BRITAIN: British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair has invoked the threat posed by rogue states and terrorists "prepared to bring about Armageddon" to mount his most passionate defence yet of the war in Iraq.
In a robust repudiation of his domestic critics, Mr Blair described the ongoing controversy about the Attorney General's advice as to the legality of the war as another "elaborate smokescreen to prevent us seeing the real issue", which he defined as "not a matter of trust but of judgment".
And he offered the British people his judgment that "the risk of this new global terrorism and its interaction with states or organisations or individuals proliferating weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is one I simply am not prepared to run".
In a speech calling for the reform of the United Nations - "so its Security Council represents 21st century reality, and giving the UN the capability to act effectively as well as to debate" - Mr Blair said groups such as al-Qaeda represented a "new type of war", and conceded that the "war" on international terror "may only be at the end of its first phase".
Speaking in his Sedgefield constituency, the Prime Minister said: "It is monstrously premature to think the threat has passed." And he warned of the "mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the new world in which we live". While everything about the world was changing - its economy, technology, culture and way of living - Mr Blair said the same was true of its security.
"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 globalisation is to the world's economy."
That threat, he argued, was defined not by Iraq but by the events of September 11th, 2001. Mr Blair said: "September 11th 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."
Describing the events of that day as "a revelation", he continued: "What had seemed inchoate came together. The point about September 11th was not its detailed planning, not its devilish execution, not even simply that it happened in America, on the streets of New York. All of this made it an astonishing, terrible and wicked tragedy, a barbaric murder of innocent people. But what galvanised me was that it was a declaration of war by religious fanatics who were prepared to wage that war without limit.
"They killed 3,000. But if they could have killed 30,000 or 300,000 they would have rejoiced in it. The purpose was to cause such hatred between Muslims and the West that a religious jihad became reality, and the world engulfed by it."
From that day, Mr Blair said, he could see the threat plainly: "Here were terrorists prepared to bring about Armageddon. Here were states whose leadership cared for no one but themselves; were often cruel and tyrannical towards their own people; and who saw WMD as a means of defending themselves against any attempt, external or internal, to remove them."
While allowing that the feared coming together of rogue states and WMD might not have happened, Mr Blair defended that judgment not to take the risk.