David Richardson

Mr Williams - the Chemistry teacher at the first school I worked at - had a great true story of when he was a probationer in a tough school in Liverpool. For his first lesson he decided to do the 'drop a bit of sodium in a tank of water' demonstration. Unfortunately, a freak accident occurred and the tank cracked. A tidal wave of water swept the jar of sodium on to the floor, and he did the 'drop a bit of water onto a jarful of sodium' instead - which resulted in the Science wing catching fire. The next week his tough class were all eager to see what he would do next! And in the middle of the lesson, the police walked in and took him away for questioning. His reputation was then made in that school.

One difference between the different original colonies was that the ones in the north tended to be founded by people with strong religious persuasions - mostly precursors of, or offshoots of various branches of non-conformist Protestant religious faiths - whilst the ones in the south tended to be business ventures (to bring crops like tobacco to the European market). My take on this is that the northern colonies were originally less concerned with establishing colonies which would be viable for other people outside their faith group, since they were mainly focussed on creating a new Jerusalem, whilst the southern ones were started by more hard-headed business people. I find it interesting that the Native Americans lasted much longer in the south than in the north …

Yes, I'm sure that the US troops are very professional, keen and ready to do their duty … but they don't live there. One of the signs which ought to have warned the politicians in the USA that something bad was going to happen was Sadaam Hussein's decision to open the armouries and distribute weapons to the population in the run-up to the invasion. I remember thinking at the time that despots don't usually hand out weapons - they usually try to retain their monopoly on violence. He obviously didn't think that the people he'd been oppressing would just turn their guns on him and his people … and they didn't. I'm not too well-informed about the exact conditions in Vietnam, but I wonder if there were quite so many light and medium weapons in the hands of the local population.

Yes … One of the things that's always intrigued me about US attitudes to the outside world is the way people expect everyone in the rest of the world to be motivated by exactly the same things that motivate Americans - except for nationalism. In other words, the Vietnamese/Cubans/Iraqis must be evil for not wanting their country to be dictated to by people they perceive as foreigners. However, if we can just find some who can be photographed drinking Coca-Cola, then we can claim that people in Vietnam/Cuba/Iraq deep down are on 'our side'. It strikes me that, once again, US servicemen are fighting against nationalists who are, ultimately, far more motivated than they are. Add in a bit of strong religious faith, so that you actually welcome the chance to die a martyr, and it adds up to a conflict which the US can never win. The only question is how many dead and broken bodies on both sides will be left behind. I think it would help us all if we asked the question "Who will be giving out the medals to the brave resistance fighters in Falluja?" In other words, we need to understand what it is that drives someone to attack vastly superior US forces with an AK-47. If it were largely coercion, then the fighting in Falluja would have been over the first day, as the coercers withdrew.

The Allies had every reason to believe that the strategic bombing campaign would fail … since the campaign the Germans waged from 1940-1943 against Britain also failed. One of the reasons the Luftwaffe switched to night bombing was that Beaverbrook had succeeded in replacing the aircraft the RAF were losing, despite a concerted effort by the Germans to bomb the aircraft factories. If 'we' could do it, so could 'they'.

One place to start from is a recognition that the beginning of a war is a sign of failure … and that there are seldom any winners. A UN with some real teeth ought to be achievable - it just needs some backing from strong countries, like the USA. Amongst the less palatable phenomena of recent years have been Israelis complaining that the Palestinian Authority doesn't crack down - whilst killing as many Palestianian policemen as they can … and Americans moaning on about how weak the UN is - whilst withholding contributions (as was happening until fairly recently), and doing everything they can to undermine the institution. Maybe the real peacekeepers of the 21st Century will be the Chinese. Perhaps they won't let their debtors squander their money on unnecessary wars! And since the USA is China's principal debtor … perhaps there's hope for us all.

And yet, the laws of war are very clear about this, which is why Serbs and Croatians are facing trial in The Hague. I haven't yet made this application, but the shoe fits absolutely. The fact that your enemies are defending themselves against invaders (which has a certain legitimacy in international law) doesn't absolve them from charges of being war criminals. Once again, you're right. One of the burdens we've had to carry since Nuremberg is that there was too much of 'victors' justice' about the process. Let's just hope that the USA finally approves of the International Criminal Court, so that we can start on making this process even-handed. It may be that we need to find different terms for the actions of Ariel Sharon and the private soldier in the British Army, but we also need to make sure that we don't put either of their actions into the category of "things that are acceptable".

Is this the Nuremberg defence - "I was just obeying orders"? I know that it's unpalatable to have the kinds of standards which we apply to soldiers from non English-speaking armies being applied to British and American soldiers, but, if we're to live in a world governed by laws and not by violence, how can we avoid it? This is not to say that US soldiers are war criminals solely for *being* in Iraq in the first place. However, when you direct fire at civilian areas where there is a high and known risk of heavy civilian casualties, then international law labels you as a war criminal, no matter how noble your intentions are. So, those soldiers and airmen who have done this have at least a prime facie case to answer. Passing the buck up the chain of command was just the kind of defence which the Nuremberg trials ruled out.

Thanks for the encouraging words, Raymond. One of my inspirations in this area comes from when I was doing sales training in London in the late 1980s. My teacher had worked for a while in the United States (for Dun and Bradstreet debt collectors!) and he told me of a presentation he'd been to given by one of the salesmen who earned more than $1 million per year in commission from the sale of life insurance to private individuals (in the late 1970s, that is). Grahame asked the presenter what made him different from, say, the salesmen who 'only' made $100,000 per year in commission. His answer was "I do the little things better". I can't say that I'm much good at the little things even now (I'm a bit of a big picture person myself), but that's what I aspire to!

I use Power Point as little as possible - mostly because everyone else uses it, and there's a premium in being different! (A bit like using a Mac in a world of PCs!) ICT stands for information and communications technology, as we all know. I think the problem is that most people get stuck on the 'I' and forget about the 'C' altogether. If you see your job as a teacher as being a purveyor of information, then you're out-competed by computers all the time. If you see it as being a communicator of values, strategies, methods, etc, then computers can start being put to extremely good use. We're going through an exercise in encouraging flexible learning (whatever that means!) here in Kalmar at the moment. My contributions all boil down to something like this: don't bother putting your efforts into producing flashy teaching materials, etc. Instead, get the small and boring things right (such as classroom design, teacher working hours and practices and administrative bottlenecks). The teachers have got the tools already (since hardly any of us use anything like the full capacity of our desktop computers) and they'll produce the flexible lessons once the boring stuff has been dealt with. Problem is, you can't go to a conference and present a paper on 'Getting the boring stuff right'!

The OnLine Educa 2004 Conference is taking place in Berlin from 1st-3rd December. You can read more about it from their website at http://www.online-educa.com/en/ I'm doing a small workshop on Friday afternoon (1430-1600) entitled "Today Småland - Tomorrow the World! Using Desktop Videoconferences to Learn English in Sweden". I'm basically going to be demonstrating how we use the Marratech system I've posted about on this Forum before. I can only be there on the Friday (my first flight leaves Kalmar at 6.00 am!), but it'd nice to meet up with any other Forum participants for lunch.

I heard on Swedish radio this morning that the Americans are in control of 70% of Falluja, and have sustained 12 killed in action. They claim to have killed 72 of their opponents. Does this mean that the 3 to 6 thousand resistance fighters the Americans were looking to kill and capture are cooped up in the remaining 30% of the city, for example? I find the low rate of casualties on the resistance side to be quite interesting. I wonder if it will keep this low as more news gets out.

I feel that Sir Hugh Dowding's contribution is often overlooked or downplayed. As I understand it he was the person responsible for developing the system of co-operation between radar stations/ground observers, strategic planners and fighter aircraft. In other words, the system which has later been adopted by more or less all airforces engaged in air combat. I understand that at the time the RAF commanders found it very difficult culturally to accept that their pilots' actions would be controlled by people sitting in bunkers in Northwood and other places. Sir Douglas Bader was one of the key figures in getting Dowding removed, resulting in the temporary triumph air wing approach of having large numbers of planes in the air in advance of an attack, with the decisions about which targets to attack being largely handed over to the pilots in the air. One disadvantage of this approach was that planes often ran out of fuel before engaging in contact with the enemy, or had to return to base more quickly. Dowding's tactics had been based on maximising the amount of effective time each plane spent in the air.

The question is going to be whether most of the Iraqi population support (or at least acquiesce in) the American actions or not. If they do, then the deaths of a few thousand Sunni Muslims in Falluja will soon be explained away and smoothed over. If they don't, then the Americans will be facing the usual equation about fighting a guerrilla war. I forget what the numerical advantage the regular forces need is, but it implies that the USA is going to have send more troops to Iraq than it possesses. In other words, if the Iraqis react in the way they've consistently reacted so far, the relatives and acquaintances of each person who is killed in Falluja will become supporters of the resistance. I'm sure that the Americans can blast their way into the centre of Falluja … but then they have to hold it for several years. It reminds me of the Afghan Wars in the late 1800s: the British could take Kabul … but then they got massacred a few months later either there or on the way back to India.

I'm going to be teaching Twelfth Night next term, so it's got me thinking once again about Malvolio - Shakespeare's revenge on the Puritans who were trying to close the theatres down, in one of my interpretations of this character. One point I make to my students (who're studying the culture and society of the USA at the same time) is that those Puritans who were being mocked by the London mob went off to America partly to set up a society where that wouldn't happen again (I read an interesting article in the Washington Post at the weekend about Karl Rove's success in re-electing Bush as being the revenge of the nerd!). Shakespeare was an ass-licker, a racist and an anti-semite in today's terms - but he was also a humanist and a pragmatist (at least as seen through his plays and the little extraneous evidence we have about what he thought and how he lived). So perhaps we have yet another historical conflict between people who see reality as it is (and try to work from there) and people who want to make a different reality in which their abstract ideas about how you ought to live actually work.

That was then … I was thinking about the more recent French colonial interventions in Chad and from Djibouti, for example. I expressed myself wrongly if I left the impression that I think that such interventions are easy. I wouldn't like to be a French soldier relying on air-power and armoured personnel carriers to save me from a crowd which was hundreds of times bigger than my 'crowd'. The impression I've received (partly from working with peace enforcers from the Swedish Army too) is that US soldiers enter into such situations with a much greater load of illusions than the more cynical French. One of the paradoxes of the intervention in Bosnia was that one of the most effective forces was NordBat (Danes, Norwegians and Swedes). When they were shelled by the Serbians, they retaliated immediately - mostly because the political stuff had been worked out in advance. The Serbians soon learned to leave them alone. Other units, however, would find themselves having to try to explain their situation to the politicos back home before they had permission to shoot back … with the result that by the time they received it, there weren't any targets any more. A lot of my contacts in the Technical Services of the Swedish Army have been offered big bucks to work with the Americans in Iraq, but the response is an automatic refusal. Even the lower-ranks in the Swedish Army know enough about the world to know that what makes the job of the Americans impossible is that they shouldn't even be trying to do it at all.

The film "The Three Kings" was a bit of a pot-boiler, but it had what I thought was some very significant scenes near the beginning when the three criminal US soldiers on the look out for loot rolled into an Iraqi town just across the border, which had been deserted by the Iraqi authorities. The first thing they see is a bloke being beaten up by two other men. The 'victim' was in plain clothes, whilst the attackers were in unmarked green uniforms. The Americans promptly rescue the victim and drive away the attackers … only to find later on that the victim was a Baathist, being attacked by Shiite resistance fighters, who'd just been challenged to rise up against Sadaam Hussein by the US President. Then they find a bunker, and down it there's a personable young man in civilian clothes, who speaks excellent English and likes the same kind of music they do. Later on, when this bloke has captured one of the Americans, he begins torturing him. The others later free their comrade and ask his torturer who taught him to torture like that. 'You did' is the reply … I've done two spells of working in the Gulf (the first time as an instructor in military English for the Kuwaiti Army) and this really rings true. Problem is, if a civilian like me has got insights like this from a little bit of time spent in the region + a popular film, why didn't the Pentagon's advisers, with their vastly superior resources, prepare their troops better? Some of the reasons must be down to personal factors … but there've got to be some systemic faults here too. I find the very different behaviour of French troops engaged in colonial wars (like the one in Ivory Coast right now) interesting. There they are with a couple of hundred troops amidst hundreds of thousands of armed civilians who could, presumably, obliterate them … and yet the French have generally achieved their military aims when they've intervened in such situations. Since the US Armed Forces are much better equipped than the French, surely the success-failure axis should lean the other way?

I live now in one of the most internationalist of countries, namely Sweden. However, I first really saw the impact the EU has had on my native country when we lived in London at the end of the 1980s. Our neighbour, Sean, was an electrician, and a typical Londoner, the kind of person who, a generation previously, would have made a virtue of never even having left the south-east of England. Sean had already worked in half-a-dozen European countries (including Sweden), and had lots of opinions about German coffee, Italian bacon, Swedish TV, etc, based on personal experience. So, I would say that people in the USA are more parochial in general than people in other western countries. The north Americans I meet here in Europe are nearly always amazed at how *small* Europe is (it takes around 15 hours to take the train from where I live to Paris). Think about one-and-half Californias (to use another of Julian Barnes' images) with 450 million people living in it. I'm sure that one of the major reasons we're so against Bush's adventurism and religious fanaticism is that we have close personal memories of where they lead … We sympathised with 9/11, but that sort of destruction was visited on large parts of a large proportion of the cities in Europe within living memory, so it wasn't such of a shock to us. One of the differences between a European visiting lots of European countries and an American visiting lots of US states is that you can't speak the same language everywhere and expect to be understood. This means that we are forced to acknowledge diversity, whether we like it or not. One of the frightening things about US forces abroad is their general assumption that everyone they meet is motivated by the same things that motivate Americans (and, indeed, secretly wish that they were Americans). You can see this tendency in the statements from Marines about what's going to happen in Falluja, right now. The Marines seem to think that when they roll into the middle of the city and start patrolling, then the grateful populace will thank them for getting rid of the 'terrorists' and then set about constructing US-style lives for themselves. What if the population see the 'terrorists' as being something more like the French Resistance?

Sorry it's taken so long to add this comment - I've been busy lately. This may very well be 'secular fundamentalism', but it was the type of secularism on which the USA was based. Just as the Electoral College mechanism was put there to prevent the emergence of an 'elected monarch', the separation of church and state was intended to prevent public affairs being infected with religion, as they had been so often in Europe in the centuries preceding the writing of the US Constitution. From where I'm sitting, it looks as though the true heirs to the Founding Fathers are turning out to be those very Europeans the Founding Fathers were trying to break away from, whilst the country they founded is looking more and more like a 17th century European power (perhaps a Holy American Empire?!).

Makes you wonder who owns Grid Learning Ltd, doesn't it! Why couldn't they just hand over some tax-payers' money to their friends directly?

I think that you could justifiably criticise 'all of them'. The problems with the officer class continued right through the inter-war period until the disasters of the Blitzkrieg and the early stages of the campaign in the desert and Barbarossa, i.e. until the old officer class who didn't think that it was the task of a gentleman to find out how to fight wars had been killed or captured. My dad was conscripted into the 5/7 Lancers in 1942, when they came back from a successful campaign against Rommel. In the Western Desert Rommel easily defeated the pre-war Lancers when they walked right into a trap. He decided to send the 'high value' soldiers back to Germany as prisoners of war, and the 'rubbish' back to the British so they would have to feed and water them. Problem was, he'd read too many school novels, so he kept the officers and sent the NCOs and other ranks back to the British! The British were then forced to re-constitute the regiment from the people they had left. During the highly successful campaign of the 5/7 Lancers in Europe after Normandy, the Colonel was the man who had been the pre-war colonel's batman (personal servant) in 1939 and his staff had largely been sergeants and sergeant-majors at the beginning of the war. True to form, as soon as the prisoners-of-war were liberated, the successful staff were transferred out and the unsuccessful ones put back in charge, but, fortunately, the war was almost over, so they managed to avoid screwing up in the little time left available. Interestingly enough, in Sweden at this time, the Swedish Army was deployed to the Finnish and Norwegian borders. I've met many people who were NCOs and other ranks at the time, and many of them have stories of who it was who was designated to shoot the captain if the Germans attacked, so that he couldn't order them to go over to the German side.

One of the factors which I think many Europeans (like myself) often forget is the isolationist nature of the current US majority. The war in Iraq is the kind of thing they can do, but look at how difficult it is becoming for even a hyperpower like the USA to sustain even a relatively small army in Iraq. This makes it even more difficult for them to do another Iraq in Iran. Can you imagine any other military powers taking part in a joint invasion of Iran? And bear in mind that Iran has a population of 70 million (as against Iraq's 25 million), most of whom also live in cities. I'm sure you'd get a few token planes from the RAF and the Italian Air Force, but the British Army doesn't have the capacity to run expeditionary forces in two Middle Eastern countries at once. I don't underestimate the US capacity to do harm to the rest of the planet, but let's just hope that they turn inwards and spend the next four years on harming themselves! It's a bit tough on the 50% who are part of Worldly America, rather than Godly American (Simon Schama's coinage yesterday), but those people are the only ones who can really help themselves.

It's going to be an interesting time in Europe in the next few years. The EU will be grappling the question of Turkish entry, where we'll be applying tests of adherence to the values of democracy and human rights which the USA would currently fail (the death penalty, suffrage and the treatment of minorities being the flash points). Let's just hope that this is the beginning of the 'European War of Independence' - except that I really hope it doesn't come to real war. I think it will be entirely healthy for everyone if we can all just agree that the USA and most of the rest of the world have just taken different paths.

George Orwell is, of course, a partisan observer, but I find this passage from The Lion and The Unicorn interesting: " [The British ruling class] could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns - by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. therefore, it was argued they *must* be friendly to the British dividend-drawer … At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact."

Thanks, Anders, I was really wondering about that.