History, once more, is getting up to its rhyming tricks. Last week, when President Trump announced he was thinking about bombing Iran’s uranium enrichment plants, I was reminded of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Tony Blair told the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed against us in the space of 45 minutes. Did this mean that these WMDs were a threat to British interests abroad, or could they, in fact, be directed against the UK? This was never made quite clear. Either way, the announcement was met with widespread scepticism from the British public. Hans Blix, head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission between 2000 and 2003, had been visiting Iraq on multiple occasions, looking for evidence of WMDs, and he never found any. When the BBC reported Tony Blair’s assertions, the reports were usually accompanied by pictures of ancient ordnance rusting in the desert sands. They didn’t look like an imminent threat. The British public took to the streets in one of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever seen in this country. Most members of the government took little notice, with one or two noble exceptions, for example, two notable Scotsmen, the late Charles Kennedy and the late Robin Cook. After the invasion, people carried on looking for the WMDs. Tony Blair urged us all to be patient, to wait and see. They were never found. Then Iraq fell apart.
This time, we have been told that Iran is within weeks, perhaps days, of developing a nuclear bomb. Is that true? I don’t know. I’m not party to the intelligence. Perhaps Blaise Metreweli knows. She has just been promoted from the position of Q, to the position of C, thus being the first woman to head MI6, not counting Judi Dench. I didn’t know there was such a person as “Q”. I thought it was a confabulation, not of the Bond books, but of the Bond films. There was a Q Branch – Q perhaps for Quartermaster – which put together Bond’s attaché case, full of dirty tricks, in From Russia with Love. You may say I digress, but these days the demarcation line between fact and fiction has become increasingly blurred.
Unlike Tony Blair, who had to take the House of Commons with him, President Trump had no need to “reach across the aisle” in Congress. He did fly a kite for a few days, no doubt gauging public opinion, conscious of the fact he was reneging on a promise not to take America into any more foreign conflicts. He said, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.” Least of all, perhaps, himself. At any rate the operation went ahead, apparently by Executive Order, and then President Trump, in the White House, flanked by J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth (what a grim picture they make), announced a fait accompli. He said the operation was a spectacular success. Is that true?
Was this sortie, (one could call it a “special military operation”) justified? The British Government sat spectacularly on the fence. They were informed it was about to take place, but not directly involved. They were pleased with the result, although they would have preferred that it had been brought it about through diplomacy.
I’m not sure that I see the logic in refusing to allow Iran to develop a nuclear bomb. After all, the UK has about 160 of them. Most of them are stockpiled in a silo 25 nautical miles from where I now sit. The continuous at sea deterrent is apparently keeping me safe in my bed at night. If they guarantee our security, shouldn’t we be encouraging every other country to stockpile them, as a mutual guarantee of world peace?
Alas, we are addicted to violence. Periodically we become possessed by it. There was disorder in Northern Island last week. Two Romanian youths were charged with an alleged sexual assault on a teenage girl. Violence flared in Ballymena. People from minority ethnic groups, businesses, and homes, were attacked. Racist violence was fuelled by misinformation emanating from social media. I was reminded of Kristallnacht. And of Quatermass and the Pit. When I saw Nigel Kneale’s remarkable BBC series as a child I was frightened out of my wits. But I didn’t realise at the time that Kneale was really utilising a science fiction genre to depict what happens when people in a society fall under a demonic spell and gang up to hunt down “the other”.
This morning, President Trump is flying another kite. He is thinking about “régime change”. History is rhyming again. In 2003, perhaps Saddam’s putative MNDs were always known to be a figment. They were posited as a justification for war, when all the time, régime change was the real motivator. Could Iran’s nuclear threat be another figment, and has régime change always been the goal?
What’s to be done about all the violence in the world? What a question. It’s like stopping an Irishman in the street to ask for directions. He says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”
jamescalumcampbell 