“Prabhakaran shot dead,” reports the Times Online.
The leader of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels, Velupillai Prabhakaran, has been killed along with his son and other Tiger commanders. Prabhakaran was ambushed and shot dead while trying to flee government troops as special forces closed in on the last rebel fortifications. … The conflict area had been reduced to a patch of land just 100 metres by 100 metres, he added. Tens of thousands of civilians who had been caught in the crossfire were finally allowed to flee to freedom over the weekend.
A senior defence official said Prabhakaran had been killed while trying to flee the area in an ambulance with two close aides. “He was killed with two others inside the vehicle,” the official said. The government said that they had found the body of Prabhakaran’s 24 year old son Charles Anthony, the heir apparent of the Tigers’ leadership. The head of the rebels’ political wing, Balasingham Nadesan, the head of the Tigers’ defunct peace secretariat, Seevaratnam Puleedevan, and their eastern leader, S. Ramesh were also said to be among the dead.
AdvertisementIndependent verification of the situation is all but impossible as journalists are not being allowed near the conflict zone.
Some will probably regard this as a tragedy because now Colombo has no one to negotiate with. An recent article from the Times Online quoted “fears in Western capital(s) … ” that “if the Tamil leadership goes ahead with their threats of suicide will there be anyone left to negotiate with? ”
The victorious Sri Lankans were said to have received large scale financial and technical assistance for their campaign against the Tigers from China. That assistance enabled them to thumb their noses at the Western capitals, which they must now be congratulating themselves for doing. Another regime largely supported by China, Burma, has now imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, sick and aging, in a prison “notorious for its filth, disease and the mental and physical torture deployed against its prisoners”.
She faces a five-year prison sentence if convicted of breaching the terms of her house arrest because a stranger swam across a lake and broke into her dilapidated home. … To compound the injustice, the junta has also charged the mother and daughter who live with Ms. Suu Kyi and her physician with various offenses that could land them in prison for years. Ms. Suu Kyi’s case matters, and not only because she is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Her situation is representative of the suffering of the 47 million people of Burma under an authoritarian and inept junta.
One wonders whether there isn’t some sudden realization that there’s no contest between brute power and the so-called protections of Western legitimacy. All the international tribunals which were supposed to bring justice to Lebanon, the sanctions which were to defang North Korea; the moral superiority which was to shame the Burmese Junta; all the pieces of paper which emanate from the United Nations are in danger of being regarded as Paper Tigers; which perhaps they now are. To see the utter pregnability of the walls of taboos and garlands of diplomatic wolfsbane with which the West has engirdled things laid bare may have sent the wrong message from Damascus to Teheran; from Gaza to Southern Lebanon; from the Northwest Frontier to the Black Sea. An international regime can survive many things; even defeat. What it cannot survive is a sudden realization that it is ridiculous. Legitimacy depends on prestige and upon respect. How much of that does the West have left?
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Exactly as much respect as its armed forces and military resolve can command.
I’ve seen a lot of Velupillai Prabhakaran’s face on Tamilwin.com over the last several weeks. The tea boys on our campus in Qatar are mostly from Sri Lanka or the Philippines. They former are very fond of that site and so I regularly print out news articles from it for them to pore over during their lunch breaks. Though I am now gone for summer holiday, I strongly suspect there is some celebrating going on in the break room today.
i can’t help but notice the disparity of reaction between what is happening in sri lanka with israelis/palesinians. compare the news reporting, deaths, UN responses, world outrage, etc. sri lanka is, by far, the more tragic of the two conflicts yet it will soon be forgotten.
palestinians should thank their allah every day that their enemy is israel and not anyone else.
“One wonders whether there isn’t some sudden realization that there’s no contest between brute power and the so-called protections of Western legitimacy.”
I forget who first wrote it, but there was an author who wrote that one of the the things which made the West powerful was the ability to revert from highly civilized mannerisms in its internal doings to absolute barbarism and violence in defense of itself. This idea has been reinforced of late by VDH and others, but it isn’t new.
Wretchard, the threat of the big stick, of occasional brute power, is a part of, not separate or different from, the West’s ‘legitimacy’, at least historically. This isn’t a sudden thing. The whole planet has known this all along, outside of leftist enclaves in Western nations, where fantasy world echo chambers exist.
A good argument can be made that it is the growing reluctance of the West since WWI to use the big stick as often as it should have that is at least in part responsible for the diminution in the West’s perceived legitimacy. Look at the antiwar left in the U.S., who believe proclamation of our lofty ideals is all that should ever be necessary for conflict to be resolved. That, however, is a foolish and dangerous notion to have. It’s not usually practical, and more often than not indicative of the intellectual hubris and narcissism of the believer in that notion than it is of anything else.
A big part of the West’s moral authority does in fact come from the successes of its institutions and justice systems and human rights concerns. But absent the big stick, these things aren’t enough, and unfortunately never can be. In a perfect world they would be. But in the real world we inhabit, brute force must always be in the room.
So, tens of thousands of innocents are being shot and blown up in an area 100m x 100m? Is that the same place where the ammo dump went up? The first hurdle we need to get over is this propensity of the international media to exaggerate. The second is to remember that the Tamil Tigers (aka terrorists) have been throwing their weight around for 25 years, and are ripe for summary comeuppance.
The use of insufficient force has been a UN staple since the Korean War was called off prematurely. This might have been the fault of whoever rolled Macarthur, who had thought to end the Chinese efforts by means of extreme prejudice via a nuke or three.
The UN has gone on to prematurely end lots of conflicts and ensure that resolution (the old-fashioned sort) just doesn’t happen. Send in the “peace keepers” who do nothing while Hezbollah rearms.
If you can’t achieve “moral authority” by means of all the PC fantasy routes (talking, stern letters, empathy, respect for cultural differences, etc) you might as well try good old brute force and sort things out afterwards.
“All the international tribunals which were supposed to bring justice to Lebanon, the sanctions which were to defang North Korea; the moral superiority which was to shame the Burmese Junta; all the pieces of paper which emanate from the United Nations are in danger of being regarded as Paper Tigers; which perhaps they now are.”
Indeed. As has been repeatedly pointed out, NGO’s and the UN have not ended conflicts such as the one in Sri Lanka as much as ensured the indefinite continuation of those conflicts. God forbid if one side actually won a civil war: quite a few NGO activists and UN bureaucrats would then be out of work, wouldn’t they?
Good thing the UN, for one, wasn’t around during the American Civil War: today, I’d probably still have to present correct identification, and consent to a full search, to get past UN peacekeeping troops if I wanted to cross over the Ohio from Indiana into the Demilitarized State of Kentucky.
It is never about people with the parasitical international fantasists: it is about them. If there is ‘someone to negotiate with’, then up pops a sleazy slew of greasy Armani suited UN and other internationalist parasites to prolong the agony that they may feast longer on the blood and suffering.
That industrial quantities of ‘little brown people’ may suffer and die during the resultant futile prolongation of the conflict matters not one whit to the jet-setting, white SUV driving, five star hotel dwelling international UN/NGO parasite class. After all, they are getting both a fine lifestyle and the warm inner glow of ‘helping the peace process’.
That neither Europe nor Asia harbours one refugee camp from the vast population displacements and refugee flows of 1945, and that Arab nations harbour swarms of fourth generation “palestinian refugees” from a minescule arab refugee flow from 1948 illustrates the point.
61 years on and the international parasite class (and others, of course) are still living on a temporary situation from 1948 which should have been resolved by 1949!
And let us not get on to the UN and NGO-operated paedophile, sex-slave and drug importation rings in the Congo and other hellholes where such loathesome do-gooders swarm like maggots on a dead dog.
Although such ‘Kumbaya Rednecks’ get the vapours when ones says this, total war has its place. It settles things rather decisively – the national socialists have been very well behaved little socialists since 1945 – a dead socialist being very well behaved indeed….
And that is a rather pleasing finality.
The LTTE got exactly what they deserved, and Columbo is to be congratulated on their victory.
Let the international parasites negotiate with the corpses of the LTTE leadership.
MarkL
canberra
I had come to believe that the days when a victor dictated the terms to the vanquished from the smoking ruins of the defeated capital were gone. The worst part of all this is that it took 25 years of bloodshed and misery to get to this point. If this sort of victory had been achieved shortly after this revolt had begun think of the lives it would have saved.
When I first became a cop one of the old-timers told me this; “Son don’t ever go looking to start a fight, but if it comes to the point that you have to hit somebody, you hit them just as hard as you can, knock him out as fast as possible.” A short sharp fight, while noisy and unpleasant, often leads to fewer injuries all around.
re: the Chinese and the Indian Ocean, in my veiw the Chinese see India as their most significant near-term enemy (proximity, population, competition for resources) and they see Africa as they source of raw material (as sort of mercantilist colonial power).
They are building as secure as possible a sea-lane between their source of supply and their hungry factories. Sri Lanka is just a part of the puzzle. The Chinese are thinking long-term and have been investing heavily in African resources.
“Legitimacy depends on prestige and upon respect. How much of that does the West have left?”
A more poignant observation comes from Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, page 33, in where he was describing the philosophy of a Sgt Paul Howe, Delta Force:
“War was ugly and evil, for sure, but it was still the way things got done on most of the planet. Civilized states had nonviolent ways of resolving disputes, but that depended on the willingness of everyone involved to back down. Here in the raw Third World, people hadn’t learned to back down, at least not until after a lot of blood flowed. Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun.“
International opinion? Prestige, respect? As ol’ Joe said: “How many divisions does the Pope have?”
Anton,
We had a hand-to-hand combat instructor at Parris Island in the 60′s that had the same philosophy. He said “beat them so bad that ever after when they see you on the street, they will cross to the other side and turn their face away so as not to risk another dose.” Ahh, Good times.
What is best in life?
“To crush your enemies — See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women! “
12. dennis:
Sadly the use of force has come to be the despised method. Better to talk for years while people die or live in terror than to act and set things right.
I see the “intellectuals” as the whiny kid who always wanted to teacher to sort out the school-yard bully rather than have the balls to stand up for what is right and risk taking one on the nose. The UN, EU, NGOs and the like are great at sitting about in air-conditioned offices, chatting about problems over lattes while the hoi-polloi die in droves.
The real answer is more Marines and fewer diplomats.
#12–I’ve had the same advice in a very similar setting: be sure you win decisively enough that there’s no room for rationalization–”he just caught me a little off-balance”–otherwise you may have to do it all over again. And, if you really did get lucky, you might lose the next time.
What was it for, that dream or nightmare? The world falls apart for us sometime in our lives, in precognition, even when we’re in our early teens. I don’t think Prabhakaran ever thought it would end this way, though he might have guessed it might.
Sorry guys – while I’ll accept that overall, as Obama talks, we’re losing our credibility. But is the extinction of the Tamil Tigers good for us, or bad for us. I confess to having lost track.
Bill
http://willstuff.wordpress.com
It’s now come, the CCP has picked up the white man’s burden — at least by proxy.
BTW, the notion of the Chinese securing the sea lanes to Africa can only be taken in the context of destroying the US Navy and all others along the route.
It’s a none workable strategy.
Power plays at that level will go ‘all in.’
Mahanian notions of naval dominance are rendered useless in a world of GPS and nuclear subs.
All CCP blue water spending is solely aimed at the USN.
If there is ’someone to negotiate with’, then up pops a sleazy slew of greasy Armani suited UN and other internationalist parasites to prolong the agony that they may feast longer on the blood and suffering.
I’m beginning to think we are living through The Perverted Times, where everything is the opposite of what it’s claimed. Perpetuating a civil war is “peacekeeping”. Tripling the deficit is “fiscal responsibility.” The coldest winter in my memory is proof of global “warming.” Taking a sledgehammer to the engine of our prosperity is “hope.” Authoritarian fascists are “liberals.”
In a sense, it seems trite and juvenile to shout hypocrisy at all the world, since hypocrisy is such a common sin. But I also think that hypocrisy is not the right description of an Algore, Tim Geithner, or other members of the Obamistration. A hypocrite is someone who judges himself less harshly than others, but a hypocrite at least thinks he’s covered by the same laws. What we’re dealing with are elitists who think laws are for us little people.
But the sad truth is that when laws are for little people, bullets, nooses and guillotines become for the big people. But there’s usually a lot of collateral damage. I’m less concerned with how much credibility the West has with the Third World than I am with how much is has left with its own populace. There’s nothing trite about the losses we’ll suffer if we lose confidence in our own system.
We need to re-establish the Rule of Law within our own societies before we revert to brute force among ourselves.
Laws are for civilizations that respect them, which assumes that a small proportion of the population will disregard them. That small minority are considered criminals by the great majority. It is a nice model when it works.
However when you have a group that is bent on overthrowing the legitimate government, then it becomes an insurrection or act of war.
That is when the big stick comes in. You go for the jugular and take them out. Same with an organism like the human body. You do not negotiate with disease.
Negotiation involves at least a modicum of trust, with verification. The West has been trying to negotiate with enemies, which only winds up giving them legitimacy.
Regardless of the larger Great Game of China, Sri Lanka did the right thing with the Tigers, and took them out. Maybe we can learn these fundamental lessons again.
Hope and Change, ya know…….
18. blert: To a large extent that it true, but look at the plans that the current POTUS has for our military. A weak president and a ham-strung military would encourage our enemies. A crippling deficit (which we will have altogether too soon) will have the Dems cutting the budget in the only area that doesn’t touch their precious social programs – the military. We have no commitment to India, if a war was to break out we would certainly not act under this POTUS.
The Chinese play a long game, we have the attention-span of a gnat.
JMH (#19):
Well put.
I have had exactly that thought, that we are living through Seinfeld’s Bizarro World.
Orwell warned us they would go after the language first.
Jamie Irons
“the sad truth is that when laws are for little people, bullets, nooses and guillotines become for the big people.”
Most of the NPR left isn’t composed of big people, it’s made of small ones who believe that by signing onto the program, they become one of the ‘cool kids’ by osmosis. It’s about attaining the perception of status by association. But sooner or later they find out the laws are meant for them, too, no matter how many times they voted for the ‘cool kids’.
That’s when it gets really ugly.
Even the head chopping functionaries of al-Qada claim that when they kill they seek to do so quickly without unnecessary suffering. The agents of “Peace Processes” have decoupled the Law from Justice, Reason or Humanity. Rhe old Air Force motto “Peace Is Our Profession” aroused deep suspicion from soldiers and sailors given to more prosaic job descriptions. At my Code of Conduct lecture I was told that “Prepare to Conduct Prompt and Sustained Combat at Sea” was a lot of corporate crap. It was our job to “kill people and break things.” He f9t is that, despite my teasing, the Air Force did its job. The UN, wher Peace is a profession but not a job to be accomplished, has spread death and misery.
Remember that The March of Dimes was created as a charity to fight polio. America’s schoolchildren collected dimes during The Depression so that FDR could have a swimming pool. .
When Salk created a vaccine the March of Dimes faced a crisis and reinvented themselves after finding an incurable condition in Birthb Defects. FDR’s swimming pool is now the White House Press Room.
anton,
Some of us have a long term view. The people who have been promoting Obama and conducting the “Gramscian March” have a very long term view.
IIRC, it was Robert Heinlein who offered a fair answer to those who claim that war never solves anything. “Ask the citizens of Carthage…”
But with peace to hand, the next important question becomes, “Does the central government have the wisdom and magnanimity to deal fairly with those survivors who had previously supported the Tigers?”
As hard as it may be to achieve, what Sri Lanka needs now is a sense of national reconciliation. Otherwise, sooner or later another insurgency will arise out of the same grievances that made this one so long-lasting and so bloody.
25. Lifeofthemind:
Got that, Mao’s “Long March” was more of an epic but far shorter chonologically, both served the same purpose and master.
OT Check out WolframAlpha…
It has all our answers…
blert/28
Tried. Close, but no cigar.
Try some lolspeak: “I can has a cheeseburger?”
It spins and spins and spins. Probably if a few dozens did that, it would crash.
Ha!!!!!!!!!
“Sorry, Wolfram Alpha is temporarily unavailable. Please try again.”
And that was only one question!
LotM,
“Peace is our Profession” was the motto of the Strategic Air Command (mailed fist clenching a thunderbolt and an olive branch), which wielded many thousands of megatons of destruction in bombers and ballistic missiles, not the Air Force as a whole. It’s job was deterrence, against the day that those terrible weapons would have to be used in retaliation against Soveit Russia. The life and death of millions hung in the balance, as long as they were an effective deterrent force in being. As a boy growing up, I knew too many men who were in SAC not to realize what a deadly serious business it was and how seriously they took their jobs.
Were that all men with that much responsibility were so resolute and dedicated.
Curtis LeMay, father of SAC, probably had a hand in either thinking up or approving this motto. I don’t think he was the sort of Bureacratic pansy that promoted the relativistic reasoning being criticized here, that has led us to this foolishness at this point in time.
Sorry if that comes across as strident, but duty in SAC was hard on many men and their families, and I saw it take a toll on a lot of people. Today there is little thanks or recognition for the heavy sacrifices that a relatively handful of men made in keeping the peace.
A senior defence official said Prabhakaran had been killed while trying to flee the area in an ambulance with two close aides. “He was killed with two others inside the vehicle,” the official said.
============================================
Sounds like the work of the ICRC.
They drive for Hamas and Hezbollah too, don’t they?
What if Bibi figures out that we are a paper tiger and orders “bulldozers to the sea!” in Gaza? Who would stop him?
wretchard said: “Legitimacy depends on prestige and upon respect. How much of that does the West have left?” & “…from China. That assistance enabled them to thumb their noses at the Western capitals, which they must now be congratulating themselves for doing.”
And why not? We have proved feckless or worse lately (see Israel & Lebanon). The Tamil’s gambled and lost, it seems. A lot of the comments up thread point this out in respect to the facts that the UN has done nothing but prolong the devastation.
JMH @ 19: “…how much credibility the West has with the Third World than I am with how much is has left with its own populace.”
As far as the current regime in the US? None. The regime in DC has no credibility left. Walk the streets and ask anyone if they have faith the DC elite can solve the nations problems. If they answer “Yes” they are probably one of the faithful to The 0bamanation.
@18 blert: “All CCP blue water spending is solely aimed at the USN.”
They are building the blue-water highway over which they will transport their plunder from the US when we attempt to default on our debt to China.
Blert #18 “… the notion of the Chinese securing the sea lanes to Africa can only be taken in the context of destroying the US Navy and all others along the route.”
“Battle of Diego Garcia” anyone? How long do you suppose we have got?
if the Tamil leadership goes ahead with their threats of suicide will there be anyone left to negotiate with?
These people seem to have a negotiation fetish. Why negotiate when you can have victory?
It’s rare that these guys get what they deserve.
Yes, people tend to forget that negotiation and compromise have little virtue in and of themselves. They are a tool to get what you want. They may have the virtue of ending a war, but in Sri Lanka’s case the opposite was true.
The Tigers had their chance at negotiating some kind of autonomy within Sri Lanka, but that’s not what they wanted. Specifically, it wasn’t what Prabhakaran wanted. He wanted to be a dictator, and he couldn’t be that unless there was some territory controlled only by him.
The Tamils should be grateful to be rid of him, because he brought them nothing but pain, suffering, death and defeat. Hopefully they can find a better way to live and a new set of leaders not intent on leading them to ruin.
Wretchard: “garlands of diplomatic wolfsbane”
So true. The Sri Lankan model surpasses the US model for dealing with terrorism right now.
Who’d have thunk it?
This conflict was a perfect example of diaspora-fed insurgency. Here in Denmark, and all-over Scandinavia, W.Europe & Canada, thousands-upon-thousands of Tamil “refugees” live on social-security. They must (well, until recently) give 10% “WAR-TAX” hereof to LTTA collectors, so their kin (or themselves)don’t get killed. These money buy weapons through respectable fronts in Singapore, kill SL soldiers, who get more weapons from China and Israel… and create more “refugees”. In normal, sane world the Tamil “refugees” would be housed in UN-supervised tracts of Tamil Nadu, India, and waited there until the insurgency is finished, presumably in few months without the financing, in fact, by western tax-payers. Shame on “humanitarian” efforts by hard-line lefties like Erik Solheim (now minister of development in Oslo). Actually just heard his interview on BBC now, and can’t sleep, so upset it made me. He talks about his “friends”, no mistake where his sympathies lay… This asshole never realized that his “helicopter” diplomacy some 4 years ago led to unnecessary prolongation of the terrorist insurgency and countless thousands – tens of thousands – deaths! My respect goes to heroes of the SL armed forces, job well done!
Was “The Man in the Green Helmet” driving?
Bob Smith: These people seem to have a negotiation fetish. Why negotiate when you can have victory?
MarkL: If there is ’someone to negotiate with’, then up pops a sleazy slew of greasy Armani suited UN and other internationalist parasites to prolong the agony that they may feast longer on the blood and suffering.
The UN is designed to forestall victory. This description is from an article on the League of Nations, the UN’s precursor: Therefore, any conflict between nations which ended in war and the victor of one over the other must be considered a League failure.
A lot of people don’t realize that the UN is in fact the League’s direct successor, many of the League’s secondary bodies transfered over, and the UN inherited the League’s archives, “Palace of Peace”, and other assets.
Speaking of useless professional negotiators the WSJ has an article on the return of arms control negotiators. As the article points out, the US and Russia have made massive progress during Bush’s term without them. But Obama has to posture, so out of retirement they come, to slow down genuine progress by making it attendant on never-ending negotiations.