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 conduct of the British Army and the Ministry of Defence begins to crumble under the information leaked from the United States and Iraq. Unwilling to deal with the problems of security in Basra (and the potential damage of soldiers forced to patrol with inadequate equipment), British forces on the ground are alleged to have sought an accommodation with the Mahdi army militias in Basra and forsaken the city. They left the citizens of Basra at the mercy of fundamentalist thugs, whose torture and murder of innocent civilians was publicised in the following months.
The motives behind this accommodation are unclear. Justificatory references to success with the IRA and domesticating paramilitaries in a political process are evasive arguments for the accommodation. Equipment shortages are left unmentioned. More astonishing is the role of Des Browne, Secretary of State for Defence, whose permission was required before any British soldier could enter Basra. Whilst the Iraqi Army and US support staff put down the militias, the British authorities waited an unconscionable six days before they were willing to allow soldiers to enter the city. This was partially caused by the commander, Major-General Barney White-Spunner, who was away on a skiing holiday. This may be unfortunate timing but it does not lessen the air of ineptitude and scuttle that surrounds this whole affair.
The Guardian publicised the Ministry of Defence’s rebuttal from unnamed officials, who stated that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Al-Maliki, used the Basra campaign to shore up his credibility at the expense of co-operation with the British. They did concede that they had come to an accommodation with the militias and that,
British defence officials today denied reports that a secret deal between Britain and the Shia militia the Mahdi army prevented UK forces from taking part in a major offensive in Basra earlier this year.
Under the terms of last year’s accommodation, UK troops released suspected members of the militia in return for militia leaders ending their attacks.
Maliki was determined to weed out rebel units of the Mahdi army and criminal gangs. Local Iraqi forces and British troops had failed to do this, annoying the US and the Baghdad government, British officials now concede.
The level of political control that Labour politicians hold over individual deployments is difficult to gauge. Yet the delay and dithering over Basra, smells more of the Brown stuff than Browne’s sauce.
Lasers for shooting down mortars bombs and missiles… sounds great and has potential to change battlefield quite fundamentally… if it actually works in practice out in the messy real world. Remember Patriot? Much cheered at the time but it turned out to be a wildly expensive but only occasionally effective weapon system designed to shoot down rather cheap and only occasionally effective Scuds.
I suppose it all comes down to it is this another a vastly costly to operate system designed to shoot down various cheap-as-chips weapon systems? I suppose time will tell because potentially this is revolutionary as battlefield lasers could eventually mean the end of a great many forms of indirect weapons. Potentially.
A new movie about the doings of special agents and local French Resistance folk in the days leading up to, and beyond, D-Day is out. I might go and see it – the reviews look quite good and the cast looks impressive. Lots of delicious French actresses – hardly difficult to turn down, really.
At the Imperial War Museum – always worth a visit if you have not been there – there is a section about the special forces that have operated before, during, and after WW2, such as the Long Range Desert Group, M16, the SAS, The Chindits (Burma), other forces in Malaysia, Northern Ireland, Aden, France, former Yugoslavia, Greece, etc. The displays are well done and there is loads of fascinating information about the ordeals of those involved, their lives, methods, equipment and roles in various campaigns. For all that I quite enjoyed the Ian Fleming exhibition in the same place, the real-life displays of derring-do by people who are often totally unknown to the broader public was in some ways far more impressive and actually rather moving. It was also, just to make a “point”, clear that many of these operatives did not need the full benefits of a surveillance state to do their jobs. What was clear that the prime qualities of getting good intelligence are commonsense and a lot of guts.
A British court has ruled that there is a ‘right to life’ even under combat conditions and therefore the families of soldiers killed in action can sue the government for not providing suitable equipment.
In a blow to Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, a senior judge said troops in combat zones have a “right to life” at all times, even while under fire on the battlefield. The ground-breaking decision could lead to a flood of cases against the Ministry of Defence from relatives who believe the deaths of their loved ones were caused by poor quality kit.
As I have written before, it is deplorable that British soldiers are sent into action so poorly equipped when the state manages to find money for idiotic sports and ‘cultural’ expenditures. Yet I think this ruling is very dangerous unless it is very tightly defined to only cover equipment issues, and even then, I can hear the sound of cans opening and worms escaping. Inevitably this ‘right to life at all times’ means relatives will sue on the basis of operational military decisions if a decision causes the death of British soldiers.
Were I the government I would do whatever it takes to overturn such a notion and made sure this judgement does not lead to ever wider ‘interpretation’, as such things are wont to do. I am all for properly equipping Britain’s soldiers but this is a potentially disastrous way to ensure that. Wars are, by their very nature, messy and imprecise things and the idea of having civil courts sticking their beaks in is a giant step towards making the military unable to function at all. Even from the perspective of rights and liberty, in a volunteer military clearly prior consent is present to be put in harm’s way within the military context. This ruling has ‘horrendous unintended consequences’ written all over it.
The Royal Air Force marks its 90th birthday today. There will be a flypast over central London at 1pm, so if readers have a digital camera, keep it nearby.
… this guy needs to buy a cat and take some well deserved ‘chill time’ for, oh, the rest of his life maybe?
“So I got down with my back to the grenade and used my body as a shield. It was a case of either having four of us as fatalities or badly wounded – or one. I brought my legs up to my chest in the brace position and waited for the explosion.”
The short version: he set off a booby-trap (the old tripwire/grenade shtick) in the middle of his patrol, jumped on the grenade and his body armour and the stuff in his backpack took the brunt of the explosion. Other than getting blown through the air, this Royal Marine walked away pretty much in one piece. Fortitude and insane luck are a very cool combination.
Let me offer the Lance Corporal a career suggestion: head back to civilian life and get a job doing endorsements for a certain backpack manufacturer.
Raising issues like non-intervenionist foreign policy on a site like this is a bit like poking a bear with a stick: potentially hazardous. In my recent item on WW2, the issue surfaced again of whether a viable foreign policy for a nation is the “Swiss model” (no, not that kind). I personally doubt it works for all nations, certainly not the largest ones with long, porous borders. But as I have praised tax havens recently, I am reminded of how the Swiss seem to cope very well thankyou outside a surpranational organisation like the EU or a military alliance like NATO. But is that country what economists call a “free rider” – taking advantage of the fact that other, bigger nations have done the heavy lifting in standing up to tyrants, etc?
I came across this temperately argued but brutal demolition of one of those books purporting to claim that we’d all be a jolly sight better off by letting that misunderstood Adolf H. chap do what he wanted in Europe and Russia and that Britain and those other warmongering Anglos should have minded their own business. The book in question is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and written by Nicholson Baker. The reviewer is Andy Ross.
Excerpt from the review:
“Mr. Baker seeks to rehabilitate the interpretation of World War II advanced by isolationists and appeasers in the 1930s. That interpretation was refuted by history itself. If it was necessary for the survival of civilization to stop Nazi Germany from dominating Europe – from replacing freedom with tyranny, suffocating culture and thought, inculcating racism and cruelty in future generations, depopulating Eastern Europe and turning it into German lebensraum, enslaving tens of millions of Poles and Russians, and exterminating European Jewry – then it was necessary to fight the war.”
And:
“A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously”.
Now, there are good books worth reading that debunk some of the myths of the war, such as that Churchill was a great strategist (he was not and made loads of mistakes), or that Roosevelt was the same (he was not, and unbelievably naive about Stalin), or that things should and could have been handled far better. There might even be a case for selling the “appeasement” line that we should have kept out of the war, at least early on, or bided our time. The trouble is, that most books I have come across selling the isolationist case, such as by John Charmley, for instance, fall down because they fail really to address how America and Britain could have realistically coped with a massive Russo-German fascist empire stretching from Vladivostok to Brest, murdering millions of non-Aryans, dominating international supply routes, and so on. Now of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. Churchill may not have known that Hitler was embarking on mass murder of European Jewry, although he was more alive to this threat than most politicians at the time. But Churchill had a pretty good idea that very ugly developments would accompany a Nazi empire, and of course had no illusions whatever about what would happen to Europe if Stalin’s Russia conquered all of it.
It is just about possible, I suppose, that Britain could have struggled on a bit as an independent nation next to such a monstrous empire – assuming we could have lived with an ounce of self-respect by leaving France and the rest in the lurch. As for America, it could, I suppose, have traded on with its southern neighbours, bits of Africa, Australasia and those scattered nations not under communist/fascist rule, but huge parts of the globe would be hostile, poor, nightmarish places. And I very much doubt that we would now be enjoying those fruits of a globalised trading environment that we unashamedly champion today on this blog.
Just came across some footage of a Dutch Apache helicopter gunship facilitating some interesting ‘inter-civilisation dialogue’ with a couple Talibs in Afghanistan.
I find myself watching YouTube more than TV these days.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the men and women who serve in the volunteer armed forces have been attacked on their own soil. There has been an attack on a recruitment office in the US. It is a sign of the times. In Peterborough, East Anglia, RAF personnel serving in such nearby bases as RAF Wittering have been abused, although it does not appear – yet – that any of the abuse has involved physical violence. As a result, force commanders are thinking of rescinding the idea of letting service personnel wear their uniforms while off-duty. Given that a chap traditionally liked to wear his uniform as a matter of pride, not to mention its wonderful women-attracting qualities (sorry if this offends PC readers), this is a poor state of affairs. I read this unpleasant story with a certain amount of personal interest as my father used to serve at Wittering with 23 Squadron, a fighter squadron that in the 1950s operated aircraft such as Venoms and more latterly, Phantoms and Harriers.
The identity of the abusers is not described. For all we know, they could be anti-war types, Islamists, or just local youths trying to impress their mates by “having a go” at folk in uniform. When I lived in Ipswich 15 years ago, there were always stories of how Army squaddies at Colchester, a nearby army town, were getting into scrapes with the locals. It was, however, much rarer for the US servicemen at RAF Bentwaters, Woodbridge, Mildenhall or Lakenheath to encounter problems, since overseas US guys tend to be more polite and let’s face it, if you insulted an F-16 pilot after drinking too much Adnams ale in an Ipswich boozer, the chances are that the guy would order in a squadron of B-52s to nuke the place. At least I like to think that was always an option.
If you do not regularly read Michael Totten’s Middle East Journal, you really are missing out on something you just do not see in the MSM. He delivers straightforward reportage not just of The Big Issues when they happen but of the mundane realities of what it is to be in the Slums of Fallujah with the USMC.
Lieutenant Lappe overheard our conversation. I think he was worried that I was getting nervous.
“No one can lay down an IED anymore without somebody calling it in,” he said.
Very revealing.
If you like his stuff as much as I do, consider dropping your mouse on his PayPal button and support truly independent journalism.
It is a widely accepted fact that one of the key ingredients to the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany and Japan in the Second World War was the ability to crack the Enigma codes used by these powers, and keep that code-breaking achievement a secret.
A question I’d like to put to Jon Snow, the chief news reader of Channel 4 news and usually a fairly cool-headed fellow, is whether he would have complied with any wartime requests to keep the Enigma achievement a secret, had he been a working journalist in the 1940s. Judging by his antics over the Prince Harry and Afghanistan episode, the answer to that question would be a no. It also makes me wonder whether anything on the scale of the Enigma code-breaking and its remaining a secret could be repeated now. Of course, the argument cuts both ways: in our more open world, it might also be harder for a country like Hitler’s Germany to make its moves in the first place. (I admit that is a guess of mine, not a prediction). Even so, the implications for military secrecy, when it is something of vital importance in defeating an enemy, are troubling if the media outlets refuse to protect a secret for an agreed period of time. And libertarians, even the most ferocious opponents of censorship, need to realise that keeping military secrets is perfectly consistent with supporting armed forces necessary for the protection of even a minimal, nightwatchman state.
There may have been an element of PR in the whole Prince Harry kerfuffle, but he’s already shown more balls than most of the folk who have sneered at him in some internet comments I have read. Come St George’s Day this year, I will be very glad to hoist something alcoholic to the fellow. Well done him.
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