Manufacturing Hegemony
Saturday 18 January 2014
New Blog Up
After a long delay, the new Warwick Globalist website is up, complete with pages for their bloggers. You can access my page here- http://thewarwickglobalist.com/columnists/connor-woodman/. I will finally be getting back to regular blogging- the next piece, written up and ready to go, is on the possibilities of a 'Left realism' in international relations. This page will be kept up for reference and may be started up properly again one day, but until then keep an eye on the Globalist blog.
Monday 25 November 2013
On the Iranian Nuclear Deal
Whilst The
Warwick Globalist has some technical issues with getting the new blog up and running
I am using this one to comment on the Iranian nuclear deal. See here for an article I
wrote for The Warwick Globalist’s temporary website on the relationship between
the British establishment and the Gulf elites. There is a forthcoming piece on
the relationship between the ‘realist’ international school of thought and international
morality, a first blog on ‘theoretical’ issues in international relations.
Yesterday news came through that a preliminary deal had been
struck between Iran and the P5+1 over Iran’s nuclear programme. I’ve written
fairly extensively on this blog before about Iran, the West and the nuclear
issue, including a brief
history of Iranian-Western relations, discussion of whether
or not Iran’s nuclear programme actually has military dimensions, military
options for the prevention of Iran acquiring a weapon, and diplomatic
options for a peaceful resolution to the issue. I stand by what I said in
those posts and they all remain relevant for understanding the background to
yesterday’s deal.
There has been a lot of comment on the deal by people who
seem not to have taken the time to actually read it, and seem unaware that this
is only a preliminary deal aimed at creating the needed mutual trust between
the parties with a view to a comprehensive settlement in 6 months time. That
said, the deal is fairly impressive in its own right. The White
House release on the details shows how Iran is to “[h]alt all enrichment above 5% and dismantle the technical connections
required to enrich above 5%... Dilute below 5% or convert to a form not
suitable for further enrichment its entire stockpile of near-20% enriched
uranium before the end of the initial phase” (enrichment to around 3.5%
is the level needed for civilian nuclear energy purposes- 19.5% can be used for
some civilian purposes such as fuelling medical research reactors, but it is
also closer to the around-95% enrichment needed for a bomb). Iran has already
been recognised as keeping its stockpile of 19.5% enriched uranium at below the
level Israel considers necessary to make one nuclear device. The
latest IAEA report puts its stockpiles at 196 kg, below the 250kg mark
needed for a bomb. Additionally, Iran will “[n]ot increase its stockpile of 3.5% low enriched uranium, so that the
amount is not greater at the end of the six months than it is at the beginning,
and any newly enriched 3.5% enriched uranium is converted into oxide”.
Furthermore, Iran will “[n]ot commission the Arak reactor. Not fuel the Arak
reactor. Halt the production of fuel for the Arak reactor. No additional
testing of fuel for the Arak reactor. Not install any additional reactor
components at Arak. Not transfer fuel and heavy water to the reactor
site. Not construct a facility capable of reprocessing. Without
reprocessing, Iran cannot separate plutonium from spent fuel”. This stops fears
of Iran taking an alternative, plutonium route to a bomb at Arak. When it comes
to inspections, the White House report describes “[u]nprecedented transparency and intrusive monitoring of Iran’s nuclear
program”; Iran will “[p]rovide daily access by IAEA inspectors at Natanz and
Fordow. This daily access will permit inspectors to review surveillance camera
footage to ensure comprehensive monitoring. This access will provide even
greater transparency into enrichment at these sites and shorten detection time
for any non-compliance. Provide IAEA access to centrifuge assembly
facilities. Provide IAEA access to centrifuge rotor component production and
storage facilities. Provide IAEA access to uranium mines and mills. Provide
long-sought design information for the Arak reactor”. This comes off the back of
a deal
Iran recently struck with the IAEA to expand inspections of many nuclear
sites. When it comes to centrifuges, Iran agreed “[n]ot install additional
centrifuges of any type. Not install or use any next-generation
centrifuges to enrich uranium. Leave inoperable roughly half of installed
centrifuges at Natanz and three-quarters of installed centrifuges at Fordow, so
they cannot be used to enrich uranium”.
Given
the extensive surveillance and “unprecedented intrusive monitoring”, it will be
hard for Iran to break these constraints and get away with it. Officials
familiar with the deal told the Washington Post that “[t]he
concessions not only halt Iran’s nuclear advances but also make it virtually
impossible for Tehran to build a nuclear weapon without being detected”. It
should also be noted that it was already the
opinion at the beginning of the year of James Clapper, US National Intelligence
Director, that “Iran could not divert safeguarded material and produce a
weapon-worth of WGU (weapons-grade uranium) before this activity is discovered”.
It
should also be noted that the relief Iran has received in return is minimal-
maybe $6-7 billion in sanctions reductions (despite what an Israeli
disinformation campaign in Washington tried to claim). The White House release
boasts how it is “maintaining the vast bulk of our sanctions, including the
oil, finance, and banking sanctions architecture”. Iran’s $100 billion in
foreign exchange holdings will also be unavailable to their government. A
US official told Foreign Policy that “Iran will actually be worse
off at the end of this six month deal than it is today”. The sanctions are
already severely affecting Iranian people; a Foreign Policy piece details
how the “results have been devastating for the Iranian population, triggering a
collapse of industry, skyrocketing inflation, and massive unemployment. As the
rich and politically-connected prosper under sanctions, Iran's middle class has
disappeared, and even access to food and medicine has been compromised”. Given that
this is expected to continue and perhaps worsen, it is surprising that Iran has
given in to such stringent demands at all.
The
reactions to the deal have been revealing. All along Netanyahu slammed the
prospects of a deal, seemingly before he even knew what the final details would
be. After the deal was sealed in the early morning of Sunday, Netanyahu
described it as a “historic failure”, and the Israeli Economics Minister, Naftali
Bennett, proclaimed
that “[i]f a nuclear suitcase blows up five years from now in New York or
Madrid it will be because of the deal signed this morning”. The deputy speaker of parliament, MK Moshe Feiglin,
of a ruling coalition party Likud, claimed
the deal was “tantamount to the Munich Agreement of the late 1930s”. These wild
ravings push Israel more and more to the fringes of the international community
and are isolating it even from its allies. It could count on its new friend
France to do
its best to scupper the deal early on in the process, but now the only
allies Israel seems to have on this issue are the Gulf dictators, chiefly
the totalitarian Saudi Arabia. The Defence Minister also reaffirmed that “[a]ll
options are still on the table”, an illegal threatening of the use of military
force, not that anyone pays any attention to international law.
Reading through
the English-language Israeli press has been an interesting experience too- some
more measured reactions from Haaretz and the US-based
Forward
are counterposed against some more dubious responses. The online Times of
Israel, for instance, explained
that the problem isn’t that the details of the deal are bad, just that Iran is “a
cunning and deceptive adversary”, and that “Iran has never acknowledged that it
is in fact marching to the bomb”. Yedioth Ahronoth, one of the biggest
newspapers in Israel, said that
one of the problems with the deal is that “[t]he Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons (NPT) will effectively be finished”- not true, but both editorials are
even more odd in light of the fact that Israel itself has refused to admit to
its nuclear arsenal and refused to sign the NPT, seriously damaging its
efficacy.
The fact
is that the only thing which would make Netanyahu happy would be a complete
elimination of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities, an absurd position, not
least because Iran has the right to peaceful nuclear enrichment for civilian
purposes under the NPT. He knows this demand is never going to be met, so as Trita
Parsi put
it in Foreign Affairs, “[t]here is reason to believe, then, that
Israel’s insistence on zero enrichment is aimed to ensure that no deal is
struck at all”. Even some parts of the Israeli military establishment seem at odds with Netanyahu on this: Christian Science Monitor reported
that an Israeli military official told them that the “intelligence
branch does not think this demand is realistic”, and that the negotiations
offered prospects for stability in the region. Every state needs to exaggerate the
threat posed by its enemies in order to further its domestic agenda, and Israel
is no different. Whilst Netanyahu asserts that “[i]t’s 1938 and Iran is Germany”,
the vast majority of scholars one should take seriously consider the Iranian
regime to be a ‘rational actor’, not the kind of actor which will fire nuclear
weapons at Israel in what would be the clearest case of state-suicide in history.
Netanyahu wants to eliminate any possibility that Iran could ever challenge
Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region. If he were serious about
eliminating the very-real scourge of nuclear weapons he would take seriously the
possibilities for establishing a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East;
but since that would entail Israel giving up their arsenal, he would prefer to
use illegal force against Iran.
The US
has done what it must in putting aside the more extreme of Israel’s demands,
and we can only hope that the reports coming out that Netanyahu is, in private,
willing to give the deal a chance, are true. Let’s hope that this
editorial from Yedioth
Ahronoth, which seems to suggest that Netanyahu is and should
be willing to risk World War 3 over this deal, represents the fringes of
mainstream thought in Israel.
Thursday 29 August 2013
Syria and The Fog of War
This shall probably be
the last of the posts on this website; I have been asked by the editor-in-chief
of the Warwick Globalist (an international affairs magazine on campus) to begin
blogging for their revamped and rebooted website come the start of term in
October. So after 8,000 hits and lots of positive feedback from people of a
variety of political persuasions (or none at all) I am pleased with how the
experiment has gone, and have enjoyed writing this blog. I will post a link to
the new blog when it is up and running, and hope everyone will continue to read
it over at the Globalist website.
It had been said that the first casualty of war is truth, and
Syria is a perfect illustration of this fact. Deciphering and manoeuvring through
the labyrinth of lies, distortions, agendas, secrets, deals, threats, and power
politics that defines the Syrian civil war is no easy task. I have become
somewhat sceptical of the possibility of achieving a substantial degree of
knowledge about the conflict, at least for now. The historian often has a far
easier task than the political scientist.
Having said that, it is the responsibility of citizens of
this country, a country which maintains a disproportionate level of power and
influence around the world, to seek to understand the conflict as far as is
possible, since we have found ourselves once more faced with the possibility
that our government will attack a country in the Middle East (correction- for now at least, they won't. Seconds before publishing this Parliament rejected a motion for military action against Syria, an astonishing event).
The
Chemical Attack
There have been murmurs about the ‘ghost of Iraq’ casting a
shadow over potential intervention in Syria, and quite rightly. We as a nation
are far from coming to terms with and atoning for the devastation we wrought in
that country, a ‘moral obscenity’ (to borrow Mr Hague’s description of the gas
attack in Syria) that far outweighs the particular attack we condemn so
vehemently today. And the uncomfortable fact remains that, despite Obama and
Cameron’s rhetoric, we don’t know exactly what happened near Damascus on the 21st
of August. We can’t even conclude which side carried out the attack for
certain. If it was the regime, we aren’t sure whether it was merely a rogue
commander or an institutionalised policy carried out from the highest levels. ABC
News has reported that:
‘the
intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an
alleged chemical weapons attack that killed at least 100 people is no
"slam dunk," with questions remaining about who actually controls
some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself
ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say…multiple U.S. officials
used the phrase "not a slam dunk" to describe the intelligence
picture’.
This is highly significant given Obama’s
assertions that the US ‘concludes’ that the Syrian government carried out
the attack as a matter of government policy. Given the terrible record of botched
and distorted intelligence in the run up to the Iraq War (and throughout
‘post-War’ history), we ought to be highly sceptical of government claims of
this kind.
Why
Intervention?
No one should have any illusions that the proposed
intervention has anything to do with humanitarian impulses or the enforcement
of international law. A brief survey of Western policy and history in the
Middle East should put rest to that idea. America has frequently
disregarded international law itself, often refusing to sign conventions (such
as the Convention on Cluster Munitions) and ignoring international law even
when it has formally agreed to it. Western politicians only speak of the crimes
of the Syrian regime, and rarely if ever about the alleged atrocities carried
out by factions of the rebel forces- for instance it has been reported in
some foreign media that a massacre of hundreds of civilians was carried out
at Lattakia by rebel Islamists. Little interest has been shown in these allegations.
Selective empathy should come as no surprise to students of
international affairs, and the reasons underlying the distinction between
‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims are rarely hard to find. In this case the
Syrian government is considered ‘bad’ because it is Iran’s only major ally in
the region, and there is a cold war being waged in the Middle East between two
poles: Saudi Arabia, the Sunni states and the West on one side, and Iran,
Hezbollah, and Syria (and perhaps Russia) on the other. The US, UK and France
have been hand in hand with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and to a lesser
extent Kuwait and Qatar in their attempts to arm and fund the rebels. The CIA
has long been involved in training favoured
rebel forces at bases in Jordan, as well as helping organising the flow
of weapons across the Turkish-Syrian border. They all hope to weaken and
isolate Iran by knocking out its major ally; they would then enjoy the patronage
of rebel forces who would partly owe their victory to Gulf and Western backers. That
totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia are joining the US in backing the rebels
should tell you something about the motives underlying the support given: it
has nothing to do with democracy and freedom, but everything to do with power
and interests, as is always the case with Great Power politics. [1]
The Syrian story has got weirder and weirder as time has gone
by- this
article from Al Monitor purported
to record a ‘diplomatic report’ from the Kremlin on a secret meeting between
Russia’s Putin and Saudi Arabia’s head of intelligence, the slimy Prince Bandar
(who used to be the Saudis' ambassador to the US). This is how The Independent described Bandar:
‘His most recent
travels, rarely advertised, have taken him to both London and Paris for
discussions with senior officials. As ambassador, Prince Bandar left an imprint
that still has not quite faded. His voice was one of the loudest urging the
United States to invade Iraq in 2003. In the 1980s, Prince Bandar became mired
in the Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua. Months of applying pressure on the
White House and Congress over Syria have slowly born fruit. The CIA is believed
to have been working with Prince Bandar directly since last year in training
rebels at base in Jordan close to the Syrian border’
Al Monitor’s article,
which was reported
and expanded on in The Telegraph,
claims that Bandar gave a thinly veiled threat to Putin that if he didn’t
withdraw his support for Assad then Chechen Islamic terrorists would attack the
2014 Winter Olympics. He allegedly said to Putin that ‘I can give you a
guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea
next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are
controlled by us, and they will not move in the Syrian territory’s direction
without coordinating with us. These groups do not scare us. We use them in the
face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria’s
political future’. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I came across this-
if true it’s an open admission from a senior Saudi official that they have a
hand in Chechen terrorism, use Islamic terrorists against Assad’s regime in
Syria, plan to abandon them if they win and most significantly an open threat
to attack Russia if Putin refuses to comply. This was first reported in the
Russian press, and then the Lebanese-based Al
Monitor. Bandar went on to offer a grand deal which included ‘an alliance
between the OPEC cartel and Russia, which together produce over 40m barrels a
day of oil, 45pc of global output. Such a move would alter the strategic
landscape’ according to The Telegraph.
This is like something out of the 16th century; indeed the Saudi
state does in many ways operate as if it were still in medieval times.
Putin was reportedly outraged at the threats and refused to
back down from supporting Syria. Interestingly, The Telegraph claims that Bandar was ‘purporting to speak with the
full backing of the US’. The EU Times
then had
an article about how Putin ‘Orders
Massive Strike Against Saudi Arabia If West Attacks Syria’, but the online
‘newspaper’ has little credibility and the article fails to give substantial
sources for its claims. Thankfully, this final part of the Putin-Bandar story seems to be a highly unlikely dramatization.
The Consequences
The repercussions of a strike by the West on Syria are
impossible to predict accurately, but some inferences can be made. The
International Committee of the Red Cross has
claimed that ‘further escalation will likely trigger more displacement and
add to humanitarian needs, which are already immense’, a sentiment echoed by
Christian Aid, which warned of ‘catastrophic effects’ if an attack is
undertaken. Highly respected Middle East journalist Robert Fisk has
said that an attack would be ‘the stupidest Western war in the history of
the modern world’, and warned
that the US/UK would be on the same side as Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-linked
forces, such as Jabhat Al-Nusra, reminding one of the CIA programmes in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 80s. In Israel gas masks are
being horded as fears of a retaliatory strike by Iran or Syria grow. If a
strike goes ahead, the potential for a diplomatic solution will be severely
weakened; already the US has unilaterally
cancelled a meeting with Russia that was to set out plans for a grand
conference to help end the Syrian crisis. Diplomacy is considered by most sane
observers, such
as former chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, to be the only hope for an
end to the violence.
Furthermore public opinion is largely against ‘intervention’,
with
about 60% in the US opposed. A
YouGov poll found that ‘77% of the British public support sending “food,
medicine and other humanitarian supplies” to Syria. However, only 9% support
sending British troops, while 74% oppose the action. Support is equally minor
(10%) for sending full-scale military supplies or even small arms (16%) to the
Anti-Assad troops’. One must further factor in the history of the West in Syria
before we seek to appoint ourselves as global policemen. France is a former
colonial master in Syria, and as this
excellent article in The National Interest detailed, the US has a long record of overthrowing governments and
imposing dictators in Syria. The article noted how a US government report even
found that there is a ‘consensus narrative’ among the Syrian population that
‘foreign conspiracies’ had sought to control Syria in the past and that these
were ‘associated with the United States’. We should bear these facts in mind
when discussing what to do with Syria today- the West has the collective memory
span of a fish, but in regions like the Middle East history holds great
significance.
Thankfully momentum towards a strike seems to be slowing (as I write this parliament has voted against military action- a stunning, unexpected and happy result),
although I fear that Obama is now too committed to back down. Ed Miliband has
done one of the only decent things of his career so far in breaking
the usual cross-party consensus on foreign policy and refusing to
unconditionally back Cameron. He has called upon Cameron to wait for the
results of the UN probe into whether chemical weapons were used, and to
strictly abide by international law, very sensible proposals. The reaction from
Downing Street has been one of outrage- how on earth could Labour be so
reckless and oppose more endless violence and war from Britain?! A government
source was
quoted as calling Miliband a ‘fucking cunt’ over his decision. This
reaction is unsurprising: Labour and the Conservatives usually fight it out over
the most minute of policy differences, but if Labour dares to finally offer a
break from the two-party consensus on fundamentals then he can expect to feel
the wrath of Downing Street. Parliament, it seems, has just voted against military action, and credit needs to go to Miliband for this remarkable result.
International opinion also appears largely opposed, as one
would expect. The
Pope, Desmond
Tutu, and Egypt have come out strongly against intervention. Even the Western-backed Jordanian state has refused
to allow the US and UK to use Jordan as a launching pad for a strike, no
doubt fearing the contempt it will receive from Arab public opinion and its own
population, and perhaps even fearing that it could become the target of
retaliatory terrorist attacks. The
Arab League has refused to back an attack, despite being
comprised mainly of Western-backed governments.
A protest has been called in London this Saturday by Stop
the War Coalition to demonstrate against British involvement in Syria.Given that seconds before I posted this the UK backed out of intervention, it may not be needed, fortunately. Less happily, the US and France could still go for a strike. The last thing we need is another imperialist-driven war in the
Middle East led by the US, particularly in a conflict so complex; the
consequences are difficult to predict but it’s not impossible that this could
flare up into a much wider regional or global confrontation with Russia and the
US facing off. We haven't won this one yet.
[1]
Some have suggested that actual Western policy on Syria is a ‘realist’ strategy
to balance the forces within Syria and let them bleed each other to death-
engage US enemies like Iran and Hezbollah in a protracted battle that saps
their energy and resources whilst not giving enough support to the rebels to
allow them to overthrow Assad, since that could lead to an even more
anti-Western government. This has been suggested by Robert Fisk, Stephen Walt,
Noam Chomsky, Daniel Drezner and Alan Berger, amongst others. It may have some
merit to it, but space precludes the possibility of discussing it here.
Wednesday 21 August 2013
The War on Whistleblowers (and the population)
Today, a little foray into more domestic issues.
The US and UK (in particular) are making very little effort
to cover up the fact that they are running a thuggish campaign to intimidate,
imprison, chase and even torture those who are motivated by conscience to
reveal government actions and wrongdoing. It’s reaching levels only seen in
authoritarian states, and observers with their eyes open (a tiny minority) are
starting to say as much.
Barack Obama, the ‘liberal’ president, has prosecuted more whistleblowers
under the obscure 1917 Espionage Act than all other post-war presidents
combined. Bradley Manning, who leaked the ‘Collateral Murder’ video
showing war crimes by a US gunship, and thousands of diplomatic documents which
have provided a treasure trove of information for journalists and activists for
the past couple of years, was today sentenced by a military court to 35 years
for his leaks. He’s already been held for around 3 years, spending 11 months in
conditions which the UN said amounted
effectively to torture. Amnesty International has already called
on Obama to commute the sentence. In the 70s Richard Nixon pardoned William
Calley, one of the participants in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, after
he had served a tiny amount of his sentence. One highly doubts that Manning
will get the same merciful treatment from the Nobel Peace Prize-winning
president. So this is American justice: reveal the crimes of your government
and army, receive 35 years. Massacre for your flag, and get let off by the
President. One probably shouldn’t be surprised by the Nixon pardon though;
after all, Nixon was himself one of the great mass murderers of the post-war
era.
It’s not just Manning who has suffered under Obama- John
Kiriakou was put in prison for revealing that the CIA had been involved in
the use of water-boarding. Again; reveal the severe international crimes of a
previous administration, and the next government will come for you. Thomas
Drake, who tried to reveal the extent of NSA spying operations before
Edward Snowden came on the scene, was also charged under the act. The list goes
on. Now the Obama administration is after Snowden for publicising the
horrendous mass spying that the NSA and GCHQ have been carrying out on millions
of people all over the world, not just in their own countries.
And it’s not only the US-
terrifying claims by the
editor-in-chief of the Guardian were made yesterday. The newspaper was the main publication to carry the NSA/GCHQ
revelations, excellent journalist Glenn Greenwald having received the documents
from Snowden. Coming shortly after Greenwald’s partner was detained at Heathrow
for 9 hours, given no legal rights, and having all his electronic equipment
stolen from him by ‘security’, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the newspaper,
revealed that he was ‘contacted by a very senior government official claiming
to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in
which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working
on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that
others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian
approach’. He was told that “You've had your debate. There's no need to write
any more”, and then was made
to destroy the hard drives containing the Snowden documents whilst the
government’s thugs from GCHQ watched. It has since
been claimed that this order came from David Cameron himself, and that the
US was given prior notice
that David Miranda, Greenwald’s partner, would be detained at Heathrow.
So in a couple of days the true face of the British state has
revealed itself- one willing to try to enforce censorship on a newspaper
seeking to release information detailing mass spying on citizens of Britain and
the world, and willing to detain a journalist under section 7 of an ‘anti-terrorism’
law and steal all his belongings. Journalists are now apparently terrorist
suspects. The whole story of the NSA/GCHQ leaks would be almost laughable if it
weren’t true. A while ago the President
of Bolivia, Evo Morales, had his plane pulled down over Europe because it was
suspected that Snowden was on board, despite huge objections from Latin
America. John Pilger rightly described this as an act
of ‘air piracy’; can you imagine the reaction if Bolivia hauled down
President Obama’s plane because it was thought that Obama was shielding someone
fleeing persecution? The US would probably go to war with Bolivia if it did
that- or else instigate a murky CIA coup. The imperial arrogance of Europe and
the US is astonishing.
Jacob Heilbrunn in the conservative National Interest got it about right when
he said that the detention of Miranda signified the day that ‘the UK took a
fateful step toward a meddling government that tells its subjects what they may
read and say’. Juan Cole, respected blogger and former editor of academic
foreign affairs journals, claimed
that we are moving towards a ‘STASI authoritarian state’. This isn’t merely
unhelpful hyperbole. We are seeing the logical conclusion of the absurd
policies of an elite that is at war with the whole world, including its own
citizens. David Miranda is now considered a terrorist suspect- and one shouldn’t
be too surprised, since the label ‘terrorist’ is generally used for people who
are opposed to the government. The aim of this ultra-rich, ultra-powerful elite
is to keep ‘the herd’ quiet, subdued, passive, and in the dark, whilst those
who know best can go about running the world, as is their natural right. We
need to realise who our real enemies are.
Update: The Huffington Post summed up the Manning sentence perfectly- 'The only person going to prison for US war crimes is the guy who revealed them'
Friday 9 August 2013
The US Against the People of Egypt
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot help but be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
George Kennan, 1948[1]
I’ve just finished reading The Road to Tahrir Square by historian Lloyd Gardner, a decent
account of US-Egyptian relations from around 1945 to the overthrow of Mubarak.
It has helped me understand more clearly the current situation in Egypt, and
has the odd fascinating piece of information about Middle Eastern relations in
general. For Gardner, ‘there is a strong historical thread stretching from the
agreements reached between the CIA and Nasser on Iraq in 1963 to the final days
of Mubarak’s regime in early 2011’ (p.95).
To many, it is hard to contextualise the events of 2011 and
see them relative to the historical ties between the US and Egypt. The US has
invested around $50 billion in military and economic aid in Egypt over the past
few decades, and this has given it no small say in Egyptian politics. During
the 2011 crisis, ‘Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen had
made phone calls to their counterparts almost every day’ (p.195). The Pentagon
spokesman claimed that this was ‘just an example of how engaged we are with the
Egyptians’. Gardner notes how the
Guardian reported days before Mubarak’s downfall that the Obama
administration ‘had refused to cut military aid to Egypt “and is instead
working behind the scenes with the commanders of the armed forces on how to
oust President Mubarak”’ (p.189). Indeed, as Kees Van der Pijl pointed out, the
takeover of the Supreme Military Council was an outcome ‘announced to Congress
by Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, on February 10, the day before it
happened’ (‘Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis’, New Left Review (70), p.27), something also commented on by
Gardner. Earlier both Obama and Biden had refused to call
Mubarak a dictator, or even authoritarian; despite, as an interviewer pointed
out, the fact that 1000’s of people were tortured and imprisoned under Mubarak
and his feared intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Obama even managed to duck the question
with the astonishing claim that he tends ‘not to use labels for folks’. Indeed,
for Obama, Mubarak was a ‘stalwart ally ... a force for stability and good’, a sentiment
echoed by the laughably pathetic Tony Blair.
As Tariq Ali pointed out, Washington tried desperately to
maintain their influence in Egypt, clinging on to Mubarak until it was clear
the pressure was too great and that the whole edifice upon which US influence
had been devised in Egypt was being threatened. When they finally abandoned
Mubarak, Obama was largely lauded by
liberal commentators as having been on the side of the people all along;
another example of the standard ‘liberal’ contempt for facts. The brutal Omar
Suleiman was even ‘at one stage touted as Mubarak’s successor’ (‘Between Past
and Future’ New Left Review (80),
p.63), before the decision was made that all the hated figureheads needed to be
changed, and the army was considered reliable enough by Washington and popular
enough with the people to be the ones to take over.
David Wearing, a SOAS researcher and up-and-coming writer, wrote
an excellent summary and review of Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the
US-Egyptian Alliance by
Jason Brownlee in February; Brownlee generally argues the same thing. Wearing
quotes a passage to sum it up perfectly: ‘Official US-Egyptian relations have
been at odds with domestic public opinion in Egypt. Rather than fostering
democracy in an incremental fashion, US and Egyptian officials have promoted an
autocratic security state that supports a US-led regional order built around
Israeli security and US influence over the Persian Gulf. By contrast, public
opinion in Egypt favours a regional security order less dominated by the United
States and Israel, and a government that respects political competition and
civil liberties’. Gardner compares the way the US provided for Sadat’s own
personal security with the way they helped train and create the brutal secret
police in Iran under the Shah. This is of course unremarkable to anyone with
even a passing knowledge of US foreign policy, but it may seem odd to those accustomed
to the standard line in the media and academia- that the US, whilst it may make
the odd mistake, is fundamentally committed to democracy promotion around the
world. This is no more true than the idea that the Soviet Union was fighting
for the poor and oppressed around the world, or that the Roman Empire had any
interest in the wellbeing of its conquered subjects (or the British Empire for
that matter). Every power in history has been concerned with its own interests,
whilst claiming to follow a higher moral cause, and the US is unremarkable in
this respect. Its rhetoric about promoting democracy in Egypt should be
disregarded; the quote from George Kennan at the start of the article is a far
more honest and accurate portrayal of US policy, from the pen of a man who did
so much to shape its direction after World War 2.
As Brownlee points
out, US policy is heavily at odds with Egyptian public opinion. Gardner cites a
Gallup poll which revealed an ‘“overwhelming tsunami of negative opinions” about
the United States’; more than half opposed any
US aid to Egypt, and three-quarters ‘opposed any aid to specific political
groups’ (p.201). He quotes Gallup’s chief analyst of the poll, who believed
that the reason was simply because US aid was perceived as only serving to ‘perpetuate
the condition of the Mubarak years’ (p.202). The recent uprisings had far more
of an anti-US government flavour to them than the 2011 uprisings- it seems the
Egyptian people offered the US a chance to redeem themselves and have now tired
of extending the olive branch. Perhaps there is a recognition that the US isn’t,
and never will be, on their side.
Anti-US government
feeling across the region is quite easily explained for those who are genuinely
interested, and don’t just want to have an idiotic rant about why
the Muslims ‘hate us because they hate us’. A review article in Foreign Affairs a couple of months ago
detailed a study by Amaney Jamal who found that so-called ‘anti-Americanism’
was the result of a ‘deeper rejection of undemocratic political systems in Arab
countries, which for decades have been underwritten and supported by the United
States’; not to mention more immediate grievances like the CIA and Pentagon’s
global assassination, torture and kidnapping campaigns, and the mass crime
which was the Iraq War (‘The Persistence of Arab Anti-Americanism’, Mark Lynch,
Foreign Affairs, 92(3), p.147).
Most interesting is
Gardner’s claim that the crisis in Egypt has ‘portended far greater long-term
dangers’ for the US government than the debacles in Iraq or Afghanistan,
something he quotes Henry Kissinger (the most powerful National Security
Advisor in US history and former Secretary of State for Gerald Ford) as
agreeing with (p.204). Egypt has been described by US officials as a ‘cornerstone’
of US policy in the Middle East, and that certainly has a lot of truth to it;
today it is second possibly only to Saudi Arabia as a US Arab ally in the
region. The latest upheavals could turn
out to favour or harm the US; it’s too early to tell.
I will continue to write about Egypt in the
weeks to come.
[1]
Quoted in The Road to Tahrir Square
by Lloyd Gardner. George Kennan was one of the major US government planners in
the Post-War period.
Wednesday 10 July 2013
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 30th
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 30th 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.
Tuesday 2 July 2013
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 30th 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).
More to come on Egypt as events unfold.
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