On tomorrow’s debate in the House of Commons

Wrestling with vote on Friday as I'm yet to see the motion. ISIS are clearly monsters but are air strikes the right approach to stop them?
— Sarah Champion MP (@SarahChampionMP) September 24, 2014

Tomorrow will see a debate in the British Parliament on whether the UK should join military action in Iraq against ISIS (Islamic State / ISIS / ISIL / DAESH) in response to a request from the Iraqi Government.

Yes, British parliamentarians should support military action in this case, but their focus should be firmly on the protection of civilians. This means not just acting to stop IS atrocities, but also demanding of Britain’s ally, the Iraqi Government, that Iraq’s military takes proper steps to protect civilians, and that sectarian militias currently fighting alongside Iraq’s army be replaced with non-sectarian professional military forces as quickly as possible.

Related reading:

• Iraq: on the frontline with the Shia fighters taking the war to Isis. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, The Guardian, 24 August 2014.
  
• Government Shelling Of Civilian Areas In Iraq Continues Despite Premier Abadi’s Pledge Not To. Joel Wing, Musings on Iraq, 18 September 2014.
  
• Can PM Abadi Appeal To Iraq’s Sunnis? Joel Wing, Musings on Iraq, 24 September 2014.
  

Syria is not the topic of tomorrow’s debate, but Syria is where IS has its main bases, and Iraq has also called for the international community to help defend them by striking IS in Syria. Just as Iraq is entitled to call on allies to defend it on its own territory, it is equally entitled under the UN Charter’s Article 51 to call for help to defend itself against the threat from Syrian territory, including by strikes within Syrian territory.

If the UK Parliament comes to debate action in Syria in the near future, the focus there should also be on protecting civilians. That would require tackling Assad’s terror as well as IS.

Cross-posted from NFZSyria.org.

In 2003 I resigned over Iraq, but in 1992 I called for intervention in Bosnia. This is a 1992 moment, not a 2003.
— John Denham (@JohnDenhamMP) September 24, 2014

@JohnDenhamMP @NFZSyria It's been a 1992 moment in #Syria for some time. Sadly our @UKLabour party has been slow in calling for action

— Bob Deed (@BobDeed) September 24, 2014

Cynicism

Cross-posted from NFZSyria.org.

Peter Ryley writes on the difference between scepticism and cynycism, and on No-Fly Zones. An extract:

Scepticism is wholly to be welcomed and is based on evidence, investigation and critical thinking. Cynicism is a posture. It is a generalised mocking stance, one that is inherently conservative. That might sound odd, cynicism often has a radical sound. Yet it answers the question, ‘what can we do’ with one word: ‘nothing’. It is a recipe for paralysis and posing.

Read the rest: Cynicism.

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.

Follow up re. Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah’s Friends in London

A number of items have been published in the last week that relate to the content of the previous post. The first part of that post dealt with a perception that the people of Syria are the immediate losers in US President Obama’s engagement with Iran.

Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah’s friends in London

Above: cartoon by protesters in Kafranbel, Syria. They see Obama trading away Syria under the table in order to get his Iran deal. Read more on Kafranbel’s history of protest in Rising Up and Rising Down, Amal Hanano’s October article for Foreign Policy.

A suspicion similar to the one expressed in the above cartoon appears in an article by Politico editor Susan B Glasser, The Price of Smart Power: Will Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran come at the cost of Syrian lives?

At Now Lebanon, Michael Weiss gives his version of this analysis, The Invisible Rider on the Deal: Syria has been ceded to Iran in exchange for a six-month pause on Tehran’s nuclear program.

The core of the analysis is this:

1. Obama’s aim is to keep the US out of any major war. This requires avoiding direct involvement in the war in Syria, and avoiding war with Iran.
   
   
2. The greatest risks that might lead the US into war are WMD proliferation in Syria or Iran, or an outright Al Qaeda victory in Syria.
   
   
3. The deal to contain and remove chemical weapons in Syria requires the survival of the Assad regime, and the deal to contain nuclear development in Iran requires the co-operation of the Iranian regime. Both of those factors weigh against a strategy of building up non-Al Qaeda rebel forces in Syria in order to counter Al Qaeda, instead they weigh in favour of allowing Iran to continue to support the Assad regime in order to contain Al Qaeda and force the rest of the Syrian opposition to negotiate a settlement.

In essence Obama’s strategy seems to seek a cold peace by allowing Iran to consolidate a Tehran Bloc from Lebanon to.. Afghanistan? The eastern limit is not yet clear. What is clear is that while Iran negotiates on its nuclear program, its proxy force Hezbollah, along with other forces armed and trained by Iran, has a relatively free hand to keep Assad in power in Syria.

Exercising the Colonel

Above, one of David Low’s Colonel Blimp cartoons from the lead up to the Second World War. You can see and read more of the Colonel in this blog’s most popular post by far, from a few years back.

I would love to look back at Low’s satires of muddled thinking and be able to say how out of date they seem, but that’s far from being the case. David Low’s Blimp character was primarily a satire on right-wing little Englander pro-appeasement attitudes, but Low also took aim at similar views on the Left via his Pmilb character: Blimp backwards. Today’s Pmilbs and Blimps continue to muddle ideas of radical left and reactionary right, of liberalism and of bigotry.

A couple of prime examples from the past pages of this blog are Simon Jenkins, a modern-day little Englander who has found a comfortable berth at the supposedly liberal Guardian, and Judith Butler, a leading academic in feminist and gender theory who contrived to describe Hamas and Hezbollah, two violent, sectarian, antisemitic and misogyninist organisations, as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

Several more examples have been on parade in recent days, with a series of supposedly Left commentators eager not to distance their own beliefs from those of religiously bigoted anti-democratic fanatical murderers, but rather to point to how close in agreement they are, and to claim justification of motive (though not of course of action) for bloody public murder on a London street.

Take Rachel Shabi’s comments on the Woolwich murder, beginning with this tweet:

Just told Sky news #Woolwich a collective problem, we should not single out Muslims; need to look into Brit foreign policy element
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

There is nothing that controversial here in my eyes. Radicalisation is a problem for the whole of society to deal with. To charge one group with responsibility for solving it in isolation would seem likely to be counterproductive. And UK foreign policy? What about it? That aspect could be taken in a number of directions.

But then she clarified that her preferred response to the murder was “eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device”.

.@nicholasblincoe it's not that madness can be cured. more about eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

So here Rachel Shabi sees UK foreign policy as bad and believes that as murderers of today and potential murderers of tomorrow agree with her, that policy should change. However when pressed by Rob Marchant on the question “Should foreign policy change as a result of these attacks,” she tries to split hairs:

@rob_marchant @tomsp @tomharrismp UK foreign policy in Mid East should change cos it is hypocritical, counterproductive NOT cos of attacks
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 25, 2013

Rachel Shabi insists that “understanding is not justifying,” but though she doesn’t justify the act she does justify the motive, making clear that she sees anger over UK foreign policy, the only motive to which she gives any consideration, as “justifiable anger,” and again “justified anger”.

Incredibly, having concluded that this anger over actions like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan leads to radicalisation and acts of terror, she then does her little bit to encourage such anger with a wholly one-sided representation of today’s news story on prisoners held by the British Army in Afghanistan:

This is how UK 'liberates' #Afghanistan: with unlawful detentions in secret prison ind.pn/112ek85
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 29, 2013

It’s an interesting story, though not so simple as Rachel Shabi would have you believe.

If I found that any of my views were shared by such cutthroats I think I might want to consider whether I was somehow in error, but Rachel Shabi is not alone in finding affirmation in such an alignment. There are more happy to declare their, at least partial, agreement with the murderers...

Ian Leslie points to the stupidity of ex-mayor Ken Livingstone blaming the attack on the invasion of Iraq.

Our friend in Canada, Terry Glavin, adds Michael Moore and Glenn Greenwald (in the Guardian) to his list of moral illiterates weighing in on Woolwich. He writes:

Do note that it isn’t some imam in some dingy mosque carrying on like that, although now and then there will be one of those, too. Note as well that the overwhelming majority of Afghans, and the overwhelming majority of Afghan-Canadians, supported NATO’s intervention, and most of these people are, as it happens, Muslims.

Note well that these idiocies about blowback and retaliation do not generally come from the mosques at all. It’s the sort of rubbish that comes from out of the mouths of moral illiterates.

It should stop.

Norman Geras finds Greenwald’s failure of logic replicated in a Guardian article by Terry Eagleton, and lays out the mechanism to display its faults.

Jonathan Freedland doesn’t forget the Stop The War Coalition, who naturally take their own alignment with the declared motives of murderers as absolute vindication.

Nick Cohen, like Terry Glavin above, takes the time to point out some people most likely not in agreement with the murderers, namely victims of Islamist violence, mostly Muslim, not just in Afghanistan but also Pakistan, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia. The list is far from exhaustive.

Bizarrely Rachel Shabi refers to Nick Cohen’s article as “a cluster bomb of muscular liberal lunacy.” Whatever about lunacy, I think her metaphor of an indiscriminate weapon of mass slaughter to describe the article is perhaps an example of what they refer to in the mental health business as projection. (A more complex analysis here by blogger Unrepentant Jacobin.)

Funnier still is that after Livingstone, Moore, Greenwald, Eagleton and the Stop The War Coalition have all had their say, Rachel Shabi writes 950 words on how debate is being stifled, closed, sealed shut even. And all of her words are published by the Guardian.

Horror and hand-wringing

(Updated at the end of the post.)

Arguments over intervention, whether in Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria, often seem over-familiar over time, with the same points being made irrespective of which conflict is being discussed.

One example is the type of argument that paints the foreign country as culturally inhospitable to democracy. Invoking Sweden as a contrast to the country in question is one way to highlight the abyss that separates us and them, as in “Why can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” Like Sweden? Ridiculous, obviously. Using Jeffersonian as an adjective is another way of depicting democracy as intrinsically Western. It’s not their culture! They’ve not been raised on Rousseau, Burke, and John Stuart Mill like us Western citizens.

As if Western voters all brush up on Jefferson or Mill before heading to the ballot box.

In recent years one fortifying tonic against such xenophobic justifications for despotism has been Normblog, the pioneering political blog of Norman Geras. For example this post from 2006 which offers a snippet of Amartya Sen citing the aforementioned Mill:

Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is "government by discussion," and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society). There can be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and of public reasoning have been very deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as Marquis de Condorcet, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be deeply misleading.
.....
Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance.

Here’s another Normblog post, this one from 2004. It excerpts portions of an interview with former Polish dissident Adam Michnik concerning Michnik’s support for the invasion of Iraq:

We [Michnick and other east European former dissidents] take this position because we know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. Even if a dictatorship is not an ideal typical one, and even if the democratic countries are ruled by people whom you do not like. I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfield is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.
.....
It's simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped. I've always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended. I would object to U.S. policy if it supported Saddam Hussein, and I have always criticized the United States for supporting military regimes in Latin America.
.....
I don't think it is utopian to want to install democratic rule in Iraq. If it won't be an ideal democracy, let it be a crippled democracy, but let it not be a totalitarian dictatorship.

That interview was published in Dissent magazine.

And this week we have Normblog recommending a post by former Dissent editor Michael Walzer. But instead of the old reliable tonic, we’re slipped a Mickey Finn. Geras quotes Walzer thus:

Many people have been criticizing President Obama for dithering over what to do in Syria. Not me; dithering seems an entirely rational response to what's going on there. The difficulty is that we don't really know what we want to happen - I mean we don't know which among the likely possibilities would be the least awful. Of course, readers of Dissent would be happy to see the victory of Syrians who have been studying John Stuart Mill or who take their cue from Swedish social democracy. But nothing like that lies anywhere on (or near) the horizon.

I despair.

Norman Geras couples this with a quote from Monday’s Human Rights Watch statement on Syria., focusing on the widely reported video of a Syrian Rebel commander apparently mutilating a corpse:

Human Rights Watch has reviewed graphic evidence that appears to show a commander of the Syrian opposition “Independent Omar al-Farouq” brigade mutilating the corpse of a pro-government fighter. The figure in the video cuts the heart and liver out of the body and uses sectarian language to insult Alawites. The same brigade was implicated in April 2013 in the cross-border indiscriminate shelling of the Lebanese Shi’a villages of al-Qasr and Hawsh al-Sayyed.

There’s no question that such corpse mutilation is a war crime. There’s no question that indiscriminate shelling of villages is a war crime. But if the question is, in Walzer’s words, “which among the likely possibilities would be the least awful,” then in trying to answer it we should look at the relative scale of atrocities by the various parties, and their relative susceptibility to pressure to stop.

This is not a nice task. It means for example comparing the mutilation of the dead soldier with a gruesome New York Times report of massacres by regime forces in Tartus province:

After dragging 46 bodies from the streets near his hometown on the Syrian coast, Omar lost count. For four days, he said, he could not eat, remembering the burned body of a baby just a few months old; a fetus ripped from a woman’s belly; a friend lying dead, his dog still standing guard.

It means for example comparing last month’s shelling of the Lebanese villages of al-Qasr and Hawsh al-Sayyed by the rebel Omar al-Farouq Brigade, killing two civilians and wounding three, with last month’s HRW report on Syrian government air and missile attacks on civilian areas of Aleppo:

During a recent seven-day mission to Aleppo, Human Rights Watch researchers documented five attacks that took place between March 18 and April 7, 2013:

• On April 7, an airstrike in the Ansari neighborhood of Aleppo killed at least 22 civilians, including 6 children.

• On April 3, a cluster bomb attack in the Sheik Sa’eed neighborhood of Aleppo killed 11 civilians, including 7 children.

• On March 29, a cluster bomb and ballistic missile attack in the town of Hreitan in northern Aleppo killed at least 8 civilians, including 2 children, and injured dozens more.

• On March 24, an airstrike in the town of Akhtarin in northern Aleppo killed 10 civilians, including at least 4 children.

• On March 18, an airstrike on Marjeh neighborhood in the city of Aleppo killed at least 33 civilians, including at least 17 children.

It means for example comparing rebel executions of prisoners, such as the three publicly executed in Raqqa this week apparently by Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamists, with Aleppo’s river of corpses, described in detail in this Guardian report by Martin Chulov.

It means asking which scenario holds the better chance of some measure of accountability, of a future Syria ruled by law: a victory by rebels, or by the regime?

Regarding the rebels, Time reports Brigadier General Salim Idris, head of the Syrian Military Council (SMC), which oversees, according to its leadership, about 90% of the rebel forces as saying “it is very clear that these kinds of behaviors, this cutting of bodies, is not allowed. If there is evidence that fighters from the FSA are doing something against human rights or international law, they will be brought before the court.”

As for the Assad regime, its chief backer in the UN Security Council, Russia, is blocking the possibility of referring both regime and rebel crimes to the International Criminal Court.

On one side is a fragile hope, more endangered with every day of war, on the other is no hope at all. Every day of dithering over Syria weakens that fragile hope further.

UPDATE: Norm has written a response, In defence of uncertainty (over Syria), and I thank him for it, especially given what a difficult time this is for him.

He clarifies that “there is not a balance of atrocity in this matter so far as I'm aware.” For Norm, the key point is “the crucial justifying condition that external intervention must have a reasonable chance of making a difference for the better.”

I explained my own views on what kind of intervention I believed was needed on just such a basis of likely consequences in March of last year. My view has not substantially changed since then, and I believe events since that time confirm the accuracy of much of my analysis.

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.

_

[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.

Checking my prejudices - 2

In the earlier post, I spent some time on a single paragraph of a recent Simon Jenkins column from The Guardian on the subject of Afghanistan. The column was titled Vanity, machismo and greed have blinded us to the folly of Afghanistan, and the first paragraph was as follows:

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country's drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world's greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.

I spent some effort looking at the issue of hunger in Afghanistan. You can read the full post here, but the short of it is that directly contrary to Simon Jenkins’s claim that “western occupation of Afghanistan” has led to starvation, wheat production (the central issue in Afghanistan’s food shortages) has never been as low since the 2001 defeat of the Taliban as it was before. This is despite drought, primitive agricultural practices, the absence of a viable milling industry, and the underfunding of the WFP. I hadn’t originally intended to spend so much effort on that one claim, but the subject is a serious one.

That earlier post also includes a passage from Terry Glavin’s excellent new book, Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, to demonstrate why Simon Jenkins’s phrase “western occupation of Afghanistan” is the exact opposite of truth.

Now I’d like to go through the rest of the column. A lot of it is just abuse, which is pointless to argue with, but as well as looking for clear falsehoods like the ‘western occupation causes hunger’ claim, I’d like to clarify the argument behind the abuse and lies.

Here’s another lie to make clear that my use of the word isn’t just rhetoric: he writes of “the decade-long punishment of Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden.” To believe that the US or NATO has been punishing Afghanistan is to disbelieve the opinion of the majority of Afghans. The graph below is taken from the December 2010 ABC/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll, Afghanistan: Where Things Stand (ABC story here and full PDF here) and it shows support for the presence of US forces amongst Afghans surveyed ranged between 78% and 62% in the years from 2006 to 2010.

The graph also shows satisfaction with US efforts dropping faster than support for their presence, suggesting that while the majority of Afghans want the US military presence, they also want them to do a better job. But for all the dissatisfaction, this is clearly not a nation that believes it is undergoing “punishment” by the US as Simon Jenkins claims.

Another Jenkins quote: “The demand that [Afghanistan] also abandons the habits of history and adopt democracy, capitalism and gender equality was imperial arrogance.” On capitalism, a 1999 article, The Life of a 102 year-old Afghan Entrepreneur: An Economic Perspective, by Mir Hekmatullah Sadat, gives an interesting view of 20th century developments in Afghan capitalism. On gender equality, the struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan didn’t begin with the fall of the Taliban; here’s a short chronology. As for democracy, in every democratic country, the struggle for democracy has been a struggle against the habits of history.

And this, his opposition to democracy’s struggle against the habits of history, can be the key to unwrapping Simon Jenkins’s argument, and showing how perverse it is that he has become a resident favourite in the pages of The Guardian, supposedly a paper of the liberal left.

Simon Jenkins is on the side of of tradition against change, Tory against Whig, Lords against Commons, feudalism against democracy.

His anti-war argument is not the same as that of the anti-West anti-imperialist kitsch left, though it sounds it at times. His stand against British imperialism is rooted in nationalist isolationism rather than second-campism. He claims that the West’s Afghanistan policy will likely benefit “those who lost the cold war, Russia and China”. Similarly in a more recent column, Why is Britain ramping up sanctions against Iran? he writes that it seems as if “every utterance from Washington and London at present is scripted to bolster the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on his insecure throne,” and laments that:

The attempt to set up pro-west regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan led the west to upset the balance of power established by the Iran-Iraq war and the Taliban-Pakistan regime in Kabul. Now the Iraq occupation has secured for Tehran unprecedented influence in Baghdad. Its influence also penetrates deep into western Afghanistan, and its support for resistance movements in the Gulf sheikhdoms is said to be growing by the year.

Be very clear about what he’s saying in the quote above. He laments the loss of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and of Pakistan’s domination of Afghanistan via the Taliban, because these regimes helped contain Iran, a greater enemy in his view. This is the brutal talk of a right wing ‘Realist’ rather than a second campist hoping for the overthrow of Western hegemony. I don’t like the latter any more than the former, but I do find it extraordinary that The Guardian gives regular space to the kind of reactionary views I remember seeing in The Sunday Telegraph in the 1990s.

I’ll have mercy and stop there. If I can suppress the nausea, I might do a third post on the bigotry of Mr Jenkins, but I’m not promising.

‘Troops Out - Stop the War in Iraq’

News coverage of yesterday’s bombings in Baghdad, some links via Iraqi Mojo.

Los Angeles Times: Baghdad bombings leave at least 60 dead, nearly 200 injured

A string of explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing at least 60 people and injuring nearly 200 just days after the last U.S. troops left the country, police and health officials said.

The attacks came in the midst of a political standoff between the country’s main Shiite and Sunni Muslim factions, heightening fears of a return to the sectarian bloodletting that devastated the country a few years ago.

Authorities said more than a dozen bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad in a seemingly coordinated assault during the morning rush hour. Most of the targeted neighborhoods were predominantly Shiite, but some Sunni areas were also hit.

In the deadliest attack, a suicide bomber detonated an ambulance packed with explosives in front of a government anti-corruption office in the Karada neighborhood, shattering windows and setting cars ablaze. A police officer at the scene said at least 16 people were killed and 45 injured.

Vaclav Havel, 1989 and 2003

From the BBC World Service archive, episode 2 of the 2009 series John Simpson Returns to 1989 focuses on Czechlosovakia’s Velvet Revolution, interviewing a number of participants, the first being Vaclav Havel.

John Simpson’s TV obituary of Havel includes a little joke. “In terms of intellect, he was way ahead of most other political leaders,” says Simpson, over a shot of Havel being presented with a medal by President GW Bush.

Unlike most (all?) of the obituaries of Christopher Hitchens this week, Simpson’s obituary of Havel doesn’t mention Iraq. Nor does the BBC News website’s written obituary mention Iraq, nor their news story on his death.

The Guardian’s editorial marking Vaclav Havel’s death doesn’t mention Iraq, nor does Julian Borger’s news story on Havel’s death for the same paper. Nor does a more personal memoir by Timothy Garton Ash.

The New York Times report by Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez does include this penultimate paragraph:

He never stopped preaching that the fight for political freedom needed to outlive the end of the Cold War. He praised the United States’ invasion of Iraq for deposing an evil dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps this is all appropriate. Vaclav Havel’s great contribution was his part in the Velvet Revolution, an event that continues to inspire attempts at non-violent revolution worldwide. His support for action against Saddam Hussein came at the end of his political career, and can be seen as a footnote.

It’s a striking footnote all the same. A man who was justly praised for his part in a non-violent revolution, went on to support the violent overthrow of a dictator by means of an invasion that was the most criticised, the most reviled, military action in recent decades. Why did he do this? Why support war? Why not wait and hope for a peaceful revolution in Iraq?

The implication must be that, despite the success of Czechlosovakia’s Velvet Revolution, he believed there were circumstances where non-violence was unlikely to succeed. The mixed outcomes of this year’s Arab revolutions would seem to support such a view.

Here, from a 2003 article by David Remnick for The New Yorker, is Vaclav Havel’s own explanation:

A year after Havel came to power, there was a crisis in Iraq, and now, as he was leaving office, he was involved in another. Earlier in the month, he had spent hours with his aides at his country villa, discussing the problem, and that day, in the Wall Street Journal, there was a letter signed by Havel, along with seven other European leaders, which essentially agreed with the Bush Administration's position. I asked him why.

“I think it’s not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in those countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven’t had the same sort of recent experience,” he said. “The Czech experience with Munich, with appeasement, with yielding to evil, with demanding more and more evidence that Hitler was truly evil—that may be one reason that we look at things differently than some others. But that doesn’t mean automatically that a green light is to be given to preventive strikes. I always believed that every case has to be judged individually. The Euro-American world cannot simply declare preëmptive war on all the regimes that it doesn’t like.”

Havel coughed and took a sip of wine. I asked him why he thought a policy of containment could not work in Iraq more or less indefinitely.

He put his glass down and said, “Civilization has changed. Today, any crazy, practically any crazy person can blow up half of New York. That was hardly possible fifteen or twenty years ago. That’s not the only reason. On the whole, the world has changed. There once was a bipolar world, a balance of two great powers, who made agreements on weapons reductions, so that they were capable of destroying the world seven times instead of ten. Now we live in a multi-polar world. . . . Of course, the question is: When is the best time for action? Should it have happened a long time ago? That is a political issue, a diplomatic issue, a sociological issue. But, generally, it’s a matter of the functioning of the world’s immune system, whether the world can deal with such a case of extreme evil before it is too late.”

The tragedy is that there was justice in John Simpson’s joke at the expense of Bush. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was led by people without the intellect of Havel, and particularly without the moral intelligence of Havel.

_

Here is the full text of the January 2003 letter on Iraq by eight European leaders including Vaclav Havel. Here is the response at the time by then French President Chirac. He was also in the news this week.

Twit Archive - December 2010

Tweets below the fold. Lots of Wikileaks blather. Plus links to TV in North Korea, the imprisonment of Iranian film maker Jafar Pahani, Dirk Deppey’s last Journalista post, Terry Glavin on the women of the Afghan National Security Forces, more detentions in Iran, Abu Muqawama on Joe Biden, Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers killed in Christmas Island wreck, how to survive a nuclear terror attack, Dave Barno, Andrew Exum, and Bob Woodward discussing Afghanistan beyond 2014, and Love and Death:

Where the blogging action is . . .

On Syria. on Libya, on the wide revolution that rose in Iran and continues across the Middle East and North Africa, my first stops are the tweeters gathered here, and also EA WorldView.

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Terry Glavin’s keyboard is taking a pounding these days. Here he is on Syria, on how “the regime of Bashar al-Assad is waging an all-out war on the Syrian people”.

And here on Libya, “long live the revolution”.

On solidarity and internationalism, and the ongoing confusions of the anti-imperialist Stopper Left. On Paul Berman, “magisterial”.

On Julian Assange, his victims in Zimbabwe, Belarus and Cuba, and his “enablers in the mainstream media.”

On truth and fiction, and on stone walls and brambles.

He has a book coming out. Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan. And you can read more about it on his blog, and via the twittergrams.

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Some more places worth a visit: Mick Hartley on the forgotten history of the Jews of Baghdad.

Harry’s Place has a number of posts on some of those having difficulty reconciling with reality in Libya, including nostalgic Communists, Americans both ‘anti-war’ and otherwise , and the governments of Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The undefeated: Potkin Azarmehr, Iraqi American Mojo, Norman Geras.

More excellent links are supplied by Bob from Brockley.

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.

War on TV

At The Afghanistan Conflict Monitor, a new survey: 60 Pct. of Britons Oppose UK Military Mission in Afghanistan.

In The Independent, Ian Burrell writes on a survey of TV coverage of Afghanistan:

The survey by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), in partnership with American analysts Media Tenor, examines the coverage of 37 international news programmes and names News at Ten – alongside Fox Special Report, CBS Evening News and ABC World News – as an outlet that devoted more than 50 per cent of its coverage of world news to stories about violence.

Steve Killelea, founder of the IEP, says such an approach is not helpful to the process of rebuilding countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. "When too much media attention is placed on violence, 'security' is seen as the only way for establishing peace; this runs contrary to current study and analysis of what creates peace." The report claimed that the channel Al-Jazeera English provided a more balanced picture of events in Afghanistan than either the BBC or CNN.

It found that Al-Jazeera reported three times more positive stories on that country than the BBC, and eight times more than the American network.

(Thanks to RB.)

I usually find BBC Radio 4 a less sensationalist source of reporting than TV news, but have a listen to this recent File on 4 report on training the Afghan police, and compare its focus on a small number of cases of Afghan security force members killing ISAF troops with the very large number of Afghan police and military who have died fighting the Taliban. There is a story here that is not getting through.

The video below gives another view of training the ANP, via the Helmand Blog.

ADDED: For a view of Afghanistan as more than the name of a war, Francis Sedgemore recommends visiting Canada House (Trafalgar Square, London) to see their current photography exhibitions of Kandahar through Afghan eyes, and Unsung Heroes of Afghanistan.

No cake today . . .

. . . instead a few links:

Spectacles and symmetries, book burners and asymmetries, tyre burners and fatalities, remembering the book bombers.

Added: An author remembers watching his books being burned, and more.
Added: A book is for reading.

Observe continuing categorisation of convolutions and convulsions on the left(s) at Bob’s place. Confused? Never fear, here’s a guide to the players.

“I believe the children are our future . . .”

More cake tomorrow.

Anti-war and anti-peace protesters in multiple missile launch

Missiles miss target. From The Guardian:

Skirmishes broke out between protesters and police at the first public signing for Tony Blair's memoirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Four men were arrested and charged with public order offences for their part in the protest this morning outside Eason's bookshop on O'Connell Street in Dublin, Ireland, which involved anti-war demonstrators and the Continuity IRA-aligned Republican Sinn Féin, who oppose the Northern Ireland peace process.

Protesters were outnumbered by paying customers, according to BBC News.

Mr Blair also appeared on Irish television during his visit, on The Late Late Show, more of a razzle dazzle affair than the earlier BBC interview, and with nicer looking chairs too.

Terry Glavin has reaction from Ulster Unionists: A Legitimate And Peaceful Request For Cheddar Cheese And Pineapple On A Stick.

Added Monday: Norm attempts a theory of Blair-hatred, and James Bloodworth shows it’s possible to write a list of Blair criticisms that doesn’t mention the war. On the Iraq war, General Dannatt reiterates his own criticism of Blair, a rather different one to that of the protesters.

Numbers

First, a poll from April by the Jerusalem Media & Communication Centre, a Palestinian NGO. On voting intentions should there be an election, it gave a figure of 16% support for Hamas in Gaza compared with 42.7% for Fatah. 40.9% of respondents in Gaza said the West Bank government was doing a better job than the Gaza government, compared with 26% saying the reverse.

And yet quite a number of people seem under the impression that Hamas is the more popular party with the Palestinian population, at least judging by commenters at the New Statesman. (Via Bob.)

Everyone knows that the Gaza flotilla killings were a massive defeat for Israel in the battle for public opinion, but how big a defeat? Michael J Totten links to a poll:

Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters believe pro-Palestinian activists on the Gaza-bound aid ships raided by Israeli forces are to blame for the deaths that resulted in the high-profile incident.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 19% of voters think the Israelis are to blame. Thirty-two percent (32%) more are not sure.

More here. It would be interesting to see polls from other countries.

Michael Totten also links to another poll story from a year ago:

A survey conducted by the Boston Review in its May/June issue shows that nearly 25% of American non-Jews blame “the Jews” a moderate amount or more for the financial crisis.

Original story here.

Mick Hartley brings news of further criticism of the survey published by The Lancet in 2006 claiming a death toll of 600,000 in the Iraq War. The survey has now been questioned by Professor Michael Spagat of the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London:

Professor Spagat's research analyses the high-profile Burnham et al (2006) survey that estimated 601,000 violent deaths in the Iraq war and says it is unreliable, invalid and unethical and resulted in an exaggeration of the death toll.

According to the study all credible evidence suggests that a large number of people have been killed in the Iraq war. However, injecting inflated and unsupportable numbers into this discussion undermines our understanding of the conflict and could incite further violence”, says Professor Spagat.

More here. Earlier posts on the Lancet survey here and here.

Finally, at Ghosts of Alexander, AfPak Conference: Opinion Polls Make You Dumb. (Oopsy.)

Relativity

Oliver Kamm keeps himself occupied reading the papers, finding a familiar problem of relativity on the subject of Iraq, and morbid finality on an argument over Kosovo.

Mick Hartley goes to a gallery, MOMA in NY, and encounters a variation on the relativity problem at a retrospective of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Martin relaxes listening to music on the radio.

And Lars Vilks stays alive. Here is his blog. Here is Google’s (unreliable) translation.

The above image comes from a Ladybird book, The Story of Newspapers. Copyright © Ladybird Books Ltd. 1969.