Canberra: British Prime Minister Tony Blair will call on the international community to stand firm in Iraq and Afghanistan and against Islamist extremism in a keynote foreign policy speech on Monday.
"If the going is tough, we tough it out. This is not a time to walk away. This is a time for the courage to see it through," the British Labour Party leader is expected to tell a joint session of the Australian parliament in Canberra.
Iraq is currently in the grip of spiraling violence -- and a debate about whether it constitutes civil war. In addition, there are concerns about a resurgence of the hardline Taliban militia in Afghanistan.
Blair will expand on themes introduced in London last week in the first of three planned foreign affairs speeches, in which he defended his "interventionist policy" in Iraq and criticised those who seek to derail moves towards democracy there.
According to excerpts released by his office, Blair will stress the need for a "global alliance for global values", arguing that worldwide links in areas like economics, communications and culture also applied to politics.
But triumph in the struggle for "values and progress" -- the opposition to which he last week called "a clash of civilisation, a battle about modernity" -- was not just about military might, he will say.
Democratic values are not simply Western, American or Anglo-Saxon, but "values in the common ownership of humanity", he will emphasise.
He will tell lawmakers in the address -- the first to a joint sitting of the Australian parliament by a British prime minister -- that the challenge ahead was to demonstrate to opponents that those values were universal.
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