Gun Boat Liberalism

for months Blair has been trying to construct a legacy to leave to the country. Signing us away up to the new EU treaty, or some other eye catching initiative. But everybody knows that Blair's legacy is Iraq. This will forever overshadow everything else that he did. This does not mean that it is not indicative of his reign. One of the beliefs evedent through all his actions is that the state is a force for good. This can be seen through the ever increasing level of state interference into private life that has occoured though the Blair years, and his love of gunboat liberalism. Over and over again Blair has gone to war in the name of helping other people: Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afganistan, and Iraq. I don't think that there can be any doubt that Blair was sincere in his intention to use British military power to try and help people, and in the case of Sierra Leone he suceeded. Perhaps this aggressive quest to spread the benevolent embrace of the British state world wide is partly due to his inability to get his way as completely in domestic policy as he could in foreign policy due to the deal he made with Gordon Brown limiting his options due to the need to ask next door whenever he wanted something funded, just as a US president will also always face the temptation of some foreign intervention since domestic spending has to be cleared through congress but dropping a couple of cruise missiles into a pharmaceutical factory does not. Or maybe had he not been so contrained at home he would have been just as eager to dispatch the Royal Navy to where ever there where headlines people calling out for his help. This will always be an unknown. What has become very apparent is that while it is very easy for our armed forces to topple a government reconstructing a civil society afterwards is much harder. It is possible if you can get enough of the people wanting what you want, as shown by Sierra Leone, but if you don't you are in for a very hard time that you cannot easily get out of.