Not so long ago a judge praised burglars for their courage. Now, with equal justification, Dave is being extolled for the courage he displayed in implicitly attacking Russia and China in his UN speech:
“The blood of these young [Syrian] children is a terrible stain on the reputation of this United Nations. And in particular, a stain on those who have failed to stand up to these atrocities and in some cases aided and abetted Assad’s reign of terror.”
That’ll be Russia and China then. Dave must have a spectral analyser built into his eyes to be able to distinguish the blood of Syrian children from the blood of millions already dripping from the hands of those two regimes. On second thoughts, perhaps he doesn’t. For, just this once, the blood whose spilling he decries adorns a different set of hands.
As is normally the case, the blood of victims is on their murderers’ hands, in this instance on those belonging, in roughly equal measure, to Assad’s troops and the rebels. The second set of culprits are those who inspired, provoked, financed and supported the outbreak of violence that goes by the name of the Arab Spring. That is to say mainly the US administration, egged on by harebrained neocon effluvia, and HMG, so courageously led by Dave.
The courage of a statesman isn’t in making fiery and irresponsible speeches. It’s in being a statesman, something that Dave manifestly is not. Rather than uttering the rubbish he saw fit to mouth, a statesman would follow, and act upon, a totally different logic in the present situation:
That Messrs Assad, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, Qaddafi et al are not to be confused with Mother Teresa is beyond doubt. Equally certain is that, in an ideal world, all of us would work diligently towards overthrowing their sanguinary regimes. In such a world, we’d all close ranks with those champions of goodness and democracy who rose against those regimes; we’d all joyously die on the barricades erected in the name of human liberty and world peace.
Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in one in which bad Middle Eastern tyrants tend to be replaced by worse ones (remember the Shah of Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini?). One way or the other, the people in those countries are going to be mistreated, often killed. This doesn’t depend on any specific government there, and it would be sheer folly to believe that a benign, liberal Muslim state could ever be anything other than a figment of neocon imagination. Our actions must depend on an accurate understanding of the region and how the events there affect our national interests.
It’s hard not to notice that for the better part of a millennium and a half Islam has been waging war against the West, or Christendom as it once was. That doesn’t mean 1,500 years of non-stop fighting any more than the Hundred Years’ War meant a hundred years of incessant hostilities. There would be a remission, then a flare-up, then a remission again. We’re into an acute phase at present.
Now why has Islam been so consistently belligerent? Because it’s that kind of religion. There are 107 verses in the Koran calling for the murder of infidels, apostates and anyone else who holds back the global march of Islam. Unlike us, the Muslims follow the tenets of their religion, well, religiously. This means that a Muslim country will always be aggressive towards us in direct proportion to its religious fervour.
Consequently, it’s in our interests to encourage and prop up the most secular Muslim regimes, regardless of how beastly they are to their own people. We must realise that, for as long as Islam holds sway over the Middle East, any alternative regime, in addition to probably being even more cruel internally, will also present a clear and present danger both to us and our allies.
Hard as it is to accept such a view on abstractly humanitarian grounds, we must also encourage, or at least not try very hard to stop, any internecine hostilities there. The more the Muslims fight one another, the weaker they’ll be to do harm to us.
This ought to be the general line of thought guiding a true statesman endowed with the courage to think straight and dispassionately. And what’s Dave saying?
“If the United Nations Charter is to have any value in the 21st Century we must now join together to support a rapid political transition.” [A transition to a fire-eating Islamist regime that’ll destabilise the region, endanger our few allies there and jeopardise world peace, is what this really means.]
“…Libyan public, who were not prepared to allow extremists to ‘hijack their chance for democracy,’ ” [Any chance for democracy in a Muslim country, Dave, is inversely proportionate to its being Muslim. The Arab Spring has so far brought to power Islamist regimes in every country that until then had been run by an awful but reasonably secular regime.]
“Today is not the time to turn back – but to keep the faith and redouble our support for open societies, and for people’s demands for a job and a voice.” [Those people don’t just demand a job and a voice. They also demand on-going war on the West waged by demographic or other means, the literal following of sharia law and an immediate annihilation of the West’s sole ally in the region.]
If this is courage, I’ll take a cowardly prime minister any day. But Dave’s courage or lack thereof comes out of the latest session with focus groups. A truly courageous statesman wouldn’t blabber away, tossing off at best meaningless and at worst dangerously idiotic phrases. He’d understand the situation and do what’s good for his country, her allies and the West in general.
Only a coward would resort to the easy option of making a speech like Dave’s oration at the UN. Only a naïve, or else ideologically inspired, commentator wouldn’t recognise this.