Q Ships?

A recent letter to the Economist brought up the idea of "Q Ships" as a means to combating the pirate menace off the Horn of Africa. Regardless of the practicality of the suggestion (which is limited, one suspects) I was sent off on a wave of nostalgia by the mere mention of these armed decoys.

When I was a small lad I was given a collection of adventure stories for a birthday or a Christmas. This book accompanied me just about everywhere (much to the chagrin of my dad: "We are on bloody holiday, get your nose out of that book look out the bloody window at the bloody scenery"). I wish I could remember the title or the publisher but I do recall that the collection contained all the usual suspects (climbing Aconcagua, the chicken switch, the fights of Jack Dempsey, the battle of Leyete Gulf, To Build a Fire, Churchill's escape from the Boers, and- oddly- The Pit and the Pendulum).

All of these stories were great but the one that inspired me most of all was the story of the Q Ships. Perhaps this was because my reading the story for the first time coincided with Mr T transforming broken vehicles into tanks on the A Team, or perhaps because I loved the pure justice of sneakiness countering stealth and restoring fairness to the ocean battle space, but I loved Q Ships. The letter in the Economist has thus inspired share the following link:

Q Ships

I'm looking for volunteers for the 'Panic Party'.

This is not an Iraq War Blog

Dictator's head
Dick head.

"Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful."

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

1st Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, on parade in Dacca, Bengal 1933 (from the photo collection of Brian Harrington Spear)
On the phone with my grandfather back in England today he brought up Obama's election in the context of the Rememberance Day commemorations he'd watched this morning.

"He wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, doesn't he? He'd better have a plan to do more than bomb them (the Taliban): your great-great uncle Charlie was on the North West frontier with the Norfolks in the thirties doing the same thing our boys are now. Nothing changes."

I suppose this is my grandfather's version of Vizzini's advice to the Dread Pirate Roberts: "never get involved in a land war in Asia".

75 years later, British airmen parade at Kandahar airfield: fighting the great-grandsons of their great-grandfathers' adversaries.

It Tells a Pilot if He Can Fit Through a Gap

From the BBC: RAF pilot wins moustache battle
"An RAF fighter pilot has won his battle with the United States Air Force over the size of his handlebar moustache.

Flight Lieutenant Chris Ball, who is on an exchange posting with the USAF in Afghanistan was told to trim his distinctive moustache.

The pilot, who is usually based at RAF Lossiemouth, turned to the Queen's Regulations and found the moustache's width did not breach RAF guidelines...."

Quite right. Someone had to stand firm in the face of USAF inflexibility or else the Australian exchange pilots would no longer be allowed to fly drunk and the Dutch exchange pilots would have had to remove their nipple rings.

All this handlelarbra lead inexorably to this bunch. Enjoy.

The Jairmans Bombed Me Chip Shop

Look Hans! The Assembly Rooms!
According to the BBC, a former German Luftwaffe pilot is going to do the old "Oops! My Bad" to the English city of Bath for dropping high explosives on it during the Second World War:

WWII pilot to apologise to city

Do you get the sense that some parts of British society are still having a hard time moving on from 1939-45? As for myself, I would much rather the Germans apologise for this:

The Horrors of War

As threatened, the Iraqi refugee clown story:

Exiled Iraqi clowns cheer refugees

Rahman, Ali and Safi are members of Happy Family Clowns group, established in 2004 to put smiles on the faces of Iraqi children. A few months ago the group started receiving death threats warning them against continuing their show, entitled A Child is as Scared as a Country.

But the clowns kept going, until two members of the troupe were murdered.

This was enough to drive the surviving three to leave Iraq.

"We don't know why they targeted us. We were entertaining children," says Rahman....

No you weren't. And while I don't advocate clownicide, I will just say that you can't squeeze in to a tiny car without the occasional accident.

Operation Mersey Trout

From the British Ministry of Defence website, via my father Squadron Leader R.P. "The Bodger" Biggles-Weasel (Rtd):

"A member of Delta Company, 40 Commando Royal Marines, at Gibraltar Forward Operating Base in the heart of the 'Green Zone' in the Upper Gereshk Valley, Northern Helmand, (Afghanistan-ww) uses the open air ablutions [Picture: LA (Phot) AJ MaCleod]"
All hail President Hamid Kharzi.

You're Welcome

On behalf of the defunct yet still poisonous British Empire, I would like to offer a big "no problem, our pleasure" to the rest of the world for ugly emergence of tribal strife in the false construct of Kenya. Just add it to the pile of Palestine/Israel, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and many other countries and regions created out of whole cloth in a back room of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office withought thought to ethnic or regional faultlines, or deliberately buggered up by withdrawing imperial administrators.

We might even be better than the French at this blowback business. By comparison to us and Johnny Frog the Americans are real rookies at this unintended consequences malarkey.

Wow

While I have a deep respect for their intellectual approach to metal I can't stand System of a Down's music, so I have never paid them much attention. This morning however I happened to turn to VH1 while eating breakfast and caught the video for "Empty Walls", the new solo effort by SoD's front man Serj Tankian:



Brilliant in so many ways.

Peace and Historically Themed Disco Tunes

Proof, if proof were needed, that my love of Boney M is not just a kitsch affectation but rather based in my admiration of novel geo-political stratagems:

Boney M' on Georgia's frontline

Georgia has hired a member of 1970s pop group Boney M, famous for songs like Daddy Cool and Rasputin, in its fight for control of breakaway South Ossetia. Marcia Barrett played a concert in a small frontline village not far from the rebel capital Tskhinvali.

Thousands of people came in cars, buses, trucks and on foot through a mountain pass skirting separatist territory to hear her sing.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili told the BBC he hoped the music would persuade people to lay down their arms.

"We hope that we'll lure out people from their trenches, force them to drop [their] Kalashnikovs, come here and dance with the others and understand that nothing is as nice as peace, nothing is as nice as reconciliation," Mr Saakashvili said.....

Ms Barrett said she did not know much about the situation in this remote region of the former Soviet Union but said she wanted to promote peace.

"Because it's a peace festival I really feel honoured to be invited to come and take part," she told the BBC.

The concert took place in Tamarasheni, a village of around 500 people that remains loyal to Georgia. Our correspondent says the event was planned by the Georgian authorities to show the South Ossetian separatists that life would be better and more fun if they returned to government control.... (the rest, courtesy of the BBC).

How can anyone think of succession when Boney M is in town? They were and are disco diplomats, spreading the message of dialogue and discussion through German produced Caribbean mid-tempo dance numbers. As the following video shows, they were easily as instrumental in bringing peace to Northern Ireland as Ahern, Blair, Paisley, and Adams. They were just 20 years ahead of their time:



Now if only there was an easily available and affordable US pressing of any of their greatest hits collections on CD...

Operation Constant Vigilance

As noted in the comments in the previous post, more people seem comfortable with cakes than espionage but I did want to mention one thing from the Milton Bearden lunch the other day before heading into the weekend. Asked how (Hindu) Bollywood movies and (Arab) Al Jazeera news broadcasts were changing the conservative culture of Afghanistan, Bearden demured but did note that President Bush was so obsessed with the idea that the Al Jazeera news crawl was sending coded messages to Al Qadea that he ordered the text to be constantly run through an NSA Cray super computer to dry to crack the code. It was such a big deal to him that in Bearden's words it resembled "Captain Queeg and the strawberries".

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Bush then insisted that if you played the audio book of Knights Under the Prophets Banner backwards it says "death to America, kill George Bush". Nevermind that it says that going forwards, but still, eh?

Dear Diary...

Had lunch Monday (along with about 80 others) with Milton Bearden, the former CIA chap who was head of station in Islamabad, Pakistan and who delivered the war-changing Stinger missiles to the Afghan Muj during their war against the Soviets. He later served as Eastern Europe honcho during the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. It can be said that he did his bit to hasten the demise of the ol' Evil Empire, but yesterday his comments over the caesar salad were mostly directed as to why the current lot running US foreign policy were about as much use as tits on a nun (I paraphrase). Most interesting, all told.

Its fascinating to me, who wanders past the transom when one stays moored to a spot long enough.

Memorial Day 2007: They Died for Our Freedoms?

They died in Europe, for Europe, and for ideas bigger than any nation
It is Memorial Day in the United States. Originally known as Decoration Day when instituted in 1868, the holiday was intended to recognise the sacrifices made by both sides in the American Civil War, up until that point the bloodiest conflict by the ratio of combatants killed or wounded the world had yet seen. As the years passed the holiday lost its association with a specific conflict and has come to serve as a national day of remembrance for all Americans killed in war from the fight for independence to the current day.

An exercise in national remembrance is a worthy thing, especially in an age where distractions and invitations to disunity abound. A little contemplation does us good, whether as individuals or in collective units. It is disheartening (although inevitable) however to constantly hear the rhetorical pablum that has become associated with Memorial Day.

The most common irksome phrase, and the one I want to waste this post considering, is "They died for our freedoms". One hates to be churlish when considering the memorialization of victims of circumstances largely beyond their control, but no, no they didn't.

At no point since the Civil War has the United States been involved in an existential war, the loss of which would result in the external imposition of an entirely new form of government resulting in the substantial loss of the ideals of freedom enshrined in the constitution. (I must say "ideals of freedom" as even today every promise of liberty contained in the constitution encounters either legislative caveats or extra-legal constraints on its route to the people. If the constitution had been fully implemented from the start and free of impediment today there would be no need for the Supreme Court to act as a freedom adjudicator).

The majority of the United States' wars fall into one of two categories- expansionist or ideological. In the expansionist phase, there was little risk that the Plains Indians, the Mexicans, or the Spanish colonial administrators of Cuba and the Philippines would have mounted a cavalry charge up Pennsylvania Avenue, deposed the president, and planted their flag in the Rose Garden. In the ideological phase, although fraught with dangers and with the prospect of a much-diminished America should defeat ensue the wars were fought overseas in support of concepts- democracy, human rights, vengeance, the free movement of capital, and so on- not to protect hearth and home. Even if Eisenhower been pushed from the beaches on D Day or if Nimitz had his fleet sunk from under him in the Pacific there was very little chance that New York would have been conquered and named "Neue Berlin" or Los Angeles would see a sushi restaurant on every block (oh, wait a minute- bad analogy). Defeat in an expeditionary war of ideology does not mean the end of the American way of life. There are proofs of this: Vietnam and Somalia.

So as you can see, it is not true but rather merely infantile and unthinking to say that the vast majority of America's war dead "died for our freedoms". In many cases they died for no less worthy causes (such as the freedom of others) and in some cases they died for fantasies (such as the idea that the USS Maine was sunk by the Spanish, or the idea of Iraq as a oasis of peace and democracy in a Middle Eastern nuclear free zone). They did not die however, to stop the Germans over-running, oooh, lets say Remsen, Iowa.

But is it such a bad thing, to simplify the idea of Americans dying for a mess of (sometimes contradictory) concepts to "They died for our freedoms"? After all, the sentiment and drive behind the desire to remember come from good places. While it is true that a wish to pause and take stock of those who have suffered for the name and beliefs of one's particular tribe is quite admirable, the problem is that the over-simplification of why they died does a double disservice. First, it is a demonstration of laziness unbeffiting those who fell. If one wants to remember beyond going through the motions, it would behoove one to know a little of the circumstances in which these many, many people died. Second, the phrase "They died for our freedoms" is a thought-killer and in antithesis to many of these freedoms people allege folks died for. Like "Support our troops" it is a mashed potato sentence; easily spoonfed to infants and the aged alike, slipping down the throat with ease, and easy to digest. It also kills debate- many people may dislike pre-emptive war, feel ashamed at the slaughter of the Native Americans, or question the utility of dropping cluster bombs on villages that may house a few insurgents among the civillian population, but who hates freedom?

Alas, the currency of this phrase will probably only grow. While in the shower this morning I heard some gormless DJ (on a sports radio station, no less) exclaim with more than a hint of gleeful malice in his voice that he held no truck with those who thought that journalists, litigators, politicians, and thinkers had contributed to the sum of human freedoms- all freedom comes at the point of a bayonet. Tell that to Gandhi, who was all four and liberated hundreds of millions of Indians in the face of the bayonets.

By all means take time to remember. But also take time to think. And what ever you do, don't confuse Abraham Lincoln's phrase: right makes might, and not the other way around. Confusion of freedom and national identity with the boots and banners of the military is what did for the Prussians and ultimately, if left unchecked, it will do for the United States as well.

The Blues and (Not) Royals

From MSNBC:

"Prince Harry not to serve in Iraq
Ministry of Defense says deployment too dangerous for 3rd in line to throne... Insurgent groups looking to target Cornet Wales — as his rank is called in the Blues and Royals regiment — would have had a concentrated area in which to look for him."

Meanwhile Private Nobby Crabbes of C "Wumbutu Gorge" Company, the Royal Angle-Iron Rgt (pictured below), eagerly awaits the results of his DNA test he is convinced will prove he is 60 millionth in line for the throne and thus exempt from Iraq service.

History Friday on a Wednesday: "Civis Romanus Sum"

I was going to subtitle this rare "History Friday on a Wednesday" post "Gunboat Diplomacy", but the excellent Flying Rodent beat me to it. Pop over there and read his stuff, there's a bunch of loves, as he's rather splendid.

Anyway, to my post. With 15 British merry Matelots and bolshy Booties under lock and key somewhere in deepest, darkest Iran, HMS Cornwall and her flotilla bobbing about sheepishly in the Shatt al Arab, and Tony Blair mumbling about how this sort of thing is just not on, one's thoughts wander back to the 1850s and the days of Prime Minister "Leg Over" Palmerston. Most specifically, the Pacifico Incident and the birth of gunboat diplomacy.

To quote (in it's entirety) the entry on the Pacifico Incident from The History of Great Britain:

"The decade of the Great Exhibition begins with an event which suggests a new British attitude to foreign policy. This is the approach later characterized as gunboat diplomacy, in which military force is used to impose the nation's will on another country.

Known as the Don Pacifico incident, the event concerns a Portuguese Jew of that name trading in Athens. When an anti-Semitic crowd burns his house, in 1847, he sues the Greek government for damages - with little result, until he appeals to Britain for help on the grounds that he is a British citizen (as a result of being born in Gibraltar).

The Liberal foreign secretary, Palmerston, provokes fierce controversy by the vigour of his response. He sends a naval squadron into the Aegean in 1850 to seize Greek ships to the value of Don Pacifico's claim. Censured in the house of lords, Palmerston wins a majority for his action in the commons where he argues that 'a British citizen, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong'.

Four years later the watchful eye and strong arm of England are in the care of a Conservative prime minister, Lord Aberdeen. He too sends warships to the Aegean to back up diplomacy, this time in support of Turkey.

A joint British and French fleet steams through the Dardanelles in 1854 as a gesture of warning to Russia. The result in this case is full-scale war in the Crimea. A few years later Britain and France again act together in distant waters. They use two minor incidents which would normally be the stuff of diplomacy (in the British case the offence of some Chinese officials in 1856 in boarding a British merchant ship and lowering the red ensign) as a pretext for launching a renewal of the Opium Wars.

The steam-assisted warship has made it possible, as never before, for a strong nation to police the entire world in its own interest. And to an unprecedented degree ordinary members of the public now feel closely in touch with events."

Not that I'm advocating for a minute that anything like that would work in this case (after all, the presence of our gunboats provoked their gunboats to attack our gunboats, etc, etc ad nauseam). But it must have been fun in the high Victorian era, and not just because of the outrageous facial hair.

A Letter to National Public Radio

I don't know if they will read it on air or not, but I had to write it or my blood pressure would have gone off the charts:

To the Editor;

I am surprised, to say the least, that you chose to follow a report on the inquest into the friendly fire death of British Lance Corporal-of-Horse Matty Hull with a general exculpatory commentary by former US Navy pilot Ken Harbaugh on the fog of war as seen from the cockpit.

Harbaugh began his remarks by disclaiming any deep knowledge of the incident in question and then went on to offer a general "accidents do happen" explanation for the tragedies of airborne fracticide, implicity excusing the A-10 pilots who killed Hull in direct contradiction to the extensively argued conclusions of the British coroner.

Without a doubt, confusion in battle does arise, and it is not always easy to distinguish ground targets from a fast moving jet platform. However, unlike the senarios described by Harbaugh, the pilots who killed Hull were not under ground fire and were not operating at the extremes of their endurance (they circled the British convoy for many, many minutes before attacking). They did however decide to attack their allies despite instructions from their ground controller to check with him before engaging any targets and after amazingly misidentifying the large orange panels identifying an ally as rocket launchers.

The cockpit video, easily tracked down via a few seconds of web searching, makes all of this apparent and for the conspiracy-minded offers ample reasons for why the US military initially refused to release it and why the British military refused to acknowledge it existed. While it is obvious that the A-10 pilots did not maliciously attack an ally, they were at the very least reckless, and this fact needs to be acknowledged publicly. The public radio audience is hardly well served by "yes, but" pieces by commentators seeking to lessen the impact of the actions of their former compatriots.

Death by friendly fire is hardly a new phenomenon. No less a light than General Patton once threatened to turn his guns on the 8th Air Force unless they stopped mistakenly attacking his positions. However, in this time of official reasurances about the accuracy of our smart weapons and the professionalism of our armed forces, NPR should perhaps be asking questions about why we still kill our own troops and those of our allies with such depressing frequency rather than offering airtime for those inclined to blame anything and anyone but those who actually pull the trigger.

The cockpit video:


The story:
Friendly Fire Killing 'Unlawful'

The pilots who did this were promoted.

As Refreshing as a Glass of Tizer

While reading a story on the BBC about British military overstretch, I was exceedingly pleased to learn that the top military Brit is an RAF officer called "Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup".

With a name like that it is almost worth putting "Imperial" back in the title "Chief of the Defence Staff".

Chocks away! There's cabbage crates over the briny, what!

Lip Service, Not Active Service

("Motivational" poster via Secular Front)
If you believed their advertisements and public statements you'd think that the Republicans- the good ol' any-kid-but-mine, we-never-said-stay-the-course party- is the legislative equivalent of the USO. They support the troops better-er than anyone, by golly, and anyone who says otherwise is a godless atheist communist freedom hating Frenchified Jihadist. In fact just espousing a different political philosophy than the GOP shows that you don't support the troops and are just waiting to straddle a Taliban anti-aircraft gun like a modern day Jane Fonda. And what's the best way to support the troops? Why, support the President, dummy! Its just plain logical: if Bush is the Commander-in-Chief, then he is the chief troop, and therefore supporting him supports all troops, Heck, its the trickle-down economics theory of troop-supporting.

If only supporting the troops came down to who could shout the loudest or wave the biggest flag. Unfortunately, one of the realities of this current series of wars means that "supporting our troops" requires more than shouting, waving, or even more than the genuinely nice folks of the Maine Troop Greeters can muster. Thanks to roadside bombs, land mines, 7.62mm AK-47 rounds with a muzzle velocity of about 700 metres a second, rocket propelled grenades, and (ironically) better protective gear that saves many soldiers who would have died of their wounds in previous wars, "supporting our troops" has taken on a more practical meaning.

"Supporting our troops" means fully funding the Veteran's Administration. It means expanding pay and benefits for active duty personnel and their families. It means paying for the best research into the new kinds of traumatic but survivable wounds inflicted by this asymetric warfare. It means that the military and civillian upper-echelons at the Pentagon need to get out of bed with the contractors (like most recently Haliburton-KBR, again) and into an honest discussion about needs and expenses. Never mind having to hold a yard sale to fund a school while the airforce gets new bombers (to paraphrase the bumper sticker), or even actual military yard sales like this one, how about a day when line infantry units don't have to scrounge equipment and scrap metal to try to protect their vehicles? One B-2 bomber (a sexy bit of kit, by all means, but I think we can all agree that its useless against insurgents) costs $1 billion. That is a hell of a lot of armour plate and kevlar. But cancelling one bomber to by a mess of bullet-proof vests probably frigs with somebody's congressional district and means a shit load of paperwork. Oh well.

Enough angry digressions. The point of this post is to highlight the disparity between words and actions (specifically, votes) of many of those Republican politicians who most loudly insist that they are supporting the troops. Thanks to the websites of both the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America and the Disabled Veterans of America you can see how every Representative and Senator voted on veteran's issues and decide how supportive they were not just of the war, not just of new weapons systems spending, but of returning troops, wounded veterans, and the families of those who paid the highest price. And interestingly, those who shout the loudest about supporting the troops and security are, natch, among the worst-rated for supporting veterans. Lets take a look at a few shockers, shall we?

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST, (R-TN): IAVA Grade D (and he wants to be president???)

JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): IAVA Grade D (Am I really surprised? After all he was tortured himself, and still voted to allow American authorities to torture, so betraying his fellow veterans who lack his personal resources is no big deal to this ol' friend of Charles Keating)

SAXBY CHAMBLISS (R-GA): IAVA Grade D- (Remember him? Chambliss, who avoided Vietnam with a law school deferment and a "bad knee", beat triple amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland in 2002 by attacking the combat wounded Democrat's commitment to national defence and "the troops")

So if you are one of those "National Security Democrats" who feel beholden to vote Republican because you believe that it takes bastards to protect us from even bigger bastards ("Oderint dum metuant" as Caligula would have had it) take a second to check out the security and veterans support voting record of your local candidates. You might be surprised by what you find.

Arlington East

My father-in-law, the Reverend Liberal Thunderer, sent along some photos today of a recent event a whole bunch of Cape Cod peace groups and churches organised on Coast Guard Beach in Eastham (where he is the United Methodist minister). The pictures are pretty powerful. Regardless of where you stand on the war, at the very least applaud the peace people for treating us like adults when it comes to casualties, unlike our political leaders:


Among others, P-Town UMC were there...
...as was my father-in-law and the Eastham UMC.


As reported in The Cape Codder:
"The tribute, organized by Cape Codders for Peace and Justice and named "Arlington East," is meant to "make the war real," said Diane Turco, the Harwich schoolteacher who traveled to Crawford, Texas, last year in support of Cindy Sheehan... Along with Camp Casey, Sheehan supporters constructed Arlington South in Crawford, followed by "Arlington West" in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, Calif., and "Arlington North" in Philadelphia.

"[We] were thinking we had to have some kind of event to continue to make the war real [to Cape Codders]," said Turco. "It just caught fire," she added, and the Cape Cod Chapter of Veterans for Peace got involved. "The purpose is to allow people to express their grief, respect and thoughts," explained Turco. "We believe that humanity can and must rise above violence to build a world of justice and peace for all peoples."

The display, recalling the country's most famous resting place for war veterans in Washington, D.C., will also pay homage to civilians and members of the press who have lost their lives. Event organizer John Bangert, also of Harwich, said, "People haven't seen this war, so we want to bring it home. We want to acknowledge the human cost of war. People don't get to Arlington very much. So it's a portable Arlington Cemetery." (The rest...)

We Will Fight To The Last Drop Of Your Blood

Custer Stayed The Course
Working Assets has recently been running a contest (now closed) to come up with a slogan to counter Republican talking points such as "Cut and run" and "Stay the course". Unfortunately, now that the voting on the various slogans has closed Working Assets has taken the list down until they announce the winner on October 10th (way to permeate the message through the membrane, you dumb hippies. Leave them up and let them spread, already!) but Sean Paul Kelley over at Agonist helpfully posted a few of the best here. As Kelley writes;

"My favorite slogan in opposition to and a way of reframing the notorious "cut and run" is: "Any kid but mine". The next time a Republican says that to me I will reply, "sure thing, Mr. Any Kid But Mine.""

The mid-terms aren't too far off, and even if you manage to avoid having to tangle with any Bush boosters during election season, keep these under your belt until Thanksgiving with that odd conservative cousin or aunt.