Remember David Miliband’s wrongheaded Guardian article from earlier this year; the one where he questioned the use of the phrase “war on terror,” and railed against the idea of a “unified, transnational enemy”? Well, today, Gordon Brown has an article in the Observer which seems dead set against his Foreign Secretary’s thinking. Its headline: “We are about to take the war against terror to a new level”. And it sets out the global threat of Islamist groups operating “under the banner of al-Qaida”:
“We should be under no illusion, however, that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under the banner of al-Qaida.
We know that there is an al-Qaida core in northern Pakistan trying to organise attacks in Britain. We know also that there are a number of networks here and as the head of MI5 reported recently: ‘There is no cause for complacency; there is plenty of activity and the threat level remains at severe.'”
Given the history between Brown and Miliband, its hard not to see this as a slap in the face for the Foreign Secretary. With more embarrassing revelations about the running of the Foreign Office in today’s papers, Brown’s would-be rival should probably feel a trifle uneasy about his position.
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