'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.

Forecasts: crystal balls or a load of balls?

It is said, often by me, that it was the Danish physicist Neils Bohr who quipped ‘it is very difficult to predict — especially the future’.

It seems he may have been quoting an old Danish proverb, but ancient proverb or physicist’s witticism, it’s certainly true. I know that myself. I predicted, back in 2017, that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a catastrophic defeat in the general election that year. In fact, after a huge surge in support, he managed to lead the party only to a narrow defeat.

Sometimes I’ve got things right. After campaigning around the town where I live, Luton, to stay in the European Union, I was left with the distinct impression that we were heading for defeat. And, indeed, the nation voted by a narrow margin, and Luton itself by a substantial one, to leave.

So now I don’t know what to predict. It’s hard to see just where we’re going today. Corbyn could still pull off the trick, sadly, of leading Labour to a rout – certainly, his position in the polls gives little grounds for optimism. And as for Brexit, it’s beginning to feel unstoppable and even that the worst possible option, departure from the EU with no deal, a so-called hard Brexit, is now the most likely outcome.

Still, both those disasters may in the end be avoided. Corbyn may pull off another remarkable escape from complete meltdown, and Britain may still find a way to keep its Brexit soft. It may even find a way to avoid one altogether, though that hardly seems probable right now. Still, I’ve been wrong before, and predictions being particularly challenging when they concern the future, it seems wiser to wait and see on both counts.

H L Mencken: not always likeable, but sometimes right —
and funny with it

Instead, let’s focus on someone who seems to have got a couple of ideas spot on, even if they were only verified long after his death. That’s H L Mencken, American journalist and writer of the early part of the last century. Not the most likeable of men, not even admirable, as he was in private at least a racist in general and in particular an anti-Semite, he did get a few things right. And expressed them with a certain wit which at least makes him fun to quote.

No great democrat – he was suspicious of a system that seemed to give people he regarded as inferior to him a say over their superiors – he did at least come up with one view which later history verified in the most powerful way:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Consider recent Republican presidents.

There was Reagan, almost certainly as we now know suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s while in the White House. He was followed by George Bush the first, who couldn’t put a whole sentence together. We thought him bad enough until we had his son, George Bush the second or simply Dubya – and boy, was he simple – who clearly entirely fulfilled Mencken’s prediction. So entirely out of touch with reality was he, that he allowed affairs to be run by Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history, and one of the more dangerous politicians of recent times: he is responsible, in particular, for the Iraq War, dragging the US with Blair’s Britain in its wake into a conflict that left thousands of soldiers dead and killed maybe as many as 600,000 civilians.

The Republicans seem to have developed an extraordinary skill: providing us with a series of presidents, each of them making us regret the one before, awful though he seemed to be at the time. Who would have thought that anyone could make Dubya look like a statesman, but isn’t that just what Donald Trump has done?

With the Republicans: downhill all the way
Making sure the White House is adorned by a downright moron

At any rate, either of the last two Republican occupants of the White House would have entirely fulfilled Mencken’s inspired prediction. And one could make a case for saying the same of Reagan and the elder Bush too.

Now it’s our turn, in Britain, to verify another of Mencken’s aphorisms.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

I always thought that was just a tad too condescending for my taste. Too much of a caricature to be true. But now we’ve had the Brexit vote.

The people have spoken. Brexit is coming. And today it looks like it’s going to be good and hard.

It’ll be interesting to see just how much the people who voted for it find they like it.

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.

A sneaking admiration for Trump

I never thought I’d write these words, but I feel a little wry admiration for Donald Trump right now.

Even more amazing, that admiration is about the level of intelligence – or at least cunning – he’s shown. That’s surprising because I’ve come to think of him as one of the dumbest politicians around. Isn’t it odd how the Republican Party has managed to outdo itself each time it’s won the White House recently, following an accelerating downward trajectory? 

It’s clear these days that Reagan was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that fully declared itself after he stepped down. George H. W. Bush was staggeringly incoherent. Dubya needed documents summarised for himself, presumably using short words only. And now Trump’s smartest comment on the presidency was that it turns out to be harder than he thought (“I thought it would be easier”).

What a brilliant insight that is.

Against that setting, you just have to pause in at least a little wonder at the way he’s handled the firing of James Comey as Director of the FBI. 

Trump and Comey: a drama of craftiness. Nastiness too

Follow the steps carefully.

First Comey revealed, on 28 October 2016, that the FBI was investigating another batch of e-mails of Hillary Clinton’s to establish whether they were evidence of a criminal act. 28 October. The election took place on 8 November, just eleven days later. On 6 November, he announced that there were no grounds for a prosecution – but that was only two days before the election and the damage was done. 

The fault for losing was certainly Hillary’s, for a poorly run campaign, but there’s no doubt that Comey nailed her coffin lid shut: without his intervention, states like Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which Trump won by excruciatingly tight margins, might have tipped into her camp and her victory in the popular vote would have been turned into a victory overall, giving her the White House.

But then Comey turned on the man he’d helped elect. He let it be known that the FBI was actively investigating links between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. However enthusiastic it was about the 28 October revelations, the Trump administration was unlikely to be quite as pleased about these ones. 

It’s hard to grasp what Comey could have been about. Was he trying to be even-handed? If so, it turned out to be misguided.

Next Comey appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 3 May and gave blundering testimony which had to be “clarified” (i.e. corrected) later.

Now comes the final act. This is where Trump displayed his cunning. On 9 May, Trump fired Comey – but not for the Russia investigation. Oh, no. For his actions in the Clinton case.

Talk about win-win. Trump gets the bump eleven days out from the election that the revelations provided. Then he can use exactly those revelations to fire the man that made them, when he became embarrassing in turn.

Pretty cunning, isn’t it? Low cunning, maybe, but cunning all the same.

Except, of course, if I can see through it, so can most people. It’s a pretty crass manoeuvre obviously guided by pure self-interest. And whatever Trump does, the pressure on him isn’t going to let up. In fact, the pressure keeps growing precisely because of what Trump does.

Not cause for all that much admiration, then. But when you’re talking about Trump, you don’t wonder about how much admiration you can have for him. You wonder at feeling any admiration at all.

Anyone but Corbyn? Don't be silly...

It began to feel like a trend when the third person in two days referred to me as belonging to the “Anyone but Corbyn” group, neatly abbreviated as “ABC”.

It seems this is the latest term that supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, current and flailing leader of the Labour Party, have come up with in their increasingly desperate attempt to label everyone else as part of one, homogeneous and, it goes without saying, despicable group.

We were all at one time “Blairites”. It was hard to get that label to stick to people, like me, with a long track record of opposing Blair as energetically as they now oppose Corbyn.

“Red Tory” didn’t work for people who’d spent a career opposing the Tories, in some cases winning elections against them. 

The label “plotters” (because they supported the supposed “coup” against Corbyn) suggested that there was a conspiracy embracing a couple of hundred thousand people, and you have to be profoundly paranoid to believe such a plot even possible.

They still, though, seem to need a single, simplifying term to brand us all. “ABC” is the latest attempt. Sadly, though, it merely shows how hopeless it is to impose such a simplification on a phenomenon far too complex for it.

I would never go for anyone but Corbyn. Why, we could end up with someone even worse – and there are people who would make an even more dire job of leading the Labour Party than Corbyn. John McDonnell, his Shadow Chancellor, for one. If we can cast the net beyond Parliament, the devious and authoritarian leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, would be another.

Perhaps “ABTC” would work: anyone better than Corbyn. Unfortunately not. I thought Ed Miliband, the previous leader, was desperately weak. More lamentable as leader even than his own predecessor, Gordon Brown. But either of them would be an improvement over Corbyn, and the last thing I want to see is either of them back.

What about “AALBTC”, anyone a lot better than Corbyn? I’m not sure that works either. You see, Tony Blair was massively better than Corbyn (or Brown or Miliband) at winning elections; he was dismal at resisting the lure of power and therefore followed the then most powerful man in the world, Dubya Bush, into the catastrophic Iraq War. That’s Dubya who was himself the worst President of the United States, or so I imagined until I discovered Trump.

No. We need someone with the ability of Blair to win elections but the guts to say “no” to power. An earlier Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was good that way, refusing to take Britain into the Vietnam War, but he wasn’t exactly the straightest of individuals and he does suffer from the inconvenient handicap of being dead.

Harold Wilson: said no to LBJ over the disaster of Vietnam
But not exactly pure as driven snow...

So what we really need is anyone but Corbyn who’s a lot better at winning elections without being opportunistic about essential principle or kowtowing to inept political leaders. Sadly ABCWALBAWEBWBOAEPOKTIPL doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

Which perhaps makes my point. We’re talking about a complex view, not susceptible to simple summary. Trying to encapsulate it with a single word or pithy abbreviation is bound to fail.

On the other hand, if you absolutely insist on coming up with a single term for those of us who oppose Corbyn within the Party, I do have one that I feel goes a long way towards filling the bill.

I like to think of myself as a Labourite.

It was a triumph for Trump. But for democracy? Not so much

It’s become a bit of a recurring refrain these days: you have to bow to the will of the people. And you have to learn to listen to them.

If you’re in any sense a democrat, then the first statement is so obvious as hardly to need saying. So why do people say it? 

Because they mean rather more than you might think. What they mean is that not only should we bow to the will of the majority, but we should like it. That’s no part of the democratic compact. We have every right to oppose a decision of the people and to try to amend it; the only obligation on us is to accept that if the will of the people remains firm, we have to acquiesce to its ultimately being acted upon, however much we dislike.

What about listening to people? I keep being told that too, and it’s another obvious idea. So again the people who say it must mean more than the words suggest. They are asking us not so much to listen, but to go along with what we’re hearing. If people are saying that there are too many immigrants, I feel I can listen and then explain, yet again, in the clearest possible terms, and with as much patience as I can muster, that they’re problems aren’t being caused by immigrants.

Indeed, by focusing on immigrants, they let off the hook the very groups they should be targeting: employers pressing down on wages, reducing rights at work, making jobs as precarious as possible, all with the support of a government that regards being “business-friendly” as meaning backing those employers, reducing their taxes while increasing everyone else’s, and recouping the money by cutting back on benefits. Opposing racism, as well as being morally right, also makes good economic sense. So I’m fully prepared to listen, but not with a view to reaching some kind of compromise with notions that are both repugnant and counter-productive.

What does all this mean in practice, right now? Well, in the US, we are under an obligation to accept the outcome of the 8 November election. It was fought under long-accepted rules – the provisions of the US constitution – and Trump won. We have to accept that he has the right to occupy the White House.

But that’s as far as I’m prepared to go towards all those people who tell me to knuckle down and stop complaining about his victory. Why shouldn’t I complain? It is perfectly democratic to prepare to oppose him. And this is particularly true in the case of Trump: his victory may have been won under the rules, but it wasn’t democratic, in the strict sense that it did not reflect the will of the people. Why?

Trump: elected but not democratically

Because Hillary Clinton beat him. She took 60,556, 142 votes to his 60,116,240, a clear majority of 439,902 even though it was small (under 0.4%).

Why was she denied?

Well, as its name implies, the United States was set up by a bunch of states which agreed to pool their sovereignty. They certainly weren’t prepared to give up all control over their lives though they went a great deal further than, say, the European Union, where states are retaining so much of their sovereignty that one of them, Britain, is even packing its bags and leaving.

One of the impacts of the retention of states’ rights in the US was that the President would not be elected directly by the people but the states, though with each state casting a vote weighted to reflect the size of its population. In other words, the President is elected indirectly with voters only choosing electors, state by state, and the electors choosing the President.

This can obviously create a situation where the people’s choice is out of line with the electors’, as it did this week. The phenomenon is relatively rare but, strangely, it has happened twice in the last five elections. In 2000, Republican George Dubya Bush beat Al Gore despite having fewer votes, before Donald Trump pulled off the same trick against Hillary Clinton this week.

Just in case anybody has forgotten, Dubya was the man who seemed to fulfil HL Mencken’s famous forecast:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

He took us into the Iraq War, one of the most appalling decisions of recent decades, which has left the Middle East in chaos and led to the emergence of so-called ISIS with the atrocities that we know followed.

Now we have Donald Trump elected in the same way, against the will of the people. This is encouraging, if only because it shows that there’s still a majority in the US against the unstable bigotry Trump represents. He seems likely to illustrate Mencken’s prediction about the Presidency, even more fully than Dubya did.

So, Trump has won the office, in accordance with the rules. We have to accept that. But he doesn’t represent the will of the people and lacks democratic legitimacy.

Given the fear we must have that he’ll take decisions even more catastrophic than Dubya’s over Iraq, why on Earth shouldn’t we oppose them?

Outrages all around. And outrageous lack of thought in response

When it comes to making the world safer, the complete – but unsurprising – failure of Dubya and Bush has now been dramatically demonstrated. These days, it seems barely a day goes by without some new outrage, generally linked with the vile genie the invasion of Iraq let out of the bottle, the terrorist so-called Islamic State.

When it comes to size and spectacular impact, the French seem to be suffering the most, but just for now, at least, it’s the Germans who seem to be at the wrong end of a long, grinding, agonising repetition.

Another day, another outrage

Not, of course, that all those attacks are actually terrorism. It was almost with relief that I learned that a machete attack in Reutlingen was a ‘crime of passion’ and not terrorist-related. It seems awful to feel relief over what was, after all, a murder, but I suppose it’s a bit like the Northern Ireland police at the time of the troubles. They had the notion ‘Ordinary Decent Crime’: with so many crimes literally atrocious, it must have been comforting from time to time to come across a common-or-garden, civil crime unrelated to the sectarian conflict.

As it happens, it wasn’t only the machete attack that was unconnected to ISIS. That was also the case of Friday’s shootings in Munich, when 18-year old David Sonboly killed nine people.

Apart from the horror of the event itself, it was also interesting to see the reactions to it. A great many people, not least the British Foreign Secretary and semi-professional bungler, Boris Johnson, assumed immediately that it must have been an act of terrorism. Boris began pontificating about the need to tackle terrorism at its roots in the middle east, as well as in the many countries it affected, which at least had the merit of being true – it just wasn’t relevant. He would have discovered that for himself had he waited until he’d had a little more information before sounding off.

Boris is a wonderful illustration of the truth that no one can be quite as stupid as an intelligent person. He has the brains to work out an astute message on terrorism, just not the self-control to wait until he finds out whether terrorism played any part in the act he’s commenting on.

It was in any case interesting to see who else jumped the gun and started running their mouths off about terrorism, with a mere skip to immigrants as the causes of terrorism, before they knew what had actually happened. “Oh, Mrs Merkel, is it time for you to have second thoughts about letting all those people in last year?” they chanted, only too happy to be able to give their xenophobia free rein.

Let’s set to one side the fact that Merkel let in a million desperately wretched people. That a handful of them turn out to be pretty rotten is unfortunate but hardly shocking. Are we really to turn our backs on over 999,990 of them because of what the rest may do?

Let’s instead concentrate on David Sonboly himself. Of the nine he killed, seven were migrants: three Turks, three Kosovans and one from Greece. It seems his victims were disproportionately immigrants, while he was German born.

Yet he was of immigrant stock: his parents were Iranian refugees. The son of immigrants rounding on immigrants isn’t that unusual, with one wave of immigration resenting the next, which it sees as destabilising its own situation, the way of life it has established with the native population. We’ve had some celebrated examples of this kind of behaviour in Britain. Leading Conservative politicians Michael Howard and Michael Portillo both backed measures to restrict asylum rights, even though the former was the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazism and the latter the son of a Republican refugee from Franco’s Fascist coup in Spain.

The people who used the Munich shooting to decry immigration were, it seems, lining up with the perpetrator against his victims. They didn’t mean to, of course, but it’s curious to see where you end up when you talk first and think later.

Either way, the incident was an outrage and a tragedy. Though it wasn’t itself linked to terrorism, it underlines a greater familiarity with violence in our societies which terrorism has probably fanned. We’re in for difficult times over the next few years or even decades.

Another case of reaping the bitter fruit of acting without thought or sufficient information, just as Dubya and Blair did. We’ll be consuming the toxic harvest of the Iraq invasion for a long time yet. The worst of is that the ill-judged reactions to Friday’s events, whether Boris’s or those of simple social media users, show that we’re still a long way from putting that kind of lazy, ill-informed and frankly bigoted thinking behind us.

Two nations from the axis of evil: contrasting treatment and outcome

It’s interesting to reflect that George Dubya Bush, who has to be in the running for dumbest US president ever – a position only likely to be challenged if Donald Trump is elected – lumped Iran and Iraq together, with North Korea, in what he saw as the “axis of evil.”

Two of those three nations have been the target of intense action by the US.

It was Dubya himself who turned his guns – literally – against Iraq, with the invasion of 2003. Thirteen years on, the nation is a shattered patchwork of regions in conflict with one another. At the centre is a weak government dominated by none other than Iran. To the north, the Kurds form an autonomous region which is independent in all but name. Both the Baghdad government and the Kurds are in a state of continuous war with what has to be the world’s most brutal terrorist group, ISIS, an organisation that grew strongly in the power vacuum Bush’s war created.

There is no reliable estimate of the deaths caused by the war. Those available range from over 100,000 to over a million.

Iran, on the other hand, never enjoyed the privilege of invasion by a US-led coalition. It continued in its evil ways, but as it toyed with developing nuclear weapons, it came in for some tough and highly effective economic sanctions. At the same time, the US and other nations engaged in intense bouts of diplomatic activity with succeeding Iranian governments.

As I write these words, the International Atomic Energy Authority seems poised to publish a report officially recognising that Iran has abandoned its military nuclear programme. As a result, a prisoner exchange is to take place between the US and Iran – a small, symbolic gesture, but symbols matter, especially as there’s bitter opposition to the deal from the backwoodsmen in the States (aka as the Republican Party). A symbolic release will be a significant success for Obama, though his opponents, and in particular Donald Trump, won’t give him credit.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and
Mohammad Zarif, Iranian Foreign Minister

Most significant of all, the deal would allow Iran back into the world economy.

Iran and Iraq may have been lumped together at one stage. But their histories in recent years have diverged starkly. Above all, that’s been due to the different policies adopted towards them by the West.

The problems in South Africa and Iran were approached through a mix of sanctions and diplomacy. In Iraq, Lybia and Afghanistan, on the other hand, the West took military action.

Compare. Contrast. Learn a lesson.

And, friends in America, for heaven’s sake – for all our sakes – keep Trump out of the White House.

Beheadings and beheadings, and how the West has no idea how to react to any of them.

Curious times we live in.

We’re rightly shocked and sickened by the appalling behaviour of ISIS. It has released yet another video of a gruesome beheading of people the group disapproves of. We’re particularly upset in Britain because the main figure has a British accent. It wasn’t that long ago that a drone took out a similar British-accented assassin, so-called Jihadi John. This was presented at the time as a major success for the Western cause, which was to be further reinforced by the Royal Air Force joining in US-led airstrikes against ISIS positions in Syria.

Well, a few weeks on, it seems that those airstrikes haven’t achieved much. Jihadi John’s heir is in place and, apparently, plying his bloody trade just as fiercely as his predecessor. Indeed, those airstrikes aren’t even finding much to do. Planes have had to come back with their weapons unfired for lack of targets. Instead, if they take any useful action, it’s in Iraq supporting the advance of the Iraqi army back into the city of Ramadi.

Iraqi troops retaking Ramadi from ISIS
with support from Western airstrikes that actually served a purpose

Oddly, the government has yet to admit that critics said all along that a campaign of airstrikes in Syria would be useless, until there were forces we could back against ISIS on the ground – as in Iraq. No doubt that’s an oversight by Cameron which he’ll correct as soon as he can, when he admits he got that call wrong.

He’ll no doubt be as keen to admit his error as Blair was to admit his own, and far greater one, of invading Iraq in the first place.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has decided to do some of its own beheading. Like ISIS, it carries them out in public, to make the process as ghoulish as possible. On the other hand, it doesn’t film them or post the videos on-line for the edification of the West – indeed, it goes out of its way to hide what it’s up to, suggesting that it’s rightly ashamed. It also works at quite a scale: fully 47 killed in the latest outrage.

What’s worse is that one of those murdered – executed is far too anodyne a term – is a leading Shia cleric in this Sunni state. Now, he wasn’t a particularly savoury character, by Western standards. He favoured the establishment of a theocratic state, with religious leaders running the state, rather like Iran at its worst. But by killing him, Saudi Arabia made him a martyr. Specifically, a martyr for Iran with its 90% Shia population.

So there have been ugly protests in Tehran, including an invasion of the Saudi embassy. Now Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan, models of democracy all, have joined the Saudis in severing or reducing their diplomatic ties with Iran. On the other side, Iraq, tipped into being another Shia-dominated nation under the tutelage of Iran, following Blair and Dubya’s ingenious invasion of 2003, has come out on the side of its mentor.

Few developments could be more worrying for the whole world, let alone the Middle East, than increasing tensions between the two regional superpowers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. And that’s what now’s happening, as a result of the barbaric behaviour of the former. Barbaric behaviour not unlike that of ISIS.

The West doesn’t confuse these two series of killings. So it will do no more than express token regret over the Saudi beheadings. Saudi, of course, has oil and huge financial influence in the West. ISIS has neither, at least for the moment. In addition, the West has a track record of entirely miscalculating the reality of tensions in the Middle East. One can’t help wondering whether distinguishing between the two types of assassination isn’t just a measure of its underlying confusion.

So here are the key questions: was it actually sensible to let governments with that level of incomprehension of the situation in the region, take further military action out there? Or might it have been more judicious to take a little longer to think about alternatives? And if none came to mind, perhaps hold back from ill-judged gestures unlikely to improve matters?

Syrian air strikes, or the British call for gesture politics

If a group declares war on us, we have every right to take military action against it.

Only a convinced pacifist could think otherwise and, while I have considerable admiration for pacifists (and vegetarians), I can’t follow them in writing off all resort to military action (just like I can’t resist the occasional bacon roll). ISIS has certainly declared war on the West. Not just any war, but one of the most loathsome, directly aimed at civilians. It’s entirely legitimate for the Western powers to respond militarily to that threat. Well, as long as three conditions are met.

1. There must be legal authority for the war, and broad consensus – which are pretty much the same thing, since both would come through the United Nations. 
2. There must be parallel diplomatic activity to bring a satisfactory outcome that will end the fighting as quickly as possible.
3. The military action must be effective, again to keep it short.

On the first two points, there has been a little tentative progress. The UN has backed action against ISIS, with no veto by Russia, which is now involved in the conflict. Discussions in Vienna may lead to some movement over the internal politics of Syria, though past experience gives little grounds for optimism.

It’s on the third point that there’s most to be done.

Firstly, effective military action means action to achieve specific, stated goals. In this context that’s action to defeat ISIS. Not to meet some politician’s hidden agenda.

Secondly, winning a war means taking and holding the territory of an enemy. Consequently, the only branch of the armed services that ultimately matters is the infantry. Air strikes not followed up by infantry achieve very little. The best example of that kind of warfare? The charge of the light brigade, where the cavalry played the role of air strikes today. They charged and took the Russian guns but, without infantry to hold the position afterwards, all the small number of survivors could do, was limp back.

The only place where air strikes against ISIS are being followed up is in Kurdish Iraq. Unsurprisingly, it’s the only place where any territory has recently been taken back from ISIS, at Sinjar. If Iraq had an army worthy of the name, it too could be supported by air power to achieve similar advances, but it doesn’t.

As for Syria, even David Cameron admits we need support on the ground. He accepts that we can’t provide it. Western populations have had enough of sending soldiers to the Middle East, and the Middle East has had far more than enough of seeing them there. Sending them in can make matters far worse, as the disaster of the Iraq invasion has shown: it led directly to the emergence of the very ISIS we’re now having to combat.

So Cameron is relying on the 70,000 so-called moderate rebels in Syria. But as the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner has pointed out, those rebels aren’t that concerned with ISIS. Their aim is to fight the government of Assad in Damascus. Incredibly, they’re also split into 110 factions. Our new friends, the Russians, are also bombing them. Trying to work with the Russians is never easy, but trying to be friends with them and allies of the people they’re bombing would be a major undertaking. That leaves only one force in Syria that can be relied on to tackle ISIS, and hold the ground it recaptures from it: Assad’s own army.

We could, of course, support that army. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d stood with a regime we distinctly disliked in order to overcome a common foe: we supported Stalin against Hitler, for instance. Still, it would take some clever footwork by Cameron. Just two years ago, he was showing exactly the same earnest and sincere desire for air strikes on Syria as he is today – but on that occasion against Assad, rather than against his enemies in ISIS.

In fact, it’s an issue Cameron needs to confront. Why should we believe him now when he got it so badly wrong then?

All this leads to the unfortunate conclusion that there’s no prospect of viable ground forces we can support from the air against ISIS. Consequetly, airstrikes are unlikely to do any good. Indeed, the US has run 7600 against ISIS already, but that didn’t stop the Paris attacks.

US airstrike against ISIS

So why is Cameron so keen on extending the bombing campaign to Syria?

Well, destroying ISIS may be the only legitimate goal of such a campaign, but it’s by no means the only possible obective. In a telling argument for airstrikes in Syria, Cameron has loudly proclaimed that we can’t leave them to the US and France alone.

So there we have it. We’re talking gesture politics. Cameron and his supporters are worried that not taking part makes him, and Britain, look bad. He wants us to join the campaign so that any politician who lines up with him, can face the voters and say “we’re taking action.” The action’s ineffective? No matter, as long as it’s seen to be taken.

This isn’t unusual. It was certainly a major part of the motivation for invading Iraq, to be seen to be doing something, whatever its value, in response to 9/11. Britain’s involvement was down to Blair wanting to offer visible support to the US, or more specifically to Dubya.

The same is true of the plan to renew the British nuclear deterrent, Trident. It’s going to cost the earth – estimates rose recently from £25bn to £31bn – so it must be good. And not to have it would make Britain look weak. So we want to divert huge sums from conventional defence, that we need, to a colossal prestige project involving weapons it would be suicidal to use.

All gesture politics. The real question facing us in Britain today is whether we’re prepared to have more gestures. 

Specifically, how far will we stomach military decisions to help politicians feel better about themselves?

A useful anniversary, as we debate further military action

November 8 was an anniversary worth noting.

It was the 33rd birthday of a woman whose name used to be notorious around the world, but who has faded pretty entirely from view recently: Lynndie England. She was brought up a disturbed child in a poor family in rural Kentucky. In childhood, she was diagnosed with selective mutism, a condition which leaves a sufferer unable to speak in certain situations or to certain people, even if threatened with dire consequences. At 20, she was married, but divorced soon afterwards.

Then in 2003, a decision she had taken while still not out of her troubled childhood, to join the US Army Reserve, transformed her life and that of many others. She was deployed to Iraq. A semi-educated, inadequately trained, part-time soldier, she found herself thrust into a conflict orchestrated by people she didn’t know, and who should themselves have known better.

She was presumably not a candidate for any of the war roles that attract glory, or at least honour, or at any rate respect. Instead she was sent to Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, as a guard.

Being a prison warder isn’t an easy job. It requires training and then years of experience under the supervision of others who’ve already learned the ropes. England and her colleagues had nothing like that, and they were put to work in a prison where the number of inmates rapidly grew from 700 to 7000 with nothing like the equivalent growth in staff.

Worse still, as the US Senate Armed Services Committee report into the subsequent events claimed, guards such as England served under top leaders – right up to the level of Donald Rumsfeld, Defence Secretary – who “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.” Rumsfeld naturally denies the allegation, but he would, wouldn’t he?

Lynndie England fell for her section leader Charles Graner, by whom she later became pregnant. Unfortunately, in this too she was a victim: he was also in a relationship with another soldier in the section, Megan Ambuhl. Graner and Ambuhl are now married.

A very ordinary young woman, with few life skills
She cracked in a situation she was unfitted to manage

England was easily led and poorly equipped for her stressful environment. Her job was one in which it was accepted that behaviour most would find reprehensible wasn’t just tolerable, it was necessary. So she and her colleagues stepped way over the line. Not only did they engage in serious prisoner abuse, they even took photographs of themselves doing it. There could be no doubt of their guilt or of the extent of the abuse. You no doubt remember the pictures of England posing next to a pile of living naked bodies, smiling in satisfaction at her and her colleagues’ handiwork, or drawing a naked prisoner out of a cell by a dog lead.

She was eventually sentenced by court martial to three years in jail. She served half that time. She’s now back home, in her parents’ trailer, where she shares a bunk bed with her son and struggles to find work: many jobs won’t employ felons, and even in the ones that would, existing staff are uneasy about working alongside her.

I’m not attempting to excuse her actions. What she committed was a war crime, and her punishment was lenient. But it’s worth observing that her apparent inability to control base instincts has wrecked her life. That might not have happened had she not been sent to Iraq in the first place.

When it comes to wrecked lives, however, we also need to look at her victims. She, apparently, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Imagine the state of the men she and her colleagues traumatised.

Apart from the individual psychological damage they suffered, there must have been serious consequences on Iraq generally and ultimately on the West too. How recruiters for the movement we now know as ISIS must have loved those photos. What weapons they provided to discredit America and Western commitment to human rights.

Which raises a far bigger question. What were we in the West thinking of, blundering into Iraq, knowing that we would have to rely on the likes of Lynndie England?

It seems we believe it possible to solve agonising political problems by means of military action. Indeed, we believe that the military can do far more than merely win a quick victory on a battlefield, that it can take on the task of rebuilding a civil society afterwards. So we took an organisation designed to deliver extreme violence to defeat an enemy, and called on it to – manage a prison.

By what twisted logic did we think the army was equipped for that kind of work? Worse still, that it could be safely entrusted to disturbed, under-trained individuals? And that no consequences would come back to haunt us? 

Lynddie England spent eighteen months in jail. The father of her child was sentenced to ten years and is still inside. But no one above the rank of sergeant has ever been called to account for what happened out there.

Meanwhile Dubya Bush, Tony Blair and Donald Rumsfeld continue to parade around the world arguing that their behaviour was justified. Far more serious still, their heirs – such as David Cameron – are looking for the authority to launch further military action, this time in Syria.

Well, maybe we should take such action, maybe we shouldn’t. But let’s at least make sure before we do, that we’ve fully learned the lesson Lynddie England and her ilk can teach us. 

There’s not much sign we’ve done that yet.

The Great British Bake Off, antidote to the bad news in a world dominated by superpower jostling

It’s great to come across the odd good news story out there, in amongst so much that’s bad.

Few are worse than the intensifying Russian intervention in Syria. What’s worst about it is that it reminds me of the behaviour of Germany in the run up to the First World War: Germany had emerged as a nation only rather late – it was proclaimed, ironically in France, only in 1871 – so it missed out on that precious time of empire building by so many other European powers.

Germany could have taken the intelligent decision that imperialism was inherently immoral (how on earth does one seriously justify a bunch of Brits, from a nation with terrible poverty, ill health and criminality in the nineteenth century, telling Indians how to live their lives?) and didn’t even benefit the imperial power that much (Britain remained racked by poverty, ill health and criminality when the Empire was at its height). Instead, it decided to get in on the act and carve out its own dominions, an ambition which led to increasingly intense clashes with France, Russia and Britain, and then the great 1914-1918 bloodbath.

So it’s worrying to see history repeating itself. The US under Dubya, enthusiastically supported by Tony Blair as British Prime Minister, went blundering into Iraq without international endorsement or legal basis, with results from which we’re still suffering twelve years on.

The worst aspect of that is that it established a precedent for ignoring the UN or norms of international legality, and simply using brute force, because one can.

Russia, reprising the role of Germany 140 years ago, instead of deciding that this kind of behaviour is reprehensible, leads to highly undesirable unplanned consequences, and ought to be avoided, has decided that anything the US can do, it can do too. So it’s blundering into Syria, making a painful situation far worse.

Why, if the latest reports are to be believed, it’s even rivalling the US in its capacity to create collateral damage, or even collateral mayhem: it seems four of its missiles may have hit Iran instead of Syria. I suppose one or two thousand kilometres of inaccuracy are to be expected in what specialists like to refer to as the “fog of war.”

Anyway, it’s in this context that I was delighted to find out about the winner of this year’s Great British Bake Off competition.

Now this is a pretty great programme. I watched it one year, though I gave up afterwards and watched neither of the last two competitions: I find the experience too stressful. It’s like watching England play rugby: it’s occasionally satisfying but often deeply depressing. In fact, in many ways the Bake Off is worse. At least on the rugby field, I know who to support and, therefore, by the simplest possible process of elimination, who to oppose. With the Bake Off, I sympathise with absolutely everyone, and want each of them to win, which means I’m distraught over the weekly elimination of a contestant, and inevitably disappointed over the final result by the failure of all the others who didn’t make it.

Nadiya Jamir Hussain, on her way to Bake Off victory

Still, I have to say that I take great pleasure over this year’s winner. She’s Nadiya Jamir Hussain, and she competed in a hijab.

We’re a long way from true assimilation in this country, and assimilation is never really reliable anyway (the Jews thought they’d achieved a high degree of assimilation in Germany in the nineteenth century, and look where that got them in the twentieth). Still, it’s good to see that a British woman can be celebrated by a British institution – the BBC had the year’s highest ratings for any programme, on any channel this year, for the final of the competition – even though she’s a Muslim.

At least there’s some progress, then.

Of course, we then have to return to all the everyday problems of racism in Britain – only today there’s been a new outcry over the poor level of dementia care offered to patients of Afro-Caribbean ancestry – but, hey, at least we can take a brief timeout to enjoy one positive event.


Postscript It was amusing to see the Guardian report that the Daily Mail failed to give front page coverage to the Bake Off result this year, as it had in the past. 

At least the paper that supported the Nazis in the 1930s has retained some consistency with its roots.

Poor old England: suffering so many blows, with such a long way to climb back up...

There are times when for nations, as for individuals, everything just seems to be going wrong.

Today, it’s apparently England’s turn.

We find that the English National Health Service is heading for a record £2 billion loss. That’s worrying but hardly surprising: we’ve known for a while that things were hurtling downhill fast. But now we learn that the government was keeping the figures under wraps so that the news wouldn’t overshadow the Tory Party conference, which is depressing but again far from surprising: we know this government has no aptitude for doing good things or doing them well, but boy it’s a past master at making it look as though things are going just fine.

We also learn that half of all teachers in England, according to a recent poll, want to find a new job outside teaching in the next two years. That makes it sound as though the school system depends for its survival on there being enough general unemployment to stop teachers finding other work. Upsetting but, again, not a huge surprise given the attitude of government.

Finally, those of us who could sit through the experience, watched the England rugby team being clinically taken apart by an Australian XV that didn’t just beat them, but outclassed them. Outclassed in much the same way as Barack Obama outclasses Dubya Bush, except that there were times the England team didn’t seem to be as quick on the uptake as Dubya.

So England’s in the doldrums.

England shattered
But Rugby may not be our most serous problem

Of the three perturbing developments, only two can really be attributed to the government (though it would be fun to blame them for the rugby defeat too). The first two are, as it happens, the most important, but hey, at least Cameron and his mates didn’t actually sell us to the Aussies (at least, as far as we can tell).

Curiously, but unsurprisingly, the only one for which we’ve had any kind of apology was the rugby. Both the team captain and the head coach have expressed their regrets for the lousy performance. Naturally, Cameron and his mates will issue no such thing. The collapse of healthcare and education won’t affect them unduly, since they can buy themselves whatever they need. Far from apologising, they are more likely to celebrate such decline as taking us in just the right direction – reducing government spending without damage to anything that matters to them personally.

When nations, or indeed individuals, go through a bad time, it’s often simply part of a cycle. There will be an upswing later. The trough leads to a demanding climb, but the effort will eventually take us back to a peak.

It certainly happens in sport. The England rugby team were world beaters in the early years of the century. They will probably be world beaters again. Fixing their problems will be tough, but it can happen quite quickly.

Sadly, when it comes to health and education, the solution tends to cost a great deal more and take a great deal longer. There’s going to be a protracted battle ahead. If we’re going to win it, we need to get started immediately.

Which probably means that, painful as it was, the quicker England puts its rugby defeat behind it, the better.