What al-Zarqawi knows

It's often been said in recent weeks that you can't negotiate with terrorists. Morally that's right: in the case of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his 'Tawhid & Jihad' interlopers' group, the statement is also fact.

Their first demand on kidnapping two Americans, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, and one British man, Ken Bigley, was the release of all women prisoners from the jail in Um Qasr: no women are held there. They demanded the release of women prisoners in Abu Ghraib: no women are held there. In the end, after successive, seemingly random demands, al–Zarqawi gave up the pretence of caring about prisoner–handover and sawed the heads off the two Americans anyway.

But he left the British man alive. Why? Al–Zarqawi seems to know the British media and public better than some of them know themselves.

Tony Blair and the British government have made their position on non–negotiation clear. Faced with such noble intransigence, al–Zarqawi (who clearly follows the minutiae of developments closer than we might think) could always rely on others breaking ranks, and it gets better the longer he holds out.

The Irish Labour foreign affairs spokesman Michael D. Higgins spoke on al–Jazeera of the “illegal war”, and – along with the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern – pleaded that the unfortunate Bigley’s life should be spared because his mother is Irish, and the Irish “had not supported the war [in Iraq]”. It’s unlikely that al–Zarqawi particularly cares about the nuances of Anglo–Irish relations, but that’s an ingeniously offensive formula. Would it be less of a crime to saw the head off a British man whose mother was from Scotland? Or America?

Meanwhile, the questionable line from the Muslim Council of Britain is that Bigley specifically should not be killed as he is “a non–combatant”. Of course, if non–combatant status “got you off” then twelve Nepalese cooks (from a country without any troops in Iraq) wouldn’t have been butchered in an Iraqi ditch.

The Bigley family’s desperation causes nothing but sympathy, but with the timetable in terrorist hands, the media – hungry for updates – has encouraged the unsavoury sights of Bigley’s brother condemning the Iraq war, publicly criticising the government’s behind–the–scenes efforts, and calling for Tony Blair to step down unless he changes his Iraq policy. Nobody likes to criticise a man whose brother looks likely to be brutally murdered, but at the root of that human fact lies one of al–Qaida’s new “asymmetrical” tactics.

With deadlines postponed and abandoned, pressure mounts on the British prime minister – agonised relatives get more airtime, and say more and more desperate things. Thanks to the British press, al–Zarqawi may yet score a direct hit on the prime minister himself. If al–Zarqawi murders Bigley anyway, Blair looks uncompromising and unfeeling. If he releases him, the terrorist looks magnanimous.

The road to perdition

How did we get here?

It started when years of negotiations with the murderers of Sinn Fein / IRA in Northern Ireland persuaded many British people that terrorists want the same things we all do, and share our values. A radical misunderstanding of IRA negotiations during the 1990s is at work here, with the mistaken assumption that IRA terror was stopped around a table, rather than with guns and superb counter–intelligence. Though this misunderstanding has helped al–Zarqawi, he didn’t need to know about it. For his recent inspiration he needed to look back only six months.

In March 2004 Zarqawi’s allies managed an asymmetrical attack which changed the political landscape of Europe. They learned from the experience in a way the west failed to do. Not only did the slaughter of 191 Spaniards persuade the Spanish populace that they could opt out of the conflict (they couldn’t – more bombs were planted after the calamitous vote), al–Qaida also got the bonus of the socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the European country whose reclamation Islamists are most set on.

To date, Zapatero‘s policy decisions have included the removal of Spanish troops from Iraq, an ongoing attempt to halve state funding of the Catholic church, and (under the same banner of attempting to create “a fully secular society”) massive increases in state funding for mosques and the teaching of Islam in schools. Those bombs last March couldn’t have worked better for al–Qaida, and their latest asymmetrical target – Britain – is now feeling the consequences. Minimal terrorist effort has been shown to be capable of bringing regime–changing rewards.

The foreigner–in–Iraq al–Zarqawi and his equally foreign colleagues are proving adept at singling out the emotive, the personal and the hopeful, then twisting these noble “flaws” in the democratic process to their own anti–democratic ends.

This time, by using one man’s life as an emotive bargaining–tool the terrorists have brought condemnation on the British prime minister, made his policy on Iraq the focus, and persuaded many people that the situation is all a result of that policy. If this trick succeeds, then the terrorists may yet achieve further blows – in Britain and Iraq.

The combination of western anti–war glee and Arab anti–westernism is a formula which could still destroy the best chance Iraq has had of peace and prosperity. The terrorists in Iraq are few in number, but with the morally bankrupt in the west silently encouraging them – people who pass over the murders of brave young Iraqis queuing in their hundreds to make their country a better place, who focus only on the ones and twos who carry out the attacks – then those terrorists could succeed.

The moral vacuum of the Iraq story can be highlighted by one final aspect of the Bigley story: the two “women scientists” whose release was finally demanded by al-Zarqawi. The only explanation for their recent benign description must be the public’s foolish interpretation of what the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq means.

The hostage crisis in Iraq could certainly be eased if Rahib Taha (wife of General Amir Rashid, accomplice of Ali Hassan al–Majid) and Huda Ammash (student of Nassir al–Hindawi, and the only woman on the Iraq Command Council) like all the former regime, and indeed the inmates of Guantánamo Bay, are fast–tracked for trial. In the last week nobody appears to have mentioned what Taha and Ammash have done. Active and complicit in at least three genocides they are responsible for countless acts of experimental human evil. It is a continuing wrong, that in a story about one man, the hundreds of thousands in Iraqi graves are even now forgotten.

Al–Zarqawi has made plain that his war is against the Americans, the Kurds and Shi’a. As the assumptive heir of the Saddam Hussein credo, his plan for religious warfare must be opposed absolutely.

Al–Zarqawi and al–Qaida are uninterested in human life – Arab or western. They have worked out that the west’s desire to lose not even one life can be exploited. Hand–in–hand with its military successes, the west must fight to make it plain that its care for human life is far from being a weakness. On the contrary, it remains just one of the many reasons why British and American troops have the right to help Iraq towards its future, and why al–Zarqawi and al–Qaida must be stopped – and stopped by all people – from dragging Iraq and the rest of the world into the moral sewer these murderers can call home.

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