There was a time when debates in the House of commons used to matter. To an extent they still do, especially the was one yesterday in Westminster Hall on the British Army (starts about two-thirds the way down). It is worth a quick look.
I'll do a summary of it when I get time … I'm ensconced in the pointy building where they have those debates, so blogging is a bit difficult at the moment.
COMMENT THREAD
For anyone with a brain, self-doubt goes with the territory. In considering any course of action, there are usually several options and the best is very often a matter of fine judgement. It is, therefore, inevitable that one will tend to second-guess one's own decisions.
It is actually quite comforting, therefore, to read the letter from Sir Edward du Cann in The Telegraph today, where he offers an explanation for the failure of the Conservative Party to attract the support it needs to form the government.
His recipe for success is quite simple, and one which we saw being rolled out by New Labour in the dying days of the Major government. It can be summed up in one word: attack.
Thus does Sir Edward enjoin the Party (and by inference the MPs) to “attack defence ministers for the lack of adequate equipment, the massacre of the Royal Navy, and so on.” National defence, he writes, always is low priority for Labour.
That was precisely the point we were trying to make in this piece here and the lacklustre performance of the current defence team must be considered to have contributed to the lack of popularity of the Party.
However, things are not as simple as that. Some of the woes of the Armed Forces stem from the profligate spending on European projects, some of which - like the Eurofighter – stem from decisions made during previous Conservatives governments.
Other woes stem from decisions yet to be made, such as the decision to go ahead with the £14 billion FRES project, which is essential if Britain is to play a leading part in the European Rapid Reaction Force – something which the Conservative Party does not oppose in principle (or at all, if the it is to be judged by its lack of comment on the subject).
Therefore, any really serious attack on the government would invite the riposte that the Conservatives are largely responsible for many of the problems and that, in future, things would be very little different under a Conservative government.
As long as the Party in thrall to its European past and future, it will struggle to be a free agent and will always have problems with the attack mode. As always, the EU casts a long shadow.
COMMENT THREAD
A Coroner's inquiry has reported on the deaths of Pte Phillip Hewett, 2nd Lt Richard Shearer and Pte Leon Spicer – three soldiers slaughtered by a roadside bomb while they were patrolling in a "Snatch" Land Rover. Our report is here.
COMMENT THREAD
Those of us who grew up on the TV crime series Hawaii Five-O will fondly remember the last line of almost every episode with Jack Lord as Detective Steve McGarrett turning to James McArthur as Danny Williams to say: "Book 'im Danno. Murder one."
It took me a little while to work out that "murder one" is premeditated homicide while "murder two" is unintended homicide, such as accident as a result of an attack or self-defence or, even, the result of a sudden uproar.
It seems that we are to have similar distinctions in genocide. Genocide one would be that carried out with racist or xenophobic motives. Any other, common or garden genocide, such as the wholesale murder of the peasantry in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan or various parts of China (to name but a few) will count as genocide two and will, therefore carry a less serious sentence.
By sentence, I do not mean a genuine legal entity, since none of the people responsible for genocide two (except for Saddam Hussein) have been charged, let alone tried or punished. But there is a sentence of world opprobrium and, clearly, genocide carried out for political reasons does not seem to be all that important.
Well, to start with, Germany, El Presidente of the European Union, has dropped plans to outlaw the swastika throughout the European Union because of various representations by Hindu groups. Of course, the Hindu sv'astika is different from the Nazi swastika, as Christopher Booker pointed out in response to the waffle presented by that all-purpose expert, Timothy Garton Ash, but, I imagine, the Hindu groups foresaw all kinds of complications and decided to nip this one in the bud.
Incidentally, the Hindu symbol adorns many a gravestone in British war cemeteries all over the world. Would they have had to be taken down?
As for the outlawing of Holocaust denying, Germany is pushing ahead with it, hoping that all EU members come to an agreement on that at the Luxembourg meeting on April 19 – 20.
"Public incitement of violence and hatred or the denial or trivialization of genocide with racist or xenophobic motives" should be criminalized EU-wide, German officials said in Brussels on Monday. "But the plan does not include a ban on certain symbols such as swastikas."There are times when I read pronouncements by officials and politicians and nearly give up the will to live. What kind of an idiot thinks that public incitement or violence and hatred (something that is covered by the criminal law of all member states) is the same as the denial or trivialization of any historical event, however ghastly?
As it happens a good deal of Stalin's ferocity was directed against specific national groups and all religions were at risk. What of the Chechens, Ingushi and Tatars who were deported wholesale at the end of World War Two? What of the second big purge just before his death that was seriously anti-Semitic? Of course, he was trying to exterminate or, at least, deport wholesale, Jews because they were "rootless cosmopolitans" not because they were Jews. That, presumably, makes it genocide two rather than genocide one.
Carola Godman Law is Chairman of the Lewes Constituency Conservative Association, Burgess Hill, E Sussex.
Responding to the decision of one of her members to resign from the Conservative Party and to join UKIP she observes that:
If you believe, as I do, that we live in a country ruled by a government of almost unparalleled incompetence and deceitfulness, you do not join a party the voting for which is likely to result in more of the same. UKIP has every chance of winning the next election – for Labour.She then goes on to ask:
How would UKIP deal with the current state of our hospitals, the debt crisis and all the other disasters that Labour has created? Or does removal from the EU solve everything?What she does not seem to realise is that there is a growing body of people who believe that the ability to govern ourselves is very much more important than the other issues which she identifies. And, in that key issue, there is nothing to chose between Labour and the Conservative Party.
In addition to its 745-acre Ithaca campus in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, Cornell University operates the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and now the Weill Cornell Medical College in Doha, Qatar.
At first sight, therefore, it does not strike one as a poverty-stricken institute deserving of the charity of debt-laden European taxpayers.
However, that does not seem to be the view of the EU Commission which perhaps has a different agenda - like propaganda. To that effect, it is funding the University's Institute of European Studies (IES) to the tune of $100,000. And, it looks like it is getting a bargain.
The grant, we are told, is being awarded to the University "in honour of the EU's 50th anniversary" (honest, I am not making this up). Some of it goes to a "town twinning" project with Elios Proni in Greece Unite, part of a "Getting to Know Europe" local outreach project. But the IES also plans to conduct "The EU and U" business seminars, which will aim to "educate local businesses and small value-added enterprises about opportunities to do business with the countries of the EU".
Additionally, part of the EU grant will be used to fund IES's comprehensive "K-12 outreach program", which is designed to "inspire local students to understand and appreciate the European Union."
Of this, the "EU Curriculum Grant Contest" is one of the noteworthy initiatives. For its money, the IES will encourage teachers from Upstate New York schools to develop curriculum materials focusing on the politics, the history and the culture of the European Union.
Selected educators will be awarded $1,125 to implement the most promising programs and plans are in hand to run a "Europe Day Poster Contest" which will let youngsters explore their artistic talents while drawing upon the theme of the recently unveiled European Anniversary logo, "Together". And, of course, winners will be announced during the Europe Day 2007 celebration on 9th May.
David Wippman, vice provost for International Relations, said that the grant will "provide an excellent opportunity to advance the outreach and international mission of Cornell University by enlightening local residents about the important work of the EU, the rich cultural history of Europe and the abundant US-EU business and investment opportunities."
Well, they certainly bought him cheap. And for a "mere" $100,000, it seems Cornell University - reputedly the third richest in the USA - has been bought and paid-for as an organ of EU propaganda. One suspects the EU Commission is rubbing its hands with glee at obtaining so many cut-price Yanks.
You would have thought, though, that if Cornell academics were intent on selling themselves to a foreign power, the interests of which are inimical to those of the United States, they would have charged a little more.
COMMENT THREAD
These are French VBLs (Véhicule Blindé Léger - "Light armoured vehicle") in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of NATO which provides no further details. Although they do look butch, these vehicles are not much better (if at all) protected than "Snatch" Land Rovers. However, you do have to admire their style.
As always, mouse-click to get the enlarged version.
COMMENT THREAD
The US Department of Defence, in one of its routine press releases is extolling the virtues of its National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California.
There, troops are put through their pre-deployment training, prior to being sent to Iraq. In particular, they are taught how to deal with IEDs – the picture here showing a simulated vehicle-borne IED.
The unit works with the Joint IED Center of Excellence, which opened its doors in summer 2006 to share the latest counter-IED tactics, techniques and procedures with deploying troops.
However, what is of special interest to this blog is the comment from its chief of integration, Air Force Lt. Col. Rodney Taylor, the center's chief of integration.
Ultimately, countering IEDs has huge implications for US military operations in the war on terror, he says. Although IEDs may be relatively simple weapons, they have the impact of strategic weapons. "If IEDs kill enough Americans, that may change the will of the American public, which is what we require in order to stay in Iraq and get the job done," he said. 
By coincidence, our own MoD has put up a press release on the opening by defence minister Adam Ingram of a £2 million extension at the UK's flagship Development, Concepts and Doctrine in Shrivenham, Wilts. We are told that it was finished early and under-budget.
The Centre is essentially the "Vatican" of the defence establishment, providing the "intellectual bases" that inform "coherent decisions" in Defence Policy, Capability Development and operations, both now and in the future (don't blame me – that's what the press release says).
In particular, the Centre develops the Armed Forces' doctrine, the detailed procedures and guides by which the Army fights its battles.
In dealing with the threat of IED, therefore, it is to Shrivenham that the Army goes for its advice. And my spies tell me that it is there where there has been some of the greatest resistance to the deployment of mine protected vehicles and other technical counter-measures.
Thus, while we hope the 100-plus staff of the DCDC are very happy in their new home, we would like to think that there is enough money left over from the savings in the budget to send some of their number to the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, where they might learn something about dealing with IEDs.
In particular, we would hope they could talk to Lt. Col. Taylor who, I am sure, would be happy to tell them about the strategic importance of IEDs, something that could take back to the Vatican and tell all their friends. If they then come up with some really "coherent decisions" on how the British Army should deal with IEDs, then the £2 million spent on their new home might just have been worth it.
COMMENT THREAD
Brian Ledbetter over at Snapped Shot has an interesting perspective on the Palestinian civil war dialogue.
Brian misses the point though. If it is not the fault of the IDF, then it must be Bush's fault. Stands to reason, as my colleague says.
COMMENT THREAD
Speaking today to an audience of 150 EU officials who met to discuss European defence policies at a conference hosted by the German Foreign Ministry, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told them:
How do NATO-EU relations stand? Let me answer that by means of a little anecdote. A few weeks ago, one of my staff told me he had been invited to a conference on "frozen conflicts". And then he added with a smile: "Of course it's about the Caucasus, not about NATO-EU relations!"Er… "the European Security and Defence Policy has … become an inseparable part of European integration."
It would undoubtedly be going too far to describe NATO-EU relations as a "frozen conflict". At least the logic of a European Security and Defence Policy is not in dispute today. The ESDP has meanwhile become an inseparable part of European integration.
A classic way for a journalist to construct a newspaper report is to write up the basic details, setting the tone of the piece and then to ring up a politician or some such to get an opposing comment. Put the two together and you have your story.
Such was definitely the structure of a story yesterday in the Sunday Times, with journalist David Leppard reporting under the headline: "Blair to launch spin battalion against Al-Qaeda propaganda".
The idea itself, though, actually seems quite good – in principle. We are told that Blair is planning to set up a "joint information unit", to be based in the Cabinet Office or the Home Office, its function to seek to counter disinformation issued by Islamic terrorists.
The unit is to be modelled on the "public information office" set up by the British Army as part of the campaign to defeat the IRA in Northern Ireland. One well-placed insider says the aim of the unit is to coordinate well-argued public "rebuttals" of propaganda messages.
In a war against global terrorism where, as we have remarked, the propaganda war is a potent as the shooting war, this is not only a good idea but absolutely essential. If there is any criticism, it is that the decision to set up the unit has been revealed. Generally speaking, the few people who know about counter-propaganda operations the better.
As to the intention to set up the unit, Mr Leppard seems to have decided it is a Bad Thing. He thus colours his piece by describing it as a "propaganda unit" in Whitehall to help sway Muslim hearts and minds in the battle with Al-Qaeda.
Leppard then tells us that the plan for the new unit was one of the key recommendations contained in a report presented to Blair last month by John Reid, the home secretary. The "Reid Group" report answered a request by Blair for a rethink on Britain's response to the war on terror.
Since other recommendations from the group have been dropped, however, this opens the way for a pointed "drop in" comment from Patrick Mercer, the Tory spokesman on homeland security. Obligingly, he tells Leppard, "Given all the time and effort that went into the Reid Group's rethink on terrorism, it is extraordinary that the only thing to get approval is a propaganda organisation, which is effectively a spin machine."
In goes the comment and the story is now "balanced" – but has Mercer done himself or the Tories a favour, or is he just being used? More to the point, has Leppard really written a balanced story, or is this just his own brand of spin – a different kind of spin?
COMMENT THREAD
To give the new SecGen of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, his due, he seems at first to have responded reasonably well to the latest UN scandal, the money passed on to North Korea'’s Kim Jong-il by the United Nations Development Programme without a great deal of supervision.
I wish I could say that it was this blog that did the trick but, I suspect, it was the probability of a prolonged campaign by the Wall Street Journal that encouraged Mr Ban to pronounce on the subject.
A week ago on Friday Mr Ban’s spokesman announced that the SecGen had met with Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the UNDP (what is he associated with, one wonders) and added:
The Secretary-General will call for an urgent, system wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programmes.The key word, as the following Monday’s WSJ editorial pointed out, is “external”. We all remember how long it took the previous SecGen, Kofi Annan (father of Kojo and brother of Kobina) to set up the independent Volcker Commission to find out what has been going on in the Oil for Food scam. Admittedly he picked a man whom he had considered to be “reliable” to chair it but, alas, the report was not quite what SecGen Annan had wanted.
If the member states of the U.N. and UNDP’s board were to decide that our presence there were no longer useful, we would leave immediately.Brave words. Unfortunately, one of the members of that board is North Korea itself (it also sits on the board of UNDP’s affiliate, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and if UNICEF as well as being a member of the UN Disarmament Conference. What are the chances of Kim Jong-il’s henchmen (for who else would be sent to negotiate on these august boards) agreeing that the UNDP and its hard cash were no longer wanted in North Korea? One of the many tales of porcine aviation that the UN is so fond of regaling us with.
We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. … Over a period of 10 years it is, of course, tens of millions.Oh well, that’s all right then. Actually, the sum is $27.7 million and, indeed, it is chickenfeed compared to the Oil for Food scam.
There are only so many times you can write about a subject before you stand at risk not only of boring your own readers to death, but yourself as well.
Such a subject is the wreck of the Conservative Party where, even a few days ago, we said as much as we could then say on the issue.
But now the issue is back again with a vengeance. All we have to do is sit back and watch the Party self-destruct as the "professionals" struggle to catch up with the things we were writing about months ago.
Thus does Anthony King note, in respect of the current You Gov poll that, although confidence in Blair is at an all-time low, the Tories are not benefiting. He writes:
Asked, in addition, whether Britain is likely to be governed better under Mr Brown than it has been under Tony Blair, most voters give the impression of tossing a mental coin. As the figures in the chart show, roughly the same small proportions are sanguine and dubious about him, with a clear majority reckoning his eventual ascent to power "will not make much difference". Of course, the problem for the Tories at the moment is that a large majority of voters clearly think the same about them.And now that the Boy has sided with the government against the Catholic Church on adoption, more and more party members are throwing their hands up in horror at the realisation that David Cameron is not and never was a Conservative.
Thanks to Pajamas Media, we get this interesting story of a Lebanese blog exposing fauxtography to do with the recent Lebanese riots or disturbances, depending on how you wish to describe them.
Michael Totten covers the story in his Middle East Journal, though we take exception to his last comment:
Busting propagandists for fauxtography isn’t just for Americans any more.Ahem, Green Helmet Guy? Did you miss that one, Mr Totten?
The move to make Holocaust denying illegal across the EU seems to have acquired legs, with the Commission supporting the German proposal and the egregious Justice Commissar Franco Frattini (he, who got his job because the original Italian candidate Buttiglioni was a devout and practising Catholic) announced somewhat pompously that he "very much welcomed and fully supported" these proposals.
I shall not bother to rehearse all the arguments against the ban, which have nothing to do with the horrible aspect of the event and of the need to know about it and to study it (though there are other things in history to study as well).
It is, however, gag-making to hear this sort of commentary:
While freedom of expression is part of Europe's values and traditions, its democratic societies also allowed to fight racist speech through penal law, the commissioner added.Those European values and traditions (that, of course, include Nazism and the Holocaust as well) seem to be infinitely flexible. What Commissar Frattini should be dealing with is the fully acknowledged growth in anti-Semitic attacks across the whole of western Europe in the last few years. Most of these member states, including Italy, routinely post police guard outside synagogues because they are afraid of attacks that come from one or two barely acknowledged directions.
Some of our readers may have forgotten about the fragrant Valerie Plame [pictured left], her less than fragrant husband, Joe (I cannot quite remember what I said last week but will this do) Wilson and the entire circus of the Libby trial. Others would have read some media coverage, including articles by British journalists, apparently copied verbatim from American publications rather than reported from the court.
Time to redress the balance and find out what is really going on. And who better to explain matters to us than Clarice Feldman, who does an expert fisking on American Thinker? Read the whole piece and if you have time, follow the links she provides. Well worth it.
COMMENT THREAD
For those who missed it, here is the explanation for the gratuitous "toy" pic.
This one is a Small Unit Riverine Craft (SURC) from the USMC Dam Security Unit, against the backdrop of the Haditha Dam on the Euphrates River in the Al Anbar province, Iraq. The photograph was taken on 30 April 2006 by Cpl. Justin L. Schaeffer, USMC.
The pic is posted at 800 pixels so, to get the full effect, mouse-click anywhere on the face of the picture.
Meanwhile, Strategy Page has done a compilation labelled: "Top ten myths of the Iraqi war". I particularly like number five:
The Invasion Was a Failure: Saddam's police state was overthrown and a democracy established, which was the objective of the operation. Peace did not ensue because Saddam's supporters, the Sunni Arab minority, were not willing to deal with majority rule, and war crimes trials. A terror campaign followed. Few expected the Sunni Arabs to be so stupid. There's a lesson to be learned there.This rather points to a central truth. There is killing and mayhem in Iraq because a relatively small number of evil men are intent on killing and mayhem. From this one can conclude that, if they stopped killing and doing everything they could to undermine the government, then there would be no killing and mayhem.
It is not only in Iraq that there is an ongoing battle for "hearts and minds". There is one raging in the Eurozone and, according to FT-Harris poll just published, the European Union is losing it.
An overwhelming majority of citizens in the big eurozone countries believe the euro has damaged their national economies. Of the French, Italians and Spanish, more than two-thirds believe the single currency has had a "negative impact". More than half of Germans feel likewise and, in France, a mere five percent said the euro has had a positive effect on the French economy.
More than half of citizens in countries using the euro say they prefer their former national currency, according to the poll of 5,314 adults in Germany, the UK, France, Spain and Italy, which was conducted between January 10 and January 22. Almost two-thirds of Germans say they preferred their former currency, the D-Mark.
Despite that, citizens of eurozone countries generally see wider benefits of the euro. More Germans, Italians and Spanish see a positive impact on the EU economy than a negative effect. The big exception is the French, more of whom see a negative rather than positive impact.
The interesting thing is though that the results coincide with a relatively buoyant time for the euro. Eurozone growth prospects have brightened, thanks largely to a pick-up in Germany, and employment prospects look better than they have for some time.
Given an economic downturn or currency crisis in the Eurozone, one can see sentiment turning even more sharply against the single currency, which means that this result is probably as good as it gets. From here, it can only get worse.
COMMENT THREAD
Emily Parker writes in Saturday's Wall Street Journal about the Chinese internet and the government's attempts to control it with President Hu Jintao asking his officials that they "actively and creatively nurture a healthy online culture".
Ms Parker points out that there will soon be 137 million internet users in mainland China, not, perhaps, a particularly large figure, given the population of that country, but no longer a tiny group either. Of course, we cannot tell how many of them use the internet simply to play games but a large proportion must read and write on various subjects. Even personal blogs become a political tool under a Communist regime.
She speculates about whether the internet and its use are likely to promote freedom and democracy in that country and the article is worth reading in full. Her conclusion seems to be that sometimes it goes up and sometimes it goes down.
The Chinese government has installed fairly effective firewalls, employs tens of thousands of internet police and is effective at closing down websites or removing postings before too many people can read it. There is also a tendency to arrest journalists or bloggers who write too many uncomfortable pieces.
Western firms who move in on the market are required to censor themselves and Yahoo even handed over the name of a journalist, who was promptly imprisoned.
Above all, the Chinese government fears uncontrolled assembly of people. We are not speaking only about tanks in Tiananmen Square but also about the inexplicably fierce crack-down on the Falun Gong, whose main crime seemed to be to bring together many thousands from all over China to Beijing in a quiet protest.
If you cannot gather or find people who share your views in the largest possible way, physically, then this may be possible on the net.
More important, though, is that for those Chinese who long harbored suspicions that their views were out of sync with the Communist Party line, the Internet created a space to learn that they were not alone. Or as I remember one intrepid, Beijing-based Internet essayist explaining to me - Now, I know who my comrades are. In his online world, there were vibrant discussions, "opinion leaders," and various intellectual camps. Peering into this universe would even lead one to imagine the root formation of political parties.Perhaps. One can go on hoping. But even knowing who your comrades are is important for the Chinese who want to think for themselves.
Reports are coming in of a British dawn raid on properties in Az Zubayr, near Basra, where ammunition, light rockets, bomb-making paraphernalia, radio equipment and timer units were discovered in a house.
The raid was hastily organised and carried out by 250 soldiers from 1 Yorkshire Battlegroup, "acting on intelligence". After the raid on the house, 500 mortar rounds were seized from a compound where troops had earlier spotted men transferring weapons into two vehicles. A number of men were also detained.
Without doubt, this is a significant action, not least because it suggests that the British Army is not entirely without friends in the area. While, on this blog, we have tended to emphasise the hardware aspect of fighting an insurgency, the acquisition of local intelligence is just as important as having well-equipped troops.
Speaking of which, in the background to this photograph (right) – unless I am very much mistaken – is a Saxon APC, fitted out with slatted armour. This is definitely one we missed as we were under the distinct impression that the vehicle had been withdrawn from Iraq, largely because the thing is perilously instable.
However, this, it seems, is one of a batch of 22 upgraded Saxons, an event not entirely applauded by their users. The addition of more armour and other equipment cannot have helped its stability.
Once again, the contrast with US aspirations is extreme.
COMMENT THREAD
If global warming – man-made or otherwise – is responsible for this year's mild winter, then the Scots have reason to be thankful for it.
According to the Scotsman on Sunday, Scotland is on the brink of a power crisis after an accident at one of the country's biggest electricity plants massively reduced supplies to the national grid.
This is Longannet in Fife (pictured). It is, in fact, the second largest coal-fired power station in the whole of the UK and has been shut down after a conveyor belt carrying coal collapsed. The worst of it is that the Hunterston B nuclear power station is already off-line, leaving Scotland perilously short of power. Outages have been avoided only because of the unseasonably warm weather.
The two stations normally account for almost half of Scotland's electricity generation and, crucially, provide constant back-up electricity at times when other stations (and the wind factories) are not operating.
Since Scotland normally exports power to England, but because of the way the grid is structured, it is difficult to reverse flow and send power from England up to Scotland.
This highlights the fundamental fragility and inflexibility of the National Grid, something we looked at in December. Few people realise that, in terms of electricity supplies, we are living on the edge and, even now, we are one power station away from disaster. As we increase our dependency on wind-generated electricity and fail to invest in more stable power providers, the situation can only get worse. No one in the business, it seems, is prepared to guarantee the stability of the grid after 2010.
The time is getting close when buying that generator is becoming essential.
COMMENT THREAD
Somewhere in that lot is a Chinook helicopter - seen at the British base at Shatt al-Arab Hotel last year. As before, mouse-click anywhere on the face of the pic to get the full effect.
COMMENT THREAD
Booker has a strong piece in his column today, on how badly the EU keeps its books. But not only does it fail to meet even the most basic standards of accountancy practice, it is utterly ruthless in preventing its accounts being investigated.
And we gave this organisation £15 billion last year. Why?
COMMENT THREAD
The Telegraph's transport correspondent, David Millward, has finally woken up to the fact that "Brussels has demanded that all member state road pricing schemes should not only be harmonised, but be capable of linking with the EU's £2.3 billion Galileo satellite." He writes, in today's newspaper:
Brussels's insistence that road-pricing technology works with Galileo was seen by critics as a way of ensuring the project recoups income from licence fees paid by tolling authorities. Such demands will apply to all road pricing and toll systems introduced since the turn of the year. Existing schemes could be forced to use the same technology.Of course, readers of the Sunday Telegraph could have seen this in the Booker column in June 2005, we wrote about it in the blog in the same month, but also as early as March 2005 and again the same month.
The Galileo project, a European rival to the Americans' GPS satellite — also hopes to make money from selling its services to companies making compatible satellite navigation devices.
In addition Brussels expects the onboard units, which should be harmonised across the EU, will also be capable of enforcing a wide range of road pricing schemes — from London's congestion charge to a German motorway tolling scheme and even, where possible, time spent in a garage or car park.
In the latest issue of eurofacts Lord Pearson or Rannoch and Lord Willoughby de Broke, of whose decision to abandon the Conservative Party in favour of UKIP we have written before, have published their political statement. Together with the editor of eurofacts we have decided to reproduce it here in full, as we think our readers would be interested, though some have, undoubtedly, seen it before.
Although this is not explicitly stated, you can divine a sense of shock amongst the media fraternity – if you can call it that – over the news that Clive Goodman, News of the World royal editor, has been jailed after pleading guilty to intercepting phone messages.
However, his co-conspirator, "security consultant" Glenn Mulcaire, who actually got the information that enabled Goodman to hack into the phones - which included those of the royal household – was handed down six months.
The judge, Mr Justice Gross, described Goodman and Mulcaire's behaviour as "low conduct, reprehensible in the extreme", adding that Goodman had been motivated by "career advancement and protection". The nub, though, was that, "Neither journalist nor private security consultants are above the law."
What are dismaying here though are two things. Firstly, a senior journalist was not brought down through him following up any great story but from the pursuit of relatively low-grade tittle-tattle. Secondly, the News of the World paid Mulcaire over £100,000 a year to assist Goodman in obtaining the information, in addition to which Goodman paid Mulcaire £12,300 in cash for his services, between 9 November 2005 and 7 August 2006.
We are talking here, of course, of the News of the World, a newspaper in name only, which specialises in "tarts 'n' vicars" exposés, which have become its hallmark. But it says a great deal that it is prepared to pay so much for poor-grade material, as long as it is about celebrities or royalty.
By coincidence this week, I shared a fish 'n' chip dinner (that means lunchtime oop north) with a journalist on the local rag – a man who has been with the paper over 30 years and wants nothing more out of life than to write. But he says, with the advent of new-technology also came savage cut-backs in the number of reporters. Says our man, in the old days, you could take three days or more to research and write a story. Now you are lucky to get three hours. We feel we are now just processors of information, he adds.
Regular readers of this blog may have detected a slight antipathy towards the journalistic fraternity, but we have some (little) sympathy for this predicament. And when newspapers are prepared to spend ridiculous amounts of money on tittle-tattle, and even more on celebrity columnists, you cannot help but think they have their priorities wrong.
In the final analysis, newspapers are about news (and informed comment). If editors and proprietors lose sight of that, then they, ultimately, will be the losers. There are plenty of others out there who are prepared to take over from them.
COMMENT THREAD
The last few months have been a little difficult for me from the blogging point of view in that I could not get on the net at home. This meant sporadic posting from various computers as and when they were available or I was near them.
All that has changed. I am now fully equipped to write, edit and post at home and shall do so. In other words, there will be more and more frequent postings from me. Bad luck for those of our readers who have not quite grasped that this blog is run by two people. Heh!
On the other hand, I shall keep to my resolution of steering clear of the forum. I shall post my stories on it but refrain from participating in the discussion.
Re-entering the debate on the EU constitution comes pensioner Alan Pavelin, of Chislehurst, Kent, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph. A profligate writer - although more at home in the Independent (and very much opposed to nasty things like referendums) - he writes:
Sir - I would point out that the treaty was negotiated by the elected governments of all the (then) 25 member states; that 18 countries (either through their elected parliaments or by referendum) have accepted it and only two have rejected it; and that, of the countries that held referendums, the total of yes votes exceeded the total of no votes.So, by this token, because 18 other countries have accepted the constitution, and that comprises a majority, we too should accept it because that is democratic?
By all means argue against the treaty because you don't like its provisions (which include, for the first time, a provision allowing any member state to leave the EU) or because you don't think one country should have any influence in what happens in another country on important issues such as climate change or terrorism.
But please don't argue against the treaty on grounds of democracy, because this flies in the face of the facts.
Charles over at Little Green Footballs is in the habit of publishing occasional photographs for no other reason than they are good pictures. He usually themes them as a "Saturday night beach" or a "Thursday night supertanker" - or some such - and very good viewing they make.
Readers would be quite surprised to learn that, in creating this blog, quite how much work goes into background picture research – we can quite understand why so many bloggers do not post them. Finding the right pictures for every story does take up an inordinate amount of time, as indeed does processing and the actual process of posting them.
During the research, we quite often come across some stunning photos that are not useable simply because there is no immediate "handle". But so good are some that it is a shame to waste them, when they deserve a wider audience. Thus, I am going to borrow the idea from Charles and publish the occasional photo, just because it is a good photo.
Today's is a recent shot from the US Department of Defense depicting a Humvee on patrol somewhere near the US Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. It does underline the fact that by no means everything about soldiering is bad. Other than being a soldier, how else could you get to see such stunning views from your own private all-terrain vehicle, and get paid into the bargain?
I have posted the pic at 800 pixels, and if you mouse-click anywhere on the face of the pic, you can enlarge it to get the full flavour of the magnificent scenery.
COMMENT THREAD
In Washington yesterday, Turkey signed on for the next phase of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), pledging $175 million toward the aircraft's production and promising to buy 100 of the conventional-take-off-and-landing version (F-35A) of the aircraft, worth about $10 billion.
This follows the decision in October last when Turkey's Air Force decided to go for the Lightning II, dashing any hopes of the "colleagues" that the Eurofighter might be chosen.
Back in October though, only the Air Force, as the user, had made the decision - which had to be ratified by the government. It now has been. In the Pentagon yesterday US deputy defense secretary Gordon England met with Turkey's national defense minister Mehmet Vecdi Gonul and undersecretary for defense industries Murad Bayar, where they signed a memorandum of understanding, cementing the deal.
Of course, this is much, much more than an aircraft deal, as indicated by England's remarks prior to the signing. He said he had spent several years cultivating US relations with Turkey and called the Turkish officials present "dear, close friends," adding, "Our country is privileged to have such a strong and dynamic ally in Turkey … Together our two nations are standing together in the name of freedom."
This continued Turkish participation, says the US Department of Defense, reinforces the longstanding and close relationship between the US and Turkish Air Forces, "providing a solid foundation for future air operations with other allied and friendly nations in a joint and coalition environment."
But it also signals, if not a cooling in the relationship between Turkey and the EU, then certainly the reluctance to get too far into bed with the Europeans, especially in such a vital area as defence. The message will undoubtedly be received and understood in Brussels, both in the EU commission headquarters and in Nato.
COMMENT THREAD
Well, of course, it is all, but all, Israel's fault. Or Bush's. It has to be. Stands to reason.
The situation in Beirut is getting ever more tense. According to this report, the general strike ended with three dead and 176 injured. Those appear to be the accepted figures for the time being.
Four more people were killed in sectarian clashes the day after the strike and around 200 injured during fights between Shias and Sunnis or, if you prefer, Hezbollah and government supporters at Beirut university. Those are the official figures but it seems that people in the street have been attacked and beaten up on the basis of their religious affiliation.
Last night was the first time a curfew was imposed on Beirut since the civil war of the seventies but it was lifted this morning and there is general weeping and wailing. AllahPundit has an interesting tape from MEMRI with Lebanese women (and one man) cursing Nasrallah. One lady expresses the widely applauded opinion that Olmert is more honourable than the Hezbollah leader. She also mentions that this is yet another holy month in Islam and, thus, the fighting is doubly wrong.
Nasrallah has called his people off the streets. We shall see whether they will go on obeying him when he pulls them back.
As Bloomberg points out, the rioting broke out just hours after the donors in Paris had pledged "$7.6 billion in new funds to help rebuild Lebanon and lend support to Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government".
Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera reports that the celebration of the first anniversary of Hamas’s election has been "marred" by factional fighting that resulted in five dead and 11 abducted. Fatah has again called off talks about a unity government.
It just has to be Bush's fault.
COMMENT THREAD
Brought to us by the BBC television news last night, courtesy of Matt Frei, was a sneering review of the latest piece of technology to be brought out by the Americans in their continuing attempt to develop non-lethal weapons.
Officially, this is the "Active Denial System", a £30 million programme to produce a Humvee-mounted weapon which projects a high-intensity microwave beam, with a range in excess of 500 yards, causing burning sensations in the target humans. So uncomfortable is the sensation that the recipient is forced to move from the area, when immediate relief is afforded.
It has been tested on more than 10,000 people over twelve years and, in the last five years of advanced development, no one has required medical attention (which suggests that some might have needed it in the early days). Crucially, it is equally safe at its minimum range of 50ft as it is at its maximum.
Hilariously, at the first public demonstration of the equipment at Moody Air Force base in Georgia, journalists – including Elliot Minor, of the Associated Press (pictured) - were targeted by the enthusiastic crew. We are told that this was voluntary but, nevertheless, they must have enjoyed even this fleeting revenge.
However, apart from the commendable use on the fourth estate, this is a tangible fruit of the US recognition that, in asymmetric wars – where the battle is as much for hearts and minds as it is territory – collateral damage has to be avoided, as accidental deaths can be exploited by the enemy to very great effect.
But, if this technology is sufficiently novel to attract media attention, it is still experimental and at least three years away from field use. But also demonstrated at Moody Air force Bases, but ignored by all and sundry, was another development which will allow soldiers in the field identify enemy the locations of enemy gunmen, by tracking where shots are coming from. 
This is achieved by using a lightweight, man-portable version of an acoustic sensor system called the ShotSpotter (pictured) which can pick up immediately the report of a shot (or multiple shots) fired, calculate the location and pass on the details to friendly forces.
But the true genius of the system is that is has been linked to Scan Eagle, a small tactical UAV with a 10ft wingspan and 4ft length. 
The UAV is launched by a catapult and has an endurance of about 20 hours. On receipt of location details from a ShotSpotter system, it can home in on the shooter and send real-time video pictures to ground forces (or airborne assets), facilitating a precision response.
Under the generic name of "Ground Situational Awareness Toolkit" this reduces the need for troops to lay down high volumes of covering fire when targeted by hidden gunman, again reducing the danger of collateral damage.
Interestingly, neither Scan Eagle nor ShotSpotter are new to the military. Scan Eagle has logged more than 20,000 hours, supporting Navy and Marine missions in Iraq, and ShotSpotter is used by both law enforcement and military agencies. But the combination of the two technologies makes a formidable addition to the counter-insurgency armoury and a good demonstration of the commitment of the US to the battle.
COMMENT THREAD
There is nothing terribly wrong with Sir Keith Ajegbo’s review of the teaching of “diversity and citizenship”. It is, presumably, not his fault that the remit was phrased in that unsatisfactory way.
Sir Keith has himself been a teacher and a headmaster in difficult parts of South London and knows that the problem extends a long way beyond disaffected Muslim youngsters. He also, it would seem, understands the phenomenon of Jade Goody and the chavs, who, as we have pointed out on this blog before, are seen as fair game to the great and the good as well as just articulate middle class (unlike pretty, weepy Indian wannabe stars).
In order for young people to explore how we live together in UK today and to debate the values we share, it is important they consider issues that have shaped the development of UK society – and to understand them through the lens of history.Who can argue with the need to teach history to all our children – history of this country, history of other countries, history of the British Empire?
It is, indeed, appalling to think that in two world wars people of all religions volunteered to fight for a country they had never seen but was present to them as an idea. The picture shows Indian lancers in Palestine while their descendants who actually live here, are turning to a completely alien Islamist (I stress that word) tradition because they see nothing for themselves here.
Such lessons could be called hard-core knowledge-based ones and might be essential counterparts to those compulsory history lessons. Of course, teachers would have to tell the truth that is no longer convenient. They would have to tell that Parliament legislates in only a small proportion of cases in this country; they would have to tell that the House of Lords is no longer the highest appeal court in this country; they would have to explain that our democracy is something of a joke and not because President Bush is such a nasty man.
To deal with the expected spring offensive in Afghanistan, the United States is to increase the number of its troops in the country by 3,500 – initially by extending the deployment of the 10th Mountain Division by four months.
With other adjustments to deployment cycles, the US will be fielding over the longer term an extra 2,500 troops, providing more than half of the troop contingent in the country, which wiil rise to 34,500.
To speed up stabilisation, the US government is also to ask Congress to commit an extra $10.6 billion in aid, $8.6 billion (£4.4 billion) to train and equip the Afghan army and police, and $2 billion for reconstruction projects.
Meanwhile, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is in Brussels, addressing NATO, telling member states that they too must raise their game if the Taliban is to be defeated. However, there are few signs that her call will be heeded. Certainly, no commitment to providing extra troops in expected to emerge from today's talks.
And does this not speak volumes for the "colleagues"? All but the most ardent anti-war campaigners will agree that the Afghan is worth fighting for, yet the "colleagues" are silent when it comes to stepping up to the plate. Neverthless, no effort is spared on the fruitless pursuit of an EU constitution, all in the name of a more powerful "Europe".
Peoples and nations are judged by their deeds not their words. By that measure, the "Europeans" are showing that, when push comes to shove, the "project" is just empty rhetoric. They are writing themselves out of the script.
COMMENT THREAD
Their representatives are meeting in Madrid today, intending to discuss how to find a way out of the "stalemate" on the EU constitution. These are the 18 Nations which have ratified the treaty (even if Germany hasn't), and they are brooking no compromise.
Not for them the idea put forward by presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants a "mini-treaty" which deals only with institutional reforms, or filleting the document to find issues on which all 27 EU member states can agree.
No, under the aegis of Portugal and Spain, deputy foreign ministers are looking for ways of by-passing the blockage imposed by the French and Dutch referendums, and getting the whole treaty passed.
We are obviously dealing with some very desperate people here. Even if the thing could be got past the French and the Dutch – and that is unlikely enough – the full monte would require a referendum in Ireland, Denmark, Britain and possibly Poland and the Czech Republic. Any one of those countries could scupper the project anew and it is almost beyond conjecture that one of them might.
All the "colleagues" can possibly achieve is to re-open old wounds and seriously hack off a very large number of "European" citizens. It simply ain't going to fly.
COMMENT THREAD
There are not a few people who would have me rejoice when a newspaper takes up an issue that this blog has been "banging" on about, on the basis that the more who make a fuss, the more likely it is that there will be a solution. No more so is this true than in the lamentable treatment of the pressing defence issues, but I am not able to draw any comfort at all from enhanced media concern.
In this piece, here, I explain why.
COMMENT THREAD
The BBC conveys the report that the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad (pictured), has spoken of differences between the US and Britain over future strategy for Iraq.
The Blair government is planning a partial withdrawal of British forces from Basra this year but Khalilzad has broken ranks and revealed that the US would prefer UK forces to remain at their current levels in southern Iraq.
Interviewed on BBC Radio 4's World Tonight new programme, though, shadow secretary of state William Hague disagreed. The troops should be withdrawn, he said, "as we are near the limit of what can be achieved."
Interviewer Robin Lustig then chipped in, suggesting that, if it was "so quiet in southern Iraq", perhaps it was a case of the Americans expecting us to come and give them a hand in Baghdad. Amazingly, Hague did not disagree with this premise. Instead he declared that the troops were needed more urgently in Afghanistan.
Are these people mad? Surely they cannot be that ignorant of what is going on in Basra?
COMMENT THREAD
If you look carefully at the picture above, you can count no less than 22 sets of traffic lights. Those, complete with the paraphernalia of signs, barriers and bus segregation, is the classic response of the conventional traffic engineer - creating an expensive, sterile nightmare that magnifies the delays and frustration, destroying visual amenity.
Such a scheme could have been the response of the City Council of Smallingerland in Friesland, Holland. In the year 2000, the councillors and officials were about to implement a long-planned scheme to reconstruct an important traffic intersection in the City of Drachten, known as the Laweiplein.
Read more here.
COMMENT THREAD
This blog was one of the few outlets to predict that the country to suffer most from Hezbollah’s perceived victory this summer (and I stress the word perceived) will not be Israel but Lebanon.
Yes, there has been an anguished heart-searching in Israel and one hopes that it will lead to a clearer understanding of how important the media war is in the modern (and not so modern) world. Yes, the chief of staff has resigned and the President has gone on indefinite leave though that has to do with other, more personal matters. But the country stands and these matters will be sorted out in due course. If ever people want an argument for a democracy as against tyrannies of all hues and colours, look to the Middle East.
Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Hezbollah is demanding a change in the government in the same petulant way as the peace marchers demanded a change in this country’s foreign policy here. I don’t like this government; I don’t care that it was elected and has the support of a majority; it is not doing what I wanted it to do; I want it to change; boo-hoo.
One can joke about our own demonstrators and armchair revolutionaries. In Lebanon matters are more serious. Hezbollah has withdrawn from the government and called a general strike yesterday.
The strike developed into a running battle between different factions and The Ouwet Front, which bills itself as “Personal Views and Opinions of Lebanese Forces Members” has some interesting pictures.
Meanwhile, the BBC World Service website, calling its story “Warning of new Lebanon Protests”, talks of Hezbollah-led opposition (at least they don’t call it “loyal”) and describes Fouad Sinioara’s government as “Western-backed”. At least, they have stopped calling it “American-backed”.
The opposition is demanding a big enough share in government to give them veto power over any decisions they do not like - a step the Western-backed government has not been willing to take.Right, let’s get several things straight. The Siniora government was elected by the people of Lebanon, many of whom are sick of Hezbollah, sick of Iranian interference and sick of Syria’s control of parts of their country and society.
Security forces were trying to break up the clash in the northern city of Tripoli, which started after the funeral of a Sunni Muslim government supporter killed in clashes with opposition protesters on Tuesday.There are, as yet, no news of casualties from Tripoli but Al-Jazeera’s report talks of six people killed and 176 wounded during the strike yesterday. Whom is one to believe? And another thing: where are those Western and Muslim protests? Are those innocent Lebanese civilians no longer of any interest?
Thousands had packed the streets of the northern city of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city, for the funeral of Bilal Hayek. "Sunni blood is boiling," chanted the mourners, some of them armed.
Even after a few days closeted in the warm embrace of the EU parliament in Brussels - where each of the MEPs' offices have beds and so much is provided under the one roof that you could live out your life in the building and never again feel the sun on your skin – the political news from the UK seems unreal.
A few days more and the mind-numbingly dull machinations of the "toy" parliament begin to look interesting and, if you try hard enough, you can even convince yourself that they are important.
I can thus imagine how British politics must look to the average American, to whom Washington is a strange, far-off country, populated by a malign species of aliens, split into warring tribes called the Democrats and Republicans. 
A lot of Americans are aware of Tony Blair, because it is he who stood by the United States in the dark hours following 9/11 and sent "his" troops into bat alongside GW, when the fateful decision was made to depose Saddam Hussein. But, I bet, very few indeed are aware that he is leader of the Labour Party or that the nearest political equivalent to his party in America is the Democrats.
Most politically-aware Americans (which is a lot) will be aware of the term "conservatives" and a smaller number might be aware that, in the UK there is a political grouping called the Conservative Party. The very few that even think about it, might briefly associate that party with conservativism and leave it at that. David Cameron, aka the Boy King, will be completely unknown to all but a handful.
It is useful nevertheless, to try and explain one's own predicament though the imagined eyes of a foreigner – and American eyes are as good as any.
Thus we can describe the political scene in Britain as been dominated by a party which calls itself New Labour, which, by tradition is akin to the Democrats - representing as it does the working man – but has long since ceased to represent anything other than itself and, if anything, is closer to Republican values in some respects.
On the other hand, we have a Conservative Party which is no longer conservative and, in its attempts to get itself re-elected, is adopting the clothes of the left wing – becoming closer in spirit to the Democrats, more so even than New Labour. This, incidentally, was the party of Margaret Thatcher, who would be turning in her grave if she was dead. Fortunately, she is not, but that is her only fortune. The party she sought to re-create has been destroyed.
For most Americans, whom we are told are so stupid that they can only count to two, and then only with a calculator (although the ultimate insult is much better – I use it in respect of the old enemy – state vets. How do you pick one out in a crowd? Ask everyone to count to eleven. The vet is the man who takes his socks off.) we have to stop at two political parties.
But for the political sophisticates – i.e., those who can handle numbers larger than two – we can reveal that there are in fact three "main" parties, the third being what is laughingly called the Liberal Democrats.
The philosophy of his party is relatively easily understood if you appreciate that it is neither liberal nor democrat, and practices an advanced form of poliitcal schizophrenia. When it campaigns at a local level, it is all things to all men (and women), telling electors anything they want to hear. But, at national level, it is unashamedly Democrat, i.e., not democratic, and thus horribly left-wing.
Thus it is in the UK that we have three main parties, all of which are left-wing. And, on the issue which is of such interest to so many of us – our continued membership of the European Union - all three of those parties are in favour.
With that background, readers not familiar with the UK political scene – which includes most citizens of the UK – are now better equipped to understand Mr Simon Heffer's rant in today's Daily Telegraph.
As a "rabid" right-wing columnist, he reveals a feature of the British political scene that seems to be catching the three main political parties completely by surprise. What is happening is that many people – we call them voters – are so disillusioned with the current setup that they are saying "a pox on all your parties", and walking away. 
This, of course, is not supposed to happen. Given a choice of three, we are supposed to pick one. Instead, with these parties all occupying various positions on the left, other, minority parties are moving in to fill the vacuum. Pre-eminent amongst these is the UK Independent Party which, as Heffer points out, is beginning to Hoover up the votes of the disaffected right wing.
In so doing, it is undoubtedly aided by its new leader, Nigel Farage, who Heffer tells us is, "highly articulate, plain spoken, experienced, attracting much media attention and highly politically motivated". Fortunately for UKIP, very few know - or care - that Farage is also an unprincipled, self-centred, intellectually challenged shit. Most of those who do have left (or are leaving) the party.
But, for those who would not now vote for UKIP even if hell froze over, there are other options, not least the British National Party. The problem here is that, although it is branded "extreme right-wing", it is in fact a far-left party. And while UKIP is capturing the disaffected right, BNP is Hoovering up votes from the disaffected old Labour left. In the heady days of the Thatcher revolution, these were the people - the "White van man" - who gravitated to the Conservatives and gave them 18 years of power. 
Perversely, while the leaders of the main parties would all like to claim the mantle of Thatcher, the recipient of her now disillusioned support is Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP. Effectively, he is the true heir of Thatcherism.
How you see it, though, depends on how close you are to which particular coal face. In the Conservative Party, there is a diminishing rump which believes that the Boy King is the New Messiah who will lead their left-facing party to the promised land. They are happy to see the unreformed right-wingers desert the ship - heedless of the fact that these comprise the core vote of the party - crowing that they are simply consigning themselves to the political wilderness.
But, as Heffer writes, "the wilderness is getting is getting rather crowded". And there we will stay until we have a true conservative party again.
COMMENT THREAD
The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat is telling us in a leader that Germany is facing the same problem in reviving the European Union constitution as a magpie stuck on a tarred roof: when the beak is pulled out, the tail gets stuck.
Finland having just escaped from the maw of the EU presidency, that is an especially poignant comment and the paper's leader-writer is by no means the only one noting that Germany seems to have adopted an extremely difficult task. One wonders why Merkel, with so many other things to entertain and detain her, is so keen to make a rod for her own back.
One also wonders why the "colleagues" are bothering at all for, in the aftermath of the French and Dutch rejection of the constitution, it became very clear that they were pushing on without it and, in many respects, the lack of the document seemed hardly to make any difference to the pace of integration.
With nearly two years elapsed, however, we have actually seen the process of integration stall, with the commission failing to offer any major new initiatives, or "big ideas" in the Delorsian mold.
Furthermore, as a player on the international scene, the EU had been almost totally ineffective. From the slow response to east Asia Tsunami, the failed attempts to constrain Iran's nuclear ambitions and the inability to restrain the genocide in Darfur, the project's famous "soft power" has proved as effective as stale marshmallow.
Then many of the projects which offered the EU a great leap forward seem to have slithered to a halt or are failing to make significant progress. For instance, the European Defence Agency – which was intended to be the proto-European defence ministry – has been forced to operate on a minuscule annual budget, and seem to be going nowhere.
Eurocorps, the wannabe European Army is confined to marginal operations of little political significance that no-one can recall, while the timetable for the European Rapid Reaction Force is slipping, as the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan dominate the headlines – which do not include the EU.
Prestige projects like the Airbus A-380 are going down the pan – possibly followed by the A-400M, about which we reported yesterday. And that includes the EU's Galileo satellite navigation system, as more troubles pile up.
According to About Electronics, delays in commissioning the system are being blamed for delaying the integration of satellite navigation into mobile telephone handsets in Europe, as operators and manufacturers remain uncertain over the deployment schedule for Galileo and the likely quality of its signal.
Then GPS World tells us that the Russian may well be redesigning the electronic architecture of its GLONASS, to permit interoperability with the US Navstar system, allowing the development of cheap handsets utilising both signals – and thereby reducing the utility of Galileo.
And just to rub salt in the wounds, as ballooning costs, bickering over the command centre, doubts even among backers on how it will earn its keep, and problems with the second test satellite weren't enough, Galileo now faces a continued challenge to call itself by its own name.
This is something we reported on way back in January 2005, but now legal proceedings have begun at a district court in Munich, Germany. UK-based Galileo International Technology LLC has filed a lawsuit against the German company Galileo Industries GmbH, headquartered in Ottobrunn.
The district court has already ruled in favour of the British company in a similar dispute and seven other courts are currently involved in settling legal disputes centring on the name Galileo, which appears as part of several other company names. A lawsuit filed against the EU commission (EC) is also ongoing.
Uncertainty over the identity of the name may contribute to the lack of a name for what has been called the Galileo Operating Consortium, or Company, composed of eight European aerospace and defense companies, communications device makers, and satellite manufacturing companies. Formed in 2005 and based in Toulouse, France, it has yet to formally name itself or nominate a chief executive officer. A 20-year funding contract with the European Space Agency and the EU remains in limbo.
From a situation where the constitution didn't actually seem to matter, the European Union as it stands today – at once battered and becalmed – seems to be going nowhere. And, when lost for ideas, the "colleagues" clutch at the nearest passing treaty with the same degree of determination that a heroine addict reaches for the needle.
Thus, despite the difficulties – and the enormous risk of reopening old wounds, with the concomitant risk of rejection – it seems the "colleagues" have little choice but to go for broke - a reflection of weakness rather than strength. With no more guarantee of success than the original attempt, however, this may be the project's last hurrah.
COMMENT THREAD
We talk a lot about the two countries which voted against the European Constitution but not that many words are spoken about the two that had a referendum and voted yes: Spain and Luxembourg. (The other 16 who have approved have done so without any popular approval, and quite right, too. You never know what people might say.)
The two countries decided to host two meetings organized by the "friends of the constitution", a select group. One meeting has been held in Madrid but the second one, scheduled for February in Luxembourg, has, as EUObserver reports, been cancelled.
Jean Asselborn, the Foreign Minister, has announced that it was decided not to hold the meeting because Luxembourg and the "friends of the constitution" did not want to seem to be in any way unhelpful to the Presidency.
Germany or, to be quite precise, the German government is known to be unhappy at the idea of a large meeting about the constitution in February just before a statement is to be signed, rejoicing in the fiftieth anniversary of the European project.
The second meeting, which would bring the pro-constitution camp and the constitution sceptics together, would also encroach on what Germany sees as the prime task of its presidency - to bridge the divide between the two camps and seek a new consensus on an EU treaty.Let's all keep quiet and maybe the problem will just go away.
Meanwhile, Mr Asselborn said that the meeting had also been cancelled because of resistance by France and the Netherlands, which would be forced at the Luxembourg conference to define their exact position on the constitution at an early stage.
Ireland and Portugal, which have not ratified the treaty but strongly support it, will send observers to the meeting.It is not clear whether Britain sent observers or not. Possibly the FCO is still wondering what that letter was about.
Germany as EU chair also chose to be represented as an observer only - sending its ambassador in Madrid to take notes of the meeting.
The Netherlands appears to have politely declined the invitation to also send an observer, with Mr Bot saying that "we will not go to Madrid."
Airbus chief executive Christian Streiff was warning in October that there might be delays, and there were strong hints in December.
Now it's official. Airbus, in the form of its executive vice president, Tom Williams, has formally warned customers of a "potential" three-month delay on its 20 billion euro ($26 billion) A400M military transport aircraft programme.
One again, therefore, a symbolic European programme is crumbling into the dust, demonstrating the inability of the "colleagues" even to get a fairly straightforward project like a military transport off the ground. This is more than fifty years after the US introduced the iconic C-130 Hercules into squadron service.
Under pressure from L’Escroc, Britain has ordered 25 of these machines at an expected cost of £2.4 billion, to replace its fleet of 51 US-built C-130 Hercules transports. For some long time it has been suffering a marked shortage of airlift capacity as it waits for Airbus to bring the A400M into production.
In December last, so critical had the situation become that the government was mooting buying another three Boeing C-17 Globemasters for a mere $660 million (about £337 million).
The trouble is that the bulk of the orders for the C-17 have been for the USAF and the orders, barring a few, are largely complete, leading Boeing to close down the production line. Although the Canadians are also interested in buying C-17s, their orders are not sufficient to keep the line open and, therefore, there is some doubt about whether the order could be fulfilled.
But, if this is problematic for the RAF, the Luftwaffe, which is struggling with a fleet of clapped-out Transalls which, even in pristine condition, do not have the range adequately to service German requirements.
More devastated will be the "colleagues" though. As with the troubled A-380, the A400M was always more than an aeroplane. It was a symbol of integration, in this case forming the nucleus of a joint Franco-German military air transport command, a precursor to a European airforce.
I am minded – showing my age somewhat - of the glorious "Telegoons" where Neddy (I am sure it was he), lacking a firearm, conspired to hold up a bank with a colour photograph of a gun. It looks as is the nearest the "colleagues" are going to get to their transport command in the foreseeable future is a colour photograph of an A400M - in the production of which Airbus seems to excel - which, presumably, they can frame and hang over their mantleshelves.
COMMENT THREAD
Defence Questions in the House of Commons yesterday provided a glimmer of hope (not a lot, but some) that more measures might be taken to protect our troops from mortar bombs on their bases in Iraq.
We have published a report and our analysis here.
COMMENT THREAD
Last Friday I experienced a serious urge to do something I had never done before. No, no, settle down, it was not that exciting. I decided that I would quite like to vote for Jade Goody on Celebrity Big Brother. Unfortunately, neither I nor the people I discussed it with (who agreed with me) knew how to go about it. So, we did not vote.
For the benefit of our non-British readers and those who are too superior to admit interest (though they admit to a great deal of disgust) in the Big Brother developments, let me explain what has been happening. (Those who are disgusted at the thought of such lowly subjects and people being discussed on this elevated forum can stop reading now.)
There is no need, I believe, to explain what Big Brother or Celebrity Big Brother are, there being similar programmes in most countries of the developed world. The participants in the latter tend to be rather moth-eaten celebs, either wannabes or ones way past their sell-by date. (There was one occasion when the winning celebrity was not one at all. She had merely pretended and nobody noticed the difference.)
So, there we were, a couple of weeks ago, with a number of moth-eaten celebrities gathering in the house, among them one Jade Goody, who is famous for being the only Big Brother participant who had made it as a celeb, her mother and boyfriend and assorted others, including a Bollywood wannabe, who had made a number of unsuccessful films and was clearly looking to this programme to do something about her career.
So what happened then, I hear you ask? Well, here is the entire rant.
COMMENT THREAD
The MoD has now posted photographs and a video of the "Apache rescue" on its website. There are 13 stills in all – well worth a look.
Despite now, the clearest evidence that the soldiers were not strapped to the wings (see above – double-click to enlarge), amazingly, one of the captions reads: "In all, four Troops were strapped to the small side 'wings' of two Apaches, two to each helicopter".
This is the MoD on which we rely to defend our country?
COMMENT THREAD
As a phenomenon, it should not go unremarked. While the majority of "professional" print journalists have been wetting their knickers over the "derring do" of the Apache drivers and their strapped-on riders, the more measured and analytical commentary has come from elsewhere.
The latest offering is from another "amateur", Jon Selous of Horsham, W Sussex, who has a letter in today's Daily Telegraph under the heading, "Wrong helicopters". He writes:
Sir – I have the utmost admiration for the initiative, aggression and bravery of the air crews and Marines who extracted the body of their fallen comrade in Afghanistan (News, January 17).One suspects, though, that Mr Selous has in mind the stirring scenes of casevac Hueys of VietNam fame, darting in to pluck casualties from under the noses of the NVA. But, of course, that is now history… or is it?
However, would Adam Ingram, the defence minister, now reconsider his statement that "our Afghanistan helicopter fleet and crews are meeting current demand through careful management"? Being forced to commit two specialist machines costing upwards of £30 million and representing two-thirds of the firepower available to the tactical commander is not an example of good management of assets – rather one of brave decision-making in extremis.
Had we lost a machine and taken more casualties as a result of this extraction, there would have been an outcry over the commander's decision. He should have had available to him a dedicated "casevac" (casualty evacuation) medium-lift helicopter covered by the firepower of all three gunships.
Among the few advantages our forces should have in Afghanistan are air mobility and rapid air casevac and extraction. Senior commanders must insist that the Government provides a better level of support and stop dissembling that they have sufficient resources.
It just so happens that, permanently stationed on the island of Cyprus, there are four Bell Griffin HAR2s (Hueys by any other name) operated by 84 RAF Squadron, used primarily for search and rescue. They would be ideal for operations in Afghanistan and would, at a stroke, double the number of tactical helicopters we have in theatre.
It's back again – that "God" question. Angela Merkel, we are told, has renewed criticism that the EU constitution does not explicitly refer to Europe's Christian roots, with a reference to God or Christianity.
This is according to an interview today, published in the German news weekly Focus. She talks with German cardinal Karl Lehmann, telling him that she "…would have liked to have seen a clearer declaration on the Christian roots (of Europe) … No one doubts that they significantly shape our life, our society."
You really do have to admire the tenacity of these people – if nothing else. Back in early 2004 when this blog was but a mere pup, God and the constitution was on the agenda then.
At the time, we though that this was primarily a ploy to exclude Turkey from the EU, or make it feel unwelcome – in the hope that this Muslim country would be dissuaded from joining.
The probably remains the case today, although Merkel has the sense to dress it up as an expression for her concern for the survival of Christianity. "I wonder, can we maintain the formative aspects of Christianity for day-to-day politics if the political sphere does not stand by them?" she ruminates.
Politics and religion, of course, is a dangerous mix but, when an idea is floated in the European Union, it does seen that you simply cannot say no. Like a recalcitrant child refusing to eat its breakfast being re-presented with the same meal again and again, the people of Europe, it seems, are to have God thrust into their lives – and a Christian God at that - whether they like it or not.
COMMENT THREAD
UPDATED
What was intended to be my last word on last Monday's attempted rescue using Apache helicopters is posted here, complete with pics of one of the actual helicopters used.
It is a testament to how the story is developing, however, that the BBC has now obtained from the MoD video coverage of the flight of one of the Apaches, which has been run on BBC News 24, with the recording available on the BBC website
Despite the stupid graphic (what is it about commissioning editors?), we actually get a sensible comment from Paul Adams, saying:
This episode raises questions. The military lacks the sort of light helicopters that would normally be used for this sort of work. It'll be another seven years before something suitable is available.The message is gradually beginning to filter out and, with luck, we might be seeing some detail emerge. It is odd, though, how it should be the BBC which picks up the thread, when all the newspapers seem to have missed it.
On a bitterly cold and windy day, some 500 demonstrators formed a human chain around the Berlaymont, the main office of the EU commission in Brussels.
This is according to AP which tells us that the demonstrators were calling on "European Union foreign ministers" to take urgent action to prevent further bloodshed in Darfur.
This is typical AP and many other media outlets use the same terminology. But they are not "European Union foreign ministers". They are the foreign ministers of the EU member states – more than a semantic difference. In theory at least, they are supposed to be representing the member state interests.
Anyhow, why the demonstrators chose the commission building, heaven only knows, as the ministers meet in the Justus Lipsus building, which is a good ten-minute trot away.
But that did not stop Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe, with Belgian politicians and members of the EU parliament joining the protest, calling for the foreign ministers, meeting as the General Affairs Council on Monday, to take concrete measures to force Sudanese and rebel forces to adhere to a cease-fire.
"We want tougher action by the EU and by the United Nations," Destexhe said. "Darfur is the major tragedy ... We think the EU is not doing enough." But what does Destexhe and his fellow travellers think the EU could do? To misquote Stalin, how many divisions has Solana?
The best the demonstrators can hope for is yet another round of
grand but futile statements, denouncing whatever it is needs denouncing this time. But, when it comes to action, neither the EU nor the member states are going to do anything that has any chance of proving decisive. But then, it was always going to be that way. Perhaps we should get the Boy King back in to cuddle some more babies.
COMMENT THREAD
According to the MoD website another British soldier has been killed in Basra, succumbing to a roadside bomb. Four other soldiers were injured, during the incident, one of them very seriously.
We are informed that the soldiers were attacked while taking part in a routine patrol on the outskirts of the northern part of Basrah City, near the districts of Al Hadi and Al Jezaizah, when a suspected roadside bomb detonated.
We may be mistaken but, from the photograph, the type of ambush location looks rather familiar - this photograph (right) showing the site of an attack on a Land Rover patrol in May 2006.
This time, however, the casualties were part of a Warrior armoured personnel carrier patrol but, says the MoD, it is unclear whether they were dismounted at the time of the attack.
This brings the number of service personnel killed in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion in 2003 to 130 – considerably less than the 3,000 plus lost by the US forces – who lost another 20 troops yesterday, including 13 lost when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed, killing all 13 on board. If it seems excessive to give equal or greater prominence to the single loss sustained by the British (and those injured), in the grisly arithmetic of war where the US has more than 20 times more troops deployed than the British, proportionately, the loss rates are roughly equivalent.
But, as we have remarked before, southern Iraq is supposed to be a quiet sector, without the sectarian fighting which is so damaging the central provinces. That the British casualty rate should be so high, therefore, is somewhat remarkable.
COMMENT THREAD
In today's Sunday Telegraph, Sean Rayment reports an officer in Afghanistan complaining that troops from Estonia … who were working alongside the Royal Marines were better equipped and had more reliable armoured vehicles than did British troops.
Er… would that be because the Estonians are operating ex-British Mambas, as reported by this blog on 8 January and The Booker column last week?
It would be too much to ask Rayment to read this blog but one might have thought that, at the every least, he could read his own newspaper – from which he might have learnt something.
In this week's edition, however, the Telegraph's defence correspondent also tells a sorry tale that all four of the Army's mine protected vehicles (MPVs), "used to extract injured troops from minefields in Afghanistan", have broken down. 
Commanders, we are told, regard the MPV (illustrated) as one of the most vital pieces of equipment in Afghanistan, where more than 10 million mines lie primed after 20 years of war. Since last June two servicemen have been killed in mine explosions and three have been seriously injured yet "one source" reveals that the farthest the MPVs have travelled outside Camp Bastion in Helmand has been just one mile. The same officer who complains about the Estonians is then cited as saying that "we need four more MPVs and we haven't got them".
Although Rayment doesn't say so (possibly because he does not know), he is actually referring to the vehicle known as the Tempest MPV (illustrated above), which we described last June. Ironically, as we described then, the Tempests were the replacements for the Mambas which have been sold off to the Estonians.
However, not all is lost. Despite the Telegraph conveying the view that there are only four MPV, readers of this blog will know that there are in fact eight vehicles (see also here), so somewhere (possibly in Saffron Waldron, where they were last seen) there are another four. It would not take very long to fly them out in a C-17 Globemaster, so perhaps the newspaper could not ask why this isn’t being done.
Even then, there is another option. Once again this is not "revealed" by the Telegraph, but as we know, the Tempest was effectively the prototype for what is now known as the Force Protection Cougar, a fact we revealed last June.
As we also know, the British have bought 100 Cougars under the name of Mastiff, some of which, we have been told, are destined for Afghanistan. These are described by the manufacturer as a "mine protected vehicle" so, far from there being only four MPVs, there are a considerable number on their way – perhaps as many at 30.
These, however – according to Rayment - are vital tools that have been refused by the Ministry of Defence. To that list, Rayment adds "night-vision equipment and thermal-imaging devices used to distinguish friend from foe" - the latter, as we know, being particularly useful for detecting suicide bombers.
Something else we know is that these is no shortage of night vision equipment – the shortage was in thermal imagers, which was "revealed" by the Daily Mail in November. But, as we reported on this blog on 9 January, plans are in place to increase this number, by the procurement of over 300 additional sights.
All that leaves little Sean with is the original litany of a shortage of helicopters and troops, which makes for rather a thin story, especially as he does not bring in the issues raised by the use of Apache helicopters to carry troops in last Monday's attempted rescue.
Fortunately, the Sunday Telegraph's alternative defence correspondent, Christopher Booker is on the ball.
COMMENT THREAD
Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has formally announced her intention to run for US president in 2008.
"I'm in and I'm in to win," she says.
Wasn't one Clinton enough?
COMMENT THREAD
On Monday the foreign ministers of the EU member states will meet to discuss various items, foremost of which will be a call from Italy's foreign minister for all EU members to push for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty.
This is at the behest of prime minister Prodi, who made such a song and dance about the 30 December execution of Saddam Hussein. Foreign minister Massimo D'Alema will urge EU countries at a to agree on a common strategy to help stop executions around the world.
At the same meeting, we are told the ministers will express strong concern about the "intolerable" situation in Darfur, and denounce air strikes on civilians by Sudanese government.
It is now estimated that at least 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes during the four-year-old conflict in Sudan’s remote western regions, although the EU has refused to accept the United States view that this is genocide.
Strangely, therefore, the EU is putting itself in a position where it is calling for an end to the killing of genocidal maniacs but it refusing to call for an end of the genocide in Africa. As always, it is nice to know that it has it priorities right. And our views on its action have not changed.
COMMENT THREAD
An interesting letter found its way into The Daily Telegraph today, from London-based David Leeder, vice chairman of the commission for integrated transport.
He observes that the campaign launched by the paper against road pricing is "curious". Why, asserts Leeder, "should tarmac be priced any differently from, say, electricity or telecommunications? If anything, it is in shorter supply, and yet the driver in a motorway jam will pay exactly the same in fuel, car tax and car insurance as a driver in rural Wales whizzing along an empty road." He continues:
The costs to the driver are the same, wherever he is and however much he uses the service. And yet we pay more for using electricity or the telephone at peak times because we think it right to charge more when something is in more demand. Most economists agree with this. So does Sir Rod Eddington, who has recently put the cost to the United Kingdom of our congested roads at £7 billion to £8 billion a year.
Charging for road use as we do any other service would quite simply make better use of the existing network. Some roads would be expensive – and some very, very cheap. At the Commission for Integrated Transport, we have established that replacing car and fuel tax with a system of variable national road pricing could cut congestion by 44 percent, traffic by five percent.
Faster and more reliable car journeys would bring huge benefits to the economy.
Mr Leeder, however, has missed the point. Firstly, as he indicates, the system is only likely to be accepted if motorists believe that road pricing will be used as an alternative to road taxation, and not simply as another revenue stream for a cash-strapped government. And very few people actually believe that it will be treated in any other way than as more cash for Gordon.
If we are to have a serious debate about the issue, though, many journalists need to up their game. In May last, we noted the extreme ignorance displayed in one newspaper about how a GPS-based pricing system worked. And yesterday, we saw another quite stunning example of the same ignorance.
As for the idea of jamming the signal, what would be the point? The enforcement system is entirely different from the registration and charging system. Road users are monitored by either by gantry-mounted cameras, with automatic number plate recognition (top right), or mobile camera units.
Another day, another UN scandal. This one is in its early stages. Well, no, the scandal has been going on for some time but its uncovery is in its early stages that are, as the Wall Street Journal points out, very reminiscent of the beginnings of what we have learnt to call the oil-for-food scam.
One lesson of Oil for Food, and its failure to lead to any serious reform, is that to some foreign policy elites there can be no such thing as a U.N. "scandal." That's because for them the U.N. is all about good intentions, and the hopes and dreams for peace, rather than about actual results. But it is precisely that forbearance that has allowed too many dictators to exploit the U.N. for their own purposes, and has brought Turtle Bay to its current low ebb. Getting to the bottom of Cash for Kim is one more chance to make the U.N. shape up, and to stop financing a global menace in the bargain.Melanie Kirkpatrick gives some of the gruesome details in an article that is worth reading right through.
In a Jan. 16 letter to UNDP Associate Administrator Ad Melkert, Ambassador Mark Wallace of the U.S. Mission to the U.N. lays out what American digging has found so far: The UNDP's program in the Democratic People's Republic "has for years operated in blatant violation of U.N. rules, served as a steady and large source of hard currency and other resources for the DPRK government with minimal or no assurance that UNDP funds and resources are utilized for legitimate development activities."So what sort of sums are we talking about? Hard to tell, according to Ms Kirkpatrick:
While the precise amount of hard currency supplied through UNDP isn't known, the documents suggest it has run at least to the tens of millions of dollars since 1998 and one source says it could be upward of $100 million. An internal 1999 audit notes a budget of $27.9 million for 29 projects. David Morrison, a UNDP spokesman, says "the overall size of the program" in North Korea has been reduced in recent years. While $22.2 million was budgeted for 2005-2006, the agency spent only $3.2 million last year and $2.1 million in 2005, he says. Programs fall into four areas: humanitarian assistance, public health, environment and agriculture, and the economy.Do we know at least what the money has gone on? Well, not really, as UN inspectors are not exactly welcome in North Korea.
A defense that the UNDP merely does humanitarian work--for the people of North Korea and not the government--isn't credible given the details exposed by Ms. Kirkpatrick. U.N. officials can't even say with confidence that all of the "development" projects exist because they haven't been allowed to visit their sites. Pyongyang officials insist on payments in cash that become fungible hard currency for the regime. Every U.N. dollar is one more that Kim doesn't have to raise from other (and often illegal) sources to pay off his generals or to buy a nuclear centrifuge.In other words, the usual messy situation has developed under cover of which hard cash is handed over to a very nasty dictator to be used as he sees fit.
But who needs a checkbook? According to the same audit, cash is the only means of payment that the government accepts. The UNDP does not use purchase orders in North Korea and local purchases--including those over $1,000--are made in cash. That includes local office costs, which are typically provided in kind by the host country. North Korea even charges rent, to the tune of $2 million a year, according to one source who has looked at the program.Does the new SecGen Ban Ki-moon watch Laurel and Hardy films, I wonder. If he does he could quote Ollie Hardy's line to his predecessor Kofi Annan: "That's another fine mess you got me into."
Meanwhile, there is little if any oversight of the UNDP's projects in North Korea, which, according to a U.N. document, numbered 30 last year. UNDP regulations require one official, on-site visit a year but since Pyongyang prohibits foreigners from visiting some of the project sites, that's another rule that's out the window. Audits of individual projects are spotty at best and in the case of "nationally executed" or "NEX" projects--that is, those run by the North Korean government with funds provided by the UNDP--they are often done by the government itself, giving new meaning to the adage about the fox running the henhouse.
Six British soldiers have been wounded in a series of attacks against Basra Palace camp (pictured), which came under fire last night three times from a mixture of mortars, rockets and small arms. One soldier was said to have been seriously injured in the attacks last night. Five others received lesser injuries.
This is according to The Times and agencies . It comes nearly three months after the Foreign Office was forced to take the humiliating step of evacuating civilian staff from the Consulate, reflecting the inability of the Army to defend a site that includes its main headquarters in southern Iraq.
Progressively, from 2003 when the Army took over the site, all they have done is add to the fortifications, giving the impression of a base under siege - which is precisely what it is, sending a signal to the insugents and the people of Basra that the British and coalition forces are not in control.
As a result, the passive defences have done absolutely nothing to stop the continued barrage of attacks which are reported to be occurring daily with, we are told, increasing accuracy.
This blog has questioned, again and again, the reluctance of the Army to take adequate counter-measures against rocket and mortar attacks and, in December, Tory back-bencher Ann Winterton asked the secretary of state for defence whether his Department had evaluated the existing Counter Battery Radar to be adapted to provide targeting data for the Phalanx C-RAM Anti Mortar system – one of the key defence weapons systems (pictured).
Minister of state Adam Ingram offered a typically complacent response, saying:
Initial assessments of the Phalanx C-RAM Anti Mortar system indicate that it is not appropriate for our current requirements, but we keep the operational situation under review. We have not therefore considered the adaptation of the Counter Battery Radar to provide targeting data for this system. We provide layered protection for British bases in Iraq and Afghanistan through a range of force protection methods.
So, unlike US and now Canadian bases, which are protected by this technology, it is "not appropriate" for British bases. We have "layered protection". We can hide under the beds, under the tables, in the bunkers…
Here we go again. After writing innumerable pieces saying that the European Union is "dead man walking", up it pops with another little jab at the member states' systems, sufficient to demonstrate that the "walking" bit is definitely right, and the Union is still alive and kicking.
We are talking here about vehicle tax and it was in April last year that we recorded EU commission action against Cyprus to purge it of the deadly sin of national discrimination, where it was charging higher taxes on imported second-hand cars than it was those bought new on the island.
Now Poland has also attracted the ire of the Community, with a report yesterday that the ECJ has ruled a Polish second-hand car tax illegal. This is exactly the same issue which confronted Cyprus, where the Polish government levied a higher tax on second-hand cars imported from other EU countries than on vehicles registered at home.
And, as with Cyprus, the Poles thought they had a good reason for their tax. It was intended as a mechanism to curb soaring imports of cheap second-hand cars from Western Europe, which were harming domestic sales of new vehicles.
However, this is not the end of the game, as the commission has launched infringement proceedings against Hungary, Denmark, Cyprus and Finland, saying their car taxes were incompatible with EU rules. EU newcomer Romania may also be added to the list.
Gradually – and it is exceedingly gradual – member states are being reminded that they lost their tax autonomy in certain key areas when they signed up to the EU.
And, to cement this lesson into place, EU finance ministers are to discuss possible harmonisation of car tax rules in May. With a proposed directive already on the table, and car taxation rules already under discussion, this begins to look like a done deal.
It is certainly one to watch.
COMMENT THREAD
... it's just we don't really like it when it does not go the way we want it to. Or so, clearly, reasons Martin Schulz, leader of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. He is not happy about what the EUObserver quaintly describes as the centre right being sort of in power in the European Union.
The reason for this mini-flap is that the former leader of the EPP, Hans-Gert Poettering (pictured below), has been elected as president of the European Parliament, thus becoming the third vaguely right-wing person to hold an important position in the EU. The others are Commission President Barroso, whose right-wing credentials are questionable or would be if one knew anything about his politics, and Chancellor Angela Merkel, temporary president of the European Union, rather handicapped by the grand coalition she heads back in her own country.
None of this is the slightest importance, politically speaking. Merkel is in that position only till the end of June and the Toy Parliament that Poettering presides over is not exactly a power in the land. In any case, what matters in EU politics is attitude to further integration and greater centralized regulation. In that there is not much to choose between the left and the right, the division being between the main groupings and the smaller ones.
Nevertheless, Martin Schulz is finding the situation disturbing.
Socialist leader Martin Schulz told EUobserver that while he was "not concerned" by the set-up, he added that "We're here to ensure that this will not change into a dangerous situation."Oooh-err! Those centre-right Germans and Portuguese can make any situation dangerous.
Immediately after the announcement of the 20-member group's formation, Mr Schulz wrote to leaders of the parliament's democratic groups, urging them to deny the new group posts under the proportional d'Hondt system of appointment.Oh dear, those European values again.
In his letter Mr Schulz says: "We must not abandon this Parliament, which symbolises the integration of Europe, to those who deny all European values."
Germany has set numerous goals in its 25-page programme for the EU presidency, including everything from securing Europe's energy supplies to outlawing Holocaust denial, improving Europeans' image of the bloc and getting serious about climate change.This is beginning to be seriously boring.
The front page of The Daily Mail today rightly complains about the politicians getting diverted onto the ultimate in trivia, a discussion on a certain television programme, thereby giving itself an excuse to devote its front page to just that issue.
It was the same show to which The Daily Telegraph print edition devoted a full page , complete with three photographs and a headline to a commentary piece which reads: "Repellent, crass and trivial: now this show has even become significant."
However, if you want something "repellent, crass and trivial", all you need to do is turn to page 18 of the print edition of the newspaper.
It is there that you will find an unbelievably amateur graphic to illustrate Monday's action of the Royal Marines "clinging" to Apache helicopters in an attempt to rescue their colleague. The picture shows two cartoon-esque overlays of soldiers lying on the top of the Apache wings as the manner in which they were supposedly conveyed to their rescue drama. The trouble is that it is fiction - total, absolute fiction.
For sure, the fiction was actually originated by the MoD itself which, in its own press release claimed that "four troops were strapped to the small side 'wings' of two Apaches, two to each helicopter." Interestingly, the MoD held the account off its website until the media had been able to chew it over.
However, no sooner had the media conveyed the MoD's claim and we put it up on our site than we began to look at the practicalities of this claim. It took very little time indeed to find out how it was done, that this was a recognised procedure to allow what is known as "self extraction", the rescue of downed crews by an Apache in an emergency.
The procedures has been carried out before, in the heat of action, at least twice, in April 2002 in Afghanistan and again, in Iraq, November 2004, the latter report complete with a photograph of how it was done (above left).
Should there be any doubt - making up for its original, inaccurate report (which is still up on the website), actually demonstrated the procedure yesterday, at its airbase in Middle Wallop, a film of which was shown by Channel 4 News. So, once again we confront the amateurism and idleness of the Telegraph which has devoted so much space to a fictional account of events. And nor was it alone: Sky News managed an equally ridiculous graphic, which it put up on its own website.
Wearily we find ourselves again repeating that, if you cannot trust the media on the small details, how can you trust them on anything. There is no magic filter that allows small-scale error but somehow ensures that other issues are treated with scrupulous accuracy. Accuracy and attention to detail is as much an attitude - a frame of mind.
More importantly, though, the space given to the graphic and the accompanying story (which was not found in the online edition), completely missed the point, the one which we so obviously asked in our own piece - why were there no proper troop-carrying assault helicopters to convey troops in what was a pre-planned attack?
Once again, it takes a letter writer to the newspaper, Mr Philip McLaughlin, of Ormskirk, Lancs, to remark that the episode showed that "our troops are still desperately short of sufficient resources in Afghanistan, especially helicopters." Mr McLaughlin, who has a son serving in the Royal Marines in Afghanistan, asks, "Why were there no suitable helicopters available for evacuation or reinforcement?"
To give it its due, for once, that issue has been picked up with a vengeance by the unofficial Army forum, which has been hosting a serious debate about the use of lightweight "cheap and cheerful" organic helicopter support, based on the MD500 series (pictured above).
This is something that the US (and other) forces have enjoyed for so long that operations without close helicopter support are scarely thinkable (and when they say close, they mean close).
That British forces are being deprived of this fundamental tool is nothing short of a scandal yet the media cannot bring itself to discuss the issue in anything that even approaches an adult manner. Either it is gossiping about the "repellent, crass and trivial" or it is falling, uncritically, for the MoD "Boy's Own" spin and ignoring the substantive issues.
As for the Conservative Party... where art thou Gerald?
COMMENT THREAD
For anyone who thought we might have been exaggerating about the emphasis given by some to global warming, we now lean that scientist Stephen Hawking has described climate change as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism.
Hawking made the remarks as other prominent scientists prepared to push the giant hand of its Doomsday Clock - a symbol of the risk of atomic cataclysm - closer to midnight.
These scientists - the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates – examined, as they had done in the past, human-made threats to civilization.
But this time they concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, they say, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.
This "deteriorating state of global affairs" led the Board of Directors to move the minute hand of the "Doomsday Clock" from seven to five minutes to midnight.
The move will mark the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward. Hawking justified the move by declaring that "as citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day."
I have to say though that we do agree with Hawking's warning… "we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks…". Accordingly, we do hereby declare Stephen Hawking and his fellow travellers as "unnecessary risks".
COMMENT THREAD
Spare a thought for the incoming "president" of the European Union. What can she say that is of the slightest novelty or interest to anybody, including herself?
Chancellor Angela Merkel laid out her country's plans for the next six months in her speech in the European Parliament. But a curious coincidence there was a great similarity between these plans and those laid out in July by the Finnish presidency and last January by whoever was taking over then.
Merkel began her speech by stressing diversity as a core European value, saying the EU had to be vigorous in defending its freedoms.The one thing that is slightly unusual is Merkel’s stress on left-wing intolerance as well as the right-wing variety. That should go down reasonably well with the East Europeans. After all, Merkel herself is from East Germany. Then again, even a cursory reading of European history would indicate that tolerance may not actually be the continent's soul or, at least, not much of the time.
"Tolerance," Merkel said in one of the speech's central lines, "is the soul of Europe." Among the liberties in need of protection, she cited freedom to voice opinions that upset others, freedom to believe or not to believe in religion and freedom of artistic expression.
"Europe," she said, "should never have the slightest understanding for intolerance, for violence by right-or left-wing extremists or violence carried out in the name of a religion."
"Tolerance," she added, "digs its own grave, if it does not defend itself against intolerance."
Merkel said the EU needed to cooperate more with the US on the issue of climate change in the efforts to achieve a global environmental treaty by the year 2012.Well, again, I am not so sure. Is terrorism not a problem that affects us all just a teensy-weensy bit? Presumably, having mentioned violence in the name of religion under the subject of intolerance (so hated by all Europeans) she does not feel she has to refer to the “t” word.
"Access to energy and protecting the climate," she said, "are two challenges affecting all of humanity in our age."
Merkel called for the issue to be resolved before the next EU parliamentary elections in 2009, warning that failure to do so would be "a historic mistake." She also stressed the need for the EU to have a foreign minister.Who is this we, paleface? In at least two countries the people had reached a decision. Which part of no does Chancellor Merkel not understand? In some other countries, such as Denmark, Ireland and Britain, the people have not yet been asked. What happens if they say no, as well? How is Chancellor Merkel going to reach her decisions, particularly on that foreign minister, whose job remains unclear as there is still no agreed EU foreign policy, despite endless discussions on the subject.
"The time for deliberation is over," she said. "We have to reach new decisions."
Benon Sevan, the former Chief of the UN’s Oil-for-Food scam … I mean, scheme … has been indicted in New York federal court for allegedly taking bribes under the scheme. The FBI, the US Attorney’s office and the Manhattan District Attorney have issued a press release to that effect.
According to the press release, Sevan allegedly received $160,000 generated from the sale of Iraqi oil under the program from one Ephraim Nadler, an associate who was also indicted, on behalf of the government of Iraq. The money was allegedly used to pay off overdue credit cards and bills.Mr Sevan, described by Fox News as a “career diplomat” but, really, a man who had worked his way through the UN for 40 years, is believed to be in Cyprus, with whom the United States does have an extradition treaty but it does not cover financial crimes.
Specifically, the two were charged with wire fraud, based on their depriving the United Nations of its right to Sevan's honest services; bribery concerning an organization — the United Nations that receives more than $10,000 annually from the federal government; and conspiracy to commit these offenses.
"It is unfortunate that the Independent Investigative Committee [IIC] has succumbed to massive political pressure," Eric L. Lewis, a Washington-based lawyer, said in a written statement. "After eight months of investigation with more than 60 employees and a $30 million budget, the IIC needed to produce a 'smoking gun.' As Mr. Volcker has conceded, there is no smoking gun. Mr. Sevan never took a penny."Claudia Rossett has a picture on her blog of the block of flats, Benon Sevan is supposed to be living in Nicosia though not the place where his aunt is supposed to have had her fatal accident.
The chief of Israel's armed forces, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, has resigned over the criticisms of the military's conduct of operations in last summer's war in Lebanon. His departure follows the completion of dozens of military inquiries into the largest Israeli action since 1982.
Although none of the inquiries concluded he should quit or be dismissed, he has still decided to fall on his sword, writing in his resignation letter to Defence Minister Amir Peretz, "For me, the word 'responsibility' is very significant … My concept of responsibility is what led me to remain in my position until this point, and to place this letter on your desk today."
Good bad, or indifferent as a general – and there are many different views – one cannot fault his style or his sense of honour. Not a few British politicians might take note.
COMMENT THREAD
I suspect that the name of Raoul Wallenberg will not mean much to most of our readers and a great deal to a few. If there was one undoubted hero of the Second World War in Europe, it is the Swedish diplomat.
Wallenberg was from a distinguished Swedish family with a degree in architecture and experience in banking.
On July 9, 1944 he was appointed to be secretary to the Swedish Legation in Budapest, where the rather belated Hungarian holocaust was in full swing. (It was belated because Admiral Horthy, while introducing some discriminatory laws against Jews, had not allowed deportations or mass murders. It was not till the German occupation of Hungary in the teeth of his protests, in March 1944 and the take-over by the local Nazis, the Nyilas party that the local Holocaust of Jews and Roma became possible.)
Wallenberg used his position to issue Swedish protective documents, the famous Schutz-passen to numerous Jews. As it happens, these documents were not legally valid but were accepted by Hungarian and German authorities and their holders were allowed to go unmolested.
Jewish refugees, particularly children, were sheltered by Wallenberg in various official Swedish buildings and he is credited with saving many thousands, though one suspects, that some of the higher figures are an exaggeration.
Wallenberg was not the only one to save Jewish children in Hungary. There were several Lutheran Pastors who established children’s homes and colonies. All of them had to go into exile in 1947 – 48 as the Communists took over.
Wallenberg’s fate is more tragic. On January 17, 1945 as the Soviet Army fought its way through Budapest, he was arrested on presumed suspicion of being an American spy. There has never been the slightest evidence for anything of the kind, though, to my certain knowledge some Western historians have tried hard to support this theory.
Another theory, which I heard as a teenager, was that Wallenberg had started collecting information about the treatment of Hungarian civilians, particularly women, by the Soviet soldiers and, more to the point, the Soviet secret police as it followed the Red Army.
Be that as it may, Wallenberg disappeared together with his driver, taken first to the Lubyanka then to the much feared Lefortovo prison. There were supposed sightings of the man later on in various prisons and labour camps but none substantiated. The Soviets announced in 1957 that Wallenberg had died ten years before.
It is one of the more disgraceful aspects of Western kow-towing to the Soviet Union in the immediate post-War years that greater pressure was not put on the Soviet authorities for the release of this heroic man who had stared down Adolf Eichmann and Gerhard Schmidthuber.
COMMENT THREAD
Four British Royal Marines, we are told by agencies and others, have staged a dramatic rescue attempt in Afghanistan, strapped to the wings of Apache attack helicopters.
This followed the death on Monday of Royal Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Ford, who was shot when more than 200 British troops attacked a Taliban fort in Jugroom in the southern Helmand province.
At the time, Ford's fate was unknown to his comrades who discovered him missing. A rescue was planned using Viking carriers but, when the Apaches became available, they decided the fast attack helicopters provided the best opportunity to rescue him.
Two marines each were strapped to the wings of two Apache helicopters, with a third Apache and several ground units providing covering fire. After landing at the site of the earlier battle, the four soldiers found Ford dead, but were able to recover his body.
According to UK military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Rory Bruce, this is believed to be the first time British forces have ever tried this type of rescue mission. "It was an extraordinary tale of heroism and bravery of our airmen, soldiers and marines who were all prepared to put themselves back into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade," Bruce said.
That is as may be or, to put it slightly different, c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. This was an extraordinarily risky venture as the two troop-carrying Apaches would have had their mobility heavily restricted and would, therefore, have been extremely vulnerable during the whole operation. And this would not just have been a question of lives at risk. Apache helicopters are extremely expensive - ours costing £60 million apiece - and any loss would have been a propaganda coup for the Taliban.
Without in any way denigrating the bravery and determination of our troops, however, this points up the dangerous lack of equipment available to our soldiers in Afghanistan, especially helicopters.
But here, we are not talking about Chinook-type transports that the media and the bandwagon-jumping Tories have been calling for. The shortage here, as we have pointed out again and again, is in light tactical helicopters (example pictured above). The nearest thing we have is the highly unsatisfactory Lynx of which, apparently, we have only four in theatre.
To an extent, we have been able to get by because our allies have been stepping in with support, and the Americans have been particularly generous with air support and the loan of helicopters (another example of which is illustrated – this one showing Lt Gen Graeme Lamb departing a US Black Hawk helicopter in which he has just hitched a ride) so much so that the British forces have acquired the title "the borrowers".
On this one occasion though, it seems the Americans were not there to bail us out so we had to rely on the amazing bravery of our soldiers and airmen. This should not be happening. We should not have to rely on this simply to make up for deficiencies in basic equipment. The time is long overdue for Blair to turn his rhetoric into action.
COMMENT THREAD
Down in the smoke and very late back... normal service will resume later today.
Whenever I get particularly depressed about the state of the world, which all too frequently coincides with my reading an article or two in one of the British newspapers, particularly the Daily Telegraph (I see the Guardian as a charmingly old-fashioned institution, all delicate and cobwebby) all I have to do is read some of the comments on the articles and I begin to feel that not all is lost.
The truth is that every fewer people seem to be taken in by the great and the good and are not afraid to say so. This is definitely the case with the comments to Lord Wilson of Dinton’s somewhat self-serving piece in today’s Telegraph.
His rather grand assurances that practically everything is going well with the civil service, reforms are being put into place and the so-called politicization of it under this government has been contained are all met with disdain from readers. I shall not quote from the responses as it is better to read them in full but I do have one or two quibbles with Lord Wilson’s assertions.
Of course, the suggestion that the numbers of civil servants have gone down or, rather, as he quite cunningly puts it, went down in the nineties and have, one must assume, stayed down, is nonsense. We know that there are ever more of them and, when it is not directly employed bureaucrats we talk about, then it is quangos and agencies staffed by formerly directly employed bureaucrats.
Nor do I, or others, find the following particularly impressive:
The Service has done its best to change while remaining true to its traditional values of integrity, selection on merit and political impartiality. Work by Mori shows that over the past two decades, when trust in most professions has not changed, there has been a noticeable rise in trust in civil servants.Mori must have interviewed an audience made up exclusively of civil servants.
A proper analysis of the performance of government over the last half century would be instructive. There have been real achievements: sustained peace and prosperity for more than 50 years, improvements in the macro-management of the economy, and many areas of particular success such as, say, the privatisation programme or the performance of our Armed Forces. Civil servants can claim a part in these achievements.I must say I am getting a little tired of all these people claiming that they are responsible for the peace and prosperity of the last 50 years. If it is not the EU, it is the civil service, though, of course, there is a close connection between the two. All those achievements have been accomplished despite the civil service and in the teeth of its determined opposition. As for the performance of our Armed Forces, as undermined by our Civil Servants, I refer our readers to the numerous postings done by my colleague on the subject.
But there have also been areas, which have proved intractable. Health, transport, education and law and order – the top priorities of new Labour 10 years ago – are good examples. Is it just that the quality of civil servants is lower in these areas than in those which have been successful? There is no evidence to support this. The answer is more complex.
It drops the conventional assumption that politicians and bureaucrats try to serve only ‘the public interest’ and more realistically assumes that, as elsewhere, they try to serve their own interests by, for example, re-election and empire-building. The vote motive in politics is the profit motive in industry.With the difference that the profit motive creates wealth for the rest of the country and beyond it.
In bureaucracies self-interest would tend to coincide with the public interest if, as in industry, they disclosed more information and were subject to competition from other bureaucracies and private producers.In other words we are not talking of decisions being taken at the “appropriate level”, as decided by the civil servants themselves but genuine openness and competition. And up with that no civil servant will put unless force is exerted.
There has been a great deal of what might be called kerfuffle around the formerly secret documents, now unearthed, that show Guy Mollet, then Prime Minister of France, proposed, firstly, a union between France and Britain and, when that was greeted with pursed lips and raised eyebrows, for France to become part of the Commonwealth.
As it happens, Sir Anthony Eden, then Prime Minister of Britain, rejected both suggestions, no doubt with some bemusement. Had he not done so, neither idea could possibly have got through either Westminster or the Assemblée Nationale. So, that’s really that. The story is of consequence only as a possible counterfactual analysis: what if France had become a member of the Commonwealth in 1956?
The only interesting part of this story, in so far there is anything interesting in it, is why did Mollet come up with such a harebrained and rather desperate scheme. After all, nobody had treated Churchill's suggestion of an Anglo-French union in 1940 particularly seriously.
Mollet is generally described as an Anglophile though as someone on the left of French politics his Anglophilia remains somewhat questionable. He does seem to have been impressed and grateful for the help Britain had given the French resistance during World War II.
There is the suggestion that he wanted to use the British card in his negotiations with West Germany over the Common Market. Unfortunately, the British card was no longer in the pack, having dropped out in 1955.
A more serious problem in the autumn of 1956 was France's involvement in North Africa and the Middle East. The Algerian War was beginning to take its toll in political and economic terms and the French suspected rightly that Gamal Nasser, the self-appointed ruler of Egypt was supplying the FLN with arms and ammunition in the name of the anti-colonial struggle.
As a left-winger, Mollet had previously opposed French colonialism in North Africa and welcomed all chances of negotiation with the FLN. As Prime Minister, he announced that the rebels had to be defeated first and negotiated with afterwards. Possibly, as one who had opposed the war previously, he felt anxious to prove his credentials as a strong leader.
France was still a staunch ally of Israel with a left-wing government being particularly strongly supportive. (How times change.)
When Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal in July, France was considerably more gung-ho than Britain in her desire to punish the upstart leader. It was France that pushed the initially reluctant Israelis towards a military plan.
September 1956 was a time when Britain once again seemed to be dragging her feet. British soldiers had left the Suez zone. Initial support for a military solution to the crisis was waning. Israel was worried that she would find herself in the unwelcome position of the fall guy. And the war in Algeria was going on.
Mollet came up with his rather desperate proposal in the hopes that Britain would be tied more firmly into the French struggle to hang on to Algeria and other parts of North Africa, nipping the growing anti-colonial fight led by Egypt, if not precisely in the bud then not too long after early flowering.
The ideas were rejected and the Suez adventure ended badly, not least because of lack of American support. As it happens, the Israelis were successful beyond their wildest dreams in the Sinai but Nasser and other Arab leaders chose to ignore that, concentrating on the humiliation of the two colonial powers, France and Britain.
It was after the Suez debacle that Konrad Adenauer told Mollet that he should make "Europe" his revenge for Suez and the negotiations proceeded apace. Britain chose to learn another lesson which, given the much closer cultural links with the United States, made perfect sense: a revival and fostering of the "special relationship".
The Algerian War went on to its disastrous ending and Nasser's refusal to accept that Egypt had been militarily defeated in Sinai led almost inexorably to the catastrophe (from the Arab point of view) of the Six-Day War in 1967.
Would any of it have been different if Mollet’s proposals had been taken seriously?
COMMENT THREAD
The picture shows a military convoy of Iraqi army Kurdish troops heading from its base in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah towards Baghdad. This is the 3rd Brigade, 4th Division – note the Polish-built Dzik-3 APCs that we have seen before, part of the new equipment which is filtering into a newly invigorated army, which is being seen more and more on the streets.
The fact that the Kurds are moving in on Baghdad is also significant. Generally, they have tended to stand separate from the travails in the capital and, with additional US convoys pouring over the border of Kuwait into Iraq (pictured below), Bush's "surge" strategy is beginning to take shape.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph's Thomas Harding seems to be just waking up to the idea that "Iran is taking control of Basra by stealth". Well I never! But for the Telegraph, how would we ever have known that?
Not for Harding the general media, commentators, local news agencies and other sources that have been saying this for months and years. This self-important correspondent has "Iraqi intelligence sources" which have "disclosed to The Daily Telegraph" that Iran plans to move in once the British troops move out, backing the local militias in taking over over the political and security structures, undoing four years of work that has cost 129 British lives and billions of pounds.
Only the Iraqi army stands in the way of the murderous militias, writes Harding. And all the evidence we have seen so far is that, when faced with the militias, it is not up to the job, without very close support from the British Army. If, unlike the Americans, numbers are to be reduced and the rest of our troops are forced to skulk in their barracks, "on standby", then the outcome looks rather predictable.
On the other hand, if a weakened and ill-equipped British Army does step in, it can expect to be caught in the cross-fire and take significant casualties – as it has every time it has sought to take a proactive stance in southern Iraq. Without the numbers and the equipment to limit casualties, one can then expect local commanders to resort to casualty avoidance measures, reducing the British presence – and effectiveness – on the streets.
Thus writes Harding: "When it withdraws from the city the Army can only watch and hope, but it appears there are greater powers at work. Iran has always known Britain's presence was transient and is well prepared for the departure – and for the next round of almost inevitable conflict." This may be a statement of the "bleedin' obvious", but it nevertheless sums up the situation which, as Iraqi and American troops pour into Baghdad, points up the contrast and the dereliction of the British government's approach - to say nothing of the total retreat of the Conservative Party.
COMMENT THREAD
How the Independent must have loved posting this headline: "Gypsy-haters, holocaust-deniers, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-semites: the EU's new political force."
This, as written by Stephen Castle, the paper's EU correspondent, records
"Europe's far-right, xenophobic and extremist parties" crossing a new threshold yesterday, winning more speaking time, money, and political influence in the European Parliament than ever before.
Claiming the backing of 23 million Europeans, ultra-nationalists secured enough MEPs to make a formal political grouping in the EU Parliament, surmounting the hurdle that requires 20 MEPs from at least six member states, all sharing a general political philosophy.
Called the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS) group, this has been made possible by the admission of Romania and Bulgaria in January. Their "far-right" MEPs have joined together with "hardline nationalists and extremists" from France, Austria and Italy, plus one from the UK, former UKIP MEP Ashley Mote, now sitting as an independent.
Mote, therefore, is being held partly responsible by The Times for helping this far-right groups to get funding, a cool €1 million each year for "administrative expenses".
Prominent members of the far-right alliance include Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of Benito Mussolini (pictured), Frank Vanhecke, leader of Belgium's separatist Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, and Andreas Mölzer, a former aide to the Austrian far-right leader, Jörg Haider.
In their haste to declaim this new group, however, none of the media seem to have realised that, in branding it "far right" and "extremist" - a position led by the BBC - they can no longer so easily tar the UK Independence Party with the same brush. Unwittingly, they have positioned UKIP – and its agenda of leaving the EU – that bit closer to the "moderate" centre.
Although having been expelled from it, Ashley Mote has in fact done a far greater service to his former Party than he could have, had he remained in it.
COMMENT THREAD
Today's the day, three hundred years ago, that the Scottish parliament ratified an Act of Union which led, on 1 May 1707, to the formal establishment of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
It was actually no big deal as the two countries of England and Scotland had shared a king ever since 1603 when, with the death of Queen Elizabeth I, James VI, King of Scots, became King of England. Some will say that we have been subject to Scottish misrule, on and off, ever since and are about to undergo another period.
Nevertheless, the Great Britain established as a legal entity in 1707 actually ceased to be in 1801 when it was superseded by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, brought about by the Act of Union of 1800 which had been enacted after the suppression of the Irish Rebellion in 1798.
That then changed again in 1922 with the grant of independence for the Republic of Ireland, after the partition of six of the nine counties of Ulster. These remained in the UK, formalised by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921, although the current title of the UK – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – was not officially adopted until 1927.
But, if the 1707 Act of Union is now being celebrated so loudly by the chattering classes, it is perhaps only because – after 300 years – the Union itself is supposedly under threat, as politicians north of the border seek a return of an "independence" that had not actually existed for a hundred years before that.
The mutterings across the border – and the limited devolution settlement introduced by the Scotland Act of 1998, which reintroduced a separate Scottish parliament and which have created no end of inconsistencies in England, not least the so-called "Lothian Question" - have led to calls for a similar parliament in England. And so, the chattering classes launch into yet another debate, with the great sheeple following.
What, of course no one mentions is that other great act of union which, coincidentally, has its fiftieth anniversary this year. That was the Treaty of Rome, creating a European Economic Community, a proto-European state. This we joined in 1973, with our own act of union, the European Communities Act 1972, which effectively signed away our independence.
That, in the view of many, including this blog, renders nugatory any discussion about devolution and separate parliaments in England, Wales and Scotland – and Northern Ireland when and if they can get their act together. As long as the bulk of our law is made in Brussels (and Strasbourg) it matters little whether we have additional talking shops in the provinces of a greater European Union.
And, if one is genuinely interested in devolution, then the power needs not to be devolved to Edinburgh, Cardiff and an English parliament, presumably in London. From here, 200 miles from the capital, we have no more love for London on some issues than we do Brussels. Genuine devolution would be the return of powers to local authorities, the central government acting more properly as a supervisor and guarantor of fair play than as ruler and administrator.
But, as long as we suffer the long shadow of Brussels, this all remains idle talk. What is so remarkable though is the willingness, apparently, of some Scots nats, to accept the yoke of Brussels while rejecting the rule of London. That is not so much idle, as mad.
COMMENT THREAD
There has been much publicity of late on how the Royal Navy has been cut to the bone – to the extent that it is now scarcely if at all a credible force. Yet, despite that, Britain – under the tutelage of Tony Blair – is still determined to play its part in prosecuting the war on terror, alongside its ally the United States.
To that effect, The Times tells us, the allies are beefing up their naval forces in the Gulf to "go after" Iran. Britain's contribution is the two 600-ton minehunters HMS Blyth and HMS Ramsey (pictured above), which will remain in the Gulf for an unusually-long two-year mission "to keep shipping routes open in the event that Iran attempts to block oil exports".
The American contribution is the 97,000 ton USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier, with its escort group, which entered the Gulf in December (carrier shown above right). It will shortly be joined by the 100,000 ton USS John C. Stennis with its carrier group (carrier shown above left). This is the first time since the invasion of Iraq four years ago that the US has deployed two carrier strike groups in the Gulf at one time.
Some interesting facts about the Stennis: it is constructed with 60,000 tons of structural steel; if lined up end-to-end, the bed mattresses carried on the ship would stretch more than nine miles; the vessel also carries 28,000 sheets and 14,000 pillow cases and has 2,000 telephones. Each of its two anchors weighs 30 tons.
The disparity says it all. Britain a naval power? Who do we think we are kidding?
COMMENT THREAD
It would be possible to accuse me of mummification in that I raised the question of whom did the fragrant Samantha Cameron ask to stay with her children when her nanny became ill and she had to attend one of the Conservatives’ gleaming fund-raising soirees. But I think I am in the clear. I was not the one to raise the subject of the nanny first and, having brought up a child without benefit of nannies, I know what happens to most people when nanny/babysitter drops out for whatever reason: you make desperate phone calls to friends and other parents, calling in favours and offering babysitting in return.
This sort of thing is taken for granted and the only reason one even thinks about it all with regard to the Camerons is because they do tend to bring the subject of their family – three children, one of whom is disabled and another a baby – into the public arena, as if having children and bringing them up somehow makes up for lack of experience in other matters and lack of understanding of various political issues. (Just exactly how is the Boy-King going to get that opt-out of the Social Chapter? He would have to change the consolidated treaties for that.)
For some reason having children has become the only criterion that is regarded at all seriously by numerous people in politics, the media and, I have to admit, even among ordinary people interested in politics.
As so many other developments, this has gone a good deal further in the United States, particularly on the left of the spectrum. The latest display of mummification is the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, lifting her gavel of office and announcing that this was all for the children.
Ensuring that the House of Representatives acts well and responsibly is for the children? Nothing to do with the American Constitution?
Since then we have had tearful comments about Bush being unable to understand the pain of people whose children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews are in Iraq. Why has he not sent his daughters there, sob these people. Well, because he cannot send his daughters anywhere. He cannot order them to enlist, as James Taranto points out in the Wall Street Journal summary of Best on the Web.
We've remarked frequently upon the tendency of war opponents to infantilize American servicemen …We have seen a similar development in this country, though we often call it Dianafication – a general over-sentimentalization of every issue. Partly, I suspect, that is because the British are living up to their reputation of the nation that really does not like children very much and partly there is an inborn sentimentality in political thinking in this country.
In truth, members of the military are adults who have made an adult commitment. They deserve to be respected for their maturity, not patronized as victims. It dishonors them to use their sacrifice as a political cudgel.
The latest display of mummification in the United States is Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice because she has no children. Apparently, it is no longer possible to discuss political or strategic matters if you cannot display your credentials as a parent. The junior senator from California apparently believes that an accomplished, seasoned diplomat, a renowned scholar and an adviser to two presidents like Condoleezza Rice is not fully qualified to make policy at the highest levels of the American government because she is a single, childless woman.Certainly, we have all had occasion to criticize Secretary Rice, not least for her tendency, shared by most of her predecessors, to accept the State Department's wisdom. But her private life is of little import compared to her achievements in public.
"Those (Tory) ideas are profound and enduring: freedom under the law, personal responsibility, sound money, strong defence and national sovereignty…" says the Boy King (not pictured – I thought I would save you the trauma).
"It is why we support the replacement of Britain's nuclear deterrent and have led the campaign for better conditions for Forces families… It is why we will restore Britain's opt-out from the European Social Chapter, and it is why we have announced our withdrawal from the federalist European People's Party."
"Our new Movement for European Reform is a pan-European campaign to promote a positive vision of an outward-looking Europe rather than an inward-looking EU obsessed with its own bureaucracy. We will continue to oppose an EU constitution that is about transferring power away from nation states and we will keep the pound as our currency."
So. The girlie boy's idea of "strong defence" is continuing the deterrent (good) and leading "the campaign for better conditions for Forces' families."
Then our Dave thinks that, because the British had an opt-out to the Social Chapter – which Blair gave up in 1997, he can go to the colleagues and ask for it back. Doesn’t he know about the ratchet effect – that surrender of powers is a one-way process? There is no provision in the Treaties for reinstating an opt-out. So what will he do when the colleagues say no?
As for getting out of the EPP, that is not until 2009 – which means you MEPs have another two years funding a group run by a French crook. Nice one Dave!
His Movement for European Reform is moribund – this blog has more traffic in a day that its website has had in total. As the Bruges Group puts it, more kindly, it is a fig-leaf. And the Boy will continue to oppose the EU constitution and the single currency? But so will Gordon.
What are you offering Dave?
COMMENT THREAD
I promised to respond to Gerald Howarth's e-mail, which we published on the blog yesterday. The exercise is useful and valid, not least because Gerald, as shadow minister for defence, is a senior Tory politician and his views give a remarkable insight into the mindset. So, here goes.
From the outset, it must be said of the man that it must take a real in-depth understanding of the political process in order to send an e-mail in which you have insulted the co-editor of one of the leading British political blogs, and then give the recipient carte blanche to circulate it. Not that I have any problem about being insulted in such a way as clearly, in Gerald, we have a master at work, and we can only stand back and admire his political skills.
Read more...
COMMENT THREAD
So, it's to be Nicolas Sarkozy versus Segolene Royal in the French presidential elections - plus, of course, le Pen. Should be an interesting match but the smart money is on Royal... and Sarkozy - watch out for the revolving door.
COMMENT THREAD
As with a woman preaching and a dog walking on his hind legs – so it is with discussing FRES. It is not done well – to misquote Samuel Johnson - but you are surprised to find it done at all.
So, we give one small cheer to The Sunday Times which today runs an article on the Future Rapid Effects System. But it does have to be a very small cheer indeed because it is not done at all well.
Written by Peter Almond, a journalist we have met before, the piece is headed, in a wholly misleading fashion, "Army faces 5-year wait for armoured carriers", betraying the profound ignorance of the media on this subject – an ignorance shared by many others.
Quite how ignorant is immediately apparent from Almond's opening which makes such a huge sweeping statement that it makes one cringe, writing as he does: "the army's plans for a new generation of armoured troop and missile carriers costing £14 billion face new delays of at least five years, undermining its ability to fight land battles overseas."
The assumption, of course, is that FRES will actually enhance the Army's ability to fight land battles overseas, which is far from the case. In fact, as we have argued, FRES could actually be a wrong turning, saddling with the Army with extremely expensive high-tech equipment that is not fit for purpose – a purpose that nobody has bothered to define.
Therein lies the real story but, as always, we see these gifted and no doubt highly paid hacks miss the real story and go running after hares. In Almond's dim little world, the story is thus how the proposed 3,000 combat vehicles which form the core of the land component of FRES "will not enter service until at least 2017", five years later than the Ministry of Defence (MoD) forecast, potentially embarrassing the government.
Almond then tells us that General Sir Michael Jackson had told troops in 2003 that they would only have to wait until 2009 for the vehicles, an assurance given "to soften the blow from the previous round of cuts when many historic regiments were abolished."
What a stupid statement that is, going well beyond mere ignorance. The "historic regiments" were abolished to make way for FRES, you idiot, so how could assurances on the timing of FRES "soften the blow"?
The perversity of it all though is that, in his own account, Almond has the making of the real story – one that links directly back to the debate which Blair is seeking, on the nature and rôle of the Armed Forces.
In that context, he - Almond - tells us that the delay has been caused by a reassessment of what the Army will need, caused by experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. The original plan had been to provide a lightweight fleet of vehicles that could quickly be flown to troublespots. But the experience of roadside bombs and rockets has highlighted the need for heavier armour.
Furthermore, writes Almond, senior planners say that with so much money and attention being devoted to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan the government's blueprint to transform the armed forces into a nimble "expeditionary" structure is coming unstuck. He then cites a cites senior planner saying,
The whole concept of the 1998 strategic defence review was to push for forces to rush out to trouble zones, restore order and return … Instead, we're stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.But that is the crucial point – FRES is designed for the "wham, bam, thank you mam!" type of expeditionary warfare exemplified in the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) concept – a quick in and out, with plenty of fireworks in between. The real world, however, is the warfare in which our troops are engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and, if that represents the future, we do not need FRES at all. In fact, FRES would be a dangerous diversion of funds. If we spend £14 billion on this, we are unlikely to have the money to spend on equipping the Army for the real wars.
During a closely fought general election, The Sunday Telegraph tells us, "those of a Conservative disposition will need to stick together if Gordon Brown is not to win by default."
This is in a leader headed, The fatal fringe, which is backed up by the Boy King-groupie-in-chief, Matthew d’Ancona, who complains bitterly that "there are Tories who would rather lose than change". And thus is the newspaper recording the Tories waking up to the threat of the minnows and the Boy King’s latest attempt to plug the leaks in the dyke.
Significantly, the line exactly matches that of Gerald Howarth whose views we published on this blog yesterday and who warns us that a victory for Gordon Brown "will be assured unless people get behind the Tory party and rally to our flag".
How interesting it is that these sophisticates - who understand the political process so well - simply do not get it: we, the electorate, as my colleague is so fond of saying, owe you politicians nothing. If you want our vote, you are going to have to earn it. The message "vote for us or Gordon Brown will get in" is not enough - not anything like enough.
It didn't work last time (pictured) - and it isn't going to work this time. To think otherwise is a fatal arrogance that is going to lose you the election.
COMMENT THREAD
In today's Sunday Telegraph website, you will see this picture. Look at it and then the caption.
Doesn't the paper know that paras are not awarded the coveted red beret until after they have completed their parachute training?
An obscure German politician, of whom only a handful of people in the UK can have heard, is hardly going to set the world on fire when he tells us that democracy is in danger because of the direction in which the European Union is developing.
However, he is Roman Herzog, former judge and German president between 1994 and 1999, and he says it in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag today, where he writes, "EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers."
What is more, Herzog has a co-author, the director of the Centre for European Policy (CEP) in Freiburg, who goes by the name of Lueder Gerken. And among their criticisms is that the German parliament was not involved in European Union legislation as required by the German constitution.
They also say the European Union is undergoing "creeping centralization" and acquiring further powers, "often without due justification". The EU constitution comes in for criticism as well, as reinforcing the centralising tendency.
Merkel apart, I suspect there are a large number of German politicians who agree with Herzog. And when enough start saying the same things, we may start seeing cracks appearing in the edifice.
COMMENT THREAD
One British soldier has been killed in Iraq and a Royal Marine has been killed in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has said. The soldier died while on duty in Basra and the marine was killed during operations in the southern province of Helmand. There are no further details, as yet.
These are the first British combat fatalities this year. And it is a coincidence that it's the 13th today.
We saw it as a genuine attempt to conduct a debate. But it says something of Independent that Blair's lecture yesterday was seen in a completely different light.
Heading its front-page piece, "Shoot the messenger: PM blames media for anti-war mood", in its eyes, the most significant thing about the lecture was Tony Blair turning the blame for his "disastrous military campaigns" in the Middle East on anti-war dissidents and the media.
Pursuing that message, the newspaper selected two passages from the lecture, quoting them in full. It thus had the prime minister saying:
[Islamic terrorists] have realised two things: the power of terrorism to cause chaos, hinder and displace political progress especially through suicide missions; and the reluctance of Western opinion to countenance long campaigns, especially when the account it receives is via a modern media driven by the impact of pictures.and…
They now know that if a suicide bomber kills 100 completely innocent people in Baghdad, in defiance of the wishes of the majority of Iraqis who voted for a non-sectarian government, then the image presented to a Western public is as likely to be, more likely to be, one of a failed Western policy, not another outrage against democracy.It then had Blair acknowledging the public backlash against the Iraq war, citing his comment that: "Public opinion will be divided, feel that the cost is too great, the campaign too long, and be unnerved by the absence of 'victory' in the normal way they would reckon it."
In seeking to blame the media for what he sees as the growing distaste of the British public for war, the Prime Minister is quite simply wrong. If there is, as he suggested, a crisis of confidence in the benefits of military force, it is one that he has brought upon himself.It is said of autism that its sufferers lack empathy. They lack the capability to see anything from the point of view of another. And here, The Independent sees in Blair's lecture a direct attack. As it can do no wrong, and has never done wrong Blair must be attacked. The one thing that cannot be allowed, of course, is a debate.
We are not looking at a general crisis of confidence in the use of British military force, fostered by the sensation-driven modern media. It is a particular crisis of confidence precipitated by the débâcle of Iraq. For all Mr Blair's personal salesmanship at the time - the weapons of mass destruction and all that - this began as a highly unpopular war, and it remains one.
It is astounding that, almost four years on, Mr Blair still fails to understand that the mission is precisely the problem. And his address contained all the old deceits. He conflated, as he habitually does, the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though the one had UN approval and the other, crucially, did not. He spoke about the qualitatively different threat we face after 9/11, as though the prime reason for invading Iraq was terrorism. And yet again he rejected all suggestion that Britain's presence in Iraq might be a factor in the alienation of young British Muslims.
To this catalogue he has now added the notion that media coverage is turning the British public off the use of "hard" power. The voters may indeed be more wary of military interventions in future. And so may the MPs who represent them. If this is so, however, it will not be because the media have willed it, but because of the fatal misjudgement of a Prime Minister.
My latest piece on defence was forwarded by a reader to shadow defence minister Gerald Howarth, to which he responded with some alacrity. We publish this, in its entirety (barring one tiny edit), below:
We have, as always, opened up a forum thread and tomorrow we will post our own response, building in the best of the comments posted.Richard North (whose pamphlet on Galileo I launched at the House of Commons) has some good ideas but gives no credit to anything anyone else does and has little understanding of the - often extremely frustrating - political process, or of the power of the Opposition to get the media to focus on the issues we are tackling. Let me make a few observations which you are entirely free to circulate:
The Opposition has been doing precisely that - opposing. Not mindlessly, but intelligently where we believe the Government is wrong. You are probably not aware, but Liam Fox held a press conference on Tuesday which was extremely well-attended, including by George Jones of the Telegraph. However, very little coverage followed, the Telegraph running not a single column inch. At the press conference not only did Liam spell out forcefully in a series of PowerPoint displays the extent to which the Armed Forces have been betrayed by this Government, but when asked if he would increase defence resources if he were Secretary of State today, he replied emphatically 'yes', thus pre-empting the Prime Minister's remarks yesterday. He also said he saw no reason at all to close either of the South Coast dockyards, currently under threat from Labour. And he was honest enough to acknowledge that the last Conservative government's cuts in defence went too far, although of course not as far as Labour, let alone the Liberals, wanted at the time.
We are constantly pointing out that Brown has betrayed the Armed Forces by failing to fund the endless military operations undertaken at Blair's behest and it was nauseating yesterday to see the Prime Minister promising increased defence spending when we know that every aspect of military activity is currently under threat and having to make cuts in advance of the Comprehensive Spending Review now underway across government.
I could go on and on giving examples of what we have been doing, but let me give you just three specifics: I think I was the first to raise the issue of armoured vehicles which I did on my return from Iraq in September 2005. I told John Reid privately that he had to do something to get better protection for the troops facing roadside bombs (privately because I represent a garrison town and know how careless politicians can cause increased anxiety). He told me that they were aware of the problem and actively seeking solutions, but would not be specific. Since then, we have raised the matter repeatedly (see my website, www.geraldhowarth.com which carries my views on the issue), as have many fellow MPs. As North suggests, the RG-31 (on which I was briefed at the Farnborough Air Show in July) is one of the most robust, but the Government has rejected this solution and gone for the US Cougar, known in the UK as the Mastiff, which I understand (I am not an expert in this field, nor I suspect is North) is similar in performance. In July the Government announced it would acquire 108 Mastiffs which would be 'fully operational' by the end of the year. It is we, the Opposition, who have established that this has not happened, only 4 being delivered into theatre. We told the press about this latest failure this week, and I gather The Sun carried the story prominently on page 2 yesterday, but it was downgraded in the final edition.
As far as the Pinzgauer is concerned, this (now) US-owned British company makes - in Guildford - an all-terrain troop carrier widely in service with the Army. I have indeed driven it at Long Valley in my constituency and it seems to me an excellent vehicle. However, it has no armour and therefore suffers from the same limitations as the Land Rover. In his July announcement the Defence Secretary also said they were ordering 'uparmoured' Pinzgauers, to be called Vector. This is a brand new vehicle but it does not pretend to have the armour of the Mastiff. It is my view that a range of armoured vehicles is required and that where the Government is guilty of betrayal is in failing to order off-the-shelf available heavily armoured equipment, such as the RG-31.
Secondly, there is the problem of troop air transport. The RAF is operating clapped-out 40 year old VC-10s and 35 year old Tristars half of which we have just established (through Parliamentary Questions, our principal means of trying to get information) are not fit for purpose. We have repeatedly raised the issue in Parliament and tried to get the press interested. In fact, The Telegraph did eventually run a story last week, so after 9 months of bashing away we obtained some coverage.
Thirdly, on procurement failures, it was we who were responsible for exposing the abject failure on the Landing Ships Docks project, praised by Blair yesterday, where the cost of the 4 ships has doubled thanks to appalling management by the MoD who awarded the principal contract to Swan Hunter. We ran a high profile campaign together with the Daily Telegraph. Last year, I asked the National Audit Office to investigate which they agreed to do and they will be reporting later in the spring.
The brutal truth is that we are not in power and not responsible for today's calamitous defence policy. Nor can we spell out today how much we will spend on coming to power in 2009 - 10, not least because we do not know what Labour will have bequeathed us in terms of commitments or the state of the public finances. All I can say is that the entire Tory Defence Team, led vigorously and determinedly by Liam Fox, are resolute that we shall not ask our magnificent soldiers, sailors and airmen to undertake tasks for which we are not prepared to give them the kit, the manpower and the training.
I know UKIP are trying to appeal to disaffected Tories, but they are not going to form the next Government. I hope that we are because I do believe that we understand the challenges which face our Armed forces and are incomparably best placed to meet them. On our benches we have MPs who have served recently (Andrew Robathan, formerly of the SAS, Hugh Robertson, Mike Penning, Tobias Elwood, Patrick Mercer (former CO of the Sherwood Foresters) and Adam Holloway, not to mention IDS. Others, like Desmond Swayne (PPS to David Cameron) and Mark Lancaster, who are TA officers, and Dr Andrew Murrison, former RN surgeon, have all served in Iraq and Afghanistan whilst being MPs. Lord Astor (who leads for us in the Lords) served for 4 years in the Life Guards, Julian Lewis MP (who leads on the Royal Navy and is the foremost exponent of the need for the nuclear deterrent) served for 3 years in the RNR, I was commissioned in the RAFVR and lead on the RAF, and of course Liam Fox spent 10 years as a civilian Medical Officer to the Army. Compare that record to the other parties!
We will not always get it right and must be subject to criticism if we get it wrong. However, I do ask that all those of goodwill will seek to encourage and support us. The most disastrous outcome would be for the UK to have inflicted on it a Labour Government led by a dour Scottish redistributive socialist who has consistently starved the Armed Forces of the resources they need to do the job and who until recently has distinguished himself by his complete lack of interest in our servicemen and women. That outcome will be assured unless people get behind the Tory party and rally to our flag.
Yours, Gerald
Gerald Howarth MP
Member of Parliament for Aldershot & Shadow Defence Minister
In general, claims Tony Blair, "the British Armed Forces are superbly equipped."
But, in order to equip them even better (/end irony), the MoD agreed last year, grudgingly, to buy 100 "Mastiff" mine and blast protected vehicles, to supplement the dangerously vulnerable "Snatch" Land Rovers.
And, as we reminded our own readers, when he announced their procurement on 25 July, defence secretary Des Browne promised that there would be an "effective capability" in place in Iraq by the end of the year.
Now, at last, Liam Fox is on the case, fronting a press release on the Conservatives' web site. It claims that British troops in Basra have so far received only FOUR Mastiffs of the "effective capability" promised.
FOUR Mastiffs… from July of last year to January of this, all the great might of the MoD can manage is four armoured trucks. It's as well we're not fighting a serious war out there, isn't it... or maybe, its just that we're not serious about fighting it.
COMMENT THREAD
First, our political classes impose a Treaty which has profound implications on all of us, for generations to come. Amongst other things, it creates a right of "freedom of establishment" which permits the citizen of any member state freely to set up residence in another state. This is the "Europe without borders".
For sure, we get a referendum, but that was in 1975 – two years after our masters decided we should join the then EEC. That means that no one currently under the age of 50 got a vote, and there was never another, not even when the membership of nine – as it was when we joined - increased to 25 and then, on 1st January, to 27.
Thus it is that we are compelled to permit entry to the citizens of 26 other member states. The number that has taken advantage of this must be well into the millions by now. Perforce, it includes a goodly number of criminals who have upped sticks to pastures new, and fresh victims. And, in the absence of a system to ensure otherwise, and without compulsion and sanctions, there is no way the police can identify these people, or get access to their criminal records.
Thus it is that a judge, in desperation calls for an EU criminal records system.
This was Judge Stephen Robbins, who made the call after "serious difficulties" had been experienced in getting accurate information on the previous crimes of foreign offenders, saying that it was a "matter of pubic concern" that the courts in England were having these problems.
Trying to check on the previous convictions of two Lithuanians convicted of gun-running had shown how "very difficult it was to glean details, let alone precise details" from their home country, Robbins said. Despite all the efforts that had been made, it had not been possible to find out details of the criminal careers of the Lithuanians.
Nor had the police had not been able to determine whether a 10-year sentence that one of the men had received had been imposed for rape. Apart from confirming that he and his co-defendant had been in trouble before, a prosecution office in Lithuania had been able to provide nothing more than a useless list of penal codes, some of which were outdated.
The judge, who jailed three men at Southwark Crown Court in London last week for a total of 32 years, has deferred a decision on whether they should be allowed to remain in Britain amid concerns over "double jeopardy" issues.
Orestas Bubliauskas, 34, from Chigwell, Essex, and Andrius Gurskas, 26, of no fixed address, were each sentenced to 11 years, while Darius Stankunas, 34, who lived in Sheffield, was sentenced to 10 years.
They used a car fuel tank to smuggle an "assassin's armoury" of revolvers, silencers and ammunition from Lithuania, an EU member since May 2004. The Russian Baikal pistols, 20 rounds of ammunition and a silencer were then sold to gangs in Britain for as little as £1,500.
So it is that, in order to protect British citizens and to ensure that justice is done, the call goes out for a better system – and EU system. How logical that is and how unreasonable it would be to oppose it. And the EU commission would be delighted to implement a system. In the fullness of time, member state governments will agree to one.
What we are seeing, therefore, is a system of integration which is incomplete and throws up all sorts of anomalies and inconsistencies – which can only be resolved by more integration. And through this means, step-by-step, as the problems are resolved, the political classes will get their full political integration, which they could not have been able to achieve in one hit.
That is called engrenage. Translated literally, it means "gearing". A more practical definition is "salami slicing". And we're looking at another example of it.
COMMENT THREAD
It is turning out to be a little more than mere intrusion on private grief, as we first suggested. The new leader of the EPP, Frenchman Joseph Daul – who gave the Tory Boy Blog so much heartache – may turn out to be something more than a protectionist Europhile.
According to a story in The Financial Times - carefully, if lovingly planted by UKIP - the man may be a crook as well.
It is certainly and indisputably the case that the new leader of the EU parliament's biggest political group is under investigation for misuse of public funds in France – part of an inquiry into the diversion of €16m (£10.6m) of agricultural money in the 1990s that has also ensnared three former agriculture ministers.
Daul was head of the National Breeding Confederation, the beef producers' union, between 1993 and 1998 and was placed under investigation in 2004 for allegedly diverting money to finance the farmers' union, the FNSEA, and to pay his own staff. He is not accused of benefiting personally but of "complicity and concealment of the abuse of public funds".
Investigating magistrate Henri Pons, a key player in the Clearstream affair, France's latest political and financial scandal, is handling the case in Paris. Nicolas Jacquet, the head of the French grain producers' union, who first complained about the diversion of his members' money in 2000, said Mr Daul and his six co-accused had used every legal avenue to avoid a trial. However, he thought a trial would be delayed until after the French presidential election in May. MEPs could lift Mr Daul's immunity from prosecution if he were charged.
This is very reminiscent of the case of Jacques "Wheel" Barrot, the EU transport commissioner. Mr Barrot, another French crook from Chirac's UMP. In another story broken by UKIP, he failed to tell his boss José Manuel Barroso that he had been convicted of fraud in a party funding scandal, this one claiming as his excuse that fact that he had been pardoned by his pal Chirac.
One hesitates to declare that all French politicians are crooks, but it would be nice to have an example of one who was not. It would also be nice to think that the Tory MEPs – of which Daniel Hannan is one - now had enough sense to get out of the EPP pronto.
It is too late, of course, for the Boy as the publicity to come on this issue cannot but help remind people of his failure to honour the one promise he made of any consequence during his leadership campaign. He is about to learn the hard way that taking the easy way out in politics is never, in fact, the easy option.
COMMENT THREAD
It is not often that this blog pays too much attention to the NFU (known in the business as No F***ing Use) but this delightful little item has caught my attention.
The NFU eschews pronouncements by people who might know something such as Van Jolissaint of DaimlerChrysler, who, as my colleague points out, did not say any of the things that were attributed to him, or Michael O'Leary of Ryanair, who most certainly did say all the things he is supposed to have said about the unknown minister of aviation.
The NFU, as ever, supports the European Commission, in the vain hope that next time round, the Union’s members might benefit from something that comes out of the European Union.
In particular, it supports the “package of proposals on energy and climate change published” yesterday. Well, supports it up to a point. For it does not go far enough.
However, while the NFU welcomes what is an ambitious programme, we are disappointed that it has taken the form of a white paper rather than draft legal texts. The Commission will be seeking endorsement from the spring EU Council meeting and will come forwards with draft legislation beyond that. We share the Commission’s view that “concrete action is required urgently”.Well, I wouldn’t be too despondent if I were the NFU. Given that there is evidence for the climate-changing propensities of cows when they perform certain bodily functions, given that the NFU persisted in supporting DEFRA's insane policy of slaughtering millions of healthy animals rather than vaccinating them during the foot and mouth epidemic, one could argue that the bods at Stoneleigh have already carried out very concrete actions in the cause of climate change.
It has been a constant refrain of this blog that we need a public debate on the role of our armed forces, with my colleague setting the tone by suggesting (nay, asserting) that we as a nation no longer have the stomach to be a military power and should disband our forces.
Not wishing this to be true (but accepting that it might) I had hoped that a grown-up Conservative opposition would lead such a debate and that the issues would be properly aired – even if I might have been less than satisfied with the outcome.
But, instead of a debate, we have one of the Boy King's loathsome "commissions" and for a shadow defence secretary Liam Fox, both of which has ensured that the issues have not been intelligently discussed – not least it seems because Fox seems to have no feeling for or understanding of defence issues.
But, in politics as in nature, vacuums are unstable things that are prone to be filled. In the absence of any sentient contribution from the Boy and his lacklustre chums, the gap is being filled by none other than our own prime minister (for the time being) Tony Blair who today spoke to the subject in Plymouth. There, at one of Britain's premier naval bases (for the time being) he opened precisely the debate we have been calling for.
According to the BBC website , Blair tells us that Britain must decide now whether it wants to be a major defence power in the future. Needless to say, he defends his own policy of intervention in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan but he also wants a debate on whether the UK should continue to send troops to trouble spots after he quits.
This is a bit rich coming as it does the day after the US announced it was sending more than 20,000 extra troops to Iraq and rumours abound that the UK is poised to withdraw over 3,000 troops from southern Iraq.
But what is fascinating is the sea-change in Blair's outlook. At the early stages of his prime ministerial career, he saw Britain's influence in the world in terms of membership of the European Union. To that effect – with enthusiastic support of his then defence minister Geoff Hoon – he was prepared to submerge the British military in the European defence identity.
Now, however, he is arguing that if Britain wants a leading presence on the world stage, it means continuing to send troops into dangerous places far away - with (and largely without) the involvement of the EU. In a interview with a local television programme, he declared, "There is a global terrorism that we face … I think it's right for Britain, alongside our allies, to be in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is a big decision to decide to be in that game still."
The crucial issue for the Eurosceptic community is that the allies with whom we are working are not the European Union. They are Nato, the United States, countries like Pakistan – with whom we share the vital task of defeating the Taliban – and Anglospheric countries like Canada and Australia.
In short, the best way for the UK to maintain its semi-detached relationship with the core EU countries such as France and Germany – and ward off encroaching political integration - is to remain immersed in fighting the "war on terror", from which the EU powers have largely opted out.
This being the case, it can be no surprise that the most strident critics of the Iraq war are the Europhile Lib-Dems, supported in the Tory ranks by such arch Europhiles as Ken Clarke. Likewise, with what are clearly emergent Europhile tendencies, it is entirely in character for the Boy King to go soft on the war and to support a policy of rapid disengagement. Equally, the Tory hierarchy are not opposed in principle to greater military "co-operation" with the EU.
The trouble is that there is not only a political divide between the European and the US-led approach, but a growing schism in military philosophies – a divide between conventional "warfighting" and counterinsurgency operations.
Between the two, the Army – in particular – sees the wizz-bang, shoot-em-up warfighting, with its tanks, artillery and other toys as "proper" soldiering. It hates counter-insurgency and treats it as an aberration, hence its reluctance to gear up for it and to develop appropriate and effective tactics. It wants to get it over and done with so that it can get back to its traditional role of breaking things and killing people – preferably "real" soldiers who have the decency to use green (or sand) painted toys and wear uniforms.
Perversely, it is the "soft power" European Union which offers the military the best prospect of equipping and maintaining a modern "warfighting" army, in its grandiose plans for the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF). Because the ERRF is a theoretical construct, unhampered by having to be structured and equipped to deal with a real enemy in a known theatre, military planners can indulge in their flights of fancy.
Actively supported by the major equipment manufacturers, who are salivating at the thought of major European programmes, they are focusing on the high-tech end of warfare, developing things like Future Rapid Effects System (FRES). These have no relationship to the conditions in real-life theatres where there are actual wars going on. But they are comfortingly expensive and complicated, and will provide for many industrial jobs and shareholder profits.
Although fighting an insurgency, requires often fairly straightforward (and cheap) equipment - £250,000 for an RG-31 or equivalent as opposed to £8-10 million for a single FRES medium-weight wheeled armoured vehicle – the Army is not really interested in the quantity and suitability of its kit. It will happily discard that which does not fit with its own image of what its role should be, in favour of less capable equipment which accords with that image.
Thus, the debate is not actually about whether we should fight the war on terror but whether we should continue so doing or pull out in order to pursue the more acceptable - to some - programme of European defence integration. But, because the dreaded "E-word" is never mentioned, we have a wholly distorted and unreal debate, with the real issues being avoided and the parties indulging in proxy arguments.
On the one side, we have Europhile Liberal Democrat peer Lord Garden (illustrated), a former assistant chief of defence staff, who agrees that the UK should pay much more of its national income towards defence. He is then supported by Air Chief Marshall Sir Michael Graydon (retd), who also says that "We mustn't fall into the trap of becoming a peace-keeping militia." He declares that, "An ability to conduct full-scale military operations is the foundation for successful peace-making and peace-keeping."
Both of them – representative of their two factions – are thus opposed to deeper involvement in Iraq but for entirely different reasons. Nevertheless, they come together with a common objective which makes them temporary allies.
What they need to understand though is that, since the Korean War in the 1950s, it is the conventional shooting war which has been the aberration. From Aden to Iraq via Malaysia, counter-insurgency has been the norm. Therefore, if we are to have a place in the councils of the world - which really mean anything - then we are going to have to ensure, whether they like it or not, that our armed forces are properly equipped and structured to deal with what is also called asymmetric warfare. And that, coincidentally, is the best way to break the grip of the EU - by developing a world view that does not accord with that of the "little Europeans".
More specifically, with current defence expenditure, we have the finance to equip our armed forces for conventional warfighting or for counter-insurgency, but not both. Clearly, the Europhiles would prefer the former - as that takes us in the direction of the EU. Also, the hierarchies of the armed forces desperately want to keep a warfighting capability and, forced to make a choice, would dispense with their counter-insurgeny roles. (As for the Tories, they do not seem even to be in the debate as they seem largely unaware of what is going on.)
Whatever the merit of retaining a significant conventional warfighting role, it has to be said that the urgent need for the here and now is to improve our counter-insurgency capability. And, by happy coincidence, promoting the development of that capability is the best way of scuppering the ERRF.
From the Eurosceptic stance, therefore, Blair is suddenly the ally - as are those who support the continuation of the war in Iraq. The Lib-Dims (the Conservatives) and the military – each for their different reasons – are the opposition. But, with the real issues ill-defined, the real opposition is ignorance. That is where we are going to have to focus, bringing it home to people that there is a real world out there. The EU is not part of it and, if we wish to be part of the real world, we cannot be part of the EU.
COMMENT THREAD
National Review has the full low-down but I prefer this version, carefully crafted to have Chrysler veteran chief economist Van Jolissaint "appearing" to attack "quasi-hysterical Europeans" for overexaggerating the risks of global warming.
But DaimlerChrysler shifted into damage-control gear after Jolissaint had been quoted by the BBC as saying that, since he started spending more time at the company's headquarters in Stuttgart, he had been shocked by European attitudes towards global warming. He described environmentalists as having "Chicken Little" attitudes. Jolissaint was also said to have described the Stern Review as based on "dubious economics".
Thank goodness National Review has cleared it up. Jolissant didn't say those dreadful things – honest guv! His reference to "quasi-hysterical Europeans" was simply an example of a view that "some people might have". He specifically said, "not me, of course".
Jolissaint's non-statement, however, represents a profound truth. While the Americans are engaged in a number of real wars, their commitment to the global warming hysteria is in inverse proportion to their commitment to fighting terrorism. The Europeans, on the other hand, are obsessed with their pretend war against climate change. Fighting global terrorism comes way down their list.
Perhaps, if they focused a little more on reality, they would have a little less time to worry about the sky falling in. Could we convince them that terrorists (terror-warmers?) are the real cause of global warming... like in Kuwait? And wasn't the world going to end then?
COMMENT THREAD
According to RIA Novosti, the new SecGen of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon has put on Kofi Annan’s “heavy crown”. Well, indeed. Many of our readers will recall a certain Henry IV in Shakespeare’s plays of that name bemoaning the fact that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”.
What the same readers might not know (though some others will) is that there is a very similar line in Pushkin’s historical play “Boris Godunov”. The latter, having been elected by the nobles to be tsar carries a heavy load of guilt because of the supposed murder of Ivan IV’s baby son, Dmitry (a dubious theory, historically speaking).
Thus, Boris not only sees visions of bloodied babies but cries out about the heaviness of the crown, that is “the cap of Monomakh”. Vladimir Monomakh was a mediaeval Great Prince of Rus, regarded as the progenitor of all subsequent ones. The crown of the Tsars of Muscovy and then of Russia is known as the cap of Monomakh. (Oh do keep up, will you.)
Well, what are we to call the crown Ban Ki-Moon has inherited, particularly as he did not have his predecessor murdered and, as far as we know, is not guilty of infanticide? The Coronet of Peace? Lacks something in realism? The Cap of Irresponsibility? Getting there.
Going on with the Novosti report, it would appear that the new SecGen has already found out that actually life may not be all that easy at the top of that particular greasy pole. Called upon by the High Panjandrum of the EU’s foreign policy, Javier Solana to send UN troops into Somalia (why now, one wonders, as if one didn’t know), Ban Ki-Moon has had to admit that actually he does not have the troops to send in. And, of course, we do not talk of the behaviour of those troops in the places they have been sent to.
All in all, the new boy has wasted no time in proving his anti-Americanism. While his first statement was more or less acceptable in that he went against UN “policy” and refused to denounce the execution of that martyr and mass murderer Saddam Hussein, things have been going downhill since.
He has, needless to say, called for the closure of Guantánamo Bay though not, strangely enough of all the many other prisons in Cuba where dissidents are thrown. Nor has he, equally strangely, called for the closure of North Korean prisons and concentration camps of Egyptian prisons that now house numerous bloggers.
He, too, has expressed his disquiet about the American attacks on Al-Qaeda in Somalia:
Notwithstanding the motives for this reported military action, the Secretary-General is concerned about the new dimension this kind of action could introduce to the conflict and the possible escalation of hostilities that may result," said Moon’s spokesperson Michele Montas during daily press briefing on Wednesday.Possible escalation? Does this mean that the Somalian conflict was somehow dying down? Or that the Al-Qaeda honchos were interested in dampening that conflict? Or that the Islamists’ sharia law was somehow popular among anyone except western commentators who can always flee to the comforts of their home?
Such random attacks have created fear among the civilians who had enjoyed relative safety under the Islamists' six-month rule.I must admit that even my jaw dropped when I read that, used though I am to the BBC’s little peculiarities. The same article says:
The advice from one and all is to get Ethiopian troops to withdraw from the country and replace them with African peacekeepers.I assume this does not mean that the BBC does not realize that Ethiopians are Africans, too, but that they are talking about the African Union peacekeepers. One wonders who those advice-givers are and whether they recall the AU’s complete and utter failure in Darfur and Sudan in general.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to cooperate in various fields as investment, export of technical and engineering services to Tanzania, he [Iranian ambassador to Tanzania] underlined.Well, never mind. The official line as expressed by that employee of the UN Foundation is that the appointment of Ms Migiro “can be considered a boon to the prospect of UN reform”. I can see that one being trotted out for all sorts of misdemeanours.
The Tanzanian energy minister, for his part, expressed satisfaction with the current level of relations with Iran and voiced his country's readiness to negotiate with Iranian companies active in construction of power plants.
Referring to the activities of Iran's Construction Jihad Bureau in Tanzania in the past, he welcomed reopening of the office in the country.
According to Confederate Yankee that famous police officer at Khadra has acquired yet another name: he appears to be Jamil Gulaim "XX", his real last names being thus protected, though none of them are Hussein.
We still have no explanation as to whom AP has actually asked for all those unsupported stories and what actually happened in Hurriyah. AP's strategy seems to be to keep very quiet and hope that all those nasty bloggers will go away after fresh prey.
I think not.
More buzzing in eurosceptic circles: Tim Congdon, the eminent economist, has announced that he will be supporting UKIP if David Cameron remains leader of the Conservative Party.
Whether Professor Congdon actually joins UKIP as George Jones and Brendan Carlin say in today's Daily Telegraph or not, if he continues to write well-argued articles of the kind on today's op-ed page, he will be something of a threat to the Conservatives.
The points that he makes are sensible and well-argued and are not confined exclusively to the issue of the European Union, though Congdon's views on that are well-known.
In the first place, the article raises the standard of individual freedom and responsibility as against paternalistic semi-socialism, as preached by the so-called One Nation Tories, though as it has been pointed out elsewhere, the refusal to contemplate the idea of vouchers in education indicates that the Conservative leadership rather likes the idea of a few children (including their own) getting good education while everyone else is stuck with few prospects of improvement.
These paternalists see their job as being the application of their superior knowledge to state action of some kind. Their political impulses are to tax and spend, to meddle and regulate, and to interfere and control; they welcome state involvement in "socially desirable" activities.We all know where that sort of paternalism has brought this country: an appalling education system, a health care system that is not nearly good enough for a country as rich as this one, and an economy that favours the parasitic public sector at the expense of the wealth making private one.
But I think this is unfair and dishonest. Mr Cameron should be taken at his word. When he says he is in favour of "national school-leaver programmes", "social action zones" and suchlike, and when he says that the Tories should become "the champions of social action", he really does mean what he says. Whether his words have any genuine meaning is another topic, but of his sincerity in uttering them there should be no doubt.David Cameron and the party under him has a set of woolly-minded ideas that can carry disastrous consequences (just think what that Third World do-goodism has done in the last four decades in Africa).
On the main issues of the day, all the big parties are now close together. Unless the Tories drop Mr Cameron with all his misguided baggage (a badly rationalised environmentalism, Third World do-goodism, holier-than-thou "social inclusiveness" and the rest), I cannot vote for it. I believe today — as I did in the 1980s — in a small state, low taxes and free trade.
Everyone involved in Tory fundraising offers the same explanation for the new bonanza. "It's entirely down to David. No modern Tory leader has been so deft with the donors," said one fundraiser. "He remembers their names, their wives' names, their business problems, everything." Added to this is the indefinable but unmistakable aura of a winner. When asked what difference this makes, my source tilts his head back and rolls his eyes. "Night and day," he says.Um, maybe. In the end, the rich man in his castle has only one vote as does the poor man at the gate, whose children get bad education and whose grandmother cannot get her hip replaced in time, not to mention the fact that his small hovel has been broken into three times in the last year with the police doing what is generally known as "sweet f.a.", while his taxes are going up and set to go up even more under a putative Tory government.
Brits set to criticise the US war effort in Iraq, or presuming to offer advice on the prosecution of the war, should at least be conscious of the efforts of their own countrymen, and the strategies of their own government – their relative weaknesses and own failures.
That injunction should apply in spades to Conservative opposition spokesman William Hague who has been quick off the mark to express concern at president Bush's decision to order more than 20,000 additional US troops to be deployed in Iraq, telling the president that the "emphasis must be on training Iraqi army".
We learn also that the great strategist Hague, while welcoming the fact that "new thinking has taken place in Washington", remains "sceptical that sending additional troops will achieve the desired results" and is concerned that “the introduction of yet more foreign soldiers into the Iraqi capital could risk refuelling the insurgency. Declares Hague:We would like to have seen a package modelled more closely on the Baker-Hamilton recommendations, giving even greater importance to accelerating the training and equipping of the Iraqi Army, and establishing an International Support Group of members of the UN Security Council and other nations to help the Iraqi government.
The man then resurrects something we had all but forgotten, with him saying, "Additionally, we would have like to have seen an emphasis on the urgent need to find a way of re-starting the Middle East Peace Process."
This endorsement of the "linkage" between fighting the insurrection in Iraq and peace in the Middle East in general (code for the Israeli question) was a particularly crass move when Hague first did it, but with Gaza on the brink of civil war and the Palestinian Authority in disarray, any idea of such linkage – always fatuous – is going absolutely nowhere. That Hague returns to it so easily demonstrates merely the stunning prescience of Proverbs 26:11 - it is almost as if the authors had the shadow foreign secretary in mind.
But to demonstrate just quite how lacklustre is this man, having been so presumptuous as to offer advice to the president of the United States also expresses a hope that "substantial number of British troops can be withdrawn from Basra in the course of the current year."
In full conformity with Proverbs 26:11, he then reminds us that his Party would continue to press the Government to establish a full-scale inquiry into the Iraq conflict adding, almost as an afterthought that:
The most vital step now is for the Iraqi government to push forward internal reconciliation and the build-up of its own effective armed forces, so that they can take genuine control of their own affairs… Our troops are working very hard there but they may have reached the limit of what they can do. The emphasis must be on training Iraqi troops so that they can take over as soon as possible.
Actually, Mr Hague, the most vital step – for the British – is to re-impose law and order on the streets of Basra, where central government has limited reach and the writ of the militias now runs, where British troops venture at their peril and where British bases are subject to daily mortar attacks.
"Victory," said president Bush from the White House Library last night, "will bring something new in the Arab world: a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties and answers to its people."
Whatever else you might say about Bush, there can be absolutely no doubt that he - and the bulk of the American people - are genuine in their desire to see democracy functioning in Iraq – and the rest of the Middle East, for that matter.
You really do have to wonder why it is, therefore, that such a noble objective should have the left-wing media – typified by our own Guardian - spitting with rage at the prospect the United States taking what might be decisive action against the terrorists who would see anarchy, misery and death.
But it really is quite staggering to read the invective pouring out. Headed, "Defiance and delusion", the Guardian leader tells us that, "George Bush's announcement last night that he is going to pour more troops into Iraq was the last throw of the dice in a misconceived enterprise that has dragged his country, this country and the Middle East into a nightmare."
The package, it helpfully tells us, includes 17,500 more combat troops for Baghdad and 4,000 more marines for Anbar province, the cockpit of the Sunni insurgency. Over $1bn will be spent in economic aid. In return the Iraqis are to promise to crackdown on insurgents, regardless of sect or religion.
The proximate reason for the newspaper's ire, of course, is that - in opting for a troop surge - Bush has "ignored the message of the mid-term elections" and the Guardian's Democrat (i.e., left-wing) chums. Bush, it screeches, "has also ignored the Iraq Study Group, Congress, his own top generals" and, horror of horrors, "most world opinion".
There you have it people. A US president, leader of the most prosperous and dynamic country in the world, a country which has achieved its status by driving its own agenda - is not listening to the opinion of the people who neither elected him nor pay US taxes. Now isn't that a bummer!
Needless to say, the Guardian has plenty of reasons to offer as to why the US initiative will fail. But, in the simplistic minds of this blog's authors, we tend to see the idea of sending more troops into Baghdad, alongside a newly invigorated and equipped Iraqi Army, as a somewhat better idea than sending half your troops home and pulling the rest back to cower in their bases, leaving the streets to the men of violence.
There, it seems, we have some common cause with the Guardian as it too regards as unrealistic Tony Blair’s plan to pull 3,500 troops out of Basra and hand the province over to the Iraqis. "The claim peace is returning to Basra is as unreal as Mr Bush's hope that order can be brought to Baghdad," says the paper.
But somehow, somewhere, in all the torrent of words and declamations, it would be really nice to see a coherent line. Either it is a good idea to put in more security forces, to seek to impose law and order, or it is a good idea to pull out and let the Iraqis handle their own affairs. Both ideas can't be right (not withstanding that the situation is different in Basra) and both can't be wrong especially as, from the likes of the left-wing Guardian, we seem to hear nothing but the counsels of despair.
Perhaps, though, Bush is on to them. In his speech, he cautioned that the new strategy would not bring an immediate end to violence, telling his people: "Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering." Stepping up to the plate, you can be assured, will be Associated Press, the New York Times, the BBC and, of course, the dear old Guardian.
COMMENT THREAD
The London Times not only seems to think the surge is a done deal, it reckons the US Army is going to copy British tactics in order to win the war.
According to the newspaper, this is what the new US ground commander intends to do, a certain General Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq in 2003.
He, we are told, is largely credited with being one of the only US officers who succeeded in bringing order to his region of Iraq by establishing "a British colonial model of civil-military interaction."
Says the Times, in Mosul he entered an area with 110,000 former Iraqi Army soldiers and 20,000 Kurdish militiamen. But unlike the tactics in much of Iraq, General Petraeus took pride in conducting raids with minimum violence.
In Mosul, also – as far as we understand it, the US deployed its now famous Stryker Brigades, adopting novel and highly successful tactics, immortalised by Michael Yon.
Methinks it was these tactics, rather than any emulation of the British that has made the different. Or am I off the wall, and does The Times have a point?
COMMENT THREAD
Those French Socialists have a way with words. Particularly political terminology. An article in the Times that has come my way via the Freedom and Prosperity blog (well, one can dream) describes the slow but sure move of American firms from EU capitals to Switzerland.
In particular, there is a move from London, the latest one of those voting with their feet is the food producer Kraft, which “has taken a lease on a building in Zurich and will transfer staff from Vienna and from Kraft’s UK headquarters in Kew, southwest London”.
Obviously, it is not the fact that the UK has not joined the single currency that is the problem but the fact that the UK is an important part of the high tax, high regulation European economic disease. (Not to mention such peculiarly London problems as appalling transport.)
Some 200 UK jobs will be affected by the move to Zurich, Kraft said yesterday, suggesting that tax was just one of the factors that drew the company away from London. Other issues, including public transport, lifestyle, quality and the cost of accommodation were equally important.France is not happy either.
Biogen Idec, a US pharmaceutical company, recently decamped from Paris to Zug, a canton which boasts nil corporate tax. The knife was twisted further when Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star, revealed that he would move his residence to Gstaad because he was “fed up” with French taxes.Well, one does rather wonder where l’escroc has been all this time. Has he not been the President of that country for a little while? Easy for him to say tax competition now. But, clearly, competition is not a word that comes easily to our Ségo and her supporters. Tax banditry, eh? You can see the woman is set to be a success in France.
Supporters of the French Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, accused Hallyday of treachery and called for European action against Swiss “tax banditry”. However, President Chirac said that France must reduce its corporate tax rate if it is to remain competitive, calling for a reduction of the rate from 33 per cent to 20 per cent within five years.
Although the British media has comprehensively ignored the story of Captain Jamil Hussein (if he exists) and the odd tale of 61 or 62 reports from him about horrific attacks on Sunnis by Shias, none of which had been corroborated by a single other news outlet. Not one.
As we reported a little while ago, it appeared that Captain Jamil Hussein had been found with no explanation of where he had been, who had seen him and what was the truth of the rather flexible Hurriyah incident.
Now, it seems that the story has taken yet another turn. Nobody had said that Captain Jamil Hussein of Khadra police station had been located - probably rather a long way away, as his supposed reports come from many different places.
What has been confirmed is that a Captain Jamil Ghdaab Ghulaim has been found in Khadra. So, is he the famous source? He says no. Has AP been using a pseudonymous source without telling anyone? We must not doubt the word of that "venerable" organization.
Confederate Yankee has the story with all the links. And, of course, Curt at Flopping Aces.
COMMENT THREAD
We are at serious risk of losing in Afghanistan said Sir John Stanley yesterday. In the days when Conservative MPs had some standing, the views of the Hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling might have had an impact, uttered as they were during a debate in Westminster Hall.
But all Sir John got was a short squib in The Daily Mail and the BBC website, the latter retailing foreign office minister Geoff Hoon’s response, he claiming to the incredulity of the few who were listening, that the mission in Afghanistan "is going as planned".
Nevertheless, just because he is a Tory MP – and largely ignored in the wider world - does not necessarily mean he is wrong, especially as he used to be Minister of State for the Armed Forces. And said Sir John:
The essence of the security problem for us was shown very well in the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 last night. Although I noted that the Government sought to dismiss the programme as being based on out-of-date film, I thought that it brought home extremely vividly, and with absolute accuracy, the essence of the security problem, which is that NATO forces are too thinly spread in the areas of Afghanistan where combat intensity is highest. That presents our forces with real operational problems. It makes them constantly vulnerable to the possibility of finding themselves significantly outnumbered. It makes them dependent on calling in air strikes, which carry with them the attendant risk of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilians’ homes, with all the political damage that that does to our long-term objectives of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan. The fact that we are so thinly stretched in the southern part of the country tends to make many Afghan civilians there significantly more alarmed and open to coercion by the Taliban than are reassured by our very limited presence.He went on to add:
The fundamental duty of any British Government is to ensure that our forces are adequately equipped for the task that they are being asked to undertake. Patently, that has not been the case and still is not the case in Afghanistan, and certainly is not in Iraq. We all know that casualties have been incurred, and lives lost, as a result of insufficient body armour. We know of deep concerns among our servicemen and women about the adequacy of their armoured vehicles. We also know—it was borne out graphically in the film on television last night—about the serious inadequacy in the amount of helicopter support available in Afghanistan.
Sir John was very much backed up by Tobias Ellwood, who reminded us all that he had been calling for some time for Warrior vehicles to be sent.
Instead of reporting the debate, it published an outrageous "puff" for the Royal Marines' BVs10 Viking, under the headline, "'Supervehicle' saves Marines' lives". Unable to see past the MoD spin, the paper even cites an unnamed "British forces hardware expert" who tells us "considerably more" troops would have died if it had not been for the new vehicle.” How so very comforting for the MoD.The Londoner’s Diary in today's Evening Standard has a delightful story of a minor though undoubtedly expensive mishap in Brussels and other, minor, capitals of the European Union. (That includes London, in case you are wondering, as well as Edinburgh and Cardiff.)
It seems that the official EU pocket and A4 desk diaries “distributed to workers throughout the EU” have been found to have a bit of a slip-up. Apparently the capitals of the two new members, Romania and Bulgaria, have been exchanged. Terrific. They don’t even sound the same.
A particularly delightful aspect of the story is that nobody noticed this, until the erratum messages went round all those workers (though not peasants, apparently) with various stickers to be placed in the rather hefty diaries with the right addresses.
It seems nobody carries round or consults those blue diaries with gold lettering and, no doubt, gold stars. Derek Scott, director of the London office of the European Parliament is quoted as explaining:
It’s not helped by all that Cyrillic print. I don’t use the diary because I contact people by e-mail.The words brewery and p*ss-up spring to mind.
“Stop the Overstretch in the Armed Forces”, says the headline on the official Conservative website in that rather unappealing green they have taken to using. Dr Fox, Tory spokesman on defence, has been attacking the Labour government for overstretching and underfunding our forces.
So far so good, though he does not seem to have any concrete suggestions as to what the Conservatives might do about this state of affairs but then, it is hard to give definite undertakings or precise figures at this stage of the electoral cycle.
Dr Fox also has a go at NATO allies who do not pull their weight.
He also criticised other NATO governments for not pulling their weight in operations, and called for powers to suspend them if they fail to contribute as promised. Accusing Germany, Italy and Spain of "not fully playing their role" in bolstering Alliance forces in Afghanistan, he said: "We may require more troops but I don't see why that has to be British troops. We are more than shouldering our load."That is the end of the piece on Conservatives.com and one has to go to the Yorkshire Post to find out what else did the bouncy little lad say.
"Where we have Nato operations taking place, the country that carries out any specific mission is the one that pays for it.This, dear readers, is known technically as tosh.
"When I was in Poland and Hungary in the last few weeks, I was complaining to them that they have come into Nato, pocketed the security guarantee and have cut the defence spending.
"We will seek, when we come to Government, to reach an agreement with our Nato partners to be able to suspend Nato members who do not spend the levels of funding that we agreed.
"It is not acceptable that British taxpayers and British armed forces should carry the burden of those who are members of Nato who want the collective security guarantee but are not going to pay for it."
It is interesting to see how The Daily Telegraph – so jealous to protect its own property – displays no compunction about nicking from the USAF a page-wide photograph of an AC-130 to illustrate its Somali story, and publishing it in its newspaper without even the hint of an acknowledgement.
But the pièce de resistance from today’s newspaper (print edition) is an "analysis" from David Blair, the "diplomatic correspondent", who writes:
An AC-130 Spectre gunship carried out the strike. This large aircraft, modelled on the Hercules cargo plane, is stuffed with cannon and machine-guns. The AC-130 is designed to saturate a large area with gunfire, hitting every square yard in the target zone with multiple rounds.To give it its due, the newspaper does allow comments on the online edition of its story, and the first two up (yesterday, just after midday) read thus:
So this was the very opposite of a surgical strike. Anyone in the path of the gunship, which departed from the US military base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, would have been killed.
Mr Blair is factually incorrect; Spectres are quite capable of 'surgical' strikes technically - check out the AC-130's capabilities via google or wikipedia if you doubt that - but we have no way of knowing yet the precise nature of these missions. Mr Blair is welcome to accuse America of an 'indiscriminate' approach but should understand that this makes him an 'indiscrimnate' journalist whose assertions are unsupported by fact.and…
Posted by michael schrage mit security studies program on January 9, 2007 1:50 PM
This sentence makes no sense. "So this was the very opposite of a surgical strike. Anyone in the path of the gunship, which departed from the US military base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, would have been killed."Following through on one of the main defence websites, one also reads:
The gunship was not shooting from the moment of takeoff. Instead it flew to the target area, located its target and then dealt with it. The AC 130 is a very precise weapon. Its 40 mm cannons can place a shell within two feet of its target. How is that not surgical? This was not a recreation of Bomber Harris.
Posted by Matt on January 9, 2007 1:48 PM
The AC-130H Spectre gunship's primary missions are close air support, air interdiction and armed reconnaissance. Other missions include perimeter and point defense, escort, landing, drop and extraction zone support, forward air control, limited command and control, and combat search and rescue.That latter phrasing - "surgical firepower or area saturation" comes straight from the official USAF website.
These heavily armed aircraft incorporate side-firing weapons integrated with sophisticated sensor, navigation and fire control systems to provide surgical firepower or area saturation during extended periods, at night and in adverse weather.
The commentators over on the Tory Boy Blog are tearing each other apart over the appointment of a rabid protectionist Frenchman (is there any other sort?) as president of the EPP – the EU parliament political group to which Daniel Hannan and the rest of the Tory MEPs belong.
If it wasn't so funny, it would be tragic. But do they need to ask why Tory peers are joining UKIP?
EU Serf has more.
COMMENT THREAD
I had intended to do a long piece on Somalia – which will have to wait until later today. I simply could not miss the opportunity of noting a huge irony – one that, without our intervention, would probably have escaped any comment at all.
The irony stems initially from our seeing on television the ultimate ignominy of the Estonian Army turning up for a firefight in Afghanistan alongside the British Army – and better equipped, having purchased the Mambas which the MoD so carelessly and cheaply discarded.
But today, the irony is complete. With 148 already delivered to the US military in 2005, another 94 having been ordered last year, we learn that the US Army Tank Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) has just announced a $76.5 million order to General Dynamics Land Systems - Canada to provide another 169 RG-31 Mk5 Mine Protected Vehicles, with an option for nine additional vehicles - bringing the total to well over 400.
These vehicles will be built in the British-owned OMC Land Systems factory in South Africa and finished in Canada's GD factory for delivery commencing June of this year.
But this is far more than just another "toy" story. With the expected announcement today by president Bush of a massive "surge" in the number of troops deployed in Iraq – and the start of a delicious political battle between the president and the newly emboldened Democrats over whether he has to power to do so – this order for RG-31 is a (belated) recognition by the US military of the tactical realities of the Iraqi and the Afghanistan theatres.
And what it also does, of course, is reinforce the very point made by the appearance of the Estonian Mambas – that the British Ministry of Defence and the Army hierarchy are still wedded to tactical doctrines which bear no relationship to the demands of the modern, non-linear battlefield.
On that modern battlefield, soldiers can be fighting for their lives in a largely conventional battle one moment, be pursuing a "hearts and minds" agenda the next, handing sweets to children and the like, and seconds later be the target of suicide or roadside bombing.
The British hierarchy, however, seems to be relying on the so-called "WIMIK" Land Rovers as fighting vehicles, equipment which has a linear and spiritual relationship with the jeeps operated by David Stirling's SAS in the western deserts of North Africa during the Second World War. (In the picture, the jeep even mounts the same machine gun - the M2 .50 cal.)
That the equipment is, on balance, unfit for purpose, is demonstrated by the two sets of pictures we have assembled – the RG-31 "before and after" (top) and the same for the Land Rover (below). In both, the damaged vehicles had been targeted by car-borne suicide bombers but only in the RG-31 did the crew escape uninjured.
Why the British Ministry and senior officer class seems to have such great difficulty dealing with reality is one of those great mysteries. However, one could venture that, for an Army that brought us the Battle of Isandlwana, William Elphinstone's retreat from Kabul in 1842, Galipoli and the fall of Singapore - to say nothing of Market Garden - the slaughter of a few Toms in unarmoured Land Rovers is neither here nor there.
Nevertheless, when even the Iraqi Army, which has up to press been patrolling in light pick-up trucks, realises that this is not a war-winning strategy, you do begin to wonder about the British. 
The Iraqi government has acquired 400 Polish-made Dzik-3 armored personnel carriers. Dzik is Polish for "wild boar" and the vehicle is described as being "equipped with all-around armour, bullet proof windows, puncture-proof tyres and smoke launchers".
However, the MoD will no doubt say the Iraqis can be dismissed - they are only foreigners after all, and we British have soooo much more experience in fighting insurgencies, don't you know. So they can go on using unarmoured Land Rovers. Far better that, than the High Command and the politicos having to admit they got it wrong.
COMMENT THREAD
The big news in eurosceptic circles is that two of the "defrocked" peers, Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Willoughby de Broke, have joined UKIP. They have not precisely "defected" as the Daily Telegraph, managing to get things wrong again, put it. It was more a question of their party abandoning them.
Both noble peers are known for their outspoken views on many issues, particularly the European Union and its effects in this country. This blog has mentioned both of them from time to time and, no doubt, we shall go on writing about the questions and debates the two peers will initiate and participate in. I have it on good authority (one of the peers in question) that they intend to go on fighting in order to persuade the Conservative Party that the European question is, indeed, a very important one.
When the peers (together with two others, Baroness Cox and Lord Stevens of Ludgate) lost the whip, I wrote about the stupidity of the Tory leadership in letting people like that go.
Lord Pearson has worked long and hard for the Conservative Party, among other actions, raising a good deal of money and a party that is £35 million in the debt cannot afford to be sniffy about such matters. Before he was ennobled, Malcolm Pearson was well known in the ranks of those who fought Communism and he has continued to speak up in humanitarian matters, such as the fate of the Kalahari Bushmen.
About his colleague I wrote at the time:
Yet an even greater sign of the Conservative Party’s desperate fumbling on this issue is their withdrawal of the whip from Lord Willoughby de Broke, one of the hardest working and most active peers in the House, though he has never held a paid ministerial job. He is not as well known in the media as Lord Pearson, but he is as important in politics. Furthermore, he is a scion of an old and active Tory family.My colleague added in another posting when Lord Willoughby de Broke addressed a UKIP fringe meeting:
David Willoughby de Broke is no ordinary peer. He is the 21st Baron, heir to an unbroken line, which stretches back to 1491, son of a war hero and a Tory through and through. If you cut him in half and split his bones, he would have "Tory" etched through them like a stick of rock. He is the embodiment of the Tory establishment, and, despite that, a thoroughly nice and truly caring man. He even looks like a Tory.Actually, I believe, the line stretches back further but let that pass.
And it was this man, this High Tory, who carried the conviction. What he had hoped to hear from Mr Howard was that he would have wished to repatriate many more powers than just fishing, the Social Chapter and aid, and, if negotiations failed, then he would "consider all our options… including withdrawal", warning that his party was "dead meat" if it did not listen to public concern over greater European integration.
I just could not resist the temptation of putting this up - the Mamba in British Army colours before being flogged off and snapped up by the Estonians - only to re-appear in Afghanistan alongside British Army unarmoured Land Rovers.
You really could not make it up.
But, since truth is evidently stranger than fiction, perhaps the MoD could sell off its unarmoured "boy racer" WIMIK Land Rovers (above left), with which it is currently equipping the Army in Afghanistan, and provide some M3A1 Half-tracks. Don't worry that these are actually World War Two vintage - they would be a significant improvement over what we have in Afghanistan right now.
I suppose we could go the whole hog here. With the addition of WWII Daimler Armoured Cars and Sherman Tanks, we would see a massive leap in our armed forces capability. All we have to do is raid the museums and we're home and dry... perhaps unrealistic, but it does illustrate the point that the Army in 1944 was better equipped than it is currently in Afghanistan.
COMMENT THREAD
Remember this?
Well, amid the welter of bad news and misery, there is this:
Mr. Hancock: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence pursuant to the answer dated 12 December 2006, Official Report, column 934W on thermal imaging, what the make of the new light weight thermal imaging sight was; how many are issued at platoon level; what plans he has to increase this number; and if he will make a statement. [110056]We are, of course, talking about the Vipir. Well done Mr Hancock.
Mr. Ingram: The Light Weight Thermal Imaging Sight is manufactured by QioptiQ. Currently one sight is issued at platoon level. Plans are in place to increase this number, by the procurement of over 300 additional sights.
I was talking to a power supply engineer the other day, and asked him whether it was worth getting a back-up generator to protect against the possibility of power cuts. The answer was a most emphatic "yes", and he is by no means the only one who has given that answer.
But what is just as worrying is that the likelihood of anything intelligent being done about the problem has just receded. According to a Eurobarometer poll released yesterday, only 20 percent of those polled throughout the EU are in favour of nuclear energy, 80 percent back solar energy and 71 percent are in favour of wind energy. Which just goes to prove that the majority can be wrong (and most often is).
But with that level of hostility towards nuclear, and those sort of percentages in favour of renewables, the chances of any politicians (apart from the French, who don't give a damn) making the "tough decision" and going hard for nuclear are extremely slight.
The poll itself has been published as a curtain-raiser to the publication of the EU's strategic energy review, copies of which have already been leaked. But first sight indicates that it is not going to become a runaway best seller.
In fact, a study of the document simply affirms that the EU is not in control and the key decisions – as always – are going to have to be made by member states. And they, it would appear, can be as bad as the EU when it comes to making the right decisions.
That generator is looking more and more like an essential as days pass.
COMMENT THREAD
The television device this evening had reporter Sean Langan filming alongside British troops, and with Afghani police and troops in the town of Garmser - taking on the Taliban. This was for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme.
Langan makes some play of the fact that the British are fighting in unarmoured WIMIK Land Rovers and, in one instance, a soldier is wounded – shot in the lower arm. Interestingly, he is extracted from the fire zone in one of the two vehicles operated by a small contingent of Estonian troops.
We are not told why this is so but can guess. Unlike the British Land Rovers, these are armoured. They are in fact, Mamba APCs, nine of which were acquired by the Estonian Army from er… the British, who disposed of them of a fraction of their original price, as surplus to requirements.
The actual machines, in British colours, are shown below - the short-wheel-base version, also known as the Alvis 8 or the Acorn. They are exactly the same, right down to the dinky little storage bins on the sides.
I doubt whether any of the British troops at the scene knew the story but, if they did, no one mentioned it. Nor did Sean Langan, who doubtless would not have known the background – and thereby missed a good story (there's unusual for you).
But how galling it is that British troops are exposed to fire in unarmoured vehicles, while our allies are able to take protection in cut-price armoured vehicles sold to them by our own caring, sharing MoD.
COMMENT THREAD
Now that Gordon Brown has also made his displeasure at the execution of one of the nastiest recent tyrants known we can all relax. Romano Prodi, Hosni Mubarak, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, old uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. One has to admit that the people of Iraq do not seem that upset about the going of the old mass-murderer but what do they know?
I know I am not the only person around who feels nauseous by the so-called popular horror, particularly among the West European elite, at the execution of Saddam Hussein and his taunting by some Shi’ite guards. Would it be too much to ask all these self-appointed guardians of international public morality to ask themselves what their reaction would be if they or their nearest and dearest had gone through what the people of Iraq have gone through under the far-from-benign rule of Saddam Hussein, his psychopathic sons and other Ba’athists close to him?
Actually, we know the answer to that in a round-about sort of way. Take Romano Prodi, for example. (Well, all right, I’ll take Romano Prodi.) The man is going to various places, such as Russia, a country known for the wonders of law and order, calling for a world-wide moratorium on capital punishment. Terrible, terrible, he says. Not fit behaviour for civilized countries and humane societies.
Could someone remind Signor Prodi that within living memory a certain Benito Mussolini together with his unfortunate mistress, Clara Petacci, hardly a war criminal and other members of his entourage were shot by the Italian partisans without the benefit of a trial, let alone a public one, let alone defence lawyers. Their still bloody bodies were then hung upside down in a public square in Milan from meat hooks. Not the behaviour of a civilized country – and Italy is proud of her long, highly civilized and extremely bloody history.
What about the Nuremberg trials, also within living memory? I have lost count of the times I have been told that the only way the former Soviet empire can sort itself out is by having something like a Nuremberg tribunal. Few of the people who make that comment have any suggestions as to who should be part of that tribunal, the former Soviet empire not having been pulverized the way Germany was in 1945 but that does not stop them from pontificating.
To be completely honest, the Nuremberg trials were a travesty of legality, with people tried on hastily invented charges by the conquerors of their country and a very questionable tribunal. The Soviet judge, Iona Nikitchenko had presided over several of the Stalinist show trials in the thirties. One of the Soviet prosecutors had been involved in the mass murder of Polish officers in Katyn, one of the indictments he then presented at Nuremberg.
Usual rules of evidence were deliberately ignored and it was made clear that the terrible crimes the Nazi defendants were accused of could happen only in the framework of an aggressive war.
Some of the defendants were acquitted, some were given gaol sentences, most were sentenced to death and those that had not committed suicide, were executed with the executions filmed to be widely shown. According to Albert Speer, he and others who had been sentenced to imprisonment were sent in to clear up the mess after their comrades’ execution. Tsk,, tsk, not the behaviour of a civilized society.
Ah, but those were different days. A terrible regime had been vanquished in war. Ahem, what exactly was Saddam’s regime like? Considerably worse than Mussolini’s though not worse than Hitler’s.
What of some other events in recent European history? The execution of Imre Nagy together with three members of his government after the suppression of the Hungarian revolution? All four of them were tricked into imprisonment and executed after a secret trial. In fact, the executions were not announced till after they had been carried out.
Another one to be executed after that secret trial was General Pál Maléter, the commander of the Hungarian insurrectionary forces who had been kidnapped when he went to negotiate with the Soviet forces.
Ah but this was all a long time ago, though one would be hard put to describe Nagy or his colleagues as being terrible oppressors or, indeed, oppressor of any kind.
The point is that over the last few decades Europe, first Western, then Eastern developed to a point where the likelihood of a monstrous regime seems low. In the United States that likelihood had never even existed. As a consequence we feel that we can pontificate on what is and what is not moral behaviour in connection with bloodthirsty mass murderers.
James Taranto had an interesting item in one of the round-ups of the Wall Street Journal Europe Best of the Web last week. He refers back to an article by Debra J. Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle that takes to task all wailers about Saddam’s untimely demise.
Ms Saunders quotes a curious statement from Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program:
The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders. History will judge these actions harshly.Excuse me? You mean history will judge Saddam’s executioners more harshly than him and his fellow mass murderers? Ms Saunders has no doubts about that:
What nonsense. The measure of a government's commitment should be in how it treats its citizens. Hussein had countless Iraqis killed without a trial. He ordered the death of an 11-year-old boy because he thought it was "the right of the head of state." History will focus on his misdeeds, not on the timely execution of a guilty despot.James Taranto goes further:
Saunders is obviously right: It is perverse to consider the execution of a mass murderer as worse than the murder of children.The following day there was a defence of Richard Dicker’s statement not by him, as it happens but by someone who clearly still believes in the Easter Bunny. This is what a reader came up with:
But she doesn't quite capture the full perversity of Dicker's statement, "The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders." By this reasoning, hanging a thief or a jaywalker would be less bad than hanging a mass murderer.
And suppose we apply the Dicker principle to the previous regime in Baghdad. How did it treat Iraq's worst offenders, namely Saddam Hussein his sons and assorted hangers-on? It provided them with nearly limitless wealth and power. By Dicker's logic, this is close to ideal: The more brutal a dictatorship and the more lavishly its rulers live, the stronger its commitment to human rights. What a monstrous moral inversion.
I don't think history will long remember how Saddam was executed. But Dicker's not making an inverse statement--the worse the criminal, the better the treatment he should receive. That's nonsense. He's talking about having a "floor" of acceptable behavior for everyone, regardless of how vile he is. For example, while one could be happy to see Timothy McVeigh walk to the gas chamber, it would be unseemly to have a jeering crowd throwing rotten fruit at him as he went.The point about the need for solemnity around the execution is a fair one and it does not get into the argument about the horrors of capital punishment or the supposed lack of fairness in Saddam’s trial.
That's not out of respect for McVeigh, but out of respect for the solemnity and seriousness of putting someone to death. Such solemnity and seriousness is also a protection for the executioners' souls. These events should not be fun, even if you believe in their necessity.
In Dicker's case, I suppose he wouldn't want anyone put to death. That amounts to the lowest common denominator that he would apply to anyone. Why do you suggest that he wants to elevate Saddam? Were you speaking tongue-in-cheek? I suppose his choice of pabulum was clumsy; replace the words "worst offender" with "most vulnerable" and it's more correct. Why not just attack his poor choice of verbiage than make an absurd claim of a "monstrous moral inversion"?
Wouldn't it be nice if one could keep to that putative resolution of not attacking David Cameron and the Conservative Party? Actually, wouldn't it be nice if we had a Conservative Party?
Well, what happens? I ignore the Sunday newspapers and lo, and behold, the Boy-King comes out with yet another political gem, which he will repeat in a speech today. It seems that the people out there (far away from his own rather expensive home and lifestyle) are paying too much. In fact, he has just been told (perhaps, by one of the nannies) that the cost of living has been going up.
So, like a good little boy scout he wants to help everyone. The Conservative Party – deeply in debt, as all of us know – is setting up a website to help people to cut down on their cost of living or their bills (whichever seems more accurate). This, apparently, is part of their campaign against Gordon Brown who is being accused "of adding to the burden on families who are feeling the pinch by hiking taxes and allowing housing costs to escalate".
So, does this mean that the Conservatives will cut some of those taxes, specifically the Stamp Duty on home buying? Not so that you'd notice.
Cutting taxes, as Georgy-Porgy Osborne has told us, is courting cheap popularity and that is something the new, caring, sharing (especially of our money) Conservatives would never do. Actually, they would never court any kind of popularity, cheap or expensive but let that pass.
So, instead of telling us what leading “a Government that helps people to live for less”, David Cameron and his Tory Boys will give us lots of advice how to cut those pesky utility bills and make sure that "some vital goods and services - such as plumbing and rail fares" did not become unbearably expensive or, any more expensive than they are, or, well, you know.
Just to show how unfair it all is, the Boy-King has promised that he would ask the Office of Fair Trading to investigate soaring gas bills. Ahem, any chance of investigating those soaring tax bills?
I suppose, I shall have to ask it again. Is this really what one wants Her Majesty’s Opposition to do: give advice on how to pay bills and cut down on the cost of living? Would it not be a goodish way for all those intellects in Conservative Central Office to spend their time to produce some ideas about how they are going to reverse the horrors of the Blair-Brown government? Perhaps, even they have given up on the notion of Cameron ever becoming prime minister.
COMMENT THREAD
Gordon Brown, we are told, went on the BBC television device yesterday – not that one watches these things.
We are also told he "signalled" that, in the event of his assuming the office of prime minister, he would forge (good word under the circumstances) a foreign policy independent of the US and initiate "frank" relations with President George Bush.
In so doing, we understand that the chancellor uttered in the direction of the camera words to the effect that he would be "very frank", then saying in a robust prime ministerial style, "The British national interest is what I and my colleagues are about."
He promised: "a new kind of politics in this country... a new style of government in the future". This would be a "Government of all the talents", one which would listen more to the views of Labour MPs. 
Bush, meanwhile, could care less. Poised to put in an additional 20,000 troops into Iraq, three times the total number the British have in place, he is ready for a make-and-break "surge" that he hopes will bring peace to Iraq.
When not even his own Congress can stop him, what a virtually unknown British politician says is of remarkably little importance – as, no doubt, Gordo will soon be finding.
COMMENT THREAD
Yesterday, according to the great Sunday Times, Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Under the by-line of Uzi Mahnaimi in New York and Sarah Baxter in Washington, the newspaper further asserts that two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters".
Nothing of this is new however. We have been reading reports of IAF practising a strike for some considerable time and, ten days short of a year ago, posted a picture of the IAF Squadron that would lead the raid. The IAF has also published a picture of one of what might be a back-up squadron (above left). And the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran goes back to at least October 2003 when the LA Times "revealed" planning for such an attack.
However, the Sunday Times, in that infuriatingly self-important way that so typifies the MSM, seems to think such plans are new. It is thus able to announce, "Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran", telling us that they were prompted "in part" by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad's assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.
Actually, this is also not new. Iran has been "on the verge" for some considerable time. But, as we pointed out in February last, it is producing a uranium bomb, which means it will be too heavy for its current or any known means of delivery in the foreseeable future.
This minor piece of information seems to have escaped the Sunday Times and nor have I seen it in any other MSM outlet. But it has an enormous significance in assessing the threat from Iran. Even if it could get a bomb together in two years, it would take several more before it could get anywhere close to developing a means of delivery that could carry the weight.
Another highly significant issue is the delivery to Iran by the Russians, which started last November, of the Tor-M1 air-defence missile systems. Time and time we have argued, not least here, that the presence of these highly capable missiles would tilt the balance of advantage against an Israeli airstrike, to the extent that, once deliveries are complete, it would no longer be an option.
This is something which the Sunday Times itself, when it was forecasting a raid by March 2006, thought important in December 2005 - but now seems to have forgotten about. It also seems to have forgotten about its earlier report in March 2005 that an Israeli strike had been given "initial authorisation", that too being announced in the same, breathless, self-important tones, the headline proclaiming: "Revealed: Israel plans strike on Iranian nuclear plant".
Once again, we have the same pair of journalists in the by-line, Uzi Mahnaimi - in Tel Aviv, not having yet moved to New York - and Sarah Baxter, in Washington. And, as for Mahnaimi, he is a very odd cove indeed.
Nevertheless, if an Israeli strike was likely then, as Mahnaimi then asserted, it is now - over a year later - highly unlikely, whether nuclear or otherwise. In the first instance, this is because it is evident that there is no immediate threat and, secondly, because the window of opportunity for a quick, pre-emptive strike is now closing, if not actually closed.
A grown-up newspaper might actually mention these issues, in the absence of which, you just know the story is a crock – one of these excitable, lightweight fillers that the Sunday Times uses when it wants to look important but actually does not have any hard news. The funny thing is that if this blog "revealed" such garbage stories in such a consistently breathless manner, we'd be laughed off the blogsophere.
COMMENT THREAD
It was last week that the self-important Thomas Harding of the Daily Telegraph told us he could "reveal" something to us, that had come from Hansard nearly a month previously.
I guess these hacks haven't caught up with the reality of the internet, and the fact that we can check on their output, because Brian Brady, Westminster editor of Scotland on Sunday is today playing the Harding game.
In a piece headed, "UK troops' vehicles fail every day", he tells us that, "New figures released by the Ministry of Defence" reveal that the lives of British soldiers are being put at risk because of the spiralling failure rate of armoured vehicles used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Brady is someone we have met before, harvesting Parliamentary Questions but this time, without bothering to tell us, his information comes from Hansard 12 December last year, on the back of other information in January - of last year - also from a Parliamentary Question. Not only that, the main information was in the Guardian on 13 December 2006.
Bearing in mind that Scotland on Sunday is a newspaper – in which case one expects a certain immediacy to the "news" offered – this also short-changes the reader who might wish to find additional information not used in the piece. By concealing his sources, Brady makes this more difficult.
Furthermore, it is also a profound discourtesy to the two MPs who actually asked the questions. They were, respectively, Mark Harper and Andrew Rosindell, both – as it happens – Conservative MPs. Brady is lifting their work without so much as an acknowledgement, something which these hacks are rather good at doing.
Writing good stories, however, is not Brady's forte. Even with the basic work done for him, he gets it wrong.
He starts by telling us that crews from a range of vehicles, including battle tanks and reconnaissance vehicles, "reported almost 450 failings in just six months up to the end of last October." So far so good. That is true, although Brady's claim - based on the PQ - that: "At least eight further incidents were deemed so serious that they could have placed personnel in mortal danger," is somewhat over-egged.
But he then goes on to embellish information even further, claiming that the "MoD's list of operational malfunctions among the armoured vehicle fleet reveals that Challengers failed 132 times between May and October last year - a rate of one complaint every 1.39 days." This simply is not true. These data do not record Challengers failing - they record equipment failures in Challengers. And that can be something as unimportant - in the grander scheme of things - as a light bulb.
Not content with this, though, Brady then says that, in the 32-month period from 21 March 2003, immediately after the fall of Saddam, to December 15, 2005, tank crews reported a failure once every 2.5 days. Warriors used in Iraq, he says, failed once every 2.38 days up to the end of 2005, but by last October the technical problems had spiralled to the point where British forces received a complaint about the vehicles every single day. The MoD's revelations list 389 Equipment Failure Reports (EFRs) in Iraq alone between last May and October.
What Brady is saying here is confused and, in its general tenor, wrong. If there is a story that can be gleaned from this, it might be how the MoD is trying to downplay the significance of the "failings". What we are actually dealing with is what the MoD calls "equipment failure reports" (EFRs) and "serious equipment failure reports" (SEFs). Look how these are described in the PQ in December of last year:
EFRs and SEFs are not technically complaints; they are the reporting mechanism used by units for routine equipment support issues. The data does not account for the results of subsequent investigations and therefore does not differentiate between what has actually been proven to be equipment failure, as opposed to operator error or damage sustained as a result of operations. Nor does this data give the severity of any such failures which in many cases have no discernible impact on operational capability or safety.But now look at how the same things are defined last January:
An EFR is logged if the user believes that "an item of equipment or component has failed unreasonably early in its life, or that it exhibits a design, handling or safety problem". A SEF is defined as "a failure or suspected failure that results in, or has the potential to result in, personal injury, loss of life or serious damage".Nevertheless, no one can say from these data that they represent vehicle breakdowns or failures, per se. The data simply record users' beliefs that "an item of equipment or component has failed unreasonably early in its life, or that it exhibits a design, handling or safety problem". In one way, they are more serious than simple failures as their nature would suggest a requirement for some sort of remedy over and above repair or replacement - but that does not mean that the "ERF" failures in themselves are serious, in terms of affecting the functioning of the machines.
One tiny bit of the all-pervading veil covering that most secretive (and dishonest) of organisations, the Ministry of Defence, was lifted for us this weekend by defence correspondent Sean Rayment (pictured), of the Sunday Telegraph.
But what he thinks he might have seen, he may or may not actually have seen. And it is a moot point – given his lacklustre track record – whether he has actually understood what he did see.
Even with that, you cannot be sure he has painted an accurate picture. This depends on whether he was allowed to see enough of the game to form a clear view – which is extremely unlikely. He will have been shown only what some of the players wanted him to see – or were able to show him, notwithstanding that none of the players themselves have a complete picture.
If you are beginning to suspect this is a laborious way of my admitting that I have not the faintest what is going on in the MoD, then you are partially right. But it is also a reminder that no one else does. What we are getting, therefore, is a confused picture. In the final analysis, it may be completely misleading - with the possibility that that is the real intention.
Not for Sean Rayment and his MSM newspaper, however, are there any doubts or caveats – and nor would you expect them. Rayment, under the headline, "Armed forces face Brown's fury" is telling us that Defence Chiefs believe that the Armed Forces are now viewed by "senior Labour figures" as a "Tory organisation", leaving them at risk of incurring the wrath of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.
Senior officers, we are then told, fear that relations with Labour are so bad that the Chief of the Defence Staff will have to issue official orders at senior level, banning the leaking of stories damaging to the government. The months of unofficial briefing by senior commanders have sparked increasing fears that the Ministry of Defence will be left the "poor relations" of government spending, with defence budgets slashed during this year's Comprehensive Spending Review.
That, of course, is what it is all about – the comprehensive spending review. This is the current "bun fight", the outcome of which will determine whether the different Services will get all the toys they want or whether some of the treasured projects will have to be cut back to pay for ongoing operations.
For all the complexity, once you have sussed that, you have the essence of the game. What you must not do is run away with the idea that the Defence Chiefs are actually interested in the performance of their respective services or even care about the current commitments in Afghanistan and - especially - Iraq. These are simply irritating side issues which are distracting them from the task of building "proper" armed forces.
The current concern about these operations thus stems not from any heart-searching about best to fight them but from a greater concern that the spending on them might eat into the finance available for longer term projects, like the Navy's carrier programme and the Army's £14 billion Future Rapid Effects System (FRES). The "war against terror" is regarded as a temporary and unwelcome aberration which must not be allowed to distract from the longer-term development of the armed forces.
Reading between the lines, this is why there is now real alarm within the MoD. The recent publicity about the under-resourcing of troops in the field has been too successful and has gone badly wrong. The message has gone to the Treasury that it is there that the bulk of spending must be concentrated, rather than on the grandiose headline projects to which the Defence Chiefs are so wedded.
What has caught them out is that they largely believed that stoking up public concern over current commitments would bring them extra (i.e., new) money. Instead, Gordon and his hard-hearted (and largely bankrupt) Treasury chums are simply planning to re-allocate existing funds, diverting them to service the immediate operational requirements.
Hence do we get another piece from Rayment (with the help of political editor Patrick Hennessy) in the inside pages, picking up what he has seen but not understood, under the headline "The big guns are ordered to hold fire".
What this amounts to is Defence Chiefs and the MoD establishment, having suddenly realised that their publicly-expressed concern for the troops in the field might actually cause money to be diverted to them rather than the favoured projects, are desperately clamping down on the publicity to ensure that their ambitions are protected. The rest is fluff.
What is rather amusing, in a pathetic sort of a way, is how little Sean has been recruited as the willing but unknowing agent to promote the Defence Chiefs' agenda. Not for him nor the MoD, and especially not the Conservative opposition, will you get any ideas that the Army – in particular – should be properly equipped for the tasks it is currently undertaking.
That defence money should actually be spent on defence is most irregular - and most definitely not on the agenda if the Defence Chiefs - with the help of the Sunday Telegraph - can keep it that way.
COMMENT THREAD
According to The Sun a London man has died after two ambulance crews could not be sent to his aid - because they were on EU-enforced lunch breaks.
The man collapsed in a betting shop, five minutes from his local ambulance station but the two teams there were on their break so a paramedic was sent in a car from the more distant Enfield station. When he arrived, he realised that the 73-year-old man – as yet unnamed – was having a heart attack. He called for an ambulance but, by the time it arrived, the man was dead.
On the face of it, this is another of those dreadful EU stories – the potential effect of which The Sun warned about last December.
But, it seems, other ambulance services have opted out of the Working Time Regulations, on the basis of an exclusion for where their duties "inevitably conflict" with the provisions of the Regulations.
Then one finds that the public sector union Unison argues that the duties of its members working within the police service, ambulance service and fire service do not conflict with the Regulations. So this begins to look more like union idiocy than the EU.
But then you read two detailed comments from ambulance workers, here and here, the perspective changes again. The problem then seems to have a great deal to do with the combination of a "penny pinching" new working contract in the NHS called "Agenda for Change" and the bureaucratic inflexibility of the system.
What started out as a quickie "shock! horror! probe!" story about the EU thus gets bogged down in all sorts of complications. The one thing you can say with certainty though is that the death of this man was not the result - directly at least - of "EU-enforced lunch breaks".
But I do wish we could be like the MSM. We could then ignore all the complicated details and go for the quick, easy kill – heedless of the fact that the story is wrong.
COMMENT THREAD
Perhaps the most telling comment on the current situation in the military comes not from a serving officer, or even a serviceman, but from MJ Downey, a serving canteen manager (NAAFI) on HM warships. He tells us he has been in this post for 31 years and, writing in The Telegraph, he tells us:
I have never seen things so bad and morale so low. Progressive governments have had a hand at running down the RN/RM, Army & RAF; but this Government has plumbed the depths in its contempt and abuse of our military personnel. I am dumbfounded why Cameron has not been vociferous in denouncing this action against the Royal Navy.A NAAFI manager is in a good position to gauge morale – and let no one say they are mere non-combatants. It was during the Falklands War that a manager manned a general purpose machine gun, to help ward off Argentinean aircraft and, on a warship, there are no REMFs. Everybody is at risk.
As I pay less attention to the MSM than my esteemed colleague does or, for that matter, many of our readers do, and never listen to Radio 4, unless there is a dramatization of a detective story on, I have to get my daily irritations somewhere else. Fortunately, these are supplied in plenty by our so-called allies, eurosceptics of various hue.
Take the subject of hiring Polish or any other kind of workers because they happen to be the best available or when it makes economic sense. Just why precisely does the media and, come to think of it, some of our "eurosceptic" brethren think that is wrong or hypocritical? How often have we said, on this blog, anyway, that being eurosceptic is not about hating people of other nationalities, even if they are European (or French), but about opposing a certain political construct?
Furthermore, if one believes in a free economy, one believes in an employer's right to hire people as he or she sees fit and there should be no discrimination on any grounds except what is perceived to be useful to the business.
Then there are all those people who do not like the European Union and pronounce themselves to be eurosceptic who then insist on enumerating all the various reforms they would like to see in the institution that would make it quite acceptable. That is like saying back in the seventies that you would not object to the Soviet Union if it introduced a multi-party system, freedom of speech, thought and religion and allowed private enterprise. Few of us would have had any objections to that but it would not have been the Soviet Union.
Those who spend their time talking of reform need to come up with answers to the questions we have posed over and over on this blog. Well, all right, just one question: exactly what methods and which institutions do you propose to use in order to promulgate those reforms you keep chattering about?
And so on to irritation number three, also to do with eurosceptics. Nothing but nothing annoys me more than sloppy thinking on the part of our supposed allies. And no, I am not talking about American political wonks who are still incapable of grasping that the EU is not a jolly, cuddly, free-market area. I am talking of people who live in Britain, work in Britain, write on politics in Britain and consider themselves to be more knowledgeable than the average populace or the political establishment.
This particular irritation was caused by a conversation I had with an editor of a dead-tree media outlet that I am much involved with. We were discussing the possibility of an article on the EU and the editor mentioned what a colleague on this particular dead-tree media outlet had said.
The colleague announced that as the East European countries are not joining the euro (except for Slovenia, which he appears to have missed) then, surely, the whole thing is dead in the water. Various reasons, such as the fact that I was conducting the conversation on my mobile phone while riding the Hammersmith and City line, prevented me from making the obvious comment: how can a currency that is being used now in twelve countries be described as "dead in the water"?
The integration process may not be going as fast as the powers that be would like it and the economic outlook for the eurozone remains rather grim. But the currency is there and is likely to be with us for some time to come. It is not "dead in the water".
Neither is the project "dead in the water". Again, the integration process has stalled and it is rotting away from within. But there is a great deal of spoiling in a state and in a political structure. The EU is still where the overwhelming majority of our laws and regulations originate with our Parliament having no right to refuse them.
The Commission is still the sole originator of that legislation and the ECJ remains the supreme arbiter of how member states (that means us) implement and obey that legislation.
So, as a final growl of irritation, let me refer to an idiotic article written by Sara Rainwater, editor of that highly esteemed dead-tree media outlet, the European Journal (no, not the one I was referring to earlier - I was banned from the EJ many years ago) in which she was describing some conference in Brussels, during which she was "proud" of fighting against the right of Brussels to legislate in the UK.
As I have seen no reference in the European Journal to the possibility of the UK withdrawing from the European Union, I fail to understand what Editor Rainwater's fight consists of. For her information, as long as we stay in the EU, Brussels has every right to legislate in the UK. Signed, sealed and delivered.
So ends my Twelfth Night or, if you prefer, Russian Christmas message to our readers.
It was February last when the Metropolitan Police escorted some low-life Muslim scum through the streets of London, allowing them to carry inflammatory placards and chant violent messages.
It took until November to get the first one, Mizanur Rahman, through the courts, with a guilty verdict and, two months later, they've finally got another.
This is Umran Javed, 27, (pictured above) who had shouted "Bomb, bomb USA" and "Jihad is the path to Allah" as he led a 300-strong crowd in chants during the demonstration. 
He was also a prominent figure in the rally outside the Danish embassy, leading chants there. But he claimed in court that his chants were "sayings and soundbites" without any intention at all. On the other hand, David Perry, for the prosecution, said that, "if you shout out, 'Bomb, bomb Denmark; bomb, bomb USA', there is no doubt about what you intend your audience to understand."
Javed has now been remanded in custody to be sentenced in April after an Old Bailey jury found him guilty by a majority verdict of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred.
There was, we are told, uproar in court as the verdict was delivered with one man led from the public gallery by security guards after shouting: "Allahu Akbar [God is great], I curse the judge, the court, the jury, all of you." Other friends and supporters of Javed also shouted insults.
We await news of their fate, and of the hundreds more demonstrators who took part in the chanting and carried banners last February. It is good to see two of them in the dock but, nearly a year later, that is not anything like good enough.
COMMENT THREAD
On reflection, the Boy King has actually achieved something that many readers might have thought impossible – an expression of sympathy from this blog for the MoD.
Cutting through the furore about Service accommodation standards, with such a huge estate (comprising nearly 200,000 bed units) it is very easy to pick up examples of the very worst and put pictures up on the net. But, as the MoD has done (left), it is also possible to put up examples of good conditions, thus redressing a balance that has been sorely missing.
What also has been missing is the reality that a great deal of Service accommodation is very good, while some of the tenants are very bad – the boozed-up squaddies that think nothing of trashing their barracks or the dozy little Misses in married quarters who block off all the vents and who do not open windows from one week to another, and then wonder why black mould grows in the bathroom (the bane of the life of many a housing manager).
Whatever else, as the dust begins to settle on this issue, what does emerge is that there is not a major crisis of Forces' accommodation. There are problems, yes – and they do require vigilance from and occasional intervention by MPs, who are the longstop in the system. But it is also fair to say that there always have been problems. In the old days of "Works and Bricks", some of the stories would have made your hair curl.
Nevertheless, the issue – as we observed when it broke – has given the opportunity for the touchy-feely Girlie Boy to deal with defence without getting his soft little hands soiled with nasty green (and now grey) things that go "bang!".
And however bad the ghastly Mr Harding of the Telegraph might be – and that is seriously ghastly – he does point up in today's piece on the Royal Navy that there is a serious defence spending crisis building up, which the Girlie Boy Tories are ignoring.
But, for all its indignation about the state of the Fleet, the Telegraph itself has not only been wholly inadequate in addressing the growing crisis but, in the persona of its defence correspondent, has been a cheer-leader for the Type 45 Destroyers which, at £1 billion each, are part of the reason why the Royal Navy is having financial problems.
And it the procurement of Type 45, as much as anything, that demonstrates so clearly why we need a broader debate on defence, one which the Tories should be – but are not – leading.
To illustrate just how wide that debate should run, I am much taken with a comment on the unofficial Army forum, which questioned my assertion that we should be using (MAMBA) counter-battery radar as part of our strategy for dealing with hit-and-run mortar attacks on our bases in Iraq. To the person who made the comment, all the deployment of that equipment meant was that troops would get extra warning, which would "get them to the trenches but not much more".
In this beguilingly simple comment lies the debate. In the last few years, the MoD has spent over £200 million on new, state-of-the-art counter-battery radar. It bought four MAMBA sets for £30 million and ten COBRA sets for £17.8 million each. If this equipment has no use in the shooting wars in which we are currently engaged – in Iraq and Afghanistan – why did we buy them?
If all they are to do is sit unused in a warehouse, "somewhere in England", against the eventuality that they might be wanted for some distant, as yet unspecified campaign, then surely we had better things to do with the money?
On the other hand, if they are to be used, there is no value to be gained simply from identifying the location of enemy mortars unless you are prepared to act on that information – attempting either to kill or capture the mortar teams. But that costs extra money, for UAVs and for helicopters – which simply has not been spent.
Therefore, it is all very well for the Telegraph to complain that defence funds "are often spent unwisely" but the only examples it can offer are the "£20 billion so far gobbled up by the otiose Euro-fighter" and a similar sum for the Trident replacement. But, as we have pointed out elsewhere, without talking into account either of these two projects, this government has overspent £8.8 billion on European projects which could have been sourced more cheaply elsewhere.
Yet, not only has this waste gone unrecorded, the paper also bleats about the "Euro-centric nature of our defence", complaining that Britain's strategic thinking has been focused on the defence of western Europe. The paper now argues that the end of the Cold War "should have released Britain to pursue its more usual vocation as an island nation with interests in every continent."
But, it says, our top brass is gearing up for the last war whereas, "the truth is that, as our horizons widen, the Royal Navy should be assuming a pre-eminence it has not enjoyed for 50 years." And, on that basis, it argues that we "should be building more ships than ever, including unmanned vessels."
Well, that is an argument, but not a very good one. The essence of our current misfortunes is that we are currently engaged in counter-insurgency operations, in which the Navy features very little. We are engaged against enemies operating to a wholly different moral code, who are not afraid to die and who are able to exploit our weaknesses. And, currently, if we are not losing, we are certainly not winning.
Rather than looking to wider horizons, therefore, it might help if we looked at the wars we are actually fighting – not the last war, not the next war but the wars of the here and now. It is these that we need to win before considering any other adventures.
The trouble is that, from its most recent record, we cannot look to our Armed Forces to come up with the answers. The government is manifestly incapable of producing solutions, the Opposition is a waste of time and space and the media is not even on the same planet.
How did that phrase go? "Houston… we have a problem!" Forget the Houston bit. We have a problem.
COMMENT THREAD
The beginning of 2006 saw Gazprom throwing its weight around and raising gas prices to Ukraine, citing "market forces" as an argument. Unfortunately, that meant an immediate decrease in the amount of gas Ukraine was sending on to various other European countries and the EU was in an uproar (well, a small uproar). A very swift agreement was reached and, while the price Ukraine paid was raised (unarguably they had been underpaying but that was part of the deal Putin had promised to Yanukevich who proceeded to lose the election once the counting was sorted out) but Russia, Putin and Gazprom did not quite get all they wanted.
In the immediate aftermath of those events there was a great deal of talk about alternative energy sources, pipelines being built and more thought given (though not in Germany) to nuclear power. Little of it came to anything, though pipes are being constructed to various other former Soviet republics.
In the last few months Gazprom has consolidated its control of natural gas and, even, oil production in Russia, forcing Shell to "renegotiate" its contract and cede control of Sakhalin-2. It is beginning to look as if Gazprom, run by various buddies of Putin, is beginning to gnash its teeth at BP. One possible outcome of all this is a gradual dropping off in foreign investment and Russia not being able to fulfil her various contractual obligations to supply energy to European countries.
That could be a disaster for Putin and his possible successor, since the Russian economic boom, such as it is, relies entirely on export of oil and gas plus a few other natural resources. There has been no sign of investment in industry nor any attempt to develop and diversify Russia’s economy.
This year started with another Gazprom attack of the vapours – this is becoming a bit of a tradition. But because this particular attack was on Belarus, led by "Europe’s last dictator", Aleksander Lukashenko and a country through which considerably less gas flows to the West than through Ukraine, the EU and its members remained shtumm.
It seemed rather odd to have Gazprom (or the Russian government, whichever one thinks of first) bullying Lukashenko, who has been Putin’s most loyal ally. He will not take his country down the Western road, unlike the leaders of Ukraine and Georgia. So, why is he being bullied?
Well, some of it is money. Belarus has agreed to an increase in price from $47 to $100 per thousand cubic metres, to be raised again by 2011 to something like $300 per thousand cubic metres. Whether Belarus will be able to afford this and what will happen if it does not, remains to be seen.
Of course, the original price was extremely low. But it ought to be pointed out that it had been negotiated, if that is the word, as a bonus for Lukashenko’s unwavering support. Furthermore, as the Wall Street Journal Europe pointed out two days ago [subscription only], we cannot talk about such things as market prices when Gazprom exercises complete monopoly and refuses to open up to foreign investors.
In any case, the money is not the most important part of the deal and, it would not be altogether surprising if those terms were loosened up at some later stage. What Russia was really after is the 50 per cent stake in Belltransgaz, Belarus's gas pipeline monopoly.
Gazprom’s openly avowed aim is to control and consolidate the production and distribution of gas to all its clients. Russia refuses to ratify the International Energy Charter, under which signatories have to allow free access to pipeline networks.
Nor is Russia particularly happy with the proposed EU liberalization of the energy market, which will break up the existing Continental monopolies but will also prevent gas suppliers to own pipelines. And vice, as they say, versa.
This is most definitely not in Russia's interests and the last few months have shown us quite clearly how that country and its state monopolies understand the expression "market forces". Briefly, it amounts to "what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable". At the barrel of the gun, figuratively speaking.
COMMENT THREAD
Just as a number of bloggers and journalists, including Michelle Malkin, were heading over to Iraq to find the mysterious police captain Jamil Hussein, lo and behold, his existence has been confirmed. Kind of. For the moment there seems to be no explanation as to where he has been all this time and why he has been whisked into arrest immediately on being found.
Nor is there any explanation as to what really happened in Hurriyah (there is still no real evidence for the story Jamil Hussein is supposed to have produced) or why none of the stories AP sourced from him have been confirmed by any other news outlet. Not just the odd one but none. Confederate Yankee, as ever, follows the story and the astonishing appearance of comments from left-wing bloggers who have, until now ignored it all.
And, of course, now there will be no need for Michelle and others to go to Iraq to see what AP is really up to. Isn't that convenient?
The Daily Telegraph today runs a front page story about cuts in the Royal Navy, reducing it, as some would aver, to the status of a coastal defence force. Yet the commentary is as puerile and superficial as ever.
The Daily Mail, on its front page, launches a crusade against waste recyling, warning of a plague of rats as Councils cut back on collection frequencies in order to pay the extra costs of meeting recyling targets. The Times gives its front page news of a proposed ban on rabbit-human embryos but also devotes two whole pages (as does the Mail) to the "crisis" over the "squalid homes" provided for our armed forces.
The Guardian choses to climate change as its lead issue, with "environment minister" Ian Pearson (who he?) complaining that airlines aren't taking it seriously enough. On the other hand, The Independent offers, "for the first time", a real blueprint for peace in Iraq, by Ali Allawi, the former Iraqi Defence Minister. He starts off saying:
The Iraqi state that was formed in the aftermath of the First World War has come to an end. Its successor state is struggling to be born in an environment of crises and chaos. The collapse of the entire order in the Middle East now threatens as the Iraq imbroglio unleashes forces in the area that have been gathering in virulence over the past decades.Amongst other things, he is suggesting a preparatory conference on a "Middle-Eastern Confederation of States" that will examine proposals on economic, trade and investment union. That seems like an Arab version of the European Union, which does not seem a terribly bright idea.
The Times tells us that a superstore tycoon and avowed Eurosceptic has defended his decision to hire more than 30 workers from Poland.
Bruce Robertson, who owns Trago Mills and is a member of the UK Independence Party member, employs the workers at his complex near Newton Abbot in Devon.
He said: "I have no alternative than to employ foreign workers to keep our business going. Increasing legislation by our own Parliament and the EU has provided a mass of red tape for employers." 
Some of that legislation was the EU's metric law, which made it an offence to sell – amongst other things – Brussels sprouts by the pound. Bruce's response was to set up a vegetable stall selling – amongst other things – Brussels sprouts by the pound, with a counter to record the number of offences committed. And what fun we had, with not a Trading Standards Officer to be seen.
But, given the quality of staff he was then reduced to "hiring", it is no wonder he is now happier with Poles. They, at least, will have no problem with metric.
COMMENT THREAD
"The UK government has enjoyed two big economic policy successes since 1997: making the Bank of England independent and not joining the euro."
Comment in the Financial Times today.
COMMENT THREAD
Domestic violence should be harmonised – or, at least, the treatment of it. According to ČeskéNoviny, this is the objective of an international congress to be held in Prague on 7-10 January, to which effect "experts from 16 countries" are meeting to prepare a "European directive" which will deal with the problem.
The draft European legislation will then be submitted to the EU Commission by the end of March, focusing on the protection of victims of domestic violence and the prosecution of its perpetrators.
Anna Curdova of the Czech Social Democrats party CSSD) is telling journalists that the Czech legislation on domestic violence is one of the most modern in Europe but a “unified European approach” is necessary, otherwise there is a danger that attacks on family members and approach to perpetrators of domestic violence will be different in individual countries.
Says Curdova, "It is necessary for the EU to have clear directives according to which individual EU countries will act. If they do not respect it they will face sanctions."
Mmm… harmonised control of domestic violence – definitely needed to ensure the proper functioning of the Single Market, methinks.
COMMENT THREAD
Ironically, it seems, the girlie agenda espoused by the Tory front bench has been exposed by Tobias Ellwood, the Tory MP for Bournemouth East.
While Gerald Howarth was pursuing his fatuous agenda on transport aircraft charters, Ellwood – an ex Royal Green Jackets officer - was asking the secretary of state for defence how many Cougar and Vector Pinzgauer armoured vehicles were being sent to Iraq Afghanistan and when they were expected to arrive.
Alongside the 5 December answer about which Thomas Harding got so excited, defence minister Adam Ingram responded thus:
On current plans half of the Mastiff (the UK variants of the Cougar) vehicles will deploy to Iraq, the remaining half will be split between Afghanistan and a training pool of vehicles retained in the United Kingdom. The first batch of Mastiff vehicles is on schedule to arrive in Iraq by the end of the year.
A majority of the Vector vehicles will be deployed to Afghanistan with a small number retained in the United Kingdom for training. The first batch of Vector vehicles is on schedule to arrive in Afghanistan in January 2007.
This, as we indicated, was on 5 December and still there is no sign of the Mastiffs arriving in Iraq. More to the point though, the minister is re-writing history. When the procurement of Mastiffs was first announced by Des Browne on 25 July, he stated that they were, "...expected to be delivered to Iraq and Afghanistan in batches over the next six month rotation, with an effective capability in place in Iraq by the end of the year."
Forget big green (or sand-coloured) toys, and nasty things that go "bang". If you want to get the Boy King "engaged" in defence, get a general to talk about accommodation standards.
Despite the heroic efforts of the Tory Boy Blog to indicate otherwise, only then you will get the Boy gushing all over the nearest microphone and piggie rushing from studio to studio, wetting his knickers about the need to provide soldiers "with comfortable living quarters while they are not away on dangerous operations."
It was in fact one of our forum members who yesterday pointed out this "girlie" phenomenon, viz-à-viz our own piece about the RAF's air transport capabilities. "The Green Tosser", he wrote,
…can't be seen to be involved in anything nasty that kills our enemies, like armaments, as that might effect the creation of his touchy-feely image in the focus groups ....but complaining about troop transport failures, which keep our brave lads apart from their loving families, is entirely in line with his PR con job of an image. Hence little Liam piping up and the whole tone of that article.
On reflection, that is very much the truth. There has been a stunning silence from the Boy about our military capabilities and the limitations of our equipment.
Frankly, though, when it comes to a dirty bath (one of the pictures sent to the BBC) and a dead soldier dragged from a shattered "Snatch" Land Rover, I know which I find more offensive.According to a mediafax report, Romania's finance ministry paid the country's first monthly contribution of 254.82 million lei (EUR1=RON3.3560) to the European Union's budget, finance minister Sebastian Vladescu said Wednesday.
Vladescu said Romania, which is EU’s newest member state along Bulgaria, is to receive a RON89.8 million aid from the E.U. in January. In 2007, Romania is to contribute some EUR1.1 billion to the E.U. budget, while the commission allotted the country up to EUR1.4 billion in 2007 funds.
The only trouble is that "someone" does not include this writer.
COMMENT THREAD
The third day into the German presidency of the European Union and it is already boring. Yet again we hear that Angela Merkel is trying to promote, not exactly a free-trade area but some freeing up of trade between the United States and the EU. We heard this last year and, before that, it was an idea promoted by the FAES think-tank, presided over by the former Spanish Prime Minister Aznar. Well, it will give Chancellor Merkel something to think about as she clearly isn’t about to introduce any of those reforms in Germany (except for putting up VAT).
In the meantime, another country has joined the euro, Slovenia, the first of the former Communist states to do so, and probably for a long time. As the New York Times points out, the others are some way off from satisfying the criteria (as are many of those who are members) and have lost interest in the subject, not being able to see the benefits:
Lithuania, one of the first of the newcomers to break with communism, hoped to adopt the euro on Monday, but it failed to meet the European Union’s inflation test by 0.06 of a percentage point this summer. Poland failed to muster the political consensus in favor of joining, and is threatening to hold a referendum on the issue in 2010. Hungary, burdened by political instability, has abandoned its previous target of entering the euro zone in 2010. Even Estonia, a Baltic tiger lauded for its economic prowess, has decided to move back its entry date from 2008 to 2010.According to the BBC, the Slovenians are overjoyed at the thought of being in the euro and inordinately proud of being the first East European country to have made it into the club.
AllahPundit and others are cautiously optimistic about the new SecGen of the UN, Ban Ki-moon. His reply to a question at a press conference indicates that he believes Saddam to have been a vicious thug and mass murderer and, possibly, deserving of the death sentence.
He also adds that whatever his private views are, capital punishment is for each member state to decide on. Of course, what he really means is that it is for the political elite of each member state to decide on, with added counter-inducements thrown in by such organizations as the European Union.
We shall watch the developments with interest but we maintain our basic position: individuals like Kofi Annan may be the pits in transnational politics but, in the end, it is the system that is the real problem.
To prove this, Al-Jazeera reports that Ban Ki-moon is finding himself in hot water by not coming out categorically against capital punishment. Italy, according to this report is starting an international drive for a complete ban (well, a complete ban by the UN and we all know what that is worth) on all executions.
On Sunday, Ashraf Qazi Jehangir, the UN special representative in Iraq, had released a statement saying that the world body "remains opposed to capital punishment, even in the case of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide".In other words, the UN together with the EU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Italian government considers the lives of bloodthirsty mass murderers to be more valuable than those of their victims.
What is it with David Cameron? Is he a kind of Rip van Winkle? Has he been asleep for years, if not decades?
Every time he comes up with a policy, those of us who have been paying attention sigh with weariness: been there, done that. The latest idea? Conservatives will ensure that food labelling will tell people that food is grown and produced in this country and locally.
Does the man not know that food labelling is an EU competence and has been for years? As we speak, a multi-annual plan for consolidating EU food labelling regulations is being rolled out. No Conservative or any other government can do anything about it. Most of it does not even go through Parliament, being EU Regulations rather than Directives.
Has the man forgotten or, come to think of it, did he ever know about the Little Red Tractor label that was supposed to signify “Assured Food Standards” but was slyly marketed by the NFU as an assurance that the food was British grown and British produced until told that it was illegal in the EU to discriminate in this way? The truth is that no food producer from any country whatsoever wanted to apply for the Little Red Tractor label and, after several relaunches, it died a peaceful death, rather like the tractor production industry in this country.
The Boy-King’s speech to the Oxford Farming Conference is full of shibboleths that were trendy a year or so ago and waffle. What it does not have is hard information. No amount of waffle about local production, the Slow Food Movement or the French not losing their link with food production (a debatable proposition) can hide the fact that the man either knows nothing or has chosen to ignore the following interesting facts: agriculture, food production (actually quite successful in this country), health and safety, labelling, environment, veterinary rules, are all EU competences.
There is no mention of the CAP, of the unrolling food labelling consolidation, of endless veterinary rules, of the meat hygiene directives, of the fact that according to the Treaty of Rome we are not allowed to discriminate against any other EU member state. I could go on but shall not. Read the whole speech and marvel at the man’s fatuity and ignorance even if “he was brought up in the country”.
Actually, given his much-boasted upbringing he ought to know that farmers in this country make up one per cent of the population (and around two per cent of rural population). A goodish number of them export their produce and are not likely to want to play protectionist games. And an even bigger number vote Labour, have always done so and will always do so. Why, therefore, should a man who does not think it worth his while to address the CBI, that is the wealth-producers of this country, go off to blather at this annual conference is anybody’s guess.
What a good thing I abandoned my resolution not to attack the Boy-King and his miserable party.
COMMENT THREAD
On the day the government forces in Somalia, backed by Ethiopia, ousted the Islamists from Mogadishu, the Daily Telegraph published a pontificating leader, entitled "The world must not ignore the Horn of Africa".
As the continuing catastrophe of the Horn of Africa means large numbers of migrants moving across the world, not ignoring the place and its problems could be described as rational self-interest. That is not how it was described by the leader writer of that esteemed newspaper. Instead, we had a good deal of waffle about how terrible things are in Somalia and how the government was unlikely to establish order, backed as it was by another country.
There was a reference to the American debacle with its Operation Restore Hope 14 years ago and a good deal of hand-wringing. The international community, according to the argument had not come up with a viable solution. Somebody, I suspect, had not looked at the map of the area or read even superficially about its history.
Curiously enough, several of the commentators insisted that the Islamic Courts were actually rather a good idea as they had imposed law and order, albeit Sharia law and order. One suspects, none of those people would like to live under the usually corrupt and unspeakably cruel Sharia law and order, but, hey, it’s good enough for those Africans.
What was the Telegraph's solution? Well, I expect, you have guessed it even if you did not read it at the time:
However, as argued above, their intervention may just as well leave a gaping power vacuum as create a platform for power-sharing talks. If the Somalis are to be rescued from the horrors of continuing anarchy, a neutral peacekeeping force will have to be deployed. For that, a UN mandate is required. The incoming Korean Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, should make Somalia the priority of his first months in office.Fast forward several days and a new year, and what do we find? As my colleague has already pointed out, even more hand-wringing and calls for Ban Ki-moon to face up to the first great challenge: accusations of child rape and abuse by UN troops in southern Sudan. This is not Darfur we are talking about but the previous civil war with a great deal of atrocity on the part of government troops and militias directed against Christians and animists.
Nobody would pretend that restoring order in such a poverty-stricken, clan-based society will be anything but fiendishly difficult. But the identification of Somalia by Osama bin Laden as a potential launching-pad for terrorism precludes leaving it to its own factional devices. American intervention, both in the 1990s and more recently in support of business-backed militias challenging the Islamic courts in Mogadishu, soon proved counterproductive.
The same fate will befall the Ethiopian coup de main unless a UN-mandated force can rapidly be deployed. Even then, the chances of a political solution, perhaps between a reconstituted TFG and moderate elements in the courts, will remain slim. But it is well worth the try, and not merely in the interests of the region.
The reason that the UN so often behaves badly is, paradoxically, because so many people wish it well. Because the organisation embodies the loftiest of ideals – peace among nations – it tends to receive the automatic benefit of the doubt. We are so fond of the theoretical UN that we rarely drag our gaze down to the actual one. The UN has therefore fallen out of the habit of having to explain itself and, in consequence, become flabby, immobilist and often sleazy.The reason, dear journalists, the UN behaves almost always badly is because its structure is in clear contradiction to its supposed principles and always has been.
There is something especially loathsome about the style of reporting which we see all too often today, the type that has that idiot Thomas Harding reporting, "The Daily Telegraph can reveal…", a style that he is rather too fond of using.
In his self-important way, Harding claims to reveal this time that, "Ageing planes force MoD to pay for civilian troop transporters". But this blog can reveal that the source of his stunning scoop is the answer to a Parliamentary Question published on 5 December.
There's Glory for you ... The Daily Telegraph can reveal that its reporter read a month-old Hansard extract.
And, as he did with his ammunition story, Harding gets it wrong, in this instance eliding details of two different issues to draw the wrong conclusions from them – the classic two plus two makes five.
The gist of the story is that since last April, the MoD has spent £11,303,000 on chartering aircraft to transport troops and sundry VIPs to unspecified destinations, information gleaned from the Parliamentary Question, asked by Gerald Howard, he of Pinzgauer fame.
But, from that slender piece of information – no doubt with the help of Gerald Howarth – the egregious Harding asserts that it is the "ageing fleet of RAF transport aircraft" that has forced the MoD to spend this money. He writes that,
With its 40-year-old Tristar and VC10 passenger aircraft in need of constant repair and a second front opening in Afghanistan, the RAF has turned to non-military airlines to help ferry troops to operational theatres.adding ...
Frustration at Britain's vintage military transport fleet has sometimes led to near mutiny among soldiers who have been stranded for days while trying to get home on leave or at the end of a six-month tour.This, actually, is because Gerald Howarth himself had a hard time of it when he visited Basra, but he (and Harding) has missed the point. Non military aircraft cannot deliver troops directly to operational areas because they are not fitted with the defence suites needed to fly in high-threat environments. But they are used routinely to ferry troops all over the world, and have done so since the dawn of time. It is often cheaper and more efficient to use charter companies, so there is no story, per se in the MoD incurring charter costs.
However, there is a shortage of suitably equipped RAF aircraft, something which the Sunday Telegraph noted back in May last year, but this is an entirely separate issue.All flights into Basra are at night with a black-out inside the aircraft. Civilian planes cannot be used as special air defence measures are required for the hostile environment. The military has attempted to send troops from Basra on Hercules transporters to Qatar and then on charter flights home with Monarch Airlines but failed to get diplomatic clearance from the Arab Emirates.The conduit of this fascinating information, readers will be interested to learn, is The Daily Telegraph on 7 October 2005. And the author of the piece - this blog can reveal - was, er... Thomas Harding.
The Daily Telegraph is pretending to be a newspaper. It is reporting child abuse by United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Sudan. Soldiers are facing allegations of raping and abusing children as young as 12.
That isn't a surprise.
No doubt my colleague will have something to say on this issue later today, but the Telegraph leader makes a start. "Yet again, the UN shows itself unfit for purpose," it opines. But, as with the EU and so many other things, the paper cannot come to the obvious conclusion – that this dire institution should be abolished. Instead, it wails, "the UN should do less, and do it better."
Ever heard the words fundamentally unreformable? What is it with these people? Brains, they have not.
COMMENT THREAD
A delicious conflict is emerging over the fate of the Finnish passenger ferry, Rosella, setting two supposedly core principles of EU law at odds with each other.
This arises, according to the Financial Times, because the ferry, operated by the Viking Line on the three-hour crossing between Finland's capital, Helsinki, and Tallinn, the Estonian capital, is crewed predominantly by Finnish nationals and the owners want to re-flag the ship and replace the crew with cheaper Estonian labour.
Predictably, the Finnish Seamen's Union – with the backing of the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) - is threatening industrial action and Viking is seeking an injunction to prevent this.
It is that which is pitting the core EU principles against each other. On the one hand, there are the "freedom of establishment" rules invoked by the shipping company, allowing businesses to set up wherever they wish in the EU. These are embodied in Article 43 of the Treaty.
On the other stands the EU's social policy which the unions are claiming conveys a fundamental right for workers to take collective action, including strike action.
The issue has already been to the UK Courts, where Viking's application for an injunction was first heard and it is now in front of the European Court of Justice, where there are to be oral hearings today in front of an unusually large panel of 13 judges.
The issues at stake go far wider than the shipping industry, and could affect businesses wherever they seek to replace existing workers with cheaper staff from another EU member state.
Because of this, the ECJ is simultaneously considering another dispute, this one referred by the Swedish courts concerning a Latvian construction company called Laval un Partneri.
Through its Swedish subsidiary, it won a contract to refurbish a school at Vaxholm, Sweden, but the company sought to use cheaper Latvian workers, a move blocked by the union.
This same problem almost came to a head last year, over Irish Ferries, but the EU commission ducked the issue and a dispute between the Irish union Siptu and the ferry operator was resolved without commission intervention.
However, the Financial Times reports that the UK is seeking to rain on the unions' parade, arguing that there is no principle of EU law that gives social policy rights any primacy over other provisions in the EC Treaty, and that taking collective action does not, in itself, even amount to a fundamental right protected by Community law.
If that is the case, then it is not beyond the ECJ to invent such a fundamental right – or find that it existed all along – which the ITF wants it to do, thus making "a judgement to be made on the relationship between human rights and economic rights".
It will be some many months before the ECJ rules on this but, whichever way the answer falls, it is bound to be entertaining. At stake claims the ITF is "what kind of EU we are going to have in the future". "Will it be one that gives priority to the rights of companies," asks the Union, "or one that supports the rights of workers to defend their interests?"
Not for the first time, the EU is going to find that it cannot have it both ways.
COMMENT THREAD
I suppose we all have our own favourite mental image of the British Army – whether it is that famous Alamein shot (which was actually Australian troops), or the timeless scene of Trooping the Colours, with the Brigade of Guards executing their drill with flawless ease.
That, if you like, is the myth – the image that the powers that be would like you to hold. The reality – or one of the many realities – is shown below, in a photo we've just discovered in one of our many trawls. I do not recall seeing this picture in any newspaper, but it has its own caption which is self explanatory.
The incident to which the caption refers is this one, at the Shatt al-Arab Hotel base, near the centre of Basra.
Months down the line, nothing changes. For want of the right kit, it is this to which our troops are reduced, cowering in their tents hoping that they are not the next to be hit.
Although most of the bombs, miss their targets, many do not. When they do hit a vulnerable site, they cause a great deal of damage and harm. Beyond that, though, the constant mortaring has a highly disruptive effect and is a constant drain on morale. It can only because the situation is so little reported that the government can get away with leaving our soldiers so exposed.
COMMENT THREAD
I can tell you where I got the picture: nicked it quite shamelessly from Gateway Pundit but I expect he nicked it from AP. And quite right, too.
It does sum up the contradictions of all those rage-filled, if somewhat belated, demonstrations. Saddam execution rage has followed cartoon rage, veil rage, Pope rage any other kind of rage you care to name.
This reminds me of an article the late lamented Oriana Fallaci wrote soon after 9/11. She interviewed a number of people in Egypt, all of whom denounced American imperialism and Western misdeeds, while wearing American jeans and refreshing themselves in the local (franchised) branch of McDonald's.
She raised the subject of the hefty subsidies the United States gives to Egypt to be told haughtily that the money Egypt receives (which keeps that economy together) and their hatred for America are not related to each other.
By the way, those with a strong stomach might like to see the pictures of what Eid al-Adha consisted of in numerous Muslim countries. Not for those who think that people have a responsibility towards animals and definitely not for people who think animals, too, are God's creatures.
I am delighted to say that nothing of this kind was seen in Shepherds Bush, where the Eid was moved to Saturday, no doubt, to give everyone a chance to celebrate New Year as well.
COMMENT THREAD
Will Saddam Hussein become a martyr to many millions of Arabs and other Muslims? Somehow, I do not think so. There is a great deal of artificial indignation being whipped up, though, for some reason, the process started a couple of days after the actual execution and where there are cameras and news reporters, there will be crowds and displays of public grief and emotion. But, for all of that, do that many people outside the anti-American western main stream media really care?
One such rather ridiculous display is described by AllahPundit. It is the daughter of the old tyrant, Raghad, joining a sit-in in Amman and generally “leading” the various protests and lamentations. Well, she is his daughter, is she not? Is it not understandable that she should be grief-stricken? Hmm, I am not so sure and neither is AllahPundit, who, frankly, thinks that there is something wrong with the woman.
Remember the story of Hussein Kamel, who ran the Iraqi nuclear programme and was married to Raghad? His brother was married to Raghad’s sister, Rana. The story of Iraq’s nuclear development came from them when they ran away to Jordan in 1995 and gave their information to the UN and the USA.
Then they were enticed back to Iraq with promises of full forgiveness. Why they believed it, remains a mystery but return they did. They were met at the border by that delightful creature Uday Hussein who whisked off his sisters with an almost immediate double divorce announced. Who says Muslim women cannot get rapidly divorced from their husbands?
It looks like Raghad and all those grief-stricken protesters may have forgotten what happened to the two brothers after they had been interrogated and released.
The Iraqi scientist Mahdi al-Obeidi wrote this:
What happened next is a matter of legend in Iraq. … dozens of security officers … surrounded the home at al-Sayidiyah. Another security team brought a busload of Hussein Kamel’s relatives and friends to a nearby knoll, from which they would be forced to watch the terrible events that were about to unfold. At dawn, a fierce gun battle broke out. Hussein Kamel and his family tried to defend themselves … most inside were dead, including Hussein Kamel’s brother, his father, his sister, his nephew, and several bodyguards. The attackers stormed the mansion dragged the wounded Hussein Kamel outside, and executed him in front of his relatives. It is rumored that they were told: “Let this be a lesson that no traitors will be allowed to live”.Did the invasion by the coalition forces wipe out this and other stories of this kind? Did Halabja not happen because it was the Americans who had found and arrested Saddam Hussein?
To those who didn’t like justice I say that his death means life to many.Are we to understand from all those protesting starting with the Daily Telegraph and ending with whatever left-wing media outlet one would like to name, not forgetting the egredious John Prescott, that the Americans should not have handed Saddam over for the verdict arrived at by the Iraqi court appointed by the elected Iraqi government to be carried out? Surely not.
Executing the dictator renews the hopes of not only Iraqis but also of other oppressed peoples in the world in having a better future where they enjoy freedom. It's time for other tyrants to learn from this lesson and realize that a similar fate is on the way if they refuse to change.
Yes, it was the people though their elected government who put Saddam on trial and who says otherwise should go back and learn about how Saddam humiliated, murdered and tortured Iraqis and plundered their fortunes in his stupid adventures.
Such is the general disdain for things military shown by my more politically savvy colleagues and rivals, who feel they have far more important things to write about than men (and women) fighting and dying, that I almost feel impelled to apologise for writing another post about things military.
For the sake of this blog too, which always shows a slight downturn in readership when we deal intensively with military matters, one tends to the view that we should avoid the subject for a while and write about more popular issues in order to maintain the hit rate.
However, safe in the knowledge that vital matters of state are being closely monitored here and here, I feel we can nevertheless attend to what many are treating as a trivial issue - the "grim milestone" of the 3,000th recorded US military death since the invasion of Iraq.
If in so doing we are taking a side-swipe at UK political blogs, it is not only because this event is important in its own right but also because it is a political event, and one of some significance to the UK. The reaction to it by the American public will have an impact on our own foreign policy in that vital area of the Middle East, and also on the fate of our troops committed to the theatre, that in itself having political repercussions.
That our own bloggers are so heedless of such issues, however, is not so much a reflection on them as on the body politic as a whole. It – rather like the media - has become so introverted and wedded to its own internal affairs that it has ceased to understand the relevance of such tedious things as foreign policy and defence matters – unless a cheap debating point can be scored.
Nevertheless, of the several points arising from this sad event which are of political concern to us, all are hugely important. The first one is that, while the US military has now suffered 3,000 fatalities, in comparative terms, we are not that far behind. The US currently maintains an establishment of 134,000 in theatre against the UK's 7,200. If we maintained the same number, our fatalities (currently standing at 127) would, on a pro rata basis, have reached nearly 2,500. And that is in a supposedly more peaceful sector where there is no sectarian rivalry.
For the Americans, the biggest single cause of deaths from enemy action is the improvised explosive device (or IED) which has accounted for a third of US casualties. That brings us to the second point of political concern to us: roughly a third of UK combat casualties have also been caused by IEDs.
Third, in both cases, the casualty rate has been needlessly high as a result of reliance on inadequately armoured patrol vehicles, in the US case the Humvees and with us the "Snatch" Land Rovers.
Fourthly, in both instances, some improvements are being made. The US is fielding RG-31s, Cougars and Buffaloes, the latter two vehicles being extraordinarily resistant to IEDs. (The photographs show three instances of Buffaloes hit by IEDS, with the crews walking away unharmed.) The UK, on the other hand, is fielding up-armoured FV432s, known as Bulldogs, and Mastiffs.
Fifth, the rate of introduction of these vehicles is too slow, in the US sector, and – with the UK, overly delayed. In both cases, it is a question of too little too late.
Finally, both governments are going to have to make tough decisions in the near future. They are going to have look at public reaction to the current (and likely future) casualty rates and assess whether they are politically sustainable - in our case, how many more "Snatch" Land Rovers we are prepared to see burn.
If the respective governments conclude that they are going to let the casualties mount at the same rate, then they are going to have to work out how to neutralise the hostile sentiment as the figures increase. If, on the other hand, they decide that the death rates must be contained, then they are going to have to spend serious money on countermeasures.
In the UK, that means billions in new money. And, given the parlous state of public finances and the already over-stretched budget, spending more on defence - especially on an unpopular war - is going to have major political consequences. It could even be one of the issues which influences the outcome of the general election, when other "services" have to be cut in order to buy kit for our troops. And the Party that is able to make the most convincing noises about supplying that kit will garner many new votes.
As we asserted, therefore, the death of 3,000 Americans is not only a "grim milestone" in human terms. It is also a political milestone, on both sides of the Atlantic. It is indeed a measure of the failure of the body politic that it cannot see (or understand) its significance. And, for remarking on that, I make no apologies.
COMMENT THREAD
Something we meant to pick up yesterday was a letter from a Mr A James of London N1, who wrote, under the heading, "Airy promises, but still no choppers":
When Tony Blair last summer promised the British soldiers serving in Afghanistan that they would get "anything they need" we were told that there was hollow laughter at the Ministry of Defence and among Service chiefs, because supplies, and especially the desperately-needed extra helicopters, cannot be conjured up from nowhere.Actually, if we had halfway decent newspapers, they would be asking the questions.
So maybe it would be unfair to ask the Prime Minister at this year's end how many helicopters have been sent to Helmand since he made that promise. But, when he returns from having suntan oil rubbed into his shoulders by the Bee Gees, can he tell us whether one single new helicopter has actually been ordered and, if so, when it will reach our Armed Forces?
This is one of the many stories the British media have missed, another of which is the tangible effect of the lack of tactical helicopters – brought home by this remarkable series of photographs of the British Army headquarters building in the Basra Palace complex.
A year later, in May 2004, and the same bulding looks a little the worse for wear. It has acquired a radio mast and a shack in the roof, and some camouflage netting is draped over one wall, but the aspect is still open and there are vehicles parked in front of the entrance. Note also the tree to the right of centre, which appears to be thriving.
An now for the most recent of the photographs. This is taken October 2005, after three and a half years of "peacekeeping" which has been so successful that the British government is ready to hand control back to the civil authorities.
None of these are media photographs and they, unlike the media, illustrate how bad the situation really is in Basra, providing some background to the evacuation of the British Consulate, an ignominious decision to run away, for want of suitable counter-measures - including, as both Booker and I have pointed out, tactical assault helicopters.
On 1 January 1999, more than 30,000 people joined a street party in front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to celebrate the launch of the euro and the first economic union in Europe since the Roman Empire. A band struck up a stirring tune to mark the historic day. Curiously, it was not Beethoven's "EU Anthem" but Land of Hope and Glory.
Eight years later, with Slovenia's rats joining the sinking ship, how different it all is. There is neither land, nor hope, nor glory and, it seems, even the French are turning against the project.
That much the Sunday Times told us yesterday, with an account of how a French diplomat who spent the festive period at his weekend home in rural France was astonished last week when a man in a DIY shop presented him with a bill in francs, rather than in euros, with the excuse: "I am sorry, monsieur, most of my clients prefer it that way."
Actually, it has never been any different, so I don't know where this "French diplomat" has been. Ever since the introduction of notes and coins on 1 January 2002, French shops have continued with dual pricing and, in some instances, show the prices only in Francs in the shop windows.
Nevertheless, we are told that hostility towards the single currency is growing as a wider malaise over an expanding Europe takes hold, making our diplomat "very pessimistic about the future" – and this blog very happy indeed, especially as the Libération newspaper noted in an editorial last week that the euro has been a far cry from the "very great federating power" that Hubert Védrine, the former French Socialist foreign minister, imagined for it.
"It has not had the effect of an integration lever that its founding fathers dreamt of," the paper wrote. "At a time when the European project has broken down ... you have to be a Slovene to feel any enthusiasm about joining the eurozone."
In another editorial today, the writer notes that it is the three that stayed out — Britain, Denmark and Sweden — that have prospered. In Britain, public opinion is granite hard for sterling, to the extent that no serious politician proposes joining the EU currency, and the lobby group set up to campaign for it has folded (only to be replaced with Open Europe).
And, with the advocates having concentrated on claiming that monetary union was inevitable, they are now on a loser. Remove the sense of inevitability and the entire construct collapses, says the paper. Yet that fool – albeit a dangerous fool – Geoff Hoon is saying that Britain will have to reach a compromise with the 18 EU member states that have already ratified the constitution.
That's the thing about these Europhiles – even when their beloved construct is in its grave, and rotting flesh is peeling from its carcase, they will still be mooning over it... necrophiliacs, one and all, they are.
COMMENT THREAD
