Is war on terror the best way to fight the terrorists?

BRITISH Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week used his address to the United Nations General Assembly to highlight the plight of British hostage Kenneth Bigley, held by militants in Iraq. The incident, he said, proved the “urgent need to combat global terrorism”, a “menace directed at us all”, which violated all the values held dear by the United Nations.

As he told the assembly, few – whatever their disagreements with Britain and America over Iraq – would differ with the condemnation of terrorism and hostage-taking as a loathsome scourge that had to be fought across the world.

But Mr Straw was somewhat glib in brushing aside the world’s unease at Britain and America’s decision to invade Iraq, especially given the venue of his speech. Terrorism does indeed violate the principles that stand at the core of the United Nations. But for the British Foreign Secretary to use such phraseology given his country’s utter disregard of the United Nations in invading Iraq and barely a week after the UN Secretary-general had described that invasion as illegal under the UN charter is somewhat rich.

Most of those listening to Jack Straw will have shared his hatred of terrorism. But most will also have felt that Britain and America’s actions in Iraq have done more to contribute to the problem than to solve it.

Indeed, Britain’s own ambassador in Rome this week said al Qaeda would be the first to cheer George W Bush’s re-election if he were to win the presidential polls in November, describing the American president as the best “recruitment sergeant” for Osama bin Laden’s network of terror.

Britain and America are keen to turn the spotlight on terror, an evil we can all agree to loathe, but terror and its repression are fast becoming a chicken and egg dilemma in the modern world: which came first, which feeds off the other? The Americans bomb targets in Falluja because terrorists are hiding there; yet such bombing kills women and children, destroys homes, driving ordinary people into the arms of the militants who become identified with resistance to a brutal occupation. The same happens in Chechnya and Palestine – both local disputes now identified as bases for a global terror network.

Britain did not eradicate terror in Northern Ireland by bombing Catholic neighbourhoods of Belfast or launching air strikes on rearguard bases across the border in the Republic of Ireland – such actions would have been unthinkable, their consequences frightening. It did so through a combination of police work, undercover intelligence and the opening of political channels. The government of Tony Blair would do well to remember those lessons in Iraq, and pass on the experience to his ally in the White House.