Brontides

Nick Robinson’s analysis of why the Snow Plot failed misses, I think, one key reason why none of Mr. Brown’s antagonists have succeeded.

That being: there there are actually no, or at least very few, actual policy or ideology wedge issues that split the Labour Party. Even at Cabinet level, the tension is not related to any specific direction of travel or intellectual underpinning that Gordon Brown has embraced. The rift is purely stylistic, which makes it something of a curiosity, as both Thatcher and Major faced intra-party opposition who disagreed with them profoundly on the way in which the country should be run. But more than that, it’s this quality that severely reduces the dissent’s chances of success: without the white heat of an ideological rift, getting enough people to take on a sufficient amount of risk to oust a sitting Prime Minister would be an impossible task.

An argument could be constructed that the lack of a coherent alternative ideology within Labour is a symptom of Labour’s political turpitude, and to be sure, the cabinet does seem to lack the ideological creativity that one would expect of a government at war with itself. With the exception of Harriet Harman and Ed Balls in their respective remits, they seem to be a bunch singularly averse to asserting firm positions on anything.

One very simple thing about the Snow Plot that has become very clear, but yet which is not getting any traction in any of the analysis I’ve seen about it, is this:

The reason why this story has so much potency is because if a secret ballot were to be held, Gordon Brown would almost certainly lose.

If you think about that, it’s quite remarkable.

It’s the open secret that hangs over British politics like a thundercloud; one of the major parties is going into an election led by a person that the majority of its members don’t want to be Prime Minister. And what’s even more remarkable is that this has been clear for a long time, and that, despite numerous attempts, no-one has succeeded in prising him out.

Yemen has leapt into the media spotlight since Christmas Day, and probably for good reason – like Somalia, it’s a perennially misunderstood and under-observed place, whose sudden elevation in the eye of the global media has led to some wild and hysterical mis-reportage. Waq Waq, which has been fighting the good fight on Yemeni news for nearly a year, shares my despondence. The misunderstanding of the nature of qat is a particular pet peeve; yes, it’s mildly narcotic, and yes it informs myriad attending problems, such as water consumption, reduced productivity in the workforce and the criminality inspired by the mafia-esque organisations that distribute it. But it has next to nothing to do with terrorism, alienation or extremism in the region, so why every news report feels the need to hold it up as a cultural constant is beyond me.

An inside look on one at the least-understood of geopolitic’s actors is always worth a look. Understanding the structure of power in Tehran is crucial as it provides context for everything that is happening today, and this is a clear, lucid and accessible starting point.

The plot threw off the actual post I was going to make today, which was along the lines of: aren’t things going well for Nick Clegg all of a sudden?

I’m not the only one who thinks so, although the attention Clegg gets from the Left and the Super-Left may not be entirely indicative. But Clegg has been experiencing a bit of a resurgence, one which probably began with the news that he would be sharing an equal stage with the other leaders in the televised debate. It was a great coup for him, and it now seems clear that it was waved through by the other leaders as part of their collective woo’ing of the third party. It’s unusual for a third party leader to be so courted, but the real takeaway from this is the left-wing media reaction. If Labour can’t provide a meaningful alternative to the Tories, could we see media outlets switching to the Lib Dems?

Of course, all of this got subsumed by the plot, a bit. For a while it looked like it might have traction but at this stage it seems to have fizzled. This probably isn’t very good for the Lib Dems, who need Labour to retain some kind of competitive margin in order to have any hung-parliament value, and it certainly isn’t very good for Labour either. So we’ll just have to see what the next few days bring. It may well be, of course, that for all the high drama voters have already factored Labour’s fractiousness into their voting intentions, and all of this will have next to no effect whatsoever…

More detail on the Jordanian who killed seven CIA operatives here. It’s a pretty remarkable story, really – in some ways one is inclined to believe that technology has moved us past the point at which physical, flesh-and-blood cloak ‘n’ dagger intrigue is efficient or cost-effective. But then, one would not be alone:-

In the past, Jordanian officials have privately criticized American intelligence services, saying they relied too heavily on technology and not enough on agents capable of infiltrating operations.

Ironic. But also interesting given my post yesterday. The man had been plucked from a Jordanian jail and recruited by the Americans and the Jordanians to spy on Al Qaida. He had a history of supporting violent islamist causes, and was a well-known contributor to al-Hesbah, a online forum run by Islamist extremists. He also ran his own Islamist blog. That the US military allowed him to walk straight from an Al Qaida stronghold into a US military intelligence facility without even frisking him shows a severe and naive lack of understanding of basic human nature.

I read this on the way back home this evening, and it was interesting – a paper by a pair of Zurich-based economists who set out to demonstrate how the decision to become a suicide bomber can be rational, and doesn’t necessarily run counter to economic principles of utility.

The whole thing is worth a read, but its chief interest for me was that it came as a reminder that insanity is to psychoanalysis as dark matter is to physics – something hazy and indistinct used to fill the chasm that exists between what we can measure, define and understand, and what we can observe as extant but not explain. While it may briefly satisfy a theoretical gap, it doesn’t absolve the inquiring mind of the duty to push deeper for more worthy explanations. The most common reasons suggested for suicide terror are madness and hate, but the paper successfully argues that these are minor influences in the decision-making process that leads to an attempted suicide bombing. The paper sets out some of the (many and varied) alternatives, splitting them out into three distinct categories:

• posthumous effects: rise in the social and monetary status of the attackers family; immortality of the attacker; accomplishment of political, religious and social goals.
• announcement effects: admiration and rise in status of the attacker before the attack.
• defection effects: negative consequences arising in case the attacker does not carry out the attack.

Aside from that, the paper also carries the stories of Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and Dareen Abu Aysheh, who detonated a bomb at an Israeli roadblock a month later. Since Idris, the Palestinian territories have become the area second most targeted by female suicide bombers, but at the time, cases such as Idris’ were a rarity. In her book, Army of Roses, Barbara Victor describes Idris as “talented… married and divorced because she was sterile”; of Abu Aysheh it was said by her brother that “[s]he was sure that [she] would be killed for nothing, maybe at a roadblock or when our houses are bombed, and she used to say that it is better to die for a reason”. In the absence of the suicide-bombing industry that would come to utilise the effects outlined above, these two women – and many others besides – used suicide bombing as a way to validate their own lives and their positions within society. Even by strictly utilitarian standards the logic makes pernicious sense.

This is the outrage that underpins the claim – briefly fashionable in the media, now thankfully on the wane, although still prevalent, at least on the British street – that Islam is a violent religion. The simple truth is that any population – even the most stoic, resolutely middle-class British or American WASPs – will, when placed in conditions similar to those under which the Palestinian population has laboured, eventually turn to violent resistance and extremism. The solution to this isn’t bombs, roadblocks and walls, it’s to remove the depredations (which, unerringly, tend to be found in the form of bombs, roadblocks and walls) that drove that population to its extreme in the first place.

Finally, this footnote – of all things – perked my interest. The writers say:

…the terrorist activity level is not modelled as a continuous variable with the maximum level being suicide attack (see eg. [J.P.] Azam [Suicide bombing as inter-generational investment] 2005).

Two thoughts emerge from this – first, why should suicide bombing be modelled on a continuous scale with other acts of terrorism? There’s no evidence to suggest progression – that a sufficiently hardened terrorist will, eventually, commit a suicide attack. And secondly, this leads to the idea that suicide bombing and other forms of terror are strictly non-analogous. To be a terrorist is to be a killer, a murderer, a methodical, calculating – and unsacrificing – designer of plots to cause havoc and death. A suicide bomb, however, is an act of desperation, a statement of self-sacrifice, and ultimately inward-facing. As this paper proves, suicide bombing is, more often than not, a strictly utilitarian decision, which is a somewhat sanitised way of saying that, for the bombers, the benefits of dying outweigh the negatives. Idris and Abu Aysheh would never have considered “conventional” terror, because any act of terror that did not result in their deaths would have missed the point. What horrors must a community suffer to make that course of action a rational one?

Anyway, the paper’s a good read, so I recommend at least glance.

What does a good week look like when talking about Iran?

Sadly, the last few weeks have skirted about as close to positive as we are likely to see, at least in the short term.

First, a bad story miraculously managed not to get worse. On the back of the collapse of a near-miss deal, which would have allowed for Iranian fuel to be enriched in French and Russian reactors, and the revelations of a second reactor in Qom, the US House of Representatives passed a crummy bill (when AIPAC crow about it, you know it’s bad), giving the President the power to ban any company who traded in Iranian petroleum from operating in the US – effectively, a sanction. This would be – and still may, in actuality, end up being – an awful idea; Prof. Gary Sick referred to it as “perhaps the worst idea to come out of Congress since they opposed the purchase of Alaska”, although Sarah Palin reminds us of the charms of that earlier act of obstructionism. Indeed, the sanctions would be entirely self-defeating; they would, by forcing legitimate companies to avoid trading in Iranian fuel, channel funds and effective power into the hands of the Revolutionary Guards, while further agitating the possibility another neocon pet war in the Middle East and exacerbating the perception that the US is hostile to the average Iranian. But midterms loom, it looks great on a campaign leaflet, and opposing it is politically risky, especially with the Democratic brand so heavily tarnished by the dirty fight over healthcare.

Happily, the US media – probably heavily aided by the White House – have responded responsibly, acknowledging the substantial successes that the White House has enjoyed in its current policy and hopefully giving the Senate the cover it needs to quietly neuter the sanctions bill.

Secondly, contrary to the expectations of many – including myself – the Green rebellion continues to develop, almost in spite of the conventional wisdom surrounding how rebellions and revolutions behave. Once again, Gary Sick, who predicted that the dissent would have legs, provides some measure of clarity on this. In many respects, the Iranian regime has performed a by-the-book suppression of the unrest, but have met with little success.

One of the interesting factors surrounding the post-election Iranian unrest is the extent to which it has been beyond the influence of individuals. At the time of the election, I said the following:

I think that Ahmedinejad is, at best, a bystander in events at the moment. To an extent, though, so is Mousavi; he seems to be one step behind the protests, always calling them after they’ve already been arranged. And to a different extent, so too is Khamenei. The ultimate choice of whether to risk it all by using force is his and his alone, but that’s the limit of his ability to act; I don’t think he’ll take that choice, so it remains to be seen how far the protesters can go.

As time goes by, this seems truer and truer. Even following the assassination of his nephew, there is no indication to suggest that Mousavi is even particularly closely connected to the bulk of the revolutionary force, which seems to be quite adept at organising and directing itself. Ahmedinejad, after a brief attempt at a post-election power-grab, has disappeared completely as an actor on both the national and international stages. And Khamenei… I wonder to what extent the Revolutionary Guard are still loyal to him, given that his survival increasingly rests squarely on their shoulders. If this rebellion does develop into a full-blown revolt then it will be a unique and intriguing new form of civil unrest, albeit one that may be applicable only to the uniquely Byzantine circumstances that prevail in Iran.

I have long admired Prof. Sick’s analysis on Iran but have respectfully dissented against his optimism regarding the outcome of the current turmoil. It increasingly seems, however, that a positive outcome in Iran may be possible – not likely, perhaps, and certainly not imminent, but possible. The longer that the Green revolutionaries in Iran hold out, and the wise continue to thread the needle in Washington, the better the odds get.