Rebel Without a Clue
Perhaps James Dean’s most iconic role was as the troubled teen Jim Stark in the 1955 classic ‘Rebel Without a Cause’. One of my favourite scenes in the movie is when Dean’s character confronts his mother and father after the unexpected death of a local gang leader. He’s perished in a driving competition with Dean, known as a “Chicken Run”. Dean and the gang leader (played by Corey Allen) had to race stolen cars towards a cliff edge, with the first to bail out of their respective car being labelled a “Chicken”. Unfortunately, whilst Dean manages to jump to safety, Allen’s character plunges to his death. Anxious to offload some of the emotional enormity of what’s happened, Dean returns home and tells his parents he’s going to the police. His bemused parents beg him not to get involved, to which he responds angrily: “But I AM involved, we are ALL involved…….We can’t just go on by PRETENDING that it didn’t happen!!”
For me, the head-in-the-sand stance displayed by Ann Doran and Jim Backus in that tense scene sums up the attitude of the UK government towards the war currently being waged in the Middle East. However much the public here – many with their instant and convenient lifestyles – may wish otherwise, the United Kingdom IS involved in this imbroglio whether we like it or not. Even if I extend the maximum possible latitude to the argument that Israel and the United States are the ones who initiated this conflict (a viewpoint I don’t personally subscribe to), the argument itself evaporated the moment Iranian drones attacked the RAF Akrotiri base in southern Cyprus. Akrotiri and Dhekelia aren’t just pieces of land our government rents from the Cypriots for a few million euros a year. These bases are sovereign UK territory, legitimised by treaty, and a physical manifestation we undertook as the former colonial power to defend Cyprus from foreign attack. Even when the Turkish Army invaded in 1974, the Turks deliberately avoided incursions into the sovereign bases for fear of provoking war with the UK. Fifty two years later, under the woeful leadership of Prime Minister Starmer, we stood back as the French and Greek navies deployed vessels to defend the seas around the island. Our sole seaworthy vessel, HMS Dragon, limped out of Portsmouth Harbour over a week after the attack took place, and is not expected to reach Cyprus for another few days.
How embarrassing it has been to be British during this period. We have a governing party paralysed by some obeisance to the imagined supremacy of international law, and one who is afraid to take on the Mad Mullahs of Tehran because they’re still reeling from the electoral machinations of the Mad Mullahs of south-east Manchester! Be under no illusion: Having lost the sacred Muslim vote to the economic illiterates and rabid anti-Semites of Britain’s Green Party, Labour will do practically anything to try to win them back. If that involves the sacrifice of our image on the world stage, exhaustive usage of the smokescreen of international law, and a refusal to attempt to decapitate the most malevolent government on the planet, so be it.
Do I think we should have granted the USA the right to use our bases to launch operations against the Islamic Regime in Tehran? Damn right I do! I even think we should be involved in the air strikes directly (though I am against putting British soldiers on the ground after the lessons of Iraq). This is a theocratic dictatorship of 47 years standing which has sponsored terrorism on every continent, posed a constant threat to Israel’s very existence, executed people in public for nothing other than being gay, operated scores of proxy terrorist revolutionaries in the wider region, murdered hundreds of thousands of its own citizens who dared to challenge its suffocating extremism, and is now happy to lash out at almost every one of its neighbours in an attempt to wreak maximum havoc to prevent its own extinction.
Will the inevitable rise in fuel prices, shocks to the economy, and the possible postponement of my tour of the UAE this coming summer upset me? Of course they will! I am sure other consequential factors of this war will upset many people. But I’m sorry if you’re expecting me to place those inconveniences above the need to try to cut down the Islamic Regime once and for all. Lots of folk would be happy to stick their fingers in their ears and, like Doran and Backus in 1955, pretend the constant threat posed by Iranian Regime doesn’t exist. They’d much prefer to run the risk of not upsetting the Ayatollah and his cronies if it meant they could get their fuel for 10p less per litre. I mean, who cares that there were 20 potentially lethal terror plots foiled here in Britain last year alone (https://www.mi5.gov.uk/director-general-sir-ken-mccallum-gives-threat-update) backed by Iran. Cheaper petrol is much more important, right?
Wrong!! The attempted removal of the Iranian Regime is of infinitely greater long-term benefit to both the Middle East and Western nations. Sod the niceties of so-called international law. This is a moral crusade America and the Israelis are involved in. Are they guaranteed success? We don’t know. But was Churchill guaranteed success when he said “we will fight them on the beaches”? Should the lack of certainty in June 1940 have halted his efforts to help defeat the Nazis? As for the media’s obsession about the apparent absence of a plan, I could ask what was Chamberlain’s ‘plan’ in September 1939 when he declared Britain was at war with Germany? Was it initially to expel the Nazis from Poland? Was it to expel the Nazis from Poland AND Czechoslovakia? Was it eventual regime change in Berlin? I’m sure Chamberlain himself wasn’t certain of the central mission at that point, or the guarantee of victory. But what he and Churchill DID recognise was the need to try to defeat an evil that had been placated for far too long. Trump and Netanyahu recognise that need now, as our captured Prime Minister bloviates and obfuscates in a feeble effort to sound like he has our nation’s long-term interests at heart. He doesn’t. If Jimmy Dean was a rebel without a cause, Keir Starmer is a rebel without a clue!
