Bahrain Folly

Britain's new military base being built in Bahrain seems like a complete waste of money. We are unlikely that we will be intervening in the Middle East on our own, without the USA, any time in the medium term future so it is fairly pointless. I suppose if we get more in arms sales to Bahrain than it costs to set up the base it may be worth it, but when people talk about the base being "symbolic" it's probably a euphemism for waste of money.

In our last two wars east of Suez, Iraq and Afghanistan, the British Army was overstretched and achieved little, as this review* from the LRB puts it:

The September 2004 draft of Fry’s plan for the switch from Iraq to Afghanistan featured a graph showing British troop numbers in Basra smoothly falling away as numbers in Helmand gradually rose. There was a cross on the chart where the two lines met. This would have been fine if Basra had stayed quiet, but as the time approached when the first troops were due to land in Helmand, it became more and more evident that the British had failed to bring anything resembling order and justice to southern Iraq. Even before the Helmand operation started, it was obvious Britain needed more troops in both theatres. But it didn’t have enough even for one.

By 2005 British forces were well on the way to ceding Basra and the surrounding area to armed Shia groups; they would end up hunkered down and isolated behind the ramparts of their main base at the city’s airport. ‘To rectify the situation in Basra, the British would have to send more troops,’ Fairweather writes. ‘And yet their pivot to Afghanistan required them to do the exact opposite and withdraw. Rather than confront this gaping hole in their strategy, the British opted to carry on regardless.’

The beginning of Britain’s deployment in Helmand coincided with the belated realisation by British high command that their American patrons considered them to have been beaten in Iraq. Their much vaunted light-touch counter-insurgency skills had failed and the US was going to have to bail them out.

Since then the armed forces have undergone further cuts, so  pretending that we are a significant independent player in Middle East doesn't seem like a good way to use scarce resources, especially if the status that goes with it tempts our illustrious and wise leaders into further missions in the region that are testing our capacity. Either fund the military well or cut back what it is expected to do.

* Via iSteve.

Stuxnet In The Middle With You

Like Infidel I am very impressed by what the Stuxnet computer virus thingy has done to the Iranian nuclear programme. Making war by outwitting the enemy rather than killing them is an all round improvement.

Up until now cyber warfare has largely meant either Chinese epionage or Russia's petulant denial of service attacks against their enemies. This is much more sophisticated and suggests that the West is just as keen on using computers as weapons.

The only regrettable part is that it is now known about so therefore less effective.

Star Trek Has Some Interesting Storylines.

USS Enterprise captain relieved of command following lewd videos.

Go Kirk!

That's A Bit Extreme

Defence cuts: David Cameron attacked by Royal Navy Harrier pilot
How did he survive?

Aliens Amoung Us

From the Daily Mail- their science section no less:

They claim that since 1948, aliens have been hovering over UK and U.S. nuclear missile sites and deactivating the weapons– once even landing in a British base.
Furthermore, they warn, our governments are hushing the activity up.
Captain Robert Salas, who, along with six others is to break his silence on the subject, said: ‘We’re talking about unidentified flying objects, as simple as that.

The extraterrestrial CND'ers have "even landed in Suffolk" too, although why anyone would assume that a vaguely human creature with a bulbous head and weird fingers was anything other than one of the inbred natives* I don't know.

* Disclaimer: not all people from Suffolk are inbred and many of them have family trees rather than family telephone poles.

Tying One Hand Behind The Back.

President Obama's announcement that the United States will not use nuclear weapons first in any future conflict has been praised as the end of an outdated doctrine that only applied to the Cold War.

However this isn't really the case, during the first Gulf War Saddam Hussein indisputably had chemical and biological weapons. However he didn't use them despite having done so against Iran and the Kurds. Whilst it cannot be proven definitively it seems probably that the thinly veiled threat of a nuclear counterstrike was decisive in deterring him from trying this.

That threat would not have been credible had a promise not to launch a first strike been in place.

Self Fulfilling Prophecy

Has the massive expansion of biodefence research in the US since the anthrax letters of 2001 made America a safer place, or more dangerous?

That's the burning question among specialists in infectious disease, after a flurry of concerns about safety at labs handling potential bioweapons agents.

The chief suspect in the 2001 anthrax case is thought to be Bruce Ivins*, a biodefence researcher who committed suicide shortly before charges were brought against him last year. It is a bit of a murky affair and lots of alternative theories of varying plausibility abound though.

However it seems likely that the anthrax was sent by someone who only had access to weaponised anthrax in order to prepare a response in case anyone use weaponised anthrax. In other words if it weren't for the efforts to prepare for an anthrax attack there would have been no anthrax attack.

So wouldn't the safest method of avoiding future attacks with biological weapons be to stop making them? As it is it seems to be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy, to prepare for biological warfare by getting leading scientists to develop more effective forms of biological warfare.

Most terrorist groups can't develop weapons themselves because they have neither the resources nor the expertise to carry out complex research and development. Countries can make them, and in some cases probably are doing so, but by and large those most likely to use them would be more likely to harm themselves than to harm the countries with the highest standards of public health and the best medical researchers on the planet.

* He appears to have been the scientific equivalent of those firemen/arsonists, releasing the anthrax in order to push the US government to increase research on anthrax.

Foreign Soldiers & UK Residence Question.

It seems right that the Gurkhas should be allowed to settle in the UK seeing as they've served the country well.

I'm just wondering though, how does the position of the Gurkha's compare to that of other foreign soldiers who serve in the British Army, although not in different regiments? Commonwealth and Irish citizens are eligible to serve and according to Wikipedia there are 6000 soldiers from outside the UK currently serving in the army including 1900 Fijians, 600 Jamaicans and a similar number of Ghanaians. Are they eligible to reside in the UK once they've completed their service?

Update: In the comments Tim Worstall says that they are allowed to become residents after 4 years of service, which makes the treatment of the Gurkhas seem even stranger.

Who Said The Government Isn't Getting Tough On Immigration?

This is disgraceful:

On 15 November, Colour Sergeant Krishnabahadur Dura of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles was killed in action in Afghanistan.
.....
this Government thinks so little of C. Sgt Dura's sacrifice that their first instinct is to weild the full weight of the immigration system against his wife and children.

{Via James Higham}

"Antiwar" Movement Force Cancellation Of Remembrance Day Event

In Australia an upcoming event to commemorate the war dead has had to be cancelled because of threatened violence by supposed peace campaigners:

"FERAL" rioters who wreaked havoc at 2006's G20 meeting have forced a Remembrance Day event to be cancelled.

The three-day defence expo due to start on November 11 has been scrapped amid fears of violence by "low-life anarchists".

Organisers of the Asia-Pacific Defence and Security Exhibition, to be held in Adelaide, took the dramatic step after reports hundreds of protesters from Melbourne and Sydney planned to disrupt it.

In recent weeks, police gave several confidential briefings on the scale of the planned protests and the cost of countering them.

Nobody's Perfect.

Barack Obama on the Surge:

“I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,”

Count me as nobody then, somehow I suspected more soldiers might be a good solution to a lack of security caused by an insufficient number of troops. It was mystifying to me at the time why the pundits were so convinced that the Surge would fail given how obviously sensible it was.

More pertinently John McCain anticipated it perfectly well and several years in advance.

We're Here, We're Queer, We Don't Want Any More Bears.

The Ministry of Defence have a tough job on their hand, with serious fighting in Afghanistan, troops in Iraq, a growing military threat by Russia and numerous smaller challenges the world over. So naturally they've decided it is the right time to hold a meeting with PETA* over whether to replace the bearskin hats worn by the guards at the palace.

The Ministry of Defence is to meet an animal rights group to discuss alternatives to the bearskin hats worn by guards at Buckingham Palace.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) has approached Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney to design a new shape for the 18in hat.

Perhaps they can then move to change the rations of soldiers in the field so that they no eat meat and dairy products whilst out in the field and instead sit down in Helmand Province to a nice nut cutlet or Quorn Burger.

* PETA refers to 'People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals', not the equally renowned 'People Eating Tasty Animals'.

Some Thoughts On Russia.

This is more of a string of inter connected thoughts than a full comment.

Russia's attack on Georgia looks more and more as though it were planned in advance. The behaviour of the Russian state over recent years demonstrates that not only is it extremely unpleasant but unlike say China, it is a danger to the rest of the world. To list a few examples of Russia's recent behaviour:

• Nuclear terrorism in London, by which I mean the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
• Refusing to extradite the main suspect in the Litvinenko case, despite having signed an international extradition treaty.
  
• Occupation of Moldovan and Georgian territory.
• The attempted murder of Victor Yuchenko, now president of Ukraine.
• Threatening Estonia over the placement of a statue honouring the Red Army.
• Threatening to annex part of the Ukraine.
• Murdering exiled opponents in Qatar.

In other words Russia has clearly been a rogue state even before they tried the Sudetenland gambit of claiming to protect their citizens in another country.

Georgia should be brought into NATO immediately and a base established there.


Various other Russia related points to comment on include the Norfolk Blogger asking why the west has allowed itself to become dependent on Russian gas, this is true to a point but we should also realise that Russia is dependent upon our buying it. Marko Attila Hoare rejects the bogus comparison between the Georgian breakaway regions and Kosovo. EU referendum has a series of good posts on the issue including the reaction of the EU:

Russia is bombing cities inside Georgia, including the outskirts of Tbilisi, and has sunk at least one Georgian boat in Georgian waters. Gori is being evacuated and the Baku-Tbilisi oil pipeline has been bombed though not, apparently, put out of action.

The EU, the body that demands that it becomes our sole representative on the international scene is preparing to call an emergency meeting of foreign ministers and this will take place, possibly, on Wednesday. Or possibly not.

This is called a Rapid Reaction in EU circles.

Maoists & Gurkhas

Daniel Hannan MEP is in Nepal, presuambly observing the election, and he reports that Nepal's newly elected Maoist* government wants to stop the recruitment of Nepalese men into the Gurkha regiments of Britain ( along with those of India and Singapore).

They have been serving in the British Army since the end of the Gurkha War ( 1814-1816), a conflict which was concurrent with the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Not to be jingoistic, but fighting three wars on three continents simultaneously and achieving the desired objectives in all three is a pretty impressive feat!

Anyway hopefully the prospect of losing the Gurkhas can encourage the British government to treat them correctly.

* Hopefully their Maoism is about as deep as that of peace protesters who wear Mao T-shirts and 'Free Tibet' badges together.

Quick Points.

Three quick points that don't quite merit separate posts.

• Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser Samantha Power is forced to quit after being reported referring to Hillary Clinton as a 'monster'. Quite right, honesty has no place in politics. It wouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone who read her first book 'A Problem From Hell' that the isn't a fan of the Clintons. There have understandably been criticisms of interventionism in recent years after the very poor handling of the Iraqi occupation, but it is often forgotten that doing nothing also has a price which is hidden. Samantha Power's retelling of Bill Clinton's almost vegetative approach to the genocides of the 1990s in Rwanda and Bosnia cost far more lives than the Iraq war ever will.

• The government has decided to allow 66 Ethiopian refugees to settle in Middlesbrough has been criticised. I have to say that for once I think that the government have got something right though (saying that feels horrible), the fundamental problem with our asylum and immigration system is the large numbers of people who enter either illegally or on bogus pretenses and then claim asylum. What has happened in Middlesbrough is closer to how the system should operate, the Ethiopians fled to a Kenyan refugee camp and then applied lawfully to be allowed to resettle somewhere else permanently and were accepted. Controlled immigration is not a major problem, uncontrolled immigration is.

• The BBC and other media outlets have been shocked, shocked I tell you, by the abuse suffered by uniformed RAF personnel in Peterborough. This is the same BBC who recently devoted a whole episode of their flagship current affairs programme, Panorama, to a sleazy activist lawyer to repreat already discredited claims about British servicemen conducting massacres (and being so ruthless that they left no actual evidence) of Iraqi civilians. If I went around spreading vicious lies about someone who was later attacked I'm pretty sure that I would face prosecution.

Polly Quote Of The Day.

Polly Toynbee today illustrates her keen understanding of the democratic system:

Former top brass find the brass neck to stage what is virtually an insurrection from the Lords red benches. A confident government would have slapped the old junta down.

She really does believe that any criticism of New Labour is tantamount to treason.

The Surge.

I didn't write about the Petreaus report on the results of the American 'Surge' strategy last week. The results of the strategy have been successful to some degree as I predicted back in January:

if we know that there were too few troops then why has it become the received wisdom that the troop 'surge' that Bush is currently implementing is doomed to failiure and we should be cutting the number of coalition personel? It seems to me that the surge is the correct policy and that only by wresting control of Baghdad from sectarian militias will Iraq be stabilised.

My opinion was vindicated to some degree, as both the Petreaus report and other sources such as the BBC's 'Monitoring the Surge' have demonstrated. Obviously it is not a panacea and some militias will simply have taken a break for the duration, but those insisting on judging it a failure, such as the infamous "General Betray Us" ad by Move On (it's an interesting quirk of American politics that the Democrats constantly whine about having their patriotism questioned, yet actual examples of patriotism questioning are almost exclusively made by them, plus Ann Coulter) are not doing so based on the evidence.

Colossal mistakes were made in the Iraq war, particularly the failure to impose order as soon as Allied troops took control and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, both of which appear to have been based on a horribly naive misreading of human nature, although Petraeus was cannier than most British and American Generals back in 2003/2004. Yet that does not justify the idea that everything that the US government does from here on is automatically mistaken, in fact since Robert Gates became defense secretary their policies have become far more rational in terms of identifying the problems of Iraq and attempting to deal with them systematically.

An Alliance Without Allies.

Michael Portillo, whom is usually a fool, makes some very good points about the war in Afghanistan here. Unlike Iraq, the Afghanistan war was not a war of choice because the Taliban were in symbiotic relationship with Al Qaeda who were responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, including a couple of hundred Britons. Unfortunately the resolve to pacify Afghanistan that existed after the 9/11 attacks has largely evaporated, particularly so among many members of Nato.

Britain's government has left the armed forces underfunded which is shameful considering the sacrifices that are being demanded of them, but Gordon Brown has preferred to use the gargantuan increases in taxation to fund his personal follies such as the failed 'New Deal' scheme or to throw money at Labour voting areas. In short the government has consistently used the armed forces for various global vanity projects that will garner the government popularity, but refuses to fund the MOD is order to appease the pacifist leanings of many of their own backbenchers.

However Britain is at least meeting the commitments to keep the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and the army has been engaged in serious fighting, with all the losses that are entailed. Meanwhile other members of what is supposedly an alliance, are shirking their duties entirely or in part. Germany for example has troops in Afghanistan, and Angela Merkel has been resolute in refusing to be intimidated into leaving, but their soldiers are based in and around Kabul which is where the fighting isn't. Peace keeping is considered to be something distinct from fighting the groups that are threatening to destroy the peace. France, Spain, Italy and Turkey are all among the countries which have refused to commit more troops. Turkey aside most of the absentees are staying away purely for domestic political advantage, however short term that turns out to be.

Afghanistan has not been an easy place to win a war historically, and NATO is doing much better than other outside powers, but at the moment the strain of the struggle falls on a handful of members. The others need to be cajoled, persuaded and prodded into engaging fully. Germany for example wants to be a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UK ought to make it clear that it cannot support the membership of a country that is unwilling to fight. Most of the members of NATO are also members of the EU, and thus receive money indirectly from the UK, that is another lever of power to be exploited.

Brown's First Transatlantic Rift.

So Gordon Brown has asked Shirley Williams to become an adviser on nuclear non proliferation. Back in 2000 she was an active opponent of the missile defence scheme that was being proposed by George W. Bush, then campaigning for the presidency, and wrote several articles denouncing the scheme- 'Britain must stop America's national missile defense plans'. So now Gordon Brown is going to invite a woman who believes that Britain should take an active role in thwarting the national security plans of our most important ally to advise him on precisely that topic! Of course it should be noted that Gordon Brown holidays in Cape Cod, which isn't really pertinent to the point but all the newspapers seem to think it is necessary to add this to any discussion of Brown and the United States.

We Paean North Korea.

One last (I hope) post about the recently released hostages. They have been criticised in some quarters for the 'confessions' they made, personally I don't see the problem because everyone knows that obviously coerced statements are fake, but wouldn't it have been nice if they could have done something similar to what Lloyd Bulcher, commander of the USS Pueblo, did when he and his crew were captured by the North Koreans in 1968:

Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, Commanding Officer of the Pueblo was tortured and put through a mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess. Eventually the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented. None of the Koreans knew English well enough to write the confession, so they had Bucher write it himself. They verified the meaning of his words, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung."