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Stripping terrorist of citizenship, then and now

A few months ago the former PM Harper proposed the following.

The policy of stripping Canadian citizenship from those convicted of terrorist crimes and associated offences is a standard affront to international laws and tends to sit uncomfortably with domestic laws as well. But it fits in well within this economy of manufactured fear.

Apologists for it have come out everywhere, and Harper can count on substantive legal opinion to back his claim. If you can have citizenship removed in circumstances of fraud, you can certainly have it pinched off you if you are a convicted terrorist.

This also elicited the following response from the BC Civil Liberties Assocation.

It’s official – second class citizenship goes into effect

Last Friday, part of Bill C-24 went into effect, officially creating a two-tier citizenship system.

Today the French suggested the following.

Hollande said he wanted French law to allow dual nationals to be stripped of their French citizenship if they were convicted of terrorism and dual nationals to be banned from entering France if they presented a “terrorism risk”.

Notice the similarity with the proposed Canadian legislation which according to CBC, the “Conservative-drafted law, known during the legislative process as Bill C-24, strips dual nationals of their citizenship if they are convicted of terrorism or high treason, among other serious offences.” It will be interesting to see how the same pundits respond to this move by the French.

In an earlier post on this blog, it was suggested that fight against Muslim terrorist will only commence when the following condition is met.

When the French intellectuals come to realize the threat that Islam poses.

Once that happens all the apologists and idiots will be brushed aside.

This is the first small step in that shift in thinking. Now that the ‘enlightened and sophisticated’ Europeans are adopting the same ‘discredited’ strategy, will the leftist around the world fall in lockstep?

Trudeau’s ‘novel’ idea to fight ISIS

From the CBC, emphasis added.

“We made a clear commitment in the campaign to stop the bombing mission by Canadian jets and replace it with a role for Canada that is still a serious military role, but leaned more towards training of local troops to be able to bring the fight directly to ISIL,” he said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). “That’s the commitment we made very clearly throughout the campaign and we have a mandate to do that.”

Did he forget this news story from two-months ago?

A $500m effort to train Syrian forces against the Islamic State has resulted in only a handful of fighters actively battling the jihadi army, the top military commander overseeing the war has testified.

“We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd Austin, commander of US Central Command, told a dissatisfied Senate armed services committee on Wednesday.

The training initiative is Barack Obama’s linchpin for retaking Syrian territory from Isis. The Pentagon anticipated in late 2014 that it would have trained 5,000 anti-Isis Syrian rebels by now.

US, with its global outreach and military infrastructure, was unable to do this and Canada is going to do down the same path? Good luck with that.

Paris attacks and it-is-all-Bush’s-fault meme

Inevitably the leftist press will circle back and state that ‘only if Bush hadn’t attacked Iraq’ this would have never happened. With that in mind it is instructive to recall some facts.

An op-ed in the liberal NYT in 2003.

President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a ”free and peaceful Iraq” that would serve as a ”dramatic and inspiring example” to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time. But it is not one that Mr. Bush has devoted much effort to selling to the American people. Most Americans would certainly rally around the idea of a strong, stable and open government in Iraq. But they haven’t been prepared for the cost of such an undertaking. For most people, the vision of a new gulf war is one of relatively quick victory, not years of American occupation.

In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, the president described an undertaking that resembled American efforts in post-World-War-II Japan and Germany. This week Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, said he believed that hundreds of thousands of soldiers would have to remain on Iraqi soil to create a stable environment for democratic change. Mr. Bush, a man who ran for office scoffing at the idea of ”nation-building,” is now betting his presidency on that idea.

Notice the ‘expansive vision.. instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction’ but for the current crop of leftist the only thing that matters is the letters W, M & D..

Joe Biden in 2010, emphasis added.

I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government

Barrack Obama in 2011, emphasis added.

Iraq’s future will be in the hands of its people.  America’s war in Iraq will be over” he remarked.  And “Iraq is not a perfect place.  It has many challenges ahead.  But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.  We’re building a new partnership between our nations.

Obama and his administration took ownership of Iraq and if Iraq is one of those ‘root cause’ then the blame lies with Obama..

So who do you think is winning?

Female-defence-ministers-010

Above: The defence ministers of Sweden, Norway, Netherlands and Germany.

 

Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu speaks in front of the Russian flag while attending a news conference after a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Phung Quang Thanh (not pictured) in Hanoi March 5, 2013. Shoigu is in Vietnam from March 4 to 5. REUTERS/Kham

The Defence Minister of Russia, Sergei Shoigu

Which countries are accomplishing their geostrategic goals more effectively these days? Germany? or Russia?

And while we are on the subject, here is something for you from the indomitable Fred Reed, called the “Petticoat Military”. You know what he is saying is true. Why is it impossible to say this publicly?

 

OK, to the female Rangers. I don’t remember exactly when the campaign to put women in the combat forces began, but as years went by the push grew. From the beginning, it was fraudulent. At first the services made small, whimpering noises of dissent, and ran tests. (If interested in the subject, read here.) Every experiment failed. The main problem, though not the only one, is that women are weaker, far weaker, than men. This had to be hidden, and was. Standards were lowered and lied about.

Instead of real pushups, women could keep their knees on the ground. Instead of pull-ups, they could hang from the bar with their elbows bent. My friend Kate Aspy, a Harvard grad who enlisted in the Army, called the idea a disaster after going through Army boot. The Navy found women  to be useless at damage control, and then hid the results. Military Medicine, then available only in the Pentagon’s library, noted that women had four times as many training injuries as men, usually sprains and stress fractures. They peed in their pants in jump school. Female medics couldn’t lift stretchers. The officer corps went along with this. Why? Their careers.

Things got positively silly. Female “soldiers” avoided drinking water on field exercises because they were afraid that the men would watch them peeing through TOW sights–which in fact they would have, armies not being genteel; consequently they suffered dehydration. Female helicopter mechanics couldn’t carry their tool boxes. Female troops in Afghanistan suffered skeletal damage because their joints are lightly built and they can’t handle the weight of a combat load. Always–always–when there was heavy physical work to do, the men did it and the women watched. They couldn’t lift crates of 81 mm mortar rounds, much less unload a six-by under fire. On and on and on.

The sexual problems were endless. I encountered scandal after scandal. Enlisted male instructors used their rank to take advantage of females under them, so to speak. A squad of thirteen men worked together as a team, but add a female and they all began trying to get into her pants–which women frequently used.

And so forth, ad infinitum.

When will the bullshit stop? Answer: never, not until we lose some colossal war.

Victory in Europe Day, May 8th, 1945

vets

Seventy years later, I want you to know a fact that will put much of World War 2 into perspective. For every dollar the US spent on fighting Japan, it spent $10 fighting the National Socialist regime in Europe.

Whether the Germans should be flattered it took so much to defeat them, or the Japanese insulted that it took so little, is beyond calculation, but that is the fact.

American Thanksgiving and Puritan Geopolitics in the Americas

 

Puritan Settlement

The painting “Desembarco de los Puritanos en America,” or “The Arrival of the Pilgrims in America,” by Antonio Gisbert shows Puritans landing in America in 1620. By Antonio Gisbert (1834-1902) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Summary

The first winter took many of the English at Plymouth. By fall 1621, only 53 remained of the 132 who had arrived on the Mayflower. But those who had survived brought in a harvest. And so, in keeping with tradition, the governor called the living 53 together for a three-day harvest feast, joined by more than 90 locals from the Wampanoag tribe. The meal was a moment to recognize the English plantation’s small step toward stability and, hopefully, profit. This was no small thing. A first, deadly year was common. Getting through it was an accomplishment. England’s successful colony of Virginia had had a massive death toll — of the 8,000 arrivals between 1607 and 1625, only 15 percent lived.

But still the English came to North America and still government and business leaders supported them. This was not without reason. In the 17th century, Europe was in upheaval and England’s place in it unsure. Moreover, England was going through a period of internal instability that would culminate in the unthinkable — civil war in 1642 and regicide in 1649. England’s colonies were born from this situation, and the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and the little-known colony of Providence Island in the Caribbean were part of a broader Puritan geopolitical strategy to solve England’s problems.

Analysis

Throughout the first half of the 17th century, England was wracked by internal divisions that would lead to civil war in 1642. Religion was a huge part of this. The dispute was over the direction of the Church of England. Some factions favored “high” church practices that involved elaborate ritual. The Puritans, by contrast, wanted to clear the national religion of what they considered Catholic traces. This religious crisis compounded a political crisis at the highest levels of government, pitting Parliament against the monarchy.

By the beginning of the 17th century, England had undergone centralizing reforms that gave the king and his Parliament unrestricted power to make laws. Balance was needed. The king had the power to call Parliament into session and dismiss it. Parliament had the power to grant him vital funds needed for war or to pay down debt. However, Parliament had powerful Puritan factions that sought not only to advance their sectarian cause but also to advance the power of Parliament beyond its constraints. Kings James I and his son Charles I, for their part, sought to gain an unrestrained hold on power that would enable them to make decisive strategic choices abroad. They relied, internally and externally, on Catholics, crypto-Catholics and high church advocates — exacerbating the displeasure of Parliament.

Both kings continually fought with Parliament over funding for the monarchy’s debt and for new ventures. Both dissolved Parliament several times; Charles ultimately did so for a full 11 years beginning in 1629.

 

 

europe_circa_1600 (1)

Europe in 1600

Spain was England’s major strategic problem on the Continent. Protestant England saw itself as under constant threat from the Catholic powers in Europe. This led to problems when the people came to see their leaders, James I and his son Charles, as insufficiently hostile to Spain and insufficiently committed to the Protestant cause on the Continent. In order to stop mounting debt, shortly after taking power James made the unpopular move of ending a war with Spain that England had been waging alongside the Netherlands since 1585. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War broke out in the German states — a war that, in part, pitted Protestants against Catholics and spread throughout Central Europe. James did not wish to become involved in the war. In 1620, the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, a relative of Spain’s King Philip III, pushed Frederick V, the Protestant son-in-law of England’s King James, out of his lands in Bohemia, and Spain attacked Frederick in his other lands in the Rhineland. The English monarchy called for a defense of Frederick but was unwilling to commit to significant military action to aid him.

Puritan factions in Parliament, however, wanted England to strike at Spain directly by attacking Spanish shipments from the Americas, which could have paid for itself in captured goods. To make matters worse, from 1614 to 1623, James I pursued an unpopular plan to marry his son Charles to the Catholic daughter of Philip III of Spain — a plan called the “Spanish Match.” Instead, Charles I ended up marrying the Catholic daughter of the king of France in 1625. This contributed to the impression that James and Charles were too friendly with Spain and Catholicism, or even were secret Catholics. Many Puritans and other zealous promoters of the Protestant cause began to feel that they had to look outside of the English government to further their cause.

Amid this complex constellation of Continental powers and England’s own internal incoherence, a group of Puritan leaders in Parliament, who would later play a pivotal role in the English Civil War, focused on the geopolitical factors that were troubling England. Issues of finance and Spanish power were at the core. A group of them struck on the idea of establishing a set of Puritan colonial ventures in the Americas that would simultaneously serve to unseat Spain from her colonial empire and enrich England, tipping the geopolitical balance. In this they were continuing Elizabeth I’s strategy of 1585, when she started a privateer war in the Atlantic and Caribbean to capture Spanish treasure ships bound from the Americas. Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were part of this early vision, but they were both far too remote to challenge the Spanish, and the group believed that the area’s climate precluded it from being a source of vast wealth from cash crops. New England, however, was safe from Spanish aggression and could serve as a suitable starting point for a colonial push into the heart of Spanish territory.

The Effects of Spanish Colonization

Spain’s 1492 voyage to the Americas and subsequent colonization had changed Europe indelibly by the 17th century. It had complicated each nation’s efforts to achieve a favorable balance of power. As the vanguard of settlement in the New World, Spain and Portugal were the clear winners. From their mines, especially the Spanish silver mine in Potosi, American precious metals began to flow into their government coffers in significant amounts beginning in 1520, with a major uptick after 1550. Traditionally a resource-poor and fragmented nation, Spain now had a reliable revenue source to pursue its global ambitions.

 

spanish-colonies
Spanish Colonies in the Carribbean

This new economic power added to Spain’s already advantageous position. At a time when England, France and the Netherlands were internally divided between opposing sectarian groups, Spain was solidly Catholic. As a result of its unity, Spain’s elites generally pursued a more coherent foreign policy. Moreover, Spain had ties across the Continent. Charles V was both king of Spain and Holy Roman emperor, making him the most powerful man of his era. He abdicated in 1556, two years before his death, and divided his territories among his heirs. His son, Philip II of Spain, and Charles’ brother, Ferdinand I, inherited the divided dominions and retained their ties to each other, giving them power throughout the Continent and territory surrounding France.

Despite having no successful colonies until the beginning of the 17th century, England did see some major benefits from the discovery of the Americas. The addition of the Western Atlantic to Europe’s map and the influx of trade goods from that direction fundamentally altered trade routes in Europe, shifting them from their previous intense focus on the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean to encompass an ocean on which England held a unique strategic position. The nearby Netherlands — recently free from Spain — enjoyed a similar position and, along with England, took a major new role in shipping. By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch had a merchant fleet as large as all others combined in Europe and were competing for lands in the New World. Sweden, another major European naval power, also held a few possessions in North America and the Caribbean. (This led to curious events such as “New Sweden,” a colony located along the Delaware River, falling under Dutch control in the 1650s and becoming part of the “New Netherlands.”)

England’s Drive Into the New World

In spite of its gains in maritime commerce, England was still far behind Spain and Portugal in the Americas. The Iberian nations had established a strong hold on South America, Central America and the southern portions of North America, including the Caribbean. Much of North America, however, remained relatively untouched. It did not possess the proven mineral wealth of the south but it had a wealth of natural capital — fisheries, timber, furs and expanses of fertile soil.

However, much of the population of the Americas was in a band in central Mexico, meaning that the vast pools of labor available to the Spanish and Portuguese were not present elsewhere in North America. Instead, England and other colonial powers would need to bring their own labor. They were at a demographic advantage in this regard. Since the 16th century, the Continent’s population had exploded. The British Isles and Northwest Europe grew the most, with England expanding from 2.6 million in 1500 to around 5.6 million by 1650. By contrast, the eastern woodlands of North America in 1600 had around 200,000 inhabitants — the population of London. Recent catastrophic epidemics brought by seasonal European fishermen and traders further decimated the population, especially that of New England. The disaster directly benefited Plymouth, which was built on the site of the deserted town of Patuxet and used native cleared and cultivated land.

After its founding in 1620, Plymouth was alone in New England for a decade and struggled to become profitable. It was the first foothold, however, for a great Puritan push into the region. In time, this push would subsume the tiny separatist colony within the larger sphere of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This new colony’s numbers were much higher: The first wave in 1630 brought 700 English settlers to Salem, and by 1640 there were 11,000 living in the region.

Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were different from nearby Virginia. Virginia was initially solely a business venture, and its colonists provided the manpower. New England, by contrast, was a settler society of families from the start. Both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were started by English Puritans — Christian sectarians critical of the state-run Church of England. Plymouth’s settlers were Puritan separatists who wanted no connection to England. Massachusetts Bay’s colonists were non-separatist Puritans who believed in reforming the church. For both, creating polities in North America furthered their sectarian political goals. The pilgrims wanted to establish a separate godly society to escape persecution; the Puritans of Salem wanted to establish a beacon that would serve to change England by example. Less known, however, is that the financial backers of the New England colonies had a more ambitious goal of which New England was only the initial phase.

In this plan, Massachusetts was to provide profit to its investors, but it was also to serve as a way station from which they could then send settlers to a small colony they simultaneously founded on Providence Island off the Miskito Coast of modern Nicaragua. This island, now part of Colombia, was in the heart of the Spanish Caribbean and was meant to alter the geopolitics of Central America and bring it under English control. It was in this way that they hoped to solve England’s geostrategic problems on the Continent and advance their own political agenda.

Providence was an uninhabited island in an area where the Spanish had not established deep roots. The island was a natural fortress, with a coral reef that made approach difficult and high, craggy rocks that helped in defense. It also had sheltered harbors and pockets of fertile land that could be used for production of food and cash crops.

It would serve, in their mind, as the perfect first foothold for England in the lucrative tropical regions of the Americas, from which it could trade with nearby native polities. In the short run, Providence was a base of operations, but in the long run it was to be a launchpad for an ambitious project to unseat Spain in the Americas and take Central America for England. In keeping with Puritan ideals, Providence was to be the same sort of “godly” society as Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, just a more profitable one. Providence Island would enable the English to harry Spanish ships, bring in profit to end disputes with the crown and bolster the Protestant position in the Thirty Years’ War.

 

plymouth_colony

But while Massachusetts Bay would succeed, Providence would fail utterly. Both Massachusetts Bay and Providence Island received their first shipment of Puritan settlers in 1630. Providence was expected to yield immense profits, while Massachusetts was expected to be a tougher venture. Both were difficult, but Providence’s constraints proved fatal. The island did not establish a cash crop economy and its attempts to trade with native groups on the mainland were not fruitful.

The island’s geopolitical position in Spanish military territory meant that it needed to obsessively focus on security. This proved its downfall. After numerous attacks and several successful raids on Spanish trade on the coast, the investors decided in 1641 to initiate plans to move colonists down from Massachusetts Bay to Providence. Spanish forces received intelligence of this plan and took the island with a massive force, ending England’s control.

Puritan Legacies

The 1641 invasion ended English settlement on the island, which subsequently became a Spanish military depot. The Puritans left little legacy there. New England, however, flourished. It became, in time, the nearest replica of English political life outside of the British Isles and a key regional component of the Thirteen Colonies and, later, the United States. It was the center of an agricultural order based on individual farmers and families and later of the United States’ early manufacturing power. England sorted out its internal turmoil not by altering its geopolitical position externally — a project that faced serious resource and geographical constraints — but through massive internal upheaval during the English Civil War.

The celebration of the fruits of the Plymouth Colony’s brutal first year is the byproduct of England’s struggle against Spain on the Continent and in the New World. Thus, the most celebrated meal in America comes with a side of geopolitics.

________________________________________________________________

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Iraq and the Obama Parallels

It seems that the path Obama is traversing is one that is well worn. A chronological summary below.

1. Heck of a job Obama

2010

On Larry King Live last night, Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

2. Mission Accomplished

2011

In a speech at Ft. Bragg, NC on December 14, 2011, President Barack Obama said the United States was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

3. Flawed Intelligence

2014

Saturday from the White House South Lawn, President Barack Obama blamed “intelligence estimates” for not anticipating the speed in which ISIS would capture large sections of Iraq.
The president,who has been under harsh media criticism for likening ISIS to an Al-Qaeda JV basketball team in January said, “There is no doubt that their advance their movement over the last several of months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the the expectation of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdoDFV5lKaA

Now the mission has gone from sending 300 special forces troops in June to bombing missions in August and Obama is stating that “this is going to be a long-term project.

Of course it wasn’t suppose to be this way as one of Obama’s favourite blogger Andrew Sullivan, better known for this assertion that Trig Palin, Sarah Palin’s son, was actually the child of her daughter, Bristol, noted in 2007.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy….

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

Welcome to the reality-based world.

MH17: Russia won’t break, West will bend

As far as I can see, this thing is over. Nobody has effectively responded to the atrocity, Malaysia more or less upgraded some Russian-backed thugs to the status of something you could negotiate with and Moscow does not seem to be yielding any ground on the question of responsibility. Without American leadership …. ah, why even pursue that thought? I think this will trickle away and the world will focus on exhorting Israel to be reasonable.

Things about to get lot worse in Middle East

Prior to today, the biggest bank robbery was in Beirut:

Beirut, Lebanon: The world’s biggest bank robbery took place in 1976, when guerrillas in Beirut blasted the vaults inside the British Bank of the Middle East and escaped with safe deposit boxes containing £22m – the equivalent of £156m in today’s money.

Today we learned the following:

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (Isis) has become the richest terror group ever after looting 500 billion Iraqi dinars – the equivalent of $429m (£256m) – from Mosul’s central bank, according to the regional governor….

Following the siege of the country’s second city, the bounty collected by the group has left it richer than al-Qaeda itself and as wealthy as small nations…

This is not only going to make things worse in Iraq, but will also allow the Jihadis to fund their ideology across Middle East. Our only hope now is a great speech from Obama!

Dalwhinnie’s Micro Book Reviews – 2

Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, is a masterpiece. It benefits from a century’s distance from 1914 and its aftermath in 1939.

Recall that the successor to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife,  were assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, and that the real culprits were members of Serbian terrorist groups with deep penetration by and of Serbian military intelligence. Imagine for a moment the IRA  assassinating Prince Charles, and that the weapons, explosives and men had received training and money from the Irish government. Picture the outrage.

The Austro-Hungarians demanded Serbia put a stop to the incessant propaganda against them and wanted joint supervision of the investigation inside Serbian territory into the murders. The Serbians prevaricated. The Russians told them to hold firm and mobilized their armies.

Mobilization is the term for launching million man armies by rail against your neighbours; it was the equivalent of launching one’s nukes.

Once Russia mobilized, their allies the French mobilized. Once the Russians had mobilized, and pointed their armies against the Germans as well as the Austro-Hungarians, the Germans mobilized. German strategy called for holding the Russians in the east for as long as possible until they knocked the French out of the war by an immense enveloping swing through Belgium, the so-called Schlieffen Plan.

In answer to the question, who started it?, the book makes clear that Russia’s mobilization against both Austria-Hungarian and the German Empires escalated the Serbian crisis into a general European war.

For the Germans, a war on one front, the eastern, was militarily inconceivable once France had signed up with Russia.

And the German military (by contrast with their French counterparts and German civilian leaders) did not attach great importance to the question of British intervention, which was seen by most German planners as militarily irrelevant – another failure of strategic and political imagination.

Clark concludes:

The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of  war was a tragedy, not a crime.”

 

This was an exceedingly balanced, well-written account of how the cataclysm of World War 1 started. In that sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have brought to our attention the fact that total war, of the kind we had to fight in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, is no longer militarily and politically impossible. No soldier will counsel the use of the kinds of weapons we now have, which is why wars became proxy affairs between guerrillas ready to spend lives and major powers ready to spend money, but never between major powers ready to spend both at the same time against each other.