War is coming

War is coming. People forget the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Balkan Wars: until you remind them that the 3rd one was soon renamed the Great, and later the First World War.

It is now clear that the rotting sore of Iraq, the spreading fire in Syria, the disaster of Libya stand as the Balkan Wars do to the war-that-is-coming.

(This article was written before the massacre in Paris — Part II is the road to victory, Part III is on the Syrian debacle, Part IV I is on ISIS’s plan for intercommunal violence in Europe and Part IV II looks at practical steps we should take in Scotland)

War Is Coming

The conflagration is general. In flames: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia. Smouldering: Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, France and Israel/Palestine.

Refugees are pouring across the Mediterranean from the South and the East.

There is no road forward from here that doesn’t involve at least a million deaths and probably several.

British foreign policy is paralysed and incoherent. The last two years have seen three major catastrophes which remain unexamined.

The Russian invasion of Crimea revealed our sworn treaty obligations to guarantee the territoriality of Ukraine as so many rubber cheques.

The Libyan demarché, the great foreign policy success of Cameron’s first administration — the one that overcame the post-Iraq paralysis — crumbled to naught. Its hard to believe that the ghastly Ghaddafi state could be replaced by something worse, a broken ruin ruled by gangsters and gunmen, and with a thriving Caliphate. A terrible metastasis of money, guns and Islamist murder gangs spread across the Maghreb.

Joseph Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s march on Moscow shows the Grande Arme crossing the Neimen with 422,000 soldiers, arriving in Moscow with 100,000 and straggling back: a mere 10,000 men still standing.

When ISIS burst out of Syria and back into Iraqi the nominal strength of the UK and US trained Iraqi army was 365,000.

2 months of fighting against the head-and-hand-chopping, pickup-truck-driving sweepings of minor European Polytechnic Media Studies Departments reduced it to a rump of 10 to 12,000 effectives.

These 3 foreign politics catastrophes should stand centre stage in British politics, but all are present only by their absence. And in this void the Westminster classes wriggle and wangle towards joining the war in Syria.

The frog of war is being boiled. News was let slip that, in the normal course of their duties UK servicemen, on secondment to our Nato allies the US, were bombing Syria.

Needless to say UK servicemen, on secondment to our Nato allies Turkey, would definitely not have taken part in Turkey’s bombing of Syria — against ‘our’ kurds.

Then, miraculously, 2 British jihadis were subject of a UK drone strike in Syria under the ludicrous pretence of Article 51 of the UN Charter. Don’t get me wrong, if I had to rank the millions who are going to die in this war on some specious spectrum of ‘innocence’ them two would not rank so high. This pretext was gossamer thin, quite the negligee of war, just getting the public used to British forces fighting in Syria.

Pace Tallyrand, we have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing from our lost wars. Not for us any doubts about our catastrophic military failures — a case in point being John McTernan’s delusional belief that the Iraq war ended 12 years ago.

On the other side the jihadis also stand over-confident. Everyone said jihadists could never beat the mighty Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but they did. Everyone said they could never beat the mighty United States, and they have.

When Al Qaeda led 21 poor coptic christians to their death on a beach in Libya this year it was to this declaration: “We will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission”. They mean this.

Our politicians are numbed with the narcotic seduction of technological war — drones and smart bombs and cruise missiles. All the marrow-thrilling, poll-enhancing, world-stage-strutting of a real war with none of the downsides: casualties on our side, expense, disruption and death.

So stupefied are we by it that we fight alongside our sworn enemies the Iranians in Iraq, a country which is the bosom companion of our sworn enemies Syria. The major funders of Islamists in Syria are the Saudis, our allies in Yemen, fighting the evil Persians with their allies Al Qaeda, the ur-enemy in Afghanistan. Its treachery and double-dealing all the way down.

This drug proved particularly addictive to the ‘vegetarian’ war mongers of the Labour Party: John Reid’s pious aspiration not to fire a shot in Helmand being a case in point. There is no better way to signal your virtue than drop a smart bomb and by god does that sound good to most of the political class at Westminster.

But the problem with the ‘revolution in military warfare’ is that, whilst it makes wars easy to start and spread, it demonstrably has been unable to win them. The political barrier to killing is lowered, as we saw with the execution of British citizens in Syria. The old firebreaks that stopped wars spreading are abolished, as we saw, again, by these executions in a country with which we are not at war.

Whilst these might well be tactical gains, in the long view they are clearly strategic losses of the first magnitude.

We have never been more able to kill those we think of as our opponents, but we have never been less willing to conquer them — because that would have incur a cost.

The flavour of olde-tyme imperialist politics is captured well by Hillaire Belloc’s quip from The Modern Traveller:

Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not

He wrote that in 1898, midway between the high lands of the Berlin Congress of 1884, which started the scramble for Africa, and the killing fields of Flanders where Maxim’s chickens came home to roost.

This is where we stand now. The militarised drone was developed by the always innovative Israeli military in Lebanon in the 80s. I wrote a submission for the Smith Commission on Autonomous Vehicles earlier this year — the better to get self-driving cars on the roads of Scotland. I can tell you one thing, as I watch the horrendous ‘news’ from Jerusalem again: there won’t be self-driving car bombs on the streets of Israel anytime soon — we totter on the cusp of the poor man’s cruise missile.

War Is Coming

When I left the Labour Party for the SNP in 2002 because of the coming disaster of Iraq I never imagined it would become as bad as this. We in the SNP did what we could to stop us going to war, but we can do nothing to stop the war coming to us.

There is a substantial jihadi infrastructure across Europe, rising inter-communal tension and a refugee crisis which is only going to increase as the war spreads. Europe cannot stay out of a general war all along its Eastern and Southern borders.

The UK has no effective military policy, its foreign policy is in tatters, it has no reliable allies and no definition of victory — only endless supplies of confidence in its abilities.

These small wars, wars of choice for the the UK, have already hastened to history the Soviet Union, Iraq, Syria and probably Libya — states we will never see again. We are on the cusp of a great war, a war that is coming to us, a war not by choice. While the clock ticks Westminster remains bedazzled and bewitched by a small war of choice, the sideshow of Syria. The Saudis will certainly join the list of former states, as will the UK.

A great war is coming.