Trust me, I'm a politician...

There's a section in the Vietnam War documentary currently showing on BBC4 (watch if you can) where they're reporting on the fall out from the Pentagon Papers leak and the realisation that Kennedy and LBJ had lied through their teeth to the American people. We now know, and lots of Americans suspected at the time, that Richard Nixon lied through his teeth about Vietnam too.

There's a marine veteran speaking to camera who says something along the lines that, prior to the Pentagon Papers, people instinctively trusted the President and his advisors on matters of great importance - war, peace, life, death. Afterwards no-one trusted politicians - the assumption was that all of us lied.

It seems to me that this simple observation from a former soldier summed up the long-term political effect of Vietnam for the USA. For all the winning and losing, elections and campaigns, there is a grumbling view that underneath it all they're probably lying about something. And are prepared to lie about everything up to and including sending young men to the other side of the earth to get killed. So much of what we see played out today in US politics reflects this moment - from low turnouts in elections through endless rounds of campaigning funding reforms to the current suggestions of sinister conspiracy involving Russians, Facebook and shadowy data companies.

For us in Britain, we had to wait a while longer for this epiphany of lies. When Tony Blair stood in Parliament to argue for us to back a US invasion of Iraq, most of us believed that no Prime Minister would bend and warp the evidence - in effect lie - in order to get parliament to back a war. Yet that is what happened, we backed a war because we believed it when Blair said the threat was real, urgent and significant. There are a lot of people who, like that Vietnam veteran from 1971, had the scales fall from our eyes as we realised that, yes, our politicians were prepared to see men die on the basis of deliberate misinformation.

Our politics is better and worse for this epiphany. Better because the public are less prepared to take their leaders simply on trust when it comes to big and important decisions. Although some of the 'wanting to know' around Brexit is little more than spoiling, the public's support for wanting to know is because, frankly, they don't trust politicians not to sell us down the river.

Politics is worse, however, because decent and honest politicians aren't believed - and most politicians, despite the epiphany of lies, are decent and honest. Worse still, politics becomes even more shallow and unpleasant because the media, reflecting public distrust, treats politicians as dodgy, something to be exposed rather than as a set of folk wrestling with getting the right policies and with making the right decisions.

Every time I see Alistair Campbell on telly, in the papers or Tweeting, I want to scream that he was the warped spider sat in the centre of a web of lies - 'spin' they called it - that resulted in hundreds of dead British troops and untold thousands of dead Iraqis. All done to indulge Tony Blair's desire to be America's best buddy. There is no going back, in most folks' minds politicians will forever be liars and deceivers. Most of us aren't, lying's too much like hard work but, because of men like Kennedy, Nixon and Blair, people start with the opinion that we are. Trust me on this, I'm a politician.

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How a private military enterprise got rid of Somali pirates

More or less...

In 2010, Prince sold his security firm and moved on to other projects.

He persuaded the United Arab Emirates to fund a private anti-pirate force in Somalia. The U.N. called that a "brazen violation" of its arms embargo, but Prince went ahead anyway.

His mercenaries attacked pirates whenever they came near shore. His private army, plus merchant ships finally arming themselves, largely ended piracy in that part of the world. In 2010, Somali pirates took more than a thousand hostages. In 2014, they captured none.

Nice story. Lots of ethical challenges in this sort of business but if it works?

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Quote of the day: Vietnam

This is spot on:

The Vietnam War was the greatest U.S. military catastrophe of the 20th century. A conflict begun under false pretenses, based on ignorance and hubris, it killed 58,000 Americans and as many as 3 million Vietnamese. It ended in utter failure. Never in our history have so many lives been wasted on such monumental futility.

My generation (and those a year or so older who sang peace and love) associate the disaster of Vietnam with Richard Nixon - it sort of suits the more lefty-minded for it to be a shockingly corrupt Republican President who shoulders the blame for this awful war. Truth is that the origins of the problem* - at least as far as US involvement is concerned - rests rather with the sainted John F Kennedy.

I've always taken the view that, far from being some blessed individual, Kennedy was as committed to projecting US power as any Republican. Kennedy's knack was to wrap it up in the promotion of democracy rather than the less appealing and blunted cold war rhetoric of Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon.

*Interestingly the "strategic hamlet" approach developed by the French and US advisors whereby radicalised communities were relocated into controllable locations was a straight lift from the policy used by the British in Malaya. The main difference was that the Malay insurgency was by ethnic Chinese making it far easier to isolate the community hiding guerrillas and terrorists.

MPs and Syria - a defence of politicians

Events in Aleppo shock us all and, as we do when such things happen, we look around for people or organisations at which we can point a finger. "You should have done something," we cry. "Why didn't you act." "Blood is on your hands," "Something must be done."

The most common target for these cries, for this opprobrium is the politician:

Shame on you, Ed Miliband. Look at the “complete meltdown of humanity” that (according to the UN’s spokesman) is Aleppo today. Look at the footage of terror, trauma and dislocation. Then, if you dare, ask what you might have done to prevent it.

I hold no particular love for Ed Miliband and don't consider him the finest example of the political class but I believe this sort of attack illustrates a problem. It is very easy for someone who is not a politician, in this case the journalist Matthew d'Ancona, to lay into the choices that a politician makes about war. Mr d'Ancona - or for that matter, any other commenters - did not have to spent hours thinking through the consequences of a decision to put lives at risk. And in the case of Syria - as we've seen with Iraq and seen with Afghanistan - the decision makers are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I refuse to indulge in this attack on politicians for making difficult - life and death - decisions. I am grateful that, back in August 2013, I was not one of those MPs charged with the decision to approve military action in Syria. One part of me looks at the events in Syria before that date and cries for justice, for someone to stop the atrocities visited on innocent Syrians - I recall a work colleague who spoke of how her brother-in-law's family had been exterminated for being seen as on the wrong side of a line they didn't know about.

But another part of me remembers thinking this about Iraq and Afghanistan. Innocent civilians dying beneath our bombs however carefully targeted those bombs might have been. And British servicemen killed and maimed fighting a humanitarian war in a place they'd never heard of before they'd signed up to defend their country.

I don't know how I would have voted had I been an MP that day but, as a politician of sorts, I'm not ready to condemn Ed Miliband or anyone else for making the decision they made back in 2013. Away from the actual decision-making it's very easy isn't it.

"Launch the bombers!"

"Send in the troops."

Yet in making these decisions we condemn people to die - either because we did act or because we didn't act. So when MPs sat and debated Syria - including many now focused on the terrible scenes unfolding in Aleppo - they had to weigh up what might be the consequences of action or inaction knowing that, however much pundits like Matthew d'Ancona might shout, there is no obvious and right course of action.

Instead of finding some politician to blame let's think of the majority of MPs, from whichever party, sitting with a cup or tea or a glass of beer thinking about how to vote on committing Britain to war. For some there'll be family and friends to help (or perhaps hinder) their thoughts, for others it's entirely lonely. A few of the gung ho or ideologically-driven will, uncaringly, find the decision easy but most MPs will waver and haver over whether to drop British bombs on Syrian targets.

Perhaps we should have decided to bomb Syria in August 2013. Maybe the events of the last few days are the consequence, in part, of us deciding not to drop those bombs. Whatever, with the sunlight of glorious hindsight, seems to be right or wrong, we should not blame MPs for hesitating before committing to risk the lives of British servicemen and Syrian civilians. Above all we were not sat in the House of Commons that day charged with the horrible task of choosing between death and destruction or death and destruction with British involvement. We do not live with that decision, with those dead bodies - politicians do.

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No we're not at war

Like many people, I vividly remember the Birmingham pub bombings. And, since I was only 13 and we didn't own a TV, it took quite something for a news story to get my attention. As the caption above shows, it was one of the very worst terrorist incidents in England - topped only by the London bombings of 2005.

We weren't at war with the IRA. They were criminal terrorists who acted from a political motive and they wanted to be at war with the British government. They weren't.

So I am reminded of that wise choice when I hear this sort of comment:

Prime Minister Manuel Valls, speaking after a crisis meeting called by the French president, says “we are at war. We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.”

However terrible an act it may be - and this is a truly terrible act - these are still acts of criminal terrorism not acts of war. Yet we know - for this has been so for every terror group from the Black Hand Gang through the IRA, PLO and Baader-Meinhoff to today's Islamists - that the terrorists want us to believe we are at war. This legitimises their particular struggle, allows them political protection and validates the deicison to become a terrorist.

I care little about the motivations of criminal murderers except in so far as those motivations allow us to catch them and bring them to justice. Just because someone lays claim to religious or political justification for their acts of murder doesn't change the fact that they remain murdering terrorists to be dealt with through the criminal justice system not the rules of war.
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In whose name? A comment on democratic will and other such stuff.

"Not in my name is the cry". Petitions are posted, letters are written, placards are badly spelled, frantic facebook rants are posted. "Not in my name".

Well, yes, absolutely. It's not in your name. Never has been in your name. Never will be in your name. That's whole point really. About this representative democracy lark, I mean. It's not done on the basis of individual approval but of collective approval. So long as fifty per cent plus one of the good folk we choose to represent us in parliament say we do it, we do it. What you and I think doesn't matter. We get to keep our powder dry until the next time we get to choose someone to represent us.

You don't think MPs are any good? Fine - that's your absolute right. But they're all we've got - the inadequate, incompetent, venal and self-serving bastion protecting us from rule by faceless bureaucrats, arrogant technocrats and anonymous securicrats. Depressing I know but that's it really which is why we should pay attention to the voting stuff and take it seriously. It's also why those people who say "we don't need any more politicians" are wrong - we need as many politicians as we can get if we want to hold the government to account - from parish councillors to peers of the realm.

Yesterday - and this is what has prompted all the 'not in my name' stuff - MPs voted to approve airstrikes against targets inside Syria. This followed a week or so of frenetic pseudo-debate and a full day of parliamentary debate culminating in that vote. And it's true that MPs, in arriving at a decision, did so with a variety of motives and reasons. Some will have supported (or opposed) airstrikes simply from loyalty to party - my party leader says one thing or the other, therefore I back that position. And this isn't a bad thing - we decry loyalty and trust too readily resulting in a world where such behaviour is assumed to be self-serving, shallow and essentially corrupt. But, for a complicated issue such as whether to take military action, it isn't copping out to take the view that, all things being equal, you'll go along with the foreign minister and defence minister appointed by your Party's government.

Others - and we saw a bit of this yesterday - will have made their decision on the basis of a moral stance ('I'm a pacifist' or 'ISIS is evil and must be stopped') without consideration of tactics. Again we see this described as sophistry or as disingenuous - as if politicians can never support something on grounds of simple conscience. Worse still, people (as they shout 'not in my name' again and again) make a moral judgement about the reasons for people making the choice - if that choice supports our view its noble and brave, if not its because of bullying, political calculation or stupidity (sometimes all three).

I'm not persuaded by the argument for bombing. Not because of any objection to war or crocodile tears over the civilian deaths that will happen whether or not we bomb. No, my concern is that there seems to be no idea as to what the end of all this looks like. I didn't listen to every word yesterday but I didn't hear an argument setting out a strategy aimed at creating a place to which several million refugees can return and live a fulfilling life in peace and happiness. And I didn't see how bombing Raqqa stops terrorists already in the UK, USA or France from machine-gunning or bombing innocents just to wave their murderous islamo-fascist ideology in our liberal democratic faces.

But my argument lost. Maybe for honourable reasons, perhaps because there's internal turmoil in the Labour Party, perhaps because too many MPs, ministers and media folk didn't understand the issues. But mostly because there was a feeling - one echoed outside the febrile world of Westminster - that, following Paris, something had to be done. And targeted bombing is something.

That bombing isn't being done in your name. It's being done by the UK government on the authorisation of parliament. If you didn't like how your MP voted on this then come the next election you get the chance to vote for someone else - it's how our imperfect system works. If you can stomach party politics, you can join one of the parties and make your case from inside. But shouting 'not in my name' is fatuous and serves no purpose except to make you feel a little bit better about the fact that parliament decided to do something you don't like.

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On the radicalisation of youth...

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I look back to this:

Between 1936 and 1939 over 35,000 men and women, from over 50 countries, left their homes to volunteer for the Republican forces. More than 2,300 of these came from Britain, Ireland and the commonwealth, of whom over 500 were killed (see below). Perhaps 80% were members of the Communist Party, or the Young Communist League, though volunteers with an alternative political background or who were active in the trade union movement were also accepted. 

Young men inspired by a passionate belief left their homes and families to go and fight a civil war in another country. They were fighting for a cause they saw as liberating - the fight against fascism was the justification given by Jack Jones but remember that the liberation these men were fighting for wasn't the liberation of western democracy but the liberation of Stalinist communism.

So tell me dear reader what the difference is between Jack Jones, Laurie Lee and Ernest Hemingway and those young men from Birmingham, Bradford or Slough fighting for was they believe in Syria and Iraq? Except that we won't be erecting monuments to their memory in the squares of Glasgow, Reading or San Francisco.

I don't think the young men of today heading to the middle east to fight are right. But then I don't think those who went to Spain hoping to impose Stalinist oppression there were right either.

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D-Day. The very least we can do is treasure the prize of liberty those men won

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Sometimes you hear something that shows someone gets it, understands what liberty - choice, opportunity - is about and why it is central to what we are:

Society is not determined by some herd of hand-wringing heifers and steers in a departmental subcommittee's focus group. Culture is not ordered off a left-wing menu like some half-strength double decaf soy latte in a recycled paper cup. Society and culture are about people. Our culture is the function of our people—all the people, not just a select few. It is a combination of the lives, the actions, the thoughts and the choices of individuals. Some individuals will choose to drink alcohol. Some will choose not to. I do not believe the non-drinkers have any moral right or obligation to enforce their view and their personal choices on to anyone else's. This is not your culture; it is our culture. 

On a day when we try to recall - to understand - why young men of 18 and 19 gulped down their hearts and headed under fire onto a beach, these words resonate. The example was the nanny state but it could have been free speech, the over-reach of 'law-and-order' or the extensions of secrecy.  We're still the free world - and are so because of what those young men did 70 years ago. But that freedom slowly atrophies in the face of assault - from the advocates of a security state scaring us with tales of terrorism, from the health fascists and nannying fussbuckets who think they have some right to tell us what choices we should make about our lives, and from the offended mob that hounds the dumb and polices the words of the ordinary man.

Perhaps we should take this moment to consider what we're doing when we lock up some sad twenty-something for saying something unpleasant on Twitter. To consider whether it's right to take children off their parents, force the elderly into homes or conduct terrorist trials behind closed doors. We might also ask why we make possessing something a crime, why we feel the need to photograph and film every aspect of people's ordinary lives and whether requiring people to show ID to buy a drink undermines trust and civility.

We should wonder whether requiring an ever more bewildering collection of permissions, licenses and seals to do the most mundane of things - the sort of act that, in the world those young men fought to save, was taken for granted. Why should you need the permission of some bureaucrat to extend your house, put up a shed, open a shop, set up a business or sell a car?

So take a moment. Remember we fought a war that both liberated and defended liberty. And ask whether taking another's choice from him is what those men fought for - whether it's a choice to drink and smoke or a decision to build a house on the edge of his wood or open a business in his front room. I have no tales of D-Day to tell but I will shed tears of remembrance at the astonishing, incredible things that ordinary men did to protect our freedom. They succeeded. Our freedom was saved.

The least we can do is treasure that prize.

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It probably won't work. A postscript on Syria.

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We are always conflicted on humanitarian matters, on Britain's role in the world and on whether the suffering of civilians in some foreign place is, or isn't, our business. And if it is our business, what the nature of that business should be.

So we have - inconsistently and selectively - intervened. Sometimes this intervention is one of those surgical strikes beloved of my neo-conservative friends, more often it's a series of bombings that are not quite so precisely targeted. And sometimes it's real troops nervously clutching guns as they creep down unfamiliar streets unsure whether the people they see are friend of foe and whether the next corner will mean a bomb, death or the shattering of limbs.

We convince ourselves that this is right and, just as importantly, effective.

But:

To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.

In layman's terms interventions increase civilians casualties rather than decrease them.

Supporting a faction’s quest to vanquish its adversary may have the unintended consequence of inciting the adversary to more intense violence against the population. Thus, third parties with interests in stability should bear in mind the potential for the costly consequences of countering murderous groups.

OK it's just one study and others may wish to challenge the findings but for me it's a reminder that, as ever, we should be careful what we wish for. And to understand that righteousness and good intentions alone do not suffice to put things right, you need a strategy that works too.

It seems to me that military intervention in Syria may increase civilian deaths. And if this is a definite risk (and leaving the moral issues to one side for now) what is needed to eliminate that risk so as to ensure our end is achieved?

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On trusting politicians

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For the regular daily political fare we never trusted politicians - you know the drill:

"It's a politician, his lips are moving. He must be lying."

"Why do politicians never answer the question?"

"They'll say anything to get elected."

And so on - as Huey Long (legend claims) told his advisors: "tell 'em we lied."

However, when it came to the serious stuff - war, death, tragedy - our politicians put on their statesman clothes and lived up to that description: honourable. On these grave and important matters we trusted our leaders to be honest, thoughtful and considered.

Then a man came along who was so great and grand, so superior he thought he could exploit that decency. We went to war on a lie. People like me supported that war because we didn't believe a leader would lie about something as serious as sending men to war.

Tony Blair killed that trust.

And no matter how subsequent leaders profess their decency, honour and honesty - or indeed whether they actually are decent, honourable and honest - we will never believe them again.

In some ways this is the very worst thing - among a catalogue of horrors - that Tony Blair did.

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...a reminder of neo-conservatism's curse

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Neo-Conservatism, bastard child of the ghastly Kennedy administration in the USA, has a lot to answer for and this is a reminder:

...on the death of George McGovern. The best thing you (Wall Street Journal) could find to say about him is that later in life he learned about the burdens of government regulation of business. But many conservatives and libertarians who love the free market as much as you do also value and praise him for his opposition to the ultimately pointless war in Vietnam. The war was an indirect cause of inflation, price controls and, most importantly, the loss of life of too many Americans (and Vietnamese) of my generation.

Those who know the subject of my first degree will understand that this story - the terrible catastrophe of Vietnam - really matters to me.  Sadly America repeated the mistake - in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya.

Pray god (if there is one still watching) that America won't make the same mistake in Syria or Iran. Or anywhere else for that matter.

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Thoughts following Remembrance in Wilsden

Each year Wilsden Main Street is closed for an hour so we can hold a remembrance service at the War Memorial. And at that service, the Chairman of the Village Society reads out the names of those listed on the memorial.

In one respect this is just a list of 50 or so names and it’s easy to find the recitation dull. Yet these names are of men who died in those two great 20th Century Wars – wars of survival for our freedom, culture and independence. Remembering their sacrifice is the least we can do.

This year, however, I noticed something else. The familiarity of those names – Firth, Ackroyd, Miles, Robertshaw, Lund, Binns – these are local names. I meet every day with people from those very families and it reminds me of the scale of the sacrifice – the effect of the loss on small communities like Wilsden. It wasn’t just that men died but that the scale of death affected everyone, every family and every street.

It seems to me significant that children in Wilsden can be taken to the memorial and shown the name of someone who died for their freedom. Not just a random name but a real name – maybe someone from their family but certainly a name they will know, a name their neighbour or their school friend shares. A real reminder of the price of freedom.

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Nothing changes - a thought on war & politics

We think our political response to war - and the arguments we make about it - to be new. But certainly in the capacity for Government deceit (at alleged deceit and accusations of deceit) nothing has changed. Here's Abe Lincoln criticising the Mexican War and arguing that Polk's justifications were...

"from beginning to end, the sheerest deception..."

...and that Polk (the Democratic President of the time):

"...originally having some strong motive...to involve the two countries in war and trusting to avoid scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory."

Lincoln argued that Polk had:

"...swept on and on until disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself...a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man."*

Now this was partly an example of Lincoln's style - his use of moral judgment to design a political point - but is was at its core political opportunism as Lincoln had backed the war!

Nothing changes!

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*Quotes are from a speach by then Congressman Lincoln to the House of Representatives, 12th January 1848 and are taken from David Reynolds, "America, Empire of Liberty"

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