You might want to take a look at this column from Ron Liddle in The Spectator on the incessant saber-rattling we’re seeing:
We should expect this sort of stuff from the armed forces, I suppose. It is when the politicians clamber aboard that I get really worried — for it is our side that worries me, not theirs. Andrew Mitchell was not alone in rattling the rusty sabre by suggesting we shoot down Russian jets over Syria. We also had Boris Johnson, our Foreign Secretary, demanding — in the manner of a clownish ayatollah — that people should protest outside the Russian embassy. Boris said this in response to the Russian and Syrian government air attacks upon Aleppo, which were certainly brutal. Then, about a week later, the West began, with clinical precision, to identify people in the last Iraqi Isis stronghold of Mosul with really radical beards and bomb them to smithereens, mercifully and humanitarianly sparing the local, decent, democratically minded citizens, who of course escaped the bombardment without so much as a graze.
Do people seriously swallow this rubbish? Do Boris and Mitchell? Both the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross have warned that more than one million people will become refugees as a consequence of the glorious liberation of Mosul — and probably hundreds killed. But when that happens, it will not be the fault of the coalition, it will be the fault of Isis, or vengeful Shia Iraqi soldiers, or the bloodthirsty Peshmerga. Nothing to do with us, guv.
The coalition action in Syria and Iraq is as incoherent and misguided as everything else we have done in the Middle East of late — from the invasion of Iraq, via the support for those somewhat chimeric ‘Arab Spring’ rebellions to the catastrophic and stupid intervention in Libya. What we have done in the name of dippy, well-meaning, liberal evangelism has cost far more lives than can be laid at the door of the Russkies and Vladimir Putin. In Syria and Iraq we are fighting in support of people who do not really exist: the nice moderates, not the jihadis, but also not Assad. You can count them on the fingers of one hand, the Syrian Lib Dems: Mohammed Clegg and his friends.
Read the whole thing. The Brits do polemic so much better than we do. It’s good to know that I’m not alone.
We also had Boris Johnson, our Foreign Secretary, demanding — in the manner of a clownish ayatollah — that people should protest outside the Russian embassy. Boris said this in response to the Russian and Syrian government air attacks upon Aleppo, which were certainly brutal.
The first I heard of that (I’m largely ignoring politics these days) was from the piece you linked to the other day from the Russian Ambassador to the UK. What a sad fucking joke! Rhetorically, I couldn’t decide if the Russian Ambassador thought it (and the turn out of, I believe, one protestor) was a joke or an insult, but either way he was clear it was pathetic. He was not wrong.
When even the Limey’s are producing dolts from their elite institutions, what to make of the state of the world’s elites? Can anyone convince me that these people aren’t as bad, collectively, as the morons that led the world into The Great War a little more than a century ago?
What disturbs me most is that I’ve been asking that last question to people in various fora for several years now, and the only people that ever try to convince me otherwise are obvious partisans of one faction or another. The fact that there’s now a history for all these factions goes largely ignored. Mostly, everyone agrees with me. So why do the leaders keep getting worse, when most people acknowledge how awful these leaders are? It’s an interesting problem in dynamical systems, and not one with a good answer.