A Three-Pronged Spear

Peter Hitchens writes:

I offer this column to the many patriotic British people who may be a bit confused as to how we have become tangled up in yet another war of choice in the Middle East – by a man who came to office by promising he wouldn’t start any more such wars. My colleague Sarah Vine thinks it’s a humanitarian conflict, while I don’t, and you can hear us discuss this on our latest podcast.

Here’s one reason why I take my view. If the Russians or the Iranians had bombed a school and killed more than 150 people, mostly girls aged between seven and 12, I do not think they would have been allowed to get away with saying: ‘We didn’t mean to do it.’ There would have been loud cries of execration, rage and anger. Quite right too.

Modern rockets are pretty accurate. A Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, can usually be expected to arrive within 33ft of its intended target.

Today’s spy satellites can see almost everything. They can, as we know, pick out an Ayatollah from many miles up. And they can certainly distinguish a girls’ school from a military base.

I don’t believe for a second that the USA or the Israelis wanted to hit that school. But I suspect they were so full of their own pumped-up epic fury that they didn’t care enough to avoid it. In which case, so much for the supposedly compassionate, humanitarian reasons for this war.

If you are revolted and distressed – as you should be – by the deaths of innocents at the hands of the Iranian mullahs, you have to feel the same about the deaths of those girls, at Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab on Saturday, February 28. Yet where is the outrage?

There’s a kind of doublethink going on, where people have two separate sides to their heads, and can believe two opposite things at the same time.

It’s even worse for the poor Trumpoids, a faction which seems to have taken over much of what is left of British conservatism.

For instance, what about this person, who said in 2016 that ‘our current strategy of nation-building and regime-change is a proven, absolute failure. We have created the vacuums that allow terrorism to grow and spread’?

And who promised to ‘stop racing to topple foreign regimes’?

If you think 2016 is too far back, then what about this from the same mouth in 2024: ‘I’m not going to start wars. I’m going to stop wars’? Yes, of course, it is Donald J. Trump speaking.

These pledges, to stop stupid wars, were the best thing about him. Such wars wreck nations, cost billions, fail in their aims and begin vast waves of mass migration.

Has the real Donald Trump been kidnapped by mad warmongers? Shouldn’t we be more worried about that? How can his supporters back him when he says he will not do things, and then does them? And yet they do.

Weirder still, British war enthusiasts seem far keener on this conflict than the people of the USA, which has actually started the war.

Three recent polls show about 60 per cent of Americans are opposed. Here, in a poll taken by BMG on March 4 and 5, 47 per cent of Britons were against the American attacks, and 22 per cent supported them. Why? I have to say I thought we settled all this after the Iraq fiasco, with its blatant lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction and direct threats to this country from Saddam.

Nobody sane now believes that, and Sir Anthony Blair is universally despised for it. Didn’t we learn a lesson? Generally, attacking countries which have not attacked you is considered morally wrong, even if it is legal (is it?). I really don’t see what is so bad about Sir Keir Starmer (no friend of mine) refusing to help out. I’m only sorry he later caved in.

A few other odd doublethink problems arise. Before this began, weren’t we all appalled that our Government can’t police the streets or run a health service or repair holes in the roads?

Why are so many, who rightly made these points, now demanding that we police the world, and blow holes in Iran, and fill its hospitals with innocent civilians maimed in ‘collateral damage’?

As for this surprise about the state of our Navy, where have you all been? It has been blazingly obvious for decades./ In 2017, I wrote here: ‘The woeful state of Her Majesty’s Navy is a national shame. Every government that has failed to keep up the strength of the Fleet has paid for it in the end.’

That wasn’t the first time. In 2012, I said the Navy had shrunk into a ‘demoralised, politically corrected remnant’. In 2007, I said: ‘The Royal Navy is as good as finished. A service that once took British power to all the corners of the Earth is now shrunk to a pathetic remnant, largely stuck in harbour for lack of fuel and money.’

I then described how so many of its ships couldn’t move, and the lack of manpower.

There’s plenty more where that came from, and much of the decay was supervised by the very Tory Party which now struts and frets in the Commons, growling and snarling at Iran, while hiding behind a dithering, incoherent Uncle Sam.

You may know that the word ‘jingo’ comes from an 1878 music hall song demanding that we went to war with the Russians (them again!), to protect the squalid Ottoman Turkish empire.

There was no humanitarian flannel in those days: ‘We don’t want to fight’, the crowds sang, ‘but by jingo, if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.’

Today, the warlike faction might sing instead: ‘We really want a fight, but by jingo, it is true, we’ve got no ships, we’ve got no men, we’ve got no money too.’

Instead of tanks, ships, fighter jets, and indeed personnel for our own country, never mind for anywhere else, we have Trident. So instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. This would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.