© Reuters / Agencja GazetaiMore than five thousand air, sea and ground troops take part in a multinational NATO maritime exercise BALTOPS in the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the resolve of allied and partner forces to defend the Baltic region near Ustka, Poland June 17, 2015.
It calls to mind one of Britain's worst military defeats, suffered at the hands of the Japanese, when 100,000 troops and sailors were marched into captivity after the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942. Winston Churchill called it "the largest capitulation in British history." Many of the British troops never even fired a shot before surrendering, thus adding to the humiliation and ignominy of their defeat at the hands of a much smaller force. The British commander responsible for the surrender, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, earned himself a cold place in history as a consequence.
A major reason for the defeat and surrender of an island that was considered a key and strategically vital part of the British Empire was that the guns of the British defenders were pointed in the wrong direction; they'd been expecting the Japanese attack to come from the sea rather than through the jungle and swamps of the Malay Peninsula behind them.
Today, in 2015, British guns are not only pointed in the wrong direction they are pointed at the wrong enemy. The most recent terrorist atrocity, carried out last week against tourists in Tunisia, has resulted in the most British victims since the 7/7 attacks in London which ended in the deaths of 52 innocent civilians. On the same day as the Tunisian attack, a terrorist atrocity was carried out in France, while in Kuwait a suicide bomber attacked a Shia mosque.
Meanwhile, in Iraq and Syria, the so-called Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS/ISIL) and other Salafist terror groups continue to kill, slaughter, and butcher men, women, and children. All this is happening while the West continues to make a virtue of impotence, more concerned with directing its ire against a country, Russia that has been at the forefront of resisting terrorism at home and abroad.
Comment: Of course Russia and the West "fight" terrorism for different reasons. The West sends terrorists into territories it couldn't otherwise access, and "cleans up" afterwards:
The US's farcical war against ISIS is falling apart
Yes, without doubt, you couldn't make it up.
Every day that IS exists it grows stronger; its vile ideology becomes more entrenched and grows more attractive to ever more young disaffected Muslim men across the world. They are not attracted to the group's religious doctrine so much as the opportunity to join a cause that allows them to feel powerful as opposed to the powerlessness of their current predicament in a world underpinned by the anarchy of a free market that breeds poverty, despair, and injustice.
© Reuters / Anna Krasko / Agencja GazetaUnits from NATO allied countries take part in the NATO Noble Jump 2015 exercises, part of testing and refinement of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) in Swietoszow, Poland June 18, 2015.
The crisis and chaos that has engulfed the Middle East as a direct result of the West's role in the region increasingly threatens civilians everywhere, including Russia, which is why it remains unconscionable that the West remains intent on treating Moscow as an enemy rather than a partner in a struggle against one of the gravest threats to modernity and civilization the world has faced. Furthermore, this cognitive dissonance, this departure from reality, informs an air campaign that has failed utterly in its stated objective of degrading the power of IS and stemming its advance. When it suffers a reverse in one part of Syria or Iraq, it advances in another, butchering civilians wherever it appears.
Comment: Obviously it's NATO itself that is the gravest threat to modernity and civilization - ISIS are their handmaidens, as the author points out.
The question needs to be asked: Where is the 30-40,000 strong rapid reaction force to counter the barbarism of ISIS? Where is the determination to contain a state - the so-called Islamic State - that violates every moral and ethical principle of humanity in its treatment of minorities, women, children, and natural justice?
There is no more grievous indictment of the policy being undertaken by the West than the fact that a large swathe of the world is now a no-go area for tourists and visitors. The impact of the attack in Tunisia, for example, will be measured in a loss of a tourism industry that is vital to that country's ability to maintain a nascent democracy that is balanced precariously on the edge of sustainability, thus making the growth of extremism and terrorism there more rather than less likely.
This lamentable state of affairs is even more grotesque when we consider that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. This was a war that saw the West and the Soviet Union unite against a common enemy, fascism, in the interests of humanity. Those who fought and sacrificed and suffered immeasurably in that war would be well within their rights to judge the current generation of leaders harshly over their lack of statesmanship and foresight in understanding who and what the real enemy is, and where the real threat to global peace and stability resides.
The barbarians are at the gates and it's time to wake up, else we're going to have a bloody disaster on our hands.
What would we have expected of this rapid strike force if it has been in place at the start of the Ukraine crisis?
Maybe European forces would have been able to block the border between Russia and Ukraine and ensure that no Ukrainian citizens manage to escape across the border to Russia