The media were furious. Their importance in the world is intimately connected with the war-making capacity of the state. BBC interviewers can summon Prime Ministers and Presidents of helpless states around the world to interviews and treat them with contempt because Britain has the recognised status of being a war-fighting state. One of Tony Blair’s last acts as Prime Minister was to remind Britain that it was a war-fighting state. There are only three such states in the world today and Britain is second in the hierarchy. And now Britain has reneged on a war.
The formal issue on which war was to have been launched—alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Government in defiance of an alleged fundamental international law forbidding them—was a bogus issue. There is no such fundamental law. There is only a “line in the sand” drawn by President Obama. There can be no such law because the main user of chemical weapons in war in the era of the United Nations is the United States. And something which the United States does cannot be illegal in any meaningful sense, because the United States cannot be indicted of a war-crime by the United Nations, let alone be found guilty and punished.
The fundamental law which the Syrian Government is alleged to have transgressed is only a policy which the US applies to others—or to some others, because it does not apply it to Israel.
During the House of Commons debate Malcolm Rifkind, a former War (‘Defence’) Minister, building a circumstantial case against the Syrian Government, said that Syria was the only state in the Middle East with stockpiles of chemical weapons. Gerald Kaufmann immediately contradicted him, pointing out that Israel had them and had used them. Rifkind said that was a point in a different argument.
Nobody mentioned the American weaponry used in Vietnam and Falluja. But it can be assumed that the MPs knew what it would have been rash for them to say.
So Parliament voted against war. If decisions about war continue to be referred to Parliament and it continues to decide against war, Britain will cease to belong to the elite of war-fighting states in the world, and the privileged status of the British media will be undermined. It will probably not happen, but the media personalities have had a glimpse of the abyss that might possibly be before them, and they are angry.
In their anger they spoke scathingly of David Cameron as the first Prime Minister since the early 18th century who lost control of Parliament to such an extent that it prevented him from going to war.
We have not seen any detail about this early 18th century reference. The only incident that springs to mind is not of Parliament preventing the Government from going to war, but of Parliament enabling the Government to end a war that was begun while it was in Opposition.
The war in question was a balance-of-power war against France. The Tories came to power during this war and wished to end it. But the Whigs had worked up public opinion for the war, and wanted it pressed to the destruction of France, or of its ability to make war. Jonathan Swift, a Tory pamphleteer, wrote a pamphlet called The Conduct Of The Allies, in which he argued for a settlement which would give a very substantial points victory to England, and treated the continuation of the war until the enemy was destroyed as the pursuit of a delusion.
The pamphlet had a considerable effect on public opinion, enabling the Government to make peace on very advantageous terms. Perhaps the most advantageous item in the Treaty of Utrecht for Britain was that it gave it the monopoly on selling slaves to Latin America.
Swift was an Englishman who happened to be born in the English colony in Ireland. But modern Ireland has claimed him as Irish. However, it has reduced him to an author of satires which are most effective as children’s stories, and an amorous letter-writer. It has preferred not to learn politics from him.
|
