We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The eight British sailors arrested by Iran have been paraded on television and forced to make public confessions. It just occurred to me that these are both violations of the Geneva Convention, which I believe applies in this case because the British sailors were in uniform, etc.
So why have I not heard any screams of outrage from the Usual Suspects? There are, after all, interest groups out there so enamored of the Convention that they want it followed in cases (illegal combatants, nonstate actors, etc.) where its provisions clearly do not apply. You would think they would be double-extra hot to have it followed where its provisions do apply, but apparently not. I guess we can file their complaints under Outrage, Manufactured Selective Partisan, Discount and Dispose of Soonest.
The seizure of eight British sailors and their small patrol boats by Iranian forces means it is time for the British government to show that unless a swift accommodation is reached, the consequences will be severe for the Iranian state. If the UK forces did indeed stray into Iranian waters, nothing more than a curt apology is due the Iranian state, and only that if they return the British sailors and their equipment without delay. The Iranian state is a vile tyranny and the sooner they are put under real pressure the better.
Of course I would like to see as much instability as possible within Iran regardless of the incident with the sailors. There is no shortage of people in Iran who would love to see the end of theocratic Islamic rule and now would be a good time to start taking advantage of the fact UK and US forces control the Iraqi side of the border. Surely there must be some fairly large stockpiles of weapons from Saddam’s army that have not been blown up and are just sitting around in Iraq…
But if the Iranians want to turn this into a hostage crisis however, the only response should be to use whatever force is required to resolve the situation, not just via anti-regime dissidents but directly by Britain against the Iranian state, and as soon as it is practical. If the theocrats want to engage in brinkmanship, I hope the UK and US will be prepared to not just go to the brink but to step straight over it very forcefully indeed. A nice opening move to the ‘negotiations’ would be to redeploy a division right up to the Iranian border.
Update: Hopefully this will all be over by tomorrow (Thursday). Perhaps the Iranian state decided it was unwise to push things too far. It will be interesting to see if there is any long term fall out from this incident.
For those who insist that the lack of an Al-Qaeda/Iraq link means Saddam should have been left to mass murder his own people unmolested, Melanie Philips has some measured words for you.
The excitement was over a preliminary assessment of evidence about al-Qa’eda by the US commission investigating September 11. The only problem was that the press coverage was untrue. The report does not rule out links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’eda. On the contrary, as the commission’s chairman, Thomas Kean, confirmed: “There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there.” As so often in the coverage of Iraq, those who make the (illogical) claim that there was no such contact and therefore no cause for war saw in this report only what they wanted to see.
[…]
Bill Clinton’s administration was absolutely certain that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qa’eda. It was a given. That is surely why, after September 11, Pentagon officials were obsessed with Iraq. Whether Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was irrelevant; if he was aiding al-Qa’eda’s terror, he had to be stopped. But this has been obliterated from the collective memory in order to place the most malign interpretation possible on the motives of the Bush administration.
Nothing new and from my point of view, so what… that Saddam was a tyrant was enough of a reason for me… but seeing as how people keep repeating ‘there was no link’ (I was highly sceptical myself at first), continue to oppose the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime if you like but please find another approach because ‘that dawg don’t hunt no more’.
We noted that Our Man in Basra, spurred to action by some less than informed commenter(s), to put it mildly, in the comments section of our post expressing outrage that the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces in Iraq. As he has so courageously by-passed his ‘handler’ and put much interesting information in a comment, I shall give you the full juicy goodness of Our Man in Basra (perhaps I should take this opportunity to rename him to Our Man in British Army), herewith:
As I notice I am being referred to, under my pseudonym “Our Man In Basra” (not I am no longer working, I should say) I thought I would throw my two-pence worth in.
Do UK troops need more equipment? Absolutely, enough personal radios, body armour, working Land Rovers – I could go on for hours. (In fairness, where I was the food was excellent). Some more helicopters would be hugely useful, but beyond fantasy as a hope.
However, more troops – abso-bloody-lutely. I cannot comment in detail for reasons that I take to be obvious, but to give generic examples of why more troops would be useful in a counter-insurgency
- More patrols, at more frequent intervals, so you can dominate the ground, throw uncertainty into your enemy, and essentially take the initiative. As all the military experts commenting above must know, having the initiative is the key to winning any kind of military confrontation. And if all your troops are tied up guarding your bases and vulnerable points, you cannot do anything to get the initiative. You cannot reduce the number of bases (much) or vulnerable points, so you need extra troops. QED.
- More (reliable) troops to guard the vital infrastructure, i.e. the electricity and oil lines. Not necessarily by sitting on them, but by frequent unpredictable patrols.
- Troops to act as dedicated QRF (Quick Reaction Forces), so that you can react rapidly to any enemy action- so that eventually he learns that any attack by him gets a very rapid response, thereby reducing the scale and effectiveness of what he can try.
- More guards for your own installations – not necessarily to boost the number on guard, but so you can rotate them more regularly, and keep them fresher/more alert.
- Crowd control. One man with a machine-gun can shoot a loot of people. But if you need to control a large angry crowd with sticks and stones, and you do not want to shoot – well then you need a lot of hard men with batons. Crowd in Iraq are in the 100s and up. That means you need a lot of troops – crowd control is labour-intensive. Unless you want to take the capital-intensive solution, and start shooting.
I am sure readers can think of plenty of other tactical uses for extra troops. At the higher level, the more troops you have, the better you can rotate them and manage their morale, thereby avoiding the kind of cynicism and depression. Soldiers thinking I hate this hole, I’ve been here 9 months, I’m exhausted and I’m not leaving for another 6 months. Who gives a shit what happens to the Iraqis? undermines the basis of counter-insurgency, hearts and minds. The British rotate our troops far more frequently than the Americans (average 4 months versus over a year), which IMHO is one reason for our relative success at hearts and minds.
The idea is not to carpet the country with troops, Boer War-style – although it may be worth noting that such an approach would actually work if we had enough troops. No, the idea is to have enough troops to do what we are doing now effectively.
To address some ‘issues’ raised by a particular commenter that goes by name Charlie who says: But if there were more soldiers, that would mean more opportunities for opportunistic attacks and therefore more casualties.
So, if there were no troops, there would be no opportunity for opportunistic attacks? True, but the point is not just to minimise casualties, or else why go there? The mission (should) come first, followed very closely by what our American cousins call “Force Protection”. And that means you need enough troops to do the job.
In this case, the job is not protecting our troops, it is protecting the poor average Iraqi from all those who seek to prey on them, from ex-Saddamites to gangsters to religious fanatics (or at least those who claim religious backing for their own grab for power).
There is an amount required to do the job. At present it might be thought that a great deal of what we are doing is being driven by a desire to minimise our troops numbers and expense, rather than to actually do what is best for Iraqis (and in the long term for us).
Of course, one way to make do with fewer troops is to use what are known as “force-multipliers”, anything that increases the effectiveness of your troop numbers. A good example is the helicopter, because it enables you to dominate larger areas of ground with fewer troops. But the UK has nowhere near the helicopter numbers of the US, because of far smaller funding. Another potential force multiplier would be reliable British Arabic translators. But to have lots of those ready to go would require more funding for Defence languages. You get the idea.
Also, in this type of operation in particular, the distinction between “combat” and “non-combat” troops is spurious. The RMP [ed. Royal Military Police] took a lot of casualties, I do not think they would appreciate being told they are not needed to fight. They, and many other supporting troops, are in great demand to, for example, run PW camps, which I would suggest is better than giving the job to reservists, as well as all kinds of other tasks – from advising the infantry on how to effect arrests while on patrol, to helping to train the Iraqi Police Forces.
That said, more infantry would be good as it would avoid the need to use other troops, such as RMP or Artillery, to perform patrolling functions, in which the Infantry are the specialists. As another commenter, Jacob, actually correctly points out, you can always use more soldiers in any kind of fighting situation. This point was made quite simply by Field Marshal Slim, one of the greatest military minds in history. I highly recommend his book “Defeat into Victory”, I think mentioned on Samizdata before. The more you use, the fewer you lose.
Unfortunately, having said all the above, there simply are not that many soldiers left in the Army [ed. British Army], and there are still many commitments elsewhere – from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, not to mention Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, etc etc. The “Harmony Guidelines” which said that for the sake of their families soldiers should get at least 18 months at their home base between operations are already a poor joke. We might need to send more soldiers, but unless we cancel everyone’s leave, we haven’t got them.
Sorry, rather longer than I planned, but I thought it was worth saying.
It has been reported that the 700 strong 1st battalion of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment has been in contact with the enemy every day for the past six weeks, racking up 250 seperate combat incidents.
Capt Justin Barry, a military spokesman, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph:
The fighters engaged were basically terrorists and gangsters – people who are out to destabilise the area, drive out the Coalition and suck as much out of Iraq as they can. But at the end of the day, we got the better of them. The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment were engaged in very heavy hand-to-hand fighting and bayonets were fixed. There’s a great sense of satisfaction among the men with the way this turned out.
Indeed, but no thanks to Tony Blair. The fact the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces is nothing short of a national scandal.
Whoever came up with all this tosh about the world being a ‘global village’? Seems to me that different parts of the world have a very different way of going about things.
In Saudi Arabia, a BBC reporter gets gunned down and lies bleeding in the street:
Police said Mr Gardner tried to get bystanders to help him as he lay wounded in the street by crying out that he was a Muslim.
Now I like to think that here in dear old Blighty, we would rush to the aid of a badly wounded human being regardless of his religion.
Oh, unless the police are around to stop us:
A police force was accused yesterday of waiting too long to act after a shooting at a family barbecue left two sisters dead. One witness claimed that their lives could have been saved.
Roy Gibson, 70, said he spent an hour waiting for help to arrive as he tried to save one of the women. Paramedics were prevented from entering until Thames Valley Police had completed a one-hour assessment of any further risk to life.
By which time, there was definitely no risk to life because the victims were no longer alive.
The storm over the revelations of prisoners’ abuse in Iraq may have subsided a bit, however, the events have prompted Our Man in Basra to come out and offer his personal comments. His perspective comes from working and talking to people who deal with Amnesty International (AI) and International Red Cross Commitee (ICRC) in Iraq and elsewhere and from knowing their reputation in the Army.
I actually support the concept of an independent civilian organisation that moderates us [ed. armed forces]. There are often unconscious pressures to slip into “abuse”, and they are most effective because of “socialisation”, the process by which you take your cue for acceptable behaviour from those around you – that is why it is easy when standards slip for all to gradually slide down. Armed forces are designed to reinforce this process, and if the standard is not set from the top (as military hierarchy is designed to ensure it is) then they can slip down quickly.
That is exactly what happened in Abu Ghraib. There is therefore a need for an independent organisations such as Amnesty International or ICRC monitoring Army (and civilian) activity. They are a separate group, not subject to same socialisation, and so can act as a brake and ensure standards are maintained even if military’s own system fails.
This relates to a more general point about Anglosphere intuitions being less corrupt in general and more effective. This is not because of better people, but better systems. This is why the United States as a country works so well with so many non-Anglo-Saxon people. In this context, one could think of Amnesty International checks as a sort of moral separation of powers.
However, Amnesty International and International Committee of the Red Cross have completely lost perspective, which in the long run is a pity for all of us. These organisations rely upon their moral authority, and in the past their most important and influential supporters have been people in the west with a strong moral sense and anti-despotic beliefs – whose faith in the ICRC and AI will be undermined once details of some current claims come out. As an anecdotal example that know of from a man working on the reports AI compile on us: They complained that Iraqis in Umm Qasr (British/US administered detention facility in the South) where being degraded because their food was handed out in plastic bags rather than delivered on some kind of trolley or plate. The Iraqis were not bothered, the food was perfectly good, but this was thought to be “degrading”. This is an important point – when one of these reports comes out and accuses anyone of “degrading” or “humiliating” behaviour, etc, it is essential to dig deeper and see exactly what they mean.
The interesting question is why has this happened? I think there are a whole host of reasons feeding off each other:
- Ignorance. The AI and ICRC are not monolithic, they have different people reporting in different places. It is a fair bet that the overwhelming majority people reporting on Iraq were not there before the war, because Saddam sure as hell would not let them. The same applies to every other Arab country. The investigators are therefore every bit as ignorant as the average journalist reporting on the country, with whom they share a lot in common, such as probably the same general meta-context and the same belief (with rather more justification) that they are there to uphold their view of civilisation. Not the local one.
- The investigators are civilians (as they must be) but therefore often poorly equipped to put things in to relevant tactical perspective. These are not weasel words – to give a concrete example, suppose an Iraqi man has been “beaten up” by British troops; a clear case of abuse? This depends upon the circumstances. There is a world of difference between beating up a helpless prisoner once back in camp (this is clearly abuse), and, for example, using physical force to subdue a struggling looter, or an armed rioter. The whole purpose of Armies is to use violence, which cannot be defined as abuse every time they do without rendering the term pointless. It is moral infantilism to say that the context does not affect the morality of the act, and it is not clear that all of the reports or accusations take this in to account.
- The above is essential to the most important point – Iraqis lie. This is not at all a criticism of Iraqis in a racial sense – being born Iraqi does not make you a liar. But lying reflexively to strangers is an entirely rational, indeed inevitable, response to living your entire life under a brutal and intrusive police state, in which the only efficient institution were the secret police forces. Therefore Iraqis have a neutral attitude to truth at best – they feel no automatic inclination to tell it the way westerners do.
In addition most Iraqis have a strong sense of pride that prevents them from admitting ignorance. They will consistently claim knowledge they do not have, rather than admit that they do not know something. It is a matter of face, especially for the more important Iraqis. This was and is a constant source of frustration for anyone trying to gather information from them. They have lived their whole lives by exploiting any small opportunities the state bureaucracy may have given them.
Most importantly, there is no punishment for lying to an investigator – what are we going to do, sue them for libel? Bear in mind as well that the vast majority of detainees were either looters, rioters, criminals of some kind (as the military, against its wishes, was stuck with running basic law and order) or actual ex-Ba’athists or terrorists. This does not give the slightest justification for abusing them, but it does suggest that they are not the most objective or reliable of witnesses.
Now consider the following scenario:
AI (or ICRC) investigator: We are investigating claims of brutality by British soldiers. We are deeply ashamed of such things, and want to assure you that we are not like the last regime; we will investigate any complaints, and we will compensate anyone who was unjustly harmed; do you know of any such incidents?
Iraqi ex-prisoner (or even not): Why, yes I do I was beaten up, and so was my brother, and my cousin, and my father was shot, and all my family, and how much did you say the compensation was?
It is an entirely rational economic act if you feel no obligation to the truth, a no-brainer gamble – money if you are believed, no cost if you are not.
- All this is not helped by the seeming automatic tendency of the AI and ICRC to disbelieve anything the soldiers or military tell them but to believe anything an Iraqi tells them. I do not really object to their scepticism towards the military, wearying as it is – after all, in a sense that is their job. But to do a good job they should apply the same standards of proof and scepticism to both sides, not just one. If anything, the benefit of the doubt should belong to the military, who have a better record of honesty. Abu Ghraib, in the US military response actually demonstrates this. It was an entirely US military internal investigation that uncovered and closed down the Abu Ghraib abuses, not an AI or ICRC one.
- Abu Ghraib has not helped, as it enables the AI, ICRC and everyone else to say “Look, these abuses have happened here, they could happen elsewhere, and the possibility must be investigated”. Although it is fair to say that most of the reports currently in the press were prepared before Abu Ghraib became public knowledge. I have no problem with that conclusion – we are all appalled by Abu Ghraib, the military probably more than most.
However, that is not the same as assuming that these things did happen elsewhere. Let’s see proof, or at least strong evidence, before accusations are taken as smearing the whole military. Note to the media: Could we please distinguish between reservists, often great people but basically civilians with minimal training in uniform and who seem to have been almost solely responsible for Abu Ghraib, and the professional regular military? And if, as I suspect, poorly trained reservists are found to be involved in any other cases of abuse, can we consider how that reflects on the moral responsibility of politicians who try to cut corners on the armed forces by sending out civilians to do their job?
- In conclusion, accusations must be investigated, but they are not proper evidence, let alone proof in themselves. They should be investigated by people with some understanding of the relevant factors, i.e. culture, situation at time of event, tactical realities, medical knowledge, etc; and with at least some parity of scepticism between the locals and the military.
Finally, I do not presume ill-will on the part of AI and ICRC per se. I am sure that the vast majority of AI and ICRC workers are genuinely trying to do the right thing. But I suspect them of making a moral equivalent of the old “equality of outcomes” fallacy, that equal treatment must mean everyone has equal wealth.
In this case, they are so keen to be, and to be seen to be, impartial between different governments and people, and between Arabs and the ‘West’ that they seem to feel they must give equal reports of abuses by both sides, when in fact there is no remote comparison of treatment. Such reports are a disservice to objective truth by giving the false impression of a broad comparability of moral standing. Shades of the Cold War anyone?
I said at the start of this post, the current state of affairs is regrettable, because in the long run it will undermine the most important resource of both AI and ICRC, their credibility. And there may be times when we will still need them.
As the recent attacks against civilians in Saudi Arabia have shown, Al Qaeda does not kill civilians as collateral damage during strikes on military targets, non-muslim civilians are the target and will always be the target. People say we should ‘understand the root causes of their anger’ and I agree. And so, after understanding, that should help us to resolve to kill as many Islamists as is needed to make their cause collapse in ruin.
Of course the usual paleo-libertarians and paleo-conservatives will take this to mean I think we should use carpet bombing in cities or nuclear weapons just to make sure we got ’em all. Yeah, yeah, whatever. But a commenter on Samizdata.net said the other day in a succinctly manner I really cannot improve on:
I just propose that the only rational way to fight a war is to fight a war, and that means using whatever force is needed to defeat your enemy. This is not exactly a revolutionary concept in most military circles.
In the case of Iraq, this just means using the usual range of weapons and tactics and applying them with resolution. There is nothing about Iraq that is at all unusual or outside historical experience to suggest this need be more than a footnote in military history.
And the same applies to Al Qaeda and its confreres wherever they can be found. You find them and then you kill them by whatever means it takes. What you do not do is talk to them or negotiate with them, unless of course it is just a tactic for getting them to stand still for juuuuuust a moment.
Mark Steyn describes an incident that confirms my impression that the politicians are botching up Iraq.
During the Falklands War, a bayonet charge on enemy positions would have been publicly applauded by the Prime Minister, honours and medals would have been discussed and the British public would have been in doubt that the government and the military knew exactly what they were doing. We could agree or disagree with the objective or the means, but not the operational competence or the political will.
Where Iraq is going wrong is not that the military are incapable (unless they run out of ammunition, boots, flak-jackets etc). It is that military action will be undermined by political ‘arse-covering’. The resolution shown by troops is frittered away by Colin Powell and his cronies in the US, and by the Labour government in the UK. Powell looks more and more like his caricature in the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks! played by Paul Winfield.
My view on Vietnam is that it would have been better if the US had not got involved after the French pull-out, given that they were going to do so eventually anyway, or that the US should have fought to win. I take a Barry Goldwater position rather than a Eugene McCarthy one.
It used to be Colin Powell’s position too.
Good luck to Iyad Allawi, the man who will, inshallah, be Iraq’s next Prime Minister.
Hopefully he will be given the external support he needs to stabilise the security situation sufficiently to allow more internal solutions to develop. Although it would be difficult to underestimate the struggle ahead, the situation is far from the hopeless one often portrayed by people with axes to grind which have very littloe to do with Iraq.
It is by now a familiar statement from anti-war folk that Saddam had no real links to Islamic terror groups of any consequence. The idea, dear boy, is totally incredible. The man, who after all was a “secular ruler” (conjuring up the image of the old bastard reading Voltaire of an evening). had a positive revulsion of Islamic religious extremism. To suggest a link is to fall prey to the fantasies of the great neoconservative/Zionist/whatever conspiracy now trying to rule the world. Right?
Well, no, actually. The Wall Street Journal has an article today setting out what it believes is rather a big lump of evidence pointing to terror links before and after 9/11:
One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam’s son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime’s dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda “summit” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.
Okay, I know what the responses will be. It’s the Wall Street Journal! You can’t believe these guys! etc, etc.
But stepping aside from this specific article, consider this following general scenario: you have a military dictator who loves taking his nation to the brink even at great cost; his military forces are seriously damaged from two devastating wars and a sanctions regime; he craves revenge and enjoys humiliating his foes. To whom does he turn to help hurt his great enemy, the United States?
Exactly. Why is it so crazy, so bonkers, to think that terror links probably did exist, and that, if it were possible, it was vital for the intelligence services of the Western powers to check those possibilities?
You may say, why does this really matter now? Well, to be frank, the argument that we need to “reshape the Middle East” always struck me as dangerously ambitious, and the costs of such a venture struck me as potentially prohibitive. That is one part of the isolationist position I have some sympathy for, a fact which might surprise some. (“Johnathan Pearce has gone wobbly!”) For me, though, what counted was the potentially deadly nexus of terror groups, mass weapons, and rogue states able and willing to offer harbour and support to such terror groups. My conscience is troubled at the thought that we might have attacked a nation of no serious threat to us. Well, if the latest stories turn out to be even half-true, then the evidence of Saddam’s malignity just got a lot, lot harder.
I took some rather hot flak when I opposed international gun control as an excuse for invading Iraq (if Iraq’s nukes are “bad”, are France’s and China’s nukes “good”?). I have also taken some sharp criticism for saying that invading a country in order to make friends is an odd strategy (worthy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau “We will force you to be free!”).
From Wires blog:
As we were leaving Baghdad, taking a ‘short cut’ through Fallujah and Ramadi, we passed a US Tank involved in ‘Stop and Search’. It had ASSAULT AND BATTERY written on it’s barrel.
Nice Peace – Keeping.
Now I do not take everything fiona says as Gospel, although her first act in Iraq was to try out an AK-47 so she can’t be all bad!
It is clear however that there is no abatement of the resistance to foreign occupation of Iraq. It does not really matter whether the fault is that the occupying forces are too forceful, or failing to keep the peace because of politcally correct instructions, or a row between the US State Department and the Department of Defense. Either way it has all the potential for Vietnam II.
The only worthwhile achievement of invasion was the removal of Saddam Hussein. He has gone, it is time to leave also.
The only worthwhile debate now is whether to recognise an independent Kurdistan or not before the troops pull out and allow Iraqis to sort out their civil affairs.
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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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