Blair on the hotseat

On a single page of Yahoo! News are presently links (which, however, shift constantly) to stories about Iraq in which (1) Condi Rice denies having ever said Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.; (2) Rumsfeld says there is no evidence to support Saddam's involvement; (3) the U.S. Commander concedes that some of the attacks on our troops are ordinary Iraqi citizens' "revenge" for our soldiers' misdeeds during the occupation; (4) six Americans and two Brits have been rounded up in Iraq as part of U.S. military sweeps of opposition elements in Iraq. In view of this one page of adverse developments in Iraq--and there are more reported on that same page--one wonders what pressure Tony Blair will feel from the heads of state of Germany and France when he meets with them over the weekend, one topic of the meeting being to "find a common ground" to pressure the United States into making concessions of its control over postwar Iraq in order to gain Security Council support for UN involvement in reconstruction and security.
A press conference is scheduled for Saturday. It will be interesting to hear what Blair says about this issue. Will he signal that he's jumping ship, joining "old Europe," Russia and China; or has he irrevocably sold his soul to the Bushies? Or will he, as is his wont, waffle?