. . .The history of civilisation as we know with it righting and urban life is just a little over 6,000 years
old. Human beings have been on the planet, depending on how you read the evidence, somewhere
between 50,000 and 100,000 years. I say that to begin on a note of optimism. The world has a whole lot
of problems, but we have not had a chance to bring it together for very long. You should be upbeat and
grateful that your party is in power at a time that you have a chance to make all the difference in the
world.
So, here we are in this interdependent world of open borders, easy travel, mass migration, universal
access to information and technology, drenched in global media. I will just give you a stunning example
that occurred to me on the way over here. When Kevin and I walked over to the hotel and got into our
van to ride here, his cellphone rang and two friends of ours were calling from Paris to say they had just
watched us walk out of the hotel in Blackpool, and how nice we looked. So I said, "Well, it's a slow day
for news in Paris," but it is a good example of our interdependent world.
This world has brought great benefits to the British people and the American people and to people
everywhere who are prepared to make the most of it and have the right values, the right vision and do
the right things. But there is a big problem with our interdependent world; it does not include a lot of
us yet.
Half the world's people live on less than $2 a day, a million people live on less than a dollar a day,
including people in three of the five nations I visited on my recent trip to Africa.
A billion people are hungry every night, a billion and a half people never have any clean water, 130
million kids never go to school, 10 million children die every year of preventable childhood diseases,
even though overall life expectancy is up and infant mortality down, even in the developing world.
One in four people this year who perish will die of Aids, TB, malaria and infections related to diarrhoea.
And it is not just the economic, health and education divides; there are large numbers of people who
simply do not have the values and vision necessary to be part of an interdependent world because
they think their differences, whether they are religious or political or racial or tribal or ethnic, are more
important than our common humanity. They believe the truth they have justifies their imposition of that
truth on other people, even if it takes them to the death of innocence.
9.11, what happened to us in September 2001, is a microcosmic but painful and powerful example of the
fact that we live in an interdependent world that is not yet an integrated global community, which
means that people who do not share the same values and vision and interest still have access to open
borders, easy travel, technology and information and the al-Qaida network used that to murder 3,100
people in the United States, including over several hundred Muslims and over 200 British citizens,
among those from over 70 countries who perished.
What does that tell you about the time in which we live? That whether you are British or American or
some other nationality the number one task of the world today is to move from interdependence, which
can be good and bad, to an integrated global community in which there is a shared future, shared
responsibilities, shared prosperity and, most important, shared values; one that says, "Hey, these
differences are interesting". It would be boring if we were all the same. Britain and America are more
interesting countries than they were 30 years ago because they are more diverse, but the only way we
can really live together is if we say that the celebration of our differences requires us to say that our
common humanity matters more.
There are a lot of obstacles in the road towards that kind of world. There are terrorists, there are
tyrants, there are weapons of mass destruction, there are all these people who are not part of our
prosperity and there are a lot of people on our side who think that we can for ever claim for ourselves
what we deny to others; there are a lot of obstacles in the way. But let us be realistic; none of you
believe that we will ever be completely defeated by terrorists. We will not allow ourselves to be
defeated by tyrants with weapons of mass destruction; that will not happen. But we could reduce the
future that we can build for our children if we respond to the challenges in the wrong way.
Whatever we do, we have to have a care for the security of our nation, the character of our people and
the future of our children. We must respond in a way that is consistent with the larger obligation we all
have to build a more integrated global community. It means, among other things, of course we have to
fight terrorists but we also have to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists. Of course we
have to stand against weapons of mass destruction but if we can we have to do it in the context of
building the international institutions that in the end we will have to depend upon to guarantee the
peace and security of the world and the human rights of all people everywhere. . .
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. . . In the aftermath of September 11th we went to work against terror in a world rudely awakened to its
universal threat, and much more willing to support the actions necessary to prevail. I still believe our
most pressing security challenge is to finish the job against al-Qaida and its leaders in Afghanistan and
any other place that they might hide. I would support even committing war forces to that. We have only
about half as many forces in Afghanistan today that we had in Bosnia after the conflict was over and we
were keeping the peace. I applaud Britain's commitment to finish the job in not only the conflict but to
winning the peace, to staying in Afghanistan with an international force and with the kind of support
necessary to make sure that we do not have the disaster that occurred when the west walked away
from them 20 years ago.
A few words about Iraq. I support the efforts of the prime minister and President Bush to get tougher
with Saddam Hussein. I strongly support the prime minister's determination if at all possible to act
through the UN. We need a strong new resolution calling for unrestricted inspections. The restrictions
imposed in 1998 are not acceptable and will not do the job. There should be a deadline and no lack of
clarity about what Iraq must do.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime poses a threat to his people, his neighbours and the
world at large because of his biological and chemical weapons and his nuclear programme. They
admitted to vast stores of biological and chemical stocks in 1995. In 1998, as the prime minister's
speech a few days ago made clear,. even more were documented. But I think it is also important to
remember that Britain and the United States made real progress with our international allies through
the UN with the inspection programme in the 1990s. The inspectors discovered and destroyed far more
weapons of mass destruction and constituent parts with the inspection programme than were
destroyed in the Gulf War, far more, including 40,000 chemical weapons, 100,000 gallons of chemicals
used to make weapons, 48 missiles, 30 armed warheads and a massive biological weapons facility
equipped to produce anthrax and other bio-weapons. In other words the inspections were working
even when he was trying to thwart them.
In December of 1998 after the inspectors were kicked out along with the support of Prime Minister Blair
and the British military we launched Operation Desert Fox for four days. An air assault on those
weapons of mass destruction, the air defence and regime protection forces. This campaign had scores
of targets and successfully degraded both the conventional and non-conventional arsenal. It
diminished Iraq's threat to the region and it demonstrated the price to be paid for violating the security
council's resolutions. It was the right thing to do, and it is one reason why I still believe we had to stay
at this business until we get all those biological and chemical weapons out of there.
What has happened in the last four years? No inspectors, a fresh opportunity to rebuild the biological
and chemical weapons programme and to try and develop some sort of nuclear capacity. Because of
the sanctions Saddam Hussein is much weaker militarily than he was in 1990, while we are stronger, but
that probably has given him even more incentive to try and amass weapons of mass destruction. I
agree with many Republicans and Democrats in America and many here in Britain who want to go
through the United Nations to bring the weight of world opinion together, to bring us all together, too
offer one more chance to the inspections.
President Bush and Secretary Powell say they want a UN resolution too and are willing to give the
inspectors another chance. Saddam Hussein, as usual, is bobbing and weaving. We should call his
bluff. The United Nations should scrap the 1998 restrictions and call for a complete and unrestricted set
of inspections with a new resolution. If the inspections go forward, and I hope they will, perhaps we can
avoid a conflict. In any case the world ought to show up and say we meant it in 1991 when we said this
man should not have a biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programme. And we can do that
through the UN. The prospect of a resolution actually offers us the chance to integrate the world, to
make the United Nations a more meaningful, more powerful, more effective institution. And that's why I
appreciate what the prime minister is trying to do, in trying to bring America and the rest of the world to
a common position. If he was not there to do this I doubt if anyone else could, so I am very very grateful.
If the inspections go forward I believe we should still work for a regime change in Iraq in non-military
ways, through support of the Iraqi opposition and in trying to strengthen it. Iraq has not always been a
tyrannical dictatorship. Saddam Hussein was once a part of a government which came to power through
more legitimate means.
The west has a lot to answer for in Iraq. Before the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds
and the Iranians there was hardly a peep in the west because he was in Iran. Evidence has now come
to light that in the early 1980s the United States may have even supplied him with the materials
necessary to start the bio-weapons programme. And in the Gulf War the Shi'ites in the south-east of
Iraq were urged to rise up and then were cruelly abandoned to their fate as he came in and killed large
numbers of them, drained the marshes and largely destroyed their culture and way of life. We cannot
walk away from them or the proved evidence that they are capable of self-government and entitled to a
decent life. We do not necessarily have to go to war to give it to them, but we cannot forget that we are
not blameless in the misery under which they suffer and we must continue to support them.
This is a difficult issue. Military action should always be a last resort, for three reasons; because today
Saddam Hussein has all the incentive in the world not to use or give these weapons away but with
certain defeat he would have all the incentive to do just that. Because a pre-emptive action today,
however well justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because I
have done this, I have ordered these kinds of actions. I do not care how precise your bombs and your
weapons are, when you set them off innocent people will die. . .