On the road with Gordon

On the road with Gordon in the search for hearts and minds

Matthew d'Ancona

01 August 2007

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It was a gamble, more than Gordon Brown’s aides had cared to admit.

The Brown camp agrees that the propaganda campaigns adopted by Bush’s long-time ally Karen Hughes, the US under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, have been much too centralised and old-fashioned. The Kilcullen Doctrine on winning ‘hearts and minds’ is based not on making local people feel affection for you, but on persuading them that you can protect them better than the enemy. In Iraq, Kilcullen wrote in June, ‘protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not’.

Meanwhile, young Muslims drawn to the flames of Islamism — in West Yorkshire as much as Basra — have to be targeted for ‘ideological conversion’, a process Kilcullen compares to the tactics used to keep young men out of street gangs. Easier said than done, of course. But this is the way Brown’s counter-terrorist thinking is heading: away from invasions, ‘crusades’, and ‘shock and awe’ and towards something that owes much more to a Cold War theorist such as George Kennan than it does to Donald Rumsfeld or, indeed, to Tony Blair.

Brown is right to be using this time to think deeply and experimentally, for he will never enjoy such freedom again. The honeymoon will end, the mood will harden, the Tories will regroup and renew their attack. He knows as well as anyone that David Cameron will not let the election slip this easily from his grasp.

The road ahead of Gordon Brown will often be rocky and sometimes blocked. Its ending its unknowable. But, in the motorcade speeding down Second Avenue towards the airport, one could only reflect that this PM’s greatest triumph to date has been to persuade the world that he is not an exhausted traveller, limping and grey after ten years in office, but a man at the very start of a journey.