Alan Dershowitz's Sinister Scheme

No politician could posture in military garb or claim to act on God's instructions over here. Blair has come close to doing the latter, and will very soon be banished to the US lecture circuit, leaving behind all those ingrates who--in the words of Home Secretary John Reid--"don't get it". As Reid and Blair model their Imperial American robes, we see only two power-hungry men, nude and deluded--and soon to be superseded. We don't "get it", and we are not afraid to say so. When Blair growls, like some gravel-throated Hollywood voice-over, "Make no mistake--the rules of the game have changed", we are unsure whether to be amused or repelled by his facile posturing.

In Britain the Premier is not viewed as the embodiment of the country--to question the man is not necessarily to defame the office. News coverage is less tightly controlled. The climate here is, on the whole, less trusting of authority, less deferential and less given to unthinking patriotism. In Europe, 9-11 (or should that be 11-9?) was regarded as a major catastrophe but did not leave the population stunned and traumatised, as it did in the US. So when Mr Dershowitz dips his febrile fingers into the chilly pool of British scepticism, he is hoping both to test the waters and, gradually, to warm them.

In a recent cover story article published in the British political weekly the Spectator (2nd September 2006) Dershowitz calls for a New Paradigm in our approach to civil liberties. His message is that the "old" model of freedom under law is unworkable. The "relatively new phenomenon of mass-casualty suicide terrorism", we are told, demands a new approach.

But this does not ring true to British ears. Our response to three decades of IRA mass-casualty attacks was a phlegmatic disdain for the killers, combined, crucially if belatedly, with a willingness to address genuine injustice through negotiation. Blair would no doubt have claimed that we faced an irrational death cult driven by a twisted form of Catholicism and motivated only by an unreasoned hatred of our freedoms. But we are well aware that terrorism is a tool intended ultimately to influence public opinion and policy. We know just as well that the strategy aims to instil a degree of fear disproportionate to the actual increase in risk of harm. Even the well-confirmed risk imposed by IRA bombs was dwarfed by the ambient risk we face daily from unscary sources like accidents, disease and Ordinary Decent Criminals. Terrorists achieve this leveraging of low-level risk by their graphic and arresting means of death-dealing. It is our duty to retain a sense of perspective and overcome the temptation to panicky and ultimately counterproductive over-dramatisation. That means resisting the hysterical rhetoric bandied about by politicians irrevocably committed to the increasingly surreal Neo-Con view of the world.

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