Issue Twelve – 21st March 2012

Picking up a copy of Rupert Murdoch’s jingoistic tabloid newspaper recently, you could be forgiven for running to a mirror to check that you aren’t, in fact, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. Since The Sun drafted its infamous “45 Minutes From Doom” headline to scare the UK population into supporting the war in Iraq, most of us have come to agree that the war was illegal, instigated on false terms, and a total failure. Yet here we go again, with a Prime Minister utilising a popular tabloid to engineer consent. In spectacular PR fashion, David Cameron bluntly asserted that Iran was building a missile capable of striking the UK. ?The intention seems clear: while the US and the UK governments claim that diplomacy is the way forward, they simultaneously engage in dangerously militant rhetoric. “All options are on the table” as the pressure continues to rise.

The rhetoric of our elected leaders is eerily reminiscent of the delusional monologues of General Turgidson, the commanding US general in the Cold War movie “Dr. Strangelove”. Seated at a sterile-looking round table in an underground command bunker, amid flashing telephones and before a large map that charts the diminishing prospects for averting a nuclear crisis, Turgidson outlines the choices that remain available to the president: “We are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.”

Granted, we do not appear to face the prospect of nuclear annihilation just yet, but the logic of militarism appears to have long outlived the fall of the Iron Curtain and the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. Faced with a volatile, unpredictable and complex situation in the Middle East, our first reaction is to flex our muscles, threaten military action, and sign new arms deals with Israel or Saudi-Arabia. If we accept the perverse logic of military planners and hawkish politicians, the choice appears to be primarily about the timing of war. Is Iran going to attack us (or Israel), or are we going to strike preemptively? The prospect of a peaceful solution seems to be losing ground every day.

The easy alternative? Don’t mobilise the troops. Don’t launch the fighter jets. Don’t deploy the warships. If peace through diplomacy seems difficult to achieve, will a war make it any easier? Why throw a match into a puddle of petroleum?

Something has changed, however, since the spring of 2003. A brief look at the comments following Cameron’s assertions reveals a scepticism perhaps unexpected in a publication like ‘The Sun’. If the spectacular failure of Western “nation-building” in Iraq wasn’t sufficient, the events in Libya, Bahrain, and now Syria have convinced many that violence cannot be stamped out with more violence. Solidarity with the Syrian revolutionaries does not imply that we support arms shipments to rebels or a full-scale Western invasion. Look at Libya: the only benefactors of the NATO campaign are the CEOs of Western corporations now cashing in on reconstruction and unfair trade agreements. After a few photo ops with Sarkozy, the people of Libya were quickly forgotten. As Human Rights Watch points out, Gaddafi’s system persists in many places. Only the names on the business cards have been changed.

In addition, the past twelve months have highlighted the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy. In 2011, while preaching the gospel of democracy, Great Britain signed arms deals with Middle Eastern countries that totalled around 3.3 billion pounds. Half of that sum came from Saudi Arabia, with its dismal human rights record, and around 80 million pounds worth of weapons went to the very country now building a nuclear bomb that could threaten the West. Much of the technology sold – surveillance gear, decoding devices, small arms and telecommunications equipment – have been used in the past to suppress domestic dissent. Egyptian and Bahraini protesters hit with Western tear gas will have woken up in hospital to see William Hague or Hillary Clinton condemning the violence on Al Jazeera. Western governments consistently sided with autocratic leaders until demonstrators were literally storming their palaces. The argument that diplomacy worked “behind the scenes” is unlikely to comfort the people who stepped in front of riot police and military units to demand change. Anyone can claim to be a hero “behind the scenes”.

While politicians demand austerity at home, they are still willing to spend lavishly on their imperial adventures abroad. If history can be a guide, we have reason for concern: When debt mounted in medieval Europe, the crusades established a fragile alliance between the Church and monarchs, with the promise of unsurpassed riches to be taken in the name of God. The Great Depression led to political turmoil in the 1930s, and ultimately became fertile ground for nationalism and fascism to flourish. The oil crisis of the 1970s led to tensions that eventually re-shaped much of the Middle East. Consciously or not, foreign aggression has always been a convenient release valve when domestic dissatisfaction threatens to unseat kings and powerful elites- just look at Thatcher’s poll bounce following the Falklands War.

But 2012 is not 1929. Bradley Manning still sits in a cell, but the video he leaked is out and doing the rounds, and war doesn’t look so attractive up close and streaming. New media technologies can bring activists together across continents and traditional divides. When the eviction order for St. Paul’s was granted and Syrian protesters showed solidarity with a bonfire, it revealed a connection deeper than the divisions, something more solid than the fighting talk and wheeling and dealing between our respective tragi-comic leaders.

Many citizens are tired of the jingoist rhetoric, the squandering of public resources for neo-colonial crusades, and the hypocrisy of political discourse. The field is wide open – not just for domestic reforms but also in relation to foreign policy. At a time when supposed political and economic “truths” have been exposed as folly, the politics of peace can be seized anew.

Illustration by Alex Charnley