I've been arguing with the readers in CiF, and I know by now I have a load of angry people attacking me and calling me, Comrade, etc, but I cant be bothered to argue with them. Their minds are made up by so much propaganda and I can't really lay into them and put out real facts and links to sites because I know the Guardian moderators will remove my posts.
Simon Jenkins.
It's worth reading the whole article because it is so refreshing to see something like this in the MSM. It's only because he has been writing for the Guardian for some time and has a lot of stature that he can get away with it .
Donald Trump’s United Nations performance on Tuesday was dangerous. It was dangerous not for the testosterone tub-thumping and infantile imagery. It was dangerous for being based on a lie. Trump said: “If forced to defend ourselves and our allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Choice is the privilege of power – and moderation is its obligation. Trump understands neither. The two objects of his vitriol, Iran and North Korea, apart from being wholly unalike, are seeking to defend themselves with the same weapons as are deployed by America and its allies. No outside force is likely to stop them, nor is it clear by what right it might do so. We may not like nuclear proliferation, but we can hardly lecture others on the subject.
Meanwhile the idea that North Korea, for all its posturing, poses an existential threat to America is paranoid absurdity. Were its ruler to go mad and direct a nuclear missile at Guam or Hawaii or Oregon, it would cause a terrible mess, and a crisis in Chinese-American relations. Few would argue against retaliation. But the greatest danger is that it would suck America into another Asian land war and probably a defeat. As in the case of America’s war in Vietnam, that again would be a choice, but not a necessity.
The Afghan war demonstrates the ailment at the heart of British foreign policy – its inexplicability. When asked why we were in Afghanistan, Blair would say we were “defending freedom” and “building a better nation”. Gordon Brown said we were “keeping British streets safe”. David Cameron said we were “driving terrorists out of that country”. What is it about Downing Street that obliges its occupants to talk such rubbish?
An intriguingly frank debate on Afghanistan took place last week at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. With commendable frankness, present and past soldiers, diplomats and politicians reviewed Theo Farrell’s Unwinnable, a devastating account of the Afghan saga, in which every British military failure down the ages has been compressed into the cesspit of expense, death and misery called Helmand.
Apart from its sense of “lions led by donkeys”, the book shows what happens when soldiers and politicians dare not speak truth to Downing Street power. Seminar participants kept asking each other: “Who is to blame?” It was hard not to shout: “You lot!”
British fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan were due simply to Blair’s eagerness to backrub George Bush in his grotesque responses to 9/11. We are now doing the same to Trump. North Korea is a tinpot dictatorship utterly in thrall to China, whose painful responsibility must one day be to cut its throat. Its leader has mastered the art of taunting to distraction one American president after another. Each week Trump rises to the bait.
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