Brontides

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.

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.

In the run-up to yesterday’s UK budget, the left wing of the internet – a cocoon that I comfortably inhabit – made merry with its buzzphrase du jour. No shock doctrine for Britain! we hear from such twitterlectuals (and Green Party luminaries – many of the most vocal Green activists have been really going for the Lib Dems of late – but that’s another post) as Sian Berry and Adam Ramsay. Now, look; the budget was painful. We all got hosed, the poor proportionally more than the rich. And the government spin hasn’t been even remotely coherent; even the usually credible Lynne Featherstone came over all loyally dishonest.

But “shock doctrine” is one of those phrases that just annoys me. It annoys me all the more because it comes from the left – a space which I nominally occupy – but yet is such a deeply incoherent piece of intellectual padding.

It was popularised by Naomi Klein in her 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which she argued that free-market capitalists and their political backers have used, and occasionally manufactured, crises and disasters in order to inflict social change on populations that are unwilling to accept them but unable to resist, due to the aforementioned upheaval. The term gained traction on the left after the Haiti quake, when the US right-wing Heritage Foundation caused an uproar by suggesting that aid be tied to economic reforms. Here’s Adam Ramsay again:

News stories about Haiti are full of tales of looters. There’s less talk of a bigger scale plunder to come. In Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine‘ she maps the rise of “disaster capitalism”. She describes how, over 40 years, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pentagon, and various mega-corporations have increasingly used (or created) disasters as an excuse to push through unpopular right wing economic policies, and asset strip vulnerable economies.

I was just finishing this book on Thursday as the scale of Haiti’s earthquake was becoming clear. My immediate fear was an obvious one. So I did what all young lefties do in a time of crisis. I set up a Facebook group: “No Shock Doctrine for Haiti”.

I plucked that quote a little bit selectively but it illustrates my first problem with the term and its use: shock doctrine is a methodology seeking application. Exponents of the theory tend to force this most fashionable of ideas onto situations rather than respond to the unique characteristics of an individual incidents. The book, for example, rests on the idea that the policies of free marketeers tend not to be very popular. For the most part this is unarguable – even Milton Friedman would concede as much – but in her zeal to apply her theory to every possible case Klein makes some dramatic reaches. Apparently, Hurricane Katrina led to the “privatisation” of New Orleans against the will of the population; however, the reforms imposed on New Orleans were structural and mostly welcomed by a population frustrated by lazy and corrupt local government. Haiti is another example of this; although tying catastrophe aid to any kind of condition would have been horrifically wrong, measures to curtail corruption and establish good governance in one of the world’s poorest countries would have enjoyed overwhelming local support. Klein’s depiction of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis as a conflict between grasping capitalists and honourable democrats shows a profound lack of historical understanding, and her claim that the protests crushed in Tiananmen Square were against further market freedom is based on pure ignorance. And those are just the cases that stretch credibility; the claims that Margaret Thatcher fabricated the Falklands War as a way of breaking the unions shatters it irrevocably.

The second problem is to do with the way that the argument is cased. At one level, the problem is that the issue is mischaracterised as being a tool used purely by the right wing to advance their corporatist goals. In truth, the technique of using a crisis to drive policy reform is as popular on the left as it is on the right. The New Deal in America was launched on an unwilling society as a result of the Great Depression; the great social reforms in the UK of the late forties and early fifties, which led to the formation of the NHS, arose off the back of the post-war slump; Barack Obama used the current economic collapse to the same ends. Blair and Brown spent much of their respective times in office extending the powers of the state, evoking the spectre of terrorism and war as justification.

But this gap masks a deeper problem with the argument, which is the assumption that governments should not use crises as a way of driving social change. It’s predicated on a somewhat condescending lack of faith in populations; it assumes that electorates, struck numb by catastrophe, are unable to resist the snake-oil of perfidious political salesmen. In fact, crises inspire rare moments of national unity; often these moments arise because the crisis in question has exposed a policy failing or fault that simply needs to be corrected, and the correction of which is obvious. Thatcher had to break the power of the unions; whether she needed to do so quite so thoroughly is an open question, but most even on the left now assume that the unions were too powerful, and that to persist in allowing them to run entire industries was a path to economic and social ruin. New Zealand, Chile and Brazil abandoned socialistic policies for freer markets because the former weren’t working well and induced economic crises.

There is some limited value to some of the ideas contained within the term “shock doctrine”. Attaching conditions to Haiti aid, for example, would clearly have been grossly wrong, and those who suggested it were rightly excoriated. The term itself, however, masks deep intellectual failings that continue to undermine the legitimacy of left-wing economic arguments. There is plenty to debate in the new UK budget; the rise in VAT, for example, will be economically and politically unpopular for some time to come. Branding it as “shock doctrine” is ludicrous and shrill, and will neither advance the debate nor grow the left-wing base in opposition.

Naomi Klein, meanwhile, remains an extremely poor role model for the left, and in an ideal world would join Michael Moore on the island of left-wing intellectual rejects. Honestly, we can be much better than this.

Since 2005, BP has seen an explosition in a Texas refinary, a big leak in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, numerous allegations of price fixing, 19 employee fatalities in unrelated incidents and, of course, Deepwater Horizon. In 2000, the company was forced to pay a $10 million fine for its mismanagement of its US properties. According to PIRG, BP was responsible for 104 oil spills in just one year, and in 1991 the EPA cited it as the single company responsible for the largest output of US pollution.

BP is also leading the building of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Despite the fact that the pipleline crosses no fewer than fourteen active earthquake zones, it has not been earthquake engineered. Land required for the building of the pipeline has been seized under hastily dwarn-up eminent domain laws.

BP is a genuinely awful organisation, and I would suggest boycotting them if funnelling your money towards Exxon and Shell weren’t just as bad.

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.

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:

• Released a report detailing the rate of capital punishment in the world in 2009
• Detailed the failing system of maternal healthcare in the US
• Reported on migrant abuse in Malaysia
• Commented on a survey showing that 1 in 7 women students have been subjected to sexual assault or violence in the UK
• Attempted to prevent the execution of a Lebanese man in Saudi Arabia
• Held a panel discussion on how religious fundamentalism affects gay and women’s rights
• Called upon Sudan to respect the work of NGOs and allow them to work unmolested

…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.

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.

America and Russia just agreed a massive nuclear arms reduction deal. Great!

Well, great-esque. As giddy as I am about the prospect of fewer nukes, this isn’t going to get passed. As a treaty, it needs to pass the Senate with an excruciating 67 votes. Meanwhile:

• Republicans hate arms control
• Conservatives are invested in the re-demonisation of Russia
• Barak Obama likes it
• Republican Senators ain’t feeling real co-operatey right now

So where are the extra seven votes going to come from, assuming that every Democrat plus Joe Leiberman votes FOR?

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.

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Last night, the US House of Representatives passed a controversial healthcare reform bill. This is the final, decisive part of a process that has been rumbling away ever since the election of Barack Obama, over a year ago, and has been the focus of one of the bitterest and most devisive political fights in recent history.

The background to this is that America is, according to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academies, the “only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have [healthcare] coverage” – in other words, unlike most other wealthy contries, America provides no medical care to its citizens, forcing them instead to procure expensive health insurance to ensure that they are able to pay for any treatment they may need. Most middle-class workers get healthcare as a perk from their employers, and the very poorest citizens are covered via. a government programme called Medicaid, but there remain many who fall between those two stools – particularly the self-employed – who have been historically uncovered, as well as many who commercial insurers rejected on the basis that they had pre-existing medical conditions. In 2007, that corpus included 15.3% of the population, or 45.7 million people. Meanwhile, even for the rest, American healthcare was disproportionately expensive and somewhat substandard when compared to that of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Scandinavia.

The bill that was passed last night actually fixes very little of that. It will make healthcare in the US somewhat cheaper – The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate is that the bill will decrease the federal deficit by $138 billion over the 2010–2019 period, generating more savings further out. It does this by taxing the commercial health insurance providers, and specifically high-value “Cadillac” health plans – in other words, taxing the rich. Medicaid has been extended up the property ladder, meaning that those somewhat above the poverty line are also automatically covered. Another programme subsidises healthcare for those somewhat wealthier – those earning up to 400% of the poverty line can now get insurance at a reduced rate.

The bill also makes it harder for health insurers to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions, as well as criminalising employers with more than 50 staff who do not provide health insurance to their workers. What it does not do, however, is provide a mechanism by which the state can offer healthcare; this does not establish an American NHS or anything like it. Finally, abortion is explicitly excluded from any public spending; subsidised plans may not be used to pay for such procedures.

Dryly, it seems uncontroversial. It costs less than the status quo ante, extends coverage and doesn’t kick any sacred cows. Instead it has inspired vitriol, and not all of the arguments have been entirely insane.

Conservative objections
The Republican Party, institutionally, has a nuanced position on healthcare despite the shrill tenor of the Conservative debate. They do not oppose the concept of universal healthcare reform, it just opposes the current Bill’s methods. The problem with healthcare in America, they say, is not a lack of government regulation; it’s the lack of a free and open market. Both sides agree that the main reason why healthcare is the US is so expensive is because most of it is procured via. insurance, which is expensive and invites waste. To the Republicans, this means that a system of tax credits should be set up and patients should be enouraged to shop around before spending their tax dollars, providing an incentive to consumers and providers to demand better-quality and lower-cost protection. The bill that passed last night is the opposite to that; by ensuring that money is transferred, directly and impersonally, from an insurance company (or government body) to a healthcare provider, it actually reinforces the perverse incentives that drive costs up and quality down. This is the argument that has been obscured by allegations of “socialism;” a Republican looks at institutions like Britains NHS, and sees that while it may be cheaper and better than what is offered in the US, it can be made cheaper and better still by removing government intervention.

They further object on the grounds that the excise tax on high-end insurance premiums reduces the amount of money available to invest in developing new medical discoveries – new vaccines, better machinery, and scientific research. There is some evidence to suggest that this may be justified.

Slightly less justifiable is the complaint, from some Conservatives, that a nationally funded healthcare programme is obligated to fund coverage “self-inflicted” ailments – the effects of drink and drug abuse, diet-related conditions, so on – which is arguably not in the public interest.

Finally, there’s the usual raft of demented and religiously-inspired objections – death panels, abortion funding, anything said by Glenn Beck etc.

Liberal objections
Liberal opposition has mostly coalesced around the opinion that the current proposals don’t go far enough. And, in truth, they don’t. The money saved by the programme is too little over too long – $100b over a decade may seem like a lot, but over the same period the programme will actually cost ten times that, and it can be substantially cheaper. The lack of a public option means that some will still miss out, and the Conservative complaint that the bill continues to prop up the insurance companies that have parasitically leeched off of the healthcare industry ring true.

So between those two poles – the orgiastic carnival of the ruling Democrats’ wishes that the bitter restraint of the Republican objections – was strung a bill that, really, no-one wanted. The process of passing it was ugly, but eventually the electorial arithmatic demanded that it be pushed through. For the Democrats, not least amongst them the President, the magnitude of the process demanded an outcome to avert electorial disaster. And in truth, while it’s not a great bill, passing it was the right thing to do. It’s statute now; it can be improved, its provisions can be extended, the backroom deals and inefficient compromises can be weeded out.

The big loser in all this is Congress; not necessarily Congressional Republicans, but the Congress as a whole. Otton von Bismark said that laws are like sausages; you don’t want to see how either are made, and in this case Congress has been the sausage factory. In some ways the whole business has demonstrated Congress at its worst, its most corrupt, disfunctional and venal, and while the President’s ratings may have slipped during the passage of the Bill, the Congressional leaderships of both parties have tumbled to sickening lows. But in another sense this is unfair. Heathcare wasn’t easy to pass because no consensus existed for it. Congress simply reflected the will of the people who elected it.

But the role of the politician is to lead as well as to follow, and the debate was ineptly framed by both sides. The Democrats must carry much of the blame for that – theirs was the duty to push for their policy; they had all the advantages, but squandered their goodwill on dead-end compromises and ephemeral policies that were doomed to fail, leaving their most evangelical advocates disillusioned and unenthused. The Republicans had fewer responsibilities but their conduct was deeply dishonourable. Instead of making a reasoned case for a free market intervention, and thus allowing a proper debate about the healthcare choices that America was presented with, they dragged the discussion into the mud, and suffered heavily for it.

Further reading:
The Economist’s Democracy in America
Matt Yglesias
Outside the Beltway
Fivethirtyeight

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?

Here’s the thing with the BBC, right. They can post an article like this entirely uncritically. This is the problem with attempting to maintain an unbiased reportage – it makes you scared of making the obvious responses, such as: “If you want an uncomplicated intelligence-sharing relationship, stop fucking torturing people. We don’t let Libya do it so why should you?”

Also, wtf White House. I thought that the Republicans were the torture-apologist party in the US?

Intelligence derived through torture is illegal under international law. Not Iraq-war illegal; actually illegal, in that most civilised countries have extremely tight laws in place to prevent its admission. I, for one, am pleased that our courts have overturned the decision of that gutless, venal slime of a Foreign Secretary and have staked their colours to the wall on this.

Edit to add: Liberal Conspiracy identifies Britain’s worst journalist on the basis of this. Come back BBC, all is forgiven. Ish.

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.

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.

davenoon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notices that Sarah Palin (or Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter) has an epigraph problem:

I realize this is a pedantic complaint, but would it be possible for Sarah Palin to launch her chapters with epigraphs that aren’t of dubious origin?

The first chapter, for example, opens with a quotation from Lou Holtz that the former football coach apparently wrote exclusively for this book. (Alas, as it turns out, Palin and her ghostwriter were simply mangling a nearly identical aphorism that — while always attributed to Holtz — never leads back to an actual source and only appears in “inspirational” books of quotations.)

Chapter Two is introduced by a fake quote from Aristotle, who never in fact wrote that “Criticism is something we can avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing.” Instead, such banalities are more properly credited to a book called Seeds of Change by Denis Waitley, a hack motivational speaker and author who once served as an executive for a skin-care Ponzi scheme.

So far as bungled epigraphs go, the third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

Our land is everything to us…. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember than our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.

Now, if that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that’s because, of course, he didn’t. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who — though a contemporary of John Wooden’s — was not the same guy.

I can’t help wondering if it was deliberate. I don’t know much about Lynn Vincent, but in her position, I’d be tempted to tip observant readers the wink as well.

Renard Sexton and FiveThirtyEight has made the most credible attempt I’ve seen thus far at justifying the bizarre inclusion of Barack Obama into the pantheon of Nobel peace laureates.

The justification for the prize, while certainly unexpected and a bit tenuous, is indeed rooted in fact. Obama has long been a booster for non-proliferation, and his speech and lobbying at the UN General Assembly and Security Council proved to be quite successful.

On climate change, the Obama administration has taken the toughest line against carbon emissions of any White House so far in terms of concrete regulations by Federal agencies [...] Though cap-and-trade or other large scale programmes are clearly the purvue of Congress, the executive branch’s efforts in the realm are likely to be a major portion of the US effort.

Regarding diplomacy, the committee was likely in part referring to the re-elevation of Susan Rice’s post, the US Ambassador to the UN, to a cabinet level post, as well as his public addresses and promised strategic changes toward diplomatic action over rapid military decisions – such as Iran. The G5 plus one meeting with Iran, where Undersecretary of State Burns officially met with the Iranian negotiator, and found a way forward on nuclear energy processing was the first concrete outcome of this strategy.

Sexton’s analysis is spot on – while the Committee’s claims are indeed justifiable, they are too stretched and too abstract to really be credible. When viewed through the prism of today, in which Obama has largely failed to steer effective climate policy through Congress, has largely failed to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons and has largely failed to improve the image of America outside of its traditional western-European and Arab-petrostate clientelle, this award seems to be designed to reward effort and intent rather than achievement. Viewed through the prism of January 2009 – which was when Obama was innaugurated and, two weeks later, nominated for the prize – it looks farcical. The above rationale evaporates when you consider that Obama’s nomination came before his agreement with Russia to cut nuclear arsenals, before any hint of engagement with Iran, before Susan Rice had been appointed to the UN and before any significant moved had been made on emissions.

More importantly, like the award given to Al Gore two years ago, it represents a direct attempt on behalf of the Nobel Committee to promote an agenda within the domestic affairs of a country – an idea that is both intuitively and strategically a bad idea. Those who disagree with the Nobel Committee’s decision will regard the brand as tarnished; those, like me, who have a degree of personal approval for Obama but would rather that prizes were given for achievements rather than intentions will regard the Nobel Peace Prize, sadly, as having irrevocably jumped the shark. The Peace Prize was was never designed to be a political tool; it was intended to reward peaceful policies, not further them. Its credibility to do either is now severely diminished.

If even George W. Bush recognised the failings of the Sarah Palin pick…

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.

I suppose it’s not a huge surprise – the man may not have been an exemplary human but he was a career politician. He would have known what he was seeing. And the last sentence is also unfair – Bush and McCain were not friends, for all that the White House said from the podium.

Sometimes I wonder what they’d do with Bin Laden, if they ever found him. Would it be a big trial then a quiet but lengthly jail sentence? Or would Obama strip down to his shorts and administer a good thrashing, Putin-style, on a scaffold at the centre of Pennsylvania Avenue?

Would the American public and press be prepared to accept the quiet dignity of civilised justice? And would the President of the day be able to resist the popularity bump that would be associated with an overwhelming and barbaric display of public catharsis?

I have a couple of problems.

First: the press really are vile in this country. “COWARDLY BROWN DUCKS LOCKERBIE QUESTIONS”, they lead, just hoping and praying that the PM leads with his chin and actually says something, giving them the golden opportunity that they crave to deliver the second arm of the pincer movement and complain about overstepping the boundaries of devolved power. The tension between the British and American versions of the free press is based on this: the British press are not content to be “just” the fourth estate; they want to be unelected, irresponsible, malign actors in the second, third, and where possible, the first as well. That the American press is too supine is beside the point; the criticisms of the British system are accurate and fair. It was once said that countries get the politicians they deserve; these days, they get the press that they have solicited, patronised and permitted, and the British example is an indictment of the sorry state of public discussion in this country. All beside the point; Brown’s silence on the matter is absolutely the right thing to do.

Second, there are now calls for Libya to pay damages to the victims of IRA terror. The rest of the world remains mystified by our insistence on demanding that every insult be met by monetary compensation. It is perhaps a good way of testing commitment – an apology costs Ghaddafi nothing – but when there are fairly calls for this, that or the other African or Middle-Eastern petro-state to cough up for the perceived slight of the week, I start to wonder what kind of a world we are creating.

No-one has come out of this with any dignity whatsoever.