Brown's Hearts and Minds

This is a good piece by Jonathan Freedland defining Gordon Brown's posture on terrorism - basically a global hearts and minds campaign as opposed to the War on Terror approach. Of course, the two shouldn't have been mutually exclusive, but somehow they were. Iraq was lost on day one as soon as it became clear that the only American policy was force majeure. The clownish John Bolton remains a true believer in this with his idiotic 'just try and stop us' rhetoric, but he's probably the only man - except, perhaps, Dick Cheney - not to notice that the insurgents/terrorists have, indeed, tried and have stopped American power, not least by successfully undermining support for the war. Brown's position is, under the circumstances, understandable. Its weakness is, of course, that it must, ultimately, be predicated on the threat of the kind of power that only the Americans can deliver. Also he's allowed anti-terrorism to become entangled with his mania for big, centralised spending. Massive aid programmes, he seems to think, will give us the moral authority to defeat terrorism. After his massive aid programme that succeeded only in making the NHS slightly worse, this is not a persuasive argument.