Tiresome though it is to come back to arguments that have been reviewed now many times, the Guardianista song about the matter I mean to consider again here goes on and on and on - and then some - and, though it can scarcely be said to merit a reply at this late stage, one may still try to expose, for the benefit of open-minded people, an assumption which it conceals. Actually, to call this a song is to dignify it unduly; it's more like a persistent low hum, with 'low' being the operative word.
What has raised this hum to a more audible level in the last couple of days is the testimony of Eliza Manningham-Buller before the Chilcot inquiry. As reported in the Guardian by Richard Norton-Taylor:
The former head of MI5 delivered a devastating critique of the invasion of Iraq today, saying it substantially increased the threat of terrorist attacks in Britain and was a significant factor behind the radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK.
Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller told the Chilcot inquiry into the UK's role in Iraq: "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam."
Norton-Taylor, it should be noted, doesn't feel a need to insert any intermediate reasoning between Manningham-Buller's observation that 'a few among a generation' were, in her chosen terminology, radicalized by Britain's involvement in Iraq and his own characterization of what she said as a 'devastating critique'. For him the claim that British involvement increased the subsequent threat of terrorism in this country suffices to make her critique of the Iraq war a devastating one. But it only would suffice if one assumed that preventing terrorism at home was the sole consideration determining whether the war was justified or not; and it wasn't the sole consideration. Naturally, any responsible government ought to take account of the threat of terrorism, as a possible consequence of war, among the factors it has to weigh in deciding on war and peace. But this can't possibly be the only factor to be weighed and we know from the public record that it wasn't.
Well, let's bend over backwards to give the low hum the benefit of every doubt. Perhaps Norton-Taylor and his Guardian colleagues mean to say no more than that the Blair government should have given some weight, or more weight than it did give, to the danger of increasing the terrorist threat. Not so. They do mean more. Pay attention now to that gentle, innocent word, to 'radicalize'. Here it is again from Seumas Milne:
The catastrophic illusions and acts of official betrayal at the heart of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being progressively exposed, one after another. In London, the former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Iraq inquiry this week that the security service had indeed warned Tony Blair's government that aggression against Iraq, "on top of our involvement in Afghanistan", would violently radicalise a generation of young Muslims and "substantially" increase the threat of terror attacks in Britain.
And so it came to pass.
And here it is again, again, from Deborah Orr:
Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of MI5 from October 2002 until April 2007, certainly had her moment this week. Testifying at the Chilcot inquiry, she offered blunt and withering criticism of the Blair government's decision to go to war in Iraq...
Manningham-Buller believed, for example, that another war against a Muslim country, and one not implicated in the September 2001 attacks on the US, would assist in radicalising young British Muslims, persuading them even to become involved in mounting terrorist attacks in their home country. Some had, after all, made the extraordinary decision to go off to fight in Afghanistan already.
Same deal, you see, as with Norton-Taylor. For Milne: they warned, the warning was ignored, end of story - a 'catastrophic illusion'. For Orr: the war would radicalize young British Muslims, 'persuading' them [don't you just love that?] towards terrorism, and Bob's your uncle - we have 'a withering criticism' of the decision to go to war. It's the low hum of argumentative sufficiency: that the war might or would radicalize some young British Muslims suffices to damn the war, suffices to give you a withering or a devastating critique.
Let us pursue 'radicalize' then. It might put you in mind of Tom Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft or William Morris, but never mind them. Let's just focus on the way it relocates the onus of blame for terrorist murder from the actual perpetrators to those who 'persuade' them by pursuing a wrongheaded foreign policy [wrongheaded according to those doing the humming, that is], 'persuade' them by going to war against Saddam Hussein. The hummers, however, are too clever to be disconcerted by this suggestion. Shift the blame, us? Never. No, but blame can always be shared. Of course, terrorist murderers are to blame [though our hummers don't hum much about this], but SO IS TONY BLAIR to blame, SO IS TONY BLAIR. We do not shift the blame, we merely distribute it about.
Except for this: that if radicalizing those susceptible to being radicalized is the end of the argumentative story, something one simply must not do and nothing more needs to be added, then that is equivalent to saying that should British foreign policy have the effect that some of our fellow citizens will take to murdering other of our fellow citizens or aiding and abetting in this enterprise or giving their approval to it, then such a foreign policy must be eschewed. And this in turn is equivalent to saying that the threat of murder should be allowed a decisive voice in the determination of foreign policy. This is what the discourse of 'radicalization' as a self-sufficient argument legitimizes by the back door.
In Orr's case, and hers alone amongst this trinity, there's some acknowledgement that there might have been other considerations in the decision to go to war in Iraq. For she alludes to Blair's thinking that to overthrow Saddam's regime might help to make the world a better place. But the acknowledgment is self-cancelling. This was Blair seeing himself as messiah, 'akin to a god' and so forth. The hummers of 'radicalization' understand very well how people can be persuaded towards mass murder; but they understand not at all how half the country (to say nothing of the wider world) could have thought there was a moral case for going to war, despite the fact that it might anger some of those opposed to doing so.
