church, the Church of England. Mr. Blair is a committed Christian, but his Christianity does not lead him to the same conservative views as Mr. Bush-and that's because the Church of England is a church organized, as it must be, as the most socially inclusive institution in the country. It preaches kindliness, tolerance and generosity towards the poor. Unlike many American Protestant churches, the Church of England is anything but fundamentalist. Moreover, in the 1970's and 80's the Church shed its links with the Tory establishment, rejected Thatcherite individualism and tried to reach out for a more ancient, gentle liberal tradition. Mr. Blair is part of that change.

And then there's the law, Mr. Blair's chosen profession. Mr. Blair believes in fairness and fair play in the fundamental English sense-and he wants to see fairness and fair play systematized in codes that everybody observes without being told to. He is against regulation, but not for the same reasons as Mr. Bush, who sees regulation as an extension of government power and intrusion against the liberty of the individual. Mr. Blair believes that in the good society, we should all observe the law of our own volition and without compulsion, because the law incorporates a common-sense view of what is fair. Of course, transgressors should feel the full force of legal penalties. But the idea is that people will internalize good and moral behavior in their own interest. (In his speech to the Commons on Tuesday night, he emphasized duty .) Throughout his leadership of the Labour party, he has struggled to square this world view with more traditional social-democratic theory-thus his interest, variously, in responsible capitalism, communitarianism and, latterly, the "third way."

The longer he has led the Labour Party, the more convinced he has become that his cocktail of views, his very English sensibility-combining kindliness and fairness with a tough-minded insistence that just laws must be obeyed to the letter-is right. And he has so far been able to persuade the British public to agree: He has remained ahead of his opponents in the opinion polls for an unprecedented nine consecutive years.

And this explains why he has done what he has done on Iraq. Saddam Hussein must obey international law-or suffer the consequences of breaking it. The U.N. Security Council must enforce international law, because without it there can be no international justice. And without the rule of law, the prospect of relieving the condition of the poorest people on the planet, in particular in the Middle East, is nonexistent. Tony Blair, educated and trained morally and professionally to accept this burden of responsibility, must shoulder it. It is not easy-look again at his face.

Will Hutton is a columnist for the London Observer. His new book, A Declaration of Interdependence , will be published by W.W. Norton in May.

It's part of the quality of the man that he's prepared, I'm sure, to suffer his fate with dignity and equanimity. He thinks Saddam Hussein a sufficient threat to British and Western security that his continuance in government blights both Iraq and the Middle East; and he thinks Britain has an obligation to its American ally under an acute terrorist threat. There's no denying Mr. Blair's inner steel over this matter-it may be a steeliness born of having backed himself into a corner, but it's a steeliness nonetheless. He's like Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms: "Here I stand; I can do no other."

But the large majority of his party membership in the country and approaching half the Labour members of Parliament are in open and passionate disagreement with his policy on Iraq. The latest polls suggest that in the absence of a second United Nations resolution, only 15 percent of Britons favor an invasion.

The British parliamentary system is subtle. The government is formed by the party that controls the majority of votes in the legislature-the House of Commons. This puts abundant power in the hands of the prime minister (he's simultaneously head of the executive and legislative branches), but it also means that he's more accountable. If he can't control the votes in the House of Commons-or if it appears that soon he won't-he is lost. The system is only operable if political parties loyally vote in the Commons the way their government instructs them, but this umbilically links the government, the party in the Commons and the party members in the country. If there's an issue that the party in the country can't stomach, then M.P.'s will be told in no uncertain terms of their local party members' unhappiness, and this quickly translates into unsteadiness in the House of Commons-and begins to destabilize the government. It's a process of political disintegration.

Already, 122 Labour M.P.'s have voted against Mr. Blair's position on Iraq. Unless there's a second U.N. resolution, the number will quickly rise to over 200, including junior and senior members of the government. With over 50 opposed Liberal Democrat votes, at least a dozen dissident Tories, and the Welsh and Scottish nationalists in opposition, control of the House of Commons is becoming insecure. Mr. Blair needs 326 votes to maintain his majority. He may no longer be able to obtain them; and if he does, he will have been bailed out only because the opposition-the Tories-have voted with him. It's this growing realization that's weakening him by the day. Tony Blair is fighting for his political life.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice & Co. were lucky to find a man of such principle and purpose at the helm of the British government. There's no better testimony to the disdain in which they hold all interests and views except their own that they've placed such an able politician and key ally in such an impossible position. Their palpable lack of concern for securing the legitimacy of Anglo-American action in Iraq through the United Nations, along with their overt bullying, have so subverted the process that even if there is a second resolution-which looks less and less likely-many will simply regard the U.N. as having been co-opted to give a multilateralist gloss to American pre-emptive unilateralism. President Bush and his cabal may not give a fig for international opinion, but they have cut the ground away from Mr. Blair. They risk losing him, and thus Britain, from the war effort they're devising. The American public, I hope, will damn them for it.

Mr. Blair is only trying to do the right thing. He wanted Saddam Hussein disarmed and regime change launched in Iraq as part of a wider settlement in the Middle East that would stop terror in its tracks. And he wanted this policy executed in such a way that the world would acknowledge its legitimacy. He wanted a U.N. framework, including a series of deadlines for cooperation from Saddam, and if the deadlines were not observed, military intervention would follow. This was to be matched by moves to demonstrate to the Arab world that the West would deliver a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mr. Blair calculated that his policy was self-evidently sane, that the American administration was sufficiently rational and that he could therefore engage with the Bush administration-and together they would cajole the rest of Europe into following suit. The U.S and the European Union would move in lockstep to fight terror in an expression of legitimate international interdependence.

It was a massive miscalculation: Mr. Blair had not reckoned with the hard-line ideological approach of the Bush administration. And he failed to recognize that British public opinion is now part of the "European street"-that its hitherto-reflex response (back America in any major crisis) would be broken by the evident thinness of the argument for going to war without international legitimacy and without incontestable evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing and noncooperation.

Mr. Blair has been squeezed by two immovable objects-Mr. Bush and the European street. My own view is that it was perfectly obvious early last year how events would pan out. Mr. Bush's hubris after Afghanistan would lead to an acceleration of the go-it-alone, coalition-of-the-willing framework, and British public opinion would react to that brash posture in the same way as European public opinion. I also believe that Mr. Blair could have played his cards differently-indeed, I tried on one occasion to persuade him to do so. He should first have formed a joint European position involving some give on all sides, the core of which would have accepted intervention in Iraq within a clear U.N. framework. Then, in concert with the other European leaders, he should have told Mr. Bush that unless he accepted the E.U. position, he would have to launch war by himself.

But Mr. Blair didn't do that. He chose what seemed at the time the easier option. Entrenching the alliance with the United States has always in the past been the best policy for British prime ministers-best for domestic politics, best for international outcome. It was an instinctive reaction, given additional momentum by compassion in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. I think Mr. Blair genuinely thought he would get more purchase on American policy than he has-not because of British influence, but because he has faith that right will out. He didn't reckon with the awesome, self-defeating stupidity of current American conservatism, and now we in Britain and you in America risk losing a great leader who has generous instincts and fundamentally the right approach to ordering the world. As he told last year's Labour Party conference, we live in an era of interdependence. Would that the Bush administration saw this so clearly.

Will Hutton is a columnist for the London Observer . His new book, A Declaration of Interdependence , will be published by W.W. Norton in May.

Europeans-to the extent anyone on this continent of 370 million conforms to the generic stereotype-are baffled and extraordinarily anxious at the rhetoric now emanating from the world's most powerful country. Mockery of President Bush's linguistic faux pas has given way to the realization that he and the people round him are very different from the American elites we've become used to. Europeans expect America to live up to the high standards it sets for itself-and, at key moments over the last century, it has done so. Now there's a realization that Mr. Bush is not of the same ilk; he is potentially very dangerous both for America and the world.

These apprehensions may be mocked and derided by the American administration and its take-no-prisoners outriders, who dominate the American media and national conversation, but that does not mean that our fears are not genuine-or well-founded. The majority on the European street is extremely wary about the doctrine of pre-emptive, unilateral intervention and the willingness to disregard international law and the U.N. process if it produces the "wrong" results; but that doesn't make us anti-American. Rather, we want America to be the better Europe that generations of European immigrants set out to make it, believing in the promise of a new continent with its Enlightenment Constitution and passionate commitment to opportunity, liberty and an equal chance.

America has been the victim of a horrendous crime, and the barbarians of radical Islam, we know, will again use terror against the U.S. (and against targets in Europe too, don't forget) if they can. They must be rooted out, and the deep causes of the crime addressed, even as we bring the particular terrorist networks to justice. But this complex task cannot be undertaken if we divide the world into the Manichean simplicities of George W. Bush: Those who are not for America must necessarily be against America. This is not good enough from the leader of the free world-and it's certainly not good enough before the evil of the threat we face. We need sophistication, wisdom, the widest coalition possible, legitimacy-and, of course, a willingness to use force if every other avenue has been closed. Instead, we hear the language of pre-emptive war (which was outlawed by the Versailles Treaty of 1919)-and this from the greatest and most admired democratic republic in the world, a country that has always prided itself on its respect for law, at home and abroad. Europeans expect much, much more from America.

This, perhaps, is what Americans do not comprehend very well. Anti-Americanism in Europe does not play well, even in France, where it intrudes into the public discourse more than any other European country. Jacques Chirac is winning support because he's asserting an idea of an independent France, le hexegon , that occupies an autonomous role in the world and stands for a cluster of values (peace, multilateralism, interdependence)-and taking on America at the same time. But when it comes to other core values-democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights, impartial justice-no leading French politician or opinion leader (except those on the fringes of right and left) is going to position him- or herself as anti-American. And if this is true for France, it's even more true for the rest of the continent. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has sacked two ministers for making unguarded, off-the-record anti-American remarks; he could not survive politically protecting them in office. Indeed, Mr. Schröder, like Mr. Chirac, is careful to argue that while he's against pre-emptive action in Iraq until the U.N. process is exhausted-and thus in opposition to Mr. Bush-that does not mean he's anti-American. Nor, in a fundamental sense, is he.

This is what troubles and infuriates Europeans. Whereas Mr. Schröder sacks ministers for making offensive remarks, Mr. Bush indulges his own; Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz or Condoleezza Rice can say anything that comes into their heads-some of it downright untrue and offensive-and there's no penalty. This is, of course, the prerogative of the powerful throughout the ages, but Americans should not be surprised if their interlocutors bridle and chafe. The wonder is that there's not more resentment.

Some of the claims made by leading American conservative commentators against Europe (I'm thinking especially of Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer)-statements that appear to reflect the views of conservative Washington-are so vicious that if they were not obviously detached from reality, there would be some real anti-Americanism. For example, the idea that America now wears the badge of Mars (the willingness to use military force, to assert itself with manly vigor and bear loss of life like other great powers in the past)-in contrast to the feminine loss of will in Europe-strikes Europeans as an astonishing case of memory loss and saturation in fantasy. Is this the same country that has a collective fainting fit at the sight of one body bag? That has been careful to fight its recent wars from 50,000 feet up? Whose tourists have so little sense of fortitude that mass cancellations follow after even the slightest hint of danger? American swagger, Europeans suspect, is the swagger of the schoolyard bully, and no more sturdy. The scuttle of Mogadishu or fighting for Kosovo and Afghanistan from the air more nearly define American military ambition-and if the going gets rough in Iraq, Europeans expect little sustained resolve or willingness to bear loss of life. Which is why it's so important that if action begins, it's launched from a platform of impeccable legitimacy-why the weapons inspectors must continue and why the U.N. process must be exhausted before the Security Council authorizes war.

The French and British have both demonstrated willingness to bear loss in the national interest. It's that same tradition that makes both populations-and other Europeans who know from experience war's senselessness and pain-so very wary. Until the ascendancy of today's conservatives, America historically shared that caution: Vietnam produced the same embedded wariness, and for very good reason. That tradition, judging by the opinion polls and the growing anti-war protests, is not entirely dead-and my hunch is that the Kagans, Krauthammers, Perles, Wolfowitzes, Cheneys and Rumsfelds will find that their own country will display many of the same sentiments as "old Europe" if they engage in this war against terror in the way they plan.

Which shouldn't be a surprise. The best of America is the best of Europe; the best of Europe is the best of America. The idea that these two pillars of the West can be fundamentally at loggerheads for long is nonsense. Rather, as I argue in my forthcoming book A Declaration of Interdependence , American conservatives have declared independence from the Western liberal tradition. Europeans are already protesting the consequences, but as that protest spreads to the U.S., the truth will emerge: It's not Europeans and liberal Americans who are the isolated, dangerous eccentrics who menace peace, order and the rule of international law. It's Mr. Bush's Washington.

Will Hutton's A Declaration of Interdependence (W.W. Norton) will be published in May. He is the former editor in chief of the London Observer .