Watched Die Another Day on arrival in Norfolk. Bond at Christmas is a bit of a tradition. Now, every Bond film stretches credulity a fair bit, but I thought this one was sillier than usual (think car chase round a hotel made of rapidly-melting ice in Iceland, where the cars don’t show a scratch!). It was worse for it.
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A police state? Crying wolf wont protect civil liberties
Here’s what I think:
A couple of dangerous assumptions here:
1. We used to have far fewer protections for civil liberties, so we shouldn’t complain about the present situation
2. New technology allows new intrusions to civil liberties- we should intervene in new ways because we can
I also think the writer is wrong to put (fully justified) anxieties about automatic and compulsory state collection of personal information (id cards, DNA databases etc) and the more questionable libertarian right to smoke in a public place in the same boat.
Where does this assumption that collecting reams of personal data for no immediate use has some kind of benefit come from?
I think the writer is quite right to say that the debate on civil liberties should be nuanced, and that both left and right can get it wrong by being too shrill. However, he then goes on to muddy the waters with some of his own faulty logic…
A friend wanted to know what I thought of the incident in the Gulf, where 15 British sailors were captured by Iranian forces.
I should begin by saying that being a blogger doesn’t and shouldn’t make me an expert on foreign affairs!
It’s interesting to note that something very similar happened in 2004, and also that several senior Iranian officers have recently been captured in Iraq, leading to Iranian threats to ‘retaliate’. So in one sense, it’s hardly a sensational development. Iranian forces are well used to the strategy of using hostages to gain leverage.
(I’ll assume at this point that the British sailors were in fact in Iraqi waters, and so ‘in the right’).
The fact that the media love a ‘hostage crisis’, with its extended denoument, plays into Iranian hands- the ability of the media to run images and simulateously ‘deplore’ them is very useful to Iran. TV pictures of uneasy hostages tap a rich vein of public anxiety.
The US and UK are in a terribly awkward position- they’ve painted themselves into a moral corner by labelling Iran as a ‘rogue state’, not to be bargained with, never mind conceded to. On the other hand, Iran is a much tougher nut than Iraq, from a military point of view.
The real diplomacy seems to be happening within the European and UN dimensions, behind closed doors (where real diplomacy should be). I’m hoping there’ll be a deal bashed out there, which the US and UK will try to dress up as something minor, while the Iranians celebrate it as a great coup.
Good comment here from Channel 4’s Jonathan Rugman.
The whole incidents highlights the fact that securing Iraq is not the same thing as invading it, but that could be another post…
