Paul Thomas: Centuries-old sense of grievance can't be appeased

COMMENT

In my novel Guerrilla Season, published in 1996, a French spy (and Rainbow Warrior-related terrorist) delivers a rant that makes Nostradamus seem like a little ray of sunshine. His apocalyptic vision encompasses Islamic militants launching an undeclared war on the West and the onset of atomic and biological terrorism.

That didn't require great foresight. John Frankenheimer's film Black Sunday, in which Black September terrorists attempt to hijack a TV blimp in order to wreak havoc at the Super Bowl, came out in 1976. Now that's foresight.

Given the merciless logic of terrorism, it was only a matter of time before a major sporting event made number one on the jihadists' to-do list. What a tantalising prospect: engineering a massacre of godless decadents live on worldwide television. Whether or not there really was a plan in train for multiple suicide-bombings at the recent Manchester United-Liverpool match, the fact that it was contemplated didn't come as a surprise.

They're coming thick and fast now, these murderous extravaganzas. Since the bombs went off in Madrid six weeks ago, Jordanian authorities have foiled a terrorist plot involving the use of chemicals which they claimed would have caused thousands of casualties.

How many other plots have been foiled but not revealed to the public for fear of compromising intelligence sources and triggering panic? Are the security services still tracking every container on the high seas because of al Qaeda's apparent interest in planting a nuclear or dirty bomb on a cargo ship and floating it, like a radioactive Trojan horse, into a heavily populated port?

Plots that come to naught behind a veil of official secrecy are like trees that fall in the forest, but the concurrence of the technology of mass destruction and the jihadists' serene preparedness to push the envelope of atrocity condemn us to living in terrifying times. It's a grim irony that 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many citizens of the Western democracies are in more clear and present danger than they were during the protracted nuclear stand-off of the Cold War.

Among the things my French spy got wrong was that the war on the West would be undeclared. In fact, Osama bin Laden issued his declaration of war in 1998. As we learned from the recent hearings in Washington, it wasn't until September 11, 2001 that the United States Government took him at his word.

Two and a half years further on, many of bin Laden's declared enemies - some of them serving in government - still haven't done so.

A significant strand in the opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq is the belief that it has only served to greatly increase the terrorist threat. George W. Bush and Tony Blair, so this argument goes, are the terrorists' most effective recruiters.

There's evidence to support this contention. However, there's little objective evidence to support the implicit extrapolation: that if the coalition of the willing and the wavering withdrew from Iraq, al Qaeda would declare mission accomplished and disband itself like some not-in-my-backyard protest group that's scotched a move to establish a halfway house in the neighbourhood.

When people are kicking up an almighty fuss and making life unpleasant for everyone around them, there's an understandable temptation to give them what they want in the interests of a quiet life. Similarly, when people are prepared to go to extreme lengths, there's a tendency to assume that the intensity of their sense of grievance is in proportion to its validity.

That ain't necessarily so. They might just enjoy causing trouble and the sense of power that comes from dominating and manipulating others. They might be monsters. They might be mad.

The French remain on bin Laden's exhaustive hit-list despite trying every trick in the United Nations book to stop America invading Iraq. He's still fired up over the Sykes-Picot agreement that wound up the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate and gave Britain and France the run of the Middle East. Sykes and Picot put pen to paper in 1916.

The new Spanish Government hopes that by pulling its troops out of Iraq, it will resolve the grievance that motivated the jihadists to commit rush-hour mass murder.

The trouble is they've got another bone to pick with the Spaniards. Al Qaeda refers to it as the tragedy of Andalusia - the overthrow of the Muslim kingdom of Granada ending Moorish rule in Spain.

You're excused if this doesn't ring a bell: it happened in 1492.