The king called up his jet fighters

A general consensus seems to have emerged in the middle ground of British politics in favour of the UN-approved coalition air attacks on Gaddafi’s forces.  Cameron, Clegg and Miliband took their positions on the frontbenches as moderates who wanted anything but another Iraq; events have turned them into multilateral hawks.  As a Young Turk I was sceptical of the idea that the thugs of Moscow, or the waxworks of Beijing, could confer legal or moral legitimacy on any military act; but the hatred the world felt towards the West for our bungled invasion of Iraq means that, if nothing else, it can no longer be in our national interest to act in the Arab world without Security Council approval.  Thankfully the new leaders of our warmongering political parties seem to have agreed.

There’s no need for me to repeat the arguments in favour of intervention: you’ll have read little else all week.  I’ll also leave aside Sarkozy’s Napoleonic motives, and the legitimate question of whether a US President is in breach of their Constitution by acting without Congressional approval (having dragged his heels for a fortnight, he can’t say he didn’t have enough time).  In this country (as, it seems, in the US) this is one of those issues that divide the centre-left and centre-right from the further left and further right.  On this position (unlike, say, the EU) I’m on the side of the centre, as it were.

On the left, we constantly hear the refrain: “What about Bahrain/Yemen/Saudi Arabia/Zimbabwe/North Korea/China?”  I would argue that just because it isn’t always practical to change the world doesn’t mean we never should.  Our policy should be one of liberal realism: deal with the world as it is but, without getting ahead of ourselves, try to make it more like what we would all like it to be when an obvious opportunity to do so presents itself (such as when a nearby dictator is hours away from completing a massacre).  But, of course, your leftist sees the world in binary terms, and rejects any possibility of incremental improvements: for him it must be all or nothing, and we must either use force against everyone or no-one.

Thinking he has thought of something very original that can’t possibly have occurred to you, he then retorts that the real reason we intervene in Libya, and not in the others, is to get our hands on its oil.  But why does it follow that just because a policy is in our national interest it must necessarily not be in the interests of the other party?  It doesn’t follow at all.  If we help the rebels to overthrow their dictators, thus helping them into power, one would hope that they would then return the favour in some way.  Everyone’s then happy, except the old regime and their pals in China/Russia/Germany/wherever.  What’s wrong with that?

On the right we see a different variant of this ‘splendid isolationism’.  Kelvin MacKenzie says on Question Time that “Libya is not worth one ounce of British blood”.  I would say that anyone joining our armed forces knows the risks perfectly well — and if they have a profound aversion to the idea of shedding their blood then perhaps they should consider an alternative career — and that preventing the torture and murder of large numbers of civilians is as good a use of their bravery and our resources as any.  Meanwhile Peter Hitchens writes that we should leave them to fight it out and make a deal with the winner.  For a man who argues that the Christian faith should be taught as truth in schools, this seems a pretty unchristian position (and, I am certain, not one that his, his brother’s and my hero Orwell would have taken).  He rightly admits his policy is “heartless”.

The left fall back on their two most feeble arguments; the right think compassion and the rule of law should stop at our borders.  Blair tried to draw Gaddafi in from the cold after he gave up his nuclear programme, but selling him the tools to brutalise Libyan citizens (I refuse to use the phrase ‘his own people’) was a step too far.  The SNP gave him back al-Megrahi while his appeal was pending; it may be that they did so for compassionate reasons, and it may well be that he was innocent, but thanks to Salmond and MacAskill we’ll never know.  So far, then, I prefer the new policy.

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Heads in the sand

Happy new year, gentle readers.  In between recovering from the usual festive excesses, I’ve enjoyed incoming Tory MP Rory Stewart’s two-part film about T.E. Lawrence on BBC 2.  Stewart’s a bit of a force of nature himself, having walked across Afghanistan and governed an Iraqi province by the time he was about my age, speaking ten languages and now lecturing at Harvard – as Ian Dury put it, there ain’t half been some clever bastards.  He’s clearly styling himself as the New Lawrence, and with luck he’ll act as a wise, romantic corrective to the legions of braindead PR whores about to replace parliament’s last lot of braindead PR whores.  His point in the film is that Lawrence’s message about the Arabs – in a nutshell, don’t try to rule them – applies today, and that we should be deeply wary of liberal interventionist fantasies about changing the world by exporting our values with force.

The alternative view was put by Tony Blair at the Iraq Inquiry yesterday.  This seems to mark the end of Iraq as a political issue in Britain – our troops have left for Helmand, the worst of the chaos in the country is long gone, there will be no more inquiries, and after the general election it will all surely pass into history.  I’ll make this my first and last comment on the matter, then.

Like many who took Blair’s word for it at the time, I have had political egg on my face ever since.  We still haven’t had a convincing explanation for why nuanced intelligence reports, full of doubts and caveats, were transformed into sensational headlines about the singular threat posed by Saddam’s weapons.  We still don’t know why exactly we went to war – was it WMD, regime change, “regime change plus” in Michael Howard’s abstruse phrase, humanitarian reasons, defiance of the UN, oil?  Like the fall of Rome, there seem to be dozens of plausible reasons, none entirely convincing on their own.  I even remember Bruce Anderson arguing at the time that powerful nations were absolutely right to invade poorer ones to secure control of their resources.  You don’t hear much from him these days.  And we still don’t know why the coalition was so tragically unprepared for the aftermath of the war.  Whatever the reasons, Bush and Blair hadn’t been reading their Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  There ain’t half been some stupid bastards.

Each of the three main parties has tried to rewrite history.  Jack Straw, possibly the least ingenuous man ever to enter parliament, now claims to have had doubts at the time about the legality of the war, as if that lets him off the hook – if anything it makes him even more culpable.  The Tory line has become “if we knew then what we know now” – but do you believe Hague and chums would have done anything other than back America no matter what?  The Lib Dems absurdly claim they were against it the whole time.  Even the reliably cynical Peter Hitchens has fallen for this line, writing that Charles Kennedy “behaved with courage and honour over the Iraq war”.  He did nothing of the sort, so let’s set the record straight: the Lib Dem policy was to support the war in the event of a second UN Security Council resolution.  They would have gone along with it if the unelected hooligans in Beijing and Moscow had waved their assent.  Of all positions I still find this the hardest to respect.  It’s hypocritical too, since the Lib Dems cheerled the Kosovo war, which was a Nato assault on the closest ally of another member of the Security Council.  In that operation we blithely bombed a European capital, ostensibly to stop a bad guy expelling a few hundred thousand Muslims.  A fat lot of thanks we got.

Was the war in Iraq worth it, in the end?  Like the French Revolution, we could argue it’s still too early to say.  Of course it was nice to see Saddam and his henchmen meet the hangman, but I can’t honestly believe it was worth $3 trillion – about a hundred grand per Iraqi – not to mention the renewed power and untouchability it has given Iran, the debasement of democracy and dissent in Britain, and the further worldwide disgrace to our already pretty toxic brand.

I would be alone on the blogosphere if I didn’t offer a few predictions for 2010, so here goes.  Any talk of a hung parliament is just an excuse to fill the column inches: there will be a workable two-figure Tory majority.  It will soon become apparent that the rump of Tory backbenchers are well to the right of Cameron, and he will have far more problems from them than from the opposition parties (especially since Labour will be too busy with internal recriminations – if they want my advice they should elect a socially conservative economic populist, not that many fit the bill, but they’ll probably just go for one of the second-rate Blairites).  The PCP will agitate for a far harder line on tax and spending, and we must hope Cameron can steer the right course between the twin delusions of the current government, spending with no regard to the deficit, and his own nihilists who relish cutting for its own sake.  Similarly, I wouldn’t bet against an Australian Liberal-style split on climate change.  Speaking of which, this seems to be the last and most important issue still unaffected by political violence – after the failure of Copenhagen, might 2010 be the year environmentalist (or anti-environmentalist) direct action turns into assassinations and terrorist attacks?  If unprecedented economic growth and evenly spread prosperity in Germany in the 1970s could spawn the murderous Baader-Meinhof gang, what might our own combination of recession, inequality and environmental calamity produce?  As for the economy, I can’t quite decide whether the inevitable spending cuts and public sector layoffs after 6 May will give us a second dip, or whether the new prudence will restore market confidence enough to offset this.  But my hunch is that the reckoning is yet to come.

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