Cabinet memo calls for a Muslim friendly foreign policy:

Something of a fuss has broken out about a secret government document which the Sunday Telegraph claims to have got hold of. According to the Telegraph, the document, a cabinet memo,

...admits that, in an ideal world, "the Muslim would not perceive the UK and its foreign policies as hostile" – effectively accepting the argument that Britain's military action in Iraq and Afghanistan has served as a recruiting sergeant for Islamist terrorist groups. Publicly, Mr Blair has resisted this line fiercely. During his final speech as leader to Labour's annual conference last month, he described such claims as "enemy propaganda".

The logical course of action, the memo argues, is to reduce the UK's military commitments around the globe. In other words, stop fighting Islamic terrorism and pull out of the War on Terror.

The idea that terrorists will stop killing and maiming if we do not oppose them is so ludicrous that it can only have come from a senior official out of touch with the real world. That sounds to me like the Foreign Office.

What if we did tell the USA that the UK was no longer an ally in the War on Terror and pulled our forces out of out Iraq and Afghanistan and anywhere else where our military presence might upset Muslims? In the Chicago Sun Times, Mark Steyn has the answer figured out for America and the lessons can be applied to the UK:

...suppose the ''Anyone But Bush'' bumper-sticker set got their way; suppose he and Cheney and Rummy and all the minor supporting warmongers down to yours truly were suddenly vaporized in 20 seconds' time. What then?

Nothing, that's what. The jihad's still there. Kim Jong Il's still there. The Iranian nukes are still there. The slyer Islamist subversion from south-east Asia to the Balkans to northern England goes on, day after day after day.

Exactly, the problems are not going to go away just because the UK adopts a foreign policy that does not upset Muslims. This is an ideological conflict between opposing sets of cultural values. Given the extreme opposition, to western post-Enlightenment Judeo-Christian value systems, of the Islamic terrorist groups and their sponsoring states, the west has a stark choice: it can either defend itself or surrender its way of life to the Islamic extremists. There is no middle way