And then there is the rapid casting aside of ancient, wise rules. Our irreplaceable liberty and justice, which took a thousand years to create, are in shreds thanks to hasty and emotive measures that did no good. And now we have the shame of lawless confinement of untried men in Guantanamo, of torture that Englishmen, far fiercer and crueller than we think we are, abandoned as barbaric hundreds of years ago. And we have the horrors of ‘extraordinary rendition’ by secret flights to secret prisons, in which dark things took place. How can we claim to stand for liberty and justice if we do such things?
And we see the dubious and dangerous use of pilotless drones to conduct summary executions of our enemies. Few can be sorry at the death of Mohammed Emwazi (the so-called ‘Jihadi John’), but what precedents are we setting? For the moment, our fanatical foes do not have drones of their own. One day, they will.
…
After all, let us not forget that Islamist terror has grown in strength and reach, not diminished, since we embarked on our supposedly benevolent interventions in the Muslim world. The Iraq invasion, the Afghan intervention, the wild and brainless enthusiasm with which we greeted the disastrous ‘Arab Spring’, the supposedly humanitarian interference in Libya which turned it into a failed state, the aid and comfort we gave to the rebellion in Syria. Not only have these things failed to prevent terror. They have visited a violent chaos on the whole Muslim world, in which fanatical and grisly death cults thrive and prosper.
And alongside them, there is the enormous migration of desperate young men, from Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, many of them Muslim, some of them no doubt easy recruits for the fanatics.
We pretend to understand these nebulous and varied terror groups, for years placing them under the all-embracing trademark of ‘Al Qaeda’, now insisting they are part of a new and greater menace called ‘ISIS’. The truth is there is no mastermind sitting in a cave issuing orders (though of course someone is always willing to claim responsibility for these outrages after they have happened – and who can be sure if such claims are true?).
That is a James Bond fantasy. And it is also why these things would still be hard to prevent if we turned ourselves into a totalitarian state of surveillance, identity cards, perpetual searches of the innocent – like going through an airport, only all the time.
according to the graun
