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Is Ron Paul’s foreign policy actually possible?

January 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Aosher in History | Politics - Middle East | Politics - US - (2 Comments)

Ron Paul is a man with a small but constant and passionate fanbase. There are many reasons for this, some good, some bad – he is one of the few candidates to openly advocate liberalisation of drug law, for example, and in general his supporters, charitably, tend towards the naive on subjects such as his apparent racism. But one of the reasons for his enduring appeal is his advocacy for a military isolationism. In a country that has been suckered into too many wars of choice since 1950, a candidate promising a return to the good old days, when wars were fought only in the national defence and politics ended at the water’s edge, has a certain appeal. It even has an element of historical rigour to it; the great long-lived empires of the past have tended to shy away from ambitious rhetoric of global responsibility, fighting wars only to protect their back yards or expand them. President Obama was elected party on the basis of a similar aspiration.

Paul argues that America’s twentieth century saw its competitiveness and prestige tarnished through a series of ideologically incoherent, politically unnecessary wars, which also happened to be massively expensive and left the country’s political class in hock to its military industrial complex. He doesn’t just want to pull US troops out of its remaining one-and-a-half wars; he wants to root the military out of government payrolls entirely, proposing to shut bases from Germany to Korea, ending foreign aid entirely (which of course plays into a broader political point, part of which is that much of that aid goes to countries who simply use it to buy American kit), and reducing both economic and military support to Israel. The last paragraph tells you one important thing about Ron Paul: namely, that he will never be the President of the United States, or even a nominee for that office. Nevertheless his ideas resonate, both with young libertarians and rightward-leaning centrists. They have a long tradition in the US – military intervention is a post-war innovation, and it has been noted that Paul’s policy really only echoes those of the country’s thirteenth President Millard Fillmore.

But Fillmore lived in simpler times. Do the politics of a complex, interconnected world allow for the isolation of its greatest power?

The short answer is probably no. Obama has found disentanglement harder than his campaign rhetoric suggested; the Afghan war drags on, drone bombings have massively increased and offences against human decency, such as corpse desecration and Guantanamo Bay, remain as problematic as they were under President Bush. This is partly a reflection of the world in which we live. Retired Colonel Pat Lang today asked

It is not clear to me what Ron Paul’s actual position is. Someone should ask him what he would do if the Iranians actually attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz to international maritime traffic. What would he do as president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces?

Presumably Paul’s counter would be that, by pulling its military out of Iran’s vicinity and reducing its support for Israel, the US would reduce tensions and improve its leverage sufficiently that such a situation would be less likely to arise. But this is optimistic, not least because the US is hardly alone amongst Iran’s agitators (Britain is arguably even less popular in Iran than the US). Disrupting oil traffic is an extreme case, but the truth is that the US is implicated, either directly by dint of supplied equipment, economically by dint of strategic interests, or morally by way of training or political support, in more or less every conflict that could conceivably take place. The international system is immensely complex. The US can not extricate itself from the web of coercive force that partly constitutes the international political order. One way or another, all wars are about power, and therefore all wars inevitably factor in the superpower. Declaring isolationism will never protect the US from being attacked.

Obama has already demonstrated that imprudently promising an end to American war. In truth, the call to war for any country is often driven more by events outside that country’s borders, and the intentions of a single leader can rarely stand in the way of the inevitable – remember, George Bush Jr came to power expecting to be a peacetime President. Paul’s rhetoric is hopeful, but it is based on a fantasy that can never be realised unilaterally. Were Ron Paul ever to find himself in the unlikely position of holding office, his principles would not survive first contact with the enemy.

Is Iran building the bomb?

January 20th, 2012 | Posted by Aosher in Politics | Politics - Middle East - (3 Comments)

A growing sense of unease is evident in Britain and the US. Populations that have been railroaded to war once suspect that the gears are quietly crunching once again. They may be right.

I saw “may be right”, but the only real doubt is to whether a state of declared war will exist in the near future. Because the US and Israel have been pursuing covert war against Iran for decades; STUXNET, drone incursions, explosive sabotage and targeted assassination of nuclear scientists, the last of which is arguably an act of terrorism. The ostensible casus belli is Iran’s nuclear programme, but Iran has consistently denied that it is making a bomb, claiming that its programme is purely civilian. That this is a lie has become an almost unchallenged public orthodoxy in Washington and Tel Aviv.

To those in the know, however, broad uncertainty does exist, which explains the emergence of articles like this one in today’s Haaretz – Israel ‘very far off’ from decision on Iran attack – which claims that Israel’s intelligence community believes Iran itself has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

This rings true to me. To an extent, the fate of the nuclear programme depends on both the extent to which external provocation backs the regime into a corner, as well as the extent to which internal pressure allows the government a free hand. 2012 could be a pivotal year in Iran – a parliamentary election in March offers a threat for fresh political instability, and an oil shock or the collapse of the Syrian regime could increase the ability of Iran’s enemies to tighten the screws. Any of these factors could bring even Iran’s robust political construction tumbling down.

Some obituaries

May 4th, 2011 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics - Middle East | Politics - UK - (0 Comments)

Was it right to have killed Osama bin Laden in cold blood?

Because that’s what the good men of SEAL Team Six did – they were given a kill order and they executed it, no pun intended.

It’s a complex question and gets tangled up in a lot of other problems, both emotional and intellectual. This post aims to unpick some of that.

Was it legal?

Many will hardly care whether it was legal or not, arguing that right and wrong are not always reflected in law. That’s a fair point, but legalities are still important, if only because they’re the difference between the subjective opinion of an individual and the agreed parameters established by a society.

On this issue the rules are actually very straightforward and relatively unambiguous: killing Osama bin Laden was inalienably legal under international law.

Under international humanitarian law, a member of an armed organised group can be killed as an enemy combatant, and as al Qaida was a recognised participant in the war in Afghanistan his death is an entirely justifiable act of war. The only strictures on such an action are the principles of distinction and proportionality, and the action in Abbotabad seems not to violate either of those restrictions.

Under international human rights law (a separate and oftentimes contradictory code), targeted killings are harder to justify but still not impossible. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 is the document that governs this code, and it states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life” – meaning that assassination is legal so long as it can be justified. If he had attempted to surrender then the case would be sticker, but the White House claims that bin Laden resisted arrest and that is certainly consistent with his own pronouncements of the issue. Given that the White House holds video of the killing – which can be subpeona’d – we can probably assume that they are being truthful in this regard.

Was it morally justifiable?

The question of moral right or wrong breaks in two – ‘can it be coherently justified to others’ and ‘is it, at a fundamental level, consistent with the moral norms established in our society’. One can be critically examined; the other is conceptually much more woolly.

The question of whether the killing could be justified is straightforward. Yes; it is clearly possible to build a coherent and convincing argument asserting that killing bin Laden was morally preferable to taking him alive. Here’s how you do it:

  • He was an enemy combatant, not a civilian. While taking him alive was an option, killing him was an equally viable one, and the question needs to be viewed in that light.

  • There was no gain to be had from taking him alive, for the following reasons:
  • He would not have given up information except under extreme torture, and the compulsion to use that torture would have been acute.
  • Taking him alive would not have changed the ultimate outcome. He confessed to the crime, he only would have been tried in America, and he would have been put to death.
  • The only difference is that taking him alive would have subjected the world to the spectacle of a court case, which would have had no real value. It would have been impossible to try him fairly, it would have been perceived to be a humiliating sham amongst our enemies (and many of our allies) overseas, regardless of how rigorous the trial actually was, and it would have given him one last prime-time podium from which to agitate for further slaughter. I accept that we should not be afraid to face extremist rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean we have to give it our network airtime.
  • The key point in the above section is that it wouldn’t actually win us any friends. People don’t like that we assassinated him and that’s sad, but the shitstorm we would have faced for trying him would have been much worse. The Nuremburg trials would have been invoked, and probably not entirely unfairly. America’s own divisions would have come to the fore as everyone’s favourite bigots – Beck, O’Reilly, Palin, Trump – would have vied to be toughest on the terrorist. Even our allies in the region would have been forced into the position of defending Islam, and bin Laden by proxy, from the acid tongues of America’s most divisive assholes.
  • Every day that he spends on TV in an orange boiler suit and shackles, his friends get more pissed off. That means reprisals, and not just against us – against anybody.
  • The videotapes of bin Laden’s final hours would be passed from hand to hand like relics. It’s a short-cut to martyrdom.
  • All of these would be equivocations from a moral imperative, though, were it not for one thing: he was an enemy soldier in a time of war. If he was a political leader, a civilian, then it would be a different matter, but he was a man whose life was war. Ultimately, this was the end he chose, and we shouldn’t let an obsession with abstract principles interfere with that.

So it’s certainly morally defensible. If the Dalai Lama can bring himself to recognise the justification then it seems bizarre to suggest otherwise.

Was it right?

If it’s legal and justifiable, then surely that shouldn’t be in question?

And yet. Outside of ground zero, away from the gates of the white house, many people – not just the airy-fairy left – are uneasy. The policy of whacking terrorist leaders is from an Israeli playbook that has a tendency to inspire revulsion, as Alan Dershowitz notes:

Among others, these critics include officials in Britain, France, Italy, Russia, the EU, Jordan, and the United Nations. [Jack Straw, the former British foreign secretary] once said, “The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called targeted assassinations of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive.” The French foreign ministry has declared “that extrajudicial executions contravene international law and are unacceptable.” The Italian Foreign Minister has said, “Italy, like the whole of the European Union, has always condemned the practice of targeted assassinations.” The Russians have asserted that “Russia has repeatedly stressed the unacceptability of extrajudicial settling of scores and ‘targeted killings.’” Javier Solana has noted that the “European Union has consistently condemned extrajudicial killings.” The Jordanians have said, “Jordan has always denounced this policy of assassination and its position on this has always been clear.” And Kofi Annan has declared “that extrajudicial killings are violations of international law.”

Yet none of these nations, groups or individuals have criticized the targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden by the US. The reason is obvious. All the condemnations against targeted killing was directed at one country. Guess which one? Israel, of course.

I disagree with Dershowitz’s conclusion – I think that bin Laden is a qualitatively different name from Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and politicians tend to be sensitive to the political sensitivities of condemning the killing of such a widely despised man. But nevertheless, a bad taste lingers. No-one is quite sure if they’ve passed through the looking glass.

Bin Laden wore no uniform. Is the argument that he was an armed combatant not a legal fudge? Yes, putting him on trial would be politically difficult. Isn’t that the kind of difficulty a strong society, with a sound ideological basis, should welcome? And aren’t the flag-waving crowds at ground zero… kinda crass?

And ultimately, those are justifiable concerns. I agree with the decision as it was made, but still, I am uneasy. It’s never comfortable to see an act of war feted on a widescreen TV.

Perhaps this moment will be a moment of closure, a final transgression that allows America to move past its dirty wars, to put Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay behind it, and to close the door on “enhanced interrogation” and extraordinary rendition. If that turns out to be the case then the moral qualms will have to be quashed, because it will have been worth it, this final destruction of the mirror that reflected America back upon itself. If not then America will continue to owe us a little more justification for this than it has yet been able to give, to quiet that tiny voice of conscience; but in that case, more and greater atrocities await.

Is Iran in the business of funding African coups?

November 23rd, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics - Middle East - (1 Comments)

This morning brings the news that the Gambia has severed all relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two pariah states have a decent history of mutual declarations of support – developing nuclear power Iran once said that Gambia deserved support as it was under pressure from “bullying” powers, while human-rights-abusing Gambia has supported Iran’s right to atomic weapons – but the affair seems to be well and truly over:

[...] all government of the Gambia projects and programmes, which were implemented in co-operation with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been cancelled.

[...]

The Gambia government hereby requests all Iranian nationals representing the interest of the government of Iran in the Gambia to leave the country within 48 hours from the effective date stipulated through a notification issued to the government of Iran.

What’s interesting, though, is that ties between Nigeria and Iran were strained earlier this week when Nigeria intercepted a shipment of arms that the Iranian government was routing through their ports. Also long-term allies, the Nigerians stopped just short of freezing the relationship but demanded a full and frank accounting from the Iranian government. Under pressure, Iran claimed that the shipment was from a private company and was on its way to Gambia… No reason was given by Gambia for the suspension of ties but it doesn’t seem especially likely that the two incidents are unrelated.

Shipments of arms going to Africa without the knowledge of the African governments in question are rarely innocent. The question is: is Iran arguing factions in Gambia? Or is it throwing its relationship with Gambia under a bus to hide its real activities elsewhere – possibly in Nigeria itself?

“Rape by Deception” in Israel

July 27th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Feminism | General | Politics - Middle East - (1 Comments)

A couple of days ago, a Palestinian man got convicted for rape by deception in Israel. The bare facts of the case are this. The man met an Israeli woman in a bar. The two got to talking, and during the course of the conversation the man directly claimed to be Israeli. The two spent the night together; explicit consent was given, and that consent was not made explicitly dependent on the man being an Israeli. Later, the woman discovered that the man was, in fact, an Arab, and prosecuted him for rape by deception.

This is a complex situation, clearly, and large sections of the internet have devoted considerable time to overreaching in search of hard conclusions. Mondoweiss, for example, which does this by raising false equivalences. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera calls it “the selective application of the law against Arabs” and “just plain racism.” Even Feministe concludes that “there are certain circumstances where rape by fraud is a legitimate claim” but “this… is not one of them, and opens the door to even greater abuses.”

One thing is clear: the crime of rape by deception is a legitimate complaint, and not in an abstract sense. Cases have been successfully prosecuted where the man has lied about his sexual health, passing HIV onto his partner; where a man posed as a senior official and promised increased social security payments in exchange for sex; and where a woman consented to sex with a man who she believed to be her boyfriend but was actually her boyfriend’s brother. The statute is not used for situations where a man, say, claimed to be 27 when he’s actually 25, or a woman who claims to be a supermodel in a bar.

For many, though, the overtly racist nature of the complaint seems to be the deciding factor. My own personal feeling is perhaps dangerously relativistic, but my gut tells me that racism needs to be viewed through a different prism when dealing with Israel and Palestine. From a western perspective, the explicitly racial justification for the suit can be nauseating; but then, racial issues – although by no means defused in Europe or America – are less of an immediate concern than they are in the Levant. It is impossible not to decry the institutional racism and xenophobic nationalist tribalism exhibited by both Israeli and Arab political and social elements.

But the heart of this case isn’t an abstract principle; it’s rooted in personal actions and responses. The woman felt genuinely and legitimately deceived and violated. That in itself isn’t enough to determine guilt of course. What is, however, is the fact that the man knew that the deception was of decisive magnitude and did it anyway. The problem here is that the man chose to tell a lie of sufficient magnitude to deny the woman the opportunity to give consent. That the woman’s objection to the deception was racist in nature is vile but to some extent beside the point.

In many ways, Israel and – to a lesser extent – the occupied territories (particularly the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip) are fundamentally racist. They are societies constructed on a nationalist ideal, defined by opposition to an alien “other”. Widespread societal changes are needed to prevent citizens of Israel from viewing non-Israeliness as a defining flaw. But the fact remains that, for now, it is a defining flaw, and that fact is a factor that must have been known to the defendant.

As much as it galls me, I have to accept that in this case the verdict was probably correct.

EDIT: For an interesting comparative, check out how rape is handled in the UAE.

The West: Torture, Kidnap and Terror

July 15th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - UK | Politics - US - (2 Comments)

How far should a government go in order to safeguard its citizens?

Two stories have emerged concurrently that cast the question into new light. While most citizens tend to be happy with the theoretical notion of covert defence, security agencies usually try to keep the visceral practicalities of that defence obscured, as support for their methods often vanishes like spit on a hot rock when exposed to the full scrutiny of public opinion.

Yesterday, I discussed the story of Shahram Amiri the Iranian who was kidnapped by / defected to the CIA in 2009. To my chagrin, the post was overtaken by events almost as soon as it was posted; Amiri was flown back to Iran and has started to talk about the events that led to his disappearance:

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to allow him contact with his family, but that he “never cracked” and had not revealed any secret information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

[..]

“They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred me to the US onboard a military plane,” Amiri said in Tehran, before making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

“Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central Intelligence Agency.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Although it seems unlikely that the US will receive the censure it deserves for this, it is still unquestionably a scandal of severe proportions. The US government kidnapped a man on a religious pilgrimage, held him against his will for over a year and subjected him to torture and coercion. The man in question was not a military target, nor even a political one. Both the US and Iran deny that he was involved in the country’s nuclear programme, so whatever paltry justification the CIA may have had has become noticeably thinner.

Meanwhile, this morning the Guardian is reporting that the UK has also been complicit in kidnapping and torture, this time of its own citizens. The Guardian has helpfully highlighted many of the key passages, but the entire document is worth reading.

A few thoughts emerge from this. Firstly, dragging these revelations into the light of day is hard and the organisations that have done so deserve to be praised. Iran will probably not receive any credit for this in the wider world, but by doggedly and tenaciously pursuing the fate of its citizen it exposed a cruel double-standard at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Here in the UK, civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and, in particular, Reprieve deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their lobbying and legal action in exposing the worst excesses of the government in the early days of the Global War on Terror. These organisations should be celebrated for their achievements and offered every support.

Secondly, citizens should not be content to give abstract permissions to government in any situation, let alone one as broad-ranging as security and defense. We have an obligation to understand exactly what is being done in our name, and if we don’t ensure that the government is acting in accordance with our wishes then we are complicit in whatever acts they undertake.

Third, it is distressing that this is so unsurprising.

What the deuce is going on here

July 14th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - US - (2 Comments)

That’s Shahram Amiri.

Mr. Amiri is an Iranian who vanished while on hajj in 2009. What happened to him is a mystery. A video released by the Iranian government in June suggested that he was an Iranian nuclear scientist, that he had been kidnapped by the CIA and tortured, and that he was being held within the US against his will. In a concurrent video, a person who appears to be the same man explains that he wasn’t kidnapped – he moved to the US of his own volition, to complete his PhD. Further muddying the waters was this ABC report, which cited unnamed CIA officials, and which claimed that Amiri is a nuclear scientist, but that he defected to the CIA of his own free will.

That’s the straightforward bit.

Yesterday morning, both the Pakistani and Iranian governments claimed that he had taken refuge in Pakistan’s Washington embassy – which serves Iran’s interests in America in the absence of its own diplomatic mission – and was trying to get home. America flatly denied the claim, however, and Wired’s Danger Room blog has a repudiation from a spokesperson at the Pakistani embassy.

But a Pakistani embassy official tells Danger Room that the reports of Amiri turning up in the embassy are ”incorrect information” and “we have no one here” matching his description. That’s from an individual at the press office who didn’t identify herself and said she could not speak for the record. She added she couldn’t explain why a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in Islamabad told reporters that the scientist is at the embassy’s Iranian interest section, about two miles away from the main facility in D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood. But she also didn’t split hairs: “He’s not in the embassy at all.”

That said, the Iranian interest section is staffed by Iranians, not Pakistanis. A spokesman for the Iranian interest section, Ali Shahrazi, tells Danger Room, “When we arrived this morning, [Amiri] was here.” He dodged a question about whether the Pakistanis assisted in Amiri’s alleged arrival, saying that it was the job of Iranian staff to help Iranian nationals. But there are lots of questions remaining about Amiri’s true identity, to say nothing of his whereabouts.

What to make of this? Firstly, if you think that the CIA isn’t trying to abduct Iranian scientists and hold them against their will then you’re out of your mind. The only question is, would they do so so badly? If true, this shows a frightening lack of finesse, not least in allowing the captured scientist the liberty to broadcast his unexpurgated thoughts onto YouTube, and then permitting him to wander into Pakistan’s embassy unimpeded. Also, the still above – of Amiri’s pro-Merican-version video – is so obviously staged it hurts. The chess set? The globe, artfully set to show America on its visible face? The warm, structured lighting rig (note how the light illuminates Amiri on the face, despite the low, mood-lighting behind)? C’mon, you can almost see the camera crew and military escort just offstage.

On the other hand, this could quite easily be an Iranian stitch-up, although it would be hard to see the benefit to Iran to escalate the story to the level that it has unless it had something worth revealing.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that you couldn’t pay me enough money to be an Iranian nuclear scientist. Wherever he is right now, I’m quite sure that Mr Amiri is wishing for nothing more than a quiet life.

EDIT: Looks like answers may be forthcoming, as he’s on his way home.

Israel has all of these guns, yet seems intent on mostly shooting itself in the foot

May 31st, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

The original title for this fine post, as seen under the banner “Israel’s biggest enemy is itself” on Liberal Conspiracy, was (marvellously) Self-Clowning Lunatics Strike Again. The money shot:

Shorter – there really is an urgent and perilous threat to Israel. It’s called “the Israeli government”.

A neat line, but that’s not really what this is about, and that’s the problem.

The Zionist argument has always been that certain ethical contortions have to be made to protect the state of Israel from its aggressors, and from the threats that imperil its very existence.

This argument resonates with those who were alive to remember the Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria used Judaism’s holiest day to pour across the border and reclaim their lands, leading to a scramble for mobilisation in which the existence of the state of Israel itself looked, very briefly, to be genuinely imperilled. Israel rallied, and the US (who viewed Egypt as a Soviet proxy) shipped in emergency military assistance; the invading armies were thus pushed back, losing the land that they had reclaimed and more.

The argument hasn’t changed, but the truth is that the situation has. Israel is, up to a point, at peace with its neighbours. In the aftermath of Yom Kippur, Egypt fell out of the Soviet periphery and is now as much a client state of the US as Israel is. Even if that wasn’t the case, neither Egypt nor Syria have the hardware to mount a serious invasion of Israel that wouldn’t be immediately and brutally punished by the Jewish State’s comprehensive and well-equipped war machine.

In short, despite the protestations of those – from both the left and the right – who remember the day when it looked like the Jews were going to lose the only state they’ve ever had, Israel faces no real external threats today. Israeli commandos killed more people last night in international waters than Hamas has killed in Israel during a decade of resistance.

Israel is no longer defending itself.

What it is defending is the siege. It is defending the status quo in Gaza and it is defending its steady encroachment into the West Bank. But it is continuing to use the language of self-defence in order to do so, and that’s a huge problem. For those who remember Yom Kippur, it’s an emotive issue. But times have changed.

It’s no longer possible to argue that criticism of Israeli actions automatically implies a rejection of the legitimacy of that state, because it’s no longer the case that Israel is acting purely in self-defence. By continuing to assert otherwise, the Israeli government and the Zionist movement is perpetrating a deceit that cannot be upheld.

It is now the will of most people – even in the Arab states surrounding it – that Israel be allowed to live in peace. By clinging to a past version of the truth, which asserts that Israel is surrounded by enemies and in a state of constant peril, the Israeli government and its supporters risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Israel will always have enemies, but by pursuing the politics of arbitrary cruelty it risks creating more.

America the Obstructive

May 19th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - US - (0 Comments)

This blog is not anti-American. While I may criticise the policies of that country’s Government and its many excesses, I feel that America’s stand on most issues is principled and right. The chief failing in America’s foreign policy is inconsistency; its governing motivation is driven by the aforementioned principle, but as a highly political culture it indulges in methods that are frequently tawdry, and too often the means overwhelm the end.

We’re seeing an example of that this week with the latest series of twists in the Iranian nuclear drama. For those who missed the background, Brazil and Turkey brokered a deal with Iran, similar to one agreed several months ago which Tehran reneiged upon, under which they would transport their raw uranium to Turkey in exchange of low-enriched fuel rods – suitable for fuel, but not suitable for weapons. I’ve blogged a little about Brazil’s foreign policy before, but this is the strongest and most visible piece of fruit it’s bourne yet.

The success of these negotiations – where previous bargains between Iran and Europe have failed – is a heavy endorsement of the growing clout of the so-called “emerging” powers. The success seems to have been predicated on the capability of Turkey and Brazil to resolve the most critical obstacle in the stand-off: the issue of trust. Both through the modalities of the new deal as well as by virtue of who they are, Turkey and Brazil have succeeded in filling the trust gap. The collapse of the previous deal hinged on this issue; they were unwilling to hand their nuclear assetts over to a West that had proven its capability to reverse its own agreements and seize Iranian property. But if the enrichment take place in Brazil, rather than Europe or Russia, then Iran can take a lot more on trust.

Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard and Middle East specialist, has a good overview of the deal and its implications. The key passages, though, are these:

Here’s why I think the United States should welcome the deal. The only feasible way out of the current box is via diplomacy, because military force won’t solve the problem for very long, could provoke a major Middle East war, and is more likely to strengthen the clerical regime and make the United States look like a bully with an inexhaustible appetite for attacking Muslim countries. (And having Israel try to do the job wouldn’t help, because we’d be blamed for it anyway). I think George Bush figured that out before he left office, and I think President Obama knows it too. So do sensible Israelis, though not the perennial hawks at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, who appear to have learned nothing from their shameful role cheerleading the debacle in Iraq back in 2002.

[...]

So what should the United States do? It should welcome the deal in principle, while making it clear that it will monitor implementation carefully and emphasizing that this particular agreement does not resolve the larger question of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Rejecting the deal would do nothing to advance broader U.S. objectives and would be an unnecessary slap in the face of Turkey and Brazil. Trying to scotch the deal would also allows Iran to blame Washington should the deal fall through, and it will only reinforce Iranian assertions that U.S. leaders are lying when they say they would like to improve relations.

So far, so sensible. It would be nice to think that America’s foreign policy establishment would manage to get to the end of that thought chain on their own; but, sadly, no.

There are a number of unanswered questions regarding the announcement coming from Tehran, and although we acknowledge the sincere efforts of both Turkey and Brazil to find a solution regarding Iran’s standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, the P-5+1, [...] are proceeding to rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran.

What is expected from Iran, if not this? Well, America’s stated desire is for Iran to give up all fuel enrichment, for civilian purposes as well as military, despite it having a inaliable legal right to produce fuel for power. But the truth is that America has other reasons for wanting this to fail. It had just finalised a tortuous agreement with Russia and China for further sanctions, and politics demanded that America take its bow on the world stage for that. Doubtless there was some desire to slap down the rising powers – and make no mistake, this is a diplomatic humiliation for Brazil and Turkey, who negotiated in good faith and secured a major breakthrough because of it. And its current Middle East policy is calibrated towards containment and demonisation of Iran. For all these reasons and more, the US Government was never likely to agree a deal that was anything short of Iranian capitulation.

In other words, politics overtook principles.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UK’s fear of internationalism

April 5th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - UK | Politics - US - (4 Comments)

The Amnesty International logo - a black circle containing a whit candle encircled by barbed wire.

Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy reports on The Times’ humiliating climbdown over its attack on the Human Rights Watch, an international and non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. As the second link, from Opinio Juris, points out, the attack is as inaccurate as it is unprincipled, and although the retraction is fairly all-encompassing there are some distortions that remain uncorrected.

At the end of his post, Sunny asks:

In other words [Jonathan] Foreman didn’t really do his research properly and ran a hatchet job that smeared HRW. If he approached HRW in advance with these points that could have been corrected.

So why didn’t he? Why did it require HRW to contact the Sunday Times after the article had been published?

If this had been an isolated issue then it would be a fair question, but attacks upon progressive international organisations have been a staple weapon in the armoury of the right-wing media – and in particular the Murdoch-owned press – in the UK and America for a few years now. These attacks are often incoherent and frequently attract corrections and retractions, but the effect is cumulative. Take Robert Bernstein’s criticisms of the organisation, from October last year, as being “left-wing, anti-Israel [and] anti-Western” (note that not only is HRW anti-Israel, it’s actually anti-Western, and – worse yet – left-wing). As an attack it holds together by the barest of threads, and is quickly demolished by Kevin John Heller of Opinio Juris, but the headline that sticks in the memory is that the organisation’s own founder turned on it for its anti-Israeli policy, and that’s a problem.

Nor is it the only problem. Recently Amnesty got into a spot of bother over a whistleblower who claimed that the organisation was working with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Times led the charge on this one, and I’m disinclined to defend the charge – for better or worse, Amnesty was working with the Taliban, and silencing internal dissent on the matter rather than forcefully articulating and defending its policies was the wrong decision. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you go back and look at that Google search, you’ll see that – with the exception of one story, detailing the origin of Israel’s white phosphorus shells – the Times has effectively ignored the entirety of Amnesty’s 2010 activity, mentioning the organisation only to report this story. A brief list of some of the other things that Amnesty has done in 2010, which other organisations have found newsworthy:

…You know what? I’m bored. That’s not all of 2010; just what I can find, from other news organisations – most of which are significantly smaller are far more poorly resourced than News Corp – from the last month. The Times has covered none of it.

What it has done is to take some chunks out of DfID – the UK government’s Department for International Development – for, again, no very good reason. I could go on in this vein but you get the gist.

The question is, why does the right wing mistrust and fear internationalism so much? The economic right should love it; organisations such as Amnesty, HRW and DfID set up supply routes and manufacture chains that, in the long run, can form the paths that corporate bodies can follow to new markets. The problem is the social right, whose witlessly reflexive delusions grow ever more elaborate – witness, today, the claim that Lady Gaga is the principle obstacle to Middle Eastern peace, and those pesky settlements are just Beltway bleating. There really isn’t much that can be done about that – other than to oppose it when it emerges and hope that enough people are listening that it doesn’t take root.

As an aside: a track from the new New Pornographers album exists. It’s good; check it out.

On Power

April 2nd, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Books | General | History | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - UK | Politics - US - (0 Comments)

Barack Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy in running poses, as if in the freeze frame at the end of a cop buddy movie.

There was an excellent interview in last weeks’ London Review of Books with Tony Judt, the American historian of European history. As I said, it was in last weeks’ magazine, but the whole thing’s available online, so you should read it before I fisk it.

There’s quite a lot here, so I’m going to speak to general points rather than specific lines or paragraphs. Firstly, I think that there are a number of ways in which events have quite rapidly played out to undermine some of Judt’s points. He early-on makes the point that Barack Obama is a compromiser, a consensus-builder – a common criticism that is balanced out by the counter-charges that he is a “machine politician” (FiveThirtyEight did a fine elaboration on that theme way back in 2008). On the whole, I think that the later group has the right of it. Obama is not a bridge-builder, he’s just someone with an acute and subtle understanding of how the machinery of power and legislation works. Sometimes, that requires him to at least appear to seek compromise. At others, it requires him to screw his party to the sticking point and ram legislation through Congress by brute force. The recent passage of healthcare exemplifies that, and should silence those who chirp about Obama’s lack of courage in the face of intransigence, at least for a little while.

Judt later observes that courage is unheard of in today’s politicians; that it is, in fact, a negating virtue. It should be noted that the passage of healthcare was considered by many to be courageous. I’m not convinced that it was – the Dems had a majority in the House, and once they’d been talking about it for a year, passing it was more or less the path of least resistance – but I do think that some individual politicians displayed considerable courage.

His comparison of the US President with the position of his European counterpart, however, was on the nose. Although it should be noted that the UK, tepidly, held out for a much more powerful and robust holder of the mandate, by and large the actions of the EU’s leaders have been exemplified by a stark lack of spine. It’s fair that the leaders of France, Germany, Spain and Britain fear an eclipsing of their individual national clouts, as a robust EU Presidency would do exactly that; but it’s a hit that’s worth taking, because the individual national clouts of France, Germany, Spain and Britain are slight and diminishing by the day. Relinquishing some local power in order to gain access to much greater, wider-scale influence should be an easy decision to make, but it takes courage, and Europe’s leaders are trained to be some of the most risk-averse in the world.

But the internal politics of Europe are thus in most regards. Judt also talks about Europe’s relationship with Israel, correctly observing that:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time… However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East [...]They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage.

This is largely correct, and indeed economically and politically it has largely succeeded. Most international companies who divide their regional operations by continent will have Europe and MEA (Middle East & Africa) – with Israel firmly in the former camp. This is largely a practicality; a sales rep or local manager with an Israel stamp in her or his passport will struggle to cross Arabic borders. But it is also a reflection of a broader truth, in which the state of Israel is culturally divorced from the land upon which it lies, even as its claims of legitimacy depend on that land for their historical vigour. Should Europe start to push back – making political and economic ties incumbent on the observation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example – then Israel would be faced with a choice that has the same outcome either way: one that forces it to reconcile itself with its neighbours and the contested land upon which it is built.

Judt asserts that Europe resists the impulse to use this economic and cultural leverage out of a misplaced sense of historic guilt; that many European states continue to treat Israel with kid gloves as a way of continuing to atone for the events that it either perpetrated or failed to prevent. I think that this relies on too many assumptions and thus fails to meet the standards set by Occam’s Razor. Treating Israel as a member of the club of civilised nations, when it already has America’s robust backing, is simply a continuation of progress along the path of least resistance.

That this multinational spinelessness must be rooted in a domestic system that encourages and perpetuates a venal political elite seems like the next logical conclusion, and to an extent, Judt makes that link persuasively. He talks robustly about the “bad use of fear” that has taken hold of Europe’s social democratic model:

There is the demagogic exploitation of fear of outsiders and strangers, which culminates in putting up barriers against immigration, refugees or exiles. The sense that things are out of control, that we may lose our jobs next year because of competition from China or India, or that some farms may become unworkable in five years’ time because of climate change, has been intensified by globalisation, and it has given rise to large, unspecific fears which are played on [...] in Denmark by the anti-immigrant party, or in Switzerland with the referendum against minarets [...] Britain has more closed-circuit television cameras, which keep a record of almost everyone’s movements everywhere at all times, than any other democracy in the world. In the old days we would have seen this as an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedoms, yet today it’s accepted because people are frightened of crime, outsiders, terrorism. We no longer have a choice of a wonderfully happy and prosperous, secure and stable future: this isn’t Sweden in 1965.

Again, this can be explained in many forms, and socially it makes a lot of sense, but politically it’s only rational if most or all of the actors are acting in a narrow, cowardly self-interest. Acquiescing to these fears breeds nationalism, patriotism, preventive wars and repressive anti-terrorist legislation. These trends can be satisfying for a population in the short term, but the ugly truth is that in the end it’s just excessive state power. They have no power to combat or limit terrorism; they don’t strengthen our economy or our cultural vibrancy; they limit our international political power and tarnish our model of governance with claims of hypocrisy; and in the long run, they make the local population less comfortable and less free. But the European politicians with the courage to make these points and argue forcefully against the encroaching illiberality of the state are noticeable by their absence.

If the cause of this trend is understandable then the ways of fixing it seem daunting. When asked how and why we have reached the point where mass protests are ignorable by political elites, Judt talks about the disconnect between the people and governments; and as he correctly observes, in the span of a nation’s transition to democracy from an earlier state, the window of opportunity – where a political system is sufficiently unstable that it has to listen to popular will – is quite narrow (although it can be artificially extended). In late-19th Century Britian, he remarks,

They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result.

This isn’t a state that lasts, however, and one of the weaknesses of democracies is that as democratic structures become more entrenched and social continuity becomes more normalised, the threat of actual consequential popular uprisings recedes. It doesn’t help that much of today’s European political activities are quasi-undemocratic, being run from bureaucracies and unelected bodies (such as the European Union, haw haw).

When I did my degree, we learned about a process called “incorporation,” by which subcultures are amalgamated into the mainstream. It’s a two-stage process; first, superficial and somewhat challenging aspects of the subculture are embraced by society at large; then, the remaining aspects are rejected as extremist and ignorable. This was presented as a process affecting the subcultures that surround musical genres (for example, clothing and some of the musical trappings of punk were assimilated, while the broader political and social aspects were attributed to anarchism and discarded), but it can also be clearly seen as affecting non-artistic philosophical and social movements – in feminism, for example, in which superficial aspects of female empowerment are embraced and prominently displayed as virtuous while the wider complaints of inequality and rape culture are dismissed as excessive and extremist.

I mention this because, to some extend, it corroborates the earlier discussion of cowardice in Europe’s political ranks. Courage is, after all, collocated with threat, but the political determination of the populace has been largely incorporated into modern mainstream politics. Elections and mass-media provide some semblance of what can be referred to as direct democracy, but the wider, more effective trappings of people power are dismissed as extremist – protest, worker collectivism and engagement with party politics. Against this backdrop, modern politicians lack a serious threat and thus have very little incentive to be courageous. The truth is that, no matter how easy and tempting it is to blame the electorate for Europe’s malaise, the power to reverse it has been removed from them.

Temporarily, though. The problem with Judt’s analysis is simply that it’s too pessimistic. It treats the status quo as a final state; it assumes that cowardice is a feature that Europe is doomed never to escape. It is this underlying assumption that is shown up by the one encouraging sign that comes from across the water, where Barack Obama – the machine politician – has demonstrated that courage, or the appearance of it, can be its own political virtue. The marvellous thing about democratic systems is that they have the potential to be self-renewing; that in a time of cowards, the courageous man is valuable simply by dint of his courage, let alone the effects and intentions that lie behind it. The era of loud, brash direct mass involvement of populaces in politics may well be over, and that may not be a bad thing, but a population can still make its will felt in terms of broad themes, if not entirely on matters of specific policy.

All of which is to say: if you value political coherence and courage enough, and vote accordingly, then it will come. In the meantime: please write to your MP and demand proper debating time for the Digital Economy Bill. It’s a dreadful piece of legislation and an accelerated period of debate won’t help that.

Israel’s misuse of British passports “Intolerable”

March 23rd, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - UK | Politics - US - (0 Comments)

David Miliband, looking stern is somewhat unshaven.
Photo: Reuters

I’d be lying if I tried to pretend that I wasn’t secretly pretty psyched that Britain is expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Diplomatic work between Britain and Israel needs to be conducted according to the highest standards of trust. The work of our Embassy in Israel, and the Israeli Embassy in London, is vital to the cooperation between our countries. So is the Strategic Dialogue between our countries. These ties are important and we want them to continue. However I have asked that a member of the Embassy of Israel be withdrawn from the UK as a result of this affair, and this is taking place.

My own gut reaction is tempered by the fact that the reasoning is pretty dreadful, though. That Israel can get away with bloodshed and theft in Palestine, but only manages to elicit a response when it clones some passports for an assassination in Dubai, speaks volumes about the priorities of the British Foreign Office and its gutless toad of a Foreign Minister. This reeks of opportunism; Israel is a tarnished brand, this week anyway, and if it gets Miliband’s name in the papers only a few weeks before an election – and, doubtless, a Labour leadership campaign – then so much the better.

Either way, it’s been a miserable week or two for Israel and its foreign policy. Between the Biden insult, the Turkey spies debacle, and now Mauritania – one of the first Muslim states to normalise relations with Israel – severing ties, Israel’s rebranding mission seems to have tanked catastrophically.

Hard troofs

March 23rd, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in History | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

Juan Cole tells it like it is:

Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Monday that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.” He continued that the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel cannot be denied. He added that neither could the historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. He insisted, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today.” He said, “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” He told his applauding audience of 7500 that he was simply following the policies of all Israeli governments since the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War.

Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.

So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.

1. In international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory, as are the parts of the West Bank that Israel unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid occupying powers to alter the lifeways of civilians who are occupied, and forbid the settling of people from the occupiers’ country in the occupied territory. Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, its usurpation of Palestinian property there, and its settling of Israelis on Palestinian land are all gross violations of international law. Israeli claims that they are not occupying Palestinians because the Palestinians have no state are cruel and tautological. Israeli claims that they are building on empty territory are laughable. My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.

2. Israeli governments have not in fact been united or consistent about what to do with East Jerusalem and the West Bank, contrary to what Netanyahu says. The Galili Plan for settlements in the West Bank was adopted only in 1973. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave undertakings as part of the Oslo Peace Process to withdraw from Palestinian territory and grant Palestinians a state, promises for which he was assassinated by the Israeli far right (elements of which are now supporting Netanyahu’s government). As late as 2000, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims that he gave oral assurances that Palestinians could have almost all of the West Bank and could have some arrangement by which East Jerusalem could be its capital. Netanyahu tried to give the impression that far rightwing Likud policy on East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been shared by all previous Israeli governments, but this is simply not true.

3. Romantic nationalism imagines a “people” as eternal and as having an eternal connection with a specific piece of land. This way of thinking is fantastic and mythological. Peoples are formed and change and sometimes cease to be, though they might have descendants who abandoned that religion or ethnicity or language. Human beings have moved all around and are not directly tied to any territory in an exclusive way, since many groups have lived on most pieces of land. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews, i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese, many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not exist.

4. Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather ‘built-up place of Shalem.”

5. The “Jewish people” were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues & etc. Jews and Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside Palestine.

6. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent “Jewish people” in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not ‘the city of David,’ since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens, don’t know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine.

7. Since archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander’s descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander’s other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= ‘Common Era’ or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.

The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.

Adherents of Judaism did not found Jerusalem. It existed for perhaps 2700 years before anything we might recognize as Judaism arose. Jewish rule may have been no longer than 170 years or so, i.e., the kingdom of the Hasmoneans.

8. Therefore if historical building of Jerusalem and historical connection with Jerusalem establishes sovereignty over it as Netanyahu claims, here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:

A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.

B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.

C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.

D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.

E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.

F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.

G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.

9. Of course, Jews are historically connected to Jerusalem by the Temple, whenever that connection is dated to. But that link mostly was pursued when Jews were not in political control of the city, under Iranian, Greek and Roman rule. It cannot therefore be deployed to make a demand for political control of the whole city.

10. The Jews of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine did not for the most part leave after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 136 CE. They continued to live there and to farm in Palestine under Roman rule and then Byzantine. They gradually converted to Christianity. After 638 CE all but 10 percent gradually converted to Islam. The present-day Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Jews and have every right to live where their ancestors have lived for centuries.

Rafsanjani and as-Sahab

March 18th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Ephemera | General | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sits behind a desk on a large red-backed chair, as he speaks into a microphone.
Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Two more bits of bleg that surfaced this morning:

First, a typically overwordy piece of analysis by Stratfor sees signs of weakening in Al Qaeda. A video offered by as-Sabab, AQ’s media outlet arm, on March 7th is the usual treat for counterterrorism cryptologists, and does appear to signal a weakening of central AQ’s efforts to cause havok – advocating, as it does, individual and “lone wolf” activity rather than a reliance on big, centrally-planned schemes.

It has come a long way from the early days of as Sahab, when bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders issued defiant threats of launching a follow-on attack against the United States that was going to be even more destructive than 9/11. The group is now asking individual Muslims to conduct lone-wolf terrorist attacks and to follow the examples of Hasan [the soldier who perpetrated a massacre at Fort Worth in Texas] and Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani citizen who conducted a shooting at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in January 1993 that killed two CIA employees [...] this video is a clear indication that the trend toward decentralization is continuing.

While lone-wolf terrorists remain a threat, research – covered previously in this blog – suggests that, without a sense of cohesive community, the terrorist spirit may find fewer and less fruitful purchases.

Secondly, Ayatollah Akhbar Rafsanjani, the massively influential, famously mercurial and ruggedly individual Iranian cleric and politician, has finally pinned his colours to the mast, throwing his weight behind Khamenei and the government at the expense of the Green Movement. At this stage he had little choice – the Green Movement has more or less run out of steam and no longer possesses the will or capability to project its power onto the streets. But it is not a cause for untrammelled pessimism for Iran:

Rafsanjani has much in common with mainstream conservatives who have long supported Khamenei, but he will never align himself with the new generation of influential hard-liners, led by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

[...]

In exchange for Rafsanjani’s loyalty, the supreme leader appears to have given him power over a new bill that will establish a National Elections Commission to reform the electoral process. Not only is this issue at the heart of Iran’s political crisis, but the commission would also determine the eligibility of individuals to stand as candidates in elections. And the Expediency Council, which monitors legislation and is responsible for any conflicts that might result over Iranian laws, will also decide the members who serve on the National Elections Commission.

That’s a huge change, and wrests a significant amount of power away from the hard-liners and the Guardian Council. Instead of being a defeat, Rafsanjani’s decision to throw his lot in with the Supreme Leader can be seen as a pragmatic compromise, which has a good chance of bearing greater fruit than the spent reform movement – whose capacity to persist as a political actor he has, effectively, killed.

Becoming Brazil

March 18th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (1 Comments)

A man holds a placard which shows the Brazilian and Palestinian flags, and says 'Sempre Amigos' in large letters

In centuries to come, the early 21st Century will come to be regarded as the moment at which Brazil emerged from a long dark age.

Probably “discovered” by the Portuguese at the start of the 16th Century, it underwent just over 300 years of Colonial surpression as its lands and resources were contested by a variety of European powers. Portugal was more successful here than it had been elsewhere; while its African and Eastern properties were gradually stripped from it by more predatory Empires, it stubbornly clung onto Brazil in the face of mounting French and Dutch opposition, eventually even shifting its metropole from Portugal to Brazil in the early 1800s to avoid the worst of the Napoleonic Wars. The absence of the King and Court from Portugal caused unrest at home, however, and after just thirteen years King João VI returned to Europe, leaving in charge his son Pedro, who promptly declared independence.

The “Empire of Brazil” lasted for some sixty years, before falling to a military coup in 1889. The ensuing parliamentary democracy also fell to a junta in 1930, which led to a period of uneasy governance, which vascillated from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, before resolving definitively into a full military dictatorship after another coup in 1964. Since 1989, Brazil has been steadily redemocratising, and has been governed since 2002 by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula” for short. Elected on a platform of reducing Brazil’s extreme inequality (Brazil has one of the most pronounced splits between rich and poor in the world), Lula is probably one of the most popular democratically elected politicians in the world; even after 8 years in power his popularity remains in the high 70s. His chosen successor, Dilma Roussef, seems to be cut from the same mould and is likely to win by a landslide. Brazil is now one of the more significant emerging economic powers; with a huge – and cheap – labour force, abundant mineral deposits, a growing middle class and rapidly developing infrastructure, Brazil has the potential to grow into a major player over the course of the next century.

With economic swagger comes political, of course, although until recently Brazil had been content to make an exception of itself in this. He is regarded as a key US ally in Latin America almost by default – by virtue of being peaceful, democratic, opposed to Chavez-esque populism and open to free-market liberalism. Although he has lobbied strongly for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Lula had – until recently – been pursuing a modest foreign policy – possibly designed to demonstrate responsibility on the world stage – best described as Oman-esque:

[...] Oman from 1970 has explicitly taken the policy to adapt to changing circumstances, remain non-aligned, never harbor hostile intentions, and avoid confrontation.

Over the last few weeks, though, something seems to have changed, and Lula has slowly, iteratively, but decisively been lowering himself into a more decisive foreign policy. His caution is justified, as his chosen point of insertion is possibly the most divisive and unstable geopolitical fracas of our times. He has refused to yeild to American pressure on Iran, saying “It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall [...] The prudent thing is to establish negotiations.” He has visited Palestine. And now, he is criticising Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, saying that he is willing to talk to Hamas and caliming that Israel’s continued settlement building was “extinguishing the candle of hope”. He has also shown himself willing to kick the US about for violating international trade law. So much for avoiding confontation.

Could this presage a more muscular Brazilian presence in world politics? While I admire Lula’s adherence to a series of principles which must seem obvious to most observers who do not rely on America’s patronage, this will do his immediate chances at gaining a permanent seat on the Security Council no good. In the long run, however, he may be gambling on the strength of a non-aligned movement in a multipolar world. What is certain, however, is that as Brazil’s strength grows it will become increasingly hard to ignore.

Hosni

March 17th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

Hosni Mubarak sits in a high-backed chair in front of the Egyptian flag.

Apologies if this post is somewhat short of being lucid – I’ve not been sleeping well lately and am thus struggling with articulation.

Hosni Mubarak, President-for-life of Egypt, re-emerged overnight after a protracted stay in a German hospital, quelling rumours of comas, juntas, illegitimate children and unannounced deaths, although the internet of course persists in contriving elaborate conspiracy theories. For a moment, though, it did look touch-and-go; and sources continue to report that Mubarak won’t seek another term in office following this recent health scare.

Which is doubtless what prompted Stratfor to hold forth on what course a post-Mubarak Egypt might take. Like the good folk at arabist.net, I’m not convinced by the idea that current intelligence chief General Suleiman will place-hold for young Jamal Mubarak; although I have no doubt that there are sections of the Egyptian government who believe that that is, or are counting it being, the plan, but the factionalism that exists within the Egyptian government and the ruling NDP is such that any multi-stage transition of this kind seems unlikely. If General Suleiman were to take power then I’d consider it far more likely that he will keep power, rather than handing it off to a comparative neophite with no firm powerbase of his own.

Questions about who will run Egypt tomorrow, however, should not distract from the question of who is running Egypt today:

This is new. For all its faults, Egypt’s political system generally makes clear who is in charge [...] Is it the security apparatus? His son? High members of the National Democratic Party? What is the role of his wife, a visible figure in Egyptian public life? Most important of all, who will follow him? Mubarak’s illness has catapulted these questions from the rumor mill to the headlines. But it has not answered them.

Aside from its overenthusiastic punctuation, the al-Shuruq article calmly reported that Husni Mubarak had deputized Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif to take on day-to-day presidential responsibilities. But Nazif is no Alexander Haig asserting that he is in control. If there is an Egyptian Haig, he is not in sight. The article made clear that Nazif’s authority is limited and that in important matters (such as those related to security) he consults with named and unnamed responsible authorities. [...]

While it is not clear who wields power — or who will run things if Mubarak’s absence becomes permanent — it is clearer how that power is being wielded. There are, to be sure, some signs of disarray, of different institutions and power centers pulling in different directions. But that disarray only goes so far. The overall direction is clear: Egypt is now in the midst of an uneven political clampdown.

Pity Egypt.

, , ,

America demands

March 15th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

Here’s a list of the demands that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to “restore confidence” in the US-Israel relationship:

Earlier Sunday, Netanyahu continued to consult with the forum of seven senior cabinet ministers over a list of demands that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made in a telephone conversation Friday. ….Haaretz has learned that Clinton’s list includes at least four steps the United States expects Netanyahu to carry out to restore confidence in bilateral relations and permit the resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.

1. Investigate the process that led to the announcement of the Ramat Shlomo construction plans in the middle of Biden’s visit. The Americans seek an official response from Israel on whether this was a bureaucratic mistake or a deliberate act carried out for political reasons. Already on Saturday night, Netanyahu announced the convening of a committee to look into the issue.

2. Reverse the decision by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee to approve construction of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo.

3. Make a substantial gesture toward the Palestinians enabling the renewal of peace talks. The Americans suggested that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners be released, that the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from additional areas of the West Bank and transfer them to Palestinian control, that the siege of the Gaza Strip be eased and further roadblocks in the West Bank be removed.

4. Issue an official declaration that the talks with the Palestinians, even indirect talks, will deal with all the conflict’s core issues – borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security arrangements, water and settlements.

Zesty stuff. Like most (including Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren), I expected this crisis to run out of steam towards the end of last week. Instead, the US Administration is escalating. Netanyahu will not meet all four of those steps; he probably won’t even attempt to meet the second or third. It would be too strong a repudiation of his existing policies in this area. One wonders if the White House truly has the courage to fight the fight it’s picking.

Uh-oh, spaghetti-os!

March 10th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East | Politics - US - (0 Comments)

Vice President Joe Biden is not a happy man.

He went all the way to Israel to calm some tattered nerves, to salve some egos, to smooth some furrowed brows with talk of unshakable bonds and “happy ends” (don’t ask) – not to mention with an intent to kick-start a new round of “proximity talks” between Israel and the PLO.

And how was he greeted?

Well, I’m glad you asked! On the day that he arrived, Israel approved 1600 new housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem. Ramat Shlomo is itself a fairly new neighborhood in north Jerusalem that lies just west of the Arab neighborhoods of Shu‘afat and Beit Hanina, not far from the Shu‘afat refugee camp. What’s more, Harat Shlomo is an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) neighborhood. It’s east of the Green Line, of course – meaning that it’s well into what the international community would consider to be Palestinian territory – and not far from the East Jerusalem to Ramallah road.

Whatever the future of Jerusalem ends up being, though, this really looks like a deliberate affront to Biden. Netanyahu has disavowed all knowledge, and the stroy goes that Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who heads the hard-line Shas Party, was freelancing. This seems implausible, to say the least; Netanyahu’s hold on his coalition is not so shaky as to allow such an obvious and major insult to sneak through without clearance. It’s too overt; it’s as if someone in the Prime Minister’s office said to themselves, “Where could we approve new construction that would be the most offensive to the US right now?” Yes, Israel insists it has the right to build in all parts of Jerusalem, but the timing here looks like a blatant “in your eye, Joe” to the Vice President, and it sounds like he took it that way:

“I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them. This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict. The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world. Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues. As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, “we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks.”

Pat Lang said it best:

Joe! Joe! If you kiss their butts and say that they are we and we are they, then you have to expect to be treated like the servant that you are. Just today you snuggled up to them and told the world that there is no “space between Israel and the US.” They took you at your word, that’s all. You got what you asked for.

The real question is: how far can Israel push before the US public allows its government to push back?

Fact-checking Yemen

January 6th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

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.

The Revolutionary Guard

January 6th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - Middle East - (0 Comments)

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.