Tripoli Revisted

Peter Hitchens writes:

There is a certain smugness about the supporters of the Libyan adventure just now. Are they right to feel that way? I of course have an interest to declare, having opposed the intervention on principle, regardless of whether it did good or not. I did not think, and do not think, that the internal affairs of Libya are any business of the United Kingdom. I do not in any way withdraw from these positions now. I still think they were right, and I will try to explain why.

But, more to the point, I did not think that the backers of our interference knew what they were doing, or why they were doing it. I strongly suspect that France’s President Sarkozy was anxious for a foreign policy success to strengthen his feeble political position. And his enthusiasm, dressed up as humanitarianism, infected the British government too. They then had a machismo contest. Both governments, in my view, were very lucky that things turned out as they did. But their luck doesn’t cancel out the strong arguments for non-intervention. Nor does it show that their initial judgement was right. Anthony Blair was similarly lucky with the short-term outcome of his bravado in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Because he mistook his luck for judgement, he entangled us in the Iraq tragedy, a disaster so serious that it is hardly even mentioned any more. Who knows what future frightfulness David Cameron will get us into, now he’s a war hero?

Who now bothers to look at Iraq, and see how it is governed and who is really in charge, and how free it really is, and what the tensions are between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, and what sort of future lies ahead for it? It is as if it no longer existed. Yet once it was so important to us that it was worth a hugely violent and expensive invasion (one of the main reasons for the economic crisis we’re now in, by the way) . Mind you, it’s also a while since I’ve seen much of an analysis of Kosovo or Sierra Leone . Afghanistan, another alleged success, is about to be abandoned , a retreat we will conceal by declaring victory. But everyone knows it has been a devastating, wasteful failure.

I have never been convinced by arguments that our actions prevented a massacre in Benghazi, or that this serves as a justification for the whole business. We have no real idea if such a massacre would really have happened if Colonel Gadaffi’s troops had taken the city. I am, I must admit, a bit short of information on what has really happened to Gadaffi supporters since ‘our’ side took over, though it is plain that sub-Saharan Africans, accused of being Gadaffi mercenaries, have had very rough treatment indeed, which I think can fairly be described as racialist. In any case, we (the British government and interventionist lobby) are not that opposed to massacres. Our attitude to the appalling savagery and repression of the regime in Bahrain has been utterly complacent, if not actually supportive. Our posturing over Syria’s unmerciful repression of dissent has been simultaneously self-righteous and feeble.

Personally, my criticism of this position is this. We should not pretend to an outrage we cannot or will not express in action. By doing so, we only encourage people to believe that help will come when it won’t, and so make it more likely that they will take terrible risks which they would be wiser not to take. I know that some people find my readiness to stand back, and my open admission that I do not truly care about repression in the Arab world, hard to stomach. I don’t like it much myself. TV coverage makes the world’s ugliness all too obvious. Knowledge of horror, without the power to stop it, is an awful burden on us. I hate to see cruelty and brutality, and I love liberty. But when I am moved by witnessing the plight of people far away, I honestly confess to myself that my emotions are just self-indulgence, especially when there are lonely old ladies and other sad persons living within a mile of my home, about whom I do little or nothing. Essentially, I would be acting, if I supported these interventions, to make myself feel better about myself. I would not be acting to do actual, measurable, unselfish good.

But when I say I do not care, I am provocatively contrasting my position with those who say they do care, but take no effective and consistent action to prove it. If they reply, ‘We act when we can’, as they do, I reply, ‘But when you say you “can” you actually mean, when you like, or when it suits you, or when it is easy, because it would be perfectly physically possible for the British or US governments to take military action anywhere in the Arab world if they really wanted to. The truth is that they are not prepared to pay the price in blood or money or lost influence that would be demanded.’ True chivalry, the thing they pretend to have, does not pay any attention to such considerations. It acts at all costs.

And so, once again, I point out that anomalies and inconsistencies are signposts to the truth. If someone claims to have a principle, and he does not apply it universally, it is not a principle. Nor is it the reason for the action which he says is principled. There must be another reason. These days, I suspect that reason is mainly personal vanity combined with electoral calculation.

My very longstanding position, that the nation is the largest unit in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, is in reality kinder and more sensible. It is kinder particularly because it does not encourage people into futile revolts which will then be crushed amid fire and screams. I might add that Syria’s regime, which is unlovely and which I have often criticised in the past when it was not fashionable to do so, may yet be preferable to whatever replaces it. Syria, for example, is one of the last countries in the Middle East in which the Christian Arab minority lives without persecution. That is why it is host to so many Christian refugees from Baghdad, where our war has led to horrible persecution of the remaining Christians in that country. It is unlikely this arrangement would survive the fall of the Assad dynasty.

My secondary position, that the extraordinarily rare and delicate liberties of Protestant Christian Anglospshere nations, founded on centuries of inviolate sovereignty behind broad seas, cannot be transplanted into recently decolonised Muslim semi-desert states, should also be borne in mind. Everyone knows this really, but rather than admit it, we close our eyes to the unavoidable lawlessness and intolerance of the new regimes we have brought into being, and concentrate on the empty forms of democracy (elections, parliaments etc) which we make them adopt as the price of our continued benevolence.

What a lot of rubbish all this intervention is. But we repeatedly solve the problem by declaring ‘mission accomplished’ and then ceasing to pay any attention at all to what is really happening in the newly-liberated paradises whose revolutions we were celebrating the day before yesterday. Those who rejoiced over the fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime have been particularly good at ignoring the faults of what has followed . Apartheid was of course indefensible, but, while the radical interventionists weren’t at all responsible for the nasty old arrangements, they will be partly responsible for what follows. And if there is one day a Mugabe-like despotism in Pretoria, which is by no means impossible, who will do the accounting to say that we have actually done good there? It is beyond me to make the calculation.

There’s a thought-proving scene at the end of that clever film ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’, in which this aspect of intervention is explored through a parable. The message is that, again and again, what you think is a good outcome turns out to be bad, and vice versa. If you wait long enough, you find out the truth, too late. It seems to me to be far too early to be describing our Libyan intervention as a success. Please forgive me if I continue to argue that we shouldn’t have done it.

Glorious stuff from the cleverer brother, who does not need to swear or to bang on about sex in order to draw attention to himself, and who is able (after all, they are journalists) to attract a mass audience in his own home country.

But Bahrain has least eight indigenous ethnic groups, including a small but very ancient and entrenched Jewish community which maintains the Gulf’s only synagogue and Jewish cemetery, and also including a community of black African descent, part of the East African diaspora in the East hardly known about by those very used to the West African diaspora in the West. Around one fifth of the inhabitants of Bahrain is non-Muslim, and around half of that is Christian. The women’s headscarf is strictly optional. No one disputes that Bahraini Muslims are two-thirds Shi’ite. Correspondingly, no one disputes that Bahraini Muslims are one-third Sunni.

All legislation requires the approval of both Houses of Parliament, and, while one of those Houses is entirely appointed by the monarch (as in Britain or Canada), the other is entirely elected by universal suffrage. The Upper House, to which women are regularly appointed to make up for their dearth in the elected Lower House, includes a Jewish man and a Christian woman; the latter was the first woman ever to chair a Parliament in the Arab world. The Ambassador to the United States is a Jewish woman, the first Jewish ambassador of any modern Arab state, although the third woman to be an Ambassador of Bahrain. She was previously an elected parliamentarian. Notably, she describes her Jewish identity as unconnected, either to the State of Israel, which Bahrain does not recognise, or to the Holocaust, of which she knew nothing until she was 14.

Her British higher education and British husband, as well as the fact that the synagogue brings in its rabbis from Britain, point to the very close ties indeed between that country and this. We installed the Al Khalifa in 1783, and they have done everything to keep up the link ever since. From Bahrain, via Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to Oman is Britain’s natural and longstanding sphere of influence, as their rulers would and do tell you. It is beyond me why they are not in the Commonwealth. I do not welcome the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, which, as the base of the United States Fifth Fleet, has not been subjected to any such incursion without at least American approval, if not American instruction. I have no wish to see a Wahhabisation of Bahraini Sunnism, since at present all of the above is perfectly acceptable even to the Salafi Members of Parliament. But which part of it do the demonstrators wish to conserve? Do they wish to conserve any of it? Or do they wish to overthrow it in order to replace it with something else entirely? We have not asked. We never do. It is very high time that we did.

And important though the Protestant tradition is, the fact remains that the roots of English liberty, of which first Union and then Commonwealth are extensions, are centuries older than the Reformation. The incorporation of Ireland into the Union was specifically in order to give effect to Catholic Emancipation, promised by pro-Union Protestant candidates to the rising Catholic professional and commercial class that could vote, but not sit in Parliament, and duly delivered by Westminster, whereas the old Irish Parliament would never have done any such thing, and the Orange Lodges opposed the Union on precisely that basis. Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have all had vast Catholic populations throughout, and not unconnected to, their peaceable transitions to representative democracy.

Nevertheless, the master is on fine form here.