Saudi oil refinery bombing: the real truth that nobody wants to talk about

Saudi Arabia is very much in the news these days.   This morning the top World News story on the BBC is “Saudi crown prince warns of ‘Iran threat’ to global oil“.    The story, however, also speaks about how Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is willing to “take some responsibility for” the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi just under a year ago – while still denying that he actually ordered it.  Few will believe him.  Tonight BBC’s Panorama programme will be look back at the murder, and especially the secret tapes that have come to light that point to official Saudi involvment in it.  One of the most interesting aspects of the Khashoggi murder is the fact that after it occurred, the establishment media in the west, and politicians in the west, started to say to actually look at and criticise Saudi Arabia’s shocking war on Yemen, which seemed to disproportionately aim at causing civilian casualties – as this blog has been pointing out for a few years.  (And it’s  not just the Iran threat, the Khashoggi murder, and the ongoing bombing campaign – there’s plenty more.)  

While it may not be obvious what the murder of Khashoggi has to do with the war against Yemen, there is a very close connection between the Saudi Crown Prince’s warnings about Iran and the war in Yemen.

This is because two weeks ago, on Saturday 14th September, there was an attack on the Saudi oil and gas processing stations in Abqaiq and Khurais.  The attack had a brief, but serious impact on Saudi oil production. At the time, the BBC reported “The Houthis say they did it; the United States insists that it was Iran; the Iranians deny any involvement. ” 

Whodunit?

Two weeks later, we are not much the wiser. One of the great mysteries is that despite the fact that Saudi Arabia has the third largest military budget in the world, they were not able to shoot down or even detect the incoming missiles. We still have no conclusive evidence of where the missiles were launched from – and despite claims that they might have come from Iraq or Iran, it still looks most likely that they actually came from Yemen.

Col Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an interview last weekend said:

“I’ve had a conversation over the last 48 hours with lots of retired CIA, DIA and other intelligence officials as well as experts in the region and the consensus amongst us is no evidence has been seen at this point to dispute the Houthi claim that they carried out the attacks.“

After all, as the BBC reports

“Houthi rebels have repeatedly launched rockets, missiles and drones at populated areas in Saudi Arabia. They are in conflict with a Saudi-led coalition which backs a president who the rebels had forced to flee when the Yemeni conflict escalated in March 2015.

The war has killed nearly 10,000 people and pushed millions to the brink of starvation, the world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster.“

The war in Yemen

The BBC is wrong on one detail here. The UN figure of 10,000 is regularly quoted, but is years out of date. The UN simply gave up on trying to to count, because it was so difficult to get detailed information out of Yemen.

Patrick Cockburn reported a year ago that

“One reason Saudi Arabia and its allies are able to avoid a public outcry over their intervention in the war in Yemen, is that the number of people killed in the fighting has been vastly understated. The figure is regularly reported as 10,000 dead in three-and-a-half years, a mysteriously low figure given the ferocity of the conflict. ” 

Today, it generally reckoned that the total is closer to 100,000

Why the BBC keeps quoting the debunked 10,000 figure, without any qualification, tells us a lot about the BBC.

But the BBC does at least point out that it is the world’s worse man-made humanitarian disaster. In fact, the UN tells us that it isn’t just the “world’s worse man-made humanitarian disaster”. It’s the world’s worse humanitarian disaster. It is, however, entirely man-made.

The facts of the war in Yemen are pretty unpleasant, and are rarely repeated in the mainstream media because they are so embarrassing.

A little history

Yemen has had an ongoing civil war for a few years now. The latest phase began when a revolution in September 2014 saw the Houthi forces taking the capital, Sana’a. In January 2015, they stormed the presidential palace, leading to the resignation of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Houthis installed a Revolutionary Committee as the interim authority. However, the Houthi-led interim authority was rejected by other internal opposition groups and was not recognized internationally.

However, the US had been actively involved in the war in Yemen – launching attacks on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) for man years.  Since the Houthis were also enemies of AQAP, America established ties with them to that they could co-operate. In January 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported:

White House and State Department officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal the contacts with the Houthis, but stressed they were focused on promoting political stability in Yemen and safeguarding the security of Americans.

The Obama administration increasingly has sought to describe the Houthis as a potential partner of Washington’s ever since the militia gained control of San’a in January.

“U.S. officials said they also are seeking to harness the Houthis’ concurrent war on AQAP to weaken the terrorist organization’s grip on havens in Yemen’s west and south. . . .

Houthi commanders, in recent interviews conducted in Yemen, asserted that the U.S. began sharing intelligence on AQAP positions in November, using intermediaries, as the conflict in the country intensified. They specifically cited a Houthi campaign against AQAP positions in western Al Baitha province as one such operation.

A similar report appeared in Al Monitor

Hence, in a recent article in The American Conservative,  Mark Perry wrote

“Key senior officers of the U.S. Special Operations Command viewed the Houthis as a robust counter to al-Qaeda’s strength in Yemen and even argued that America take steps to support them. “The Houthis were only nominally Iran’s surrogates,” a military officer told me at the time, “but they were also our quiet partners against al-Qaeda.”

However, things were to change sharply in March 2015 when Saudi Arabia (assisted by a group of other Arab countries) launched operation Decisive Storm.

“The Saudi-led intervention began well enough, with a relentless air campaign and naval blockade that initially eroded Houthi strength. And despite its skepticism, the U.S. military turned on a dime, providing the Saudi-led coalition with intelligence and logistical support and advising senior officers of the United Arab Emirates, which commanded most of the anti-Houthi ground forces. But over the course of the next three years, the intervention bogged down. The blockade triggered a famine that affected millions of Yemenis, the UAE’s mercenary force proved no match for the better-led Houthis, rebel militias began to lob scud missiles into Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, Riyadh’s allies began to peel away from the coalition (the UAE exited Yemen last July), the UAE-led mercenary army suffered a series of devastating defeats along the Saudi border, and, most crucially, the Houthis strengthened their ties with Tehran—all of which Pentagon officials had predicted back in 2015.”

Those Saudi bombings

And of course, there was the Saudi bombing, which has repeatedly hit civilian targets such as weddings, funerals, markets, and schools.

In June this year,

“The Armed Conflict Location Eventa & Data (ACLED) Project released its latest findings on fatalities caused by the war on Yemen, and now that they have completed their assessment of all data from the first year of the war they conclude that more than 90,000 have been killed over the course of the last four years.”

Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition accounted for 67% of the civilian casualties.

But bombing was not the only cause of death.  Again, Daniel Larison in The American Conservative:

The ongoing conflict has further reduced the pace of development. The impacts of conflict in Yemen are devastating—with nearly a quarter of a million people killed directly by fighting and indirectly through lack of access to food, health services, and infrastructure. Of the dead, 60 per cent are children under the age of five. The long-term impacts of conflict are vast and place it among the most destructive conflicts since the end of the Cold War. 

The Houthis hit back; the world responds

Not surprisingly, the Houthis have hit back – and launched several attacks against Saudi Arabia. None were particulary effective – until the one this month.

But strangely, most of the reporting in the west over the past fortnight has said very little about Yemen, and a lot about Iran – and how Iran is to blame:

Hence the BBC reported this week that

“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued their statement on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

“It is clear to us that Iran bears responsibility for this attack. There is no other plausible explanation. We support ongoing investigations to establish further details,” they said.”

In other words, there is no evidence that Iran was involved in any way, but they think it was.

And these statements that blame Iran all use vague phrases “Iran bears responsibility” or “Iran is complicit in the attack” or “Iran is behind the attack”. The fact of the matter is that the Houthis are not Iranian proxies, and there is very little evidence that Iran provided much in the way of arms supplies to them.

Saudi Arabia has been enforcing a complete land and sea blockade of Yemen for over 4 years, so Iran hasn’t had any way of getting weapons in.

As Yemen expert, Michael Horton said in April 2015

‘These constant reports that the Houthis are working for the Iranians are
nonsense, . . . . The Houthis don’t need Iranian weapons. They have plenty
of their own. And they don’t require military training. They’ve been
fighting Al-Qaeda since at least 2012, and they’ve been winning. Why are we fighting a movement that’s fighting Al-Qaeda?’”

The elephant in the room

The long and the short of it all is that Iran may or may not have been in some way involved / complicit in / behind   the attack on the Saudi oil installations. We just don’t know. But even if they were involved, it seems that their involvement was fairly minor.

However, there is a huge elephant in the room. An elephant that the mainstream media in the west has been remarkably silent about.

There is absolutely no question that the US and the UK have been massively involved in the slaughter of Yemeni civilians by Saudi Arabia. It’s right there in Wikipedia:

“The United States provided intelligence and logistical support, including aerial refueling and search-and-rescue for downed coalition pilots. It also accelerated the sale of weapons to coalition states. The US and Britain have deployed their military personnel in the command and control centre responsible for Saudi-led air strikes on Yemen, having access to lists of targets.”

There is no secret about any of this.  Some of it even makes The Daily Mail, which earlier this year had an article entitled “Our secret dirty war: Five British Special Forces troops are wounded in Yemen while ‘advising’ Saudi Arabia on their deadly campaign that has brought death and famine to millions“.

In short, Iran may or may not have behind the attack on the Saudi oil installation, an attack that killed precisely nobody, and western politicians speak of it as a terrible crime. And yet the American and British governments are fully complicit in an ongoing campaign that has killed thousands of civilians in Yemen, and it is no big deal.

And what is more horrifying, almost nobody in public life in the UK and US is pointing this out. The media? Silent. Even opposition politicians are saying nothing. Instead, in America they keep going after Trump for things that, in the end of the day are pretty minor.  And in the UK, all they seem concerned about is Boris Johnson proroguing Parliament, and using words like “surrender” and “humbug“. 

In other words, giving MPs a few extra days away from Westminster is a far, far more serious crime than the mass slaughter of civilians in far off lands.

And that tells you all you need to know about the values of politicians (and the mainstream media) in Britain and America in the year 2019.  Indeed, we could probably say it tells you all you need to know about contemporary American and British values. 

The Iranian tanker affair: Why is nobody concerned about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the British government?

I have written twice before (here and here) on the fascinating story of the Grace 1 – an oil tanker going about its ordinary business, that was seized near Gibraltar by Royal Marines, on the instructions of the British government. The UK authorities claimed that the ship, which was bound for Syria, was in violation of EU sanctions on Syria.

The British government’s story was nonsense: Iran, not being part of the EU is not bound by EU sanctions on Syria. As pointed out by Gareth Porter, “The EU Council regulation in question specifies in Article 35 that the sanctions were to apply only within the territory of EU member states, to a national or business entity or onboard an aircraft or vessel “under the jurisdiction of a member state.””

In fact, the real reason the UK seized the ship probably has nothing to do with EU sanctions on Syria – but rather was acting at the request of the Trump administration in Washington which has an ongoing quarrel with Iran.

Anyway, on August 15th the Gibraltar Supreme Court gave permission for the Grace 1, (now renamed the Adrian Darya 1), to go free, after the Iranian authorities gave assurances that it would not deliver the oil to Syria.

The oil delivery

The latest is that, having made its way to the Eastern Mediterranean, it has now delivered its cargo. Apparently, the oil has ended up in Syria – though Iran has neither denied nor confirmed that. It merely said that the oil had been sold at sea to a private buyer, and it was up to the buyer where the oil went.

As reported by Reuters,

“Iran’s envoy to London said on Wednesday the oil cargo of tanker Adrian Darya 1 was sold at sea to a private company, denying Tehran had broken assurances it had given over the vessel, but he insisted EU’s Syria sanctions did not apply to Tehran.

“At (the) meeting with the British Foreign Secretary, it was emphasized that British authorities’ action against the tanker carrying Iranian oil was in violation of international law,” ambassador Hamid Baeidinejad said on Twitter after being summoned in London.

“EU sanctions cannot be extended to third countries. Despite numerous threats by America, the tanker sold its oil at sea to a private company and has not violated any obligation,” Baeidinejad added.

“The private company … (which is ) the owner of the oil sets the sale destination of the oil,” Baeidinejad told the state news agency IRNA.”

In other words, the oil went to Syria, and the Iranians felt no obligation to do what the UK government wanted after the UK government had shown complete unwillingness to abide by international law.

Bribery and blackmail

That was all fairly predictable. What was not expected was a startling story that the Financial Times broke last week:

“Four days before the US imposed sanctions on an Iranian tanker suspected of shipping oil to Syria, the vessel’s Indian captain received an unusual email from the top Iran official at the Department of State.

“This is Brian Hook . . . I work for secretary of state Mike Pompeo and serve as the US Representative for Iran,” Mr Hook wrote to Akhilesh Kumar on August 26, according to several emails seen by the Financial Times. “I am writing with good news.”

The “good news” was that the Trump administration was offering Mr Kumar several million dollars to pilot the ship — until recently known as the Grace 1 — to a country that would impound the vessel on behalf of the US. To make sure Mr Kumar did not mistake the email for a scam, it included an official state department phone number.”

“The remarkable outreach by such a high-ranking official was not an isolated case. Mr Hook, who heads the state department’s Iran Action Group, has emailed or texted roughly a dozen captains in recent months in an effort to scare mariners into understanding that helping Iran evade sanctions comes at a heavy price.

“Iran knows that the success of our pressure campaign depends on vigorous enforcement of oil sanctions,” Mr Hook told the FT. “We have collapsed Iran’s oil exports in a short period of time. We are working very closely with the maritime community to disrupt and deter illicit oil exports.”

The offer to Mr Kumar marks a new front in the US “maximum pressure” campaign designed to starve Iran of cash and persuade Tehran to come to the table to negotiate a broader deal than the nuclear accord that Iran signed with the Obama administration and world powers in 2015. . .

“With this money you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age,” Mr Hook wrote in a second email to Mr Kumar that also included a warning.“If you choose not to take this easy path, life will be much harder for you.”

In response to the FT story, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted: “Having failed at piracy, the US resorts to outright blackmail — deliver us Iran’s oil and receive several million dollars or be sanctioned yourself.”

And the comments of Daniel Larison at The American Conservative, were equally scathing:

“The administration’s Iran obsession has reached a point where they are now trying to bribe people to act as pirates on their behalf. When the U.S. was blocked by a court in Gibraltar from taking the ship, they sought to buy the loyalty of the captain in order to steal it. Failing that, they resorted to their favorite tool of sanctions to punish the captain and his crew for ignoring their illegitimate demand. . .

Many people have already mocked Hook’s message for its resemblance to a Nigerian prince e-mail scam, and I might add that he comes across here sounding like a B-movie gangster. Hook’s contact was not an isolated incident, but part of a series of e-mails and texts that he has sent to various ships’ captains in a vain effort to intimidate them into falling in line with the administration’s economic war. This is what comes of a foreign policy of “maximum pressure” and swagger: tawdry bribes, heavy-handed threats, and complete failure.

As amusing as it is to point out the administration’s incompetence, we need to remember that the economic war that the administration is waging is illegitimate and it is doing great harm to the Iranian people. The economic war may be run by clowns, including Brian Hook, but it is causing severe damage to innocent people all over Iran.“

Which raises the question, how many people in the US – or the UK – are concerned about innocent people in Iran?

Honesty or hypocrisy

And for that matter, how many people in the UK are actually concerned about honesty? I ask, because, for me, the most interesting thing about all this is the statement put out by the UK Foreign Office concerning the Adrian Darya’s oil delivery:

“An angry statement from the Foreign Office said it was “now clear that Iran has breached these assurances and that the oil has been transferred to Syria and Assad’s murderous regime”.

It said the Iranian ambassador had been summoned to explain the “unacceptable violation of international norms”, and that the UK would be raising the issue at the United Nations later this month.

Mr Raab added: “This sale of oil to Assad’s brutal regime is part of a pattern of behaviour by the government of Iran designed to disrupt regional security.

“This includes illegally supplying weapons to Houthi insurgents in Yemen, support for Hezbollah terrorists and most recently its attempts to hijack commercial ships passing through the Gulf.” “

This statement is breathtaking in its dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Let’s break it down

1) “Iran has breached these assurances “

As I have already pointed out, Iran was dealing with a gang of pirates who had little regard for honesty or international law, and clearly felt no obligation to be strictly honest with them

2) “the Iranian ambassador had been summoned to explain the “unacceptable violation of international norms“

I suspect that the Iranian ambassador responded that he was unimpressed with the UK’s “unacceptable violation of international norms”

3) “the UK would be raising the issue at the United Nations later this month.”

I suspect that everyone at the UN will remember how just a few months ago, its “general assembly has overwhelmingly backed a motion condemning Britain’s occupation of the remote Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.” and how “The 116-6 vote left the UK diplomatically isolated“

4) “the oil has been transferred to Syria and Assad’s murderous regime . . . sale of oil to Assad’s brutal regime“

Assad’s regime is, indeed brutal, but then so are the vast majority of regimes in the Middle East, including that of the UK’s close allies, the Saudi Arabians. It is also worth pointing out that the Assad regime allows full religious liberty, unlike the Saudi government who don’t allow Christian churches to operate at all, and whose brutality extends to crucifying convicted prisoners convicted in highly questionable trials. 

And, furthermore, the Assad regime in Syria was fighting a civil war against extremely brutal Islamic militants backed by our good friends, the Saudi government.

5) “a pattern of behaviour by the government of Iran designed to disrupt regional security“

I don’t know what Raab means by “regional security”, but when it comes to the disrupting the region of the Middle East, the UK’s involvement in a completely unprovoked invasion of Iraq that probably lead to the death of over a million people, not to mention its involvement in the Libya fiasco. is pretty appalling. Compared to the UK, Iran looks like a paragon of virtue.

6) “This includes illegally supplying weapons to Houthi insurgents in Yemen“

Apart from the fact that there is no evidence of Iran supplying any significant number of arms to the Houthi forces in Yemen, Dominic Raab’s statement utterly ignores the reality of what is happening on the ground in Yemen. Yemen has been in a state of civil war for several years, and in 2015, Saudi Arabia decided to launch an invasion. Their attack has consisted of indiscriminate bombing, often of civilian targets, and imposing a blockade designed to starve the civilian population into submission. It has resulted in a completely man-made cholera epidemic which has killed thousands of children. And all the while, guess who has been supplying weapons to the Saudi armed forces in order to support their war crimes? Yes, you’ve guessed it. The UK government has stood shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi government.

And what about Brexit?

Meanwhile, in the UK, you will listen in vain for any criticism of Dominic Raab’s outrageously dishonest comments on this affair. The silence is deafening. All they can talk about is Brexit and proroguing parliament and the Prime Minister possibly lying to the Queen.

But I think there is a connection. Rob Slane wrote a thoughtful piece last week, entitled “Brexit — As Explained to the Bemused and Befuddled“. In it, he writes “Even though there are no doubt a few honourable individual exceptions, I am left utterly appalled by all parties in Parliament, with each one exhibiting their own particular flavour of cynicism and duplicitousness. “

I think he is entirely correct. But this isn’t just about Brexit. It is about the whole political establishment. The Grace 1 affair, and the astonishing remarks of the Foreign Secretary, and the absence of any criticism, are simply part of the same picture.

I, too, am left utterly appalled by all parties in Parliament. And they all do exhibit cynicism and duplicitousness.

The rule of law: Boris’s Brexit coup and the Iranian tanker

In case you didn’t know it, we had a coup in the UK last week. The newspaper headlines proclaim it.  We had: “Britain will pay a big price for Boris Johnson’s Brexit coup ”  We had “‘Stop the coup’: Protests across UK over Johnson’s suspension of parliament ”  And, of course, we had “‘A very British coup’: How Europe reacted to Boris Johnson suspending parliament in Brexit push.”

It wasn’t just the newspapers. Craig Murray’s headline was “The Queen’s Active Role in the Right Wing Coup.”  He wrote:  “The very appointment of Boris Johnson by Elizabeth Saxe Coburg Gotha was a constitutional outrage. ” His explanation is that

“Johnson has been able to take over without facing the electorate because of the polite constitutional fiction that it is the same Conservative government continuing and nothing has changed. Yet he justifies the prorogation of parliament by the argument that it is a new government and a new Queen’s Speech is thus needed. Johnson is of course famously in favour of having cake and eating it, but the chutzpah of this is breathtaking. ”

George Galloway, however, is not convinced. 

Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London (described by Wikipedia as “one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts “) also seems sceptical: “It is time perhaps to tone down the rhetoric and consider the facts.”

That sounds like good advice to me. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what comes out of next week’s hearing. Perhaps Murray will turn out to be correct.

The place of law

However, the important thing is the question of the place of law. The immediate question, of course, is about whether the government is acting in accordance with the UK constitution, or ignoring it. But the more fundamental question is: Is the government above the law, or under it? We like to think that governments are under the law – but the reality of the world we live in, and the temptations of holding power, mean that governments often simply ignore politically inconvenient laws.

The Iranian tanker

Which brings me back to the case of Iran. Last month, I wrote about the British seizure of the Iranian oil tanker, Grace 1, on the 4th if July off Gibraltar, by 30 Royal Marines. Since then, there has been a lot of water under the bridge. 15 days later, on the 19th of July, Iran seized a British tanker, the Stena Impero, in the Strait of Hormuz. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called it an act of “state piracy”, which at the very least, was a bit rich.

Blogger Rob Slane, wrote an entertaining satirical piece entitled “Researchers Find That Nicking Ships May Have Consequences“, beginning with the words

“A new study from the University of the Blindingly Obvious has found that if one country nicks another country’s ship, the country whose ship has been nicked may be likely to respond by nicking a ship belonging to the country that nicked theirs. According to the authors of the report, the reason for this may be down to something called “the way the world works,” or what is often known as tit-for-tat. “

A more sobering investigation came from Gareth Porter in a piece entitled “Did John Bolton Light the Fuse of the UK-Iranian Tanker Crisis?” Porter wrote:

“The rationale for detaining the Iranian vessel and its crew was that it was delivering oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions. This was never questioned by Western news media. But a closer look reveals that the UK had no legal right to enforce those sanctions against that ship, and that it was a blatant violation of the clearly defined global rules that govern the passage of merchant ships through international straits.

The evidence also reveals that Bolton was actively involved in targeting the Grace 1 from the time it began its journey in May as part of the broader Trump administration campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran.

Contrary to the official rationale, the detention of the Iranian tanker was not consistent with the 2012 EU regulation on sanctions against the Assad government in Syria. The EU Council regulation in question specifies in Article 35 that the sanctions were to apply only within the territory of EU member states, to a national or business entity or onboard an aircraft or vessel “under the jurisdiction of a member state.””

In other words, the UK was ignoring / breaking the rules of the sea in order to do a favour to the US administration, while pretending that this had nothing to do with Trump’s quarrel with Iran. It looks like the British government is trying to stay on good terms with the White House while not being too close to it.

Dominic Raab and the rule of law

Hence on the 15th of August, the British let the Grace 1 go (on the condition that it doesn’t go to Syria) and shortly afterwards rejected an American request to seize it again. However, the new British Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, has spoken of building strong ties with America:

“I also want to build a stronger alliance to uphold international rule of law and tackle the issues that threaten our security whether that’s Iran’s menacing behaviour or Russia’s destabilising actions in Europe, or the threat from terrorism and climate change.”

I have several problems with that sentence. For a start, I haven’t a clue what he means by “Russia’s destabilising actions in Europe”.  Nothing Russia has done in Europe in recent years compares with the way that the US and the UK have destabilised Iraq and Libya, not to mention Syria and Yemen in recent years.   But for the moment, the really laughable things are the references to upholding “international rule of law” and “Iran’s menacing behaviour”.

If we were to go through all the relevant facts about Iran, this post would be seriously long, so let’s just concentrate on a few. The UK seized an Iranian tanker that was just going about its business taking oil to Syria. As Gareth Porter pointed out, the UK’s action was in violation of the international rules, and its justification for its action was nonsense. (Craig Murray has also made that point pretty well – and forcefully.) The British government was doing this at the behest of the US government.

America and Iran

America had recently pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a treaty agreed by the U.S, UK, Germany, France, China, Russia, and Iran.  This treaty relaxed the crippling economic sanctions that had been imposed in Iran in exchange for Iran making certain limitations in its nuclear programme – which was about nuclear power, not nuclear weapons, but which some were concerned could become a nuclear weapons programme.  Iran had kept to the terms of the treaty, but America pulled out – in other words, broke their word – and imposed sanctions on Iran which were more crippling than the ones that had been broken before. This has caused massive hardship and suffering to people in Iran, particularly sick and poor people.  (Though whether the intention is to cause suffering to sick and poor people, or just to destabilise yet another Middle Eastern country, I don’t know.)   Iran hoped that the other countries in the JPCOA would stand up for them, but the EU countries, despite making noises about trying to help, did little. And then, as if that wasn’t enough of a problem for Iran, the UK seized and held its tanker, the Grace 1.

(The latest on this story is that the Grace 1 (now renamed the Adrian Darya 1) is in the Eastern Mediterranean, and may well be heading for Syria. One suspects that the Iranians are thoroughly fed up with the US breaking treaties, and the UK seizing ships under false pretences, and feel no obligation to keep their promises to governments they have lost all trust in.)

Another very British coup

However, it may not be completely irrelevant that there is another story here, which is rarely mentioned in the news in the west, but is curiously relevant to current events, and which is pretty well known in Iran. All the 2019 ingredients are there – Iran, an alliance between the US and the UK, the seizing of ships, and yes – even a coup – this time, a real one.

In 1951, Iran’s new democratically elected government decided to nationalise the the BP controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The British government didn’t like this, and

“in July 1952, the Royal Navy intercepted the Italian tanker Rose Mary and forced it into the British protectorate of Aden on the grounds that the ship’s petroleum was stolen property. News that the Royal Navy was intercepting tankers carrying Iranian oil scared off other tankers and effectively shut down oil exports from Iran.”

Furthermore, the British government contacted the Americans and asked if the Americans would organise a coup in Iran to bring down the democratically elected government, and install a government who would give BP back the AIOC. America duly obliged in 1953, and the Shah was installed. Most conveniently, the US government recently released previously confidential papers related to the event, including one with the rather plain spoken title: “British proposal to Organize a Coup d’etat in Iran”.

One suspects that the 1953 coup was no more in accord with the “international rule of law” referred to by Dominic Raab than the seizure of the Grace 1.  Indeed, one could say that staging a coup also counts as a “destabilising action.”  And one suspects that as Iranians today watch the actions of the British and American governments, they do so with a strong sense of déjà vu. 

Getting things in proportion

Which brings me back to Boris’s Brexit coup, and to the words of Professor Bogdanor: “It is time perhaps to tone down the rhetoric.”

People in the UK seem to have been getting very worked up about the prorogation of Parliament.  Whatever the constitutional rights and wrongs, it looks to me like a storm in a teacup.  But they have been remarkably silent about the way that the government has simply ignored the international rule of law with respect to Iran.  And seizing tankers and causing suffering to the poor and the sick of a couple of Middle Eastern countries seems to me to  much more serious than the prorogation of Parliament.

Are the Royal Marines acting like 17th century pirates?

Yesterday, under the headline “Oil tanker bound for Syria detained in Gibraltar“, the BBC reported:

“Royal Marines have boarded an oil tanker on its way to Syria thought to be breaching EU sanctions, the government of Gibraltar has said. Authorities said there was reason to believe the ship – Grace 1 – was carrying Iranian crude oil to the Baniyas Refinery in Syria.” adding “The refinery is subject to European Union sanctions against Syria.“

It further explains

“Gibraltar port and law enforcement agencies detained the super tanker and its cargo on Thursday morning with the help of the marines. The BBC has been told a team of about 30 marines, from 42 Commando, were flown from the UK to Gibraltar to help seize the tanker, at the request of the Gibraltar government. A defence source described it as a “relatively benign operation” without major incident. Mr Picardo said he had written to the presidents of the European Commission and European Council to give details of the sanctions that have been enforced.“

And then it gives some background:

“The Baniyas refinery, in the Syrian Mediterranean port town of Tartous, is a subsidiary of the General Corporation for Refining and Distribution of Petroleum Products, a section of the Syrian ministry of petroleum.

The EU says the facility therefore provides financial support to the Syrian government, which is subject to sanctions because of its repression of civilians since the start of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011.

The refinery has been subject to EU sanctions since 2014.”

A journalist called Neil Clark wasn’t impressed, and tweeted:

This can’t be supported. The Royal Marines should be defending the realm not acting like 17th century pirates.

Is he right?

I would say he is spot on, and that what happened was absolutely shocking and morally indefensible. Why? Let me lay out three reasons:

Sanctions

Sanctions are basically an economic attack on a country – an attempt to hurt a country economically by preventing certain imports and exports. They are generally imposed by wealthy countries on poorer countries to “put pressure on them” – which means, in practice to impose hardship and misery on the ordinary people, because the governments of the sanctioning countries don’t like the governments of the sanctioned countries. They don’t actually hurt the leaders of the countries of the sanctioned countries, merely the ordinary people – and those who get hurt worst are the poorest, for whom hardship and misery mean poverty, ill health, and premature death.

see Rania Khalek’s video for a slightly more detailed look at sanctions.

The fact that the EU imposed sanctions on Syria tells you a lot about the people who run the EU.

The strange logic

Furthermore, note that the reason that the EU imposed sanctions on Syria was because of the Syrian government’s “repression of civilians since the start of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. ”

So – the government of Syria was repressing Syrian civilians and the response of the EU was to inflict hardship and misery on Syrian civilians? To say this is bizarre is a bit of an understatement

The truth about Syria

As for the matter of the “repression of civilians since the start of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011“, there is the question of what actually happened on the ground in Syria. If you have an uprising against a government, you can expect a response from the government. Western political leaders tended to claim that the response of the Syrian government to the uprising was completely out of proportion, and gave the impression that the Syrian uprising was simply peaceful protesters wanting more freedom and democracy.

Sharmine Narwani, a former senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, has done a lot of first class investigative work to get at what really happened in the war in Syria, and she tells a very different story. In an interview entitled “Reporter Sharmine Narwani on the secret history of America’s defeat in Syria“, she tells how she discovered that the uprising against the Syrian government was violent right from the early days, and the response of the Syrian government was pretty much what you would expect from any country that faced an armed uprising. Right from the beginning, members of the Syrian security forces were being killed in large numbers.

And, as it turned out, the uprising against the Syrian government largely consisted of militant Islamic Jihadists, who received a lot of support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – and a fair amount behind the scenes from U.S. government.

The fact that the EU imposed sanctions on Syria in these circumstances strikes me as being simply evil.

And as for the fact that Royal Marines were involved in seizing a tanker bound for Syria – I can’t see how that is any different from piracy.

The fact that they fly a Union Jack rather than a Jolly Roger, and that they are acting under the auspices of a national government doesn’t really make any difference.  

Tanker attacks, Iran, and what Christians should be doing

Last Thursday, the BBC reported that two tankers were “significantly damaged in suspected attacks in the Gulf of Oman. The Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous with 23 crew members aboard and Norway’s Front Altair with 23 people were abandoned after the blasts.”  It added “It is unclear what caused the blasts coming amid high US-Iran tensions.”

The US was quick to blame Iran for the blasts, and released a video as evidence.

Most people remain sceptical. Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas commented “The video is not enough. We can understand what is being shown, sure, but to make a final assessment, this is not enough for me.”   The Japanese government also asked the U.S. for more evidence, with a senior government official saying “The U.S. explanation has not helped us go beyond speculation”.

The Kokuka Courageous’s Japanese owner also cast doubt on the theory that a mine had been used to attack the ship, telling journalists that members of his crew had witnessed a flying object.

And there are further reasons to be sceptical.

Learning from history

For a start, there’s history.   Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, who famously said “We lied, we cheated, we stole”, has a history of making statements about Iran over the past few months which are completely untrue.

Before that, America (assisted by allies like the UK), twice bombed Syria after claiming that the Syrian government had carried out chemical weapons attacks – when the evidence indicates that the Syrian government almost certainly had not done so.

And there were the statements made before western air power was used in Libya which were wildly exaggerated.

And then there was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on American claims about “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, which turned out to be complete fiction.

And, if you want to go back before that, there was the shooting down in 1988 by the US of an Iranian civilian airliner (Flight 655) killing all 290 individuals on board. It later emerged that everything Iran said about the incident was true, whereas most of what the US claimed was not.

And of course, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident which bears some interesting similarities to last week’s events.

The lesson that history teaches us is that American government statements about what is going on in the Middle East should be taken with a large dose of salt.

A likely story

But added to that, the story itself is, itself, extremely unlikely.

Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, sums it up nicely: “I really cannot begin to fathom how stupid you would have to be to believe that Iran would attack a Japanese oil tanker at the very moment that the Japanese Prime Minister was sitting down to friendly, US-disapproved talks in Tehran on economic cooperation that can help Iran survive the effects of US economic sanctions. “

How stupid would you have to be?

Well, the UK Foreign Office said that it was “almost certain” that a branch of the Iranian military – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – attacked the two tankers on 13 June, adding that “no other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible”.

In response, Jeremy Corbyn tweeted

“Britain should act to ease tensions in the Gulf, not fuel a military escalation that began with US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. Without credible evidence about the tanker attacks, the government’s rhetoric will only increase the threat of war. “

I don’t think that is very controversial. But it didn’t go down well with Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, who responded:

“Pathetic and predictable. From Salisbury to the Middle East, why can he never bring himself to back British allies, British intelligence or British interests? “

And, as reported the BBC, “Mr Hunt’s fellow Conservative leadership candidates, including Rory Stewart, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab, also condemned Mr Corbyn’s recent comments. ”

That accounts for all the Conservative leadership candidates, with the exception of Boris Johnson, who, of course, is a former foreign secretary.   What did he say?   Well, Johnson has not exactly gone out of his way to comment on the matter, but he did retweet the response of Conservative MP Liz Truss to Corbyn:

“Yet again Corbyn sides with an authoritarian regime over believers in democracy and freedom. He seeks to undermine everything that makes our country great. “

I can only assume that Johnson endorses Truss’s comments – which is very disappointing, because they strike me as incredibly foolish. If she is really saying that one should always believe that the government of a democratic country is saying in the run up to a war with a non-democratic country, then she has clearly forgotten the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the shooting down of Flight 655 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Western action in Libya in 2011.

And, of course, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Looking at what is happening in the Middle East, and the sabre-rattling that has been going on in Washington DC, and the response of the British government and the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Party – one of whom will, presumably, be the next Prime Minister, is somewhat depressing. 

Our job

What are we supposed to do?

And the answer, if you are a Christian, is to remember what Paul told Timothy:

“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”  (I Timothy 2:1-2)

The point is that we want to live a peaceful and quiet life – which requires not having a war raging all around us.

The big question is “Who’s we?”   Paul and Timothy?

Obviously not, but I suspect a lot of the time, those who read this think it means primarily me and my neighbours – people in the country I live in – or Christians in the country I live in. We take it that we are being asked to pray for our rulers. But Paul says “all kings” – and be “we”, I suspect he means all Christians, for he speaks of leading not only a peaceful and quiet life, but also a godly one.

All Christians includes the ones in the Middle East. The fact is that the West’s military incursions in the Middle East in recent years have made life particularly difficult for Christians there – in Iraq, in Syria, and in Libya for starters. Those military adventures have lead to Christians (and not just Christians) being killed and driven from their homes by Islamic extremists. If war involving Iran were to break out, you can be assured that it would make life very difficult for Christians in Iran. According to Wikipedia, there are between 300,000 and 400,000 – but Open Doors reckons that the number is closer to 800,000.

But since Christians believe in doing unto others as you would have them do onto you, we also want non-Christians to be able to live peaceful and quiet lives, and to have freedom from war.

As we look at the Middle East, and listen to the noises coming out of Washington and Westminster, the message that should be coming through loud and clear is that we need to bring these people before God in prayer.

The justice of Pontius Pilate, and the defamation of Julian Assange

Some 2000 years ago, a court case made history. The judge was Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea, and the accused was a man called Jesus. We are told some interesting things about the trial.

1) Pilate believed that Jesus was not guilty.

“Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was misleading the people. And after examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him. Neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Look, nothing deserving death has been done by him. .” (Luke 23:13-15)

2) As a result, Pilate wished to release Jesus.

“Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus, ” (Luke 23:20)

3) Pilate decided to have Jesus sentenced to death because of public pressure, out of a desire to “satisfy the crowd”:

“And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” And they cried out again, “Crucify him.” And Pilate said to them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. ” (Mark 15:12-15)

4) The reason that the crowd called on Pilate to sentence Jesus to death was because they had been stirred up by the enemies of Jesus. Pilate asked the crowd, 

“Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release for them Barabbas instead.” (Mark 15:9-11)

In other words, we can see that the Roman justice system could be much influenced by public opinion, especially if there were powerful people / groups who wanted a certain result – e.g. to have a person that they didn’t like executed – even when that person was not actually guilty of a criminal offence.

Public opinion and popularity 

This, of course, is not just true of the Roman justice system 2,000 years ago. It is also true in many countries today. It is potentially true in any country at any time.

What is significant about this is that in the past few days, I have heard two people being interviewed making very similar comments with regard to the case of Julian Assange.

One is Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation in America, who commented that the American Justice Department might think that since “Assange is an unpopular person” they could probably “get away” with prosecuting him in order to “criminalise journalism”, and that “they decided to go against someone who is, at least in mainstream circles, unpopular, and thinking they can get away with it.”

The other is George Galloway, a former member of the UK Parliament, who said:

“This is a story with multiple layers, and that will not just be decided in a court room, because court rooms are not impervious to public opinion, political opinion and the view of the government.”

In other words, what the crowds think, and what the powerful think, and how popular a defendant is (which is basically the same as what the crowds think), are all highly significant in what happens in court rooms – just as in the days of Pontius Pilate.

The usefulness of defamation

Which is why the defamation of Julian Assange, which was highlighted by Nils Melzer (the UN Special Rapporteur on torture ), and which I wrote about last week, is significant.

To put it bluntly, the more unpopular someone is, the less likely that person is to get a fair trial. If the crowd doesn’t like you, you are more likely to be found guilty. That is the sad reality of life in this world, and no-one should kid themselves that it isn’t true.

And the fact is that the main reason that Julian Assange isn’t popular  is (to use Melzer’s phrase) an “unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr. Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Sweden and, more recently, Ecuador.”

Melzer, in an interview in The Canary, expanded on this, saying

. . . we have to realize that we have all been deliberately misled about Mr Assange. The predominant image of the shady “hacker”, “sex offender” and selfish “narcissist” has been carefully constructed, disseminated and recycled in order to divert attention from the extremely powerful truths he exposed, including serious crimes and corruption on the part of multiple governments and corporations.

‘By making Mr Assange “unlikeable” and ridiculous in public opinion, an environment was created in which no one would feel empathy with him, very similar to the historic witch-hunts, or to modern situations of mobbing at the workplace or in school. Once totally isolated, it would be easy to violate Mr Assange’s most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage. ‘

Defamation is serious matter. The problem with people saying nasty things about you is not just that it hurts your feelings, but that it affects the way you are treated – sometimes in horrifying ways.

And that might explain why it defamation (i.e. slander) is treated as a very serious evil in some of the Psalms. Psalm 15, for examle, begins with the question “Who is fit to come into God’s presence?” The answer, we are told, is:

“The one whose way of life is blameless,
  who does what is righteous,
     who speaks the truth from their heart;
whose tongue utters no slander,
    who does no wrong to a neighbour,
         and casts no slur on others;
who despises a vile person
but honours those who fear the Lord;
         who keeps an oath even when it hurts,
and does not change their mind;
who lends money to the poor without interest;
who does not accept a bribe against the innocent.”

It’s an interesting selection of characteristics, but what is notable is that defamation comes high in the list of things that are completely unacceptable.

In Psalm 120, the psalmist is clearly very unhappy, and calls on God to save him.   What does he want saved from? What are his enemies doing that is so distressing?   They are telling lies.  In other words, they are slandering him.

“I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me.
   Save me, Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.

What will he do to you, and what more besides, you deceitful tongue?
    He will punish you with a warrior’s sharp arrows,
        with burning coals of the broom bush.”

If the punishment that the psalmist calls for seems severe, there is a good reason for that. Defamation can wreck people’s lives – or even get them killed.

Note

The main reason (though not the only one) that most people don’t like Assange is the matter of the rape case in Sweden – and in particular, the way it has been reported in most of the press in the UK and US.  The reality is that the case against him is very weak, and the way it has been handled by Sweden verges  on bizarre.  For those interested in knowing more, Nils Melzer has spoken about it in an interview (and he is scathing about Sweden’s behaviour), or see Joe Lauria’s article in Consortium News.   

 

Who is on trial? The UN expert, Julian Assange, and bearing false witness

Last week, the UN Human Rights office put out a statement which declared that 

“A UN expert who visited Julian Assange in a London prison says he fears his human rights could be seriously violated if he is extradited to the United States”

Furthermore, this expert, Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture,

“condemned the deliberate and concerted abuse inflicted for years” on Assange.

The BBC reported on the statement, and focussed on the fact that it said

Assange has suffered “prolonged exposure to psychological torture.” 

In the words of Melzer,

. . . in addition to physical ailments, Mr. Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma. . . . The evidence is overwhelming and clear. Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.

The headline in Reuter’s report on the statement not only uses the word “torture”, but also speaks of a “show trial”.

Reuters actually interviewed Melzer, and he told them

““I am seriously, gravely concerned that if this man were to be extradited to the United States, he would be exposed to a politicized show trial and grave violations of his human rights . . .”

Melzer (Reuters explained) did not expect U.S. authorities to subject Assange to physical torture such as water-boarding during interrogations.  Rather, 

“I would much more expect him to be subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, to very harsh detention conditions and to a psychological environment which would break him eventually.””

Psychological torture and show trials are not the stuff of free countries, so Melzer’s words have not gone down well. Jeremy Hunt, the British Foreign Secretary, rejected Melzer’s accusations by tweeting:

“This is wrong. Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice. The UN Special Rapporteur should allow British courts to make their judgements without his interference or inflammatory accusations.”

to which Melzer bluntly responded:

With all due respect, Sir: Mr Assange was about as “free to leave” as a someone sitting on a rubberboat in a sharkpool. As detailed in my formal letter to you, so far, UK courts have not shown the impartiality and objectivity required by the rule of law.

It is clear that Melzer does not believe that Assange was running away from justice, but was seeking to avoid a show trial where it was very doubtful that he would receive justice.

This, as I say, is a very serious accusation. Melzer has questioned the fairness of both British and American courts.

On this subject, I recommend reading Craig Murray’s article “Jeremy Hunt Works That Rogue State Status” in which he says that it is “immensely sad to see the abandonment of the project for an international system based on the rule of law rather than on force,” and concludes

“One by one, the UK is simply repudiating the authority of all the major international institutions that enforce international law. The UK is acting as a rogue state. “

Defamation and vilification

However, there is one particular aspect of the Julian Assange affair, and of Melzer’s report, that I think is important, and that is not getting much attention.

There is something important that Melzer speaks about that is not mentioned at all in the BBC report, but is mentioned in the opening sentence of the Reuters report:

“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has suffered psychological torture from a defamation campaign and should not be extradited to the United States where he would face a “politicized show trial”, a U.N. human rights investigator said on Friday. “

The word that the BBC does not mention is “defamation”.

The UN report states

“Since then, there has been a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr. Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Sweden and, more recently, Ecuador.” According to the expert, this included an endless stream of humiliating, debasing and threatening statements in the press and on social media, but also by senior political figures, and even by judicial magistrates involved in proceedings against Assange. 

Further down the page, the report uses the word “vilification”:

“I condemn, in the strongest terms, the deliberate, concerted and sustained nature of the abuse inflicted on Mr. Assange and seriously deplore the consistent failure of all involved governments to take measures for the protection of his most fundamental human rights and dignity,” the expert said. “By displaying an attitude of complacency at best, and of complicity at worst, these governments have created an atmosphere of impunity encouraging Mr. Assange’s uninhibited vilification and abuse.”

Melzer is saying that there has been a deliberate campaign to blacken Assange’s name. I suspect that it may be significant that the BBC report didn’t mention this.

Why do I raise this subject?  Because just about every time I mention Assange to someone, almost the first thing they say is something along the lines of “he’s not a very nice person”. It’s almost like there is something so unpleasant about him that people don’t want to talk about him.  I don’t know if anyone has every mentioned Assange to me in a conversation.  And the reason for that is that just about everybody, even those who have not made any effort to follow Assange’s case, has heard quite a few things about him that do not exactly endear him to them – things that are distasteful.

That is where the words “defamation” and “vilification” come in. People think what they think because of what they hear.  But are the things that they hear true?

Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone has written an article entitled “Debunking All The Assange Smears”, in which she lists 29 smears against Assange, and deals with them – in great detail – one by one. It is a pretty long article.

But before she starts going through them, she makes this comment:

Looking at that list you can only see two possibilities:

Julian Assange, who published many inconvenient facts about the powerful and provoked the wrath of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, is literally the worst person in the whole entire world, OR

Julian Assange, who published many inconvenient facts about the powerful and provoked the wrath of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, is the target of a massive, deliberate disinformation campaign designed to kill the public’s trust in him.

And then she adds:

As it happens, historian Vijay Prashad noted in a recent interview with Chris Hedges that in 2008 a branch of the US Defense Department did indeed set out to “build a campaign to eradicate ‘the feeling of trust of WikiLeaks and their center of gravity’ and to destroy Assange’s reputation.” 

The fact is that it is possible to destroy people’s reputations, and thus wreck their lives, by engaging in a whispering campaign is certainly true.  And, it seems to me, it has certainly worked in the case of Julian Assange.  

Bearing false witness

Which brings me to the ninth of the Ten Commandments:

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

What does that mean?

The Shorter Catechism (drawn up by the Westminster Assembly almost 400 years ago) spells out what it requires, and what it forbids:

The ninth commandment requireth the maintaining and promoting of truth between man and man, and of our own and our neighbour’s good name, especially in witness bearing.

The ninth commandment forbiddeth whatsoever is prejudicial to truth, or injurious to our own, or our neighbour’s, good name.

Or, in modern English:

The ninth commandment requires us to tell the truth and to maintain and promote it and our own and others’ reputations, especially when testifying.

The ninth commandment forbids anything that gets in the way of the truth or injures anyone’s reputation.

That seems pretty relevant to the case of Julian Assange.

And note the words “especially when testifying.” It is when someone is being charged in court that this becomes particularly important – because lying can bring about serious harm to an innocent person.

But in addition to that, the way that our world is, and the way our society works, means that it is also true that if a person’s reputation can be damaged sufficiently, then it is easier to get them to brought to court, and more likely that they will be found guilty.

But there is one other thing that needs to be said.

The Westminster Assembly’s Larger Catechism, expands on what the ninth commandment requires and forbids.

And I find it very interesting that one thing that it says that real obedience to the ninth commandment requires that we should not avoid

receiving and countenancing evil reports, and stopping our ears against just defence

– or, in modern English

receiving and giving credit to evil reports, and refusing to listen to a legitimate defence.

It seems to me that perhaps that speaks to each one of us about how we read and listen to news reports – and in particular what we think of Julian Assange.  Because it seems to me that when we hear bad things said about people (especially if we hear them again and again and again) we all to easily accept those those reports without making any attempt to examine them.  

Referendums, Brexit, and the dishonesty of British public life

This morning, the front page of The Times has an extraordinary story. For the first time in over 50 years, a UK poll asking people how they would vote in a General Election shows Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck in the race for third place. There are two parties ahead of them.

There have been times when the LibDems (or the Liberal / SDP alliance before them) have pushed ahead, leaving Labour and the Conservatives in second and third place. But there has never been a time when two unrelated parties were ahead of the two big parties – when both Labour and the Conservatives polled at under 20%. This is a historic moment.

How did we get here?

The big question is “What brought it about”? It all started with the EU referendum in June 2016, and that morning when I got up expecting to hear that the UK had voted to remain in the EU, but discovered that we had voted by 51.89% to 48.11% to leave. This was a shock, because a YouGov poll on the day had forecast a 52% – 48% win for Remain, which was in line with other polls taken in the week before the vote.

This was the first time ever that a national referendum result had gone against the preferred option of the UK government. But nobody could have forecast that this result would lead to such massive problems for Britain’s two main political parties.

After the referendum

Very little was said before the referendum about exactly how the UK would leave the EU if it voted to do so – about what the terms would be. People seemed to assume that should the country vote to leave, then the business of leaving would be straightforward.

In fact, the business of leaving turned out to be extremely messy – much messier than anyone seemed to anticipate. To some extent, this may be because it is much easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium. Joining the EU had its complications, but it was nowhere near as complicated as leaving.

The arithmetic of power

But there was another reason that leaving was difficult. The details about how the UK was to leave were in the hands of Parliament, and the vast majority of MPs were not enthusiastic about leaving. It is estimated that 486 of the 650 MPs at the time of the referendum were Remain supporters – 75 per cent of MPs.

Furthermore, when the Conservatives elected a new leader in the wake of the Referendum, they chose Theresa May, who had been a Remain supporter. The matter of making arrangements to leave the EU was largely in the hands of people who were not enthusiastic about leaving.

The Westminster fiasco

In the event, Parliament was simply unable to agree on what to do. Large numbers of government ministers resigned, parliament failed to agree on how to proceed, and the date agreed for the UK to leave the EU (29th March 2019) came and went with the UK remaining in the UK.

Why couldn’t parliament agree on what to do? Basically, because it was completely divided. The deal that the Prime Minister was offering struck a lot of people as the worst of all worlds – most of the disadvantages of being in the EU with few of the advantages. Many felt that either leaving without a deal on WTO terms, or remaining in, would both be better than accepting May’s deal. It was referred to as BRINO – Brexit in name only.

The Labour Party, like the Conservatives, were committed to leaving the EU. Like the Conservatives, they made that clear in their 2017 election manifesto. But in practice, Labour (like the Conservatives) was divided, and it was never quite clear to most people what Labour would have done if they’d been in power.

The LibDems were clear that they didn’t want to leave at all, but with only 12 seats in Parliament, they were fairly minor players. Their 2017 manifesto stated:

when the terms of our future relationship with the EU have been negotiated (over the next two years on the Government’s timetable), we will put that deal to a vote of the British people in a referendum, with the alternative option of staying in the EU on the ballot paper. We continue to believe that there is no deal as good for the UK outside the EU as the one it already has as a member.

The SNP manifesto said nothing about having a second referendum (at least not on EU membership), but it did speak about the importance of staying in the single market.

The options

This raises the question: “Where do we go now?” It seems to me that four options are available.

1) Leave without a deal

2) Leave with a deal

3) Have another referendum

4) Remain in the EU, but don’t have another referendum on EU membership

I shall assume that option 4 is not really on the table. While it is a very simple and straightforward option, and would be very acceptable to most politicians, and a lot of voters, it would be so unpopular with many other people as to be politically unacceptable. To tell voters that there would be a referendum, and that what they voted for would happen, and then for Parliament to decide that it wasn’t going to happen, would be so blatantly dishonest that few people would try it – at least not in a country with a democratic tradition like that of the UK.

So we are left with three options.

Option 1 (No Deal Brexit) is as simple as option 4. The problem is that it is not popular with any of the main parties in Parliament, and while reasonably popular in the country, it certainly doesn’t have the support of the majority – and is strongly opposed by a substantial minority.

Option 2 (leave with a deal) is what most politicians in Parliament have been trying to do, but have completely failed at – even though they have had almost three years to work out how to do it. And few people have confidence that the Labour or Conservative parties (or at least their current leaderships) would be able to do it.

Another referendum?

Which brings us to Option 3: another referendum. The LibDems clearly supported this option in their 2017 manifesto, and said that the alternative of remaining in the EU should be on the ballot paper.

However, there is a real problem with having a second referendum that includes the option of voting to remain in the UK.

Daniel Hannan puts it succinctly in his short video “Here’s what they were saying before the referendum“.

He asks the question “What would it say about our democracy if the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU were sent back and told to try again?” He then says “Rather than listening to me, let’s ask some of the people who are now campaigning for a second referendum.” He then gives us clips of three politicians (all of whom later came out in support of a second referendum) speaking before the first referendum. The most blunt was Paddy Ashdown, former leader of the LibDems saying:

I will forgive no one who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken, whether it is a majority of one per cent or twenty per cent. When the British people have spoken you do what they command. Either you believe in democracy or you don’t.

And Hannan concludes: “Why should we listen to calls for a second referendum from people who, by definition, do not accept the results of referendums?”

Democracy . . . or honesty?

The word that both Ashdown and Hannan used was “democracy”. Ashdown said “Either you believe in democracy or you don’t.” Hannan said “What would it say about our democracy if the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU were sent back and told to try again? ” And yes, I take the point that if Parliament ignores the way that people vote, then it goes against basic principles of democracy.

But this goes deeper than that. It is about honesty. When Parliament agrees to hold a referendum, then it is making a promise to the electorate. It tells them “We will do what you say.” Even if it is a majority of just 1 per cent, you do it.

And offering people a second referendum on the same question – before Parliament carries out the expressed wish of the people in the first referendum – is simply dishonest. If we had a general election, and before the newly elected Parliament convened, a new general election was called, it would look extremely odd. This sort of thing would only happen if it was discovered that there were widespread fraud or irregularities – something that nobody has seriously suggested took place in the 2016 referendum.

A useful question to ask in such circumstances is the one that is implied by Dan Hannan’s video: What would happen if the boot was on the other foot? We know the answer, because Paddy Ashdown said it: “I will forgive no one who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken, whether it is a majority of one per cent or twenty per cent. “

In other words, to call for the results of the 2016 referendum to be set aside so that the UK remains in the EU – or to call for another referendum which offers voters the option of voting for the UK to remain in the EU – is simply dishonest. There is no getting around that.

Which brings us back to the subject of public life in Britain today. Large numbers of politicians are talking about fighting Brexit, or are calling for another referendum – one that would offer voters the option of remaining in the EU. They are doing it utterly shamelessly.

And the electorate are, apparently, not horrified. Indeed, it has gone down very well with a lot of voters.  The LibDems, a party that has been advocating a second referendum consistently for the past two years, has seen its popularity shoot up, so that according to the YouGov poll in this morning’s Times, it is now the most popular party in the UK, polling at 24% of the vote – up from 7.4% at the 2017 General Election.

What does that say about honesty in Britain today?

Syria: the explosive story that the western media won’t touch

Ten days ago, a group called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published a report with the rather boring title “Assessment by the engineering sub-team of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission investigating the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018.”

What the report had to say was anything but boring. It alleged that the The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had suppressed a report from its own engineering subgroup that told a very different story from the OPCW’s final report on the alleged chemical attack in Douma in Syria a year ago. Whereas the OPCW’s report said that supposed gas cylinders found in bombed buildings in Douma, Syria, were probably dropped by helicopters on those buildings, the engineering subgroup’s report came to the opposite conclusion.

What is shocking is that the OPCW covered up the subgroup’s report.

This is important because the alleged dropping of these cylinders by a Syrian military helicopter is at the heart of the allegation that Syria used poison gas at Douma last April – whereas the leaked document differs sharply.

And this is not insignificant because, in response to those allegations against the Syrian government, the United States, France and the United Kingdom carried out a series of military strikes against multiple government sites in Syria – without, it must be added, even waiting for the OPCW investigators to arrive on the site.

In the words of Australian journalist, Caitlin Johnstone,

“As near as I can tell the kindest possible interpretation of these revelations is that an expert who has worked with the OPCW for decades gave an engineering assessment which directly contradicted the official findings of the OPCW on Douma, but OPCW officials didn’t find his assessment convincing for whatever reason and hid every trace of it from public view. That’s the least sinister possibility: that a sharp dissent from a distinguished expert within the OPCW’s own investigation was completely hidden from the public because the people calling the shots at the OPCW didn’t want to confuse us with a perspective they didn’t find credible. This most charitable interpretation possible is damningly unacceptable by itself, because the public should obviously be kept informed of any possible evidence which may contradict the reasons they were fed to justify an act of war by powerful governments.”

There are, as she points out, less charitable interpretations, which look to me at least as plausible as the charitable one:

It is not in the slightest bit unreasonable to speculate that the ostensibly independent OPCW in fact serves the interests of the U.S.-centralized power alliance, and that it suppressed the Henderson report because it pokes holes in the narratives that are used to demonize a longtime target for imperialist regime change. That is a perfectly reasonable possibility for us to wonder about, and the onus is now on the OPCW to prove to us that it is not the case. 

And she explains why this is a huge story:

Either way, the fact that the OPCW kept Henderson’s findings from receiving not a whisper of attention severely undermines the organization’s credibility, not just with regard to Douma but with regard to everything, including the establishment Syria narrative as a whole and the Skripal case in the UK.

There is something that she didn’t mention, but which is significant. In September 2017, Gareth Porter, a respected investigative reporter and historian wrote a piece in which he noted that in its report on the alleged chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun , the OPCW broke its own rules:

In citing the positive test results on environmental samples and reporting on biomedical samples taken by one of the parties in support of its conclusion that sarin had caused the deaths and injuries in Khan Sheikhoun, the OPCW violated one of its most fundamental rules. It is forbidden from using any biomedical or environmental samples as evidence unless they have a verifiable chain of custody, as a spokesman for the organization clarified when allegations of chemical attacks first arose in Syria four years ago.

The OPCW itself took no samples of any kind in Khan Sheikhoun because its fact-finding mission never set foot in the city. Instead, it performed all of its work in Turkey or elsewhere in locations in Syria controlled by al Qaeda or another rebel group. That, too, was an explicit violation of the organization’s own rules. The same OPCW spokesman who insisted that OPCW could only use evidence with a clear chain of custody also told reporters in 2013 that the OPCW was not supposed to rule on whether an attack with banned chemicals had taken place without direct access to the relevant site. At no point did any OPCW inspector come within 100 miles of the alleged attack site in Khan Sheikhoun.

But this is not just about the OPCW. Porter continues:

Despite this flagrant breach of its own protocols, the OPCW has faced no real scrutiny from Western mainstream media. The disinterest of the international press corps in raising any questions about the OPCW’s methodology or probing the actual evidence surrounding the event has reinforced the initial story spun out by al Qaeda-tied media activists. The same pattern of passive acceptance of the official narrative is now continuing with the coverage of the U.N. Commission report, which is received as gospel despite its flaws. But as this investigation has demonstrated, the official narrative on Khan Sheikhoun doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

And, surprise, surprise, exactly the same thing has happened this time. The silence of the western mainstream media on the suppression of the report of the OPCW’s engineering subgroup is deafening. As Caitlin Johnstone wrote (and this was 6 days ago):

This should be a major news headline all around the world, but of course it is not. As of this writing the mass media have remained deadly silent about the document despite its enormous relevance to an international headline story last year which occupied many days of air time. It not only debunks a major news story that had military consequences, it casts doubt on a most esteemed international independent investigative body and undermines the fundamental assumptions behind many years of Western reporting in the area. People get lazy about letting the media tell them what’s important and they assume if it’s not in the news, it’s not a big deal. This is a big deal, this is a major story and it is going unreported, which makes the media’s silence a part of the story as well. 

So we have two stories that cast doubt on a respected international independent investigative body, and the media does not cover them, but continues to quote the OPCW as if it is completely trustworthy. The media’s silence is, indeed, a huge part of this story.

The only exception is Peter Hitchens, who has played a major part in breaking and publicising the story in his blog in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

And apart from Hitchens’ blog, even the Mail hasn’t given the story any coverage at all.

There are two other things of interest here – both covered in Caitlin Johnstone’s most recent article on the subject.

The first is concerns Theodore Postol of MIT, who has now seen the engineering subgroup’s report, and who says

I will have a much more detailed summary of the engineering report later this week. For now, it suffices to say that the UN OPCW engineering report is completely different from the UN OPCW report on Khan Sheikhoun, which is distinguished by numerous claims about explosive effects that could only have been made by technically illiterate individuals. In very sharp contrast, the voices that come through the engineering report are those of highly knowledgeable and sophisticated experts.

A second issue that is raised by the character of the OPCW engineering report on Douma is that it is entirely unmentioned in the report that went to the UN Security Council. This omission is very serious, as the findings of that report are critical to the process of determining attribution. There is absolutely no reason to justify the omission of the engineering report in the OPCW account to the UN Security Council as its policy implications are of extreme importance.

I have written about Postol before, because, like Porter, he has seriously questioned the standard US government line about the alleged chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun. What I said on that occasion bears repeating.

Postol’s contribution got almost no coverage in the mainstream media. Again, this is slightly curious, because in 2013 the BBC carried a story about Postol, describing him as “a leading US expert on missile defence.”

The second thing of interest is that while the western political and media establishments are silent about these revelations about the OPCW, the US State Department has just released a statement accusing Syria of, yes, you’ve guessed it, using chemical weapons in its latest offensive against rebel held positions.

And yes, that is getting plenty of media coverage. 

So, what we have here is an internationally respected body, which has, up to now, been treated as being fair and objective, suppressing key information.  And we we have the western media doing exactly the same thing.   I think that says a lot about where western society stands today with regard to the matter of honesty.

And I don’t think that it is any co-incidence that the information that the OPCW and the media are suppressing is information that throws into question the actions of those who hold political power in the west.  

Should we put our trust in Christian politicians?

A couple of years ago, I was chatting to a friend, and I suggested that the decision of theologian Wayne Grudem to publicly endorse Donald Trump in 2016 raised serious questions about Grudem’s judgement. My friend responded (presumably in defence of Grudem) that at least it could be said that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence, was an evangelical Christian.

That response reflects a view which has long been common among evangelical Christians – the view that if a candidate is an evangelical Christian, then there is a strong case for supporting that candidate. Some people might think that this view is basically the same as the way that in many countries, people tend to vote for someone of their tribe – or the way that Freemasons would be likely to vote for a Freemason. But Christians would argue that this goes beyond “He’s one of us, so we should vote for him.” Christians prefer to think of it in terms of supporting the candidate who has Christian values – who is more likely to be honest, and to vote the way a Christian should vote, a way that is moral.

I must confess that for years I tended to take that view. If a committed Christian ran for office, then there is a good case for voting for the Christian candidate. Today, however, I would say that it is not that simple.

Why? Because, it seems to me, Christian politicians are often as seriously flawed as other politicians in important respects. And there are two that (it seems to me) are good illustrations of this.

Mike Pompeo

The first is Mike Pompeo. Pompeo is currently the American Secretary of State, and thus one of the most powerful politicians in the world. According to Wikipedia,

“Pompeo is affiliated with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Pompeo serves as a local church deacon and teaches Sunday school. In 2014, Pompeo told a church group that Christians needed to “know that Jesus Christ as our saviour is truly the only solution for our world”.

Furthermore, in January this year, he said in a speech,

“In my office, I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and His Word, and The Truth. And it’s the truth, lower-case “t,” that I’m here to talk about today.” And he went on to say “We need to acknowledge that truth, because if we don’t, we make bad choices – now and in the future.”

Which sounds good.

Hence it seems strange that last month, in a speech in Texas, he referred to his training at the US Military Academy at West Point, and said

““What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” ”

Furthermore, he was laughing as he said it.

A Christian commentator remarked ““that’s not the resume of the Secretary of State… that’s the resume, if we look at the Bible, that’s the resume of Satan.” 

There seems to be a stark contradiction in what Pompeo said on those two occasions.

What are we to make of this?

For some years, I have been reading Daniel Larison, who writes on foreign policy at The American Conservative. Larison is a sober commentator who is not given to exaggeration; and if he says something, I take it seriously. Since Pompeo is the US Secretary of State, it is not surprising that Larison has commented frequently on Pompeo’s statements. And there is a word that comes up again and again and again. See if you can spot it.

On the 15th of March, Larison wrote a column entitled: “Pompeo’s Obnoxious Yemen Lies”

On the 29th of April, it was “Pompeo’s Risible Yemen Lies“

On the 5th of April, in an article entitled “Challenging the Administration’s Many Iran Lies“, Larison begins “Mike Pompeo lied about the nuclear deal again this morning in his interview with Norah O’Donnell . . . “

On the 28th of March, in an article entitled “Secretary Pompeo Has No Credibility“, Larison begins

“Mike Pompeo spoke at the National Review Institute this week and made several false statements about North Korea, Yemen, and other issues.”

He goes on to say

“Pompeo has spent the last ten months lying to the American public, Congress, and everyone else when he says things like this, and he never seems to pay a price for it. ”

And he concludes with the words

“Pompeo is the chief representative of the United States abroad besides the president, so his habit of making things up out of thin air and telling easily refuted lies can only harm our reputation, undermine trust, and cause even our allies to doubt our government’s claims. Thanks to his constant misrepresentations and fabrications, nothing that the Secretary of State says can be believed. “

If you are interested in the truth, and look into the things that Daniel Larison saying, I think you’ll find that he isn’t exaggerating.

Ben Sasse

Let’s move on to Ben Sasse, a Republican Senator from Nebraska.

Sasse’s credentials are a lot more impressive than those of Mike Pompeo. For me, the thing that is really impressive is that “For the next year, he served as consultant/executive director for Christians United For Reformation (CURE). During his tenure, CURE merged with the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), and Sasse became executive director of ACE in Anaheim, California” 

I have been following CURE and ACE for over 20 years, and both have had rock solid reputations. They have been bodies that I would trust completely and look to for wisdom.

Furthermore, Sasse co-edited the book Here We Stand!: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals for a Modern Reformation with respected preacher James Montgomery Boice. If Ben Sasse has a long association with these people, he must be solid.

His record for political courage is also strong. He stated publicly in 2016 that he would not vote for Trump – he was the first sitting Republican senator to say so – and has probably been more outspokenly critical of Trump than any other Republican in Congress.

And, on top of all that, he’s smart. He went to Harvard, and has a PhD from Yale.

And yet . . .

Last month, Sasse published an article about foreign policy, in which he said that America needed a “foreign-policy imagination that is broader, more adaptive, and more creative.” He wrote:

“I am an unstinting advocate for American engagement in the world, and I think the impulse to withdraw from America’s important, long-standing commitments is a very bad thing. U.S. global leadership is indispensable, not only for the security of America’s friends and partners, but for protecting America’s own interests. When hell breaks loose on the other side of the world, it inevitably boomerangs home. When the United States doesn’t lead, chaos inevitably follows. If America continues to drift toward global disengagement, it will be sucked into all sorts of troubles that it can’t envision right now.

The lesson of the two World Wars and of the Cold War is that the United States cannot avoid the world. America ultimately must lead a system of alliances. When it does otherwise, the consequences for the United States and its partners are much worse than policy-makers are liable to anticipate in the short term, when disengagement can seem appealing.”

Daniel Larison’s comment is simple: “Almost everything that Sasse says here is untrue or significantly misleading.”

Larison has plenty of good comments, but it seems to me that the key thing is this:

“The experience of the last 20 years shows that the U.S. is much more often responsible for creating chaos and instability when it “leads” through military action and support for regime change. The more active and forceful U.S. “leadership” has been, the more destructive our foreign policy becomes.

One of the core conceits of Sasse’s case for interventionism is that our “leadership” is good for the U.S. and the world, but there is considerable evidence from just the last two decades that it imposes enormous costs on us and causes terrible harm to many other countries.”

Exactly. 

And I must confess that as I read Sasse’s words, I was astonished. “Untrue or significantly misleading” is an accurate description of much of it. So much so, that Sasse appears to live in a fantasy world, in which America’s actions on the world stage are always a force for good around the world, and governments disliked by America’s political leadership are wicked. While Sasse has been critical of Saudi Arabia, he has also voted against ending U.S. military support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen. This is astonishing. America’s support from Saudi aggression in Yemen has been utterly reprehensible – and yet Sasse has consistently supported it.

What do I make of this? I think Sasse actually does live in a fantasy world . His view of world affairs is, in many ways, divorced from reality. He describes Putin as ‘evil’, and China is ‘a bad actor’ in the world.

It seems to me, however, that any fair minded person who looks objectively at the facts regarding the conflicts and wars that have been going on over the past 25 years, would have to conclude that the governments of China and Russia have not been nearly as responsible for stirring up death and destruction as successive American administrations. And it isn’t even close.

It is noteworthy that while Sasse’s article mentions China and Russia a few times, it never mentions America’s part in the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Iraq, Yemen, and Libya are not mentioned at all, and while he makes some derogatory remarks about the Syrian government, he doesn’t mention America’s support for Jihadist militants in the war in Syria, who brutalised Christians and members of other minority religious groups.

Loving the truth

How do I account for this? How could a sincere, intelligent, Christian be so completely wrong?

As I pondered this, the word that came to me was “delusional”. And as I thought further, a verse from the Bible came to me: II Thessalonians 2:11 “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false.” So I had a look at it.

What Paul actually says in this passage is:

“The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.“

Now, this clearly doesn’t apply to Ben Sasse. Paul is talking about unbelievers, who reject the gospel.

But it struck me that the words “they refused to love the truth” might be relevant to Sasse. You see, when Paul says “the truth”, he is talking about the Christian gospel. But there are a lot of things that are true. And some of those things can be highly uncomfortable to us, because they don’t fit with things that we really like to believe.

Loyalties . . . and idolatry

And when it comes to politics, people have a lot of deeply held beliefs. And even more importantly, politics involves loyalty – loyalty to political leaders, loyalty to political parties, and loyalty to one’s country. Admitting that the leader you have supported is seriously flawed can be difficult. Admitting that your party has got something seriously wrong can be difficult. But perhaps admitting to the failings of your nation is the most difficult thing of all. Patriotism is a powerful force. To admit that the foreign policy that your country has pursued over the past 20 or 30 years is seriously mistaken isn’t easy. To admit that the foreign policy your country has pursued has brought large scale death and destruction can be painful.

And the fact is that Ben Sasse holds very strong beliefs about America. He wants “an American-led, American-powered global order. “

But his belief in America strikes me as being naive, unrealistic, and verging on arrogance. What if a politician from China spoke of “the value of a Chinese-led, Chinese-powered global order?” Or a German politician spoke of “the value of a German-led, German-powered global order?” Or an Indian politician spoke of “the value of a Indian-led, Indian-powered global order?” To believe that an American-led, American-powered global order is inevitably going to be be a good thing – especially after Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen – is astonishing.

In our world, and especially in the world of politics, people often speak as if loyalty to a great leader, or to a party, or to a tribe, or a nation are important virtues. Failure to show such loyalties is often described as treachery. And that is especially true of loyalty to one’s nation. But the truth is that such loyalties are not always a good thing, for they often blind people to the truth.

And I will go further. The Bible doesn’t use the word ‘loyalties’. But it does speak of idols. In the Old Testament, idols are always statues made of stone or wood. But in the New Testament, the apostle Paul speaks (Colossians 3:5) of covetousness as idolatry. And if wanting other people’s property can amount to serving idols, can we not make gods of human political leaders, or parties, or tribes, or nations? Can we not put faith in a leader or party or tribe or nation that should be reserved for God alone? Can we not give loyalty to a leader or party or tribe or nation that should be reserved for God alone?

It seems to me that Ben Sasse’s faith in America as a force for good in the world, and his belief in the value of “an American-led, American-powered global order” comes pretty close to idolatry.

And that’s a problem.

At its heart, I think that politics itself is a big part of the problem. Politics demands (and creates loyalties) – loyalties that have always been around. But as I read the New Testament, it seems to me that those loyalties were pretty much absent from the New Testament church. The early Christians, for the most part, knew nothing of loyalty to political leaders, to political parties, or to nation states. I don’t think that is accidental.

That may also be true of some modern Christians – but it is not true of many. There are many modern Christians who have political loyalties – and in particular, loyalty to their country. And in practice, that becomes loyalty to the foreign policy pursued by their country, and thus loyalty to the allies chosen by our governments – which, in my opinion, is dangerous ground.

Last year, an article in the New York Times bluntly stated:

The United States is not directly bombing civilians in Yemen, but it is providing arms, intelligence and aerial refuelling to assist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they hammer Yemen with airstrikes, destroy its economy and starve its people. The Saudi aim is to crush Houthi rebels who have seized Yemen’s capital and are allied with Iran.

That’s sophisticated realpolitik for you: Because we dislike Iran’s ayatollahs, we are willing to starve Yemeni schoolchildren.

Schoolchildren?  Yes, and not just schoolchildren. The UN recently warned that if a proper ceasefire is not brokered by the end of the year, the total number of dead could rise to 233,000, with 60 per cent of the deceased being children under the age of five.

The UN’s projected count includes 102,000 killed in combat and 131,000 who will die due to a lack of food, health services and infrastructure in the war.

As Daniel Larison put it,

“It can’t be emphasized enough that U.S. policy in Yemen is both deeply immoral and irrational. Our government is a partner in war crimes and crimes against humanity . . . .“

And Mike Pompeo is a forthright advocate of this policy, and Ben Sasse voted against ending U.S. military support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen.

When loyalty to one’s nation leads to being so deluded as support the mass killing of thousands of children, it’s no small thing.

I don’t think idolatry is too strong a word.