Cover Story

Just don’t call it war

16 July 2005

Boris Johnson says it is time to reassert British values in the face of extremist Islam

At least the IRA had comprehensible geographical objectives: to reverse the partition of Ireland. What do these folks want? Do they really want British troops out of Iraq, when most people I met in Baghdad secretly or openly want them to stay and help fight the insurgency? Is it really the injustices of Palestine that get their goat? Is that what makes a young cricket-loving Beeston lad go and top himself? Is it the continued existence of the house of Saud? Or were they all so seriously maladjusted to modern Britain, and found it so hard to get girlfriends that they went down the Tube in search of the hur, the 72 black-eyed ones of paradise that some Islamic scholars believe to be correctly identified not with virgins but with raisins?

If we are baffled by them, it may be that they find our own motives equally puzzling and suspicious, and that, too, is why it is a bad idea to talk of a general ‘war on terror’. There are plenty of people in Iraq who think Britain did a wonderful thing in helping to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and it is still too early to reach a final verdict on the success of the Iraq war. But it was surely a mistake to continue, in spite of all the evidence, to present this invasion as part of the ‘war on terror’. It became obvious to everyone that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and it is easy to see why Muslims might suspect that there must be another explanation.

To the paranoid Muslim mind, the evident bogusness of the ‘war on terror’ — in so far as it applied to Iraq — suggested that the war was really about something else: about oil, about humiliating and dominating the Islamic world; and because they make no separation between religion and politics, the bogus ‘war on terror’ seemed to imply an undeclared war on Islam, and that was an impression that neither Bush nor Blair properly corrected. If the neocon project means democracy throughout the Middle East, and Starbucks, and women being able to drive, then I am an ardent neocon. Just don’t call it war.