February 17, 2003

Blair to defy anti-war protests

Tony Blair refused to blink last night in the face of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever held in Britain and worldwide.

Ministers and officials insisted the protests - which saw more than 1 million people march in London on Saturday - would not delay military preparations for war next month.

One well-placed source said: "It changes nothing at all. The quicker it is done, the better. To back down now would be the worst result possible. We would have no credibility if Saddam Hussein was still in place."
[...]Mr Blair will face calls to give the inspectors more time when he meets the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, and the French president, Jacques Chirac, at an EU summit on Iraq in Brussels tonight. The summit was called by Greece, which holds the EU presidency, to try to secure common ground but there was little optimism in London that it would achieve much more than a reiteration of support for existing UN resolutions.
[...]Mr Blair, speaking at the annual conference of the Labour party in Scotland, said that while he understood the moral concerns of the marchers, the balance of morality lay with ending a barbaric regime.

While refusing to be dismayed by the scale of the protests, Downing Street aides took quiet satisfaction yesterday as cabinet members defended what the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, called Mr Blair's "courage, integrity and honesty" in the crisis.

John Reid, the Labour party chairman, took the marchers head on, saying they recommended doing nothing, and that such a moral choice meant sustaining a status quo "under which there are people being murdered, tortured and dying and starving".

Tony and Cabinet, thanks ever so much!
Your leadership, along with your great moral courage, is definitely reaching Churchillian proportions now.
Hold steady and firm for Britain.
We're right and the Islamist terrorists and their appeasement-loving "peacenik" supporters are wrong.