Great speech at the UN

UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuel speaks inconvenient truth to the UN Human Rights Council. The response of the Council's president is all too predictable.



Pathetic.

Electronic Jihad Part 3: Great Information Operation

This video was just sent to me by a friend. It is extraordinary how sophisticated AQ's propaganda is. Do we do Information Operations this well? This is very professional work

The Fall of Modernity

I have been discussing two things in class lately: the nature of the 'Long War'; and how progress in it can be assessed. On top of that I have been preoccupied with the topic of 'strategic narratives' as I'm writing an article on how social media is used to generate and sustain compelling strategic narratives which I would argue constitute the real centres of gravity in this conflict. Probably this makes me unduly susceptible to this article by Michal Vlahos in the latest American Conservative, 'The Fall of Modernity'. There's a lot of food for thought in it. (And, incidentally, observe the footnotes--that's how it should be done). But what caught my attention particularly was this:

So we are, as our own government tells us, in a war of civilizations—a national testing in which we will emerge triumphant, the true beacon and best hope of humankind or else find ourselves destroyed, the detritus of history. This is not simply inflated rhetoric. It is avowed American policy.

In the president’s own words, it is nothing less than “the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history,” pitting “progress” and “freedom” against a “mortal danger to all humanity,” the “enemy of civilization.” Moreover, “the call of history has come to the right country,” and “the defense of freedom is worth the sacrifice.” Ultimately the “evil ones” will be destroyed, and “this great country will lead the world to safety, security, and peace,” a millennial world where “free peoples will own the future.”2

Here inevitably, rather than reflecting actual conditions, it is more important for reality to fit the sacred narrative. So for nearly four years, it has been “the Iraqi people” vs. “the killers,” or more broadly in the world of Islam, “good moderate Muslims” vs. “evil.”

Does it matter whether we pursue grand drama for wholly narcissistic reasons, as long as we win? What if we don’t? Failure might lead to the collapse of friendly tyrannies like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia or even to economic crisis and an expansion of the war. Longstanding alliances could come apart. But even then our military power, our vast economy, and the strength of the American people would still be intact. Strategic recovery should still be possible. The old narrative might be in tatters, but that might turn out to be a good thing because we could then build a more modest national story.

Such recovery is foreclosed, however, in a script of civilization and its enemies. Not only did American leaders go for the existential War of History instead of dealing with reality, they chose the worst possible dramatic vehicle for restaging the national passion play. For what we are experiencing is no war of civilizations. It is not even a war.

Because the national narrative is a sacred retelling of God’s message and His American mission, its periodic restaging always assumes the form of a great war—revolution, civil war, world war. But after 9/11, there was no great war to be had, so we created a simulacrum. Up to a point, we might keep it looking like a war. But at last it will not perform for us. It cannot support the demands of the drama we require. What we needed was a grand yet simple story with easy enemies and a ringing ending called victory. But our drama has shape-shifted from a war into an uncontrollable force accelerating larger world transformations.

The “war” is revealing the distant contours of the end of modernity.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

She's got my vote!

Well, if I had a vote that is. From the New York Times, 'If Elected ...Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain':

WASHINGTON, March 14 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

This is almost exactly my view with the caveat that I would aim by fair means and foul to actively destabilize, subvert, and undermine Iran rather than merely to 'deter it' (the deterrability of Iran being open to question, I think). It perfectly encapsulates the least-bad-response to what seems to me the case that:

1. The counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq is probably beyond recovery; but,
   
2. the consequences of packing it in leaving Iraq a failed state maelstrom which sucks in the rest of the region (even more than it does already) are too high a price to pay.

Electronoic Jihad Part 2

According to this Times On-Line article 'Al Qaeda plot to bring down UK internet'. In my earlier post on this I speculated that AQ's cyberwar innovation looked to be combining physical coercion with cyberattacks. This is a slightly different, but rather more ambitious, variant: physical attacks designed to take down information systems. Clearly, somebody's been reading up on Effects-Based Operations.

Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am currently reading (devouring rather) Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel. I highly recommend it. Which is why I found rather underwhelming Timothy Garton Ash's not terribly favourable review of it in the New York Review of Books. Christopher Hitchens takes on the critics much more eloquently than I can in this Slate piece 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali is no Fundamentalist.' Have a read.

Update: Good article here at the Wall Street Journal covering the 'Secular Islam Summit' in Florida, 'Islam's Other Radicals'. The author mentions Irshad Manji, the Canadian-Lesbian-Muslim-Feminist (how's that for identity politics?) whose book The Trouble with Islam is also good reading.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims.

There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I Am Not a Muslim," who doesn't want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

There are Muslim runaways: People like Afshin Ellian, who in 1983 fled Iran -- and the threat of execution -- on camelback and is now a professor of law at the University of Leiden in Holland. (Now threatened by European jihadists, he lives with round-the-clock police protection.) There are experts on Islamic law: People like Hasan Mahmoud, a native Bangladeshi who, as director of Shariah at the Muslim Canadian Congress, was instrumental in overturning Ontario's once-legal Shariah court last year.

There are even a few practicing Muslims here, such as Canadian author Irshad Manji. Ms. Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates and reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says. "Reform-minded Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it."

The difference is not trivial. For more than five years, the Bush administration has been attempting to enlist the support of the so-called moderates in the war on terror -- its definition of "moderate" being remarkably elastic, to put it charitably. To take one example, administration emissary Karen Hughes has "reached out" to such figures as Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, head of al-Azhar theological university in Cairo, with whom she had a "wonderful meeting" in September 2005.

Sheikh Tantawi, adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth, had earlier approved a fatwa calling on the Iraqi people to "defend itself, its land, and its homeland [against the U.S. invasion] with all means of defense at its disposal, because it is a jihad that is permitted by Islamic law. . . . The gates of jihad are open until the Day of Judgment, and he who denies this is an infidel or one who abandons his religion."

Undersecretary Hughes is not at this summit, of course, nor is anyone else from the State Department, nor is the U.S.-funded al-Hurra Arabic TV station -- facts archly noted by the conferees. In the quasi-official U.S. view, the speakers at this conference amount to an exotic, publicity-seeking fringe group, with whom close association is politically unwise.

Al-Jazeera, however, is here, suggesting that the real Arab mainstream better appreciates the broad interest the conference's speakers attract in the Muslim world, as well as their latent power. Perhaps this is the flip side of the appeal of extremist Islam, an indication that what Muslims are mainly looking for are radical alternatives to the unpalatable mush of unpopular autocratic governments, state-approved clerics like Sheikh Tantawi, and Saudi-funded "mainstream" organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Radicalism, at least of a kind, is certainly what this summit provides via Wafa Sultan. Dr. Sultan, a Syrian-born psychiatrist now living in the U.S., came to widespread public attention last year after she debated a Sunni cleric on al-Jazeera. "Only Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches," she observed. The televised clip, translated by Memri, has been downloaded on YouTube more than a million times.

Dr. Sultan, whose outspokenness has forced her and her family into hiding, is here to receive an award from the Center for Inquiry, the summit's organizer and lead funder. She accepts it by saying: "I don't believe there is any difference between radical Islam and regular Islam."

The view is shared by some, though by no means all, of the conferees. "Salafists cannot imagine Islam without the killing of apostates," says Dr. Hamid, who also now lives in hiding. "To them, the religion is a house of cards: Remove one element, and the whole structure collapses." Another conferee subscribes to the Salafist logic, though he dissents from the religion as a whole. "Truth is," he admits, "to be a Muslim democrat you have to be a bad Muslim."

In this view, the baggage of Shariah and hadith -- the traditions in which some of the most violent Islamic injunctions are to be found -- are as central to Islam as the Quran itself. Hasan Mahmoud disagrees. "Most Muslims don't even know what the Shariah laws are," he says. "The moment you actually show them what the laws are, they can understand they're unjust." Mr. Mahmoud illustrates the point by observing that, under Shariah, a husband does not require a witness to divorce his wife. "But the Quran says that if you want to divorce your wife, you need two witnesses. With Muslims, this kind of thing works magic."

Mr. Mahmoud spreads his gospel partly by way of cheaply produced DVDs, which seems pretty crude until one recalls that Ayatollah Khomeini, during his exile in Paris, spread the gospel of Islamic revolution by way of audiocassettes. Other conferees also have their Web sites: Alamgir Hussain, from Singapore, has islam-watch.org; Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, the conference's moving spirit, puts out IranPressNews.com; other conferees write for MiddleEastTransparent.com and so on. These are the "frugal chariots," to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson, that bear the Muslim reformer's soul.

A fair bit of U.S. government money is being spent on conference security, including from the FBI. Still, it's remarkable that the government, given the huge resources available from places like the National Endowment for Democracy, provides no funding or support for this conference or its various participants.

Here are two questions for the government: If Mr. Warraq, Dr. Sultan et al. are really irrelevant to the larger Muslim debate, why are the jihadists so eager to kill them? And if the jihadists want to kill them, don't they deserve support as well as security?

Think Beyond War

'Don't send a lion to catch a mouse' Says Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post in summarizing the thrust of a recent study by Col Isaiah Wilson III of West Point and Jason Lyall of Princeton University of some 250 conflicts since the Napoleonic era:

Two political scientists recently examined 250 asymmetrical conflicts, starting with the Peninsular War.

Although great powers are vastly more powerful today than in the 19th century, the analysis showed they have become far less likely to win asymmetrical wars. More surprising, the analysis showed that the odds of a powerful nation winning an asymmetrical war decrease as that nation becomes more powerful.

The analysis by Jason Lyall at Princeton University and Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point shows that the likelihood of a great power winning an asymmetrical war went from 85 percent during 1800-1850 to 21 percent during 1950-2003.

The same trend was evident when the researchers studied only asymmetrical conflicts involving the United States. The more industrialized a powerful country becomes, the more its military becomes technologically powerful, the less effective it seems to be in an asymmetrical war.

Essentially, what Lyall and Wilson are saying is that if you want to catch a mouse, you need a cat. If you hire a lion to do the job because it is bigger and stronger, the very strength and size of the lion can get in the way of getting the job done.

"A lion is built for different prey," Lyall said. "A lion is built to take down an antelope, and a cat is designed to take down a mouse. Now [in Iraq] we are a lion trying to take down a mouse.

We were lucky enough to have Colonel Wilson visit the Department of War Studies at King's College London last week to make his case, and am impressive case it was. Wilson cuts an impressive figure intellectually--and tellingly he more than held his own in the debate which followed in the pub afterward (the true test of a scholar, IMHO). I suspect and hope that we will hear very much more from him. Have a look at his website Think Beyond War which I recommend highly.

I very much buy his argument so far as I have seen it thus far. And I'd like to see more. What's the future for the 'lion'? Is it all mouse-catching from here on? If so the lion better give birth to some kittens asap. How to make that happen is something that interests me greatly.

Update: Reading it over that last sentence seems an invitation to a bunch of bad jokes. Fire away in comments.

Warning: Graphic!

Have you ever wondered what flies look like close up after they've hit your windscreen? Wonder no more.

Guardian report on Iraq

The Guardian yesterday posted a gloomy assessment of the situation in Iraq, 'Military chiefs give US six months to win Iraq war', based on an unnamed sources insight into the allegedly pessimistic views of the 'Baghdad Brains' Trust', Cols Kilcullen (ret), McMaster and Mansoor, brought in by Gen Petraeus to advise him on a new counterinsurgency strategy. This morning I see that Kilcullen has strongly refuted the article in the Small Wars Journal 'Guardian article misrepresents the advisers' view'. Extract:

And yes, there is a risk that home-front political will might collapse just as we are getting things right on the ground. Given some commentators’ overall negativity, one suspects that their efforts may be directed to precisely that end. You may not like the President, you may be unhappy about the war. But whose side are you on? The Iraqis trusted us, and this is their fight. They deserve our support.

Buried in the article, though, are some references to real-world progress:

• Progress has been made on oil-wealth sharing legislation – a major development

• Joint operations are beginning in Baghdad, and are going well so far

• Iraqi community leaders are reporting somewhat improved morale and public confidence among the civilian population, though this is tempered by previously unmet expectations

• Numbers of political murders have fallen (precipitously) since the operation began, though these are still too high in absolute terms

• Iraqi forces are turning up, and performing well, though not always at 100% strength

• In al-Anbar, tribal leaders have realized extremists have nothing to offer them – a huge development, as influential community leaders have "flipped" from AQ's side to support the Iraqi government

• Regional diplomatic efforts, including with Iran and Syria, are apparently underway

Unfortunately most of these developments are buried in the last paragraph of a long article.

The Guardian is entitled to its own view of the war, and reasonable people can differ on these issues. But the Guardian’s view is not ours, and the anonymous source misrepresents our views. It is really too soon to tell how things will play out, though early signs are encouraging so far, and the advisers as a group remain cautious realists, not pessimists.

Actually I'd describe my own view on Iraq as cautiously pessimistic, my gut feeling is that the counterinsurgency is lost and we need to be think now about how to limit the fallout from that; but as ever I think Kilcullen is worth listening to. I am impressed moreover with the speed with which he got this rebuttal out because he hits the nail on the head when he says 'there is a risk that home-front political will might collapse...' Indeed I think that it has already here in Britain in no small part because of the relentless chipping away of the Guardian, and the BBC for that matter.

Peace beats War in the 'Tolstoy Cup'

I missed the game which was evidently a nail-biter.

Electronic Jihad

There's a good article in the Jerusalem Post on 'Cyberspace as a Combat Zone'. I have been following the literature on 'hacker war' with a skeptical interest for a while now--visit the excellent Information Warfare Site for all your IW needs. My belief is that the 'Electronic Pearl Harbor' (ie., catastrophic electronic-only attack on critical systems) threat is something of a cliche, more hype than threat. But what has been growing increasingly clear is that Al Qaeda makes excellent use of the Internet as a tool for, inter alia, mobilization, fund-raising, propagandizing, planning, training and communication. Indeed, I'd say that when it comes to the information war AQ is running rings around us. It inclines me somewhat to agree with Bruce Berkowitz who wrote

History will not portray Osama bin Laden as a mere terrorist. Rather instructors at West Point and Annapolis will cite him as one of the first military commanders to use a new kind of combat organization in a successful operation.[1]

Well, maybe that goes too far. I doubt Osama is blogging and YouTubing from his cave personally. Still it is the case that his followers and fellow travellers have grasped the impact of the Digital Revolution in a way which contrasts with ironic sharpness with their medieval thinking in every other respect. An interesting part of the Jerusalem post piece is this:

Reports posted by the mujahideen after attacks on Web sites indicate that these cyberassaults affect the Web sites only temporarily, if at all. In many cases the mujahideen themselves admit that their attack was ineffective and that the Web site returned to normal functioning only minutes or hours after the attack. In light of this, the mujhahideen often resort to another method in an attempt to completely eliminate the targeted site.

An Islamist hacker explained the method as follows: "We contact... the server [which hosts the target website] before and after the assault, and threaten [the server admin] until they shut down the target website. [In such cases], the 'host' [i.e., server] is usually forced to shut down the website. The battle continues until the enemy declares: 'I surrender.'"

Pure cyber attacks with no 'kinetic' element (to use the lingo) are not very effective, but cyber attacks combined with threats of violence and intimidation (good old-fashioned thuggery, in other words) work a trick. Perhaps there's a parallel here with the hoary old debate over air power's claim to strategic decisiveness independent of other arms?

[1] Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War will be Fought in the 21^st Century, New York, NY: The Free Press, 2003, p. 17.

Should armchair critics just cut it out?

I always start my on-line day day with a visit to this website run by the Canadian Forces College Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs. I highly recommend it because it is updated everyday and searchably archived. I also like the simple categorization (Canadian News/Canadian Commentary and International News/International Commentary). Being ethnically Canadian I am occasionally interested in sampling the Canadian debate. This article on Canada.com 'Armchair critics must halt drumbeat of defeatism over Afghan mission' caught my eye. As a self-confessed Armchair General I'm sensitive to the thrust of what he's saying here:

It's a golden rule of military operations that, unless you know what it is you are trying to do, you will fail -- at best suffering humiliation -- at worst needlessly losing lives.

There is another impediment to success, just as malignant. It's when you have a chorus of armchair observers shouting unsolicited advice, amplified by a gullible media.

At the risk of coming over all postmodern I think there is a tendency of the West to create a reality of defeat out of nothing but our tendency to jabber on in the endless societal echo chamber of which the Internet (case in point this blog) is a megaphonic amplifier. I sympathize with the urge of the author to scream 'shut up!' I paraphrase, actually what he says is:

Dithering politicians -- and blinkered academics -- are blurring the focus of the mission in Afghanistan.

In doing so, they risk weakening a military alliance that is a bulwark against terror for millions living in western democracies.

But my sympathy only goes so far. Frankly, I am apprehensive about the mission in Afghanistan as I wrote here. It seems to me that Afghanistan tends to be seen as 'the war that can be won' which is true but it could equally truly be called the 'war that can also be lost' if we repeat the mistakes of post March-April 2003 Iraq which it seems to me in some respects is happening:

• There are not enough troops on the ground and the ones that are there in the tough areas are so busy nailing insurgents while staying alive themselves that the goal of securing the population's support risks being compromised.

• The central government is weak and sectarian divisions (admittedly not of the Manichean proportions of the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq) pervade the country.

• Ungoverned regions of Pakistan (possibly with the compliance and/or tacit support of parts of the Pakistani security services) act as a staging point and logistical base for attacks inside Afghanistan.

• Suicide bombings are on the rise and the conflict is internationalizing with the arrival of enthusiastic Jihadis from all parts of the Islamic world eager to join the fight.

In short, defeat is a plausible outcome here. So with all respect to the author what I want to say is not 'Shut up!' but 'Wake up!' which is a very different thing. The problem is as Edward Luttwak once wrote that 'The West has become comfortably habituated to defeat.' (On the Meaning of Victory, Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 289) This is civilizationally insanely suicidal. So, sure, let's cut the defeatism and start a real dialogue on how we can win--and for what it's worth I think his idea that what's needed is more firepower and more armour is the sort of short-termist band-aid-ism that leads to strategic failure. There's a debate to be had here to which even Armchair Generals like me can contribute. I fear, however, that the situation is even worse than the author acknowledges: the first step, and it's a big one, is shaking people out of their comfortable habituation with the idea that losing doesn't matter.

Update: Two good articles on Afghanistan from the On Point blog here

Prince Harry Going to Iraq

Very busy week, hence snail-like blogging rate. The report that Prince Harry will be deploying with the Blues and Royals to Iraq caught my eye, however. I can see many problems with this, particularly that Harry being the terrorist dream target puts others in graver danger than they would otherwise be by his mere presence. I think the argument against is well expressed here:

Harry's desire to serve is admirable. But if a single additional squaddie is harmed protecting him, his will be a deployment too far.

On balance, however, I'm for it. He's a soldier doing his job, his duty. It'd be worse if the 2nd in line were offered a free pass on combat deployment (as he obviously was) and took it. I think it speaks well of him and I hope his special attractiveness as a target gives his mates lots of opportunities to plink those who out of eagerness for a big kill attack unwisely.

Kernel of truth

Off topic, the BBC reports that at last night's Brit awards Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher laid into Tony Blair's record. Ho hum, blah, blah, blah... heard it all before. The late great sage Will Rogers once said 'there is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.' That goes double for pop idols and movie stars who unfortunately are constantly having microphones thrust at them and invited to extemporize on the weighty matters of the day. With very few exceptions the results are cringe-making. This bit caught my eye though:

David Cameron is no different from Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown is no different from David Cameron.

They're all cut from the cloth and it annoys me that the biggest political icon from the last 30 years has been Margaret Thatcher, someone who tried to destroy the working class... it freaks me out you know.

So I don't really think there's anything left to vote for. That's why people don't vote... why people would rather vote for celebrity talent shows than would vote for politics.

I beg to differ on Maggie, but otherwise I reckon he 's right . The terms of debate have narrowed so in this country that there doesn't seem much of a choice to be made.

Afghanistan: Losing Friends and Making Enemies?

The Senlis Council released a lengthy report yesterday on Afghanistan, 'Losing Friends and Making Enemies', based on 500+ interviews with average locals. I've only managed to scan the bulk of it this morning but the main thrust of it is sobering. As it says in the conclusion:

The International Community needs a reality check: we must fundamentally reassess the status of international community counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan The international community has failed to convince the local population that it is there to help and has failed to increase support for the Afghan government.

This has reinforced a situation in which the local Afghan population sees itself as being alone, faced on the one hand, by the international community and the government, and on the other hand by the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

The support that the international community enjoyed when it first arrived in the country has disappeared and must be rebuilt in order to provide a positive environment for the military to fight in and to build support for the Karzai Government in Southern Afghanistan.

We must acknowledge this reality and take immediate steps to turn around the dynamics between the international community and the local Afghan population. Despite the fact that counter-insurgency theory is normally understood to include many different policy areas, the counter-insurgency strategy used in Afghanistan is dominated by a military approach. The other elements of classic counter-insurgency responses such as humanitarian aid, development cooperation and infrastructure/institution building have been sorely neglected, under-funded and under-prioritized during the five years of international presence in Afghanistan.

This means that despite the significant military success in the south we are not able to establish government control in the south, nor can we establish meaningful security systems.

You can see the Canadian press on the report here which takes the line 'we're waging a losing war' and the British on the BBC here which takes a more equivocal view. My gut feeling is that the report slightly exaggerates the difficulty of the situation. I hear what David Kilcullen, Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism at the US State Department, quoted in the BBC report, is saying 'The fundamentals, the bones of the situation, in Afghanistan are quite sound...Challenges remain and will have to be tackled but the prospect for success remains good.' But I can't help thinking AQ's chief strategist could well be saying exactly the same thing. There's really no room for complacency.

Putin's speech at Munich conference

I meant to blog about this earlier. Last week Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech at a security conference in Europe which NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer described, in the most diplomatic words possible, as 'disappointing and unhelpful'. According to a BBC report Putin claimed,

The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian, and has imposed itself on other states," he said.

It was a formula that, he said, had led to disaster: "Local and regional wars did not get fewer, the number of people who died did not get less but increased. We see no kind of restraint - a hyper-inflated use of force.

Not surpisingly, the talk afterward has been of the 'new Cold War'. Ariel Cohen writes about 'Confronting Putin's Push' noting the Russian plan to spend $189 billion over the next five years on arms which sounds like a lot but should be taken with a large grain of salt. There've been half a dozen major reform and rearmament plans for the Russian Army since the collapse of its mighty predecessor none of which have amounted to much. The Guardian reports today that Russian conscripts have been forced to work as prostitutes which, if true, marks a low which surprises even me (I spent 1996 to 2001 researching and writing about the decrepitude of the Russian military in some detail).

So let's keep things in perspective here. Russia's important. But if the Soviet Union was accurately characterized as 'Upper Volta with nuclear weapons' , then Russia today is the smaller, poorer, more decrepit neighbour of Upper Volta--with nuclear weapons. Max Boot has it right when he writes 'Putin: the louse that roared'. Putin is a man who has famously played his cards as well as could be done. He's clever and he has his hand on Western Europe's gas valve which gives him some stick. But he's overplayed his hand here.

Update: Excellent article by Andrei Piontkovsky.

The attitude of the Russian political class to Europe, and to the West in general, over the latest three to four centuries has always been contradictory, hypersensitive, and extremely emotional. The best Russian political text on the subject remains, even today, Alexander Blok's 1918 poem, The Scythians, with its famous lines about Russia and its attitude toward Europe: "She stares, she stares at you with hatred and with love," and "We will turn our Asiatic snout toward you." Just as 300 years ago, and 200, and 20, Russians know perfectly well that we cannot do without Western technology and investments, and that autarky and an Iron Curtain spell economic and geopolitical disaster for Russia. We understand that Russian culture is an integral part of European culture.

And yet, the West seems to irritate us by the very fact of its existence. We see it as a psychological, informational, spiritual challenge. We are constantly trying to convince ourselves that the West is inherently hostile and malevolent toward Russia, because this flatters our vanity and helps to excuse our shortcomings and failures.

If you take any mainstream Russian publication and read the last 100 articles dealing with foreign policy matters, 98 will be full of bitterness, complaints, irritation, poison and hostility toward the West. This despite the fact that most of the authors of those articles like to spend as much time as possible in Western capitals and Western resorts, keep their money in Western banks, and send their children to study in Western schools and universities.

As in Blok's famous poem, a passionate declaration of love for Europe turns, at the slightest doubt as to whether it is reciprocated, into a threatening "And if you won't, there's nothing we can lose, and we can answer you with treachery!"

This is positive

According to reports this morning Moqtada al Sadr has left Baghdad for Iran. Not great for al Sadr's credibility--though there's nothing saying the departure is permanent. I don't imagine the Iranians are too pleased, however. For the last week the US has been trying to pin on Iran support of arms and men for the Iraqi insurgency--a charge which Iran has vigorouosly denied. But it's a little hard to maintain that suspension of disbelief when one of the top insurgent leaders pitches his tetnt in Tehran and announces he will henceforth general his army by phone from there, as well as in light of other evidence, for example the capture of .50 calibre sniping rifles sold to Iran a year ago in Iraq. On a related note, the BBC says this morning that 11 Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been killed in southern Iran by a roadside bomb. According to the report,

Iranian officials have accused Britain and the United States of supporting ethnic minority rebels operating in the Islamic republic's sensitive border areas.

If this charge is true, good; if it is not true, why aren't they?

So good I have to share

A witty student added this aside to an ongoing discussion on air power in our 'Strategic Dimensions... 'course. I think all will get a kick out of it:

Off topic but while we're on the subject of knocking the RAF I can't resist pointing in the direction of this article in last week's Sunday Times for an example of just how 'in touch' some members of the junior service really are:

utterly, utterly..

Are they trying to make themselves look bad or what? Is this some kind of reverse psychology recruiting method that I haven’t heard of?

As I read this the mental image I was forming of fthe author was this. Be sure to watch the video.

No one ever has enough books so go buy this one

As most readers of this blog (there are a few!) will know I teach mainly on the on-line MA War in the Modern World programme of the Department of War Studies at King's College London. We are lucky to have as one of our students on this programme Dan Ford. Why it has taken me so long to put together the name with the author of the book Incident at Muc Wa which was later made into the classic Vietnam War film Go Tell the Spartans I cannot comprehend. The penny dropped when asked, as one is sometimes, 'what's your favourite war film?' and I was compelled to consult wikipedia (as one does) in drawing up my short-list (again). So I looked around and found this site www.danfordbooks (couldn't be any clearer URL) where I purchased my own copy of Incident. I heartily recommend that you all do the same.

Dan, could I have mine autographed please?

A ray of light

In one of the courses I'm teaching this term we just concluded a unit on the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a lively discussion--as it almost always is with this group of students--full of quite sharp divisions on some points, which is natural enough given the subject. As I wrote there,

... I feel myself rather bleak about the situation. Assuming events in Iraq and Iran do not precipitate a wider conflagration which will subsume the Arab-Palestinian conflict--at the moment this seems to me the most likely eventuality--then Israel will complete its security wall which will work for the most part in keeping suicide bombers out. Palestinians will have a sort of state which will have none of the attributes of political stability or economic viability and all of the ingredients needed for a descent into its own miniature miasma of inter-communal violence, lawlessness and misery.

In other words I really don't see much chance for a peaceful settlement as such. My guess is that sooner not later there will be peace of a sort because the belligerents will be physically separated as the Israelis withdraw unilaterally subsequent to which, actually, as we are seeing in Gaza now, in parallel with, the nascent Palestinian state will violently and irrevocably collapse. But reading this article, 'A plea for peace from a bereaved parent', written by a Palestinian father mourning his ten-year old daughter, dead with a rubber bullet in her brain, causes a small ray of light to penetrate my dark pessimism. 'From small acorns mighty oaks grow.' May it be so.