It seems only yesterday (actually two weeks ago) that we were writing of the duty of British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to supply a "continuous stream of headlines" justifying our involvement in these unwinnable wars, while a couple of months ago we noted the tendency for others to see us as "dreaming of the lost grandeur of empire". In the last few days it was as if all the symptoms of our national self-deception condensed into one image, that of Harry Windsor as soldier prince.
Everything was thrown indiscriminately into this last hurrah for national greatness: the young avatar of Henry V crying "God for England, Harry and St George", trumping Laurence Olivier with his royal blood and actual presence. Helmand was Agincourt and the Taliban were somehow identified with the eternally wicked French, who continue to this day to thwart our aspirations in Europe. Not only that, the modern Harry is the son of the People's Princess, and like her apparently of the people with his accurate televised portrayal of that other Shakespearean stereotype, the soldier "full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard". What brought this whole media spectacular to life was of course the genuine courage he showed, so allowing him unwittingly to feature as the signifier of an immense falsehood.
What are the realities wished away by this piece of military mise en scรจne? Apart from the dying of the light of western internationalism, the economic dimension becomes clearer by the week. The fact is that the financial burden of the wars in which we are engaged is radically tipping the international balance against the US and its major allies. We have referred before to the march of the sovereign wealth funds accumulated by oil-rich states and dynamic manufacturing powers like China and South Korea, already valued at $2.2 trillion and projected to reach $13.4 trillion by 2010 (A new (economic) world order?, 24th December; Guardian, 1st March). Along with their acquisition of assets in western economies brought low by unsustainable credit will eventually come a power that will one day be wielded.
Meanwhile Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes* have been doing the accounts of the Iraq war, and conclude it will cost a deeply indebted US at least $3 trillion, with similar bills falling on its allies and through rising oil prices (partly due to the war) on developing countries. So much has been borrowed (Bush cut taxes at the same time as invading Iraq) that they might be called the hire purchase wars, with the repayments falling on future generations. Here the government's failure to meet its child poverty reduction targets further illustrates the distortion of priorities.
One of the ironies of our national fantasy is that whatever Henry V's victories at Harfleur and Agincourt, they were part of a doomed campaign to re-establish English dominance in France and more widely on the continent. Though in the mythical history evoked by images like Harry in Helmand such realities are rigorously suppressed, defeat in the Hundred Years' War led to a marginalization in Europe from which Britain still suffers. Are we about to repeat the mistake on a worldwide scale?
*The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Allen Lane 2008
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