Storm, Shadows

The official story about the Skripals has fallen apart. The United States is supplying landmines to Ukraine. Britain is ostensibly saving £500 million by scrapping two amphibious assault ships, a Type 23 frigate, two tankers, the Watchkeeper WK450 Mk1 drones, and 31 helicopters, yet we have promised Ukraine three billion pounds per year "for as long as it takes". That turns out to include firing Storm Shadow missiles, at a cost of two million pounds each time, into undisputed Russian territory, thereby putting us at war with a nuclear power.

But majority opinion in Ukraine is now for a negotiated settlement, which can only mean that Crimea officially became part of Russia while the Donbas either did so, or became nominally independent in such a form as to amount to the same thing. The people there want that. They were only ever put into the Ukrainian SSR to make the heavily Ukrainian Soviet elite's position more secure by making independence effectively impossible. Define Ukraine's borders as those of the SSR, and, while it has taken a generation to prove, that has worked.

There is even talk of conscription. It is useful for that debate to be revisited from time to time. Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. But if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. Yet here we are. Again. And has Donald Trump nothing to say? If he said what he had an electoral mandate to say, rather than what many of his nominations would suggest, then what of our own mute Official Opposition?