The Islamic State controls territory, which serves the group's propaganda, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at the Clinton Presidential Library on Friday, adding that the world should take an interest in reclaiming that territory.
But beyond military action, the problem of terrorism would be alleviated by improved domestic security, vocal condemnation by Muslim clerics and better education, he said.
Blair, who was recently the subject of a critical report of his decision to take part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, spoke about globalization, extremism and the war on terror during the Frank and Kula Kumpuris Lecture at the library.
He did not address the report and was not asked about it by Alexis Herman, a former U.S. labor secretary under former President Bill Clinton who served as the lecture's moderator. However, Blair did call on the world to better address terrorism and explained his thoughts on the value of education. A proper education reduces extremism, he said, and the world should assist countries struggling to provide it.
"If you teach young children -- and there are millions of them every day taught in this way -- nothing but a particular version of the Koran from early in the morning to late at night, to the exclusion of science and technology, to the exclusion of the type of critical thinking that is a necessary part of any education system in the modern world, you cannot be surprised if a portion of those people become extremists," Blair told a crowd of several hundred.
He also decried Thursday's attack in Nice, France, where an assailant driving a truck ran down several hundred people and killed at least 84.
"France has suffered so much over these past couple of years in these terrorist attacks and my heart really goes out to the French people," Blair said. "These barbaric attacks, which target the most innocent people in the most random way, are terrible and I'm afraid they bring home to us the global nature of this problem."
On Thursday, Blair appeared onstage with Clinton and former President George W. Bush at a graduation ceremony for Presidential Leadership Scholars, a program for midcareer professionals administered by the presidential centers of Clinton, Bush, George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson.
The former world leaders, who spoke Thursday in the gymnasium at Central High School, took shelter in a lower floor during thunderstorms that brought a tornado warning, a Clinton spokesman said. Other attendees took cover on a different part of that floor.
"Your weather is interesting," Blair said Friday. "Alexis said to me yesterday, she said, 'Do you have many tornadoes in Britain?' I said, 'Well, we get the odd gust of wind, but that was quite something last night.'"
Blair praised both Clinton and George W. Bush in his remarks Friday. He worked with both presidents as prime minister from 1997 to 2007.
Clinton once used his words to get out of a tricky question from the British media, Blair said. In 1996, when Blair was the leader of the opposition party running for election, Clinton was asked if he thought Blair would be the next prime minister.
"This is a hard question," Blair said. "He can't say yes, because there's an existing prime minister. So if he says yes, that's a diplomatic faux pas. He can't say that. On the other hand, if he says no, this has not been a good visit."
Clinton, who was in the midst of his re-election campaign, said: "I just hope he's sitting alongside the next president of the United States," according to Blair.
Bush had a good sense of humor, he said. At a summit of world leaders, the prime minister of Belgium said Bush should triple gasoline prices to help the fight against climate change, according to Blair.
"President Bush is listening to this and he turns to me and says, 'Who in the hell is this guy?'" Blair said.
Both presidents are different, but they found a way to work together on the Presidential Leadership Scholars and broadly agree on trade and immigration reform, he said.
Leaders throughout the world should look to that relationship as an example to develop solutions instead of shouting past one another, Blair said.
Clinton watched the end of Blair's remarks Friday. He then took the stage and told the crowd that humans have persisted as a species because they work together.
Sometimes it takes awhile. Take World War II for example, he said.
Then-Prime Minister Winston "Churchill said at one of his endless press conferences -- with the press berating him for why his buddy [President Franklin] Roosevelt wouldn't get in the war -- he said the United States invariably does the right thing after exhausting every other alternative," Clinton said.
People flirting with isolationist tendencies and incendiary rhetoric are at a similar point, Clinton said.
"We keep trying to find excuses to avoid doing what deep in our hearts we recall is the right thing to do," he said. "That's where we are right now. We are in the growing pains of globalization."
Metro on 07/16/2016