Martin Jay
Is there a dark game being played here by the spooks in Britain, using a cavernous and inept media machine to create a smoke screen to the real issues?
One wonders if Britain's MI5 chief, Ken McCallum is a real person or some banal technical creation of the boffins of the UK's home security service. His recent comments about the Taliban giving rogue winnable terrorists around the world a moral boost after the calamity of the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan not only smacks of 'stating the bleeding obvious' but also of paternal baloney nefariously designed to distract the UK's public attention away from the real issues.
Is McCallum actually the real boss of MI5 or the nerdy, hapless fake chief who is there merely to generate fake news in the UK press?
Writing in the God-awful woke Guardian, he harps on about preventing over thirty UK terror attacks which he admits span over four years, but spectacularly fails to make his assertions stand up. His unsubstantiated article was really just a rant which probably only served his own interests rather than the country's; it also neatly took a pot shot at Biden without naming the U.S. president which might give us all a hint about the so-called special relationship between the UK and the U.S. being really just a farce, or a cliché used by both sides on special occasions.
But in a period where people are reflecting about Afghanistan and trying to look for lessons learnt, the article was way off the mark for a intelligence chief and raised a number of red flags.
The Americans and the British who followed them got the intel really wrong in Afghanistan as indeed was the case in Iraq. So should we really expect anything from the security services in terms of looking back - and then looking forward? And is there a dark game being played here by the spooks in Britain, using a cavernous and inept media machine to create a smoke screen to the real issues?
How could anyone with any real intellect and understanding of international politics be so stupid? The oversimplification is stunning.
In reality, some pundits might speculate that such media stunts are all about guiding a gullible public away from the difficult-to-chew truth towards the easier-to-swallow perceived truth about U.S. interventionism and the link to homegrown terrorism.
America has failed spectacularly in its military ventures for decades, going back to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam. It has a short blip in the 90s with the NATO-led air strikes against Serbia and later some success in Kosovo; but a small cabal of foreign hacks have always pointed to the faked attacks on Muslims in Sarajevo which paved the way for NATO getting the green light for the campaign pushed by the odious Madeleine Albright. And in the same period, a U.S.-led UN mission in Somalia in 1993 led to the bungling of a raid supposed to bring a recalcitrant warlord in, but led to the catastrophe of 'Black Hawk Down' - which singularly led to Bill Clinton failing to intervene in the Rwandan genocide a year later.
In the 90s there was a false sense of righteousness brought about largely by the Russian withdrawal of Afghanistan. And this has prevailed leading to 2001 when George W Bush sent troops to Afghanistan - by far the biggest failure of U.S. military-led foreign policy ever leading to thousands of lost lives, trillions of dollars of debt and most European leaders scratching their heads in recent weeks wondering if Europe can ever be beguiled into blindly following the U.S. into an intervention ever again, regardless of how shocking the events are which preceded it.
America just can't help itself in using its force to resolve the illogical outcomes of its befuddled policies. Madeleine Albright once commented in 1998 when she was Secretary of State that "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
And Britain can't seem to help itself but to follow Washington wherever it goes. But what the UK spy chief failed, curiously, to point out in his link with the Taliban and UK terror attacks is that it is London which has supported the U.S. in its dirty wars in Syria and Libya which has overwhelmingly led to nearly all of the attacks he claims he is foiling. It was Britain after all who even assisted Libyans living there to get on planes and go to Libya to fight with Al Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi, before returning only to be welcomed at Heathrow airport by spooks who gave them the nod and the wink. It was also Britain who stood side by side with the U.S. in its sponsoring of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria who were hilariously called 'moderates' just to help British journalists who were camped in Beirut but who ventured into Northern Syria to 'embed' with them. There are no moderates anymore in Syria, in case you were wondering. The West has given up its obsession with Assad so the need to blur the lines is no longer necessary. Dirty wars though, which involve terrorists being paid hard cash by the U.S. and UK, will no doubt continue as long as a naïve public laps up all those terribly insightful articles in the Guardian and assumes them to be genuine. And how is it that the home security boss seems to be an expert on Afghanistan, to the point where he is almost preparing the British public for British soldiers to return there at some point?