Maybe Israel Is No Longer 'The Canary In The Cave'

That is what Belmont Club suggests:

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.

The source for this comes 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.

Apparently MI5 is incapable of doing the job themselves:

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.

The dramatic escalation in CIA activity in the UK followed the exposure in August 2006 of Operation Overt, the alleged airline bomb plot.

The British intelligence official revealed that CIA chiefs sent more resources to the UK because they were not prepared to see American citizens die as a result of MI5's inability to keep tabs on all suspects, even though the Security Service successfully uncovered the plot.

I'm not sure exactly how this situation makes the UK into a 'canary'--when applied to Israel, it meant that the enemies and situation that Israel faced were a forerunner to what the West would be facing in the near future. Here, some of the enemies of the US seem to be working out of the UK. 

The apparent weakness of the UK and inability in defending itself is reminiscent to the situation that Israel found itself in back in 2006:

Bush and some of his aides have been quietly concerned over the image of Israel as a country ready to withdraw in the face of terrorism. Privately, leading aides and strategists believe that Israel's hesitancy to fight Hamas, Hizbullah and other terrorist groups could encourage Al Qaida and those sworn to defeat the United States. They also see Israel's failure to defeat Palestinian insurgents as encouraging Iran's belligerency.

...Until 2002, Bush saw Israel has a powerful ally of the United States and able to deter its enemies. Today, the president sees Israel as weak and Bush has publicly
pledged to protect the Jewish state from an Iranian attack. Quietly, Israeli defense officials dismiss Bush's pledge was little more than symbolic given the start of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

"The feeling in both the administration and among belatedly among many conservatives in Congress is that Israel has to accept the fate of a small nation reliant on a superpower patron," a leading U.S. analyst who is close to the administration said.

To a degree, Israel has taken steps to reacquire its old image and ability to deter its enemies, though the jury is still out on Operation Cast Lead. The fact that Great Britain has found itself in a comparable position is troubling, especially in light of the accommodations being made to the Islamists and the rise in Anti-Semitic attacks.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Great Britain and Terrorism.