The US-led invasion of Iraq had in many respects increased rather than diminished the terrorist threat, former chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Commission Chris Patten, now Lord Patten of Barnes, said in Dublin yesterday.
He was delivering the second Mary Holland Commemorative Human Rights Lecture at the Royal Irish Academy, under the auspices of the Irish Hospice Foundation.
Recalling the career of the late Irish Times and Observer journalist, Lord Patten said Mary Holland was "a tireless campaigner for social justice, communal reconciliation and dignity for the dying".
Introducing the lecture, Irish Times Editor Geraldine Kennedy said Holland had "devoted her journalistic life to the problems and people of Northern Ireland".
In his lecture, entitled "Democracy and Terrorism", Lord Patten described the Iraq War as "a terrible example of how terrorism can provoke a government into taking actions which do much more damage to it and its country than the original terrorist assault".
He added that, "as was predictable and predicted, not least by intelligence agencies in Washington, London and elsewhere, the Iraq invasion has in many respects increased rather than diminished the terrorist threat.
"The conflagration, in part a civil war, predominantly between Sunnis and Shiites, and in part a fight to expel American and allied forces, has provided a magnet for jihadist terrorists. It has sadly confirmed the unfair caricature of America as hostile to the Arab world, mainly because she is a friend of Israel, but also because of America's alleged wish to steal Muslim resources, mainly oil.
"Bin Laden had hoped to provoke the US into an expensive, and militarily and morally draining, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. He cannot have believed his malign luck when Iraq became the scene of the neo-conservatives' grievous and foolish error, taking attention away from Afghanistan and the adjoining Pakistan border regions where al-Qaeda continues to find refuge."
Asserting that the "war on terror" was essentially unwinnable, Lord Patten continued: "Any time you declare victory you can find that your crowing is the precursor to this or that extremist strapping bombs to his or her body and descending into an underground system to cause death and maiming."
He added: "Yet tactically, despite some political and strategic blunders, some argue that the containment of terrorism has been moderately successful. What is controllable has been controlled." Lord Patten said: "This might encourage us to recall that counter-terrorism can and does succeed. It worked in Malaya and the Philippines in the 1950s; it worked against the Red Brigades in Germany and Italy in the 1970s; and it had some success against the IRA in Northern Ireland."
Commenting further on the Iraq War, he added: "When [ former US defence secretary] Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 said of the prisoners in Guantanamo that he did not have even the slightest concern over their treatment, and when it became apparent that American forces had not only used torture but that their commander-in-chief had debated with his advisers just how much torture was legitimate, the anti-terrorism cause was heavily discredited." Lord Patten stressed that, "Democracies should live by their principles in fighting terrorism."
Full text of speech on ireland.com