From Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Party conference:
[O]f course, the new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit.You can see and hear that section of Blair's speech here, starting 36 minutes in. If you follow him to where he says that withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan would be a 'craven act of surrender' you'll see that he is met, not with silence, but with applause. (Via Tim Blair.)This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.
This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it. It's not the consequence of foreign policy. It's an attack on our way of life. It's global. It has an ideology. It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.
It has been decades growing. Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey. Over 30 nations in the world. It preys on every conflict. It exploits every grievance. And its victims are mainly Muslim.
This is not our war against Islam.
This is a war fought by extremists who pervert the true faith of Islam. And all of us, Western and Arab, Christian or Muslim, who put the value of tolerance, respect and peaceful co-existence above those of sectarian hatred, should join together to defeat them.
It is not British soldiers who are sending car bombs into Baghdad or Kabul to slaughter the innocent.
They are there along with troops of 30 other nations with, in each case, a full UN mandate at the specific request of the first ever democratically elected Governments of those countries in order to protect them against the very ideology also seeking the deaths of British people in planes across the Atlantic.
If we retreat now, hand Iraq over to Al Qaida and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to Al Qaida and the Taleban, we won't be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.
Of course it's tough.
Not a day goes by or an hour in the day when I don't reflect on our troops with admiration and thanks - the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for.
They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation's future.
But this is not a conventional war. It can't be won by force alone. It's not a clash of civilisations. It's about civilisation, about the ideas that shape it.
In any case, referring to this passage from the Prime Minister's speech and drawing on the findings of US intelligence, The Guardian yet once more today plays upon the 'rage and fury that has been generated by Iraq' (not only rage, also fury); and yet once more it fails to follow through on its own thought. For, including Afghanistan as well as Iraq amongst the ingredients of the 'poisonous brew' (one 'heavily spiced by anger and resentment') with which we are now faced, the paper omits to say what we're supposed to do with this information.
It's hard to avoid the inference that we're being told that the war in Iraq should not have happened, not only for all the other reasons the Guardian thinks it indeed shouldn't have, but specifically because it has made the democracies more vulnerable to terrorist attack. But, as I've pointed out before, the same reasoning then applies to the intervention in Afghanistan; and the Guardian seems unable to handle this idea. More generally, are we supposed to conclude that no nation should ever enter a conflict when by doing so it might provoke some form of retaliation from those inimical to its aims? That a country should never engage in a war it can't win in short order? It's hard to think the editor of the Guardian could explicitly sign up to this conclusion, and that maybe is why the paper's leader today doesn't follow through on the thought which it nonetheless gestures towards.