Blair sees more ‘consensual’ 2nd term for Bush

President Bush has learned from his first term in office and will adopt a more “consensual” foreign policy, his closest international ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said in an interview published on Thursday.

“Evolution comes from experience,” Blair told the historian Timothy Garton Ash in an interview in the Guardian newspaper.

“It is possible to construct an international agenda that is more consensual, more multilateral than what has gone before," he said.

Blair said that a process of learning, beginning with war in Afghanistan, had taught Bush -- who takes the oath of office for a second term later on Thursday — the importance of using other measures, besides military force, to make the world safe.

“In the end, we can take security and military measures against terrorism but ... the best prospect of peaceful coexistence lies in the spread of democracy and human rights," he said.

Blair, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush over Afghanistan and Iraq, has been criticized at home for failing to win American support for his own foreign policy goals.

Britain leads the Group of Eight industrial countries, and Blair wants progress on reducing African debt and fighting greenhouse gas emissions believed to cause global climate change.

He said he does not expect Bush to reverse his opposition to the Kyoto protocol aimed at reducing global warming. But Washington could take other steps to curb emissions.

Europe leads the way on Iran
He also appeared to play down the threat of a confrontation with Iran, which Britain, France and Germany are trying to persuade to abandon nuclear programs that the United States believes are aimed at producing a bomb. Tehran says it is developing nuclear energy provision.

Although Washington has “what appears to be a harder position” toward Iran than the European three, the Bush administration seems content to let Europe take the lead for now, he said.

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On Iraq, Blair said he would have taken the same decision to go to war in 2003 despite having learned since then that Iraq did not have a large arsenal of banned weapons, the justification given for war at the time.

But he acknowledged that mistakes were made after the invasion that ousted President Saddam Hussein, especially the decision to dismantle the Iraqi army quickly.

“I’ve said before that I think in retrospect ... the speed of de-Baathification and disbanding of forces was too great," he said.

The interviewer did not discuss Britain’s latest Iraq news — a court martial which released photos that appear to show British troops sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners. Blair said in parliament on Wednesday the pictures shocked and appalled him.

Assuming Blair wins an election expected this year and serves out his term, his third term in office will roughly match Bush’s second, tying him to the American leader forever in history books.

But he told Ash he was not worried about how he would be remembered.

“They’ll write whatever they write, and probably different from how it’s viewed at the time.”