suburbanmusings

I have recently joined a Bloggers’ circle, named, appropriately enough, the Bloggers’ Circle. The idea is that each member should contribute four posts each month and comment on two blogs posted by other members.

Rowland Manthorpe has an interesting little post about luck, and why some seem to enjoy more of it than others. Rowland writes that chance is by definition events that are out of our control, but luck is something than we can, at least partially influence. Rowland quotes psychologist Richard Wiseman.

“Lucky people are social magnets who build “networks of luck”. They have a relaxed attitude towards life. They are open to new experiences. Lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings, and they anticipate good fortune in the future. They expect their interactions with others to be successful.”

Napoleon believed that luck was a personal attribute, rather than a matter of chance and when considering a promising young officer for promotion he is famously supposed to have declared, "Yes, yes I know he's brilliant, but is he lucky?”

Rowland writes that luck favours, not so much the brave, but the confident. I think this is an interesting point, but I think fortune and confidence probably feed off each other. For example, someone who has had a lucky start in life by being good looking, born into wealth or a loving family or by having a strong personality, is far more likely to be confident than someone who had the misfortune to be brought up in a dysfunctional family or experience bullying early in life. Luck breeds confidence and confidence breeds luck.

No-one ever said that life was fair or that it was necessarily easy; indeed chance can often intervene with devastating consequences for the most confident of people or with the redemptive consequences for those confidence is at rock bottom. While people maybe able influence the amount of luck they enjoy, surely they can’t control it entirely, and perhaps the most important thing is to savour every piece of good luck that comes our way.

In recent weeks the world’s attention has been grabbed by Swine Flu, economic turmoil, riots in China and human tragedy in Afghanistan, perhaps the best news recently has been the very lack of news to have come out of Iraq.

We are all aware of the bitter controversy over the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and, of course, the country’s subsequent descent towards a bloody abyss of bombings, kidnappings and civil war. At times it seemed as if US troops would be stuck in Iraq for decades, or that even if they did pull out, the country would tear itself apart in a genocidal civil war.

I’m not interested in writing about the rights and wrongs of the invasion in this post; that is an issue that is well documented and has been even more extensively debated. However, I am interested in looking at what the future may hold for Iraq, if the country does indeed have a long-term future and, on that front, the recent signs are encouraging.

On 30 June, Iraqis of all religions and races celebrated as US combat troops were pulled off the streets of every town and city in Iraq. Just two years ago it seemed for many in Iraq, and across the world, that this moment might plausibly take decades to achieve. Importantly for Iraq it was the huge reduction in violence seen in Iraq since the end of 2007, and not the terror imposed by Al Qaeda in Iraq or the Mahdi Army, which finally allowed Iraqis to reclaim their streets.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (by all accounts largely made up of Iraqi rather than foreign Islamists) and the Mahdi Army both sought to overthrow the national Government and impose their own rule on the country. The Islamist way of life wasa often brutally imposed on the people of the Sunni Triangle and the story of its empathic rejectection by Iraqi Sunnis is a story waiting to be fully told. Likewise Moqtada al-Sadr saw his Mahdi Army militarily defeated by Iraqi and US Forces in 2008; while the subsequent withdrawal of American combat troops has neutered his populist anti-occupation cause and the Mahdi Army has largely been relegated to Hamas-inspired welfare projects.

That is not to say that Iraq faces a peaceful future. Whatever one thinks about the American presence, the idea that the violence visited on the country was caused exclusively by the US occupation was a misnomer. Indeed the bomings and shootings have continued since American troops left Iraqi streets. Yesterday four Iraqi policeman were killed in separate bomb attacks in Anbar and Mosul. The day before three policemen, one Iraqi soldier, and a tribal anti-insurgent leader were murdered. A handicapped man was also shot dead in Mosul. The week before, four Churches were bombed in Baghdad. Clearly there are still groups that wish to overthrow the elected Government or impose their violent ideology on Iraqi society. Senior Iraqi General Babaker Shawkat Zebarir recently stated that the insurgency had been whittled down to hard-core cells, but lethal terrorist attacks could cotinue to afflict the country for “a year or two or three". For most other countries this would represent a nightmare vision, but Iraq is gradually awakening from its nightmare and the reduction in violence has allowed its citizens to star dreaming about their futures again.

The Iraqi Army passed its first really big test last week, when around five million Shi’te pilgrims descended on Baghdad to commemorate the death of Imam Moussa Al-Kadhim. In the past years such gatherings have been targeted by Sunni suicide bombers, but this year’s festival passed off peacefully, albeit with massive security measures in place. The next big test for Iraq is the general election in January 2010. Major threats to peace and stability in Iraq remain and there are many unresolved problems, such as the increasingly separatist and assertive Kurdish political parties, the large-scale disillusionment amongst Sunnis and the lingering, and still lethal, insurgent groups. But whatever happens it is clear that Iraqis once stared into the abyss, during the dark days of 2007, and devided to take a collective step back from the precipice. Shia politician Haidar al-Obadi recently told BBC News:

"There is no going back to a dictatorship or a one-party system in the country now . . . people have tasted democracy, they have worked on democracy, it is an operation not only at the centre, but also in other areas, in the governorates and in the regions. Nobody can enforce dictatorship again on this country."

Whether the opportunity for Iraqis to dream about a peaceful future has been worth the price paid by so many over the last six years is not for me to say. Yet, with democratic protestors being brutally repressed in Iran, and the Saudi Government as authoritarian and theocratic as ever, Iraq may yet act as well of stability and democracy in a troubled region.

I have been meaning to write about this issue for sometime, but in the past ten days we have seen ten snapshots of ten grinning, young, newly dead soldiers on the evening news and sensed the brutal, life-shattering grief of ten young army families. The last ten days provide some all too real perspective on what I mean to say.

I have previously written about my concern that the strategic objectives in Afghanistan have long been dangerously loose and ill-defined. Obama has gone some way to making-up for the incompetence of his predecessor by authorising an ‘Afghan-surge’ and by sacking and replacing the ineffective US Commander, General David McKiernan. Indeed 4,000 US marines have flooded into Helmand Province in an effort bring the wild and restive province back under the control of the Afghan Government. Although, in my view, the strategic aims of the Afghan mission remain dangerously vague, I am satisfied that with extra troops and the command of McKiernan’s replacement, General McChrystal and CENTCOM commander General Petraeus there is a chance that the strategic stalemate may be broken.

Despite the lack of clear strategy the Government, and the opposition, still consider that the war in Afghanistan is worth the fight, and the increasingly heavy cost. I’m inclined to say, that on balance, they may well be right. The crucial point is that the decision to fight a war is the most important decision that a Government can make, and in my view it should be at the very top of even the most pressing priorities.

This week I wrote about the pressing need to reduce Government spending. I firmly believe that this is the case, even if it means reducing education, health and international development funding. However, I also firmly believe that it is time to increase the defence budget, which has been steadily reduced since the end of the Cold War. If a Government decides that a cause is worth taking lives and sacrificing the lives of its own citizens, then there can be no priority more important. Everything should be done to ensure that the armed forces have the right equipment and manpower to do the job. Furthermore, if a Government decides that its citizen soldiers should risk life and limb, then it has a responsibility to provide them with the best equipment available to the job and the best care available should they be wounded. Clearly, despite the platitudes of Blair, Brown and numerous Defence Secretaries, the Government has failed on both counts.

Even when the Government has spent money on the armed forces it has been wasted on white elephants or projects aimed at safeguarding British jobs rather than providig useful equipment. For example the UK has committed to buying 183 Eurofighter Typhoons at £30 million each and two super-aircraft carriers at a total cost of £5 billion. The fact is that aircraft carriers are unlikely to be needed unless the Falkland Islands are re-invaded. Britain is unlikely to become involved in a future interstate conflict unless the US is involved, and the US has more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world put together, several times over. In the same way the Typhoon is only likely to be used in a future interstate war that would involve NATO allies, and again the US has the materiel to guarantee total air supremacy against almost any foe.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Empire and the rise of Islamism and failed states, the armed forces are likely to spend the next 20 years engaged in small-scale guerrilla conflicts such as in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. In these wars the navy and air force has little or no role to play; the army takes the lionshare of the risks and the fatalities. And for this role the army is chronically undermanned and underequipped. It is no exaggeration to say that Army landrovers are barely more armoured than their civilian equivalents. After suffering massively from IEDs in Iraq the US Army brought out a new generation of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles, which are impervious to all but the biggest IEDs. The MOD has bought some of these off-the-shelf vehicles but they have still failed to ensure that all frontline troops have access to these vehicles. The 9,000 or so British troops in Helmand have access to no more than a handful of helicopters, while the 4,000 Marines recently deployed to Helmand have more than 150.

If the Government believes we should fight for what we believe is right then it should bear the financial cost of doing so, which is only fair since it asks its citizen soldiers to make the ultimate sacrifice. Furthermore the MOD should move away from purchasing aircraft carriers and fighter jets in order to safeguard British jobs. Instead it should invest in better weaponry, MRAP vehicles, attack helicopters, transport helicopters, surveillance drones, more troops and better pay and conditions. Of course, in a system in which the MP representing the ship building town of Barrow-in-Furness can be made Defence Secretary, personal priorities may take precedence.

In 1992 John Major’s Conservatives scored an unexpected General Election victory over Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party. The Tory victory was partly due to the party’s use of the slogan ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ which adroitly exploited the electorate’s aspirational yearnings. Gordon Brown learnt a bitter lesson in 1992 and New Labour’s subsequent electoral successes were based on a promise not to raise the top rate of income tax and slightly Machievellian threats about potential cuts in public services under a Tory Government.

Despite abundant evidence that even a Labour Government will preside over public service budget cuts after 2010, Gordon Brown seems determined to run a campaign designed to provoke fear over public service cuts under a Tory Government.

Yet the Treasuary’s own figures suggest that there will be at least a 7% cut in departmental funding for public services between 2011 and 2014. The budget deficit for this year is expected to exceed £75 billion; interest payments on the national debt for 2009 alone will exceed £35 billion (the same as the defence budget). By 2013 the national debt is expected to be around 75%. In short the UK’s national debt will soon be unsustainable, unless drastic action is taken.

Brown has already reneged on New Labour’s pledge not to raise the top rate of income tax. The Laffer Curve suggests that raising the top rate of income tax can actually lead to a decrease in tax revenues for the treasuary, as the rich are given an incentive to avoid punitive taxation. Yet even if the rich are taxed ‘until the pips squeak’ it would not be enough to reduce the UK’s national debt to manageable levels.

When a private consumer faces economic uncertainty they reduce their spending, pay off their debts, put off frivolous purchases and aim to spend their money more efficiently. Governments should do the same. It is likely that we, our children and our grandchildren will be paying for the banking recapitalisation and the recession of 2009 through higher taxes. Yet we also have a once in a generation opportunity to reform a public sector that has become bloated and wasteful through two decades of unprecedented boom and Government largesse. The Government operates a £700 billion budget; it is inconceivable that efficiency savings cannot be made. In the 1990s Canada faced a similar public sector crisis but managed to reduce public spending by 20%, without significantly damaging its welfare state; indeed it is also riding out the world recession much better than most other countries.

Unfortunately Brown does not want to engage in adult debate with the electorate or respond to the problems that Britain faces. He simply wants to get re-elected. But Brown has surely misjudged the public mood. The electorate knows that the national debt is becoming unsustainable and surveys indicate that even the poorest workers in society show disdain for those who exploit the welfare state. It is likely that the Torys will win the next election, if not with a significant majority. Yet Cameron and Osborne have also proved reluctant to grasp the nettle of public sector reform. It is important for the future of the country, as well as the electoral success of their party, that they have the courage to do so.