Tony Blair Comes to Chicago, pt. 1

This is going to be a short one because I got home late and haven’t had enough time to fully collect my thoughts on the event The Chicago Council on Global Affairs hosted tonight with Tony Blair.  Briefly: He was personable and likeable, and I’d take him over almost any conservative politician we have in this country to date.  Blair made cogent arguments for his actions, though I can’t say I agree with him much.

No apologies for the Iraq War, though there seemed to be a hint of regret.  He’s very good at setting up the typical liberal strawman who’s soft on dictatorships and weak in the knees when it comes to foreign policy.  He also made an odd claim that poverty has little to do with the problems we’re experiencing in the Middle East.  On top of that all, he drew a very thin distinction between his claim that we need to fight injustice everywhere, and his working with countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt (because they’re “working with us”, we can overlook their actions to some extent).  More on this later.

The Q&A from the audience was pretty soft, except for two interesting questions: one about poverty in the Middle East (I mentioned that earlier), and another about the distinction between Islamic radicalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the rather linear way we look at Islamicism in general that leads to certain semantic pitfalls (the way we call certain people “moderate” Islamacists, when they really aren’t any less devoted, just not inclined to violence).  This led to a quick, interesting comment on how we may alienate certain groups by calling them moderate and making the appear weak.

Anyway, happy Earth Day, I guess.

Be sure to check out all the green items being sold at Walmart.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 2:18 am and is filed under Policy, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.