Why Are We In This?

Peter Hitchens writes:

Who decided to send the SAS to Ukraine? What are they doing there? What would happen were they to be killed by Russian forces, or captured by them? And what was a British surveillance plane, capable of carrying 30 people, doing over the Black Sea last September, when a bungling Russian pilot almost shot it down, only failing because his missile was a dud? What would have happened if the missile had worked, and many British servicemen and women had died?

Nobody will answer these questions when I ask them. Once upon a time, we had a proper Parliament in which brave, indomitable MPs such as the late Tam Dalyell would pursue such matters. Perhaps, even now, some courageous man or woman is getting ready to step into Tam Dalyell’s shoes. I do hope so.

We can be pretty sure that the leaked documents revealing these facts are accurate, given the ferocious reaction of the US authorities to their publication. By the way, you may be sure that the Kremlin will have known about all this for many months. The cloud of secrecy around such matters is (as so often) there to keep the British and American publics in ignorance, not to keep hostile powers in the dark.

Meanwhile, as far as I know, this country is not at war with Russia. If we did enter such a war, as a Nato member, we would instantly widen the current conflict to cover the whole of Europe. Can you begin to imagine what that would involve? How would the people of this country gain by such events? Is anybody thinking about what we are doing?

First of all, what interest does the United Kingdom have in continuing and sustaining this war? A powerful faction in Washington DC, with supporters in the West Wing of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, have long wanted a proxy war with Russia. They believe passionately that Russia must never be allowed to rise again. This faction, whose founding document is known as The Wolfowitz Doctrine, have been hard at work since 1992, when The New York Times leaked their plans. They are almost exactly the same people who created the Iraq War out of nothing, who got the West into the Afghanistan quagmire, and who backed Islamist fanatics in Syria – who were the sort of people they would have arrested in Chicago.

If every dollar these zealots have spent on war had been spent instead on building prosperous free countries in places such as Russia, the world would be a startlingly better place. That, fundamentally, is America’s problem. If nobody in the USA will stand up to them, they will get their repeated stupid wars and the rest of us will have to watch, weep and receive the fleeing multitudes.

But we do not have to take part. Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine? How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it, its cities wrecked, its economy half-dead, untold numbers of its young men gone to graveyards? Why should any British soldiers be there at all? If Parliament does not debate this, then we are not a democracy. And if any critical voices are drowned out with slander and abuse, then we are not a free country.