Prime Minister Tony Blair has indicated that God influenced his deliberations when he committed British troops to fight alongside US forces in Iraq.
The remarks, which surprised some antiwar campaigners, were made in an Independent Television talk show that was to be broadcast last night.
A transcript was released by the ITV station on Friday.
Blair has made no secret of his Christian faith, but he has not previously ascribed policy decisions to his religion.
In the past, he refused to answer persistent questions by an interviewer about whether he had prayed together with President Bush.
In the interview yesterday on the widely followed Parkinson show, Blair was asked about the sending troops to Iraq, ITV said.
"That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with," he said, according to the ITV transcript, "and in the end there is a judgment that -- well, I think if you have faith about these things, then you realize that judgment is made by other people."
Asked to explain what he meant, he replied, "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."
"This is not just a matter of a policy here or a thing there, but of their lives and in some case their death," he said. "The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing, according to your conscience, and for the rest of it you leave it to the judgment that history will make."
The Iraq war has proven unpopular with many Britons. Rose Gentle, an antiwar activist whose son Gordon died with British forces in Iraq, said: "A good Christian wouldn't be for this war. I'm actually quite disgusted by the comments. It's a joke."
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS