Thursday, July 29, 2004
10:32 pm
Twenty Years of Failure
Like NASA, the Defence Procurement Agency instituted a process of 'smart acquisition' that was, to use the spin: "faster, better, cheaper". The Defence Committee of the House of Commons have produced their annual report on procurement and have concluded that none of the long-term problems identified have been resolved. The purchase of weapons systems remains prone to slippage in the target deployment dates, with at greater cost than first budgeted. Unsurprisingly, the DPA comes in for criticism.
There appear to be a number of problems and these examples will suffice:
Like NASA, the Defence Procurement Agency instituted a process of 'smart acquisition' that was, to use the spin: "faster, better, cheaper". The Defence Committee of the House of Commons have produced their annual report on procurement and have concluded that none of the long-term problems identified have been resolved. The purchase of weapons systems remains prone to slippage in the target deployment dates, with at greater cost than first budgeted. Unsurprisingly, the DPA comes in for criticism.
There appear to be a number of problems and these examples will suffice:
- The system of "smart acquisition" has never been implemented, despite the promise that such an approach would acheive when first set out in 1998;
- The Agency has proved unable to simplify the process of procurement, leading to complex assessments, leading to uncertainty and expense in bidding;
- The Agency did not fully assess the risks of particular projects and approval was often undertaken without understanding their potential downside. Examples can be found under "Smart Acquisition".
The picture that emerges concerns an Agency that has settled practices of procurement and manages to foil 'forces of reform' that wish to expedite these processes more effectively. The prerogative of civil servants everywhere has proved disastrous for the Armed Forces. The losses incurred by inefficient procurement are meted out on soldiers, sailors and airmen.
The Defence Committee is loath to assign blame to the politicians in charge of the Ministry of Defence. Nevertheless, New Labour has been in power for six years and announced the reform of "smart acquisition" yet never implemented more than one point. This is a hallmark of New Labour and a standard feature of their administration.
We can point to the politicians in charge of this dreadfuyl misappropriation of resources. Geoff Hoon was appointed the Minister of Defence in 1999 and this fiasco is his direct responsibility. It is another example of overpromoted incompetence. If he goes, he should take Lord Bach of Lutterworth with him, appointed Minister for Defence Procurement in 2001 and also responsible for "three years of waste".
(23.03, 29th July 2004)
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
1:57 pm
British Body Count
I've reset the British count so that it is up to date and the friendly fire deaths aren't seperated. Information is from Lunaville and they get it from the Ministry of Defence.
Hopefully the blood sacrifice - (C) Tony Blair - can be followed more accurately.
I've reset the British count so that it is up to date and the friendly fire deaths aren't seperated. Information is from Lunaville and they get it from the Ministry of Defence.
Hopefully the blood sacrifice - (C) Tony Blair - can be followed more accurately.
Monday, July 26, 2004
1:22 pm
What's the House Style?
It's an old joke from around the Gulf War. The Guardian foreign affairs subeditor comes to the chief subeditor looking puzzled, "I'm not sure about this article, is our house style I-R-A-Q or I-R-A-N ?"
At least that doesn't happen in real life!
Sunday, July 25, 2004
7:18 pm
Headcount
The reception of Geoff Hoon's expected reforms for the Armed Forces have run into an increasing level of flak as the details have been opened up to greater scrutiny. The primary conclusion is that the Treasury has punished the Ministry for Defence for its inability to wield a procurement budget with efficiency and strategic perspective. Unwilling to cut projects that paint the mangy lion with gold, the reductions have been forced on all three services.
Hoon's vision included a hi-tech army that employs fewer soldiers but achieves far more with networked systems that resemble the Rumsfeld doctrine of battlefield superiority achieved through a more productive use of information technology. Prefigured by his admission that Britain would no longer fight a war without the United States, the restructuring is designed to maintain Blair's sought-after status as 'junior partner', ensuring that the Atlantic alliance is cemented. Blair's objective of maintaining a link between the United States and Europe through Britain is furthered by Hoon's reforms.
However, Britain's strengths lie in counter-insurgency warfare and urban fighting, skills learned in the Northern Ireland War. Network-centric tools do not outweigh such experience, as the United States has learned on a fast curve since April 2003 and now applies effectively. The reduction in troops is the weakness in Hoon's spin. When Blair is musing about intervention in Darfur, General Mike Jackson defends the changes as a necessary redeployment of finite resources in the Sunday Telegraph and attacks the loyalists who defend the tried and tested system of regiments, upon which the Army is based. Are there parallels with Scarlett, another servant who forsook professional neutrality for political friendship, and personally benefited from his Blairite loyalty?
The House of Commons Defence Committee is due to publish a report damning the system of procurement as a waste of money.
Committee chairman Bruce George, a Labour MP, attacked Hoon last week, asking: "What idiot thought we could cut the infantry at a time when the pressure on it is enormous?" He will step up his attack this week and is expected to argue that UK forces are more committed than ever to overseas obligations, so "the last thing they should have to worry about is whether critical equipment will arrive on time, or at all".
These changes will not reform the armed forces or render them more capable in the short term. Due to the failures of the procurement system, it is unclear if Hoon's objectives could ever be achieved. However, morale in the armed services will deteriorate (given Jackson's role as bagman), and the overstretch will wear ever thinner. If the crucible of the battlefield heats up, that elastic will snap and, with no depth to their deployment, the risks of British servicemen dying away from home will increase. Perhaps some of that Scottish subvention could be directed away from their dependency culture towards the regiments.
Blair's Britain: Black Watch goes, Afghani hijackers stay...
(18.18, 25th July 2004)
The reception of Geoff Hoon's expected reforms for the Armed Forces have run into an increasing level of flak as the details have been opened up to greater scrutiny. The primary conclusion is that the Treasury has punished the Ministry for Defence for its inability to wield a procurement budget with efficiency and strategic perspective. Unwilling to cut projects that paint the mangy lion with gold, the reductions have been forced on all three services.
Hoon's vision included a hi-tech army that employs fewer soldiers but achieves far more with networked systems that resemble the Rumsfeld doctrine of battlefield superiority achieved through a more productive use of information technology. Prefigured by his admission that Britain would no longer fight a war without the United States, the restructuring is designed to maintain Blair's sought-after status as 'junior partner', ensuring that the Atlantic alliance is cemented. Blair's objective of maintaining a link between the United States and Europe through Britain is furthered by Hoon's reforms.
However, Britain's strengths lie in counter-insurgency warfare and urban fighting, skills learned in the Northern Ireland War. Network-centric tools do not outweigh such experience, as the United States has learned on a fast curve since April 2003 and now applies effectively. The reduction in troops is the weakness in Hoon's spin. When Blair is musing about intervention in Darfur, General Mike Jackson defends the changes as a necessary redeployment of finite resources in the Sunday Telegraph and attacks the loyalists who defend the tried and tested system of regiments, upon which the Army is based. Are there parallels with Scarlett, another servant who forsook professional neutrality for political friendship, and personally benefited from his Blairite loyalty?
The House of Commons Defence Committee is due to publish a report damning the system of procurement as a waste of money.
Committee chairman Bruce George, a Labour MP, attacked Hoon last week, asking: "What idiot thought we could cut the infantry at a time when the pressure on it is enormous?" He will step up his attack this week and is expected to argue that UK forces are more committed than ever to overseas obligations, so "the last thing they should have to worry about is whether critical equipment will arrive on time, or at all".
These changes will not reform the armed forces or render them more capable in the short term. Due to the failures of the procurement system, it is unclear if Hoon's objectives could ever be achieved. However, morale in the armed services will deteriorate (given Jackson's role as bagman), and the overstretch will wear ever thinner. If the crucible of the battlefield heats up, that elastic will snap and, with no depth to their deployment, the risks of British servicemen dying away from home will increase. Perhaps some of that Scottish subvention could be directed away from their dependency culture towards the regiments.
Blair's Britain: Black Watch goes, Afghani hijackers stay...
(18.18, 25th July 2004)
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
12:12 pm
A Fundamental Divide
Tony Blankley, writing in Townhall, comments on a recent article by Kissinger, concerning the differences between Europe and the rest of the world. Kissinger has argued that the "erosion of the nation state" within the European Union and the embedding of these values within public opinion (to the unreasonable extent that war is no longer viewed as a tool of foreign policy), supports an international order where states are subordinated to supranational laws and institutions. Since this international order strikes at the heart of current conceptions of foreign policy, whether under Bush or Kerry, it poses a fundamental difference between the European Union and the rest of the world, not just the United States.
Leaving the position of Great Britain aside in the struggle of these misconceptions:
But, of course, Blair supported both Bush and Clinton out of calculations of British national interest -- not for good fellowship's sake. As Lord Palmerston explained the classic British foreign policy maxim: Britain has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. And so it has been for all nations and alliances. Since WWII, British foreign policy has been premised on being Europe's best friend to America, and America's best friend to Europe -- thus maximizing her influence in both quarters.
although Blankley is sorely misconceived about Blair's role, we can see that the majority of states conform to Kissinger's definition of state actors that act in their own interests, whether as nation-states, or as elite kleptocracies. If the European Union does obtain support, it is because smaller state actors are bribed and regional constellations view the emergence of the EU in traditional terms as the rise of a possible counterweight to the US.
Blankley's article provides an insight into one narrative on the continued development of the European Union: that of the New World Order. There is plenty of evidence to show that the European publics prefer butter to guns and support a risk-averse foreign policy that undermines any actions that smack of militarism. However, public opinion in Europe is not as susceptible to elite persuasion as many argue, and the current generation have passed through terrorist campaigns whilst altering their views, through the rise of the environmentalist/peace political complex.
If one looks at the public pronouncements of European politicians advocating a role for Europe, this is often cast in realist terms as a rising power providing support for other states in a multipolar world as a 'counterweight' to the United States. Disguised in a hypocritical concern for international law, the political elites of Europe are insulating themselves from democracy through Weberian institutions, cast in the Bureaucratic-rational mode, disenfranchising their pacifistic publics, and wondering how to gain financial muscle, whilst their armies devolve into the Home Guard. This is one circle that cannot be squared.
(23.12, 19th July 2004)
Tony Blankley, writing in Townhall, comments on a recent article by Kissinger, concerning the differences between Europe and the rest of the world. Kissinger has argued that the "erosion of the nation state" within the European Union and the embedding of these values within public opinion (to the unreasonable extent that war is no longer viewed as a tool of foreign policy), supports an international order where states are subordinated to supranational laws and institutions. Since this international order strikes at the heart of current conceptions of foreign policy, whether under Bush or Kerry, it poses a fundamental difference between the European Union and the rest of the world, not just the United States.
Leaving the position of Great Britain aside in the struggle of these misconceptions:
But, of course, Blair supported both Bush and Clinton out of calculations of British national interest -- not for good fellowship's sake. As Lord Palmerston explained the classic British foreign policy maxim: Britain has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. And so it has been for all nations and alliances. Since WWII, British foreign policy has been premised on being Europe's best friend to America, and America's best friend to Europe -- thus maximizing her influence in both quarters.
although Blankley is sorely misconceived about Blair's role, we can see that the majority of states conform to Kissinger's definition of state actors that act in their own interests, whether as nation-states, or as elite kleptocracies. If the European Union does obtain support, it is because smaller state actors are bribed and regional constellations view the emergence of the EU in traditional terms as the rise of a possible counterweight to the US.
Blankley's article provides an insight into one narrative on the continued development of the European Union: that of the New World Order. There is plenty of evidence to show that the European publics prefer butter to guns and support a risk-averse foreign policy that undermines any actions that smack of militarism. However, public opinion in Europe is not as susceptible to elite persuasion as many argue, and the current generation have passed through terrorist campaigns whilst altering their views, through the rise of the environmentalist/peace political complex.
If one looks at the public pronouncements of European politicians advocating a role for Europe, this is often cast in realist terms as a rising power providing support for other states in a multipolar world as a 'counterweight' to the United States. Disguised in a hypocritical concern for international law, the political elites of Europe are insulating themselves from democracy through Weberian institutions, cast in the Bureaucratic-rational mode, disenfranchising their pacifistic publics, and wondering how to gain financial muscle, whilst their armies devolve into the Home Guard. This is one circle that cannot be squared.
(23.12, 19th July 2004)
Friday, July 16, 2004
11:40 am
Groundhog Day
An inner city Safe Labour seat with a eye wateringly tight finish, Lib Dems picking up votes among ethnic minorities with their anti-war stand, Tories go from second to third.
The similarities between the recent Birmingham and Leicester results and Brent East were so obvious that even political journalists spotted them. There were also comforting crumbs for the Tories. Although the vote slipped, it did not do so by much and neither of these seats had been won in either 1983 or 1987 (although the Birmingham seat had fallen in a similar byelection in the 1970s). Almost like the Lib Dems in the recent Euro results. So the Tories didn't do so badly.
But they did. The easy and convenient answer to the Lib Dems leapfrogging over the Tories in Brent East was that IDS was a liablility. The idea that a man who was in charge when the Tories went from 20% behind in the polls to 5% ahead was a liability is testament to the strange political isolation that affects the denizens of parliament, and the lobbyists, support staff and journalists that surround them. The Tories may be dazzling in Parliament and with stunning policy ideas but they are treading water, a bit like Hague really. If the constituency parties had the guts to tell their MPs that they would pay the consequances of ignoring the volunteers' superior political antanae then perhaps the Tories would not be in the mess that they are now. I suppose this is the price of deference.
On an aside this also definitely puts the bullet in the more subtle condemnation of IDS, that his poor organising skills were the reason to dump him. That they put a barrister in the place of an army officer is indicative that this was not a real reason. However the fact was that in the last election I had got the definate impression from the news that the Tory vote had held its own - from the Tory spin and the journalists reluctantly repeating it. This time around I had to find this out for myself. No matter how many leaflets were delivered, if you can't spin a disapointing result then you've failed the organisation test.
However there is one area where the Tories are still paying for an IDS miscalculation and that is on the war. There was an argument, a tiny argument admittedly, as to what side the Tories should take before the war. I argued, as did my comrade Christopher Montgomery, that the party's interest was to be mildly sceptical towards the war - like the Democrats in America. That way if the war went well (OK if it was popular afterwards) the Tories could quietly forget their probing questions and conditions on support. If the war turned out badly - which in public opinion terms it has - then the Tories could trumpet their brave and prescient opposition. Their chosen strategy, we warned (look I got something right, I'm not used to it) would simply get them nowhere if the war was won and would stand in the way of a post war recovery.
The Tories made themselves irrelevant on a major issue, as we warned. When the war slips from public conciousness then the Tories go up, when the war hits the headlines then the Lib Dems go up. Over the long run this at least gives the Tories the consolation that memories of the war will wear out. Unfortunately the next general election is not going to be fought out in the long run.
IDS out of a matter of personal loyalty stuck to his neo-conservative friends. Michael Howard, who is not in the neocon orbit, is saddled with this strategic mistake.
Of course the peace movement also messed up, but unlike the Conservative Party they don't win elections (as RESPECT showed, although the hyper-partisan Michael Crick predicted on Newsnight that they would get more votes than the Tories in Leicester South). RESPECT has to be admitted as a failure. The Socialist Worker's Party and the Muslim Association of Great Britain will probably win twenty council seats if they have a good run. Their defeatism has no real echo amongst an antiwar public, and their failure to win a European Parliament seat means that obscurity beckons. Loyalty to the Labour Party is such a bad option for advancing the anti-interventionist case that even George Galloway has worked it out. Dallying with the Liberal Democrats may seem to be a good idea at the moment, however the only way they will get into power is by coalition - probably with Labour.
Which leaves the Conservatives. The problem with the peace movement is that it is chock full of Trots. While they are good at organising and essential when the cause is unpopular, they scare off Tories. They are also repelled by Tories and so would prefer to keep losing the argument on the war rather than see to help a Tory. Many of the CND types who also make up the antiwar coalition (the third element being whichever cultural community feels that it is being attacked, whether Serb, Croat or Muslim) would put aside their distaste for the Tories because they care more for peace than they do for perpetual revolution. So why haven't they?
Well they're timid. The Trots do not believe in non-violence. The Trots organise better than the CND vicars. The CND hippies are scared that they will be exposed as window dressing if they carry out any politically astute moves. And so they trail behind the Trots. Again. And lose even when the public are behind them. Again.
Without an antiwar party that can win elections, Blair will be immune no matter what the unpopularity. We'd still have the poll tax if opposition to it was confined to the Liberal Democrats. It was the fact that it could win Labour votes, and so government, that scared the Tories. The simple fact is that the peace movement needs the Tories - and more than the Tories need them. Without one of the two main parties the peace movement is simply a hamster on a permanent wheel of outraged protest.
There are things that the CND types can do. They can allow for little Englander arguments to be made by peace types. Instead of going on about an Arab right to Palestine with all the anti-semitic connotations that we all know is behind this, they could simply ask where Iraq (or Kosovo, or Bosnia, or East Timor) are on the map. If you don't know, vote no. Union Jacks and St George crosses could be prominently displayed in all antiwar demonstrations. Antiwar Tories could be invited to speak as key note speakers, including to demos in their constituencies.
However the Tories still need to win elections, and so far they have thrown out the most potent vote winner on the market. Is there a way out of this for the Tories? This is the bit where I'm supposed to offer a path that if the Tories would only follow it then they would all be sorted, in the smug and comfortable knowledge that they will not. The Conservatives may be able to pull off turning on a penny, as they did to their benefit on tuition fees. Sadly the time may have passed and the Conservatives may have allowed the single biggest vote getter in the next election to simply sail by.
If every major non-American pro war government falls except for Blair (and Howard and Berlusconi are the only ones left), then this will be the Conservatives' payment for their blinkered attachment to all things American. Let's hope it's their last payment.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
12:26 am
An Ode to Timothy Starr
On the Occasion of His Request
for Financial Assistance
That I, unmurdered in my bed,
And Mrs Gabb, unravished,
May count forever on the care
Of Mr Bush and Tony Blair,
Let us give praise to him whose eyes
Have seen the truth among the lies.
Timothy Starr, to thee I sing -
Whose name shall through all ages ring
For statements based on evidence,
And sometimes too on common sense.
Thou from the first wast quite assured
Mesopotamia's tyrant lord
Had - God knows how, though without right -
Weapons of vast and horrid might,
To use against us in attack,
Or hand around outside Iraq.
Yes, others doubted; others sneered;
Others maintain that none appeared.
But thou, O Timmy, thou cheered on
Those brave, brave men in Washington
To their true duty of defence
Regardless of intelligence.
So Iraq we liberated,
While Dick Cheney's partners waited,
And children there did we compel
To arms or sorrows bid farewell.
Some their monument seek in stone:
Be thine in Baghdad blood and bone.
If it decay, as must all flesh,
There will be minds to keep it fresh.
Therefore, indebted for the care
Lavished from thine office chair,
These verses on our happy state
To thee, O Tim, I dedicate.
On the Occasion of His Request
for Financial Assistance
That I, unmurdered in my bed,
And Mrs Gabb, unravished,
May count forever on the care
Of Mr Bush and Tony Blair,
Let us give praise to him whose eyes
Have seen the truth among the lies.
Timothy Starr, to thee I sing -
Whose name shall through all ages ring
For statements based on evidence,
And sometimes too on common sense.
Thou from the first wast quite assured
Mesopotamia's tyrant lord
Had - God knows how, though without right -
Weapons of vast and horrid might,
To use against us in attack,
Or hand around outside Iraq.
Yes, others doubted; others sneered;
Others maintain that none appeared.
But thou, O Timmy, thou cheered on
Those brave, brave men in Washington
To their true duty of defence
Regardless of intelligence.
So Iraq we liberated,
While Dick Cheney's partners waited,
And children there did we compel
To arms or sorrows bid farewell.
Some their monument seek in stone:
Be thine in Baghdad blood and bone.
If it decay, as must all flesh,
There will be minds to keep it fresh.
Therefore, indebted for the care
Lavished from thine office chair,
These verses on our happy state
To thee, O Tim, I dedicate.
Thursday, July 08, 2004
10:55 pm
A Following Wind
Australia has just signed an agreement with the United States to co-operate on missile defence. It is unclear if Blair will be giving Sydney Harbour a wide berth on this matter.
Expect him to follow Australia's example.
To the joy of our select readership, I shall take up Marillion's song and remain "Incommunicado" for a fortnight whilst I join the Totty Inspectors for some prospecting.
(23.01, 8th July 2004)
Australia has just signed an agreement with the United States to co-operate on missile defence. It is unclear if Blair will be giving Sydney Harbour a wide berth on this matter.
Expect him to follow Australia's example.
To the joy of our select readership, I shall take up Marillion's song and remain "Incommunicado" for a fortnight whilst I join the Totty Inspectors for some prospecting.
(23.01, 8th July 2004)
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
10:39 pm
Energy Insecurity, or Ditch Kyoto, Go Nuclear!
The oil price remains high in comparison to price fluctuations since the first Gulf War, even though it is far lower, in real terms, than the oil crises of the 1970s. The market now includes a premium for the political risk that dogs the sources of our primary energy source.
Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, provides a survey of the unstable regions that now provide most of the world's oil. Most are in areas marked by ideological rivalry and political instability, where anti-Americanism has become a populist tool and oil wealth a source of kleptocratic wars.
The current market is peculialy vulnerable to the actions of a single producer such as Chavez of Venezuela due to the convergence of a number of factors: limitations of supply amongst providers, increasing demand due to new entrants into the oil market, and the instability of the 'swing producer', Saudi Arabia. These factors may lessen or worsen depending upon developments.
Britain has allied itself with the United States in the search for new energy sources, and faces the risk that any producer boycott against the US could include ourselves. However, the Blair government has donned a green tinged hairshirt under the lunatic demands of the Kyoto treaty and is knowingly pursuing green policies even though concerns have been raised about our increasing dependence upon oil from unstable sources. Moreover, the European powers play upon the Kyoto pedestal whilst clandestinely appeasing those who can assure their supply of oil: Russia and the Middle East. There is no indication that soft-pedalling Iran or the Arab states will prove more beneficial in the long run.
To conclude, Britain faces a credibility gap in energy, until new technologies provide real alternatives to fossil fuels at a credible price. The response of the government in rigging the market and directing investment towards renewable energy sources will exacerbate our insecurity. The first step towards redressing this gap would be to ditch the Kyoto Treaty, free up the energy market and assess whether nuclear power stations are a necessary insurance policy to redress any possible price spikes in an increasingly volatile market for fossil fuels.
(23.10, 6th July 2004)
The oil price remains high in comparison to price fluctuations since the first Gulf War, even though it is far lower, in real terms, than the oil crises of the 1970s. The market now includes a premium for the political risk that dogs the sources of our primary energy source.
Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, provides a survey of the unstable regions that now provide most of the world's oil. Most are in areas marked by ideological rivalry and political instability, where anti-Americanism has become a populist tool and oil wealth a source of kleptocratic wars.
The current market is peculialy vulnerable to the actions of a single producer such as Chavez of Venezuela due to the convergence of a number of factors: limitations of supply amongst providers, increasing demand due to new entrants into the oil market, and the instability of the 'swing producer', Saudi Arabia. These factors may lessen or worsen depending upon developments.
Britain has allied itself with the United States in the search for new energy sources, and faces the risk that any producer boycott against the US could include ourselves. However, the Blair government has donned a green tinged hairshirt under the lunatic demands of the Kyoto treaty and is knowingly pursuing green policies even though concerns have been raised about our increasing dependence upon oil from unstable sources. Moreover, the European powers play upon the Kyoto pedestal whilst clandestinely appeasing those who can assure their supply of oil: Russia and the Middle East. There is no indication that soft-pedalling Iran or the Arab states will prove more beneficial in the long run.
To conclude, Britain faces a credibility gap in energy, until new technologies provide real alternatives to fossil fuels at a credible price. The response of the government in rigging the market and directing investment towards renewable energy sources will exacerbate our insecurity. The first step towards redressing this gap would be to ditch the Kyoto Treaty, free up the energy market and assess whether nuclear power stations are a necessary insurance policy to redress any possible price spikes in an increasingly volatile market for fossil fuels.
(23.10, 6th July 2004)
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Sorry - I will do this again
10:27 pm
War and the National Interest:
Arguments for a British Foreign Policy
by Sean Gabb
The Hampden Press, London, 2004, 133pp, £10/$20
ISBN: 0-9541032-3-8
Reviewed by Daniel P. Mulroney
This is a maddening book, half right, half wrong. It was put together from a set of commentaries on the War on Terror, but says much else about the nature of war and foreign policy. I don’t agree with its basic premise. But the more I disagree with this, the more I admire the execution, and the more I want everyone to read it who really cares about winning the War on Terror.
For us Americans, Gabb is the most famous English libertarian writer. He is famous through his writings on the Internet. He claims 12,000 subscribers to his list. But for years I read him at second or even third hand on groups that he still doesn’t know about. Everything he sends out is like a self-replicating message in a bottle. I have spoken to people who think he is the only libertarian in England. This isn’t true. There’s the rest of the famous Libertarian Alliance, and there are some pretty good blogs. But for most of us, mention libertarianism abroad, and the name Sean Gabb crops up. Certainly, mention sustained ideological writing, and Gabb comes pretty near top of the list.
This isn’t to say famous means popular. Last month, he published an article which became an instant classic of anti-American snobbery. This is reprinted in the book. The most notorious passage in this most notorious article reads thus:
It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people. But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating as they went a great nation. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power and the moral insight of a tree frog. (p.100)
This generated a flood of denunciation that probably only delighted Gabb. In its inarticulate rage and defensiveness, much of it also probably just confirmed his opinion of our country. Let’s be fair, though, he did sort of apologize in his next article, saying how he just got carried away by his own rhetoric. Sadly (or, for Gabb, perhaps not!), this didn’t reduce the flow of maddened abuse. But here is a man who seems to equate success with unpopularity. He has spent the past 20 years making himself feared and loathed in the British Conservative Party. Since the opening of the War on Terror, he has used his considerable skills as a writer to do the same with America.
This is a shame, because his writings skills really are considerable. I have spoken to many people about Gabb’s prose style, and hardly anyone appears to understand what makes it interesting. I have read more or less conscious imitations of him and once read a parody of him. None of this worked. Gabb is an old-fashioned writer. But this doesn’t mean he goes for uncommon words and difficult grammar. His is an easy, conversational style, in which the underlying art is carefully disguised. To see this, I recall a passage written in imitation of Gabb. It began: “I have perused a missive from your keyboard”. This isn’t Gabb at all. (His usual response to e-mails goes something like: “I have just read your message of three months ago, and guilt obliges me to reply”!) He uses common, usually short words. His sentences are usually short. He creates his effect not by the nature of his words, but by his use of them. You can see this with the passage quoted above. Read it aloud, and listen for the patterns of emphasis and pitch, the pauses, the use and avoidance of hiatus, the way in which consonants are sometimes allowed to clash and sometimes prevented by the rearrangement of words. What he says is said about as well as it can be. The effect is always deliberate, but is made to seem accidental.
But style doesn’t by itself make a writer good. That also needs something to say that is worth hearing. Here, Gabb scores. I said he is a libertarian. But he is also a conservative. He isn’t the sort of conservative who hangs round our National Review or The Spectator and The Telegraph in England. He doesn’t get into a sweat about moral values and abortion and all the other issues of our moral majority types. He worships his country, but isn’t an assertive nationalist. His England is place where modern civilization was born, the place where constitutional government and due process and freedom of the press and trial by jury were all created and presented as gifts to the rest of the world. Yes, he ignores what England has done in Ireland (an odd oversight, considering his Celtic name and probable roots). Yes, he never seems to realize that, while the rest of us have to value what England has done for us, we also have to remember what she has often done to us. But Gabb has enough of a point not just to come over as a British eccentric.
For those who come to him with fixed political categories, it must be confusing to see him at work. One moment, he is defending the English system of weights and measures and the Church of England and the Monarchy in an almost mystical Tory spirit. The next moment, he is coolly explaining why drugs should be legalized and why there is nothing bad about gay marriage and adoption. In his own terms, there is no contradiction. Freedom is an Englishman’s birthright, and the English Constitution is more a set of customs and habits of thought than a set of legal rules. Libertarianism in England is contained within conservatism. As he might put it, an attack on the wigs and gowns of the judges is necessarily also an attack on trial by jury and the double jeopardy rule.
It is the same with his economic views. He knows his Austrian analysis, and wrote a short book about entrepreneurship a few years back. At the same time, he hardly ever argues against some state intervention on the grounds that it disrupts the smooth working of the market. His real objection is always that intervention is the act of a state enlarged beyond its proper functions. I remember he once conceded that the British Government could have successfully intervened in the 19th century to get a more rational railroad system, but was glad it did not intervene, as this would have given it confidence to intervene elsewhere.
Let me turn now to this present book. In its particulars, his argument is correct. We went to war in Iraq without any clear strategy, and the result has been a military and political embarrassment. Except the Iraqi armed forces ran away as fast as they could drop their guns, all that Gabb predicted has come about.
But this doesn’t mean I think his basic premise is correct. Gabb believes in a world of nation states all following narrow and predictable interests. He doesn’t believe in wars fought for other than these narrow and predictable interests. He is particularly opposed to fighting against abstractions. He says:
In general, I think the world would be a less violent place if it mainly consisted of nation states, each acting to preserve its own borders and other narrowly defined interests. This would give a predictability to international relations of the sort that existed in Europe between 1648 and 1914—a period in which, with the arguable exception of those against the French Revolution, hugely destructive wars were avoided. The problem with moralistic crusades for democracy or human rights, or whatever, is that they involve unpredictable actions in support of often unachievable ends. The natural result is unlimited national or ideological hatreds that lead to permanent instability. (p.23)
This is a good point. Gabb’s problem is that he doesn’t see how the modern world is different than the old one. I lunched with him the last time I visited London. He asked me in a jeering tone if I really thought history had begun with the first version of MSDOS. Of course I don’t. There are people who do seem to think this, and I think that is why we messed up in Iraq. No one in Washington guessed that people who dress and talk like characters from a costume drama could be highly sophisticated politicians able to make us dance to their tune without us even knowing it. We aren’t dealing with children, and we’ve got some growing up to do ourselves.
At the same time, Gabb is wrong when he says that the modern world is just like the past but with better plumbing and nice shiny electronic toys to divert us. Modern technology has totally changed the world. A country can’t just ignore the rest of the world as he wants England to do. In this, he’s like someone shutting their apartment door on a fire in the lobby outside. Modern communications have turned us from a world of detached nation states into one of civilizational blocs.
Gabb is kind of right when he says the 911 bombings were a response to American intervention in the Middle East. He is flat wrong when he says they were no business of England. We no longer live in a world where it takes half a year to sail from London to Calcutta. There is no buffer space left between civilizations. The other is no distant from us than Kew is from Westminster in Gabb’s mental world. Civilizations can no longer go their separate ways, but are in constant touch, and increasingly in constant competition for mastery. By the 22nd century, either the Islamic world will be westernized or the West will be overwhelmed by Islam. Gabb focuses on the specifics of 911 just as he might once have focussed on the specifics of the Sarajevo shootings. Yes, this was a specific event, but it was also a precipitating event. It didn’t begin a clash of civilizations. It was just the accident that started what circumstances had already made inevitable. And yes, the war with Iraq was badly planned and executed. That doesn’t mean we should just give up and walk away.
Perhaps the most hurtful thing anyone can say to Gabb is that his England is dead. You can get the country out of the European Union. You can cut taxes and regulations. You can smash the “Enemy Class”. But there will be no return to his dream of Little England. It’s gone. Whatever happens next will be a new start. This will be some kind of English Union. He and I are part of the same civilization. Our countries are part of an Anglosphere that includes all the English-speaking countries and a few European satellites. 911 raised the curtain on a new world, in which there is no room for Britain as an independent actor, and none even for America. Does he think the Muslim clerics raising jihad make or even see any distinction between British and American? Outsiders see us as all the same. If we are to survive, let alone prosper, in this world, we must learn to regard ourselves as outsiders regard us. We stand together or hang separately.
Let me put this in terms that Gabb might appreciate. With his rhetorical skills, he is the closest the British conservative movement has to a Demosthenes. But Demosthenes knew something Gabb doesn’t. By the middle of the fourth century before the Common Era, the closed world of the Greek city states had been made obsolete by the rise of Macedon. It was no longer safe for Thebes and Sparta and Athens to look on each other as foreigners and score little points off each other. Every city state was now faced by an enemy that wanted to conquer them all. Either the Greeks would drop their particularism and join together in a more than occasional alliance, or they would lose everything. It is the same with us. It is worse for us. At least the Macedonians were kind of Greek, and then there were the Romans, who loved the Greeks. The enemy facing us is not us by any definition, and does not love us. We shouldn’t have fought the war in Iraq as we did. But if we are all to survive, American and British servicepeople will be serving together in many other places before this century is out. The trick is not to denounce this, but to help make it work better than it just has.
In closing, I will make this appeal to Gabb: “Sean, you got it half right. Yes, our side was ignorant of history and drunk on technology. Some of us did think we could overthrow an evil dictator and watch his people rise up by themselves to make their country into a more picturesque Wisconsin. The Islamic mind set is a bigger mess than we gave it credit, and the Islamic mind is more sophisticated than we stupidly imagined it. We messed up in this war. But you were also half wrong. Islam is a threat to us all. Have your little triumph against us. But then come and join us. If you really think we are no better than tree frogs, come and tell us how not to be. We are all at war, and we need people like you on side to help us win it.”
In final closing, buy this book. Learn from it, and write to Gabb yourself to get him to see that even his country can’t be an island in our new world of the Internet and cheap airplane travel. 911 happened in my city. It might have been in his. Next time, it might be.
Daniel P. Mulroney teaches English Literature at a high school in New York.
Arguments for a British Foreign Policy
by Sean Gabb
The Hampden Press, London, 2004, 133pp, £10/$20
ISBN: 0-9541032-3-8
Reviewed by Daniel P. Mulroney
This is a maddening book, half right, half wrong. It was put together from a set of commentaries on the War on Terror, but says much else about the nature of war and foreign policy. I don’t agree with its basic premise. But the more I disagree with this, the more I admire the execution, and the more I want everyone to read it who really cares about winning the War on Terror.
For us Americans, Gabb is the most famous English libertarian writer. He is famous through his writings on the Internet. He claims 12,000 subscribers to his list. But for years I read him at second or even third hand on groups that he still doesn’t know about. Everything he sends out is like a self-replicating message in a bottle. I have spoken to people who think he is the only libertarian in England. This isn’t true. There’s the rest of the famous Libertarian Alliance, and there are some pretty good blogs. But for most of us, mention libertarianism abroad, and the name Sean Gabb crops up. Certainly, mention sustained ideological writing, and Gabb comes pretty near top of the list.
This isn’t to say famous means popular. Last month, he published an article which became an instant classic of anti-American snobbery. This is reprinted in the book. The most notorious passage in this most notorious article reads thus:
It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people. But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating as they went a great nation. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power and the moral insight of a tree frog. (p.100)
This generated a flood of denunciation that probably only delighted Gabb. In its inarticulate rage and defensiveness, much of it also probably just confirmed his opinion of our country. Let’s be fair, though, he did sort of apologize in his next article, saying how he just got carried away by his own rhetoric. Sadly (or, for Gabb, perhaps not!), this didn’t reduce the flow of maddened abuse. But here is a man who seems to equate success with unpopularity. He has spent the past 20 years making himself feared and loathed in the British Conservative Party. Since the opening of the War on Terror, he has used his considerable skills as a writer to do the same with America.
This is a shame, because his writings skills really are considerable. I have spoken to many people about Gabb’s prose style, and hardly anyone appears to understand what makes it interesting. I have read more or less conscious imitations of him and once read a parody of him. None of this worked. Gabb is an old-fashioned writer. But this doesn’t mean he goes for uncommon words and difficult grammar. His is an easy, conversational style, in which the underlying art is carefully disguised. To see this, I recall a passage written in imitation of Gabb. It began: “I have perused a missive from your keyboard”. This isn’t Gabb at all. (His usual response to e-mails goes something like: “I have just read your message of three months ago, and guilt obliges me to reply”!) He uses common, usually short words. His sentences are usually short. He creates his effect not by the nature of his words, but by his use of them. You can see this with the passage quoted above. Read it aloud, and listen for the patterns of emphasis and pitch, the pauses, the use and avoidance of hiatus, the way in which consonants are sometimes allowed to clash and sometimes prevented by the rearrangement of words. What he says is said about as well as it can be. The effect is always deliberate, but is made to seem accidental.
But style doesn’t by itself make a writer good. That also needs something to say that is worth hearing. Here, Gabb scores. I said he is a libertarian. But he is also a conservative. He isn’t the sort of conservative who hangs round our National Review or The Spectator and The Telegraph in England. He doesn’t get into a sweat about moral values and abortion and all the other issues of our moral majority types. He worships his country, but isn’t an assertive nationalist. His England is place where modern civilization was born, the place where constitutional government and due process and freedom of the press and trial by jury were all created and presented as gifts to the rest of the world. Yes, he ignores what England has done in Ireland (an odd oversight, considering his Celtic name and probable roots). Yes, he never seems to realize that, while the rest of us have to value what England has done for us, we also have to remember what she has often done to us. But Gabb has enough of a point not just to come over as a British eccentric.
For those who come to him with fixed political categories, it must be confusing to see him at work. One moment, he is defending the English system of weights and measures and the Church of England and the Monarchy in an almost mystical Tory spirit. The next moment, he is coolly explaining why drugs should be legalized and why there is nothing bad about gay marriage and adoption. In his own terms, there is no contradiction. Freedom is an Englishman’s birthright, and the English Constitution is more a set of customs and habits of thought than a set of legal rules. Libertarianism in England is contained within conservatism. As he might put it, an attack on the wigs and gowns of the judges is necessarily also an attack on trial by jury and the double jeopardy rule.
It is the same with his economic views. He knows his Austrian analysis, and wrote a short book about entrepreneurship a few years back. At the same time, he hardly ever argues against some state intervention on the grounds that it disrupts the smooth working of the market. His real objection is always that intervention is the act of a state enlarged beyond its proper functions. I remember he once conceded that the British Government could have successfully intervened in the 19th century to get a more rational railroad system, but was glad it did not intervene, as this would have given it confidence to intervene elsewhere.
Let me turn now to this present book. In its particulars, his argument is correct. We went to war in Iraq without any clear strategy, and the result has been a military and political embarrassment. Except the Iraqi armed forces ran away as fast as they could drop their guns, all that Gabb predicted has come about.
But this doesn’t mean I think his basic premise is correct. Gabb believes in a world of nation states all following narrow and predictable interests. He doesn’t believe in wars fought for other than these narrow and predictable interests. He is particularly opposed to fighting against abstractions. He says:
In general, I think the world would be a less violent place if it mainly consisted of nation states, each acting to preserve its own borders and other narrowly defined interests. This would give a predictability to international relations of the sort that existed in Europe between 1648 and 1914—a period in which, with the arguable exception of those against the French Revolution, hugely destructive wars were avoided. The problem with moralistic crusades for democracy or human rights, or whatever, is that they involve unpredictable actions in support of often unachievable ends. The natural result is unlimited national or ideological hatreds that lead to permanent instability. (p.23)
This is a good point. Gabb’s problem is that he doesn’t see how the modern world is different than the old one. I lunched with him the last time I visited London. He asked me in a jeering tone if I really thought history had begun with the first version of MSDOS. Of course I don’t. There are people who do seem to think this, and I think that is why we messed up in Iraq. No one in Washington guessed that people who dress and talk like characters from a costume drama could be highly sophisticated politicians able to make us dance to their tune without us even knowing it. We aren’t dealing with children, and we’ve got some growing up to do ourselves.
At the same time, Gabb is wrong when he says that the modern world is just like the past but with better plumbing and nice shiny electronic toys to divert us. Modern technology has totally changed the world. A country can’t just ignore the rest of the world as he wants England to do. In this, he’s like someone shutting their apartment door on a fire in the lobby outside. Modern communications have turned us from a world of detached nation states into one of civilizational blocs.
Gabb is kind of right when he says the 911 bombings were a response to American intervention in the Middle East. He is flat wrong when he says they were no business of England. We no longer live in a world where it takes half a year to sail from London to Calcutta. There is no buffer space left between civilizations. The other is no distant from us than Kew is from Westminster in Gabb’s mental world. Civilizations can no longer go their separate ways, but are in constant touch, and increasingly in constant competition for mastery. By the 22nd century, either the Islamic world will be westernized or the West will be overwhelmed by Islam. Gabb focuses on the specifics of 911 just as he might once have focussed on the specifics of the Sarajevo shootings. Yes, this was a specific event, but it was also a precipitating event. It didn’t begin a clash of civilizations. It was just the accident that started what circumstances had already made inevitable. And yes, the war with Iraq was badly planned and executed. That doesn’t mean we should just give up and walk away.
Perhaps the most hurtful thing anyone can say to Gabb is that his England is dead. You can get the country out of the European Union. You can cut taxes and regulations. You can smash the “Enemy Class”. But there will be no return to his dream of Little England. It’s gone. Whatever happens next will be a new start. This will be some kind of English Union. He and I are part of the same civilization. Our countries are part of an Anglosphere that includes all the English-speaking countries and a few European satellites. 911 raised the curtain on a new world, in which there is no room for Britain as an independent actor, and none even for America. Does he think the Muslim clerics raising jihad make or even see any distinction between British and American? Outsiders see us as all the same. If we are to survive, let alone prosper, in this world, we must learn to regard ourselves as outsiders regard us. We stand together or hang separately.
Let me put this in terms that Gabb might appreciate. With his rhetorical skills, he is the closest the British conservative movement has to a Demosthenes. But Demosthenes knew something Gabb doesn’t. By the middle of the fourth century before the Common Era, the closed world of the Greek city states had been made obsolete by the rise of Macedon. It was no longer safe for Thebes and Sparta and Athens to look on each other as foreigners and score little points off each other. Every city state was now faced by an enemy that wanted to conquer them all. Either the Greeks would drop their particularism and join together in a more than occasional alliance, or they would lose everything. It is the same with us. It is worse for us. At least the Macedonians were kind of Greek, and then there were the Romans, who loved the Greeks. The enemy facing us is not us by any definition, and does not love us. We shouldn’t have fought the war in Iraq as we did. But if we are all to survive, American and British servicepeople will be serving together in many other places before this century is out. The trick is not to denounce this, but to help make it work better than it just has.
In closing, I will make this appeal to Gabb: “Sean, you got it half right. Yes, our side was ignorant of history and drunk on technology. Some of us did think we could overthrow an evil dictator and watch his people rise up by themselves to make their country into a more picturesque Wisconsin. The Islamic mind set is a bigger mess than we gave it credit, and the Islamic mind is more sophisticated than we stupidly imagined it. We messed up in this war. But you were also half wrong. Islam is a threat to us all. Have your little triumph against us. But then come and join us. If you really think we are no better than tree frogs, come and tell us how not to be. We are all at war, and we need people like you on side to help us win it.”
In final closing, buy this book. Learn from it, and write to Gabb yourself to get him to see that even his country can’t be an island in our new world of the Internet and cheap airplane travel. 911 happened in my city. It might have been in his. Next time, it might be.
Daniel P. Mulroney teaches English Literature at a high school in New York.
Review of Sean Gabb's Book on Foreign Policy
10:25 pm
War and the National Interest:
Arguments for a British Foreign Policy
by Sean Gabb
The Hampden Press, London, 2004, 133pp, £10/$20
ISBN: 0-9541032-3-8
Buy from http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk
Reviewed by Daniel P. Mulroney
This is a maddening book, half right, half wrong. It was put together from a set of commentaries on
the War on Terror, but says much else about the nature of war and foreign policy. I don't agree with
its basic premise. But the more I disagree with this, the more I admire the execution, and the more I
want everyone to read it who really cares about winning the War on Terror.
For us Americans, Gabb is the most famous English libertarian writer. He is famous through his
writings on the Internet. He claims 12,000 subscribers to his list. But for years I read him at second
or even third hand on groups that he still doesn't know about. Everything he sends out is like a self-
replicating message in a bottle. I have spoken to people who think he is the only libertarian in
England. This isn't true. There's the rest of the famous Libertarian Alliance, and there are some
pretty good blogs. But for most of us, mention libertarianism abroad, and the name Sean Gabb
crops up. Certainly, mention sustained ideological writing, and Gabb comes pretty near top of the
list.
This isn't to say famous means popular. Last month, he published an article which became an
instant classic of anti-American snobbery. This is reprinted in the book. The most notorious
passage in this most notorious article reads thus:
"It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people.
But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into
money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he
looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second
and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values
and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating as they
went a great nation. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a
version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from
their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power
and the moral insight of a tree frog."(p.100)
This generated a flood of abuse that probably only delighted Gabb. In its inarticulate rage and
defensiveness, much of it also probably just confirmed his opinion of our country. Let's be fair,
though, he did sort of apologize in his next article, saying how he just got carried away by his own
rhetoric. Sadly (or, for Gabb, perhaps not!), this didn't reduce the flow of maddened abuse. But here
is a man who seems to equate success with unpopularity. He has spent the past 20 years making
himself feared and hated in the British Tory Party. Since the opening of the War on Terror, he has
used his considerable skills as a writer to do the same with America.
This is a shame, because his writings skills really are considerable. I have spoken to many people
about Gabb's prose style, and hardly anyone appears to understand what makes it interesting. I
have read more or less conscious imitations of him and once read a parody of him. None of this
worked. Gabb is an old-fashioned writer. But this doesn't mean he goes for uncommon words and
difficult grammar. His is an easy, conversational style, in which the underlying art is carefully
disguised. To see this, I recall a passage written in imitation of Gabb. It began: "I have perused a
missive from your keyboard". This isn't Gabb at all. (His usual response to e-mails goes something
like: "I have just read your message of three months ago, and guilt obliges me to reply"!) He uses
common, usually short words. His sentences are usually short. He creates his effect not by the
nature of his words, but by his use of them. You can see this with the passage quoted above. Read
it aloud, and listen for the patterns of emphasis and pitch, the pauses, the use and avoidance of
hiatus, the way in which consonants are sometimes allowed to clash and sometimes prevented by
the rearrangement of words. What he says is said about as well as it can be. The effect is always
deliberate, but is made to seem accidental.
But style doesn't by itself make a writer good. That also needs something to say that is worth
hearing. Here, Gabb scores. I said he is a libertarian. But he is also a conservative. He isn't the sort
of conservative who hangs round our National Review or The Spectator and The Telegraph in
England. He doesn't get into a sweat about moral values and abortion and all the other issues of our
moral majority types. He worships his country, but isn't an assertive nationalist. His England is
place where modern civilization was born, the place where constitutional government and due
process and freedom of the press and trial by jury were all created and presented as gifts to the rest
of the world. Yes, he ignores what England has done in Ireland (an odd oversight, considering his
Celtic name and probable roots). Yes, he never seems to realize that, while the rest of us have to
value what England has done for us, we also have to remember what she has often done to us. But
Gabb has enough of a point not just to come over as a British eccentric.
For those who come to him with fixed political categories, it must be confusing to see him at work.
One moment, he is defending the English system of weights and measures and the Church of
England and the Monarchy in an almost mystical Tory spirit. The next moment, he is coolly
explaining why drugs should be legalized and why there is nothing bad about gay marriage and
adoption. In his own terms, there is no contradiction. Freedom is an Englishman's birthright, and the
English Constitution is more a set of customs and habits of thought than a set of legal rules.
Libertarianism in England is contained within conservatism. As he might put it, an attack on the
wigs and gowns of the judges is necessarily also an attack on trial by jury and the double jeopardy
rule.
It is the same with his economic views. He knows his Austrian analysis, and wrote a short book
about entrepreneurship a few years back. At the same time, he hardly ever argues against some
state intervention on the grounds that it disrupts the smooth working of the market. His real
objection is always that intervention is the act of a state enlarged beyond its proper functions. I
remember he once conceded that the British Government could have successfully intervened in the
19th century to get a more rational railroad system, but was glad it did not intervene, as this would
have given it confidence to intervene elsewhere.
Let me turn now to this present book. In its particulars, his argument is correct. We went to war in
Iraq without any clear strategy, and the result has been a military and political embarrassment.
Saving the Iraqi armed forces ran away from us as fast as they could drop their guns, all that Gabb
predicted has come about.
But this doesn't mean I think his basic premise is correct. Gabb believes in a world of nation states
all following narrow and predictable interests. He doesn't believe in wars fought for other than these
narrow and predictable interests. He is particularly opposed to fighting against abstractions. He
says:
"In general, I think the world would be a less violent place if it mainly consisted of nation states,
each acting to preserve its own borders and other narrowly defined interests. This would give a
predictability to international relations of the sort that existed in Europe between 1648 and 1914—a
period in which, with the arguable exception of those against the French Revolution, hugely
destructive wars were avoided. The problem with moralistic crusades for democracy or human
rights, or whatever, is that they involve unpredictable actions in support of often unachievable ends.
The natural result is unlimited national or ideological hatreds that lead to permanent instability."
(p.23)
This is a good point. Gabb's problem is that he doesn't see how the modern world is different than
the old one. I lunched with him the last time I visited London. He asked me in a jeering tone if I
really thought history had begun with the first version of MSDOS. Of course I don't. There are people
who do seem to think this, and I think that is why we messed up in Iraq. No one in Washington
guessed that people who dress and talk like characters from a costume drama could be highly
sophisticated politicians able to make us dance to their tune without us even knowing it. We aren't
dealing with children, and we've got some growing up to do ourselves.
At the same time, Gabb is wrong when he says that the modern world is just like the past but with
better plumbing and nice shiny electronic toys to divert us. Modern technology has totally changed
the world. A country can't just ignore the rest of the world as he wants England to do. In this, he's
like someone shutting their apartment door on a fire in the lobby outside. Modern communications
have turned us from a world of detached nation states into one of civilizational blocs.
Gabb is kind of right when he says the 911 bombings were a response to American intervention in
the Middle East. He is flat wrong when he says they were no business of England. We no longer
live in a world where it takes half a year to sail from London to Calcutta. There is no buffer space left
between civilizations. The other is no distant from us than Kew is from Westminster in Gabb's
mental world. Civilizations can no longer go their separate ways, but are in constant touch, and
increasingly in constant competition for mastery. By the 22nd century, either the Islamic world will
be westernized or the West will be overwhelmed by Islam. Gabb focuses on the specifics of 911
just as he might once have focussed on the specifics of the Sarajevo shootings. Yes, this was a
specific event, but it was also a precipitating event. It didn't begin a clash of civilizations. It was just
the accident that started what circumstances had already made inevitable. And yes, the war with
Iraq was badly planned and executed. That doesn't mean we should just give up and walk away.
Perhaps the most hurtful thing anyone can say to Gabb is that his England is dead. You can get
the country out of the European Union. You can cut taxes and regulations. You can smash the
"Enemy Class". But there will be no return to his dream of Little England. It's gone. Whatever
happens next will be a new start. This will be some kind of English Union. He and I are part of the
same civilization. Our countries are part of an Anglosphere that includes all the English-speaking
countries and a few European satellites. 911 raised the curtain on a new world, in which there is no
room for Britain as an independent actor, and none even for America. Does he think the Muslim
clerics raising jihad make or even see any distinction between British and American? Outsiders see
us as all the same. If we are to survive, let alone prosper, in this world, we must learn to regard
ourselves as outsiders regard us. We stand together or hang separately.
Let me put this in terms that Gabb might appreciate. With his rhetorical skills, he is the closest the
British conservative movement has to a Demosthenes. But Demosthenes knew something Gabb
doesn't. By the middle of the fourth century before the Common Era, the closed world of the Greek
city states had been made obsolete by the rise of Macedon. It was no longer safe for Thebes and
Sparta and Athens to look on each other as foreigners and score little points off each other. Every
city state was now faced by an enemy that wanted to conquer them all. Either the Greeks would
drop their particularism and join together in a more than occasional alliance, or they would lose
everything. It is the same with us. It is worse for us. At least the Macedonians were kind of Greek,
and then there were the Romans, who loved the Greeks. The enemy facing us is not us by any
definition, and does not love us. We shouldn't have fought the war in Iraq as we did. But if we are all
to survive, American and British servicepeople will be serving together in many other places before
this century is out. The trick is not to denounce this, but to help make it work better than it just has.
In closing, I will make this appeal to Gabb: "Sean, you got it half right. Yes, our side was ignorant of
history and drunk on technology. Some of us did think we could overthrow an evil dictator and watch
his people rise up by themselves to make their country into a more picturesque Wisconsin. The
Islamic mind set is a bigger mess than we gave it credit, and the Islamic mind is more
sophisticated than we stupidly imagined it. We messed up in this war. But you were also half
wrong. Islam is a threat to us all. Have your little triumph against us. But then come and join us. If
you really think we are no better than tree frogs, come and tell us how not to be. We are all at war,
and we need people like you on side to help us win it."
In final closing, buy this book. Learn from it, and write to Gabb yourself to get him to see that even
his country can't be an island in our new world of the Internet and cheap airplane travel. 911
happened in my city. It might have been in his. Next time, it might be.
Daniel P. Mulroney teaches English Literature at a high school in New York.
Arguments for a British Foreign Policy
by Sean Gabb
The Hampden Press, London, 2004, 133pp, £10/$20
ISBN: 0-9541032-3-8
Buy from http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk
Reviewed by Daniel P. Mulroney
This is a maddening book, half right, half wrong. It was put together from a set of commentaries on
the War on Terror, but says much else about the nature of war and foreign policy. I don't agree with
its basic premise. But the more I disagree with this, the more I admire the execution, and the more I
want everyone to read it who really cares about winning the War on Terror.
For us Americans, Gabb is the most famous English libertarian writer. He is famous through his
writings on the Internet. He claims 12,000 subscribers to his list. But for years I read him at second
or even third hand on groups that he still doesn't know about. Everything he sends out is like a self-
replicating message in a bottle. I have spoken to people who think he is the only libertarian in
England. This isn't true. There's the rest of the famous Libertarian Alliance, and there are some
pretty good blogs. But for most of us, mention libertarianism abroad, and the name Sean Gabb
crops up. Certainly, mention sustained ideological writing, and Gabb comes pretty near top of the
list.
This isn't to say famous means popular. Last month, he published an article which became an
instant classic of anti-American snobbery. This is reprinted in the book. The most notorious
passage in this most notorious article reads thus:
"It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people.
But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into
money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he
looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second
and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values
and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating as they
went a great nation. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a
version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from
their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power
and the moral insight of a tree frog."(p.100)
This generated a flood of abuse that probably only delighted Gabb. In its inarticulate rage and
defensiveness, much of it also probably just confirmed his opinion of our country. Let's be fair,
though, he did sort of apologize in his next article, saying how he just got carried away by his own
rhetoric. Sadly (or, for Gabb, perhaps not!), this didn't reduce the flow of maddened abuse. But here
is a man who seems to equate success with unpopularity. He has spent the past 20 years making
himself feared and hated in the British Tory Party. Since the opening of the War on Terror, he has
used his considerable skills as a writer to do the same with America.
This is a shame, because his writings skills really are considerable. I have spoken to many people
about Gabb's prose style, and hardly anyone appears to understand what makes it interesting. I
have read more or less conscious imitations of him and once read a parody of him. None of this
worked. Gabb is an old-fashioned writer. But this doesn't mean he goes for uncommon words and
difficult grammar. His is an easy, conversational style, in which the underlying art is carefully
disguised. To see this, I recall a passage written in imitation of Gabb. It began: "I have perused a
missive from your keyboard". This isn't Gabb at all. (His usual response to e-mails goes something
like: "I have just read your message of three months ago, and guilt obliges me to reply"!) He uses
common, usually short words. His sentences are usually short. He creates his effect not by the
nature of his words, but by his use of them. You can see this with the passage quoted above. Read
it aloud, and listen for the patterns of emphasis and pitch, the pauses, the use and avoidance of
hiatus, the way in which consonants are sometimes allowed to clash and sometimes prevented by
the rearrangement of words. What he says is said about as well as it can be. The effect is always
deliberate, but is made to seem accidental.
But style doesn't by itself make a writer good. That also needs something to say that is worth
hearing. Here, Gabb scores. I said he is a libertarian. But he is also a conservative. He isn't the sort
of conservative who hangs round our National Review or The Spectator and The Telegraph in
England. He doesn't get into a sweat about moral values and abortion and all the other issues of our
moral majority types. He worships his country, but isn't an assertive nationalist. His England is
place where modern civilization was born, the place where constitutional government and due
process and freedom of the press and trial by jury were all created and presented as gifts to the rest
of the world. Yes, he ignores what England has done in Ireland (an odd oversight, considering his
Celtic name and probable roots). Yes, he never seems to realize that, while the rest of us have to
value what England has done for us, we also have to remember what she has often done to us. But
Gabb has enough of a point not just to come over as a British eccentric.
For those who come to him with fixed political categories, it must be confusing to see him at work.
One moment, he is defending the English system of weights and measures and the Church of
England and the Monarchy in an almost mystical Tory spirit. The next moment, he is coolly
explaining why drugs should be legalized and why there is nothing bad about gay marriage and
adoption. In his own terms, there is no contradiction. Freedom is an Englishman's birthright, and the
English Constitution is more a set of customs and habits of thought than a set of legal rules.
Libertarianism in England is contained within conservatism. As he might put it, an attack on the
wigs and gowns of the judges is necessarily also an attack on trial by jury and the double jeopardy
rule.
It is the same with his economic views. He knows his Austrian analysis, and wrote a short book
about entrepreneurship a few years back. At the same time, he hardly ever argues against some
state intervention on the grounds that it disrupts the smooth working of the market. His real
objection is always that intervention is the act of a state enlarged beyond its proper functions. I
remember he once conceded that the British Government could have successfully intervened in the
19th century to get a more rational railroad system, but was glad it did not intervene, as this would
have given it confidence to intervene elsewhere.
Let me turn now to this present book. In its particulars, his argument is correct. We went to war in
Iraq without any clear strategy, and the result has been a military and political embarrassment.
Saving the Iraqi armed forces ran away from us as fast as they could drop their guns, all that Gabb
predicted has come about.
But this doesn't mean I think his basic premise is correct. Gabb believes in a world of nation states
all following narrow and predictable interests. He doesn't believe in wars fought for other than these
narrow and predictable interests. He is particularly opposed to fighting against abstractions. He
says:
"In general, I think the world would be a less violent place if it mainly consisted of nation states,
each acting to preserve its own borders and other narrowly defined interests. This would give a
predictability to international relations of the sort that existed in Europe between 1648 and 1914—a
period in which, with the arguable exception of those against the French Revolution, hugely
destructive wars were avoided. The problem with moralistic crusades for democracy or human
rights, or whatever, is that they involve unpredictable actions in support of often unachievable ends.
The natural result is unlimited national or ideological hatreds that lead to permanent instability."
(p.23)
This is a good point. Gabb's problem is that he doesn't see how the modern world is different than
the old one. I lunched with him the last time I visited London. He asked me in a jeering tone if I
really thought history had begun with the first version of MSDOS. Of course I don't. There are people
who do seem to think this, and I think that is why we messed up in Iraq. No one in Washington
guessed that people who dress and talk like characters from a costume drama could be highly
sophisticated politicians able to make us dance to their tune without us even knowing it. We aren't
dealing with children, and we've got some growing up to do ourselves.
At the same time, Gabb is wrong when he says that the modern world is just like the past but with
better plumbing and nice shiny electronic toys to divert us. Modern technology has totally changed
the world. A country can't just ignore the rest of the world as he wants England to do. In this, he's
like someone shutting their apartment door on a fire in the lobby outside. Modern communications
have turned us from a world of detached nation states into one of civilizational blocs.
Gabb is kind of right when he says the 911 bombings were a response to American intervention in
the Middle East. He is flat wrong when he says they were no business of England. We no longer
live in a world where it takes half a year to sail from London to Calcutta. There is no buffer space left
between civilizations. The other is no distant from us than Kew is from Westminster in Gabb's
mental world. Civilizations can no longer go their separate ways, but are in constant touch, and
increasingly in constant competition for mastery. By the 22nd century, either the Islamic world will
be westernized or the West will be overwhelmed by Islam. Gabb focuses on the specifics of 911
just as he might once have focussed on the specifics of the Sarajevo shootings. Yes, this was a
specific event, but it was also a precipitating event. It didn't begin a clash of civilizations. It was just
the accident that started what circumstances had already made inevitable. And yes, the war with
Iraq was badly planned and executed. That doesn't mean we should just give up and walk away.
Perhaps the most hurtful thing anyone can say to Gabb is that his England is dead. You can get
the country out of the European Union. You can cut taxes and regulations. You can smash the
"Enemy Class". But there will be no return to his dream of Little England. It's gone. Whatever
happens next will be a new start. This will be some kind of English Union. He and I are part of the
same civilization. Our countries are part of an Anglosphere that includes all the English-speaking
countries and a few European satellites. 911 raised the curtain on a new world, in which there is no
room for Britain as an independent actor, and none even for America. Does he think the Muslim
clerics raising jihad make or even see any distinction between British and American? Outsiders see
us as all the same. If we are to survive, let alone prosper, in this world, we must learn to regard
ourselves as outsiders regard us. We stand together or hang separately.
Let me put this in terms that Gabb might appreciate. With his rhetorical skills, he is the closest the
British conservative movement has to a Demosthenes. But Demosthenes knew something Gabb
doesn't. By the middle of the fourth century before the Common Era, the closed world of the Greek
city states had been made obsolete by the rise of Macedon. It was no longer safe for Thebes and
Sparta and Athens to look on each other as foreigners and score little points off each other. Every
city state was now faced by an enemy that wanted to conquer them all. Either the Greeks would
drop their particularism and join together in a more than occasional alliance, or they would lose
everything. It is the same with us. It is worse for us. At least the Macedonians were kind of Greek,
and then there were the Romans, who loved the Greeks. The enemy facing us is not us by any
definition, and does not love us. We shouldn't have fought the war in Iraq as we did. But if we are all
to survive, American and British servicepeople will be serving together in many other places before
this century is out. The trick is not to denounce this, but to help make it work better than it just has.
In closing, I will make this appeal to Gabb: "Sean, you got it half right. Yes, our side was ignorant of
history and drunk on technology. Some of us did think we could overthrow an evil dictator and watch
his people rise up by themselves to make their country into a more picturesque Wisconsin. The
Islamic mind set is a bigger mess than we gave it credit, and the Islamic mind is more
sophisticated than we stupidly imagined it. We messed up in this war. But you were also half
wrong. Islam is a threat to us all. Have your little triumph against us. But then come and join us. If
you really think we are no better than tree frogs, come and tell us how not to be. We are all at war,
and we need people like you on side to help us win it."
In final closing, buy this book. Learn from it, and write to Gabb yourself to get him to see that even
his country can't be an island in our new world of the Internet and cheap airplane travel. 911
happened in my city. It might have been in his. Next time, it might be.
Daniel P. Mulroney teaches English Literature at a high school in New York.
Thursday, July 01, 2004
7:33 pm
You do it, dubya
George Bush has told the EU that it should accept Turkey and all main parties (surprise) over here agree with him. But is it actually in our interests?
I have never gone for the conventional Eurosceptic attitude on EU enlargement. You know the one, the idea that if the EU grows large enough it will be too unwieldy to be a superstate. Well since we joined in 1973 it's grown from nine members to 25. In that time we've also had the Single European Act, the Factortame decision, the Maastricht treaty and now the proposed constitution. So the wider not deeper plan has not worked.
Unfortunately as long as we are members of the EU we have an interest in whether applicant countries should be accepted. So what does Turkey bring to the table. Here's a short list:
- 80 million potential Muslim immigrants
- A lot of poverty
- Borders with Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
- A Kurdish problem which makes Northern Ireland look easy
- A history of millitary government
Is that enough?
There is nothing that Turkey brings in for us that we can't get through a couple of civilised free trade agreements.
In the end it comes down to the Americans, and their need for an Islamic ally that doesn't need to rule by fear. If America really wants to keep the Turkish model on track then it should be America signing NAFTA style agreements with Turkey and American visas handed out to Anatolian peasants.
Turkey is not our (Europe or Britain's) problem.
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