Monthly archives: March 2011

The Enemies of Freedom

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The West is extremely selective about which enemies of freedom it opposes and which it supports, to the extent that it is a necessary conclusion that liberty is not a real factor in western foreign polcy. As part of the western world, it is the hypocrisy of my own wider community that most troubles me.

But equally, the enemies of freedom may themselves be pro or anti-western, or vacillate for personal advantage. Karimov and Gadaffi are among the latter and arguably Putin. Ahmadinejad is the mirror of Obama in the hypocrisy of his calls for freedom. Assad is proving as adept as his father in killing those striving to be free. But I want to focus in particular on Hamas who are using open violence against the young educated population of Gaza and against journalists, and whose reign of terror in Gaza is shamefully ignored by much of the British left.

Those who have known Palestinians and followed their cause for as many decades as I, understand that it took colossal forces to warp Palestine’s impressive civil society until it could produce an ugly excrescence like Hamas. Those forces were produced by the vast pressure of the Israeli crushing of the population of Gaza in a long, slow but relentless and very deliberate genocide. But understanding how it happened does not make Hamas any more acceptable. If the young people of Palestine are ever to know freedom, they have to throw off not only the vicious Israeli deathlock, but also the violent, narrow, religious nutters of Hamas and the perjured, fat, corrupt sell-outs of Fatah.

The only good news is that a significant proportion of young Palestinians do seem to know that.

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US Sponsored Massacre in Yemen

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Forty pro-democracy demonstrators have been killed outside the university in Sanaa by the US sponsored Yemeni regime this morning, with over two hundred shot. The Clinton/Obama plan for US allies to crush the democracy movement against their Gulf allies, while the whole media is diverted to the “pro-democracy” military demonstration in Libya, proceeds apace.

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Military Action Against Libya Is Not Illegal, Not About Democracy and Very Limited

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I was much attacked, especially by “Liberal interventionists”, in comments across the blogosphere when I broke the news four days ago that:

A senior diplomat in a western mission to the UN in New York, who I have known over ten years and trust, has told me for sure that Hillary Clinton agreed to the cross-border use of troops to crush democracy in the Gulf, as a quid pro quo for the Arab League calling for Western intervention in Libya.

I must be wrong, it was widely opined, because the US was against military intervention in Libya; a number of quotes from Clinton and Gates to that effect were thrown around. Well, I was telling the truth and they were lying. The Arab League support was essential to getting the Security Council Resolution passed. The Security Council Resolution 1973 contains this preambulatory paragraph:

Taking note also of the decision of the Council of the League of Arab States of 12 March 2011 to call for the imposition of a no-fly zone on Libyan military aviation, and to establish safe areas in places exposed to shelling as a precautionary measure that allows the protection of the Libyan people and foreign nationals residing in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

As part of the US deal with Saudi Arabia, the Arab forces which are going to be used as poster boys for the action against Libya will come largely from the Gulf Cooperation Council, ie precisely the same organisation which the US and Saudi are using to put down democracy in Bahrain. So whatever this is about, it is not about support for democracy.

I have no pretence to omniscience, or great judgement. But I was a pretty senior diplomat, I do have a reputation to protect, and when I say I know for sure that something is happening in the diplomatic world, I do know it for sure.

There is no doubt that SCR 1973 does authorise military action against Libya. That is understood by the phrase “All necessary means”, which is precisely the phrase that Bush and Blair tried and failed to get into resolutions on Iraq. So unlike Bush and Blair, in launching attacks against Libya, Obama and Cameron will not make themselves guilty of the war crime of launching an illegal war of aggression.

That is not a minor point. International law is extremely important, and has to be rebuilt after the Bush/Blair demolition of the concept.

But for action to be legal it must stay within the confines of SCR1973, which are much more constrained than the warmongering media is putting over.

SCR 1973 SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT AUTHORISE GROUND INVASION
SCR 1973 SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT AUTHORISE VIOLENT REGIME CHANGE
SCR 1973 SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT AUTHORISE ARMING OF REBEL FORCES

SCR 1973 SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT AUTHORISE GROUND INVASION

Operative Paragraph 4
4. Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, and requests the Member States concerned to inform the Secretary-General immediately of the measures they take pursuant to the authorization conferred by this paragraph which shall be immediately reported to the Security Council;

SCR 1973 SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT AUTHORISE VIOLENT REGIME CHANGE

Operative paragraphs 1 and 2:
1. Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians;
2. Stresses the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people and notes the decisions of the Secretary-General to send his Special Envoy to Libya and of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union to send its ad hoc High-Level Committee to Libya with the aim of facilitating dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution;

SCR 1973 SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT AUTHORISE ARMING OF REBEL FORCES

Operative Paragraph 13
“13. Decides that paragraph 11 of resolution 1970 (2011) shall be replaced by the following paragraph : “Calls upon all Member States, in particular States of the region, acting nationally or through regional organisations or arrangements, in order to ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo established by paragraphs 9 and 10 of resolution 1970 (2011), to inspect in their territory, including seaports and airports, and on the high seas, vessels and aircraft bound to or from the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, if the State concerned has information that provides reasonable grounds to believe that the cargo contains items the supply, sale, transfer or export of which is prohibited by paragraphs 9 or 10 of resolution 1970 (2011) as modified by this resolution, including the provision of armed mercenary personnel, calls upon all flag States of such vessels and aircraft to cooperate with such inspections and authorises Member States to use all measures commensurate to the specific circumstances to carry out such inspections”;

On the arms embargo, the scope is simply geographic, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya being the official name of the country as recognised by the United Nations. Other provisions within SCR 1973 make it plain that phrase is simply used to denote the whole country.

Furthermore the initial UK draft of the Security Council Resolution contained a provision to exempt the rebels from the arms embargo. It read:

“to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”

The phrase highlighted was dropped in the negotiating process. As paragraph 9 of SCR1970 institutes the arms embargo, the proposal would in effect have exempted the rebels from the arms embargo justified as protection of civilian populated areas. That has been dropped in negotiation and it is therefore explicit that the arms embargo applies to all of Libya.

So military action against Libya is legal provided and only provided it stays within the strict parameters of SCR 1973. I continue to believe it may prove unwise, and am most concerned at the civilian casualties that will certainly accrue from air strikes which the media will lie to us were incredibly targeted and precise. But this is not full scale illegal war of the Iraq kind.

We await events with apprehension.

Meantime the leader of the opposition and six other prominent dissidents in Bahrain have been thrown into jail, along with four hundred supporters, and foreign armies patrol the streets. Where is the Security Council Resolution about that? I repeat, this all has nothing to do with promoting democracy. It is about promoting US interest, controlling and directing pro-democracy movements where they cannot be stopped, but more widely clamping down on them with brutal force in favour of US client tyrants.

The media has now gone into full war gaming mode, and western public attention will be diverted in a false cloud of war patriotism from the vicious activities of western allies in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and elsewhere. The blogosphere now has a vital role to play in keeping truth available to those who wish to find it.

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Niall Ferguson, Neo-Con Propagandist, Intellectual Charlatan

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Madam Miaow has produced a superb dissection of Ferguson’s lowbrow television tirade, and particularly his absence of research.

Ferguson is a man of little learning who wears it heavily. I recently discussed his hateful and lightweight theories on why Muslim societies are in some way inferior. Ferguson is so enamoured of the idea that only our more virile culture really knows how to run places, he has become an apostle of “liberal interventionism”.

Sierra Leone is a charlatan’s dream because the Western public is so ignorant of it, any amount of tosh can be spoken with apparent authority. If you read my book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, you will understand in depth just why the claims are utter nonsense that this was a great success for Blair’s “Liberal Interventionist” foreign policy.

One of the loudest, and the most ignorant, of those making those claims was Niall Ferguson. On p16 of The Catholic Orangemen I write:

The Sierra Leone War of 1898 to 1900 rates not a mention even in Thomas Pakenham’s magisterial survey The Scramble For Africa. Niall Ferguson’s Empire mentions Sierra Leone just twice. He notes its founding in 1797, and next gives us the year 2000 and the views of Tony Blair and his acolyte Robert Cooper on how Sierra Leone justifies “A new kind of Imperialism”. In missing out the intervening years of actual Empire, Ferguson shows the same lack of historical perspective as undermined Blair and Cooper’s analysis. Of course the latter two aren’t pretending to be historians.

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“Raymond Davis” – Actually, Not the Worst Result

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Whoever “Raymond Davis” really was, he is out of Pakistan now. The interests of justice have not been best served, but this is far from the worst possible outcome.

The most disastrous of outcomes would have been for Pakistan to accept Davis had diplomatic immunity. By agreeing to pay blood money the US have de facto dropped that claim. To accept that an evident mercenary like Davis had immunity would have made a mockery of the Vienna Convention, and ultimately eroded the security of all diplomats worldwide, and especially US diplomats. Davis was never a diplomat and we can be confident he is not going on to supervise textile negotiations or public diplomacy in Denmark. It was a farce and a disgrace that Obama ever made that ridiculous claim.

Another very bad outcome is that Davis could have been hung. Nobody deserves to be hung. If you could make a world ranking of by how much people do not deserve to be hung, Davis would not score too high. But still, nobody deserves to be hung, plus blood is becoming the currency of politics in Pakistan. We have to hope nobody connected with his release is assassinated.

The payment of blood money entails an acceptance of guilt. It would have been better if his self defence plea could have been tested in court, but he has dropped it and acknowledged guilt.

Personally the payment of blood money for murder is a bias towards the rich which is one of the many things I find unacceptable in Pakistan’s system of sharia law. But the Americans have taken it, and in doing so have indicated their acceptance of the justice and validity of sharia law, which is one to chalk up for future reference.

So my own urge for proper justice may not be satisfied. But I am not a party to the case and it appears that Pakistani law has been followed. So as I say, not the worst outcome.

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The Haynau Precedent

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The vicious war criminal King of Bahrain will be among the guests at the royal wedding. There is a much honoured precedent for how we should deal with him.

After the European pro-democracy revolutions of 1848 were bloodily put down, one of the most vicious aristocratic oppressors, the Austro-Hungarian General Haynau, was visiting London. As he had used the military against unarmed protestors, including women, ordinary London people made plain he was not welcome. He was dragged from his carriage and beaten up in Park St, Southwark.

There is a monument to it. I was taught it at school as something to be proud of, as showing the British people’s disdain of foreign tyrants. But then I didn’t go to the same kind of school as David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

So I intend to form the Haynau contingent, a group of people dedicated to landing one squarely on the nose of the fat absolute monarch when he arrives in the UK for the wedding. I am looking for volunteers to join me. I am going to write to Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office and to the Embassy of Bahrain declaring this intention.

When the Emperor of Austria-Hungary launched a diplomatic protest at the treatment of General Haynau, Palmerston told him where to shove it. From Palmerston to William Hague – was there ever a starker illustration of the decline of a nation?

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You Don’t Have To Appease Dictators

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Western collusion with vicious dictators is a policy choice. But it is also an individual choice by those who carry out the policy. The Arab Spring has put iinto context the stand I took over our support of the Uzbek regime and our collaboration in its brutality.

With that in mind, this BBC interview I gave with John Humphrys has a new resonance now. This blog also has thousands more readers every day than it did back in 2005, so it may well be new to most of you. I think now my concerns are much more widely understood by the public than they were then.

Listen here:
On The Ropes

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Bahrain: Crimes Against Humanity

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Live rounds by security forces were used in a massive dawn attack on the protest camp at Pearl roundabout. The hundreds of injured have been denied access to the hospital, which is surrounded by military including Saudi military. Doctors are not allowed to leave to treat the wounded outside. This is a crime against humanity.

Both CNN and Al Jazeera have numerous eye witnesses to these events. CNN report that some doctors and patients have been beaten. Yet Hillary Clinton has just been shown calling for “restraint by all sides” and calling for an end to “sectarian violence from all groups”. This is the standard US response to an atrocity by one of its close allies. In Uzbekistan, when at least 700 pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred by security forces at Andijan, the State Department called for “Both sides to stop violence”.

So there you have it. People who wanted democracy are dying from gunshot wounds which could be treated if they were not denied medical attention, actually within sight of the ships of the US fifth fleet. I do hope US citizens reading this are feeling proud and patriotic today.

It is also interesting how keen apologists for the fat rich ugly King of Bahrain, including Clinton, are to cast this as “sectarian”. There are plenty of Sunni democrats also who do not wish to live in an absolutist monarchy. It is yet another variation on the theme “We have to support the dictator as there is no democratic alternative. The only alternative is theocracy”. Clinton is falling back on that bullshit – again just as in Uzbekistan.

There is no doubt that, as a matter of law, the denial of hospitil access to the injured demonstrators, following a planned attack on them preceded by the importation of foreign troops, puts the King of Bahrain in line for a cell at The Hague. How can Britiain be surprised at lack of UN support for a no fly zone in Libya, when our concern for democracy and humanity is so blatantly selective? Where is the travel ban on the King and his family, and the freezing of his assets?

There are moments of clarity when the doublespeak of governments is starkly exposed. This is one of those. It is plain that Obama did not mean a single word of the concern for democracy in the Muslim world he expressed in his “Cairo speech”. The US much prefers its pet dictators.

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Bahrain Anschluss

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The fatter of these two evil ugly bastards is the King of Bahrain. Having invited in foreign armies to crush the pro-democracy protests of his own people, he has immediately let them loose on the demonstrators, who are being viciously attacked by them even as I type.

In classic anschluss fashion, the King has invited his people to “co-operate fully and to welcome” the invaders, as they attack them. He has simmediately declared a state of emergency, made demonstrations illegal, and attacked the protestors. Today they killed two and injured 200, many very seriously.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was in Bahrain the day before the Saudi invasion. The British Embassy issued a first travel advisory for Brits not to travel to Bahrain, also the day before the Saudi invasion. As I reported yesterday, the US agreement to the Saudi military crushing of democracy movements in the Gulf was part of a complex deal which included the surprise Arab League agreement to a no fly zone over Libya. Interestingly, in the BBC report linked above the US admit to advance knowledge of the Saudi invasion, but BBC News is now reporting they are denying it.

There is still absolutely no sign of condemnation from the UK or US of this outrageous crushing of Bahrain’s democracy movement by foreign military forces. The hypocrisy of our governments is breathtakingly audacious.

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A Silly Way To Boil Water

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As regular readers know, I have been involved with a company installing gas turbines in Ghana. Our next plan is to collect the exhaust heat, generate steam from it, and feed that into a steam turbine to generate more electricity for no added fuel cost.

That is a sensible way to boil water. It can go wrong – any large machine operating with high forces can do damage. But even the worst disaster would be localised and over in an instant.

All nuclear power stations do is to boil water to make steam for a steam turbine. Given the massively disproportionate potential forces at play, the capacity for a Chernobyl style disaster killing thousands, and the long term dangers from nuclear waste, that really is a very very silly – and enormously expensive – way to boil water. You have to be slightly deranged to see nuclear power as sensible.

Those massively disproportionate potential forces in play lead to nuclear power always bringing in its train government lies, secrecy, restrictions on liberty and increase in state power. For those reasons politicians find it attractive. As it involves massive capital cost, there is a big industry lobby that backs it. As many of the full costs are met by the state, the corruption possibilities are good too. That is why the lobby for this crazed option is so strong.

Here is another better way to boil water:

Within 6 hours deserts receive more energy from the sun than humankind consumes within a year. An area of around the size of a living room, covered by mirrors for concentrating solar thermal power plants, would suffice to cover the electricity need of one person day and night – carbon free.

Thanks to Ingo for the desertec link.

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The Invasion of Bahrain

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A senior diplomat in a western mission to the UN in New York, who I have known over ten years and trust, has told me for sure that Hillary Clinton agreed to the cross-border use of troops to crush democracy in the Gulf, as a quid pro quo for the Arab League calling for Western intervention in Libya.

The hideous King of Bahrain has called in troops from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait to attack pro-democracy protestors in Bahrain.

Can you imagine the outrage if Gadaffi now called in the armies of Chad. Mali and Burkina Faso to attack the rebels in Ben Ghazi?

But do you think that those in power, who rightly condemn Gadaffi’s apparent use of foreign mercenaries, will condemn this use of foreign military power by oil sheiks to crush majority protestors in Bahrain? Of course they won’t. We just had Sky News rationalising it by telling us that the Gulf Cooperation Council have a military alliance that a state can call in help if attacked. But that does not mean attacked by its own, incidentally unarmed, people. NATO is a military alliance. It does not mean Cameron could call in US troops to gun down tuition fees protestors in Parliament Square.

This dreadful outrage by the Arab sheikhs will be swallowed silently by the West because they are “our” bastards, they host our troops and they buy our weapons.

I do hope this latest development will open the eyes of those duped into supporting western intervention in Libya, who believe those who control the western armies are motivated by humanitarian concern. Bahrain already had foreign forces in it – notably the US fifth fleet. Do you think that Clinton and Obama will threaten that they will intervene if foreign armies are let loose on pro-democracy demonstrators? No they won’t.

Whether this will have any effect on the railroading of public opinion behind military intervention in Libya remains to be seen. I am fascinated to hear, for example, whether Ming Campbell and Phillippe Sands, who wrote of Our Duty To Protect The Libyan People , also believe we have a duty to pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain to protect them from attack by foreign forces.

We know from Iraq and Afghanistan, Serbia, Lebanon and Gaza that the “collateral damage” from the initial bombing of Libyan air defences will kill more people than are dying already in the terrible situation in Libya. While a no-fly zone would help rebel morale, most of the actual damage rebels are sustaining is from heavy artillery; without a no tank, no artillery and no gunboat zone, a no-fly zone will not in itself tip the military balance.

It appears that getting rid of Gadaffi may be a longer slog than we would like, but an attempt at a quick fix will lead to another Iraq, and give him an undeserved patriotic mantle. It was former UK Ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles who said western military intervention in Libya should be avoided above all because of the law of unintended consequences. One consequence has happened already, unintended by the liberals who fell in behind the calls for military attacks on Gadaffi. They helped cause the foreign military suppression of democracy in Bahrain. For Clinton and Obama, it is a win-win forwarding US foreign policy on both Libya and the Gulf, where they don’t want democracy.

People of good heart should weep.

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Edge of Darkness

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I had a few articles in mind for the weekend, but the vivid horror of the Japanes tsunami gave me pause. Anything I might say seemd trite, and the tune, or rather chant, of this kept running through my head insistently:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,

The terrible events in the earth remind us of the frailty of human existence and the power of the Earth. Of course, there have been worse disasters – it is only two years since an earthquake in China killed perhaps ten times as many. But the technological capacity of Japan to capture and broadcast its own disaster gave it an immediacy to us that forces us to confront and absorb the fact of massive individual human suffering.

I have however been conscious of an undertow of anger at the continual stream of nuclear industry dependents and lobbyists brought on to every Western network to assure us there is no real danger from the nuclear plants and that a meltdown is most improbable.

When the second reactor house blew off last night at least eight people were injured, some seriously. If there were not a serious possibility of major disaster, then they would have not had those workers on site, desperately trying to cool the core with sea water, when it has been fully understood that the hydrogen explosion they were caught up in was likely to happen. They were working desperately and presuming knowingly on what might easily have proved a suicide mission.

Like Three Mile Island, the nuclear industry is hoping they will get away with it on a wing and a prayer (and, in this case, millions of gallons of sea water and boric acid). I certainly hope they do avert disaster. But to pretend everything is fine, and propagandise that to the Western world throughout which the nuclear industry is urgently seeking to regenerate itself, is both sickening an an insult to our intelligence. One of many reasons I am against nuclear power is that in practice it always brings with it government lies, secrecy and corruption.

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Real Versus Imaginary Terrorists

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For the last ten years we have suffered media hysteria at the very mention of a bomb plot. The live news networks have been devoted for whole days and weeks, and the front pages monopolised, by a whole series of alleged bomb plots, even though in the large majority of cases there turned out not to be any actual bomb, just bragging emails or loose macho talk. So-called bomb plots in the US had as much power as alleged UK plots to dominate UK news.

Yet when a very real terrorist with a very real and large actual bomb tries but fails to kill very many in a large crowd, it gets a cursory mention on TV news and the only report in the UK press I can find is the Daily Mail

Who can doubt the level of hysteria that would have been whipped up if this were a Muslim and not a Nazi?

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Whether It Matters When Arabs Die Depends On Who Is Killing Them

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How very few of the voices urgently raised now for a no-fly zone over Libya, said anything at all when Israel killed 1,400 civilians in the Gaza Strip, raining down white phosphorous bombs. Did NATO meet to discuss a no fly zone then?

The Libyan National Council recognised by France includes some good men but also includes Gadaffi’s former interior minister and former head of the national security service. These are people drenched in the blood of dissidents. You can be quite sure that the rush by Western governments to pick a side is related to positioning by oil interests seeking to benefit from those who take over power.

None of which is to excuse Gadaffi or demean the thousands of ordinary people genuinely fighting for freedom. They should be supported. But anyone who believes the NATO governments are acting from humanitarian concern is a fool. This is their chance to capture and tame the Arab revolution. The African Union was quite right to reject outside intervention.

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It’s Not Prince Andrew’s Fault

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The wave of urgent desire for freedom that has swept the Arab world has its pale reflection in the belated realisation that we have as a nation been complacent in maintaining and indeed supporting hideous dictatorships.

Somehow it all became real to the sheepish British public. We had been complicit for years in flying extraordinary rendition victims in to suffer hideous torture by Mubarak’s security forces. But suddenly a few pictures of torture victims appear on facebook, and television stations for once start giving some young Egyptian torture victims a sympathetic chance to tell their stiry. Suddenly, instead of becoming rag-headed al-Qaida members who deserve all they get, the public sees these are attractive educated dissidents who just want the kind of life we take for granted.

Governments have moved behind public opinion to catch up with the sudden public revulsion at the heartless realpolitik that has been going on for decades, to the benefit of rapacious Arab oligarchs, Western oil tycoons and arms manufacturers, and Israel and its relentless western lobbies.

The last 48 hours of broadcast news have been giving graphic detail of torture in Libya. Do people not realise that Gadaffi’s torture rooms were always extremely busy, at the same time that he and Blair were hugging each other so warmly and BP were getting those oil contracts?

Government now picks and chooses its advocacy of democracy by the criterion of media, and thus public, attention. Democracy in Libya has become an urgent necessity worth our servicemen’s lives. Recent government killings of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain and Yemen go unmentioned by the UK government, as does the ban on all public assembly in Saudi Arabia. While the Uzbek dictatorship, so essential to our Afghan war, is still strongly supported. The British government will continue to support those allied tyrannies it can get away with.

One interesting sign of that public revulsion has been a sudden wave of remorse by those who had private dealings with the Gadaffis. Howard Davies has resigned from the LSE, which is an accidental boon for higher education from events in Libya. Nelly Furtado has given back her fee for a private Gadaffi family concert. This wave of public revulsion laps gently on this website, as we have this week hundreds of new visitors to an old page about Sting’s private performances for the Karimov family in Uzbekistan.

Oh Sting where is thy death?

But the strange thing is that Prince Andrew has become the lightning rod for our revulsion at the deep collaboration with horrible dictators by the British government, longstanding but brought to its highest pitch by Tony Blair in his “War on Terror”. British and US ministers and heads of government embraced such monsters as Karimov, Aliev and Mubarak, and there are whole banks of the civil service engaged in arms sales to them.

Prince Andrew’s role is plainly a sympton of our national and governmental complicity with dictators, not the cause of it. He is a victim of an accident of birth – he might have lived perfectly happily and usefully as a heating engineer or something if he had been born in less degrading circumstances.

Prince Andrew makes a useful lightning rod for outlets like the Guardian, staunch supporters of the New Labour war criminals who warmly endorsed the relationship with (in this case) Aliev which they complain about. It is the personalised trivialisation of a national disgrace.

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Uncharitable Thoughts

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Central Asian friends of ours thought that all their dreams had come true when they won a green card and went to live in Florida. But reality soon caught up – living in a cramped room, and no work. Their baby soon got seriously ill, but they were turned away from hospital as they had no money. The baby got worse. Eventually they were seen at a charity clinic but by that stage the baby needed urgent hospital admission. In desperation they turned to us; we were having a hard time ourselves, but I scraped together some money.

The wife – who is well qualified and fluent in English – told me she had applied for many jobs. Even for toilet cleaning and dishwashing she had been turned down flat. She said that she had, on almost every occasion, been asked straight out whether she was a Muslim. They had chosen Florida because of the Disneyland posters.

The baby is now fine and their financial situation is improving because the husband has joined the US Army. Think of that next time you hear of US troops in Afghanistan; some of them are there from deepest despair.

Of course, many poor children die in the US every year because of inadequate healthcare. But should British taxpayers fund their healthcare? No, of course not. It will be plain to you I am using that sad but quite true story to introduce a reductio ad absurdum to try to counter the knee jerk liberal/left reaction that it would be wrong to stop giving aid to India.

Last week India tested its missile interceptor shield – a US $11 billion programme. That was the moment that did it for me. Of course, there is nowhere in the world that there are not people who need help. But if India taxed people earning over US $50,000 per year at the same rate that the UK does, that would bring in extra revenue approximately 70 times the amount the UK gives India in aid.

I don’t suggest that as a formal test, but it is an increasing indicator. If Ghana for example charged those earning over US $50,000 at the same rate the UK does, that would not amount in extra income to as much as just once the amount the UK gives Ghana in aid.

I am only suggesting an indicator, not advocating those tax increases. And I don’t think that our aid plans should be cut -merely given only to countries that really can’t help themselves.

On the subject of misuse of funds in BRIC countries, here is a quite astonishing statistic that indicates monumental corruption on a scale it is hard to get the mind around – there are 67 dollar billionaires who are members of China’s People’s Assembly. That is a great many more than there are in the whole of the UK.

But a fascinating thing is that I learnt that from China’s atate broadcaster, CCTV, where it was discussed quite openly as an example of “Misuse of influence”. A few hours of CCTV is rewarding viewing. You will certainly learn the point of view of the Chinese government, but discussion both of China and of world affairs really is surprisingly free, and the overall level of bias is much less, and certianly much less shrill, than Fox News. Presumably as it is in English, the authorities are much more relaxed about it than they are about internal media.

CCTV is in large part aimed at Africa. In Ghana, for example, BBC, CNN, Sky and Al Jazeera are all available by satellite with a subscription, but the Chinese Government pays the South African satellite provider (covering all sub-Saharan Africa) to make CCTV available without subscription to anyone with a satellite receiver. Possession of a receiver and old dish but no subscription is very common, especially in local bars and other communal spaces where many watch their TV.

SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

More teething problems on new site this morning, it won’t let me add any new posts. If it doesn’t get cleared in a couple of hours I’ll add the new article to the bottom of this one as a temporary fix.

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The 18.45 Link

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Justin on International Women’s Day

In 2009 reported sexual assaults went up 11 percent, according to Department of Defense statistics, with one in three women reporting having been sexually violated while serving in the military. The Pentagon itself admits that reported incidents probably represent just 20 percent of those that actually occur. Female recruits are now far more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed in combat.

Those figures are difficult to process. There are currently something like 1.8 million women in the US military. That’s 600,000 sexual assaults.

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Israel Requests US$20 Billion Extra in Military Aid From The US Taxpayer

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Israel is requesting an extra US $20 billion in military aid from the USA, in addition to the US $30 billion ten year programme given to Israel in 2007 by George Bush.

While Israel did not face an immediate threat to its security, Barak told the WSJ, “The issue of qualitative military aid for Israel becomes more essential for us, and I believe also more essential for you [the U.S.].

“It might be wise to invest another $20 billion to upgrade the security of Israel for the next generation or so,” he said, adding: “A strong, responsible Israel can become a stabilizer in such a turbulent region.”

Doubtless those US taxpayers who are unemployed, have their homes reposessed, or cannot afford medical treatment will be delighted by this. But I hope that Barak’s basic thesis is correct, and that democracy will bring an end to Arab tolerance of Israel’s slow genocide against the Palestinians.

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