A Tale of Two Wars

David Cameron and Barack Obama met last week in Washington for their first bilateral talks. At the top of their agenda was how to extricate themselves from the wars they have inherited. With the announcement of a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2015, it would seem that neither administration is willing to stay any longer than expediency allows. The terrible cost in blood and treasure has turned public opinion firmly against the war, and both will be eager that they do not pay a political price. It is likely that Iran and North Korea also formed part of their discussions, but both men would do well to learn the lessons that their predecessors provided and should be wary of any future interventionist adventures.

In 1989 the world changed. The Berlin Wall was torn down, bloodless revolutions swept Central and Eastern Europe and by 1991 Boris Yeltsin rode on a tank into Red Square. The Cold War dissolved with the preconceptions of how global politics worked. The problem with this post-cold war idyll was that it took from our governments their raison-d’être, as leaders of the ‘free’. Into this vacuum entered Tony Blair, whose path to interventionism it would seem was initially an organic one. British troops were sent to Sierra Leone to free UK hostages from the rebel forces, but once on the ground they quickly realised they could end the civil war with ease, and did so, apparently without explicit government consent. Buoyed by this success, Blair turned his attention to Kosovo and led Bill Clinton’s America reluctantly to the conflict. It is hard to criticise either of these interventions, and in so far as any wars can be called good, these were.

After Kosovo, Mr Blair became a firm believer in interventionism as a force for good and when George W Bush’s hawkish Republican administration took office in 2001, he found a leader who shared this world view. The Republicans dreamt of creating a global democratic free-market utopia and they believed that US military power should be deployed to impose it, especially in the troublesome Middle East. The Muslim hardliners who preached of ‘The Great Satan’ - with its imperialist pretensions in the Arab world - felt vindicated and Bin Laden attacked the Twin Towers. The philosopher John Grey, in Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern suggests that the ideologies of both the Western interventionists and Al Qaeda were born of contradictions and false premises - nonetheless they led us to war.

In his polemic three part documentary, The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis argues that the ‘war on terror' lies largely in the imagination of our elites as a post cold war narrative, and the resultant actions of British and American foreign policy have made the world less safe than it was before. He believes that Western governments were emasculated by the ending of the cold war, but by deluding themselves of a global terrorist nightmare and saving us from it - they could become powerful once more. The real threat to Britain lies in the disenfranchisement of youth from minority ethnic Europe, the oppression of Palestine, the manipulation of Pakistan, the nation building in Afghanistan and that we have ended up fighting a morally dubious conflict as part of a deeply misguided post colonial doctrine. These actions have created a discontented Islamic world, and a minority have been drawn to violence - but to characterise this as a replacement threat equal to the Soviet Union simply does not stand scrutiny.

David Cameron has already betrayed a poor grasp of history, when he described Britain as “America’s junior partner in 1940”; one might have thought an expensive Eton education would have taught him that Britain stood alone in that year - America would not join the conflict until December 1941. It is however a more recent history that Obama and Cameron must learn from if the damage to America and Britain’s reputations in the international community are to be repaired. When Nick Clegg stood at the dispatch box on Wednesday and denounced “the illegal invasion of Iraq” as “Labour’s most disastrous decision”, he may or may not have been materially correct, but he accurately articulated the deeply held view of a great many across the globe. It is a timely reminder that we must face up to what has been done ‘in our names’ to make sure that it can never happen again - and that the rule of law extends not just to citizens but to our leaders as well.

It would be naive to think endless peace is credible, but I believe that it is fundamental that Britain should only ever fight ‘the good fight’ in the future.

Flaming June

Well, it’s been over a month since I last wrote a blog; for you see I’ve been busy writing essays, making a radio feature and working extra nights at the petrol station (the things I will do to put bread on the table!). It has certainly been an interesting month and I’ve rued not having the time to pontificate on a number of events.

My last offering correctly predicted The Supreme Leader’s end and the absurdly titled ‘Rainbow Coalition’ which seemed to exist only in the minds of left leaning daydreamers; however I didn’t guess it would be the Scottish Old Left Dinosaurs who would snuff out such an outcome. It seemed that opposition was preferable to having to compromise with their despised SNP counterparts. It was a remarkable sight, to behold Mandleson and Campbell running like demented schoolboys to the Sky/BBC news circus on College Green, one day fawning over the Lib Dems and then within 24 hours castigating them. It was enlightening to see how our country had been run for the last decade, only for once being conducted in the glare of the TV cameras. This has however provided us with the ‘spectacle’ of a Labour ‘leadership’ contest, which seems to highlight to the uninitiated an amazing lack of talent in the ranks of the party; I have tried to imagine any of the contenders in the role and can only see disaster ahead for those of a Labour bent. We have seen Diane Abbott given her place in the contest, an act which smacked of unbelievably patronising tokenism from the other contenders and it would serve them right if she won. To be fair to Ms Abbott, she at least has a little integrity, which is notably lacking in the others, even though she is woefully unqualified for the role which she seeks. The belief of many Labour activists that when the coalition becomes unpopular, they will waltz back into government regardless of policy or leader, which seems to be somewhat optimistic in my humble opinion. However its endless reassertion in the Guardian seems to provide them succour, so I will wish them the best of British luck with that strategy.

We have also seen BP unleash the greatest environmental disaster on the world ever. Well, the largest to affect a Western country anyway. Who gives a toss that there has been a strikingly similar event going on, unreported for years, in the Niger Delta. Rule one of news – a hundred dead Africans is no news; ninety-nine dead Africans and one dead Anglo-Saxon and it leads the ten o’clock news. Still, this has given the increasingly suspect Obama the opportunity to rant and rave with high hyperbole about this being a new 9/11, and to exercise his barely concealed Anglophobia. Never mind that the rig was operating under licence for BP by an American company; never mind that it was Halliburton (of course it was!) that was responsible for the failed blow out preventer; never mind the criminally lapse US regulatory body, which it would seem didn’t regulate anything other than signing off contracts; never mind the fact that the US is the largest polluter on the globe by a very large margin and have done their utmost to block any attempts to modify their excesses, and that their insatiable craving for oil has caused untold misery across the globe for the last hundred years. Why take an uncomfortable look at yourself, when you can whip up xenophobic sentiment against ‘British Petroleum’ to mask your own impotence in the situation and the subsequent drop in the approval ratings. We’ll ignore the fact that BP is 40% US owned and Britain has been America’s staunchest, loyalist and some would say slavish ally for a century, even when that has meant British leaders damaging themselves to defend America’s interests. We’ll ignore all that, because you’ve got those midterms coming up, oh brave and principled leader of the free.


We also had a mad man go on a killing spree in Cumbria. Whilst this is a thankfully rare event in the UK, it didn’t stop the media going into overdrive, with all its phoney soul searching and seeking answers to unanswerable questions. BBC news24 and Sky take the prize though, for their usual brand of insensitive reporting. Did they really still need to be camped on the street 48 hours later, interviewing people with no connection to the events? Is it only me that finds the mawkish and intrusive way that rolling news treats these events so distasteful? These were real people whose lives were cut short in a brutal way by a man who clearly had severe problems. It wasn’t an episode of Midsummer Murders or CSI. It should be possible to report the news in restrained and respectful manner; I suspect there is just too much emphasis on ratings and too much technology available to these rolling news shits. I half expected a reconstruction of events by day two to star Robert Carlisle as the gunman being stalked by PC Dick van Dyke with Cracker providing psychoanalysis back up, leading to a final confrontation at the top of Scarfell Pike.


Now to the much maligned coalition. I am growing somewhat weary of people telling me that the Lib Dems are somehow sell-outs, I have been told we should have, for some reason yet to adequately be explained to me, put the national interest behind some narrow ideological standpoint, which isn’t what we stand for anyway. This probably stems from the woeful and lazy media coverage we have received for the last two decades, where we have unfairly been labelled as Labour-lite. We are now the little-Tories, which of course is equally inane and un-descriptive of our politics. We are a liberal party. That we have areas that overlap with Labour and at the same time with the Conservatives shouldn’t be that hard to grasp, unless you have a very low intellect. We believe in protection for those who have fallen through the gaps of society, we agree with the welfare state (to a degree) and it was the Liberal Party of Asquith, Lloyd-George and Churchill who instigated the state pension, unemployment payments and National Insurance. It was Beverage, a Liberal, who drew up the welfare plans adopted by Labour after the war, and which we have supported ever since. We also deplore bureaucracy, government waste and seek value for money; we believe that the free market is the best way to deliver economic freedom; however that it requires regulation to reduce inequality and to produce stability. Above all else, we believe in personal freedoms in all its forms, the state should be limited in its interference in personal affairs; only to prevent individuals from impeding on another’s freedoms.


As a Liberal, the idea that you can have welfare provision which offers value for money and reduced bureaucracy and that you can have a government which doesn’t spy, pry or dominate individuals, whilst seeking to restrain the free market to reduce the inequality gap doesn’t seem inalienable positions. We have much in common with the liberal wing of Labour and the One Nation Conservatives – at the same time! It would have been just as difficult to form a coalition with Labour, as we Liberals despise the authoritarian Old Left Labourites as much as we despise the ‘unreformed right’ of the Tories. I believe Clegg made the best of the options available to him. We have an amazingly liberal set of policies for the coalition – and for the record, coalition doesn’t mean the Lib Dems have ‘joined’ the Conservatives, it is an agreement between the two parties forming a joint government of Lib Dems AND Conservatives – but the fact remains the country is bust and some unpopular choices will have to be made.


What this will mean for the Lib Dems in the future is difficult to guess, however I strongly believe that any other choice made by Clegg would have led to an even worse outcome. If we lose votes, so be it. If we lose the more demented of our activists, to Labour or the Greens, good riddance. Finally, I would like to counter a repeating charge that the Lib Dems have betrayed Labour supporters, who voted Lib Dem to ‘keep the Tories out.’ As a party, we could not have been any clearer. Repeatedly in the last week of the campaign, Nick Clegg urged voters to not vote tactically: “vote with your heart, for what you believe in” he said maybe a little too frequently. It was Peter Hain, Alistair Campbell, the Mirror and the Independent who urged you to vote tactically – not us.

Clicking in the name of!

So it’s happened. Rage Against The Machine, ironically enough, have proven the power of social networking to the remaining anti-techs out there, and it has real power. Last year we saw Barack Obama successfully highlight that the internet generally, and social networking specifically can be used to enhance a political campaign, he used it to: build a support network, raise money and target where his volunteers should canvass. This momentous achievement of new technology, helping in such a fundamental way to put the first black president in the White House was largely missed by most of the mainstream media; however Simon Cowell’s X-Factor act missing out on the Christmas number one - this is an achievement that cannot be ignored by our celebrity obsessed ‘news’ outlets.


It is a truly surprising outcome and a parable for our brave new world that husband and wife, Jon and Tracy Morter, could from the comfort of their own home, using the social networking site Facebook, topple the four year monopoly that the X-Factor has enjoyed over the Christmas number one slot. The LA rockers', Killing in the name of, has set two records: the most downloads registered in a single week, and the first song to peak the charts solely on download sales alone.

There has been a lot of nonsense talked about the demise of the Christmas number one over recent years, let’s be realistic, I can count the number of festive hits that had any artistic merit during my lifetime on one hand.


As a Rage Against The Machine fan, I’m ecstatic about their signature tune being so prominent once more, however the number of people who have commented that it is just a foul tirade of expletives have annoyed me. I would like to highlight the songs meaning for those who have dismissed it as profanity and empty angst.


The song is about powerful leaders and police officers being institutionally racist, many of them being members of the insidious Klu Klux Klan, it goes on to tell us that those in power manipulate and control what we think about them, i.e. ‘all police officers are heroes’, that in our society it seems justifiable for the police to kill, or to brutalise people from minorities in the name of the law, and that we moronically honour slain racist police officers. The line “Killing in the name of” therefore has two meanings: it is the murder of a black person by a racist cop, and that cop getting his just desserts in retaliation. “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” is a rallying call to black minorities to stand up to racist police and to fight back, rebel against and to defy corrupt oppressive authority.


Killing in the name of may not be a jolly festive tune, but for the first time in a great many years a song has topped the chart which has a powerful message, great guitar riffs, and soul. We have caught a glimpse of the future power of social networking and happily we have learnt that Simon Cowell can’t always polish a turd, giving us a superbly surprising end to the otherwise dull and culturally vacuous year that was 2009. Happy Christmas!

Copenhagen, another Kyoto cop out?

It appears that as I write some sort of face saving fudge has been reached at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. A US spokesman is reported by the BBC to claim “a historic step forward” after an agreement between the US, China, India and South Africa has been reached, adding “the deal was not enough to prevent dangerous climate change in the future - but was an important first move.” Barack Obama describes it as a foundation for action, before adding there was “much further to go”. There is no mention in this statement of the EU, the world’s largest economic trading block, which seems a little surprising. I can only assume it’s an oversight, seeing as how Europe has led the charge on climate change for well over a decade now.



So will this “historic step” amount to anything? My suspicion is no, not really; it is another voluntary agreement, just the same as Rio and Kyoto. People will hail the fact that the US have taken part at Copenhagen, and are prepared to sign up this time. So what, would be my response; if we look at how many of the signatories to the two previous ‘agreements’ came even close to meeting their voluntary targets then we see that these conferences are utterly meaningless. They do however give our politicians the opportunity to strut on the global stage, spouting rhetoric to sure up their ‘green credentials’, whilst many will on previous evidence have no intention, whatsoever, of even attempting to implement a single commitment.


The conference build up was overshadowed by the accusations of “climategate”, where scientists from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were reputed to have suppressed evidence that there was a levelling out in the rising temperature trends over the last decade. This was followed by the Russians accusing the Met Office of “cherry picking” the weather station data from across their country in order to enhance the case for warming. The Met Office strenuously denies this charge and they say they choose a set of stations evenly distributed across the globe.


Who knows what the truth is; the mysterious thing to me over the last decade has been the idea that most people are quite happy to accept those scientists who are sceptical to be naturally corrupt and in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby, like modern day Dr Mengeles. At the same time there is a bizarre assumption that those meteorologists who agree with a warming hypothesis are beyond reproach, neutral and impartial; like some sort of noble Victorian gentleman scientist. Modern science is an expensive business, and regardless of what side of an argument a scientist finds himself on, he is funded by someone or other. In the vast majority of cases, because they have a vested interest in that research supporting their view, this will sometimes deliberately and often subconsciously impact the findings of that research.


On this basis; I like everyone else, assume the sceptics look to ‘find’ evidence which highlights their hypothesis, but I also assume the non sceptics (for want of a better term) are equally as biased as their counterparts. This is true in many other fields of science, so why people think it should be different in the field of climatic research a mystery; as such I wasn’t remotely surprised to hear of alleged ‘selection’ by the Climate Research Unit.


Incidentally I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the growing use of ‘totalistic’ language employed by green activists over the last few years; sceptics are painted as ‘climate change deniers’ which is quite frankly offensive, and mere climate change is no longer serious enough, it has to be ‘disastrous’ or ‘catastrophic’. This seems to be the language of a cult to me, where any dissent is no longer tolerated; there can be no other view or challenge to ‘consensuses’. These characteristics are counterproductive to the argument and will turn people off from the problem; hence 46% of people in the UK are supposedly sceptical of manmade climate change, according to a recent ICM survey.


I think that the case for Global Warming is now highly established and that pumping billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is clearly effecting that process, however I also realise that those with the most to lose, should we try to reduce emissions are some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. The latter are the voices that global politicians hear, not ours; it doesn’t matter how hysterical the green movement becomes, they will stop using fossil fuels when they run out and not a second sooner. Sad, but unfortunately true, you may charge me with being too cynical, but I would suggest it is a realistic assumption based on history and human nature.