Quotulatiousness

December 15, 2011

Mick Hume: Dispelling Euro-myths

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

In this post at Spiked, Mick Hume pours cold water on five Euro-myths:

Euro-myth No 1: ‘It was a triumph for Cameron — or Sarkozy’

Depending on who you listen to, either UK prime minister David Cameron bravely stood alone for Britain by rejecting a new EU treaty, or else he was beaten by the wily French president Nicolas Sarkozy who got what he wanted by the UK’s omission from the new deal around the Eurozone.

In fact, what the rupture showed was that both the six-footer Cameron and the diminutive Sarkozy are, to coin a phrase, pygmies in political terms. And so are German chancellor Angela Merkel and the rest of Europe’s political elite. Far from a triumph for anybody, it marked an embarrassing failure of basic diplomacy among substandard statesmen and women. There are always tensions and ructions at international summits. But in other times they would have been kept under control by careful diplomatic preparation and consultation beforehand – not left to break out in a schoolboy spat on the day, with Cameron and Sarkozy reportedly almost coming to blows. Even far more strident Eurosceptics such as Margaret Thatcher knew how to play the great power game without tripping over their own laces. Europe’s destiny is now in the hands of self-regarding pygmies who think more of their next headline than the shared future of the continent.

As for the notion that Cameron struck a noble blow for the British people and ‘our’ national sovereignty — come off it. Indeed, one of his main motives appears to have been to avoid giving the British people any kind of say on the matter, by dodging both the referendum that would be demanded if he accepted an amended EU treaty, and the general election that would follow if he went too far the other way and broke up his coalition with the EU-loving Liberal Democrats. The government would rather fall out with the French than risk the wrath of British voters.

December 7, 2011

Time to end the “forced march” to Fiskalunion?

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Patrick Hayes outlines the way European national leaders and unelected EU officials are steadily blocking any democratic influence over the future of Europe:

Missing from this deal-making has been the European public, which has been held in complete disregard; whether such a ‘forced march’ is acceptable to the European populace is deemed utterly irrelevant, a triviality, in the face of impending doom. After all, as Merkel reminded us recently, ‘nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe’. The need for such fundamental changes to Europe’s government and economic system are deemed to be beyond debate.

Even when raising the importance of the national sovereignty of their countries, European leaders do so by pointing out too much economic and fiscal integration would get in the way of solving the short-term crisis. There is little discussion of sovereignty as a matter of principle, as the basis upon which voters can hold politicians and technocrats to account. Actually asking the people directly what they want, through national referenda on any new treaty, is regarded as an unnecessary distraction from the urgent task of saving the Euro, to be avoided at all costs.

[. . .]

Once again demonstrating who is actually wearing the trousers in the partnership between the two wealthiest Eurozone countries, Merkel largely got her way. Only last week, Sarkozy was calling for a return to greater democracy in the European Monetary Union: ‘The reform of Europe is not a march towards supra-nationality’, he said. However, Merkel also had to water down her desire to haul naughty countries before a supra-national authority such as the European Court of Justice or a ‘super commissioner’ in Brussels. Instead, sanctions for breaches of the new Eurozone rules would be enforced internally within countries, who would adopt new laws promising they will obey EU rules.

Despite this, as is evident by a leaked document being circulated by EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy and to be discussed by senior EU officials today, the full arsenal of punitive measures for rule-breaking Eurozone members remains on the table. Van Rompuy suggests that bailed-out countries could be temporarily deprived of political voting rights in EU councils; pension reforms, social security systems, labour-market policy and financial regulations could be ‘harmonised’ across EU countries; and there could be ‘more intrusive control of national budgetary policies by the EU’. Development aid for poorer EU countries could be cut, too.

[. . .]

Whatever gets decided at this week’s summit, and whether the fiscal rules are accepted by all 27 EU nations or just by the 17 Eurozone members, it’s clear that greater intrusion into member countries’ national sovereignty by EU officials is the way the wind is blowing. Should countries overspend and breach EU rules, they may no longer be allowed to decide how they set their taxes, how much they can borrow, even the make-up of their budgets. Such decisions, fundamental to a country’s sovereignty, get ripped from the hands of the people living in the countries and their elected representatives, with decisions instead being forcibly guided by European technocrats in Brussels.

December 6, 2011

The Battle of Ortona

Filed under: Cancon, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies is marking the anniversary of the Battle of Ortona in 1943 by sending Twitter updates from @BattleOfOrtona to outline the historical events of the 1st Canadian Division and the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade in this key battle of the Italian Campaign. Here is the situation just before the battle opened, from Terry Copp:

The Canadians were involved in a series of isolated battles in the mountains of Central Italy in November 1943 when General Bernard Law Montgomery issued orders for an advance up the Adriatic Coast to seize control of the east-west road Pescara to Rome. The American 5th Army was to launch a direct advance towards Rome at the same time.

The Canadians were still in the mountains when British, Indian, and New Zealand troops fought their way across the Sangro River, forcing a German withdrawal to the Moro River. The 78th British “Battleaxe” Division had shot its bolt at the Sangro and Montgomery ordered the fresh, full strength Canadian Division to take over the advance on the coastal flank. The move was to be completed by the night of 5 December.

The German 10th Army, responsible for the defence of Italy east of the Appenine Mountains, contained 12 divisions — 10 infantry and 2 armoured. The 76 Panzer Corps held the river lines south of Pescara with 1st Parachute, 90th Panzer Grenadier, 26th Panzer and 65th Infantry divisions. Normally an attacker needs to outnumber the defender by at least 3:1. This ratio could not be achieved in December 1944 and with the beginning of heavy winter rains air power could only play a small role. Everyone but the infantry was optimistic.

November 28, 2011

The real reason the German bond auction failed

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Tyler Cowen explains:

If Germany and a few other, smaller AAA countries were to guarantee or monetize the debts of Italy, Spain, and possibly France and Belgium, never mind Greece and Portugal, Germany would not be AAA itself. The German median voter has very little interest in guaranteeing the above-mentioned debts. If German yields are flipping upwards, it is, in my view, because investors now see the whole euro deal as unraveling and don’t want to deal with the complexities and flak. A big chunk of the German auction didn’t sell at all. You don’t have to think that Germany is ripe to default to see that markets are warning Germany not to take on the whole burden.

The only remaining question, if Germany isn’t willing to take on the entire burden of European debt, is when will the whole edifice come crashing down and who’ll manage not to be crushed by falling debris.

November 24, 2011

Nigel Farage on “German-dominated Europe”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

November 23, 2011

The political delusion: “We must re-establish the primacy of politics over the market”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:06

That’s Angela Merkel, expressing the thought that many politicians have, but rarely speak out loud. There’s a lot of wishful thinking wrapped up in that statement:

“We must re-establish the primacy of politics over the market.” That sentence, spoken a little while ago by Germany’s Angela Merkel, sums up the startlingly unoriginal character of the approach adopted by most EU politicians as they seek to save the common currency from what even Paul Krugman seems to concede is its current trajectory towards immolation.

As every good European career politician (is there any other type?) knows, the euro project was never primarily about good economics, let alone a devious “neoliberal” conspiracy to let loose the dreaded market to wreck havoc upon unsuspecting Europeans. The euro was always essentially about the use of an economic tool to realize a political grand design: European unification. Major backers of the common currency back in the 1990s, such as Jacques Delors and Helmut Kohl, never hid the fact that this was their ultimate ambition. Nor did they trouble to hide their disdain of those who thought the whole enterprise would end in tears.

From the common currency project’s beginning, economic considerations were continually subordinated to the goal of using the euro to cement political bonds. That’s why most countries were allowed to enter the euro despite not having met some basic entry criteria. It also explains why no one really seemed to care too much when Greece admitted in 2004 that it had fudged, distorted, and lied its way into the euro club. Now, however, Europe is discovering what happens when political games diminish a currency’s ability to reflect economic facts on the ground.

H/T to “Monty” at Ace of Spades HQ, who commented:

This in a nutshell is everything that is wrong with the sovereign governments of both Europe and the United States (and China, and Russia, and…well, you get my point). The “market” is not a thing to be managed, or a process to be controlled. The market is just an aspect of the natural world, working on the creatures who move through it. Merkel’s comment reflects the combination of arrogance and ignorance that is at the root of so many of our economic problems.

November 22, 2011

Acronym watch: “In the euro zone farmyard, it’s time to forget about the PIGS and start counting the broken EEGs”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

The journalists will appreciate this new acronym:

The euro zone needs a new acronym. For the past three years, PIGS has served as a catchall for the cash-strapped states on the single currency’s periphery. But now that the crisis has moved to the core, a change is overdue.

PIGS has proved surprisingly durable. When it was first coined, citizens of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain were understandably upset at being lumped together in such a derogatory way. Yet as Ireland and Portugal followed Greece in seeking bailouts, their similarities outweighed historical differences.

Some felt the acronym was self-fulfilling, giving attention-deprived speculators a handy shortlist from which to select their next sovereign victim. However, its survival was also an accident. When Italy got into trouble earlier this year, it slotted smoothly into the slot previously reserved for bailed-out Ireland. Politically sensitive bodies avoided the zoomorphic insult by reshuffling the letters to create the GIPS.

[. . .]

A better idea might be to start with the one remaining euro zone member that isn’t under attack from the bond markets. Andrew Balls, head of European portfolio management at PIMCO, now describes the euro zone states being shunned by investors as EEGs: Everyone Except Germany.

November 17, 2011

Snapshots from Greece

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Brendan O’Neill has a few snippets from Athens:

‘Prime ministers should be chosen by us, not Angela Merkel,’ says the taxi driver taking me to the Acropolis. Taxi drivers here love talking politics, and they love hating Merkel. She’s treated as the arch villain of this tragedy. Magazine covers show a massive Merkel playing with Greek politicians as if they were dolls. Graffiti invites her to do things that are probably anatomically impossible. My advice to her is to avoid visiting Greece for the duration of The 100 Days. Probably longer.

•••

The taxi driver also tells me he can’t relate to Papademos. ‘He’s not a man of the people’. But it’s precisely Papademos’s lack of experience in dealing with the grubby, demanding demos that endears him to the EU elite, which fought tooth-and-catapult to have him installed as PM. As one European economist put it: for Brussels the great thing about Papademos is that he ‘speaks the language and shares the philosophy of [the] EU and ECB’ and that he ‘comes in without officially representing a party’. That is, he’s apolitical, unchosen, boring and bureaucratic — just the kind of politician the EU likes. It’s already a cliché, but that doesn’t stop it being true: Athens is now both the birthplace and graveyard of European democracy.

•••

Yet the graffiti expresses exasperation as well as anger — a deep disappointment with Greek workers. Commonly scrawled phrases are ‘Wake up!’ and ‘Stop being slaves!’ You get the impression that the Greek left, which is rowdier and noisier than its western European counterpart, is as annoyed with the masses as it is with Merkel. In Syntagma Square, nothing much remains of the radical protest camp that so excited outside observers earlier this year and which provided the template for the global ‘Occupy’ movement. There is just a memorial tree, with political paraphernalia attached to it in remembrance of the camp. It’s like one of those shrines that pops up on roadsides where someone has been killed by a speeding car, only it is adorned, not with wreaths, but with balaclavas, goggles and batteries (which were thrown at the police). It has the unwitting whiff of being a gravestone not only for the Greek left, but for Greek politics itself.

November 13, 2011

The report from Greece

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Michael Petrou and Stavroula Logothettis survey the Greek debt crisis in a report that Maclean’s cheekily headlines “Acropolis Now”:

“We are finished as a nation,” says Marko Gjini, a 39-year-old unemployed construction worker in Athens. “The country has been sold off. We have no say in anything anymore. Greece is owned by the Germans.”

Like many Greeks these days, Gjini is bitter and despondent because of his country’s financial mess, and the austerity measures that have been imposed in an effort to contain it. His wife, Aleka, a public hospital nurse, has seen her income drop from 1,200 euros a month to 800 euros. Now, facing more taxes and cuts to public expenditures, the family expects to have a net monthly income of less than 500 euros. Marko and Aleka are investing whatever money they can toward English lessons for their twin eight-year-old boys in the hope that they might have a better future somewhere else. “Let the government fall,” says Gjini, “[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel is the boss now anyway.”

[. . .]

For Vaso Gildizi, a Greek freelance writer, events in Cannes were “a national humiliation for the country.” The Greek prime minister was scolded like a schoolboy and sent home. The incident didn’t sit well with many Greeks who were already sour on the bailout deal and the euro itself.

“We’re bankrupt,” says 44-year-old Vasilia Paneli, owner of Bliss, a trendy café a short walk from Syntagma Square and the parliament in Athens. “We know it. The EU knows it. And yet we continue this Greek tragedy. A referendum would at least give us a voice, a chance to speak up for our future.” Paneli was unmoved by French and German threats that a referendum on the bailout deal would have meant a vote on whether to remain in the eurozone. She’d rather Greece leave it. “It’s self-serving,” she says. “I say let’s go back to the drachma.”

[. . .]

William Antholis, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, likens flirting with a return to the drachma to “threatening suicide to avoid a lynching.” Greece is in for a painful few years whatever happens, he said in an interview with Maclean’s. The austerity measures are going to bite. But leaving the euro, he says, would be disastrous. The costs could include a run on Greek banks, as people sought to withdraw euros before they were changed to drachmas. Some banks would probably collapse. Greece would likely default on its debts, and would be unable to pay pensions and salaries. Some sectors of the economy built on export might benefit from a new, devalued currency, but at the expense of much heavier blows elsewhere.

November 9, 2011

Under attack by overwhelming economic forces, French and Germans consider retreat to citadel

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Germany — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:42

If they’re floating ideas like this, the Euro is done:

German and French officials have discussed plans for a radical overhaul of the European Union that would involve establishing a more integrated and potentially smaller euro zone, EU sources say.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave some flavor of his thinking during an address to students in the eastern French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday, when he said a two-speed Europe — the euro zone moving ahead more rapidly than all 27 countries in the EU — was the only model for the future.

The discussions among senior policymakers in Paris, Berlin and Brussels go further, raising the possibility of one or more countries leaving the euro zone, while the remaining core pushes on toward deeper economic integration, including on tax and fiscal policy.

As in any retreat, some outlying forces (countries) will have to be sacrificed to save the main body (France and Germany). A small retreat may not be enough — but Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal are likely to be left outside the walls.

September 29, 2011

Charles de Gaulle as euro-skeptic

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Germany, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Conrad Black provides a thumbnail sketch of de Gaulle’s real intentions regarding European integration:

Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille in 1890, to the family of a monarchist schoolteacher. De Gaulle was a Flaubertesque haut bourgeois, as well as an officer of the French army when it was rivaled only by the German army as the greatest in the world, and was unrivaled as the most storied army of all. He was imbued with the middle-class concept of the value of savings, frugality, pay-as-you-go. To him, greatness and security could never be bought or sustained on the installment plan. And mere politicians, whom he considered a lesser breed swimming in a sticky fondue of moral weakness and opportunism, could never be trusted to resist the temptation to pander, devalue, or seek short-term gain.

De Gaulle’s farsightedness was not confined to national projections of household economics; he also warned of the dangers of Euro-integration. He was the chief architect of the Franco-German friendship treaty of 1963, and — as a veteran of the terrible hecatomb of the Battle of Verdun and a World War I prisoner of war of the Germans, as well as the founder of the Free French in World War II — he knew as well as anyone the horrors of the centuries-long conflict along the Rhine. He also favored a common market and the end of violent ancient rivalries among the many European nationalities. But he always saw a homogenized, centralized Europe as a dangerous fantasy. He believed that a Continental interest, composed of as many as 20 or 25 languages and cultures, would be only an alphabet gruel, blended and stirred by faceless bureaucrats from the little countries, and not representing any real popular interest at all.

He thought that the original Common Market of France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux could be used by France, effectively maneuvering between the U.S. and the USSR, and between Germany and the Russians, to project and amplify France’s — and, more particularly, his own — influence. Up to a point, while the U.S. was mired in Vietnam, and before European Communism became too enfeebled to challenge the West (which de Gaulle also foresaw), he was correct. But he believed that an unlimitedly accessible Europe would become an incoherent Tower of Babel, governed by bureaucratic intermeddlers in the name of feckless politicians, and liable to excessive outside influence, including from the U.S.

H/T to Monty at Ace of Spades HQ for the link.

September 22, 2011

We need to borrow another word from German

Filed under: Germany, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:29

The English language is adept at picking up bits of vocabulary from other languages — it’s one of the greatest strengths of English. I’ve just read of a word in German that I have needed for decades:

Schadenfreude captures a much more complex psychological concept, and therefore lacks a single-word counterpart in the English dictionary (Schadenfreude itself is a combination of the German words Schaden and Freude; meaning damage and joy respectively).

Nonetheless, Schadenfreude is such a basic human experience, that it is only natural that — if you don’t develop your own word for it — you would certainly want to adopt somebody else’s word for it into your vocabulary.

Another word that seems similarly essential to describing a particular feeling that most humans experience at some time or another, but which — unlike Schadenfreude — has somehow evaded incorporation into the English language, appears in the verb “Fremdschämen“:

Fremdschämen describes embarrassment which is experienced in response to someone else’s actions, but it is markedly different from simply being embarrassed for someone else. In particular it is different from being embarrassed because of how another person’s actions reflect on us or because of how another person’s actions make us look in the eyes of others.

Instead, Fremdscham (the noun) describes the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. Fremdscham occurs when someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves simply is not, and you start feeling embarrassment in their place. It is at the heart of beloved “mockumentaries” such as The Office, Modern Family, or Ricky Gervais’ Extras. It is also what makes the auditions for American Idol, Britain’s got Talent and Deutschland Sucht den Superstar so discomfortingly entertaining…

I can now use the correct word to express how almost-physically-painful I feel when I see someone else get embarrassed or humiliated. Fremdschämen. I must remember that.

August 27, 2011

Germany is an intensely weird place

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:30

Michael Lewis highlights one of the ways Germany is different from anywhere else on the planet:

Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech — all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties — for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

Dundes caused a bit of a stir, for an anthropologist, by tracking this single low national character trait into the most important moments in German history. The fiercely scatological Martin Luther (“I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole,” Luther once explained) had the idea that launched the Protestant Reformation while sitting on the john. Mozart’s letters revealed a mind, as Dundes put it, whose “indulgence in fecal imagery may be virtually unmatched.” One of Hitler’s favorite words was Scheisskerl (“shithead”): he apparently used it to describe not only other people but himself as well. After the war, Hitler’s doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces, and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him. Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. “The combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior-dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content — is very much a part of the German national character,” he wrote.

July 18, 2011

Soviet tank battles

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

I just picked up a copy of The Battle of Kursk by David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, based on a recommendation by Jim Dunnigan in his World War II Bookshelf. While any attempt to pick the top books about the Second World War is doomed to perpetual nit-picking by second-guessers and Monday Morning Quarterbacks, I’ve generally found the works he recommended to be worth reading.

Although I’ve read much about World War II, I haven’t read much about arguably the most critical part of the entire war: the gargantuan battles pitting the Soviet Red Army against Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Some of that is just sheer pig-headedness: I used to work for the biggest wargame store in Toronto, back when wargames meant cardboard counters, vast paper hexagonal maps, and charts and tables galore. The hardest of the hard-core gamers seemed to be either Napoleonic grognards (down to the secret stash of sabres and shakos in the gaming room) or even more dedicated junkies of the “Great Patriotic War”/”Operation Barbarossa”. Some of the latter were genuinely crazy, right down to the barely contained hints that “Hitler was just misunderstood”.

On the assumption that certain forms of craziness are contagious, I avoided most of the latter as much as I could, consistent with my duty to sell them the latest and greatest game involving their particular passion.

One day, perhaps in a fit of weakness, I allowed myself to get lectured by one of the fanatics about the details of the Battle of Kursk. The fan who felt the need to bend my ear was eager to impart information about some “famous battle” that turned out to have been a serious tactical miscalculation by a Soviet officer. The story, as he told it, had a very large formation of Soviet tanks “taking a shortcut” through a major minefield, resulting in many disabled/destroyed tanks and wounded or dead men. In the telling, this kind of thing could not be admitted as having happened without some enemy contact, so it was propagandized as being a major tank battle involving significant formations of German panzer troops and/or SS units (of whom, of course, the glorious defenders of the Motherland took a greater toll than they suffered themselves).

I’d heard a couple of variations of this story by this point, but none of them could name the general who led the formation, the location of the event, or the “battle” that was supposedly re-written for propaganda purposes.

Does this story ring a bell for anyone? I’d imagine if it had really happened in a way close to the way it was told to me, it would have been documented in great detail (especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, in that brief period that both the Soviet and the Nazi records were available to western researchers without direct censorship).

July 17, 2011

Saudi Arabia upgrades their armoured forces

Filed under: Germany, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

Saudi Arabia will add a few hundred of the most up-to-date panzers to their defence forces:

Saudi Arabia is buying 244 Leopard 2A7+ tanks from Germany. Saudi Arabia is believed to have already ordered 44, and now has increased that order. It was only a year ago that German tank manufacturer KMW has revealed this, the latest version of its Leopard 2.

Two years ago, the German Army announced that it was going to upgrade 150 of its Leopard 2A6 tanks to the A7 standard. That would include more armor on the sides and rear (especially to protect against RPGs), more external cameras (so the crew inside could see anything in any direction, day or night), a remote control machine-gun station on top of the turret, better fire control and combat control computers and displays, more powerful auxiliary power unit and better air conditioning, and numerous other minor improvements. This would increase the weight of the tank to nearly 70 tons.

[. . .]

Saudi Arabia is concerned about Iran, which has a force of 1,500 much older tanks (most of them Russian T-72s and T-54/55s). Saudi Arabia has 1,300 tanks, most of them older American M-60s and French AMX-30s. But the Saudis also have 370 U.S. M-1s and 150 Russian T-90s. The 244 Leopards will increase the Saudi edge. The Saudis also have the money to buy spare parts for their modern tanks, and Western instructors to provide the best training. But the Iranians are better soldiers, so they might have an edge there.

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