Tony Blair on Radical Islam This Week's World

Hello and welcome to This Week's World. Today we tackled the

programme of Islamic extremism head-on. Where does it come from?

Where will it all end up? We hear from somebody close to the Muslim

Brotherhood and we talk to Tony Blair. I have real humility about

the decisions I took and the issues around them. I was trying to deal

with this in the aftermath of 9/11 and it was very difficult. What is

the legacy of the decisions he took? We are on the ground in rack. We are

asking if Vladimir Putin is trying to break up the EU. Before that we

ask our panel. We start with the number 1238, the number of delegates

Donald Trump secured midweek to get him over the line to be the

Republican presidential candidate. $6, that is the amount TV chef

Anthony Boyd and spent on dinner for President Obama in Hanoi street

cafe. The President's visited yet known and lifted a long-standing

arms embargo. 8% is the amount Venezuela's economy is expected to

shrink by in the next year amid a devastating food and energy

shortage. As the company continues to fall apart, Venezuelans are

sourcing the basics like medicine, bread and toilet paper. 51 degrees

is the highest temperature that has been recorded in India. The heat

wave has struck as the country is dealing with a major drought and

water shortages that have affected 300 million people. Now we are

joined by a banker turned journalist. You have picked out a

female fighter pilot. There is a Ukrainian female fighter pilot who

has been released from prison in Russia and swapped back for a couple

of Russian prisoners. In a world where no one is able to land a glove

on Vladimir Putin and his regime she has been lighting it up in prison in

Russia. She has sworn at the judge, she has shouted in front of TV

cameras, she has made fun of Vladimir Putin and she has managed

to get release from prison without asking for clemency to the extent

that Putin had to pretend that the families of the alleged victims of

this woman had themselves asked for clemency for her to save face. She

landed in the Ukraine a couple of days ago and she thanked those who

supported her, those who did not. And she flipped Putin a bird. She

did. Another strong female voice is coming through in your pick. You

call it the hot drink of the week. Being Iranian the hot drink of the

week must be a cup of tea. This is an cup of tea that one of the

founders of the Iranian revolution, one of the closest disciples of

Ayatollah Khamenei, and of the largest minority in Iran and are

these people who are denied many citizens' writes. When I worked in

Iran I could not discuss many issues, they called them red lines.

For the daughter of a founder of the Iranian revolution meeting the

leader is revolutionary. That was the hot drink that shook Iran. I am

going to go to something slightly more muscular. This is the smack

down of the week. Hulk Hogan, the wrestler, sued Gorka by leaking a

video tape of him. It is a gossip website yes, it is a celebrity

website that reveals a lot about celebrity sex lives and outs a lot

of popular people as gay. He took them to court and he won and he got

a huge settlement. Gorka is struggling to pay. It is a very

popular site because it is unsavoury and plays quite dirty. But what has

galvanised the media establishment against Hogan unexpectedly in

support of Gorka is it has been revealed as silicon valley

billionaire has financed Hulk Hogan's campaign against Gorka in

order to bankrupt them because Gorka outed him as a four years ago. It

set off this counterintuitive alignment of interests because

people who are not fans of Gorka are supporting it because they feel

private interests should not have the right to destroy media

establishment because they can afford to. I get the last word to

you. We could go with a poem of the week or organ of the week? Stories

about this Burmese poet who wrote a five line poem and in the poem he

says that he has a tattoo of the President on his penis. Can I say

penis on television? You just have. So he has that tattoo and he just

got married and his newlywed saw the tattoo and she is horrified,

inconsolably horrified. Because of that he went to prison. The wider

point is this is happening in Burma when you think things have started

to change. And that is what surprised them, but there are many

similarities between Iran and Burma in the sense that even though there

are forces for reform in the executive branch, the judiciary, the

courts, are still in the hands of a very small clique of people. In Iran

you have the clerics who are holding the key to the courts. I have served

time in an Iranian jail, I was arrested because of an article I

wrote. This man, he was sent to jail by courts which are in the hands of

the military in Burma. It is very interesting. We have to finish on a

high note. He said that the Government of Burma if it wants to

be an efficient and good Government, it has to understand poetry. With

much of the Middle East involved in bitter conflict programmer will be

taking a look at new ideas about how to fight violent extremists at

Islamic State. We will hear from Tony Blair and his critics. What can

be done to end the brutality done in Islam's name. Islamist is a

controversial term, it is meant to describe something different to the

faith. It is a set of political ideologies tied to religious

principles. The 20th century saw various peaceful Muslim parties

emerge. They believed the state should be based on sharia law and

principles. From 1979, small but ever more violent splinter group

spun off from them. Sunni extremist groups supported jihad, a holy war,

against Russia in Afghanistan. That year the Shah of Iran was

overthrown. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair was part of the

global response which began with the war aiming to root out extremists in

Afghanistan. Then there is 2003 and rack. Previously secular, the

country became a magnet for foreign jihadis and they took swathes of

territory. Until last year, Tony Blair was Middle East peace envoy,

nobody is arguing for a new approach. Not just fighting a small

group of violent fanatics, but countering the broader ideologies of

Islamism. I think the ideology of Islamism

and the idea that you have a view of religion that governs politics,

society, the economy, the way people live, work and think,

I think it is certainly in its more extreme forms the single biggest

threat that we face today. And how many people do you think

share that ideology? The numbers of people

who engage in fanaticism, who engage in the terrorist

activities, are relatively small. You can number those

in tens of thousands. The numbers who believe significant

parts of the ideology I think In some of these radical clerics

they will have Twitter followings The Muslim Brotherhood, and not all

parts of them think the same, but many parts of the Muslim Brotherhood

who share a pretty extreme view of the world, their membership goes

into many millions. You would describe those people as extremists?

The Queen's speech spoke of counter extremism measures. Would you try to

clamp down on what they believe? You cannot stop people believing what

they believe, but you can count on it because it is important, and you

can make sure that young people are educated to a way of thinking about

others. We need to come together in a global commitment on education

where countries agree that within their education systems they will

promote cultural tolerance and we doubt prejudice. They should do that

with systems that are formal and informal. If you end up polluting

the mind of young people in your country, in today's world where the

boundaries come down and there is more migration and integration, that

is a problem not just for your country, but it is a problem for all

of us. You have stressed how important it is that countries

around the world in the Middle East get to choose their own leaders. You

side with the democratic process that elected the Muslim Brotherhood

in Egypt? I signed up with the democratic process. The Muslim

Brotherhood were a real problem for Egypt and the reason why you had

that popular revolt were millions of people came out on the street is

that having experienced that Government and seeing how they were

effectively taking the basic norms of society away and distorting them,

I also supported the counter revolution that removed them. Isn't

it that we like democracy until it throws up the wrong answer? I do not

think that is fair. There are a lot of democratic results we do not

agree with. If you get people who are democratically elected, and the

Muslim Brotherhood is a very good example of this in Egypt, but then

they are systematically taking away the institutions of the country so

that if you like it is this election we are going to win, but by the time

you get to the next election the rules have significantly changed,

then you have a different problem. But ultimately the real question is

do you want an economy that is rule-based and a society that is

religiously tolerant? Those are the two things that are as important as

simply whether you have the vote or do not. Where does a Saudi

dictatorship fit into that pattern? It seems that the argument for

democracy runs out there. They are a friend, an ally, in your words.

Saudi is a classic case where you want it to evolve over time. There

are deep-seated challenges economically and socially. I do you

agree with democracy or you say let it evolve. But if it is not evolving

it is possibly better to let it evolve which preserves the stability

of the country and the region. You will be aware that there will be

people screaming at their TV screens right now that this man is the

problem, the cause, not the solution. But people have to come to

their senses on this. You have to track this back over decades. 9/11

came before anyone had intervene anywhere. Let's not kid ourselves

about this. The problem is when you have these radical Islamist elements

stepping into a situation where you have a vacuum of power, then it is

so much harder to get the country on its feet and moving forward. That

vacuum of power was aided, was created, by the invasion of rack and

the removal of the infrastructure? You can save the removal of Saddam

created a situation where you had to supply it with a different form of

Government. But the people of rack were desperate for change and

welcome the fact they had a new Government. What happened there is

that into that process of change have come people whose desire has

been specifically to disrupt it by terrorism. But the disbanding of the

Iraqi army was pointed out as one of the biggest mistakes of the time, do

you agree? In retrospect it should not have happened and I understand

why people say it. But I say to you that those of us who were there at

the time it was a much tougher set of decisions because people were

saying, we do not want these people who have been brutalising us over

the years to be in charge of us. It is not the root of the problem.

Let's take this further. This man is British Iraqi, a hostage negotiator

whose father led the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq. And a former

Al-Qaeda operative who for nearly a decade was an agent for the UK

Government. Nice to have you both on This Week's World. Tony Blair said

Islam is in its extreme form is the biggest single threat we face today.

-- Islamism. You see yourself as an Islamist? What does that mean? I

have no idea. One of the marks of Tony Blair's interview is the fact

that he has listed his thesis with terms that we have no firm

definition of. You are correct, I am often described as an Islamist, it

was not my choice, I don't know what it means. You would like to see

Islam as a central tenet to any state. Then the answer would be no.

But that is the problem. I have no platform, apart from this programme,

to say, listen, we need to talk about these terms. The way in which

this very reductionist, simplistic division of a region, housing

hundreds of millions of people of a particular culture, a particular

religion, a particular creed... A multitude of races and ethnic uses.

-- ethnicities. It is problematic. There is a myriad of elements that

make up the region. What is reductionist about saying we need a

global interpretation of the values of open-mindedness? It is the fact

that according to Tony Blair, history started with 9/11, that is

entirely problematic. The fact is this region has had these same

people, the same culture and religion, for 14 centuries. And

never have we seen the level of violence, the complexity of

violence, the sophistication of violence, the advantage of violence

as we have seen since 2003. Tony Blair has said that these Islamist

ideas are widespread, in the millions. Do you agree? Yes, of

course. At the end of the day, I agree that the problem did not start

with 9/11, the problem started with 1979, I would say. The year when the

great Muslim Civil War, if I could describe it this way, started. The

Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Saddam took power in Iraq. Ayatollah

Khomeini seized power in Iran. The forces of fundamentalist Muslims,

what habits, in Saudi Arabia took over the grand mask briefly. All of

these events together paved the way for the rise of the ideology of

jihad. -- grandma sew. In order to achieve change on the ground. A

problem that is 37 years in the making. US about that ideology of

jihad for a time. You were with Al-Qaeda. -- you espoused that

ideology. What made you leave? I started to realise we were heading

towards a clash of civilisations. That we cannot win. No one will win.

Everyone will lose. And this is the realisation that I more or less came

to embrace in 1998, after the East Africa bombings in Nairobi and

Tanzania. I realised we were heading on a dangerous path. Initial is the

can win... I partly agree, with him, but I disagree that he starts with

1979. Part of the problem with what Tony Blair is saying is the West is

washing its hands of generations, propping up regimes which have

brutalised and oppressed. And ultimately led to people thinking

there is no way out. Do you mean the West should be washing their hands

or not? Do you want intervention or not? I would rather there was no

intervention. But I agree with Tony Blair that we live in a global

village. We can't say, you know what, you can do as you wish and I

will not be affected. We have seen that doesn't work. But at the same

time, to say that, listen, all this has nothing to do with me...

Everything the West is doing in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, that has

nothing to do with me, I have done my bit to help you, and I have clean

in terms of my conscience, and all this is upon you... To be fair, he

says he is coming back with a solution, which is education. Do you

think you can come back and say, we need to re-educate? Of course

education is important, but before education you need some peace in the

region. Within Muslim factions. Militant Shia is 's are fighting

Sunni Islam. People who espouse a political framework, the Muslim

Brotherhood, in conflict with the Arab monarchies in the region.

Before you can re-educate people, you need to bring them together to

have some sort of peace, at least a ceasefire. The forces of

sectarianism and fundamentalism, bring the region back from the

brink. Unfortunately, we don't see that at all. Gentlemen, thank you.

We will hear more from Tony Blair on his legacy later. First, with so

much of the critique of him centring around Iraq, what of life on the

ground now? Jim Muir has followed the story for decades.

Life does still go on here, and sometimes it can

But this is not a normal, peaceful country.

It's a place of concrete blast walls and barbed wire.

A place where people who go shopping in markets get blown to pieces.

Where Shia militias, created by Iran, are battling

Where government is paralysed by factional rifts.

The blitzkrieg unleashed in March 2003 did a lot more than remove

130,000 US troops and nearly 30,000 British occupied the country.

They found no weapons of mass destruction.

But they dissolved every structure in a tightly

controlled dictatorship - the ruling Baath Party,

the security apparatus and, crucially, the Iraqi army.

Adnan Janabi is one of the few politicians who was an MP under

The people and the army were not only disbanded, they were cut off.

Not only the army, the military industry people, some of whom

are now making bombs for Daesh, and before that,

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, linked to Al-Qaeda, moved into Iraq

almost as soon as the invasion happened.

Within just a few months, the UN compound in Baghdad

was demolished by a massive bomb attack carried out

by Sunni extremists and disgruntled Baathists.

Ten days later, a similar outrage killed a revered Shia cleric,

Ayatollah Hakim, setting a pattern of sectarian provocation

Hisham al-Hashimi was a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein.

Many others perished under his repressive rule.

But even he agrees that people were more secure and safe

The bitter grievances felt by Saddam Hussein's minority Sunni

community provided absolutely perfect soil

It was in Iraq's second city, Mosul, that the leader of IS,

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed his caliphate

But the invasion of 2003 was a godsend to another power

If anybody was dedicated to containing Iranian influence,

In 1980, he sent his troops into mainly Shia Iran,

looking to puncture the Iranian Islamic revolution.

That started a war that lasted eight years and claimed

Even before the 2003 invasion, Iran was already moving.

I watched the Shia Iraqi militia, the Badr Organisation,

parading after it crossed the border into Iraq just before the invasion.

It was formed, armed, trained and commanded by the Iranians.

Fast forward 13 full years, and this is still the Badr

They've been through the sectarian blood-letting

And now here they are as part of this huge force that's attacking

towards Fallujah in the very Sunni Anbar province as part

of a big campaign to get rid of the militants,

the Sunni militants, of Islamic State.

The battle for Fallujah is part of a struggle that

Turned more than three million Iraqis into refugees and beggars

Almost every day, there are terrible suicide bombs that kill dozens.

At the centre, politics is deadlocked

Parliament and government, unable even to meet.

At this stage, nobody even knows if Iraq is going to stick

All this is the legacy of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Jim Muir. After seven years and around 2 million words, John

Chilcott's report on the invasion and its aftermath will finally

emerge on July 6th. I asked the former Prime Minister for his

reflections before the report's application.

I have a real humility about the decisions I took

I was trying to deal with this in the aftermath of 9/11

and it was very tough, it was very difficult.

I think it is important that we also have humility about the next phase

of policy-making so we try and learn the lessons of the whole

I think if we do that and we have an exchange that isn't

a trading of barbs and insults, but is an attempt really

to understand what we are dealing with, then we can confront this

But my anxiety at the moment is we are still lost in the West

We are not seeing this issue in its broader dimensional.

How we deal with it, you can have strong disagreements about,

but the roots of it are deep and we need to get to those roots.

That debate is going to come to a head in six weeks' time.

Are you worried that findings from the inquiry may inflame

Well, I can't comment on it because I don't know, but I don't

think it is going to come to a head in six weeks and I don't

think it's going to be resolved in six weeks.

This is a specific inquiry into a specific event.

This problem pre-dated it, post-dated it and it is going to be

with us for a long time, so, sure, we will have that debate

when the report is published and I am not going to comment on it

before then, but whatever people think about that, you have got

If we don't do that, we are going to store up an even

This is a different threat from anything we have faced before. It

requires a different type of policy response. And it requires a

different rhythm of thinking, where we understand this is a generation

fight, not a fight that's going to be resolved in two years or even

ten. You accept that your understanding of the Middle East is

much deeper today than it was as Prime Minister. Is it possible,

then, that everything, the whole invasion was based on a

misunderstanding of the region? No, I think in the end there will have

to be change. Sometimes regimes will only ever go when they are removed,

as it were. But I do think if you look back in these last years, and

you don't just learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the

lessons of the Arab Spring, then I think the combination of economic,

social and religious factors is such that if you can manage a process of

change over time, that is the better way to go. You have spent so much

time thinking about this now, and a log of your time in the Middle East.

When you come back home, the vilification of Tony Blair goes on.

I wonder if that is hard? It's the way it is. Look, obviously you have

to understand, there are people who disagree with me for reasons that

they say to do with Iraq, but actually are to do with the fact

that I won free elections for the Labour Party and they like it. Do

you think that Corbyn is your child, the result of...? I think it's the

product of the way the world works. It's a big challenge. When I'm not

thinking about the Middle East, I'm thinking about this. Because I do

think, by the way, it would be a very dangerous experiment for a

major Western country to get gripped by this type of populist policy

making. Left or right. Tony Blair, thank you. That thought of winning

elections, bear this in mind, and perhaps practice saying the words

President Donald Trump. Perhaps one day you might need to. So here is a

radical thought. What if he emerged as the most moderate Republican

candidate for decades? They are bringing drugs.

Extremism. They are rapists.

And then there's Isis. Let me say that again -

Donald Trump is a moderate. His style might be a little crass,

and he says things that some say A total and complete

shutdown of Muslims So we get the impression that voters

have picked the most right-wing But in many policy areas,

he is actually the most moderate Take government spending.

He is no conservative. In fact, he's a big spender.

As you may have noticed. And he wants to protect

American jobs with tariffs. On foreign policy, he said that

9/11 was Bush's fault He wouldn't have gone into Libya

and he'd be happy to talk to Russia. So if you're worried about his

finger on the nuclear button, don't. Trump is running on

an anti-war platform. Our military dominance must

be unquestioned. So what's going on?

Is Trump a secret Democrat? No - the truth is he's just making

it up as he goes along. But his instincts are far to the

left of the modern Republican Party. So maybe that's

Trump's secret weapon. As his party becomes more

ideologically conservative, And if his ideological flexibility

has taken him this far, who knows, maybe it will take him

a little further? And after November, we'll

all have to get used Talking of secret weapons, is Russia

waging a new kind of warfare on the EU to break up the union? Would a

Brexit be in Russia's best interests as David Cameron suggested.? The EU

has started its own task force to counter what it says is Russian

disinformation. I have a paranoid or do they have a point? Tim Whewell

has been watching Moscow for 30 years.

Is Vladimir Putin using hybrid warfare to destabilise the EU?

Hybrid warfare can refer to any form of aggression short of open

invasion. His critics say it is his way to force Europe to drop its

sanctions against Russia. Russia's interest in breaking up Europe is

clear and it uses a variety of means, everything it can do possible

to achieve this break-up. So what is Putin accused of? This information.

The EU is so worried about information warfare that it has set

up a unit to combat it. Russia spends millions spreading its

version of reality in Europe, including fabricators, like the

story of a 13-year-old Russian girl living in Germany after she vanished

for a day last January. Russian media quoted her family saying she

had been raped by migrants. German police were covering it up. That led

to anti-government protests in Germany and a diplomatic spat after

Russia accused Berlin of whitewashing reality with political

correctness. But it turned out Lisa, the girl, was never raped. Was the

story the Kremlin weapon against Angela Merkel? Moscow says it is

absurd. Cyber warfare. For a few terrifying hours in 2007 cyber

attacks almost shut down Estonia. Even supermarket checkouts did not

work. Many blamed the Kremlin. Investigations failed to prove it.

Last year, cyber attacks were reported on the German parliament

and Bulgarian state websites with Russia widely suspected, but again

there was no proof. Political warfare. Does Russia fund anti-EU

political parties? US intelligence is now investigating that. The

National Front in France approved Russia's takeover of Crimea and a

Russian bank lent it millions of euros. Is Germany's AFD party and

hungry's far right party taking Kremlin cash? Some say yes, but they

deny it and there is no evidence yet. In any case the Kremlin says

both sides play the same game. Europe has long tried to spread its

use in Russia and other former Soviet states. The West calls its

soft power. How does it differ from what Russia does in Europe? The West

does not have the kind of tools that Russia has and the West is not able

to organise all the tools of the state against Russia the way Russia

uses them against the West. No comparison then. Russia's critics

say the warfare is a reality. If they cannot prove that Putin is

waging it, that is because by definition hybrid warfare cannot be

proved. I am joined by the Russian ambassador to the EU from our studio

in Brussels. What do you make of this allegation of hybrid warfare?

First of all, to recognise the allegation one needs to have a clear

picture of what the term hybrid warfare is all about. If you stretch

it into history, you might end up with elements of hybrid warfare

during the empire or ancient Greece or medieval conflicts across Europe

and the rest of the world. It is not a denial exactly? Hybrid warfare, it

depends on what you mean. Well, I put to you in the report some of

those allegations that Russia is trying to infiltrate or, if you

like, influence EU politics. Why would Russia want that or need that?

I would say there is a misperception very widely spread, not only in the

European Union, but beyond, that Russia is ostensibly tried to split

the European Union, trying to drive wedges between individual member

states of the EU and primarily between the EU as an entity and its

member states. All those allegations are totally wrong. Would Brexit make

a difference? There would be fewer EU countries if that happens. Is

that a good thing for Russia or a bad thing? British and Russian

relations will not stop and Russian and European relations will not

stop, but it is not our show in any way. What are we to make of these

strong financial links between Russia and arch Eurosceptics in

France like Marine Le Pen? Does Putin want the National Front to

succeed? I assume you mean a certain loan that the National Front in

France got from a Czechoslovakian bag. From a Russian back? It is

linked to a Russian bank. The US are investigating this link, so

presumably they see it as coming from Russia and Russia's Government.

They are free to investigate whatever they like, but the Russian

Government has nothing to do with it. Thank you for joining us. That

is all from This Week's World. Before we go, there are a couple of

questions that had Tony Blair stumped. One was my fault. Do you

think you why the air to call them? I am the air to Corbyn? Donald Trump

predicted last week that Chilcott would be terrible for you. Donald

Trump! Is there anything in that sentence that you would like to

undertake? The biggest and bloodiest

naval battle... You've got to be able to

hit that target before it hits you. In its centenary year,

join Dan Snow... ..as we remember

the Battle of Jutland.