Category: Politics

One of the things about travelling is that you often wind up reading newspapers that you don’t normally encounter. Thus it was that when I came down to breakfast at my hotel in Louisville, Colorado, the only newspaper available was MacPaper USA Today. I flipped to the op-ed page, and came across a spectacularly stupid piece by Peter Schweizer entitled Strategies or diversions? His thesis was that Bush’s strategy of invading Iraq rather than concentrating on al-Qaeda should be compared to Roosevelt’s decision to prioritize the defeat of Germany over that of Japan.

“With a logic that Bush would find familiar, FDR was lambasted by his critics for his WWII military strategy of defeating Germany first before focusing on Japan. They considered Germany a diversion. Wasn’t it Japan and not Germany that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor, asked Sens. Arthur Vandenberg and A.B. Chandler? One foreign minister called the idea ‘suicidal heresy’.”

The amazing thing is that he extends this argument over twelve paragraphs without once mentioning the fact that Hitler’s Germany was already engaged in bloody conflict all across Europe, and that as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. Let’s see….

• FDR: faced with two foes, both of which have declared war, both of which are killing Americans and allies: chooses a balanced, albeit controversial, strategy to defeat both.
• GWB: faced with an amorphous non-state opponent that has attacked the US, makes an incomplete stab at one related group (the Taleban in Afghanistan), and then invades another country (Iraq) that posed no threat to the US and had not been involved in the attack

Yup, that sounds comparable to me [sarcasm alert]. This Schweizer guy makes it sound as if Germany was peacefully minding its own business, leaving all of its neighbors alone, and when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suddenly took it into his head to put Tojo on the back-burner and lash out at Germany. What utter bollocks! Does the Hoover Institution really pay this idiot to write?

The Guardian, BBC and others are reporting that: “former Cabinet minister Robin Cook, 59, has died after collapsing while hill walking in north-west Scotland.” Apparently he was fell-walking with his wife Gaynor near the summit of Ben Stack, and he had a heart attack which led to a severe fall; it took some time for rescue services to reach him.

Robin Cook was the most senior politician in Britain or the US to take a principled stand against the invasion of Iraq. I blogged about his book, Point of Departure, last year. It’s still essential reading. What a great loss to British politics.

(I note that Jack Straw, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and others have issued statements expressing sympathy and appreciation for Cook’s contributions. But there’s nothing from Tony Blair yet.)

Paul Routledge has an excellent opinion piece in today’s Daily Mirror. (Things have come to a pretty pass when the Daily Mirror is a more reliable source than the New York Times.) The question: why is Tony Blair so consistent in shooting himself in the foot?

Just when it had become possible to be optimistic after the terrible events of 7/7, the Prime Minister… picked a needless argument, not just with his own security services, but with the British people – claiming that the London bombings have nothing to do with Iraq. This attitude is so manifestly absurd that it was immediately repudiated by two thirds of voters in an opinion poll. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre also gave the lie, reporting: ‘Events in Iraq are continuing to act as a motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.’ These are Blair’s own spooks, whose findings presumably go across his desk in Number Ten….

Nobody, certainly not me, says that the war in Iraq is the sole, direct and immediate cause of 7/7. It wasn’t. Nor is it any form of justification. But it is pointless to pretend that this conflict has not helped to create a climate in which it is easier for hard-line Muslim clerics to corrupt young minds and for terrorist godfathers to recruit suicide bombers.

So why does Blair do this, squandering good-will and stirring up trouble for himself? Routledge argues that the cause is his “naive, all-consuming self-belief”, and cites the damning verdict of Lord Roy Hattersley, the former deputy Labour leader

‘The ultimate justification for the war in Iraq – when it was no longer possible to pretend that weapons of mass destruction were only 45 minutes away – was that Blair’s conscience allowed no other course of action.”

(Driving in to work this morning, I heard John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister repeating Blair’s absurd “nothing to do with Iraq” claims. Maybe it’s a virus – Howard is visiting Blair, and had just visited Bush.)

Juan Cole has a piece in Salon entitled The Iraq war is over, and the winner is… Iran, in which he discusses the implications of this week’s love-in between Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (accompanied by eight cabinet ministers) and the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. I wonder how the neocons felt about al-Jaafari laying a wreath on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, not to mention all of the elaborate plans for joint oil projects, food shipments, electricity supply, and so forth. And how would the American voters feel about the fact that Iran will be providing a billion dollars in foreign aid to Iraq, to go along with the gazillions that the US taxpayer is contributing. (Of course the Iranian aid is unlikely to be recycled through American contractors.)

Money quote:

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq’s neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

Over the last few days we’ve had to endure repeated expressions of incredulity by politicians and pundits about Islamism and the motivations of the London suicide bombers. Politicians such as Blair and Straw, op-ed writers like Cathy Young in today’s Boston Globe, and countless others reject the notion that there is any connection between Western policy – especially recent military actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – and the risk of terrorism.

Now on one level, such claims are trivially absurd. Simply consider the alternative: we are supposed to believe that terrorists who are clearly aligned with certain ideological groups such as al-Qaeda are entirely indifferent to the events that are held up by these groups as emblematic of their conflict. If there is no connection, why were New York, Madrid and London bombed, rather than, say, Paris, Beijing and Stockholm? Coincidence? A flip of the coin? A mere whim, unconnected to any historical reality? Of course not.

The reason for such illogic and denial is not hard to see. People confuse causality with responsibility, and responsibility with blame. There is no time to explore the complicated, messy nature of the real world: everything must be brought down to a simply dichotomy. Thus for Cathy Young, quoting a New York resident:

When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? “Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? “We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.” In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault.

The non-sequitur is breathtaking: a reasonable contributing cause is instantly transformed by Young into responsibility; “our fault” (and, implicitly, nobody else’s). And since this conclusion is (correctly) rejected, the original causal connection must be wrong! And the final twist: rather than recognizing her own muddled thinking, Young treats this as an example of “A moral muddle on the left”. This is pretty pathetic stuff from an editor of Reason magazine….

So where can we turn to for reasonable analysis, with logic and historical context? Johann Hari has two excellent pieces in the Independent which deserve your attention. First, cause and effect:: it all goes back to the way the Western powers carved up the Middle East, from Versailles to Yalta.

The reasoning of the perpetrators is explained in the 2001 book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man Bin Laden describes as his ‘mentor’. Into the 1990s, the Islamists became frustrated that they could not rally the ‘Muslim masses’ to overthrow their local tyrants. So they decided to strike the ‘big enemy’ – Western states – to re-energise Wahhabi jihadism and precipitate revolutions throughout the Middle East.

So Islamism is more a response to the decisions of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt than of Bush and Blair. Last Thursday was not the price for Afghanistan and Iraq; it was the price of decades of trading oil for tyranny without any regard to the consequences. These recent wars may have been useful propaganda tools for the jihadists, but saying they were their primary motivations does not match the evidence.

So much for the origins of the conflict: what about the response? In the piece just quoted, Hari considers, and dismisses, the simple solution: to give Bin Laden what he wants: concede Wahhabi control over all of historical Islam. As he points out, where would that end? Turkey? Spain? Kosovo? Much of India? Simplistic thinking, whether of military victory or defeatism, must be rejected.

In a follow-up piece last Friday, Hari argues for an alternative approach: a slower, messier, more complicated strategy. It has two key elements: engaging Muslim women, and eliminating Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil. On Muslim women:

One of the central tenets of [Wahhabism] is the inherent inferiority and weakness of women. Every jihadist I have ever met – from Gaza to Finsbury Park – has been a fierce ball of misogyny and sexual repression…. The best way to undermine the confidence and beliefs of jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women, their mothers and sisters and daughters. Where Muslim women are free to fight back against jihadists, they are already showing incredible tenacity and intellectual force.

And on dependency:

I have (reluctantly) begun to think that, until we are no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil, no amount of pressure will make our governments support real democracy and women’s rights in the region. The risk of another 1973-style oil-price shock will mean they will always support the “stability” of control over the gamble of proper democracy, no matter how enthusiastically the methods of control are rebranded or relaxed. Until we stop being addicted to the petrol and the status quo in the Middle East, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

AMERICAblog has a lengthy piece about how the British attempted to prevent an Al Qaeda bomb plot against London, and why they failed:

“ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years. This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year.”

This is essential – and infuriating – reading. It’s well documented, not conspiracy theory stuff. The Bush team inadvertantly* caused the name of a “mole” in Al Qaeda to become public, and…

“The appearance of Khan’s name in the New York Times on August 2 caused the British to have to swoop down on the London al-Qaeda cell to which he was speaking. As it was, 5 of them heard about Khan’s arrest and immediately fled. The British got 13, but it was early in their investigation and they had to let 5 go or charge them with minor offences”.

And the British authorities have now connected this group with last week’s bombing.

—
* Let’s be charitable.

Sully admits, grudgingly, “Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let’s concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism?” How about the way that many of us proposed back in 2002-2003 while Sully was infatuated with Baghdad? Afghanistan and Palestine. Nail al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for which we had worldwide support, and really rebuild Afghanistan (thus demonstrating that we were serious about this not being a crusade). Meanwhile pull a Bush I on Israel and force through a real solution to the West Bank and Gaza. With all of that going on, it’s really doubtful that Saddam would have held out for more than a year or two….

And why on earth does Sully raise the spectre of Saddam helping al-Qaeda? Has he learned nothing? Is his argument so weak that he has to grasp at such totally discredited straws?

Of coure all of this is purely hypothetical, and presumes a basic competence in policy execution which is obviously absent in Bush’s team of bozos. In hindsight, since they were going to screw things up whatever they did, it would have been better if they’d done as little as possible to exacerbate the situation.

Americans have been falling over themselves to spin the London bombings into arguments for Bush’s policies; to couple 9/11 with 7/7 and present America and Britain as joined at the hip. Here’s Bush: “Just as America and Great Britain stood together to defeat the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, we now stand together against the murderous ideologies of the 21st century.” But apparently “standing together” is for politicians, not the military. Yahoo! reports:

All 12,000 members of the U.S. Air Force stationed in Britain have been banned from visiting London because of last week’s bombings…. A U.S. spokeswoman was quoted as saying that military staff were not allowed to go anywhere inside the M25 orbital motorway belt surrounding the capital until further notice, “because the security of our people is our top concern.”

“Family members who are U.S. civilians and are not subject to orders are also being encouraged to stay away from London,” the spokeswoman, Cindy Dorfner, was quoted as saying.

The response of the British media was appropriately caustic. The Daily Mail said it best: “It was business as usual in brave and resilient London yesterday — though not if you were a member of the world’s most powerful military machine.”

I wonder how New Yorkers would have reacted if, after 9/11, the U.S. Air Force had banned all visits to the Big Apple because it was too dangerous. They have a legendary capacity for invective; I imagine that “chickenhawk” would have been the least of the epithets…

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, the ban has now been lifted – but not before it had disrupted U.S. participation in various ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War 2.

Some of the most incredulous comments came from Thomas Conlon, the UK director of American Citizens Abroad:

“These same people who are being restricted from London are being flown into Baghdad,” he said. “If they’re going into Baghdad, I can’t imagine why they aren’t allowed to go into London.”

He said he estimated that around 80% of Britain’s 250,000 expat Americans lived in London. “I’m surprised at the military that they would do this,” he added. “If you go to the city, the American expats are all back at work now.”

Indeed. But they’re doing really important stuff, like making money. Any comments from the Pentagon about this stupid decision?

I like astute observers like James Wolcott who have the knack of capturing an idea that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness and hauling it out into the spotlight. Case in point, apropos of the US coverage on London in the aftermath of Thursday’s terrorist attack:

“The curious thing is that so many of the rightward bloggers and Fox Newswers who are hailing the Brits for their quiet stoicism and pluck don’t seem to realize they’re issuing an implicit rebuke to themselves and their fellow Americans. They’re saying, in effect, ‘You’ve got to admire the Brits for showing calm and quiet perserverence after these explosions–they don’t get all hysterical, overdramatic, and overreactive the way we Americans do.’ They don’t seem to realize the example shown by Londoners might be a lesson to them, a model they might follow instead of playing laptop Pattons at full volume every time they feel a rousing post coming on.”

My reactions on hearing about today’s bombings in London:

• “Oh, no – not again.”

• An almost visceral sensation of being transported back to 1976, to Platform 3 at Baker Street Station, waiting for a Metropolitan Line train, seeing a momentarily unattended bag, and being convinced that it was another IRA bomb. (It wasn’t. But to this day I scan for unattended packages or bags in trains, buses, and public spaces, as a matter of deep habit.)

• Are my colleagues at SunUK all right? (So far the answer seems to be yes.)

• Thinking how stupid Bush’s “We’ll fight them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them at home” sounds now.

• A deep satisfaction that the cricket match between England and Australia went on without a hiccup. And England won by nine wickets: Australia 219-7, England 220-1 in 46 overs.

• A strong impulse to jump on a plane to Heathrow. (I guess that removes any doubt about where I think of as home.)

• Hollow laughter at hearing a survivor explain that “nobody in my carriage panicked when we heard the explosion and saw the smoke, because we assumed that it was just another technical malfunction.”

• Reading Tim Bray’s piece (linked from Chris’s), and remembering a group counselling session after 9/11 when I was shouted down for saying that I thought we needed to understand why people do these things better than we do. We still need to.

• Trying to imagine what it would be like to pack your briefcase (removing any unnecessary weight), get an extra bottle of water from the vending machine, and prepare to leave work in the City and walk five, eight, or ten miles home. And just doing it, without any fuss.