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  • The West Cannot Face A War

    THE WEST CANNOT FACE A WAR

    The Nation, UAE
    March 11 2014

    March 11, 2014

    Robert Fisk - For some reason, our last century's two world wars
    started rather far from home. I bet that most people in January 1914
    couldn't find Sarajevo on a map. But then again, how many of us -
    really, I mean - could have found Simferopol on a map a year ago? Or
    three weeks ago, for that matter? The Second World War started because
    Britons simply wouldn't take another crooked deal like Czechoslovakia -
    "a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing", in which
    our Neville at least put distance in front of ignorance. So Poland
    it was, which, by awful mischance, shares a border with modern-day
    Ukraine.

    And this really is, I fear, the sort of grim, only slightly understood
    consciousness that we can't let Poland/Ukraine down again, that we
    can't let Putin threaten little Ukraine as we let Hitler threaten and
    invade Poland. Poland is on Ukraine's doorstep - it's funny how we
    get upset about countries that are "on our doorstep" - that's what we
    said about Bosnia in the 1990s. They were in the backyard, I suspect,
    no privies, you know the sort of thing.

    But, of course, Putin is not Hitler and it would be well to try to get
    the Second World War out of our bloodstream - not least because we
    have the First World War coursing through our corpuscles this year,
    and besides the Russians were on our side in the last war and in the
    war before that (for a time). So were the Serbs. But what struck me,
    watching all the EU spivs looking serious in Brussels last week, is
    that these people have no experience of war and somehow think that
    once they have made their threats, they can all go home and forget
    "the crisis". I admit I am much moved by a newspaper headline in
    Beirut last week that began: "War looms..." Well, let's hope not.

    And the "crisis" or the war "looming" in the Ukraine is of great
    interest to someone who lives not a hundred miles from my home:
    President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who will have been much relieved
    to see Putin leap to the rescue of Russian Ukraine as firmly as he
    did for Syria. Indeed, Assad, according to his government, has even
    sent a telegram to Putin - do people still send "telegrams", by the
    way? - in which he "expressed ... Syria's solidarity with Putin's
    efforts to restore security and stability to Ukraine in the face of
    attempted coups against legitimacy and democracy in favour of radical
    terrorists". Syria was committed, Assad said, to "President Putin's
    rational, peace-loving approach that seeks to establish a global
    system supporting stability and fighting".

    And Assad praised Putin's "wise political leadership and commitment to
    international legitimacy based on the law that governs ties between
    nations and peoples". Phew. Well, we got the point. Assad liked what
    he saw in Simferopol, although I notice he didn't say anything about
    the ousted Viktor Yanukovich - and I'm not surprised. The Ukrainian
    leader did a bunk out of his own country. Assad did not run away.

    Putin, I suspect, will have liked that, just as Putin will have
    enjoyed the fact that Madame Clinton, Obama himself, David Cameron
    and Messieurs Hollande and Sarkozy - all of whom said years ago that
    Assad would go, was about to go or virtually gone - were totally wrong.

    So what did I really think when I saw all these folk meeting in
    Brussels? I was reminded of a wonderful description of a British
    politician. It was written by Lawrence of Arabia and I take it from a
    fine new book on him by Scott Anderson. The man in question was "the
    imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements ... a bundle of
    prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside,
    and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style
    of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from
    its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it." The politician
    was Mark Sykes of Sykes-Picot infamy, trying to be nice to everyone.

    But lest you think Sykes was too removed from our time, try this
    from the mouth of another British politician: "However much we may
    sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful
    neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the
    whole British Empire (for which read "the EU") in war simply on her
    account." Our Neville again, of course, in 1938.

    Makes you draw in your breath a bit, doesn't it? The Russkies are not
    going to be shaking in their boots at sanctions. Punishing Russians
    and Ukrainians involved in Russia's move into the Crimea will be a
    "useful tool", said Obama - though why the US President has to use
    the language of computer geeks to threaten Moscow is beyond me. But
    that's what it's all about, isn't it? We can't have war "looming". It
    would destroy all our internets and computers and live-time news
    and globalisation and "tools". It might even destroy us! Read that
    line again, the one from our Neville. They'll patch something up, a
    political gig to let Russia gobble part of Ukraine but still calling
    it a federated republic. Pity about the Tatars. Peace in our time.

    On the subject of Ukraine, you might - if you happen to be passing
    through Beirut - pick up two hefty volumes by Katia Peltekian, an
    Armenian researcher who specialises in publishing news reports about
    the 1915 Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks. The Times and
    The Manchester Guardian gave extensive coverage to the century's first
    Holocaust - some of the young German military witnesses turned up in
    the Wehrmacht in Russia less than 30 years later - and Peltekian has
    captured most of these reports in 976 pages.

    What is most intriguing is the way in which the Great Powers lost
    interest in the one and a half million Armenian dead almost as soon as
    the 1914-18 war had ended. The Times was filled with heartbreaking
    letters from Armenians and the British society which supported
    them, pleading with the British and French and the Italians and the
    Americans - pretty much the same lot who were rambling on in Brussels
    last week - to let them have a nation that included part of eastern
    Turkey. Be patient, the Armenians were told. They had already been
    scattered across the Middle East, but were still being killed inside
    Turkey itself. Some found refuge in Russia. And some in the Ukraine
    ... -Independent

    http://www.nation.com.pk/international/11-Mar-2014/the-west-cannot-face-a-war

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