Airstrip One

Postbox time

Something old, something new. A hostile response (conveyed with unfailing politeness) to "Calling an End to Empire":

You yourself succinctly state the principle that underlies your article: "... any continued presence overseas should be on the sole prerequisite of 'How does this help England's security?'". This principle can be generalized to give us "Public policy must always put the interests of the majority first"; as you yourself say, "The majority of people under British rule live in the British Isles (indeed, live in England)".

Adherence to your principle would in time cause the disintegration of the nation-state. Northern Ireland & our overseas protectorates go at once; the rest will go in time. However the United Kingdom is divided- geographically, socially, ethnically, however -, every single stratum of society is benefited by policies that are not, in themselves, in the interests of the majority. Resources devoted to protecting the Shetland Islands are not directly in the interests of the majority who do not live on the Shetland Islands; money spent on unemployment benefit is not in the interests of the majority who do not receive unemployment benefit; university education is not in the interests of the majority who do not go to university; & so on (ignoring questions of enlightened self-interest). The trouble is that all these minorities who benefit at the expense of the majority add up collectively, not just to a majority, but to *everyone in the country*. That is the problem with talk of majorities & minorities (a problem that also bedevils the politically correct): everyone is a member of numerous different minorities & majorities, because everyone has numerous different characteristics & circumstances that are shared by varying numbers of people, some by less than 50% of the population (e.g., being left-handed, being black, being intelligent), some by more than 50% of the population (e.g., being female, being able to walk, having somewhere to live). There is no
such thing as "the majority". A majority is a majority *in respect of something*. So to say that we ought to adopt policies in the interests of "the majority" is to doom government to incoherence at best, perversity at worst (in that we may find that the only respect in which there is a majority is that no-one's real interests - most of which are minority interests - are looked after by government).

Let me give you an example: every town in the United Kingdom contains a minority of the country's population. Strategic considerations aside (& they must, after all, be second-order considerations, since we need to decide first *whose* strategic interests are important to us, & that is what we are trying to do now), it is not in the interests of the other towns in the United Kingdom that any particular town should have resources devoted to its protection. And this applies to every town in the United Kingdom. So a properly majoritarian policy would be not to protect any of our towns from attack. Yet that is in no-one's interests. (The same reductio ad absurdum applies to the "double-consent" argument.)

We don't need game theory here. The problem comes when you take what is meant to be a unit - the nation-state - & start picking & choosing which bits of it are important. If the nation-state is to be a unit, & not merely a bundle of dispensable territorities, then every part must be treated as important - important enough that every other part is willing to come to its defence. Of course that means that questions about what the nation-state consists in need to be answered; but it also means that we ought to think very carefully before we decide that any section of the population hitherto regarded as belonging to the nation-state - as British subjects - is cast out. The only good reason seems to me that they want to leave. Otherwise, we are only seeking an excuse for our unwillingness to protect our fellows, & the distinction between not protecting them & getting rid of them begins to look like a convenient & hypocritical fiction. Protecting *any* of our fellows carries a cost, & it is our willingness to bear the cost that marks us as members of a unified society we see as an end in itself, rather than as atomized individuals who see the nation as only a means to our own ends.

I personally have little time for the psycho-babble of game theory (it could be laziness rather than distaste). But I think that the concept of who is English is well defined enough for us.

Something New:

Another response, this time to the column on Son or Star Wars. I like the bit about the web log:

Your web log is a great idea and I hope it becomes a regular feature at
Antiwar.com soon. Thanks for the link to Free Life Commentary. I was
totally unaware of this journal.

A comment on your piece on missile defense. In light of the history of
America's strategic nuclear weapons, the National Missile Defense being
proposed on this side of the pond is not intended primarily to protect
Americans (not to speak of Japanese, Brits, and Laplanders), but to
intimidate countries like Russia and China.

Between 1945 and 1960 the United States was the only country that had a
large arsenal of atomic bombs and enough long-range bombers to deliver
them. The U.S. used this advantage several times to intimidate Russia
and China. In 1946, the Haberdasher from Independence, Missouri,
threatened to nuke Russia within 48 hours unless it withdrew from northern
Iran. Truman, MacArthur, and Eisenhower threatened Russia and China
repeatedly during the Korean War and the Quemoy/Matsu crises. Secretary of
State Dulles even pressured the French to accept a few nukes to drop on
the Vietnamese surrounding Dien Bien Phu! During this period the U.S.
Air Force conducted many provocative "reconaissance" flights over
Soviet territory, occasionally with nuclear capable bombers. More than
once, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the President to launch a
preventive/preemptive nuclear strike, before the Russians developed an ability
to nuke us back. The chief thing that stayed the President's hand was,
first, fear of retaliation by the Red Army in Europe and, later,
retaliation by the small Soviet bomber force.

Between 1960 and te mid-70's, U.S. nuclear war fighting wonks like
Kissinger and Paul Nitze acquiesced in the "MAD" doctrine only because
there was no iron clad guarantee against Russian bombers and ICBM's. Very
accurate silo-busters, whose only possible justification is to launch a
first strike, were conceived during the 70's and 80's. Still, there
remained the risk of surviving and Russian and Chicom bombers and
missiles getting through.

NMD must be viewed with this history in mind. You better believe that
the Russians and Chinese leadership have not forgotten. With the
Russian armed forces now in disarray and the Chinese still far behind us in
strategic and conventional weapons, the nuke warriors over here sense
another window of opportunity, similar to that of '45-'60. A credible
missile defense would enable these humanitarian imperalists to make the
world safe for democracy, with the help of some cruise missiles and
Marines, without worrying that the ingrate beneficiaries might try to
fight back.

The best way to protect Americans (and Brits, Japanese, and Laplanders)
against a nuclear holocaust is for the U.S. to stop such provocative
policies as (i) launching unprovoked attacks against sovereign states
(Iraq, Serbia, etc) (ii) expanding NATO, and (iii) interfering in the
PRC/Taiwan dispute.

Whether we deploy a NMD has little to do with the inexorability of
science but much to do wih politics. What would we say of the man who
constructs a flamethrower to "meet the challenge(nuck warriorese)" of a
parking space dispute with his neigbor? Did the scientific feasibility
of the flamethrower drive him inexorably to deploy it, or some darker
motive?

To be honest I don't care why the US wants NMD, as long as Britain is not disadvantaged - that is my sole criterion.

On the other hand I really see no problem in a country wanting the best military technology as long as it does not bankrupt it. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Bookshelf

This week has been Ulster week.

Faithful Tribe : The Loyal Institutions by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ruth is a bit of an odd bird, a defender of Protestant Irish culture who herself is from an Irish Catholic background. She writes an engaging book on the history of the Orange Order which gets under the skin of this most controversial of institutions, even if the relationship with the present day takes on a rather personal turn as Ruth and her band of "modernisers" (many of whom are not members) take on both the extremists and IRA apologists like Tim Pat Coogan.

7/10

The Informer by Sean O'Callaghan

Written and packaged like a spy novel, this is the work of a man who risked his life by infiltrating the IRA as part of the extremely succesful infiltration campaign by the British authorities in the 1980s and early 1990s. It is truly gripping reading although it does get bogged down in some (quite understandable) self justification. This is a good introduction to what the IRA is like, although if you know a bit about the IRA already it will not add much to your picture. Sean O'Callaghan is still under sentance of death from the IRA, even though they are engaged in the "Peace Process".

5/10

Loyalists by Peter Taylor

This is an informative book by the author of Provos, a book on the IRA. It tries to find out what the Loyalists were thinking - and does so from a long time journalist who has lived in Northern Ireland for a few decades. It deals with the transition from a hardline Unionist cat's paw, to local anti-IRA militias, to the psychopathic brutality of the Shankhill butchers to the current working class tribunes of moderate Unionism. Peter Taylor tends to downplay the hardline (and criminal) antics of Johnny Adair and the followers of the late Billy Wright. This may be because of the time in which it was written - after Billy Wright's death and before the Shankhill road feud. Any way this is a fairly balanced treatment of some oddly shaped pieces in the Ulster jigsaw.

7/10

Your Say

As I now have evidence that three people have read this web log, I would like to point out that you can make suggestions as to what will appear and I am desperate for content (sorry, open to all fresh suggestions). It should broadly be around issues of British Foreign Policy. E-mail me on isolationist_2000@yahoo.com