Michael Yon emails Instapundit, “The British Ministry of Defence cancelled my embed after today’s dispatch. Please read Bad Medicine.”
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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. August 7th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 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. May 27th, 2009 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
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? 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. April 17th, 2009 | 97 comments - (Comments are closed)
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? April 15th, 2009 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. April 6th, 2009 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. February 20th, 2009 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blogger and soldier Andrew Olmsted was mentioned on a Fox News report I listened to on the net tonight. His posthumous last post from January of this year seems worthy of Christmas Eve. If I (and apparently he) are wrong and there is an after… I sincerely hope it is populated by souls such as his. December 24th, 2008 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
So writes Michael Portillo. Well, you can certainly tell that he does not intend to stand for election again. This blog is not generally a fan club for politicians, but even here one must admit that when a former Secretary of State for Defence and Shadow Chancellor writes –
– it carries more weight than the same sentiments coming from most other sources. Is it true? Broadly speaking, of course it is. I agree with those commenters to the Times who placed blame on the “carping, self-loathing left wing commentariat”, or made the parallel with the media in the Vietnam War, or with MGG of Auckland, who wrote
As I wrote in a post about the New Cowardice in the emergency services called ‘Loss of Nerve’, “Poisoned soil does not long give forth good fruit.” That said, I suspect that when viewed from the distance of thirty years, the sharp outline of defeat in Basra (and what is worse, a defeat that followed from a disgraceful accommodation with the enemy on the part of commanders too fond of their own cleverness) will be blurred by other, better parts of the picture. Mr Portillo has shown an admirable willingness to make himself unpopular: he praised George W Bush, rightly, for the latter’s contempt of public and educated opinion. Mr Bush (contrary to popular opinion, which is one reason he has such contempt for it) has studied history and will certainly have paused over this quotation from Lincoln, written in August 1864:
That is why I say that the difference between the United States and Britain in this story is not so large as all that. After all, in this war the Americans voted in the favoured candidate of the Copperheads, a President-elect who did indeed secure his election on such grounds that it would have been impossible for him to win the war after his inauguration, though he will be glad enough to take the victory that was won by other hands before it. December 22nd, 2008 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
Chinese crew used beer bottles to fight off pirates While I salute the captain and crew of the Zhenua 4, I cannot help thinking that guns might have been more convenient. What, exactly, is the difficulty over providing them? December 20th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article at Forbes about the connection between wars and the expansion in state power. He argues – quite convincingly I think – that while war may once have been one of the primary causes of increases in state power, that increasingly, it is demand for other public goods and initiatives that drives state power. For example, I reckon that the environmentalist argument is likely to prove a significant justification for such increases in spending, tax and regulation, as will, alas, the current financial crisis. The “war is the health of the state” argument is often one that some libertarians use to oppose any wars, even if such wars might have some legal/moral justification, on the grounds that wars inevitably create costs that outweigh the supposed benefits of toppling some nasty regime, etc. An example of this view comes from Robert Higgs, whom I recommend. But the WIHOS argument is not a fixed law, rather a general tendency with some clear exceptions. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, for example, the UK public sector, such as it was, was retrenched and the income tax was abolished for more than two decades. The end of the Cold War saw significant cuts in military spending. Perhaps what is not so easily retrenched, however, are state controls and regulations over behaviour. Consider World War One. Before 1914, UK subjects did not need a passport; there was no Official Secrets Act and the role of the state, relative to that of our own time, was small. Now it is much larger. WIHOS is not an iron law, but rather a sensible rule of thumb. Alas, there are plenty of other factors besides war that drive expansion of public spending and controls. November 21st, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have written about this subject before as an urgent issue of security, and surely the topic of piracy must be at the top of countries’ security agendas now that a large oil tanker has been seized. It makes me wonder what insurers such as Lloyds of London must think: surely, if shipping fleets want to keep insurance premia down, an obvious solution must be to arm, or better protect, such vessels. I do not know what the law is about whether ships, operating in international waters, on carrying weapons on board merchant vessels. In centuries past, vessels of the East India Company, for instance, were frequently as well armed as many naval vessels. They had to be. If this problem gets worse, then it is not just the navies of the western powers, such as those of Britain or the US, that might have to think about protecting shipping routes more aggressively. I think that the rising economic power of India must take on more responsibility to guarding some of the shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean. India, after all, is a prime beneficiary of globalisation and global trade. For that matter, China probably will have to think about protecting its shipping more effectively, as must jurisdictions which engage in much ship-borne trade such as Singapore and Australia and Brazil. One of the reasons why a strictly isolationist foreign policy does not work is that in the real world, the web of global trading routes from which we all benefit have to be protected. Free market transactions must be protected against predators. That means things like naval bases or agreements between states to protect certain shipping routes, for example. If states cannot do this, but somehow expect merchant ships to continue conveying the goods which drive the world economy, pressure to let merchant ships carry weapons will be irresistable. Some time ago, I read the Frederick Forsyth novel, The Afghan. I won’t give away the plot but piracy is a key part of it. Any security policy, including an anti-terrorist one, must take account of seaborne threats. It might seem rather obvious to point this out in an island nation like the UK, but a large proportion of our economic produce is conveyed over the wet stuff. If the anti-terror experts have not addressed themselves fully to this issue, they had better start doing so. Maybe this hijacking might have a galvanising effect. Here is what the US navy has been doing. November 18th, 2008 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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