Wherever the flag of Islam has been planted is Islamic land forever.

I am not the only one who thought the Madrid outrage had less to do with Jose Aznar’s support for Bush’s Iraq policy and more to do with the reconquest by Ferdinand and Isabella.

While Islam flourishes we will be forever fighting the battle of Tours and the way things are going we’ll be doing it without a Charles Martel.

*Some of them women, without hijab, driving vehicles and armed! The horrors the poor man must’ve suffered. just thinking about it.

The horrors indeed. Ever contemplated the Former Mrs. Sunfish, armed and behind the wheel?

You got in before me.

For Islamists land is critical. OBL himself seriously took against the USA only after the feet of infidels* despoiled the holy deserts of Arabia in Desert Shield.

spence,
Thanks for the reply. Soldiers ought to have better pay and conditions. Low-grade office wonks in government depratments earn more and they don’t get shot at, though a great many of them should be.

That was initially a typo but I’m allowing serendipity to take her merry course.

*Some of them women, without hijab, driving vehicles and armed! The horrors the poor man must’ve suffered. just thinking about it.

Fair ‘nough, Guy. Although this does sound a little like one of those old-fashioned English Public School novels — if fat weak Biffy in the Third Form refused to put up his fists when challenged by big bullying Carruthers of the Sixth Form, the consequences would be limited to Carruthers making some withering comment about Biffy’s cowardice and then sauntering away.

If murderous Islamist terrorists would agree to play by English Public School rules, then there might be some value in denying them the fight. Meanwhile, back in the real world ….

The government there has all sorts of plans for tower blocks and motorways – which will ruin the city (the “old city” would be left as tourist trap, but much of the area round some of the old gates into the city will be messed up, indeed some of the gates into the city themselves will be destroyed).

It is sad to see the mistakes made in so many Western cities being made in the most ancient capital city in the world. The Chinese are doing a similar thing with Peking (sorry “Bejing”) – those “liberal” morons at “Newsweek” magazine had a front page story praising all the tower blocks that are to be built (I have been hearing terrible stories about the destruction of historic houses, indeed whole areas of the city, for months now).

Definition of a “modern” person – someone whose ideas are stuck in the past (broadly from the 1940′s to the 1960′s) and who refuses to learn, either from reasoned argument or from experience.

Perry correctly repeats the basic point that General Keane was making – i.e. that this retired American General thinks (rightly or wrongly) the British army should be bigger (i.e. that the Daily Telegraph misreported his position, by implying that he was either too ignorant or too dishonest to understand that the British Army was too small to do the things that it was called upon to do).

Mille Woods.

There was a suggestion (the names escape me as I sit here) that 9/11 should not have been responded to at all.

After all we are even less likely to make Afghanistan a friendly nation than Iraq – if Iraq is “hopeless” (as many people claim) then Afghanistan is even more hopeless (and, of course, defeat in Iraq would make the war in Afghanistan a sick joke – as enemy spirit would be so boosted).

Actually it is possible to make Iraq a democracy (at least it was) – because it was done (well close to). Hard fighting by British forces in the early 20th century produced a constitutional government in Iraq which was basically a democracy (sort of) – however it was destroyed in 1958.

One of the factors that made me wary of the Iraq operation in 2003 was that even “experts” on Iraq kept saying “it has been a dictatorship for thirty five years” (or other numbers close to this) – 1958 to 2003 = 35?

They did not have a clue what they were talking about (they thought that Saddam and the Baath were the only dictatorship Iraq had been under) – and this made me doubt everything else.

The trouble with this view is that a President who followed it in 2001 would have been committing political suicide.

Some people say we should have just gone after the leaders of A.Q. and the Taliban (they working hand-in-glove, and many people are part of both, so to draw a distinction between them is false) – however (and this I did NOT expect) we have failed even in this.

Perhaps O.B.L. is dead but there is no proof of this, and his deputy is very much alive. And the leader of the Taliban (Mullah Omar) is alive.

“But we have got X, Y, Z,” – yes we have got people we started to say were important when we could not get the people we went after. I repeat that I did NOT expect this.

Actually (in strict military terms) the performance in Iraq has been BETTER than the performance in Afghanistan. In Iraq when the order comes down “get so-and-so” he is got (sooner or later), and if a so-and-so is not got (such as Sadr) it is because there has been NO ORDER TO GET HIM.

I have no doubt that if the order was given to the United States Army in Iraq to kill or capture Sadr he would be killed or captured. But operations in Afghanistan – well things (in military terms) do not seem to go so well there (perhaps because the command structure is not under U.S. Army control).

Guy:

Your reasoning is strong (as always), however I am not sure I go along with all your conclusions.

Army accommodation, especially for single soldiers, is in many cases poor. I have spent time living in cockroach infested flea-pit barracks in Germany – but on the other hand, I’ve also bedded down in much worse places – you have to be pragmatic, soldiering isn’t an easy life. Maintaining a standing Army is very expensive, procurement and operational costs are often dwarfed by the costs associated with simply maintaining the force infrastructure, it would be wrong to say that there haven’t been improvements though. Resources being what they are, it is impossible to do everything that needs doing at once, you have to make the best of what you have.

I can speculate, hypothetically, that perhaps the problems start to get serious when the resources aren’t sufficient to maintain the infrastructure in a static state, because things will deteriorate after that point and get progressively more expensive to put right (and therefore get more difficult for decision-makes to sign-off the spending) – at that point cuts begin because the cost of doing without makes sense compared to putting things right. I’m certainly no expert on all this but I think that in my speculative model, cutting capability would be the more attractive option for those who hold the purse strings. I think it becomes a circle as capability elimination in one place reduces the effectiveness of other previously linked capability in another – making this other capability seem not worth maintaining, leading to it being cut etc. etc.

guy,
You’re absolutely right about the Islamicists denial of history. Many of the glories of the height of Islamic civilization would be a distinct embarrassment to bin Laden and his ilk. Have you ever read the “1001 Nights”? The incredibly syncretic nature of this civilization would likewise be an embarrassment to folk who think all anybody really needs to know is in the Qu’ran and whatever hadiths they approve of.

I think the key difference between Germany without Hitler (worked out OK) and Iraq without Saddam (a bloody shambles) is that in 1945 Germany was flattened, destroyed, had suffered enormously, lost millions of people and the Germans just felt defeated. This was not the case in Iraq 2003. Iraq had been attacked with genuine precision bombing, the army (such as it was) had been rolled-up relatively easily by a very small number of “boots on the ground” and somehow I don’t think the air of general demoralization was the same as in a thoroughly defeated Germany in 1945.

I hope I’m wrong in that observation.

Millie,
As Bismarck once put it about a cause he didn’t much care for, “it wasn’t worth the bones of a single Pommeranian grenadier”.

I’ve got a fair bit of time for the “let them stew in their own juice” way of thinking… The more atrocities occur in Iraq, the more I’m tempted to think “bugger the lot of them”. Having said that, though… We broke Iraq so we’ve bought it and we really ought to try and sort something out which is both tolerable for the poor sods who live there and for US/UK prestige* otherwise every raggy-assed Islamic renegade in the world will be emboldened.

Which brings me onto one case where stewing in their own juices would be an unalloyed good (and probably the only way forward). The recent withdrawal of foreign aid to Gaza would I suspect, if it had been made permanent, forced Hamas/Fatah/whoever to adopt a vastly more pragmatic stance. The EU has recently said it’ll go back to paying Gaza’s electricity bill (why won’t they pay mine? I never blew-up a Pizza Hut even though I’ve had lousy service in them more than once…) but no… The EU will keep the ramshackle Gazan thugocracy going. And nothing changes. If only we’d had the wit to leave the buggers to implode in their own sweet time and then just possibly they might come to their senses.

I’m really not sure about what I’ve just written. I could be very wrong. It’s just an idea.

*Difficult. Even if our forces were to withdraw 100% victorious it would still be seen as a defeat for the “imperialists”.