That one of the venues for
the suicide gun and bomb attacks in Paris on the 14th November was a
Cambodian restaurant brought to mind Britain’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Harold Wilson (Prime Minister 1964-70) refused American requests for British
troops to help prop up the unelected South Vietnamese dictatorship, although he
did not oppose the attachment of British Special Forces personnel to Australian
units as they rotated through Southeast Asia; men who went to those jungles
(now known as rainforests) were told they were in Cambodia. Some still wonder
why the ‘Cambodians’ were so belligerent about their presence.
Vietnam was part of ‘French
Indo China’ when invaded by the Japanese in 1942 and was taken by the British
in the south and the Chinese in the north in 1945. Ho Chi Minh’s home rule
campaign started against the French and continued against the Vichy French and
Japanese with American support through WW2; he declared an independent republic
following the Japanese surrender, but couldn’t get anyone outside his gang to
recognize it; so he declared war on France and fought them until the French
gave him victory at Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva accord gave him the
north. Anyone who wasn’t a communist and could ride a bike, walk, row or swim
headed south to be despotically governed by the regime America eventually
bulwarked as part of their foreign policy of preventing communism spreading.
The concept of communism –
holding property in common - as a social infrastructure dates back to the Stone
Age, according the Karl Marx, and has been flirted with by various groups
throughout history, such as the early Christians, Knights Templar and the
Pilgrim Fathers. Such groups usually have had a self-appointed leader to
follow. The Vietnamese got Ho Chi Minh for that, as the Chinese got Mao Zedong
and, a decade later, Cubans got Fidel Castro; but whether these 20th-century
guys were really paid-up card carrying members of the communist party or not (‘Che’
Guevara never was), doesn’t matter. What they all had in common was that they
attracted a following and then steered their revolutions to seeing off the de
facto government so that they could take their turn at being the de facto
government.
They voted with their
bullets; losers voted with their feet. Having taken the north, Ho continued a
policy of extending his remit south, which he did not live to see. His
successors did, however, and Vietnam became one country in 1975. The success of
that reunification might be judged by remembering the Vietnamese boat people
who sailed and rowed to Hong Kong or washed up elsewhere around the Pacific Rim
to get away from it. The passage of time seems to have settled things down,
making Vietnam a friendly and welcoming place to visit; safe, according to the
Foreign Office, same as North Korea.
Ho would not recognize
this history of his country as we describe it: he regarded the whole of Vietnam
as always occupied by the Vietnamese, making his war a case of getting rid of
foreign occupiers (Normans out, as Hereward the Wake might have styled it) and
latterly American-backed native big cheeses who failed to see him as their
leader and saviour. He didn’t carve out a Caliphate; he knew before he started
where its borders would be. That made his a defensive war, which he never
sought to carry beyond the natural borders of the former French Indo China. The
presence of his armies in Cambodia and Laos were largely for topographical and
logistic reasons.
A country’s borders tend
to follow geography, which also sets the pattern of occupation as farming
families expanded into clans or tribes. Later politics define (or rub up
against) those natural borders; consider Rome’s northern expansion and the
effect the rivers Rhine and Danube had on it, both curtailing expansion (from
either side) and as a defensive line. It seems perfectly natural in the
political history of our planet for strong leaders to want to expand their
empires, usually to gain control of resources; the Bible records various ‘neighbours’
invading Israel/Judea, including the Jews themselves, back when it was called
Canaan. Located as the western end of the ‘fertile crescent’ cradle of
civilisation, it was regarded as valuable real estate.
In the Middle Ages,
Saladin carved out his Caliphate in the Middle East, his territory eventually
including Egypt and Syria. Western objections to his imposing himself on those
territories led to the various attempts to oust him, remembered by history as
crusades. Saladin followed the time-honoured trajectory of empire builders by
taking much of the Fertile Crescent and expanding into the massive oasis that
is the Nile valley. What made the bids to oust him different was that they were
inspired by religion. His making tourism difficult for ‘infidels’ and the Popes’
missing the revenues formerly sent to them by the Christian churches of Holy
Land were enough to browbeat the royal houses of Europe into doing something
about it.
A hundred years ago, most
of Saladin’s caliphate (apart from Egypt) was part of the Ottoman Empire, which
aligned itself with Germany in the nineteenth century and thus was invaded by
Britain and her allies at Gallipoli in the Great War. That war ended with four
empires in collapse, one of which was the Ottoman. A 1922 conference in Paris
carved up the Middle East. That’s where British Mandatory Palestine was
invented; the French had the Lebanon and Syria by the same mandate, which also
created Iraq and Kuwait.
Kurdistan was thought too
small economically to be a country, although the consideration at the time was
not who lived there so much as infrastructure. Geographically it’s big, but
land-locked, lacking ports and navigable rivers. The carve-up put parts of it
in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey; none of whom has since wanted to give birth to
a ‘new’ nation, although it has always been there.
Movements for independence
traditionally fight defensively in their homelands. The Jewish revolts of the
first and second centuries generated warfare in Judea, unless you subscribe to
the theory that the great fire of Rome in AD64 was the first strike of that
revolt by Jewish Christians targeting the seat of the government they hated.
The IRA fought to rid Northern Ireland of British rule and from time to time
they extended their campaign to bombing the mainland; they also (accidentally)
invented the suicide bomber.
The new Caliphate
currently being carved out in the Middle East plans on world domination, so
while Ho Chi Minh didn’t bomb Paris or New York to make his point, the new
Caliphs have and will.
This round of bloodshed
started with the ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia and spread to Libya, where insurgents
were soon spotted by TV crew cameras sporting mint condition British L1A1
rifles; the sort our government took off us in 1989 because it was too dangerous
for us to keep them. Now we know why; suitably motivated people can use them
for regime change.
Egypt had its regime
change, but Syria stood firm in the face of insurgency. British L1A1 rifles did
not appear there, as the Foreign Office did not know who to give them to.
Opposition in and around Syria is multi-faceted; ISIS is just one of them – a
successful one for psychological reasons. It’s better to be pro something than
anti, so being pro a new state is better than being anti an old one.
Thousands of people are
voting with their feet, fleeing Iraq, ISIS, Syria etc. in nearly all
directions. We think that’s a good idea; the Caliphate, or Syria for that
matter, is nothing without the de facto government having people to rule over,
as Norse invaders discovered in what became England. It’s all very well
attacking the place, sacking the monasteries, stealing crops and putting people
to the sword, but no point trying to settle it unless you either keep the
farmers that are there to plant crops with which to feed you or bring
non-warrior people with you to do that work. Failure to do so makes the invader
lord of starvation, as the Pilgrim Fathers discovered that first winter near
Plymouth Rock.
Our government seems to us
to be tripping over itself to attack ISIS wherever they may be found, before
things are right on the ground for them to do so. There are still a lot of
people in the Middle East who would flee given the chance. The problem is that
those who have already voted with their feet have found it dangerous or fatal
doing so and the supposedly safe havens they are fleeing towards obstructive to
their presence. Word of such gets back to the people who have yet to make the
journey, so they are still there, having to decide between being eye witnesses
to the American/British/French/Russian/etc. bombing, or possibly drowning in
the Aegean after a long walk.
This could all have been
handled better; the supposed free movement of people and goods in Europe doesn’t
extend to outsiders, who have to sneak in under the radar and then operate
their own version of Operation Stack in Calais to find a way to Britain. We
were in Calais during the debacle that closed the Channel Tunnel and backed
lorries up to the extent that there were ten miles of motorway hard shoulder in
use for parking. The wannabe immigrants walked along the central reservation
looking for likely lorries to pick on once it got dark.
One Scottish seafood
company had to write off more than £100,000 of invoices because one lorry
taking fresh food to the continent got caught in the jam. That comes straight
off their corporation tax and that was one lorry, one day; there were tens of
thousands of lorries and disruption that lasted more than thirty days.
It would have been cheaper
to send a fleet of double decker buses to pick all the wannabe Brits up; next
stop Kent, who wants it? That way, they’d all come in officially, making it
easier to reject those who do not need asylum. It is always the case that
people who are smuggled into the UK can bring stuff with them that is not
welcome here: guns and bombs, VD and TB, cannabis and heroin.
What does not make sense
is that, while making it difficult for Syrians to escape ISIS, Syria, etc. our
Government are also making it their job to prevent people going the other way.
We would much rather that those people who want to join the Caliphate are
allowed – encouraged – to do so. It’s much easier to bomb them in Iraq or Syria
after they have ‘come out’ as it were, than it is in England where the collateral
damage would be greater, if indeed they can be identified here before doing
something horrific.
