The 25th anniversary on 2 April of the Argentine occupation of the Falklands in 1982 has predictably, but tiresomely, prompted the exhumation and public brandishing of the old myth about Lord Carrington and his junior Foreign Office ministers having nobly and selflessly resigned over the Falklands, despite being personally blameless, but accepting principled responsibility for the failures of their effete and incompetent officials. Liam Fox, Tory shadow defence minister, worked it into his indictment of the real Defence Secretary, Des Browne — not for the MOD's failure adequately to equip and supply our troops fighting hopeless wars in Iraq and Afghanista, nor even for the government's failure to bring them home without further delay, but for his initial endorsement of a decision to let the fifteen captured sailors and marines sell their 'stories' to the media. (Thus do trivia edge out catastrophe in parliament and the press.)
The 'noble Falklands resignations' myth was also paraded before our wondering eyes by Richard Luce (as he now isn't), one of the junior FCO ministers who resigned with Carrington, in an indignant letter to the Spectator magazine — not apparently available on its website — in reckless reply to an earlier Spectator article by Simon Jenkins in the issue of 31 March.
An essential ingedient in the noble resignation myth is the assertion that officials of the FCO and the JIC failed to warn ministers of the probability of an impending Argentine invasion until immediately before it took place, far too late for ministers to take action to deter and prevent it. According to this account, officials either didn't know about the likely invasion through their own slothfulness and the failures of British intelligence to spot it, or else they knew but didn't bother to tell ministers. Thus Margaret Thatcher (as she too now isn't) in her memoirs:
Nothing remains more vividly in my mind, looking back on my years in 10 Downing Street, than the eleven weeks in the spring of 1982 when Britain fought and won the Falklands War. … The war was very sudden. No one predicted the Argentine invasion more than a few hours in advance, though many predicted it in retrospect. [Emphasis added]
Contrast this with a few selected items in the Falklands timeline for 1982:
24th January 1982 Junta's plans to capture Islands revealed in a series of articles in La Prensa newspaper
26th March Argentine government says it will give all necessary protection to the workmen on South Georgia;
British intelligence source in Buenos Aires warns that an Argentine invasion of the Islands is imminent but the British government dismisses the warning;
29th March Joint Intelligence Committee reports an invasion seems imminent
31st March British intelligence source warns that the Argentine fleet is at sea heading towards the Islands;
2nd April Argentine special forces land at Mullet Creek at 4.30am, more troops land at York Bay at 5.30am, and by 6am are engaged in battle with the Royal Marines – 3 Argentines are killed; main Argentine landing force begins disembarking at Stanley at 8am; Governor Hunt orders the surrender at 9.15am
5 April – Lord Carrington, Humphrey Atkins and Richard Luce resign.
Simon Jenkins's Spectator article recalled that:
The JIC in July 1981 was told by the Foreign Office that if Britain failed to negotiate sovereignty in good faith and agree some compromise, ‘Argentina might occupy one of the uninhabited dependencies …and might establish a military presence on the Falkland Islands themselves.’ By the start of 1982 this same message was communicated to London by the British ambassador in Buenos Aires Anthony Williams, by his defence attaché Stephen Love, by the captain of HMS Endurance Nick Barker, and by South American desk staff in the Foreign Office. In the two weeks of naval activity while Lombardo was bringing his plan forward — when submarines might have been sent south and public ultimatums issued to Buenos Aires — the messages (now on record) became a flood.
They were blocked because they were messages the system did not want to hear, implying costly ship movements. Love told me he felt like murdering the defence ministry section which buried his warnings. The foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, did not want to risk infuriating Thatcher with talk of compromise on sovereignty. The JIC was brainwashed by the culture of defence cuts. Falklands alarmists were regarded as slightly bonkers — until it was too late. …
The Falklands invasion was a classic of the intelligence phenomenon known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, where the recipient hears only what he wants to believe is the case. Not until Thatcher saw her career about to collapse about her ears did she and those around her wonder why they had not been warned. She was vastly relieved to be told by Franks that, in effect, there was nothing to warn — though for four months a foreign power had been planning to attack her in the belief that she would not resist.
The preliminaries to the Iraq war were uncannily inverse. Once Tony Blair had decided to go to war in Iraq with America — at the Crawford summit in March 2002 — intelligence about Iraq ceased being a guide to policy and became its cheerleader. As in 1982, the Cabinet was impervious to shifts in intelligence assessment (assuming there were any). Intelligence that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to the West was doctored, even though it was the only legal basis for attacking him. Such raw material as was available was described in the Hutton and Butler reports as variously ‘not great’, ‘dodgy’, ‘pretty meagre’ and ‘a total horlicks’. It had constantly to be re-engineered by Downing Street to support the case for war. In this it was fiercely reinforced by cognitive dissonance in Washington.
Having studied both cases, I am inclined to the sanguine conclusion that far too much is expected of intelligence as an aid to policy. All the brains in the world will never overcome cognitive dissonance. An intelligence genius is always trumped by an idiot politician. In both the Falklands and Iraq, the Foreign Office and intelligence sources were feeding the machine with sensible material, but it was material that it suited nobody to hear. In both cases the ‘clear bell of warning’ was muffled… [B]oth these failures to hear intelligence aright led to the two bloodiest wars fought by Britain in my lifetime. [Emphasis added]
In case anyone feels inclined to argue that these warnings might not have been brought to the attention of ministers, the answer (like the computer nerd's exasperated "RTFM") is: Read the Franks Report. Thanks to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the full text of this report on the lead-up to the war is available on the Web (PDF file). The report's conclusions in its final chapter ("The government's discharge of their responsibilities") exonerate on almost every count both ministers and the FCO from any blame for failure to foresee or to take action to forestall the invasion — and this chapter was issued to the media in advance of the rest of the report, which in consequence few media commentators at the time ever got round to reading. The preceding chapters, however, contain ample evidence that there were numerous intelligence assessments and FCO papers containing warnings that the Argentinians might well occupy the islands if they once became convinced that the British government was not negotiating on sovereignty in good faith. These assessments and papers would inevitably have been submitted to ministers, as anyone familiar with FCO and general Whitehall procedures at the time will confirm. In any case, Franks documents several key decisions in the run-up to the invasion that were taken by Lord Carrington personally, including his decision to reject official advice that the government should launch a campaign to 'educate' the islanders and parliamentary opinion in the realities of the situation and the desirability of reaching an accommodation with Argentina over the islands' future, and also his decision to reject FCO officials' advice, several months before the conflict, to call a meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee to consider the situation and a contingency planning paper to be prepared by officials:
291. …Officials in both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence were looking to Ministers to review the outcome of the contingency planning they had done in view of a potentially more aggressive posture by Argentina. In the event, Government policy towards Argentina and the Falkland Islands was never formally discussed outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office after January 1981. Thereafter, the time was never judged to be ripe although we were told in oral evidence that, subject to the availability of Ministers, a Defence Committee meeting could have been held at any time, if necessary at short notice. There was no meeting of the Defence Committee to discuss the Falklands until 1 April 1982; and there was no reference to the Falklands in Cabinet, even after the New York talks of 26 and 27 February, until Lord Carrington reported on events in South Georgia on 25 March 1982.
292. We cannot say what the outcome of a meeting of the Defence Committee might have been, or whether the course of events would have been altered if it had met in September 1981; but, in our view, it could have been advantageous, and fully in line with Whitehall practice, for Ministers to have reviewed collectively at that time, or in the months immediately ahead, the current negotiating position; the implications of the conflict between the attitudes of the Islanders and the aims of the Junta; and the longer-term policy options in relation to the dispute. [Franks report, Cmnd 8787, paras 291-292]
In February 1996 a Guardian article by Richard Shepherd MP about the need for ministers to accept responsibility for the actions of their departments, even if they had not been personally informed of them, quoted the resignations of Lord Carrington and his FCO ministerial colleagues over the Falklands as examples of blameless ministers accepting their responsibility for the failures of their officials and accordingly honourably resigning. On 24 February 1996, the Guardian published my letter challenging this account of those famous resignations:
I ADMIRE Richard Shepherd's courageous article (The rusty sword, February 21) asserting ministers' responsibility for their own and their departments' actions. But his account of Lord Carrington's (and his ministerial colleagues') resignation over the Falklands does less than justice to the Foreign Office.
The Franks report somewhat resembled the Scott report[1] in producing a good deal of largely inculpatory evidence, while half-fudging its verdict on ministers' responsibility. Franks expressly acquitted the FCO of pursuing a policy of its own. He made it clear that it was the ministers of successive governments who chose the policy of seeking a negotiated settlement, and that it was FCO ministers who decided not to pursue a policy of public education in favour of the "lease-back" proposal because of noisy opposition to it in Parliament and the initial opposition of the Falklanders; and it was FCO ministers who decided to postpone the tabling of a paper on the Falklands situation, as advocated by FCO officials, at the meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee on March 16, 1982, arguably the last moment action might have been taken to deter invasion.
Franks's evidence does not support Shepherd's suggestion that Lord Carrington was carrying the can for "a significant error of policy" by the FCO.
I declare an indirect interest: I was a member of HM Diplomatic Service at the relevant time, serving in the FCO for some of it, though not personally involved.
Brian Barder
[1] Scott report on the scandal over the sale of arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, 1996 (!)
After this letter had been published, I received a personal letter, strongly endorsing what I had written, from a senior FCO official who had been intimately involved in every aspect of the events preceding the Falklands war, as well as the war itself.
I was and remain a whole-hearted admirer of Lord Carrington, one of the best ministers for whom I ever worked (never on any subject connected with the Falklands), and, incidentally, easily the (intentionally) funniest. It was largely because of his courageous determination and realism that the intensely difficult and challenging problem of Southern Rhodesia was finally resolved, including the controversial but unquestionably right decision to accept the verdict of the Zimbabwe people at the elections won by Robert Mugabe. But his relations with Mrs Thatcher were often difficult and, as Simon Jenkins says, this seems from the public record to have contributed to his reluctance to confront her with the bad news about the looming crisis in the south Atlantic. With hindsight, as Franks recorded, mostly understandable misjudgements were made by most of those concerned, both officials and ministers. But, pace Lord Luce (a likeable and honest minister for whom I also worked, on African questions), a careful reading of the early chapters of Franks, and an alert eye for the deadly implications of some of his comments on the government's record even in the final, generally exonerating, chapter, demonstrate beyond dispute that Lord Carrington bore personal responsibility for some at least of the mistakes that were made, and that in resigning he was not carrying the can for erring officials.
But the answer to my initial question: Whose fault was the Falklands war? — is neither Lord Carrington nor the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. It was the fault of General Galtieri.
Update (7 May 07): Now also see a fascinating account of the naval and military events leading up to the Falklands war, and their political consequences, by 'the Yorkshire Ranter' dated 5 May 2007. Recommended for its own sake and not simply because of its graceful link to this post!
Brian
How soon will the government cite the tragic killings at Virginia Tech on 16 April in support of the deeply flawed Mental Health Bill now before parliament? Quite soon, no doubt. However, to do so would be completely invalid.
The present Bill stems from a number of cases of murder or other violent crimes committed by 'psychopaths' such as Michael Stone, who had a history of mental illness and who was convicted of the murders of Lin and Megan Russell in 1996. In the words of the Guardian's editorial on the new Bill published, by unhappy coincidence, on the day of the Virginia Tech killings, it was conceived –
nine years ago, when, in the light of Michael Stone's conviction, the government signalled that it wished to bolster the power of medics pre-emptively to detain and attempt to treat those who, like Stone, suffered from severe personality disorders – or, in more traditional terms, were psychopaths – even where no treatment of proven effectiveness is available.
At present a mentally sick person for whom no effective treatment is available and who has committed no offence can't be 'sectioned' and detained against his will under the existing Mental Health Act, even if he is thought by doctors and psychiatrists to be a potential danger to himself or others, although there are of course various procedures under which the police and Social Services can be warned of the risk that he is thought to represent. New Labour ministers regard this as a loophole in the law and want to plug it in the new Bill. Now the House of Lords has passed an amendment to the Bill (one of several) on which the Guardian editorial rightly commented:
And on detention, the Lords insists that treatability should remain an essential condition – that has to be right when it alone can offer the hope of rehabilitation and release, which those suffering custody without having committed any crime are surely entitled to.
The government says however that it will resist the Lords' amendments and will insist on the original provisions of the Bill, under which a mentally ill person who has committed no offence and whose condition can't be treated, but who is thought by his doctors to be a potential danger to himself or to others, will be liable to be detained, presumably indefinitely, not so that he can be compelled to undergo treatment (none is available), nor as punishment for any offence (he has not committed one), but purely on the suspicion that he might harm himself or others in the future.
This is the latest in a series of examples of the obsession with pre-emption of a pathologically risk-averse government. However remote and improbable a danger, action must be taken to pre-empt it. Saddam Hussein might not have WMD now, but might he develop them one day and pass them to terrorists who might then use them against us? Overthrow his régime and bomb and occupy his country for years, just to be on the safe side. Might some unnamed country one day conceive the idea of launching a nuclear attack on Britain, only to be deterred by fear of specifically British nuclear retaliation in circumstances where the risk of American nuclear retaliation is insufficient deterrence? No-one can construct a credible scenario in which such a thing could possibly happen, but better spend a few billions on renewing Trident, just to be on the safe side. Is there someone in Britain who has committed no offence but who the security service (or a neighbour with a grudge) suspects might get involved in terrorism at some time in the future? Slap a Control Order on him, effectively putting him under house arrest, wrecking his working life and probably his social life and his family and labelling him a terrorist in the eyes of his friends and neighbours — just to be on the safe side. A teenager is playing rock music late at night, disturbing a neighbour's sleep: could this be a sign of a future violent hooligan? He has committed no prosecutable offence, but put an ASBO on him: he's sure to breach its conditions sooner or later, which will be an offence, and then he can be locked up — just to be on the safe side.
Why this passion for predicting and then trying frantically to pre-empt all these worst-case scenarios? A genuine sense of duty, no doubt, to the interests of public safety, on the principle that salus populi suprema lex. But it's more than that. Ministers have a collective terror of being accused of those capital political crimes: complacency, indolence and inactivity in the face of danger, failure to put public safety first, whatever the cost to civil rights and due process. Better to lock up any number of people with mental illness who would never have done any harm to others or themselves, than to leave a single psychopath "free to roam the streets", murdering at will. Then if an undetected psychopath does nevertheless commit a murder, no-one can blame the crime on the government's 'complacency' or failure to foresee the future: ministers did all they could. The tabloids rule, OK?
But, I hear a Blairite cry, doesn't Virginia Tech demonstrate the need to lock up a potentially dangerous psychopath before, rather than after, he has massacred classrooms full of terrified students and gallant professors? Look at today's Guardian report:
Fears led university to commit gunman to mental hospital
Cho Seung-hui … had a history of bizarre behaviour dating from November 2005. That trail raised disturbing questions last night about how campus police and the university responded to early warning signs of mental illness. When a student reported [that] Cho seemed depressed, the university arranged his admission to a mental health hospital in December 2005 for his evaluation as a suicide risk, the campus police chief, Wendell Filchum told a press conference. The doctor who examined him the next day reported that Cho was mentally ill, but as he denied having suicidal thoughts ordered his release… Lucinda Roy [former head of the English department] had removed Cho from a poetry class in November 2005 because his behaviour and writing frightened fellow students, as well as his professor… She notified campus counselling services, the legal department, and the dean of students about Cho. "He seemed incredibly depressed. He really needed help," she said. She also asked campus police to review the writing sample which had disturbed Ms Giovanni. The police were responsive, but Ms Roy said there was little they could do because Cho had not made direct threats.
The implication of this chronicle of conscientious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to help a deeply disturbed and potentially dangerous student is that beyond a certain point there is nothing that can be done to restrain even the most suspect of potential criminals until they cross the line into illegality, without the unacceptable risk of wrecking the lives of the innocent and harmless. An American, even if mentally ill and obsessed with violence and killing, is protected by the US constitution from being detained against his will if he has done nothing that could justify charging him with an offence. No such safeguards, apparently, will protect a Briton in similar circumstances, once the government's Bill (without the Lords' amendments) becomes law. Where are such unfortunates to be locked up? Not in hospitals, presumably, since they can't be treated and they would be blocking hospital beds that could be used for those who could. Prison seems unsuitable for someone who has committed no offence, who has not been charged with any offence and who can't be said, even by New Labour ministers, to deserve punishment. How many amenities of ordinary life are to be made available to these unfortunates, at public expense (since the state is to deprive them of the opportunity to earn a living)? Theatre outings? A car? The pleasures of good food and wine? Sex? What will the Sun newspaper say about that?
The truth is that evil things will happen, whatever pre-emptive action is taken in the fruitless effort to prevent them. Even if the definition of a psychopath were to be accepted as meaningful ("severe personality disorder" has a disturbingly Stalinist ring to it), we can lock up a thousand people who answer to that description and who have been prudently assessed as liable to harm others or themselves (by mental health specialists who are fully aware of the danger to themselves of pronouncing someone safe who then goes out and commits a murder), and still there will be a murder committed by another person with a severe personality order who got through the net. Action to avert future danger, especially if it entails gross injustice to innocent people, needs to be proportionate to the degree of risk involved, and to the likelihood that it will be effective. Legislation to deprive of their liberty people who have done nothing wrong, and who are mentally disturbed but whose condition can't be treated, is not proportionate to the low risk involved and can't possibly be effective: on the contrary, it is obviously wide open to gross abuse, and is certain to involve gross injustice to innocent people, perhaps on a huge scale. The Guardian's editorial writer knew whereof he or she spoke, in writing that "on detention, the Lords insists that treatability should remain an essential condition – that has to be right when it alone can offer the hope of rehabilitation and release, which those suffering custody without having committed any crime are surely entitled to."
It's all very well being risk-averse: but ministers ought to be equally, if not more, averse to the risk of undermining fundamental freedoms in the search for copper-bottomed guarantees against future dangers when there can be no such guarantees. Some risks have to be accepted if we are to continue to live in a free society.
Brian
Assiduous readers of this blog, if they exist, will remember my occasional campaign for Britain to go the whole hog with a federal system that would guarantee full Home Rule (resonant phrase: absit omen!) not only for Scotland but also for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, answering the West Lothian question conclusively and logically as well as resolving many other anomalies in our present inchoate and chaotic constitutional arrangements. In a blog post last February, following the publication of a letter of mine on the subject in the Independent, I tried to answer some of the objections and queries raised to and about the federal proposal and included links to earlier pieces that I have written on the subject.
Now an uncharacteristically silly piece in the Guardian by Geoffrey Wheatcroft has spurred me to have another go, with a letter to that newspaper of which an only slightly garbled version has been published there this morning. For the record and whatever it's worth, here is the full text of what I originally wrote to the Guardian:
Sir, Geoffrey Wheatcroft's solution to the Scottish problem (A union of crowns is the only remedy for devolution, 11 April) endorses the SNP's policy of full independence for Scotland under the same Crown, in effect putting Scotland on a par with Australia or Canada, and abandoning devolution. (Like the SNP he also implicitly assumes that Scotland would be automatically admitted into the EU, an assumption worth questioning.)
But, contrary to the article's heading, this is not the 'only remedy for devolution', nor the best. It neglects to cater for Wales, Northern Ireland or indeed England (the only part of the UK without its own parliament or executive). The 'problem' with devolution is that we don't have enough of it. We have sleep-walked half-way into a de facto federation of the four nations but are inexplicably scared to go the rest of the way. We need a parliament and government for England on a par with those already created in the other three national capitals, exercise by right of all internal powers (education, health, crime, security, etc.) by the four nations, and the Westminster parliament and government taking responsibility only for matters affecting the whole country, mainly foreign affairs and defence. This answers the West Lothian question at a stroke, gives full internal self-government, free of interference from Westminster, to Wales and Northern Ireland as well as England and Scotland, avoids the wasteful duplication of the paraphernalia of complete independence by both Scotland and the rest of the UK, and gives us a federal system of the kind that works well for the Americans, Australians, Swiss, Germans and many others. Why is British democracy supposed to be so defective that federation can't work equally well for us?
Yours sincerely
Brian Barder [etc]
Of course the federal proposal raises very many questions, many of which have been asked and (I hope) answered in earlier posts here and in comments on them: eg here, here and here (and more links in each of them). So I trust that I may be forgiven if I don't go over all that ground yet again in reply to any comments here.
In particular I hope, almost certainly in vain, that my Guardian letter won't trigger another battering from the Little England brigade in further Guardian letters, comments in Ephems, and letters and leaflets through my letter-box. Too many of the authors of these are interested only in getting an English parliament, and in many cases don't give a damn about Scotland or the rest of the UK, or about preserving the Union while satisfying the legitimate aspiration of the four nations to run their own affairs, or how best we can all live together under a sensible constitution that will endure for the next few generations: i.e., a federation. As I said in a post earlier this year,
…embarrassment at some of the excesses of the English nationalists — right-wing extremists in many cases, Europhobes and Scotophobes, xenophobes into the bargain, true Little Englanders — should not be allowed to divert the debate; nor should the noisy wavers of the England flag be permitted to hijack the argument about the need for a true federation, one which should appeal above all to small-l liberals and internationalists of all the mainstream parties.
I have no Scottish blood or other connections, as far as I know, but I do have several much valued Scottish friends of long standing, and I would regard the secession of Scotland from Britain as being almost like the amputation of an arm or a leg. To change the metaphor, Scotland is an indispensable ingredient in our national casserole, which will become dull and flavourless if that ingedient is removed. Federation, and only federation, will give us the best of both (or all possible) worlds.
Brian
A few more choice examples of conspicuous illiteracy, as a pendant to the last collection:
Sir Roy Mcnulty, acting chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, … [i]n an interview with the Guardian to mark the project's first year yesterday, … insisted it had been "fast out of the blocks" and hit all the main milestones. Guardian, 2 Apr 07
[I treasure the image of an athlete small enough to get inside his starting-blocks, and then losing the race through being slowed down by constantly hitting milestones.]
Relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea have been strained since the border conflict that ended in 2000. … As part of a fierce propaganda war, both countries routinely accuse the other of trying to spread instability. Guardian, 5 March 07
[I wonder which this 'other', third country is that both Ethiopia and Eritrea routinely accuse? Somalia?]
Very early on, I had to understand something I didn't before: that Afrikaaners are Africans. I didn't get that. (Guardian, Film and Music, 16 March 07, Ed Pilkington quoting the actor Tim Robbins)
[The language and the people who speak it getting mixed up once again.]
He [Barack Obama]'s black alright, but [for some Americans] simply not 'black enough'. Gary Younge, Guardian, 1 March 07
[Comment is superfluous. Not necessarily G Younge's fault: perhaps he dictated it to some illiterate intern on job experience at the newspaper. But the subeditors and proof-readers have no excuse.]
One tree in particular, the Faidherbia albida, known locally as the gao tree, is particularly essential. New York Times section, Observer, 18 February 2007
[Perhaps it's even more perfect than other trees, too, and more unique? Nice to see the mighty New York Times nodding, though.]
So far, the first minister, Jack McConnell, has failed. Unless he can start sounding like he wants power and fears the SNP for something more fundamental than the possibility of being beaten by it … the SNP will stay on course to come first. Guardian editorial on the Scottish elections, 3 April 07
[This is another losing battle, I know, but one still worth fighting to the last drop of ink (or the last byte)]
And a tailpiece which isn't a linguistic howler, just a wonderful example of intellectual ingenuity in the vain hope of extracting the speaker from a tricky situation:
The public consultation… has flouted the Cabinet Office code by not involving campaigners before publishing proposals and asking closed questions with no option for the unit to remain open. Challenged on this, the [Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Trust]'s corporate secretary, Terry Alty, said: "We followed the code. We haven't specifically complied with it." Report by Sarah Hall, Guardian, 11 April 07
[A formula that might come in handy when you're booked for speeding?]
As usual, the Guardian figures heavily, because (a) I read it regularly (as well as wearing sandals and a beard) and (b) since it's generally better written than its competitors, its lapses cause more of a jolt. Anyway, some of the howlers are committed in quotation marks and can't be blamed on the dear old Guinarda.
Contributions of other jewels most welcome. Excuses for items in this batch will be sceptically entertained — but civilly, in accordance with the new bloggers' code.
Brian
Reactions to the criminal kidnapping of the fifteen British sailors and marines by the Iranians in Iraqi waters of the Gulf have produced interestingly varied reactions here on the part of both personal friends and the media commentators. These have been divided roughly into two groups: the romantics, hungry for glory and heroism — dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; and the more down-to-earth, the pragmatists, who are simply happy that the 14 men and one woman were released fairly quickly, and that no-one got hurt. Many of us feel strongly that we have no business to be deploying our naval or military forces in and around Iraq and that those who illegally attacked and occupied Iraq in the first place should be the last people on earth to be acting now under UN resolutions and at the request of the Iraqi government as peacekeepers, naval patrollers or Customs officers. But the fact is that we're there, legally, and doing a legal and necessary job. Those who tell us to understand why the Iraqis hate us because of the century of British oppression and intervention against them, as well as because of 2003, come dangerously close to condoning the action of a deeply unpleasant Iranian régime in kidnapping a group of young Britons going about their lawful business: taking them prisoner and grievously mistreating them: and repeatedly lying to justify the crime they committed. Implicitly condoning all that reveals real moral bankruptcy.
It was only to be expected that the cavalry charge of the romantics would be led by Andrew Roberts, the right-wing historian, brandishing his sabre in the Sunday Times of April 8, 2007:
Few of us can guess at the terror involved in being handcuffed, blindfolded, put in solitary confinement and told that confession would mean "liberty" whereas refusal would entail seven years in an Iranian jail. "I really felt we were goingto die," said one marine,though his officer realised that instead of a mock execution the Iranians were only playing with their weapons. Yet it all comes down to training. With proper preparation for such hardships – in what is, after all, the most dangerous theatre of operations on the globe – the captives ought never to have given the Iranians what they wanted in the way of propaganda. … why have our troops not been trained properly in how to resist tough interrogation techniques?
And what on earth does the great historian imagine training would have achieved? Heroic deaths under torture, posthumous medals for gallantry, proud bereaved parents and widows (one widower)? Chuck it, Roberts! And what's all that about "the most dangerous theatre of operations"? Does Mr Roberts think we are at war with Iran, or with anyone else on or near the Gulf, or indeed with anyone else at all? The 'war on terror' is not a war but a badly misleading metaphor.
Max Hastings in the Daily Mail also gets carried away by his soldierly enthusiasm for pointless displays of heroism:
"The prisoners' public demeanour was pitiful, and sorely damaging to the image of Britain's armed forces."
What rubbish! Disappointing, too, coming from the usually perceptive and informative Sir Max.
The pragmatists are represented, among others, by Andrew Sullivan, also in the Sunday Times:
"The captives — subjected to physical threats — had little choice but to cooperate minimally with their captors. …. I don't feel of a mood to condemn sailors and marines held captive by the Revolutionary Guards of an unstable theocracy…. According to them, they were subjected to blindfolding, mock executions, stripped and told they were in line for up to seven years in an Iranian jail. I don't know what I'd do in those circumstances. [Well, I know what I would do! -- BLB] And yes, a lone boat of lightly armed sailors deciding to precipitate a full-scale war between the West and Iran might not have seemed the best idea at the time. In my book, they get a pass.
In mine, too. Thank goodness they weren't heavily armed! If so they might have been tempted to start shooting at the kidnappers. Much good that would have done.
Will Hutton in the Observer, also sensible:
Soft power can be a match for hard men
The Prime Minister's exemplary handling of the Iran hostage crisis marks the way to finding peaceful solutions in the Middle East
After a little bit of predictable grand-standing and muscleman talk, Blair was evidently persuaded to pipe down and let the diplomats handle it, which they duly did, without blood being spilled.
Unfortunately our Ministry of Defence has idiotically spoiled an otherwise good record on all this by announcing that the Fifteen will be allowed to sell their stories to the media (and apparently also to keep the resulting loot), a decision they will come to regret as future generations of servicemen and servicewomen who suffer disagreeable experiences in the line of duty, but who live to tell the tale, demand the same freedom to get rich quick by selling their 'stories'. It's easy to imagine the feelings on this subject of the families of the four British servicemen (two men and two women) killed by a bomb in Basra last week,around the time when the Fifteen were being released.
Just to be clear about the key facts and non-facts:
1. There can be no serious doubt that the Fifteen were in Iraqi waters (and therefore doing nothing wrong) when they were kidnapped. This was actually corroborated by the co-ordinates originally handed over by the Iranians themselves, until they realised that they didn't exactly help their case, and invented some better ones.
2. Kidnapping the citizens of another country, whether naval, military or civilian, without cause is a serious breach of international law, tantamount to piracy. In another age — or if the Fifteen had not behaved so sensibly — it would have been an unquestionable casus belli.
3. Even if the Fifteen had been in Iranian waters (which they pretty clearly weren't), there would have been no excuse for the Iranians' action in kidnapping them and taking them as prisoners to Iran. The only proper course would have been to escort them back into Iraqi waters with a severe reprimand and a subsequent diplomatic protest to the British government.
4. After being kidnapped the Fifteen were not in any sense prisoners of war: there is no war in the area to be a prisoner of. The old rubric about giving no more than one's name, rank and serial number doesn't apply.
5. At least one of the Fifteen has confirmed that their Rules of Engagement would have permitted them to resist capture with military force; but they decided, fortunately for all of us, that this would be pointless, that it wouldn't affect the outcome, and that causing bloodshed would only have made a bad situation infinitely worse. Rabbiting on about how they should have been more heavily armed — and should have used their arms against the Iranians — betrays a sad inability to grasp the realities that they had to deal with.
6. Even if the mother ship's single helicopter had been giving the Fifteen air cover, it seems unlikely that matters would have turned out any differently. The Fifteen might possibly have had somewhat earlier warning from the helicopter of the approach of the Iranian patrol boats, which could conceivably have given them time to run away back to HMS Cornwall (hardly the act of gallantry yearned for by the romantics, incidentally): but given the much greater speed of the Iranians' boats, it seems most unlikely that our people would have got away.
7. The treatment of the Fifteen by the Iranians was outrageous. The blindfolding as part of what seemed like a mock execution; the isolation in tiny cramped individual cells; the mental torture inflicted on the sole servicewoman by telling her falsely on the first day that all the rest had been released and had gone home, leaving her alone in captivity; the threats of seven years' imprisonment as penalty for refusing to 'confess'; the parading in front of television cameras — all this was inexcusable. Those who seek to condone it by observing that Guantanamo is worse should be ashamed of themselves.
8. The episode has prompted the usual British media festival of finger-pointing: someone must be to blame. One favoured culprit is the commander of HMS Cornwall and his superiors in London for exposing the Fifteen to such danger. But this was not a wartime operation: the task was to check ships entering Iraqi waters for smuggled arms, drugs or other contraband, on behalf of and at the request of the elected Iraqi government. True, the Iraqis had kidnapped some of our service people back in 2004 — but not since then. Only the most pathetically risk-averse would seriously argue that no routine naval patrol should ever go out, in peacetime, in national coastal waters, without the substantial military protection that would be required to guarantee it against a random and unpredictable act of piracy by a nearby rogue state. But will ministers have the guts to resist the demands of the media lynch mob?
Two points of possible interest.
(i) Who is the fifteenth man? Why has he not been named, nor his service identified?
(ii) Those, 'ardent for some desperate glory', who are seduced by the romantic notion that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country), and who have the nerve to blame the Fifteen for not having been willing to act accordingly, would do well to remember the verdict on that proposition pronounced by a soldier, Wilfred Owen, who was himself about to die for his country (and must have known as he wrote that this would almost certainly be his fate):
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Brian
