Letters | 2 February 2008

Phoney war

Sir: I was sorry to see that Con Coughlin (‘Agent Brown’s new plan to smash terror’, 26 January) has now joined the likes of poor William Shawcross on the pottier side of paranoia in asserting that the occasional acts of Islamist terrorism in the United Kingdom over recent years mean that ‘we are a nation at war’. Coughlin even justifies George W. Bush’s now stale rhetoric about ‘the war on terror’, and reckons that Gordon Brown ‘is not a man who fits easily or naturally into the role of a wartime leader’.

All this goes to demonstrate a dangerous loss of proportion. The last time the United Kingdom was engaged in a real war in defence of her sovereign independence was in 1939–1945, and the enemy then was not a scattering of bedsit plotters with homemade bombs, but the formidable armed forces of Nazi Germany. Islamist outrages such as those in London in 2005, however appalling in themselves and their impact on victims and their families, simply cannot be compared to the 1940–1941 ‘Blitz’ on London and other British cities, or the 1944–1945 bombardment by flying bombs and V-2 rockets.

Similarly, it is ludicrous for Coughlin to claim that the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan is waging ‘war on terror’. The current Iraqi insurgency is the direct product of the Bush–Blair invasion of Iraq five years ago. Saddam Hussein himself was a secular dictator and the sworn enemy of Islamic extremism. Left in place, he could have served as our tacit ally against Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda. As for Afghanistan, we have President Karzai’s own testimony that the Anglo-American occupation forces are now serving to exacerbate the country’s internal tensions rather than foster a solution.

Correlli Barnett
Norwich

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