Roger Simon praises Blair.
01/04/2004: THE TRUE LIBERAL
Having eluded (or not) Al Qaeda at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik (who knows?), Tony Blair has paid a surprise visit to Basra to rally the British troops. As usual, he put the situation succinctly:
``This conflict here was a conflict of enormous importance because Iraq was a test case,'' he said. ``If we backed away from that, we would never be able to confront this threat in the other countries where it exists.''
Blair is the anti-Chamberlain. He went on for the umpty-umpth time to reiterate the motivations for the war:
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Blair, who last visited Basra in May, said Saddam Hussein's regime ``had a proven record of use of weapons of mass destruction'' and that ``literally hundreds of thousands of its citizens died in prison camps.''
Critics of the war always ignore the latter part as if no one ever mentioned it before the conflagration started. I take that as a personal insult because that was always by far the most important reason to me. Maybe I'm exceptional, but I find mass murderers horrifying.
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Of course, I'm not unique in this and, of course, anyone
who was paying the slightest bit of attention before the
war saw it mentioned by virtually everybody in favor of
regime change from Bush on down. That many still choose to
ignore this (some even on this site) I can only regard as
deliberate obfuscation for political purposes. They fool
no one but themselves.
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Usually, those same people go on to say that we did not emphasize this motivation at the UN. And they are right about that. And probably we should have. But the idea of Jacques Chirac responding positively to a moral argument for war, from Americans of all people, in the Security Council sounds like a skit from Saturday Night Live (and not a good one!). A more legalistic approach was taken, leaving us to search for elusive WMDs hidden or exported by a totalitarian maniac. Whoever said war didn't have unintended consequences?
And speaking of those consequences, Blair's top envoy in Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, predicts larger bombs to come from the pro-fascist forces (known euphemistically in the media as "insurgents"... Question: would they have called the Nazis "insurgents"? Probably not. Then why the Baathists?).
``The opposition is getting more sophisticated, using bigger bombs and more sophisticated controls. We will go on seeing bigger bangs,'' Greenstock said.
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We are in a long war on many fronts--quite probably longer
and more complex than World War II. Most of the critics
would prefer to ignore this. I predict that some of them,
however, will soon be changing their tune.
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