1828 and All That
The year 2008 marks the 180th anniversary of The Spectator. The original Spectator, founded by Addison and Steele, ran only briefly from 1711 to 1712, although its spirit lives on in our Coffee House blog. Today’s Spectator was founded by Robert Stephen Rintoul, in 1828, and we shall be inviting readers to a series of events this year to celebrate.
In the year of this magazine’s foundation, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister; Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States; Goya, Schubert and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool died; and Jules Verne, Ibsen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tolstoy were born. Agitation for parliamentary reform became ever more insistent, paving the way for the 1832 Reform Act.
In the first days of 2008, we survey a domestic scene overshadowed by economic storm clouds and drained of energy by Gordon Brown’s decision not to hold an election. Labour’s task is to prove that it has a mission other than to cling to power for as long as possible, in the ignominious tradition of John Major. David Cameron’s challenge is to transform his strong 40 per cent position in the polls into a regular 45 per cent, and to match likeability with the aura of robust competence: he has to look like a prime minister in waiting, a leader capable of taming and reforming the public sector, putting police officers back on the beat and keeping prisoners behind bars, and restoring control of Britain’s borders. Mr Cameron does not have to unveil too many detailed policies — but he should never forget the stunning impact that George Osborne’s proposals for inheritance tax cuts had upon the political landscape. That landscape is shifting, and the Tories must shift with it.
The political event of the year will be the US presidential elections, as open a race as any in recent memory. It is to be hoped that John McCain stays in the running in the ini tial primaries, as his vision of America’s role in the world is precisely what America and the world now need. McCain’s awesome record of honour and courage as a serviceman in Vietnam underpins his determination that the US must finish what it started in the war on terror, but also his insistence that the West must reclaim the moral high ground if it is to prevail: no more Guantanamos, or Abu Ghraibs. A McCain-Obama race would offer a tantalising battle between two quite different strategies for change presented by two generations. But the twists and turns of the US primary system make it quite impossible to predict at this stage whose names will be on the ballot papers on 4 November.
The departure of George W. Bush from the White House a little more than a year hence will lay to rest one of the most intellectually contemptible delusions of our time: that Islamist terror is somehow a reflex response to the provocations of the President and Tony Blair. Of course, chronology alone proves what nonsense this is. When the World Trade Center was first bombed in 1993, Mr Blair was not yet opposition leader, and Mr Bush had not yet been elected Governor of Texas.
No matter: the traumas of Iraq have given comfort to those who argue, ludicrously, that atrocities such as the 7/7 bombings would not have happened without the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003. We are told repeatedly that the Iraq conflict has been a ‘recruiting sergeant’ to militant Islam. That may be so. The trouble is that everything is a ‘recruiting sergeant’ to militant Islam, from the continued existence of the state of Israel, to the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, to the length of skirts worn by women in Western countries.
Indeed, the first days of 2008 are overshadowed by a tragedy that shows how deeply rooted and complex the threat truly is. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on 27 December revealed, once again, the abso lute resolve of Islamic fundamentalists to destroy anyone and anything that obstructs their murderous objectives.
The attempts to implicate President Musharraf in the assassination — inevitable as election fever mingles with blood feud in Pakistan — are nonetheless a red herring. It may well be that the terrorist cell responsible for Ms Bhutto’s death had links with the Pakistani intelligence service or ISI, which has long given succour to the Taleban and its al-Qa’eda affiliates. Musharraf has not always prevailed against such forces — the Waziristan Accord of September 2006 was effectively an admission that large parts of Pakistan were beyond his control. But he deserves credit for what he has achieved, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the roll call of Pakistan’s leaders since partition in 1947, Musharraf is one of the more successful and enlightened.
Mr Brown has emphasised the ‘criminality’ of global terror, but the use of such language misrepresents the scale of the Islamists’ ambitions, their twisted fervour and the ferocity of their will. The PM is on more solid ground when he seeks symmetries with the ideological struggle of the Cold War.
The two conflicts are, of course, hugely different, not least because the confrontation with the Soviet bloc was fought according to well-established rules. The first rule of the Islamist strategy is that there are no rules. But Mr Brown is right that this is as much a battle for ‘hearts and minds’ as it is a war of attrition in Baghdad, the Afghan mountains and the heartlands of Hezbollah.
Blair has gone, and Bush’s successor will be elected in November. But al-Qa’eda and its network of franchises will still be here when the next President is sworn into office in January 2009. The bitter truth that we must confront in 2008 is that, whether we like it or not, this will indeed be a long war, fought on many fronts. As Gerry Adams once said of the IRA: they haven’t gone away, you know.
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