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Mark_Urban

Listed below are comments made by Mark_Urban between Wednesday, 27th August 2008 and Monday, 20th April 2009.

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The Price of Division 6:52pm on 20 Apr 2009 bookhim, Dtraynier and cping500,

none of you like the pottery shop argument - but its quite an important one in a democracy. A significant part of the anti-war movement - exemplified by the Liberal Democrats - got it. Having fought tooth and nail to prevent the war, they accepted the UK's moral responsibility to try and put things right after it. I recall the German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, having tried to halt the path to war and empower the UN said words along the lines of 'I didn't want this but now its happening its in our interests for it to be as quick and successful as possible'.
I'm not sure that you would use your line of argument in any other area of government policy. Would a failure of a campaign to close private schools mean you would boycott the entire education system ? Or at an even more basic level, would the failure of your party of choice mean you would boycott all future elections ?
Rallying around a joint policy that you may actually have vehemently opposed is an accepted part of any government system from the UK (where you get it in the rules of Cabinet government) to the old Soviet bloc, where the Marxist Leninists called it democratic centralism.
Naturally you would hope that government learns its lessons of a decision like invading Iraq and that's why I referred to the lesson 'first and foremost' being one about not taking a divided nation to war.

Gavburt and moraymint
thanks for your contributions too. keep writing :-)
A Plan for Afghanistan 3:45pm on 26 Feb 2009 shedlily/Clare
thanks for your comment and info about your own great uncle. The Commonwealth War Graves Commissions website CWGC.ORG will give you the exact location of his grave. Also they will have the gardeners take a picture of it for you if you want. I will look in for him if I am there in the near future.
MU
Pause for thought in Atufah 10:01pm on 20 Feb 2009 bookhimdano
no, naturally we are also there to search for inconsistencies in the IDF version too. Look out for our piece in Tuesday.

whateverfor
the local people were saying to us that they weren't there, they all fled. Our local producer confirmed the idea that the local population de-camped. It seems entirely understandable under the circs, but equally that's why one can't put much reliance on their assurances about what may or may not have been happening in their absence. What's wrong with using instinct ? 20 years of covering conflict tells me that often clear cut answers can be elusive.
As for my suggesting Palestinians were "largely responsible for the annihilation", that's nonsense that I can't accept. I didn't do that, I simply drew attention to something in the local mindset that emerged in answers to my questions.

The-second-principle
Self evidently there were attempts to fight the incursions because they claimed the lives of several Isareli soldiers and Hamas released video of some of its operations.
Equally the Ha'aretz comment you quote is a statement of the obvvious - that there was no organised military resistance of the kind you would expect from an enemy army. Either way, I would agree that we are talking about small scale guerrilla-type actions.
I think you are right that the Israeli army tried to send a signal to its troops and public that the 'gloves were off' in terms of using heavy force against perceived threats. The legality or otherwise of such orders will presumably be a matter for future court cases...
Obama could come unstuck in Guantanamo's legal treacle 3:36pm on 27 Jan 2009 filmsecurity

you've obviously got the President's Executive Order down in all its essentials. My blog is about the possible difference between pen strokes and real world outcomes. It was also about the political capital this order might afford the president's enemies.

consider this foreign page lead paragraph from , from The Times today (27/1/09),

"President Obama's plans to close Guantanamo Bay within a year appeared to be unravelling yesterday with the emergence of former inmates on terrorist websites, fierce opposition in the US, and a lukewarm response to taking detainees from the European Union".

I don't share the view of the Times journalists who wrote that - nb it seems to me to be quite premature to say the plan is 'unravelling'. But what you get from the Times piece is a sense of the practical difficulties and political opposition that are already showing themselves.
I don't doubt that President Obama will consider his convictions to be right and will plough on, trying to overcome these obstacles. That's what President Bush did too....
Israel's Gaza news management 3:33pm on 21 Jan 2009 Just reading through all your comments, I'm pleased to see this has been a good debate and, in most cases, a very reasoned one given the emtovie neature of the conflict.
A few thoughts now the ceasefire has come in...

- I'm glad those who suggested to me that reporters would not be allowed in after the ceasefire were either wrong or went unheeded;

- had reporters been allowed inside during the fighting, I don't think we can assume that we would have had an avalanche of anti-Israeli coverage. Asking people whether they blamed Hamas for what had happened and wanted them to stop the rockets would have been two of our first questions. Interesting to see our correspondent Aleem Maqbool interviewing a man in Gaza on Tuesday who seemed to be as critical of Hamas as he was of the Israelis.

- it would have been hard for us to verify the total casualty figures in there but we would have got a better feel for what proportion were combatants.

- yes, it would have been dangerous in there for us, had we been allowed in !

- lastly, one poster asked about the Egyptian border. BBC Corr Christian Fraser actually managed to get in via Egypt a couple of days before the ceasefire. So while there is a perfectly valid question to be asked about Egypt's policies vis a vis the Gaza border, they proved marginally more open to the press than the Israelis did during the actual fighting.
Have we failed to learn lessons of Iraq WMDs? 8:34pm on 13 Nov 2008 taliandtess
a fair question. I did a piece on the eve of the war showing how the Iraqis forces were not in a position to resist the Coalition and was pretty frank in the run up to the conflict about the limited intelligence and (what we believed) limited stockpiles of WMD. But, yes, it is fair to say that journalists to a certain extent well victim to a group think assumption that Saddam had something to hide, even if it was just the remnants of his pre-1991 chemical arsenal.

alphaptarmigan
I dont think we've been slow. My colleague Gordon Correra did a story back in February when the cuts were first proposed. The Sunday Times website had a story recently. Ours carried it forward in reporting that the cuts had already started and in getting the views of Brian Jones et al.

Huntingdonian (and Jessthedogblog might apreciate this too) - we know that some of the staff cuts are in Scientific and Technical intelligence and that the number of people working Counter Proliferation will fall too. Oddly, the documents we've seen argue that Counter Proliferation work will be more effective because they are creating a new directorate of counter proliferation under a one star officer ! More managers, fewer analysts...
A defence review by another name? 3:57pm on 23 Oct 2008 stayingcool
I have seen those stories about job creation through increased 'Keynsian' spending too and it suggests to me that there is a vigorous argument going on about where to cut and by how much. I believe there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that defence spending is not a particularly efficient way of creating jobs - high speed railway links and the government's school building programme are suggested as more efficient ways of turning pounds into employment.

threnodio
we don't need American permission to use our nuclear weapons but the UK is dependent in a broader sense on US techonology and cooperation - eg our missiles come from a common pool run by the Americans in Maine, and the nuclear warheads check their position by GPS satellites shortly after launch. All of this suggests the US could throttle British capability if they wanted to, but not that they could stop Britain from firing a missile at, say, Iceland, tomorrow if it wanted to.

Prof Valdiny
I believe the UK foreign aid budget may be cut too. I think your questions about aid are perfectly fair - perhaps you should fire them off to the Dept for International Development !
Redefining the US-Iraqi relationship 2:38pm on 01 Oct 2008 barrie
there are some big bases (notably Camp Victory (Baghdad airport), Tallil, al Taqudam, and Balad) that the US would probably remain for some time under any new security treaty but the US Ambassador, in an interview he gave for tonight's prog (Weds) insists the US has "absolutely" no desire for long term bases in Iraq. I must confess I've always found the 'war for bases' idea a little hard to credit. After all the US always has many options on land in the region + aircraft carriers. Also these land bases simply can't be used without the host government's say so - look at Turkey or Saudi Arabia's refusal to facilitate the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

chris morrell
the Americans call it the 'pottery barn principle' - if you break it, you own it. It was reported that Colin Powell actually said this, directly to President Bush some months before the invasion.

the gangofone
yes, I take your points. I agree the US achievement is the result of many different efforts, inckluding those by Iraq 'Awakening Forces', as Sgt Dupuis said in the report. I'm not sure that I am 'opimistic' about Iraq in the broadest sense - its government and parliament are still often maddeningly slow or inept. But clearly the country and the Coalition forces now sit in a much better place than they did 18 months or even one year go.
National interest v global good 2:15pm on 01 Oct 2008 LordBedd,
well, I suppose historically it works when nations - or at least those with veto power in the Security Council - perceive a common interest. There was a balmy time in the early nineties when many of assumed that would happen MORE often, but now we know better...

barrie
I like your point about those who succeed in politics. But isn't the same true of so manyu walks of life; the media or city to name but two :-)
19th century attitudes still at work in Russia 10:26pm on 27 Aug 2008 jacob
a lucid essay - I think you probably allowed yourself more words than I did, so I hope you'll forgive me for limiting my perspective. I agree that 'New Russia' does not seem to have revived its nineteenth century intelligensia - including the novelists, composers and artists who gave so much to the wider world. But maybe in its emphasis on money and discarding of even many Soviet-era cultural institutions Russia is truly 'modern'.

Steve-London
Those images you asked about came from old copies of Punch (the bears) and Illustrated London News. The Cartoon Museum has them, but we do not in downloadable form. You may be able to find some elsewhere on the net...

dennisj
Brilliant ! thank you :-)

threnodio
was not the quotation attributed to Lenin: "scratch many a Bolshevik and underneath the surface you will find a Great Russian chauvinist" ? Perhaps you or someone else can shed some light on this...

gangofone
certainly the Georgians committed a violent blunder. Perhaps you are right about western governments being tepid in their condemnation of it. I am at a disadvantage because I didn't look in detail at the time at what they said - 'I was on holiday at the time, your honour'.

leftieoddbod
well, I hoped from the above that it was apparent that I come to the study of Russia from a sympathetic position, nautrally in regard to events like Hitler's invasion. Those who forget history may be condemmed to repeat it, but equally those who cannot look beyond their history will find it very hard to build a future.

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