NEW LEFT, OLD TORY, ISLAMICIST--WHO CAN KEEP TRACK?:

Ken Clarke and the suicide bomber: Should critics of Blair's foreign policy take their lead from an old Tory and an Islamist fantasist? (Brendan O'Neill, 9/02/05, Spiked)

What do Mohammed Siddique Khan, the suicide bomber who killed himself and six others at Edgware Road on 7/7, and Ken Clarke, John Major's roly-poly chancellor of the exchequer who has put in a bid to become Tory leader, have in common? Well, they both issued public statements yesterday criticising Tony Blair's foreign policy - Clarke in a statement to members of the Foreign Press Association at Westminster, Khan in a grainy video recorded some time before he blew himself to smithereens two months ago (which, like Clarke's statement, was also aimed at the media).

Khan's video has been held up as evidence that the Iraq war inflamed terrorism, was thus wrong, and should now be called off. [...]

This video - which only shows a Yorkshireman in a headscarf saying that British foreign policy made him feel upset - is no more an argument against the Iraq war than the murder of Sharon Tate in 1969 was an argument for letting Charles Manson join the Beach Boys (one of Manson's grievances, apparently, was that he never made it into the group). Yet anti-war commentators have effectively made Khan their unofficial spokesman, citing his wacky views as an argument for getting out of Iraq. They have even put words into his mouth. In his video Khan says that 'your democratically elected governments' (presumably meaning the British and American governments) must 'stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people'. This, according to a news report in the Guardian, is 'a reference to Iraq and Palestine'. How do they know that? Khan didn't mention the words 'Iraq' or 'Palestine'. And even if he had, so what? Should governments (especially democratically elected ones, in Khan's sneering reference) base their foreign policies on what some loon from Leeds thinks?

Khan also said that his 'driving motivation' was Islam, 'obedience to the one true God, Allah, and [to] follow in the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger Mohammad. This is how our ethical stances are dictated.' But commentators conveniently brushed over such religious nuttiness and upfronted his concern for 'my people' (whomever they might be). In so doing, they are using moral blackmail and feeding off defeatism to try to win the argument about the war in Iraq. What they're effectively saying is: 'Look, if we stay in Iraq then more people like Khan will become angry, strap bombs to themselves, and blow us up! Let's get out now - better safe than sorry.' They are using the politics of fear to make their case, just as cynically and opportunistically as Bush and Blair did when they launched this war to save us from Saddam's 'weapons of mass murder' in the first place.

Ken Clarke plays precisely the same game. Indeed, he may be a posh, cigar-chomping, one-time Thatcherite turned wannabe leader of the clapped-out Conservative Party, but in many ways Clarke is the ideal figurehead for today's anti-war movement. This movement is less about taking a clear and radical stand against the right of the West to intervene in other state's affairs, than it is concerned with preaching the virtues of safety, caution, self-preservation and salvaging British values of 'fair play' in love and war from the jaws of the beastly Bush administration. And who better to speak on behalf of such a small-minded and perversely patriotic movement than an old Tory?

A Clarke victory would completely cede the Right to Tony Blair.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2005 9:49 AM