These are serious times and they demand serious people. And we have Trump |
The futility of war is starkly illustrated by the events in Iran and the Middle East, says Herald columnist Calum Steele
The last thing the world needs, with the ongoing bombing campaign on Iran, is another white middle-aged bloke pontificating about the causes, the effects, and the global strategic consequences of a potential regional, if not global, war. But having already solved the global financial crisis, the political and economic fall-out from Brexit and the Covid pandemic over pints in the pub – the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war on Gaza settled through tactful, measured and meaningful debates on social media – there was a danger the unrivalled expertise we bring to the table on almost every crisis could have been denied to the world.
But here we are, and this is a juicy topic. One ripe for absolute certainty on a subject we know little about and where doubt and nuance can never be admitted or conceded, lest we come across as some lily-livered terrorist-supporting sympathiser or Trump apologist who gets cut out of the messaging groups sharing the memes and jokes which such occasions inevitably demand.
Mercifully, though, the need for our expertise this time may not be called upon at all. We have the reassurance that a man who is renowned for his calm and rational decision-making is at the helm.
Can you imagine the chaos that might follow if this war were being waged by a man who would deploy the military against his own people, who ignores the rule of law, and who is so thin-skinned and riven by self-interest that he requires an army of sycophants around him?
Read more by Calum Steele
Stripping Andrew of his title doesn't cleanse the institution
US policing is bloody enough. We don't need Trump fanning the flames
Thank you, thank you: we owe our courts a huge debt of gratitude
I know that when I woke to the news on Saturday morning, I, for one, was reassured that with such leadership guiding this particular foray into bombing peace into the region, the prospect that this might be ill-thought-out, illegal, or likely to be anything other than a short, decisive, and precise war (perhaps even the most beautiful war ever) never crossed my mind – no sir – not for a second.
The comfort I feel is not misplaced either. Those who are being obliterated do not look like me. The innocents losing their lives are a price worth paying to bring the kind of stability that has not been seen in the Middle East since Iraq and Afghanistan, or, closer to home, in Libya. Liberating and ending the suffering of civilian populations was always a stated priority there too, especially the women and children who endured so much, and who now enjoy limitless “opportunity.” Thank the Lord we didn’t abandon them when our stomach for staying the course waned.
These are serious times and they demand serious people. As I compose this piece, I have just watched the American Secretary of War live on television refer to traditional allies as hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers, boasting that they would not be curtailed by “so-called international institutions” or “stupid rules of engagement”. As an illustration of how to persuade and secure consensus, Kissinger it was not.
As flag-draped coffins already make their way home, soundbites have replaced solemnity. We are assured that others will follow. Deaths are reduced to a mere inconvenience to be endured – but only by others, as egos are stoked and hoo-haas shouted by men watching from the safety of their monitors continents away.
The first casualty of war is not, as the maxim claims, truth, for that conveniently ignores the inevitable innocents wiped out with any attack – targeted or otherwise. The versions of truth that follow are always framed by the sympathies of the teller, and in today’s world there is no shortage of those ready to cash in on the telling.
War reporting demands sobriety, not spectacle. Here, the BBC – for all its travails – still understands that and, crucially, delivers on it. Elon’s platform may boast of record usage, but like the much-diminished moral authority of the United States itself, scale and noise have replaced seriousness. What remains is a marketplace of mis- and disinformation, feeding pre-formed views and sowing mistrust among an audience it must keep permanently riled.
The fog of war breeds a euphoria and anticipation that lack serious consideration of long-term consequences. No one should shed tears for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; his repression of his own people has been an ongoing abomination, long overdue for reckoning. Yet we must acknowledge that brutality does not excuse the blunders of those claiming to end it. Wars are rarely won in a single strike. They can, however, be lost in the assumptions made before a shot is fired or missile launched.
Almost every conflict of the past 50 years has led to instability and chaos. They have tended to create power vacuums and factional score-settling. Death and devastation continue long after military successes are claimed, and as in every war it is the ordinary people who suffer, usually the women and children worst of all. Battles for power, influence, and money drive criminality, and the ready access to ever more sophisticated weapons and explosives creates new markets and opportunities for established crime gangs across the world. Few things are more profitable than human misery. Women and children are traded like commodities. Tactics developed and honed on battlefields become a new currency traded amongst those who care little for the value of life. Just as the weapons of past wars are now commonplace so too can we expect the drone technology dominating the skies over battlefields to become a staple of crime gang arsenals in the not-too-distant future.
Coffins holding the bodies of mostly children are prepared for the funeral of those killed in what Iranian officials said was an Israeli-US strike at a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, on Saturday (Image: PA)
The displacement of people is as inevitable as the headlines that greet it. Families scatter across borders and continents, and eventually some of them, bewildered, exhausted, and above all else, inconvenient. No one asks why. Why would we? Their presence is the story now. The boats. The numbers. The strain.
By the time they reach us, the economic costs of war will be baked into everything. Oil drives the price of almost all we consume. A country already feeling the pinch will have little patience for being squeezed again – and as the squeeze comes we can at least point fingers of blame.
We may take solace that Khamenei can no longer direct his terror proxies, but those who rise in his wake will be no less brutal and, in the chaos, inevitably less restrained. The threats will not evaporate. They will mutate – and become harder to contain.
On the upside, however, our expertise, even if not called on, will once again come into its own – and we will solve these new crises with the same unshakeable certainty that has served us so well for every one before.
Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both.