Blair takes leave of reality

Now, finally, Tony Blair ("Yo!'' Blair to President George W. Bush) is going on his Caribbean holiday.

He will be in touch by telephone, he assures a worried world, to help in formulating a Lebanon peace deal. Except he won't.

The thought that Bush would consult Blair over the crisis is laughable. He may ring him up and tell him what America wants but that is different than consulting him. Jacques Chirac will definitely not be consulting Blair and I doubt that any Israeli or Lebanese politician will want to talk to him. And just what are the improvements that allows Blair to take leave? Even the proposed resolution is insulting to Lebanon.

"I've put off going away for a couple of days because it was necessary to get everybody in the international community together and get a text [of the resolution] and we've done it now," Blair said.

If the situation was so serious that he could not go on holiday a week ago, well, someone should tell him it is far more serious today. Still, it must be a great relief to the streaming refugees that their situation is now so improved that the British Prime Minister feels able to sample the waters of the Caribbean.

But the resolution that has allowed him to get the swimming shorts ironed is a sham and an insult to the United Nations. No call for Israeli withdrawal, it envisions buffer zones, rewards an aggressive Israeli military, demands no compensation for the Lebanese and provides no help for neighbouring countries to cope with the refugee influx. It is a resolution without resolve.

It is so nonsensical that part of it is open to legal challenge. One section calls "on all parties to co-operate ... with the Security Council" but since Hezbollah are deemed a terror organisation in the United States and considering that the United States is currently waging a war on terror this raises obvious, practical difficulties.

The resolution is a veneer, it gives the impression that something is being done. Apart from endorsing Israel's actions, all it has achieved is to permit Blair to apply the sun block.