Back Towards The Locus

David Aaronovitch has a terrible column in the Times today, defending a continuing “War on Terror”…

“All theocracies are coercive, as are most Islamist movements, and where they are not (as in Turkey) it is because they have been forced to change. Crooke’s Hamas and Hezbollah are still the organisations that pour out hour after hour of poisonous anti-Jew racism on their TV channels, and have a rough way with dissent in their own areas.

In the Pakistani region of Swat, whence the Akond has long fled, the local Taleban were blowing up schools, attacking schoolgirls with acid, murdering journalists and assassinating human-rights activists.

On November 26 Bakht Zeba was dragged from her home, flogged and shot dead for the crime of criticism. Last week the Pakistani authorities reached a ceasefire with the insurgents, part of which is to agree that girls will no longer have the right to go to school in Swat. Where are the student occupiers and the calls for sanctions?”

Those are all terrible things, but if he’s reciting a litany of International ills then why doesn’t he mention tyrannies such as, say, Uzbekistan? And if we’re talking Islamist radicalism then why doesn’t Saudi Arabia merit a mention? The answer, as you’ve all probably guessed, is that they’re allies, whereas the ones Aaro touches upon are in direct contention for violence from Israel or the US.

Incidentally, the “where are the student occupiers and the calls for sanctions?” line is among the most wretched of the loose hairs and toenail clippings that make up this kind of column. Britain isn’t exactly pally with Hamas, Hezbollah or the Taleban, and shares no particular diplomatic link. What, then, would be the point of protesting? They don’t occupy buildings for the hell of it.

“…there is no more War on Terror. Except, as my friend Professor Norman Geras has been pointing out, Barack Obama has found phrases that mean exactly the same thing, such as this from the inauguration: “Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”

Or this: “The United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism…” Professor Geras calls it “the struggle formerly known as the War on Terror”.

So Binyam may be back, Barack may be in the White House, but the truth is that the problem remains.”

What “problem“? The problem of international nastiness? Aaro’s own problem is that he hasn’t argued that the Taleban, Hamas, Hezbollah etc. pose urgent national security threats, only that they’re bad things. Well, there are terrible things all over the world, but we can’t actively combat them all. We can only make a beneficial difference where it’s possible.

Aaronovitch might believe that it’s worth concentrating on targets that the US/UK/Israel have specified, because their intervention brings that beneficial difference. If this is the case, I warmly invite him to back to the real world, and suggest that he extracts his head from whatever dank crevice it’s got wedged into. The War on Terror isn’t a strategy for them, it’s just a concept used to legitimise whatever conflict they want to partake in, and in endorsing this shapeless lump of disingenuousness, Aaro is only softening the ground for them and compounding his foreign policy foolishness.

Tip of the hat to Aaronovitch Watch.