28/07: An Extraordinary Political Friendship
Category: From the Heart
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
Watching the President and British Prime Minister Tony Blair meet the press in the East Room today, I am reminded of the Okie Gardener's comment years ago: Tony Blair may prove to be Aaron to George Bush's Moses (Exodus 4:10-14).
It is perhaps difficult to remember how surprising it was to some of us when Blair proved so stalwart in his conviction that remaking the Middle East was the crucial task of our generation. Where would we have been without Blair?
Like Joe Lieberman, the opponents of the war rightly hate Blair, without whom the President would have been hard-pressed to move forward. Blair's integrity, credibility, resolve and eloquence steadied the President and the policy in indispensable ways over the past five years. In the ultimate statesman-like fashion, Blair has sacrificed his popularity and his short-term legacy to support the President in what he (Blair) sees as the right thing to do.
If anything, the administration has made too little use of Blair's vast talent. Nevertheless, Americans owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to this valiant friend.
News coverage of the press conference from the AP. Press Conference video from C-SPAN.
It is perhaps difficult to remember how surprising it was to some of us when Blair proved so stalwart in his conviction that remaking the Middle East was the crucial task of our generation. Where would we have been without Blair?
Like Joe Lieberman, the opponents of the war rightly hate Blair, without whom the President would have been hard-pressed to move forward. Blair's integrity, credibility, resolve and eloquence steadied the President and the policy in indispensable ways over the past five years. In the ultimate statesman-like fashion, Blair has sacrificed his popularity and his short-term legacy to support the President in what he (Blair) sees as the right thing to do.
If anything, the administration has made too little use of Blair's vast talent. Nevertheless, Americans owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to this valiant friend.
News coverage of the press conference from the AP. Press Conference video from C-SPAN.
A Waco Farmer wrote:
After a David Gregory "loss of American influence" question seemed to befuddle the President, and a follow up had him swinging wildly, the PM stepped up and knocked the pitch out of the park, silencing the hostile crowd.
(And the fans listening back home, in fly-over USA, went wild.)
PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: "I don't think, actually, it's anything to do with a loss of American influence at all. I think -- we've got to go back and ask what changed policy, because policy has changed in the past few years. And what changed policy was September the 11th. That changed policy, but actually, before September the 11th this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do. But, actually -- and this is probably where the policymakers, such as myself, were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th, this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.
"I mean, in Algeria, for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives. This movement has grown, it is there, it will latch on to any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred. You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya. You can see it in Palestine.
"Now, what is its purpose? Its purpose is to promote its ideology based upon the perversion of Islam, and to use any methods at all, but particularly terrorism, to do that, because they know that the value of terrorism to them is -- as I was saying a moment or two ago, it's not simply the act of terror, it's the chain reaction that terror brings with it. Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on. But in a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades."