Cameron has guns, bombs and a plane – and not one good idea
SO FAR there is little sign of serious thought about the Paris atrocities. We are to have more spooks, though spooks failed to see it coming, and failed to see most of the other outrages coming, and the new ones will be no more clairvoyant than the old ones.
France and Belgium are reaching for emergency laws, surveillance, pre-trial detention, more humiliation of innocent travellers and all the other rubbish that has never worked in the past and won’t work again.
David Cameron (in a nifty bit of news management) takes the opportunity to announce that he will henceforth be spared from flying like a normal human being, using instead an ego-stroking Blaircraft paid for by you and me. Austerity must have been having a day off.
Actually, if grand personages like him had to shuffle through the security screens, belts off, shoes off, shampoo humourlessly confiscated, like the rest of us, these daft and illogical rules would have been reviewed long ago.
BRITISH police officers dress up like Starship Troopers, something they’ve obviously been itching to do for ages and now have an excuse to do, the masked women involved looking oddly like Muslim women in niqabs.
It’s not the police’s job to do this. If things are so bad that we need armed people on the streets, then we have an Army and should deploy it. If not, then spare us these theatricals, which must delight the leaders of Islamic State, who long for us to panic and wreck our own societies in fear of them.
Next comes the growing demand for us to bomb Syria. Well, if you want to. Only a couple of weeks ago all the establishment experts were saying that the Russian Airbus massacre was obviously the result of Vladimir Putin’s bombing of Syria.
Now the same experts say it’s ridiculous to suggest that our planned bombing of Syria might bring murder to the streets of London or to a British aircraft.
Perhaps it’s relevant to this that Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who survived the Bataclan massacre in Paris, said he heard one fanatic in the theatre say to his victims: ‘It’s the fault of Hollande, it’s the fault of your President, he should not have intervened in Syria.’
There may be (I personally doubt it) a good case for what’s left of the RAF to drop what’s left of our bombs on Syria. It may be so good that it justifies risking a retaliation in our capital, and that we should brace ourselves for such a war.
But I think those who support such bombing should accept that there might be such a connection, and explain to the British people why it is worth it.
I am wholly confused by the Cameron Government’s position on Syria. It presents its desire to bomb that country as a rerun of the parliamentary vote it lost in 2013. But then Mr Cameron wanted (wrongly, as it turned out) to bomb President Assad’s forces and installations, to help the Islamist sectarian fanatics who are fighting to overthrow the secular Assad state.
This is more or less the exact opposite of what he seems to want now.
Far from being a rerun, it is one of the most embarrassing diplomatic U-turns in modern British history.
Or is it? Does Mr Cameron in fact intend, somehow, to return to his original purpose, and to use the RAF to aid the anti-Assad rebels – who are the sort of people he would arrest if they turned up here?
If IS were our real target, then this would be absurd. But is IS our real target? If so, we would abandon all scruple, and side with the Syrian Kurds, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Russia and Assad to defeat it. For they are by far its most effective opponents.
After all, when we fought the Hitler menace, we allied with another monster, Stalin, to do so.
MR CAMERON also called IS ‘the head of the snake’, and the origin of all these horrors. But again, is this true? Or is IS in fact an outgrowth of the burgeoning, richly funded spread of extreme, puritanical, intolerant, violent Islamism, whose head is not in Raqqa but rather further south?
I hope that if Mr Cameron brings a plan for war to Parliament, there will be enough informed and wise men and women there to question him thoroughly on these points, and vote against him if they are not convinced.
Trickery and propaganda do not invariably arrive in the same shape.
Just because we all now know that Blair defrauded us into a dangerous war with WMD, we shouldn’t be too sure that we won’t be just as easily fooled by his equally smooth and persuasive heir.