WAR, WAR and MORE WAR

 

Antonia J Jones 1 August 2006

 

 

Antonia J. Jones is Professor of Evolutionary and Neural Computation at Cardiff University, Wales UK. She has long been a student of weapons technology and military history.

 

I have no particular ax to grind in this debate. I am not a Jew, or a Muslim, or, come to that, a Christian. I am just a student of international affairs and an ordinary western citizen who would prefer not to be blown up. However, I am sick of the hysterical nonsense and lies in our media, and I am terribly angry with our so called leaders. If we (by ‘we’ in this essay I mean the U.S., the U.K. and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe generally) are to deal effectively with our current situation we need to understand how we got to where we are now. Contrary to what the media would have us believe the enemy are not madmen – they have a point of view – we need to understand their position if we are to resolve the issues.

 

Yes the West is in a war, but not a conventional war in the historical sense of one nation state against another.  The first step in war is to correctly identify the enemy. The second is to understand why they are fighting. Undoubtedly Muslim terrorists are the enemy. They attack targets both military and civilian across the world. Why? Why is complicated, but I give you the first unpalatable truth:

 

 

The West wanted to give the Jews a place of their own after the atrocities of Hitler’s Germany. But in doing so they stole a whole people’s homeland and created a refugee problem the like of which the modern world had never seen - and which still, more than half a century later, has not been resolved. By attempting to ameliorate one great evil we created another huge injustice.

 

Do the mothers in the Gaza, who send their children out to self-detonate, love them any the less than we love our own? No, of course not – Palestinian mothers support their children and applaud these evils because the whole people are desperate, and the world does not recognize or act to right the blatant wrong done to them.

 

The West manipulates Middle Eastern politics relentlessly. We armed the Shah as a bulwark against communism. When we started Iran was a great wheat exporting nation – by the time the Shar’s government was overthrown, together with the evil secret police the SAVAK, Iran had spent all its oil money on arms (bought from us) and was a net importer of wheat. When the revolution came, the Iranian liberal left-wing got no support from us. We turned our back on them and they were quickly eliminated by the Mullahs. Essentially, by interfering for many years and then failing to act when the regime we had propped-up collapsed, we created the U.S. Embassy siege and the whole current situation in Iran. Iran has an educated, liberal and civilized middle class, who do not support the Mullahs and are just waiting for them to go. Now our governments are thinking up reasons for invading Iran next? This is insanity. Iran is not a threat – even if they had nuclear weapons not even the Mullahs are stupid enough to allow them to be used. All such an invasion will accomplish is to harden World and Arab opinion against us and create more terrorists.

 

After 1991 Iraq was no threat to us either. The weapons of mass destruction were a lie. Anyone who had bothered to read Ritter’s little book about disassembling Iraq’s weapons programme after 1991, knew that. Before we invaded in 2003, demonstrators on the streets of London, in the biggest demonstration ever seen in the UK, knew that. In February 2003, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who said “That is my problem, I cannot go to the public and say, 'these are the reasons', because I don't believe in them,” knew it. And yet still, to this day, our media says: “Well, everyone believed at the time that Saddam had nuclear weapons”. Hello, is there anyone there? Guys, no one believed that!  Nor, as things turned out, was it true. If any weapons had been found they would have been put there by the CIA post-facto. In fact, in retrospect it is surprising that that didn’t happen. Could it be a shred of sanity survives, or is simply that nobody thought of it?

 

Bush had made his mind up to invade Iraq, and simply had our intelligence services keep re-writing their reports, until the reports said what he wanted to hear. Nobody seems to have explained to this self-professed Christian that it’s immoral to start a war with no good reason. The ‘Axis of Evil’ starts closer to home than we care to admit. By repeatedly going along with the current government position, even when it is manifestly untrue, our media does us a profound disservice.

 

 

Worse, Bush implemented no plan for the aftermath. Those professionals in the State Department, who fully understood what the situation would be post-invasion, were ignored and sidelined. Post-invasion, museums, with artifacts from the dawn of human civilization, and hospitals were looted. The resources needed to win the peace were never made available. Heaven help us, Halliburton was the main beneficiary! People on the streets in Baghdad, who, like me, object to being blown up, now feel (correctly) they had more security under Saddam (see Baghdad Burning). We should be ashamed of ourselves, electing such a President – although, come to think of it, we didn’t elect him did we?

 

There were no Muslim fundamentalist terrorists in Iraq before we invaded; now they are all over us.  Post-invasion we failed to control the Iraqi borders. Muslim fundamentalists flooded across with their AK47’s and rocket launchers. From Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan they came. If we had been just a little bit clever, knowing they would inevitably come in their thousands, we would have concentrated on annihilating them at the borders. There we really could have used our technology to hit them hard. It was one of the few times when the real enemy was actually visible – almost anyone crossing into Iraq at that point was a legitimate target. But we missed that opportunity. The enemy merged into the civilian population and became largely invisible. It’s a mess. Probably, the best way out now is to eat humble pie and ask the UN to take over.

 

There’s the rub. The real problem in this war is that mostly there are no obvious targets. It’s frustrating – it means we can’t fight this like a conventional war. What we must avoid at all costs is blindly lashing out around us. Dropping bombs all over the place may make it look like we are doing something, but in reality it is both counter productive (it engenders even more long term hatred) ineffective (the bad guys are usually somewhere else), and immoral – the ones who suffer are the civilians. It fact, it always seems to be the civilians who suffer in modern warfare.

 

Before we stand ready to sacrifice our hard won freedoms, and start pointless wars all over the place, we need to pause and reflect that governments have killed vastly more people than ever have terrorists. Governments and their wars directly and indirectly killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century, terrorists maybe a few thousand. I am not saying we should not fight the Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, they leave us no choice. But I am saying that if we give up our freedoms, and create a society where everyone is afraid to have open debate, then the enemy will have won by default.

 

 

Saddam Hussein was a very unpleasant dictator but, before he made a fatal mistake and invaded Kuwait, he was our dictator. His regime was secular. He hated, and was hated by, the Muslim fundamentalists. For many years the West condoned his brutally repressive regime. We (ironically it was actually Germany) even supplied him with the means to create the poison gas which he used against the Kurds (another displaced people) at Halabja in 1988. If we wanted to get rid of him we should have done so in 1991. We didn’t. Not because of a UN Resolution, but because we were afraid that Iran would step into the power vacuum that would be created if the Saddam regime fell. There was a danger that Iraq would fall into the hands of the Muslim fundamentalists. Does this sound at all familiar?

 

Our rhetoric is that we are going to ‘give’, apparently by force if necessary, the peoples of the Middle East ‘freedom and democracy’. Anyone who has spent any time in the Middle East knows that many people in Muslim Arab nations don’t actually want democracy, they want a theocratic state under Sharia law (note Iran is not an Arab nation). Although not all Muslim/Arab states want a theocracy. If  they did, many existing regimes would have collapsed by the sheer power of the `Mulla-ocracy' a long time ago. Fortunately, the civil servants and other administrative officials are totally opposed to a theocratic state - and this is one of the reasons why many Arab states remain secular. Still, that being said, here is my second unpalatable truth:

 

 

It is absolutely pointless to try. Ironically, when we do get elected governments in Gaza (or Lebanon) we don’t like the results - Hamas in Gaza (or the two Hesbolla representatives in Lebanon). We tell them that their elected representatives are unacceptable (to us), cut off their funds, and tell them to elect someone we approve of!  Democracy? In the meantime social order collapses in Gaza, hospitals are not funded, civil servants are not paid, and as night follows day, resentment against the West becomes even greater – if that is possible.

 

The situation in Gaza is becoming horribly reminiscent of the Warsaw ghetto of WWII. They were dancing in the streets in Gaza after 911 – do you understand yet why they hate us so? By financing Israel and not using that leverage to force them to reach a settlement, we continue the historical wrongs. Obviously, Israel needs security and defensible borders, but equally obviously we need to sort-out the Palestinian issue. It’s not insoluble, but it will be very expensive. The real issue here is that no-one has really tried. Moreover, the problem is not just with Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East. At home End-Time Christian fundamentalists, responsible for much of the U.S’s unconditional support of Israel, are also part of the political problem. I’ve got news for you guys, the human race has got one shot at Eden and we are messing it up right royally. There will be no second chance after Armageddon – just a radioactive wasteland.

 

All militant fundamentalists are dangerous to liberal democracy, because it is not in their nature to compromise – they are right, everyone else is wrong, and that is that - they will readily use force to establish their position. Well, we had a word for that back in the last century – not much used now except as a general insult – we called it ‘fascism’ and our fathers fought a world war against it.

 

 

But ‘freedom and democracy’, in this context, have become buttons that our media and politicians press when they want to side-step rational argument. Let’s just concentrate on the moral, economic and military realities.

 

Saudi Arabia is another Middle Eastern country where we have an unsavory history of political manipulation: possessing of vast oil resources, ruled by a theocratic elite, encouraged by the West, and original home of fabulously rich public enemy number one - Osama Ben Laden.

 

Ben Laden issued his personal fatwa, declaring war on the United States, in 1996. What balls! A single man declaring war on the U.S. - and make no mistake he meant it! In 1998 Ben Laden and others issued another fatwa. It lists three main grievances: U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula; U.S. devastation of the Iraqi people (presumably the 1991 war and subsequent outrageous scandal of the ‘Oil-for-Food’ programme etc.), humiliation of their Muslim neighbors; and U.S. support of Israel. The objectives of the war were to ‘bring the war to the U.S’, and to ‘end the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula’. It is worth noting that he has largely achieved both objectives, and still remains free. So in a very real sense right now he is winning his war. A fact which we tend not to talk about!

 

Ben Laden is not representative of Muslims in general, but he has a huge following amongst Muslims around the world. Why? Because, stripped of the rhetoric, a lot of what he said in his fatwas is true – that’s another thing we don’t talk about. Most of us have never even read the fatwas. You would think that when a multi-billionaire, with a following of millions, many armed and prepared to lay down their lives, declares war on us his reasons would, at the very least, be essentially and accurately summarized in our media?  Not a bit of it – until 911 very few in the West had ever heard of Ben Laden and al-Qaeda.

 

Was invading Afghanistan a reasonable response to 911? Arguably it was, although now the opium exports are thriving again. Like many Muslim states the Taliban oppressed women, denied them education, and provided our enemies with training bases and refuge. They were a thoroughly unpleasant bunch. By all means knock them off – even if we did arm and train them as a thorn in the flesh of the Soviets. But be warned – the Afghans essentially brought the entire Soviet army grinding to a halt, holed up in forts, and blasting mountain villages with helicopter gun ships. In 1842 the Afghans inflicted one of the worst ever military defeats on the British army. Of the 16,000 soldiers, wives, children and camp followers who fled Kabul after a tribal revolt, only one man got away; the rest were massacred, or taken prisoner, by Ghilzai tribesmen. Only Dr William Brydon was deliberately left alive to tell the tale, and warn people back home of the consequences of getting involved in Afghanistan.

So invade them – well maybe - but again plans for post-invasion were largely noticeable by their absence, and what about prisoners? Well, we’ll stick the worst in Cuba, where no one knows what is going on and grill them at our leisure. I have to say, it really doesn’t look very edifying. If you are going to do things like that you had better be able to keep it quiet.

But Iraq – no! Iran – no! This is not only outrageously stupid – it is dangerous.

And right now we have the latest war – the Lebanon. Once again, inevitably, the issue centers on Israel. Hesbolla in the north see Hamas in the south having a hard time at Gaza, and decide now is a good time to start using their stockpile of missiles, thoughtfully supplied by Iran via Syria. One can hardly blame the Israelis, for taking military action when Hesbolla are firing hundreds of rockets into their cities. But mass bombing of mainly civilian targets? No, that cannot be a sensible solution. Flattening the arduously rebuilt war-torn Lebanon will just engender more hatred and resentment.

Ask yourself what product or ‘good’ can only be traded in a single currency across the entire world? And then ask yourself why.

 

The West is energy hungry.

 

 

We would not be dependent on Middle East oil. Our cities would be quieter (have you ever noticed that about Venice), we would have clean air, and our CO2 emissions would be minimal. Carter made a stab at starting to rationalize our energy policy and was thwarted. Shouted down, treated like an idiot. But he was right! Our strength is our scientific innovation and advanced technology – we should play to our strengths.

 

So my recipe is:

 

  1. Develop a rational energy policy.
  2. Solve the Palestinian problem – by buying desert from Egypt, making it bloom with desalination plants, and creating a Palestinian homeland.
  3. Give Israel defensible borders.
  4. Make Jerusalem a UN protectorate.
  5. Stop trying to impose unwelcome styles of government upon countries that don’t want it.

 

If all this sounds a bit far-fetched, just think how the U.S. got Alaska. Sure it would cost, but we would make everyone an offer they couldn’t refuse, and if it meant lasting peace in the Middle East it would be damn cheap at the price.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

Postscript. March 2007. Olympia Dukakis made a now very famous speech that said it all so much better than I could ever do. See <here> and listen <here>.