The magnificent Tony Blair.

I was just listening to C-Span's re-airing of the press conference that took place yesterday in Baghdad with Tony Blair and Iyad Allawi. Blair's brilliance as a speaker always amazes me. My intense admiration for his speaking is tinged with the pain of the comparison to President Bush, whose gift for communication is modest. If only Bush could speak like Blair, it seems, things would go much better. I know Blair has his troubles back home, but I marvel at his capacity to inspire. This part of the press conference particularly impressed me, as a reporter tries to pin him with a hard question:

Q: Nick Robinson, ITV News: Can you just give us a sense of your feelings today? You flew here in secrecy under armed protection into what is still a safe zone more than a year and a half after Saddam fell. Can you honestly say to yourself, this is what I meant to bring about when I said that we ought to invade Iraq?

Tony Blair: That's a good question. I'll tell you exactly what I felt coming in. Security is really heavy - you can feel the sense of danger that people live in here.

He takes a very long pause here -- long enough to make you worry that he's going to crack and reveal his despair.

But what I felt more than anything else was this - the danger that people feel here is coming from terrorists and insurgents who are trying to destroy the possibility of this country becoming a democracy.

Now where do we stand in that fight? We stand on the side of the democrats against the terrorists. And so when people say to me, well look at the difficulties, look at the challenges - I say well what's the source of that challenge - the source of that challenge is a wicked, destructive attempt to stop this man, this lady, all these people from Iraq, who want to decide their own future in a democratic way, having that opportunity.

And where should the rest of the world stand? To say, well that's your problem, go and look after it, or you're better off with Saddam Hussein running the country - as if the only choice they should have in the world is a choice between a brutal dictator killing hundreds of thousands of people or terrorists and insurgents.

There is another choice for Iraq - the choice is democracy, the choice is freedom - and our job is to help them get there because that's what they want. Sometimes when I see some of the reporting of what's happening in Iraq in the rest of the world, I just feel that people should understand how precious what has been created here is. And those people from that electoral commission that I described as the heroes of the new Iraq - every day... a lot of them aren't living in the Green Zone, they've got to travel in from outside - they do not know at any point in time, whether they're going to be subject to brutality or intimation even death and yet they carry on doing it. Now what a magnificent example of the human spirit - that's the side we should be on.

UPDATE: An emailer suggests that Tony Blair comes across as too slick when you have to hear him all the time. Conceivably, Bush's imperfect, but strong and heartfelt speech is more effective.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The link above is to the text of the press conference, but you can watch the streaming video here. The delivery is a big part of the effect.