The Left-Right Alliance For Peace Takes Shape

Peter Hitchens has a stormingly good column all round this week, but particularly important, coming as it does from the Right, is this:

I like Georgia. I like Georgians and their superb hospitality. I have several times travelled to that beautiful country. But I wouldn’t lift a finger to save it from the Russians.

What cause would we be serving? Democracy? Ha ha.

This Olympically corrupt statelet is not a law-governed democracy. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s nauseatingly named Rose Revolution was a putsch achieved by an orchestrated mob, followed by an election so shamelessly one-sided that our supposed hero got 96 per cent of the vote.

The only excuse for this was that previous elections had been rigged, too, which of course they had.

American-trained he may be, but his opponents and critics fall victim to blatantly Soviet-style methods of intimidation. He is also adept at bombastic propaganda.

Do we really want young men from the Midlands of England and the Lowlands of Scotland fighting and dying for years to come to save this dubious creature from his own unhinged, wilful conflict with the Kremlin?

You might think not, but David Cameron is all for it. In an amazing demonstration of unfitness for office, the Tory leader last week wrote one of the daftest articles I have ever seen.

He wants Georgia to be allowed into Nato, so committing this country to come to Georgia’s defence if it is attacked. He wants to do the same for Ukraine.

Will someone send this man an atlas and a history book? When will our political class stop trying to grow hairs on their teenage chests by starting wars and deploying forces we no longer have?

Why should we get entangled in this? What business is it of ours if Russia wants friends and allies on its borders, rather than a weird Nato alliance, kept on life-support long after it triumphantly achieved its purpose. What is Nato for now? Does anybody know? If they know, will they say?

No doubt some half-educated twerp will now accuse me of appeasement. There is certainly plentiful appeasement going on now – of the Provisional IRA and of the European Union.

But Britain has no interests in following American adventures in the Caucasus, let alone taking sides over the dangerous future of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is not Hitler – or Stalin. As for Neville Chamberlain, the stupidest thing he ever did was to promise to defend Poland, when he knew we couldn’t and wouldn’t do so.

When our bluff was called we were dragged by an unstable, rackety ally into a war we weren’t ready for and very nearly lost.

Who plays that part today?