My Plan for the Middle East
by Tony BlairGosh – people can be quite unnecessarily negative! Consider yesterday’s NEW IMPROVED HEAD blog post which implied that I will somehow be hampered in my new role as special envoy to the Middle East by my association with the invasion of Iraq. Others have argued that my government’s support of Israel has led Middle Easterners to distrust my motives as an envoy charged with finding a resolution to the problems of the Palestinians.
These critics – as usual – conveniently forget to mention all that I have done to build bridges between the West and the Middle East. Why, my government even arranged for a knighthood to be bestowed on prominent Muslim writer Sir Salman Rushdie! And – of course – the critics never mention the greatest example of President Bush’s and my benevolence towards the Middle East – we have not invaded Iran!
When one actually takes off one’s bile-coloured spectacles off and looks at things as they really are, one finds that I have many attributes that will reveal my true colours to Middle Easterners, in spite of the frenzied efforts of the naysayers! For example, my deep religious faith should re-assure a region which has its own deep religious faith. This re-assurance should be even greater once I have converted to Roman Catholicism, a church with which Middle Easterners have had a long and complex relationship.
I am sure that, when they see all these plusses on my resume, people in the Middle East will not worry about my ability to find a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Yes, the wiseacres can claim there are now three states to be dealt with, but they ignore the perfectly obvious fact that there are only two of them that I’m willing to deal with.
I also resent the idea, implicit in the naysayers’ criticisms, that the Muslim people of the Middle East are irrational and violent. Ask yourself – if the Muslims in the Middle East were irrational and violent, what would that make me and President Bush? One might as well argue that we had no good reason to invade Iraq, or that our forces have killed large numbers of Iraqis!
In actual fact, the Muslims of the Middle East are strikingly like the peoples of the United Kingdom and the United States, majorities of whom also oppose our intervention in Iraq. It is this framework of shared values that I hope to ignore while bringing peace to the middle east.
After all, I won three elections in a row for the Labour Party, including the largest electoral victory it has ever achieved, while ignoring the party’s bedrock political principles! The peace I will bring to the Middle East may not in the end be as peaceful a peace as the dyed-in-the-wool nitpickers and complainers – the people of the Middle East, for example – consider appropriate. I promise, however, that I will never call it anything but peace. You have my word.
My Plan for the Middle East, by Tony Blair © John FitzGerald, 2007
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