Hitchens on the question of US foreign policy's effects on
would-be jihadists.
Now we are all being asked to consider whether or not we are
"safer" than we were five years ago. What this question
means in practice is: Has the Bush/Blair foreign policy
exposed us to more danger or to less? The answer depends on
how you define the threat. You can either believe that Sept.
11, 2001, was the opening shot, or the most shockingly
palpable shot, in a long war waged by Islamic fanaticism
against "the West." Or you can believe that it was part of a
stubborn resistance to an unjust global order largely led
and organized by the United States, with Britain as its
servile junior partner.
If you take the first view, then "safety" is really a
second-order issue. The main priority is to take the war to
the enemy and to deny things like "safe havens" to his
suicidal warriors. Any risk involved is preferable to
continued passivity or inaction. If you take the second
view, then every such action undertaken will only incite and
justify further acts of "terrorism," thus making us all less
safe by definition.
The classic division here was expressed after the London
bombs last July and has surfaced since then in the
controversy over the High Wycombe arrests. There are those
who say that these actual or potential atrocities are to be
expected as a reaction to a foreign policy that is
"perceived" as "anti-Muslim," and there are those who say
that the resort to violence is produced by the preachings of
a depraved clerical ideology. Actually, both of these
positions are simplistic. There obviously is a connection
between our foreign policy and the activities of people who
think it their holy duty to commit mass murder. They are
doing so in solidarity with other mass murderers, in
Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, who want to destroy
democracy or prevent it from emerging. (One casualty of the
King's Cross bombing last July was, aptly enough, a young
Afghan who had fled his homeland after many of his family
had been killed by the Taliban. He had been under the
illusion that in London he would be "safer.")
You may if you choose take the view that resistance to
jihadism only makes its supporters more militant and, given
the fact that all wars intensify feeling on both sides,
there must be some truth to this. But the corollary is a bit
disturbing: The most prudent course of action then seems to
be compromise or surrender. This is a rather contemptible
conclusion. And it also overlooks the unpleasant fact that
the jihadists don't seem to be that much interested in
compromise. Indonesia and Canada, to take two very different
countries, both opposed the Iraq war. But both of them have
been targets of vicious terrorist attacks, as have Turkey
and Morocco, which likewise opposed the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein.
http://www.slate.com/id/2150336/
------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
