Sir Simon Jenkins Is Peddling Weapons-Grade Tripe. Again.

Via Norm, I see that Sir Simon Jenkins is up to his old tricks, publishing yet another meretricious column on the Afghan war which, all too conveniently, manages to ignore the reason why US and allied troops ever landed in that benighted country in the first place. That’s right: Sir Simon never mentions 9/11. Not even in passing. Reading his column you could be forgiven for thinking US generals (and their British accomplices) sat around discussing the need to give their troops some proper entertainment. A kind of Club Hindu Kush M16. What a jolly wheeze!

Anyone who knows anything about the Americans would know better than to describe the Afghan war as “a neocon fantasy”. Sir Simon Jenkins does not fall into this category. Anyone who deplores the way the Afghan war sprawled out of control (and Sir Simon Jenkins is definitely in this camp) has had a decade to come to terms with the fact that their fellow travellers in Washington are the dreaded, despised so-called “neocons” themselves. Donald Rumsfeld, whatever else you may care to say about him, was not keen on occupying Afghanistan. Sir Simon boasts of ownig “two dozen” books about the war yet seems not to have grasped this elementary fact.

Bafflingly, Jenkins argues everything was simple and eminently foresseeable. Above all “Nato should not drive al-Qaida, a tiny Arabist cell in 2001, into alliance with the Taliban.” Perhaps my memory is faulty but I seem to recall that the Taliban was in cahoots with and sheltering this “tiny Arabist cell” before NATO ever thought about Afghanistan. The Taliban were asked to sever this link but chose not to. The war was not, whatever Jenkins pretends, a conflict chosen by the west. On the contrary! It was a response to events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania and the Taliban brought it upon themselves.

By ignoring 9/11 Jenkins distorts history. The reader can decide whether this is a matter of ignorance or malice. Jenkins says America’s allies were “sucked into the Afghan vortex by NATO blackmail”, inviting the reader to suppose that the war was always based on a false prospectus that had nothing to do with anything that preceded it. This too is preposterous. 

He continues: “Whatever might have been achieved against al-Qaida with minimal force in 2001 – on which I recommend Lucy Morgan Edwards’ book The Afghan Solution – is past history. Resumed chaos beckons.” Doubtless this is so. But if so he might consider that a “quick” war in 2001-2002 would surely have left Afghanistan in choas too. That might have saved a great deal of blood and money but, again, Jenkins appears unaware his analysis is similar to that advanced by the likes of “necocon fantasists” such as Donald Rmsfeld and Dick Cheney.

According to Jenkins, we have learnt nothing from the Afghan story:

Which is why this is not the endgame. Britain is even now rattling sabres and dicing with disaster alongside the US against Iran. Such a war would be as catastrophic as could be imagined, and against a country that poses no conceivable threat to western security. The sole reason for going to war against Iran is to go to war against Iran. That is how we went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly, nothing has been learned.

See what he does there? As Norm says, there are never any reasons for war save the crazed bloodlust and imperial dreams of those addicted to the use of force. Poppycock on stilts, of course. I happen to think military action against Iran would most probably be a colossal mistake. Nevertheless, one may think this yet also appreciate that the argument for trying to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions rest upon concerns about the likely impact and consequences of Iran getting the bomb. It is a balance of risk.

Similarly, the notion that the United States was gagging to go to war in Afghanistan is a grotesque perversion of the historical record. It comes perilously close to arguing that 9/11 was rather useful, even almost welcome, for the Americans. Iraq is a slightly different case but even here it is a nonsense to suggest there were no reasons, flawed or not, for the war other than the mighty delusions of neoconservative fantasists in Washington. If Sir Simon Jenkins doesn’t know this then he should; if he does then he’s being deliberately meretricious and peddling weapons-grade tripe.