Telling You So

Peter Hitchens writes:

David Cameron's war of personal vanity still rages on, its aim and its end unknown. Our ludicrous Libyan allies – who may in fact be our enemies – fight each other as we protect their so-called army from Colonel Gaddafi. If we don’t send weapons and troops to help them, they have no hope of winning. Will we? Or will we, in desperation, wink at an assassination of the Colonel, an action that will take us close to his moral level?

Or will we, by then, be too busy bombing our way to the Big Society in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Zimbabwe, China and anywhere else where government doesn’t reach our leader’s alleged high ethical standards? Nobody knows. Ministers, apparently with no idea of the forces they have unleashed, drawl that it’s as long as a piece of string. Ho ho. Or maybe it’s as long as the rope needed to hang themselves. Yet the House of Commons endorses this leap in the dark with a vote so overwhelming that you wonder if they put something in the water, or whatever it is they drink. What are all these costly people for?

Last year we worried about their expenses. This year we should be worried about their salaries. We hired them to question and watch the Government, not to do what the Prime Minister tells them. Aren’t we still recovering from the gullibility of MPs (and the media) over Saddam Hussein? Do we learn nothing from experience? Are too many of us, and them, just too thick to be in charge of a small nuclear power? It seems so.MPs should be reminded they are not the employees of Downing Street, but of us.

I am quite sure that a huge number of British people do not want this war, and for good reasons. It is not in our national interests. We can’t even protect old ladies from rapists in our own country, and perhaps we should sort that out before reforming Africa. They correctly think it is not our affair. After being told that we can’t even afford public libraries, they have to watch Liam Fox burning great mounds of banknotes (provided by us) as he rains costly munitions on Tripoli. They are baffled to see the remains of our naval power towed surreptitiously to a Turkish scrapyard, because we allegedly cannot afford it. And meanwhile, an obscure public relations man who has never fought in a war poses as the saviour of Benghazi.

Where was the British people’s voice in the Commons on Monday? I don’t care much what the UN, that rabble of torturers and tyrants, thinks. I would cheerfully see it abolished. I have no idea why we still need Nato 20 years after the threat it was formed to face vanished for ever. The fact that it has endorsed Mr Cameron’s adventure doesn’t comfort me. What really troubles me is that Parliament wasn’t asked its opinion until after the missiles were launched. It was treated, contemptuously, like a neutered chihuahua, a pitiful yapping thing to be pushed about by the Premier’s polished toecap, and patted as long as it fawned. And if it doesn’t now revolt against this treatment, then that is what it will have proved itself to be.

I believe that the Government knew by Friday, March 18 that it was more or less certain it would begin military action on the evening of Saturday, March 19. There was time to call a special session of the Commons. And there was a precedent – the Falklands. The first motion before the House on Monday should have been a censure of the Government for launching a war of choice without seeking Parliamentary approval. Yet, while the whole engine of British diplomacy was devoted to getting Mr Cameron’s war past the UN, Nato and (of course) our ultimate rulers in the EU, Westminster was forgotten. And so were we.

This is wrong. Those involved should not get away with it. Later on, I shall say I told you so. Just now, I’m telling you so.