blair's speech

Read Tony Blair's speech to the Australian parliament. Very well written and no doubt brilliantly delivered in his usual impassioned manner. (Personally, I can only see the Dead Ringers guy whenever I watch Blair speak these days.)

What's wrong with the picture he paints?

For starters, who's this "we" in the West who are committed to "justice and tolerance"?  Presumably the same "we" who are engaged in the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq. So it includes the US, not exactly renowned in recent years, months and days for its pursuit of justice and tolerance in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or indeed South Dakota, plus cases of poltically sanctioned domestic injustice too numerous to mention. Not to mention Australia's record of intolerance and injustice towards refugees. Those Australian politicans, especially John Howard, calling out 'hear hear' in parliament yesterday don't exactly exemplify Blairs vision:  "We are open societies. We feel enriched by diversity. We welcome dynamism and are tolerant of difference.."

But there's a bigger sleight of hand in Blair's speech and in the rhetoric ( the same one that's been repeated again and again pre and post-invasion). This is how it goes:

economic globalisation is here now
globalisation of Western democratic values cannot be taken for granted [note the evangelical tinge to this thought]
in fact, it must be aggressively [?militarily] fought for alll over the world
a global alliance for these values needs to be constructed [what about the UN?]
the main enemy of those values is Islamic extremism
that's why our military presence in Iraq is justified - ie the invasion took place in order to bring the vote to the Iraqi people.

Was Saddam Hussein's regime one of Islamic extremism? No. Are there countless other totalitarian regimes all over the world who in this schema should be invaded by western armies? Yes. Should Saudi Arabia be first on the list? No, because although that's a despotic Islamicist regime, they're our friends.

The argument is a house of cards.

What really infuriates me about Tony Blair is that in taking the high moral ground, he consigns responsibility for the morally objectionable morass that Iraq now is to everyone else. A truly amoral position.

And, needless to say, in this speech there's a conspicuous silence about weapons of mass destruction, supposedly the reason for the invasion, and oil, which just might have something to do with the invasion.

Comments

[Sandra]

Sounds to me like he's talking about a holy war, a crusade. It has always looked that way to me, but I thought "we" weren't supposed to admit that's what it's about.

[Guy]

Very nice dissection.