BOMBS-AWAY DON DOES DIPLOMACY (also,

BOMBS-AWAY DON DOES DIPLOMACY (also, does ‘Bombs-away’): I’ve written before about Bombs-Away Don suffering some illusions that in addition to being SecDef he’s also the Secretary of State… His latest diplomatic debacle has even set the tea-cups tinkling in 10 Downing St., it seems.
So there he was at a Pentagon press briefing today saying, essentially, that he doesn’t give a hoot whether the 44,000 valiant troops whom Her Majesty currently has in Kuwait join in the war or not. If it wd be too difficult for Tony (‘the lapdog’) Blair to commit troops to the campaign, BAD was saying, then fine, “we can manage with a workaround.” (A “workaround”, you’ll remember, is what the Pentagon also had to scrabble to do to deal with the recalcitrance from that darned democratic Parliament in Turkey.)
So while the teacups were still tinkling at BAD’s suggestion of British irrelevance, Tony got on the blower– to whom, I wonder? I need to check… to Powell? Or to BAD himself? And the message, loud and clear according to BBC-TV’s Andrew Marr this evening, was “you’re not helping”.
Marr said some people had tried to suggest that BAD thought that he was sensitively “helping” Tony get off the hook caused by his own parliamentarians’ recalcitrance, by, um, well, trying to take the pressure off him or something. But as Marr commented in an all-time understatement of the year, “Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t DO sensitive very well.”
So BAD tried to issue some kind of retraction… Maybe he should just leave diplomacy to Colin Powell?
Of course for Tony, this suggestion that Britain is nearly irrelevant to today’s global balance of power is deeply wounding. The Beeb’s Diplo Correspondent later huffed that “Of course, the US would have both political and military problems if there is no British participation in the war.”
Political problems– yes. A “coalition of the willing” containing only Albania somehow doesn’t inspire much confidence. But military problems? I doubt it. I should imagine that from the operational point of view, coordinating with the British forces may well be a real pain for the Americans.
… And meanwhile, this just in from the US military: They have now done a demo detonation of their latest, biggest, baddest piece of heavy ordnance, called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB (though the AP reports coyly that it has also come to be known unofficially as the Mother Of All Bombs.)
Actually, on behalf of mothers everywhere, I want to call for an end to the use of all these “Mothers of All …” references in a warlike context.
But anyway, it seems clear that the detonation of this 21,000-pound behemoth over a test-range in Florida, and its wide publicization, is part of the old ‘Shock & Awe’ routine. For more info on Shock & Awe, if I’ve got my permalinks working right here now, you can go here or here.
Moab, in case you’re interested, was Lot’s grandson: the fruit of his incest with his elder daughter. His descendants later settled the area east of the River Jordan. and various other things happened to them… Well, that’s the Old Testament for you.