A comment made by the Prime Minister recently left me
feeling poleaxed, and upon reading it I felt like rubbing my eyes and dousing
myself in cold water to ensure that I was awake. Surely he could not have
uttered the following sentence and believed in the substance of the words that
he was enunciating with respect to the recent hostage crisis in Algeria:
What does he mean by stating “had
to deal with”? By using these words he seems to imply that the problem there
has been solved. Has it? What has been achieved in Afghanistan? How has the
problem been dealt with in Pakistan? Has the Islamist problem been solved in
either country, or even here in the UK? Quite clearly, the answer must be no.
Our intervention in Afghanistan may have eliminated al-Qaeda training camps,
but what in reality has it achieved? When our forces leave that country after
well over a decade of death, mutilation, psychological trauma and the
expenditure of billions of pounds, what will we see? A prosperous Afghanistan
friendly to the UK advocating freedom of opinion and expression for its
citizens, together with respect and equal rights for its women, or a jubilant
Taliban-dominated theocracy celebrating victory over the infidel, just as
antipathetical to the UK and the West in general as it was in 2001 and imbued
with a spirit of vengeance? It would seem that the second scenario would be far
closer to what emerges than the former one.
A decade on from invasion and its
subsequent occupation Iraq remains a religiously and ethnically cleft violent
wreck. The Arab Spring, encouraged by the UK Government, has led to increased
instability across North Africa and the Middle East, with Islamists playing a
major role in the popular uprisings and in the new administrations that have
emerged following the toppling of the old regimes. Cameron and Hague were keen
to intervene in Libya, and have been chomping at the bit to do the same in
Syria, irrespective of the chaos and geopolitical blowback that such meddling
can produce. It has been widely claimed that the post-Qaddhafi instability in
Libya has helped to flood parts of North Africa with weaponry, assisting an
upsurge in violent Islamist militancy that has manifested itself both in the
ongoing attempt to overthrow the Malian government as well as in the recent
Algerian hostage crisis.
The Prime Minister’s call for a
“global response” to what he dubs the “al-Qaeda” threat is thoroughly
wrongheaded. Islamism existed before Bin Laden and it will exist long after his
passing. Islamism, in one form or another, is as old as Islam itself, and until
that ideology dies we will always have a problem with its violent fanatics
wishing to impose their crude, vicious and misanthropic ideology upon everyone
else: non-literalist Muslims and non-Muslims alike. What, after all, does
Cameron mean when he states that:
Perhaps the Prime Minister should
steer clear of reference to “iron” to denote resolve, for we all now how
brittle his “cast iron” guarantee proved to be with respect to an EU membership
referendum. Is he committing us to an endless series of wars in which we fight
with our hands tied behind our backs, bereft of either a clear goal or modus
operandi? If so, who will die and who will pay for this policy? What benefit
will it bring and to whom?
It would appear that the immense
corrupting wealth of the Saudis and the other Arab petrodollar states of the
Gulf has effectively muzzled politicians such as Cameron. The fountainhead of
Islamism today, in both its violent and political variants, is Saudi Arabia.
Find an effective alternative to oil, and the Saudis’ malign and growing
influence would collapse. Thus, to find such an alternative should be one of
our key political and economic tasks. The Saudis produce nothing of value other
than what they pump out of the ground, with the rest of their wealth being
derived from parasitic investment around the globe. If Cameron truly wished to
wage war to destroy Islamism he would call for the subjugation and occupation
of the Arabian Peninsula, but to be ‘successful’, that sort of war would call forth
the logic of total war witnessed in the horrific brutality displayed by both
sides on the Eastern Front with its associated exterminist logic. Who wants
such a war? Not me. I would prefer the option of the peaceful development of
viable alternative energy sources and the concomitant undermining and collapse
of the economic, political and cultural influence of the Arab petrodollar
states. Only then will we stand a chance of defeating Islamism.
Cameron and Hague are intellectual
lightweights, and if they truly wished to root out Islamism they could make no
better start than by rooting it out at home, for after all, they and their
political predecessors in the Labour Party have allowed it to flourish in
Britain. They may as well launch drone strikes on Tower Hamlets and Bradford as
upon Pakistan, for there is not a great deal to differentiate the two
environments other than an increasingly nominal sovereignty. As it is, the two
men seem intent upon poking their noses into as many Islamist hornets’ nests as
possible, with Syria and Mali looking like our most probable forthcoming
entanglements.
Such interventions will be
pointless, bloody, expensive and ineffectual. Moreover, they will generate ever-greater
resentment against us, no matter how ill founded, by Muslims around the globe. At
the same time, Cameron, Hague and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will
continue to push for the economic and eventual political integration of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa into an expanded EU, arguing that
this is ‘necessary’ to disseminate economic prosperity throughout the Arab
world and thereby undermine support for Islamism. This is the eventual goal of
Euromed, but in reality what it would achieve, if its logic were to be fully
enacted, would be for every state in the EU to be flooded by a massive
demographic wave from the Muslim states of the eastern and southern Mediterranean
littoral, bringing economic and cultural decline to Europe, as well as the
demographic eclipse and eventual disappearance of the European peoples. Alas, a
twin combination of cack-handed interventionism and half-baked policies on
economic integration are likely to be the favoured response of the current
Government. It is a grim prospect, but we can expect only support for such a
policy from an intellectually bankrupt Labour Party. Where is the effective
opposition? Who will articulate the much-needed alternative?
