Da Boss wrote:Before I respond - I get along grand with you Ketara and would happily buy you a pint any day of the week. But I like a challenging argument.
On that note, let me know if you're ever back in old Blighty, it would be grand to have another game with you.
To me, your first two paragraphs are framing my argument in a particular way that I didn't intend. That is probably because I did not put enough effort into framing it at first, and because I needed to clarify my own thinking on it. So I'm not blaming you, but I think we're to an extent, talking past each other.
On the internet? Surely not!
British interference in the middle east has been negative. It has contributed to the current situation. The level to which it has contributed is certainly up for debate - you feel it was extremely limited, I feel it is a little more insidious and wide ranging than that. I'm more than happy to admit that the governance of madmen like Qaddafi and Saddam were huge contributing factors, and there is a historical and cultural explanation for islamic extremism that goes well beyond "It woz the West wot done it".
If you look back, you'll note that I more or less qualify myself in that I believe our recent influence is limited. Once you roll back more than twenty years or so, I think you're entering into the realms of the historical, and trying to say, 'this part of British involvement was positive, and this part was negative' gets quite dicey. But that's possibly my training kicking in, historians (or good ones, anyway) tend to do their best to avoid putting 'positive' or 'negative' connotations around historical events, and settle on just trying to describe what we think happened.
Playing the 'what if?' history game is grand fun, but saying (for example) 'Britain shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan in the nineteenth century because it contributed to later negative events' may sound logical, but for all we know, if Britain hadn't, it could have ended up part of the Russian Empire with even more 'negative' consequences. As such, when someone says, 'Britain is responsible for the current situation in the Middle East' or even 'partially responsible', I get a bit leery because I find trying to chart Point A to Point B on the timeline is rarely so simple.
But that is irrelevant to my point. Of the countries in Europe, aside from possibly France, Britain has more to answer for in the Middle East than anyone. (Happy to be corrected on that).
See, the concept of 'to answer for' immediately gets my hackles up, because it frames things in a hostile 'assigning blame/doling out justice' sort of way.
Whether they are the prime cause or just partially to blame is broadly irrelevant. There is a humanitarian crisis.
I did say in my first response that I could understand appeals/arguments from humanity, it was just the assigning of responsibility for an entire geographical region, with millions of people and different governments, religions, ethnicities, cultures, economies etc, to a small island off the top of Europe that I bristled over.
The brunt of this crisis is being borne by nations who did little to contribute to it's genesis. The UK sits by and grumbles to itself in a "poor me" fashion, and does as little as possible to help. This is a shameful approach and does nothing to lift my opinion of the UK. If Germany leads on this and leads on so many other issues in Europe, it is little surprise that the UK may find itself marginalised despite it's economic, diplomatic and military clout.
To shrug your shoulders and say that it's okay for the UK to do as little as possible is also to avoid responsibility.
I'm of the opinion that our foreign aid programme should be diverted into a refugee resettlement programme. Let the government decide a suitable number of refugees, and hold the lottery in the American style, with language classes and housing provided upon arrival, and refugees spread out over a geographically large base so as to avoid internal tensions. Tie them to a programme granting British citizenship within twenty years, on the condition of no crimes committed, and being tied to that geographic region for a period of a decade or so. Breaching the conditions of the programme would be grounds for immediate deportation.
Either that, or we should start reconquering the provinces (only half joking here).