'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.

Britain going rudderless to the chasm

Leadership is hard to define. But it’s easy to recognise when you see it. And easy to spot when it’s missing.

Take Winston Churchill pronouncing perhaps the four most important words of his career: ‘We shall never surrender’. They sent a shiver up the spine of my mother when she heard them in 1940.

‘We were alone against the Nazis,' she told me. 'We knew a great many people near the top of government wanted to open peace talks. Churchill’s words told us the fight would go on.’

My mother never voted for Churchill in her life. But she recognised this act of leadership for what it was.

A counter-example? George W. Bush paralysed in a classroom of children when told his country was under attack on 9/11. And then taking longer to get to ground zero in New York than it took Bill Clinton, though Clinton had been in Australia at the time of the attack and there was a ban on international flights into the US for several days afterwards.

No wonder Dubya struck that pose on the deck of an aircraft carrier, under a  ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, after US troops had brought down Saddam Hussein. Having failed to show leadership when called on to do so, he needed to ape it later to try to make up.

Britain today is on the brink of the most serious step since watching the breakup of its Empire in the 40s and 50s. The EU has given the country access to a huge free trade area since 1973, and with that access has come investment, trade and jobs. In less than nine months, it is due to leave and there is still no clear vision of what future it will face.

The uncertainty is itself a factor in the country’s economy. Companies, with no indication of how Brexit will look, are beginning to plan for its being abrupt and violent – a hard Brexit where Britain leaves with no agreement in place for continuing trade with the EU or, indeed, with other countries. Investment plans are going on hold or even reversed, with plans to transfer production to other countries.

The impact on jobs and the economy generally is likely to be massive.

Why are we in this position? Because Theresa May as Prime Minister, though she claims to preside over a Cabinet, is in fact doing little more than refereeing a constant battle between a group of warring ministers. Some seem more than ready to accept a hard Brexit, if only as a way to break completely from EU regulation, whatever the cost. Others favour different levels of ‘soft Brexit’ where Britain continues to accept some parts of EU regulation in return for some of the benefits.

May keeps her position unclear, ostensibly because she doesn’t want to reveal her hand during negotiations, though most of us suspect that she actually has no definite position. She’s trying to hold the ring between diametrically opposed contestants, and therefore refuses to pick a side of the argument.

All she claims to want is to keep as many as possible of the benefits of EU membership, such an open border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland (which is remaining in the EU) and ‘frictionless trade’ with the EU. In return, she wants to accept little or no regulation by the EU.

It’s not surprising she feels this way. To accept almost any degree of EU regulation might be regarded as remaining the EU ‘by stealth’ and a ‘betrayal of the will of the people’ expressed in the referendum vote for Brexit. On the other hand, the benefits of membership are vital. She’s trying to square a circle, trying to take benefits without obligations, a position the EU has already rejected. They claim, correctly, it’s an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it.

May: she may be doing her best but no one knows what it is.
So it's not good enough.
No leader she

Whatever May’s approach is, leadership it ain’t.

Opposite her is Jeremy Corbyn, leading the Labour Party. His position is equally difficult. There is a trend in the Labour Party, mostly in its leftmost reaches (from which, as it happens, Corbyn emerged) that opposes EU membership. It’s an odd tendency that seems never to wonder why it ends up sharing platforms with the far right. If you’re agreeing with people with whom you have nothing in common, it’s worth asking whether you might have gone wrong somewhere.

If you have odd bedfellows, it might be because you’re in the wrong bed.

But there are other more practical problems emerging for Brexiters of the left. Most notably, they’re in a minority in the Labour Party.

Even Corbyn’s biggest trade union backer, Unite, is now questioning whether Brexit really is good for its members’ health. They can see the jobs going, along with the workers’ rights the EU imposed on the essentially right-wing British regime. They’re beginning to demand that Corbyn endorse an explicit pro-EU stance.

This is an embarrassment to Corbyn, who needs Unite support but has been as assiduous as May in avoiding any clear position on Brexit. He’s caught between his roots in left-wing Brexitism and the unpleasant realisation that the majority of Labour, and even of his fan base, increasingly backs staying in the EU.

Corbyn with his pal McCluskey of the Unite Trade Union
But Unite members are beginning to ask for more from Corbyn.
He's not giving it. No leader he

So he’s as paralysed as May. Unable to take a stand on Brexit. Unable to lead his party or nation either towards a hard or soft Brexit, or towards remaining in the EU.

Again, I say, whatever that is, it ain’t leadership.

The worst of it is that a government as weak as May’s could fall. Rumours reach me that we should prepare for an election in October. That might leave Corbyn in number 10, with just five months to Brexit day and everything to negotiate. He might, at last, be forced to take a position.

I have friends who claim he would choose to stay in the EU rather than accept a hard Brexit. That would be a courageous position to take: he too would be assailed by Leavers high and low accusing him of betraying the will of the people. Would he really do that? It might be easier, politically, just to claim it wasn’t his fault that the Brexit was hard, and that he had no choice but to accept it.

That would be followership, of course, not leadership. But if nine months out, he still can’t even say that remaining in the EU might be an option, how can we be sure that he would just weeks before the fatal day?

Either way, what’s certain, is that Britain stands on the brink of a historic decision. And in neither of the parties likely to be in government to make it do we see any sign of leadership on the question. Just when the country needs it more than usual.

Not a prospect to inspire much confidence.

Obama Trumped

The Donald has torn up the Iran nuclear arms agreement. On the basis that it was a rotten deal and shamefully one-sided. He’s probably right on the second point: it has led to Iran dropping its military nuclear programme, but few of the promised economic benefits in the way of foreign investment into Iran have materialised.

But maybe Trump didn’t mean that the deal was one-sided against Iran.

The worry seems to be that Iran has never abandoned a policy of extending its influence throughout the region, by manipulating puppet governments and backing deeply unpleasant groups. In particular, Iran’s friend Hezbollah has shown itself perfectly ready to take terrorist action or use violence generally to advance its political agenda.

What’s curious, though, is that it’s the states of the region most inclined to use such violence who are leading the charge against the Iran deal.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, seems intent on pummelling Yemen back into the Stone Age, as it uses its military to starve the Yemeni people and leave it victim to disease as well as injuries without the means to fight them. It also regularly kills large numbers of civilians – for instance, at weddings or funerals – always it claims unintentionally, which means the Saudis are either lying and therefore committing war crimes, or telling the truth and therefore so utterly inept that they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a weapon.

Saudi Arabia teaching Yemen to appreciate peace

Israel, too, has long established the principle of a hundred eyes for an eye, reacting to any attack on its people by one tens of times more powerful and more murderous. It also regularly intervenes militarily in Syria, in just the same way as Iran or Russia does, with the same callous indifference to the wellbeing – or even survival – of the citizens or the hopes for peace.

But these two nations proclaim their commitment to ending terrorism as their reason for wanting the nuclear deal with Iran ended.

Meanwhile, in the greatest irony of all, it is the United States itself that has done most to ensure the growing power of Iran across the Middle East. It was Dubya Bush, after all, slavishly supported by Tony Blair, then British Prime Minister, who invaded Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a deeply unpleasant character and no one deserved to overthrown more than he did, but he was also deeply hostile to Iran. Why, he even fought an eight-year war against his neighbour.

His overthrow left a power-vacuum in Iraq into which flowed the Shia groups who, precisely because they represented the majority of the people, he had always oppressed and prevented holding power. They were enthusiastic supporters of Iran, ruled by fellow Shiites. So in place of Saddam, we now have a puppet-government of Iran’s holding sway over Iraq and its oil.

The West itself set the trap in which it was then caught.

And it looks as though Trump wants to do exactly the same thing again. The Iran nuclear deal was by no means perfect, but it was the only deal we had. Whatever Benyamin Netanyahu of Israel may say, all the evidence points to a huge reduction in Iran’s nuclear programme. In addition, we now have observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency regularly checking Iran’s installations, which we didn’t have before. But just as the UN inspectors were disbelieved when they reported that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, before the Iraq invasion whose declared goal was to deprive him of them, so Trump refuses to believe the IAEA inspectors today.

What is certain is that if the agreement fails, Iran will return to preparing and stockpiling nuclear weapons. The reformist government may well fall and be replaced by something far less accommodating. Iran may turn from an uncertain partner in peace into an enemy all the more dangerous for thinking itself threatened.

Like Dubya and Trump before him, but at far greater scale, Trump is creating precisely the monster he claims to be acting against.

An ignorant man turns his own weapons against himself. Sadly, he turns them against the rest of us too. Something for which we have to thank the equally deluded minority of US voters who thought they would somehow benefit from putting him in a position to do the damage.

Just as with Brexit, if your answer is Trump, you’re asking the wrong question.

Mission accomplished: déjà vu

It’s always a little sad to see someone who really can’t be expected to know better, take credit for completing a job when they’ve barely even started. Worse still, they may have started down the wrong route. A child, say, who carefully paints all the parts of his new model before assembling it, only to find they no longer fit together afterwards.

Or the US President who claims to have achieved his objective when he has achieved nothing – or, worse still, achieved the opposite of his intent.

Dubya in 2003

That was my first thought when I heard that Donald Trump had claimed ‘mission accomplished’ following the US-French-British missile strikes on Syria. It was exactly the same claim as made by Dubya Bush back in 2003, giving me a thoroughly dire sense of déjà vu. That followed the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Dubya clearly felt he’d achieved a major success, a view that looks jaded fifteen years on, with fighting still raging in the region and the only winners in Iraq being the West’s great bogeyman, Iran.

That didn’t stop Trump making the same claim for his missile strikes. And I suppose he was right in the most limited possible sense: he gave the world notice of his intention to use missiles against Syria, and he has indeed used missiles against Syria. If that was the extent of his mission – to demonstrate the military power at his disposal – then I suppose the mission was indeed accomplished.

Donald Trump in 2018

One might imagine, however, that such an action ought to deliver more than that, however. More than allow Trump a feel-good macho glow (Macron of France, too, I suppose, though whether May enjoys machismo it’s hard to say – but then, little surprises me about her any more). Generally, one would expect the use of massive military force to advance some cause or another, beyond the purely personal. 

Topple President Assad, maybe? 

End the suffering of Syrian civilians after seven years of civil war? 

At least ensure that chemical weapons would not be used against them again?

Maybe that last goal may be achieved, though I think it would take a brave man to assert it. We shall see. And even if it, it’s unclear to me that being killed or crippled is that much less unpleasant by artillery fire than by chemical weapons.

As for overthrowing Assad or ending the war, it would take a high degree of naivety to believe that the missile strikes will have achieved that much. Or even that bringing Assad down, however desirable in itself, would do any more in Syria’s current crisis than the equally attractive overthrow of Saddam did in Iraq.

Perhaps there’s one negative benefit the strikes have produced: they seem not to have destroyed any Russian equipment or inflicted any Russian casualties. That suggests that we may have avoided a third world war for now.

No. It’s hard to believe that these strikes have done anything very much, except persuade people in the west that, because something had to be done about the chemical attacks, it was legitimate to just about anything, which is what has now been done.

That may have made Trump, Macron and May feel better about themselves. Which I suppose is a benefit of sorts. Though they’re unlikely to have done anything for the Syrians or, indeed, for anyone in the West.

Still, Mission accomplished. Again. In some sense of the expression.

Refugee crisis: if only we helped as much to make peace as to make war...

Have you seen the film Charlie Wilson’s War? 

It may not be Aaron Sorkin’s best screenplay, but his work’s so good that even a minor piece is worth more than what most others produce.  

Based on historical events, by the end we see Charlie Wilson, a far from pure Democratic Congressman from Texas, managing to bargain up the minimal support the US was prepared to give the mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan, into a billion-dollar subvention providing, among other things, the missiles they could use to bring down Russian assault helicopters. Wilson had, in effect, engineered a victory for the anti-Soviet forces.

Then, however, he goes in search of a mere million to help build a school and is unable to win a hearing anywhere. For war, he could find money. For help in peacetime, none.

That’s interesting, given that within the mujahideen the US backed, were the Taliban who eventually seized control of Afghanistan, with lamentable results for the West. As we all know. A million for a school? Chickenfeed. A billion for weapons? Impressive but hardly breathtaking. How about nearly a trillion dollars spent by the US fighting its erstwhile Afghan allies up to the end of last year?

We too, in Britain, share this Western love of astronomic expenditure on war. The war in Iraq cost Britain £8.4 billion. That’s trivial compared to the US Defense Department’s estimates of its own direct expenditure of $757 billion, and Brown University’s estimate of total costs at $1.1 trillion, but it’s still a massive expenditure for a smaller country less used to making that kind of military outlay.

Tony Blair, the chief figure responsible for Britain’s involvement in that war as the Prime Minister of the day, still maintains it was worth fighting. The world, he has always claimed, is better without Saddam Hussein. That’s true enough – as long as what replaced him was an improvement.

We live in perpetual fear of the next terror attack in the West. But in neither Britain nor the US has anyone died in a terror attack so far in 2015 (unless you count US gun crime). In contrast, in Iraq there have been 3500 deaths already.

Far more serious still, the election of a government representing the majority of the population – a good thing – has led to the arrival in power of Shiite leaders and the exclusion to the point of alienation of the former rulers, Sunnis – not such a good thing. That in turn has been a fertile breeding ground for ISIS, which now controls a large part of Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Tony Blair may be right that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, but his replacement by a failing state subject to constant terrorism, and above all the rise of ISIS, undo any good that came from it.

This is becoming increasingly critical today in Europe, as refugees driven from the region by ISIS atrocities begin to flood our borders. We’ve actually been fortunate not to have experienced the problem in its full intensity before: Lebanon, for example, with 4 million inhabitants has already taken a million refugees.

Refugees piling into trains in Hungary, aiming for Germany
What our £8.4bn – and the US trillion – bought us

Out £8.4 billion bought us a growing refugee problem. In an increasingly xenophobic country, that’s a terrible difficulty for a right wing government that isn’t particularly friendly towards immigration to start with, but likes to think of itself as Christian. In the face of a humanitarian catastrophe, clearly calling for a Good Samaritan response from anyone claiming to share the values of Jesus, David Cameron’s government is tearing around in panic trying to make it more difficult for migrants to reach the country.

This is in the face of a few thousand trying to reach Britain, compared to the 800,000, now expected to reach a million, forecast to be making for Germany.

The government claims to be doing more than one might think. It points to 5000 Syrians given asylum in this country, but fails to state that a great many of them were already here and were simply unable to return to their own country. In other words, they were students or tourists or businessmen – reasonably well off and probably able to cope with their exile. These were not the desperate individuals clinging to inflatables for the tricky crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands.

In one respect, though, the British government has adopted an intelligent policy: it feels the long-term solution lies in helping the home countries of the refugees to improve conditions, so that fewer leave in the first place. That’s certainly the best approach. However, when the government points to its investment of nearly £900 million over the next four years or Syria, one can’t help feeling it’s a little low compared to the £8.4 billion spent on war.

Equally, though the government is trying to make up for its passivity so far over the refugee flows by agreeing to take a few thousand from the camps inside Syria, that seems inadequate given that over 3 million have already left the country.

Isn’t that Charlie Wilson’s War again? So much to spend on war. So little on help.

Which reminds me of Aldous Huxley: ”that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

As a public service: unveiling a pattern that the bright young things seem to have missed

I’m going to explain this very carefully and slowly, so even the bright young things at the Pentagon and the Foreign Office can get it.

Iran is a really, really dangerous country. So dangerous, in fact, that we had to make sure that it didn’t get a democratically elected leader. When it tried with Mohammad Mosaddegh, back in the 50s (yep, this story goes that far back, at least), we in the West overthrew him.

So Iran got the Shah, and that was fine and dandy until in 1979 he got overthrown in turn and replaced by the awful Ayatollahs. Who were even worse than Mossadegh.

In our consternation, we turned for help to our good friend Saddam Hussein (yep, he was a good friend then), who was really running a fairly decent dictatorship in Iraq, only torturing opponents; he would later demonstrate moderation by not using poison gas on too many civilians.

We gave him lots of nice weapons to fight Iran with, which he did for eight years. At the end of that time, since it was clear that neither side was actually going to win, they decided to call it a scoreless draw and went home.

Tasteful tribute to the war dead in Iran

But then Saddam had a lot of nice American toys to play with and a bit of a taste for war (just like the Americans, as it happens. And the Brits. And the French. And the Israelis. Most of the good guys, in fact). He was pretty sure he could count on his good friends, so he invaded Kuwait.

Sadly, for some in the US this was crossing a bit of a line. So we went to war against him. We got him out of Kuwait, but not out of power. We needed something else

That wasn’t a problem. We invented some stuff about weapons of mass destruction, and to back up our point, we rediscovered the poison gassing of his civilians, and decided that maybe it wasn’t that acceptable after all. We got Tony Blair to go on TV and look honest while spinning lies, and back we went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Sadly, with him gone, we found Al Qaida trying to take power in iraq.

Another quick rethink was in order. We decided to back a government in Baghdad backed by Iranians (remember them?) and between us and our new friends, the friends of Iran, we saw Al Qaida out of the picture.

But we barely had time to draw breath before ISIS, even worse than Al Qaida, were out there torturing and beheading thousands of civilians to say nothing – and this is really serious – even a handful of Western citizens. So who did we turn to?

Why, we called on Al Qaida for help. Of course. We had some Al Qaida guys call some ISIS guys they knew to see if they could perhaps save Peter Kassig, an American hostage, and stop being really beastly any more, at least to Westerners.

Sadly, we cocked up. We didn’t tell the Jordanians that the Al Qaida guy in Jordan was a friend, unlike the Al Qaida guys who were enemies, so they arrested him and he’s locked up to this day. ISIS duly murdered Peter Kassig and things went on getting worse.

Now there is in all these events something that we students of matters historical like to call a “pattern”. In case those bright young things mentioned above are struggling to grasp it, I’ll spell it out.

It works like this. Every time we find an enemy, we knock him off his perch. Unfortunately, he’s usually replaced by someone even worse. To deal with that character, we often have to turn to the very people we were fighting against before.

Now it’s hard to imagine anyone much worse than ISIS. They seem pretty much the pits. But we shouldn’t underestimate Western ingenuity. If we really set our minds to it, we can probably conjure up something still more horrific than ISIS, and then have to turn to ISIS for help to deal with it.

Given their track record to date, would anyone doubt their ability to pull the trick off? And make us nostalgic for ISIS? As we seem to have been forced to become for Al Qaida? For Iran? Even for Saddam Hussein in his time?

If only we’d thought of that before ousting Mossadegh.

Isis and the mission of the unaccomplished

There’s so much to learn from Iraq. In particular, the truth of the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I’m prepared to go out on a limb here, and say that I’m prepared, for the purposes of argument at least, to give Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt. I’m prepared to allow that he might actually have been sincere in believing that Saddam Hussein was “a profoundly wicked, I would say almost psychopathic, man” and that, in consequence, he was right to do what he could to bring him down.

Saddam. A vile dictator. Bringing him down was a great idea
if only what followed hadn't been still worse

Now, however, even Blair admits that overthrowing Saddam Hussein may have contributed to the situation today. On 23 June, he told the Independent, “of course the Iraq of 2014 bears, in part, the imprint of the removal of Saddam Hussein 11 years ago. To say otherwise, as a recent editorial in this newspaper implies that I do, would be absurd.”

Indeed. Bringing down a vile dictator sounds like a fine plan, but you have to be sure that you’re going to replace him with something better. Whereas the intervention of 2003 has inflicted on the region, and on the world, something far worse. The massacres, the enslavements, that expulsions of innocent people by Isis give the measure of the utter barbarity of that movement. And yet, perhaps on Stalin’s principle that a single death is a tragedy and a million merely a statistic, the gruesome beheading of Jim Foley has brought it home far more powerfully still.

Jim Foley reported on horrors which have now claimed him
A single murder can be more blood curdling than a massacre

Why, it even dragged the British Prime Minister back from holiday. For the second time. On the first occasion, he authorised limited British military action in Iraq. but then shot off again as quickly as he could. It’s possible that his family stop him reading the papers or watching TV while he’s away (nothing about David Cameron suggests he regards being Prime Minister as a full-time occupation), because on his return it seems the security services had to make him watch the video of Foley’s death. Apparently to make him understand the gravity of the situation.

I imagine quite a few people had grasped how serious it was even without watching the video (I, for instance, feel no inclination to watch it). But perhaps Cameron’s just not that quick on the uptake.

A man who certainly isn’t quick is George Dubya Bush. It probably hasn’t occurred to him yet that there’s trouble in the same Iraq that he invaded. He may indeed not know that there’s trouble at all. Let’s not forget that he was unforgivably slow in his response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, although he was on holiday (yes, there’s a pattern here) in Texas, the state next door.

He probably still believes that he accomplished his mission in Iraq, as he proclaimed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. He may not have grasped that the murder of one of his compatriots, Foley, is a direct consequence of the mission he botched, with Blair’s faithful support. Less of a mission accomplished than a mission bungled by the unaccomplished.

Just how bungled is shown by what the West is reduced to hoping for these days.

The US heavily armed the Iraqi army it set up to replace Saddam’s. As a result, Isis has been able to seize enough weapons to arm five divisions, when that army turned tail and bolted from its advancing enemy. Now we have to hope that the Iraqi military can learn some effectiveness from the Iranian officers who are trying to get it back into some semblance of order.

And yet one of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq was to protect us from the still greater threat of Iran.

Meanwhile, Isis continues to make serious advances in Syria, using the US weapons it captured in Iraq. The country’s biggest city, Aleppo, is in danger of falling to its militants. The only hope of stopping them? The army of Bashar al-Assad, the man Blair still feels we ought to have bombed last year.

We may well have gone into Iraq with excellent intentions. But what a mess we made. We’ve woken a far worse, far deadlier, far more monstrous enemy. We’ve put weapons in his hands. And now we have to rely on highly unsavoury regimes to help us defeat him.

Yep. Good intentions. They take you straight to hell.

Who's the rebel, who's the democrat, who's the bloodthirsty dictator? Middle East politics for beginners

Sit up at the back of the class there. Pay attention. Stop texting your friends or chatting to your neighbour. 

Today we’re tackling the problem of Western policy towards the Middle East, and it’s complicated, so follow carefully. There will be a test at the end.

Start by learning two principles that will help follow the rest.

First of all, democracy’s a delicate machine, and like all machines, it needs regular oiling. So anyone with oil is a friend. Careful, though: we’re not that fond of Russia. Don't worry. Russia’s more about gas than oil, so it’s a bit of a toss-up whether we need to like them in the first place.

Secondly, Israel’s a friend and Iran’s a demon. 

Israel’s a great democracy, like us. There may be people who don’t agree, but they’re in places you’ve barely heard of and will never go to, like Ramallah or Gaza City. The people you get to vote for all agree that Israel’s a good, peace-loving friend, and they can’t all be wrong, can they?

As for Iran, well, they’ve been beastly to the West on repeated occasions. In particular, they took a load of Western diplomats hostage in a thoroughly reprehensible way. And they may or may not be building a nuclear weapon, which makes them really worrying. We can’t have nuclear powers in the Middle East. Well, apart from israel of course, but see above.

Because Iran’s so nasty, we were keen to help Iraq under its fine leader of the time, Saddam Hussein, when it went to war against its neighbour. But then, sadly, Saddam thought he could invade Kuwait. Now that’s a country with lots of oil, and so at least as good a friend as Iraq (which also has oil). So we invaded right back, with a view to bringing ex-friend Saddam down.

But then we didn’t. The Russians didn’t like the idea, and this was one of those occasions when we thought we ought to treat that gassy lot as friends. So we left Saddam alone.

Next, though, he did something unforgivable. He didn’t stop a bunch of Saudis attacking the United States on 9/11. It’s true that he didn’t have anything to do with the terrorists, but Saudi Arabia has lots and LOTS of oil, so we couldn’t pick on them; besides, we had unfinished business with Saddam, so this seemed like a good opportunity. If you can’t follow the logic, don’t worry. Nor can anyone less.

The second war on Iraq was an unmitigated success. Where the people of Iraq used to live in fear under a bloodthirsty dictator, now they live in fear under a terrorist-riven nominal democracy. Also it has a government run by friends of Iran. Which, it seems, is just fine. Again, it may damage your health to try to follow the logic here (or, indeed, try to find any).

Next a rebellion started against another bloodthirsty dictatorship: that of President Assad in the country next door, Syria. Now Syria doesn’t have any oil, so we can safely line up against its government. On the other hand, it doesn’t have any oil, so why would we bother? Even so, the West decided the trick would be to rain a few missiles down on them, just to show that democratic values mean something.

That would have got up Russia’s nose again, because Assad is their bloodthirsty dictator, but this was another of the occasions when the West felt that we could safely dislike the Russians.

In the end the West didn’t do it, because a number of people wondered whether missiles were quite precise enough to hit only the bad guys and leave the good guys entirely unharmed (to say nothing of ordinary unaligned civilians, at least 100,000 of whom died in Iraq). And being precise is particularly key in Syria, if only because it turns out that the rebel side isn’t composed entirely of good guys. In fact rather a lot of them are part of the very movement that attacked the US on 9/11.

ISIS. Heroic champions of democracy resisting tyranny in Syria
Or do I mean vile terrorist opponents of democracy in Iraq?

Which leads to the latest act (certainly not the last act) of this exciting drama. Because one of those rebel groups is ISIS. We’re told that stands for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which is worrying if only because it suggests that they don’t know how to spell ‘Levant’. They’ve started taking over cities in Iraq, even though there are only 7000 of them. It turns out that the armed forces and police of the shiny Western-backed democratic government have been melting away in front of them.

As a result, the US is considering taking military action in Iraq again. They might bomb ISIS. And, because they like to be consistent, they might bomb them in Syria too. So instead of bombing Assad and the Syrian regime, they might end up bombing the rebels against him. Well, some of them anyway. Assuming they can tell one lot from the others.

Meanwhile, because ISIS is fighting for Sunni Islam against the Shias in power in Iraq – well, in office in Iraq – Shiite Iran is keen on blocking them too. They’re offering help to the government.

So the US and Iran could end up on the same side.

Isn’t that fun?

OK, no more enjoying the irony. Time to take the test below.



Middle East Crisis Test

Choose the option that most closely describes the way things are.

1. The West is:

• for Iraq and against Iran
• for Iran and against Iraq
• against Iraq and Iran
• all of the above

2. The West is:

• against Syria’s President Assad
• against some of the rebels against President Assad
• against Assad’s friends in Iran
• on the same side as Assad’s friends in Iran
• all of the above

3. The rebels fighting the Syrian government are:

• heroes taking on a repressive sectarian regime
• people to back because they are the enemies of Iran
• terrorists representing the worst threat the West faces today
• fundamentalists we ought to help Assad crush
• all of the above

4. The rebels fighting the Iraqi government are:

• heroes taking on a repressive sectarian regime
• people to back because they are the enemies of Iran
• terrorists representing the worst threat the West faces today
• exactly the same people as in question 3

5. The Western intervention in Iraq has been

• a glowing success
• an unmitigated disaster
• an incoherent blundering action with no clear goals or exit strategy
• exactly what happens when you think military force can solve civilian problems

6. Faced with the prospect of Western intervention in Syria, your reaction is:

• it would be a magnificent act backing democracy against dictatorship
• it would turn out as incoherent and damaging as it was in Iraq
• who the hell would we back?

If you chose the final option to all six questions, you have grasped Western strategy for the Middle East, in all its coherence and clarity. You might consider pursuing a career as a highly-paid policy adviser on the region.

Sarin in Syria and toxic reactions

So France and Britain have unearthed evidence that the Syrian government has used the nerve agent Sarin against its own people.

That’s a shameful act, and it’s understandable that for the US as well as the French and British governments, it represents a red line they’ve said they won’t let the Assad regime cross. So their accusations, coming on top of the successful British and French move to lift the EU arms embargo on Syria, suggest there’s a head of steam building up to intervene against Assad. At the very least, the governments seem intent on supplying weapons to the rebels.

What’s impressive, at first glance at least, is that they’ve gone to the trouble to build up some evidence for their view before acting on it. The problem is they’re ignoring rather a lot of other evidence.

The first is that Western intelligence agencies don’t have a terribly good track record on information about inhumane weapons in the Middle East. We went down that road over Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and it didn’t lead anywhere we’d want to go again.

Qusair. Now recaptured by government forces.
Is this somewhere we really want to get sucked into?

The Iraq experience rather makes my second reason for reticence over renewed Western intervention in the region. All these Arab springs, they’ve had mixed results. Probably the one that has done best was Tunisia, and even there there’s plenty to question, not least the current trial of feminist activists. But whatever Tunisia achieved, it managed without Western involvement. On the other hand, where we have stuck our oar in, things have often gone pretty badly. 

In Libya the results have been at best patchy. And in Iraq, they were disastrous: at huge cost, above all in Iraqi lives, we’ve converted that country into a client state of Iran, the nation the West most loves to hate in that part of the world. Which presumably wasn’t the aim of the exercise.

It looks as though we could end up doing the same thing in Syria, by putting entirely the wrong people in power. Al Qaida elements are increasingly dominating the rebels. Certainly, we’d be supplying arms to the nice guys, but how could we prevent them sliding into the hands of the bad guys afterwards?

It’s hard to see how anyone can possibly still believe that getting involved in warfare around the Middle East will do the West the slightest good. That our governments still indulge that fallacy can only be a tribute to the power of their faith, or at least its capacity to overwhelm any aptitude they may have had for sober policy-making.

The faith in British and French government circles may not move mountains but it can shift arms and involve us in another debacle. Which has already started: the first, and dramatic, consequence of the ending of the EU arms embargo is that Russia has provided Assad with advanced anti-aircraft missiles. Emboldened, the regime has since recaptures Qusair, for a long time a major rebel stronghold. And the conflict now has the potential to become a proxy war between Russia and the West.

That the British government should be that wilfully blind is perhaps understandable: Britain has previous form on blundering into Middle East wars on misleading or even faked evidence. But the French? They had the good sense to stand out against the Iraq disaster. They got that one right, so why are they out there beating the drum with Britain this time? Such a disappointment, that Hollande fellow.

The British electorate is way ahead of its government in the good sense stakes. Polls suggest that three quarters are apparently opposed to our arming the rebels. Sadly, however, I remember the biggest ever demonstration in British history: two million people opposing intervention in Iraq. Blair took us in anyway.

We seem to be standing on a dangerous slope we could slip down to results as toxic as any nerve agent being used in Syria.  That would put us in danger of proving Hegel right: ‘What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.’

We fail to learn from our errors and condemn ourselves to repeating them. The saddest consequence is that the price will be paid first by the Syrian population, and then by our own.

The sword-waving politicians responsible will merely wipe the blood from their hands, write best-selling memoirs and make a fortune on the speaker circuit.

Running like George Galloway

Just back from a run. I find it concentrates the mind, and given how it knackers the legs, what it tends to concentrate the mind on is running.

Thinking about running led to my thinking about the word itself. For instance, in the expression ‘running for office’. Now originally that was the US term, but it’s now pretty standard in Britain too, even though traditionally we tend to ‘stand’ for office. Much more decorous, don’t you know. Much more the well-tailored blazer instead of the track suit. Much better if you want to keep pretending that the voters come looking for you and demand you take office, without your having to pursue them and woo their support.

In turn that got me thinking about Bradford West. For any of you who might not be following the details of minor English electoral battles, what occurred was a by-election caused by the retirement of a highly popular Member of Parliament, in a constituency with 38% Moslem voters, held by Labour since 1974.

Unlike some of our cities which have managed to crawl out of the hole into which the loss of their earlier prosperity had hurled them — one might mention Glasgow or Liverpool — Bradford seems to be stuck in a rut of high unemployment and continuing decline, symbolised by the hole in its centre — in its heart, one might say — where a new shopping mall was due to be built but now isn’t.

Its misfortunes are laid by many at the door of the system known as ‘Bradree’. Despite how it sounds, it’s not linked to ‘Bradford’ linguistically, though it is in everyday life. It’s an Urdu word for brotherhood or family and has come to mean a local government regime where everything depends on your own and your connections’ having roots in the Kashmiri town of Mirpur. 

Into this mix steps George Galloway. Back in 1987, he won the Glasgow Hillhead constituency for Labour, unseating Roy Jenkins who had won it in a much-hyped victory for the then Social Democratic Party.

Galloway quickly made a name for himself as a maverick and a fine, daring speaker in often unpopular causes. When US and British troops were engaged in Iraq, he called on Arab nations to come to the rescue of their Arab brothers in that sad nation, even though it was still led at the time by Saddam Hussein.

Excluded from the Labour Party, he agreed to give up his Glasgow seat. But, having already claimed a major scalp in beating Roy Jenkins, in 2005 he went on to take Oona King’s seat in Bethnal Green and Bow.

Despite being suspended from parliament for bringing the institution into disrepute, and failing to find a constituency in the general election of 2010, now he’s won another famous victory, taking the Bradford West seat from Labour, and by a handsome majority of 10,000 votes.

As I pounded on with my run, it occurred to me that Galloway is a man who certainly runs for office rather than merely standing. He’s shown again and again how at ease he is with quick footwork. He did it when, called to testify to a US Senate committee on money he might have made from Iraqi oil, he accused them of putting up the ‘mother of all smokescreens’; he did it again on Friday morning when, despite being no Moslem himself, he called for ‘All praise to Allah’ following his win, a form of words unlikely to be badly received by his most active supporters, many of whom are Moslem.

Unsuccessfully opposing him for Labour in the by-election had been Imrain Hussain, deputy leader of Bradford Council, and a man who certainly traces his lineage back to Mirpur. He’s a barrister and therefore no doubt a gentleman, much more used to wielding the stiletto of the law than the bludgeon of the political hustings. He declined even to cross swords with Galloway by engaging him in public debate.

Yes, I think Hussain stood for office while Galloway ran. And Galloway left his opponent standing.

All that was going through my mind as I forced myself on to another kilometre or two this morning, with my poor dog Janka struggling breathlessly behind me. At least there was satisfaction in knowing that Galloway had proved the superiority of running over standing still.

But back at my car, another thought intruded to spoil my mood.

Because despite all that effort, all that expenditure of energy, all I'd achieved was to find myself right back where I’d started from.

Janka's new best friend (top left): ‘Stay and play. What's the rush?’

Janka, struggling to keep up: ‘Search me. We run and run but end up back where we started.’