An update to my Tony Blair post, if you will…
My post of my personal thoughts about Tony Blair is still up from last night, but I have a noteworthy stand-alone update to deliver. You may recall my comments (and Sir Giuliani's) about the former British Prime Minister's moral clarity and vision. Well, by happenstance, Suzanne Fields in a Townhall.com column dated today wrote - and I'm clipping for the time-challenged:
"If you had told me a decade ago that I would be tackling terrorism," he wrote in the Economist magazine, in an essay titled "What I've Learned," not long ago, "I would have readily understood, but would have thought you meant Irish terrorism."
Actually, what he learned was that getting the Irish Republican Army to put down its guns and renounce violence was considerably easier than getting the Islamists to do the same. He learned that "international politics should not be simply a game of interests, but also of beliefs, things we stand for and fight for." Not an easy sell in a spectacularly fractured world.
Sad but true, Tony Blair is more admired in this country than in his own, and the Brits who dislike him dislike most his firm friendship with the Americans. Just as Churchill understood early on the menace of the Nazis and later of the Soviet Union, Tony Blair understands the deadly Islamist jihad, that we ignore the Islamist "will to win" at our peril. He boldly accuses his critics of naivete when they argue that removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein has enabled terrorism to grow.
. . .
Tony Blair is right to acknowledge that the terrorists have warped the thinking in the West, and right to warn against the coward's impulse that "makes us blame ourselves." He calls this a "dulling of the senses," creating a strong public demand to withdraw from Iraq. Who gets blamed for the lack of progress in the Palestinian problem? Inevitably, the West. When the crisis in Lebanon is provoked by these same malignant forces, who gets the blame? Inevitably, Israel.
He stresses the crucial importance of fighting the terrorist menace wherever it threatens us, and argues that the West must do better in making Western values more accessible to the darker regions of the world. "But this won't happen unless we stand up for our own values, are proud of them and advocate them with conviction." Hear, Hear. We'll miss you, Mr. Blair.
Hear, hear!
On June 29, 2007 at 9:59 am, Playin' Possum wrote:
Poodle Blair was an empty suit too cowardly to call a liar - a liar he knew to be a liar - what he was and who instead followed the American Liar-in-Chief into a disaster. If the Brits think less of Poodle Blair than Americans do, that is just an indication they are better educated - and maybe smarter - than the average dumbed-down, jesused-up rightwing American idiot…
If "the west" gets blamed for the middle east’s woes it’s because we have repeatedly thrust the torch into the fuel. The dirty Brits have their prints all over this mess going back almost 200 years. They helped re-establish the long dead - properly dead - state of Israel; the Zionist ambitions are a dagger thrust into the side of the Arab world.
No wonder the area around Israel festers… That’s the proper response to an infectious agent.
Of course, religious zealotry aside, the agitators could have never drug US into the mess were it not for our lust for oil…
The IRA disarmed because enough of their legitimate grievances were satisfied that the remains weren’t worth fighting for anymore. The committed leadership lost the support of the rank and file; eventually the hard core simply ablated to nothingness. The rank and file in the middle east will walk away in the same fashion when their legitimate grievances are met…
And frankly, I don’t care how many people who deny those legitimate grievances become casualties. The welfare of such doesn’t concern me… The Brits have another one today…
As you christians note, you reap what you sew… The Brit leadership sewed this for the people. The innocent blood - what innocence there is - that blood is on the poodle’s fur, and on the hands of all of the arrogant might makes right promoters of the west before him.
Still their is one silver lining in all this: The utter incompetence of the western armies in putting down these tiny bands of ragged patriots is very encouraging. When the legitimate grievances of the screwed-over majority here in the US finally spills over into revolt, the army - the part that doesn’t join the cause - won’t be able to stop the new American patriots, either.