As a metaphor the language of war may be a forceful means of expressing the priority our security forces should put into defeating terrorism. As George Soros has observed, “We have fallen into a trap”.Part of the problem of the present Western approach on terrorism is the insistence of our leaders in Washington and London on describing it as a war. The great irony is that invading Iraq is precisely what al-Qa’ida wanted us to do, because it served their agenda of polarising the West and the Islamic world. The invasion of Iraq has handed the terrorists a whole new weapon to deploy on the Arab street. The bombs in Madrid resulted in the worst terrorist atrocity in Europe for 15 years and were the latest in a litany of murderous assaults from Turkey to Morocco.Our own experience in Northern Ireland has demonstrated that the only way to diminish the threat from terrorism is to isolate the terrorists and to deny them any sympathy from their own public. The rational approach is to ask whether our actions are making the world as a whole safer from their malign intentions.The sober, depressing answer to that question must be that the invasion of Iraq has made the world more vulnerable to a heightened threat from al-Qa’ida, which is precisely what our intelligence agencies warned the Government on the eve of war.

There is no certificate of immunity which can be obtained from al-Qa’ida. Given popular sentiment in Spain it is almost certain that nine out of ten of those murdered in Madrid had opposed the Iraq war. The lethal energy of al-Qa’ida makes no nice distinctions between those who opposed the invasion of Iraq and those who supported it. It was our occupation that gave al-Qa’ida the motivation to target Iraq and the incompetence of our plans after Saddam that offered them the open door through which they entered it.Tony Blair is right when he insists that there can be no opt out from terrorism for any individual country.

Yet the conversion of Iraq into an extended battlefield between the West and al- Qa’ida is a measure of the failure of our policy, not a justification for invasion.The Islamic fundamentalists regarded Saddam with as much hostility as anyone else, and he reciprocated by keeping them out of Iraq. Iraq has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that intelligence cannot provide evidence reliable enough to justify war on such a speculative basis.A year later ministers do not justify our presence in Iraq by the hunt for those elusive weapons of mass destruction, but by the need, as the Prime Minister put it yesterday, to be “steadfast against terrorism”. The new Bush doctrine claimed the right to make war on any country that could be a potential threat some years down the road. Any retrospective examination would inevitably draw attention to questions that they find increasingly difficult to answer – such as why they ever believed Saddam was a threat since he turns out to have had no nuclear programme, no chemical or biological agents, and no delivery system with which to fire them.A fitting way to mark the anniversary would be to drive a stake through the doctrine of pre-emptive strike and bury it where it cannot be disinterred to justify another unilateral military adventure. Britain is a nation given to commemorating our military actions. Even 60 years on we are preparing to remember the D-Day invasion and honour the incomparable courage of the men who waded ashore that day.
It says much about the nervousness in Government over Iraq that they have no plans to mark tomorrow’s anniversary of the invasion of Iraq This is very sensible on their part.