MAX HASTINGS: Why, with heavy heart, I believe we have no choice but to go to war again
So it is to be war — again. Despite Parliament’s endorsement yesterday of air strikes against IS fanatics in Iraq, the British people may be forgiven for venting dismay and doubt.
The Prime Minister yesterday told the Commons that IS, the Muslim fanatics who have overrun swathes of Syria and Iraq, pose a clear and present danger to Britain; that we have no choice but to fight them: ‘There is no walk-on-by option.’
But have we not been here before? Have we not heard the same arguments presented by Tony Blair to justify the commitment of Britain’s Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, then by Cameron to make sense of crusades in Libya and — until the House of Commons sensibly stopped him — Syria?
Today, after the expenditure of billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives, we see Afghanistan on the cusp of succumbing to chaos and warlordism; Iraq in ferment and apparently incapable of self-defence; Libya a shambles where no Westerner can walk in safety; Syria steeped in blood, contested between the mass-murdering President Assad and the mass-murdering IS.
Kenneth Clarke said yesterday with his accustomed bluntness: ‘We made things worse.’
Below, I shall make the argument for qualified support for David Cameron’s latest military mission.
But no British citizen can be blamed for throwing up their hands in despair and asking why a single British Grenadier, or indeed strike aircraft, should be put at renewed risk in the Middle East.
The whole tone of yesterday’s Commons debate emphasised the sense of bewilderment and uncertainty shared by us all.
Let us start by considering where we stand today. Every Western government and intelligence agency, headed by those of the United States, has been wrong-footed by the tidal rush of IS across great tracts of Syria and Iraq.
In the space of the summer, a few thousand jihadis have carried all before them, causing the Iraqi army to flee, its formations to collapse, abandoning their heavy weapons and vehicles.
Even the Kurdish Peshmerga army, whose fighters were thought to be made of sterner stuff, have failed to check the invaders.
The Assad regime in Syria has chosen not to tangle with them. Neighbouring Turkey is proving amazingly reluctant to participate in military action to stop them, even after three million terrified refugees have stampede
The Americans lavished huge resources on training and equipping Iraqi forces after 2003, but once the U.S. surrendered the country to its democratically elected leader, Nouri al-Maliki, he allowed the army to degenerate into a corrupt, demoralised Shia sectarian militia.
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The threat to all our peoples is too great to stand aside
In short, ‘our side’ in this struggle against a movement which David Cameron justly characterises as barbarian, has proved much less motivated and effective — frankly, less courageous — than the jihadis.
This is a depressing reality, and goes far to explain why President Barack Obama has been reluctant to commit U.S. forces against IS.
For the truth is that there is little for us to ‘join up’ with politically, and the struggle can only be won by the people of the region. So what can the West do, if they lack stomach to resist the monsters of IS?
Monsters they certainly are, offering no credible economic, political or social vision; wedded only to a culture of intolerance and death. A swathe of the Middle East has abandoned productive activity in favour of strife. But IS does not merely proclaim its commitment to creating a medieval caliphate in conquered territory. It is also bent upon using its resources to attack the ‘infidels’ of the West.
It is because they are so eager to challenge us that they behead Western prisoners on camera: they seek to goad America and its allies. They believe that every American, French or British warplane overhead will bring more recruits to their own cause. They want war: that is what jihad means.
But if that is so, say sceptics in our own society, is not the sensible response to refuse to meet their wishes? Why not leave them to create a hell in their occupied territories, and wait for the people who live there sooner or later to awaken and throw off their shackles?
It is a position that I cannot support, believing instead that we need to accept the view reluctantly adopted by President Obama, by France’s Francois Hollande, the governments of the Middle Eastern nations which have joined U.S. air strikes, and now David Cameron — that local forces must be given immediate military support. The threat posed by IS to the security of all our peoples is too great to stand aside. We must do what we can — which is not a lot — to assist the forces of moderation in the Middle East, such as they are. The fact that we cannot do everything — pouring in divisions of infantry — should not become a justification for doing nothing.
IS is not the first movement of its kind to trouble the world. Among historical precedents for the British in particular, it is especially striking to recall the late 19th-century Dervish empire.
Mohammed Ahmed, a carpenter’s son born on an island in the Nile in 1844, put himself at the head of an Islamist jihad which overran the Sudan and invaded Abyssinia.
The Egyptians dispatched a 10,000-strong force to deal with him, led by British officers. On November 3, 1883, their regiments met 20,000 men faithful to Mohammed Ahmed — who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, or Islamic spiritual leader.
The Egyptians were engulfed, and killed almost to a man. In the following year, Sudan’s governor, the British General Charles Gordon, perished when the Dervish hordes stormed Khartoum.
The threat to all our peoples is too great to stand aside
In short, ‘our side’ in this struggle against a movement which David Cameron justly characterises as barbarian, has proved much less motivated and effective — frankly, less courageous — than the jihadis.
This is a depressing reality, and goes far to explain why President Barack Obama has been reluctant to commit U.S. forces against IS.
For the truth is that there is little for us to ‘join up’ with politically, and the struggle can only be won by the people of the region. So what can the West do, if they lack stomach to resist the monsters of IS?
Monsters they certainly are, offering no credible economic, political or social vision; wedded only to a culture of intolerance and death. A swathe of the Middle East has abandoned productive activity in favour of strife. But IS does not merely proclaim its commitment to creating a medieval caliphate in conquered territory. It is also bent upon using its resources to attack the ‘infidels’ of the West.
It is because they are so eager to challenge us that they behead Western prisoners on camera: they seek to goad America and its allies. They believe that every American, French or British warplane overhead will bring more recruits to their own cause. They want war: that is what jihad means.
But if that is so, say sceptics in our own society, is not the sensible response to refuse to meet their wishes? Why not leave them to create a hell in their occupied territories, and wait for the people who live there sooner or later to awaken and throw off their shackles?
It is a position that I cannot support, believing instead that we need to accept the view reluctantly adopted by President Obama, by France’s Francois Hollande, the governments of the Middle Eastern nations which have joined U.S. air strikes, and now David Cameron — that local forces must be given immediate military support. The threat posed by IS to the security of all our peoples is too great to stand aside. We must do what we can — which is not a lot — to assist the forces of moderation in the Middle East, such as they are. The fact that we cannot do everything — pouring in divisions of infantry — should not become a justification for doing nothing.
IS is not the first movement of its kind to trouble the world. Among historical precedents for the British in particular, it is especially striking to recall the late 19th-century Dervish empire.
Mohammed Ahmed, a carpenter’s son born on an island in the Nile in 1844, put himself at the head of an Islamist jihad which overran the Sudan and invaded Abyssinia.
The Egyptians dispatched a 10,000-strong force to deal with him, led by British officers. On November 3, 1883, their regiments met 20,000 men faithful to Mohammed Ahmed — who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, or Islamic spiritual leader.
The Egyptians were engulfed, and killed almost to a man. In the following year, Sudan’s governor, the British General Charles Gordon, perished when the Dervish hordes stormed Khartoum.
Thereafter the Mahdi imposed an Islamist regime not much different from that of IS today. Many years after, Theodore Roosevelt, later U.S. president, wrote of Sudan in those days: ‘There flourished a tyranny which for cruelty, bloodthirstiness, unintelligence and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilised people can ever imagine.
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