Irregular Analyses

Leaving on a jetplane

2006-08-11T09:20:00.000-04:00

On the basis that I am probably not going to be in a position to reasonably keep things up (ooh-er) here with a high enough volume of posts to keep it interesting, I will from now on be a wholly owned subsidiary of Professor Mark Grimsley of Ohio State University and can be found at Blog Them Out Of The Stone Age.

The site will stay up for future reference, but otherwise follow the link.

Thangyooverymuch.

She was too old for Yentl...

2006-07-28T21:46:00.000-04:00

James Joyner notes that there has been yet another case of a gay military Arabist being discharged from service.

Now, it's unlikely that we are going to lose the war on the basis of 55 discharged gay linguists, but it's pretty hard to argue with Joyner when he notes that:

Whatever one’s thoughts on the suitability of homosexuals for infantry duty, it’s rather difficult to fathom the argument for tossing out a linguist–let alone a critical Arab linguist–on the basis of finding out he’s gay via anonymous emails.
It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes; there probably aren’t a lot of translators there, either. Further, it’s rather clear his fellow All-American paratroops had no clue he was gay; it’s unlikely, therefore, that he was harming the esprit de corps. Conversely, the potential loss of life because there’s nobody around to translate in a critical situation could be quite bad for morale.

Well, quite. The story is not made any less whimsical by this delightful footnote:

On December 2, investigators formally interviewed Copas and asked if he understood the military's policy on homosexuals, if he had any close acquaintances who were gay, and if he was involved in community theater.

Well...

Excuse me, are we a little teapot?

Of course, it's a much kinder, gentler military these days. It wasn't all that long ago that there was a brouhaha when, following vague watercooler rumours that an (married) NCO was not as other NCOs, military investigators subjected his wife to a series of interviews in which the questions included, but were not limited to, "Does he ever ask to fuck you in the ass?"

What a delightful window dressing.

Just on a final note, it seems to me that the worst bit is this:

"The director brought everyone into the hallway and told us about this e-mail they had just received and blatantly asked, 'Which one of you are gay?"' Copas said.

As far as I can tell this came before any of the interviewing or whatnot. By acting this way it strikes me that the senior officers made it completely impossible for it to be kept under wraps. Had they played it somewhat more softly softly catchee monkey, it seems that it might have been that his mates need never have known and things could have ticked over more or less as usual - especially given that the chap involved had apparently gone to great lengths to keep his sexuality and his military service hermetically sealed from each other. That said, it may, of course, be that this was precisely the result the officers involved wanted.

Dangleberry Shebang

2006-07-27T17:44:00.000-04:00

So, anyway, can the Israelis win? Well, I'd say that they can though it's a hypothetical that requires a large number of things to happen and quite a few not to happen.

If, by their attacks, the Israelis can focus enough foreign attention on the Lebanon to result in a genuine peace enforcement force to be deployed to Lebanon with a mandate to empower the current Lebanese government and block attacks against Israel, then things might just turn outl... well I won't say well, but at least not disastrously.

I say this as somebody who has very, very little confidence in the UN. The point is that I just don't see a better solution.

The problems are many.

First off, the buffer zone currently being proposed is at least 30 miles too shallow to put Israeli residential areas out of range of Hizballah rocketry (though it might make them have to launch their ordnance from less friendly parts of the country).

Second, I'm not sure who would make up this force. The US is almost certainly not trusted enough. The UK doesn't have the manpower. The French might take a role but that isn't enough. Additionally, although the Israeli notion of a NATO force is attractive, I don't know whether such a force would be broad-based enough to not cause serious problems with the Lebanese. Ideally it should include Muslin countries, but then the trust factor flips and questions would no doubt arise over their willingness to move to disarm Hizballah terrorists to the benefit of Israel.

Third, I still don't know whether or not even a muscular UN force (assuming that isn't a contradiction in terms) will be accepted in Lebanon to a degree that will prevent the place splintering.

So there are a load of ifs. But it strikes me as the biggest hope.

Boom Bang-a-Bang

2006-07-27T17:14:00.000-04:00

Another big news story of the day is the growing brouhaha over the deaths of UN observers.

The received wisdom has rapidly become - as it tends to in these situations - that the Israelis blasted the UN people on purpose. I have to say that even allowing for the calls for them to stop bombarding, I tend toward the cock-up theory rather than conspiracy. It seems to me that the only people with anything to lose from the deaths of UN personnel on Lebanese soil are the Israelis.

Michael Totten

2006-07-27T17:03:00.000-04:00

They (I say they because until recently there have been people filling in for him) have been blogging up an absolute storm at Michael Totten's site. Totten and his friends are cut from the "muscular liberal" mold, broadly pro-Israeli and generally strong boosters for democratic transformation. So when they think things are going badly wrong, their views deserve to be taken with a fair amount of weight.* Plus, he's actually, you know, been in the Lebanon, which helps.

An admittedly fairly lengthy sample:

I spent a total of seven months in Lebanon recently, and I never could quite figure out what prevented the country from flying apart into pieces. It barely held together like unstable chemicals in a nitro glycerin vat. The slightest ripple sent Lebanese scattering from the streets and into their homes. They were far more twitchy than I, in part (I think) because they understood better than I just how precarious their civilized anarchy was. Their country needed several more years of careful nurturing during peace time to fully recover from its status as a carved up failed state.

By bombing all of Lebanon rather than merely the concentrated Hezbollah strongholds, Israel is putting extraordinary pressure on Lebanese society at points of extreme vulnerability. The delicate post-war democratic culture has been brutally replaced, overnight, with a culture of rage and terror and war. Lebanon isn't Gaza, but nor is it Denmark.

Lebanese are temporarily more united than ever. No one is running off to join Hezbollah, but tensions are being smoothed over for now while everyone feels they are under attack by the same enemy. Most Lebanese who had warm feelings for Israel -- and there were more of these than you can possibly imagine -- no longer do.

This will not last.

My sources and friends in Beirut tell me most Lebanese are going easy on Hezbollah as much as they can while the bombs are still falling. But a terrible reckoning awaits them once this is over.

...

Israeli partisans may think this is terrific. The Lebanese may take care of Hezbollah at last! But democratic Lebanon cannot win a war against Hezbollah, not even after Hezbollah is weakened by IAF raids. Hezbollah is the most effective Arab fighting force in the world, and the Lebanese army is the weakest and most divided. The Israelis beat three Arab armies in six days in 1967, but a decade was not enough for the IDF to take down Hezbollah.

The majority of Lebanon’s people were wise and civilized enough to take the gun out of politics after the fifteen year war. Lebanon was the only Arab country to do this, the only Arab country that preferred dialogue, elections, compromise, and debate to the rule of the boot and the rifle. But Hezbollah remained outside that mainstream consensus and did everything it could, with backing from the Syrian Baath and the Iranian Jihad, to strangle Lebanon’s democracy in its cradle.

Disarming Hezbollah through persuasion and consensus was not possible in the first year of Lebanon’s independence. Disarming Hezbollah by force wasn’t possible either. The Lebanese people have been called irresponsible and cowardly by some of their friends in America for refusing to resume the civil war. Unlike Hezbollah, though, most Lebanese know better than to start unwinnable wars. This is wisdom, not cowardice, and it's sadly rare in the Arab world now. They are being punished entirely too much for what they have done and for what they can't do.

Israel and Lebanon (especially Lebanon) will continue to burn as long as Hezbollah exists as a terror miltia freed from the leash of the state. The punishment for taking on Hezbollah is war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah is war. Lebanese were doomed to suffer war no matter what. Their liberal democratic project could not withstand the threat from within and the assaults from the east, and it could not stave off another assault from the south. War, as it turned out, was inevitable even if the actual shape of it wasn’t. Peace was not in the cards for Lebanon. Its democracy turned out to be neither a strength nor a weakness. It was irrelevant.

Holding up as a democracy in a dictatorial region isn’t easy. Chalk this up as yet another thing Israel and Lebanon have in common with each other that they don’t have in common with anyone else in the Middle East -- except, perhaps, for the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Unlike Israeli democracy, though, Lebanese democracy may not have the strength to keep breathing. Already some right-wing American "realists" are suggesting Syria return its forces to Lebanon. (Bashar Assad may be as much a foreign policy genius as his late father.) The March 14 Movement, the Cedar Revolution, may be too weak to survive until the region as a whole is transformed. If the Lebanese, the Americans, and the Israelis are not wise in the coming days, weeks, and months it could die the same death as the Prague Spring in the late 1960s, crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks and smothered until the day the world around it had changed.

Go and have a read.

*I note, just in passing, that as far as I can tell Totten has largely ceased to be quoted by swathes of the internet commentariat in the wake of the Lebanon situation.

*UPDATE:

An example. A quick search of Roger Simon's site shows that until the end of May this year, he used to refer to Michael Totten's postings perhaps an average (rough guess) of once a week. Since the current crisis started - bear in mind that Lebanese issues are very much Totten's are of specialisation and where his stuff should carry MOST weight - Roger hasn't referenced him once.

Coincidence? Maybe.

Quotation of the Day

2006-07-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

"The death penalty? I'm all over the map. I'm not anti it, but I'm anti the wrong guy being executed. And I do ask the question, 'When was the last time we executed a rich guy?' If I'm governor, there won't be anybody executed - except for the few that really need to die."

- Kinky Friedman

Bombing to Lose

2006-07-27T16:27:00.000-04:00

One of the problems faced by the Israelis has undoubtedly been the (understandable) reliance upon air power. If the effort is truly to destroy Hizballah, then an airpower driven effort is surely doomed to fail and I can think of no happy precedents to convince me otherwise. Even if the aim is rather less than this, it still represents an extremely high-risk/low-payoff way of going about things.

In the event of an extended bombing campaign against what is to all intents and purposes an insurgent group, the Israelis are going to rapidly find themselves running out of viable targets. This leaves three main options:

Call a halt
Broaden the target menu and rules of engagement
Launch a land invasion

If the first option is taken, it begs the question - what was the point in the first place? At the tactical/operational level the Hizb will be back to full strength in a very short period of time. Stockpiles can be replenished. There is a large manpower pool. The Israelis will have inflicted a temporary inconvenience, quite possibly (though not certainly) at the cost of destroying the Lebanon. It's very hard to spin this as other than a strategic defeat.

The second option will lead inevitably to higher civilian casualties, greater outside condemnation and an even greater chance of internal Lebanese collapse, with no matching increased likelihood of strategic success.

Option three is fantastically risky to the point of being nuts. Of course, you can listen to the funny little people in sections of the commentariat (you know who they are) who have convinced themselves, apparently with the help of the usual unnamed "sources", that the Lebanese people will be just cock-a-hoop at a semi-permenant Israeli presence in their country. You are, of course, fully entitled to take the view that Munich 1938 has more to tell us about the current situation than... oh, I dunno... the Lebanon 1982-2000. But I wouldn't commend it. What will be guarenteed is mounting Israeli and civilian casualties and the real risk that Hizballah will be energised and the Anglo-American position in Iraq further compromised.

As for the Cedar Revolution - forget about it. Although it suits us to focus on the pretty, young pro-Western, broadly favourable to the Israelis, photogenic type people who seemed at the forefront of the action, like most successful revolutions the Cedar Revolution represents a broad coalition of interests. Let's forget for a moment the fact that the bombing campaign has alienated many of the previously pro-Israeli young liberals. Another, perhaps more important, grouping are those Lebanese who are simply fed up of communalism and outsider interference. These nationalists, perhaps best exemplified by General Michel Aoun, may be anti-Syrian but that does not make them pro-Israeli. The idea that they are going to welcome the Israelis using their country as a field for their own battles, or will buy into US rhetoric about Middle Eastern transformation, is naive to the point of criminal foolhardiness.

But in order to "win" in the Lebanon, the Israelis will have to find coalition partners from within the Lebanese population. For reasons noted above, they are likely to find this harder in 2006 than they did in 1982. However, even if they can the implications hardly bear thinking about. Effectively to further their purposes they will have to stoke, encourage and cement precisely the sort of inter-communal, inter-confessional tension that so many people, both in the West and among the Lebanese population, have been working so hard to minimalise.

Now, it's become abundantly apparent - and this is something I'll try to address at a later time - that sections of the US commentariat think this is a price that it would be just peachy to pay.

I non-respectfully disagree.

Blood pressure roller-coaster

2006-07-26T04:40:00.000-04:00

So what is it with art gallery websites that feature various bits of artwork and then, instead of providing you with information on how much it costs, provide a little note indicating that they will provide the price on application?

We will get it, by hook or by crook...

It seems to me that there are two possibilies here. The first is that they like people to email because it allows them to calculate how much of a gullible schmuck the potential buyer is ("In case you are wondering, I'm not some sort of easy mark...") and adjust the price accordingly.

The other, more likely option, it seems to me, is that it's simply a snob thing. In which case they might as well be upfront and just say "If you need to know how much it costs before buying, you can't afford it".

In fact why not go hog wild and have an introductory flash animation going "Please, no riff-raff"? Bastards.

Anyway, to cut a long story short...

2006-07-23T17:28:00.000-04:00

Well, I had planned on putting up a series of posts culminating in my* view on what the only potentially workable, albeit drastically imperfect, solution might be.

Too late...

However, it seems that events have overtaken this and the Israelis have come to this realisation themselves anyway.

Always assuming that this represents something not a million miles away from the ultimate endgame, one wonders whether the Israelis always had this in mind but were of the view that in order for the international community to actually get off their backsides and come up with an enforcement regime with teeth it was a necessity for stuff to explode. Perceptive insight or NRO Corner-style wacky horsecrap? God knows.

*deeply unoriginal

Never rub another man's rhubarb...

2006-07-23T11:20:00.000-04:00

First and foremost it is important to note that the Israelis have a legitimate grievance.

They pulled out of the Lebanon, a fact accepted by the UN
In exchange - also as mandated by the UN - Hizballah was meant to be disarmed
For whatever reason, this did not happen
A UN force was inserted into the border region in order to observe what was going on and ensure that the terms of the agreement were upheld
They were not upheld and the UN troops proved ineffective at doing anything to constrain the Hizb
For several years the "international community", instantaneously hysterical over Israeli action, managed to raise scarcely a murmer over the ongoing activity of Hizballah against Israelis.

So the Israelis have a right to be pissed off. They have a right to take some sort of action - including within the military sphere. In addition, when they don't take seriously the urgings of international opinion on this issue, it should come as no great surprise.

However, even taking all this into account there is much with which to be concerned. I'll try to put down a few things of note in the not distant future, but it seemed worthwhile to set out my stall as regards who I consider the "good guys" in all this. Hopefully that might lend some extra weight when I make arguments that are seemingly extremely critical of said good guys.

Herbie Goes Bananas. And by Herbie I mean Alan Dershowitz

2006-07-22T23:09:00.000-04:00

I know a lot of people, notably Le Professeur, who think that Alan Dershowitz's never ending one man argument about torture is pretty appalling and should not be given house space. I'm not one of them. Not that I agree with him - I don't. However, I think he makes a provocative and not entirely bonkers argument and that it deserves to be taken seriously.

This article, however, not only demonstrates a woeful lack of understanding of how things like counterinsurgency, how can I put this, work, but is also wrong, bonkers and just plain nasty. In fairness, there is the germ of a decent argument in it somewhere, albeit to a lesser degree than with the torture issue. Once he gets to the specifics though, he's all over the place:

Turning specifically to the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas, the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear. Hezbollah missiles and Hamas rockets target and hit Israeli restaurants, apartment buildings and schools. They are loaded with anti-personnel ball-bearings designed specifically to maximize civilian casualties.

Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those "civilians" who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks.

The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.

Define "cannot". Cos there's like a, y'know, a continuum. There's the lame and the halt. There's babes in arms. There's the chap off Jerry Springer where they have to cut the roof off his house in order for an industrial crane to airlift him to the cardiac unit.

Then there are a lot of people who will take the devil they know over the devil they don't. Especially when a) all their worldly posessions, their family and in many cases their only means of financial upkeep are contained within the four walls of their house, b) they have nowhere else to go and c) the pamphlets they get telling them to leave also say something along the lines of "By the way, you might not want to use the transport netowrk either because we reserve the right to blow seven shades of crap out of it". In this situation, the instinct of a lot of people is to sit tight, keep their fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Call it human nature at work. Call it thick as pigshit. But what it isn't is complicity in terrorism. Of any kind.

We saw it in Fallujah, where gormless coalition public affairs officials stood around and responded to complaints of civilian casualties and bits of the city being flattened by air power and gunnery by going "But we sent out leaflets telling the locals that they had 24 hours to leave the city".

We saw the same thing in New Orleans, where there was less danger in leaving, more likelihood that the infrastructure would exist to support you once you'd left and substantially less likelihood that, once you'd shoehorned the kids, granny and a biscuit tin full of cash into the station wagon, you'd take a Hellfire missile up the exhaust pipe while pulling out of the cul-de-sac.

It seems to me that it should not take a rocket scientist to see that this doesn't work. Now, does this make the Israelis as bad as the Hizb, who are deliberately out to kill women and kids? No, it doesn't. Have the Israelis sacrificed a degree of operational effectiveness in dropping the leaflets in the first place, thereby giving the bad guys advanced warning of what's likely to be happening when and where? Yes, they have. Does (non-voluntary) population relocation, carefully managed have a role in counterinsurgency? Historically it certainly has and, depending on context, it may well do again. But among sections of both Israeli and US opinion, dropping a few leaflets going "We suggest you leave because it's all going to kick off" seems to be seen as some sort of magic talisman that removes responsibility for any carnage that might ensue and furthermore provides moral sanction for deploying whatever intensity of firepower happens to be operationally and tactically expedient.

Which is dubious and worrying. Suggesting that those who don't heed the warnings somehow sacrifice a chunk of their civilian status is beyond worrying, it's appalling.

Baaaaaaaack.

2006-07-22T23:04:00.000-04:00

How long this will last I don't know, but I've been finding myself mulling over various aspects of the Lebanon situation and it strikes me that one of the best ways to organise my thoughts is via the medium of writing. So... I suppose this seems like a good way of doing it. It probably isn't, actually, as once something like this dies off for six months (largely due to a massive workload, decreased internet access and a lack of inspiration compounded with a decreased tolerance for ploughing through the news [which ain't great in this line of work...]) I don't know that you can really go back. But ho hum.

No guarentees as to quality, however. If I say anything over the next few days take it as an assessment of probabilities - nothing's definite!

Burnin' Down the House

2006-01-03T20:10:00.000-05:00

Well, this isn't very good is it?

A prized collection of antiquarian books - including a rare edition of works by Sir Walter Scott and a complete collection of the writings of Rudyard Kipling - was destroyed.

Mr Linklater said the destruction of irreplaceable bound manuscripts of books by his father, Eric Linklater, was "a devastating loss".

Bloody buggery bollocks, as I seem to remember they used to say in Ab Fab.* Not a very good way to see in the new year.

Apropos of not a lot, I'm often interested by how little even quite important manuscripts sell for. Rick Gekoski estimates the handwritten manuscript of Lord of the Flies at the high end of a £50,000-250,000 estimate, were it to go to auction, which seems to me to be very little money. Well, it's an eye-bulging amount of money obviously. But were I, for example, a Captain of Industry or generic Bond Villain, it seems to me that I could happily spend that and then some and not come away feeling I'd been fleeced. The top carbon from the typescript of The Kraken Wakes was on sale not so long ago for a low four figure sum. Even given that it was the carbon, it doesn't seem like that much to me, if you've got the disposables. I think I'd prefer that to a plasma screen TV*. Of course I can't afford either, but that's not the point.

*Though that may have been part of a fevered dream, I'm not sure.
**Which is why I will die alone and unloved, possibly known by local youths as "The Scary Book Guy".

Snyder Rifle (urrrgh)

2006-01-03T19:47:00.000-05:00

Jack Snyder's one of the good guys. Julian sitting in for Andrew Sullivan flags up the fact that he's got a new co-written book out the warns that when it comes to the old Democratic Peace theory, all may not be well in the garden of shag. The Cato event that's on next week may well be worth checking out if you have the time.

On a similar note, anyone who hasn't read Fareed Zakaria's "The Future of Freedom"... er... should read it.

Let's all go to the lobby...

2006-01-02T21:27:00.000-05:00

Roger Simon is, perhaps predictably, none to enamoured of George Clooney's latest opus, Good Night and Good Luck. I haven't seen the film so I can't comment on its content, though from the clips I've seen and commentary surrounding it I'm none too optimistic. Certainly it sounds like there's a substantial helping of boilerplate.

It's a shame really because a nuanced take on the McCarthy era would be worthwhile, not least because the common perception is shaded very strongly by the pat left-wing (and rather ahistorical, confused and Hollywood-centric) version of what went on and recent revisionist attempts by sections of the conservative commentariat to rehabilitate McCarthy are every bit as misplaced.

Joe McCarthy does not deserve rehabilitation. He was, at the risk of sounding trite, a bad man. His motivation was largely base, feeding as he did on the publicity and opportunity for self-promotion his position afforded him. Prior to finding his niche in anticommunism, he drifted with the breeze, latching on to any transitory issue that seemed likely to raise his profile. He was indiscriminate in his accusations, sweeping the innocent up with the guilty and making ever wilder claims as he began to believe his own publicity. He used his position as a weapon with which to menace personal enemies and political rivals. The Eisenhower executive branch viewed him as a menace and a fraud, though it was largely stopped from acting by a believe that the conservative grassroots had take McCarthy to their bosoms. Eisenhower himself personally vowed to put the boot into McCarthy when the opportunity arose - as eventually it did when McCarthy's claims became so ludicrous as to include the likes of General George C. Marshall. McCarthy's methods were simply not conducive to the functioning of an open and free liberal democracy. He deserved to fall and fall hard.

These flaws alone mean, it seems to me, that he deserved his comeuppance. However, as Norman Friedman has pointed out in his "The 50 Year War", perhaps McCarthy's worst legacy is simply the fact that he made anti-communism somehow grubby and not respectable.

"Of course, we all know there's no such thing as vampires or lesbians. But what's that under the bed? And who's that in the closet?"

This had (and has) major implications. It did so because the fact of the matter is that the threat was real. The empirical evience to back this up, both from the Venona decrypts and from the opening of the Soviet archives, is absolutely indisputable, except to a fully paid up pro-USSR shill*. The Soviets were operating an aggressive and extensive espionage network in the USA and they did, in fact, have agents in most parts of the US governmental and military bureaucracies and, for culture war purposes, within the artistic and literary community. These agents exacted a shockingly heavy toll in terms of purloined information, pilfered scientific research, leaked decrypts and the betrayal of Western agents in place and dissidents struggling for freedom within the Eastern Bloc. The fact that actually there was a threat is something that is, at best, skimmed over in the pat mainstream interpretation of the McCarthy period. Arthur Miller chose the Salem Witch Trials as his allegory of McCarthyism. The analogy is fundamentally misplaced because, although Miller would have us believe otherwise, the existence of actively treasonous figures within US society and bureaucracy was not an ignorant and superstitious conceit brought about by closed minds. Unlike witches, the reds did actually exist. But McCarthy was notably unsuccessful in uncovering the significant players (in fact, none of the major Soviet moles got their just desserts as a result of McCarthy, he just happened to be frolicking in the right ballpark**) and his methods caused such a backlash that it became easy for legitimate anticommunism to be portrayed as inherently repressive, untrustworthy and anti-liberal. The situation persists.

*Although it predates the high McCarthy period, it's worth noting, just because I'm a bitter, twisted little man being gradually eaten away in a pool of my own stomach acid, that in the case of almost every major high-profile Soviet spy tried brought down during the Cold War, from Alger Hiss to the Rosenbergs onwards, a substantial chunk of mainstream left-wing opinion made it, in some cases for a good forty year period, a noisy and ongoing article of faith that they were the innocent victims of outbreaks of authoritarian right wing paranoia. As it has emerged over the past decade or so that they were actually guilty as hell the common response seems to have been to pretend that nothing's happened.

**Alger Hiss fell foul of the HUAC, but of course McCarthy was not associated with HUAC. This is not to say that nobody fingered by McCarthy was guilty. In fact, several of the people on McCarthy's lists were guilty as hell. The problem is that a) he accused so many people that almost by the law of averages given the threat a proportion of them would be guilty and b) although evidence has shown some to be guilty, Soviet files and decrypt evidence provides no support in the large bulk of allegations made by McCarthy.

There Goes The Neighbourhood

2006-01-02T20:43:00.000-05:00

Interesting little story.

Really the Anglo-American situation with regard to race in WW2 is rather strange. There's no doubt that even as early as the Great War the British, whose attitudes on race couldn't exactly be regarded as enlightened by the standards of today, found the American willingness to segregate American citizens peculiar and morally dubious*. The Americans, for their part, largely found Britain's colonial ways distasteful and repressive. So we have this rather whimsical situation in which the Brits, who controlled large armies of colonial subjects in which the overwhelming majority of officers were white (a minority of officers in some parts of the Imperial forces [especially the support arms] were native, but they generally had to claw their way up through the other ranks to a lare commission and couldn't expect to rise above company command) and in which the bulk of the troops were from parts of the world where self-determination was something that happened to other people, thought it was pretty grotty that black Americans didn't get a decent bite of the cheese and the Americans, who found the entire structure of British colonialism utterly offensive (and ripe for demolition) and who prided themselves on being beacons of liberty and overall creamy goodness were quite prepared not only to force their black soldiers to serve seperately but also frequently to treat them as distinctly second class. There's enough hypocrisy and general lack of self-awareness on both sides to fill a bucket.

Kevin Pollack

On a related note, with regard to the many and varied allied contingents of varying sizes based in the United Kingdom during the bulk of World War 2, there's a fairly hefty amount of Security Service documentation** reporting on very bad relations between the British and the Poles. The Poles were viewed by the police, the army, the security service and, apparently, a substantial chunk of the population of London, as being in the large part a bunch of violent racists and anti-semites (I believe more than one report wonders rhetorically whether there was much difference between the Poles and the Nazis in these respects). Not only was their antisemitism apparently overt and noisy but there were police reports of Polish troops roughing up Jews in the East End. Additionally there were regularly fights between Poles on the one hand and Imperial troops on the other and the security services reported Indian Army officers complaing of widespread incidents of Polish soldiers verbally abusing their men and in some cases refusing to serve alongside black or Indian forces.

*Characteristically "Black Jack" Pershing, whose strong stance in "standing up" to requests to have American forces dispersed among Allied fighting formations has earned him a lot of praise and something of an iconic position, lost no sleep whatsoever in signing over the substantial bulk of the AEF's black contingent to the French wholesale and barely looking back.

**I believe Richard Aldrich is The Man when it comes to this topic.

Winston's back...

2006-01-02T20:32:00.000-05:00

The newly released WW2 cabinet papers have been getting a lot of news coverage. I freely admit I have only checked out the various precis that have been bandied about on the computer interweb hypermeganet, but as far as I can tell we are supposed to get quite breathless about the following:

Churchill believed the top Nazi leadership should have been summarily executed.
He didn't much like Gandhi.
He didn't get on that well with the Free French leadership.

To the best of my knowledge none of this is actually terribly (or indeed in any way) revelatory, although the documents themselves will no doubt reveal interesting new details to an already known story.

For me the most interesting little nugget is this:

The documents also reveal intense debate in 1942 over possible British reprisals for Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia.

On 15 June, Churchill suggested that British bombers wipe out three German villages for every one Czech settlement destroyed.

This I did not know. Intriguing.

Metastasized Diarrhoea

2006-01-02T19:35:00.000-05:00

John Quiggin, with whom I have differed in the past over his assertion that the United Kingdom should shut down its intelligence community, writes:

I just received an email drawing the (far from original) comparison between terrorism and cancer. It struck me that, to make this metaphor exact we’d need

attacks on cancer researchers for seeking to ‘understand’ cancer

even more attacks on anyone trying to find ‘root causes’ for cancer in the environment, such as exposure to tobacco smoke

Vee pithy. Vee, vee pithy. And in fairness it's sometimes true. But mostly not.

More accurately, you will get some lumpen idiots within certain sections of the commentariat who will live up to this sort of stereotype. However, it's a lot more complicated than that.

The problem with "understanding" and "root causes" is not that we shouldn't be trying to understand or that we shouldn't attempt to address root causes insofar as is a) practical and b) not an unreasonable abdication of our values. It is the fact that most of the people outside the academic/policy community who talk about "understanding" and "root causes" don't actually know what these are.

There's a lot of literature out there. Terrorism experts have spent a substantial amount of time constructing empirically based studies looking into terrorist motivation, behaviour and recruiting patterns, both in general and in terms of terror-group specific case studies. The literature is not monolithic and areas of disagreement exist between the experts, who often come from varying disciplines and areas of expertise.

The problem is that the people who talk loudest about root causes and understanding within the public forum - the Cherie Blairs, Jenny Tonges, Guardian Opinion section contributors, Chomsky/Said cultists and Question Time audiences of this world - generally show no sign whatsoever of having read, let alone seriously engaged with, this literature. Instead we are too often treated to blissful assertions regarding the roles of poverty, global inequality, Western arrogance etc etc.

This is not to say these don't play a role. Some do and some don't* and indeed, as can be seen from individual group case studies, actually motivatory (is that a word?) factors can vary from terror group to terror group. But the reason so many root cause-wallahs take a lashing is not (mostly) because of an inherent closed-mindedness but because their root cause explanations are often based on nothing more solid than taking the prejudices they harboured pre-9/11 and dumping them down as a template for what causes a sort of catch all "desparation" that we are supposed to believe causes terrorism. As far as I am aware, Jerrold Post, Marc Sagemen, Walter Laqueur, Max Horgan, Walter Reich, David Rapoport, Martha Crenshaw and company actually don't have to dedicate much of their time to fending off ad hom attacks for having carried out the work they've done, nor does thier progression up the ladder within the security community seem to have been obviously impeded.

Dr Quiggin thinks that what we see today is the equivalent of cancer researchers being attacked for seeking to understand cancer. In fact what we more often see is the equivalent of Tom Cruise being attacked for arguing that people should put their faith in L.Ron Hubbard mystic happy clappy bullshit as treatment for post-natal depression rather than anti-depressants.

*The role of poverty, for example, is an interesting and complicated one and its impact can range from near non-existant to fairly important depending upon which group is being discussed. In the case of al Qaeda the role is plays either as a motivator or as a "recruiting sergeant" is, at most, minimal. In the case of Palestinian terrorism there is empirical evidence that it can make certain terror candidates, most notably potential candidates for suicide bomber recruitment, riper pickings for the higher-ups within the terror networks.** However, to claim that poverty is a catch all "root cause" of terrorism (as an annoying large number of people do) is simply not supported by the empirical evidence.

**Especially interesting is the case of female suicide bombers recruited by Hamas. What has certainly been the case in a number of documented instances is that impoverished Palestinian women who have exhibited no overt sign of religious radicalisation, but who have young children, have been approached by Hamas officers who have induced them to suicide murder on the committment that their children will receive a handsome, life-changing financial annuity in exchange for the "sacrifice". The sheer cynicism and moral cowardice of the terrorist recruiters deserves to be given greater exposure in the Western press.

You a ho' etc.

2006-01-02T17:35:00.000-05:00

Dan Drezner has his list of the 10 worst Americans up.*

Interesting list. Slapworthy though Al Sharpton so undoubtedly is, I don't think he'd be on my list and neither would Richard Nixon.

And, frankly, nor would JJ Angleton, nuts though he clearly was.**

I haven't managed to come up with a top 10 list of my own, either for Brits or Americans. My Brit list tends to be far too heavily slanted toward the 20th century, for a start.

A few people possibly worth considering.

Brits: Horatio Bottomley, Kim Philby, Charles Townshend (of Kut), William Joyce, Sean Russell (who was, I believe, technically a British subject), Henry Morton Stanley (Though I think he became a Worst Yank later on)

Yanks: Joe Kennedy, Douglas MacArthur, Charles Lindbergh, Andrew Jackson, George Armstrong Custer, Henry Ford, Ramsey Clark.

May add to the lists as names crop up.

*Which follows on from this.
**Not sure I'd put Aldrich Ames up there. Was he a turd? Sure. But people always go, "Oh it was so terrible, more terrible 'cos he did it for the money and doing for the money is so base". Yeah? Well I dunno, I think maybe crapping on your country out of ideology at a time when Communists were herding millions of people into gulags, inflicting man-made famine on the Ukraine and later on suppressing Eastern Europe and going just plain nuthouse crazy in China was worse***. I am a lovable eccentric though.
***And why is it that if you're talking about somebody who spied for the Reds people - especially people who read the Guardian or work for the BBC - always get this sort of furrowed brow look and go, "Yes but they were motivated by sincerely held political beliefs". Hungh? So what? Surely that must apply to Nazis too then? If I started talking about Lord Haw Haw or whoever, would you be saying the same thing? No? Then shut the f*** up? Yes? Then shut the f*** up.

Cock, Arse, Cock, Bugger

2006-01-02T17:24:00.000-05:00

Having come across, at a gibberings-of-uncontrollable-glee-inducingly-low three figure price, a set of bound notes and correspondence relating to a certain set of Royal Navy gunnery tests, inscribed by a certain Arthur Pollen to a certain John Fisher*, I have just been informed that I have been beaten to the purchase by the British Library**.

Bugger. Bugger!!! I rather feel that my patriotic outlook ought to mean that I should be feeling a warm glow from the knowledge that, rather than gathering dust on my shelves, it has been "saved for the nation" or whatnot. Curiously, right now I feel more like engaging in an elaborate and noisy act of ritual suicide***.

You know those bits where Charlie Brown stands there and goes "ARRRRRRRRGH!"? That.

*Either you know who these people are or you don't.
**Which makes it doubly bad because the fact that it's in the BL's holdings means it will never, ever come on the market again.
***Or instigating some sort of Pink Panther/Wrong Trousers style criminal enterprise in order to get my sticky little hands on it.

Happy New Year

2006-01-02T15:12:00.000-05:00

Anthony has been doing a nice job of shouldering the slack of the remaining old man (read: me) on the blog. As one of my many New Year's resolutions, I'll try to take up some of the blogging burden. This of course, however, will probably drive away the site's remaining fan base. Oh well.

Bullshit Watch

2005-12-31T05:07:00.000-05:00

"I have spent a journey pleasantly from Archway to Bank on the Northern Line..."

Why must you turn the Murdoch press into a den of lies, Matthew?

Muddy Boots

2005-12-30T15:28:00.000-05:00

Dan Todman has the first draft of a joint book review up that repays reading.

Quite apart from anything else, prior to reading it I had no intention whatsoever of buying Peter Hart's book (largely because I had assumed it would be another Lyn MacDonald etc) and now I've got it down on my list of books to get hold of. The Prior & Wilson book is well worth getting hold of, though as has been noted we're probably still a little way from any one volume on the Somme that is comprehensively adequate.

Dan's questioning of Prior & Wilson's focus on Haig is, in my view, appropriate - and doubly ironic given that Prior and Wilson have spent time in the past productively attacking writers who have perpetuated the Haig-centirc focus of the historiography.

As Dan notes, P&W document the fact - which really should be widely recognised by now, but isn't - that the popular image of British infantry marching slowly shoulder-to-shoulder into machine gun fire and being mowed down in rows is largely a load of old nonsense. Perhaps the most interesting thing to draw out of this, a fact that I think goes to the heart of British Army performance during the war, is the fact that different units acted very, very differently. In some cases this was due to local conditions. However, what it does throw into stark relief is the fact that well into 1918 what we would nowadays recognise as a coherent doctrine really did not exist in anything more than embryonic fashion within the army. British best practice in numerous areas was extremely good and in some cases better than that of the Germans, but unlike in the case of the Germans, the mechanisms by which best practice could be disseminated and promoted were inadequate.* For all that the Somme can be at least partly legitimately described as the "crucible" of the British Army, the fact remains - and it's a fact that learning curve advocates, among whose number I count myself, have to grapple with - not only that the British Army would, for a variety of reasons, get itself into an even bigger mess in 1917, but also that one of the primary reasons for German success in 1918 was a near scandalous failure of the results of lessons-learned to be disseminated evenly, not only from army to army (as with the general view that 2nd Army was a great posting and 5th Army was an invitation to have your clogs forcibly popped) but actually within army and even corps formations. When the Germans struck in 1918, some of 5th Army's formations were deployed in a manner that would have met with approval from any modern military commander, while others were set out in a manner that hard practice had (should have - even without hindsight) demonstrated was unlikely to be durable enough to meet an assault, largely on the whim of individual major-generals. In some cases there were mitigating circumstances, in others not.

This shouldn't take away from the overall achievement. The improvement in the British Army to the demands of modern warfare 1914-1918 can plausibly be argued to outweigh any improvement (or none) it made 1939-45. This achievement is doubly impressive when one considers its roots as essentially a colonial police force, pitted against a modern army designed for massive-scale continental combat. At the very worst the British Army put in a performance worthy of Rocky Balboa in Rocky (and at best in Rocky II. Or IV. Or something.). But it is interesting to note the extent to which different officers, including as high up as army and army group command, were able to work on what should have been a unified plan while nursing substantially different assumptions regarding what was going on.

*doctrinal underdevelopment is actually a key theme in examining the 20th century British Army at least into the 1980s, but that's a whole other story.

Can't Not.

2005-12-30T14:36:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know it's has absolutely nothing to do with anything even vaguely important but I simply can't resist stuff like this:

1. Beatles, Stones or Beach Boys? Beatles.
2. Kant, Hegel, Marx? Kant. I feel so dirty now.
3. Cluedo, Monopoly, Scrabble? Cluedo.
4. Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford? Too difficult..
5. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart? Mozart.
6. Australia, Canada, New Zealand? Canada.
7. Groucho, Chico, Harpo? Groucho.
8. Morning, afternoon, evening? Four legs, two legs, three legs.
9. Bridge, Canasta, Poker? Poker, unless the ghost of Iain Macleod is in town.
10. Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Big Lebowski.
11. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau? Locke. Why couldn't Hobbes be an option in question 2?
12. Cricket, football, rugby? Cricket.
13. Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte? The brother because apparently he died standing up.
14. Parker, Gillespie, Monk? Monk.
15. Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham? Up the Arse.
16. Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld? Frasier and Curb your Enthusiasm.
17. Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart? It's Sophie's Choice, you sadistic bastard.
18. France, Germany, Italy? Italy.
19. Apple, orange, banana? Apple.
20. Statham, Tyson, Trueman? Trueman.
21. Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Lobo? Rio Bravo.
22. Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman? Streep.
23. Chinese, Indian, Thai? Depends on my mood. Thai comes a poor third..
24. Handel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi? Handel.
25. Oasis, Radiohead, Blur? Blur.
26. Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Yes Minister? Fawlty Towers.
27. Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw? Ibsen.
28. American football, baseball, basketball? Baseball.
29. FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton? The inferior of the two Roosevelt presidents..
30. Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky? No thanks.
31. Paris, Rome, New York? Paris or NYNY.
32. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck? Steinbeck.
33. Blue, green, red? Blue.
34. Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, West Side Story? My Fair Lady.
35. J.S. Mill, John Rawls, Robert Nozick? Mill.
36. Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman? Armstrong. Anyone who picks Goodman is insane.
37. Ireland, Scotland, Wales (at rugby)? Wales.
38. The Sopranos, 24, Six Feet Under? 24.
39. Friday, Saturday, Sunday? Saturday.
40. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear? Macbeth.
41. Fried, boiled, scrambled (eggs)? Boiled.
42. Paths of Glory, Cross of Iron, Saving Private Ryan? Cross of Iron.
43. England, Australia, West Indies (at cricket)? England.
44. Chabrol, Godard, Truffaut? Why thank you Andre, I'll have the veal piccata.
45. Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks? Blonde on Blonde sounds kinky. Therefore Blonde on Blonde.
46. Trains, planes, automobiles? All of them..
47. North By Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo? North by Northwest.
48. Third, Fourth, Fifth (Beethoven Piano Concerto)? Fifth.
49. Coffee, tea, chocolate? Tea.
50. Cardiff, Edinburgh, Dublin? Edinburgh.

Rogue's Gallery

2005-12-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

There's a splendid little quiz over at Harry's place. I'd urge you to check it out, if only to remind yourself quite what a bunch of nasty, nasty vicious bastards lurk under the Stop the War/MAB/Respect/SWP/etc banner and the fact that, regardless of your views on the Iraq War, these are not the sort of people with whom one should associate with good conscience.

It's actually fairly tough. Here are the ones I (think) I know.

1) I know Alain de Benoist did. Dunno about the rest.
2) Sa'ad al-Faqih
3) Tariq Ali
4) I'm guessing Sir Menzies Campbell, given that he can't go on TV these days without using the phrase "flawed prospectus".
5) Educated guess - 'Cos he's a nasty little rat-f*** c**t.
6) Alex Callinicos
7) Galloway
8) Guess - Lindsay German
9) Don't know
10) Harold Pinter. Don't know which Yanqui-peeg-dogs are supporting it.