NATIONAL SELF-DEFENCE

We live in a very dangerous world and in the easy-going West we underestimate these dangers at our peril. I believe we need to raise our guard higher, particularly currently against Militant Islam, a ferocious and fanatical enemy of all our values. International politics is not a gentlemanly, diplomatic game; it is a deadly struggle for survival played out with daily car-bombs and slaughter in Middle Eastern cities, co-ordinated terror attacks on America on 9/11 and murder and mayhem in London on 7/7. Effective response to these threats requires a policy framework and I support “The Three Cs” – Containment, Commonality and Covert Action.

Containment is an old chestnut and was the keystone of the historically very effective US and NATO reaction to Militant Communism from 1946 onwards. A Communist bloc existed, but it was to get no larger. Encroachments into Western Europe, South Korea, Indo-China, Malaysia and the Middle East were to be resisted by backing existing regimes and a cordon sanitaire spun around the seat of infection. After a bitter Cold War, the Soviet bloc and the USSR had collapsed by 1991. If need be, Containment could lead to military intervention – not always successful, as in tragic Vietnam.

  

Dulles, Apostle of Containment

 

Reagan, Victor of Containment

At this time, Containment should see the West supporting General Sisi against the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. A stable, economically functioning Egypt is in our strategic interest. Despite the hand-wringing by Robert Fisk in The Independent about the betrayal of “Democracy” and the selective sympathy of the Left and the tender-hearted in general for the victims of street fighting, those people in Egypt who have a stake in the country recognise the Brotherhood as the menace it has always been since the 1920s. Its suppression, which will inevitably involve bloodshed, is an objective to be pursued with all determination and it is only a matter of time before the Brotherhood is again proscribed and the raucous mobs of ignorant fellahin supporting it are silenced.

The Arab Spring has stimulated many Islamist parties and the West should, as part of Containment, pour resources and treasure into those elements pursuing a broadly secularist agenda in Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria; so too further East in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The cry always goes up that the West is thus “interfering in the internal affairs” of the country in question. Well, we have our own interests to protect and will resist our sworn enemies however we can, accepting that local politics can be many-faceted and obscure.

 

Mohammed Morsi, Islamist Egypt

General Sisi, Secular Egypt

 

                     

Most regimes and probably most of the inhabitants of the Muslim world are not aggressive internationally. There are pariah regimes in Iran, Yemen and Somalia which need constant surveillance and a presumption of evil-intent towards the West. Wealthy Saudi Arabia harbours many of the most deadly enemies of the West and promotes Wahabi medieval values; its financial inter-dependence with the West makes it a special, oddly anachronistic case. Fortunately it is a doughty enemy of Shia Iran, whose nuclear programme must soon be eradicated.

Free movement of people between the Muslim and Western world is an impossible luxury and the visa process should be strenuously thorough and a real obstacle. Troublemakers who slip through the net and get to Britain should be instantly removed on the traditional grounds that “their presence is not conducive to the public good”. This is an executive matter and the past complaints of the fetid swarm of “human rights” lawyers like Cherie Blair and the pompous intervention of judges like Lords Hoffman and Steyn, circumscribing action against terrorism, all add to the argument that the UK should reform its human rights legislation and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Fortunately energetic Theresa May, current Home Secretary, has pushed forward the deportation of several notorious Islamist agitators including Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada.

Abu Hamza, preacher of Hate

Abu Qatada, roving ambassador for Al-Qaeda

              

Containment of Britain’s own home-grown terrorists is a trickier matter; the perpetrators of the London carnage of 7/7 were all British-born. First stop is the full force of the normally adequate Law. If the Law is ineffective or too slow, the government has other weapons usable in an emergency, most obviously Internment without Trial, with appropriate safeguards. It was used against suspected Irish terrorists, so why not against the Muslim variety? A confined sojourn in the Isle of Man would be salutary, with the more dangerous specimens quarantined somewhere more remote, like St Kilda.

My 2^nd “C” is Commonality. This means the rewarding of moves by previously hostile regimes towards what we in the West call “civilised values”. First priority is the rule of law and respect for property and personal rights. Freedom of worship is another requirement, noticeably absent in many Muslim counties. Women’s rights are routinely flouted in the name of religion, not to mention the misery of forced marriages and the obscenity of female circumcision. Progress on the elimination of these practices can earn reciprocal benefits. Pressures of these kind can be very fruitful in changing the face of our erstwhile enemies. Critics will say that the assumption of Western superiority is arrogant and patronising. Well, we are where we are, and the evidence of the lead of the West in technology, in culture, in the creation of wealth and in the establishment of contented societies is frankly overwhelming. The West is far from perfect but let us not allow the mote in our own eye obscure the beam in the eye of our opponents.

The final “C” is Covert Action. Our government has an obligation to defend us in whatever way necessary, without being mealy-mouthed and trying to abide by some notional Marquess of Queensbury Rules. These attacks may be cyber-warfare or old-fashioned subversion of hostile states. Sometimes our enemies simply need to be eliminated and the US deploys its Special Forces and the UK its SAS. The assassination of Saudi Osama Bin Laden by the US is a case in point and the use of unmanned drones to decapitate Al Qaeda’s leadership, including US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, has been extremely successful. 

Osama Bin Laden, eliminated

Anwar al-Awlaki, eliminated

 

These Covert Action methods probably do not stand up to judicial examination – they are simply illegal under international law. One of history’s baffling mysteries is the failure of Western intelligence agencies to put a bullet into the brains of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s. “Oh No!” I hear, “that would be shamefully illegal!” Tell that to the Polish officers dragged into the forest at Katyn, the French villagers put up against a wall at Oradour or the Jewish mothers made to face the horrors of Auschwitz. What a vast scale of human suffering would have been averted!

I hope against hope that Cameron and Hague, Obama and Kerry and other Western leaders can be relied upon to resist our enemies with bold initiative and magisterial decisiveness.

SMD

19.08.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013