London, Apr 11: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, preparing for Washington talks next week with US President George W Bush, has said that the current crisis in Iraq was a "historic struggle" the US-led coalition must win. "We are locked in a historic struggle in Iraq. On its outcome hangs the fate of the Iraqi people," said Blair in an interview. "There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win and it is happening now in Iraq," Blair said yesterday in one of his fiercest defences of Iraq policy to date. His comments came the day after Foreign Secretary Jack Straw warned that the situation was the "most serious" the US-led coalition has faced, and that the Sunni insurgency in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, was "profoundly dangerous." "The lid of the pressure cooker has come off," he said, as coalition troops faced the added pressure of dealing with a Shiite rebellion in Baghdad and south of the Iraqi capital led by radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. Britain is the United States' main ally over Iraq with some 8,700 troops still in the country, mostly in the southern and relatively peaceful Basra region.
"Were we to fail, which we will not, it is more than 'the power of America' that would be defeated," Blair said. "The hope of freedom and religious tolerance in Iraq would be snuffed out." "Dictators would rejoice; fanatics and terrorists would be triumphant," he said.
Bureau Report