The alleged plot is no reason to change Anglo-American Middle East policy. If anything, it confirms its validity.
Fri 11 Aug 2006 17.27 BST
No sooner do British security forces avert yet another attempted radical Islamist terror plot than a slew of siren voices emerge to urge a change in the foreign policy that they allege is responsible for such outrages. How predictable. In fact, while we may all feel afraid and angry as a result of the alleged plot, those who argue for a foreign policy shift have inverted the true relationship between radical Islam and Anglo-American foreign policy. Perhaps this is because they have allowed their fear to get the better of their judgment. Meaning that their anger has been directed away from the militant Islamic terrorist perpetrators who should be its proper focus. Those who demand a change in foreign policy fail to appreciate that the war against terror that we are engaged in is not a war of choice but a war of necessity. If Britain chooses to withdraw from fighting it now, then all we will be doing is delaying the inevitable. Radical Islamists will not be satisfied merely imposing a Caliphate in the Middle East. Theirs is an expansionist creed and with liberty being the antithesis of their ideology; they will seek to destroy those who believe in it regardless of whether we wish to oppose them or not. And Britain and the US, as the two great bastions of liberty in the west, will always be the first targets of any such jihad. As a case in point, the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre occurred in 1993, long before Middle Eastern nation-building was on the Anglo-US agenda. The only question therefore is whether we allow the militants to engage with us now - when they are "just" terrorists - or whether they do so when they are in control of a swathe of Middle Eastern states, backed up by nuclear weapons. I know which I prefer. Advertisement Nor is it correct to assume that Britain has blindly followed the US into adopting this foreign policy. Ethical interventionism has a distinguished British history stretching back to Pitt and Wilberforce and it is Blair, not Bush, who first embraced this agenda in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Blair is the true believer, Bush the zealous convert. For this reason, to suggest that Britain has no influence in the Anglo-American relationship, or that the relationship has no strategic value, is fallacious. Blair is a co-creator of the war against terror policy rather than a reluctant adherent. And the warmth that our shared values generate means that the special relationship yields its own strategic reward for Britain in terms of intelligence sharing, military cooperation and back-up for our Trident nuclear defence system. The world would be a poorer - and more dangerous - place without it and without the principled Anglo-American foreign policy stance that brings hope to millions living under the threat or reality of radical Islamic oppression.
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