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1/3/2002 (10:55) |
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The flaws in Downing Street's fatwa
Claiming war has made us safer is a dangerous hostage to fortune
George Galloway
Thursday January 3, 2002
The Guardian
Largely lost over the festive period, Downing Street's pre-Christmas fatwa - hailing the government's war triumphs, while denouncing '10 media views which proved to be wrong' - deserves closer scrutiny.
Cutely entitled '100 days, 100 ways', the document declares premature victory and parades the scalps of its critics before they have in truth been taken. The principal targets of the war, Bin Laden and his key associates, remain uncaptured and unslain.
Even Mullah Omar, the one-eyed obscurantist and erstwhile emir, seems to have been mislaid. By carefully honing down the war aims to little more than better gender-balanced government in Afghanistan (not something the government is crusading for everywhere in the Islamic world), No 10's war-room spinners claim the victor's spoils.
But even in Afghanistan, the last shot is a long way from being fired. Since the 100-days euphoria, hundreds have been killed by maladroit US bombing or maliciously misguided targeting.
And having achieved the leader-ship of the multinational force, British soldiers pack their kitbags for another expedition through the Khyber Pass and our own thin red line is strung out still farther.
The Queen scarcely has enough soldiers to fill the foxholes we are in already in Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait - so much for the 1960s withdrawal east of Suez - yet the New Labour army marches on.
Their arrival is unlikely to remain uncontested. As one Pashtun warlord put it: 'To kill occupation soldiers will be a duty for all Afghans; to kill British soldiers will be a pleasure.' But the most dangerous hostage to fortune is the government's claim that, as a result of the war, 'you and your family live in a safer world'.
'Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough' is always a dangerous chant, whether on the terraces at Millwall or aimed at the people 'in 50 countries' who, according to Colin Powell, have made a strategic turn to suicide. Running through government propaganda is the taunt that those who saw armageddon in the mounting rage of Muslims - over Palestine, Iraq and the west's bottomless succour for the tyrannies which rule them - were crying wolf.
But what was September 11 if not a taste of apocalypse? And why should we conclude that daisy-cutting Kandahar caves has made 'you and your family' safer? There is scant evidence that the terrorists who hijacked those planes and flew them to destruction went to Afghanistan, far less depended on it.
What is certainly true is that their cells were formed in Europe and their crucial training in flying and martial arts took place in the sun-kissed Florida glades. These were men more at home in hotel lobbies and internet cafes than the boltholes of Tora Bora. While no doubt useful, a state-sponsored base camp is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a successful terrorist campaign, as decades of IRA activity in the UK proved.
And what of the well of hatred from which the Bin Laden phenomenon draws its power? Do we take the hundred days of coup-less quiescence as dissipated rage? Does every bomb and convoy-strafing rally the world's Muslims to our side? As the Palestinian Authority lies comatose on life support, do we take the silence as a cry of surrender? Or are the Muslims merely nursing their wrath to keep it warm?
On New Year's Day in a top Cairo hotel, I watched a cabaret act go into into a kind of rap routine. The audience roared with delight as the vocalist improvised on current events. But they saved their loudest applause for his paean of praise for Bin Laden. Today the Muslim world is stretched taut, waiting for the storm to break.
The Wall Street Journal calls the British prime minister 'America's newest and brightest ambassador'. Despite their widely trailed objections to a widening of the war, the British are about to learn that ambassadors - whether sent abroad to lie for their country or someone else's - don't make decisions, but merely carry them out.
Puffed up and pumping 'let's kick ass' braggadocio, the Nixon-Reagan-Bush apparatchiks now proliferating in the treaty-busting White House are buckling up for the next assault. I wonder how safe the government feels 'you and your family' will be once these tough guys get going - and the going gets even tougher.
· George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and a Scottish Mail on Sunday columnist.
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