UK war on ISIL: Dragged into a war by clowns who can't even run a railway

Wars cause far more atrocities than they prevent. In fact, wars make atrocities normal and easy. If you don't like atrocities, don't start wars. It is a simple rule, and not hard to follow.

The only mercy in war, as all soldiers know, is a swift victory by one side or the other. Yet our subservient, feeble Parliament on Friday obediently shut its eyes tight and launched itself yet again off the cliff of war. It did so even though - in a brief moment of truth - the Prime Minister admitted that such a war will be a very long one, and has no visible end.

The arguments used in favour of this decision - in a mostly unpacked House of Commons - were pathetic beyond belief. Most of them sounded as if their users had got them out of a cornflakes packet, or been given them by Downing Street, which is much the same.

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Those who favour this action claim to care about massacres and persecution. But in fact they want to be seen to care, writes Hitchens

Those who favour this action claim to care about massacres and persecution. But in fact they want to be seen to care, writes Hitchens

Wild and unverifiable claims were made that Islamic State plans attacks on us here in our islands. If so, such attacks are far more likely now than they were before we decided to bomb them. So, if your main worry is such attacks, you should be against British involvement.

The same cheap and alarmist argument was made year after year to justify what everyone now knows was our futile and costly presence in Afghanistan. Why should the Afghans need to come here to kill British people when we sent our best to Helmand, to be blown up and shot for reasons that have never been explained?

Beyond that, it was all fake compassion. Those who favour this action claim to care about massacres and persecution. But in fact they want to be seen to care. Bombs won't save anyone. Weeks of bombing have already failed to tip the balance in Iraq, whose useless, demoralised army continues to run away.

A year ago, we were on the brink of aiding the people we now want to bomb, and busily encouraging the groups which have now become Islamic State. Now they are our hated foes. Which side are we actually on? Do we know? Do we have any idea what we are doing?

The answer is that we don't. That is why, in a scandal so vast it is hardly ever mentioned, the Chilcot report on the 2003 Iraq War has still not been published. Who can doubt that it has been suppressed because it reveals that our Government is dim and ill-informed?

As this country now has hardly any soldiers, warships, military aircraft or bombs, Friday's warmongers resorted to the only weapon they have in plentiful supply - adjectives ('vicious, barbaric', etc etc). Well, I have better adjectives. Those who presume to rule us are ignorant and incompetent and learn nothing from their own mistakes. How dare these people, who can barely manage to keep their own country in one piece, presume to correct the woes of the world?

Before they're allowed to play out their bathtub bombing fantasies, oughtn't they to be asked to show they can manage such dull things as schools (no discipline), border control (vanished), crime (so out of control that the truth has to be hidden), transport (need I say?) and hospitals (hopelessly overloaded and increasingly dangerous)?

None of them will now even mention their crass intervention in Libya, which turned that country into a swamp of misery and unleashed upon Europe an uncontrollable wave of desperate economic migrants who are now arriving in Southern England in shockingly large numbers.

We have for years happily done business with Saudi Arabia, often sending our Royal family there. It is hard to see why we should now be so worried about the establishment of another fiercely intolerant Sunni Muslim oil state, repressive, horrible to women and given to cutting people's heads off in public. Since we proudly tout our 1998 surrender to the IRA as a wonderful and praiseworthy peace deal, it is hard to see why we are now so hoity-toity about doing business with terror, or paying ransom.

We gave the whole of Northern Ireland to the IRA, to ransom the City of London and to protect our frightened political class from bombs. Why can we not pay (as other NATO members do) to release innocent hostages? We conceded the principle of ransom years ago. Talk about swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat.

How is it that we have allowed our country to be governed by people so ignorant of history and geography, so unable to learn from their mistakes and so immune to facts and logic?

Can we do anything about it? I fear not.

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Wordsmith: Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel

Mantel wouldn't dare kill off a Lefty

Liberal Britain rallied round the fashionable author Hilary Mantel, left, after she wrote a (rather dull) short story about an IRA man murdering Margaret Thatcher, and a middle-class person not minding.

Those who object are supposedly missing the point. It's all in the cause of art, see? But I don't think the reaction would have been the same if Ms Mantel had written a similar tale about an Iranian hitman murdering leftist literary lion Salman Rushdie.

Stephen Fry, BBC favourite and darling of the new Establishment, noisily confesses in a rather sad and attention-seeking new book to possession and use of cocaine in Buckingham Palace.

The official penalty for this offence is seven years in jail and an unlimited fine. Could there be better proof that the elite know perfectly well that the laws against drug possession haven't been enforced for years, and exist only on paper?

Mr Fry, who last week called me a 'slug', seems to think that I need to be instructed to criticise him. He is mistaken. I do it for my own pleasure, and because it is necessary.

I do pay buskers - but only to shut up

Amplified buskers have managed to drown out the timeless beauty of Evensong at Bath Abbey, a neat symbol of our corrupted, blaring excuse for a culture. If a street musician needs an amplifier, he's no good anyway.

But busking has always been a form of blackmail, under which we pay in the hope they'll go away. The best busker I ever met came into my carriage on the London Tube with his guitar and said: 'If you give me some money, I won't even start.' Eager to be spared another rendition of Streets of London, almost everyone paid up. Perhaps the congregation of Bath Abbey should think along these lines.

EU rules allow a convicted murderer from Latvia to breeze in and out of this country unhindered, yet the European Arrest Warrant cannot be used to detain this person, a suspect in an alleged murder. Please tell me. How do we benefit from belonging to the EU?