As Bush admits making mistakes over Iraq, Blair offers a new world vision

Alec Russell / London Telegraph | May 27 2006

Tony Blair last night challenged the world to unite around a policy of "progressive pre-emption" as he sought to shore up his legacy by linking the invasion of Iraq to a range of problems, from global warming and poverty to immigration.

In a speech in Washington just hours after he and President George W Bush made strikingly frank admissions of mistakes in their handling of Iraq, the Prime Minister called for the world to help the new government in Baghdad. On his visit to Iraq on Monday he had seen a "child of democracy struggling to be born".

He also called for radical reform of the United Nations and its sister bodies, the IMF and the World Bank, arguing they were out-of-date and incapable of confronting the financial and security threats facing the world.

"Occasionally I look at our international institutions and think as I do about our welfare state: the structures of 1946 trying to meet the challenges of 2006," he said.

Mr Blair was clearly trying to move the domestic and international debate on from the rifts over Iraq to how to tackle future crises.

But the setbacks in Iraq inevitably overshadowed his visit to Washington, which may be his last as prime minister. In a joint press conference at the White House on Thursday night, both leaders briefly dropped their usual staunch defence of the Iraq policy and expressed contrition for some past utterances and actions.

Mr Bush said he regretted his "tough talk" conceding that his "bring it on" dare to the insurgents in the summer of 2003 and his "wanted dead or alive" taunt to Osama bin Laden in late 2001 had sent the "wrong signal to people".

The most concrete proposals in his speech at Georgetown University yesterday concerned the UN. He called for more powers for the UN secretary general, and increasing the number of permanent members of the security council.

A council with no fixed seats for India, Germany, Japan and no representatives from Latin America and Africa was no longer "legitimate in the modern world" and must be changed, he said. "The danger of leaving things as they are, is ad hoc coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy; or paralysis in the face of crisis." The G8 summits of industrialised nations should now also include China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico.

He said his vision was shaped by two crises early in his premiership - the war in Kosovo and the 1997 collapse of the Asian markets. "What these two crises taught me was that the rule book of international politics has been torn up," he said. Challenges such as global warming and mass migration "can only be tackled together. And they require a pre-emptive not simply reactive response".

Mr Blair will face scepticism, in particular over UN reform which is bogged down. He stressed, however, that in nine years as prime minister he had become convinced that the traditional distinction between foreign policies driven by values and interests was wrong.

Since the September 11 attacks "the greatest danger is that global politics divides into "hard" and "soft", he said. The idea that the "hard" get after the terrorists, the "soft" campaign against poverty" is dangerous and misleading. "We have to be prepared to think sooner and act quicker in defence of (those) values - progressive pre-emption, if you will."

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