Pants on Fire!

When I was in Taiwan I visited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, a structure worthy of a Chinese Emperor, there to see mementos of the late Generalissimo, including his car.  When I was in Tunisia I visited the Habib Bourgiba Mausoleum in Monastir, there to see mementos of the country’s first president, including his silk summer suit. 

How would you choose to be remembered, what object or personal belonging might best represent your life?  Perhaps a car, or a suit or some other item that would reflect on your dignity or your humility?  Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen, is memorialising his own thirty three year rule in a new museum created in his honour.  And what do you think he has chosen as the central and most personal exhibit, the thing he wants people to remember him by?  This is a man less ordinary.  He does not want anything as ordinary as a car or a suit.  He has chosen, rather, a pair of his scorched underpants.  Yes it’s true – Ali, Ali,  Pants on Fire! 

His singed white pants, along with a pair of torn trousers, is the central display in the new museum, set up in a wing of the Saleh Mosque in Sanaa, the capital.  The torn and burnt clothing is a reminder of the bomb blast that almost killed the ex-president during the 2011 rising against his autocratic rule.  Although not yet open to the public, the news of Ali Saleh’s risible narcissism has spread. 

Although still a powerful figure in Yemeni politics, he is seemingly wholly unaware just how ridiculous this makes him look, a clear comment on the blind and humourless vanity of certain politicians.  Or perhaps it’s just Arab autocrats that are at fault here.  Can you imagine Hitler, Stalin or Mao expecting the masses to be in awe of their burnt smalls? No?  I certainly can't.  

I expect you have already booked your flight to Sanaa, keen to pay your own respects to the Ali Saleh legacy.  You will be pleased to know that the museum holds a further 2000 exhibits, gifts from foreign dignitaries.  There is a Christmas card from Princess Anne that you might want to see.  Just look for the section marked “Spain, Portugal and Hungari” [sic].  I’m not sure if this means that the said card was sent from Spain, Portugal or Hungari, or if some other bizarre logic is at work.  Perhaps the curators think that Britain is located somewhere alongside Spain, Portugal or Hungari. 

Meanwhile Hamza al-Shargabi, a Yemeni blogger now based in New York, has set up a page on Facebook, “We are all going to see Ali Saleh pants on fire.”  I can’t wait.  

Old, unhappy, far off things

Sixty-five years ago this month the Daily Express published a particularly horrific picture on its front page.  Under the heading Hanged Britons: Picture that will shock the world, it showed two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been murdered by Irgun paramilitaries in the Mandate of Palestine.  The sergeants had been kidnapped and killed in reprisal for the execution of three members of the Jewish underground organisation in what was becoming an increasingly ugly guerrilla war. 

There had been other terrorist incidents in the course of the conflict, but what became known as “the sergeant’s affair” was different.  The sheer ugliness of the event – the bodies were also bobby trapped – brought the conflict home to the people of Britain, causing the most widespread anti-Semitic rioting the country had ever seen, notwithstanding the fact that the killings had been condemned by British Jewish leaders.

By the end of the August holiday weekend there had been serious anti-Jewish rioting in Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool, with more minor disturbances in Bristol, Hull, Warrington and London.  Although there were no fatalities a number of people were beaten up and property destroyed, including a wooden synagogue in West Derby.  In Eccles, John Regan, himself a former sergeant, harangued a crowd of some seven hundred people, saying “Hitler was right.  Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child.  What are you afraid of?  There’s only a handful of police.”

Serious stuff, but in the end it all proved to be so much hot air, not just Regan’s incitement, for which he was charged and fined, but the whole violent wave.  Even obvious fascist politicians like Jeffrey Hamm, formerly of the British Union of Fascists and now in charge of the League of Ex-Servicemen, could not make any lasting political capital out of the incident.  The Express, which had triggered the violence with its sensational front page lead, backed off in shock, calling for calm and describing the attacks on innocent shopkeepers as a national disgrace.

That short hot summer has left almost no memory.  It’s a pity, really, because as history the whole episode is really quite intriguing.  Although superficially caused by an event far from these shores, it revealed much more about problems and difficulties far closer to home: the problems of austerity Britain. 

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published two years after the sergeants’ incident, is supposedly about a dystopian future.  In actual fact it was much more about a dystopian present, as people reading it at the time would have recognised.  The drab London he depicts in the novel was not some imaginative construct but a living reality.  Like so many other British cities, it had not fully recovered from the war.  Vacant lots and bomb sites were everywhere.  With a housing shortage came a serious problem of homelessness. 

The war, and its financial legacy, also had had a profound effect on the economy. Some foodstuffs, like butter, meat were still rationed. Confectionary had come off ration in 1949, but distribution had to be brought back under state control because demand was simply too great. Shortages meant that people took to producing their own food in back gardens and allotments. Income tax was at an extraordinarily high level, more than twice what it is today. Bureaucratic red tape was a major feature of everyday life, also brilliantly reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the 'social comedies' being produced by Ealing Studios, movies like Whisky Galore and Passport to Pimlico.

The war had been won; the peace was clearly being lost.  Food shortages and serious unemployment were compounded by a fuel shortage in the bitter winter of 1946-47, when coal was rationed in a coal-rich country.  Unhappy and bewildered, people looked for scapegoats, turning to the greatest scapegoats of all – the Jews.  Rationing created a vigorous black market which, by common perception, was controlled by the Jews. It’s not that surprising that so many ordinary people were taken in by this, especially as Ernest Bevan, foreign minister in the Labour government of the day, made anti-Semitic remarks, including one to the effect that the Jews of Europe were “pushing to the front of the queue.”

Cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, where the rioting was worse, also happened to be the places most affected by unemployment and general deprivation.  What began there as anti-Jewish riots soon turned into a looting free for all.  But the whole thing passed just as quickly as it had emerged.  The hooliganism had been based on personal frustration not on any deep rooted anti-Jewish hostility.  It was too soon after the Holocaust, details of which were still being revealed, for anti-Semitism to become a credible cause.  1947, as Lionel Trilling said in an article on the subject (New Statesman, 28 May), was the end of a chapter, not the beginning. 

The following year the state of Israel was formed and the sergeants’ affair, and the riots, forgotten.  It left one painful and unnoticed irony: Clifford Martin was Jewish.  

Egypt through the Barrel of a Gun

No sooner had Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s new Islamic Brotherhood president, assumed office than he showed that he was not a figure to be taken lightly.  The parliament, dominated by his Brothers and dissolved earlier this year by court order (for this read army order), had to be reinstated, he decreed.  The following day he changed his mind.  His office, he said, would respect the court’s decision “because we are a law based nation.”  In other words, he is a figure to be taken lightly. 

I have to ask what brought this epiphany in a mere twenty-four hour period.  Your guess is as good as mine and my guess is the generals  They are ever present in the omnipresent SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the guardian of all truth, justice and the Egyptian way, or the Egyptian way as they see it, which is their way. 

I have said this before and I will say it ad nauseum – in Egypt old soldiers never die; they don’t even fade away.  The other thing I will continue to say is that the so-called Arab Spring was never about freedom and democracy; it bore no relationship whatsoever to the process that ended the moribund communist gerontocracies in Eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties.  No; it was about power; it was a struggle over the transfer of power from one self-interested group to another self-interested group

In Egypt the generals may have let power slip in the pretence of democracy but you can be assured that they will never let power go.  Egypt is not a law-based nation; it’s a military-based nation.  Anticipating a victory for the Islamists in the presidential election, SCAF issued a constitutional decree as soon as the poll closed, stripping the potential president of many of his powers, most particularly oversight of the armed forces.  Brothers to the right of them, Brothers to the left of them, the generals were having none of this valley of uncertainty. 

So, then, the future of parliament is in the power of the courts and the courts are in the power of the army.  The only way that Morsi can achieve full constitutional legitimacy is for his Brothers to reassemble and administer the oath of office “This will go down in history as the first serious step towards a democratic transition in Egypt, said Omar Ashour, an Egyptian academic.  “The ultimate test of a democratic transition is whether civilians are in charge of the armed forces.”

In matters like these I often draw parallels with seventeenth century England.  Egypt now is a little like this country after the conclusion of the First Civil War.  Then there was uncertainty; then the outcome could not be predicted; then there were fractured sources of authority.  In the contest that followed the New Model Army came out on top, the guardians of the revolution as they interpreted it.  Political power came from the barrel of a gun; political power comes from the barrel of a gun.  Egypt is set to prove a time-worn adage.  

Christian Winter

This is an article I had published on Broowaha on Easter Sunday under a different title.  I want to preserve it here also. 

It’s Easter Sunday, late in the evening. I’m in Paris for the weekend, looking out over the city of lights. It’s been a wonderful few days. I’m not in the habit of writing on vacation, especially when I’m on a romantic interlude in the most romantic city on earth!

I could have held this article over until Monday evening, when I’ll be back in London but, as I say, this is Easter Sunday. There is no better time to draw your attention to the plight of the ancient Christian communities in the Middle East, now in serious danger of extinction.

These are the original Christians, people whose forebears were settled in the area several centuries before the Muslims arrived. For them the Arab Spring has not brought liberation but persecution and fear, all caused by the upsurge of militant and murderously intolerant forms of Islam.

Most of you will be aware of Hilary Clinton’s attempt to have a UN resolution passed, condemning the government of Bashar al-Assad for the violent assault of the Syrian army on the rebel-held city of Homs. What you may not be aware of is that Islamists in the city have carried out a ‘religious cleansing’, forcing 50,000 Christians to flee from their homes in terror, a fact reported by Douglas Davis in the latest issue of the Spectator.

It’s not an isolated event. Christians in other Syrian cities have come under attack. Bishop Antonine Audo of Aleppo, where a car bomb was exploded in the Christian quarter last month, says that the people are very afraid – “The Christians don’t know what their future will hold.”

Left-liberals are much given to gnashing of teeth over the plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. There are no laments at all over the persecution of Palestinians…by other Palestinians. The threat even extends to Bethlehem, the literal and metaphorical cradle of Christianity.

As Davis mentions in his article (Out of the east), thirty years ago three quarters of the people living in the West Bank town were Christian. A reign of terror by Islamic extremists, involving land theft, intimidation and beatings, has reduced that figure to an estimated ten per cent.

The violence extends to Hamas-controlled Gaza, where half of the Christian

population have left their homes since the terrorist organisation took control of the area in 2007. Hardly surprising when one learns that there have been calls for people to slaughter their Christian neighbours, a chilling fact that seems to have escaped the likes of Alice Walker and all of the other 'useful idiots' who would succor Hamas.

I was in Egypt last November, when I made friends among the local Coptic community, people whose ancestors were in the country in the days of the pharaohs. The email correspondence I receive confirms the reports of growing apprehension in the face of the victory of the Islamist parties in the parliamentary elections. There have been killings and church burnings from Luxor in the south to Alexandria in the north. Last year no fewer than 200,000 people were forced to leave their homes under threat of further violence.

The greatest tragedy of all, though, has to be the fate of the Christians of Iraq, whose exodus from the country in the wake of George Bush’s ill-conceived invasion of 2003 has reached biblical proportions. Before the invasion there were 1.4million. Now only 400,000 are left.

Since 2003 nine hundred and fifty Iraqi Christians have been murdered and over sixty churches bombed. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom warned recently that “the end of Christianity in Iraq” was approaching. Most of those who are left are the elderly, people who exhausted their savings helping their children leave.

Amidst this unprecedented tragedy there is one bright spot for Arab Christians – Israel, a state that guarantees freedom of worship to all faiths. There the community has increased by an estimated 2000 per cent. In highlighting this fact, West goes on to make the following observations;

Never mind the ‘Israeli apartheid’ myths that flourish on Britain’s university Campuses. What intrigues me is why Britain’s political and media classes, normally so sensitive to humanitarian issues, turn away in the face of very real apartheid-style oppression that persists on the Arab world; why they remain silent as Christians are persecuted and the UN Human Rights Council, which last month endorsed the human rights record of Libya’s late Mummar Gaddafi, peddles its bizarre nonsense.

I’m guessing the position here is the same in the States, at least judging by the attitude of Hilary Clinton. I would urge you all, Christian or not, to spare a thought for an ancient community facing annihilation, even if she does not.

The Price of Freedom

I’ve been keeping a close eye on political events in Egypt, an interest spurred by my visit to the country last November. Some news I get via email from people I met while I was there, people with hopes of a better future, mired ever deeper in doubt, especially now that the Islamists have come out of the parliamentary elections as the dominant force, commanding two-thirds of the representation.

A presidential election is scheduled for sometime this year but in the meantime the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) remains in control. The generals may eventually slip into the background, but I don’t think the military will ever relinquish power; I don’t think it will ever give up its role as king maker, one that it has held ever since Nasser’s coup in 1952.

On the streets, still punctuated with violent discontent, the word is that the very models of modern major generals have struck up a clandestine deal with the Islamists. In parliament the liberals, those with the confidence of the street protesters, are fighting a kind of gallant rear guard action. Legislation has been proposed that that would exclude the army from oversight of any future elections. I guess it’s unlikely to succeed, unless the Freedom and Justice Party, the main Islamist force, decide to break their links with the soldiers

The real victim here in the complex game of political poker is Egypt’s ancient but vulnerable minority of Coptic Christians. Incidents of sectarian violence, in part encouraged by the military, have been steadily increasing since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year. Under attack from the extremist Salifist movement, with the army offering intermittent protection at best, the community is going through one of the most apprehensive stages of its history. There is little doubt that they are being singled out as a scapegoat. Thousands have left the country; millions have no choice but to remain.

Freedom is not for free, said one of the banners held up in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year. How ironic it is that the secularist dictatorships, the regimes of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, the last still holding on, offered the greatest protection to the Christians of the Middle East. Now the Copts are indeed discovering that freedom is not for free. It has a price, one being negotiated at their expense.

Syrian Pawns

I visited Egypt last November, though I had originally planned to go to Syria. There are some wonderful places there, particularly the remains of Palmyra, who’s Queen Zenobia, a figure of endless fascination for me, once took on the power of Rome. There is also Krak de Chevaliers, the most magnificent Crusader castle in the whole of the East.

I didn’t go, for obvious reasons. After my initial planning last spring the political situation began to spiral downwards in successive stages. It was too volatile, I was advised, too dangerous, so best to look elsewhere. I had a marvellous time in Egypt but I still think of Syria, still hope that one day soon I will, like Saint Paul, take the road to Damascus.

I’m certainly keeping an eye on developments in the country, just as I did last year on Libya, when Sarkozy and Cameron went on muddle-headed humanitarian ‘crusade’, one that has had wholly predictable results, results that I predicted at the time. All the right sounds are being made about Syria, how awful Bashar al-Assad is, how dreadful the massacres of the people, and on and on, but so far the two twits have done nothing but tweet. So, too, has Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, fuming at Russia and China for blocking an anti-Assad resolution at the United Nations.

I despair of our politicians, our leaders, forever incapable of looking below the surface. Look below the surface in Syria and what do you see, the huddled, pro-democracy masses yearning to breathe free, perhaps? No, that’s not what I see. Oh, yes, there is plenty of footage from Homs, the scene, supposedly, of the worst outrages by the Syrian army. But the majority of the country, including the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, is peaceful and unaffected. Sorry, that’s not quite true. As Rod Liddle writes in the Spectator, there have been occasional attacks by the operatives of the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’ on civilian targets in the capital.

Even the benighted Dame Clinton (I can just picture her in pantomime) admits that, unlike Libya, large parts of Syria are peaceful, that there is no massive anti-Assad movement as there was anti-Gaddafi. What she can’t see, seemingly, is that the opposition, encouraged by the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and Saudi Arabia, is dominated not by democrats but by fundamentalists. Not content with allowing the Islamists to take charge in Tripoli she also wants them in Damascus.

“Democracy and human rights” the early demonstrators against Assad chanted. Oh, no, they did not; they were heard to shout “Send the Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to coffins.” Syria has a large Christian minority going right back to the days of Queen Zenobia. It’s now the largest the Middle East, given that the previously flourishing community in Iraq has all but been destroyed by the Bush-Blair ‘crusade.’ The secular Assad regime has long protected the community, just as it has protected the moderate Alawites and other Shia minorities. Now they all face an uncertain future if the rebellion is not contained.

The Free Syrian Army, whose NATO-sponsored ‘government-in-exile’ is dominated by the most reactionary elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, is fighting a proxy war on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. President Assad describes them as ‘foreign terrorists’ with some justification, for a great many are, coming from Iraq and Libya. The weapons are supplied by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, countries that could not give a damn about the suffering of the Syrian people. No, in the bigger game of politics they just want to replace the region’s last secular ruler, all the more contemptible to them because he is an ally of Iran. In this game the ordinary people of Syria are no better than pawns.

Don’t mistake my position here; I am no friend of Assad, as unscrupulous and as bloody a dictator as they come. But a backward Wahhibi theocracy would be so much worse; worse for the majority, worse for the minorities, worse for women, worse for those who desire even a modicum of personal freedom.

It’s the hypocrisy that angers me most. Western leaders pontificate about the abuse of ‘human rights’ in Syria while conveniently ignoring those same abuses in Saudi Arabia. Britain and France intervened in Libya in support of ‘freedom’, only to see ‘freedom’ crushed in Bahrain without comment. With no appetite in the West for fresh interventions, the Saudis and Qataris are urging us to arm the rebels, a more cowardly course of action I find difficult to contemplate, one that will only prolong the suffering of the pawns of Syria into an indefinite future.

Back to the Past

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph General Richard Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff at the time of the premiership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, says, in the light of the murder of General Abdel Fattah Younes by Islamists in Libya, that “it should be a clear lesson that compromise will lead to Libya’s destruction as a unified nation and produce a situation that no one in the international community envisaged.”

I’m not a member of any community, certainly not one that would have the likes of this Gilbert and Sullivan officer in its ranks, but I envisaged alright, for all the good it did. I envisaged at the outset of this adventure, writing several articles. I take these words from Cassandra’s Lament, a piece I published in early March;

Consider what Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy have done, look at the possible outcomes. The Colonel’s offensive may be halted, frozen exactly where it is, leaving him in control of Tripoli and the west with the rebels holding on to Benghazi and the east. This may be a permanent state, with Libya hereafter a divided nation, a political fracture caused by tomahawks. I would hazard that the whole region will be destabilised as a result…

But it’s the ignorance of our great world leaders that perplexes me most, their complete incomprehension when it comes to the Arab world, the tribal nature of the Arab world, the tribal nature of places like Libya. The Colonel for all his lunacy at least gave the place unity, a sense of national identity. David Cameron says he does not want a failed pariah state on Europe’s southern flank, “potentially threatening our security, pushing people across the Mediterranean and creating a more dangerous and uncertain world for Britain and for our allies, as well as for the people of Libya.” But…a failed state is exactly what Libya is almost certain to become, one of constant civil war between competing tribes, Somalia on the Med.

Here we are, months later, no nearer to a solution. Cameron’s government has withdrawn the final traces of diplomatic legitimacy from the regime of Colonel Gaddafi, instead recognising the Transitional National Council in Benghazi as the rightful government of Libya, just at the point we have discovered that this body is backed by powerful and shadowy Islamist forces.

What solution does the former Leader of the Queen’s Army offer? Why, that we should start arming the rebels, the bombing not being enough. I now know for certainty why our military forces were handled with such stunning incompetence during the Iraq fiasco, why our army suffered one of the worst humiliations in its long and noble history. It had a man like Dannatt as its operational chief, a man who probably is not up even to polishing door handles.

So, as I predicted, NATO intervention in Libya has just led to a protracted war of attrition. It did not require any great skill or foresight on my part, just a little common sense, mixed with an understanding of history and politics, an understanding that our benighted leaders – and generals – so obviously lack.

I’ve been following the recent series in the Times on the so-called Arab Spring and the signs are all bad. Into the vacuum caused by the collapse of the old order the Islamists have been moving in slow but relentless degrees, from Tunisia to Egypt. Ancient Christian communities are under attack, threatened now even in Syria, where so many took refuge from the sectarian hell of Iraq. The rights enjoyed by women in the secular societies of the old regimes are threatened by the advance of reactionary obscurantism. It is not a happy picture.

The Arabs want freedom, yes, we all want freedom, that most precious commodity, the birthright of humanity, the birthright of the Facebook and Twitter generation. But I’m going to say this and say it without equivocation: the Arabs can die for freedom but they are not mature enough to live for freedom; they have no understanding of what freedom is, no tradition of freedom. Their idea of freedom is simply to replace one tyranny with another, the tyranny of a nepotistic minority with an intolerant majority, secular law with Sharia law.

That’s the idea of democracy one individual I debated with had, that it means the minority have to obey the majority. No, no, no and again no. That’s the antithesis of true democracy, which depends on respect for minorities, which depends on equality under the law, human law not God's law. Look always beneath the surface. The unrest across the Arab world is not the spring time of peoples; it's not 1989; it's not even 1848. At a deeper level it’s a kind of cultural counter-revolution, a march not into the future but back to the past.

Wormtongue and the Arab Spring

Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson of Foy, Business Secretary in the last Labour government, is possibly the most repellent and reptilian figure ever to have occupied high office in this country. For me this seedy and disreputable man seems to have all of the character attributes I associate with Shakespeare’s Iago or, better still, Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings.

This particular Wormtongue enjoyed the company of the great and not very good. In his toadying style he enjoyed the company of Saif Gaddafi, with whom he had a jolly good time not so long ago at a private villa on the Greek island of Corfu, all chums together. But that was then, a time when he was falling over himself to do deals with Gaddafi senior. Things change; the Colonel is now the Beast of Tripoli and Lord Wormtongue welcomes the Arab Spring.

Indeed, he goes out of his way to welcome it in the latest issue of Prospect, a monthly political journal, saying that nerves over the great upheaval are misplaced, that the people want democracy, not extremism. He should know; he goes to the Middle East, he knows exactly what the people want, Colonels at one moment, freedom at the next. “I have recently made a return visit to Kuwait and, for a longer period, to Qatar”, he writes in his inflated and pompous style. Yes, democracy is what the people want; Mandelson says so.

I myself have recently not made a return visit to Tunisia, the country which saw the beginning of the end of the Arab Winter. I do keep an eye on things, though; keep an eye on press reports a lot more trustworthy than Mandelson’s musings. I read that Nouri Bouzid, the Tunisian director and prominent secularist, recently honoured at the Cannes Film Festival, was equally honoured in his own country when he was stabbed in the head by an unknown assailant. He survived, only to find that a speaker at a rally organised by Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest Islamist party, called for him to be “shot with a Kalashnikov.”

I really don’t want to rain on the Arab Spring but Tunisia is now showing every sign, as I wrote on a previous occasion, of the season turning to autumn with no summer in between. All over the country, with Ennahda on the rise, women, who previously enjoyed rights almost unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world, are being forced to wear the veil. Forced praying and condemnation for apostasy are also on the rise. Moderate imams are being ejected from their mosques, too afraid to complain to the authorities because of the perceived weakness of the provisional government.

Hmm, a weak provisional government with a radical opposition busy organising among the grassroots, does this not remind you of something, another time and another point in history? Oh, there are all sorts of professions to ‘moderation’ and to ‘pluralism’…for the time being. As a Tunisian liberal leader said recently, there is a huge gap between what the Islamists say and what they do. February is past; the revolution heads towards October, guided there by the Bearded Bolsheviks.

You can safely disregard all that, disregard my Cassandra-like pessimism. People in the Arab world want secularism and democracy as a check on theocracy and extremism. Of course they do; Lord Wormtongue says so.

Keep out of Libya!

I’m beset with a sense of déjà vu. Speaking recently at the Women in the World conference, ex-president Bill Clinton, king of the liberal interventionists, called for the West to join in the Libyan civil war on behalf of the rebels. “I think we should support them”, he said, “We have the planes to make an appropriate contribution to this.”

Meanwhile, David Cameron, the British prime minister, a sort of political Mister Bean, has been seen trotting along the European corridors of power, trying – so far without a great deal of success – to get agreement on a no-fly zone and targeted airstrikes against Gaddafi’s forces. Europe, he believes, must do more to stop the Mad Colonel’s rampage against his own people.

Yes, as I have said, a sense of déjà vu. It’s Kosovo all over again; it’s Clinton in the same role; it’s Cameron pathetically trying to don the mantle of Tony Blair, Britain’s home-grown war monger. Was that a success? Well, I suppose it defends on one’s definition of success. A ruthless bombing campaign directed against civilian targets in Serbia, coupled with support for the Kosovo Liberation Army, a kind of murderous mafia headed by Hashim Thaçi, Blair’s chum, which is alleged to have smuggled heroin and cocaine into Western Europe, as well as butchering Serbs to sell their organs. The outcome was an independent and semi-criminal fiefdom in the Balkans, with Thaçi as Mr. Big. Yes, as I say, it really depends on how one defines success.

How much of this kind of self-righteous interventionism can the world take, I have to ask? How many more pyrrhic ‘successes’ must we celebrate; how many more Kosovos, Afghanistans and Iraqs? But there is more here, a more pertinent question: what business is it of ours, what business is it of Europe and America, to go dashing from here to there around the Third World setting wrongs to right? What incredible arrogance, what hubris, this displays, a nineteenth century gunboat mentality with a twenty-first century gloss of canting hypocrisy.

I have no doubt at all that Gaddafi is a ‘bad man’, a dictator, one under whom I personally would not care to live. But he is still a recognised head of state, one with whom we were quite happy to do business until quite recently. Do we know anything of the rebels? Do we know anything of their politics, other than their desire to get rid of the Colonel? Have Clinton or Cameron even paused to think what a post-Gaddafi Libya may look like? Do I need to hazard answers here?

The point is, like him or not, like it or not, Gaddafi has every right to deal with insurrection in any fashion he sees fit. Throughout history governments have taken action to contain rebellion, not excluding those of England and the United States. Yet there seems to be a special condescension when it comes to places like Libya that allows pontification over what is and what is not acceptable, schoolmasters addressing homilies to naughty children.

It’s as well to remember that we once intervened in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban. We intervene in places like Libya at our own peril. The last thing we should expect after the event is gratitude. That much should be obvious from the fiasco that is Iraq.

Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

The Egyptians are living in interesting times in the fashion of the Chinese curse. I’ve offered no comment so far, waiting for the situation to become clearer, though watching the news broadcasts from Cairo and Alexandria last week some words of Edmund Burke’s came to mind. Appropriately enough they are from his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the seminal text of modern conservatism;

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

What is it, I wonder, that will please the mobs, beyond the departure of President Mubarak? What is to come after Ozymandius has left nothing but footsteps in sand and time? If one tried to find answers here, if one tried to penetrate beneath the surface of transient events, one is best to ignore the reports of the BBC, unbelievably banal in their shallowness and lack of understanding. Jeremy Bowen, their Middle East editor, was heard to say of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamental face of Egypt, that they are a “fairly moderate force here…they don’t want to rock the boat too much.” No, let the boat keep rocking; they will be there to steady it afterwards.

I cannot myself say what the outcome will be, though not a stable western-style democracy, that much I will hazard. The Islamists in the Brotherhood may not be as strong as they were in Iran, but they are still a potent and organised force, in much the same manner that the Bolsheviks were a potent and organised force in Russia before their putsch in November, 1917. As far as these people being a ‘fairly moderate force’ I would refer you to On Jihad, written by Hasan al-Banna, the movement’s founder, where he writes that the Koran and the Sunnah “summon people…to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces and all forms of land and sea fighting.”

Please do not misunderstand me. Far from being an advocate of Mubarak it seems obvious that his dictatorship has been an unpleasant experience for a great many of the people of Egypt, though I feel sure not quite as unpleasant as the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was for the people of Iraq. Just imagine what would have happened in his day if mobs had taken to the streets of Baghdad. Yes, I’m sure that Mubarak could be unpleasant, but at least he kept the country’s home grown fascist movement in check, the Brothers of the Brotherhood. More than that: in the wider politics of the region he has long been a force for moderation and stability.

Revolutions are all very well when they produce the results one approves of, but they don’t always do that, do they? If you are reading the book Egypt please don’t make the mistake of reading Eastern Europe 1989; read Iran 1979. Here I find myself in complete agreement with Andrew Roberts, the conservative British historian, who said with regard to the situation in Egypt that we should abhor policy created by mobs and assume that all revolutionary change will ultimately be for the worse.

What I find most astonishing is the attitude of Barack Obama, the weakest, most irresponsible President in American history. Here is a man who is calling for the departure of one of America’s closest allies; here is a man who appears to be urging on the Cairo mobs, though with no clear idea of what the outcome is likely to be for the people of Egypt as a whole. Yes, he speaks now just as he kept silent in 2009 when Iranian students took to the streets following the fraudulent presidential election in that country. It’s quite legitimate to wonder what exactly is going on here, just exactly how this wretchedly incapable man is advancing the cause of democracy and freedom, or even the interests of the United States. No matter who wins he loses, an opportunist ally, a false friend.

What do the Egyptians want themselves? For some time now polls have shown that they want democracy…but they also want sharia law, a glaring contradiction. The source of law can be God or it can be the people; it can’t be both. Will another Nasser emerge – could the country take more of the absolute misery that he inflicted on it? – or someone altogether more sinister, more brotherly?

Is there a ‘third way’ in a country that has never had a third way? I really don’t believe so, though there is the example of democracy Gaza-style, which gave us Hamas. I believe if things continue as they are, even if Mubarak goes, the chaos and anarchy will get ever worse, to the particular cost of the fragile Egyptian middle class.

And always keep ahold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. We may have cause to regret the passing of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptians most of all.

A star in the east

This month will see the publication of Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, taking its cue, I suppose, from Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. I’m looking forward to this; for he is a superb biographer, having written Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar and Young Stalin, both exceptional works. There is no better candidate to write the life story of a city.

I visited Jerusalem a few years ago, staying in the King David Hotel, my sitting room looking towards the Ottoman-constructed wall around the old city, the part punctuated by the Tower of David. This city is not part of history; it is history, a heart where the life-blood of three of the world’s great religions flows through. Even my hotel has a story: for the wing I stayed in, formerly British Army headquarters, was blown up by Irgun, a militant Zionist organisation, in July 1946, as the video channel helpfully reminded us!

Jerusalem is really an odd amalgam of the old and the new. It’s two cities, existing side by side never meeting, cultures never melding. The old city, where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is located, supposedly on the Hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified, is a complete warren. I suspect not an awful lot has changed since the days of the Ottomans.

After we visited the Church we turned the wrong way, ending up in narrow and narrower streets full of Arab traders, all wearing the keffiyeh, the traditional headdress. I have to say the deeper in we got the more uneasy I became, feeling completely out of place, completely déclassé and alien, all the more so being a female with free-flowing hair, not that anyone was in the least threatening; it’s just that we were the only westerners there, thus all the more conspicuous. I was really quite glad to get out after we traced our way back.

Returning to Montefiore’s book, there is a taster in January issue of History Today, where he has a look at the city during the heyday of the medieval Crusader state (Jerusalem: Dark and Satanic). It’s the little details that fascinate me, the comparison that can be drawn with other times and other places; for Jerusalem in the twelfth century was the centre of the Wild East! This is the time when the incorrigible Melisende was queen. She was also the wife of Fulk, Count of Anjou, the descendent of the depraved Fulk the Black, son of Fulk the Repulsive, nephew of Fulk the Complete Bastard. OK, I made the last Fulker up but the others are real enough. :-)

The city was really a combination of royal capital and frontier town. It was the place to be for fortune hunters, adventurers of all sorts. There were as many taverns as holy places; for this was a town of soldiers as much as a town of pilgrims. Each of the taverns apparently had a clunking chain across the entrance to prevent knights riding into the bar! Saladin’s secretary, who was able to observe things at first hand, describes the prostitutes, who arrived at the ports of Acre and Tyre in boatloads from Europe, thus;

Lovely Frankish women, foulfleshed and sinful, appearing proudly in public, ripped open and patched up, lacerated and mended, making love and selling themselves for gold, callipygian and graceful, like tipsy adolescents, they dedicated as holy offering what they kept between their thighs, each trailed the train of her robe behind her, bewitched with her effulgence, swayed like a sapling, and longed to lose her robe.

Where holiness goes sin is never that far behind!

Jerusalem, as the author says, is in so many ways the universal city; the city of Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman; of Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill. There is a cast of thousands here, prophets and warriors, politicians and preachers, the famous and the infamous. Disraeli was there as was Rasputin, Mark Twain and Lawrence of Arabia. I was there.

The Last Best Hope?

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has had enough, and who can blame him, with Hamas on one side and Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Likud Prime Minister, on the other. The ‘Two State Solution’, the one genuine hope for a peace in the Middle East, is very likely to go with him. Barak Obama, for all of his overripe rhetoric, has been totally unable to stop the advance of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. But the final straw for Abbas was Secretary Clinton’s shift from demanding a complete freeze on settlements to praising Netanyahu’s ‘restraint’, though I personally am not at all sure in what fashion this alleged ‘restraint’ has expressed itself.

Showing herself to be the true stateswoman she clearly is, she then flew to Cairo to urge President Mubarak to put pressure on Abbas to re-enter negotiations with Israel unconditionally. Already unpopular because of his delay in endorsing the Goldstone Report accusing Israel of war crimes, already thrown into the ‘dust-heap of history’ by Hamas, the wretched President of a non-existent state had little real choice but to announce his departure. It really is such a pity, for those too blind to see, as Nader Said-Foqhhaa, a Palestinian political analyst put it, that “He is the best president that the Americans and Israelis can have. He is ready and willing to go the distance. But what did he receive? Nothing.” Now turn to the Book of Jeremiah;

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

Will there ever be peace? It does not seem very likely. Mahmoud Abbas was probably the last best hope, a moderate man surrounded by fanatics and dogmatists; secular ideologues and Bible literalists. Oh, wait, I’m being far too pessimistic; there is a man whom all realms obey, dost sometimes counsel take…and sometimes tea. There is Tony Blair. :-))

I want to sleep with Muhannad

I see the Turks are making some smash TV shows, a smash in the Arab world anyway. There is a show called Valley of the Wolves in which Israelis are shown doing nasty things to Palestinians, but that’s not the most popular, not by a long-way. You see Arabs don’t always go for high politics; they also like a spot of romance; they like a soap-opera called Noor.

This show, dubbed in Arabic, was first broadcast last year by MBC, a Saudi-owned satellite network viewed across the Arab world. The message is interesting, not one the Arabs are generally used to, cantering around the adventures of an emancipated modern woman. But for women throughout the Middle-East and North Africa that is not the main issue, no, the main issue is a blue-eyed blond former male model who goes by the name of Muhannad. The other issue is a portrait of a marriage; for you see Muhannad is a ‘modern man’, one who even does the dishes!

The bliss of this ideal throws the reality into a distressing contrast. Noor, it is said, is responsible for a rising number of divorces in the Arab world, as women compare Muhannad with their own husbands. In Jordan one woman was divorced after her husband found his picture on her mobile. It gets worse. In Syria another divorce was occasioned after a wife announced to her husband that “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.” :-))

Not surprisingly this trend has caught the attention of the Saudi religious establishment. The Grand Mufti has called for a boycott of the Turkish series, describing it as ‘evil.’ But MBC knows a good thing. Not only does Noor continue but it has obtained the broadcasting rights to other Turkish television dramas. This is how revolutions are made, by popular culture rather than grand politics. It was West German TV that brought down the Berlin Wall as much as anything else. Perhaps the Turks will bring their Muslim cousins right into the modern age, the age of Noor and dishy Muhannad.

Have You Seen a Queen Travelling?

Gertrude Bell is a particular heroine of mine: the first woman down from Oxford with a First in Modern History; an independent scholar, an archaeologist, and expert in several Middle Eastern languages, a writer, a political specialist, a traveller; a friend of sheiks and kings-the female Lawrence of Arabia! In 1900 she dressed herself as a Bedouin man, riding alone into the dangerous Hauran Plain, still under the control of the Ottomans, in search of the Druze, a militant Muslim sect, which had been fighting the Turks for two hundred years. She made contact with Yahya Beg, king of the Druze, and conversed with him in his own language. Some weeks after he was to ask another visitor to his domain 'Have you seen a queen travelling?'

Bell's knowledge of the Arab peoples was later to be used by the British authorities after the outbeak of the First World War. When the British Army captured Baghdad in March 1917, she took up a position in the city as Oriental Secretary. There she remained in Iraq, or Mesopotamia, as it was known at the time, until after the conclusion of the war. Like her friend, Lawrence of Arabia, she became keen advocate of an independent Arab state. In 1919 she complied a report on the subject, in which she wrote;

An Arab State in Mesopotamia...within a short period of years is a possibility, and...the recognition or creation of a logical scheme on those lines, in supercession of those on which we are now working on Mesopotamia, would be practical and popular.

Her advice was effectively ignored, and the tribes of the Euphrates, angered that one form of imperialism gave every appearance of being replaced by another, rose in revolt, an event that cost the lives of 10,000 Arabs and several hundred Britons. Bell wrote:

We have made an immense failure here. The system must have been far more at fault than anyone suspected...I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an incohate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern...and failed.

For Bell the one way out was to give the people a distinct political identity, which she believed could be focused in a monarchy, in the particular person of Faisal bin Hussein, recently deposed by the French as King of Syria. At the Cairo Conference of 1921, she and T. E. Lawrence worked assiduously for the creation of Iraq and Transjordan, and Bell persuaded Winston Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, to endorse Fisal as King of Iraq. Bell was also in favour of Sunni dominance in the new nation: "Otherwise", as she put it, "you will have a... theocratic state, which is the very devil."

With her help and guidance Fisal came to his new kingdom, and was crowned king in August 1921. For Arab and Briton alike Bell was the uncrowned 'Queen of the Sands.' With the King's approval she went on to found Iraq's great Archaeological Museum, whose unparalleled collection was so sadly looted in 2003. This leads me on to some final words from 'Queen Gertrude', which may serve to sum up the present position of the Western powers in the region;

If Mesopotamia goes, Persia [Iran] goes inevitably...And the place which we leave empty will be occupied by seven devils a good deal worse than any which existed before we came.

I've always believed that an understanding of history should be an essential basis for the formation of policy. But historians will always be cast in the role of Cassandra. Even so, Gertrude Bell's book, The Desert and the Snow, is still worth reading, all these years later.