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Tony Blair and Iyad Allawi, in Iraq yesterday:

Question:

Prime Minister, can you just give us a sense of your feelings today. You flew here in secrecy, under armed protection, into what is still a safe zone, more than a year and a half after Saddam fell. Can you honestly say to yourself, this is what I meant to bring about when I said that we will ...?

Prime Minister:

That is a good question. I will tell you exactly what I felt coming in. Security is really heavy, you can feel the sense of danger that people live in here, but what I felt more than anything else was this, the danger that people feel here is coming from terrorists and insurgents who are trying to destroy the possibility of this country becoming a democracy. Now where do we stand in that fight? We stand on the side of the democrats, against the terrorists. And so when people say to me well look at the difficulties, look at the challenges, I say well what is the source of that challenge? The source of that challenge is a wicked destructive attempt to stop this man, this lady, all these people from Iraq who want to decide their own future in a democratic way, having that opportunity. And where should the rest of the world stand, to say well that is your problem, go and look after it, or you were better off with Saddam running the country, as if the only choice they should have in the world is a choice between a brutal dictator killing hundreds of thousands of people, or terrorists and insurgents. There is another choice for Iraq, the choice is democracy, the choice is freedom, and our job is to help them get there because that is what they want. And you know sometimes when I see some of the reporting of what is happening in Iraq in the rest of the world, I just feel that people should understand how precious what is being created here is. And those people from that Electoral Commission that I have described as the heroes of the new Iraq, every day, a lot of them aren't living in the green zone, they have got to travel in from outside, they do not know at any point in time whether they are going to be subject to brutality or intimidation, even death, and yet they carry on doing it. Now what a magnificent example of the human spirit, and that is the side we should be on.

Dr Allawi:

I may add a few points to what Prime Minister Blair has said. Iraqis do not see what happened as invasion, as I clearly said that we deeply appreciate the commitment of the international community to have helped the Iraqi people to rid Iraq of ... and to stand with us in fighting terrorism. Frankly what you see now, the security, is a manifestation of a war that is being waged against us by evil forces. We have to stand firm, we have to stand tall, we have to defeat the insurgents, we have to defeat the evil forces, we have to defeat terror, and this is really to protect the whole world and the generations to come. We are adamant that we are going to proceed with the democracy, with the freedom, with the rule of law, with respect of human rights, these are the important values that have been brought into Iraq, and for the first time the Iraqis feel the sense of liberty, it is a dream which is becoming true. We don't expect forces ... against us just to stand idle, to see this huge construction going ahead in a peaceful way. This what you see now, inshallah will disappear in the very near future.

Words not intended to address yesterday's events, but remarkably apropos.