By way of light relief: readers may recall the saga of the seemingly brainless two-house development in Croydon - a pair of very large, pricey properties, awkwardly situated and with no garages - that were taking ages to shift.
Well, more than a year on from my first report, one of them has sold! To whom, is not at all clear to the passer-by. There's a black SUV on the drive (where else?) at all hours, and no signs of human life. It rather looks as though dust will be continuing to settle in at least six out of the seven bedrooms.
With the other house still firmly unsold (and even dustier), at least our current solo SUV driver has an easy(ish) time of it on the communal driveway. And of course, buyer #1 has picked the house less hemmed-in. For the sake of the developer (or whoever still owns the second one) we must look forward to when a couple of large families with corresponding car fleets are in residence, hopefully reaching a satisfactory motoring modus vivendi on this rather limited patch.
ND
28 comments:
Och, they'll end up nationalised and handed to "asylum-seekers". Who will happen to be cousins of Labour MPs.
Plod on a stakeout?
Sounds like a cannabis farm to me. Point an IR camera at the roof.
OT
Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.
Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”
“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”
1984: West German intelligence sources claim that Iran’s production of a bomb “is entering its final stages.” US Senator Alan Cranston claims Iran is seven years away from making a weapon.
1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells the Knesset that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
1995: The New York Times reports that US and Israeli officials fear “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” – less than five years away. Netanyahu claims the time frame is three to five years.
1996: Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres claims Iran will have nuclear weapons in four years.
1998: Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claims Iran could build an ICBM capable of reaching the US within five years.
1999: An Israeli military official claims that Iran will have a nuclear weapon within five years.
2001: The Israeli Minister of Defence claims that Iran will be ready to launch a nuclear weapon in less than four years.
2002: The CIA warns that the danger of nuclear weapons from Iran is higher than during the Cold War, because its missile capability has grown more quickly than expected since 2000 – putting it on par with North Korea.
2003: A high-ranking Israeli military officer tells the Knesset that Iran will have the bomb by 2005 — 17 months away.
2006: A State Department official claims that Iran may be capable of building a nuclear weapon in 16 days.
2008: An Israeli general tells the Cabinet that Iran is “half-way” to enriching enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon and will have a working weapon no later than the end of 2010.
2009: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak estimates that Iran is 6-18 months away from building an operative nuclear weapon.
2010: Israeli decision-makers believe that Iran is at most 1-3 years away from being able to assemble a nuclear weapon.
2011: An IAEA report indicates that Iran could build a nuclear weapon within months.
2013: Israeli intelligence officials claim that Iran could have the bomb by 2015 or 2016.
Biden's autopen would have done it? Proof positive that it was a silly bloody idea.
Rather like the Arctic ice cap melting, eh?
Looks like sanctions paid off then. Stopping Iran completing its task of making a bomb.
The timeline reads as if Iran is an innocent incompetent. Unable to master a hugely difficult scientific endeavour.
The reality is they have been prevented from making the nuclear bomb by the solely actions of other nations.
If they had been left to do as 5hey wished. They would have a completed bomb and missile to carry it.
Perhaps Mr Trump et al might
fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
Alternatively he might like to 'finish the job'. Not a quick or simple job. A nuke? spinning the moral argument might be a bit difficult and make the US and allies fair game for a rematch. Not wise and not got the stones for it.
Getting GOP re elected is what matters - with or without Trump. Chucking blood and treasure at Iran is wasteful. Cheaper and more certain to throw Trump under a bus whilst putting a crimp in Iran's ambitions. At least appearing so to the US population. Solves several problems.
The real problem now is what happens when Trump gives up or goes for broke. Short of total immolation Iran will be left knowing the US and the RoW can be beaten. Psychologically stronger. That will create a new place for Iran and Israel may not like it. But it was a daft idea to start this war. Start thinking now.
And no, I don't want to live in Croydon.
By the way kit is being moved to the ME (a chunk via Fairford and Mildenhall) I'd say going for broke is the option.
A pity. A world where China is the global hegemon will probably not be to our liking, and even less to the Aussies and NZ.
It’s an interesting subject.
Aside from very limited in scope conflicts with clear strategic aims and very tightly defined theatres, I cannot think of any conflict since WWII which ended in what you can reasonably call a decisive victory for one side. The Falklands conflict. Erm, Grenada. You might at a stretch add Venezuela (but that is still very murky to me).
On the other side of the ledger, we have Korea, Vietnam (too obvious to mention), Afghanistan I, Afghanistan II, Iran/Iraq, Iraq/Kuwait, Iran (again), the Balkans, Ukraine (still in flux of course but c’mon, 4 years already)…
Happy to be corrected on this by more knowledgeable military expertise. However the trend towards messy compromises seems definitely identifiable.
Clive, didn't Vietnam have a conclusive victory over Red China? Earlier it had had a victory over France. And of course they licked the Yanks.
The Republic of India had conclusive invasions of Hyderabad and later Goa. East Pakistan beat West Pakistan.
British and Commonwealth troops had a victory in the "Indonesian Emergency".
If Sturmer has his way Mauritius will have a victory over Britain.
I too wasn’t sure about that one so I had to use one of the dreaded Large Language Models to check into it. I’m hardly likely to get a good answer here, am I, in my defence.
Here’s what I found on the web (or xAI did anyway): https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg_bd0ddb27-ed38-480b-8ed8-5340b817d3ef
More-or-less as I expected. Vietnam won, within a narrow context, but even though the US stopped fighting (you couldn’t say the US was defeated, they didn’t rename Sunset Boulevard Ho Chi Min Victory Avenue did they) within a very short period of time Vietnam’s drift back into the welcoming arms of the western international (cough, splutter) “order” is now pretty much complete.
Sure, it’s rebranded as the Bamboo Curtain, but there is loads of US (certainly western) influence pushing through it. The US could still flatter a the country (again) if it wanted to. But what would they achieve?
What all this tells me is that — as happens so very, very often, yesterday’s sworn fight-to-the-death enemies almost inevitably end up as tomorrow’s friends with benefits. Victory is at best short term and fleeting and, as a result, difficult to really define it as such.
flatter a == "flatten". Doh.
Not sure why you've omitted Israel's successes in 1956 (even though UK & France screwed up), 1967 and - reactively - 1973. Because they are still fighting now, maybe? But for a reasonable time after cessation of fighting it was a pretty clear win in each case, relative to the scope of the conflict itself.
I'd add the Malaysia campaign against the Communists in 1950s.
Maybe a bit small to be considered 'war', but the two Oman campaigns - Jebel, 1950s-60s, and Dohar, 1960s-70s - were pretty definitive (and enduring) wins.
On Israel: 1967 and 1973 definite wins even if unable to draw the US in with the Liberty in '67. Patchy ever since the '82 Lebanon invasion. The invincibility of the IDF has been shown since then. That said (no judgement on 'right' or 'wrong',) useful political maneuverings in Syria, Golan Heights and around have expanded territory rather than direct military victory imo.
H
These are very good examples as are Nick’s (especially Malaysia). I’d return to my primary framing (excluding small, localised, geographically constrained and not encompassing large populations in determining when there were unambiguous outright winners in a recent-ish conflict) though for Isreal (and let’s say any conflict with a total theatre size of less than a couple of hundred square miles is more of a regional skirmish than a significant war).
If we’re throwing in the likes of Isreal’s Golan, Gaza and West Bank land grabs, we can probably add Russia’s successful annexation of South Ossetia too.
But I’m just not seeing “medium (or even large) sized country A takes over unequivocally medium sized country B and manages to hold, garrison or regime-change it in the long run” examples outside of a tiny, tiny handful.
That, to me, says something about modern warfare (especially how weapons sophistication had trickled down so that even your most rudimentary tribesmen or scarcely-more-than-a-local-family/clan grouping can get RPGs, SAMs, drones, missile defences and IEDs and use them very, very effectively and for a virtually unlimited amount of time to devastating effect).
ND - might have mentioned this before, but Ranulph Fiennes' "Where Soldiers Fear To Tread" on Dohar is a cracking read from the moment he flies in, to see his predecessor being carried on a stretcher into the plane. In those days Russia and China were very dialectically materialistic, and taught their guerillas that Islam was a Western tool of the ruling elite.
Turkey are still in North Cyprus after their full scale invasion of fifty-plus years ago.
Dunno if this is going anywhere useful, but although Iraq/Kuwait 1990-91 didn't result in Iraqi regime change, it was a clear and decisive recapture of wholly-captured Kuwait - which was Bush Snr's very explicit objective, which was tightly defined (you might recall I've written about this at length).
Regime change would have been nice, but it would only have been a serendipitous by-product.
Desert Storm successfully put Saddam firmly back in his box for more than a decade. (After which he was put in his box permanently, but disastrously, of course.)
Not sure where this talk of old wars gets us. Our current world is much more interconnected and depends on communications and oil far more than 20 to 60 years ago. We can't really afford to chuck bombs around any more, not at scale, it annoys everyone.
May 1st is next week and Trump may (or not) face trouble in Congress. His mandate for war runs out May 1st. Not likely to bother Trump much, looks bad electorally to pull the rug but there are rumblings that the war is unpopular. Folk with a brain in their head ask 'where is this getting us, what have we gained'. Answer Nada.
But no one Stateside wants to overtly stop Trump and no one wants to say Yes. So it will rumble on until it doesn't.
Materiel is being moved closer but that may be moving chess pieces around. RoW is getting fed up but no one can punch Trump on the nose, we all make nice and grit our teeth. Meanwhile Russia and China rub hands with mixed glee. Us at home, we count how many liars in Parliament, to no purpose whatever.
Russia definitely but perhaps China not so much.
No-one anywhere on Earth depends more on oil than China. It's (pretty successfully) rebalanced its internal enery consumption mix to renewables (with coal for baseload coverage, although all new demand is met from the renewables expansion).
But it's mercantile model depends on cheap petrochemical inputs and if those inputs are not so cheap, then the only thing left to squeeze is labour costs. And there's a lot of unhappy people at the bottom of the new social order there, if the Falun Gong produced knocking copy I see on line (or knocking social media content, maybe more accurately put) is to be believed.
Add in a failure to climb much up the value chain and you've cut off another peotential saviour -- pricing power. Sure, I'll pay for a few bits of cheap chinese tat (i just bought a counter top ice maker for 90 quid, it's suprisingly well desigend although I don't expect it to last more than five years, tops, you can see where it's liable to fail). But no way, ev-ah ev-ah ev-ah I'm I going to blow £40k on a chinese-made EV where the hapless dealers are doing several days of warranty work on the PDI.
My thesis still holds true I think -- Iraq took Kuwait but couldn't hold it.
The US later took Iraq, but it couldn't hold that, either.
You can (just about) get away with citing some examples of long term conquer and hold from the 1950's. But that's getting on for 75 years ago. The world -- and militaries --(both regular and irregular) are scarcely recongnisible. Taking about 1950's conflicts now is like me (and you) talking about the Boer war when we were teenagers.
If we're philosophising about the conclusion of wars, surely victory is just a snapshot? I'd say the important thing is the context change. Regardless of what you want to classify, say Vietnam, as a victory or not, it's the societal changes that count. The US may not wear many physical scars from it, but the trauma it inflicted is still heavily evident.
And that ties into holding captured territory too, projection of power costs, assimilation comes with higher costs than integration as resistance to the former goes down to the cultural foundations, and that will continue to exact a high cost. Winning hearts and minds gets treated as a snappy quote, but it is how you turn conquest into consolidation.
CH
The very thought of Croydon ... idyllic? Not an invader in sight anywhere?
See this poem, it's changed a bit since then.
https://voetica.com/poem/7483
Reading old news, I see that around 2008/9 Croydon was, a/c/t the police, bothered by Tamil organised crime - is this still an issue or have events in Sri Lanka curbed their enthusiasm?
"After the men were convicted Det Sgt Snowdon told the Croydon Guardian: "They the gangs are very violent. They are constantly tooled up and ready to go. It is almost like the level of violence is ad hoc. Whatever happens for them happens, and it depends on what weapons they have around." A businessman who runs a shop in Croydon said Sri Lankan Tamil gangs controlled most of the crime and had the town centre on "lockdown." Police have always in the past denied there was a problem with the gangs in Croydon, but have now admitted there was a specialist officer dealing with Tamil gang activity in the borough."
“Keir, you didn’t support us in Iran - so we’re going to review our stance on the Falkland islands”
“Brilliant, we were going to give them away next anyway”
“This is supposed to be a punishment Keir”
“No you’re doing me a big favour, my advisors can’t wait to get rid of them”
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