Egypt: June 30th

I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time in the last week trying to figure out just what has happened and is happening in Egypt. The events since June 30th have been fascinating and incredible; the 4 days of protests to push out former President Mohamed Morsi are claimed to have been the largest in human history- at least 10 million people took to the streets (maybe over 14 million) in a country of 84 million. By contrast Britain’s biggest ever demonstration was in 2003 against the Iraq War, garnering around 1 million people. The uprising was even greater than that which ousted long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The events have so many dimensions, and examining differing elements in the mix- Western media coverage, the role of the US, the power struggle in Egypt, the causes of the uprisings- provides a microcosm of everything that makes international politics so interesting.

Informal spokesmen for the military had said in recent months that they would intervene in civilian politics if the ‘majority’ willed it- and a petition started by the ‘Tamarod’, or ‘Rebel’ movement claimed to have gathered around 23 million signatures on a petition calling for Morsi to step down. Morsi’s approval rating was down to around 28%. The huge pressure on Morsi and his Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, culminated in the Egyptian Armed Forces deploying troops and tanks to the streets of Cairo and arresting Morsi and several other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, even those which dealt with non-political elements of the organisation like the Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie. This decision was taken after consultation with leaders of several opposition organisations (like the Salafist Al Nour party and the National Democratic Front) and representatives of Egypt’s differing social groups (like the Coptic Christian’s Pope) and an interim civilian government was appointed, led by Adly Mansour, recently appointed head of the Supreme Constitutional Court. However no one should have any doubt that the real power currently lies with Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, or General Sisi as he is generally known, the Supreme Commander of the army, and of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, which ruled the country during the transition from Mubarak to Morsi.

The military’s actions were met mainly with jubilation of the streets of Cairo; the scenes broadcast live on Al Jazeera from the mass crowds in Tahrir Square were incredible. There was some dissent: according to Ahram Online members of the ‘6 April Youth Movement , the Revolutionary Socialists, the Egyptian Popular Current and the Strong Egypt Party issued a statement last week in which they declared their refusal of both Muslim Brotherhood rule and military rule’. But the military still commands huge public approval- one poll puts it at 94%, the highest of any institution in Egypt. As The Economist pointed out, ‘one might have expected Egyptians to be especially wary of military intervention. The period of army rule between the fall of Mr Mubarak and Mr Morsi’s election was marked by hamfisted management, maladroit politics and vicious human-rights abuses. Before that, Egypt had suffered six decades of increasingly corrupt, army-dominated government behind a façade of civilian presidents, all of whom had previously been army officers’. ‘Virginity tests’ on female detainees, thousands of civilians tried in military courts, their closeness to the US and hugely entrenched role in civilian politics and the economy should, it seemed, have rung some alarm bells. The reaction around the world has generally been negative- the African Union has suspended Egypt’s membership, Tunisia has slammed the Army’s action, as has the governments of Turkey and Germany, to name a few. It’s not difficult to see why a country like Turkey would be highly suspicious of military intervention in civilian affairs, given its long record of military coups. But many liberal commentators in the West have also joined the chorus of condemnation of this ‘military coup’- Rupert Cornwell writing in The Independent probably sumed up the feelings best when he contrasted the ousting of Nixon in the 70’s to the way Morsi was overthrown. Most good Western liberals believe that the best way to remove someone you don’t like from power is through the ballot box or a constitutional process, as Nixon was; the Egyptian people should have waited patiently another 3 years or so until the next presidential elections came around, rather than engaging in messy direct action to remove an official. However if you are one of the 25% of Egyptians living in poverty, or a member of the liberal middle class seeing a slow stripping of your hard-won freedoms by the Muslim Brotherhood, then you don’t have 3 years to spare, and there are no constitutional mechanism for removing a president before their term has finished in Egypt. The stakes are so much higher than they are in elections in the West, and so millions felt it was necessary to remove Morsi now, not in the future. Besides, most of the liberal commentators flocking to defend ‘democracy’ now had nothing to say during the decades of Western-backed dictatorship in Egypt, so their sincerity is in serious doubt.

The Brotherhood itself echoed the Western commentators by claiming that Morsi was the ‘legitimate’ government of Egypt, thereby painting the uprising’s demands as ‘illegitimate’. However this assumes that once a leader is chosen by the people they are bound to that choice until the term is up; as political scientist David Beetham has argued, the protests constituted an act of delegitimisation in themselves. The withdrawal of consent and demand for Morsi’s removal was in itself removing the legitimacy of the government. Furthermore, there are questions to be raised about how ‘democratically’ Morsi was elected. The West usually focuses solely on whether elections are formally ‘free and fair’- that is the absence of voting fraud or physical coercion. However a richer conception of the democratic process requires a relatively level playing field upon which candidates can compete. In 2012 the Brotherhood and the Mubarak-camp candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, had prior organisational capacity and vastly superior funding to all other candidates and parties. And not only that, but the Brotherhood was well known for going in to rural areas and providing social services to effectively bribe the poor to vote for them. In an interview with the BBC’s Shaima Khalil, the spokesman for the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Mohamad Zidan, responded to these accusations as follows: ‘that’s fine then… this is democracy. Let the others provide more services… then they will win the race. Let them do it, it’s a race’. This is a stunning admission from a senior FJP figure that the Brotherhood has a strategy of providing social services in return, effectively, for votes. Other parties and candidates lack the ability and money to do this (they don’t have wealthy backers in the Gulf) and so find themselves at a disadvantage.

As to the fact that the military took over; the unfortunate fact of Egyptian politics is that the Egyptian Armed Forces are still the real power brokers behind the scenes, and they were the vehicle that the protesters chose to use to remove the Brotherhood from power. What matters now is how the army uses their new found power, and how the protests monitor and keep checks on the army’s power until a new civilian government can fully take over. The early signs are worrying- what appears to be a relatively unprovoked massacre of 51 Morsi supporters in Cairo by the army has got events off to a terrible start. Evidence has emerged suggesting that many were shot as they were kneeling in prayer, including some children. It would take some stunning prejudice against the Brotherhood to think that the protesters could have been violent enough to warrant turning the area into a free-fire zone, injuring over 440 people. The Guardian reported that ‘the killings are being reported by state media as a legitimate action by the Egyptian Armed Forces in defence of the revolution’; words which can’t fail to remind everyone of the waves of terror that were unleashed ‘in defence of the revolution’ in post-revolutionary France, Russia and China. However, as Sheri Berman wrote in Foreign Affairs the other month, these problems often stem from the legacy of dictatorship- decades of oppression and divide and rule tactics means that deeply entrenched fault lines in society start to emerge, and the ‘deep state’ and old institutions remain more than a residue of influence upon the political behaviour. It’s not generally the revolution that causes the issues, but rather removing the hand of oppression freezing society allows the deeply infested poison of dictatorship to be drawn out, often with messy results. That said, the army is itself part of the old ‘deep state’, and so handing them the reins of power willingly is a risky strategy at best.

An interesting quirk of these events is that the urban revolutionaries have found themselves unwittingly allied with the United States government in one facet of the debate. Egyptian Streets declared that ‘THIS IS NOT A COUP D'ETAT’, arguing instead that the army was merely implementing the revolutionary wishes of the people. The US too, is reluctant to call it a coup, though for entirely different reasons. As chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman wrote, ‘as soon as the United States declares that the Egyptian government has been overthrown by a coup, it is legally bound to cut off aid to Egypt’, something it doesn’t want to do given its close relationship with the Egyptian military. In Western commentary, one of the few voices cheering on the coup came from the conservative Wall Street Journal, which came out with this gem: ‘Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy’. Wishing the Pinochet treatment on Egyptians is a throwback to the old Cold War days, when US papers would openly praise neo-Nazi and genocidal dictators in their columns (example: Time described the takeover of General Suharto in Indonesia in the 60’s, who took power in a bloodbath of over 500,000 people, as the West’s ‘best news in Asia’). It is slightly disconcerting that the Egyptian revolution finds friends in such quarters. There are also other slightly dubious aspects about certain parts of the opposition, which I will write about in another post. 

A question needs to be asked about how everyone in the West failed to predict this (again). In fact, a close look back at pre-June 30^th reporting shows some tentative signs of things to come. Mohamed ElBaradei, the respected figure-head of the opposition, former UN weapons inspector, and Nobel Peace laureate, was writing in Foreign Policy a month ago about how ‘people are now saying something that we never thought was possible before: that they want the Army to come back to stabilize the situation… Egypt is teetering on the brink’ (‘Case Study: Egypt’, Foreign Policy, 201). The afore mentioned Shaima Khalil of the BBC, who recorded an excellent 5-part documentary series for the BBC World Service covering all major aspects of Egyptian politics, found many protesters gearing up for a huge change in the country. Cairo has experienced protests nearly weekly since Morsi’s takeover, and she found demonstrators holding banners saying things like ‘the people want a military coup right now’. In the programme, a professor from the American university in Cairo said that ‘if we continue with this chaos, either on the economic or the political side, I expect that we are maybe going to see something of the magnitude of the revolution in the coming year or two’. The Tamarod movement was in fact already claiming that this was going to be a second revolution prior to the June 30^th protests- so close observers of the country may have had a rough idea of things to come. However no one can really be blamed for missing it- political events, especially those as messy as revolutions, are nearly impossible to predict, because there are so many variables involved; ‘theorising’ in political science does us little good here. More worryingly, Khalil also reported that she heard two chilling words being uttered with disconcerting frequency in recent months: ‘Civil War’.

The next post will examine causes of the revolution and where the future of Egypt lies. 

Egypt, the Arab Spring, and the US

Establishment international relations analysts in the West view the justification for their existence in terms of the utility their work has for decision makers. They often end their articles in academic journals with policy prescriptions for government officials. This partly helps explain the wide disparities in coverage and analysis of comparable conflicts and political events around the world: protests in Turkey are discussed in great detail, those in Bulgaria ignored; a war where millions die in the Congo is side-lined, but conflict in Syria has thousands of pages of analysis dedicated to it. This reflects, in part, the relative strategic priority assigned to different events and nations by the government of the state the analysts call their home. Most IR work is carried out in the US, and so they spend their time studying and coming up with policy prescriptions for areas the US considers to house its vital strategic interests; the Middle East is far more important to the US than Central Africa, and so the corresponding volume of academic analysis dedicated to the two regions reflects the incongruity in importance US planners and policy makers assign to the two areas.

I write this because recent events betray this fact in its entirety. Since the June 30^th protests in Egypt several articles about the situation have already appeared on Foreign Affairs, the journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations (probably the largest establishment institution for IR analysis). Having several articles published on the website of possibly the main IR journal two days after a political event is notable. It signifies that analysts believe urgent policy advice is needed for US governmental planners for the Middle East; it signifies that the US considers Egypt to be a country of major importance to US interests.

There is ample evidence to suggest that this is the case and ample reason why it would be. Egypt, the most populous Arab country, is located right at the heart of the Arab world in an incredibly important geo-political location. The Suez Canal is the connection between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, the sea route between East and West. The Sinai Peninsula connects Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, and is a historic locus of political strife involving Israel, Egypt and outside powers. Egypt is known as the ‘heartland of Arab discontent’, with a tradition of revolution and uprising; Nasser was once one of the biggest enemies of the West for his anti-imperialism and attempted moves towards Arab independence. What happens in Egypt effects the rest of the region, and what happens in the region effects the rest of the world.

It then comes as little surprise that the Egyptian military receives more military aid from the US- around $1.3 billion a year- than any other country in the world, bar Israel. US troops are stationed in the Sinai (more are being moved there currently), and close relations between the US and Egyptian governments have been entrenched since the days of Sadat.

The Arab Spring is a complex phenomenon that has been subject to many competing interpretations. The situation in Egypt is in many ways evidence of a true revolution taking place; democratic transformations don’t happen overnight. Sheri Berman detailed in Foreign Affairs the other month how most modern democracies had years long, sometimes generational struggles to achieve the gains they have today, on occasion even descending into civil war before coming out the other end (the US is a prime example). Those upheavals which we uncontroversially describe as ‘revolutions’ today often took years, and smaller events which were at the time described as revolutions, like those in the 2000s in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, will probably not be judged as such by history.

The struggle in Egypt has been characterised as taking on three parts- against the Mubarak government in 2011, against the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) regime in 2012, and against the new Morsi government in 2013. But there is another underlying and pervasive struggle against counter-revolutionary forces present which is often missed. As Tariq Ali claimed in New Left Review a couple of months ago, ‘any adequate analysis of the outcomes of the Arab Spring must reckon with Washington’s tight defence of its interests in the region’ (‘Between Past and Future’; New Left Review; 2013 (80)) . This isn’t merely leftist dogmatism; a careful reading of the establishment journals and a close look at US policy reveals as much. Writing in the same issue as Sheri Berman, Seth Jones of the conservative RAND Corporation gave a realistic assessment of US policy during the Arab Spring. According to him, the US and its allies ‘need to protect their strategic interests in the region- balancing against rogue states such as Iran, ensuring access to energy resources, and countering violent extremists. Achieving these goals will require working with some authoritarian governments’ (‘The Mirage of the Arab Spring’; Foreign Affairs; 2013; 92(1)). This is more or less what the US is doing and should be doing, according to him. He is honest when he states that ‘a number of authoritarian Arab countries… are essential partners in protecting [US] interests’. However the key piece of analysis comes at the end of the article, where he states that the reality is ‘that some democratic governments in the Arab world would almost certainly be more hostile to the United States than their authoritarian predecessors, because they would be more responsive to the populations of their own countries’, which he goes on to show are highly unsupportive of the US role in the region (i.e. in 2012 19% of Egyptians had a favourable view of the US, according to a Pew Research poll).

Jones inadvertently hit the nail on the head. He recognises that democracy is actually one of the biggest threats the US faces in the Arab world, something to be combated at all costs, at least for as long as the US defines its interests in a way counter to the wishes of the majority of the population. As Jones realises, any move towards democracy would make Arab governments ‘more responsive to the populations of their countries’, and since the vast majority of the populations want the US out of their country, to have domestic control over their country’s resources and foreign policies, and to have an economy run in the interests of the majority of the population, then almost by definition the US must be opposed to democracy in the region, Egypt included. And indeed US actions have shown this to be the case. Jones, for his part, concludes from this that it is quite proper for the US to be opposing democracy in the Middle East- and using his warped logic that is a rational course to take. For the sane majority, however, we should conclude the opposite: that the US should leave the region in accordance with the wishes of the population.

More to come on Egypt as events unfold. 

The Economist and Media Bias

I’ve read The Economist every week for years now, and every so often an article comes along which reminds me never to underestimate the newspaper’s ability to infuriate me with its incredible reserve of pro-Western war mongering. The July 22^nd-28^th issue featured a front cover with ‘Can Iran Be Stopped?’ plastered across it, the name of the main leader in the paper this week. It also contained a 3 page briefing on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The Economist has a proven track record at advocating every intervention and Western war our elites cook up, including the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and intervention in Libya and Syria. The language it regularly uses about the need to ‘punish’ nations which ‘misbehave’ economically or politically often has more than a slight undertone of good-old British imperialism. This week’s leading story was another case study in the art of omission and distortion that the newspaper has mastered.

The main leader started with an effort to claim that the West should disregard the recent victory of Hassan Rohani in the Iranian presidential elections; Rohani was considered the moderate in the contest. We shouldn’t laud the new President’s calls for serious negotiation with the West according to the paper, as apparently ‘Iran’s regional assertiveness and its nuclear capacity mean that it is a more dangerous place than it ever was before’. By ‘regional’ they mean the Middle East, and a glance at Arab public opinion, the majority of citizens in the Middle East, shows that they actually consider the United States to be the biggest threat in the region, not Iran. According to a study by the Wilson Center and the United States Institute of Peace carried out in 2011, ‘Iran remained far behind… the United States: 59 percent identified the United States, and 18 percent identified Iran as one of the two greatest threats’ in the region. Other studies show similar, or even more pronounced results. Of course, The Economist has little regard for the ignorant opinions of the natives. That they consider the US to possess far more ‘regional assertiveness’ than Iran is irrelevant. That Israel is the only country with ‘nuclear capacity’- actually nuclear weapons- is also presumably irrelevant. Note also the construction of Iran as a ‘dangerous place’, not merely a dangerous state or government. The portrayal of enemies and far-away lands as mysterious and dangerous has a long tradition in Western journalism and writing.

The paper notes with implicit approval that Western-imposed sanctions have inflicted ‘severe economic pain… on Iran’s people’, ‘with 40% of Iranians thought to be living below the poverty line’; there is no comment on the fact that our actions are seriously harming the lives of millions of innocent Iranians.

It then provides a sober analysis of Obama’s recent decision to arm the rebels in Syria: ‘many believe the greater reason was [Obama’s] reluctance to see Mr Assad hold on to power as a client of Iran’s’. This cynical ‘real politic’ is actually applauded by the paper, which claims that a major reason to not only arm the rebels but to establish a no-fly zone over Syria is to ‘stem the rise of Persian power’. Apparently it is ‘not in the West’s interest that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon’. That one of the West’s major allies in the region (Saudi Arabia) is probably a far greater sponsor of terrorism than Iran is of little importance to the paper. So presumably is the fact that Israel and the US have carried out terrorist assassinations of civilian scientists in Iran and sponsored exiled Iranian terrorist groups like MEK, something I wrote about briefly here. The historical context is utterly stripped from the article, and Iran is portrayed as the aggressive would-be hegemon in the region, a fantasy which ignores the elementary facts available to anyone who cares to look: namely that the US and Britain have sought to control the Middle East for their own interests, often with extreme aggression and terrorism, for decades. The piece ends with the battle cry: ‘When Persian power is on the rise, it is not the time to back away from the Middle East’; suggesting that there is some voluntary retreat from the Middle East by the Western powers, a fabrication unsurprisingly not elaborated on by the paper.

The briefing on Iran’s nuclear programme is somewhat more subtle, revealing in what it excludes rather than what it asserts. It follows the tradition of nearly every Western politician and journalist of the last decade and a half in hysterically asserting that the time is near when Iran will be able to acquire nuclear weapons- maybe true, but the humble reminder that people have been making that charge- falsely- for years, is again unsurprisingly missing from the paper’s piece. It presents Iran as making an ‘impossible demand’ in negotiations, ignoring the US role in scuppering potential deals and negotiations, something I wrote about here. It claims that ‘British and American intelligence sources think [Iran] is about a year away from having enough fissile material to make a bomb’, ignoring that it is the intelligence agency’s assessments (and the IAEA’s) that Iran hasn’t made the decision to attempt to get a bomb. Jacques Hymans wrote in Foreign Affairs the other month that ‘at the end of January, Israeli intelligence officials quietly indicated that they have downgraded their assessments of Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb… Now, Israel believes that Iran will not have its first nuclear device before 2015 or 2016.’ That will probably be pushed back even further in the future.

It quotes a researcher at the highly establishment RAND Corporation, Greg Jones, and a more respectable source, David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, to back up its arguments. It also references the oft-mentioned 2011 IAEA report that I discussed here. Left out of the picture are those such as former Director of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team, Robert Kelly, who argues that the report proves nothing, and former head of the IAEA, Hans Blix, who has claimed that the hysteria about Iran is over-hyped. Even Jack Straw has come out recently to say that there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapon- far from it.

Ultimately, thankfully, the paper doesn’t advocate a military attack on Iran, though for strictly practical reasons, as is the usual in the media. The (il)legality, or the (im)morality of a strike, isn’t even discussed. They do have the sense to recognise the danger that an attack upon Iran could end with a ‘full-scale invasion’ of the country, something even The Economist doesn’t want.

This is an example of the endless systemic bias inherent in the media, often represented most clearly in liberal papers like The Economist. A source of information they may be, but one needs to know how to read the media: a task I am still learning. 

A Few Words on Barack Obama

It’s been a while, but exams are now over for me (bar the unfortunate fact that I have to retype my world politics exam because my handwriting is so terrible), and so regular blog posts will now return. To get back into it, and kick off the summer, a few comments on President Obama.

Barack Obama remains surprisingly popular among Europeans in general, particularly young Europeans. At Warwick’s election night event last year, cheers rang through the building every time Obama won a state, and choruses of boos were to be heard whenever Mitt Romney’s face appeared on the big screen. I’ve long found this bizarre- I could perhaps understand why the casual observer may have once been taken in by the sweeping rhetoric of the first black President, but it seemed to me that anyone who took even a passing dispassionate look at policies and practice, rather than just rhetoric, would see the sharp continuities between the hated Bush administration and the adored Obama successor.

Reading through a 2010 article by Pakistani-English writer Tariq Ali, I was struck by the comparison he drew between Obama and Woodrow Wilson, ‘whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia, and his treaties handed one colony after another to his partners in war’ (‘President of Cant’, New Left Review, 2010, 61, p.116). It seems an apt comparison indeed, since for all the fine words from Obama, his administration has more or less carried on the major policies of the Bush administration, and in some instances even upped the intensity.

Drone strikes are an obvious example. Obama has increased their frequency by around 6 times that of Bush, including expanding their use in Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen. I won’t deal with this topic here- it will be saved for a later blog post- but suffice to say this represents a massive expansion of an unregulated, most probably illegal (Professor David Luban of Georgetown University said in a lecture at Warwick earlier this year that the memo justifying the strikes was ‘terrible legal reasoning’), global assassination campaign, waged in any country Obama and his advisors deem to be housing enemies of the US. The destabilising effects in Pakistan are well known; those in Yemen less so, revealed most fully by excellent independent journalist Jeremy Scahill in his new book about US foreign policy ‘Dirty Wars’.See this short documentary by him here for a window into the impact on Yemen.

Connected to this is Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan.  His ‘surge’ in Afghanistan has probably left the US in a worse military shape than before, with the Afghani troops the US army is training turning their weapons on their mentors more often than in any other US war in history (so-called green-on-blue violence). The Afghan population has seemingly turned completely against the US, Afghanistan is now constantly in the top two worst places in the world to be a woman (along with the DRC), Afghanistan is the number one source of refugees in the world (over 2.5 million), unknown 10’s of 1000’s of civilians are dead, the CIA is fuelling corruption by funnelling millions of dollars of ‘ghost money’ into the Afghani leadership… and so on.

Recently it has been revealed that the global kidnapping campaign started by the Bush administration (often referred to as ‘rendition’) has actually carried on under Obama. So-called ‘black sites’, legal black holes that the CIA set up after 9/11 to imprison and torture people they didn’t like without any semblance of due process (given a relatively easy ride in the Hollywood blockbuster ‘Zero Dark Thirty’) have carried on under Obama, at the least in Somalia. Scahill, the afore-mentioned independent journalist who also revealed the Somalian black site, has documented the continuation of and increase in so-called ‘Special Operations’: secret operations carried out all over the globe with no transparency or legitimacy, little oversight, no public knowledge, and often murky consequences.

I’ve written about how the Obama administration has continued the absurd Bush policies (and policies of more or less every President of the US) towards Iran, and we can only hope that Obama doesn’t make his Presidency remembered for starting a disastrous war with Iran before 2016.

That doesn’t even scratch the surface of foreign policy- domestically, on civil liberties in particular, he has been no better.

The Bush administration was notorious for hauling people into off-shore prisons like Guantanamo Bay, without the possibility of a trial or release. However under Obama, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 has actually made it legal for the government to detain any US citizen or foreign national indefinitely without charge or trial, if the executive branch deems them ‘suspected of terrorism’. Signed in to law quietly on New Year’s Day 2012, it marked the codification of what Bush had always done anyway and damn the law: the destruction of the right to a fair and speedy trial, habeas corpus. The act is currently under challenge in court by a group of academics, activists and journalists- the part of the act relating to indefinite detention was struck down, but the Obama administration has appealed (the case continues). Most interestingly, the administration refused in court to promise that the plaintiffs in the case (such as Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky) wouldn’t ever find themselves being held indefinitely under the NDAA for their work.

Another aspect of Obama’s attack on civil liberties is the ‘War on Whistleblowers’. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson passed the Espionage Act, designed to put foreign spies in prison (and almost certainly crush dissent domestically) during WW1. Obama has blown the dust off the act and charged more people under it than all other post-war Presidents combined. The people charged include Bradley Manning, who leaked the ‘collateral murder’ video of a US helicopter opening fire on unarmed civilians, and thousands of low-level classified diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. He was kept for over 1,000 days without trial in conditions the UN’s special rapporteur on torture described as amounting to ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was also charged. There is some evidence to suggest that a secret indictment has been issued under the Espionage Act to charge Wikileaks founder and head Julian Assange.

Lastly for this blog is the vast domestic surveillance that has carried on under Obama. In the last week or so it has come out that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring between 150 - 300 million American's phone calls, and the ‘PRISM’ programme taking mass amounts of data on users from internet service providers like Google and Facebook. Those who follow these issues closely would have been more or less aware that this kind of thing was going on already, and whistleblowers like William Binney had revealed it long before the latest story. However this time we have documents fully confirming it, leaked by (now former) NSA official Edward Snowden, who has now fled to Hong Kong. The Snowden leak has also revealed a glimpse into the Obama administration’s plans to wage global offensive cyber war- but that’s for another blog. Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists at the Guardian who received the documents from Snowden, has hinted that far more devastating revelations will follow in the near-future.

This blog has barely touched on the ways Obama has not been the ‘change we can believe in’. Tariq Ali pointed out in the article I quoted earlier that disenchanted former Obama-supporters tend ‘to blame structural constraints rather than the incumbent himself’, seemingly unwilling to accept that Obama is little different to George Bush in the face of his apparently progressive and inspiring speeches. But one’s elocution is no measure of one's moral fibre; we should assess Obama without reference to his speeches, skin colour, looks or charms. Policies are what matters. It is true that there are deep power structures in the US which prevent any President from enacting real change, and the fundamentals of US Empire go far deeper than any one man. But the gusto with which he has furthered the cause of US hegemony overseas and domestic state control should give us all strong pause for thought when cheering on the next tall, handsome, ‘liberal’ Democrat. 

UPDATE: A day or two after writing this, Mehdi Hasan at the Huffington Post wrote a good new piece arguing the same thing: worth a read here.

An Elementary Thought Experiment

A short summation of the 4-piece series on Iran, from the perspective of an alternative world:

Imagine, if you will, that in 1953 Iran overthrew the elected government of the United States and installed a puppet dictator who would rule for 26 years, keeping US natural resources firmly under the control of Iranian companies. Imagine that in 1979 this Iranian-backed ruler was overthrown in a popular revolution, and US national independence restored. In time, Iran would invade both Mexico and Canada, building at least 42 military bases in the surrounding region, replete with a naval fleet to patrol the Gulf of Mexico. Iran then utilises politically distorted intelligence estimates to demand that the US surrender its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium, in return for a vague promise not to pursue ‘regime change’ in the US. Any pretence of negotiations is undermined by the threat of an attack upon the US, in violation of the UN Charter. Imagine American scientists are assassinated, infrastructure decimated by ‘cyber-bugs’, and devastating sanctions imposed, causing a pharmaceutical crisis for the US people. Iran’s major regional ally, Venezuela, works with US Christian terrorist groups who seek to overthrow the US government. A conference on establishing a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in the Americas, to be attended by the US, is whimsically cancelled by Iran to ensure that their ally Venezuela be allowed to unilaterally retain the only nuclear weapons in the region.

Rhetorical musings aside, everything written here has manifested itself in reality, with one key difference: the official ‘enemy’ is not the perpetrator of the crimes. We are.

The Bloody Formula

Having previously been an avid Formula 1 watcher, I find myself compelled to write a piece on one of the factors that contributed to my stopping watching the sport I love a couple of years ago: namely, the utter disregard for the political implications of the sport’s refusal to cancel the Grand Prix in Bahrain. The sport has collectively contributed to legitimising the regime in Bahrain, despite a vast human rights crisis in the country. The reasons are not hard to find.  

The Bahrain Grand Prix takes place this weekend. Since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 Bahrain has been largely off the news agenda and off the lips of Western officials, but the importance of the small Sheikdom is not negligible. Located in the most important strategic energy location in the world, the Gulf Peninsula, it forms a vital part of the system of global energy supplies. All 6 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, are ruled as dictatorships with severe levels of repression, and if one were to fall to democracy, the others could follow.

Bahrain has seen the most unrest of the GCC states since 2011, as the Shia majority has attempted to rise up against the minority Sunni rulers. Around 90 protesters have been shot dead in the streets. Incarceration without trial and torture is rampant, as confirmed in an official report set up by the Bahraini government as part of a ‘reform’ process. The report even stated that the torture and repression ‘could not have happened without the knowledge of higher echelons of the command structure’. The Bahraini government then went on a tour de force to whitewash its record, employing Western PR firms to use an array of techniques to make it seem like a progressive, reformist regime. The ostensive reform-agenda has failed to fool human rights groups, who have continued to document how doctors have been trialled for helping wounded protesters, activists have been taken from their homes in raids, and objectors to brutal police treatment have been thrown in prison.

In March 2011 Saudi Arabia ‘intervened’ in Bahrain (at the ‘request’ of the Bahraini government) to help put down the uprising, with little Western protest. Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote how a senior Western diplomat at the UN assured him that Hillary Clinton (then-US Secretary of State) gave an explicit green light to Saudi Arabia to carry out the invasion in return for Saudi support at the Arab League for the Western intervention in Libya. These claims were also reportedly given to the Asia Times Online which claims that ‘two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group’ stated that this US-Saudi deal had been struck. It is impossible to confirm these claims, but they seem plausible given the interests the US has in Bahrain, the close relationship between the Saudi’s and the US, and similar US actions in the past (more on that in later weeks).

Bahrain is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and along with the other Gulf states, buys millions of dollars (and pounds) worth of military equipment off the US and UK every year. The Saudi National Guard, which was the main force used to crush the protests in Bahrain, has long been trained by British forces, including in ‘public order and sniper training’. In September 2011, the US moved to sell ‘armored vehicles and optically-tracked wire-guided missiles to Bahrain for an estimated cost of $53 million’. In 2012, ‘licenses were granted for £2.2m-worth of UK weapons to be exported’ to Bahrain. Bahrain is designated by the US as a ‘major non-NATO ally’.

A report by the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, headed by the now-US Secretary of State John Kerry, explicitly states why the US has made no effort to help the democracy protesters in Bahrain. The major goals for the US in the region, it explains, are for ‘The United States [to] carefully shape its military presence so as not to create a popular backlash, while retaining the capability to protect the free flow of critical natural resources and to provide a counterbalance to Iran’ (page 4). A passing mention to democracy is made, with no real recommendations on how this is to be achieved. The main focus for the US and UK is on preserving the dictatorial, bloody regime in Bahrain, a compliant, pro-Western government that does its best to serve Western interests and keep the population subdued.

Against this backdrop, Formula 1 has done its best to keep in line with elite opinion in the West. After the race was called off for a while in 2011, it has gone ahead the following two years despite mass protests by the Bahraini people calling for it to be cancelled. The wilful ignorance amongst the F1 elite is astounding- racing legend Jackie Stewart claimed that the unrest was ‘no different to the Glasgow Rangers and the Glasgow Celtics’, and that Bahrain has ‘already started a move towards democracy’. The ever-principled Bernie Ecclestone (head of F1) has compared the protests to those at Thatcher’s funeral in Britain, and last year called all controversy ‘a lot of nonsense’. He claimed he wanted an earthquake to occur so the media would start writing about that instead. In 2012, three-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel felt that it was ‘all a lot of hype’, and wished it would blow over so ‘then we can start worrying about the stuff that really matters like tyre temperatures, cars’. Clearly tear gas being fired at protesters, ITN film crew being forced to leave the country for filming protests, and detention of leading activists is of little concern to teams, drivers, and Formula 1 bosses.  

Conservative MP David Davis last year called it an ‘example of where big money is over-ruling serious ethical concerns’, and his analysis is surely partly correct. To F1, the money is far more important than the principle. However, the race acts not only as a large source of revenue for F1 and the Bahraini government, but it also helps legitimise the ruling class in Bahrain, the favoured Western allies. That there should be little concern for human rights and democracy is of little surprise, when the people who run F1 are no doubt immersed in the norms and values of the elite class to which they belong. Commercial incentives are important, but not necessarily the entire story. As Robert Fisk pointed out last year, would Bernie Ecclestone host a race in Iran or Syria, Western enemies, even if they were prepared to pay $40m to do so? The answer is likely no- F1 will host races in countries which are ruled by governments the West likes, no matter how oppressive they are. But when the government is an ‘official enemy’ of the West, suddenly the human rights issues, and the legitimacy which the race would lend the ‘enemy’ government, become important (China is a special case). That is why the Western client-regime of Bahrain will continue to be allowed to host races as it guns down and tortures its citizens- and why we won’t be hearing about the Tehran Grand Prix any time soon. 

Another post on Bahrain and the Gulf states will follow in the coming weeks.

The Boston Bombings

On the 15^th April two bombs exploded at Boston marathon killing at least 3 people and injuring over 100. On the same day, around 30 were killed in Iraq in bomb blasts and 160 wounded. On the same day, at least 16 workers were killed in Ghana in a mine collapse. The week before, 15 people were killed and nearly 50 injured in a bomb blast in Syria. Today, an earthquake hit the Iranian- Pakistani border killing at least 13 people, injuring around 20 and destroying ‘hundreds of houses’.

The media coverage of the above events couldn’t have been more distorted. The Boston bombing, which in terms of numbers was probably the least severe of the events, dominated the news. The mine collapse appeared to be barely news-worthy in the UK, despite over 5 times as many people dying- I only read about it on international news sites. One can understand why domestic events may be at the forefront of British news, given that in a world of strictly divided nation-states, events that happen within ‘British’ borders are likely to affect ‘British’ people politically, socially and culturally in a more immediate way than those events which happen overseas. Clearly, however, such arguments don’t apply in this case. Proximity fails to function as a reason too; as was pointed out to me, Syria is around 1,000 miles closer to the UK than Boston, Iraq 500 miles closer, and Ghana is roughly the same distance away.

The Boston bombing has led to some predictable and laughable reactions. One Fox News contributor reacted by claiming that all Muslims are ‘evil’ and that we should ‘kill them all’. Despite the obvious genocidal nature to the tweet it also ignores the fact that no one knows who carried out the bombing: statistically, more attacks are carried out in the US by right-wing terrorists than by Islamic ones. One blog records a few of the more extreme reactions from US citizens on Twitter- one of my personal favourites was this gem: ‘I swear to god I’ll murder the Korean moms, kids, dogs, dads, elders, everyone’.  Another blog points out that some have chosen to blame Jews or even the US government itself (happily, these are offset by some fine responses from Glenn Greenwald and Stephen Walt, amongst others).

More concerning is the way the mainstream British media is placing so much emphasis on the event over everything else. Taking a quick survey of the main media’s internet front pages this morning, the Guardian’s looked like this, and was fairly representative of all British outlets-

The ‘latest’ updates from the FBI on the bombing were considered more important news than an earthquake which has killed far more people. The Telegraph and BBC were much the same. The Independent had 7 stories listed on the Boston bombing before the earthquake was even mentioned.

This apparent devaluing of the lives of those of different colour, or perhaps culture, is made even more concerning when one considers the fact that ‘we’ are responsible for creating the conditions which led to the wave of bombings in Iraq yesterday. Furthermore, I came across another blog pointing out that 175 children killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan and beyond is barely treated as news in the US or UK, despite the bombings being comparable to the Boston attack (for those doubting that statement, I will give a detailed post on drones and why they constitute terrorism in the future).  

So why the focus on Boston and the neglect of every other tragic story, horrendous as they all are?  Is it racism? Cultural affinity? Pandering to readers who are more interested in America than Africa and the Middle East? Or a manifestation of the fact that much of our culture, politics, and media landscape is shaped in the image of the US, and naturally follows US events far more closely than that of ‘less important’ countries? The truth probably contains all those elements. For you and I though, we should extend the sense of compassion we feel for the 8-year boy killed in Boston to the Yemeni child killed in a US attack, the Ghanaian miner crushed to death, the family losing their house in an earthquake in Iran, and all those killed as bombs rip through crowds of innocent people in Iraq.