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Blair, Bush say their goodbyes

Their partnership came together over toothpaste and will end with a bad taste in the mouth for legions around the world who decry their war in Iraq as a catastrophic failure.

But US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were defiant to the last over a war that sank their political fortunes, as they staged a White House swansong for their tumultuous double-act on Thursday.

Heaping fulsome praise on each other, the two leaders said history would be the judge of their decision to invade Iraq in search of elusive weapons of mass destruction and to topple former president Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Will I miss working with Tony Blair? You bet I will," Bush said after Blair's last visit to the White House before he resigns on June 27.

Blair said that Britain under his successor, Treasury chief Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, would remain "a staunch and steadfast ally" of the US "in the fight against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere."

Turning to Bush, he said: "You have been a strong leader at a time when the world needed strong leadership."

But if Blair kept close to Bush to retain a seat at the decision-making table, he failed to get a great deal in return on signature issues like Middle East peace and climate change, critics argue.

It had seemed an unlikely partnership given the two leaders' diverging politics and personalities, especially as Blair had built up such a rapport with Bush's Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton.

They discovered, however, a shared zeal for remodeling the world -- fired in Blair's case by a philosophy of "liberal interventionism" forged in Kosovo and then Sierra Leone.

The "neoconservatives" in Bush's administration meanwhile champed at the bit to take on Saddam and, they said, refashion the Middle East into a bastion of democracy.

Both leaders also had convictions rooted in their Christian faith, although Blair bridled at the suggestion that they prayed together to find common guidance from God.

"The rap on Blair was that he was Bill Clinton's best friend," said Ari Fleischer, Bush's first White House press secretary.

"Who would have guessed that a conservative like George Bush and a Labour liberal like Tony Blair would have such a similar world view?" he said.

The alliance blossomed at their first Camp David summit, a month after Bush took office in January 2001, when the US leader was asked by reporters what they had in common.

"We both use Colgate toothpaste," he replied.

More gravely, the Bush-Blair alliance was welded by the searing experience of the September 11 attacks of 2001, as the prime minister placed Britain "shoulder to shoulder" with its oldest ally in the traumatic aftermath.

Both leaders enjoyed broad public support for the US-led invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that followed. But for Blair, the subsequent war in Iraq would leave him fatally adrift of public opinion in Britain.

For Bush, the reckoning has been longer in coming. But he now has dismal poll ratings and the Democratic-led Congress is proving reluctant to give him a "blank check" to fund the Iraq war.

Frances Burwell at the Atlantic Council of the United States said the Bush-Blair partnership might find a kindlier verdict in the history books than it gets now.

"I think history will judge it as a very strong partnership both personally and politically, one that helped to bridge a transition from the US and Europe talking among themselves and acting instead on external threats," she said.

"But there's no doubt that it's come at a cost," Burwell said. "One of the questions for the future will be whether the affection that the US public feels for the British now will be reciprocated when both countries are under new leaders in a couple of years."

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