I regularly visit my holiday house by the sea in the sunny Canary island of Tenerife. It sits under the volcano, the world’s third largest — Mount Teide. But I am sure that when an eruption happens the authorities will arrange to pick me up in a boat from the pier 100 meters away. That’s why I paid my taxes here for four years whilst I wrote my last book.
And that’s how Londoners appear to react to the latest Al-Qaeda-inspired bomb attacks. Whilst Americans live in the eternal shadow of the airliners exploding into the twin towers, Londoners shrug them off, as they have over 40 years a multitude of IRA bombs. After all compared with the risk of a traffic accident the odds of death or injury are infinitesimally low and, as Gideon Rachman wrote in Financial Times, “Setting yourself on fire and then punching a policeman, while shouting “Allah”, is about as low-tech as it gets.”
Living with political hype is the price to be paid for the virtues of a competitive democracy. By and large electorates are reasonably clever at separating the wheat from the chaff in political overstatement. That doesn’t seem to stop the politicians trying. Sometimes, indeed, the results can be quite disastrous as with the combined effort of George W. Bush and Tony Blair to deceive their electorates that there was incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he was in league with Osama Bin Laden. But, like juries, electorates usually come to sensible decisions although the “big lie” as Goebbels pioneered, takes some time to unravel, by which time the deed the leader wants to do is done. Still, over time, democracies learn and act upon their mistakes.
Blair is now gone. Almost every British political analyst believes he would still be in power if it hadn’t been for his great deception. Bush is as low down in the polls as a president can get and there is no chance of a successor being elected unless he or she eschews the lies he told.
But, going forward, as the Americans say, how do we ensure that we are not railroaded again by political hype at a sensitive moment? Clearly the occasions for irresponsible leadership will arise, even more frequently now that Bush/Blair have stirred up a hornets’ nest in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
There will be more homegrown violent groups at work in Europe and North America. But there is not much reason to think they will be any more frightening than the 1960s Black Panthers in the USA or the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany or the IRA or ETA. Careful police work rather than massive political hysteria will be the best counterattack, particularly if it is combined with an attentive approach to their grievance.
All the talk of terrorists gaining access to nuclear technology is balderdash. This kind of expertise, for all the scare stories, is impossible to develop without the massive support system of a state structure. At worst there can be a conventional explosive wrapped with some stolen nuclear material, the so-called “dirty bomb”, but it won’t be the end of the world. Chemical weapons are almost impossible to disperse effectively and biological weapons are many years away from being manufactured in a useable way. Besides, most of these groups, as the recent London/Glascow effort showed, are light years away from such ambitions. Even if it’s proved there is some sort of loose Al-Qaeda connection, Bin Laden and his immediate cohorts holed up in the Pakistani mountains are unable to do serious weapons research whatever their fantasies. After all 9/11 was the innovative use of an old technology.
If we really want to make progress against terrorism the answer is the calm application of thought to the now near intractable problems of the Middle East and Afghanistan.
In short order the agenda should be troop removal, the international purchase of Afghanistan’s poppy crop at market prices to use for medicinal purposes in a world literally crying out loud for pain relief in terminal illnesses, an almighty push on Israel to compromise around Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah’s peace plan and the end of the political isolation of Iran, substituting in its stead the engaged diplomacy that brought Libya in from the cold, leading to the end of its nuclear weapons’ program. In truth we are not yet living under the volcano. But time moves on and opportunities are being lost every day.
