War is stupid

The shrewd, insightful words of Mr Boy George esq, shortly before he won his first Nobel Peace Prize, opining, through the medium of the pop charts, that war is, indeed, stupid.

It seems that Mr George was indeed correct in his prognostication for no less an authority than the former chief of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, agrees with him. Speaking at the current inquiry into the Iraq war, she said, “"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine. It is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.” A unit to make the facts fit the story Dubya wanted to tell.

More compelling yet though was her insistence that "Our involvement in Iraq radicalized, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam”, adding that Britain and the west are more, not less at risk from terrorism than we were before this all began.

Given that we remain in Afghanistan, this opinion is of far more urgent importance than deliberations of just how we got into Iraq in the first place. That cannot be undone. The current catastrophic loss of life among British and American troops in Afghanistan can be halted.

It’s sad that we seem to learn so few of the lessons of history, particularly when they should be so recent and fresh in our minds. Sadly, truths do not always fit into the narratives the ruling classes want to hand down. They would have us believe that the Cold War was won by Ronald Reagan rounding up a posse, saddling up his horse and winning a shootout with that varmint Gorbachev. That it was all down to the west winning the arms race, that the threat of Star Wars eventually toppled the Kremlin.

In the end though, it was all rather more banal than that. The eastern bloc was beaten from within, by its own citizens, who tired of their own oppression, who railed against the grey, drab conformity. It was MTV, Levis and Coca-Cola that won the Cold War, the urge of those in the east to sample the same kind of consumer lifestyle that we had long since taken for granted. And in the end, it is the same kind of things that will be more effective in bringing some kind of peace again. Provide aid, hope, eventual wealth to those who are currently living in poverty and the motivation for them to take up arms will melt away. If the lives of you and your people are comfortable rather than constant struggle, the imperative to strap explosives to yourself is no longer there.

Not that that will rid the world of the problem of religious extremists, but nor should we pretend that the only such extremists are Islamic, not when anti-abortionists still firebomb and intimidate those who work in abortion clinics in the USA for instance. By their very nature, religious nuts are just that – nuts. If they are motivated by a religious hatred of the infidel, how are you going to stop it?

You can’t wipe out vast swathes of population in nations that might just harbour such extremists. All you can do is create social and political conditions that make it harder for them to radicalise and recruit others to the cause. Invading a nation and stamping all over it is not the way to go.

Which, in roundabout fashion, brings us to Trident and the innate lunacy of replacing it in the years to come at ruinous cost, some £100billion over 25 years – wouldn’t that make a hole in the bank created deficit? This is a very different world to the one of the post-war settlement some 60 years ago, when there was a genuine arms race and the threat of mutually assured destruction. That threat is broadly gone, there appears to be no realistic possibility that any nation state, not even Iran, has any desire or intention of unleashing nuclear weapons upon other nations. It may be that Britain should keep an independent deterrent, though frankly, its hard to see why, but if that is the case, the infinitely cheaper Astute system should certainly be considered.

That was certainly the view of the supine Liberal Democrats in the days when they had principles, ie when they were in opposition and could say anything because it didn’t matter. Nowadays of course, they think that being allowed to disagree with nuclear power policy is ok as long as they don’t vote against it, a little like saying you don’t believe in burning down houses as you pass an arsonist a box of matches and a tin of petrol.

Once upon a time, when Labour needed the votes of the Conservatives to get their last vote on Trident through, the then Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell – who’d be turning in his grave at the current fiasco if only he were dead – said, “The government's got its way, but it's a humiliation for the prime minister that on a policy to which he has attached his own personal reputation he is unable to carry the House of Commons without the votes of the Conservative Party. It's a bit like the Iraq vote once again."

Although the coalition agreement allows the Liberal Democrats to argue for alternatives to Trident, it’s pretty obvious that will amount to nothing, which is why Cameron let them have it. But what is it for? The nation threat has gone. The threat of nuclear destruction lies elsewhere, inside the briefcase of a fanatic who, one day, will wander into Times Square or Trafalgar Square, and open Pandora’s Box. And what good will Trident be then?

It used to be true that, as various Presidents were quoted as saying, if you had them by the balls, their hearts and minds would follow. Those days are gone, blind servitude to the man with the money is over, and politicians need to wake up to that fact and the danger it presents. Hearts and minds are suddenly much more important.

Send that £100billion to aid the developing world and that briefcase might just remain closed.