New hope in the debate about terror

In the last couple of days, the level of post July 7 debate has shown welcome signs of rising above the “told-you-so” vs “Nothing to do with Iraq” standoff.

First, this in yesterday’s Guardian by Norman Geras - a piece so good, it’s hard to know what to excerpt. So forgive this long quote:

“No words of dismay, let alone grief, could be allowed to pass some people’s lips without the accompaniment of a “We told you so” and an exercise in blaming someone other than the perpetrators. [...] We had the same after 9/11; still, one nurtures the illusion that people learn. Evidently some don’t.

It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them. The plea will be - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy seeking to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else.”

Hurrah for that. Then, in today’s Times, Gerard Baker asks: “suppose invading Iraq has made us more vulnerable - what then?”. His answer, unfortunately for ideologues on all sides of this argument, isn’t simple.

“Invading Iraq has undoubtedly created in the minds of many millions of Muslims the idea that their people, their faith is under attack.

The right way to tackle that view is not to indulge it, sympathise with it or nurse it, but to correct it. [...]

And we must continue to explain what we are doing — to take on directly the outrageous falsehood that this is a fight between Islam and its enemy, and to point out to Muslims in London, Leeds, Karachi and Kandahar just how false this is.

It would help, for instance, to point out that in 1991 we liberated Kuwait, a Muslim country, from Saddam Hussein and that, in the process, saved the holiest sites in Islam — in Saudi Arabia — from falling under his heel too. That in Bosnia we intervened (belatedly) to save Muslims from being massacred by Christians; that we did the same again in Kosovo a few years later. And also that we are striving to create a state for Palestinians.”

In other words, this is a complex problem requiring complex solutions, and solutions that might not fit any comfortable ideological templates. That’s progress. Here’s hoping the newly heightened level of debate is maintained through yesterday’s attempted attacks, and today’s shooting at Stockwell.