Category Archives: Britain

Britain, Europe, Government, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

The stakes are high for any target Israel chooses

MIDDLE EAST

THE idiom that “revenge is best served cold” doesn’t apply in the Middle East, because retribution is delivered swift and white-hot.

For in this febrile part of the world, failure to respond to military aggression can be fatal. Enemies smell weaknesses and will readily strike again.

And so, following Iran’s unprecedented missile strike against Israel earlier this week in this rapidly unfolding conflict, it is no surprise that Israel is already planning revenge.

The fact that a seemingly large proportion of the 200 or so Iranian rockets fired were neutered by Israel’s famed “Iron Dome” is irrelevant. Israel will strike back. The question now is just what form that military response will take.  

There are three likely options for retaliation. First, and perhaps most dangerously, Israel may well seize this as an opportunity to strike at the heart of Iran’s nuclear bomb project. Although Iran does not yet have the Bomb, its nuclear programme is alarmingly well advanced. Israel has long believed Iran’s nuclear ambitions poses an existential threat to its security and existence.

Writing on social media, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett called this “the greatest opportunity in 50 years” to “destroy Iran’s nuclear programme”.

The most likely target for such an attack is the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre in the centre of Iran, 300km from the capital Tehran. Earlier this year, Israel bombed a nearby military site, a symbolic warning to its Islamist foe that it has the Isfahan centre in its sights.

It houses research reactors, a uranium conversion plant, and a fuel production base. It’s essential to Iran’s nuclear programme. A knock-out blow against this, or a similar facility, would certainly appease the hardliners in Benyamin Netanyahu’s government whose support the leader relies.

However, this strategy would mark a grave escalation in the conflict and poses the ugly risk of significant collateral damage and unintended consequences.

Such a strike could blast radioactive material into the air, unleashing a Chernobyl-style cloud of atomic pollution across the region. In the worst case, a strike on a reactor could even trigger a nuclear “chain reaction” – leading to widespread destruction reminiscent of the 1945 atomic strike on Hiroshima.

Israel must also consider that Iran’s mullahs may retaliate by spiking its future warheads with radioactive waste, creating “dirty bombs” that could have ramifications far wider than a regular missile – because even shot down by the Iron Dome the radioactivity would still disperse.

Another of Netanyahu’s options is that he could try to disrupt Iran’s military arsenals with smaller, localised strikes using its fleet of American F35 and F16 fighter jets. However, considering Iran boasts thousands of missiles and drones across the country this would not nullify the threat of a further strike by the mullahs similar to that seen this week.

Realistically, the most effective method of reprisal would be to attack command-and-control centres, the only places from which Iran can fire its long-range weaponry. Although these are buried deep underground and are incredibly well fortified, they will now be vulnerable to Isreal’s so-called “bunker-buster” bombs such as those used to assassinate the Hezbollah leader last week in Beirut.

There is, however, one further option, though fraught with danger – not just for the cauldron of the Middle East but for the world. If Israel really does intend to shake the foundations of the Iranian regime, rather than just give it a bloodied nose, it could choose to attack Kharg Island, Iran’s only oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf and the foundation of the Iranian economy and the mullahs’ riches.

If Israel does this, the price of oil will sky-rocket far beyond anything we saw during the early days of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Shia Iran will then likely retaliate – as it has vowed – by attacking oil infrastructure in Sunni Saudi Arabia, its enemy, with the goal of further disrupting the global oil supply. This would lead to a severe world shortage with inevitable energy rationing in Europe and the UK.

So far, Israel’s political allies – notably the US and the UK – have stood strong with Netanyahu. But if Israel upsets global energy supplies, international support could rapidly dissipate.

There’s a cruel irony to all this. Because if Israel does strike Iran’s oil industry, Europe could even face the ignominy of going cap in hand to purchase Russian oil – albeit through proxies and intermediaries.

Netanyahu and his war cabinet must choose their next move very carefully indeed.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Labour will be judged on deeds not words

LABOUR PARTY

THE CHANCELLOR, Rachel Reeves, with a rictus smile glued to her face at the Labour Party conference this week has sought to change the government’s central message from one of unremitting gloom to one of hope.

After weeks of relentless negativity over alleged black holes, broken Britain and “tough decisions” ahead, the Chancellor has laid out her vision for the promised land to come.

No one could argue with most of it. Who wouldn’t want a fairer society, great public services, better schools, higher growth, and a strong economy? However, Ms Reeves offered no discernible strategy for achieving these admirable goals. Nor did she touch on the price we will all have to pay.

Many will be surprised to hear her say there would be “no return to austerity”.

For millions of pensioners stripped of their winter fuel allowance it has already arrived and the Budget on October 30 is expected to be an assault on the finances of middle Britain.

The Chancellor claims she will not raise taxes on “working people” but what does that mean? Does she include those who have worked all their lives but are now retired? Those whose efforts and talents put them in the higher tax brackets? Entrepreneurs? Savers?

More likely she will deliver selective austerity, in which the private sector will be fleeced to ratchet up the pay and pensions of state employees.

The process has already begun with inflation-busting wage increases across the public sector which, incidentally, account for around half of the £22billion black hole supposedly left by the previous Tory government.

There will be a crackdown on welfare, fraud, and worklessness. The Government has said it will make special provisions in law for the most vulnerable.

The Trade Unions, far from being grateful, are ravenous for more. RMT chief Mick Lynch is demanding nothing less than “the complete organisation of the UK economy by trade unions”.

Mr Lynch wants to sweep away the Thatcher reforms and make it easier to shutdown workplaces and even entire industries if employers fail to meet demands on pay and conditions. Welcome back to the 1970s.

Other unions are coming in hard and fast. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said the recent 5.5 per cent pay award for nurses in England was not enough and must be improved.

By giving train drivers 15 per cent and junior doctors south of the Border 22 per cent, Ms Reeves has begun a wage spiral which could strangle any hope of economic growth.

Hardened by years of industrial trench warfare with the Tories, union barons are not about to bow down to a weak and inexperienced Labour government. On the contrary, they believe they can control it.

The constant talking down of the economy is having baleful effects. It is now hard fact that UK businesses are freezing both vital investment and the hiring of staff ahead of the Budget. There is an alarming collapse in business confidence.

Ms Reeves has said this would be “the most pro-business government we have ever seen”. But with the constant negativity and parlous state of the UK economy why would anyone invest in a country when its Chancellor has been saying for weeks that it is effectively a basket case?

This speech was an attempt to inject some positivity into the Labour narrative, but she will be judged by her deeds, not her words.

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