Prime Minister Tony Blair is quickly becoming a hero of mine. This is a leader who knows that many, if not the majority, of his countrymen are against his decision to be an ally in the War in Iraq. Furthermore, many in his own party are against him as well. Of course this is the Labour Party, not too dissimilar to the NDP in Canada; a political ideology PM Blair is attemting to recast as progressive. I readily admit that I am ignorant on the bulk of British domestic policy, but on foreign policy the British are as strong as ever.
PM Blair is doing the world a great service in pointing out that the War on Terror and specifically the War in Iraq need not be a divisive issue. The spreading of freedom and liberty is a concept that progressives and conservatives can get behind.
As I have mentioned before, another great service that PM Blair supplies is that he is better at articulating the "coalition of the willing" message than President Bush. I was particularly struck by this portion of the recent joint press conference of the President and Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: ...But I think the President said something here that I really think is very, very important. In the politics -- when I was first a member of Parliament and making my way up the greasy pole and all the rest of it, there was a view in foreign policy that you dealt with countries on the basis of whatever attitude they had towards you, but really whatever they did within their own countries, that was up to them, and didn't really make a difference to your long-term relationship.
I think what we are learning today is that there is not stability of any true, long-term kind without democratic rights for free people to decide their government.
Now, that doesn't mean to say we try and interfere with every state around the world, but it does mean that there's been a shift, and I think a shift quite dramatically, since 9/11 in the thinking that is informing our view of how we make progress.
That's why it wasn't enough to go into Afghanistan and rout out al Qaeda or knock down the Taliban. We actually had to go there and say, no, we must replace that with a democratic form of government -- because, in the end, if we replace it simply with another dictator, then we'll get the same instability back. That's why in Iraq we decided when Saddam was removed, we didn't want another hard man coming in, another dictator.
Now, it's a struggle, because democracy is hard to bring into countries that have never had it before. But I've no doubt at all that the Iraqi people, given the chance -- and indeed, you can see this in some of the local elections now down in the south of Iraq -- given the chance, they'll want to elect their leaders. Why wouldn't they? I mean, why would they want a strong-arm leader who's going to have the secret police, no freedom of speech, no free press, no human rights, no proper law courts? The people want the freedom. What we recognized, I think, today, is that we're not going to have our security unless they get that freedom.
So when we come to the issue of Israel and Palestine, I think what we are saying is, we are going to work flat-out to deliver this. But people have to understand, we can't deliver something unless the people who it affects actually want it to happen. And we don't believe there will be a viable future for a state of Palestine unless it's based on certain key democratic principles.
Now, I think that's a tremendous thing. And I also think that in the end -- of course, you're right, people can vote for the people they'd like to vote for in elections, right? That's what democracy is about. I think we've got to have some faith, though, in the ability of ordinary people, decent people, to decide their own future. Because it's a curious thing, you look at all these Eastern European countries -- Central East European countries in the European Union now, just democracies over the last 10 years -- fierce election debates, change in the government, often difficult circumstances when the governments change. But you go to those countries and talk to the people there, and their sense of liberation and their sense of self-worth as a result of the freedom they have, that is the best testament to why it's sensible to have faith in democracy.
And sometimes when people say, well it's -- you've got a Republican President, and a progressive politician from across the water, but in my view, people from different sides of the political spectrum should be able to come together to argue that policy case, because democracy is something that should unite us, whatever political position we
have.
