from the Guardian today. This is one of those articles with which my thoughts don’t quite align (like the anti-UN initiative from earlier), but it’s extremely interesting nonetheless. I shall have to mull this over for awhile.
Popular trust in government is a necessary foundation of a society’s defences against terrorism. We need to believe we are being told the truth and that our government is acting in good faith. Unfortunately there is now sufficient reason to be sceptical about who we should entrust our security to.
…the problem is not that his critics “don’t get” the terrorist threat, as the home secretary has put it, but that the government has, with the US, abandoned all the principles of effective counterterrorism. These were practised by the British against countless insurgencies. Whether or not you agree with Niall Ferguson and Gordon Brown about empire, it is instructive to review the five key principles that – usually – allowed imperial rule with minimum force.
First, ensure good coordination between security services and police. Karen DeYoung‘s indictment of the failure of the US security services to talk to each other in this week’s Washington Post is truly damning. By refusing to communicate, the US services render their, and by extension our, services less effective. We now know that US officials have a routine seat at Britain’s joint intelligence committee, a fact that one of its former chairmen told me makes it hard for the British state to think independently. Do US officials also sit in on the UK’s counterterror organisations, and if so how do they relate to the myriad, non-communicating services detailed by the Washington Post?
The other four principles are to deny the enemy a base, secure your own base, keep the political and moral high ground and address your opponents’ grievances.
Our leaders say there are no grievances to be addressed, despite the fact that the London bombers said they were motivated by the Iraq war and our security services warned that the occupation of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat.
Our moral high ground is preserved by a US attorney general who was promoted to this office after sanctioning the Guantánamo detention camp and the practices used at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The Islamist terrorists still have a base in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By shifting attention to Iraq after 9/11, we gave al-Qaida and the Taliban a respite for which British troops are now paying the price. And more people are prepared to provide tacit support to those fighting the US.
Our own base is now less secure than before 9/11, based on the number of actual and alleged threats, while our continued unnecessary dependence on oil makes our home base hostage to adverse regime change abroad. There are indeed those who do not get the terrorist threat.
Principal among them are the prime minister and his supporters.
raincoaster 
The thing is raincoaster, once you start a ‘War on Terror’ and decide who the ‘Axis of Evil’ is and therefore who the ‘Terrorists’ are and start slaughtering them, how do you just stop?
A very good point. But it’s better to admit a mistake than to continue to pursue a path that will take you straight into the Heart of Darkness. To say nothing of making you a perfect target.
If they really want to wage “War on Terror” they could rebrand it as an economic development and law-enforcement package. Encourage governments that act democratically and pursue dialogue-based solutions (after all, if they’re speechifying they’re less likely to be building bombs) and try and address the root causes of the sort of grievance that leads to terror attacks (war, torture, warrantless arrests on no evidence, that sort of thing).
And yeah, occasionally smack the $#!7 out of a training camp.
Oh and one last thing. It’s the hardest, but the most important. Stop using the word “safe”.
There is no safety this side of the grave. As a society we need to accept that at some point someone who is sufficiently determined will pull off another major terror strike in North America.
For the regimes who’ve invented and bought into the “War on Terror” it’s grotesquely irresponsible to pretend they’re going to create some sort of impermeable safety net. Instead, let them admit openly what we all know: We will watch and wait, and pray no-one gets through. But if and when someone does, we will swallow the pain and move on.
We cannot allow fear to destroy the freedoms and protections of the greatest form of government ever created. But the small-souled and mean little old men who are heading up this “War on Terror” are doing just that.
I don’t believe in conspiracies. What I do believe is that an unfortunate accident of history placed almost all the wrong people, with the least vision and leadership, in the hot seat when the crunch came.