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Some of Britain’s problems right now in Basra are a consequence of the absurdity of Muqtada al Sadr still walking around when killing him last year would have been clearly legitimate and just a damn good idea. At the very least he should be sitting in a prison cell. This is not an election campaign, it is an insurgency and the US missed a big opportunity to ‘retire’ Sadr when his militia previously fought against the allied armies.
When I called for ‘no pussyfooting around’, I was just suggesting that when an Iraqi faction shoots at British soldiers or throws petrol bombs at them, the respsonce should not be to just ‘contain’ it or to ‘negotiate’ with the faction responsible (at least not until much later after it has been suitably knocked down to size), no, it should be to use all the force at their disposal to try and cut that faction to pieces. Moreover, it should result in significent reinforcements being sent to give UK forces more options.
People like Sadr will use violence only if they think using violence will gain them a political advantage at a tolerable cost… so the trick is to make the cost intolerable. It is crazy to give such people a ‘second chance’ during an active insurgency as clearly all Sadr has done is use the time since he last took on the occupying powers to rebuild his power base. No, just treat the guy like the Islamo-fascist he is, put a bullet through his head and make it clear that hard line Islamists militias will not be tolerated in the Iraq.
So if local administration in Basra were truly considering handing British soldiers over to Sadr’s militia, then they need to be dragged into the nearest HQ and told if they plan on growing old, that sort of behaviour is a very bad idea. Far from giving them an apology that those undercover SAS man were free by force, they should be told to ‘get stuffed’ and expect more of the same if they prove by their actions that they are the enemy.
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?
Now this gaffe by the French foreign minister in Israel would seem to defy belief…
The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked – while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed – whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy’s question was met by his hosts with amazement. “But Monsieur le minister,” Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, “England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II.”
Now please, somebody, tell me this is a piece of gross mis-reporting by Haaretz (not the first time that would have happened). Surely, the foreign minister of France cannot actually be that utterly clueless. It would be funny if it was not so scary to think someone like that can hold high office in a nuclear armed First World nation.
Or could he have been thinking about England in 1190 and just got a bit (ahem) confused about the dates?
Hat tip to the Dissident Frogman for unearthing this gem
Just in case you have not been already doing so, essential blog commentary on Germany’s cliff-hanger can be found over on David’s Medienkritik.
It will be interested to see if just under 12% unemployment has actually got the attention of the German electorate or is it going to be more of the same old stuff? Angela Merkel is something of an unknown quantity and the mere fact she is described as a ‘loose cannon’ by the political chattering classes makes her someone worth watching with at least a soupcon of hope. Germany badly needs an ‘Iron Lady’ so it will be interesting to see if Angela Merkel has what it takes or will the entrenched system just make her one of them.
The election hangs on a knife edge…
I think it is a mistake to assume that the motivations of all people in government, or most of the people who vote for governments, is knowingly malevolent. Most people want to believe the policies they support are ‘helping people’ because voting or passing a law makes them feel good about themselves as they are ‘doing something’. Consequently such people really dislike having it pointed out that their ‘something’ actually makes things worse more often than not, regardless of what their motives are.
That said, I think there are indeed quite a few people who understand full well the real harmful consequences of what they do, and they do it anyway because all they care about is maintaining the political apparatus from which they benefit at the expense of others. Those people will also react angrily to this being pointed out, because what they do requires their motives to be thought of as benevolent by the wider public whereas in reality it is just a force backed appropriation that benefits a favoured constituency at the expense of those less favoured.
My view is that ‘doing something’ via the state is sometimes the correct thing in an emergency (most obviously during a war, plague or natural disaster). Alas people often then apply the same logic to normal civil society outside the context of the emergency, acting as if the social logic of the lifeboat and normal civil society were one and the same (libertarians of some ilk often make the same mistake but from the opposite direction). A leitmotif of the post war British election in 1945 was “Look what we achieved together in wartime, think what we can do in peacetime!”… as if life in a total war and life in the social context of peacetime were much the same thing. The same logic used when being threatened by a totalitarian state is then applied to the ebb and flow of normal social life generally with monstrous results.
But cynical politicians who know full well the real consequences of their actions have powerful reasons to misrepresent the truth bacause all they care about is maintaining their personal power and influence and they do this by playing to people’s need to feel good by ‘doing something’… and they are the people who will do it. For this reason I think it is very important to keep pointing out the true effects of actions that governments take, and the consequences of participating in a process designed to lead to those sorts of interventions in civil society. Sometimes it is important to make people feel bad about themselves for ‘doing something’.
And that would be the law of unintended consequences.
The urge to alleviate the woes of the world can cause people to do great things. However when that urge is coupled to the power of a state, it is a dangerous mixture which can have the opposite effect to the one intended.
The think-tank Civitas has made no friends in Whitehall with its latest release titled Blair government causes child poverty and the UK Treasury is clearly incandescent at the suggestion that big government is actually the problem rarther than the solution.
But then the truth often hurts.
Well, sort of…
Actually I have long taken a similar view that without the distortions of the Common Agricultural Policy, many farm would and should go out of business or at least change what they do. My guess is that it would mostly be those who concentrate on the high end ‘premium’ end of the market (such as pandering to the demand for ‘organic’ food) who would survive.
Remove the barriers to trade and let the agricultural economies of less developed parts of the world feed us. Does it really make sense to artificially keep so much of the First World under cultivation?
The EU Courts have just given themselves the power to impose European criminal laws, by which I mean to decide itself if an offence against an EU regulation is now a criminal matter, even against the wishes of an EU states own government and legal system. How anyone who is even a casual observer of the EU could not have predicted this was on the cards is a mystery to me.
So next time you hear someone tell you that the real power remains, and will always remain, at the national level, perhaps you might like to ask them if deciding if something is, or is not, a criminal matter is a core function of a state’s legislative and judicial structures.
If people like Tony Blair and Ken Clarke want to dismantle Britain and make it a European province, well would it not be better if they just said as much and argued why that was the best course of action?
But Foreign Office sources said that, although the judgment raised the possibility of Britain having to create new criminal offences against the wishes of the Government, in practice EU member states would never agree to such a loss of sovereignty.
Any time you hear ‘Foreign Office sources’ say something will not happen ‘in practice’, of course that means the opposite is usually true. I expect within 18 months or so Britain will indeed be enacting criminal legislation imposed by European Courts on a regular basis.
There is an interesting article on American Thinker about the institutional mindset of political correctness.
A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi-hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity
And a useful comment on that story that quotes Theodore Dalrymple can be found on No Pasaran
The Tory party has been an ideology-free zone for quite some time now, defying any but the more internally focused Tory activist to really have any notion of what the Tory Party truly stands for. Not that the Labour Party actually wears its ideological heart on its sleeve any more, but at least the Labour Party clearly still believes in the Labour Party. The Tories on the other hand, well…
There is a very strange article by Peter Osborne in The Spectator in which he marvels that Tories cannot see that Ken Clarke is the solution to their woes, by which presumably he means that what the Tories need is a leader who wants to give more power to European Union institutions and run the economy pretty much as Tony Blair has. He also marvels at the ‘lurch to the right’ that the Tory Party has taken…
Yeah, that notion had me rather puzzled too. In short, Osborne seems to think that rather than search for ideological purity (!), the Tory Party need to just throw their lot in with Ken Clarke’s favour of regulatory statism.
So I guess I must have missed the Tory Party advocating scrapping the NHS and coming up with a non-rationing based healthcare system. I must have missed the plans to end inheritance tax completely, the bold decision to scrap entire government departments and reduce the state take by 15% in the first term…
If the Tories had quixotically adopted meaningful ‘right wing’ (whatever that actually means) policies, that would indicate the Tory Party actually believed in something. Yet even flirting with a moderate and rather inconsequential idea like the flat tax apparently makes you ‘right wing’ in Osborn’s universe. I guess departing materially from the post-Thatcher Labour world view seen as weird extremism, which of course means only the CINOs like that clapped out old milker Ken Clarke actually seem ‘sensible’ to someone for whom politics only ever means arguing over the rate at which the state should grow.
But the Tory party as a whole have not seriously even had that discussion and unless David Davis actually gets into the hotseat, it probably never will. I think Peter Osborn must have had a Tory Party from some alternate reality in mind…
If you want to read a splendid and truly hilarious article about US politics from the Irish Times, written by Newton Emerson, then go take a peek at Slugger O’Toole, where the entire article has been reproduced with permission.
And the reason it is so damn funny is that it is entirely correct.
How else can you interpret the authorities intention to disarm people in New Orleans? We are not talking looters here, we are talking about people with legal weapons.
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