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“Truth is the first casualty of war,” is a well-worn but deceptive saying, pointing out that combatants in a military conflict unashamedly manipulate facts to their own advantage and the disadvantage of their enemies.
But war is also a merciless truth-teller because, though it may generate lies, it also exposes them when boasts of military success are contradicted by failure and defeat. Long-established regimes self-confidently go to war in the expectation of a quick victory but instead see their state and society buckle and break under the pressures of unrelenting warfare.
War acts as a lighthouse sending out beams which illuminate the human landscape, showing up what is solid and reliable and what is rotten and kept in place merely by inertia or the absence of stress. To cite a personal experience, I was a correspondent in Moscow in 1999, and for some years afterwards, as Vladimir Putin was establishing his power as Russian leader. I thought then he was a second-rate security chief, with no hidden depths in evidence, describing him as “a sphinx without a secret”.
As the decades went by, and he was still there in the Kremlin leading a somewhat resurgent Russia, I wondered if I had underestimated him. But then in 2022, he launched his predictably calamitous invasion of Ukraine, proving in a few weeks that he was a self-deceiving nincompoop, much as I had always suspected.
Three wars – Russia vs Ukraine, US-Israel vs Iran, Yemen vs Saudi Arabia – are now shining bright, objective light on the way the world really works in the 2020s. As of this year, they reveal a planet dominated by wars which affect everything from the price of diesel in Samoa (up 22.6 per cent per litre from 1 October) to the outcome of the Senate race in Texas, the UK Budget and the Spanish general election.
Tectonic shifts are taking place in the international order, but nobody is sure about the direction they are taking us. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gained much credit earlier this year by seeking to map out the contours of this new and frightening era.
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said, describing the gathering clouds, as the US under President Donald Trump ceases to pretend that America is a semi-benign hegemon and instead pursues its own interests unilaterally.
Carney called on middle-sized powers – such as Britain. France, Germany, Brazil, India, South Africa, Australia – to act collectively because “if we are not at the table, we are on the menu”.
But there is no sign of middle-sized powers doing anything of the sort, and they behave rather like frightened chickens caught in a thunderstorm. They are not at any negotiating table in Ukraine or Russia or the Middle East. Despite their vital economic and political interests being at risk because of the wars, they have chosen to remain marginalised spectators.
In all of the three wars, it has been the supposedly weaker side – Ukraine, Iran and Yemen – that has held its own in fighting enemies with far greater resources.
Why is this? I suspect that what Carney describes as a rupture is a confusing mix of the usual wartime chaos and unprecedented developments, notably the two presidencies of Donald Trump. These have turned the US into a sort of self-declared rogue state – kidnapping and assassinating foreign leaders, contemptuous of legality at home and abroad – whose unpredictable policies are like a pack of wild cards in the hands of a player who is a bizarre combination of Latin American dictator, American mobster and tireless entertainer. Governments all over the world privately debate how far Trump is a one-off and how far he marks a diminution or an increase in American power.
In Israel, for instance, the political elite recognise that Trump has been a wartime ally of Israel against Iran, a role that no previous American president was prepared to fill. But what if his successor decides that decoupling from Israel best serves American interests? Will Israel be able to withstand the hostility of all its neighbours in the Middle East without the backing of American power? In any case, how great is that power, as the US stalemate with Iran continues and turns into a forever war?
In a speculative, dystopian piece on Israel’s options, retired Major-General Tamir Hayman, former chief of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Intelligence Directorate and now executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies, says: “The US is a ‘declining’ power and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event.” To be fair to Hayman, he puts this forward as one interpretation of the direction that the US and Israel might take.
The world appears to be careering out of control at an ever-growing pace, propelled by forces that are both old and new. The politics of war are markedly different from the politics of peace. It may appear surprising that Iran, Ukraine and Yemen are holding their own against the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia, but it is not unprecedented.
For the smaller states this is an existential battle they cannot afford to lose. If a great power wins a war against a smaller one, it gains little credit. But if it fails to win, or does so only after vast effort, it demonstrates weakness rather than strength.
There is nothing new in this: the British Empire at its peak before the First World War was weakened by the length of time it took to subdue a few tens of thousands of lightly armed farmers on horseback in the Boer War. As sole super power, the US was damaged by simply failing to win in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – and now in Iran.
“Beware of small states,” said the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1870, arguing that they were always tougher and more dangerous nuts to crack than might appear. His warning rings even truer today than it did then, because the availability of cheap precision-guided drones and missiles has robbed great powers of their long-standing monopoly of air power.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, roadside bombs made it costly in terms of US casualties to move by road, but the US air force could strike at will without fear of the other side retaliating in kind. That advantage has gone: Arab Gulf oil producers have made desperate efforts to suppress information about the huge damage caused to their oil facilities and infrastructure by pinpoint accurate Iranian attacks on key components according to an investigation by Reuters news agency using satellite imagery confirmed by local eyewitnesses and published this week.
The Houthis in Yemen demonstrated the same capacity in the last few days by hitting King Khalid airport in Riyadh and the Saudi Aramco headquarters in Dhahran in the Eastern Province on the Gulf coast.
As big powers fail to win wars they expected to be walkovers, we are entering an era when wars never end.
Further thoughts
Viewed from the outside, Hoads Wood on the outskirts of Ashford looks like a pretty Kent woodland which is carpeted in spring with bluebells and whitewood anemones. But in the last five years this same, known for ancient oak and hornbeam, has been the site of two very different crimes.
It was here in March 2021 that Met Police officer and member of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, Wayne Couzens, dumped the body of Sarah Everard whom he had kidnapped, raped and murdered. Couzens owned a plot of land in the 200-acre wood. He is now serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
In July 2023, Hoads Wood once again became the site of a crime when professional fly-tippers dumped some 40,000 tonnes of household and industrial waste in the wood over a six-month period. In places the waste was piled four metres (13.1ft) high, submerging vegetation whose roots were poisoned by chemicals leaking out of dump. The great mound of waste has now been finally removed at a cost of £15.5m to the taxpayer, but the woodland will take decades to recover.
I have an interested in Hoad’s Wood because it is not far from where I live and I was struck by the fact that this idyllic piece of rural Kent woodland should twice have become a crime scene in a short period. Failure by state authorities was a common feature in both cases and I thought of writing a longer article about its story, but very late in the day, the Environment Agency (EA) had finally obtained court orders to completely seal off the targeted section of the wood.
In theory, fly-tipping on an industrial scale should be easy to stop by placing a few concrete obstacles or a locked gate at the access point. Large lorries carrying waste over a six-month period are highly visible and likely to be reported to the EA, the local council or the police by do walkers or by parents taking their children for a walk as well as by joggers and birdwatchers. But all in supposed authority passed the buck until it was too late in a typical example of official inertia. Excuses for this include fragmented private ownership of the wood, parts of which were owned by individuals – like Wayne Couzens.
Beneath the radar
Gulf Arab oil producers made every effort to deny the precise accuracy of Iranian drone and missile strikes and conceal the huge level of destruction to energy and infrastructural targets. From the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on 28 February, Gulf rulers clamped down ferociously on anybody filming or even talking about the damage. In cases where it was undeniable, the damage was attributed to falling debris from anti-aircraft missiles falling to the ground after successfully eliminating incoming Iranian and Houthi drones and missiles.
It is known that Iran had devastated US military bases in the Gulf, but now a Reuters investigation has revealed for the first time the pinpoint accuracy of Iranian attacks on Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE. In all these states, damage assessment has become a state secret. Embarrassed by its failure to defend its Gulf allies, the US joined in, but Reuters has carried out a meticulous investigation based primarily on satellite imagery confirmed by local eyewitnesses and technical experts. All this matters to the rest of the world because what happened to the Gulf Arab states earlier this year might well happen again, with consequent damage to the global economy.
To take just one example of the real impact of the bombardment: a main Iranian target was Fujairah port in the UAE through which oil exports flow by pipeline, avoiding the Strait of Hormuz. “The first Fujairah attack was announced on 3 March,” Reuters says. “Two days later, the flaming tanks could still be seen from space…The next attack, announced on 9 March, did more than destroy fuel. Satellite imagery showed this strike took out the first matrix manifold, a transfer system of 62 pipelines that feeds crude oil and finished petroleum products from oil terminals to shipping berths.”
The Iranian attacks on UAE infrastructure ceased in May, apparently after the UAE agreed to unlock $10bn (£7.5bn) in Iranian funds held in the UAE banking system. The importance of this is proof that the Iranians can destroy almost any targets in the Gulf and anti-aircraft defences will not be able to stop them. If full-scale war in the Gulf resumes with the US launching a bombing campaign against Iran, then the infrastructure of the rest of the Gulf will be hit once again and it will not matter how far the Strait of Hormuz is open or shut for tankers if oil production itself is halted.
Cockburn’s picks
The easy tolerance shown by obituary writers towards the recently deceased Jeffrey Archer – crime novelist, discredited MP and former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party – was pretty hard to stomach. He was not a lovable rogue but an exceptionally nasty piece of work, who received four years in prison in 2001 for perjury during a libel case in 1987.
The soppy and misleading obits did, however, make me appreciate Ian Hislop and Private Eye’s less sycophantic take on Archer.