Combating terrorism: we know what works and what doesn't. So why do we keep choosing what doesn't?

There’s no simpler solution to complex politics than war.

That’s because all war requires is the willingness to spend a lot of money, sacrifice a number of lives of your own people and, if things go to plan, a lot more lives of another people. Mostly nations of the prosperous West have little difficulty working up the necessary will. So, for instance, the Fench reaction to the Paris attacks, to mount bombing raids on ISIS in Syria, is a simple, not to say simplistic, response.

French air strikes.
Simple. Powerful. Effective? Who knows.

Almost as simple is rounding up people. It’s more difficult if you take the trouble to arrest real suspects, against whom you can mount a case. If you just go after people who might be supporters, without pedantic concern for, say, evidence, that’s as easy as bombing raids. You might, like France, just round up the perpetrators’ families.

Not that I’m particularly criticising France. Other nations behave as badly. Consider reactions to the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, carried out by a team which was predominantly Saudi. The leader of the organisation behind the attack, Al Qaida, was also Saudi. Much of the funding was Saudi.

It still made some sense to attack Afghanistan, if only because the Al Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, was living there. But it made no sense to attack Iraq next. Iraq? There was no suggestion of Iraqi involvement in 9/11. So the justification for the Iraq invasion became weapons of mass destruction. Absence of evidence, the hawks would tell us, isn’t evidence of absence. However, once we were able to establish facts on the ground, it became clear there was plenty of evidence of the absence of those weapons. And hence absence of any justification for the war.

To try to give it some kind of retrospective appeal, the invading forces decided to rebuild the country along new, improved lines. Unfortunately, they used the army to do the job. Armies are designed to destroy, not to build. So the effects were as disastrous as might – ought – to have been expected.

After years of downright oppression, the Shia majority of Iraq took power. Like most people previously downtrodden, they leaped at the opportunity to do some treading down themselves. The West, which had casually disbanded the Iraqi army with its Sunni leadership, took no steps to protect Sunnis from the rule of their enemies. New Sunni resistance movements emerged, fell under the control of religious fundamentalists, and from that toxic fusion, produced ISIS.

Doesn’t the French reaction, so far, to the Paris attacks remind you of the US/UK response to 9/11? Force first, and repression, rather than thought, self-analysis and careful consideration of the consequences of action.

Self-analysis is badly needed. It’s emerging that both Iraq and Turkey warned France of the impending attacks. That they weren’t forestalled is a major intelligence failure. Analysing that shortcoming is far harder than despatching aircraft or arresting suspects. Besides, many people – some of them individuals I’d previously regarded as sensible – are clamouring for heavy handed action. “Close the borders!” they call, “lock up the imams! Kick out the refugees!”

That last call is particularly curious. Many refugees are fleeing the onslaught of ISIS, the very foe we face in the West, and which the West created. More Syrians are killed every day than in the Paris attacks that so stunned Europe. Close the borders to them? That’s like eating a starving man’s meal and then refusing to let emergency supplies through.

What’s worst about the demand for repression is that we saw what happened when we took that approach towards Iraq. It heightened tensions. It attracted recruits to the insurgent cause. It led to the unleashing of the forces we now have to combat.

Curiously, we also know a different way of behaving and know it works. When the troubles broke out in Northern Ireland, Britain’s initial response was also repressive. The consequences were Bloody Sunday, the Guildford 4, the Birmingham 6, a whole litany of other miscarriages of justice, murders, bombings and misery.

Eventually saner spirits prevailed. They understood that an insurgency only survives with the support of a disaffected population. So steps were taken to stop the disaffection. Housing, job opportunities and education were improved for the previously oppressed nationalist communities. Military action was maintained but at a lower level, while the accent moved more firmly on effective intelligence work, until the IRA was so penetrated that its decisions were being communicated to British security services in near real time.

Out of all this came the Good Friday peace agreement. There have been setbacks, but by and large it’s held. The result, for anyone who remembers Belfast before, is spectacular. It used to be a city under siege; today it’s vibrant and exciting. 

That approach works, and we know it works. Against ISIS, we may have to use more extensive brute force, to defeat it militarily. But we’ll also need far better intelligence work than France has produced so far. And we’ll need to support the communities that produce the terrorists.

The last step’s counter-intuitive. It means investing in the very people from whom the insurgency emerges. It means making them prosperous and tolerating their cultures and faiths. For those in France who are sickened by the Muslim veil or beard, and are saying so loudly since the attacks, that will be a hard pill to swallow.

Trust me, guys. It really works. Far better than repression, which is what ISIS wants – repression generates the oppressed, disaffected Sunnis who made it strong in the first place. ISIS hates the idea of well-off Muslim communities in the West, peacefully coexisting Shia and Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. 

Because they’ll snuff ISIS out.

Separated by a common language? Over-united more like. With some odd quirks

On both sides of the Atlantic, we love to quote the Shaw view that England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

A completely different view was expressed by the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. He’d been a leading aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, but emerged in the 1790s as an outspoken Anglophile. Which made him the nemesis of Thomas Jefferson, Anglophobe and friend of the French.

Hamilton told a leading British agent “I have always preferred a connection with you, to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”

Indeed. There is something out there which the French call the “Anglo-Saxon” mentality, and not as a compliment (they move quickly on to talk about globalisation and neo-liberalism). It tends to come out in a joint obsession between the two countries to put profit before pretty much anything – if Britain, as Napoleon claimed, is a nation of shopkeepers, the US is a country of mall operators – and to use military force against anyone who is even suspected of possibly jeopardising such a sacred way of life.

As a result, even an ostensibly Centre-Left government could end up trotting obediently into Iraq at the beck of possibly the most inept of US presidents, Dubya Bush. We’re still paying the price twelve years on. And it’s likely to get worse. Just because ISIS are a lot grimmer even than Al Qaida doesn’t mean we won’t face something still more dire down the line.

Yep. That’s the one we chose to follow into Iraq
Might have been useful to have spoken a different language:
he made no sense in ours

The community of thought which makes possible this kind of consensus, with all its beneficial consequences, surely owes much to the fact that on both sides, “we think in English.”

So – it’s more a matter of two nations (along with New Zealand, Australia and Canada – predominant whiteness plays a role) bound together, for better or for worse, by a common language.

What differences exist, are pretty insignificant. Does it really matter that Americans wear their pants outside, covering their underpants, while we keep our pants inside, with trousers over them? I think not.

Even so, from time to time I find some of the differences a little quaint. Quaint to the point of bizarre. Here’s a curious contrast between the two sides of the pond in the use of prepositions (little words that really matter in this common language of ours).

If I were to call in on my friend Tom, I would reckon I was visiting him. In the language the French persist in calling “Américain” I would, however, be visiting with him. That always strikes me as slightly odd. I feel that if I’m visiting with Tom, then we’re popping in on someone else, George perhaps. Together.

On the other hand, an American desiring to enter into correspondence with him, would write Tom. Without a preposition. Again, that puzzles me. Surely if you write Tom, you have to be penning a piece of fiction? Shakespeare wrote Touchstone, and pretty clever it was too. If he’d wanted to send him a letter, he’d have written to Touchstone. Which, if he’d expected a reply at least, would have been pretty silly. 

Branagh playing Touchstone in As You Like It.
He did well to write him, but never wrote to him.
And wouldn't have had a reply anyway

Occasionally I listen to books instead of reading them. Recently, I was listening to a book being read by someone called Edward Herrmann. What struck me about him was that, despite being American, he pronounced the word “era” in a way that distinguishes it from “error”. As I do. Generally, on the other side of the pond, the words are indistinguishable when spoken.

This is awkward if we wanted to describe, say, the time of Dubya, if I can return to that sad period. In British English, even in the spoken language, we can distinguish the two words in “error era.” In Américain, they’re the same. You’ve got to admit that would sound a bit silly.

On the other hand, you might argue that to sound silly when talking about the Dubya presidency is entirely appropriate.

And you may well be right.

Je suis Charlie: terrorism and free speech

Occasionally college lecturers get things right, and I’ve never forgotten the one who told us that the point about really good satire, is that it had to make you feel uncomfortable. You laugh as you read it, but you turn the page in apprehension, for fear you were about to find yourself targeted.

That’s Charlie Hebdo. Hilarious at times, uncomfortable at others. Plenty to stimulate thought and provoke smiles, plenty to offend and annoy. Exactly what satire is supposed to do.

It’s the impact satire can have that makes it so important. It teaches us not to take our sacred cows too seriously. If we learn that lesson, we’ll probably learn that the cows weren’t that sacred in the first place. It’s an important stance to take towards governments, always inclined to view themselves as far more important than they really are (I was in Italy for two months in 1979: when I got there, the country had been without a government for four months; when I left, it had been without a government for six months. But the restaurants were open, the shops sold goods, the buses ran… It was an object lesson to the world.)

A bunch that needs laughing at and relativising even more than government is religious fundamentalism. To join their numbers, you have to have your sense of humour surgically excised. Incapable of seeing your cows as anything but sacred, you also insist that everyone else shares your reverence for them.

Unfortunately, few organisations are as irreverent as Charlie Hebdo. It didn’t just get up Muslim noses. Before the attack of 7 January, the most serious threat the magazine had faced was in 1970, when it was called Hebdo Hara Kiri. Charles de Gaulle, former president and hero of the Second World War, died in his home village of Colombey-les–deux-Eglises, just ten days after a terrible disco fire elsewhere in France had killed 146. The weekly’s headline after the ex-President’s death was “Tragic Dance at Colombey: one dead”.

Announcing the news of de Gaulle's death
The move to suspend the publication
led to its taking the name Charlie Hebdo

The Minister of the Interior, as appreciative of humour as any fundamentalist, suspended the paper’s right to publish, which changed its name to Charlie Hebdo to get round the ban.

But the paper was most famous for its irreverence for Islam. They repeatedly printed cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, in clear breach of Muslim teaching. Humourless Islamists responded on 7 January with the only weapons they knew how to use: real ones. They made another attempt to shut the publication, by killing two policemen outside the building and ten staff inside it, including the editor and cartoonist Charb, and the cartoonists Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski.

The shootings will, however, do their cause no good. The immediate reaction has been to rally huge numbers round the journal and speak out in favour of the absolute right of free speech. Many leading figures, in France and around the world, have leaped to defend that right, even the political heirs of those who tried to shut the publication in 1970. And, as the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz points out, cartoons that had previously only been seen in France will now be seen around the world. Exactly the opposite of what the terrorists intended.

Steve Bell gets it exactly right in the Guardian

Nor will the action slow the determination of those fighting ISIS and Al Qaida in the Middle East. If anything, all it will do is strengthen support for operations against them. Again, precisely the opposite of what the terrorists’ cause should be seeking.

The depressing effect will be in increasing division within our own, Western societies. There were a handful of attacks on Muslim centres in France yesterday: the nation has nearly seven million Muslims; three carried out a vicious attack; there are people stupid enough to try to pin the blame of the three on the millions, and to resort to violence themselves against the violence they denounce.

As stupid was the statement made in Britain by Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right movement UKIP, who deplored the presence in this country of a fifth column “holding our passports that hate us.” He’s right to want to put an end to these corrosive forces that try to divide our people against each other and stir up bitterness between us. He can personally do something about the problem, by shutting up himself and disbanding his noxious little party.

I take comfort from the fact that journalists in France have rallied round and will help get next week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo out. The best news? It will have a print run of a million copies, against the usual 45,000. You can bet it’ll sell out. You can also bet it’ll contain a cartoon of the prophet.

A fitting response to this week’s outrage.

My favourite Muhammad cartoon is from Le Monde not Charlie Hebdo:
Plantu writing over and over again "I must not draw Muhammad"