Reality check

Mark Steyn says the so-called realists are wrong about the war on terror, and suggests that ‘creative disruption’ is the best way to deal with Saudi Arabia

New Hampshire

Here’s a headline from Tuesday’s Glasgow Herald: ‘Saudi Security Forces “Allowed the Killers to Escape”’.

Hold that thought for a moment. For two-and-three-quarter years now, there’s been a continuing debate between, loosely, the ‘neoconservatives’ and the ‘realists’. The old realpolitik crowd dispute that the war on terror is a war at all, except in the debased sense of the ‘war on drugs’. That’s to say, terror, like drugs, will always be with us, and the best thing to do is manage and contain the situation through the usual long-established mechanisms — a quiet word with Crown Prince Abdullah here, a modest initiative with M. Chirac there. Insofar as I can remember anything Sir Crispin Tickell or Lord Hurd said in these pages a few issues back, that seems to be the gist of it.