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Whatever the Left says, there is never any excuse for terrorism

By Barbara Amiel

LAST week, I hugged my indispensable Lebanese hairdresser before and after my blow-dry. Mr Shah, my London chemist, hides behind the prescription counter these days, lest I invite him to dinner once more. I'm just following the examples of all our leaders, who seem to be hugging every available member of the Islamic community in sight.

John Ashcroft, the US attorney-general, set the pace with his emotional (for him) thanks to the "many thousands" of Arab, Sikh and Muslim volunteers who have called offering their services as translators to the World Trade Centre investigation. I do think this is splendid, but most of us know that about 99.9 per cent of Arabs and Muslims are not terrorists and that it is wrong to assault any handy Arab because we've got a spot of "terrorist rage".

All the same, "terrorist rage" can be helpful if you are in the governing elite. Mr Ashcroft is pushing a Bill to freeze the assets of suspected terrorists. Mr Ashcroft says such a Bill will stop terrorists having the means to murder us. Law enforcers the world over love these sorts of Bills, because they don't have to bother with a trial or conviction before they start punishing suspects - and their families and business associates.

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, wants us to demonstrate that we're all doing our bit to stop terrorism by finally caving in to Europe's beloved identity card. Both Mr Ashcroft and Mr Blunkett prove you don't actually have to wait until a theocracy such as the Taliban comes into being to introduce repressive (and, in these cases, useless) legislation.

I am 100 per cent behind President Bush's war on terrorism, in spite of these slightly ludicrous antics. Some dodgy notions against it, though, are being floated. First, there is the idea that we, the West, helped create Osama bin Laden. This argument is used as if America should shut up and reap what it sowed without complaining. This is a half-truth and half-truths are often worse than lies. America rightly helped the Mujahideen, including bin Laden, fight the Soviet invasion during the 1980s. At that point in history, the USSR was the biggest menace in the world. Its defeat in Afghanistan was a key factor in bringing it down. Thanks to the opening of the KGB archives, we now know that empire was evil beyond nanny's most nightmarish tales.

Before that, we were allies with Stalin against Hitler, even though we had to swallow the fact that Stalin had first been an ally of Hitler. Stalin was a monster of hideous proportions, but that doesn't invalidate our support of him against the Third Reich. We sided with Iraq against Iran for most of the 1980s and so we helped Saddam Hussein. We felt then that the more significant threat was the expansive power of the ayatollahs, which threatened the whole region. We also needed to keep Iraq out of the Soviet orbit. A year ago we assisted the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is now fertile ground for bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrrorists.

Obviously, not all geopolitical judgments are correct, but to say that America deserves bin Laden because it allied itself with some dubious people for a good cause is moral blindness. The West's intentions were honourable and totally defensible, even with hindsight. History has shown that, for a variety of reasons, alliances may be temporary and that, in international affairs, just as in personal ones, yesterday's friends occasionally turn out to be tomorrow's enemies.

Another argument against Mr Bush's plan hides behind euphemisms. Terrorism is piously condemned, but the solution is to tackle the "root causes" of terrorism, as the Guardian puts it. "Root cause" does not turn out to mean the evil in the terrorists' brains or those who support them. It is a cover-up phrase that actually means embracing the terrorists' agenda. This is what I call "pulling a Yasser Arafat": he tells the world he wants nothing to do with terrorism, but, if the world wants to stop it, well, they must do what the terrorists want (in this case, render Israel helpless). The Left claims the "root cause" of this jihad is poverty and the humiliation of the Islamic world in face of the vulgar, bullying wealth of the West in general and America in particular. So hand over your money and society.

Our response must be firm. Any decent human being should hold that, even if there might be some merit in a given cause, the minute terrorism is used to help that cause, it becomes tainted and should lose all support. That response alone can tackle the "root cause" of terrorism.

One man's terrorist is not another man's freedom fighter in any moral sense whatsoever: there is a profound difference between uniformed soldiers defending themselves or defending civilians from mob attacks and terrorists blowing up pizza parlours or civilian airlines. That difference is why, in 1946, the Jewish Haganah (the embryonic Israeli army) fought Jewish terrorists who were using violence to try to get the British out of Palestine. The Nato bombing of Yugoslavia appalled me, but it was not morally equivalent to Slobodan Milosevic's murder of civilians in Kosovo. Nato acted under military rules of engagement, with advance notice, real attempts to negotiate and sincere efforts to minimise civilian casualties.

Treating all states that support terrorism as "belligerents", which is what Mr Bush has proclaimed, doesn't mean bombing them all back to the Stone Age. It may not mean invasion with ground troops or even surgical air strikes, though it could entail some of these measures. Belligerency creates a status in international law with certain consequences, such as no commerce, no mail, no telephone, no diplomatic relations, no landing rights for aircraft of enemy registry, or aircraft flying to or from enemy destinations. These consequences are just the beginning. In the classic definition of the legal historian Henry Sumner Maine: "The property of an enemy is one of those things that Roman law, in one of its oldest portions, considered to be res nullius - no man's property." This opens the door to blockades and confiscation.

So far, freezing some assets is all that has been done. This is a good beginning, but not a fraction of what can be done. This "war" has weapons that don't entail the firing of a single shot or the invention of a single new rule. And in using them, we might actually bring down the "root causes" of poverty and lack of esteem in the miserable, troubled world of theocratic Islam.

-- Anonymous, October 01, 2001