I’m listening to all the spin coming from this year’s NATO Summit.
The media are still sniping away at Trump’s comments with reference to the US attack on the three major targets in Iran.
The key soundbites coming from heads of state may well be almost in unison. However, I know from recent history that it’s never the case.
Take NATO in Afghanistan for example.
I was lucky enough to be in a position as the security adviser to small media teams who were interviewing visiting NATO chiefs to the in country NATO Generals, almost all American. That would allow me to feed in to the media, pertinent questions of the day to put to those individuals (it would be the same to key Ambassadors to Afghanistan too).
One such question, as an example of where NATO really was back then, was key: “Do you have all your chess pieces on the board to move around as you need to?”
I would be there to see the answers coming for myself, as the correspondent would put it to the visiting diplomat, General or Ambassador on at least 5 occasions over the years.
“Yes” would be the answer back, usually followed by…nothing!
I knew that the answer was untrue.
Why?
Because certain countries, for domestic politics back home, would NOT allow their troops to cover “hard areas” such as Kandahar, Helmand, and certain Eastern Provinces. That would be left mainly to the USA, UK, Canada, and a small handful of other countries’ troops.
That alone was an important indication that, despite the spin, the reality on the ground was quite different.
As for the UK, with the PM at the summit announcing the purchase of 12 F35A fighter jets that will be able to carry US nuclear bombs.
In my view, with a broken NHS, foreign ownership of our utilities, and thousands of young foreign undocumented men of fighting age running around our streets having arrived on our shores unopposed, these are today’s priorities…cleaning up our internal domestic mess, before nuclear and other adventures abroad in order to appease the US President, and pretend that we are still relevent sitting at the top table of Western superpowers.
Instead of the waste in blood and treasure of US corporate-backed adventurism in the Greater Middle East over the last 20 odd years, the UK Government and the UK armed forces heads should have been looking at putting the former right domestically before announcing today’s intentions to raise defence and security spending to 5% of GDP, while knowing all along that there is no money to achieve that.
Clean up the mess inside of our borders, before spending a penny outside of our borders…no matter who the government is trying to impress, as they are NOT impressing me.
Bob Shepherd 