The Incredible Vanishing Foreign Policy Factor

August 14th, 2006

Views: 521

Posted by ChrisG at 2:34 pm

From Riverbend:

And the world wonders how ‘terrorists’ are created! A 15-year-old Lebanese girl lost five of her siblings and her parents and home in the Qana bombing… Ehud Olmert might as well kill her now because if he thinks she’s going to grow up with anything but hate in her heart towards him and everything he represents, then he’s delusional.

From Kim Howells:

Mr Howells told BBC News 24 the letter’s comments were “facile”. He said: “I have no doubt that there are many issues which incite people to loathe government policies but not to strap explosives to themselves and go out and murder innocent people.

Suppose we were in a bar, and I was telling you about how an acquaintance of mine, let’s call her D, was responsible for killing a man with malice aforethought. And I was telling you how D did this. She waited for him silently in the shadows, laid hold of an iron bar, snuck up behind him quiet as you like, and brained him. No question of it being unpremeditated. But she got off, no problem.

And then suppose I stopped the story there, finished my drink, and left – leaving you marvelling at how she killed him in cold blood without any consequences, and more than a bit suspicious. Suppose you then mentioned this to a friend of yours, who also knows D, and she, surprised, said ‘didn’t you hear? It was in all the papers: this guy had chased her down an alley with a knife, screaming he was going to rape her!’

Wouldn’t you feel a bit betrayed? That by leaving out a fact like that from the story, I’d in effect lied to you about what happened? That I’d tried to twist the facts?

What Howells and the other weavers of the NuLabour ‘narrative’ are incapable of avoiding is giving anything other than just that impression – because they can’t help omitting something important, on pain of the whole tale collapsing around their ears.

The official story of how we got from the pre-11/9 world, where the universal threat of global terrorism wasn’t exactly playing big to domestic audiences, to 2006, where every public official and major media pundit is convinced hundreds of homegrown ‘Islamic fascists’ are out to get the rest of us infidels and apostates at any cost is undoubtedly patently unconvincing. And the reason for this is because those who are responsible for telling it it can’t find any place within it for the actions of the Blair government.

British foreign policy plays absolutely no causal role in the real world: apparently it is neither an effect of events out there in the world, nor (of course) can it be a cause of them.

Which leaves one conclusion only: its sole function is to further a numinous project to “extend democracy” that is innocent of any material effects in any of the places to which it has apparently been extended.