What a very grim weekend it has been watching the aftermath of the Paris attacks. I have turned down many requests for interviews as I dislike the need for speculation and anger-driven conclusions which immediate responses require. However, three days on, I offer here a few reflections on Friday’s events.
First, my heart goes out to those whose Friday night was shattered by the events, families who have lost loved ones and those who face the physical and emotional scars of the injuries they have suffered. I am also thinking about the police and security agencies who will be bending every sinew to investigate who was responsible and to determine the scope of the current threat. The style of attack is one which people have feared since the Mumbai attacks of 2008. At that point, when I was home secretary, authorities started to prepare for a similar scenario.
Unlike the ‘lone wolf’ attacks which have been a concern over recent years, the Paris attacks would have needed much planning, communication and coordination. Many are already asking, therefore, why this attack was not foreseen and foiled? Being wise after the event is a luxury not available to police and security agencies. Just this morning, the prime minister suggested that seven attacks have been foiled by our agencies in the last year. However, those tackling terrorism have to be successful all the time while those intent on terror attacks only have to be successful once to cause the death and mayhem we saw on Friday, so I am not one to point accusatory fingers and claim intelligence failures. There will undoubtedly be reviews of whether this attack could have been identified earlier. I hope they will also ask the question about whether the ability to ‘pick up’ the traces of the threat were enhanced or not by the Snowden revelations. These have given terrorists a much greater understanding of the capacity of intelligence agencies to hear the ‘chatter’ around attack planning and to make the linkages between terror suspects and plots.
Second, there will be views about what, as well as who, is to blame for these attacks. Some of the crassest responses over the weekend came from those, including Stop the War, who sprang to blame western governments and their people for the terror wrought against them. This victim-blaming is reprehensible, but also fails to recognise that the violence of Daesh (Islamic State is neither truly Islamic, nor is it a state) is mainly aimed at the people of Syria, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Last Thursday, 40 people were killed on the streets of Beirut while going about their everyday business. It is not the details of foreign policy which make us victims – it is the fact that we want to live in the 21st century. Apologising for our foreign policy will save not a single life nor prevent a single attack.
Finally, we will need to decide what our response should be. It was probably right for Jeremy Corbyn to cancel his policy speech on Saturday. However, the response from our frontbenchers over the weekend has largely focused on what they are not willing to do rather than a plan for action. We get it that some of our frontbench do not think that a military response in Syria can address the issues on its own. Is anyone arguing that a military response alone is enough? However, this was an attack inspired and probably actively planned from Syria. Inaction in Syria has had consequences too. Thoughtful backbenchers have already started to argue for a wide-ranging diplomatic, humanitarian and military response in Syria. This needs to be worked up into a plan.
Many of us tweeted and messaged about solidarity over the weekend. I am proud that Labour is an internationalist, not an insular, party. Solidarity and internationalism need to mean more than putting a French flag on our Facebook profiles and stumbling through the words of the Marseillaise at this week’s football (even though I will be doing both of these things). I am not sure in recent years that we have put these values into action in our foreign policy. We now need to think hard about what standing with the French – and other Daesh victims – actually means.
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Jacqui Smith is a former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @Jacqui_Smith1
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Food for thought and maybe time to face some truths before falling into the trap, that ISIS has set, and banging the drum for more military action . http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39727/paris-attacks-middle-eastern-oligarchies/ http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/
Jacqui, your first and final paragraphs are far more revealing than the remainder of this rambling and unfocused article! Tweeting and messaging, on this subject plus many others, often indicates a narcissistic personality, coupled with a desire for virtue-signalling within a particular peer group.
I am glad that you managed to suppress your ‘Rent-a-Gob’ tendencies for an entire weekend but having now proven that this was achievable, think how much better it might be (for society, if not your bank balance) if this could be extended for the next decade or more? Having initially realised, that your opinion and speculations were unlikely to make a positive contribution to any debate, then why continue, unless there are contractual reasons?
http://psychcentral.com/disorders/narcissistic-personality-disorder-symptoms/
Perhaps you should form a support group, to include: Simon Danczuk, Tristram Hunt, Luke Akehurst, Jamie Reed, Mike Gapes et al?
Until very recently the Tories were arguing that we needed to make a military response and had no plans at all on the diplomatic front. We also need to ask the question, as military leaders are doing, what precisely is the objective of military action in Syria. If there is a realistic objective which can help defeat ISIL, OK. But at the moment there isn’t one. The current argument for UK military action amounts to no more than “The others are doing it – we can’t be left behind.” That’s not a military objective.
“Standing with the French ” does NOT mean sitting on the fence.
Yet this is the consequence of Hilary Benn’s insistence that a fully worked out post-conflict plan is in place before Labour might support military action against Daesh.
No such detailed plan is possible for Syria. It’s too much of a mess there. To demand it is to fail to stand with the French.
The best we can hope for is for Russia, the US and EU to agree that free fair elections will be guaranteed in Syria via a UN-run procedure (no Assad administrators) with votes for expats (= refugees) aged 18+ and with UN peacekeepers (not just observers). Maybe two rounds will be required since there will be so many candidates.
We are talking about a country as devastated as Germany was in 1945. Elections were held in 1949 in the federal state comprising three military zones. The social democrats lost to a coalition led by Adenaur’s CDU, starting a long history of coalitions right up to today’s Grand Coalition.
It all took a lot of planning. In Syria, Assad needs to be 100% excluded from the planning.
But Benn can’t expect those plans to be bottomed out here and now. He has to decide to learn the real lessons from Afghanistan, Iraq and the Arab Spring and then work out how the UK with its coalition partners can best stop Daesh in its tracks.
The alternative is pure pacifism – a dogma as wrong-headed as militarism.
Progress are censoring and deleting posts yet again! Is this because the authors of articles, subject to critical analysis, cannot offer any credible rebuttal? If this is the case then this only serves to draw attention to the author’s original failure, in attempting to present a logically coherent position. Incompetence or cowardice, perhaps both are prevalent at Progress?