"The consensus will die hard..."

After the Bali nightclub bombing in October 2002, Clive James wrote a fine article for The Guardian in which he noted:

But let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.

The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain.

The last sentence quoted was hyperbolic. The consensus is eroding hard, but shows no sign of expiring. But the great insight of James's piece is that the objection of Islamist terrorists is not to our sins of omission and commission, but to the values that make Western societies civilised: liberal political rights, the separation of civil and religious authority, women's emancipation, universal education, scientific inquiry, homosexual rights, and - on a less rarefied but no less important plane - the ability to choose to go to a nightclub, travel as a tourist, and dress as one pleases.

Since the London bombings three months ago, the political debate in this country has taken a predictable form. Anti-war campaigners assert that UK participation in the Iraq War made us a target; the Government insists that Iraq had nothing to do with it. Neither judgement is right, but the anti-war view is in far more serious error.

Against the Government's position, I can see no purpose in disputing that our helping to overthrow Saddam Hussein has inflamed Islamist totalitarian groups. Why deny what we should take pride in? Tony Blair recognised at an early stage - and with a greater percipience than was evident in the Bush administration's unsubstantiated assertions of direct links between Sadam and al-Qaeda - the centrality of overthrowing Baathist tyranny in Iraq to our campaign to defeat Islamist terror. It is entirely plausible that theocratic fanatics would recognise the same relationship: that there exists a genuine 'root cause' of terrorism in the persistence of autocratic regimes throughout the Arab world and the opportunities these provide for the incubation of hatred.

Yet the Government is still right to point to the incidence of terrorist acts of war before we overthrew Saddam - not because it demonstrates the independence of terrorist acts from our foreign policy, but because there is no foreign policy we could adopt that would not provoke our enemies into indiscriminate (and if they have the ability, apocalyptic) violence. Consider, for example, this report from the Australian Green Left Weekly from 1994 under the headline 'Pilger calls for escalation of East Timor campaign':

[John] Pilger recalled how in August 1976 the then prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was warned by the White House to toe the line and support Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. In October 1976, Australia was the first country to give de facto recognition to the Indonesian military takeover. This year, Pilger noted, “[Prime Minister Paul] Keating went to the US to tell Congress off for being too harsh on the Indonesian regime. For that Keating was called a `comrade-in-arms'” by the Suharto government....

“We have a lot to do. We need to let as many people know about the facts as possible. But we also need to do more than that”, Pilger said. “We need to build the movement for independence in East Timor and oppose the `special status' position for East Timor put forward by [Foreign Minister Gareth] Evans.”

Need I remind my readers that an independent East Timor was cited by Osama bin Laden as a direct cause of the bombing of the Bali nightclub and the murder of more than 200 young people? Here is what he said in a broadcast in November 2002, as translated by the BBC:

We warned Australia before not to join in [the war] in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali. Its government falsely claimed that they [the Australians] were not targeted.

Whereas after the London bombings Pilger wrote a despicable article in the New Statesman levelling blame at Tony Blair (and Pilger's editor compounded the indecency still further with a cover picture of a rucksack and the headline 'Blair's Bombs'), I do not recall Pilger's ever having been accused of culpability in the Bali bombing three years ago. Such a charge would be the exact equivalent of the charge he has made against the British Prime Minister, which is to say it would be an outrage.

I say this not as a debating point against Pilger, but as an indication that there is no foreign policy we could adopt that would satisfy those whose objection to the Western democracies is to what we are rather than what we do. We might as well, therefore, do the right thing, and the right thing is to attack those who wish to destroy Western civilisation - to acknowledge that they and not we are the belligerents, but to fight them on our terms and at a time of our choosing, rather than on theirs. Indeed, even if we had no foreign policy at all we would still be targets. Bali three years ago and again this weekend, is the proof of it. What possible provocation could a Hindu island that serves as a haven for Western tourists cause Islamist fanatics?

The question answers itself, of course.