How Should One Deal With A Psychopathic State?

A State Attached To An Army: Palestinian leaders must give up the tactic of launching tens-of-thousands of young people against the border-fence separating Gaza from Israel. The deepening psychopathology of the Israeli state makes its response to such tactics as predictable as it has been deadly.

THE TRAGEDY UNFOLDING in Gaza poses the question: How does one deal with a psychopathic state?

Israel was founded in violence and dispossession. Many of its founding fathers were active members of terrorist organisations with blood on their hands. A much larger number came to the British mandated territory of Palestine from Europe in the years immediately following World War II – the deeply traumatised survivors of Nazi Germany’s attempt to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It is difficult to imagine a less auspicious beginning for any nation state. That it would grow into a trusting, generous and peace-loving member of the family of nations was always a very long shot.

The problem confronting Israel’s neighbours has always been one of determining how best to deal with this extraordinarily vicious cuckoo in the Palestinian Arab’s nest. Unsurprisingly, the first response of the nation’s adjoining the State of Israel was to answer its violence and dispossession in kind. Unfortunately for the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians, the Israeli armed forces proved extremely difficult to overcome. Even worse, in repelling the Arab armies, the Israelis came to the unshakeable conclusion that they constituted an unappeasable and existential threat to the survival of their state.

The hatred bubbled away furiously on both sides of Israel’s disputed borders, poisoning the minds of every combatant. Even more tragically, however, it poisoned all hope of peace for the Palestinians who now found themselves cast as the wronged victims of Zionism; the people for whom the rest of the Arab world was pledged to drive the Jews into the sea. Not fighting the Israelis was unthinkable: honour demanded that the struggle for Palestine – by Palestinians – must not cease until, finally, they and their children were free to return to their olive groves and pastures and reoccupy the houses and shops of their stolen inheritance.

For Israel, a nation founded by terrorists, the emergence of armed Palestinian militias and terrorist cells came as absolutely no surprise. They had driven the British out of Palestine by employing all the techniques of terrorism: bombings, assassinations, kidnappings. Not only did they know what to expect, but they also knew how to resist it. Decency, fair-play, the traditional rules of war: these were what the British had at least paid lip-service to in their fight against Irgun and the Stern Gang. The Israelis, however, knew exactly what those who attempted to fight terrorism with a rule book were called – The Losers.

In the aftermath of the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, the Israeli Prime Minister gathered her military and intelligence advisers around her and ordered them to hunt down and kill every member of the Palestinian “Black September” organisation involved in planning the attack. Not one of the planners survived. When a Palestinian fighter was captured by the Israelis, he or she was by no means the only person to be punished. The perpetrator’s family’s house would be bulldozed flat by the Israeli army and their farms and businesses destroyed. The price paid by the Palestinian people for their unceasing war against the State of Israel climbed higher and higher. With deadly symmetry, the terrorist responses of the Palestinians became commensurately lethal and indiscriminate.

After 70 years, the question must surely be asked: can Israel be defeated by force? Protected as it is by the most powerful nation on earth, is Israel even the most appropriate object of the Palestinian people’s quest for nationhood and freedom? If the withdrawal of United States support is the absolutely unavoidable precondition for Israel negotiating a viable “two-state solution” to the conflict, then the place where Palestinian statehood will ultimately be won is in the living-rooms of ordinary, decent Americans. But to win there, the Palestinians must first reinvent themselves entirely: forsaking forever the techniques of terrorism in favour of a political narrative stressing peaceful co-operation and mutual respect.

As part of that process, Palestinian leaders must give up the tactic of launching tens-of-thousands of young people against the border-fence separating Gaza from Israel. The deepening psychopathology of the Israeli state makes its response to such tactics as predictable as it has been deadly. In persisting with its campaign to send the inhabitants of Gaza “home”, the Palestinian leadership is displaying either the most reckless ignorance, or, the most chilling cynicism. If it is the former, then the first incoming live rounds from the Israeli Defence Force’s snipers should have wised them up. If it’s the latter, then these demonstrations are nothing more than invitations to martyrdom. The watching world recoils in horror from the actions of both antagonists.

On one side of the border fence stands the army of a psychopathic state which regards the pitiless murder of teenagers as the only viable means of guaranteeing Israel’s national security. On the other, a national liberation movement utterly convinced that the only hope of healing the broken body of Palestine is by nourishing it constantly with the blood of its children.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 17 May 2018.

Britain's Interests Nowhere Near The Moral High Ground.

And Never The Twain Shall Meet: Britain’s spoils from the First World War were many, but its greatest prize was indisputably the vast territories formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire (whose territory we invaded on 25 April 1915). Between them, Britain and her principal wartime ally, France, carved up the Middle East as if it was an oil-soaked Christmas pudding.

IN JUST A FEW DAYS tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders will gather to commemorate the 102nd anniversary of the ANZAC landings. All the usual bromides about heroism, sacrifice, freedom and democracy will be trotted-out. Young people, who are featuring more and more in contemporary Anzac Day ceremonies, will construct their public remarks on the foundational assumption that, in 1915, New Zealand stood on the moral high ground. (By which they mean alongside Great Britain). It does not do to question this assumption. April 25 is this country’s Day of the Dead – and the Dead must be respected.

Let us, therefore, leave the Dead and examine the empire for which they died. Because the lines of British force and British interests that intersected at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 were not broken there. They survived all that fruitless killing, growing stronger and more extensive as the war wore on. So much so that, by 1919, when most of the peace treaties were signed and sealed, the British Empire controlled considerably more of the earth’s land surface than it had when the conflict began. (As did New Zealand, which found itself in possession of the former German colony of Samoa.)

Britain’s spoils of war were many, but its greatest prize was indisputably the vast territories formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire (whose territory we invaded on 25 April 1915). Between them, Britain and her principal wartime ally, France, carved up the Middle East as if it was an oil-soaked Christmas pudding.

Nations that are still, more than a century later, providing the world with its blackest headlines: Palestine (now Israel) Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia; were all cradled in the intersecting lines of British force and British interests. Young protesters may have waved placards decrying the exchange of young blood for oil during the first Gulf War of 1991 but, rest assured, the idea – if not the slogan – is much, much older than that!

Not that all the people of the region were content to live their lives enmeshed in the lines of British force and British interests. Many of them rose in rebellion against the British Empire – just as T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”, had encouraged them to do against the Ottoman Empire during the Great War.

In 1920, anxious to conserve British blood and treasure while putting down these Arab revolts, the then British Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, recommended that the RAF deploy chemical weapons – mustard gas in particular. Gas, he insisted, was bound to inspire “a lively terror” in the rebel-held territories.

Not that Great Britain restricted itself to terrorising the Arab peoples. In “Arabia” they were only too happy to secure a kingdom for the House of Saud. In a bewildering series of alliances forged and friendships betrayed, the British armed Abdulaziz al Saud and his fanatical Wahhabist militia and allowed them to take control of most of the Arabian Peninsula, including the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina. When the Wahhabists attempted to spread their fundamentalist version of Islam beyond Abdulaziz’s new realm, he had their leaders mown down with British-supplied machine-guns.

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between Great Britain and the Muslim world. In India the lines of British force and British interests were deliberately drawn between the Muslim and Hindu communities. While the British Raj endured, the purpose of these “divide and rule” tactics remained purely political. Only in 1947, as British rule was coming to an end, did they become geographical. It was the Foreign and Colonial Office that partitioned India and created the Muslim state of Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Wahhabism: for the past 70 years these have been the nurseries for all manner of Islamic religious fanaticism and jihadi terrorism. Saudi Arabia gave us Osama Bin Laden, and Pakistan, when it wasn’t busy organising and supplying the Taliban, gave him shelter. And through it all, though increasingly difficult to discern clearly, the lines of British force and British interests have continued to run. Which countries are counted among the biggest importers of British military equipment? Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The invasion we celebrate every year on 25 April continues to cast a very long shadow. Wherever Britain and the Anzacs were standing on that day, it was nowhere even remotely near the moral high ground.

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, 20 April 2018.

Serbia/Syria - The Parallels Are Frightening.

Two Shots Heard Round The World: Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, was the necessary provocation that allowed the Entente powers to set in motion the General European War that they - and Serbia - had been planning for more than a decade. In Syria, today, there are frighteningly strong parallels with the Great Power intrigues and transformative territorial ambitions that led to the outbreak of war in 1914.

 

SYRIA HAS BECOME the Serbia of the early Twenty-First Century. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, Serbia was Europe’s tinder-box. All the major powers understood the risk Serbia posed, but each of them had too much at stake in the Balkans to hazard bringing the criminal Belgrade regime to heel. The same can be said of Syria. The major powers all have a great deal to lose by ending the Syrian civil war and restoring peace to the Middle East.

 

What this means, however, is that the seething rivalries fuelling the Syrian civil war could, at any moment, draw the major powers into a military confrontation – with profound consequences for the whole world. Just as Britain, France and Russia knew that Serbia could very easily be made the pretext for a war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the United States and its key Middle Eastern allies know that Syria could very easily be turned into a shooting war against the Russian Federation and Iran.

 

The fatal flaw in the great powers’ relationship with Serbia in the early Twentieth Century was that Serbia had geopolitical aspirations that could only be satisfied by a general European War. The Serbian dream was to become the leader of a new South Slav (Yugoslav) kingdom carved out of the Balkan provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That was never going to happen while Austria-Hungary endured. Serbia wanted – Serbia needed – a general European war.

 

In Syria, the raging fratricidal battles are being driven by two, mutually exclusive, geopolitical and religious visions of the region’s future.

 

For Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s beleaguered President, the best outcome of the civil war would be the creation of a Shia Islam alliance extending all the way from Syria’s Mediterranean coast, through Iraq, to Iran’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

For Syria’s Sunni majority, the ultimate goal is the creation of a Sunni Islam alliance embracing Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

 

The success of either of these arrangements would fundamentally derange the geopolitics of the Middle East. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the two leading nuclear powers, the USA and the Russian Federation, both have planes in the air and (some) boots on the ground in Syria.

 

Tipping The Scales: The intrusion of Russian air power in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government has dramatically upset military calculations across the Middle East.

 

President Vladimir Putin would dearly love to have a friendly Shia confederation stretching protectively along the Russian Federation’s southern flank. That the increasingly erratic regime of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would find itself squeezed between the two (and, quite possibly, a newly created independent Kurdish state) only adds to the attractiveness of this outcome.

 

For President Barack Obama, the situation is a great deal murkier. Washington’s unshakeable alliance with the State of Israel leaves it in something of a quandary. Jerusalem already lives in existential fear of an assertive (i.e. nuclear-capable) Iran. It’s reaction to an Iran-dominated Shia confederation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean can only be imagined! But a vertical alliance of Takfiri-driven Sunni states, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, would, if anything, be worse! How long could it be before nuclear-armed Pakistan applied to join this incipient Caliphate?

 

Russia’s much clearer set of objectives is reflected in its much clearer foreign and military policies in the Middle East. It’s straightforward goal is to keep Bashar al-Assad in power and destroy the Turks’ and the Saudis’ Takfiri proxies – which include the Al Qaeda aligned al-Nusra Front as well as the murderous Islamic State. [The Takfiris are Muslims who claim the right to brand as apostate, and make war upon, every Muslim who, according to the Takfiris’ radically literal interpretation of the Quran, is guilty of deviating from the “true” path of the Prophet.]

 

So far, the Russians and their Syrian Government allies are doing pretty well. Thanks largely to Russia’s fighter-bombers, the strategic rebel stronghold of Aleppo is on the point of falling to Assad’s army.

 

To the Turks and the Saudis, the fall of Aleppo would be a disaster. Not only would the rebels’ crucial supply lines to Turkey be severed, but the road to the Islamic State’s Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, would lie open. But, as Ankara and Riyadh both know, the moment the “moderate” rebels and the Islamic State are defeated, the Syrian civil war is over. And if that happens, there will be nothing to prevent the extension of Iranian power all the way to the Syrian coast.

 

Hence the Saudi-Arabian Crown Prince’s excited talk about sending tens-of-thousands of ground troops to Syria via Turkey, ostensibly to destroy Islamic State, but actually to establish a “buffer zone” along Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Russia has warned that any such breach of international law will be answered with military force.

 

On Sunday, Turkish artillery began shelling Kurdish positions across the Syrian border.

 

The parallels with Serbia in 1914 are frightening.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 February 2016.

Making A Desert And Calling It Peace: Why I Agree With Winston Peters.

Syria In Agony: It is such a mess. And all the horrors that fill our screens are the progeny of the West’s intervention. Every hostage beheaded. Every gay man hurled to his death from a high place. Every 9-year-old girl traded in the slave-markets of Raqqa and Mosul. Every screaming reproach and accusation wrenched from the victims of IS and Assad, alike, is ours to answer. Only the West possessed the power to break this world, and only the West can fix it.

WINSTON PETERS wants the men of Syria to fight for their homeland. By all means, he says, let us give succour and safe haven to the women and children of that bloody dystopia. But, let us not offer a permanent residence to Syria’s misery. Not unless the world is ready to swallow every last Syrian. To leave their home a desert – and call it peace.

 

The Left finds it easy to dismiss Winston and his gnomic pronouncements. They look at him the way they’ve always looked at people who wear suits to protest planning meetings – with a mixture of disbelief and suspicion. That prominent leftists are now willing to vouch for him only pushes the comrades’ eyebrows higher. “Don’t let the flash suits put you off,” say Matt and Andrew, “Winston’s okay. A little old fashioned, yes, but don’t worry, we all hate the same people.”

 

Okay, but, really! How are we supposed to take Peters seriously when he comes out with stuff like this? Send the Syrian men back to fight? FFS - the guy’s an idiot!

 

But when our tears for little Aylan have dried. When the global news cycle has rolled over enough times for the images of the Middle East’s wretched human refuse to have lost their power to shock and shift public opinion. What then? When the razor-wire fences have all been made people-proof. When the sleeping dogs of European racism have all been kicked awake and are howling down the bleeding-hearts and do-gooders. What will we do then?

 

Because the great engine of all this grief; the motor of all this misery, will not have stopped. Not for a moment will the death machine that is the Syrian civil war have ceased to pump out its torrents of innocent blood. Four million human-beings have already been driven beyond Syria’s borders by the combined efforts of Bashar al-Assad’s Baathists, the Islamic State, and whatever loose assortment of Saudi-funded and US-trained jihadis are currently passing themselves off as the Free Syrian Army. That just leaves another 20 million souls to decant into the already overflowing vessels of Syria’s immediate neighbours.

 

Who cannot possibly take so many, and so will drive these new waves of refugees northward and westward, following the trail of tears to the European Union. Which, in spite of its name, will offer only increasingly divided counsels – and higher walls.

 

Yes, the injustice of all this rises to heaven on a reeking cloud of Western mendacity. Having broken the Middle East and North Africa into a thousand pieces, the United States and its Nato allies now refuse to own the desolation their own hands have wrought. They smashed Afghanistan for no better reason than to sate the Great Hegemon’s thirst for vengeance after 9/11. Then they invaded Iraq – this time in pursuit of some delusional NeoCons’ dream of inculcating capitalist democracy in a made-up country with virtually no history of either capitalism or responsible government.

 

It is such a mess. And all the horrors that fill our screens are the progeny of the West’s intervention. Every hostage beheaded. Every gay man hurled to his death from a high place. Every 9-year-old girl traded in the slave-markets of Raqqa and Mosul. Every screaming reproach and accusation wrenched from the victims of IS and Assad, alike, is ours to answer. Only the West possessed the power to break this world, and only the West can fix it.

 

But not just the West. The Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China must also be part of the solution. A truly global force, assembled under the banner of the United Nations. Hundreds-of-thousands of soldiers: men and women of all colours and creeds, drawn from every continent, to cauterise the bleeding wound that is Syria. And in their wake the agents of international justice – for the sake of ruined Palmyra and its martyred guardian; for the sake of tiny, helpless, innocent Aylan.

 

And in the vanguard of that mighty host, the young men of Syria: leading the attack; hewing down the flags of tyranny; setting their nation free.

 

It’s all Winston Peters is trying to say: that Syria cannot be saved by emptying it of Syrians.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 9 September 2015.

Time To Stop "Dribbling" And Start "Clouting"?

Boots On The Ground: The former head of the UK armed forces, General David Richards, suspects in his “bones”, that if the Islamic State is to be defeated, then the armed forces of the West will have to stop "dribbling" and start "clouting". In the General’s words: “tanks would have to roll and there’s going to have to be boots on the ground”.

 

ARE WE AT WAR with the Islamic State – or not? The Prime Minister says “Not”. Our role in the conflict between the Islamic State and its enemies is merely to assist the government of Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. Sixteen NZ Defence Force personnel are stationed less than an hour’s drive north of Baghdad at Camp Taji – a former US military base. Their mission: to help train Iraq’s army. A further 100 Kiwi troops have been sent to provide them with protection while they get on with it. That’s all.

 

This is what General David Richards, former head of the UK’s armed forces, and current member of the House of Lords, calls “dribbling” – the sort of one-handed military activity soldiers are required to engage in when their political masters would rather not have them wage war with both hands.

 

Lord Richards has warned UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, that, when it comes to defeating the Islamic State, “dribbling” will not be enough. What’s needed against the highly motivated and exceptionally well-led soldiers of the self-proclaimed Caliphate is “clouting”.

 

“Properly brought together with proper leadership and proper command and control it is a very doable proposition”, Lord Richards told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. “But I worry that […] if we dribble, which is really rather what we are doing at the moment, it is simply firing up the problem rather than dealing with it.”

 

The former head of the UK armed forces told Marr that he suspected, in his “bones”, that if IS to be defeated, then its army will have to “clouted” by his country’s soldiers – on the front lines. In the general’s words: “tanks would have to roll and there’s going to have to be boots on the ground”.

 

But the UK could not possibly do this alone. After 14 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the UK’s defence force is bruised, battered and in urgent need of repair and replenishment. Lord Richards knows full-well that what he is really calling for is the assembly of another great Western invasion force; comparable in strength to Operation Desert Storm, and guided by similar, strictly limited, objectives.

 

The mission of Operation Desert Storm was to drive the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. The core mission of this new Western force would be the utter destruction of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. To render the defeat of IS permanent, however, it would, almost certainly, be necessary to accomplish the complete pacification of Syria and the disarmament of the Iranian-backed Shite militias operating in Iraq.

 

The elimination of the murderous regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and the disarmament of his many enemies, would lift a huge burden from the shoulders of Syria’s neighbours. Millions of refugees, driven across borders by civil war and religious extremism, would be free to return, and the arduous task of reconstructing their ancient homeland could, finally, begin.

 

An effort of such magnitude on the part of the West – especially the USA and the UK – is the only truly effective means of bringing the multiple tragedies of the last quarter-century in the Middle East to an honourable resolution.

 

The barbarity of IS is an affront, not just to the peoples of the Islamic world but to all humanity. And, in their heart of hearts, the USA and the UK both know its poisonous creed could only have been distilled from the seething cauldron of hatred and resentment which their 2003 invasion of Iraq created. “You break it, you own it”, quipped US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, back in 2003. Well, between them, the USA and the UK smashed Iraq into a thousand pieces, and now they must make her whole again.

 

Do the peoples of the West have the stomach for another great military effort in the Middle East. Many would say “No.” But they should fix their eyes on the tens-of-thousands, desperate and despairing, who daily make their way toward Europe’s borders. If the West does not bring peace to the Middle East, then the Middle East will bring chaos to the West. Lord Richards knows the efficacy of forward defence, that is why he is urging his prime minister to stop dribbling and start clouting.

 

Would it be asking too much of our own defence force, and prime minister, to do the same?

 

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, 24 July 2015.

One Hand Clapping? Why Ika’s Latest Intellectual Meal Proved Less-Than-Satisfying.

Bring On The Dialectic: Politics without conflict isn’t politics. For Ika's "Table-Talk" evenings to work, there need to be speakers seated on both sides.

 

I’VE BEEN RACKING MY BRAIN ever since Tuesday evening, trying to work out what went wrong.

 

The occasion was another of the Ika Seafood Bar & Grill’s “Table-Talks”. On the face of it, I should have come away from the event feeling intellectually replete. Our hosts for the evening, TV3 journalists Mike McRoberts and Paula Penfold, as seasoned professionals, were well-placed to handle the two-and-fro of discussion. The invited panel of speakers: war correspondent, Jon Stephenson; former Green Party spokesperson on foreign affairs and defence issues, Keith Locke; and the General Manager of the Changemakers Refugee Forum, Tayyaba Khan; brought considerable experience and expertise to the question “New Zealand at War: Where are we and what are we doing there.” And yet, I came away feeling intellectually famished. Why?

 

The answer I’ve arrived at, after mulling the question over for 72 hours, is rather convoluted, so please, bear with me, while I try to explain.

 

In my opinion, all politics is adversarial. So, if I find myself at an event and there’s no conflict, then, whatever’s happening, it isn’t politics. On Tuesday, for example, nobody questioned the fundamental premise of the topic under discussion – that New Zealand is at war. Nor was there any disagreement about why New Zealand military personnel are stationed in the Middle East. It was simply assumed that this was the price of admission to John Key’s “Five Eyes Club”. That this is not a Club New Zealand should belong to, and that, anyway, the admission price is much too high, was not disputed.

 

The audience did not object. Indeed, there was almost complete accord between what the panellists were saying, and what the audience believed to be true. Boiled down to its essentials, this could be summarised as: War is a very bad thing. It inflicts terrible and ineradicable injuries upon bodies and souls. This, in turn, produces a downward spiral into ever more horror and violence. New Zealanders, therefore, should have nothing to do with war – except to offer as much help as possible to its victims.

 

The audience had arrived at Ika with these opinions, and, as far as I could determine, they left with them either unchanged or considerably reinforced. Which meant that, for me, nothing political had occurred. The participants had applauded a series of eloquent and heart-felt reiterations of views with which they strongly agreed. No one was challenged. No one was forced to defend their beliefs.

 

War is, indeed, a very bad thing. Thank you for coming, and have a safe journey home.

 

Consider the impact of the following, counterfactual, Table-Talk.

 

The first speaker, a military historian, openly disputes the assertion that New Zealand is at war. He asserts that the dispatch of a fraction of New Zealand’s small, highly professional, defence force as advisers to the armed forces of the Republic of Iraq, in no way meets the definition of a country at war. He asks his audience to recall what they have been told about life in New Zealand during the first and second world wars, and then to compare the experiences of our parents and grandparents with life in New Zealand today. Can we really say, with any honesty, that this country is at war? Syria, he declares, is at war. New Zealand is not.

 

He then turns his attention to the question: “What are we doing there?”

 

Our oil, their sand? Photo by Jon Stephenson

 

There must be a very good reason, he says, why first Great Britain, and then the United States, have been willing to expend so much blood and treasure over a part of the world distinguished primarily by heat and dust. And, of course, there is a very good reason. A reason which every person in the audience who drove to the restaurant, and who intends to drive home, should be able to guess. The UK and the USA have been interfering in the Middle East for the past 100 years for the very simple reason that – as one American wit put it: “Unaccountably, a huge proportion of our oil has ended up under their sand.”

 

That would have been more than enough. The introduction of a set of perspectives so radically at odds with those of the Ika audience would have transformed the evening from an opportunity for people to bear witness to a set of pre-agreed articles of faith, to a full-scale political engagement between a handful of military and diplomatic realists and a roomful of neutralists and pacifists. Those articles of faith might have been tested. People’s beliefs would, without question, have been challenged.

 

Politics without conflict isn’t politics. For Table-Talk to work, there need to be speakers seated on both sides.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 18 July 2015.

Give War A Chance

Mars Takes The Field: The role warfare has played throughout history in reconciling the irreconcilable and solving the insoluble is beyond dispute. Sometimes, if peace is not in prospect, it pays to give war a chance.

 

THE RUBBLE in Europe and Asia was still smoking when representatives from 51 nations assembled in the undamaged United States city of San Francisco in June of 1945. Calling themselves the “United Nations”, they there inscribed their collective determination, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”.

 

Surveying the corpse-strewn landscape which separates us from those hopeful signatories of ‘45, you’d have to say that Peace has failed. Over the past 70 years, barely a day has passed without the scourge of war bringing untold sorrow to at least one unfortunate member of the family of nations somewhere in the world.

 

That the existence of the United Nations has spared us all a third global conflict is less a testimony to the wisdom and forbearance of a chastened humanity, than it is to the certainty that, being waged with nuclear weapons, World War III would’ve had no victors and no survivors.

 

And yet, in spite of the UN’s consistent failure to save succeeding generations from its effects, War continues to be both rejected and condemned as an instrument for the advancement of national policy. Though member states of the United Nations have regularly unleashed war upon their fellow UN members for precisely that purpose, the pious hopes enshrined in the UN Charter remain the official expression of what is – and is not – acceptable international conduct.

 

Is humanity well-served by this extraordinary hypocrisy?

 

Extraordinary Hypocrisy: The United Nations headquarter in New York City.

 

When a prominent politician from the United States, the nation which, in complete contravention of the UN Charter, launched a full-scale military invasion of Iraq, shamelessly castigates the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, for “violating Ukraine’s national sovereignty”, one struggles to muster any kind of respect for the existing international system.

 

Indeed, one wonders (heretically) whether the world might not be better off if the number of nation states belonging to the United Nations (currently 193) was significantly reduced. With the benefit of hindsight, isn’t it at least arguable that the much-vaunted principle of “national self-determination”, far from making the world a more peaceful place, has actually increased the incidence of organised violence?

 

In a similar vein, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to respond to global crises, such as anthropogenic global warming, if humanity was aggregated into larger, rather than smaller, political units? If it’s possible to construct banks and corporations that are “too big to fail”, might it not also be possible to create states that are “too big to lose”?

 

And where nations are embroiled in bitter conflict, as in the Middle East, shouldn’t it be acknowledged, honestly, by nations outside the region, that war may be the only effective means of re-arranging the pieces on the board?

 

Even more heretically, should we not ask whether nation states are even the most sensible solution to conflicts whose origins lie not in ethnicity or geography but in matters of religious doctrine?

 

Certainly, it is the view of James Traub, from the Centre for International Co-Operation, that what we are witnessing in the Middle East is not a “clash of civilisations”, but clashes within a civilisation. The war, argues Traub, is “not between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but inside the Islamic world.”

 

Would the planet be better or worse off if the outcome of this war inside the Islamic world was the emergence of a political entity roughly akin to the open, tolerant and inclusive Abassid Caliphate that once stretched all the way from Baghdad, in what is now Iraq, to Tunisia? Such an outcome would have less to do with redrawing national boundaries than it would with redefining the way Muslims express their religion.

 

The rules governing the relationships between nation states, as elaborated by we Europeans, are, in part, the product of our own civilisation’s inability to resolve religious schisms. But, whether the conflicts currently tearing the Islamic world apart can be resolved by the principles enshrined the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants, is highly debateable.

 

Beyond dispute, however, is the role warfare has played throughout history in reconciling the irreconcilable and solving the insoluble. Sometimes, if peace is not in prospect, it pays to give war a chance. Alexander the Great didn’t unravel the impossibly complex Gordian Knot with his fingers. He used his sword.

 

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, 13 February 2015.

Between The Sea And The Stars

 

THIS HAUNTING SONG Gortoz A Ran (I Am Waiting) written and sung here by the incomparable Denez Prigent and Lisa Gerrard, was chosen as the theme song for Ridley Scott’s 2001 movie Black Hawk Down.

 

As the West contemplates yet another foray into the broken world of Middle Eastern conflict, it is timely, surely, to contemplate the bitter lessons of Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

The song’s lyrics, translated from the original Breton, are printed below.

 

I was waiting, waiting for a long time

In the dark shadow of grey towers

In the dark shadow of grey towers

 

In the dark shadow of rain towers

You will see me waiting forever

You will see me waiting forever

 

One day it will come back

Over the lands, over the seas

 

The blue wind will return

And take back with it my wounded heart

 

I will be pulled away by its breath

Far away in the stream, wherever it wishes

 

Wherever it wishes, far away from this world

Between the sea and the stars

 

Video courtesy of YouTube

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.