British Prime Minister Tony Blair was back in London yesterday, looking fit and tanned after a Red Sea holiday and a snap visit to Iraq, ready to plow into one of his toughest months since he took office.
Blair ended a 10-day family New Year's holiday at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday with an unannounced six-hour visit to southern Iraq, his second since the US-led invasion that deposed Saddam Hussein.
There he mingled with some of the 10,000 British troops occupying the oil-rich desert region, saluting them as "the new pioneers of soldiers in the 21st century."
PHOTO: AFP
"Iraq today is taking shape under your help and with your guidance in a way that would have been unthinkable a year ago," the blue-blazered prime minister told several hundred soldiers in berets and desert camouflage fatigues.
Back in London, however, Blair faces two big hurdles in the coming weeks.
One is strictly domestic: legislation that would, in effect, raise university tuition fees -- no minor concern for middle-class British families -- as much as threefold.
Blair, who regards the proposal as a key part of his overall reform program, has indicated that he will stake his future on its success, amid signs of a rebellion among backbench members of his own Labour party.
The other has an Iraq twist: the much-awaited report of a judicial inquiry into the July suicide of David Kelly, a Ministry of Defense weapons expert and former UN arms inspector.
Kelly was exposed by Blair's government as the source of a BBC report two months earlier alleging that key intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction had been "sexed up" in the run-up to war.
If Lord Hutton, the senior judge who conducted hearings in August and September, comes down hard on Downing Street, it will give fresh ammunition to Blair's critics who are already tut-tutting the failure of US and British forces to find hard proof that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction.
During his visit Sunday to Basra, Iraq's second city, where British troops are headquartered, Blair preferred to dwell on the need to see through the reconstruction of Iraq into a keystone of democracy in the Middle East.
Unlike central and northern Iraq, where US forces have been under almost daily insurgent attack, the south has been relatively calm, with officials reporting fewer and fewer incidents.
Fifty-four British troops have died in Iraq since the March 20 invasion, the last in November -- in a traffic accident. By comparison, US forces have suffered more than 200 fatal casualties.
On his flight home, Blair -- who last visited Basra on May 29, the day of the BBC report -- said the focus now is on the proposed mid-year handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi governing council, ahead of elections next year.
"It's important to realize that we are about to enter into a very critical six months," he told journalists.
"We have got to get on top of the security situation properly, and we have got to manage the transition," he said. "Both of those things are going to be difficult."
He added: "It's very important to show the people of Iraq that we are not walking away."
Besides mingling with the troops, Blair met Sunday with Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator for Iraq, and the governor of Basra, Wael Adullatif -- practically the only Iraqi he had time for during his six-hour visit.
He also spent 15 minutes inspecting a former prison camp, southwest of Basra, where British, Italian and Danish police officers will be retraining 6,000 Iraqi police officers over the next six months.
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