The threat and its implications

An article by Jason Burke on Friday (apropos Ayman al-Zawahiri's warning of further terrorist attacks on Britain) included these two paragraphs:

The focus on the UK might also concentrate the minds of those in government who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, deny a link between the attacks and Britain's role in Iraq.

The UK has rapidly ascended the list of preferred jihadi targets in the past two years. A threat against the UK existed before 2003, but our involvement in Iraq made it very much worse.

Though his phrase 'concentrate the minds' might suggest that he is advising that some practical inference be drawn, Burke does not himself spell one out. It might be that he thinks that Britain should not have participated in the liberation of Iraq, or that British troops should now be speedily withdrawn from there. Or it might be that he doesn't think either of these things. There's no need for me to speculate, however, because this is certainly the view of many who draw attention to the increased threat to British lives said to have resulted from the Iraq war; and it is the view itself I'm interested in, rather than whether or not it is Jason Burke's view.

People who believe that we shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq, or should now get out quickly, because of the increased threat to British civilian lives that has been the result of the war might be thought open to the objection that they thereby simply set the shape and limits of this country's foreign policy according to the ideas and intentions of al-Qaida and others of like mind. Shouldn't this be determined through the parliamentary and associated democratic processes generally regarded as legitimate for fixing on right policy?

However, it can be urged on behalf of those emphasizing the increased terrorist threat as a reason against Britain's role in Iraq that they aren't - not most of them, anyway - operating on the premise that that threat to British lives is the sole, or even a sufficient, reason against British participation in the Iraq war. What they believe, instead, is that it is one among the many compelling reasons there were against the war. But, of course, this is just what is disputed by people who supported the war, and who think that the balance of reasons was in the other direction. For us the combination of reasons against the war proffered by its opponents isn't going to work, indeed it hasn't worked; and so throwing in the increased terrorist threat as just one among many, or at least several, reasons also won't work unless it is itself being given as a decisive reason. But then we're back where we were, and al-Qaida and co get to define the shape and limits of British foreign policy. This would mean, for example, for all those who supported the intervention in Afghanistan but not the Iraq war - and it is a goodly number - that that also should not have happened, since it made Britain more open to terrorist attack than it was before. And other things about Western culture which 'alienate' radical Islamists need to be changed. And so forth. Or, in other words, maybe not.

Let's try something else. Perhaps proponents of the line of thought I'm examining here - that minds should now be concentrated on the 'link between the attacks and Britain's role in Iraq' - believe neither that the increased threat of terrorism in Britain is enough of a reason for Britain to have declined to participate in the war, nor that it was merely one strong reason in a plurality of strong reasons not to have participated. Perhaps what they believe, rather, is that it was a 'tipping-point' reason: that is, maybe they think that there were reasons for and reasons against British participation in the war, and the two sets of reasons were too finely balanced to call, but when you bring in the increased terrorist threat it tilts the balance towards the anti-war position and - now - to a rapid withdrawal of British troops. Well, maybe - though it is, in truth, an artificial procedure to nominate some particular reason from a number of reasons as the one tipping the balance. But, in any case, if there are people who think like this, I haven't come across them, either in person or in print. The vast majority of those urging upon us the link between the Iraq war and an increased terrorist threat were against the war anyway, for some standard combination of reasons.

It seems to me, therefore, that isolating and giving particular emphasis to the increased terrorist threat is only going to be persuasive if the view that the shape and limits of British foreign policy should be determined by al-Qaida is persuasive - which it isn't. The state of the argument between those who supported and those who opposed the Iraq war is left pretty much where it was before.