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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
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’.
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.
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