Tony Blair uses words in ways that can only make Jean Chrétien weep.
Yesterday, speaking to the annual Labour Party conference in Brighton, the British Prime Minister, with customary eloquence and urgency, again showed the moral clarity in crisis and the determination of purpose that makes him the Anglo-Saxon world's most compelling leader.
"This is a battle with only one outcome: our victory, not theirs," he said of terrorism. To the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, he gave no quarter: Hand over Osama bin Laden and his network or face the consequences. But he left little doubt that the Taliban, and not just Mr. bin Laden, was a problem for the world to tackle.
Sitting in the audience was Michael Foot, who led Labour in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it espoused unilateral nuclear disarmament, expressed skepticism toward the European Community, and was still wedded to massive state intervention in the economy.
How far the Labour Party has come. As Mr. Blair said: A decade ago, people wondered whether Labour could ever win, but now they ask that question of the Conservative opposition.
Mr. Foot's Labour Party was full of visceral and latent anti-Americanism of the kind now rooted in the Canadian left. The Labour Party has grown up immeasurably, fully confident in Britain's identity and not worried about being seen as a poodle of the United States.
Speaking of the Americans, Mr. Blair said: "We were with you at the first. We will stay with you to the last." No equivocation. No moral equivalence. No tortured contextual analysis suggesting that perhaps the Americans had it coming.
"America has its faults," Mr. Blair said. "But it is a free country, a democracy. It is our ally, and some of the reaction to 11 September betrays a hatred of America that shames those who feel it."
Mr. Blair caught the essence of something that escapes too many people in Canada: We are not engaged in a police action. In a classic police case, someone commits a crime. The authorities seek out that person and, if successful, they bring the perpetrator of the crime to "justice" -- that is, to some kind of court. If convicted, they lock that person up.
What occurred on Sept. 11 was a military action by terrorists using planes as weapons in which the targets were not just civilians but the central economic, political and military institutions of a country. The attack, therefore, was not just a "crime against humanity," in which innocent civilians died, but an attack against the government of a country. And the attack was part of a worldwide network dedicated to terrorism as a tool of destabilization, violence and political gain.
The notion of finding Osama bin Laden, assuming that could be done peacefully, and hauling him before a special United Nations court or the International Criminal Court misses the essence of the motivations and deeds behind the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. "Defeat it or be defeated by it," said Mr. Blair of terrorism. He got it right.
Mr. Blair also got it right in what it takes for a modern social democratic party to be electorally successful. He understands, as Canada's federal New Democrats do not, that globalization is not something to be opposed, because it is a fact of technology, communications, commerce and increasingly multicultural countries.
This was not an easy sell to Labour, with its old instincts of skepticism about international trade, free markets and government intervention in the economy. Nor did Labour care much about Britain's fiscal strength, being prisoner to a corrupted Keynesianism of the kind that led Canada to run more than two decades of consecutive deficits in good economic times and bad.
Mr. Blair's speech, apart from the section on terrorism, was all about "community" and responsibility, both in Britain and in international relations. He knows that plenty of Britons worry about the state of the health and education systems, and he pledged to spend more in both areas, but with the quid pro quo that public services need to be more accountable.
That's the Blair Way, the sometimes ill-defined Third Way -- compassion and responsibility, spending and accountability, equality of opportunity, not outcome. It drives old-style socialists crazy, of course, but it drives ordinary Britons to vote for his Labour Party.
Europe is very fortunate in these trying times to have leaders such as Tony Blair in Britain, Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin in France and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany. They are all experienced and tough, realists as well as visionaries.