When Barack Obama recently urged Benjamin Netenyahu to pursue the diplomatic rather than military route with regards to Iran and its nuclear ambitions, the Israeli Prime Minister was keen to remind the President and the world of Israel’s close proximity to Iran and how that makes for a different timeframe for them to operate upon: “the American clock regarding preventing nuclearisation of Iran is not the Israeli one. The Israeli clock works, obviously, according to a different schedule.” In other words, Israel feels that there is greater imperative to act sooner rather than later on account of its geographical closeness to Iran. Presumably, that also means less time for diplomacy. Such hastiness seems strangely familiar. To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, Netanyahu would do well to turn his “clock” back to 1981.

Back then, Israel felt threatened by Iraq and what it believed it was up to at its Osirak nuclear reactor plant in Tuwaitha. Like present-day Iran, Iraq insisted its nuclear programme was peaceful. Of course, Israel was wise not to take the word of the Iraqi incumbent Saddam Hussein. However, it wasn’t just the Iraqis that insisted Osirak served a peaceful purpose. Harvard Physicist, Richard Wilson, who inspected the plant in December 1982, was adamant that Osirak was nothing more than a power plant. It was his belief that “to collect enough plutonium [for a nuclear weapon] using Osirak would’ve taken decades, not years.” Iraqi exiles would later voice their agreement with this analysis. The French, who sold the Iraqis the reactor in the first place, also stated that the plant wasn’t capable of producing a nuclear weapon.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding Osirak’s true purpose, Israel went ahead and launched ‘Operation Opera’ – a swift bombing by Israeli warplanes that levelled the plant in mere minutes. As is typical with Israeli airstrikes, there was little to no regard for human life as the bombings killed eleven, including a French civilian.

If one were being generous to Israel, we could say that such disregard for casualties and International Law could be forgiven if the bombings prevented or significantly slowed down Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. However, the evidence indicates that the airstrikes had the complete opposite effect – not only did they fail to stop the programme but they may in fact have initiated it. At the very least it accelerated the process. As such, it is erroneous to describe Operation Opera as a ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘preventative’ strike as many have done over the years. It is far more accurate to describe it as an ‘instigative’ or ‘accelerative’ attack. Those who cite the bombing of Osirak as a successful model to be emulated in Iran clearly need to be reminded of this.

There are of course, key differences between Iraq 1981 and Iran 2012. In the case of the latter, it would take more than not launching an instigative or accelerative attack to halt its nuclear weapons programme. However, it would at least be one less step towards a nuclear Iran. If Israel wishes to take multiple steps back, then it and its allies will need to abandon their programme of provocation and to end the practise of undertaking military aggression too readily on the doorstep of Iran.

It’s not only three-decade old history that the Israelis should be wary of when it comes to Iran. One only has to glance at recent history of the region – specifically the belligerence of Israel and its allies – to see why the Iranians have been going down the path of nuclear weapons in the first place.

If Israel chooses to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, it’s highly likely that they won’t inflict enough damage stop their programme for little more than a while. It’s far more likely that such an attack will motivate the Iranians to push their programme quite literally further underground in harder bunkers. More significantly, any attack will inspire the Iranians to pursue nuclear weapons with an even harder resolve.

At long last, those damned illusive WMDs have been found! The discovery of a secret and undeclared stash of chemical weapons comprised of tons of mustard gas and chemical shells by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will surely be enough to warrant an immediate and full vindication of former Prime Minister Tony Blair won’t it? Not quite. The problem is that at the time of the invasion of Iraq we weren’t quite looking in the right place. In this case, a miss is as good as 1600 miles as these WMDs were found not in Iraq but in Libya. Still, kudos to Blair for getting the general region right (and to think that people have the audacity to criticise Blair for his alleged weak grasp on all things International. Shame on them!).

The fact that Colonel Gaddafi could surreptitiously stash these weapons is made all the more shocking by the fact it happened on Blair’s watch. This was the same Blair who described “Tyrannical regimes with WMD” as “begetters of chaos.” In light of such a view, we can assume that when he made his 2004 “deal in the desert” with Gaddafi, Blair was careful to put strict provisions in place to absolutely guarantee that these weapons were destroyed; perhaps insisting on a team of UN Weapons Inspectors and a number of vigorous tests and deadlines to be met without fail. Well, no. Instead Blair took the “Mad Dog” Gaddafi (clue is in the name) at his word and blindly accepted his assurances that chemical weapons, such as the ones found last week, would all be declared and subsequently destroyed.

Only a year prior to this “deal”, Blair was a far less trusting individual. This was no less true than when it came to the likes of Saddam Hussein, Iraq, international opinion and evidence (or rather lack of). For instance, he didn’t take Saddam at his word about the state of Iraq’s WMD arsenal and quite rightly so for rather obvious reasons. However, Blair’s distrust extended far beyond the Iraqi dictator personally. He was distrustful when the UN Weapons inspectors were allowed to return in 2002. He was distrustful when Iraq issued a 12,000 page document detailing the statuses of its weapons programme. He was distrustful when Hans Blix made his announcement that Iraq was cooperating with the UN’s team’s work and his citation of the destruction of 40 Iraqi missiles as proof. He was certainly distrustful when Blix announced he found no evidence of WMDs in Iraq. Such was the strength of Blair’s distrust that he was willing to go to war on it. In fact, the only thing Blair could trust was his own distrust of everything and everyone but himself and his US ally.

In his Commons address to MPs on the eve of invasion, Blair attempted to explain the disparity between his own distrust and the actual evidence:  “We are now seriously asked to accept that in the last few years, contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence, he [Saddam] decided unilaterally to destroy the weapons. Such a claim is palpably absurd.” Blair wasn’t wrong and was in fact displaying sound reasoning and common sense – it would be hard to accept that Saddam had destroyed all his weapons, contrary to history. However, the question begs, why didn’t he apply the same sound reasoning and common sense when he made his deal with Gaddafi a year later? Anyone with a basic knowledge of the Libyan dictator would have found it hard if not impossible to accept that he, like Saddam, contrary to history and intelligence had decided to destroy all his WMDs – anyone but the “palpably absurd” Blair it seems.

So what makes a Prime Minister distrustful to the point of war and invasion one year, and then capable of casually accepting the assurances of an insane tyrant the next? Had Blair undergone some sort of personality transplant? Had his ever-growing faith in Christianity meant that he had become some sort of Patron Saint of Trust? Was it just bad (or appalling) judgement? Was it his trademark arrogance? As optimistic as these explanations are, one suspects the real explanation is something far more sinister and unacceptable.

Could the real reasons lie in the fact that Gaddafi, unlike Saddam, was willing to open up his country (and its oil reserves) to the UK and her economic interests without a fight by choosing to “come in from the diplomatic cold”? Iraq’s reluctance to do the same meant that Blair “had” to be distrustful, even if that meant going to war on a premise that lacked credible evidence. In other words, if Iraq wouldn’t come in from the diplomatic cold voluntarily, it would have to be dragged in, not only kicking and screaming but bleeding and dying.

In September of this year, eight years after coalition troops had first entered the country, President of Iraq Jalal Talabani told the UN General Assembly that his country had now been completely liberated. In the meantime, the world has witnessed a series of liberations in other Middle Eastern countries. By comparison these were speedy affairs, taking months rather than years. They were not marred by the levels of bloodiness witnessed in Iraq. Notably, they were liberations that came from within. The question begs, if Iraq had not been invaded in 2003, would they too have enjoyed a home-grown liberation? Had they done, imagine what a wondrous event that this would have been.

The scenes of Saddam’s statue being torn down in Baghdad would have been a genuine explosion of joyous celebration rather than that embarrassing, contrived photo op put on by a handful of American GIs. The benefits of a home-grown liberation would not have stopped there. There would have been no debacle of the CPA, no Paul Bremer, no disastrous De-Ba’athification programme, no foreign fighters on the street for Al Qaeda to target and rally support against, no civil war, no five figure body count, no thousands of coalition soldiers going home wrapped in flags, no deepening of the pool of grievances against the West for extremist to draw from, no eight-year wait for complete liberation etc. I concede that this is all counter-factual history. There is no way of knowing for certain what would have happened if the Iraq War had never been. However, it’s very hard to imagine any liberation of Iraq going as badly or worse as it did in reality.

Some may say at least the removal of Saddam came sooner rather than later. There may be something to this but if Saddam had to go in 2003 then why not do it another way? Doesn’t the NATO intervention in Libya demonstrate how a once intractable dictator can go with a little push? Unfortunately however, the idea of a limited intervention was never really considered by the UK Government. In the build-up to war, Bush and Blair insisted that there was “no alternative to invasion” – Saddam had to go and an invasion by the US and UK was the only way to go about it. They found this a most convenient way to silence those in the anti-war camp and brought much of the public’s mind round to the idea of invasion. At the time, the notion that the Iraqi people could liberate themselves was ridiculed, overlooked or ignored.

However, as the recent success of NATO in Libya goes someway to demonstrate, a limited intervention could have worked. In fact, such an intervention would likely have proved a lot easier in Iraq than it was to be in Libya, for a number of reasons. First of all, in Iraq, unlike Libya, there were plenty of properly trained and experienced armed opposition fighters that formed a semblance of an army. Comprised of Shia, Kurdish and Communist guerrillas as well as numerous veterans from the 1991 uprisings, they numbered in the thousands and in the event of an armed uprising, would likely have been better coordinated and more professional than the rebels in Libya proved to be. Secondly, a No Fly Zone would be rather easy to implement for the simple fact that there were already two in operation come 2003. Thirdly, any internal rising could have been supported by the freezing of Saddam’s and his cohorts’ overseas assets and the retargeting or removal of the sanctions that were empowering the regime. Some may say that suggesting alternatives to invasion comes only with the benefit of hindsight.

Of course, there was no Libya example to draw upon back in 2003. However, it’s not like Blair’s Government were unaware of the alternatives at the time of going to war. Furthermore, they were made fully aware that such alternatives had a high probability of success. Despite being well-informed, they still maintained that there was “no alternative” to invasion. Perhaps the truth is we didn’t want the Iraqis to win their own freedom and found it much more preferable for them to receive a freedom of our choosing. A cursory glance at the UK’s handling of the Iraqi pursuit of freedom over the last two decades illustrates this. By allowing the use of his attack helicopters and artillery, we allowed Saddam to brutally supress the 1991 uprisings (uprisings that we encouraged). We then, with the help of the US, administered deadly sanctions which, as well as leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands Iraqis, empowered Saddam further. In 2003, rather than assist the Iraqis in the pursuit of their own freedom we launched a full-scale and bloody invasion followed by a disastrous and deadly occupation. At long last and only once we’d determined post-Saddam Iraq’s constitutional arrangements, opened up its markets to foreign investors etc. we were ready to give the Iraqi people “freedom” – something far detached from the freedom the Iraqi people would enjoy had they been allowed to attain it for themselves.

There are no qualms about wanting to remove Gaddafi from power and democratise Libya for the good of the people. But let’s get one thing straight, never have the intentions of a political and military entity such as NATO been to safeguard civilian life. What lay behind the initial goal of his removal from power was the creation of the Gold Dinar, a currency that would have rivalled that of the Dollar and the Euro.

It was a form of currency that Gaddafi devised to help get true value for its oil, considering the dollar is really just a piece of paper. This most certainly scared the establishment, notably the IMF, who primarily use the dollar as the world currency – making vast profits off worldwide transactions that take place between global traders.

The gold Dinar would have weakened the dollar and have provided Africa as a whole far greater parity with the Euro and the Dollar. It would have brought greater prosperity to the people on the continent. Gaddafi held two conferences, the first in 1996 and the last of which was in 2009 lambasting the west for exploiting the Middle East and Africa for its resources in exchange for a pittance. There is certainly a case to be argued for the pot calling the kettle black as Gaddafi himself has amassed an exorbitant amount of riches. His wife and remaining kin fled to Algeria with a sum of thirty billion dollars following their exodus from power in cowardly fashion.

Without digressing, one can certainly look at the motives as being a reasonable one for the IMF, which is effectively a branch of the American Treasury. The case of Saddam Hussain is the most prominent example of a similar occurrence happening. Saddam too had contemplated switching to using the Euro instead of the Dollar to trade in. Before such plans could be implemented a story pertaining to the madman hiding weapons of mass destruction were cooked up before the UN by Colin Powell and before you know it the UK and US were marching to the drums of war invading Baghdad in 2003.

Neo-Conservatives can harp on about the Libyan mission being a humanitarian cause and the spreading of democracy being at the heart of it all but it’s a crock. The fact simply remains that massacres are occurring in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia with brutal crackdowns, yet such countries receive no visible criticisms. The reason for this? Because they are strategically aligned to what the West wants in spite of having political despots as heads who are on par with Gaddafi in terms of callousness.

Iran too is the focus of this of the military industry complex of America, which is embedded with the IMF. As part of the “Shanghai Initiative” along with Russia and China they are already plotting to oversee the demise of the dollar. They are sick of financing US expeditions in the Middle East who themselves are planning for the future, hence the attack on Libya.

Interestingly enough Gaddafi had been welcomed back into the international fold after being discarded to the periphery for so long due to his links with terrorist organisations. Yet strangely after opening the doors to the West for business after Tony Blair’s visit in his last year of office, he was immediately turned on even after complying with the West. He abandoned his weapons of mass destruction program, allowed western corporations to exploit Libya’s vast oil reserves and even shared intelligence with western intelligence agencies in regards to seeking Libyan dissidents who were to be caught and tortured.

The sad images coming back from Libya will only serve to give my assertions more credence. The NTC will be a stooge government for western interests. The country will take decades to recover from the barrage of bombings its infrastructure took and not to forget the hearts of those Libyans that will have become obdurate following the innocent death of relatives in various bombing raids conducted by NATO.

If Iraq is anything to go by, Libya will face challenges just as stern and difficult. Whilst Gaddafi was no saint, he was certainly the lesser of two evils when compared to NATO. Under the tyrant there was stability and he modernised Tripoli greatly, particularly his home town of Sirte, creating housing complexes for people to live in. Libya’s standard of living was also the greatest in Africa, though this is certain to change in the coming years.

Just as it happened upon the break up of the Soviet Union, the IMF managed to take control of vast resources and privatise the economies to the detriment of the people. They have done so in Iraq with its great oil reserves and will do the same with Libya. Had it not done so and Gaddafi’s currency plans come to fruition, they along with many of the oil providing states could have demanded far greater payment for the commodity. Payment in gold would have been astronomical and something NATO and its allies in the west could not contemplate.

For attempting to change the economic status quo and for challenging the economic elites, Gaddafi, much like the former Iraqi counterpart Saddam Hussein, paid the price. The eye of the IMF will firmly be fixed on Iran next as they too speed up the process to help change the balance of economic power in cahoots with China and Russia as they look to bring about the downfall of the American dollar as the world’s currency reserve.

It was the great French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre who first asserted that a people gets the government it deserves. On this basis, those who believe in karma would be led to the conclusion that the British people must in their past lives have committed truly dreadful sins. For the Blair government was undoubtedly the worst in modern British history.

A largely forgotten episode in 1997 serves in hindsight as a warning sign of the disaster to come. Having been swept into office partly because of public revulsion at Tory ‘sleaze’, Blair wasted no time in besting the worst efforts of the guilty Tories. After a meeting with Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, the then Prime Minister intervened in the lawmaking process to secure an exemption for that sport from a tobacco advertising ban. This was as naked an act of corruption as had ever occurred in modern times, and Blair evaded detection by declaring himself a ‘pretty straight kind of guy’. The teenage language is itself instructive, betraying either stupidity or a certain low cunning.

Things could only get worse. Throughout his years in office, Parliament was used as a printing press, his obedient MPs rubber stamping bill after bill, the majority entirely superfluous but a dangerous minority aimed squarely at depriving the British people of their liberty. Whether wanting to detain people for three months without charge, installing CCTV on every street corner or demanding that the population carry identity cards, the desire for control and repression was a defining characteristic of the era.

Perhaps worst of all was Blair’s intentional vandalism of Britain’s constitution. A country without a written constitution must rely on the respect of historical norms to remain free. Without a document to restrain a tyrannical government, that government must be restrained by institutions or by the people. In his extraordinary speech to the 1999 Labour conference, Blair urged that every last vestige of conservatism in Britain should be eradicated, thereby – though he didn’t say this – removing any obstacle to he and his party establishing total control. (Anyone who still believes New Labour was ‘right-wing’ should read this speech.) Within months he was making good on his promise, ejecting hereditary peers from the Lords and packing the chamber with Labour apparatchiks in a straightforward act of treason. The office of Lord Chancellor was subsequently casually abolished. The Cabinet was hardly worthy of the name and the independence of the Civil Service was subverted. Britain now truly was, as Blair put it, a ‘young country’, a nation with no past to look back to and no institutions to challenge executive power.

We know now, thanks to the strategist Andrew Neather, that mass immigration was encouraged to ‘rub the right’s noses in diversity’. It is plain that the impact of allowing huge numbers of people to settle in Britain despite having limited qualifications and often no grasp of English was twofold: to suppress the wages of the working class people Labour was supposed to represent and to create cultural tensions. With Blair’s agenda of the destruction of old Britain in mind, it can be concluded that there was a third, desired, impact: to prevent any feeling of nationhood or integration in Britain, further encouraging an ignorance of or hostility towards the British tradition of individual freedom, the value most antithetical to the New Labour project.

Of course, the most obvious crime on the charge sheet cries out to be examined – Iraq. To reduce a country from a stable tyranny to a barbaric anarchy is of doubtful benefit. To impose this change on a country from without is at best dangerous naivete. To do so while putting British troops in harm’s way is unforgivable. International law is of no consequence: those who stupidly invoke it in their opposition to the war imply that violence is wholly permissible as long as some bureaucrats at the United Nations give it the all clear.

What matters is morality. It is difficult to think of the hundreds of thousands dead, the millions of homeless, the orphaned children and the coffins draped in Union flags without feeling furious. The purpose of this misadventure will never be established. It is now widely accepted that Blair and his cronies massaged the facts and bullied civil servants in order to convince Parliament to go to war. When it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, rather than apologise Blair executed another of his manoeuveres and reminded us all of how nasty Saddam Hussein was. While true, this was a straightforward obfuscation of the facts: Britain went to war on a false premise. Future generations may well be astonished at the scale of this crime and the lack of punishment for its perpetrator.

Whatever mass psychosis caused the nation to vote for a rabble led by a charlatan three times has now hopefully lifted. The economic miracle that perhaps caused it has been exposed as a credit boom; yet another lie, one which gave the appearance of prosperity while storing up immense problems for the future. All the while, false riches were pumped into the creation of a client state, a make-work programme for bureaucrats and a sure source of votes come the next election.

The Blair regime stuns in the scope of its destructiveness and the scale of its crimes. Like a gang of rioters, its transgressions are too numerous to list and its smaller offences, by themselves serious, are overlooked when compared to everything else. That Blair got away with it for so long is shameful. A culture of celebrity that values good looks and spin over substance is harmful by itself. Applied to politics it opens the door for ruthless liars and frauds to swindle the population by simply wearing a decent suit and smiling a lot. Orwell thought of tyranny as a boot stamping on a human face. We now know that it can take the form of a loathsome grin.

 September 10th 2001. The world was a relatively quiet, predictable place. Neither the USA or UK were involved in any big wars, NATO and the UN were following peaceful lines. The Taleban were secure in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein safe in Iraq, and Israel was facing violence from the Palestinians and the rhetoric from Syria, who were also occupying Lebanon. Hosni Mubarak was Egyptian President and Head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, and Libya’s Colonel Gaddaffi was being readmitted to the international world after years as a pariah.

September 11th 2001. Nothing was happening. Three thousand people in New York had gone to work in the Twin Towers. Then at 0820 EDT (1220 GMT) America’s FAA Boston centre declares AA Flight 11 is hijacked. At 0846 the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan, NYC is hit by a Flight 11. By 1003 EDT another plane has crashed into the South Tower, one has crashed in Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon was hit by a fourth. By the end of the clean-up 3000 people are dead and many more are suffering with mental issues resulting from the trauma and others from physical problems caused by the attacks themselves and the debris.

Ten years on, how has the world changed? Some people, mainly on the Left, would say that many more people are dead due to the ‘War on Terror.’ American values are queried, mainly in the Arab world, dictators have fallen and the West on edge and dictators more bold. What the world experienced was probably the biggest single event in history since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was also the worst terrorist attack on mainland America and the single largest loss of American lives (excluding warfare) since Pearl Harbour. In the following months and years,terrorists became emboldened, people became hysterical, Islamophobia rose and Britain and America went into two wars for questionable reasons.

In less than a month, the US, UK, Afghani rebels, and by December 2001 a host of other countries had invaded Afghanistan, in what some call an ‘illegal’ move. I believe that morally the USA had an obligation to invade Afghanistan as did the UK and all other countries. The Taleban refused to hand over the –most wanted man and suffered the consequences. The following year, Saddam Hussein caused his own downfall by suggesting he had WMD. Legally or not, the West went into Iraq and then the violence started. Even now violence plagues both Iraq and Afghanistan but it is getting less so. Both countries, as well as many others, are going through the long process of, as Natan Sharanskys puts it, “the transition from a fear society to a free society.” It is this that the West supports and wants yet as diplomacy can dictate, it is sometimes necessary to preserve the world order by supporting dictatorships than forcing through change. In the 10 years between 1991 and 2001 this is the policy followed by the Western world and it came crashing down in their faces.

If the US and the world had followed through into Iraq following the first Gulf War in 1991, maybe Iraq would have been peaceful and less willing to sponsor terror and threaten the world, And maybe Osama bin Laden and his Taleban sponsors would have thought twice about attacking America in both 1995 and 2001. America would still be seen as a shining light of Democracy and not as a hypocrite. America is probably the most hated country in the world, with the possible exception of Israel, following the War on Terror, and even Barack Obama’s election as America’s 44th President did not stop this hatred. What many people may not realise is that they don’t hate America or American values but American actions. They see America as “the land of the free” and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as a traitor, an Imperialist nation forcing it’s values on people who are different and traditional. While they want freedom, they don’t necessarily want American Freedom.

Another outcome of the 9/11 and the War on Terror was the 7/7 attacks on London. 52 people died in London because of so called home grown terrorists. Again, it is probable that those four young men who committed the atrocious acts, and their conspirators who are incarcerated, would not have undertaken the acts if this country was not involved in the wars that they saw as unjustified.

The real question we need to ask though is: js the world safer now than before9/11? The answer to this is in two parts. The first is yes, it is safer as rogue regimes that harbour known terrorists are finding it harder. Where there weren’t sanctions before there are now, countries are less likely to develop WMDs (e.g. Gaddaffi renouncing them), and the West is more sensitive to the feelings of the leaders of the Arab/Muslim world.

On the other hand, we are not safer from terrorists themselves. Governments across the world have had to bring in new ways of determining the terror threats, and countering those threats. In the UK we were lucky as the security services had had practice at this due to Northern Ireland. America however, had to draft in experts from around the world.

Despite these efforts terrorist attacks have increased. Excluding Afghanistan and Iraq, we have seen the Shoe Bomber in December 2002, the Bali Bombings in 2002, one in Istanbul in November 2003 that killed 60 people including the British Consul, the 2004 Madrid Bombings, 7/7 in the UK, and the attempted bombing of a US bound plane last year to mention but a few. The majority of these are related to the perceived Americanisation/westernisation of the Arab world by the west. Attacks in Israel/on Israeli interests, while much lower than the pre-Camp David accords has shot up in response to America’s aggressive foreign policy.

As a consequence of repeated terrorist’s attempts on planes, air travel has become much more stressful due to increased restrictions which, unfortunately, are needed. They increase timings to get through security and therefore people need to arrive at airports earlier than they used to to avoid queues. Airlines, and security services in general, have also, illegally and unofficially, been racially profiling Arab/Muslim looking people and doing more extensive searches. With this in mind, is it any wonder that thousands of young Muslims are feeling alienated?

Moving away from the West and Middle East, Islamic terrorism in Russia has increased severely. Russia rules a large Muslim population in the South Caucuses which includes places such as Chechnya and South Ossetia. Following the Chechen War in 94-95 there was a certain amount of self-rule in the area which placated the population but in recent years Muslim extremism is more active in Russia. While this is not directly linked to the attacks on the West they are funded by the same people and carried out by groups linked to organisations such as Al Qaeda and, allegedly, the Iranian and Syrian governments.

It really is too hard to say whether the world is safer. On one hand tyrants and dictatorships are more on edge about WMDs and international relations, while on the other, terror organisations are acting bolder and in new and imaginary ways. While I can’t answer the question, I can admire and support the bravery of those involved, especially in the Armed Forces and undercover officers infiltrating the groups who are risking their lives on daily basis.