Prime Minister Blair, whose close friendship with President Bush was forged in the heat of the war on terror, on Friday will urge radical reform of the United Nations, the culmination of that other great Anglo-American war partnership, between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill.

Mr. Blair will argue that the various world institutions, set up 60 years ago to better facilitate a peaceful resolution of conflicts between states, are no longer suited to the present world’s needs. He will question the role and membership of the Security Council and will plead for a major overhaul of the council to rehabilitate the United Nations in the eyes of the world.

He will tell an audience at Georgetown University that the lofty ideals that inspired Roosevelt and Churchill to set up the United Nations at the end of World War II are being betrayed today by small-mindedness, narrow national interests, irrelevant politicking, and corruption. The much-touted “reform” of the world body suggested by Secretary-General Annan has made minimal progress, yet until true reform is carried out, the United Nations will remain a mere talking shop with little influence and no power.

Mr. Blair has turned to U.N. reform – and the reform of world bodies like the International Monetary Fund and the G8 – because he feels it is time for America and Britain to move beyond the war in Iraq, a country he has said has been transformed by the democratic elections and Prime Minister Maliki’s coalition government of many faiths that has followed.

Mr. Blair came to Washington after a visit to Baghdad, where he spoke to leading members of the Iraqi government and heard firsthand of progress toward restoring public services and political stability. As he told Mr. Bush yesterday, no member of the Iraqi government asked him to withdraw British or American troops from Iraq.

“If the violence stopped, we would be out as soon as we can,” he told an interviewer from Al-Jazeera on his Iraq visit. “We don’t want to stay there any longer than the Iraqi government needs us to stay.”

Mr.Blair told Mr.Bush yesterday that he was increasingly optimistic about the prospects for peace and democracy in Iraq and that his commitment to the wider project of extending democracy throughout the Middle East was undiminished.

“Iraq could be a successful, prosperous country,” he told journalists in Baghdad. “It could be a role model of democracy throughout the Arab and Muslim world if the people would stop sectarian killing, bomb attacks, suicide bombs, and all the rest of the miserable violence that does absolutely nothing to advance the cause of anybody.”

In conversations with senators from both parties in Washington, Mr. Blair reassured them that the aim of replacing the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein with a government chosen by the people and determined to govern on behalf of the differing groups in Iraq is progressing well. He said that “by the end of the year” the vast majority of Iraq would be under full government control.

“Today you have got a political process that is inclusive, that is democratic, that is U.N. blessed. Why not let it work?” he asked doubters on his visit to Iraq. “If people have got a problem in Iraq, they should articulate that problem. And why don’t they do it through the political process, instead of Al Qaeda and Zarqawi?”

However, Mr. Blair declined to name a date by which active American and British troops would start to be withdrawn. He said he believes that until the violence and the terrorist attacks cease,the Iraqi government will continue to ask for Allied military help. It would be treacherous to withdraw before adequate Iraqi law enforcement and military capability has been achieved, he said.

Behind closed doors yesterday, Messrs. Bush and Blair discussed Iran’s intransigence in the face of international pressure to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Blair told the president what he told the British journalists who traveled with him to Iraq.

“We don’t want a conflict with Iran,” he said. “We have got enough on our plate doing other things. But if Iran goes out of its way then to breach its international obligations, of course the international community, through the U.N. Security Council, has got to take up the issue.”

In Friday’s speech, Mr. Blair will say it is time the world’s governments faced up to the fact that the world bodies founded in the aftermath of World War II have become moribund and ineffective. Whereas 60 years ago the world was divided into nation states that could operate more or less independently of each other, now international leaders are confronting an ever diminishing world brought intimately together by globalization, a technological revolution that has led to revolutionary approaches to labor employment, and greater economic interdependence between states.

Yet the world bodies have not kept up with the economic and social progress of the last 60 years, Mr. Blair will say. A smaller world entailed sharing values such as extending the freedom of movement and freedom of information enjoyed by the West with the rest of the world. Above all, the democracy that some nations take for granted should be provided to those trapped beneath restrictive and repressive regimes.

Unlike some American conservatives, Mr. Blair has said he believes that world bodies like the United Nations have not only an important but a leading part still to play in extending freedom to the whole world. But if the United Nations is to take up this task, it must reform itself so that it becomes a body that inspires respect from the world because of the clarity and wisdom of its leadership.

Mr. Blair will demand that Mr. Annan, who retires in the fall, be replaced by a strong successor, who should be granted greater independence from the General Assembly in appointing staff and in intervening in world crises.

The world bodies should be made more transparent in the way they operate and more representative as well, he will say, but they also must be prepared to reflect a greater political will to take on hard issues and not duck them. He will cite as an example the need to make the G8 more representative, transforming it from a small Western club into a body routinely including nations with emerging economies.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair is near the end of his term. Having said at the time of his second landslide election that he would not stay on for a full parliamentary term, he has let it be known that he expects to retire next year, perhaps in the summer.

Mr. Bush, too, finds himself with the hourglass running out. The two men, ostensibly from different political traditions, have found themselves bound together in a common objective, to the derision of many world leaders. They have found their popularity slumping and their good name traduced as the bad news from Iraq continues.

But in their meetings yesterday and Mr. Blair’s foreign policy speech on Friday they encouraged each other to believe that in the short time available to them important themes remained to be addressed and goals to be achieved.

Messrs. Bush and Blair have combined as effectively and as amiably as their World War II predecessors Roosevelt and Churchill. And, while they were not brought together by a shared ideology, as were President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, they have, as leaders in a new type of war that some find difficult to grasp, provided the world with a strong sense of purpose and direction.

The British press, sensing blood in the water, has billed this Blair visit to Washington “The Swansong Tour” and has passed on the Economist’s snarky assessment that the pair now make up an “Axis of Feeble.” Whether Messrs. Bush and Blair can live up to their ambition to leave a legacy every bit as lasting as the 1945 postwar settlement is not in their hands alone.