The War Within The West

Testify Sister Melanie, Testify!

(Melanie) -- As I predicted yesterday, a number of commentators have rushed to blame Tony Blair and President Bush for causing yesterday’s carnage in London by having the effrontery to defend their countries against the war declared upon the west. Not that they see it that way, of course — the west’s defence is deemed to be aggression and the Islamist jihad merely an act of self-defence. Thus the ageing revolutionary Tariq Ali writes in the Guardian:

‘The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday lives of most Europeans does not mean the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diaspora is insignificant. As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge. At the beginning of the G8, Blair suggested that "poverty was the cause of terrorism". It is not so. The principal cause of this violence is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. And unless this is recognised, the horrors will continue.’

No point telling Tariq Ali or the Guardian’s comment page editor that Iraq, Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza were only ‘occupied’ as a defensive move because they were all being used as the front line of attack against the west. For such people, America and the west cannot ever do self-defence because by definition they are colonialist oppressors and therefore their very existence is an act of aggression.

More generally, it is specifically Iraq that is presented as terrorist year zero. The Islamic world was all sweetness and light, it appears, until the Iraq war acted as a recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda. Thus James Reynolds, currently the BBC’s World Affairs correspondent and soon to head the BBC’s bureau in Israel (where he will no doubt continue to shine as an exemplar of the Robert Fisk school of objective journalism) writes of Tony Blair:

‘He is committed to staying in Iraq and to the hope that, in due course, the insurgency there can be overcome and Iraq will develop into a functioning, democratic state backed by its oil riches. Britain therefore remains in the front line, and the option of withdrawing from Iraq and minimising the risk of further attacks is not presently open to British voters. They have taken their decision and must accept the consequences’ (my italics).

Note in particular the pronoun ‘they’. For Reynolds here goes even further than blaming Bush and Blair for creating terror. It’s apparently all the fault of the British people for voting Blair back into power – for which they must ‘accept the consequences’ of being blown to bits on public transport! What an extraordinarily malevolent thing for anyone to write, let alone someone being paid to do so from the pockets of the very people he is so venomously blaming for their own destruction.

The reason why blaming al Qaeda’s terror on the war in Iraq is morally so obtuse goes deeper than the astonishing historical amnesia displayed by those who appear to airbrush from their memory the declaration of war upon the west and associated acts of terror over more than a decade culminating in 9/11. It is because it takes an element of truth and then draws from it a perverse and amoral conclusion. The element of truth is that the west’s actions in Afghanistan and Iraq undoubtedly have exacerbated jihadi fervour and drawn more into the cause. The amoral conclusion is that therefore these actions by the west were wrong.

The truth is that, for countries that believed Afghanistan and Iraq had already inflicted aggressive acts of violence upon the west and were poised to inflict even worse, there was no reasonable or principled alternative but to wage war upon them. The fact that any attempt by the west at self-defence would enrage yet more Islamists was merely the other prong of Morton’s Fork, and illustrated the dilemma posed by all terrorism – if its victims defend themselves, this recruits more to the terrorist cause, but if its victims don’t defend themselves this encourages the terrorists to redouble their attacks because their whole strategy is to demoralise their victims in every way in order to finish them off altogether. This is, after all, the terrible dilemma faced all the time by Israel – a choice between, on the one hand, protecting its citizens from genocidal attack by means which inflame the Arabs in the territories simply because they perceive any self defence by the Israelis as aggression thanks to the warped ideology with which they have been brainwashed, and on the other hand, appeasing terror by a variety of means which are all taken as a sign of weakness and which act therefore as a spur to redouble the terrorist war.

Faced with this intrinsic dilemma posed by terrorism, in which both courses of action have a downside, the only moral choice is to fight terror by the most vigorous means of self-defence possible. This is because while in the short to medium term this may recruit more to the terrorist cause, the alternative route of appeasement is to commit cultural or national suicide. In other words, for free peoples there is no alternative. That is why blaming the continuing war by al Qaeda on the west’s actions in Iraq is such a degraded and disgusting position to take.

Posted by melanie at July 8, 2005

The war arrives on British soil

Our thoughts and prayers are with our British friends.

(War on Terror) -- Touching and heartening messages of sympathy and solidarity have been arriving in Britain from across the world after today's horrendous acts of mass murder in London. For me, however, the most poignant are those which call up the heroic image of the British wartime spirit: that stoical, phlegmatic response which is determined to continue as before in the face of unspeakable acts because to do otherwise is to give terror its victory. And yes, there's plenty of that stoicism and quiet heroism around, and it was on display today.

But alas, there is something else, something horrible and warped, also lurking just below the surface. It is the belief that this monstrous event would never have occurred had Tony Blair not taken us to war in Iraq, that that war has created more not less terror and that the British would not have been a target at all had we distanced ourselves from the US. It is a view which has so far only been expressed openly, as far as I am aware, by far left groups such as the SWP. But it is believed far more widely than that, and I expect to see mainstream writers saying as much over the next few days. The great question is which of these rival impulses will define the mood among the British public as a whole. Are Britons still the people of the Blitz, or have they become like Spain after the Madrid bombings?

Our friends in America look at Tony Blair, whom they admire so much for his staunchness in the struggle to defend the west, and they imagine that Britain overall is in that same mould. Well, it is not. It is impossible to overstate the pernicious influence of the viciously anti-American, defeatist, appeasement-minded media and intellectual class, which has quite simply shifted the centre of moral gravity and subjected the country to a remorseless diet of distortions, lies and illogicality.

As a result, Britain has never properly understood or faced up to the nature and scale of the threat it faces, or indeed that it was always a target of attack along with the US. This lack of understanding of the war against the west may well lead the British to blame not al Qaeda but Blair and Bush - the very outcome desired by al Qaeda, and which therefore makes it so much more likely that it will attack countries where the population is perceived to be flaky. Every utterance since 9/11 by an appeasenik, it has to be said, made today's attacks that much more certain.

On the other hand, the British who are so slow to anger are bloody-mindedly warlike when finally roused. How they react to today's obscenity will be a critical turning point in this war. As we grieve for those who have lost their lives or who have sustained terrible injury in today's act of war, we must also hold our breath.