Tony Blair On Iraq
from No. 10 Downing Street Op-Ed printed in The Observer (UK)

I've been conciously avoiding political issues, but I thought that this was a particularly eloquent argument for contiuing the American presence in Iraq. Sad that it had to come from the British. The whole text is preserved under the [More] link.

By 1 June, electricity will be 6,000MW, 50 per cent more than prewar, but short of the 7,500MW they now need because of the massive opening up of the economy, set to grow by 60 per cent this year and 25 per cent the next.

The first private banks are being opened. A new currency is in circulation. Those in work have seen their salaries trebled or quadrupled and unemployment is falling. One million cars have been imported. Thirty per cent now have satellite TV, once banned, where they can watch al-Jazeera, the radical Arab TV station, telling them how awful the Americans are.

The internet is no longer forbidden. Shrines are no longer shut. Groups of women and lawyers meet to discuss how they can make sure the new constitution genuinely promotes equality. The universities eagerly visit Western counterparts to see how a modern, higher-education system, free to study as it pleases, would help the new Iraq.

People in the West ask: why don't they speak up, these standard-bearers of the new Iraq? Why don't the Shia clerics denounce al-Sadr more strongly? I understand why the question is asked. But the answer is simple: they are worried. They remember 1991, when the West left them to their fate. They know their own street, unused to democratic debate, rife with every rumour, and know its volatility. They read the Western papers and hear its media. And they ask, as the terrorists do: have we the stomach to see it through?

More

HEADLINE: Comment: Why we must never abandon this historic struggle in Iraq

BYLINE: TONY BLAIR

BODY:


WE ARE LOCKED in an historic struggle in Iraq. On its outcome hangs more
than the fate of the Iraqi people. Were we to fail, which we shall not, it is
more than 'the power of America' that would be defeated. The hope of freedom and
religious tolerance in Iraq would be snuffed out. Dictators would rejoice;
fanatics and terrorists would be triumphant. Every nascent strand of moderate
Arab opinion, knowing full well that the future should not belong to
fundamentalist religion, would be set back in bitter disappointment.

If we succeed - if Iraq becomes a sovereign state, governed democratically
by the Iraqi people; the wealth of that potentially rich country, their wealth;
the oil, their oil; the police state replaced by the rule of law and respect for
human rights - imagine the blow dealt to the poisonous propaganda of the
extremists. Imagine the propulsion toward change it would inaugurate all over
the Middle East.

In every country, including our own, the fanatics are preaching their gospel
of hate, basing their doctrine on a wilful perversion of the true religion of
Islam. At their fringe are groups of young men prepared to conduct terrorist
attacks however and whenever they can. Thousands of victims the world over have
now died, but the impact is worse than the death of innocent people.

The terrorists prey on ethnic or religious discord. From Kashmir to
Chechnya, to Palestine and Israel, they foment hatred, they deter
reconciliation. In Europe, they conducted the massacre in Madrid. They threaten
France. They forced the cancellation of the President of Germany's visit to
Djibouti. They have been foiled in Britain, but only for now.

Of course they use Iraq. It is vital to them. As each attack brings about
American attempts to restore order, so they then characterise it as American
brutality. As each piece of chaos menaces the very path toward peace and
democracy along which most Iraqis want to travel, they use it to try to make the
coalition lose heart, and bring about the retreat that is the fanatics' victory.

They know it is a historic struggle. They know their victory would do far
more than defeat America or Britain. It would defeat civilisation and democracy
everywhere. They know it, but do we? The truth is, faced with this struggle, on
which our own fate hangs, a significant part of Western opinion is sitting back,
if not half-hoping we fail, certainly replete with schadenfreude at the
difficulty we find.

So what exactly is the nature of the battle inside Iraq itself? This is not
a 'civil war', though the purpose of the terrorism is undoubtedly to try to
provoke one. The current upsurge in violence has not spread throughout Iraq.
Much of Iraq is unaffected and most Iraqis reject it. The insurgents are former
Saddam sympathisers, angry that their status as 'boss' has been removed,
terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda and, most recently, followers of the Shia
cleric, Muqtada-al-Sadr.

The latter is not in any shape or form representative of majority Shia
opinion. He is a fundamentalist, an extremist, an advocate of violence. He is
wanted in connection with the murder of the moderate and much more senior
cleric, Ayatollah al Khoei last year. The prosecutor, an Iraqi judge, who issued
a warrant for his arrest, is the personification of how appallingly one-sided
some of the Western reporting has become. Dismissed as an American stooge, he
has braved assassination attempts and extraordinary intimidation in order to
follow proper judicial process and has insisted on issuing the warrant despite
direct threats to his life in doing so.

THERE YOU have it. On the one side, outside terrorists, an extremist who has
created his own militia, and remnants of a brutal dictatorship which murdered
hundreds of thousands of its own people and enslaved the rest. On the other
side, people of immense courage and humanity who dare to believe that basic
human rights and liberty are not alien to Arab and Middle Eastern culture, but
are their salvation.

Over the past few weeks, I have met several people from the Iraqi
government, the first genuine cross-community government Iraq had seen. People
like Mrs Barwari, the Minister of Public Works, who has just survived a second
assassination attempt that killed her bodyguard; people like Mr Zebari, the
Foreign Minister. They are intelligent, forward-looking, tolerant, dedicated to
their country. They know that 'the occupation' can be used to stir up
anti-coalition feeling; they, too, want their country governed by its people and
no one else. But they also know that if we cut and run, their country would be
at the mercy of warring groups which are united only in their distaste for
democracy.

The tragedy is that outside of the violence which dominated the coverage of
Iraq, there are incredible possibilities of progress. There is a huge amount of
reconstruction going on; the legacy of decades of neglect is slowly being
repaired.

By 1 June, electricity will be 6,000MW, 50 per cent more than prewar, but
short of the 7,500MW they now need because of the massive opening up of the
economy, set to grow by 60 per cent this year and 25 per cent the next.

The first private banks are being opened. A new currency is in circulation.
Those in work have seen their salaries trebled or quadrupled and unemployment is
falling. One million cars have been imported. Thirty per cent now have satellite
TV, once banned, where they can watch al-Jazeera, the radical Arab TV station,
telling them how awful the Americans are.

The internet is no longer forbidden. Shrines are no longer shut. Groups of
women and lawyers meet to discuss how they can make sure the new constitution
genuinely promotes equality. The universities eagerly visit Western counterparts
to see how a modern, higher-education system, free to study as it pleases, would
help the new Iraq.

People in the West ask: why don't they speak up, these standard-bearers of
the new Iraq? Why don't the Shia clerics denounce al-Sadr more strongly? I
understand why the question is asked. But the answer is simple: they are
worried. They remember 1991, when the West left them to their fate. They know
their own street, unused to democratic debate, rife with every rumour, and know
its volatility. They read the Western papers and hear its media. And they ask,
as the terrorists do: have we the stomach to see it through?

I believe we do. And the rest of the world must hope that we do. None of
this is to say we do not have to learn and listen. There is an agenda that could
unite the majority of the world. It would be about pursuing terrorism and rogue
states on the one hand and actively remedying the causes around which they
flourish on the other: the Palestinian issue; poverty and development; democracy
in the Middle East; dialogue between main religions.

I HAVE COME firmly to believe the only ultimate security lies in our values.
The more people are free, the more tolerant they are of others; the more
prosperous, the less inclined they are to squander that prosperity on pointless
feuding and war.

But our greatest threat, apart from the immediate one of terrorism, is our
complacency. When some ascribe, as they do, the upsurge in Islamic extremism to
Iraq, do they really forget who killed whom on 11 September 2001? When they call
on us to bring the troops home, do they seriously think that this would slake
the thirst of these extremists, to say nothing of what it would do to the
Iraqis?

Or if we scorned our American allies and told them to go and fight on their
own, that somehow we would be spared? If we withdraw from Iraq, they will tell
us to withdraw from Afghanistan and,after that, to withdraw from the Middle East
completely and, after that, who knows? But one thing is for sure: they have
faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism.
And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.

It is not easy to persuade people of all this; to say that terrorism and
unstable states with WMD are just two sides of the same coin; to tell people
what they don't want to hear; that, in a world in which we in the West enjoy all
the pleasures, profound and trivial, of modern existence, we are in grave
danger.

There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win and it is
happening now in Iraq.

posted by prof_booty | 03:04 PM