Then yesterday came a sudden failure of nerve on Dame Jackal's part, detectable both at the Times and at the Telegraph. The latter organ of reaction now goes on to raise the ineluctable BernieLewisite question, "What went wrong?" The answer goes like this:
| The military's ability to fight global terrorism is being hampered by an exodus of officers from the Intelligence Corps, with 20 per cent departing in the past three years, defence sources have disclosed. The Army is suffering significant losses of soldiers who have been lured into lucrative security jobs The use of a key weapon in fighting the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents, as well as Islamic terrorists, has been undermined by more than 100 officers being lured into highly paid private security jobs or becoming disillusioned at the way intelligence is handled, the Daily Telegraph has learnt. |
Notice that the Torygraph gentry have adopted the line that their Dame Jackal really was at one point better and brighter than the Godzilla of Crawford that she is constrained to subordinate herself to, and have adopted it without looking into its accuracy. I daresay it's all so stereotypical with them that they mistake the familiar for self-evident: "Me Greek Jane, you Roman Tarzan," as it were. [1]
Notice also that the journalistic gentry insist twice in three sentences upon "lured" -- plus elsewhere in the piece there are "defections" and then "lured" again --, a form of expression which Paddy would have thought a sort of lésé majesté against the Sacred Private Sector. Perhaps that intramural controversy was not, after all, irrevocably decided in the good old days of Baron Thatcheress? Mr. "Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent" manages to find quotees who sound positively antediluvian at times:
| "The corps now has to operate with people they would not normally fit into a post," a defence source said. "Majors are being put into a lieutenant colonel's job they are not up to right now." |
According to Lord Source, anyway, mere majors are so far down the totem pole that they might as well be other ranks altogether. If Dame Jackal's whole military establishment marchs to that tune, those who have been lured out of it are rather to be congratulated than censured, even by those of us who have not the honour to be rabid AEIdeologues. The lurees themselves will, if we stipulate that they were not hereditary Stupid Party types altogether, have been sufficiently frustrated by recommending this or that sensible consideration to the redcoat commanders only to see the contrary happen according to the dictates of Harvard Victory School MBA's. There is no need to assume that they all jumped ship out of pure shameless greed. [2]
Officials of the current Airstrip One régime are largely to blame, of course, as Party orthodoxy demands that they should be:
| Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said there was an indication that the Intelligence Corps was "so over-stretched that it may mean operations are compromised". He said: "They are being sent on a very high number of deployments but without intelligence we are working in the dark." He added that there had been a "complete failure" to understand the importance of intelligence, and the situation had not been helped by MI5 and MI6 "poaching" Intelligence Corps officers. |
It sounds altogether plausible to me that Mr. Liam Fox is working in the dark. Certainly he expresses himself obscurely on the BernieLewisite front:
(1) To say that an operation of aggression was "compromised" does not mean merely that it failed, but that it failed because it somehow became known to the evil opponent. If a shortage of "intelligence" gentry means that the redcoats go charging off cluelessly against the wogs, failures are likely enough without there being any question of "compromised."
(2) Mr. Fox is almost as disrespectful of Her Brittanic Majesty's violence professionals as Dr. Cordesmann was the other day with his "defeat" and "weakness." The quasiminister verbally agrees with the neocomrade about British "failure," only specifying that it is "complete failure to understand the importance of intelligence." The specification is inaccurate and misleading, for most of the redcoats' troubles would be far better characterized as Cordesmanniacal "weakness," especially if we include their being too weak to handle the Rancho Crawford cowpokers as well as too weak to clobber the restless natives.
(3) The Stupid Party quasiminister suffers from departmentalism, it looks like. If he believes in Kiddie Krusadin' at all, then MI5 and MI6 are just as much krusaders as anybody out in the neocolonies. If he considers that the minions of Gordon Brown have been misallocating Dame Jackal's resources, let him discuss the issue in those terms. It is scarcely a "failure to understand the importance of intelligence" on the minions' part to consider defence of the realm more urgent than the bigmanagement of distant indigs. They may be mistaken about that point, but if so, it is certainly not because they misunderstand "intelligence" in the violence profession's sense. [3]
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[1] There's not much left of the former Laughin' and Grief in the Brit curriculum, I hear, but anything classical at all would beat most of the holy Homeland's Knights of Western Civ.
[2] Some of them are not "defecting" from the Kiddie Krusade at all, it seems:
| International security companies are poaching them with offers of £125,000, tax-free, for a year in Baghdad including three months' leave. By contrast, a major in the Army would earn around £47,000. |
One might speculate, indeed, that some lurees are only taking a sort of sabbatical to study the braniac methodology behind the Ever-Glorious Surge of 07™, with ardent hopes of learning all the fine points of Neo-MacNamaran Counterinsurgency at the very feet of Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton and West Point. Or, on the other hand, maybe not. I doubt His Nibs shares much of his transcendental braininess with "international security companies," but naturally that is just my guesswork.
The Torygraphers (and those international security companies) pretty clearly think of "intelligence" in a geopoliticsitarian or Soc. Sci. way rather than an Area Studies way. Their "intelligence" is an all-purpose universal know-how rather than anything to do with merely local details. Lord Source may think of it as a component of the inbreed master-class habit of command, to be sure. Both these attitudes may have more to do with "What went wrong?" than anything Mr. Harding explicitly discusses. He does, however, say
| The role of the Intelligence Corps, particularly in defeating the IRA in Northern Ireland, has been recognised as crucial in the fight against terrorism. |
which cuts both ways, I should think. Now that Paddy has forgotten his native language, eighty or ninety percent of the local details in Occupied Ireland are common knowledge on the part of the redcoat "intelligence" gentry, which is not exactly the case in New Afghanistan or the former Iraq. But God knows best.
[3] New Labour could easily score some demagogic (?) points against Mr. Fox and the Torygraphers and their Party hereabouts. It seems a safe bet that most Airstrip One subjects would agree that preventing more excitements at home is more important than helping the militant extremist Republicans rule the world elsewhere. Like Mr. Brown and the minions of Labour, the Brit street may be right or wrong in their judgments. It is no business of Paddy, or any other foreigner, to make such judgments for them; that would be to treat them as if they were mere neo-Iraqis!
All the same, if Liam Fox talks rubbish, one may object without thereby attempting to dictate anybody's judgments about aggression and occupation policy, not even Mr. Fox's own. Let him think of better arguments for what his hormones urge, that is all one asks.
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