Final stop
- 29 Mar 06, 11:59 PM
INDONESIA : It's Thursday, so it must be Jakarta - the last stop of this BlairAir tour. This morning in Auckland Tony Blair promised to strive to save the planet from climate change. This evening he embarks on a mission to save civilisation from Islamic extremism. No-one can say this boy lacks ambition.
Lest you think I'm sneering, allow me to point out that I'm merely quoting from the prime minister's recent speeches on terrorism - in particular one delivered in London a week ago which he believes was woefully under-reported. He may have a point.
It reveals that the next stage of Tony Blair's "war on terror" is not to be another military campaign but an ideological one designed to defeat the ideas of "Islamic extremism". To do this he wants to help create a "moderate Muslim" resistance to them.
If you sense an echo of the Cold War in this, you're not the only one. One senior government figure (and that's not code for the PM himself) has told me that all the tools of the state will have to be deployed to defeat the ideas of "Islamic extremists" much as they were in the battle with Communism.
The West desperately needs allies in this new battle of ideas. The PM has come to Jakarta because, we're told, it's "the right place, the right people, the right politics and the right time". In other words he wants to build strong links with the world's largest Muslim country now that's it's run by a directly elected president and not a dictator. He wants to add its leader to those of Pakistan and Turkey as members of a moderate Muslim coalition lined up against the "Islamic extremists".
Why you may wonder have I placed inverted commas around the words "Islamic extremist"?
I've done it to highlight a phrase the prime minister says he was advised to avoid since it might give offence to many ordinary Muslims. They believe that it focuses attention on the religion of the instigators of 9/11, Bali, 7/7 and all the rest rather than on their criminality. This advice, claimed Tony Blair, was part of the same thinking that argued that Muslims were bound to be react violently to the invasion of a Muslim country. It was, he said, all part of "a posture of weakness, defeatism and, most of all was deeply insulting to every Muslim who believes in freedom". Strong words.
He went on : "This terrorism will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted head-on, in their essence, at their core... This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction".
That tells you why we're in Jakarta.
