Jonathan Freedland (Guardian Utd): The war's silver lining [View All]

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited
Dated Wednesday March 2

The war`s silver lining
We need to face up to the fact that the Iraq invasion has intensified pressure for democracy in the Middle East
By Jonathan Freedland

Tony Blair is not gloating. He could - but he prefers to appear magnanimous in what he hopes is victory. In our Guardian interview yesterday, he was handed a perfect opportunity to crow. He was talking about what he called "the ripple of change" now spreading through the Middle East, the slow, but noticeable movement towards democracy in a region where that commodity has long been in short supply. I asked him whether the stone in the water that had caused this ripple was the regime change in Iraq.
He could have said yes, insisting that events had therefore proved him right and the opponents of the 2003 war badly wrong. But he did not. Instead he sidestepped the whole Iraq business.

Perhaps he was simply reluctant to reopen a debate that came to define, if not paralyse, much of his second term. Or maybe he calculated that it was best to keep the current democratic shift in the region separate from the Iraq war, so that people who opposed the latter might still rally to support the former.

But if he 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.

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