"While England Sleeps"

Conservative MP George Osborne has a stirring defence of the war on terror in this week's Spectator:

Then there are those who say the ‘war on terror’ is the wrong response. I say to them: what other response could there be? Listen to the chaotic and barbaric ramblings of Osama bin Laden. Watch, if you can bear it, the videotaped beheadings of innocent civilians in Iraq. There is no agenda there we can negotiate with. Of course, we can reduce the support they receive among the broader Islamic world. That means dealing with the poverty and underdevelopment of many Arab states, and making yet another attempt to resolve the Palestinian dispute. It also means reaching out to disaffected young Muslims here at home. But only the deluded think that that would deal with the terrorist leaders themselves. Police and intelligence operations of the kind we saw last week in Britain are vital, but will not succeed alone. We need to disrupt the support and succour terrorists receive from certain regimes. We need to stop any possibility of their getting hold of weapons of mass destruction. That may involve intense diplomatic pressure, such as with Libya or Syria, or military action, as with Afghanistan. Together it amounts to an exertion of national effort and military might of the kind seen only in a war.

Then there are those who say we’ve achieved little in the last three years except to inflame Islamic opinion. That’s not what al-Qa’eda must think. Many of their key operatives in the West have been arrested and their activities severely disrupted, for which our police and intelligence services deserve our thanks. The terrorist training camps in Afghanistan have been razed and the regimes that supported them either destroyed or disabled. The terrorist ringleaders are either dead or, in the case of Osama bin Laden, probably holed up in a cave somewhere on the Pakistan border unable to communicate with the rest of the world except by periodic videotape. This is not a cause for embarrassment but for celebration.

Read it all.

Posted by damian at August 13, 2004 06:55 AM