Posted 9:16 AM by Paul
VC - A young black man (he is from the West Indies) has just been awarded the VC. The first since the Falklands War in 1982 and the first non-postumous VC since the late 1960s. In an act of incredible bravery he survived an ambush and dragged his comrades out of burning personnel carriers with no thought to his own safety. He did this on two separate occasions. Apparently this all happpened last summer. This reminds me of the old adage that soliders don't fight for Queen and Country. They fight for their regiment and their mates. It is also very telling that none of this was reported at the time, possibly because he was badly injured and might have died. There is pretty obvious news management going on. A brave man who deserves his VC and all the attention but anyone who thinks this award at this time is unconnected with the General Election is just not paying attention

Posted 9:06 AM by Paul
Themed Birthday - Yesterday we went to Chessington World of Adventures a theme park aimed at smaller children on the outskirts of London just before you hit the stockbroker belt of Surrey. It was by way of a birthday treat for Emily who is 8 next week. It is an uplifting thing to hear her laugh. The weather was great and she spent much of the day skipping and dnacing her way between rides. So, in a week when Bush nominated Paul Wolfovitz (the man who brought us the Iraq War claiming casualites would be minimal and the whole thing self financing) as President of the World Bank we must hold on to an important fact. An American invented theme parks and in the main they are a massive improvement on what went before

Posted 8:42 AM by Paul
Intelligence

Parliament is about to relase a report from a powerful all party committee on the lessons to be learnt from the Iraq War. Usual stuff....British Armed Forces did a world class job etc. except for two surprising points

• It reveals that some British soldiers were armed only with blanks when they went into battle. Proof if we needed it that we were not prepared because we did not have enough time because the date of the war had been decided months in advance in Washington.
• The existence of "woeful intelligence" which "left troops expecting garlands of flowers" instead of the hostiltity of a population hardened by a bombing campaign against them"

The first point reminded me of my father's stories about life in the Home Guard during World War II. Wooden rifles, all night card games and nothing more than blind faith. If Hitler had made a full landing during 1940 he would have walked it. Well that's what dad reckoned anyway

The second point made me want to get semantical. We didn't need better "intelligence" in the sense of accurate information from our spies. We needed intelligence from our politicians as in the ability to reach a reasoned conclusion based facts and evidence. No one likes to be invaded by foreigners. Even if they are nice foreigners. Why on Earth would you welcome anyone who had bombed your kids. Even if they had done it with the best intentions.

If it wasn't serious it would be funny.