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That the_ Guardian_ provided a right of reply to Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War (StW) after it was attacked here in the paper by the Leader of the Opposition, would suggest a

parity of esteem that is unsustainable. But then the_ Guardian _always has been a clearing house for all shades of Left-wing thought, however ludicrous the thinkers might be. After all, the

newspaper still pays Owen Jones to deliver his predictable objections to waking up every morning and finding he is still not living in a socialist one-party republic. Ms German’s article

opens with a question, in this case “ What has happened to Keir Starmer, the seasoned anti-war protester?”. This question is loaded with an assumption that is not backed by facts. Sir Keir

is actually a seasoned lawyer who may at times have expressed objections to British foreign and military policy. Lindsey German is just objecting to Sir Keir not being more like Lindsey

German, and little else. The rest of her article is a mixture of the incoherent and the ludicrous, as well as a personal attack.  The main objection Ms German seems to have is that just

because Sir Keir opposed Anglo-American forces invading and occupying Iraq, it should follow he must also oppose every other aspect of Anglo-American foreign and military policy. Certainly

German does. StW is an explicitly anti-American and anti-NATO organisation. While its heyday may have been in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, most people do not realise it was actually

set up to capitalise on the 9/11 attacks, barely 10 days after that atrocity. The organisers in effect demanded that the US should accept the murder of over 3,000 of its people by Islamist

terrorists, backed by Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, and take no military action. The existence of NATO and the collective security it provides to all its member nations is also opposed by

StW. Its supporters include Jeremy Corbyn and numerous other useful idiots, which at one time ( German asserts ) included Sir Keir. But to demand that Sir Keir keeps supporting the same side

in the manner of a football fan is childish, as is her charge of hypocrisy for not tacitly kow-towing to Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine, as Ms German seems to do. In her article, Ms German

complains that opposing military action in Afghanistan and Iraq was widely described as amounting to supporting the continued rule of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. And yet this is an

accurate and fair description. While making their protests, no useful idiot had any positive alternative that did not include Saddam being let off the hook for his numerous international

crimes and also being allowed to commit more of them, or the Taliban leading Afghanistan into the kind of humanitarian disaster we see unfolding there, now that StW’s wishes have been

granted and the US has gone. Ms German’s opposition is instinctive and unthinking. There is also the inconvenient truth that Anglo-American military action has actually seen a decrease in

terrorism, not the increase she mistakenly asserts. When there was no major military action overseas, the US suffered a devastating terrorist attack that disfigured the New York skyline and

murdered over 3,000 innocent civilians. There have been no further attacks of that magnitude, probably because any country whose leaders plan to host international terrorists now knows

precisely what would happen to them and their country. When the StW hate-figure Donald Trump became US President, the steady rate of Islamist attacks on US soil that took place under the

Obama presidency actually dropped to almost zero. Ms German might argue that there were still terrorist attacks across Europe, but these may have taken place anyway had al-Qaeda been allowed

to operate from Taliban-dominated Afghanistan with impunity in her ideal scenario of US-UK inaction. Islamist attacks had been a part of life in the Middle East and North Africa for more

than a decade prior to 9/11 and its spread to Europe was probably inevitable, whether or not the US and UK intervened overseas. Intervention probably reduced the number of attacks by

confronting and destroying terrorist organisations more than it inspired others to act. German confuses correlation with causation. The rise of Islamist terrorism would have taken place

irrespective of Western action, as it was already rampant in Muslim countries. Islamism cannot coexist with the West, but Western military superiority means that any conventional army

fielded by an openly Islamist state would automatically lose any war it made on the West, rather as Saddam was comprehensively routed in 1991 and 2003. Thus urban terrorism using

infiltration by non-state actors is the only form of military action Islamists can and do take. It is how the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, usually makes war on its enemies. StW

capitalises on this fact and states that we have brought these terrorist attacks on ourselves. We did not. These terrorists are religious fanatics that seek to destroy us and our way of life

as part of what they regard as a holy war, irrespective of where we have placed our soldiers or dropped our bombs. Ms German also falsely pins the blame squarely on NATO for the suffering

of the peoples of Libya and Afghanistan. In Libya, NATO forces prevented Colonel Gaddafi from using his army to make war on civilians, and the country was already in disarray due to the Arab

Spring protests. Western military intervention cannot be held responsible for the ongoing disorder, or indeed prolonging it. Had Gaddafi been allowed to “ purge Libya inch by inch, house by

house, alley by alley”, as he threatened to do, the death toll would have been much higher. The West also held off the Taliban for two decades, and its only failure was that it proved

impossible in that time to build a government and institutions with solid enough foundations to survive Western withdrawal. Any suffering in Afghanistan originated with the Taliban, not the

West’s response. In her shopping-list of objections, Ms German includes NATO countries being asked to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, stating that this “ encourages further

militarism and conflict”. But she makes no mention of the fact that Russia spends more than double that percentage already. By the logic of her own world-view, this should make Russia twice

as militaristic as NATO. Ms German accuses NATO of being expansionist, but that is to misrepresent the role of NATO. Countries are not forced to join NATO in the same way that a slew of

Eastern European countries were strong-armed by Khrushchev in 1955 to sign up to the Warsaw Pact and have their armies run by the Soviets. In fact it is the bitter experience of being a

Soviet slave state that made the numerous former Warsaw Pact countries eager to join this defensive Western alliance. Wanting never again to be dominated by Russian militarists is a valid

reason for a former Warsaw Pact country to join NATO. This is especially so for the Baltic states, that were illegally taken over by Stalin at the same time as Hitler was on the rampage, an

act applauded at the time by StW’s Stalinist antecedents . Ms German rounds off her article by declaring that StW has been “ proved right over the previous wars, while those who mistakenly

supported them seem to have learned no lessons from the terrible consequences of their errors”. This is simply not the case. The West has intervened in failed states whose failure included

exporting violence beyond their borders. Ms German seems to believe that anything less than leaving a country with a peaceful civil society like, say, unified Germany after 1991, is a “

terrible consequence ”. The world is not like that. Wars are messy affairs and it is not the fault of the West that civil societies have seldom emerged from the ruins of these failed states.

The failures ran far too deep. This is the fault in these countries, their institutions and their people, not in the West’s response. The civil war in Syria has had terrible consequences,

not least because of Russian military intervention, propping up the ailing Assad regime just as it was starting to collapse. It was also from Syria that Daesh started their murderous

campaign. And yet there were hardly any Western boots on the ground, and air strikes were limited and proportionate, unlike those of Putin’s bombers which targeted hospitals. StW, of course,

make no mention of this in their propaganda, which exposes their double standards when commenting on world affairs. While the_ Guardian_ may have been obliging in providing a right of reply

to StW, the newspaper should have scrutinised that reply more closely. StW are a knee-jerk anti-American and anti-NATO, hard left organisation. Their arguments are partisan rather than

objective, informed by a hatred of the US for allegedly being capitalism’s cheerleader. Lindsey German’s problem is that a reasoned argument against Sir Keir’s criticism of her organisation

does not exist. That is not a good excuse for the senior editors of the_ Guardian_ to associate themselves with her nonsensical rantings. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only

publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout

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