July 15, 2004

Making The Case for War

George Miller over at London Calling, has a fantastic piece on Tony Blair and the ongoing political tussle over the intel surrounding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - and the moral implications in focusing on Blair's pre-war statements rather than on the greater evil of Islamist terror. How good is it? I was trying to find a small bit to excerpt and found I was about to excerpt the whole thing. So I excerpted the excerpt. Here's two key bits, though I'm loathe to provide them because you really need to read the whole thing:

There were countless reasons to suspect [Saddam] of secret weapons programmes and I seem to remember the anti-war brigade arguing that we needed to be careful or we would provoke him to use them.

Would [Blair] have won the argument to back the Americans if he had said (more in the manner of President Bush): "We don’t really know if these weapons exist, but after September 11 and the proven terrorist threat, we can’t really take the chance. Furthermore, the West has a credibility problem with these fanatics that it has tried to ignore for the past decade. We must make an example of Saddam Hussein." Blair did say some things similar to this, but he judged that he needed extra ammunition to win the argument with his own backbenchers. As someone rather skilled in politics, he probably judged correctly.