[Guardian] Does India have a right to invade Britain?

Does India have a right to invade Britain?
Roger Howard

July 12, 2006 04:36 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/roger_howard/2006/07/does_india_have_a_right_to_inv.html

Although nobody has as yet claimed responsibility for Tuesday's attacks in Mumbai, in which hundreds have died, it seems just possible that British extremists may have had a hand in them somewhere. After all, many such Islamist radicals are known to have travelled to Pakistan to visit training camps there, join the Kashmiri jihad and perhaps share expertise of the sort that two of the 7/7 bombers, Shehhzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan, had built up by the time they travelled there together at the end of 2004.

If we just suppose for a moment that British citizens were involved, then try and imagine your reaction if Indian politicians now began to openly demand radical changes to the political system in this country, or for sweeping reforms to the way our schools and hospitals are administered. Unless there is more democracy in Britain, these imaginary voices in India might demand, and unless minorities are given more voice, better job prospects and a higher standard of living, then India will be at risk of further attack from disgruntled and disaffected British citizens. It is therefore in the India's national interest to change the way of life in this country, or even invade us if its armed forces only had the capability.

Of course such calls sound ludicrous. But it is just such claims that President Bush has been making over the past few years and which, even after three years after the Iraqi calamity began, are now being actively championed in some influential quarters.

For although "neoconservatism" is widely portrayed to be on the retreat, a wholly discredited doctrine harboured only by a handful of extremists who lack the humility to admit their mistakes, the truth, unfortunately, is not quite so simple. What have really been discredited are the means by which neoconservative ends are pursued: for the moment at least, the use of military force to shape the institutions and values of the outside world is no longer such an easy option.

The doctrine's essential premise - that the fate of freedom and democracy elsewhere in the world is integral to the national interest of the United States - remains soundly undefeated. The neoconservatives, in short, have merely changed their methods and, in some cases, their terms of self-description, being more likely to call themselves "supporters of freedom" and "interventionists".

Consider, most obviously, the recent National Security Strategy document, published in March, whose underlying goals are baldly stated at the onset: "it is the policy of the United States", the document opens by saying, "to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world". Such claims echo the familiar argument that came so fashionable after 9/11: the fact that 15 of the 19 plane hijackers who struck the World Trade Center were nationals of a highly repressive state, Saudi Arabia, has subsequently been said to be starkly illustrative of the interrelationship of freedom and democracy in different parts of the world.

Alarmingly, however, it is not just in the White House and the corridors of political power where this neoconservative premise remains undefeated. In wider academic circles, too, the argument that global democracy is vital to America's national interest attracts a powerful following. So in his new work After the Neocons, Professor Fukuyama distances himself from the advocates of the Iraqi invasion but nowhere rejects the underlying premise upon which they built their case for war against Saddam.

This week a group of British neoconservatives, the Henry Jackson Society, is launching their own manifesto, The British Moment. Yet its members need to recognise the fundamental problems with their assertion that the fate of freedom in our own country is part and parcel of freedom elsewhere in the world. Above all, if the US has a right to interfere in the domestic affairs other countries, then other sovereign states must equally have a corresponding right of intervention in order to pursue their own interests. But such a consequence would not only be unpalatable to Washington but would equally lead to a state of global anarchy.

So even if British nationals were involved in Tuesday's attacks, then the Indians plainly would not, after all, have any right to attack the United Kingdom, or try to change our political institutions, cultural values and way of life even though over the past decade or so a sizeable number of British Muslims have long joined the armed struggle in Kashmir, and a much larger number have subsidised it. Nor does the unsuccessful bid of the British suicide bomber, Omar Khan Sharif, to kill Israeli citizens in 2003 give Tel Aviv a right to similarly intervene over here. If it were ever possible at all, any such bid would merely stir up a furious nationalist anger and create immensely powerful currents of anti-Indianism and anti-semitism.

The fact that events in one country have always inevitably had repercussions in others is instead a necessary justification only for cooperation between governments, for international surveillance of existing or would-be national enemies and for well-organised domestic policing.

 

Sigh. Is your sarcasm merter broken or your reading comprehension suddenly ceases to function? Is the author's satrirical undertone completely lost on you?