Beware This Rush To War

In March, we learned that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, had helped the United States to “frame their request” to use British bases to bomb Iran. How was that Knighton’s job? How was it even compatible with his job? His only medals are Jubilee ones, the Coronation one, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, while there are no wings among his braids. In 38 years, his only combat tour has been as an engineering support officer in Italy during the Kosovo War. To have risen to his present eminence, appointed in the end by Keir Starmer of all Prime Ministers, he is obviously a spook, and thus steeped in the Five Eyes culture of being fed scraps by the Americans while yelping our gratitude at having been fed at all. And now, Peter Hitchens writes:

Why is the Chief of our Defence Staff beating war drums on the BBC, while making incorrect public statements about Russia, as I shall describe below? His job, surely, is to defend our seas, coasts and skies, not barge into political controversy.

And isn’t it time war went out of fashion? Like the dreadful clothes and hairstyles of the 1970s, it looks increasingly ugly and embarrassing. More and more people look at what has happened and ask: ‘What were we thinking when we did that?’

Donald Trump’s illegal attack on Iran, hand in hand with Israel, has gone hopelessly wrong and threatens to plunge us all into recession while achieving less than nothing. Almost all sensible people are now utterly sick of Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated bloody resort to bombs and shells in Gaza and Lebanon. They hold back only because they do not wish to damage Israel.

Vladimir Putin has brought increasing ruin on his country by foolishly thinking he could outsmart America’s Russia hawks – by using naked violence in a lawless invasion. It was exactly what they wanted him to do and had been trying to goad him into doing for years. It has – as those hawks hoped it would – exposed Russia’s many serious weaknesses as a country. Not least that its conventional armed forces are weak and rusty. The resulting cemeteries can be seen from space.

None of this is any surprise. All my life, idiots have reached for aggressive war rather than diplomacy, and covered themselves in blood and shame. In our own case, attacks on Suez, Iraq and Libya have brought disastrous national decline, growing poverty, a climate of toxic lying and unstoppable mass immigration from the lands we have ruined.

Yet there is still a strong war party in this country, and it burst rather weirdly into action on Friday. Recent years have seen the strange sight of spy supremos emerging from secrecy to freeze our blood with warlike musings. Service chiefs, too, once models of silence and impartiality, have begun to blurt and blether in support of war, which – in our system of government – they really should not do. They are paid to fight, not to bloviate.

The latest is Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, currently Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS). He was interviewed on Friday by the normally level-headed Justin Webb on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. As it was the eve of the anniversary of D-Day, Sir Rich (as he prefers to be known) rightly recalled the courage of those who fought in Normandy in 1944, but also ‘the strength of the alliance that allowed us to fight for freedom and push Nazi Germany back’.

So far, so ordinary. But then the exchange turned weird. Mr Webb asked, in the woeful tones of a funeral director: ‘How close are we now to having to fight again against Russia?’

Note that ‘again’. Why did he say it? Britain has not been at war with Russia since the end of the Crimean War in 1856. In 1914, Russia was our ally against Germany. In 1944, Russia – then in the USSR – was utterly vital to the alliance that, as the CDS rightly said, ‘allowed us to fight for freedom and push Nazi Germany back’.

Russians would argue that D-Day, as brave and noble as it was, could not have happened if Russians had not fought Hitler for the previous three years over many bitter, bloody miles.

The current official frenzy for a new conflict with Russia causes people to forget such inconvenient things. It shouldn’t.

But then came the really odd bit. Sir Rich turns out to be against illegal invasions (tell Sir Anthony Blair!), critical of those who carry out assassinations (tell Mr Netanyahu!) and critical of those who are willing to ‘use military force against another nation’ (tell President Trump!). He also believes this is ‘the most dangerous period that I have known’ in 35 years of service. Is it really?

Then he began to speak about the Kremlin threat. He said that ‘closer to home we have seen in 2026 more long-range aviation from Russia. These are strategic aircraft that will go well into our own airspace, as many in 2026 as we saw in 2025’.

Alas for the CDS, this is twaddle. There haven’t been any such incursions since 2005. Russian planes may fly close to our airspace (we also fly close to theirs) but they don’t usually fly into it. You might bear this in mind the next time you see a headline claiming that some ancient Russian Bear Tu-95 (it first flew in 1952, so is almost as old as I am) has violated Britain’s sovereign air. It won’t have done.

When I pointed out the CDS’s rather serious factual mistake to the Defence Ministry, they tried to pretend that Sir Rich had been speaking of the ‘High North’, a vague ill-defined area in the Arctic which includes Russia and has no specific airspace anyway. But he didn’t utter the phrase. What he had done was to use the words ‘closer to home’ and ‘our own airspace’, which plainly mean the UK.

But the real question is: Why do senior military figures believe and spout this stuff? Yes, they want more money. But by turning rusty, bungling Russia into a giant bogeyman with scare stories and alarm, they – and the BBC – may alas get their wish, a real war. You won’t enjoy it, if they do.

Beware this rush to war. All that the warmongers learned from being caught out lying in Iraq was how to make their propaganda slicker.