Category Archives: British Politics

Rupert Murdoch: Befuddled old man, or willful blindness?

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Stockholders in News Corporation ought to be worried. On the evidence of his appearance before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee yesterday, Rupert Murdoch is preparing a defence against any potential charge of “willful blindness” by presenting himself as a befuddled old man. He sat motionless and unawares during the shaving-foam assault on him towards the end of proceedings, it was up to Wendi Deng and an un-named woman to spring to his defence and wipe him clean afterwards, but in the three hours prior to that he had shown an equal degree of mental torpor.

The willful blindness charge matters a great deal, that’s why he needs to avoid it at all costs. It applies when executives try to deny responsibility for errors or illegal activity by their subordinates by claiming they didn’t know about it. That defence fails if it can be shown that they ought to have known but kept themselves in the dark or saw to it they were kept in the dark. The only other plea in that situation is insanity.

Some selected questions and answers from the Hearing to illustrate:

Louise Mensch MP: You are ultimately in charge of the company. Given your shock at these things being laid out before you and the fact that you didn’t know anything about them, have you instructed your editors around the world to engage in a root-and-branch review of their own news rooms to be sure that this isn’t being replicated in other News Corps papers around the globe? If not, will you do so?
Rupert Murdoch: No, but I am more than prepared to do so.

It seems incredible to me that being aware of how serious the situation is he hasn’t already launched an enquiry, but even more, when fed a leading question he still doesn’t announce that he will have an enquiry only that he is prepared to do so.

Louise Mensch MP: It is a much bigger ship, but you are in charge of it. As you said in earlier questions, you do not regard yourself as a hands-off Chief Executive; you work 10 to 12 hours a day. This terrible thing happened on your watch. Mr Murdoch, have you considered resigning?
Rupert Murdoch: No.
Louise Mensch MP: Why not?
Rupert Murdoch: Because I feel that people I trusted I am not saying who, and I don’t know what level have let me down. I think that they behaved disgracefully and betrayed the company and me, and it is for them to pay. Frankly, I think that I am the best person to clean this up.

Ms Mensch should have followed this up by asking “What will you do to clean this up?” but she did not, despite his acknowledgement that people he trusted have behaved disgracefully and betrayed the company. He knows people have lied to him or his subordinates, yet he shows no interest and has taken no steps to finding out who they are. The same line again in response to an earlier question from Tom Watson MP:

Tom Watson MP: If it can be shown to you that private investigators working for newspapers in News International used other forms of illicit surveillance like computer hacking, would you immediately introduce another investigation?
Rupert Murdoch: That would be up to the police, but we would certainly work with the police. If they wanted us to do it, we would do it. If they wanted to do it, they would do it.

A pattern emerged at the Hearing of Rupert Murdoch consistently failing to find out when he ought to have been finding out.

The track record of News Corp’s cooperation with the police is not good either. Leaving aside accusations that they were bribing members of the Metropolitan Police for information, and that they had a too-close relationship with some seniors officers, Keith Vaz, Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee which is also investigating the phone hacking scandal has said, “…there has been a deliberate attempt by News International to thwart investigations…” Therefore, Rupert Murdoch’s assurance that they will work with the police cannot be taken at face value.

Furthermore, any reasonable person would think that someone in Rupert Murdoch’s position would order a thorough investigation immediately upon hearing about these allegations and without waiting for the police to launch a criminal enquiry. The scale of some of the out-of-court settlements which bought the silence of some News of the World victims, and the interference with some of the evidence by senior News of the World executives points to a culture of denial and cover-up. Did that culture extend all the way up to the top of News Corp?

Rupert Murdoch is in an invidious position. If he really is a befuddled old man from who other people were keeping the truth, then he isn’t a fit and proper person to be running such a large organisation. If on the other hand he is a fit and proper person to be running the show, he cannot deny responsibility for his failings.

Defence Select Committee report on operations in Afghanistan

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We’ve read over the last few years some pretty alarming reports in the press about the state of operations in Afghanistan, now we can read an authoritative report from Parliament which has had access to all the relevant papers and interviewed people involved at the highest level. It is a horrifying report.

The Select Committee writes:

“It is unacceptable that UK Forces were deployed in Helmand for three years from 2006 without the necessary personnel, equipment or intelligence to succeed in their mission, says the Defence Committee in its report on Operations in Afghanistan.”

“The Committee is disturbed by the fact that in 2006 the Secretary of State was being told that commanders on the ground were content with the support they were being given in Helmand when clearly they were not.”

Summary of the report

Index to the full report

Here are some further points about what the report says, distilled from an article in the Telegraph:

  • The key failing was to send too small a force into Helmand.
  • The report also criticises senior commanders for sending the task force into Helmand without a strategic reserve force – a move widely regarded as a fundamental and potentially catastrophic military mistake.
  • Troop numbers were capped at 3,150. Of those, around 650 combat troops were deployed into an area half the size of the UK; by contrast, in 2001 NATO had 30,000 personnel in Helmand.
  • The task force deployed with just five Chinooks (heavy-lift helicopters) and just over half the number of vehicles required. Defence chiefs told ministers they had enough helicopters in Helmand even though field commanders complained of shortages. It was deployed without a single vehicle capable of surviving a strike from a Russian anti-tank mine or larger IEDs.
  • The lack of armoured vehicles meant convoys could not safely travel the vast distances over which troops were spread without sustaining heavy casualties, and within weeks of their arrival, British troops were trapped in isolated locations and engaged in daily battles.
  • The 75-page report does not name officers but those in positions of authority at the time included Gen Sir Mike Walker, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, Gen Sir Mike Jackson and Gen Sir Richard Dannatt.

The full article in the Telegraph

My own view is that none of this comes as a surprise. We read all about this as it was happening, but it still comes as a shock to see our worst suspicions confirmed and to see how little the reality on the ground affected those at the Ministry of Defence whose incompetence created the shambles in the first place, and whose only response seems to have been to tell lies and cover it all up. As the Telegraph observes, the report names no names, but the four four-star officers named above presided over a monumental military cock-up that has cost 370 lives and counting, and more than 2000 wounded.

Surely there has to be some accounting for their conduct? Just how incompetent do you have to be to lose out on another promotion? Just how negligent do you have to be to lose out on another appearance in the Honours List?  Just how many servicemen do you have to kill before you lose your job?

Dishonouring the Dead

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Air Marshal Sir John Day and Air Chief Marshall Sir William Wratten should hang their heads in shame.

The respect in which our Service men and women are held by the public at large is quite remarkable. Royal Wootten Bassett earned the gratitude of the nation and its “Royal” title because of the touching acts of respect residents showed to the fallen returning from Afghanistan, whose hearses by chance used to pass through their quiet town. The contempt in which the Ministry of Defence is held is equally remarkable. The MOD is an institution which has under-performed in spectacular style and has displayed gross incompetence, deceitfulness, and petty bickering on a staggering scale. It deals in denial, cover-up and blame shifting.

In 1994, an RAF Chinook helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, killing the crew of four and all twenty five passengers. It was described as “the largest peace time tragedy that the Royal Air Force had suffered”. The cause of the crash could not be determined by the Air Accident Investigation Branch, nor by an RAF Board of Inquiry who did not find the pilots, Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook, negligent. Nor was negligence found by the civilian Fatal Accident Enquiry. This was because there was no evidence that they were.

The RAF Manual of Flight Safety AP 3207 published by the Inspectorate of Flight Safety and in force at the time of the accident provided in paragraph 9 of Annex G to Chapter 8 that “only in cases in which there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever should deceased air crew be found negligent”.

This strict rule did not trouble the AOC 1 Group and the C-in-C Strike Command, both of whom were required to give a final review of the Board of Inquiry into the crash. Despite there being no facts to support him, AVM Day concluded that both pilots were negligent to a gross degree and ACM William Wratten agreed with him.

What is known is that the Chinook was a deeply troubled aircraft with a history of mysterious faults that would show up during flight but be untraceable on later inspection. A report two years previous to the crash had cast doubt on the airworthiness of the Chinook fleet. And a House of Lords Select Committee which also investigated the crash in 2002 covered all this in great depth and included this telling account in their report:

Witness A, who was a member of the Special Forces Flight with considerable experience of flying Chinooks operationally, had, at the time of the accident, experienced intermittent engine fail captions on a reasonably regular basis. He had subsequently experienced torque mismatches on an intermittent basis. Pilots were instructed that if the failed captions remained on for more than 12 seconds they were to be treated as though something was wrong with the engine but if they stayed on for less than that time they could be ignored. When a caption came on in flight one of the crew was directed to check engine instrumentation and the engine itself.

Witness A also had personal experience of UFCMs in Chinook Mk1s. In one case over a period of days an aircraft bounced vertically every time it was turned right. Repeated unsuccessful attempts were made to find the cause and the problem eventually disappeared of its own accord. In another case in daylight the lights came on to maximum intensity, dimmed to minimum and the hydraulic gauges cycled between zero and maximum. The pilot reported that the aircraft was becoming difficult to control and Witness A ordered him to land at the first available opportunity. The subsequent engineering investigation found no fault.

In answer to a question as to how much the unforeseen malfunctions occurring in the Chinook Mk2 since its introduction were a matter of discussion among helicopter pilots, he answered,

“They occupied our minds to a great degree, crew room talk was of little else at the time. The crews felt extremely uneasy about the way the aircraft had been introduced into service. This perception was reinforced by the lack of information contained in the aircrew manual, the poor state of repair of the flight reference cards and such like as well”

The full report can be read here.

In all these years the MOD have maintained the line that the crash was caused by the gross negligence of the pilots when there is no evidence whatsoever to support that line, and plenty of evidence to suggest a failure on the aircraft may have been the cause.

The MOD in this matter have displayed every aberrant behaviour that has earned it the contempt of the public, but Day and Wratten plumbed new depths in blaming two hapless pilots in order to deflect criticism from the MOD.

Defence Reform: A welcome report from Lord Levene

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I have to say I am very impressed with the Defence Reform report produced by Lord Levene and his team. It can be downloaded and read in full here. It is a report that examines the way the MOD is managed, rather than the usual report that looks only at how many ships, tanks and planes we think we need. They have consulted with a commendably wide range of informed sources both within the MOD of course, but externally as well including with foreign defence departments, academics, think tanks, even trade unions, and also including some of the MOD’s staunchest critics.

However I have a few bones of contention with the report.

My first concern is the time scale over which they envisage reforms taking place. It is far too long. They recommend that a Defence Reform Steering Group should reconvene on an annual basis for the next three years. The urgency of the situation surely dictates that they should reconvene quarterly for the next twelve months. Potentially disastrous decisions are already being taken and more will be taken before the reforms are in place. The harm that is being done must be minimised so we need to end the old way of doing business and have the new model established as a matter of urgency. The most ambitious time scale must be adopted.

That leads me to my second concern.

There is deep and widespread criticism of the SDSR. This is a plan that has been put together by what most commentators agree is a dysfunctional organisation that has made catastrophically bad decisions all of which this report acknowledges. Why on earth is the discredited SDSR still being implemented? It is the product of bitter inter-Service rivalry and a lack of strategic thought. It must be halted immediately, and any decisions that irrevocably removes military capabilities must be reversed. Nothing should happen until the newly reformed MOD is up and running and can make its own decisions based on a rational appraisal of balanced military need. A new SDSR should be drawn up within a year of the reforms being completed.

My third concern is about money.

The drive for reform is made critical because of the calamitous mismanagement of the economy by Labour during their thirteen years in power. The country is broke, and Defence is broker if I can put it that way. The discovery of a ten billion pound black hole in the Defence budget merely adds to the sense of disgust. But it is not feasible for an organisation to build a new structure while burdened with the costs of the old. If the new structure is to be trimmed to suit what little is left in the budget, it is doomed to start off in a state of crisis from which it may never recover. This point was not addressed in the report, despite many recommendations that have cost implications. If the coalition government is serious about Defence, it needs to ensure it is viable. Colossal sums of money were made available at the drop of a hat to bail out the financial sector, something of far less importance. Defence only needs a fraction of that amount to help it get through this crisis and it should be given that bail-out.

Which leads to my fourth concern.

Punish the guilty. No one can read the litany of incompetence and downright deceitfulness that has characterised the Labour government in general and the management of the Ministry of Defence in particular and not be angry. Yet all those involved have gone on to receive honours and accolades when, with the example of the House of Commons expenses scandal fresh in our minds, some of them should be going to jail. I would like to see another team formed to investigate every decision and assess the culpability of all those involved. It is clear, even at a cursory examination, that the best interests of the country were not being served by those appointed to positions of trust. Subverting the Defence of the Realm must still be an offence whatever the motives and the guilty should be identified and prosecuted. At the very least, contracts must be cancelled where there has been improper conduct or they have been unlawfully signed.

Does it matter whether Aung San Suu Kyi likes us or not?

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When John Simpson interviewed Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi last November, the most striking thing about her was her English accent. It was very old-school received pronunciation, exactly what one used to hear on the BBC World Service years ago, all prim and proper. She explained to him at the time that she listened to the BBC a lot while she was under house arrest, and she elaborated on the topic in the Telegraph yesterday. According to Aung San Suu Kyi: my love for the Hairy Cornflake, she particularly enjoyed listening to music which, she laments, is not often heard on the service any more.

The reason for that, I suspect, and for the timing of the interview, becomes clearer with today’s story: BBC World Service receives £2.2m funding boost. The World Service has been subjected to a massive 16% budget cut, on top of many cutbacks in services over the years. One such cut, I would guess, is to play less music and pay less in royalties which would be why Ms Suu Kyi can’t hear any any more. As well as cutting expenditure, the World Service is also cutting its workforce by a whopping 25% and dropping still more language services. All of this is deeply depressing. But it must be good news that William Hague has found £2.2 million to give a boost to the World Service, surely? Not really. A 16% cut on a budget of £270 million is £43.2 million. Giving the corporation £2.2 million back still leaves it £41 million down. That £2.2 million is much less than 1%. It’s chicken feed.

When I lived in Germany, I used to listen to the World Service regularly, it was my strongest link back to England. Ex-pats are inordinately attached to the traditions of their native land and I can still hear Lillibullero, that jaunty, bouncing melody that introduced the news at One o-clock each day with more than a twinge of nostalgia. Not parochial news from and about England, but truly world news, events that were shaping the world we lived in that most of my compatriots back home would be blissfully ignorant of. You can hear the tune here.

What the World Service does for us and our standing in the world is enormous, but the benefits are all intangibles. And that’s a problem in this balance-sheet driven world; the World Service doesn’t make a profit for us. Last year there were 188 million listeners and audiences in Persian, Urdu and Arabic are increasing. What built it’s reputation is that from the start the news was written and presented by serious journalists, the best in the business for objectivity, it wasn’t “British propaganda”, it was honest and unbiased news reportage. Listeners across the world, particularly in oppressed states, could tune in to hear the news in their own language about what was going on in their own country. They did not have to believe what their rulers were telling them.

In an age when Facebook and Twitter can be used to stir revolution, the BBC World Service is still a significant force for good. So does it matter that Aung San Suu Kyi likes us? With respect, no. It’s good that she shares values with us, but what matters more is that dictators the world over don’t like us because we are able to talk directly to their people and tell them the truth.

Isn’t truth supposed to be mightier than the sword?

£25 Billion Bail-out for Britain’s Military

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The government announced a £500 billion bail-out for Britain’s banking system in October 2008, extended with a further £50 billion in January 2009.

We need to do something equally urgent and equally dramatic about our defence forces because they are in serious peril. We need a bail-out to give immediate relief from the demands for cutbacks, to cover the added expenditure of unplanned operations called for by the government, to halt the scrapping of vitally needed weapons systems, and especially, to stop the redundancies.

I know there isn’t an area of government where deep cuts are massively unpopular and often demonstrably harmful. I know that. Yet because of the disaster that was thirteen years of New Labour profligacy, coupled with crass incompetence, those deep cuts must be made and if anything, made deeper.

But defence is a special case because we’re at war right now and calling on the army, navy and air force to deliver above and beyond the call of duty on two fronts. They are already suffering the ill-effects of previous cutbacks and the catastrophic mismanagement at the Ministry of Defence over the last couple of decades. They can’t take it any more.

We were the nation that could launch an armada at 48 hours notice to sail eight thousand miles to the south Atlantic and liberate the Falkland Islands, and do that against an enemy operating close to their homeland, equipped with modern weapons and with ample time to prepare their defences. We were the nation that was second only to the military might of the USA when liberating Kuwait from Sadaam Hussein as a key player in a multi-national alliance. We are not that nation any more.

The shambles of procurement means that new weapon systems are delivered late and massively over budget. Some are only run to completion because the cost of cancellation was prohibitively high thanks to penalty clauses. Who was in charge when such contracts were signed? How was this allowed to happen? Other contacts, presumably without penalties to protect them, are cancelled leaving us without vital operational capability.

I applaud those senior officers who are now speaking out about the strain the operations over Libya in particular are causing, on top of the climate of cutbacks and uncertainties in general.

Here is a very depressing speech given by Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham (retired). It’s depressing because it confirms from first-hand knowledge what we have suspected all along. Here’s one point he makes: “We are used to the comforting and rather romantic thought that our forces are world class, and that we are military leaders in Europe. I believe this is no longer the case. As just one piece of evidence the French, now indubitably the leading European military power, have flown three times as many sorties in Libya as the RAF.” And even that level is unsustainable.

There may be hope on the horizon if Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary can bring about the degree of organisational restructuring that is needed, here’s his business plan.

We must also hope that The Defence Reform Unit under Lord Levene will also propose meaningful reforms. Unfortunately, it’s not clear who they are taking their advice from and there is very little to be discovered in the public domain, here’s an introduction on the MoD web site.

Clearly they must have a period of open consultation where experienced and reform-minded individuals can tell them in no uncertain terms what is needed, otherwise they’ll only get their input from the vested interests who are already in the MoD. I can’t see anywhere that says they will do this, and they are due to report by the end of July – in a few weeks time – so someone needs to rattle their cage. Here’s my shortlist of who they ought to invite to talk to them: Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Beverley, Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham, Major General Sir Patrick Cordingley, Major General Julian Thompson, Air Commodore Andrew Lambert, Colonel Tim Collins, Commander John Muxworthy, Antony Hitchens, Allen Sykes, Andy Smith.

We must have serious reforms in place to justify the bail-out. We must have that bail-out.

A Lesson for Teacher

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When you walk into your classroom, pause for a moment and look around.

Those eager young faces are your pension fund.

You see, a pension fund is not some bottomless pot of money created by government magic, it is actual cash that has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your pupils when they are old enough to get a job. In the meantime, they depend on you for an education.

Except you’re going on strike.

You are disadvantaging the very people who will pay your pension when you retire.

That’s not clever.

I suggest instead of striking you work harder to give them a better education so they can get better jobs and create more wealth for the economy, because it’s how wealthy the economy is that determines how much pension you get.

Right now the economy has tanked and everyone is struggling.

So if you’ve been in education a long time you haven’t done a very good job, have you?

Otherwise we would have a bright, well educated workforce and we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

But you think going on strike will improve matters.

See me after school.

How to build a ship: The State does it, or Private Enterprise does it

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Way back in 1998, the Ministry of Defence decided it needed new aircraft carriers and announced a competition amongst defence contractors. In 2003, they announced a winner, and in 2007 they signed a contract worth £3.9 billion for two vessels. As of mid-2011 they are expected to cost £5 billion (widely regarded as a gross underestimate) and the first carrier will not enter service until 2020. It will not have any aircraft. When the second carrier is ready for service, the first will be sold or moth-balled. The carriers will be 932 feet long, and will displace 65,600 metric tons.

Five days ago, the US Navy announced the name of a new aircraft carrier it was building, the USS John F Kennedy. Construction had already begun in early 2011 and it is to enter service in 2018. It will be longer (1092 feet) and heavier (101,600 tons displacement) than the Royal Navy carriers, will carry 75 aircraft, and cost an estimated $10.2 billion. The US Navy currently has eleven carriers.

Today, P&O Cruises announced they are to build a new luxury cruise liner. It too will be longer (1082 feet) and substantially heavier (154,407 tons gross) than the Royal Navy carriers, will carry the same number of aircraft as HMS Queen Elizabeth (ie none), will be in service in 2015, and will cost £500 million.

So private enterprise can build a bigger, better ship at a fraction of the price and have it at sea sooner. If we had given P&O the job at the outset we’d have two carriers off Libya right now making a useful contribution to our campaign, and have a lot more money in the coffers.

The Royal Navy's new luxury cruise liner

One of Our Aircraft is Over-Budget, or, the Modern Ministry of Defence

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Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is a work of genius. His description of the absurdities of petty military bureaucracy are devastatingly accurate and despite the humour, frightening, because anyone who’s been in the forces knows it’s all too real. When you combine it with the Peter Principle that tells us everyone rises to their level of incompetence, we begin to get a picture of what life must be like at the highest levels of the Ministry of Defence.

For most of its time in office, the Labour government appointed ministers of breathtaking incompetence to run the department. They in turn favoured admirals, generals, and air marshals who spoke the same language, that is, when they spoke at all. How else do we explain the shambles that we have today, with front-line troops fighting a hot war while badly equipped and about to bear the brunt of the economic cutbacks? Our military capability is tiny and becoming miniscule.

I would like to imagine how a conversation might have gone between Wing Commander Guy Gibson and whoever his boss was following the successful Dam Buster mission. I say “whoever his boss was” because I’m certain ‘Bomber’ Harris would never have survived in the kind of climate we have in the modern Ministry of Defence.

I think it would have gone something like this:

HQ: Gibson, HQ here, do you hear me, Old Boy? Over.

Gibson: Loud and clear, HQ, over.

HQ: Good show on the dams. Pass on our congratulations to your crew.

Gibson: Thank you Sir, they will appreciate that.

HQ: Now, here’s the thing, Gibson. Now that there are no dams to attack, we’re rather over-manned in the dam-busting role.

Gibson: I see Sir.

HQ: So what we need you to do is find the nearest airfield, and land your plane there.

Gibson: But they’re all enemy-held airfields over here Sir.

HQ: Well that’ll be more mouths for them to feed, eh? Ha ha.

Gibson: But don’t you want us to come back Sir?

HQ: No. Do not come back Gibson, we don’t need you any more.

Gibson: But we could re-train Sir?

HQ: Not on Old Boy, we got rid of training in the last round of cutbacks.

Gibson: There must be something we could do Sir, they might rebuild the dams or something?

HQ: No, we’ve thought about that, they won’t and there’s no point maintaining capabilities we don’t need. There is a war on, you know.

Gibson: But what do I tell my crew?

HQ: Tell them these are difficult times for the economy and we must all share the pain.

Gibson: Can’t we make some economies at HQ instead Sir? Cut back on some of the back office staff?

HQ: Really, Gibson, I’m surprised at you. We at HQ are going to have to work much harder to manage the same number of operations with fewer front-line staff. I myself am having to accept a pay rise to reflect the added responsibility. I don’t want it, but we don’t all get what we want in these situations, Gibson, and don’t you forget it.

Gibson: I’m sorry Sir, I don’t know what came over me.

HQ: So just go ahead and land your plane, and hand yourselves over to the enemy, there’s a good chap.

Gibson: As you wish, Sir.

HQ: And with any luck, you’ll have that plane paid-off by the time the war’s over.

Gibson: Excuse me, Sir?

HQ: Well, we’ll deduct the least amount we can from your wages, but you’ll have to pay for the plane you’re not bringing back.

Gibson: But it’s not my choice not to bring it back, you’ve ordered me not to!

HQ: We can’t make an exception for you, Gibson, or there would be no incentive for the other crews to bring their planes back.

Gibson: They don’t need an incentive to bring their planes back, Sir, they will do anything they can to defend their country.

HQ: Now Gibson, that’s just silly talk. Do you think we at HQ would put in the hours that we do, working until almost gone 5 o’clock, the endless committee meetings – with no biscuits I might add, all those important papers to read, if we weren’t incentivised? Reports don’t just write themselves, you know. Everyone needs incentives.

Gibson: But the Nazis don’t.

HQ: Exactly, do you want us to all end up like them? That’s what this war is all about and that’s why we need incentives.

Gibson: Very well Sir, I’ll crash-land the plane forthwith.

HQ: Good show, Gibson.

Gibson: Thank you, Sir.

HQ: By the way, Gibson.

Gibson: Yes, Sir?

HQ: We’re going to award you a Victoria Cross.

Gibson: That’s very kind of you, Sir.

HQ: It’s the least we can do. I’ll deduct the cost from your salary of course, but would you like it presented by the King?

Gibson: How much extra would that be, Sir?

HQ: Now you’re getting the idea, Gibson.

One Swallow Does Not An [Arab] Spring Make

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Forgive me for injecting a note of realism, but as much as Western leaders seem in thrall to the prospect of democracy sweeping the Arab world, I am filled with dread at what the future holds. There is much heady talk of the benefits of the Arab Spring, from drastically reduced numbers of refugees fleeing repressive regimes, to a welcome boost to global trade as free enterprise takes off across the region, as well as genuine pleasure on behalf of the soon-to-be-liberated masses and the happiness in store for them. If only.

History tells us it will be different. In too many cases, sweeping away a despotic regime has resulted in a long period of turmoil at least, and bitter civil war at worst. The stages are clearly defined: a population lives under the thumb of a ruthless regime; the regime is removed, peacefully or otherwise, with or without external help; then after a brief honeymoon period they descend into factional fighting over the future of their newly liberated country. It is sometimes a long and painful period before peace arrives.

The scars have barely started to heal in the Balkans after Marshal Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart, giving us the most graphic example of this process from recent times. Within a decade of his demise, we saw vicious intercommunal wars and the spectre of ethnic cleansing, leading to the fracturing of the country into smaller independent states. So bad were the atrocities, there and in Rwanda, that the international community was moved to establish a criminal court to pursue justice for those who suffered. (Update: Ratko Mladic, accused of orchestrating the Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, has just been arrested. Daily Telegraph, May 26, 2011)

We saw the same pattern in Iraq. Bush and Blair led us into war to remove Saddam Hussein and liberate the Iraqi people. Once liberated, Iraq descended into bitter sectarian conflict stoked by al-Qaeda and Iran. Only now is a truly democratic government beginning to take shape, after countless billions of US dollars expended, thousands of US and allied lives lost, and untold thousands of civilian deaths. Bush was blamed for not having a post-Saddam strategy, we must not make the same mistake again.

But it looks like we are making the same mistake again.

The Egyptian people threw President Mubarek out of office in an amazingly peaceful revolution, however, the cracks are already showing and sectarian violence is rearing its head. What can the West do to prevent an all-out civil war? We already have a particularly bloody civil war taking place in Libya where Colonel Gaddafi is clinging to power by turning his heavily-armed army against what at first was an unarmed civilian population. Charges of war crimes have been filed against him at the International Criminal Court, as they have also against President Assad of Syria who has turned his security forces against his own population. Similar upheavals are taking place elsewhere, in Yemen, and in Iran where the Green Revolution was ruthlessly crushed. Some of the Gulf states too are simmering with discontent.

When you look across the region as a whole, calling it an “Arab Spring” is perhaps naive.

Instead of patronising words, the West needs a strategy for helping the Arab world transition from dictatorship to democracy and fending off those forces that would destabilise it. In other words, we need a Marshall Plan for the Arab world. We need clear goals, and a clear process for achieving those goals.

What we don’t need is to clumsily stitch this together with the Israeli/Palestinian problem and I believe that President Obama is seriously mistaken in trying to do that. The problem, the imperative and the solution are entirely different. Leaving aside Gaza which has its own added complications, both sides already have functioning democracies; both sides are – off and on – engaging in peaceful discussion; neither side is ruled by a dictatorship. The occasional outbreaks of violence are triggered more by outside agents and causes than from within the two sides. Any updated Marshall Plan for the Arab world which aims to facilitate peaceful change, promote democracy and encourage free enterprise is not going to be relevant to Israel and the Palestinians, and including them will simply complicate the matter and alienate the rest of the Middle East.