He muffed it. This was the speech in which the Prime Minister needed once and for all to confront head-on the madness that has overwhelmed public debate about Iraq, to spell out in terms why Saddam was so dangerous that whatever the risks of toppling him, the risks of leaving him in place were greater. But he didn't do it. Instead, he made precisely the leap of logic which has given such impetus to the anti-war zealots. Having made his admission that '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 then said this:

'And the problem is I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.'

But if the implied reason he went to war was wrong, then what was the justification for removing Saddam? Just getting rid of a bad man won't do at all -- not least because this was not the reason for going to war. It was because Saddam posed a threat to the world, and had refused to show the world, as it had demanded, that he no longer posed that threat. But the result of Blair's words today is that people are none the wiser about what that threat was, not least because of his bald statement that the information that there were actual WMD was wrong. No word about the 12 year breach of UN resolutions. No reference to the reports that WMD components were moved to other countries. And most crucially, no word about Saddam's involvement with terror, including the frequent contacts with al Qaeda.

This was clearly a strategic decision to draw a line under the whole WMD issue by stating the worst case scenario that the intelligence was wrong. But in doing so, Blair has done the cause of truth and rationality a grave disservice. Nor has he drawn a line under the controversy that dogs him over Iraq. He might have done so had he come out fighting. But he blew it.

And as a result, the warning he then went on to make about the unprecedented threat we are facing from a type of global terrorism that we have never seen before -- a fundamentally important point -- disastrously begged the question of whether that was the cause or the result of toppling Saddam. Blair promisingly singled out for attention the key charge that he is being accused of making things worse in Iraq rather than better. But then he just went on to describe the new type of terror -- yet without explaining that Saddam's Iraq was always involved in the export of such terror, even though it was not at that time itself a theatre of war.

So all those people in Britain who think that a) there are certainly a lot of very bad people who are going round cutting people's heads off and blowing up children but b) this has nothing whatever to do with Saddam Hussein and c) that Blair has turned Iraq into a crucible for these characters whereas it was never associated with terror before, will now feel even more confirmed in believing such garbage. Incredible! Wasn't there anyone in or around Downing Street with an ounce of intellectual or political nous who could have read this before allowing Blair, at such a critical juncture for both his premiership and the defence against terror, to muck up this opportunity so badly?

There was even worse to come. For Blair also said this:

'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.'

With this statement -- which he has made before -- the Prime Minister surely revealed the alarming extent of his abject failure to understand the single most important thing about the Middle East impasse. The absence of a state of Palestine is not the cause of demented, paranoid Islamic and Arab terrorism -- it is the result of it. Yes, the existence of Israel -- not a dispute over its behaviour or a quarrel about land, but the very existence of the Jewish state -- is a totemic cause for the jihad. But it is only one such cause, taking its place alongside Kashmir, Chechnya and Bosnia as the iconic grievances behind which the jihadis march for their goal, not of a state of Palestine but the restoration of the medieval Caliphate across the globe.

Does Blair really imagine that, if a state of Palestine existed, the jihadis who are slaughtering the innocent from Bali to Beslan would stop? The Palestinians could have had their state when they were offered it in 1947 or in 2000, or when Jordan and Egypt (illegally) occupied the West Bank and Gaza from 1947 to 1967. They didn't take these opportunities because a Palestinian state was never the issue. It was rather the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Israel.

The Middle East impasse is not about a state of Palestine. It is about the fact that a significant part of the Arab and Islamic world, unable to live with the reality of western progress and the global spread of freedom and democracy, has resolved to extirpate them anywhere they come into contact with present-day Islam or its ancient empire. Does the Prime Minister understand this? If he does, his failure to spell this out is contemptible. If he does not, then Britain's role as a principal bulwark in the defence of the free world is no more than an illusion.

Posted by melanie at September 28, 2004