UK Foreign Affairs Committee: Iraq War increased terror threat

The UK Foreign Affairs Committee has released its fourth report for 2006, continuing Foreign Policy Aspects of the War on Terrorism (pdf). The report is worth reading, as it contains a refreshingly honest assessment of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East and the war on terror, in aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war, as well as several academic submissions which set up the current state of international law vis-a-vis response to terrorism, while looking at the scope and necessity of reform.

The latter review, is in my view, is to be welcomed for its coherence given the sweeping rhetoric coming out of Washington, and even Downing Street, which has tended to chronically overstate the inadequacy of the current collective security regime in constraining legitimate state-led action against the threat of terrorism. As public confusion over the international system, fear about terrorism, and the tendency of the public to view state failures as the responsibility of a monolithic UN "world police", have made the exceptionalist world-view more politically tenable, we need, all the more, voices like Professor Sands to countervail against those who would use the idea of a post 9/11 reality to permanently marginalise the UN process for their own pernicious agenda.