Prime Minister Tony Blair gave an excellent speech on Friday, and one that shows us all how much he is going to be missed by our Country when he leaves later this year. He spoke about how this war against Fanatical Islam will last a generation and we must not, we cannot, run from this fight:
Today we face a situation, which yet again changes the paradigm within which military, politics and public opinion interact with each other.
Put simply, September 11 2001 changed everything. Three thousand people died on the streets of New York. They did so as a result of a terrorist, suicide mission. The mission was planned and organised by the Al Qaida group out of a failed state, Afghanistan, thousands of miles away. The state was run by a fanatical, religiously motivated dictatorship, the Taleban. Even now, the bald facts of what happened are utterly extraordinary.
But though September 11 did indeed change the way we look at the world, the profound nature of the change for our armed forces was not immediately apparent.
[…]What was unclear then but is very clear now is that what we were and are confronted with, is of a far more fundamental character than we supposed. September 11 wasn’t the incredible action of an isolated group, a one-off strike masterminded by Osama Bin Laden. It was the product rather of a world-wide movement, with an ideology based on a misreading of Islam, whose roots were deep, which had been growing for years and with the ability to mount a radically different type of warfare requiring a radically different type of response. What we face is not a criminal conspiracy or even a fanatical but fringe terrorist organisation. We face something more akin to revolutionary Communism in its early and most militant phase. It is global. It has a narrative about the world and Islam’s place within it that has a reach into most Muslim societies and countries. It adherents may be limited. Its sympathisers are not. It has states or at least parts of the governing apparatus of states that give it succour.
[…]The notion that removing two appalling dictatorships and replacing them with a UN backed process to democracy, with massive investment in reconstruction available if only the terrorism stopped, could in any justifiable sense "inflame" Muslim opinion when it was perfectly obvious that the Muslims in both countries wanted rid of both regimes and stand to gain enormously, if only they were allowed to, from their removal, is ludicrous. Yet a large part, even of non-Muslim opinion, essentially buys into that view.
So our enemy will see their strategic advantages as terrorism and time. They are not a conventional army. They can’t be defeated by conventional means. This is the enemy our Armed Forces face today. The enemy knows something else also. That when they kill our soldiers, it provokes not just understandable grief and anguish, but resulting from that, a questioning of why we are "there"; what it’s got to do with "us"; how can the struggle be worth the sacrifice in human terms.
Yet to retreat in the face of this threat would be a catastrophe. It would strengthen this global terrorism; proliferate it; expand its circle of sympathisers. Given the nature of it and how its roots developed, long before any of the recent controversies of foreign policy, such retreat would be futile. It would postpone but not prevent the confrontation.
More truer words have not been spoken. It is indeed ludicrous to think that bringing Democracy, hope and freedom to a part of the world so much in need of those rights could instead foster hatred. But the MSM and the left continue on with their charade, highlighting the death and destruction while hiding, or ignoring the good.
I find it incredible how anyone with even a teeny little bit of common sense could be so brainwashed, so ignorant, not to see the danger we face from fanatical Islam. Iraq is one battle in this long war and to run and hide from it, as Clinton did for so long, would be one of the greatest single disasters in a generation. We’ve lived through the Carter and Clinton years, haven’t we had enough of disasters?
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At least someone gets it. I excerpted and linked at Tony Blair puts the blame where it belongs.
I wish George Bush would have Tony Blair make all his speeches and public statements for him. The press should be required to give Bush a Miranda warning…”You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to have Tony Blair present before any questioning…..”
I guess it would be better for a immoral coward who speaks well to be President huh? Cough…Clinton…cough
I didn’t say I wanted Tony Blair to be president. But if Bush can’t talk, and he either can’t or won’t, he ought to get someone to do it for him. An important part of a president’s job is to explain to the American people what he is doing. Bush has failed on that. History will say so, I believe. I still voted for him twice because the alternative was worse.
I didn’t say you wanted Tony Blair as President. My point was that I would rather have a horrible speaker (which I do not believe Bush is) who is morally courageous rather then a great speaker who is morally corrupt.
I disagree with you that Bush has failed on communicating what he is doing and I am 100% sure history will put Bush down as one of the greats.