Blair, Wright, and The War on Terror

Tony Blair's farewell speech before the Labour Party Conference [here's a relevant part} The fundamental dilemma: how do we reconcile liberty with security in this new world? I don't want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy. When crimes go unpunished, that is a breach of the victim's liberty and human rights. When organised crime gangs are free to practice their evil, countless young people have their liberty and often their lives damaged. When ASB goes unchecked, each and every member of the community in which it happens, has their human rights broken. When we can't deport foreign nationals even when inciting violence the country is at risk. Immigration has benefited Britain. But I know that if we don't have rules that allow us some control over who comes in, goes out, who has a right to stay and who has not, then instead of a welcome, migrants find fear. We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world. That is why Identity Cards using biometric technology are not a breach of our basic rights, they are an essential part of responding to the reality of modern migration and protecting us against identity fraud. I remember when I introduced the DNA database. On it go all those who are arrested. We were told it was a monstrous breach of liberty. But it is now matching 3,000 offences a month including last year several hundred murders, and thousands of rapes and other violent offences. Difficult reform leading to real progress in the fight against crime. In the next Parliamentary Session, the centre-piece will be John Reid's immigration and law and order reforms. I ask people of all Parties to support them. Let Liberty stand up for the Law-abiding. And of course, the new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit. This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible. 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's global. It has an ideology. It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of. It has been decades growing. Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey. Over 30 nations in the world. It preys on every conflict. It exploits every grievance. And its victims are mainly Muslim. This is not our war against Islam. This is a war fought by extremists who pervert the true faith of Islam. And all of us, Western and Arab, Christian or Muslim, who put the value of tolerance, respect and peaceful co-existence above those of sectarian hatred, should join together to defeat them. It is not British soldiers who are sending car bombs into Baghdad or Kabul to slaughter the innocent. They are there along with troops of 30 other nations with, in each case, a full UN mandate at the specific request of the first ever democratically elected Governments of those countries in order to protect them against the very ideology also seeking the deaths of British people in planes across the Atlantic. If we retreat now, hand Iraq over to Al Qaida and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to Al Qaida and the Taleban, we won't be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril. Of course it's tough. Not a day goes by or an hour in the day when I don't reflect on our troops with admiration and thanks - the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for. They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation's future. But this is not a conventional war. It can't be won by force alone. It's not a clash of civilisations. It's about civilisation, about the ideas that shape it. From 9/11 until now I have said again and again. If we want our values to be the ones that govern global change, we have to show that they are fair, just and delivered with an even hand. From now until I leave office I will dedicate myself, with the same commitment I have given to Northern Ireland , to advancing peace between Israel and Palestine. I may not succeed. But I will try because peace in the Middle East is a defeat for terrorism. We must never again let Lebanon become the battleground for a conflict that neither Israeli or Lebanese people wanted though it was they who paid the price for it. Peace in Lebanon is a defeat for terrorism. Action in Africa is a defeat for terrorism. What is happening now in the Sudan cannot stand. If this were in the continent of Europe we would act. Showing an African life is worth as much as a Western one - that would help defeat terrorism too. Yes it's hard sometimes to be America's strongest ally. Yes, Europe can be a political headache for a proud sovereign nation like Britain. But believe me there are no half-hearted allies of America today and no semi-detached partners in Europe. And the truth is that nothing we strive for, from the world trade talks to global warming, to terrorism and Palestine can be solved without America, or without Europe. At the moment I know people only see the price of these alliances. Give them up and the cost in terms of power, weight and influence for Britain would be infinitely greater. Distance this country and you may find it's a long way back. So all these changes of a magnitude we never dreamt of, sweeping the world, are calling for answers of equal magnitude and vision. All require leadership. And here is something else I've learnt. The danger for us today is not reversion to the politics of the 1980s. It is retreat to the sidelines. [Commentary] What Blair addresses is the part of the equation that neither hard left nor hard right in the US and Canada (or Britain) seems willing to discuss. The far right wishes us to close our eyes to the mistakes, the mis-management, the incompetence of the steps taken after 9/11 that culminated in the invasion of Iraq. Conversely, the far left wishes only to discuss the horrors and the mileading case for war. To follow either path is to be caught in a morass that paralyzes us and gives us no hope ever of solving anything. The Bush administration is now reaping the spoils of their conflation of the Iraq invasion with the war on terror as the Afghanistan mission is losing support amongst allies and the very point al-Qaeda and the Taliban are rearming for a new assault. You can try to make the case that the war in Iraq has made things more difficult around the globe to arrest the jihadism that has been growing, and you'd have a point, but it isn't the cause of that jihadism, just an easy excuse. There is a new book out called "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda's Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright, I hope to read it soon in full. Excerpts I've read, however, and interviews I've seen with Wright give me some idea of the case he is attempting to make: that is that the fantacism that developed al-Qaeda had nothing really to do with American foreign policy at all. Al-Qaeda was born of the ideology of brand of Islamic nationalism, its roots in Egypt in the pan-Arab movement in the late 1940s and other post-WW2 anti-colonial movements. But this new violent strain sought a virtual Islamic imperialism of its own, first conquering the Arab states then beyond its borders, the world. American foreign policy, Israel, etc are merely scapegoats (sometimes wittingly so) in the jihadist movement. The Israeli-Palestinian dimension merely made their mission easier, feeding the beast of hatred. There are mistakes to go around in the American governments past and present, and it seems that Wright is able to address those in some detail, but the underlying point of both Wright's book and Blair's speech should be, it seems to me, that whatever you may think of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the decisions made to undertake them, the dilemma involved in each, and around the globe in the larger war on terror is real, important, and more complex than either political side seems willing to grasp in full.