Shaphan

Symbolism matters

Events may prove me wrong - he may be kept safely away from harm and bring peace and harmony to the region - but it seems to me that Prince Harry's deployment to Iraq is a terrible decision.  Gen. Dannatt, the army chief, said it was his decision, but if it was, it shouldn't have been.  Tony Blair has repeatedly washed his hands of it, saying it was a decision solely for the Army. The Queen has said nothing, as usual.  But only Tony Blair, as prime minister, along with his Cabinet, was properly qualified to make such a decision, as it involves not only military factors but also political and constitutional issues as well.  If Blair and the Cabinet did delegate the decision down to the military, that's crazy, irresponsible and scandalous.

When soldiers join the Army, they make an oath of allegiance:

I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors and that I will, as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully defend Her Majesty, her heirs and successors in person, crown and dignity against all enemies and will observe and obey all orders of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors and of the generals and officers set over me. [Wikipedia]

If Harry were to be true to the above oath, he would not go to Iraq; he is an heir and possible successor to Her Majesty; but he is young and headstrong.  If Richard Dannatt were to be true to his oath and considered the constitutional as well as the military factors involved, he would rescind his decision, if indeed it ever was his.  I don't know whether prime ministers take oaths of allegiance upon assuming office but maybe they should (- Blair's allegiance appears to be to America and its ideology, not to Britain and its heritage).  Blair's overriding duty should have been to protect and defend the British national interest, which is symbolized by the Crown, and that includes its human representatives, the monarch, her heirs and successors, and that includes Prince Harry, until William fathers children.  But Blair and his fellow ministers have shirked their responsibility.

Even if Harry is to be safely secreted at a desk on the British base, he will still be deploying under the aegis of the Stars and Stripes, a foreign power.  (The Brits have operational control of the south, but not overall strategic control, which is with the Pentagon and the White House.)  He is a symbol of British sovereignty, a possible future king, yet he is to be deployed as a soldier in a military coalition led by America - it sends out all the wrong signals about our subordinate relationship to the US, about how our sovereignty has seeped away across the Atlantic during the Blair years.  Symbolism matters.

Below I pointed out the fallacy of comparing Harry's deployment with Andrew's in the Falklands.  Other commentators, such as the Independent, have made the comparison with Prince Edward in the First World War.

In August 1914, Prince Edward, the future Edward VIII - and, after his abdication, the Duke of Windsor - asked for a commission, having trained with the Navy since 1907.  He joined the Grenadier Guards, but soon learned that the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had refused to allow him to serve on the front line.  He tried to argue his case, but was told that the possibility of the enemy capturing him, and the added danger his presence in the trenches would mean for those around him, ruled it out.  Despite this, Edward became the first Prince of Wales since the Black Prince to undertake war service in France, and visited the front line several times - leading to his award of the Military Cross in 1916.

Of course, unlike Prince Harry, Prince Edward was the direct heir to the throne, but, unlike his counterpart today, William, he did have four younger brothers and a sister, i.e. there were five spares if anything untoward happened.  And still he was kept away from danger and from endangering others.  (And his chain of command led to Whitehall, not Washington.)  William and Harry, being Charles's only two children, in theory have thrice the sovereign value of Edward and his five siblings a century ago.  Thus Harry, arguably, is constitutionally even more important to the realm than was Prince Edward at the start of WWI.  So where's today's Kitchener when you need one?

Spare Harry

In the public discussion about whether or not Prince Harry should serve in Iraq, an analogy is often made to his uncle, Prince Andrew, flying helicopters in the Falklands war.  It's a false analogy, for two reasons.

Firstly, Andrew was serving in a British-led and -manned force - Harry would be serving in a multinational force that is, ultimately, led by the Americans.

Secondly, Harry is far more constitutionally significant than Prince Andrew ever was or is.  Andrew was the third of the Queen's four children.  In March 1982, when Argentina invaded South Georgia, the Queen was, it appeared, still long to reign over us; her heir, Charles, was married to Diana, who was was six months pregnant with their first child.  If Andrew had been killed in battle, Edward and Anne were still 'spare', and an heir to Charles was due soon.  With Diana due to give birth, Andrew's constitutional importance had become almost non-existent.

Whereas, in 2007, the Queen is still long to reign over us but minus 25 years; Charles is nearly 60; and William appears years away from producing an heir.  If anything untoward happened to William in the coming few years, Harry would be the last in the direct lineage.  Until William produces the goods, Harry should be protected by the British state, not ordered to serve it, and its politicians, in its most dangerous arenas of conflict.  The Army would be failing in its duty to protect the monarchy if it allowed Harry to serve on the front-line.  Andrew was expendable, then; Harry isn't, yet.

Worrying about Harry

I wish Prince Harry wasn't going to Iraq.  It's not just that it'll be a bit like having a distant relative out there in harm's way, although it will.  It's that he's the spare, and a rather good one - I thought he came across really well in an admittedly PR-savvy documentary about his AIDS work in Lesotho.  If anything happened to Prince William before he sires an heir - and William does have a thing about high-performance motorbikes, which is a somewhat risky hobby - I'd rather have Harry ascend to the throne than the Yorkies - Andrew, Fergie and the girls - who are next in line. 

If, God forbid, William did have a fatal motorbike accident, and if Harry doesn't get killed in Iraq, then our future monarch would have been implicated in what, some would argue, is an unjust and illegal war, entirely of his own choosing.  Such a monarch might find it difficult to act as a unifying figure for the people he would be supposed to represent. 

If, on the other hand, Harry lost his life in Iraq, it might create a horrible, Blair-associated symmetry with his mother's death.  Diana was killed four months after Tony Blair became PM - in some ways, her death made his premiership.  It would be unfortunate if, as a result of Blair's decision to allow America's invasion of Iraq, Harry were to be killed at the end of his premiership.

An Iraqi 9/11

On Sunday, Coalition forces in Iraq killed about 250-450 'cult members', at the behest of the Iraqi government.  We, the British, contributed to the massacre, which, in relative-population terms, was equivalent to an Iraqi 9/11.

American Apache attack helicopters and F-16s, as well as British fighter jets, flew low over the farms where the enemy had set up its encampments and attacked, dropping 500-pound bombs on the encampments. [NYT]

Women and children are believed to have lived and died at the encampment.  Reports yesterday suggested the leader, who was believed to be a herald of the Imam Mahdi, had been killed along with this followers - but the NYT is not so sure.

Iraqi officials said Monday that they had killed the leader of the militia in the weekend fighting, identifying him as a man who went by the name Ahmed Hassan al-Yamani, but whose real name was Diyah Abdul Zahraa Khadom.  However, a Shiite cleric who has had contact with the group said the real leader was Ahmad bin al-Hassan al-Basri.  The cleric said he believed that Mr. Basri was alive and probably hiding near Karbala.

I would have thought that, when faced with an apocalyptic cult, the last strategy to try would be to wreak apocalyptic violence upon its followers - it sort of reinforces the beliefs of the survivors.  In addition, targeting religious groups, such as the Soldiers of Heaven, is considered genocide under international law.   I'm lost for words.

Sharon and On

Some months ago, when I thought Ariel Sharon was close to death, I wrote in praise of him.  It's typical of the man that he still stubbornly clings to life.  Now, his thoughts on the Iraq invasion have been revealed in the liberal American-Jewish magazine "Forward".

... Olmert’s predecessor, by contrast, was anything but an amateur in Israeli-American relations, and more broadly in dealing with America’s policies in the region.  When it came to Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq and to democratize the Arab Middle East from within, Ariel Sharon took a far more sophisticated position.

Publicly, Sharon played the silent ally; he neither criticized nor supported the Iraq adventure.  One reason for his relative silence was Washington’s explicit request that Israel refrain from openly backing its invasion of an Arab country or in any way intervening, lest its blessing damn the United States in Arab eyes.

But sometime prior to March 2003, Sharon told Bush privately in no uncertain terms what he thought about the Iraq plan.  Sharon’s words — revealed here for the first time — constituted a friendly but pointed warning to Bush.  Sharon acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an “acute threat” to the Middle East and that he believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Yet according to one knowledgeable source, Sharon nevertheless advised Bush not to occupy Iraq.  According to another source — Danny Ayalon, who was Israel’s ambassador to the United States at the time of the Iraq invasion, and who sat in on the Bush-Sharon meetings — Sharon told Bush that Israel would not “push one way or another” regarding the Iraq scheme.

According to both sources, Sharon warned Bush that if he insisted on occupying Iraq, he should at least abandon his plan to implant democracy in this part of the world.  “In terms of culture and tradition, the Arab world is not built for democratization,” Ayalon recalls Sharon advising.

Be sure, Sharon added, not to go into Iraq without a viable exit strategy.  And ready a counter-insurgency strategy if you expect to rule Iraq, which will eventually have to be partitioned into its component parts.  Finally, Sharon told Bush, please remember that you will conquer, occupy and leave, but we have to remain in this part of the world.  Israel, he reminded the American president, does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by regional radicalization and the spillover of violence beyond Iraq’s borders... [Forward]

Given that, in Bushworld, you're either with them or against them, Arik Sharon was clearly an evil-doer.  Luckily for the Americans, in December '95 Sharon suffered a minor stroke and, unluckily for the then most important man in Israel, he was prescribed the wrong drugs, which caused him to have a massive brain haemorrhage in January '06, which put the more US-pliant Olmert in the PM's chair.  Poor Arik - he had been able to diagnose the weaknesses of US 'plans' for Iraq, but his own doctors were unable to diagnose that he, like many people of his age, suffered from cerebral amyloid angiopathy.  Some irony there, I think.

Blood on our hands

I haven't seen nor heard the recording of Saddam Hussein's last moments before he was killed and I don't intend doing so.  Our political leaders are deploring 'the manner' of his death, rather than the fact of the death itself - Prescott, Brown and Blair would have preferred for there to have been no cameras and for no one to have taunted the old man.  But they surely did support the execution of the sentence, for Saddam Hussein was a prisoner in our custody and we handed him over to the Iraqi government knowing that they would kill him. 

Okay, I know, Saddam was in US custody, it's repeatedly stated.  But was he?  The US and UK are in Iraq as part of the Multinational Force, aka the Coalition.  It is not a US force; it is a US-led multinational force (MNF), of which Britain is a founding and active member.  Saddam Hussein was in the custody of the MNF in Baghdad, which, for operational reasons, happens to be American.  If Saddam had been held in the South, the legal predicament might have been clearer.  But, legally, it matters not whether he was held by the US in Baghdad or by the Brits in Basra - he was in Coalition hands, of which the Blair government is a full partner. 

So I think Blair, Brown, Beckett et al. should face criminal charges for colluding in the premeditated murder of Saddam Hussein.  In the unlikely event of that happening, may more mercy be shown to them than they showed to Saddam!

P.S.  I've checked and it seems clear that, under international law, Britain and America are not there as individual nations but as part of a US-led multinational force.  Therefore, Britain, led by Tony Blair, had joint legal responsibility for the custody of Saddam.  Forget cash for peerages - conspiracy to murder is what Blair should be charged with.    

Hanging Gardens

To call the Saddam trial a travesty of justice would be to imply that it bore a relationship to justice.  Margaret Beckett, as foreign secretary, should be denouncing the flawed legal process and, especially, the homicidal sentence, but instead she has welcomed it.   Saddam was one of the few people to have come out from the Iraq mess with his reputation at all enhanced, unlike his denouncers.  It turned out that he was more impressive than either Bush or Blair, who remain jointly responsible for far more deaths than this man whom they Bush now wants dead.  Long live President Saddam Hussein!  Long live everyone!

General anxiety

The new head of the British Army, General Dannatt, has got plaudits and stick for his honesty about the strain the military is under in Iraq and elsewhere.  He's intruded where he should not go, into British politics, but has done so from a position of strength.  If Blair gets uppity, the general could send the tanks into Whitehall.  I've sometimes fantasized, since 9/11, of the benefits or otherwise of a non-violent military coup.  Having read Dannatt's interview with the Daily Mail, I'm worried by his interest in domestic British affairs and in modern-day values and ideologies.

The General is a practising Christian and this informs his views on the Army's role and place in society.  He believes our weak values have allowed the predatory Islamist vision to take hold.

"We can't wish the Islamist challenge to our society away and I believe that the Army, both in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably wherever we go next, is fighting the foreign dimension of the challenge to our accepted way of life.

"We need to face up to the Islamist threat, to those who act in the name of Islam and in a perverted way try to impose Islam by force on societies that do not wish it.  In the Cold War, the threats to this country were about armies rolling in.  Threats now are not territorial but to the values of our country.

"In the Army we place a lot of store by the values we espouse.  What I would hate is for the Army to be maintaining a set of values that were not reflected in our society at large — courage, loyalty, integrity, respect for others;  these are critical things.

"I think it is important as an Army entrusted with using lethal force that we do maintain high values and that there is a moral dimension to that and a spiritual dimension.

"When I see the Islamist threat I hope it doesn't make undue progress because there is a moral and spiritual vacuum in this country.  Our society has always been embedded in Christian values; once you have pulled the anchor up there is a danger that our society moves with the prevailing wind.  There is an element of the moral compass spinning.  I am responsible for the Army, to make sure that its moral compass is well aligned and that we live by what we believe in.

"It is said we live in a post-Christian society.  I think that is a great shame.  The Judaic-Christian tradition has underpinned British society.  It underpins the British Army."   I ask what this means for Muslim soldiers and their allegiance.

"These are British Muslims who are also British soldiers.  If they are prepared to take the Queen’s shilling they will go wherever the mission requires them to go."

He continued upon this theme on the Today programme this morning, suggesting that Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur ("probably wherever we go next") were not separate conflicts but part of a larger West vs Jihadist war.   And he kept coming back to the alleged internal threat from 'negative forces', by which he meant Islamism.  I wondered if he envisaged a time when the Army might play a role domestically combating these 'negative forces'.  And then I remembered Iain Dale's post the other day, about Met. Police chief  'Sir' Ian Blair threatening to bring back internment for radical Muslims.  It seemed as if there were dark forces gathering in our realm and that not all of them were Islamists.

Samarra time

Who bombed the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra?  It's a question many, including myself, have asked, and it's produced so many answers that it could well be used as a verbal Rorschach test for paranoia.  This week, the Iraqi government announced that it had captured an al-Qaeda fighter from Tunisia who had confessed to having been one of bombers.  Case closed; end of conspiracy theories?  Nah.

The man who informed the world of this alleged development was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's National Security Adviser.  The last we heard of him was just after the killing of Zarqawi (plus some other people in his near circle).  Mowaffak held a press conference to announce they'd found documents on a laptop, and then promptly released the text of one to the media.  Blogger Abu Aardvark wrote about it, questioning the veracity of what Mowaffak had said.  I think the Aardvark's scepticism was well founded.

Now Rubaie is at it again, it seems.  Claiming to have solved the bombing has several functions.  Conspiracy theories get deflated.  Al-Qaeda gets the blame.  The nation, esp. Sunni and Shia, can unite against the common enemy, who is trying to incite civil war.  It's all good propaganda for the new government.

But I doubt it's true.  It's not just that al-Qaeda in Iraq have denied it, but they have, and they tend to be straight about what they have and have not done.  The Mujahadeen Shura Council has said Rubaie's allegation was "a new play performed by the government of (Prime Minister Nouri) al-Maliki to prove its worth and try to regain the confidence it has lost even among those who voted for it".  Agreed.  It's also a continuation of the Americans' 2004 psyop campaign to "villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response" in order to cohere the country. 

I still stand by my hypothesis that it was Israel's way of punishing the world's most famous devotee of the Twelfth Imam - President Ahmadinejad of Iran - for having repeated Khomenei's call for the Zionist colony in Palestine to be wiped from the pages of history.  Mowafak Rubaie's announcement this week hasn't altered the results of my imaginary Rorschach test.

On Zarqawi, RIP

Two things about Abu Musab I'll remember, which weren't much covered in all the reports and obituaries published today.

The first was his dramatic, symbol-laden entry on to the Iraqi battlefield.  If you don't know what I'm referring to, that's because our dozy media missed it and the American authorities chose, at the time, not to draw attention to it.  On August 7, 2003, the Jordanian embassy was truck-bombed - it was the first vehicle-borne bombing in Baghdad after the invasion.  Following the August 19, 2003, bombing of the UNHQ, I wrote this on an openDemocracy board: