Tony Blair (Playing Hugh Grant Playing Tony Blair) Still Can't Outrun the Iraq War

Judging by the number of jobs he has taken on, Tony Blair clearly seems to relish his post-Downing Street afterlife as an international statesman and global do-gooder. Either that or he needs Ritalin.

For example: The day Blair left office in June 2007, following a rousing, decade-long run as prime minister, he was named special envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia, with the goal of ending the region's intractable violence. He has also made battling climate change climate change andchange and ending malaria in Africa personal priorities, and he started the Tony Blair Sports Foundation to "increase childhood participation in sports activities." In May 2008, in one of his signature initiatives, he launched the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which aims to "promote respect and understanding about the world's major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world."

If that weren't enough, Blair has also been spending a good deal of time in the United States. He just wrapped up a year as a visiting professor at Yale (his eldest son just completed a master's program there), lecturing on faith and globalization, and he has been giving talks to private groups at up to $250,000 a pop.

Résumé-building for a Nobel nomination? Why not? Well, there is the nagging problem of Blair's part in justifying the ill-fated Iraq War.

Even as the United States and the Obama Administration try to move on from the Iraq years -- focusing on the deteriorating economy and tamping down calls for truth commissions -- the British appear determined to get to the bottom of their responsibility for the war, and that includes Blair's signal vocal role in backing George W. Bush's dubious evidence undergirding the invasion.

Last month, Blair's longtime Labor rival, ally, and successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced the terms of a much-anticipated independent inquiry into the Iraq war. But Brown surprised the inquiry's chairman, Sir John Chilcot, by declaring that the proceedings would be secret, with testimony from Blair and others (Brown himself is certain to give evidence, as he was Blair's finance minister) out of public view. Chilcot rejected that stipulation, and Brown seemed to back off.

But Blair himself appears to have done the most damage to his prospects of emerging from the inquiry with his reputation intact. British media have been detailing Blair's behind-the-scenes maneuvering to convince Brown to keep the inquiry private, quoting Blair as saying he feared a "show trial" if forced to testify in public and under oath. At the same time, there have been more revelations that Blair knew Bush's evidence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs was shakier than Blair has admitted.

All this has led to a backlash that seems likely to complicate Blair's desire to distance himself from the Iraq years. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, told The Times of London that Blair must appear in public and under oath. Otherwise, he said, "people [will] feel this is just a grand cover-up for, after all, what was the biggest foreign policy mistake this country has made since Suez."

The prospect now is that Tony Blair and Labor will be the focus of an embarrassing public inquiry that could run more than a year and likely coincide with elections that might well spell the end of Labor's remarkable run -- and also of Blair's reputation as a cross between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, a political genius who transformed his party in part by co-opting his opponents' agenda. Increasingly, Blair's trajectory seems to mirror Bush's fall from grace, though with the specter of a public investigation dogging his efforts to recreate himself while Bush hangs out, unconcerned, at home in Texas.

Blair seems keenly aware of his jeopardy. In one of his valedictory addresses before heading back to the United Kingdom, Blair spoke on June 27 at the Wharton School in Philadelphia to a group of Catholic leaders. The ironies of the event were manifold: A former British PM speaking in the cradle of the American Revolution virtually on the eve of the Fourth of July was an obvious one.

Then there was the fact that Blair, who converted to Catholicism only in December 2007, was advising top Catholic lay people and bishops -- members of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management -- on restoring the church's credibility following the sex-abuse scandal and other crises.

Just last March, in an interview with a gay magazine, Blair criticized Pope Benedict XVI for his "entrenched attitude" against gay rights and said the Catholic Church, like a political party, had to "accept that the world is changing" and lead that change rather than trying to stop it.

Needless to say, such comments from a fairly new convert didn't go down so well with Catholic leaders. In May the departing leader of the English church, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor -- who had personally received Blair into the church at Mass in his private chapel -- reversed course and decided not to serve on the board of Blair's Faith Foundation, and neither Blair nor his wife were invited to the installation of the cardinal's successor.

In his talk in Philadelphia, Blair was careful not to step on any doctrinal toes, and he went out of his way to praise Pope Benedict for his trip to the Holy Land in May.

But his counsel to the assembled church leaders sounded very much like the self-justifications he may have been rehearsing.

Blair was certainly as appealing as ever, his hair graying but his affect still youthful, almost boyish -- sort of Tony Blair doing Hugh Grant doing Tony Blair. But he is also sharper than before, speaking of how wearying he found the constant stream of criticism when he was prime minister, and how unfair much of it was.

He told his audience that the first thing any leader had to understand is that "the world is divided in two -- the 'doers' and the 'commentators'." He lamented "the virulence of the commentary visited upon people in positions of leadership" in a 24/7 media industry that is, more than ever, driven by "scandal and controversy" and without "deference to institutions." Blair said that in this context the most important thing that leaders can do is communicate to the public and the media a "balanced picture" of oneself or one's institution that takes into account the good as well as the bad. Holding to one's "inner convictions," he added, is key. "I always used to find that, no matter how difficult the times, you can never lead unless that inner faith is there."

He told the gathering that to be an effective communicator and leader, one had to be clear about what one wanted to do and stick with it, "irrespective of the brickbats."

In an off-the-record discussion after the talk, participants said, Blair was even more forceful. In balancing the competing claims of transparency and "discretion," Blair told the group that leaders have to be honest but also have "a duty to protect our good name."

"If you don't stand up for your own cause, no one else will, in my experience," Blair said in a line that drew knowing laughs. "I do think you can get yourself into such a situation of apologizing that you forget about the good."

Whether this advice can save the Catholic Church is an open question. More pressing, perhaps, is whether it can save Tony Blair.