The politics of delusion

How much traction this is going to get is difficult to judge. So far, only the BBC seems to have covered it – the so-called Ballymurphy Massacre in August 1971, just short of six months before Bloody Sunday. Then, 11 people - ten men, including a local priest, Father Hugh Mullan, who was shot while giving the last rites to a dying man, and a mother of eight children - were killed, again by soldiers from 1 Para.

Now, on the back of the Saville Report, the relatives are demanding their own inquiry into what they claim is the brutality of the Paras, remarking on the similarities with Bloody Sunday where the British system also "connived in a cover-up."

The events followed the introduction of internment on 9 August 1971, and the details of the affair are admirably set out in a Times archive blog. There it is noted that "the tone of the Army statements shows an extraordinary lack of awareness of the real nature of the struggle they were engaged in."

In a struggle that was about to be launched into a whole new phase and was to drag out for more than two decades before a resolution even began to look feasible, Brigadier Marston Tickell, the Army chief of staff in Northern Ireland, was claiming that the hard core of the IRA had been "virtually defeated".

Looking back at those events, even at the time - as we saw them recorded in our newspapers and on our TV screens – the Army's optimism seemed delusional. But what was less evident was the brutality with which the Army – or some sections of it – was operating.

However, almost immediately after the internment programme had been implemented, reports started to come in of Army mistreatment of prisoners. On 17 August, allegations were published that soldiers had urinated on prisoners, subjected them to electric shocks and threatened to hurl them from helicopters.

What was so significant, though, was that even as detailed allegations of troops' brutality continued to be made, most Army officers were prepared only admit that their soldiers had been "brisk" in their handling of Irish civilians. They largely believed – as did most of us - that many of the allegations being made were so totally out of character with British troops' behaviour as to be "ludicrous".

As it turned out, the allegations were very far from being ludicrous and, as the evidence mounted, they served to poison the image of the British Army in the eyes not only of the Roman Catholic community here and of a large section of the population of the Irish Republic, but also in overseas countries and particularly in the United States. That was not only to do a great deal of damage, but was also directly to prolong the conflict.

Thus are the "Ballymurphy Massacre" relatives currently saying that, had their allegations been taken seriously at the time and acted upon, then maybe Bloody Sunday might never have happened. The corrective action would have been taken, and history would have been changed.

But it is an Irish columnist, Kevin Myers, who puts his finger on the issues, noting that Bloody Sunday, was not unique: it was merely an extravagant example of what the Parachute Regiment was already doing - and would continue to do - in Northern Ireland.

Something like 90 percent of clearly unlawful army killings throughout the Troubles were by the three battalions of the Parachute Regiment. Both Catholic priests who died in the Troubles were shot by the Paras and were, to his mind, murdered.

Other Para killings included shooting dead Patrick Magee, an innocent 20-year-old student teacher on the steps of St Comgall's school on the Falls Road as he left teaching practice. The same day, the Paras shot dead one-eyed Patrick Donaghy, aged 86, one of the oldest victims of the troubles. He was killed as he stood at his window, eight storeys up in Divis Towers.

The real crime, Myers says, was not just the killings that Lord Saville has been investigating in his insanely wasteful enquiry, but the tolerance of the Parachute Regiment's conduct by both the British army and successive British governments. He continues:

That is the real mystery. Because the IRA had no better friend than the Parachute Regiment; wherever the Paras went, IRA recruitment subsequently rose. The price to be paid for their random and reckless brutality was the lives of other soldiers and the many, many more civilians killed by the IRA.

So why wasn't it stopped? Why, asks Myers, was the Parachute Regiment deployed in Northern Ireland and why was its often evil conduct tolerated?

Here, we have the clue in the response of Army officers to accusations of brutality – a belief that they (the accusations) were so totally out of character with British troops' behaviour as to be "ludicrous".

This is the politics of delusion, the determination to believe what you want to believe, a rejection of anything which might contradict the received wisdom and what I call "constructive ignorance", a wilful, culpable refusal to seek out any information which might challenge the preferred narrative.

And this is why, contrary to the genuine expectations of commentators such as Subrosa, there can be no real closure, partial or otherwise. The system has been caught out but there is no real contrition, no acceptance of blame and no real change. Delusion is still a powerful policy driver, pervading every nook and cranny of government.

This is evident in the likes of Iain Dale, who seems to prefer the idea that Bloody Sunday was an aberration, with "merely a small part of the British armed forces" at fault that day, and even Owen Paterson, who has agreed to meet the Ballymurphy campaigners, cannot offer a remedy to the underlying ailment.

Slugger O'Toole believes that the publication of the Saville report heralded a good day for reconciliation, others would castigate Tony Blair even for allowing the Saville Inquiry, calling him "insane" for agreeing to it, and Daniel Finkelstein insists that the soldiers are treated with the same leniency as the IRA, thus not even beginning to understand the issues.

Martin Meenagh thinks the greatest unindicted villain of the piece was Edward Heath. Lurking behind the Paratroopers' action that day is the general fuhrerbefehl he issued, to show the natives who was in charge. Meenagh may not be wrong.

Jim Greenhalf, on the other hand, reminds us that sometime this week, next week, the death toll of British soldiers in Afghanistan will reach 300. The ultimate political result when we pull out next year, or the year after, will be "job well done", as it was after we left Iraq, which cost us 179 dead soldiers, he says.

And that will be another delusion, to sit alongside the delusion that the British Army is a saintly (and competent) institution that can be relied upon to do the job and do it well.

If nothing else, Saville has challenged that, although the wider lessons have hardly begun to be appreciated. But, if we the public, in general, and the politicians and military in particular, believe that Saville applies only to Bloody Sunday, that will be another delusion.

Saville Inquiry thread

Who cares?

The EU commission does, apparently.

Bovine stupidity

There is a sort of bovine, lumpen stupidity in the media's insistence at labelling today's meeting of the European Council a "summit".

It is not that most journalists are thick – even if many are – or that their editors have the intellectual quotients of gnats (some are actually quite bright), but that they simply do not have an intellectual frame of reference by which they can understand the phenomenon of a supranational government and the nature of its diverse structures.

However, their evident incapacity makes their "sagacious" comment quite irrelevant. Without the intellectual equipment, the basic knowledge, they have no means of understanding what they are seeing and they, therefore, simply do not know what they are talking about. All they can do is extrude meaningless drivel. Much of it sounds very convincing, but it is nevertheless drivel.

Unfortunately, the bovine stupidity that we see in the media also extends to politicians – and especially The Boy - seen above in his natural surroundings. He typifies a certain type of Tory toff who is wholly incapacitated from learning, suffering as he does the singular handicap of believing that he actually does know what he is talking about.

For that affliction, there is no known cure, which is why Tory politicians are so routinely taken apart in "Europe" as the "colleagues" run rings round them. But, as long as we have a media which not only shares the ignorance but revels in it, there is little chance of them being revealed for what they really are.

Whatever else happens, the charade must go on, noted only by the likes of Mary Ellen Synon, a rare diamond who observes, with great accuracy, that Cameron lacks the equipment to do the business.

COMMENT THREAD

A high level failure

Too quickly it seems, Dannatt is getting his way: the media is moving on from the Saville Report – although the Sundays may return to the issue. But, with over £190 million spent on the damn thing, the very least we should do is get our money's worth from it.

Thus, before we leave the issue for the time being – doubtless to return at some time in the future – I feel impelled to offer a few more observations, not least a suggestion that too many of the current pundits seem to be missing the point, the very point I made in my original piece about 1st Para, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things".

But, by no means all of the pundits are missing the point. In The Independent there is Robert Fisk, who writes:

We knew the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. "Tough" was the word we reporters used if the soldiers were beating up rioters. Brutal was the word we should have used. But sometime towards the end of 1971, I think we all realised that the Parachute Regiment was being prepared for some pretty nasty confrontations. They were the hard men, the reserve battalion at Palace Barracks, Holywood, a boring seaside town on the south side of Belfast Lough, a unit that spent most of its time waiting for trouble.

If that is from one end of the political spectrum, though, we also have Max Hastings, writing in The Daily Mail, who was in Derry on Bloody Sunday. From him we get:

An English reporter friend of mine that day in Derry found himself trapped among demonstrators and rioters. He asked a soldier manning a barricade if he could squeeze past their line to find safety behind the troops. "No, you bastard!", snarled the squaddy. "You stay there and take what's coming to you."

At that stage, mid-afternoon, only CS gas and rubber bullets were being used. But I myself met Paras preparing to conduct the planned "scoop-up" operation to arrest rioters, who were obviously spoiling for action. The Paras are a great military institution, but quite unsuited to peacekeeping. They are a fighting regiment, and that day they expected and wanted to fight.

Hastings, the terribly grand former Daily Telegraph editor, is the man who writes with the authority of "being there", and is therefore treated with great respect. But he nevertheless talks a great deal of tosh, as when he tells us: "The Army, enraged by terrorist killings, was in a savage mood, and still relatively new to the restraints essential for counterinsurgency."

Here the point is that, virtually since the end of World War II, the British Army had been doing little else but counterinsurgency, and no more so than 1 Para. Formed on 15 September 1941, the battalion operated in Haifa during the Palestine Mandate until British troops withdrew in 1948. It was then temporarily disbanded on return to the UK but reconstituted in 1949.

From mid 1951 to 1954, it saw active service in Cyprus, the Canal Zone in Egypt and during counter-terrorist operations against EOKA in Cyprus in 1956. It participated in the Suez landings during the crisis in November, before being back in Cyprus in 1958. Between 1962-3, the battalion served in Bahrain, in early 1964 undertook a UN peace-keeping in Cyprus and in 1965 and 1966 was back in Bahrain. The battalion covered the eventful withdrawal from Aden in 1967 after 127 years of British rule.

The first of its 12 Northern Ireland Op Banner emergency tours began at the end of 1969, two years after it had left Aden – at which time the use of firearms in riot control was standard procedure.


Much is made (not least by The Independent) of the evidence of General Ford, commander, land forces in Northern Ireland (pictured above). He revealed to the inquiry that in 1971 he was "coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary … is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued".

In other words, wrote Ford, "we would be reverting to the methods of IS [internal security] found successful on many occasions overseas" – precisely the methods 1 Para would have been trained to use in Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus and Aden. Thus, with its reputation, background, experience and training, it would have been entirely predictable that committing 1 Para to the pressure cooker of Londonderry in January 1971 would have produced a violent outcome.

And "pressure cooker" it was. On 8 July 1971 in Derry's Bogside two rioters, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, had been shot dead by soldiers in disputed circumstances.

The military had claimed the pair were armed, which had been denied by local people. Moderate nationalists including John Hume and Gerry Fitt walked out of the parliament of Northern Ireland in protest. A British Army memorandum stated that as a result of this, the situation "changed overnight". The Provisional IRA's campaign in the city beginning at that time after previously being regarded as "quiescent"

In January 1972, to all intents and purposes, violence is what the Army and the media expected, as indeed did the politicians. Heath apparently told his cabinet committee on Northern Ireland that: "As to Londonderry, a military operation to re-impose law and order would be a major operation necessarily involving numerous civilian casualties."

Where the failure came, therefore, was in not realising the political implications of such violent scenes, spread over the pages of the newspapers and on the TV screens. 1 Para would have done much worse in Aden and elsewhere, but not in the full glare of the media.

Journalist Kevin Cullen was later to write (now two years ago): "Over the years, I met dozens of men who joined the IRA because a British soldier harassed or humiliated them or their families." He went on:

Thirty-six years ago this week, the army rounded up hundreds of Catholic men and teenagers, few of whom were actually in the IRA. Far from smashing the IRA, the army's overzealous policy of internment without trial infuriated the entire nationalist community.

And in 1972, when British paratroopers killed 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday, the IRA was flooded with recruits. Half of the more than 3,500 people killed in the Troubles died in the fury of the five years that followed Bloody Sunday.

From General Michael Rose, we get confirmation of this. On Bloody Sunday, he says, it was absolutely clear that in exchanging fire with the terrorists, the British Army had fallen into the trap laid for them by the IRA, who had set out that day to commit murder and mayhem, caring nothing for the lives of their own republican supporters. Claims Rose:

Indeed, I believe it was their specific aim to get as many people killed as possible. For the deaths would serve as a ruthlessly cynical recruiting tool. As the news of the dead in Londonderry that day spread around the world, the result was much the same as Irish people everywhere rallied to the nationalist cause. In Northern Ireland, in the Irish Republic and in the US, thousands of young men and women joined the IRA.

And all of this puts the focus up the chain of command, into the high level military and political arenas, where – clearly – tactical and strategic errors were made in terms of the conduct of the campaign.

The other day, I wrote about the battle of Dien Bien Phu being lost not in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief.

By the same token it seems to me, the slaughter of Bloody Sunday happened through the failures of the military brass and the politicians to appreciate the special demands of a counterinsurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. One has to marvel at the political naïvety.

What did the Army really think would happen, with the media camped on the doorstep and TV cameras on permanent standby, if they started shooting rioters and demonstrators? Were they really so stupid or so isolated from the political realities that they did not realise that images of dead bodies plastered all over the TV screens and the newspapers might have an adverse effect on public sentiment?

But, as always, the BPI are in the frame. That much I wrote earlier but, with even greater clarity, the idea of a high level failure stands up. This is where we should be looking to lay the blame. One wonders, therefore, precisely for what Mr Cameron was apologising ... the incompetence of the Army High Command, or the greater and more serious incompetence of the Heath government, which bears the ultimate responsibility.

Saville Inquiry thread

Not his finest hour

Neither Your Freedom and Ours nor Autonomous 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 idiot is definitely losing it.

COMMENT THREAD

Let's not

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.

Saville Report thread

The master race?

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.

COMMENT THREAD

The second one is "off"

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.

COMMENT THREAD

And now for the Saville Report

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".

COMMENT THREAD

Moral and intellectual cowardice

It is a bit of a cop-out for the Tory Boy blog just to paraphrase Liam Fox's speech to RUSI yesterday, and then to offer a link with no analysis. But, like the rest of the Tory blogosphere, they're running frit on defence issues, not even picking up on the Great Leader's speech. It seems they can do the soft and girlie issues but can't cope with real political meat.

Talking to a journalist yesterday about the reluctance of the "right wing" blogs to deal with defence, he suggested that individual writers might be deterred by their lack of first-hand experience. They are intimidated by men in uniform, with their medals and sewing badges and tales of derring-do, and fear laying themselves open to criticism for "not being there".

I certainly had to deal with that in writing Ministry of Defeat - a whole book about the campaign in southern Iraq without ever once going as far as Basra. In that precise context, reading accounts of the great 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu (where I was also absent), I came across in Bernard Fall's book this observation:

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was lost during the brief fortnight between Novermber 25 and December 7, 1953. It was not lost in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief. Once Giap had decided to accept trial by battle at Dien Bien Phu, it remained only for 15,000 French and 50,000 Viet-Minh troops to act out the drama in pain and blood and death.

So it was with Iraq. The British lost the battle not in the streets of al Amarah and Basra, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street (yes, I have been inside). "Being there", in the sense of being where the action was, would mean being in many different places (often simultaneously) and many where only insiders had access. Constructing a historical narrative, therefore, requires the use of research skills, not direct observation of events.

In the context of the military telling us that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan – one thing the limited intellects of the military brass seem to be able to understand – the "battle" is essentially political. Thus, the battle is being lost not on the streets of Kabul, Kandahar and Musa Qala, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street.

The refusal to follow the narrative and engage with the politics represents one of the greatest failings of the right-wing "claque". There is a moral and intellectual cowardice here – which explains the lack of response to my recent challenge. However, this is not the first time I've taken on the "claque", having written a strongly-phrased piece in September 2006 and again in January 2007.

I know the pieces were read, and the lack of comment and response is driven by a sense of shame and embarrassment – some have admitted as much to me privately. And as well they might hang their heads in shame.

But one person not afraid to get stuck in is our feisty "Dundee wifey" who vastly outshines these big, butch political bloggers who are so full of themselves. She picks up a military blog called Think Defence which has The Boy's strategy sussed. This is the "Iraq gambit", which comprises two broad elements:

1. Get the fuck out of dodge;
2. Pretend it was a victory.

In fact, while the girly-boy bloggers cower in their bunkers, it is very much the fairer sex which makes the running, with Mary Riddell telling us that, "Britain is stuck with a war it can't afford and can't win".

In a powerful turn of phrase, she writes of "Mr Fox's batsqueak of truculence" which "echoes the discredited Blairite credo that Britain should punch above its weight and beyond its purse." Both Mr Cameron and the opposition, she says, "owe the country more honesty."

Indeed they do, but as long as the fabled right-wing blogosphere is sitting on its hands, with its collective heads in a physiologically impossible position, The Boy has neither need nor incentive to do anything other than to continue on his ruinous course. But he will need more than a metal detector (pictured) to chart his way though this minefield. We've seen it all before with Iraq so some of us already know what he is doing. We will not be silent, even if the "claque" has muzzled itself.

COMMENT THREAD

Seriously scary

The Oil Drum is a reputable and well-founded site, and its talking about the collapse of the well in the Gulf of Mexico and the leakage of the entire reserve ... billions of barrels. In other words, it's about to get a whole lot worse.

"The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our lifetimes if the worst or even near worst happens ... ", it says. And Obama is to address the nation live, tonight. He is as much on the rack as BP – it will be interesting to hear what he says. It had better be the speech of a lifetime.

COMMENT THREAD

Germany falling

The Guardian is reporting that Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition government looks to be close to collapse, weakened by a string of disagreements and intense infighting over austerity cuts, policy reform and the departure of senior conservatives.

Merkel called at the weekend for the government partners to bury the hatchet over their disagreements after a week when relations reached such a low that members of her government had variously referred to each other as "wild pigs" and "gherkin troops" (rank amateurs).

But much of the mistrust and anger is being directed at Merkel herself. This week's Spiegel magazine called her the Trummerfrau, a reference to German women who cleared away the rubble after second world war bombings. It painted a picture of a woman presiding over a government in ruins and used its title page to request the government in one word to "Aufhören!", or stop.

It just couldn't happen to a nicer government ... and sets a wonderful precedent for The Boy.

COMMENT THREAD

Belgium

The non-country just got even more fragmented. Subrosa tells the story.

People don't realise just how desperate the situation is there. Not so very long ago, I took a taxi from Brussels to the Catholic University of Leuven, in the heart of Flemish country. The taxi driver (French-speaking), had no idea where to go, but rather than ask the way, got me, an English-speaker, to ask for directions.

COMMENT THREAD

Our mission is doomed

So, "Call me Dave" made a statement to the Commons yesterday, his first since his trip to Afghanistan as Cleggeron leader, supposedly spelling out his administration's approach to the ongoing conflict.

Heavily trailed as paving the way for a change in strategy, it followed extensive talks with Karzai at Chequers and meetings with US defence secretary Robert Gates and Gen David Petraeus in Downing Street – all on the back of a delegation of three Cabinet ministers being sent to Afghanistan to see the situation on the ground for themselves.

But, if there were expectations of a change in strategy, they were not fulfilled. One even wonders why The Boy actually bothered with a statement. He offered nothing new, nothing different. All he really wanted to do was emphasise why, in his view, our troops were in Afghanistan. It was all about national security. Afghanistan was not strong enough to look after its own security and without our presence it could emerge again as an al Qaida base.

What had changed then, one might ask, to which The Boy provided the answer: we needed to be clear on national security perspective.

Our route home was to put security first. We were six months in to the surge and had to give it time to take effect. We would not stay a day longer than necessary – the key was in training the Afghan security forces so that we could transfer the security responsibility, but based on facts on the ground not pre-determined timetable. Then we could come home, job done, heads held high.

And that was it. In a sparsely attended chamber there was no hint of the huge controversy which has been raging over the weekend, with the likes of Matthew Parris asserting that Cameron and Clegg "must know our mission is doomed", up against the controversial General Dannatt who believes the war can be won.

Of these two, soldier Dannatt is ostensibly better qualified - but Parris has the advantage of consistency. He has always been against the Afghan adventure, right from 2006, when he decided that the mission could not work with 3,000 or even with 30,000 men, in June 2008, when he declared we couldn't win and now, when he thinks we are simply sacrificing soldiers to keep the US on-side.

Parris is too sincere and his case too well argued for it to be dismissed as cynical, while Dannatt is too stupid for his case to be considered at all. He trots out the bog standard "exit strategy" meme, arguing that the Afghans must run their own security and "the Afghan economy must be converted as quickly as possible from one based on the illegal opium trade, to one profiting from traditional cash crops, such as wheat, saffron and pomegranates."

If pigs could fly and politicians could think coherently, the world would be a very different place, but either is about as likely as Dannatt's nostrums for Afghanistan. And then you realise that the General is offering exactly the same prospectus as "Call me Dave". The mission is indeed doomed.

COMMENT THREAD

What will it take?

New readers of this blog may not be aware of my existence and that is fine with me. Occasionally, however, some communication needs to be established. So, with the Boss's consent and encouragement I place a link to my latest posting on Your Freedom and Ours where I try to put the boot into another Conservative front organization. Enjoy.

Weaker is stronger

Defence cuts will be "ruthless and without sentiment", warns Liam Fox. The military will have to bear its share of the cuts needed to reduce the record deficit. But, insists the defence secretary, Britain's security would end up "stronger" by ensuring its military approach was relevant and realistic - with a "clean break" from Cold War-legacy thinking.

COMMENT THREAD

Journalist ignorance soars

"Mole population soars due to poison ban," writes Laura Roberts for The Daily Telegraph, telling us that the mole population has soared across Britain due to the ban on the poison used to kill them. Pest controllers (sic) have said they could number up to 40 million although the most recent estimate is currently 33 million.

What the lovely Laura doesn't tell us, though, is that the poison concerned – strychnine – was banned by the loathsome EU, on 1 September 2006. This intelligence also evades Emily Dugan, who writes a similar story in The Independent - so similar in fact that it probably came from an agency report, which doubtless also didn't mention the EU. And without the prompt, the little girlie reporters wouldn't know diddly squat about where the ban came from.

Funnily enough, local papers have covered the story, not least the Oldham Chronicle. Last year it told the tale of Peter Brown, the "mole man" who had his business wiped out by the ban and took to the road with a suitably decorated van to express his views of his tormentors.

Peter staged many a protest outside Oldham MEP Chris Davies' office as well as writing countless letters, which got him precisely nowhere – as one might expect. He then resorted to painting "deception and corruption rule" and "unjust bureaucratic parasites" on his van in a bid to spread the message of his protest as far and wide as possible.

But, a year on, he reckoned without the girlies of the national papers, who have about as much idea of how the government works and who actually rules us as "Call me Dave". Confronted with ignorance such as that, there is no hope and no solution. The girlies - of both sexes - are taking over.

COMMENT THREAD

A dishonest response

The quango queen Deirdre Hutton has rushed into print this week in the letters column of The Sunday Telegraph. This is the lady who as chair of the CAA earns £130,000 a year for a two-day week and, clearly mortified at being outed by Christopher Booker in last week's column, is exercising her "right of reply" after being accused of defending the "hopelessly flawed system" used by the Met Office to monitor volcanic ash in UK airspace.

For the annual £130,000 she claims from the taxpayer, though, you would think that we would at least get a higher standard of rhetoric for our money, but not from this lady. She delivers the same low-grade garbage that we get from any one of the hundreds of thousands of over-paid apparatchiks.

Booker, for instance, wrote that "it has now been confirmed, at great expense, by the airlines themselves, that the closing down of Europe’s air traffic thanks to the Met Office computer was wholly unnecessary." But Hutton translates this into a claim that Booker has stated that UK airlines have now "confirmed" that there was never any ash in UK airspace.

Actually, what Booker did say was that, Willie Walsh – British Airways CEO - said after 8,000 engine tests, "there was no ash". I knew what he meant, but then I'd written my own piece – headed "look – no ash!" - based on this piece in the Wall Street Journal, referring to the absence of ash found after engine testing, the "8,000 engine tests" to which Booker refers.

Alright – he could have been more specific, but Booker's problem is that he is always tight on space, trying to cram as much in as possible. That granted, there is no way that Booker actually wrote that there was "never any ash in UK airspace". This is an invention by Hutton, every bit as - if not more - inaccurate than the inaccuracy of which she is complaining.

But then, when you are "above the line", you can get away with that sort of dishonesty, making out that criticism is ill-judged. And this she hones to a fine art with the main paragraph of her letter, complaining that Booker "repeats the myth that the Met Office relied solely on a computer model to plot the position of ash clouds and assess density levels." She writes:

During the crisis there were repeated test flights across Britain of specially equipped aircraft. The Met Office also used other tools, such as satellites, radars and ground-based lasers. The Met Office do use a dispersion model which, far from being a "hopelessly flawed system" is endorsed by the meteorological community.

What Booker had written, though, was this:

The problem was that the official bodies responsible for air safety, including our own Civil Aviation Authority, had concocted a crazy new system which relies solely on the UK Met Office's modelling of the direction of winds around Europe, without at the same time providing any means whereby specially equipped aircraft could be used to measure the density of the ash and thus whether it posed any genuine risk.

And it was that one word, "solely" that gave the dreadful Deirdre her entrée. Yes, they do use satellites, which give visual confirmation of the most dense parts of the plume, and they use ground-based lasers. These, though, are few and far between, don't have standard calibration, don't extend vertically beyond 10,000 feet and cannot penetrate cloud. As for the radar – it doesn't work. Thus, if only Booker had written "mainly" rather than "solely", he would have been covered.

As for Hutton's claim that there were during the crisis "repeated test flights across Britain of specially equipped aircraft", this is – to say the very least – disingenuous. As this blog's readers know, there was initially only the ARSF Dornier 228, which was wholly unsatisfactory and quite unable to carry out the necessary density measurements.

And, while the airspace was closed progressively from the 16th April, it was not until the 20th that they got the much more capable FAAM BAe-146 up and flying, able to make the necessary density measurements. As I later recorded - that very day, the ban was lifted.


It now transpires that the Dornier was not alone in Europe in the early stages. From the 17th, there was also a powered glider, a Diamond HK36 MPP (Multi Purpose Platform), operated by Zurich-based MetAir, the Swiss airborne measurement company (pictured above).

Its results showed that the ash particle concentration was initially "remarkably high" and noticeably decreased visibility. But it was also found that the ash cloud lost altitude very quickly. When the measurement flights started, the cloud was at an altitude of 15,000 ft but only nine hours later it had descended to just 6,000 ft.

This powered glider was not only able to take photographs of the ash cloud (top - the thin band visible on the horizon), in conjunction with the Jungfraujoch research station in the Alps (pictured left), it was able to calculate the mass concentration of the ash particles in the atmosphere in order to compare the reality with the computer simulations made by London's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre. The levels were found to be low: the regulators' choices would have been justified only if the maximum mass concentration of the plume was one hundred times the levels Jungfraujoch scientists measured.

It was these data, and data from Germany's Aerospace Centre, which sent up a twin-engine jet Falcon 20E to measure the ash aerosols and gases in the plume, that the German authorities used in determining that their airspace could be reopened for commercial flight.

Although several commercial airline companies had flown aircraft through the ash cloud to evaluate possible risks to aircraft, "there's a difference to seeing if a plane still works versus doing actual research measurements," said Jan Wörner, the German centre's chairman. And with the BAe-146 data, this forced the CAA to follow suit and re-open British airspace.

The way our Deirdre tells it though, everything was done for the best, in the best of all possible ways. That was very far from the case. The CAA, the Met Office and all the rest, got it wrong. Booker tried to say so and made a few small errors, which has allowed the CAA and its overpaid chair completely to misrepresent the situation. Hers was a dishonest response. That, by any measure, is also wrong.

COMMENT THREAD

A public service

The Sunday Telegraph has done us a public service today, publishing a large piece by Andrew Gilligan, who notes that "wind turbines are a poor way to harness energy - but a very good way to generate public subsidies."

The piece says a great deal less than has been written many times by Booker – and by myself on this blog – although it does frame it in terms of Nicky Clegg's missus. She has "acted with characteristic business acumen," writes Gilligan. "These aren't just wind farms – they're subsidy farms. As well as turning a blade or two, at least when the wind is blowing, they're about to start turning a very healthy profit." For that, it is worth reading.

The paper also offers a long piece by Richard Dannatt, headed: "Afghanistan: can the war be won?" It can't, of course, although Dannatt seems to believe it can. His arguments, therefore, demonstrate with clarity why Gordon Brown was right to block his appointment as CDS.

In publishing these, the ST has thus done us yet another public service, by reminding us quite how awful the man is - although I doubt it sees it quite that way. I will be reviewing his piece and many other defence pieces that have appeared in the MSM today, and will publish on DOTR.

COMMENT THREAD

The first climate sceptic?

Booker was away in France for most of last week, giving him little time to prepare a column, which left him to come up with a "this is one I prepared earlier" story about "the first climate sceptic", Margaret Thatcher.

The story, nevertheless, is very much one that needed to be done. As with the euroslime who constantly want to "own" Winston Churchill, and have him supporting a united Europe (he did, but he didn't want Britain to be part of it), the warmists are keen to claim Thatch as one of theirs, the politician who launched the worldwide alarm over climate change.

This then allows them to claim that The Boy is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to be a loyal Thatcherite. Booker though has bottomed out the truth, which is much more interesting than is generally realised.

Thatch certainly was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988. With her scientific background, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, then our man at the UN. In the 1970s, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling, but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming.

Under his influence, as she recorded in her memoirs, she made a series of speeches, in Britain and to world bodies, calling for urgent international action, and citing evidence given to the US Senate by the arch-alarmist Jim Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

She found equally persuasive the views of a third prominent convert to the cause, Dr John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office. She backed him in the setting up of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, and promised the Met Office lavish funding for its Hadley Centre, which she opened in 1990, as a world authority on "human-induced climate change".

Hadley then linked up with East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to become custodians of the most prestigious of the world's surface temperature records (alongside another compiled by Dr Hansen). This became the central nexus of influence driving a worldwide scare over global warming; and so it remains to this day – not least thanks to the key role of Houghton (now Sir John) in shaping the first three mammoth reports which established the IPCC's unequalled authority on the subject.

In bringing this about, Mrs Thatcher played an important part. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed "Hot Air and Global Warming", she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.

She voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us. Pouring scorn on the "doomsters", she questioned the main scientific assumptions used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the chief force shaping world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels.

She mocked Al Gore and the futility of "costly and economically damaging" schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer.

Thatch also recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.

In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. Alas, what she set in train earlier continues to exercise its baleful influence to this day. But the fact that she became one of the first and most prominent of "climate sceptics" has been almost entirely buried from view.

COMMENT THREAD

Approach to Helmand "flawed"

The Today programme has picked up on the Afghanistan series in The Times, interviewing Conservative MP Adam Holloway and Rear Admiral Chris Parry, the MoD's director-general of development, concepts and doctrine in 2006. The interview has since been reported by the Press Association and The Sun.

Parry's comments are especially interesting as he played a key role in discussions leading up to the initial deployment of troops to Helmand in 2006 and he has now admitted that the MoD's approach to the mission was "flawed".

Read more on Defence of the Realm.

Gone AWOL

I have a reputation on this blog for bitching about other blogs – but if I do complain about them, it is because I care about the political blogosphere, its independence and its capabilities. I do not want to see it sell out to the MSN, and its ranks of sterile, smug, self-satisfied "clogs", nor go down the route of producing low-grade crap.

This is also about democracy and the failings of the MSM – and the bit about "democracy is not a spectator sport". Blogs are the perfect tool for the democrat. I want to see the blogosphere succeed and become an influential part of the political process.

Traditionally, the fourth estate has been an essential part of that process, in its ability to scrutinise and question government. But since it has largely given up on this duty and become part of the entertainment industry, or does it so badly that it has become part of the problem, the hope has been that the "citizen journalist" would fill the gap.

If there is a gap to be filled right now, it is Afghanistan – or, to be more precise, our military campaign there, the one that is costing us at least £3.5 billion for the coming year, and is going to result in an unhealthy number of coffins coming back from theatre.

One would like to think that this is an issue on which the blogosphere could excel, not least because Cameron's political agenda is so transparently dishonest and inept and the media are not even past first base in identifying or reporting the salient issues.

The Times and its three-day investigation is, at the moment, as good as it gets. But all that gives us is some fairly superficial criticism of the early phases of the 2006 campaign. It has managed to break out from the "received wisdom" and offer some relatively restrained criticism of the military. But remarkable as this is, there is still a long way to go.

The debate started, though, is continuing in The Times with input from back-bench MPs, and we're seeing The Economist have a go. But it is very difficult to detect any significant or sustained blogospheric activity. Even Tory Boy Blog doesn't cover its hero's derring do, preferring a softer agenda.

This and the other "big hitters" thus have nothing useful to say (or anything at all to say on the subject, for that matter), leaving some of the minor blogs such as Subrosa to have a go. It is rather ironic that a "Dundee wifey" has a view, and all the big, brave men bloggers seem to be running a mile.

Actually, it is very difficult finding any who are dealing seriously with the Afghan issues, and have anything intelligent to say. There is a blog search facility on Google but it doesn't work very well, which means a search through diverse blogrolls – with very little result.

Interestingly, we find the US network CNN citing Cameron saying "Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy and national security issue facing Britain," yet the (British) blogosphere has largely gone AWOL. And, if it is not prepared to address an issue like this, "the most important foreign policy and national security issue facing Britain," then is there any point in having a blogosphere at all? Should we just leave it to the MSM?

Or am I not supposed to ask such questions?

COMMENT THREAD

Prat

Environment minister Chris Huhne has pushed the EU for tougher climate change targets which could see an extra 2,500 wind turbines going up around Britain. The Lib-Dim used his first EU talks since taking office to call for a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across Europe by 2020 "to help stop dangerous global warming."

"I've been trying to think which politician on earth I would rather have less in a cabinet post in the current coalition than Chris Huhne," writes writes Dellers. Despite the competition, it is hard to think of a better candidate for exclusion. Huhne is a man who makes shooting politicians not only acceptable but a moral imperative.

COMMENT THREAD

Stuffed by the eurozone

Euroslime Nicky Clegg has been telling the euros that economic sluggishness and instability in the eurozone is the "greatest threat" to Britain's own economic recovery.

The deputy Cleggeron leader was on a jolly to Spain – no doubt so his wife can pick up her Green Shield stamps – and took the time out to tell a conference in Madrid that: "Our economies are intertwined. Other EU countries are the UK's biggest trading partners by some distance - around half of all our exports go to the EU and over half our inward investment comes from there."

"That means," he said, "that economic and financial difficulties in the eurozone directly affect Britain. Indeed continuing instability and a lack of growth on our doorstep is the greatest threat to our own economic recovery ... Quite simply slow growth in the eurozone means fewer British exports, slower British growth, fewer British jobs."

Of course, there is a simple answer to that – diversify our economy, building trading relationships outside the sclerotic eurozone. Leaving the EU would also be a very good idea. But little Nicky would never agree to that ... not while he and his missus are so firmly embedded on the gravy train.

Meanwhile, Spain's economy ministry has declared that it has not made a request for economic aid from the EU, after the FT Deutschland said that Spain might need the aid if the problems at the Spanish banking sector get worse, and that the EU was preparing to activate a package in case Madrid asked for it.

On the other hand, Bloomberg is saying that European banking shares indicate a Greek debt default may be just a matter of time while Reuters claims that the ECB is continuing with its programme of buying up eurozone debt and has so far bought €40.5 billion-worth.

Yet Clegg thinks this calls for "fully" implementing existing single market legislation and extending the single market to new areas such as the digital economy. They don't call 'em Lib-Dims for nothing.

COMMENT THREAD

A political own goal

An unannounced visit by the Cleggeron leader to Afghanistan yesterday - intended to underline the improving security situation in the country - has partially backfired. "Call me Dave" was forced to cancel a visit to the Army's Shazhad forward operating base in Helmand.

This, we are told, followed two successive mobile phone intercepts, the first referring to a possible rocket attack on a helicopter and the second, intercepted close to the base, which suggested that a VIP was flying in.

A decision was thus taken by military commanders to call off the visit. The base is in an area which was previously an insurgent stronghold and which was heavily contested in the recent Operation Moshtarak offensive in central Helmand.

Dave's Chinook was diverted to Lashkar Gah where he met some British troops for a photo-opportunity and was forced to eat a hamburger with ketchup. He was said to be disappointed that the diversion gave the impression that the security situation was not good when to all intents and purposes the opposite was the case.

So there we are ... three helicopters – to our knowledge – have been lost to RPGs – two within one month. Others, including two RAF Chinooks, have been downed by Taliban gunfire. But hey! This gives a false impression about the security situation. Why it is though we are fed such drivel and why it is that The Boy feels the need to offer himself as hostage to fortune, Heaven only knows.

Despite his fond wish that the progress can be speeded up, this is unlikely to happen. Even US Gen McChrystal is admitting that operations were not going as planned and winning support from local leaders was proving "tougher than expected". In Marja, where the US Marines have claimed early success, residents see signs that the insurgents "have regained momentum" in recent weeks.

Where the US forces, with their vastly superior resources and larger reserves of manpower are having such problems, a BBC "expert" put the task facing Cameron as: "How do you withdraw in good order without giving the impression of defeat?" But, as it stands, Dave seems determined to set himself up for a fall. Building expectations of "progress" which the armed forces cannot deliver, he is confronted with not just with the impression but the actuality of defeat.

When that happens, it will be something of a political own goal. He could have distanced himself from the failures associated with the previous administration but has accepted responsibility for achieving success in a war he did not start, does not understand and is not temperamentally equipped to resolve. "This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity," he says. "This is not a war of occupation. This is a war of obligation."

Despite a second-rate defence team, a dysfunctional military, a fragile political base and empty coffers, Cameron has still fallen into the trap of casting himself as a (reluctant) war leader. This lack of acumen could well be his undoing, the failure which defines his short tenure as prime minister.

COMMENT THREAD

Media plurality

Can we have that discussion on the plurality of the media? So asks EURSOC, which also notes my point about establishment-friendly blogs.

What is the point of having political blogs if they are just as crap as the MSM?

CAMERA NEVER LIES THREAD

The changing of the narrative

There is something interesting and profoundly important going on when, for the second day running, The Times gives over its front page to a story critical of British military efforts in Afghanistan, plus this story, this and this, making up three pages of coverage, plus another lead editorial on the subject.

The fact of the pieces and their critical line is as important as the detail of what they say – possibly more so. What we are seeing here is a changing of the narrative, or an attempt so to do. Given the low grade of defence journalism in this country, there is no expectation that the new narrative is going to be any better informed than the previous one, but at least it is different from the "underfunding" and "overstretch" mantras that have hitherto dominated the headlines.

Following on from my own piece yesterday, I'd all but forgotten this piece that I wrote in March, remarking on the power the narrative, and the difficulty in changing it.

But, in The Times attempt, at least now there is a grudging and belated recognition that there were "errors all the way down the chain of command". At last, we are getting some serious – if limited – discussion about failures in strategy, with talk of "arrogance in the field", "hubris disguised as confidence", "decisiveness trumping thoughtful caution" and the pursuit of tactical victories "sometimes to the detriment of strategic progress".

One should thus be heartened by the paper's call for "a review that takes in capability, the relationship between politics and military and the conventional wisdom of counter-insurgency", but it is precisely that which this and the rest of the British media has avoided for years, as the debate has raged on the other side of the Atlantic – recorded by our own Defence of the Realm.

And, of course, presiding over the failures in strategy in Afghanistan, from the very beginning until fairly recently, was everyone's poster child, the saintly General Dannatt. No review could take place without re-examining his role in the campaign and, when history comes to be written, his reputation will have to be heavily reconsidered. A lot of clever-dick commentators are going to have to eat humble pie, not that they ever do.

Of those, one should undoubtedly be Patrick Mercer, who has spouted more rubbish than enough, and been right at the forefront of the underfunding mantra. Yet this self-same "renta-mouth" is putting himself up for the chairmanship of the defence committee, saying of the Helmand failings: "I think there should be a very clear inquiry into why senior officers allowed this to happen."

Yet another should be James Arbuthnot, the previous chairman, who has said that if he was re-elected one of his tasks would be to investigate Afghanistan as part of a Strategic Defence Review. He says that The Times investigation would form a "very important crux of such an inquiry", yet this is the man who has consistently shown himself to be part of the problem and fatally compromised by having been a seriously inadequate procurement minister.

Yet, it is a measure of the wonderful "new politics" that the squeaky clean new parliament, given an opportunity to make a fresh start, has re-elected Arbuthnot as defence committee chairman. Committed to the status quo, and never one to pass up the opportunity to grovel to the military brass, here is a man who will ensure that the generals past and present are never brought to account, or even troubled by anything that might embarrass them. A more pathetic start, it would be hard to imagine.

But, with so many having bought into the earlier narrative, it was always going to be difficult to find anyone with clean hands. They will not be found in the military or politics and there are very few in the media, which has been entertaining itself at our expense. One of those few is Simon Jenkins who, in yesterday's Guardian argues for the complete abolition of the British military.

Given its overall incompetence, and the complete inability of the media and the political establishment to exercise any meaningful control over the bloated and useless military bureaucracy and the fantasies of its overpaid generals, it is very hard to disagree with Jenkins. His view may be rhetoric, but if it takes hold and gets the military establishment really worried, it will be no bad thing.

COMMENT THREAD

The camera never lies

... but photographers (and newspaper editors) do. The picture above is taken from a Russian site, which was commenting on the recent Reuters photo-cropping scandal. It shows how selective cropping of a picture can completely change the message delivered.

Interestingly, I picked this up through the statistics site because it linked to EU Ref. And I'm getting quite a few links on the Reuters story, but - with the occasional honourable exception - British blogs have gone AWOL. It was exactly the same in 2006 during the Qana affair, when this site attracted well over a million hits in the space of three days. British blogs were noticeable by their complete absence.

It is thus not only the British media which presents a distorted view and then exhibits a dismal parochialism that would put a village fête planning committee to shame. The British political blogosphere, at times, is as small-minded as it comes. Mostly, the "big hitters" are Westminster-centric, as are so many of their readers. That explains why they are so ill-informed, so dismally narrow in their perspectives and limited in their influence.

The blogosphere has never really taken off in this country as a political force – and part of the reason is that so much of the production is parochial crap which is more often than not aping the parochial crap in the MSM. But then, that's obviously what a lot of readers want, and if they get it, they can hardly complain. But it is still crap.

COMMENT THREAD

Pot-pourri

I thought about doing a post on The Boy and yesterday's PMQs, but then this more interesting topic came up. Mary Ellen Synon buries the knife in the posturing idiot.

There, at least, you get coherence, which is more than you can say about this piece. It tells us that Nasa has switched part of its focus from space to the ocean, after its scientists announced their first ever field study "to investigate how climate change is affecting the Arctic's ice."

Researchers from the space agency, the report continues, "hope to provide the most detailed research yet on how global warming is devastating the ocean's ecosystem." And there is an example of really impartial, objective science. Without any preconceptions at all, we are going to tell you how "global warming is devastating the ocean's ecosystem," they say. Shite!

Meanwhile, I had a response to my post on the Ministry of Defeat, suggesting that my publisher might be persuaded to bring out a second edition. Then I could emulate Robert Conquest who, when asked what subtitle he wanted for the second edition of The Great Terror, is supposed to have said, "How about - 'I told you so, you f*cking fools'?"

The idea is extremely attractive.

COMMENT THREAD

A bit bloody late

I didn't realise how big The Times was running the Afghan story until I saw the full newspaper today – then to see that it was the main theme of the day, complete with the lead editorial headed: "Institutional Denial".

There, we are gravely told that: "The politicians have deserved criticism about Afghanistan. An investigation by The Times shows that senior military personnel cannot escape blame either." And, just to cement this in, we get a comment piece from Anthony Loyd who tells us that the findings:

... reverse much of the received wisdom that the Labour Government, stingy in every allocation of manpower, resource and equipment, spendthrift only in soldiers' lives, was solely responsible for the misfortunes endured by our Army in Helmand.

Well, excuse me! It may have been your "received wisdom", but it wasn't mine. In this blog and the sister blog, Defence of the Realm, I have consistently – and almost entirely on my own – been writing posts like this and many more about the inadequacy of our general staff and their roles in the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thus, while the media was having wet dreams about the saintly Dannatt, and the blogosphere and media alike – along with the Tory opposition and its claque - was chanting "under-resourced" and "over-stretch", I was telling a completely different story.

Even then, it was in April last year that I finally finished Ministry of Defeat which embodies much of what The Times is saying today, but also much, much more, about Iraq and Afghanistan.

And did The Times review the book? Apart from Thomas Harding of The Daily Telegraph, did any defence correspondent take a blind bit of notice of it, or bother to review it? Did any of the clever-dick political blogs which were sooooo voluble about the underfunding, etc., etc., have a look and change their thinking?

For months now, my publicist and publisher have been telling me that the book - which has actually done quite well despite the lack of publicity – was ahead of its time, running themes that are only now beginning to make an appearance, which people are now only beginning to recognise. They could have read it a year ago in the book, and years before that on the blogs. But they were far too grand and clever to do that.

Significantly, Michael White in The Guardian today notes how The Times is rewriting the political narrative. But he observes that the "interesting shift" may reflect a diminished enthusiasm for beating up elected politicians over defence policy when they are Tory, not Labour.

That, of course, is what it was really all about. The media, the political classes and the claque were not interested in the performance of the military, per se or what was really going wrong. The problems had a utility only in that they presented an opportunity to attack the Labour government. And if that meant supporting – and applauding – inadequate generals, while their troops died, so be it.

Says White, the refocus on professional errors is a useful corrective. The top brass has been unusually vocal in attacking Labour's military failures in office – think General Sir Richard Dannatt, whose advice seems to have been quietly shelved by the incoming government now that he's served his purpose as a high-profile defector from the ranks. Now its own role is being more closely examined.

Of course, it's a bit bloody late – too bloody late, some might say, and far too bloody late for the troops who died in shit kit because the generals had their heads up their arses.

So yes, I am angry – bloody angry. The time, the effort, the skill, and the risks taken by some really serious people in the background who kept me informed and told me what was really going on, went largely to waste - because what people really wanted was a stick to beat the government. And dead soldiers were as good a stick as any to exploit.

While a fundamentally unserious media played its games, men died unnecessarily. Too late were the failings of the generals realised - but they were not "realised" earlier because no one wanted to know. It was not politically convenient.

Britain's soldiery have had it bad these past seven years of war, writes Loyd. One of the burdens under which they labour was that: "among their generals lurk donkeys in disguise." "Carelessness, arrogance and a reluctance to learn from the mistakes of Iraq appear to have shadowed every step of the Army's planning for the Helmand mission."

As I say, a bit bloody late to start pointing that out now. Where were you four years ago?

COMMENT THREAD