Category: History

Syria – Monday 30th November

There’s a vote coming up in the House of Commons on the subject of bombing Syria –  bombing IS, something very different from the vote on bombing Assad’s forces which was lost two year’s ago. (Bombing Assad would have been a disaster, but that’s another subject, for another time.)

What are the arguments? Should we bomb, should we join France, Russia, the USA? Would we making the same mistake as we did in 2003? How valid are comparisons?

The two situations are radically different. IS is a clear and present danger, terrorising, a very literal sense, destroying communities, espousing a brutal ideology, with no spiritual content in the way I’d understand the term. Inaction isn’t a strategy. Bombing cannot win a war, but it can contain, it can limit IS’s expansion beyond its current boundaries, and if sustained break its lines of communication and its oil-based ‘economy’. Removing IS from Raqqa and Mosul is another matter, and will indeed require ground forces, and there is real danger of loss of innocent life and widespread destruction. But concerns over Raqqa and Mosul shouldn’t mean that we don’t act now to restrict IS’s operations, and at the same time break its hold on the imaginations of potential recruits.

Our engagement with the Middle East arguably goes back to the Battle of Lepanto in the 16th century when we first began to turn the tide of Arab and Ottoman dominance. There followed centuries of Ottoman decline and growing British and French interest in the trade and politics of the Levant.  Our Western instinct, that we know better, our instinct to interfere, is deep-rooted. The second Iraq war in 2003, which I strongly opposed, was born of that instinct, and a radical misjudgement. But this isn’t to say that all engagement is wrong, and the situations in Iraq in 2003 and in Syria in 2015 are radically different.

I’m well-aware of the argument that the bombing to date has been ‘ineffective’. Though in what sense? True, IS haven’t been defeated. But how much further might have they have extended their reach had they been (with the exception of the Kurds) unimpeded, without any disruption to their supply lines?

The answer now cannot be to withdraw, or to fail to support allies (and that in itself is a powerful argument) who are very much engaged. I don’t doubt that bombing on a much extended scale, well directed, and with a much broader political support, can be effective.

I don’t buy into the argument, which has been picked up across political spectrum, that we should have a clear end-strategy, and not approve a strategy involving bombing IS without one. What we can guarantee is that whatever that end-strategy might be, it won’t be what happens in the end. We have to proceed  step by step, deal with immediate dangers, and move forward from each new position we achieve. There is common ground at this time between the French, Russians and to a degree the Americans, and we need to take full advantage of this – as of now.

We also need to recognise that Syria in the short and medium term will comprise several different authorities and spheres of influence. Assad will remain in control of Damascus and considerable territory along the Mediterranean, and to the north. The Free Syria Army will have, I would hope, its own sphere of influence, and Kurdish territory will be well-defined. I wouldn’t expect them to fight side-by-side but their action could nonetheless be coordinated if all the various parties involved, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, work toward that end.

We may have a dream of a Western-style democratic Syria, but it’s one we should put out of our minds for now. The aim has to be an end to violence and reestablishing political authority in whatever form proves most viable. Once that’s in place and security is guaranteed refugees can begin to return home. They have to be the first steps.

The aim for ten years time has be a Syria, or a Syrian territory, at peace, and that peace needs to be a guaranteed peace, ideally with UN involvement. The return of refugees will be well underway if not a complete, and the traditions of civilised life which were well-established, along with religious tolerance and educational opportunities, before 2011, will have a chance to reassert themselves again.

The Celts at the British Museum

What I wonder would it have been like to have travelled the tracks and pathways of northern Europe not just one but two thousand years ago?

That’s one thought I had in mind when I visited the British Museum’s Celts: Art and Identity exhibition last week. And I didn’t quite find the answer.

What the exhibition does do is combine wonderful display and lighting to give life and meaning to everything from a horse-drawn cart and Celtic crosses by way of the ubiquitous torc to swords and the carnyx, a serpentine and over-sized battle horn.

I remember the BM’s Viking exhibition from last year, and how the artefacts on display linked to trade routes stretching as far afield as Byzantium and Russia.  The Vikings were extraordinary adventurers. You just can’t do that with the Celts. The word keltoi dates back to the ancient Greeks and was applied loosely to anyone north of the Alps. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did it take on its association with the peoples of the western shores of Britain and Brittany, defined by similarities in language. So while these days we connect the term with Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, the landscapes behind the exhibits in the Celts exhibition comes from across north-western Europe, and that makes it hard to link them to specific environments.

Galicia? I spent a week last month walking through Galicia, another Celtic landscape, which doesn’t get even the smallest mention here.

The exhibition’s final section, celebrating the Celtic revival, is all about Celtic identity, and how that identity was reinterpreted in Ireland and in the Celtic diaspora. It’s about literary and popular culture and there’s a big disconnect between the swords and torcs and the specific locations of the burials where they were found, and the imagery of an imagined culture, which could muddle Celts and Druids and anything that had a touch of mystery to it. Legends became almost real, and even now Cuthulain is celebrated in Ireland – a hero adopted during the Troubles by both sides, Protestant and Catholic. WB Yeats lived and breathed Celtic myth and landscapes.

Back to the real world of the Celts, let’s say 500BC to 500 AD. I missed a sense of the land, of landscape, a ‘Celtic’ way of life. The fact that so many exhibits come from burial hordes doesn’t of course help.

One term used in the exhibition set me wondering – ‘warrior-farmer’. Farming has to be a secure and sedentary occupation. So maybe military service was given in exchange for land in some kind of early feudal relationship. How they occupied, cultivated, travelled and fought across their lands – that’s what fascinates me.

None of which is to say that I didn’t enjoy the exhibition. It achieves brilliantly what it sets out to do, and it’s drawing in the crowds.

So many torcs – it’s as if they were a currency in the afterlife. And there’s an extraordinary cauldron, found in Denmark, made of plates of beaten silver depicting rituals within and gods without. Celtic crosses, looking a little out of place, tower above you: Christianity arrived in Ireland as early as the 5th century.

You can listen to the carnyx and its loud, grating, chilling note which would have attached itself to the enemy’s nerves, and sent fear through their ranks. It would have echoed across mountain, field and bog. I have there my own imagined sense of place.

After Paris

France, in President Hollande’s words, is now at war with IS. And that’s the way I think most of us in the UK feel as well.

War challenges us, challenges our humanity.

As I’ve often made clear in this blog, I aspire to time for quiet and reflection, for a life made more simple, where there’s time for close observation on the one hand, and time to rest in the sweep of the days and seasons on the other. It could be open country, or Kew Gardens, where we wandered recently amid cacti and orchids, or music …. in the way Autumn Leaves and its gentle melancholy accompanied me along the Camino.

How to combine a more reflective life with a political engagement, and with all the issues of everyday life, that’s the challenge I set myself.

When I returned from the Camino and read up on all the events of the month I’d been away I was grateful for the fact that nothing untoward had happened. Crises continuing, but nothing like the events of last Friday.

That shattered all calm. Anger and grief, and a desire for retribution, took over. But the enemy is elusive. It will take wisdom and detachment to find solutions. And also understanding other points of view – not the IS standpoint, which is beyond ordinary understanding, but the causes that lie behind their rise and their ability to recruit.

How to avoid giving IS a victory and closing national borders?  Remember – they are already in our midst and terrorists will funds ways of circumventing closed borders. IS has recruited readily among local populations in the UK, France, Belgium and elsewhere, where there’s unemployment, a lack of opportunity, alienation, exacerbated by anti-Islamic sentiment. Integrating those populations into wider society has to be a high priority, and it will be achieved by providing opportunities (no mean challenge, I accept), not by further cutting benefits.

Improved security along the EU’s external border is vital, not least shared databases. But closing that border, separating Europe off from the Arab and wider Islamic world – leaving them to fight their own wars – misses the point that they are our wars too. Populations intermix, resources and manufactures are traded and shared, and given our long involvement exploiting and influencing the region we have a moral responsibility too. More than that – the Arab world is not homogeneous – the difference between the before 2010 relatively mild and secular version of Islam practised in Syria and the Wahhabi variant in Saudi Arabia is vast. Iran despite the ayatollahs has a strong secular and western-focused culture, especially among the younger generations, and in the cities. The enmity between Sunni and Shia, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, is another matter: nonetheless populations have lived adjacent to one another in Syria and Iraq since the seventh century.

But when a central authority is taken out, and ideologues and hotheads find space to operate, chaos and civil war ensues, as happened in the Balkans twenty years ago, post Tito, and in Iraq after 2003. Scrapping both army and police in Iraq was a tragic mistake, so too, and more controversially, imagining that a Western-inspired democratic revolution could transform a region with little tradition of genuine democracy.

The law of unintended consequences worked to brutal effect.

I’m also well aware that under the Damascus and Baghdad caliphates, and in medieval Spain, Islam inspired a remarkable civilization, intellectual and artistic – and tolerant, with Muslims, Jews and Christian living side by side for many centuries.

First and foremost now we have to act decisively to take out IS, with the West and Russia combining, not just in military action, but in a solution which will involve huge compromises but can lead, I believe, to an end to hostilities between Assad’s forces and the original western-backed rebel forces. Sykes and Picot drew the original Syrian border in 1916. The USA, Russia, France, the UK, and others, will have to decide how Syria divides and is governed as part of a post-war settlement. There may be multiple authorities, and that may be all that can be achieved in the short and medium term.

The refugee crisis requires safe havens financially supported by all the countries of Europe within the countries of entry, and plans to facilitate and finance repatriation at the earliest opportunity. Some Syrians may want to stay in Germany, but Syria has been and can be – will be – again a remarkable country. So much of our civilisation and our values, our culture and our morality, comes from that part of the world, and their people could one day rise again to the heights their forebears achieved. That has to be their aim – and our aim.

(I’m adding here a quote from Barrack Obama, which I read after I’d uploaded this blog, and with which I wholeheartedly agree: ‘It is very important that we do not close our hearts and start equating the issue of refugees with terrorism.’)

No-one in the West can easily conjure solutions to the enmity between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Shia and Sunni. But take out IS in Syria and Iraq as a warzone, and destroy that sense of invincibility IS have enjoyed, then potential recruits to other battlegrounds in Yemen, Somalia, Egypt and elsewhere may think twice, and local populations left to live again side by side, as they have for centuries.

Likewise if IS is destroyed, its triumphalism punctured, and its followers in France, Britain and other countries of western Europe realise that violence and martyrdom are a fool’s game, then we can focus again on what we’ve failed to deal with over the last thirty and more years – the growing alienation of many young people in the Muslim communities in our midst.

It’s another area where skill and understanding will be required, and where closed minds and bigotry must be opposed at every turn.

We are all one people.

The Warburg Institute under threat

I read that London University is trying to charge the Warburg an impossible rent for its property in Woburn Square.  And the university back in June launched a legal action to challenge a  deed of trust signed back in 1944 when it undertook to ‘maintain the Library [the Institute’s library] in perpetuity.’

As the THES put it, ‘The future of a “unique and extraordinary” library saved from Nazi Germany lies in the balance …’

How this will be resolved we will know this autumn.

I studied at the Warburg under Ernst Gombrich over forty years ago. And I notice Yale are re-publishing Gombrich’s ‘Shadows: The Depiction of Shadows in Western Art’ this autumn.  It is a most wonderful title, and idea. What can we learn from shadows in art, how do shadows in art and in life change the way we experience things…

But there is of course an irony here.

Should the Warburg be forced to close or relocate to some cheap and gloomy cellar, or be broken up, that would cast the longest shadow of all. It just needs one collector wiser than his peers to put his money into an endowment, and the Warburg, ‘dedicated to the intellectual and artistic legacies of Greece and Rome’ on which our civilsation rests, would be saved.

And if such a wise person is not to be found? If the university has its way?

[Ref: Martin Kemp’s article in the RA Magazine.]

The dry bones of a thousand empires

Also from the Mark Twain quote:

(Damascus) has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

When we talk of being part of a Christian tradition, we do need to widen that to encompass Judaic, Greek, Roman, Arab. Talk of a thousand empires may be a little exaggerated … but our spiritual and cultural traditions have been nurtured and fashioned over many millennia, and they’ve come down to us interpreted and recreated through (for the UK) a fifteen-hundred-year Christian history. When we try and conjure value systems without that spiritual content we are doing simply that – conjuring. Belief is one thing, faith is another, they can be disavowed, but to disavow our Christian tradition, to imagine that our values have simply an evolutionary explanation, is to deny history. I italicise simply. Scientific and cultural evolution work together. The former doesn’t have the conceptual framework remotely to encompass the latter, any more than the latter can explain the former (not that anti-evolution and intelligent design protagonists haven’t tried).

To get back to Damascus – ‘will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies’. Thing long, think in terms of centuries, even millennia. Every generation thinks it has solutions, and every generation comes up short. Put the rights of man and democracy in that context: if there is a promised land it will not come out a eureka democratic moment, it will evolve over historic time.

For Syria, as for all of us.

 

Damascus

Syria’s turmoil continues, with the numbers of refugees and violence and destruction at levels which would have seemed inconceivable three years ago. It is a reminder that the inconceivable can happen. Syria is such an extraordinary country, a crossroad and an intermingling of cultures, now as three thousand years ago. Diana Darke in her insider’s view of Syria and Damascus in particular (My House in Damascus) quotes Mark Twain (An Innocent Abroad):

She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality… Damascus has seen all that ever occurred on earth and still she lives.

She is being challenged now as never before, such is the ability of modern armament to flatten the old with same equanimity as it flattens the new. It will take an extraordinary mix of tolerance and goodwill to restore old harmonies and the old fabric. We may glibly think that democracy, western-style, is the answer. But leadership and vision must come first.

Democracy as in Algeria and Egypt and Libya can tear a country apart.

Wildwood

In a previous blog I mentioned Roger Deakin’s Wildwood…

He makes habitable the Tudor farmhouse he buys by keeping out the wind and rain but still allowing at least partial free passage for the animal and insect life who had been its previous owners. He sleeps in a caravan to listen to the rooks, he’s part of the moth-makers circle as they cluster round the bright lights that draw the moths in, he recounts the stories of willow-men and the basket-and bat-makers who work the willow.

His is a wonderful but all too little known counter-balance to all the damage we do to our world, to our climate, to our landscape. I wonder at times whether we could impose a back-to-nature requirement on all road-builders, all architects and town-planners, anyone who would spread bricks and especially concrete over the landscape without a thought for future generations who will be left with it when lifestyles and domiciles and transport have moved on. Where once we felled trees in Britain at least we now have open pasture and hedges and copses which hide and nurture their own wildlife. Where we put down concrete nothing can grow, save after decades in the slow-wearing interstices where weeds find a scraggy home.

It would be good to have a long-term damage assessment built into every new project, with a minimum threshold in terms of decay or decomposition, to remind ourselves of the duty we owe not just our children, but to many generations hence.

It seems that the Environment Agency haven’t a clue when it comes to considerations of this kind. Deakin quotes their indifference to the withy (willow) growing tradition in the Somerset Levels. Floods brought poisoned water which ruined the crop one year, and no-one from the agency visited, and now it seems they have plans to flood the withy beds permanently. When I’ve heard stories about the agency in other flood situations I’ve always put it down to shortages of staff, or local misunderstandings, but it seems that it goes deeper, to an institutional level.

On a lighter note, Deakin notes that cricket bat willow only grows really well in England, to the frustration of Australians who must import English willow wherewith to thrash, they hope, the Poms.  Louis MacNeice writes of the drunkenness of things being various. Here we have the singular, the co-incidence of place and time to play which led to a game where the spring of willow and the resilience of cork and leather make for a game perfectly matched to human strength and capabilities. A more stolid bat would propel the ball much less far, and vibrate the hand, a softer bat and the ball would die before it left the square. Without willow where would we be, without the game that’s an antidote to all the frenetic activity which characterises most popular sports. With maybe the exception of snooker, but that’s about paralysis rather than relaxation of mind. But I digress.

20:20 cricket is another game altogether, although it still requires the magic of the willow wand, which however brandished remains something it seems modern materials can’t replicate. Long may it remain so.