Don't turn a failed bomb plot into an al-Qaida victory
Yemen is a catastrophe of a country, and we should help it. Talking up confrontation is a stupid response – and exactly what terrorists want to hear
* Julian Glover
*
o Julian Glover
o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 31 October 2010 21.00 GMT
o Article history
Jack Straw has given the game away. In the Observer on Sunday, he let slip the secret of the war on terror. "Never, ever, downplay the possible consequences." Ghouls under the bed, germs in the kitchen and al-Qaida's out to get us all: this is alarmist, and the coalition shouldn't fall for it. The telling word in Straw's statement is "possible". It's the sleight of hand that moves us from what does happen to what might, the trick that transforms a non-exploding printer cartridge packed in a box alongside a copy of the The Mill on the Floss into words from the mouths of presidents and prime ministers.
"There is no early evidence [the explosion] was designed to take place over British soil but of course we cannot rule that out," David Cameron said at the weekend. He's right, of course. You can rarely rule things out. You can't – for instance – rule out the possibility that a drunk Russian general might launch a nuclear attack on the west this afternoon, or that a Trident sub might crash into its French equivalent (as one did) and explode (as thankfully it didn't), or that a jet bound for London City airport might crash in Canary Wharf on a foggy November day. But prime ministers tend not to make statements about such dangers, though they too are real.
There is another danger we need to be aware of too: the symmetry of self-interest between the would-be bombers and the security services assembled to stop them. Both have a tendency to magnify serious but isolated incidents into one great interconnected global battle. The American military likes to describe the arc of terror that supposedly runs from Afghanistan through Pakistan into Yemen and down through Somalia. The British security services warn us, as Sir John Sawers did in a generally wise speech last week, about "the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country".
These people aren't making it up. But they are part of a mentality that encourages us to believe there really is a clash of civilisations under way and that if we don't give them the tools to destroy the other side first, they will destroy us.
I don't believe for a moment Cameron thinks like that. Nor is there any reason to suppose Sawers does. There are some people in the Islamic world who would like to murder large numbers of people in the west – and whatever the cause, whatever the morality of our own actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is the government's task to stop them.
But it is easy for ministers and cops to whisper from behind their hands: "If only you knew what we know, you would be frightened too." Maybe we would be. Or maybe we would assess the threat in the way we assess countless threats to our lives: as we assessed the threat from the IRA, which managed to kill many more people in Britain than this latest bunch of evil incompetents.
A reasoned response to terror might begin by asking what unsteady judgment our political leaders have been reduced to. Al-Qaida has won the psychological war: a failed bomb plot should have produced reassuring statements that something bad might have happened but didn't. It is inconceivable that in the second world war or the height of the cold war a danger like this would have caused presidents and prime ministers to leap to podiums.
A reasoned government might go on to make a series of sensible factual observations. It might note that Yemen is indeed a terrible state, but not, primarily because of imported terrorists. Oil revenues are about to dry up. Sana'a is about to run out of water. There are insurgencies all over the place. This is a catastrophe of a country, and we should help it. Talking up confrontation is about the most stupid response possible: all those bold claims that Yemen is the new Afghanistan, as if terrorists choose their battlefields as the fashion industry selects its autumn colours, are just what the men of violence hope to hear. Roll up, roll up, the Red Sea is where it's at. Lashkar Gah is so 2009.
Talk to those who have worked in this field and you find some optimism. Al-Qaida is fragmented, perhaps wrecked for good. Saudi Arabia, tipped not long ago as its next conquest, broke the movement through intelligent deradicalisation as well as repression. We sometimes speak of Islamist terror as if no one in the countries involved has the will to stop it. But they do and they can.
Where we fail is at home. The threat to the west lies in the west and from the west. It comes from cells of bitter and dangerous Islamist expatriates, in Bradford or Detroit, and from a foreign policy that has gone out of its way to allow them to believe quite wrongly that we want to destroy Islam.
We have become lost in a world of demented misunderstandings. We must not talk ourselves into making it worse. It would have been awful if a crude device posted in a faraway place had brought down a plane over the Atlantic. It would be even worse if we turned that possibility into the kind of theatre for which there's a dangerous audience far closer to home.
