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(27 Feb, '08)
Blair IS responsible for the Jihad against us.
Blair and his people have always said that the wave of terrorism facing us in the UK has nothing to do with Britain's part in the invasion of Iraq. The 2005 London Bombings were not his fault. But... that doesn't seem to be what some of those involved are reported to think nor, I suspect, is it what a fair number of people in this country think. And it's certainly not what I think.
In the most facile sense, of course, Blair is right. We've been in trouble since long before 2003; but in saying what he does, Blair is being disingenuous. Or deluded, as some of the less kind among us have suggested.
1917 is the crucial date, I believe, particularly for the Arabs.
There has been friction between Europe and the Middle East since the year dot. That is a stage which human neighbours too often seem to have to go through, like the English with the French, before they come to an accommodation. The crusades, or people's historical prejudices about them, have been providing a glorious accusation-fest between Christians and Muslims; it's a blame-game in which the Muslims appear to have taken all the tricks, notwithstanding that the crusades did not start entirely as a Christian adventure in the way that's always being suggested. They were also in response to the growing harassment of, assaults on and the killing of pilgrims travelling from Europe to Jerusalem - certainly with the approval of (and probably at the instigation of) the Muslim court, particularly under the Caliph Hakim (called 'The Mad' by many in the west and by quite a few Muslims). It is probably no coincidence that the difficulties started at a time when perhaps less enlightened groups in the Muslim world were tightening their control of the Middle East. (Spain, where the earlier Caliphate survived, continued as an enlightened, tolerant, Islamic-ruled society for another 350 years.)
Why start with blaming the Christians for the crusades? Why not go further back and blame the earliest Muslims for sweeping through Christian counties right up into France, spreading their message by the sword? Or go further back: the Iranians can certainly object that the Roman Empire, who by endless assault successfully changed multi-cultural Persia into a ghastly mirror of Rome. Or further back still, before there were any Christians or Muslims: Alexander of Macedon, perhaps, in the 4th. century BC (who was simply another in a long line of war-making dictators who also spent his time destroying ancient cultures)? Or to Persian Xerxes, King of Kings, who set out to conquer Europe in the 5th? Or do we go back to Agamemnon? How far?
Of course it's nonsense to go back hundreds or thousands of years, unless it's to remember that for most of the time, when those schoolyard bullies weren't trying to prove who could pee furthest, ordinary people worked, traded, got on with their lives - with each other. I think there is an argument that what happened in the (Christian) British Empire in the nineteenth century does have a serious bearing on today's events, as did what happened in (Muslim) Turkey's empire right up to 1917; each, after all, committed crimes against (the other's) religion which still reverberate. But, none of us were alive. Unless we are to have an endless dysfunctional Sicilian (or Afghan) vendetta, events before we were born have to be set aside by both sides. The problem is, that there is a vendetta and it is still going on.
It takes two sides to sustain a vendetta.
Which brings me back to the period immediately after 1917, the year when Britain seemed to be promising the Arab world control over its own destiny. The aftermath of the Great War was marked by the greatest reorganisation of the world there had been in modern times, and with the greatest opportunity to make the world a better place since Westphalia. The British, particularly, were in very good standing with a large part of the Arab world, having driven the Turks out and (apparently) made their promise . If there had been a few politicians more capable of seeing beyond imperial interests - or simply a few with a sense of justice like Lawrence of Arabia, that opportunity might have been taken (or so one feels, perhaps rather idealistically).
To cut the story short, the West did not honour its implied promise to the Arabs; Britain and France carved up large parts of the Arab world between them, imposing governments, in Iraq for example, to suit their own interests. The first use of chemical weapons on civilians after 1918 was by the British in Iraq; in fact, so far as I know, all the use of such weapons until Japan's invasion of China was by European countries on Muslims. British impositions on Iran and Iraq in pursuit of oil went on until (and even after) the people in those countries rebelled. Do I need to go on? Aden? Suez? And the British and the West still went on interfering, right up to Saddam's war with Iran in the 80s. There wasn't any such violence by Muslims against civilians in the UK in all that time, so far as I know, but there were plenty of Muslim lives lost in their home countries.
(I've conflated Arab and Muslim to some extent, although they're not the same thing; but each story impinges on and reflects the other and, the Arabs being at a core part of the Muslim world, I think the conflation is a fair convenience for my purposes here.)
So when Britain is part of a vengeful attack on Iraq in 2003, against international law and the (increasingly effective) work of the international community, what on earth else are the Arabs (and possibly all Muslims) to think but this is part of the ongoing assault by the West on their world?
To come back to Blair... He shares responsibility for what has happened right back to1917 because he did not distance himself from it or work to heal it. The West, with Britain up there in the lead, has made the running in aggression and imposition against the Muslim World throughout the post-Versailles period: in his action in taking us to war with Iraq, Blair, far from repairing the damage, endorsed it. If Hitler had died in the fullness of war and Johann Schmidt from Bahnhofstrasse had taken over, would we not have held that Johann Schmidt - in taking power - also accepted responsibility unless he immediately acted to end the war and the holocaust?
Blair is responsible for the invasion of Iraq and, as has been shown conclusively by publication of the Williams draft, culpably so. By his own choices, he shares responsibility not just for 2003, but for a long history of aggression against the Muslim world before that. I suggest that only delusion or deceit would deny that.
And, since he accepts responsibility, de facto, for 80 years of aggression against Muslims, he cannot deny responsibility for the hatred that has been unleashed against us.
He had a chance to offer to end the vendetta; he didn't take it. He is responsible for the jihad against our country.
Incidentally, that also means that he is largely responsible not just for the destruction of the liberties of our people which his government has undertaken, but for the supposed need for that destruction in the name of security in the first place.
As a postscript: I'm not a Muslim. I'm WASP(ish) British. As it happens, I think there are plenty of Muslims who haven't come up smelling of roses... but I don't think that's my first priority; the wrongdoing of my own leaders is.
Written 27.02.08 To be checked, proofread, rewritten, sold, scrapped... after I've had a few days to reflect.
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