Week 26 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Middle East Maelstrom

          A recent email from a regular blog reader sums up the current situation relating to Islam and its neighbours in the Middle East, a considerable part of central Africa and the Indian sub-continent:

Well, I said the militant Islam thing was going to come to a head, and almost immediately the Pakistan Taliban come very close to capturing Karachi main airport, and ISIS are getting close to taking Baghdad. And still the Nigerian school girls haven't been returned.  The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.  Would have been better to have left Saddam Hussain in Iraq, but I see Tony Blair is very sensitive to that obvious criticism and has tried to pre-empt it. Likewise, it is crystal clear the west should have given no support to those trying to overthrow Assad. These dictators may be bad and use their powers arbitrarily and brutally, but an ultra orthodox religious regime is ten times worse because it so deeply affects the lives of ordinary people; especially women, who make up 50% of the population and gays who make up 7%, and anyone else of a different religion, or of a more moderate version of Islam.

I couldn’t have put it better or more succinctly myself – though he’s missed out the second batch of schoolgirls who have been abducted by jihadist militants in Nigeria, or the massacres that have recently taken place there.  Nor did he mention the atrocities that have taken place after ISIS victories.  Perhaps, as a former POW, I am particularly affected by tv images of Iraqi soldiers being cold-bloodedly shot en masse by these ‘religious zealots’ after capture. In North Africa in 1941/’42 we on one side and the Germans and Italians on the other tried to kill each other – but we did all adhere to ‘the rules of war’.  Many years later, when my family and I were on holiday in Austria, we encountered a German family remarkably similar to ourselves.  We discovered that the father, like me, had been taken prisoner in Tobruk in 1942 – I, by Rommel in June, and he by ‘Monty’ in November!  Because, all those years ago, both sides had adhered to those rules, we had both survived to look each-other in the face and shake hands as friends.

I was fascinated by Tony Blair’ attempts to suggest that the current conflict has nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq into which he and George Bush lured us.   It is, so he says, the clear result of our failure to intervene in the Syrian Civil War. On which side does he think we should have intervened?  It is possible that, early in the conflict, many of the rebels did seek a more democratic Syria.  It has for some time though been clear that the current rebellion is led and dominated by Islamist zealots of the same breed as those who perpetrated 9/11, were responsible for the subsequent bomb outrages in London, who kidnapped those Nigerian teenagers, and who are now fighting their murderous way through Iraq.  Does Tony Blair really suggest that we should have helped them overthrow Hassad?

When David Cameron expresses concern about British radicalised Muslims returning from Syria to the UK after learning the terrorist arts he doesn’t, for one moment, imagine that they’ll have learned those arts from President Hassad’s supporters. Their teachers will have been those anti-Hassad activists that we have been supporting but, according to Tony Blair, not supporting strongly enough!

I suppose that one good thing that can be said to have come out of the present crisis is a more friendly relationship with Iran.  I heard a Conservative MP in the House of Commons warning the government that this might damage relations between ourselves and our present Middle East allies.  Could he possibly have been referring to such ‘allies’ as Saudi Arabia and Qatar?  These countries, to which we blithely sell arms, are the source of the jihadists bloodthirsty inspiration.  They are the patrons and supporters of Sunni Muslims as Iran is the inspiration, patron and supporter of the Shia.   I have little doubt that these wonderful Middle East allies of ours have been supplying the Syrian rebels with arms (probably some that we have sold them!) and funds to keep them going.  I wouldn’t wish to live either in Saudi Arabia or Iran but, if I were compelled to make a choice, I would certainly settle for Iran, as being the less restrictive and the lesser offender against what I (and I think, Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband) regard as inalienable human rights.  But, of course, human rights are all very well - but business is business! And the manufacture and sale of the weapons of war (the instruments of death) is very big business indeed.

Now we, with the Americans as our ‘senior partners’, are considering intervention to halt the progress of ISIS and prevent the downfall of the present Iraqi government.  We’re not going to put troops on the ground, but we’ll possibly bomb ISIS troop concentrations and so on.  Unmanned ‘drones’ may be used to ‘take out’ some of the ISIS commanders and political leaders.   Inevitably, in doing so innocent civilians – men, women and children will be killed and maimed.  Whatever might be the conclusion of the current fighting it will certainly result with Middle Eastern Muslims – Sunni and Shia alike – uniting in their hatred of the western infidels who inflicted even more death and destruction on their benighted countries. History demonstrates that foreign intervention in civil conflicts always makes them bloodier and more protracted

Twenty-five years ago Christians were a tolerated minority in many Muslim majority countries though not, of course, in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq and Syria in particular there were thriving and long-established Christian Communities.  They set an example of tolerance in an increasingly intolerant world. Today, Christians have been a target of extremists in both those countries.  Christian lives are in daily danger throughout the Middle East and those who can get out have done so.  Our Christian faith is in danger of becoming extinct in the very area of the world in which it was born.

That is the true and lasting legacy of the policies of George W. Bush junior and Tony Blair.  I wonder if they’re proud of it?

Spoiling for a fight?

I have just been listening to an interview with the Secretary-General of NATO about Iraq and the state of the world generally. Perhaps we need reminding that NATO was created during the Cold War specifically to deal with the perceived military threat from the Soviet Union.  The United Kingdom is a member and, unlike our membership of the European Union, joining NATO was taken on quite arbitrarily by the government without any referendum or consultation with the British people.  It is now concerning itself with matters far beyond its original purpose.

The Afghan war for example, is now coming to a less-than-victorious end, after a decade long struggle.  It was a war in which, theoretically at least, NATO was attempting to combat jihadist terrorism at its source.  This was considered to be in Afghanistan, where Al Qaida was protected by the fundamentalist Taliban Government.  All that has happened is that Al Qaida has moved its bases elsewhere, what has been portrayed as ‘western aggression’ has gained recruits for the terrorists, and the Taliban remain undefeated. Meanwhile the conflict has cost the UK and, of course, the USA hundreds of lives and millions of pounds and dollars.  The best place to combat terrorism is in the western countries in which acts of terrorism are threatened or are taking place.  The only role that NATO should take is ensuring the dissemination of intelligence about terrorist groups, and experience of foiling their activities – a field in which, if official sources are to be believed, the UK has been very successful.

That however is not the way Anders Rasmussen. NATO’s Secretary General sees it.   In his Radio interview  he gave the impression of a man spoiling for a fight.  ISIS aggression against Iraq, he averred, was a threat to all of us – it was imperative that firm action be taken against them.  Fortunately for us all, American President Barak Obama (without whose OK, NATO certainly won’t act!) is a great deal more cautious.  He has reinforced the defence of the US Embassy in Baghdad and is sending 300 ‘advisers’ to help organise defence against ISIS but not to get directly involved in conflict.  He doesn’t rule out air strikes against carefully selected targets, but they are not to be taken for granted.  He does not want ‘mission creep’ dragging the USA deeper and deeper into the conflict. 

Mr Rasmussen hasn’t forgotten the Ukraine.  There’s Russia’s virtually bloodless ‘annexation’ of the Crimea, to the satisfaction of the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants! There’s the ‘provocation’ of military exercises near Ukraine’s borders, and Mr Rasmussen is sure that Russia is encouraging the armed separatists in Eastern Ukraine. I’d have thought that much more provocative were NATO’s naval exercises in the Baltic and Black Sea and the reinforcement of NATO troops in Poland and the Baltic states.  As for encouraging the armed separatists, we do know that they have asked Russia to send troops over the border to assist them – and that Russia has declined.  Russia has had more experience than any other country at opposing jihadist terrorism. They were fighting it in Afghanistan when we and the Americans were supporting the fathers and grandfathers of today's Taliban fighters. Instead of thinking up more and stronger sanctions – which affect us as much as they do them – we should be co-operating with them in combating this world-wide scourge.  Goodness knows, we were happy enough to co-operate with a much less amiable Russia to defeat Hitler and the Nazis.  But, of course, neither Mr Rasmussen nor any of the world’s statesmen are old enough to remember that!

Week 11. 2011 15.3.11

TENDRING TOPICS…….on line

‘Well bungled Sir!’

Was there ever such an SAS venture quite as inept as the recent one carried out ‘in friendly territory’ in Libya? ‘Like thieves in the night’, a party of SAS men, armed to the teeth, arrived by air and landed ‘somewhere in the desert’ in the vicinity of Benghazi, where they were met by unnamed British agents. It was fortunate perhaps that they were arrested before they had been able to do further harm to Britain’s reputation! What on earth was their purpose? Had they landed in the vicinity of Tripoli, in a government controlled area, it might have been understandable. They could have been on a top-secret death-or-glory mission to kidnap Gaddafi and bring him to justice.

If, as it is suggested, they were there to further the cause of the freedom and liberty, then why not ring the front door bell and seek admission as friends, rather than metaphorically creep round the back and try to break in at a window? I don’t understand it, and neither did the Libyan insurgents. Why on earth should the Libyans have instantly accepted Britons as their friends? We have, until recently, been supplying weaponry to Colonel Gaddafi’s government and to similar governments in the region. Even while the insurgency was taking place and gathering momentum, our Prime Minister, with an entourage including arms dealers, was paying friendly calls on autocratic Middle Eastern regimes with rulers not unlike those that were being toppled by people-power in North Africa. These included Saudi Arabia, arguably neck and neck with North Korea as the country in the world with the least regard for what we regard as inalienable human rights. Characteristically (and without a word of disapproval from ‘the west’) Saudi Arabia’s ruler has threatened to put down even the most peaceful protest against his regime with utmost force.

In view of our Governments’ (both the present one and New-Labour) record of supporting oppressive regimes in the Middle East, I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that since the beginning of the current insurgency, Britain’s words and actions have been distinguished by muddle, uncertainty and indecisiveness. Remember, in the early days of the Libyan uprising, William Hague our Foreign Minister suggesting that Colonel Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela to seek shelter with ‘his friend’, President Chavez? Wherever did he get that idea? Perhaps Gaddafi and Chavez were friends – but I recall seeing pictures of our former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, embracing Colonel Gaddafi in a way that suggested they were the very closest of good pals!

Then there were the bungled and delayed early attempts to rescue Brits stranded in strife-torn Libya. Remember how the first plane (there was just one!) belatedly chartered by the government, failed to start? How useful the now-scrapped Ark Royal, or any similar large aircraft carrier, could have been in that situation! Those enormously expensive but sacrosanct, nuclear submarines weren’t much use in that – or any other likely – emergency.

There has also been dithering over whether or not we should support the idea of establishing and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya – blowing hot one day, and cold the next. It is a pity there wasn’t similar hesitation, and the same insistence upon international agreement, before embarking on the illegal invasion of Iraq! My guess is that there will be a no-fly zone but that it will be imposed only after hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent Libyan lives have been lost. We shall, very cleverly, succeed in getting the worst of two worlds!

We often hear how this, that or the other politician was ‘the best Prime Minister that we never had’. I reckon that William Hague, our Foreign Minister, could well be the worst Prime Minister from whom we luckily escaped!

Late news

As I prepare to post this blog on the internet it seems that my worst fears about Libya’s future are likely to be realized. An undisciplined, untrained force equipped only with small arms and a few captured light anti-aircraft guns could never hope to stand up against a disciplined army with tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft at their disposal, no matter how numerous and enthusiastic the rebels might be. The insurgents never had a chance unless complete units of the government’s army defected, with their arms and equipment (including armoured vehicles and artillery), to swell their ranks, or they had substantial overseas aid before they were overwhelmed.

This just hasn’t happened. There were too few defectors and overseas support has, so far, been limited to hot air. Soon, I fear, the insurgency will be over and the secret police and killing squads will move in to exact a bloody retribution.

While NATO, the UNITED NATIONS and the EU wring their hands and argue about what to do next; to prevent similar future fiascos it might be worth enquiring about the source of Colonel Gaddafi’s tanks, armoured cars and heavy artillery, his fighter and bomber aircraft. It would surprise me if many – if any in fact – have ‘made in Libya’, stamped or engraved upon them. They have been manufactured and supplied by us; by the Americans and the Europeans (including we Brits) who are now so outraged and horrified. It was surely obvious that Gaddafi wasn’t going to waste the money that Libya’s oil had brought him on hospitals, schools and old people’s homes! He wanted his war toys – and now he is playing with them!

When will the world learn that the Arms Trade is every bit as immoral, and does every bit as much harm to mankind, as the Slave Trade? Let’s stamp it out!

‘Got a fag mate?’

That question, which translates into polite English as, ‘Could you spare me a cigarette friend?’ would have been clearly understood by anyone – certainly any adult male – in the late 1930s. The chances are that it would have been answered positively. The penniless and proud, who would never have dreamed of begging for money, had no hesitation in asking complete strangers for a cigarette. And even those who had little enough themselves, would usually find a battered packet of Woodbines in their pocket, and offer one of those precious, tobacco filled paper cylinders to whoever asked.

Tobacco was regarded as an essential of human life! Top people usually smoked cigars, the professional and middle classes puffed on their pipes, while members of the working class had their ‘packets of fags’! During World War I, one of the best loved army padres was the Rev. Studdert Kennedy, Anglican priest and popular poet, who was affectionately known as ‘Woodbine Willy’ because of the generosity with which he distributed Woodbines to common soldiers in the trenches and to the wounded in military hospitals.

PoWs in Italy and Germany during World War II were regularly sent supplies of British cigarettes by the British Red Cross. We were the envy of our guards and of the prisoners of war and the conscripted civilian ‘slave workers’ of our allies with whom we worked. A Russian phrase that has stuck in my memory for the nearly seventy years that have elapsed since that time is ‘Davai s’cooreet Tovarisch?’ which, very loosely translated, is ‘Got a fag mate?’ Why, I wonder, have I remembered that phrase from 1944, while nowadays I regularly forget the names of people I have known for years!

Even our captors recognised tobacco as being one of life’s essentials. The Italians very occasionally gave us some of their Nazionali cigarettes. They were awful – but not quite so dreadful as the captured Russian Mahorkas that the Germans occasionally handed out. They were paper cylinders, about an inch long, filled with black tobacco ‘dust’, mounted on the end of a cardboard cylinder perhaps just over two inches long. Put the end of the cardboard cylinder in your mouth, light the end of the paper cylinder and puff away – but not too enthusiastically. Inhale too vigorously and you would find yourself breathing smouldering tobacco dust! Still, to those of us who were hooked on tobacco they were better than nothing.

All of which illustrates the fact that smoking is among the many things to which official and, to a somewhat less extent, public attitudes have changed dramatically during the past fifty or sixty years. No one, other perhaps than athletes, then thought of tobacco as being anything but beneficial. ‘A woman’s only a woman’, wrote Rudyard Kipling in a verse for which he would probably be lynched today, ‘but a good cigar’s a smoke!’ ‘For your throat’s sake – smoke Craven A’, urged the manufacturers of one popular brand of cigarette.

By the ‘60s it became generally accepted that smoking caused lung cancer. Gradually other human ills were laid at its door; asthma, heart disease, chromic bronchitis and so on. Most of us heavy smokers simply carried on. We all knew folk who had smoked like chimneys and lived till they were ninety. It was other people, not us, who got lung cancer – and some people who didn’t smoke got it too. Who better than the tobacco manufacturers to lay smoke screens round the subject? There were, in those days, still to be found a few medical authorities questioning whether smoking was harmful. Now this is universally accepted. Remaining debate is about the extent the state should interfere to prevent its citizens from harming themselves.

Smoking tobacco is addictive and very difficult to give up, as any ex-smoker will confirm. I gave up smoking in the mid-‘60s, when I was about forty-five. I didn’t lose the craving ‘for a fag’ though. I used sometimes to dream that I was smoking again! Ten years later, when I had become Clacton’s Housing Manager, someone offered me a cigarette in a moment of stress – and I accepted it. Within five minutes I was right back to where I had been a decade earlier!

As the years passed I made attempt after attempt to give up, failing every time – usually after about three weeks! I was over 65 (25 years ago!) before I finally succeeded. I haven’t touched a cigarette, cigar or a pipe since. I had tried the lot! I doubt very much if I would have reached my present age had I continued to puff away!

I welcome every initiative by the present government and its predecessors to reduce the number of smokers. I was pleased when smoking was banned in offices and other work places (when I had been Tendring’s Public Relations Officer people had approached me through a haze of cigar smoke!) on public transport and in pubs ancd restaurants. I never dreamed that any government would have the courage to ban smoking in pubs, but New-Labour did (and I must unwontedly praise them for that!). What’s more, the law was enforced. Pubs are now smoke-free.

I welcome the present government’s ideas of requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packets and kept out of sight. They wouldn’t prevent the sales of cigarettes but they would reduce them, and reduce the chances of young people buying and becoming addicted. As Tesco, a major purveyor of tobacco products, claims in quite a different context, ‘Every Little Helps!’

I look forward to the day when smokers are regarded by the general public as being sufferers from a dangerous addiction leading to self-inflicted illness and disability; weak-willed folk who should be pitied and helped rather than blamed.

Yes, I am well aware that I was once myself a ‘fully paid up member’ of the Smoking Brigade!

The Japanese Catastrophe!

It is difficult to find words with which to comment on the disaster – the earthquake and the consequent Tsunami – that struck Japan just a few days ago. I don’t believe that in my lifetime of now nearly 90 years, that there has been a comparable natural catastrophe. Whole communities were swept away, acre after acre rendered barren and lifeless, littered with shattered cars, tree trunks and other deposited debris. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of dead, and as I write, the possibility of a natural disaster being made even worse by the effects of the quake and tsunami on at least three nuclear power plant. How puny are humankind’s powers – even our powers of destruction – compared with those of nature!

For God’s sake – and I mean that prayerfully not blasphemously – let us start
working together to prevent where we can, and mitigate where we can’t, the effects of the natural disasters with which, during this past year in particular, humanity has been plagued! Why can't Mutually Assured Co-operation replace the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD!) of nuclear ‘defence’?