Prime Minister Tony Blair Thanks UK Armed Forces in Basra Surprise
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Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair talks
with military personal in Basra, southern Iraq, January
4, 2004.
Peter
Macdiarmid / Reuters |
Prime Minister
Tony Blair has praised the work UK troops are carrying out in
Iraq. On a surprise visit to Basra after vacationing in Egypt
with his wife and four children.Mr. Blair said the world will
owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.
In Blair’s
opening remarks to the troops he said, "It is a great honour
for me to be here today and to say a few words to you, and really
the first thing I want to say is a huge thank you for the work
that you have done, and that reputation of the British Armed Forces
I don’t think has ever been higher than it is today, or its prestige
ever greater, and that is down to you and the work that you have
done."
Read
the Prime Minister’s address to troops in full below:
Prime
Minister Tony Blair’s Full Statement to the Troops
(10
DOWNING STREET)
PRIME MINISTER:
Good Afternoon everyone. It is a great honour for me to be here
today and to say a few words to you, and really the first thing
I want to say is a huge thank you for the work that you have done,
and that reputation of the British Armed Forces I don’t think
has ever been higher than it is today, or its prestige ever greater,
and that is down to you and the work that you have done. And whatever
people, and as you know there are a few different opinions about
the wisdom of conflict, but whatever opinions people had of that,
there is absolutely nobody – nobody – back home who has anything
other than enormous pride in the British Armed Forces, and rightly
so.
And I think
there is one very good reason why your reputation and your prestige
is so high, and I think that the British soldier, the British
Armed Forces today, they are if you like the new pioneers of soldiering
in the 21st century, because the threat that we face today, the
threat that our country faces from other countries around the
world, is not the one that certainly my generation grew up with,
it is not the prospect of a big world war where countries are
fighting each other, you can never discount that, but it is highly
improbable, except I suppose in one set of circumstances, and
those are the circumstances of chaos, and that chaos comes today
from terrorism, from a particular virus of Islamic extremism that
is a perversion of the true faith of Islam, but is nonetheless
incredibly dangerous and which you see literally in every part
of the world. And that is one part of the threat, and I don’t
suppose there is a single country round the world at the moment
that is not trying to guard against it.
But the other
threats are brutal and repressive states who because of their
brutality, because they don’t actually have the support or consent
of their people, are developing weapons that can cause distraction
and destruction on a massive scale and are a huge, huge liability
for the whole security of the world.
And those
two threats come together. Democracies don’t sponsor terrorism.
No country that obeys the rule of law tortures and maims its citizens.
No government that owes its position to the will of the people
will spend billions of pounds on chemical, and biological and
nuclear weapons whilst their people live in poverty. And these
threats together produce chaos, because in the world in which
we live, if there is chaos then the whole world system economically
and politically breaks down.
And this conflict
here was a conflict of enormous importance, because Iraq was the
test case of that. Iraq was a country whose regime and proven
record of the use of weapons of mass destruction, not just their
development, and a regime so abhorrent that as you will now know
better than you did before, literally hundreds of thousands of
its citizens died in prison camps, in the ways of torture and
repression. And if we had backed away from that, we would never
have been able to confront this threat in the other countries
where it exists.
And so the
British soldier and the British Armed Forces in what you have
done in winning the conflict in Iraq was immensely important.
But then there
is the other part of 21st century soldiering, which is that you
haven’t just to win the conflict, you have then got to win the
peace, and that is difficult too. But there is one reason why
I think we can be optimistic. It is not just that the interests
of ourselves and the Iraqi people today are the same.
I have just
visited the Police Training Camp and seen the Iraqi police officers
try to get the basic rudiments of proper police training so that
they can police their country properly so that people no longer
fear the police but see them as their friends and supporters on
the streets of Iraq. And what the Iraqi people want is prosperity,
they want security, they want to bring up their families in some
peace and decent way of living, and that is what we are trying
to do.
And so we
are trying to help them do it and your role there is of course
of immense importance, and that is perhaps the single most important
thing now, it is the greatest challenge we face, which is that
your soldiering has got not just to be about fighting and being
able to engage in combat, and to win that combat and win it well,
which you do brilliantly, but it is also to win the peace, it
is to win the hearts and minds of people. It
is to show by the way that we try and help this country on its
feet as a stable and prosperous democracy, to show in the manner
by which we do it, that there is a better way forward for Iraq,
that countries like this whose people have never enjoyed the freedoms
we have taken for granted, actually can exist side by side with
each other, with democracy, with the rule of law, with basic canons
of respect for other people and respect for themselves, and that
work again you do brilliantly. And by nature and by instinct and
by the intelligent use of the experience that you have had, Iraq
today is taking shape under your help and with your guidance in
a way that would have been unthinkable a year ago.
So of course
I want to say to you, thank you for the work that you are doing,
but I think that when you come to a far away country such as this
and you spend many months, it is as well to know not merely that
you are fighting because that is what you have been ordered to
do, but that the work that you have been doing has been in a noble
and a good cause, and it has. And there are people here – and
I have just met some Iraqis, ordinary Iraqi people – who for decade
upon decade knew nothing but the Secret Police, poverty, utter
dependence on the state, fear, inability to make any difference
to the country in which they lived, who today have some hope and
some prospect of a future thanks to you.
So I know
that this a multinational effort, and I know that you have been
working hard with the Americans of course, our principal allies,
but also with the scores of other countries that are here now
helping us in Iraq. But I wanted to say a special word of thanks
to you. I believe, you know how passionately I believed in this
cause and in the wisdom of the conflict as the only way to establish
long term peace and stability, but I would like you to know that
part of the pride that people feel in you is the knowledge that
in years to come people here in this country, and I believe around
the world, will look back on what you have done and give thanks
and recognise that they owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude,
and from the bottom of my heart I thank you very much indeed.
Thanks.