Civitas Blog

Latest grounds for bolstering my fear that jihad is coming ever-closer to our local neighbourhoods take the form of a two page report in today’s Times about the recent pronouncements of two British-born converts to Islam.

One of these is a 31 year man whose family hailed from Jamaica. Formerly known as Trevor to some of his acquaintances in Hackney where he grew up before he converted to Islam at the age of 17, this man then acquired what, given his reported pronouncements, is the far more appropriately militant-sounding name of ‘Abu Izzadeen’ which means ‘Might of the Faith’. According to the Times report, the newspaper has acquired transcripts of his sermons in which he discussed killing the Prime Minister. It also reports him as having previously described the July 7 bombings as ‘completely praiseworthy’.

Reassuring to know I might be sharing my tube-carriage on my way home tonight with this friendly-sounding gentleman, or worse still with impressionable youngsters who might have read his sermons and pronouncements.

The other Muslim whose pronouncement are reported in today Times is a middle aged man, originally named David Wyatt when he settled in Britain in 1967 and when, according to the report, he formed part of the leadership of the neo-Nazi group, Combat 18. This was before he converted to Islam, whereupon he acquired the new name of Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt.

Although reported as having described himself as having once been ‘staunchly opposed to non-white immigration into Britain’ and twice jailed for violence in pursuit of his erstwhile political aims, he is reported as having recently described Muslims as affording the best hope for combating Zionism and the West which he regards as having become subservient to Zionism. He is quoted as having said he now believes that ‘pure authentic Islam of the revival which recognises practical jihad as a duty… the force capable of fighting and destroying the … arrogance of the West …for [whom] nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionism…’ He is also reported as having said of the form of jihad to which he is now committed:

‘ This may be a long war, of decades or more – and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad – to take part in the fight to free our lands of the kuffar [unbelievers]. Jihad is our duty.’

If the recent pronouncements of these two British compatriots are not cause enough for unease, some of the recent postures and pronouncements of Iranian leader President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are no more reassuring.

Many here and elsewhere, of course, believe Britain has brought the threat of Islamist terror upon itself by having joined the US in a misguided and unnecessary invasion of Iraq to rid it of WMD it did not possess and remove a regime with links to Al Qaeda that it did not have.

Many who share this view claim the threat the West currently faces from Islamist aggression is only likely to increase should any attempt be made, either by the US or Israel, to launch a strike against Iranian nuclear reactors in an endeavour to destroy that country’s capability of acquiring nuclear weapons.

One prominent advocate of such a point of view presents the case for it in an op-ed that appears today in the very same issue of the Times as contains the news report remarked on above. In an article bearing the title ‘The madness of bombing Iran’ , Robert Skidelsky offers the following four reasons against a pre-emptive American or Israeli strike against Iran. Such a strike would be, he argues illegal, immoral unnecessary and counter-productive.

It would be illegal, because contrary to international law if carried out without UN authorisation.

It would be immoral for the same reasons as was the Iraqi invasion – viz the absence of incontrovertible evidence that the target of the attack posed an imminent threat to the US or of one of its strategic allies. Without such evidence, of which Skidelsky claims there is no more in the case of Iran as there was in the case of Iraq, any such a form of strike is an act of aggression rather than of defence.

It is not needed to ensure Iran never puts its nuclear reactors to military use. A beefed-up regime of UN inspection, something allowable under the terms of the on Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory would suffice to do this job as effectively.

Finally, such a strike against Iran would be counterproductive in reducing the threat of Islamist terror against the West, as well as economically damaging to it. It would enflame Muslims animosity towards the West as well as be economically damaging by encouraging Middle Eastern insurgency that would interrupt Middle Eastern oil supplies to the West and raise the price of oil.

The un-wisdom of any future strike against Iran as well as that of the past invasion of Iraq is also the theme of an article by Alan Dershowitz in this week’s Spectator entitled ‘We should attack Iran – but we can’t’.

In it, Dershowitz claims Iran does pose a nuclear threat in the short to medium term, if not imminently. Moreover, the US has the technical capacity to neutralise that threat. But, so he argues, because it made such a mess by going to war unnecessarily in Iraq, it can no longer carry out a strike against Iran because American public opinion would not tolerate a further war.

His argument is that, had the US not gone to war against Iraq, it would have been better able than it now finds to tackle the very real threat Iran poses, unlike Iraq under Saddam which, in Dershowitz’s view, never really was one.

Israel is not similarly inhibited by domestic public opinion from making a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. But while it has the will, it lacks the capacity of the US to ensure that any unilateral strike by it will not do more harm than good. For lsrael cannot unilaterally bring down the Iranian regime, and any Israeli strike against Iran would only serve to strengthen that regime and its resolve to develop a nuclear capability with which to bring Israel down.

The sub-text of Dershowitz’s piece seems to be that the US did itself and Israel no favours in having gone to war against Iraq.

Hence, the title of my present blog: Oh! What a Lonely War that the British and American forces are now fighting in the Middle East. How few supporters and how many enemies they seem to have both at home and abroad.

However, they do have at least one supporter here in the form of yours truly who finds the arguments advanced by Skidelsky and Dershowitz against pre-emptive war in both Iraq and Iran deeply flawed.

Consider Skidelsky’s arguments first.

A US strike against Iran would not be illegal under international law, if militiary assistance had been requested by an ally who could justifiably claim Iran to be engaged in carrying out or supporting hostilities against it. There is very patent evidence Iran is behind a good deal of the current insurgency in Iraq. So the Iraqi government has good cause to regard itself as under threat from Iran and justified in calling on active support from its major ally, the US, which would also be independently justified in international law in initiating hostilities against Iran, given the latter's active support of the insurgency in Iraq against its troops there.

Nor would such a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities be immoral since they posed no more of a threat to the US and its allies than did Saddam's regime. First, more and more evidence is beginning to emerge that Iraq was both actively seeking, if not already in possession, of WMD shortly before the US invasion three years ago, as well as had close ties with Al Qaeda. There is reason to think the Iranian regime is no less mischevious than and as much of a threat to the US as Saddam geniunely was.

As to the idea that UN inspections would be as effective a way to prevent Iran from using its nuclear reactors to deveop a stock-pile of nuclear weaponsas destroying them, the ineffectivess of inspections in Iraq prior to the war suggests very much the opposite.

As to the Skidelsky’s claim that a strike against Iran would be both counter-productive to the West in terms of reducing the threat of terror and costly to it, this very much depends on how successful and effective one envisages it as likely to be.

One could argue, as have some who have debated the issue on the thread about Dershowtiz’s article in Little Green footballs yesterday, that a strike by the US could well finish the present regime off in Iran and begin its return to normality, just as arguably is beginning to happen in Iraq.

The fact is that the allied invasion of Iraq has by no means been shown to be either unwarranted or unsuccessful in its own terms. On the contrary, one could argue, and here we turn to deal with Dershowitz’s analysis, invading Iraq has put the US in a prime position to take on and remove the present appalling regime in Iran. In the same way as the invasion of Iraqi frightened Libya into rejoining the community of responsible governments, so arguably would an American invasion of Iran have a salutary effect on neighbouring Syria as well as on other dubious Muslim regimes in the Middle Eastern and elsewhere.

And when, as I truly hope, all these rogue and semi-rogue regimes are forced by allied action to wake up and smell the coffee of overwhelmingly superior US military fire-power, then the pipe-line of financial support that flows from them to our home-grown militant Muslim minnows will be turned off and they will simply exfiate on our home soil when radical Islamism is destroyed in the Middle East.

Some here will be tempted to wonder whether it can possibly be worth Britain and America risking the lives of its own troops to defend what can on the construal of Muslim militancy which so many Islamists like to present of it. ‘Give us back Palestine – all of it, and you will be safe'.

For those here tempted to think Western security would be best served by offering up the state of Israel as a sacrifical lamb rather than taking on the lion of Islamism, may I remind (or inform) them of what Neville Chamberlain said as Prime Minister when he sold Czeschoslovakia down the river to Nazi conquest in 1938:

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

At the moment, the US and Britain might be fighting a seemingly ever-increasingly lonely war against Islamist aggression in terms of domestic public opinion. But, we should no more necessarily take that as a sign they are wrong to be fighting it or that public opinion could not be made to swing round very quickly again, as happened in the case of British resolve to fight Nazism.

Let us hope Britain remembers and learns in time from its former misguided attempts at appeasement towards totalitarian and expansionist enemies.