If for any reason you regret Boris Johnson's victory over Ken Livingstone a year ago, just be glad that it's only a former mayor of London who issued this statement today:
In 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, the security services warned the Prime minister, Tony Blair, that this would make Britain a target for terrorist attacks. We are still experiencing the dreadful truth of this warning.
The multi-faceted stupidity of this statement is hardly worth your time or mine but here are a few observations.
First, why didn't he make this point after the 7/7 bombings, when he was mayor? I mean, it would have been stupid then too but it might have had a little more resonance as our troops were still engaged in Iraq. Who knows? Perhaps a residual sense of proportion and decorum, long since abandoned.
Second, consider for a moment the weird, solipsistic psychology of someone who sees in an atrocity like this a great opportunity to settle old scores. "I see a man has had his head chopped off with a machete. Well, this will show everyone I was right all along! I hate Tony Blair."
Third, why accept the stated motivation of people like the perpetrators of this act at face value and, in doing so, lend it legitimacy? Why treat them as serious geopolitical actors? That's what they long to be. Future terrorists may read into statements like Ken's all the justification they need. Why should we let them define our foreign policy?
Fourth, if Ken's statement does anything useful, it draws attention to the fact that the predictions he and others made about "blowback" have largely been proved wrong. There were good reasons for believing the Iraq war was a mistake, and some have been shown to be correct, but not this particular one. We heard many times that British military action in Iraq and Afghanistan was a "recruiting sergeant" for terrorists, that it would convert millions of Muslims around the world to Jihad. Yet here we are, ten years down the line, and Al Qaeda is on the ropes, 9/11 hasn't been repeated, and the predicted uprising of the enraged comes down to two brothers exploding a nail bomb in Boston and two people attacking a passer-by in Woolwich with a machete and a rusty shotgun that blows up when you pull the trigger. It doesn't diminish the awfulness of these incidents to say that they do not represent anything like the rise in the level of terrorism predicted.
The simple reason is that most Muslims, like most everyone, are not potential terrorists just waiting to be activated by the action of a government. It takes Ken-levels of parochialism and self-obsession to imagine that they are.
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