Never again, and again, and again

Reckless Diplomacy Disguised as Caution Cost Lives in Srebrenica. And It’s Happening Again, This Time in Syria

Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey former Bosnian foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations joined with Najib Ghadbian, Special Representative to US and UN, National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces to write this comparison of two avoidable man-made disasters.

“As Bosnia & Herzegovina’s first Ambassador to the UN and the Syrian opposition’s first Ambassador to the UN, we are struck by the painful parallels between our two conflicts, and how indecision and a lack of moral courage are once again leaving innocent civilians to pay the ultimate price.”

Sacirbey and Ghadbian argue that although a no-fly zone in Syria lacks the wide support given to the no-fly zone in Bosnia, it would be even more effective in saving lives, it would counter extremism, and it would make a political solution more possible. Read the rest.

From an interview with Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and former U.N. humanitarian chief, at Syria Deeply:

“We have Srebrenica happening every few months in Syria in terms of civilians killed and maimed.”

Read the rest: Jan Egeland: It’s Time to Change the Narrative for Syria’s Refugees.

James Bloodworth also writes of UK complicity with the Srebrenica massacre, and compares it with Syria.

For more detail on how British, French, and US government decisions helped pave the way for the Srebrenica massacre, see How Britain and the US decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate, by Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy.

As it was in Bosnia, so also in Syria it is within the power of the UK, France, and the US, acting singly or together, to stop much of the killing.

The single greatest culprit in the killing of civilians is the Syrian Air Force.


Chart from Violations Documentation Center in Syria report for May 2015. More details.

Last month, 81 NGOs called on the UN Security Council to enforce its own Resolution 2139 to end the barrel bombing. Realistically, this won’t happen by collective Security Council action. Russia has blocked any effective Security Council measure, including blocking a resolution to give the International Criminal Court jurisdiction in Syria. This week Russia even blocked a resolution recognising the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide.

On Syria, as on Kosovo, in the absence of Security Council unanimity, individual Security Council member states must act.

Assad’s barrel bombings kill mostly civilians, and mostly in areas not held by ISIS but held by the Syrian rebels who are fighting both Assad and ISIS.

Assad’s air attacks have actually been helping ISIS attack Syrian rebels.

As the greatest danger to civilians, Assad’s air attacks are the greatest driver of refugee flows. The number of refugees has more than doubled since the UK, France, and US, turned away from military intervention in 2013.

Aid for Syria is becoming the most expensive sticking plaster in history, costing billions and still woefully underfunded. The need will not end until the violence is stopped, and the violence is mostly Assad’s.

If you are in the UK, write to your MP here.

If you are in the US, write to Congress here.

Download and share Syria Solidarity UK’s document: Ongoing chemical weapons attacks and bombing of civilians by the Syrian Air Force: A call for action (PDF)

NFZ reading list

• Syria casualty reports
• What is a No-Fly Zone?
• International law
• Opinion and advocacy
• News reports

Cross posted from NFZSyria.org.
Read more below the fold.

Syria, the US, and NATO: Failure yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Even now, with the rate of killing in Syria worse than the worst years of the Iraq war, there are still some who argue that the West’s policy in Syria, though a failure, remains a better option than military intervention.

In his Foreign Policy column this week, Marc Lynch, who has consistently argued against US military intervention in Syria and in favour of diplomatic efforts, writes that “US military intervention would very likely have made things in Syria worse.” However the only way in which he seems to see such a scenario as worse is that the US would have incurred the direct costs of military action.

This is not a small thing, and is of course a reasonable concern for the US if not for Syrians, but the acknowledged failure of non-military efforts to date also has a cost or the US, and continued failure could lead to very great costs indeed, including military ones, for the US and for allies in the region, including NATO.

Arguments about numbers killed in war are choked with contradictions between a desire to do justice to individual deaths and the impersonal anonymity of statistics. Worse, in these grim versions of the trolley problem, we see again and again how the dead of other nations are counted for less than ones own. But even if we allow the inevitability of this dehumanising abstraction, this contextualisation of the thousands dead in terms of national interest and strategy, the killings still count.

Returning to my comparison between rates of killing seen in the Iraq war and the rate of killing in Syria, in strategic terms the killing rate is relevant as an indicator of the likely outcome. The strategic aim for the US in both Iraq and Syria must be a stable state that doesn’t pose a threat to US interests. By extension, the aim must be for a state that largely respects the rule of law and is capable of enforcing it within its own borders. The higher the killing rate, the poorer the prospects for such an outcome in the near future.

The worse the killing now, the more likely a Somalia-like future where US drones pursue Islamist terror groups sheltering in the rubble of a fractured Syrian nation that is unable to maintain rule of law within its own borders.

In an earlier column this month, Marc Lynch suggested the lessons of Iraq had been “long since internalized” by Americans, while praising Obama for keeping the US military out of Syria. It seems to me that while he’s understood some of Iraq’s lessons, he is ignoring others.

While all can see much of the extent of failure in Iraq, a greater failure was possible, and was avoided, in the post-invasion civil war. If the US hadn’t backed lesser evils when the most extreme forces were at their height in 2006-2007, Iraq would be in a much worse state today. Now in Syria, by failing to back the more moderate elements in the uprising, the US is helping the extreme ones to flourish. This is a lesson from Iraq that Marc Lynch misses out. [1]

Marc Lynch also seems blind to lessons on military intervention in the recent history of Bosnia. In March 2012, Radwan Ziadeh published an article titled Have We Learned Nothing From the Nineties? Syria is the Balkans All Over Again. Ten months later, it’s worth re-reading. At the time Marc Lynch responded with an ill-judged tweet, “People do realize that Bosnia war eventually ended through diplomatic negotiations with Milosevic, right?”

This flip factoid wholly ignored the part played by NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, the air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces carried out between 30 August and 20 September 1995 that belatedly brought an end to the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo and forced Serb leaders to negotiate. While the air campaign was successful in this, the negotiation ended in the Dayton Agreement which rewarded ethnic cleansing and failed to deter Milosevic from carrying out further crimes in Kosovo, leading to another NATO air campaign in 1999.

More usefully, in this blog post Marc Lynch points to some alternative views on Syria. They are A Syria Strategy for Obama by Andrew Tabler, Syria: Is It Too Late? by Frederic C Hof, and The Road Beyond Damascus by Michael Doran and Salman Shaikh.

The US and NATO’s Syria failures of yesterday and today can’t be allowed to excuse continuing failure tomorrow.

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[1] Added 20 Jan: In his February 2012 policy paper for the Center for a New American Security, Pressure Not War (PDF), Marc Lynch does mention the 2006 arming of the Sons of Iraq militias, but uses it more as a lesson in unintended consequences than as an illustration of reducing violence by militarily strengthening a political centre against extremes. It must be remembered though that in February 2012 the estimated number of killed in Syria was a tenth of what it is today, and many still saw change by primarily peaceful means as a viable option. The relevant passage:

... However, providing weapons is not a politically neutral act. Those with greater access to the networks that distribute Western guns and equipment will grow stronger, politically as well as militarily. The arming of the Sons of Iraq in 2006, for instance, dramatically shifted the political power of competing Sunni tribes and families in unexpected ways, and the effects continue to unfold today. Better armed fighters will rise in political power, while groups that advocate nonviolence or advance political strategies will be marginalized.

Sixty thousand dead in a strategic context

The latest UN count of Syrians killed in the ongoing war lists 59,648 dead from March 15th 2011 to November 30th 2012 according to a conservative survey, with the actual number expected to be greater. This puts the rate of killing in Syria higher than in the two worst years of the Iraq Body Count figures for the Iraq war, 29,026 for 2006 and 25,280 for 2007.

Update: IBC figures don’t include confirmed military casualties. From icasualties.org, Coalition military deaths in 2006 were 873, and in 2007 were 961, giving minimum totals of 29,899 killed in 2006 and 26,241 killed in 2007.

If one compares the figures as daily averages, these Iraq minimum counts showed a daily average of 82 people killed per day in 2006, and 72 people killed per day in 2007, while the UN report shows an average of 95 people killed a day in Syria over the entirety of the conflict. If one looked only at 2012 in Syria the average would be higher as the killing escalated significantly, particularly from April onwards.

US military figures given for insurgents killed in Iraq were 3,902 in 2006 and 6,747 in 2007, but these likely have some overlap with IBC figures for civilians. Taken at face value they add 11 killed on average per day in 2006 for a total of 93 per day, and 18 per day for 2007 for a total of 90 per day, still lower than the daily average for Syria.

Both the UN count for Syria and the Iraq Body Count numbers are minimum counts, which do not include the missing or the unreported. In another example, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prepared its 2010 estimate of the death toll in the 1992-95 Bosnian War, it arrived at a list of 89,186 unique death records, the minimum number, but the undercount was estimated at 15,546 resulting in the total number of casualties of 104,732. See report here (PDF). Even this added margin doesn’t include excess deaths: indirect casualties caused by the disruption and destruction of war. The number of deaths resulting from the war in Syria will already be much higher than 60,000.

Making the comparison between the rate of killing in Syria now with the rate of killing in Iraq in 2006-07 might give some sense of scale. It also raises the question of whether a US led military intervention in 2012 might have reduced the killing, or whether such an intervention in 2013 might effectively reduce the killing. The numbers of course can’t give an answer, but they can call into question any expressions of certainty that US intervention is doomed to make things worse.

With the rate of killing higher than that seen in Iraq, and the minimum count of people killed already two-thirds of the minimum count for the Bosnian War, with the war being fought across NATO’s southern border, why is there still no sign of decisive intervention by the US and allies?

The cold horror of this war from a strategic view is that the further it goes without US involvement, the greater are the losses inflicted on rival powers (Iran, Russia) at the lowest cost to the US, at least until it reaches a point where diminishing returns on the war’s effects on rivals are outweighed by rising dangers to US allies. Prior to that point, if the US intervenes it assumes associated risks, military economic and diplomatic, and lets rivals like Russia off the hook to cut their losses and blame the consequences on ‘imperialists’.

The strategic problem is that the point where rising dangers exceed diminishing returns, where intervention may become preferable for the US, could be hard to identify before it’s already passed. And the more damaged the physical, social, and psychological fabric of the country and its people, the harder it will be to build a stable and safe neighbour for NATO and the other US allies bordering Syria.

In the meantime hundreds of people will continue to be killed every week, and they will weigh lightly in the US and NATO’s strategic balance.

Added: a detailed article from FP magazine dated March 2012 on Patrick Ball, the statistician primarily responsible for the UN’s new Syria report.

Also, Jeff Weintraub considers the implications of comparing Syria and Iraq.

The arrest of Ratko Mladic

A lot has been written on the recent arrest and extradition of Ratko Mladic. Below are just a few links. I will add to the list later.

Sarah Franco  of Café Turco writes from Kozarac in Bosnia on the muted reaction of survivors, and of a commemoration at the concentration camp of Trnopolje.

She writes, “there isn’t even a memorial plaque in Trnopolje acknowledging that non-Serbs were imprisoned there, mistreated there, raped there, and then all of those who were not killed there were sent other camps, or to exile. In this place, where a school was turned into a concentration camp and then once again into a school, there is, however, a monument to the fallen soldiers of Trnopolje. Yes, a memorial to Mladic’s soldiers stands there, through which the children pass everyday on their way to school.”

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Marko Attila Hoare writes a substantial post on the wider picture of the Serbian military and political control of their campaign of genocide in Croatia and Bosnia, “The trial of Ratko Mladic will not mean that justice has been served.”

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Harry’s Place points to four articles by Francis Wheen from 1998-2000 on some of the positions held by those on the left and right in the UK during the conflict. The articles were on clivejames.com. Three of the articles can also be found here, here, and here.

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Journeyman writes “If the trial of Mladic is to achieve anything it could be to show that ethnic hatred is not something far away - either in history books or ‘developing’ countries,” and would like to see schoolchildren learn about the Balkan wars alongside the Holocaust, with Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde as recommended reading. An earlier mention of the book on this blog here.

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James Bloodworth of Obliged to Offend writes “Isn’t it time for an apology, Mr Chomsky?” on Noam Chomsky’s support and praise for two deniers of the genocidal Srebrenica massacre, Diana Johnstone and Edward Herman.

The Radio Bug

Sadly, the Speechification blog, main source for the last two radio posts, has gone off the air. You may still get some joy by searching Google’s cache of the site, at least for a limited time.

On the plus side though, BBC radio seems to be keeping ever more programmes available online for longer, for example The Age of the Genome, a four part Radio 4 series presented by Richard Dawkins from June is still available. Some Radio 4 programmes which are no longer available for streaming after a week, then turn up on the BBC World Service available indefinitely.

From across the Atlantic, here are three programmes looking back on the last seven years of war in Iraq, in order of my preference.

First, from This American Life on WBEZ, Iraq After Us, an outstanding hour of radio built primarily on interviews with Iraqis recorded in Iraq.

Second, on PRI’s The World, Reflections on Serving in Iraq, Former U.S. Army Captain Blake Hall interviewed by Jeb Sharp of How We Got Here.

Third, on WHYY’s Fresh Air, A Foreign Correspondent Reflects On Iraq War, Anthony Shadid of the New York Times interviewed by Terry Gross. The interview focuses on this story about the trials of a family trying to locate the body of a family member kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and dumped.

I had minor reservations on that last interview, to do with distracting comments by the interviewer, but I still recommend it.

Related, Roland Dodds writes, State Building in Iraq has Just Begun.

From those same three sources, let’s have some other topics.

Here’s a This American Life broadcast from 22nd of May 2009, Turncoat, on red-baiting amongst America’s Vietnamese population, on Brandon Darby’s trip from anti-cop anarchist activist to FBI informer, by way of encounters with one of FARC’s pals in Venezuela and a pro-Hamas bombing conspiracy in the US, and ending with reading a short story from Israel by Etgar Keret.

And another from PRI’s The World, Revisiting the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, lawyer Judith Armatta talks about her experience of monitoring the trial, and of her book Twilight of Impunity. Interviewer Jeb Sharp includes a report from the trial she recorded in 2003.

Three related blog recommendations: Café Turco, Greater Surbiton, and Americans for Bosnia.

One more from The World, in the science archive, Seeking the Roots of Kindness: The Life and Work of George Price, in which Oren Harman talks about his book, The Price of Altruism.

And a blog post related to that, at Stumbling and Mumbling, Gamu Nhengu and the context of justice, on altruism, asylum, and familiarity.

A bunch from WHYY’s Fresh Air: Mark Feldstein talks about Jack Anderson and Richard Nixon, ruthless journalist vs ruthless politician, David Bianculli talks about The Smothers Brothers (see earlier post), Eric Foner on the evolution of Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery, and Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration (see earlier).

Finally, not really radio, from Wolfgang’s Vault, a 1978 interview with David Bowie. You’ll need to register for this, but it’s free, it just means being put on their mailing list. More Bowie at Bob’s.

PICTURE CREDIT! The comic strip is The Radio Bug in ‘If 8:15 isn’t a good hour, what is?’ by Walt McDougall, reprinted in Jerry Robinson’s The Comics, an Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, soon to be reissues in a new edition. Copyright © Walt McDougall.

Radio in a bottle

I only recently came across the Speechification radio blog, via a post by illustrator Stephen Kroninger on the case of The Gorbals Vampire, a story of children, comics, and censorship, that began in a Glasgow graveyard in 1954, and led to the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, a law that is still in force. A BBC Radio 4 documentary on these bizarre events is preserved at Speechification.

UPDATE 19th October: Speechification has gone off the air, along with its archive. I’m leaving the dead links in place in case of some future change of heart. You might also find cached copies of the blog via Google useful.

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Debunking the Islamisation Myth is a substantial attempt by Edmund Standing to distinguish between rational concern about radical Islamist movements, and irrational fears of Britain or other European countries being somehow conquered by political Islam, either via immigration or via conversion. Edmund Standing’s writings are mainly about the extremists of Britain’s racist far right, but he has also written on the extremism of political Islamism, and the interactions between political Islamism and the kitsch element on the left.

In the past I’ve disagreed with Standing’s views on immigration. I don’t know if his thoughts on that have now changed, but this current effort is a good attempt to tackle the problem of the racist right using concern over the extremist Islamist right to gain support for their divisive politics. Some reactions to it here.

Edmund Standing is a frequent contributor to Harry’s Place, a blog which has itself often been criticised for failing to adequately distance itself from racism and religious bigotry in its ongoing effort to cover extremist Islamism in the UK, this criticism being mainly in relation to the commenters it attracts. More on that topic by Flesh is Grass, Marko Attila Hoare, and Poumista.

Speechification has two BBC documentaries that complement the above particularly well: from Archive on 4, Hate against Hope, on the struggle against racist extremists in London’s East End in the 1970s and ’80s, and Turkey in Europe, on migration and Islam in Austria and in the Balkans.

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After that, a break for some music. Speechification is not just talk, here’s a Radio 3 documentary on outsider composer Moondog. There’s hours more Moondog radio with Irwin Chusid on WFMU here and here, and Mr Chusid blogs Moondog here.

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More recently on the WFMU blog, The Comedy Writer That Helped Elect Richard M Nixon, on the superficially counter-culture TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, its head writer Paul Keyes, and the media team of TV and ad men he worked with on Nixon’s campaign. (Spotted by Paul.)

The post details a substantial bit of American political and media history, and reading it is not easy in the WFMU blog format of white text on black. I printed the whole thing out, and it was worth the effort.

The post also goes into the Nixon White House campaign against another TV comedy show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. If, like me, you were unfamiliar with them, may I recommend the following clips in order of ascending madness: Boil That Cabbage Down, a folk song from Israel, and My Old Man.

And to wash that down, one last item from Speechification, The Life and Crimes of Lenny Bruce, a BBC Radio 3 documentary from 1996.

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The illustration for this post is a detail from my cover art for The Chesterfield Arrangements, music by Raymond Scott performed by The Metropole Orchestra with The Beau Hunks.

Fritz Behrendt

Caption: You never know who's next to you in a German tram, but then you never know in The Netherlands either.

The Dutch Resistance Museum, Amsterdam, is currently showing work by the cartoonist Fritz Behrendt. The show runs until November 15th. There’s a short review at Globespotters. You can see photos of some of the Fritz Behrendt displays along with some of the museum’s permanent exhibition in this Flickr set.

Born in Berlin in 1925, Fritz Behrendt’s family moved to The Netherlands in 1937. From 1943 to the end of the war he attended the Amsterdam Arts and Crafts College.

During a lesson he watched as three British planes were shot down by the Germans. The RAF pilots were shot dead while hanging from their falling parachutes. “That was the moment when I told my art teacher that we could no longer keep on drawing flowers. That was the moment when I decided I would not become a painter or a photographer, but rather use my drawing skills in the fight against injustice.” He was imprisoned by the SS in 1945 for participating in the Dutch Resistance.

In 1947 he went to Yugoslavia as a commandant in the Gerrit Jan van der Veen youth brigade to work on the Samac to Sarajevo Youth Railway. In 1948 he studied at the Art Academy in Zagreb, and in the holidays worked as project leader and interpreter in the International Youth Brigade constructing the Zagreb to Belgrade motorway.

At the urging of Erich Honecker, leader of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, Behrendt went to East Berlin in 1949 and worked there in the FDJ Central Council as an expert on visual promotion, designing orders of merit and citations. Following the Tito-Stalin split, Honecker had Behrendt arrested as a supporter of Yugoslavia. He was imprisoned in solitary confinement for six months, one of the first prisoners of the newly formed Stasi secret police. He was released in 1950 following pressure from the Dutch government.

He went on to work for several major Dutch papers, as well as The New York Times, Time, Punch, Der Spiegel, and the New York Herald Tribune. He died on December 5th last year.

This Vrij Nederland article (in Dutch) includes a choice sample of his postwar cartoons, anti-Stalinist, pro-Israel, UN-critical, including the above drawing on the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the one below of hip Western leftists making an embarrassing discovery.

Details taken from this Dutch biography and this Germanish-English one.

Drawings copyright © the estate of Fritz Behrendt.

You might also be interested in my earlier post on Danish cartoonists during the occupation.

Hangover Monday

(With added links throughout the day.)

European elections: miserable results in the UK, and comparison figures from last time.

Comment from Oliver Kamm: The price of failure. From Marko Attila Hoare: We must defend our Britain and our immigrants from the fascist menace. ModernityBlog: Fascists, ferrets, and how to stop the far right. Bob from Brockley: Post-election depression. Fat man on a Keyboard: Doomed I tell ye.

Your Friend in the North tells how he cast his vote.

Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland are using the Single Transferable Vote system rather than a list system like Denmark or most of the UK, so counting is still going on. I miss the Irish system, it’s the most fun you can have with a ballot paper.

Danish results, gains for Socialists and far right Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) at the expense of Social Democrats and Radikale Venstre (Social Liberal).  Here’s Politiken’s short english language report.

Lebanese elections: positive news, and comment from Abu Muqawama.

Iranian elections: further to the post below, here’s Norm: Stirrings in Iran.

Not elections: Martin marks the bicentennial of Thomas Paine’s death. See also a substantial item on the BBC News site.

More not elections: Americans for Bosnia continues a series of posts on “Washington’s War” by Michael Rose: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

The author of the book in question is General Sir Michael Rose, commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia from January 1994 to January 1995. Below is a depiction of him from Joe Sacco’s outstanding piece of journalism in comics form, Safe Area Goražde.

Click to enlarge.

Copyright © 2000 Joe Sacco.

Eastern Approaches

Above, Walden Books on Harmood Street, Camden, London, yesterday afternoon. This was a quick acrylic sketch, reworked a bit after I got home.

Below, a book I picked up there a couple of months ago, Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. I’d never heard of him before reading this.

The book describes his time as a British diplomat in the USSR in 1937 and ’38, when he was in his mid-20s, and goes on to tell of his experiences with the SAS in the Second World War in North Africa, Persia and Yugoslavia.

While in the Soviet Union he spent his periods of leave on unofficial travel to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and on to Afghanistan by rail, road and foot, often with an escort of disgruntled NKVD men under orders to keep up with him. This section of the book also includes his vivid eyewitness description of one of Stalin’s show trials.

The middle part is made up of desert adventures behind enemy lines in North Africa, having escaped the diplomatic service by unusual means. He had previously tried to resign in order to join up, but was refused permission to leave. Reading the Foreign Office Regulations, he spied a way out: entering politics would disqualify him from the diplomatic service. He announced his intentions to the FO, resigned, joined up, ran for parliament, and then spent the rest of the war fighting overseas.

The final part of the book is about the last years of the Second World War in Yugoslavia, where he was Churchill’s ambassador to Tito’s Partisans. He gives some gruesome details of the extreme brutality of the war there, and of the divisions which were to re-emerge in the more recent Balkan wars. There is also explanation of the reasons for supporting Tito and the Communists over the Četnics, and of his own part in the decision.

I see Marko has written a much fuller account of this period, though as a casual reader I wonder how much more detail I’d have the stomach for.

Added - a curious consequence of Tito’s postwar break with Stalin here, via Oscar.

Don’t cry for . . .

 . . . Harold Pinter, writes Marko Attila Hoare. Also Harry’s Place, and Oliver Kamm, twice.

Playing Genocide

At Café Turco: History as written by other people, on Srebrenica and a gross misrepresentation of history in the drama film Resolution 819.

Related, in the New York Times: Never Forget. You’re Reminded, A.O. Scott on film dramatisations of the Holocaust.

Also on dramatising horrors of recent history, two earlier posts on this blog: Narcissus at the movies, on Hiroshima mon amour, and Narcissus at the movies 2, on The Lives of Others.

On Powell’s endorsement

Oliver Kamm writes:

For me, two issues of great moment from the 1990s destroyed Powell's claim to be taken seriously as a public figure. First, Powell counselled against military action to expel Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, after the tyrant had annexed (not merely invaded and occupied) that sovereign state in 1990. Powell didn't see an exit strategy, so he urged that US forces stay at home. If he'd been listened to, Kuwait would have remained the subjugated and plundered 19th province of Iraq.

Secondly, despite having been disastrously wrong on Iraq, Powell was listened to respectfully by the Bush administration when Slobodan Milosevic launched his war of aggression against Bosnia. He even opposed any US role in providing humanitarian aid or enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia. He was essentially ignorant of the conflict and of the region, and his advice had disastrous consequences.

More. Oliver Kamm has also endorsed Obama, but with caveats.

Brutal banter

In the comments to the coconut nutritionist post on Harry’s Place, Ben Goldacre of Bad Science writes:

incidentally i love the lefty-bomb-them gang, which i assume harry is in, especially kamm and pootergeek, although it’s true i do disagree with them.

to which another commenter responds:

Are you in the “leave Radovans slivovic fuelled gunners alone in those hills around Sarajevo” gang, ben?

That would be this gang.

Back to Ben Goldacre, this Bad Science post is positively brutal. You are what you eat, so don’t swallow that newspaper whole.

On Karadzic’s arrest

From Martin Bright, political editor of the New Statesman:

Karadzic and Srebrenica

I have always believed that all British school children should be taught about the unique horror of the Srebrenica massacre in the same way that they are all taught about Auschwitz. The failure of the international community to come to the aid of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men massacred in the safe haven of Srebrenica in July 1995. The massacre had a huge influence on Tony Blair's policy of humanitarian intervention, which he relied on as justification for intervention in Kosovo and, to some extent Afghanistan and Iraq. [more]

From the Americans for Bosnia blog:

Russian Foreign Ministry Needs Better Maps

Today, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that the Karadzic arrest is an internal Serbian matter. Considering that ALL of the indictments against Karadzic concern events in Bosnia, which--despite the best efforts of Greater Serb nationalists--is not part of Serbia, this is a very strange position to take. [more]

And Marko Attila Hoare looks at the implications of the history of Karadzic for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al Bashir, very recently indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court:

Bashir indicted and Karadzic arrested - what are the lessons?

The Bashir indictment is to be celebrated, because whether or not it results in the tyrant ever facing justice, it represents a nail in his political coffin; a push sending him further along the road already trodden by Milosevic and Karadzic.

His international isolation will increase; what is left of his legitimacy will decrease; it will be more difficult for other states to collaborate with him; and if he survives his eventual overthrow, the successor regime will have to collaborate with the ICC in bringing him to trial, which will be a catalyst to its own democratic reform - just as enforced collaboration with the ICTY catalysed democratic reform in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. [more]

UPDATE 23 JULY - From Oliver Kamm:

About Karadzic

We know, from records of telephone conversations between Milosevic and Karadzic in July 1991, that Belgrade was making clandestine shipments of arms directly to the Bosnian Serbs.

This was in preparation for the adoption by the UN Security Council, at the request of Yugoslavia, on 25 September 1991 of Resolution 713 imposing an arms embargo. The resolution thus left the newly independent states helpless against Serb aggression. [more]

UPDATE 2 - after reading a bizarre claim in the LRB, Bob from Brockley gives a reality check:

An extraordinary claim

What was the position of Western politicians? Some Western politicians, like Bob Dole, called for action. The majority of the Bush I clique American politicians, epitomised by James Baker, Lawrence Eagleberger, Dick Cheney, Brent Snowcroft and Colin Powell, opted for a "realist" response: doing nothing, shifting responsibility to Europe. Samantha Power has dubbed the Bush policy as a policy of disapproval: disapprove, but do nothing. In Baker's memorable words, America "did not have a dog in this fight".

Clinton, who won the Democratic Party nomination for president during the period of ethnic cleansing, called for action. It was only after his election at the end of '92 that intervention became politically possible. But despite some American politicians (notably Dole, Frank McCloskey, Al Gore and Joe Biden, as well as Madeline Albright), calling for action to finally be taken, the majority of Republicans and Democrats denounced them as war-mongers.

Thirteen months into the war, well over a hundred thousand Bosnians massacred, Clinton finally sent Carter-era hack Warren Christopher to Europe to persuade the Europeans not to actually act but to lift the arms embargo so the victims of cleansing could defend themselves. He came back having changed his mind, and the Bush I policy of disapproval and inactivity continued for months, a continuity signalled by Colin Powell remaining in post. Warren Christopher even claimed the Muslims were themselves responsible for their own genocide. The official line was: this is a tragic civil war, there's nothing we can do.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, the David Owen led European diplomatic initiative was signally ineffective. The UN came up with a tepid "safe areas" plan over a year into the slaughter (de facto accepting genocide outside the safe areas), but failed to send anywhere enough troops to defend them. France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark were the only European countries to actively support this. Mitterand, under pressure from both left and right-wing politicians to act more decisively, accepted a minimal UN presence. Only when Chirac took over in 1995 did France take a more robust position. Italy opposed intervention from the start. Greece not only opposed intervention but supported Milosovic. Helmut Kohl, to the intense irritation of Major and Mitterand, took a stronger line - but Germany's official military neutrality stopped it from actually committing troops.

What was Britain's position? Under John Major and Douglas Hurd, Britain took an even more anti-interventionist "realist" position than Bush I. [more]

 

This is not a rolling news service

David Thompson reads The Guardian so that I don't have to.

I used to read it, in the days when they were a bit clearer on the need to stop murderous dictators. In those times however, the story was of the West's failure, a tale that fitted very well with the paper's world view.

I still read The New Yorker, but not every issue. This story I'm glad I saw, Lawrence Wright on dissent within the radical Islamist movement. He's written a lot of other good pieces for the magazine in recent years. An interesting one in connection with the most recent article is a short item from 2006 on the relationship between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the main Al Qaeda leadership. Longer articles by Lawrence Wright that stand out in my memory are a profile of Al Qaeda second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri from 2002, and an article about how Islamic terrorists use the Internet from 2004. 

The debate within Islamism on the use of violence, described in his most recent piece, takes place in part via the internet as well as in books, pamphlets and newspapers. Another old New Yorker article underlines the centrality of media networks for Al Qaeda, a 2006 article by George Packer on David Kilcullen. The centrality of media networks to Islamist terrorism suggest that dissent within the movement may be highly significant, in that it can spread via the same means.

Also written by George Packer in 2006 was The Lesson of Tal Afar, about a successful US counterinsurgency operation in one town in Iraq in 2005. That operation served as one of the models for the surge of 2007, and the officer in charge of it, Colonel HR McMaster, is interviewed in a clip available here. Highly recommended viewing.

Segregation

Did you listen to BBC Radio 4's Start the Week on Monday?

One of the guests was Samantha Power, talking about her new book on Sergio Vieira de Mello, an extract from which appeared in The New Yorker.

Towards the end of the programme, another guest, Ronan Bennett, asked her in her capacity as an adviser to Barack Obama whether as president Obama would pull out of Iraq. Part of her answer surprised me - here it is in full:

"Yes, I think one of the things that he's done though, that sets him apart from his colleagues in the Democratic Party and on the left, is actually developed a plan for responsible withdrawal, which to you might sound like an excuse for staying but is in fact a planning process that would actually put Iraqis central to our thinking about how we get out, so it would involve fair notice, and moving potentially people from mixed neighbourhoods to homogenous neighbourhoods, tragic that it's the equivalent of facilitating ethnic cleansing, which is terrible but if that is the choice of people there, massive refugee assistance initiatives so that neighbouring countries actually open their borders again because they've been sealed for a long time, so the short answer is his best guess right now, from talking to military people, is that you could get all combat brigades out within eighteen months, but you also have to embed in it some consideration of what is happening to Iraqis as you go. But his objective would be both to be able to focus on Afghanistan and in quotes deal with al Qaeda, and I think we have to learn to live with insecurity in the way that people in this country have lived with it, but also in order to restore American standing longterm."

- Apologies for that unwieldy paragraph, but I didn't want to seem to be taking anything out of context.

The bit that surprised me was "...moving potentially people from mixed neighbourhoods to homogenous neighbourhoods, tragic that it's the equivalent of facilitating ethnic cleansing, which is terrible but if that is the choice of people there..."

Samantha Power is obviously more knowledgeable about ethnic cleansing than I am, as she's best known for her book on genocide, so I find it strange that she's advocating entrenching the results of terror in a way that is likely to increase sectarianism rather than overcome it. And I find it bizarre to talk about this as a choice by Iraqis, as the population shifts have been as a result of terror carried out by the minority of violent thugs on each side of the divide.

I also find it strange to suggest that Barack Obama would wish to enable segregation rather than combat it, albeit segregation in Iraq rather than the US. Is that really his thinking?

This post appeared first as a comment on Harry's Place. The drawing above is an old one from 1993, published in the Times Higher Education Supplement, illustrating a different war.

I have a follow up post on this topic here.