British cabinet ministers have been told by the country's Foreign Office to drop the phrase "war on terror" and similar terms that may anger British Muslims and "increase tensions more broadly in the Islamic world."
The Guardian reports that the change "marks a turning point in British political thinking about the strategy against extremism."
'It's about time,' said Garry Hindle, terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London. 'Military terminology is completely counter-productive, merely contributing to isolating communities. This is a very positive move.'
A Foreign Office spokesman said the government wanted to 'avoid reinforcing and giving succour to the terrorists' narrative by using language that, taken out of context, could be counter-productive'. The same message has been sent to British diplomats and official spokespeople around the world.
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Senior British politicians and counterterrorism experts have for some time believed that the phrase allowed militants to use the sense of war and crisis, and the "clash of civilizations," to recruit new and younger supporters. They see words like "war," "battle," and "war on terror" as being ultimately counterproductive.
However, the Guardian notes that President Bush and the US government continue to use the phrase frequently, which underscores the growing divide between Britain and the US in dealing with Islamic militancy.
The split was further underscored by comments Saturday by Geoff Hoon, who served as Britain's Defense secretary during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr. Hoon told The Daily Telegraph that "Britain lost the argument" about dissoving the army of Saddam Hussein.
"Firstly we would not have disbanded the Iraqi army," he said. "We were very concerned in the final stages of the conflict that the Iraqi army was a force for stability in Iraq and I think we would have preferred for that army to remain intact. I don't think we would have pursued the de-Ba'athification policy in quite the same way.
"I think we understood from perhaps experience in Europe that quite a lot people were Ba'athists because they had to be if they wanted to be teachers or administrators and they weren't necessarily committed to Saddam Hussein. Those were arguments that I certainly put forward and I know other members of the government put forward. So we lost the argument."
Asked to whom they had lost the argument, Mr Hoon said: "To the Americans."
The Minnesota Daily writes in an editorial that the "special relationship" between Britain and the US has been strained for the past year. And, the paper's editors say, that it is time for Britain to make a decision: "be at the helm of the European Union or risk being cut adrift," by continuing to focus on its declining relationship with the US.
It is hard to dispute British claims that the relationship between our two countries entails Britain being subordinate to the United States, due mostly to the economic power the United States wields. Furthermore, current ideologies diverge between the two powers. Unlike during the Cold War, the alliance is economic and only vaguely cultural. Now, the controversy and the international backlash over British supported American actions in Iraq have enraged the British, all but severing the relationship between the two countries.
The Times of London reported in late November that senior State Department analyst Kendall Myers gave a talk in Washington where he argued that the "special relationship" between Britain and the US was actually a "myth."
"The British have a kind of tough-minded strategic sense of things politically in the Middle East and the world as a whole. We typically ignore them and take no notice. We say, 'There go the British telling us how to run the empire — let's park them'. It's a sad business." ...
He also had hard words for the US record in the [Iraq] war. "It's a bad time, let's face it. We have not only failed to do what we wanted to do in Iraq, but we have greatly strained our relationship with each other." He said that Mr Bush and Mr Blair were going to have "a difficult reckoning".
Tom Casey, a spokesman for the State department, later said that Mr. Myers is not a policy maker, nor does he have influence on foreign policy issues. Mr. Casey added that Myers had been called in to explain to his superiors his remarks, which Casey said "could be described as ill-informed and I think, from our perspective, just plain wrong."
Gerald Baker, the United States editor of The Times of London, agrees, writing that "it is impossible to read too little into the words of Mr. Myers," whom Mr. Baker describes as a "genial part-time academic" in "a widely forgotten and largely ignored part of the vast US foreign policy bureaucracy."
Baker argues that Myers' comments about the end of close ties between the United States and Britain are premature, and likely due to a misunderstanding of the fundamentally unequal relationship between the two.
It is perhaps a sign of Britain's overdeveloped sense of its importance that anyone even queries the idea that the US-British relationship is an unequal one. Given the relative size and weight of the US and the UK, the relationship could hardly be anything other. The US economy is approximately five times the size of the UK's.
But should not the UK still get something in return for its costly support of the US? Some foreign policy specialists around Mr Blair seem to have deluded themselves that as some sort of payment for Britain's support in Iraq, the US will agree to lean on Israel a bit harder to make peace with the Palestinians.
Finally, the Associated Press reported Friday that a "simmering row" between Britain and the United States over the sharing of stealth technology may scuttle a $256 billion Joint Strike Fighter project. The British Parliamentary Defense committee has suggested that Britain reconsider its involvement in the project because it is still not clear if the United States will hand over the sensitive technology needed to operate the fighters independently, despite Blair and Bush announcing such an agreement last May.
- Children of Islamic Hamas opponent killed (The Times of London)
- US tries Google for intelligence on Iran (Washington Post)
- Olmert declines to rule out military action against Iran (Haaretz)
- The neocons have finished what the Vietcong started (Guardian)
Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan.
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