A Brief Flash of Knowledge and Understanding

Peter Hitchens writes:

Experts seem to have vanished from British foreign policy.

They gave unwanted advice before the Iraq war (they were against it) and so were sidelined in favour of political commissars, spin doctors and politicised ‘intelligence services’, whose huge unquestioned budgets are a reward for their loyalty to the government of the day and their willingness to sustain its claims and feed its fantasies.

This is easy for them since they don’t ever have to give public accounts of what they allegedly know, and can fend off all inquiries by claiming to have prevented all kinds of horrible attacks which would otherwise have taken place, claims that can never be tested.

My own instinct is to mistrust them because they are both self-serving and secretive.

On Saturday, in a brief flash of knowledge and understanding, the BBC allowed an actual expert on Syria on to a major programme.

I am not sure they bargained for what they got, a few brief minutes on concreted, well-informed scorn for the policy the BBC has itself been actively promoting through the nature of its coverage since the Syrian crisis began, thoughtless, emotive, utopian and one-sided from the start.

Some of you may recall my appalled response to this coverage at the time, which seemed to me to be playing with fire. I didn’t know the half of it.  

This expert is Peter Ford, once Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to Syria ( a job not handed out to just anybody), genuinely knowledgeable about that country and the Middle East, and so utterly opposed to the British government’s current ridiculous policy.

He argued that the choice is quite simple, between Assad or the deluge.

He said Russia’s policy was quite reasonable. He wondered out loud, as I do, why the Labour Party did not make more of this very considerable British foreign policy failure.

He described the Western powers as having ‘impaled themselves’ on their policy of calling for the downfall of President Assad.

He argued, and this I had not heard before, that Western sanctions on Syria, by creating more misery there, were also causing people to flee destitution and become refugees.

Peter Ford’s interview can be found in full, 1 hours 35 minutes into Saturday’s Radio 4 Today programme, here. Justin Webb does actually ask him a question beginning ‘Are you seriously expecting…?’

Questions couched in this form, especially directed by generalists against experienced veteran diplomats who know more about the subject than the questioner, really are a breach of impartiality.

By the way, the phrase ‘barrel bomb’, a phrase always  enunciated in tones of horror, as if there is something intrinsically macabre about barrels, creeps into this exchange, as it crept into a recent statement on the subject by President Obama.

Readers here will know that I am not an enthusiast for dropping explosives or incendiaries on populated areas.

Indeed, I am loathed and despised by many for my condemnation of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes by this country’s political and military leaders in World War Two (not just Dresden, the whole lot).

So I am not in any way a defender of ‘barrel bombs’, any more than I am a defender of the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in which civilians inevitably died, or the Anglo-French bombing of Libya, in which civilians inevitably died, or of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which civilians inevitably died.

If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. It’s a simple rule, and one I hope to make popular in time.

But, while all such bombs are axiomatically horrible,  I cannot see what is so exceptionally horrible about ‘barrel bombs’, which are simply crude improvised unguided bombs.

In what way are they more barbaric than supposedly guided bombs, whose alleged accuracy is greatly over-rated? Is it nicer to die or be maimed by more sophisticated, more accurate bombing?

To ask the question is to demonstrate the absurdity of such distinctions. High explosive, splinters, incendiary chemicals, tear and burn the human body just as terribly whether they are 'sophisticated' or crude.

Accuracy in aerial bombing is a pernicious self-serving myth. Anyone who catches himself using the mendacious term ‘surgical strike’ should afterwards be ashamed.

By the way, I also note the absence of outrage over the current Saudi air attacks on Yemen. In what way are these attacks morally superior to Assad’s barrel bombing of rebel areas in Syria?

If you or I were being bombed from the air in our homes how much would we care about the shape of the bomb?

Also, if we are so exercised about barrel bombs, when did you last hear through any British or US medium that ‘our’ ‘democratic’ Iraqi President, Nouri al Maliki,  had used these weapons in populated areas against Sunni militants in Fallujah in 2014?

My own guess is that this stuff about barrel bombs is a result of the failure to establish that Assad had used chemical weapons, and his subsequent decision to dismantle and abandon his chemical munitions.

Supporters of continuing efforts to overthrow Assad at all costs speak and write as if the case had been proved, but in fact it never was, and alternative theories have been put forward (also unproven) by the American journalist Seymour Hersh.

So I advise care, and intelligent curiosity, when you hear or read the phrase.