Mike Huckabee: right by accident, wrong intentionally

There are some remarkable characters in the gang surrounding Donald Trump. Most recently, I’ve found it fascinating to catch up on Mike Huckabee. 

Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel
Innovator in his approach to diplomacy

Huckabee used to be governor of Arkansas, a post to which his daughter has now ascended. One of the great things about republics as opposed to monarchies, is that they pass on power by election rather than by inheritance. The US is a case in point, as long as you ignore such presidential cases as the George H.W. Bush-George W. Bush father-son pair or, rather earlier, the William Henry Harrison-Benjamin Harrison grandfather-grandson pair and the even earlier John Adams-John Quincy Adams father-son pair.

The Huckabees are at least progressive, in that they’ve allowed the father's inheritance to pass to a daughter rather than insisting that it go to a son.

In any case, Huckabee continues to occupy a key position on the political stage, nearly twenty years after ending his time as state governor. Today he’s the US Ambassador to Israel. Now rather a lot of people – a growing number – around the world are becoming increasingly upset at the behaviour of Israel in Gaza. 

Why, some have gone so far as to talk about genocide.

Huckabee, though, has the answer to all that. He seems to have been annoyed, in particular, by the decision of the UK government to recognise Palestine as a state. On social media, Huckabee told the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer where to get off. In no uncertain terms:

So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved. Did UK surrender to Nazis and drop food to them? Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer? That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!

Is it just me or is there a bit of what-aboutery there? You know, as in, ‘hey, you want to criticise what Israel’s doing in Gaza? You want to have a go at Israeli forces killing civilians? What about what you did to Dresden?’

Still, he clearly thinks that the fire-bombing of Dresden was a good thing, not a bad one, presumably including the fact that it caused a firestorm so intense that it sucked the oxygen out of the air and many people died of suffocation. And what he’s doing is drawing a parallel between that atrocity and what’s happening in Gaza. Which, presumably, he regards as equally justified.

I wouldn’t disagree. It seems to me that it’s precisely as justified to do what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza as it was to set fire to Dresden. I suppose it’s helpful of him to highlight the equivalence. Mind you, I don’t think that he’d agree with my view that the Dresden raids constituted a major, unacknowledged and unprosecuted war crime, and Israel’s violence in Gaza and starvation of its population is another. The parallel he draws has merit, but not the way he meant. He’s got it right, but only by accident.

But are the two atrocities really equivalent? The four raids on Dresden may have been ghastly but at least they only lasted from 13 to 15 February 1945. The Gaza incursion has lasted 22 months and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Unsurprisingly, it has caused more deaths: the best estimate for Gaza is some 60,000 and rising, while most commentators agree that the Dresden raids killed around 25,000. But, worse than that, the Gaza action is threatening an entire population, believed to be about 2.1 million today. 

Israel is targeting an entire people, and that whole people is in danger of death. Mostly by starvation, though Israeli Defence Forces are helping the process along by bombing or firing on people, in particular when they come looking for food. War on a people is pretty much a textbook definition of genocide.

It's never been really clear to me where to draw the line between a war crime and a crime against humanity. However, I can’t help feeling that it’s somewhere between Dresden and Gaza. That, though, isn’t anything Huckabee’s ever going to admit.

And if he’s right, without meaning to be, to categorise Gaza and Dresden as similar events, he’s wrong to draw a veil over the difference in scale and in genocidal intent between them. What he got right, as I suggested before, he got right by accident. What he’s getting wrong, I suspect, he’s getting wrong on purpose.

The hallmark of the Trump regime.

Where should we be looking for the war criminal?

Sad news. Tzipi Livni, former Israeli Foreign Minister and current leader of the Opposition, has cancelled her planned trip to London. The reason? A court in Westminster has issued an arrest warrant for her on charges of war crimes.

This is an outrage. If we had any doubt about how outrageous it was, we had only to wait for the explosion from Israel. ‘The lack of determined and immediate action to correct this distortion harms the relations between the two countries,’ the Israeli Foreign Ministry told us. And worse was to come: ‘If Israeli leaders cannot visit Britain in a dignified manner, it will naturally be a real obstacle to Britain's desire to have an active role in the peace process in the Middle East.’ Another fantasy political football match is under way in the Middle East, in which noble words get kicked around for a while, and then everyone goes home feeling they’ve done their best for the good cause while things just get worse on the ground. And if we’re not nicer to the Israelis, our fine British leaders won’t be allowed to play.

Still, it’s an interesting development that judges over here should try to hold politicians to account for their war crimes. On the other hand, it feels odd that these particular judges should be concerned with those particular crimes. Whatever the Israeli Army may have done in Gaza when Livni was in office, don’t British judges have other fish to fry?

Some years ago, when he was still Prime Minister, Tony Blair looked into a TV camera and told us all that he was ‘a straight sort of guy’. Since leaving office, he has found his way to God, converting to Catholicism. It’s a good faith for straight guys. Blair is, incidentally, a longstanding friend of one fine Catholic, the present Prime Minister of Italy.

Now when honest Blair took us to war in Iraq he told us his aim was to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Last weekend, he told the BBC that even if he had known there were no WMD in Iraq, he ‘would still have thought it right to remove’ Saddam Hussein. It sounds like the saintly straight guy of today is undermining the good faith of the straight guy then.

You see, our international obligations unfortunately only allow us three grounds for military action, that (a) we are under attack, (b) we are under credible and imminent threat of attack or (c) our action has been explicitly authorised by the UN. We weren’t under attack and Blair couldn’t get the UN to endorse the war, so that only left an imminent threat of attack. That would have been hard to prove even with WMD in Iraq, since the country didn’t have missiles capable of hitting Britain. Without WMD, the argument becomes flimsy to the point of being threadbare.

But Blair has gone further still. By declaring that he would have gone to war even if he had known there were no WMD in Iraq, he is admitting that he was prepared to wage war without legal justification. An illegal war, in fact. It’s hard not to feel that a man prepared to wage an illegal war fits pretty precisely the textbook definition of a war criminal.

So the only question that really matters is – did he honestly believe that Iraq had WMD? Or did he actually already know and go to war anyway – as he says he was prepared to do?

Now the evidence for Iraqi WMD was weak at the time – the UN weapons inspectors were checking out location after location identified by the Western Allies, only to find them empty of WMD – and the invasion showed conclusively that Iraq had none.

Isn’t it just possible that he might have had an inkling of the truth? OK, OK, it’s a harsh charge to bring. It suggests that a man who told us himself how honest he was may have been a little economical with the strictest truth. Perhaps it’s an unworthy thought, but it’s one I’d love to see tested in a court of law.

So the question for British judges is, did they miss a trick when they issued a warrant to arrest only Tzipi Livni?