Back To Their Bases

100,000 military age males had not been murdered in Kosovo. The attacks of 11th September 2001 had not come from Afghanistan. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Therefore, those weapons were not capable of deployment within 45 minutes. Saddam Hussein had not been feeding people into a giant paper shredder. He had not been attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.

A genocide had not been imminent in Benghazi. Gaddafi had not been feeding Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape. He had not intended to flee to Venezuela. It was not an undisputed fact that Assad had gassed Ghouta. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were not dead, as announced on the front page of The Times on 12th March 2018. 40 people in Salisbury had not required treatment for nerve agent poisoning, as claimed by The Times on 14th March 2018. There is no Iranian nuclear weapons programme. And there has never been any Russian plan to invade Ukraine.

Throughout the third of a year that that invasion has been “imminent”, both the President of Russia and the President of Ukraine have insisted that it was not. During that period, “Neither Washington Nor Moscow” has become popular rather than elite opinion from Washington to Moscow; from Los Angeles to Vladivostok the long way round, via London and Paris, Berlin and Kiev (I might consider writing “Kyiv” when the BBC agreed on a pronunciation of it). Far too few Russian troops to have invaded Ukraine are now completing their exercises in friendly Belarus or on their own territory and going home, exactly as and when they always would have done.

They are not the only ones who ought to be given their marching orders. No Foreign Office or Defence Minister has resigned over this nonsense. No Foreign Affairs or Defence Spokesperson of the Labour Party, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats or the DUP has opposed it. I am not aware that any member of either the Foreign Affairs or the Defence Select Committee has done so.

Each of those MPs therefore deserves to face at the next General Election the candidacy of a combat veteran who had felt the consequences of the above lies, and who was committed to strengthening families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.