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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.
16:30 GMT: If my time-of-flight guestimate is correct, the B-52s which took off earlier from RAF Fairford in Britain will be over Iraq in the next hour.
Stand by for the promised ‘shock and awe’.
More information from the just finished Ministry of Defence briefing suggests the fighting in Umm Qasr was considerably harder that expected as the last section of the town containing some Iraqi die hards has only recently fallen.
Reports are also coming in that suggest forward elements of 7 (UK) Armoured Brigade and US mechanized forces have reached the outskirts of the very important city of Basra, scene of bitter fighting in the Iran-Iraq War and viewed by many Iraqis as their ‘Verdun’. It may prove to be very psychologically important if Basra can be taken quickly by the Allies, but I expect they will first encircle and isolate the city from the north rather than try a risky coup de main today.
Update: 17:20 GMT: …or then again, maybe they are indeed going for a daring coup-de-main against Basra! Reports on SkyNews just in are saying unconfirmed reports indicate the allies (unspecified which units) have already seized part of downtown Basra! Blimey!
Eight Royal Marines and four Americans were killed in a non-combat related helicopter crash last night.
In an interesting Order of Battle snippet, it is also now clear that 3 Commando Brigade (Royal Marines) is fighting with a battalion of US Marines under the control of its HQ. As RM and USMC often train together and have famously cordial relations, I suppose this is not all that surprising.
Also, it is being reported that 3 Commando Brigade (Royal Marines) have secured the strategic Al Faw Oil Facility. I assume the success of this operation on the Al Faw peninsula will lead to a move towards Basra next, which Sky News reported has come under air attack this morning.
Astonishing pictures of some significant fighting in the town of Safwan were coming out live on television this morning (UK time), showing that some elements of the Iraqi army were putting up a fight against USMC forces. A group of USMC vehicles could be seen pouring machinegun and grenade launcher fire into Iraqi positions, and gunship helicopters were seen firing cannon and rocket fire to suppress outgoing Iraqi gunfire.
It now seems that taking the border town of Umm Qasr, reported to have fallen to the allies last night, required more fighting that was initially claimed by US news reports. USMC mechanized infantry was apparently pinned down by Iraqi fire for two hours, requiring Royal Marine artillery support before the advance could resume.
On the left flank of the allied move into Iraq, forward elements of the US 3rd Infantry Division are reported to be as much as 90 miles in from the Kuwaiti border and although as of now (08:40 GMT) the US division is reported to be stationary whilst it refuels, there does not seem to have been any serious opposition yet to what is probably the main American advance.
18:45 GMT Ministry of Defence sources are reporting that British ground forces are now engaged with the enemy in southern Iraq.
Earlier reports indicate USMC artillery and gunship helicopters were also in action in the 5 km wide demilitarised zone along the Kuwaiti border.
Update: 18:45 GMT: M.O.D. has announced that 3 Commando Brigade (Royal Marines), supported by RAF Harriers & Tornados plus US Navy SEALs, have launched an ‘offensive’ against the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq.
Update: 21:30 GMT: The attack by 3 Commando Brigade (40 & 42 Commando plus artillery, HQ and logistic assets) on the Al-Faw peninsula was initiated with a fast hovercraft mounted amphibious assault which put the Royal Marines assets ashore along with supporting Scimitar light tanks of the Royal Dragoon Guards. The Brigade is said to have now ‘moved inshore and though its initial objectives’.
Peter Briffa is absolutely smoking tonight… and I hope he puts me in touch with his supplier! He has a series of ‘future quotes’ from a veritable constellation of leading Tranzis, such as this gem from Germaine Greer:
This is not a war about oil. This is not a war about blood. Forget all that male, patriarchal propaganda. No, this is a war, above all, about the penis. The penis of war versus the vagina of compassion. Not since I was sitting on the dunny on Bondi Beach, and a whole team of beer-swilling Collingwood footballers came in and gang-raped my great grandmother have I witnessed such bloodlust.
Outstanding.
If you oppose a war to overthrow Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq but also claim to despise Saddam Hussain, then I can only assume that you are a ‘containment’ advocate… which is to say you view the policy of the last 12 years which prevented the Iraqi regime attacking it neighbours as an adequate response. You probably also think that containing Hussain within Iraq’s borders is all that is really in the interests of any outsiders (which in practice means primarily the USA and UK)… therefore what happens inside Iraq is really not germane. You might even add that you would be quite happy to see the Iraqi people overthrow Hussain, just not with our tax money or the blood of US and UK soldiers, thanks.
Okay, I do not agree but that is indeed a coherent argument to make.
However if part of your argument against this impending war is ‘many Iraqi civilians will be killed and thus it is unjustified’, then you are not making the ‘containment’ argument, nor are you making a ‘not in our national interest’ argument. What you are saying is that the interests of the Iraqi people are actually important to you and presumably have some objective value.
So ponder this: Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Socialist regime has been in power since 1979… about 22 years. Although the figures for how many people his regime has murdered varies hugely depending on the source and which axe they are grinding (with the high figure being 2 million), I will assume that the one million statistic being widely bandied about is correct… and lets for now just gloss over the number of people tortured, imprisoned or driven into exile.
That is approximately 45,500 Iraqi and Kurdish people per year murdered inside Iraq by the Ba’athist government… about 125 people per day that Saddam Hussein has been in power (or equal to about two Waco massacres every day). This is a crude blood calculus of course but it does put the Butcher’s Bill up where it can be seen and priced. Even if the number was half that, it gives us some measure of the scale of the horror involved.
So if your argument against a (hopefully short) war to overthrow Iraq’s Socialist regime is based on the undeniable fact innocent people will die, you would seem to be saying that it only matters when Iraqis are killed if outsiders are the ones killing them… because Iraqis are already dying at the hands of the Iraqi state in prodigious numbers. If that is indeed your position, I would contend that you really do not give a damn about what is best for the Iraqi people.
When the air turned to poison in Halabja: the reality of peace in Iraq
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
– John Donne (1573-1631)
When one embarks upon a war, nothing is ever certain. However if I was a betting man, I would anticipate the mother-of-all-surrenders, at least initially, followed by some nasty but sporadic and isolated fighting in a few key centres… in the end there is only so much that can be done from 20,000 feet and it is the squaddies with bayonets who will end this matter once and for all.
But just as the article Silver Linings earlier today suggests, I have an inkling that it is not just Saddam Hussain and Ba’athist Socialism which will rue the day Al Qaeda changed the world on September 11th. The aftermath of the Cold War ended today in the United Nations and I suspect when we look back in ten years we will realise that a great many things were never quite the same again. I think that NATO, the UN and (to a lesser extent) the EU have all been fatally weakened and thanks to Jacques Chirac, a great many people who matter have finally noticed that the zeitgeist has shifted and we are entering terra incognita: uncharted territory.
We have been hearing about the end of the bi-polar world and the ‘New World Order’ but in reality I do not think people really believed that the old institutions, assumptions and mindsets were really as obsolete as they actually are. It remains to be seen how long the UN and NATO continue to twitch but when the British and American tanks stash across the border of Iraq, they will be cutting the veins of more than just Ba’athism.
Britain too has just had an object lesson in the fact you cannot have your cake and eat it too. We are either an Atlantic nation trading with the world as we always have, or we are within Festung Europe. I do not think he realizes the enormity of what he is doing but Tony Blair is never going to be a ‘Good EUropean’ again… and if he tries to be, the contradictions are going to be impossible to reconcile.
Stay tuned. We live in interesting times.
The assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic comes as no real surprise to me.
Serbia is now reaping the cost of failing to follow up the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic with a systematic and ruthless process similar to the ‘de-nazification’ of West Germany that followed World War 2. As the new regime failed to use the opportunity to wipe out (literally) the nationalist/socialist thugs responsible for much of the calamity in the Balkans, these same thugs have retained control over chunks of Serbian society the way they always did… with violence and terror.
Zoran Djindjic will be remembered as a reformer and the man who gave up Slobodan Milosevic to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. However it has been suggested on Samizdata.net before that surrendering Milosevic for trial by foreigners was a serious error. The end of Mussolini at the hands of Italians would have been a far better model for the Serbs to have followed.
So government minister Clare Short is against a war in Iraq. That makes the following remarks all the most interesting:
The truth is this is a war. Wars are vile… It’s against an evil, monstrous regime that has caused a terrible war and displacement, raping and killing people. Now it is doing it again. This evil will be reversed. We will succeed, the sooner the better… But we will do what is necessary. It will be done and we will look after people and get them home…Please everyone think what is at stake here… This is a challenge for our generation. We must do what is right otherwise evil will triumph, Europe will have fascism back in it and all the instabilities that will lead to increasing conflict… Please be steady everyone. We’ve got to do what is right and we will do it.
– Clare Short, May 23, 1999, on the need for war against the Serbs (not OK’d by the UN).
So please will someone tell me… why is she opposed to a war to depose Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq? It seem that her claims that the UN must sign off on a war against tyranny did not matter when it came to Slobodan Milosevic, so what makes Saddam Hussain different?
We are always being told by those who oppose war against Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq of the downside… and although on balance I still support the armed overthrow of Saddam Hussain’s regime, on some of those issues I am all too aware that there is some truth to the fact this open ended ‘war on terrorism’ is also being used as an open ended ‘war on domestic civil liberties’.
However, let us also ponder the potential upside:
- Enough Americans will finally realizes that not only is the UN a body which allows blood soaked tyrants to stand up with impunity and take money from taxpayers in the USA, and this will push the US political establishment into seeing that the UN no longer serves any positive role… leading to US withdrawal and the UN’s financial collapse. Excellent!
- War results in the overthrow of a mass murdering tyrant who has waged wars against three nations in the region, and the Iraqi people end up almost immeasurably better off. Excellent!
- Tony Blair stands steadfast with the USA and the Anglosphere is once again shown to be the true repository of resisting tyranny across the world… Excellent!
- …and at the same time is fatally weakened politically by virtue of the fact the gulf between him and the grass roots of the socialist Labour Party have now been so starkly illuminated that it can no longer be finessed by spin doctors. Excellent!
- NATO is shown to be the anachronism it is and is restructured… and a new looser alliance of willing partners in Europe and North American emerges to take its place, without France and Germany… Excellent!
- … which also derails the terrifying prospect of a pan-European military alliance centred on the EU. Excellent!
- And speaking of the EU, now that France has broken cover with its remarks to Eastern Europe to ‘shut up’, I think the future seeds of the EU’s disintegration have been well and truly planted. Very excellent!
Always curious to know what US politicos are thinking about these turbulent times, I had dinner with Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) last night and made many of these points to him. Whilst I would not say he was happily endorsing my views, I did not see any grimaces or rolling of eyes from the urbane Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. Although he did not make me a convert to the joys of the ‘Patriot Act’, I was surprised to see the number of issues we did indeed agree on.
Of course I am well aware things can always shake out very differently as war and politics have a ways of springing surprises on even the canniest of customers, but sometimes things also have a way of turning out better than expected. Face it, nobody really knows what will happen.
Jeremy Sapienza wrote in his article called Only Terrorists Kill Innocents on Anti-State.com:
There seem to be many people, even in libertarian circles, who think that America was attacked because of abstract principles like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy.” And I didn’t want to say it, but so far it has been overwhelmingly true: the libertarians who would otherwise agree with the rest of us on most things but have done complete 180s here are Jewish. They support Israel blindly and fanatically, out of some allegiance to, as one writer put it, his “creed.”
[…]
It is a very easy concept to understand: the US government bombs innocent civilians all over the world, with hundreds of thousands dead in Arab parts, and so they hate us. They hate us because our government exterminates them like mosquitoes. So, in response to our government killing civilians, they kill OUR civilians. It is not right, but it is the only logical sustaining impetus for this utter hatred of Americans and our country.
[…]
Don’t worry, if we carpet-bomb Kabul there will still be Afghanis. I mean, they can still make more, right?
[…]
What the hell is the matter with you people!? Why are you so thirsty for innocent blood!? There has not been any arguments thus far that have convinced me that Muslims or Arabs are innately evil, or innately hate America because it is a prosperous, capitalist country. These are the ravings of people who are either lunatics or are too lazy to apply otherwise-heeded libertarian principles to their knee-jerk emotional reactions. Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it.
Well I am a so-called ‘pro-war’ libertarian, though 100% Goy, so I assume at least some of what is being written on anti-state.com is being directed at me and those of my ilk. However I do not support Israel 100%… in fact probably rather less that 50% if the truth be known.
Nevertheless I think it is clear that America was indeed attacked for abstract principles, just not ones like “freedom” and “prosperity” and even “democracy”. It was attacked for the abstract principles upon which the Islamic fundamentalism is based, which is to say ‘anti-secularism’ and as a corollary, anti-capitalism. You see Islam is indeed under attack in ways that really terrify fundamentalists the world over. However it should be obvious that the people who brought us the latest in Kamikaze tactics that bombing, and violent death generally, is not what frightens and engenders hatred from Islamists… it is an aggressive, global, unbounded secularism, whose carrier wave is a global and God-neutral capitalism which they fear. Not B-52s or F-16s or Tornados or Cruise missiles, but Playboy and Nintendo and banks-which-charge-interests and cheap DVD’s and satellite TV which mullahs cannot effectively control and so on and so on…
The likes of Al Qaeda want ‘us’ to leave ‘them’ alone… and by ‘them’ they mean the world’s Muslim population. But ‘we’ will never ever do that, because ‘we’ not really controlled by any authority who can make us stop making and selling whatever nominal Muslims the world over want to buy. And so out of desperation, the people to whom the very reason for their existance on earth is an imposed morality centred on certain abstract conceptions of God and Man which the secular world cares nothing about, attack us.
But Jeremy Sapienza does not see that, just the fact Iraq has been bombed since the ‘end’ of the last Gulf War, ergo that is the reason ‘they’ attacked ‘us’. And yet on September 11th the USA was not attacked by Iraqis angry at their treatment by the USAF, so I cannot see the relevance of Mr. Sapienza’s remarks about that being why ‘they’ kill ‘our’ civilians … neither was the USA attacked by members of the PLO or Hamas, who regularly get bombed by Israel, so I am not sure what relevance that has either… and just for completeness, neither were the hijackers that day Serbians who were pissed off about losing Kosova due to US and NATO actions, or German smarting over the end of the Third Reich or Japanese lamenting the loss of the South-East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
For the most part they were Saudis… and I cannot off-hand recall the last time the USAF bombed Saudi Arabia.
But then I think the article about which I am commenting is just a litany of misunderstandings and outright fallacies…leaving aside the patently false and positively libelous notion that the USAF/USN intentionally targeted civilians in Afghanistan (or anywhere else in the last decade). I wonder if Mr. Sapienza realises ‘carpet bombing’ is a technical military term which actually has a specific meaning. If Kabul had been carpet bombed, it would look rather like Dresden or Hamburg circa 1945, with tens of thousands killed in each air attack.
So what is the matter with us? Well for a start, we are not ‘pro-war’… we are pro-liberation. If Jeremy Sapienza can come up with a way to end mass murderous Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq by using harsh language and grimaces and singing Kumbayah, then I will quickly become a generous benefactor of anti-war.com. Until that is the case, I do wish he would stop his knee jerk emotional reactions and realise that yes, death is horrible… and the best way to stop the epidemic of state sponsored death in Iraq is to engineer the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism so that Saddam and Uday, and their coterie of thugs, end up hanging on meathooks in a public square in Baghdad.
You see, some libertarians see the world the way it really is and want to actually see tyranny overthrown with the tools at hand now and replaced with liberty and justice for all. Quaint but there you have it.
Yes we all know that what will follow Ba’athist Socialism will not be some libertarian nirvana, but it will be better that what is there now… if you are an isolationist, then call yourself an isolationist, I have no problem with that. Just don’t think you are taking a moral libertarian position. You ain’t. The article quotes the anti-war.com crowd, who are very willing to contemplate the cost of war and the benefits of peace… but that rather misses the obvious fact that the alternative to war in Iraq, right now, is not ‘peace’ but continued tyranny. So what is the cost of tyranny in Iraq, Mr. Sapienza… year after year after year?
So when he writes “Death is horrible. We should be working to eliminate it, not perpetuate it”… why is he so keen to see Saddam Hussain, the principle cause of unnatural death in Iraq, perpetuated? That may not be his desire, for I have no reason to think Jeremy Sapienza is an evil man, but that is the reality of an anti-war position.
In news which will surprise no one who has actually been following events and listening to what Tony Blair has been saying consistently for more than a month, it has been reported that 300 British SAS troops are already operating inside Iraq. God speed, Gentlemen.
Now please stop this preposterous charade of pretending to need the imprimatur of that exclusive club for mass murderers, thieves, thugs and tyrants (The United Nations) to justify anything whatsoever. We are already well past the point of no return, so just leave those friends of Saddam Hussain and Ba’athist Socialism who write for and advocate the views of the Guardian newspaper to their delusions of relevance.
The moon in silence goes its way and heeds no yelping cur.
knock, knock…
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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