By Mowahid Hussain Shah
A visitor in Manchester for a brief stopover, a day after the bloody bombing of the consulate at Istanbul, could see the London papers full of it, even eclipsing the first state visit by a US president to London in 80 years, as well as previews of the Rugby World Cup final between England and Australia at Sydney the following day. Well, England did go on to become the first northern hemisphere team to win the rugby world cup by beating Australia. But winning the “war against terrorism” is going to be an altogether different ballgame.
In a letter to the London Times of November 21, Sir Nicholas Barrington, Great Britain’s High Commissioner to Pakistan (1989-1994), wrote that Anglo-American policies are feeding extremism and creating more recruits to the cause of violence. Pundits are pondering whether Britain’s policies are presenting their nation as a target thereby attracting terror attacks on it.
There is enormous disquiet among Britons over the direction charted by Prime Minister Tony Blair in the post 9/11 era. To be fair, the interlocking and overlapping nature of the Anglo-American nexus leaves very little wiggle space for any British leader.
Despite the Monroe Doctrine precluding any such action, the United States allowed Britain to enter the Western Hemisphere to wrest back the Falklands from the Argentines in the early summer of 1982. But having said that, Blair’s starry-eyed look and syrupy rhetoric while beating the war drums helped only in jarring the sensibilities of the British public, which expected better given Blair’s undoubted acumen as well as the gravitas traditionally associated with Whitehall.
By not reflecting public will (and his own substantial intellect), Blair’s legacy promises to be overshadowed by Iraq and mired in the quagmire of America’s increasingly apparent no-win situation there. More importantly, he has made Britons feel far more vulnerable and insecure than they were before 9/11.
What was sold and packaged as liberation, has gradually unfolded as an occupation.
The rising escalation of attacks, not only on US targets but also its expansion on ‘softer’ targets such as its Muslim and European allies, has introduced a new lethal dimension to the global arena. Its net effect would be to put Blair on the defensive and Britain on the backfoot.
