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Is it the silly season? Yesterday the Guardian led with a peculiar non-story about wargaming an invasion of Iran. Of course the UK military will have exercises planning the invasion of noisy regional powers like Iran. It might be a better story if

• UK politicians had suggested rather strongly to the military that Iran would be a better subject for the exercise than, say, Pakistan, or
• UK politicians had been trying to make an invasion of Iran seem plausible among the general public, rather than people who are preparing to invade arbitrary countries all the time. We can't really imagine invading Egypt or Pakistan, but the mental groundwork for an invasion of Iraq was done fifteen years ago in Operation Desert Storm. NATO couldn't have bombed Belgrade if we hadn't been prepared by years of war in the Balkans.

I wonder whether this story actually prepares the public to acquiesce in the sort of action we've seen in Iraq.

A more interesting point follows from a quote further down:

According to an MoD source, war games covering a variety of scenarios are conducted regularly by senior British officers in the UK, the US or at Nato headquarters. He cited senior military staff carrying out a mock invasion of [...] Scotland in January.

What would you invade Scotland for?

• The small amount of oil left in the North Sea?
• The tourism sector (better)?
• The financial services sector (best)?

The trouble is that an invasion would destroy both the tourism and financial services sectors. I suppose the lesson is that natural resources are a poor way of avoiding invasion, unless you can use them to build social industries. This is perhaps why we can imagine invading Iraq or Saudi Arabia but not somewhere like Dubai.

posted at: 20:57 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry