Blair, Increasingly Alone, Clings to Stance
By ALAN COWELL


ONDON, Feb. 16 — After a watershed weekend following setbacks at the United Nations and on the streets of his own capital, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain — Washington's main ally in the effort to disarm Iraq — looked lonely today, his destiny pinned to the uncertain progress of the campaign against Saddam Hussein.

As he prepares for a summit meeting of European leaders on Monday, Mr. Blair is heading for the gathering armed with little more than a sense of high moral purpose and an alliance with President Bush — neither of which has done much to persuade fellow Europeans to join a war in Iraq.

His cherished role as Europe's bridge to America has been severely damaged by a Franco-German axis opposed to war in Iraq or, in Berlin's case, to war altogether. Prospects of winning United Nations authorization to invade Iraq — a key to swinging opinion his way at home and abroad — are under challenge from influential Security Council opponents including France, Russia and China.

As millions across this divided continent marched in Europe's biggest antiwar demonstrations on Saturday, with at least 750,000 in London, Mr. Blair seemed to acknowledge that his increasingly vocal moral commitment to ousting Saddam Hussein had set him apart from many of his own people.

"I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honor," Mr. Blair said at a meeting of his Labor Party in Glasgow, billed as a major attempt to swing his fractious party behind him. "But sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction."

Yet, that shift to a moral argument — sidestepping the diplomatic formulations of the United Nations Security Council — was perhaps the most telling response to the antiwar protests this weekend. Significantly, the biggest demonstrations were in London, Rome and Madrid, whose national governments side with the White House.

"Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity," Mr. Blair said in Glasgow, in what was widely taken to be an unequivocal commitment to "regime change," the policy long espoused by Pentagon hawks. "It is leaving him there that is in truth inhumane."

There is a sense here that in doing so, Mr. Blair has taken a fateful step. British analysts are divided over whether Mr. Blair's political survival is at stake. Many argue that a quick victory in Iraq, supported by the United Nations and confirming Iraq's willful failure to disarm would provide enormous vindication.

But "a disastrous campaign in Iraq would cost the prime minister dearly," said Matthew d'Ancona, a columnist for the conservative Sunday Telegraph. "He would be seen to have pursued a personal crusade with calamitous consequences. His credibility would be forever tainted, his wings broken."

With the marches on Saturday, though, Mr. Blair and the other pro-Bush European leaders were forced into a recognition that they are already fighting a two-front war, one in international diplomacy and one for the support of their own people.

The continent has not seen protests on that scale in memory. The crowds were so vast in Barcelona and Madrid that they jammed the streets and were unable to march. Protest organizers usually exaggerate numbers, but from official accounts alone at least three million people marched across Europe. Other nonpartisan accounts put the total at between four and six million. Even in Italy, which has sought to qualify its support for the United States, at least 600,000 people and possibly many more thronged Rome.

The breadth and magnitude of the demonstrations opened a rift between ruler and the ruled, convincing many that street protest had overtaken conventional democracy in expressing the popular will.

"The real question is not about intervention," said John Game, 38, a doctoral student at London University, gesturing to the crowd around him as he marched Saturday. "It's about why Tony Blair is not listening to the people of Britain. That's not democracy; this is what democracy looks like." Among the demonstrators' posters were some that read, "Regime change begins at home."

That was a remarkable turnabout for a prime minister who once prided himself on touching the pulse of the nation in moments of crisis.

"One of the most repeated riffs of the protest was that they, not Tony Blair, speak for public opinion," said Andrew Rawnsley, a columnist, referring to the marchers who filled the capital yesterday. "Ownership of `the people,' that misty mass which the self-styled `People's Prime Minister' used to call his own, is now claimed by the Stop the War coalition."

Those sentiments have left Mr. Blair little option but to change script and invoke the moral issues. In Glasgow, for instance, Mr. Blair said the peace marchers had displayed "a right and entirely understandable hatred of war. It is moral purpose, and I respect that. But the moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam. It is not the reason we act. That must be according to the U.N. mandate on weapons of mass destruction. But it is the reason, frankly, why if we do have to act, we should do so with a clear conscience."

Unless he persuades his European adversaries to agree to a second United Nations resolution authorizing force, however, Mr. Blair will find it difficult to carry dissidents within his own party and government into a "go it alone" war at America's side, according to Mr. Rawnsley.

For the summit meeting on Monday, moreover, the huge weekend demonstrations seem likely to play into the existing rifts. They will enable leaders like Jacques Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder of Germany to argue that their antiwar sentiments have received a mandate from the streets, while leaving Mr. Blair and José María Aznar of Spain seeming to swim against Europe's tide. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/international/europe/17BLAI.html