More Cool Thought

Peter Hitchens writes:

Have our brains turned into lasagna? I struggle all the time to work out which of the many wars now wrecking the world is good, and which is bad. How can you tell? Are the bad people the ones who commit murder and kill children? Apparently not. As Iran buries its assassinated leader, in a colossal, furious funeral lasting for days, Western media are full of the usual rather dim and thought-free stuff about the sinister bearded regime and its desire to have nuclear weapons.

Well, OK, it is sinister and it is bearded and it pretty certainly wants nuclear weapons now, even if it didn’t before it was bombed by the US and Israel. Yet what would we say if a Russian missile had been used to kill a major Western leader, and in the course of doing so had murdered his year-old granddaughter? You’d never hear the end of it. Yet this is what the US did to Iran.

The girl’s name was Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani and her life was worth exactly as much as that of any other year-old little girl, anywhere in the world. Nobody in the US government has ever directly addressed her death, let alone said sorry. The view seems to be that it was the Iranians’ fault for having a little girl there when the US chose to assassinate her grandfather in a surprise attack.

Oh, and by the way, aren’t we against assassination? Isn’t the murder of John F Kennedy one of the worst crimes of our time? Don’t we rightly excoriate the Russians for their revolting poisonings on British soil? I must take another handful of anti- confusion pills before I continue. Then what would we say if Russia had rocket-bombed a girls’ school in Ukraine, killing 175 people, mainly children? But when the US obliterated the Minab girls’ school in Iran, there was never any really fierce grief or anger in the West. Why not? What civilised human does not weep and rage at the slaughter of children, any children?

Once again, it turns out to be Iran’s fault for aggressively putting a girls’ school where the Pentagon thought there was a Revolutionary Guard base, or some such tripe. Where are all those sophisticated satellites – you know, the ones that can tell a blackboard from a submachine gun at a height of 150 miles – when you really need them? As for Israel’s bombing and shelling of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, what would we say if the Russians did these things in Ukraine? We’d be pretty cross. We certainly wouldn’t (as the Americans do) send them more money and ammunition so that they could keep right on doing it.

My point is very simple. Our emotions about these events are in a mess. We are quite right to be distressed by assassinations, by the deaths of children, by the mangling and killing of civilians in wars they did not choose. But our pity and distress must apply in all cases, not just in some. Our own side, if such a thing still exists, has, alas, done some terrible things which may not be expiated in our lifetimes. It is not even true that the bad people have, in all cases, started the fighting. Vladimir Putin is rightly despised for his lawless invasion of Ukraine. But the surprise bombing of Iran, while peace talks were in progress, was a shameful act of duplicity which its victims will not quickly forget.

So, in all these wars, may we please have less righteous passion? We aren’t entitled to feel especially righteous. And may we have more cool thought, which we badly need? What outcome do we really seek in Ukraine or Iran? Can we afford the price, in lives and freedom, which we are being asked to pay for it? Do we want a more or less permanent war of bombing in Europe, which might at any time spread westwards to our own cities? Have nearly 50 years of relentless hostility to Iran, and cruel sanctions imposed on its innocent people, brought down the regime? Well, no. Might it be worth trying something else?

For these suggestions I shall of course be called, yet again, an appeaser, traitor etc. This thoughtless bilge drowns debate in countries which have let simple-minded propaganda drive out thought. Carry on like this and we will blunder into total national disaster.