WHOM SHALL WE INVADE ?

By Clayton Goodwin

A few years ago, just before he died rich in years and memories, I spent an enjoyable evening talking in his Black Forest home with a veteran of the Wehrmacht about his experiences in the Second World War. That is the War which he insisted ran from 1941 to 1945. Surely he was wrong? The War started for me and us two years earlier. Hadn’t he been misled by all those American war-films giving the date of when they came into the conflict.
“No” he insisted – and here I translate and paraphrase his words. “The Second World War began when the Russian people called on us, Germany, to help them overthrow Stalin and the Bolshevik state”.
That was, I have to admit, a completely unexpected take on my own understanding of the situation. What about the Polish campaign? The fall of France? The Blitz – the bobs falling on our own garden in my infancy? Greece? Crete? And a whole catalogue of military actions on any different fronts from the Middle East to Scandinavia, and so much in-between, and in the air and on the seas.
“That was a police action” – said Albert, for that was his name. According to his recollection Germany was always bring called in to save a minority community from persecution, or to keep two prospective belligerents apart. The Western democracies didn’t object to that to much. Sure, they had to put up some public opposition, mainly for the benefit of those lands with whom they had treaties – but it wasn’t that serious. They didn’t exactly exert themselves. When the whole thing looked like getting out of hand the Germans merely chased them back to whence they had come. It wasn’t that big an affair. Comparatively few people were involved, and he wasn’t even called up. He continued with his peace-time occupation in the textile industry in spite of being in the physical prime of his life. Life went on us normal – you couldn’t call that as being a state of war.
Then it call changed (almost before the Germans were conscious of the change in gear).
“The War began with the fighting in Russia in 1941”.
I thought of the American commentator Howard K. Smith’s excellent book “Last train from Berlin” written at the time it happened. Hitler was always saving the German people from something or some-one. The Jewish Peril – the Red Peril – the Yellow Peril – the White Peril – it didn’t matter which one as there was always another one behind. Each rescue-act ended with his armies committing “necessary” atrocities in the name of liberation, and each ended with the need for a further operation to secure the gains won in the action just completed.
Although he had lived through it all – and was far from being just a gullible peasant – Albert could not be sure of where exactly the join came which separated the police action from the War. Not at least, it was too late and he could do nothing to prevent the Red Army from its rapine ravage of Berlin or the French poilus from ransacking his own humble family-home. The Rhineland re-occupation, the Austrian Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Poland, Norway, France, Operation Sealion, the Balkans were steps along the way and then – snap – Barbarossa. It was a slow mesmeric build-up from a police action to the eve of destruction. The German people sleep-walked into their own oblivion with no real idea of where they were going. Yet once they got their feet on the slippery slope it was damn-nigh impossible to get off.
I thought even more of the succession of our own ministers from Tony Blair to William Hague urging as ever onward to another act of liberation (weapons of mass destruction or otherwise). Iraq was hardly settled, the action in Afghanistan still going on, before eyes were cast in the direction of Libya with more than a sideways glance towards Iran, Pakistan and even North Korea. Just how many countries can we accommodate in our career of liberation!
There are so many targets from which to choose. I am reminded of the mosquito let loose in a nudist camp and did not know just where to start – a remark I heard first from Walter Rodney, African historian, Marxist politician and martyr, when we were together in the debating society of the School of Oriental and African Studies in the early 1960s.
Some are already rattling their swords in the direction of Argentina over the Falkland Islands – again. It may be serious: it is worrying the South Americans. And why not Argentina? Like a pop singer re-cording his greatest hits some years after the event it is good to go over successful old ground once ore. It isn’t the same though. The conditions are different. Ronald Reagan isn’t in the White House, Margaret Thatcher isn’t in Downing Street, and the “special relationship” isn’t quite so special any more. Besides, we have cut back on our naval capability.
Cuba will be a tempting target for the Americans when the Fidel Castro era finally ends – and that cannot have too far to go now. Newt Gingrich is already tempted – and he isn’t alone. With Fidel finally foes somebody from inside the island will surely be found to invite the Americans “in” to save the Cubans from themselves. If nobody does it for them I am sure there will be plenty among the émigrés to do it for them. There are no Soviet rockets to deter them this time – though, seeing themselves surrounded in the American sphere of influence, the Cubans may do it of their own accord. 
The rhetoric over Syria has moved at such pace that it has gathered its own momentum and in full flow will be difficult to arrest. I am still not sure whether Syria is regarded as being a cause in itself or as the prelude to an even major step towards Syria – nor, I suspect, are the politicians and commentators. Both countries face a similar Sunni opposition, and whatever the faults of the present dictatorship in Damascus it does provide protection to Shi’a and other Muslim minority sects as well as to Jews and Christians. Syria is not like Libya and the Iraq of Sadda Hussain. Russia stands behind them, a country which has recovered from its immediate decline on the break-up of the Soviet Union and is anxious to prove that it should be regarded still as being a great power – and what better way of doing that, in an election year, than by standing behind its friends.
China joined Russia in the recent UNO veto. It seems that whatever diplomatic game in played and however it is conducted the result is always “advantage China”. The erosion of the potential American international hegemony as soon after the end of the Cold War, which was supposed to herald the dawning of the Pax Americana, and the snuffing out of the last British pretensions to be an influential player on the world stage, both the result of the Bush-Blair (mis)adventures in the Middle East, has distracted attention while elsewhere China signs up the globe. The Chinese have funded the new headquarters building of the African Union in Ethiopia, bought up much of that continent and Latin America, and are said to be poised to take over Afghanistan as soon as the West pulls out. They have even financed cricket grounds in the West Indies. Our strutting and posturing as bantam-cocks in the farmyard can be only to the advantage of China who move softly and carry a very big – whatever it is it is more effective than anything that we have got.
Iran, situated between the Levant/Near East and Afghanistan/Pakistan, faces two implacable regional adversaries in Israel and Saudi-Arabia. Predictions of a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability and too numerous and from such usually solid sources to be comfortable and Osuma bin Laden and the terrorists who carried out the attacks of 11^th September 2001 were Saudi-Arabians, whether renegade or otherwise. The Iranians will not take any strike against them without retaliation. Here the Israelis and Saudi-Arabia, the major Sunni power, are united in their cause though for contradictory reasons. It would be more politic for the former to deliver the strike as the Saudis would have a lot of explaining to do for their aggression against a fellow-Muslim country in collusion with a state whose very existence is supposed to be an anathema. American and Russian rockets would face other in greater pointed confrontation than at any time since the Cuba missile crisis in October 1962.
Iraq and Afghanistan are occupied but – certainly in the case of the latter and probably also for the former – neither conquered nor cowed. Pakistan, the invasion of which has been spoken of as being inevitable for so long, seems to be have been put on the back-burner for the moment. Although their country seems to be in a mess the Pakistanis cannot be written off – and that does not apply only to their cricket team. Whatever their nuclear and political muscle, Pakistan’s most formidable threat is through the cultural links with fellow communities in the United Kingdom, Western Europe, North America, the states of the Arabian Gulf and in East Africa and also in India. From there terrorism can get into the blood-stream undetected until it is too late.
The governments of North Korea, once and very recently a key fulcrum of the “axis of evil”, and the Yemen, though harsh and undesirable, are less inviting targets for the United Kingdom, whatever the Americans and their more immediate allies may care to do or say. The autocrats of Bahrein, of course, are among the “good guys” and secure to go about their ways. I have quite lost touch as to which African countries still require saving by an “ethical foreign policy”.
That’s quite a lot of states on which we have not pressed our desire for “good neighbourliness” – and nearly all of whom we expect to, and need for them to, participate in this summer’s Olympic Games in London, Terrorism and the potential death of public figureheads, both within and outside the country, are not the only hazards the event faces. You cannot invade somebody’s boundaries and then realistically expect them and their friends to come to your party.
Although no actual invasion is contemplated – I presume – a cold, or verbally warm, confrontation will be pursued nearer to home. The attitudes of press and politicians to the European Union has long since gone beyond the merely puerile. In spite of years of foreboding, or wishful thinking, the Euro has not gone out of existence, nor has any country yet tumbled out of the Eurozone – even though Greece has not moral right to be there, having provided incorrect data to obtain membership. And if any have been saved “only” by the help of its partners surely that is the whole work of the enterprise and its vindication. Within the last few months (and, in some cases, years) we have been told that Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and more will go crashing out, but none has done so yet. One European country has become bankrupt, of course – Ireland which is hardly mentioned as it is not in the Eurozone and does not fit the prejudice.
The Euro will have to be amended at some time in either form, value or the countries covered, but that is in the nature of currencies. When the sceptics whoop in delight at the “vindication” of their doomsaying will they recall, too, that traditional currencies – including the pound sterling (“new pence” and all that) – went through their own revaluation. By then the United Kingdom will be even further behind the pack and even more petulant.
I use the term “United Kingdom” with some consternation as in its present form it may not outlive the Eurozone in its present form. Westminster seems to be doing all it can to hand the cards to Alex Salmond and the SNP as the country talks Scotland into an independence neither party really wants. Full independence is still one of the least likely options, as, indeed, is the current degree of integration. Scotland has had a much more realistic, and less jaundiced, view of the European Union, and who can say what effect the breach and re-orientation of one of the partners better-disposed to Europe will have on the Welsh. Now that generation which lived through, and fought through, the “troubles” is fading away Northern Ireland could even find a closer relationship with its southern neighbour in a co-operating island within a united Europe to be more re-assuring that life in a fracturing (dis)United Kingdom. It may still be very unlikely but stranger things have happened. I can remember a time, not long since past, when the Cold War and the Berlin Wall, and apartheid in South Africa, seemed to be immutable.

Who shall we invade?
More pertinently, whom can we afford to invade – that is the question – whether it is in terms of finance, weaponry or prestige. That brings us back to Albert, the former Wehrmacht man, and the way the years leading up to the Second World War were perceived. We were told that Hitler had to keep the military momentum going to divert domestic attention from the hardship at home and that he had to keep running at twice the pace as before just to stand still. A generation or so before that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, too, was said to have to keep probing in the Balkans to hide its own internal and weakness and to hide the fact that it was no longer a “great power”. The weaker the Empire became, and the more the real disintegrated, the harder they probed until, a few years after the ruler celebrated his Diamond Jubilee, these probing led to the outbreak of the First World War.
Britain today is less inclined to launch its own unilateral invasion – there should be no reprise of the Falklands experience. Yet as a small boy shadows a bigger boy, or group of boys, to acquire strength through association we are all too likely to go with the U.S.A. or an American-led group of nations. As British influence declines within the European Union and the Commonwealth, our enthusiasm grows for the adventures of our bigger trans-Atlantic brothers. Ay, there’s the rub. For if the coming months leading up to the American presidential election are fraught with danger as both candidates will endorse the more bellicose course of action to appease the jingoistic sector of the electorate, once it is over, assuming we come through the hazard successfully and he is returned to office, President Obama will have no need to temper his policies to that particular wind for the remaining four years of his term of office.
The new channels of (un)social communication are said to have created in their immediacy a frisson of fever for intervention. Or have they? Outside of the media, I have found no call, let alone enthusiasm for an invasion of Syria, Iran, the Falkland Islands, Pakistan, Cuba, North Korea, Yemen or Bahrein, less so for Scotland, the European mainland, let alone for Essex.
Whom shall we invade?
Not – surely – by design.
Let us beware, however, of what may creep up on us unawares.