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Well Fancy That!

· International affairs

Does this look like playing both sides?

So under a “defence pact” with Qatar, French troops will be in the Gulf after all. Just in time for the reconstruction contracts I trust. (Incidentally, “MAM” as the French Defence Minister is known, is regarded by French troops with similar contempt to that shown by British troops for Geoff “Buff” Hoon).

I’m getting about as much flak from reaction to my last posting as a B1 over Bagdad. I will reserve comment on the diplomatic bungling until the organised fighting stops.

Whether or not Salam Pax is genuine or not, the Samuel Huntingdon quote carried on his blog about sums up how a big chunk of the world’s population regards the Anglosphere.

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

The bombing of Bagdad is doing little to dispel this notion. I don’t approve or agree, but that doesn’t make it less of a problem.

March 23rd, 2003 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

About bloody time!

· Middle East & Islamic · Military affairs · UK affairs

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

March 23rd, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)

Warblogging

· Middle East & Islamic

We are getting to the stage where the constant stream of news does not join the dots and leaves much unanswered. I found The Command Post warblog very good for instant updates with the kind of questions that I’d ask and the reporters don’t seem to, investigated. Instapundit is constantly linking to it too, so this is just for those who missed it.

Click for on-target news

March 23rd, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)

Dangerous curves?

· Humour

I saw something interesting in the Sunday Times today:

People in show business circles are puzzled by Foreign Office warnings to British subjects to stay away from Jordan…

Jordan: not very popular with the Foreign Office these days, it seems

March 23rd, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)

No safety in weaseldom

· Middle East & Islamic

In recent days there have been reports of ricin in France and a foiled attack in Germany.

This should be instructive to those who believe the danger will go away if we just close our eyes and believe three impossible things before breakfast.

If you are going to get hit either way you might as well stand and fight.

March 23rd, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Covering the war

· Middle East & Islamic

Surfing the cable TV channels has provided me with a glut of semi-useful information about the unfolding drama in Iraq, but has also astonished me with the wide qualitative differences between the news networks.

The coverage of SkyNews has been head and shoulders better that the rest, as was also the case during the fighting against the Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. CNN and ITN are both fair to adequate, and the BBC is hovering between adequate and truly dire, with dreary hackneyed commentary filled with technical errors. Are the BBC incapable of finding a few ex-military people to employ who might know that there is no such thing as an ‘Abrahams’ battle tank?

It is also easy to see the institutional political biases of the different channels: SkyNews has been repeatedly showing an extended clip of bemused Royal Marines in Umm Qasr surrounded by exuberant Iraqi men welcoming them as liberators… I saw one clip of about 6 or 7 seconds long of this on the BBC. Once.

March 22nd, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Missing in action

· Independent sites & social media

The reason why there has been a relatively small number of posts on Samizdata.net is the simple fact that we have been glued to our TV screens. We don’t have better access to facts and news than the media and there will be time for analysis later…

March 22nd, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

The sadness of being correct

· Middle East & Islamic

Before the war started I made the comment there might well be more media casualties in this war than are usual. I must admit I did not expect the media guys would be running a close second to the soldiers for death by enemy fire. It must be an historical first.

I’m fairly sure they will soon fall well behind the soldiers in this sad statistic. Even so, the total butchers bill has been incredibly low all around. I would like it to stay that way but the only thing one can say about the fortunes of war is that they are unknowable.

My condolences to all those brave (and sometimes foolhardy) journalists running about an extremely dangerous Iraq.

March 22nd, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)

When is half a million not half a million?

· UK affairs

The answer is when it comes to counting the numbers of people at a ‘peace protest’.

The Stop The War coalition claimed 500,000 people turned up for today’s protest in London (they later lowered their claims to 200,000) … yet the Metropolitan Police were quoted on SkyNews tonight as have said “less that 100,000 attended”.

Of course membership of the Stop The War coalition has considerable cross over with CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), a well known glove puppet of the old Soviet regime. During the Cold War, CND also used to vastly inflate the claimed attendance at its rallies, aided and abetted by the left wing BBC who would just report these claims as though they were incontrovertible. The fact CND & the BBC consistently inflated these numbers was exposed by Dr. Julian Lewis MP by using aerial photographs of CND protests.

The world may have moved on but the old Marxist left have not changed one iota.

Fortunately it is now it is easier than ever to ‘fact check their ass’.

March 22nd, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

Turkey role

· Middle East & Islamic · Military affairs

This is not altogether surprising but, nonetheless, it is a potentially serious complication:

A Turkish military source told Reuters about 1,500 commandos crossed Turkey’s southern border at three points late on Friday, aiming to secure access for subsequent, larger deployments.

“Turkish units have begun crossing into northern Iraq to take security measures at various points,” the official said.

The United States has told Turkey it would not welcome a unilateral incursion into northern Iraq, where local Kurds are suspicious of Turkish motives and have said such a move could lead to conflict.

Fighting between Kurds and Turks in the North of Iraq? Not impossible by any means.

March 22nd, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

After the Lord Mayor’s show…

· French affairs

I do not share the blood-lust of some of my fellow Samizdatistas, but I could not help thinking that if the [economic] Planning Ministry in Bagdad has indeed been destroyed, that a more suitable target would be hard to imagine for a free-market individualist. If President Bush hates Iraq, he’ll have a bigger one rebuilt later…

I have been silent about the former Mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac for some time now, but all I can say is that since I wrote this, this, this, this, this and this, nothing the so-and-so has said or done in the last month has come as a surprise. Chirac has only ever caved in to the left in his entire political career, apart from his infantile attempt to ban a royalist wreath-laying ceremony in early 1993.

Some voices I hear are talking about French loss of influence on the world stage and Chirac out within two years. On the first count, that’s pure wishful thinking. For a start there is an element of this argument about the apparently incongruous alliance of France, Rusia and China. If you’re looking for a reason to sack Colin Powell, his failure to keep Russia onside, or apparently to even realise what was happening are serious lapses on a par with Britain’s judgement in 1939 that Poland would be a more capable military ally than the USSR against Nazi Germany.

On Chirac’s imminent departure, I wish it were that simple. Chirac is in until 2007, unless he dies in office. I don’t think he actually can be impeached: an investigator into his affairs can be either appointed by him (or by his appointees) or switched to other cases, if they come too close to finding anything, and his almost worse henchman Alain Juppé controls the party machine which has the majority in both houses. It would take street protests or a foreign invasion to remove Chirac, which is why his pandering to the left is so handy.

March 21st, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

Coolness under fire

· Middle East & Islamic

I was just watching SkyNews and they showed a briefing for the Arab press by the Iraqi Defense Ministry: a rather humble low tech affair compared to the slick US Defense Department or UK MOD counterparts.

The spokesman in Iraqi military uniform was pointing at a large map of Iraq and giving the upbeat Iraqi version of the military situation when suddenly a bomb or cruise missile exploded very nearby, shaking the room and making the venetian blinds next to him jump about… several people in the room were clearly terrified and almost all flinched expect the spokesman, who continued his briefing without so much as batting an eyelid.

I cannot but admire his sang froid.

March 21st, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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