Nothing to do with all our strength

I'm not sure that the vote in the Commons went the wrong way. But it didn't go the right way. And I don't know how it could have.

So much of the discussion has revolved around comparisons to previous conflicts. Labour were quick to say how much they regret Iraq and were keen not to repeat the mistake, but this isn't very similar. Surely it's more like Libya; long-distance, targeted strikes, designed to help rebels who we've finally come out in support of. Are we looking nervously at new developments in Egypt, and deciding that maybe this sudden outpouring of "freedom" wasn't such a good idea after all? Individual MPs may protest their reasons for voting one way or another, but many outlets have been quick to highlight that this wouldn't be a "popular" war. In the face of what is being presented as a moral choice, is it our national war-weariness which is the most powerful motivator?

What is most upsetting though is that this whole discussion is only happening now. For months and months and endless months a government has been at war with a section of its people, and bystanders have died and their homes have been destroyed, and well over a million people have fled their home to go...nowhere. A country which was a safe haven for refugees from the Iraq war now wreaks devastation upon itself, and we only feel compelled to even discuss acting because the method of death-dealing has changed?! "But kill them gently!" we bleat, while we act as a platform for the international arms trade, and defend our insistence on selling arms to the conflict zone by arguing that we need to make it a fair fight. Have we learned nothing about the price of conflict? Even as fresh warnings from Sri Lanka ring in our ears? A repeat vote on military intervention has been ruled out; what about other forms of intervention? The government is clearly happy to contribute financially to the conflict, can we please send something to the humanitarian relief?

There has been hand-wringing about our "role in the world". The USA does not seem fazed by our lack of involvement, turning instead to the erstwhile cheese-eating surrender monkeys for support (if, in fact, they need any at all). Maybe now we can get over the idea that we are a "great power" in the world; is it too late to form closer alliances with other neighbours? To build new bridges in light of our new-found irrelevance?

Or perhaps we can take on a greater responsibility; do more for the world than just making explosions when one side of a muddy conflict turn a darker shade of grey, having sat on our hands for so long. Because our utter inability to do anything effective at this stage, whatever the result of last week's vote, is the greatest tragedy. Not a tragedy for us, but for the entire nation of Syria.

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

When I was in America a couple of years ago, I took with me a short book on American  history (A History of the United States by Philip Jenkins]; I figured that actually being there would be a good excuse to break me in to a subject I knew next to nothing about. I was explaining this to an American at a party, when he completely cut me off.

"Whatever book you're reading, throw it out and get a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It's just amazing."

Well, it's taken me two and a half years, but I eventually took his advice. And it was really good advice.

Through a dense 600+ pages, Zinn overturns the conventional narrative of American history, and tells the stories of the people who found themselves on the wrong side of the powers that were, and consequently of the history that they wrote. He opens by challenging Columbus' legacy as a great man, using the explorer's own words;

[The Arawaks] brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things...they willingly traded everything they owned. They would make fine servants....With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Zinn goes on to spend the rest of the chapter examining the first trans-Atlantic slave trade (as European ships sailed empty to Hispaniola and were packed full of islanders to take back), and the initial callous brutality meted out by these and other early pioneers.

This approach to history, that of giving the often voiceless pride of place rather than relegating them to a footnote¹, is carried through the book up to the early 1990s, but it wasn't this which struck me most strongly, or which prompted me to keep it overdue from the library so that I could write this blog post (I've already renewed the book twice). Instead, I kept feeling that the situations Zinn described were remarkably mirrored by those going on today.

As an example, political protest is (inevitably, given the author's chosen perspective) a recurring theme of the book. In 1780, the Founding Fathers denounced a series of protests led by a group known as the Regulators (who argued that the revolution hadn't changed anything for ordinary people) for using tactics which they themselves had used during the Civil War, just as the new Egyptian regime has been undermined by popular protest in Tahrir Square, the birthplace of that country's Arab Spring. After a protest in 1837 turned violent, the media denounced the protesters (now labelled rioters) and everything they stood for, just as elements of the press in Britain cover the slightest disturbance at a modern rally and nothing else about it. Political opposition to a coming war became almost impossible the moment it started in 1846, and citizens on both sides were urged to put aside all other grievances for the national good during the Civil War. There was even a (initially) left-wing politician called Tom Watson, just as there is now.

"You're a miserable pipsqueak of a man, Taft!"

Social movements don't seem to have changed too much either. In the mid-nineteenth century, women were urged by conservative religious leaders not to wear more practical clothes in order to preserve their feminine mystique;

Woman, robed and folded in her long dress, is beautiful. She walks gracefully....If she attempts to run, the charm is gone....Take off the robes, and put on pants, and show the limbs, and grace and mystery are all gone.

Attempts by the oppressors to help the oppressed were ham-fisted back in the 1830s too, as Zinn reports that southern black leaders "had to struggle constantly with the unconscious racism of white abolitionists". He also of course relates the ever-present problems of those facing intersecting prejudices, as well as disagreements within movements which in some ways were all striving for the same things, and in other ways really weren't. And of course there's apathy, or the perception of it; Alice Rossi's quotation below could come from a 1992 newspaper column, or indeed a 2012 opinion piece from someone who isn't reading the right blogs.

There is no overt anti-feminism in our society...not because sex equality has been achieved, but because there is practically no feminist spark left among American women.

It in fact dates from 1964, three years before a new rash of women's lib groups spread across the States.

What I found most distressing, though, was the appearance of instantly recognisable themes in war and conflict. It turns out that the most eloquent argument of the futility of renewing Trident amidst a massive removal of state support for the most vulnerable was made by Martin Luther King in 1968;

We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development...when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.

At the other end of Zinn's timeline, impoverished white settlers were repeatedly encouraged by the authorities to settle on land occupied by native tribes, leading to friction and conflict. This was used as a pretext to send in the military to "defend" the American citizens, while boundaries were "renegotiated" with the people who had lived there for centuries, and treaties were signed promising the sanctity of the new boundaries in perpetuity. A few years later white settlers were encouraged to farm that land as well, and the cycle started again. Though in fairness to the fledgling USA, I didn't read anything suggesting that they had built a giant wall around tribal areas / through native villages. Later, when the army was supposed to "manage" the forced migration of the remaining native peoples east of the Appalachians into the West, instead they outsourced the job to private contractors, who forgot to provide enough volunteers for the Olympics did everything as cheaply as possible, contributing to a sharp decline in the quality of healthcare provision and huge numbers of deaths².

It was disheartening to read a long history of battles which are still being fought today, or governments which have not learned from their mistakes (and perhaps do not want to), or the continuity of oppression over a long span of time. Is this the lesson to be learned? Or should I be encouraged, enjoying a new-found solidarity with people throughout history and across a continent, who have fought fights mirrored in today's world and have sometimes triumphed? Still living through the aftershocks of the global banking crisis, a speech beginning, "Wall Street owns the country" and dating from 1890 (yes, 1890) suggests that not much progress has been made (unless you work in finance), but it also points to people who have always rejected the idea that business should be bigger than humans, that "companies are people, my friend" (Mitt Romney), that economics should always be in the driving seat of policy making.

It remains, however, the best book on American history that I have ever read (and I have read slightly more than two). In the last chapter, written in or around 1996, Zinn dares to hope for a popular uprising of the 99% of people who own a less than obscene amount of the country's wealth. In fact, he uses the phrase "the 99%" so repeatedly that I started to look for connections between his work and the Occupy movement (I failed; the man was clearly simply prophetic). Either way, though allegations of bias might be levelled by people who support the great American narrative, it seems that if we do not know Howard Zinn's history, then we are indeed doomed to repeat it.

Also, does anyone know Haringey library's opening hours? I have a fine to pay.

¹ Presidents, industrialists, and other establishment figures are also mentioned in this book

² I of course appreciate that a comparison like this over-states the significance of coalition outsourcing in modern Britain, but it was interesting to see that it is nothing new

We're not Judge Judy and executioner.

Well, looks like we finally got him. Osama bin Laden has been killed by American special forces in Pakistan, identified and buried at sea all in the blink of an eye, after 10 years as America's bogeyman-in-chief. And the world wants to celebrate! Americans feel as proud to be American as we did to be British just last Friday, while our very British newspapers fall over themselves to publish photographic evidence of bin Laden's death, so that we can all have a good look and tell ourselves how evil he was and how much he deserved what he got. Maybe the Sun will get to reuse it's most infamous headline tomorrow morning. The other two men killed in the raid are a mere footnote, as is the woman who was reportedly, "being used as a shield". Presumably someone decided a few more deaths was a price worth paying.

Because it has to be a price worth paying, right? We know that he killed all those people on September the 11th, we've been told so for 10 years. Never mind that he denied responsibility for it for 3 years (only claiming credit for the attack in an October 2004 attempt to discredit George W. Bush's re-election campaign), or that the British government's "September 11 attacks - Culpability document" concluded only that bin Laden headed the organisation responsible, or that al-Qaeda is not an organisation with a top-down command structure. Given that the perpetrators died in the attack, we needed someone else to be angry at, and the media repeatedly directed us to him. Who needs a trial? As Bush put it, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty".

This is all pretty troubling, but what on earth does this action say about our foreign policy? Obama at least is being consistent, having promised in his election campaign to pursue bin Laden into Pakistan with or without the permission of their government (and having spent so much time criticising operations in Iraq as having "taken our eye off the ball" that he's probably going to do extremely well out of this), and as yet it is unclear whether Pakistan even knew that the raid was coming - at the time of writing, the "Death of Osama bin Laden" Wikipedia page states, "the government of Pakistan was not notified of the planned raid", though this has yet to be cited (or even tagged, "citation needed"). To have assassinated a man without trial in the territory of an ally but without their permission?

What if America had tried this in North Korea? Or if it had happened in Pakistan, but executed by Indian troops? There are two first strike scenarios for Joshua to run right there. Should we now expect a series of surgical operations against other people America has reason to hate? Can minor states expect to get away with policing the world in this way? And what merits this kind of special attention, is it the number of people killed or just the number of Americans?

At what point did the world's most powerful nation decide that it was acceptable to mete out punishments of which it deemed people were deserving, without recourse to anything resembling a judicial process, the approval of the international community, or the knowledge of those on whose soil this was being carried out? It's not as if killing him does anything for his victims, proven or alleged. And what about the three people who died with him?

What a load of baloney.

Excuses excuses.

Eight years after the start of the Iraq war, International forces (surely calling them, "Western forces" is nonsensical while Qatar is considering getting involved?) have become involved in Libya. Precipitated by the breaking of a declared ceasefire, both Barack Obama and David Cameron have emphasised the unilateralism of the action, the latter stating, "British forces...are part of an international coalition to enforce the will of the United Nations." He also underlinedthe legality of the action, presumably to head off any comparisons with the Iraq war. He mentioned the support of the Arab league, as well as the UN.

So is this wide-ranging agreement the tipping point? Cameron postured but didn't interfere when Gaddafi's troops marched steadily eastwards, with the Colonel talking about taking Benghazi (the heart of the uprising), "house by house". But nobody has interfered in Bahrain, in spite of Saudi and UAE troops being brought in to suplement the Bahraini military quelling protests against the regime. The UN human rights chief has condemned the reported "arbitrary arrests, killings, beatings of protesters and of medical personnel, and of the takeover of hospitals and medical centres by various security forces", but there has been no emergency summit to draft resolutions. Neither has anyone interfered in Ivory Coast, where President Laurent Gbagbo who lost a democratic election has refused to step down. His supporters recently shelled a market killing dozens of civilians, an action with the UN has now called a "war crime".

So if the condemnation of the UN isn't the green light, what is? Cameron has further justified action in Libya by saying, "We have all seen the appalling brutality meted out by Col Gaddafi against his own people", adding that it is a "just cause" and in "Britain's best interests". I'm not convinced that the "appalling brutality" has much to do with it. Where is the action against North Korea, which has a ridiculously long list of human rights violations, including (according to Human Rights Watch) "routine public executions [and] the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people, including young children"? What about a country whose treatment of asylum seekers is so bad that it has to use tear gas to subdue their protests, as Australia did this week? What about countries which stand accused of colluding in the torture of its own citizens, like the UK? Do we really believe that we are fighting in Libya because it is a just cause, and we are not fighting elsewhere because there are no others?

Which leaves us with this conflict being in Britain's best interests. Both Obama and Cameron were elected on a promise to withdraw troops from existing theatres of war, so this long-range support for an already existing military force is an easy way of being the good guys. The UN resolution does not talk about regime change, but about enforcing the will of the Libyan people, and while Hilary Clinton has talked about a "unified" Libya, and Cameron about getting rid of Gaddafi, the military means to carry this out has not yet been discussed (publicly at least).

Perhaps we shouldn't be interfering at all. We've supported militia groups from a distance before, whether the defeated Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War or the victorious Taliban in 1980s Afghanistan, and to say that it turned out well would be something of a lie. But if we are going to get involved we have to know why we are doing it, and what we are doing. Hypocrisy has been a terrible sin for thousands of years, and life being unfair is almost the first complaint we learn as children.

In the meantime, my thoughts and prayers will be in Libya; not so much with the foreign military in their modern technology and at their great distance, as with the people on the ground, who will care about the long-term political implications of what is happening as much as we will care who buries them.