Monthly archives: March 2011

Obama Stops Pretending

 in Rendition by | View Comments

Any last pretence that Obama is substantively different from Bush was abandoned yesterday when Obama signed an executive order providing for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, which will not close. He has also abandoned the idea of giving detainees a reasonable process in civilian courts, and instead is resuming the kangaroo “Military tribunals”. About the only improvement on Bush is that any detainees who happen to be multi-millionaires can have their own civilian counsel before these kangaroo courts, if they pay for it themselves.

Washington Post here

While Saudi Arabia has imposed a blanket ban on political demonstrations. There has been no condemnation from the UK or US of this outrageous denial of fundamental human rights. Funny that, isn’t it?

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One Story, Two Takes

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William Hague deserves some credit for upgrading the status of the Palestinian mission to the UK. It is something that implacably zionist New Labour would never contemplate. But, unlike many other EU countries, the head of mission will still not be recognised as an ambassador, and there are interestingly divergent takes on this in
The Guardian
and Ha’aretz.

Still, progress of a kind. As much as it is a message to Palestine or Israel, it is a message to Obama after the US’ irrational sole veto of a security council resolution on Palestine that was a simple statement of fact.

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This Hague Cock-up Must Be Explained

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So far it is a toss up whether events in Libya pose more threat to the careers of Muammar Gadaffi or of William Hague. First we had the sadly typical farce of the inert UK evacuation effort, with British diplomats cowring behind their walls concerned about health and safety, and our Ambassador being tied down with politically correct nonsense about his “Duty of Care” to his staff not to let them anywhere near harm’s way.

Reminiscent of this, isn’t it:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, British citizens had been evacuated to the horror and squalor of the Superdome stadium, where thousands of people were crowded among what the BBC described as “knee-high piles of faeces”. After the roads in to New Orleans had become again passable, a British Consulate convoy set out to pick them up. Reaching a checkpoint, they were told they were not allowed to enter without a permit from the Governor of Louisiana. Our intrepid diplomats turned back.

Ten minutes later the Australian consul had arrived. Told he had to turn back, he replied “Are you going to shoot me?” and drove through the roadblock, the Southern Cross flying proudly from his bonnet. . The Australians got out their own people and some of ours. When the British finally arrived at the stadium two days later, having gone through the paper hoops like good little bureaucrats, they found they had almost no-one left to rescue, most of the Britons having been helped out by journalists.

And now we have a posse of the SAS and MI6, motoring around the Libyan desert pretending to be Fitzroy Maclean, before ignominiously being captured, detained and thrown back as of no value.

What on earth were they playing (I use the word advisedly) at? WHat on earth came over Hague to authorise this extremely daft blunder into a highly delicate situation? The one thing we do know is that the cover story is nonsense. They were not there to establish contact with the rebel leadership. Our Ambassador, Richard Northern, already had close contact with the rebel leadership and indeed was able to phone the rebel leaders up and beg for the release of our crack squad. Hague had not even thought it necessary to tell our Ambassador about the operation.

If we had really wanted to establish a liaison with the rebels, we would have sent a real diplomat into Benghazi on a ship. Preferably someone already accredited in Libya. I did plenty of that kind of stuff in my career, as recounted in my books. You want a simple unarmed person to liaise, not a Ramboesque raiding party.

And make no mistake, this was a raiding party. But just what were they going to raid? We are not at war in Libya, and the government has no right to undertake armed intervention in a foreign country without telling the British people and parliament. There is no right to mount covert armed operations by military units abroad. William Hague must tell us what he was doing.

UPDATE

I just heard on the BBC that Hague is indeed going to parliament to explain himself. As usual our politicians will be competing to harrumph loudly in a patriotic way, and just as with the similarly embarassing incident of the stray sailors captured by the Iranians, nobody will be asking any sensible questions for fear of not getting the Murdoch seal of approval for supporting “our heroes”.

ADDENDUM

Very interesting comment here by Ruth which I am elevating to the main body of the post. I recall well the reports of the arms dump explosion – 27 killed was the last total I saw. Assuming Ruth is right (and her source on timing is the Guardian) it appears that this team were in that area, and had been there at the relevant time.

The Guardian quite clearly states that the SAS men had been in the country for two days. Most reports say that they landed in the dark in the early hours of Friday morning. First reports stated they were picked up on Saturday by the rebels. All the reports I have read state that they were found a few kilometres from Benina, Benghazi’s airport. Ramjah, the big arms depot supplying the rebels, is a few kilometres from Benina in the very same direction. The depot exploded at 7pm on Friday. There had been no planes in the vicinity.

I am pretty secure in my contention that this was a raid, not a search for a meeting. It appears it may be physically possible that the mission was succesful and the target the arms dump. No more than a possibility, but a great deal more plausible than the Hague explanation.

Now Blair’s grest rapprochement with his “Friend” Gadaffi led to all sorts of grubby deals, One distinct possibility is that weapons were sold to Libya which the government doea not want people to know about. The US did not join in Bliar’s Libya love-fest. A very large percentage of British manufactured arms include components made under license from the US, with strict controls on to whom they can be sold on. We wouldn’t want that kind of stuff turning up in any arms dumps.

Just a hypothesis which fits the limited facts we appear to know so far. But I repeat, a great deal more plausible than Hague’s explanation.

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Nick Cohen: The Needle is Stuck

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Poor old Nick Cohen still rambles away, continually repeating himself, like a poor deranged bag lady outside a supermarket, only more drunk and less well groomed. Why on earth does the Guardian/Observer continue to pay him to churn out this stuff?

“The difference between Islamism and the rest is that liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with the wet blanket of political correctness”

His claim in this case is that it is only righteous supporters of the Iraq war who are against the horrible murder of Salmaan Taseer and of Shahbaz Bhatti.

Religious violence in Pakistan is a dreadful problem, but so is all other violence in Pakistan. The fundamental problem is the gap between a wealthy and highly corrupt elite and a vast impoverished population. The resulting tenisons are exacerbated by years of outside meddling, be it from the CIA and US military or from well funded Saudi radical clerics. On all of which Cohen has nothing useful to mumble at all.

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The Puzzle of National Identity

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Ivory Coast, like its neighbour Ghana, has recently discovered significant volumes of deepwater oil which is just coming in to commercial exploitation. That does much to explain the unusually hight degree of Western interest in its electoral standoff, and particularly the strenuous French support for President-elect Alassane Ouattara, who is close to French oil interests.

Unfortunately an apparently united international community and strenuous economic sanctions have done nothing to move Mr Ouattara closer to power, and he remains a virtual prisoner in a 5 star hotel, protected by concentric rings of UN APCs. The large majority of the population of the capital, Abidjan, would string Mr Ouattara up given half the chance. The distinct “incomer” districts where Ouattara’s Abidjan supporters live have been pillaged and terrorised by supporters, of Laurent Gbagbo including the army and police. At least thirty Ouattara supporters have been killed this weekend already, as Ivory Coast threatens to plunge back into civil war.

Like most West African states, Ivory Coast has a sharp cultural split between Northerners and Southerners. Meet any Gbagbo supporter and they will immediately tell you that Ouattara is not really an Ivorien at all, but rather from Burkina Faso or Mali.

The root cause of the conflict is the nonsensical colonial boundaries drawn up between the British, French and the US sponsors of Liberia. Again like West Africa in general, the boundaries bear no reference to tribal, cultural, economic or social divisions, other than those since inculcated artificially by the existence of the boundaries themselves. Cultural identities, tribal and chieftaincy loyalties have no relation to these boundaries – and divisions within the artificial nation are potent and dangerous.

Yet is is also true that new national identities do take hold to an extraordinary degree. Cross the border from Ghana and you instantly see a completely different world – Gitanes, scooters, everybody speaking French. Football matches are a vital component of national pride, and the Ivory Coast team is supported enthusiastically by Northerner and Southerner alike. Yet individual national identities are blurred where the border has no tribal meaning.

Artifical borders are not the only unfortunate colonial legacy in Ivory Coast. To a large extent traditional landholding systems were overturned and replaced with large plantations, that made Ivory Coast the world’s largest producer of cocoa. But it also brought landlessness, rural poverty, urban drift and the use of child labour on plantations. Given existing ethnic tensions and this weak social structure, increasing migration from drought affected Mali and Burkina Faso helped create the current tinderbox.

Nor is the international community as united behind Ouatarra as the endorsement of the EU, Ecowas and African Union would appear to suggest. Gbagbo has strong support, including practical covert assistance, from Ghana, where the NDC government views him as an important ideological ally. More crucially still, Gbagbo enjoys strong personal support from Jacob Zuma, who detests Ouattara and views him as a colonial puppet. The Chinese hope that if Gbagbo can be kept in power, the west will be punished and they rewarded with oil contracts. And the electoral situation was not as clear as it seems; the electoral commission and the constitutional court declared different victors, free and fair polling was not really possible in either the North or the South as supporters of both candidates terrorised the minority in the areas they respectfully control. There is also the great unsaid, but which everybody who knows Ivory Coast understands; there are a great many more voters on the register in the north than there are actual people living there.

All of which makes it quite remarkable that Ouatarra received so much international endorsement in the first place. They keys to this are strong and very active personal support from Sarkozy, and the firm backing of Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali.

All the signs are that this protracted standoff is going to decline into something much more violent. Neither “President” is interested in compromise. Ouattara is notably vainglorious, while Gbagbo is something of a thug. The Ivory Coast needs to be shot of both of them and to discover younger leaders and a politics that unites its people, rather than serves the interests of opposing northern and southern elites.

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Nick Clegg The Death of Voting Reform

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I am a strong supporter of proportional representation, by the single transferable vote. I believe it would open up our politics and roll back some of the corporatism that makes our national politics so unresponsive. The purpose of this post is not to argue that case; we can do that another day.

Alternative Vote seems to me only very marginally preferable to first past the post. Rather than everyone having a good chance to be represented in a multi-member constituency, increasing diversity, AV advantages the inoffensive, it brings the elevation of mundanity. It is only marginally better than FPTP, which advantages the offensive and the funded to the exclusion of everyone else. The main reason I shall vote yes in the referndum is that at least AV will dispense with the ridiculous argument that the British people are incapable of ranking 1,2,3.

But after Barnsley Central it must be extremely likely that the AV referendum will be lost, because the electorate will fear it will bring an electoral advantage to Nick Clegg.

I rejoined the LibDems after Norwich North because I learnt from that experience that electoral politics in the UK are near impossible for an individual to crack. Ironic then that, as just an individual, I polled very nearly as well in Norwich North as the LibDems did in Barnsley – not just as a whole national party, but as a party in government. Indeed, as just an individual in Blackburn in 2005 I polled significantly better than the LibDems did in Barnsley Central.

Not only did I rejoin the LibDems, but at the LibDem Special Conference in Birmingham I voted for the coalition. But that was for a coalition agreement that bears no relation to what the government has actually done. I did not vote for £9,000 tuition fees. The LibDems could have abstained on tuition fees as the agreement I voted for provided – but it turns out that agreement was merely to placate the membership and bore no relation to what the right wing enthusiast Clegg actually intended to do in government.

Free schools, £9,000 tuition fees, ideological market mechanism reform of the NHS bringing yet more bureaucracy, internal invoicing, accountants and waste, 28 day detention, the continuation of control orders, war without end, children still in immigration detention, no sign of an open inquiry on complicity with torture…. I shall be astonished if anyone votes LibDem ever again. There must be some extremely happy Tories out there. Did they always know Clegg would turn out to be to the right of Thatcher?

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Perspective

 in Afghanistan by | View Comments

NATO air strikes have killed 80 civilians in Afghanistan in the last two weeks alone, including nine small boys who were out together collecting firewood. We have been raining down death from the sky around the world on innocent people pretty well every single day since 2002. Gadaffi’s use of air power is very wrong, but is on nothing like this scale.

The people who are positing a no-fly zone over Libya are precisely the people who support and sustain the bombing of children in Afghanistan. The lack of self-knowledge, the complete absence of any perspective, is bewildering.

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Western Cant on the Middle East

 in Middle East / Uncategorized by | View Comments

Consider a few facts:

The Obama administration had two years ago stopped all US funds to human rights defenders and civil society groups in Egypt, stipulating that all aid must go through the Mubarak regime

President Karimov of Uzbekistan killed more peaceful demonstrators in a single day in May 2005 than Colonel Gadaffi has done in the Libyan uprising so far. Yet Karimov in the fast three months had a visit from Hillary Clinton, a new military supply agreement with the United States and new partnership agreement with NATO, an official visit to the EU in Brussels, and new tarriff preferences for slave picked Uzbek cotton entering the EU. Most people in Uzbekistan have not a clue the arab revolutions are happening, such is state control of meida and internet and blocking of airwaves

In 1991, when the allies embarked on the First Gulf War to retake Kuwait from Iraq, John Major and George Bush sr declared that, rather than simply put the absolute Kuwaiti monarchy back on its throne (which it had unheroically run away from), the price of western soldiers being asked to risk their lives was the democratisation of Kuwait. That was immediately forgotten after the war. Ordinary British, US and other taxpayers paid out billions to put one of the richest families in the world back in sole charge of massive oil reserves. The Kuwaiti royal family still has a total monopoly of executive power, with a talking shop parliament and very limited electorate.

I could go on. If you want to go to the absolute font of western hypocrisy, take this from David Cameron:

It is not for me, or for governments outside the region, to pontificate about how each country meets the aspirations of its people. It is not for us to tell you how to do it, or precisely what shape your future should take. There is no single formula for success, and there are many ways to ensure greater, popular participation in Government

This was spoken in Dubai as Cameron travelled the region with a gang of millionaire arms dealers trying to flog weapons to any Emir wanting to buy. In other words, we feel free to insist on democracy in Libya. If we don’t do so in Saudi Arabia, it is not because we are hypocrites, it is because there is no single formula. Democracy would be quite wrong for Uzbekistan and Bahrain, and until two months ago it was quite wrong for Egypt too. It might hurt our allies. But it is absolutely essential yesterday in Libya and Zimbabwe.

Words scarcely suffice to condemn this cant. In Bahrain the majority are struggling for more freedom from their minority rulers, to a deafening silence from the West. In Yemen, a gross dictator hangs on with every kind of US support. In Egypt, the US policy of propping up Mubarak, then their replacement policy of a managed transition to Suleyman, have failed one by one and now we have a military dictatorship which is every day abducting and torturing pro-democracy campaigners. Over fifty Tahrir Square demonstrators have been sentenced to at least three years jail each by military tribunals in the last week, to total western silence. The US aim of securing an entrenched pro-Israeli government continues to be pushed forward by every available means.

That odious charlatan Niall Ferguson, producer for the right wing US market of popular history devoid of original research , informs us that democracy is not something arabs can do. For him to cite the invasion of Iraq, which he supported, as evidence that you cannot succeed with democracy in Arab countries, is sickening on so many levels. That democracy might be better implanted without killing hundreds of thousands of intended recipients, like so much else, does not occur to him.

Ferguson’s ludicrous assertion – inaccurate even for a generalisation – about lack of property rights in the Islamic world making democracy impossible there, needs to be challenged.

Firstly, it is by no means clear that democracy can only exist in a society with entrenched property rights. Ghana, for example, is widely viewed as the model African democracy, yet it is virtually impossible to own land there other than leasehold from the “stool”, or local chieftaincy. The vast majority of Ghanaians are not property owning in the Ferguson sense, but democracy and human rights function very well, thank you.

Secondly, there is a wide variety of property models throughout the Islamic world, and Islam has little or nothing to do with why the model is so different in Turkey, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

The notions that arabs and/or muslims are incapable of democracy is of course the staple of neo-conservative thinking. For there to be a “Clash of civilisations”, Islamic civilisation must be portrayed as incompatible with all modernity, as retrograde, autocratic and violent. Again, that is far from the truth.

That Islam and democracy are incompatible (and Turkey therefore presumably a mirage) has been the excuse for the Western backing of Mubarak, Karimov and endless other “hard men”. We really back them because they serve western interests over oil and gas, over Israel, or over Afghanistan. But we pretend that we back them because the only alternative to them is radical Islam.

That false dichotomy was given a seeming substance by our complicity with the torturers of Egypt, Uzbekistan, Tunisia and Morocco. The regime torturers happily made dissidents twisting in unimaginable agony admit that they wanted an al-Qaida state. The regime passed this on to the CIA and MI6, and they and western political leaders happily swallowed this claptrap because it united their interests with those of their client regime in a grubby circle of lying self-justification. I hope that puts Murder in Samarkand in context for you.

As for Gadaffi, we should not make the mistake of presuming he is not bad, because he is hypocritically denounced by those who support other dictators as bad or worse. Gadaffi is bad, and he is barking mad (you can read of my personal experience of him in The Catholic Orangemen of Togo). I hope that the Libyan people manage to oust him and bring democracy, though I fear this curiously low level civil war could drag on for a long while.

But the West should stay out. That the powers which are still trying, in the interests of Israel, to limit the democratic reform in Egypt, which still occupy Afghanistan, and are still propping up their puppet Gulf autocracies, should interfere with air or ground intervention, would be deeply unhelpful and the consequences are unreckonable. I can see an argument for shipping food and medical supplies to Benghazi and Tobruk, but that is the limit of western interference which might be helpful.

The Arab people have shown they are more than capable of seizing their own destiny. This must be for the Libyan people and other Arab states to sort out. For years, Western commentators spoke of “the Arab street” as a coherent public opinion, but as though it were natural that such opinion was at complete odds with the views of autocratic leaders, and the arab voice had no potential for translation to action. That has changed and the Arab voice must reverberate loudly enough to shake down more autocratic leaders – Gadaffi included.

The undeniable fact of the existence of the articulate young protestors of Tunisia, Tahrir Square, Bahrain, Muscat and elsewhere should have killed forever the figleaf behind which Western viciousness sought to skulk, that there are only two Arab political options: dictatorship or theocracy. In fact the Arab peoples are teeming with possibility and vast untapped human potential, waiting to form dynamically into new political and social organisation. We should leave them alone, stop arming their repressors and give them that chance.

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It Looks Wonderful – But Does it Work?

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I have a brand new shiny blog but can I fly it? I’ll never get over Macho Grande.

Infinite thanks to Tim Ireland for the extraordinary amount of work involved in getting this blog moved over from Movable Type to WordPress. Not to mention cleaning out over 300,000 pieces of spam. Transferring the 57,000 (yes, really that many) remaining genuine comments on to the Intense Debate plugin has been even more onerous and is still not complete. While that process goes on, comments will have to be delayed by moderation. Volunteer moderators from longstanding and trusted associates and contributors are welcome.

Thanks as ever also to Richard Kastelein and expathos for their fearless hosting.

Many of you will be familiar with WordPress; input is welcome on the format, look and working of the new site and which plugins you would particularly want to see.

Events over the last few months has made this blog’s largely international focus, particularly on human rights and the Islamic world as impacted by Western foreign policy, more relevant than ever. So if I can post this, then enough of the admin and let me get down to the real work.

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Don’t panic!

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You may have noticed the sudden disappearance of every comment on the site. This is part of the IntenseDebate installation, and perfectly normal. In fact, the IntenseDebate installation is why he had to be so certain that the bulk of comments were imported to WordPress correctly (because they then had to be processed by this provider).

On that note, I am happy to announce that the 9/11 thread was saved, and will re-appear in a complete state along with all other comments in the coming days (there are tens of thousands of comments to import – 56,727 to be exact – and this will take some time).

The site should re-launch shortly with Craig at the helm, and should process any new comments immediately (something I am just about to test before closing this thread). Cheers all.

–

UPDATE – Test completed, but we are stuck with the default settings of IntenseDebate until the import is complete, and it will take a while to get to know everybody regardless, so all comments will be processed immediately, but very few of them will be published immediately; they will need to be approved first. The system will get easier to use when we can later adjust the settings to ‘trust’ regulars with immediate publication.

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