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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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…no, that does not mean what you think.
The casualties in question are Fox New Channel reporter and all round buffoon Geraldo Rivera, who has been booted out of Iraq by the military for the committing the cardinal sin of any war correspondent… he revealed sensitive information live on television. It is interesting how the CCN article I spotted this in buries the fact en-passant at the bottom of a much larger article. My Grandmother had pretty much the perfect summation of our ol’ buddy Geraldo back in December 2001.
The other casualty is Peter Arnett who has been fired by NBC/MSNBC for being a ‘useful idiot’.
The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the world is back running in well oiled grooves… now if only the same thing would happen to the odious Robert Fisk.
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.
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!
Aqui hay algo para personas que hablan Español, quienes son unos ‘utiles idiotas’. Esta presentación ha sido creada por algunos que no lo son.
(Although it helps if you speak Spanish, the meaning of the presentation can be understood by anyone.)
Although war still rages, it is already time to start looking to Iraq’s future.
All but the most willfully blind will have seen that no accommodation is either possible nor in fact desirable with Ba’athist Socialism, and that must shape how the allies act not just now but when victory has been won.
Since 1945, we have had the examples of the overthrow of many totalitarian regimes: National Socialism in Germany, Fascism in Italy, Fascist Imperialism in Japan and Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe… each informs us in very different ways.
In Russia, Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia, Communist totalitarianism was cast off by internal dissent, made possible by a decaying security apparatus and enervated ruling elite that were the inevitable long term result of Marxist economics.
The good thing about the momentous sloughing off of Communist tyranny across the Slavic world was that it came with a relatively small price in blood even in places like Romania. However therein also lies the cost…
Throughout eastern Europe the success of civil and political society breaking out of the toxic legacy of communism has been very patchy indeed. As the overthrow of communism was political, the inevitable political cost was that accommodations with ‘former’ communists were made… in many cases former communists came to dominate the post-communist nations, effortlessly exchanging command economics for so called ‘crony capitalism’. In nations like Serbia, the thuggish national socialist elite retains control over large sections of society as it always did: with assassinations, fear and brutality.
In Germany, Italy and Japan however, the overthrow came not from political processes but at the point of a foreign bayonet. In East Germany unfortunately the bayonets were those of the equally monstrous Soviets but elsewhere it was the Western Allies who crushed the Nazi and Fascist regimes… and brought in their wake a process called ‘De-Nazification’.
In occupied post war Germany member of the Nazi Party were simply forbidden from participating in politics and excluded from any ‘sensitive’ jobs. Leading members of the German National Socialist German Workers Party were put on trial and many were hanged. The British even had what can only be described as military ‘hit squads’ ranging across Occupied Germany in 1945 summarily executing upper and middle rank German officers responsible for atrocities against British personnel during the war.
A ‘De-Ba’athification’ process is what must follow the destruction of Saddam Hussain’s state. Mere membership of the Ba’athist Party must be taken as prima facie evidence that the person is unfit for any political role whatsoever and membership in the Fedayeen Saddam must carry with it a presumption of guilt for crimes. When an anti-Ba’athist Iraqi regime is in place, they must not only not be restrained from conducting their own systematic purging of Iraqi society, but must be required to do so.
Similarly the allies must not get squeamish and should make no apologies for the use of violence to expunge Ba’athist toxins from the Iraqi state and society… Something that many libertarians fail to understand is that when normal civil society has collapsed, normal rules of civil interaction and legal niceties are not just impossible, they are madness. When the guns are out, it is the logic of the lifeboat which applies, not the logic of the lawsuit.
Ba’athist Socialism is institutionalised civil violence and unlike communism, it could have lasted indefinitely as it fed like a vampire on the rich blood of Iraq’s oil wealth. It is not enough to destroy Saddam Hussain’s armies, Ba’athist Socialism too will have to be killed just as National Socialism was, quite literally.
In a similar vein, hopefully the Fedayeen responsible for executing British prisoners and massacring fleeing Iraqi civilians will be summarily shot by British soldiers if they are captured when Basra is finally taken (that may of course happen regardless of any ‘policy decisions’ in London). The most effective way to do this and the best way for Iraqi society in the long run, is simply not to take any Fedayeen prisoners, except a few perhaps for intelligence gathering purposes. Rough justice is the only justice there is at such times.
As you may have noticed, Samizdata has been having technical problems for the last two days.
We are looking for new hosting arrangements but we have just put a short term ‘fix’ in place which should get us up and running for now, so do not fear, we are not about to go belly-up!
Hopefully normal output will resume shortly!
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.
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
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
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.
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’.
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