suburbanmusings

I have just watched Fitna, the film that may or may not be making headlines this time next week.

The images and sounds in the film are truly terrible and the film should not be watched lightly; no-one is obliged to watch it. But one must remember that everything in the film is an original source, there is no commentary in the film and no opinion until the very last minute.

The sounds and images speak for themselves and it is up to individuals to decide what lessons, if any, they draw from it. Geert Wilders may be right or he may be wrong; his film may be important or it may be forgotten by tomorrow.

But I will always defend his right to make it.

“Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”

George Orwell

When the motley crew of Stop The War (NOT IN MY NAME!) activists are asked to elaborate on their opposition to the War in Iraq, they usually reply with the apparently logical argument ‘Why aren’t we invading North Korea, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia?’. Now this is a logical argument, but only if you believe in Liberal Interventionism and you want it to be used against even more of the world’s despots. In one brief sentence the unholy alliance of Socialists, Islamists and George Galloway proclaim themselves to be more Neoconservative than Paul Wolfowitz. According to their logic, the main problem with Bush is that he didn’t launch simultaneous invasions of North Korea and Zimbabwe, but I guess nobody’s perfect.

Of course the other favourite call to arms is ‘No Blood for Oil!’ which seems to imply that there are certain things which are worth shedding blood for, (the destruction of Israel perhaps?). The ‘Blood for Oil’ war cry overlooks the fact that the Americans were so unconcerned about the oilfields, that they made them responsibility of the British Army. That’s the same British Army that forces its troops to go to war in the kind of Land Rovers that mothers use to drop their kids off at school. A slightly more cogent, but less rabble rousing chant would be ‘No Blood For The Removal Of Genocidal Dictators And The Establishment Of Democracy In Previously Totalitarian States’. Most likely though, Galloway’s moral compass would preclude him from any criticism of genocidal dictators.

Of course the absurd Stop The War organisation is an easy target and there are perfectly legitimate reasons to oppose the decision to invade Iraq. Indeed my personal view is that while a moral case can be made for removing dictators, I feel that war is so destructive that it should only be sanctioned in self-defence, the defence of another state or to stop an active genocide. I also feel that the war was a strategic mistake that aided Iran and Al Qaeda more than the West.

Sadly though it seems that the world is so concerned about discussing the run-up to War, and who was right or wrong, that nobody is interested in analysing what is actually happening in Iraq today.

This very week Parliament debated on whether to hold an enquiry into the decision to go to War and the failure of post-war reconstruction. Now I’m all for enquiries but there is already a veritable library of books describing, in agonising detail, the mistakes made in post-war Iraq. Reading Thomas Hicks’ ‘Fiasco’ would be as illuminating as any Whitehall enquiry. And if you want to find out exactly why we went to war, then you need only read page one of Bob Woodward’s ‘Plan Of Attack’, which chronicles Bush’s journey towards Iraq. It starts with Bush taking Donald Rumsfeld aside after a meeting on 21st November 2001 to ask “What kind of war plan do you have for invading Iraq?”. If the war had been instigated by intelligence about WMDs, then the book would have started with a piece of terrifying intelligence being brought to the President’s desk, forcing him to decide whether to take military action. As it was the decision was taken by a cabal of influential advisors close to the president. Dick Cheney remains convinced to this day that Al Qaeda were in league with Saddam and in 2001 he was terrified of a nuclear terrorist attack, Paul Wolfowitz was an idealist who dreamt of bringing democracy to the Middle East by force, Donald Rumsfeld believed in the projection of old fashioned American military power and George Bush, well, he kind of believed in all of those theories. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we had a war.

Unfortunately we are all familiar with what happened next, Iraq began its slow descent into Hell on Earth. The conventional view of this catastrophe is that the Americans dropped the ball during the reconstruction phase and that is why we have between 100,000 and 1,000,000 dead Iraqis (depending on which newspaper you read.) In short it was all America’s fault. Now is it me, or is there something there that doesn’t quite add up?

I watched a short film on Channel 4 News last week which convinced me that the causes of the Iraqi insurgency are as misunderstood as the causes of the war. Two scenes in particular stick in my mind. In the first scene Sunni residents of Haifa Street described how their neighbours were tortured and murdered by Al Qaeda terrorists and later by Shi’ite members of the local Iraqi Army brigade. The wild dogs in the street became so accustomed to human flesh that they tried to eat unwary locals alive. Normality only returned to the street when American troops teamed up with local Sunnis to drive extremists out of the neighbourhood. The second scene covered the story of an elderly Sunni lady whose husband and fifteen year old son had been beheaded by Al Qaeda terrorists. The Sunni lady discovered their fate when a DVD of their beheading was posted through her door. Their ‘crime’ had been so innocuous that I forget what it was now; but I will never forget the image of the handcuffed boy, his terrified eyes stare imploringly at the camera as the masked ‘insurgent’ holds the knife to his throat . . .

Much has been made of the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and ban Ba’athists from Government jobs in 2003. Certainly that decision made a very bad situation worse, but reversing that decision would not have stopped the insurgency. Saddam had planned for a post-invasion insurgency for years, and tens of thousands of Fedayeen militia had been trained for exactly that purpose. The Iraqi Sunnis stood to loose everything with the fall of Saddam. Fiercely xenophobic, nationalistic and armed to the teeth, they were never going to accept the collapse of the regime; around 90% of Sunnis support attacks on American forces. The Nationalist Insurgency has been truly destructive for Iraq. Apart from attacks on US forces, Sunni insurgents regularly planted car bombs outside police recruitment centres or overran police stations. At least 8,000 Iraqi police have been killed by insurgents since 2003. Sunni insurgents have also regularly murdered Government workers, teachers, doctors, intellectuals, reconstruction engineers and thousands of innocent civilians; 80% of those killed by insurgents are civilians. Sabotage attacks have also regularly destroyed oil pipelines, power stations, the national grid, sewage works, bridges and other infrastructure vital to the Iraqi nation. All this destruction has been carried out by the Ba’athists, the same men who ran Iraq for thirty years and led it into two destructive wars. Saddam Hussein was not going to last for ever and the Sunni population were always going to act with extreme violence when they lost their position of power. If it had not happened in 2003 then it may have happened when Saddam died, or fifty years from now, but the Sunni backlash was always inevitable.

Many blame America for ‘allowing’ militant Islamists into Iraq, but Iraq is surrounded by totally porous borders and even an army a million strong could not have halted the flow of insurgents into the country. We know for sure that many Islamists have been aided and abetted by the Syrian Government and were initially welcomed by Sunni nationalists in Iraq. Again Saddam’s regime was always destined to collapse at some point and thousands of Islamist fanatics were waiting to jump into the power vacuum as they did in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Algeria.

More than any other group, the foreign fighters have brought Iraq to the brink of destruction. From the start they aimed to bring about a civil war in the country. They sent suicide bombers to blow up as many Shi’ites as possible at their festivals, in their markets, in their houses and schools and at their mosques. They have also tortured and murdered thousands of Sunnis for various ‘transgressions’. They built torture chambers that made Abu Ghraib look like a kindergarten. They have attacked churches and hospitals and in one attack they blew up 500 hundred members of the Yazidi religion.

Terrorism was not seen in Iraq during Saddam’s time because the Sunnis used state terrorism to keep the Shia oppressed. Decades of murder and oppression by the Sunni majority caused extreme hatred to build amongst Iraq’s Shia and this hatred exploded outward when Saddam’s regime fell. Unlike the Sunnis they were included in the army, the police and the civil service and yet still they have butchered Sunnis by the tens of thousand. The Shia militias have tortured and murdered thousands of Iraqis, the have siphoned off Iraq’s oil riches and they have fought amongst themselves for the right to carve out vast criminal empires. Since the British Army left Basra in September, more than one hundred women have been brutally murdered by militias for ‘crimes against Islam'; male students at Basra University have been murdered for picnicing with female colleagues. These militias pre-date the 2003 invasion. The Badr Brigade was founded and trained by Iran in the 1980s, the Mahdi Army have been following Moqtada Al Sadr since the 1990s and the Fadilah Militia split from the Mahdi Army to battle over territory and criminal rackets. These militias are supported by hundreds of thousands of Shia Iraqis. The groups were formed during the decades of terror practised by the Sunni regime, not during the occupation. Today they are battling their fellow Shi’ites in the Iraqi Army, they are not interested in the Iraqi state, only in furthering their own murderous interests.

The Nationalists, the Islamists and the Shia Militias represent the extremists that have held the ordinary Iraqis to ransom and forced four million from their homes. The elected Government in Baghdad is hitting back and this week the Iraqi Army launched an offensive against the Shia Militias in an attempt to crush the extremist groups. A Basra resident told The Times:

“This is God’s revenge. When they killed my son they said he was a spy and a traitor. But they are killing and stealing and smuggling the oil and the drugs, they are the criminals!”

America made catastrophic errors when it occupied Iraq, but they are not errors that cause Muslim to kill Muslim and in my opinion America’s current role in Iraq is truly altruistic. Americans die everyday in Iraq protecting a democratically elected Government and a population that thanks them for removing Saddam but still supports attacks on them. The Americans are in Iraq under a UN mandate to help to rebuild and protect the country, and they are spending billions of dollars doing so. In my opinion America’s role in Iraq follows its proud tradition of rebuilding nations such as Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Yes America must accept some blame for what has happened in Iraq, but not the majority of it.

Saddam’s state was so brutal and so dysfunctional that it was always going to descend into chaos when Saddam fell. No American forced a Shia to murder Sunnis with an electric drill and no American forced a Sunni to abduct and behead a Shia. This sectarian hatred was always under the surface of Iraq and it was always destined to explode when the Sunni regime collapsed; as all dictatorships inevitably do. One needs only look at the former Yugoslavia, to see how tensions and hatred that have built up over decades can explode into violence when the ruling regime loses its grip on power. The American occupation may have been guilty of ignorance, hubris, incompetence and, sometimes, murder but the war in Iraq is a civil war with the Americans playing piggy in the middle. Iraq Body Count (an anti-occupation website) states that 27,519 Iraqi civilians died during the civil war of 2006 but that only 623 of those deaths were attributable to US forces (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007/).

The hatred between Sunni and Shia was not created overnight and it was certainly not created by the Americans. As I have previously written Iraq has a bright future if Iraqis choose peace and reconciliation; but if they choose hatred and conflict, then I’m afraid Iraqis will only have themselves to blame for the consequences.

Channel 4 News recently showed a series of films to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. One of those films followed a U.S. Army unit in Mosul and a young American soldier who had been knocked unconscious by an IED the previous day. When asked why he had joined the army, the young soldier stated that when he had seen the Twin Towers collapse and fall, he knew that his destiny was to serve his country in a time of war. It was sobering to realise that this young man had been twelve years old when 9/11 occurred.

As we survey the bloody wreckage of the war in Iraq, the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan and the tidal wave of extremism that has engulfed the Muslim World it is worth taking stock and considering how we got to this point.

Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of one global conflict, the events of that day in September marked the beginning of a new worldwide struggle. Like the Cold War this was to become an amorphous, sometimes abstract confrontation played across nation states and touching on ancient grievances. However it did not always have to be this way.

The attacks of 9/11 succeeded because they are examples of iconic terrorism. The images and sounds of that day haunt the imagination; the second plane streaking across the brilliant blue sky; captured on countless camcorders with a running commentary by terrified and disbelieving eyewitnesses. The unbearably sad messages left on the answering machines of loved ones, by people who knew they were about to die. The New York Firefighters, loaded with equipment, trudging defiantly and uncomplaining towards their fate; awe and incomprehension etched onto their faces. The office workers and policemen running for their lives as they are chased by an apocalyptic dust cloud, laced with the ashes of their colleagues. 9/11 succeeded because it triggered three of the most ancient of human emotions; fear, hatred and anger. And the emotions were felt just as strongly whether you were watching the tragedy unfold in Los Angeles, New York or London.

The effect on the American psyche cannot be underestimated. To the Americans this was an unprovoked declaration of war by an enemy whom they neither knew nor understood. The need to lash out against this enemy, using the greatest army the world has ever seen, was palpable. And that was exactly what bin Laden wanted.

9/11 was a tragedy for America; that George W. Bush was president at the time was a disaster. Much has been made by Bush and Cheney about 9/11 ‘changing the rules’ and the idea that America is now ‘in a state of war’. Indeed the draft dodging Bush clearly felt his sense of manhood enhanced by declaring himself a ‘wartime president’. He couldn’t wipe the smirk off his face as he prepared to announce the invasion of Iraq, he donned combat overalls to visit the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk to announce ‘mission accomplished’ and his threats to the Iraqi insurgency, (‘bring ‘em on’) smack of a man who gets a kick out of war.

But 9/11 was never a declaration of war. It was executed by a group of perhaps thirty criminals who simply got lucky. To call it a declaration of war merely lends it legitimacy. It was no more than first degree murder on a mass scale and it should have been treated as such. After all the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre did not cause the same reaction, even though the perpetrators had the same aims, motives and backers as the 2001 terrorists. The 1993 attacks may have killed far fewer people but does that make any difference? Are attacks that kill a few dozen mere annoyances but attacks that kill a few thousand acts of war? Even if 9/11 had been a declaration of war by Al Qaeda, the very last thing that America should have done was take the bait. Al Qaeda has the capacity to commit mass murder but it will never pose a threat to the future of Western Civilisation. The greatest threat it posed was that its philosophy could spread like a virus across the hundreds of millions of uneducated and disenfranchised young Muslims across the world. By blundering into Iraq like a dinosaur into a tar-pit, Bush helped to ensure that this did in fact happen. The genie is now out of the bottle and it cannot be put back.

It is a heartbreaking thought-game but it is possible to imagine what might have happened if Al Gore had been in power on 9/11 rather than George Bush. The more experienced and intellectual Gore may have denigrated the perpetrators as criminals rather than lauding them as ‘combatants’. The invasion of Afghanistan was about as morally justified as any war ever has been and perhaps Gore would have used the doctrine of 'overwhelming force' to destroy Al Qaeda and capture bin Laden. He may even have ordered war plans to be updated on coming to power. Alas Bush did not order such plans to be drafted upon taking office, even though Bill Clinton had specifically warned him that bin Laden would be his ‘biggest problem’. Certainly Donald Rumsfeld would not have been the architect of the invasion and maybe as a result the U.S. Rangers would have been in place at Tora Bora to capture bin Laden. As it was Bush was too concerned about loosing U.S. lives to risk American troops in Afghanistan, which is curious considering what was to come. Instead he outsourced the Battle of Tora Bora to the Mujahideen who duly took a bribe and allowed bin Laden to escape to Pakistan. Maybe Gore would have poured billions of dollars into stabilising and rebuilding Afghanistan and used it as a model to showcase modernism and Western values. Gore would never have sanctioned torture and would surely have committed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to a fair trial at a criminal court; at a stroke taking away the terrorist’s fig leaf of legitimacy and providing an exhibition of America’s unassailable moral superiority. I can imagine no sweeter punishment than condemning a man who craves martyrdom to a lifetime of solitary confinement in a super-max prison. We know that Gore would never have gone anywhere near Iraq, as he opposed the war from the start, and his judgement proved to be sound. Alas Gore lost the election by a whisker and instead we got Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, water boarding, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, ‘stuff happens’, trillions of dollars wasted and five thousand allied dead.

But the wider struggle is not lost and even the disaster of Iraq could now be used to our advantage. The new U.S. president, be it McCain, Clinton or Obama, will face many challenges but also the opportunity to set a new course for the War on Terror. The battle against Al Qaeda has been consumed by the battle against extreme Islam and to win it we need to understand who we are fighting, how we can fight them and how we can win.

One of the golden rules in Sun Tzu’s Art Of War is ‘Know Your Enemy’, and in the fight against Al Qaeda it is pitifully clear that no-one in power has obeyed that rule. To learn how to defeat Al Qaeda we must first learn how bin Laden lives and thinks. Through his fatwas and his sermons we know what his objectives are and we can summarise them in four main points:

1. To punish the U.S. for its support of Israel.
2. An end to the presence of infidels and foreign troops on Muslim lands.
3. An end to U.S. support for ‘un-Islamic’ dictatorships across the Middle East.
4. The re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia.

The battle against Al Qaeda is in reality a worldwide counter-insurgency operation and it requires a co-ordinated military, economic, political and philosophical approach. The key to a counter-insurgency operation is to isolate the insurgents from the people and we can do this by neutralising the appeal to ordinary Muslims of bin Laden’s four main goals. To initiate that process the next U.S. president could begin by making a key-note speech in Riyadh or Cairo, extending the hand of friendship to the Muslim World. This must be part of a concerted effort to lure mainstream Muslim opinion away from the extremists and towards universal values and ideals. Al Qaeda thrives on the oxygen of Jihadism and the War in Iraq should be de-escalated as soon as circumstances allow. This would deny Al Qaeda its biggest recruiting tool and a battlefield in which U.S. technological superiority is seriously compromised. In Afghanistan more money needs to be spent re-constructing the country and training the Afghan National Army. Democracy should be encouraged across the entire Middle East even if this causes a short-term spike in extremism.

Every Al Qaeda attack is a propaganda defeat for the organisation. In countries such as Jordan and Pakistan the once huge support for Osama bin Laden has collapsed, after suicide bombers started blowing up ordinary Muslims in the two countries. Wahabbism is out of sync with mainstream Islam and the Islamist parties were soundly defeated in the recent Pakistani elections. Al Qaeda's attempt at setting up a Wahabbist Caliphate in Anbar has been emphatically rejected by Iraq's Sunnis. The West can capitalise on this by offering Arabs a peaceful, democratic alternative to extremism. Saudi Arabia has had much success in ‘re-educating’ extreme imams and America should encourage this reform across the world. American funding should also be used to overhaul the Madrassa system which is churning out suicide bombers in Pakistan.

The Israel–Palestine dispute is a running sore in the Arab world. The new President should aggressively push the Israelis and Palestinians towards a two state solution. Talks with Hamas should be commenced behind the scenes as soon as possible, if only to negotiate a ceasfire. The achievement of a ceasefire and political resolution in Palestine would go a long way to assuaging anger on the Arab street.

America needs to re-establish its moral superiority; a critical weapon in its arsenal. Torture must be outlawed and Guantanamo Bay needs to be closed as soon as possible. Top ranking terrorists should be put on trial in criminal courts and lower ranked terrorists deported to their country of origin.

Of course Al Qaeda still poses a terrorist threat and offensive action must be taken against it. Arrests and targeted assassinations remain the best way of weakening the organisation, although these are only short term measures; there is always a new recruit to replace a fallen comrade. The United States must be prepared to take covert military action on Pakistani soil, even without the permission of the Pakistani Government. Military action against Iran must be avoided at all costs; it would not be in Western interests to attack Iran at this point in time.

The struggle against Al Qaeda has been subsumed by a wider ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and the West. It is clear, in my opinion, that this represents a collision between highly advanced Western cultures and the pre-industrial cultures of the Islamic World. These upheavals will continue until the Islamic World starts to develop democracy, industrialisation, secularism, individual freedoms and critical thought towards its own culture and religion.

Al Qaeda can never achieve its aims. It can only offer terrorism and totalitarianism; it cannot offer happiness, enlightenment or economic success. However we should be prepared for a ‘long war’ against Islamic extremism. This ‘war’ may last for several generations until it burns itself out. Eventually the Islamic World will develop a pluralist, democratic, free-thinking culture, but that may take many decades to occur. In the meantime the best the West can do is isolate Al Qaeda from mainstream Islamic public opinion and encourage the growth of democracy and critical thought in the Middle East.

Finally the phrase ‘War on Terror’ must be revoked. The British Government learnt that the best way to denigrate the IRA was to treat it as a criminal entity rather than a legitimate army. Likewise if we treat Al Qaeda as an army then we bestow upon it legitimacy and a propaganda victory. Furthermore if we declare ‘war’ on an entity such as Al Qaeda, how do we declare victory? When every last terrorist is dead or in jail? Al Qaeda’s lifeblood is publicity; it would be far better if our Governments wage a secret war against it whilst helping the rest of the world to forget that it ever existed. We can win the War on Terror and the first step may be to deny that this ‘war’ exists.

It’s a truism that many middle class Brits believe their hometown to be the worst in the country; and if you live in my hometown of St. Helens, then it's very easy to subscribe to that view. Lying between Manchester and Liverpool, the town was once described by Tony Wilson as “The perineum of the North West”. For those who live outside the M62 corridor, St. Helens is one of those grim northern towns that are all too easy to denigrate. The people are usually shabbily dressed, working men’s clubs are considered an attractive night out, the local cuisine consists of deep fried carbohydrates and a walk through the town centre is not recommended without a healthy dose of Prozac. But like the sneering comedies Little Britain and The Catherine Tate Show, criticism of working class communities is more often than not laced with snobbery and hypocrisy.

Sure St. Helens, like many towns built during the Industrial Revolution, has its fair share of problems. When the think tank Reform UK produced an urban crime report in 2006, St. Helens scored the second highest murder rate in the country; as well as the fourth highest assault rate and the tenth highest total urban crime rate. It also has one of the country’s highest teenage pregnancy rates and unemployment is at 7% compared to the national average of 5.8%. The place is not exactly a hotbed of culture and to describe the town’s architecture as non-descript would be to pay it a compliment. Even the main church is spectacularly ugly, which is a fairly amazing feat.

So it’s not New York, it’s not Paris, hell, it’s not even Slough. But it is wrong to mock and denigrate a town that thousands of people call home, even if you can’t find a place that serves a decent cappuccino. As in every working class town in Britain the citizens, in the main, work hard and pay their taxes. People have made their lives there; they have built careers and brought up their families in the community. On a Friday night they go to the rugby and cheer on ‘The Saints’, (the best Rugby League team in the world by all accounts). They don’t trouble the world and the world doesn’t generally trouble them.

And while it may not have a branch of Waitrose St. Helens, like the rest of U.K., is also host to freedoms that we take for granted and that many in the world are loosing their lives trying to achieve. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of sexuality and freedom to vote may not seem like much to us, but St. Helens would appear as a bastion of freedom and justice if it were transplanted to Burma, Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe.

With a white population of 99.8% St. Helens may seem to be one of the least diverse towns in Britain but it has always provided a haven for refugees from across the world; from ‘The Apostle of England’ Dominic Barberi two hundred years ago, to small groups of Poles, Italians, Greek Cypriots, Arabs, and Chinese today. Around 40% of the population are Roman Catholic; a legacy of massive Irish immigration during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed St. Helens has the highest proportion of Roman Catholics in the country and serves as an example of how immigrant communities can indeed melt into mainstream society.

You may still want to avoid passing through St. Helens today, but you would do well to consider what effect this superficially ugly, post-industrial town has had on the wider world. The St. Helens coal fields helped to power the Industrial Revolution. In 1757 the Sankey Canal was opened to transport coal from St. Helens to the River Mersey; it was the first navigable canal to be built in Britain. In 1829 the Rainhill Locomotive Trials were held outside the town and the world's oldest railway line passes through the southern suburbs. The Pilkington brothers set up one of the world’s foremost glass manufacturers in 1826 and in the 1950s Sir Alastair Pilkington invented float glass production; revolutionising the use of glass across the world. Thomas Beecham founded Beecham’s Pills, the world’s first commercial producer of pharmaceutical pills, in St. Helens in 1842. After several mergers the company is now better known as GlaxoSmithKline. Other notable residents include the philanthropist Sir John Rylands; the internationally renowned composer Sir Thomas Beecham; the legendary pioneer of Hollywood’s ‘Talkie’ movies George Groves; the Hollywood actor Herbert Mundin; first Prime Minister of New Zealand, Richard Seddon; pioneering naturalist Thomas Nuttall; Lord Nelson’s muse Emma Hamilton; Lord Stanley, of Stanley Cup fame; film director David Yates and, um, ‘comedian’ Johnny Vegas.

So although I wouldn’t recommend that you visit, (indeed those listed above invariably found success by leaving the place), I would also ask that you dissuade from sneering at it or other working class communities across the country. And if you can find me a town of a similar size anywhere in the world that has produced more famous sons, then I promise I will visit. If you can find me a town that has as many freedoms in China, the Middle East, Zimbabwe or Cuba then I promise I will move there to stay. Maybe.

When I was about sixteen I imagined that I would spend part of my early twenties engaging in noble volunteer work in Africa and, perhaps, meeting some loose hippy chicks while I was at it, (there’s no such thing as a selfless deed apparently). Unfortunately real life got in the way of those dreams and I decided to spend eight months snowboarding in Canada instead, (the Canadians need our help too you know). Last year I was splitting my sides watching Comic Relief so I decided to go and get the phone to make a donation, but I kind of got distracted on the way and ended up making a cup of tea instead. I did donate around £100 a year to the Third World through a scheme at work; but when I changed jobs I quietly cancelled the direct debit. However, just when I was starting to think that I was a complete ethical failure salvation came in the form of a lovely bar of chocolate. One day I was busy doing my shopping in Tesco’s when I noticed a bar of Fairtrade chocolate, its wrapping glistening in the light. Hey, I thought, I love chocolate and people in the Third World love being farmers, everyone’s a winner! I casually tossed the bar into my trolley satisfied that I finally had the Third World’s terrible suffering off my conscience. Or did I?

The Fairtrade logo acts like some kind of lazy panacea for middle class guilt over world poverty. By buying Fairtrade products we can confidently proclaim ourselves to be truly ethical without having to travel to Africa with its dirt and its disease and its horrible, horrible poverty. Fairtrade products must be good for the Third World because it says so on the packet, right? Anyway we can’t busy ourselves with little things like the details of how and why; we’ve got dinner parties to throw.

The Fairtrade project is symptomatic of the patronising and hypocritical attitude with which we view the Third World. It seems that those who have made comfortable and successful lives from capitalism don’t want the ‘innocent’ Third World to lift itself out of poverty through capitalism and industrialisation. The Fairtrade organisation and other well meaning charities view the Third World as a farm. They seem to see the Africans as noble peasants who would be delighted to live as subsistence farmers without prospects or modern amenities as long as we pay them a ‘fair’ price for a banana. Meanwhile we can get along with the filthy business of enjoying the fruits of industrialisation, content that the Africans are happy enough working twelve hour days harvesting crops.

The price of a coffee bean is low because that what it’s worth. There are plenty of coffee producers in the world and comparatively few consumers and supply and demand dictate price. If everyone bought Fairtrade we would only succeed in condemning the Third World to subsistence economics for decades to come. Nobody can become rich by spending their lives growing bananas or rearing chickens on a small holding. Furthermore if we encourage a developing country to tie its economy to a cash crop, then if the market price for that crop crashed the developing economy would also crash and burn. And there is a very real danger of that happening if we continue to use Fairtrade products. For example if Fairtrade sets the price of chocolate artificially high, (i.e. above the price dictated by demand) then overproduction would inevitably be encouraged, the market would be flooded and the price of chocolate would crash affecting all farmers and their dependants.

Only landowning farmers who have formed co-operatives are allowed to join the Fairtrade organisation, landless subsistence farmers,who make up the vast majority of the world’s poor, are banned from the project. By encouraging small scale industries Fairtrade is also encouraging the economic inefficiency that has blighted the Third World since 1945. A continuation of this backward economic policy will hold back future generations and prevent the mechanisation and industrialisation that could allow the whole world to be developed. Large scale plantations employing unionised and well paid workers are able to compete on the world market far more effectively and represent true economic development for the Third World.

The Fairtrade organisation claims to have helped around seven million farmers, (out of two billion global poor) but they have not exactly transformed the lives or prospects of these people. Supermarkets use the Fairtrade logo to mark up a huge profit on those products. Only 10% of the profit on Fairtrade product is spent on poor farmers. In reality this means their wages are increased by a few pence, hardly a life changing amount. Undoubtedly Fairtrade has helped to improve the lives of many who participate in the project through the provision of irrigation and clean drinking water but there are many charities that have been performing this task for decades. More than likely there will be one in your home town. Why not donate a pound to these charities rather then buy a chocolate bar for £1 with 90% of that money going to the supermarket? Fairtrade is an incredibly inefficient charity and tends to encourage people to think that they have ‘done their bit’ for the Third World when that is not the case.

The only way individual farmers in Third World can compete with Western farmers is through universal free trade. That would mean the complete abolition of all trade barriers and tariffs in every country. That way every producer would be able to sell their produce at a price dictated by the market. In short everybody would have an equal opportunity to compete on the world market.

Fairtrade is a noble idea but it is fundamentally flawed. We shouldn’t be treating the Third World as some kind of innocent farm while the developed world enjoys the fruits of industrialisation. We should encourage the developing world to follow the principles of capitalism that allowed England to smash its way out of the Malthusian Trap two hundred years ago. Thirty years ago Ethopia and South Korea shared the same level of GNP; now one is kind of doing better than the other, mainly due to the economic decisions made by the two Governments. Even the poorest countries in the world today have the opportunity to achieve a decent and dignified quality of life for their citizens, provided they make the right economic, social and political decisions. We should not be encouraging poor people to live as subsistence farmers, performing back breaking labour in fields with the same fate in store for their descendants. Western charities and Governments need to encourage capitalism, democracy, industrialisation, mechanisation, birth control, education and the provision of basic amenities.

There are many charities out there making a real difference to the lives of the world’s poor. The Rainforest Alliance runs a similar scheme to Fairtrade without the drawbacks, Café Britt helps its farmers to add value to their product by processing and packaging its coffee in Costa Rica. Why not buy cheaper products and donate the money you have saved to a microloan agency like Kiva.org? There are many easy ways that we can make a difference, personally I’m just off to the bank to re-instate that direct debit.

“I have a simple principle in foreign affairs. I see what the Americans are doing and I do the opposite. That way I am sure to be right.”
Jacques Chirac, 2005.

Today it seems that certain truths are self-evident; the earth is round, night follows day, the Iraq war was all about oil, Israel is evil incarnate and the West pursues a foreign policy that is ferociously anti-Muslim. Well these are self-evident truths if you happen to be slightly to the left of Tony Blair anyway.

In his recent book ‘What’s Left?’ Nick Cohen lamented the fact that the British Left is so consumed with its hatred of George W Bush that it's prepared to ally itself with Islamofascist groups that are the antithesis of its own viewpoint. Cohen, heir to Orwell’s reportage and arch-critic of Western foreign policy, found himself disgusted that his fellow left wingers attacked the Governments that gave them their freedom whilst getting into bed with racist and fascist Islamist groups. Indeed in a twisted 21st century version of the Nazi-Soviet pact we now see left wing politicians and Islamist terrorist recruiters peddling the same politics and intellectual philosophy. Clare Short compared Al Qaeda In Iraq to the French Resistance, George Galloway stated that it would be justifiable to assassinate Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone invited Yusuf al Quaradwi (wiki him) to London and nearly everyone brushed over the 7/7 bombings as being caused by ‘the war in Iraq’. That the murder of 52 innocent civilians is excused and appeased by the Left is surely the nadir of British intellectualism. The idea that anger towards the war caused someone to commit mass murder is so intellectually lazy it makes you want to cry. By the same sad logic one could say of the murderers of Stephen Larwence, ‘I don’t agree with what they did but if there weren’t any black people they wouldn’t have done it’. Stephen Lawrence was murdered because his killers believed in an ultra violent, racist, supremacist ideology not because black people made them so angry that they had to murder. In the same way anger about the war may have attracted the bombers to radical Islam but it was radical Islam alone that convinced them to commit mass murder. If anger about the war in Iraq caused Mohammed Sadiq Kahn to blow himself up then by that logic everyone who was angry about the Iraq war should have blown themselves up. Obviously that did not happen; ergo the war in Iraq does not cause people to blow themselves up. One thing and one thing alone caused those men to do what they did and that was radical Islam.

Which brings me to my main point, that both the British Left and the Islamist Right peddle the argument that the West follows an ‘Anti-Islamic’ foreign policy. The fact is that this is just a convenient propaganda tool, Al Qaeda use it as a way of attracting naïve young Muslims and the Left use it as a way of attracting naïve lefties. The idea simply helps to consolidate the ingrained prejudice and beliefs held by both groups, i.e. their hatred of America. Neither group is really interested in the truth because the truth is that they’re wrong. And they certainly aren’t interested in admitting that they might be wrong.

If you happen to be a fully paid up member of Al Qaeda or you are Ken Livingstone you might want to ignore the next part of this essay because this is where evidence gets in the way of dogma and facts get in the way of emotions. The truth can hurt but sometimes it can also be pretty straight forward.

You see both the Left and their Islamist friends seem to forget that hundreds of NATO troops died saving Bosnian Muslims from genocide in the 1990s. The Bosnians may be white Muslims but they are still Muslims nonetheless. And who could forget NATO’s crusade (note small ‘c’) to save Kosovar Muslims from genocide in 1999. Indeed NATO are still in Bosnia and Kosovo to protect the Muslim citizens and help rebuild their countries. I'd say that if there was a definition of a pro-Muslim foreign policy then the West's stance in the Balkans would be pretty close to it.

Today the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are casually touted as anti-Islamic wars in which NATO forces have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. But the fact is that a true Muslim should support the allies’ presence in both countries. In 1990 Osama bin Laden asked the Saudi King for permission to use his Mujahideen to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Now correct if I’m wrong, but isn’t that exactly the same idea that the Neo-cons had? So does that mean that Osama bin Laden is anti-Muslim? When Turkey invaded Iraq this month no-one suggested it was an anti-Muslim invasion but if a Christian country does the same thing it’s automatically seen as an anti-Muslim policy.

Furthermore the coalition troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect the democratically elected Governments, provide security against terrorism and rebuild the shattered economies. They are the forces that are rebuilding those countries whilst the ‘heroic resistance’ concentrates on killing as many Muslims as they can in huge bomb attacks. Don’t just take my word for it though; look at the views of ordinary Muslims in the two countries, after all they should know. In Iraq thousands of Sunnis have joined forces with Americans to drive out the Islamists who have murdered tens of thousands of innocent Muslims, (US forces are responsible for less than 2% of violent deaths in Iraq by the way). People also forget that the Taliban were toppled without a single regular US Army unit being on the ground; it was the Northern Alliance Mujahideen that defeated the hated Taliban with relish. And in Helmand Province, where eighty-nine British soldiers have died and billions of taxpayers’ pounds have been spent on reconstruction, the district Governor is Mullah Salaam, an ex-Taliban leader who states the Taliban are “Enemies of God and Afghanistan”.

Ah, but what’s that I hear you say? America bankrolls Israel – oppressor of the Palestinian people? Well it is true that the US sends Israel about $2.6 billion dollars annually (compared to Israel’s self-generated GNP of $195.3 billion) but the US also sends over $25 billion worth of humanitarian aid to seven Islamic countries including Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Sudan. Furthermore the U.S. has encouraged the spread of democracies in Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon and Kuwait. When a terrible earthquake ripped through Pakistan in 2005 US medics and rescue teams were on the ground helping survivors in a region that shelters Al Qaeda leaders. Nor is this aid to Islamic countries a recent trend. In Helmand Province the only visible signs of development since the middle ages are the hydroelectric dam at Kajaki and the irrigation canals around the Helmand River; they were built in the 1970s by, yep, you guessed it, the USA.

Now I’m not saying that the West’s foreign policy has been perfect or above criticism, far from it, but why does everything have to be viewed through the prism of religion? America fought a war against Nazi Germany; it doesn’t mean that it was an anti-Christian war. They fought a war in Vietnam; it doesn’t mean that it was an anti-Buddhist war. In Darfur more people have been killed than in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine put together, but no-one apart from the American Government seems to know or care. Is that because the people of Darfur are poor, black and Christian? What would happen if they were poor, black and Muslim? There are many reasons to criticise Western foreign policy, but to suggest that it is driven by religion, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is simply pandering to extremism.

When naïve British communists visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s Stalin contemptously labelled them ‘Useful Idiots’. It seems the likes of Galloway and Livingstone serve the same purpose for Abu Hamza today as George Bernard Shaw did for Stalin in the 1930s. However during that dark decade thousands of British Socialists and Communists made their way to Spain to fight and sometimes to die trying to save the country from Fascism. If today’s left-wingers see themselves as rightful heirs to that noble generation, then maybe they should go to Afghanistan to help bring the freedoms they enjoy to the inhabitants of that blighted land, whatever their religion may be.

There’s a serious problem with politicians. It’s not just that they’re overpaid, greedy and devious, or the fact that they all used to be lawyers. No it’s much more dangerous than that. The trouble with politicians is that you will never, ever, hear a politician admit that he doesn’t have the answer to something. Whether it’s how best to reform the tax credit system or who’s going to win Pop Idol, a politician will endeavour to give you the definitive answer, even when they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. In my experience people who tell you that they possess the answers to everything are the ones whose arrogance mucks it up for the rest of us; Marx, Lenin, Castro, Hitler, Steve McLaren, the list is endless. So when we were treated to the likes of David Davis MP telling us how to stamp out our binge drinking culture this week, collective rolling-of-the-eyes was called for. Now I’ve nothing against David Davis personally but how, exactly, is he qualified to advise us on the answer to our binge drinking illness? Is he a reformed alcoholic? Does he DJ at Chicago Rock venues across the North? Maybe he hangs around with kids on street corners drinking White Lightening and discussing why they have to be such annoying little shits. No, the thought of David – I-used-to-be-working-class-you-know – Davis holding the solution to Britain’s ancient love affair with alcohol is, well, laughable.

The Tories current answer to our collective alcoholism consists of: a) lambasting Labour’s answer to our collective alcoholism and b) raising taxes on Special Brew and Smirnoff Ice. Come on David, Smirnoff Ice was so 2001, the kids drink Rose these days you know. Smirnoff Ice, I ask you. I do think taxes could be used to combat public drunkenness but they’re certainly not the ultimate answer, indeed prohibition in America wasn’t exactly a brilliant success. The fact is that our dysfunctional relationship to alcohol is so culturally ingrained that if alcohol was banned today then supermarket sales of de-icer would have mysteriously doubled by, er, tomorrow. Anti-binge legislation is little more than a band-aid attached haphazardly to a rather nasty wound by a slightly incompetent surgeon. The problem is that we live in the so-called ‘Vodka Belt’ of Northern Europe. In Italy alcohol is used to compliment a large and fabulous meal, in France a glass of wine is to be nursed while discussing the works of Jean Paul Sartre and the meaning of life. In Britain it’s used to get rat-arsed, to borrow a lovely expression. In Southern Europe public drunkenness is a source of shame, in Northern Europe it’s a badge of honour and apparently an interesting topic of conversation.

Alcohol is one of man’s oldest discoveries and it’s therefore probably not a coincidence that prostitution is the world's oldest profession (incidentally since when has prostitution been considered to be a ‘professional’ career?) Apparently we’ve always been big drinkers; it’s in our blood – literally. Stonehenge was host to enormous drunken festivals and in the Roman Empire British beer was considered to be a delicacy, though Carling obviously hadn’t been invented then. In 1066 the Anglo-Saxons got slaughtered to celebrate their victory in the Battle of Stamford Bridge and then had to march south with a hangover to fight the Normans, who literally slaughtered them. Alas the Norman’s didn’t bring their sophisticated drinking habits with them, as William the Conqueror’s direct descendant Prince Harry attests.

All this historical baggage doesn’t mean that we are all a bunch of inveterate alcoholics as the chattering classes like to imply. The UK is still the world’s fourth largest economy and British people work the longest hours in Europe, the younger people especially. The violence associated with binge drinking only really occurs on a Friday and Saturday night, the rest of the time Brits do actually hold down responsible lives and careers, believe it or not. The hysterical reactions to the introduction of 24 hour licensing smacked of snobbery and hypocrisy and figures released by the Government show that violent crime has actually dropped in the 12 months since the law was introduced. Furthermore we are not the only culture to have struggled with alcohol abuse, for example more than 50% of Russian males will die from alcohol disorders. Perhaps the greatest act of alcoholic vandalism occurred in 330 BC when Alexander the Great got steaming drunk and decided to burn down the magnificent palace of Persepolis; an act of destruction that puts urinating into a gutter in some crappy British town into context.

Although we do manage to combine economic productiveness with getting hammered, binge drinking is still a serious problem for British society. It costs the economy about £20 billion every year, it puts a massive strain on public services and it’s a major cause of death amongst British citizens. Furthermore the images of obnoxious, drunken British people on a Friday night are quite frankly, a national embarrassment. So how do we combat such a fundamental part of our culture?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with drinking alcohol, the French drink a similar amount to the Brits, it’s just how you drink it that matters and in that respect taxation may help to ease the problem slightly. Firstly alcohol in bars and clubs could be taxed according to alcoholic strength; spirits would be punitively expensive while beers would be attractively cheap. Furthermore the age for drinking spirits could be raised to twenty one. Stricter licensing laws could be used to limit the rows of bars that use high decibel music and a lack of seating to encourage people drink more at a faster rate. This approach to licensing has worked quite well in Nordic countries which have suffered similar binge drinking problems. The police should also increase their zero-tolerance approach to anti-social behaviour. To balance out this punitive approach we could encourage a more open, liberal and mature attitude to alcohol in line with our enlightened European cousins. It could be made legal for under-sixteens to enjoy diluted wine or beer with a meal at a pub and sixteen to eighteen year olds could be allowed to drink low alcohol beers at certain pubs. Taxes on alcohol in restaurants could be lowered to encourage the partaking of drink with a meal, something that limits the more insidious effects of alcohol.

However these measures can only act to curb the worst effects of alcohol abuse; they will not stop it entirely and as long as Anglo Saxons view getting blind drunk as the only way of enjoying each others' company then nothing will change. In many ways Britain has changed massively in the last thirty years; if you went out for a coffee in 1979 you’d probably end up with a mug of Nescafe, today you can order a double decaf, dry, extra skinny, fair trade macchiato. In other ways, however, the Anglo Saxon mentality has changed very little, indeed extreme drunkenness now seems to be commercially encouraged. To change a people’s culture is very hard and I for one don’t know how we can change our attitude to booze anytime soon. Maybe I should just ask David Davis for the answer, over a pint of course.