On War

That decidedly unlikeable theologian Martin Luther once remarked
"when I fart, they smell it in Rome", a little bit of historical trivia
that brings to mind current tribulations. The world awoke on 17th
December 1998 (in fact I heard the news at 2.30am, my daughter being
then two months old) to discover that the United States, shamefully
followed by the Blair regime, had launched air attacks against the
Iraqi infrastructure.

Preceding events in Washington took on a sense of the eerily macabre.
Clinton's constant 'little boy lost' expression during his visit to
Israel reflected his worries about the situation at home, as many
congress were pushing for his impeachment. The Hollywood jet-set, and
the New Labourite trendies in Britain, sought desperately to defend
him; pressing the case for an errant husband (and who isn't nowadays?),
now guilt-ridden and beset by remorse being permitted to remain in
power due to his apparent expert and statesmanlike handling of the
Presidency. Political bias was revealed for anyone with sense to see -
the soft left was simply forming a protective cordon around one of it's
favourite sons. During a TV interview Madonna retorted that the man was
'brilliant' and should not be punished for failing to be a paragon of
virtue. Of course, no human being is expected to be whiter than white,
but most of us expect - or at least ought to - at least a basic sense
of moral propriety and rectitude from the most powerful politician on
Earth.

The reaction of Clinton himself in the run up to the bombing of Iraq,
and his explanation of the night itself, played as a sudden descent
into deadpan humour. It was almost as if the silver-haired gigolo was
making a final obscene gesture at his detractors; a real obscenity that
would be physically experienced throughout the Arab world. Apparently
it was offensive to kill Muslims during Ramadan, so the attack simply
had to take place immediately - at least the Iraqis could combine
fasting and praying with the burial of their dead. Save's time and all
that. Clinton also took time to refer to Iraq's deployment of chemical
weapons against Iran during the 1980-88 war to further justify the
attacks - a cynical and hypocritical statement, worthy Orwell's
Ministry of Truth itself. Iraq's war effort against its Farsi neighbour
was supported at every stage, both overtly and covertly, by the United
States.

Amidst the cheers of many transatlantic militarists, each as bad as
those of a darker hue they claim to despise, the world forgot the role
of the CIA in bringing the Ba'ath Party to power, of training it's
murderous security forces and it's 'interrogators'. This darkly ironic
state of affairs had been further illustrated earlier in the year, as
the West began to wring its hands in horror over the dangerous nuclear
arms race between India and Pakistan. NATO was and still is armed to
the teeth with such weapons - its protestation surely gives the term
'unilateral disarmament' a powerful new meaning.

Poor taste aside, the present writer earnestly hopes that Clinton's
political career will not survive the current controversy. A man of
such appalling character, a genuinely sick individual who seeks to save
his political skin by ordering the murder of innocents, cannot be
permitted to leave a positive account to posterity. Insufficient
criticism has been directed at the acts that led him to this imbroglio.
His allies sought to defend him by citing understandable and apparently
common human weaknesses; some, laughably, by referring to a trumped up
medical condition, 'sex addiction'. The moral of the story is thus:
never trust a man who seeks to dignify his own wrongdoings by seeking
to apply them to the whole of humanity, least of all a head of state.
Their cries seemed to point to the idea that the President was little
more than a primate, unable to control his animal urges but somehow
capable of governing a nation of two hundred and fifty million.

Disgracefully, the spurious rhetoric of peace was adopted in justifying
the war of December 1998. A tactic not fully employed in the United
States since the Reagan years, 'kill for peace' was revived in all its
ignominy. Throughout the crisis the West has sought to appear as the
Iraqi people's ally - this is where the often puzzling refusal to allow
the regime in Baghdad to even mention the adverse humanitarian effects
of the UN sanctions emerges. One pro-Clinton commentator even remarked
that ceasing the bombing amounted to letting the Iraqis down! This
thoroughly modern doublespeak had also earlier been used in this
twin-pronged offensive, as Clinton desperately dreamt up semantic
devices regarding the exact definition of sexual intercourse.
Adulterer, warmonger and liar too - America is surely blessed!

Britain is hardly less so. With memories of Labour claiming to be the
party of the working class receding as rapidly as the life expectancy
of an Iraqi baby, Blair's babes were in top form over the crisis. It is
apparently not only acceptable for New Labour to immerse the nation in
the EU amalgam, with no fully democratic discussion permitted, and to
alienate the poor and unemployed; it is now perfectly fine for
ministers to wax lyrical on the need for 'tough action' against an
entire people. What odd times we live in, dominated by a transatlantic
military axis of the liberal left!
And let us not be distracted by arguments that the strikes were
intended to force Saddam to comply with UN resolutions over arms
monitoring: the UN was not consulted - if this was the aim of the
action, it was certainly put into effect in a highly novel way. Nor,
one suspects, was the removal of the Iraqi President himself uppermost
in Clinton's mind. The planes were sent on their way by the distant
machinations of quite another part of the big guy's anatomy.

The great historian AJP Taylor once raised eyebrows by attributing a
decisive role to train timetables in the outbreak of the First World
War. I intend to argue for a similar congruence of seemingly distant
and unrelated events, and present Bill Clinton as a Martin Luther of
the modern age: "when I unzip, they feel it in Baghdad."

Kosovo (April 1999)

It is intriguing how the world of art can provide alleyways into
current events. Several years ago JG Ballard wrote a short story
telling of a future Britain ravaged by civil war, with a patriotic
rebel army fighting a US-backed puppet regime. The British conscripts
thrown against the rebels were treated by their American overseers with
as little regard as they treated the South Vietnamese;
indistinguishable, in the thinly veiled racism which has come to
characterise American foreign policy, from their Communist co-patriots
to the north. North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese?amidst the melee of
poodles jostling for the attention of the master that now passes for
international affairs, is Britain still justified in viewing herself as
somehow set apart?

In recent years cracks have begun to appear in the rose-tinted
perception of Britain and the US as close cousins, as 'partners in the
struggle' as it were. We are all aware of 'friendly fire' incidents in
which British troops were shelled by Americans during the 1991 Gulf
War. This year revelations have emerged of American scientists leaking
the locations of British nuclear submarines to China, an act that,
following the destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, we can
only hope will not return to haunt us. Perhaps in it's eagerness to
assert the Pax Americana over the globe, US interests have, either
through inadvertent or (dare one say it) deep seated suspicion and
hostility to all foreigners, begun to regard Britain as little more
than another puppet state, to be moved around the strategic by Our
Father Uncle Sam, and ditched if found to be troublesome. Are these
isolated incidents or part of a more general trend, which may yet
culminate in Ballard's apocalyptic vision? The advice of the present
writer is to turn your eyes to Kosovo.

Whatever the underlying trends, Blair's willingness to automatically
involve Britain as a faithful adjutant in America's 'whipcrackaway'
foreign policy has produced some startling political developments. As
we approach the millennium a transatlantic military axis has emerged -
albeit an uneven one, reminiscent of Berlin-Rome - between two leading
protagonists of the liberal left! During the Cold War this ideological
position was consistently opposed to military aggression - today we are
confronted with the likes of Glenys Kinnock speaking of 'the Serbs'
through clenched teeth; of Will Hutton making a typically liberal and
rational decision to support the obliteration of the Yugoslav
infrastructure. Recently an ITN reporter commented gleefully that the
situation in Montenegro is 'like Bosnia before the war'. The growth of
the post-Soviet 'New World Order' has unleashed mysterious forces we
are still struggling to understand.

In December 1998 Britain followed the script and co-operated in the
bombing of Iraq, ostensibly to divert attention from Clinton's
adultery. Perhaps the moral degeneration exemplified by the President
provides at least a partial explanation of the current behaviour of the
US on the world stage. Whatever the faults of President Reagan, chief
amongst them his galloping senility and almost deliberate and dangerous
misunderstanding of Soviet peace initiatives, he was renowned as a
paragon of family values. Not so with the current occupant of the White
House. His primate-like sexual proclivities and basic, barefaced deceit
act as a potent symbol of the decline of a once great country.

Most of us in Britain have grown up with a certain image of the United
States - of pioneer heroism and masculine virtues through Westerns, of
moral correctness, justice and familial warmth through the films of
Frank Capra, of the awe-inspiring resonance of the key tenets of
quintessential American culture - the Cadillac, Coca-Cola, the New York
skyline. When we consider seriously the essence of what passes for
American culture in the late nineteen nineties, what confronts us? The
Jerry Springer Show springs to mind as the archetypal symbol of
contemporary America. The protagonists in this delightful spectacle
lie, in the words of Aldous Huxley, not so much beyond good and evil as
beneath them. Human beings are depicted as earwigs, viewers are
encouraged to take an erotic-voyeuristic fascination in the depths of
moral turpitude into which others can fall, and thus become earwigs
themselves. America's unregulated TV networks have adopted the policy
that trash sells. The American public is in the dangerous state of an
amorphous mass deprived by stealth of the ability to think for itself,
and vulnerable to the age-old militaristic propaganda (disguised as
patriotism) that bombing foreigners per se is a valid tool in achieving
foreign policy objectives.

The pre-Cold War, pre-Second World War isolationism of the US - to
which some of it's political commentators have advocated a return - has
given way to a rampant interventionism fuelled by ignorance and
arrogance. American strategists are only now coming to realise that
Serbian (and Kosovar) families will not happily consent to being blown
to pieces in the name of 'freedom', and this has hit them in the manner
of a revelation. This of course follows the earlier nasty surprise that
Milosevic did not immediately capitulate and give up what has been
since the Middle Ages a territory that Serbs see as the historic
heartland of their country, when the first bomb fell. And the tedious,
facetious, insulting and childlike mantra of 'oh, sorry' that is heard
each time NATO kills a civilian, blows up an embassy or bombs Bulgaria
is beginning to wear thin, both with what remains of international law
and with the patience of would-be opponents in a future war. It is
quite feasible that Hitler did not 'mean' to destroy Coventry
Cathedral.

With NATO's disastrous war against Yugoslavia increasingly looking like
an interventionist adventure to break up that country in the name of
the terrorist KLA, the mind of this Briton begins to play strange
tricks. I look to the fragility of the peace process in Northern
Ireland?a belligerent IRA might re-emerge, and inevitably seek
transatlantic patronage?with America seemingly pledged to breaking
countries up, will this adopted vehicle of their particular brand of
imperialism begin to rain bombs on the Home Counties? Will Blair throw
in his lot with the Republican-Clintonian-liberal alliance? We had all
better start toning up our protect and survive skills, perhaps while
readying our pens - in the manner of a future JG Ballard.