Blair Defends Foreign Policy of Intervention

Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday resolutely defended U.S. and British action in Iraq and urged his audience to accept greater “interventionist” activity against terrorism.

Today’s worldwide struggle against terrorists is not “a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence,” Blair told an audience of media representatives and politicians here. His remarks came in the first of three foreign policy speeches he planned to give over the next few weeks.

Blair attacked Western commentators who have criticized intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying they advocate “a view which sees the world as not without challenge, but basically calm, with a few nasty things lurking in deep waters, which it is best to avoid.” That stance amounts to “a doctrine of benign inactivity,” he said.

Noting that “the easiest line for any politician seeking office in the West today is to attack American policy,” Blair said that failure to construct “a common global policy based on common values” would “risk chaos threatening our stability -- economic and political -- through letting extremism, conflict or injustice go unchecked.”

Terrorist violence springs from deeply embedded ideological roots, Blair said. “Today in well over 30 or 40 countries, terrorists are plotting action loosely linked with this ideology.”

He added: “The struggle against terrorism in Madrid or London or Paris is the same as the struggle against the terrorist acts of Hezbollah in Lebanon or the [Islamic Jihad] in Palestine or rejectionist groups in Iraq.”

Countering that threat requires cooperation between nations, Blair said. “Inaction, pushing the responsibility on to America, deluding ourselves that this terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement” is not an option, he said.

Blair noted that in dealing with extremism in British communities, government ministers had been advised not to use the term “Islamist extremist” for fear of giving offense. Yet, he said, those Muslims who commit acts of terrorism “are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. To say his religion is irrelevant is ... completely to misunderstand his motive.”

Blair praised Islam and said the 20th century torments of war and colonization had engendered religious extremism and hostility to Western values, which was now exported around the world in the form of acts of terrorism. The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. were one of many such acts, he said.

The prime minister called on his critics to examine the hostile acts and propaganda put out by the Al Qaeda network and other terrorists and see them as part of a strategy to undermine security and defeat the pursuit of democracy in the Middle East.

He promised to elaborate in the future on plans for the Middle East peace process and to prepare a response to a Hamas government in the Palestinian territories. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, “remains perhaps the real, genuine source of anger in the Arab and Muslim world that goes far beyond usual anti-Western feeling.”

In other areas beset by human rights abuses, Blair said, citing Sudan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and North Korea, “We have not intervened as effectively as I would wish, even if only by political pressure.”

Blair said it was unlikely that there would ever be full support for the tough action that was “essential to safeguard our way of life

But the fundamental battle was not just a fight against Islamic extremism, he told listeners, but a battle about modernity, about helping unite Islam and democracy: “It is a battle of values and progress, and therefore, it is one we must win.”