Chances of Tony Blair becoming the European Union’s first president dimmed Thursday when socialist leaders from the continent refused to back their Labour Party colleague.
First the good news from the Jerusalem Post:-
Chances of Tony Blair becoming the European Union’s first president dimmed Thursday when socialist leaders from the continent refused to back their Labour Party colleague.
The “no” to Blair from continental socialists kept alive a race to fill the posts of EU president and foreign ministers, two jobs created by a hard-fought EU reform treaty due to take effect in January.
The French also leaned away from Blair over his role in the Iraq war and resistance to British use of the euro – and suggested a woman might make a better candidate.
Blair’s charisma and international cachet may be working against him, too. In a race where no one has formally declared candidacy and the job is still ill-defined, there are as many nations that want a low-key technocrat as those that want a towering figure who can go head to head with other global powers.
European socialists, meeting in the margin of an EU summit Thursday, said they want the new EU foreign affairs chief to be a left-wing politician, said Dutch Europe Minister Frans Timmermans.
That choice would effectively ban Blair from the president’s job, as leftists cannot fill both top EU jobs that become available next year.
And then the bad news, a rather depressing report from the JP on the ongoing global struggles and wars:-
The week in blood
It’s been another dreadful week in the war of civilizations. On Sunday, 153 people were killed and more than 500 wounded in back-to-back car bombings in Baghdad. On Tuesday in Kabul, five UN staffers and three Afghans were killed in an attack on a UN guesthouse. And on Wednesday in Pakistan, 100 people – mostly women and children – were killed and 160 wounded in a shopping district bombing in Peshawar. The week also saw 24 American service personnel killed in Afghanistan, making 58 fatalities for the month – the deadliest since 9/11.
This is a war of civilizations in the sense that Muslim extremists with imperial ambitions are engaged in a zero-sum struggle against the values associated with modernity – liberty, enlightenment and tolerance.
For now, the battle is being played out mostly in Muslim-majority lands, though New York, London, Madrid and Israel’s cities have also been killing fields. Western elites have tended to deny, downplay or reject outright the systemic nature of the Islamist menace. Under these circumstances, there has been no real will to mobilize Western publics for the sacrifices ahead.
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