I was at the speech in 1999 when Tony Blair spoke in Chicago and declared "We are all interventionists now." James Taranto looks back....
By JAMES TARANTO
Yesterday Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, delivered an important speech in Chicago. As Oliver Kamm of London's Times notes, it was a follow-up to a speech 10 years ago, also in Chicago, in which Blair, as Kamm puts it, "rightly perceived that rogue states posed a threat to civilised values and regional stability" and, in Blair's own words, "set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention."
When Blair spoke in 1999, Saddam Hussein still held power in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic ruled what was left of Yugoslavia. The end of Saddam's dictatorship was four years away, but NATO was already acting to liberate Kosovo from Milosevic's domination. The Kosovo operation proceeded fairly smoothly, but the liberation of Iraq turned out to be more complicated. That, combined with distaste or hatred for George W. Bush, caused many liberals to lose their nerve and abandon the idea of intervention on behalf of human rights.
Not Blair. He acknowledges a mistake, in that in 1999 "I thought that removal of a despotic regime was almost sufficient in itself to create the conditions for progress." Nonetheless, he says, "I still believe that those who oppress and brutalise their citizens are better put out of power than kept in."
This is a far less popular view on the American center-left than it was in 1999--or in 2002, when 162 congressional Democrats voted in favor of Iraq's liberation. Today many American liberals scoff at a concern for human rights and espouse instead a coldhearted "realism" that might once have passed for conservative.
Blair argues that such realism is not realistic at all:
We should not revert to the foreign policy of years gone by, of the world-weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be.
We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced. Here is where I remain adamantly in the same spot, metaphorically as well as actually, of 10 years ago, that evening in this city. The statesmanship that went before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. It's all a power play; a matter not of right or wrong, but of who's on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. The notion of humanitarian intervention was the meddling of the unwise, untutored and inexperienced.
But was it practical to let Pakistan develop as it did in the last 30 years, without asking what effect the madrassas would have on a generation educated in them? Or wise to employ the Taliban to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Or to ask Saddam to halt Iran? Was it really experienced statesmanship that let thousands upon thousands die in Bosnia before we intervened or turned our face from the genocide of Rwanda?
Or to form alliances with any regime, however bad, because they solve "today" without asking whether they will imperil "tomorrow"? This isn't statesmanship. It is just politics practiced for the most comfort and the least disturbance in the present moment.
One need not agree with Blair on every point; for instance, we would argue that support for the anticommunist resistance in Afghanistan, which helped bring about the disintegration of the Soviet empire, was justified both morally and practically. (The failure lay in neglecting Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal.) His overall point, however, is true and important. Often so-called realists like Charles Freeman, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt and Roger Cohen display a perverse pride in their moral insensitivity, as if amorality itself were the same as clear thinking.
Does liberal interventionism have a future? That, it seems to us, is up to President Obama. Here are Blair's thoughts on the matter:
President Obama's reaching out to the Muslim world at the start of a new American administration is welcome, smart, and can play a big part in defeating the threat we face. It disarms those who want to say we made these enemies, that if we had been less confrontational they would have been different. It pulls potential moderates away from extremism.
But it will expose, too, the delusion of believing that there is any alternative to waging this struggle to its conclusion. The ideology we are fighting is not based on justice. That is a cause we can understand. And world-wide these groups are adept, certainly, at using causes that indeed are about justice, like Palestine. Their cause, at its core, however, is not about the pursuit of values that we can relate to; but in pursuit of values that directly contradict our way of life. They don't believe in democracy, equality or freedom. They will espouse, tactically, any of these values if necessary. But at heart what they want is a society and state run on their view of Islam. They are not pluralists. They are the antithesis of pluralism. And they don't think that only their own community or state should be like that. They think the world should be governed like that.
In other words, there may well be groups, or even Governments, that can be treated with, and with whom we can reach an accommodation. Negotiation and persuasion can work and should be our first resort. If they do, that's great, which is why if Hamas were to accept the principle of a peaceful two state solution, they could be part of the process agreeing it [sic]. But the ideology, as a movement within Islam, has to be defeated. It is incompatible not with "the West" but with any society of open and tolerant people and that in particular means the many open and tolerant Muslims.
Obama's bitterest opponents see him as actively hostile to American ideals and interests, à la former president Jimmy Carter. A more plausible worry is that the president is naive and egotistical enough to believe that his own luminous personality is sufficient to solve the world's problems.
But if Obama's glad-handing is a mere tactic--if it is, or comes to be, part of a strategy that incorporates Blair's insights about the importance of Western ideals and the evil of the enemy's ideology--he could prove to be a successful foreign-policy president.
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