"It is time we connected the dots"

Nearly twenty years ago the SAS shot dead three IRA terrorists on Gibraltar. There was great public controversy. On a radio discussion programme, David (now Lord) Owen attracted a certain amount of derision from his fellow panellist Roy Hattersley, then Deputy Labour Leader, for prefacing his remarks by thanking the SAS. I recall thinking at the time that Owen had judged the import of the issue much better than Labour's leadership. On an issue where there has been no loss of life, and the stakes were far greater, the Metropolitan Police (whose Commissioner I recently argued in print should be dismissed) and the intelligence services merit praise and gratitude, and this should be the first thing to say. If they have acted against an advanced plot to kill thousands of civilians, then both the monstrous character of our enemies and the professionalism of those who protect us can scarcely be overstated.

Gerard Baker in The Times today says much that I would wish to say:

But we should also remember that our continuing existence lies not just in inconvenient security measures and uncomfortably intrusive intelligence activities, but in a grand global strategy. Success requires, in addition to the tiresome banalities of long check-in queues and tighter limits on hand luggage, a commitment, whatever the costs, to eradicate the deep global political causes that threaten us.

And for this it just won’t do to claim it’s all about bad US foreign policy. It is repetitive but necessary to point out that we didn’t start this war when we invaded Iraq. The attacks on 9/11 were planned not only before we invaded, but during a time when the US was expending extraordinary effort to try to forge a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

And if our actions have radicalised the jihadists we should remember that they are animated at least as much by our ridding Afghanistan of their spiritual brethren, the Taleban, as they are by whatever crimes the US may have committed in Baghdad.

The same applies to Israel and Lebanon. Not only is the current war the direct result of Hezbollah’s aggression, its deeper causes lie in the continued determination of Israel’s enemies, increasingly emboldened by Tehran, to liquidate the Jewish state.

He might have in mind an instant comment posted yesterday by a blogger on the Guardian's Comment is Free site, Martin Bell, whose post reads in full:

Alone among the countries of Europe, Britain pursues a foreign policy indistinguishable from that of the United States.

Alone among the countries of Europe, Britain has not pressed for an immediate ceasefire in the month-long Middle East conflict.

Alone among the countries of Europe, Britain has played a leading part in waging a war described by the United Nations as illegal.

Now our diplomacy is sidelined. Our voice is an echo. Our moral authority scarcely exists. Our people are the targets of terrorism and the threats of terrorism, wherever they are, and whether they travel by underground or in the air.

Our government has endangered us. It is time we connected the dots.

I know Mr Bell quite well, but I'm still surprised by the outcome of his join-the-dots exercise. He seems to be arguing that only by Britain's pursuing a foreign policy that he agrees with, on Lebanon and Iraq, will terrorists be sufficiently mollified to abandon their plans to attack British and American civilians on planes and the underground. This is not a matter for dispute over interpretation and judgement; Mr Bell is demonstrably wrong.

There are legitimate arguments on the prudence and ethics of the Iraq war, of which I am a supporter. (Mr Bell's claim that the UN has described that war as illegal is, however, spurious. The UN has said no such thing. Mr Bell is probably alluding instead to an assertion by Kofi Annan to that effect in September 2004. Mr Annan is not an international lawyer, but a civil servant. He has no competence to make judgements on international law, no democratic legitimacy, no standing to make up policy for the UN, and no business venturing from his position such contentious and undiplomatic comments.) The same is true of international diplomacy over the Lebanon, on which I agree with the position taken by the Prime Minister. Calling for an immediate ceasefire is equivalent to calling for an enduring threat to the lives of Israeli civilians from an Iranian-backed private army driven by theocratic ideology. This issue has nothing to do with arguments about transatlantic relations. There is a UN Security Council resolution that requires the disarming of Hezbollah; it has not been implemented, and in the circumstances Israel is entitled to defend her citizens and her sovereignty. (Some critics of Israel's actions are uninterested in those considerations, but Mr Bell is not one of them. Having witnessed at first hand the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, he knows better than most Israel's security dilemmas.)

I do not for a moment dispute that al-Qaeda and its fellow-travellers are outraged by the interventionist and atlanticist policies of Tony Blair. But look at the context. I wrote a short book last year in which I argued:

As a rule, there is no purpose in gratuitous provocation in foreign policy, but the provocation offered to Islamist extremism is inevitable whatever we do, and something of which we should be proud. Why deny that the West’s role in allowing an independent Timor (which bin Laden counts as part of the Islamic world) to emerge from Indonesian tutelage has inflamed Islamist terror? Or that our enemies are incensed by our promotion of women’s emancipation and legal rights for homosexuals?

Even a purely isolationist policy such as that favoured by obscurantist conservatives such as Pat Buchanan or the Little Englander tendency in British politics (on the Left as much as the anti-European and anti-American Right) would provide no escape. The negligence and amorality of European governments in failing to counter Serb aggression against Bosnia in the early 1990s was not lost on bin Laden, who took this episode as one further instance of the West’s criminal and bellicose anti-Muslim policies. Whatever we do, or fail to do, we will be a target, and so will others for whom – if liberal or socialist internationalism is to mean anything – we have a responsibility. We might as well, therefore, do the right thing.

In presenting his foreign policy preferences as a means by which we may soothe the sensibilities of those who wish us harm, Mr Bell fails to take seriously the announced aims of our enemies. Like many rational and civilised men (though more surprisingly in his case, because he has hardly led a life sheltered from conflict and suffering) Mr Bell appears to mistake the apocalyptic pronouncements of those forces as rhetorical code for something more reputable - a pacific southern Lebanon, or a two-state territorial accommodation between Israel and Palestine. I cordially invite him to consider bin Laden's 1998 statement ("The Nuclear Bomb of Islam") that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God", and explain - in the press, on his blog or on mine - in what respect Tony Blair should meet this challenge.

Does Mr Bell seek a foreign policy that presents no threat to those who follow bin Laden's ideology, and if so what does he think it would look like? Or does he, like me, take pride in the gross offence that my country and government cause the forces of theocratic, misogynist, mediaeval, murderous, bigoted, antisemitic, irrationalist, apocalyptic fanaticism?