ROD LIDDLE
What message do Trump’s missiles really send?
exciting contest. For sure, we have some
sympathies with the secular, liberal Syrian
opposition — but that is a total of seven
people, despite what William Hague might
think. The rest of the combatants — the rag-
taggle alliance of jihadi maniacs, al Qaeda,
Isis and those Nusra savages versus the
unpleasantly totalitarian Assad regime —
well, we’re unable to make a call on that one.
We’re straight down the middle. We don’t
much like any of them. We have selflessly
disregarded our own geopolitical interests.
Assad was a possible ally in the war
against Islamic terrorism — as was that
lunatic Gaddafi and the bloke who used
to run Egypt who looked like a crestfall-
en kebab-seller — but we put these minorand selfish considerations to one side. We
urged on the participants of the Arab Spring
because we fully expected the insurgents to
install, in place of those dictators, liberal and
democratic administrations like the kind
of thing Tim Farron or Chris Patten might
institute in our own country, were they ever
allowed near the levers of power. OK, it
hasn’t quite worked out like that. Hard to
imagine why not, but there we are. But at
least we tried, just as we did when we invad-
ed Iraq with good, decent, clean, depleted
uranium bombs.
There are more messages those Toma-
hawks sent out. To the Russians, for exam-
ple: we would rather have you as an enemy
than a friend. A message reinforced by BorisJohnson’s principled decision to cancel his
trip to Moscow and thus take us back in
time, as far as relations between our two
countries are concerned, to about 1961. We
are somehow far more comfortable hat-
ing the Russians than we are in facing the
maniacal wrath of an entire religion. Even
while we pretend to ourselves that it is not
an entire religion but just a few extrem-
ists who have got Mohammed all wrong, us
being Koranic experts and thus qualified
to adjudicate on such matters, which we do
even while the trucks plough into western-
ers in Westminster, Nice and Stockholm, and
while the bombs detonate in Paris and Lon-
don and Moscow and Brussels. We would
prefer to give succour to people who want
us all dead right now for reasons of ideology
than appease Putin, with his mild homopho-
bia (as opposed to their somewhat vigorous
homophobia) and his worries about what
Nato is doing on his back doorstep. Oh, and
his undoubted ruthlessness and aggression,
sure. And his cold pragmatism.
More messages. Still more messages from
those Tomahawks. That the UK govern-
ment will generally hold a handkerchief to
its nose when the name of Donald Trump is
mentioned — but then embrace him warmly
when he does something truly deranged
and dangerous for almost certainly domes-
tic political reasons. A message to Congress
and those investigators: you think I am in
thrall to that beady-eyed, bear-wrestling
Slav? Watch this! And then duck and cover.
And a message to those of us who were
stupid enough to think that Trump might
have a slightly more realistic policy towards
the Middle East, be a little less governed by
the weight of deluded liberal sensibilities
and might, further, have understood that
our interference in its wars, its visceral and
primitive hatreds, its awful governments, its
wrecked economies, its incompetence, its
anti-Semitism, its endless thuggery — never
tends to end well. Ah, got you. Message
received. We were wrong about that then.
So many messages from just $50 million
worth of Tomahawk cruise missiles. Money
well spent, I think.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
The argument continues online.L
et me take this opportunity to join with
our Prime Minister and Foreign Secre-
tary in commending President Trump’s
swift and decisive military action against the
Syrian government as being ‘appropriate’ —
one of my favourite words and one which I
like to use every day, regardless of whether
it is appropriate to do so.
The important thing was not of course
the destruction of a few Syrian planes and,
collaterally, a few Syrian children. The
crucial point is that this moderate and judi-
cious use of expensive missiles ‘sends out a
message’ to President Assad. And the mes-
sage is very simple. We will no longer tol-
erate Syrian children being killed by hugely
unpleasant chemical weapons such as sarin
or chlorine gas. We may think of the Syrians
as pitiful specimens who do not amount to
much, but in fact they are actually human
beings. And as human beings, they have
the right to be killed by nice clean high-
ordnance, weaponry such as those fabulous
Tomahawk cruise missiles that Mr Trump
dispatched and which did, indeed, kill a few
lucky children living near the airbase. Assad
must learn that it is barbaric to kill children
with nerve gas, but civilised and even kindly
to kill them with high explosives.
Another message it sends out is that we
shall in future act as referees, or perhaps line
judges, in this interesting conflict — in order
to spin it out for as long as is humanly pos-
sible, and thus maximise the number of peo-
ple killed. If too many people are killed by
one side in a very short space of time we will
intervene. We want many, many more peo-
ple to be killed over a much longer period
of time — and this will be the effect of that
raid on Assad’s nasty aeroplanes. Even if
the Tomahawks did somehow miss the run-
way, it has still slowed a little the Syrian gov-
ernment’s attempts to achieve victory. The
war will drag on for longer, perhaps much
longer. And while it does so, we will sit on
those unfeasibly high stools overlooking the
net and decide who has made a foot fault.
And when we notice the foot fault we shall
penalise it immediately. We want this war to
be played out in a pristine and gentlemanly
manner. May the best man win.
Which is the other message we are send-
ing out. We are strictly impartial in this
As human beings, Syrians have
the right to be killed by nice
clean high-ordnance weaponry‘Signal from the President —
a new foreign policy.’