On Tuesday, Siemens, the German conglomerate, announced in its annual shareholders meeting that it has reduced its commercial ties with Iran. The next day, a company spokesman made that statement a bit more explicit: the company, he said, has “decided not to conclude new contracts with commercial partners in Iran.”

That leaves a lot of wiggle room – Siemens is free to conclude new contracts with government entities in Iran, free to carry on with its existing contracts, and free to conclude new ones until its self-imposed deadline of mid-2010 rolls around. And it does nothing to meet criticism from German human-rights advocates that Siemens sells to states like China, knowing that China will then resell to Iran. But it is, at least, a tiny sign that Siemens is feeling the heat. About time too, given Europe’s commercial complicity with the Iranian regime.

Completely coincidentally, two days later, the Senate, as Jen mentioned, passed tough sanctions on Iran. Among other steps, as the AP notes, the Senate bill “would prohibit the U.S. government from purchasing goods from firms that do business in Iran’s energy sector, or provide sensitive communications technology to Iran — a measure that could affect telecommunications giants Siemens and Nokia.” As I say, it’s certainly just a coincidence that, two days before the vote, Siemens intimated it was heading for the Iranian exit, anyhow.

But it does make you think. Engagement has been a complete failure, as even Richard Haass now admits. It hasn’t stopped the Iranian nuclear program, reduced the brutality of the regime, or done anything to diminish Europe’s vast trade ties with Iran, which have shrunk in 2009 mostly because of the recession. And yet, as soon as the U.S. Senate looks like it might pass a bill – which still needs to be reconciled with the House version, and for which the President has shown no enthusiasm at all – a major German firm suddenly, mysteriously develops a case of the shakes about cozying up to Tehran. I wonder what they’d do if we really started trying.

UPI is running a story that sums up a lot of bad reporting about a favorite liberal cause: the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty. The piece – headlined “Arms Trade Plagued By Corruption” – is halfway between reporting and editorializing. It’s occasioned by the arrest in Las Vegas, after a two-and-a-half-year undercover Department of Justice sting operation, of 22 Americans, Britons, Israelis, and others at an arms expo. They are charged with trying to bribe an individual they thought was an African defense minister to obtain a $15 million contract. Bribing foreign officials is a violation of the 1977 U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The story – dated from Beirut, which helps explain its emphasis on Western wrongdoings in general, especially directed at the Israelis, Americans, and British – emphasizes how international arms trade should be controlled by the UN, and how UN action has been stymied by the UN Security Council’s permanent members, especially the United States. According to UPI, the Obama administration’s support last fall for an arms-trade treaty, and its willingness to arrest the individuals in Las Vegas, shows that times and the mood of the U.S. are finally changing.

This is ridiculous. The DoJ investigation began under President George W. Bush, so the arrests tell us nothing about changing U.S. policy. It’s wrong to presume guilt, but if those arrested in Las Vegas did seek to violate the 1977 Act, then U.S. authorities did the right thing by arresting them. The tale of the U.S. as the preeminent hold-out against good and right is contradicted by the story’s emphasis on BAE’s legal difficulties in Britain over bribes that may have been paid to facilitate sales in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Saudi Arabia, and by its summary of the conviction in October of the son of Francois Mitterand, the late President of France, on charges of trafficking arms to Angola during its civil war. What is striking is that the U.S. is the only state that engaged in preemptive investigative action, which is in line with its reputation as one of the very few states that is serious about enforcing its export controls.

But the main nonsense is the story is simply this: the UN’s resolutions on the treaty say nothing about bribery. Their goal – supposedly – is to establish “common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms.” Even if the UN gets its treaty, bribery will remain what it is today: a crime (or not) for various states to define, investigate, and prosecute (or not) as they see fit.

Supporters of the treaty, like Britain, point out the need for signatories to “subscribe to the highest standards of good governance, including the need to tackle bribery and corruption.” But if states do not do this now, there is no reason to believe that a treaty will make them behave. Far from demonstrating the need for a treaty, the Las Vegas arrests sum up why a treaty will be irrelevant: what matters is not the creation of new common international standards but the ability and willingness of states to make and enforce good laws. The U.S. does this. Regrettably, the vast majority of the states negotiating the UN’s treaty do not.

In a major speech on Friday at Chatham House, David Cameron set out how the Conservative party would approach the issue of national security should it win the forthcoming general election. His theme was the value of connection — both domestically, with an emphasis on what Britain has to gain from better joined-up government, and abroad, emphasizing Britain’s need to see conflicts as a whole, and to respond to threats before they become crises.

There’s nothing that can be said against the idea that government should be better coordinated, or more forward-looking. Of course, advancing this idea while out of power is simpler than achieving it while in power. The creation of a National Security Council is not likely to persuade the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Ministry of Defense, and all the other players in Whitehall to abandon their institutional interests, just as the American NSC has palpably failed to achieve this in Washington.

Aaron Friedberg’s short, superb study of the collapse of strategic planning in the U.S. is very relevant here. It argues that the task of the NSC is to be “an aid to the collective thinking of the highest echelons of the government … [not] a mechanism for the production of operational plans.” It may be that Cameron’s vision of the role of his NSC leans a little more toward the vision of NSC as planner in chief than Friedberg would wish.

On the other hand, Cameron is clearly right to argue that the existing system in Britain treats national security as, at best, a second-order concern; that it has allowed development aid and post-conflict planning to become disconnected from the national interest or to go AWOL entirely; and that, in an age of Islamist terror, security must begin at home. If a British NSC can assist Prime Minister Cameron and his cabinet in implementing policies based on these preferences — and especially on the last one — it will be a good deal more than a step in the right direction.

For my money, the most interesting parts of Cameron’s speech – and the accompanying Green Paper that the speech launched — were those that dealt not with machinery but with attitudes. It’s always easy for politicians — especially newly elected ones — to blame the system: President Obama has done a good deal of this, especially recently. But this is not helpful: systems are always less than optimal, and, especially in a war with a determined and intelligent enemy, they are always going to fail.

Systems, in the end, matter less than leadership that acknowledges when it’s in a war and demands that responsible people take decisions and accept responsibility for them. The problem is ultimately one of culture. That was exactly the note on which Cameron ended, and while, again, it is obviously more pleasant to call for responsibility when out of office than it is to accept responsibility once in it, Cameron’s speech was a refreshing change from Gordon Brown’s determination to evade responsibility for all the errors for which, as chancellor of the exchequer and then as prime minister, he bears a central responsibility.

Contracting out in defense is an important public and political issue in both the United States and Britain. When based on the proper principles, contracting out allows the government to draw on private-sector skills and resources to deliver services more efficiently. But in Britain, Labour’s sketchy accounting methods for the cost of these contracts has created another snare for Britain’s defenses.

These contracts, of course, commit the government to future costs. But because Labour has played accounting games that put these contracts on the department books but not the national ones, Britain’s total future obligations  will be larger than those shown on the country’s overall accounts.

Defense isn’t the only department that’s contracted out, of course. Health has done the same thing.  But all the major political parties in Britain are committed to ring-fencing expenditure on health. But the big future obligations certain to show up on defense departmental accounts ensure that when it comes time to examine which departments need to scale back their future spending, the weight will fall even more heavily on defense.

In essence, the Labour government has created another affordability crisis in defense – one that it can now use as yet one more reason to reduce defense spending even further.  Already, over the past few months, the case – a largely spurious one – has been made by Bernard Gray’s report on procurement for imposing more cuts on the Ministry of Defense, on the grounds that its future spending plans are unaffordable.

Even on its own merits, this is a painful confession of governmental incompetence: Labour has been in power since 1997, and yet it now argues that the Ministry has somehow, mysteriously, developed plans it cannot afford to fund.  It’s now setting itself up to play the same game all over again: use the contract spending to which it had once agreed to accuse the Ministry of unaffordable future profligacy.  That would be a bad move at any time, but it’s particularly unbearable when British forces are operating alongside U.S. ones in Afghanistan.

Could it happen here?  Well, not easily.  U.S. policy requires programs to be fully funded up front, so the costs are on the books. The purpose of the U.S.’s Military Housing Privatization Initiative – to improve military housing – is similar to some of Britain’s deals, but by and large the MHPI has been well-administered, successful, and properly accounted for.

Still, in an era of justified unhappiness about the size of the federal deficit, coupled with the administration’s desire to spend, the attraction of taking costs off the books is obvious.  If the Obama administration starts to question the “on the books” requirement in a major way, the British experience suggests we should start worrying.

Geoff Dyer’s column “My American Friends” in the New York Times is hitting my mailbox from every direction at once. If you’ve not read it, you should: it’s fun. It’s got, of course, a few swipes at George W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair, but it’s really a love letter from Britain to the United States. Dyer points out that many of the British clichés voiced about America reflect either ignorance or a barely-disguised, liberal-elite desire to bring the U.S. down a peg or two because, as too many Britons are grumpy and desperate to feel superior about something, Americans must be made out to be inferior.

He’s certainly right about the grumpiness. I’ve written about this myself, pointing out that “Britain is a more self-absorbed, less expansive, society than it was in the post-war era, and while it is more prosperous, it is also less happy and less sure of itself.” The Economist writes this week along the same lines, noting the British, of all the citizens of the advanced democracies, are among the least satisfied with the state of their nation. Of course, given the parlous condition of Britain’s economy, their dissatisfaction may be a sign of rationality, but Dyer is not alone in thinking that it’s not just the economy getting Britain down. Read the rest of this entry »

The parlous state of Britain’s economy and budget and the necessity of cuts in government spending should be common knowledge. The British public certainly grasps the situation. Its one manifestation is the data by the polling firm Ipsos-MORI. In its latest monthly “Issues Index,” which invites interviewees to name as many issues of concern as they care to, “Economy/Economic Situation” stands at 49%.

By contrast, issues that Labour might be thought to own, such as “Pollution/Environment” (8%), “Poverty/Inequality” (7%), and “Low Pay” (3%) are of distinctly tertiary importance to the public. Given today’s statement by Pimco’s Head of Global Portfolio Management that Britain stands a better than 80% chance of losing its AAA credit rating, on the grounds that the government’s debt reduction plan “is lacking in conviction and . . . is lacking in details,” focusing on the economy makes a good deal of sense.

As Pimco’s criticism of the government implies, the only man not willing to grasp the nettle of reality is Gordon Brown. Mike Smithson, the proprietor of the lively Political Betting blog, points out that in a weekend interview with Andrew Marr, Brown refused to acknowledge even the possibility of cuts in government spending.  As Smithson puts it, “The interviewing trait where Mr. Brown is at his most vulnerable is when he seeks to deny something that is clearly the case. Less charitable people than me might use the word ‘porkie.’ The problem is that he does this when it is so obvious.”

A big part of dealing with the problem of government spending will be reducing the size and cost of the British civil service. This is a problem in the U.S. as well, as publications such as the Economist and columnists like Michael Barone have pointed out recently, but anything the U.S. does in this context, the UK can do worse. The most recent Sunday Times notes that in 2009, 21.1% of all UK labor was employed by the state, and that – measured by hours on the job, rate of wage inflation, or salary – it is almost always better to be paid by the government than by a private employer. Even in the highest paid job, the private sector pays better salaries, but the government offers a much larger pension.

What’s more, some British ministries have become increasingly top heavy: more generals, fewer privates. In the Ministry of Defense, for instance, the number of workers in the lowest two pay grades has fallen by about 19,000 since 1997, while the upper tiers have increased by 2,000. I have my suspicions about just how real the headcount reductions are – you can achieve seeming miracles by contracting out, as the MoD has done extensively under Labour – but even if you take the cuts seriously, they’ve not stopped total civilian pay from rising 13% from 2003/04 to 2008/09, as against a 12% rise for pay to the forces. The cost of the senior grade pay and pensions must be a major part of that increase, which is particularly scandalous given Labour’s general cheapness when it comes to defense spending, and what should have been the effect of a substantial decrease in the size of the MoD.

The pension question is particularly interesting and dangerous. The Institute of Directors estimates that the unfunded cost of public-sector pensions in Britain over the next 50 years is about 335 billion pounds. Given the relative sizes of their economies, that’s even larger than the $2 trillion shortfall the U.S. faces, according to the Financial Times. And every time Brown or Obama hires someone else, that shortfall gets a little bigger, and the size of the productive economy gets a little smaller.

It makes me think, first, of the superb “Yes Minister” episode on “The Economy Drive,” in which Sir Humphrey proves to Jim Hacker that, in order to achieve increased efficiency, you have to hire more people. And, second, of Margaret Thatcher.  The UK National Archives have just released some of her early Prime Ministerial memos. Her first priority: cut the civil service by at least 5%, and preferably by 20%. “What,” she asked, “are we doing with 566,000 that can’t be done with 500,000?” An excellent question, then and now.

It’s commonly believed that, compared with other countries, the U.S. enjoys an exceptional measure of freedom of the press and, closely allied to it, exceptionally liberal libel laws. The comparison with Britain is particularly marked, and the Index on Censorship and English PEN have launched a libel-reform campaign that describes British libel law as “a global disgrace” and refers glowingly to American freedoms.

The Adam Smith Institute has also weighed in, observing that “English libel laws are used by the rich and influential to deflect attention, while discouraging serious journalism and the spread of ideas to the UK.” American Rachel Ehrenfeld, whose 2003 book, Funding Evil, was targeted by a Saudi critic, would likely agree, as would the American authors of the 2007 Alms for Jihad, published by the Cambridge University Press.

But perhaps we in the U.S. should stop patting ourselves on the back. Last month, the Centre for Social Cohesion in Britain produced a well-documented study of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s Islamist ideology and strategy. The report details HuT’s activities outside and, especially, inside Britain and documents the disturbing extent to which it has been accepted as a legitimate partner for engagement by mainstream British political institutions. The study is available through CSC: notably, Britain’s strict libel laws did not prevent it from being published there.

It did not, though, get much press in the U.S. That may be because PR Newswire, the CSC’s press agency, refused to carry a news release announcing the report, stating — in e-mails I have read — that its U.S. office would “reject the release based on its inflammatory content” and that it owed a “a duty of care to the newswire providers we work with.” The U.S. office weighed in, too, with a statement that “due to the unsubstantiated allegations of criminal activities and inflammatory language,” they would not be able to run the release.

“Unsubstantiated” is a curious word to describe a report of more than 100 pages and 600 footnotes with extensive quotations from original sources. But more broadly, this is precisely the problem that bedevils Britain: the real damage done by its libel laws is not caused so much by the courtroom challenges to authors but by the fear the laws create among publishers that they may be next.

In the British context, it is at least encouraging that Justice Secretary Jack Straw is now publicly committed to libel reform, though his observation that the danger derives mostly from lawsuits by “big corporations” ignores who has done most of the suing so far. But the remedy when press agencies in the U.S. refuse to run news releases that might anger jihadis is less clear: we already have the First Amendment; yet in this instance, we appear to be less able than Britain to bear the burden of publishing on terrorism.

Britain has fallen a notch in Transparency International’s 2009 Corruptions Perceptions Index. It now ranks 17th out of the 180 countries surveyed. Transparency said that the decline “reflects the damage to its international standing caused by the MPs’ expenses scandal and the weakness of its efforts to prosecute foreign bribery.”

The second item, the “foreign bribery” problem, relates to the long-running saga of allegations against BAE and arms sales to Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Tanzania. I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of these allegations, which shed revealing light on the hypocrisy of the UK’s support for the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty, but they are old news. It’s probable that Britain’s decline was driven by the expenses scandal. Read the rest of this entry »

Stuart Koehl has an excellent piece up at the Weekly Standard on a Washington Post article that characterized the Army’s Stryker combat vehicle as a “kevlar coffin.” Koehl’s not an unmitigated supporter of the Stryker, but his main point is that criticism of the Stryker’s ability to protect infantry in Afghanistan is misinformed in ways both obvious and subtle.

The first and more obvious point is that the Post provides no information about the number of injuries and fatalities sustained by troops in Strykers as compared with  past alternatives, and appears to proceed on the assumption that every Stryker “lost” is a Stryker that has been totally destroyed instead of one sent to the shop. Without this, it’s hard to know just how well or poorly the Stryker is actually doing.

The second and more subtle point is that some of the destroyed Strykers hit IEDs that were as large as 2,000 pounds. At that size, even a main battle tank would not protect its occupants. As Koehl notes, if it becomes a pure race between the armor makers –- who  have to design vehicles that are actually useable –- and an undisturbed network of bomb makers with access to unlimited quantities of explosives, the bomb makers will win every time.

The U.S. has seen this kind of criticism before: it’s reminiscent of the up-armored Humvee “scandal” of 2004-05. As with that incident, the brief burst of criticism of the Stryker combines a bit of commonsense — yes, of course the U.S. and its allies should seek to provide their forces with ample quantities of the best equipment — with a lot of disguised criticism of the administration.

Now this administration deserves to be criticized. As Con Coughlin and Fraser Nelson point out in the latest Spectator, the Obama administration’s dithering isn’t just hurting the U.S. cause; it’s treating its allies — especially Britain – with “astonishing disregard.” But in the U.S., and especially in Britain, the criticism has tended to focus too much on equipment. In the U.S., it’s the Stryker and the Humvee; in Britain, it’s the British Army’s
shortage of helicopters and mine-resistant vehicles.

It’s certainly true that the British Army could use more of both. But as Koehl points out, “the solution to the IED problem is not technical, but rather tactical and operational.” In other words, since you can’t win the battle with the bomb makers by building an invulnerable vehicle, you have to win it by fighting a counterinsurgency campaign. If you control the ground, protect the people, and gather intelligence, you win not by beefing up your armor, but by making it impossible for the bomb makers to make and plant bombs.

Criticizing the supposed failures of the equipment is an easy way to make the correct point that the government is getting it wrong.  But it has a serious cost: it encourages administrations on both sides of the Atlantic to respond to the criticism as a short-term political issue simply by rush-ordering more equipment, while neglecting the more serious problem of how to fight the war effectively. By all means, criticize the Obama and Brown administrations on Afghanistan. but if the criticism is to serve anything more than a political purpose, it needs to proceed from a realization that even the best equipment can’t rescue bad strategy.

Anthony Sacramone, working from a New York Times report, is tolerably severe about the rise of domestic surveillance in Britain. As always, the Times is late to the party. The House of Lords Constitution Committee issued a lengthy report on this subject in January, following on five years of discussion about the rise of the “surveillance society” in Britain. The committee’s report opened:

Surveillance is an inescapable part of life in the UK. Every time we make a telephone call, send an email, browse the internet, or even walk down our local high street, our actions may be monitored and recorded. To respond to crime, combat the threat of terrorism, and improve administrative efficiency, successive UK governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world. At the same time, similar developments in the private sector have contributed to a profound change in the character of life in this country. The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine, and almost taken for granted. Many of these surveillance practices are unknown to most people, and their potential consequences are not fully appreciated.

The broader connections of all this are worth pausing over. It is easy to say that all the domestic surveillance in the UK stems from concern — in many cases, justified concern — over terrorism. But as the Times, the Lords, and many other authorities have pointed out, most of it is related to commonplace offenses, such as this undercover campaign against “dog fouling” — i.e. dogs making messes on sidewalks — that barely rise to the level of being an offense. In a society where the state has assumed responsibility for preventing all bad things from happening — for that is the promise of the tender embrace of the social welfare state — there is no principled way to object to it all. It is a case of “we know best.”

And that brings me back to the ongoing scandal about Britain’s broader controls or lack thereof. The guiding theme of this scandal is the same: the political elite doing good unto the voters, whether they wish it or not. The latest story to emerge on this front is that the internal report that made the case for Britain’s covert embrace of mass migration was deliberately doctored to “remove details of [immigration’s] possible links to organised crime, street fights and begging.” Of course, there is plenty of domestic criminality in Britain too. But a policy of open borders is a temptation that many ill-doers would find hard to resist.

That’s one more reason it’s a bad policy: if you don’t control your borders, you have to clamp down even harder domestically. The House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs accepted this point when it stated in 2006 that “the focus can no longer remain so heavily weighted towards initial entry and border control. … Far greater effort will in future have to go into the enforcement of the Immigration Rules within the UK.” Of course, the border controls at the time were actually, and intentionally, quite weak. But to all the other reasons for which Labour liked that, add one more: it justified even more domestic surveillance.

The story by now should be wearily familiar. Last week France was caught supplying arms to the dictatorial regime in Guinea, which then used them to brutally suppress protesters. This time, it’s Britain. Amnesty International UK asserts that Guinea also used a Mamba armored personnel-carrier that it bought from a South African subsidiary of a UK-based company.

Amnesty International UK’s arms programme director, Oliver Sprague, followed with the predictable call:

An Arms Trade Treaty that does not prevent international arms supplies to those with a persistent record of grave human rights violations like Guinea’s security forces will be a worthless gesture. At the UN this week, the UK and its allies are proposing new procedural rules for the Treaty’s negotiations that could severely restrict progress towards a treaty that can protect rights, lives and livelihoods.

There is certainly a legitimate question about whether exports from South Africa, even if carried out by a British subsidiary, are not first and foremost a matter for South African action. Still, let us assume for the sake of argument that the responsibility falls to Britain.

But Britain has been the biggest cheerleader for the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty. If it feels so strongly about the treaty’s desirability, why does it not ban or control arms exports by British subsidiaries itself? Why is there this appearance of hypocrisy between Britain’s public support for the treaty and the continuation of this trade? The answer is that the treaty is a deeply unserious undertaking, as the actions of its supporters, such as Britain, France, and — far, far more seriously — Iran, prove every day.

And what, by the way, are those “new procedural rules” that threaten to restrict the treaty’s progress? They are the Obama administration’s demand that the negotiations proceed on the basis of consensus. On that score, Amnesty International can relax: far from slowing things down, the pursuit of consensus will accelerate them. Of course, the resulting treaty will be both fast and bad, because consensus is just another word for watering standards down to the lowest common denominator. But that is not the kind of thing that should worry organizations more concerned with the appearance of progress than with its substance.

Late last week, the Obama administration did what I feared it would do: It endorsed the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty negotiations. The goal is to craft a treaty negotiated and ready for signature by 2012 that would impose standards on the entire conventional arms trade. The projected treaty’s scope is vast. Here, by way of example, is what the United Kingdom believes it should cover:

. . . all conventional arms, ranging from handguns and other small arms and light weapons (SALW), to main battle tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, combat aircraft (including helicopters), warships and conventionally armed missiles. To ensure that such arms are not used in breach of international commitments, an instrument should also cover munitions for the equipment listed above, including ammunition for SALW and larger weapons, the technology to produce and maintain such equipment, and their parts and components.

One obvious problem with this laundry list is that such a broad a treaty will likely – indeed, inevitably– cover nothing in practice by virtue of trying to cover everything in theory. And that would only subvert the U.S.’s export controls, which are widely acknowledged, not least by the administration, to be the best in the world.

So what did the administration do?  It agreed to join the negotiations, but only if they proceeded on the basis of consensus.

And why?  In order, the Washington Post reports, “to forestall criticism from U.S. conservatives that an arms trade treaty would be a first step toward regulating the [domestic] U.S. arms trade.”

Evidently, the Second Amendment is one area – our export controls are another – where even this administration willingly concedes that the U.S. is, in fact, exceptional. Read the rest of this entry »

No, I’m not talking about the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, though some very stinging questions have been raised about just how, exactly, the release was related to BP’s negotiation with Libya about an oil-exploration deal. I’m talking about the 1970s.

I don’t normally place much faith in the Independent as a news source, but this story is backed up by just-released documents from the UK’s National Archives. According to them, Britain, in a personal letter from Prime Minister Harold Wilson, offered to pay Moammar Qaddafi £14 million in return for settling various claims against the UK and ending Libyan military support for the IRA.

Predictably, the offer went nowhere, even as Britain became increasingly desperate to settle up so as to get “a share of the latest Libyan five-year plan.” By the end of the decade, Qaddafi, sensing he had the British on the run, was holding out for £51 million — that’s about £1.5 billion in today’s money — and continuing to carry on just as before.

It’s an all-too-familiar story from the 1970s, one that repeats the theme of Germany’s pathetic collaboration with the PLO, which allowed the escape of the surviving terrorists after the Munich Massacre: don’t hurt us and we’ll give you what you want. Sometimes the bad guys cash the check. Sometimes they just laugh at the offer. But whatever they do, they don’t stop causing trouble. Britain, BP, and the Labour Government — if it lasts long enough — will have occasion to find that out when the returns come in from their latest Libyan adventure.

The Institute for the Study of War has released an outstanding report by Jeffrey Dressler on “Securing Helmand: Understanding and Responding to the Enemy.” The report surveys the province, the enemy, the Taliban’s campaign plan, the British experience in Helmand, and the recent ISAF operations in it. It also contains some excellent maps. There is too much in the report to summarize: anyone interested in the war should read it in full. But it makes three points that are of particular interest to those, like myself, who have followed Britain’s contribution to the war.

First, though the report does not state this explicitly, it is inescapably clear that the UK — and indeed the U.S. — has a serious problem with operational security. In June 2009, Britain and Afghan National Army forces undertook Operation Panther’s Claw in central Helmand, near Lashkar Gah. As the report notes, “[Days] before the launch of the operation, drones monitoring the town recorded scores of residents fleeing . . . the British faces relatively modest resistance as they advanced towards the bazaar [of Babaji]. They soon discovered that the entire area had been abandoned.” It is very hard to see how the UK or the U.S. can follow a course of shaping, clearing, holding, and building if their operations are known to the enemy so far and so clearly in advance.

Second, much of the criticism of the UK’s operations in Afghanistan has centered on the shortage of helicopters and IED-resistant vehicles. There is much truth to this, as the report makes clear: it points out that Britain is so short on helicopters that it had to borrow six Chinooks from the U.S. to launch Panther’s Claw in the first place. But the criticism is not entirely persuasive. The report also makes it clear that Britain’s strategy has moved from “peace support and counter-narcotics” to a “platoon house” approach based on positioning small outposts throughout the province. What it did not try to do was to clear and hold population centers.

In this context, the fact that British forces have taken serious losses from IEDs is not hard to understand: as Sam Kiley writes in his recently published book Desperate Glory, British influence “extends only so far as the soldiers can walk and fight.” Because British forces don’t control the ground, they leave themselves open to repeated IED attacks on their patrols. Britain’s shortage of helicopters and IED-resistant vehicles is real, and a very serious problem — but one that has to be seen in the light of the strategic deficiencies.

Third, the report points out that while Britain has not effectively shaped, cleared, or held the battlefield, it has devoted excessive emphasis to building on it. Of course, building is a good thing. But the report makes it clear that, for Britain, “building” is as much a public-relations strategy, designed to maintain support for the war at home and to achieve victory in Afghanistan through demonstration effects, as it is part of a counterinsurgency campaign that must begin by establishing security. The Kajaki Dam operations in September 2008 are particularly depressing in this regard: Britain mobilized 5,000 troops and numerous planes and vehicles to deliver turbines to the Dam in an effort to restore electrical power  to southern Afghanistan. In a limited sense, the operation worked. But now British forces are pinned down on a hill overlooking the Dam and “the enemy’s control of the battle-space . . . offers it the freedom of movement to conduct coordinated ambushes and IED attacks largely at will.”

Britain can fix these problems if it wants to. But right now, the government — adrift and rudderless in advance of an election it will almost certainly lose — looks as though it is still more interested in denying problems than in addressing them. As Michael Yon — caution, harsh language — warns in one of his latest dispatches, it seems to him as though those in charge in London “wish to separate realities from readers.” And given what the realities say about them, this — though dangerous and depressing —comes as no surprise.

The following message, which I reproduce in its entirety, was forwarded to me in my capacity as a Yale alum by a friend at Yale’s Divinity School. I am assured that it is not a parody. Any other
comment is superfluous.

A Note of Community Concern

Dear Divinity School Community,

On the evening of Friday, September 11th, following the Community
Dinner, there was a food-eating contest in the Common Room. The
contest was between teams of students eating watermelons. The contest
was a painful reminder of past images and painful stereotypes
involving watermelons and African Americans that continue to be used
today, and it should not have happened. To the extent that it happened
at all is a shared responsibility which we all deeply regret and for
which we all deeply apologize. The incident was not the fault of any
one person or group of persons, and it certainly was not the fault of
any two people. It went forward in ignorance of what it represented
and how it would be perceived by others. While we may acknowledge that
ignorance is no excuse for offense, it must also be acknowledged that
neither the ignorance nor the offense was intentional.

Student leaders, in consultation with faculty and administration, will
think together about ways that we as a community can address this
painful occurrence in a constructive and conciliatory manner. One way
this may go forward is with an educational opportunity about our
nation’s history and aspects of that history that often are
inadequately conveyed. We will give notice of this educational
opportunity as plans develop over the next several days. For now,
please note the suggested links at the bottom of this message for
educational information. Other opportunities for community
conversations related to this incident may go forward, as well, and we
will give notice of these opportunities as plans are made.

At our best, we are a community that respects and honors all its
members. At our best, we are a community whose members communicate
with one another directly and thoughtfully. It is our hope that we
might be the best community we can be in this challenging and
difficult situation. May it be said of us that love characterizes our
listening and our speaking, and that honesty and peace shape our
discourse. May we move forward in mutual understanding and justice.
Please know that we and others of the staff and faculty are available
to you for conversation, as needed. Please let us know of concerns you
have and ways we might address those concerns. Our prayers are with
you and this community, as we all seek God’s guidance and wisdom for
the path ahead.

Yours truly,

Emilie Townes
Academic Dean

Dale Peterson
Dean of Students

Please note: Background on this stereotype can be found on the links and also by making use of Google:

Does President Obama’s trip to Copenhagen tomorrow to lobby for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics mean that victory is in the bag for the Windy City? Ramesh Ponnuru, for one, believes so, and quite a few others have echoed his thought that the president would hardly dare to go—especially after he said on September 14 that he was too busy to make the trip—and risk looking foolish if Chicago lost.

They may be right, but my take is a little different. The IOC has an enormously swollen ego, believing itself to be the spiritual center of the ideology of Olympism. It very much likes to have world leaders at its beck and call. Tony Blair’s successful in-person lobbying for London’s 2012 bid set the unfortunate precedent, and now this round of bidders must match his standard. What persuaded Obama to schedule the visit to Copenhagen was not an assurance that Chicago had won. What persuaded him was influential Canadian IOC member Dick Pound’s comment that his absence from Copenhagen would “be noticed.” Obama is not going to Copenhagen to win. He is going to avoid losing.

It is depressing that Obama, after notifying the Czech Republic that he was pulling the plug on missile defense in a last-minute, late-night phone call, and after having spoken with his senior commander in Afghanistan only once in 10 weeks, has found time to fly to Copenhagen to lobby the IOC. But the IOC itself is far more depressing. Consider the IOC’s history of the Games, titled Athens to Athens, and published in 2003 by British journalist David Miller. Here is the IOC’s official statement, on page 345, on 9/11 and the 2002 Salt Lake City Games:

Yet again every foreigner was either embarrassed or irritated by the rampant American media chauvinism. George W. Bush breached protocol when declaring the Games open “on behalf of a proud, determined and grateful nation.” In the space of five months the American people seemed wholly to have forgotten what they had temporarily begun to acknowledge on September 11: that while the immense achievements of the nation over two centuries are regarded with admiration and not a little envy, there are many who find U.S. triumphalism unacceptable.

There is a lot that could be said about this disgusting smear. But most repulsive of all is the IOC’s implication that 9/11 was a reply by a few of the “many” offended by unacceptable American triumphalism, and that Americans are too dense to recognize in a permanent way their own culpability in causing the attack. That is the official, published view of the organization that the president of the United States has decided to grace with a personal visit of supplication. And that is the most nauseating part of this entire miserable affair.

Liam Fox, the Tory shadow defense secretary, spoke at the Heritage Foundation yesterday. His admirably concise remarks on the “The War in Afghanistan: Why Britain, America and NATO Must Fight to Win” will be available online shortly. They’re well worth your time if you’re interested in Afghanistan or what the Conservatives are likely to do if they come to power in May, as all the polls indicate they will.

The main takeaways are clear, and welcome. First, the Conservatives remain strongly committed to the fight in Afghanistan. Unlike conservatives in the U.S., they aren’t that much concerned that the current government wants out of the fight: bluntly, Gordon Brown is in too deep for that. Second, the Tories would back an increase in the size of the British forces in Afghanistan if those forces were used to train the Afghan National Army. And third, Fox in particular is concerned about mission creep in Afghanistan and how failure to fulfill all possible aims of the war is sapping public support. As he put it:

The best way to maintain support is to be very clear that we are there for national security reasons. . . . All of these other aims—on human rights, on democratic improvement, on what happens to education for the next generation, especially women—these are important and laudable aims in themselves but they’re not why we’re in Afghanistan.

For my part, Fox’s most interesting comment came toward the end of his remarks, when he pointed out that, while—as in Iraq—there will be many locals in Afghanistan who are reconcilable, there will remain a hard core of fanatics who will never be amenable to negotiation and who must be met with force. The belief that everyone is amenable to negotiation is, he argued, one of our most characteristic modern delusions.

Of course, this conviction is not unique to Dr. Fox. But he will shortly be in a position to act on it. And in the British context, something very much needs to be done. As evidence, I point to the most recent National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom, released in late June. The fact that it is 112 densely spaced pages long is one problem: nothing so wordy can possibly qualify as a strategy. But one of the worst bits is its treatment of ideology, which it describes, correctly if stiffly, as “a particularly important . . . threat driver.” But it then concludes:

Such [belief-based] rivalries can be made less potentially harmful if they are constrained within multilateral systems of rules, at the global level through the United Nations, though international law, through security and defence alliances such as NATO, and through regional organisations, particularly in Europe through the European Union. A rules-based international system is vital to help turn any rivalry into peaceful competition and in turn into constructive cooperation. This is another compelling argument for strong multilateral governance.

Yes indeed: the way to defeat rival ideologies is to invite those possessed by them into the UN, the EU, NATO, and the whole panoply of international institutions, membership into which will convince them to turn to “constructive cooperation.” That is the British government’s official view of how to deal with global ideological challenges. It is hard to imagine a more unserious and dangerous approach, or one more in keeping with the views that Dr. Fox rightly criticizes.

The U.S. Constitution was signed 222 years ago yesterday. But for all the reverence with which the Constitution is treated, Constitution Day isn’t one of the higher-visibility federal holidays. Perhaps that’s because, for most Americans, holidays are days on which you don’t have to go to work. Or perhaps it’s because, until 2004, the day was known—to the few who had heard of it—as Citizenship Day.

I confess to having been somewhat skeptical of Senator Robert Byrd’s initiative that led to the renaming of the day, in part because it requires all publicly funded educational institutions—which is almost all of them, to some extent—to devote part of the day to the history of the Constitution. The idea is excellent in theory, but I tended to think that, in practice, the universities that needed to study the Constitution the most would do their best to pervert any history they offered of it. But credit where credit is due: Yale’s commemoration yesterday included a public address on Lincoln and his faith in the Constitution by a former leader of Yale’s Conservative party. True, such events do nothing to change the political tide in American higher education, but at least they incline in the right direction.

Today, though, I’m more exercised about another constitution, the European one. The so-called Lisbon Treaty—in reality a rewrite of the EU’s abortive constitution—is up for its second vote in Ireland on October 2, the Irish having rejected it the first time, in June 2008. At that point, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned that “there is no plan B.” That, of course, was untrue: the plan, as always in Europe, was to have the Irish vote until they got it right. And this time, the EU might just squeak by: polling shows that support for the treaty has been dropping, but it still has a lead of 46 percent to 29 percent, with 25 percent undecided.

That’s not as strong for the yes vote as it looks: last time round, the no vote was behind by almost 2-to-1 and ended up pulling it out. But facing the EU’s “vote, vote, and vote again” strategy, and Ireland’s economic collapse in the interim, the no campaigners must be less confident this time. As Tony Barber’s EU blog post for the Financial Times suggests, the main asset of the no campaign—apart from Irish anger at the EU’s presumptuousness in demanding a revote—is the sentiment that, since pro-Lisbon politicians made a mess of Ireland’s finances, they should not be trusted with the future of its sovereignty.

But there are other troubles ahead for the EU’s constitution. One of them is in the Czech Republic, where President Klaus has yet to sign—and shows no intention of doing so. The more formidable one, though, is in Britain. If by chance Ireland votes no, and presuming it wins the May general election, the Conservative party will hold a referendum on the constitution, which will destroy it. The trickier question is what the Tories will do if Ireland votes yes. This remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but there are some valuable straws in the wind. The first is the simple political reality that 90 percent of all Tory candidates want to reduce the EU’s hold on Britain. That is not a bloc of future Tory MPs: it is virtually the entire party.

The second is Dan Hannan’s recent statement, after a meeting with the Tory shadow minister for Europe, that “I am increasingly confident that Britain will get its referendum. I’m not in a position to explain why at this stage, but our hand is stronger than is generally supposed.” Right now, that remains just a tantalizing hint, but as the results of the June European elections show, there is a good deal of anger at the political establishment in Britain, and nothing is more establishment than the European Union.

The party that challenges that establishment, and Labour’s steady centralization of power into it, will not win power simply on an anti-EU vote, but resisting the EU will be essential to the coherence of the appeal. And that—apart from the EU’s failure to serve British national interests, of course—is the fundamental reason to believe that Hannan is not just indulging his hopes, and to believe that this constitution, unlike the American one, will not make it 222 days—much less 222 years.

Yale has a World Fellows Program. When launched, it was talked about on campus as a kind of mid-career equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship: bring the rising thinkers and doers of the world to Yale for a semester (people with careers, unlike newly minted undergraduates, usually can’t afford to take more than four months off), expose them to American higher education and all its wonders, recruit them into the Yale cadre, and toss them back into the lake to fructify and rise to run the world.

The scheme hasn’t been a complete failure, but, predictably, it has made only a limited impact on Yale—partly because the university lives an almost self-contained life and has little interest in visitors with a four-month tenure, and partly because Yale tends to select World Fellows who mirror its own prejudices. In other words, if you already think that America—and all the ills for which it is supposedly responsible—is the world’s biggest problem, Yale doesn’t have much to teach you.

So what were the World Fellows doing midmorning on 9/11? They were listening to the following program, offered, as part of a regular series, by one of their own:

Meltdown: Eye-witness Accounts of Catastrophic Climate Change Arctic explorer, environmental scientist, and World Fellow Tim Jarvis presents dramatic eye-witness evidence of melting polar ice-caps. His presentation will be supplemented by short accounts of the effect of catastrophic climate change on front-line countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. The discussion will focus on what has already occurred and is demonstrable, and what the consequences of further climate change will be.

I don’t demand that on 9/11 Yale focus only on 9/11. I don’t even object, too much, to the obviously propagandizing nature of the event—even though a scientist should be willing to accept that eyewitness anecdotes are no substitute for data. But would it be too much to ask that the World Fellows, living for the time in the United States, on one morning focus on the actual and demonstrated dangers posed to the U.S. and many other nations by Islamist mass terrorism? Yes, it evidently would be. Get back into the memory hole, 9/11.

Last month, the story broke that Yale University Press was censoring one of its own books—by Jytte Klausen on the Danish cartoon controversy—out of fear that if it published the cartoons in question, it would, in the words of John Donatich, the press’s director, put “blood on my hands.” In other words, there would be riots and murders by outraged Islamists.

Since then, there have been several developments that are worth following up on. Martin Kramer has done sterling detective work assembling circumstantial—but plausible—evidence that Yale’s decision had at least as much to do with its desire to win a big donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as it did with cravenness. Particularly significant in this connection is the fact that Yale named Muna AbuSulayman, executive director of the Alwaleed Bin Foundation, as a Yale World Fellow—a sort of midcareer equivalent of the Rhodes Fellowship—for fall 2009.

As Kramer puts it, “Imagine, then—and we’re just imagining—that someone in the Yale administration, perhaps in President Levin’s office, gets wind of the fact that Yale University is about to publish a book on the Danish cartoons . . . Whooah! Good luck explaining to people like Prince Alwaleed that Yale University and Yale University Press are two different shops. The university can’t interfere in editorial matters, so what’s to be done? Summon some ‘experts’ who’ll be smart enough to know just what to say. Yale will be accused of surrendering to an imagined threat by extremists. So be it: self-censorship to spare bloodshed in Nigeria or Indonesia still sounds a lot nobler than self-censorship to keep a Saudi prince on the line for $20 million.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, a colleague and I published a substantial paper on the faults inherent in the UN’s efforts to negotiate an arms-trade treaty. These faults are many and serious, but they come down, fundamentally, to the fact that too few states enforce their existing laws, or live up to their existing responsibilities, on the import and export of arms. A treaty will do nothing to remedy this disinterest, incapacity, or—in far too many cases—malfeasance.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal and other papers reported a case that illustrates these faults. In August, the UAE seized a shipment of military hardware from North Korea aboard a vessel bound for Iran. This is, needless to say, a violation of the UN Security Council ban on military exports from North Korea, but that did nothing to stop Iran from seeking to import them.

But Iran and North Korea were not the only nations involved. The weapons were carried on an Australian vessel, flying under a Bahamian flag. The exporting company was an Italian firm, working out of Shanghai, China, and the parent company of the Australian shipping firm is based in France. So all together, at least seven nations are implicated in this effort to breach the sanctions on North Korea. We can have confidence that Australia, at least, will treat this failure with appropriate seriousness. But it is much less easy to be sure of Italy, with its enormous trade ties to Iran, never mind China.

Fortunately, the weapons were not nuclear. The Wall Street Journal reports that they were “detonators and ammunition for rocket-propelled grenade launchers.” But that is bad enough: take a look about halfway down the page at one of Michael Yon’s latest dispatches from Afghanistan if you want to see what an RPG does to a professionally constructed military barricade. There is a very good chance that those North Korean RPGs were headed for Afghanistan, to be used by the Taliban against British and American soldiers.

Needless to say, Iran proclaims—in its submission on the projected UN treaty—that it “has enforced and continues to enforce measures to prevent and curb the illicit trafficking and transfer of such weapons.” This is a blatant lie. It has, further, the gall to claim that “the major problem of the developing countries” rests in the culpability of “certain major exporters of . . . [small] weapons,” i.e., “certain Western countries.” Like the other nations involved in this case—though in Iran’s case, the problem is evil intent, not a lack of attention—Iran is engaging in activities that violate its own laws and existing UN Security Council resolutions. Another UN treaty will not cure this problem—it will only give the bad states more cover to hide behind.

And that is something the UN specializes in. Indeed, since the UN works for all its member states—the bad ones as well as the good ones—it can scarcely do anything but incline toward covering up malfeasance. Yesterday, French officials harshly criticized IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, who called the Iranian nuclear threat “hyped.” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner replied that “it is clear on reading the IAEA documents that not a single question has been answered,” while another French official, speaking off the record, said “ElBaradei has been watering things down for a very long time and now we’ve had enough. . . . [IAEA inspectors have gathered] whole series of pieces of evidence, of proof.”

Proof indeed. It’s too bad that the French back the UN’s projected treaty. Their own complaints about the IAEA, and their circumstantial and perhaps unknowing involvement in the shipment of North Korean weapons to Iran, illustrate the fallacies inherent in believing that a UN treaty will be effective.

Van Jackson, founder and executive editor of Asia Chronicle, has written a column titled “Principles impede progress for Burma,” attacking those—like a colleague of mine here at the Heritage Foundation—who have the temerity to argue that U.S. policy toward Burma should be based on principles. Jackson, by contrast, prefers the meaningless criterion of effectiveness devoid of any actual objectives.

In his pursuit of steely-eyed utilitarianism, Jackson makes the amusing claim that “British philosopher John Stuart Mill would turn over in his grave at the idea of allowing such a failed policy to continue.” Jackson appears to know just enough about Mill to be dangerous, i.e., that Mill was a utilitarian. True indeed—at least until Mill suffered from a nervous breakdown at the age of 20 and turned to the poetry of the Romantics as a relief from the dust-dry pursuit of utility. Partisans of policy without principle might take a lesson from that.

But we needn’t rely on Mill’s love of Wordsworth to make the case. One of Mill’s greatest essays was “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” originally published in 1859. What might Mill have said about the idea that the U.S. should engage its way to good relations with a lawless dictatorship?

“To suppose . . . the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilised nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into, however it may be with those who, from a safe and unresponsible position, criticize statesmen. . . . [T]he rules of ordinary inter-national morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate.”

Reciprocity is fundamental to diplomacy, and to international affairs more broadly. But reciprocity cannot reliably exist if one side is not governed by law. And that is why engaging with dictators is a recipe for diplomatic failure, as well as a disgrace to decent principles.

Michael Barone has an article in today’s Washington Examiner that is—like all he writes—thought-provoking and worthy of a read. Titled “Obama’s lyrical Left struggles with liberalism,” it argues that Obama is a member of the “lyrical Left”—basically, a dove. But it wasn’t a dovish foreign policy that made the state big, argues Barone: it was the undovish liberals like Wilson and FDR who fought wars, because wars grow the state. As Barone concludes, “A big-government president, Obama is learning, needs to be a war president first.”

Well, maybe. I doubt Obama is learning any such thing: he doesn’t seem like the type much interested in fighting big wars, or in learning. The term “lyrical Left” is new to me, and while it makes sense, I’ve always thought of Obama not as a dove but rather as a college professor. He has the cool, above-it-all, slightly condescending attitude of a tenured member of the Harvard faculty. Not so much lyrical as holier than thou.

But Barone is definitely right about the “lyrical Left.” His case study is Randolph Bourne, a writer for the New Republic who opposed U.S. entry into the Great War on the grounds that it would give too much power to the state to interfere in private enterprise and private opinions. Indeed, that was largely the reason that Wilson himself delayed and delayed going to war, so Barone’s characterization of him as part of the “unlyrical warlike Left” is not precisely right, though fair enough as a retrospective summary.

What Barone is writing about is Gladstonian liberalism: averse to war abroad and averse to the big state at home. Not that the Grand Old Man didn’t fight and legislate, of course. But the liberal argument in the 19th century had it that the purpose of state action was to remove restraints it had previously imposed, be it on trade or voting rights, usually at the behest of powerful vested interests. The problem, in other words, was the state itself, and its capture by the aristocracy. Liberals then were the optimists.

But that is not today’s Left. The generation of the 1960s may have been pacifists abroad, but while they were supposedly in favor of freedom at home, they defined freedom as liberty from inherited morality. The past was a nightmare from which, at least rhetorically, they were trying to escape. And that attitude dovetailed perfectly with a massively expanded state, which existed not to undue its previous errors but to remedy the inherited wrongs of society at large. Skeptical and pacifist about the U.S. abroad, skeptical and interventionist about it at home. It isn’t Gladstonian or lyrical, but it’s undeniably coherent. Liberals today are the pessimists.

It would be wonderful if Barone were right. If so, the Left today would either be pacifist abroad and libertarian at home, or activist abroad and activist at home. Neither of those would be entirely to my liking, but in any case it would at least be one out of two, and that’s not bad. But the fact that the Left has existed for more than 40 years as pacifist abroad and activist at home suggests that the “basic contradiction” Barone sees between the Democratic party and liberalism is really a contradiction between the old liberalism and the new—even if the latter is now more than two generations old.

I hope that everyone listens, though there’s not much chance of that. On Wednesday, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a new study—”What Will They Learn?”—accompanied by a very spiffy site of the same name. The study, timed to hit the market as the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings appear, grades colleges and universities not by easily manipulated and subjective criteria but by doing what is most damaging to academia: taking it at its word.

ACTA presents the “mission statement” of each institution it grades and assesses whether it has strong general-education requirements. This is not the same, it is careful to note, as having distribution requirements: almost every institution has those, but they are usually so broad as to require no common core of knowledge. The results, for anyone who has followed higher education, are depressingly predictable: lots of F‘s, especially for the nation’s liberal-arts colleges and elite universities.

My own undergraduate institution, Grinnell College in Iowa, gets a well-deserved straight F for requiring nothing whatsoever. Frankly, that was one big reason I went there, which only goes to show that most 19-year-olds are entirely unqualified to assess the merits of the argument for a core curriculum. But I did enjoy ACTA’s quote from Grinnell, that “the heterogeneity of good critical thinking and the free exchange of ideas militate against any single answer” to the question “What should the liberally educated person know?” Read the rest of this entry »

Newspapers around the world are reporting that an Islamist Internet site affiliated with supporters of Abdullah al-Faisal—Jamaican-born Trevor William Forest, who was deported from Britain in 2007 after serving a jail sentence for soliciting the murder of Jews, Americans, and Hindus—is promising “spectacular attacks” in Britain, to be launched by “home-grown terrorists.”

By itself, this is hardly the “astounding revelation” that the newspapers suggest: home-grown terror in the UK is sadly nothing new. And, though MI-5 is undoubtedly paying attention, these reports say nothing particularly useful about the threat of terrorism in Britain in the near future: Islamist sites have predicted 50 of the last three attacks.

But I am interested to read that, at least on this particular site, Islamists are now arguing that Britain and Europe pose a more serious threat to their future prospects than the United States. Perhaps that reflects nothing more than pique at al-Faisal’s deportation: it is certainly hard to think of much that continental Europe has done recently to merit the honor of being Islamism’s worst enemy.

On the other hand, the contention does have a logic. The Islamist thesis—most closely associated, for obvious reasons, with Osama bin Laden—that they should attack the U.S. first never made much sense, based as it was on a feeble analogy between the U.S. and the USSR’s defeat in Afghanistan.

Attacks on targets in Europe, though less damaging than 9/11, have been more politically fruitful, as illustrated by the impact of the Madrid bombings. An Islamist focus on Europe, and on Britain in particular, might open up extremely painful gaps between the U.S. and its NATO allies about the conduct and continuance of the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, unless the terrorists acquire WMDs, this is probably the best way for them to achieve a political victory that would be out of all proportion to their actual strength. Let us hope that they are not as strategically minded as these reports suggest.