Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have brought Bush and Blair together in ways the two leaders could hardly have imagined at their first meeting. They’ve met one-on-one four times since 9-11. They preview each other’s speeches. NEWSWEEK has learned that Blair got an early look at Bush’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 12, and helped shape its more multilateral tone. Bush got a sneak peek at Blair’s Sept. 24 statement to Parliament on Iraq; his evidence against Saddam was bolstered by U.S. intelligence. They speak regularly on the White House-Downing Street hot line. Bush sometimes places calls to Blair after his morning run, when it’s midday across the Atlantic, greeting Blair as “my friend in London.”

Not since the days of Roosevelt and Churchill has armed conflict brought together two such politically disparate American and British leaders. Blair is a career center-left politician and Oxford-educated cosmopolitan who once delivered, in French, a 35-minute speech to the French Assembly. Bush, at 56 seven years older than Blair, is a conservative Texas Republican who in Paris earlier this year publicly ridiculed an American TV correspondent for asking the French president a question in French. “They come from very different political clans,” says Denis MacShane, a British M.P. “But their politics are driven not by ideologies, but by values.”

The two leaders are convinced that terrorism, political repression and antidemocratic forces in general are a threat to global security and economic well-being. They both also have deeply held Christian religious beliefs, though Blair, unlike Bush, doesn’t wear them on his sleeve. From their very first meeting, when over an “unscripted, no notes” breakfast at Camp David they surveyed the world and found their thinking clicked, “the personal chemistry was good,” says a Bush administration official. Their common ground (undisturbed by their caricatured differences) enabled Bush and Blair to assemble a remarkably broad coalition behind the war in Afghanistan and the struggle against Al Qaeda.

Iraq is turning out to be a very different story. For now, Bush and Blair are all but alone and could well remain isolated unless the U.N. route that Bush has chosen to pursue, partly at Blair’s urging, yields a Security Council resolution that rallies the support of other nations. More than a few Britons fret about Blair’s cozying up to Bush. Nevertheless, judging from Blair’s star turn at his Labour Party’s annual conference last week, he believes he’s right to do what he’s doing–and willing to take the political risks of doing so. He tackled head-on the growing criticism at home that in slavishly backing Bush’s hard line on Iraq he’s behaving like America’s “poodle.” He lashed out at his critics: “Remember when and where this alliance was forged–here in Europe, in World War II, when Britain and America and every decent citizen in Europe joined forces to liberate Europe from Nazi evil. My vision of Britain is not as the 51st state of anywhere, but I believe in this alliance and I will fight long and hard to maintain it.” It didn’t hurt Blair that he got a rousing vote of confidence from former president Bill Clinton, a man beloved by Blair’s party faithful, who told the Labour conferees: “I am glad Tony Blair will be central to weighing the risks and making the call.”

Bush and Blair grappled with those risks when they last met, on Sept. 7, back at Camp David. With their closest advisers, they discussed their options into the late afternoon and then over dinner. As the meal came to an end, the two leaders somewhat impatiently signaled to each other and stood up from the table. They wanted some time alone. They got 10 minutes–a slow, “principals only” walk through the Catoctin Mountain woods to a helipad, where a chopper was waiting to take Blair to his plane at Andrews Air Force Base. The lonely walk was a poignant moment. Bush and Blair can only hope it was also fleeting, and not a portent of things to come if they go to war against Iraq with the rest of the world standing on the sidelines.