Some Reflections on Flying Flags at Half Mast

And so with a loud ‘clunk’, it all falls into place. Britain’s apparently mad foreign policy of the past few years now makes almost complete sense. It had seemed to me that a slavish desire to please the Saudi government lay behind our government’s desire to attack Syria.  Well, I can see why we, as an increasingly indebted country with very few flourishing export industries apart from weapons and aircraft, might want to be on good terms with Riyadh, a limitlessly wealthy oil state with a large appetite for… weapons and aeroplanes. It may be an old excuse, but it’s perfectly true that if we didn’t sell them these things, someone else would.  

 

 

Now, I would much rather fly a  flag at half mast from time to time, or get Prince Charles to struggle into a burnous again, than despatch British service personnel into another stupid war. And I prefer British workers to be employed. 

 

But we cannot really square this with our claims to be the apostle of liberty, democracy etc. etc. in the Arab world.  So let’s not do so. Be polite to the Saudi Royal Family by all means. It wudln't be the first or the last despotism with which we have cheerfully done business.

 

Send any number of royal princes and politicians to Riyadh to be nice to them if it saves British jobs.

 

But please, please stop pretending, at the same time,  to be the apostles of liberty, democracy and the rule of law, in the Arab world or anywhere else. It's tiresome, stupid, an insult to the intelligence and it only gets us into conflicts for which we are (to put it mildly) not equipped. 

 

As I wrote nearly a year ago (23rd February 2014)  ‘I was filled with admiring wonder by a  picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear. Could his trip (one of several in recent  years) have been connected to the  finalising of a contract under which BAE  is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

 

‘BAE is one of our few remaining real industries, because (though nobody admits this) we protect it against foreign competition, and work hard to keep it in orders. The Prince is right to help.

But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism sit very oddly with our windbaggery over ‘democracy’ in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. One or the other. But not both.’

 

I’m not sure now sustainable this Saudi policy is if we just carry on being ncoe to the, but don't join any more wars. But quite possibly, it is practicable.

 

Does it really require us to attack Saudi Arabia’s enemies in the Arab and Islamic world, as our leaders seem to think?

Personally, I suspect that Saudi Arabia doesn’t much care whether Britain tags along in American operations against Saudi Arabia’s foes. I think it’s just as happy to get the Royal visits, and forget the airstrikes and the ground troops. Likewise, I think Washington is less concerned than we are told it is, about whether a British contingent joins the US armed forces on any of these adventures. The USA does not need our help physically, and don’t think it really needs it diplomatically either. Anyway, these days France seems very happy to act as chief sidekick and is, after all, the home of the poodle.

 

The British government cannot openly explain what I suspect is its reasoning. It is rightly unsure that Britain is willing to pay in lives for Saudi orders. Our leaders would never dare say ‘Saudi Arabia will buy lots of things from us if we attack Syria, so that is what we are going to do’. Because most British people would object to Britain, behaving in this way. They think we’re still an independent, solvent, sovereign country which keeps armed forces to defend itself. (They were also, encouragingly, unfooled in the end by the propaganda campaign for the Syrian war, though they seem broadly fooled by the anti-Russian public relations campaign.)

If Mr Cameron or anyone else were to say such a thing, apart from anything else,  the pretence that the government has solved, or is anywhere near solving, our economic problems would immediately be punctured, quite fatally.

 

But it’s even worse if it isn’t even true – that the Saudi and American  pressure to do these things is small or non-existent, and the real problem is the self-important vanity of our politicians, who like to imagine that they are still significant figures in the world and enjoy almost any excuse to start ordering armed forces into action and watching the resulting pretty explosions (pretty if you’re not nearby)  on 24-hour TV.

 

 

And so we had the ridiculous pretence that we wished to support ‘democracy’, liberty etc etc etc’ in Syria, or wherever it is, is maintained, with a straight face, by Mr Cameron and by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. At the same time, of course,  Saudi Arabia was using British made armoured vehicles to support the government of Bahrain in its efforts to prevent ‘democracy’ or liberty from breaking out there. And Britain has been silent about the violent military putsch that has put an end to ‘democracy’ in Egypt.  Also, though they never mention it, some of our governing class must be having some misgivings about the disastrous outcome of our ‘democratic’ intervention in Libya, which has turned that country into a circle of Hell from which no easy escape is visible.

 

By the way, there’ve been some interesting revelations recently about the closeness between the Blair government and Colonel Gaddafi. But can anybody tell me what the initial policy of the Cameron government was towards Libya?

 

I will tell you.  Archives reveal ( as I first pointed out some years ago) that the 'Minister for Africa', Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as 'Brother Leader') at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had 'turned a corner' which 'has paved the way for us to begin working together again'.

 

Something mysterious happened after that. I wonder what? Perhaps Libya suddenly stopped being ‘democratic’, but I doubt it.

 

It’s so complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the British government actually wanted Parliament to reject the Syria war plan, having realised ( after learning a bit more about the Syrian ‘rebels’) that it had ignorantly talked itself into a disastrous policy but having no other way of telling the Saudis that we couldn’t now take part. The immediate collapse of the government’s efforts to get its war was remarkable . Even more remarkable was the collapse, days later, of President Obama’s desire to bomb Syria.  Seymour Hersh put forward another theory in the New York Review of Books here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin and here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line, which is interesting if impossible to prove.

 

Of course, our leaders still pretend they wanted to fight, and blame Ed Miliband for getting in the way (I only wish he had done so more vigorously).   But they would, wouldn’t they?