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Blair wins wide praise, but not for Iraq strategy

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a major player on the world stage for a decade, won widespread praise on Thursday for defending Kosovo, fighting global warming and overseeing peace in Northern Ireland -- but criticism for championing the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Blair announced on Thursday he would resign on June 27 as prime minister and leader of Britain's Labour Party.

US President George W. Bush was effusive about Blair, a crucial ally in the Iraq war, calling him a man who kept his word.

"When Tony Blair tells you something, as we say in Texas, you can take it to the bank," Bush said.

Bush also had kind words for Blair's expected replacement, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, saying he "found him to be an easy-to-talk-to, good thinker."

Former US president Bill Clinton said: "Blair revitalized his party, modernized his country's economy and its approach to social problems, took the lead on global issues from climate change to debt relief to doubling aid to Africa, to the quest for peace in Northern Ireland and Kosovo and started the global Third Way political movement."

"I am glad he was there and grateful for our friendship," Clinton said in a statement.

"Tony Blair has taken Britain from the fringes to the mainstream of the European Union," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. "[Blair] leaves an impressive legacy including his commitment to enlargement, energy policy, his promotion of action against climate change and for fighting poverty in Africa."

But many viewed the Iraq war as a serious mistake by Blair, and criticized him for not questioning the US insistence on toppling the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt called Blair a "jovial, easygoing person" and a "fantastic speaker."

Staying in office for 10 years was a major accomplishment, Reinfeldt said, adding that "to do it in a country with the British press is an accomplishment in its own right."

Reinfeldt said the Iraq war led to Blair's eventual demise, and that his decision to join the 2003 invasion was likely influenced by the notion that "every British prime minister has a historical duty to be very close to the American administration."

"It is no easy task to make fundamentally different policy assessments [from the US] on important foreign policy matters," he said.

White House press secretary Tony Snow called Blair "an extraordinary leader," and praised him for maintaining "a long tradition of an alliance that is of extraordinary strategic importance."

In former colony India, Blair won praise for supporting its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

In Kosovo, Blair is credited with leading and building international consensus to stop the crackdown by Serb forces on the ethnic Albanian majority in 1999. When he visited the province shortly after British forces deployed in Kosovo following the war, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians gathered to thank him.

"We are grateful and thankful for his extraordinary contribution," said Ulpiana Lama, Kosovo's government spokeswoman. "He made the Kosovo issue in 1999 a priority of foreign policy."

Also see story:
Blair exits with poisoned legacy

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