Stay the course. Maybe not in Iraq but outgoing Brit PM Tony Blair is urging those who will follow to maintain the warlike foreign policy he established.
“There are two types of nations similar to ours today,” he said. “Those who do war fighting and peacekeeping and those who have, effectively, except in the most exceptional circumstances, retreated to peacekeeping alone. Britain does both. We should stay that way,” he said.
“The frontiers of our security no longer stop at the Channel,” he said. “What happens in the Middle East affects us. What happens in Pakistan, or Indonesia, or in the attenuated struggles for territory and supremacy in Africa for example, in Sudan or Somalia — the new frontiers for our security are global,” he said.
“Our armed forces will be deployed in the lands of other nations far from home, with no immediate threat to our territory, in environments and in ways unfamiliar to them,” he said.
“They will usually fight alongside other nations, in alliance with them; notably, but probably not exclusively with the U.S.A.,” he said.
It's easy, even fun, to deride Tony Blair now when he's down and heading for the exit. Yet there's a fair bit of truth in what he says. It's just too bad that Tony Blair, his credibility in tatters, was the one to say it.
No comments:
Post a Comment