Category Archives: United States

Britain, Government, Islamic State, National Security, Politics, Society, Syria, United States

Victory against ISIL can’t mask the incoherent approach in Syria

THE DEFEAT OF ISIL

Intro: The defeat of ISIL has become a cause for celebration, but there are hard security lessons to be learnt as well

FOR those who have participated in the challenging mission to destroy Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) deserve richly awarded plaudits. In the summer of 2014, when ISIL seized control of vast swathes of territory in northern Syria and Iraq to establish its so-called caliphate, removing the fanatical zealots from well-entrenched positions in places like Mosul and Raqqa looked to be a nigh impossible task. At its zenith, ISIL’s caliphate occupied an area approximately the same size as Portugal and controlled the fate of around 10 million people.

Thanks to the relentless efforts of the US-led coalition, ISIL’s empire now consists of little more than a square kilometre of desert scrub on the Syria-Iraq border. ISIL’s barbarous reign of terror is effectively over.

In strictly military terms, the coalition has achieved its stated objectives. With ISIL no longer able to terrorise those living under its control, nor in a position to spread the twisted propaganda that persuaded so many young impressionable Muslims (in Britain and elsewhere) to join the jihadi cause, there is genuine cause for celebration that this brutal death cult is on the verge of annihilation.

It can even be argued, as the former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon has said, that in prosecuting the ISIL campaign the Western powers have finally found a workable paradigm for implementing military interventions in the Muslim world.

In this instance, the coalition has relied more on the judicious use of air power and special forces to achieve its goal, rather than resorting to the deployment of large-scale, and politically controversial, ground forces, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet, before becoming too carried away with the success of the anti-ISIL mission, it is worth remembering that our initial involvement in the Syrian conflict was aimed at destroying an entirely different foe.

Back in 2011, the primary aim of the US and Britain, the two Western powers that have been most heavily invested in the Syrian tragedy, was the overthrow of tyrant and dictator President Bashar al-Assad, whose minority Alawite clan has run the country since 1971.

It is hard to believe now, but former prime minister David Cameron even signed a joint declaration with the then US president Barack Obama in the summer of 2011 calling for Assad to step aside, arguing that he should “face the reality of the complete rejection of his regime by the Syrian people”.

Mr Cameron’s briefly held enthusiasm for securing regime change in Damascus ended when he lost the 2013 Commons vote to launch military action against Assad over accusations the regime has used chemical weapons on civilians.

And, pertinently, given the way the conflict subsequently developed, Cameron and his anti-Assad acolytes had a fortuitous and lucky escape. For, had they succeeded in overthrowing Assad, the fall of the Syrian government might well have resulted in ISIL taking control of the entire country, rather than confining their Islamo-fascist creed to the less populous northern districts.

It was, after all, the very real prospect of ISIL and its Islamist allies seizing control of Syria in the summer of 2014 that persuaded Iran and Russia to come to the aid of the Assad regime, thereby helping to turn the tide of the war decisively in the dictator’s favour.

So much so that these days the British and American governments accept Assad’s survival as a fait accompli, to the extent that neither country has shown the slightest interest in attending the talks aimed at deciding Syria’s post-conflict future.

Hence, the lesson of the West’s inchoate handling of the Syrian conflict is that, rather than celebrating the demise of ISIL’s caliphate, politicians would be better advised to reflect on their incoherent and muddled approach over the past decade, one that, had events taken a different course, could easily have resulted in the establishment of an uncompromising Islamist regime in Damascus.

That is certainly not the outcome Britain and its allies imagined at the start of the conflict, when they manged to convince themselves that the overthrow of Assad’s regime would result in its replacement by a secular-orientated, Western-style democracy.

Given that Islamist extremists have been Assad’s most committed opponents since the early 1980s, this was wishful thinking in the extreme, and the reason why, when considering any future military intervention in the Middle East (or anywhere else for that matter), it is vital that our parliamentarians properly examine the likely consequences of their actions.

All too often in the recent past we have got ourselves involved in conflicts without fully grasping the possible outcomes. A good benchmark would be to give priority to those threats that directly impinge on our own national security.

On that basis, destroying ISIL – a movement committed to carrying out terror attacks in Britain – always made much more sense than seeking to overthrow the Assad regime.

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Arts, Films, United States

Film Review: Vice (15)

REVIEW

VICE, appropriately named, tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.

The film, which is written by Adam McKay, makes no secret of his own motivational objective. It stems from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising given his bias which runs from the first minute of this film to the last.

Whether you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet is another question entirely. For pure malignancy, Vice makes the present incumbent of the White House look like Forrest Gump. But it must be said he presents it very entertainingly.

Film critics would have noted that McKay deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. He delivers jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to the camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, only to be revealed in a late here-I-am kind of flourish.

It’s almost as if the director, and his editor, Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wholly wrong to categorise them as one-trick ponies; they have dozens of production tricks.

If the viewer can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award for his remarkable lead performances. He renders himself almost unrecognisable and nails Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.

Gary Oldman won the Academy Award last year for his role as Winston Churchill, but he didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale does Cheney (both physically and temperamentally).

As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

In the years since her breakthrough movie in 2002, Catch Me If You Can, Adams has acquired the acting adroitness in playing Lynne Cheney who is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to local folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.

How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit”, is the film’s narrative.

 

IT BEGINS in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.

They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). One of the fascinations of this film is the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.

After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the more shrewder and Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs the highest – with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a rather ludicrous – if not hilarious – scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.

Cheney’s appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever and astute enough never to look or give the image of being greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated) invites him to become his running mate – “a nothing job,” snorts Lynne – he plays hard to get. He insists he’s happy running an oil company.

Eventually, he says he’ll do it on the proviso that he takes some of the more “mundane” jobs such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy. McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.

Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He even has the pretence to turn the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.

McKay’ political bias is adept enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: “I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.”

I doubt it will come as no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice when the Oscar nominees gather in Hollywood, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release in December, to see the film flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.

The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is an emphatic no.

Verdict: Left-leaning political bias, but well delivered.

★★★★

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, United States

Book Review: Lords Of The Desert

REVIEW

Traditional and conventional wisdom has it that after 1945 Soviet Russia swiftly became Britain’s most deadly foe, while our great ally was the United States.

But this orthodox version of history is now in urgent need of reassessment according to James Barr’s magnificently researched new book. He demonstrates that the U.S. was just as determined, if not more so, to destroy Britain’s global power and influence as Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

The United States wanted to establish itself as the new global hegemon. According to Barr, this meant subverting Britain at every turn and, as the author shows, was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. He infers that, while Britain had an official enemy in the shape of Russia, it had, too, a much more insidious and unofficial enemy in the U.S.

This process culminated in Britain’s total humiliation when the United States pulled the plug on Britain’s failed attempt to seize back the Suez Canal in 1956.

Some five years earlier the U.S. had sabotaged a carefully-planned attempt by MI6 to take control of Iranian oil production – a move which sent a message round the Arab world that British influence was severely dented if not doomed.

American contempt for Britain started even before World War II was over, with a disastrous visit to Egypt in 1942 by Wendell L Wilkie, the Republican opponent to Franklin D Roosevelt for the Presidency two years earlier.

Wilkie arrived in Cairo full of vim and admiration for the British. Then he had dinner with a senior British official and was filled with horror: “What I got was Rudyard Kipling, untainted even with the liberalism of Cecil Rhodes,” he recorded.

These men, executing policies made in London, had no idea the world was changing. And Wilkie had no doubt that Winston Churchill was to blame.

His hostility was increased further by a disastrous mix-up when Churchill paid a brief visit to Washington after the United States joined the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Wilkie wanted to meet Churchill to establish his credentials as an international statesman, ahead of the 1944 presidential elections.

Churchill, in turn, was eager to meet Wilkie, then the favourite for the Presidency. He tried to phone Wilkie to arrange a clandestine meeting.

Unfortunately, though, the switchboard operator put him through to the wrong extension number. Barr records:

“I am glad to speak to you,” gushed Churchill.

“Whom do you think you are speaking to?” came the reply.

“To Wendell Wilkie, am I not?”

“No,” came the answer. “You are speaking to the President . . . Franklin Roosevelt.”

The President then banned Churchill from meeting Wilkie, who was mortally offended when the event was cancelled.

This was just one of a series of mishaps and misunderstandings which set the tone for Britain’s post-war relationship with the U.S.

At bottom, both countries were determined to gain access to oil, already known to exist in abundance on the Arabian Peninsula.

In an underhand move, the U.S. tried to hire Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British explorer, to guide them in finding oil reserves. Thesiger stayed loyal to the British: he was in fact hard at work on their behalf, at one stage carrying out oil exploration under fake cover for an organisation called the Anti-Locust unit.

 

THIS is a splendidly written book. It demonstrates the early perspicuity of a young Tory researcher called Enoch Powell who sought out Anthony Eden (then a highly regarded former foreign secretary) shortly after the war to give him advice.

“I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans,” the young Powell told the elder statesman.

Eden looked at him as if he was mad. But Powell had the last laugh. Eden was later to reflect: “I had no idea what he meant. I do now.”

– Lords Of The Desert by James Barr is published by Simon & Schuster for £20, 416pp

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