- A former top adviser to Tony Blair and the intellectual
father of the Iraq war recanted yesterday, admitting that the removal of
Saddam Hussein had made the world a more dangerous place.
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- Robert Cooper, a British diplomat who helped shape Mr
Blair's global doctrine of humanitarian interventions, told the Dutch Volksrant
newspaper that the region was sliding out of control.
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- "From a geo-political point of view, the chaos in
Iraq is a greater risk for us than it was under Saddam Hussein," he
said.
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- "The majority may say now, yes, we prefer the current
situation than under Saddam Hussein but what will happen if this continues
for another year?
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- "The nightmare is the combination of terrorists
and weapons of mass destruction."
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- Mr Cooper, who is now the European Union's director-general
of foreign policy, has advocated a muscular "liberal imperialism"
along Gladstonian lines led by Brussels, seeing his mission as "spreading
civilisation and creating good government".
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- In March 2002 he issued a pamphlet seen as the founding
text of the wars in Iraq and Afghansistan, warning that the West had to
act against terrorists exploiting states outside the international order.
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- "If they become too dangerous for established states
to tolerate, it is possible to imagine a defensive imperialism," he
said.
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- "What is needed is a new kind of imperialism, one
acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values.
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- "The post-modern EU offers a vision of co-operative
empire. Like Rome, this commonwealth would provide its citizens with some
of its laws, some coins and the occasional road. That perhaps is the vision."
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- Mr Cooper was Mr Blair's special envoy to Afghanistan
during the first stage of the war against al-Qa'eda.
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