Shaken, not stirred

Maybe the real “canary in the coalmine” isn’t Israel, but the UK. Westhawk writes, “imagine a government that has lost such control over its country’s internal security that it is forced to invite in a foreign intelligence service to help prevent a disaster. That describes the situation in Great Britain, according to this report from the Telegraph.”

American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain. … Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.

A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.

America is — was — the security and financial guarantor of last resort for a Europe which has progressively pulled out its own teeth and multied its culture. One supposes that MI5 has turned to the knuckle draggers from the USA to do “jobs that Britons won’t — can’t — do”. But what happens when Hope and Change transform the knuckle draggers into the paragons of political correctness?

But some US intelligence officers are irritated that valuable manpower and resources have been diverted to the UK. One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a “swamp” of jihadis.

Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” he said.

Things ain’t what they used to be. The problems besetting the UK, the US and Europe are now clearly rooted not in one-time events like 9/11 but rather in an accumulation of changes, none of them fatal in themselves, but each like an incessant drip of water, progressively weakening the foundations. The causes are many: demography, a loss of cultural confidence, overborrowing — the reader can list them himself — but now they may be coming together in a perfect storm. If the West is to survive the crisis that appears to be beating at it’s door, it must first understand its origins. But that is the problem in itself. Like a deer paralyzed in the headlights the Western intelligensia seems capable of nothing more than repeating worn out phrases from the 1960s.  It is shaken, but not stirred.