Blair addresses the elephant in the room

He’s on his way out, so he’s going for broke. Distilling some of the remarks he made at an important speech that got little attention at the time, Blair now pointedly calls out his cohort—the elites of the West:

Western leaders are increasingly aware of the global nature of the struggle against Islamic extremism led by Iran, but within Western public opinion “there is a big battle to be won.”

This somber assessment was offered here Sunday by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in an interview with Haaretz. The British leader, who just recently announced his intention to step down within a year, acknowledged that his own domestic political difficulties were closely tied with this “ideological battle” for British and Western hearts and minds.

This is a far-ranging interview that he gave Ha’aretz, and it’s worth reading the whole thing.

Blair thinks it can take a long time (up to a generation) to get people to come around to understanding things differently. But that we must persist in speaking out and in persuading them.

And as I said recently in my L.A. speech, the first way to win a battle is to realize you’re in a battle. That’s part of the trouble: We don’t yet really understand this is a global movement and it requires a global strategy to beat it.

One other point - you can’t beat it simply by security or military means. This is an ideological battle. It’s got to be taken out to the enemy. And that’s why I say it’s important for us always to be the ones who have got a political strategy running alongside the military strategy. We should never, ever, whatever the technical difficulties, let the political strategy fall away.

We in our paper see your political difficulties and the battle of ideology as very closely linked. We have witnessed with a certain amount of sorrow your inability to inculcate this awareness in your own public opinion and among Western European opinion.
Yeah, but you know in the end sometimes it takes people a long time to wake up. And sometimes these struggles go over a whole generation, almost. It’s less important what my position is - but as you say rightly, I expect it indicates that we’ve got a big job to do.

But I think that underneath opinion is changing. On the surface I agree at the moment, no, it isn’t. But underneath people are beginning to see it change. Now my own view is that if we were able to revive the Palestinian process that would be a huge part of persuading opinion that the one issue where even quite moderate Muslims just feel frustration and anger - that we were dealing with it now.

…I know from the Israeli point of view how frustrating it is to be told, you know, this is an issue that in the interest of the world has got to be solved… and you worry in Israel that maybe our interests get sacrificed in the course of finding a solution. I hope that I’ve done enough to prove that I will never sacrifice the security of Israel in that way. But I do genuinely believe that our job has got to be to build that alliance of moderation and empower the moderate Muslims and Arab voices.

Hear, hear.