Jihadi strategy is working,,,,,,,,,

Whatever the Masters of the Universe would have us believe, there is a very long term jihadi strategy, and it’s working.

 

It is an arguable hypothesis that jihadism, in the sense of a holy war waged against unbelievers as part of a religious duty, saw its genesis in the fall of the Shah of Iran, and attacks against the West have been planned ever since by various terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda.

 

In this context, to think that 9/11 was a one-off attack designed to give the Great Satan a bloody nose in naïve. It was a deliberate provocation to massive US retaliation as part of an overall strategy to draw the US into unwinnable conflicts in the Muslim world and thus unite Islam in a holy war against western civilisation.

 

It worked perfectly (it is said that Bush actually considered the nuclear option). The target was Iraq despite the fact that 9/11 was nothing to do with Saddam. So Gulf 2 was launched with appalling results that are the main cause of increasingly aggressive terrorism today. In  the lead-up, I was working in the Cabinet Office in Jamaica. A Jamaican colleague told me that it was beyond belief that the US and the UK. Would put themselves in the cross hairs of Arab terrorism’. I told him that in my view this was all bluff; the West would not be so stupid as to destabilise the only non-Islamic, secular, country in the region, one which was kept in order; albeit by a brutal dictator.

 

So jihad sucked the West into a bloody war that continues to this day, except we now have the new menace of Isil which trades in a barbarity not seen before.

 

Then jihad tempted us into Afghanistan by letting it be known that Al Qaeda had its main operational base there.

 

Once again, the West swallowed the bait. Al Qaeda decamped to Yemen and other dusty hell-holes within three weeks. The ‘allies’ i.e. the Americans and British stayed for another 14 years. Quite why has never been explained. A brief reading of history, as in ‘The Great Game’, would have shown the impossibility of waging war in Afghanistan. And the Russians, with their much more recent experience, could have told us that.

 

The guiding principle when contemplating military action is ‘ What vital British interests are at stake?’ We have yet to be told.

 

Next was the ‘Arab spring’ which was heralded in the West as the downfall of the dictators. That was not going to happen. In Egypt the dominant power has always been the military, and there was no way they would allow a revolutionary government led by the Muslim Brotherhood to loosen their grip. The Saudis quickly snuffed out any democratic leanings in Bahrein. The overthrow of Gaddafi, aided and abetted by the West, had the same effect as with the case of Saddam. There is now a totally dysfunctional state which has become a haven for Isis, which is now signalling that it will move their centre of operations to Sirte, which they already control if Syria gets too hot.

 

And so to Syria.

 

It was the received wisdom at the time that Assad would only last a few weeks. Wrong again. It would have happened if the West had pulled the rug from under him quickly, but the Obama doctrine of ‘no foreign entanglements’ ruled this out. Thus we intervened when we should not, and funked it when we should.

 

To add to this woeful state of affairs, Western intelligence completely misread Isil. We were led to believe that it was no existential threat to us because its sole interest was in establishing a medieval caliphate in parts of Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan with strict Islamic law as prescribed by their primitive interpretation of the Quran.

 

We are now clear as to how wrong this was. Isil has supplanted Al Qaeda as the spearhead of jihad against the West. AQ is a spent force, at least for the moment.

 

Terrorism by a group that is suicidal is a frightening prospect. Fear of death is an essential characteristic of being human. How to cope with those who seem to be semi-detached human beings? Modern societies are incredibly vulnerable. A single SAM fired at Heathrow would close it for days. One aimed at the ATC tower would be even more serious. It would be relatively easy to sabotage water and electricity supplies. Ricin in a rush-hour tube station scarcely bears thinking about.

 

The strategy must be two-fold. Isil must be destroyed in situ. The objective should be not victory but extermination, and if this means using force ‘with extreme prejudice’, as the Americans say, then so be it.

 

And every measure, no matter how offensive to so-called human rights,  must be taken to prevent Isil terrorists from infiltrating the West.

 

Which brings us to the issue of the hour; Muslim refugees. The EU will continue its faffing-about, so no solution there is to be expected.

 

Simple logic and the instinct of self-preservation should tell us how many Muslim refugees should be accepted into Europe and the US.      

 

None!       

 

If, as we are led to believe, 2 million have already arrived, it is a reasonable certainty that this number will contain a number of jihadi terrorists: 2000 might be a conservative estimate. It is said that the IRA had only about 300 ‘active’ at any given time. They killed over 3000 people and maimed many more in gun and bomb attacks over a period of over 30 years.

 

But they were not suicide bombers or beheaders or believers in paradise.

 

It takes little imagination to grasp the mayhem ISIL fanatics could wreak throughout Europe, perhaps over decades.

 

Just how strong is our will to suppress the bleeding hearts? In WW2, there were two ‘defence of the realm’ measures that might be worth reviving; ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’, and ‘spreading alarm and despondency’.

 

The one reasonable certainty is that the situation will get worse before it gets better, given the limp-wristed leadership in most of the West.