PETER HITCHENS: We need a Commons rebellion – not a stupid war in Timbuktu | Mail Online.
Mail Online
Peter Hitchens
3 February 2013
This is why I despise almost all Members of Parliament: our Prime Minister is taking us into yet another stupid war, and most MPs do not even care. Where is the rebellion? Where is the Opposition? Where are the demands for an emergency debate in which our motives and reasons for this latest nonsense are examined, torn to pieces and flung on the floor?
There is no case at all for Britain to send soldiers to Mali, or any other part of North Africa. We have no interest there, never will have and never have had. If we truly fear terrorism so much, then this adventure is doubly moronic.
It will give terrorists a pretext to attack our country that they did not have before. Like the Afghan war, it will also allow terrorists to kill us without needing to travel here.
Another conflict: Sending soldiers to Mali will give terrorists a reason to attack Britain that did not exist before
We will send our servicemen there, where the terrorists can more easily shoot them or blow them up.
If, three or four years hence, British soldiers are returning from North Africa in coffins, the empty-headed cretins of our political class will place their hands reverently upon their chests and burble solemn tributes, as they do now when the dead come back from our equally futile mission in Afghanistan.
Much less is said about the far larger numbers of terribly wounded young men, each of them worth 10,000 MPs, who will remain maimed or disfigured or both, long after those responsible are drawing plump pensions or being applauded by American matrons on the lucrative lecture circuit.
How is it that people who know so little, and who are so incapable of learning anything from experience, dominate both politics and the higher levels of political journalism? In the past two years we have cheered on the installation of an Egyptian president who said in September 2010 that Israelis are descended from apes and pigs, and created a lawless, failed state in Libya so chaotic that we have to urge our own citizens to run from Benghazi for their lives. But you would barely know these things from either Parliament or the heavyweight media.
Zero Dark Thirty: The new film, starring Jessica Chastain, ficuses on the ‘War on Terror‘
It is not just that the Premier and his senior advisers plainly know no history. They seem also to have been asleep during the Blair years, when crude propaganda and cruder lies drove an expedition so foolish that those responsible should be so ashamed that they never show their faces in public again. Then there is Comrade ‘Doctor’ ‘Lord’ John Reid, the unrepentant former communist who gets hoity-toity when reminded that he sent British troops into deadly danger in Afghanistan while piously hoping that ‘we would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot’.
Remember that piece of naive drivel when you examine our current Premier’s sudden transformation into the Warlord of the Maghreb, which began with promises of no boots on the ground and continued with an almost instant breach of that promise.
Then go on to ask what all this is about. Once again, we are being told that we can, in some way, defeat terrorism. To know how foolish this is, you don’t even need to be able to read. You can go and see the new film Zero Dark Thirty, in which Jessica Chastain plays a gaunt, obsessive CIA woman on the trail of Osama Bin Laden.
In the end, after a lot of disgusting torture, she finds him, mainly thanks to an overlooked old file that nobody had bothered to study.
Bin Laden is killed, amid rather horrible scenes of weeping and terrified women and children, which are graphically and honestly shown. And, of course, the ‘War on Terror’ goes on exactly as before, because neither side particularly wants it to end.
Or you can buy the DVD of a much better film, The Battle Of Algiers (Mr Cameron should do this), and so learn the miserable history of France’s last attempt to stage a ‘war on terror’ in Africa. Once again, there is hideous torture, which corrupted poor France for decades afterwards.
There is also unspeakable terrorism. People do these ghastly things in the belief that they are doing good, and destroy themselves in the process. Then there is the illusion of victory, followed by the whole thing starting all over again.
Thank heaven we have no need to be involved in this latest bout of futile tragedy. The Americans forced us to surrender to IRA terror in 1998, so we have no debts in that direction. France is and always will be our rival, not our ally, and the only rational explanation of Mr Cameron’s War in Timbuktu is that he is trying to reassure the European Union that he is its loyal servant.
But why should anyone die for that?
Elections ARE rigged… in favour of robots
How funny to listen to the moans of the Useless Tories about the death of their scheme to change parliamentary boundaries. Who cares?
The real rigging of elections in this country takes place when candidates for safe seats are selected by the parties.
Anyone who looks likely to speak for Britain is rejected straight away in favour of some teenage robot or yet another equality and diversity merchant.
And instead of turning away in disgust, you vote for these walking, talking insults to the intelligence.
You can’t win with our hopeless police
I am haunted by the case of Suzanne Dow, the unhappy woman who, besieged in her home by evil neighbours, begged the authorities for help and received none. Believing that she was abandoned and without hope, she took her life.
God rest her soul, for she had no peace in this world.
As usual, and as in the case of Fiona Pilkington, everyone is terribly sad now. But they weren’t when it mattered. The truth is that in this country drugs are legal, violence is legal, intimidation is legal, theft is legal – provided you’re big and nasty enough.
And the same thing will happen again and again – it is happening now, in fact – to distressing numbers of people who cannot afford to buy themselves a little distance from the seething, callous selfishness of modern Britain.
The dim ‘police’ officer who was so exasperated with Suzanne Dow’s pleas for help that he emailed a colleague ‘you just can’t win with some people, can you?’ is widely condemned.
But he was only doing his job as it is now understood in the Land of Human Rights, in which the police are a sort of UN peacekeeping force mediating between victim and ‘offender’, not taking sides or being ‘judgmental’. That would never do.
Why, if we were judgmental, we might grasp just what a cesspool we have made out of our country, and do something about it.
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