Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk

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

Bin Laden Bin In?

Well said, Rowan Williams, for speaking out on Osama Bin Laden. No doubt you will receive reams of hate mail from the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph religiously over their cornflakes, but you were quite right.

Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.

When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.

And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?

Emergency, War 10!

The Tories and their stooges in the Mini-Tories have been quick to point out that the cost of the war against Libya will not come out of any existing budgets from Government departments already squeezed by the cuts, cut - in some cases - to the bone, and then beyond.

No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.

Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!

Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!

This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.

Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.

Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.

Gadaffi! Duck!

Colonel Gadaffi (is it Gadaffi or Gaddafi? It looks wrong both ways) may not be clinically insane, as some cohorts of our media wish to portray him, but I wouldn't be surprised if, at times, he didn't feel more than a tad schizophrenic, particularly on the subject of whether or not he is a legitimate target for the Western military air strikes that are currently pounding Libya. The answer seems to change day by day, and to depend on who it is you are talking to. Sometimes, it changes by the hour.

The UN resolution which is sort of "authorising" all of this activity, as I understand it, speaks merely of safeguarding innocent civilians and ensuring that the cease fire is enforced, things like that. Say what you will, but it can't be denied that, by giving air support to the anti-Gadaffi faction, the West is currently, if anything, prolonging he conflict, rather than seeking to curtail itand bring it to a swift conclusion. And presumably the argument which links regime change to the safeguarding of civilian lives rests on the rather shaky premise that, without a strong dictator at the helm, Libya won't degenerate into a completely shambolic, anarchic mess, post-conflict, with factions fighting proxy wars and Al Quaida using it as a training ground, in exactly the same way as Iraq did after the fall of Saddam Husseuin. We know very little about these people we are helping, but seeing one of them on the news miming the act of putting a pistol to Gadaffi's head doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that they will be rivalling the ancient Athenians as a paragon of democracy any time soon. In these types of circumstances, the lives of innocent civilians are probably just as much at risk, if not more, as they would be if Gadaffi stayed on. All that is different is which set of innocent civilians gets fed through the shredder.

Have we learnt absolutely nothing since 2002?

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.

Happy as a Sandbag

It is not often that a story where the Government is involved has a happy ending, still less so when that story involves Iraq. However, I can report on one such occurrence, albeit one in which no credit at all is due to the Government in the matter.

I am referring of course to the rescue of three dogs and one cat from Baghdad and Umm Qasr, and their safe return to the UK. The animals in question were Sandbag, a dog, and his puppy, Christened “Dirtbag”, another dog called Royal, and a cat known as Hesco. All of these creatures had previously become attached to various UK units serving in Iraq, in each case becoming unofficial “mascots”.

When the units concerned had to withdraw, in each case, the question was asked, could they bring their mascots back to the UK with them, and in each case, the answer from the MOD was “no”.

Sandbag, in particular, became something of a cause celebre as a result of this. At one point, he even had his own Facebook page, and a petition was drawn up on the 10 Downing Street web site, asking for him to be repatriated. Needless to say, the answer was again, “no”.

This is actually a classic illustration of how badly Gordon Brown is being advised, and why he is going to go down at the next election to a crashing defeat that will make Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a peaceful canter in the park. Just pause to think for a moment what would have happened if BLAIR had still been Prime Minister. He would have had that dog crated up for air freight before you could say “Pedigree Chum” and he would have then invited the world’s assembled press onto the tarmac at Brize Norton to watch him give it a medal and hand it a bonio.

Anyway, be that as it may, thanks to a coalition of the willing (where have we heard that before) involving a South Wales Animal Welfare charity, Baghdad Cat Rescue (surely the single most thankless task in cat welfare, at least from its title) and The Blue Cross, funds have now been raised to bring Sandbag, Dirtbag, Royal and Hesco back to the UK, and they are now currently in quarantine for six months, but at least that is better than being turned out to wander the streets of Iraq's war-torn capital, which was the alternative.

So, Gordon, if you are reading this, which I very much doubt, you, or rather your advisors, might like to ponder on the fact that the British are a nation of animal lovers, and your opponent, Mr Cameron, has already said that he will allow a free vote on repealing fox-hunting if he gets in next year. Why not start asking him some awkward questions on his record regarding animal welfare, instead of continuing to miss this endless procession of open goals?

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.

UN - believable!

The Israeli Defence Force has reacted to the report issued by the UN, which blames them for the deaths of some civilians at UN sites within Palestine during the most recent Israeli incursion. The IDF says the report is “biased”.

Biased? I should bloody well cocoa! What did the IDF expect? If someone invaded my territory and killed innocent people by wanging off tank rounds left right and centre, I’d be a teensy bit biased, wouldn’t you? What did they expect? Probably something like:-

“Well, a few of our people got killed indiscriminately by Israeli tanks but hey, shit happens you know, and those Israeli soldiers, well, they probably had a rough childhood, so we shouldn’t rush to judgement, and then there’s always The Holocaust”

There you go, Israel, I’ve written it for you. Better now?

I’m sorry, but I don’t see why we should make allowances for war criminals. I would love to know how these people sleep at night. Not only content with getting away, literally , with murder, they are allowed on top of that to rubbish the findings of a UN report.

Well, Israel, why don’t you just resign from the UN if it’s that biased. After all, you already ignore most of its resolutions.

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.

We don't discuss individual cases

Israel's war crimes in Gaza are even now slipping into collective memory, overtaken by other news of more pressing urgency (at least in the view of the people who decide what the news agenda should be).

Plus, of course, the BBC has decided that it is now the arbiter of which disasters are worthy of publication and which are not to be aired under any circumstances, which is another collectively unconscious nail in the coffin of publicity.

I won't waste too many words on the BBC. Their decision not to show the Gaza appeal is so determinedly wrongheaded that I can only assume it is a result of their having been nobbled by either Mossad or the IDF, letting them know covertly that if the appeal went ahead, they would treat BBC journalists as combatants in future conflicts in the area.

I do, however, want to talk about the Israelis and their well-tried, practised methods for deflectivng criticism, whenever they have done something that they get picked up on, such as disabling a four year old girl who got caught in the white phosphorous shellfire.

The first thing they do is to say they have no knowledge of the incident, then they say they are investigating, and finally, if they are really pressed, they fall back on "we don't discuss individual cases". You can hear the pattern repeated over and over again, whenever a journalist tries to get beyond the self-justifying propaganda that usually starts such interviews.

Well, I would like to speak about a few individual cases. Just to be going on with. Just so they are not forgotten.

Such as:

Two brothers, aged five and seven, were killed at a school sheltering up to 1,800 local residents in Biet Lahiya, in northern Gaza. The mother of the children lost both her legs in the incident and another 13 people were injured. Christopher Gunness, a United Nations official, called on Israel to investigate the incident, which he said could constitute a "war crime."


The main United Nations compound inside Gaza City was set on fire as fierce fighting erupted when Israeli tanks advanced towards the Tel El Howa district.

UN sources said the blaze was started by Israeli shells containing white phosphorus, the controversial material used to create a smokescreen for advancing troops.
Eye witnesses said the tank advance led to thousands of civilians fleeing on foot, some seeking shelter in the nearby al-Quds hospital.

Under the rules of war, white phosphorus can only be used in open spaces away from large civilian populations.

There have been repeated allegations in Gaza that civilians have suffered disfiguring burn injuries after being hit by white phosphorus.

The UN compound housed the headquarters and logistical centre of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the group that feeds and supports about a million refugees inside Gaza.
Chris Gunness, spokesman for UNRWA, said three members of staff had been injured.
"Three white phosphorus shells have hit the compound and right now the pallets on which we are meant to deliver aid are on fire," he said.

"What more powerful symbol can there be than pallets used for aid being set alight by the fighting? With white phosphorus you cannot put out the flames with water. You need sand and right now there is too much fighting for our staff to get sand."

Or this, from Oxfam's Gaza Blog:


I met with Sameh Al Sawaferi who is 58 years old; he is a father for 11 and the biggest chicken and egg farmer in the Gaza Strip. Every day he sold 1,000 chickens and produced 120,000 packs of eggs, each pack containing 30 eggs. He supplied Oxfam with eggs just before the Israeli military offensive started.

The smell and sight as I went to greet him made me retch, 60,000 chickens were laying there, dead.

Israeli tanks had destroyed the entire farm including the chickens, those that were spared probably died later of dehydration and hunger. Sameh was told by the Israeli troops that occupied the area to leave so he could not tend to them.

“Along with many other people from the area, I was asked by the Israeli military to go into one room. Among us were people who had just been injured. We were told to leave immediately or face death. We asked if we could take the injured with us, the answer was no. When we returned, those whom we were forced to leave behind were dead, ” Sameh told me. I said he must report this to Oxfam partner the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who are documenting allegations of war crimes.

Sameh was only able to go back when the attacks ended, he returned to find 50 years of his hard work destroyed. ” I never imagined I would lose everything. The sight of my farm destroyed was devastating and then I entered my house only to see soldiers’ footprints, they had left their food and defecated around my home,” he said. As he was telling me this I looked up and saw the words, ‘Leave, or you will be killed’, scribbled on the wall.

More from the same source:-

But the worst thing I saw was just outside of Beit Lahia (North East of Gaza Strip) in the area of Atta Abed Rabo. I could not recognise Beit Lahia! Entire neighbourhoods have disappeared. In place of houses and street there is nothing. It’s like looking at fields of ruins. I cannot imagine how long it will take to rebuild. How much money will be needed.

The people of Atta Abed Rabo have suddenly lost everything. This community is composed of original residents of Gaza, who were here before the influx of refugees in 1948. They were the middle class and now even they are badly affected. I met a family who lost their house and the taxi cars that constituted their only source of income. When I met them they were sitting in front in the rubble where their house used to be, preparing tea on a small burner. They are not used to receiving aid, as they were among those donating to charities like Dr. Risek’s. They don’t understand what has happened, they are still in shock.

I don't see how anyone, faced with evidence like this, can view Israel's actions as being anything other than a massively disproportionate collective punishment of the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza for having the temerity to vote democratically for control by Hamas.

This is not to say that Hamas are blameless. They may well have cynically manipulated the situation for publicity purposes. Neither side in the conflict is capable of grasping (or wilfully ignores) the fact that two wrongs don't make a right. The conflict will never be resolved until the Israelis are forced to sit around a table and discuss the two-state solution.

But when it comes to individual cases, right now, where the blame, and the responsibility for paying for it to be put right, should currently be apportioned, is crystal clear.

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

The Orphans' Picnic

When I was little, we used to have a joke in our family about "Mummy, can I shoot you so that I can go to the orphans' picnic?"

It seems that the Israeli Defence Force has a similar disconnected approach to morality. Just let me get this right. They are going to stop bombing people in Gaza for three hours a day so that they can distribute aid and medical supplies, then three hours later they are going to start bombing again?

What fucking planet are these people on?

Also I would like to know what the rules of engagement are for the IDF when it comes to shooting at schools. It's a fairly devastating question, because either way, if they have been given the coordinates of the school and told NOT to fire at it, then they are in breach of their own rules of engagement, and if their rules of engagement allow them to shoot at schools, then presumably that implies the deliberate disregard of civilians and - is that not against the Geneva convention?

Back briefly to the issue of proportionality.

What is Israel hoping to achieve? Unless they occupy every square foot of Gaza, which they just don't have the military wherewithal to do, there will always be some neglected back lot somewhere where the jihadists will appear as if by magic, set up their rockets, and then shoot and scoot. There's also the issue of the relative totals of casualty figures. I know that war is not a game of cricket, and that in a sense, the five Israeli dead are just as 100% dead as each of the supposed 500 Palestinians is.

But these rocket attacks that are being advanced as the primary casus belli in this case. According to figures published by its own central bureau of statistics, road accident deaths in Israel 2000-2006 averaged at 7.1 people per 100,000. Given a population of 7.73 million, I make that 523 people. Just over 87 per year. According to stats published by The Israel Project, in the period June 2004 to December 2008, 17 Israeli citizens were killed by Qassam Rockets and Mortars fired into Israel by Hamas from Gaza.

Now, like I said, I freely accept that every one of those 17 innocent people is 100% dead and probably leaves grieving families. None of them deserved to die, probably, but the thing is, one of the things governments should do is look at the bigger picture. If Israel is concerned about the threat of the deaths of its citizens, on the face of it, they should be bombing their own ministry of transport this morning.

Which is what leads me to conclude that Israel knows as well as I do that there is no military solution to prevent the rocketing from Gaza, and no justification for the massively disproportionate response apart from to make certain members of the Israeli cabinet look good at election time. Plus, they are handing a massive propaganda victory to Hamas and their cohorts.

To the outside world, it looks like "collective punishment" rather than a military campaign. And every shot they fire, every Palestinian they kill, is creating another vendetta, another family who will be exploited by the loopy fundamentalist twisters of Islam, another kid who will end up wearing a suicide bomber's vest.

I do know, also, that there are decent, humane people in Israel who want the peaceful, two-state solution that seems to me to offer the only glimmer of hope in the whole sorry mess, and I do acknowledge that their voices get drowned out in the brash pronouncements of the likes of the IDF.

I don't deny Israel's right to exist, you can't wind time back to 1948, you have to start from where you are now. Which implies a two-state solution.

A small note on the principle of proportionality

I despair of the situation in Gaza.

The more I see of Tzipi (Zippy) Livni, the more I wish she had stayed on "Rainbow". And the more I see of Mark Regev, the more I wonder how he sleeps at night.

The problem with Israel and Gaza is that both sides are past masters of "whataboutery". "Whataboutery" is a concept invented (I think) by the blogger Slugger O'Toole. Basically, what happens is that one side says "What about these bombs you are dropping on us" and the other side says "Yeah, well what about all these rockets" and the first side says "Yeah, well what about all these settlers" and the other side says "Yeah, well what about all these suicide attacks" and so it goes, leapfrogging over each other til you get back to Biblical times and the Hittites smiting the Shemites.

Neither Hamas nor Israel is capable of understanding that two wrongs do not make a right. It would be easy to say that they are both equally to blame for the current situation in Gaza, except for one thing. Disproportionality.

To understand what I am getting at, consider the example of Northern Ireland. For twenty five years, until John Major of all people finally saw sense and opened up a dialogue that led eventually to a fragile peace, we here in England suffered in an undeclared war with the IRA. Now there were, undoubtedly, English atrocities during that time, or at least, if not atrocities, let's say dirty tricks, collusion, turning a blind eye, the occasional shoot to kill instead of due process of law, that sort of thing.

But never once, while the IRA was blowing up our pubs, our railway stations and our town centres, did we retaliate by sending in the RAF to strafe Belfast indiscriminately, and then when the world howled in protest, say "well, it's their own fault, there are terrorists all mixed up with civilians and I'm damned if we can tell them apart".

Yet this is exactly what Israel is getting away with in Gaza. True, Hamas probably do exploit the situation, because they know that every time the Israelis cock up and hit a school instead of a rocket launcher, it's another notch on the propaganda ratchet. In that respect, Hamas are guilty of using the people who elected (yes, elected, remember) them into government, as pawns in a cynical propaganda campaign. But Israel's response is so disproportionate as to be breathtaking in its arrogance. The other night on the news, Tzipi Livni was saying that Hamas hide their rockets in amongst civilians because "they don't care if they use their own people as human shields" - she omitted the crucial four words "and neither do we".

Israel justifies its actions because of a supposed threat to its existence, from a few zealots with clapped out rockets made from old gas pipes and shit like that, in a state where Israel has created, in effect the world's biggest concentration camp, and can turn off the taps of aid, food and trade, whenever it likes. A state whose inhabitants ride about on donkeys while Israel has tanks and (probably) nuclear weapons.

No, Israel is doing this just because it can. They will never achieve a "military" solution, because even if they destroy Hamas they will have created a whole new generation of potential jihad martyrs in doing so, and if Hamas goes, something even worse will take its place. Israel knows this, they are not stupid. It's all to do with posturing and seeming "strong", after the drubbing they got in Lebanon the other year.

So, if a single rocket falls on Israeli soil, then revenge is visited tenfold on the Palestinians, or even an hundredfold. Is this ever going to break the cycle of whataboutery? What do you think.

And of course, if you dare to criticise them, they play their trump card. Any criticism of Israel is presented as being anti semitic, and before you know where you are, you are a holocaust denier! The irony that they are now doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to six million European Jews in 1941-45 is completely lost on them.

And we are going to pick up the bill, apparently. When the IDF eventually deign to let the aid in, it will be the British taxpayer, yes the same British taxpayers who are losing their jobs in droves and shouldering the burden of rescuing the failed and profligate banks, who will be paying seven million pounds to fund this.

Bollocks! Israel is a rich country and the least, the very least, that we should demand is that they should pay to clear up their own mess. So I look forward to hearing that Broon has frozen all Israeli assets in the UK and deducted seven million pounds from them.

RIP Rachel Correy, by the way. I know her name gets up the noses of Zionists, so it will do them no harm to know she is remembered.

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.