Lot’s of love for Hilary Benn’s justification for 8 British Jets to bomb people in the bronze age back to the stone age last week. Vice notes...
The reviews are pouring in, as if this were a West End musical instead of the overture to a massacre. “Truly spellbinding”, the Spectator gushes. “Fizzing with eloquence”, gurgles the Times. “Electric”, gloops the Guardian. The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges, who can reliably be called upon to provide the worst possible opinion at any given time, goes further. “He did not look like the leader of the opposition,” he writes. “He looked like the prime minister.”
But when you actually read what Benn had to say, the rhetoric starts looking less ‘fizzing’ and more ‘fuzzing’…
Benn made a few comments that were really startling, both callous and clunky. He mentioned the inevitability of civilian casualties only once. “Unlike Daesh”, he said, “none of us today act with the intent to harm civilians. Rather, we act to protect civilians from Daesh, who target innocent people.” Well, that’s fine then. As if our sincere good wishes mean anything when we’re lobbing bombs at a city from 30,000 feet.
He declared that the United Nations had been founded because, “we wanted the nations of the world working together to deal with threats to international peace and security,” rather than with the goal of abolishing wars altogether – wars like the one Hilary Benn MP helped start in 2003, which led to the one he helped start last night.
He gave a strange sort of credence to David Cameron’s absurd claim that there are 70,000 ground troops in the Syrian opposition ready and waiting to help Britain defeat Isis – while admitting that it’s simply not true, he insisted that, “whatever the number, 70,000, 40,000, 80,000,” their existence requires us to act now. Maybe there are a million, he may as well have said. Maybe there’s just one.
Ignoring Benn’s own role in voting for the disastrous war for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist which helped create ISIS in the first place seems churlish but in the rush to capitalise on our collective shock that the uber violence that is a norm in the places we bomb occurring on our civilised well heeled streets means we have to ignore the root cause to start a new righteous grievance.
Every bomb we drop creates more terrorists, not less.
Being against more violence isn’t giving into the terrorists, it’s about stopping them from recruiting more of the disillusioned.
I always liked Tarpley’s term for these kind of peer pressure imperialists – ‘humanitarian bombers’. When they get those chickenhawk impulses, but know it will clash with the ‘leftish’ image they’ve cultivated, they ‘reluctantly’ emerge in favour of war, the ‘humanitarian bombers’; stressing the ‘difficulty’ at arriving at their decision, stressing that it is a ‘last resort’, forced upon them by evil doers, ever present in places where valuable resources exist.
Then, the inevitable; they invoke the spectre of fascism. Humanitarian bombers like Benn love it when they get to invoke the fight against fascism in the service of grubby plunder and peer pressure imperialism. It makes them feel like real ‘statesmen’ (never mind that they seem curiously absent from the debate about the astroturfing of the Maidan by US State department and a curious assist from Pierre Omidyar, facilitating an actual fascist coup in Ukraine).
Hell, he’s definitely going to get to shake Barry’s magic hand for this one – and it’ll be photographed and everything! Won’t that look nice in a frame in his study. It’ll be in one of the colour plates included when he published his hagiographical, ghost written Christmas gift list biography upon retirement. The day the president thanked him for adding some pink tie, Oxford cloth gravitas to his grubby campaign to assist Erdogan in the creation of his neo-Ottoman Wahhabi Grossdeutschland in Syria.
Plenty of bile for all in your post, Mr Cemetery.
As a rule it may often be better to start with a magnanimous interpretation of motivation before going to “self-serving” and ultimately “wantonly evil”.
Hilary Benn might be misguided, but like the rest of us, he is probably casting round for a suitable yardstick to measure decision.
It’s true that, also like the rest of us, he is doubtless looking for a measuring stick which will give him the outcome he wants, but so do we all.
Man, the rationalising animal.
The Syrian situation is especially complex, because we confront a foe who can probably not be just left to their own devises, (although that is perhaps another option) nor can the West intervene to potently without attracting the not altogether hyperbolic charge of behaving like latter-day Crusaders.
From the typical Syrian-on -the-ground’s position, being killed by Assad, ISIS or the Coalition forces is a distinction without a difference, whatever the motivation. Moreover, for a “moderate” Sunni, ISIS might easily be seen as the less of three evils.
Not all will oppose the idea of Sharia Law, modified by regional variations. Many Arabs look back on the ancient Caliphate as the highest point of their civilization, which it probably was.
That said, bombing the bejesus out of the civilian population you are trying to help is not unknown to the “Forces of Good”. But it is still a little more complicated that some would suggest.
I recently listened to a recording of the attack on Caen in Normandy after the D-day invasion. The place was reduced over a few days to smoldering ruins. A woman was interviewed after the attack, having lost home and much else.
She offered nothing but thanks.
If Benn was ‘casting around’ for such a yardstick, then he has plenty of British colonial experience upon which he can draw before cocking his leg upon Bob Smillie’s grave.
Of course, beyond the pleasure of simple invective is the truth, namely that your favourite Humanitarian Bomber and mine, the honourable Tony Blair and his free masonic fellow traveller GW Bush set this all in motion. Baathism for all its faults was a system with a secular public sphere, and in the same way the US State department’s fingerprints are all over the Maidan, so too did they pour fuel on the fire when the Assad regime faced protests.
There are elements within the Anglo-American elite who were just waiting for the opportunity to help their Wahhabi friends exploit such a situation. You had folks like George Friedman talking for years about the temptation to break Syria in order to counter the strategic depth which Iran has skilfully created from the opportunities created by the invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to bring it back into the fold of the Sunni oligarchs, but instead gifted it to Iran.
The Turkish agenda is clear. They have been wiping out Kurds while buying oil off Daesh and helping their Turkomen militant satraps sieze land in Latakia province – their own little neo-Ottoman Grossdeutschland strategy, and one which can be used to deprive Russia of its port in the Mediterranean. Erdogan has worked with Gulenists, Grey Wolves left over from the Gladio era, and anyone else of a similar bent to undo secularist reform, stack institutions with Islamists of the Gulenist school or neo Ottoman persuasion, and used the Grey Wolves to terrorise opponents.
It is now a dirty little proxy war for geopolitical interests, and in that sense at least Vladimir Putin is being honest about his reason for intervention. If this is how it must be, then the best I can say is that I’d rather see Volodya acting like Nikita Khrushchev than suck it up and let Hilary Benn get away with acting like Tony Blair while telling us he’s Eric Blair.
If Putin restores order, expect Assad to get on a plane and spend the rest of his life in a dacha in Sochi surrounded by armed guards, while the next generation of Baathists restore the secular public sphere which Syria has had for so long. If Erdogan and Prince Bandar prevail, expect violent interpretations of Sharia, sectarian ethnic cleansing, and a continuation of proxy war, with the blessings of our beloved Humanitarian Bombers in Washington and London.
It’s spin doctoring 101–
When in doubt. Mention the war
No one ever says why bombing campaigns creates more terrorism.
Basically because more babies can be produced than bombs made in factories.
Iraq has has been invaded three times and population growth has been steady rising. Even with a head chopping caliphate with in its boarders the numbers say Iraqs population will still grow.
With all this trouble – over the next 30 years, I won’t be surprised if Iran dosnt just annex Iraq.
We’re not like ISIS who kill people with nasty evil bombs – we kill people with polite, well mannered bombs that say sorry as they explode
Hi Martyn
I will not waste my time giving considered feedback if you would prefer furious but ill-considered input only.
Many of the posts I make are, presumably, rejected or discarded, while space seems always found for hateful and ignorant ravings (as well, admittedly, as interesting and valuable contributions).
I will use my time more profitably if you would prefer not to receive my posts just because I believe strongly in the primacy of reason of over inarticulate rage. There is more than one way to achieve Nirvana, there is also , perhaps, a discussion to be had on what that Nirvana would look like. (Or even if there is time to achieve it, to judge from Chris Trotter’s latest Stuff posting on the imminent inevitability of global warming oblivion).
Cheers
Nick
Not everyone here is a frothing zealot, Nick. Some of the posts here on TDB have me shaking my head sadly and wondering at the future of the human race. Others are intelligent, well articulated and give me a lot to think about. If someone can present a reasoned, coherent argument, whatever their political persuasion, most of us will take the time to peruse and ponder it. At least, that’s been my experience so far.
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