Reality Check

[Annie]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...2901.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/05/29/ixop.html

West must take pre-emptive action for its own security
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 29/05/2006)

You could hear a snigger of triumph echo round the world as George Bush and Tony Blair uttered an admission of their "mistakes" over Iraq. Not quite the mortified apology that the anti-war lobby wanted, but it would make a satisfying headline.

The Blair Government is imploding at home and when Tony goes under, George will be friendless. The Bush-Blair foreign misadventure show is in its last, discredited moments.

In no time at all, we will be back to business as usual: the UN can hunker down happily into its familiar stalemates and corrupt corridor deals, while Europe witters about the minutiae of its latest wave of regulations. And the peoples of the world who live under murderous despots can go to hell in a handcart.

Well, it's not to be: never business as usual again, I'm afraid. The status quo ante is not an option - not just, as Mr Blair likes to say, because of 9/11, but because the old dispensation was a product of the Cold War.

In the days when two nuclear superpowers eyeballed each other across the wall, the little dictators were part of a global chess game.

The big boys could be complacently cynical about third world tyrannies: it didn't matter if a ruler was genocidal or corrupt and kept his own population in terrorised poverty. All that mattered was that he was your guy.

We kept our sons-of-bitches under control and they kept their sons-of-bitches under control. It was a global carve-up of the most callous and immoral kind.

It always makes me smile when I hear Leftists complaining, in the old Stalinist tradition, about Western imperialism in Iraq: these are the very people who used to attack the United States for supporting dictatorships that suited its interests.

Well, you can't have it both ways. Either it's good to remove dictators, or it isn't. But anyway, the game is up. It is the little dictators and the rogue states, with their access to nuclear weapons and their terrorist networks, who are the threat now.

The ideological struggle which had once bribed and coerced them into compliance is finished. They are on the loose, and there is no room for complacency any more.

The undoing of the Blair-Bush case for the war - the "deception" of public opinion over the existence of weapons of mass destruction - was actually rooted in this historical shift. Removing Saddam Hussein had to be justified on the old rules - he is an immediate threat to our national security - when, in reality, this was the first war to be fought on the new rules.

In his Georgetown University speech, Mr Blair said that, in this new global politics "idealism becomes the realpolitik", which sounds like one of his rhetorical oxymorons.

Typical of Mr Blair's pronouncements on this subject, it was sententious and self-regarding - and absolutely right. What he meant was that a policy that would once have seemed hopelessly pious and far-reaching - liberating oppressed people in distant lands that seem to have little to do with us - was not just an abstract moral duty but essential for our security.

If terror is to be defeated, then the swamp that breeds terrorists must be drained. So try putting it this way: "Pre-emption is the pragmatism of the 21st century." Mr Blair's talk about UN reform makes Washington impatient: they see the talking shop principle as exhausted, irrelevant and too reliant on the cooperation of the dictators who must be displaced.

If there is a criticism to be made of the Blair logic, it is that it does not follow the argument through to its obvious conclusion: the lunatic in charge of Iran must not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons under any circumstances, and so the threat of force must remain on the table as a last resort.

If his beloved international consensus fails, Mr Blair knows that the United States and its best friends will have to handle this alone, whoever occupies the White House and Downing Street.

But it is a pity about Europe's pusillanimous response to the new order: the US does have real limitations in its understanding of how the rest of the world thinks.

What really went wrong in Iraq was a failure of the US to grasp that not everyone would seize the gift of freedom with both hands and make it work. They say that America is an optimistic country because that's where the optimists went.

What is also true is that it is the place where people went when they hungered for freedom - from religious persecution, from poverty, from inequality. Americans believe that being free is a universal birthright.

They just don't get it when nations, given the choice, opt for dictatorship, theocracy or the tribalism of warlords. What Mr Blair has tried to sell to Washington is the wisdom that the Old World has to offer about ancient hatreds and peoples who fear liberty - but this will not wash if Europe wants no part of the new order and refuses the role it might have had.

Now the Blair era is crashing to a gruesome end. While the Prime Minister delivered his grand speech on the future of the world, his deputy was playing croquet in a kind of parody of aristocratic insouciance.

There is a comic quality to the fiasco of New Labour's failure to manage even the most mundane functions of government. The brand new Home Secretary sets off on holiday while illegal immigrants discover that they can simply walk out of detention.

But in the first analysis, the Iraq war will be seen as the cause of Mr Blair's collapse. It will be his support for the Bush foreign policy that will take the blame - at least, in the media coverage - for his downfall, even though domestic problems are causing greater public anger and anxiety.

But, as Mr Blair knows, these things are connected: illegal immigration, which arouses so much resentment, will remain a problem for Britain and the US so long as poverty and oppression in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East persist.

In the West, we have learned how to eradicate mass starvation and gross inequality. There is no mystery: the answer is liberal democratic government and free market economics. Those are the things that we are going to have to export if we are to have any hope of a peaceful future.