Side by Side Fighting Against Islamic Fundamentalism
Some things have to be said by politicians, while some things, it seems, can only be said by ex-politicians. Tony Blair’s speech at Bloomberg in London, was a speech that needed to be given. And since it isn’t a speech that the US President or current UK Prime Minister seems willing or able to give, the job fell to a former Prime Minister. What Tony Blair did on Wednesday morning was to speak into a policy vacuum which is increasingly felt on both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed around the world.
For more than a year, and even more since last summer’s failed vote on Syria in Parliament, we have heard the same tune on Western engagement in the world. We have been told by the US President and Secretary of State, by the UK Prime Minister and Chancellor, that the West is ‘tired of war’. Since the post-liberation debacle in Iraq and the mounting casualties over an ill-defined mission in Afghanistan, we have seen a cynicism about intervention grow among the various publics of the West. As allied forces got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, as they left the former, and as they prepare to leave the latter, the cynicism about interventionism has developed into a hostility about any Western engagement in the world. The question of ‘Can we do any good?’ has turned into, ‘What good could we possibly do?’
An isolationism, a sense that we are going to be better off in the long and short term if we pull up the drawbridge, has become a motif in more countries than America. The idea is also showing traction elsewhere. Nigel Farage’s UKIP has a public relations hit on its hand whenever it warns of the perils of engagement overseas. Those advocating the furthest flung parts of this argument, even end up looking with a doe-eyed admiration at the ‘principled’ stance of Vladimir Putin (himself hardly a non-interventionist, as the citizens of Ukraine and Crimea can testify).
Tony Blair’s point this week was that intervention does not always mean military engagement. What it does mean is an engagement with the issues of our time. For our age, the issue is Islamic fundamentalism. Blair identified that problem at length and laid out not only the problems that exist, but the problems which are going to emerge if we do not stand firmly against the threat of the jihadists, whether it is at home or abroad.
It was an important marker to put down, not just against the jihadists but against the fatalism and ennui which threaten to become the standard attitudes of our time. As Blair said towards the end of his speech; “This is not a mess where everyone is as bad as each other. There is a side we should be proud to take. There are people to stand beside and who will stand beside us”.
