COMMON GROUND OF PEACE AND WAR

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech to Congress last week was
masterful. He was inspirational, funny and leading us toward common
ground.

The common ground is what remains to be done in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both supporters and critics of the war ought to care about what
happens now.

"So if Afghanistan needs more troops from the international community
to police outside Kabul, our duty is to get them," Blair said. "Let us
help them eradicate their dependency on the poppy, the crop whose
wicked residue turns up on the streets of Britain as heroin to destroy
young British lives, as much as their harvest warps the lives of Afghans."

Or a future Iraq that Blair said could switch from "sources of
instability to beacons of calm."

It was fitting that on the same day Blair was in Washington, D.C., a
new report detailed just how big a job it is to rebuild a nation.

One finding is that the coalition needs to grow; we need help from
countries that will send troops only under a United Nations' umbrella.
India was the first test of this principle. "Relying on the war
coalition will not produce sufficient resources or capacity," the
report says. "The scope of the challenges, the financial requirements
and the rising anti-Americanism in parts of Iraq argue for a new
coalition. ... "

According to Robert Orr, Washington director of the Council of Foreign
Relations and a member of the Iraq review team, the U.N. agency role
is already proving helpful. Every Iraqi the group interviewed, he
said, praised the work of the United Nations' oil for food program.
And, unlike the coalition, the United Nations has a high percentage of
Arabic speakers.

We can already hear the critics, those who say no to any attempt to
build a broader, global coalition.

But we cannot do this alone -- and yet we hear Blair's plea for common
ground.

"You may think after recent disagreements it can't be done," Blair
told Congress. "But the debate in Europe is open. Iraq showed that
when, never forget, many European nations supported our action. ...
Today, German soldiers lead in Afghanistan, French soldiers lead in
the Congo where they stand between peace and a return to genocide. So
we should not minimize the differences, but we should not let them
confound us either."