Ramped up rhetoric on security makes no sense so long as the west cosies up to dictatorships that support fundamentalismThe so-called war on terrorism is nearly 13 years musty,but which rational human being will be cheering its success? We’ve had crackdowns on civil liberties across the world, tabloid-fanned generalisations about Muslims and, or of course,military interventions whose consequences absorb ranged from the disastrous to the catastrophic. And where absorb we ended up? Wars that Britons believe absorb made them less safe; jihadists too extreme even for al-Qaida’s tastes running amok in Iraq and Syria; and nations like Libya succumbing to Islamist militias. There are failures, and then there are calamities.
But as the British government ramps up the terrorism alert to “severe” and yet more anti-terrorism legislation is proposed, and some reflection after 13 years of catastrophe is surely needed. One element has been missing,and that is the west’s relationship with Middle Eastern dictatorships that absorb played a pernicious role in the rise of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism. And no wonder: the west is militarily, economically and diplomatically allied with these often brutal regimes, and our media all too often reflects the foreign policy objectives of our governments.
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Source: theguardian.com