This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

A century ago, stupid and vainglorious politicians dragged us into war. We started it as a great, rich empire and ended it as an indebted husk.

Soon afterwards, America’s President Woodrow Wilson told aides he would wipe Britain ‘off the face of the map’ in another ‘terrible and bloody war’ unless we ceded our naval supremacy.

And US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raged and shouted at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.

In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all!

'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’

These little-known but important facts should be borne in mind as we look back on this dreadful episode. I for one have had enough of war poets and trench memoirs. Let’s have some proper history – who did what to whom and what it cost.

As Simon Heffer explains on the previous pages, the war was the greatest event in modern history, its aftershocks still persisting even now.

By the way, we didn’t even go to war to save Belgium. The Cabinet had already decided on war before a single German jackboot had crossed the Belgian border.

The rape of Belgium – which we weren’t actually obliged to defend – was a pretext invented afterwards to soothe readers of The Guardian.

Have our leaders learned anything from this episode of folly, mass death and waste? Absolutely not.

They still reach for war at the slightest opportunity. Everyone knows now (I did at the time) that our Iraq adventure was stupid and wrong, and that we had no business in Afghanistan.

But I can well remember being told off sternly for not supporting David Cameron’s war in Libya, supposedly waged to prevent a fictional massacre and some fictional rapes. Only a few weeks ago I was still being told the same story.

Well, Libya is now in flames, British Embassy staff are fleeing the country and the place is far too dangerous for anyone to go there and report on it. Massacres can proceed with impunity, and refugees head unhindered to Italy – and eventually here – in their thousands.

Let me remind you that Mr Cameron was quick to claim an easy triumph. He told the Commons on September 5, 2011:

‘Some people warned, as Gaddafi himself did, that the Libyan people could not be trusted with freedom; that without Gaddafi there would be chaos.

‘What is emerging now, despite years of repression, and the trauma of recent months, is immensely impressive.’

Compare and contrast what I said here that same week:

‘Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better… The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like.’

I warned that our Armed Forces were aiding ‘a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know’.

You might note that, at the time, hardly a voice in so-called mainstream, grown-up media or politics was raised against the Libya folly.

Few (but happily, enough) spoke or wrote against Mr Cameron’s even madder scheme to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.

If we had supported that, we would have found ourselves on the same side as the Islamist fanatics of Isis, now murdering, persecuting and mutilating their way across the Middle East to the terror of all.

It might just be a good moment to wonder if our united national leadership, utterly wrong on every foreign policy issue they have ever faced, are also wrong now, as they march towards what may well end up as war with Russia.

People still don’t grasp how dangerous the conflict in Ukraine already is, or how powerfully Russia believes it has been wronged by an arrogant, aggressive West.

Ukraine’s armed forces, like Israel’s in Gaza, are ruthlessly using artillery and bombs on densely populated areas and will soon be fighting in the million-strong, close-packed city of Donetsk.

The UN estimates 800 civilian deaths and 2,000 civilian wounded so far. The region is riven by the sound of guns, the Guns of August thundering yet again.

It is no mere skirmish. It is a war in the making. Do you really want to join in? This is a dangerous time of year. It will be less dangerous if we refuse to trust our leaders.

Let us have no more moves towards conflict with Moscow without a full recall of Parliament. And let us pray that our MPs are reading some history on their holidays.



Don't paint over Rolf's crimes

I can see why people might want to destroy or blot out paintings and murals by Rolf Harris. But they shouldn’t. Wiping out evidence of past mistakes makes us more likely to repeat them.

Communists do this – the wonderful Café Sybille in East Berlin still preserves half of Stalin’s moustache, which is the only remaining trace of an enormous statue of the monster that was smashed to pieces by order of the state when he fell from favour.

Better by far to remind ourselves that we idolise our fellow creatures, in politics and show business, far too easily, and that the fashions of today often look worse than stupid a few years hence.

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Some railway companies are shamefully abandoning quiet carriages, where mobile phones are banned, ‘because they cause rows’.

They cause rows because such companies have always been feeble about enforcing them. Now they use their own feebleness as an excuse to give up altogether.

Perhaps, if they could make us pay for peace and quiet on trains, they might actually see that the rules were observed.

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Does the Tory Party still exist? Subscription income is now lower than Ukip’s. They haven’t published up-to-date membership figures.

My information is that so many have quit in disgust at David Cameron’s liberalism that in many seats there will be no troops to fight the General Election.

Good riddance. I could carve a better party out of a banana.

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As a cyclist, I can’t wait for all cars to be driverless. Even the wonkiest driverless car would be safer for the rest of us than the thousands of vehicles whose homicidal drivers are texting or yammering on their mobiles, while the useless police look the other way.

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