Martin Bell, ex-BBC foreign correspondent and former independent MP; Patrick Cordingley, commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade (‘Desert Rats’) in the 1991 Gulf war; Paul Rogers, professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, discussed themes of peace and answered questions from young Quakers at an event organised by Colchester Quakers. This article sets out thematically some of the discussion.

From left: Martin Bell, Patrick Cordingley and Paul Rogers in Colchester, with chair Jennifer Kavanagh | Mervyn Carter

IRAQ

Martin Bell: In terms of Iraq 2003, that war in my mind was the worst decision by a British prime minister in my lifetime. Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind.

I think what has happened is that our soldiers are on one side and our politicians are on another.

The recent New Labour government is the first time in our living history we had nobody in our government who has ever served in the army or any of the other services or who knows anything about the reality of warfare or what can be achieved by the application of armed force. They think it can deliver outcomes that it cannot. This is quite new.

Ask yourself how we British stayed out of the Vietnam war. Against the blandishments of Lyndon B Johnson we still would not commit. All he ever asked for was the Black Watch! He didn’t get it. Why? Our defence secretary at the time was Denis Healey, who had served as a beachmaster at Anzio and who knew the reality of warfare. He knew the costs and casualties.

The danger is that we create the conditions that we are trying to avoid.

Paul Rogers: In Iraq today there is still huge instability and violence. In one day 150 people were killed in twelve different incidents. It was hardly reported in the western media.

In a real sense the way the war on terror has been conducted is an example of old thinking. And we have to go very much beyond that. We have to get much clearer picture of what is actually motivating Al Qaeda.

We need to get to grips with the factors that are causing support for Al Qaeda and meet them at the causal points. It is not easy but in the longer run probably very much more successful.

Martin Bell: My spies in the Ministry of Defence tell me there was a feeling in political circles in the Ministry of Defence that the scenes in Wootton Bassett were bad for morale, and undermining us, because they were putting too much emphasis on the costs and casualties of war. You cannot have too much emphasis on the costs and casualties of war.

AFGHANISTAN

Who pays the price for conflict? A group of young girls from the village of Shamal Gah gather for a photo during a humanitarian aid delivery by the Afghan National Army. | ISAF Public Affairs.

Martin Bell: I think we British have gone AWOL from our history. There is not a regiment in the British army – not one – not the old regiments or the new merged regiments that does not have Iraq, Mesopotamia and Afghanistan on its battle honours over and over and over again and we never seem to learn the lessons.

Helena Kennedy described Blair’s Downing Street as a ‘history free zone’. You might like to consider the consequences of that for the soldiers of 16 Air Assault Brigade up the road because they are the ones who pay the price. We British are now fighting our fourth Afghan war. We might like to reflect on who won the other three. We didn’t.

Patrick Cordingley: As a rule of thumb it costs the Americans about one million dollars per person in Afghanistan per year. Let us say there are about 200,000 Americans [soldiers and citizens] involved in Afghanistan – or will be. The bill for that – at one million dollars per person, you will all have worked out – is $200 billion a year. Now the American debt is $12 trillion. Their overseas borrowing, mainly from China, is $3 trillion. The Americans are not interested in casualties – American casualties. They are not particularly interested in the legality of what is going on there. They are not actually certain of where Afghanistan is. What they are concerned about is terrorism in their own country… and taxes.

Now Barack Obama has got a real problem and he has got to be re-elected. If more American troops have to be sent there, the bill will go up. He may have difficulty in borrowing it and the only way he is going to get that money is by putting up taxes and if he does that by too much he will not be re-elected.

Don’t think that we in this country have much say in what is happening in Afghanistan. What happens to us and the other nations involved in ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] is dictated by the internal politics of what is going on in America.

And we will dance to that tune. So watch what is happening in America if you want to know when our boys are coming home. That is the key to this particular thing. You may think that I am being cynical. I am not. I am being entirely realistic.
Don’t believe the government when they say it is about security in this country.

THE STRATEGIC DEFENCE REVIEW

Patrick Cordingley: What this document deduces is that wars will be fought for resources and fought for ideology. I don’t think there is anything clever about that. Water is going to be in short supply and oil and so on… wars will continue to be fought by proxy… look what is happening with Hamas at the moment or Hezbollah.

But there are fundamental questions to answer: What are we doing in the world today? What is our posture? Are we a mini-superpower? What do we really want to achieve? What are our national interests?

And what the politicians need to do is to work out what we don’t want to do – because just at the moment we want to do everything.

Paul Rogers: The problem is that we still live in a society that still sees things in terms of military responses to problems that go far deeper.

There is an approach which I call ‘liddism’ – keeping the lid on things rather than going down to the underlying problems – why you have the problems in the first place.

We need a much broader security review, which takes in all these issues and examines them together.

And it may be that going for military control over problems that go far deeper that this is not actually the way forward.

Patrick Cordingley: And if you were the prime minister of this country and you wanted a seat on the [UN] Security Council and you wanted to strut the stage alongside Barack Obama you too would want to do everything. But is that realistic? Can we afford to do that?

In it all is the possibility of expeditionary warfare. In other words pre-emptive strikes against nations who might affect our national interest, whatever these may be.

And to make this possible we are building two super aircraft carriers. As one person put it, we are building four acres of mobile sovereign airfield. And we are putting on these things hugely expensive aeroplanes – an aeroplane that costs about £190 million each. And we initially wanted 180 of them. Now we are down to 135 because we simply can’t afford it.

TRIDENT

Patrick Cordingley: Can we really afford to have a piece of equipment coming into service as a replacement for the Trident, which is going to cost at a conservative estimate £90 billion?

And what happens too if we go along and say we want ‘a like for like’ replacement for Trident – in other words a better submarine and a better missile system and a more effective warhead, which will presumably kill more people?

What does that say to the rest of the world? It lifts literally two fingers at any emerging state that is trying to reduce its nuclear capability.

What is Britain doing? Well, actually, it is improving its nuclear stance. Is this what we really want to say to the world? I just don’t believe that.

It is not just the cost of the submarine and the missiles and the warheads – because we are a signatory to the nuclear test ban treaty, we can’t test a new warhead.

So what do you do? You go to Aldermaston and you say you have got to have simulators that are capable of simulating whatever megaton worth of explosive we are going to put on top of the new D5 missile.

What does that cost? It costs Aldermaston, in the next few years, £3 billion… £4 billion pounds… to actually build these simulations. It is an enormously expensive game.

WAR AND INEQUALITY

Paul Rogers: It is a time of tremendous economic growth; but it has been tremendously asymmetric. Most of the increase in wealth over the last thirty years has gone into the hands of a billion and a half people out of a global population of seven billion.
One in five have gathered most of the benefits of the kind of economic systems that we have and that gap is widening.

The richest fifth actually get about eighty-five per cent of the income. One tenth of the population has eighty-five per cent of the household wealth.

That trend is towards a widening, not a narrowing. It is not so much between rich country and poor countries. It is a trans-global phenomenon. China has more relatively rich people. The United States have a great majority of people in the elite but still forty million plus can’t afford health insurance. In Britain we have poverty still. It is a global phenomenon and that has to be understood.

The biggest threat in India is not Pakistan but the neo-Maoist rebellion in the north.

Many of you will remember in the ’70s the sociology talk of a ‘revolution of rising expectations’ – what you have now also is a ‘revolution of frustrated expectations’. And it drives many radical movements. It causes huge suffering.

For the first time in human history we as a global community are impacting on the entire global environment. What has become more and more clear from all the climate change research of recent years is that those parts of the world going to be most affected are the tropical and sub-tropical regions – with the environmental constraints and with the divisions you get the potential for a very fragile, very fractured world.

Young Quakers from Colchester prepare to ask questions of the panel | The Friend

Why is there not greater media coverage of conflicts in places such as Darfur?

Martin Bell: The reason why some conflicts in different parts of the world, like Darfur, are not covered as they should be is because many of the news media find it too expensive. They are also much more interested in agendas closer to home. And it is too dangerous. Everything has changed since 9/11. The ability to report on some situations is no longer possible if journalists get kidnapped and held to ransom. This is a disincentive.

We have the phenomenon of suicide bombers and now, unbelievably, of child suicide bombers in Afghanistan. The return of child soldiers to the Congo. The Congo in these last ten years has suffered a war – the great war of Africa – in which four million people have been killed… and our media tell us nothing about that.

Do you think our growing capacity to destroy ourselves and our environment equates with a loss of religious values?

Paul Rogers: The reality is that broadly speaking the world is getting more religious rather than less. We see the growth of religious movements in what we call the majority world. I am not sure there is a decline in religious or more moral and ethical values – at a time when we are learning how to destroy ourselves and our environment. It is just that there is an increased need for those values because we are not keeping pace with other developments. It is whether we can increase our wisdom.
What of the threat of Iran?

Patrick Cordingley: If I was an Iranian I would almost certainly want to have a nuclear weapon. They are surrounded by nuclear states – Israel, India and Pakistan. And they are threatened by America. What is the best way not to be threatened by America? That is to have your own nuclear weapons.

If you are worried about the rhetoric coming out of Iran… that rhetoric has been coming out of Iran ever since Israel has existed. I have sympathy for Iran. I hope they don’t develop a nuclear weapon.

Threatening them is not the way to resolve this issue.It is difficult to talk to them but nevertheless we have got to go on talking to them.

How far was the Gulf war just about oil?

Martin Bell: Was oil a part of the Iraq war? Yes it was.

In 2003 I looked out from a watchtower across at the oilfields, and there was an army officer beside me and he said: ‘Now I know what it must have felt like to be an officer in the German Wehrmacht in France in 1940.’ Oil was part of it but only a part of it. Our inability to distance ourselves in any way from the Americans was another.

Patrick Cordingley: What always fascinated me about the second Gulf war was whether it was just. And that argument still rumbles on now.

Nobody really addressed the problem of was it just. And it wasn’t just… according to any of the theories that I have come across.

I remember in the first Gulf war a soldier said to me: ‘Sir, would we be doing this if they grew carrots in Kuwait?’ And I remember saying to him: ‘Good question, sunshine, now let’s get on with the job.’

Paul Rogers: On the issue of oil and Iraq imagine a rectangle – 400 miles east to west, 1,000 miles north and south – off the north-east coast of England.

Take the same rectangle plonk it down over the Gulf. You get sixty-two per cent of the world’s oil in one small area. There are other factors but that is one of the underlying reasons why the Gulf is so tremendously important.
What would you do as minister of defence?

Paul Rogers: I would re-think the entire business of replacing Trident and cut the number of British warheads in half.

I would cancel the aircraft carrier programme. It is a huge mistake and hugely costly and will direct British defence policy in one direction.

Finally, you have got to have some overall authority to get a grip on these grandiose overly expensive defence projects. You need an over-all authority to handle the big defence projects.

Martin Bell: We have to restructure our armed forces to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we wish it to be or the world as it used to be.

Link: Rod Usher writes about Colchester Quakers' recent work on peace. http://thefriend.org/article/searching-for-our-peace-testimony/