A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.
With these blanket labels flying around, it is difficult to know the extent to which any given author is perpetrating a deliberate slander, or to which they’re simply caught up in their own misguided rhetoric.
I’m not sure which is the case when guest-poster Ben makes the following declaration about why he turned from Stopper to idiot: Continue reading…
An empirical study examining every story about Iraq on ABC and CBS News between 1st Aug 02 and 19th Mar ‘03 - 908 stories in all - showed the networks were biased towards invasion. More: The Monkey Cage.
A group of 100 officials, Jewish activists and academics have launched a new lobby in Washington to challenge the way AIPAC represents their views. Will it signal a shift in Middle East policy?
The now infamous interview where Nick Clegg roughly talks about his sex life with Piers Morgan for GQ also has this exchange (via) on Iraq: Continue reading…
A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.
I very much welcome Gordon Brown’s commitment to an inquiry ” to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath” - even aside from the unusual experience of this very welcome political development coming in correspondence between myself and the Prime Minister. (Naturally, one also expects that other Cabinet ministers will take note.
In a response to Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society, Brown has accepted that the government will hold an inquiry on the Iraq war. The Indy has made it front page news. You can read the original letter and Brown’s response from here.
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inexorably hotting up again. In summer 2006 the flashpoint was northern Israel/southern Lebanon, now it is mid-Israel/Gaza. The dynamic of the current conflagration is similar to the previous one: Hamas/Hezbollah firing missiles at civilians in Sderot and Ashkelon/northern Israel; Israel responding with missiles and a ground invasion that causes many civilian deaths. In the current flare-up only a ground invasion of Gaza is lacking and that could well be about to happen.
This style of conflict reveals the sheer hopelessness of this kind of ‘asymmetric warfare’ in which the weaker party fights with crude weapons and has not a hope of total victory of the battlefield. Hamas’s crudely produced rockets cannot beat the Israeli military machine but can and do cause terror, injury and death to the people of Sderot and now Ashkelon. Israel’s mighty army can cause devastation for the people of Gaza on a greater scale than Hamas can manage, but it cannot prevent the rockets (it’s worth remembering that rockets were fired, albeit on a smaller scale, even when Israel was occupying Gaza). The hopelessness lies in the impossibility of victory for either side. Insofar as Hamas has a realistic political strategy, it is that decades of low-intensity warfare will perhaps weaken Israel’s desire to fight. Israel’s more realistic leaders admit that re-occupation of Gaza presents no ultimate solution. Continue reading…
Do you like reading fine words? Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007:
I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.
I know right-wingers have no consistent standards when it comes to free speech, but I’m yet to hear a good argument for why the cleric Al-Qaradawi, contemptible as his views are, should be denied a visa. After all, if we don’t want to listen to nastiness, we should stop the BNP too shouldn’t we?
A gang-rape victim who was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her was pardoned by the Saudi king after the case sparked rare criticism from the United States, the kingdom’s top ally.
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Justice Minister Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Sheik said the pardon reported Monday by Saudi media does not mean the king doubted the country’s judges, but that he was acting in the “interests of the people.”
What he means is that western media outrage, which led to the issue being raised with President Bush, forced the Saudi king to back down. For the victim this is undoubtedly good news and I would hope this incident would make the Saudi legislative think again next time when they convict rape victims. Though, I doubt it. Governments are understandably reluctant to tell other countries how they should treat their own citizens, lest it comes back to haunt them.
For lefties there are (possibly) added dimensions to such stories. Continue reading…
David Miliband is the Minister responsible for Government policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, including those in fear of their lives.
In a recent webchat on the Number 10 website, Mr Miliband was asked the following question by Justin McKeating: “I would like to ask the Foreign Secretary why the assistance being offered to locally employed staff in Iraq, who are being threatened with reprisals - including torture and death - from local militias, is being rationed according to length of service. Isn’t it perfectly possible for an Iraqi employee who has only been employed for five months to face the same dangers as a colleague who has been employed for twelve months or longer?”
To which he replied “The scheme is open to all existing staff whatever their length of service. For previous staff who no longer work for us, there is a 12 month criteria. I think this gets the balance right. The fortitude of civilian staff alongside military forces has been amazing on the part both of British staff and locally employed staff. The new scheme tries to recognise this.”
Scoop writes: “I have reached the stage where a mild urge to avoid discussing Middle
Eastern politics, with those I find otherwise intelligent and interesting, has arisen.”
What I find amazing is that the urge is only mild. I have few urges stronger than the desire not to discuss the middle east. I find it hard enough to work out what’s happening in British society, so how I can hope to understand middle eastern ones, especially as the media is vanishingly unlikely to enlighten me?
One reason for this is that that so much “discussion” seems to ignore the principles of methodologicalindividualism in favour of talk about groups. And this just runs into the pronoun problem; when you talk about “Israelis” do you mean all, most, some, a few, what?
And then there’s the sampling problem. The question to ask about any event - in sport, finance, politics, whatever - is: what sample is that drawn from? Where does it lie on the probability distribution? What’s the shape of the distribution? So, does a suicide bombing, say, represent average Palestinian opinion or minority opinion? If so, how small a minority?
I suspect most discussion about the middle east is as fatuous as discussion about God. It’s an expression of tribal sympathies, without bringing any new evidence to the question. And, as Richard says, such dogmatism is simply illegitimate in the public sphere. So, please enlighten me. Could someone point me to a discussion of middle eastern politics which makes sense, which accords with the basic principles of rational analysis I’m used to in economics? If such analysis exists, what proportion does it represent of all discussion?
(cross-posted with Stumbling and Mumbling)
The Guardian today leads with the story that a US National Intelligence Estimate, which pulls together the work of the 16 American intelligence agencies, concluded: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme.” Whoops. What are the neo-conservatives going to do now? The article goes on to say:
In a startling admission from an administration that regularly portrays Iran as the biggest threat to the Middle East and the world, the NIE said: “We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” That contradicts the assessment two years ago that baldly stated that Tehran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons”.
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Although a halt to the nuclear weapons programme is significant, the NIE is far from a clean bill of health for Iran. Tehran is pushing ahead with its uranium enrichment programme, which has only limited civilian use and could be quickly converted to nuclear military use. The NIE warned that Iran could secure a nuclear weapon by 2010. The US state department’s intelligence and research office, one of the agencies involved, said the more likely timescale would be 2013. All the agencies concede that Iran may not have enough enriched uranium until after 2015.
Which, in my view, indicates that while diplomatic pressure must remain on the country to avoid building nukes, there is no viable reason to go to war with the country to protect Israeli sovereignty anytime soon. In case that wasn’t already obvious.
The decision to publish the NIE is aimed at trying to recover the public credibility lost when the agencies wrongly claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the years leading up to 2003.
Israel and the Palestinians – or one faction of the Palestinians, at any rate – have agreed to talks with a view to a peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.
But yesterday’s announcement in Annapolis takes up no further forward than we have for at least 15 years. This is simply Oslo for slow learners.
The outline of a two-state solution to the root of all Middle East evil has long been easily sketchable on the back of a beer mat; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after. Simple, really.
Except a two-state solution necessarily will not work like that. All it amounts to is the establishment of an aid junkie Bantustan on Israel’s doorstep.
In particular, the Gaza Strip – currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway - will into a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides with no seaport or airport. No one will be able to enter or leave without passing through Israel. Israel will at will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.
This much should be elementary to anybody on the democratic left. Continue reading…
I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be - and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.
We’ll call the first man Employee One. He worked for the British for three years: “I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)”. His British friends knew him as Chris. The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this.
I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening. Here’s an email exchange we had the other day.
1) Are you still in Iraq?
“Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.” Continue reading…
A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.
