Blair: Bush's little puppy..I was wrong
nytimes.com
September 28, 2004
In Party Speech, Blair Admits Political Cost of Iraq Mistakes
By PATRICK E. TYLER
BRIGHTON, England, Sept. 28 — Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged today that there had been a decline of public trust in his government over the military campaign in Iraq and he offered the assembled delegates of his governing Labor Party a qualified apology for some of the judgments he had made in taking the country to war.
"The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons as opposed to the capability to develop them has turned out to be wrong," he told hundreds of party leaders and delegates as about 8,000 protesters against the war and against a ban on fox hunting demonstrated outside the hall in this seaside resort on Britain's southern coast.
"And the problem is, I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam," Mr. Blair said, adding, "The world is a better place with Saddam in prison, not in power."
A small number of protesters slipped inside to twice interrupt Mr. Blair's address, one of them shouting that the prime minister had "blood on his hands." Party delegates booed the intrusion as security officers forcibly pushed the protesters out of the hall.
The speech is seen by party leaders as critical to shoring up Mr. Blair's personal standing at the top of the Labor Party as it prepares for elections next year. The Labor government hopes to win its first third term in the party's history, a realignment that has profoundly affected the future prospects of the Conservative Party, which dominated British politics from Winston Churchill through Margaret Thatcher, whose successor, John Major, relinquished No. 10 Downing Street to Mr. Blair in 1997.
While a number of Labor Party delegates said they interpreted Mr. Blair's remarks as an apology and helpful to galvanizing the party for the election fight ahead, others were more measured. A prominent union leader, Derrick Simpson, issued faint praise in a televised interview by saying Mr. Blair had given a "sound" performance.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative Party leader, appearing in a BBC television panel immediately after the speech, asserted that Mr. Blair's apology was too conditional. "I certainly didn't hear an apology about the war," he said.
A debate on Iraq is expected to dominate the Labor gathering on Thursday.
The speech was delivered on a day when two more British soldiers were killed in Iraq and as the fate of a British engineer, Ken Bigley, was unknown after being taken hostage in Baghdad 12 days ago.
In a contrite tone, Mr. Blair said he was as "fallible" as "any other human being" in his mistaken judgments on the war, but he also said the struggle against global terrorism since the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had changed him as a leader.
"I know this issue has divided the country," he said, and that many Britons think the prime minister has stopped "caring" about jobs, families and the domestic agenda.
"Or worse," he added, many Britons have come to believe Mr. Blair has been "pandering to George Bush" in a cause "that's irrelevant to us."
But he asserted that the threat from terrorism had changed profoundly from the terrorism "we have always lived with" in international affairs.
"I never anticipated, and neither did you, spending time on working out how terrorists trained in a remote part of the Hindu Kush could end up present on British streets threatening our way of life," he said.
The new terrorism, he said, has become deep rooted and based on a "perversion" of Islam and pervades the religious schools of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and parts of the political spectrum in the Middle East, Asia and the mosques of European cities.
Mr. Blair was applauded when he told the delegates that "the only path to take is to confront this terrorism, remove it root and branch and at all costs stop them from acquiring the weapons to kill on a massive scale, because these terrorists would not hesitate to use them."
Sounding a note from President Bush's campaign speeches, Mr. Blair said that he had come to realize that "caring in politics isn't really about caring: It's about doing what you think is right and sticking to it."
In that vein, Mr. Blair was slightly more defiant on the Iraq issue, saying that "healing" within the party could only come "from understanding that the decision, whether agreed with or not, was taken because I believe, genuinely, that Britain's future security depended on it."
And while he said that the fight against terrorism would require "more fighting" by British and American forces in Iraq, he added that "military action will be futile unless we address the conditions in which this terrorism breeds and the causes it preys on."
In a pledge that drew vigorous applause for its implicit criticism of President Bush, the British prime minister said that after the American elections in November, he would make the revival of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians "a personal priority."
"Two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in an enduring peace would do more to defeat this terrorism than bullets alone can ever do," he said.
The Brighton conference is crucial for Mr. Blair because it will probably stand as the last party gathering before Mr. Blair leads the party into an election, probably in May 2005, to face an electorate whose preferences appear from recent public opinion surveys to be evenly apportioned among Labor, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats.
Mr. Blair used the annual address to lay out a domestic agenda, setting forth 10 specific pledges for improvements in education, crime fighting, health and social welfare and sought to rally the party with humor, taunts at the opposition and then a lengthy homily on Iraq and how the struggle against terrorism had changed him as a leader.
Referring to the 10 pledges, he exhorted the delegates in language that clearly conveyed that the election campaign had begun.
"Don't tell me that's not worth fighting for," he said of the pledge list. "And now we have to go out and win the trust of the people to do it with some fire in our bellies."
The decline in Labor's fortunes has raised the question of whether Mr. Blair could rally the country again behind his leadership, or whether he has become such a liability due to the Iraq war that he should step aside in favor of Gordon Brown, his oldest political ally. The party consensus, fragile at times, has been that Mr. Blair will lead the party in the elections, but perhaps not all the way through a third term if Labor prevails.
Friction between Mr. Blair and Mr. Brown over the nuances of policy and a rivalry of leadership vision has been the hallmark of their seven years in power. In an effort at unity, Mr. Blair's wife, Cherie, entered the hall in advance of her husband's speech and dramatically embraced Mr. Brown to the applause of delegates.
And in his speech, Mr. Blair paid special tribute to Mr. Brown as "a personal friend for 20 years and the best chancellor this country has ever had." |
