Corbyn
Closes Gap: Will He Go Past?
Saeed Naqvi
Prime Minister Theresa May and leader of
the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, have been pitted against each other
on a host of issues but nothing has caught the popular imagination more than terrorism,
as I discovered after recent interaction with students, teachers and social
workers in Manchester. Terrorism has acquired urgent saliency after the recent
Manchester bombing in which 22 youngsters, including children, lost their
lives.
The tailwind would have been behind the
Prime Minister in another era – say, when George W. Bush, dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld were embarked on full spectrum global dominance before Lehman
Brother’s collapsed. Theresa May, alas, is mandated to unclasp one hand from
Europe and attempt to clasp Mr. Trump’s with the other. But Trump is
perpetually on a high wire act of unpredictable spins and turns. How to clasp
that hand? His dizzying performances, most recently at the G7 and NATO summits
have caused event the dour Angela Merkel to throw up her hands. He is too
unreliable; Europe has to fend for itself, she suggested.
Even as she said, this, the new French
President, Emanuel Macron, was embracing Vladimir Putin at Versailles Palace.
“We have to fight terror together.”
This is not as straightforward a
commitment as it sounds. If he is to follow through on “fighting terror” with
the Russians, he will come immediately into conflict with the Deep State in
Washington with tentacles in Paris as well.
There is a huge difference of opinion on
Syria, to begin with. How to separate militant outfits like Jabhat al Nusra, Al
Qaeda and the IS from the so called Syrian opposition. According to the
Russians, their merger and separation depend on alliance tactics.
Since it is becoming difficult even for
western intelligence agencies to keep so many balls up in air, a brazen new
theory is being floated: the US must not waste its time fighting groups like
the Islamic State and its affiliates in Syria.
This theory was spelt out by Thomas
Friedman, ace columnist for the New York Times. He says the IS’s targets are
not the US or Israel. “IS right now is the biggest threat to Iran, Hezbollah,
Russia and pro Shiite Iranian militias.”
Friedman wants “Trump to be Trump –
utterly cynical and unpredictable.”
Columns of this nature are not written to
advise the state. They are written to generate a wider debate.
It is prescient of Merkel’s advisers to
have picked up the scale of “unpredictability” already in the works in Trump’s
Washington.
The theory being promoted by Friedman has
theoretical application in India’s vicinity as well. After, his recent meeting
with Sunni and Israeli leaders, the Saudi’s may well exert every muscle to
create Shia-Sunni chaos between Pakistan and Iran. The US cannot be indifferent
to the potential of this upheaval which could disrupt the Pakistan-China
economic corridor, a key link in China’s mega One Belt-One Road project. But
all game plan, are not implementable because international relations do not
proceed in straight lines.
Weigh May’s and Corbyn’s stands on the
issue of terror in this balance. May’s Security Minister, Ben Wallace is
flailing his arms against “duplicitous social media firms”. They are failing to
halt terror. “Their data encryption is allowing Jihadist cells to emerge
unnoticed.
May has been talking of a full-fledged
commission, upgradation of police, intelligence. Corbyn has no quarrel with any
of this. But to insulate Britain against terrorists – in this instance with
Libyan link – foreign policy will have to obviate military interventions which
destroy local structures and leave behind terror breeding grounds.
Outspoken though Corbyn is, even he had to
measure his words just in case the media supportive of the ruling party give it
an anti-national or an Islamophobic spin.
It is clear as daylight even to the
ubiquitous taxi driver: if you destroy countries, kill millions, render many
more homeless, by what logic do you consider yourself exempt from the fury of
revenge?
It is one of the ironies of our time that
the cult of suicide bombing is, in a sense, a gift of the US, Saudi, Pakistan
alliance which ousted the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989. But when, at George
W. Bush’s behest, Gen. Musharraf turned upon the very Afghan’s which Pakistan
had groomed as double-distilled, ferocious Islamists, the suicide bomber
mushroomed. Brilliantly brain washed, he was convinced of his pre-paid passage
to paradise. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of Pakistan’s Jamiat e Ulema, once
told me a chilling story. At a Majlis e Shura, meant only for the elders, he
was surprised to see a young man approach him with some urgency: his parents
both seriously ill, were eager for their son to go to paradise while they still
lived. Could the Maulana help him jump the queue of Suicide bombers?
Corbyn dare not cast Salman Abedi, the
Libyan suicide bomber of Manchester, in that kind of stark drama, but he did
link faulty foreign policy to acts of terror at home. Immediately, the Prime
Minister was on his case: Corbyn is making excuses for terrorism. Her campaign
has consisted of attacks on Corbyn, while he has focused on issues – foreign
policy, for instance.
As the popularity gap between the
candidates narrows, papers, like the Guardian, spot a comparison with Bernie
Sanders. But situations differ. I had written then: “if the establishment makes
Sander’s impossible, it makes Trump inevitable.” In British elections, if the
establishment (media) makes Corbyn impossible, well, you have a lack luster
May, one who can barely eclipse Corbyn.
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