Tony Blair means only one thing when he talks about his values

He claims his aim is to spread democracy and the rule of law, but his true commitment is to the global market
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So now we know. The purpose of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was not regime change, Tony Blair explained in Los Angeles on Monday, but "values change". By bombing and shooting their way into Baghdad and Kabul, he and President Bush wanted to convince the benighted locals of the benefits of democracy, free markets and the rule of law.

They think Israel can achieve the same ends by pulverising Lebanon, and thus dealing a blow to the "arc of extremism", successor to the still undefeated "axis of evil". And the reason extremism appears to be growing is that, in reality, we are winning. Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Lebanese - they're all embracing democracy, and presumably voting for Hamas and Hizbullah only because of what the Marxists used to call false consciousness. The terrorists - who are all "the same thing" whether they are in Gaza, Baghdad, Kashmir, Indonesia, Africa, Madrid or London - are becoming more and more desperate because "reactionary Islam" now faces "existential battles" for its survival.

Well, it's good to have that straight. Many thought it unkind to compare the Blair-Bush policies in the Middle East to the medieval crusades. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Blair believes he is engaged in a holy war, even though he reckons this is true only of the other side. No wonder, with the stakes so high, he won't listen to Labour members, backbenchers, ministers or foreign-affairs advisers. Or even his own past words. "We could have chosen security as the battleground," he said in Los Angeles. "But we didn't. We chose values." Forget what he said about WMDs; strike it from the record.

Strike also from the record what was once the prime minister's favourite mantra: what matters is what works. Invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon clearly don't have to work in any conventional sense. Everything comes down to ideology after all.

So what is that ideology? What does Blair mean by values? Both in Los Angeles and, the previous day, in San Francisco, addressing the big cheeses from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Blair tried to give some coherence to his political philosophy, and explicitly linked it to the Middle East. The "isms" that now dominate debate, he argued, are not socialism or capitalism. (Nor, we must assume, communitarianism, one of Blair's forgotten favourites.) They are "protectionism, isolationism, nativism". It is a battle between "open or closed" responses to globalisation, between "modern or traditional attitudes to a changing world".

On one side stand free trade, open markets, investment in education, science and technology; on the other, protectionism, tariffs, tight labour market regulation, resistance to foreign takeovers. No prizes for guessing which side Blair thinks he is on.

The key word here is "modern". It comes up repeatedly when Blair speaks. The "global fight", he said in Los Angeles, is "about modernisation". "Everywhere," he said at his monthly press conference in London yesterday, "we support a process of modernisation." This modernity, in Blair's mind, is associated with the "competitive global market" that he wishes the whole world, including Muslims, to embrace. That is what gives his political thinking, domestically and internationally, a kind of unity.

If he believed wholeheartedly in the rule of law, he would have a greater care for civil liberties and international conventions about when and how to wage war. If he were as committed to democracy as he says he is, he would pay more respect to the British public's views on the Iraq war and on Israel's bombing of Lebanon and to the Palestinian and Lebanese votes for Hamas and Hizbullah respectively. But Blair's true commitment is to the global market.

As things stand, the global market is run by the rich in the interests of the rich. Two-thirds of global trade is controlled by just 500 firms. The competitive element is competition between nation-states for their favours - in terms of investment, jobs, sponsorship of public projects. This is the modern world that Blair wants Islamic countries to join. When he and Bush talk about an "open" Middle East, they mean open not just to different political views and religions but also to global capital, restlessly searching for new markets and assets.

Even to some moderate Muslims, this is a big step. They live, for the most part, in traditional societies. Yet they are invited to join a global market under which, as Marx and Engels warned, "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned". Some Gulf states contrive to allow Mammon to coexist with God, but Islam as a religious faith has developed no significant equivalent of Calvinism, which interpreted worldly commercial success as a sign of God's grace.

There lies the inadequacy of Blair's approach. As he acknowledges, we have to convince moderate Muslims that our values are preferable to those of reactionary Islam. But it is not, as he seems to think, enough just to find a settlement in Palestine. He also has to convince Muslims that our laws and political systems can better protect what they hold precious than can the fanatics and terrorists. This does not necessarily include sharia law and veiled women, but it does mean preserving a certain social and cultural integrity, and running their own economies as they wish.

What happened in Iraq immediately after the invasion - the wholesale privatisations, the grab for assets by US-based multinationals - justifies their scepticism.

But the modern world doesn't have to be under the thumb of global capital. We can be "open" to a global market but it need not be this one. The rules of global trade can be biased towards the poor, instead of being framed in the interests of the rich. They can encourage tariffs where they protect infant industries in developing countries, instead of allowing them only where they protect western interests. Crucially for Islamic countries, they can allow controls on capital movements, as well as on migration of people. They can nurture stronger trade unions, stricter health-and-safety regulation and improved environmental practices, instead of treating all these as market distortions. They can act against international monopolies and, again crucially for Islamic countries, in favour of local ownership. They can favour investment in public goods over private consumption.

In that kind of global market many poor Muslims might see something for them. In the global market we have now they see benefits only for rich westerners. Blair talks about liberty and tolerance. But the global market is highly illiberal and intolerant. It allows only one form of economic organisation and it is relentlessly hostile towards the traditional, as anyone who surveys British retailing or recalls what happened to mining communities will understand. Muslims might be persuaded of the merits of democracy and legality, but the merits of modernity, as defined by Blair, are a harder call.

· Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman

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