Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 221

On Knowing What I am Talking About - my new e-book explains why I do.

My new e-book, ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’, for which I could not find a three-dimensional publisher,  now has 47 customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk ( 43 of them awarding it five stars). On Amazon.co.uk it has 11 reviews. ten of them 5-star.

 

If this is enough information for you , you should know that you do not need a Kindle or other e-reader to read this book. It can be downloaded in seconds on to any computer.

 

You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:

 

See here :

 

http://amzn.to/1tuzY9f

 

 

 

 

You can find the book here: 

 

 

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK)

 

or here  

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)

 

 

But if you’d like some examples of what you will find in this book, here are a few below:

 

 

 

 

DATELINE BAGHDAD (May 2003):

 

‘The Anglo-American attack on Iraq was supposed to be a liberation, and perhaps one day it will turn out to be one. But for most people here it has meant a return to Year Zero. Everything that made Iraq a country has gone. The currency swoops up and down in value and satchels full of dinars are needed to pay for anything important.

 

There is no law to speak of. The schools do not know what to teach or who should teach it. The frontiers are controlled by foreigners, if they are controlled at all. All the national TV channels have disappeared. The telephones are all dead.

 

Most medicines are unobtainable.

 

And in the world's second greatest oil producer, mile-long queues mark every petrol station - and the fuel on offer is a filthy, rancid-smelling muck which wrecks engines and fills the air with noxious clouds.

 

There is no gas for cooking, the tap water is tainted with sewage. Many people have not been paid for weeks and are not even sure that their jobs or businesses still exist or will ever reappear. Imagine what it must be like to be the parent of small children in such surroundings. Many Iraqis are haggard with worry and lack of sleep.

 

And yet in their guarded compounds, where the power always works and air conditioning cools the 95-degree heat, the American rulers of the city continue to show the clueless complacency that has marked their occupation since it began. The big men ride about in armoured convoys, machine-gunners fore and aft glaring suspiciously about them, too scared of the people they have liberated to get out, walk and see for themselves.

 

The real reason for the mess is that Washington knew nothing about Iraq - and cared even less - before it attacked.’…

 

…If the Americans had studied Britain's long-ago experience in Baghdad, they might have learned that democracy cannot simply be unpacked from crates and set up in a place like this. They might have learned that if you take over someone's country you have to use the old institutions and elites, even if you do not like them.'

 

 

DATELINE GAZA (October 2010):

 

‘Gaza was bombed on the day I arrived in retaliation for a series of rocket strikes on Israel, made by Arab militants. Those militants knew this would happen, but they launched their rockets anyway. Many Gazans hate them for this.

 

One, whom I shall call Ibrahim, told me how he had begged these maniacs to leave his neighbourhood during Israel's devastating military attack nearly two years ago. His wife was close to giving birth. He knew the Israelis would quickly seek out the launcher, and that these men would bring death down on his home. But the militants sneered at his pleading, so he shoved his wife into his car and fled. Moments after he passed the first major crossroads, a huge Israeli bomb burst on the spot where his car had been.

 

The diabolical power of modern munitions is still visible, in the ruins of what was once a government building. It looks as if a giant has chewed and smashed it, and then come back and stamped on it.

 

If you can imagine trying to protect a pregnant woman from such forces, then you can begin to understand how complex it is living here, where those who claim to defend you bring death to your door.

 

For the Islamist rocket-firers are also the government here, supported by Iran and others who care more for an abstract cause than they do for real people. They claim that their permanent war with Israel is for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs. But is it?

 

Human beings will always strive for some sort of normal life. They do this even when bombs are falling and demagogues raging.

 

Even when, as in Gaza, there is no way out and morality patrols sweep through restaurants in search of illicit beer and women smoking in public or otherwise affronting the 14th Century values of Hamas.

 

So I won't give the name of the rather pleasant establishment where young women, Islamic butterflies mocking the fanatics' strict dress code with bright make-up and colourful silken hijabs, chattered as they inhaled apple-scented smoke from their water-pipes. Their menfolk, nearby, watched football on huge, flat-screen televisions. Nor will I say where I saw the Gazan young gathering for beach barbecues beneath palm-leaf umbrellas.

 

Of course this way of life isn't typical. But it exists, and it shows the 'prison camp' designation is a brain-dead over-simplification. If it is wrong for the rich to live next door to the desperate - and we often assume this when we criticise Israel - then what about Gaza's wealthy, and its Hamas rulers? They tolerate this gap, so they are presumably as blameworthy as the Israelis whose comfortable homes overlook chasms of poverty.

 

Then there is the use of the word 'siege'. Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands?’

 

DATELINE MOSCOW (February 2012):

 

This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite. Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation - bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is - or was - England.

 

I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.

 

I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died.

 

I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder.

 

When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended. I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia - heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin's frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin - a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive.

 

It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin - whose devastating documentary We Can't Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era - is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was 'a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust'.

 

But, now, he says, 'we have returned to "normal", "civilised" corruption'.

 

This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word 'Voruyut' - 'They steal'.

 

But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western 'experts' stalked the land, the nation's rulers stole the whole country.

 

I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.

 

But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia's government.

 

DATELINE SHANGHAI:

 

‘They are building the future capital of the world here at the mouth of the Yangtze River, a city so vast, astonishing and potent that it ought to be a warning to the soft, declining West that the 21st Century may well see the centre of global power shift from the free, English-speaking world to the tyrannical Orient.

Those who have not seen this place simply cannot grasp the scale and nerve of the endeavour. Each day a new tower surges towards the sky in a project so gigantic it makes the Pharaohs look cautious. Forget the buried era of boilersuits and red books, tractor factories, grey pitted concrete cubes and windswept parade grounds. Chinese Communism is now just a vast machine of power, privilege and money, with the children of the mighty building great fortunes for themselves and their friends, untouchable and beyond criticism. 'To get rich is glorious' has replaced 'The East is Red' as the governing slogan of the times.

And it has been taken very seriously. The contrast between wealth and poverty here is like a Victorian morality tale. Except that in a China which has never known Christianity or the sentimentality of Charles Dickens, nobody draws any morals from it.

Filthy beggars grovel on the pavements near to where Porsches and Rolls-Royces sit in shiny showrooms. Luxury of every kind is on shameless display in the city's heart, while destitute migrant workers labour for tiny wages in construction gangs, living in spartan dormitories and sending their money home to mudbrick villages in the distant interior. While private living standards soar, the rivers are dark with muck and the smoggy, hazy air stinks of sulphur.

China is an entire alternative planet of 1.3 billion people with a shared culture and a more or less common language, in which the Third World and the First World are within a passport-free train ride of each other. And in Shanghai, only a bus ride often separates the two.

Travellers arriving at the colossal new international airport can head towards the city on a futuristic magnetic levitation train capable of more than 200mph, so fast they can barely make out the thousands struggling along the roads on decrepit bicycles.

Smart young people pour into the city's four huge B&Q warehouses to equip their fashionable new high-rise apartments to the highest standards. Superb restaurants charge London prices to smoothly dressed businessmen and their polished women amid glossy surroundings. Volkswagen and Buick cars, made in Shanghai factories, provide the growing middle class with a symbol of independence and status.

Yet overlooked by the new city of towers, respectable, decent people are still living in alleyways, known as longtangs, carting chamberpots to communal sluices, hanging washing from their windows, confined to one room where they must sleep on a shelf and sharing dismal kitchens with nine or ten neighbours.

Young married couples are often forced to share the same bedroom as their parents, separated only by a curtain. These people are so poor that they sometimes fight with each other over who has been using too much expensive water, so that each family has its own metered tap. I saw one such place with a dozen taps projecting from a riot of plumbing over the grim tiled sink. At night the kitchen is almost unusable because it is full of bicycles which cannot safely be left outside.

You might think that such people would be glad to be rehoused. But often their homes are bulldozed by unscrupulous developers and they are simply driven away without compensation. They are unlikely to find flats in the new blocks which swiftly replace their demolished alleyways.

Their plight is barely noticed. China, which has just put a man in space and plans to follow America to the Moon, is using the same driven determination to build a great megalopolis which is plainly designed to rival New York and utterly overshadow Hong Kong - whose colonial past and lingering traces of Britishness make it distasteful to the fervent, unashamed patriots who now hold power in Peking.

The sheer size of it is almost impossible to take in - the official city limits cover 2,500 square miles containing more than 13 million people, not far short of the entire population of Australia and bigger than several European countries. The packed central core of 90 square miles somehow crams in nearly eight million humans, perhaps the highest population density in the world. That would be even bigger if ruthless pressure to keep families small did not lead to 300,000 abortions a year, twice the figure for the whole of the UK.

There is plenty of ruthlessness here. You can practically feel it. Ruthlessness has drawn in nearly 20,000 foreign companies glad to make use of the low pay and high skills available in this disciplined police state with its almost limitless supply of labour and its excellent education system. Ruthlessness has created Pudong, until recently a glum district of low-rent housing and rice paddies, now planned as Asia's Wall Street.

As yet it is an eerie, inhuman city within a city of extravagant, ornate towers obviously meant to copy and eventually surpass the skylines of Manhattan and Chicago. Two of them, the Oriental Pearl TV tower, with its globes and spire, and the Jin Mao Tower with its strange pagodalike spikes, top 1,400ft. The tallest skyscraper in the world will soon stand alongside them. At their feet sits a great stone engraved with the words of Deng Xiaoping: 'Waste no time. Do not waver until the development of Pudong is complete.' If you are surprised that a communist leader demanded the swift construction of a boastful zone dedicated to rampant greed, then it is time that you realised that the world's Marxists now believe that capitalism, not state socialism, will create the classless, global, multicultural world they have always dreamed of.

These arrogant towers stare down - and it cannot be an accident - on the ghostly grandeur of the Bund, the old Shanghai riverfront which was once the symbol of Western Imperial power in Asia. But its formerly majestic Edwardian and Twenties buildings, which long ago symbolised the fact that the West's foot was on China's neck, are now grimy, sad, dingy and pathetically small, preserved as a museum of a time which Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to remember with bitterness.

Here is the riverside park where, until 1928, a notice at the gates banned Chinese people from setting foot and casually added that dogs, too, were not admitted. Here are the old British and French concessions where Chinese law did not run and Westerners controlled their own special quarters of the city. And here is the place where a brief, savage and unequal artillery duel between a Japanese cruiser and a brave but tiny British gunboat in December 1941 signalled the doom of European colonial power in China.

You cannot help feeling that we in the West are being sent a message here. The whole project seems to say: 'You came here and taught us that if you are poor and weak, then the rich and strong can rule learning Chinese over you. Now it is our turn to be rich and strong.' For a moment, the image flickers through my mind of Chinese street signs in London and parts of our cities given over to Chinese law while we are kept outside.’

 

DATELINE GORLOVKA, EASTERN UKRAINE (September 2010)

 

'It is true that there are plenty of parts of Ukraine where people do feel and speak Ukrainian - mainly in the west around the city now called Lviv (though in the past 150 years it has also been the Austrian city of Lemberg, the Polish city of Lwow and the Soviet city of Lvov - in this part of the world you can move from country to country just by staying in the same place).

But travel east, as I did, to the old coal-mining region of the Don Basin, and you will find out why so many Ukrainian citizens did not support the 2004 Orange Revolution. I went to the decayed town of Gorlovka. Independence has done little for this place. Cut off from its Russian hinterland and its markets, it is expiring. All around are dead slag heaps and ruined mines and factories, and tragic landscapes of collapse under a ferocious sun.

Gorlovka’s coal mines and chemical works fed the USSR's industries. Now they are mostly dead and the town - twinned with Barnsley in the Eighties - is nearly as bereft of its traditional industries as its Yorkshire opposite number. Sad, empty playgrounds are melancholy evidence of a city condemned to die. There is still a statue of Lenin in the main square but on its flanks are scrawled graffiti - a thing I have never seen before in the former USSR. The image of Lenin was once revered, and later hated, but never trivialised by drawings of Bart Simpson.

The mayor, Ivan Sakharchuk, is proud of his treaty with Barnsley and also insists that there are no difficulties with being Ukrainian.

I am not so sure. Nobody uses the town's Ukrainian name of Horlivka. Many of the street signs are still in Russian. The names of shops are in Russian. The newspapers on sale are in Russian. In the rather smart Cafe Barnsley, the only beer on sale is Russian and the radio is tuned to a Russian station. I suspect the people are hoping for - and expecting - a Russian future.’

 

DATELINE HAVANA (July 2006)          

 

'Castro was to revolution what Mick Jagger was to rock, and his image (and Guevara's) had a lot to do with the strange student revolt that destroyed Charles de Gaulle's conservative France in 1968, and with the wave of cultural revolution that changed the morals and attitudes of the Western world and has now subsided into the weary swamps of political correctness.

Interestingly, the student revolutionaries who loved Castro and Guevara got Fidel wholly wrong. He loathed rock music as degenerate and only in recent years has he recognised it as an ally, permitting a John Lennon memorial park in Havana. They got a lot of other things about him wrong, too.

Castro matters so much to the fashionable liberal Left that they have tried to deny – to themselves – the true nature of his very nasty regime. A recent example of this was a March 2005 letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Nadine Gordimer,Harry Belafonte and Danielle Mitterrand, which claimed that in Cuba 'there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised'.

This is almost total garbage and just shows what the Left will put up with when it likes someone. Castro personally reversed the verdict of an important trial when he disagreed with it. He used to round up homosexuals and put them in labour camps to 'make men of them'.

One of his old comrades, Huber Matos, confided after 20 years of brutality and starvation in Castro's jails that he was 'subjected to all kinds of horrors, including the puncturing of my genitals'.

Just three years ago, after a brief period of liberalisation, Castro threw 75 peaceful dissidents into dungeons.

Most are still there. Their wives demonstrate bravely every Sunday for their release and are attacked and abused by 'spontaneous' mobs of loyalist women.

Others who defy the leader face similar misery short of jail. They lose their jobs. Their houses are trashed by government supporters. One incredibly brave dissenter, Oswaldo Paya, remains at liberty (NOTE: Oswaldo Paya has since died in a mysterious car crash)  but he is constantly watched and the state has placed an insulting poster near his house which says: 'In a country under siege, all dissent is treason.' Imagine the response of Pinter and his friends if a Right wing Latin American dictator had done half these things. No wonder one of the Alsatian guard dogs that patrol Castro's villa near Havana is called Guardian.

Or so I am told. Like all tyrants, Castro conducts his real life behind thick screens. After a long absence he has twice appeared in public recently.

During a rambling speech in Cordoba, Argentina, he continually plucked at his collar as if in some sort of discomfort.

The cameras swung away. Back in Cuba a few days later, he jokingly promised not to stay in power until he was 100.

A recent rumour that he had died was spread, as always, by Cuban exiles who yearn for him to go so that they can come back.’

Second Part of my Review of 'the Bombing War' by Richard Overy

Yesterday I promised more details from Richard Overy’s ‘the Bombing War’, especially evidence that the military effectiveness of the British bombing campaign is overstated. But before that I’d like to remind readers of one or two previous postings here on this subject in general.

 

From February 2010, this on Anthony Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/02/among-the-dead-cities.html

 

Scroll down here and you will find some thoughts  on Max Hastings’s ‘Bomber Command’

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/07/making-shameful-conquest-of-itself-shakespeare-the-bbc-bombs-and-the-lords.html

 

and this on the memorial to the brave men of Bomber Command

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2166966/PETER-HITCHENS-The-heroes-Bomber-Command-deserve-memorial--unlike-butcher-led-them.html?ITO=1490

 

And this on technical rather than moral objections to the bombing

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/a-secret-drama-at-the-heart-of-power.html

 

 

 

Now back to Richard Overy:

 

I won’t give a lot of detail, but will point out here that careful readers of the book will find that a neglected theme of this controversy is the constant and rather nervous desire of the RAF, and of Bomber Command, to justify their actual existence, and to advance the claims of air power as an independent force, rather than (as both Army and the Navy have always wanted and still want) as an adjunct to the Army and Navy, aiding them in their purposes.  The bombing of cities as independent targets, unconnected with any ground operations, is a direct outgrowth of this highly questionable view of military science.

 

 

 

As one might expect, a significant part of the drive for the killing of Germans did come from Josef Stalin, our noble ally against Hitler, and (like Hitler)  a man to whom the killing of innocent people was never a problem. Though it seems (p.394) that Stalin was not to blame for the attacks on Dresden.

 

Let us proceed to pages 296 and 297, where Churchill has gone to visit Stalin, who is very annoyed that the British and Americans have abandoned a plan for an invasion of Western Europe originally set for 1942, and is more or less insulting.  Churchill says there will be bombing instead, lots of it.

 

 

‘Stalin took over the argument himself and said that homes as well as factories must be destroyed’ .

 

Soon afterwards, Churchill (p.297) was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. It was, Churchill said ‘ better than doing nothing’.

 

But better for whom? This is basically war by public relations, with actions judged by their political and morale effect, rather than their military result. Can one kill innocents for the sake of appearances? It seems a moral stretch to me.

 

Leo Amery, a war cabinet member, was not taken with Harris’s urgings for a full-scale bombing attack (p.297). Quoting a scientist at the Air Warfare branch who said the RAF could not hit enough German industry to do decisive damage, Amery wrote: ‘’I am aware that this view of night bombing is shared by very large number of thoughtful people’.

 

One answer to the claim that the bomber offensive forced Germany to divert resources from the Russian front is that a more effective bomber offensive against military targets would have done the same. Another is that the bombing campaign also forced Britain to divert scarce and costly resources – trained men, metals, explosive, engine manufacturing capacity, from the build-up of its D-Day army, and of course from the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boat war which Churchill later confessed was the only part of the conflict that had truly worried him.

 

Was it a sensible sue of resources.

 

On pp 298-299 we find that in 1942 the RAF dropped 37,192 tons of bombs on Germany. Most missed their targets completely. The raids cost 2,716 bombers lost on missions or in accidents. During 1942, the RAF also killed 4,900 Germans, two for each bomber lost (Bomber Command itself lost 14,000 dead from September 1939 to September 1942).

 

On p.303 Overy notes that the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, at which the USA and Britain hammered out their European strategy, did not really view the bomber offensive as central to victory. He writes :’ Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the western allies, but because it was secondary’.

 

 

On p.310 we learn that the RAF’s Charles Portal was predicting that his force could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, seriously injury 1,000,000, destroy six million homes and ‘de-house’ 25 million people (so much for deaths being unintended collateral damage. Overy also points out that American fliers were puzzled as to what the RAF;s actual strategic aim was in pursuing this policy.

 

On p.322, we learn that Arthur Harris admitted that his bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943. This is important because so many people like to claim that the bombing ‘saved Britain from invasion’,  or ‘won the war’ or was ‘the only way we could strike back’. Yet the invasion had been cancelled I September 1940. Russia and the USA had joined the war in 1941(making German eventual defeat inevitable) but for nearly three years after Dunkirk, this ‘sole weapon’  had barely begun to be used.

 

What is more, the decisive battle of Stalingrad, after which the victory of the USSR over Germany was pretty much assured, had ended with a Soviet victory in February 1943, Von Paulus and his armies had been marched off to prison camps before Harris’s offensive even got under way.  

 

Claims are often made that the firestorm in Hamburg, if replicated, could have destroyed German morale. Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer is said to have held this opinion. The damage was indeed appalling.  But in fact (pp.337-338) Hamburg recovered as a functioning city and port with remarkable speed.

 

On pp 343 there are some striking figures about RAF losses 4,026 aircraft lost, 2,823 of them in combat (the constant attrition of experienced crews meant rapid training and many more flying accidents than would have befallen well-trained crews) .

 

As Overy writes .’Although both forces [British and American] advertised their success in diverting ever-increasing numbers of German fighters to the defence of the Reich, this was in some sense a Pyrrhic victory, since the bomber forces were now subject to escalating and possibly insupportable levels of loss and damage’.

 

Harris (p.344) was livid when researchers said his attacks had only reduced German economic potential by 9%in 1943. He was sure he had done far more damage. But after the war 9% turned out to be an over-estimate.

 

Again, the human cost of the war to our own side was appalling. During 1943, Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or captured, and the US 8th Air Force lost 9,497.

 

The idea that the bombing might create some sort of revolution against Hitler was often touted. But expert analyses pointed out that Nazi Germany offered no avenue for protest, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender( an unexamined policy which may well have prolonged the war for a year or more) rather ruled out a more compliant government coming to office and suing for peace.

 

This is not the place for a long debate on the American daylight bombing, under increasingly heavy and effective long-range fighter escort – though there is no doubt that experience shows that , had the allies made a determined attack on German oil production and refinery capacity, they would have done far more damage to the war effort than by any other means.   Overy concedes that many of the American raids were in effect area bombing since they could not achieve the accuracy for pinpoint bombing,  contrasts the Americans’ decision to take the war to the Luftwaffe itself (which in the end destroyed German air power) with the RAF’s persistence, to the end, in bombing urban targets.

 

In April 1944 (p.368) Overy details a costly and ineffective RAF raids against Berlin (too far away , too spread-out and too well-defended to allow concentrated attack easily) , and Nuremberg. Even Harris conceded that German night defences were so effective that they might create conditions in which loss rates ’could not in the end be sustained’.

 

Overy writes ‘Between November 1943 and march 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,128 aircraft for little evident strategic gain’.

 

On p.381 there is an interesting discussion of possible retaliatory gas attacks, and of how they were contemplated by Churchill .

 

But they were not used.  They would only have been used, I am sure, in retaliation against such attacks by Germany. But by then there would have been few scruples. In a very telling paragraph, Overy writes(p.382)

 

'The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated - *deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted*(my emphasis). This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons n German targets in 1945 if the war had dragged on late into the year.’

 

Overy recounts how on 28th March 1945 (p.396) Churchill referred to area bombing in a memo as ‘mere acts of terror and wanton destruction’ , urging that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no mind, and horrible things were down to several German cities in the last weeks of war.

 

The two major bombing powers, the USA and Britain, both conducted surveys of the effects of bombing after the war. These are described on pp398-409. Captured Germans tended to agree that bombing of transport links and oil facilities had been crucial, bombing of cities comparatively unimportant I hampering the Nazi war effort (p.400( It is hard to see why they should have dissembled about this).

 

The American survey itself (p.401) said that city attacks cost only about 2.7% of German economic potential. The whole combined offensive cost a total of 17% of German economic potential by 1944, mostly due to US bombing of selected targets. (p.401). the British report largely concurred, except that it was in some way even more modest in its claims for area bombing’s effects, especially in the key year of 1844. (pp 401-402). Transport and oil remained the most important targets whoever was looking at it.

 

 

 

As Overy writes (p.402) : Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied sides, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes – defeating the German Air Force and emasculating oil supply and transport - are unlikely to be undermined by further research’.

 

He quotes a senior RAF officer Norman Bottomley (Portal’s former deputy during the war) as saying the effect of area bombing was ‘great but never critical’.

 

Of course it had an impact(pp 404-405). Industrial workers died, many hours f work were lost, and most crucially huge numbers of fighter aircraft were diverted from Italy and Russia.  Overy writes: ‘This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture’(p.407). Though I repeat here that attacks on actual targets , as opposed to night-raids on crowded cities, would have achieved the same effect, and that the attacks were themselves a diversion of Allied strength from other fronts and aspects of the war which might have been more urgent and more productive of victory) .

 

But he also quotes J.K.Galbraith’ as saying the man-hours, aircraft and bombs ‘had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany’. This again suggests that the same resources, used elsewhere, might have achieved just as much if not more effect on Germany, without the severe moral problems of bombing cities.

 

Overy is not much concerned with the moral aspect of the controversy. He ends his chapter on the offensive within a sort of shrug. Governments liked bombing because it squandered fewer lives than ground offensives, because they believed it was good for propaganda and morale, because it made maximum use of new technology.

 

To some extent the continued popularity bombing was then, and is now, an effect of universal suffrage democracy, whose wars, as we know, are crueller than those of Kings. To question it (as I well know) leads swiftly to a questioning of the whole myth of the war, and an unwelcome examination of how we came to be waging a war in Europe against one of the greatest land powers in human history, yet had no army in Europe with which to fight it. The day has not yet come when this conundrum can be calmly discussed in this country, even though the whole episode began 75 years ago, and finished 69 years ago.

'Copenhagen' and 'King Lear'

Here’s a brief appreciation of a performance of Michael Frayn’s play ‘Copenhagen’, which I saw last night at Oxford’s sparkling new Mathematics Institute. Alas, I missed the 111 theatre Company’s earlier plays on scientific themes, ‘Emilie – La Marquise du Chatelet defends her life tonight’ and ‘Trumpery’, a drama about Charles Darwin and his rival Wallace.

 

I used to go to see any play Michael Frayn wrote, and still read any book he published – but as a non-Londoner with a  fairly frantic life I’d missed ‘Copenhagen’ on its first outing and, though much taken with the subject, had never previously seen it.

 

I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.  It’s about an actual, but mysterious meeting between two of the greatest scientific minds of all time. Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, mediated by the often acid commentaries of Bohr’s highly perceptive wife Margrethe (one of the best female parts I’ve seen lately in film or theatre). Both men had become friends during the near-legendary period of international scientific excitement in the 1920s, when for a short while scientists believed they might actually be going to explain everything, and young men ran to the laboratory early in the morning, so enthralled were they by their work.

 

Heisenberg, by the way, is played by Alexander Rain, who manages to look extraordinarily like the German genius, Bohr is played by Michael Taylor and Margrethe Bohr by Katherine Jones. All three create an extraordinary tension on the austere stage, and for much of the time quite a lot of the audience seemed to be holding their breath as three clever people wittily and pungently debated some of the most tremendous subjects man can address, while an old friendship collapsed into ashes and ruins. Bohr was a very good man who lived well and courageously. By contrast, there’s a lot you can say against Heisenberg, if you like to think of yourself as being faultless and wholly courageous. But there’s quite a lot to be said for him as well. And, to irritate the silly atheists who think that science negates religion,  Heisenberg made a couple of remarks that seem to me to be  relevant to this debate. Remember, this comes from a  man who had looked deep inside the architecture of the universe, equipped with powers of understanding most of us cannot help to possess:

 

‘In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.’

 

And: ‘The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.’

 

 

If I have understood the rather tough second half of the play  rightly, it confirms a view I have long held, that the human mind holds back from discoveries it does not wish to make, or fears to make. This is usually because they will lose us friends or destroy happy certainties with doubt. This is why we do not change our minds very often. In this case, the fear was even deeper or greater. It’s a very satisfying explanation of why Germany never got very far in developing an atom bomb, despite Heisenberg’s brilliance. I would like to think it was true.

 

This was the second play I managed to see during the Oxford summer, the first being a performance (by the Globe company) of ‘King Lear’, in the unrivalled setting of the Bodleian Library courtyard, a building exactly contemporary with Shakespeare. The Globe have mastered a technique of concentrating Shakespeare, with very few frills or costumes and on a stage nearly as austere as the Mathematical institute.  It’s all pretty informal – Shanaya Rafaat, who plays an unusually seductive (and so particularly wicked)  Regan came and chatted to the audience before the play began.

 

Perhaps it’s because these productions are so spare that the force of the words comes through very hard. Lear is crammed with passages that haunt the mind (How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…’ ‘As flies to wanton boys…’  but is above all about the amazing capacity of men to believe their enemies are their friends, and to be beguiled by oily flattery and displeased by truthful love  (how else could the Tory party have survived so long).

 

Then there is its limitlessly sad closing line (so powerful for each generation as we discover too late that our fathers and mothers were seeking so hard to communicate their experience to us, and we were too busy and arrogant to pay attention): ‘We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long’.

A Children's Crusade Marches Towards Red Square

Will we repeat the idealistic follies which led to disaster in Iraq, Syria  and Libya?

How can it be a 'defeat' to have conquered millions of square miles of central and eastern Europe, and destroyed Communism? Why do we need yet more territory? 

What is the moral imperative that says the 'West' must possess Ukraine? 

A reply to Ben Judah's call to 'Arm Ukraine or Surrender' in the New York Times. 

 

I have been much struck by an article in the New York Times by Ben Judah, published beneath the headline : ‘Arm Ukraine or Surrender’. It really ought to have an exclamation mark on it, so frantic is its tone.  Given its prominent publication in that important forum of opinion, it may be influential. It ought not to be. I explain why below. You can read it here:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/opinion/arm-ukraine-or-surrender.html?_r=0

 

It seems to me to  have been written in the hope that its readers, especially its readers in Washington DC,  will heed the call to arms (or rather to arms shipments), rather than the call to ‘surrender’ (or, as some might say, make a sensible compromise with Russia).

 

The same people who have turned much of Syria into a smoking, gore-encrusted rubble-heap, and Libya into a cauldron of blood and fire,  are hard at work here, making a very similar mistake to the ones they made in Damascus and Tripoli. First, they think that because the Russian government is bad (beyond dispute) , whatever replaces it will be better (very questionable). .  

 

The author presents the dilemma thus: ‘Either we arm Ukraine, or we force Kiev to surrender and let Mr. Putin carve whatever territories he wants into a Russian-occupied zone of “frozen conflict.”’

 

Let’s go through the article. Mr Judah says : ‘Russia and Ukraine are now at war.’

 

***No they are not. No state of war yet exists, despite the best efforts of a legion of pot-stirrers who openly wish for a war with Russia.  The two neighbours still have diplomatic relations and their governments are in communication with each other, probably rather more than either is letting on. Ukraine’s leaders are much given to exaggerated public claims against Russia, which a generally gullible and unquestioning Western media reproduce as proven fact. Ukrainian forces have allegedly destroyed a Russian armoured column, an event for which no evidence has ever been produced. More recently Russian forces were said to have annihilated an entire Ukrainian village. I have yet to see evidence of this. There are plenty more such claims. I have seen them reproduced as fact, without qualification in headlines, in respectable western newspapers which ought to know better.

 

Russia meanwhile tells its own lies, not of exaggeration but of what might politely be called understatement.  Russia maintains, quite incredibly, that none of its soldiers are in Ukraine and that it is not arming the rebels.  Of course Russian soldiers are in Ukraine, and of course Russia is helping with supplies and training. To the extent that all its operations are technically deniable, this may well be true. But it is obvious that the GRU is giving powerful aid to the rebels. Quite rightly, the western media recover their proper scepticism when confronted by these claims, and sneer at them.

 

What they do not do is ask how it was that the pathetic Ukrainian armed forces suddenly, a couple of months ago, began to fight effectively. Could it be that they, too, have been receiving help from elsewhere? Anybody remotely interested in the serious truth about this crisis would surely at least wonder about this. But nobody does.

 

Mr Judah says : ‘ At least 2,200 people have died in the conflict; thousands more may die yet.’

***This is so. But Mr Judah does not say that, so far as observers have been able to make out, a large number of these casualties are non-combatant civilians who have died in indiscriminate Ukrainian bombardments of Kramatorsk, Lugansk and Donetsk. Reports from a brave OSCE team in the area have made it plain that this is happening. Reliable figures in such circumstances are  impossible to get, and nobody claims to have any. But it seems to me that the Kiev government’s forces are doing the thing known as ‘killing their own people’, an action which invariably de-legitimizes any government which world liberal opinion dislikes. Why then, in this instance, does it not affect the standing of the Kiev government among right-think persons in the civilized capitals of the world? Such deaths are not directly intended9 at least one hopes not ) but they are predictably inevitable if artillery or rocket fire is used on crowded urban areas, and I believe such warfare is frowned on by international law.

Mr Judah continues:

 

‘The Western powers — America, Europe, NATO — now have no good options, but they cannot do nothing.’

 

***Who says they have no good options?  Compromise is seldom a bad option, especially when the choice is war, in which any victory will be Pyrrhic? Where is it written down in the rules of International Diplomacy  that Ukraine must be part either of a Russian bloc or of the German-dominated bloc which is the EU? Germany, we know, has long desired Ukraine. But so has Russia. When Russia, out of weakness, allowed Ukraine to achieve formal independence in 1991, it was not disavowing any future interest in that country. By contrast, it was disavowing future interest in many lands which it had dominated after Yalta, from eastern Germany to Bulgaria. Wasn’t that enough? Why does world liberal opinion think that the USSR’s defeat in the Cold War should trigger the realization of an ancient,  troublesome and controversial,  German foreign policy goal. Is the reactivation of this long-dead conflict likely to make Europe more peaceful, free, settled and prosperous, or the opposite?

This crisis did not grow out of nothing. Its origins lie in German foreign policy of a century ago, the use of ‘national liberation’ to break up the old Russian empire and turn it into a ‘liberal’ German empire (See ‘the Deluge, by Adam Tooze, for a superb account of this and its effects on the Peace of Brest-Litovsk of 1918) . It re-emerged in the Polish-Russian war of 1919-21, and again in the Russo German war of 1941-45, and the Yalta settlement which ended it. It then re-emerged yet again in the events following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a collapse so total that Moscow lost control of territory it had held continuously (when not being invaded by Germany) since the 18th century.

 

Just think, if the United States underwent such a total reverse in its economic and political fortunes that it was compelled to live by an ideology it regarded as alien, and driven back to the borders of 1848? It might perhaps endure such a reverse, but not, I think, if a pro-Russian government was established in Mexico City, and Russian ships based at San Diego.  

 

 

The current crisis was planted, fertilized and watered by decades of hard work by the USA, the EU and NATO, who have long ignored repeated warnings from Moscow that its patience is limited.  It is interesting to recall that Vladimir Putin made this speech more than seven years ago (in Munich in February 2007) . http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/12/AR2007021200555.html

 

The language is extraordinarily strong. Any diplomat would be able to see that it is at the outer limits of exasperation. Yet the response of the EU, of the USA and of NATO was to carry on exactly as before.

 

It reminds me of a cartoon I recall from long ago, of a middle-aged married couple perched on top of a large cupboard in their living room, as a furious dog crouches, snarling and hot-eyed,  beneath them, hackles bristling,  coiled to spring, a piece of trouser dangling from its bared teeth.

 

The wife is saying mildly to the husband (who seems puzzled by the scene below)  ‘Well dear, you have been rubbing him up the wrong way all evening’.

 

Of course, it may be that everyone involved has always actually wanted another European war. It may be that they are all ignorant of the Versailles disaster,  in which France and Britain – having gone too far in their 1918 demands, failed to make timely and reasonable compromises with Germany’s constitutional, lawful ruler,  Gustav Stresemann. And so they encouraged the belief in Germany that another sort of ruler might get those concessions and perhaps more.  Those who constantly and childishly compare Vladimir Putin with Hitler (which he so obviously is not) might consider that Mr Putin might in retrospect turn out to have been modern Russia’s Stresemann, and that by treating him as we now treat him we are aiding the creation of a monster, as yet unknown to us, who will be truly as bad as we pretend Mr Putin to be.

 

Having by oyr previous policies dismembered Iraq,  created both ISIS and the howling chaos that was once Libya, and cheered on the vents which imprisoned Egypt in the shackles of military rule, we can hardly claim our judgement on such things has been good. Why should it be good this time?

 

I am in general tired of attempts to turn every major crisis into a re-run of Munich in 1938. But there is a parallel between the humiliation of Germany in 1918 and the humiliation of Russia in 1991, which bears some study.

 

We long ago drove the Red Army irreversibly out of central Europe. Why would it now be a defeat, and for whom,  if we allowed a non-Communist Russia to continue to exert some influence (not total influence, but some) in Ukraine? That strikes me as a perfectly good option, and I cannot see why Mr Judah would want us to ignore it.

 

Thus when Mr Judah says : ‘President Vladimir V. Putin has left us with two dire choices, both fraught with risk: Either we arm Ukraine, or we force Kiev to surrender and let Mr. Putin carve whatever territories he wants into a Russian-occupied zone of “frozen conflict.”’

 

***He is wrong. If we act like wise and experienced human beings. Rather than like frantic ideologues for whom there is no proper end but the unconditional surrender of our opponent, there is a way out.

 

Kiev need not be ‘forced to surrender’. The Kiev government, installed after a violent mob putsch backed by the West, has no doubt come under pressure from various quarters to pursue a policy of confrontation with Russia which it has duly done, to the great loss of millions in the east of the country. But Ukraine, being virtually bankrupt and lacking serious armed forces, could not possibly have pursued such a policy without promises, explicit or more likely implicit, of foreign aid, both guns and money.

 

Supporters of this policy always pretend that they are acting against corruption and in favour of democracy. But this is just foolish boasting. The substantive difference between the pre-Maidan Ukraine and the post-Maidan Ukraine is purely one of foreign policy orientation. The rest continues pretty much as before . Claims of improved democracy are self-evidently ludicrous.  The existing Kiev government (which has sought to ban at least one legitimate political party) came to power through extra-constitutional means and cannot possibly claim to speak for democracy. A for corruption, do we see any evidence that it has ceased? Is Ukraine’s government, or indeed any part of that country,  currently in the hands of poor men, of practitioners of the career open to all the talents who have worked their way to the top purely on merit? It doesn’t look that way to me.

 

Mr Judah writes : ‘It is a stark choice, and Mr. Putin is not rational.’

 

***That is quite an assertion. Mr Judah might pause to wonder if Mr Putin’s rationality is based upon different considerations from Mr Judah’s. This is often a better guide to action than assuming your opponent is unhinged, and saying so from the carved-oak pulpit of the New York Times.

“ Any rational leader would have reeled from the cost of Western sanctions.”

 

***Would he? One of the many arguments against sanctions is that political leaders are generally immune from them. Another is that they tend to be ineffective against the resourceful and self-reliant. Mr Putin is selling his gas and oil to China. If he ceases to import food from the EU, Russia can grow its own or buy it from Latin America. Famously, sanctions against South Africa created a prosperous and profitable arms industry in that country, where there had been none before. Who knows what they might do to Russia’s currently rather ill-balanced economy?

 

In any case, Mr Putin has raised the genie of Russian patriotism, and he cannot cram it back in the jar. If he gives way, and so falls,  he might well be replaced by others who would go further. It is not to be ruled out. It would be quite rational of him to continue to seek an agreement which leaves him in agreed possession of Crimea ( whose ownership by Ukraine was in any case an anomaly) and allows Russia a lasting veto on Ukrainian membership of the EU or NATO.

 

Mr Judah says : ‘Russia’s economy is being hit hard by a credit crunch, capital flight, spiraling inflation and incipient recession. This will hurt Mr. Putin’s surging popularity at home. But none of this has deterred the smirking enigma.’

 

I have not yet seen any evidence that has hurt him significantly at home, whether he smirks or not. Personally, I love phrases such as ‘smirking enigma’, and I like a bit of sparkle and fire in public argument. But  we’re talking about war or peace here. Is this the right register for that?

 

Mr Judah says ; ‘Ukraine cannot win this war. Mr. Putin has made it clear that the Russian Army will annihilate Ukrainian forces if they attempt to liberate Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine’s ramshackle army cannot rout the crack troops and conscript forces of an oil-fueled giant.’

 

***Has Mr Putin said that? I missed it. As for the word ‘liberate’, it’s usually dishonest and it seems so on this occasion. Any honest person has to concede that quite a lot of people in eastern Ukraine don’t regard the Ukrainian forces as liberators, and are even less keen on the semi-official militias which accompany them and which are much feared.  I completely accept that many of the fighters on the pro-Moscow side are also fearsome, cruel, undisciplined, drunk disreputable and lawless. I would be grateful if any of those who romanticize Kiev’s struggle against Mr Putin would accept that ‘their’ side are not fighting entirely as Pollyanna might wish them to.

 

Actually the Ukrainian forces were doing pretty well until the new ‘NovoRossiya’ offensive was launched along the Sea of Azov a few days ago. Russia is very unwilling to make an open, acknowledged  move across the Ukrainian border, despite the incessant cries of ‘Wolf!’ from people in NATO who ought to know better. Given more Western aid, equipment, ‘advisers’  and training (no doubt swiftly matched by the GRU from the other direction) , I suspect both sides could turn the whole of eastern Ukraine into a miserable hellhole of rubble, refugee camps and shallow graves for years to come.  A swift victory for either side is pretty unlikely. Why would it be worth risking this? Once again, why should he civilized people of the world be condemning Ukraine to this fate, when a modest climbdown, in which we lose nothing important, would avoid it?

 

 If Ukraine were some paradise of law and freedom, menaced by the dark and sneering slovens of Evil Russia, then you might see the point. But Ukraine is a corrupt economic basket-case, decades from prosperity or good government whatever happens. Russia isn’t Mordor. Mr Putin isn’t Sauron, and Ukraine certainly isn’t the Shire. It isn’t even Gondor.

 

Mr Judah continues ;

‘The West needs to be honest with Ukraine.’

 

***Well, there I agree with him completely. Modern western politicians have a habit of giving the impression to troubled countries that a huge treasure chest of aid and bounty will be opened unto them if they can just adopt certain outward forms of government. It isn’t true. We haven’t the power or the money, and  Anglosphere forms of government can’t just be transplanted into rusting deserts like Ukraine, or into the Arab world for that matter. and these half-formed promises cause repeated woe and disappointment. Ukraine, in the end, must rescue herself from corruption and lawlessness. The EU flag will no magically bring these things about (anything but)

Meanwhile the NATO promise looks thinner the more widely it is spread. Who really believes we’d sacrifice Chicago for Lviv, or even Vilnius?

 

 

 Then Mr Judah veers back towards his warpath: ‘We talk as though this country were one of us — as if, one day, it will become a member of the European Union and the NATO alliance. That is Kiev’s wish, but the West is not giving Ukraine the means to fight this war.’

 

***As if we ever could. All we could do would be to do as I have suggested and warned against above, turn Ukraine into a miserable warzone as a means to another end. We would have to sacrifice Ukraine in0rder to save it, devastate the very place we claim to care so much about.  If we turn this into a real war, in which NATO formed units fight Russian formed units in a  declared or undeclared conflict, the horror of it will shock the world. The power of modern conventional munitions is appalling, vastly greater than it was in the last great European war. Many Arabs know this already. Europe has yet to experience it . If we behave in this way we will be proving that what we want is not goodness, freedom and prosperity, but land and power.

 

Mr Judah then says :

 

‘Ukraine is being destroyed. The economy is in tatters. The military will not survive a Russian offensive. Ukrainians are taking refuge in romantic nationalism and preparing for partisan warfare. The costs are mounting — continuing to fight will cost thousands of lives — and the liberal dreams of the revolution are drowning in the jingoistic fury and hysteria of war.’

 

***In this I once again very much agree with him. It is very frightening.

 

Mr Judah says next: ’ A few more months without meaningful Western help and Ukraine will have lost the fighting core of its army — and its infatuation with the West. This will be replaced by a sense of betrayal, and there will be no way for Ukraine’s pro-European liberals to survive the backlash. The far-right extremists now on the fringe will ride into Kiev’s parliament on the lids of the caskets being shipped back from the front. Ukraine will become a ravaged conflict zone: a European Syria, or a hideously enlarged Bosnia.’

 

***This is, again, a warning with some force to it.  Mr Judah is wise to be worried about such people. They are not a figment of Kremlin propaganda, but a real force.  Except that, *with* ‘meaningful Western help’ the same thing will happen, only worse. Fanatics prosper in war. The same forces which placed the Syrian opposition in the hands of Islamist fanatics will place the Ukrainian war in the hands of unlovely ultra-nationalists. The idea that Western aid will curb this tendency is as wrong in Ukraine as it was in Syria. The western aid will go to the fanatics because they will fight most effectively for it. Peace and compromise, and the rapid disarming of militias,  are the best hopes for Kiev’s gentle and civilized pro-European liberals.

 

Now Mr Judah reaches his peroration : ‘We cannot let this happen. If we believe that Ukraine will one day become a member of the European Union and NATO, then we should be ready to arm it.’

 

***If this is truly the case, then, for the sake of the people of Ukraine and indeed of Europe, surely we should abandon this objective. Why is it necessary? For whose benefit, exactly?  Once again, what rule book says that the borders of NATO and the EU should extend this far east?

 

Mr Judah says : ‘We must face the fact that the costs of unlimited European Union and NATO expansion have meant war with Russia by proxy — and then fight the war.’

 

*** This is very honest. Mr Judah’s policies mean war,. He has said it. This, to me, having seen a little war, would be reason to reject his policies out of hand anyway. Others, less squeamish about body parts, screaming women and whole families turned into blots of blood,  might be happy to proceed . But if so, can they please tell me why it’s so important? What mroal imperative justifies it?

’Must’ we, Mr Judah? Why? What is this imperative? Whence does it derive?  Or, as I might more crudely put it ‘Who says so?.

 

Again and again I feel it necessary, even urgent, to ask, what precisely is the moral basis on which we are required to advance NATO and the EU into this particular territory? This raises the fascinating question of why it is that Russia itself is plainly *not* to be invited to join either organization.  If expanding the alleged joys of the EU and NATO to their furthest possible extent were the motive, then surely this would be the obvious solution. Yet we all know it isn’t even seriously considered.  So there must be some other motive. And for this, I think we need to go back and search history, especially 1918 and 1941.

 

 

Mr Judah now argues :

‘Having reignited the hottest moments of the Cold War, we must deal with the consequences of encouraging democratization in Eastern Europe.’

 

***Hotter, surely? The Cold War never got this hot. That was the point of it. People understood the risks, and so did not take them. And what does he mean by ‘democratization’? The forms of democracy are observed even in Russia. They are certainly observed in NATO Turkey, though it is less free year by year. Surely we should call a power struggle a power struggle, not dress it up as a children’s crusade for ‘democracy’. When we k now that in reality no such thing exists in Ukraine, or is likely to’ for many years to come.  

 

 

Mr Judah now asserts :’ This logic demands that we send Western military advisers to Kiev,’

 

***Well, excuse me, but haven’t we already done that? Has Mr Judah checked?

Mr Judah ‘…and give the Ukrainians full intelligence and satellite support. And we must ship them guns, tanks, drones and medical kits by the ton.’

 

***The logic which demands the insertion of ‘tons of guns’ into Eastern Ukraine is a logic which ignores the dangers of war, that it spreads, that it ruins us, that it poisons our civilization as it has done so many times already in the last 100 years.  This is our offensive, our attempt to push our power into an area where we were previously not, and where another ‘s power is exercised,  begun with our interference, our putsch,  our money, our politicians encouraging the Kiev mob. If there is now war, its disasters and horrors will be on our conscience. We have pushed too far and met serious resistance which we (foolishly) did not expect. Why not compromise?

 

 

Mr Judah:  We must even be ready to deploy NATO troops if Russian tanks roll toward Crimea, as many fear they will, to build a land bridge to the mainland of southern Russia.’

 

***This is indeed the terrifying destination of this logic.

 

Mr Judah then concludes:

 

‘No question, this path involves enormous risks. Russia will throw its might into Ukraine. American and British special forces should be dispatched to plant the flag and protect the airports of Kiev and Odessa. But Mr. Putin may call our bluff: Russian forces might — in an echo of the 1999 Kosovo war — encircle them.

 

‘But if we are not prepared to take these risks, then we must force the Ukrainians to abandon their deadly delusion. It would be up to us to prevent Russia from slaughtering Ukrainian conscripts in vain.

The only way to achieve this is for the West to oblige Ukraine to surrender. Ukraine is completely dependent on the International Monetary Fund, which is Western money. We must tell Kiev to accept as a fait accompli that Russia has carved out a South Ossetia in the east — or we turn the money off. We can console them: Being another Georgia is not the worst thing in the world.

We could save thousands of lives this way, but it would be a crushing defeat for the West. Russia would have restored itself as an empire — the former Soviet Union once more under the sway of the Kremlin. The West would thus concede, in effect, that Russia may invade or annex any of these territories as it pleases. And in these lands, the appeasers would flourish, and democracy wilt.’

 

***This is frenzied exaggeration. The Soviet Union is dead- I watched it die. The Warsaw Pact, likewise, is gone. The extent of the territorial gains of the ‘West’ in Europe since 1989 is colossal. There is no urgent need to push them further, and good reason for leaving it at that.  It is a funny sort of surrender that leaves the ‘West’ in possession of : The former GDR, Poland,  the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romanian, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Estoni.

 

As defeats and retreats go, the bloodless conquest and takeover of millions of square miles of your former enemy’s territory, plus the irreversible collapse of his ideology and the dissolution of most of his conventional forces, seems to me to be not much of a defeat. Quite how failing to extend this triumph into yet another segment of our former enemy’s former territory can be called a shameful defeat, I do not know. Quite why it should be a surrender, or a blow to democracy, to give up a failed attack because we have, after a quarter of a century of getting our own way, met a little resistance, I am not sure. I can only say that if this is a defeat and a surrender, what would an advance and a victory look like? Do we need a victorty parade through Red Square, with Mr Putin’s head on a pole outside St Basil’s, before Mr Judah is content?  Silly isn’t the word for this, because it is so dangerous. And yet it is, even so, profoundly silly. In reply I can only paraphrase Gladstone to say that the resources of sarcasm are not yet exhausted. 

 

He then plunges into a frothing, purple sea of rhetoric which I think largely condemns itself  

 

 ‘Russia would have triumphed over the world order imposed by the West after the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. This would mean the destruction of American geopolitical deterrence. America’s enemies, from China to Iran, would see this as an invitation to establish their own spheres of influence amid the wreckage.

'Russia would not stop there. Mr. Putin wants to undermine NATO, and the smell of weakness would tempt him further. It would be merely a matter of time before Moscow exploited the Russians in the Baltic States to manufacture new “frozen conflicts.” Poland would feel compelled to act as though NATO did not exist, creating a defensive military alliance of its own with the Baltics; it might even establish a buffer zone in western Ukraine.

'There is no easy way out now. But we must not let thousands of Ukrainians die because we dithered. We must be honest with them if we are not willing to fight a new Cold War with Russia over Ukrainians’ independence. But if we force Ukraine to surrender, rather than sacrifice lives in a fight for which we have no stomach, then we must accept that it is a surrender, too, for NATO, for Europe and liberal democracy, and for American global leadership. That is the choice before us.’

 

***No it isn’t. A sensible, reasonable compromise is available at any time, if only we decide to seek it. Can it be that some people actually want war? 

If Dave and his pals are our 'clever elite' why does Nigel make them look so stupid?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The only interesting things about Douglas Carswell’s switch from the Tory Party to Ukip are that it took him so long and that he has acted alone. Any thinking person has been able to see for years that the Tory Party hates conservatives. It is a roadblock, not a road, championing the elite against the people.

It is kept in being only by the BBC and various dodgy billionaires, who provide it with airtime and money out of all proportion to its real support. It has no actual aims except office at all costs.

It has no actual policies either, only negative smear campaigns, falsely portraying Ukip as mad Nazis, or Ed Miliband as some kind of Trotskyist loony.

The party leader has never pretended to be anything other than he is – the heir to Blair. That is why so much of the Left-wing media prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband.

Mr Cameron’s promise of a referendum on EU membership is worthless three times over. First, nobody can rely on his word after his broken promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Second, Mr Cameron could  not win a Westminster majority in 2010, and there is even less chance of his doing so next May, as he well knows. He could promise paradise and be sure he would never have to deliver it.

Third, does anyone seriously think that a referendum on EU membership could be or would  be conducted fairly in a country whose main source of news is the BBC, and whose whole media establishment is pro-EU?

As I write, I have in front of me the sad relics of the 1975 referendum on the same subject. I had a narrow escape. I had meant to vote to stay in. But I voted ‘No’  (to leave) after my officially impartial local newspaper delayed a story I had written on the eve of the vote because it would have harmed the ‘Yes’ campaign.

Months of brainwashing were cancelled out by this sharp personal experience of the ‘Yes’ campaign’s instinctive and necessary dishonesty. If it didn’t lie about its real aims, it would never get any support. The whole thing was rigged from the start (as Mr Cameron’s would be).

There are no laws to stop this. In 1975, the state used taxes to pay for and send out two pamphlets urging a ‘stay in’ vote – one from the Government and one from  the ‘Yes’ campaign’ – but only one from the ‘No’ campaign.

Read them now and the ‘Yes’ material is often dishonest drivel, including a false claim that the threat of economic and monetary union ‘has been removed’. Not exactly. The ‘No’ pamphlet, by contrast, is prophetic and truthful.

But in 1975, nobody foresaw that the EU would one day abolish British passports and force us to throw open our borders to legions of low-paid workers from the former communist bloc. Nor could they have known that the EU would be aggressively fomenting a new war with Russia, using our money to do so.

Brussels distributed more than £300 million of taxpayers’ money in Ukraine between 2007 and 2013. It went to all kinds of lucky recipients, so it is no great surprise that Kiev blossomed with EU flags last winter during the violent mob putsch which so many idiots in the West supported.

They were generally the same idiots who supported the ‘Arab Spring’, and so helped plunge Libya and Syria into a sea of blood and fire, and to launch ‘Islamic State’. Now these idiots are well  on the way to starting the biggest European war since 1945, and are busy blaming Russia for having the effrontery to defend itself against this blatant aggression.

It really is time that we understood that those in charge of this country have no idea what they are doing. Even Nigel Farage has more of a clue about how the world works than our supposedly clever elite.

And yet those who could make a difference still cling to the Tory nurse for fear of finding something worse. Well, what could be worse than bankruptcy, uncontrolled mass immigration and war?

Volcanic panic was all hot air

Remember the 2010 ash cloud panic,  when thousands of flights were halted by an invisible (and in my view non-existent) volcanic peril?

Well, don’t worry about the latest rumblings in Iceland. Quietly, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Met Office and the airlines have changed their rules so that if it happens again, most planes will fly.

They’ll never admit it, but I suspect this is as close as they’ll come to confessing that they over-reacted wildly in 2010.

Politically correct - and totally wrong

Some credit must go to the ex-MP Denis MacShane for admitting that, ‘as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie’, he may have kept too quiet about the treatment of girls and women by members of the ‘Muslim community’.

But would he have made this confession if he had not been brought low by the expenses scandal and had nothing to lose? I tend to agree he was the victim of highly selective justice, but I also  recall him lecturing me for alleged xenophobia when he was still on the political career ladder.

I am anything but politically correct, but I  freely confess that I am scared of the destructive, unreasoning power of the politically correct lobby. They have prevented the proper exposure of much wrongdoing – and they still do so.

Nick Clegg is the only one confused about sex

We've had sex education in this country since the 1950s, expanding rapidly from coy biological diagrams to funky cartoon depictions of the sex act, and the stretching of condoms over countless bananas by giggling  teens.

The only thing that can’t be advocated in  these sessions is heterosexual marriage.

Hilariously, the original idea was that this would reduce teen pregnancy and sexual diseases.

But these diseases have gone up steadily ever since  sex-ed was introduced, though massacre-scale abortions and taxpayer-funded morning-after pills for all have finally begun to get pregnancies down.

Now Nick Clegg wants more sex education.

May  I suggest an experiment? Let’s try not having any for a few years and see what happens.

There can’t be anyone left in Britain over the age of seven who doesn’t know how babies are made.

British diplomats in Washington have  got into trouble for making jokes about British troops burning the White House  during the War of  1812 between our  two supposedly friendly nations.

Let me say it again: there is no ‘special relationship’. Americans don’t  love us. It’s long  past time for us to declare independence  – from them.

If you wish to comment, please click and scroll down

A young mother condemned to die by trendy, stupid politics

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

Silently, and without noticing, we have become used to levels  of crime and disorder which would have shocked and angered  our forebears.

Well, they still shock me. You can often find it in the way we talk of a ‘burglary that went wrong’,  as if there was one that could ever go right.

Or when (this is an epidemic now) the media describe some revolting, lawless murder as an ‘execution’, which is exactly the opposite of what it is.

A real, lawful execution of  the criminal culprit would  be the best way of preventing  such horrors.

I was furious last week to read reports of the machine gun murder of 24-year-old mother Sabrina Moss.

What enraged me most was that the account said she had been ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

Well, Sabrina was in Kilburn High Road, a normal London main street, near which I once lived, sheltering from the rain outside a fast food joint.

It was pretty early in the morning, but so what? 

If it is now reasonable to expect that you will be machine-gunned by members of a drug gang because you are sheltering from the rain in the small hours in Kilburn High Road, then you are  in the wrong country.

To me, this was more distressing by far than the murder of the brave American journalist James Foley, somewhere in Syria. I will discuss that outrage elsewhere.

It is quite right to be disgusted by cruel and violent death wherever it happens, but surely our first concerns lie closer to home, not least because, if we wished, we could do something about it.

All the solutions to this sort of thing are quite simple, as I found out some years ago when I researched and wrote a book about what happened in the Sixties and afterwards to our police, courts and prisons.   

Since then, I have been unable to take the statements of most politicians on the subject seriously. They plainly have no idea what is going on at all.

We made a series of simple, reversible errors, mainly to suit the political and moral fashions of the time.

The book was, of  course, abused where it was not ignored, as all reasonable Conservative positions are these days.

A few years ago I gave a copy to the current Home Secretary, Mrs May, but I have yet to see any sign that she has read it, let alone that she agrees with it.

A British Government could, if it wished, deal with these mistakes in a few compact Acts  of Parliament.

And it could then set out on the longer task of rebuilding the  married family on which our  prosperity, safety, civility and future chiefly depend.

But none of them will. So we are all condemned to be ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

Bloody lessons we didn’t need to learn

For all the good he did by coming back from Cornwall last week, the Prime Minister might just as well have stayed on holiday, perhaps studying some more fishmongers’  slabs.

There he might find a flounder, the creature he currently most resembles – flat and still for most of the time, flailing wildly about when agitated.

The public murder of journalist James Foley has stirred a great deal of powerless frenzy. As you listen to our leaders and their media friends raging and threatening vague things, I urge you to remember the following: They used to say exactly the same about the Provisional IRA, whose apologists are now welcome to sup with Her Majesty at Windsor Castle. If people such as me criticise them, they grow pious and call themselves ‘peacemakers’.

Poor Mr Foley (may God rest his soul) was captured in November 2012 by the Syrian rebels our Government (and those of the USA and France) were already encouraging
against President Assad.

On August 11, 2012, the former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind said sides had already been picked. He said we should be ‘giving them [rebels against Assad] equipment to bring the conflict to an end much sooner’.

Now this genius, a man who has had great power in the State, is saying we should work with President Assad against the Islamist fanatics.

He might claim he had learned from his mistakes.  But he had no need to. This outcome was obvious at the time. In June 2012, I wrote ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?

‘Don’t we realise that the “activists” we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias?’ I also passed on reports from informants in Syria who told of ‘Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria’s minorities of Alawites and Christians.’

In February that year, I had written: ‘I tremble for the fate of Syria’s Christians if the Assad regime falls.’

The weathercock politicians who now claim to be shocked by the deeds of IS should be ceaselessly reminded that they helped to create it, when they could have known better.

And, like those who supported the Blair War in Iraq, their every public statement should be accompanied by a large warning, saying: ‘Wrong then  – why should I be right now?’

Meanwhile, the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War remains unpublished, a scandal greater than any in modern times.

The sight of men swathed in safety gear on the face of Big Ben – in living memory of the days when the same  job was done with a few ropes and planks – reminds us once again of one of the greatest national mistakes we ever made.

In this country, we are no more afraid of heights or of danger than we ever were. But we are terrified of lawyers. The trouble is, hardly anyone realises to this day that this tyranny of the ambulance-chasers was caused quite deliberately by the supposedly conservative Thatcher and Major Governments, in Section 58 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 and the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations, passed as a Statutory Instrument in 1995.

The next time you come up against the iron fist of ‘health and safety’, please remember who’s to blame.

The saddest, most evocative and most apposite picture of the state of Britain in 2014 was this image of HMS Plymouth, a fighting ship battered by war in the Nelson
and Drake tradition, being towed to a Turkish breakers’ yard past a line of useless windmills, imposed on our once-free landscape by foreign diktat.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchen's blog click on Comments and scroll down

Summer Timetable Begins

For the next fortnight, this weblog will be operating its Summer Timetable - that is, my Mail on Sunday columns will be posted as normal, but - unless there is a pressing reason to do so - I shall not be posting any other comments on current events, reviews or other material.

David Cameron Analysed

An article has been published under the Prime Minister's name in the 'Sunday Telegraph' on the current crisis in Iraq.

You can find it here :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11038121/David-Cameron-Isil-poses-a-direct-and-deadly-threat-to-Britain.html

Here I attempt to analyze that article.

My comments are in bold and marked with an asterisk *:

'This poisonous extremism is a direct threat to Britain'

 

Stability. Security. The peace of mind that comes from being able to get a decent job and provide for your family, in a country that you feel has a good future ahead of it and that treats people fairly.

*Note the Blairite tone, verbless sentences, if sentences they can be called, in an outdated red-top newspaper style from the 1980s.

In a nutshell, that is what people in Britain want – and what the Government I lead is dedicated to building.

Britain – our economy, our security, our future – must come first. After a deep and damaging recession, and our involvement in long and difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hardly surprising that so many people say to me when seeing the tragedies unfolding on their television screens: “Yes, let’s help with aid, but let’s not get any more involved.”

I agree that we should avoid sending armies to fight or occupy.

*Does he? See if he sticks to this later on, after most readers will have peeled off, reassured that British troops (apparently) won’t be sent back to Iraq.

 

But we need to recognise that the brighter future we long for requires a long-term plan for our security as well as for our economy.

 

*Is this in fact true? Surely we only increase or safeguard our security if our actions do not make new enemies, and do not needlessly expose our soldiers to death or injury? He is making the case for intervention before he has explained precisely why it is justified in this place.

True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources – aid, diplomacy, our military prowess – to help bring about a more stable world. Today, when every nation is so immediately interconnected, we cannot turn a blind eye and assume that there will not be a cost for us if we do.

*What ‘military prowess’ ? Is the Prime Minister unaware of the enormous cuts he himself has made in the Army and the Navy? 'To the bone' is inadequate to describe them. He has cut deep *into* the bone.  Does he not realise that many of the most experienced officers and NCOs have left as a result, and that plans to make up the gap with reserves have run into serious trouble?

 

 

The creation of an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and extending into Syria is not a problem miles away from home.

*Actually it may well be such a problem, or at least one we have managed to cope with before. The word ‘extremist’ is notoriously subjective,  but many people would regard the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (and of some of the Gulf States too) as being 'extremist’ by the standards of 21st-century western law-governed democracies. A case could be made for classifying the People’s Republic of China as ‘extremist’ , and I personally think the word could be applied to Turkey’s new President Erdogan. Well, Mr Cameron and his colleagues cannot keep away from Peking, and Prince Charles is often in the Gulf. We seem to have found a modus vivendi with Pakistan. Are we as fussy as we claim to be? We have in the past had to come to accommodations with all kinds of people we much disliked, but didn’t have the power to remove, notably the Russian Bolsheviks. Oil-producing countries need customers, and oil-consuming countries need sellers. In the past they have tended to overcome strong dislike.

 

 

Nor is it a problem that should be defined by a war 10 years ago.

 

* This is one of the key points of the article. What it means is ‘because the 2003 Iraq war (which the Tories supported) was a catastrophe, there’s no reason to think that this one will be. Well, the pretext is different – atrocities rather than WMD. But action to prevent atrocities can be limited to that, which is why Mr Cameron is trying to widen the issue to national security.

 

It is our concern here and now. Because if we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain.

*This is highly questionable. Much the same thing was said for years, to justify our pointless engagement in Afghanistan. Why precisely should the Islamic State want to target the streets of Britain?  I'm not saying it won't, just that 'd like to know why it should. Please show your working.

We already know that it has the murderous intent. Indeed, the first Isil-inspired terrorist acts on the continent of Europe have already taken place.

*Could you, or anybody, please say which acts these were? 

Our first priority has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq. We should be proud of the role that our brave armed services and aid workers have played in the international effort. British citizens have risked their lives to get 80 tons of vital supplies to the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar. It is right that we use our aid programme to respond rapidly to a situation like this: Britain has given £13 million to support the aid effort. We also helped to plan a detailed international rescue operation and we remain ready and flexible to respond to the ongoing challenges in or around Dahuk, where more than 450,000 people have increased the population by 50 per cent.

 

* Excellent. Who could object? But, as we now see, humanitarian relief is somehow not enough.

 

But a humanitarian response alone is not enough. We also need a broader political, diplomatic and security response.

*Why, exactly? This seems to me to an unsupported assertion.

 

For that, we must understand the true nature of the threat we face. We should be clear: this is not the “War on Terror”, nor is it a war of religions. It is a struggle for decency, tolerance and moderation in our modern world. It is a battle against a poisonous ideology that is condemned by all faiths and by all faith leaders, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim.

*In what important way does this differ from the “War on Terror” or a war of religions, except that these ideas are discredited and he does not want to be associated with them?

What is a battle against an ideology? How do you do that? Also, if this ideology is condemned by all faiths (including the one the ISIS militants follow with such zeal and passion), then why do they continue to behave as they do? 

Of course there is conflict between Shias and Sunnis, but that is the wrong way to see what is really happening. What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

*Interesting. Who precisely are these ‘fanatics living far from the battlefield’?  

So this threat cannot simply be removed by airstrikes alone. We need a tough, intelligent and patient long-term approach that can defeat the terrorist threat at source.

First, we need a firm security response, whether that is military action to go after the terrorists,

*So military action is, after all, being considered. See above.

 

international co-operation on intelligence and counter-terrorism or uncompromising action against terrorists at home. On Friday we agreed with our European partners that we will provide equipment directly to the Kurdish forces; we are now identifying what we might supply, from body armour to specialist counter-explosive equipment.

*What about actual weapons? And what about allowing Kurdistan to sell its oil on the world market, which it is presently banned from doing? Could it be that we are coy or reluctant because we are afraid of what will happen if we allow Kurdistan to become fully independent of Baghdad? Not surprising if so. An armed and oil-rich Kurdistan would cause major destabilisation of the whole region. Iran and what is left of Iraq would be very reluctant to allow such a thing, and Turkey’s attitude cannot be predicted. Yet it is hard to see how such a thing can now be avoided.

 

We have also secured a United Nations Security Council resolution to disrupt the flows of finance to Isil, sanction those who are seeking to recruit for it and encourage countries to do all they can to prevent foreign fighters joining the extremist cause.

Here in Britain we have recently introduced stronger powers through our Immigration Act to deprive naturalised Britons of their citizenship if they are suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. We have taken down 28,000 pieces of terrorist-related material from the web, including 46 Isil-related videos. And I have also discussed the police response to this growing threat of extremism with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. The position is clear. If people are walking around with Isil flags or trying to recruit people to their terrorist cause, they will be arrested and their materials will be seized. We are a tolerant people, but no tolerance should allow the room for this sort of poisonous extremism in our country.

 

*This is just flailing with gestures, and quite possibly a general threat to civil liberties as well. Laws of this kind are either ineffectual and hard to enforce because they are too vague, or a danger to everyone because they have to contain catch-all clauses which give the police and the courts huge power over the individual.

Alongside a tough security response, there must also be an intelligent political response. We know that terrorist organisations thrive where there is political instability and weak or dysfunctional political institutions. So we must support the building blocks of democracy – the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, the rights of minorities, free media and association and a proper place in society for the army. None of these things can be imposed by the West.

 

*Well, isn’t it odd, in that case, that we have just collaborated with the Ayatollahs in Teheran, in overthrowing Iraq’s democratically-elected Prime Minister? As for the ‘building blocks of democracy’ where, pray are they now in Libya, the country Mr Cameron so breezily ‘liberated’ a few years ago? And where are they in Egypt, whose hard-faced and repressive military junta we support? I could go on. Surely it is time that this idealist guff was dropped?

 

Every country must make its own way. But we can and must play a valuable role in supporting them to do that.

*Or we can make a terrible mess, by intervening without understanding or knowledge, and with an exaggerated idea of our skill and power.

Isil militants have exploited the absence of a unified and representative government in Baghdad. So we strongly welcome the opportunity of a new start with Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi. I spoke to him earlier this week and assured him that we will support any attempts to forge a genuinely inclusive government that can unite all Iraqi communities – Sunnis, Shias and Kurds – against the common enemy of Isil, which threatens the way of life of them all.

The international community will rally around this new government. But Iraq’s neighbours in the region are equally vital. So we must work with countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and Turkey against these extremist forces, and perhaps even with Iran, which could choose this moment to engage with the international community against this shared threat. I want Britain to play a leading role in this diplomatic effort. So we will be appointing a Special Representative to the Kurdistan Regional Government and using the Nato summit in Wales and the United Nations General Assembly in New York to help rally support across the international community.

 

*Why no mention of Syria?  Syria is a vital part of the battlefield against ISIS, and if Syria fell to ISIS the whole politics of the Mediterranean and the Levant would indeed to be transformed. Apart form anything else, ISIS would then have a border with Israel, and incredibly dangerous point of friction.

 

ISIS is to a great extent our fault. It grew out of the destabilisation of Syria, which Western countries began as long ago as 2011 for reasons best known to themselves, and which was then reinforced by Gulf-supported foreign fighters overwhelmingly made up of Sunni fanatics. The idea that there is a ‘moderate’ rebel force in Syria is a fantasy. Even where the non-Wahhabi rebels disagree with ISIS, they are too weak to resist it, and must do what it says and hand over their weapons to it on demand.

Finally, while being tough and intelligent, we must also be patient and resolute. We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology, which I believe we will be fighting for the rest of my political lifetime.

*This prediction is particularly disturbing. Why should this country be committed to a war which our own Premier says cannot be ended in his lifetime

 

We face in Isil a new threat that is single-minded, determined and unflinching in pursuit of its objectives. Already it controls not just thousands of minds, but thousands of square miles of territory, sweeping aside much of the boundary between Iraq and Syria to carve out its so-called caliphate. It makes no secret of its expansionist aims. Even today it has the ancient city of Aleppo firmly within its sights. And it boasts of its designs on Jordan and Lebanon, and right up to the Turkish border. If it succeeds, we would be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a Nato member.

This is a clear danger to Europe and to our security. It is a daunting challenge. But it is not an invincible one, as long as we are now ready and able to summon up the political will to defend our own values and way of life with the same determination, courage and tenacity as we have faced danger before in our history. That is how much is at stake here: we have no choice but to rise to the challenge.

Hitchens’s first rule of political rhetoric is as follows: Whenever a politician says there is no choice or no alternative, he or she means that there is a choice or an alternative, but that they hope nobody will notice. The alternative at the moment is resolute humanitarian action to save the persecuted, combined with extreme and patient caution over deeper involvement. And by patient I don't mean an unending war against an idea we don't like.  The more that Mr Cameron talks of our ‘values and way of life’, whatever he means by that,  the faster the rest of us should count our spoons. General, foggy dangers of this kind are a) beyond the power of governments to combat or overcome and b) risk a state of permament idealist war in which there is never any objective point at which victory (or defeat) can be declared. 

 

 

 

                                                           

 

Were we Misinformed About our Obligations in the Crisis of 1914?

Because if so, could such a thing happen again? History is never irrelevant.

Our current government seeks to hurry us into a war whose end is – by the Prime Minister’s own admission – unknown. I thought this would be a good moment  to take a deeper look at Sir Edward Grey’s successful efforts to rush us into the 1914 disaster. Perhaps we could learn something from them , in this extraordinarily precarious moment of history, with potential wars smouldering in the Middle East and Ukraine.

 

In his speech to the Commons on the early evening of 3rd August 1914, which was followed later by a voteless debate which was not attended by much of the government Front Bench, Sir Edward made much use of the 1839 Treaty of London, under which Britain and several other powers had guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium.

 

As Sir Edward Grey and the Cabinet well knew (see my recent blogs on 1914 revisited, and some subsequent postings in answer to my automatic critic, the Wiki Man),  this Treaty did not bind Britain to go to war. They also knew that Britain’s secret military commitments to France, discussed over years between henry Wilson and Ferdinand Foch, and above all Sir Edward Grey's very recent rushed agreement to undertake the defence of the French Channel Coast from a hypothetical German naval attack, had committed us to war before Belgium’s neutrality was violated.

 

The famous Belgian Treaty’s  provisions  (Everyone has heard of this Treaty. Almost nobody has read it) had been viewed as so weak and vague by W.E.Gladstone, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, that he had made special extra emergency treaties (with the North German Federation, as it then was, and the French Empire, as it then was) which were specific on intervention. Those treaties (which, amazingly, simultaneously committed us to possible military alliances with France against Germany, or with Germany against France) were limited in effect and time.

 

They specifically ruled out British involvement in any general war, limiting it to the defence of Belgian neutrality. And they expired after a year, which meant they were long dead and buried, and we were back to the 1839 text.   But anyone who did not know this rather inconvenient detail would have been much enlightened by Sir Edward’s speech.

 

 

**

Sir Edward must have known this. Yet his speech does not really explain it. He said :

 

‘The people who laid down the attitude of the British Government were Lord Granville in the House of Lords, and Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons. Lord Granville, on the 8th of August 1870, used these words. He said:

"We might have explained to the country and to foreign nations that we did not think this country was bound either morally or internationally or that its interests were concerned in the maintenance of the neutrality of Belgium, though this course might have had some conveniences, though it might have been easy to adhere to it, though it might have saved us from some immediate danger, it is a course which Her Majesty's Government thought it impossible to adopt in the name of the country with any due regard to the country's honour or to the country's interests." '

**

This seems to me to be mere bluster about honour, of the sort to which politicians resort when they are short of actual arguments, of little interest one way or another. Gladstone, on the other hand, is harder and clearer. But if you did not know the background, a casual listener might not have realised just how different the two were.

Sir Edward said : Mr. Gladstone spoke as follows two days later:—

"There is, I admit, the obligation of the Treaty. It is not necessary, nor would time permit me, to enter into the *** complicated question of the nature of the obligations of that Treaty*** (my emphasis, PH); but I am not able to subscribe to the doctrine of those who have held in this House what plainly amounts to an assertion, that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is binding on every party to it, irrespectively altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the time when the occasion for acting on the guarantee arises.”

***

What Sir Edward is actually quoting Gladstone as saying is, if you read it carefully, very damaging to his case. Gladstone is ‘not able to subscribe’ to the ‘doctrine’ of those who say that ‘existence of a guarantee is binding on every party *irrespective*of the specific conditions. In other words, this Treaty at any rate is so vague that it is inadequate for the needs of 1870 (and by implication even more inadequate for the equally unforeseenneeds of 1914)

 

 

Grey went on to quote Gladstone further: ‘ The great authorities upon foreign policy to whom I have been accustomed to listen, such as Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston, never to my knowledge took that rigid and, if I may venture to say so, that impracticable view of the guarantee.’

*****

Palmerston certainly didn’t take a rigid view of treaties. His  (in 1870) very recent evasion of British obligations towards Denmark in 1864, much more specific than the 1839 Treaty, would have been fresh in Gladstone’s mind and those of his listeners. But did Sir Edward Grey’s audience know of it? For them it was almost half a century ago, as obscure to them as Harold Wilson’s East of Suez foreign policy is to us now. Sir Edward, and his Foreign Office staff would have known of all of this, and would also have known of the detailed context. It was their area of knowledge and expertise. But it seems to me they were happy to give a highly misleading impression of Gladstone’s real position. For Sir Edward ends his quotation from Gladstone’s specific speech here.

**

' "The circumstance that there is already an existing guarantee in force is of necessity an important fact, and a weighty element in the case to which we are bound to give full and ample consideration. There is also this further consideration, the force of which we must all feel most deeply, and that is, the common interests against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any Power whatever."'

 

Sir Edward then continued ‘The Treaty is an old Treaty—1839—and that was the view taken of it in 1870. It is one of those Treaties which are founded, not only on consideration for Belgium, which benefits under the Treaty, but in the interests of those who guarantee the neutrality of Belgium. The honour and interests are, at least, as strong to-day as in 1870, and we cannot take a more narrow view or a less serious view of our obligations, and of the importance of those obligations than was taken by Mr. Gladstone's Government in 1870.’

 

**

Sir Edward then quoted Gladstone (from elsewhere in the same speech) on the general issue of Belgian independence. Once again the quotation tells us much less than it ought to :

 

‘I have one further quotation from Mr. Gladstone as to what he thought about the independence of Belgium. It will be found in "Hansard," Volume 203, Page 1787. I have not had time to read the whole speech and verify the context, but the thing seems to me so clear that no context could make any difference to the meaning of it. Mr. Gladstone said:

"We have an interest in the independence of Belgium which is wider than that which we may have in the literal operation of the guarantee. It is found in the answer to the question whether under the circumstances of the case, this country, endowed as it is with influence and power, would quietly stand by and witness the perpetration of the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history, and thus become participators in the sin."

***

Interestingly, the context does make a considerable difference, and I really don’t see why Sir Edward had no time to check it.  I am sure that the necessary bound volumes of Hansard were available in the Foreign Office Library, and that Sir Edward had plenty of well-educated assistants to check them for him. I am tempted to wonder if his claim that he had ‘no time’ was an attempt to expiate some slight guilt at leaving out the previous words.

Gladstone’s words immediately before this quotation run :  

 

‘Looking at a country such as that, is there any man who hears me who does not feel that if, in order to satisfy a greedy appetite for aggrandizement, coming whence it may, Belgium were absorbed, the day that witnessed that absorption would hear the knell of public right and public law in Europe?’

Again, some historical knowledge is helpful here. The country Britain suspected of wishing to absorb Belgium in 1870 to ‘satisfy a greedy appetite for aggrandizement’ was not Germany (which did not then exist) but France, a country with which we had nearly gone to war in the early 1860s, hence the huge ring of forts built round Portsmouth in 1865, still there as evidence of abiding Anglo-French suspicion.  Indeed, Belgium had been created (under British pressure) as a modern nation largely so as to prevent France from taking over that territory, should it once again acquire a leader such as Bonaparte.

 

On the eve of our going to war as France’s ally, I doubt very much whether Sir Edward wanted to revive any such memories.

 

My own view is also that Germany meant what she said in 1914 when she pressed Belgium to let her troops through unresisted, saying that in that case Belgium would be unmolested and unoccupied (this promise was accompanied by a threat, very much fulfilled, to make war and occupy if Belgium resisted).

 

This is not becaue i think the Kaiser's Germany was nice, but because I think it was rational. Germany certainly wanted to defeat France, but she was mainly interested in conquering and carving up the Russian Empire, not in colonizing developed western European nations.  Paradoxically, Belgium’s best guarantee of independence and neutrality would have been to let the Kaiser through.

Anyway, I turned, as anyone can do, to the necessary Historic Hansard for 10th August 1870,  debate on Belgian Neutrality Sir Edward and the MPs of August 1914 would have benefited from a more thorough study of what Mr Gladstone said, and what was said to him. :

 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1870/aug/10/observations

 

House of Commons Debate 10 August 1870 volume 203 columns 1776-92, beginning at column 1776.

 

Mr Gladstone is busy explaining why Britain has concluded two new and important treaties at short notice:

MR. GLADSTONE 

‘As I understand, Sir, that during my absence in the discharge of other duties yesterday a desire was expressed by some hon. Gentlemen to make observations upon the recent proceedings of Her Majesty's Government with respect to affairs abroad, I think it is desirable that the House should be in possession of the facts up to the present time—that is to say, precisely as they will presently receive them in the Speech from the Throne. I therefore wish to mention that the Treaty proposed by Her Majesty's Government to the belligerent Powers has been actually signed by Count Bernstorff on the part of the North German Confederation, as well as by Earl Granville on the part of Her Majesty's Government, and also that M. de Lavalette, the Ambassador of the Emperor of the French at this Court, has, in a letter dated yesterday, stated that he is now in a position to announce to Earl Granville that he is authorized by the Government of the Emperor to adhere to the Treaty proposed by the British Government, for the more effective guarantee of the neutrality of Belgium. He adds, I shall sign the Treaty as soon as I shall receive the full powers which I expect for that purpose.

 

‘With regard to the instrument itself, perhaps it would be convenient for the better understanding of what has been done that I should simply read the principal articles, omitting, for the sake of clearness, the ordinary preamble. The first Article is this— His Majesty the Emperor of the French having declared that, notwithstanding the hostilities in which France is now engaged with the North German Confederation, it is his fixed determination to respect the neutrality of Belgium so long as the same shall be respected by the North German Confederation; Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, on her part, declares that if during the said hostilities the armies of the North German Confederation should violate that neutrality, she will be prepared to co-operate with His Imperial Majesty for the defence of the same in such manner as may be mutually agreed upon, employing for that purpose her naval and military forces to insure its observance; and to maintain, in conjunction with His Imperial Majesty, then and thereafter, the independence and neutrality of Belgium.

 

(This is particularly worth noting) It is clearly understood that Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland does not engage herself by this Treaty to take part in any of the general operations of the war now carried on between France and the North German Confederation beyond the limits of Belgium, as defined in the Treaty between Belgium and the Netherlands of April 19, 1839. 

 

‘The second Article is this— His Majesty the Emperor of the French agrees, on his part, in the event provided for in the foregoing Article, to co-operate with Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, employing his naval and military forces for the purpose aforesaid, and, the case arising, to concert with Her Majesty the measures which shall be taken separately or in common to secure the neutrality and independence of Belgium. The third Article is this— This Treaty shall be binding on the High Contracting Parties during the continuance of the present war between France and the North German Confederation, and for twelve months after the ratification of any Treaty of Peace concluded between those parties; and, on the expiration of that time, the independence and neutrality of Belgium will, so far as the high contracting parties respectively are concerned, continue to rest as heretofore on the first Article of the Quintuple Treaty of the 19th of April, 1839. Sir, such is the Treaty which we have proposed to the belligerent Powers, mutatis mutandis. There is some correspondence on the subject; but I think the reading of the principal Articles will give the House all the information that is necessary.’

 

 

Mr Gladstone was then challenged rather smartly by a Mr Osborne -  a member for Waterford, a city then of course represented in the London House of Commons rather than in the Dublin Dail. From Mr Gladstone’s description of him as ‘honourable and gallant friend’ we know that Mr Osborne was a Liberal had served in the Army or Navy (perhaps seen active service in the Crimea?)  and so knew a bit about war.  But I have been unable to find out any more about him

 

 

 

MR. OSBORNE 

‘I do not know whether it is competent to any Member to make remarks on this extraordinary document. I will only say that there never has been a more extraordinary document, or a more extraordinary manner of producing such a document on a great crisis like this in the history of the British House of Commons. Now, we have had recently so many strange revelations of diplomatic proceedings that I have myself lost all faith in diplomacy. Indeed, Sir, I am very much inclined to think that if our other weapons are not in better order we are very badly off, as the weapons of our diplomatists are not remarkable as arms of precision. For what a Treaty is this! For my own part I would sooner have no Treaty at all, because I think this Treaty involves hidden dangers, which nobody can foresee.In the first place, this Treaty is entirely superfluous if the Treaty of 1839 is worth anything at all. In the eyes of Austria and Russia that Treaty of 1839 is entirely superseded by this. You have struck a blow at that Treaty, which you can never put in the same position again. Where is the article? Now, do look as men of common sense, and not as versed in diplomacy—

 

MR. GLADSTONE 

‘As far as I understand, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Waterford (Mr. Osborne) has complained that we have destroyed the Treaty of 1839 by this instrument. As I pay so much attention to everything that falls from him, I thought that by some mistake I must have read the instrument inaccurately; but I have read it again, and I find that by one of the Articles contained in it the Treaty of 1839 is expressly recognized. But there is one omission I made in the matter which I will take the present opportunity to supply. The House, I think, have clearly understood that this instrument expresses an arrangement between this country and France; but an instrument has been signed between this country and the North German Confederation precisely the same in its terms, except that where the name of the Emperor of the French is read in one instrument, the name of the German Confederation is read in the other, and vice versâ. 

 

 

The Grand Old Man continues (at some length) before actually answering Mr Osborne's point, by simply denying its truth:

'I have listened with much interest to the conversation which has occurred, and I think we have no reason to be dissatisfied at the manner in which, speaking generally, this Treaty has been received. My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton (Mr. White) speaking, as he says, from below the Gangway, is quite right in thinking that his approval of the course the Government have taken is gratifying to us, on account of the evidently independent course of action which he always pursues in this House. The hon. and gallant Gentleman opposite (Colonel Barttelot) has expressed a different opinion from ours on the great question of policy, and he asks whether we should not have done well to limit ourselves to the Treaty of 1839. We differ entirely on that subject from the hon. and gallant Gentleman; but we cannot complain of the manner in which he has expressed his opinion and recognized the intentions of the Government. From Gentlemen who sit behind me we have had more positive and unequivocal expressions of approval than fell from the hon. and gallant Gentleman. The only person who strongly objects to the course taken by the Government is my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Waterford; and I do not in the least object to his frank method of stating whatever he feels in opposition to our proceedings in a matter of so much consequence, though I do think it necessary to notice some of his objections. In the first place, he denounces this Treaty as an example of the mischiefs of secret diplomacy. He thinks that if the Treaty had been submitted to the House it would not have been agreed to. 

 

My hon. and gallant Friend is a man much, enamoured of public diplomacy. He remembers, no doubt, that three weeks ago the Due de Gramont went to the Legislative Body of France and made an announcement as to the policy which the French Government would pursue with respect to Prussia. The result of that example of public diplomacy no doubt greatly encouraged my hon. and gallant Friend. Then we have a specimen in the speech of my hon. and gallant Friend of the kind of public diplomacy which we should have in this case if his hopes and desires were realized. He says that if Belgium were in the hands of a hostile Power the liberties of this country would not be worth 24 hours' purchase. I protest against that statement. With all my heart and soul I protest against it. A statement more exaggerated, a statement more extravagant, I never heard fall from the lips of any Member in this House. [Mr. OSBORNE: Napoleon said it.] Whatever my hon. and gallant Friend's accurate acquaintance with the correspondence of Napoleon may induce him to say, I may be permitted to observe that I am not prepared to take my impression of the character, of the strength, of the dignity, of the duty, or of the danger of this country from that correspondence. I will avail myself of this opportunity of expressing my opinion, if I may presume to give it, that too much has been said by my hon. and gallant Friend and others of the specially distinct, separate, and exclusive interest which this country has in the maintenance of the neutrality of Belgium. What is our interest in maintaining the neutrality of Belgium? It is the same as that of every great Power in Europe. It is contrary to the interest of Europe that there should be unmeasured aggrandizement. Our interest is no more involved in the aggrandizement supposed in this particular case than is the interest of the other Powers. That it is a real interest, a substantial interest, I do not deny; but I protest against the attempt to attach to it the exclusive character which I never know carried into the region of caricature to such a degree as it has been by my hon. and gallant Friend. What is the immediate moral effect of those exaggerated statements of the separate interest of England? The immediate moral effect of them is this—that every effort we make on behalf of Belgium on other grounds than those of interest—as well as on grounds of interest, goes forth to the world as a separate and selfish scheme of ours; and that which we believe to be entitled to the dignity and credit of an effort on behalf of the general peace, stability, and interest of Europe actually contracts a taint of selfishness in the eyes of other nations because of the manner in which the subject of Belgian neutrality is too frequently treated in this House. If I may be allowed to speak of the motives which have actuated Her Majesty's Government in the matter, I would say that while we have recognized the interest of England, we have never looked upon it as the sole motive, or even as the greatest of those considerations which have urged us forward.

 

There is, I admit, the obligation of the Treaty. It is not necessary, nor would time permit me, to enter into the complicated question of the nature of the obligations of that Treaty; but I am not able to subscribe to the doctrine of those who have held in this House what plainly amounts to an assertion, that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is binding on every party to it irrespectively altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the time when the occasion for acting on the guarantee arises. The great authorities upon foreign policy to whom I have been accustomed to listen—such as Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston—never, to my knowledge, took that rigid and, if I may venture to say so, that impracticable view of a guarantee. The circumstance that there is already an existing guarantee in force is of necessity an important fact, and a weighty element in the case, to which we are bound to give full and ample consideration. There is also this further consideration, the force of which we must all feel most deeply, and that is the common interest against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any Power whatever. But there is one other motive, which I shall place at the head of all, that attaches peculiarly to the preservation of the independence of Belgium. What is that country? It is a country containing 4,000,000 or 5,000,000 of people, with much of an historic past, and imbued with a sentiment of nationality and a spirit of independence as warm and as genuine as that which beats in the hearts of the proudest and most powerful nations. By the regulation of its internal concerns, amid the shocks of revolution, Belgium, through all the crises of the age, has set to Europe an example of a good and stable government gracefully associated with the widest possible extension of the liberty of the people.

 

Looking at a country such as that, is there any man who hears me who does not feel that if, in order to satisfy a greedy appetite for aggrandizement, coming whence it may, Belgium were absorbed, the day that witnessed that absorption would hear the knell of public right and public law in Europe? But we have an interest in the independence of Belgium which is wider than that—which is wider than that which we may have in the literal operation of the guarantee. It is found in the answer to the question whether, under the circumstances of the case, this country, endowed as it is with influence and power, would quietly stand by and witness the perpetration of the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history, and thus become participators in the sin? And now let me deal with the observations of the hon. Member for Waterford. The hon. Member asks—What if both these Powers with whom we are making this Treaty should combine against the independence of Belgium? Well, all I can say is that we rely on the faith of these parties. But if there be danger of their combining against that independence now, unquestionably there was much more danger in the position of affairs that was revealed to our astonished eyes a fortnight ago, and before these later engagements were contracted.

 

I do not undertake to define the character of that position which, as I have said, was more dangerous a fortnight ago. I feel confident that it would be hasty to suppose that those great States would, under any circumstances, have become parties to the actual contemplation and execution of a proposal such as that which was made the subject of communication between persons of great importance on behalf of their respective States. That was the state of facts with which we had to deal. It was the combination, and not the opposition, of the two Powers which we had to fear, and I contend—and we shall be ready on every proper occasion to argue—that there is no measure so well adapted to meet the peculiar character of such an occasion as that which we have proposed. It is said that the Treaty of 1839 would have sufficed, and that we ought to have announced our determination to abide by it. But if we were disposed at once to act upon the guarantee contained in that Treaty, what state of circumstances does it contemplate? It contemplates the invasion of the frontiers of Belgium and the violation of the neutrality of that country by some other Power. That is the only case in which we could have been called upon to act under the Treaty of 1839, and that is the only case in which we can be called upon to act under the Treaty now before the House. But in what, then, lies the difference between the two Treaties? It is in this—that, in accordance with our obligations, we should have had to act under the Treaty of 1839 without any stipulated assurance of being supported from any quarter whatever against any combination, however formidable; whereas by the Treaty now formally before Parliament, under the conditions laid down in it, we secure powerful support in the event of our having to act—a support with respect to which we may well say that if brings the object in view within the sphere of the practicable and attainable, instead of leaving it within the sphere of what might have been desirable, but which might have been most difficult, under all the circumstances, to have realized. The hon. Member says that by entering into this engagement we have destroyed the Treaty of 1839. But if he will carefully consider the terms of this instrument he will see that there is nothing in them calculated to bear out that statement.

 

It is perfectly true that this is a cumulative Treaty, added to the Treaty of 1839, as the right hon. Gentleman opposite (Mr. Disraeli), with perfect precision, described it. Upon that ground I very much agree with the general opinion he expressed; but, at the same time, peculiar circumstances call for a departure from general rules, and the circumstances are most peculiar under which we have thought it right to adopt the method of proceeding which we have actually done.

 

Then Mr Gladstone at last says: ‘The Treaty of 1839 loses nothing of its force even during the existence of this present Treaty. There is no derogation from it whatever. The Treaty of 1839 includes terms which are expressly included in the present instrument, lest by any chance it should be said that, in consequence of the existence of this instrument, the Treaty of 1839 had been injured or impaired. That would have been a mere opinion; but it is an opinion which we thought fit to provide against.’

 

But does he, by saying this, make it true? I personally think not. In fact I think he rather contradicts some of his earlier words. The Prime Minister went on:

 

‘The hon. Member has said that this is a most peculiar method of bringing a Treaty before the House I admit it. There is no doubt at all that it is so. But it is not easy to say what circumstances there are that will justify the breaking up of general rules in a matter so delicate and important as the making of communications to Parliament upon political negotiations of great interest. The rule which has been uniformly followed in this country is this—that no Treaty is communicated to Parliament unless it becomes binding; and it does not become absolutely binding upon the signatories until it has been ratified; and, by the law and usage of all civilized countries, ratification requires certain forms to be gone through which cannot be concluded in a moment. Under these circumstances, we had only this choice—whether we should be contented to present a Treaty to Parliament without the usual forms having been gone through, or whether we should break down the rule which we think it is, on the whole, most desirable to observe, and we thought it best to adopt the course we have followed in the matter.

 

The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Somerset Beaumont) has asked whether this Treaty has been concluded with the sanction of Belgium. My answer is that I do not doubt the relevancy of that inquiry, but that the Treaty has not been concluded with the sanction of Belgium, for we have advisedly refrained from any attempt to make Belgium a party to the engagement. In the first place, Belgium was not a party to the Treaty of 1839. But that is a matter of secondary importance. What we had to consider was, what was the most prudent, the best, and the safest course for us to pursue in the interest of Belgium. Independently of Belgium, we had no right to assume that either of the parties would agree to it, and we had also to contemplate the case in which one party might agree to it and the other might not. If we had attempted to make Belgium a party we should have run the risk of putting her in a very false position in the event of one of the parties not agreeing to the proposal. It was, therefore, from no want of respect or friendly feeling towards Belgium, but simply from prudential considerations, that we abstained from bringing that country within the circle of these negotiations.

 

The hon. Member has also asked whether Austria and Russia have been consulted upon the subject of the Treaty, but upon that point I have nothing to add to what I communicated to the House the other day. Both those parties have been invited—as Her Majesty has been advised to announce from the Throne—to accede to the Treaty, and I said on Monday that the reception of the Treaty as far as those Powers were concerned had been generally favourable. I have no reason to alter that statement; but, on the part of Russia, a question has arisen with regard to which I cannot quite say how it may eventually close, especially from the circumstance that the Emperor and his chief advisers upon foreign affairs do not happen to be in the same place. That question, so raised, is whether it might be wise to give a wider scope to any engagements of this kind; but if there is any hesitation on this point, it is not of a kind which indicates an objection of principle, but, on the contrary, one which shows a disposition to make every possible effort in favour of the Treaty. We are in full communication with friendly and neutral Powers on the subject of maintaining neutrality, and upon every side the very best dispositions prevail. There is the greatest inclination to abstain from all officious intermeddling between two Powers who, from their vast means and resources, are perfectly competent for the conduct of their own affairs; and there is not a less strong and decided desire on the part of every Power to take every step at the present moment that can contribute to restrict and circumscribe the area of the war, and to be ready, without having lost or forfeited the confidence of either belligerent, to avail itself of the first opportunity that may present itself to contribute towards establishing a peace which shall be honourable, and which shall present the promise of being permanent. 

 

That is the general state of the case, with regard to which I do not, in the least degree, question the right of any hon. Member behind me to form his own judgment. I cannot help expressing the opinion that, allowing for all the difficulties of the case, and the rapidity with which it was necessary to conduct these operations, we have done all that appeared to be essential in the matter; and the country may feel assured that the conduct which we have pursued in relation to this matter has not been unworthy of the high responsibility with which we are entrusted. '                                                    

Abolish the Lords! And lose all the creeps and dodgy donors

This is Peter Hitchens Mail On Sunday column

Let’s abolish the House of Lords. I never thought I’d say that, but when the facts change, I change my mind. And they have changed.

Before the Blair revolution, the Lords was full of independent minds, who owed nobody anything and could not be pushed around by Downing Street. There was no logic to  it, as there often isn’t in this country, but it worked.

It was such a good idea that even revolutionaries used to envy it. Until 1913, the US Senate was modelled on it – and so was not elected. I can’t see any signs that America has been better run since they started electing Senators. And I can  see plenty of signs that Britain has been worse run since the Blairites took over her.

Now it seems you can only  get into our Upper House after crawling to the big parties,  or after giving them piles of cash, or both at once. It’s just  a coincidence, of course, that crawlers and donors get peerages, but it’s so.

As a result it is now a worthless and rather shameful  relic, stuffed to the rafters  with exactly the sort of people who should have nothing to do with power.

 I hate it because I can remember what it once was. I can also recall the derision and mockery I received for warning that change would make it worse, and for defending the old hereditary system.

I am pretty sure that the  next Government will sweep it away and replace it with an elected senate. Unless we combine to thwart them with  a better idea, this will not be  an improvement.

Because such a senate will  be picked by the big parties, and guess what sort of people will be at the top of their lists  – why, donors and crawlers,  of course.

Just as in the House of Commons, you’ll be presented with bland, obedient pre-chosen candidates and invited to approve them in elections decided by big money and big media, in which independent minds won’t stand a chance.

They will then do what the Government tells them to do, in return for salaries and expenses that most people could never dream of. This is what we in this country call ‘democracy’.

The best thing would be to get the old hereditaries back, but our media and political classes are too stupid and malevolent to allow that.

So how about an elected British senate, but one utterly unlike the servile House  of Commons?

Here are a few suggestions: Anyone who has belonged to  or given money to any party within the past five years, to be absolutely disqualified. Any senator who later joins or gives money to a party, or receives any kind of pay, favour, title  or post from the Government,  to be automatically and instantly unseated.

I’d urge a minimum age of 50 and special allocations of seats to full-time mothers, war veterans, crime victims and pensioners, all despised and ignored by our existing Establishment.

But above all, we must destroy the tyranny of the three Zombie Parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory,  who speak for nobody but themselves and have wrecked the country.

Who'd want to be on a stamp with this lot?

Very odd postage stamps have just been launched, featuring strangely smooth Soviet-style airbrushed portraits of a very peculiar selection of Prime Ministers.

If I were the Monarch,  I’d ask for my head to be taken off these scraps of sticky paper from now on.

Who’d want to keep such company?

And I’m really not sure what’s Royal, or even British, about a former institution which has been forced into hectic privatisation by  the EU.

By rights our  stamps should feature the heads of Jacques Delors, Herman Van Rompuy and Mr Cameron’s high-fiving friend Jean-Claude Juncker.

Everyone will find someone to dislike in the gallery of Premiers provided. I’d be nervous about the fate of any letter with a Thatcher stamp on it – and it’s interesting that, despite immortalising Maggie, they decided not to risk a Blair stamp.

It’s not true that you have to be dead to be on a British stamp – several living footballers were honoured  in this way in February.

But it may well be that  Mr Blair has now become  the most unpopular living person in Britain.

And yet I remember when you couldn’t breathe a word against him.

Which of today’s admired figures face a similar reversal of fortune?

Most of them, I hope.

Strong borders save the world

Of course Sir John Major is right that immigrants generally come here to better themselves.

I have always admired the courage and determination of people who travel thousands  of often dangerous miles in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

But so what? The case against mass migration has nothing to do with the personal qualities  of migrants. It has to do with our desire to preserve our own culture, laws and language.  It also has something to do with our wish not to have wages forced down by a huge pool of cheap, easily exploited labour.

It’s also worth considering that the countries from which these people come suffer from the loss of their bravest and most enterprising young men and women.

Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.

Didn’t we once say we had brought democracy to Iraq? Yet this week we combined with the Islamic Republic of Iran to support a silent coup against Nouri al-Maliki, that country’s democratically elected premier. The ‘democratic West’ also backed the overthrow by a mob  putsch of Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych, and by a military coup (ssshh, we mustn’t call it that!) of Egypt’s elected President Morsi.

Meanwhile, Western media and politicians are full of praise for Turkey’s new and menacing President Erdogan, who is more repressive than Russia’s Putin and memorably once said: ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.’ I think he’s nearly there.

I also think our rulers don’t really care about democracy, there or here. They just say they do.

My thanks to those of you who responded so kindly to my request to write to the Iranian President seeking the release of my friend  Jason Rezaian and his wife, still alas held in secret detention in Tehran since July 22. I will let you know of any developments.

To comment, please scroll down