The Good Samaritan did not have a gun. I make this simple point to deal with those who seem to think that you can show mercy and pity by lobbing cruise missiles into war zones.
I make no claims to be a good person, but I am more and more annoyed by warmongers who dress up their simple-minded, vainglorious desire to bomb foreigners as moral.
Take Lord Ashdown, who moaned on Friday, after MPs voted against an attack on Syria, that he had never felt so ashamed. Really? Many of us can remember at least one occasion when Lord Ashdown certainly ought to have felt more ashamed.
But these days, our moral worth is not judged by such things as constancy and trust close to home, but by our noisy readiness to bomb people for their own good.
The moral bomber is one of the scourges of our age. He gets it into his head that he is so good that he is allowed to kill people (accidentally of course) in a noble cause.
This stupid conceit was – at long last – challenged last week in the House of Commons. MPs, many of them rightly prompted by the fears and concerns of their constituents, refused to be stampeded by emotional horror propaganda. They kept their heads.
The response of the moral bombers was typical of them. There was twaddle about ‘appeasement’. There was piffle about how our world status has suffered (don’t these people know what the rest of the planet has thought of us since the Iraq War?).
There was tripe about damage to the non-existent ‘special relationship’ between this country and the USA. Anyone who has spent two weeks in Washington DC knows that this ‘relationship’ is regarded there as a joke.
There was foul-mouthed fury from taxpayer-funded Downing Street aides, who I don’t doubt echoed their master’s voice. There were the usual snivelling attempts to portray dissent as disloyalty, cowardice or as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
These flailing, spiteful acts were the reflexes of a babyish despot deprived of a toy.
(HT @PhilBC3)
Mark Carrigan 