http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/09/29/monitoring_bush_saudis_off_the_hook_again.php
Last month I noted that the Bush administration had failed to act as required by law after designating Saudi Arabia as a country which severely restricts religious freedom.

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2003/12/06/why_are_we_arming_the_saudis.php
Why are we arming the Saudis?

Was that worth the 5 minutes of my time it took? I’m betting not.

30 seconds with google gets:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,552763,00.html

In the 20th century, State instigated and perpetrated violence was responsible for de deaths of roughly 200 million individuals.

The vast majority of which was instigated by people (Hitler, Mao, Lenin/Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, …) who fought their way into power by use of non-state violence. Stopping that kind of thing happening seems more feasible than disbanding and disarming all states.

Which is to say: Iraq is an unjust war, stupidly entered and badly led (Gonzalez torture memos, Rumsfeld’s browbeating of U.S. generals into an untenable fighting position, etc.), but that even within that framework, there are those who have fought the war justly and those who have been (and will be killed) whose deaths are justified (that is, the Iraq war is not wrong because it involves the killing of insurgents, but for a whole host—and it’s quite a list!—of other reasons).

Brooksfoe—Have you ever participated in a sustained USAF (or even USMC close air support) bombing? Having done so at both Twenty-Nine Palms and in the Persian Gulf, I can tell you that there are few things you’d rather avoid than this. Out on a limb here, but I think stupidity like this is something the movies are somewhat responsible for: when Hollywood shows even artillery exploding, it blows puffs of smoke or knocks someone off their feet or takes branches off a tree—but a 155mm shell has a kill radius of 50 meters and a casualty radius of 100 meters & will destroy a 6-8 inch concrete wall; a single MK84 bomb makes a crater 50 feet wide, 30 feet deep, and kills to radius of 400 meters (or: more than a quarter-mile). Which is why they just shouldn’t be used outside of total warfare (or even: ever against civilian targets). The use of incindiary/HE bombs—much less nukes—in even WWII was, to my mind, totally uncalled for for this very reason: when you get a sense of the scale of destruction involved (between 40 and 90 percent of Japan’s major industrial cities), it’s just not possible to countenance (and here I’m really looking forward to reading Grayling’s new book, which I haven’t seen reviewed anywhere in the States).

In the 20th century, State instigated and perpetrated violence was responsible for de deaths of roughly 200 million individuals.

Uniforms, armies, arsenals, vertical control structures, and revenue collection make it easier, not harder, to kill people.

Meanwhile in the real world, not the world of contrived analogies, victims of conventional bombing outnumber victions of sucide bombings by 4 or 5 orders of magnitude.

And I don’t think aspiring dictators and mafiosi would risk their lives fighting overwhelming military force with little or no hope to survive, let alone win; there are much easier ways to become a mafioso. You can find suicide bombers’ stories on the internet, try wikipedia. Try Mohamed Atta or something.

As far as where I would rather be – that’s just silly, sorry.

Tolstoy was an idiot on such questions. Rebels and insurgents are for the most part aspiring dictators or mafiosi. There are of course exceptions. The rebels and insurgents least likely to be mafiosi are those most likely to dress their troops in uniforms, have well-defined orders of battle, rules, and command structures, and internal systems of justice and taxation in the territory they hold – i.e. to be the most like governments. See Ho Chi Minh, George Washington, William of Orange, Fidel Castro, etc. If you would rather be behind the lines in a chaotic ill-organized zone where bunches of guys have just grabbed their rifles to shoot at the Americans or whoever else they dislike, than behind the lines in a well-organized disciplined armed revolt like the Nepalese Maoists with clear rules and lines of command, then you’re nuts.

I would rather be on the receiving end of a sustained USAF bombing raid than on the receiving end of a sustained bombing raid by suicidal pilots who aimed to kill as many civilians as they possibly could. I would rather be on a street in Gaza with the IAF trying to target a car carrying a Hamas leader than in the World Trade Center with Mohammed Atta aiming his 767 at me. Yes, “the odds are better”. First equalize the level of force; then ask whether the suicide terrorist or the uniformed soldier is scarier.

However, I am unaware of online texts in which Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Oliver Kamm (et al) questioned the war in Iraq, let alone ‘failure to secure an international treaty governing the arms trade.’

However if they do exist please let me know and I will retract this statement.

(ps while looking for such statements you might also want to check out the following references: ‘http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1860681,00.html’, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1451279,00.html, http://www.unite-against-terror.com/whysigned/archives/000028.html, http://www.slate.com/id/2117328/. It is not difficult to find pieces by most of the major proponents of the ‘decent left’ viewpoint engaging in slavish genuflection at the altar of Saint Tony).

Let me see:

1. the war in Iraq (all of it for some people, some of it for all).

2. being polite about Guantanamo, Saudi Arabia, etc.

3. failure to secure an international treaty governing the arms trade

4. not coming up with some arrangement to allow the cultivation of heroin poppies legally in Afghanistan

I think those are the major ones. Which do you think could usefully have been pushed further in the manifesto?

‘Labour, New Labour, and Blairite are all rather different things. Which one are you claiming?’

However, I thought my accusation to YOU (and the EMers in general) would have been crystal clear. My accusation is that the document represents that wing of the Labour party most strongly associated with the foreign policy of Tony Blair. I’m perfectly aware that in terms of domestic policy, the EMers tend to lean ever so slightly to the left: they are probably Brownites more than Blairites.

But in terms of foreign policy, I am unaware of any aspect of Blair’s foreign policy that the EMers have any problems with (or at least that any of them have criticised).

“I’d have no problem killing an Iraqi insurgent—in fact, I think we should kill more of them, if only we could find an efficient way to do so.”

OK, a bit more context here… we were talking about, specifically, Iraq and the insurgency & a hypothetical, “What if I were still in the Marine Corps & back in Iraq?” More more context: and that in response to my having just finished a review of Sallah and Weiss’s Tiger Force, the book-length version of their 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning story on atrocities committed by U.S. commandos during the Vietnam War. I had said that it was a shame the Army never got to prosecute the 18 men they’d determined had committed war crimes. There followed a rather glib, “like we’re committing in Iraq right now” comment & off we went to beer spitting. I presented the anecdote because it seemed to me a signal case of two people who more-or-less agree on the stupidity of the war, but where one just couldn’t countenance killing terrorists/insurgents even when they were actively engaged in killing.

Thanks for the context, Joel. So you weren’t talking about the morality of killing bad people in general. You were speaking about a soldier’s duty to follow instructions and apply an escalating use of force in a war zone.

In this context you would of course not be killing your Commander-in-Chief, irrespective of any greater moral culpability he might have vis-à-vis your viable targets.

and Syd Webb—would you call me “boy” to my face?

In a face-to-face meeting we would be in an actual country. So it would depend. In a country like Japan I’d use the tone befitting an elder instructing a younger person. In the USA, with her sad history of racial conflict, I’d avoid using a loaded word like ‘boy’.

Here we are in cyberspace, Joel. And in cyberspace, unless you use block capitals, I can’t hear you scream.

There is, though, something of a moral difference between someone who deliberately places a bomb on a minibus and someone who orders the bombing of a military target that then misses and hits the minibus.

Hypothetically. In practice, the author of the orders to hit military targets which has resulted in the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians is also the author of orders that have targeted innocent civilians.

OTOH, when starting a war, there is the knowledge that no matter how careful you are, innocent civilians will almost certainly die so in some sense launching any war is a “deliberate targeting of civilians.”

Yes. There is, perhaps, a moral question about how good one’s intentions are. They make a good road-surface on the road to Hell.

In fairness, credit where credit’s due. The USA has fought some of her wars of the past 60 years with a reckless indifference to civilian casualties. With Korea it was a re-hash of the strategic bombing of WWII. In Vietnam Nixon used widespread bombing of the North in an unsuccessful effort to change Hanoi’s negotiating stance.

These days the US armed forces take greater care to avoid civilian deaths. As a consequence the Iraqi civilian death toll is only, say 100,000 – the US military’s actual figure is a secret, than say 1 million. Clearly 100,000 deaths is better than 1 million. Whether 100,000 deaths and a trashed country is a good outcome is a question best left to those closer on the ground, say the Iraqis themselves.

And which elements of Lib Dem foreign policy go against the manifesto, and do you support them in doing so?

Not being an expert on every aspect of lib dem policy, the only example I can think of is Jenny Tonge, and that comment got her sacked.