Iraq

Whether or not the Iraq war was wise, it's fair to say that it is now unwise for Tony Blair to intervene in the ongoing foreign policy debate. The former Prime Minister was under fire last week as the country British and US forces invaded in 2003 was rent asunder by ISIS, and naturally the debate about whether these developments show the intervention was the wrong decision has put further pressure on Blair. He rarely needs much pressure to justify his actions, though: he gives the impression of a man who protests too much. In his column today, Boris Johnson makes quite clear that these protests do not come without a cost to the wider debate about intervention.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="Former solider Tom Tugendhat and Fraser Nelson discuss ISIS in Iraq" startat=1758] Listen [/audioplayer]Seven weeks ago, Barack Obama proclaimed that ‘it’s time to turn the page on more than a decade of war’. The people of Iraq do not have this option. They’ve seen, in Basra, Iran-backed militias take on and defeat the British military. They’ve seen highly effective jihadis, disowned by al-Qa’eda for their brutality, take control of a major city, Fallujah, just 40 miles from Baghdad. This week they have seen their second city, Mosul, fall to that same band of psychopaths.

Canon Andrew White is one of the bravest men you could ever meet. He is the Anglican vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad and has continued his service in that country throughout its recent horrors. He has lost hundreds of members of his congregation but he has remained an extraordinary, humbling and hope-giving presence throughout recent years. But now, with ISIS having taken over Mosul and surrounding areas in recent hours, he says that things are worse than at any point in the last decade. This, Nineveh, is the heartland of Iraqi Christianity. In this heart-breaking call for help, Canon White writes: ‘Iraq is now in its worst crisis since the 2003 war.

An astonishing number of useless twits appear to think Russia's annexation of the Crimea is somehow not Vladimir Putin's fault. The poor Russia despot - no longer much too strong a term, by the way - is not responsible for his actions. He was provoked! Not simply by the Ukrainians, who should, it is implied, have known better, but by the west. It's our fault and Putin is simply acting logically and rationally. He has every right to reassert Russia's ancient prerogatives and if we hadn't penned him into a corner he wouldn't have needed to at all. Twaddle of course but the kind of stuff that's not hard to find. Plenty of people - by no means confined to those you would not expect to know better - appear to be swallowing this nonsense.

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.

There has been lots of debate about our impending intervention in the Syrian conflict today. Many of my Coffee House colleagues have counselled against intervention, arguing against Danny Finkelstein’s piece in the Times yesterday. I’m in broad agreement with the general sentiment of the piece, but some of its subtexts need greater illumination. Leave aside Finkelstein’s argument about omission bias. For a moment, forget the ‘complexities’ of the conflict, imbibed as it is with sectarian differences, confessional rivalries, and great power posturing. Even the discussion of what should happen next in Syria can wait for another day. The use of chemical weapons against civilians is an affront to the very idea of civilisation itself.

Max Hastings is one of the foremost military historians in the English-speaking world. His multi-volume history of the Second World War is magnificent. Until recently, however, I had not known that he counted soothsaying among his many accomplishments. How else, however, to explain his article in today's Daily Mail in which the old boy outs himself as a first-class mind-reader. Hastings is responding to a presentation Alastair Campbell gave to an audience of PR types in Australia in which Mr Blair's communications wizard, perhaps rather too glibly, noted that Winston Churchill frequently and deliberately peddled untruths during the Second World War. And yet his reputation remains higher than that of poor old Tony!

On the face of it, the Supreme Court’s decision to allow three suits to be brought against the Ministry of Defence is surprising, almost shocking. My colleague Alex Massie has castigated the judgment; but, while I don’t necessarily disagree with Alex’s sentiments, the judgment merits very close attention. It is a politically far-reaching decision. The Court was asked to consider whether British military personnel on active duty overseas are under the jurisdiction of the European Convention of Human Rights. If they are, then the British state has a duty to secure the human rights of its overseas personnel (specifically their right to life under article 2 of the Convention) as if they were at home. In short, is there some corner of a foreign field that is forever Europe?

The British Army may never go to war again. Not because it is under-resourced and over-stretched but because, as of today, it may no longer be able to afford casualties. That, at any rate, is one thought prompted by the Supreme Court's extraordinary - to my mind - ruling that dead soldiers' families can sue the ministry of Defence for damages. According to the Supreme Court justices, the MoD may have been negligent in its "duty of care" and, consequently, the families may sue the government for failing, apparently, to safeguard the human rights of soldiers killed in Iraq (and, presumably, elsewhere). The court dismissed the MoD's suggestion there might sensibly be "battlefield immunity". I cannot for the life of me understand why. (The whole judgement can be read here.