US spies deliver coup de grace
"The Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Trends in Global Terrorism
The final damning indictment of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has come and, in a twist of irony, it arrives in the language of cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Iraq as jihadist cause celebre? Naturellement.
For those whose IQ is in double figures this piece of "intelligence" is patently obvious and can not be honestly denied. Anyone could predict that the occupation of a large Arab country by infidel forces would irk Muslims worldwide and lead to more, not fewer terrorists.
The last domino has fallen - all the arguments for invading Iraq have now been proved false. Iraq didn’t have WMDs, nor did it have links with al-Qaida. The war has made the world less, not more, safe. Just last week, the UN reported that in the brave new world of democratic Iraq, torture is more commonplace than under Saddam.
And of course all this has been learnt at the expense of thousands of lives, most of them innocent Iraqis. With the country breaking up along ethnic lines and civil war under way, there is worse, much worse, yet to come.
Those who still believe that a new, benign Iraq will eventually emerge from this catastrophe can still maintain that the short-term pain is worth the long-term gain of a democratic, peaceful Middle East. While immensely optimistic, this is at least hypothetically possible. But they can not go on denying that invading Iraq, with its attendant slaughter of Arab innocents, has been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida.
Yet even now, with the top US spooks having extricated their heads from the sand, one man at least refuses to acknowledge this patently obvious equation.
I speak of course of the soon-to-be ex-prime minister of the United Kingdom, Mr Tony Blair. In yesterday’s farewell address to the Labour party conference, one of the war’s chief architects surveyed the rubble and told us all that the structure remained sound:
"This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn't cause it. It’s not the consequence of foreign policy. It’s an attack on our way of life."
It is about foreign policy. Not just Iraq, but Lebanon, Afghanistan, Palestine, the support for Arab despots, any number of grievances going back to colonialism. A long series of humiliations of which we in the west may confess ignorance, but of which Muslims are well aware.
But although Blair is wrong, demonstrably and laughably wrong, to fail to acknowledge the consequences of his actions, he is also right, or at least half right, in seeing the bigger picture here. For, while it is true that the disaster in Iraq has made the situation far worse, it is naïve to believe that minus Iraq, minus Palestine, minus all bin Laden’s recruiting sergeants, there would be no al-Qaida.
Blair is right and, I’m sad to say, some in the anti-war movement wrong, to point out the existence of a religious fundamentalism which would impose seventh century morality on all of us, Muslim and infidel alike.
This jihadism is a rash on humanity and anyone who denies its existence is being just as ridiculous as Blair, who claims that scratching it is the best solution.