Tony Blair was wrong on Iraq but right about Islamic extremist threat back then and now

News Letter editorial of Tuesday September 7 2021:
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

Very many prime ministerial spells in office end in failure, an observation that is roughly in line with what Enoch Powell said is the fate of all political careers.

Yet almost all of those periods as head of government are launched in joy. It is a media ritual to see beaming politicians such as Theresa May enter Downing Street, only to emerge years later, almost broken.

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Tony Blair’s entry into Number Ten was a particularly memorable moment of joy, with supporters lining his journey from north London to Whitehall in 1997, marking the end of 18 years of Tory rule. But it is almost as if the most triumphant entry leads to the most ignominious departure.

Mr Blair has in recent years seemed a shadow of his former self, as if haunted by the widespread antipathy to his legacy, based on the 2003 Iraq war. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, his government issued misleading information on weapons of mass destruction, used to justify the middle eastern invasion.

Mr Blair rarely gets credit though for having been right about two things: first, the deranged nature of radical Islam, and the global security threat that it poses, and second, about the thoroughly rotten and brutal nature of Saddam Hussein.

Now, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Mr Blair has given a speech to the Royal United Services Institute military think tank, in which he describes Muslim extremists as a “first-order security threat”. He goes on to give chilling warnings about how Covid underlines bio-terror possibilities.

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September 11 2001 showed us that fanatics would kill tens of thousands if they could. The Twin Towers held 50,000 at capacity, but were only partly filled because it was early in the day. Anyone who would do that would hardly hesitate from doubling or quadrupling that toll with a nuclear blast if they could.

Mr Blair is right to say that the Islamic threat, left unchecked, will come to us.

The tricky question though is what we can do about it. As the fall of Afghanistan to Taliban extremists showed, containing global threats is not easy.

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Ben Lowry

Acting Editor