Giles Fraser Guardian/UK 23 July, 2016
In one of her first acts as prime minister, Theresa May sat down to write to the commanders of our four nuclear submarines, laying out what she would like them to do in the event of a nuclear attack. These handwritten instructions are locked in the boats’ safes, only to be opened if an attack has knocked out all contact with government. No one has ever opened one.
On Wednesday night, on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO, commander of the Desert Rats during the first Gulf war – so no bleeding-heart liberal – said that he thought it would be the moral duty of commanders not to fire, even if Mrs May had instructed them to do so. It was astonishing to hear a senior military figure urging fellow officers to disobey a direct order from the PM.
The general was not being squeamish – he was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. Rather, he was making the point that if Britain had been the victim of a nuclear attack, then the game was already up and there would be little left for us to defend. Firing in such circumstances would be tactically pointless. Indeed, it would be murderous revenge, nothing more. And who wants their last action on earth to be one of mass genocide?
Speaking in the House of Commons during the Trident debate, Mrs May said she was perfectly prepared to order her commanders to fire. She has to say that, of course. There’s no point in having a deterrent if the PM indicates in advance that she wouldn’t use it. Even so, locked inside those safes, what the top-secret letters actually say is a totally different matter. Remember, the only reason to open them would be if deterrence had failed. And there would be absolutely no point in firing. In other words, given her commitment to the idea of deterrence, the only moral thing would be for Mrs May to tell the world she has written “fire” when, in fact, she has written something else entirely. And that, we might reasonably suppose from subsequent comments, is precisely what Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher did. It should come as no surprise: this is poker and everybody lies.
So parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.
Tories voted for Trident out of some backward sense of patriotism, still pretending the UK is a big player in the politics of global power, and New Labour voted for it as an act of non-virtue signalling, still deliberately distancing themselves from the electoral kryptonite of those pacifist hippies of the 1970s.
The old argument for nuclear weapons during the cold war was simple. We didn’t have the conventional forces to resist the Russians if they drove their tanks into Germany. If they invaded, we could only stop them with tactical nuclear weapons. This nuclear option was primarily envisaged as a first-strike option. But does anyone seriously imagine that we would do the same today if the Russians invaded Latvia? MPs are still going on about a deterrent even though any plausible scenario for this to be employed has disappeared. Deterrent is an empty threat, a retro tactical theory, marooned by totally different geopolitical circumstances.
Sitting opposite General Cordingley in the Moral Maze studio was Michael Portillo, who used to be the hawkish secretary of state for defence before he retired to play with his trains. Like Cordingley, he too is against the renewal of Trident, seeing our few hundred or so nuclear warheads as irrelevant in a world in which the Russians and the US have several thousand nukes each. The world has changed since the cold war, but too consumed with internal politics, the House of Commons has failed to notice. [Abbrev]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/21/theresa-may-is-lying-over-trident-or-at-least-i-hope-she-is#img-1@giles_fraser
Monday, 25 July 2016
Response to the Nice Attack
By
Robert
Fisk @indyvoices Independent/UK 16 July 2016
The act was obscene. President Hollande’s description – “monstrous” – was adequate so far as it went, but created the old problem. What happens when three or four hundred innocents are killed by a murderer? Or five hundred? Does that become “really monstrous” or “very monstrous indeed”? But the political reaction to this crime against humanity in Nice was mundane to the point of lunacy. Hollande announced that France would “reinforce our action in Syria and Iraq.”
Sure, I get the point. If Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel of Tunisia had anything to do with Isis or Nusrah (and when he spoke, Hollande would not have known if this was true), then firing more French missiles into the burned sands of Mesopotamia or the desert around Raqqa in the hope of striking Isis would have no effect other than to reinforce the old “feel good” factor of biffing “world terror” for the sake of it.
Tunisia, of course, is well over a thousand miles from Syria, let alone Iraq, but one bunch of murderous Arabs is much like another to our foreign ministries and if Bouhlel turns out to have “Isis roots” – no matter how self-declared – then the bigger the bombs the better.
Everyone who dares to point this out – and European leaders are always threatening Isis, just as Isis is always threatening the West – is immediately cast out of society as a “friend of terrorists”. There is, in fact, a whole vocabulary of abuse for anyone who says that there are reasons for these acts of mass murder which we need to know, however crazed they are. At present, the Isis/Western hate mail to each other is almost identical with King Lear: “I will do such things…what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth…”
Of course, I fear we are going in the coming hours to be inundated with painful repetitions of atrocities past: relatives who had "no idea" their son/brother/nephew/uncle might be a violent killer, neighbours who will attest that the attacker was always a quiet man (who probably “kept himself to himself”, as they say), Muslims who will again insist on the peacefulness of their religion. In addition to this, we will have politicians who will promise to stamp out “terror” and cops who will praise their brothers-in-arms for their courage.
And we will forget France’s fraught colonial history in Algeria and Tunisia, the 125th anniversary of its Tunisian “protectorate” this year – and the 70th anniversary of Tunisia’s independence – and the Islamist presence that has grown frighteningly within the body politic of Tunisia since the 2011 revolution. It is no good holding up this painful history as some sort of excuse or “root cause” of the mass murders in Nice. But at some point, we in the West are going to have to learn that if we intervene militarily in Mali or Iraq or Libya or Syria or interfere in Turkey, or Egypt, or the Gulf, or the Maghreb – then we will not be safe “at home”.
It’s an old story now. In the past, we could go on foreign adventures in Korea or Vietnam without worrying that North Koreans would blow up the London Underground or that the Vietcong would attack New York with airliners. Not anymore. Foreign adventures come at a terrifying cost. Claiming they do not – or pompously declaring that “their” bombs in London or Paris have nothing to do with “our” bombs in Iraq – is dishonest.
Sure, I get the point. If Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel of Tunisia had anything to do with Isis or Nusrah (and when he spoke, Hollande would not have known if this was true), then firing more French missiles into the burned sands of Mesopotamia or the desert around Raqqa in the hope of striking Isis would have no effect other than to reinforce the old “feel good” factor of biffing “world terror” for the sake of it.
Tunisia, of course, is well over a thousand miles from Syria, let alone Iraq, but one bunch of murderous Arabs is much like another to our foreign ministries and if Bouhlel turns out to have “Isis roots” – no matter how self-declared – then the bigger the bombs the better.
Everyone who dares to point this out – and European leaders are always threatening Isis, just as Isis is always threatening the West – is immediately cast out of society as a “friend of terrorists”. There is, in fact, a whole vocabulary of abuse for anyone who says that there are reasons for these acts of mass murder which we need to know, however crazed they are. At present, the Isis/Western hate mail to each other is almost identical with King Lear: “I will do such things…what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth…”
Of course, I fear we are going in the coming hours to be inundated with painful repetitions of atrocities past: relatives who had "no idea" their son/brother/nephew/uncle might be a violent killer, neighbours who will attest that the attacker was always a quiet man (who probably “kept himself to himself”, as they say), Muslims who will again insist on the peacefulness of their religion. In addition to this, we will have politicians who will promise to stamp out “terror” and cops who will praise their brothers-in-arms for their courage.
And we will forget France’s fraught colonial history in Algeria and Tunisia, the 125th anniversary of its Tunisian “protectorate” this year – and the 70th anniversary of Tunisia’s independence – and the Islamist presence that has grown frighteningly within the body politic of Tunisia since the 2011 revolution. It is no good holding up this painful history as some sort of excuse or “root cause” of the mass murders in Nice. But at some point, we in the West are going to have to learn that if we intervene militarily in Mali or Iraq or Libya or Syria or interfere in Turkey, or Egypt, or the Gulf, or the Maghreb – then we will not be safe “at home”.
It’s an old story now. In the past, we could go on foreign adventures in Korea or Vietnam without worrying that North Koreans would blow up the London Underground or that the Vietcong would attack New York with airliners. Not anymore. Foreign adventures come at a terrifying cost. Claiming they do not – or pompously declaring that “their” bombs in London or Paris have nothing to do with “our” bombs in Iraq – is dishonest.
At some point in history – though how far into the future, when we will have cut away the foundations of our own freedoms with our own new laws – we will probably have to re-think our relationship with the Middle East and with history. Yes, and with religion.
A BBC reporter was drawing parallels yesterday with the car-ramming Palestinians who have killed Israelis. But the last phone-video I saw which had any parallel of scale with Nice was a horrifying piece of footage during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 when an Egyptian army truck was driven at speed – and swerving wildly – into a crowd of peaceful protestors. Why didn’t we remember that after Nice? Because the killers were never caught? Because no-one remembers yesterday’s news? Or because the victims were Arabs involved in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know – by and large -- nothing. [Abbrev]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nice-terrorist-attack-france-isis-francois-hollande-response-syria-iraq-military-bombs-vicious-a7139101.htmlT
A BBC reporter was drawing parallels yesterday with the car-ramming Palestinians who have killed Israelis. But the last phone-video I saw which had any parallel of scale with Nice was a horrifying piece of footage during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 when an Egyptian army truck was driven at speed – and swerving wildly – into a crowd of peaceful protestors. Why didn’t we remember that after Nice? Because the killers were never caught? Because no-one remembers yesterday’s news? Or because the victims were Arabs involved in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know – by and large -- nothing. [Abbrev]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nice-terrorist-attack-france-isis-francois-hollande-response-syria-iraq-military-bombs-vicious-a7139101.htmlT
Tuesday, 19 July 2016
Ian Harris on loyalty
Otago Daily Times July 8 2016
In a time of transition, is the timidity of the clergy killing the church? asks Ian Harris. Where does loyalty lie?
Why do so many ministers, retiring after a lifetime of service to their church, hardly ever go to church again? Not, usually, because they’ve lost their faith. Rather, they’ve come to feel out of sync with what they see happening there. Many lay people feel the same way. After loyally playing their part for years in parish life, they wake up one morning and ask themselves: “What exactly am I being loyal to? The church as an institution? A denominational heritage? A family tradition? The people of my parish? The minister or priest? The example of Jesus? Christ of the creeds?”
All these are worthy, but there’s a deep-down dissonance. The pieces don’t fit together as neatly as before. They don’t find church-going the energising, focusing, deepening experience it used to be. They hang on by their fingernails as long as they can . . . and then drop out. This malaise has been happening across denominations for decades, with Auckland Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn last month highlighting the steady defection of New Zealand-born Christians as the “Kiwi drift”.
One used to hear people say they were subjected to so much religion while growing up that they were happy to break free of it as soon as they could. Winston Churchill was one such. He tells how at Harrow he attended three services every Sunday, plus morning and evening prayers through the week: “I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”
That is not happening so much today, simply because so many parents decide not to introduce their children to church at all. Perhaps a reaction will set in one day when, as adults, a curious new generation begins to wonder what they have been deprived of. And perhaps not.
One major reason for the “Kiwi drift” is the churches’ failure to allow Christian faith to evolve in a changing world. They have clung to creeds, doctrines and practices that made excellent sense in light of the knowledge of former times, but which are crying out for a thorough-going re-interpretation in our 21st-century world.
I have had many letters reflecting that. After lifelong membership in her church, one woman writes: “What a pity the churches have kept silent and denied Christian people access to the thinking of modern scholarship. And how much pain its devotees could be spared as they are left to ponder their own apparently heretical views.”
Another, in her 80s and still attending church: “My faith journey has brought me to a place of questioning the dogma of the church . . . Sometimes it seems as though my efforts at finding a meaningful belief put me out on a limb, but now I realise that I am not alone.”
Their comments echo the views of ministers whose reading and thinking have taken them far from the point where their journey began. Together they are part of a far-reaching transition that is occurring within Christian thought, but not so much in regular church life – often the reverse as leaders dig in to resist substantive change.
Sometimes it is clergy who hold the church back. At the Napier Progressive Spirituality Conference in May, American United Church of Christ pastor Dr Robin Meyers declared bluntly: “The timidity of the clergy is killing the church.” Usually it is pastoral concern that deters them from offering contemporary insights on the Bible and faith, even when they would like to. But silence leaves people who would be open to such insights in limbo.
Sometimes it is lay people who block progressive alternatives, believing any change to ancient formulations would be a sell-out. There could be some truth in the prediction that the last seven words of the church will be: “We’ve never done it like that before.”
For me, the future of Christian faith does not depend on loyally keeping fossils warm, whether fossils of creed, doctrine, church order, or anything else. It hinges rather on identifying what is core to our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and then working out how people at home in the modern world can relate to it and express it honestly in terms of today. Which happens to be just what Christians of the 4th, 12th, 16th and other centuries did in and for their own times.
That would unquestionably be loyalty – but loyalty to the Judaeo-Christian core and the quintessential religious process, rather than to interpretations which, in our secular understanding, are no longer tenable.
Let the transition roll on!
In a time of transition, is the timidity of the clergy killing the church? asks Ian Harris. Where does loyalty lie?
Why do so many ministers, retiring after a lifetime of service to their church, hardly ever go to church again? Not, usually, because they’ve lost their faith. Rather, they’ve come to feel out of sync with what they see happening there. Many lay people feel the same way. After loyally playing their part for years in parish life, they wake up one morning and ask themselves: “What exactly am I being loyal to? The church as an institution? A denominational heritage? A family tradition? The people of my parish? The minister or priest? The example of Jesus? Christ of the creeds?”
All these are worthy, but there’s a deep-down dissonance. The pieces don’t fit together as neatly as before. They don’t find church-going the energising, focusing, deepening experience it used to be. They hang on by their fingernails as long as they can . . . and then drop out. This malaise has been happening across denominations for decades, with Auckland Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn last month highlighting the steady defection of New Zealand-born Christians as the “Kiwi drift”.
One used to hear people say they were subjected to so much religion while growing up that they were happy to break free of it as soon as they could. Winston Churchill was one such. He tells how at Harrow he attended three services every Sunday, plus morning and evening prayers through the week: “I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”
That is not happening so much today, simply because so many parents decide not to introduce their children to church at all. Perhaps a reaction will set in one day when, as adults, a curious new generation begins to wonder what they have been deprived of. And perhaps not.
One major reason for the “Kiwi drift” is the churches’ failure to allow Christian faith to evolve in a changing world. They have clung to creeds, doctrines and practices that made excellent sense in light of the knowledge of former times, but which are crying out for a thorough-going re-interpretation in our 21st-century world.
I have had many letters reflecting that. After lifelong membership in her church, one woman writes: “What a pity the churches have kept silent and denied Christian people access to the thinking of modern scholarship. And how much pain its devotees could be spared as they are left to ponder their own apparently heretical views.”
Another, in her 80s and still attending church: “My faith journey has brought me to a place of questioning the dogma of the church . . . Sometimes it seems as though my efforts at finding a meaningful belief put me out on a limb, but now I realise that I am not alone.”
Their comments echo the views of ministers whose reading and thinking have taken them far from the point where their journey began. Together they are part of a far-reaching transition that is occurring within Christian thought, but not so much in regular church life – often the reverse as leaders dig in to resist substantive change.
Sometimes it is clergy who hold the church back. At the Napier Progressive Spirituality Conference in May, American United Church of Christ pastor Dr Robin Meyers declared bluntly: “The timidity of the clergy is killing the church.” Usually it is pastoral concern that deters them from offering contemporary insights on the Bible and faith, even when they would like to. But silence leaves people who would be open to such insights in limbo.
Sometimes it is lay people who block progressive alternatives, believing any change to ancient formulations would be a sell-out. There could be some truth in the prediction that the last seven words of the church will be: “We’ve never done it like that before.”
For me, the future of Christian faith does not depend on loyally keeping fossils warm, whether fossils of creed, doctrine, church order, or anything else. It hinges rather on identifying what is core to our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and then working out how people at home in the modern world can relate to it and express it honestly in terms of today. Which happens to be just what Christians of the 4th, 12th, 16th and other centuries did in and for their own times.
That would unquestionably be loyalty – but loyalty to the Judaeo-Christian core and the quintessential religious process, rather than to interpretations which, in our secular understanding, are no longer tenable.
Let the transition roll on!
Thursday, 14 July 2016
Hatred Unlimited
Uri
Avnery Gush Shalom July
9, 2016
A PALESTINIAN youngster breaks into a settlement, enters the nearest house, stabs a 13-year old girl in her sleep and is killed. Three Israeli men kidnap a 12-year old Palestinian boy at random, take him to an open field and burn him alive.
These are the manifestations of a hatred so terrible that it overcomes all norms of humanity. THIS WAS not always so. A few days after the 1967 war, in which Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I traveled alone though the newly occupied territories. I was welcomed almost everywhere. At the time, Palestinians did not dream of an eternal occupation. They hated the Jordanian rulers and were glad that we had driven them out.
Within a few years, all this had changed. The Palestinians realized that the Israelis did not intend to leave, but that they were about to steal their land, quite literally, and cover it with their settlements. Hatred is everywhere. The settlers terrorize their Arab neighbors, Arab boys throw rocks and improvised fire-bombs at passing Jewish cars on the highroads where they themselves are not allowed to drive.
BY NOW, the two peoples seem to live in two different worlds. A centuries-old Arab village and a new Israeli settlement, situated one mile apart, might just as well exist on two different planets. From their first day on earth, children of the two peoples hear totally different stories from their parents. This goes on in school. By the time they are grown up, they have very few perceptions in common.
In the Palestinian view, Jews ruled Palestine in antiquity for a few decades only. The Jewish claim to the country now, based on a promise given to them by their own private Jewish God, is a blatant colonialist ploy. The Zionists came to the country in the 20th century as allies of the British imperialist power, without any right to it.
Every Jewish child in Israel learns from an early age that this land was given by God to the Jews, who ruled it for many centuries, until they offended God and He drove them out as a temporary punishment. Now the Jews have come back to their country, which was occupied by a foreign people which came from Arabia. These people now have the cheek to claim the country as their own.
I AM convinced that it is in the vital interest of Israel to make peace with the Palestinian people, and with the Arab world at large, before this dangerous infection engulfs the entire Arab – and Muslim – world. The leaders of the Palestinian people, both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are still comparatively moderate people. This is true even for Hamas, a religious movement.
I would suggest that for the West in general, supporting peace in our region is also of paramount importance. The convulsions now affecting several Arab countries do not bode well for them, either.
Reading a document like this week's Quartet report on the Middle East, I am amazed by their self-destructive cynicism. This ridiculous document of the Quartet, composed of the US, Europe, Russia and the UN, is intent on creating an equilibrium – equally blaming the conqueror and the conquered, the oppressor and the oppressed, ignoring the occupation altogether. Verily, a masterpiece of hypocrisy, a.k.a. diplomacy.
Absent all chances for a serious effort for peace, hatred will just grow and grow, until it engulfs us all. Unless we take action to stem it in time. [Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1467393036/
The Guardian view on war in Iraq: a country that we helped to ruin
Editorial
Guardian/UK 4 July 2016
This is not to relitigate the decision to go to war. There will be plenty of that later in the week. The point is that mistaken decisions to go to war have a more terrible cost than almost any other sort of mistake, and to remember the price that the people of Iraq have paid. The years of war pile on their heads like lime. The bomb in Baghdad appears to be a retaliation by Islamic State (Isis) for the loss of the third battle of Falluja. First it was taken by the Americans; then they were expelled by a Sunni uprising. Then they fought their way back in; then it was handed over to the Iraqi government. Two years ago, Isis recaptured it. Now the Iraqi forces, assisted by Shia militias, have recaptured the city again, but the surviving inhabitants are scattered into refugee camps in the surrounding desert.
In Baghdad, it was announced that the completely worthless fake bomb detectors sold to the security forces by a British businessman in 2012 – and based on a novelty golf ball detector – will no longer be used after this atrocity. But the same announcement was first made in 2013.
As both tragedy and farce repeat in an apparently unending cycle, it is tempting to ask whether the deaths in Iraq have led to any greater progress than did the slaughter on the Somme. In purely military terms, the answer is unpromising. Falluja it is only one part of a wider attempt to dislodge Isis from the cities that it overran two years ago, when the Iraqi army, supposedly trained and equipped at incredible expense, simply ran away as the enemy approached. The expense had been real enough, but it had all been translated into foreign bank accounts rather than training or equipment.
The decisive battle will come when an attempt is made to recapture Mosul. This was meant to have been started last year, and then again this spring. Now it seems to have been postponed again in the face of great military difficulties and dissension between the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who are both fighting Isis together and manoeuvring against each other for position in the scarcely imaginable peacetime Iraq that must eventually emerge from all this horror.
The only consolation, and it is consolation of a very grim sort, is that there is now a clear war aim. Whatever else happens, the military defeat of Isis, and the annihilation of its self-declared caliphate, is a precondition for peace in the ruins. In the meantime, what Britain can do is to continue to supply aid, and see that it reaches the neediest. The war, along with sectarian cleansing, has made refugees of three million people. We need to remember our obligations to a country that we have helped to ruin.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/the-guardian-view-on-war-in-iraq-a-country-that-we-helped-to-ruin
(I must question strongly this continued commitment to a military road to peace. A.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)