Tim Worstall

Good Golly Polly!

Yes, yes, I know, I normally disagree with everything she writes, including the words and, or and the. There are parts I disagree with in this too, however, praise where it is due:

Every minister hotly denying this obvious truth sounds absurd – but
makes the wrong point altogether. The point is that a democratically
elected government’s foreign policy can’t be moulded by threats from
murdering religious maniacs. There are 1,001 good reasons why we should
never have supported, let alone joined, the war in Iraq. But the one
truly bad reason would have been fear of terrorism.

Those signing the letter steer perilously close to suggesting the
government had it coming. The Muslim leaders wrote: "The debacle of
Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the
attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to
ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists who
threaten us all." They urge the prime minister to "change our foreign
policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever
they live and whatever their religion. Such a move would make us
safer." Maybe it would, but there can’t be many, pro- or anti-war, who
think sparing us from threats by God-blinded killers should be the
number-one priority in foreign policy.
…
It goes with the selective amnesia that forgets about the Kosovo
Muslims Blair and Clinton saved from genocide. It goes with a distorted
memory of the Taliban as anything other than ruthless despots to their
people (especially their women) and unprovoked originators of terror
against the rest of the world. As for Iraq, invasion was dangerously
misguided, but selective Islamic memory forgets that Saddam murdered
Muslims.
…

Spot on. As she says, we can agree or disagree with any of the specific actions but to have not done any or all of them because medieval theocrats would threaten us is absurd.

In

45 responses

  1. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    With so many media reports focused on war in the Middle East and the arrests in Britain relating to the alleged plot to bomb trans-Atlanic flights tomorrow, we have tended to overlook reports in June of the outcome of a long trial of jihadists in France:
    “A PARIS court sentenced 25 Muslim militants yesterday for planning attacks against the Eiffel Tower and other targets with explosives in support of rebels fighting Russian forces in Chechnya. The five main defendants, of Moroccan and Algerian origin, received prison terms of eight to ten years for planning terrorist acts. The others received lesser terms for criminal association. Two were acquitted in a trial which prosecutors said demonstrated the ‘globalisation of the jihad movement’. . . ”
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2226738,00.html
    “A French court has jailed 25 alleged Islamist militants for planning attacks in France in support of Chechen rebels. The main defendants received jail terms of eight to 10 years, while others were jailed for six months or more. Two defendants were acquitted. Prosecutors said the group’s intended targets may have included the Eiffel Tower, the Halles shopping centre, police stations and Israeli interests. The group was accused of ‘jihad’ links with Chechen militants fighting Russia. The ringleaders of the group, most of whom came from Algeria, allegedly received training in Afghanistan or in the war-torn southern Russian republic of Chechnya. . . ”
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5078812.stm

    Reply
  2. dsquared Avatar
    dsquared

    not sure I agree with this; there is surely more reason to avoid a stupid idea which is also dangerous than a merely stupid idea. After all, if there were a bunch of Islamofascists saying “Allah hates really shitty light rail systems and we will bring fire and death to the infidels who install them”, I would have been a much more active opponent of the Manchester Metrolink.

    Reply
  3. james higham Avatar
    james higham

    “Spot on. As she says, we can agree or disagree with any of the specific actions but to have not done any or all of them because medieval theocrats would threaten us is absurd.”
    And this is why I have a problem with labels like left/right, libertarian/conservative and so on. I agree with Tim on this and yet our politics would be labelled differently by observers.

    Reply
  4. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    not sure I agree with this; there is surely more reason to avoid a stupid idea which is also dangerous than a merely stupid idea.
    You have completely missed the point, which is that even if an idea is stupid, the idea should be adopted or rejected based on its merits, not on the basis that violent extremists make it dangerous.
    The actions of the violent extremists should be addressed independently, and outside the assessment of the idea.

    Reply
  5. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    DSquared,
    Don’t know if you take much of an interest in goat husbandry – but according to Andrew Sullivan the Iraqi Islamists ‘are threatening shepherds with violence if they don’t clothe their goats with diapers to avoid tempting lonely shepherds.’
    In 2003 the Egyptian journalist Wael A-Abrashi reported that Wahhabism Islam directed that the toothbrush is an instrument of Satan, and directed good Muslims to use tooth picks instead.
    Other Wahhabist teachings have incuded the fatwa issued by the late Sheikh bin Baz in 1982 directing that the Earth is flat.
    Not so funny, now, I imagine.

    Reply
  6. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    “Not so funny . . ”
    Nor is this:
    “Galileo Galilei 1564-1642: Italian astronomer and physicist. The first to use a telescope to study the stars. Discoverer of the first moons of an extraterrestrial body. Galileo was an outspoken supporter of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. In reaction to Galileo, the Church declared it heresy to teach that the Earth moved and silenced him. The Church clung to this position for 350 years; Galileo was not formally exonerated until 1992.”
    http://www.nineplanets.org/help.html#G
    Until 1992, the sun moved round the earth and then they swapped, right?
    But as for campaigns against animal nudity, try this:
    http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/sina.html

    Reply
  7. dsquared Avatar
    dsquared

    Martin: what’s your point? All three of those things are hilarious.
    I understand perfectly the idea that we should “quarantine” some of the predictable consequences of a course of action and pretend that they don’t exist. It’s got some basis in game theory as a way of discouraging future attempts to intimidate us. However I don’t think that the game theoretic argument can be made to work and all the real-world examples I can think of (the doctrine of “credibility” in Vietnam, the various follies in the defence of Singapore which were justified on the basis of “morale” and indeed the tedious evenings spent in crap pubs in my youth because somebody felt it important to show “those bastards” that they couldn’t push us out of “our” pub) have been disasters.

    Reply
  8. dsquared Avatar
    dsquared

    Note also that there is a bit of a double standard here; in general, it is a fairly central plank of our foreign policy that we expect other people to choose their options on the basis that we are threatening them, and when they refuse to take our threats into account we call them “madmen” and blow them up.

    Reply
  9. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Are we so sure that the IRA’s bombing campaign didn’t change British policy, both Conservative and Labour?

    Reply
  10. Q Avatar
    Q

    dsquared, I think your last point would only be relevant if we were using our foreign policy to somehow coerce our domestic muslim population. Does anyone seriously claim we conduct our foreign relations in order to influence non-state actors?

    Reply
  11. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    At some time, someone in the British government must have made decisions not to obliterate Armagh and Donegal by bombing or explosives (the Lidice solution) or to bomb Dublin in retaliation for IRA bombing despite compelling evidence that IRA bombers were crossing into NI from the Republic or taking the ferry to come into Britain. Evidently, Olmert’s government in Israel operates with a different set of values about killing innocent civilians, including children, by the hundreds.

    Reply
  12. Politicalog Avatar
    Politicalog

    Held to Ransom

    You would think that the Muslim community would be falling over themselves in an effort to denounce and weed out the subversive elements that plague their religion.
    It seems not:
    But, in what she admitted were sharp exchanges, some senior…

    Reply
  13. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Evidently, Olmert’s government in Israel operates with a different set of values about killing innocent civilians, including children, by the hundreds.
    I think if the IRA’s declared intention was to remove every last Brit from the British Isles, and the Irish Army had four times previously attempted to fulfil this goal, then the values of the British government with regards to the IRA would have been remarkably similar to Olmert’s.

    Reply
  14. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    “even if an idea is stupid, the idea should be adopted or rejected based on its merits, not on the basis that violent extremists make it dangerous. ”
    Don’t those merits include whether or not they will make people more or less likely to support medieval theocrats? After all, we’re not going to change the minds of the theocrats, but it seems to me that the more we drop bombs on ordinary people the more they support those who violently oppose us, which makes it harder for us to achieve our foreign policy objectives. Now, to me that’s a valid reason for reconsidering our foreign policies, but the government and Polly Toynbee seem to want me to think that it’s completely irrelevant.

    Reply
  15. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Don’t those merits include whether or not they will make people more or less likely to support medieval theocrats?
    Some think the opinions of medieval theocrats and their supporters should not be taken into consideraton when deciding on foreign policy. That you do is entirely up to you, but Polly is saying that she doesn’t.
    Note that this is not the same as saying foreign policy has no bearing on medieval theocrats or their supporters.

    Reply
  16. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    It’s a plank of an imperial foreign policy to behave in the manner described; but to attempt imperialism’s insanity in an age of mass transit and open borders.
    The IRA’s bombing campaign didn’t stop because of British policy – it stopped in 1994 because they knew they couldn’t keep it up for another 25 years. What’s happened since, of course, has been an appalling fudge, a disgrace.
    And the presence of 500,000 Irish in the UK might have acted as something of a brake on ‘Lidice solutions’ happening in Lisburn.

    Reply
  17. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Evidently, Olmert’s government in Israel operates with a different set of values about killing innocent civilians, including children, by the hundreds.
    Oh, and has there ever been an instance when “children” have not been included in the category of “civilians”? Or did you just make specific reference to them for emotive purposes?

    Reply
  18. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    “Some think the opinions of medieval theocrats and their supporters should not be taken into consideraton when deciding on foreign policy.”
    But they don’t have a fixed number of supporters, and they’re not all armed fanatics. Lots more ordinary people in the Middle East seem to have become more supportive of those who violently oppose us partly as a result of the Iraq war. And if one of our objectives is to reduce the number of their supporters (which Blair and others say it is), and one of the effects of our policies is exactly the opposite, then it is completely bloody stupid to ignore that effect.

    Reply
  19. Umbongo Avatar
    Umbongo

    Tim Newman
    Apparently, according to the reasoning of Bob B and others of his credulous ilk, the Israelis deliberately targeted children rather than blitzing sites which Hizballah had carefully placed away from civilian areas to minimise civilian casualties. The Israelis killed children to achieve a public relations coup and receive applause from the BBC. This policy obviously back-fired. Next time the Israelis should try to destroy Hizballah assets rather than make war on children. Cue photo(shopped) images of Qana fronted by a sobbing Fergal Keane.

    Reply
  20. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    And if one of our objectives is to reduce the number of their supporters…
    Yes, this is right. But this aim is secondary to reducing the effectiveness of Islamic terrorists (i.e. their ability to murder lots of people), and the latter unfortunately comes at a cost to the former.
    If reducing the number of supporters of al-Qaeda was the primary aim, the correct response to 9/11 would have been to do nothing. In invading Afhganistan, the US/UK reduced the effectiveness of al-Qaeda by removing their state sponsor and their training area, but this came at the cost of enraging Muslims worldwide (who seem to enrage very easily, it must be said).
    The Israelis worked this out years ago. It knows it will be universally hated by its enemies, so it doesn’t care whether they number in ten million or twenty million. What they do care about is how much damage its enemies can inflict, and they work pretty hard at reducing that threat. When viewed this way, an awful lot of US/UK, or even Israeli policy makes more sense.

    Reply
  21. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    Tim N,
    “In invading Afhganistan, the US/UK reduced the effectiveness of al-Qaeda by removing their state sponsor and their training area”
    7/7?

    Reply
  22. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    What about 7/7? Nobody said that invading Afghanistan would remove the threat of home-grown terrorists.
    However, it is difficult to deny that al-Qaeda as an organisation had its effectiveness reduced after they were kicked out of Afghanistan. With their leaders on the run and state backers gone from power, they are not the same adversary they were on September 11th 2001. They are not finished by a long way, but they got hurt badly when the Taliban were removed.

    Reply
  23. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    Since the number of Kosovo people killed has dropped from the 500,000 (US State Dept claim at the biginning) to about 2,000 (including Serbs killed by the KLA & Nato, Albanians killed by the KLA & NATO, 330 of them in one convoy, & heavily armed KLA thugs, who were a fairly legitimate target but no proven Albanian civilians murdered by anybody on the other side) her remark seems, at best, gratutious.
    In fact we handed the Kosovo Albanians over to a bunch of murdering drug dealing, schoolgirl kidnapping monsters merely for “reasons of state” & because we armed them in the first place. This oppresion doesn’t really count because on that occasion we were helping the terrorists.

    Reply
  24. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    In fact we handed the Kosovo Albanians over to a bunch of murdering drug dealing, schoolgirl kidnapping monsters merely for “reasons of state” & because we armed them in the first place.
    Who, exactly, did we arm?

    Reply
  25. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    ” But this aim is secondary to reducing the effectiveness of Islamic terrorists (i.e. their ability to murder lots of people), and the latter unfortunately comes at a cost to the former.”
    Fine, but supporters can turn into terrorists or militants, or simply aid and abet them, so the former can also come at the cost of the latter (if you see what I mean). I accept they’re both valid objectives and have to be weighed – which may mean that the best policy would have been yes to invading Afghanistan and no to invading Iraq. Obviously these aren’t easy decisions but to pretend that one of the objectives – hearts and minds – just isn’t valid, which I think is what Blair and Toynbee but not you are basically implying, is foolish.

    Reply
  26. towcestarian Avatar
    towcestarian

    The defining rationale for any government policy should be “the best interests of the country”. At the moment, TB’s foreign policy probably falls into that category. However, if violent muslim raction to the policy escalates to the point where it is uncontrollable, then “the best intersts” will be clearly influenced by the violence, and policy should change accordingly. That policy change MIGHT legitimately include changes to foreign policy.
    However, the muslim extremists would be setting a dangerous precedent for themselves and the rest of us. How would they feel if there was a rise in violent attacks by gays in protest about the presence of homophobic religions in the country. Would draconian government suppression of homophobic religions then be more easy to accept?
    Be careful what you wish for, it might come true. There are a lot of minorities out there.

    Reply
  27. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    Bob B.:
    “Evidently, Olmert’s government in Israel operates with a different set of values about killing innocent civilians, including children, by the hundreds.”
    In the last thread about the Middle-East, you lambasted the knee-jerk reaction of some to label any critics of Israel as anti-Semites.
    You are right to say that calling any critic antisemitic is simply an ad hominem. However, I suspect the reason that is happens is more complicated. It’s not just criticism of Israel, but the lack of criticism of other situations.
    Take the Stop the War Coalition. How many protest marches have they made against the lobbing of rockets from Gaza from the disengagement? How many protest marches about what is going on in Darfur? How many protest marches against Iranian and Syrian involvement in supplying arms to paramilitary groups? Hezbollah have been hiding among civilians drawing Israeli fire upon them, which is a war crime. How frequently does that get mentioned?
    It seems that the chattering classes only get their knickers in a twist over the misdemeanors of the Jewish state.
    It’s… disproportionate. If proper attention was given to the crimes of non-Jews then maybe the label antisemitic wouldn’t be bandied around as much.
    Then there’s the fact that Hezbollah and Nasrallah are unapologetic haters of Jews and their flags can be frequently seen at so-called peace marches. (How a flag with an AK-47 on it can be seen a symbol of peace is beyond me!)
    Now that you’ve taken your dig at Olmert, would you care to balance that out with an equally strong condemnation of Hezbollah’s war crimes? (I’m sure you will, but why do we always have to ask for it? Why can’t you guys show fairly distributed criticsm of your own accord?)

    Reply
  28. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    Bob B.:
    “Evidently, Olmert’s government in Israel operates with a different set of values about killing innocent civilians, including children, by the hundreds.”
    In the last thread about the Middle-East, you lambasted the knee-jerk reaction of some to label any critics of Israel as anti-Semites.
    You are right to say that calling any critic antisemitic is simply an ad hominem. However, I suspect the reason that is happens is more complicated. It’s not just criticism of Israel, but the lack of criticism of other situations.
    Take the Stop the War Coalition. How many protest marches have they made against the lobbing of rockets from Gaza from the disengagement? How many protest marches about what is going on in Darfur? How many protest marches against Iranian and Syrian involvement in supplying arms to paramilitary groups? Hezbollah have been hiding among civilians drawing Israeli fire upon them, which is a war crime. How frequently does that get mentioned?
    It seems that the chattering classes only get their knickers in a twist over the misdemeanors of the Jewish state.
    It’s… disproportionate. If proper attention was given to the crimes of non-Jews then maybe the label antisemitic wouldn’t be bandied around as much.
    Then there’s the fact that Hezbollah and Nasrallah are unapologetic haters of Jews and their flags can be frequently seen at so-called peace marches. (How a flag with an AK-47 on it can be seen a symbol of peace is beyond me!)
    Now that you’ve taken your dig at Olmert, would you care to balance that out with an equally strong condemnation of Hezbollah’s war crimes? (I’m sure you will, but why do we always have to ask for it? Why can’t you guys show fairly distributed criticsm of your own accord?)

    Reply
  29. David Gillies Avatar
    David Gillies

    “the more we drop bombs on ordinary people the more they support those who violently oppose us”
    I must have missed the bit where we dropped bombs on High Wycombe.

    Reply
  30. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Josh,
    Try Avi Shlaim’s assessment of Zionism:
    “What I do know is that a lot of decent people, without any anti-Semitic baggage, are really upset and angry with Israel over its inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. There is simply no getting away from the fact that attitudes towards Israel have changed in recent years as a result of its own shift towards the Zionism of the extreme Right and of the radical rabbis. We have to recall that during the years of the Oslo peace process, when Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were leading, Israel was the favourite of the West. Anti-Semitism was limited because they gave the message that Israel was willing to withdraw from the occupied territories for the sake of peace. Sharon’s government is prepared to withdraw from Gaza but only as a prelude to annexing large chunks of the West Bank to Greater Israel. This is a recipe not for peace but for perpetual conflict, violence, and bloodshed.”
    http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/Zionism%20AS.pdf
    Anyone IMO wanting to gain a serious understanding of the roots of the Palestine conflict needs to start with Avi Shlaim’s book: The Iron Wall (Penguin Books, 2001).
    My motivation to start questioning received messages about the evil Palestinians came from reading Avi Shlaim and Gerald Kaufman – see the latter’s speech in Parliament on 16 April 2002:
    http://www.deiryassin.org/gkaufman.html
    Btw have you seen Matthew Parris: “Two reasons why I cannot bring myself to write about the Israel problem”?
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2277670,00.html
    In case it’s of interest, I do know what war and bombing are like having lived through WW2 in inner London: in June 1944, a V1 flying bomb (the precursor of cruise missiles) landed down one end of the road where I lived then and a V2 ballistic rocket landed down the other in January 1945 – I found and checked the dates on a web database. Altogether, nearly 9,000 civilians were killed in and around London from these missiles in the period June 1944 to March 1945.
    Try this on the comments of Britain’s government on the recent 60th anniversary celebrations in Jerusalem of the atrocity at the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946:
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2277717,00.html
    Amazing that the organiser of that atrocity went on to become prime minister of Israel 1977-83.

    Reply
  31. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Bob B,
    Perhaps you’d care to address what Josh actually wrote rather than copying and pasting other peoples’ denounciations of Zionism?

    Reply
  32. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    “I must have missed the bit where we dropped bombs on High Wycombe.”
    Funnily enough, dropping bombs on ordinary people elsewhere doesn’t win many hearts and minds at home either, especially when some people here particularly identify with the bombees. The assumption that British citizens don’t care who dies at our hands overseas doesn’t hold for everyone.

    Reply
  33. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Tim: Perhaps you’d care to address what Josh actually wrote rather than copying and pasting other peoples’ denounciations of Zionism?
    Try Matthew Parris:
    “You will wish to remind me that to be Jewish is not to be a supporter of everything (or anything) the state of Israel does, and of course that’s true. You will point out that among the harshest critics of Israeli policy are Israeli and Jewish voices, and of course that’s true too. But it’s a personal observation which one cannot just brush aside that, on this, those who are Jewish tend to have much stronger feelings than others, and that they are overwhelmingly if not universally sympathetic to the Israeli cause, more inclined than most to justify the actions of Israel, and prone to feeling personally wounded if one disagrees. . . The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast.”
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2277670,00.html
    In my experience too it has become sadly and very obvious that many – but by no means all – jews feel absolutely impelled to defend what the state of Israel and Israelis do regardless of how despicable, vile and reprehensible the actions are. Dare to criticise Israel and one is instantly dubbed an antisemite, a friend of David Irving or an admirer of Hitler – all preposterous claims which demean those who make them.
    The well-documented fact is that many Israelis have celebrated monstrous atrocities inflicted in pursuit of their cause while vociferously complaining about acts of terrorism perpetrated against Israelis. Menachem Begin proved that terrorism pays.
    As an alternative, try instead: Jews For Justice For Palestinians:
    http://www.jfjfp.org/
    Between the hugely active Israeli lobby and the Jihadists, the rest of us are being pushed into supporting one lot or the other when many of us reject both.
    There are alarming parallels with the late 1930s when people were enjoined then to choose between the Nazis and the Communists. One outcome was that many members of the British intelligensia elected to support Stalin and the Communists so downstream we had Karl Fuchs and the five Cambridge spies: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and (?) John Cairncross.
    History had to be fudged to cover up that Stalin had no insuperable ideological objects to the Soviet Union signing a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany on 28 September 1939 when Britain and France were already at war. We are getting into to the situation where some, like the sheep in Orwell’s Animal Farm, are bleating: Israeli terrorism good, Jihadist terrorism baad.

    Reply
  34. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    I take it back. You apparently won’t balance out your criticism of Israeli war crimes with a criticism of Hezbollah war crimes.
    And I suppose the opposite side never cheers its own atrocities either.

    Reply
  35. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    Tim – we armed the KLA. You don’t go from non-existence to 25,000 guns in 3 years without NATO knowing all about it. Officially many of thses guns were smuggled into Albania & the NATO fleet, whose job was to maintain the UN weapons embargo was unable to stop a single one because they were speedboats. Anybody who believes this was not deliberate may be interested in a bridge I own going cheap.
    Many of Israel’s critics may not be anti-semitic but it is impossible to believe that those, such as Ming Campbell, Jack Straw & Clare Short, who enthusiasticly supported bombing, including cluster bombing, of Yugoslav civilians & now accuse the Jews of “war crimes” for inadvertently killing civilians are motivated by some moral objection to bombing civilians.

    Reply
  36. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    Tim – we armed the KLA. You don’t go from non-existence to 25,000 guns in 3 years without NATO knowing all about it. Officially many of thses guns were smuggled into Albania & the NATO fleet, whose job was to maintain the UN weapons embargo was unable to stop a single one because they were speedboats. Anybody who believes this was not deliberate may be interested in a bridge I own going cheap.
    Many of Israel’s critics may not be anti-semitic but it is impossible to believe that those, such as Ming Campbell, Jack Straw & Clare Short, who enthusiasticly supported bombing, including cluster bombing, of Yugoslav civilians & now accuse the Jews of “war crimes” for inadvertently killing civilians are motivated by some moral objection to bombing civilians.

    Reply
  37. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    Tim – we armed the KLA. You don’t go from non-existence to 25,000 guns in 3 years without NATO knowing all about it. Officially many of thses guns were smuggled into Albania & the NATO fleet, whose job was to maintain the UN weapons embargo was unable to stop a single one because they were speedboats. Anybody who believes this was not deliberate may be interested in a bridge I own going cheap.
    Many of Israel’s critics may not be anti-semitic but it is impossible to believe that those, such as Ming Campbell, Jack Straw & Clare Short, who enthusiasticly supported bombing, including cluster bombing, of Yugoslav civilians & now accuse the Jews of “war crimes” for inadvertently killing civilians are motivated by some moral objection to bombing civilians.

    Reply
  38. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Josh,
    Why do you suppose the UN is having so much trouble getting governments to commit troops to a UN international peacekeeping force in Lebanon?
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4797187.stm
    Could it be that many see:
    (a) a UN peacekeeping force as having the military responsibility for keeping back Hezbollah so Israel can complete annexation of the West Bank without the threat of attacks by Hezbollah across Israel’s northern border?
    (b) a UN peacekeeping force as being on a potential suicide mission from Israeli air strikes?
    There is no point in debating the finer points of whether Hezbollah did or didn’t commit war crimes or terrorism without reference to:
    – This in 1953: “. . Unit 101 was commanded by an aggressive and ambitious young major named Ariel Sharon. Sharon’s order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses, and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out this order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to a pile of rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civiliains, two-thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they had no idea that anyone was hiding in the houses. The UN observer who inspected the reached a different conclusion: ‘One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.’” Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall p.91
    – “The 1982 massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps claimed the lives of at least 800 civilians, murdered by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel during its brief occupation of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The killings are considered the worst atrocity of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war and perhaps during the entire Middle East conflict. . . Mr Sharon resigned his post after an Israeli commission of inquiry established that he bore indirect responsibility for the deaths for ‘having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance’ by the militias when he allowed them into the camps.”
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1779713.stm
    – “The PHR team found that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has used live ammunition and rubber bullets excessively and inappropriately to control demonstrators, and that based on the high number of documented injuries to the head and thighs, soldiers appear to be shooting to inflict harm, rather than solely in self-defense. . . ”
    http://www.phrusa.org/research/forensics/israel/Israel_force_2.html
    Btw I was utterly appalled to learn from web sources – some based in Israel – that Lehi (the Stern Gang) contacted the Nazis to create an alliance against Britain in 1941, a year when the war was going badly for us. Despicable.

    Reply
  39. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    “There is no point in debating the finer points of whether Hezbollah did or didn’t commit war crimes or terrorism without reference to:”
    So you think whether Hezbollah committed war crimes is a matter for debate? You’re not so cautious with your labelling of Israel.
    I’m sure there are many rational, fair minded people who criticise Israel for what it does. You are clearly not one of them.

    Reply
  40. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    “There is no point in debating the finer points of whether Hezbollah did or didn’t commit war crimes or terrorism without reference to:”
    So you think whether Hezbollah committed war crimes is a matter for debate? You’re not so cautious with your labelling of Israel.
    I’m sure there are many rational, fair minded people who criticise Israel for what it does. You are clearly not one of them.
    Listening to you, you’d think Israel is the only country in world history to do reprehensible things.

    Reply
  41. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Josh,
    Israelis started on their terrorism a long while back. Try the official summaries of these recently released MI5 files:
    http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page453.html
    As mentioned many posts back, I took my lead on the Palestine conflict from Gerald Kaufman and Avi Shlaim.
    Btw I’ll certainly not dispute that there are many shameful episodes in the history of the British empire – like the opium wars with China or using gas to suppress an uprising in Iraq in 1920:
    “Saddam Hussein was not the first to use chemical weapons against the Iraqi population. General Sir Aylmer Haldane commanded the British forces which effectively ruled Iraq after its conquest by the Allies during the first world war. When the tribesmen of the Euphrates rose in rebellion against British military rule in the summer of 1920, the British army used gas shells – ‘with excellent moral effect’ – in the fighting which followed.”
    http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/1991/0119britbombers.htm
    But then I’m not in the business of systematically trying to rewrite Britain’s long history to blot out all the embarrassing bits and we have a deep tradition of political dissent going all the way to the top.
    Famously, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox often spoke up in Parliament in support of the rebels during the American War of Independence. Lord Aberdeen, the prime minister at the start of the Crimean War, deeply (and very sensibly) disapproved of the war and was eventually obliged to resign because of it. Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the start of the Boer War, disapproved of that war. Their problem was that by reports both the Crimean War and the Boer War were hugely popular at the start, which is doubtless why the respective prime ministers felt obliged to swim with the popular tide despite their misgivings. In the event, history has tended to vindicate their judgements.

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  42. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    Still evading. We already established the culpability of Israel. Now, do you condemn Hezbollah’s acts of hiding amongst civilians, a war crime itself, and launching rockets at civilians in Israel?

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  43. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    I’m not disposed to endorse or advocate any variety of terrorism but do we actually have evidence of a differential intent of Hezbollah to hide among civilians in ways that Irgun and Lehi did not when those terrorist organisations were active in murdering people in pursuit of their political aims to establish the state of Israel? What we are witnessing is the downstream consequences of that terrorism and noting the recent semi-official celebrations in Jerusalem of the 60th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946 organised at the time by Menachem Begin who went on to become prime minister of Israel.
    Israelis have inherited that weighty legacy of history and can’t simply disown the way in which the state of Israel was created because it has become inconvenient.
    I really find it impossible to make fine ethical distinctions between the ways the IDF policed the Intifada by shooting young Palestinian demonstrators between the eyes or the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 and Hezbollah sending rockets over the Lebanon border with Israel into civilian areas.
    As someone who, as a young boy, had to endure being the target for V1s and V2s in 1944/5 I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. But then the V1s and V2s killed nearly 9,000 civilians in and around London over a nine month period and I note that the civilians killed in Lebanon in the recent conflict were more than ten times the number killed in Israel. By any reasonable standard, that is hugely disproportionate.
    As Mr Egeland, the UN official put it, “There is something fundamentally wrong with the war where there are more dead children than armed men.”
    http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/54937fc55776f55f77b0b72d642ce5f9.htm

    Reply
  44. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    “I’m not disposed to endorse or advocate any variety of terrorism ”
    I didn’t ask if you were advocating it. I asked if you condemned it.
    The UN and Human Rights Watch, neither particularly amiable to Israel’s actions have condemned this behaviour of Hezbollah, which you are apparently trying to weasel out of accepting.

    Reply
  45. Frascud Avatar
    Frascud

    Isn’t it time there was a Darfur Day. THe horrors of what has been going on in that region for years have generally been kept from us by the powers of the media? THe Islamic lobby demamds changes to British foreign policy, but has any one heard a word from them about rape and murder and pillage on a massive scale. Not to mention slavery which has been for decades and still is the usual practice in northern Sudane part of the Sudan.

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