Pity Britain’s irate political class. They see that Blair (and of course his leash-holder, Bush), not Islamic terror or Arabian despotism, has darkened their happy world. And their anger is only intensified by having none of the one thing that might help shed some light: None of them have a real idea. They have regret and perfect hindsight, and they’re angry about Iraq and they’re angry about Israel. But when it comes to really hard thinking, like how to solve this Mideast war that grows more perilous by the second, Blair’s critics have become literally thoughtless.

One obvious example of this state may be seen in the phrase “immediate ceasefire.” Those words have been spoken so many times in Europe that on a fair day, they may be seen in the clouds. The BBC has exhausted itself, as in this item about cabinet friction, wondering why Blair doesn’t make Bush make Israel accept an immediate ceasefire — forgetting, apparently, that the difference between a ceasefire and surrender is that in a ceasefire, both sides have to cease firing. Since ceasefires are not part of the Syrian-Iranian tradition of paramilitary Islamic proselytization, what they really mean is Israel should surrender to Syria and Iran. Blair, Bush, and the Israelis think that’s a bad idea.

In fact, outside the fairy world of the European media, most people think it’s a bad idea. As the Guardian noted sadly, not even the EU could bring itself to demand an “immediate ceasefire” this week while some European governments were actually sympathetic to Israel. (The mind of Melanie Phillips has wrapped itself most wonderfully around the media’s distaste for Jews.)

Blair, on his return from America, brought with him what would seem to be a good idea: Instead of defaulting always to war against Islamic extremists, support Islamic moderates and help them to find ways of bringing benefits to all Muslims. The first order of business, according the Blair: growing a middle class in the sands of Araby. Impoverished democracies are pretty rare, so that’s a fairly commonsense idea. To the leader writer at the Guardian, however, even common sense must yield to the pleasures of blind anger:

Like a man who sets fire to his house and then discusses the flames, Tony Blair has a habit of drawing attention to his policy failures by analysing them. He did it in Los Angeles on Tuesday night in a significant speech on the Middle East that described a region ablaze with conflict without recognising his own role as one of the arsonists.

God forbid the Left should analyze when it’s so much more joyful to simply criticize — and simplicity is everything to the furious. Hence, this “connect the dots” front page of one of Britain’s more simplistic papers, the Independent, where even the normally sane Malcolm Rifkind waxes indignant, angry about what has passed him by, but clueless about where to go next. This is global politics as seen by John and Yoko, it’s sex-as-a-tantrum, and it becomes clear reading this kind of rubbish that for the British Left the only thing that would save Israel’s Jews from the deeply complex problems confronting them is if they were little, furry animals. Like those who hate Bush so much they want to see American reverses around the world, Blair-haters, angry at being ignored more than anything else, are happy to see the kind of guarantee of future bloodshed an “immediate ceasefire” would produce so long as it means humiliation for the man they love to hate.

Often, this kind of prioritization leads to some truly mindless moments, as reporters struggle to penetrate complexity with a simple thought that even they can understand. Thursday night, for example, the BBC sent one of its hopelessly hardheaded Hardtalk crew to interview Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister. Douste-Blazy had just returned to reality after the president of Iran, no enemy of simplicity himself, greeted the French suggestion, as noted by NRO’s David Price-Jones, that Iran could be a “stabilizing influence” in the region, by proposing the destruction of Israel as the solution to the Mideast problem.

Unconcerned by the foreign minister’s perplexing details, Hardtalk’s Carrie Gracie kept demanding from Douste-Blazy a date when the fighting would stop, and he kept explaining to her that France, after a meaningless call for an “immediate ceasefire,” reported here in Haaretz, was now working with the U.S. He celebrated the fact that some American newspapers had misidentified France as an important ally of the U.S. With U.S. and British encouragement, he was hopeful of producing a no doubt fanciful plan, but at least one paying some obedience to reality: “No international force without a ceasefire and no ceasefire without a political — not a military — solution,” he said, approximately (use the Hardtalk link above to watch the interview). “We do not want to be the ones who disarm Hezbollah.” Unfazed, the blonde reporter kept interrupting by repeating over and over the words, “A date…a date…a date.” Douste-Blazy merely looked at her as if she were a simple thing, a pathetic child, a frustrated, and dateless girl.

– Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.