21st Century Vision

Déjà vu all over again, and not for the first time

Camp David 1978, Oslo 1993, Wye Valley 1998, Camp David again 2000, the 2003 Road Map, and now at Annapolis another international forum meets to re-start the peace "process" in the Middle East. Another American president, who like all his predecessors has armed and financed the Israeli state no matter what it inflicted on the Palestinians on whose land it was created, pronounces himself ready to broker yet another "settlement". This time, however, on the Palestinian side the heir to Arafat speaks only for a fraction of his people, and by that token the proceedings have even less meaning than many of their ill-starred forerunners. Meanwhile Israeli repression in the West Bank and Gaza continues unabated, as does the construction of the only type of settlement that really seems to matter: that of Jewish settlers in territory which is Israeli only by naked right of conquest.

It is pointless to ignore the background. In 1947 the UN gave the Zionists who then owned about 5.8% of the land and made up perhaps 30% of the population 56% of the land. This was then enlarged to 78% by war and the Palestinians largely driven out by ethnic cleansing (see our blogs of 15th and 22nd January 2007). In 1967 Israel conquered the rest, and parts of neighbouring Arab states as well. Since then Israel has withdrawn from Gaza (though it retains - and applies - an economic stranglehold), built a wall across the West Bank which divides and annexes Palestinian territory, selectively assassinated Palestinian leaders at will, invaded Lebanon on two occasions and killed thousands of Palestinians who have had the temerity to fight back. Many Israelis too have been killed and suffered in other ways, whether wholehearted supporters of the Zionist project or just innocents who happen to have been born in what amounts to a colonial occupation.

So what are the options? The main alternatives are -

• A two-state solution, in which as envisaged 60 years ago the Palestinians would get a state alongside Israel. True, after half a century of military and economic force-feeding of Israel by the US, and the systematic denial of resources to the Palestinians, relations between the two would reverse the sense of the phrase "David and Goliath". But the basic question here is whether anyone - Bush, Olmert, the Quartet or anyone else - is willing to work for a viable, territorially integral, genuinely independent state of Palestine free of foreign occupation, and on how much of the land. O yes, and then there is the question of the refugees from 1948 and 1967
• A one-state solution, an increasingly attractive proposition to many, in which all barriers would come down and Jews, Muslims, atheists, humanists, tree-huggers and everyone else would enjoy equal rights in a secular state of let us call it Palestraelia. Of course Zionists would see this as a betrayal of their cause, particularly as non-Jews would probably form a majority of the population. But scriptural Zion is of the mind, and to the advantages of peace would be added a form of society in which entitlements flowed from merit and citizenship, and not from mere membership of a faith community
• Deliberate prolongation of negotiations to infinity, following the rhythm of US presidential elections, and allowing every new incumbent to pose as a peace-maker in the Middle East, at the same time dripping further generations of poison into hearts and minds and into prospects for world peace

If there is any hope from Annapolis, it comes from remarks made afterwards by Olmert, who told Ha'aretz that the collapse of the two-state solution might bring with it "a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights". As soon as that happened "the Jewish organizations which were our power base in America" would turn against a manifestly undemocratic system. The state of Israel would be "finished".

If that meant a democratic one-state solution, many are asking whether that would be such a bad thing. Perhaps they are right.

Click here for Olmert's interview with Ha'aretz

Moving on in Iraq?

Is the worst over in Iraq? Has the surge worked, and are we stumbling towards the emergence of a post-Saddam settlement that achieves the main goals of the coalition? Has democracy finally asserted itself, put Al Qaeda to flight and seen the point of making common cause with the US and Britain?

By some indicators you might think so. Coalition casualties are down sharply, in the British case dramatically. But then the British have effectively withdrawn, albeit to bases still within Iraq. As regards civilian casualties, the best estimates now suggest there have been over a million deaths as a result of the invasion, while Iraq Body Count has this to say about recent trends -

"It is important to place the events of 2007 in context. Levels of violence reached an all-time high in the last six months of 2006. Only in comparison to that could the first half of 2007 be regarded as an improvement. Despite any efforts put into the surge, the first six months of 2007 was still the most deadly first six months for civilians of any year since the invasion."

If there has been a significant reduction in civilian deaths since then it will be some time before research confirms it, and mortality aside, Iraq remains a deeply damaged society at every level, political, economic and psychological, with childhood trauma likely to reverberate for decades into the future.

One reason for the changing level and pattern of violence is undoubtedly that many Iraqis are taking stock of this catastrophe and looking to a post-invasion world. The surge will soon be over and Bush will soon have gone, so why fight now?

But behind all this is the social disaster, with perhaps two million Iraqis having fled the country and a similar number of internal refugees. Ethnic cleansing, encouraged by the divisive policies of the coalition, has done its work, and left the future government of Iraq a task of the most extreme difficulty. And as regards our part in this, the Refugee Council remarks that -

“We are witnessing a massive humanitarian crisis in Iraq, with a movement of refugees bigger than any in the last fifty years. The UK, as a leading country in the international community, is failing to live up to its responsibility. Instead, it continues to focus on removing relatively small numbers of refused Iraqi asylum seekers, at great cost, so as to meet Home Office targets. Quite apart from being very dangerous, this is a total misallocation of resources. Ministers need to get their priorities in order.”

Proliferation? No problem, we'll just grab them

For nearly forty years our government and those of the other nuclear powers have flouted their obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which commits them to "negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament". As we have pointed out here (26th February), the renewal of the British Trident submarine-based missile system further undermined the process envisaged in the treaty. Our parliament calmly took a decision which endangered us all and paid no regard to whether our children would inherit a safer world.

In their arcane game-theory calculations, nuclear strategists analyse rational responses to threats and opportunities. Should we launch our long-range missiles "on warning"? Can we lower the threshold so that - to use a phrase beloved of ministers whose connection with the actual battlefield is limited to seeing it in the cinema - we can deploy short-range weapons "in theatre"? Would a "counter-force" strike (i.e, one against military targets) mean a "counter-value" response (i.e, against cities) using missiles surviving the first strike?

What seems to escape the attention of these planners of death on a scale that must be the envy of Lucifer is that calculations based on the thinking of rational actors assume that government is stable and rational actors in control. Of course it has dawned on them that a criminal or terrorist organization might try to produce a dirty bomb (one using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material). For the rest the nuclear powers can only make strenuous efforts to deny nuclear capacity to state actors presumed to be non-rational, which in practice means that they are hostile to us (Libya, Iran) or to our allies (North Korea).

And yet if we look at the history of the nuclear states themselves, stability is not exactly their leading characteristic, with several having undergone major political - even revolutionary - upheavals. The Soviet Union collapsed and for a period experienced near anarchy; in South Africa the nuclear-armed Apartheid regime fell to pieces; North Korea is on the verge of widespread famine, if not worse; and Israel fights endless wars to survive as a racially based state.

Largely because they wanted to point them at each other and not at us, India and Pakistan were allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and the dominant powers comforted themselves with the same facile assumption that rational actors would always be in control. Now that turmoil in Pakistan has once again exposed the illusions of the nuclear elite, what do they propose to do? Well according to the Washington Post (11th November), they are considering moving in to take control of the country's nuclear arsenal. "Former officials" concede however that any attempt by the US to seize the weapons could be "very messy".

So there you have it, the modern approach to non-proliferation. First behave as if non-proliferation doesn't apply to you, while allowing your friends to acquire nuclear weapons. Then, when things go wrong, move in to confiscate them, even if it might turn "messy".

Just one question: wouldn't it have been better to implement the NPT in the first place?

Click here for the Washington Post article in full

Open that door!

It has always been an assumption of what might be called the Western political consensus that democracies will be on "our" side; and also that history itself tends towards universal democracy through a virtuous circle whereby free trade generates not only commerce in goods and services but also the emergence of middle classes with middle-class aspirations just like ours. These bourgeois groups will have every reason to support a menu of human rights, political freedoms and laissez-faire economics, so giving another turn to the ascending helix. It is the Whig interpretation of history - the idea of a steady accumulation of rights and freedoms as the leitmotif of our British island story - projected onto a global level.

Of course the time it takes for the benefits of this process to make themselves apparent to others has sometimes seemed too long. As the future US president Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1907, "the doors of the nation which are closed [to trade] must be battered down", an approach well illustrated by US proconsul Paul Bremer's remark in Baghdad in May 2003 that "Iraq is open for business". Western idealism, as neoconservatism has realised, is impatient to bring liberty to others who will then thank us for it - and also become more like us.

Almost by definition, anyone who resists or criticises the open door is a friend to tyranny. Anyone who points out for example that exposing weaker economies to competition from the immense accumulation of capital and technological expertise of the West is a formula for domination must somehow be opposed to liberty. To suggest further that the very purpose of opening doors in this way is to facilitate corporate penetration into every corner of every activity on the planet is to make oneself an enemy of Western values.

Strange, then, to find who are the real allies of dictatorship. Last week it was the king of Saudi Arabia and his entourage parading down the Mall and dining with the queen. These standard bearers of democratic values in the Middle East - who also happen to be such excellent customers for our military hardware, even if it takes a little bribery to oil the wheels - are our stalwart partners. This week Western support for General Musharraf in Pakistan turned from farce to tragedy and back with bewildering speed. It doesn't matter that his military dictatorship is now eight years old, that he has repressed the opposition and arrested the supreme court judges: all will be OK if he just "takes off his uniform" and holds "elections" in January.

And why do "we" support them, just as we condone the Israeli oppression in Palestine? Why do we not excoriate them all, as we are pleased to do with Robert Mugabe?

Can it be that like the blood-soaked horrors of Vietnam and Iraq, or like the savage repression in Indonesia in the 60s or Latin America in the 70s and 80s, they are all part of the process of holding open the door, and that what matters is the opportunity for business, not the democracy which is supposed to be its consequence?

Heart of darkness

We continue our occasional series shedding a dim light on some of the more obscure conflicts taking place around the world with a look at the Central African Republic (CAR). This is a conflict so obscure that even respectable information websites such as Lonely Planet, Infoplease and even the BBC fail to mention it in their country profiles, except as something like 'armed groups operate in parts of the country'.

The lid was lifted last week by Johann Hari in the Independent. This blog is extracted from that (long) article, so if you have the time and interest to read it (recommended!) you can save the time required to read the rest of this. For the more time-constrained/impatient, here goes:

The story goes back to the days of imperialism, when the French share of the spoils of Africa included the CAR. They treated the local population virtually as slaves, fodder for the rubber industry which generated wealth for La Patrie. The days of Empire are gone, but little has changed - the French still see the CAR as a colony, and happily send their troops and planes to shoot up anyone their puppet ruler wants shot up. It seems to have been here that the technique the Americans used so successfully in Iraq was developed: invade, put in a puppet ruler and get him to ask for your help, thus legitimising the invasion.

The first President of the newly independent CAR was Barthélemy Boganda, a remarkable man who favoured multiple political parties, a free press and human rights, and had a vision of a United Africa. He didn't last long, though: his plane blew up in suspicious circumstances. The French did not permit an investigation, and instead installed the first of their puppets, David Dacko, who promptly reversed all Boganda's reforms.

Since then there have been a succession of rulers, including the fearsome mad cannibal, 'Emperor' Bokassa. He was too much even for the French to take, so they helped overthrow him - bringing back David Dacko. Conditions for the people have not improved. The current incumbent, Francois Bozize, was a bodyguard to Bokassa, latertried to stage a coup in 1982 that went horribly wrong, but re-emerged as a Presidential candidate in 2002. Backed by French money, he won.

The government provides no services for the people, they just exercise power. The insurrection which Hari went to see for himself is basically to get the government to act like a government. Alas, it seems to have failed. Reuters reports today that the last rebels, the Popular Army for the Restoration of the Republic and Democracy, are suing for peace.

In the interests of balance, you should also read the French Ambassador's response to Hari's article on the Independent's letters page on Tuesday (page down a bit to find it).

Sublime moments

Every writer knows that moment when creative work - whether of analysis or imagination - seems pointless, because life not only mimics art but does so to such overwhelming effect as to mock the puny efforts of even the most accomplished. Great landscape painters must despair at the spectacle of a real sunset over a turbulent ocean and military historians at the experience of actual battle. Even Proust must have felt at times that he had only gestured towards the true awfulness of an aristocracy in decline. Indeed aesthetics has elaborated a theory - they call it "the sublime" - to deal with those phenomena which somehow exceed the capacity of the senses to convey in rational discourse. All that is left is to say "Oooh" or "Aaah", and move on.

Well we UNA naggers and bloggers are no G.M.W. Turners or Basil Liddell Harts or Balzacs, but in our small way we feel driven to utter a quiet "Oooh". You study public policy on climate change or foreign affairs for months and years, trying in your small way to define its inadequacies and denials and to point out mendacity and inhumanity where they occur. You try to read what the runes say about the road ahead if nothing changes and we carry on in the same old way. Of course plenty of people agree with what you are saying, and many are saying it better than you, but like you they are on the fringes - the awkward squad whose voices somehow never penetrate the minds of policy makers and elected politicians.

And then, one day, things change, and what you were trying so painfully and for so long to sketch out imposes itself on the world like a force of nature. It is not just that the minor villains - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Perle, Black, Rove, Bolton and most recently Gonzales - have gone down one by one, proving that nemesis has an eye for detail as well as for the bigger picture. More to the point, it now seems to be accepted that the whole neocon enterprise, that tidal wave of shock, awe and unimaginable violence unleashed on the back of 9/11, was not only incompetently managed but fundamentally misconceived in the first place. What you have spent so much time vainly advocating  is suddenly the accepted wisdom of generals and editorialists, of politicians and bishops, and indeed of the chattering classes as a whole. One imagines an H.M. Bateman cartoon: "The Man Who Still Thought Attacking Iraq Was a Good Idea".

The same is true of climate change. Suddenly it's not just the Greens who think renewables are the future - it's the Lib Dems and the German government! OK, there's still plenty to disagree about - will "feed-in tariffs" do the trick? - but the debate is henceforth about realities, and therefore on our home ground.

So are we - the permanently disaffected critics who just didn't get why slaughtering thousands (as it turned out hundreds of thousands) in the Middle East and Afghanistan was a rational response to a terrible crime committed in New York - redundant? Naturally we don't think so. It isn't that no one has been held responsible for the enormities of the last five years - none of the minor villains listed above has been held to account for his role in promoting aggressive war, human rights abuses or outright torture - more that the systemic defects which allowed this to occur are completely unreformed. Last year's congressional election in the US changed everything, but it could so easily have gone the other way.

Oooh, are we happy with that?

At last some good news

The picture shown here (taken from the front page of the Independent) is a drawing made by a traumatised Darfuri boy showing government forces attacking his village. It is one of 500 to be submitted to the International Criminal Court as proof of war crimes. There is an appropriateness about the agonised outpourings of war's chief victims being used to bring their assailants to justice.

Justice is still some way off, but it has finally begun to move closer with the decision to send a joint UN/African Union peacekeeping force of 26,000 to Darfur. Darfur is a big place, so even 26,000 will have their work cut out to cover everything that's going on, but at least it is a serious move in the right direction, and an unequivocal signal to Khartoum that their days of being able to ignore the strictures of the international community are over. A signal, too, to the dispossessed refugees huddled in their camps surrounded by Janjaweed that the world has finally taken notice of their plight and started to do something to help.

Not before time, of course. The genocide in Darfur has been going on since 2002, with a pattern of unprovoked attacks on villages - sometimes with air support - driving the surviving villagers into refugee camps which are essentially controlled by their enemies. Women have the choice of going out to gather firewood at the risk of rape and possibly murder, or seeing their families starve. The world has looked on, wrung its hands, even uttered the word 'genocide' (which governments are strangely reluctant to do normally) - but done nothing.

This blog is frequently critical of the British government's foreign policy, and no doubt we will have many future opportunities to criticise Gordon Brown's version, but he has certainly started off on the right foot here, with an impassioned speech to the UN helping to get action finally in train. Good on yer, Gordon - now see if you can keep it up.

Burma update

Further to our post of July 19th, the House of Commons International Development Select Committee - the committee whose job it is to scrutinise the policies and actions of the Department for International Development - has just returned from a visit to Burma. They were horrified by what they saw. You can read their report, or the Independent's front page coverage. The latter is backed up by further articles here and here, and an editorial.

Where is the debate?

Whatever its other virtues the newly-branded British government is hallowing the traditions of its predecessor in one respect - by refusing to have an intelligent approach to developments in the West Asian wars. If anything requires a mobilisation of "all the talents" it is the emerging reality not only of post war Iraq and Afghanistan, but of our own adjustment to the international aftermath.

So where do we stand?

• The US ambassador to Iraq has called for all his local employees to be given refugee status in the US because of grave concern that, as the Washington Post puts it, "they will quit and flee the country if they cannot be assured eventual safe passage to the United States". Seeing history repeating itself, these people clearly do not want to be clinging to helicopter skids in the last days of the Green Zone
• The Guardian reports today that while 163 British service personnel have died in Iraq, "nine have been killed this month". This neatly disguises the reality that while UK troop numbers in the country have been heavily reduced, and as those remaining withdraw to fortified bunkers whose purpose is anyway highly questionable, the casualty rate has risen sharply. Apart from the invasion itself and immediately afterwards, until recently the most who have died in any four-month period is 17 (in 2004-5); yet 29 have already been killed since 1st April this year. What does this tell us about the situation on the ground in Basra and Maysan?
• The MoD is busy leaking the private view of the head of the UK armed forces that they are very near to breaking point, with inadequate troop numbers and shortages of vital equipment. We have quoted Sir Richard Dannatt before in this blog (13th October 2006), and his predecessor, now Lord Guthrie (30th October 2006), but no one in Whitehall seems to have taken their warnings half as seriously as they would a hostile headline in the Daily Mail
• Meanwhile - and perhaps explaining the somewhat reduced sectarian slaughter in the country - Iraqis themselves are preparing for the coalition's departure, with reports that Sunni insurgent groups are forming a common front to negotiate the terms. Only a straw in the wind perhaps, but by excluding both Al-Qaeda and those who have co-operated with the current occupation one can see they are taking serious decisions about the future shape of their country

And therein lies the difference. What preparation is being made in the UK to address an outcome to the Iraq and Afghan campaigns which is less than glorious triumph? Where is the thinking about the impact it will have on Britain's international role? While defence secretary Des Browne bleats about NATO allies doing more to shoulder the burden in Afghanistan, what realistic planning is taking place to rebuild our partnerships in Europe and at the UN on the basis of a respect for multilateral engagement and the rule of law?

Is the problem perhaps that we cannot acknowledge that any mistake was made in the first place?

Click here to read "We're running out of troops warns army chief"
Click here to read Seumas Milne on political developments in Iraq

'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi...You know? So what?'

The Americans love to depict themselves as the saviours of the world, the 5th cavalry riding to the rescue of oppressed peoples everywhere Their government invariably depicts the army as brave boys doing a difficult job superbly well (we won't mention Abu Ghraib). So does ours, come to that.

No doubt many of the troops do indeed try to live up to that image, but soldiers, while often brave, are brainwashed into seeing the enemy as sub-human trash - they have to be, else how could they bring themselves to fight and kill other human beings they have never even met? In a situation like Iraq, where the dividing lines between friend and foe, enemy or civilian are blurred, is it any wonder that many of the American troops (and no doubt ours as well) have been drawing those lines in very much the wrong places?

The US magazine The Nation has just published a report in which they interviewed 50 Iraq veterans and found out what really happens. The heading of this blog is a comment by one of the 50. Here's another: "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous". I will leave you to read the rest for yourself.

As I have already indicated, we cannot afford to get complacent here, either. Remember the Baha Musa case? (see this blog, June 14th if you don't) Soldiers of whatever nation are never going to be eager upholders of human rights, at least not while they are in the middle of a war. Kill or be killed is - necessarily - the rule they will always go by. Put yourself in their place if you can, and it becomes harder to blame them.

It doesn't make it any harder to blame the politicians who started the war, though. It goes without saying that the enemy will abuse human rights any chance they get, but if you realise (as you should) that your own brave, upright soldiery will too, then that's another good reason (how many do we need?) to make damn sure that the war you are starting is a just one. It probably won't be by the time it's finished.