Political Doodle Sketch - British Current Affairs, Politics, & Economics

I don't often agree with the military historian Max Hastings, but there's an interesting article by him on the Guardian's excellent comment is free website. In it, he deftly expresses my opinion on the current debate over Islamic terrorism:

We know that we face a real threat from Muslim fundamentalists, and that we are unlikely to begin to defeat this until we see it for what it is: something infinitely more complex, diffuse and nuanced than the US president wishes to suppose.

The US is clearly oversimplifying the threat of Islamic terrorism, by calling it a "third world war" (Newt Gingrich) and referring to "Islamic fascism" (George Bush). What's truly saddening is that it has been seen so many times throughout history - the obvious example being Vietnam, when the US administration (particularly the Pentagon) consistently failed to distinguish between communists and the nationalist/anti-Diem movement. The same may be said of the difficulty (for Israel in particular) in separating Palestinian nationalists from international jihadists.

What's frustrating is that criticism of the neoconservative strategy is often construed as "appeasement". Max Hastings deals with this fabrication well:

Whatever the truth about last week's frustrated aircraft bomb plot, we cannot doubt that Britain faces a serious and ongoing threat from violent fanatics undeserving of the smallest sympathy. Yet we shall defeat them only when our Muslim community at large perceives that its interests are identified with Britain's polity... As a citizen, I am willing to be resolute in the face of terrorism, which must be defeated. I become much less happy about the prospect of immolation, however, when Bush and Blair translate what should be an ironclad case for civilised values into an agenda of their own which I want no part of.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

SPL : Max Hastings on Bush-Blair folly

0 Comments:

Links to this post: