What America doesn't understand
Homegrown U.K. terror is a growing threat, multicultural "tolerance" can't combat it, and the war in Iraq will only make it worse.
By Andrew Brown
Read more: Terrorism, Opinion, London bombings
AP Photo/Matt Dunham
A police officer looks at a man outside a mosque in northeast London, near where a number of homes were raided by police, Aug. 11, 2006.
Aug. 11, 2006 | The most shocking fact about the foiled U.K. bomb plot may not be obvious to an American reader: The bombings were planned in High Wycombe, a suburban town that is a byword for middle English dullness and uneventful safety. When poet James Fenton wanted to refuse an invitation to go traveling in the Amazon with explorer Redmond O'Hanlon, he replied, "I wouldn't go with you to High Wycombe!"
That's not all Americans don't seem to understand about the crisis we find ourselves in now. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I wrote a piece for Salon about the lessons Britain had learned in 50 years of struggle against terrorist movements, from the Stern gang to the Irish Republican Army. Don't torture people, I wrote; don't shoot the young men who throw stones. Remember that wars go on for longer than seems remotely possible when you start them, and that the really dangerous enemies are not the young men trying to kill you today, but their unborn children, should they grow up to hate you, too. These were not startling or new reflections over here. They were, however, alien to the way that most Americans seem to think of terrorism. (A day or two later, I found myself on a radio show in Oregon, where a caller asked whether it was now OK to shoot or at least intern green activists because the people trying to stop logging were like terrorists.)
Five years later, the gap in understanding between Britain and America has widened. The American angle on the airplane bomb plot has been that Muslim terrorists were trying to attack American flights; here, what's interesting and frightening is that British Muslims were planning to attack flights out of British airports. In the five years since 2001 both the British left and right have had to come to terms with unpleasant truths.
As far as can be told, every single one of the suspects arrested here was born here. One was a white convert, known until a year ago by the strikingly un-Muslim name of Don Stewart-Whyte. We are not dealing here with something wholly foreign. The discovery of the plot comes less than a week after a poll for a reputable television program suggested that between a quarter and one-third of young British Muslims say they understand the motives of the suicide bombers who struck London in July 2005; about the same proportion would be happy to live under sharia law. Given a Muslim population of about 1.6 million, this translates to something between 100,000 and 200,000 people who could be described as terrorist sympathizers.
Now, from an American perspective, that can seem incredibly dangerous. When Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, was sacked earlier this year, it was widely assumed that this was because he had said that it would be "nuts" to start a war with Iran. This is undoubtedly the majority view here, but it is offensive to the Bush government, which may be planning just such a thing and certainly believes that the threat of war is essential to its credibility. But a much more worrying theory has been floated by Irwin Stelzer, an economist who is regarded as Rupert Murdoch's ambassador here, who claimed in a recent column that Straw was sacked only after Condoleezza Rice visited his home district in northwest England and discovered that 20 percent of the voters there are Muslim. Straw, Stelzer alleged, was found to be compromised by his own constituency. This, if true, is an odd way to demonstrate your commitment to spreading democracy among your allies.
Of course, the presence of a large disaffected and angry bloc of Muslim voters who believe that British foreign policy is immoral and misguided creates a problem. The fact that our army in Iraq will almost certainly have to retreat, defeated, makes the problem worse. It looks as if the army in Afghanistan is fighting a much harder war than some politicians foresaw; it's also clear that America will have to pull back from Iraq, and the British army is hardly going to stay there on its own.
One may not like the fact that the invasion of Iraq has made homegrown British terrorism more likely. But it is a fact, acknowledged by almost everyone except Prime Minster Tony Blair. The trouble is that a defeat in Iraq will make the invaders seem both weaker and more immoral. This is a dangerous position to be in.
