15 Year Fight Against Terror!

So says the new Security Minister.

Britain faces a 15-year battle to end the threat posed by Islamist terrorists, the Government's new security supremo has admitted.

Admiral Sir Alan West, the former First Sea Lord, said the overall danger facing the country, from both home-grown and foreign terrorists, was at its greatest ever level and that a new approach was badly needed to tackle it.

In his first interview since his surprise appointment by Gordon Brown as security minister, Sir Alan called on people to be "a little bit un-British" and even inform on each other in an attempt to trap those plotting to take innocent lives.

"Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone," he said. "I'm afraid, in this situation, anyone who's got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life."

Indeed, these people are trying to destroy our way of life. Let's not help them along the way, shall we? I think most of us would accept that if there were a short-term answer, some sort of clamp down that removed many of our civil liberties which actually solved all of this, then we'd find it acceptable. Say, a three month, or six month, move to a war based society. Detention without trial, no presumption of innocence and so on, all the things that have already been enacted....if it was for a limited period of time, in the face of great danger, terminal danger to our way of life, many would in fact support such a thing.

Assuming that it would be effective, of course.

But 15 years? Now you're talking about somwhere near the rest of the natural lives of a good portion of the citizenry. You're also talking about a period of time long enough that we will, all on our very own, change the society irreversibly. After a 15 year period where civil liberties are so curtailed, after we have become a nation of snitches who have given up our freedoms for security (if indeed the latter will have been achieved) then who really believes that we'll get them back?

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, but I think I would rather live in a free society which included the possibility of my being blown up than to surrender said freedom for the rest of my life.

The very fact that this campaign will last 15 years is exactly the reason that we should not change the law to wage it.