Tommie Hu$tle
Member
Patrick E. Tyler/NYT
Or did he?
BRIGHTON, England Prime Minister Tony Blair conceded Tuesday that there had been a decline of public trust in his government over the military campaign in Iraq, and he offered the assembled delegates of his governing Labour Party a qualified apology for some of the mistaken judgments he made in taking the country to war.
"The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong," he told hundreds of party leaders and delegates as about 8,000 protesters against the war and against a ban on fox hunting demonstrated outside the seaside hall.
"The problem is: I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam," Blair said, adding, "The world is a better place with Saddam in prison, not in power."
A small number of protesters slipped inside to twice interrupt Blair's address, one of them shouting that the prime minister had "blood on his hands." Party delegates booed the intrusion as security officers pushed the protesters out of the hall.
The speech was seen by party leaders as critical to shoring up Blair's personal standing at the top of the party as it prepares for elections next year. The Labour government could win its first third term in the party's history, a realignment that has profoundly affected the future prospects of the Conservative Party, which dominated British politics from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher.
While a number of Labour Party delegates said they considered Blair's remarks an apology and a help in galvanizing the party for the election fight ahead, others were more measured. A prominent union leader, Derrick Simpson, issued faint praise in a televised interview by saying Blair had given a "sound" performance.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative Party leader, appearing in a BBC television panel after the speech, asserted that Blair's apology had been too conditional. "I certainly didn't hear an apology about the war," he said.
A debate on Iraq is expected to dominate the Labour gathering Thursday. Blair delivered his address on a day when two more British soldiers were killed in Iraq and as the fate of a British engineer, Ken Bigley, was unknown 12 days after Bigley was taken hostage in Baghdad.
In a contrite tone, Blair said he was "fallible" like "any other human being" in his mistaken judgments on the war.
But Blair also said the struggle against global terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States had changed him as a leader.
"I know this issue has divided the country," he said, and adding that it had caused many Britons to think the prime minister had stopped "caring" about jobs, families and the domestic agenda.
"Or worse," he added, many Britons have come to believe Blair has been "pandering to George Bush" in a cause "that's irrelevant to us."
But he argued that threat from terrorism had changed profoundly from what "we have always lived with" in international affairs.
"I never anticipated, and neither did you, spending time on working out how terrorists trained in a remote part of the Hindu Kush could end up present on British streets threatening our way of life," he said. The new terrorism, he said, has become deep-rooted and based on a "perversion" of Islam and pervades the religious schools of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and parts of the political spectrum in the Middle East, Asia and the mosques of European cities.
Blair was applauded when he told the delegates that "the only path to take is to confront this terrorism, remove it root and branch and at all costs stop them from acquiring the weapons to kill on a massive scale, because these terrorists would not hesitate to use them."
Sounding a note from Bush's campaign speeches, Blair said that he had come to realize that "caring in politics isn't really about 'caring' - it's about doing what you think is right and sticking to it."
In this vein, he was slightly more defiant on Iraq, saying that "healing" within the party could come only "from understanding that the decision, whether agreed with or not, was taken because I believe, genuinely, that Britain's future security depended on it." While combating terrorism will require "more fighting" by British and American forces in Iraq, he said, "military action will be futile unless we address the conditions in which this terrorism breeds and the causes it preys on."
In a pledge that drew vigorous applause for its implicit criticism of Bush, the prime minister promised that after the November elections in the United States, he would make the revival of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians "a personal priority."
"Two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in an enduring peace would do more to defeat this terrorism than bullets alone can ever do," he said.
The Brighton conference is crucial for Blair because it will very likely stand as the last party gathering before he leads the party into an election, probably in May, to face an electorate whose preferences appear from recent public opinion surveys to be evenly apportioned among Labour, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats.
In his annual address, Blair laid out a domestic agenda, setting forth 10 specific pledges for improvements in education, crime fighting, health, pensions and welfare. He sought to rally the party with humor and taunts at the opposition.
Referring to the 10 pledges, he exhorted the delegates in language that clearly conveyed the election campaign had begun. "Don't tell me that's not worth fighting for," he said of the pledge list. "And now we have to go out and win the trust of the people to do it" with "some fire in our bellies."
The New York Times
Or did he?