TONY BLAIR WILL NOT ADMIT INVASION OF IRAQ MADE BRITAIN VULNERABLE TO TERRORIST
ATTACK – ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS IT DID.
*
Mr
Blair has repeatedly denied our role in the invasion of Iraq has made Britain more vulnerable to
terrorist attack.
NO ONE BELIEVES HIM
By
Max Hastings.
*
Daily Mail
Friday, August 11, 2006
To a terrorist, it is so tempting. In a season when
every airport in the world is thronged with heaving humanity, how great are the
chances that a hot, weary, eye-sore security scanner will identify a random
jumble of innocent-looking components in a handbag as a potential explosive
device?
The world’s murderous fanatics remain fixated with
aircraft as targets. For all their size, they are relatively fragile.
Hundreds of people die when a plane is destroyed in
flight, and thousands more are at risk if its stricken remains fall on a great
conurbation.
We should pity the security forces. They are obliged
daily to juggle our safety against the economic and social priority of enabling
hundreds of thousands of people to travel freely.
The Israelis run the world’s ONLY genuine
high-security airline, and EL AL achieves this by adopting an intensity of
passenger search and interrogation which most of us find unacceptable.
Our safety hinges overwhelmingly upon identifying
prospective suicide-bombers before they can strike, as the police and
intelligence services appear to have done yesterday. It is hard to overstate the strain which this
responsibility imposes.
They can frustrate plot after plot, detain suspect
after suspect. Yet, amid the teeming multitudes out there in the streets of
suburban [England],
among the growing number of Muslim radicals, they know they need miss only a
single cell for disaster to fall upon innocent people.
That is why they keep warning us that sooner or later,
another atrocity as horrible as last summer’s London bombings is bound to happen.
It takes about 20 officers to maintain
the round-the-clock surveillance on a terrorist suspect. Often, such a person is a ‘sleeper’, who does
nothing for months, save pursue his lawful affairs.
When resources are stretched constant juggling of
manpower is needed to monitor dangerous people. Yet the security services and
police know that, if they withdraw coverage of a suspect [As they did
with one of the July 7 -London
bombers]
who later
commits a terrible crime, Ministers and the Media will be at their throats.
‘The stakes are getting higher for government as
public expectations of safety and security rise,’ Sir David Omand, Britain’s
former co-ordinator of security and intelligence, said a few months ago.
‘The UK is wrestling with the trade-off between
intelligence effectiveness and individual privacy, between due process and
protecting the public from dangerous fanatics, between public free speech and
neutralising the messages of hate from the advocates of terrorism’
In the early Fifties, in the dark days
of the Cold War, Britain’s
chiefs of staff debated how to defend this country from Soviet suicide-bombers
carrying portable nuclear devices.
After a brief discussion, they decided
that it was impossible to provide ‘point defence’ against such a threat. They
concluded that the only answer was to depend on deterrence –
Russia’s knowledge that if its agents
exploded atomic bombs in Britain, we would respond in kind.
Today, of course, deterrence is a dead letter. It is impossible to threaten retaliation
Osama Bin Laden in his cave, though mercifully his acolytes lack nuclear
weapons [As YET?]
The only course for government and its agents is to
defend us by what they call ‘the four Ps’:
PREVENTION
PURSUIT
PROTECTION
PREPARATION.
The first two of these are designed to address the
present generation of terrorists. The
last two are intended to forestall the next generation.
Everybody connected with intelligence and
counter-terrorism recognises the need for a long-term programme to prevent the
radicalisation of young British Muslims.
[The momentum of Islam is unstoppable as their aim is
to convert the world to its FAITH. The majority of Muslims are non-violent but
there will ALWAYS be those who wish to bring their Ideology to the world by
other means. As in the West there are
those who use their POWER to bring their Ideology disguised as DEMOCRACY to
carry out their aims to CONTROL further regions of the World by illegal
invasions and also by other means.]
To return:
Sheaves of reports and studies circulate among the
security departments, which assess why some young men – especially our own,
home grown residents – become radicalised to the point of being willing to kill
themselves and others.
I have one such document in front of me now. It notes
that many would be terrorists fall prey to the fanatics in their teens, and are
at their most dangerous in their 20’s.
They are overwhelmingly male, though women play a part
in the family support structure of so called jihadists.
Ironically given the inferior status of women in the
Muslim world, female ‘victimhood’ is a significant force in motivating some
young radicals –
For instance, through images of Muslim women allegedly
being violated by Coalition troops in Iraq.
The INTERNET plays a large part in their political
education, with a host of websites inciting them to rise against the infidel.
Jihadists believe that Islam is under attack from the
Jews and the Christian West –
especially America – and is betrayed by
corrupt insufficiently fundamentalist Middle Eastern governments.
They think that, in such circumstances the Koran
justifies defensive action – which, in their twisted minds, includes killing
Western innocents.
One clue to imminent suicide action by a
terrorist can be that he pays his debts, to make himself ‘a purer offering’ to
God’. Many swallow the ‘Single Narrative’, which regards history as an unbroken
tale of Christian and Jewish persecutions of Islam.
In Britain,
second – and third – generation Muslims often feel isolated both from their own
societies and from ours. Embracing
radicalism gives them a sense that they are adopting a higher IDEAL than
either.
It is very hard for a Western nation to counter the
sort of nonsense peddled by the
‘SINGLE NARRATIVE’
-Tony Blair urges moderate Muslims to work more
actively to counter the extremists’ myths, but he has little success.
Muslims of all persuasions resist almost anything a
Westerner has to say about their
FAITH
- and even moderates show little enthusiasm for taking
on the extremists.
Some young Muslims are attracted to radicalism not by
religion, but merely by cultural and political alienation.
Joining a violent assault on the West, even upon the
very community in which they live, gives a sense of purpose to bored and
rootless lives, of the same kind that a generation that a generation ago made
some young Catholic Northern Irishmen choose the status of becoming IRA gunmen
in preference to being an unemployed bricklayer or barman.
The most obvious cause of Muslim
alienation is, of course IRAQ
– and now American and British support for Israeli action in Lebanon.
Tony Blair has repeatedly denied that our participation
in the
INVASION of IRAQ
-has made Britain more vulnerable to attack.
NO ONE!
-least of all in the intelligence services, believes
HIM.
[Except of course the man rewarded for
his unstinting help to Tony Blair with his 24- hour claim of attack –– John
Scarlett appointed head of M16. Until this man is removed from the Intelligence
Services there can never be an absolute surety that all is being done to
protect our nation.]
Deluded young men in Birmingham
or Bradford, London or Leeds,
who address themselves to terrorism, see an immediate grievance in Western
actions in the
Middle East.
Nightly scenes of slaughter and
devastation on their television screens rouse them to blind bitterness against
those they hold responsible.
By blowing up an aircraft or a Tube train, they do not
expect to drive Britain and America out of IRAQ,
or Israel out of Lebanon. They are content merely to inflict pain upon
our country comparable with that which they think we are inflicting on the
nations of the Middle East.
‘Many jihqadists see themselves as engaged in a
divinely ordained millennial process rather than a progression leading to a
result –
Victory or Defeat,’ says a Whitehall analysis of British Muslim
radicalism.
‘What is important to them is not the winning – God
will see to that eventually –
But the taking
part. What will change them, gradually
is argument, the removal of justifying causes (Palestine, Iraq),
the erosion of belief and the day –to-day frustration of their designs.’
[As we have said before even when the
causes of the war between the East and West are corrected there will still be a
faction in both regions who will continue the struggle for their own ends. But when this happens as sure it will at
least both sides will have no one else to blame but themselves.]
To return:
There is not much comfort there for us, prospective
victims of these impassioned, reckless, murderous people. Neither George Bush nor Tony Blair shows any
signs of penitence for Iraq,
and indeed both have raised the stakes by backing Israel’s
actions in Lebanon.
Religion plays a part in their motivation, too. They
are driven by a sincere Christian belief in their own rectitude, which is no
more susceptible to rational argument then the
‘SINGLE NARRATIVE’
- of the Islamic radicals.
They are not terrorists, of course, but the elected
leaders of democracies. Nonetheless, their God has persuaded them to commit
some sorely ill-judged actions, which have cost a host of lives.
Sir David Omand says:
‘The struggle of ideas, as much as the tactical battle
on the streets, has to be won. We badly need a counter-narrative that will help
groups exposed to the terrorist message make sense of what they are seeing
around them.’
[Well we have given an answer to this
already and it is that until our hands are clean of injustice and we instead
devote all our energies to the solution of the Middle East
Question there will be no PEACE.
Our ability as a nation to now do what
should have been done before the illegal invasion of IRAQ
has been greatly impaired in the eyes of the World and particularly in the Middle East.
Tony Blair and his many cronies ignored
the good advice before the Iraq
war and later the expected Mission Impossible in Afghanistan
and to finally shut the door by inaction over Lebanon.
Only an immediate change of Prime
Minister and those Ministers with their Independent Advisors who supported the Iraq War
resigning will the world finally get the message that we are again as in the
past
in
the main a
NATION STATE
-which will not turn a blind eye to
INJUSTICE.
A great parliamentarian of the 19th
century John Bright when as he did so often support those who were defending
their right to JUSTICE – appealed to his fellow MPs with the following words:
‘To
the upright there ariseth light in the darkness’
MPs and others of Integrity such as
Robin Cook and David Kelly and others who spoke out against the evil of the day
were mindful of their duty to their
Conscience and Country.]
To return:
Yet it is hard to create this when many British and
American people, never mind the Muslim radicals, lack confidence in their own
governments policies in the Middle East.
The police and intelligence services are struggling
not only to provide us with short-term protection against murderous fanatics,
but against a government foreign policy which is making matters worse by
promoting Muslim radicalisation.
Nothing justifies terrorist atrocities. Nothing can
make it acceptable for young British Muslims of foreign jihadists to murder
innocent people.
BUT it would be absurd not to acknowledge that, in the
five years since 9/11, Muslims have become more and not less alienated from the
West. In other words, the security authorities’ job is getting harder, not
easier.
[But is this not because of the
complicity of some members of the Security Services in greatly assisting a
Government to mount an illegal war. We
must NEVER forget the suspicious death of a Patriot – Scientist David Kelly who
showed that there was much doubt at the time about the Government’s claims for
their justification for war. We are
still awaiting a FULL INQUIRY which Tony Blair refuses to give.]
To return:
Yesterday [Thursday –August 11, 2006] was a miserable day for us call. We pitied hundreds of thousands of hapless
people who found holidays wrecked and lives disrupted by the huge airport
shutdown.
Yet we must anticipate more of the same in the years
ahead, because there is no short-term panacea for international terrorism and
we are front-line targets.
Many countries around the world, which declared total
support for the struggle against Al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, are today only
half-hearted in their contributions.
Even some European nations do much less than they
should, because they are unsympathetic to American Middle eastern policy, and
pin hopes for their own safety upon avoiding provocation of Muslims. Either
individually or as nations.
This makes the job of our own intelligence services
that more difficult. Almost all
terrorist networks cross frontiers, as the Home Secretary John Reid observed
yesterday. Only if the West unites to counter the threat can we prevail and
today such unity is elusive.
However little we like it, we must resign ourselves to
some loss of civil liberties. The
police and the intelligence services cannot deal with terrorism without the
wide spread of powers of surveillance.
It is their misfortune that they depend for new
legislation to assist their purposes on a GOVERNMENT
[AND
SECURITY SERVICES]
which no longer
command TRUST?
[As many have advocated no longer should it be
possible for a government to browbeat the security services to hide the true
facts from the public in order to follow a Government into an illegal war.
In future the prerogative powers of the Executive
should be overseen by a non-partisan Select Committee of the House of Commons
and no longer left to a sofa clandestine meeting in No10 without notes.
WHY the Government has been allowed to stay in power
after its criminal and corrupt practices and expect the People to accept
limitations to their accustomed
‘Rights and Liberties’
will be a
wonder to future historians.]
It is understandable that the public has little
enthusiasm for giving new powers to Tony Blair and his ministers, when they
show themselves so little fit to exercise those which they already possess.
Before judging the plot which the security forces
frustrated yesterday, we need to know much more about it.
For now, we can only mop brows and be grateful that
what appears to have been a major threat to innocent lives has been
prevented. But there will be more of the
same, and as a society we shall need all our courage and patience to meet them.
*
* *
[We are more than a little suspicious that the timing
of the round-up of suspects of the plane plot was to give Mr Nice Guy Dave a
helping hand at a yet again a difficult time he was having from his own side in
Westminster and the growing difficulties abroad in the Middle East.
It could be that the Intelligence Services have jumped
the gun in that a precipitative move on their part has made it only possible to
see a few ringleaders jailed while the others will have flown. We will have to see.
What is most galling to many is that the very
Government which brought us so much distress to people in this country and so
much destruction of life and property abroad and the deaths of innocent
citizens at home and of the many of our brave troops in Iraq and now in
Afghanistan where the 14th brave life has been extinguished and YET is able to
remain in power to clear up the mess they themselves were responsible for with
the curtailment of the LIBERTIES it is their duty to PROTECT.
THIS IS NOT DEMOCRACY
THIS IS DESPOTISM
THIS IS ABSOLUTE POWER
WAKE UP ENGLAND!-DON’T LET THEM GET AWAY
WITH IT.
* * *
[Font altered-bolding & underlining used-comments
in brackets.]
AUGUST/06