If you want to use nuclear weapons primarily to “deter” conventional forces you are, by definition, threatening first use of them.

This is what you define as the “nuclear deterrence” you believe in. Clearly it is an even better threat against those peoples which don’t have nukes & you were therefore threatening to use them against every nation with any armed forces.

You day “You fail to address my key point which is that our weak response to Russian interference in Georgia will lead inevitably”

Presumably not being a complete hypocrit you are on record as condemning Russia’s failure to start a nuclear war over the LibDem supported invasion, ethnic cleansing, genocide, child sex enslavement, dissections & theft of organs & de facto annexation of Kosovo which, with greater inevitability lead to Georgia’s recent attack & attempted genocide. I would be interested to see a link showing you not to be a complete hypocrit.

The Russians, quite rightly, chose not to make a “weak response” to a deliberately genocidal attack on their citizens clearly inspired & probably lead by US troops. The only alternative was that genocide – something which you & all those opposing Russia’s defnce of the Ossetians, including most British politicians, are implicitly supporting

You are of course correct about us being more vulnerable to having our power turned off. This is because our governments, enthusiastically supported by the LibSems have opposed any serious attempt to update our electrical capacity, choosing intead to surender to the Luddite tendancy. This was our own choice & that the Russians are keeping Europe’s lights on is not a fault of their’s.

“PQs the Lib Dems asked before the recess revealed that defence spending on nuclear is now proportinately higher than during the Cold War!”

What a really daft question. The reason is obvious massive (and unwarranted) cuts in our conventional capability is the reason. We are operating a minimum deterrent now so it cannot be cut without abolishing it altogether.

The problem with a defence review is that it isn’t a policy. Your (our) policy is to think about things? The problems with our armed forces are clearly understood and a review is required only to address the details. The overall problem is to few forces to meet our commitments in peace time let alone in the two wars we are now fighting. You do not need a review to work this out – its in plain bloody obvious.

To be honest and credible the Lib Dems have to say:

(1) are they unilateralist or not – our current policy is a pathetic compromise which doesn’t satisfy either faction in our party and doesn’t give us credibility.

(2) are we infavour of massively increasing expenditure on conventional forces or are we going to cut our commitments massively.

What we have got to stop saying is that we will through European co-operation get more capability for less. There is little evidence that we are any where near that level of convergence. At the end of the day its down to money.

We have got to stop placing too much expectation on the EU or UN in the short term. The EU is hampered by lack of capability or preparedness to do what needs to be done, whilst the UN security council cannot act against any state enjoying the protection of a permanent five state.

The basic problem remains that our party is the resting ground for a large number of pacifists, our country is not.

Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons was predicated not on the need to deter nuclear attack by the Soviet Union but to deter conventional attack by the Soviet Union whose supremacy in conventional weapons we could not, or did not wish to undertake the expense, in manpower and treasure, of matching.

No where in my comment did I advocate first use or genocide, however it was the case that with ammunition for only a few days fighting NATO would have in the event of hot war been forced to surrender or go nuclear in very short order. All of this is merely a statement of the facts of the cold war.

The truth of our current position is that it is considerably more vulnerable than it was 25 years ago. With our energy sourced either from the Russian Federation or by sea from Arabia. Whereas 25 years ago we produced our own oil and gas and generated our electricity with our own coal.

My later paragraph points to the need to rebuild key conventional capabilities neglected in our armed forces over the past 20 years. The most serious of which are the anti-submarine and mine counter measures forces of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

This relates to the facts as they are today with the Russian Navy rebuilding its submarine capability and conducting the probing operations I alluded to against our ports which they are doing now as they did in the past.

It was perhaps confusing of me to mix conventional forces with Nuclear deterrence – however the lack of conventional capability would in the event of hot war bring forward rapidly the point at which a government would have to consider more drastic options.

I did not anywhere in what I wrote advocate a first use of Nuclear Weapons Iraq, Iran, Russia or China. Frankly you made that bit up for yourself.

You fail to address my key point which is that our weak response to Russian interference in Georgia will lead inevitably to Russian interference in Ukraine and other bordering states. Our (the west’s) weak response is built on our knowledge of our own weakness, in particular with regard to conventional forces and energy supply.

The Liberal Party was, along with the Labour Party in the position of calling for disarmament in the face of the rise of Nazi Germany in the mid to late 1930s. We failed to support the Czech’s faced with just the same territorial situation we see in Georgia today.

If we are not firm then Georgia and Ukraine, perhaps Belarus and Kazakhstan may fall back under the Russian yoke.

Compared to armchair genocides like you Ben, bin Laden was a piker.

Ed along with most of our party you totally miss the point. British Nuclear weapons were and are required not to deter Nuclear attack on our country but to deter conventional attack from a more powerful neighbour.

With Russian forces now regularly probing our Naval and air defences in the North Sea and North Atlantic the complacency of the party and the nation is tragic.

There are only 3 coherent positions to hold on deterrence and our party holds none of them.

Unilateralist – you think whatever the price they are unjustified – the pure pacifist approach – in my opinion the 20th century has proved conclusively that pacifists and disarmers are dangerous nutters who through their silly opinions contributed firmly to a second world war by naively advocating disarmament in the face of aggressive totalitarian regimes. To be fair to the people of those times they had the tragedy of the great war writ large in their minds – we however with the lesson of appeasement have no excuses.

Multi-lateralist you believe nuclear weapons are just to deter other nuclear weapons states attacking us. You believe you can trust other nations to honour a deal of getting rid of the risk of nuclear weapons. So we are supposed to trust Communist China, Pakistan, and who knows else as well as the Russians who have just invaded their neighbours. (this is the majority view but is losing ground to the unilateralist approach – prob due to history having been removed from the History National Curriculum)

You believe in Nuclear deterrence. This is my view – as a child of the Cold War I am grateful for not having had to fight unlike two immediately preceding generations.

Frankly our armed forces along with most of Europe are not sufficient in size to face the coming times where severe competiton for resources will inevitably cause international tensions.

When I was at RMA Sandhurst, a senior officer said France was not in NATO, everyone knew he meant not in the military command.

Well let’s look at what you actually wrote:

“Third, we must respond enthusiastically to the strong leadership shown by President Sarkozy, not just over Georgia, but in his historic revision of Gaullism, with his proposal for France to join NATO. With Europe’s other major military power for the first time in decades prepared to join the defence pact we have with the US, surely we should be setting aside the lingering doubts some have over the place for the EU’s Defence and Security Policy.”

Did I read that correctly: “Europe’s other major military power for the first time in decades prepared to join the defence pact we have with the US”?

In view of the 10 French soldiers who were reported killed this morning while on a NATO mission in Afghanistan, I suggest that you owe an apology to those soldiers, their grieving families and the entire French nation.

It is laughable that anyone should take your opinion as a foreign affairs spokesman seriously when you don’t even know who our allies are. You may be an MP but you are clearly a twit.

Wouldn’t international relations benefit from more openness on behalf of Russia?

Am I the only one who thinks it might be better for the party if our shadow foreign secretary didn’t have to defend something so half baked, badly written and ill thought out?

Fundamentally, I don’t share his faith in disarmament, and feel that his line of argument does demand (as he does of the Conservatives) that we expand defence spending (although I understand that conscription could be inconsistent with the Liberalism).

Nor do I share his claim that there can be no blame in this struggle. I think Georgia has made some foolish errors in the mode of its involvement in South Ossetia, but fundamentally this was an incursion by Russia into sovereign Georgian territory. Georgia is not a perfect democracy by any means, but it is aspiring to become so, and I think deserves rather less categorical support.

Again, my thanks to Mr Davey for coming on and clarifying his comments.

It’s important to realise how artifical the boundaries of many of the former Soviet Republics are. Only a few (Turkmenistan, Armenia and Tadjikstan) were not saddled with significant national minorities. How did that come about? Lenin appointed as his Commissar for Nationalities, a native Georgian, one Josef Stalin. Despite the fact that he was a Georgian, he showed even less sympathy toward them than Great Russians would have done, something he shared in part at least with Lenin, who despite his Russian name (Ulyanov) was of at least partial Tartar ancestry. In the case of his native Georgia, this was probably exaggerated by the fact that the three Caucasus Republics had had strong Menshevik sympathies.

Stalin rapidly moved up in the party, as we are all aware, but retained his ‘post’ as the party’s expert on the nationalities question.

After his rise to power, he carefully pursued a policy of divide and rule, for example adding areas with large numbers of Russian speakers in the east and the Crimea to the Ukraine, and vast tracts of southern Siberia to Kazakhstan, so ensuring in both cases very large Russian minorities were there to prevent any nationalist moves. The most cynical example was the addition of a small strip of land on the east bank of the Dneister to Moldova which was then colonised by Russians and continues to act as an major problem to the Romanian speaking majority. Stalin even tried to impose the Cyrillic alphabet on the Latin Moldovan dialect.

So we turn to Georgia. While North Ossetia was incorporated with Daghestan into the Russian Federation within the USSR as ASSRs, South Ossetia was incorporated with Abkhazia and Ajaria into Georgia, also as theoretically ‘autonomous’ regions. This gave Georgia along with a significant number of Great Russians and Armenians, very significant minorities within their boundaries. This of course was unimportant until Georgia became an independent nation in 1991.

The rest we know, or think we do. The fact is that Russia is now acting as a self interested and nationalistic bully in Georgia, just as Georgia has been trying to do in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia (Ajaria, which has no border with Russia was bullied into line by Georgia in 2004).

Things in the former Soviet Union are simply not as simple or as black and white as those of us in the west (having long ago either repressed, expelled or exterminated our inconvenient minorities) like to think.

Thinking that everything is black and white has already got us in enough trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan…

The first attempt was the Oligarchs. The alcoholic idiot, Yeltsin, was persuaded to flog off Russia’s energy reserves at a song to a group of crooks assembled by Boris Berezovsky, a US placeman. These oligarchs would then sell their assets to the Americans, it was hoped. But the plot failed. Putin intervened and put a stop to it just in time.

So then came game-plan No 2. Move into the former satellite Caucasian and Central Asian states, set up puppet governments, and pump the oil they can get their hands on out through Georgia and Afghanistan (hence the continuing conflict in the latter country).

What Cheney and his neocon chums didn’t bank upon was the sheer maniacal ruthlessness of Putin and his allies.

There are a number of ways forward:-

(1) Accelerate the construction of nuclear power-stations, and the development of hydrogen cars, so we never have to rely on Putin’s oil and gas.

(2) Dump Trident, which is and has always been a US operated weapons system designed to protect the United States, which we pay for.

(3) Engage with Russia constructively, but with caution. Russia is now a capitalist country and will need foreign investment. Such investment requires a legal and institutional stucture that a semi-dictatorship is unlikely to provide.

(4) Ask the necons outright: do you want war with Russia? That seems to be the logical consequence of their bellicosity. Trouble is, when fighting actually breaks out, neocons tend to make themselves scarce and the “poor bloody infantry” gets slaughtered at their behest.

There has been mention in this thread of conscription. Actually, I don’t think conscription is a threat in this country, as much as the moral youth-hating right would love to have it. The armed forces don’t want it, it would reduce effectiveness, and it would be very expensive.

1. Donating your joining fee to the party.

2. Boosting our membership and helping the party.

3. Being able to contribute to the members forum.

4. Being trusted more.

5. There are some great publications on Lib Dem Image that I never realised were member only.

6. It makes you feel you are part of it.

7. There are plenty of ways to connect with the top of the party – the internet is one of them but if you feel your views aren’t heard there are plenty of ways to air them, conference and consultations, etc.

:@)

It is heartening to hear a major figure interact in this fashion and it makes me reconsider signing that membership form which has been hanging around.

I’ve been a supporter and deliverer for a while now, but I’ve been wondering what the benefits of joining are, so I hope the Bones report and your commenting here are a sign demonstrating our willingness to reconnect the top of the party with the grassroots is something which will continue. It is most welcome.

Getting more involved has been a desire which I’ve so far resisted based on these doubts, so a bit more of this and they’ll be dispelled.

Some browser set-ups do not seem to support our comment form properly and omit the lines inserted between paragraphs by commenters – I’ve had this problem before. That may be the case here.

Sounds like blaming to me.

Perhaps you might want to explain what alternative Russia should have adopted. Do you doubt that, had Russia not acted the genocide & ethnic cleansing of Ossetia, with US help, would have been completed by now? That, as with the NATO assisted genocide in Croatia the NATO powers would have vetoed any UN action to stop the killings? That you personally would still “not be attributing blame”?

Tell us Mr Davey – did you ever “attribute blame” when NATO was bombing Yugoslav hospitals & if so to whom? Did tou ever “attribute blame” when NATO police carried out the Dragodan Massacre or dissected 300-1,300 Serb teenagers for their organs? If so whom did you blame?

Or are these the sort of unfriendly questions you choose not to answer.

PS I suggest putting spaces between paragraphs would make it easier to inderstand what you are thinking. On the other hand that may be the idea.

This goes from bad to worse.

How on earth can someone claim on Monday to have carefully avoided attributing blame, having written the following on Sunday?
“A response that criticises Russia for her attacks into Georgia’s sovereign state territory is both necessary and valid. Russian leaders are brutal bullies and the international community must condemn such disproportionate action. Yet these ex-KGB are also hard-headed and calculating.”