Responding to the Brussels attacks: how to get it wrong

It’s Brussels this time. At least another 31 deaths and over 200 injured. Harrowing, dismal events, and the latest in a series of them.

The scene at Zaventem airport, Brussels, soon after the explosion

That’s bad enough, but then it gets worse. As usual, our own reaction will magnify the damage and give the terrorists a victory they’ve done nothing to merit.

The Belgian government, for instance, will go way over the top with security measures, making life much safer but far less convenient. People will have to leave earlier to get to work on time, earlier to catch a plane. So as well as the tragedy inflicted on the families immediately involved, the terrorists will leave a lasting mark on the economy of a major European capital, making it more difficult to run.

The British government has added to the mix by advising against travel to Brussels. I have no particular reason to go to Brussels at the moment, but fear of terrorism wouldn’t stop me: the place is going to be one of the safest on earth for the new few weeks or months. Just a pig to get around.

In any case, it would be nonsense to fear Brussels, since I commute into London. That city has to be facing a risk of terrorism at least as high as at any time since the IRA campaign of the eighties. But I still feel I’m much more likely to be involved in a traffic accident than caught up in a terrorist outrage; since I’m not going to stop crossing roads or driving a car, it makes no sense avoiding London.

Besides, refusing to be deflected denies the terrorists an easy win.

There are other, still more vital ways, of denying them. One of the most important is to resist the urge to bomb them out of existence. It was that kind of thinking that got us into our difficulties in the first place: an illegitimate, unnecessary war in Iraq spawned ISIS. The Syrian civil war has become a proxy for East-West clashes as well as tensions inside the Middle East, that are wreaking havoc in Libya and Yemen too. We’ve brutalised a great many young men, and not a few young women, and given them something to avenge.

Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy on the Syria crisis, told the Guardian that, following the Brussels attacks:

The message we are drawing out is that we need to end the fires of war. We need to find a political solution in Syria to make sure we can all concentrate on what is the real danger, in the world and in Syria.

Take away the underlying conflict, and you take away its expression in other countries – in Turkey, which suffers more often than most, but also in Europe.

Going a step further, we also have to resist the temptation to blame the outrages on Islam or Molenbeek, the district of Brussels from which the attacks against both Brussels and Paris came. Donald Trump is naturally attacking immigration itself as the source of such terrorism, trying to blame entire populations for the work of a handful of people; in Britain, the far-right UKIP attacks open borders in Europe, ignoring the fact that Salah Abdeslam, who led on the logistics of the Paris attack, was stopped at the Hungarian-Austrian border in September 2015, but was allowed to drive on. The failure wasn’t due to the Schengen group’s open borders but to lousy intelligence.

Stigmatising a European Muslim population of several million for the actions of a tiny minority simply creates more enemies for us; targeting Molenbeek would be just as counter-productive, since what makes the district generate aggression so easily is precisely that it’s so poorly assimilated. 30% are out of work. One in three of the population is foreign. Increasing its pain will do no one any good.

The IRA campaign in Northern Ireland was waged by a few hundred activists. Behind them, however, there were probably many thousands of passive supporters who provided the active members with information and shelter as necessary.

Eventually, once Westminster had woken up to a more intelligent approach to the province than military repression, huge sums were invested into Northern Ireland to revive the economy. A long campaign led to reasonably fair access to jobs, housing and education for Protestants and Catholics. The effect was to drain the swamp that gave the activists their support.

At the same time, intense and highly competent intelligence work enabled the security services to break up IRA groups and thwart attacks. After all, if the IRA had to depend on many thousands, it was impossible not to have leaks to the police, and good intelligence took advantage of them.

It’s clear, if only from the fact that Abdeslam escaped arrest in Molenbeek for several months, that there’s an extensive passive support network there too. Again, there must have been leaks. But were the security forces set up to take advantage of them? Belgium is, for instance, coming to terms with the fact that the police force has far too few Arabic speakers.

Whatever Trump may say, Molenbeek doesn’t demonstrate a failure of the Community, merely a failure of Community policing.

Will we be smart enough to apply the lessons of Northern Ireland elsewhere in Europe? To respond to the latest attacks not with increased repression but with investment and highly-competent intelligence work? To help all our sad little Molenbeeks, across the continent, out of their misery rather than drive them deeper into it?

Which boils down to one simple question: will we avoid giving the terrorists yet another undeserved victory?

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.

Strange tale of an extremist, a Prince and the not-so saintly Maggie

It was ironic to see the pictures of Prince Charles, tea cup in one hand, using the other for an apparently cordial handshake with Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland and for many on this side of the water, one of the great bogeymen of all time.

The Prince and the Extremist
Extraordinary cordiality

He repeatedly leaned forward towards the Prince, apparently exchanging not merely remarks, but confidences. This is particularly surprising because they both have bitter history against the other, as Adams made clear yesterday: he blames the British paras for the terrible killing of fourteen people on Bloody Sunday, in Derry, in 1972, and the Prince is the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment. However, Adams did also recognise that Charles had “been bereaved by the actions of Republicans”, in a reference to the IRA killing of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India and a relative to whom Charles was particularly close (his “honorary grandfather”).

None of this was half so ironic, for me, than the contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s attitude when she was Prime Minister. She famously talked about the need “to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend”. That led to one of the more risible aspects of her long and painful reign: she banned the voices of extremist organisations being heard on British TV.

This meant that for six years, we could see Gerry Adams on our TVs, we could see his lips forming the words he was pronouncing, but we couldn’t hear his voice pronouncing them: instead, an actor would dub them in over the picture. Exactly the same words, mind you. The “oxygen of publicity” denial didn’t affect his message, only his voice.

This is one of the less well-remembered aspects of the Thatcher years. I always remind her fans of it, when they present her as some kind of secular saint, as they regularly do. It was an entirely pointless act, and damaged only Britain: you can imagine how difficult it made it to argue against freedom of speech limitations in other countries.

The ban kept running after Thatcher fell, perhaps out of deference to her memory. But finally, in 1994, her successor John Major dropped it. The only people who regretted its passing were the actors who were called on to dub the voices: it had been a nice little earner for them.

Today, that same Gerry Adams met and chatted for a few minutes to the next in line to the British throne. With every appearance of cordiality. No actor was on hand to repeat his words for him. And the earth didn’t fall into the sky.

In fact, what the incident did was to strengthen the growing bonds between erstwhile adversaries in Northern Ireland, as the Queen herself did three years ago, when she met Adams’ colleague and the current Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuiness, and shook his hand.

Rather underlying the fact that if you want to bring peace anywhere, it’s a lot more effective to come to terms with your resentments, however deeply held they may be, however justified, and listen to your adversary. A lot more effective than spreading further hatred by labelling him a terrorist and extremist. And then trying to shut him up.

And if it turns out you actually can't, it’s laughable as well as ineffective

From humourless Thatcher to paranoid Cameron

During last Friday’s ‘Reunion’ programme on BBC Radio 4, former Sun jounralist Wendy Henry told Sue MacGregor about the time she met Margaret Thatcher.

I went to Downing street to interview her, and I’m a little ashamed to say that I lost control of the interview around about the third minute... She just spoke on and and on and I remember desperately sitting there thinking “Oh my God, what am I going to get out of this?”

Then I made the fatal mistake of trying to inject a bit of humour, I suppose probably very sort of tasteless humour. We were talking about Ireland and conflict and things like that, and I said, “Oh well, I know how we can solve the problem.”

She went “Oh, really?”

I said, “Yes, if we take the IRA and put them on the Gaza strip, and we take the PLO and we put them on the Falls Road, we’ll have solved the problem.”

There was a deathly silence and she said “Right, well, I think this interview is finished” ... so I slunk off.

Wendy Henry’s joke wasn’t that amusing, so the funniest part of the interview is Thatcher’s response: grim, self-important and above all humourless. It amazes me that a country like Britain which prides itself on its sense of humour still insists on sanctifying her. She was so dour, so dull, so unbendingly solemn.

Not all Tory Prime Ministers were like that. Winston Churchill was famed for his banter. When Manny Shinwell, a fine figure of the radical socialist Left, asked Churchill if he could borrow twopence to phone a friend, Churchill apparently offered him four pence with the words “phone all of them”.

It’s not as though Churchill was any less courageous than Thatcher. He led the country at a time of far worse danger to it, and it was his combination of courage and humour that made him so admired.

If we could face them with a smile, why are we so panicked today?

Thatcher faced risks too, redoubtable enemies even though they were not as dangerous as the Nazis. It might have been her lack of humour stopped her seeing how risible was the most ludicrous measure she adopted against them. 

She argued that terrorists ought to be denied the “oxygen of publicity.” Now one can argue against this proposition. One can argue that it implies a restriction of a fundamental right, freedom of speech. One can argue that it is better to hear what the terrorists have to say than to leave them in the dark to hatch ever more desperate plots. But even if one agrees that they should be denied publicity, one can’t argue is that it makes any kind of sense to allow their words to be heard, though not their voices.

That was the situation Thatcher created. In 1988, she banned leaders of organisations associated with terrorism from being heard on broadcast media. So for six years we had the ridiculous sight of people like Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness being interviewed on TV with an actor dubbing the words they were speaking. Words but not voices? Was that denying them the oxygen of publicity?

That was only the most laughable act against the IRA. Far less funny were the repeated attempts to crush them by military force, which created martyrs and gave the movement momentum, or the use of deeply anti-democratic actions, such as detention without trial, which also attracted new support for the cause. None of these were specifically Tory, incidentally: Labour was just as guilty of them.

If the troubles came to an end, it wasn’t ludicrous restrictions on broadcasts or administrative measures taken in flagrant contradiction of democratic principles that beat the IRA, it was outstanding intelligence operations leading to deep penetration of paramilitary organisations, and action to alleviate the difficulties of the minority in Northern Ireland, so that the IRA was denied the pool of disaffection from which it recruited.

Now roll forward nearly twenty years.

Britain once more faces a terrorist threat. Indeed, there hasn’t been a moment since the Good Friday agreement when we haven’t faced such a threat. And what has been the reaction of government, and indeed of much of the people? Churchillian good humour and a courageous stand to protect the very rights the terrorists threaten? Sadly, anything but.

No, it’s back to authoritarian measures. Worries that young Britons who have travelled to the Middle East to join organisations such as the Islamic State, might come back as hardened jihadists, is leading to a popular wish to deny them entry to the country. That’s denying British citizens entry to Britain. And on mere suspicion.

That undermines the very foundation of what citizenship means.

Certainly some of those banned, if these powers are adopted, will be wholly innocent of any offence or even the intention of committing an offence. The fact of banning even real jihadists will whip up sympathy for them and probably for their cause. The move will be as counter-productive as detention without trial was in Northern Ireland.

And what threat do we face? We used to have IRA attacks in London every couple of months. We have yet to see a single attack by Isis. IRA members could travel to the rest of the UK without passports and without any kind of check. Isis members coming back from Iraq will be known to the security services. It’s hard to see how this can be as serious a threat as Thatcher faced, let alone Churchill.

It’s time to grow a little courage. See the threat for what it is. Prepare for it, arm ourselves against it (above all with more of the kind of intelligence that beat the IRA), but don’t give up our fundamental principles in panic at it.

And above all – find that old Churchillian sense of humour. Laugh a little. Overcome fear. And only then dig in.

Tomorrow's leaders seen by yesterday's target

Ten years as a University of London student are an eloquent testament to my misspent youth. Single-mindedly buckling down to study was not my top priority. Still, I had a lot of fun, and not all of it morally reprehensible. 

But among a lot of good memories one that jars was the low-grade anxiety I felt every time I stepped onto a train, a bus or an underground. It became second-nature to check under seats, in overheard racks, up and down aisles. Was there an abandoned case or a bag? ‘Who,’ someone might ask, ‘does that bag belong to?’

I never saw a bomb explode but twice heard them. And once the police stopped me leaving a Chinatown restaurant for several hours, while they cleared the streets in response to an IRA bomb threat. The restaurant had a plate glass front and, although my colleague and I were sitting at the back, it was quite obvious that if a bomb went off nearby the flying glass would have a distinctly career-limiting effect on us. 

Now, I’m a strong supporter of the Irish Republican cause. It strikes me as indefensible that six out of 32 counties on one island should be run by the island next door. It seems almost obscene that for 25 years and more young Englishmen were sent out there to become targets or, even worse, perpetrators of brutal violence.

Not only do I believe that the Republic should take over Ulster, I often toy with the idea that it could take over the rest of the UK too. The role of the Catholic Church is unattractive, but surely waning, and at least absorption by Dublin would rid us of the monarchy and the House of Lords and perhaps reduce our inclination to get mixed up in further foreign wars.

But my enthusiasm for republicanism stops short of wanting to be cut to shreds in furtherance of its aims. Even in a Chinese restaurant. However good the restaurant. I find it hard to maintain much cordiality to anyone likely to be cut me into little bits.

Nor am I partial to the people who fund actions to spoil my meals in this way. Way up at the top of the list in eighties was a bunch called Noraid, the Irish Northern Aid Committee. This is a US organisation which strenuously denies ever having financed terrorism, which presumably means that it only proves the oppressive nature of the American establishment that the Department of Justice obliged to Noraid to list the Provisiona IRA as its ‘foreign principal.’ 

All this is interesting because all those upstanding gentlemen currently bucking for the Republican presidential nomination are making such mileage out of their commitment to eradicate terrorism. And not just the candidates: a leading light of the Republican Right is Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who has gone so far as to organise hearings into the radicalisation of American Muslims. 

‘80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists’,  he declared in 2004, describing this presence as ‘an enemy living amongst us.’ Curiously, this same King was a long-time leading supporter of Noraid. Only last year he declared that ‘if civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it.’ 

It’s nice to know that had the IRA blown my restaurant to pieces and taken me out in a storm of glass shards, Congressman King would have found this regrettable. On that point, at least, he and I are in complete agreement.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
But it's all the same if you're at the receiving end

At the risk of seeming a bit picky, though, I’d feel more comfortable if he denounced the terrorism that targeted me back then with the same vehemence he directs at the Islamic variety today. Otherwise one might suspect it isn’t so much terrorism he abhors as Moslems.

Now that's a position it would be nice see Santorum and Gingrich distance themselves from, wouldn’t it? 

But I'm not holding my breath.

Is the legacy of the IRA a load of old rubbish?

The central problem in Anglo-Irish relations is that the Irish remember too much, and the English forget too quickly. Most Englishmen barely remember who Oliver Cromwell was. In Ireland, his armies might as well be rampaging through the land still, slaughtering the people in an orgy of self-righteous fury.

The same forgetfulness afflicts us now. We’re losing sight of how things were only twenty years ago. Throughout the 1980s, when I regularly travelled into Central London from the suburbs, it became a routine to check for abandoned packages on the overhead shelves or under the seats every time I got into a train. While I never saw a bomb go off, I twice heard them: it wasn’t Belfast, far less Beirut, but London was an uneasy place.

Today, practically no trace remains of those troubled days. People, and above all politicians, love to whip up anxiety over Moslem terrorism, but they’re not even in the same league as the IRA. Why, apart from the casualties, the IRA regularly shut down the main stations or other public places by the simple expedient of phoning in a bomb warning, sometimes without going to the trouble of actually planting a bomb. You had to admire their economy of effort, to say nothing of their sheer deviousness.

Still, if there is little trace of those times today, they have at least left one small legacy. I’m reminded of it every time I go through the glorious, airy and brilliantly constructed main hall of St Pancras International station, something I’m obliged to do a couple of times on most days. The architecture is wonderful, the layout charming, the atmosphere uplifting – but there isn’t a single litter bin.

Now this is a direct result of the IRA campaign. Bins were far too easy places to plant bombs, so in the course of the eighties, they were done away with throughout London. In recent years, they’ve been gradually coming back, usually in the form of clear plastic bags, in which I presume it would be relatively easy to spot a bomb (if, say, it comes with trailing wires or perhaps a helpful label ‘bomb’).

But St Pancras is hanging on grimly to the tradition of the last two decades and resisting the reintroduction of waste bins. I asked a cleaner once ‘so where do I leave my coffee cup?’

‘On a table or a chair, anywhere you like,’ came the answer, ‘we’ll clear it up.’

So that’s what I do. I dump my rubbish any old where in the station, and each time I think of the IRA.

My personal tribute to the IRA

A fitting monument, I’d say.