"Ripples of change"

The Prime Minister gives an interview to The Guardian:

Mr Blair, in an echo of Harold Macmillan's phrase "winds of change" heralding the end of colonialism in Africa, expressed optimism that there was "a ripple of change" in the Middle East following a call [in the State of the Union address] by the US president, George Bush, in January for greater democracy.

The Times' first leader notes:

Suddenly, there is a whiff of 1989 in the air. The Middle East, one of the last regions in the world to cling to repressive government by corrupt and self-perpetuating elites, has been touched by democracy. One by one, regimes that seemed as entrenched as they were unresponsive have accepted demands for greater democracy and accountability — demands that only a few months ago would have brought persecution, arrest and even torture to those voicing such sedition. As with the collapse of communism, the challenge to authoritarian Arab governments has appeared suddenly, has emboldened once cowed protesters and has been largely inspired from outside.

And even The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, an opponent of the Iraq War, acknowledges that if, in his interview, Tony Blair:

... had wanted to brag and claim credit - boasting that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had set off a benign chain reaction - he would have had plenty of evidence to call on.

I consider this the crux of the case for the grand strategy that the US and UK have pursued since 9/11. Perhaps it was thought more politic - though was clearly in the longer run damaging - to stress what turned out to be bad intelligence on Saddam's arsenal, but there was always a more fundamental reason for promoting international regime-change. After the US mainland was attacked and 3000 civilians killed in a morning, there was much reflexive and unreflective commentary urging the West to tackle - in a cliche that has come to epitomise the ideology of 'Blame America first, last and at all times in between' - the 'root causes' of terrorism. Whenever these root causes were enumerated, they turned out to be whatever the critic concerned had been campaigning about on and before 9/10 - among many others, world poverty, a Palestinian state, or global warming.

These issues are important in themselves, but there is literally nothing that the US and her allies can do about them that would in any way dissuade those who are bent on the destruction of Western civilisation and its replacement by a restored Caliphate. The only possible response to theocratic totalitarianism from the adherents and defenders of Western civilisation - those of diverse views on other matters but who value in common the Enlightenment principles of free inquiry, separation of civil and religious authority, liberal political rights, the pursuit of science and reason, sexual equality, pluralism and tolerance - is militant opposition.

But there is a sense in which it is right and important to talk of root causes. It has been well expressed by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman:

Unless Bush dispenses with his discredited argument for the war - weapons of mass destruction - no one will hear or listen to what I believe was always the only right argument for the war and is now the only rationale left: to depose the genocidal Saddam regime in order to partner with the Iraqi people to build a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world - because it is the pathologies and humiliations produced by Arab misgovernance that are the root causes of terrorism and Muslim extremism.

There is much to criticise in the execution of US foreign policy in the past couple of years, but the overall strategy is one I consider essential both to the notion of a decent politics and to our security. In a misplaced realpolitik, Western policy had for years acquiesced in the perpetuation of a series of autocracies in the Middle East in order, so it was thought, to deflect anti-Western sentiment. It was, apart from anything else, a disastrous policy on the grounds of the very realpolitik that provided its rationale: the notorious tilt towards Saddam in the 1980s encouraged a despot of scarcely-imaginable brutality in territorial aggrandisement, while the absence of political means of redress across the region ensured that dissent took the form of religious fanaticism. To overthrow Saddam's gangster-regime and allow Iraqis to build a constitutional order with free elections is a course for Western policy that I have supported not only since the first Gulf War but for a decade before (since Israel's destruction of Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor, when I first became aware and convinced of the gathering storm of Saddam's ambitions). Britain's participation in that venture I count as the most strategically far-sighted and noble act of British foreign policy since the foundation of Nato.

I have written before that the Labour Party in government has done good and important things in foreign policy - of which these two instances, separated by more than 50 years, are the outstanding cases. I also noted a few weeks ago the response of the Conservative Party, as reported by the BBC, when one of its MPs, Robert Jackson, defected to the Labour benches:

"[Jackson] believes students should pay tuition fees, that Tony Blair should not be criticised over his handling of the Iraq war and that more powers should be given to Europe," the spokesman said.

This seems to me an admirable set of policies on which to fight an election, and I warmly endorse them. Having been a Labour Party activist for most of the 1980s (I was chairman of my university Labour Club, a member of the moderate Labour Solidarity Campaign, and then a member of the Lambeth Labour Party in south London for several years), I allowed my membership to lapse on the grounds that arguing the case for nuclear deterrence, the Atlantic alliance, student loans instead of grants, competitive markets, and surcharging Lambeth Labour councillors who refused to set a rate didn't appear to be making a great deal of headway, or at least not when and wherever the task was entrusted to me. It is a pleasure as well as a civic obligation now to renew that membership after a gap of 17 years, as a mark of gratitude and support for the Prime Minister's stand on Iraq, and his instinctive and unwavering solidarity with our American allies.