Cameron's Policy of Perpetual War in Northern Africa: British Brains, American Muscle, and Saudi Money

January 23, 2013 • 10:37AM

British Prime Minister David Cameron laid out his government's plan for implementation of the Blair Doctrine of post-Westphalian global dictatorship and permanent warfare in North Africa, in a statement to the House of Commons on Jan. 21. The statement followed a meeting of the government's emergency committee (COBR) on Jan. 20 and preceded a meeting of the National Security Council Cameron convened today. Ostensibly, all of this was done in response to the hostage crisis in Algeria and the related crisis across the border in Mali, but what Cameron laid out in his Commons statement is a plan for permanent warfare in that region, steered by the British Empire, but implemented with American military muscle and paid for with Saudi money (though the Saudis, of course, aren't directly mentioned).

Cameron said that while the terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan has been reduced, it has grown in North Africa and Yemen. Until now, it has primarily threatened those states. "But as it escalates it is also becoming a magnet for jihadists from other countries who share this poisonous ideology," he said, and therefore it demands an international response. Britain's role, he said, is to help the governments of the region meet this threat, which means helping them provide security, but it also means supporting "effective and accountable government" in those countries.

"Together with our partners in the region, we are in the midst of a generational struggle against an ideology which is an extreme distortion of the Islamic faith, and which holds that mass murder and terror are not only acceptable but necessary," he said. "We must tackle this poisonous thinking at home and abroad and resist the ideologues' attempt to divide the world into a clash of civilisations."

Cameron vowed that he will use the UK's current chairmanship of the G8 "to make sure this issue of terrorism and how we respond to it is right at the top of the agenda where it belongs. In sum, we must frustrate the terrorists with our security, we must beat them militarily, we must address the poisonous narrative they feed on, we must close down the ungoverned space in which they thrive, and we must deal with the grievances they use to garner support. This is the work that our generation faces, and we must demonstrate the same resolve and sense of purpose as previous generations have with the challenges they faced in this House and in this country."

The Daily Telegraph reported that Cameron's pledge "prompted suggestions of a shift in his foreign policy to a much more interventionist stance, and drew an allegation that the Prime Minister has developed a 'crusading zeal' for military operations."

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta followed along in Cameron's wake in a series of interviews he gave, yesterday, after President Obama's inauguration. He told CBS News' Scot Pelley that we have to make sure Al Qaeda "has no place to hide" in Africa or anywhere else. "So the effort by the French to go after Al Qaeda in Mali is a first step in trying to make sure that they do not establish any kind of base of operations from which to attack our country," he said. "And we've got to be part of that effort, and we will be." Panetta made his comments just as the first US C-17 cargo plane landed in Bamako carrying French troops and equipment. That landing was the first of many intended to bring a French armored battalion of 600 men into Mali.