Show of strength (19 March 2004)

Glen Rangwala unmasks the dangerous thinking behind the ‘Blair doctrine’.

Published in Labour Left Briefing (April 2004)

On 5th March, Tony Blair offered his new doctrine on international affairs to an audience of businessmen in Sedgefield. This was a call for "a new type of war" to be directed at the prospect of terrorists possessing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The Prime Minister invoked the possibility of "Armageddon" to explain the scale of his fears that led him into launching an invasion of Iraq. Six days later, ten bombs in Madrid produced devastation on a scale, with over two hundred killed and a thousand injured, that many of its witnesses described in similarly apocalyptic terms. So, was Blair correct after all, then, that inaction in response to the threat from Islamist fanatics, when the evidence of the carnage they wish to cause is so palpable, would be to run the greatest risk of all?

In one sense, the answer is yes. Over the past few years, the nature of many radical Islamist groups has changed dramatically. From the mid-1960s through the Iranian revolution of 1979 and into the 1990s, the primary aim of most radical Islamist groups had been to capture power within predominantly Muslim countries, and so to transform the state into one that rules by (their interpretation of) Islamic law. These movements could threaten western economic interests and personnel based in those countries, but they were rarely a threat to the overwhelming majority of people in the US and UK.

This has now changed: Islamist movements in much of the world, from the Latin American émigré groups to the Philippines, no longer talk primarily about their desire to transform their own state; that's old hat for many of them. Instead, all the emphasis is now on the global war, seen as Bush's crusades against the Muslim world. The massacres caused through bombs in Europe and North America are seen as part of a global struggle to defeat a bitter enemy. As Blair put it, to think that a few more arrests of prominent Islamists would significantly reduce the risk of further large-scale attacks would be naïve and irresponsible.

But there is a problem with Blair's argument. The speech in Sedgefield was not only to propose a future course; it was primarily to explain why Iraq was attacked a year ago. The attack occurred when UN weapons inspections were working better than ever before in verifying the past destruction of Iraq's WMD programmes. Even the prime minister does not claim that Saddam Hussein was transferring chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to Islamist terrorists.

But Blair gave a different form of justification for that war. "Suppose at that point we had backed away," he hypothesised. "The will to act on the issue of rogue states and WMD would have been shown to be hollow. The terrorists, watching and analysing every move in our psychology as they do, would have taken heart." Put plainly, we invaded, not because Iraq was any sort of threat, but because to have not gone to war would have made the US and UK look weak.

This of course is the long-standing argument of the neo-cons in the US. They proclaimed throughout the late 1990s that the US had lost its image of power worldwide because of its perceived reluctance to make largescale displays of military force. The way for them, and now it seems for Blair, to dissuade further attacks by states or terrorist groups is to demonstrate one's military might. Terrorists strike you because they think you're weak; they respect you if they think you're strong.

This line of reasoning is deeply flawed in its understanding of the world. If it becomes part of policy-making, it is hard to think of a more dangerous approach to take. The fact is that nothing has brought support for violence against civilians in Europe and America to greater levels than the aggression conducted by the US and Britain against Iraq. Far from building respect, the invasion has had the effect of polarising sentiment, providing recruits and a supportive base for terrorist groups. An image of western strength only gives prestige to those groups who go about challenging the west and demonstrating its vulnerabilities.

A few days after the Madrid bombs, the Washington-based Pew Research Center released a report on global attitudes, conducted under the direction of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Among the pro-US countries of the Muslim world, it found that 65% of the population of nuclear-armed Pakistan had a favourable impression of Osama bin Laden (a further 26% refused to answer). Around 55% of Jordanians agreed with this sentiment - although in Blair meeting's with King Abdullah of Jordan earlier in March, he proclaimed that relations between Jordanians and the British were "excellent". And more Moroccans support bin Laden than oppose him.

These results are highly disturbing, particularly as they demonstrate a much greater level of support for bin Laden than two years ago. But they are hardly incomprehensible. To think of them as a result of the news coverage of Arab satellite stations, as members of the US administration have claimed, is to have taken leave of all political responsibility and sense. Instead, they correspond to a widespread perception of a US attempt to maintain control of the Middle East in particular, a stated goal of President Bush's national security strategy.

This point was made well by Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA. "The whole point is to make sure that the US learns that such interventionist projects are flights of dangerous folly," he wrote on the day before the carnage in Madrid in reference to another bombing. "Radicals seek to drive home the point that Americans should never contemplate for even a moment the ambition of visiting American military force against the Muslim world ever again."

Voters in Spain have realised that their former prime minister's sponsorship of interventionist projects has led to a situation in which those who threaten violence against them draw support across a wide swathe of the world. The British right-wing press has howled that the Spanish electorate has given in to terrorism - as if it should be the responsibility of the Spanish to be attacked so that we might be spared. That attention would be better spent on those in government who have spent the past years feeding it at untold costs to all of us.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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