[DEBATE] : 'Waaah, it's all Blair's fault!'

[Russell]

Monday 14 August 2006

Brendan O'Neill
'Waaah, it's all Blair's fault!'
Making simplistic links between British interventions abroad and alleged 
terror plots at home is NIMBYism dressed up in anti-war garb.

On the same day that British police arrested 24 men suspected of plotting to 
blow up planes travelling from Britain to the US, former BBC war 
correspondent Martin Bell wrote a 113-word piece for the Guardian website in 
which he declared that the plot was a protest against British foreign 
policy. Under the headline 'Connecting the dots', he insinuated that the 
Blair government's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its 
failure to call for a ceasefire in the Middle East, had put the rest of us 
at danger.
So that you can get the full flavour of Bell's argument (for want of a 
better word) here is his article in full: 'Alone among the countries of 
Europe, Britain pursues a foreign policy indistinguishable from that of the 
United States. Alone among the countries of Europe, Britain has not pressed 
for an immediate ceasefire in the month-long Middle East conflict. Alone 
among the countries of Europe, Britain has played a leading part in waging a 
war described by the United Nations as illegal. Now our diplomacy is 
sidelined. Our voice is an echo. Our moral authority scarcely exists. Our 
people are the targets of terrorism and the threats of terrorism, wherever 
they are, and whether they travel by underground or in the air. Our 
government has endangered us. It is time we connected the dots.' (1)
It used to be conspiracy theorists who 'connected the dots' between various 
events to prove that there was a hidden hand or influence at work. Or else 
'joining the dots' was better known as the pastime of children armed with 
crayons and a colouring-in book. Now it seems respectable reporters are 
getting in on the dot-to-dot act, substituting instantaneous line-drawing 
for an analysis of the facts. So even before we knew who had been arrested, 
whether they were serious about or capable of blowing up planes (something 
we're still unsure of), or what their beef might have been, Bell was telling 
us that they were the angry byproduct of an uncaring British foreign policy.
Bell's premature speculation shows that today's arguments about British 
intervention abroad giving rise to terrorism at home are not really 
arguments at all. They are reflex spasms; emotional outbursts that follow 
every terror attack and which are best summed up as saying: 'Waaah, it's all 
Blair's fault!' The 'terrorism is a response to foreign policy' line has 
become a cheap, catch-all slogan, designed not to explain anything but just 
to piss and moan about it. Worse, it is motivated by the politics of fear, 
where instead of putting forward some half-decent arguments for why Britain 
should stop meddling in the Middle East, Blair's critics try to scare us 
into challenging his foreign policy by describing terrorism as the 
inevitable consequence of it. They use moral blackmail rather than political 
conviction, cynically stoking up fears of future terror attacks as a way of 
demanding that Blair change direction.
They hide behind the terrorists (or in this case alleged terrorists), citing 
their bloody actions (or in this case alleged potential actions) as the main 
justification for why Britain should call a halt to its foreign ventures. 
This effectively confers political authority on bombers, which does nothing 
to discourage disgruntled individuals from contemplating taking similar 
actions in the future.
It is striking how mainstream the argument has become. After 9/11, initially 
only a handful of radical leftists argued out loud that the downing of the 
Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon were a response to American 
foreign policy. There was an undertone of 'America is to blame' in the 
post-9/11 debate, but it took a while for commentators to come out and 
declare that American meddling overseas led to the terror of 9/11. Today, 
foreign policy is put in the firing line even before the dust has settled 
following a terrorist bombing (or, in the case of Bell's ruminations last 
week, before we know for certain whether a terrorist bombing is due to take 
place). After 7/7, everyone from left-wing MP turned Big Brother pantomime 
cat George Galloway to posh establishment newspaper columnist Max Hastings 
(once dubbed 'Hitler Hastings' by Private Eye) said the Tube and bus 
bombings were payback for Iraq. 'The price for joining President Bush's Iraq 
adventure was always likely to be paid in London, in innocent blood', said 
Hastings, sounding indistinguishable from Galloway, who said London had 
'paid the price' for Blair's wars (2).
These arguments have become even more respectable and mainstream following 
last week's terror alerts. They have graced the pages of publications from 
the Socialist Worker to The Times, and fallen from the mouths of MPs of 
various different hues. In The Times, Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim 
Council of Britain said 'It's undeniable: British foreign policy is 
endangering all of us', while a few pages on a paid-for advert signed by 
various Muslim MPs, community groups and imams said, 'It is our view that 
current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk 
both in the UK and abroad'. Blair should 'change our foreign policy to show 
the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and 
whatever their religion' (3).
Such arguments might be dolled up as a critical challenge to Blair's policy 
in international affairs; in fact they are lazy and deeply unconvincing. For 
example, everyone from Bell to Galloway to the Muslim bigwigs in that Times 
ad mentioned Blair's failure to demand a ceasefire between Israel and 
Lebanon as a possible factor in the alleged terror plot. Yet that conflict 
has only been going on for four weeks, whereas this plot has apparently been 
in the offing for a year or more. And to demand that Blair 'change our 
foreign policy' because there were some bombings on 7/7 and an alleged plot 
to bomb some planes is to give a green light to every tiny sect-like cranky 
group that wants to have things its own way but can't be bothered to win the 
argument or convince a constituency. As I wrote after 7/7, on this basis you 
could argue that all blacks and Asians should have been repatriated 
following the actions of the nail-bomber in London in 1999 - after all, that 
is what that racist loner wanted. Or you could say that a reasonable 
response to the Charles Manson murders in the late Sixties would have been 
to allow Manson to join the Beach Boys; apparently one of his many murderous 
motivations was that he didn't make it into that band.
The question is: even if the 7/7 sect and now this alleged gang of 
plane-plotters were motivated by Iraq or by Afghanistan or, by some crystal 
ball-gazing skills on their part, by the Israel-Lebanon conflict, so what? 
Why should that become the argument for changing British foreign policy?
The mainstreaming of this uncritical response to occasional terror attacks, 
where the 'Blair is to blame' script is now read aloud by everyone from 
dyed-in-the-wool socialists to former Thatcherites, shows that this is not a 
serious political critique of Blairite foreign policy. Rather, what we have 
here is an unholy marriage between radical posturing and middle-class 
disgruntlement with Blair, between anti-war activists looking for an easy, 
readymade argument with which they might terrify the public into being 
anti-war and Conservatives, former Labourites and Muslim leaders who are 
expressing their angst with the Blair government through the terror issue. 
In the process, Blair's critics have indulged in the politics of fear every 
bit as cynically as have Blair and Bush themselves, and have made being 
anti-war more about self-interest and self-preservation than anything as 
old-fashioned as solidarity with people in the Middle East.
Blair's uncritical critics, lacking any true political conviction, hope that 
fear will win the argument for them. In place of a coherent argument against 
Blair's interventionism abroad, and against the right more broadly of 
powerful states to override the sovereign rights of less powerful states, we 
get this alternative: 'If we don't stop launching wars, they're gonna come 
over here and bombs us!' Rather than challenging the politics of fear - 
which both Bush and Blair deployed to win support for the wars on Iraq and 
Afghanistan, with the fantastical tales of Saddam's WMD and al-Qaeda as a 
mortal threat to life and liberty as we know it - columnists, anti-war 
activists and Muslim leaders embrace it and try to turn it to their 
advantage. They play the same game as the US and British governments, so 
that we end up with a grotesque auction to see who can terrify us the most: 
Bush and Blair with their claims that only military intervention can stop 
the 'Islamic fascists' on the warpath against Western civilisation, or their 
critics, who claim that military intervention will create more Islamic 
fascists who will blow us to smithereens while we fly around the world or 
commute to work. This is no clash of political views, of a pro-war line 
against an anti-imperialist opposition; it is a grisly competition of 
fearmongering.
And if anything, the anti-war critics are worse than the pro-war lobby. 
Where Bush and Blair say we need 'pre-emptive action', military ventures 
overseas designed to kill off the terrorists before they can reach us, 
anti-war elements call for pre-emptive inaction - which is an argument to 
stay at home, take no risks and never do anything ever lest it pisses off 
some wannabe jihadist with a grudge and a recipe for ricin. Strikingly, 
today's anti-war argument comes across as more conservative than the pro-war 
argument.
What we end up with is an anti-war sentiment that is more concerned with 
saving ourselves than anybody else. We've gone from the self-serving slogan 
'Not In My Name', which became the cri de coeur of anti-war protesters in 
the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to 'Not In My Backyard', an 
opposition to Blairite interventionism on the grounds that we don't want 
those bloody mad terrorists to send their money or their manpower over here 
to attack our planes and trains. I am implacably opposed to Blair's 
moral-military interventions into other state's affairs, which is why I am 
also opposed to today's lame and self-centred anti-war position - because 
you cannot build an anti-war movement on fear, loathing, NIMBYism and a 
suspicion of dodgy foreigners.
(1) Connecting the dots, Martin Bell, Comment Is Free, 10 August 2006
(2) See Linking 7/7 and Iraq: a peculiar consensus, by Brendan O'Neill
(3) 'Protect civilians wherever they are', Advert, The Times (London), 12 
August 2006