Gordon Brown Will Save the World Again

By Christopher King

Redress, January 2010

Christopher King argues that rather than slavishly pimp for the US and cheer “its reflex to bomb and shoot everything in sight” in Yemen, he should instead try to win the hearts and minds of Yemen’s destitute people by helping to develop their economy and thereby give them a stake in peace.

Things surely must get better. It’s bad enough blowing up Afghans in their mud brick houses in one of the poorest countries of the world. We have now gone lower down the scale. Our illiterate Chiefs of Defence Staff who can’t read the Nuremberg Principles and our politicians who don’t want them to, are probably going to bomb what is probably the very poorest country in the world. The United States and Saudi Arabia are already doing it.

It’s an appalling thing to do, but if one doesn’t have nuclear armed submarines, intercontinental missiles, supersonic bombers and fighters, the latest tanks etc., it’s actually very effective retaliation to send a misguided, probably troubled young man with a bomb in his underwear back the other way on a commercial flight.

Both the aggression and the retaliation are horrifying but we should note that it’s not the Yemenis (or Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis or Iranians) who are occupying the US or UK and shooting and bombing our citizens.

Gordon Brown has grasped the self-publicity opportunity to call a summit to ponder our new enemy and its threat to the world as he calls it. Will compassion for these poor tribesmen and their under-nourished children move him to propose an immediate programme of agricultural aid? Perhaps he wants UNICEF to implement a crash child-health project? Will village-level technology projects be his big idea? One may hope.

Now, call me pessimistic, but I suspect that these are not what he has in mind. Unhappily, his record, like that of his predecessor, is of slavish pimping for the US and cheering its reflex to bomb and shoot everything in sight if there’s a problem. After his present wars, crashing the UK economy, pressing a trillion pounds on our greedy bankers and plunging us, our children and grandchildren into decades of debt, Mr Brown clearly needs suggestions.

Already, the direct costs of the last attacks on the Yemenis’ mud or rough stone houses have cost the Saudis and US millions of pounds. We will also take counter-measures: full-body scanners at airports, training and personnel to operate them, additional security of various sorts and probably another war. Then there’s more delay and inconvenience to travellers which will have enormous time costs for the indefinite future. Costs will be billions of pounds over the next few years. Many billions. My suggestion: “Scrap all this.”

Gordon must surely have realized by now that the bomb-everything-and everyone method of nation-building is gaining few hearts and minds. Here’s a better idea: Send the security police over to Oxfam and threaten the director with terrorist charges unless he gets together a comprehensive village-level development plan for Yemen by the time of the summit. This is a constructive use of terrorist legislation that will also keep the security police happy. Budget about a billion a year for five years. At the conference, pass the hat around. Get Oxfam and other development agencies that can actually deliver aid to buy, ship and distribute equipment, supplies and training to Yemen. Cement and window glass are useful. One can build houses with them and compared with cash bribes they are very difficult to convert to weapons. Don’t give anyone in Yemen any money – if not spent on arms it just goes into Dubai bank accounts.

I suppose that our present aid to Yemen is either cash or arms. This should also go to village and town economic and health programmes. Tell the Yemeni government that they need to get their funds by way of taxes. Send someone to explain that it’s part of democracy since they should get money from and listen to their taxpayers, not foreign governments. They won’t know that Gordon doesn’t do it himself.

Present the project to the Yemenis as a cost-saving exercise, that it’s too expensive to bomb them. In no circumstances say that it’s for humanitarian reasons because they won’t believe it, will think that they’ll be bombed imminently and will target our embassies, etc. It will work because Yemeni men will be kept busy building houses and irrigation channels etc rather than shooting each other and plotting means of sending bombs around the world. They will have something to lose, which they haven’t at the moment and their wives will have something to complain about if they don’t fix the house.

Oh yes! No more of this Al-Qaeda nonsense either. If the Americans don’t like the plan, Gordon can save face by blaming his minister father and Christian upbringing.

This is obviously the best means of aggressively neutralizing the Yemenis, as I think the expression goes. Think about it. For the cost of an air ticket and using a misguided young man with a handful of explosive that the US gave to Iranian dissidents, the Yemenis have instantly involved Europe and the US in spending billions of pounds, dollars or euros that we can’t afford because of Gordon’s and his US friends’ economic incompetence and banking scams. It’s a lost cause.

It could be arranged that President Obama’s friends’ companies supply the equipment to be sent to the Yemenis which lets them still feel clever about profiteering and that they’re getting their money’s worth from their political donations. When it’s seen to work, or even if it doesn’t, General McChrystal can plagiarize the plan and and roll it out in Afghanistan as his next strategy. It has a better chance of getting that gas pipeline built than the present one.

Nor need the CIA worry about job cuts. They could teach American accented English and build their databases by getting their students to inform on each other, their friends and families. It’s a more credible cover story than pretending to be a development agency while sitting behind barbed wire and blast barriers, organizing drone attacks on Pakistani villages. Much more useful too.

Speaking of the CIA in Afghanistan, the Zionist Murdoch’s London Times describes one of the eight agents who ran the drone programme and were killed in a suicide bomb attack as “a gentle man”. Another was a “middle-aged mother of three”. Their families will surely feel their loss as much as Iraqi or Afghan families do from losing the 700 people that these agents killed with drone attacks last year. And there we have the contradiction that runs through all this conflict. Who truly were this gentle man and middle-aged mother of three, who were part of a secret organization that specializes in murder and torture, part of an invasion force in a foreign country, carrying out assassinations and on the word of informers, killing men, women and children? It is the contradiction of ordinary, likeable people who love their families carrying out appalling mass murder beyond inhumanity, that they do not recognize for what it is.

That is the image that Gordon should bear in mind during his summit. He should remember what his father told him: Love your enemies. Gordon thinks that he knows better than his father but he doesn’t and has done better than his father, but he hasn’t.
Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK.