UK election 2017 (1?)

Wow, no-one was expecting that.

Opinion polls at the start of the campaign showed that the Conservatives (Tories) had a lead of around 20%. They narrowed during the campaign but then showed a bit of a pick-up for the Tories at the end, to a gap of about 6-8% and an increased majority.

I thought that it would be a damage-limitation exercise, that the battleground, where the line might be held, would be at a point where the Tories won about 40 seats. At this point, the Tories would have a majority approaching 100, but Labour would maintain something of a base in Parliament, to build on for the future (without Jeremy Corbyn as leader).

On the doorstep, for example in Derby North, where I helped with the campaign, as in Stoke Central in February, quite a few people said they were not voting Labour because of Corbyn. True, he did run an energetic campaign and “energised the base” (*). 

However, it seems that Tory voters were even more pissed off.

Firstly, the election was seen as unnecessary, the reasons given for calling it specious or even absurd: the EU's European Commission was plotting to undermine the UK's negotiating position; LibDem MPs (all 8 of them) were determined to derail 'Brexit' (Britain's exit from the EU). There was no reason for Theresa May to seek to extend her mandate by 2 years to 2022. The election could have been held in 2020 as scheduled, when her government plans to have taken the UK out of the EU by March 2019, or before then, when a deal has been agreed (or “no deal”). 

This was compounded by the timing of the general election, 5 weeks after local elections. The general election would normally be held on the same day, as on 5 May 2005 and as has generally been the case for the last 20 years (**). In a BBC report at the start, that later “went viral”, a 75 year old woman from Bristol said, “you're joking, not another one”?

Then, the campaign fought by Theresa May was exceptionally vacuous. It consisted mainly of empty slogans, such as “strong and stable leadership”. Where they did provide concrete proposals, they betrayed an arrogant and complacent assumption that they could cut public spending how and where they liked, since they were going to win anyway.

In what May declared was to be a “Brexit election”, there was little discussion of the issues around leaving the EU. Instead, all she offered was, “Who do you trust to negotiate a deal for Brexit”? She received more or less the same answer that Edward Heath famously got when he asked, “Who governs Britain?” in February 1974: “Not you, mate.”

* Some said that if only he had put as much effort into the EU referendum last year, there could have been a different result.

** In 2001, "the election had been expected on 3 May, to coincide with local elections, but both were postponed because of rural movement restrictions imposed in response to the foot and mouth outbreak".

Trump has won

3 Tweets with my thoughts early this morning (9 Nov):
(6:20) what will Trump do .. ? (BBC WS).
1 thought: Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) for #US_president 2020?
Suddenly the #EU is the last best hope for democracy in the world.

To expand on these thoughts.

(6:20 GMT) what will Trump do .. ? (BBC WS).
First, the obvious, Trump was winning: a few seconds from the radio was enough to establish this. But the question - how many of his campaign promises will, or can, be put into effect - will take a lot longer to be answered (here is the difficulty for his opponents: how do you criticise him for not keeping his promises, when so many of his promises are so hateful or crazy?)

When he spoke shortly after winning, he sounded like any other candidate: "I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton .. ". (Markets had fallen, in the far East, but the tone of this speech caused them to stabilize.) So, the 1st promise, on Hillary Clinton, "lock her up", having achieved its aim, could well be abandoned. 

Somehow it was established in the minds of people that Clinton was dishonest.  However, one study found that around 70% of Trump's statements could be categorised in a range from somewhat inaccurate to "pants on fire". For Clinton, it was 27% (BBC WS, Weekend, 6.11). Trump's lies are so blatant (for example, his claim that he opposed the 2003 war in Iraq is, I think, provably false) but not so obvious to nearly half the population. (1).

1 thought: Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) for #US_president 2020?
Clearly, Americans did not want another Clinton as president, any more than they wanted another Bush. One priority for the Democratic Party is to find a convincing candidate for the 2020 election. A year ago there was a lot of talk about Elizabeth Warren as a more radical alternative to Hillary. Presumably she decided not to stand, and attention switched to Bernie Sanders. Many will doubtless now say, “If only we had picked Bernie, we would have won.” But to my my mind, thinking that choosing someone who until about 3 years ago was not even a Democrat but styled himself as an Independent Socialist would have been better is an illusion (but there again, Trump was not a Republican until about 3 years ago).

Before that there are congressional elections in 2018, where the Democrats could maybe flip the Senate. This is important for reasons that we shall see.

One thing that looks likely to happen is the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare, healthcare). (I just heard (19:20) someone say that Trump does not have super-majority in Senate, 60%, but he doesn't need it: the Senate won't need to overturn a presidential veto. I'm not that much of an expert on the US constitution, but it's hard to see how a Democrat minority could block, say, the repeal of the ACA.) (2).

Then, Trump will be able to appoint Supreme Court judges, at least one, to replace Antonin Scalia, where the Republicans unjustly refused to even consider Obama's nominee. Their gamble paid off here, but a Democrat-controlled Senate could well act in the same way. Further vacancies are likely to arise, but dependent on the result of future elections, Trump's window for appointments could be limited to around 3 years (Scalia died in February 2016, 11 months before President Obama is due to leave office). This has implications for issues like the right to abortion.

(1) For a dispassionate analysis of "those damn e-mails" of Hillary's, see Matthew Yglesias (via Jeff Weintraub).  

(2) Slavoj Žižek (via Jeff Weintraub again):

 “He said he will not totally dismantle universal healthcare, raise the minimum wage, and so on.” .. The example of this, he returns to time and again, being the introduction of universal healthcare in the US – an achievement worthy of the highest praise for Obama and countless thousands of Americans who worked to realise it over decades, ..

But even if you only partially dismantle universal healthcare, it's no longer universal. Trump managed to get away with not providing any details of the "something better" he would replace "Obamacare" with and still get elected.

To be continued.

Published 12 Nov 2016. Two of the issues I discussed seem to be developing in diametrically opposite ways to how I thought (Hillary Clinton and the ACA). The only thing we have learned for certain in the last few days is that nothing is predictable.

Britain, the EU and referendums: 1975 & 2016 (Part 1 note)

*  One word I remember from that 1975 Sunday Times article is "post-prandial". This more recent article is very interesting.

Forecasts can be wrong, and those from "experts"(at the IFS & IMF etc.) are reflexively rubbished by the Leave campaign, but hard historic facts are harder to argue with.

Economic Outlook: Britain whistled a happier tune after joining the EU - David Smith, 28 February 2016

While Europe was busy integrating, the world was Britain’s oyster. Where there had once been the Empire, on which the sun never set, now there was the Commonwealth. There was the special relationship with America. There were opportunities well beyond the narrow confines of the EEC.
The world, however, was not enough. Commonwealth countries such as Australia and South Africa, far from being happy to be easy markets for British exports, wanted to develop their own industries and imposed tariff barriers against the mother country. India was heavily protectionist from the time of independence in 1947. As a result of this and other factors, Europe’s grass started to look a lot greener. Britain’s economic performance in the 1950s and 1960s was poor in relation to the EEC pioneers. Germany and France had a lot more catching up to do after the devastation of the Second World War but, even allowing for this, they achieved growth well in excess of Britain’s.

In the years from 1950 to 1973, sometimes known as the golden age of growth, gross domestic product per head rose by an average of 2.4% a year in Britain, 4% in France and 5% in Germany. By 1960, Germany was once again producing more cars than Britain and had secured a bigger share of world trade.

Having sampled life outside the EEC, successive British governments wanted in, and desperately so. After trying a smaller alternative, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), established in 1960, Britain was rejected for EEC membership in 1963 and 1967 before being finally admitted at the start of 1973. Envy of Europe ran deep. [ .. ]

 The politicians of the 1960s and early 1970s were not daft. Having lagged behind growth in the EEC prior to membership, Britain caught up and then outgrew the original six. Their growth became no longer a cause for envy. Growth rates slowed everywhere after the golden age, but Britain’s relative performance improved. Plainly not all of this was due to being in the EEC. Clearly, some of it was.

Joining the EEC was a considerable economic success, according to a new paper, The Growth Effects of EU Membership for the UK: A Review of the Evidence, by the noted economic historian Professor Nick Crafts of Warwick University. “Membership has raised UK income levels appreciably and by much more than 1970s proponents of EU entry predicted,” he writes. “Joining the EU raised the level of real GDP per person in the UK compared with the alternative of staying in EFTA. The deeper economic integration EU membership entailed increased trade substantially and this had positive effects on income.” His calculations suggest that the positive economic effects of membership have outweighed the cost of Britain’s EU contributions and red tape by a factor of about seven to one.

The world was different in 1973, when Britain joined the EEC, and 1975, when we had a referendum on whether to stay in. Many people who did have a vote in 1975, and some who did not, claim that the country was conned; that we voted to join a common market and ended up with ever closer union, migration and a single currency on our doorstep. It is true that at the time of the 1975 referendum the government chose to emphasise the trade aspects of membership to the exclusion of almost everything else. Freedom of movement and equal treatment of people were part of the Treaty of Rome, though in the 1970s most people expected the flows to be from Britain to the rest of Europe, not the other way around. The TV series Auf Wiedersehn, Pet, first shown in 1983, was about British migrant workers in Germany.

As for the single currency, when Ted Heath began his successful entry negotiations, the EEC was still officially on course for monetary union, the Werner Report of October 1970 having set the target of achieving it by 1980. It took a further two decades for the euro to arrive, but Europe’s intentions were pretty clear.

A stronger point is that Europe has changed in 40 years. No longer do we envy our European partners their growth, although many people I talk to still have a lot of envy for Germany and even France. The world has changed, too, with the rise of China and other emerging economies. Trade is freer, for goods if not yet enough for services. Britain is making great strides in the latter, though: service-sector exports doubled between 2006 and 2014. 

 The question I will address in coming weeks is whether things have changed enough for life to be better outside the EU. Does membership prevent us taking full advantage of the wider world, or is that an escapist fantasy? Germany has been a big success, from within the EU, in selling to the world. Only China and America, with much larger populations, export more.

Britain, the EU and referendums: 1975 & 2016 (Part 1)

With Britain in full swing of debate ahead of the  referendum, 2 memories from the earlier debate stick in my mind.

In 1975,  the anti-Europe argument was largely the preserve of Left-Labour: people now in favour of continuing EU membership, were then opposed, from Jeremy Corbyn to shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, then campaigning with his father Tony to leave. Of course, there were some figures n the Right, such as Enoch Powell and Nicholas Ridley, who opposed EEC  membership, but these were largely seen as mavericks. Nonetheless, small though it was, the anti-Europe element in the Tory party forced the Heath government in 1972 to rely on pro-European Labour MPs (some of whom later defected to form the Social Democrats Party) to get the legislation through that paved the way for the UK's accession to the EEC

Now the anti-EU sentiment seems more embedded in the Conservative mainstream: those supporting Leave include cabinet ministers such as Michael Gove, former leader Ian Duncan-Smith & former London mayor Boris Johnson; they have joined the campaign alongside UKIP leader, Nigel Farage.

So, this is the 1st memory, of 2 articles in the Sunday Times, 1 for, 1 against. It was the against argument that made the most impression on me: with free movement of capital, workers would be pissed upon. They certainly were in the years that followed, mainly as a result of the Thatcher reforms. But it would take more than leaving the EU for them to be unpissed upon (*) .

Back then, there were many people who had memories of the Second World War, had even fought in it. For some of them, what was then the European Economic Community (subsequently the  European Community, then the  European Union) represented peace: France and Germany had relatively recently been at war (their 3rd clash in 70 years); now war between these rivals was unthinkable.

Another idea, viewed through the Cold War prism, was that the EEC strengthened the Western bloc. In one discussion in the early 1970's, when the question of "rule from Brussels" was brought up, Peter Ustinov said (this is the 2nd memory), "better that than rule from Moscow".

The counter-argument to this, then as now, was that it was NATO, not the EEC, that guaranteed the security of Western Europe. And, of course, this was somewhat in contradiction to the idea of the EEC as agent of peace.

Now, when David Cameron talks about the 70 years of peace in Europe that have been achieved, he is accused by Boris Johnson of saying that if the UK left, World War 3 would break out, although he himself was prepared to leave (if negotiations had not been concluded satisfactorily). And it is this caricature of his remarks that seems to be remembered.

What has changed since 1975, is that the EU has been a huge engine for democracy. Portugal had just emerged in 1974 from 45 years of right-wing dictatorship; Franco was still in power in Spain; Greece was just emerging from the rule of the colonels. Allan Little, in his series for the BBC WS, rightly emphasises the events of 23 Feb 1981, when for a few hours it seemed that Spain might plunge back into military dictatorship. After that, for the Spanish Left, including (the / former) Communists, membership of the EEC was a foreign policy priority. 

These 3 countries formed the next wave of EEC expansion in 1981 & 1986, following the accession of Britain, Ireland and Denmark in 1973.

* (reference to follow) 

1 Jun 2016 (to be continued)

Published 22 Jun 2016: with campaigning about to close, I am publishing what I have written so far, incomplete as it is and lacking some links and  references.
 
Update 24 Jun 2016: corrected link to Allan Little's series (Europe's Challenges: Expanding the Union, Episode 2 of 3).

Even I get it wrong on Syria sometimes (quite often)

There are 2 glaring mistakes in my previous post on the situation around Aleppo and to the North. But I have not really found anything that supports Juan Cole's assertion.  As Aron Lund says, it's actually a four-way fight, the fourth actor being the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mainly Kurdish alliance (it includes the YPG, for example), which is also supported by the US.
As you can see from the map, there are areas that are disputed between the government and ISIL. There has been one recent offensive by  government forces towards ISIL territory, about 30 km east of Aleppo (north towards Al-Bab). By contrast, there have been 3 recent offensives from government territory south of Aleppo, north-west, west and south-west, onto the area controlled by the "rebels" (FSA & others).

 From rebel-controlled East Aleppo, there is a narrow exit from near-encirclement by government forces and then a narrow corridor to the Turkish border. There have been 2 recent offensives on this corridor: westwards by ISIL; and eastwards by the SDF (this is presumably the capture of the village of Tanab,  advancing towards  A'zaz, that I mentioned previously). The FSA have attacked out of this corridor, eastwards into ISIL territory, just south of the Turkish border.

The YPG have said that their first priority is to link the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in the west with Kobane to the east, clearing the remaining 60 miles of the Syria–Turkey border  from ISIL control. To roll back ISIL is clearly understandable and unproblematic (except for Turkey). But to link up Afrin to Kobane, the SDF would need to cross or control the stretch of border currently controlled by the FSA (which is obviously their supply route to Turkey). This is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, nor in Roy Gutman's report for McClatchy on which it is based  "U.S. begins airdrops of weapons to Kurdish forces in northern Syria", 12 October 2015).

Without wanting to make excuses, I think my errors are indicative of one thing: that the Syrian conflict is not always covered in sufficient depth by the "mainstream media".  I don't always have the time to dig out the truth from obscure Tweets.

Update: this is from Reuters' report, 1 Jan:

A U.S.-backed alliance of Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters advanced against Islamist insurgents in the north of the country on Friday, capturing at least one village in Aleppo province  [..] Fighters from the Democratic Forces of Syria seized the village of Tanab near the town of Azaz after heavy clashes with the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and the powerful Ahrar al Sham, spokesman Talal Selo told Reuters.  "We liberated Tanab," he said.[.. T]he Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Democratic Forces of Syria had also captured the village of Tat Mrash. Selo said he could not yet confirm its capture. 
[..]
The alliance has separately [from its fight against ISIL] been fighting in recent weeks against Nusra Front, Ahrar al Sham and other insurgents in northern Aleppo province. .The Democratic Forces of Syria includes the Kurdish YPG militia, which has been the most effective partner on the ground for U.S.-led air strikes. 

...

More on Aleppo

Reporting by Rami Jarrah ‏ ( 2 Jan) :  according to one Aleppo citizen, ISIS (ISIL) is advancing against the FSA in the North because the Russian planes are helping them.  More on PBS Newshour:

JEFFREY BROWN: So, the Russians are saying that they are targeting ISIS and other — and strategic sites, but that’s not what you’re seeing.

RJ: No, Jeffrey, that’s definitely not what I’m seeing, and it’s definitely not what the civilians here in Aleppo are seeing.

I think this man in the video is a small example of what is actually happening. He is frantically trying to explain, it’s just civilians here. There’s no signs of ISIS here. Why are they attacking us? [..] This is what this man is saying. And it’s basically the language that you’re going to hear around Aleppo, because the people here are very much convinced that the Russian and Syrian airstrikes are meant and aimed to target civilians and to drive them either out of Aleppo or to kill them.

And this is something that they have come to believe because of the constant attacks. We’re witnessing between 10 to 15 airstrikes in central Aleppo alone on a daily basis. And these airstrikes, what we have been doing is trying to follow these airstrikes. I have gotten my hands on — access to information of when the strikes hit. So, I’m following the civil defense. I haven’t, until now, seen one attack that has landed on a military unit or a depot. And this is something that we’re trying to document and make clear. Now, the problem is that last year U.N. Security Council resolution actually allowed Russia to actually attack areas that have ISIS or al-Nusra in them.

But that’s on the basis that we’re taking Russia’s take on where those groups are located. But those groups are not located in these areas. And that’s the excuse that is being used to attack these areas. So, this is a major problem. It’s who decides where these groups are. We have been trying to prove that these groups are not located here. If they were, I wouldn’t be able to operate. I wouldn’t be able to do the reports I was doing.

JB: So, what are the biggest fears that you’re hearing from people now? Is it a government victory backed by Russia? Is it ISIS, especially, perhaps, as it’s driven more from Iraq, coming in even stronger in and around Aleppo? [..]

RJ:  The people here are not in any way worried that Assad or Assad’s army or Russia or Hezbollah forces are going to invade Aleppo. I haven’t heard this expressed once. The people here are worried that ISIS is going to, in fact, take over Aleppo, because of the fact that the — not only the Russian airstrikes, but in addition to the coalition airstrikes, they are actually forcing ISIS further away from Iraq and deeper into Syria. And what that means is past Raqqa, past Deir el-Zour, and into Aleppo. So there are no signs of ISIS in Aleppo. So, the fear here is that ISIS takes these areas and that there isn’t really much preventing that by Russia or the Syrian regime, who are actually more so accepting the idea of Aleppo being taken by ISIS, as a sort of an excuse that can be used at a later stage to allow the rest of the international community also to intervene against the opposition. [My emphasis]

...

Even Juan Cole gets it wrong on Syria sometimes (IMHO)

Yesterday (3 Jan 2016), I read this post from Juan Cole's blog.

This seems, on the whole, to be a sane and balanced piece. However, there is one point I disagree on (highlighted below):

In the past 18 months, Daesh [ISIL] has been contained and then rolled back. It was pushed back out of Samarra. It has lost Beiji and Tikrit. Falluja appears to be in play. It is losing Ramadi, which has been cut off from supply lines to Syria. Ramadi the most vulnerable of Sunni Arab cities in Iraq to attacks from the Shiite south and it was never likely Daesh could hold it in the long term.

On the Kurdish front, the Peshmerga have regrouped and gotten better training and arms. They pushed Daesh out of Kurdish areas in Diyala province. In Ninewah province, they took back Mt. Sinjar, hundreds of miles from Erbil, and then recently took back Sinjar city.

In Syria, Daesh was prevented from taking Kobane and has lost half of al-Raqqa Province, its base. It is being blocked by the Syrian Arab Army, Hizbullah and Russian fighter jets from moving into Aleppo (where even rebel-dominated east Aleppo rejects it).

The situation of Daesh in its capital, al-Raqqa, is so uncertain that there has been talk of them evacuating it toward Mosul. It is being bombed there now by the French and British, a new development this fall.
[..]
I don’t deny that the wheels have moved slowly. But you can’t say there has been no progress. There are a lot of problems with mainly enlisting Shiites and Kurds to crush Daesh. They can do it, and probably could do it on an accelerated schedule. But it is much better to have Sunni Arabs play a big role. Reports suggest that they are playing such a role in taking back Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province, and have finally been armed by the government of Haydar al-Abadi. Contrary to what Lindsey Graham thinks, US troops would not be more welcome as liberators in the Sunni Arab cities than would Shiite or Kurdish troops.

Comments are now closed on Professor Cole's post, but this is an extraordinary remark, and I must say something about it.

In reality, Russian airstrikes in their early days allowed ISIL to advance around Aleppo and I have not seen anything to suggest they have had a different effect since. Let's look at the situation in the North, from Aleppo to the Turkish border, as I understand it.

The regime is in the West, its territory stretching back through Homs to Latakia, Damascus and the border with Lebanon; ISIL is in the East, back to Raqqa (Deir Ezzor) and Iraq. The rebels (the non-ISIL opposition) are in the middle. In other words, they are between the regime's forces and ISIL's. It is possible, I suppose, that Russian airstrikes are targeting ISIL here (on their frontline with the rebels near Aleppo), but highly unlikely: Putin has said that Russian forces would be prepared to co-operate with the Free Syrian Army, but I have not seen any evidence that they are doing so (*).

For example, regime forces recently captured the village of Tanab from 'rebels + Nusra & IF' , advancing towards  A'zaz  (SDF = Syrian government forces and its allies).

I may have said this before, but I'll repeat it. ISIL fights against everyone, but mainly against the rebels and generally not against the regime. The rebels are in a 2-way fight, against ISIL on the one hand and the Assad regime, supported by Iran, Hezbollah  and, recently, Russian airstrikes, on the other. There are exceptions to this, of course (**).

* Russian air strikes in Syria cause 'civilian deaths', 7.10 "On Tuesday, Russian jets hit areas under the control of the [ISIL] group in Palmyra and the northern outskirts of Aleppo.The attacks destroyed 20 vehicles and three weapons depots in ISIL-held Palmyra, Syrian state television said, quoting a military source. In Aleppo, Russian strikes targeted the towns of al-Bab and Deir Hafer, about 20km east of a military airport currently besieged by ISIL fighters." Nothing like the air campaigns co-ordinated with regime ground forces seen elsewhere in Syria (against the non-ISIL rebels).
US to scrap Syria rebel training programme, 9.10 "The [Syrian] Observatory [for Human Rights] reported that ISIL fighters have advanced and captured several villages in Aleppo province following deadly clashes with other armed groups. This offensive is one of ISIL's strongest advances towards Aleppo in months and puts them closer to government-controlled areas, the observatory said. This comes as an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general was killed near Aleppo, where he was advising the Syrian army on their battle against the ISIL fighter." [my emphasis]

** In Deir Ezzor, ISIL has treated Jabhat al-Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria) with the same savagery it has shown to everyone else, but in the West and just over the border in Lebanon, in Arsal, it seems to have co-operated with Nusra. It has fought with the regime and captured territory from it around Palmyra.

3 Tweets: Samir Kuntar

or Samir Kantar or Samir Qantar
one
BBC - Lebanon militant Samir Qantar killed in rocket strike in Syria http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35144483 …

two
Samir Kuntar was 1 of the 3 (or 1 and a half) prisoners Hezbollah went to war with Israel over in 2006.http://davidp1.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/fog-of-war-replies.html
three
Yossi Alpher in http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/what-hezbollah-is-fighting-for-reality.html …

Jeff Weintraub:

When it gets specific, Hezbollah tends to mention three names (yes, that's 3), but there is no evidence that one of these has ever been an Israeli prisoner. So that leaves two.

One of these is a convicted murder, Samir Kuntar, who led a 1979 terrorist attack against Israeli civilians in the northern town of Nahariya that killed two children, their father, and two policeman. Kuntar personally shot the father in front of one daughter and then bludgeoned the 4-year-old girl to death by crushing her skull. The mother managed to hide in the attic with her other daughter, a 2-year-old, but in trying to keep the girl quiet she accidentally suffocated her.

Yossi Alpher:

In fact, there are not even three Lebanese in Israeli jails--only one and a half. One of the three names cited by Hizballah is a missing person but was never jailed by Israel. A second, a Lebanese born to a Jewish mother, immigrated to Israel in the 1990s in accordance with the law of return and was subsequently arrested and tried as an Israeli on charges of spying. The third is Samir Kuntar, a Druze who as a teenager participated in a murderous terrorist attack in Nahariya in 1979.

The 'prisoners' issue was one of two main pretexts Hezbollah used (the other was the 'sliver of land' known as Shebaa Farms).

Update 21 Dec 2015
Kuntar's killing took place in Damascus. Hezbollah has said that the fight to support the regime in Syria and the Alawites (as a Shi'a offshoot)  takes precedence over the fight against Israel. (Kuntar took part in the 1979 attack as member of a Palestinian group but later became an important figure in the Hezbollah hierarchy). But Israel, reportedly, prefers to have ISIL as a neighbour (in Syria) rather than Hezbollah.

Israel welcomed his death, but declined to confirm that it was responsible for the missile strike. The woman who survived the 1979 attack, Smadar Haran, thought it might have been carried out by any of the actors in the Syrian Civil War, but it seems to me likely that it was Israel.

The arguments convinced me, ultimately, that Hezbollah bore most of the blame for the 2006 war in Lebanon. But key aspects are omitted in many accounts in the British media, and  as I said at the time, Israeli propaganda was unspeakably bad - their spokesmen failed to highlight these aspects. This is what was said in the Channel 4 News report: "By 2006, as Hezbollah  and  Israel went to war over the capture of 2 Israeli soldiers, Kantar had become a legend to some in Lebanon, a propaganda poster boy. And in 2008, Israel traded its prisoner and 4 others, all of them alive, for the dead bodies of its captured soldiers. Kantar came home to a hero's welcome."

Smadar Haran  reminds us that it was in support of Kuntar (amongst others)  that the 1985 attack on the Achille Lauro  and murder of  Leon Klinghoffer was carried out (interview on BBC WS, Newshour, 21:06).

Kuntar was 16 years old at the time of the 1979 attack. In India, a 17-year-old was released after taking part in that horrendous rape 3years ago (admittedly provoking huge protests).

- Fire traded over Israel-Lebanon border after militant's death -

Corbyn and the pacifists

(23 Aug) One interesting snippet regarding Jeremy Corbyn, who has become the leading contender for leadership of the UK Labour party (1), from the FT: "Born in Britain's West Country to idealistic parents – peace activists who met campaigning for an end to the Spanish civil war" (2). That raises an interesting question: how could the Spanish Civil War have ended earlier? By those who were fighting on the Republican side surrendering? It was not as if the fighters could simply lay down their arms and be "forgiven" by the dictatorship (forgiven that is for fighting in defence of a government that, for all its flaws, was democratically elected) and return to normal life. After the fascists captured Badajoz, men with rifle recoil marks on their shoulders were sought out for execution (3). 

In the last 5 years, a similar situation existed in Libya and still exists in Syria. In Libya in 2011, for example, some western journalists were detained and held where they could hear the sounds of captured opposition fighters being tortured by the Gaddafi regime. They knew what they were fighting against and that they had little option other than to continue. 

To return to Jeremy Corbyn, he has been criticised for sharing a platform with Hamas and Hezbollah, though he claims not to share their aims. Another leadership candidate says Corbyn was opposed to Poland joining NATO and he wants Britain to leave NATO. And of course he is against Trident, Britain's nuclear deterrent. The Times in its leader, 22 Aug ("Wrong again"), says that Corbyn opposed not only the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush in 2003, but also the intervention in Kosovo under Bill Clinton. There is another point that Corbyn has made, regarding Syria and Iran, but that requires a more detailed response.

(1) Corbyn has gained the support of the biggest Trades Unions, who seem to believe, following Labour's poor (disastrous in Scotland) performance in the May election, that having a clear-cut radical candidate is the best way forward. What should be remembered, though, is that, in the 2010 leadership contest, Ed Miliband adopted a position that was seen as more left-wing and thereby gained the support of the unions, enabling him to defeat his brother David, who was a far more credible Prime Ministerial candidate. 

(2) 'The far-left outsider leading the field', George Parker, Financial Times, 1 Aug 2015.

(3) Beevor, p148; See also ; Jay Allen's report in the Chigaco Tribune, 30 Aug 1936. After the fall of Barcelona in January 1939, as many as 10,000 people are said to have been killed. Mussolini ordered that all Italians in the Republican army who were captured should be shot immediately" (Beevor, p367). After the "end of the war", it is estimated that the figure for executions and political killing up until 1943 was nearly 200,000 ( p390, Ch XXIX: "The Fate of the Defeated ..", Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War, 1982, Cassell Paperback, 1999). 

 

Update 12 Sep
(11:40) Corbyn wins (BBC R4).  

More details are coming out: Corbyn founded the Stop the war coalition in 2001 ahead of Afghanistan. The Argentinian president has congratulated him, since he would like to open negotiations on the Falkland / Malvinas Islands. Corbyn  is seen embracing Hugo Chavez in archive footage shown on BBC News.  

Earlier, The Times, unearthed various columns Corbyn wrote in the Morning Star: for example, he takes the view that NATO "is trying to find a role for itself". 

(23:20) The Morning Star is to publish a Sunday edition for the first time. The editor of the Morning Star:, described as a "left-wing paper" (formerly known as the mouthpiece of the British Communist Party), is featured on the BBC News24 review of the press.

Published 13 Sep 2015

Charlie Hebdo (2): more double standards

Joe Sacco, in a full-page cartoon strip in The Guardian (10.1),  I think just about got the balance right.  He notes,  as does Tariq Ramadan, that Charlie Hebdo once sacked Maurice Siné (or Sinet) for an allegedly anti-semitic cartoon.

One aspect of the intellectual mood in France,  before the attacks,  was captured in Michel Houellebecq's latest novel,  which is due to be published in English later this year:  it envisages a future in which the "Islamic party" wins the 2022 presidential election.  This seems to me somewhat hysterical,  though some disagree.

As both Nabila Ramdani on BBC WS, Weekend 10.1,  and Abdullah al Andalusi on Channel 4 News, 12.1,  point out,  France is not consistent in allowing freedom of expression,  since muslims have restrictions imposed on their dress,  on schoolgirls wearing the hijab (headscarf) and more recently on the wearing of the burqa and niqab in public.

In a way that we anglo-saxones find difficult to understand,  many in France,  including "liberals" and those on the left,  worship secularism (or laïcité) as an end in itself,  making of it a kind of fourth pillar of the Republic along with liberty,  equality and fraternity. (1)

At the press conference for the first issue of Charlie Hebdo after the attack,  one of the editorial board said,  'If you say "I am Charlie, you should also say "I am secularism" ' (BBC WS, 13.1, 22:09).

You do not have to push this  much further to arrive at the position of the Front national. Marine Le Pen:  "we have to oppose all demands that aim to shatter secularism [..] Demands that create special rules that would allow Muslims to behave differently."  (interview on AJE, 13.1). (2)

(1) There is a small but articulate minority that opposes the dominant trend.  Here's Christine Delphy: "nous assistons depuis les massacres des 7, 8 et 9 janvier au retour en force d’un néo-laïcisme autoritaire".  And Pierre Tevanian: "« Laïcité sacrée » : cet invraisemblable slogan, figurant sur des autocollants arborés lors d’une manifestation commémorant le centenaire de la loi de 1905, indique à quel point la laïcité a été, au sens propre, sacralisée". He reminds us of Jacques Chirac's « on ne doit pas toucher aux piliers du temple ».

(2)  Ms Le Pen is leading in opinion polls since the attack,  but she would lose in the second round of the presidentielle (The Times, 31.1).

For more about how muslims feel about the "secular" state in France,  listen to or download Assignment from the BBC WS, broadcast last Sunday (2.2, also 29.1).

Charlie Hebdo (1): double standards

Tariq Ramadan on Al Jazeera English, 8.1.2015, says: we must value Arab lives equally  - Syria, Iraq, Gaza ... Quite right. He continues in the same vein in The Guardian (The Paris attackers hijacked Islam but there is no war between Islam and the west, 10.1):

We are reacting emotionally because 12 people were killed in Paris,  but there are hundreds being killed day in,  day out in Syria and Iraq,  and still we send more bombs.

Oh dear,  that last phrase.  Most of the people killed in Syria are by bombs sent by the Assad government , while in Iraq and Syria,  ISIL are carrying out massacres and cold-blooded executions and it is against them that we are sending  bombs.

.Jonathan Freedland writes (Charlie Hebdo: first they came for the cartoonists, then they came for the Jews):

So far there have been mercifully few attempts to make the usual, kneejerk move, insisting that the animating grievance must be western foreign policy. It is hard to draw that conclusion when the targets have been a satirical magazine and a shop selling salt beef and pickles.

It did not take long for that to be done, by none other, perhaps unsurprisingly, than former French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. His views were echoed (again unsurprisingly) by Alain Gresh of Le Monde Diplomatique. This is de Villepin:

The West has created Islamic terrorism and ISIL is the nasty child of the arrogance of the West's policies.
The Western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali has led to an increase in the number of the jihadists  (Inside Story, AJE, 11.1)

De Villepin's views on the 2003 intervention in Iraq are of course well known and often repeated.  There is a strong argument that the action was not justified,  was even counter-productive in terms of the fight against terrorism (or jihadists or violent islamism).  It is a well-worn refrain that "there was no al Qaeda in Iraq before 2003" (though there was some, near the Iranian border,  but probably not with the collusion of the regime).  But it should also not be forgotten that there was no al Qaeda in Syria before,  without any intervention from the West, its people carried out an uprising against a dictator,  which was brutally suppressed.

It is strange, though, that de Villepin lumps in Afghanistan and Mali.  In Afghanistan,  the US intervention in 2001  removed an AQ safe haven.  In Mali,  separatist rebels,  then islamists, took control of the North when government forces collapsed following a military coup.  Most people in towns like Gao and Timbuktu,  mainly non-Tuareg, were unhappy with being under the control of the rebels.  The French intervention (in January 2013) was again entirely justified,  as the rebels were moving into the centre and south of the country.

As for Libya,  no-one could deny that it now does not have an effective government.  But what would de Villepin have preferred?  That we stood by while Gaddafi suppressed the uprising?  That seems to me to be a counsel of despair:  al Qaeda was at a low ebb when the "Arab Spring" seemed to be going well.  There is an argument that is at least equally as strong that it was Western non-intervention in Syria that created the conditions for Al Qaeda in Iraq to come back as ISIL (or "Islamic State") and that tolerance of a military coup in Egypt facilitated the resurgence of jihadis generally.

Cherif Kouachi,  who is said to have been originally radicalised by the US abuses in Abu Ghraib,  interviewed by French TV, after the Charlie Hebdo attack: 

I,  Cherif Kouachi, was sent by al Qaeda in Yemen. ... Did we kill civilians during the two days you've been looking for us.
Interviewer: you killed journalists.
Kouachi:  But did we kill civilians?  Civilians or people during the two days that you looked for us?
Interviewer: Wait,  wait,  Cherif, Cherif,  did you kill this morning? Kouachi:  We are not killers. .. We don't kill women.  We kill no one. .. We are not like you. You are the ones killing [ inaudible] muslims [ or women and children, according to the English subtitles] in Syria,  Iraq and Afghanistan. [..]
Interviewer: But you took revenge there nonetheless,  you killed 12 people. 
Kouachi: Yes,  to take revenge , as you said.  That's it,  because we took revenge.

Amedy Coulibaly did kill a trainee policewoman in Montrouge in the South of Paris,  before killing 4 Jewish people at a kosher supermarket in porte de Vincennes in the east of the city (Coulibaly's partner and Chérif Kouachi's wife had exchanged more than 500 'phone calls the previous year,  French authorities revealed). Elsa Cayat ("Charlie Divan") was among those killed at Charlie Hebdo.  The Kouachis did spare Corinne Rey ("Coco"),  who was about to leave to pick up her daughter from kindergarten,  but threatened her with their guns,  forcing her to enter the security code giving them access to the magazine's offices.

(1) Incidentally,  in case you wondered who the man was on Francois Hollande's right at the rally in Paris on 11.1,  The Guardian provided this useful guide: it's Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (elected democratically following that French intervention);  Benjamin Netanyahu is on IBK's right,  Mahmoud Abbas is 3rd from Hollande's left.
And something I've just come across: Coulibaly's family was of Malian origin and there was some speculation that his body might go to Mali for burial.

The CIA: torture and the US

The US senate committee report was attacked by most Republicans as being politically motivated in the dying days of the Democrat controlled Senate.  An honourable exception was John McCain (again), almost unreported,  but I happened to catch him speaking (live on Al Jazeera English, 9.12, 17:30).

Leaving aside the debate over whether the methods used constituted torture or could be described as "extended interrogation techniques",  or EITs (they were torture - Geoff Dyer in the FT provides a useful summary (limited access)), the key question is whether the techniques were efficacious.  This matters because polls show that a majority in the US would support the use of these techniques,  provided they help prevent terrorist attacks.

John Brennan,  CIA director,  says it is "unknown and unknowable" whether the techniques can be shown to have provided useful and valuable information.  On the BBC WS, (Weekend, 13.12.2014, 08:06 +2:30) Philippe Sands says Brennan "confirms that he is unable to state categorically that the techniques produced information useful in the [..] war against terrorism", which Sands says supports the conclusion of the report (that the techniques were ineffective).  But it doesn't:  Brennan says that we cannot know whether the useful information given by detainees was as a result of the techniques being used on them.  Which is not the same thing.

Sands goes on to call for what amounts to a witch-hunt on any lawyer who gave advice that would have justified the techniques.

However,  the point that even if the techniques could be shown to work in the short term,  in preventing attacks,  this is outweighed by the immense damage to the US's reputation in the long term.

Also unanswerable is the point,  made by both Moazzam Begg and Clive Stafford Smith (*),  that the torture techniques provided incorrect information linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq with al Qaeda.

* AJE, 9.12 13:06; C4 News, 15.12 19:18.

Posted 29.12.2014

Update 29.12.2014.
Needless to say,  some of the reaction around the world has been of breathtaking hypocrisy. 

Converting for ISIL ...

ISIL certainly seems to be attracting all sorts of nutcases and psychopaths to associate themselves with the group. That's a success of a sort, I suppose.  Most media (BBC, AJE) had extensive reports of the case of Man Haron Monis,  who killed 2 Australians in Sydney on Monday (early hours of Tuesday local time),  and mentioned that he was Iranian, but not what I was most interested in.

This from The Guardian:

As recently as last week on a website he used both to defend and promote himself, he announced that he had converted from Shia to Sunni Islam and pledged his allegiance to the caliphate declared by the militant group Islamic State [ISIL]. That website was shut down as Monday’s siege developed, and police asked media outlets to refrain from giving him a platform as he held 17 hostages in the Lindt cafe in Martin Place.

Sydney Shia leaders had apparently urged federal police to probe his claim to be a leading cleric, while he was ignored by the Sunni community. He had no links to the Islamic State terrorist group, and despite his criminal past was not seen as a likely exponent of the group’s ideology.

See also Jonathan Rugman's report on C4N (15/12).  According to C4N, Monis posted on his website:

 "I used to be a Rafidi, but not anymore. Now I am a Muslim, Alhamdu Lillah”

...

Tweeting for ISIL?

It was quite a shock to see Channel 4 News on Thursday (11/12),   with ‏@ShamiWitness emblazoned across the  background.  I'd come across this userid myself on Twitter.  A look through the archive shows the odd retweet, but mainly tweets he was mentioned in.

Aymenn J. Al-Tamimi, writing on Joshua Landis's Syria Comment blog, has a detailed analysis:

he emerged on the Twitter scene around the beginning of 2013. At that time, he would often try to engage certain, more prominent Twitter users on issues related to the Islamic world, myself among them. For instance, one of his first tweets to me was to criticise a rather inane tweet I had written on a ‘Bangladesh Spring’ victory over Islamists.

His perspective was clearly that of an Islamist but- undoubtedly through prior tracking of social media- he seemed to have a broad knowledge of Syria’s Sunni insurgency with a particular focus on Salafi and jihadi groups, something that extended to Libya in particular and the wider Muslim world [..]. Other indications of his Islamist leanings in those earlier times were his support for the Ikhwan-led government in Egypt [i.e. the Morsi / Muslim Brotherhood government ] - his main line of defence being that none of the Ikhwan’s opponents could necessarily do a better job at governance (not an unreasonable argument)- and his cheering on of Erdogan during the Gezi Park protests that erupted in May 2013. It was of course during this same period (i.e. April 2013 onwards) that IS’ predecessor the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) emerged: at that early stage of ISIS’ existence it would not necessarily be fair to characterize him as an ISIS partisan. On the contrary he was more keen on the notion of ‘Islamic rebel/jihadi unity’, so to speak: something that could include ISIS. In short, his worldview was of an Islamist who at least had hope in the gradualist non-violent Islamisation projects of Erdogan and the Ikhwan in Egypt while showing sympathy for jihadis more generally. [..]

Two events mark key points in Shami’s transformation from an apparently rather standard Islamist to the IS fanboy as so many have come to know him. [..] The first event was the coup against the Ikhwan-led government, which enraged him considerably. Yet even after this point, he had not yet become a full-blown ISIS partisan, but rather was still willing to give credence to forces like Jabhat al-Nusra (Syria’s al-Qa’ida affiliate) and the Islamic Front coalition, which contrasts him with other prominent hardline ISIS fans at the time  [..]. Thus, the second main turning point was the outbreak of infighting between ISIS and rebel groups at the start of 2014. This completes his definite public transformation into the ISIS/IS fanboy. It is also this stage, it should be noted, where many of the other pro-jihadi Twitter users take more definite sides in contrast to a previous attempt at jihadi brotherology.

This is worth reading in full.

The Times,   on Saturday, described ShamiWitness as an "Isis spokesman" and got the timing slightly wrong: it says the unmasking was "last night";  in fact, the original story was run on C4N, Thursday (19:00),  with a followup on Friday (19:07).

Posted 16.12.2014

Update: 16.12.
Simon Israel's latest piece for C4N,  Sunday (14/12), can be found here. 

Israeli shifts on Gaza?

An interesting piece from AJE (8/8):

the ceasefire has temporarily silenced critics on the right. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who last month called for a resumption of the occupation of the strip, now wants to hand it over to the United Nations - an organisation he has long demonised.
...
Hamas was pushed into inking a "unity deal" with Fatah, and a national consensus government was born. Netanyahu spent weeks trying to kill the deal, and was furious when the US and other nations endorsed the new government. He walked away from negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas precisely because of the agreement.

Netanyahu now wants to implement some of the terms of the deal in a permanent ceasefire with Hamas:  negotiators want the agreement to give the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces control of Rafah crossing. "We have cooperated, and are cooperating, with the PA on [these] matters," Netanyahu said on Wednesday. "We’re prepared to see a role for them."

(Dalia Hatuqa reporting from Ramallah and Gregg Carlstrom from Tel Aviv.)

...