Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk

Can anyone tell me what we are still doing meddling in Libya?

Doing a Dubya on Libya

So, we are bombing Libya. As I wake up on this cool, grey, Sunday morning in March, listening to the birds tweeting and some distant church bells pealing over rural England, British service personnel, some of whom probably have a P45 from the government waiting in the post for them at home, are putting their lives at risk once again in the cause of naked political horse-trading and the sort of selective American foreign policy we thought we’d seen the back of when Dubya finally donned his spurs and stetson and rode off into the sunset.

My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.

Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.

Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.

It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?

No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.

What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.

We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.

I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.

But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.

Not in my name.

Foggy Compo, Clegg.

There has been a predictable outcry by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts about the proposal to settle claims for compensation out of court with the victims of Guantanamo Bay.

What these people fail to grasp is that if someone is wrongly imprisoned, probably illegally, and tortured to boot, and our government is responsible, then it's only right that the injustice should be compensated. It's what makes us the good guys. Still. just.

If we were really interested in being the good guys of course, instead of sinking to the same level as Al Qaida in the first place, seizing people, sandbagging them, holding them against their will and applying mental and physical pain, we wouldn't have done it, but at that time we were wedged so far up George Bush's chuff we couldn't see daylight.

I wonder if there would be as much fuss if the people illegally detained and tortured were called "George", "Henry" and "Cyril" instead of Mohammed. I suspect not. Brown people getting compensation of any kind, even compensation to which they are legally entitled and which will presumably save the taxpayer money if it is an out-of-court settlement, always gets the bigots frothing.

People who argue against this proposal often link the issue of torturing detainees with the 7/7 bombings. Errr. Am I missing something here? What does 9/11 and 7/7 have to do with Guantanamo Bay, except that we colluded with the US in a like for like response that dragged us down to the same level as the bombers?

Are they claiming that in some way 7/7 was caused by Guantanamo detainees? I thought it was three guys from Leeds and one from Reading. I am not following the process by which they are linking the two. Or are they claiming that, if only someone had turned up the current a bit on someone's ghoulies out in Guantanamo, this would somehow have magically prevented 7/7 taking place?

Sadly, it is excrescences like Guantanamo that CAUSE radical idiots to get more and more radicalised, until they start strapping bombs to themselves, and by following George Bush down the primrose path to dalliance, we played right into their hands. We're lucky that we didn't have more than one 7/7. We may well yet have further cause to regret it.

Orwell, of course, in between wishing he could fly, way up in the sky, once famously said that all that keeps us free is that rough men stand ready in the night to do harm, and this is the crux of the question. There ARE people out to destroy our way of life. I would contend, however, that helping George Bush in his ill-starred "War on Terror", with things such as Guantanamo, has ADDED to their numbers, considerably, rather than deterred them.

Also, I question the worth of any of the intelligence gathered by means of torture. If you turn the current up far enough, your victim will tell you whatever you want to hear. It would be instructive to know really how many threats have been neutralised since 2001 by this method of intelligence alone.

I suspect the answer would be very few, because the agencies concerned probably rely on a patchwork of intelligence from different sources, of which torture is only one, which again leads me to question its worth, compared to the problems it causes us by giving radical idiots something to latch onto and radicalise other idiots.

The intelligence agencies are unlikely to tell us the truth, however, because their interest is in making it seem as if there are hundreds of plots every day, which are only averted by shipping people off to CIA deniable "black" prisons. That's how they keep us cowed, and get us to accept the loss of more and more of our own civil liberties to anti-terror legislation.

By the way, just because I am opposed to us lowering ourselves to the depths of torture, doesn't mean I am automatically against the use of lethal force against (for instance) an invading force in a declared, legal war. If Al Qaida were massing at Dunkerque in their invasion barges, I would be reporting for duty on the White Cliffs of Dover, but the War on Terror is a different matter: an undeclared dirty war on a concept.

People also argue that we are now at war against the whole Third World, and this requires desperate measures.

I think that "the third world" as a whole is much more occupied with scrabbling for food in the dust and trying to prevent their children dying of malaria every 40 seconds than mounting a sustained attack on the west. What you are talking about is one convoluted strain of Islam, espoused by a radical bunch of beardyweirdies originally in Saudi Arabia, latterly living in caves in Tora Bora, that objected to the US bases in their Holy Land, and to US policy in Israel. I agree, though, that since 2001, the west in general and the US in particular, seem hell-bent on increasing the number of people who hate us as quickly as possible

And anyone who thinks torture (or collusion with torture) isn't still going on under a ConLibdimwit government is living in cloud cuckoo land.

Afghan Wounds

The latest spike in the casualty figures from the dismal conflict in Afghanistan has provoked a flurry of comment and criticism from all sides. At one end of the spectrum you have the armchair warriors who say we must never surrender to the Taliban and who will willingly fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. And on the other end, the troops-out peaceniks of the Stop the War Coalition and similar organisations.

What is the ordinary person to make of it? By persuasion, by calling, I am of the peacenik party. I was against the Iraq War. I called it the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons. I had my reservations about going into Afghanistan. Picking a fight with the Taliban because they refused to surrender Bin Laden was a big ask. Did they even have the power to surrender him in the first place? Did George Bush even care, as long as the TV audiences at home could see US bombs falling somewhere, on someone vaguely Muslim, in retaliation for the lamentable failure of US foreign policy that was 9/11?

The reasons for being in Afghanistan today are a lot different from those advanced in 2001. The original reason, to flush out Bin Laden, has been unsuccessful largely owing to the porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the lack of sufficient resource to do the job, and the fact that the mission got deflected, along the way, into a larger mission to win over the hearts and minds of the population. Quite how you win over the hearts and minds of the population by invading and bombing them has become an increasingly problematic question, and one to which there is no answer. In using violence to try and change the culture of radical Islam and in attempting to use it to weld together an uneasy amalgam of warlords to a government that many feels lacks legitimacy, the UK/US forces in Afghanistan have probably radicalised more than they have converted. We’ve created an unholy alliance of the Taliban and Al Qaeda where none existed before. In short, we have incited every hothead east of the Euphrates with access to an AK47 or a grenade-launcher to take a pot at us.

It is often advanced by the Prime Minister that our military presence in the area is somehow making us safer from terrorism. The problem I have with this approach is that the people who perpetrated the worst atrocity on British soil since the dark days of the IRA were actually from Leeds and Reading. They were moved to carry out their actions by our presence in Iraq and, er, Afghanistan. So far from being a preventative measure in the circumstances, I feel that our presence there is exacerbating the situation.

Don't rain on my parade

The demonstrations by a small but vociferous gaggle of protestors during a "homecoming" march of the Royal Anglian Regiment in Luton on Saturday has led to a predictable outbreak of Muslim bashing in the media, with the Daily Mail and the Telegraph leading the charge, and commentators on their articles online suggesting everything from charging them with treason to deporting them, or both.

What these people don't get is that free speech is free speech for everyone. Even people who you might consider to be well beyond the lunatic fringe, people like Omar Bakri who are one stop beyond Barking and quite a long way off the bus route.

Free speech is what makes us the good guys. You may not like what these people claim, or say, and personally, I think that many of them put the "mentalist" into "fundamentalist" but as long as they do not break the law, they have a right to protest.

Whether they were protesting in the right place, at the right time, against the right people, is another matter. Personally I think it is possible to respect and admire the professionalism of our armed forces, who are doing a fairly difficult job since our politicians turned them into professional targets in two distant and nasty battlefields that were never, and never should have been, of our choosing.

I do so despite being an implacable opponent of the Iraq war (the wrong war against the wrong enemy, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons) and despite being ambivalent about the engagement in Afghanistan. I think our friends in Al Mujiharoun or whatever it's called were shooting at the wrong target. If their banners had accused Bush and Blair of being terrorists and baby-killers, it might have been nearer the mark.

As it is, all these dismal fanatics have done is add a few hundred new recruits to the BNP's ranks, fuelled the mad xenophobic rantings of The Sun with its gung-ho BNP-lite campaign of "Help for Heroes" and hasten the day when we have white v. Muslim civil war on our streets. They may well view the latter as "progress" in their own warped way, a self-fulfilling prophecy, part of a philosophy similar to the cowards who gun down unarmed pizza delivery men in Northern Ireland.

People like Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail have been quick to condemn the protestors, whereas previously she was arguing in favour of Geert Wilders being allowed to enter the UK and show his anti-Muslim film, in the name of that very same "free speech". We must draw the inevitable conclusion that she believes in free speech, but only when it is on a topic she agrees with. The media of course has done its predictable thing of seeking out the most extreme Muslim loopy fruits it can find and asking them to refuse to condemn the protest. It's a bit like interviewing Jack the Ripper for a piece on prostitution. You sort of know what you are going to get.

I am glad at any rate that moderate Muslim leaders came out against the demonstration, even though they were largely ignored for doing so and even though in some cases, their mandate to speak for all British Muslims is in any case, at best, questionable, especially since a whole younger generation has been radicalised and alienated by the war in Iraq.

I don't suppose this will be the last instance of this sort of thing. There may be other, nastier confrontations ahead. The army isn't going to stop holding homecoming parades because they are in turn under pressure from the government and the MOD to behave as if there is nothing to be ashamed of, and something to be proud of. There is, in a sense, something to be proud of, but it's not the glib assertions of the politicians.

I really do hope though that if this crowd of rentamob would-be mujihadeen shows up at another event, that the crowd takes its cue from the behaviour of the troops of the Royal Anglian Regiment last weekend, and roundly and comprehensively ignores them.

And I also hope that the police will demonstrate that there is not - as some commentators claim - one law for them and one for us by arresting and charging any protestors whose banners they consider constitute incitement. There are perfectly workable, servicable laws on this topic. and they should be employed where necessary, and like all laws, without fear or favour.

Troublesome Justice

The office of coroner is an ancient one, going back to Elizabethan times. Unfortunately for this government, some coroners take their duties to inquire into the truth seriously. This would include Her Majesty's Coroner for the County of Oxford, which by virtue of the location of Brize Norton airbase, is where inquests on British personnel killed on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan are held.

There have been a numberof high profile examples of the Coroner saying things that the government does not like, things that point out the woeful inadequacy of British army equipment, or, in the case of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, the woeful inadequacy of our so called "allies" in theatre to tell friend from foe.

So it comes as no surprise, therefore, that Jack Straw is now pushing out proposals to hold inquests where the out come "might affect matters of national security" to be held in camera. No jury, no press, no coroner. What's the betting that these inquests that affect matters of national security turn out to be JUST those types of inquest that ask awkward questions about British army equipment or friendly fire incidents. Mark my words. National security covers a multitude of sins.

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

White Poppies, white feathers

Sorry, I got a bit aereated yesterday.

I don't have a baseball bat anyway, and ultimately nothing is solved by lamping people who you disagree with. Even if they crassly suggest that in some way white poppies are inferior to red poppies. And what about the people who wear both - red to remember the needless waste of lives, white to show they are trying never to let it happen again.

Mind you, lamping people you disagree with would make Prime Minister's Question Time more entertaining, and we nearly got there today. Of which more later

Sitting on Defence

Well, I had better make a start on the Bolshy Manifesto somewhere, and it might as well be Defence of the Realm, given that today is Remembrance Day and on the way to the Lakes on Sunday we saw a World War II Dakota complete with authentic paint job, flying over the M62. Unless it was a hallucination of course.

I am not, technically, a pacifist. I wish I was. I have to say, though, that my desire and admiration for the British way of life is such that I can foresee a situation where, if the invaders were at the gates, I would be there, lined up alongside such of my countrymen who were prepared to stop them invading. Not that I would be any practical use but, as a moral relativist, I have to concede there are times when, if for instance another Hitler came along and could not be stopped by any other means, then you might, in extreme circumstances, have to resort to violence.

Unfortunately, this also then implies the need for professional armed forces to defend the country, and all that this entails. And, in an uncertain world, where the idiots in charge of our foreign policy have been wedged so far up Bush’s chuff they haven’t seen daylight for years, we’ve now made a lot of enemies. Which is why, unfortunately, reluctantly (see how those words recur like a tolling bell), we’ve got to replace Trident. I know, I can hear the howls from here. And it ties us in to the Americans. I know, I know. (I’m assuming a slippery operator like Blair made Trident help a condition of being America’s “Blind Ally” this last few years, and if he didn’t, he’s a bloody fool.)

In the question of Trident, I find myself reflecting that it’s like the situation where ideally, you would like to go to the shops but you are actually stuck up to your ankles in an unfamiliar peat bog in the middle of nowhere, it’s getting dark and it’s coming on to rain, you’ve got no torch and you’ve lost your map. Ideally, given the choice, you wouldn’t start from here.

So it is with Trident. Ideally, the Bolshy Party wouldn’t start from here, but given that, by slavishly following the Primrose Path of dalliance promoted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, we’ve now made ourselves the target for every hothead east of the Euphrates with an AK-47 (and quite a lot west of the Euphrates as well), it seems we have no choice. Great legacy, George, Tony, thanks a lot.

However, this doesn’t mean we want to go exporting aggression. It’s perfectly possible to be proud of England without feeling then obliged to invade France (or Iraq). I can see (sort of) an intellectual justification for invading Afghanistan, given that it was a hotbed of fanaticism, but someone should have a) asked the question – what is it about the USA that these people hate so much that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and kill themselves in the process? and b) someone should have taken Bush aside and told him that western armies have very poor track records of invading and subduing Afghanistan, ever since the North-West Frontier wars of the nineteenth century.

Another justification for invading Afghanistan was the plight of Muslim women under the Taleban. Yes, this was pretty dire, but is it possible to coerce an entire religion, especially in a situation where the most militant fringe of it has gained political power by force, into making 600 years of progress in half-a-dozen? Islam and Islamic scholars kept the flame of knowledge alive in the Middle Ages, providing the vital link back to Classical Greek and Roman thought and texts that fuelled Western Europe’s Renaissance. Yet militant Islam is still stuck in the 1100s, when it comes to the place of women, especially. But you can’t bomb someone forward to civilisation, you can only bomb them back to the Stone Age.

So, for these reasons, it’s Bolshy Party Policy to withdraw straightaway from the American-induced adventurism in Iraq. Their mistake, their mess, they can stay and clear it up if they still want the oil, which they will do, even under Obama, I predict. There will be US involvement in Iraq for generations yet, military bases and military “advisers”, private security firms (mercenaries or contractors, depending on who you talk to) and joint exercises.

We would use the men, weapons and materiel freed up by the withdrawal from Iraq to ease the strain on the UK contingent in Afghanistan, while planning a phased withdrawal from there, too. The women will have to be helped by other means – by intellectually challenging the bankrupt assertions of the Taleban and their questionable spiritual authority.

The possession of professional armed services doesn’t mean, either, that you have to use them for fighting. Every year there are scores of disasters, natural or otherwise, around the world which require specialist logistical expertise in relief efforts. Even in the UK, when we get the by now regular floods each summer as a result of climate change. I look forward to the day when the Army, Navy and Air Force have largely morphed into a sort of global logistics and rescue service – a bit like International Rescue but with fewer "strings" attached. A plane can be used to drop food aid instead of bombs. A temporary bridge can allow food convoys to cross a swollen river, rather than tanks.

The Bolshy Party believes that it is perfectly possible to be proud of the achievement and expertise of our nation’s armed forces without that translating over into a sort of gung-ho Little Englander patriotism that sees its mission in the world as being to teach Johnny Foreigner what’s what, keep him in his place, and give him a bloody nose.

The only justifiable intervention outside of the UK, apart from humanitarian aid, should be in the pursuit of international law and justice, and this should be carried out rigorously, without fear or favour, if it is to be done at all, and certainly not done with a sort of lip service attitude, only in areas where it suits the broad aims of US foreign policy.

Soldiers are probably the last people who want to go to war:

Soldiers who wanna be heroes
Number practically zero
But there are millions
Who want to be civilians

- that old protest song from the Vietnam era of the 1960s has it more or less right. So, in those circumstances, we at the Bolshy Party do not consider that if you wear your poppy on Poppy Day, for instance, you are automatically glorifying war. We see it, on the contrary, commemorating all of the countless millions of ordinary blokes and women who didn’t particularly want to go to war, who were quite happy where they were, thanks very much, but who, when the call came, put down their spades, their scythes, their tools, their pens and marched to meet the challenges.

There are different reasons for remembering the dead of the two different wars. For the dead of the First World War, men such as Harry Fenwick and William Evans, we remember the waste and the futility, the sadness of all those millions of unfulfilled lives. For the dead of the Second World War, at least on the Allies’ side, those emotions are also mingled with a kind of thanks for stopping Hitler – or stopping the Hitler war fascist machine. For the dead on the German side, again, there is only sorrow at unfulfilled lives. And of course, potentially the most tragic waste of that conflict, the millions of innocent civilians who were killed, wounded or displaced, some of the consquences of which we still feel today, in the Arab-Israeli standoff.

So to sum up, the policy of the Bolshy Part on defence is: we’ve got to start from where we are, not where we’d like to be, and the longing we feel for where we’d like to be is irrelevant in that context. We’ve got to extract our troops from the two areas in the world where at present all they are doing is providing targets for fanatics. Ideally, in Afghanistan, if we can improve the lot of women by continuing to challenge militant Islam intellectually, if we can cut off the Taleban’s funding by buying up the opium crop and turning it into diamorphine for the NHS, there are still things we can do to pull out the troops without leaving the Afghans in the lurch.

We’re stuck with Trident’s replacement, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go looking for excuses to lose it. It’s a deterrent.

Finally, let’s not also forget that the government gets an easier ride thanks to the efforts of the British Legion and other people who deal with the welfare of veterans. You can say this about many charities. The government gets off lightly in many areas where they should be spending money wisely because goodhearted people who recognise a need for action, get stuck in and sort it out. I’ve written about this dilemma before, in the context of overseas aid.The problem is, if the charities go on strike, it isn't the government that gets hurt by that, it's the people or cause the charity was trying to assist, but no, we should never let our politicians get away with short-changing the people who fought their battles for them.

And it’s possible to be proud of our armed forces without indulging in gung-ho patriotism, and it would be possible to be even more proud of them if we succeed in turning their planes into ploughshares. And if you wear a poppy, it doesn’t make you a war-monger – just the opposite, in fact.