Come Friendly Bombs

Here we are again. There has been a terrible, brutal, repulsive terrorist attack on the streets of Paris and so the cry goes up 'something must be done'. 

David Cameron wants something to be done: he wants us to bomb ISIL in Syria. Because most MPs and, rather importantly, the influential Foreign Affairs Committee don't think this is a good idea, he has set out his reasons in a substantial dossier. He published this document and then presented it to parliament yesterday.

It's a very odd document. For something that is supposed to be explaining with precision and detail the UK's comprehensive strategy to deal with ISIL, it's full of bluster, assertion and repetition. It begins with a long blurb talking about the dangers we face (not contested) and insisting we must take military action (highly contested).

But the bulk of the document is taken up with Cameron's answers to seven questions posed by the Foreign Affairs Committee. I'm going to summarise the questions and the answers and offer some sceptical responses to each:

1.        How would UK airstrikes help?

It just would.

Genuinely, this is his argument. He doesn't explain how it would help, he just says there's lots happening and it's working in Iraq.

2.       How would it help Syria?

It would help the moderates fighting ISIL.

This is very dodgy. First, he displays very dubious confidence in the coherence, effectiveness and numbers of the so-called moderate fighters in Syria. He says there are '70,000 Syrian opposition fighters on the ground who do not belong to extremist groups' (p. 19). Does this sound to anyone else like a figure plucked out of the air? The situation in Syria is very complex; I don't have much confidence in the quality of our intelligence in subtle and nuanced situations where the affiliations are shifting and many-layered. There's a long history of the West making catastrophic errors of judgment in situations like this (cf. Afghanistan).  

3.       But we don't have a UN resolution.

(a) UN Security Council Resolution 2249 calls on Member States to take 'all necessary measures' to defeat ISIS.
(b) We have a right to self-defence. 
(c) The well-established principle of the 'collective self-defence of Iraq' permitted Western militaries to attack ISIL there. It's the same principle here.

It's the same problem in all cases. What Cameron glosses over is that this would involve violating Syrian airspace; we'd effectively be invading. The 'collective self-defence of Iraq' arose after the Iraq government invited western powers in to help it combat ISIL. Assad has not invited us. So the UN Resolution is certainly encouraging but it's common sense that it's not a blank cheque. The defence of Iraq or of ourselves does not permit endless incursions. Supposing France got wind of some ISIL sympathisers in Oldham planning to bomb the Paris Metro, the UN resolution would not give them authority to conduct airstrikes on Oldham. 

The right to self-defence is important, of course. But I'm not persuaded of the claim that this will make us safer. It may put us in much greater danger. Now, in fact, I'm not sure that the risk to us of 'blowback' is a knockdown argument. Sometimes, you have to do the right thing even if it's at a cost to yourself. But (a) it's not clear this is the right thing and (b) actually Cameron has made our safety a key part of his argument, so this bad argument becomes operative. I'm not impressed by his suggestion, made in the House of Commons, that, according to the head of MI5 Britain is 'already in the top tier of countries that ISIL is targeting'. I'd like to see how these 'tiers' work, because we may be in the Premiership, but air strikes might risk making us league champions.

Here's another thing. I worked on a show a few years ago; it was a big, collaborative event and during one workshop one of the companies producing the show came to see how far we'd got. We tried to explain the project but it seemed terribly confused. Sensing this, we all got into this verbal loop of insisting that the idea was very clear. I think of this when I read Cameron insisting 'there is a clear legal basis for military action' (p. 15), 'the collective self-defence of Iraq provides a clear legal basis...' (p. 16), 'It is clear that ISIL's campaign ... has reached the level of an "armed attack" such that force may lawfully be used...' (p. 17). Because if you really do have legal advice that this is clearly lawful, publish it. 

4.       Does UK military action have agreement of the regional players?

Oh sure. Definitely. Trust me on this. 

Yep, that's pretty much what he says. He answers the question 'yes', without actually saying yes. It all sounds very Gentleman's Club. 'Oh absolutely, Turkey is a very sound chap, we can rely on him'. Again, it would be very good to have chapter and verse on the diplomatic discussions and the assurances we've received. Because these things are very nuanced. I can well believe that Jordan would like to see Syria stabilised and ISIS defeated, but do they actually want the UK to do the defeating? That seems to me much less probable. If he's really confident about support, why does he just say 'Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Russia are all members of the International Syria Support Group and are engaging in the political strategy to end to Syrian conflict' (p. 18) as if that's any kind of answer to the question of whether they would support UK air strikes on ISIL. 

5.       What about ground forces?

There are 70,000 moderate Syrian fighters who can do all that. It's working really well in Iraq and there's plenty of evidence that it will work in Syria.

First, see my comment on point 1: 70k sounds like a made-up number and masks the incoherence and discontinuities of the groups. Second, is it working well in Iraq? The dossier gets a lot less confident when you look at the actual wording. '[we] are having an effect', '[we are having] some success' (p. 11), the model is 'starting to work' (p. 18). It is true that the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraq Security Forces have had some strategic victories but they've also had some considerable losses. And they are much more organised and coherent than the varied Syrian opposition forces. Third, Cameron trumpets some successes by the Kurdish fighters in the Northern Syria in defending supply lines and territory, but these victories are tentative and it is a very slender basis for a military strategy. Because even if ISIL were destroyed, without a ground force to fill the vacuum, we really will make things worse, both in terms of Syria's future and in terms of European security. Finally, this policy is even condemned by Cameron in his own dossier: on page 1, he urges UK involvement in the Coalition with the words 'it is wrong for the UK to sub-contract its security to other countries'. Isn't this precisely sub-contracting our military strategy to these ground forces?

And also, aren't these ground forces the very fighters that Russia is targeting? Have we actually talked to Russia about this strategy? No, obviously, or you'd have said it under 4.

6.       What are our war aims?

We want to degrade and defeat ISIL.

Okay, that's not an answer is it. What does 'degrade and defeat' mean? Because 'degrade' is way way way too vague. You knock a tin hat off an ISIL fighter's head and you've degraded their fighting capacity, but surely that's not good enough. So Cameron is more specific: 'so that it no longer presents a significant terrorist threat to the UK' (p. 22). Blimey. This seems both too broad and too narrow. It's too broad because if ISIL were kicked out of Syria and Iraq, those fighters aren't going to disappear; they'll just go somewhere else. And if you say, 'ah but technically ISIL is tied to that territory - the Caliphate depends on them having territory - so if we do remove them from Syria, we do technically destroy ISIL as a terrorist threat', then your argument is too narrow, because you're treating ISIL like they are a site-specific artwork not a loose coalition of angrily disaffected violent terrorists. 7/7 didn't require an ISIL headquarters in Raqqa; it's not yet at all clear that the France attacks depended on the Caliphate. ISIS's territorial ambitions are important but they are hardly the main thing here.

should say, apart from the military stuff, there's plenty that's really good in this section. It talks about 'squeezing ISIL’s finances; cutting off its flow of foreign fighters; challenging its poisonous ideology; providing humanitarian assistance to those in need; and working for a settlement to the Syria conflict and greater political inclusion in Iraq’ (p. 22). This is all really excellent and backed up elsewhere in the document with precise references and it only throws into sharp relief the haziness and vagueness of the military plans - even though the latter are supposedly the a 'key' part of the strategy.

7.       What do we bring?

Lots of stuff. The Brimstone Missile, which everyone wants but only we have; the RAPTOR surveillance system which is really excellent.

Well, maybe. It does seem to be true that the Brimstone is a really great guided missile and that RAPTOR is as good as it gets. But before every war, we are always given this stuff about 'precision guided' 'surgical strikes', that the technology is so good now that it can pick out an enemy and leave the people around him standing - until we blow up a hospital or a civilian bunker and then suddenly it seems that these missiles went off-target or that the maps are out of date or the target was misidentified. And ISIL aren't just sitting in an evil bunker; this is a town with non-combatants, with civilians in it. If the air strikes go ahead, will civilians be killed as collateral in a wider war? Because that's ISIL's justification for the attacks on Paris.

Second, this presumes that air strikes are effective. Nothing yet has shown that they are. The Coalition have been throwing tonnes of ordnance into Syria for over a year. To what effect? Because, after all, what war has ever been won by air strikes? When the Germans blitzed London in the Second World War, did it do anything to help them win? If anything the reverse. And let's remember that this is exactly what ISIL want. They are a millenarian cult and they long to do battle with the crusader on their territory. You think attacking them in Syria is going to deflate them? It's going to bloody inspire them. 

Of course, the temptation to respond militarily is strong: how dare they attack us? How dare this bunch of religious fanatics attack us at the heart of our culture? Yes, we think, let us rain a terrible vengeance on them. It makes us feel good to swagger about with guns and bombs (like those people at the top of the page - look at how they swagger). So yeah, let's show no mercy. Let's bomb the fuckers.

Unless doing so would do no good whatever. 

Because does something have to be done? It seems peculiar even to ask the question, but does it? I mean, yes, there's plenty of stuff in the dossier that's good: choke off the oil trades, restrict the financing, get better at combatting ISIL's communications, support the Vienna processes, continue offering foreign aid to the region. We should share intelligence between nations,  make sure the intelligence we are gathering is being processed as effectively as possible, we should continue to be vigilant. All of this is being done and should continue to be done.

But must something military be done? What if there is nothing militarily useful that will help? David Cameron's dossier is very unpersuasive; he hasn't made the case (I don't know what dossier Tom Watson has read). That old reflex, that empty desire to do something, anything, this is the soil in which bad ideas flourish. Let's take a moment and look at the evidence. There is no good case for air strikes on Syria. Not because ISIL don't deserve to be destroyed but because our strategy won't achieve that.

Something must be done. Sure it must. Let's reaffirm our confidence in our way of life, our secular freedom, our taste for life and love and free thinking, our determination not to let these things be destroyed and not to tear them up too casually ourselves.

France

One of the things I love about playwriting is the way it suddenly tips you into a completely unexpected areas of thinking and imagining and research. For the last thing I did, I read a huge book on the early Christian martyrs and found out more then I ever thought I'd need to know about ecclesiastical embroidery.

For the first episode of our Zola adaptation, I had to translate 'The Marseilleise'. The French national anthem, as I'm sure you know, was composed by a French army officer in 1792 under the name 'Battle Hymn of the Rhine Army' but it was seized upon with glee by army volunteers from Marseille who sung it as they marched towards Paris: hence 'Marseilleise'. France was under attack from Prussia and Austria and the song is a rallying cry that upholds the spirit of the revolution and swears death to its enemies.

This is why it is extremely bloodthirsty. In my translation, I made it slightly more bloodthirsty, because it is being sung by Antoine, a rather petulant Republican sympathiser, to wind up his conservative brother Pierre. So, in the first verse, the 'flag red as blood' in the original is actually that of the tyrants. But I've made him sing a version that is more of a threat.

Here's my version of the first two verses.*

Rise up you children of our country
The day of glory has arrived
We will fight and destroy all the tyrants
And we’ll raise up our flag, red as blood
Yes we’ll raise up our flag, red as blood

Do you hear in the lanes and the forests
The song of our soldiers so brave
They will come to save us all
And cut the throats of all their enemies

To arms, citizens!
Form battalions!
March on! March on!
Let traitors’ blood
Water all our fields!

We see the armies of our enemy
Holding out their iron chains
We will not let those shackles bind us
We will not submit to slavery
We will never submit to slavery
Do they think that France bows before them?
Do they hope we ever will be slaves?
Let fury fill your hearts
Let anger break their chains of iron

To arms, citizens!
Form battalions!
March on! March on!
Let traitors’ blood
Flow throughout the land!**

I thought of this on Friday night as the terrible news came from Paris of the series of coordinated terrorist attacks. I'm not of course suggesting that bloodthirsty reprisals should be the French response, but I love the song's spirit of unbending defiance, defiant in never bending to a would-be master, be it ISIS or fear itself.

England is playing France in a friendly match on Tuesday. I would love to hear the whole stadium singing the Marseilleise.

Notes

* Of course there is dispute about what order the verses go in. My version will not be agreed by everyone.

** Allons enfants de la patrie, / Le jour de gloire est arrivé! / Contre nous de la tyrannie / L'etendard sanglant est levé! / L'etendard sanglant est levé! // Entendez-vous dans les campagnes, / Mugir ces féroces soldats? / Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras / Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes! // Aux armes, citoyens! // Formez vos bataillons! / Marchons! Marchons! / Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons! //Que veut cette horde d'esclaves, / De traîtres, de rois conjurés? / Pour qui ces ignobles entraves, / Ces fers dès longtemps préparés? / Ces fers dès longtemps préparés? // Français, pour nous, ah! quel outrage / Quels transports il doit exciter! /C'est nous qu'on ose méditer / De rendre à l'antique esclavage! // Aux armes, citoyens etc.

No Platform

A thing may or may not be happening. Speakers are allegedly being banned from universities because of views that they hold. There are certain 'extremist' groups whose representatives have been banned - fascist and racist groups like the BNP and the EDL or extreme Islamist groups associated with anti-semitism and homophobia like Al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir, for instance. But there are also individual speakers, often holding controversial views on sexual matters, who have been targeted. 

• The clearest instance of this is that the National Union of Students in 2009 voted to ban the feminist activist Julie Bindel from its various student unions because of an article she wrote five years earlier which made a series of crass, flippant and insulting jokes about transsexuality.
• This is the most explicit instance of this type of no-platforming, but earlier this year comedian Kate Smurthwaite had her invitation to Goldsmith's College withdrawn because her views on prostitution (she's against it) contravened the university's 'safe space' policy. What this seems to have meant in this case was that several people apparently planned to picket the gig and the Union would find it hard to keep the event secure.
• In November 2014, a debate on abortion at Oxford University, which would have included someone offering a pro-life argument, was shut down to protect the 'students’ emotional wellbeing'. 
• This month Manchester's Student Union banned Julie Bindel and the horrible arsehole Milo Yiannopoulos, also for contravening its 'safe space' policy, because of the previous views expressed  by these speakers.
• And this week, Germaine Greer (pictured) faced a petition calling for her proposed talk at Cardiff University to be banned because of her views on trans people. A similar row broke out at Cambridge earlier this year over the same issue.

Let me say that I have always admired Germaine Greer very much but disagree strongly with her views on transwomen. I don't agree with what Julie Bindel said either (but to be fair, nor does she). I have no idea what Kate Smurthwaite's views on prostitution so I don;t know what I think about them but I do know that Milo Yiannopoulos is a horrible prick. And I'm very strongly pro-choice. For what that's worth, which isn't much.

But I also think that banning people from universities - universities, for Christ's sake - is counterproductive and the opposite of what universities should be. They should be safe spaces, yes, but safe spaces in which to hear and debate views we disagree with. It may be that some people would find the views expressed so upsetting that they would feel almost violated; then don't go. By banning these speakers, the views don't go away; it just makes them seem like martyrs.

Free speech isn't perfect. It's a horizon not a fixed position. No one believes that everyone should say whatever they are thinking at any moment. It's subtle; it's nuanced. Germaine Greer doesn't have a right to speak at Cardiff, but if she's legitimately and openly invited to speak, she should be heard by those who want to hear her. She's got decades more thinking, writing and campaigning than most of us and she's worth listening to, even if she's wrong. Because what's the worst that can happen?

Because let's say something about hate speech. Hate speech is not just mockery or disagreement. It must express and stir up hatred in the full meaning of the term. What Germaine Greer has said may offend you (it offends me a bit), but it's not hatred; it is not an act of violence; she is not whipping up people to hate or attack transwomen; she is not Hizb ut-Tahrir or the EDL; she is strongly expressing a view, however much you or I might agree. 

And now, of course I don't know what it's like to be a transwoman, but I'm trying to imagine what it must be like to grow up feeling that there is something profoundly dissonant about who you are and seem to be, to realise eventually that you feel you've been born into the wrong gendered body, fighting battles within yourself over what to do, having to find incredible resources of courage to fight incredible resources of fear, finding out, probably in secret, what medical options you have, steeling yourself to tell friends, family, colleagues that you are going to transition, putting yourself through a series of arduous and physically and emotionally traumatic procedures, coping with the terrifying midwayness of transition itself, learning to adjust to a changed body, making all growing up's mistakes again, coping with the multiply complicated responses of friends and strangers. Compared to that, coping with a few crass remarks by Germaine Greer has got to be a walk in the park.

Because the only way of making these views go away is engaging with them, debating with them, showing where they are wrong. Being able to defend your own views against people who disagree is a fundamental component of having serious opinions at all. If you have to shut  your eyes and cover your ears and lock your doors against your opponents, your opinions must be terribly fragile. And don't we honestly know, it's when our opinions are most fragile that we resort to closing down our opponents rather than engage with them?

And what's more, what if we're wrong? What I mean by this is: what if transwomen and women are different in some ethically/politically/cultural significant respect. Think of the politically transformative effect of 'queer' (gay people saying 'we are not just like heterosexuals') on the gay community. What if, after some time, as transexperiences become more common and everyone gets a chance to live with these new dynamics, some transpeople decide that they are not women, but something different - like, actually, the amazing Kate Bornstein has done. Are you going to tell them that they are guilty of hate speech and should not be allowed to speak in public? It is an act of monstrous historical arrogance to assume that we, in 2015, have simply got the right answers and therefore we should literally prevent anyone from challenging it. When has that ever been good? How different is that from the Inquisition showing Galileo the torture instruments to stop him arguing for a heliocentric universe?

And we shouldn't be afraid of debate. Remember when Nick Griffin went on Question Time. Lots of people were against it. I may have been nervous about it too; I honestly can't remember. But when he did go on, it put an end to the rise of the BNP. His bluster was apparent; the thinness of his ideas was obvious; he was a massively unpersuasive and unimpressive figure. Without that appearance, quite possibly, he would have continued to grow the BNP's support.

Yes, Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel and others offend you. I have probably offended someone writing this. But being offended is not a bad thing. If we try to ban being offended we are turning politics into a species of etiquette.

*****

As a postscript, let me say something else. This whole, 'no-platforming' debate has been an opportunity for the right to characterise the left as intolerant and authoritarian, wanting to restrict our freedoms from a position of holier-than-thou sanctimony. See here and here and here and here and here.

And what that does is draw attention away from the most powerful version of no-platforming in the last quarter-century. Margaret Thatcher and her followers tried to shut down a left analysis of the economy with their slogan 'There is No Alternative' (TINA). It's what Tory governments have done ever since, try to make it impossible for anyone to offer an opposing argument to their small-state, free-market, private-sector, competition-is-always-good ideology. Okay, no, it's not exactly the same thing but there are strong parallels. Note how rarely the Tories ever argue. Instead they just shut the left-wing speaker down. It's only a debate in the sense of the sixth-form common room debate, which is all bluster and ad hominem and smart-aleckisms. When have you ever heard George Osborne or David Cameron actually make a reasoned economically-literate case for austerity? Ever? They don't do it. They will not have the debate. They just smear and lie and shut down their opponents.

This most spectacularly happened in relation to the national debt; they have simply, unmistakably and wholly lied about it since 2010 and anyone who makes the - perfectly reasonable - case for public investment they smear as a 'deficit denier'. Anyone who tries to argue against welfare cuts, they ask 'where's the money going to come from' as if governments simply have no possible way to stimulate income. When Corbyn started riding high in the Labour leadership polls they said he'd 'drag us back to the eighties' (what? when the Tories were in power?); when he got elected, they insisted, without any explanation, that he would be 'a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family's security'. They pretended that he thought Osama bin Laden's death was a tragedy. They accused him of snubbing the Queen. They said he disrespected our armed forces for turning up to a Battle of Britain memorial and standing in dignified silence. There are no arguments here.

The economic arguments of the left have been 'no-platformed' since the early eighties. The reason why they are so aggressive towards Jeremy Corbyn is that here, for the first time in a generation, the debate is happening and they don't like it.

Eppur si muove.