Monday, 29 December 2008

Monday, December 29, 2008

The new deal

Reviewing the breast-beating in the "liberal" media over the Israeli strikes on Gaza, it occurs that the UK government – and military – should understand completely what the Israelis are trying to do.

In this, there is a singular parallel between the situation in which the British found themselves in Iraq in 2005-6, where their base near al Amarah called Camp Abu Naji was subject to incessant rocket and mortar attack.

Starved of resources, the British Army had little option but to endure - through no fault of its own - occasionally launching punitive raids into the city in the hope of taking out some of the insurgents and affording the camp slight relief from the daily bombardment.

This culminated in the heroic but disastrous raid on 12 June 2006, when a Company-strength overnight raid into the city was met with an estimated 200 Mahdi Army fighters. The ensuing battle (wholly unreported at the time) was reckoned to have seen the most vicious fighting since 2004, in which the Army – with the help of air cover and heroic flying by a USMC helicopter pilot – managed to extract without fatalities. 

Brilliantly fought - reflecting the Army (and supporting arms) at its most professional - the raid was nevertheless a strategic failure. Within days, the rocketing and mortaring of the camp resumed and was to continue with increasing intensity until, in August, the British vacated Abu Naji, only to have it ransacked by a jubilant Mahdi Army.

If the British thought this would afford relief – they were wrong. With al Amarah virtually under Mahdi Army control, the city and surrounds became the armoury and workshop for the insurgency. Thus invigorated, the Mahdi Army turned its full attention to British bases in Basra. One by one, the Army was forced to evacuate, until it was hunkered down in its one remaining base in the former Basra International airport.

The lessons from this are simple – and hardly new.

First, if someone is attacking you with the intention of killing you, you must respond with deadly force, killing them before they have the opportunity to achieve their aim. You do not negotiate - you kill them.

Second, a half-hearted response is worse than useless. A failure to deal decisively with the enemy simply encourages them to redouble their efforts. Any response should be overwhelming (what the military call "overmatch") and wholly disproportionate. The objective, as much as anything, is to demonstrate your power and to demoralise the enemy, sending it a message that it cannot win.

Third, appeasement, or the "softly-softly" approach, is doomed to failure. In the macho culture of the Middle East, this is seen by the enemy as a sign of weakness, prolonging rather than ending the agony.

It instructive that, when the Iraqis and US forces finally decided to clear out al Amarah – which they did in June of this year - they sent in 22,000 troops, supported by massive air power. This compared with the British effort, which allocated a mere Battle Group of 1200 men, and minimal air cover.

The US and Iraqi forces gave plenty of warning and told the insurgents to surrender their arms or be killed. When the troops entered the city, not a shot was fired. Enough arms to supply a small army were surrendered.

Therein also lies a lesson for the "international community". As long as they give succour to the terrorists, giving them aid and interceding with "cease fires", thus saving them from ultimate destruction or surrender, they will perpetuate the agony.

There is only one solution to this continuing tragedy – overwhelming, deadly force, sending out an unmistakable, unequivocal signal: "You try, you die!" Only when Hamas get that message, loud and clear – and cannot turn to the "international community" to protect them from consequences of their own murderous behaviour – will the violence stop and the talking start.

That is – or should be – the new deal. Anything else, as the British found in al Amarah, leads you down the road to defeat, destruction and, in the final analysis, more death and misery.

COMMENT THREAD

A single European identity

Bruno Waterfield had the story on Saturday on how the "EU spends £2bn each year on 'vain PR exercises'".

This was Open Europe doing its stuff, claiming that so-called European "information" campaigns were one-sided and boasted a budget that is bigger than Coca-Cola's total worldwide advertising account.

The Sunday Times picked up the same story yesterday, featuring the commission's massive spend on its "EU-tube", only to be rewarded with a pathetic hit-rate as an indifferent public completely ignored the site.

The ST also allowed a spokesman for the commission his say, whereupon he said, rather sniffily, "This is not propaganda, we are simply providing information." He added that the commission "did not recognise" the €2.4 billion figure, which this paper had flagged up. 

In one sense, the commission is being honest – the figure does not represent the true spending on PR. It is much, much more.

As an example, we see today a report that a new advertising campaign has been set up to promote the .eu domain to the transport industry 

Learn the Value of an .eu domain name at www.goingfor.eu, it warbles, highlighting the growing number of companies within the industry that have "discovered the value of using the .eu internet address."

Right up top, though, it offers the true reason, not only for the campaign, but the .eu domain as well. "The .eu domain," it says, "offers a single European identity on the Internet for 490 million Europeans in 27 different countries."

And, of course, that is what is all about. That is mainly what the EU does. Much of its legislation, much of its initiatives, and most of its money is dedicated to promoting that single cause – a "single European identity". The cost is tens of billions each year.

To the dismay of EU and commission officials – and the rest of the europhiliac "community" - it isn't working. Thus they have recently stepped up "information" campaigns after polling has shown that only two per cent of Britons are aware that European elections are taking place next year.

This was a pre-Christmas Eurobarometer opinion survey which found that the already low levels of interest in next June's elections were actually declining as the vote gets closer. The number of "citizens" who say they are likely to vote is less than it was six months ago.

With a bit of luck, as the election comes near, that percentage will decline to zero and, judging from the euroweenies' panic at being ignored, that perhaps points the way for the election. Methinks the thing to do is spoil the vote. And, funnily enough, when we first wrote about the .eu domain, we had just the message to put on the ballot paper. 

And sending it will cost nothing at all.

COMMENT THREAD

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas is over

No, it was fine – much time spent with friends, at an exhibition and watching films. We even managed to miss by something like 20 minutes the guy being shot in our street on Christmas Eve. Back to reality.

A few (very few) of the blog's readers may have noticed that my presence on it has recently been erratic and occasionally non-existent. There are various reasons for this and one of my new year's resolutions (well, actually, the only one) will be to make some kind of a decision about it all.

In the meantime, I want to widen the issues we normally discuss. No, I am not going to write about Gaza, that most predictable of developments, except to mention that Hamas is not getting the support of Arab leaders that it is, presumably relying on. (See herehere andhere. More on that tomorrow.)

Instead, let me take our readers to a book I have been re-reading in the last week, “Russian Conservatism and Its Critics” by Professor Richard Pipes, probably the best living historian of Russia and the Soviet Union.

In chapter 3, "The Onset of the Conservative-Liberal Controversy", Professor Pipes discusses the inconsistency with which eighteenth century Russian rulers approached the whole subject of public opinion and the amount of freedom it should have. He quotes A. M. Skabichevskii who published in 1892 a history of Russian censorship from 1700 to 1862 (when Alexander II introduced serious political and judicial reforms).

In governmental circles of that time there predominated people brought up in the spirit of old times who simply could not accustom themselves that in society there should emerge any intellectual movement that was autonomous, independent, and lacking in the slightest official sanction. They were accustomed that every undertaking in the intellectual sphere – whether the publication of some periodical or book, or the founding of some educational institution – all this was done not only with the sanction of the authorities but by the authorities themselves, and the entrepreneur, if not previously in the service, by virtue of this very enterprise turned into an official.
Setting aside the argument about people brought up in the spirit of old times, this is a pithy analysis of our rulers and controllers, whether in Brussels or London.

We have remarked on numerous occasions the propensity for assuming that "civil society" is a number of organizations set up by the Commission; of a similar propensity to assume that accountability means discussing proposed legislation with carefully selected organizations and self-appointed "representatives"; of the notion that entrepreneurship consists of obeying a set of rules set up by the government, be that the Commission or the DTI; of the assumption that education and cultural activity cannot exist without some kind of guidance from above.

The point is that this sort of belief is completely genuine. The ever-growing army of regulators at all levels cannot imagine that anything can possibly exist outside their rules and decisions. And then they wonder why European countries are floundering economically, scientifically and culturally.

The most terrible aspect of it all is that this attitude should be acceptable in Britain, the country that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the ideal of private enterprise at all levels for those unfortunate countries that did not know how they would achieve that state of affairs. Instead, we have lost what we had. And yes, we did it ourselves. For once, Dr Heinz Kiosk,s famous comment of "we are all guilty" is actually accurate.