Columns

Unlike the Bourbons of France who learnt nothing and forgot nothing, British Prime Minister David Cameron has learnt a lot which he strives to forget hoping others will do too.

Combating ISIS: David Cameron delivers his speech

As former Labour Party prime minister Tony Blair did, the current man at the helm would like to give a twist to history past and present and distort it in a way that British governments donned in lily-white purity covering the ineptitude and foreign policy actions that have given rise to conflicts and political extremism in different parts of the world.

After the recent massacre of British tourists in Tunisia by Muslim jihadists believed to be members of the increasingly violent ISIS movement, Cameron made a major speech in Birmingham last week in which he announced a five-year strategy to contain the spread of jihadism in the UK and appealed to ethnic minorities living here to accept and cultivate “Britishness” in order to build a well-knit society.

While these are oft repeated sentiments and hopes, my concern is more with the continuing Blair-Cameron narrative of denying that Britain’s role in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has nothing to do with the growing radicalisation of young British Muslims and in the larger Islamic world.

It is now claimed that at least 700 British Muslims have gone to Iraq and Syria to join in the fighting on the side of the ISIS-declared caliphate called the Islamic State. About half of them are said to have returned to Britain after a spell in one or both of those countries.

A common argument now used by both Blair who pushed Britain into the Iraq war in support of George Bush junior, and Cameron goes like this. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US preceded the invasion of Iraq and therefore that invasion did not spark Islamic terrorism which already existed.

This argument might have a semblance of validity if history began on September 11, 2001. But it does not as everybody except Blair and Cameron know or would want us to believe. In fact Cameron goes a step further in pursuing this argument.
He said in his Birmingham address that “when people say it is because of the involvement in the Iraq war that people are attacking the West, we should remind them that 9/11, the biggest loss of life of British citizens in a terrorist attack, happened before the Iraq war.”

That is true and nobody in his right mind would condone such attacks in which innocent persons who have not been party to the imperialist adventures launched by the West, become victims of terrorist atrocities.

But Cameron is trying tangentially to suggest that 9/11 was also an attack on Britain which is, of course, rubbish. It was essentially a challenge to American power. It was intended to provide material evidence that the US, for all its nuclear weaponry and super power status, was vulnerable to attack even within its borders.

Cameron seems to forget that one of the targets which the attackers could not destroy or seriously damage was the Pentagon. Surely the attackers did not go looking for British nationals there.

No, it was the use of western imperialist power, particularly by the US and UK, far from their own frontiers in Asia, the Middle East and Africa over several decades if not centuries, that has contributed to the accumulation of grievances that now erupt in the most vicious ways resulting in the deaths of innocents.

Cameron’s dismissal of “grievance justification” by pointing to 9/11 preceding the invasion of Iraq is the typical Tony Blair argument after he misled the British parliament into voting for the invasion of Iraq. In fact Cameron’s recent remarks seem to superimpose so neatly on Blair’s attempt to absolve Britain’s disastrous foreign policy for feeding Islamic extremism, that somebody suggested Blair should sue Cameron for plagiarism.

Early next month Tony Blair will be in Sri Lanka apparently on holiday. Whether it is only on vacation or combining it with his vocation on the international lecture circuit, one wishes the media and others will have the occasion to nail him over the political and social chaos he left behind in Iraq, not to mention what little he achieved in his role as Middle East peace envoy of the Quartet in building Palestine’s economy.

Why Blair and Cameron are striving to distort history and exonerate themselves and Britain of responsibility for the multiple Middle Eastern tragedies is because Cameron voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq that Blair agitated for having much earlier discussed war plans with Bush the Younger and those war mongers in his administration.

Now Cameron is planning to send British bombers into Syria having failed to deter the extremist build up in Iraq and the occupation of vast swathes of territory by what is today called the Islamic State that Isis first set out to create.

Cameron’s Oxford Bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics seems to have left a gap in his education. Had he spent some time mugging up British history in the Middle East he would have learnt that the “grievance justification” that he dismisses so derisively had its antecedents at least 100 years or more ago.

Space does not permit a long recital of the actions of “Perfidious Albion” which broke promises given to Sharif Hussein, the Emir of Mecca that a full independent Arab state would be granted if the Arabs revolted against the Ottoman Empire in support of Britain during World War 1.

Though the Arab’s did Britain reneged on that promise signing an agreement with the French to carve out a modern Middle East, an agreement which came to be known as the Sykes-Picot pact after the two officials who signed it.

It would be useful for Cameron’s further education if he glanced at the slogans that ISIS uses as part of its rallying call for recruits to the jihadist movement. The Sykes-Picot that left the Arabs holding only a sheaf of broken promises, figures very much in it as a symbol of western perfidy.

Moreover a recent book by the London-based Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan on the genesis of ISIS and its growth sets out in clear detail who some of its leading figures are and the connections some of them had to Saddam Hussein and his security apparatus.

To say that the invasion of Iraq war did not lead to the increasing militancy of anti-western Islamic movements and the radicalization of Muslim youth determined to use violence as a response to past wrongs and suppression, is to pretend at historical amnesia.

Now Cameron is trying to take a leaf out of Blair’s book and wants to launch a “full spectrum response” which is not only to deal with the spread radicalization of Muslim youth at home but also to engage in bombing raids into Syria currently limited to Iraq.
Britain is slowly being dragged into a wider Middle East conflict. Cameron is being spurred on by retired generals who have been beating the war drums for months seated in their arm chairs.

Cameron is sending smoke signals like he was Geronimo or Cochise. Maybe he sees himself covered in military glory, never mind all this history.