The war within the west
The war within the west
Melanie Phillips
As I predicted yesterday, a number of commentators have rushed to blame Tony Blair and President Bush for causing yesterday’s carnage in London by having the effrontery to defend their countries against the war declared upon the west. Not that they see it that way, of course — the west’s defence is deemed to be aggression and the Islamist jihad merely an act of self-defence. Thus the ageing revolutionary Tariq Ali writes in the Guardian:
‘The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday lives of most Europeans does not mean the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diaspora is insignificant. As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge. At the beginning of the G8, Blair suggested that "poverty was the cause of terrorism". It is not so. The principal cause of this violence is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. And unless this is recognised, the horrors will continue.’
No point telling Tariq Ali or the Guardian’s comment page editor that Iraq, Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza were only ‘occupied’ as a defensive move because they were all being used as the front line of attack against the west. For such people, America and the west cannot ever do self-defence because by definition they are colonialist oppressors and therefore their very existence is an act of aggression.
(In this brilliant analysis Phillips describes the dilemma.)
[..]The truth is that, for countries that believed Afghanistan and Iraq had already inflicted aggressive acts of violence upon the west and were poised to inflict even worse, there was no reasonable or principled alternative but to wage war upon them. The fact that any attempt by the west at self-defence would enrage yet more Islamists was merely the other prong of Morton’s Fork, and illustrated the dilemma posed by all terrorism – if its victims defend themselves, this recruits more to the terrorist cause, but if its victims don’t defend themselves this encourages the terrorists to redouble their attacks because their whole strategy is to demoralise their victims in every way in order to finish them off altogether.
This is, after all, the terrible dilemma faced all the time by Israel – a choice between, on the one hand, protecting its citizens from genocidal attack by means which inflame the Arabs in the territories simply because they perceive any self defence by the Israelis as aggression thanks to the warped ideology with which they have been brainwashed, and on the other hand, appeasing terror by a variety of means which are all taken as a sign of weakness and which act therefore as a spur to redouble the terrorist war.
Faced with this intrinsic dilemma posed by terrorism, in which both courses of action have a downside, the only moral choice is to fight terror by the most vigorous means of self-defence possible. This is because while in the short to medium term this may recruit more to the terrorist cause, the alternative route of appeasement is to commit cultural or national suicide. In other words, for free peoples there is no alternative. That is why blaming the continuing war by al Qaeda on the west’s actions in Iraq is such a degraded and disgusting position to take.[..]
Posted by Ted Belman at July 10, 2005 02:50 PM
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lignaeus
said:
Isn't Melanie Phillips wonderful? How come a country can't get someone like her to be Prime Minister? We should start a campaign, MP for PM! Sometimes you despair of ever getting real leaders, I guess the job is a lot more difficult than it appears, politics being, as Harold Wilson I think said, the art of the possible. But thin isn't the role of leader to make the seemingly impossible come about? Give GWB his due, an awful lot of people thought the successful invasion of Afghnistan was impossible. It was they said the grave yard of many imperial armies.
Maybe Christopher Hitchens could be her foreign minister.
Posted by: lignaeus on July 10, 2005 06:58 PM
The war within the west
Melanie Phillips
As I predicted yesterday, a number of commentators have rushed to blame Tony Blair and President Bush for causing yesterday’s carnage in London by having the effrontery to defend their countries against the war declared upon the west. Not that they see it that way, of course — the west’s defence is deemed to be aggression and the Islamist jihad merely an act of self-defence. Thus the ageing revolutionary Tariq Ali writes in the Guardian:
No point telling Tariq Ali or the Guardian’s comment page editor that Iraq, Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza were only ‘occupied’ as a defensive move because they were all being used as the front line of attack against the west. For such people, America and the west cannot ever do self-defence because by definition they are colonialist oppressors and therefore their very existence is an act of aggression.(In this brilliant analysis Phillips describes the dilemma.)
[..]The truth is that, for countries that believed Afghanistan and Iraq had already inflicted aggressive acts of violence upon the west and were poised to inflict even worse, there was no reasonable or principled alternative but to wage war upon them. The fact that any attempt by the west at self-defence would enrage yet more Islamists was merely the other prong of Morton’s Fork, and illustrated the dilemma posed by all terrorism – if its victims defend themselves, this recruits more to the terrorist cause, but if its victims don’t defend themselves this encourages the terrorists to redouble their attacks because their whole strategy is to demoralise their victims in every way in order to finish them off altogether.
This is, after all, the terrible dilemma faced all the time by Israel – a choice between, on the one hand, protecting its citizens from genocidal attack by means which inflame the Arabs in the territories simply because they perceive any self defence by the Israelis as aggression thanks to the warped ideology with which they have been brainwashed, and on the other hand, appeasing terror by a variety of means which are all taken as a sign of weakness and which act therefore as a spur to redouble the terrorist war.
Faced with this intrinsic dilemma posed by terrorism, in which both courses of action have a downside, the only moral choice is to fight terror by the most vigorous means of self-defence possible. This is because while in the short to medium term this may recruit more to the terrorist cause, the alternative route of appeasement is to commit cultural or national suicide. In other words, for free peoples there is no alternative. That is why blaming the continuing war by al Qaeda on the west’s actions in Iraq is such a degraded and disgusting position to take.[..]
Posted by Ted Belman at July 10, 2005 02:50 PM