Tuesday, March 29, 2016 

Syria, Islamic State, and seeing conspiracies that weren't there.

War is not neat.  War is not tidy.  War is nearly always fought in the equivalent of a fog.  All three of these statements are such truisms they are practically cliches.  In times of struggle you often have to make tacit alliances with people you would otherwise go out of your way to avoid.

This is especially true when it comes to Syria in terms of oil.  Practically, everyone is guilty of buying and selling to each other: Islamic State sold to Assad.  Islamic State sold to Turkey.  Thieves stole from Islamic State and sold to everyone.  Trying to make some grand statement about how about one country or one side is in bed with another on the basis of oil is foolish.  Turkey until recently turned a blind eye to Islamic State and other foreign fighters travelling through her borders as they didn't care who replaced Assad, as long as he fell.  Of all the double games that have been played, Turkey's has been just about the most egregious.

And yet, even now, even after the retaking of Palmyra by the Syrian Arab Army, still this kind of nonsense is being spouted, including by the Graun:

The second conclusion is that when governments stop playing a double game in which they use extremists for their own purposes, they do better. Assad did this for a long time, leaving Isis alone so as to put more pressure on its other opponents. After the loss of Palmyra in May 2015, the Syrians abandoned that policy and tried to retake the areas they had lost, but they had not the resources and, in particular, the airpower to do so, until the Russians made up that deficiency.

To an extent, Assad did indeed leave Islamic State alone. This was for the reason that the territory taken by IS in the country's eastern, mostly desert regions was not strategically essential to the regime's survival.  The SAA gave up Palmyra in order to retrench and reinforce its other frontlines, primarily around Damascus, Latakia, and in Aleppo.  It was only after the Russian intervention at the end of September last year that the SAA alongside Hezbollah and other groups was finally able to make some headway, and then it took months.  Likewise, Islamic State has somewhat learned the lesson of the thrashing it received in Kobane, once the Americans decided the overrunning of the town would be an advance too far; they withdrew from Palmyra to cut their losses, as they also did in Sinjar in Iraq.

As Juan Cole writes, it's not immediately clear why the SAA would now retake Palmyra when the likes of al-Nusra are still much closer to home.  Part of the reasoning is no doubt for symbolic reasons, that expelling IS from Palmyra makes for good propaganda.  Whatever the exact motives, it does dispel once and for all the idiotic notion that there was some kind of accord between Assad and IS, or that the Russians were effectively Islamic State's air force, or any such gibbering.  The retaking of Palmyra has happened primarily because of the ceasefire with the groups other than IS and al-Nusra, which is holding to the surprise of pretty much everyone; without wanting to blow my own trumpet too loud, this is what I suggested was the more realistic outcome if a ceasefire happened.  Not the "70,000 moderates" fighting Islamic State for us, but the SAA backed by the Russians from the air.

Whether retaking Palmyra is purely symbolic, with the Russians having no intention of providing the backup required for the SAA and allies to retake Raqqa, the ultimate target once Deir al-Zor has been relieved, we're yet to see.  We don't for instance know if like in Palmyra Islamic State might simply retreat; the declared capital of their caliphate or not, Mosul seems more likely to be where IS would choose to make a last stand.

Last stand is in any case a relative notion.   Just as IS's previous incarnation, the Islamic State of Iraq, appeared to have been defeated, Islamic State seems unlikely to be defeated completely when its resurrection was far more an expression of the rage of Iraq's Sunnis at their on-going persecution and under-representation in post-war Iraq than it was sudden support for the group's internationalist ideology.  Also unlike in Syria, where those who have survived have been hardened and bloodied by the experience, in Iraq the army still seems to have fundamental issues with morale, continuing to run away at the first sign of Islamic State striking back.  Retaking Mosul remains an ideal, not something likely to turn into actuality any time soon.

As for whether or not you believe the reports about "hundreds" of foreign fighters being sent back to attack Europe, that the cell that first attacked Paris and then Brussels seems to be as large as it was hardly suggests a lack of ambition.  Even if IS loses the territory it holds, its success has been in updating the template laid down by al-Qaida, creating a banner to which both the disaffected and the deeply religious have been attracted.  Either it will rise again, or another group, even less scrupulous, even more murderous will take its place.  What will really matter is if we then repeat the same mistakes we have twice already.  I'm not betting on the third time being the charm.

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3/29/2016 07:39:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, March 28, 2016 

Palmyra.

Odd, isn't it, that for all the expressions of horror at the taking of Palmyra last year by Islamic State, the subsequent demolitions of treasures of the ancient world, the calls for a stepping up of the bombing of the group, even outright intervention, come the liberation of the city there is almost silence from those same people.

Well, no, it's not.  But you get my point.

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3/28/2016 05:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, March 14, 2016 

In praise of not doing stupid shit.

"Imagine," said Stewart Lee, in the first episode of his new series, in his style of not meaning it while somewhat meaning it while knowing that his audience will agree with him, "James Corden watching me.  It'd be like a dog listening to classical music."

We don't however have to imagine something highly similar.  Boris Johnson this morning accused President Obama of hypocrisy for sticking his oar in over the EU referendum vote.  Denis Healey once said that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep, a decent put down turned into the complete destruction of a lesser foe, thanks to how awful politicians generally are at verbally pummelling their opponents into submission.  Boris, who likes to think of himself as a classical sophisticate when not acting the upper class twit, is in every way far more like good ol' Bill Clinton.  A charismatic dilettante who has repeatedly cheated on his wife, with a far higher opinion of himself than has ever been warranted, continually getting away with it thanks to how he's, well, Boris.  Boris Johnson laying into Barack Obama is like watching a toddler trying to knock over Geoff Capes.  It's like watching Nick Grimshaw and Rita Ora sit in judgement of other people.  It's like Chris Evans trying his damnedest to be Jeremy Clarkson.  It's like spending however much it is for a ticket to go and see Adele when you could stay at home and listen to next door's cat fight the tom from down the road for free.

It's ignorant, pathetic and stupid is what I'm getting at.  Obama has not been, the consensus seem to be, the greatest of presidents.  Especially for one who came to office promising so much, only to achieve relatively little.  He has still without a shadow of doubt been the best US president of my lifetime thus far, and barring something astonishing happening, I would say is odds on to be the best US president of my lifetime full stop.

This much is apparent just from reading the superb extended interview/feature in the Atlantic, somewhat hopefully titled the Obama Doctrine.  Each president must have a foreign policy doctrine.  Dubya's was to act pre-emptively against threats, both perceived and real.  It didn't go well.  Obama's, by contrast, so much as he has one, is "to not do stupid shit".  This not doing stupid shit itself has not always worked out.  Intervening in Libya might not have been stupid, if say there had been a plan for handling the aftermath.  Sadly, there was no plan for handling the aftermath.  Likewise, the going along with the Saudi/Qatari plan for Syria, arming and funding jihadists, and from almost the outset demanding that Assad must go has been stupid.  It has though been vastly preferable to the alternative, active US intervention in Syria, as demanded and urged by most of Obama's advisers and appointees.

"Not doing stupid shit" is in fact Obama playing down his impact on foreign policy, as is the notion that his time in office has signalled something of a retreat from the world.  Obama has it's true not sent US troops to other countries in anything like the numbers that Bush did.  He has though given the go ahead to a "surge" in Afghanistan; intervened again in Iraq; intervened in Syria, if only against Islamic State; intervened in Libya; and also has authorised an unknown number of drone strikes in countries from Somalia to Pakistan.  This is without considering the backing given by the US to other states to carry out their wars, like in Ukraine and to the Saudis in Yemen.  Oh, and he killed Osama bin Laden.

Obama sums it up best himself:
“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

Almost needless to say, most of Obama's aides and his secretaries of state, including John Kerry and a certain Hillary Clinton do follow this playbook.  Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz will without doubt follow it. Trump you can't be certain of, just as you can't be certain of anything he says, but you'd wager he'll be far more of a traditionalist than he claims he would be currently.  Clinton gets it the neck repeatedly, and deservedly, and makes clear how she would operate, saying in reference to Obama's withdrawn red line on Syria that "If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice."  Hillary was gung-ho for the Libya intervention to the point where Joe Biden is reported to have said "Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir."

Most of the reaction over here to the piece was focused on Obama's criticism of David Cameron over Libya, or as Obama apparently refers to the Libyan intervention, a "shit show".  Cameron, according to Obama, stopped paying attention, "distracted by a range of other things.”  Which is in truth a fair summary of the intervention as a whole: we went in, Gaddafi got sodomised with a knife, Dave flew to Benghazi to be garlanded by the locals, and once that was over it was time to move on.  No messing around Iraq style with trying to create a new state out of the one we destroyed; we'd just leave the Libyans to it.  What we thought we knew turned out to be wrong, and soon liberated Benghazi became a city fit to be filmed as a hellhole of anti-Americanism by Michael Bay.  A couple of MPs, including Andrew Mitchell, claimed this was all terribly unfair without really putting their all into it, for the reason that it's true.  France and ourselves were the ones who wanted the intervention for reasons known only to Sarkozy and Cameron, and Obama went along with it in the belief that this time maybe his allies would pull their weight as well as anything for a quiet life.  Instead the Americans again had to do all the heavy lifting, just as they are doing in Syria while Cameron makes a song and dance in the Commons about our magnificent Brimstone missiles that so far haven't killed any Islamic State fighters.  No wonder Obama had to make clear to Dave that 2% spending on defence was truly non-negotiable.

Obama does of course want to portray the decisions he has made in the best possible light.  It's that he does so convincingly, or Jeffrey Goldberg is skilful enough in his write-up to present it that way.  He feels constrained by the pressure put him on by the foreign policy establishment, the foreign and military funded thinktanks, the "playbookers", the Samantha Power "responsibility to protect" agitators.  He would clearly have liked to have dumped Saudi Arabia as an ally given the chance, Pakistan probably too.  You can argue that a truly radical president would have done these things, would have refused to listen to people that he believed were advising him to do "stupid shit".  You can also look back through recent American history and see that by most measures Obama's foreign policy has been relatively sane, based mostly on correcting the mistakes of his predecessors.

Whoever wins the election in November (unless there is a Sanders miracle) will almost certainly have a doctrine that abandons the not doing stupid shit rule.  Difficult as it is to believe Clinton could be worse than Trump on this score, such are the advisers she has always had by her side (Susan Rice, Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter are all long term associates), such was the way her husband used foreign policy repeatedly as a distraction from problems at home.  The rise of Corbyn here has not stopped our once similarly critical of foreign adventures prime minister from following the playbook, while his potential successors, George Osborne especially, are if anything even more minded to act.  Labour itself has a core group of MPs that have never seen a war they didn't want to get involved in, who coincidentally tend to be the most critical of Corbyn and the left.

After 8 years of Bush, Obama was the most blessed relief.  I can't help but feel we're about to plunge into the maelstrom again.

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3/14/2016 09:44:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 08, 2016 

Turkey and the EU ought to be a dream for Leave. It won't be.

If the various Leave campaigns had any sense, which is a contradiction in terms in itself, but bear with me for a moment here, then they would drop the whining about scaremongering and turn their own fearmongering up to maximum volume.  Never mind these laughable attempts to suggest they care about fishing quotas and the like and in turn get us to care about them, they ought to target their fire on the EU's true weak spot: the organisation's commitment to expansion.  Bulgaria and Romania were never in a million years ready to join the EU, and yet in they came.  Similarly, while the picture is more complicated with what were the accession A8 eastern European states, some still fail to come up to scratch on freedom of speech and freedom of the press, not to forget having complicated histories they would rather didn't get much attention.

Turkey is without doubt though in an league of its own.  Countries across Europe openly discriminate against the Roma to varying degrees, but none are in a state of open warfare as Turkey once again is against the Kurds.  Sure, the war is technically against the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, regarded as a terrorist organisation by the EU, and yet everyone is aware of the reality.  Since President Erdogan's AKP won the second of last year's two elections, the repression of all opposition to the government has increased dramatically.  Today brings news that Turkey's second largest news agency, Cihan, has been seized in an identical fashion to how Zaman, the country's biggest newspaper was taken over last week.  Both are linked to the Gulen movement, once allied to Erdogan, but since turned on after a breakdown in relations between the men is alleged to have sparked a 2013 investigation into corruption that implicated Erdogan and his sons, among other AKP figures.

In usual times, it wouldn't be the best of ideas to be crushing media dissent and teargassing protesters at the same time as asking for talks on joining the EU to be restarted.  These are not usual times.  Last week saw Nato's Supreme Allied Commander Europe claim to the Senate that Russia and Syria were "weaponising" the refugee crisis in a bid to "overwhelm European structures and break European resolve".  If there wasn't a Nato member from which the vast majority of migrants were making their attempts to get to Europe proper, rather than say Syria itself, this would just be the familiar spectacle of the Americans tending to send their most insane/most anti-Russian generals over to Europe.  As Turkey is a Nato member, a Nato member that Simon Tisdall in the Graun writes has arguably made the refugee crisis worse through its policies in Syria, it makes fairly apparent that in the end the Americans will always choose Turkey.

As for the "arguably" part, read definitely.  Turkey has been the main conduit for weapons for the non-Islamic State opposition to Assad, a conduit operated in part by the CIA.  As for IS itself, until very recently Turkey all but waved through anyone who wanted to pledge themselves to the caliphate, while more "arguable" is just how close the relationship between Turkey and Islamic State was, whether it extended to mere trading of oil, something that all actors involved in the conflict were caught up in, or whether it extended to perhaps even the sharing of intelligence.  Either way, Turkey has more than a case to answer for prolonging the war in Syria and contributing to the refugee crisis, including in its attitude towards the Kurds.

Erdogan essentially concluded that hosting millions of Syrian refugees was acceptable in the short-term if it meant not losing face when it came to his policy of seeing President Assad overthrown.  Besides, it's turned out to be something of a happy accident for him.  Refugees, unable to work legally, tiring of living in camps and despairing of the war ending any time soon last year started to turn in larger numbers towards the people smugglers, encouraged further by the humanitarian if disastrous in hindsight gesture of Chancellor Merkel.  In spite of the winter and an agreement last year between Turkey and the EU that was meant to see a crackdown on the traffickers, up to 2,000 migrants a day are now landing on Greek shores.  Just how well in practice a country with a coastline as long as Turkey's can stop those determined to get Europe and those determined to provide them with that service is open to question, but with Schengen in danger of collapse and fences going up on borders in the Balkans, EU leaders want a deal at almost any cost.

If that means providing succour to a president who has modelled himself on Putin, a leader with the audacity to close down newspapers and bomb his own citizens at the same time as those talks are going on, then apparently Merkel, Hollande and others have decided so be it.  The proposed deal whereby the refugee boats will be taken back to Turkey, with Syrians from the camps resettled in the EU in an "one in, one out" scheme has as many holes in it as the average vessel the traffickers put their customers to sea in.  That's before you even get started on the legality, let alone morality of sending refugees from countries other than Syria that are just as dangerous back to where they fled from.  The chances then of even a "preparation of a decision on the opening of new chapters in talks on EU membership for Turkey" taking place are fairly remote.

And yet even this merest suggestion that Turkey could join the EU ought to be seized on by the Leave side.  Yes, there's the obvious scare line about the potential for 75 million more people potentially having the right to come and work in the UK, and their overwhelmingly being Muslims to boot for the hard right to make much of, as Paul Mason identifies.  Also though there's the potential for dwelling on how this often seemingly anti-democratic union has very few qualms about doing the most dodgy of deals with outright autocrats, so long as it solves a problem in the short-term.  There's both a positive and negative case to be made for why Turkey should be refused entry, and to how it makes clear the direction in which the EU appears to keep on heading.  Expect though that Leave will just carrying on with their bitching and moaning about how unfair their opponents are being, as that seems the only thing they know how to do.

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3/08/2016 10:31:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, February 16, 2016 

Syria and the pessimistic imagination.

One of the best, most thoughtful posts on whether we should join the bombing of Islamic State in Syria came from Shuggy.  3 months on and if anything it's even better:

A number of people supporting this military action have said to me personally that 'things can't get any worse than this'.  This has to one of the most over-used phrases in the English language and relates to the title of this post.  What we have is a regional conflict with the Assad regime backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah on one side; Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar backing the Sunni insurgents on the other.  On top of this we have the United States and France air power.  The Assad military - depleted though it undoubtedly is - is still the largest functioning military force in the country.  It cannot win the war but now it is backed by Russian air-power, it can't lose.  Without it, the only other force capable of winning is ISIS and its affiliates.  Among the many problems the American have is that they don't want either side to win but are not - thank goodness - willing to countenance a military confrontation with both sides.  It is this horrible situation that we have been drawn into and one would have thought the dangers of this escalating into something wider and very much worse should be obvious.

In the time since things have indeed got worse, and thanks to the terror gripping the Turks, and to a slightly lesser extent the Saudis following the advances of the Syrian army towards encircling Aleppo, we are facing a situation where like it or not, the Americans may find themselves in something resembling an outright confrontation with both sides.

The strange or in fact not strange at all thing is how just as the Russians used the excuse of Islamic State to intervene on the side of Assad, despite 90% of the time attacking the other rebels, jihadist, Islamist or "moderates" alike, so our allies have done also.  Turkey claimed to be striking against Islamic State only to in fact attack the Kurds 99.9% of the time.  Now the Saudis have made the offer to send in ground forces, again supposedly to fight Islamic State.  This doesn't for so much as a moment fool Michael Clarke, former director general of the RUSI thinktank, writing in the Graun:

Militarily, the Saudi threat issued at Munich has to be made credible. If a ceasefire does not materialise soon, the Russians, Iranians and Assad himself have no incentives to quit while they are ahead. Only the possibility of Arab ground forces, from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE, heavily backed by western logistics and intelligence, air power and technical specialists, could force Assad and his backers to make a strategic choice in favour of cessation. Only the US could make that work for the Saudis and others – and only Britain could bring along other significant European allies.

How genuine the Saudi offer of ground troops is remains open to question, not least as the deployment of troops in Yemen in support of their own air strikes has been limited.  This more than suggests they have little to no confidence in their ability to achieve much that their air strikes aren't already.  Bearing in mind that the Houthis, capable as they are, do not have an air force backing them up as the SAA, Hezbollah and the other groups fighting for the government do, and that with the best will in the world the Houthis would be no match for Hezbollah, chances are the Saudis would not last long, advanced weaponry brought with them or not.

In any case, you might have imagined that after 5 years of miscalculations concerning Syria, now would be the point to fold rather than double down.  Yes, we could of course let our regional allies send in troops, and back them logistically and with air power, and possibly tempt in the process a third world war, or we could say sorry, we tried, and let everyone who still thinks Syria is worth fighting over get on with it.  Clarke sort of gets this, and sort of doesn't:

This would undoubtedly be a dangerous escalation of the conflict. But in the absence of a genuine ceasefire, the conflict is destined to escalate in any case as Russian forces and Iranian militias put a vengeful Assad back in control of a broken country. If that has the eventual effect of letting him deal with Isis in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor it will leave the west with much bigger strategic problems across the region as a whole. Fifteen years ago these would not have seemed such difficult choices. But after Iraq and Afghanistan they look like dismal options.

Yes, it's a difficult decision, isn't it? Do we put everything on black, and risk the possibility of a direct confrontation with the Russians, as would be more than plausible if things didn't go to plan and we really did have to support Arab ground forces from the air, or do we let Assad deal with Isis himself, leaving "the west much bigger strategic problems"?  These strategic problems would be seemingly not much different to the ones we faced prior to the Syrian uprising, wouldn't they?  Or is Clarke obliquely referencing how if we don't back our regional allies now, they might lose all faith in us?  Is not being aligned with governments that have backed the Syrian rebels such a terrible thought?  Earlier in the piece Clarke correctly identifies that Isis is not the crisis, but rather a symptom of the civil war within Islam in the Middle East, and the struggle for dominance between the Saudis and Iran.  Now, if we had to pick a side, my choice would most certainly not be the one that finds common cause with Islamic State, and that has armed and funded jihadist groups in Syria and around the world for that matter.  It wouldn't be the state set to be effectively fighting on the same side as Islamic State if it intervenes.

Which really does sum up how utterly deranged and mangled American policy, if not British policy also, has become on Syria.  The Americans are supporting the Kurdish YPG as the only ground force they trust against Islamic State.  At the same time Turkey, our Nato ally, has been bombing and shelling the YPG, which has also been advancing in alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces, under the umbrella of Russian air strikes.  The Turks are once again raising the idea of a "safe zone", protected by a no-fly zone, which is just by coincidence in the same area as the Kurds have advanced into.  Germany is now apparently supporting this venture, which the Americans continue to oppose on the grounds they are still resistant to getting into a shooting war with the Russians.  While Turkey is asking the Americans to choose between it and the Kurds, probably not entirely seriously, the similar game of supporting the rebels through the arming and training of "verified" groups, who routinely ally with jihadists, including the al-Nusra Front, goes on, at the same time as condemnation of Russian attacks on these "moderates" continues to be hurled.

Clarke concludes:
The west can choose a dangerous push for a settlement now, or a tepid continuation of a policy that promises a longer war and strategic failure in the region – while hundreds of thousands of desperate people wait at Europe’s doorstep.

It comes back to what Shuggy called the "pessimistic imagination". What Clarke describes as "dangerous" looks to me about the most foolish gamble imaginable, hoping that the Russians will blink over the laughable combined forces of the Saudis, Jordanians and Emirate nations, and the not so laughable backing of the West.  What happens if they don't and they start bombing them in the same way as they have "our" rebels?  How do we respond?

By contrast, a "tepid continuation" of our policy as it stands is preferable by a factor of 50.  Not offered as an option it's worth noting is telling Turkey to stop bombing and shelling the YPG, telling the Saudis their hopes of overthrowing Assad are over and that if they must carry on with their proxy war with Iran they should concentrate on Yemen, and making clear to the rebels that now is the time for a deal.  These would also be options, although presumably would add to our "strategic problems".  Perhaps, as noted above, it's about time that regional strategy was reviewed.

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2/16/2016 08:02:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, February 15, 2016 

100 years ago...


Which reminded me of something Mark Ames has repeatedly said: that absolutely no one has suffered as a result of supporting the Iraq war.  Sure, in the sense that they've been somewhat diminished in the eyes of some of their peers they have been, and yet no one has truly paid the cost of being wrong in the sense of losing their job, or no longer being able to earn a crust through giving their opinions, or being denied employment at any number of financial institutions, or not being able to give speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Your Nick Cohens, your David Aaronovitches, your Hillary Rodham Clintons, your Michael Ignatieffs, your Tony Blairs, any number of others you could care to remember and bring up, they're all still around, all still giving us their hot-takes on why we should have intervened in Syria and how terrible it is that Russia is killing moderates and bombing hospitals and all the rest.

It almost gives the impression that just as some institutions are too big to fail, so too are some personalities.  No matter how many times they've been wrong, no matter how often they're wrong, no matter how badly wrong they have been, they stay in place.  Almost as though it's not the opinions that matter, but rather their other qualities that have always mattered.  Almost makes you think it's not worth bothering.  Almost.

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2/15/2016 08:16:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, February 11, 2016 

Syria: where our "best intentions" go to die.

If it wasn't for what's happening in Syria being horrific, you'd have to laugh.  Syria is where the West's best intentions, for which read best intentions in terms of what's best for our allies in the short-term, have come to die.  Gradually, slowly but surely, every claim of our politicians and often our media also have been shattered.

First, we were told that President Assad was doomed.  He would fall imminently.  Five years on, and he's still there.  Let's for argument's sake assume that prior to the Russian intervention last September that he was finally beginning to wobble.  This was not due to those within Syria who have supported the government from the outset withdrawing their consent, and whom we chose to pretend didn't exist.  It was down to attrition: territory gradually being taken by the rebels and Islamic State, supply routes being cut off, the displacement of millions, manpower shortages in the military, all of which you would expect after four years of brutal, often sectarian war.

Second, the claim that the rebels other than Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front are "moderates" of the kind we can work with, that some are even secular liberals who genuinely want democracy.  Regardless of the beginnings of the uprising, as the revolution became civil war it turned viciously sectarian in very short order, unsurprisingly considering the support and funding that was soon provided by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Emirate statelets, with Iran following in to help the regime.  Even now, when it could not be more apparent that the remains of the Free Syrian Army are allied with jihadist groups, whether they be the Saudi-backed Islamic Front or the Army of Conquest, the latter of which includes the al-Qaida aligned al-Nusra, we still hear of how terrible it is these moderates are being targeted without mercy by the Russians.

Third, that the Russian intervention was failing or would fail, that it was helping Islamic State, that it wasn't achieving anything.  Suddenly, as soon it became clear from the shrieks of said moderate rebels that Aleppo was in danger of being encircled, starved, according to today's Guardian editorial being "exterminated", subject to a siege equivalent to that of Sarajevo, we've been getting articles either grudgingly respectful of Putin while still slandering him, or ones that remarkably have some relationship to what's been going on quietly for months.

The most obvious example being this fine summary by Jonathan Marcus for the BBC.  He only really errs in saying many of the so-called moderate rebels are being "forced" into alliances with groups close to al-Qaida, when the truth is they've been fighting with them for months and in some cases years.  The Russian goals in Syria have been simple, and make sense, agree with them or not: ensure Assad doesn't fall in the short-term, then build his forces up in the medium-term in order to support them in regaining the territory the government needs to survive long-term.  In the process Putin has shown that Russia is still a military power to be reckoned with, displayed his new weaponry in the field to buyers around the world, and prevented a regional ally from potentially falling.  Whether once these goals are achieved Russia will turn its attention fully to Islamic State or not, who knows.  It doesn't matter so much as IS is relatively contained, if not in danger of losing as some of the more wishful thinkers imagine.

Meanwhile, just what has our policy been in Syria all these years?  Has it made even the slightest sense?  Has it looked like achieving our supposed goal, which is the end of the Assad regime and some sort of inclusive governmental system to replace his one-party rule?  As Marcus says, essentially our policy for some time has been to ally with al-Qaida against both Assad and Islamic State, while pretending that in fact we're helping moderates.  Has it worked?  The Ba'ath certainly looked in danger of falling last year, but what would have replaced it?  Something better, little different, or in fact worse?  If your answer is anything other than one of the latter two, try again.

So here we are.  Rather than say encourage genuine peace talks when it looked as though the rebels were in the ascendant, we preferred to allow them to make excuses about why they couldn't attend.  We preferred to go along with the foreign policy objectives of our regional allies, the Saudis and the Turks, helping to fund and arm the rebels through their auspices, while knowing full well who their backing always goes to.  We carried on doing this even as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled and came to Europe, as we still apparently believed that our side could win, whatever winning would look like.  Even now, we talk about "stains" on "records", as though anything we've done in Syria has been about protecting civilians at any point.  The more deranged talk about moral bankruptcy, and would it seem quite happily push the world to the brink of war to prove our "moral commitments" and "humanitarian objectives".  Sorry, boys.  You've been outfought, outplayed and outmanoeuvred.  Time to admit it and cut our losses.

Except, of course, we won't.

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2/11/2016 03:23:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, January 27, 2016 

A bunch of cunts, long to reign over us.

"A bunch of migrants".  According to Anna Soubry, David Cameron's choice of language was nothing more than a unintended, understandable descent into slang.  He clearly meant "a group".  There's one very good reason to believe it wasn't a unscripted sort of gaffe, which we'll come to, but there's also another.  How often exactly does anyone use "a bunch" as a collective noun, other than in a bunch of grapes or bananas, or at the opposite extreme, a bunch of cunts?  More widely used, at least 'round my way, would be "a load".  It smacks of the kind of line written with the intention of sounding like something that an ordinary person would say, except it doesn't, because the prime minister's advisory clique doesn't have the slightest clue what us proles talk like.

Not that it really matters.  The reasoning behind using the line is, sadly, completely sound, which is precisely why it was a scripted attack line.  "A bunch of migrants" is pretty neutral compared to a lot of the discourse around the refugee crisis.  One solution I heard in passing was that they should be forced back into their boats, pushed out to sea, and then sank.  Or shot.  Or sank and shot.  Either way, they were not meant to survive.  Of course, this isn't to be pretend there aren't plenty of bleeding hearts out there as well, or indeed that the man who offered his opinion truly meant it.  When however you have the Road Hauliers Association demanding that the French army be sent to Calais because 50 migrants living in utterly desperate conditions had the temerity to storm a ship, and when you consider that whatever spin the government puts on it, our response to the crisis has been derisory, the equivalent of a middle finger salute to the rest of Europe, regardless of the merits or otherwise of the policies pursued by other states, the level of rhetoric has always been way out of line with the numbers we've taken.

Realise also that if anyone is still getting the blame over immigration/migration, it's Labour.  It doesn't matter that the Conservatives failed utterly with their ridiculous tens of thousands target, nor that in further desperate attempts to keep the numbers down non-EU students are being arrested with the apparent intention of dissuading others from coming to the UK at all, when it comes to the focus groups, they still point the finger at the opposition.  In fact, as that whole Deborah Mattinson report makes clear, the Tories can blame Labour for anything and everything and a distinct group will nod their heads and go along with it.  A tax probe into Google started under Labour in 2009 but which wasn't finalised for 7 years and when it is amounts to the company paying a rate of 3%?  Labour's fault, because Blair, Brown and Darling now all work for banks.  At least we're trying, says Cameron, and can you imagine Chas and Dave over there getting more when they're craven to the trade unions, want to hand over the Falklands and say you're welcome, come on over, to a bunch of illegals?

Scripted as it was, it probably wasn't written with the intention of distracting attention from the Google tax difficulty, when the Italians, the Italians of all people have apparently persuaded them to hand over proportionately more.  Yes, every so often Cameron's mask slips, and yes, it is an utterly callous way to describe people literally living in filth, the vast majority of whom will have escaped war, oppression, or grinding poverty, but it's not one that's going to affect his ratings one iota.  No one who hasn't already reached the conclusion that this government are a bunch of heartless bastards at best and a bunch of utter cunts at worst is going to be swung by Cameron's use of words; no one who hasn't already been moved by the plight of the migrants across Europe, in the Middle East, is going to be now.

If anything, attitudes are only going to harden further as an apparently unending wave of refugees struggle to make their way to safety on the continent.  The only real solution, to bring an end to the wars in both Syria and Iraq, is either too difficult, thought impossible or not so much as on the agenda.  And indeed, how do you put an end to conflicts that are as much as anything about centuries' old sectarian and tribal enmities when it is in the interests of the two major regional powers for them to carry on?  How can we pose as honest brokers when we have funded one side by proxy, and when we are resolutely behind the state the UN accuses of breaching international humanitarian law in Yemen, just as we accuse the Russians of doing in Syria?

The only real way to get a hit in on the Tories is to draw all these various strands together.  We have a government that reaches derisory deals on tax with major corporations, and so in order to claw back whatever it can from elsewhere, it deducts money from victims of domestic violence and the seriously disabled for having "spare rooms".  We have a government that, personally responsible or not for the Iraq disaster, is bombing both it and Syria, and so is directly contributing to the immediate plight of civilians, even if the overall aim has the best of intentions.  This same government claims, hilariously and disgracefully, to be doing more than any other nation to help refugees, even while it refuses to do the bare minimum in alliance with the rest of the EU.  Whatever it does, the government favours the rich and the strong over the poor and the weak.  At the same time, it denies as much responsibility as it possibly can for its actions, and where possible, blames the victims.  The challenge for Labour is to make this argument about the government's heartless irresponsibility without further convincing the voters it needs to win back over that it's only for the "down and outs".

And there lies the reason we seem to have many long years of Tory rule ahead.

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Thursday, January 21, 2016 

The state's monopoly on violence and Litvinenko.

Killing Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector who, variously, worked for MI6, the Spanish security services, private security companies, oligarch asset-stripper in chief Boris Berezovsky, and accused the Russian state of being responsible for various false flag attacks on itself while in the employ of those foreign intelligence agencies, not to mention accusing Vladimir Putin of being a paedophile (PDF), was a "blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of international law and of civilised behaviour".

Killing Reyaad Khan, a jihadi halfwit who allegedly was plotting attacks on the UK despite seemingly no one being arrested in connection with those plots, was fully justified under international law (PDF), essentially because in the classic formulation of Jimbo and Ned, HE WAS COMING RIGHT FOR US.

International law is remarkably malleable.  A state making a decision on how and when to kill its enemies can nearly always be justified in some way.  The murder of Alexander Litvinenko was outrageous and despicable, but hardly unforeseeable given whom he was working for.  MI6, as usual, failed to foresee it, and as usual, continues to so much as confirm or deny if he was an agent.  The evidence it did provide to the inquiry, which itself only got going after Marina Litvinenko challenged the home secretary's decision not to grant one, seems to have led Sir Robert Owen to point the finger of blame directly at Putin.  Rather a shame they didn't reckon on the threat the Russian state considered him to be before he was slipped a polonium nightcap. 

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Tuesday, January 12, 2016 

A question.

Is it victim blaming, or making excuses for terrorists to argue that Istanbul has now fully "reaped the whirlwind" of its at best years of turning a blind eye to the activities of Islamic State within its borders, and at worst active connivance with the group for unbelievably short-sighted political reasons?  Who could have known that IS wouldn't be satisfied with killing merely the opponents of President Erodgan and the AKP, and would eventually turn its sights to tourists?

Considering even Kyle W. Orton, for it was he, suggested in a piece back in December that "Turkey has laid the foundations for what would be called, if it happened to Westerners, “blowback”", perhaps not.  Of course, you could also make the case that it is Turkey's very belated and still not wholly convincing crackdown on Islamic State inside the country that has prompted today's slaughter and the previous bombing on the 6th of January, and I could also be less of an arsehole about it when the bodies of the German and Peruvian nationals are not yet cold.

Forgive me though, as I've become more than a little sick of late having to read the bloviating opinions of people determined to assign positions to their opponents that they do not hold, at the same time as refusing to accept so much as the merest possibility that foreign policy could have something of a role in the threat we face from terrorists, even if it does not for an instant excuse them or make them less responsible for their actions.

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Monday, January 04, 2016 

Meet Kyle W. Orton, for he is the future.

How many 24-year-olds get to write a comment piece for the New York Times?  Answer: not many, not even around the dog days of Christmas time.  And how does a 24-year-old who aspires towards writing for the New York Times go about achieving that goal?  Answer: by saying the right things to the right people at the right time.

Meet Kyle W. Orton, for it is he.  Orton you might recall was one of two analysts getting big ups for telling us exactly whom those 70,000 moderates in Syria David Cameron mentioned were, despite err, the government itself saying it couldn't for reasons of national security.  Not many will make the leap from say, Left Foot Forward to the NYT, Orton's former main stomping ground away from his own blog.  At least, not unless you have the chutzpah to break out a really big lie, an untruth so humongous it dwarfs everything else you're ever likely to write.

Even better is if your lie overturns an established truth.  The vast majority of people think the Iraq war was a disaster.  They don't however agree on an over-arching reason as to why it was a disaster.  Some think it was a disaster because of the Iraqi loss of life.  Some think it was a disaster because there were no weapons of mass destruction found.  Some think it was a disaster because it has made subsequent interventions in the Middle East more difficult to sell to the public.  Some think it was a disaster because we invaded and *didn't* take the oil.  Some think it was a disaster because one of its unintended consequences was the creation of the predecessor groups to Islamic State.

What then if you make the case that, rather than the Iraq war in part being to blame for the desperate situation in the wider region, you instead turn history on its head and say no, we're not responsible, Iraq's leader was at the time and still is now?  Isn't that exactly what a whole class of politicos who always have great problems taking responsibility for their actions and those of their immediate predecessors want to hear?  Isn't that exactly the message a decent proportion of the public themselves want to hear, that rather than it being somewhat their fault, or their country's fault, it's in fact always been the dastardly workings of a leader long since dead, who was so evil that even in the grave his wicked scheming has come to fruition?

Yes, Orton's big lie is that Saddam Hussein put in place everything Islamic State needed to eventually gain power.  Hussein according to Orton created an Islamist state; his Faith Campaign led to a "Baathi-Salafism".  Sure, the occupation made mistakes, but the point remains: Islamic State was not created by removing the Ba'ath; Islamic State is the aftermath of the Ba'ath.

It's a lie so huge it temporarily blindsides you.  Forget the claims before the war that Saddam was in league with al-Qaida, that he had links to 9/11, and all the rest of it.  That was bullshit, but the truth, the real truth is he was using Salafism to maintain power.  It all makes sense.  It all makes perfect sense.  How did no one prior to Orton see this before?

Bit of a shame then that Salafism only bothers Orton when it comes to the Ba'ath's "Salafism", or the IS brand of Salafism.  Along with most of the other high profile Syria analysts and aligned commenters, Orton cried into his Christmas dinner over the killing of Zahran Alloush, leader of Jaysh al-Islam, most likely in an Russian airstrike.  This is the purest example of Russia's perfidy, went the wail.  Russia, allied with Assad, is killing the leaders of the groups needed to reach a deal with the Syrian government!  Couldn't it be clearer what they're up to?

That Alloush was a Salafist didn't matter.  That Alloush had repeatedly denounced the Shia, Alawites, had called for Damascus to be cleansed, repeatedly allied with the al-Nusra Front (indeed, was apparently killed at a meeting between various rebel groups, including al-Nusra), wanted an Islamic state, just not an Islamic State, was explainable as rhetorical exuberance or understandable in such an atmosphere of war.  After having met with American officials, Anne Barnard in the NYT explains, Alloush had "softened his tone".  Hassan Hassan (so good they named him twice) writes it would be a mistake "to equate [Alloush's group] with extremist organisations, especially since such statements by no means reflect the group’s intentions or actions."  Why, Alloush even reassured a Christian dissident of how the Alawites were victims of Assad.  The head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, went so far as say the killing of Alloush was part of the effort to reduce Syria to a false choice between Assad and IS.

Don't get confused.  Orton doesn't think Alloush was a moderate, or at least, "never said" that he was.  Get it in your head, there's huge differences between Jihadi-Salafism, Ba'athi-Salafism and just plain old Salafism.  Besides, Alloush was supremely anti-Islamic State, and that's the sort of thing that matters most.  His differences with IS were with mainly over turf rather than ideology, but that sort of thing is what we have to work with in Syria.  Don't allow it to be to a binary choice, as Roth said: it's not Assad, or IS.  It's far more complex.  It's Assad, IS, or rather Ba'athi-Salafist or just plain old Salafist.  Those Salafists may be moderates, they may not be moderates.  They're better than the alternatives, though, right?  How can you not trust a 24-year-old with the wherewithal to get in the NYT, to make discoveries the rest of us can only dream of?  Orton's going to go far, that's for sure.

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Thursday, December 17, 2015 

That all new, all improved Westminster Christmas tradition.

Don't you just love Christmas traditions?  Kisses under the mistletoe, roasting chestnuts in the microwave, the EastEnders Queen Vic fight, the Boxing Day ripping apart of defenceless animals by braying hoorays, the opening up of wrists by people with no one to share all these magic moments with?  To which we have a relatively new innovation to add: the annual mass dumping of ministerial statements and other government business on the very last day of parliament before the Christmas recess.  Think of it as the polar opposite of spending the last day of school before the holidays playing games or watching Cool Runnings.

The aim fairly transparently is to bury any unpleasantness contained therein, leaving already put upon hacks with an impossible choice as to what to feature and what to leave out.  Add in how newspaper sales always plummet in December, when concerns are traditionally far from the news, especially at this point in month, and the chances of getting away with putting out a release authorising the slaughter of the first born increases exponentially.  They couldn't have counted on our tame Russian asset stripper deciding to get rid of Maureen today, but it could have hardly worked out better with Cameron also off at his latest EU masochism summit.

Almost certainly best or rather, worst or the bunch is an official DWP study into the bedroom tax, or as only the government calls it, the spare room subsidy.  The study finds that it works, as long as by works you mean impoverishes those subject to it to the point where they either go hungry or take out loans, therefore robbing Peter to pay Paul, and has also failed in regard to incentivising those penalised to move to smaller properties.  Seeing as punishing moochers for daring to claim anything seemed to be pretty much the point from the outset, Iain Duncan Smith must be delighted.

Coming in a very close second must be publication of the list of ministerial special advisers in post as of today (PDF).  This reveals David Cameron has a quite astonishing 32 SpAds, 31 of whom dish out their advice (call leader of opposition terrorist sympathiser, start war with Russia, don't fuck that pig) on a full time basis.  As the government doesn't need to make clear how much any SpAd paid under £63,000 is earning, we can only be certain that of those whose salaries have been disclosed, the total cost to the taxpayer for telling Dave to do his flies up is a mere £2,164,000 a year.  George Osborne by contrast gets by with just the 6 SpAds, with James Chapman, Thea Rogers and Sue Beeby sharing £296,000 a year between the three of them.  They'll presumably get by on such a pittance, unlike say those who were due to be getting the letters right about now telling them how much they would be getting cut from their tax credits, a wheeze that his 6 advisers presumably also thought was a terrific plan.

Which brings us neatly onto the Lord Strathclyde "rapid" review into what to do about the Lords daring to vote down the statutory instrument needed to push through the cuts to tax credits.  That the Lords' refusal to countenance the slashing of the benefit that helps make work pay was subsequently accepted as unnecessary by the err, chancellor himself, albeit with the cuts instead worked into the universal credit system makes no odds.  Strathclyde's recommendation is that the Lords still be allowed to reject a statutory instrument, but only the once.  If the Commons then overturns that vote, its decision would be final.  Whether this would amount to the effective curtailment of the Lords' ability to block secondary legislation obviously depends on the government of the day's majority: probably not in the case of the Tories now, as theirs is so slight, with the Lords' veto likely to make MPs think again and increase the determination of the opposition.  If there was to be a return to the days of the majority of the coalition or the 2005 Labour government though, let alone the 1997/2001 varieties, it would clearly amount to a power grab by the Commons, something there is not the slightest evidence it needs.  As plenty of others have pointed out, this is a mess of Cameron's own making: he had the opportunity to reform the Lords, and he declined to go along with it.  The government also has a majority of only 12 for a reason: the electorate declined to endorse the Conservatives more fully.  They should act like it and listen accordingly, not attempt to govern as though they have a majority of 100.  A bit like telling a toddler it has to share, I realise.

Lastly, and most amusingly, there's the long-awaited, much delayed report into how the Muslim Brotherhood are a bunch of extremist bastards.  Or at least that's what the likes of the Saudis and the Emirate states demanded of the government in one of their periodical hissy fits after being called out for being extremist bastards themselves.  Not that we still have the report itself, as that's for Dave's eyes only, us proles only being provided with the main findings (PDF) .  Suffice it to say, the Muslim Brotherhood is amazingly, a religious organisation that has at times not always been down with democracy, and has also never fully renounced the teachings of either its founder, Hassan el Banna, or most (in)famous ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, he of inspiring various jihadists groups and helping to popularise takfirism, i.e. the practice of declaring anyone who doesn't share your exact same brand of Islamism to be an infidel notoriety.  It also, shock, has at times defended Hamas, unsurprisingly considering Hamas is its sister organisation.

The report doesn't tell anyone a single damn thing they didn't already know, and while Dave in his usual authoritarian style declares that membership or association with the Brotherhood should be considered as a Possible Indicator of Extremism, the ban our allies in the Middle East so wanted does not seem to be on the cards.  Bearing in mind Cameron has repeatedly stated his wish to ban Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and still hasn't managed it despite now being PM for coming up on 6 years, the chance of the MB being subject to such treatment was laughable in the first place.

As is the bulk of the report itself.  Leaving aside the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia's criticisms of the MB's brief period in power in Egypt, brought to an end in a military coup, with al-Sisi recently invited to Downing Street for tea and cakes despite his overall responsibility for massacres of MB supporters and other protesters, not a mention of Syria is made.  If the MB is such a vile organisation, why then are we working with its Syrian branch?  Why if the Muslim Brotherhood is so terrible are we in effect allying with al-Qaida, as the Saudis and Qataris have done?  If the MB is bad, then surely Ahrar al-Sham, the biggest opposition group/militia invited to the Saudi talks, with its determination to create an Islamic state in Syria, is doubly so?  At least the MB has attempted to present a veneer of respect for democracy; the Saudis, Qataris and Emirate nations have no intention of allowing their people to vote for them in anything other than sham elections.

Our government doesn't have quite as much contempt for us as that, it must be said.  Nor though are they going to chance us properly holding them to account either, as days like today demonstrate.

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12/17/2015 09:53:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, December 16, 2015 

Droning on about targeted assassination.

In all the excitement over the decision to bomb Islamic State in Syria, you'd be forgiven for it slipping your mind that we err, already had been.  Not only were British pilots embedded with the Americans without parliament needing to be informed, a British citizen no less was also judged to be such an immediate danger to us back here that he needed to be evaporated via drone.  Rather than let the Americans do it, as they did our good pal Mohammed Emwazi, on this occasion we did so ourselves.  Why?  The answer seems to remain along the lines of "because we could" and "fuck you, we'll bomb what we want".

For the decision behind the drone strike on Reyaad Khan (for it was he), Ruhul Amin, the other British jihadi killed in the strike, and an unknown Belgian, remains completely opaque, as evidenced by today's appearance by defence secretary Michael Fallon before the Joint Committee on Human Rights' inquiry into the apparent change in policy.  Integral to the government's case that it is entirely legal to kill whoever it feels like so long as they are judged to pose a significant enough threat is Article 51 of the UN Charter.  This talks of "armed attacks", and how nothing in the rest of the charter should impair the right of individual or collective self-defence if one occurs.

If you find it dubious that the authors of the UN Charter were thinking of armed attacks by jihadists using improvised explosive devices, or quite possibly even knives when they wrote it, rather than say the actions of another state's military, then you're probably not on the attorney general's Christmas card list.  Individual terrorist attacks, the memorandum submitted to the JCHR by the government goes on (PDF), may rise to the level of an "armed attack" if they are of sufficient gravity, as the 9/11 attacks clearly were.  In any case, the "scale and effect's of ISIL's campaign" as a whole are judged to reach the level of an armed attack against the UK.  Islamic State, you'll note, has not directly attacked the UK, even if it has threatened to do so.  Force can also be used where an "armed attack" is "imminent".  It's not clear if imminent is the same thing as "highly likely", as in a terrorist attack is highly likely, as judged by the current and all but perpetual overall threat level, but we can take a wild guess and hazard that yes, it is.  Fallon for his part told the committee "I don’t think it’s possible to have a hard and fast rule about how you define imminent".

In other words, the government considers it lawful to kill Islamic State cadres full stop.  This seemingly applies outside of Iraq and Syria also, or at least that was the impression Fallon gave, as he said there was no overall policy on targeted killing at all.  Considering David Cameron had already hinted at the potential for future drone strikes in Libya this isn't surprising, and yet it would all but confirm the wholesale adoption of the US policy on drone strikes, with Fallon refusing to address questions about any substantial difference.  This would be the same US policy that has come in for heavy criticism of late, including from no less a figure than the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  Quite why we would decide to emulate it at this point isn't clear.

If indeed we have, as it remains an open question of why Khan was targeted, as the memo certainly doesn't explain any further than the government did at the time.  Khan the memo argues could have launched an attack at any time, such was the danger he posed; it's extremely odd then that not a single one of the plots it is claimed he directed would it seemed have reached the point of being launched.  The memo interestingly notes that "some were foiled", presumably the ones newspapers splashed on, including the one the Sun itself claimed to have averted.  What then was the result of the others? Did they just fall apart?  Were they abandoned?  Did those recruited to carry them out get cold feet?  Or were these "plots" of the type like the one the Sun saved us from, of the inspiring and telling sympathisers how to make pressure cooker bombs variety?  As there still doesn't seem to have been a single person arrested for terrorism offences linked to Khan, it's worth asking the question.  The memo goes on to argue that there was no other way of stopping Khan as he had no intention of leaving Syria, and yet his plots seem to have petered out all by themselves.  Of course, there is no guarantee he would have continued to fail, but this rather undermines the claim he could have ordered an attack at any time.  Certainly, there has been no evidence presented to substantiate that, or that he had risen to that sort of position in IS.

It's almost as though the fact the newspapers were reporting on these apparent threats to events and people, however lacking in reality they were, was enough on its own for Khan to be put on the "kill list".  This might seem all but moot now that we're fully joined up members of the death to IS club, but how can it not be troubling when politicians take the decision to kill one of their own citizens on evidence they refuse to expand upon, beyond vague declarations of the righteousness of doing so?  Khan was not Emwazi; his guilt was not and is not obvious.  Fallon might have bristled about how the others killed along with Khan were not innocent civilians, which is true; did they deserve to die, however?  If the policy is expanded to countries like Libya as suggested, why should we have any confidence based on what we've been told about Khan that others won't be killed alongside the target?  At the very, very least there ought to be a genuinely independent investigation and review after the fact, as the JCHR suggested. 

The smart use of drones could be the least worst option when a real, genuine threat cannot be countered in any other way.  The government has not even begun to prove that is the policy it has decided on.

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12/16/2015 11:23:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 15, 2015 

The brilliant PR and distraction techniques of a terrorism sponsoring kleptocracy.

Unless you're one of those members of the general public we talked about yesterday, you won't have missed the wonderful news at the weekend of how a tiny number of Saudi Arabian women were able to vote (and stand for election) for the first time.  They were voting for local councils that have essentially no power whatsoever, the country remaining an absolute monarchy, or better described, a vast kleptocracy, Saudi Arabia literally meaning the entire country belongs to the Sauds, but such things nonetheless remain important.  At least as long as you regard such gestures as retaining meaning; the film Suffragette thought it was notable enough to include in its ending sequence of the year women first gained the vote, so who am I to argue?  It's the principle of the thing, and if say some women who wanted to take part weren't able to as their guardian refused to drive them to the polling station, as suffrage or not, women remain chattel, that can be worried about later.

If nothing else, the Saudis have great PR, and you can bet every foreign desk in the world was informed weeks ago of the approach of this great democratic advancement.  Turnout overall might have been derisory, most of those eligble might have taken part in the boycott, and it might have made Iran's managed democracy and presidential elections where hundreds of candidates are blocked from standing look the very model of free and fair, and yet the headline, that women were able to vote, will be all that matters to the Sauds.

The exact same thinking is behind the launch of a Saudi-led anti-terrorism military coalition of Sunni Muslim states.  Just as much play was made of how the Saudis, Emirate nations and Jordan were taking part in the bombing of Islamic State, sorties that lasted at most a few months before those jets flew off to take part in the other proxy war in the region in Yemen, it's not whether there's any realistic chance of the coalition doing anything whatsoever, it's that it exists.

Some might for instance think it a striking coincidence that last week also saw the Saudis play host to the first ever foreign meeting aimed at bringing the various opposition factions in Syria together, excluding Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front, of course.  Invited was Ahrar al-Sham and other groups in the same Saudi backed alliance that includes the al-Nusra Front, but can you imagine al-Qaida signing up to a declaration that Syria after Assad will be a rainbow nation of every colour and creed, democracy a necessity?  Granted, Ahrar al-Sham did withdraw and only returned when it was explained that their goal of an Islamic state could be achieved via a democracy that would then never be called on again,  but let's not splits hairs, eh?

Also purely coincidental is how this week sees talks between the Houthis and Yemen's nominal president Hadi, talks not being attended by Iran, the Saudis or the Emiratis, the key backers of the respective sides.  The Saudis and their allies have been reducing what was already the Arab world's poorest nation to rubble in a war backed by both the UN and our good selves, without so much as a smidgen of the outrage or opprobrium that has rained down on President Assad.  Like with the backing given to the allies of al-Qaida in Syria, one of the side effects of the conflict has been the advance of al-Qaida in Yemen, aka al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, aka until the rise of Islamic State the jihadist group most feared in the West, and the one linked to the two French nationals who carried out the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Cynics might be drawn to the conclusion there is some sort of connection between the Saudis making clear just how against terrorism they are while groups they either enable or actively support march on.  As Hayder al-Khoei has tweeted, this joke doesn't need a punchline.  It's too bad we're the joke.

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12/15/2015 11:24:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, December 10, 2015 

Can you imagine if they had stopped a war?

Here's a challenge to someone of a cultured literary bent: write an alternate history short story/novella based around the premise that rather than fail, the February 15th 2003 Stop the War march led to the resignation of Tony Blair.  Ian McEwan set his novel Saturday on the day of the march, after all; why not a "what if" considering the ramifications had the march succeeded?

The incredible thing is that in the minds of some, that march did succeed.  How else to explain the vitriol, the gnashing of teeth, the sheer fury the Stop the War Coalition continues to inspire among those who demand it be condemned whenever it rears its head?  How can an organisation that is otherwise such a laughing stock, ran by far leftists who have never won a thing in their lives be regarded as such a malign force?  How can an group that has not stopped a single war it has campaigned against inspire otherwise well-grounded individuals, who insist they respect those with anti-war opinions, to repeatedly come out with the most childish taunts and absurd criticisms?

Believe it or not, today's Independent regards the latest machinations surrounding the StWC and Jeremy Corbyn as being the top issue facing the country.  Labour MPs and the likes of James Bloodworth are demanding that Corbyn, whom is attending the StWC's Friday dinner to effectively hand over the chairmanship that he resigned from after becoming Labour leader, to not go.  Corbyn in response has said that "The anti-war movement has been a vital democratic campaign which organised the biggest demonstrations in British history and has repeatedly called it right over 14 years of disastrous wars in the wider Middle East."

Well yes, but what exactly do opponents of those wars have to show for it other than being able to signal their righteousness?  Almost nothing.  At best, they can point to how, finally, the debate on Syria last week was somewhat better informed than previous ones and did consider if we could be making the same mistakes again.

Otherwise, what is there?  As has been made clear, to be against war is one thing; to campaign against it, whether that involves lobbying your MP or protesting outside an MP's constituency office is to risk being tarred as a bully or far worse.  In this world, a vigil organised in part by a local vicar becomes a mob, with the Labour deputy leader going so far as to say that if Labour members were among the crowd they should be expelled from the party.  Words taken completely out of context from blog posts that were hosted on the Stop the War site before being swiftly deleted and disowned are repeated over and over.  Yes, it does sound awful on the surface that StWC apparently said "Paris reaped the whirlwind", or that "IS fighters are the equivalent of the International Brigades", only they didn't, and the author of the latter has apologised profusely for any misunderstanding.

It is nonetheless impossible to pretend that the StWC are the ideal organisation or vehicle for mainstream anti-war sentiment.  They are not, and have always been tied up with the familiar baggage Trotskyist groups carry, some of whom do still believe in being anti-imperialist only when it's Western countries invading and bombing other nations.  They are however the only one we have, and there is no reason to believe if there was a new anti-war group created that was entirely separate from the manoeuvrings of the rump far left it would be regarded any more kindly when its goals would be the same.

This is because the majority doing the finger jabbing now are the exact same people who were condemning their comrades on the left back in 2003.  The standard flavour of discourse both now and then can be gleaned from a Nick Cohen piece for the Telegraph back in January of that year, when he complained of how the anti-war movement ignored Iraqi democrats.  12 years later, and what's being used as one of the principal weapons to bash the StWC, including by Peter Tatchell, who ought to know better?  That they won't so much as let Syrians speak.  The precise details, that these Syrians are in fact a UK group specifically calling for a "limited" intervention in their country, not against Islamic State but against Assad, something that would entail a direct confrontation with the Russians, are naturally left out.

When that gets a bit stale, it's back to the what-abouttery the Eustonites claim to be so against.  Why aren't they protesting outside the Russian embassy?  Why? Why aren't they condemning this, or this, or that?  Why aren't they doing what an anti-war group of my fantasy would, which is admit it's wrong about everything and commit ritual suicide on the graves of the victims they both blame and ignore?  There is simply no satisfying them, however much they claim to be reasonable: Bloodworth in his article writes "even on those rare occasions where the government appears to be acting militarily for the greater good, there is usually some base motive buried under it all," as though he has opposed any of the wars when in his words the government wasn't acting for the greater good.  The StWC could protest outside the embassies of every government involved in the proxy war in Syria, and still it wouldn't gain them any grudging respect.  Nor would it have any impact whatsoever; what is the point of gathering outside the Russian embassy when our government, about the only one that could possibly be influenced by such protests has so little sway over them?

What it all eventually comes back to is the touching faith the pro-war left continues to have, for reasons unknown, in politicians and military commanders who often hold views diametrically opposed to theirs.  The Iraq war was never about those Iraqi democrats, whom the likes of Cohen dropped just as quickly as the Americans did.  Syria has never been about protecting civilians, not in 2013 and certainly not now, otherwise we would have been serious about trying to reach a settlement in the early years of the conflict.  Hillary Benn can talk about fighting fascists, when to George Osborne far more important is that "we've got our mojo back".  Reducing bombing to being about national prestige, slandering opponents as terrorist sympathisers, both seem a lot more disreputable, repugnant and abhorrent than going to a fundraiser for an organisation that whatever its faults, has always exercised its democratic rights legitimately and lawfully.  In the end, there's a choice we all have to make.

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12/10/2015 05:55:00 pm | | | links to this post

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