"One of Triumph of the Person over the Politics, or of the Politics over the Person"

"Eager to refute accusations in the British press that he was 'Bush’s poodle' or enabler, Mr. Blair reminds the reader of his own belief in an interventionist and morally driven foreign policy, articulated years earlier during the Kosovo crisis. He also argues that by being in the room, he hoped to press the United States to go the United Nations route and 'pitch to George the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process.' 'If you wanted to be part of the planning,' he writes, 'you had to be, at least in principle, open to being part of the action.'
"Left unaddressed is the contention of many politicians and journalists that Mr. Blair failed to get the Bush administration to embrace a multilateral approach and a broader 'road map' for Middle East peace, because, in the words of the Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, 'he committed the greatest error in diplomacy: he declared his hand too early,' thereby enabling the Americans to take him for granted."

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Tony Blair's A Journey: My Political Life.