Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [300]
The initial demonstration of coalition airpower seemed another instance of Goliath stamping on David, notwithstanding the fact that much of this assault involved precision weaponry devised with a view to minimising civilian casualties in a world where warfare is under twenty-four-hour media scrutiny, with legal repercussions whenever anyone screws up. The US has developed artillery systems which calculate possible collateral damage, so that at a certain point the guns cannot be automatically fired. Apparently a new generation of robot weapons with built-in moral systems to factor out such human emotions as anger and vengeance are only a couple of years from deployment. The massive investment such systems require makes no sense if the intention is to kill Muslims indiscriminately. The technology is designed to do the opposite.
It became apparent that intelligence materials had been deliberately contaminated by political concerns, specifically to support the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction whose deployment was imminent. The fact that he had used such weapons in the past, notoriously with devastating effect against the Kurds, was elided with flimsy evidence that he was planning to use them against coalition armies, and even flimsier proof that he had been consorting with Al Qaeda terrorists. This double deceit has caused long-term damage to some of the intelligence agencies involved, which may find it hard to make a plausible public case in the event of future conflicts. Promoting one of the key figures involved in putting together that intelligence to the post of director of MI6 seemed dubious to many observers. At least the US largely stuck to the line that its primary goal was to remove a dictator who had flouted any number of UN resolutions.
One consequence of an invasion whose occupying aftermath was culpably mismanaged with the passive connivance of the entire Blair government, including all hold-overs to the Brown administration, was the activation of Europe’s Al Qaeda/Ansar al-Islam networks, with the result that some hundreds of Belgian, British, German, French and Italian jihadists were recruited and sent via Kurdistan or Syria to fight coalition troops inside Iraq. The latter were perplexed to discover that one suicide bomber who attacked them was a thirty-eight-year-old blonde, white, Catholic Belgian woman called Muriel Degauque, a convert to Islam who killed herself in Iraq. They became part of a conflict that involves ‘former regime elements’, Sunnis disgruntled at losing power after ruling Iraq for the Ottomans, the British and Saddam, and some thousands of foreign jihadists of whom the monster al-Zarqawi was the first prominent commander. Although Al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri had some difficulties with that monster’s indiscriminate slaughtering of workmen—especially if they were Muslims—in December 2004 bin Laden eagerly acknowledged al-Zarqawi as ‘the emir of the Al Qaeda organisation in the land of the two rivers’. Apart from the running sore of Chechnya, Iraq is likely to be the prime source of highly trained, and battle-hardened, jihadists who may make their terrorist mark in Europe. No European state has seen fit to make it a criminal offence to go abroad to fight its own, or allied, nationals, or to incite others to do the same. Although they have a good idea of who is going where to do what, intelligence and police cannot prosecute any of these fighters. High-level co-operation among European intelligence agencies is good—they have contacts going back