LONDON: We know it. They know it. We know that they know it. So why do they continue to deny it? I am, of course, talking about the very obvious connection between British foreign policy and the rising terrorist threat, and the government’s refusal to come to terms with it. Politicians rarely admit their mistakes, but this mental block is more than just routine political obduracy; it is a serious issue of national security.
We have come to expect little better of Tony Blair, whose personal reputation now depends on such a falsified version of reality that he increasingly appears to inhabit a land of make-believe. But what was truly depressing about the response to the recent open letter from prominent Muslims warning that British policy is providing ‘ammunition to extremists’ was the number of ministers — several of whom clearly know better — who lined up to parrot the mantra that it was ‘dangerous’ to suggest a link.
Those same ministers must have been galled by this week’s Guardian/ICM poll suggesting that 72 per cent of the British people agree that our foreign policy has made us less secure, while only one per cent accept the government’s assurance that it has made us safer. That’s as close to zero as it’s possible to get in an opinion poll.
The one thing that could always be said of New Labour was that it knew how to read and adapt to public opinion. Its detachment from the popular mood on national security encourages those who believe that its time in office is drawing to a close. It is the ministers, not their critics, who have lost the plot.
The standard riposte is to point out that Al Qaeda’s terrorist campaign against the West predated the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, so cannot be blamed on them. That is obviously true, but it ignores the essential point. Potent though it was, before 9/11 Al Qaeda drew its support from a fairly narrow base — mainly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The effect of our foreign-policy miscalculations has been to expand that base to places where it was previously weak or almost nonexistent.
Britain was certainly a centre of Muslim extremism before 9/11 and the Iraq war. But apart from the solitary case of the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, there is nothing to substantiate the idea that Al Qaeda had established a meaningful presence among British Muslims. John Reid recently claimed that the first Al Qaeda plot in the UK was identified in 2000. If so, it was not considered significant enough to feature prominently in the regular joint intelligence committee assessments.
Whatever the government may want us to believe, evidence suggests that the phenomenon of British-born Muslims willing to carry out suicide attacks at home postdates the Iraq war and has been inspired by it. As the intelligence and security committee noted this year: “The judgments of the JIC in 2002 suggest attacks against the UK were felt more likely ... to be conducted by terrorists entering from abroad than by British nationals resident in the UK. By early 2004 perceptions of the threat, and the threat itself, had changed.”
We all know what caused that change. The only ‘danger’ in acknowledging it is to the credibility of those who have been directing the war on terror over the past five years. That’s the real reason behind the collective ministerial panic attack that followed the open letter.
The government argues that to change policy in the face of a terrorist threat would be an act of moral cowardice that would put us in even greater danger. But that would only be true where the policy in question was both legitimate and necessary in order to combat terrorism or serve some other vital objective. It would, for example, be sheer folly to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. Eliminating Al Qaeda’s principal base of operations was fully justified on grounds of self-defence.
The same cannot be said of Iraq. Saddam Hussein posed no threat beyond his borders, and the main effect of our intervention has been to create an enormous terrorist threat that didn’t previously exist.
The absence of legitimacy and necessity applies particularly to the government’s acquiescence in America’s support for Israel, which along with Iraq is the main source of Muslim anger. In his book Celsius 7/7, Michael Gove argues that to pressure Israel to trade land for peace would be akin to another Munich. What he conveniently omits to mention is that the land Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender in 1938 was its own and not someone else’s. It can never be ‘appeasement’ to demand that a country ends an illegal occupation.
Blair’s justification for pursuing a foreign policy that lacks legitimacy has been the necessity of sticking close to America. It follows that developing an alternative that diminishes extremist sentiment would require a post-Blair government to rethink its relationship with Washington. This does not mean abandoning the transatlantic alliance or reneging on our obligation to support America when it is attacked. It simply means an end to deference and a willingness to be firm when America has got it wrong.
There is no reason why this should not happen. As Lebanon showed, the foreign policy advanced in Britain’s name, but without its support, is not Labour’s, the government’s or even the cabinet’s. It is shared by few people beyond Downing Street and Blair’s ever-decreasing circle of admirers. That makes it all the more regrettable that so many of his ministers felt the need to associate themselves publicly with his errors. There is now a strong public appetite for a change of foreign-policy direction, and Labour will need to tap into that if it is to recover the authority to govern. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
—David Clark is a former Labour special adviser at the Foreign Office
