Via the Observer blog comes this footage of a police offiver in Palm Beach, Florida, using a taser to subdue a ‘dangerous’ criminal…

… a 22 year old woman who’s been stopped for a traffic offence.

(Note - requires Quicktime and sound turned on for full effect, so maybe not one to view in the office unless you’ve an understanding boss)

To say the least this makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing.

What can be said about an incident like this.

The police believe, as the alternative commentaries show, that the followed the correct procedure and were entirely justified in their actions - one the soundtrack you can clearly hear one of the officers tell the woman afterwards that she was tasered for ‘taking a swing’ at his colleague, although you have to think that as the woman was in a seated position in the car at the time this ’swing’ wou;d have more a bit weak flailing around with her arm to try to prevent the officer from pulling her bodily out of the car rather than anything likely to cause an injury or offer any real threat.

The accompanying special report in the Palm Beach Post, which is linked to on the page, is well worth a visit as well and, amongst other things, you’ll find out from it that a class action lawsuit has been filed in the US challenging the safety claims made by Taser after a string of deaths, over a hundred according to the article, which followed the use of a Taser during an arrest.

Stories of ‘trigger happy cops‘ are by no means uncommon in the US, nor indeeed over here - the introduction of pepper spray in the UK has brought occasional allegations that Police were too quick to resort to it in situations where the person they were trying to arrest was clearly agitated but otherwise not offering a real threat of violence, and that’s really where the concern lies.

The risk with Tasers is that the are heavily promoted as being ’safe’ and not causing permanant injury when used, which makes them look like an easy option in a potentially difficult situation yet not only are question marks emerging in the US about their safety but this also ignores entirely the clearly traumatic effect that they have at the time of arrest, as this footage shows. They’re not some boffiny product of ‘Q division’ which renders someone quickly, painlessly and safely unconscious but device which inflicts excruciating pain on the poor bastard on the receiving end adn, as such, should only be used in the most serious situations where there really is no alternative to their use other than use of firearm.

Sometimes a picture really does say a thousand words…

Okay, after savaging the pro-war left a couple of days ago I think its time I set about courting a bit more controversy and shooting another sacred cow along the way, even if I do it in a rather more considered manner.

Q. In this whole escapade that is Iraq, what is the one assumption that almost no one ever questions, no matter what side of the debate they’re on?

A. That whatever else happens, democracy can only be good for the Iraqi people.

Well is that necessarily true? Is democracy really what the Iraqi people need and will it really benefit them as much as everyone supposes or are we merely projecting our own values and ideas into a situation we don’t really understand because it makes us feel better?

Now before everyone starts reaching for their keyboard to start composing a political/philosophical defence of the principle of democracy lets be clear that where I’m going here is not down the road of some sort of study in comparative government nor am I about to attempt a general polemic against democracy. The question here is not ‘is democracy a good thing?’, or ‘is democracy a better system of government than a totalitarian dictatorship or a absolute monarchy?. No, the question I want to pose is one that is specific to Iraq’s present circumstances.

‘Is democracy the right way to go about building a nation state?’

As a starting point we need to get a bit of background under our belts, both in terms of what is a nation state and how one comes about and also about the formation and foundations of present day Iraq.

What is a nation state?

Probably the best description I can find comes from the ever reliable Wikipedia, which defines the nation state as follows:

A nation-state is a specific form of state, which exists to provide a sovereign territory for a particular nation, and derives its legitimacy from that function. In the ideal model of the nation-state, the population consists of the nation and only of the nation: the state not only houses it, but protects it and its national identity.

Before going on to note:

A nation-state is typically a unitary state with a single system of law and government. It is almost by definition a sovereign state, meaning that there is no external authority above the state itself. Dependent territories of any kind are not considered nation-states, until they achieve independence. The nation-state implies the parallel occurrence of a state and a nation. In the ideal model, they coincide exactly: every member of the nation is a permanent resident of the nation-state, and no member of the nation permanently resides outside it. In reality this is unusual, not to say impossible. That does not mean that there are no nation-states, the ideal has influenced almost all existing sovereign states, and they can not be understood without reference to that model. It also explains how they are different from their predecessor states.

This contrasts with the kind of states which preceded the advent of the nation state which were defined almost exclusively in relation to the ruling dynastic house of the state, the prevalent model being a monarchical state, the boundaries of which were defined by the extent of the territory ruled by the King, Emperor or, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan. Factors which tend, these days, to define a common identity amongst groups of people, e.g. ethnicity, religion, language tended not to get much a look in – the archetypal non-nation state tended to be a multi-ethnic empire, although there was usually some advantage to belonging to the same, usually dominant, ethnic group as the ruling house.

The nation state is a relatively recent innovation, one which dates, depending on your preferred perspective, either to the rise of European nationalism, and particularly ‘Romantic Nationalism’ in the late 18th and early 19th Century or to the mid 17th Century, albeit in a rather limited way. This confusion arises out of the question of whether nationalism, which in its full flowering is very much a 19th Century concept, and the idea of a common national identity are synonymous – if you believe they are then nation states like the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States of America and France, all of which emerged before the concept of nationalism took hold are a kind of hybrid, a step on the road to the nation state but ones which were not fully realised until their sense of common identity evolved into a sense of nationalism. This, for me, is rather too literalist a view; one that’s too limited in its notion of what it is that makes for a common identity and its understanding of where and how the common identity required for nationhood forms. It also ignores, in a fairly typical piece of Eurocentric conceit, that nation states developed outside of Europe, in South America, independently of the main strands of European nationalism.

Whatever your take on the disputed origins of the nation state it remains the case that a nation state is defined by reference to its people who, so the model assumes, will share a common identity. Common identity in central to and, in fact, a prerequisite for successful nation building. Its also its biggest complication and not only is there no single way to develop such a common identity but the various options which could be used as a basis for a common identity are often contradictory and a source of conflict.

Inherent in the practice of nation building is therefore not only the process of forging a common identity but also the process of suppressing or expelling identities which don’t fit in with the preferred route to nationhood – usually by the use of violence, repression and social engineering. It’s often forgotten, in England at least, that creating the British nation state involved the wholesale destruction of the Scottish clan system following the Jacobite rebellion, the wholesale and deliberate Anglicisation of the Scottish and Irish aristocracy and the colonisation of Ireland, and Ulster in the particular, with loyal Scottish protestants, displacing the Catholic Irish in the process. Building the United States of America, likewise, required the widespread destruction of the varied cultures of its indigenous population, a process which was still going on up until very recently through the practice of forcing Native American children, often by removing them from their families entirely, to attend ‘Missionary’ schools which would give them ‘a good Christian upbringing’ – a practice which has also been used to devastating effect by the Spanish, in South America, by several European nations during the colonisation of Africa and as recently as the 1960’s in Australia. Lets also not forget that the people of the United States have had cause to dispute the nature of the common America identity amongst themselves, leading to the American Civil War of 1861-65. It’s also largely forgotten that France, up to an including the period of the French revolution, was by no means possessed of a common identity either. Regional variations in culture and language were, in pre-revolutionary France, so pronounced that a peasant born barely 30 miles from Paris could barely make themselves understood on visiting the capital. In fact, much as it is tempting to point to the French revolution as the beginning of French nationhood, its effect outside of Paris and France’s other major towns and cities was very limited – The real architect of the French nation was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, a despot and arch-imperialist, who forged modern France out of his own imperial pretensions by standardising everything from its administration and language to its legal system under the Napoleonic Civil code, imposing a uniform and dominant ‘French’ culture in the process.

What history tells us about the process of nation building is that, with very few exceptions, that process leads invariably to a conflict of identities which is resolved only when a single identity achieves dominance. Exceptions to this rule are extremely rare. Switzerland is one, in fact the only one in which a consensual civic identity has formed the foundations of a nation state. Japan, due to is almost total isolation until the middle of the 19th Century, is arguably another although this is primarily a result of it having more or less dealt with the question of identity during its imperial phase, long before making the transition to becoming a nation state, and was not accomplished without it own acts of repression, the subjugation of the indigenous Ainu population being, in many respects, similar to the subjugation of the Welsh and subsequent destruction of the Welsh culture by the English during the reign of Edward I.

What history also tells us is that democracy and the idea of a common identity founded on civic values is rarely strong enough to sustain or force through the process of building a more or less cohesive nation. Few, if any, nation states are founded successfully on the principle of democracy and a common civic society without this being supported, fully, by a common identity derived from another source. This is because democracy, which supports and encourages the development of society based on diversity and plurality is fundamentally at odds with the process of nation building which demands the development, in its initial stages, of a homogeneous and dominant monoculture. Only when a nation state has succeeded in finding and stabilising its common identity are the conditions absolutely right for democracy; prior to that democracy tends to be divisive and to work against the process of defining the nation’s common identity by legitimising, even from the minority position, identities which diverge from and conflict with the common identity upon which the nation state is being built.

Nation building by purely civic means and on the basis of a common civic identity is, therefore, rarely successful; other than in the case of Switzerland it success is generally predicated on there being a lack of competition from other means of defining identity. In the United States the development of its civic identity and, therefore, its nation state was supported both by the liberal political philosophy of the enlightenment and by the colonist’s rejection of the idea of a uniform religious or ethnic identity, an extremely rare event in itself as, by and large, religious and ethnic identities tend to carry far more weight with a defined population. One can also point to a small number of former British colonies; Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which have had the benefit not only of developing from an established civic nation, the UK – although the road to nationhood in this country did not begin with it civic identity but with its religious identity derived from the reformation and refined by Puritanism – and, again, a lack of competition from other identity markers like ethnicity and religion.

Why a civic identity should be seemingly so weak in the face of competition from other potential common identities is a function of the extent to which an identity is perceived to be either personal/natural or ideological/artificial. Generally speaking there exists a distinct hierarchy of identity, one in which the strongest tends to be ethnicity, followed very closely by – and under the right conditions even superseded - religion, then culture with the weakest being the state, ideological and civic identities. The state-based identity treats the nation and the state as being entirely synonymous as in Italian Fascism or the Turkish nationalism of Attaturk. Communism could also be argued to be a state-based identity however this ignores its internationalist leanings and is, therefore, better thought of as an ideological identity even though, in practice, it has typically resulted in the creation of a strong and, by varying degrees, repressive state.

The strongest identities, in terms of nation building, are therefore those which are felt most personally by members of the nation, the ones which are perceived to be an intrinsic part of the individual, and by extension, national character. With very few exceptions – the USA being one – these are also the identities which engender the greatest sense of both personal and collective history and which, therefore, largely pre-date the European enlightenment. State, ideological and civic identities, by contrast, are very much products of the enlightenment and offer a far weaker and more abstract sense of common identity.

What this means in terms of the theory of building a nation state is that not only that it will work effectively only where there is a common identity but where, in turn, that common identity is one of the stronger, pre-enlightenment personal identities or where more than one of those identities combine and work together. Conversely where two of more of these potential common identities come into conflict and, in particular, where an abstract post-enlightenment identity comes into conflict with one of the stronger identities, i.e. ethnicity or religion it is difficult, if not impossible to build a common identity…

… other than by means of force.

This, in particular, is where the civic identity based on democracy runs into real problems when it comes to nation building as in the absence of a solid and consensual common identity it is almost impossible to obtain support sufficient to legitimise the use of force to maintain social order with the result that either social order within the state dissolves leading to chaos and civil war or, alternatively, a single faction, typically but not always the military, seizes control of the state in order to re-impose order turning the state into a dictatorship. The worst case scenario in terms of the latter arises where the faction which seizes control not only identifies itself with one of the identities which was previously vying for the position of becoming the common identity of the nation but also sees itself as being diametrically opposed to any of the other identities within the state, a situation which results at the very least in severe political repression but which can also lead on to acts of genocide, particularly where divisions are based on conflict between ethnic identities.

In general terms, this is why nation building in the post-war, post-colonial era is often so unsuccessful and has seen so many states which were set up as democracies by their former colonial ‘masters’ fail, collapsing into civil war and/or despotism.

Where does all this leave modern day Iraq? Not very well situated as it happens.

Iraq, like many of the states of the Middle East in and around the area of the Arabian peninsula, did not exist until the 20th Century. Up until the end of World War I, Iraq was not one but three separate provinces of the Ottoman Empire; Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, an arrangement which broadly reflects the religious and ethnic divisions of Iraq in the modern day – such arrangements, which were deliberately drawn up to reflect areas of common ethnic or religious identity were entirely commonplace in imperial non-nation states as they tended to make such areas rather more easy to govern.

Following World War I, Iraq became a British Mandate - the British League of Nations Trust Territory of Iraq – until 1932 when it was granted independence as one of two Hashemite Kingdom’s set up by Britain in the Middle East; the second one being Jordan, then called Transjordan, which remains an independent state and one of Britain’s closest allies in the region, today. It should be noted that the Hashemites had no historical territorial claim to Iraq later than than the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 AD which brought an end to the Abbasid Caliphate, rather the Hashemites controlled the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia under the Ottoman Empire until the collapse of its power in 1917, following which the Hashemite leader, Husain ibn Ali ruled the Hejaz as an independent state, declare himself King, until 1924. The Hashemites were finally expelled from the Hejaz after it was annexed by their chief rival in the Arabian peninsula, a tribal warlord named Ibn Saud, the founder of the House of Saud, which has ruled Saudi Arabia since this same period.

Hashemite rule in Iraq lasted until 1958 when it was overthrown by a popular revolution, installing a left-wing, pro-Soviet military government. This was, in turn, overthrown some ten years later by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party of which Saddam Hussain become the leader in 1979 resulting in the inevitable Stalin-style purge of his political opponents.

As should be obvious from this brief history, Iraq not only has no history of democratic rule whatsoever but also no real history of having developed or even of having tried to develop a common Iraqi identity of the kind which would sustain it as a unified nation state. Throughout its entire existence as an independent entity, the identity of its people as Iraqis has been enforced upon them by, in the first instance, a British supported monarchy and, since the 1950’s, by an all-powerful and controlling state.

In terms of trying to build a viable nation state out of Iraq, the last ninety or so years might just as well have not happened at all.

Instead of moving towards a common identity Iraq, as it is today, is little different from what it was under the Ottomans, three largely separate and distinct provinces, each of which has it own sense of common identity which is different from and conflicts with the others, a situation which has been made even more confused by the Ba’athist’s Al Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the north of Iraq, a component of which was a deliberate policy of ‘Arabisation’ in the region which has since been characterised as an attempt at ethnic cleansing.

So what we have today in a country made up of three large self-identifying groups and competing groups, ethnic Kurds - who are also Sunni Muslims – Arab Sunni Muslims and Arab Shi’a Muslims, placing the two most powerful determinants of identity, ethnicity and religion, into a three-way conflict.

To make matters even more complicated there is also the influence and expectations of neighbouring states to be taken into account.

In the north the ethnic homeland of the Kurds, Kurdistan, is divided between Iraq and the Turkish Republic, a key strategic ally of the West in the region, member of NATO and, itself, under increasing internal pressure to move towards an Islamic rather than secular state. In terms of common identity and the idea of a nation state, the Kurdish preference would undoubtedly be their secession from Iraq and the formation of an independent Kurdish state, which would seem, at first sight, a feasible option were it not for the fact that this would undoubtedly result in the Kurdish population of Eastern Turkey seeking secession in order to join with the Iraqi Kurds to form a unified Kurdish state. Such a move would not only destabilise Turkey and its government, placing its own secular state at greater risk but also provoke an opposite reaction to Kurdish demands for secession in which the Turks decide to resolve the problem by annexing the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and incorporating it into a ‘Greater Turkey’.

In the south, the situation is equally confused. On might assume that the Southern Shi’a Muslim population’s natural ally is neighbouring Iran, a revolutionary Islamic state which, since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 has viewed, and been viewed by, the West with varying degrees of suspicion and downright hostility – and indeed its clerical leadership does to some extent look to Iran for it lead. However this is not such a clear cut situation as it might first appear and for all that the share a clear of identity with Iran in terms of religion, the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980’s and, in particular, the ferocity of the conflict in the area between Basra and Abadan, centred of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, has left a legacy of mistrust and suspicion and a fear of reprisals which makes any idea that the two populations might join forces in a formal sense highly unlikely. It needs also to be remembered that as the largest of the three groups, the Shi’a Muslims have potentially the most to gain from the initial stages of democratic rule by virtue of sheer weight of numbers, which make them the most influential of the three groups even if it is insufficient of itself to give them overall dominance. The unanswered question with the Shi’a population is the extent to which they will be prepared to moderate their ultra-conservative religious values in dealings with the state sufficiently to accommodate the less conservative position of the other two groups.

In the middle of all this are the third main group, the Sunni Arabs, who were at least nominally the dominant group prior to the 2003 invasion, as it was from this group that the Ba’ath Party emerged and drew its support. The Sunnis have been, to date, the group least inclined to play ball with the process of nation building in Iraq for reasons which almost certainly include everything from lingering sympathies and support for the Ba’athists to a fear of reprisals with middle ground in their thinking being the suspicion that no matter what the new-look Iraqi state ends up looking like, they’ll be on the losing end of it one way or another. With competing self-identifying groups on either side, each of whom are, in their own way, pulling in very different directions the position in which the Sunni Arabs of Iraq now find themselves is many respects similar to the position of Germany following World War I in the sense that they have been stripped of their previous power and authority and are surrounded by enemies of their own making - the only difference being that no one ever expected Germany to build a single nation state and common identity in partnership with France and Poland, which the Sunni Arabs are expected to do in partnership with the Kurd and the Shi’a.

In short, you could not have chosen a worse set of circumstances in which to try to build a unified nation state than exist today in Iraq if you’d tried, especially if your goal is to create a democratic nation state based on a civic identity. As has all too often been the case in Africa, where state boundaries were for the most part drawn up by the colonial powers without, almost, any reference to pre-existing ethnic/tribal territories and long-standing rivalries, this is a recipe for instability and conflict from which a unified and stable democratic Iraqi state has little or no prospect of emerging. Indeed, as our experiences in Africa should have taught us, the most likely outcome of our latest attempt at nation building is likely to be civil war and the balkanisation of Iraq or the emergence of new ’strongman’ leader, most probably from the military, to hold the the country together by the enforcement of a similar state-based identity and approach to that of the recently deposed Ba’athists. In terms of any democratic aspirations we might have for Iraq, probably the best we can hope for is a situation similar to that which has prevailed in countries like Pakistan and Nigeria which tend to flip-flop between democratic and military rule depending on the relative stability of the state during a particular period, with the military steeping in every time democracy becomes so troublesome and divisive that it is seen to threaten the integrity of the state and, of course, that if such a leader does emerge, that they are reasonably well disposed towards our interests and interested in a diplomatic relationship with the West.

Of all the errors made by the West the one that will prove to be the gravest in the long run will be the one that derives from our greatest and, since World War II, most consistent conceit, the idea that we can take states like Iraq, artificial states which we created during the the colonial era and which lack the coherent sense of common identity necessary to form a stable nation state, and create democracies from them out of nothing.

If we put aside our political and cultural prejudices for a moment and consider only what history teaches us, it should be obvious that the history of the formation of nation states and nation building is not the same history as that of democracy but rather the history of the military and/or political ’strongman’, the dictator and the despot, of Bonaparte, Bismark, Stalin, Tito, Mao Tse Tung, Mugabe, Salazar, Nasser, Idi Amin and a whole host of others…

…including Saddam Hussain.

If you supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 then somewhere along the line you’ll have told yourself that whatever other reasons there may have been for that invasion, it will all work out for the good in the end because at least the Iraqi people will have gained democracy and the right of self-determination , which they didn’t have before. Indeed, the more it became apparent that the reasons we we told we had to go to war, the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussain to neighbouring states and the stability of the region, we a work of total fiction, the more you’ll have come to rely on the idea that democracy will be good for them to justify and explain your position.

On the other hand, If you’ve read and understood this article in full, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be starting to wonder whether that particular argument is just a bit of ‘reach’ and whether, in long run, the best that Iraqi people can hope for down the line is a relatively benevolent dictator, by dictatorial standards; one in the mould of a Zia-ul-Haq or Pervez Musharraf, someone who is no less a strongman but at least fairly pragmatic in their use of force and repression – in which case this piece has done its job…

…and if not, I’d be interested to hear your arguments as to how and why Iraq will be any different from all the other failed and semi-failed attempts at nation building through democracy that have gone before.

On June 28th 1919, Britain, France, Italy and the United State of America force upon Germany what ultimately turned out to be the most inequitable, humiliating and downright stupid political treaty of the 20th Century, the Treaty of Versailles.

This one single treaty, which was devised in the mistake belief that it oudl prevent Germany from ever again threatening peace and order in Europe, turned over large parts of what had previously been German territory to, amongst others, France, Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania and Japan.

It placed strict limits on Germany military capacity and capabilities and held Germany sole responsible for the entire loss and damage caused by World War I, extracting financial reparations of 132 billion Marks from the German economy.

The Treaty of Versailles, as it later transpired, created the social, economic and political conditions which led to the rise of Naziism and ultimately to World War II and is widely acknowledged as one of the root causes of that war.

Around the beginning of 1945, the three great allied powers - this time Britain, Russia and the United States - met once again, with the tide of war having turned against Nazi Germany, to consider what could be done this time to prevent any further German aggression after the war was won…

…and once again, a plan was put forward which proposed the hiving off of large chunks of German territory to its neighbours, crippling its industrial economy and humiliating the German people. The vision of Germany in this this plan was a picturebook version of Germany made up entirely of peasant farmers - no threat to anyone.

Roosevelt supported this particular plan…

…only for it to be vetoed out of hand by Winston Churchill.

You see Churchill, fascism’s most implacable enemy, understood all too well how the Treaty of Versailles had shaped Germany after World War I and how this had, in turn, given rise to Naziism. Churchill understood root causes and how, by addressing and dealing with them, it was possible to prevent further German aggression.

So instead of a Hansel & Gretel theme park, we got the Marshall Plan and the rest, as they say, is history…

The ‘moral’ of this story, as George Santayana pointed out, is simply that “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Or not, in Churchill’s case.

“Hypocrisy: prejudice with a halo” – Ambrose Bierce, ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’

“I can stands so much, and I can’t stands no moreâ€? - Popeye the Sailor.

The latter quote pretty much sums up the point I’ve reached with the welter of sophistry, rhetoric and shrill hysteria emanating from the pro-war left since the first terrorist attack on London, two weeks ago.

In case you’ve missed any of this, the pro-war left’s argument can be readily summarised as follows;

Terrorism is evil. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly evil it is. I mean, you may think that a mythical fallen angel with horns growing out his head and a nice line in fiery pitchforks is evil, but that’s just peanuts to terrorism.

Anyone who suggests that the may be even the merest shred of a hint of a possibility of such a connection or who tries to formulate an explanation or understanding of terrorism is an ‘apologist’ and a fascist sympathiser.

I think that pretty much sums it up… well apart from forgetting to mention the ‘we’re right, you’re wrong’ bit that runs through everything they’re putting out at the moment.

Oh, and of course there’s also their propensity for demanding to know what your ‘position’ is on terrorism if they sense the slightest hint that you may not see the world in quite the same way they do – to save a bit of time here in regards to that particular trait can I just point out that my position, at this particular moment in time is that I’m sat in front of a keyboard and writing this article which is about why the pro-war left are acting like a bunch of complete twats, just so you know where I’m coming from.

The ‘position’ of the pro-war left on terrorism is based on two central premises;

a) the characterisation of underlying ‘ideology’ of Al-Qaeda and its supporters as ‘fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred’, and;

b) the contention that terrorists are possessed of ‘moral agency’, i.e. they possess the capacity to make rational, self-interested moral judgements and take actions which are in accordance with morality - this is really little more than a high-falutin’ way of saying ‘they [should] know the difference between right and wrong’ – and as moral agents it is the terrorists themselves who are morally and personally responsible for their actions.

For all this might seem a perfectly reasonable and even laudable position on terrorism, the reality is that its bullshit – in fact not only is it bullshit but its ignorant bullshit.

Worse still, its ignorant, dangerous bullshit, dangerous because it de-contextualises terrorism, because it encourages and supports the view that the whole framework in which terrorism exists and takes place is self-contained and self-referential, that it can only be opposed and not understood or explained, either of the latter being misinterpreted as ‘apologism’.

It portrays the terrorist as being intrinsically evil, elevating them to the status of a supernatural bogeyman who belongs more to the realms of the Gothic horror story or Norwegian ‘death metal’ album than to the real world. For fucks sake, you might as tell the world they all wear ice hockey masks and are called ‘Jason’ for all that makes any rational sense or contributes anything of substance to our efforts to rid the world of terrorism.

There is a very good reason why we should, indeed we must, try to understand and explain terrorism. Why we cannot ignore the complex chains of cause and effect upon which it feeds and from which it draws both its ideological and material sustenance.

That reason is to be found not in modern political analysis and certainly not in the sophistry, rhetoric and propaganda of the pro-war left but in a single statement contained within a treatise on the subject of war written more than 2,000 years ago, a book entitled, prosaically enough, ‘The Art of War’.

“Know your enemy and know yourself and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated� - Sun Tsu

You cannot defeat terrorism through ignorance of its drives, motives and objectives, by dehumanising the terrorist and turning them into a bogeyman, or by denying even the possibility, let alone reality, that own own actions have, in a multiplicity of ways, contributed to and, in some instances, created the context in which terrorism exists.

Understanding and explaining terrorism and its causes is not the act of an apologist but that of a strategist – you seek to understand and explain terrorism because only when you possess such an understanding do you have the means at your disposal to deal with it effectively – anything else is just pissing in the wind.

Let’s not try to pretend here that terrorism is anything new either. By our modern definition of terrorism - in terms of the use of violence against a civilian population, human history is littered with acts of terrorism – everything from the ‘barbarian’ assaults on the Roman Empire by the Vandals, Hun and Visigoths to Viking Raids to the Crusades to the tactics of medieval siege warfare can, from a modern perspective, be considered terrorism.

When it comes to terrorism the only thing that’s really changed in the last hundred years or so, and particularly in the post-war, post-colonial era, is that we’ve gotten rather more squeamish about how we deal with it. Its only a hundred years ago that we – the British – created the concentration camp in order to deal with terrorism arising from the Boers in South Africa and back in the days of Empire a terrorist attack on London would have almost inevitably have resulted in the British Army being ordered to burn a few villages and a town or two once we’d decided who was responsible, just to prove the point that we’re not going to be intimidated. If today we meet the threat of terrorism with stoicism and the “Blitz spiritâ€?, its not very long ago our preferred response would have been to introduce them and a few of their ’supporters’ to dear old Lee Enfield.

If, a couple of weeks ago, four Swiss Muslims had bombed the living shit out of the centre of Geneva then I could probably swallow the idea that they may be no real causal relationship between terrorism and actions taken by the government in the international arena – either that or Muslims just hate fucking cuckoo clocks. But this is Britain we’re talking about here and much as I love my country I have to admit that we’ve spent the best part of the last three hundred years running around the globe and pissing off pretty much everyone we’ve come across - In fact, pretty much the only people we haven’t managed to pick a fight with at some point are the Swiss, which is all a bit of an unfortunate oversight when you think about it as at least we could have eradicated the cuckoo clock from the face of the earth and picked up a few decent recipes for chocolate at the same time.

Having spent that much time getting right up people’s nose and especially having told everyone back in the 1950’s and 60’s that we were knocking this kind of behaviour on the head, to start up again, only this time riding pillion on Bush’s trillion dollar moped of doom, seems to me to exactly the kind of thing that’s going to reignite a bit of lingering resentment here and there, which is just the kind of thing that’s likely to result in a bit of backwash and, these days, the odd suicide bomber taking a sightseeing trip to London – ‘all you can eat’ buffet and doe-eyed virgin included.

Or, as Dr Paul Cornish, head of the International Studies Group at Chatham House so succinctly put it:

“If you stick your dick in a bees’ nest, you’ll get stung, that much is obviousâ€?

Unless, of course, you’re a fully paid up member of the self-style ‘progressive’ left.

Recognising this is not being an ‘apologist’ for terrorism, its simply noting a basic fact of life – that we have no control over what terrorists believe and that if we want to make any inroads in preventing further attacks then the very first thing we need to do is fucking well get down to the business of figuring out just what it is they do believe, why they believe it – and in particular - why that makes us a target. After that, we might just manage to figure out what we can reasonably do to counter these ideas and persuade those that the terrorists are seeking to recruit to their cause that there’s actually a much better way of going about things than getting on the tube with a backpack full of home-brew explosives.

You see it doesn’t matter a flying fuck whether the pro-war left want to believe in a causal relationship between our taking part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recent attack on London or not – what matter is that the guy with the fucking bomb believes it. Nor is it the act of an apologist to point out that there’s every possibility that he wouldn’t have got around to believing things like that if we hadn’t have fucking well invading Iraq in the first place.

The very worst you could possible say about that particular idea is that its stating the fucking obvious.

Then again, should we really be so surprised that the pro-war has got this wrong…

… when just about every other piece of their ‘analysis’ is also wrong.

Let’s look at a couple of choice examples of where the self-styled ‘progressive left’ more than ably demonstrate that they really haven’t got a clue what they hell they’re talking about, starting with their version of the ‘No true Muslim’ fallacy.

To start with a bit of background for this, Anthony Flew, in his 1975 book ‘Thinking About Thinking’ coined the term ‘No true Scotsman’ to describe a particular for of logical fallacy, the argument for which takes this kind of form:

Argument: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”

Rebuttal: “Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”

This kind of fallacy in pretty common in low-grade political rhetoric, as much amongst political colleagues as political opponents – a good example of its use would be the charge that’s cropped up frequently over the last few years that ‘no true conservative’ would support Britain joining the Euro, which is a fallacy as proposes and identity between conservatism and euroscepticism which does not exist because people are far more complex in their political views than the limited, homogeneous, view of political ideology which underpins this fallacy suggests.

Nevertheless, since the London attack, we’ve heard constantly from a wide range of sources that ‘no true Muslim’ would carry out such an attack.

Why?

Well, one reason is obvious. By promoting heavily the line that those responsible for this attack are not ‘proper’ Muslims everyone from the government to the Police to Muslim communities themselves hopes to deflect public anger away from Islam and avoid, or at least limit, the possibility of a violent backlash. This is a simple but useful piece of propaganda in the current climate, inasmuch as it hopes to dissuade people from taking out their anger on a group of people the vast majority of whom are entirely innocent either of any involvement in these attacks or of supporting the ideological position of those who carried them out.

However, when it comes to the pro-war left, to those who style themselves as ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ in their outlook on the world is serves a rather more important purpose.

Self-styled progressive liberals have something of a problem when it comes to Islam.

On the one hand, many of Islam’s core values, on things such as gender equality, homosexuality and religious tolerance, to give but three examples, are distinctly illiberal and in polar opposition to the values of those who style themselves ‘progressive’. It’s therefore very difficult to support Islam without being perceived to compromising on your own core values.

On the other hand, its very difficult for progressive liberals to really criticise Islam for its reactionary tendencies and illiberalism without appearing hypocritical and being seen to compromise on their own values, particularly in relation to their own belief in religious tolerance. Worse still, the vast majority of Muslims are non-European, raising the spectre that criticism of Islam for its illiberal ’shortcomings’ could be interpreted as ‘racist’.

This is the central dilemma at the heart of the credo of multiculturalism, it requires liberals to show respect and tolerance for values which they would otherwise vehemently oppose.

It’s also, ironically, the same dilemma they face in relation to criticising Israel for its treatment of the Palestinian Arabs – unless one is extremely careful in how one constructs and expresses such criticism one runs the risk of being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’. In fact in the case of Israel one has to be even more careful that usual as it and its supporters have long since worked out that they can more or less deflect any criticism, however valid it might be, by simply labelling it anti-Semitic and letting lingering western guilt over the Holocaust take care of the rest.

How, then, do the self-styled progressives resolve this particular dilemma? Well, for the most part they don’t.

What has emerged instead is something of an uneasy and unstated accommodation based on ‘looking the other way’ and not making too much of the reactionary values within Islam so long as Muslims keep a bit of a lid on things and don’t make it too obvious themselves – its a tacit form of the idea of ’separate but equal’ which works just so long as no one rocks the boat too much by trying to put some of Islam’s more illiberal values obviously into practice.

This accommodation rests square on an exclusively western interpretation of Islamic society based on the enlightenment ideal of the separation of religion and state. Consequently one can be tolerant of illiberal values within the religion of Islam so long as these do not carry forward into the political ordering of civil society – Muslims can believe what they like as long as they don’t encapsulate those beliefs into the state and the manner in which it functions to order society.

This, however, ignores both that orthodox organised religion, in any society, is an inherent political and ideological force; the Catholic Church is no less a political institution than the Labour Party, and that the secularism of the enlightenment has not actually succeeded in separating religion and politics, rather it has to some extent neutered the overt influence of religion, forcing it to find alternative routes to exert power and authority. For all that America has an enforced legal separation of Church and State it remains one of the most deeply religious, and religious influenced, societies in the world – Bush drew a considerable amount of his support in the 2004 presidential elections from public perceptions that he is a ‘god-fearing man’ and openly espoused policy positions designed to capture the support of the Christian right. In Britain, the fact that Alistair Campbell famously announced that ‘Tony doesn’t do God’ in response to questions about whether Blair’s personal beliefs might influence government policy does not in anyway obviate the presence of a clear bias toward Christianity in policy-making such as the exemption given to religious groups in prohibiting discrimination in employment on grounds of sexuality or the failure to incorporate the repeal of the common law offence of blasphemy, which applies only to Christianity, when legislating to outlaw religious hatred.

The fact that direct theocratic rule remains the exception rather than the rule in the Islamic world does not in any way lessen the influence of Islam in shaping and directing civil society in Islamic countries – political and social illiberalism in the Islamic world remains very much the direct product of religious illiberalism and not an aberration introduced by an artificial fusion of religion and politics. Terms which are currently the common currency of the ‘progressive’ left such as ‘Islamist’ and ‘Islamofascism’ and which imply the existence of an undesirable politicisation of Islam are complete misnomers. It is not the political ideology of hard-line groups which shapes their religious position but their religious views which shape a large part of their political ideology – the core theological roots of the majority of hard-line Islamic groups, other than those few rooted in Iranian-style Shi’ism, lies in Salafism, a tradition within Islam which was at its peak in the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries (AD) and which has undergone something of a revival over the last century. While it is certainly reactionary in outlook, from a theological point of view it is far from being either heretical or divorced from the mainstream of Sunnism – the idea that Salafists are not ‘proper’ Muslims is no more a valid proposition than the idea that Lutherans are not proper Christians due to their having broken away from the Catholic Church.

This is a particularly uncomfortable idea for those who view themselves as being progressive in their values, they can only maintain both their opposition to the reactionary position of the Islamic
world on things like gender equality and homosexuality and their ‘principled’ position on religious tolerance so long as they can characterise these reactionary values – which they would consider to be ‘fascist’, as being political/social values, the product of political ideology, and not religious in origin. To equate the religion of Islam, itself, with fascism would comprise their values on religious tolerance to the point where their sense of their own progressive identity would become unsustainable.

This is where groups like Al Qaeda become extremely problematic as their overt expression of the reactionary values which exists within Islam directly challenge the progressive left’s presumption of their own tolerance so extensively that it becomes a matter of absolute necessity that they be separated entirely from the mainstream of Islamic society and culture – the ‘no true Muslim’ fallacy becomes more than simply a useful and utilitarian piece of propaganda serving a defined purpose. Instead it becomes an ‘article of faith’ for the progressive left, reinforced by the creation of portmanteau neologisms like ‘islamofascism’, one which serves to preserve their own liberal identity, as ‘progressive’ and ‘tolerant’ by presenting the extremists as being political and not religious ideologues – they can then safely be opposed and attacked as ‘fascists’, without compromising their principles because the extremists are not ‘proper’ Muslims at all.

This position is only sustainable, however, so long as we don’t look too closely at what groups like Al Qaeda actually believe and their motives for carrying out terrorist attacks on targets outside of the Islamic world. One of the key reasons that the self-styled progressive left have been so quick to characterise this form of terrorism in terms of the presumed ‘moral agency’ of the terrorist and in the absence of any context which might be derived either from consideration of the theological roots of al Qaeda in Islam or influence that western foreign policy in the Middle east might have played in the formulation of their ideological position is that only by viewing this form of terrorism as being self-contained and self-referential can they sustain their belief in the ‘no true Muslim’ fallacy and, therefore, their own sense of identity as being progressive, liberal and tolerant.

This leads nicely into the second major error of analysis which has become common currency amongst the pro-war left, in fact one which is currently both its favourite trope in debate and its second favourite insult after ‘apologist’ - “islamofascismâ€?.

Probably the first thing to note here is the inherent semantic hypocrisy of the term itself when used by those who go to great and often excruciating lengths to promote themselves as being unequivocally committed to equality and opposed to racism in all its many forms. anti-racist credentials. Let’s face it here, a portmanteau term which juxtaposes the concept of ‘brown-skinned guy with prayer mat and natty line in headgear’ with that of ‘20th century’s most famous facist pantomime villain and daddy of all genocidal maniacsâ€? may not be anywhere near as direct or in your face as ‘paki’ or ‘nigger’ but its a pretty racist metaphor nonetheless.

However, this is not the real issue here. The real issue here is the inaccurate characterisation of Al Qaeda’s political ideology as ‘fascist’, an idea which is sustained by almost exclusively by the use of a logical fallacy, the ‘no true Muslim fallacy’.

In theological terms, there is very little divergence between Al Qaeda’s values and those to found throughout the mainstream of Islamic theology, which no real surprise given that both are derived from the same source text, that of the Qu’ran.

Where Al Qaeda does diverge from the mainstream is in its reinterpretation of the concept of ‘defensive jihad’ along political/ideological lines in order to provide theological justification of terrorist attacks outside of Muslim territory. It should be noted that in terms of Islamic jurisprudence, Al Qaeda has no alternative but to try to sell its activities as a form of defensive jihad – while Islam also incorporates the concept of an ‘offensive jihad’, i.e. the expansionist use of violence and aggression to bring non-Muslim lands under Muslim control, an offensive jihad can only be lawfully declared by the Caliph, the last of which was deposed with the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate by Kemal Attaturk on the creation of the secularist Republic of Turkey, No Caliph, no offensive jihad, its a simple as that.

This is, therefore, where a critical difference exists between Al Qaeda’s concept of Jihad and that of a Palestinian group such as Hamas, particularly in relation to the theological basis of and justification for ’suicide bombing’. Defensive Jihad actually means what it says, it is the prosecution of a holy war in defence of the Muslim homeland, the purpose of which is to secure the expulsion of the invading infidel. In the context of the ongoing Palestinian situation, Israel, or to be more accurate the land occupied by the Israeli State, is considered to be part of this notional Muslim homeland and this justifies, in theological terms, a defensive jihad to reclaim that part of the Muslim homeland which has been occupied by non-Muslims.

Consequently, a Palestinian suicide bomber who blows themselves up on a bus in Tel-Aviv, taking a few Jews with them in the process, would be considered a martyr and should, therefore, have made doubly certain that they’ve boned up the Rubai’yat and the Perfumed Garden before setting out as the fast track to paradise and six dozen willing virgins is, according to Muslim tradition, waiting for them when they’ve finished the job.

On the other hand, places like New York, Madrid and London are NOT part of the Muslim homeland and the rules aren’t quite the same – a suicide bombing outside of the Muslim homeland is not an act of martyrdom and all the poor saps who got suckered into the deal by Al -Qaeda really have to look forward to afterwards is a distinct absence of willing virgins, plenty of wrist-action and forearms like Popeye - so if you are the kind of person who does believe in the afterlife then you might find small consolation in knowing that right about now it should just about be dawning on the four guys who blew the shit out of London that they’ve been sold a bit of a pig in a poke and that the Trades Description Act doesn’t really apply in their new neighbourhood. Not having gone into the detail of Islamic beliefs about the afterlife I can’t say for certain whether in their case it might involve eternal torment, fire, brimstone and little red imps stabbing them in bollocks with a pitchfork on the hour, every hour…

…but you have to hope that its something like that, anyway.

It is important to understand this as while it is Al Qaeda and misuse of the concept of defensive jihad which does separate them from the mainstream of Islam it by no means follows that the use of terrorism, particularly in the form of suicide bombing, is fundamentally unIslamic and, therefore, impermissible under Islamic theological law – whether such attacks can be considered to be within the confines of defensive jihad depends very much on where and in what context they take place, this being yet another reason why one cannot simply rely on Kantian notions of moral agency as a sole basis for explaining terrorism.

Equally, none of this makes Al Qaeda a fascist organisation or even one that espouses a fascist ideology – its core theological values are those of Islam, all be it a very conservative form of Islam particularly in terms of their insistence on theocratic rule and the implementation of sharia law. It might be tempting, given the reactionary conservatism of this position, to interpret it as fascist in nature but this ignores entirely the fact that its religious values substantially pre-date the European enlightenment by more than a thousand years where fascism is very much a post-enlightenment ideology.

However that’s not to say that Al Qaeda’s political ideology is in anyway medievalist in nature, as some suppose. Far from it, in political terms the ideological position of Al Qaeda is drawn almost exclusively from the European enlightenment – its just not fascism.

Al Qaeda’s primary goal is the establishment of a utopian pan-Islamic society under a ‘pious caliphate’ and sharia law, a society which will be brought into being through the political will of those who seek its creation. As reactionary as this may sound, if we put the theological language to one side for a moment, what we have here is a very modern, post-enlightenment idea, a man-made contrivance based on a concept which did not appear until the enlightenment, that a perfect society can be created by humanity through an act of will and not solely by the supernatural agency of a supreme being.

This shows that in terms of its political ideology, Al Qaeda shares with fascism the same sociological roots, roots which are to be found within the positivism of Comte and Saint-Simon…

…but then those same roots can also be found in both communism and the neo-liberalism of the universal free market, so on its own that offer no proof that Al Qaeda are fascists.

In fact, if we take away from our consideration of Al Qaeda’s political ideology everything which can be traced back to Islam, we’re actually left with little or nothing which could be traced back to fascism, other than the adoption of a bit of modern right-wing rhetoric in relation to Israel and ‘Zionism’ which is really only the result of applying the modern idiom to rivalries which stretch back over centuries and which came into being long before the concept of fascism even existed. There are no signs that Al Qaeda is attempting to develop any form of organised mass movement in support of its objectives, no sign of any leanings toward syndicalist corporatism or economic regimentation and even if the idea of a ‘pious caliphate’ seems to mirror the fascist notion of loyalty to a single leader - the dictator – it has to be remembered that within Islamic society the rule of even a Caliph is not absolute but subject to the will of God as expressed through the society’s religious leaders. Rule by a single all-powerful state, as demanded by fascism, is actually extremely rare in Islam where the norm, historically, has been that society is ordered, as is the case in modern day Iran, in terms of there being both a political state and a religious state which exist side-by-side and function in parallel.

The idea, then, that Al Qaeda is somehow the bastard offspring of Islam and Hitler/Mussolini is palpable nonsense and completely misrepresents the political ideology, motives and drives of this organisation.

If Al Qaeda is not a fascist organisation, as the progressive left suggests, then what is it?

Well, if you put away your prejudices for a moment the answer is actually staring you in the face.

Ask yourself this one question – given that Al Qaeda’s goal is the creation of a utopian Islamic super-state through the exercise of political will, how exactly is it going about trying to achieve that goal? In other words, what is Al Qaeda’s modus operandi?

Answer – Terrorism, or to be more precise, revolutionary terrorism – a practice which belongs to the political left and, in particular, revolutionary anarchism rather than to the fascist right. Give Al Qaeda a proper political paternity test and you’ll find that the ‘daddy’ here is Mikhail Bakunin not dear old ‘uncle’ Adolf at all.

If that’s the case, then how/why has the pro-war left got it so badly wrong?

Well, in part, because for all their reliance on the ‘no true Muslim’ fallacy, the one thing they failed to do was accurately differentiate between the political and theological elements of Al Qaeda’s ideology.

However this is only a partial and somewhat unsatisfactory explanation, one which fails to give sufficient weight to the influence of the pro-war left’s own prejudices and assumptions in seeking to interpret what Al Qaeda is and what, in political terms, it actually stands for.

To some extent, one can argue that they arrived at the conclusion that Al Qaeda are a fascist organisation precisely because that’s the conclusion they expected to arrive at, because as self-styled progressive liberals they expect that anything which, in political terms, is diametrically opposed to their own position and values must automatically be fascist in nature. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification and, therefore, yet another logical fallacy.

However its also the case that from the pro-war left’s perspective, the idea that Al Qaeda are fascists - and of ‘islamofascismâ€? in general - is extremely seductive inasmuch as it lends to their own beliefs and actions the sense of them being a ‘noble and worthwhile cause’. This is particularly important to pro-war left at the present time as they see it both as lending credence to their efforts to promote a revisionist interpretation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq as one motivated by humanitarian concern for the Iraqi people and not, as is really the case, by the naked pursuit of western strategic, political and economic interests and as an easy way of silencing dissent – after all no one wants to be thought of as either an ‘apologist’ for terrorism or as a ‘fascist sympathiser’, the two main charges levelled at anyone who disagrees with them.

Given the choice of labelling Al Qaeda’s political ideology as coming from either fascism or revolutionary anarchism, fascism wins hands down simply because it makes for a far better bogeyman. Fascism slaughters people by the millions, revolutionary anarchism merely kicks in the windows of fast food restaurants and nicks bodies from graveyards – no contest is really.

Label anything as being fascist and you can more or less justify any response short of lobbing around a few nukes and slaughtering millions of people yourself.

A while back I characterised the pro-war left’s attempts to present Al Qaeda’s form of terrorism as a self-contained phenomenon which exists without reference anything but itself as both ignorant and dangerous due to their failure, in fact their point blank refusal to place Al Qaeda in its proper context. Hopefully, by now, it should be dawning on you why the pro-war left’s perspective is so profoundly dangerous and, indeed, illiberal but in case the penny hasn’t yet dropped, I’ll elucidate further.

First of all, if we accept the pro-war left’s contention that terrorism, particularly that of Al Qaeda, can only be considered in terms of the presumed moral agency of the terrorist and is therefore without context then we turn terrorism into a form of universal evil which can only be defeated by its total eradication of the ideology on which it is based which, in turn, requires the extermination of every single individual who subscribes to that ideology – we have to kill it before it kills us.

Given that the likelihood of successfully defeating terrorism in such a way and by such means is near enough zero as makes no difference what we inevitably end up with is a perpetual state of war - Bush’s war against terror becomes a permanent fixture in our lives. Orwell, of course, predicted the likely consequences of such a perpetual war and the shape that society will take under such conditions in “1984â€? and who’s to say that we won’t be heading blindly down that particular road ourselves. Not me. Not with ID cards, the database state and a whole slew of other restrictions on civil liberties on the immediate horizon.

One of the other tropes which has featured heavily in the rhetoric of the pro-war left of late has been to characterise the terrorist in terms of their presumed nihilism, yet isn’t the assumption that there is no other solution to the current terrorist problem but a perpetual ‘war on terror’ equally nihilistic in that it admits to no other possible solution but that perpetual war?

This is precisely why it is vital that we try to understand and explain terrorism and in particular how, when and why our own actions, those which have followed on from the west’s policy towards, in particular, the Middle East have created the context in which Al Qaeda exists and carries out its attacks on our society. Far from trying to pretend that this form of terrorism is without any root cause(s) we should be desperately trying to find those causes as only by understanding them can we formulate an effective counter-terrorism strategy.

In fact, the root causes here are fairly easy to identify.

First and foremost there is the ongoing ‘Palestinian question’ which shaped, first, the views of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam and subsequently those of Osama Bin Laden, himself – Azzam being Bin Laden’s mentor during most the period of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Next there is the matter of the military invasion of Muslim territory by an external, non-Muslim power – not the invasion of Iraq by the US/UK and others but the aforementioned Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978.

These are the two primary ‘grievances’ which have shaped the political ideology of Bin Laden and of Al Qaeda, grievances which remain active today both directly – the last twenty-five years have spawned one of two false dawns but brought us little closer to a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs – and indirectly – to Al Qaeda there is no intrinsic difference between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the presence of foreign [Russian] troops on Islamic soil and the presence, today, of western forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and, indeed, in any Muslim territory, nor does it matter whether they are there by invitation, legally under international law, as was the case during the 1990 Gulf War, or illegally as is still the case in relation to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And it is these two ‘grievances’ that must be addressed an dealt with if we are to ‘defeat’ Al Qaeda.

Note, I said ‘defeat’ not ‘negotiate with’, not ‘find a political solution with’ – about the only thing the pro-war left has got right in its analysis is that there is no negotiating with Al Qaeda and no prospect of a political settlement, simply because what Al Qaeda demands, its pan-Islamic pious Caliphate, is not ours to give.

Imagine what would happen if there was a negotiated peace settlement which gave the Palestinians their own independent state and if western forces were withdrawn from the Islamic world, replaced perhaps with peace-keeping forces drawn from the Arab League and other Muslim countries – where would that leave Al Qaeda and its ideology?

With a plan for a pan-Islamic caliphate that no Islamic country would support, a claim to the right of defensive jihad based only on the abstract notion that western ideas and symbols of western culture and capitalism are corrupting the Islamic world and an obvious blood feud with the House of Saud, that’s where. What chance would they have of recruiting suicide bombers in Leeds then, if the only real grievances against the west they could point to were the McDonald’s Halal-Burger and the BBC World Service?

That’s how you defeat the likes of Al Qaeda, by starving them of their most important resource, their support within the Muslim community in Britain, Iraq, Jordan, Indonesia – everywhere, which you can achieve only if you take Islam’s grievances seriously and act on them.

That’s why you can’t pretend that the Islamic world has no grievances with the west, or at least none that would lead to or result in terrorist activity. That’s why you cannot pretend there are no root causes. Not because to do so is to become an apologist for terrorism and a fascist sympathiser but because to fail to recognise the validity of those grievances and deal with them is to hand the terrorist the weapon they crave most, a ready supply of pissed off young Muslims looking for a cause.

The grievances which spawned Al Qaeda may not be exactly the same as those in place today, although in relation to the situation between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs it is exactly the same grievance and the same root cause, but those same grievances or ones very similar still operate today, creating fertile ground for Al Qaeda and others in which to plant their message of revolutionary terrorism and see it grow and flourish. No one has said, certainly to my knowledge, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 created Al Qaeda – not even Gorgeous George. What has been said, quite rightly, is that there is no more effective recruiting sergeant for hard-line groups like Al Qaeda than the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country by a foreign, non-Muslim power, especially one in which the invaders can’t even be bothered to keep a count of civilian casualties in case it makes them look bad.

Ultimately the pro-war left’s position on Al Qaeda and on the recent terrorist attacks on London is wrong, fundamentally wrong, because their goal is not just to oppose terrorism but to try to channel public anger over these attacks into support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an invasion which remains as illegal today as it was on the day it was launched irrespective of their efforts to rewrite history and sell Bush’s great desert adventure as an act of ‘humanitarian interventionism’.

There position is, at once, specious, self-exculpatory and hypocritical, a product of intellectual dishonesty, propaganda and a blind refusal to accept any shred of accountability or responsibility for the mess created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

So tell me again – just who are the apologists here?

*****

One thought that’s just occurred to me after posting this - if McDonalds were to sell a quarterpounder halalburger with cheese in France, would they have to call it a ‘Caliph with Cheese’?

“Deferred success” should replace the idea of failure for low-achieving pupils, a teachers’ organisation will hear at its annual conference.

Now I know that a few bloggers have reacted scornfully to this suggestion but just think about for a minute, it actually has it’s merits.

Failure is such a traumatic thing that its only right we find some way of cushioning the blow and making it a bit easier to take, like the retired teacher who’s put this idea up says, we don’t want to put people off.

Just think how much easier other situations would be if we use this idea of deferred success in other areas of life.

Imagine how this would work in the office, for example - ‘It’s alright, you’re not being fired we’ve just decide to defer your employment’.

How about down at the fertility clinic - ‘Look, it’s ok. It’s not as though your infertile you just have a bit of a deferred pregnancy’.

And let’s not forget how useful it would be when the grim reaper comes-a-callin’ - ‘Oh no, your mother isn’t dead, it’s what we professional call deferred breathing’.

See, isn’t that so much nicer.

Former BNP leader John Tyndall has shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to the great cross burning in the sky.

Not much more to say really apart from that the reports suggest he died all alone and there’s one less Nazi in the world - which is a result in anyone’s book.

A few weeks ago(June 6th 2005), Owen Gibson wrote this in the Guardian…

In the UK, there was a feeling that the general election would provide domestic blogs with a similar spark to Rathergate. There was no shortage of primary material, such as the attorney-general’s advice on the war in Iraq, but there was little sense that the internet impinged on the mainstream media.

While Belle de Jour got the mainstream media speculating on her (or his) identity, and the likes of Scary Duck greatly amuse, there is a sense that the Americans take their blogging more seriously than we do. With the odd exception (Guido Fawkes’ Order-Order.com and Mick Fealty’s Slugger O’Toole blog on Northern Ireland for example), there is little heavyweight comment and it is rare to see a blog break a story or substantially move it on.

…while bemoaning the failure of the British blogosphere to spawn a Rathergate of its very own, before going on to note -

For all that, Neil McIntosh, the assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited (responsible for introducing a series of blogs allied to this newspaper), says that a breakthrough Rathergate moment is inevitable sooner or later. “You’d be daft to say never. All that it takes is someone to see that a properly produced Private Eye-style blog would work brilliantly on the web. You’ll get something like that in Britain.” Cornfield also points to evidence of bloggers mobilising the “No” vote in the French referendum on the EU constitution as proof that it just takes the right kind of issue to spark interest.

How ironic is it then for the Guardian to find itself on the wrong end of this story following a bit of detective work by Scott Burgess of The Daily Ablution…

… a blogger.

…himself sole author of his own disgrace?
William Cowper

So passes into ignominy the career of Sir Roy Meadow, eminent professor, paediatrician and as lousy an expert witness as has had the misfortune to grace our legal system in some considerable time.

Of course misfortune is a relative thing.

Meadow has lost the right to practice medicine, having been found guilty of serious professional misconduct and subsequently struck off by the medical register by the General Medical Council. At 72 years of age, he already retired and with his credibility as a ‘expert witness’ long since shatters one has to consider such a loss to be no real loss at all. What value can his professional standing amongst his peers – which is all that the GMC has really taken away - have by comparison to the losses of those convicted of that most heinous of crimes, the murder of one’s own children, as a result of his now discredited and thoroughly discreditable testimony.

Sally Clark served more than four years in prison, wrongfully convicted by Meadow’s ‘expert opinion’. Margaret Smith served more than two years. Angela Cannings over a year. Trupti Patel was the ‘lucky’ one of the quartet; lucky inasmuch as she, unlike the others, was acquitted by a jury…

But then luck, like misfortune, is also a relative thing and the relief of acquittal is scant compensation for the trauma of having been accused in the first place and of having to sit in court and listen while this supposed expert, this ‘man of science’ expounded his pet theories, yet again, with the full expectation that his word would be ‘as law’ in the eyes of the jury.

Meadow fully deserves his fate and has no one to blame but himself.

Yet if the verdict of the GMC is damning – the panel found that he had “abused his position as a doctor”, that he had failed in his duties as an expert witness and that the consequences of his errors “cannot be underestimated” – it is not so damning as the simple fact that Meadow was guilty of bad science, of an unshakable belief in his own eminence and authority, and in the hypothesis that made his career, that was so fierce that it led him to present his personal opinion without equivocation as a scientific law.

Meadow’s ‘Law’ - that, in reference to cot deaths, “one in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder” – has been shown for what it really is; a trite aphorism based on the adage that ‘once is happenstance…’. Not science but sophistry.

As a scientist, Meadow should have heeded the words of a man far greater that he in eminence and authority, the philosopher and one of the father’s of psychology, William James;

“I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.�

He evidently didn’t

As an educated man he should have pondered long and hard on the words of philosopher, David Hume;

“When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities”

He failed in that too.

What Meadow did is unforgivable.

Unforgivable because his opinion and reputation sent innocent women to prison.

Unforgivable because in his arrogance he presented opinion to a court as scientific fact.

And most of all, unforgivable because when he was shown to have been wrong, he declined to do the one decent, human act left to him and offer Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, Margaret Smith and Trupti Patel the one thing they have wanted all along – a simple apology.

If his career is to have an epitaph then that must surely be the words of a man who’s work Roy Meadow should have known above all others – Hippocrates.

“There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.�

From Global Voices Online:

Blogger Khalid Jarrar, author of Secrets in Baghdad, remains in custody of the Iraqi intelligence service, known as the Mukhabarat.

As we reported yesterday, Khalid’s brother Raed says their family was relieved to hear on Thursday morning that Khalid is still alive after going missing for two days. On Sunday, Khalid described on his blog how his apartment in Baghdad had been broken into and his hard drive was stolen. Soon after that he disappeared…

Having read a few of Khalid’s blog entries there is nothing in them to suggest that he is anything more than an ordinary Iraqi who’s a bit pissed off with seeing his country shot to shit under US occupation and if the US and the fledgling Iraqi government want to convince us that everything will turn out for the best then the very least they can do is apply habeas corpus.

You can read Khalid’s blog for yourself here - Secrets In Baghdad