Pluck, Gumption and Very Few Experts

Britain's leading liberal newspaper reports, with apparently a straight face, that Britain's brave boys and staunch servicepersons are about to toddle off to Mali and show the lesser breeds a thing or two about keeping the peace. The British military has few people with any experience of the region; and despite British journalism's obsessive concern with its duties as a dead-cat thrower for the Conservative Party, the conflict has "little or no visibility among the British public." There is a vigorous weapons trade in the region, particularly since Libya's leading gangster Colonel Gaddafi died in 2011, apparently without reference to any peacekeeping missions that might have been raining high explosives on Libya at the time. Weapons, as we know, can be dangerous when they fall into the wrong hands, and according to some experts they may even have the potential to contribute to regional instability.