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Sometimes people are shown ink blots in the hope of finding clues as to their mental characteristics. If the ink blots remind you of the 'wrong' things then you may have problems.

However, a different form of "ink blot madness" has been doing the rounds for some time: The ink blot strategy.

The ink blot strategy holds that the British won in Malaya (now Malaysia and the independent city state of Singapore) not by killing, capturing or driving out the communists, but by taking bits of Malaya and making life "so good" in these bits that people "did not want to fight the British any more" and then expanding these bits "like ink blots". By copying this strategy we can all win in Iraq - or so it is claimed.

There are various problems with this idea. Firstly it is not what the British army did in Malaya - whatever some people may say they did. In reality the men went out and fought the enemy (in the jungle or elsewhere). Certainly there were 'protected villages' and so on, but Malaya was a fight (it was not a welfare project).

Further the British did not give vast amounts of aid to Malaya. Britain did not have this sort of money to give away in the early 1950's and it would not have really improved economic life anyway (more on that below). In so far as economic life did improve in Malaya during the "Emergency" British aid was not the real reason.

And, of course, the (mostly ethnic Chinese) communists in Malays were not fighting for "better socio-economic conditions" anyway - they were fighting for communism (hint, that is why they were called 'communists'). Try asking someone who knows something about Vietnam how all the welfare statism there did not make the VC or NVA vanish (nor was 'support' for them among civilians based upon poor social or economic conditions, such support was based on terror - you helped the communists or you and your family would be killed)

How can someone be so plain daft as to suppose that the reason someone becomes a suicide bomber in Iraq (whether they are from Iraq or from outside) is because they turned on the light one day and it did not go on. "Oh if only the electricity and the water supply worked better, then I would not strap a lot of explosives to myself and go blow up a bus full of school children".

Also physics teaches us that it is less difficult to destroy that to create. The terrorists left undisturbed (under the ink blot strategy) in 'their' bits of Iraq will find it less difficult to come in and blow things up in 'ink blot land' than the U.S. Army (or anyone else) will find it to build nice services.

The ink blots will not 'spread, they will shrink. Going on the defensive is sign that one has no real will to win - and would mean that soldiers being killed would be dying for nothing (as the poltical choice to give up had already been made - sound familar?).

Then there is the assumption that government can make the lives of people Iraq "so good they will not fight", it is not just that the terrorists are fighting because they would like nicer 'public services' (which is absurd), but the whole idea that the government can make so many millions of people have such happy lives.

One does not have to a libertarian to see the absurdity of this idea. The government can not (for example) make the lives of Compton in greater Los Angeles. "So good they will not want to fight" (after so many decades of welfare schemes and 'urban renewal' schemes) - so how is going to that in Iraq?

Whatever one thinks of the Iraq war, the 'ink blot strategy' is stupid. And whoever the military officers and politicans who are behind may be, it is time they shut up. If the war is justified then fighting should continue (i.e. the enemy, especially the leadership, should be hunted down and killed or caputured), and if the war is not justified then the troops should come home.

But there is no 'socio-economic road' to victory.

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U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam's Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam.

I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all.

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This story seems to be making the rounds...

The US military said Wednesday it was investigating a report carried on an Australian television network that claimed American soldiers in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters and then used the action to taunt other Islamic militants

...and my response is why oh why is this news? Just to state the obvious, the Taliban bodies in question were dead prior to being burned, so who cares?

I guess is that if they had not burned those bodies, the same people making a big deal of this would be penning articles with the title:

US forces start epidemic in Afghanistan!

As for this being an 'affront to Islam', if the object was to 'smoke out' the enemy by enraging them, again... so what? The job of US forces is to KILL members of the Taliban and I fail to see why it is unacceptable to outrage their sensibilities and perhaps even hurt their feeling prior to punching them full of 5.56mm holes.

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I have no idea how events in Iraq will eventually play out. I fervently hope that this tortured country can move to a more peaceful direction but the current violence and mayhem makes such a prospect seem pretty distant. One thing that has always struck me is how Saddam has never gotten sufficient blame for bringing the current mayhem on to his own country. So it is interesting to read this smart passage by Russell Roberts over at the Cafe Hayek blog:

I don't understand how the failure to find weapons of mass destruction makes the war unjustified. It's not like Bush made up the idea of WMD. Saddam Hussein is the guy you ought to be mad at. Saddam Hussein acted as if he had or was working on nuclear capability. He's the guy who employed nuclear scientists. He's the guy who convinced the UN that he wanted nukes. He's the guy who resisted weapons inspections. He's the guy who said you can look over here but not over there. Why did he do all these things? Either because he actually had nuclear capability or was close to it, or because he wanted to fool people into thinking he was more important than he was. He managed to fool Bill Clinton, the United Nations, George Bush and Israel into thinking he had a desire for WMD. It appears now to have been something of a ruse. Probably. Should Bush have ignored the behavior of Saddam on the grounds that the whole thing was probably a hoax to enhance his self-image? I don't think so. That certainly turned out to be a mistake with Osama. His talk wasn't cheap.

Exactly. 20/20 hindsight is all very well, but it is not much use in making credible foreign policy.

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If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further... by the British army.

Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.

If Britain's government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail... or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?

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It is splendid news that the trapped Russian submariners have been rescued from the dreadful fate that overtook the Kursk a few years ago. Fortunatly the Russians did not stand on their pride as they did the last time they suffered a subsaquatic disaster. This time they seem to have fairly quickly accepted the help that was offered to them by many navies around the world.

Although the Royal Navy's robotic sub was the prime mover of this rescue, it was really a very international effort with the USA and Japan providing vital assistance in the rescue. Hopefully this more enlightened approach by the Russian government and military authorities admitting they could not effect the rescue themselves is a sign of institutional change at the top, but the cynic in me wonders if it was not just a domestic political calculation that the embarrasment at having to have their submariners rescued by Western naval personnel represented less political damage than another scene on the television of angry family members on the dockside grieving over their dead sons.

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The oldest "mini-aircraft carrier" used by Britain's Royal Navy, HMS Invincible, is being retired from service. The vessel, from which Sea Harrier jets can operate - as well as helicopters - is more than 20 years old and was used in the Falklands War, among other theatres of operation.

As I said a while back, I have no ideological issue one way or the other about the exact composition of our armed forces, which must change with the times and respond to different threats to this country. Coming from a bit of a navy family myself and being an enthusiast over our island's naval history, I am nevertheless the first to realise that sentiment must not trump hard calculation when it comes to manning our defences. But it bothers me that our navy has been reduced to a level that makes independent military action by this country a logistical impossibility. It is probably quite unlikely that we could mount a Falklands-style operation on our own again. The present government wants, so it is reported, to build two new massive carriers but as is usually the case in these matters, the likely date of construction seems to stretch into the horizon, rather like the prospect of England beating Australia at cricket.

In an age when we fret about islamofascist psychos letting off bombs on the Tube, it may be tempting to think that the Senior Service's role is little more than to patrol the coasts and put on commemorations about the Battle of Trafalgar. How complacent that would be. Given that we are an island nation, still reliant on shipping for a huge amount of our economic and physical wellbeing, such an attitude is fraught with danger. We could run the risk of cutting the fleet so hard that we lose the inner core of skilled men and women needed for the service.

With the exception of anarcho-capitalists, even the most hardcore classical liberal realises that defence is a baseline requirement for a proper state. And for an island nation like Britain with a long coastline, that means having a workable navy.

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Piracy in the Straits of Malacca has been a serious problem for many years now and shipping companies have grown tired of waiting for governments in the region to do something effective to stamp it out.

So they are hiring private companies to do it instead. Sounds like an exciting line of work.

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Whilst watching the BBC news' report about the horrific terrorist attacks against Shi'ite civilians in Iraq, I was astonished to hear the following uttered:

Ominously, there are increasing calls for locals to take up arms and defend their communities.

Excuse me? These poor people have just had the centre of their community blown out and many people killed but the desire to defend themselves is denounced by the BBC as... ominous? It might tell you something about what is happening in Iraq but it also tells you quite a lot about the mindset at the BBC.

It seems to me that locals taking up arms to defend themselves against terrorism directly are exactly what the USA should be encouraging whole heartedly. The fact is that people will start doing so regardless of the wishes of the USA if the security situation continues to deteriorate, so not only would it be pointless to try and stop them, why not make a virtue of necessity and show that the occupying powers welcome Iraqis becoming more self-reliant and willing to confront these murdering bastards themselves?

Iraqi territorial para-militaries could be quite an asset fighting the insurgency precisely because they are not going to be centrally directed, at least to some extent. Counter-insurgency by its nature relies on more than just firepower, which the US has in abundance. It also relies on local knowledge and a willingness to be ruthless, something pissed-off locals could certainly provide. The idea that Al Qaeda can only be fought in Iraq 'top down' (i.e. directed from Washington using US and Iraqi government forces) is probably a mistake, so arming the people who are taking the brunt of the attacks seems a pretty sensible way to go.

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USAF personnel in the UK have been told to stay out of London because of the bombings. Sorry but this is not just a propaganda gift to the enemy, it is just plain daft.

Firstly, the US was not the target of these bombs, Londoners were. Secondly, London is always full of American visitors and US military folk do not really stand out from the crowd all that much. In fact Americans are probably more likely to form identifiable 'target clusters' in the rural communities around the US bases in the UK.

It was a terrible atrocity but we have seen it all before in London at the hands of the IRA, so please, telling US service personnel to avoid London is foolish and plays to the often held stereotype of Americans as easily scared by such incidents. I am sure USAF people are made of sterner stuff and more than capable of assessing the risks for themselves.

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Yours truly, my fiancee plus regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor, have returned from a fine and patriotic day out in Portsmouth for the "International Festival of the Sea", an event which at its core commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Trafalgar in fact was fought in October, but the organisers are no doubt exploiting what passes for the English summer to put on all manner of events for sailing nuts like myself.

There has already been a fair amount of media coverage of the events linked to the Trafalgar bicentennial, although arguably the BBC has underclubbed its coverage, giving more attention it seems to Wimbledon tennis and the Live8 music event. For anyone who wants to know the human cost of defending this nation's liberties, however, understanding what Lord Nelson and his forces achieved is important. As an island nation, our livelihood is crucially dependent on our peaceable enjoyment of the high seas.

For more than 100 years after Nelson crushed the Franco-Spanish forces off Cadiz, the Royal Navy dominated the world's oceans, enjoying a naval mastery to an extent not seen until the modern U.S. navy and its vast carrier fleets. Nelson instilled in the Senior Service an esprit de corps, a sense of confidence that was to carry on until the First World War, at which point Germany and Japan began to challenge Britain's mastery.

There are many excellent studies of Nelson's life and achievements, and I would recommend in particular Alan Schom's study of the countdown to Trafalgar, which gives credit not just to Norfolk's most famous son but also many of the other actors of the time, who ensured that the Royal Navy was raised to a high pitch of excellence. Tom Pocock's biography of Nelson is also a rattling good read of this brilliant, occasionally vain and charismatic man.

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Samizdata readers may remember my article about this amazing little battle. It clearly showed what happens when irregulars ambush real soldiers.

With great pleasure I now report a follow up to the story: three members of this fine bunch, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mikhave have been awarded the Silver Star.

Well done and congratulations guys!

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As a young kid I remember all those old war films portraying the various RAF air raids on Nazi-held targets like the Ruhr dams or the Norwegian heavy-water plants. The daring achievements of 617 squadron (The Dambusters, as they became known) are part of the folklore of military aviation history. I wonder how many people, however, have heard of a raid that probably helped save the world, at least temporarily, from a serious nuclear threat? I am talking about the bombing of Saddam's nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 by the Israeli Air Force.

In a recently published book, Roger W. Claire recounts the tale of how an elite group of pilots trained for the raid that hit the nuclear plant, recording along the way Saddam's massive programme to build a facility able to produce the materials for nukes. Even though the F-16 planes used in the raid are a light-year away in sophistication from the Lancaster or Mosquito bombers employed in WW2 raids, the pilots still endured terrific strains on mind and body in carrying out the missions deep inside hostile territory, knowing they faced a high chance of not returning.

Israel's bombing of the nuclear facility drew worldwide condemnation at the time from governments including that of Ronald Reagan, which seems monumentally ironic now. Indeed vice president Dick Cheney was later to thank the Israeli government during the 1991 Gulf War for the raid.

What does this story say about pre-emption as a doctrine? Strict supporters of international law might argue that what the IAF did was illegal, that a sovereign nation like Iraq was entitled to develop weapons and unless there was demonstrable proof of malign intent, no such action would be justified. It remains a point of debate among libertarians, including scribes for this blog.

But it is clear to me, in my view, from reading this and other accounts, that Saddam, both from his actions and his own rhetoric, intended to use nukes to intimidate his neighbours into surrendering territory and the threat posed to Israel from a man fancying himself as a pan-Arab leader was no myth. It was real.

The actions of the Israeli Air Force have not gotten the praise they deserve, in my view. In considering what might have been, it is worth quoting at length from the following influential book by Kenneth M. Pollack:

Although the alternatives are considerably more costly, deterrence is the riskiest of all the policy options available to the United States. We would be betting that we could deter a man who has proven to be hard (at times impossible) to deter and who seems to believe that if he possessed nuclear weapons, it is the United States that would be deterred... The use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world would be terrible. Their use on the Persian Gulf oil fields; against Tel Aviv, Ankara, Riyadh, or another regional city; or against U.S. military forces in the region is unimaginable... Beyond this, Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons has the potential to push the world into a second Great Depression while killing millions of people.
The Threatening Storm, 2002

The above quotation helped turn yours truly, a formerly fairly isolationist type of libertarian, into a reluctant supporter of the pre-emption doctrine embraced by George W. Bush. Although the failure to find WMDs in Iraq has shown that Saddam's threat was not imminent - though possibly inevitable - there can be no doubt that the monster harboured a long desire to get and develop a substantial nuclear weapons programme which would have had incalculable consequences.

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The British Army is making a new regiment operational with a dedicated anti-terrorist mission in mind, called the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Much of the manpower will come from 2 Para bn and 14 Intelligence coy:

CGS statement 1st April

The SRR will draw personnel from existing capabilities and recruit new volunteers, both male and female, from serving members of the Armed Forces where necessary. Officers are keen to recruit those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, as well as Muslims and members of ethnic minorities. Priority at recruitment must be given to those able to infiltrate or blend in with Islamic terror groups, rather than to their fitness or fighting capabilities.

There has been chatter about the unit from irrepressible insiders since the middle of last year (the name Reconnaissance and Surveillance Regiment was mooted) but the firm news is hitting the mainstream media now that the unit is going operational.

The badge seems to me to be referencing the Artists' Rifles insignia, which seems appropriate give the Artists' Rifles special forces lineage.

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It is late but I simply must share this tale with you.

The MP's crossed the kill zone and then turned up an access road at a right angle to the ASR and next to the field full of enemy fighters. The three vehicles, carrying nine MPs and one medic, stopped in a line on the dirt access road and flanked the enemy positions with plunging fire from the .50 cal and the SAW machinegun (Squad Automatic Weapon). In front of them, was a line of seven sedans, with all their doors and trunk lids open, the getaway cars and the lone two story house off on their left.

The battle results are described later:

Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded 6 (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, 6x RPG launchers w/ 16 rockets, 13x RPK machineguns, 3x PKM machineguns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-rd AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rds of PK ammo.

The story has probably been covered in the US. We all know how knowledgeable most journalists are about military matters... so read a real battle report. It is really quite an awesome little vignette. It shows just how good our military folk are at their job.

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One of the current controversies around the war on terror is how to treat the prisoners. Dale Franks at the excellent Questions and Observations blog gets it pretty much right, I think.

My preferred method of dealing with these terror prisoners would be to get two captains and a major together as a tribunal, declare them to be unlawful combatants, and put them in front of a firing squad. Now, maybe, because we're nice guys, we could let them know that if any of them give us verifiable, useful information, then we'll commute their sentences, and won't shoot them. Otherwise, however, it's a blindfold and a last cigarette for the lot of 'em.

The difference of course, is that doing so would be legal. It would be part of the accepted customs of warfare that have been generally agreed upon for over a century. Torturing or beating them to death, without even the convenient fiction of legality, is not.

I found very little to quibble with in his excellent essay on the subject.

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This story does not inspire a lot of confidence in the current Coalition effectiveness of dealing with islamists and sundry Baathist dead-enders in Iraq.

Some 22 people have been killed and many more wounded after a rocket attack on a U.S. military base in the northern town of Mosul. A grim day. Now, call me a pajama strategist, but I wonder whether it ought to be possible to make some use of the tremendous technological advantages of America's modern army in defending soldiers against such attacks on their own military encampments. No, I am not going to make the mistake of supposing that we can create the 'perfect' military. I am aware that all organisations, even relatively well-run ones, have their weak spots, and that includes the armed forces of the West. But it does stick in the craw that a group of servicemen having a meal can end up being killed by a bunch of insurgents running around with a few rocket launchers a few thousand yards off.

I have been looking around a few websites for possible enlightenment on what can be done. DefenceTech blog gives some insight into how ordinary servicemen and women are improvising their own techniques, including piecemeal bits of engineering, to make their vehicles and equipment less vulnerable to attack. It goes to show that crushing the insurgents is not just about the fancy stuff like flying an Apache helicopter. Improvisation has its part to play.

As an aside, it makes me wonder how those critics beating up Donald Rumsfeld at the moment would have written about the calibre of F. D. Roosevelt's defence chiefs 50 years ago, during the Battle of the Ardennes, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Andrew Sullivan might have been calling for Eishenhower's head on a stick by now.

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December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.

The image says it all.

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I hear the term "Anglosphere" as meaning that there is some community of the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But when I come across this site, I feel like I am living in a foreign country to Americans.

Trying to list all the reasons why Adopt a Sniper is definitely not an English website would take hours. And that is a shame.

[via Instapundit]

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row by row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If yea break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae

In my office today in the City, at 11 o'clock, on the 11th of November, hundreds of us switched off our phones, stilled our keyboards, took our eyes off our spreadsheets, and marked two minutes' silence for the men and women killed in defence of this country.

A lot is written about what Poppy Day ought to mean, but for me, the son of a former RAF aircraft navigator, cousin-in-law of a fine member of the US Air Force and descendant of two Royal Navy commanders, the meaning is very clear. I would not now be able to blog my inconsequential libertarian thoughts without the sacrifices made by others. It is as simple as that.

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The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.

There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.

You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.

I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.

PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by... good luck and good hunting.

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Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D'Afrique under General D'Allonville).

The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade's commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped "Here goes the last of the Brudenells", his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).

Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.

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I was paging through the new issue of American Rifleman, the monthly magazine of the National Rifle Association, when I came across an interview with General Tommy Franks, who led the brilliant assault on Baghdad last year. (Sorry, no link available).

In the interview, the retired General is asked a couple of questions about his preferences in guns, and I found his answers surprising.

First, he said he prefers the current Beretta 9mm handgun to the .45 he carried in Vietnam. He couldn't really point to anything concrete, just a generalized (so to speak) preference. He did note that it had to be shooting the right loads to be an adequate combat weapon, but that was the only concession he made.

Second, he said he considered the M-16 to be a superior battlefield weapon to the AK-47 in every way. Period. Based on his comments about the M-16 earlier (he was in basic training when they were first issued), I think there is an unspoken assumption here that that it is a better weapon in the hands of well-trained troops who know how to maintain it.

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...about my manhood have just been reinforced. And how:

Perez, 21, lost his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq more than a year ago, but despite the phantom pains that haunt him, he says he is determined to prove to the Army that he is no less of a man - and no less of a soldier.

"I'm not ready to get out yet," he says. "I'm not going to let this little injury stop me from what I want to do."

Perez is one of at least four amputees from the 82nd Airborne Division to re-enlist. With a new carbon-fiber prosthetic leg, Perez intends to show a medical board he can run an eight-minute mile, jump out of airplanes and pass all the other paratrooper tests that will allow him to go with his regiment to Afghanistan next year

When he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for his rehabilitation, Perez asked a pair of generals who visited his bedside if it was possible for him to stay in the Army.

"They told me, 'It's all up to you, how much you want it'," he says. "If I could do everything like a regular soldier, I could stay in."

He wasted little time getting started. At one point, a visitor found him doing push-ups in bed. He trained himself to walk normally with his new leg, and then run with it.

Perez has to rise at least an hour earlier than his fellow soldiers to allow swelling from the previous day's training to subside enough for his stump to fit into the prosthetic.

I am glad he is on my side.

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A British muslim in the Royal Air Force has been successfully prosecuted for going AWOL after claiming he did not want to help kill fellow muslims in Iraq.

It seems to me that an excellent reason for refusing to join a nation's military is the simple desire to not shoot at, or facilitate shooting at, people that you might not feel should not be shot at. If you have a goodly distrust for the wisdom of the state to begin with, taking the view that you are not going to kill someone just because the government wants you to is a very reasonable default position to adopt.

Now of course all states and their militaries are not the same. If you voluntarily contract to do the bidding of the government of Sweden or the Vatican or Switzerland or Costa Rica or Swaziland or Belize or Luxembourg... nations who are certainly not 'military extroverts'... then the range of things you could reasonably expect to be asked to do will generally not include going to far off places you had never previously heard of and dropping bombs on the locals.

However...

If you do elect to join a military in circumstances other than fighting off the clear and present danger of an invasion, it seems to me that you are offering to allow the state make the decision for you of when it is appropriate to shoot and at which particular people. Moreover, if you join a military of some place like Britain, France or the USA, i.e. states who frequently sent their soldiers off to kill folks in far off lands for all manner of reasons other than the direct self-defence of the homeland, then it seems a bit rich to take the state's pay checks for several years but then act surprised if you get asked to, well, help kill folks in far off lands.

Read the damn job description before you take the shilling.

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Austin Bay is right up there with Wretchard when it comes to good analysis, hard common sense, and good info on the current war. He's back from the front in Iraq with a column on how the current war really is a fight for freedom.

If there is one mistake I think we've made in fighting this war, it's been the way we've soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.

Our enemies are the enemies of freedom within their spheres of influence. In the modern world of jumbo jets and international networks of all kinds, they have already succeeded in reducing our freedom, and seek to do so even more. Because they have chosen to attack us with violence, we are in a war of self-defense with the enemies of freedom. Fighting this war is, in my view, entirely consistent with a libertarian world-view.

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There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:

Firstly the blog's author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.

Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified...

Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military's funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:

Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.

I would prefer to think of it as 'members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them', rather than the more pejorative 'perfect strangers', filling the spaces left in the Pentagon's supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.

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President Bush has announced, and not a moment too soon, that the US will undertake a massive reorganization of its overseas deployment, moving troops out of theatres where war no longer threatens (e.g., Europe). Apparently, most of the troops would be brought home to the US.

As I have noted before, the security guarantee that the US extends to its nominal allies can be counterproductive, encouraging irresponsibility and anti-American attitudes in such allies. For nations, as for individuals, there is no substitute for self-defence.

It is awfully strange behaviour for an imperial hyperpower, though, isn't it? Surely the evil Bushchimpler realizes that bringing troops home is no way to expand global hegemony. Whatever could he (or his puppetmaster Karl Rove) be thinking?

Update: Mark Steyn weighs in.

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We have been following the British government's treatment of the armed forces for some time, when we got hold of some important information...

A document was found in a briefcase left outside Samizdata HQ. We would like to offer it back to the MOD (Ministry of Defence) but in the meantime we publish it for all to see...We believe it offers the key to understanding the thinking behind the government's recent defence cuts rationalisation of the Armed forces to produce a more efficient, effective and capable military....

Download file: STAFF GUIDANCE ON DEFENCE RESTRUCTURING

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As many will have read by now, the British government has made substantial cuts to parts of the country's armed forces, such as disbanding Royal Air Force Squadrons, cutting frigates, and reducing headcount across the board. As I would have guessed, this has prompted a lot of criticism from various quarters and no doubt some, if not all of it, is justified.

However, rather than get into fine details of whether Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon is a strategic genius, sensible manager or weak fool (I report, you decide), I want to pose the question as to what sort of armed forces a libertarian-leaning government ought to have in place. (Use of mercenaries, perhaps?). Well, given that the first responsibility of any government is defence of the realm against attack, it is at least debateable whether an island nation like Britain requires, for example, a big army, an extensive airforce, or even a large navy with lots of aircraft carriers, and so on. So one could argue that the kind of armed forces envisaged by Blair's government might be appropriate for one restricted to a self defence role. (In reality I expect commenters to point out the many flaws in these plans. Please do).

However what is obviously strange about the timing and nature of the cuts is that they come from a government not exactly shy of projecting force overseas for its liberal internationalist ends. For example, at times Blair's position on Iraq has been more to do with overthrowing thuggish regimes that attract his scorn rather than do so on the basis of Britain's long-term self defence needs. Such a view surely requires rather a big army, navy and air force. It also makes me wonder whether Britain any more has the ability to act as an independent military power in any meaningful sense. I doubt it. A friend of mine who has recently left the RAF says it is almost unthinkable that a Falkland Islands operation would be possible with today's force levels. Others I know who have served in the military tell me the same thing.

There is also, one final long-term worry that I have. These cuts will further deter bright and capable young men and women from seeking a career in our forces, which require ever-higher levels of technical know-how while also drawing on the permanent need for courage and endurance. The message from these defence cuts is hardly going to get young folk to think about a career. I dreamed once of following my father into the RAF as a flyer. Now I am glad I did not. A shame. I'd have looked pretty nifty in that flying suit.

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You may remember this sad incident in the opening days of the Iraq Campaign: a US Patriot battery engaged and shot down a returning British Tornado. The official report on the incident is finally out:

IFF failure led to destruction of RAF Tornado

A Royal Air Force (RAF) Board of Inquiry investigating the destruction of an RAF Tornado GR.4A by a US Army Patriot missile during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq has concluded that the aircraft's identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system had failed. However, it also criticised the missile-classification criteria used by the Patriot system, and the US Army's Patriot rules of engagement, firing doctrine and crew training. [Jane's Missiles and Rockets - 28 June 2004]

If any of our readers has a link to a pdf of the original report - if such exists - I would be happy to include it here.

Editor: Kudos to Julian Taylor for the link to the MoD pdf file.

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The British Army is getting butchered.

In a rare display of acknowledgment by the mainstream press of what is going on in the British forces, John Keegan lays the blame not only at politicians' feet but accuses the top military commanders who fail to impress the rank and file, and fail to stand up to their political masters.

We have always had a thing or two to say on the current state of the British Army here, here and here. We tend not to mince words and yet feel that we cannot adequately convey just how serious and harmful the dismantling of the British forces has been since the end of the Cold War.

John Keegan is a measured writer, the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph, which means that for him to come out so strongly against both the political and military masters in his opinion piece suggests that the situation is desperate and serious.

Why, then, does the Government contemplate - apparently so blithely - reducing yet further the number of regiments, the only really efficient instruments of power that it controls? All sorts of reasons can be cited. The Parliamentary Labour Party is anti-military, to a degree that prevents it acknowledging the favour done to the Government by the Armed Forces. The chattering classes are also anti-military, as they will remain until some terrible terrorist outrage shakes their complacency. Key ministers are either anti-military, such as Mr Brown, or uncomprehending, as is the Prime Minister. The media, besotted by football and celebrity, are also uncomprehending. The Armed Forces have, outside the constituency of ordinary British people who admire and support their Servicemen, no friends.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

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Scaling up one's beliefs about how individual human nature to a collective, and especially national, scale, is always a dicey business. With the hotting up and late engagement of some Western powers, but not others, in the current war, it looks as though there may be some basis for my long-time suspicion that welfare for nations has many of the same pernicious effects as welfare for individuals.

The specific form of welfare I have in mind are the security forces stationed by the United States in a number of its allies. It is a source of continuing frustration to many Americans that the very nations we have done the most for have, in turn, been the least willing to pitch in with us. However, the reason they oppose us is precisely because we protect them from the consequences of their beliefs. Count on Mark Steyn to crystallize the issue:

More importantly, the prolongation of the American security guarantee has been disastrous for those allies, transforming them into ersatz postmodern allies who require you to engage in months of elaborate diplomatic tap-dancing in order to get them to contribute a couple of hundred poorly equipped troops. There’s a line conservatives are fond of when they’re discussing welfare: What’s better for a man? To give him a fish? Or to teach him to fish for himself? That goes double for defence welfare. The continued US presence in Europe is bad for Europe and bad for the US.

The presence of American troops guarding their frontiers has relieved our European allies, and to a somewhat lesser degree the Japanese and the South Koreans, of the responsiblity of providing for their own national security. As a result, these nations have largely disarmed, much as the residents of major US cities protected by large and visible police forces have disarmed, and the internal politics of these countries mirrors the politics of US urban centers on issues of national/personal security.

Just to pick one area of congruence, European nations believe that it is unnecessary for anyone to maintain a large armed deterrent to attackers, just as urban liberals believe it is unnecessary for an individual to own a gun for self-defense. Because such an armed deterrent is unnecessary, use of it is unjustifiable by either nations or individuals. Thus, armed self-defense is illegitimate, and violent threats to personal or national security are to be met either with more welfare directed at "root causes," or with jaw-jaw by social worker/diplomats, rather than war-war.

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The eight British sailors arrested by Iran have been paraded on television and forced to make public confessions. It just occurred to me that these are both violations of the Geneva Convention, which I believe applies in this case because the British sailors were in uniform, etc.

So why have I not heard any screams of outrage from the Usual Suspects? There are, after all, interest groups out there so enamored of the Convention that they want it followed in cases (illegal combatants, nonstate actors, etc.) where its provisions clearly do not apply. You would think they would be double-extra hot to have it followed where its provisions do apply, but apparently not. I guess we can file their complaints under Outrage, Manufactured Selective Partisan, Discount and Dispose of Soonest.

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The seizure of eight British sailors and their small patrol boats by Iranian forces means it is time for the British government to show that unless a swift accommodation is reached, the consequences will be severe for the Iranian state. If the UK forces did indeed stray into Iranian waters, nothing more than a curt apology is due the Iranian state, and only that if they return the British sailors and their equipment without delay. The Iranian state is a vile tyranny and the sooner they are put under real pressure the better.

Of course I would like to see as much instability as possible within Iran regardless of the incident with the sailors. There is no shortage of people in Iran who would love to see the end of theocratic Islamic rule and now would be a good time to start taking advantage of the fact UK and US forces control the Iraqi side of the border. Surely there must be some fairly large stockpiles of weapons from Saddam's army that have not been blown up and are just sitting around in Iraq...

But if the Iranians want to turn this into a hostage crisis however, the only response should be to use whatever force is required to resolve the situation, not just via anti-regime dissidents but directly by Britain against the Iranian state, and as soon as it is practical. If the theocrats want to engage in brinkmanship, I hope the UK and US will be prepared to not just go to the brink but to step straight over it very forcefully indeed. A nice opening move to the 'negotiations' would be to redeploy a division right up to the Iranian border.

Update: Hopefully this will all be over by tomorrow (Thursday). Perhaps the Iranian state decided it was unwise to push things too far. It will be interesting to see if there is any long term fall out from this incident.

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We noted that Our Man in Basra, spurred to action by some less than informed commenter(s), to put it mildly, in the comments section of our post expressing outrage that the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces in Iraq. As he has so courageously by-passed his 'handler' and put much interesting information in a comment, I shall give you the full juicy goodness of Our Man in Basra (perhaps I should take this opportunity to rename him to Our Man in British Army), herewith:

As I notice I am being referred to, under my pseudonym "Our Man In Basra" (not I am no longer working, I should say) I thought I would throw my two-pence worth in.

Do UK troops need more equipment? Absolutely, enough personal radios, body armour, working Land Rovers - I could go on for hours. (In fairness, where I was the food was excellent). Some more helicopters would be hugely useful, but beyond fantasy as a hope.

However, more troops - abso-bloody-lutely. I cannot comment in detail for reasons that I take to be obvious, but to give generic examples of why more troops would be useful in a counter-insurgency

1. More patrols, at more frequent intervals, so you can dominate the ground, throw uncertainty into your enemy, and essentially take the initiative. As all the military experts commenting above must know, having the initiative is the key to winning any kind of military confrontation. And if all your troops are tied up guarding your bases and vulnerable points, you cannot do anything to get the initiative. You cannot reduce the number of bases (much) or vulnerable points, so you need extra troops. QED.
2. More (reliable) troops to guard the vital infrastructure, i.e. the electricity and oil lines. Not necessarily by sitting on them, but by frequent unpredictable patrols.
3. Troops to act as dedicated QRF (Quick Reaction Forces), so that you can react rapidly to any enemy action- so that eventually he learns that any attack by him gets a very rapid response, thereby reducing the scale and effectiveness of what he can try.
4. More guards for your own installations - not necessarily to boost the number on guard, but so you can rotate them more regularly, and keep them fresher/more alert.
5. Crowd control. One man with a machine-gun can shoot a loot of people. But if you need to control a large angry crowd with sticks and stones, and you do not want to shoot - well then you need a lot of hard men with batons. Crowd in Iraq are in the 100s and up. That means you need a lot of troops - crowd control is labour-intensive. Unless you want to take the capital-intensive solution, and start shooting.

I am sure readers can think of plenty of other tactical uses for extra troops. At the higher level, the more troops you have, the better you can rotate them and manage their morale, thereby avoiding the kind of cynicism and depression. Soldiers thinking I hate this hole, I've been here 9 months, I'm exhausted and I'm not leaving for another 6 months. Who gives a shit what happens to the Iraqis? undermines the basis of counter-insurgency, hearts and minds. The British rotate our troops far more frequently than the Americans (average 4 months versus over a year), which IMHO is one reason for our relative success at hearts and minds.

The idea is not to carpet the country with troops, Boer War-style - although it may be worth noting that such an approach would actually work if we had enough troops. No, the idea is to have enough troops to do what we are doing now effectively.

To address some 'issues' raised by a particular commenter that goes by name Charlie who says: But if there were more soldiers, that would mean more opportunities for opportunistic attacks and therefore more casualties.

So, if there were no troops, there would be no opportunity for opportunistic attacks? True, but the point is not just to minimise casualties, or else why go there? The mission (should) come first, followed very closely by what our American cousins call "Force Protection". And that means you need enough troops to do the job.

In this case, the job is not protecting our troops, it is protecting the poor average Iraqi from all those who seek to prey on them, from ex-Saddamites to gangsters to religious fanatics (or at least those who claim religious backing for their own grab for power).

There is an amount required to do the job. At present it might be thought that a great deal of what we are doing is being driven by a desire to minimise our troops numbers and expense, rather than to actually do what is best for Iraqis (and in the long term for us).

Of course, one way to make do with fewer troops is to use what are known as "force-multipliers", anything that increases the effectiveness of your troop numbers. A good example is the helicopter, because it enables you to dominate larger areas of ground with fewer troops. But the UK has nowhere near the helicopter numbers of the US, because of far smaller funding. Another potential force multiplier would be reliable British Arabic translators. But to have lots of those ready to go would require more funding for Defence languages. You get the idea.

Also, in this type of operation in particular, the distinction between "combat" and "non-combat" troops is spurious. The RMP [ed. Royal Military Police] took a lot of casualties, I do not think they would appreciate being told they are not needed to fight. They, and many other supporting troops, are in great demand to, for example, run PW camps, which I would suggest is better than giving the job to reservists, as well as all kinds of other tasks - from advising the infantry on how to effect arrests while on patrol, to helping to train the Iraqi Police Forces.

That said, more infantry would be good as it would avoid the need to use other troops, such as RMP or Artillery, to perform patrolling functions, in which the Infantry are the specialists. As another commenter, Jacob, actually correctly points out, you can always use more soldiers in any kind of fighting situation. This point was made quite simply by Field Marshal Slim, one of the greatest military minds in history. I highly recommend his book "Defeat into Victory", I think mentioned on Samizdata before. The more you use, the fewer you lose.

Unfortunately, having said all the above, there simply are not that many soldiers left in the Army [ed. British Army], and there are still many commitments elsewhere - from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, not to mention Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, etc etc. The "Harmony Guidelines" which said that for the sake of their families soldiers should get at least 18 months at their home base between operations are already a poor joke. We might need to send more soldiers, but unless we cancel everyone's leave, we haven't got them.

Sorry, rather longer than I planned, but I thought it was worth saying.

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It has been reported that the 700 strong 1st battalion of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment has been in contact with the enemy every day for the past six weeks, racking up 250 seperate combat incidents.

Capt Justin Barry, a military spokesman, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph:

The fighters engaged were basically terrorists and gangsters - people who are out to destabilise the area, drive out the Coalition and suck as much out of Iraq as they can. But at the end of the day, we got the better of them. The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment were engaged in very heavy hand-to-hand fighting and bayonets were fixed. There's a great sense of satisfaction among the men with the way this turned out.

Indeed, but no thanks to Tony Blair. The fact the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces is nothing short of a national scandal.

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“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the Air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
- Memo composed by General Eisenhower, 5 June 1944.

Today, we commemorate one the most glorious chapters of German arms: the lightning-fast response of 21 Panzer Division to Eisenhower's overconfident thrust, a response that rolled up the British left flank and culminated in the annihilation of the British and American invaders.

How appropriate it is that, lacking the the confidence in race-destiny that comes so naturally to the Germanic peoples the Allied commander had actually composed his memo taking responsibility for failure beforehand!

Despite the somewhat tense international situation, the commemorative ceremonies have proceeded with our customary German precision. It is certainly a sign of how the bitter memories associated with the dawning of the atomic age over Hamburg, Smolensk and Manchester all those years ago have faded that for the first time we have welcomed to our remembrance the President of France, speaking from Vichy by audio-visual link, and the General Secretary of the British Communist party speaking from London. Many have seen in this technical and political triumph a sign of a possible convergence between the two great systems, National Socialism and Communism, that currently dominate our world.

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The storm over the revelations of prisoners' abuse in Iraq may have subsided a bit, however, the events have prompted Our Man in Basra to come out and offer his personal comments. His perspective comes from working and talking to people who deal with Amnesty International (AI) and International Red Cross Commitee (ICRC) in Iraq and elsewhere and from knowing their reputation in the Army.

I actually support the concept of an independent civilian organisation that moderates us [ed. armed forces]. There are often unconscious pressures to slip into "abuse", and they are most effective because of "socialisation", the process by which you take your cue for acceptable behaviour from those around you - that is why it is easy when standards slip for all to gradually slide down. Armed forces are designed to reinforce this process, and if the standard is not set from the top (as military hierarchy is designed to ensure it is) then they can slip down quickly.

That is exactly what happened in Abu Ghraib. There is therefore a need for an independent organisations such as Amnesty International or ICRC monitoring Army (and civilian) activity. They are a separate group, not subject to same socialisation, and so can act as a brake and ensure standards are maintained even if military's own system fails.

This relates to a more general point about Anglosphere intuitions being less corrupt in general and more effective. This is not because of better people, but better systems. This is why the United States as a country works so well with so many non-Anglo-Saxon people. In this context, one could think of Amnesty International checks as a sort of moral separation of powers.

However, Amnesty International and International Committee of the Red Cross have completely lost perspective, which in the long run is a pity for all of us. These organisations rely upon their moral authority, and in the past their most important and influential supporters have been people in the west with a strong moral sense and anti-despotic beliefs - whose faith in the ICRC and AI will be undermined once details of some current claims come out. As an anecdotal example that know of from a man working on the reports AI compile on us: They complained that Iraqis in Umm Qasr (British/US administered detention facility in the South) where being degraded because their food was handed out in plastic bags rather than delivered on some kind of trolley or plate. The Iraqis were not bothered, the food was perfectly good, but this was thought to be "degrading". This is an important point - when one of these reports comes out and accuses anyone of "degrading" or "humiliating" behaviour, etc, it is essential to dig deeper and see exactly what they mean.

The interesting question is why has this happened? I think there are a whole host of reasons feeding off each other:

1. Ignorance. The AI and ICRC are not monolithic, they have different people reporting in different places. It is a fair bet that the overwhelming majority people reporting on Iraq were not there before the war, because Saddam sure as hell would not let them. The same applies to every other Arab country. The investigators are therefore every bit as ignorant as the average journalist reporting on the country, with whom they share a lot in common, such as probably the same general meta-context and the same belief (with rather more justification) that they are there to uphold their view of civilisation. Not the local one.



2. The investigators are civilians (as they must be) but therefore often poorly equipped to put things in to relevant tactical perspective. These are not weasel words - to give a concrete example, suppose an Iraqi man has been "beaten up" by British troops; a clear case of abuse? This depends upon the circumstances. There is a world of difference between beating up a helpless prisoner once back in camp (this is clearly abuse), and, for example, using physical force to subdue a struggling looter, or an armed rioter. The whole purpose of Armies is to use violence, which cannot be defined as abuse every time they do without rendering the term pointless. It is moral infantilism to say that the context does not affect the morality of the act, and it is not clear that all of the reports or accusations take this in to account.



3. The above is essential to the most important point - Iraqis lie. This is not at all a criticism of Iraqis in a racial sense - being born Iraqi does not make you a liar. But lying reflexively to strangers is an entirely rational, indeed inevitable, response to living your entire life under a brutal and intrusive police state, in which the only efficient institution were the secret police forces. Therefore Iraqis have a neutral attitude to truth at best - they feel no automatic inclination to tell it the way westerners do.

   In addition most Iraqis have a strong sense of pride that prevents them from admitting ignorance. They will consistently claim knowledge they do not have, rather than admit that they do not know something. It is a matter of face, especially for the more important Iraqis. This was and is a constant source of frustration for anyone trying to gather information from them. They have lived their whole lives by exploiting any small opportunities the state bureaucracy may have given them.

   Most importantly, there is no punishment for lying to an investigator - what are we going to do, sue them for libel? Bear in mind as well that the vast majority of detainees were either looters, rioters, criminals of some kind (as the military, against its wishes, was stuck with running basic law and order) or actual ex-Ba'athists or terrorists. This does not give the slightest justification for abusing them, but it does suggest that they are not the most objective or reliable of witnesses.

   Now consider the following scenario:

   AI (or ICRC) investigator: We are investigating claims of brutality by British soldiers. We are deeply ashamed of such things, and want to assure you that we are not like the last regime; we will investigate any complaints, and we will compensate anyone who was unjustly harmed; do you know of any such incidents?

   Iraqi ex-prisoner (or even not): Why, yes I do I was beaten up, and so was my brother, and my cousin, and my father was shot, and all my family, and how much did you say the compensation was?

   It is an entirely rational economic act if you feel no obligation to the truth, a no-brainer gamble - money if you are believed, no cost if you are not.




4. All this is not helped by the seeming automatic tendency of the AI and ICRC to disbelieve anything the soldiers or military tell them but to believe anything an Iraqi tells them. I do not really object to their scepticism towards the military, wearying as it is - after all, in a sense that is their job. But to do a good job they should apply the same standards of proof and scepticism to both sides, not just one. If anything, the benefit of the doubt should belong to the military, who have a better record of honesty. Abu Ghraib, in the US military response actually demonstrates this. It was an entirely US military internal investigation that uncovered and closed down the Abu Ghraib abuses, not an AI or ICRC one.



5. Abu Ghraib has not helped, as it enables the AI, ICRC and everyone else to say "Look, these abuses have happened here, they could happen elsewhere, and the possibility must be investigated". Although it is fair to say that most of the reports currently in the press were prepared before Abu Ghraib became public knowledge. I have no problem with that conclusion - we are all appalled by Abu Ghraib, the military probably more than most.

   However, that is not the same as assuming that these things did happen elsewhere. Let's see proof, or at least strong evidence, before accusations are taken as smearing the whole military. Note to the media: Could we please distinguish between reservists, often great people but basically civilians with minimal training in uniform and who seem to have been almost solely responsible for Abu Ghraib, and the professional regular military? And if, as I suspect, poorly trained reservists are found to be involved in any other cases of abuse, can we consider how that reflects on the moral responsibility of politicians who try to cut corners on the armed forces by sending out civilians to do their job?




6. In conclusion, accusations must be investigated, but they are not proper evidence, let alone proof in themselves. They should be investigated by people with some understanding of the relevant factors, i.e. culture, situation at time of event, tactical realities, medical knowledge, etc; and with at least some parity of scepticism between the locals and the military.

In this case, they are so keen to be, and to be seen to be, impartial between different governments and people, and between Arabs and the 'West' that they seem to feel they must give equal reports of abuses by both sides, when in fact there is no remote comparison of treatment. Such reports are a disservice to objective truth by giving the false impression of a broad comparability of moral standing. Shades of the Cold War anyone?

I said at the start of this post, the current state of affairs is regrettable, because in the long run it will undermine the most important resource of both AI and ICRC, their credibility. And there may be times when we will still need them.

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Mark Steyn describes an incident that confirms my impression that the politicians are botching up Iraq.

During the Falklands War, a bayonet charge on enemy positions would have been publicly applauded by the Prime Minister, honours and medals would have been discussed and the British public would have been in doubt that the government and the military knew exactly what they were doing. We could agree or disagree with the objective or the means, but not the operational competence or the political will.

Where Iraq is going wrong is not that the military are incapable (unless they run out of ammunition, boots, flak-jackets etc). It is that military action will be undermined by political 'arse-covering'. The resolution shown by troops is frittered away by Colin Powell and his cronies in the US, and by the Labour government in the UK. Powell looks more and more like his caricature in the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks! played by Paul Winfield.

My view on Vietnam is that it would have been better if the US had not got involved after the French pull-out, given that they were going to do so eventually anyway, or that the US should have fought to win. I take a Barry Goldwater position rather than a Eugene McCarthy one.

It used to be Colin Powell's position too.

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I took some rather hot flak when I opposed international gun control as an excuse for invading Iraq (if Iraq's nukes are "bad", are France's and China's nukes "good"?). I have also taken some sharp criticism for saying that invading a country in order to make friends is an odd strategy (worthy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau "We will force you to be free!").

From Wires blog:

As we were leaving Baghdad, taking a ‘short cut’ through Fallujah and Ramadi, we passed a US Tank involved in ‘Stop and Search’. It had ASSAULT AND BATTERY written on it’s barrel.

Nice Peace – Keeping.

Now I do not take everything fiona says as Gospel, although her first act in Iraq was to try out an AK-47 so she can't be all bad!

It is clear however that there is no abatement of the resistance to foreign occupation of Iraq. It does not really matter whether the fault is that the occupying forces are too forceful, or failing to keep the peace because of politcally correct instructions, or a row between the US State Department and the Department of Defense. Either way it has all the potential for Vietnam II.

The only worthwhile achievement of invasion was the removal of Saddam Hussein. He has gone, it is time to leave also.

The only worthwhile debate now is whether to recognise an independent Kurdistan or not before the troops pull out and allow Iraqis to sort out their civil affairs.

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I ran across this little item from ten days ago while catching up with postings on a network admin group:

Ordnance Find Closes Baltimore Tunnel BALTIMORE (AP) -- The Baltimore Harbor Tunnel has been closed indefinitely after a worker at a nearby construction site discovered military ordnance.

Nine munitions, ranging in size from 500 to 4,000 pounds, had been found since early Wednesday. The construction site, less than a half-mile from the tunnel, was once used by the Navy to assemble and disassemble ships.

Disposal teams were working to determine the status of the munitions, said Col. Tim Madere, of the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Military investigators are trying to determine exactly where the ordnance came from, said Cpl. Greg Prioleau, a spokesman for the Maryland Transportation Authority.

The closing was ordered by Gov. Robert Ehrlich on the recommendations of ordnance disposal teams from the U.S. Army, Baltimore City, the FBI and the Maryland State Fire Marshal. Adjacent portions of I-895 also were closed.

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On March 19 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released the nerve gas Sarin on five trains of the Tokyo underground. Until 2001, I rated this the most frightening news story of the previous ten years. Why? Because until then the most severe weapons that had been used by terrorists had been conventional explosives. The expression "Weapon of Mass Destruction" is overused, but as the word is usually definted, this fit the bill. As it happened, due to a combination of inexperience in deployment and concern for the safety of the people actually deploying the weapons - the concentration of sarin in the containers was apparently substantially lower than Aum Shinrikyo had considered using - the Tokyo attack only killed 12 people, although a great many more were injured or otherwise affected by the attack.

But it was extremely close. Had a few fairly minor details been different, thousands would have died. As it happened, Aum Shinrikyo had one chance only to cause carnage of this kind. They were the kind of organisation that it was relatively easy for the Japanese authorities to round up and eliminate, and the Japanese authorities did indeed do this. But what they demonstrated is that a few skilled chemists with the sorts of resources that can be moderately easily bought on the open market in a developed country can produce extremely deadly chemical weapons.

It is now 2004, and such weapons have not been used again by terrorists. (In fact, I don't think they have been used in warfare since then either. To be truthful, they are not terribly useful in achieving military objectives unless your military objectives include killing large numbers of civilians. Saddam Hussein in the 1980s seems to be the last person who was into using them in a big way. While on that, I hope Mr Hussein is enjoying his cell in Qatar or wherever it is). Since then, we have had far too many terrorist attacks using conventional explosives, and one attack in which terrorists attempted to see if the sorts of fantasies that exist in Tom Clancy novels and James Bond movies will work in real life. (The answer was clearly yes, once. I can't imagine that September 11 type attack will work again, however). What we have learned since then is that there are terrorists out there who wish to kill westerners in large numbers, and who have operatives who are willing (or even eager) to die while delivering the weapons. Given that, an attack such as the one in Tokyo seems a fairly obvious way to achieve such objectives. So why hasn't it happened? I find it impossible to believe that Al Qaeda would not attempt such an attack if it could. The only explanation must be that they do not have such weapons?

Why not? Demonstrations that something is possible are usually followed by somebody else trying it. So why not here?

We have not seen this scenario discussed much. This may just be that the media have missed it. (I am sure that the intelligence agencies have not missed it. And I can't imagine that the terrorists have never thought about the posssibility). What we have seen discussed is much discussion of the possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons of various kinds. And the underlying fact is this: It is much harder to build a nuclear weapon than it is to make some nerve gas. This is why Saddam Hussein was never able to build a nuclear weapon, although he had lots of nerve gas. And it is why that Aum Shinrikyo attacked Tokyo with sarin. Reports are that they wanted to build nuclear weapons, but didn't have quite the skill or the resources.

Which leads me to think that Al Qaeda (and other similar terrorist organisations) are in a technical sense very unsophisticated. I am not a chemist, but I know enough chemists to know that if I were to recruit two or three chemists of the right kind (or maybe one, if I could find the right person straight away), and they were to cooperate with me, I could have some nerve gas in no time.

Again, I am not a nuclear physicist (although I actually am a physicist by training), and I also know that actually assembling a nuclear weapon isn't all that hard (although some types are trickier than others). However, obtaining the enriched Uranium (U-235) or the Plutonium isotope (Pu-239) necessary to build a nuclear weapon is, however, a substantial engineering exercise. It is relatively difficult to hide from, say, the air force of Israel. It is becoming easier to do and easier to hide as technology advances, which is a frightening thing, but the key point here is that it remains substantially harder than making some nerve gas. (The other thought is of course that Al Qaeda or some other organisation manages to buy or steal some fissile material or even complete bombs from some country that has built them, possibly the former Soviet Union. One thing to slightly take heart from is that fissile isotopes decay, and old nuclear weapons often no longer work. Only slightly, though, as the fissile material in such bombs is much easier to enrich back to something nasty than is uranium in its natural form).

This leads me to think that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations are nowhere near building nuclear weapons of their own. If they had much technical expertise, we would see it in other kinds of weapon - most notably chemical - long before we saw anything nuclear. But at first thought it surprises me that they have neither kind of weapon. Because, in both cases I have a rough idea how I would go about making such weapons myself, and I know who I could ask who would know in great detail. Particularly in the case of chemical weapons, it really doesn't strike me as very hard.

However, when I think about it some more, it becomes harder. If I were to ring up three chemists I knew at grad school, and ask them do they know how to make sarin, or do they know someone who would, I suspect that there is a fair chance that I would get on to someone who knew before long. And it's quite possible that he or she would tell me how. However, what would also happen is that the fact that I had been asking questions would also get around, and before very long I would have someone knocking on my door and asking me all kinds of questions about why I wanted to know this. While this kind of knowledge is not widespread, it is relatively easy for security organisations to keep track of it, and to notice anyone who can ask awkward questions. This fails when knowledge becomes widespread and there are too many people to keep track of. US intelligence services attempted to keep knowledge about hard encryption secret in the way they would suppress knowledge about how to build weapons - in fact encryption softwere was legally treated as a munition - but failed utterly. (This book gives a good overview of the story).

And of course, it seems impossible to stop things like the Sasser worm for much the same reason. Quite probably our information networks do make this sort of thing much harder. However, there is an enormous difference between the number of bright anarchic 18 year olds programming computers in their basements and the number of Al Qaeda sympathetic teenagers dabbling in organic chemistry in their basements.

I could read lots of books and attempt to make sarin myself without consulting other people, but chances are I would kill myself in an early experiment rather than make any weapons. I could go back and do a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry, and learn all these things without arising suspicion, but that would take a long term plan. And the fact is that you can't really choose people to be scientists: they choose themselves. Non-scientists don't generally understand the mindset very well, and so sending a few people off to American colleges to learn how to make sarin is probably not very effective. And if you send too many people, some of them will not be loyal. (Neal Stephenson wrote an entertaining (but for some reason very obscure) novel named The Cobweb under a pseudonym a few years back, which was all about this - Iraqi grad studends making biological weapons for Saddam Hussein in a public university somewhere in the American west. And ultimately people did notice). In practice the best way to develop chemical weapons in secret if you are a terrorist organisation is to find a few people with the right mindset (although not necessarily complete expertise in the subject at hand), put them together in secret, and encourage them to talk to one another until they develop the correct expertise. As far as I can tell, this is what happened in Japan. The terrorist organisation in question seemed particularly designed to recruit people of the right mindset, and it was a more authoritarian top down organisation.

Al Qaeda is not like this. It seems to be more a loosely federated organisation of semi-autonomous cells. The disaffected middle class Saudi quality of the September 11 terrorists notwithstanding, Al Qaeda isn't an organisation of much appeal to people of a scientific mindset, even Arabs of a scientific mindset. Most Arab scientists I know are not entirely free of anti-Americanism, but they despise the fundamentalists just the same. (Both Aum Shinrikyo and Al Qaeda have a curious fondness for Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy though). A structure consisting of loosely federated small cells doesn't really allow for the development of much technical sophistication or institutional knowledge. Which possibly explains why the terrorists are seemingly such amateurs in terms of obtaining and building weapons. The extraordinary thing about September 11 was the sheer novelty of what was achieved. A weakness in America's systems was expoited in such a way that two of the largest buildings in the world were destroyed with a few knives and a couple of sets of boxcutters (or whatever it was). This was a triumph of planning over resources. Al Qaeda went to this much trouble because as I see it it was forced to by a lack of resources.

None of this really makes me sleep any easier. This is merely an attempt to answer a simple question. "Given how easy it is to make weapons of mass destruction, why do the terrorists not have them?". Given how easy it is to make them, I suspect terrorists will have them at some point. However, when it comes down to it I am amazed they do not have them already. And the only reason I can think of for why is incompetence. And this is the only way I can explain the incompetence.

Even if it is hard for terrorists to build nasty weapons of their own because of their institutional structure, states do have the right institutional structure, and there are one or two states out there that could conceivably supply terrorists with weapons. (The fear of what America might do to any state from which such weapons could be traced is hopefully something of a deterrent. But how really do you deter somewhere like North Korea?). When weapons capable of killing thousands or more people fall into the hands of small non-state groups, the world will really have changed. We are at a curious moment in which two things have happened: there has been one terrorist attack (Tokyo, 1995) in which a potential weapon of mass destruction was used without mass destruction being causes, and there has been one terrorist attack (New York, 2001) in which mass destruction was caused without a "weapon of mass destruction" being used. I cannot see how the two things will not come together at some point.

And this will genuinely will be a moment unique in human history. And we must not forget this fact. And we must prepare for it, however difficult it seems.

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An interesting question for those concerned about creating a more free society is how such a society, be it a model of constitutional, limited, minimal government, or even an anarchist one, would actually defend itself from attack. What sort of practical ways would such societies employ, and would such societies require armies, navies, air forces and the like?

It seems pretty fair to me to assume that outside some sort of pacifist utopia, any such model requires defence and people with the skills and willpower to serve as soldiers, pilots and the like. That is why in the absence of the draft, which libertarians rightly abhor, we need people who can volunteer to serve in the armed forces, giving up the comforts of home. That is not sentimental military-speak, but hard reality.

Hard reality is something of a stranger to the author of this diatribe, full of twisted logic, presumptiousness and lies against the late American soldier and former NFL star, Pat Tillman.

I will not bother to fisk the piece. The illogicality of it is so glaring, its vile intent so obvious, that a line by line response would merely insult the intelligence of this blog's readership. Suffice to say that a man gave up the promise of a fat paycheck and the comforts of a loving family to go and join the army, knowing that in so doing he might be called upon to fight in situations those moral perfectionists in our academic world would find abhorrent.

Whether one agrees with the war against Saddam and the Taliban or not, on a broader point, it seems obvious to me that we will need people willing, like Pat Tillman, to defend us. This is a point that about which a "chickenhawk" like me who is too old to serve in the forces any more is only too painfully aware.

Remember the name of the woman who wrote this shabby article. As the years go by no doubt she will continue to enjoy the benefits of a world made rich by a model of free enterprise she hates, and defended by "macho" men she despises. But I will not forget. This sorry excuse for a human being has not just traduced the memory of a very brave and good man; she has done so against all those who believed they were fighting to defend the freedoms we enjoy.

(Please post comments on the Daily Collegiate website I linked to. They deserve to hear what you think).

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I have only just noticed this. But I agree with it, and I think the point is good enough to last way longer than a fortnight. It is from our own Natalie Solent on what to do about hostage taking:

Iraqi gunmen of the Mujahideen Brigades, a previously unknown group, have taken three Japanese citizens captive and say that Japan must pull out its troops or the prisoners will be burned alive.

Well, it worked in Spain. It worked in Somalia. The question is, do we keep it working?

I say, no. Kill the Muhajideen brigades. God willing the hostages might be saved, but if they are killed too, better a bullet than being burned alive and better a world where they die thus than one where the tactic of threatening hostages with death by torture works. As I said in January when Israel more-than-foolishly released many terrorists in exchange for an Israeli hostage, "Yes, of course I'd feel and speak very differently if it was my relative held hostage. Do you think I'm made of stone? But what is that to the purpose?" Think not only of the hostage we see now but of the next, and the next, and the next - because unless war is waged and won on this tactic, that is what there will be.

Whenever I line up next to, or myself say, things like this, I recall Saki's phrase about the reckless courage of the non-combatant. As Natalie asks, what if a relative of hers were a hostage? What if she was? What if I was?

Nevertheless, I truly believe that she is right, and there is no future in giving in to these people, and not too abysmal a hope of a present for any hostages if the captors and their fortress are stormed rather than negotiated with.

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There are times when the newsies reach depths which even I find difficult to fathom. There has been an ongoing debate with the DOD by the lowest of the breed about access to Dover Air Force Base where our war dead make their first stop on home soil.

The DOD says it is being sensitive to the needs of the families; that most do not want the return of their loved ones turned into a ratings carnival for the Evening News.

Personally, if I were a family member and a loved one of mine were being returned, I would expect quiet and dignity. If the DOD ever changes the policy in favour of the paparazzi, family members should consider applying their weapon of choice against the nearest, most expensive cameras.

Kicking a cameraman in the balls could be equally educational to the receiver, even if she doesn't have them.

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The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.
- Mao Tse Tung

The recent offer of truces by both Al Quaeda and Muqtada al Sadr's followers in Iraq suggests an incompetence for guerrilla warfare, or that they are losing.

There are two dangers in the weeks ahead. The first is that since the 1960s, a different sort of guerrilla warfare has emerged, which consists of sacrificing cannon-fodder until your opponent can no longer morally take it.

The first historical case of this that I can find comes from the First World War, on the second day of the Battle of Loos. It was an accident. Ten thousand British troops were lined up in ten ranks and marched slowly across muddy open terrain with range markers placed by the Germans. The German machine gunners simply mowed down rank after rank of the British, without taking any casualties themselves. The British came up to the barbed wire that was supposed to have been cut by the artillery bombardment, only it had not been. None of the British troops was equipped with wire cutters (this bit has not changed). So groups of British soldiers ran up and down the barbed wire looking for a way through. The result was virtually 100 per cent casualties on the British side.

Now it is not true that this battle left the Germans unscathed. About a dozen German machine gunners were so traumatised by the massacre that they suffered nervous breakdowns and needed to be hospitalized (the British would have shot them for cowardice).

Since the Vietnam War, it has become a deliberate tactic of the weaker combattant to make a point of losing hundreds or thousands of casualties in the belief that the West does not have the stomach for slaughtering poorly armed enemies. To return to the Mao quote, now is the time to press even more firmly with military force: "enemy tires, we attack". Failure to do so merely confuses by-standers who consider compassion to be effeminate weakness, and encourages the enemy.

The second threat is the 'compromise' with the UN. Letting the UN organise the hand-over of power to an Iraqi government (which will surely be different from the one the US wants) is rather like inviting the USSR to decide who governs Germany and Japan in 1945. Except that the USSR was an ally.

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Paul Staines points out a splendid example of the French state doing its bit to support the world's largest tyranny

As Taiwan's democrats get bullets before ballots, France demonstrates its exceptionalism once again.  This week the French navy began joint exercises with the Chinese navy. No, really.

Not content with just lobbying other EU countries to lift the arms embargo on China imposed in the wake of the Tiannamen Square massacre in 1989 (who says the French are always against free trade?), they are training with the Chinese navy. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said they would be China's biggest ever joint military exercises with a foreign power.   (Note to Beijing,  it took Churchill a single day to sink almost the entire French navy, but maybe you have not got many seafaring friends to learn from.)

Taiwan obviously is anxious about the situation – which they describe as a threatening show of force. The French not content with cruising the seas with Taiwan’s mortal enemy recently condemned President Chen Shui-bian's plan to hold a referendum on missile defense as part of this coming Saturday's election, prompting Taipei to suspend top-level ties with Paris.

I suppose with reduced opportunities for arms sales to Iraq the prospect of equipping the Chinese military appeals.

Paul Staines

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There is a reason why the military is one of the few areas in which the State operates successfully. It is Darwinian. Bad soldiers die at a faster rate than good soldiers; bad generals lose battles and are replaced; nations with bad armies cease to exist.

So it is with defense programs in war time. No matter how technically sweet a weapon system may be, it must fulfill an actual current battlefield need. It must be able to survive in the battlefield that actually exists and perform the actual missions required in war as it is, rather than as it was imagined.

So it is with heavy heart we say goodbye to a truly magnificent and now still-born aircraft: the Comanche. The US Army announced it will be cancelled. The money will instead be used to buy more Longbows and Blackhawks and to upgrade survivability across the fleet and especially in the National Guard units.

The SAM's of Iraq spoke... and the US Army listened.

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About a year ago I predicted the US was in the first stages of disentangling itself from global tarbabies. Invading Iraq was one of the items I expected as there was no real path out of the Middle East so long as Saddam was there. Northern and Southern Watch would have continued for decades. This is not to say America will not be stuck there for quite a few years to come, only that there is a plausible exit strategy where there once was none.

The BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process is due to culminate in a report in mid-March and will include what may well be the greatest re-organization of American overseas basing since the end of WWII. I expect to see the buzz word 'capabilities based defense' used as an explanation for greatly decreased numbers of Americans in overseas bases.

The third part is South Korea, and I give you these two items from Jane's to take as thou wilt:

Seoul's AEW&C buy will reduce reliance on US. The relaunch of the E-X airborne early-warning and control (AEW&C) programme by the Republic of Korea (RoK) Ministry of National Defence (MND) on 4 February is intended to reduce the country's reliance on US Air Force E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft (JDW 11 February). [Jane's Defence Weekly - first posted to http://jdw.janes.com - 13 February 2004]

South Korea haggles over procurement programme. The Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defence (MND) established its Korea Multirole Helicopter (KMH) Programme Management Office (PMO) last month to lead the country's largest-ever defence procurement programme, with a value of some $12.5 billion. [Jane's Defence Weekly - first posted to http://jdw.janes.com - 13 February 2004]

We will see agreements for unrestricted bases containing pre-positioned supplies in in places convenient to expected trouble spots. There will only be enough local American staff to handle peace-time security, inventory and infrastructure. Perhaps there will be some intelligence, training and Special Forces as well, but the 'footprint' will be small. As much as possible will be handled by civilians, on base where absolutely required and otherwise 'outsourced' to a back-office in the US.

Naval basing will be an exception. A primarily maritime power still needs home ports for the Fleet that are within reasonable sailing distances of trouble spots.

We are entering an era in which our military will be kept at home and deployed only when and where required. It will take most of this decade to get there.

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Wired reports that Russia has successfully tested a hypersonic anti-Star Wars weapon capable of penetrating any prospective missile shield, a senior general said Thursday. The prototype weapon proved it could maneuver so quickly as to make "any missile defense useless," Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, told a news conference.

This exchange of statements has an air of nostalgia about it:

Putin said that the development of new weapons was not directed against the United States, and Baluyevsky reaffirmed the statement, saying that the experiment shouldn't be seen as Russia's response to U.S. missile defense plans. "The experiment conducted by us must not be interpreted as a warning to the Americans not to build their missile defense because we designed this thing."

In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement. "If you're in that business -- intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads -- you want them to be survivable, and maneuverability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defenses."

I suppose the signs of new era are the following bits:

Putin said that Russia has no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle. "We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow."

Baluyevsky said that Russia had informed the United States about its intention to conduct the experiment and added that U.S. officials issued no objections.

We shall see.

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This is an thoughtful posting:

The weekend was spent in Manchester, via Oxford. On Sunday morning a friend and I visited the Imperial War Museum North, which forms part of the dramatic redevelopment of the quaysides around the ship canal on the Salford/Trafford border.

I was brought up on school trips to the Imperial War Museum in Kennington. The huge naval guns at the entrance, the trench experience, the endless tanks, artillery pieces and bombers' cockpits you can climb over, the uniforms, guns and bayonettes in cases. Regardless of your attitude towards war, you can't deny it is a fascinating collection.

So we expected something similar in Manchester, but were surprised. There are very few physical exhibits: one T34 tank, a field gun, a fire engine, and for reasons I still don't understand, a Trabant car. The cases are sparsely filled. The emphasis is not on weapons or uniforms or battles, but on the effect of war on people - refugees, children, prisoners, asylum-seekers, and peace protestors. So there were more letters and diaries than rifles and grenades. There was even a case filled with cultural items which reflect Britons' obsession with WWII: Warlord comics, action man, and Dad's Army.

There are frequent films projected on the vast walls - we saw one about children in war, and one about the 'causes of war' (it's all about oil and money).

This is not a place for a military historian or one who wants to see the development of the machine gun, but perhaps that's not what people want anymore. Does the new type of musuem reflect changing social attitudes, or is it trying to mould them?

At least the architecture of the building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is stunning, and you can buy Airfix models in the giftshop (very tempting!).

"Stunning" means, from the outside, looking like this:

Normally, I do not dislike buildings of this sort. For modern art something along these (curvey) lines is very appropriate. But put it like this, if the people who fought and died in the wars being propagandised about inside this edifice were asked what they thought of it, what do you think they would say? Or is it that I now associate such buildings with harmless trivialities, that therefore it really does not matter what they look like, and that therefore the architect might as well have some fun – but this is a museum about war?

By the way, to add some other design-related facts, the genius who did the recent redesign of Samizdata.net, and who designed this and this, and also, not surprisingly, this, also did this.

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India has closed the deal for the purchase of the 'Admiral Gorschkov', a Cold War era Russian aircraft carrier. It is expected this ship will come into service with the Indian Navy around 2008, just in time for the retirement of the INS Viraat, their current aircraft carrier.

It is quite interesting that there is a continuing armaments relationship between the Russians and India, despite the seismic geopolitical changes of the last decade. An untutored alien landing for the first time on Earth would make no sense of it. The roles of the US and the USSR in that region should be reversed, Russia should be partnered with the alternating military dictatorship and semi-democratic kleptocracies of Pakistan and the US with India, the oldest liberal democratic state in Asia.

Relations between nations have layers within layers and oft-times deep and conflicting historical roots, I am aware of some of the public history of the region, but cannot help wondering if there is a bit more to it, an unspoken geopolitical undertext.

India has centuries of liberal European traditions behind it. It is also not likely to change very much even under severe pressure. Generations would come and go before the paperwork for change was properly submitted, checked, authorized and filed. In a Cold War world the risk of India actually going Red was rather slim and thus of less worry than perennially unstable Pakistan.

Pakistan borders China and is within spitting distance of Russia across a ultra thin panhandle of Afghanistan. The region is wild and uncontrolled and right in the hotspot is the contested Kashmir Province. Given the location and the consistant interest in access to the oil and southern oceans shown from Tsarist through Soviet days, Northern Pakistan was absolutely ripe for fun and games with the KGB. It seems obvious checkmating this move was of far more Realpolitik value than telling the Indians how much we admired their history.

With the end of the Evil Empire, much of Geopolitics changed, but the full extent of the re-alignment of interests in this part of the world did not really click into place until September 11th, 2001. Islamic fundamentalists were already a clear and present danger to the Russians. Nutcases don't even have to board an airliner to get to Moscow. They can drive there. After 9/11 they were also top priority to the US.

Over the last century or so, the Russians have ticked off a lot of people on their borders and they know it. They've done a far better job at this than the US... so it is somewhat in their interest for the US to take the brunt of whatever direct ire is caused by sorting out the problems. Otherwise they would have to deal with it, and given their level of success in Afghanistan and Chechnya, I would not have much hope for solutions from that direction.

From the Russian viewpoint, it is ideal if the US stabilizes Pakistan and acts as the lightning rod for fundamentalist ire; meanwhile they help arm India so that in the worst case, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan, India can keep Pakistan occupied and looking away from Russian territory.

The Russians see the regional problems up front and personal; they are damned pretty much whatever they do and aren't very good at building stable liberal democracies. They haven't even worked the bugs out of their own yet. The US is somewhat less at risk from the downsides of action in the region since it is far, far away and bordered by oceans and democracies. Not that such is a total protection. It just means the crazies have to expend more energy and more resources to carry out their attacks. To put it bluntly, the US stands to lose a smaller number of cities to the fundies than would Russia.

So there is method to this madness. You just have to sit a moment in everyone's chair and ask 'what's in it for me?'

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The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House, 2002

The author, a (presumably ex-) CIA operative, has written this book, published in the Autumn of 2002, as an advocate of "regime change" in Iraq, listing the various alternative options, five in all: Containment, Deterrence, Covert Action, The Afghan Approach" and (the preferred one) Invasion (p. xxix and Part III, pp. 211-386).

Iraq's History and Relations with the US to Gulf War I

Part I (pp. 1-108) Iraq and the United States, following a 30 page Introduction, gives a concise summary of Iraq's history and relations with US, with greater concentration after the fall of the Shah turned Iran from a Western bulwark to Islamic menace. From someone regarded with repugnance, Saddam became the "man we can do business with", which meant tolerating some ghastly atrocities in the chemical warfare line against rebel Kurds and Iran, which Saddam had rashly taken on after its armed forces had been purged by the mullahs and sabotaged by departing US and dissident technicians. If the US rescued Iraq by supplying weapons, others - China, Russia (still the USSR), France, Germany and Britain - followed suit, many selling the ingredients for the nuclear, chemical and biological programs that have subsequently given so much trouble (p. 19). Officially Saddam could claim a victory and emerged from the 1980-88 war with a large well-armed army, but with 200,000 dead, terribly in debt and his economy badly degraded. His decision to attack and occupy Kuwait for its wealth, in gold, goods and oil, was fortified by his mistaken belief that his army could defeat an American riposte, and not unassisted by misguided pacific overtures and reports by the US ambassador, Susan Glaspie - and what has happened to her, I wonder?

Gulf War I, 1991

Kuwait was invaded and occupied on August 1st, 1990. Nearly 6 months later, following a month's bombing of Iraq and its forces in Kuwait, on Sunday, February 24th, 1991 US and other forces attacked and, by the end of the week, had ejected the Iraqis and defeated them soundly enough to stop fighting. It is always, in retrospect, surprising how long it actually takes, compared with how immediate it seems viewed historically, for this kind of series of events to happen. I think everyone forgets the hesitations, negotiations and wobbles. Pollack leaves me in little doubt that the situation after the fighting had ceased (on our part) was badly mismanaged, basically because the US government (on whom everything depended) thought a) Saddam would be replaced by his own military and b) Iraq might otherwise fragment and a counterpoise to Iran be lost. Horrendous massacres of Shi ite rebels and Kurds were the result. Saddam rebuilt his strength and spent the next twelve years evading the conditions imposed by the UN. At first, especially when Saddam attempted to initiate another threat to Kuwait, there was consistent international consensus that he should be kept under pressure, and it became obvious from time to time, from information from defectors, that the UN weapons' inspectors (UNSCOM) were being hoodwinked.

Saddam Survives ...

After the first general disappointment that Saddam had not been removed by an internal coup, a number of efforts were made by the CIA to support one, but these, together with a Kurdish attack in March 1995 to promote Iraqi army defections, all failed. At the same time, however, the plight of the Iraqi people promoted international sympathy, the blame, with typical injustice, being laid at the US door. It was not until early 1996 that Saddam accepted the conditions for the "oil-for-food" (plus medicines &c, so, later "oil for stuff", p. 100) program, not long after world opinion had hardened when a major defector revealed to what extent UNSCOM had been cheated (p. 77). However, during 1996 things improved for Saddam. He took advantage of the divisions amongst the Kurds to inflict a major defeat on one faction, after backing another. Then he uncovered a CIA-backed plot and destroyed the conspirators, his two defected sons-in-law inexplicably returned to Iraq and were killed in a shoot-out, and the resolution of the weapons' inspectors weakened and they were systematically frustrated.

... and International Interest Weakens

The world was getting tired of the problem; to signal the way they were going, France, Russia and China abstained from a resolution rather weakly supporting the inspectors and when the US and UK started to get tough, almost immediately Arab and European governments began to distance themselves from Washington and London (p. 88)." Saddam had succeeded in splitting the Security Council and continued to be obstructive to the weapons inspectors who finally withdrew as a result. Four days of heavy US and UK bombing at the end of 1998 had some impact and stimulated a near-revolt in the Shi ah area, but Pollack obviously thinks it wasn't persistent enough (p. 94). Also the amount of bombing it took to bring Milosevic to reason over Kosovo made the Clinton administration realise that bombing wouldn't be enough to bring about regime change in Iraq, though this was announced as policy by Clinton himself (p. 94).

Pollack himself had by now been recruited to try to work out various methods to bring about regime change without invasion, but the external "Iraqi opposition was a mess (p. 96)" and at odds with their only US backers. Kosovo put regime change on the back burner in favour of containment. This relaxation benefited Saddam and sanction-breaking became blatant which Washington was virtually powerless to stop, while the Iraqi opposition fell apart. Clinton was busy trying to leave office with an Israeli-Palestinian accord to his credit but failed. The Palestinian intifadah that followed also aided Saddam by moving Arab sentiment onto his side. There was even a chance that Iraq and Syria might have attacked Israel and it is not clear which of them backed down (p. 104). When Bush II took office in 2001, he continued the containment policy, and got a resolution for "smart sanctions" through the UN, though this had little effect on smuggling. Sept. 11th changed the attitude of the American public into a more hawkish one. Although the immediate result was action against Taliban Afghanistan, it also made military action against Iraq more feasible.

The Iraq Situation in 2002

Part II (pp. 111-181) Iraq Today [i.e., 2002] starts with an account of the organisation of Saddam's tyranny. "Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine. The fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks (p. 122)." reported John Sweeney of the BBC on June 22nd, 2002. A couple of pages elaborate on the regime's methods of ensuring this. Then there is the post Gulf War I misery, occasioned by Saddam's response to the UN sanctions set up in 1990. "It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the time that the regime would simply choose to allow its people to perish (p. 126)." and "It is important to remember that Saddam and his cronies were the most important element in Iraq's humanitarian disaster ... Saddam always had it in his power ... to give up his WMD programs (p. 133)." Although there seems to have been enough food, the infrastructure, particularly sanitation and hospitals, went downhill, as did the economy in general, at least resulting in a decline in defence expenditure. Sanctions even helped the regime to increase its grip by its control of the rationing system. Because, aimed at manipulating world opinion, Iraqi statistics exaggerated the child death rate, no one can really know how many deaths sanctions actually caused. Pollack attacks critics that blame the US for this state of affairs, excusing Saddam "for his cruelty the way we could excuse a wolf for killing sheep," but all the same, "there is a kernel of truth to this perverse argument ... if you hand an ax to an ax murderer, can you consider yourself blameless when he plants it in someone's back (p. 140)?" I can see how this leads to direct intervention, though this is not stated.

The Shi'ah and the Kurds are discussed; the Kurds (though disunited) are definitely more separatist; the Shi'ah fought for Iraq against Iran (though a Shi'ah state) and have no wish for independence; the Kurds do and under US protection have such de facto; virtually a normal existence and hope to stay that way. Pollack continues by outlining the threat that Iraq under Saddam posed (the tense applies to post Gulf War II) to its neighbours, the US, Israel and the world in general, emphasising that this is long rather than short term, in Iraq's pre Gulf War II weakened state. I can see that while this is a perfect reason for pre-emptive action, it collides with what has become the UN "last resort" stance.

"Weapons of Mass Destruction": Saddam Sacrifices $130-$180 billion to get them

"Saddam has given up anywhere from $130 billion to $180 billion worth of oil revenues to hang on to his WMD programs ... [and] demonstrated for more than a decade that his WMD arsenal is more important to him than Iraq's oil wealth, its people, its economy, or even its conventional military power (p. 175)." His goal was to lead the "Arab nation" to become a new superpower, comparable with China, the US and USSR (p. 150). This would involve control of all Middle East oil, to be used entirely for political, rather than economic purposes. In terms of conventional warfare, the Iraqi army had some strengths, in defence, movement and supply, but was poor in coordination and initiative and after Gulf War I it deteriorated from lack of money for maintenance. The airforce was next to useless. Pollack believes that since his conventional forces had become unable to face the US, Saddam had to concentrate his hopes on WMD (p. 168). Of all these, the nuclear is the most important: "if he has a nuclear weapon the world will have to treat him differently (p. 178)". Pollack claims: "Just to be clear about this: in 1990, Iraq built a workable nuclear weapon. All it lacked was the fissile material (p. 174)." Given time and opportunity, Iraq could continue and complete its nuclear weapons program (p. 175).

Terrorism - Saddam Not Guilty (so far)

As for terrorism, this "is the least of the threats to ... the United States ... well below Iran, Syria, Pakistan and others" the main reason being that Saddam had distanced himself in 1982 from terrorist organizations because it needed US help against Iran (p. 154). After 1991 and Gulf War I the situation changed but Iraq had had no terrorist allies and its own terrorist management was amateurish. But would Saddam give WMD to terrorists? Pollack concludes this to be unlikely. It is one of several things Saddam might, in Pollack's opinion, do if he got desperate - but which we have seen he didn't do.

The Problem of Arab "Help"

In Ch. 6, "The Regional Perspective", Pollack points out that the US need for Arab allies to help oust Saddam (minimally, to supply bases) conflicts with the universal Arab hatred for Israel, believed to be kept in existence by the US, while anti-British feeling goes back to Suez in 1956. Every Arab-Israeli crisis has exacerbated anti-US feeling, expressed in rioting &c, while the Arab "street" (shorthand for ill-informed public opinion, inflamed by the Internet and satellite TV) intimidates the mostly undemocratic regimes of the region. Also, the US had kept up the pressure on Iraq to such an extent that the surrounding Arab regimes saw Saddam as so little a threat that they could afford to resent the US presence. As a symptom of this, there was even a "mock rapprochment" between Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq at the Arab Summit in Beirut in March 2002. The attitude of Saudi Arabia is thoroughly ambivalent: it would have loved Saddam to be got rid of, but saw no other way than by direct US military intervention, with no mucking about with limited means, or "covert action" – "Countless Saudi princes, officials and businessmen have asked me, 'Why don't you just invade?' (p. 189)" However, Saudi Arabia was not going to cause itself any trouble by doing anything to help the US, as Gulf War II amply demonstrated. The Kuwaitis are naturally more pro-US: only US protection will save them from annexation by even a weak Iraq. Other Gulf States feel less threatened by Iraq and are consequently more anti-US. The Jordanian predicament is succinctly put (pp. 194-5); also Syria's economic dependence on an Iraq despite or even because crippled by sanctions.

Turkey, Israel and Iran

When the book was written Pollack thought that Turkey, despite its misgivings about the possibility of Kurdish independence, could be brought to support a US invasion. In fact, though its government might have cooperated, it was prevented by its democratic institutions from doing so. Egypt's government's minimal cooperation, despite the generally anti-US popular feeling, is all the US needs or desires. Israel would have preferred the US to have dealt with Iran first, then Iraq: both are threats, but Iran provides most of the funds and intelligence to the Hizbollah. Iran - or at least the government there - hates Saddam for the enormous damage he inflicted on the country (400,000 dead in the Iran-Iraq War) and the US for the usual inadequate reasons. Although it would feel surrounded if Iraq were occupied, it may well feel now that the US has its hands sufficiently full and unlikely to do much about Iran.

The UN - Allies and Opponents of the US against Saddam

Pollack also gives a round-up of potential US allies and opponents in the UN, though his forecasts have sometimes proved incorrect. The UK is the US prime ally; Pollack states that "Its continued support is critical to any new policy of containment (p. 203)." He also says, giving a reference in both The Guardian (7/4/02) and The Washington Times (11/3/02), that "Tony Blair's own remarks have made it clear that [he] would be willing to support a US-led invasion of Iraq to change the regime once and for all (p. 204)." He stresses, however, that the UK would very much like to have a clear green light from the UN" and is much more a stickler for international legality than the US is, an insight certainly borne out by events. France is characterised as "one of Iraq's chief advocates" with sound economic reasons for being so. Pollack believes that the French realise that it is the US that will ultimately have to deal with Saddam if he obtains nuclear weapons, "and they are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement." Pollack has been proved incorrect in saying that "if France becomes convinced that the US is absolutely determined to remove Saddam ... they will likely flip and become supporters of the operation." He generalises too much in having the Mediterranean countries line up with France and the Northern with the US. Russia also "has quite a bit at stake with Saddam Hussein's regime" and "hates to see the US throw its weight around (p. 205)." But it would not do anything to save him (quite right there). He makes no mention of their common fear of Muslim terrorism. China also hates the US throwing its weight around. In all, Pollack seemed to have overestimated potential support for and underestimated international disaffection with the US, perhaps because Bush arouses greater antipathy amongst media opinion-formers than Clinton did.

Dealing with Saddam: The Five Options

Part III deals with the "The Options" - Containment, Deterrence, Covert Action, The Afghan" Approach, and Invasion. Each is analysed in detail, with the conclusion that only the last can bring about the desired result.

1. Containment

"For many years after the Gulf War, containment [by sanctions and inspections] did meet Washington's minimal requirements. ... It also had the huge advantage of being the policy of the UN ... [and] benefited everyone except the Iraqi people." But by the time of writing, it no longer worked and to set it up again would be extremely expensive, financially and politically. After the Weapons Inspectors had left in 1998 sanctions were being dismantled in effect, by France, Russia and China, who would see to it that they were not reinvigorated. The US would either have to compensate neutral sufferers or apply sanctions against the active sanction-breakers. Sanctions had already put the control of trade into Saddam's hands and he used all his powers to favour sanction-breakers, ration-control his own people &c. In fact there was no chance of improving the sanctions regime (on, say the notional lines on pp. 222-4) because There is no meaningful support [for sanctions]. The vast majority of countries simply want the problem to go away (p. 225)." Nor can the US impose sanctions unilaterally, involving as it would penalising the evaders. No inspection regime will do any good; the new regime UNMOVIC (= Monitoring & Verification Commission) set up by the UN Resolution 1284 was even weaker than the already weakened UNSCOM (= Special Commission for the Disarmament of Iraq). Even if the US toughened the inspection regime by threatening to invade (as it did) we cannot hold a gun at Saddam's head for as long as it would take to actually disarm Iraq," something Saddam fully appreciated, for the US cannot keep an invasion force in the Gulf region for more than about six months (p. 247)." That the US should stop dithering and get on (with the invasion) or get out was the universal wish of the governments of the Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia. What their people would have liked was a different matter, but a major reason for that wish.

2. Deterrence

If containment was impracticable, what about simple deterrence, which, after all, has worked up till now with a number of nuclear-armed and mutually hostile states? Pollack argues that with Saddam, such a policy would have been extremely risky, since Saddam was an ill-informed, over-optimistic pathological gambler, as instanced by his behaviour after his invasion of Kuwait, evidence reinforced by the testimony of the Russian PM Primakov who tried to make him see sense. He simply did not believe that the US and its allies would do what they did - Pollack does not mention the usual wavering and havering at the UN, to say nothing of the same in the US Congress, that may have supported Saddam in his view.

3. Covert Action

Covert Action - i.e., trying to get rid of Saddam either by direct assassination or by supporting internal Iraqi plots was also a non-starter. Pollack makes it clear that Saddam's security was so efficient that the chances were less than 10% that any plot could succeed - the wider the plot, the more likely it was to be betrayed - and that though under normal conditions this sort of initiative might ultimately work, the longer it went on for the more uncooperative the surrounding, potentially allied states would become (as with the containment option) and the CIA didn't have a high rate of success with instigated plots anyway - nor did the KGB and nor did Mossad.

4. The "Afghan Approach"

After the rout of the Taleban, the so-called "Afghan Approach" seemed attractive to many because of its economy in US lives. Briefly, an organised indigenous fighting force of sufficient strength had defeated, in open terrain, with US logistical and air assistance, a fairly small, heterogeneous enemy, albeit with a fanatical core. Pollack had strongly backed this method for Afghanistan, but refutes its possible use in Iraq by carefully distinguishing the reasons for its success in Afghanistan, compared with its failure when attempted in Kosovo, about which he is especially scathing. Furthermore, there was nothing comparable in Iraq to the Afghan Northern Alliance and the Iraq Republican Guard showed itself quite competent to deal with what resistance there was among the Kurds and Shi'ah, even after defeat by US Marines, following heavy bombing. Bombardment of men and vehicles from the air is far less destructive than people would like to think, though it may have a catastrophic effect on units with poor training and hence low morale. Once again, the allied states, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to say nothing of the other neighbours, would not favour the "Afghan Approach" and certainly wouldn't help. As for the Kurds, they didn't like the idea since they would certainly be crushed by Saddam if they participated and maybe if they didn't; also "we should expect the Turks to be apoplectic (p. 322)" if the Kurds were used in any way. This is an option which the US would be seen to be participating in halfheartedly and regime change "is not the kind of operation in which we should be trying to cut corners (p. 334)."

5. Invasion

"It is the inadequacy of all other options towards Iraq that leads us to the last resort of a full-scale invasion," Pollack begins. Every time I say or write this, I find myself wondering whether it is truly necessary. ... [but] we need to recognize that we have run out of alternatives." This is a "war as a last resort" position, obviously not persuasive to those who the author thinks hope that if we just think hard enough an unforeseen solution will materialise that will relieve us of the need to make the hard choice." Admittedly Pollack has already rejected the UN solution of muddling along with Saddam indefinitely. In fact, the UN, despite figuring significantly in the book's Index, merits little consideration in its text, and the potential of the Security Council to make trouble not envisaged. It may well be that Pollack did not see the need, let alone the advisability of having the UN sanction the invasion, but rather the collecting of allies the most important measure, even to worrying about the permission the Gulf States might withold. Yet he by no means chooses to ignore International Law, though his interpretion of it is generous, if commonsensical – "Indeed, if international law cannot condone the invasion of Iraq to remove from power one of the most odious, aggressive, dangerous and bloody dictators since Joseph Stalin, then there is something wrong with international law (p. 370)". This is, however, in addition to more specific arguments. It seems probable that the cry "The war is illegal" would have surprised him, though he might have dismissed it as the protest of those who could give no better reason for their opposition.

The Campaign: Recommendations and Predictions

Pollack gets down to how the campaign should be run, and it is interesting to contrast his predictions, worst and best, with what actually happened. He opts for rather larger forces than were actually used: 200,000 to 300,000, favouring the higher figure, about twice as many as participated. He does not favour a prolonged bombing campaign; in the event the bombing and the invasion were more or less simultaneous. But his most optimistic forecast was something like what actually happened, though he does not give figures. What he does forecast as "the most likely case, [a campaign of] four to eight weeks [and] 500 to 1000 combat deaths, [with it] more likely that the error would be positive (a faster campaign with fewer casualties) than negative (p. 351)". His worst-case forecast was 10,000 deaths, in a campaign of four to six months. He foresaw the likelihood of urban warfare, especially in Baghdad, and the possibility of chemical warfare, neither of which happened. He tends to disbelieve that the Arab "street" has any real threat behind it, but interestingly, however, finding it more destabilising after a US victory than before (p. 361).

And Afterwards: The Alternatives ...

Rebuilding Iraq has a chapter to itself, preceding Conclusion. Pollack has few illusions about the mixed reception with which US liberation would be received. Interestingly, one of the attitudes he discovered amongst Iraqis is puzzlement as to why the US has inflicted so much misery by means of sanctions, when it is "omniscient and all-powerful" and could liberate them if it wanted to (p. 382). Though Pollack rightly emphasises the importance of rebuilding Iraq, he tends to question US will rather than US power; also "our allies might actually be better at this part than we are (p. 363)". However, since this would preferably mean getting "the Europeans" on board before hostilities, this option must be regarded as more difficult now. He was clearly unable to see the sheer messiness of the aftermath, the looting, sabotage, random killing, religious hysteria, gut xenophobia and mutual distrust - all the irrational behaviour that is so much against everyone's best interests that it tends to be discounted by someone trying to plot the options for an occupying force.

... The "Pragmatic" –

After a quick exit, with minimum political or economic reconstruction, or expenditure of US effort and money to aid the same, the result, in Pollack's view "would inevitably be a form of warlordism", similar, but worse, to what has happened in Afghanistan. Although the Kurds would have no wish to do anything but keep themselves to themselves, the other sections or fractions, Sunni and Shi'ah would probably start a civil war to gain overall control - much of the oil is in the Kurdish area, the rest in the Shi'ah, while the most aggressive, and till now dominant section has been Sunni. "At best it would produce ... more of the 'bad old Middle East.' It would leave in place all of the autocracy that has alienated populations, the corruption and cronyism that has impoverished them, and the sectarianism and intrastate animosities that destabilised them (p. 392)." Pollack does not add, "and whatever happened the US would get all the blame," but of course it would. In short, he roundly rejects the "pragmatic solution".

... and The Reconstruction Approach

The need for this arises simply because, as Pollack believes, "the current Iraqi political and social framework cannot produce a government that is stable and legitimate (p. 392)". It goes almost without saying that since instability has been a feature since independence in 1932, the emergence of a stable and legitimate government will take some time. Convening a consititutional convention could take place within six to twelve months after the end of combat operations, with legislative and executive elections a year to two years later (p. 407), a leisurely programme compared with what seems in fact to be happening. An alternative would be to start locally, at the bottom, as it were, with Iraqis gaining experience of the democratic process before national elections took place. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq had been a relatively prosperous and well-developed country until Saddam's aggressions against Iran, the Kurds and Kuwait. Its abundant oil should make physical reconstruction relatively easy.

Conclusion

In his final chapter, Pollack reiterates the message of his book, the need for the immediate invasion of Iraq, and the arguments for it. It is the only route for long-term safety and must be done before Saddam obtains nuclear weapons, for no one can know the limits he will put to their use, or to what extent he can be deterred by threats of retaliation. Pollack makes much of the potential for Middle East stability of a regenerated, prosperous, democratic Iraq. He may be over-optimistic, but the alternative of inaction is the product of a quiet despair. His analyses tend to be over-rational; in his discussions on the attitudes of other countries and the role of the UN regarding Pre-war, Wartime and Post-war Iraq, there is no apprehension of the extreme hostility manifested by large sections of the public in the democratic "natural" allies of the US. Pollack perhaps discounts, as one formerly working for the Clinton administration might, the irrational hatred that the predominantly left-wing intellectuals who are well-ensconced in the media in Europe, Britain and the US itself, have for US Republicans and for Bush personally. Also missing is any real questioning of the extent of what might be called the stamina of US public morale, for the strength of which opinion polls provide little confidence.

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I rarely add a new blog to my list of daily visits, but Belmont Club makes the cut.

What does Belmont Club bring to the blog party, you ask? Adamantine analysis of the military situation in Iraq, for one thing, as well as a very interesting look at the pending takeover of the European left by radical Islamists.

As for the Iraqi situation, Mr. Wretchard thinks that the Baathists and Islamists are getting their asses handed to them,

and backs it up with trenchant strategic analysis.

In contrast to Giap, Saddam's Ba'athist strategy could have come straight from the pages of the Republic Serials. Episode to episode with nothing leading to anything else. His donkey rockets, so beloved by the Western press, did not help his fancy uniformed feyadeen in the slightest when it attempted to ambush the 4th ID. His earlier campaigns against Iraqi infrastructure in their turn had no connection with the donkey rockets. His attacks on Iraqi policemen did not materially assist his campaign to shoot down American helicopters. And his campaign against the helicopters no connection with the attacks on the police. You can almost imagine the stupid working of his mind: 'after I kill the Spaniards and the Japanese and the Koreans, I will crown it all by destroying two 4th ID columns like Groupment Mobile 100'. But no military thread ran through them; simply a media thread. Giap knew that strategy has meaning only if it is cumulative. He would have asked, 'how will killing Spaniards help me destroy a 4th ID column?' without which he would have left the Spaniards alone. But then Giap was a genius, whereas Saddam is ... well, his donkey rockets impress the media.

In each case, Saddam Hussein has invested time and resources to achieve an indecisive result. He has not materially affected the function of the targeted system in any single case, be it infrastructure, logistics, air transportation, or the organization of Iraqi government agencies. Every thing America has attempted has been sheeted home, despite the churnings of his genius campaign, though much admired by the press. The Saddamite insurgency bears all the hallmarks of his previous erratic campaigns, with their reliance on showy military effects to achieve a political result. To Saddam the battlefield is a theatrical prop to support a political gesture. (Remember Khafji? Remember the intentional oil spills?) But CENTCOM to the puzzlement of the media, fights to win. It has been boringly predictable. It captures enemy personnel, including key officers in the Ba'ath, seizes arms caches, intelligence documents by the truckload and ceaselessly sows informers among the enemy ranks. It has a touching belief in power of arithmetic, especially subtraction as applied to the numbers of foemen, coupled with a traditional attachment to the adage that it is better to do unto others before they do unto you.

Serious historians may recall the fate of combatants who gadfly over the battlefield without achieving serious or decisive results while being pummelled in their vitals by their enemy. It will be the fate of Saddam. The Belmont Club's fearless prediction. CENTCOM by a knockout.

Go to Belmont Club. Read and learn.

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John Keegan writes about his meeting with Donald Rumsfeld. Aparently, he does not think the situation is that bad:

Mr Rumsfeld read me a series of reports, from the American regional commands, summarising progress achieved: terrorists apprehended, weapons recovered, explosives destroyed. The totals were impressive. Despite daily reports of American casualties, he was dismissive of the danger to coalition forces. Within the context of the total security situation, he sees the level of violence as bearable and believes that the trend of terrorist activity is downward.

Economically, the outlook is strongly positive. Electricity supply actually exceeds pre-war levels, with an output of 4,400 megawatts per day in October, as against 3,300 in January. Oil production is returning to pre-war levels, at nearly 2,200 million barrels per day in October, as against 2,500 million barrels before the war.

Socially, the country has returned to normal. More than 3.6 million children are in primary school and 1.5 million in secondary school. University registrations have increased from 63,000 before the war to 97,000. Healthcare is at pre-war levels and is improving rapidly, because of greatly increased spending, estimated to be at 26 times pre-war levels. Doctors' salaries are eight times higher and vaccination and drug distribution programmes have also been greatly increased.

Mr Keegan was frequently asked why there is so much less trouble in the British than the American area of occupation. He conceded that America, the Great Satan is target of greater hatred and Britain as the 'lesser' Satan does not attract the same degree of hostility. Further he acknowledged that the southern Shia area, where the British are operating, has always been anti-Saddam and therefore their task is easier compared with the American policing of the Sunni area. Also, Basra has a long history of dealing with Britain going back to the days of the East India Company. However, he insisted that there is a fundamental difference between the British and the American approach.

While the Americans, for reasons connected with their own past, seek to solve the Iraqi problem by encouraging the development of democracy, the British, with their long experience of colonial campaigning and their recent exposure to Irish terrorism, take a more pragmatic attitude.

They recognise that Iraq is still a tribal society and that the key to pacification lies in identifying tribal leaders and other big men, in recognising social divisions that can be exploited, and in using a mixture of stick and carrot to restore and maintain order.

The conclusion is unexpected and I expected will be resisted by those who think the United States' exceptional history and status is as a result of the country's banishment of European political practices, especially its opposition to imperialism.

Forcibly, America is becoming an imperial if not an imperialist country. The attitude was exemplified by an encounter I had with a tall, lean, crew-cut young man I met in Washington. Our conversation went as follows: "Marine?" I asked. "Yes," he answered. "Have you been in Iraq?" "Afghanistan. Just got back." The exchange was straight out of Kipling. There is a lot more of that to come.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the British Empire by the Americans and by most marxist and statist continentals, namely that it was driven economically, not politically, and maintained defensively for the most part. The British merchants explored the world for new markets and the British state defended territories where trade with Britain took hold. British imperialism was not the sort the Romans would recognise. We do not need to look that far back, comparisons with Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Soviet Empire would highlight the different nature of the beast. So being imperial may not be so bad, provided you stop short of being imperialist.

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Today is Remembrance Sunday and I am watching the Cenotaph ceremony in London. The military band just finished playing Rule Britannia and I remembered, time and again, what an amazing and powerful piece of music it is. Arrogance, defiance and a vow of no submission. It is not a piece of imperialist propaganda, as our transatlantic brethren are prone to conclude about anything British that smacks of national pride, but a cry that represents the desire to defend hundreds years of history and common heritage. It vows that Britons shall never be slaves. Not the country, not her rulers but Britons. And it rings true on this day, when we remember those whose lives were sacrificed to preserve the values that united Britain and her society against her enemies during the First World War and against the totalitarian evil sweeping the world during the Second World War.

Yesterday I was arguing hotly (off-line) against the very meaning of the Remebrance Day. It made me angry to think of so many individuals and their aspirations so cruelly and so pointlessly extinguished. Pointlessly, because the war was the result of the European states doing their 'worst' on the international scene. The state's only legitimate role is to protect its citizens, but the First World War was sparked off by political horse-trading and petty international diplomacy that had nothing to do with the lives of those who were called upon to die on the European states' playground. The British state let its people and soldiers down, by a strategy that counted lives by a heap. Today's ceremonies are a far cry from the undignified deaths of the millions on the battlefields, in the trenches, they do not remember the mud, the corpses, the fear, pain and despair.

And it makes me angry to see the politicians taking on their most pious and sanctimonious expression for such occassions, men who have never known and would never understand that kind of sacrifice but are in a position to send others to it. Their expression contrasts with that of the veterans, whose eyes look beyond the memorials to their memories. And I suppose that is why I join the two minute silence and remember that those who died did not die for nothing. Their memory may have been hijacked and the truth tainted but that makes it all the more important to keep that memory alive.

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True:

In this handout picture made available Tuesday Oct. 28, 2003 by the Israel-based Cornershot Co. in Tel Aviv, Israel, a rifle is seen composed of two parts; the front, that can swivel from side to side, containing a pistol with a color camera mounted on top, and the back section which consists of the stock, trigger and a monitor. According to a report by the Israeli daily 'Maariv' newspaper, the pistol, produced by the Florida-based Cornershot Holdings, is being tested by the Israeli military and has already been bought by a number of special forces around the world. The unique weapon allows a soldier to remain behind cover, with only the barrel of the rifle exposed in the direction of the hostile fire. (AP Photo/HO, Cornershot)

If you've already seen and heard about this days ago, apologies from me and only me. If not but you're glad to see and hear of it now, you also have Chris O'Donnell to thank.

Update from the editor: As it happens, this innovative Israeli weapon is just a more sophisticated development of an idea implemented by the Germans in World War II... a version of the MP44 with a 'shoot-around-corners' attachment using a mirror.

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Another bracing dose of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:

[A]fter September 11 we will either accept defeat and stay within our borders to fight a defensive war of hosing down fires, bulldozing rubble, arresting terrorist cells, and hoping to appease or buy off our enemies abroad — or we will eventually have to confront Syria, Lebanon's Bekka Valley, Saudi Arabia, and Iran with a clear request to change and come over to civilization, or join the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

[B]y any historical measure, what strikes students of this war so far in its first two years is the amazing degree to which the United States has hurt its enemies without incurring enormous casualties and costs.

As always with VDH, it pays to read the whole thing.

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The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?
Stephanie Gutmann
Scribner, 2000

First published in 2000, nothing could better illustrate the subordination of the military to the civil power than this account, by a woman journalist, of the submission of the male-oriented former to the feminist-dominated latter. Since it is modern political dogma that men and women are equal, the recruitment of women into the fighting forces becomes obligatory. This book is a description of how this is done, and what happens afterwards. As yet, the result has barely been tested in battle conditions, so the problems are being confronted in peacetime.

There is ample evidence that if physical equality was the criterion, few women would qualify – after training intensively, a batch of women, in it for the experiment (not recruits), reached the standard of the weakest males (p. 251). At the same time as trying to pretend that females could be the equivalent of males in tough fighting with enemies out to kill them, they were presumed so vulnerable that they needed protection from all forms of harassment by their comrades, which meant that the sexes couldn't really interact – and when harassment changed into acceptable behaviour, that was just as bad – the pregnancy rate soared.

There is a long account and analysis of the notorious "Tailhook" party in 1991, post-Gulf (pp. 156-188) "when we had finally gotten over Vietnam" which led to numerous dismissals of top airforce brass and a greatly lowered morale of the rest, resulting in a haemorrhaging of disgusted qualified pilots, at a cost of $lm each for training. This was ostensibly about harassment, though most of the women present could either take care of themselves, expected what they got or went there to get it. Even during a rowdy "gauntlet", when someone shouted "I've lost my pager", everything stopped until it was found. The woman who led the complaints benefited to the tune of $5+m – and left the service. After Tailhook, everything was about gender, ... [it was] the worst event for the Navy since Pearl Harbor."

Of course, the whole burden of the book is that the US armed forces are not being treated by Congress and the media as a fighting force whose efficiency is paramount, but as a section of society which can be moulded into something with quite a different agenda from fighting and killing, though what that is is difficult to define – that men and women are basically equal and if it doesn't always work out that way, it's the men's fault.

The book ends with a series of recommendations, granted that the forces should remain open to women:

1. Eliminate recruiting quotas for women;
   
2. Have separate-sex "boot camp" training;
   
3. Have high and equal standards there;
   
4. Restore "openness" and be frank about the problems, not just put them down to "sexism";
   
5. Exonerate the personnel victimised after Tailhook ("Witchook");
   
6. Separate the social service personnel from the fighting forces;
   
7. Copy the practice of Marines, who seem to have fought through the "gender" nonsense largely unscathed.

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Interesting legal development - a group of Gulf War veterans are suing the banks and chemical companies that facilitated Hussein's procurement or manufacture of chemical weapons to which the troops were exposed during the first phase of the Gulf War.

"Sixteen veterans from the Persian Gulf War filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., against 11 chemical companies and 33 banks from throughout the world that allegedly helped Iraq construct and support its extensive chemical warfare program.

The banks named in the suit include Deutsche Bank AG of Germany, Lloyds Bank of the United Kingdom, Credit Lyonnais of France, State Bank of India, Banca Roma of Italy, National Bank of Pakistan, Arab Bank of Jordan, Bank of Tokyo and Kuwait Commercial bank. The companies that the suit claims have sold chemicals or materials to Iraq are headquartered in France, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and the United States - ABB Lummus Global Inc. in Delaware."

The companies all do business in New York, where the suit was filed, so there is no issue of extraterritorial jurisdiction (the fatal flaw to date of that pet tranzi project, international courts).

The lawsuit will have to clear some very difficult legal hurdles before any recovery can be had. If these hurdles are cleared and the veterans receive damages, then the end result could be extreme reluctance on the part of any private business to sell anything, or provide any services, with a military application to any government. After all, liability for the damages, or even collateral or unintended damages, caused by weapons sold to a government, would probably shut down or impede the sale of weapons by the private sector to governments. Attempts to force governments to indemnify their suppliers would be, interesting, to say the least. Depending on exactly how the case goes off, it could clear the way for lawsuits against gun manufacturers for shootings and other crimes. Second order effects could will include the nationalization of defense industries and weapons manufacturers to bring them under the umbrella of sovereign immunity, or other special treatment for these firms.

If the firms were violating the law when they made the sales, then I can see holding them liable for the foreseeable effects of their illegal activity. If the sales were legal when made, then I begin to have a problem with this lawsuit, on both jurisprudential and policy grounds. The jurisprudence of imposing liability for actions that were legal when done is very troubling, of course. The policy implications, a few of which are noted above, are also troubling, although the notion of governments being pariahs in the marketplace for things that hurt people has a certain very definite attraction.

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One doesn’t have to look far to find all manner of carping about the current occupation of Iraq. Much of the carping lacks any broader perspective, and this lack of perspective leaves one at a loss as to how seriously to take, for example, anonymous reports of Iraqi citizens being abused by US soldiers. Setting aside the morally obtuse, who think we should have just left the Iraqis to the continued ministrations of Saddam and the Baathists, those critiques worth listening to at all generally boil down to a complaint about the competence of the occupying forces.

I think that we are seeing is an entirely predictable result of the fact that the American, and to a somewhat lesser degree the British, military forces are designed and operated as war-fighting forces. This is in sharp contrast to most other military forces in the world, which serve as a combination of welfare jobs programs and, in effect, domestic occupation forces. The US army, at least, does not prepare much for occupation work, perhaps because they find their time fully occupied preparing for their primary function of kicking the living crap out of the opposition force. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.

War-fighting and occupation are famously incompatible with each other - one demands the rapid application of lethal force, the other the modulated escalation of minimum necessary force, etc. A war-fighting army cannot transition, on the fly, from war-fighting to occupation, at least not with the speed and efficacy now demanded of the US and British forces in Iraq.

See what conclusion you derive from the following assumptions:

1. The West, as a matter of self-defense, will need to occasionally go in and change the regime of a foreign nation. Unless you retreat into pacifist fantasizing, I think that 9/11, not to mention WWII, demonstrates that, from time to time, militarily expedited regime change of hostile nations will occasionally be a necessity for the continued survival of even the most libertarian country.

2. The occupation forces need to be operating at near pitch-perfect levels within a few days of the Dear Leader statues coming down. It is apparently now the case that, once the old regime is out the door, the victorious forces must have the place running at least as good as before, in jig time.

3. The war-fighting forces cannot operate as an occupation force at satisfactory levels. The current conventional wisdom seems to be that successful post-war occupation requires administrators and enforcers that speak the language and are conversant with local customs spread throughout the country within a manner of weeks, if not days, and no heavy-handed policing or otherwise excessive uses of force allowed.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that the US, and possibly other Western nations, need to diversify their armed forces to include specialist occupation and civil administration units. Since many of the complaints about the occupation have to do with the lack of intimate familiarity with the Iraqi situation, we will need to have units training up to take over and run specific foreign nations years before hostilities actually break out.

Imagine the diplomatic possibilities! Will the French be offended because we don't deem them enough of a threat to spin up a French occupation army group? Or will they be offended because we are planning to run France, for a bit, anyway?

The logic of sky-high expectations seems inescapable to me - self-defense requires regime change, which requires expert military occupiers and nation builders, which in turn requires detailed advance training in the language and customs of the nation to be uplifted.

The strategic and diplomatic consequences of going this route are, of course, disastrous. Even worse are the potential domestic effects - having a prefab military junta sitting around with nothing but time on its hands does not bode well for the domestic tranquility, does it?

Of course, in my view, this is all unnecessary if realistic expectations are maintained. Occupation is a tough business, one that will satisfy virtually no one no matter how well it is done. The Iraqis have complained, for example, that we don't shoot looters on sight, and undoubtedly many of the ongoing problems with electricity and the oil industry have to do with the coalition trying to rule with a relatively light hand. But for every step we take toward greater enforcement and protection (more troops, more aggressive patrolling, shoot on sight policies, etc.), howls of protest will go up from both within and without Iraq.

The key, I think, is to keep your eye on progress towards the long-term goal and to maintain some minimal perspective on events. Sadly, in today's partisan world of 24 hour news cycles, long-term thinking and perspective always run a poor second to political cheap shots and sensationalist video clips.

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Our Man in Basra has sent us a few quotes from locals before his next dispatch about Basra society.

Words from the streets of Basra:

For over 30 years we suffered under Saddam. No Arab, no Muslim country came to help us. Then America and Britain made political decision to get rid of Saddam. Now we should help the British.

You should be more like the Americans and kill more Ba'athists.

After US killed Uday and Quasay and first time I heard anyone say we should be more like the Americans!

I am very happy that Uday and Quasay were killed but it is a pity they were not captured so they could be put on trial and tortured and then killed. Being killed like this was good for them.

The people here really hate Saddam and all his family and friends. It's about the one thing everyone agrees on. When the news was confirmed that the evil sons were dead, the whole place was like 4th July in South L.A. In fact it was like watching TV footage of the nights Baghdad was bombed, there was tracer arching up into the sky from every direction you looked. Quite pretty to watch it sailing overhead, but a little worrying to see how many places all around us have automatic weapons to fire off, as well as all kinds of flares. And no shortage of ammo either. On the other hand these people must like us really, because we don't get all that fired at us, and there's a lot more civilians with guns here than there are soldiers. But basically, Saddam's sons dead - party time. The only down notes I heard from anyone was "let's get the rest", and "pity they didn't suffer more". A lot of people wanted them put on trial but I don't think a few years in prison and early parole for good behaviour was ever an option. Incidentally, one 12 year old boy sleeping on a roof seems to have been killed by falling fire, though we can't be certain that was the reason - we had a few near misses. This prompts the thought that one of the first things Iraq really needs is some decent fireworks for celebrations. And don't worry too much about the safety regs, just make them loud.

You British built Basra, you built the sewers, you taught us how to dress, how to eat, how to run the oil industry. We do not know the Americans, we think they are against the Muslims because of what they do, but we know you. Why do you not do now what you did in 1920 and 1941 and control this place and get rid of the bad men? Then Basra will be very rich for everyone.

By bad men this man meant Ba'athists, anti-CF, sheikhs, criminals and religious fundamentalists. There are quite a lot of anglophiles in Basra from the last time my Regiment was here in WW2 but of course you have to allow for them telling you what they think you want to hear...

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After a short hiatus due to snail mail from Basra involving wrong addresses and the usual off-line world confusions I give you the forth letter written by our illustrious 'Man in Basra'. The following has been written partially as a response to this article in New York Times about continuous riots over critical fuel shortages in Basra.

Riots aren't that bad. There's 1 1/2 million people here, we are controlling the situation with around 300 soldiers actually on the streets, including fuel escorts, petrol stations guards etc.  So let's get some perspective - nothing like Northern Ireland where they are professional rioters.  Not to say it can't get worse, but let's not get carried away.
 
It's riot season.  This used to happen under the old regime this time of year as well, but a) it wasn't reported, and b) it was smaller because they used to shoot people.  But the lack of electricity and other utilities that is the underlying problem was the same. It's over 135 degrees outdoors, there's no electricity for fridges and air conditioning in many areas, so people are pissed off. And it's very humid when the wind blows from the south.  Every revolt in Iraqi history, including Ba'ath one, takes place at this time of year.
 
Our enemies, ex-Ba'athists and others are working hard to stir the situation up with false rumours, provocation etc.  This is not spontaneous.
 
The article highlights the fact that the fuel price are too low and this is a situation we inherited from the old regime. Whole Basra economy is based upon it and so it is very difficult to change in such a short time. Also, it is not in our mandate, we just provide security, currently means keeping fuel flowing. CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) are supposed to sort out bigger questions, such as pricing of fuel. 
 
The root cause of the problem at the moment is ex-Ba'athists and Fedayeen sabotaging the power to the refinery, so it has fuel but can't either reprocess it or pump it into tankers.  Iraq always produced huge quantities of crude, but didn't spend the money on refineries - they export to their neighbours and bought refined fuel back in. So there are only a few refineries in the whole country, which makes it rather difficult to create a self-sustaining oil industry by yesterday.

In the next letter I will try to give you the promised description of Basra society.

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The always interesting Victor Davis Hanson chimes in this morning with a warning about the ongoing conflict with Islamist barbarians. His message: it is highly unlikely that the barbarians can win this war, unless we hand them a victory:

Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms — even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society.

Such smug dispensation — as profoundly amoral as it is — provides us, on the cheap and at a safe distance, with a sense of moral worth. Or perhaps censuring from the bleachers enables us to feel superior to those less fortunate who are still captive to their primordial appetites. We prefer to cringe at the thought that others like to see proof of their killers' deaths, prefer to shoot rather than die capturing a mass murderer, and welcome a generic profile of those who wish to kill them en masse.

We should take stock of this dangerous and growing mindset — and remember that wealthy, sophisticated societies like our own are rarely overrun. They simply implode — whining and debating still to the end, even as they pass away.

Like Mr. Hanson, I believe that it is a conceit, a fatal mistake, to treat a war as a court proceeding, and to try to apply peacetime norms in a wartime environment. The danger with the new era of 'asymmetrical warfare' is that the threat is much more nebulous, making it that much more difficult to confine the wartime dispensation. We have already seen plenty of 'slop' in the US, as the Justice Department is already using its 'anti-terrorism' powers to go after pornographers, drug dealers, and so forth.

The dilemma is quite real, and I don't see any easy answers other than eternal vigilance combined with bloody-minded realism. In other words, pretty much what has preserved the spirit of liberty through past crises.

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Steve Sailer is a name I hear now and again, every few weeks, but I know very little about the guy. Someone commented on this, which I wrote last night (about men wearing their shirts outside their trousers), to the effect that Sailer had something to say about this, about a week ago, that was relevant. I couldn't find it, but I did find this 1995 piece about the nuances of why race relations in the US army are so much better than race relations in US colleges.

It's no surprise to me that treating people in a totally meritocratic way, regardless of race, makes for better inter-ethnic relations, or that armies can't allow inter-ethnic rivalries to build up in the ranks, so they don't. So it was another less than completely obvious idea that I found striking in this piece, which is that the way for an unpopular racial or ethnic group to make an admired impact on the wider society is for it to concentrate and conquer niches rather than disperse and try to do well across the board. Sailer's point is that academic racial preference policies undermine (to name but one of their many drawbacks) this benign process, by over-dispersing the group supposedly being helped.

The US armed forces have been following the niche achievement model based on focussing totally on what each individual is best at contributing and letting the coloured faces concentrate or disperse at will, while the colleges of America, especially the elite colleges, have been applying the help-and-disperse model, with racially toxic results. The US army has enabled black men to impress white men – and black people to impress people generally – far more impressively than colleges have done. What's more, this process has only become the more pronounced during the time since Sailer wrote his piece. (To drive home the point about what individuals can and can't do, Sailer notes that although black Americans have excelled as Generals, they have as yet scarcely even flickered as Admirals.)

This fits my own experience, in non-military London. After my first few years as a Londoner I was seriously worried that I was turning into a racist. The last six black people I'd encountered were all blaring black music from their car stereos too loudly for my comfort, and I was starting to blame blackness, and to believe that there was a Black Musical Bad Manners gene. You don't say things like this to strangers, but I was seriously starting to think it. (And I dare say that in a complicated genes-interacting-with-environment way this is actually true.)

Then I went to work, in a part-time and very menial capacity, in a totally meritocratic (and absolutely free of all racial quotas) financial services business, where clutches of black (and also black Muslim) guys were niche conquering, and doing fantastically impressively and well. The rule was simple. Are nine of the top dozen high-earning achievers nationwide in the business black guys with strange foreign names? So? What is your problem? You want white racial preferences do you? The rules are the rules! There is no problem! The rules are working and we are making money by the ton. Handshakes and rounds of applause all round. End of story.

I was graciously, and I do mean graciously, permitted to converse with a few of these mighty personages and all suggestion that such people were in any way genetically – or for that matter culturally – incapable of making anything impressive of themselves was expunged from my mind. And need I add that the manners of these impressive people (to someone of no likely importance or advantage to them – me) were impeccable? I felt immense relief. I didn't want to become a racist, thank you very much. But I had become scared that the facts might oblige me to.

In other words, a potential white racist was cured not by the race I might have despised being helped (this would only have added resentment to my existing suspicions of inferiority), but by it finding a niche where (for reasons which I still don't really understand) it had an advantage and where it was therefore concentrating, and was being allowed and encouraged to concentrate, and being handsomely and deservedly rewarded for what it was concentrating on.

(I have here dodged the whole argument about what exactly being "a racist" means. Here's what I think about that. According to some definitions of racism, I still am a racist and this is a racist article, because it says that different groups are better at different

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Reports are coming in that both of Saddam Hussein's mass murderous sons may have been killed during an attack by US Forces on a house in Mosul in Northern Iraq. Early reports said 'seized' but SkyNews is currently (17:40 GMT) reporting live from Mosul saying US reinforcements are "pouring into the area" and bodies at the house "have a strong resemblence to Uday and Qusay".

Let's hope the reports are confirmed soon!

Yes! it is being confirmed that Uday and Qusay are dead. Good riddance to two of the most evil psychopaths to walk the earth in recent times...

...and to the US forces who did it: way to go, guys!

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On this day, nearly two hundred years ago, the artillery, cavalry and red coated infantry of Britain, along with their Dutch and Prussian allies, finally put an end to the tyrannical rule of Napoleon Bonaparte on the Belgian wheat fields of Waterloo, near Brussels. It was the Duke of Wellington's greatest triumph.

Given that this blog is of course, such a great fan of the French political class (heh), I trust no readers of this publication would be so vulgar and unsophisticated to point out this salient historical anniversary to their friends and colleagues today.

I just thought you would like to have this titbit of historical information, gentle reader.

"Up Guards, and at 'em!"
- Wellington, June 18th 1815

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British troops injured in war are being forced to pay for private medical treatment or join the long patient lists waiting for operations on the National Health Service. A staffing crisis in the Defence Medical Services (DMS) means that more than 10,000 soldiers - the equivalent of 15 infantry battalions - are currently not fit for frontline duty.

Large sections of the Army will be declared un-operational because of the number of troops waiting for surgery unless there is an emergency injection of cash. Commanding officers have been rationing the private treatment but the amount of money available to each unit for private healthcare is not enough to reduce the number of servicemen and women waiting for operations.

The Telegraph reports:

One soldier, who was injured on active duty in Afghanistan, has now been told that he faces a 12-month wait for a knee operation unless he is prepared to pay £2,000 for private treatment.

Another soldier who recently returned from Afghanistan after serving with the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (Isaf) has been told that he will have to wait six months before he can see a specialist about his damaged ankle. He may then face a further year's wait for an operation. He has, however, been advised that if he were to go private, he could see a specialist immediately and have the operation within three weeks.

In addition to the pain and inconvenience caused by the injuries, service personnel are "medically downgraded", if the injury prevents them from carrying out their duties. They are unlikely to be able to undertake courses which are physically demanding and cannot be deployed on military operations. Their pay can decrease and they may be passed over for promotion until fully fit.

This is just one example of how Blair's government is treating the armed forces. The undermining of the British military is a result of a profound distrust of it by the New Labour establishment, despite the fact that the armed forces are the only state entity that has consistently bailed the government out of its botched policies (foot and mouth crisis) and allowed Tony to play a world statesman (Afghanistan, Iraq).

Blair achieved a measure of uncritical popularity with the American public, due to his support of Bush's determination to depose Saddam. He risked his job and support of his voters at home in order to do that. It may be commendable and we wholeheartedly supported his efforts that resulted in the liberation of Iraq. We did so without any delusions as to his statist convictions, in which near messianic zeal mixes with autocratic tendencies.

However, those on the other side of the Atlantic harbouring inflated opinions about Blair, and occassionally making preposterous comparisons of Blair to Winston Churchill or other great British statesmen, should examine the way their pet foreign leader behaves on the domestic scene. Let the Telegraph article be an eye opener to the true nature of the valiant Prime Minister Blair and his tightly led pack of ministers.

We at Samizdata.net do not trust the man further than we can throw him. So watch this space, we will be reporting on the latest development in Blair's successful dismantling of other worthwhile British institutions.

 

Churchill                              Not Churchill

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The Ministry of Defence is leaving no stone unturned in its investigations of the allegations against Colonel Tim Collins:

The Ministry of Defence said an inquiry into the death raised issues about the "wider military culture" within the unit which demanded further investigation.

Say it isn't so!! A 'military culture' in the British Army? Has the world gone stark raving mad? 'Military culture' has no place in our armed forces and it must be rooted out forthwith.

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To all intents and purposes, the war has been over for a few days now, bar the shouting. Oh sure, incidents like the sabotage of the arms dump earlier today are going to be a problem for quite some time to come, so it is not exactly 'Miller Time' just yet, and I fully expect a few 'messy days' ahead. The war, however, is over and the police action is beginning.

What I am interested in is, from a purely military point of view, what went right and what went wrong? Which weapons performed as advertised and which did not? Which systems and organisations did better than expected and which did worse? Was 'shock and awe' a Terrible Swift Sword or a damp squib... or bit of artful misdirection? Can we start trying to pick through the propaganda and extract the signal from the noise, or is it still too soon?

In short... it is time for those who are interested in such things to start trying to figure out what the text books are going to say about this war in 5 years time. For example, there is some interesting stuff on Intel Dump, such as some discussion of the 11th Aviation Regiment's repulse near Baghdad. As significant military set backs like that were so rare, the ones that happened will no doubts be analyzed to the point of obsession. Similarly there have been some spectacular images of just how tough the A-10 Warthog proved to be even after a severe pounding.

Hard as nails... the aircraft is pretty tough too

So... who has some good links to reports to contribute? Leave a comment!

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Once again Australians are celebrating ANZAC Day. It seems only yesterday I was writing about it here on this blog but another year goes by and yet again, British and Australian soldiers are on Middle Eastern soil together.

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There will be no ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes of Gulf War II and, given the current political and cultural climate, I suppose that is understandable. However, one would have thought that Mr.Blair might at least see the benefit of a suitably discreet pause before publicly shafting them:

Tony Blair is prepared to radically scale down the Royal Irish Regiment as part of his proposals to persuade the IRA to destroy all its weapons and halt all paramilitary operations, army and political sources claimed yesterday.

So it appears as if the Royal Irish Regiment, whose members fought with such gallantry and tenacity in the Battle for Basra as far back as...ooh, let's see...a few days ago, are to be issued with a whole new set of marching orders. Thanks very much, chaps, now fuck off!

The irony can surely only be desribed as breath-taking. Whilst neither Saddam's Ba'athist thugs nor his Republican Guards could put so much as a dent in them, their very existance as a fighting unit is about to be sacrificed by a government that will stop at nothing in a (vain) attempt to appease the brooding war-dogs of Sinn Fein/IRA.

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In British military vernacular they are called 'bumpy jumpers', but they are a sight more chilling to the very hearts of Islamic fundamentalist extremists than an approaching squadron of B-52s wheeling in for an attack run.

Women without veils...

Good looking blonde women without veils...

Good looking blonde women without veils with guns!

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The news that Kirkuk, centre of the northern Iraqi oil industry, has fallen not to the coalition, but to US backed Kurdish Peshmerga has electrified the Kurds and horrified the Turks. I suspect that the Jash (pro-Saddam Kurds) are going to be cut to pieces unless they manage to find the few coalition troops in that part of Iraq to surrender to.

The Turkish foreign ministry has said any attempt by Kurdish forces to take permanent control of Kirkuk would be unacceptable to them. They are claiming on domestic Turkish TV that the US has promised remove the Peshmerga from Kirkuk once order has been restored, and that Turkish military observers will be going there to make sure this happens.

Firstly I do not for one minute believe a word the Turks are saying: I would be astonished if the USA was idiotic enough to make such a rash promise to the Turks, who frankly do not have all that much political capital to call on in Washington D.C. at the moment. The US would be insane to alienate the highly motivated Peshmerga, who it must be remembered have made great efforts to assist the lightly armed US forces in the north. What possible motivation does the US have to get in the middle of this?

Secondly, what Turkey finds 'unacceptable' in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan is unlikely to impress or intimidate the Kurds any more. The usual internal Kurdish squabbles have been replaced by the PDK and PUK actually fighting along side each other in displays of uncharacteristic unity (yesterday on TV I saw a veteran BBC reporter marvel to see soldiers from the two groups coming out of the same bus!).

The Peshmerga are not only better situated politically than any time in the last 25 years, they are also better armed, better organised and thanks to the US Special Forces, better trained. Once the Ba'athists are gone, the Kurds will be able to turn their undivided attention towards any Turkish incursions into Iraq and no prize for guessing who is scooping up all the heavy weapons and ammunition abandoned by the defeated Iraqi forces around Kirkuk. The facts on the ground are strongly in the Kurds' favour.

This problem was entirely predictable and is entirely of the Turkish state's own making. As I have written before, I have no sympathy for them and it is hard to see how it would be in the interests of the US or UK to try and crush the legitimate desires of Kurds for self determination.

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But the author, General Mirza Aslam Beg, the former Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, did not realise it at the time. I particularly liked:

The Iraqi nation has shown its resolve and resilience, to stand up against the over-powering superiority of the aggressor, who has been forced to recoil back, for replenishment and re-enforcement. It is the coalition forces, which suffer from "shock and awe" due to the stiff resistance and the remarkable display of courage and capability, to fight according to a well thought-out war plan, which is holistic in conception, embracing all tenets of operational strategy.

Read and laugh

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Funny how these things work out. Al-Qaeda sowed the wind, and the people of Iraq are now reaping … a crop! No 9/11, and there would never have been this. Not nearly so soon, anyway.

Looting? Well, according to our TV people it seems to be reasonably well targetted, maybe not exactly laser guided, but heavily concentrated on The Bastards rather than just inflicted on random innocent civilian shopkeepers. Good to see that the UN building in Baghdad has been included in the rampagings. And besides, I agree with Instapundit:

Some people think the looting is bad, but I think that a certain amount is good. It reinforces in people's minds that Saddam is gone, and that he was unpopular.

I'll say.

I like silly postings as well as sensible ones, because civilisation consists of harmless fun as well as profound goodnesses like those on TV today (provided you exclude our Chancellor Muhammed al-Brownaf spitting in the face of financial reality in the House of Commons). And a rich vein of silliness is Dave Barry's Blog, which I heartily recommend, even if you just enjoy his fun writing and ignore all the fun links.

Links to individual items in Dave Barry's Blog don't seem to work, so you'll either have to scroll down or else take my word for these stories.

There's a nice losing the Drug War item. (Kermit with a joint.)

Mice with herpes isn't so funny. Says Dave: "This is just what we need." Although this story is really evidence of extreme human ingenuity in the face of the mouse menace.

And how about the escape of 80 million bees? This happened when a lorry full of them crashed, in Florida.

But what is this? "Another reason why we will definitely win." That sounds like it could be serious, as well as funny of course. And it is.

Laser guided concrete:

The jets, normally based at RAF Marham in Norfolk, have already used high-tech weaponry such as the "bunker busting" cruise missile Storm Shadow, which cost £750,000 apiece and can pierce several feet of concrete.

But now the crews operating over Iraq from the Ali Al Salem airbase in northern Kuwait are about to go to the opposite extreme and use "inert bombs".

These are basically blocks of concrete shaped as bombs and painted blue to identify them as non-explosive if they are discovered still intact after the war.

But they will be laser-guided 1,000lb blocks of concrete, capable of destroying a tank or artillery piece, but without causing a devastating explosion that would put civilians at risk and shatter surrounding buildings.

Tornado Detachment commander, Group Captain Simon Dobb, said: "We have the option of using these inert bombs.

"They still have the guidance and steering methods of other high explosive weapons but the risk of causing civilian casualties is greatly reduced."

But I reckon these high tech lumps have had another very big pay-off during the last few days and weeks.

Suppose you are an Iraqi in a tank, during a "battle", i.e. slaughter. You face death at any moment. You can't hope to win the battle. So what the hell else can you do to stay alive? Answer: get out of your tank and "melt away" as fast as your legs can carry you.

I am only guessing about it, but my understanding of, for instance, World War 2 tank battles is that, dangerous as it was to be in a tank during a tank battle, it was even more dangerous to get out of your tank, because the air outside it was full of bullets, bangs and bits of metal wizzing about. Climbing out of a tank was stepping into a mincing machine. So you stayed put and hoped against hope.

But with these deadly accurate laser guided bombs, that rule changes. In Iraq a week ago, if you were an Iraqi soldier and you stayed in your tank or beside your big gun, you might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with a target on the front. But, if you climbed out of your tank or abandoned your big gun and run away, they might then lose interest in killing you. All the big bangs in this war have been concentrated exactly on your hardware, so, if you abandon your hardware, you may get to stay alive.

Reporters have been struck by how few busted Iraqi tanks have contained any dead Iraqis, and I have already joined the small chorus asking about where the dead Iraqi bodies are to be seen in our newspapers and on our screens, because despite everything there have to have been some.

But things like these concrete bombs suggest another explanation for the general absence of dead Iraqi soldiers. It wasn't just that the Iraqis were uniquely unwilling to fight for the uniquely nasty Saddamite regime. There was also the fact that, for the first time in the history of conventional warfare, "melting away" actually worked as a way to stay alive. Faced with an enemy willing and unprecedentedly able to smash all your big weapons, but willing to leave you alone if you just got the hell out of there, which the Iraqis were facing if I understand Coalition tactics correctly, they actually could run away.

If this is correct, then this is just one more reason among hundreds to admire all the thought that has gone into the Coalition attack and its tactics, throughout the last few weeks but also throughout the previous year and more. I hope that, when the story emerges, we will discover that the Coalition wasn't just trying to avoid killing Iraqi civilians, but that they were also trying to avoid killing Iraqi soldiers more than was absolutely necessary to protect their own activities. Certainly the public pronouncements of Rumsfeld and co. suggest this. "Go home, abandon your weapons", etc. Well, that's what seems to have happened.

There is also this. I am reluctant, speaking as an armchair sub-lieutenant, to call anyone a coward. God knows, I'd be brown underwear terrified if anyone ever stuck me in any battle, let alone anything like a tank battle.

Well, this explanation of the Iraqi army's "collapse" – that they could run away – not only strikes me as adding another important little truth to the mix; it also has the good side effect of being more respectful towards the wretched Iraqi soldiers, who all have my profoundest sympathy, along with all the civilians that many of these soldiers were compelled to torment. It wasn't that they were any more cowardly than the members of any other army that was hopelessly outgunned and out-commanded and out-everythinged. It wasn't that they were any less willing to stand and fight than earlier generations of doomed soldiers. It was just that this time around, they had an alternative. Life outside of their tanks and away from their guns was systematically safer than life inside the tanks and attached to their guns, so they had a chance to stay alive by running away, and they took it. Smart them. In their situation I'd have tried to do exactly the same thing, assuming only that I had been smart enough to work it out.

Okay this is all guess-work on my part. Armchair and all that. But it makes sense to me.

I've now switched on the TV again, and I just saw the big Saddam statue in the centre of Baghdad coming down, amidst jubilation. Talk about winning hearts and minds.

(I want to do a whole separate posting here some time soon about what America learned from Vietnam, because boy did they learn.)

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The crew of the Royal Navy's flagship aircraft carrier Ark Royal have complained so bitterly about the BBC coverage of the war that the captain has removed the news channel BBC 24 from the selection available on board. Ark Royal is one of the few RN ships that receives TV channels directly via satellite.

And just to add insult to injury... the captain has replaced BBC 24 with arch rival SkyNews. Ouch!

(via Biased BBC)

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Allied claims of the fall of Basra and reports of American tanks in the centre of Baghdad were robustly denied this evening by Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed al-Sahhaf.

Attending a press conference before by a rapidly dwindling troupe of Western journalists, Minister al-Sahhaf took the podium to address his audience beneath a solitary, naked lightbulb. In the distance, the crump of tanks shells could be heard.

Despite the gloom, the Minister could be seen standing in front of a map of the world carefully arranging a sheaf of papers that he claimed were messages being relayed from the front lines by Iraq soldiers.

"The so-called Coalition forces have been completely routed by the Iraqi Armed Forces. There is not a single British or American soldier on Iraqi soil"

Pausing only to wipe away the plasterdust that was settling on his head from the cracked ceiling above, the Minister continued:

"In accordance with the brilliant strategy devised by our beloved leader Saddam Hussein, our glorious soldiers have launched their successful counterattack which is destined to end in a great victory for our side. Already the cities of London and Sydney have been laid waste by the bold actions of our heroic and fearless fedayeen".

Just at that moment, the building was shaken by a heavy rumble coming from outside.

"It is nothing, it is nothing".said the Minister "Just a thunderstorm".

Unphased by the interruption, the Minister continued with his address:

"Advance units of our elite Republican Guard have also surrounded the American capital city of Washington and, in the next few hours, they will begin their final push to capture the Whitehouse."

As he finished his final sentence, a nearby explosion shattered the windows and blew out the single overhead lightbulb, plunging the room into darkness. There was a pregnant silence suddenly broken by the clatter of a chair as the BBC Correspondent leapt to his feet to applaud enthusiastically and shout "Bravo, bravo. More. Bravo!!".

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Instapundit links to this stirring piece in the Mirror by Tony Parsons, with which I almost wholly agree. Wow, says Instapundit. Indeed. But here's the one bit I have a problem with.

Yes, there have been deeply disturbing images of dead and burned Iraqi children. But do we honestly imagine that Allied forces, fighting a war unrestrained by political concerns, didn't kill and maim countless numbers of innocent French, Dutch and Belgian children in the Second World War, never mind the babies we burned alive in Japan and Germany.

We just didn't see pictures of them.

But I haven't seen any pictures of dead Iraqis either. Not at any rate on television, which is the news source I've been relying on.

Neither has James Lileks.

I really like Lileks, to the point where one of the things I most dislike about Saturday morning now is that there'll be no Bleating from him until Monday. But, I find his archives hard to navigate, and I don't know how to get to this Bleat once it has stopped being today's Bleat. This link just goes to the latest one. Meanwhile, here's a big chunk of what he says today (as I write this) on the pictures of dead Iraqis issue. He's talking dead Iraqi soldiers, rather than civilians, but the principle is the same because I haven't seen any pictures of them either.

But I’m serious. Where are the bodies? Or, more to the point, why aren’t we seeing them? One of the most remarkable shots I saw Friday was a slow roll down a broad modern highway; on the verge, a truck with some sort of machine gun fastened to its bed. It was just charred metal - but still, you’d think that if anyone had been manning the gun or sitting behind the driver’s seat, there would have some human remains visible. Then you saw a long black patch blasted in the road. The truck had been hit by a missile and knocked back with such force that anyone inside may have been thrown out, or just plain converted to something that burned without leaving a recognizable shape. That’s just something the camera caught while passing by. Imagine what it would see if it went looking.

I think we should see the casualties, but not to serve any particular pedagogical purpose. I get irritated when told that we should see the dead so we understand what war is really like - as if the idea that people die in horrible means would be a surprise. You mean they don’t freeze up, shout AIIEEE, or grimace and crumple over? I saw a T-72 take a hit the other day, and it was one of those classic examples of the flaws of Soviet design – an armor-piercing round set off the munitions, blowing the turret high in the air. If there was anyone inside, the end was fast. But you can imagine the nature of that quarter-second between life and death- and you should. Men died. In the time it takes you to wink the irreplaceable worlds these men held in their heads vanished. One shell, four men, eight parents, 20 siblings, a hundred friends, a thousand details lost for good. One second in war echoes for a decade.

Show the carnage. Rope it off, show it in the late-night hours when the kids are in bed, but show it. I feel the same way about the 9/11 footage. Show it. Don’t presume we can’t take it or must be shielded, like children, from the truth of the thing we have unleashed. I’m not suggesting that the news should be nothing but Death on Parade, or linger with unwholesome glee on the injuries done to our soldiers or theirs. But you cannot edit death out of war; to do so defames those experience it. How can we understand the soldiers who return home without understanding not just what they saw, but what they did?

The Americans have learned many things from Gulf War I, including many good things. Don't start popular uprisings you don't then join in and support. Smart bombs good dumb bombs bad. Kill as few of the enemy as you can. Good stuff like that. But they have also learned this: Don't show scary pictures of dead enemy bodies you do kill to the civilians because they can't handle it.

Remember those gruesome images form Gulf War I of the retreating Iraqis spit-roasted on the Road of Death? Okay, there's not actually been anything quite like that this time. But no incinerated and disfigured dead bad guy bodies? Come on.

But as I say, I've been relying on TV – plus this blogosphere internet stuff of course. Have the old paper media had pictures like this? Or have they been scrubbed clean of such horrors also?

At this point in the writing of this I abandoned my desk in my kitchen and I went out and bought copies of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Mirror. There were many references to dead Iraqis, including in the headlines. If ever there going to be gruesome dead Iraqi pictures in the papers, this was when, and this was where. But there was just one very small picture, a very blurry one off the telly, in the Independent of a few of the dead bodies in the John Simpson friendly fire catastrophe that killed a bunch of Kurd commanders.

Apart from that, none. I call this kind of thing SFGO: something funny going on.

Is the deal that the colour magazines can print all the gore they like, once the war is good and over, but not before? Or will these pictures never be seen? (I assume that they have at least been taken.)

I support this war. I thought it was winnable, quickly, and it is being won, almost as quickly as I had hoped. So this is not me saying that this is evil and fascist. I'm just saying that it is happening.

Maybe we civilians really can't handle such pictures. In terms of boosting civilian support it may have been a very smart move indeed to stop us seeing such things, and at the very least this was perhaps a wise precaution, to delay the moment when the civilians might have turned against a longer campaign than actually happened.

It makes you wonder, as I'm sure the peaceniks are already wondering very loudly: What else are they not allowing us to see?

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When I was a boy, soldiers communicated by yelling at each other, and with big boxes which they yelled into and also listened to, carefully. Each bunch of soldiers had one box through which all orders came, and through which they sent all their news back to their superiors. Remember those boxes which malfunctioned in A Bridge Too Far, to the disgust of Sean Connery. Those.

Fast forward. On TV I'm now watching our soldiers, and they all seem to be wearing headsets to talk into, like in a Van Damme SF movie. Every infantryman has become like a fighter pilot. Mostly they seem to observe radio silence. I guess they don't want to be jabbering all at once.

When did this happen? It's a big change, and surely a big, big step forward and a big, big difference between our guys in this war and the other poor fellows, who do not have headsets unless I'm much mistaken which is of course only too possible.

That's it. No links, because if I had a link to something on this I'd probably have the answer. Just questions. When did this change occur? What did it consist of? And what does it mean? A lot, I'm guessing. Commenters please let rip.

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Since Samizdata, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, seems to be in us-Brits-great-or-what? mode today, please permit me to mention here that over on my Education Blog, I did a piece about the British Army as a teaching organisation, based on a conversation with a friend who is a captain in it. If what you're now thinking is: "Wow, those Brits, how do they do it?", well, I think this little piece goes some way towards answering that question.

At the centre of the piece is an accronym: EDIP. This stands for: Explain, Demonstrate, Immitate, Practice.

The other key principle "embedded" – to use this month's mot du jour – in British Army practice is that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Quite junior officers start the "high powered" bit of their army careers by instructing at Sandhurst, and Sergeants and Corporals do most of the day-to-day training of the soldiers. At the end of it the soldiers may not be completely in command of what they're doing, but the men who've been teaching them have it ingrained into them. Soldiering can be taught, and so can leadership, and this is how.

The thing I remember most vividly about that conversation was, well, how vivid it was. The question "Education – How about that then? – How does the army go about doing that?" is just about the best way for a civilian like me to get inside the head of a soldier that I could possibly have picked. "So, what's it like killing people?" is useless by comparison. (a) It's insulting. It makes it sound like that's the thing they most like doing. (b) Half of them don't know. (c) Those that do have no way of really telling you. And above all (d) they don't want to talk about it. But asking them about how they teach is, as I said in my original piece, like taking the cork out of a shaken champagne bottle.

I want to do a lot more pieces like this one, about actual teachers and how they set about it, for my Education Blog, but so far have only done one more, about my friend Sean Gabb. So if any Samizdata readers are doing any teaching, of any sort, in the London area or near offer, and of a sort they wouldn't mind me sitting in on and/or writing about (I promise to accentuate the positive – almost all teachers are doing some good things), please get in touch.

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Ode to British Armed Forces:

Yesterday, in Basra, we were reminded. Our soldiers conducted themselves with courage, patience, discipline and, when necessary, appropriately directed violence. They were splendid.

[...]

...as they advanced through Basra's suburbs, our Servicemen had to rely on older attributes: unit cohesiveness, steadiness under fire, controlled aggression, trust in each other. Strip away all the artefacts of modern war and we are left with an undeniable truth: man for man, our soldiers are better, braver and deadlier than theirs.

By yesterday afternoon, American commentators were hailing the pacification of Basra as a model for what should happen in Baghdad. To have occupied a city of 1.2 million people with negligible casualties to the attacker is extraordinary; to have done so without incurring the hatred of the inhabitants is little short of providential.

Britain's standing in the United States is as high as it has ever been, and with good reason.

As a former prime minister once put it: "Rejoice - just rejoice!"

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The latest reports on SkyNews are showing large crowds of ecstatic Iraqi civilians greeting the British mechanised troops deep inside Basra. One clip showed jubilant Iraqi children and young men clambering over a Challenger 2 tank and shaking the hands of the vehicle's bemused commander and driver.

On a less happy note, one British soldier was killed earlier by a booby trap, so it is too soon to regard the Basra operation as completely 'done and dusted' but it seems clear that to all intents and purposes, the city has indeed fallen.

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I have no idea - no idea whatever - whether or how much of this is true, or made up, or what. But here it is, for whatever it may be worth - it being from a website run by something called Bikesport, "Michigan's largest road and triathlon store". I kid you not.

I'm guessing that not all of the blogosphere has seen this yet. If it has and I was the last to hear about it, apologies. Thanks to Boris Kupershmidt for the link.

[EMBARRASSING UPDATE: It's fiction, as commenter number two has just pointed out. Oh well. Maybe something approximately like what follows has been happening. Follow this link for the background to all this, which is definitely a story, if not anything like the story I thought it might have been.]

It's a big night for Mike. He's at work tonight. As I mentioned his clothing is wet, partially from dew, partially from perspiration. He and his four co-workers, Dan, Larry, Pete and Maurice are working on a rooftop at the corner of Jamia St. and Khulafa St. across from Omar Bin Yasir.

Mike is looking through the viewfinder of a British made Pilkington LF25 laser designator. The crosshairs are centered on a ventilation shaft. The shaft is on the roof of The Republican Guard Palace in downtown Baghdad across the Tigris River

Saddam Hussein is inside, seven floors below, three floors below ground level, attending a crisis meeting.

Mike's co-worker Pete (also an Ironman finisher, Lake Placid, 2000) keys some information into a small laptop computer and hits "burst transmit". The DMDG (Digital Message Device Group) uplinks data to another of Mike's co-workers (this time a man he's never met, but they both work for their Uncle, "Sam") and a fellow athlete, at 21'500 feet above Iraq 15 miles from downtown Baghdad. This man's office is the cockpit of an F-117 stealth fighter. When Mike and Pete's signal is received the man in the airplane leaves his orbit outside Baghdad, turns left, and heads downtown.

Mike has 40 seconds to complete his work for tonight, then he can go for a run.

Mike squeezes the trigger of his LF25 and a dot appears on the ventilator shaft five city blocks and across the river away from him and his co-workers. Mike speaks softly into his microphone; "Target illuminated. Danger close. Danger Close. Danger close. Over."

Seconds later two GBU-24B two thousand pound laser guided, hardened case, delayed fuse "bunker buster" bombs fall free from the F-117. The bombs enter "the funnel" and begin finding their way to the tiny dot projected by Mike's LF25. They glide approximately three miles across the ground and fall four miles on the way to the spot marked by Mike and his friends.

When they reach the ventilator shaft marked by Mike and his friends the two bunker busters enter the roof in a puff of dust and debris. They plow through the first four floors of the building like a two-ton steel telephone pole traveling over 400 m.p.h., tossing desks, ceiling tiles, computers and chairs out the shattering windows. Then they hit the six-foot thick reinforced concrete roof of the bunker. They burrow four more feet and detonate.

The shock wave is transparent but reverberates through the ground to the river where a Doppler wave appears on the surface of the Tigris. When the seismic shock reaches the building Mike is on he levitates an inch off the roof from the concussion.

Then the sound hits. …

My guess is that this was why the rush to war took fourteen months, or whatever it was. They were getting all of this stuff good and ready and working nicely. If true - and something a lot like this must presumably have been happening - then very scary.

And you can't help thinking: SH has been completely dead from day one. [But see the EMBARRASSING UPDATE above! SH is definitely still alive. The videos prove this beyond doubt. "We have crushed them ... we are pounding them ... this is American disinformation ..." etc. etc. Oh well.]

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British forces have overrun Basra, with 16 Air Assault Brigade taking the north of the city, 7 Armoured Brigade taking Central Basra and 3 (Royal Marine) Commando Brigade taking Southern Basra.

Although the British military authorities are studiously avoiding actually saying that 'Basra has fallen', it seems clear from all the reports I have seen from the journalists inside the city itself that this is indeed the case, bar the inevitable mopping up of isolated die-hard elements. Fedayeen Saddam resistance is being described as sporadic and uncoordinated and at one point a reporter with SkyNews said several thousand jubilant people mobbed the British as they pushed deep into the city.

Although fighting is continuing, it seems clear that Ba'athist Socialism is dying with a frightened whimper rather than a defiant roar. The Fedayeen are discovering that two decades of murdering civilians has not prepared them for fighting some of the most fierce and professional troops in the world.

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Or in this case, the Shatt Al Arab waterway. The ever flexible and innovative Royal Marines have taken to small fast boats to show it dominates even the waterways right around Basra, at one point helping out an astonished local fishermen who was having engine troubles.

This and other tactics show a couple centuries of colonial experience are serving the British military well, illustrating the way to 'hearts and minds' is a mixture of well armed ferocity when challenged and common helpfulness otherwise. Keeping the focus on the fact this is an anti-Ba'athist war, not a war against Iraq, UK forces in Basra are reacting cleverly to propaganda targets of opportunity, as reported in the Washington Times:

In another incident, when an Iraqi colonel was fatally shot in his vehicle, British troops found a thick wad of local currency. Instead of handing it in to officers, the troops decided to dole the cash out to wide-eyed local youngsters, a monetary variant of candy handouts.

Nice one!

Update: British mechanised forces are now reported as fighting Fedayeen irregulars 7 km inside Basra!

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Pentagon planners must have been grinding their teeth with irritation when the Turkish parliament refused to allow a US division to unload in a Turkish port and move into Northern Iraq. Clearly having major US assets approach from an entirely different strategic direction would have enormously complicated the Iraqi military's defensive dilemmas. In the event, the Iraqi army has been able to concentrate its the majority of its efforts against the allied moves in the south. Although it seems that allied special forces have run riot in the west of the country, that is really just desert of little real strategic importance to Iraq's national cohesion. So far so good for the bad guys (well, sort of).

And yet...

The army which has attacked Iraq is much smaller than the one which ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The thinking here was clearly that the advances in technology and war fighting generally meant that a much smaller but 'smarter' force was all that was required to defeat Saddam's armies in the field. The down side to this is that the sheer size of Iraq means that lines of communications are far longer than was the case in 1991 and in addition are running through enemy territory almost entirely... and there are far less troops to keep them secure.

If the allies have made any miscalculations, it is not with regard to the Iraqi army or Republican Guard: although both have resisted, they have been signally unable to prevent the overrunning of nearly half of Iraq and in every major battle so far against US and UK forces, their formations have been smashed and the survivors thrown back.

No, the unknown and more importantly, the unplanned for factor is the Fedayeen Saddam and sundry Ba'athist militias. These irregular forces, like all, irregular forces, have little real combat power but are able to disrupt logistics, cause irritation out of all proportion to their numbers and equipment, and most importantly for Saddam's cause, maintain Ba'athist authority and political presence in areas nominally under the control of the allies. I lost track of how many times the allies reported that "The US Marines have taken Umm Qasr" day after day. What, again?

In reality it was only in the last two days that the Fedayeen and Ba'athist infrastructure in Umm Qasr had been sufficiently crushed by Royal Marines doing painstaking house to house clearances that Iraqi civilians felt safe enough to openly apply for jobs with the allied forces in the port city.

Similarly, the roads north to the bulk of the US forces are being called 'ambush ally' by the rear echelon troops tasked with the essential logistic task of keeping the heavy divisions rolling and shooting around Karabala and Nasiriyah.

And so if the tank, artillery and AFV heavy Iraqi units around Baghdad are not really what is causing the allies difficulties, then the fact irregular forces are able to attack overstretched supply lines is the thing that should be worrying us, give the lack of absolute numbers of infantry the attacking allied armies.

Well, the forces that would have moved into Northern Iraq are about to arrive in Southern Iraq. If my guestimates are correct, their ships should be reaching the appropriate Gulf ports any time now.

In Northern Iraq, they would have faced much the same problems as their colleagues in the south... but deployed in the south, they will increase the feet-on-the-ground per square mile considerably, which can only be very bad news indeed for the Fedayeen.

Perhaps this cloud has a silver lining.

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During my search for breaking news for fast & furious warblogging on the Command Post, I came across this precious announcement:

The fledgling Euro-army launched its first military operation yesterday, picking the Balkan state of Macedonia as a trial run for future missions in Bosnia, Africa and the Caucasus.

A force of 320 soldiers wearing "Eufor" badges with the European Union's blue and gold stars on their right shoulders took over peacekeeping duties at a ceremony in Skopje, replacing Nato troops who have already done the hard work of pacifying Macedonia over the past two years.

EU officials cite the mission as proof that joint defence plans agreed by France and Britain in 1998, and further honed by the EU a year later, remain on track despite the bitter differences over Iraq. While volleys of insults go back and forth across the Channel, British and French officials are meeting twice a week to lay the groundwork for a joint aircraft carrier battle group designed to project EU power around the world.

"You might not believe it, but Franco-British defence is going great guns", said a senior diplomat. The general assumption in Brussels is that Tony Blair will commit Britain deeper to EU defence once the Iraq conflict is over.

Somebody please tell me that this is a joke...

Also posted on the Command Post

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Ten days onto the offensive, it is clear that the Wehrmacht is exactly where the French want them, as evidenced by their pause to refuel their tanks and rearm with more ammunition.

We are told by various reporters that the war is bogging down. that casualties are 'heavy', that Iraqi resistance is 'stiff'. We hear that thing are going badly and the allied military leaders have miscalculated.

Yet although the allied forces have taken loses, for sure, and each of those is a tragedy, the cold facts are that in military and historical terms, UK and US casualties have been insignificant, trivial in fact.

The allies have overrun a huge chunk of Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary militia, smashing the Ba'athist Socialist infrastructure of repression and hammering targets of military importance at will. The fact that not everything has gone the way UK and US planners expected will not be an earth shattering surprise to them as there is a well known military axiom that they will all be very familar with: "no plan ever survives contact with the enemy".

It seems that any war which does not result in single figure losses and which is not over in time to not interfere with the screening of the Oscars is going to be deemed a 'catastrophe' by a media which knows nothing about either military affairs or history. The British took 58,000 casualties (one third of them killed) on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. That is what 'heavy casualties' means.

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British forces are continuing their aggressive incursions into Basra, capturing some senior Iraqi Army Officers and killing a Republican Guard colonel in the process.

My guess is that the object of this is keeping the Iraqi forces off-balance and probably trying to demonstrate to the population of Basra that Ba'athist control is decaying daily... hence the day before yesterday's foray into the city by British Challenger Tanks for the decidedly non-military objective of blowing up a statue of Saddam Hussain in a public square with the tank's 120mm gun!

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There has been some speculation about why the Australian military contribution to the war in Iraq has not received anything like the coverage that the American (obviously) and British forces have.

Well the reasons are twofold: firstly, the size of the force is a great deal smaller as it is made up of the elite Australian Special Air Service (which is operating in conjunction with their British SAS and American Delta Force & SEAL counterparts)... and secondly the fact they are special forces means operational security is paramount. The Aussies are famous in Special Forces circles for their ability to survive without resupply for long periods of time, something very useful when operating behind enemy lines. Just how they do this is a closely guarded secret.

However there is another more... puzzling... aspect to the lack of news, considering the Australians are the only group to invite the Al-Jazeera TV channel to embed journalists with them. A recently broadcast signal from a Australian SAS unit 'somewhere in Iraq' made mention that they had run out of embedded journalists and could they send a couple more out, preferably less stringy ones this time. It is unclear what the significance of that last remark was.

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John Keegan asks whether trying to avoid civilian casualties may cause more deaths:

How much more difficult are the allies making this war for themselves by their determination to spare the Iraqi civilian population as much suffering as is humanly possible? That is certainly a condition of the strategy being pursued.

...is the effort to minimise civilian mortality counter-productive? Do slow and careful operational procedures actually increase the number of civilian deaths and the amount of suffering, when a less precautionary and more peremptory approach might achieve the same, or even a better effect, by hastening the end?

A good analysis of the classic military dilemma. Also, an important reminder that it is Saddam's ba'athists who are using civilians as a proxy:

Saddam and his apparatchiks have absolutely no compunction about employing violence to keep themselves in power. They will shoot anyone who looks like changing sides or trying to escape from the regime's control. They benefit from the indisputably powerful effect of displaying force. They equally benefit from the reluctance of the allies to display any more force than they believe to be necessary.

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There is some remarkable information in a larger article about Basra, relating to how Royal Marine infantry and 1st The Queen's Dragoon Guards with light reconnaissance vehicles successfully took on Iraqi battle tanks yesterday.

Whilst the Soviet era T-55 is an older tank, facing such heavy armour and 100mm guns in an agile vehicle armed with a 30mm RARDEN cannon and designed only to protect the crew against small arms fire and fragmentation does not leave a whole lot of room for error.

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Last Friday, the Mises Institute published a special edition of their daily article containing nothing else but quotes by von Mises on the subject of war.

The quotes are hard to disagree with, apart from their mistaken application to the current situation. No distinction is made between using war as a means of conquest, expanding one's power and using war as a defensive measure, protecting one's security, freedom etc. For those who believe the US and the UK are engaged in the former, I shall leave them to their struggle against the neo-imperialists...

For the rest, I retaliate with a small collection of quotes that make such a distinction:

We make war that we may live in peace.
- Aristotle

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
- John Adams

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
- John Stuart Mill

That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon.
- G.K. Chesterton

I cannot see how we can literally end War unless we can end Will. I cannot think that war will ever be utterly impossible; and I say so not because I am what these people call a militarist, but rather because I am a revolutionist. Absolutely to forbid fighting is to forbid what our fathers called "the sacred right of insurrection." Against some decisions no self-respecting men can be prevented from appealing to fortune and to death.
- G.K. Chesterton

OK, this is not going to win the war, but it will have to do while we are waiting for our logins for The Command Post warblog!

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For years now the British soldier-in-the-field has been bitching about the crappy Light Support Weapon version of the bug-ridden SA-80 rifle that they have been saddled with.

So I was delighted to see picture after picture of British Army and Royal Marines using the excellent Fabrique National Minimi Squad Automatic Weapon. British soldiers deserve proper weapons and at last they seem to be getting them.

Soldier of the 1st bn Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in action in Iraq, using the FN Minimi SAW