Commentary: Ron Lipton – Missing in Action

The restoration of Ron Lipton’s referee’s licence just over a year ago by the New York State Athletic Commission, was from the perspective of many committed boxing fans, I think, acknowledged more with an overwhelming feeling of relief and less with a sense of triumph.

Here, after all, is a man who had officiated at the highest levels of the sport in the 1990s but whose licence, revoked initially on the basis of an incident in which he was acting in self-defence, had became embroiled in a protracted effort to secure registration in a toxin-permeated atmosphere of what appeared to be an interminable series of obfuscations and needless and heavy-handed bias.

Still, with well over a decade of his refereeing career frozen and never to be returned, it was in something of a celebratory mood that in May earlier this year, a party of upwards of 70 persons consisting of his family, friends, acquaintances and students from New York City’s Marist College in Poughkeepsie came out to see Lipton referee a preliminary bout on a bill headlined by Patrick Hyland, an up and coming super featherweight.

Some may have considered it to be something of a humiliation, or if that is too strong a word, something of a ‘comedown’, to be refereeing on a prelim bout before a hometown audience. But not Lipton.

How would one know this? Anyone looking on as a member of the audience or tuned into the live Internet stream would have noticed Lipton’s figure, situated just outside the spotlights which were strategically shone onto the squared ring, in the partially-darkened vicinity of the ring; his silhouette conveying an erect and focussed posture.

They would have then observed him proceed to embark on a gentle but precisely executed set of stretching exercises, and would have noted him purposefully walking around the ring prior to the entrances of the combatants of the bout to which he had been designated to officiate.

This is Lipton before any bout he officiates. It matters not whether he is about to officiate a twelve-round world championship bout before a capacity crowd of frenzied Irishmen in the Green Glens Arena in County Cork or in a six-round preliminary bout in a modest promotion in New York State; Lipton is the same model professional exhibiting the same high level of commitment and diligence before, during and after the fight that he is overseeing.

This will not come as a surprise to those who have known him in his capacity as a trainer, a college instructor, an award-winning choreographer and as an officer in law enforcement.

To know Lipton is to recognise in both his background and persona a dyed-in-the-wool native of New York City. What with underpinnings as a police official, a three-time boxing champion in the amateur ranks (albeit achieved in neighbouring New Jersey) alongside his Jewish-Italian heritage, he is a definition of the essence of what could be defined as ‘traditional’ New York.

And with his ambiance as a tough and versatile, life-long dweller and operator within the hyper-competitive jungle of America’s foremost conurbation, there resides in his cool, articulate demeanour something of the unquenchable spirit referred to by the character portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca who matter-of-a-factly cautions the Nazi figure played by Conrad Veidt about the practicability of invading certain neighbourhoods in New York.

For most of his life, Lipton has lived and breathed boxing. Yet, one year on after the re-issuance of his licence, the May fight is the only one he has participated in despite a number of high profile promotions having taken place. The biting sense of discrepancy is not displaced even if one allows for an ostensibly not unreasonable strategy of easing him back into his duties after his rather lengthy ‘lay off.’ The fact is that Lipton does not appear to have been used as often as he could and should be utilised particularly given his vast experience.

What is behind this seeming policy of exclusion if no longer outright ostracism? During his enforced absence, Lipton was outspoken in his criticism of certain figures in the boxing industry and specifically was unrelenting in his denunciations of what he perceived to be the woeful standards of refereeing.

The latter was not particularly controversial given the widespread criticisms of certain referees voiced by fans on the pages of boxing magazines and Internet sites. Most notorious was the condemnation and revulsion felt by many at the handling of a fight involving Beethoven Scotland who later died from brain injuries. This formed the centre point of an article by the late Jack Newfield in the November edition of The Nation in 2001.

While Lipton lessened the tone of the criticisms he had voiced about certain figures, he remained uncompromising in his appraisals of refereeing competence. His outspokenness was due not only to the injustice meted to him but also because many aficionados of the sport sought his opinions in the aftermath of every major match on the cyberboxingzone website where he has served as a popular and respected resident expert for over a decade.

Since his formal re-instatement among the fraternity of New York referees, he has kept silent on performance as he is bound by a code of conduct. But the developments over the past year appear not to have solved the issues at the heart of his original blackballing.

If the often self-touted cultural trait of British ‘fair play’ is not a phrase commonly used across the Atlantic, the Americans nonetheless frequently assert the pre-eminence of justice as an essential cog in the conduct of the affairs of their society.  Openness and transparency are the highly valued corresponding values in an avowedly competitive culture shorn of the stereotypically tradition bound methods practised in the so-called ‘Old World.’

But in the culture of New York, the LaGuardian values of meritocracy have for long vied with those of Tammany Hall-like patronage and deeply embedded traditions of intrigue and the closed-door dealings of cabals.

From this writer’s outsider’s vantage point, it is almost inconceivable to think of the son-of-the-soil Lipton being the victim of an ethnic-based prejudice, although he is surely one of a few Jewish referees who have operated at top level boxing in recent times. The same applies even taking into consideration the changes in demography and the increased and influential role of African-Americans and Latinos in boxing administration since the 1970s. Those familiar with the Lipton story would be aware of his championing the cause of African-Americans and other minorities which was undertaken at great personal cost while he was in law enforcement.

The suspicion is that there are issues at play which may be rooted in party political allegiances or are predicated on persons bearing a particularly severe form of personal animus.

Meanwhile, as the sands of time ebb away ever slowly but surely, the Jeffersonian quote about justice not sleeping forever must continually plague the mind of Ron Lipton and, indeed, any reasonable and objective person who loves and cares for the sport of boxing.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2012)

Ron Lipton is featured in IMPACT: Jewish Boxers in America a new documentary airing on Cablevision and The Jewish Channel.

Adeyinka Makinde is the author of DICK TIGER: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal and JERSEY BOY: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula.
Website: http://adeyinkamakinde.homestead.com/index.html

Book Review of Chinua Achebe’s THERE WAS A COUNTRY: A Personal History of Biafra

The importance of the pen, the brush and the voice of the artist as a social critic and as an interpretive lens to focus on the intricacies as well as the banalities of inter-human conflict may or may not carry less weight than they did in distant and not so distant past.

This of course is a question of perspective; but even in the age of the saturation coverage of wars and insurrections by the apparatus of the mass media, the nuanced touches provided by the evocative poet and the erudite writer can give new dimensions of insight into the background, the evolution and the effects of the wars waged by mankind.

Certainly those artists whose works have profoundly captured the imagination and which have been indelibly marked in human memory thus becoming part of the general narrative of historical consciousness have consistently spoken of the inherent baseness of wars: its infliction of mass suffering and its capacity for unleashing the demonic qualities that lie dormant in men.

The destructiveness inherent in war; the anti-thesis of the creative impulse of the artist has frequently cast the artist as being anti-war. But while Pablo Picasso’s monumental Guernica, the depiction of a Nazi air raid on a Basque city during the Spanish Civil War, projects the pacifist’s angst at the evident traumas induced on a wretched and defenceless civilian populace, the role of many an artist has not been confined to one of conscientious neutrality. There are those who have used their talents to extol the virtues of patriotism and the valour inherent in sacrificing self in the cause of the nation. There are those who have taken unambiguous stances for both belligerence and for resistance.

The Nigerian Civil War fought between 1967 and 1970 was a war which engaged a number of figures drawn from the nation’s cultural life. The dramatist and later Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, made efforts geared towards creating what he termed a ‘third force’ for compromise as the fractured nation hurtled inexorably towards a military showdown. He was jailed for his troubles by the military regime of General Yakubu Gowon.

Another figure, one not widely known outside of literary circles, but whose status has grown in succeeding decades, the poet Christopher Okigbo, was not content to remain in civilian life and joined a regiment of the secessionist army of Biafra. He met his death at the age of 37; an ending which inspired the Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui to indict Okigbo for “wasting his talent on a conflict of disputable merit” in his work The Trial of Christopher Okigbo. “No great artist,” he argued, “has a right to carry patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential.”

For Chinua Achebe, author of the seminal work Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian Civil War was one in which he had no choice but to involve himself. As he explains in his book There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, the integration of art with the community in traditional African society formed the basis of his war time ambassadorial role in promoting an international awareness of the plight of the short-lived Biafran state which was composed in the main of people of his Igbo ethnicity; a people who had endured a series of pogroms in the lead up to the war.

Achebe was in the vanguard of those artists who although initially absorbed with writing about the effects of colonial society on the African psyche would later become pre-occupied with the events in post-colonial Nigeria, events which took on increasingly dysfunctional turns.

Indeed his fourth novel, the unerringly prescient A Man of the People, ends with a military coup, an event which for the first time took place in Nigeria at the time of the book’s publication and which served as a trigger that would lead to a concatenation of violence: communal massacres, a second army mutiny and finally an armed conflict replete with the brutal instruments and cynical policies of warfare.

It is a war which was widely covered by Western correspondents and produced books by the likes of John De St. Jorre and Frederick Forsyth, who in contrast to De St. Jorre’s attempts at an even-handed approach was an unabashed polemicist for the Biafran cause.

The writers Arthur Nwankwo and Samuel Ifejika also contributed an important book during the war, and later in the re-united Nigeria, as taboos associated with dredging up the past began to relax, a plethora of books authored by former stalwarts of the Biafran military machinery created an industry of memoirs.

Younger generations of Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have used the war as a backdrop to their work. Achebe for his part although far from reticent about the ills which continue to plague Nigeria confined expressions of his war time experiences to poetry writings; twelve of which are interspersed at intervals in this his long awaited memoir of his wartime experiences.

The war of course remains a sensitive issue in Nigeria for a great many reasons; the narrative remains a contested one, but in the minds and the hearts of many Igbos who have for long claimed to be marginalised from the centres of power and influence, it signified more than physical and material defeat: It was a wholesale destruction of the spirit; of the post-Independence-era zeitgeist of optimism and aspiration in a society still operating with some semblance of meritocratic values. Defeat represented the extirpation of all that they considered to be morally right and just.

Achebe’s book works around this central thesis: The Igbos were the willing acquirers of Western culture and that the synthesis with their pre-existing cultural mores of what he considers to be their ‘individualism’, democratic ethos and competitive spirit enabled them to supersede other ethnic groups in the British created colonial order. This led to tensions and their subsequent removal from positions of leadership by forcible means which included a strategy of ethnic cleansing.

For Achebe, the importance of the civil war had profound consequences which went further than the territorial borders of Nigeria. It was he argues “a cataclysmic event which changed the course of Africa.”

In his typically direct, uncluttered style Achebe weaves a compelling literary reportage of roots which were embedded in an ancient society existing within a colonially imposed order and how that cultural dialectic shaped him and the wider destiny of his people within the multi-cultural potpourri of the conglomerate state of Nigeria.

The dramatis personae of the era, their backgrounds their motivations and his critique of their respective roles at this most critical of periods are laid out: The rival colonels Yakubu Gowon and Odumegwu-Ojukwu; the leader of the Yorubas, Obafemi Awolowo, as well as key military and political figures on the Nigerian and the Biafran sides.

Achebe also considers the role of the wider world in a conflict which in his view was influenced foremost by the necessities of realpolitik  and not by the objective application of moral standards.

But for all the moral weight behind it and sympathy that the plight of the Igbos engendered, one of the key criticisms of the Biafran enterprise was that its leaders did not provide a clear and distinct idea platform to serve as a template for the rest of Nigeria and the African continent other than one which was dominated by a tribal group seeking self-determination.

The Nigerian Civil War has been typically viewed as one permeated by the ultimate reality of naked tribal interests in conflict and not as a battle of ideas. Achebe attempts to redress this by addressing the motivation behind the Ahiarra Declaration of 1969 which he describes as an attempt aimed at expressing the “intellectual foundation” of the new nation of Biafra.

The effect of the declaration on world opinion at the time was limited and in certain quarters, it was derided as an ill-sorted hodge-podge of ideas and intentions. But the task of evolving a fundamental core of ideas and precepts aimed at transforming an ex-colonial, multi-clan group into a self-constructed modern nation deserves the sort of considered attention Achebe’s book is not able to fully explore.

Granted, Achebe’s explorations do take account some of the philosophical and cosmological constructs of the pre-colonial Igbo and the effect these have had on the Igbo psyche in the modern world. But a consideration of the efficacy of Igbo nationalism and the collective identity of the people must acknowledge to a greater degree the historical record.

From the Igbo-Biafran perspective there have been few if any truly introspective works which have considered the viability of a Biafran state from the point of view of the historical reality that there was never a united Igbo nation which operated as a cohesive national entity. A study of the period before colonial conquest reveals not a united kingdom of Biafra but an aggregate of disparate villages and hamlets whose communities became steeped in the conduct of the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The argument that by the dawn of the colonial era, the Igbos had not evolved to a feudal level of social organisation and developed attendant indigenous institutions of governance, akin to say to that of the neighbouring Edo people, may of course be met with a riposte that the social organisation practised by many Igbo communities manifested a form of ‘republicanism’ and ‘individualism.’

But whatever the interpretation given to the underlying nature of the relative sophistication of these descriptions, the reality was that tensions arose during the civil war between Igbo-Biafrans based on their places of origin as indeed they did with the non-Igbo minorities within the borders of the former Nigerian Eastern Region without whose acquiescence the Biafran project was doomed to fail.

The unity of the Igbos based on their collective fortune as a successful people in the post-colonial order as well as their ill-fortune through the trauma of pogroms and abuse, understandably provided the strong, emotionally grounded impetus to create a separate nation. Nationalism, a concept that is inherently grounded in the practice of self-invention, can be a force for self-transformation. But while emotion may serve as an excellent form of petrol, it is, in the final analysis, a poor engine.

That said, Achebe has produced an extremely readable personal history in which he provides a masterful series of vignettes that greatly sensitize the reader to the struggles, the triumphs and the tragedy of the artist and his people during an era of rapid change and great turbulence.   

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2012)

Adeyinka Makinde is the author DICK TIGER: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal, the story of a Nigerian world champion boxer of Igbo ethnicity who became embroiled in the Biafran War. His latest book is JERSEY BOY: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula. 
Website: http://adeyinkamakinde.homestead.com/index.html

Dick Tiger versus Gene Fullmer 50th Anniversary

It is 50 years today since Dick Tiger won the world middleweight title from Fullmer at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. 

The hectic and fascinating backdrop to the staging of this bout is recounted in my book DICK TIGER: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal when meteorological conditions and a World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees postponed the date twice. 

But the ultimate postponement hovered eerily as the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to plunge the USA and the USSR into a thermonuclear exchange.

Annual Boxing Memorabilia Fayre (2012)

Another year; some more spieling. Had a great time particularly meeting former British & Commonwealth middleweight champion and world title contender, Herol Graham who graciously signed a copy of his autobiography for me.

 My stall.

 Chas Taylor introduces Herol 'Bomber' Graham.

 Herol acknowledges the audience's applause.

 Signing a copy of his autobiography 'BOMBER: Behind The Laughter'.

Posing with Herol and my signed copy.

 Mo Hussain, the former Commonwealth lightweight champion is introduced.

 A former resident of Hudson County displays his copy of JERSEY BOY: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula.

 Posing with signed copies of my biographies on Dick Tiger and Frankie DePaula.

 'DA ROCK'

 Portraits of two Joes: Joe Louis and Smokin' Joe Frazier.

Part of Chas' main stand with a great deal of stuff on Muhammad Ali including vintage but pristine cover editions of LIFE and even Muhammad Ali shoe polish.

Stand dedicated to Nipper Pat Daly, a Welsh-born fighter professionally active in the 1920s and 1930s.

 One of Chas Taylor's stands.

A closer look...

With Kymberley Taylor (right) and her mother.

JERSEY BOY: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula (2nd Impression)

HardCover: ISBN 978-1450-20639-6 ($30.95)

SoftCover: ISBN 978-1450-20637-2 ($20.95)

Genre: True Crime / Boxing

Publisher: iUniverse

Pages: 274

More than just a book about boxing, Ade Makinde's JERSEY BOY: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula, is a portrait of the social and cultural mores of the tough working class, Catholic-dominant environs of 1960s Jersey City where the Mafia was an all pervading presence.

The story of the hard-punching, charismatic but flawed Frankie DePaula encapsulates the romantic toughness as well as the destructive underbelly of the first city of 'The Garden State.'

THE STORY

Hailing from the tough Westside section of Jersey City, Frankie DePaula appeared to be a phenomenon in the making when he stopped all of his opponents’ en route to claiming a Golden Gloves title in 1962. That Frankie failed to establish a boxing legacy befitting of one imbued with his natural physical endowments and punching talent is one of the largely unsung tragedies of the fight game. Here for the first time, Adeyinka Makinde, author of the definitive biography of boxing immortal Dick Tiger, tells the remarkable story of a man seemingly possessed of a force of nature; a charismatic pied piper of Jersey City who sold out arenas and inspired such devotion from fans that some were willing to bet their houses on him being victorious. Frank Sinatra sat ringside at several of his bouts, while Frankie Valli and Joe Namath were close friends. But Frankie was also a man whose character flaws would lead him to an early grave. The book explores the controversial aspects of his life and career including: . The rumors that his 1969 fight with Bob Foster for the world’s light heavyweight championship was fixed . His involvement in a notorious $80,000 heist of electrolytic copper . The precipitous death of his first manager, Pat Amato, whose role was inherited by Mob front man Gary Garafola . His dalliance with the married step-daughter of a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family . Rumors that he was compromised as an informant for law enforcement agencies . His shooting in an alley, his subsequent disintegration and eventual demise in a charity ward of the Jersey City Medical Center Although Frankie appeared to some to be a true life exemplar of a character from ‘Dead End’; a wild and unreconstructed deviant headed for disaster, his life is set against the backdrop of the often times dysfunctional environs of Jersey City, for long the seat of power of an administration dominated for decades by Mayoral potentate Frank Hague and maligned by the corruption of local politicians and the increasing influence of organized crime. Recounted are Frankie’s exciting tussles with the likes of Charlie ‘The Devil’ Green, Jimmy McDermott and Dick Tiger. Here too are reminiscences of Frankie’s explosive power as a street fighter and the fear he inspired as a Mob collector. Although prone to being brutish, Frankie could also be big of heart. And while his many sins rendered him as heartless, he was capable of feats of kindness. Tough, but ultimately weak-minded; Frankie’s tale is a cautionary one: a sobering rendition of one man’s capacity for self-destruction.

THE AUTHOR

Adeyinka Makinde is Nigerian by birth and based in England. He trained as a barrister and is a lecturer in law. He wrote the well-reviewed biography, Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal, which was published in 2005.

PRAISE FOR JERSEY BOY: THE LIFE AND MOB SLAYING OF FRANKIE DEPAULA

"The author tells it like it was...Anyone who was around boxing in those days or has any knowledge of what the sport was like in the 1960s and early 1970s should read this book. It's worth every penny." ---J. Russell Peltz, IBHOF inductee and noted Boxing Historian & Archivist "A brilliant biography...Makinde brings it all to life through meticulous research, painstaking chapter notes and a smooth, lyrical writing style." ---Murray Greig, The Edmonton Sun "It's a cracking read" ---Steve Bunce, BBC Radio London Boxing Hour Show "Makinde writes in elegant yet precise prose" ---eastsideboxing.com "A book worthy of a Hollywood encore" ---maxboxing.com

CONTACT

For further information, interviews, movie rights, or  review copies contact: Website: http://adeyinkamakinde.homestead.com/ e-mail: thelawacademy@aol.com

Rejoinder to a comment on my recent commentary: Tony Blair - War Crimes Suspect

Glad you enjoyed the column Michael.

I take all your points on board although I do disagree with a number of your interpretations.

The article wasn’t comparing the US political system to that operated by the Hitler regime.

It was laying out the cold facts which if linked to the relevant legal principles means that anyone ranging from the leader of a democratically elected nation to those at the helm of a totalitarian state can be judged by the same standard.

Otherwise we would have different standards for punishing a person who burgles a house while dressed in traditional eye mask & striped jersey to that of those who burgle while dressed in a tuxedo. They have both committed the same crime.

It is important to distinguish between culpability for the initiation of the war and further issues such as culpability for the conduct of war including the targeted slaughter or otherwise of innocent civilians.

My commentary focuses on the initiation aspect. What was the pretext? What was the disingenuous material relied upon as justifying the commencement of hostilities?

In the case of the totalitarian Nazi regime, it was the manufactured ‘attack’ by so-called Polish soldiers on a German radio station, while in the case of the democratically elected American and British governments, it was the reliance on false (or at the very least shoddy) intelligence reports on the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

These non-existent weapons of mass destruction were specifically highlighted as being capable of deployment and launch within 45 minutes. To believe that, Tony Blair (and George Bush) would have needed to have obtained credible intelligence data to a highly specific degree which many suspected at the time was very suspect and which was subsequently confirmed as untrue. 

Michael, you write: “Fakery apparently works over there (in the Arab world)”, but just as surely, fakery works just as well over ‘here’ (in the Western world).

The history of war-making when put under close scrutiny from the perspective of the United States is littered with highly suspect events: The blowing up of ‘The Maine’; the sinking of ‘The Lusitania’; and what of the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’?

So far as the underlying reason for an attack on Iraq is concerned (as well as the removal of ‘hostile’ regimes in Syria and Iran) eyes should be directed at the geo-political strategies devised by the infamous think tank named the Project for the New American Century.

Paul Wolfowitz was obsessed about the idea of a cataclysmic (or a catastrophic and catalyzing) event analogous to that of Pearl Harbour which would form the basis of a justification for greater spending on the American military infrastructure and the application of its war machinery with or without international support to enforce a form of global domination. This would involve overthrowing certain regimes as well as ensuring continued secured access to resources including that of oil from the Persian Gulf.

Amazingly, then came 9-11.

Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11, but there were strenuous efforts made at the time to link Iraq to it. No chance: Saddam presided over a secular and not a theocratic regime which meant that he was not in league with Osama Bin Laden or any network of Al Quaeda.

The “ultra-violent terrorist” to whom you refer is I believe Abu Nidal. Nidal was assassinated by Saddam. (Incidentally, he was from a breakaway faction of the Palestinian Liberation Movement whose group committed acts of murder directed either at Yasser Arafat’s group or against targets which seriously damaged the cause of the PLO).

But Michael, when you write that “someone was going to get attacked” and then add “justifiably”,  one wonders whether the true emphasis in that statement is that regarding the need of attacking “someone” (another state given the decidedly acephalous nature of Al Quaeda); a fixed state and less on the justification.

There were absolutely no grounds for attacking Saddam’s Iraq which had been severely weakened by sanctions and the imposition of, I believe, two geographic no-fly zones, which incidentally did not stand the test of international law.

So where does the buck lie? Your response gives clues as to the likely culpability of key members of the Bush administration although as chief of state, George Bush cannot be let off the hook. And based on the principles established at Nurnberg, those senior members of the American armed forces who prosecuted the war on behalf of their political masters would also be culpable. We all remember the non-defence of “I was merely following orders”. The fact that Parliament and the US Congress approved this illegal action only shows the imperfections in so-called democratic and informed societies who are just as susceptible to the manias that are whipped up by government propaganda as well as by the mass media. Again, it is instructive to look at the historical role of the media in beating the drums of war as they manipulate and fashion public opinion.

I understand the distinction which you wish to make between the nature of the Hitler regime and even Saddam’s brutal reign, but I beg to differ as to its relevance in regard to the facts of relying on false information to start a war.

And by the way, I agree with you about the misuse of the Hitler comparison in certain instances in history. (This, as I have explained, does not apply to my references to Nurenberg; one has to mention Nurnberg because the Nurnberg Principles are the starting point. They are the STANDARD.) Take Gamal Nasser who was painted as ‘The Hitler of the Nile’ by Anthony Eden as well as the Israel propaganda of the day. He was nothing of that sort.

And while we speak of Nasser, here’s a thorny-sensitive matter: The war commenced in 1967 by the state of Israel on the basis of its being a pre-emptive act in self-defence against an impending attack by Egypt and the armies of Jordan and Syria is one of the most persistent myths in the annals of war.

In short hand, Nasser was skilfully lured into a trap set by Israeli hawks who had practically staged a military coup against Levi Eshkol’s government and installed Moshe Dayan as the minister of defence. The war of 1967 was one of a pre-designed territorial expansion; one which was to create a Greater Israel and complete business which had been left unfinished after the 1948 war.

The admissions of Generals Rabin, Bar Lev, and Peled, along with members of the war cabinet including Menachem Begin make this plain.

Nasser’s closing of the strait of Tiran and removal of the UNIF buffers were actually designed to, as he thought, force the hand of the American government to settle issues which he believed were in accordance with the state of affairs left by Eisenhower who forced the British, French and Israelis to call off their illegal occupation of Egyptian territory during the Suez war of 1956.

The existential threat posed by Egypt in ’67 and the threat of the annihilation of ‘little Israel’ is simply not true. Israel has never been in danger of being overwhelmed by any combination of Arab armies. Not in 1948, nor in 1967. Not even in 1973.

But back to Saddam, while you say that he started the first Gulf War, I think it worthwhile to put the invasion of Kuwait into some context.

The background to this is the war between Iraq and Iran which lasted for much of the 1980s. Saddam was encouraged to attack Iran by the United States who wanted to be rid of the Ayatollah and other theocrats who had hijacked the anti-Shah revolution of 1979. He was also encouraged by much of the Arab world who have historically displayed much antipathy towards the Persians who are also of the rival shia denomination; the Arabs being largely Sunni.

It is rather shameful that people only remember the chemicals unleashed against the Kurds by Saddam but not the chemical warfare that he employed against the Iranians.

Anyway, the war was a costly, bloody drawn out affair and Iraq, given that they were fighting a pan-Arabist, Sunni war on behalf of the Gulf kingdoms (and a proxy war on behalf of the United States), not unreasonably demanded that they pay something towards repairing the Iraqi infrastructure as well as fix things so as to enable higher oil prices from which Iraq as an oil producer would benefit.

When this was not forthcoming he threatened Kuwait which also shared a not very well demarcated border with Iraq (both were under the same administration during European colonial rule). Kuwait was also apparently ‘stealing’ crude oil from fields which apparently had been agreed as Iraqi.

Crucially, there is evidence that a serving but outgoing US ambassador to Iraq gave assurances that the United States would not view an invasion of Kuwait in an unfavourable light.

So not condoning his invasion (did you hear that the stuff about Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti newly borns out of their incubators was a propaganda lie?) but that’s the background to that first Gulf War.

Again, I must say that I respectfully disagree with the standard that the “US and Britain would have been stupid to give him the benefit of any doubts. And doubly so in the aftermath of 9/11”.

Such an argument would not stand the test of scrutiny of a lawfully constituted tribunal of inquiry. Nations cannot start wars or threaten to start wars on the basis of this or that nation posing existential threats. That is a law which favours the strong over the weak. It is analogous to the proverbial law of the jungle, although it fits in perfectly with the aforementioned Wolfowitz Doctrine of acting unilaterally and with overwhelming might.

But I believe that what you say about “fixing what we broke” and giving them “food and money” serves as an admission on your part that an unjust and indeed an illegal war was instigated by America.

Apologies will not bring back the colossal cost in human life (or indeed the lives of American servicemen whose relatives should not be seen as unpatriotic if they choose to hold to account the chiefs of state who led their nation into this disastrous debacle), and you are correct to assert that they can never be truly paid back fairly.

That war did not serve America’s interests at all. In fact, it led to a majority government of Shias who had been oppressed by the minority Sunni regime of Saddam, thus giving a foothold to neighbouring Iran.

It also led to the unleashing of ‘Al Queda in Iraq’ which proved that Bin Laden and his demented Sunni extremists have killed more of their fellow Muslims than so-called ‘Western infidels’. The chain reaction of violence was/is truly tragic and for this, the initiators of the original war should bear responsibility.

You need to listen to the father of one of the British soldiers who was among the first servicemen killed after the commencement of war when he speaks with such bitterness, but moral and legal force about the culpability of Tony Blair.

As I said in my preamble to this thread, the appellation of war criminal should not be delimited to African, Asian and Balkan figures. There are a number of Western leaders with blood on their hands too!

NB

Did someone just mention the name ‘Henry Kissinger’?

(C) Adeyinka Makinde (2012)