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.

Ian Paisley: salute a man who found a voice for reason

It’s difficult to work up much of a sense of bereavement over the death of a politician who, during their lives, voiced views that we find toxic.

For my part, I felt no desire to celebrate Maggie Thatcher’s departure – I reserved that for her fall from her office, after which it was a matter of complete indifference to me whether or not she still lived, since she no longer exerted any direct influence over things I held dear. That baleful influence persists, for instance in the 2008 crash caused by the deregulation of banking presided over by Ronald Reagan with her enthusiastic support, but it’s exercised by others who deserve our opposition today. When she died, the matter seemed to me just a footnote in the news.

But I feel different about the death of Ian Paisley yesterday. While I have no sympathy with Ulster Unionism, I can appreciate the stature of the man. He was a far greater figure than Thatcher could ever be.

Ian Paisley in his prime: the megaphone voice of Protestant Unionism

Thatcher was a politician without compassion. She ruthlessly destroyed whole communities in pursuit of beliefs she held with utterly dogmatic, unshakeable certainty. She was incapable of giving any consideration to the possibility that she might be wrong on any issue. It strikes me as particularly powerful wisdom on the part of Tim Minchin to point out that while it’s true, as the popular expression has it, that opinions are like arseholes in that everyone has one, opinions differ from arseholes in requiring to be regularly and closely scrutinised.

It always struck me about Thatcher that she would never have been open to the idea that an opinion of hers deserved scrutiny. She would probably have denied that anything she believed was tenuous enough to be called an opinion rather than a fact. But then I doubt she could have been prevailed upon to admit she even had an arsehole: she took herself far too seriously to allow anything so low.

It was that utter humourlessness, particularly with regard to herself, that was her defining characteristic. Her determination to be taken seriously meant she couldn’t admit that any view contrary to her own might have merit; that made her rigid and intolerant. It was those qualities that led to her ultimate fall. Having pummelled her way into gaining acceptance of such policies as the poll tax, she made herself unelectable, the deadliest of sins within the Tory Party. After having worshipped her for more than a decade, it unceremoniously knifed her.

Now Paisley seemed to be a politician cut from exactly the same block. The phrase most associated with him, a continuation of Edward Carson’s “no surrender” that did such damage to Ulster for decades, was his notorious “never, never, never.” It echoed Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” (Tina as we came to know it, though not uniformly with affection).

There is always an alternative. Paisley unlike Thatcher saw it. On 12 July 2006, eight years after the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement, Paisley said of Sinn Fein that they “are not fit to be in partnership with decent people. They are not fit to be in the government of Northern Ireland and it will be over our dead bodies if they ever get there.”

And yet on 8 May 2007, a mere ten months later, he became First Minister of Northern Ireland, with as his deputy Martin McGuinness, who is not only from Sinn Fein but a known former IRA commander. Paisley said “today at long last we are starting upon the road — I emphasise starting — which I believe will take us to lasting peace in our province.”

Now it takes real courage to make that kind of a turn in politics, or in anything else. To do it for the sake of peace in a riven community shows real greatness.

Thatcher famously – or infamously – said “the lady’s not for turning.” Paisley turned on a question central to his whole political being. And proved himself far the finer statesman by doing so.

Rest in peace, Ian Paisley. My disagreement remains as strong as ever. But it comes with a substantial dose of admiration too.



Postscript. I was once told a story about Paisley whose truth I’ve never been able to establish, and indeed have never investigated: I’d hate to discover it was an invention.

Bernadette Devlin was for a while an MP at Westminster, and the sworn enemy of everything Paisley stood for. She once told him that unionism was unfair. He admitted that she was right but pointed out that he’d “rather be British than be fair.” That at least has the merit of being honest, especially as many Brits like to believe that to be British is to be essentially fair – or at least to believe in fair play, which may or may not be the same thing.

Bernadette Devlin: MP at 22
Firebrand nationalist and nemesis of Paisley

The story I was told was that after a late night sitting of the House of Commons, Paisley was waiting for a taxi in the queue outside the Palace of Westminster. A taxi drew up, but he stood back to let the next MP have it.

“But it’s your cab,” the other replied.

“I’m waiting for Bernadette,” he told him.

Bernadette was a young woman, it was late and London is a big and sometimes dangerous place. She might be a sworn adversary, but Paisley saw it as his duty to see her safely home.

A BBC journalist told an anecdote last night which rather suggested that this might be true.

He found himself, by coincidence, sitting next to Paisley on a plane to London. They chatted all the way over, but Paisley spoke so softly that the correspondent had difficulty hearing him over the engine noise. As they arrived in London, they were besieged by reporters. Paisley switched on his trademark megaphone voice and used it to proclaim some inflammatory and unbending statement or another.

And then turned to his travelling companion and winked.

In praise of Blair the Peacemaker

What a disappointment it would be to meet one of the great figures of our time and find they didn’t live up to their reputation.

Imagine meeting George W. Bush (Bush the lesser, that is, or perhaps I should say, even lesser) and find him suave, witty, insightful?

Meeting Robert Mugabe and finding him gentle, cordial and sensitive?

Meeting Maggie Thatcher and finding her self-effacing, diffident and open to the ideas of others?

Equally, it would be horrible to discover a Tony Blair unafraid to admit his errors, happy to share credit for his achievements and prepared to atone for, or at least admit to, his untruths.

Tony Blair showing how foreign self-satisfaction is to him

So it was wonderful to see Blair writing in the Guardian about his ‘pain, passion and empathy’ and what he’s learned about peacemaking. His article is a fine tribute to his efforts as a peacemaker, making it quite unnecessary for me to sing his praises. It is also a glorious example of the use of the truth to deceive. 

It’s true that the Good Friday agreement which brought a measure of peace to Northern Ireland, was Tony Blair’s greatest achievement. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t celebrate it, and in this article he does little else. It’s also true that he speaks highly of the Irish players in the drama, including the then Prime Minister of the Republic, Bertie Ahern. He even gives credit to the Americans, Bill Clinton and George Mitchell, but then he never suffered from any failure to behave obsequiously towards leaders from the United States.

What he doesn’t mention is any of the British involved in the process. Mo Mowlam, for instance, gets no mention, but then she was an independent-minded woman not unwilling to tell Blair when she disagreed with him. Nor does he mention John Major, his predecessor as Prime Minister.

Now I don’t think anyone can accuse me of knowingly giving a Conservative credit for anything unless I absolutely have to, but the Good Friday agreement didn’t leap from Blair’s brain fully-fledged, like Pallas Athene springing fully-armed from the head of Zeus. It took years of careful preparation, rather longer than the eleven months Blair had between his election and the signing ceremony.

After years of mishandling of the province by Margaret Thatcher, descending to its most ludicrous when she had actors voicing over the words of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in TV interviews (so we weren’t hiding his words, just his voice), John Major put in some serious spadework. It involved both judicious use of intelligence operations and early, secret negotiations. It prepared the ground for Blair’s triumph.

See what I mean? Blair’s right to claim the success, wrong to hide the contribution of others to making his breakthrough possible.

But, of course, Blair’s worst silence in the article doesn’t concern Northern Ireland at all.

When we think of Blair, what is the first issue that comes to mind? Is it really Northern Ireland? Is it indeed peacemaking?

Surely the name of Blair will be forever associated with a another part of the world, and with war far more than with peace. And not any old war: a probably illegal war, waged in Iraq for no better reason than one of the worst American presidents of all time, Dubya, wanted to. It was a war, furthermore, which threw the region into even worse turmoil than before while costing an obscene number of lives.

That’s Blair’s real legacy. And it has given him the reputation for duplicity that haunts him still – deservedly: we’ve discovered from the Snowden revelations that the intelligence services know a great deal more than they should, not a great deal less. A secondary effect of those disclosures must be that they had a good idea there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and so Blair was either unforgivably ignorant of the truth, or recklessly economical with it.

Yet of that he had nothing to say in his article.

Perhaps a second article, a sequel, in which he admits his lying and his errors. Wouldn’t that be a refreshing change? Perhaps a shock though, as completely out of character.

And I certainly won’t be holding my breath.