Obama gets Osama, but the war goes on

How would the global media have coped if Obama had finally caught up with Osama on Friday rather than Sunday?

I reached page 24 of my broadsheet newspaper on Saturday before I found a single mention of anything other than the royal nuptials. That was a story about the need for larger than expected hospital cuts, released by some strange oversight when all eyes were on Westminster Abbey. Even an ardent monarchist like myself could not help wondering whether a sense of proportion was being lost.

For me, the most remarkable thing was not that dress, or the maid of honour’s striking figure, or even the alleged billions who watched the ceremony on TV. It was the hundreds of thousands who turned out in person to snatch a passing glimpse of this piece of history and to roar their approval of those kisses on the palace balcony, even though they could have seen far more in much greater comfort on their sofas at home.

I am glad to live in a country where huge crowds turn out to rejoice in a royal love match. The hatred that motivated the flag-waving crowds celebrating the death of bin Laden in Washington and New York yesterday was entirely understandable, but still demeans those taking part. Just as the footage of Palestinians whooping in the streets at the fall of the Twin Towers provides one of the most revolting memories of 9/11.

I have friends who are currently climbing Mount Everest. It sounds like hell on earth. Still, at least I had been consoling myself with the thought that bin Laden and his sidekicks must be enduring similar discomforts in a filthy Stone Age hiding place high in the Hindu Kush. Instead it turns out that he had been living comfortably about 800 yards from the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst, and presumably receiving regular deliveries from their version of Ocado (as he would surely have raised an eyebrow or two if he had been regularly pushing a trolley around the local answer to Tesco).

Clearly the solution for William and Catherine, in their quest for privacy, is not a remote cottage on Anglesey but a floodlit palace in the centre of London with soldiers marching up and down outside.

No doubt we will find out in due course what contribution Britain made to this belated triumph against al-Qaeda, whether through the intelligence services of GCHQ or the lessons Northumbria Police were able to provide from the search for Raoul Moat. And perhaps the question may also be asked why our forces are in action in Afghanistan when the chief instigator of the terrorism we are supposedly fighting was holed up a completely different country.

If President Obama had acted 24 hours earlier, he could have claimed the scalp of his public enemy number one on the anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler. But that truly was an ending. The demise of bin Laden is just another act in a saga of death and destruction to which no one can see a conclusion.

We can be sure that cruel retribution will follow, and the victims are unlikely to be well-protected heads of state. It could be me. It could be you. We can do nothing but be vigilant. The traditional way of ending terrorist campaigns, like the IRA’s, is to give in to their major demands. But the Islamist movement, fuelled by perverted religion, has no rational goals that the secular and materialist western world can even begin to comprehend, let alone discuss.

The bottom line is this: love is good, hate is bad. That is why we were right to celebrate on Friday, and the Americans wrong to rejoice on Sunday. Not least because, like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s marriage, the war with terror has only just begun.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Peering into our mediaeval future

Analysing the past is a lot simpler than predicting the future. That is why historians are, on the whole, more reliable authorities than clairvoyants.

While history was always my favourite subject at school, I was also an avid viewer of Tomorrow’s World and am pretty sure that we were all supposed to be travelling in flying cars by now, wearing silver foil instead of tweed or denim, and subsisting on vitamin pills.

I do not recall anyone warning me, when I began assembling a vinyl record collection in the late 1960s, that I might as well hang on as the technology would soon be overtaken by cassette tapes, then CDs and now internet downloads. In fact, I do not remember anyone forecasting the life-changing phenomenon that is the World Wide Web.

Or, for that matter, the rise of celebrity culture, Islamist terrorism and manmade global warming (though I do vividly recall the dire warnings that a new Ice Age was just around the corner).

Despite this depressing track record of failure to see into the future, the media have become obsessed with trying to predict it. We cannot even wait until 3p.m. on Christmas Day to find out what the Queen might wish to convey in her annual message; we must hear an uncannily accurate resumé of what she is “expected to say” the day before. Today almost the only “news” that is straight reportage rather than short range forecasting involves deaths, whether of elderly celebrities in their beds or of ordinary folk in accidents, natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Or, with luck, the avoidance of deaths because said terrorists have again failed to strike their target. At least the weirdly perverted religion that drives the desire to blow us out of the skies seems to be associated with an encouragingly high degree of technical incompetence. Having said that, it would clearly be wrong to pin our hopes on the fanatics’ continued failure.

While history shows that those who keep up sustained campaigns of violence often get their way in the end, they normally have some vaguely rational underlying political agenda. That is lacking in the current generation of would-be mass murderers.

What we can surely safely predict is that the progression from shoe bomber to underpants bomber will be followed up by the development of some even more fiendish and presumably ingested explosive device, and that ever-more intrusive attempts to detect these will make boarding an aircraft even more of a living hell than it is now.

At least if this results in a catastrophic collapse of the global airline industry, it will please the adherents of that other growing world religion, the true believers in manmade climate change.

Look on the editorial and letters pages of any newspaper, and you cannot fail to notice that the sceptics about the benefits of European integration and the causes of global warming are precisely the same people. This seems logical enough, since both are founded on a healthy cynicism about movements tending to diminish individual freedom.

In the case of Europe, one can study history and know that the anti-democratic federalist agenda was based on a noble ideal (the prevention of war) but has been pursued with a reliance on the Big Lie that would make even Hitler or Saddam Hussein blush. On climate change, we are into the realms of futurology and it seems reasonable to apply precautionary principles just in case the science turns out to be right for once.

But it is surely a complete coincidence that those prepared to blow themselves up in the name of religion and the environmental opponents of air travel should turn out to be batting for the same side, too. Or is it? After all, the desired caliphate and wind power are both, in their different ways, profoundly mediaeval concepts.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

How many lives is Afghanistan worth?

In my pessimistic way, I have often dreamt of returning to my house to find it a smoking ruin, as a result of some momentary inattention to detail by the fighter pilots who regularly train overhead.

Luckily, in my nightmare, a policeman always places a consoling hand on my shoulder and assures me that Biggles ejected safely before the plane came down. So that’s all right, then. And at least I feel reasonably sure that the RAF is on my side.

But what if foreign airmen – say Afghans, to pluck an example at random – came along and flattened my house with a bomb? It would also be an accident, “collateral damage” while they were trying to pick off some bloke with a beard and a funny hat who was holed up in a cave in the Cheviots while he masterminded terrorist atrocities overseas.

Would I laugh off their little mistake, accepting that it could happen to anyone, and feel eager to help them tracking down that nasty man? Or would it make me wish more power to his terrorist elbow to get my own back?

Perhaps it is perverse of me, but I suspect the latter. Which rather undermines the main plank of last week’s argument from both Gordon and Dave for our presence in Afghanistan, namely keeping terrorism off our own streets.

There is also the objective of making Afghanistan a functioning, Western-style democracy. After the triumph of the recent, not at all rigged or corrupt, Presidential elections, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office website assures us that “Parliamentary and district council elections are scheduled to take place in 2010.”

How strange that we should be spilling blood to create district councils in another country, when the Government has just casually abolished our own. I have tried manfully to picture Afghan councillors politely debating whether to move to fortnightly wheelie bin collections, and working on their expenses claims, but have enjoyed only limited success.

We are also training and supporting the Afghan armed forces until they are strong enough to take over from us, overlooking the detail that the country would never be able to generate the tax revenues needed to pay for them. We are clamping down on the world’s biggest supplier of opium, which will obviously be why drugs are now unobtainable on our streets. We are protecting the rights of women, by keeping out the evil Taliban, who threatened to kill girls seeking education, and replacing them with a cuddly, liberal regime which has just made it legal for men to starve wives who deny them their conjugal rights.

It was entirely understandable, after 9/11, that the world’s greatest military power should feel the urge to give someone a powerful retaliatory kicking, and attacking Afghanistan with its Al Qaeda bases at least made a little more sense than invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

But terrorists can and will operate anywhere (it is widely argued that the destruction of the World Trade Center was actually planned in Hamburg) and our continuing involvement in Afghanistan strikes me as being more likely to win converts to the anti-Western cause than to deter them.

In short, I question whether whatever we think we are doing in Afghanistan is worth the bones of one British soldier, let alone hundreds. And when we leave, whether in five years or 40, as one general recently predicted, I suspect that we will do so not with Kandahar District Council happily twinned with Sunderland and beating its recycling targets, but with our tails between our legs and no clear sense of achievement. Just like the Russians did in 1989. Not to mention the previous great power that barged in thinking it could sort the place out once and for all. Who was that again?

Oh yes, it was us.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.