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Terrorism (Foreign Policy Aspects)

I will take a slightly different perspective to that which has developed so far by asking people to look back at some historical parallels and to the problems of propaganda and counter-propaganda in war. I mean to look back a long way to the autumn of 1914 when a photograph was prominently published on the front pages of a number of British newspapers showing what was obviously a Royal Navy battleship sinking beneath the waves. The headline was ““An audacious picture””. The battleship, as the Chamber may have guessed, was HMS Audacious, which had been holed by a mine. The reason that the Government were so upset about the picture being published was that they felt that the news of the loss of the battleship should be suppressed for fear of undermining morale at home in the early stages of the great war. It was, of course, a forlorn hope that such a disaster could be concealed from the British public and, indeed, it was not. By the second world war, the Government had learned a great deal about warfare propaganda. When one looks at the films that were made during the war—many dealt with events in occupied European countries—one is struck by the fact that they were dauntingly realistic. The cavalry did not always come to the rescue. The paratroops did not always land in the nick of time. The tanks did not always roll through the defences just in time to save the partisans from the firing squads. On the contrary, those who played the freedom fighters and the men and women of the resistance in those films often paid with their fictional lives in those films, just as the people of the resistance and the freedom fighters in reality paid with their lives in the occupied countries that the films fictionally represented. Instead of the usual two word ending, the films would often end with a defiant three words: ““Not The End””. In other words, the fight went on despite the sacrifices. What has all that to do with the conflicts that have been so articulately discussed today? Quite a lot, I suggest. The belief has grown that war is something that can be waged cleanly, quickly and with minimal loss. In fact, it is horrible, unjust and dirty. It is extremely costly in lives and in the damage caused to all the countries involved, whether they are innocent bystanders and victims or aggressive nations that are being resisted. The battle that is being faced today would I suppose have been called low intensity warfare in the 1960s and 1970s. It is therefore rather surprising that we do not seem to have learned all that much from the two main post-war conflicts in which Britain has been involved—namely, the conflict in Northern Ireland, which has already been mentioned, and the conflict in Malaya, which has not. One of those conflicts went on for three decades and the other for 12 years. Some hon. Members will have received representations from servicemen anxious to know if they will be allowed to receive medals from the present Malaysian Government in gratitude for what they did then. What worries me is whether the Malay conflict could have been pressed to a successful conclusion, with the sort of tactics that had to be used over such a long period, had the spotlight of publicity been shining upon it, focusing day by day on every incident and every casualty. It was said earlier that security alone did not bring peace to Northern Ireland, and that political solutions had to be found. That is a one-dimensional view of what solved the conflict—if, indeed, it has been solved. Political solutions would not have been found had it not been for the security presence and the political determination of successive British Governments to make it clear that no matter how many murders or atrocities took place—can one imagine anything more heinous, despicable and contemptible than blowing up the people at the Enniskillen war memorial on Remembrance day?—the IRA would in the end have to conclude that they would not be able to bomb and kill their way to victory. Therefore, the political solution was contingent on the ongoing long-term security and military contribution, backed up by the political will to win. It worries me greatly, when we consider the situation in Iraq, to hear people talking about bringing troops back soon, and saying, ““Next year, before the election, we will hand over security to the local forces.”” That smacks not so much of the approach that was successful over a long period in Malaya and Northern Ireland, but of the process that was tried and failed in Vietnam. Let us face the fact that if we engage in a conflict with a combination of outside extremists and domestic insurgents, we will not be able, in the short term, to hand over the security situation to the indigenous forces.