Another War With Iran?

A Long, Vicious And Forgotten War: The country which unleashed the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was Iraq. For the duration, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was able to count on the strong support of the United States. The backing of Presidents Jimmy Carter’s and Ronald Reagan’s administrations never wavered, not even when, for the first time since World War One, the Iraqis deployed chemical weapons.

WILL THERE BE a war with Iran? Better to ask: will there be another war with Iran?

So many of us in the West have forgotten that the country, currently being fitted-up as the next Middle Eastern aggressor, endured eight years of extremely vicious fighting, at the cost of at least half-a-million lives, between 1980 and 1988.

The country which unleashed this war was Iraq. For the duration, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was able to count on the strong support of the United States. The backing of Presidents Ronald Reagan’s and Jimmy Carter’s administrations never wavered, not even when, for the first time since World War One, the Iraqis deployed chemical weapons.

The date of the Iran-Iraq War’s outbreak, September 1980, is significant. Eleven months earlier, 52 American hostages had been seized in an attack on the US Embassy in Tehran. When his secret mission to rescue the hostages ended in disaster, President Jimmy Carter quietly appealed to Saddam, who, as a secular Baathist, was no friend of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution”, for help. His reward, providing his army could win them, would be Iran’s most productive oil fields.   

The hostages’ eventual liberation, pointedly timed to coincide with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, came in January 1981. When asked by a reporter if he would ever go back to Iran, one of the freed hostages replied: “Only in a B-52!” Thanks to Saddam’s illegal invasion, however, President Reagan was never required to unleash his strategic bombers on the Iranians. The Iraqi armed forces had become America’s proxy punishers. Iran had humiliated the United States, and for eight terrible years it was required to pay the price.

With another war on Iranian soil looming, it is interesting to register the size of the Iraqi invasion force. Saddam sent 100,000 troops and hundreds of battle tanks across the Iranian border in September 1980, while his air force flew hundreds of sorties against Iranian targets. The scale of Saddam’s invasion bears close comparison with the Anglo-Soviet invasion of neutral Iran in August 1941. That, too, was a massive affair, involving hundreds of thousands of British Empire and Soviet troops.

Remember, these were invasions of Iran – not by Iran. As strategic analyst, Dr Paul Buchanan, observes:

“[I]t should be remembered that modern Iran has not engaged in an unprovoked attack on another country. Although it supports and uses irregular military proxies, it is nowhere close to being the sponsor of terrorism that several Sunni Arab petroleum oligarchies are. In spite of its anti-Israel rhetoric (destined for domestic political consumption), it has not fired a shot in anger towards it.”

This is important. If war is unleashed against Iran, its 80 million citizens will find themselves engaged in a defensive war. Accordingly, the Iranians will enjoy the home-ground advantage. The Americans, and whoever is foolish enough to join them in such a mad endeavour, will find themselves, like the Iraqis, required to fight not only Iran’s people, but also its formidable geography. In addition to confronting human-beings, the United States will be battling snow-capped mountain ranges and waterless deserts.

The Americans are not daunted. When it comes to the Middle East (and its oil) the behaviour of the United States can only be described as unhinged. When Saddam dared to act independently of the US, the debt America owed his country, for its costly – and ultimately futile – war against its Iranian neighbour, was forgotten in a heartbeat.

And it wasn’t just Saddam who paid dearly for his failure to comprehend the full extent of America’s derangement. When US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Astonishingly, the same people who beat the war-drums for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, are beating them again in 2019. President Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, gives every impression of never having seen a square kilometre of Middle Eastern soil which could not be immeasurably improved by being pulverised with US ordnance.

It would be comforting to believe that wiser heads will prevail. Sadly, history suggests otherwise.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 July 2019.

If America Refuses To End The Syrian Civil War, Then Russia Will Have To Win It.

Aleppo's Agony: More than anything else, global opinion is demanding an end to the siege of Aleppo. Surely, who rules Syria matters less than bringing this seemingly interminable and indiscriminate destruction to an end? Why can’t those doing the fighting see that? Why won’t they stop?

 

THE IMAGES EMERGING FROM ALEPPO are gut-wrenching. Tiny babies, dust-covered and ominously silent, are pulled from the rubble of their homes. The cries of anguished parents mingle with the wailing of ambulance sirens as their broken children are carried away. A young man on Skype warns the world of Aleppo’s “annihilation”. A water-treatment plant is bombed, and in retaliation the only other functioning plant is shut down. Two million people are left without safe drinking water. This is the Syrian Civil War up-close and personal. Unbelievably horrible.

 

More than anything else, the global audience confronted with these horrors wants the war to stop. Surely, who rules Syria matters less than bringing such indiscriminate death and destruction to an end? Why can’t those doing the fighting see that? Why won’t they stop?

 

The warring parties won’t stop because they can’t stop. Not until the government of Bashar Al-Assad either triumphs over, or is decisively defeated by, its enemies.

 

If he chose to, the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, whose lugubrious features are so well suited to his repeated expressions of sympathy for the Syrian people, could end the war in a moment. All he has to do is halt the supply of weapons to Assad’s enemies. Yes, that would involve placing a restraining hand on the shoulders of America’s Saudi and Turkish allies. But if his government was genuinely committed  to ending the fighting, that is what it would do.

 

Because Assad’s regime is still recognised as the legitimate government of Syria. Its representatives continue to take their seats in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and its ambassadors continue to be recognised in the world’s capital cities – including Washington DC.

 

That’s because there was a time when the West was only too happy to have Syria’s friendship. It was 2003, and US forces were busy overthrowing Assad’s fellow Baathist, Saddam Hussein. No one had too much to say back then about the brutally authoritarian character of the “murderous Syrian regime”.

 

On the contrary, in the decade following the Iraq invasion, the Western powers were at pains to point out how very different Bashar was from his hard-line Baathist father, Hafez Al-Assad. Bashar’s western education was played up, as were the charitable works of his glamorous wife, Asma. The general diplomatic consensus up until 2011 was that a gradual liberalisation of the regime was underway. Elections had been held. Political prisoners had been freed. All Assad needed, said the Middle East-watchers, was time.

 

He didn’t get it. The Arab Spring of 2011 unleashed a wave of popular uprisings across the Middle East. Assad watched with growing alarm as first Tunisia, then Egypt and finally Libya succumbed to politico-military putsches that saw heads-of-state roll – sometimes literally.

 

This was the point at which an intelligent American administration would have made it clear to the world that it was committed to preserving the reforming government of Bashar al-Assad. Unfortunately, the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fresh from her “triumph” in Libya, prevailed upon President Barack Obama to figuratively hold the cloaks of the Syrian rebels while they stoned the Assad regime to death.

 

Tragically, the Obama Administration had reckoned without the Assad family’s grim reputation for holding on to power at any cost. Like his father before him, Bashar looked not to Syrian civil society for salvation, but to the Syrian military. Civil war, with all of its attendant fratricidal slaughter, was unleashed. Syria was ripped apart.

 

Wrong-footed by Assad’s bloodthirsty response, Obama dithered. As he cast about for a solution that did not involve putting American boots on the ground, Saudi Arabia did all it could to ensure that it would be an Islamic, and not a secular, state that grew out of the rubble of Baathism.

 

Meanwhile, in eastern Syria, something even more deadly was rising. Remnants of Saddam’s disbanded army had crossed the Iraqi border; ruthlessly eliminated the student groups responsible for the democratic rebellion; and allowed their fanatical Salafist understudies to announce the return of the long-dead Caliphate – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

 

Enter Vladimir Putin. As long-time allies of the Syrians, and with radical Islamic terrorists of its own to worry about, Putin’s Russian Federation was willing to embrace what the Americans consistently refused to endorse – foreign military intervention.

 

Whatever else they may be criticised for, the Russians cannot be faulted for their grasp of war’s greatest priority: securing victory as swiftly as possible. Were the Americans only willing to immediately staunch the flow of arms to Assad’s enemies, then the slow torture of Aleppo could cease, and its interminable siege be lifted.

 

In the absence of decisive American action, however, the Russian and Syrian bombers will continue their deadly sorties.

 

And the awful images of war will continue to assault our eyes.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 September 2016.

The Ultimate Guarantor.

Don't Mess With Me! The knowledge that a nation possesses nuclear weapons is usually enough to dissuade its enemies from launching any kind of attack or invasion. For those unfortunate states caught in the cross-hairs of the great powers, it is difficult to imagine a stronger incentive to risk everything on acquiring the ultimate guarantor of national independence.

 

WITH THE IMPORTANT EXCEPTION of Israel, no nation in possession of nuclear weapons has ever been invaded. It is difficult to conceive of a better incentive for any state threatened with aggression to risk everything for the deadly technology History has taught it to esteem as the ultimate guarantor of national independence.

 

Exactly how many nuclear weapons Israel possessed when she was attacked by her Arab neighbours in 1973 is unclear, but she certainly possessed some. Exactly how close she came to using them, however, remains even more historically hazy.

 

To the south, the Israelis had the buffer of the Sinai Peninsula in which to absorb Egypt’s thrust across the Suez Canal. In the north, however, the situation was much more fraught. Had the Israeli Defence Force not been able to halt the advance of Syria’s armoured columns in the first 72 hours of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Golda Meir may have concluded that she had no choice except to threaten Damascus and Cairo with obliteration if hostilities were not halted immediately and their troops withdrawn.

 

In the deadly chess game that is nuclear strategy, the very possibility that Israel might feel obliged to make such a threat, required the United States to signal that a nuclear counter-threat against Israel, issued by the Soviet Union in defence of its Arab allies, would not be countenanced. That signal took the form of advancing the US armed forces to DEFCON 3 – a “Defence Condition” positioned just two perilously short steps away from Armageddon.

 

The Nearest Run Thing You Ever Saw: The Israeli PM, Golda Meir and her Defence Minister, Moshe Dyan, visit the Golan Heights in the hours following the Syrian army's thwarted attack. Had things gone differently, Israel's leaders would have been forced to threaten the use of its small stockpile of nuclear weapons.

 

Fortunately for the world, the Russians were not about to initiate World War III on behalf of Egypt and Syria. With the benefit of hindsight it is also clear that the mere possibility of an Israeli nuclear strike was sufficient for the leaders of Egypt and Syria to limit their military and diplomatic objectives to the restoration of Sinai and the Golan Heights, and the Israeli evacuation of the West Bank and Gaza.

 

In the light of these facts, the Israeli case is not as exceptional as it might, at first, appear. Even when they possessed the military resources to launch a war of annihilation against the State of Israel, the Egyptians and the Syrians dared not do so. No one doubts the willingness of the Jewish people to defend themselves against a second genocide with every weapon at their disposal – including Israel’s atomic bombs. Like the biblical hero Samson, Israel, in extremis, will not hesitate to bring down the Temple upon the heads of its enemies – even at the cost of being crushed itself.

 

These lessons in invulnerability were not lost on Israel’s middle-eastern neighbours. Does anyone seriously suppose that the United States and the United Kingdom would have launched a conventional invasion of Iraq if Saddam Hussein had possessed even a small stockpile of nuclear weapons? And is anyone truly surprised that the revolutionary government of the Islamic Republic of Iran very early on began diverting resources to what Israel and the United States were convinced was an all-out effort to create a nuclear arsenal?

 

That Iran has been persuaded to abandon its, geopolitically-speaking, extremely strategically destabilising nuclear-weapons programme, is not due entirely to the United Nations’ crippling economic sanctions. The Iranians have witnessed the exemplary fate of, first, the Iraqi, and then the Syrian, attempts to construct and operate a nuclear reactor capable of enriching Uranium and/or producing weapons-grade Plutonium.

 

The Israelis call it the “Begin Doctrine” – after Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who, in 1981, authorised a pre-emptive air-strike against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Begin described Osirak’s successful destruction as “anticipatory self-defence at its best”. In 2007 the Israelis did it again. “Operation Orchard” utterly destroyed the nuclear reactor constructed (with North Korean assistance) in the remote Deir ez-Zor region of Syria.

 

Although the Iranians took the precaution of locating most of their nuclear facilities deep underground, their military chiefs were never entirely convinced that the Israelis wouldn’t deploy tactical nuclear weapons to take them out. The bloodthirsty threats of Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (whose bellicosity frightens even his own generals!) upped-the-ante still further. In 2015, sanctioned and intimidated, the Iranians finally abandoned their bid for the ultimate guarantor.

 

One question, however, remains. Does Israel’s acceptance of Iran’s diplomatic assurances have anything to do with Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 January 2016.

Dictatorship Or Chaos? The Only Choice Left In The Middle East.

A Room Full Of Spiders: Shia militiamen training in Iraq. Living with dictators is never easy, but if events in the Middle East since 2003 have taught us anything, it’s that living without them is impossible. The curtailment of civil liberties that characterises dictatorial regimes has often been considered an acceptable trade-off for the peace and stability they bring with them. People living in these circumstances know that the alternative to dictatorship isn’t democracy – it’s chaos.

 

“SADDAM WAS A FAT BLACK SPIDER high up in the corner of the room. You knew where he was, and kept as far away from him as possible.” As a description of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, the metaphor was memorable enough, but what the young Iraqi woman said next was unforgettable. “Now that Saddam has gone the room is full of spiders. You can’t watch them all, and you can’t keep out of their way.”

 

Living with dictators is never easy, but if events in the Middle East since 2003 have taught us anything, it’s that living without them is impossible. There’s a simple reason for this. The conditions that give rise to dictatorship are generally so appalling that the curtailment of civil liberties that inevitably follows their establishment is considered an acceptable trade-off for the peace and stability they bring with them. People living in these circumstances know that the alternative to dictatorship isn’t democracy – it’s chaos.

 

Let us give the West the benefit of the doubt and say that its leaders failed to grasp this obvious truth. Let us assume that when Tony Blair declared Saddam a monster, and insisted the world would be a better place without him, he was being sincere. Let us accord the same honour to President George W. Bush, and assume that he, too, was speaking sincerely when he told the US Congress, in his 2007 State of the Union address: “The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity.” Where does it leave us?

 

It leaves us contemplating a number of brutal truths. The first, and the most brutal, being that, even allowing for Blair and Bush harbouring only the best of intentions, the answer to “the great question of our day” is that America and her allies cannot build free societies in the Middle East. And that the men and women living there will not be sharing the political rights of Westerners any time soon.

 

That being the case, the West’s choice is no longer between dictatorship and democracy; it is between dictatorship and chaos. And, given that chaos is the only thing the West’s intervention in the Middle East has created, there is really only one positive choice to be made, and that is to back those military/political leaders with the best chance of maintaining, and/or restoring, peace and stability.

 

In terms of the present security crises precipitated by the Islamic State, and the deadly chaos of Syria’s civil war (out of which the Islamic State emerged) this can only mean recognising what the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has understood from the very beginning; that the best hope of peace and stability in Syria, and eradicating Islamic State, resides with the Baathist government of President Bashar al-Assad.

 

It is what Emile Simpson, former British Army officer and author of War From the Ground-Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics, is calling the “cold realism” of the  West’s diplomatic and military future. Writing for the conservative American magazine, Foreign Policy, Simpson predicts:

 

“The post-Paris war on terror will affirm the West’s commitment to fighting radical Islamic terrorism, but, in the process, it will reject the idiom of revolutionary, moralizing democratic change inherited from President Bush. Syria was the end of the line for that approach. This new phase will assume that terrorists are nonstate actors, and will take the view that if you have an international system built around strong sovereign states — no matter how brutal or unconcerned with human rights — life becomes much harder for nonstate armed groups, including terrorists. This is simply a reflection of the new realities we face, not a celebration of that shift.”

 

Democrats will stand aghast at this unapologetic re-emergence of Nineteenth Century realpolitik. They would, however, be wise to curb their outrage. The Baathist regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Assad family were, indisputably, ruthlessly oppressive in the context of political rights. When viewed from the perspective of the economic and social rights these secular Baathist regimes delivered, however, the picture changes. Modern systems of public education and health opened up the prospect of a more prosperous life for both men and women. Large-scale state interventions generated both jobs and, by Middle Eastern standards, prosperity. Most important, in both Iraq and Syria, the Baathists kept Islamic fanaticism under tight control.

 

All of which raises the worrying question: Was it really dictatorship that the West was determined to eradicate from the Middle East – including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States? Or was it Baathism? Were the men behind Blair and Bush actually betting that their long-term interests would be better served by “a room full of spiders?”

 

If so, then they lost the bet.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 November 2015.

Loving Your Enemies: New Zealand's Catholic Bishops Come Out In Support Of The Iraq Deployment.

Cry Havoc! For the first time in many years a major New Zealand Christian denomination has come out in support of military action. But have the Catholic Bishops interpreted their Church's "Just War Doctrine" correctly? (Graphic: Warmonger by John Carroll.)

“WE CAN NO LONGER watch from the sidelines as the Islamic State continues to inflict immense suffering and brutality.” John Key? Mike Hosking? Fran O’Sullivan? John Roughan? No. These are the words of the Catholic Bishops of New Zealand. Alone among the other major Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has come out in support of the National-led Government’s troop deployment to Iraq.

 

“If by providing training to the Iraqi Army we can assist them to stop the aggressor in their land,” write the Bishops, “then as a matter of promoting the common good we should provide that assistance.”

 

Released on 24 February, in the form of a letter to their congregations, the Bishops’ message argues strongly that the people of Iraq “must not be left to face such unjust aggression on their own.”

 

Pope Francis, himself, write the Bishops, has said that it is “licit to stop an unjust aggressor”.

 

The Catholic Church’s senior cleric in New Zealand, Cardinal John Dew, softened the bishops’ position (if only slightly) by adding that: “Substantial humanitarian support should also be part of New Zealand’s involvement in Iraq.”

 

It has been a long time since any of New Zealand’s major Christian denominations spoke out publicly in favour of a military engagement. Indeed, the reconciliation of Jesus’s injunction to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you”, with support for any kind of warfare requires some very fancy philosophical and theological footwork.

 

Before attempting such a challenging ethical tap-dance the Catholic Bishops would have checked out Paragraph 2,309 of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which lists four strict conditions for “legitimate defence by military force:”

 

1.      The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain;

2.      All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3.      There must be serious prospects of success;

4.      The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

 

Few would argue that the First and Second Conditions have not been met in full. For the unfortunate souls who find themselves living in Islamic State, the likelihood of suffering “lasting, grave and certain” damage at the hands of its fanatical soldiers and clerics is all-too-real. Moreover, almost all of the numerous attempts to prevent or mitigate that damage, whether by negotiation or exhortation, have failed. If these were the only preconditions for the use of military force, then the Bishops would have their episcopal slippers on some pretty solid ground.

 

Where their position becomes decidedly unsteady, however, is when the Third and Fourth Conditions are applied to the Iraq Deployment.

 

Very few experts foresee the Western intervention against Islamic State having any serious prospects of success. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate could not have been born, nor could it have survived, had the armies of the Christian West not attacked and occupied Iraq, and the Shi’a regime, installed on the points of those armies' bayonets, not unleashed a murderous campaign of terror, murder and theft against the Sunni population.

 

The current Iraqi government, characterised by its American sponsors as more moderate and inclusive than its vicious predecessor, is in fact beholden to precisely the same constellation of religious, military and economic forces. For the Sunni Muslims of Iraq and Syria, the present evils of al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate are, sadly, preferable to the much worse evils that await them should the Shi’a militias prove victorious.

 

International relief and refugee agencies are already preparing for the flight of up to a million Sunni citizens from the city of Mosul should it be in imminent danger of falling to the Shi’a dominated (and soon to be Kiwi trained!) Iraqi army. Few Sunni Iraqis doubt the intensity of the Shi’a desire to be avenged upon the “butchers” of Islamic State. The mutilated bodies of Sunni citizens dumped on Baghdad’s rubbish heaps by Iranian-backed Shi’a militiamen have been every bit as effective, as brutal, flesh-and-blood propaganda, as any of Islamic State’s gruesome videos.

 

The better our Kiwi soldiers train these Shi’a extremists, the graver the evils and disorders they are bound to produce. In attempting to eliminate the evil of Islamic State, the New Zealand Defence Force could very easily become an accessory to the bloody sacking of Iraq’s second-largest city.

 

Are the Catholic Bishops really content to be associated with the slaughter and rape of innocent women and children? The torture and summary execution of thousands of Islamic State fighters? And the burning and looting of a great and ancient city?

 

St Thomas Aquinas wrote that: “Three things are necessary for the salvation of Man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”

 

With St Thomas’s words ringing in their ears, New Zealand’s Catholic Bishops should think again.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Tuesday, 3 March 2015.

Sharpening The Stick At Both Ends: "Lord Of The Flies" Comes To Parliament

"I've Got The Conch!" Democracy is a brittle construct and easily shattered. The Prime Minister's behaviour in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, 24 February 2015 plumbed new depths of intemperance and aggression. Like Jack in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, John Key evinces scant regard for the traditions of free speech and honest disagreement.

 

THE PRIME MINISTER’s conduct in the House of Representatives yesterday afternoon was disgraceful. It is doubtful if any of John Key’s predecessors have ever displayed such contempt for the dignity of their office. Shouting across the chamber in a manner which has been described, with considerable justification, as unhinged, Mr Key looked and sounded like someone on the verge of unleashing physical violence.

 

The Prime Minister, John Key: Unhinged?

 

“Get some guts! Join the right side!”, the Prime Minister screamed at the Opposition benches – as if it was an argument.

 

What happened then was, if anything, even more unnerving that John Key’s out-of-control demagoguery. As he dropped, exhausted, into his seat, the Prime Minister’s colleagues leapt to their feet, roaring and clapping.

 

Watching them on television, it was difficult not to mentally superimpose upon the screen the 1930s black-and-white footage of thousands of ecstatic Germans hoisted to their feet by the frenzied ravings of the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. If those National Party MPs had stretched out their right arms and begun chanting “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”, it would not have been any more outlandish than the Prime Minister’s own conduct.

 

It is to be hoped that, having had 24 hours to reflect upon their conduct during yesterday’s debate on the Cabinet’s decision to deploy close to 150 troops to Iraq, Mr Key’s parliamentary colleagues are feeling appropriately shamefaced.  Because, in the course of delivering his response to the other party leaders’ near-unanimous opposition to the Government’s announced troop deployment, Mr Key crossed a vital constitutional line.

 

Parliament’s rules, its “Standing Orders” insist that all members are “Honourable Members” – and must be treated as such. Without this rule, the conduct of the legislature’s business would rapidly descend into rancorous disorder. Rational debate would become impossible – raising the spectre of MPs coming to blows on the Floor of the House. It has happened many times in other jurisdictions, it would be tragic if it happened here.

 

Parliamentary democracy is a brittle thing and very easily broken. All it takes is for those who have agreed to abide by its rules to suddenly renege on their agreement. This democratic vulnerability and fragility is captured brilliantly in William Golding's famous novel, Lord of the Flies.

 

In the story, a group of English school-boys, stranded on a desert island, create a democratic assembly in which all important decisions are debated. Anyone wishing to speak at these gatherings asks for and is given a beautiful conch shell which, while held, guarantees the holder a fair hearing. The boys’ final descent into barbarity occurs when Jack, driven by his lust for power and control, kills the cleverest boy on the island, Piggy, as, conch in hand, he attempts to persuade the boys to keep working together. The murder weapon is a giant boulder which Jack dislodges from above. Piggy is crushed, and the conch shatters into a thousand pieces on the rocks below.

 

Yesterday, in the House of Representatives, John Key became Jack. His intemperate outburst, bristling with insults and barely concealed threats against everyone who'd dared to speak out against his government’s decision to commit New Zealand to another war in the Middle East, was as unprecedented as it was chilling. If not shattered, the delicate conch shell of parliamentary democracy was very roughly handled.

 

Tellingly, instead of reacting to their leader’s extraordinary display with the same stunned expression of horrified disbelief as the Opposition, the faces of the Government members registered only the most delirious approbation.

 

In Lord of the Flies, Jack’s followers whisper darkly that their leader has “sharpened a stick at both ends”. It is a metaphor well suited to this Government’s announced intention to not only deploy troops to the Middle East, but to pass legislation further strengthening the powers of the security and intelligence services. The same Parliament which the Executive refused to entrust with a vote on the Iraq Deployment, will soon be asked to invest that same Executive with even more powers to keep the New Zealand people under surveillance.

 

After catching a glimpse of the Jack that lurks beneath the mask of genial John, the House of Representatives would be most unwise to oblige the Prime Minister in this regard. Or, at least, not before he gives proof that he accepts and understands that the Labour, Green and NZ First parties (and, in the case of the Iraq Deployment, the Maori and United Future parties as well) constitute Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

 

That these parties have rejected the Government’s decision to re-join the Middle East conflict is both their right and their duty. In saying “No.” they are representing the very substantial number of New Zealanders who do not want their soldiers in Iraq. These people are not gutless. Nor are they on the wrong side of the argument merely because the Prime Minister believes himself and his government to be on the right side.

 

The aggression and intolerance which the Prime Minister displayed in the House yesterday afternoon should fill all New Zealanders with a deep sense of foreboding. If the Iraq Deployment gives rise to deadly reprisals by Islamic State, it is by no means clear that this government’s response will be either rational or restrained. Those who hold the conch of free speech in their hands will need to keep their eyes open and their backs against the wall.

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Wednesday, 25 February 2015.

Iraq: The Unasked And Unanswered Questions.

Invasion Force: Western troops return from an exercise in the Saudi Arabian desert in the run-up to Operation Desert Storm (1990-91). St Thomas Aquinas enjoined his fellow Christians to avoid all wars in which the cost of their participation was, by any rational calculation, likely to be higher, in human terms, than their abstention. Is the Middle East a better or worse place after 25 years of Western intervention?

 

BY THE TIME you read these words, the dispatch of New Zealand troops to Iraq will, almost certainly, have been announced. For the fourth time in less than quarter-of-a-century, Kiwi boots will be kicking up sand in the Middle East. Unasked, presumably, by those seated around the Cabinet Table yesterday morning, were the questions:

 

“Has the Middle East become a better, or a worse, place since the West’s first, massive, post-war incursion, back in 1991?”

 

And: “Will it be a better, or worse, place for the Western “Club’s” intervention in 2015?”

 

It is worth reminding ourselves that Osama Bin Laden’s decision to shift Al Qaida’s focus to the “far-away enemy” was triggered by the arrival of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in the Arabian Peninsula – home of the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina. Imagine how Catholic Christians would react to the sight of several Arab divisions setting up camp in the Vatican City, and you’ll have some inkling of how profoundly affected Bin Laden and his followers were by the Americans’ arrival.

 

The past has much less purchase on the sensibilities of the average Westerner than it does on the hearts and minds of those belonging to the Islamic faith. Even today, both Al Qaida and Islamic State denounce the military contingents of the West as “Crusaders” – referencing the Frankish knights who invaded the Muslim world early in the Twelfth Century. Nor is this mere rhetoric on their part. Through all the intervening centuries, street-singers from Beirut to Baghdad have kept alive the horrors perpetrated by the Christian invaders, and recounted proudly how Islam’s great captain, Saladin, recaptured the holy city of Jerusalem. The Crusades are as real to the people of the Middle East as the much more recent tragedy of Gallipoli is to us.

 

Every grain of sand kicked-up by Kiwi soldiers’ boots in Iraq will be weighted down with centuries of history. It is, moreover, a living past, inextricably intertwined with the present, and its effects can be deadly. The terrible punishments meted out to those who have fallen into the clutches of Islamic State are not the random choices of sadistic criminals, but the fate prescribed by Islam’s 1,383-year-old holy book, the Quran:

 

“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter”.

 

This is the world into which our government has decided to send one hundred or more young New Zealanders. Our soldiers will now be numbered among “those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger”. From the moment New Zealand’s participation in the war against Islamic State is announced, the fate of any Kiwi soldier, or citizen, falling into the hands of Islamic State, is sealed.

 

New Zealand is very far from Iraq and Syria; so far that it is possible the self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has forgotten we exist. The news that 100 New Zealand troops are on their way to join the ranks of the “Crusaders” will, therefore, come as a forceful reminder of our role in Middle Eastern history. It is to be hoped that Prime Minister Key has not forgotten how far the influence of al-Baghdadi’s regime now reaches. If he needs instruction, he has only to ask the citizens of Copenhagen, Paris, Sydney and Ottawa. The “Caliphate’s” arm has grown very long indeed.

 

If our Government has deliberately invited the religious fervour of the Middle East into these peaceful and hitherto tolerant islands, then we, ourselves, will have to answer the questions they refused to consider: “Has intervention worked in the past?”, “Will it work now?” And, “Is it justified?”

 

The first two answers are, obviously, “No.” But what about the third? What possible justification can we offer for dispatching troops to a country where millions of the people they’ve been sent to help will curse them as enemies of God?

 

Is it possible that we, like the gullible inhabitants of Medieval Europe, have allowed ourselves to be goaded into action by sermons filled with the details of hideous atrocities? Are our soldiers about to depart these shores with the red cross of the crusader knights emblazoned – if only metaphorically – on their uniforms? If so, then we are embarked upon a fool’s errand that can only end in horror and despair.

 

St Thomas Aquinas enjoined his fellow Christians to avoid all wars in which the cost of their participation was, by any rational calculation, likely to be higher, in human terms, than their abstention.

 

Our presence in Iraq cannot be justified. It will end badly.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 February 2015.

What's In A Name? Let The Anzacs Rest In Peace, Mr Key.

Imperial Folly: If the Anzac legend is about anything at all, it is about young Australian and New Zealand men transcending the idiocy and mendacity of their leaders and the hopelessness of their situation to assert a set of values and qualities unique to the places they called home.

 

IF ANYTHING can still be considered “sacred” in New Zealand it’s Anzac Day. For Pakeha New Zealanders, in particular, the commemoration of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 holds a visceral significance which Waitangi Day has never achieved. That the day has survived the passing of all those who were actually there bears testimony to its status as one of the most potent symbols of our national identity.

 

In her nine years as Prime Minister, Helen Clark devoted considerable energy (and a not insignificant amount of taxpayer cash) to enhancing the power and reach of Anzac Day. Ms Clark’s purpose was to underscore the military tragedy’s role in nudging New Zealanders forward from their reflexive identification with the British Empire towards the first, tentative, notion that they might, one day, become something more than mere “loyal subjects” of the King-Emperor.

 

You might, therefore, think that Ms Clark’s successor, contemplating the hundredth  anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, would be anxious to ensure that nothing happened to besmirch or cheapen the solemn character of this major historical commemoration. But, in this matter, as in so many other matters of late, our current prime minister, John Key, is full of surprises.

 

At his post-Cabinet media conference on Monday, Mr Key announced that: “it’s not impossible that they [the training components of Australian and New Zealand military contingents poised to join the international effort against Islamic State] could be badged as an Anzac unit.”

 

Mr Key and his Australian counterpart, Tony Abbott, have clearly been mulling over the possibility of resurrecting the Anzac “badge” ever since the two politicians teamed-up in the West Australian port of Albany to jointly preside over commemorations of the original Anzacs’ embarkation for Egypt on 1 November 1914.

 

It is difficult to know where to begin the list of reasons why the Prime Ministers’ suggestion should be dismissed out of hand.

 

Perhaps we should start by reviewing why the original Gallipoli Campaign proved to be such a disaster.

 

In April 1915 New Zealand was ordered into a hastily improvised invasion of the Ottoman Empire with no clear understanding of what we were being asked to do – or even if we could do it. If the Anzac legend is about anything at all, it is about young Australian and New Zealand men transcending the idiocy and mendacity of their leaders and the hopelessness of their situation to assert a set of values and qualities unique to the places they called home.

 

We honour the 2,779 young Kiwis who fell in that fight not simply for their tremendous courage, but also for the terrible lesson which their utterly needless deaths have, hopefully, inscribed upon our national memory. That it is terribly wrong for our leaders to send young New Zealand men and women to right wrongs that we, as New Zealanders, did not commit and which we cannot hope to end.

 

Mr Key has stated that he has no intention of “doing something that’s disrespectful”. But allowing us to be drawn into a joint role with the Australians under some sort of sentimental throwback to the Anzacs is, as Labour’s Andrew Little noted: “pretty cynical”.

 

Especially since it would be a joint mission without clear objectives; lacking any reliable metric for success; and which will likely end with New Zealand’s soldiers being hastily withdrawn amidst recrimination and disgust.

 

Dry Run? US Marines and New Zealand soldiers conduct joint military exercises, "Dawn Blitz", at Camp Pendleton, California, in 2013.

 

Iraq is a failed state riven with corruption and religious enmity. Its standing army is a standing joke. Nine tenths of the men we’d be “training” have no wish to either kill or die for a regime they neither respect nor trust. The remaining tenth will gladly put themselves and their weapons at the disposal of Islamic State. Nowhere in Iraq is “behind the wire”. The whole country is a combat zone.

 

If the “strategic studies” departments of our universities were worthy of the name they would be condemning the madness of sending foreign troops to Iraq in order to crush a movement brought into being by the presence of foreign troops in Iraq. With Australian planes strafing IS positions and its special forces readying themselves for combat, nothing could endanger New Zealand’s “home front” more than publicly joining our name with that of the United States’ gung-ho “Deputy Sheriff”.

 

Imperial folly has claimed enough New Zealand lives. No more.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 December 2014.

If Kobane Falls?

Under Fire: The fate of the Syrian border-town of Kobane has assumed an international significance. Its capture by the forces of the Islamic State would be a serious blow to the West's collective resolve to degrade and ultimately destroy this new and extremely dangerous radical Islamist project.

 

IF KOBANE FALLS – or should that be when Kobane falls – a number of terrible things will happen. Any Kurdish soldiers found alive in the Syrian border town will be killed. For propaganda purposes some will be beheaded, their deaths recorded, and the video clips uploaded to the Internet. Young Shi’ite women will be rounded up and sent deeper into the Islamic State (IS) where many will find themselves being offered to IS soldiers as “brides”. Any professional women (doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers) found in Kobane will face instant execution by the Islamic State pour encourager les autres. All facilities for the secular education of women will be closed.

 

If Kobane falls – or should that be when Kobane falls – the strategic and geographical coherence of the Islamic State will be greatly enhanced and their victorious forces re-deployed to apply what is likely to prove decisive additional psychological and military pressure on Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State’s advance into Anbar province.

 

If Kobane falls – or should that be when Kobane falls – the resolve of those Western nations pledged to degrade and destroy its aggressive military potential will be further weakened. Turkey, a NATO ally of the US and UK forces already engaged in Iraq and Syria, will face furious international condemnation for refusing to deploy the overwhelming strength of its armed forces in defence of Kobane’s Kurdish defenders.

 

If Kobane falls – or should that be when Kobane falls – many people in the West will observe that if the Syrian people’s nearest neighbour is prepared to sit on its hands and watch while thousands of soldiers and civilians are slaughtered or sent into sexual slavery, then why should nations thousands of kilometres from the fighting be expected to expend blood and treasure on their rescue?

 

If Kobane falls – or should that be when Kobane falls – New Zealand’s Prime Minister, John Key, and his Cabinet will be faced with some extremely difficult decisions. They must weigh very carefully the costs and benefits of committing elements of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) to the international coalition currently battling the Islamic State. If they decide upon a military commitment (most probably in the form of personnel belonging to the NZDF’s elite Special Air Service) then how long should it be for, and under what circumstances might it be curtailed? Should New Zealand remain engaged if the seemingly unstoppable advance of the Islamic State prompts the armies of Turkey and Iran to intervene? With the boundaries of the entire Middle East being re-drawn, what business would New Zealand soldiers’ boots have on any part of its disputed ground?

 

If Kobane falls – or should that be when Kobane falls – what are young Sunni Muslim men and women living in New Zealand and other Western countries likely to make of yet another Islamic State victory? Will they (as we hope) recoil in horror at the brutal battlefield behaviour of their co-religionists? Or will at least some of them attempt the ethical calculus required to determine whether the beheading of a Western aid worker is more or less reprehensible than the “collateral damage” inflicted by an American Predator drone unleashing its Hellfire missiles on a Yemeni or Waziri village? And will those same young Muslims not wonder why Saudi Arabia, in which 57 people have been beheaded in the last year alone, has not merited the same expressions of international outrage as the Islamic State?

 

If Kobane falls – or should that be when Kobane falls – wouldn’t it be a good time to ponder the reasonably obvious fact that in the eyes of many young Sunni Muslims the Islamic State is not the dwelling place of monsters, but the one location in the Muslim world where corruption is ruthlessly rooted-out; where the administration of the law is given over to ordinary people pledged to uphold and enforce the traditions of their faith; where the State is not the enemy of ordinary people but their friend, extending to them not the iron fist of tyranny but the solicitous hand recommended by the Prophet; and where, to be a woman is not to be paraded as a lump of sexual meat, but as a precious vessel to be cherished and protected. Isn’t it time we in the West asked ourselves: just how likely is it that young Muslim men and women are leaving their families and their friends, travelling thousands of miles and hazarding their freedom, their lives, their very souls – for monsters? Internationally acclaimed expert on the funding of terrorism, Loretta Napoleoni, has already asked herself this question. Her conclusion: “It’s not.”

 

The question New Zealanders should now be asking themselves is whether the fight against the Islamic State is their fight? Ethically, militarily, diplomatically and politically – what  should we do if Kobane falls?

 

Or should that be when Kobane falls?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 October 2014.

Blair's Bilious Bloviating. Or, Jeez Tony, Haven't You Done Enough Damage?

Purveyor of Hot Air Since 1997: Tony Blair's latest essay on the Middle East was so bad that even London's Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, told him to "put a sock in it". The terms "self-deluding" and "self-serving" are barely adequate to describe Blair's bilious bloviating.

FOR NEARLY A WEEK the world has been retching over Tony Blair’s essay on Iraq. Having read it, even London’s Tory Mayor, Boris Johnson, curtly instructed him to “put a sock in it”.

This global revulsion is not solely attributable to the fact that Mr Blair, the second-most-culpable person associated with the bloody Iraqi omnishambles, is still presuming to tell the world how to fix it – though that would be reason enough. It’s because his recipe for peace and progress in the Middle East is exactly the same as it was back in 2003. Invasion, occupation and the imposition of Western values.

 

The formula that worked so tremendously well the first time!

 

According to Mr Blair, the Islamic world, being “inherently unstable”, cannot actually be damaged by anything “we” (by which he presumably means the Anglo-American imperium and its assorted hangers-on) do to it. Iraq, Libya, Syria: they’d all have gone bad regardless of “our” actions. None of it is down to “us”.

 

“The problems of the Middle East are the product of bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion going back over a long time. Poor governance, weak institutions, oppressive rule and a failure within parts of Islam to work out a sensible relationship between religion and Government have combined to create countries which are simply unprepared for the modern world. Put into that mix, young populations with no effective job opportunities and education systems that do not correspond to the requirements of the future economy, and you have a toxic, inherently unstable matrix of factors that was always – repeat always - going to lead to a revolution.”

 

So, you see, the “international community” has nothing to reproach itself for when it comes to the Middle East. Those fine fellows, Sykes and Picot, drawing lines all over the maps of the dying Ottoman Empire back in 1916, were entirely blameless. War, after all, is war. And if you’re foolish enough to thrown in with the losing side, then you can hardly complain when your territory is carved up like a (ahem) Turkey.

 

Yes, yes, yes – alright! His Majesty’s Government may have encouraged Colonel T.E. Lawrence to stir up the Arabs against the Turks by promising them their own independent kingdom if they threw in with the winning side. But that was a wartime promise – and everyone knows (or should know) what a wartime promise is worth.

 

And, no, on balance, Mr Blair clearly does not agree that the Royal Air Force’s deployment of poison gas bombs against rebellious Iraqi tribespeople in the 1920s and 30s is in any way evidence of “poor governance” or “oppressive rule” on the part of the British Empire. Any more than the 1918 Balfour Declaration, which, by promising the Jewish people their own homeland in Palestine laid the foundations for the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, could be described as the product of “bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion”.

 

Mr Blair’s essay is not burdened with such irrelevant historical detail. “We have to put aside the differences of the past”, he warns, “and act now to save the future.”

 

Brave words. And yet, among the 2,833 words of Mr Blair’s bilious essay two very important words are missing – Saudi Arabia.

 

Which is really rather odd, because it is the Wahhabism of the Saudis, coupled with the Kingdom’s extraordinary oil wealth, which is inspiring, resourcing and providing diplomatic cover for terrorist militia all over the Middle East.

 

A Caliphate of the Righteous? Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadists pose for the cameras. While Western Imperialism continues to dictate the fate of the Middle East, ISIS will never want for recruits.

 

If “saving the future” does not involve imposing UN sanctions upon the Saudis. If it does not include the “international community” stepping away from the feudal potentates and military dictators it has been pleased to call “moderate Arab opinion”. If it is not about openly sponsoring comprehensive democratic reforms. Then, Mr Blair’s self-righteous and self-serving exhortations notwithstanding, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its shimmering mirage of a borderless caliphate of the righteous, will never lack for followers.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, June 20, 2014.