Friday, March 5, 2004
Tony Blair gave a speech today reminding everyone of what's important and why.
CNN.com - Blair warns of WMD terror threat - Mar. 5, 2004
He argued that the international community had a "duty and a right to prevent the threat materializing" and to stop a regime brutally oppressing its people.
"The threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before. It is to the world's security, what globalization is to the world's economy. It was defined not by Iraq but by September 11.
"September 11 did not create the threat Saddam posed. But it altered crucially the balance of risk as to whether to deal with it or simply carry on, however imperfectly, trying to contain it," Blair said...
Gone are the days when "the enemy" built a battleship, so you built two and felt yourself safe. Gone are the days when a European army could be a million men strong, and we could feel content sitting on the opposite side of an impentrable wall known as the Atlantic Ocean and feel ourselves safe. In these days when unconventional weapons are obtainable by many, including independent operators with no Ambassadors, no capital city and no head of state with whom to negotiate or force capitulation, the old formulas simply do not apply - in spite of the Democratic Party's and other's attempts to get us to slumber anew. So thank you, Tony Blair, for once again firing another salvo in the good fight.
Oh, and the article also has some quotes from some guy named Blix, which are out of place in a supposed news article about a Tony Blair speech other than in his part as the voice of the narrator, in this case CNN, inserting their own editorializing as part of the story. Anyone who understands what really matters, understands that Blix's opinion doesn't.
Update: Here is the text of the speech in full (hat tip: mal)
