Government minister says, Blair administration talked "bollocks" on terrorism

I love a good headline, don't you?

Britain's security and counter-terrorism minister, the unenviably named Lord West of Spithead, has broken with New Labour tradition and acknowledged the obvious.

"In an outspoken assessment of the terror risk facing Britain, Gordon Brown's security adviser was scathing about the assertion, made by Tony Blair when prime minister, that foreign policy did not alter the UK's risk of a terror attack.

"We never used to accept that our foreign policy ever had any effect on terrorism," he said. "Well, that was clearly bollocks."

He added: "They [the Blair administration] were very unwilling to have any debate about how our foreign policy impacted on radicalisation.""

As I wrote shortly after the bombings here in London on 7 July 2005, Blair's government government "deliberately and repeatedly ignor[ed] the advice of the UK’s intelligence services, departmental advisers and independent experts" that Britain's foreign policies, especially the invasion and occupation of Iraq, were increasing the threat of terrorist attacks being carried out on British soil.

Now when politicians swear blind that black is white, one of the questions that springs to mind is whether they can genuinely believe what they're saying, and if not, how they can consciously peddle what they know to be falsehoods while keeping straight faces. Does the last remark from the minister quoted above - that the Blair administration were unwilling to have any internal debate about how our foreign policy impacted on radicalisation - give us an insight into this? Did Blair and his advisers stick their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la" whenever someone suggested that blowback from their foreign policies was endangering the British public, because they genuinely believed it wasn't true? Or because they didn't want to allow what they knew was a pathetically flimsy position to be tested in serious debate?

At one level it doesn't matter. Britain has continued with substantively the same Middle East policies post-Blair; backing local tyrants, supporting Israeli expansionism and repression of the Palestinians, and playing spear-carrier to the United States' imperial role in the region. All this is music to the ears of AlQaeda's recruiting officers, who can fill their ranks with young Muslims and Arabs driven to violent rage by these injustices and unable to see credible non-violent outlets for that anger. It matters little whether the government acknowledges the fact of this dynamic's existence if it pursues substantively the same policies, since the results will be the same. Better PR by Western governments won't change that. But it's interesting to see how, within power-structures, debates takes place between rational pragmatists and true-believer dogmatists. Both will pursue policies that serve powerful interests to the exclusion of more moral concerns. But each will have differing takes on how best to formulate and present those policies.

Clearly this isn't just a matter of abstract interest. If you can understand the kind of thinking that leads people to start wars like the US-UK invasion of Iraq then you're better placed to challenge that thinking and maybe prevent those wars from taking place.