A Babyish Despot Deprived of A Toy

Peter Hitchens writes:

The Good Samaritan did not have a gun. I make this simple point to deal with those who seem to think that you can show mercy and pity by lobbing cruise missiles into war zones.

I make no claims to be a good person, but I am more and more annoyed by warmongers who dress up their simple-minded, vainglorious desire to bomb foreigners as moral.

Take Lord Ashdown, who moaned on Friday, after MPs voted against an attack on Syria, that he had never felt so ashamed. Really? Many of us can remember at least one occasion when Lord Ashdown certainly ought to have felt more ashamed.

But these days, our moral worth is not judged by such things as constancy and trust close to home, but by our noisy readiness to bomb people for their own good.

The moral bomber is one of the scourges of our age. He gets it into his head that he is so good that he is allowed to kill people (accidentally of course) in a noble cause. 

This stupid conceit was – at long last – challenged last week in the House of Commons. MPs, many of them rightly prompted by the fears and concerns of their constituents, refused to be stampeded by emotional horror propaganda. They kept their heads.

The response of the moral bombers was typical of them. There was twaddle about ‘appeasement’. There was piffle about how our world status has suffered (don’t these people know what the rest of the planet has thought of us since the Iraq War?).

There was tripe about damage to the non-existent ‘special relationship’ between this country and the USA. Anyone who has spent two weeks in Washington DC knows that this ‘relationship’ is regarded there as a joke.

There was foul-mouthed fury from taxpayer-funded Downing Street aides, who I don’t  doubt echoed their master’s voice. There were the usual snivelling attempts to portray dissent as disloyalty, cowardice or as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. 

These flailing, spiteful acts were the reflexes of a babyish despot deprived of a toy. 

Luckily, we are not yet a despotism. Despite a long assault on our free constitution, MPs can still follow their consciences, and public opinion cannot be entirely suppressed or manipulated.

In some ways, most shocking has been the behaviour of the BBC. It uncritically promoted atrocity propaganda from the beginning, making no effort  to be objective. It frequently treated opponents of the rush to war with nasty contempt. If the BBC Trust is to justify its large budget and fancy offices, it would do well to investigate this grave failure to be impartial.

But it was not just the BBC. Until a couple of days before Mr Cameron’s War was abruptly cancelled, most of the media were still braying for an attack.

What bunkum it all was. The ‘West’ has no consistent or moral position at all.  The ‘West’ readily condoned Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980s and ignored his use of them in Halabja for years, trying to blame others for it.

Saddam, later a villain, was then our ally. Hypocrisy continues to this day. The US and British governments, as they vapour about the wickedness  of Syria’s government, refuse even to admit the obvious fact that the Egyptian military junta came to power by a bloody and lawless putsch.

And, as they weep loud tears for the dead of Damascus (whose killers have yet to be identified) they are silent over the heaps of corpses piled in the streets of Cairo, undoubtedly gunned down by the junta, which used weapons paid for by the USA to do so, and didn’t even try to hide its actions.

Mr Blair himself, in an article for the Warmonger’s Gazette, formerly known as The Times, actually says we should ‘support the new [Egyptian] government in stabilising the country’.

That’s one way of putting it.

No doubt Bashar Assad would say he was stabilising his country. If outrage is selective it isn’t really outrage.

President Assad, for instance, was a welcome guest at Buckingham Palace on December 17, 2002, when his country was already famous for its torture chambers, its sponsorship of terror and its harbouring of grisly Nazi war criminals such as  the child-murderer Alois  Brunner.

If you know anything at all about the subject, it is rather difficult not to laugh at Mr Cameron’s righteous pose.

As for the rest of the Prime Minister’s arguments, they are not fit for an Eton junior debating society.

 WHAT is wrong with ‘standing idly by’, if the only alternative is to do something stupid? Why does it matter so much that this country takes part in the stupidity? How can he be sure that any military action is limited?

If you start a fight, you provoke retaliation. And you then start a chain whose end you cannot possibly know. So it isn’t limited.

 And, as he has been bursting to intervene in Syria for months, how can he claim that his passion is solely to do with the use of poison gas? If his aim is to deter future use, what is the mad rush?

As for Cameron’s ‘intelligence’ document, I could have written it myself. It all came off the internet.

Truly, he is the Heir To Blair. But having had one Blair already, we are at last learning the folly of indulging such  fantasists.

I don’t quite understand why he hasn’t resigned, as I’ve never in 40 years of journalism seen a Prime Minister more totally and personally repudiated by Parliament and nation. 

But, whether he knows it or not, I think he is now finished. That at least is one good thing to come out of this self-righteous, ignorant posturing.