Collapse of authority

Well, resuming blogging after a break over Easter, it's time to round up the Iraq situation. (I know, it's been a very Iraq blog lately but it's hardly surprising, no?) Although the initial crisis now seems to be past, or at least in suspension, we can't honestly believe things are getting any better. Not when two helicopters have been shot down in two nights - an AH64 Apache, and a MH53 Pave Hawk. Note that last one. It was destroyed near Fallujah, and the US spokesmen stated that it did not belong to the US Marines operating there. It certainly didn't - the MH53 is the fancy special forces variant of the UH53 Blackhawk transport, which suggests that their helicopter-shooting party is getting good. And, for the first time, we have a hostage problem. Although the some have been released, the agenda is pretty clear - kick the fear up a notch and spread the targets. Two coalition states have decided to withdraw, and one (the Ukraine) has admitted that its force in Iraq was "not fit for hostilities" when it was chased out of Kut. There is now ample evidence that the various Iraqi paramilitary forces are unreliable at best. Although al-Sadr's militia have apparently permitted Iraqi police in Najaf to return to their police stations, one has to wonder how far that development just represents a legitimisation of Shia street muscle - if the cops are the rebels, it makes sense to put them back in charge.

President Bush's remarks yesterday - when he declared that "gangs" were behind it all, but in the same sentence said they were "trying to make a statement before June 30th", thus neatly contradicting his own attempt to deny them any political agenda or legitimacy - demonstrate the gap between reality and understanding. The situation is in some ways very comparable with certain phases of the Vietnam war, however much screaming and moaning this evokes - the forces the US is trying to build up have proven to be a means of supplying the other side with arms, to the extent that when the US Marines reoccupied Kut they had to disarm the police. There seems to be none of what was called psycho-political control back then - and this is a question of legitimacy, most of all.

Good story here (Washington Post). Note the reference to members of the ICDC. And what about this new policy? BBC News

"Many newly-trained Iraqi police and army personnel refused to fight Shia and Sunni rebels in the recent unrest, the head of US Central Command says.
Gen John Abizaid said this was a "great disappointment" - and announced the coalition would draw top officers from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussein."

More horrors, Ranter proved right. Sometimes I really don't like me

In a long post on the Shia uprising in Iraq on Tuesday, I argued that the Mahdi Army was following a strategy seen in numerous civil wars - seizing the locations of legitimate power and co-opting the police and administration. According to this story in the Indy, I was right..

""The Americans are just as bad as Saddam Hussein," said Hamid al-Ugily, the leader of six men from Sadr city carrying a green flag who are spending two to three days walking to Kerbala. "We think they will attack Muqtada in Najaf. We will defend our religious leaders." What is menacing for the US is that all of the men marching to Kerbala, something they once did secretly under Saddam Hussein, are soldiers in the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC)."

And there's more..

"If the US army uses its massive fire power to fight its way into Najaf in pursuit of Sadr it well be seen by Shias as a repetition of the Iraqi army offensive. This was against rebels in Najaf and Kerbala during their great uprising against Saddam Hussein at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.

In many of the southern cities of Iraq where Shia are the majority of the population, the local Iraqi police and paramilitary units - supposedly under orders from the coalition - have shown they are not prepared to fight fellow Shia in the Mehdi army."

Indeed. With the police, paramilitaries and others either supportive or thoroughly intimidated and at least one coalition force (the Ukrainians in Kut) apparently beaten, it isn't looking good. But this is futile gloating in the light of the US airstrike on a mosque in Fallujah, in which as many as 40 people may have died. US officers quite correctly referred to international law, citing the principle that a protected location or person loses that status if they are used for military purposes. Quite right, although one might argue that the attack was disproportionate to the direct military advantage expected, a test which is used in this case. Not that this will do any good in terms of ethics, or of policy.

"It Seemed Like Everyone In The City Who Had A Gun Was Out There"

Damn good coverage from the Washington Post of the Fallujah battle - which rather invalidates the last sentence of the last post. The US Marines have an institutional history of being rather better at political war than the Army, going back to their 19th century role in Latin America - as evidenced by this quote:

"One Marine officer described that attack as a piece of "well-organized street theater" that was designed to "whip up a mob mentality." He said local Muslim clerics had issued an order saying the mutilation of the corpses was an offense to Islam, but that a locally made videotape of the attack was already selling in many shops."

I think that was the point I was trying to make earlier. But it doesn't bode well that AC130 Spectre gunships were called in - even if they are trying to avoid using the "big guns", there are few more devastating forms of supporting firepower than one of these.

Getting worse - al-Sadr supposedly controls Najaf

CNN link

"Supporters of maverick Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr controlled government, religious and security buildings in the holy city of Najaf early Tuesday evening, according to a coalition source in southern Iraq.

The source said al-Sadr's followers controlled the governor's office, police stations and the Imam Ali mosque, one of Shia Muslim's holiest shrines.

Iraqi police were negotiating to regain their stations, the source said.

The source also said al-Sadr was busing followers into Najaf from Sadr City in Baghdad and that many members of his outlawed militia, Mehdi's Army, were from surrounding provinces."

Same pattern again - target the political space of power. God knows what will happen if they have to get them out of the Imam Ali mosque - not a good place to be letting off the big guns, especially as the man himself has taken up residence in it. Did nobody see that one coming?Back to Iraq quotes the insane statement of Bremer's in the CNN story and points out that a fat 77% of the Iraqi population lives in the towns currently experiencing fighting.

In Fallujah,things are worse, and they ain't great in Nasiriyah either. In fact, the fighting in Nasiriyah sounds well-planned:

"About 500 Italian troops came under fire as they launched a pre-dawn operation to dislodge fighters controlling key bridges in Nasiriya.
The Italians returned fire and, after a gunbattle, regained control of the bridges, said a statement issued in Rome by the Italian defence ministry."

So - as well as the police station, the mosque and the governor's palace, those bridges that the US Marines had so much pain securing in the war (the last war?). According to Der Standard, three US soldiers were killed storming al-Sadr's party offices in Baghdad. Der Standard is also the first media source I have seen to pick up on the issue of al-Sadr's presence in the Imam Ali mosque as mentioned above - good work, Austrians. The BBC news ticker is currently announcing that "US soldiers control part of Fallujah after heavy fighting". Given that they are occupying it, this is one of those lines that says less than it seems.

Nuclear explosions - illegal in UK!

Thanks to the excellent Spy Blog, the blog operated by the Watching Them Watching Us campaign for the regulation of surveillance technology, I now know that the controversial Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001 made it a criminal offence to "detonate a nuclear weapon in the UK without permission". What? All these years it was quite legal to let off nukes - and I never even tried! And - where do you apply for permission?

Prosaically, I suppose the bit about permission is to cover the possibility that the govt. might one day resume tests and do it in British territory, on an island perhaps. Is that form U-235, I wonder?

Iraq - the black weekend and the new war

Well, it has all finally happened. The potential for trouble represented by the Shia militias has been converted into actuality, and General Abizaid's staff have supposedly been given 48 hours to think of possible sources of reinforcement (link). A cynic might say that Muggins Britain will be top of the begging letter list when it comes to putting out this American-induced fire. The decision to shut down Moqtada al-Sadr's newspaper is shaping up to be the worst decision taken since - well, the decision to invade Iraq. After all, it had a circulation not that much greater than that of this blog - it claimed 10,000 readers, but I suspect audited circulation is a concept strange to Iraq and likely to stay that way. And just look at the results. Black-clad gunmen invading police stations, screaming mobs, firefights in packed city centres, chaos and terror. Not trrr, the real chest-heaving gutgripping kind. No, I think (with hindsight, I know) we could have put up with that paper, don't you? Depressingly, one of the reasons for Al-Hawza's closure was that the US governor was personally annoyed about its coverage of the governor. I'm not sure having the ranking western official in Iraq behaving like a film star does anyone any good.

If it was a film, though, it would have been a good one. The political theatre of the last few days has been extreme in a way that suggests premeditation. Note that everywhere - from the governor's office in Basra to the suburbs of Baghdad - Al-Sadr's gunmen seized police stations, mosques, and other symbols of authority. The message is clear - we are the masters now. The aim is slightly less clear, but all the more important for that. They do not seem to have insisted on the police pulling out completely. The Guardian reported today that at one occupied police station, the head cop and some others were still in residence albeit demoralised. This is serious. Taking over the police and military institutions and then co-opting their members is a strategy seen in numerous civil wars - Spain, Bosnia, Rwanda come to mind, as does Palestine in 1948. When the British army withdrew it was a race to seize the fortified police and army posts and to either co-opt or eliminate the local personnel. In the Shia-majority cities, it's likely that the police are Shia-majority too. That leaves a minority element to be terrorised or bribed - and we have Iraqi B Specials for al-Sadr, complete with whatever arms and training the occupation authorities provided for them. It is possible (I'd say likely) that the militias had a plan for this, ready for the struggle for power post-30th of June - and that Bremer's press crackdown triggered it early.

The response? It doesn't look brilliant so far. Lots of the usual Bush-team political theatre: beautifully tailored spokesmen and pistol packin' officers give bullish briefings about the latest offensive. The same words come up again and again: the perpetrators of the Fallujah atrocity will be punished with "overwhelming force", "at a time of our choosing". That last one especially. The same idea came up when a warrant for al-Sadr's arrest was announced - there would, we are told, be "no advanced warning". The source of this insistence on timing is clearly current military doctrine - the Americans want to be more like the Israeli or British armies in terms of tactics, moving towards the ideas of manoeuvre warfare theory, where one strives to bring your strengths to bear against the enemy's weaknesses and to get ahead of the other side's decision process - acting before they can understand what has happened and react. All good, and certainly an improvement on the scared 90s obsession with that other phrase above, overwhelming force, that induced the US to practically resign from peacekeeping. But what can it mean here? Whatever it says in The Spokesman's Boys' Book of Manoeuvreism, anti-terrorist and counter-insurgency warfare do not permit such imperial confidence. You can only act when you know who to act against, where they are, when they are - operations are dictated by information gathering and testing. No amount of bluster (Operation VIGILANT RESOLVE? Please.) changes that, and a failure to realise it will trap you in the belief that you can plan all your moves. Sweeping Crackdown! Decisive Action! Overwhelming Force!

And that is when you end up doing things like VIGILANT RESOLVE. The US Marines carrying it out have built a huge concrete wall - that looks exactly like a section of the Israelis' "security fence" or "terrorism prevention fence" or whatever it is called this week, just for good measure - across the road west from Fallujah to Jordan. No-one may pass. Unfortunately, this also means that all overland trade between Iraq and Jordan - and this means in effect most of the world - is cut off. No marks for joined-up thinking there. And just to help matters, the British army in Iraq is about to plunge into a major troop rotation - the 20th Armoured Brigade is leaving next week and being replaced by 1st Mechanised Brigade, so the troops who are acclimatised, briefed and experienced will go and be replaced by others who will need to go through the same process before being fully effective - just when they will need all the effectiveness they can get. As the controller in Airplane! put it, looks like I chose the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

Our strangest search request

I've just taken a peek into our search referrals. The horror..the horror..and that's without the horde of perverted googlers who the last post will no doubt draw to us like flies to shit. (Still, it's all traffic..) Who the hell searched for "email a-z information of churches" and hit the Ranter? Now that's just filthy.

Now that's a real cockup

CNN reports that a man from Los Angeles (where else?) has gone to jail after meeting a woman in a chatroom dedicated to rape fantasies. Unfortunately for all concerned he broke into the wrong flat....

"The victim stopped the attack by yelling and attacking Howard's testicles. Howard then asked for the name the victim used in the chat room and she responded by saying she had never visited a chat room and did not have a personal computer."

Doh.

More on the nanniebots - a fit of childishness

Mr. Wightman has now declared on his website first that he would close down the site because he was being "treated like a criminal for trying to save kids" (puke!), and now apparently that the whole thing will be translated into Portuguese. One wonders why, but not what. The what is pretty clear - he's had a childish fit and is now going to eject the teddies, spit the dummy etc. In the "news" section of his homepage sits this message - 02/04/2004 190800 Deal to translate the site and AI into Portuguese nears completion. (link) Sadly, this seems to be trudging unmistakably towards the arena of bollocks.

Wolverhampton's Turing..what happened next?

Due to an unaccountable outbreak of laziness, when I saw the story about an IT consultant from Wolverhampton and his chatroom monitoring programs (Nanniebots) that appeared to pass the Turing test I didn't blog it. (Original New Scientist story and transcript here, The Register, BBC news, Need To Know) Basically, his claim was that he had developed a suite of bots, autonomous software agents, that logged into chatrooms and took part in conversations. If (I suppose) anything on a watchlist intended to signal paedophile activity came up, the bot would log it to raise the alarm. Pretty clear, but this implied that the chatbot could converse with a human being without their noticing it was a machine. Alan Turing famously theorised that the defining case for artificial intelligence was a machine capable of carrying on conversation indistinguishable from that of a human being. Was this a brilliant breakthrough in AI or a fake?

Well, I for one was really hoping that this might be a real future burst. The idea of a chap in a shed in Wolverhampton discovering everything Cambridge, Imperial, Stanford, MIT and everywhere else with a multizillion budget couldn't (after all, Frank Whittle built the jet engine in a shed in Leicester) was too great to turn aside, as was the hope that this time - this time - we might not make a horrible potmess out of it and spend the next hundred years paying the Yanks billions annually for the use of our own inventions. Unfortunately, a quantity of debunking matter has appeared. For one, he's supposedly been caught boasting about non-existent software before. And the Guardian's Bad Science column, which had already secured a promise of an independent trial of the bot, has outed him as a Holocaust denier - quoting some pretty ugly posts on newsgroups for that particular online community. Puke! (He claims it's not his fault, but the posts came from his IP address.) Jim Wightman, the chap concerned, has been posting heavily on comment threads associated with the subject. Or at least people using his identity...on the Internet, no-one knows you're a dog. (They know you're a blog, though.) Check this out:

I have a crazy theory. The other project of ChatNannies is humans monitoring and reporting on chatrooms. What if the bots are actually humans? You could describe this as collecting pop culture references from the internet. An experiment in tapping the power of a distibuted human brain network to create an "AI". Perhaps the figure of 100,000 is his report database capacity.
posted by Zombywuf on March 25, 2004 03:31 PM

I think Jim Wightman is actually a bot.
posted by Michael Williams on March 25, 2004 03:54 PM

Has anyone thought of the wider ethical implications of this?
a) When "nanniebots" are running on many chatrooms, children obviously won't know if they're talking to another child or a nanniebot. Is it right to deceive millions of children in this way?
b) What if the system was used for evil instead of good? "Nanniebots" could befriend children, set up real-world meetings, and let pedophiles know the time/location automatically by email. Takes all the hard work out of "grooming" children...
But luckily, I doubt either of these are real problems, given that the whole idea is so infeasible and must be a hoax of some sort.
posted by James on March 26, 2004 09:05 AM

James: Why not bot children that lure in pedophiles? Then the bots could all just "seduce" each other and cut out the middle-man.
posted by Michael Williams on March 26, 2004 10:04 AM

It's getting too postmodern in here! Meanwhile, over at overstated.net, Cameron Mackintosh reported a conversation with what was claimed to be one of Mr. W's menagerie. This has been heavily debated on other sites, especially the moment when the alleged bot came up with an error message. This was widely seen as a transparent attempt to make the beast seem more mechanical. Other critics suggested that it lacked the damage control procedures to be expected from a machine - the devices used to elicit repetitions if the machine fails to understand a remark, what linguists would call a help strategy. These tags litter our own speech, oiling the wheels of conversation, organising turn-taking and clearing up misunderstanding. "Can you repeat that?" or "Huh?" for example. I'm not so sure - there appear to me to be several points where the alleged machine does apply such a strategy.

[cameronfactor] i'm learning about stuff and junk
[Guest8474860] !

Now that sounds to me like a tactic to get something less inscrutable to work on. I agree with most of those commenters, though, that the end of the conversation where Cameron first accuses the "bot" of being a bot, and then claims to be one himself is handled with almost suspicious cleanliness. That brings up the logical problem of the whole case - the only evidence that will convincingly demonstrate that Mr. Wightman is not a gifted hoaxer is a failure that would show up the bot for what it was - and that would, of course, invalidate his claims! In a sense, that should be enough - Karl Popper would have thought so. We have a hypothesis capable of refutation. We have a repeatable way of attempting to refute it. All good, no? The problem is, of course, that Popper's method excludes the possibility of bad faith, and requires complete openness. Unless both possibilities can be trusted - that it doesn't work or that it does - we need some positive proof. The only way to secure that would be to exclude the possibility of the bot being a human operator. What's needed is a double blind trial with the machinery under impartial supervision. Mr. Wightman seems horrified at the idea. And his (at least, the chap calling himself him's) behaviour on threads discussing the issue is not helpful. He claims that critics are "below him" and that he "looks forward to nuclear holocaust". Nice. It fits with the nazi spammer, and doesn't bode well for any real proof.

The joy of headline

Just to put this on record - the Daily Express is running with "THE TEEN BOMBERS" as its (huge) headline today. The story is apparently the arrest of a suspected al-Qa'ida cell as detailed below, but the headline sounds so much like a band that I had an odd feeling that I might have been to one of their gigs. Strange. The Sun, of course, produced its usual contribution to race relations by running "MOSQUE FULL OF BOMBERS!" At least they couldn't find an asylum seeker.

BBC NEWS Terror suspects held in raids

BBC NEWS link

Police have seized half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, in a self-storage warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Further action resulted in eight arrests. Those arrested are apparently all British. (What was that about fighting a war on terrorism in Iraq?) The stuff in question is a old favourite in the terrorist kitchen. Mixed with diesel or something similar and provided with a small quantity of something stronger as a detonator, it is an effective low explosive. The legality and cheapness of the ingredients mean that, although the power by weight is low, quantity can easily make up for it. Practically every terrorist group has used it at some time in the past, especially the IRA.

Now, I seem to remember suggesting on this blog that self-storage is a weird and alien phenomenon. I wait for David Blunkett to announce new restrictions on them... Curiously enough, I noticed a business-page share tip the other day for a self-storage firm. (Full disclosure, and Ranter investment advice: it was Lok'n'Store plc.) Apparently, "there is roughly 14 times as much self-storage space per capita in the United States, so the only obstacle to growth appears to be finding suitable sites". Quelle horreur!

Juan Cole - how the Israelis got it wrong and helped us do likewise

Juan Cole's Informed Comment link

"A subcommittee of the Israeli Parliament has issued a report sharply critical of Israeli intelligence failures concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It notes that Mossad thought Iraq's programs and stockpiles were a threat, which they were not, and yet seemed unaware of how much progress Libya had made on nukes.

The fact is that Israeli intelligence failures in Iraq contributed to drawing the United States into the war (pace the Knesset report). Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith, a representative of the American branch of the Likud Party, met repeatedly with Israeli generals at the Pentagon (who were not properly signed in, contrary to post-9/11 regulations), and they gave him fodder for his pre-determined insistence on ginning up a war against Iraq, reinforcing what was being said by liars like Ahmad Chalabi. They were conveying Israeli intelligence to a key American policy maker, and it was wrong..."

Cole theorises that something similar to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the White House Iraq Group must have existed in the Israeli security establishment - hence the dodgy information passed to the Americans. It is a feature of psychology that we are more likely to accept information that appears to come from multiple sources. This is rational enough, but it is also true that we seem to rate information from sources close to us (or better still, first-hand information) far above even the most massive evidence from less familiar sources. People tend to generalise from these first-priority sources in forming their images of the world - given just a little external support, especially from a familiar source, we can become extremely resistant to even overwhelming refutation. It's all part of our evolutionary heritage, I suppose - a useful way of organising the flood of data pouring in - but it can easily be toxic. It seems plausible that the neo-conservatives' image of policy was reinforced by the fact that their information came from their closest allies - Israel, Chalabi, and Britain. From a British perspective, the fact that the Americans and Australians were so convinced must have had a similarly powerful effect. The exchange of information across the Atlantic was then doomed to be a self-confirming dialogue.

Security: the occult way!

As a further contribution to our occasional series on aviation security, I'd like to call this to your attention.

"A psychic's warning that a bomb might be on a Dallas-bound passenger jet at Southwest Florida International Airport prompted federal and local officials to search it with bomb-sniffing dogs."

Well, I have suggested in the past that the US Transportation Security Administration could improve its methods of analysing the terrorist threat by using the golden legacy of Roman civilisation - dispensing with intrusive, expensive data mining and surveillance and instead killing a chicken and reading the auguries of its entrails before despatching each flight. It could hardly be worse. It would appear from this report, though, that the TSA is showing the rest of American government a good example by listening to world opinion and, hence, doing as I say. Perhaps the workers who put themselves through an X-ray screening machine to "see what their brains looked like", far from being pig-ignorant victims of a clearly hopeless selection procedure, were attempting to divine the future the modern way?

"Not actually doing anything wrong" - but Miliband wants our kids locked up

Story

David Miliband, the quintessential Blairite (he was the head of the No.10 Policy Unit before feeling - y'know - a need to get back to the, ah, communities - and getting himself elected for South Shields, a Labour fortress so safe that it is usually the first seat in the country to announce its election results) and School Standards Minister, has issued a rant in which he heaped praise on Swanlea School in East London for keeping its pupils in the school at lunchtime. Not an astonishing leap of policy, you might think, but Mr. Miliband attributes all kinds of good things to this simple measure.

"...an end to the tipping out on to the streets at lunchtime. Pupils here are in school all day, no exceptions, end of story.....A culture of high achievement helps to reinforce good behaviour. Of course, children need a break at lunch. And they need something healthy to eat to set them up for the afternoon. But they don't have to be out of school, roaming the streets, to do it."

Mr Miliband said that at Swanlea, in Bethnal Green, "students stay on the school premises, and the school provides an enriching lunchtime programme of mentoring by local business people, reading groups for support with literacy, sporting activities supervised by youth workers, as well as a wide range of language classes.

"That is the kind of innovation I support. Good for pupils. Good for the school. Good for the reputation of education in the local community."

So - it makes them cleverer! Wow! We shall note a couple of points regarding this speech. First, notice the fingerprints of our most tiresome and usually wrong politicians. "All day, no exceptions, end of story" - feel the hacked language, the unconvincing tough-guyisms, and the hectoring tone. Smell the cliches - roaming the streets! There's one I haven't heard in years. In fact, I haven't heard it since I was a teenager myself, in the defunded paint-peeling years of Major when it rained every day (at least that's how I remember it) and the government was trying to make "music characterised by repetitive beats" illegal. It seems positively antediluvian now, on the other side of a cosmic cultural chasm. Were we really that lame? But suddenly, it seems that the mid-90s are with us once more - the decade of revival fashion is itself about to be revived. Michael Howard, the icon of the time, is back on the front bench and pages. Malcolm Rifkind is back in the Commons. The government is quite evidently a bunch of bunglers with the credibility of a fortune cookie in a weather station and the morals of a crack-riddled goat. This time, it could even be worse - after all, the first bunch of goatish incompetents are the alternative! And the music is so much worse this time! Listen to the headteachers' association president has to say:

"Sometimes people, particularly old people, feel intimidated even when the young people are not actually doing anything wrong."

By 'eck! This is so familiar as well! Let us recap - Mr. Miliband feels that children ought to be kept in school grounds - locked up, I suppose - in case they do not actually do anything wrong. Great. I remember Howard being very proud of legislating to give the police powers to stop "youths" and take their names and addresses, and inform their parents. Why was never made clear, but it at least gave the police another reason to alienate the citizenry in case they ran out. Instead, Mr. Miliband wants the little buggers to be subjected to "an enriching lunchtime programme of mentoring by local business people, reading groups for support with literacy, sporting activities supervised by youth workers, as well as a wide range of language classes." I'm sure the reading groups are all very laudable, even if you may wonder what they do in class if they have to have classes at lunchtime. But I strongly suspect that an enriching lunchtime programme of mentoring by local business people translates as "being forced to give up your lunch break to absorb the platitudes of unwilling small-town car dealers". And what kind of sense does it make to have compulsory voluntary sport at lunchtimes if you can't have it in games lessons because Mr. Miliband's previous advice to the prime minister on finance means that the school doesn't have a playing field? What is the point of preventing kids who might otherwise play football in their lunch break from doing so, in order to force them to (after, of course, an improving talk from your friendly local dealer)?

Which answers, I suppose, the question of why Mr. Miliband found it necessary to tell us that he supports innovations that are "good", presumably as opposed to bad ones. You might have been forgiven the mistake. One day, could we possibly have a policy initiative that doesn't involve somebody being locked up?

Blair appoints former John Major spin doctor

Like asking the Kennedys for security advice....like asking Jeffrey Archer to look over your CV....like taking a nap at Dr. Shipman's surgery...you wouldn't think anyone would seriously seek PR advice from the chap who ran John Major's 1997 campaign. But that's just what the prime minister has done! The man chosen for the new job of Permanent Secretary for Government Communications is one Howell James, who ran the Tory '97 campaign and was also briefly the Hinduja brothers' PR. This job was created post-Hutton on the odd, semi-theological grounds that if the Government's PR was run by someone who was officially a Civil Servant rather than a Special Adviser, then there was no chance that any spin might creep in. How the government communications service can possibly not be accused of serving the government's interests bewilders me, I have to say. Isn't that what it's for? And what sort of mysterious breath of heaven cleanses these characters of any possible political taint? Couldn't a life spent in the service of the State render you more, not less, likely to bow to the will of power?

But exactly what makes Mr. James an impartial civil servant and not a political appointee is hard to say. He has leapt directly into a permanent secretaryship from his business without passing through any time spent in the public sector. Whoosh! I know that, of course, his appointment is under the Nolan rules and was carried out by a selection panel blah, blah, blah - but it does sound vaguely like patronage still. He will be pulling down a salary somewhere between £121,000 and a thick £203,000 annually. Now, whatever they may say, it is utterly certain that Mr. James's efforts will be irrelevant to the front line delivery of public services or to the formation of sound policy. He is a propagandist. Which is odd, when the Civil Service is meant to be disposing of 40,000 employees. As a comparison, the job of deputy head of emergency planning for London was advertised yesterday. The salary? A princely £31,000. Now that's what I call efficiency, and far more important than the Tory beef that James is a friend of Peter Mandelson, as if that was a vetting criterion.

Blogroll: My Way of Thinking

We welcome My Way of Thinking, who has started linking to the Ranter.

Whacking the lies - Madrid and Iraq

As a brief guide, here are some reasons why the bashers who are still spewing vitriol about the Spanish elections are lying. Now, their main line is that this is "appeasement". Further to this, they claim that the PSOE was "opportunistic" and "took orders from terrorists". The point is apparently that "you cannot run away from terrorism". We shall take this point by point.

1. Appeasement.

The point of this is to recall the language of the 1930s, trying to position the global Right as the opponents of Nazism - and everyone else as either weak Chamberlains or complicit Lavals. (The special viciousness of applying this to Spanish socialists does not need or deserve further highlighting.) Obviously, the idea of appeasement implies that there is a morally and pragmatically better course of fighting. And this relies on the central belief that invading Iraq is in fact the "war on terrorism". Otherwise, how could not taking part be "appeasement"? We will hear more of this. In passing, note that the use of the language of 1938 has a two-fold effect: not only does it portray your opponents as the next best thing to real Nazis, but it validates your own Churchill fantasies.

2. Opportunism.

Simply disposed with. If the PSOE were "opportunistic", they must have changed their policy to take advantage of opportunity. They opposed the deployment of Spanish troops in Iraq before the deployment. They still opposed it the day before the blasts. They opposed it the day afterwards. I suppose they stuck to their principles - opportunistically?

3. Taking orders from terrorists.

See 3. Policy determined months beforehand. Logically insane.

4. Running away.

This implies that invading Iraq was a blow against al-Qa'ida, and that the continuing war there is a struggle against it, and that our anti-terrorist interests are best served by war in Iraq. Otherwise, what would be shameful about liquidating a wasteful and unnecessary commitment? Let us recall a few facts. No-one has produced one scintilla of evidence to show any al-Qa'ida presence in Ba'athist Iraq or Iraqi involvement in al-Qa'ida activity. What good did the Spanish brigade's presence in Iraq do for the fight against al-Qa'ida? The bombs exploded in Madrid. They did not explode in Hillah. The attack was prepared by Moroccans (it seems) in Spain. Would the soldiery not have been better employed elsewhere? Let us consider the effects of the British invasion fo southern Iraq on our own anti-terrorist efforts. The emergency planning budget - which funds the local authority emergency departments who would have to cope with the logistics of recovery after a major attack - has been pegged at £19 million since April, 2001. April! That means that its value has FALLEN. The deployment in southern Iraq is estimated to cost £125 million MONTHLY! Muslim opinion has been provoked as never before. The real pursuit of al-Qa'ida was effectively shut down for months. Our army is (to use a Churchillism) sprawled in costly and rewardless occupation, its budget drained, its reserves raided, its stocks exhausted, rather than crouched and ready to spring at opportunity. What a brilliant success! Heroically, with undiminished resolve, the neocons and their pals march doggedly forward - in the wrong direction!

First with the news, and the death of Sheikh Yassin

On Wednesday, I reported that Ha'aretz was covering a British programme of semi-military aid to the Palestinian security organisations in Gaza. By Saturday, The Guardian was running this.

"The British involvement is initially modest, limited to providing financial, logistical and other support on security matters to the PA. But if the pilot schemes are successful Britain intends to offer much more in the way of finance and personnel.
This would include sending security staff experienced in Northern Ireland and helping to rebuild the Palestinian security infrastructure, such as police headquarters and prisons, destroyed by the Israelis."

Who says blogs aren't the wave of the future? But enough basking. This morning, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was killed by an Israeli air raid. (
details) This has brought the expected storm: of outrage in Gaza, self-congratulation in Tel Aviv, of diplomatic platitudes everywhere else. Certainly, Hamas are the big problem in terms of terrorist potential in Gaza. I'm sure Yassin bore some responsibility for Hamas's actions, even though not even Ariel Sharon believes he had any operational role. But I doubt blowing up an elderly priest in a wheelchair will do anything at all to prevent further terrorist attacks. Not when they are willing to attack with axes. It wasn't as if crazy-eyed kamikazes filed past his zimmer frame to personally draw explosives from his very hands. The argument for his assassination is that he "inspired" them. The problem with people who inspire others, as ideas, idols, icons, is that they don't have to be alive. In fact, their symbolic power is often greater dead. The leader myth can only be exploded in the metaphorical sense, not the physical.

And if there is anywhere on earth that the power of martyrdom and the myth of the dead hero should be blindingly obvious, it is the Holy Land. You don't need to go back as far as Christ - the dead Lebanese warlords whose recorded voices were broadcast daily by their factions' radio stations through the 1980s to incite their followers are an equally harsh and much closer example.

Those British advisors' job just got even worse.

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