Tony Blair said:
Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value…
Earlier today, I gave authority for UK forces to be deployed against Iraq.
Operation Desert Fox was launched at 10 pm London time (2200 gmt).
There can be no greater responsibility upon a prime minister than to ask British servicemen to risk their lives for the sake of peace and stability in another part of the world, and I feel that responsibility tonight, profoundly.
I can confirm that Nato air strikes against Serb forces have begun and that UK forces are engaged in this action. Any political leader thinks long and hard before committing forces to action and the inevitable risks that are attached to it. I would not take this course if I did not think it was the right thing to do.
I want to pay tribute at the outset to our Armed Forces. We owe a huge debt to them for their courage and their professionalism.
Tonight there are families in Britain who will be feeling a real sense of anxiety. They can feel too however a real sense of pride at the contribution their loved ones are making to peace and stability in Europe.
As you will know from the announcement by President Bush military action against targets inside Afghanistan has begun. I can confirm that UK forces are engaged in this action. I want to pay tribute if I might right at the outset to Britain’s armed forces. There is no greater strength for a British Prime Minister and the British nation at a time like this than to know that the forces we are calling upon are amongst the very best in the world.
They and their families are, of course, carrying an immense burden at this moment and will be feeling deep anxiety as will the British people. But we can take pride in their courage, their sense of duty and the esteem with which they’re held throughout the world.
No country lightly commits forces to military action and the inevitable risks involved but we made it clear following the attacks upon the United States on September 11th that we would take part in action once it was clear who was responsible.
On Tuesday night I gave the order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq.
Tonight, British servicemen and women are engaged from air, land and sea. Their mission: to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
The fact is that in the 21st century, let us hope it is unlikely we are going to be defending our own territory here in Britain, it is very likely we will be involved in all sorts of different operations with other forces around the world…
If there is one fact which sums up the scale of our achievement, it is surely this - this Labour government is responsible for the longest period of peacetime growth since records first began in 1870 - 130 years ago.
Tony Blair seems to have borrowed that last phrase from Gordon Brown.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue. Last year, the Lancet (the official journal of the British Medical Association) published the second peer-reviewed survey on post-invasion mortality in Iraq by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad. The “controversial”* study found that at least 400,000 more Iraqis had died since 2003 than in the years immediately preceding the war. The most likely number of excess deaths was 655,000.
The study period concluded in July, 2006. A year has passed since then and the violence appears to have intensified. How many people have died now? The UN says 4.2 million Iraqis have now fled their homes - two million inside Iraq, 2.2 million abroad.
In the ten years since Tony Blair spoke of a generation that might never go to war again, “a prize beyond value”, he has launched or maintained war in all but three of them: 1997, 2000 and 2002. But even these years don’t count since Britain and the United States were still bombing Iraq throughout the decade - and they intensified their attacks in 2002.
A decade of war. And if Blair’s successor raised any opposition to this, I must have missed it.
*One of the most widely circulated critiques of the Lancet report was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Steven E. Moore - former adviser in Iraq to the spectacularly incompetent proconsul L. Paul Bremer. A rebuttal of Moore’s arguments can be found here. A more detailed description of the Lancet report was given in at a Congressional hearing last December - transcript here.
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