Whether a US major actually said “It
became necessary to destroy the town to save it” in justification of the destruction
of Ben Tre during the Vietnam war remains a matter of conjecture. That it
describes the more-than-occasional absurdity of the military mindset is less
open to question. It’s reflected in Donald Trump’s apparent belief that bombing
the whole of Iran back to the Stone Age is a way of freeing Iranians from an
oppressive regime: the difference is more a matter of scale than of substance. UK
politicians aren’t immune to the same way of thinking, as Tory leader Kemi
Badenoch demonstrated
a day or two ago. According to her, the way to prepare for war with Russia is
to cut benefits, pushing more families into poverty in
the process. ‘It is necessary to starve them in order to save them’,
apparently.
Politicians and military chiefs seem to delight in
telling us that Russia will be ready to attack us in five years’ time, a ‘truth’
which underpins their obsession with increasing military spending at the
expense of anything and everything else. Whilst it is true that the loss of soldiers
and equipment in Ukraine over the past 4 years means that Russia is hardly
ready today to launch a major attack on the rest of Europe, and that it would
take time for them to rebuild their forces and replace the losses, the evidence
that they will be ready to launch said attack in five years’ time is not
exactly obvious. And, in any event, it assumes firstly that the losses in Ukraine
stop rather than continue, and secondly that Russia’s leaders will have learnt
nothing from the cost of invading a single country which will in any way
influence their thinking about attacking an even larger ‘enemy’. It rather
looks as though ‘five years’ has been selected as the timeframe of choice by
NATO’s political and military leaders because it’s close enough to sound
imminent, but far enough away to allow people to believe that a huge
redirection of resources into military hardware might make a difference. A
betting man might suggest that, five years from now, the alleged threat will
still be five years in the future. But the demand for more resources will
continue to grow.
But here’s the other side of that five-year coin, as
it were: it’s also enough time to pursue an alternative course of action, aimed
at preventing a war rather than preparing to fight one. The warmongering
politicians and military leaders demanding the impoverishment of the population
in order to be ready to fight another major war in Europe may well sincerely
believe that the best way of preventing a war is to convince ‘the other side’
that they would lose and lose heavily if they attempted it, but the danger of
such an approach is that that ‘other side’ instead sees every improvement in
equipment, and every deployment of troops, as a sign that an attack on them is
being prepared, and reacts accordingly. Whilst I really don’t believe that
NATO’s eastward expansion was an intentional precursor for an invasion of
Russia (one of the concerns allegedly underlying the Russian invasion of
Ukraine), I can understand that things might look different when viewed from
Moscow.
With a major war raging on European soil, and with
the White House and the Kremlin both occupied by madmen, seeking to de-escalate
and build trust instead of planning a war isn’t going to be easy, but it’s the
only rational approach for Europe to follow. Those who would lead us into war
are fond of telling us that the first duty of any government is the protection
of its citizens, but there’s an unspoken addendum: ‘even if it means impoverishing
them’. I wouldn’t phrase the ‘first duty’ like that. It takes a very narrow
view of the meaning of ‘protection’. If we rephrase it to say that the first
duty of any government is to maintain and improve the wellbeing, welfare, and
living standards of the population, priorities start to look very different.
And they don’t include pushing people into poverty in order to fight a war.
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