Not his finest hour - by Richard... Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Not his finest hour - by Richard... Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Neither Your Freedom and Ours norAutonomous Mind seem terribly impressed by the speech Obama delivered last night.

Jonathan Adler over at The Corner was glad he missed it. He went to the movies to see something more realistic and believable. This is a president, he says, who likes to assert his authority but remains unwilling to accept responsibility.

The full text of the speech is here. The "one approach I will not accept is inaction," the man says, then talking of "our determination to fight for the America we want for our children ... even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like." 

"Even if we don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there," he concludes, "We know we'll get there." His critics might just have a point here! Even HuffPuff was disappointed: "And yet, basically what we got, in spades, was sentiment. To be sure, it was no doubt deeply felt ... ".

The boy is definitely losing it.

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Let's not - by Richard...

Move along there, nothing to see here, writes Richard Dannatt: "We must not dwell on the errors of the past". The fact that the Saville Inquiry has taken nearly 38 years to arrive at the truth means that its lessons are of limited use, Dannatt then asserts. "How we view things in 2010 is inevitably different from how we viewed them in 1972."

Well, that may be the case, although the assertion is highly debatable - even if there is a great deal of revisionism going on. But we are certainly not always doing things differently. British soldiers are still murdering people, with officers turning a blind eye, and Ministers still lie about events. 

Furthermore, the Paras are still slaughtering civilians in the mistaken belief that they are being fired upon – although if only brown people in faraway places get killed it doesn't seem to matter so much.

But, most of all, the cover-ups still go on and, as Raedwald points out, there are still plenty of bent inquiry chairmen and whitewashers, obedient to the political class rather than to truth and to honour.

It is, thus, all very well Cameron apologising to the relatives and friends of the Bloody Sunday victims, but what about an apology to us, for being lumbered with a bill of £191 million to remedy the cover-up? What happened on Bloody Sunday, he says, "was both unjustified and unjustifiable." But what happened afterwards was also "unjustified and unjustifiable."

Equally "unjustified and unjustifiable" is the assertion by Gen Sir David Richards, current CGS – ranking alongside Dannatt's claims – his insistence that the Army had changed greatly over the 38 years since Bloody Sunday.

But it is just over 100 years since the Army failed so egregiously in the Boer War, following which Kipling published his poem, The Lesson. "Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, we have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good," he wrote.

Yet we are dealing with an Army which, 100 years later failed in Iraq and has since refused publicly to examine the lessons of that failure, only to repeat its mistakes in Afghanistan.

So, no Mr Dannatt, I don't think we should move on just yet. We should dwell on the errors of the past, long enough at least to learn the lessons from them, otherwise, as the Army seems so keen to do, we are doomed to repeat them, again and again and again.

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The master race? - by Richard...

A German student, we are told, made a rude gesture at a group of Hells Angels and hurled a puppy at them before trying to escape on a stolen bulldozer. He was picked up by police after complaints that his getaway vehicle was causing a three-mile traffic jam on the road into Munich.

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The second one is "off" - by Richard...

Announcing a complete review of how "Britain" collects and disposes of rubbish, Caroline Spelman, the Cleggeron environment secretary, has promised to make the country a "zero waste economy".

She says biodegradable waste like food could "no longer be allowed" to just rot in landfill. This is likely to mean that all councils have to introduce slop buckets so that food waste can be collected separately.

But "allowed" by whom, she does not reveal ... and this is the administration that wants to be "in Europe but not ruled by Europe". Thus does she say on behalf of her EU masters, "We need a new approach to waste ... We cannot keep putting recyclable and biodegradable material into landfill."

So, we already have a waste bin, another bin for paper, an insert for glass and tin cans, a woven bag for cardboard and another for garden waste. And now we have to have another waste container, making six in all?

We have two words for Caroline "slop-bucket" Spelman. The second one is "off". Following that, we have some extremely detailed instructions on where she can put her slop buckets, the results of which would be extremely painful.

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And now for the Saville Report - by Richard... Tuesday, June 15, 2010

As The Boy stands up to make a statement on the £191-million Saville Report, news comes in that two soldiers from 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment have been shot dead in separate incidents in Afghanistan. They died while on patrol in the Nad Ali district of Helmand province. 

Their deaths bring the total number of UK troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 298. Two more and we have a magic round number, so we can have another media blut-fest. It may just beat the historical account of the Paras slaughtering 14 innocent civil rights demonstrators and bystanders, an event which was to rack up the intensity of the "Troubles" and cost many more lives.

It is axiomatic that crowd control requires very special skills and discipline. Putting poorly-trained troops under the command of inexperienced officers on the front line, with rifles and live ammunition, is asking for a disaster. We did not need a report costing £191 million to tell us that. 

The disaster happened on 30 January 1972, so-called "Bloody Sunday", when the gung ho* 1st Para manned the line, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things", for which purposes it was designed, trained and equipped. 

The resultant carnage, therefore, was not the fault of the soldiers (the Army was to lose over 100 troops that year), any more than the failures in Afghanistan are the fault of individual soldiers of the line. For that, we must look to the politicians who put them there and their senior officers. Talk of prosecution of the soldiers who fired the shots is misplaced.

But, as so often when innocent people get killed, the PBI takes the shit and we pay the bills. The lawyers walk away with the dosh (in this case, several of them have "earned" millions in fees), the officers get gongs and more sewing badges and the politicians get honours and awards. Then as now, nothing really changes.

* Saville Report: Chapter 4, para 4.8: "... a force with a reputation for using excessive physical violence". 

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