If You Care, Go

Peter Hitchens writes:

On the Libyan question, I will briefly point out that my Mail on Sunday column on 20th March seems to me to have been some way closer to the mood of the people of this country than the wretched House of Commons, in which adversarial opposition has ceased and dissent is confined to the marginalised. This House is now Mr Cameron's Poodle. I thought that, after Gordon Brown's post-Iraq declaration, this country would not again enter a war of choice without Parliamentary approval. Obviously if we were under attack, this would not be possible. But we weren't and aren't, and the circumstances under which we began our violence were foreseeable and had been foreseeable for days.

By the way, can those who write here and say that Gaddafi is a national enemy because of Lockerbie please state what they believe to be the evidence that Gaddafi is connected with this episode, and where it is on record? I have seen none. Those who rightly point out that Gaddafi armed the IRA need to deal with the fact that this country surrendered to the IRA in 1998 and the lawfully constituted authorities now regard it as a partner in government. (So, in my experience, do most people in this country, who regard my condemnation of the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a weird eccentricity) So there's no current casus belli on that score either. If these people are so keen to make war on evil killers, torturers etc then why are they happy that we are at peace with the Provisional IRA, who actually launched a campaign of murder on our soil and tried to assassinate the British Cabinet in their beds in Brighton, along with anyone else from chambermaids to kitchen staff who happened to be in the way at the time?

Yet Mr Cameron used Royal prerogative (which should really be renamed Downing Street prerogative since the Monarch no longer has anything significant to do with it) to unleash colossal violence against a sovereign foreign country on Saturday night. If the matter was so urgent, then the Commons could have been summoned on Saturday morning, as they were during the Falklands crisis. The first item on the business of the Commons on Monday should have been a censure of the executive for launching a war without Parliamentary authority. But it wasn't. Instead the chamber was almost unanimously in favour of the action, with a tiny number of MPs either speaking or voting against it - far fewer, by my reckoning, than would have been justified by the feeling in the country as it has so far been measured. And remember, the doubt among the populace existed despite an almost wholly favourable media, especially TV, which has in my view thrown objectivity to the winds during the alleged 'Arab Spring'.

Edward Miliband failed the first major test of his leadership of the Labour Party. Having become leader by being prepared to condemn the Iraq War, he made himself David Cameron's lifelong slave by failing to oppose the Libya adventure. Why do I say this? Because his acquiescence was evidence that he is afraid of the Prime Minister, and no Leader of the Opposition can do his job if this is so. Once he has acted out of fear once, Mr Cameron knows he has him where he wants him, for good. He and his party were afraid of being jeered at for their attempts to normalise relations with Colonel Gaddafi in 2004. I am sure the Tories would have made the same attempts themselves had they been in office then. Michael Howard did oppose the Blair-Gaddafi meeting on 2004. But I can't see what principle he was applying. The Tory attitude to the surrender to the IRA (for which William Hague actively campaigned when it was subjected to a rushed referendum in Northern Ireland) has always been devoid of morality. And the IRA were for years Gaddafi's principal allies on British soil (and to this day retain weapons and explosives supplied by him, though we pretend this is not so in case it annoys them).

As for the 'Liberal Democrats', the pathos and misery of their position must be increasingly unbearable. If they can't oppose this sort of nonsense, then why do they exist at all? Still more votes lost in May.

Dim Tories, we all know, believe that all military action is patriotic. The drum beats. They rally to the colours, however moronic the cause. My theory is that in this way they comfort themselves for their abject surrenders to the EU and the IRA, real threats to this country, by biffing Arabs instead. Though there were one or two genuine patriots prepared to voice fears. And the best moment in the debate, as several contributors have noted, was when Mr Cameron was asked what we would do if the rebels committed war crimes. From what we know of this uninspiring rabble, it seems more than possible that they have already done so, and very likely that (if we arm them) they will do so. I continue to be puzzled that we should have invested so much in a force so incoherent, so disorganised and of which we know so little. It is all very like that great novel 'Scoop', in which the actual issues took second place to the story.

By the way, given how little we know of the various battles taking place, why is it that the BBC insists on saying that Tripoli's reports of civilian casualties cannot be verified? Of course they can't, and they may well be propaganda. But so may many other things the Corporation reports as fact. If we're going to be cautious about accepting what we are told, then let's not be selective in our caution. Anyway, there are bound to be civilian casualties. The power of modern munitions is terrible and their accuracy gravely over-rated by gullible war-junkies in the media. War is Hell. Don't forget it.

Then there's the row about whether we are trying to rub out Colonel Gaddafi himself. General Sir David Richards is obviously appalled by such talk, as well he might be, since it is his men who will end up in the International Court in the Hague if this turns nasty. Mr Cameron's strange shiftiness about this seems to me to be very worrying. My guess is that he realises that as long as Gaddafi lives, Tripoli will keep fighting, and the death of the Colonel (in 'collateral damage') is the only way to put a term to a civil war that could otherwise last for years. But that is now much harder than it would have been. And Mr Cameron certainly doesn't intend to spend his late middle age festering in the Slobodan Milosevic wing of the special prison in the Hague for politicians who misjudge the situation. Mind you, nor did Mr Milosevic intend or expect to end up there.

That deals with most of Mr Swanson's objections. As for his view that 'the fact that democracies cannot fight or overthrow every tyranny existing on the planet, all at once without delay, does not mean that they should not deal with at least the ones that present the most urgent and manageable problems', it needs elaboration. On what principle of law or morality do we fight or overthrow other governments? The whole doctrine of Just War was developed to deal with this, and its principal difficulty is that War is Hell, and needs very strong justification. People such as Mr Swanson really do need to educate themselves about two aspects of war. One, that innocent people's lives are horribly ruined by war, even war in a good cause; and two, that wars are easy to start and hard to end.

My test is this: If you are so keen to set Libya to rights, establish an International Brigade of like-minded persons, all so truly concerned about that country's fate, and so sure of which side is in the right, that you are prepared to be maimed or rendered limbless and disfigured in that cause, Off you go. Fly to Egypt, slip across the border and offer your services to the heroes of Benghazi. I won't stop you. But I pay for armed forces to defend me, not to go off on righteous adventures, and soldiers likewise sign up to defend their own country, not mess around with other people's. My case is that 'democracies' whatever they are, have enough to do at home keeping the weak from being robbed and attacked by the strong. And that war is so wicked that the only real justification for it is to defend yourself against those who would destroy, rob or subjugate you.

And that those who claim to 'care' are usually curiously absent when the guns begin to shoot. George Orwell ( who did actually volunteer for the Spanish Civil War and found when he got there that his own side wasn't as nice as it looked) wrote once, I think, of 'that rare sight, a Jingo with a bullet-hole in him.' I would update it to 'that rare sight. A muscular liberal with a bullet hole in him'. If you care, go. If you don't go, then I don't believe you care. You just want to feel good about yourself.