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.

I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony...

2005-12-28T20:21:00.000-05:00

Awwwwwww.

So sweet. I haven't cried this much since Optimus Prime died.

Yeah, I know, I'm a bad person.

Seriously though, apparently this thing draws very much on the various Sufi traditions and one point worth making - setting aside any broader debate regarding how wholesome Sufism is or whether or not Islam as a whole is fundamentally a happy religion of peace and pink marshmallows - is the fact that in fact the bits of the Islamic world (and the travelling Salafist self-detonating terrorist roadshow we're currently butting heads with from London to Iraq) with whom America tends to have beef also tend to be the places and the people that have been the keenest to suppress Sufism.

The Unpleasantness

2005-12-28T10:50:00.000-05:00

Norm has some comments by Jonathan Sacks up.

I'm not religious (if God's worth worshipping I'm pretty sure he'll be hip to the groove enough to let it slide...), but I've long been of the view that, both morally and intellectually, the Chief Rabbi is the only man among our current crop of religious leaders (at least on the Anglican/Hellfire-bound Papist/Jewish/Muslim front) to be worth a damn. He has also been consistently cautious and not alarmist in his pronouncements regarding anti-semitism and only a few years ago he took the line that, broadly speaking, anti-semitism within the United Kingdom was not a major issue. He is not a man to cry wolf or to indulge in flamboyantly emotive rhetoric.

Over the past few years - and especially in the past 12-18 months - it has become clear that he is increasingly worried and alarmed. If he's worried so am I* - and you should be too.

*I was worried anyway from the evidence of my own eyes. But the fact that he's worried simply lends weight to the idea that I'm not just going mental.

"I say let them crash!"

2005-12-28T10:03:00.000-05:00

James Joyner links to a piece discussing the perils of being a talking head for the broadcast news types.

Mysteriously, I've never been asked to air my prejudices on BBC News 24. However, I have met a number of people who have provided "expert comment" and I also happen to live with a Reuters journalist when in Westminster, so I've seen both sides of the wire.

I can only comment with regard to defence-related "expert analysis" on the television news, but my one piece of advice is to take most of it with a huge pinch of salt.* The journos, as noted in the article, want concise answers that fit easily into a short broadcast segment. They also want solid, unequivocal responses, even when there are none to give.

This is unfortunate, as in both war and the wake of terror attacks it is difficult to sit in a TV studio and give these sorts of answers. Or, more accurately, it's easy to give them but they'll be guff. In addition it is common for the editorial staff to have constructed a pre-conceived narrative and the questions the expert will be asked are often extremely leading, to put it mildly (often with the news host responding with incredulity or a persistent lading follow-up if the expert does not take the bait). Most of the expert analysis during the conventional phase of the Iraq war turned out to be total nonsense. Our own Sir Lawrence Freedman, who is as careful and nuanced an analyst as one would care to encounter in his written work, infamously predicted in 2001 that it would be next to impossible for the Allies to take Kabul by the end of the year - less than 24 hours before Kabul fell (this was, of course, the narrative being pushed by the news editorial staff at the time, replate with dire predictions of military "quagmire", unprecedented refugee displacement and "silent genocide" - all of which turned out to be wild speculation of the most irresponsible kidney). Similarly, following terror attacks the news people want answers and they want them now, even though in reality clear pictures don't emerge until at best days and more often weeks after the event - a fact they'd make clear to their viewers if they actually wanted to provide a serious public service. If anybody is unequivocal you should immediately have your guard up.

Here's vaguely what the expert analysis should sound like:

PRESENTER: I have with me in the studio Dr Dave Skidmarx from the Frank Gaffney Military-Industrial Complex Institute. Dr Skidmarx, clearly the question on everyone's lips today: Are we looking at an al Qaeda strike?
DR SKIDMARX: Well I think right now the only real answer I can give you is "I don't know". I don't know for sure and I don't think anyone else does. We can say that the MO, several simultaneous, co-ordinated attacks on serperate targets, is a traditional al Qaeda hallmark. However, the fact of the matter is that doing something like that isn't exactly rocket science and anyone with an awareness of roughly ho these things operate and how it's been done in the past could have taken it on board. We could be looking at a centrally planned al Qaeda operation. More likely, especially given the way they operate these days, is that it's some sort of loosely affiliated group that may have received some form of backing either in terms of finance or technical support. Or it could be neither of these and we could actually be looking at a completely independent group. We aren't likely to know within the next 24 hours and actually it could be a few weeks. The best thing we and your viewers can do is sit tight and wait for more of the facts to come in - and bear in mind that the theories that emerge in the first 24 hours often turn out to be wrong or at least incomplete. In a few days we may at least be able to take an informed guess. Until then anybody who offers you a concrete answer to your question is either a fool or a knave.

And here's what it actually sounds like:

PRESENTER: I have with me in the studio Dr Dave Skidmarx from the Frank Gaffney Military-Industrial Complex Institute. Dr Skidmarx, clearly the question on everyone's lips today: Are we looking at an al Qaeda strike?
DR SKIDMARX: Yes.

It's enough to make you choke on your Fruit and Fibre.

*said the pot to the kettle...

So I showed it to the doctor and he took one look and he said, it's all got to come out he said...

2005-12-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

Dan Drezner thinks we should boot the Russians out of the G-8.

He's a lot smarter than me on this sort of thing and I don't want to put myself in the inevitable John Laughland-led camp that'll blame it all on the US and claim everything is peachy all that jazz but I'm honestly not sure what giving them the shove would really achieve and I'm not as sanguine as Dan regarding the possible costs.

So they took it all away and they put a bag in, but it doesn't seal very well you see...

Now my period of being sympatico with the Rooshians ended when they shot the Tsar but it does seem to me that letting them in was one of those things that you don't undo lightly.

First off, will anyone but America agree to it? The Germans almost certainly wouldn't and I can't see the French or even probably Her Majesty's Government being particularly mad for it either.
Having been comprehensively splattered in the Cold War and having seen its spheres of influence in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East wither away like an eskimo nudist's unmentionables, the Russians seem to have a chip on their shoulders regarding national greatness that makes your average Gaullist seem well-adjusted. Far from putting serious pressure on Putin to permit domestic reform, it seems to me just as likely that moving against Russia in the G-8 field would actually cause the Russian public at large to rally behind the government.
There is at least an argument that we need the Russians to be nice to us in the fields of anti-terrorism, non-proliferation and energy security just as much as they need us to pat them on the back.

Maybe I'm wrong. It's at least arguable that it wouldn't be a disaster - and the above points are hardly conclusive - but it's a bit move to make and I'm really not sure what the payoff would be. At the very least I'm surprised to see Dan setting out his stall on the issue as though it's a no-brainer. But then maybe it is a no-brainer and I just don't get it..

The Nutcracker

2005-12-24T07:42:00.000-05:00

Just a few things that might be of interest:

Fascinating (if you like that sort of thing, which I do) post over at Airminded.
In spite of the fact that I live not much more than a stone's throw away from the place of origin, everywhere seems to have sold out of Wensleydale cheese and I'm buggered if I can find any.
Er... that's it. For now. But probably just that's it.
Oh yes, it turns out the Chris Martin is a great big poncing hypocrite.
Rather like that chap Jay Kay out of Jamiroquai who nances around telling everybody that if he wasn't a music star he'd be an "eco-warrior", while maintaining a large fleet of sports cars which he uses to burn around the countryside, breaking the speed limit and worrying the sheep.
The big git.
Christopher Hitchens doesn't like Christmas. Fie, I say. Fie and pshaw. We can only hope he will be visited by ghosts in the night and thusly learn the error of his ways.

The people have spoken. The bastards.

2005-12-20T18:07:00.000-05:00

It goes without saying that I stand four square behind the right of the Bolivian people to elect a hairy-palmed pinko bonkers mentalist to be their President, should they so wish, but it's fairly difficult to view this as Good News.

A Gentle(ish) Madness

2005-12-20T17:22:00.000-05:00

So I was browsing on Airminded and I found this site and with a dreary degree of predictability I now find myself in the middle of cataloguing my library.

If anyone is interested in the contents of my shelves you can find a partial catalogue of the books currently housed Oop North here. This does not feature my antiquarian collection, nor does it list the overwhelming majority of my books dealing with strategic and military historical issues as these are largely still at my flat in Westminster. As such it's fairly unrepresentative of the collection as a whole. But I suppose on the other hand it gives an insight into what I'm reading when I'm not reading about Shit Blowing Up.

I've catalogued 350-odd right now, but I reckon the entire collection, including works in London, probably clocks in at somewhere around the 1,000 level. Which is pretty big, but as nothing when compared to the sheer scariness of Chris Brooke's library.

Eye Level is the theme music to Van der Valk...

2005-12-20T17:00:00.000-05:00

James Joyner has some interesting "skinny"* on varying casualty figures from different recent conflicts.

*Oh, heavens, yes.

Obituary Watch

2005-12-20T12:18:00.000-05:00

Kenneth Macksey has died.

Quotation of the Day

2005-12-18T18:36:00.000-05:00

"Of course there will always be viewers for whom the first world war is a new story... All the same, if you feel you've gained a pretty full picture from the war poets, Journey's End, Paths of Glory, Blackadder Goes Forth and so on, you can afford to miss this latest dispatch from the front."

- From a review of "Merry Christmas" in today's Sunday Times "Culture" supplement.

I've got my eye on you, so take your finger out your bum...

2005-12-18T18:10:00.000-05:00

I was talking to my brother on the phone a few weeks ago and he mentioned the fact that he had been walking around town and had noticed a police poster with a large pair of eyes on it and a slogan saying, "Watching you... for your protection."

We agreed that ultimately the point may come when the country in which we both grew up is a spiritually dead husk, having cast off pretty much every value that made it a worthwhile place to live in the first instance, at which point it would become painfully necessary to move to either Canada or the United States.

...it doesn't look nice, try your thumb instead.

Anyway, tangentially related is the story that the US government has been, allegedly illegally, poking its nose about in areas that may not, strictly speaking, have been any of its business. This has prompted a flurry of commentary on the computer-information-hyperweb-meganet ranging from allegations of criminal perfidy on the one hand and charges of treasonous undermining of the executive in wartime against the leakers of the story on the other. Daniel Nexon mounts a fairly unequivocal case for the prosecution. Phil Carter has more. James Joyner has made several posts over the past few days offering the non-hysterical case for the defence. At this point my response is going to remain limited - and may well do so permenantly as I don't feel equipped to offer a considered opinion - to having a nice hot cup of tea and a sit down. But more interesting links as (if) they emerge.

Tribes 3: Franchise Abuse

2005-12-18T17:13:00.000-05:00

There are two very interesting posts up at Dan Todman's site regarding the recent Royal Marines "bullying" case which was much in the headlines a couple of weeks ago.

Post 1
Post 2

I was actually going to write something about this earlier, but Dan's posts seemed to me to do the job better than I could hope to so I held back. But I'm bored so here's my penny's worth, in which I'd like to try to make a couple of points regarding the aspects of this sort of thing that struck me first.

When the story first broke we were treated to a veritable tidal wave of officers in the TV news studios, donning furrowed brows and informing us of their shock, dismay and disbelief at what appeared to have happened.

A very specific image entered my head at this point, namely that of Claude Rains going, "I'm shocked - shocked! - to find gambling taking place here!". I imagine I was hardly alone in this.

Perhaps I'm overly nasty and suspicious, but I'd actually be surprised if that sort of thing wasn't happening. Which isn't necessarily to say it's either right or harmless (I'm not judging one way or t'other) but merely to note that it's very much part of the tribal ethos.

Anyone who is a civilian and spends a reasonable amount of time around military people, especially Army and Marine people and especially Army and Marine NCOs who have seen active service, will be aware that there can be a chasm between people who serve and have served and people who have not. The width of this chasm varies. At it's thinnest it will merely take the form of there being certain conversational topics that the civvies will not "get". At its broadest it can take the form of people with extensive regular military service genuinely finding it hard to connect emotionally or socially with people who don't have the same life experiences or - most relevantly - the form of servicemen refusing to treat civilians as equals until the civilians have "earned" their respect.

So on a broad level there is, or at least can be, a form of sociological split between servicemen and civilians. At a more specific level there can be internal tribal splits between, say, regulars and reservists, or Green Jackets and Paras, or Teeth arms and REMFs/PONTIs.

These tribal tensions tend to manifest themselves very strongly in the case of Elite troops vs. non Elite troops. An ethos of specialness is often best nurtured by emphasising the deficiencies, real and imagined, between those of the elite and those not of the elite. Internally within a unit or organisation there will also often be initiation ceremonies to mark the point at which new blood ceases to be part of the "other" and becomes a recognised part of the tribe. In the case of newly minted junior officers this can, at its most tame, take the form of the initiate being induced to drink vast quantities of alcohol at a single sitting. Obviously there are different strokes for different folks but the principle is fairly consistent.

If you want to be a Royal Marine, your instincts can mean the difference between life and death. Look at this photo of a biscuit cracker - what's your immediate reaction? If the answer is "Wank on it", we'd like to hear from you...

The Royal Marines, of course, represent an elite.* By reputation, for the Royal Marines there are two - and only two - types of people in the world:

People who are Commando Trained
Everybody else

There have been a number of stories regarding the Marines giving non-Marines a rough time - including instances in which non-Marine officers on attachment for various purposes found themselves victims of "hi-jinks" ranging from property destruction to physical abuse. This sort of thing - especially if it turns out to be initiation-related - should come as little surprise to anybody and frankly I find it hard to believe that many of the military talking heads were being other than disingenuous on this issue when they expressed slack jawed amazement at it (though, being almost universally officers, their own experiences may have been rather more genteel).

As Dan notes it's hard to tell how long this sort of thing has gone on. Documentation of specific activities of this sort within the armed forces in the pre-1945 period is extremely scanty, if not non-existent. The principles, however, are surely by nature primal and as old as human history itself.

The main difference, one suspects, is simply that the latest generation is decreasingly inclined to accept it. In the past these things were accepted because 1) after humiliation came acceptance, 2) it came as part of a recognised and ongoing cycle - those doing the humiliating today were once themselves the humiliated and today's grovelling victim would in turn take his place in enforcing the rites of passage on those who came after him [all terribly top public school, I dare say] and 3) today's generation are a bunch of soft mummy's boys, innit?

I don't think this is the full story, of course, but I do think it forms a broadly accurate narrative. I don't make any judgement on whether what happened was good or bad, unacceptable, unfortunate or brimming with hearty manliness. I'm not a Royal Marine and I never will be. I know they're very, very, very good at what they do, but ultimately whether what we've seen is an essential part of their ability to keep us all safe in our beds or whether it was a nasty bit of casual, meaningless, institutionalised cruelty conducted for shits and giggles by abusers of authority I don't know.

*By weird coincidence, a couple of weeks before this incident broke I was having a conversation with someone in which one of the topics raised (not by me) was the strange tendency of Marines to get stark bollock naked in public at the drop of a hat.

The Bookworm 2: I'm Losing It Boogaloo

2005-12-18T16:54:00.000-05:00

I know that my haul of Christmas presents this year will include, as it does every year, several books, so I make a point of not getting into anything too "heavy" in the immediate run-up to the 25th because once the day comes anything I'm reading will be cast aside and perhaps not returned to for a goodly period of time as I munch through my new acquisitions.

A few months ago I picked up a hardback copy of Lionel Casson's "Libraries in the Ancient World" but with the onset of the new university term I didn't get a chance to start reading it before having to get back to the grindstone. It's only a couple of hundred pages long so it struck me that it would serve as a nice little time filler.

I can't find it anywhere. I know I haven't left it in Pimlico so... it should be here somewhere. But as far as I can tell it isn't. The problem is that now I'm beginning to think that maybe I only thought about buying it and didn't actually get it. Which makes me wonder whether I'm developing a truly olympic case of senile dementia five decades early.

On top of that in spite of scouring both my flat in London and my bedroom here from top to bottom I can't for the life of me find my copy of Loch Johnson and James Wirtz's edited volume on Strategic Intelligence, which seems to have vanished into thin air. Short of it having spontaneously combusted or been eaten by the black labrador I occasionally babysit I'm not sure what could have happened to it.

Anyway, it looks like for the next week I'm going to be reduced to re-reading this for the 34th time.

Oh, you are awful...

2005-12-18T16:11:00.000-05:00

Tee hee.

SSI COIN Paper

2005-12-18T14:03:00.000-05:00

There's a new paper up at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute site that looks interesting, though I haven't had a chance to give it an indepth read yet.

Funnily enough, one of the topics I was considering for my dissertation (which has since been discarded) was a study of the complications raised by the employment of indigenous allies (in various forms - from white colonists in Africa to Vietnam etc) by Western armed forces conducting counterinsurgency operations abroad. Probably lucky I hadn't decided to invest a great deal of time in it.

The Harvey Proctor Collection

2005-12-18T11:11:00.000-05:00

Haha. Ha.

Quite what David Adesnik though he was doing wearing a bow tie in public I don't know (this from a man who was quite seriously contemplating the purchase of some two-tone shoes yesterday) but the reaction he got probably ranks somewhere in the top ten list of "it's funny because it's true" moments.

It's a general rule in the political arena that anybody who sports any of the following:

A bow tie
A colourful waistcoat
A pocket watch, especially with ostentatious chain
A rosy, grandfatherly visage that immediately puts one in mind of Father Christmas

will almost certainly be deeply, deeply, disturbingly right wing.*

People sporting a combination of three or more of the above almost certainly enjoy sexual spankage in addition to being deeply, deeply etc.

Similarly, left wing people can be identified by the following:

Grey shoes

In a related vein, teachers who wear ties emblazoned with cartoon characters will almost certainly be utterly, utterly humourless.

If you encounter any of the following combinations:

Cartoon bow tie
Grey shoes and cartoon tie
Franklin Mint commemorative "limited edition" Father Christmas pocket watch

run far, run fast.

*There is, of course, an exception to every rule, he said in a grovelling fashion.

The Bookworm

2005-12-18T10:55:00.000-05:00

With the partial exception of my bedroom in my flat in London, which is so small it tends to become ever more cluttered and messy until I suddenly go into a flurry of tidying up and get it all Sir Garnet (for at least a couple of days...) I'm a reasonably domesticated type. I especially like to have everything just so over Christmas so I've been undertaking a fairly thorough non-Spring cleaning over the past couple of days. I'm simultaneously pleased and horrified to come to the recognition that my livrary has got so big that it actually does need a library (I should buy the Cluedo house) to house it. My bedroom currently has three full sized book cases in it and the only way I can store everything other than in piles on the floor, on top of my chest of drawers, heaped under my desk etc is to completely double stack the cases, with the books stored horizontally (which isn't good for them). A good third of my collection, including most of my War Studies relevant texts, is still in Westminster. Frankly, what the hell I'm going to do with them if I ever get put in a position where everything needs to be in one place I have no idea. Right now half of me is glowing with pride at the distinguished nature of my "library" and suppressing the urge to stand leaning nonchalantly against the living room fireplace, smoking a pipe and looking smug and the other half is suppressing the urge to start shrieking incoherently and set fire to the lot.

Tribes 2: Light Infantry Boogaloo

2005-12-17T17:44:00.000-05:00

Interesting story here.

I don't know what the impact, beyond a lot of emotional hurt, the army's reorganisation is going to have. The arguments in favour of it are not unpersuasive with regard to the demands of modern warfare, jointness etc, but nor do I consider them exactly watertight and conclusive. I think the cultural backdrop is interesting, though.

Arguably the binning of the Light Infantry does mark the end of centuries of tradition, in the we've had Light Infantry in a recognisable form since at least the 18th century. On the other hand, the proud regimental tradition that we know and love has, in fact, undergone several seismic upheavals since the birth of the modern British Army, most notably in the 1880s and the 1960s but also in the early 1990s.

Take my grandfather's old regiment, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry. A proud name, now sadly no more. But for soldiers of a couple of generations before that of my grandfather it would have been a name to be cursed to just as great an extent as we now brandish our fists at something as vulgar as "The Rifles" (which is pretty vulgar actually - where's the romance?).

Prior to the Cardwell/Childers reforms, British foot regiments (foot, mark you, not infantry...)were numbered, although these numbered regiments did often enjoy geographical links and would sometimes be referred to in these terms [eg. the 43rd (Monmouthshire) Light Infantry]. In the 1880s the system was replaced, in the face of violent opposition, with the various "county" regiments the like of which we tend to hark fondly back to today.

Servicemen of the time were horrified. As Richard Holmes noted in his "Riding the Retreat", the general attitude was "damned names mean nothing" and one officer wrote that under no circumstances would he "come to anything called a Hampshire Regimental Dinner. My compliments, Sir, and be damned.".

The 43rd (Monmouthshire) and 52nd (Oxfordshire) Regiments were merged to form the Oxfordshire Light Infantry (doubtless officers of the 43rd were especially apoplectic). In 1908, the regimental name was expanded to become the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

In the 1960s further reforms (for "reforms" read "cuts") were made, involving several regiments being disbanded and others being merged. The Somerset and Cornwall, King's Own Yorkshire, King's Shropshire and Durham Light Infantry were merged to form the Light Infantry. The Ox and Bucks became the 1st Battalion of another amalgamated regiment, the Royal Green Jackets, which drew its heritage from the Rifle tradition (which is related to, but not analogous with, light infantry), it's second and third battalions being drawn from the King's Royal Rifles and the Rifle Brigade.

In the early 1990s the RGJ was reduced to two regular battalions and it was the nominally Ox and Bucks bit of its heritage that got dumped.

So, what's the point of this timeline? I suppose to illustrate that, although it would be going far too far to claim that the regimental system as it currently exists is a nonsense tradition and that those who are passionately dedicated to preserving it are deluding themselves (on an emotional level I agree with them entirely - and some regiments, such as the Black Watch, have been far less messed about with over time than others), to some extent we are talking about preserving an imagined tradition that has actually been in a fairly regular state of flux over the past two centuries.

Black Mafia

As far as I can tell, from my position as an outsider, the change seems to be generating more than the usual resentment by the fact that those driving it are perceived as being those who will suffer least. The CDS comes from the Anglians (who are already effectively a super regiment) and will be replaced by an Air Marshal when he retires. The CGS came up by way of the Paras and the Intelligence Corps and his deputy is a gunner. The British Army (and, perhaps, all armies) has a reputation for going through phases during which, for whatever reason, officers from certain branches tends to dominate the higher echelons of command and arguably to have a disproportionate impact on the direction the army takes. In the late mid to late 19th century, gunners and sappers tended to dominate. In the Great War years there is the old chestnut about the dominance of the cavalry officer.* In the 1980's there was a common perception that the higher levels were dominated by the "Black Mafia", Green Jacket and Gurkha officers who eased the path up the promotion ladder for their tribal peers and undertook elaborate plotting, Byzantine in complexity and quite possibly Satanic in nature, to guard their parent regiments from cuts. In recent years there seems to be a popular perception (perhaps not entirely legit) that the route to the top is increasingly via the Paras, preferably with a stint in the Regiment along the way. One way or another I think it's fair to say that the "bog standard" infantry types are feeling fairly hard done by right now.

*Heavily overplayed by post-1945 historians. In reality, most senior British officers were infantrymen - though cavalry arguably enjoyed disproportionate representation given the size of the cavalry arm. Additionally, there is little empirical evidence that generals drawn from the cavalry proved any less competent, by and large. than their infantry counterparts.** The most underrepresented branch, especially given that it was the most important, was the artillery - though Horne, who commanded 1st Army from 1916-1918, was a gunner.

**Anybody who cherishes iconoclasm, controversialism and general purpose pain in the arse cussedness might productively consider spending some time constructing the argument that cavalry officers in the Second World War were actually less able to deal with modern warfare than their supposedly arme blanche-obsessed counterparts 1914-1918.

No Touchy

2005-12-15T20:36:00.000-05:00

What a great country.

There are, of course, issues with the McCain amendment. There seem to be genuine questions over legislative meddling in an area that is arguably the purview of the executive*. From a purely utilitarian perspective the record of Congressional poking about in the President's foreign policy back garden is in no small degree positive. For all that Congressional interests run to pork, interest groups, noisy passion without responsibility (as over Taiwan for example) and general guff, I think it's fair to say that the historiography (by no means all of it left wing) to date seems to indicate that on the issue of Latin America in the closing years of the Cold War, Congress largely got it more right than Reagan. On the other hand, arguably Congress was significantly behind the curve during the early years of WW2 and much of the backdoor support to Britain from the Roosevelt administration, which is now seen as both crucial and entirely laudable, would have found little favour either in Congress or among substantial sections of the American public at large and was, well, rather naughty.

But the fact of the matter is that even if it's wrong in every other way, every legal and political particular, McCain was fundamentally (on a spiritual, zen, karmic and whatnot type thingy level) right. Indeed, if there are negative consequences of his amendment, and I believe they have been overplayed, I think they will almost certainly be worth paying. The fact of the matter is that, rightly or wrongly the US's cache and credibility right now is not good. The overwhelming support gathered by Senator McCain speaks volumes that, fundamentally, even if they bugger stuff up along the way, the USA is still one of the Good Guys (or as close as we get to good guys in the hugger mugger world of international politics) and the elected representatives of the American people aren't about to sell their (much trumpeted) values down the river. This is a good day for America, it's a good day for American values and it's almost certainly a good day for a soundly conducted War on Terror. Which is a pretty happy combination.

It's also a very bad day, in my view, for Dick Cheney, who seems to have been positively frenzied over the past few weeks for precious little result. The Vice President seems to me increasingly detached and to be honest I'm really not sure sure what the hell is going on in his office. I'm not a natural Dick Cheney hater: Unlike some commentators I see relatively little in his past to mark him out as a natural enemy of all things wholesome and creamy. But frankly his judgement seems rather off on a whole array of issues, from this to Iraq - where he has "mis-spoken" with regard to everything from WMD to progress in training the Iraqi armed forces so often that one begins to feel uncharitable.

*Or so I read - Americans feel free to enlighten me if I'm groping about in the dark.

Trial of the Century

2005-12-15T20:12:00.000-05:00

Oliver Kamm has things to say regarding the Newsnight production "Allies on Trial".

The fact is that this particular type of current affairs programming is fundamentally unserious. The idea that the "verdict" reached is in any way analytical tends to be complete rot and the "prosecution" tends to take a substantial amount of ground by the simple gambit of self-righteous posturing and superficially plausible bullshit, asserted with enough conviction and furrowing of brows to play to the audience's preconceived prejudices.

The format was, of course, pioneered by Channel 4 News, which has produced a string of distinctly unedifying and lavishly one-sided "trials" of the following topics:

The Monarchy
The War on Terror
The USA
The Iraq War

The shows made for frustrating viewing for anybody whose worldview wasn't roughly within the spectrum running from the left wing of the Labour movement to the Socialist Worker's Party. The presenter, Jon Snow (whose pearls of insight run to dismissing the Iraq conflict as "Mr Bush's war for oil" in his memoirs), made a manful effort to keep his prejudices in check and, to his credit, succeeded for all of the first five minutes (watching him trying not to curl his lip whenever he's interviewing an American on Channel 4 News is like watching Dr Strangelove trying to control his right arm, bless 'im). If serious attempts were made to ensure the audience wasn't stacked they failed abysmally, with "defence" witnesses regularly being bayed down and the general mood among audience members seeming to bear no relation whatsoever to what, if the polls are to be believed, a genuinely representative cross-section of society would display. The whole sorry spectacle generally seemed to add up to not much more than a thinly disguised chance for the Channel 4 editorial team to give vent to their political angst.

Maybe the Beeb is better than that and the "trial" will actually provide an enlightening forum in which competing ideas can be tested in a challenging and intelligent way. I doubt it.

Iraqi Election

2005-12-15T17:45:00.000-05:00

It looks like good news from Iraq. Very good news. The fact that the turnout is high and the fact that the Sunni seem to be voting in large numbers is undboutedly very good news indeed.

It would be ridiculously premature to suggest that this represents a leap to victory against the insurgency. Although free and open elections are toxic to the prospects of success for an insurgent movement it remains very much an open question whether the Sunni will really swing in behind the result if it is not favourable to them. And even if this proves to be a real change in the environment it is likely to be very much the end of the beginning and not the beginning of the end. However, the fact of the matter is that this is good news and everyone should be very pleased indeed.

And, frankly, somewhat humbled. A lot of people where we come from go "Oooh, you must vote - people have died so you can have that vote", but the fact of the matter is that the Iraqis voting today really know what that means.

I note with some displeasure that in the entire comment and leader section of today's Guardian, the only comment the professional do-gooders and bleeding hearts who make up the backbone of that rather tarnished publication can summon up regarding this risky, exploratory and perhaps imperfect but self-evidently widely supported experiment is a rather pissy article by one of the usual suspects arguing the whole thing's a terrible sham. If I was an Iraqi liberal, queuing nervously to vote and wondering whether I'd get to the doors of a polling booth before somebody decided that it was desperately necessary, for the good of the oppressed Islamic world in general, for me to be blown limb from limb in a ballbearing-laced suicide bomb explosion, I think I'd be a little bit miffed, frankly.

Update:

Norm has more.

All the news that's shit to print...

2005-12-13T11:08:00.000-05:00

There are a number of interesting counterinsurgency-related posts up at Arms and Influence that are worth checking out.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with the meat of this post, however, in which the US practice of planting positive stories in Iraqi newspapers is condemned on various counts.

It's a tricky area. I tend to feel that in the area of press manipulation the main commandment is "Thou shalt not get caught". Well they clearly violated that one.

In fact since 9/11 itself one of the most curious things is just how woefully incompetent the current US administration has been at controlling and shaping the news agenda beyond the borders of the USA itself. Quite apart from its craptastic public diplomacy, in the first term we used to be treated to things like Rumsfeld openly announcing that task forces were going to be set up to covertly influence coverage of events, not just in the Third World but in places like NATO Europe - and then adopting an expression of irritated bemusement when people living in Europe went, well, mental.

So you could argue that this whole project was doomed from the start and certainly the way in which it was implemented does seem to have been extremely cack-handed and amateurish.

But contrary to general American principles? I dunno. Arguably the Cold War provides a long enough heritage to demonstrate a veritable strategic culture involving American media maniuplation (and, in the case of Radio Free Europe, of the central government losing control, blowing its credibility and everything going arse up at an inconvenient moment).

For my part I'm quite mellow on the issue - the fact is that if it's handled well it can work. Psy-ops and agenda control played a key part in the British COIN effort in Oman. Facts were massaged, good news was boosted, bad news was suppressed or downplayed and care was taken to massage all sorts of unglamorous little prejudices (including religious) to win over support for the government.

It implies that the US government believes the Iraqis to be gullible, unscrupulous, and incapable of handling their own affairs

Well, yes. Or at least some of them. I'm not saying it's a particularly nice line to go down, but media manipulation, if done well, can be an important item in the counterinsurgent's toolkit. As long as you do it well and don't get caught. In this case it was done badly and they were caught. In moral terms though, it's a piece of nastiness I can live with, as long as it works - and I don't think it's especially un-American.

I think one of the more interesting questions to ask is whether, with the proliferation of news sources, media manipulation is not less practical a gambit than it was Back In The Day. Have structural changes made this sort of thing more or less doomed from the start?

Shiny Happy People

2005-12-13T08:23:00.000-05:00

An encouraging poll from Iraq. There's also some encouraging news in the form of more Sunni coming on board for the election. Too much can be made of it, of course, but broadly speaking it's good news and certainly the attitudes expressed demonstrate that all is not lost.

Incidentally, you can get extremely paranoid regarding press bias and I myself have taken others to task over being too quick to allege pernicious machinations in this area, but I am slightly irked by the speed with which this story has slipped down the agenda list on the BBC website: Especially as it's only 24 hours since it broke in the first place.

On the other hand, this is still towards the top of the story list and it's also a positive sign.

How The Axis Learned Their ABC...

2005-12-13T07:59:00.000-05:00

For some time now I've taken the view that probably the most under-appreciated and under-rated organisation (both among the public at large and in the historiography) during the Second World War is the Royal Navy.*

However, for a variety of reasons I've spent some time recently looking at the Royal Navy's activities 1939-1945 and I'd actually like to go even further.

I reckon, and I'm prepared to take a slapping on this one**, that if you're trying to locate a Finest Hour in the Royal Navy's history you shouldn't be talking about the Seven Years War, nor even the Napoleonic Wars (yes, including Trafalgar) - I reckon you should be looking at 1939-1945.

Feel free to try to convince me otherwise.

*actually if I'm being scrupuplously fair it's probably the Royal Canadian Navy, as most historians actually take the trouble to notice that the Royal Navy existed....

**Offer closed to LSE graduates.

Plum Duff

2005-12-13T07:49:00.000-05:00

Dr Who to deliver anti-war message on Christmas Day.

"It's Christmas Day, a day of peace," said chief writer Russell T Davies. "There is absolutely an anti-war message because that's what I think."

Actress Penelope Wilton plays the Prime Minister in the hour-long show.
In one scene she says of the US president: "He is not my boss and he is certainly not turning this into a war."

Yes, that's just what we need, another cringingly obvious, heavy-handed, unsubtle, gauche and deeply self-righteous slice of cant shoehorned into an otherwise amiable bit of light entertainment.

Taste the rising tide of bile

A later scene echoes former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to sink the General Belgrano during the Falklands conflict in 1982.

Wilton's Prime Minister orders the destruction of a retreating alien spaceship, a decision condemned by the Doctor.

You can just about get away with Iraq, but the General Belgrano? It was a left wing nutjob issue back in 1982 and it hasn't exactly matured like a fine wine since then.

Tribes

2005-12-09T06:39:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, this happened.

It so happens that at the time it all went down, I was standing in the foyer of the main Strand building, chatting with one of my friends.* The sound of very large numbers of pissed people singing "Que Sara Sara" wafted down the street and then the mob hove into view. Amusingly, because the main Strand building has a large revolving door, the first 15 or so people to hurl themselves forward became comprehensively jammed inside it and looked like a right bunch of wankers. Finally the mob found its way in an proceded to smash up everything in the foyer that wasn't bolted down, while bellowing "Fuck KCL" and then made their way upstairs, where they proceeded to smash things up further and wreck most of the ceiling tiles on the second floor.

I'd love to tell you that we fought to bar their entry by forming an Anglo-Saxon shield wall and sold our lives dearly while banging axes on shields and defiantly bellowing "Out! Out! Out!", as was the fashion in those days.

In fact that's exactly what we did. I was hit in the head with an arrow and was killed instantly.

No, it's just not plausible enough to run with. What actually happened was that we stood there rather bemusedly while the mob, who beyond hurling verbal abuse at the college in general, were not out for a fight (Which is lucky, cos I'd have learned 'em if they'd tried anything. Clearly. Ahem.), passed through and then we went on our way.

The interesting point to this is this:

If you look at it empirically, they actually caused a lot of trouble for themselves. The money - and it runs to a hell of a lot of money - is coming out of their student union funds, which means they've pretty much shot themselves in the foot and I suspect that those students who didn't take part are probably not that chuffed. If anyone is positively identified (which I doubt will happen given the sheer number of students - if there were fewer than double the number estimated in the BBC report [I dunno who gave them the 50 estimate but they must have had all the perceptiveness of a myopic bush baby] I'd be very surprised) they stand to lose out badly not only financially but academically. So what's lost? Nothing really.

And yet... and yet. The point remains that they made a right old mess of our place and their stomping ground over at the Aldwych remains pristine and unviolated. Did they "shame" their college? No, they didn't, they struck a blow because in however many years time the financial cost will not be remembered but the fact that they made a right old mess of KCL will remain, doubtless burnished into a sparkling little bit of student folklore. And we did nothing about it except demand that their administration pay for what happened, which in spiritual terms is roughly the equivalent of running crying to teacher.

Not that I'd advocate actually going and, Bomber Harris styl-ee, giving them a taste of their own medicine and then some. By every measure of sanity and common sense the college Principal is absolutely right. But it's hard to shake the niggling feeling that they violated our patch and that because like has not been repaid with like even if we get everything paid for, even if they get a stern talking to, even if one or two of their people get carpeted and given an apocalyptic bollocking, on some weird spiritual warrior-bollocks level it's 1-0 to them.

Which is nonsense really... and yet given that college loyalty can spur that sort of thinking it puts a bit of context on just how fucked up things can get once you're in a situation where people are getting killed. Ouch.

POSTSCRIPT:

Traditionally, of course, the main inter-collegiate rivalry within London University has been between UCL and King's, though I've seen little active evidence of it in my time here. Famously, Jeremy Bentham's preserved head is now kept locked in a safe because our lads kept stealing it from its display case and either dispatching it to far corners of the nation (it once eneded up in a station luggage locker in Aberdeen) or, on more extreme occasions, playing football with it in the grounds of Somerset House.

Which when you think about it is absolutely appalling in every conceivable way. But generally speaking it leads to the perception that we've got one up on them so I'd be lying, ashamed though I am to admit it, if I told you I gave a shit.

*Who later announced cheerily that he knew somebody at the LSE who had mentioned that something was going to go down that week but that he'd forgotten about it. Given that he's from Jersey and is therefore already wide open to suspicion of pro-French/Nazi/Illuminati/Stuart Monarchy sympathies this does his credibility no good at all...

Stop Press

2005-12-09T06:38:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Steele produces not bad, mostly right Guardian column.

Oooooh, Barracuda!

2005-11-26T12:03:00.000-05:00

This is a very odd story. So odd, frankly, that I'm inclined to dismiss it. It broke several days ago of course, so you all know about it already.

It's no secret that al-J drives many Americans to the end of their rag, often pretty understandably. But I somehow can't see them deliberately blowing the guys up. In Qatar of all places.

On the specifics of whether or not the Jazeera wallahs are an irritant, even a dangerous irritant, or not I have a lot of sympathy with those who feel antagonistic. What I've seen of their coverage doesn't fill me with confidence and frankly I don't really think the fact that they allegedly purvey an alternative but somehow equally legitimate and hitherto suppressed "truth" gets them off the hook. On the other hand, if you want Arab democracy and Arab media liberalisation, al Jazeera is what you get. You can't have it both ways.

Piss off, Grasshopper

2005-11-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!

Wax on, whack off...

Although actually the Karate Kid was rubbish.

No, it was, it was rubbish.

Brimming with Eastern Promise

2005-11-20T13:18:00.000-05:00

Bill Lind has a look at the latest effort by H. John Poole.

I've delved into Poole's books and, although I'm perhaps not the best person to judge, they seem to me to be interesting, useful and, broadly speaking, selling the right message.

That said, there is a bit of a problem. Lind sort of hints at it in noting that he disagrees with Poole when Poole argues that ancient Chinese strategic works are a key plank of the insurgents' collective mindset. But he doesn't address the 600-pound gorilla, which is this: There is no single "Eastern" way of warfare any more than there is a really identifiable and historically consistent "Western" way of warfare.

It's good to talk...

2005-11-20T13:14:00.000-05:00

I've long taken the view that decoupling the two strands of insurgency taking place in Iraq would be an important step towards eventual Coalition success and that pacifying the domestic insurgency is almost certainly a prerequisite to dealing with the ongoing threat posed by foreign fighters. Therefore this story is fairly interesting, though there have been rumblings in this direction for some time now - probably with the encouragement of the Americans.

The question, of course, is whether this is a sign of strength or of weakness on the part of the Iraqi government. I imagine that much of the commentariat will go with the latter. This is certainly plausible, but I don't know.

Honey, you got real ugly...

2005-11-20T13:03:00.000-05:00

This is pretty appalling.

Not that this Murtha bloke's right. He isn't. He's horribly, horribly wrong. Bestiality wrong. But that's not the point. He doesn't have more right to a view on this issue due to his military service than somebody who hasn't served, but he does, it seems to me, rather deserve not to be the butt of the sort of comments this gobby shrew-woman has made. Mizz Schmidt is a prime example of why whenever I hear well-fed, well-heeled GOP functionaries declaring that this, that or the other issue is "a question of character" I gag on my Marmite toast.

But Murtha is very wrong. And if the Democrats think (as some BBC journos seem to reckon) that they can win elections adopting that sort of line I think they're painfully mistaken.

Bang bang, you're dead

2005-11-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

Interesting story in the Telegraph - should come as no surprise to anybody. More please.

"When she opened her lips, cheese fell out..."

2005-11-20T12:58:00.000-05:00

Well, well. David Irving has been nabbed for telling porky pies about the Holocaust.

There's not doubt whatsoever that Irving is a cheesy bell-end of the very highest order, but I'm not sure I really approve of arresting him for it. That said, I don't live in Austria and they've got some "past issues" to deal with so what do I know?

Anyway, it keeps him off the street.

Hersh-y Bar (urrrgh)

2005-11-16T14:06:00.000-05:00

Michael Totten notes Seymour Hersh's scepticism towards the notion that the Syrians might quite probably have grubby fingers.

Hersh has done some (note: SOME) very good work. That said, I've seen him being interviewed twice on British TV and each time I've seen him I've come away with the strong impression that he's completely and utterly barmy and that it's well nigh impossible to claim with any degree of seriousness that he's not a man with an axe to grind the size of which we haven't seen since Charles I got the chop.

You heard it elsewhere first...

2005-11-16T13:36:00.000-05:00

I am informed that during the course of Prime Minister's Questions today, Patrick Mercer MP (Tory) asked the Prime Minister a question regarding British troops numbers in Iraq in the course of which the claim was made that the British commanders on the ground have requested additional manpower in order to run interdiction against manpower and materiel coming into their sector across the Iranian border and that this request had been refused. The Prime Minister replied that he was "not aware" of any such request.

However, Patrick Mercer is a retired army officer (and rather a good military historian too, actually) who is known to maintain good contacts within the forces and there seems to be a whif that something is afoot. If indeed it turns out to be true that British commanders have requested more men, expect this to be a story with legs, especially if requests for reinforcements have been rejected by Whitehall.

Keep those beady little eyes of yours skinned and an ear to the ground, gentlemen...

Disco Inferno

2005-11-16T12:58:00.000-05:00

Well the phosphorous story seems to be getting a lot of play, at least in the various British news media. The Beeb seems to be running hard with it, Sky seems to think it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup.

I'm not sure exactly what the situation is, to be honest. First and foremost it's worthwhile pointing out what all the non-hysterical commentators are already pointing out - phosphorous is not by any accepted definition a chemical weapon. The employment of it by the United States is not in any way illegal.

That said, I'd be interested to know some more details about the circumstances in which it was used - and I'd be very interested to hear from any military chaps on either side of the Atlantic who can give me some context on this. There seem to be two narratives emerging here - the first is that the Americans employed phosphorous shells against enemy positions in a built-up area, the second is that the shells were used only against relatively exposed trench positions to weed insurgents out of bunkers that were not being penetrated by ordinary munitions. I don't know which is true but it seems to me the latter is preferable to the former. I don't want to sound like a world class armchair general but it seems to me that the offensive employment of phosphorous in a city environment with a civilian population - especially in a COIN situation - is probably not ideal (though there may be a case that it was necessary - email me and make the argument if you like, I'm open minded).

Certainly when the USA sold phosphorous shells to the Israelis in the early 1980s they came with the explicit caveat that they were not to be used for shelling in any areas featuring a civilian population - an agreement that the Israelis promptly ignored, employing phosphorous shells to bombard Palestinian residential areas and tower blocks in Beirut. As Fred Willard says in A Mighty Wind - "Wha' happened?" Certainly something seems to have changed 'twixt then and now (though I don't believe for an instant that the Americans have been as indiscriminate at the Israelis were at that point - and claims of massacre are not backed up by reliable eyewitness reports from the BBC and Sky News).

On the other hand it ought to be pointed out that it certainly appears that the Italian documentary that excited much of the interest in this topic is, for want of a better word, bollocks.

UPDATE:

Good treatment of the subject at Intel Dump. In fairness to the BBC (sort of) the BBC's own correspondent on the ground was on Newsnight last night and made it abundantly clear that as far as he was concerned there was no evidence whatsoever of US forces deliberately targeting civilians. That said, the BBC editorial staff do seem rather more eager to run with this some other news outlets.

I think the question is - and as I've noted I don't really know the answer to it - one of proportionality and prudence. It may be that military necessity demands, or at least mandates, the employment of phosphorous for purposes other than illumination. However, first of all I believe that many counterinsurgency specialists would raise at least one eyebrow at the employment of phosphorous offensively in something like an Iraqi urban situation (again, as I've noted we don't actually know at this point precisely what the circumstances were, accounts differ) and second of all it does have to be noted that when not employed in a very distinct battlefield phosphorous is one of the less discriminate tools in the military arsenal of the United States (or indeed the UK) and therefore whether or not it is the most appropriate piece of kit for the environment the coalition is currently operating in is at least open to question. I don't know precisely what the circumstances are or which side of the argument has the best of it but it seems to me that the debate needs to be framed around the above considerations. I do agree, however, that if sections of the press try to put the worst possible spin on this (and, yes, there is evidence that sections of certain editorial staffs are taking this line - though so far the expert talking heads and their own correspondents on the ground have largely refused to play their game) then it's pretty unworthy.

Quotation of the Day

2005-11-15T14:34:00.000-05:00

"This week, a Channel Four season on 'The Lost Generation'...Now, there is much evidence around the construction of this season of the great steps that have been taken by some of those working on the First World War. The director of the programme on the Somme gives a very lucid interview in which he discusses the tensions he had to overcome to create a fresh and involving piece of programming. It looks like it might be good.But the Channel 4 publicity department has obviously gone to town over the season's website. There's a great game of WWI bingo to be played here, as we cross off the times we read the words 'mud', 'horror', 'slaughter', 'futility'... full house!What is remarkable is the effort that the site puts into making the First World War 'relevant'. You can enter a competition for the best 'last message home' - by text - and read some fictional blogs composed by soldiers on every side.I recognise the difficulties that this is trying to overcome - how do you interest people in a war which can seem long ago and far away?

This effort, however, is surely utterly misguided. I am not sure to whom it is more patronising. To those who went and fought to prevent the takeover of the European mainland by a militaristic hegemon, who certainly didn't think their efforts were 'futile'? To those who wrote back from the frontline in the belief that they were going to die and who now have their efforts reduced to a txt cmptn? Or to today's youf, who it is presumed cannot empathise with the past unless it is presented in terms of contemporary technology?What 'The Lost Generation' season is doing online is not an imaginative use of technology - far from it. It is turning the past into the eternal present, teaching people to apply an ahistoric set of standards to understanding what happened before they were born. And it is, if anything, a rejection of the real possibilities that electronic resources offer to viewers of television documentaries. Why not digitise a genuine set of soldiers' letters from the Somme? I refuse to believe that modern audiences would not be moved by reading the original documents - indeed, I regularly experience the wonder of schoolchildren and university students when they see 'the real thing' in archives."

- Dan Todman

At the Coleface

2005-11-15T14:19:00.000-05:00

Mark Grimsley has a link to streaming video of Juan Cole at Ohio State University.

Also circulating the internet right now is this highly critical piece on Cole by Alexander Joffe at the Middle East Forum. I offer it up as an alternative viewpoint. It attempts to refute claims made by Cole on a point by point basis, with mixed success in my view. I have to say that a year or so ago I emailed Juan Cole asking for information on a at least two occasions and he was invariably helpful and forthcoming in spite of the fact that I was fairly self-evidently something of an ideological opponent. I also have to say that I find Joffe's "Campus Watch" setup fairly dubious and unfortunate and I speak as somebody of broadly pro-Israeli sympathies who has been more than happy to speak in support of Israeli accademics and an Israeli presence on British university campuses. I tend to feel that the way Campus Watch operates, however, tends to generate more heat than light and has from time to time been excessively broad-brush in its approach. Way back in the day Jacob Levy came up with an excellent critique of the way it worked on the Volokh Conspiracy but I can't find it now.

Yes. But...

2005-11-15T14:01:00.000-05:00

John Derbyshire discusses the remembrance of the Great War over at the Corner:

Why does WWI maintain such a grip on the imagination of the English? Open
any regimental history of the war at pretty much any page. I just did the
internet equivalent. "The Newfoundland battalion, for example, attacked 750
strong. 40 odd unwounded returned in the course of the day and the remaining 710
were casualties." Note that that particular battalion was part of the third
wave, and when they went "over the top" already knew that the first two waves
had been annihilated by enemy machinegun fire. "At the going down of the sun and
in the morning We will remember them."

The emotional reaction is entirely understandable. However, his quotation doesn't really answer the main tilt of his question, with its specific focus on the "English" (or, rather, British [and Commonwealth]). The appalling situation facing many British soldiers in the Great War is not in any way in question. What I do think is interesting (and of course I'm hardly original in this) is the fact that the war arguably has a far greater grip on the imagination of the British than on the collective imaginations of many other nations, in spite of the fact that in both absolute and relative terms we got of substantially more lightly than pretty much everybody but the Americans. In terms of proportions of the population and ratios of men enlisted to men killed and wounded we suffered notably less than the French, Germans and Russians, all of whom lost more on almost any measure you care to employ. And yet it seems to grip the British popular imagination more than it does those of our continental neighbours, who by any reckoning suffered substantially greater privations. There have been various critical inquiries into this, of course, perhaps most notably (and stridently) by Correlli Barnett, but it's still not a very widely recognised fact. Not that this in any way lessens the recognition due to our veterans and the validity of the memorial process.

Steers and Queers

2005-11-15T13:39:00.000-05:00

Right, I've enabled some sort of a verification thingy for the comments boxes because I'm buggered if I'm going to plough through a load of comment box spam. Hope it works ok. I think it just involves having to do a word verification thingamajig so it shouldn't be too onerous. That said, it might not work. In which case I'm going to go completely postal and shoot up the town.

Wormwood Scubs Blues

2005-11-15T12:46:00.000-05:00

The recent defeat of the government over proposed plans to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days has me in two minds.

For the record, I ought to state right away that my instincts were entirely against the legislation. However, I think a few points need to be made that don't really seem to have filtered through into the overall debate.

First of all, I think the government made a right old pig's ear of things. They banged on and on about the fact that a) we should listen to the police and security services and do what they recommend and b) that the public was overwhelmingly in favour of the measure, an argument that falls flat on its face when one considers that we live in a representative democracy where parliamentarians should, in theory, make up their own minds on issues and neither be slaves to professional advice, nor adopt an attitude towards their constituents that sets them in the position of a mere cypher or delegate and that is made doubly unappetising by the fact that the government regularly chooses to ignore expert advice and a vast swathe of issues from education to pub opening hours.

The government then proceeded to muddy the waters by claiming that the legislation would merely "bring us into line" with countries on the continent, who have already adopted similar legislation and award their security services powers that our own people are denied, thus leaving them compelled to fight with one arm tied behind their back. This later turned out to be complete codswallop (had it been true it would merely have been a crap argument, rather than actively pernicious) and in reality had the legislation been passed the British security authorities would have had powers of detention unrivalled in any liberal democracy.

The most shocking aspect of the whole situation however, in my view, is simply the fact that the government had to be prodded and poked kicking and squealing in order to grudgingly include two safeguards in the legislation that should never, ever, have been in question in any legislation of this type in a modern democracy - independent judicial oversight and a sunset clause.

On the other hand, I think we can be too hasty to dismiss the notion that the government, slippery and authoritarian and un-British though it may be, is not struggling to deal with a very real problem. There is evidence that the system is not working and, frankly, some of the civil libertarian pressure groups - while right to raise vigorous concerns - are coming dangerously close to crying wolf (is there a single aspect of the counter-terrorism effort that Liberty and co. have not announced will be likely to act as a "recruiting sergeant" for terrorism?).

I don't know the figures offhand but of the suspects arrested since 9/11, an alarmingly high proportion (I believe upwards of 95 per cent) have been released without charge. The common left-wing explanation for this is that the security services are a bung of buffoons who are going on endless fishing trips and plucking perfectly innocent Muslims chaps off the sreet with gay abandon, only to find they've done nothing wrong. There may be some truth to this. However, I don't think it's the full story. The reality is that there seem to be very real problems in terms of the police being able to get the cases to court. There are a number of factors underpinning this. First is the fact that the Security Service is not empowered with the same powers of arrest as the police and, more importantly, few of its officers have any real experience within or knowledge of the legal system; once the security services have swooped everything passes out of their hands and starts a slow grind along the police/Crown Prosecution Service conveyor belt. As a result it seems likely (and I don't KNOW, obviously, but I've read and heard enough to put the pieces together with what I reckon has a certain whif of truth about it) that the Security Service and the police/CPA are not reading from the same hymn sheet and the Security Service is building cases on evidence that ultimately turns out either to be insufficient to lead to prosecution or simply inadmissable in court.

On top of this there is the ongoing debate over standards of evidence in terrorism prosecution. The claim that the Security Service often cannot proceed with prosecutions in open court for fear of compromising sources and methods should not be dismissed out of hand (for an accessible look at this, Michael Smith's "The Spying Game" [not to be uncritically relied upon with regard to its coverage of the conflict in Ulster] provides a basic popular account of some of the issues). Additionally, the breezy claims of opponents of change that "We coped ok with the IRA without any of this nonsense" don't really stand up to scrutiny. Apart from the fact that a number of extraordinary measures were introduced to deal with the Irish threat, a number of the cases in which Republican suspects were convicted in British courts on charges that were later thrown out on the grounds of the security forces fixing up the evidence may well have occured not due to a desire on the part of the powers that be to just lock up any random Paddy they could pin something on but due to the fact that they believe they knew suspects were guilty without being able to prove it under the system then in existence (this doesn't necessarily excuse the actions of the security services, it's just an attempt to illustrate that the notion of everything being peachy and workable during the Troubles doesn't entirely stand up - though the flip side is that it also lends weight to the argument that the security forces can't be trusted to keep their own house in order).

So I think it's a blurry picture and I do wonder to what extent the attempt to push for 90 day detention was a trade-off against keeping current evidentiary (is that a word?) standards unsullied. What surprises me is the extent to which it doesn't really seem to have surfaced in the popular debate, with the government's side accusing opponents of being soft on terrorism and motivated by rank opportunism and the government's opponents accusing the government of introducing an "apartheid" system that will, hoover-like, suck massed ranks of Muslim youth into the dustbag of Islamikaze wackiness.

Anyway, I'm buggered if I know and frankly I think the recent debate has generated far more heat than light. I do know that if the 90 day mechanism had gone through and the current arrest:prosecution ratio endured we would be looking at an unmitigated disaster. I also know that we'd be crossing a painful threshold, whether the Man In The Pub recognises it or not. Had I been an MP I would have voted against. But I think there may well be a case to be made that the system as it stands doesn't work and for all the ranting that has gone on over the past few weeks I feel that we aren't really any closer to real clarity and joined-up thinking on the issue, at least not in the public forum.

Booknotes

2005-11-15T12:36:00.000-05:00

Robert Citino has a new book out. I personally rate his two-part work on the development of operational warfare highly and I look forward to seeing what interpretations he comes up with. Any attempt to espy a consistent "way in warfare" from the 18th century to the fall of Berlin runs the risk of running into generalisation and selectivity, but on the evidence of his previous work I suspect that Citino will give a balanced, if not uncontroversial, account of German military merits and flaws. Might well be worth checking out - and if you're American it's so bloody cheap!

Also, Robert Doughty's latest book is out. Any serious treatment of the French part in the Great War in the English language is very welcome indeed and I look forward to reading it. For a long time my pat contribution to any conversation or debate regarding gaps in the historiography of the war was that we needed a decent English language treatment of the French role - Anthony Clayton's "Paths of Glory" eventually emerged to fill the gap to a good degree; I suspect that Doughty's work is likely to take things somewhat further.

Mother of Pearl

2005-11-14T15:47:00.000-05:00

I've got 42 comments in my last post and I'm not even going to begin to commence to look. Even the lure of the possibility of endless links to free pictures of young ladies in various states of undress will not motivate me to do so.

So I was at an awards do tonight and one of the members of staff comes up to me.

"Hey-a Anthony," he said, "Why-a you-a no write-a on da blog-a no more?"

Not really. He's not Italian. Or a Disney animation. But considering pretty much every fortnight for the past two months I've found myself thinking, "gosh," (note to American readers: that means "gee") "I really ought to do some writing on the old website", I figured I may as well apply grubby finger to sticky keyboard and churn something out.

That and the fact that the Amateur Gourmet has a book deal and there is no motivation in this world as powerful as burning, psychotic, staring-eyed jealousy.

So... what's in the news today.

Well as some of you will no doubt be aware, the Red Chinese have been in town and I've had to put up the sight of their grotty flags dangling off every public building between Pimlico and the Strand. Plus, apparently in order to impress Mr Poo, or whatever his name is, various artistic landmarks were bathed in red light as a form of tribute over the weekend.

Now, I'm all for harmonious relations with non-democratic, student-killing, monkeybrain-eating police state mentalists (they make such damnably good t-shirts), but it seems to me that this was gilding the lily somewhat. Overegging the pudding, if you will. It's almost as bad as when Jiang Zemin went to France and the French acted like the bloody French.

In other news, Paul McCartney has broadcast a live performance to the international space station. A splendid performance that almost succeeded in distracting my attention from the highly suspect rich chestnut brown colour his hair has taken on over the past couple of years.

Oooh, crikey...

2005-08-29T18:44:00.000-04:00

I completely forgot, Dan Todman also co-edited Alanbrooke's diaries.

Explain to him again, as you would a child...

2005-08-29T17:48:00.000-04:00

The Krepinevich article is creating a buzz. First off, read it. Second off, I agree with virtually all of it, which will come as no surprise whatsoever to regular readers.

I'm not sure, at the time of writing, what I've got to contribute to the general blather, so I figured I'd reproduce an email reply I sent on the topic (without permission, but given that it's me ranting I imagine it will be ok) yesterday. It's rather intemperate, I admit (and yes, I know the presence of words highlighted by typing them in capital letters means I'm completely, completely, irretrievably mental).

Great stuff, agree with almost all of it.

But again, THIS IS COIN 101!!!! It frustrates me so much that two years in
people like Krepinevich can come up with this and people can react like it's
something novel. David Brooks has a column on it and it makes me want to grind
my teeth to dust. Two bloody years into this bloody insurgency...

The truth is that I could have written most of this two years ago (if I was able
to string it together in as coherent a manner as Krepinevich has). I offer
this up not as testimony to my own brilliance (though I did get some
satisfaction when reading Krepinevich's points on the centres of gravity and
the contact initiation metric [which I'm sure you'll be aware I've been banging
the drum for for months]) but to the fact that this really SHOULD, if we had
the right institutional mindset, be stunningly banal stuff. In fact, never mind
two years ago - it's almost criminal that people weren't seriously considering
it BEFORE we went in. I'm sure [*****] would agree. Hell, I'm sure Krepinevich
would agree. Everything in there is stuff we've been over before - population
protection, intelligence-led operations, better co-ordination, White Zones,
CAP-style local presence and small-unit military adviser embedding, Keeni-Meeni
style operations in the Red Zone, an end to (or substantial drawdown of)
"Whack-a-Mole" conventional search and destroy ops.

Basically, what Krepinevich is saying, I'd have been trying - I say trying,
because I know it's far, far easier said than done - to do from day 1. The
problem is that I think the state of opinion both within the administrations,
British and American, and the public at large is now such that the chances of
the powers that be calling a Mulligan and saying we need a substantial
re-jigging for a ten year project are close to zero, even if they do come to
think Krepinevich is broadly right.

Buh?

2005-08-29T05:04:00.000-04:00

I've had a go at the BBC in the past... and I'm going to have a go at them again.

This is an interesting article that draws attention to something worth drawing attention to - the fact that within Kosovo ethnic Serbs are now subjected to a fair amount of intimidation and sometimes open violence. Not on the scale the Serbs themselves inflicted on others, of course, but the bottom line is that that's not the point and we should be aware of these things happening and ask questions as regards what we can do about them.

But the phrasing of the pice suddenly seems a bit odd:

In March 2004, 19 people were killed and hundreds more injured in an explosion of anti-Serb violence in Kosovo. It was the worst violence in Kosovo since 1999, when a Nato bombing campaign ended a Serb crackdown.

Crackdown? I know it is official BBC policy to be exquisitely mealy-mouthed about these things but this seems to me to be a startlingly evasive characterisation of what the Serbs actually carried out. Pretty bloody limp in my view.

On a not-unrelated note, see this article in the Times today. I've written before of the tendency of the television news media to make strenuos assertions about supposed "overwhelming majority of law-abiding" people who "unequivocally condem" things in the face of polling evidence that suggests that, actually, they don't. Sometimes these assertions are even followed up by vox pops that make them sound pretty hollow in the first place, even while the editorial underpinning stresses that everything is just wonderful. Mostly it happens with regard to the Muslim community, but as the article notes this is actually just the most common example. You can understand the thinking behind it, of course and its not entirely reprehensible as such. But that doesn't stop it being bullshit.

Yup

2005-08-26T03:17:00.000-04:00

Michael Totten on the recent Israel situation

"Israel has four options.

1) Rule the West Bank and Gaza forever while denying Palestinians citizenship and equal rights. Basically, this is the South African apartheid model. The fact that Israel acquired those lands in self-defense in 1967 doesn't change that.
2) Grant citizenship and equal rights to Palestinians. This would make Jews an ethnic minority in Israel only a few years from now. They'll never do it.
3) Forcibly relocate (in other words, ethnically cleanse) Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza.
4) Withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.

A debate over when Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza is an argument worth having. Perhaps it’s best that Sharon is pulling out of Gaza now. Maybe it would be better if he waited. We won’t really know for certain until we can look back in hindsight and see what happens next.

But if “Israel should be under Jewish rule” forever, as Pat Robertson claims, that means Israel has to choose one of the first three options. None are even remotely viable. Jewish morality and experience rightly forbids options one and three. Hardly anyone on either the Israeli or the Palestinian side has any desire to see option two implemented. That leaves only option four. The West Bank and Gaza will not, cannot, remain under Jewish rule. Israelis leave now or later because they have no other choice."

I actually have my concerns re: the West Bank, largely because of the water situation, but broadly speaking you wouldn't want to disagree with any of that.

If memory serves, Barbara Amiel was at one point very much in favour of Option 3 with the added twist that while doing it the Israelis should threaten first strike use of tactical nuclear weapons against anyone who tried to intervene to stop it. I seem to remember it was around that point that I switched to the Times.

The Drezner Challenge

2005-08-26T03:04:00.000-04:00

Dan Drezner challenges his readers to come up with plausible candidates for which international figure self-appointed moral arbiter Pat "Let's give lots of money to Charles Taylor" Robertson would like the CIA to blow up next.

For what it's worth, my nominees are as follows.

- Whoever is Prime Minister of Canada in two years time.
- Kofi Annan
- Winona Ryder
- Desmond Tutu
- Tinky-Winky
- That gay bloke out of Fright Night, (not the late Roddy McDowall, the other one)
- Salman Rushdie

Goodbye to all that...

2005-08-26T02:25:00.000-04:00

Via Mark Grimsley, I note an interesting post by Esther MacCallum-Stewart on her excellent site regarding Brian Bond's "The Unquiet Western Front".

For what it's worth, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and, generally speaking, agree wholeheartedly with its central thesis, which will be obvious to anyone who has read post on Wilfred Owen. I would echo one of the inhabitants of Esther's comments box in noting that I think she perhaps misinterprets Professor Bond's argument in implying that his stance is that literature is somehow inherently bad or misleading or soppy gloop.

In reality I'd classify Bond's argument as encompassing two broad strands.

1) In reading Great War literature, both generally and with a view to employing it as a piece of historical source material, people have generally been deeply selective in precisely WHICH pieces of literature they have chosen to use, with the result that what one sees, over and over again, is not a sweeping canvas but a torn fragment of the whole picture - and a misleading fragment at that.

2) Those very selective examples of the Great War canon that we reliably choose to lavish our time, approval and quotation passages on (Owen, Sassoon, Sheriff etc etc etc) are, in turn, rarely placed within any sort of reliable context and, lacking that context, their impact on the popular imagination leads to distortion and their use as historical source material has been and remains rather dubious.

Smashing

2005-08-26T02:22:00.000-04:00

Excellent – Dan Todman, a First World War specialist who co-edited this (excellent) book with Gary Sheffield now has his own blog. I’d encourage all readers to visit it as so far it looks first class. Looking forward to seeing where he takes it.

Flypaper, Shmypaper

2005-08-26T02:19:00.000-04:00

Gregory Djerejian has an uncanny habit of saying largely what I’ve been thinking but am too clumsy/lazy to put into words effectively. Do read Gregory Djerejian has an uncanny habit of saying largely what I’ve been thinking but am too clumsy/lazy to put into words effectively. Do read his new post on precisely what’s wrong with the so-called “Flypaper Strategy”.

He notes ten reasons, but here are the most important. The others are good, but you really only need these:

1) It assumes there exists a set, finite number of insurgents that we need only kill in order to achieve victory.

2) It presupposes that it offers a strategy that will kill terrorists faster than they are created.

3) It assumes that the attrition being inflicted upon the enemy provides a greater blow to them than the training, experience and in-country tradecraft development they now have access to is benefiting them.

4) It’s just plain immoral.

To this I’d add:

5) It requires the almost certainly fallacious supposition that we, fighting a limited war with necessarily limited means, will have more staying power than an almost pathologically committed adversary who is quite willing to commit to a total (by their lights) conflict with total means.

On point 1, it really is just so blindingly obvious that the fact it apparently needs restating makes me want to fall to my knees and scream like some sort of flaked-out, drug-addled U.S. GI in an Oliver Stone film. We’re talking COIN 101 here. You cannot work on the assumption that the insurgent pool is finite and that whatever you do, as long as you gut nasty guys the numbers will go down. It doesn’t work like that.

As for the morality of the situation, well my personal view is that it’s pretty much immoral. Now, that’s not necessarily a problem in the international sphere. But first of all it had better damn well be effective – and it isn’t. And second of all if you are a commentator and you are going to espouse this theory, don’t then come about spouting all your “Oh we are spreading freedom and building a wonderful new Iraq and we are so moral, blah, blah, blah” at me. Just don’t even begin to commence to think about it. Because the fact of the matter is that the Iraqi people are your pawns. And that’s it. That really is it. And if you can’t see that, well I can only shrug as though I were a Frenchman. And I hate that.

On a last point, Gregory does a good job of putting the theory in historical context. It’s often said by critics of the war that the “liberation” side of the justification for the conflict was all cooked up after the event as a smokescreen to cover for the fact that no WMD were uncovered. I don’t think this is fair, in fact I think it’s plain wrong. I do believe, quite genuinely, that many in the US administration and the British government alike (though the British politicos were less happy to state it outright by virtue of their more legalistic approach to making the case) saw the conflict as a happy convergence of national interest and genuine goodness – hell, I saw it that way at the time. The “Flypaper Theory” however, emerged entirely after the fact as one of the endless “hidden good news stories” cooked up by sections of the commentariat in order to make what was actually a situation going rapidly tits-up appear as though part of a wonderfully subtle, well thought out and brilliantly conceived strategy on the part of the Bush administration. It could have died in the cradle, but unfortunately a surprisingly large number of people who, in the immortal words of Quentin Tarantino, “should have f***ing better known better” decided to pick it up and run with it. The fact that so many people give it credibility two years on makes me want to gnaw my own feet off.

Off Topic

2005-08-18T00:11:00.000-04:00

Oscar Peterson gets his own stamp. Very cool. The main thing about Peterson's two main trios is that you look at their discography and it's one great album after another and then you realise that on top of that they spent just as much time if not more backing up pretty much every major name that was ever out there at one time or another. Stunningly good stuff.

Mind you, that Diana Krall - pretty much lift (elevator to my transatlantic chums) muzak these days since she went to Verve (ouch! Can't believe I said that. Painful but true).

I hope that drunk bloke doesn't go mental...

2005-08-17T23:49:00.000-04:00

Over at the Civil War Bookshelf there are extracts from a just plain bizarre interview with James McPherson.

This struck me as especially choice:

This is a volume in the series Gary Gallagher ... is editing for the University of North Carolina Press. [...] About a dozen books are scheduled for the series, on the both the military and nonmilitary aspects of the war. Since I had become interested in the naval war, especially when I edited the Lamson letters with my wife Patricia a few years ago, I asked Gary if I could do the naval volume in his series.

Boggle.

The whole thing is pretty rum to be honest.

Also see this follow-up.

Iraq....

2005-08-17T23:36:00.000-04:00

Interesting Intel Dump post by Jonathan Caverly on the emerging situation in Iraq.

I'd like to write something trying to put some sort of context into the recent coverage of the situation in Basra following Steve Vincent's murder but to be honest I just can't summon up the energy to do so yet.

On the issue of whether Iranian influence is increasing the answer, it seems to me, is an unequivocal Yes.

On the issue of permenant American bases, IF that comes on the table - while it's plausible that there will be Iraqi politicians concerned about growing Iranian influence in Iraq (Sunnis and some Shia) it is going to be well nigh impossible to make the case that permenant American basing in the country once the insurgency is suppressed is in any way whatsoever representative of the will of the Iraqi people. Hell, I don't believe it. I'll say that flat out right now. I would also throw into the mix the notion that it might actually result in the replacement (or augmentation) of a Sunni insurgency by a Shia one.

Anyway, enough of that for now. Go read the Intel Dump piece and give it a chew over

FUBAR

2005-08-17T23:17:00.000-04:00

I would expect a major brouhaha to erupt over the next 24 hours (well, it's already started...) regarding the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menendez by British armed police on the 22nd July. It appears that pretty much everything we thought we "knew" about the incident may well have been... well... bollocks.

I supported the police at the time and still would were the circumstances as set out then to be accurate. However, the apparent (we still don't know) revised circumstances seem to me to make the whole issue substantially more of a grey area - at best.

The real issue though is that we now smell the rank stench of a coverup.

For a month we were led to believe he was was wearing a bulky coat that was believed (reasonably but incorrectly) to be concealment for a bomb.

He wasn't.

That he was challenged by officers emerging from a suspected-terrorist safehouse.

He wasn't.

That, upon being challenged, he ran away from them.

He didn't.

That so frantic to escape was he that he barged into an underground station, vaulting the passenger barriers to get to a train.

He walked into the station and bought a ticket the usual way, pausing to buy a newspaper as he did so.

Even if you allow that the error made by the police was within the bounds of merely tragic and not incompetent (an argument that is feasable, though not to anything like the extent it used to be), these are vast differences with the story that came out at the time and the public have been allowed to run with it for a month during which the police have variously encouraged that interpretation of events or done nothing to disabuse Joe Public of any inaccuracy. We also know that in the aftermath senior police officers, including Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, made strenuous attempts to prevent the opening of an independent inquiry.

Although all the facts are not yet in, today's revelations are certainly enough for very legitimate concern. The question rather becomes one of who knows what and for how long have they known it?

My gut instinct is that Sir Ian will be gone by Monday. More likely rightly than not.

He's dead, Jim...

2005-08-17T23:00:00.000-04:00

James Booth, the actor who played Private Henry Hook VC in Zulu, has died aged 77.

I've already done a post on the rainbow array of glaring historical inaccuracies in the film (which is, nontheless, a great film) and I won't rehearse them all here but...

But his portrayal of Private Henry Hook as a thieving drunk would later inspire a campaign to restore the reputation of the Victoria Cross-winning soldier.

Frankly, it's scarcely surprising. Short of the fact that he won the VC, the Hook portrayed in the film could not have been a greater contrast to the real man if the scriptwriters had tried (ironically, the writer behind the film, John Prebble, was himself a sometime historian). In the film Hook is seen as a drunk, a malingerer, a cheat and a thug, who finds mean redemption in the battle). In reality, Hook was a teetotaller, a hard worker and one of the most popular figures in the battalion among both officers and men, with a repuation for kindness, generosity and conscientiousness (and a doting father and husband). Indeed, he was only present in the hospital at the time of the attack because he had volunteered to take on extra duty assisting Surgeon-Major Reynolds.

Makes U-571 and The Patriot seem like pretty small fry in comparison!

Apologies...

2005-08-17T22:58:00.000-04:00

Forgive the long absence. I've had various things on the boil and minimal time and less inclination to write anything. In all honesty I've been avoiding the news somewhat over the past couple of week, beyond the daily chew through the BBC website. Burned out or something.

Robin Cook dead at 59

2005-08-06T14:43:00.000-04:00

What it says on the tin. Christ. Quite a shock.

Cook was always regarded as one of the smartest of the Labour Party's big hitters but always lacked a personal following within the Commons, which was seen to put something of a damper on his ambitions.

For my part I thought he was mostly wrong in office (not that this is particularly a minority opinion, much of his pre-1997 promise was widely seen to evaporate once he actually got behind the controls - "The man with the ethical foreign policy and the unethical home affairs policy", as somebody in the defence community quipped a couple of years ago) and mostly wrong out of office. To his credit, when he decided to resign he did so and he went, in marked contrast to Clare Short (though the sight of him being given hearty congratulations by Frank Dobson after his speech in the Iraq debate still makes my eyeballs bleed). It may conceivably be that time bears out that he was correct in his actions. However, my personal view is that his post-war musings have been not merely wrong but dangerously wrong, most notably in his notion (shared by the Lib Dems) that come what may Anglo-American forces should be pulled out and replaced by UN troops that don't even exist on paper and would not emerge even were we to withdraw. That said, I saw him on This Week a few weeks ago and I thought he largely gave a nuanced (wrong, but nuanced) and honest performance.

All this said, he was one of the big beasts in the Westminster jungle, 59 is no age these days and his presence on the scene will be missed by most observers (dare I say it, comedy impressionists perhaps most of all). RIP.

UPDATE:

I've done Cook something of a disservice. I completely forgot his response to the Scott Report on the arms to Iraq scandal, which Michael White, the Guardian's political editor (and a minor league national treasure in his own right, bless 'im) was flagging up on BBC News 24. A genuinely inspired and skilful piece of work and perhaps one of the most important indvidual contributions on the floor of the Commons in recent(ish) political history.

Joyner on McCaffrey on Iraq

2005-08-06T08:29:00.000-04:00

James Joyner has a roundup of points from a recent report (PDF) by reitred General Barry McCaffrey. Well worth a look and certainly at first glance (I haven't had time to fully digest it yet) the report looks like good stuff.

I hesitate to zoom in on a single negative when there's a fair bit in there that's "trending" positive, but I note that it seems Fallujah is a right bloody mess. I only note this because the city is still pretty much a news blackout with remarkably little solid information coming out of it (apart from the inevitable heartwarming good news stories about prancing children and bustling bazaars). And also because it's what I already suspected.

Hrrrgh.

2005-08-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

The focus of this site is meant to be on broadly non-political things of a serious nature, so I'll try to make this the last post of its type for a while but until then...

Fresh from claiming that the London bombings were quite possibly not carried out by Muslims and that al Qaeda is a plot cooked up by the CIA, the chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, one of the biggest, if not the biggest in the UK, has announced that the Prime Minister is akin to Hitler and that proposed anti-terror legislation could be the first step in a project not unlike Nazi treatment of the Jews.

While we wait for his constituents, who purely by the law of averages must largely be made up of the Overwhelming Majority Of Moderate Muslims, to condemn the chairman's statements over the past fortnight and demand his resignation, I suggest passing the time by laughing at his hilarious wig.

UPDATE:

Oh lawks, looks like there's no point waiting. It's not that I am not acutely aware of the possible civil liberties implications of new anti-terror legislation. Nor, in fairness, can moderate Muslims be expected to come grovelling every time one among their number says something crappy. However, this is a running story regarding a major figure within the British Islamic community and I do find the apparent deafening silence annoying. Apart from criticism from the local Labour MP, who is a Muslim, everyone else seems more or less willing to give him a silent pass and his constituents appear to endorse him. It would be a substantial boon, in my view, if somebody from the MCB or a similar groups was prepared to come forward and say, "Actually, unrepresentative though they were, it is very hard to dispute that the London bombers were Muslims. Actually, al Qaeda is not a fraudulent concoction of the CIA and is a real threat that we need to deal with, though we may differ on quite how to do that. And actually, although we may have civil-liberties related concerns regarding the imposition of new terrorism legislation and we feel these need to be subject to intense scrutiny, it is neither helpful nor reasonable for one of the major public authority figures in our community to compare the Prime Minister to Adolf Hitler." But apparently that is too much to ask.

Through a glass, darkly.

2005-08-05T21:02:00.000-04:00

I doubt it will have escaped anyone's attention that we're looking at the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

The event was an historical landmark and deserves to be treated as such. It was also clearly a human tragedy. However, my personal view is that much of the ethical debate that has inevitably and understandably resurfaced is largely sterile as it tends to involve placing an ahistorical and arbitrary partition between the nuclear bombings and the conventional bombing campaign that followed it.

This is a mistake, as to do so removes a lot of the context from the debate. It is important to recognise that, immense though the devastation was, it was not, in fact, conventional devastation of an order of magnitude particularly removed from that inflicted in the Combined Bomber Offensive in the ETO or - more relevantly - in the massive incendiary bombing sweeps conducted by the USAAF over Japan in the months leading up to the atomic bombs being dropped.

What we get in this case is two wild cards, both of which tend to play on an emotional level - the fact that the devastation was caused by a single bomb on the one hand and the radiation factor on the other. The former tends to invoke an understandable horror, but it is highly questionable whether that alone sets the atomic bombing as a breed apart, ethically speaking. The radiation is a double whammy in that it continued to kill long after the fact and the outbreak of peace and it plays to the natural, instinctive repulsion felt by human beings at the notion of "poison" (which is of a piece with notions of the "beastliness" of poison gas in the Great War and undoubtedly has a substantially fuller pedigree that laziness prevents full documentation here). However, at the time the bombs were dropped, the implications of the radiation were recognised hazily at most, with numerous American scientists, boffins and soldiers present at the creation subsequently popping off at a not especially ripe age and many theorists more worried about the possibility of chain reactions that would cause the planet to blow up.

The point is not that no ethical debate is justified, but that any ethical debate makes little real sense if the bombings are placed in a vacuum. I would contend that to set them apart from the conventional bombing campaign is a serious mistake and one that will generate far more heat than light.

Quotation of the Day

2005-08-05T20:50:00.000-04:00

Enola Gay
You should have stayed at home yesterday
Words can’t describe
The feeling and the way you lied

These games you play
They’re gonna end in more than tears someday
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way

It’s 8:15, and that’s the time that it’s always been
We got your message on the radio, condition's normal and you’re coming home

Enola Gay
Is mother proud of Little Boy today?
This kiss you give
It’s never ever gonna fade away

Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away

It’s 8:15 and that’s the time that it’s always been
We got your message on the radio, condition's normal and you’re coming home

Enola Gay
Is mother proud of Little Boy today?
This kiss you give
It’s never ever gonna fade away...

Those new anti-terror provisions

2005-08-05T14:03:00.000-04:00

Roundups here and here.

We're in a very delicate period. The attacks on London invite rushed legislation, pushed through with minimal scrutiny in a very tense environment. Although the notion that rushed legislation in response to a specific event is generally bad legislation is a cliche, it has the very real virtue of being true.

Let's have a shufti at some of the things being proposed:

New anti-terrorism legislation in the autumn, to include an offence of condoning or glorifying terrorism anywhere, not just in the UK

All for it in principle. In fact it seems to me long overdue. How enforcable it will be remains to be seen. Let's finally get round to the notion that there are some foreign buggers we just don't want in the country.

The addition of the Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun Islamist organisations to the list of prohibited groups

My gut response to this is to be annoyed that it took bombings in London to put this on the table. Quite what the impact will be I'm not sure though.

An examination of the possibility of longer pre-charge detention for terrorism suspects

I'm open to convincing on this - but unless we're talking about a process under the scrutiny of independent judicial review I'd say no.

Consultation with Muslim leaders about drawing up a list of those not suitable to preach, who will be excluded from Britain

In principle I agree - we need to start freezing people out (and we need to start producing domestically trained imams too rather than importing them from Saudi and Pakistan). In practice though "Muslim leaders" is bound to include the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MAB, who are part of the problem. As it is I don't know whether this will be worth the paper it's written on.

Agreements with other countries, such as Jordan, to ensure people can be deported to their nations of origin without being tortured or ill-treated

Hahaha. We may as well be frank here - these agreements are unlikely to be worth the paper they are written on. We need to decide openly whether our national security means that we are prepared to send people off into a situation where they are likely to have electrodes attached to their goolies. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But this seems to me to be a particularly slimy way of going about things.

Home secretary automatically to consider deporting any foreigner involved in listed extremist bookshops, centres, organisations and websites

Great - except that we are likely to run into the electrodes/Betty Swollocks interaction scenario mentioned above.

Automatically refuse asylum to anyone with anything to do with terrorism anywhere

In principle, fine. But again... see above. And I can see real implementation problems.

Use more control orders against British terror suspects, who cannot be deported

Again, independent judicial review please...

Increase the number of special judges hearing terror cases

Maybe, though I do wonder whether we need reforms in other (largely evidence-based) areas too.

Review the threshold for gaining British citizenship and establish, with the Muslim community, a commission to advise how to better integrate parts of the community "presently inadequately integrated"

High time, in my view.

Create a list of foreign preachers who will be kept out of the UK and consult on creating new powers to close places of worship used to foment extremism

Yup.

But - and it's a BIG but - here's the really big issue.

Consultation to strip citizenship from naturalised citizens engaged in terrorism

To quote loosely from a former Prime Minister - No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No.

No, no, no.

No.

Nope, nup, no.

Citizenship is not something to be taken lightly. We have given it too lightly in the past. That must now change, the better to deal with the future. But I am very, very, very uncomfortable with the idea that somebody's citizenship - and presumably the protections and rights that go with it - could be stripped away. This is a bad, bad idea, a bridge too far and I hope there will be vigorous opposition to it.

This is not to say we don't have a problem - largely a self-created problem. But talking about removing citizenship is not the way to deal with it. This means that it will be harder to deal with existing problems than it will be to reduce future problems, but it is an entirely necessary restraint in my view.

4GW Books

2005-08-04T15:47:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting "Ten Best" 4GW book list up at Defence and the National Interest.

It's nice to see, once again, John Nagl's brilliant counterinsurgency book getting another plug. That said, there are a few areas where I'd take issue.

Fizzy Gravy

First off, I'm not sure I'd list Bunker's "Non-State Threats and Future Wars" in the top ten. It's a smashing little collection in its own right, including reflections on their classic texts by Martin van Creveld and Ralph Peters, but I don't think it's particularly earth shattering as a whole - especially when one considers what books didn't make the cut.

One of my general criticisms of 4GW theorists is that they tend, in my view at least, to have a strange blind spot for classical counterinsurgency theory and texts. Lukin, in fairness, doesn't quite fall into this trap, but I think some of his core choices require context. Mao is, of course, classic and fundamental but it's important to put it into context - since Vietnam, most Maoist insurgencies have fallen flat on their arses.

I'm also wary of anything that is set up as providing insight into "the Eastern style of warfare". There isn't one. In fact "Eastern" styles of warfare are many and varied between and within China, Japan, SE Asia and the Indian subcontinent.* None of this is to say that various Oriental texts lack usefulness, merely that we need to be wary of a selective and indiscriminate reading of history and varied regional strategic cultures.

Finally - although it only makes the "Honourable Mention" section of the list - in spite of the fact that it widely has the term "classic" stapled to it I reckon you could afford to give Taber's "War of the Flea" a miss. It's not valueless but it's very much of its time and has dated substantially, with a confidence in the effectiveness of guerrilla groups that was largely demolished by events subsequent to its publication ("Che", for example [and his "foco" theory], is seen very much as the Wave Of The Future and it's amusing to read the parts of the book that deal with him, given that not long after the book's publication he got himself very dead indeed in a comedy fashion).

Hand Shandy

I think it's important for anyone interested in the 4GW concept to read quite broadly at this stage and not take it at face value. Although there is much of value emerging, equally lucid critiques exist (and I personally feel that we should be looking at 4GW as a supplement to traditional strategic thinking and threat assessment, not a substitute [which is what many of its advocates are pusing for]):

If you're going to read Bunker's "Non-State Threats", check out this at the same time:

Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom (eds.) - Rethinking the Nature of War

Great collection in a similar format that broadly takes a far more sceptical look at the issues. Also includes defences of 4GW/"New Wars" theories by Mary Kaldor and Martin van Creveld.

Also these:

Colin Gray - Modern Strategy
Colin Gray - Another Bloody Century
David Lonsdale - The Nature of War In the Information Age: Clausewitzian Future
Various readings, primarily by Christopher Bassford, available at Clausewitz.com.
Jeremy Black - War and the New Disorder in the 21st Century
On a final, rather self-glorifying note, I wrote a rather rambling critique of The Transformation of War a while back and I still think that it's more or less right.

On "Western" and "Eastern" ways of war, John Lynn's "Battle: A History of Combat and Culture" is an invaluable counterpoint to the VDH Western Way model.

*Beyond very broad generalisations with variable applicability through history, there isn't a Western Way of Warfare either. Sorry.

On an unrelated note, but one that equally makes me a martyr to my gall bladder....

2005-08-04T14:11:00.000-04:00

An extreme-right wing Jewish terrorist has been lynched after opening up on Israeli Arab bush passengers.

But look:

Israeli security sources described the incident as a "Jewish terror attack".

...

"It seems like Jewish terror against Arabs," police spokesman Avi Zelba told Reuters news agency.

I love the way those wicked, ghastly, racist Israelis are prepared to call a spade a spade on this issue but over here we're still classifying people who blow up cafes full of kids and old women and pluck civilian reconstruction workers off the streets and saw their heads off on camera as "militants".

George Galloway Watch - Part 2,358

2005-08-04T14:00:00.000-04:00

Oh look, more fun.

If this was a few decades ago we'd have strapped this grinning, malevolent son of a bitch to a chair in a courtyard and shot him. I make no value judgement in pointing this out.

The philosophers over at Crooked Timber are beginning to have second thoughts:

To be honest, listening to these orations, my reaction was that this is on the absolute cusp of being the sort of thing that a decent, liberal society ought to be chucking people in jail for.

Well.... duh. But everyone was happy to share a platform with him when it suited them weren't they? "Chatshow" Charlie Kennedy and all. And to give him a platform to rant and pontificate. It's not like it was impossible to see this coming back in the day, but I remember when I and others who pointed out just what sort of a person Gorgeous George is were dismissed as warmongers or told that there was a broader "cause" that was more important than any dodgy affiliations that Galloway and his chums may have. It's not rocket science that the man is a shit of the very first water, it's just that a large number of people chose to ignore the fact until after the Stop the War Coalition was faltering and he'd safely ousted Oona King - shame on them.

One for Matthew...

2005-07-22T18:26:00.000-04:00

Michael J. Totten has an article in the Lebanon Daily Star.

It's interesting, provocative, well-intentioned and, in my personal view, pretty detached from reality (and I think the Cold War analogy is pretty.... bleuurgh) and quite possibly dangerous but worth a read. I can't be bothered banging on about what I don't like about it - if anybody thinks it's the bee's knees, let me know and I'll try to muster a rebuttal.

Bye bye, baby, baby bye...

2005-07-22T17:58:00.000-04:00

Intriguing. The "blogosphere" has claimed a scalp - a justified and eminently worthwhile scalp in my view.

The Guardian and Dilpazier Aslam have, how shall we say, parted company.

The Guardian initially stood by a legalistic defence, arguing that Hizb ut-Tahrir is a legal organisation. So it is. And so is the British National Party and the National Front and if the Guardian found they had a leading BNP or NF activist working for them, he'd be out so fast his feet wouldn't touch the ground.

In fairness to the Guardian, although this result has been slow in coming (and the Guardian's Media section is reacting with extremely bad grace) it seems that many of the actions of their staff in the build-up were undertaken in good faith. But as far as I'm concerned this is the right outcome and I am very, very pleased.

The Guardian has stated that it intends to broaden access to young Muslims with aspirations to succeed in the print news media. This is a perfectly laudable objective. I strongly suggest they hire one of the ones who aren't bigoted Islamist wankers.

Everything changed. Mostly.

2005-07-22T04:49:00.000-04:00

How and why has war changed as a consequence of industrialisation?

“Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim gun and they have not.”

- Hilaire Belloc

“Military organisations rarely have the opportunity to conduct the dirty business of war. In times of peace they cannot replicate wartime conditions: thus they find it difficult to evaluate the implications of technological and doctrinal changes. It is as if surgeons did not perform surgery for decades and then had to execute thousands of operations in cold, damp conditions, without food or sleep and with rivals shooting at them from the balconies of the operating theatres.”

- Williamson Murray

The process of industrialisation played a key role in the development of the conduct of war between the Napoleonic and First World Wars. However, we must from the very outset recognise two stumbling blocks that can impede any analysis of its impact. First and foremost, though it should scarcely need commenting upon, it serves to note that while industrialisation, as we shall see, had enormous impact on the way armies were raised, equipped and supplies, with knock on effects at most levels of the conduct of war, these changes had an impact only on the character of warfare as it developed from the pre-industrial period to the twentieth century – the objective nature of war it altered not a jot[i]. Second of all, it should be noted that industrialisation beckons to the scholar, Will ‘o the Wisp-like, to dip a toe into the intellectual fever swamp of technological determinism and this should be avoided in assessing its impact.[ii] While acknowledging that revolutionary technological change took place between 1815 and 1914 (and accelerated after that), it is also important to take note of two further factors, which will underpin the following analysis: First, the social and political context in which technological developments took place.[iii] Second, the fact that, while a comparison between, for example, a representative field artillery piece of 1815 vintage and an equivalent piece of kit dating from 1914 demonstrated startling improvements in every measure of effectiveness, this apparently revolutionary change represents the result of a string of minor, incremental improvements over time. Key developments linked (though not necessarily solely so) to industrialisation include the railway and telegraph, expansion in the size of armed forces, steam power and armoured fighting ships at sea and key improvements in artillery and infantry weapons. The practical impact of these developments was seen at all levels – strategic, operational and tactical.

At the strategic level, developments in communications were key, though these developments were slow and should not be overstated.[iv] Most dramatically, the development of the telegraph permitted armies in the field to contact their home governments with relative ease. A system of semaphore telegraphs existed in France in the pre-industrial period, but the development of the electric telegraph – first seen in action in the Crimea – represented an improvement in terms of range, speed and reliability, a situation further improved by the introduction of the Marconi wireless telegraph in 1897.[v] However, although communications between governments and their commanders in the field improved, communications between commanders and their troops saw only minimal improvement.[vi] Faced with the emergence of ever-larger armies without a parallel improvement in communications, commanders were forced to devolve control to ever lower levels. The Crimea demonstrated the worst effects of this, as control was devolved without any accompanying doctrine to inform junior officers’ decisions and ensure the dissemination of best practice. The situation had improved by 1870, but not to a drastic extent, as the performance of the Prussian Guards and of Steinmetz’ corps showcased. Methods of communication were relatively inflexible and immobile, a situation that persisted into the First World War.

At the operational level, the advent of the railway made a significant difference over time. Troops could travel greater distances at greater speeds and be maintained in the field for longer periods away from supply depots. Wounded troops could be evacuated and soldiers could depart from the theatre of operations when on leave.[vii] The employment of railways for military means was incremental, starting in the 1830s when various governments earmarked domestic rail systems as a means to facilitate the rapid deployment of troops from barracks towns to suppress internal insurrection (in 1839 the British deployed troops by rail to suppress a Chartist uprising and the Prussians employed a similar move against revolutionaries in Cracow seven years later)[viii] Use of the railway in inter-state conflict emerged in the 1850s, but revealed major limitations, including a lack of co-ordination and the fact that the movement of troops was easier than the rapid and regular movement of supplies. At this point the technological development of the railway was paired with social and political developments in the field of expanding bureaucracy to create viable systems for the rapid, co-ordinated deployment of troops by rail, which reached fruition in the wars of German unification. Problems persisted, such as the fact that the system tended to break down as troops advanced beyond the railhead. However, given that a two-day march could be compressed into a two-hour rail journey, it would be churlish to deny that the railway had an extensive impact.

Naval developments also had a significant impact on logistics and supply. The availability of steam power to the British and French allowed them to sustain their forces in the Crimea and run rings round the Russians, even though the Russians were operating on their home turf. Naval developments showcase the incremental nature underpinning much of the broad revolutionary change of the period.[ix] Auxiliary steam power was introduced in the 1830s, but sails were not abandoned altogether until the 1880s. Shell firing rifled guns made an appearance in the 1840s and the 1860s saw the beginning of the armouring of ships, partly in response to this.[x] In the 1880s, iron cladding was replaced with steel. In the early years of the twentieth century, coal power was replaced with oil. Meanwhile, paddle propulsion had been replaced by the propeller screw. The speed, range and lethality of naval vessels all increased radically during the period covered. It is difficult to find many similarities between an ironclad or Dreadnought and their Napoleonic cousins. However, it is important to note that for all this, the fundamentals of naval warfare and seapower remained much the same in 1914 as they had been in 1815.[xi]

Industrialisation is often linked with the growth in the size of armed forces. This is correct but misleading. Industrialisation was a necessary but not a sufficient condition in explaining the expansion of armed forces. Key factors in the emergence of mass armies were increasing population size and the political will for mass mobilisation, generally emerging through the phenomenon of nationalism.[xii] Additionally, the political scene in much of continental Europe grew to support the idea of linkage between military service and citizenship. The leap in size between ancien regime armies and French revolutionary armies was both greater and substantially more rapid than the leap in army size between 1815 and 1914. In the eighteenth century, armies peaked at around 80,000 men in size. French revolutionary armies could muster up to 600,000. To place the armies of industrialisation in perspective, in 1870 the Prussians were able to deploy 1,200,000 men and in 1914 Germany put 3,400,000 men in the field.[xiii] These were major increases, but clearly it is inadequate merely to place credit at the door of industrialisation. It is also important to note that due to a combination of different strategic concerns, geopolitical factors and social and political mores, neither Britain – for much of the period the gold standard for industrialised power – nor the United States (with the dramatic exception of the American Civil War, which displayed a fusion of emerging industrial methods and technology and pre-nineteenth century national mobilisation) maintained large conscript armies. The equation industrialisation = significant army expansion is simply not good enough. What industrialisation did was to make these armies more sustainable. Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies largely had to subsist off the land they occupied.[xiv] Thus, when the Russian campaign took place the logistical and supply system quickly collapsed and insufficient food could be foraged. Industrialisation permitted these armies to be supplied in a reasonably efficient manner (though the Crimean War demonstrates that there was a steep learning curve) both through the railway and the advent of the steam ship and through the advent of canned food on a large scale.[xv]

Industrialisation also helped states sustain prolonged war efforts. This development is first showcased through the example of Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain certainly benefited from nascent industrialisation and the fruits of industrial production would spread both horizontally and vertically as the nineteenth century progressed. However, the sustainability of the British war effort also stemmed from factors not related to industrialisation – notably the development of banking methods and the establishment of a modern system of credit. These different factors were mutually supporting and self-sustaining, a pattern common in much of the development seen through the period of industrialisation.

The development of artillery provides another excellent case study in the incremental nature of much of the development and reform that took place during the period. Modern quick-firing artillery was the end result of many different and often unrelated improvements that came together to form a more or less revolutionary whole. The constituent developments can be identified as; smokeless powder, developed in 1861 but not widely deployed until a decade later, which not only permitted artillery units to fire without revealing their position but increased the power of the charge and therefore the range of the shot and resulted in a relatively high-visibility battlefield so that this increased range could be employed productively; the 1852 Boxer time fuse for shrapnel shells, which made explosive shells increasingly reliable and discriminate; the percussion fuse which emerged in 1870; the recoilless gun carriage (permitting the gun to be fired repeatedly without time-consuming re-laying of the 1890s; the auto-ejecting breech block, also of the 1890s, which massively increased firing speed from an average of three rounds a minute to between fifteen and thirty and – most importantly – mid-nineteenth century standardisation of machine tools and the development in the 1860s of increasingly efficient methods of steel production which increased output and decreased cost (between 1865 and 1879, British steel production quadrupled).[xvi] Many of these developments fed into each other and showcase the impact of industrialisation in microcosm. Steel was available prior to the 1860s and had many advantages – notably strength and lightness. However, the manufacturing capability did not exist to exploit it in a cost effective manner. Similarly, breech loading guns had long been available, from breech loading fixed naval guns from the pre-industrial age to the 1855 Armstrong breech loading system. However, production in iron was not satisfactory in terms of either safety or reliability and until the 1860s, muzzle loading remained more reliable. It was the drawing of these different developments together that ultimately produced a “revolutionary” weapon and the revolutionary nature of the change is most obvious in hindsight. Certainly there was no technological “big bang” for serving officers at the time.

The development of artillery and of rifle technology (a similarly incremental tale – if not more so - that resulted in significantly increased range, accuracy, weight of fire [the latter being more important than the former], rate of fire and – an important point that is often overlooked – bullet penetration) had a significant impact at the tactical level.[xvii] This is most often seen to manifest itself in the “empty battlefield” from the latter stages of the American Civil War onwards, where weapon lethality resulted in infantry going to ground. Part and parcel of this was the emergence of fire-and-manoeuvre tactics, the fundamentals of which persist to this day relatively unchanged. The recognition that massed frontal assaults were costly (though, contrary to popular belief, the historical record does not support the notion that frontal assaults were rendered futile) resulted in a focus on flanking manoeuvres at both the operational and the tactical levels. This was perceived to require ever-larger conscript fighting forces and yet paradoxically, manoeuvre, decentralised command and tactical flanking was seen as beyond the grasp of conscripts, which contributed to some of the confusion in the development of theories of attack in the run-up to the First World War (culminating in the first day on the Somme, where plans were devised, reasonably enough in theory, around the perceived limitations in performance of very raw non-regular troops).[xviii]

It is also of paramount importance to note that one of the key advances – if not the key advance - provided by industrialisation was to make existing theoretical ideas practical.[xix] We have already seen that ideas for “modern” cannon existed before the technological advances that brought them into general use existed. The point is that a good idea may have no military utility if it cannot be produced in good time, in large numbers and at reasonable cost. History is littered with ideas that came before their time and the supposedly reactionary ways of the top brass rarely provide for a realistic explanation for their failure. Major Patrick Ferguson developed a rifle during the American Revolution. It was a very fine piece of kit with many advantages. It could be loaded quickly and fired from prone. It was highly accurate. The breech loading removed the difficulty of forcing the ball ammunition through the rifle grooves. Yet it never went into major production (Ferguson’s small ranger unit was equipped with the weapon and created havoc for the rebels, but when the unit was almost wiped out and Ferguson killed, it lapsed into obscurity), not because British officers were hidebound and mentally deficient, but because brilliant though it was it was simply not practical given the manufacturing methods available at the time. It was a bespoke, labour intensive weapon. Similarly, the Chinese developed gunpowder weapons in the thirteenth century but in order to have broad military utility a weapon must be capable of being produced in large numbers to relatively uniform quality. This was industrialisation’s great achievement.

Bibliography

Beckett, Ian F. W. (2001), The Great War 1914-1918 (Harlow: Pearson)

Black, Jeremy (2004), Rethinking Military History (London: Routledge)

Black, Jeremy, “Determinisms and Other Issues”, The Journal of Military History 68 (October 2004), pp.1217-1232

Black, Jeremy, ed. (2003), War in the Modern World Since 1815 (London: Routledge)

Gray, Colin (1999), Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Holden Reid, Brian (1999), The American Civil War and the Wars of the Industrial Revolution (London: Cassell)

Howard, Michael (1976), War in European History (Oxford, Oxford University Press)

Howes, Philip (1998), The Catalytic Wars (London: Minerva Press)

Jensen, Geoffrey and Wiest, Andrew, eds. (2001), War in the Age of Technology (New York: New York University Press)

Jones, Archer (1987), The Art of Warfare in the Western World (New York: Barnes and Noble)

Knox, MacGregor and Murray, Williamson (2001), The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Lynn, John A. (2003), Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview)

Parker, Geoffrey, ed. (1995), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Prior, Robin and Wilson, Trevor, “Conflict, Technology and the Impact of Industrialisation: The Great War 1914-1918, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol.24, No.3, (September 2001), pp.128-157

Sheffield, Gary (2001), Forgotten Victory: The First World War Myths and Realities (London: Headline)

Smith, Merritt Roe and Marx, Leo, eds. (1994), Does Technology Drive History? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Sondhaus, Lawrence (2001), Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge)

Strachan, Hew (1983), European Armies and the Conduct of War (London: Routledge)

Wawro, Geoffrey (2000) Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792-1914 (London: Routledge)

[i] As indeed it could not. See Gray (1999) in general

[ii] Black (2004i). Technological determinism is the true hobgoblin of small minds. And senior officers in independent air forces. Not that the author suggests that the latter necessarily possesses the former.

[iii] On revolutionary change, see Knox & Murray (2001), p.77. On the oft neglected role of social and political factors in the historiography, see Black (2004), pp.104-111 and Black, ed. (2003), p.201

[iv] Black, ed. (2003), p.202

[v] Strachan (1983), p.124

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Howard (1976), p.98

[viii] Howard (1976), p.97; Holden Reid (1999), p.25

[ix] Parker, ed. (1995), p.243

[x] Wawro (2000), p.54

[xi] Black, ed. (2003), p.205. The new requirement for coaling stations and other refuelling points represents one area of change.

[xii] Strachan (1983), pp. 108-109 and Wawro (2000), p.3

[xiii] Howard (1976), p.99

[xiv] The Duke of Wellington’s Peninsula army represents a notable exception and there is something good waiting to be written on the positive impact the relatively sophisticated and thorough logistical system employed by Wellington had on British operational and strategic performance. That said, it should be noted that the British enjoyed the advantage of a relatively small army and the luxury of operating on friendly territory.

[xv] Methods for preserving food in sealed glass bottles predated the industrial period. This was very much a bespoke practice, however and the productions of the necessary materials was time consuming and labour intensive. The advent of tin canning allowed existing methods to be reproduced reliably and in bulk.

[xvi] See, variously, Wawro (2000), p.153; Strachan (1983), p.111 and Howes (1998), p.153-65

[xvii] On the weight of fire vs. accuracy and individual marksmanship debate, see Jensen & Wiest, eds. (2001), pp.29-34

[xviii] Black, ed. (2003), p.204. Trivia: As is more of less common knowledge by now, the photograph of advancing troops is actually of a mock advance staged as part of the filming of a propaganda film to boost morale during the Great War. However, audiences at the time were not aware of this, believing it to be footage from the front - the film is widely regarded as being one of the first exposures of home front audiences to the ghastliness of frontline combat - and it backfired. Tickets for the first showing of the film were in great demand and the audience arrived in collective high spirits but at the point when one of the advancing troops (apparently) falls dead in the wire, a woman in the audience cried out "Mr God! Oh my God, they're dying! They're dying!" An uproar ensued, with a number of female members of the audience becoming hysterical.

[xix] Black (2004), pp.114-116

For want of anything better to do...

2005-07-22T04:25:00.000-04:00

I've been struggling to come up with some military history content recently with no success, so I've decided to post up one of my essays from last academic year on industrialisation and warfare. I've tweaked it very slightly but it's largely as originally presented. Please excuse a horrible, negligent error in the endnotes (they appear as footnotes in the original essay, but endnotes plays better on the site). Correct form is that chapters in edited works should be cited by chapter author and title as well as book editor and book title. I neglected to do this and frankly deserved to get my wrists slapped because it's not exactly rocket science. But anyway.

The essay took a very solid First, but the more I look at it the more I would like to change a lot of it - a feeling I get with all my essays regardless of grade. Some things added, some things taken out, newly discovered sources incorporated. But no. Particularly I'd have liked to go into the development of the rifle in a similar manner to my treatment of the artillery piece, but a fixed word limit rendered this impossible. I may have something to say on rifle development - with specific regard to the Dreyse needle gun - in a seperate post. We'll see.

Anyway, hope you find it moderately interesting. I loathe monocausal explanations and techno-centrism and I always emphasise themes of continuity over revolutionary change, as you can probably tell. If it makes you want to put your head through your computer monitor, you know my email address.

Paperback Writer...

2005-07-21T21:36:00.000-04:00

Interesting interview with Ian McEwen.

Whether you agree with Mr McEwen or not (full disclosure: I mostly do), it's refreshing to see a novellist expressing some views that are... well... a bit different. So many people from the arty community these days, they're so drearily predictable it's like they've had their political views and issue stances fed to them on note cards by the same slightly mad, rather flustered person (I've ploughed through two post WW2 "Writers take sides" books, on Vietnam and Iraq, and it was like having teeth pulled).

Good stuff. Chap's got his head screwed on straight.

(via The Professor, who also has an article in the Grauniad)

Oooh, baby I love your way...

2005-07-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

Much though I'd love to offer some insta-analysis of today's mercifully crap bombing attacks in London I shall refrain from doing so except to make one quick comment.

There has been much gushing praise among the American commentariat of John Howard's words spoken alongside Tony Blair today. Indeed, the Prime Minister's statement has been contrasted quite negatively with those of his Australian counterpart. Especially at the Corner, there seems to be widespread dismay that the PM didn't launch into a lengthy piece of glittering, defiant and principle-laden rhetoric.

I disagree.

Today, the Prime Minister's job was to speak to the British people and as far as I am concerned he did that very well. It was far more the sort of thing we need and want to hear right now and, by and large, the public agree with it. Had he attempted something along the lines of what Mr Howard said, I think it would have been perceived - rightly or wrongly - as stagey, out of step with the public mood and, quite possibly, cynical. Although there are a great many Brits who might broadly share John Howard's sentiments I don't think they are in the mood for that sort of "speechifying". Mr Howard's words may get him great reviews in America, but it was the Prime Minister's job to speak to the British people and I think he did a pretty good job of speaking both to - and for - us.

And I don't say that very often.

Cloudy Lemonade

2005-07-21T20:03:00.000-04:00

Tim Collins has an article in the Telegraph, attacking the charges against British troops for war crimes.

It seems to me that what we actually have here is a conflation of a number of different issues.

What should be considered worthy of legal action in a war zone.
The legal and bureaucratic mechanisms via which legal investigations are pursued.
Precisely which crimes should be considered "War Crimes".
What - rightly or wrongly - the implications of the emerging culture are going to be.

I have sympathy with some of what Colonel Collins is saying. It seems to me that the mechanisms may well be deficient. Two years is a hell of a long time for the wheels to turn to completion. I also wonder whether what the British servicemen in question are alleged to have done should really come under the category of war crimes. Certainly that's an open question that bears consideration.

On the other hand, we have one key fact to play with - a man is dead. He died in British custody. This is something that deserves - no, demands - investigation and action (and is of a different order of magnitude altogether to what Colonel Collins was accused of) to be taken according to what that investigation discovers. Colonel Collins seems to assert that the Army should be largely permitted to police its own behaviour and can be trusted to do so. History indicates that this is simply not good enough. The overwhelming majority of British squaddies and officers, like their Americans counterparts, are honourable people who try to play by the rules. None of this alters, however, the fact that the Army is a relatively closed institution with institutional interests and that closed institutions do not have an enviable record in the matter of being prepared to expose those among their number who cross the line (though internally administered honour codes and rough justice may be another matter).

In broad terms, the performance of the British Army in the post-war period (and before) is largely - overwhelmingly, even - admirable, in both absolute and relative terms. Enough unpleasantness has taken place, however (in Palestine, Kenya, Ulster and other places), for it to be clear that some form of outside scutiny and oversight is necessary. Quite what form that should take, however, is entirely open to debate.

They want you, they want you, they want you as a new recruit...

2005-07-21T19:38:00.000-04:00

James Joyner has a roundup of positive news regarding the recruitment of native Iraqi forces.

I agree that this seems positive and slow progress is still progress. That said, I'm not sure I quite echo all of Joyner's commentary. It's easy to sound churlish in questioning Iraqi motives for joining up and there is no doubt whatsoever that many do join out of a genuine enthusiasm for the fresh start the country has in its sights. That said, we shouldn't ignore the unfortunate fact that a lot of them are signing up quite simply because there are families to feed and the armed forces or security services a) pay over the odds and b) are sometimes the only available source of income. There's nothing dishonourable in it - indeed it is the hallmark of professional soldiery through much of history (let's not romanticise it). What it does do is draw into question whether we can draw wider positive lessons from the long queues outside recruiting offices.

One of the problems - and it's a problem that is widespread in trying to get some sort of clear picutre of what is going on - is that so very much of the evidence on offer is anecdotal and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence on both sides. What is undeniable is that units are emerging, however unskilled, which are prepared to stand their ground in the field. This is progress. I am of the view that the practice - long overdue - of "embedding" Coalition troops with Iraqi units may well pay dividends (and is overdue). Whether this is going to be enough to swing the Big Picture, I don't know and I think the picture is too mixed to come to a conclusion either way.