I'm going to start this with a truly idiotic idea in (fG)Britain:

A proposal for Britain and France to share their aircraft carriers was last night described as 'barking mad' by military experts.

Fury erupted after it was claimed that David Cameron was preparing to announce the measure in an attempt to save money.

As Theo says, "I think he jumped."

(If you're not familiar, look up 'Nelson' and 'Trafalgar')


Now for an example of, among other things, mission creep:
Malcolm Hay, who runs a business from his Kensington town house, sold hundreds of broken pottery pieces to a visiting dealer from Athens in 1999.

Eight years later, he was arrested by armed police at City airport in London. He was detained for two days after a European Arrest Warrant was issued claiming the items he sold had been stolen from the Greek state.

Under the warrant, endorsed by the Labour government six years ago as a fast-track process for terrorists, foreign prosecutors do not have to show evidence to the British courts, but simply demand that the person be “surrendered”. In Mr Hay’s case, court papers in Athens show the alleged offence should not come under Greek jurisdiction because it took place in London. Mr Hay, 60, calls the entire affair “a false stitch-up”.
You think maybe? So a law supposedly enacted to deal with terrorists is- SURPRISE!- being used for other things because- at the least- it wasn't properly limited; anybody surprised?
...“The English involvement is what I find more upsetting and disgusting. Having been brought up and lived in this country, with all its values, I find it really hard to understand.
Guy, you have to understand that the people behind this don't LIKE the old British values; it all stems from that.
“It has allowed Greece to extend their jurisdiction, because they do not need to produce the evidence. That is despite the alleged wrongdoings happening in Britain – even the dealer I sold to says that.”
And in a fine example of "No shit?",
David Blunkett, the former home secretary who introduced the warrant, said he had been “insufficiently sensitive” about how it could be “overused”.


Insty has a couple of e-mails from friends in Mexico and about the subject:
“Shit’s about to collapse in MX and points south. It is frightening. I am seeing first hand, am traveling. Total anarchy and terror unfolding.” Well, that’s encouraging. All those counter-insurgency and nation-building skills we’ve honed in Iraq might come in handy closer to home.

Or, you know, we could just legalize drugs and pull the rug out from under the cartels.

UPDATE: A followup email:

It’s so complex. The USA unilaterally legalizing weed, as many have proposed, wouldn’t stop the violence — there are any number of possible outcomes to that. The causes are complex and brewed over time… all I know is that all signs are pointing to a far worsening situation down there, and increasing impact here.

Militarizing the border isn’t a solution, but having seen what I’ve seen, I’d be terrified if we weren’t hardening that border right now.
You can argue about legalization, but if you think that would make the cartels fall apart, I think you're dreaming. On the border, one of the reasons that, despite voting for him twice, I'd still like to kick George Bush in the ass was his refusal to act to strengthen our borders; some of the politicians involved more deserve tar and feathers(at the least) to hanging.

While back I talked to a troop who'd been stationed at a base near the border who said it was a local joke that every so often the artillery people reworked their solutions for setting up on the parade ground to shell the city over the border; the crap going on in Mexico makes me wonder if it's really a joke.


Back to some Brits doing it right:
The Taliban in Helmand are being killed by the SAS on an "industrial scale" with a quarter of senior commanders killed since spring, leading to a dramatic drop in British casualties.
Hooah!
The number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) being laid by the Taliban in Helmand has reduced by a quarter in the last three months, which has been partly attributed to bomb-makers being killed by the special forces unit referred to as Task Force 42.

Intelligence figures passed to The Daily Telegraph show that at least 65 out of 240 senior Taliban on the "kill or capture" Joint Priority Effects List, with codenames such as Snowball, Commando Flood or Merlin, have been accounted for.

The SAS squadron operating in Helmand has had a significant effect on the Taliban's ability conduct operations, defence sources said.


I'll end this with Hanson on Obama's speech last night:
But there was something bizarre about his entire Iraq speech — it was as if it were being delivered by an exhausted Obama factotum, rather than the animate Obama of old. So we got a flat Iraq / flat Afghanistan / flat hope-and-change recession address. It almost seemed a chore.

Perhaps Obama’s ennui arises from the impossibility of squaring his circle. How could an erstwhile fierce critic of Iraq — as well as his diplomatic team (e.g., Biden with his loud wish to trisect Iraq, and Hillary Clinton with her “suspension of disbelief”)—convince us that Iraq was a “remarkable chapter”?

In September 2007, Senator Obama wanted all combat troops home by March 2008; a little later, he modified that by repeating that the U.S. should “immediately begin to remove our combat troops.” He declared that the surge, which saved Iraq, was not working and would have stopped it had he the power, and, indeed, cut off all funding. The point here is not hypocrisy, but rather an explanation of why Obama tonight seemed so unimpressed with his own argument.
Maybe he so aware of being full of crap that even the teleprompter couldn't help?
Also, the general framework of withdrawal was scheduled as part of the Bush/Petraeus status of force agreements with the Iraqis. Obama is to be congratulated for keeping to it, but chastised for suggesting that it was his own — and more so for not referencing the surge that made it all possible. So, again, it was a weird moment: Are we supposed to think that after 20 months a president is responsible for his own record (e.g., Bush need not be credited for his lonely, but critical support for the surge that allowed the withdrawal), but not quite responsible when it is inconvenient (Bush must be blamed for leaving a bad economy that Obama’s borrowing cannot cure)?