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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An article about the exploits of the Royal Anglian Regiment reminds us that the fighting in Afghanistan has been very sharp indeed: over six months the Royal Anglians suffered one hundred and forty four casualties (nine killed and one hundred and thirty five wounded), in return for one thousand Taliban killed (which according to the traditional 5:1 ratio which would probably be more accurate for the technologically unsophisticated Taliban, implies at least a further five thousand wounded).
Yet I cannot escape the feeling that the quality of the politics has gone a long way to undermining the quality of the military efforts. Why oh why are we trying to stop people in that poor country from growing the cash crop they have grown since time immemorial and thereby making enemies of people who just want to make money? And as paying people to not plant opium is a demonstrable waste of time, if the governments of the west are so keen to stop opium ending up on the streets of western cities, why not take the vast ocean of money wasted on odious subsidies to affluent western farmers in Europe and the USA, and instead just buy whatever opium the Afghan farmers can grow? At a stroke the Afghan economy is improved in the short term, distorting subsidies removed from western economies and Afghan farmers and warlords alike given a very good reason to maintain good relations with their western patrons (i.e. addict them to subsidies).
Just over 20 minutes from the time I am writing this, a quarter of a mile from my flat, people will line up around the Cenotaph, Whitehall, to commemorate the fallen. Wars involving our servicemen and women are being fought as I write. I leave aside for this post whether we should or not be fighting said wars, let us leave that for another time. There are various charities and organisations that people can support to help those who have suffered from their service as well as support the families left bereaved or in serious hardship.
My old man was a RAF navigator in the 1950s and he has several old squadron buddies who served in combat and could use a bit of help. So this is the charity I’ll be supporting this year: the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.
I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing.
So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty?
The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on ‘watch the report’ to see for yourself). I kid you not.
Someone somewhere deserves a medal.
The Israeli raid on a Syrian target earlier this month has mostly faded from the news, but to my knowledge there has been no definitive report on exactly what was bombed. My own best guesses are either a big Hezbollah staging area or a Syrian nuclear weapons related facility, but my gut guesses and ten cents will buy you a cup of coffee if you have access to a TARDIS.
This item, by a former Jerusalem Post editor is about the best discussion I have run across.
What’s beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6. Israeli sources had been telling me for months that their air force was intensively war-gaming attack scenarios against Syria; I assumed this was in anticipation of a second round of fighting with Hezbollah. On the morning of the raid, Israeli combat brigades in the northern Golan Heights went on high alert, reinforced by elite Maglan commando units. Most telling has been Israel’s blanket censorship of the story – unprecedented in the experience of even the most veteran Israeli reporters – which has also been extended to its ordinarily hypertalkative politicians. In a country of open secrets, this is, for once, a closed one.
Read the article and make up your own mind.
Remembering one great Kiwi. On September 15, the Battle of Britain was won.
Some aviation eye candy.
In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:
- Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the ‘Surge’) in order to actually win
What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated… and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.
Yet surely to argue for any reduction in military force levels in Iraq by anything less that 100% and to argue that things are not going well, is tantamount to saying you support a policy to make the allied military situation even worse.
The next time the Russian airforce tries to test the UK air defences (which seem to be working fine), perhaps the boys in grey-blue should paint a big sign on the side of the Typhoon fighters saying this: “The way to Harvey Nichols’ jewellery department and Chelsea FC is that way, chaps”.
Seriously, what the expletives deleted does Putin think he is trying to prove, exactly? It is not as if one of those “Bear” aircraft are state-of-the-art. Ironically, there has been a lot of criticism about the expense of the Eurofighter project – justifiably – but at least the RAF have a superb fighter. Let us hope they do not have to remind the Russians of what an outstanding force the RAF still is.
Correlli Barnett, a long-standing critic of the Coalition overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’ath dictatorship, gives us this in this week’s Spectator:
“In Saddam’s strictly secular Iraq, al-Qa’eda and other forms of Islamist extremism were ruthlessly put down. Is it not plainer every month that we would all (including Iraqis) now be much better off if Saddam Hussein had been left in power,but under continued allied air surveillance?”
The regular trope that Saddam was a “strictly” secular leader won’t wash. The “strictness” was in fact pretty variable. What is Barnett trying to say, that Hussein kept copies of the complete works of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins under his bed? Surely, to be serious, Saddam was capable and willing to use and invoke religion when it suited his purposes; I have no idea whether he thought there was a supreme being or not, but frankly, what consolation would it be to the tens, hundreds of thousands of people who were brutalised by his rule to be told that he was “strictly” secular? The Marsh Arabs, the Shiites, the Kurds and other groups may want to ask Mr Barnett what benefit they had from being oppressed by a “secular” ruler. Stalin was “strictly secular”, as was Mao, at least as far as I know.
In fact, this argument is so silly that it got me wondering about what exactly is so marvellous about “strictly” secular regimes that cause havoc on a mass scale; Stalin’s Russia, for example, with its attendant mass famines, the Gulag, and the rest, surely drives a stake through the notion that the absence of revealed religion automatically brings a better state of affairs. I am a lapsed Christian, and no admirer of much that goes under the name of religion (that’s puttting it mildly, ed), but there are so many examples of evil, secular regimes, that it is hard to summon breath to point this rather obvious fact to someone like Barnett.
Then there is this claim that Iraqis and others would have been “much better off” with the old brute in power. That is frankly impossible to judge, and sitting here in the comfort of my apartment, is not one I feel fit to make, but then neither does Mr Barnett. I guess the henchmen who ran Saddam’s torture chambers and his security services feel that their circumstances have taken a big turn for the worse; George Galloway and the various other lowlifes clearly may mourn his passing; arms dealers in the West, East and elsewhere may rue the missed orders and deals no longer struck (that includes Britain, I am ashamed to say), but if Barnett wants to make this claim with seriousness, he needs to weigh the costs of what is now happening in Iraq with the toll of the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the gassing of villagers in northern Iraq, etc. And he needs to consider whether, and for how long, Saddam’s regime could have lasted, even without sanctions, and what would have happened thereafter.
The other problem I have is Barnett’s casually thrown-in comment about the Allied air surveillance – he means the “no-fly zones” in the north and south of Iraq. They cost money to enforce, there was exchange of fire between the airforces and the Iraqi forces on the ground (breaches of the 1991 Ceasfire, for those who bleat about the “illegal” invasion of 2003). It is naive to imagine those flights could have remained indefinitely, or have been enforceable beyond a certain point. Sooner or later, the air cover would have been reduced, leaving those in the north and the south to the tender mercies of Saddam’s/his son’s forces on the ground. Not a happy prospect.
There are good arguments to be made against the war: Saddam posed us no immediate threat; his armed forces were degraded after 1991 and there were more serious threats around which required more of our attention. There are also prudential grounds to avoid war if possible, starting with the old adage, which ought to be familiar to libertarians: the law of unintended consequences. I have found myself, more than once, rueing the entire enterprise as an object lesson in the folly of interventionism and chided myself from falling off the wagon in this respect. But the only problem is that I start getting those neo-con urges as soon as apologists for dictatorship like Barnett put pen to paper. The anti-war folk may have many arguments in their favour, but so many of them give me the creeps.
(Update: topic heading changed: this article has nothing to do with Korea!)
What I find so infuriating about the situation in Southern Iraq is that it was all so avoidable, and by that I do not mean by not getting involved in the first place. Clearly I was wrong to assume that just because the British government did the right thing helping with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, they would do what was needed to actually secure victory in the aftermath and focus Britain’s resources on achieving military success against the Iranian based insurgents in their area of responsibility. Silly me.
What US generals see, however, is a close ally preparing to “cut and run”, leaving behind a city in the grip of a power struggle between Shia militias that could determine the fate of the Iraqi government and the country as a whole. With signs of the surge yielding tentative progress in Baghdad, but at the cost of many American lives, there could scarcely be a worse time for a parting of the ways. Yet the US military has no doubt, despite what Gordon Brown claims, that the pullout is being driven by “the political situation at home in the UK”.
A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus’s thinking said: “The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time – more than a year – they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.
“They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.
It is not like Britain lacks the troops to send in order to apply the needed force to Basra and its environs. What exactly are the 23,000 British soldiers defending Rheindahlen, Saxony and Westphalia from at the moment? It is extraordinary that the standard response to things getting rough militarily these days is not to reinforce but rather to cut back in-theatre thereby increasing the pressure of those troops left behind… hardly an approach calculated to bring success.
I thought the one thing the damn state was capable of was waging wars, particularly ones of its own choosing. If it cannot even do that, what the hell use is it? Even less than I thought, and that is saying something.
The Russian airforce has recently resumed long range patrols, approaching the airspace of Britain and Diego Garcia… and I am pleased to say the correct response has come from the US State Department:
“If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again that’s their decision,” Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said. “That is a decision for them to take – it’s interesting. We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It’s a different era.”
Amen. This is the comment I left on the Telegraph article:
Who cares? All this talk about the resurgence of Russian power is tosh. Just look at the numbers. Even with all their gas and oil, Russia has the same GDP as Italy (and Italy is not an economic monoculture based on what comes out of the ground). Compared to China, the EU and the USA, Russia is, strategically speaking, in the minor league. If the quasi-fascists who run Russia these days want to rattle their little sabre, strut around like Mussolini and pretend they matter, let them. The appropriate response to their antics? No response at all.
I think the murderous actions of the Russian secret service in London are far more worthy of harsh responses than the antics of their military. I suspect a reaction to these military flights consisting of broad indifference and maybe the odd embarrassed snicker is far more likely to enrage the Kremlin than shaking a sabre back at them. The Devil does not like to be mocked.
Paul Staines takes a very gloomy view of the situation in Britain’s two wars
I take no pleasure in reporting this, but it seems to be going unsaid in the British press. British forces are painted, particularly by broadcasters, as having achieved a measure of success in Basra due to superior British peace-keeping techniques honed in Northern Ireland.
The truth is very different. To quote from a report;
Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by “the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors,” a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.
The Washington Post reported a senior U.S. intelligence official yesterday saying that “The British have basically been defeated in the south”.
The article went on to say that British forces
… are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
In May Blair visited the Basra HQ and came under mortar attack – not a sign of pacification.
The head of the armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, told the BBC that success depends “upon what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place… I’m afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations for Iraq, and for the south of Iraq.” The reality is that once British forces exit Basra the fighting will escalate into a full-scale civil war: Mission failure.
This begs the question – what now is the plan in Afghanistan? They are a people who fought the Red Army and won. The Soviets were brutal and were still defeated. Is NATO going to match and exceed that brutality in pursuit of “victory”? Afghanistan should be monitored closely and elements that present a clear and present external danger should be eliminated. It is not the job of NATO to impose Western values by force as Rome’s Imperial Armies once imposed Roman law.
Fresh from his humbling at the hands of Hillary Clinton and following on from a statement indicating his willingness to invade Pakistan, Barack Obama ladles on credence to the increasingly ubiquitous assertion that he’s inexperienced:
I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance…involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.
Desperately wrong answer to (what should be) a deal-breaking question, Mr Obama. Sure, waving the threat of one’s nuclear weapons capacity around like a pair of chopsticks in a cheap Chinese restaurant is not sensible, because it ultimately reduces that capacity’s deterrent value – which is the only practical reason why a sane nation would field a nuclear arsenal in this world of other nations who also possess The Bomb. A wise leader does not even refer to his country’s nuclear weapons capacity, because the widespread knowledge of that capacity speaks for itself more effectively than any politician could ever hope to.
Conversely, it is sheer lunacy for a US President (or hopeful) to declare that he will never press the button, because such statements completely undermine the deterrent value of these weapons. Mr Obama, if you are not running on a platform of nuclear disarmament, you never take the nuclear option off the table. Ever. You made a most elementary strategic blunder – you are not a suitable candidate for the role of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.
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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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