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 occasions where I am prepared to wade in on the side of a bunch of a civil servants are as rare as hen’s teeth but this one is truly no contest:
THE Ministry of Defence has banned Britain’s biggest commercial news broadcaster from frontline access to the nation’s forces, The Times has learnt.
In an unprecedented move that risks accusations of censorship, the Government has withdrawn co-operation from ITV News in warzones after accusing it of inaccurate and intrusive reports about the fate of wounded soldiers…
“As bad a hatchet-job as I’ve seen in years. Cheap shots all over the place, no context, no reasonable explanation…”
In other words, the standard operating procedure of the MSM. The stink is now so bad that it is finally getting in to some very lofty nostrils.
And the reason? Simple, the USA has banned Vegemite! I expect to see RAAF strikes on US targets by late this evening and Aussie SAS teams boarding US shipping and dumping cargoes of Skippy Peanut Butter into the sea.
More seriously, it is just preposterous that the state interferes in the most picayune aspects of life. Next time I am in the US I intend to smuggle a jar in disguised as Marmite and smear it over the door handles of the first US federal government building to see.
There is an excellent bit of reportage in The Guardian by James Meek, covering the experiences of British troops in Southern Afghanistan that gives a good troop’s eye view of things.
One of the things that struck me, reading the comments on the recent thread about the casualty toll in Iraq, the North Korean bomb test, and the ongoing debate about what to do about Islamist terror, is what are countries doing to defend against missile attacks, including nuclear ones? When George Bush was first elected in 2000 (whatever Michael Moore might claim), he made a great deal of play about missile defence and the ABM Treaty. Now I may have missed something, but anti-missile defence, as a topic, seems to have gone a bit quiet. But surely, if North Korea has the bomb, with Iran not far behind, then anti-missile defence ought to be one of the top priorities for defence planners.
Even if you are a paleo-libertarian who thinks defence policy rules out any form of pre-emption, you presumably – unless you are a pacifist – embrace technologies to ward off attacks. So it seems to me to be a bit strange that we have not had more discussion about what countries should be doing in this area, and the pros and cons of the technologies involved. (There may have course have been a lot of discussion, but it has been out of the media spotlight, for various reasons).
Some old thoughts of mine about the merits and perils of pre-emption. Here is a book about what a defence policy that is really about self-defence might look like, via the Independent Institute.
I love the Science Museum in London, and there is another good reason to go there: it has an exhibition about the Spitfire fighter aircraft. Here is a nice review of it at the Social Affairs Unit blog.
Do not believe the nonsense about how the RAF was not essential to preventing an invasion of Britain in 1940. It was vital, and it seems morally right somehow that the aircraft that helped to nail the Luftwaffe was not just a brilliant piece of engineering, but also drop-dead gorgeous.
Who would not sympathise with injured soldiers, forced to endure poor conditions and MRSA at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Now one has been threatened by a local Muslim:
On one occasion a member of the Parachute Regiment, still dressed in his combat uniform after being evacuated from Afghanistan, was accosted by a Muslim over the British involvement in the country.
Soldiers are concerned about their safety. In such matters, one expects the usual response from government: a statement that refuses to acknowledge the problem and masks neglect:
The Ministry of Defence, which said that it had no record of threatening incidents, indicated that there was a military security presence at the hospital and it co-operated closely with local police.
A MoD spokesman said there was “appropriate security” at Selly Oak for the 11 servicemen currently being treated.
We know where they would like to end up:
Soldiers on operations say they would rather receive a more serious injury and go to the top American military hospital in Ramstein, Germany, than end up in a NHS hospital.
They now half jokingly refer to getting “a Boche rather than a Blighty” in reference to the wounds that would send them home. Ramstein has an outstanding unit for brain surgery, and neurological intensive care beds in Britain are in short supply. “The blokes see it that if you are unlucky you get wounded and go to the UK at the mercy of the NHS, but if you get a head wound you get sent to Ramstein in Germany where the US has an outstanding medical facility,” said an officer serving in Afghanistan.
“It also does not do morale much good knowing that within 18 hours of being wounded you could wake up in a NHS hospital with a mental health patient on one side and an incontinent geriatric on the other.”
The black humour of the British Tommy! No wonder New Labour hates them.
UK military authorities are claiming the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan has been ‘tactically defeated’, which can mean quite a variety of different things. Certainly the accounts of what has been going on there indicate bloody hard fighting down to bayonet range on occasion and given the lack of resources at their disposal, any significant victory against the casualty insensitive Taliban reflects rather well on the British Army.
Now if only the UK government would get rid of some of the many utterly pointless government departments, say for starters the Department of Trade and Industry and the truly preposterous Department of Culture, Media and Sport), we could spend more on the military and still reduce the level of taxation. Well, one can wish…
“What was going through your head during that second engagement?” a journalist asks me at a press conference the next day.
“A rocket-propelled grenade,” I say.
– Private Johnson Beharry VC
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that a remake of the classic, and creepy UK film, The Wicker Man, was coming out. We seem to have a lot of remakes at the moment, prompting thoughts that Hollywood has run dry on creative ideas. I sympathise up to a point with this. The remake of the old Michael Caine/Noel Coward caper, the Italian Job, was an amusing piece of film but not a patch on the original. Flight of the Phoenix was good, but not as good as the original, etc. And yet and yet….the Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and Denis Leary, was excellent, in fact an improvement in certain ways on the original, which starred the great Steve McQueen.
I suspect the problem is that when we first see a film, or read a novel, we intend to invest a certain amount emotionally in the experience if is a good one. I can imagine the howls of outrage if someone tries to remake Casablanca, or the African Queen, say. One of the problems of course is that remakes can remove elements deemed politically incorrect. The original Italian Job, for example, took a poke at the older incarnation of the EU, known at the time as the Common Market; it also made fun of Italian crooks and security services, while it also celebrated a sort of camp Britishness and had the wonderful character, Professer Peach, as played by Benny Hill (his character had a penchant for very large women).
Even so, I resist the urge if I can to get snooty about remakes. Peter Jackson, the maestro behind Lord of the Rings, is planning to bring out a new version of the classic war movie, The Dambusters, using modern computer technology to portray how 617 Squadron breached a number of German dams during the war. Jackson is no PC bore and seems determined to pay his respects to the heroisim of the RAF. I am definitely looking forward to the film when it comes out.
In the original movie, the RAF leader Guy Gibson has a black labrador, called Nigger. I will be interested to know if that rather un-PC fact is airbrushed out. Also, it being the 1940s, most of the aircrew should smoke cigarettes like chimneys. Will they be forced to stub out the habit to preserve the sensibilities of 21st Century viewers?
Well shall see.
Report here stating that Israel’s response to Hizbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers took Hizbollah by surprise, particularly the extent and ferocity of the IDF action, according to a Hiz deputy leader.
Given the determination of Israel’s armed forces to defend the tiny Jewish state over the years against a host of enemies, why some terrorist organisation like Hizbollah should be surprised is, frankly, surprising. In any event, this interview may suggest that Israel’s campaign to hammer Hizobollah may not be quite the debacle that some commentators have supposed. The jury is still out on the future of the current Israel administration, however.
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect.
The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force.
Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944.
But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign.
And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim.
Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking?
1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics
…of the Bush administration’s war on terror by Bill Quick. I find very little to disagree with.
A few excerpts, below the break, for those who need to be convinced to Read the Whole Thing.
Mr. Quick reflects my frustration that we have not been serious with fighting this war. I am not quite sure I can agree with him that we are worse off for having pursued this war because we have done so in a weak-kneed, half-assed way, but we certainly have not done what we could to exterminate the Islamofascist threat, and we are rapidly approaching the day when we will be worse off because it will be a nuclear-armed Islamofascist threat.
I vividly remember on the afternoon of 9/11, I told one of my law partners that I had no doubt that we would see nuclear weapons used before this thing was done. Sadly, five years on, I see no reason to withdraw that prediction.
As succinct and comprehensible a statement as I have seen of why military intervention in Iraq (and elsewhere) is essential to exterminating militant Islamofascism:
[T]he most effective strategy, in fact, the only proven effective strategy, available for waging and winning the war against Islamist fundamentalist terrorism: It would be necessary for us to destroy the regimes that sponsored, armed, trained, supported, protected, and used these Islamist terror organizations. Just as the seemingly ubiquitous communist “revolutionary fronts” all over the world seemed to dry up overnight with the destruction of their sponsor, the Soviet communist regime, removing the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere that similarly succored a host of Islamist terror organizations would both give us a clear-cut, straightforward strategy, and also give us the standards by which victory would be measured: the destruction of those regimes would signal victory.
His verdict on Bush:
The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush’s great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.
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