Friday 10 October 2014

But From The Left?

Simon Jenkins writes:

It is my first Hitler of this war.

I queried the west’s strategy of bombing Islamic State (Isis) and an elegant thinktanker retorted, “I suppose you would let Hitler run riot over Europe.”

I walked away. I always respect Godwin’s Law, which states that the longer an argument runs, the greater the likelihood Hitler gets mentioned, killing it stone dead.

I cannot recall a conflict so swamped by incoherence as the one in northern Iraq. The awfulness of Isis has given the something-must-be-done-even-if-it’s-stupid lobby an ostensibly crushing moral ascendancy.

The right takes comfort in faux belligerence: David Cameron’s party conference speech frothed with “evil people, pure and simple”; it dripped with killed children, raped women, genocides and beheadings.

He declared that “some people seem to think we can opt out of this. We can’t. There is no walk-on-by option.”

He then walked on by.

He suggested that a bit of bombing would do the trick while conceding that “troops on the frontline” would be “Iraqis, Kurds and Syrians fighting for the safe and democratic future they deserve”.

None would be British. The adjectives were apocalyptic, the response cosmetic.

The left was no better.

Neither Ed Miliband nor Nick Clegg mentioned voting for military action in their recent conference speeches. Were they ashamed?

Labour’s pragmatic strain, which led Michael Foot to oppose the Falkands war [no, he didn't, and Thatcher always held him in high regard for not having done so], was clearly eroded by long years of whipped support for Tony Blair’s wars.

We remain in ignorance of Miliband’s strategy. It may have been in the “forgotten cupboard” of his speech. 

He muttered something about support for “overnight action against Isis”, but did not explain his strategy of airstrikes in Iraq but not in Syria.

As for Clegg, he didn’t even mention a conflict for which he is actively responsible as deputy prime minister. He might assert that “we are the only party that refuses to trade in fear”, but that is precisely the currency of his security policy.

All these leaders have a terror of being thought of as a wimp.

The same is true in America. There, Barack Obama may have been elected on a platform of withdrawal from foreign wars, but he too must scamper from helicopter to White House dodging jibes of impotence.

His plea that “doing stupid stuff” is no answer to a global crisis is derided by his old secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

“Great nations need organising principles,” she says, whatever they may be.

“Not doing stupid” lacks what the New Yorker last month called the “snarl and swagger” that Americans want in their leaders, even if they lead to defeat.

That war has all the best tunes is a truism.

So is the relief that governments in trouble have long drawn from foreign adventures and manufactured foreign threats.

Cameron is emerging as a typical politician of fear, with his hyperbolic elevation of Isis as a menace that “we must deal with or they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets”.

An inability to differentiate between lethal criminality and national security is dangerous in a democratic leader.

Governments face peculiar pressures. That does not go for oppositions. Their duty is to challenge and, if necessary, oppose a reckless state.

The ageing cold war diplomat George Kennan was appalled when George W Bush was heading for war in Iraq.

If Saddam Hussein posed any threat to America or the world, he said, it was trivial and war was “just not worth it”.

But Kennan reserved his full fury for the “shameful and shabby” opposition Democrats, who were refusing to call Bush to account out of a “timid concern for the elections”.

Closing down debate was what led to mission creep, with countries ending up “fighting for entirely different things you had never thought of before”.

If democracies could not openly discuss war for fear of seeming unpatriotic in the eyes of idiots, they were doomed.

This is vividly displayed by the Isis predicament.

The war motion passed by the House of Commons on 26 September – yes to bombing Iraq, no to troops on the ground – received just 43 votes against. Canada’s parliament mustered 134 against.

Did it really need General David Richards to point out last month that bombing made no sense without ground forces to follow?

The enemy would simply relocate. The war, Richards said, would go on for ever unless a competent land army was involved. As it was, British jets were finding little to bomb.

Two more Tornados were sent to raise the British deployment to eight, because, I am told, Denmark had sent seven.

Britain’s strategy is to howl blue murder and then declare a sort of half-war.

A conflict we have neither the intention nor the capacity to end, and that should be contained regionally, is being internationalised.

We bequeathed a bunch of warrior zealots a nation in a state of anarchy and a vast arsenal to play with. If the region cannot handle them, they may have to rampage themselves to exhaustion.

Their victims desperately need our aid, as do the victims of war everywhere, but not our bombs. For the price of a bombed pick-up truck you can feed a refugee camp for a year.

Humanitarian intervention has drifted far from the ideal of charitable aid to become a liberal’s surrogate for war; it is licensed machismo.

It emerged in the 1990s, largely in Somalia and Yugoslavia, without a coherent philosophy or rules of engagement.

In 1992, Henry Kissinger – no interventionist slouch – warned America against going beyond preaching “moral and humane concern” and trying to impose that concern on the world by force.

It would become a habit, as if not doing so would imply that “American life would have lost meaning”. No nation could police the world’s humanity. The ideal was dangerously vague.

In 1999, Tony Blair’s “adrenalin” speech in Chicago sought to goad America into a ground war in Kosovo (in my view justified).

But even he set out specific criteria for such intervention.

These included that military action should be sensibly undertaken, that there should be a coherent long-term strategy, and that British interests be correctly identified.

Few of Blair’s criteria are met in the case of Isis.

It fails war’s most critical imperative – once known as the Powell doctrine – that it be fought all out and ended quickly.

The Isis adventure looks like costly, half-hearted window dressing. As for fighting another Hitler, history must be dead.

We might expect all this from the right of the political spectrum.

But from the left?

5 comments:

  1. The most right wing people I can think of-Alan Clark, Bill Buckley, Pat Buchanan, Peter Hitchens etc-vitriocally opposed the neocon wars. As does UKIP now.

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    1. That'll come as news to UKIP's online cheerleaders.

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  2. It's not "news" to anyone-UKIP's consistently opposed every neocon war in the book. It was the only party to take Russia's side in the Ukraine dispute. Rightly so.

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    1. It may not be news to people who pay attention. But a lot of people don't.

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  3. Ok, I take your point. But as a party that opposes membership of the EU and the Convention on Human Rights because we support national sovereignty, we can hardly support wars fought in American/Israeli interests.

    That would be inconsistent and I wouldn't vote UKIP for a moment of they did so.

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