Hurry. There may yet be time to prevent this latest folly
I see no evidence that the planned bombing of Iraq is a Just War
I sense that tomorrow’s Parliamentary debate on bombing the Middle East has been rigged in advance at the top. But it can't be rigged at the bottom. Individual MPs are still free. There is still time for you to telephone or e-mail your MP to let him or her know that you see no reason to rush into yet another stupid conflict in the Muslim world. And indeed that it is precisely because of the emotive, hurried, propaganda-driven decisions to go to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (and the West’s unwise support of the ‘Arab Spring’) that we have already lost so many lives, and made the Muslim world so much more unstable and dangerous than it would have been had we done nothing at all.
But you can’t just do nothing!
Why not? Nothing is often the best thing to do, especially if you are a stony-broke, hopelessly indebted former imperial power which has all its work cut out trying to stay in one piece at home.
One thing is surely plain from our moronic, zig-zagging , contradictory failures in the Islamic world year after year, that those in charge don’t know what they are doing, and that nothing, in all cases, would have been a better course of action than the one they chose.
The obedient ‘reporters’ who reproduce government thinking in the media are telling us that the Prime Minister is ‘confident’ of ‘cross-party’ ( i.e. Labour) support . They are also telling us that the Prime Minister believes that this war against the ‘Islamic State’ will last for many years. Has anybody asked him if this is wishful thinking? Is it perhaps the case that the ‘security’ establishments of this country and the USA actually want us to be engaged in yet another unending conflict? George Orwell knew all about that, and also about how the enemy could switch overnight. He'd have been sourly amused by the fact that the people we now want to bomb are the people we wanted to support a year ago (and yes they are- and we helped to create them too. The claim that if we'd given more support to the Syrian opposition it wouldn't have been taken over by Sunni fanatics is a fantasy. They always dominated it, and would always have pocketed all our support).
In any case, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, will act with cautious responsibility, as he did last year when faced with Mr Cameron’s absurd demand for a bombing war on Syria. The initiative collapsed with amazing speed, and Mr Cameron accepted his defeat without quibble (though his press mouthpieces have ever afterwards denigrated Mr Miliband for actually doing his job and leading the opposition).
A couple of days later, Washington abandoned its plans for an attack on Syria as well.
One explanation of this extraordinary change of mind, one of the swiftest and most total policy reversals I have ever seen in long years of reporting, was provided by Seymour Hersh in the fascinating article to which I link below. Mr Hersh is a distinguished and well-connected journalist, but he is by the nature of his work compelled to rely (as in this case) on sources he cannot ever identify, and which we cannot check.
But history shows that far odder things than this have happened. I have no way of knowing if his suggestions here are correct, but mention them to make it plain that this thesis has been advanced by serious people. I might also add that the Syrian state has since then got rid of its remaining chemical weapons with unexpected speed and efficiency, an event that has tended to be covered, if at all, on the inside pages of unpopular newspapers, because it does not fit the narrative.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line
Few now remember that there was never any objective proof of the claims that the Assad state had used poison gas on its people. Efforts to produce such proof rather dried up after the clamour for war came to an end. I remain unconvinced.
This is not a question of simple wickedness. The Assad state is clearly capable of terrible actions, and nobody – least of all me – would ever dispute that. But its savagery is rational. It would have been self-destructive madness on the part of the Assad state – especially in defiance of a specific statement by Barack Obama that such an action would trigger the very US intervention which would have doomed the Assad state - to have used poison gas on the people of Damascus, the city in Syria most easily investigated by outside agencies and media.
Nothing in the actions of that state suggests that it is that crazy.
There is a poignant footnote to this controversy in Patrick Cockburn’s excellent, timely short book on the rise of the Islamic State ‘The Jihadis Return’, reviewed here.
I’ll leave you to find it.
But back to War and Peace.
1.Why should we intervene at all?
Atrocity stories, always a bad guide to action, have been vital to the case for war. The world, alas, is full of atrocities. Many of them are taking place now in Libya, largely unreported because it is far too dangerous for Western media to go there any more. These horrors are happening because we intervened there ( as we plan to do now in Iraq and Syria) without having a clue about what we are doing. But (rightly) there's no serious clamour for a return. Mr Cameron wants us to forget Libya completely, and no doubt wishes he could. So I hope he'll be asked about it a lot in tomorrow's debate.
Many more horrors will take place in Afghanistan shortly, when the fragile and unsustainable government we have left behind falls apart, as it must. These horrors will be our fault, as have been the years of violence, sectarianism, injustice and needless poverty in Iraq since our misguided 2003 intervention.
I would argue that the recent horrors visited on Yazidis, Kurds and Arab Christians by the Islamic State are also our direct fault. Because we backed away from bombing Syria last year, we often forget the active part which Western (and Gulf) diplomats played in undermining the Assad state for some years before that , actively encouraging rebellion and winking at the flood of foreign fighters, most of them Salafist fanatics, who were allowed into Syria (especially through Erdogan’s Turkey, whose part in these events has been especially irresponsible). The people we now propose to bomb are exactly the same people we proposed to support a year before. Western (and Gulf) intervention created the Islamic State.
By the way, if we so dislike intolerant fundamentalist Islamist regimes that cut people’s heads off in public, then why are we on such good terms with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of our main trading partners and the frequent scene of high-level visits from the British Royal Family? We have learned to live with them. We never helped to destabilize them, preferring for some reason to destroy the (relatively) secular regimes of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and cheering on the overthrow of the (relatively) open and easy-going government of Egypt.
Now that we have completely smashed up the post-1918 order in the Middle East, what is it that makes us think we can now decide what kind of government is going to dominate the region?
I don’t myself understand why we can’t just accept that we no longer rule the world, and must simply put up with the fact that other countries are run differently from ours. My main concern is to retain our liberties and civilisation, not to indulge in failed attempts to bring enlightenment to others by bombing their cities.
It’s not a new idea. We have in our time made accommodations with the Bolshevik murderers of the Tsar and his family, and with the Chinese Communists (who this week shamefully jailed a Uighur professor for the rest of his life, and confiscated his savings, leaving his young family destitute, in a shameful unfair trial . No wonder his poor wife howled with hopeless grief when the ‘verdict’ of the court (if this tribunal deserves the name) was read out.
2. What about the Hostages?
A good question. We must all wish and hope and pray for their release. We know that several Western governments have paid ransom for hostages held by the Islamic State. Well, why don’t we? We say it’s against our principles. But it isn’t . Our pretence that we don’t pay ransom was exploded in 1998 when (under heavy American pressure to do so) we released huge numbers of convicted criminals, and handed over a large part of our country to rule by terrorist organisations.
We did this in return for promises that the IRA would no longer attack mainland Britain, especially the City of London.
Some would say that the elevation of the late Yasser Arafat to the role of world statesman, and the support of the ‘West’ for a Palestinian State, is likewise an example of a ransom being paid.
As George Bernard Shaw almost said ‘We have established what we are. Why quibble about the price or the details?’
If the hostages held by the Islamic state were my relatives, I would be infuriated by the government’s pretence of puritanical probity. They’ve paid and paid to save their own skins, and would do it again. The terrorists of the world know that our toughness is so much macho bluster. Why not then pay to save a taxi-driver or a journalist from a horrible death? The market for hostages is already flourishing. By standing aside, we won’t reduce it. We’ll just leave people to their fate for a pretence.
3. What about the terror threat to Britain?
Good question. What about it? Why are we so willing to be persuaded by media folk and politicians adopting serious voices and citing ‘security sources’ to make our flesh creep? How can these sources ever be tested or held to account? Why don’t we ever wonder if these huge expensive security organisations we pay for feel the need to puff up their importance, so as to secure their enormous budgets at a time of cuts?
I have seen no serious evidence that there is any such threat. I doubt if the leadership of the Islamic State spends more than a second a day on wondering what we think in London (though they may be more concerned with us if the RAF starts bombing them) . Even if there were such evidence and we could see it for ourselves, terror’s main power in the West comes from our own governments’ readiness to panic and pass repressive laws in response to terror actions which would not have been prevented by such laws, and which are designed to create the very panic we then indulge in. IMost of us, when we beocme adults, ahve learned not to repond to those who goad us into fights. If someone actively wants a fight, it's usually a good reason not to provide him with one. Why do governments still respond to such goasing with the emotional spasms of six-year-olds. Are we in fact governed by responsible adults, or by childish fantasists who have seen too many action movies?
Personally, I should have thought it mathematically more likely for there to be terror attacks on London if we take part on the raids on Iraq, than if we don’t. Islamist terrorists tend to attack countries prominent in attacks on the Islamic world. I can’t recall a terror attack on Zurich lately.
This same wretched argument was used to sustain, years after it should have ended, our ludicrous and now obviously pointless and futile intervention in Afghanistan. In fact terrorists had no need to come to Britain during that period, if they wished to kill British citizens. They were able to do so, in horrible numbers, in Helmand. Have we already forgotten the sad processions through Wootton Bassett? Do we want them to begin again? In a rare example of foresight and planning, the government, who didn’t like the attention these events attracted, have quietly routed such processions away from any urban areas, in the hope that future wars won’t get the same publicity. But the good people of Carterton have so far frustrated this plan, going in large numbers to the route of the corteges, even though it avoids the centre of their town.
4. Will bombing work?
There’s very little reason to think so. Very few conflicts in modern history have been resolved without infantry. But once we start bombing, we are so committed that- if it fails – the pressure to commit soldiers will become relentless and hard to resist. Why start down a road whose end is so obvious and so bad?
The ostensible pretexts for this action are transparently feeble. I am sure that the response of the war party to articles such as this will be smears (as they were when I opposed bombing Syria on behalf of the Jihadists last year). I was slandered then as an apologist for the Assad state. Let us see what they come up with this time. But whatever it is, it will show either that they have no real reason for doing what they plan to do, or that they are not prepared to say in public what that reason is.
Either way, it will do no harm if you put some or all of these points to your elected representative. The election is quite close, and MPs will be readier to listen than at other times. All history shows that wars are easy to start, and very hard to finish. We really ought to learn from this. It is also worth remembering that war is not a video game, that those ‘smart’ bombs you see on the news still dismember, scar and rend, and cannot actually tell an innocent person from a guilty one. And that if you license their use on others, you are, at some point in the unknown future, licensing others to use them on you and yours.
If this is a just war, I have yet to hear the justification.
Peter Hitchens's Blog
- Peter Hitchens's profile
- 299 followers
