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I was never much smitten by John Smeaton. Nor was I especially reassured by the bulwark against Jihadism, or its threat to our way of life that his man-in-the-street intervention at Glasgow Airport supposedly represented. 

Medals for gallantry, world acclaim for trademark celtic pluckiness, and a media profile to make faltering celebrities choke on their champagne, it all seemed like an overplayed propaganda stunt in the war against terror,  just like the tabloid treatment of our taliban-busting young prince Harry.

So it was with nothing less than gleeful satisfaction that I heard news of some fellow compatriots, foot soldiers of this latterday William Wallace, and themselves unsung participants in the Glasgow mayhem, stepping somewhat belatedly out of the woodwork and casting aspersions on our hero’s alleged heroism. Their testimonies to Smeaton’s exaggerated involvement in the subduing of desperate, bungling, and in one case burning, clinicians turned terrorists, comes across with typical, down-to-earth, Scottish drollness, and there is no reason to doubt them. Even more telling in this hopefully conclusive exposure of the politics behind the hype was the nature of Smeaton’s own reaction to the story.

Echoing a sentiment expressed many times over in the course of his transatlantic lap of honour, he empasized a reluctance to accept acclaim while repeating a wish that other, equally deserving locals, had been similarly recognised. For all his bewilderment at being so singled out, Smeaton insists it would have been rude to spurn the mantle of greatness that the establishment and a media-whipped public were so urgently keen to wrap around him. 

Perhaps now the cynically manipiulated arbitrariness of it all will become clear, because if the heartfelt thanks of Queen, Prime Minister and country are really as deserved as the hullabaloo suggests, then Smeaton is wasted as an airport ancillary, and should be posted, at officer rank, into the Middle East theatre forthwith. Until then, in my mind, he is just another bloke throwing people’s luggage about with the normal level of disregard, and this latest revelation will hopefully bring Smeatomania the disdain it deserves.

 

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Nobody, not even the most news averse among us could have have failed to notice the loud and lengthy celebrations of post-invasion Iraq’s fifth birthday this past week.

 

It is an indication of how little attention this running sore of the middle east has received from the media in recent times, that so much recapping of the past and updating of the present was considered to be necessary as part of the coverage.

Yet as the years roll by, so the analysis, with all its enrichment of retrospective wisdom, becomes more charged with the enormity of it all. I have been sure in my own mind for quite some time that the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation is the most devastating and far-reaching geo-political event of my lifetime. But from a context of recent Gulf troubles and then on to invocations of Suez, commentators are now reaching all the way back to the Boer War for a comparable British foreign policy disaster.

As an inveterate consumer of Iraq’s ongoing story, most of what was served up by the media as party food for this inauspicious birthday was already quite familiar, but a few delicacies still caught my fancy.

Channel 4’s screening of “The Battle for Haditha” was immediately followed by a program updating us on the fate of that massacre’s protaganists; namely, those same US marines forced by the evidence to retract initial denials and subsequent half-truths and finally admit to knowingly killing innocent women and children. The program told us that all those concerned are now well on the way to acquittal of all charges, and that the army chief who leapt so determinedly to their defence has already been honoured with a promotion. 

At the height of the Abu Ghraib outrage, the US administration insisted that America stood apart from its terrorist enemy on account of a willingness to bring its own wrongdoers to book. Even if we concede, as it seems we must, that the rules of war, for the top dogs at least, are not worth the paper they are printed on, then this latest whitewash, steered by the uncontestable nuances of legal interpretation, and rooted in a conviction that the war morale must not be compromised, must surely end any remaining doubt about America’s utter lack of moral authority in the affairs of the world. Meanwhile of course, that country’s current military hegemony renders such an observation purely academic - for now at least.

Then there was the BBC’s “10 days to War”, which came to its stirring five year anniversary climax with Kenneth Branagh playing colonel Tim Collins addressing the British troops on the eve of the invasion. The reconstructed scene takes to the Kuwait desert, on the edge of Iraq’s southern border and the tanks are about to roll. 

Branagh, one of our most celebrated contemporary Shakepearian actors unleashed one of the great military speeches of modern times, and it was an astute piece of casting. Collins’ eve-of-war oration was worthy of one of the Bard’s very own warrior kings. All that lyricising about magnanimity, and avoidance of hubris. Those soaring, biblically-referenced sentiments about the  region’s ancient, and magnificent civilisation. The perfectly weighted emphasis on fierceness and bravery in battle but respect for the dignity of the dead and the rights of the innocent. The importance of treading lightly, and of leaving the land a better place than before they arrived. All neck hair bristling stuff.

In fairness, the British were never as gung ho as their coalition partners (although their strategic role may have been crucial to this), but oh, how cruelly the Americans have proceeded to subvert each and every one of those noble and eloquently articulated principles of the Lieutenant Colonel’s speech, as it was boomed across the ranks of the invaders on that day in the desert.

Finally, there was Newsnight, and in all weighty matters of the day, there’s no show without Jeremy Paxman, so I considered my quota of birthday entertainment incomplete without tuning in to his own po-faced contribution to the “my, how time flies”, and ” 5 already, but look how you’ve grown” jamboree.

The panel of assembled interviewees included Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff five years ago, and Richard Perl, arch neo-con and longtime defence advisor to successive US administrations.

Even with Perl for company, Powell proved to be the most unreconstructed apologist for the war of the lot, whilst Paxman himself was disappointingly meek in his line of questioning. But like so many  recent post mortems of the conflict, Oil did not even get a mention. Is the fog of politics already closing over an essential part of the landscape of truth as it slips backwards into history?

In the warmth of the studio, where intellectual soundbites often provide the flimsiest correspondence with reality, the ghastly nature of war itself was also too readily dismissed. After the unspeakable death and destruction of two world wars, one might expect any current debate about the present horrors of the middle east to include a rigorous analysis of the principles underpinning it all.

 

However, if anything has been learnt from the slaughterfests of the past,  it is the propaganda impact, positive and negative of one’s own casualty figures. In an increasingly secular and individualistic western world, the value of life is greater than ever, and modern attitudes to warfare reflect this. Forget military sportsmanship, or rules of engagement based on combat-eligibility. There was a time when a soldier would be expected to embrace an additional degree of risk, as befitting his his job, in order to avoid the death of innocents. But nowadays its all about stretching the semantics of “collateral damage” and a range of weaponry, allied to battlefield tactics, that put the protection of one’s own forces before everything else.

As the party winds down, and various friends of Iraq, real or bogus, slope off home with their swag bags, life for the birthday boy goes on, and even this week, another couple of towering ironies presented themselves.

Addressing his nation with that grave expresion of his which always looks so forced, President Bush reassured his people that the final victory in Iraq was edging closer. And the reason for such optimism? Al Qaida, bombed out of Fallujah, and flushed from the central provinces, have now been chased, five years down the line, to their final stronghold in the country’s north. But Sir, Al Qaida did not exist in Iraq at all before you clove the country wide open.

And with all the continued hand-wringing about Sunnis and Shias, local insurgents and foreign fighters, government corruption and Iranian influence, infrastructural breakdown and bureacratic chaos, it is just becoming clear to some of the occupying power’s more astute analysts, that a strong and secular leader is required who can foster nationalism in a way that overrides sectarian interests. Somebody who can rule with a totalitarian grip, if that is necessary, and deal brutally with political opponents and terrorists alike. Somebody in a similar mould  to a certain, ahem, Saddam Hussein, perhaps?

   

 

 

 

One Response to “The hollowness of heroism and some birthday greetings”

1. Media Districts Entertainment Blog » The hollowness of heroism and some birthday greetings on March 31st, 2008 11:53 am

   [...] Jon Pullman put an intriguing blog post on The hollowness of heroism and some birthday greetingsHere’s a quick excerpt [...]

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