BRITAIN: Extremists rely on fresh grievances to foster anger, Britain's shadow security minister tells Mary Fitzgerald
The Iraq war has proved a highly effective recruiting tool for international jihadist networks, the British shadow security minister has said on a visit to Dublin.
"Iraq is a recruiting sergeant. There are preceding organisations and preceding terrorism, but what Iraq has done is provide a fresh political grievance, one with high political saliency and also a lot of propaganda value. It is used against us and it is powerful," Dame Pauline Neville-Jones told The Irish Times.
Though she initially supported the invasion of Iraq, the newly appointed minister said the war had given a fresh impetus to extremist networks. "Is it the root cause? No, but the whole narrative of victimhood needs to be fed constantly by new events which convince those who are moving in that direction that here is a new cause of grievance which needs to be avenged. If it is all very old historical stuff, it has less potency, but if you can feed it all the time it has potency. That is the danger Iraq presents."
Dame Pauline also echoed remarks made by Sir Alan West, Britain's new security minister, in which he said the terrorist threat could last 15 years. Sir Alan added that people would now have to be "a little un-British" and inform on each other to catch suspected terrorists.
"He is right to warn there are no quick fixes and that this is going to be a long issue. Implicit in that is this isn't just a matter of counter-terrorism, this is a matter of the loyalty of the population as a whole to the common good and willingness to obey UK law," she said.
"It makes me slightly uncomfortable that we have to fix it by citizens informing on each other. I think it is absolutely right to indicate that we all need to help the police, but I would hope that this isn't going to be done by one community being hostile towards the other. That's why confidence between the communities is an absolutely essential ingredient in defeating terrorism."
Dame Pauline welcomed a statement by the Muslim Council of Britain in which the influential umbrella organisation said it is the "Islamic duty" of Muslims to co-operate with police, but said she was concerned about elements within Britain's Muslim community that push a separatist agenda.
"The vast majority of Muslims want to get on with their lives, be left alone, make their way, progress and be upwardly mobile," she said.
"But there are some Muslims that preach or urge that the way to be a good Muslim is to separate yourself from what they portray as an inadequate if not downright bad society, and are willing to go to the lengths of exploiting the freedoms that such a liberal society gives them to ends that are destructive of it - whether to try to impose a different legal system or to separate the Muslim communities from the rest of society.
"Now those are things the UK will not, I hope, be willing to concede. There are some lines that you need to draw. The message is integration, not separation."
Dame Pauline, chairwoman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the 1990s, admitted security services underestimated the danger posed by radical preachers given asylum in Britain at that time. "I think they made a mistake. Some of these people went on to preach violence in Britain. We allowed them to do that and we shouldn't have.
"I don't think these people were regarded as anything more than individual threats. What was not understood was the extent to which they could mobilise opinion in a way which in the end would create such a degree of movement and a willingness actually to conspire against us."