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Blair: Fight terror and Saddam
LONDON, England -- Britain will continue to fight the war against terror as it also moves to disarm Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair says. "Both are new threats facing the post-Cold War world," Blair told the House of Commons on Tuesday. His comments echoed those of U.S. President George W Bush, who said the war on terror could still be waged while assuring that Saddam no longer has weapons of mass destruction. Both leaders were speaking in the wake of weekend car bombings in Bali that killed more than 180 people. A growing number of politicians and terrorism experts are pointing to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and its Indonesian associates Jemaah Islamiah as the prime suspects in the Bali attack. Blair said his government is considering banning Jemaah Islamiah, although the group is not known to have any presence in the UK. A move to proscribe the group would block any members from seeking refuge in Britain, a Blair spokesman said. As he sought to forge a link between al Qaeda and Southeast Asian terrorism, Blair also reminded MPs that a reported plot to bomb the British High Commission in Singapore had been thwarted last December. "Some say that we should fight terrorism alone and that issues to do with (weapons of mass destruction) are a distraction. I reject that entirely," Blair told Commons. "Both, though different in means, are the same in nature. "Both are threats from people or states who do not care about human life, who have no compunction about killing the innocent. "Both represent the extreme replacing the rational, the fanatic driving out moderation. "Both are intent not on letting people live in peace with each other, celebrate our diversity, and work out our differences in an orderly way, but on producing such chaos and disorder that out of it comes a world in which religions and nations and peoples fight each other for supremacy. "That is the true measure of what is at stake. "The war against terrorism is indeed a war, but of a different sort to the ones we are used to. Its outcome, however, is as important as any we have fought before." The prime minister described the Bali bombings, which he said have left at least 30 Britons dead, as "an act of pure wickedness." He said they were "horrific and brutal attacks which have left hundreds of families here and all around the world in shock and grieving." Blair's tough stance reflected determination not to let critics use the Bali bombings to blow the U.S.-British position on Iraq off course. Blair's stance won strong support from opposition leader Iain Duncan Smith of the Conservatives. "Bali cannot be used as a pretext for letting Saddam off the hook," he said. "Those who say we have to choose between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are setting a false choice." UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was in Washington on Tuesday for talks with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell as efforts continued to draw up a fresh U.N. resolution on returning weapons inspectors to Iraq.
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