Blair is wildly exaggerating the terror threat
This is excellent. Simon Jenkins and Matthew Norman (particular joy here!) are my top columnists ever. Re. Blair and Terror. See also How Mad is Tony Blair, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on The Rules of the Game ( PDF here) . Another interesting read from the JRF is this report on 'Reflections of Young Pakistani Men from Bradford'.
Am reading State of Denial at the moment, brilliant but scary.
Am reading State of Denial at the moment, brilliant but scary.
posted by Rachel at 10:26 am
Can't look at all those links just now, but will be checking them out. Glad you're still out there following things up.
The Jenkins article is grotesque revisionist nonsense riddled with errors based around the awesomely stupid claim that Taliban Afghanistan with AQ present was not a threat to the west.
An argument can be made that the west has been heavy handed. That some of the rheotric is overblown or that a softer military approach would have won more friends and inspired fewer enemies but it is truly ridiculous to pretend the threat is a fabrication of western governments needing an enemy. Yes it’s true that Al Qaida is not in a position to destroy western civilisation but taking no military action (i.e allowing AQ and the Taliban to carry on unmolested in Afghanistan) would have allowed them to launch 9/11 and 7/7’s with a terrible frequency. 9/11 was not the summit of Bin Laden’s ambition it was a single step in a strategic plan of taking the fight to the west. It is complacent and wrong to claim that AQ cannot deploy a WMD. It is plausible to assert that they could not make a serious WMD (a dirty bomb or home made chem/bio attack is plausible but much less scary) but deploying one they’ve acquired from elsewhere is much easier.
Asymmetric warfare on the grand scale dreamed of by Bin Ladin requires a base to prepare, plan and train. Depriving AQ of that base in 2001 and stopping them regaining it is essential to the campaign against them. Al Qaida attacks since 9/11 have become smaller and more amateurish but that is because of the successes against them and not representative of the threat they would pose should we ever drop our gaurd.