Obsession with public opinion is the terrorist's greatest ally
Politicians with one eye on the news cycle can never properly
defend us from the deadly, patient threat of Islamist terror
By Matthew dAncona
Telegraph.co.uk
There is nothing Gordon Brown relishes more than a chance to claim leadership
on the global stage: and so it was all but inevitable that the Prime Minister
would find a way of holding an "emergency summit" in London after the Christmas
Day airline bomb attack a "crisis meeting" on Yemen, as it turns out. He loves
a crisis meeting, does Gordon. And, like all politicians, he is pathologically
fearful of inaction or, more accurately, the appearance of inaction.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Obama administration has flailed badly
in its response to the attempted downing of Northwest Airlines flight 253 over
Detroit: a deeply unsettling echo of September 11, a sort of 9/11-lite. In spite
of warnings from the suspect's own father, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name was
not posted by US intelligence on the official "no-fly" list. Yet, according to
Janet Napolitano, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary, "the system worked". To
which one can only reply: not so much.
In the end, the President himself was forced to concede that the
near-catastrophe reflected "human and systemic failures". One of Obama's
supposed historic functions was to make all this nasty stuff go away, to act, as
his very name suggests, as a balm to the geopolitical brow. His administration
dropped the nasty phrases "war on terror" and "long war", preferring the much
nicer term "overseas contingency operation". It has even referred to terrorist
acts as "man-caused disasters". No wonder the President has looked so vexed and
neurasthenic in the past week. This sort of thing was not meant to happen to
him.
The primary purpose of the PM's New Year's Day statement, posted on the
Downing Street website, was to convey the opposite impression: a leader in
control, unfazed, overseeing a surge in activity. "We have trebled our security
budget," Gordon declared; then added that "we must never be complacent" which
is why he has ordered a thorough review of airport security and already
signalled his support for full-body scanners. There was just a whiff of
condescension in his promise that all this would be done "in cooperation with
President Obama and the Americans" as if the PM were saying, "leave this to
me, Barack, I know what I'm doing."
That said, Brown is also keenly aware of the potentially hideous
embarrassment for this country in Abdulmutallab's immediate past. The Nigerian
did, after all, spend three years studying at University College London, before
embarking on his career (it is alleged) as a fully-fledged jihadi. Was he
radicalised at UCL? In a sentence of fabulously tortured syntax, Gordon urged us
not to draw conclusions. "Although we are increasingly clear that he linked up
with al-Qaeda in Yemen after leaving London," the PM said, "we nevertheless need
to remain vigilant against people being radicalised here as well as abroad."
All of this is a familiar ritual, one to which we should have grown used
since 9/11. There is an Islamist attack, successful or narrowly-thwarted.
Governments promise a tough response: summits, reviews, the facing of "hard
choices", the removal of gloves. We are told, as Tony Blair told us on August 5,
2005, after the 7/7 atrocities, that "the rules of the game have changed". There
is a flurry of activity. And then, quietly, everybody creeps back to their
various comfort zones.
More than eight years after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, there
are two competing narratives in the West. The first is frightening, difficult
and poses a host of deeply unwelcome questions. According to this version of
events, we face a global struggle against a new mutation of militant Islamism
ready to use all and any means at its disposal, bonded by anti-semitism, hatred
of America and a desire to enforce sharia law and to restore the Caliphate. This
network plots globally and kills locally. The merit of this is that it happens
to be true.
The second narrative dismisses the whole notion of the "war on terror" as an
aberration of the Bush-Blair era. According to this version of events, Islamist
terror is mostly the consequence of "Western foreign policy" (for example, the
Iraq War was directly responsible for 7/7). With Bush and Blair gone, and
al-Qaeda supposedly scattered to the winds, it follows that the winding up of
the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will bring the whole sorry chapter to an
end, and we can all get on with life as normal. The only flaw in this comforting
narrative is that it happens to be complete nonsense.
In recent years, the Labour Government, driven by the ebb and flow of public
opinion, has borrowed arbitrarily from both narratives. A year ago, David
Miliband declared that "the notion [of the war on terror] is misleading and
mistaken" and may even have done "more harm than good", and that there was no
"unified, transnational enemy". The terrorist threat, he said, was disaggregated
and heterogeneous. We were dealing with "myriad fragmented demands".
Yet on Friday the Prime Minister explicitly (and correctly) acknowledged the
existence of a global Islamist network. "Almost 10 years after September 11,
international terrorism is still a very real threat," he said. "Al-Qaeda and
their associates continue in their ambition to indoctrinate thousands of young
people around the world with a deadly desire to kill and maim." That's true. But
was the Foreign Secretary freelancing a year ago or accurately reflecting the
tactical position of the British Government at the time?
According to the Guardian, "profiling" more stringent checks for
certain types of passenger is now "in the mix" of the review of airport
security. Hitherto, this Government has always ruled out this technique on the
grounds that it would provoke ill feeling among Muslims and British Asians. In
2005, prime minister Blair said that "the rules of the game have changed". Last
November, on the other hand, Alan Johnson readily conceded that some of the
counter-terrorism proposals after 7/7 were "too draconian" and "not the right
way to go". Yet, last Monday, the same Home Secretary was talking tough again on
the Today programme, warning of the perils of "the most serious threat
from a type of terrorism that we have never experienced before".
Which is the authentic voice of the Government? Robust or appeasing? Hawkish
or dove-lovely? The truth is: both and neither. The tone and content are
determined by the news cycle, by the needs of the hour. And that is the great
advantage the jihadis have over us: they think not in days, but in centuries.
They would never drop the phrase "long war" because, for them, all wars are
long. Gordon will have his summit on Yemen and then it will all be forgotten,
before you can say "election campaign launch". Meanwhile, doubtless pleased and
fortified by the political mayhem caused by the Detroit attack, al-Qaeda will
resume its quiet plans for a campaign of infinitely longer duration.
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