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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“Churchill, who was prone to the black dog of depression, went to bed on the night of the 5th of June 1944 with a heavy heart. Gloomily he told his wife, Clementine, that by the time they awoke in the morning many tens of thousands of young men he had sent across the Channel might lie dead on the beaches of Normandy. In Alanbrooke’s diaries (he was the finest of the WWII diarists) it is clear how heavily he felt the weight of responsibility throughout his time as a commander in France in 1940, and subsequently as CIGS. Yet neither Alanbrooke nor Churchill felt the need to go in front of the cameras and explain how troubled they were by all the pressure. Even long afterwards it wouldn’t have occurred to either for a split second that this would be a good idea or remotely appropriate.”
– Iain Martin, commenting on the recent performance of Mr Blair’s former spinmeister on the TV. He makes a good point, I think.
The BBC, as well as other news outlets, is carrying this story about the father of a dead soldier. The father is complaining about the lack of helicopters and other important equipment. It also turns out that a letter that was due to be sent from Downing Street to the man’s father was sent very late. This is a sad and anger-inducing story: the father was interviewed, clearly distressed, on BBC television this morning, and was also making very angry, and to my mind, some pretty shrewd, points about the management, or mismanagement, of the war in Afghanistan.
And yet there is something about these interviews with grieving parents of dead military personnel that bothers me. And it clearly also has bothered the writer and one-time prison doctor, Theodore Dalrymple. Mr Dalrymple was writing about a related recent story of how a letter of condolence, sent by Gordon Brown to the mother of a dead serviceman, contained spelling errors. Mr Dalrymple writes in the Social Affairs Unit blog:
“No one, I think, would take me for an admirer of Gordon Brown, much less an apologist for him; but in the matter of the letter that he wrote to Mrs Janes, mother of the soldier killed in Afghanistan, I feel sorry for him. He has become a victim of the ideological sentimentality so assiduously promoted by his odious predecessor, and now so fully a part of our national character.”
“The letter he wrote to Mrs Janes seemed to me a perfectly decent one. It was legible (perhaps, as a doctor, my standards of legibility are low); the sentiments expressed are decent, conventional ones, without the kind of extravagance that might lead you to suspect insincerity.”
“The offence of the mistake in the name – Mrs James instead of Mrs Janes – does not seem to me a hanging one. Mr Brown is a very busy man (would that he were less busy!) and the mistake is one that we could surely all envisage ourselves making, given the relative frequency of the two names.”
“The grief of Mrs Janes was perfectly understandable, of course; the loss of a child is like the loss of a world. But grief is not necessarily the midwife of truth, and some of the things that Mrs Janes said are simply not true. Surely only someone determined in advance to find the letter disrespectful would have found it so; one might even think that a hand-written letter from the Prime Minister was a sign of respect, when he could so easily have written nothing or have ordered someone else to do it on his behalf.”
I agree. I think it is terribly harsh to say to a person like the father interviewed this morning that he should bear in mind that serving in the army is a risky profession and that anyone who joins up should recognise this, but it does need to be said, by someone. The “victim culture” is spreading its slimy tentacles across the land; when I see any parent lash out and demand that X or Y be blamed or shamed for a train of events happening in a warzone, I can sympathise, even agree with some of the comments. But what I cannot abide is the failure to recognise that the risks are high, and many brave people pay the supreme price.
A member of the Australian military went missing in the middle of a deadly clash with the Taliban then, fourteen months later, she just wanders back into camp. Is a court martial convened to see if she is guilty of desertion? No, people just shrug their shoulders and start playing tennis with her. What madness is this?
What is the world coming to when a valued member of the armed services takes off under fire and leaves their comrades chasing their tails wondering what happened to her? And it should be noted there were persistent rumours that far from being held captive by the Taliban, she was sniffing around an area of Afghanistan notorious for opium production while her compatriots were risking their lives facing down the enemy. How can this not cause serious repercussions when she wanders back to base after being located by US soldiers (who reportedly said she was a real bitch)? Shocking.
I have my doubts – which grow by the day, to be honest – about what exactly we are achieving by the operations in Afghanistan. This story is picked up by me at random, but of course there are hundreds of deaths that hit home the mesage about what a grim struggle that conflict is proving to be. May this gallant soldier rest in peace, and my condolences to his friends, comrades and family.
I just picked this up from a Jane’s newsletter:
UK Conservatives plan procurement overhaul. The UK’s procurement process will undergo “root and branch reform” if the Conservative party wins the next General Election, Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox told the Jane’s UK Defence Conference on 7 September. The Conservative politician said that the current procurement team was bloated and required significant changes in personnel. “How can it be that, while we have a navy of only 34,000, we have almost 24,000 people working in procurement alone?” he asked. “Military personnel are routinely placed in roles inside the procurement process for which they do not have the required skills or experience.
As Glenn Reynolds is wont to say: “Indeed”.
Michael Yon emails Instapundit, “The British Ministry of Defence cancelled my embed after today’s dispatch. Please read Bad Medicine.”
I must admit that in many respects, I find the former Labour cabinet minister, Roy Hattersley, to be a bit of a buffoon in his clinging to socialist dogmas of a planned, highly taxed economy. But he can write: and this essay on the funeral of Harry Patch, who had been the last surviving British soldier of the First World War, is first class.
This article in the Independent articulates an argument that I summarise thus: North Korea is developing nukes, it is firing rockets and other stuff into the sky near or above its neighbours, but the country is a basket case; it is led by a nutcase and all this stuff is in fact it is a sign of weakness, not strength. In other words, nothing much to worry about, please move along, ManU are playing Barcelona in the Champions League, etc.
I actually accept that there is probably a great deal of truth in this “nothing to get overly worried about” line. There’d better be. There is not much, short of war, with all the terrible costs it would bring, that neighbouring countries such as South Korea, China or Japan can do to pressure North Korea that they have not done already. (Japan, by the way, has been busily expanding its naval forces). When in the past I have briefly mentioned North Korea, some commentators on Samizdata will point out that the West (ie, the US), should not, or has no need or business, to defend South Korea or indeed to act as if North Korea is a “problem” to be fixed. Let the locals sort it out, etc. Well up to a point, but there will be wider effects to think about if nuclear weapons are ever used, or threatened to be used, against what is, after all, a broadly free and friendly country like South Korea.
I think part of the problem is that as long as the US has kept significant armed forces in the region, it can create a sort of moral hazard problem, in that the countries thus protected fall out of the habit of learning to defend themselves, or understand its costs. I am not an expert on South Korean public opinion, but I cannot help but wonder what the impact of a long-running US presence will have on creating a possible false sense of security. One of the things that is clearly coming out of the current economic crisis, and the wrecked state of US public finances, is that there will now be enormous pressure on any US administration, even one led by more hawkish people than Mr Obama, to cut, or just limit, defence spending. South Korea has not escaped the impact of the credit crunch, and if it was not willing to shell out more money on defence five years ago, it is hard to see it doing that now, unless it is completely terrified of an attack. I am sure that the top brass in North Korea understand all this only too well.
Let us hope it is a sign of a weak, not strong regime. But remember also that weak, or desperate countries can do desperate things, such as the Argentine Junta’s decision to invade the Falkland Islands in 1982. As we know, Argentina lost that conflict, and it helped destroy the regime. But Argentina did not have, or threaten to use, nukes.
Mr Obama’s administration has released documents about details of “harsh interrogation techniques” that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences – assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked – then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what “hope and change” meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)
Torture, and its use, is one of those “canary in the mineshaft” issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.
As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.
Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.
Okay, let’s remember that there is a world outside the Westminster Village. The president of Iran is not a man whom anyone would want with his hands on the nuclear button, certainly not Israel, which has reason to worry that the man is an anti-semitic fruitcake. It appears that there has been a possible change in the tack of US policy towards Iran now that Mr Obama is at the helm. Now it may be that Mr Obama is playing a devilishly cunning game and, by trying to make nice to Iran, is either buying time or trying to engineer real, positive change. Of course, it also may be that Mr Obama is out of his depth and has made the fatal mistake that one can do business with a regime like Iran.
The danger, it seems to me, is that failing to stop Iran from proceeding with an enrichment programme for nuclear material is going to worry the hell out of Israel. And remember, that while Iran may not be the West’s immediate problem, it is a massive, existential one for Israel. The US may be wise not to want to pick a fight on this issue, given that such a course could go horribly wrong. Israel may not have the luxury of having to make even that choice.
Given that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction tends to work when both sides are basically rational, even if they are bad, it is folly to suppose that nuclear deterrence will work with a regime led by a man who sincerely dreams of taking his place in heaven, and putting lots of those he loathes somewhere else, very violently. At the very least, a defence policy must now involve greater development of anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down incoming weapons, since there will be the risk that the launch sites and development sites may be out of reach of an airforce or ground assault team.
Consider this: why does Iran, with all its oil reserves, want to spend billions of its currency reserves on developing enriched fissile material? What does the Iranian government propose to do with it – use it for garden compost?
This item about the recent missile firing by North Korea reminds us that in all the attention currently being focused on the credit crunch and the policies of governments to deal with it, that geo-political threats cannot be ignored. It is, I suppose, all too easy to dismiss the leader of North Korea as some sort of harmless nut if you are living thousands of miles away. For the Japanese, who fear that a leader of a broken country might try something really stupid – as dictators tend to do – the situation is far less easy to shrug off. And Japan had better reckon without a blanket promise of support from the US in the future. I hope the anti-missile defence systems that Japan has installed are in good working order. Japan now has a pretty useful navy.
Not a happy situation. At all. Here’s an agency report on the rocket launch.
This looks like a film worth seeing for anyone who values the bravery and steadfastness of the American soldier, as I do and as should any Briton. (Full disclosure: I am related to several people serving in the US military). Kevin Bacon is a fine actor and well chosen for the lead part.
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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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