PETER HITCHENS: Our deadbeat leaders are marching us towards chaos

Do you have confidence in our leaders on tax, health, policing, farming, immigration, sleaze, housing, education or transport? Every single one a bungle, run by deadbeats where they generally achieve the opposite of what they promise. So why trust them on war in Ukraine?

Yet here we go again, down the road to chaos. The weaker we get, the louder we shout. How the rest of the world must snigger at our great power posturing in Ukraine last week. They will have laughed especially at how pathetically and quickly we aped the Americans as they went directly into war with Moscow, authorising US Service personnel to guide ATACMS weapons to targets in Russia.

As soon as Washington announced this dubious plan, London did the same with our Storm Shadow rockets. These cannot be launched without the direct involvement of British military know-how and American guidance systems.

But as we officially became direct combatants in the Russia-Ukraine war for the first time, our government announced yet more cuts in our pitifully weak Armed Forces. Off to the scrapyard went two assault ships, two tankers, one frigate and a variety of helicopters and drones. The believable excuse for this is that the kit is clapped-out.

Alas, if all the clapped-out ships, aircraft and tanks in our arsenal were scrapped, there’d be little left. Our submarines mostly cannot move. Our surface ships are little better. The two giant targets called ‘aircraft carriers’, whose military purpose is impossible to discover, conk out at frequent intervals. If anyone did attack this country, they would find it as ill-prepared as it has been at any time since the days of Ethelred the Unready.

The much-reviled Neville Chamberlain, during the 1930s, ordered the design and building of the Spitfire fighter, developed radar and significantly strengthened the Royal Navy. That is how we survived in 1940. The politicians who these days sneer at Chamberlain as a dithering weakling have no such record of preparation. Set beside them he is a strong, wise leader.

Probably the only significant nation whose conventional military is more useless than ours is Russia, with its army of released convicts and ancient howitzers, and its lone aircraft carrier, which appears to be fuelled by cooking oil and is so prone to breakdown that it dare not go to sea without a tug to take it in tow.

The Russians, in 1,000 days of fighting, have not managed to capture the city of Kharkov, 19 miles from their border. You think this lot are going to march to Berlin and on to Calais? Not really. I mention these things because so much pure tripe is ceaselessly extruded by warmongering pundits.

Now let us move on to the question of how much we want to turn the European continent into a war zone. For this is the key issue of policy, and our governing, media and thinking classes are busily failing it.

For 23 years, from 1991 to 2014, Ukraine was a reasonably democratic, partially free and more or less contented country. But in 2008, this sensible arrangement was doomed. That was when the warmonger President George W. Bush – fresh from wrecking the entire Middle East with his Iraq invasion – declared that he wanted Ukraine to join Nato.

His then ambassador in Moscow, William Burns (now head of the CIA) warned: ‘Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.’ That is ambassador-speak for ‘Don’t do this, Mr President!’

His point was crucial. This wasn’t just Putin. It was all the nice, liberal, democratic Russians who we claimed we liked before Putin came to power.

Put very simply, normal Russians regarded a Nato Ukraine as we would see a Chinese military and naval presence in Dublin, or as the Americans would view – oh, let’s think of an equally far-fetched parallel – a Russian nuclear missile base in Cuba. Yet Bush did not give up, and nor did his successors. Finally, in November 2013, Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, refused (despite huge Western pressure) to go any further with plans to link Ukraine with the EU, a first step towards Nato.

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Then, in February 2014, Yanukovych was driven from power by a violent mob, which, among other unlovable things, killed several police officers. The USA and Britain quickly condoned this lawless putsch, and recognised the resulting government – so showing that their supposed commitment to law and democracy is so much lavatory paper.

These are all facts. You’d strive to learn them from the BBC, but it was this process that brought about war in Ukraine.

Everything else, horrible as it might be, followed after. I do not defend it. I condemn it, especially the stupid and barbaric Russian invasion of 2022. But you cannot ignore its causes, or the way that Washington repeatedly ignored warnings of what might go wrong.

I am furious that we, who have no possible interest in this conflict, have been dragged into it.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that lobbing British-owned rockets into Russia will make us safer. The opposite is almost certainly true.

Our leaders plainly have no genuine concern for our national safety, or they would not have let our actual defences rot and rust as they have. Oh, how we need a proper patriotic opposition.

What about that ban on landmines?

Long years ago I made myself even more unpopular than usual by arguing the case for landmines.

Of course, like all munitions, they do horrible things. But they were useful, I pointed out, for small countries defending themselves against land attacks by bigger neighbours.

My view was squashed flat by the late sainted Princess Diana, shown here in a famous portrait as she walked through a partly cleared minefield in Angola in 1997. Soon afterwards, she called for an end to ‘the plague on Earth caused by landmines’. Sir Anthony Blair then agreed to the Ottawa Treaty, which bans them (easy if you’re surrounded by deep water). But – as I could have told you – the USA, China and Russia never signed it. The interesting bit is this: now the USA is supplying landmines (bad) to Ukraine (good), fickle public opinion has forgotten its former hostility to these weapons.