The Syrian Riddle

CounterPunch, FPJ, Palestine Chronicle

Recent remarks by Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss investigator of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, have changed the nature of debate on the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. Momentum had been building up for months against Bashar al-Assad’s government, first on the basis of accusations that such weapons were in use, followed by heavy hints by anti-Assad groups and Western politicians that the Damascus regime was guilty of chemical warfare against its opponents and civilians. There is no doubt about the unspeakable brutality committed by both sides in the conflict, but chemical warfare, if proven, would mean escalation to another level involving serious war crimes.

Carla Del Ponte, Switzerland’s former attorney general and prosecutor of the UN tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, is no pushover. She is now a member of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, appointed under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Contrary to subsequent insinuations that she did not know what she was talking about, Del Ponte had chosen her words carefully. She had said that witness testimony made it appear that “some chemical weapons were used, in particular nerve gas.” And it appeared to have been used by the “opponents, by the rebels.” There is “no indication at all that the Syria government … used chemical weapons.” She said she was a “little bit stupefied” that the first indications were of the use of nerve gas by the opponents.

Del Ponte’s remarks, made amid reports of gains by Syrian government forces, seemed to undermine the position of rightwing hawks in Washington like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and in London Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague. These are some of the powerful figures who craft Western policy, but hardly objective and credible voices on Syria and the wider Middle East.

Within hours, enthusiastic interventionists in Washington and a somewhat reluctant Obama administration were scrambling to adjust. The White House said the United States believed that chemical weapons were used by the Assad regime. In a stark reminder of Iraq in 2003, the British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted in Parliament: “I can tell the House that there is a growing body of limited but persuasive information that the [Syrian] regime has used and continues to use chemical weapons.” The Foreign Secretary William Hague agreed. Mainstream television channels and newspapers remained broadly uncritical, unquestioning, even generous in giving the benefit of the doubt to Hague, despite lessons of Iraq.

Persuading those who are ideologically drunk and politically myopic is often a hopeless undertaking. Hunger for war and lust for power or for distant resources always impair both reason and morality. The developing situation on the ground has made the war hawks struggle for credibility. For them, the last resort is to assert with dead certainty their “belief” that it is Bashar al-Assad’s forces who have employed chemical weapons and committed war crimes. How could “freedom fighters” do this?

The changing reality of Syria’s long and brutal war, in which government forces show much greater resilience than their opponents’ predictions, has generated some desperation among the rebels and worry in the American and European capitals about Islamist factions gaining control of the anti-Assad campaign. The capture by rebels of UN peacekeeping troops in Syria, freed after a week of behind-the-scenes activity, tells the story, bringing a little more balance in the scenario usually painted before us.

It was the second time in two months that UN peacekeepers had been held by a rebel faction. The United States and its allies are trapped between delusions of total victory in the Middle East and its true consequences – emergence of anti-Western forces such as Al-Nusra Front that are even more aggressive and erratic.

The outcome of the recent Moscow visit of President Obama’s new secretary of state John Kerry is instructive. America’s agreement with Russia that they co-sponsor an international conference to find a negotiated settlement raised some eyebrows in Washington and among U.S. allies in Europe and the Arab world. President Vladimir Putin seemed to have prevailed in his insistence that Assad’s exit cannot be a precondition. But this precondition is the starting point for the Syrian rebels and many of their foreign supporters who have a wider Middle East agenda. A commentary in Italy’s rightwing publication Il Geornale said in its headline, “Obama’s Defeat: To Pacify Syria He Is In Cahoots With Putin.”

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, struggling to maintain his authority within his Conservative Party and coalition with the Liberal Democrats, immediately flew off to Moscow for talks with Putin in an attempt to see that any international conference on Syria is held in London; Cameron’s trip to Washington would be next; Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel planned a visit of his own to Moscow after ordering two secret air attacks against Syrian military facilities in a week; and Israeli and Western newspapers issued warnings that Russia was about to supply S-300 missiles to Assad.

As for Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov maintains that Moscow is “not planning to supply Syria with any weapons beyond the current contracts,” which, he says, are “for defensive purposes.” Russia’s message to Washington, delivered a year ago, continues to be “hands off Syria and Iran.” Obama continues his rhetorical maneuvers. And the war goes on.

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Johan Galtung on Syria

Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung, founder of the disciple of peace studies, offers with stunning clarity an explanation of why the Syrian conflict will be so difficult to resolve if the present state of affairs continues, meaning that the rebels, supported by the United States and its Western and Arab allies, go on insisting on their own “solution.” That solution includes getting rid of Bashar al-Assad by all means, a ceasefire, and negotiations between all legitimate parties, from which a compromise (political solution) will emerge.

Acknowledging the complexity of Syria and the wider Middle East, Galtung offers a far more nuanced package of “solutions.” He says, “Let the parties outside and inside Syria talk. Let them state their goals and the Syria they would like to see.” Here is how Galtung identifies various interests:

First, an image of the goals of some outside parties:

• Israel: wants Syria divided in smaller parts, detached from Iran, status quo for Golan Heights, and a new map for the Middle East;
• USA: wants what Israel wants and control over oil, gas, pipelines;
• UK: wants what USA wants;
• France: co-responsible with the UK for post-Ottoman colonization in the area wants confirmed friendship between France and Syria;
• Russia: wants a naval base in the Mediterranean, and an “ally”;
• China: wants what Russia wants;
• EU: wants both what Israel-USA want and what France wants;
• Iran: wants Shia power;
• Iraq: majority Shia, wants what Iran wants;
• Lebanon: wants to know what it wants;
• Saudi Arabia: wants Sunni power;
• Egypt: wants to emerge as the conflict-manager;
• Qatar: wants the same as Saudi Arabia and Egypt;
• Gulf States: want what USA-UK want;
• The Arab League: wants no repetition of Libya, tries human rights;
• Turkey: wants to assert itself relative to the (Israel-USA) successors to the (France-UK-Italy) successors to the Ottoman Empire, and a buffer zone in Syria;
• UN: wants to emerge as the conflict manager.

Over this looms a dark cloud. Syria is in the zone between Israel-USA-NATO and Shanghai Cooperation Organization, both expanding.

Then, there are goals of inside parties:

• Alawis (15%): want to remain in power, “for the best of all”;
• Shias in general: want the same;
• Sunnis: want majority rule, their rule, democracy;
• Jews, Christians, minorities: want security, fearing Sunni rule;
• Kurds: want high level autonomy, some community with other Kurds.

How can the Syrian crisis then be resolved is explained in his editorial at the website of TRANSCEND, A Network of Peace, Development and Environment, which he founded.

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UN Watch Better Watch Itself: The Demonization of Richard Falk

Jeremy R Hammond writes in a guest column, originally published in CounterPunch    

Richard Falk

The Zionist organization UN Watch has cited a commentary by Professor Richard Falk on the Boston bombings in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon demanding that that Prof. Falk be reprimanded for it. Prof. Falk, who serves as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, originally posted the commentary on his blog and I republished it, as I often do his writings, with his kind permission, in Foreign Policy Journal, which version UN Watch links to in its letter. As one should expect, the letter from UN Watch is characterized by its dishonesty and vain attacks on Prof. Falk’s character that deflect attention away from and fail to address the substance of what he wrote.

The UN Watch letter begins with the lie that Prof. Falk in his article “justifies the Boston terrorist attacks”. The UN Watch letter also falsely claims that Prof. Falk blamed the Boston terrorist attacks on Israel and characterized the attacks as “due ‘retribution’ for American sins”. Where Mr. Falk discusses Israel in the article, it is in the larger context of blowback for U.S. foreign policies, including the 9/11 attacks, which, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its report, were motivated in no small part by U.S. support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Nowhere in his commentary does Mr. Falk blame Israel for or otherwise connect Israel to the bombings in Boston. As for the word “retribution”, where it appears in Mr. Falk’s article, it is in the context of a quote from someone else. What Falk actually wrote was:

Listening to a PBS program hours after the Boston event, I was struck by the critical attitudes of several callers to the radio station: …. Another caller asked “is this not a kind of retribution for torture inflicted by American security forces acting under the authority of the government, and verified for the world by pictures of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib?”

Nowhere did Falk say the attack was “due” or “justified”. The letter goes on this way with its fabricated charges against Falk’s character. At the UN Watch blog, the letter is prefaced with the remark that Falk “was recently expelled by the Human Rights Watch [HRW] organization”. The link directs readers to a video embedded in another UN Watch blog post claiming that Falk was “Removed For Anti-Semitism”, the source for that claim being none other than Hillel Neuer, the Executive Director of UN Watch and author of the letter to the Secretary-General. In fact, the reason Mr. Falk left HRW’s local support committee in Santa Barbara, California, was because of HRW’s “longstanding policy, applied many times, that no official from any government or UN agency can serve on any Human Rights Watch committee or its Board. It was an oversight on our part that we did not apply that policy in Richard Falk’s case several years ago when he assumed his UN position.” But the truth just doesn’t serve Neuer’s or his organization’s agenda, so he prefers to make up lies to demonize an honorable man.

The UN Watch’s lies have been parroted elsewhere by unscrupulous so-called “journalists” who don’t let little things like honesty or integrity get in the way of an opportunity to manufacture a sensational headline.

Ann Beyefsky, for example, at Breitbart, unashamedly lies that “Richard Falk has published a statement saying Bostonians got what they deserved in last week’s terror attack” before accusing him of “antisemitism” for his criticisms of Israeli policies in his role as Special Rapporteur for the U.N. The fact that Mr. Falk is himself Jewish shouldn’t cause anyone to be surprised that he would face such a charge; indeed, this kind of intellectually and morally bankrupt accusation is standard fare for apologists of Israel’s constant violations of international law. It certainly comes as no surprise that Beyefsky is unable to produce any quotes from Mr. Falk to back up any of her disgraceful lies about him.

The JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency) repeated in a headline the lie that Falk “pins blame for Boston Marathon bombing on ‘Tel Aviv’” and repeats the falsehood that Falk “called the Boston attack ‘retribution’ for the actions of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan”, which leads one to wonder whether the author of the JTA story even bothered to read Falk’s article or relied entirely on UN Watch’s distortions of it for its own reporting.

The Times of Israel also picked up the story, stating that Falk “has a history of provocative and outrages [sic, i.e., “outrageous”] statements, both supporting Islamic terror and bashing Israel.” The Times of Israel would have a very hard time indeed finding any substantiation for its lie that Falk has made statements “supporting Islamic terror”; and “bashing” Israel is the usual euphemism for legitimately criticizing Israel’s constant violations of international law. Just as instructively, the “outrageous” statement referred to in this case is Falk’s remark that “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance… the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks”. The Times of Israel spins this observation into the dishonest headline, “UN official says US had Boston attack coming”; the idiom “to have something coming” meaning, of course, that the outcome is deserved. This headline is just another lie. Yet Mr. Falk neither said nor implied that the U.S. deserved the attacks in Boston.

To offer several more examples of the disingenuous responses to Mr. Falk’s article, Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch calls Falk’s commentary a “dumb” “diatribe” and feigns not to understand Mr. Falk’s rather elementary point that the U.S. government’s policies create hatred towards the country and result in blowback such as the 9/11 attacks. John Hinderaker at the Power Line blog repeats the lie that Mr. Falk said “Boston had it coming”. Hinderaker reveals his remarkable ignorance by saying that Falk’s statement that “the neocon presidency of George W. Bush, was in 2001 prior to the attacks openly seeking a pretext to launch a regime-changing war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”, among others, is “false” (the truth of that and other of Mr. Falk’s statements is hardly a secret and not in the least bit controversial). Hinderaker goes on to dismiss Falk as “a lousy writer”, “insane”, “a psychopath” who has a “demented frame of reference, that we associate with mental illness”, “a nut; a crank”, “a mental case”, someone who “should seek treatment for his mental illness.” Bryan Preston at PJ Media similarly repeats the lies that Falk “Justifies” the bombing in his article and said that the U.S. “had this coming”. The Global Dispatch likewise parrots the lie that “Richard Falk said in a statement that Bostonians got what they deserved”.

One is just not supposed to tell the public that U.S. foreign policy results in what intelligence analysts call “blowback”. This is a forbidden truth, reminiscent of the 2007 presidential debate when Rudy Giuliani condemned Ron Paul for making the completely uncontroversial statement that the 9/11 attacks were “blowback” for U.S. foreign policy, to which Dr. Paul replied by standing firm and repeating the uncomfortable truth before the audience. It is a point that Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, Alec Station, has also made in a commentary on the Boston bombings published atForeign Policy Journal, in which he remarks that “it is blatantly obvious from the evidence the authorities have presented to date that the attackers were motivated by what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world”.

It is clear from the hysterical reactions to Mr. Falk’s commentary on the Boston bombings that his own sin is in speaking uncomfortable truths many Americans don’t want to hear about their government’s policies, as well as for his courageous stand against Israel’s lawlessness in the face of such demonization by its Zionist apologists.

An updated and extended version of the article appears at the Foreign Policy Journal website.

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst and recipient of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. He is the author of The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict  and Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian economics in the financial crisis. He is the founding editor of Foreign Policy Journal and can also be found on the web at JeremyRHammond.com.

[END]

The Significance of Margaret Thatcher

CounterPunch

Independent, April 15, 2013 

The death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher on the day Britain’s Tory-led government introduced major changes to disability benefits which, according to charities, would eventually lead to as many as six hundred thousand disabled people losing state support may be dismissed as a mere coincidence. But they both signify a singular phenomenon of social transformation which has been extremely costly and painful, and which continues more than two decades after Thatcher was forced out of office in 1990. Her funeral with great pomp and ceremony, at an estimated cost of ten million pounds, is in sharp contrast to the effects of her policies to date.

Precisely for this reason, Margaret Thatcher has secured her place in history as one of the most controversial and divisive British prime ministers in living memory. For while destroying her enemies within and without, she dismantled the nation’s industrial base and withdrew the state’s role from the lives of vulnerable members of society, rendering many working class communities beyond recovery. Few were able to buck the trend. The yawning gap between rich and poor in British society today is the result of a particular version of free-market ideology which has come to be known as Thatcherism, and will remain in the political lexicon for a long time. Whether one is her admirer or adversary, it is very hard to deny the significance of Margaret Thatcher.

She was much more a politician of radical free-market ideas instead of a politician of the people. She enjoyed the image of a hard-faced woman with masculinity which placed her above her peers. Admirers who had worked with her sometimes spoke of her warmth in private, but it was to be expected from close associates who owed their positions to her. Since her years as prime minister after the 1979 victory over Labour, Margaret Thatcher’s name stirred strong passions. Following her death, Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party would not stop singing her praise. It was as if Cameron, mindful of his own controversial policies and criticisms from his right-wing MPs for not being radical enough, wanted to use the event to reposition himself suitably.

A special session of parliament was called to “debate” Thatcher’s legacy, just a few days before a session was due in any case, making each MP in attendance about 3,750 pounds richer for a few hours of “work.” On one hand, the governing benches were packed with young, admiring Tory MPs, children of the Thatcher era. On the other, not even half of Labour and other opposition MPs turned up, and many stayed and worked in their constituencies. Labour veteran Michael Meacher, ex-environment minister, persisted amid jeers from the Tory benches: “Too many industries, too many working class communities across the north were laid waste during those years without any alternative and better future to replace what had been lost.”

Another ex-minister Glenda Jackson commented that “Thatcher wreaked the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country,” adding: “a woman? Not on my terms.” Dianne Abbot, a member of the shadow cabinet, spoke of people’s dismay at Thatcher’s insistence on calling the African National Congress a terrorist organization, and about the way the striking miners were crushed and communities devastated. In Glasgow, Bristol and London’s Brixton district, where riots had taken place in the early 1980s, small crowds celebrated Thatcher’s demise. There were further protests in London and elsewhere as the day of her funeral drew closer. However, as immediate surveys indicate, many Britons remain ambivalent, more than twenty years after Thatcher was toppled in a party coup. As for the performance of Conservative MPs, a headline in the Independent newspaper said: “ They came, they gushed, they left no cliché unturned.”

Thatcherism was a phenomenon caused and sustained by a number of factors. She became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, winning the 1979 general election at the end of a decade of international and domestic crises. The oil embargo and fourfold rise in energy prices had hit the British economy hard. At home, the Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan was barely functioning with the Liberal Party’s support in parliament. Outside, Callaghan was battling the trade unions, angry at his policy of income restraint amid high inflation, and the Left in his own party. What came to be known as the “winter of discontent” finally prompted the withdrawal of Liberal support, bringing down the Labour government followed by defeat in the 1979 general election.

Margaret Thatcher also had a piece of luck, twice, when she was in deep trouble. In 1982, the Argentine military junta, committing a huge miscalculation, invaded the disputed territory of the Falkland Islands (Argentina calls them the Malvinas) with a population of around 1,500 people in the South Atlantic. It is said that not one of Britain’s military commanders thought that Britain could win the Falklands back. Thatcher sent a naval armada and, with support of the United States under President Ronald Reagan and Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, defeated the Argentine forces against odds. Information that has emerged since tells us what a close run thing the Falklands War of 1982 was. Then in 1984-1985 came the miners’ strike at home.

Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Miners leader who took on Thatcher, was the “enemy within,” just as General Leopoldo Galtieri, leader of Argentina’s military junta, was the “enemy without.” Scargill also miscalculated, determined to go ahead with the walkout despite misgivings among other union leaders about the government’s preparedness, and the union’s lack thereof. A trade union leader with an authoritarian and impetuous instinct on the political Left, Scargill represented the other extreme. There could only be one strong-willed figure left standing. After one of the most bitter industrial disputes in living memory, the victory was Thatcher’s. It was the beginning of the end of the coal mining, steel, shipbuilding and car industries and workers’ unions.

There were under one and a half million unemployed in Britain before Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. The number of jobless rose up to three and a quarter million in five years, and a new era of large-scale privatization had begun. In 2013, unemployment is two and a half million, and many in work have only part-time jobs. The Labour Party’s postwar vision of “full employment” has been buried in the past, overtaken by ever-widening wealth gap between rich and poor.

As miners and steel workers began to lose their livelihoods in their hundreds of thousands, their rural communities were devastated, their homes repossessed and sold for a fraction of their previous worth. Margaret Thatcher, at the same time, orchestrated a drive to sell local council houses, originally built for poor, many of which had become derelict for lack of proper investment in maintenance. A vast proportion of other state assets were also sold on the cheap. The policy earned Thatcher immediate popularity, contributing to her election victories twice in the 1980s. But the same policy eventually played a significant part in creating the property boom in subsequent years of both Conservative and “New Labour” governments, and a housing crisis for the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.

Deregulation and a rampant free-market system were to continue without forethought, prompting former Conservative prime minister of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harold Macmillan, to liken Thatcher’s privatization to “selling the family silver.” Today, some publicly admire Margaret Thatcher; others openly celebrate her death; many seem emotionally indifferent; and there are few signs of genuine national mourning. It is those in office in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party, ruling the country in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who have most to gain, as they drive Thatcher’s policies to a new destination.

[END]

Cyprus and the Eurozone Crisis

CounterPunch, March 29, 2013

The economic crisis of the Republic of Cyprus follows the Greek tragedy of the past year. Only the scale this time is bigger, but the anger in the small island with one-tenth of the population of its neighbor no less. Pressure applied by the troika of Germany, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund has led to the imposition of draconian measures on the banking system of Cyprus, affecting the lives of its residents in ways unimaginable before the crisis. They include a tax on large savings, bank shutdowns and severe limitations on withdrawals and transfers for all.

These are unprecedented steps, forced on a western country by the European economic bloc which, in effect, is led by Germany. What transpired has caused humiliation among Cypriots­–a sentiment that often proves lasting and causes more problems in the longer run than it solves in the short run. Until a few days ago, Chris Pavlou was the vice chairman of the Laiki Bank of Cyprus, and was at the heart of discussions as the crisis unfolded.

An insider’s account given by him is instructive. Pavlou spoke to Britain’s Channel 4 News about the humiliation felt by Cypriot officials: “It’s not very nice actually to see two or three people half your age, clever people, coming over there and shaking their hands at the president and saying ‘you have to do this, otherwise we will bring you down’. It’s very painful for someone who has just been elected to actually face that.”

Only a few days before, even after an amended version of the original package was introduced in the Cypriot parliament, not a single MP had voted in favor. In the streets of Nicosia people had celebrated the rejection, and seemed to go home happy.

There was talk of Cyprus turning to Russia to bail its economy out. The finance minister of Cyprus, Michalis Sarris, was in Moscow to seek help. But as the European Central Bank’s deadline to Nicosia to “sort it” by March 25 loomed, the Cypriot finance minister spoke of there being no hurry to leave the Russian capital. The two sides held negotiations about Russia investing in the vast gas fields around Cyprus and the Cypriot banks.

In the end, though, the Cypriot finance minister returned home disappointed, because Russia would not get involved as long as Cyprus was under the European Union’s economic regime. Turkey, which supports the unrecognized “Republic of Northern Cyprus” since Ankara invaded the island in 1974 during an intense proxy war with Greece, had indicated that it might challenge Nicosia’s use of gas reserves in the bailout.

It is the politics, rather than the economics, of the eurozone’s latest crisis which is more intriguing. Faced with a general election, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was once again in an uncompromising mood. National interest and political expedience were no less powerful motives which proved critical in decisions taken in Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels on the fate of Cyprus.

The euro has faced increasingly powerful challenges in more than a decade since the currency was introduced. The case of Cyprus is a watershed. Recent events confirm two main trends which were emerging for a number of years. One, the euro is a troubled currency whose problems do not seem to go away. Second, the survival of the European currency depends on one member-state, Germany, by far the most powerful country in Western Europe.

Germany’s domination thus sustains the single currency in the eurozone in the short run, but throws the entire project in its current enlarged form in doubt. Such power dynamic puts Germany at the center, and the rest on the periphery, perhaps with the exception of France, which also must go along with Germany’s leadership, despite sometimes diverging views between Berlin and Paris. It makes the eurozone not a community of equals, who are in the currency union voluntarily, but an empire with one ruler and many ruled, utterly dependent on the center of power. The economic crisis extending throughout Europe, but hitting Ireland and countries in the south hardest, is alarming.

We see the current state of affairs polarizing much of the European continent. We see rightwing, nationalist sentiments pushing elites who govern more and more to the right. Even so, the peoples’ frustration mounts, and we must ask how far these governing elites are likely to go to assuage the scale of discontent. These are reasons for instability and conflict, and far from the idea of unity and peace in Europe envisioned sixty years ago after two devastating wars.

[END]

David Cameron’s Mission to India

Sri Lanka Guardian, February 26, 2013

David Cameron and Manmohan Singh

Leaving the scandal of horsemeat contamination of processed meat products behind, the British prime minister David Cameron flew to India for a three-day visit (February 18-20), boasting the largest-ever trade delegation he had led to a foreign country. The aim of young Cameron was to clinch multi-million pound deals with the world’s second most populous nation, and a vibrant and rising economy. The reasons behind his mission to India were domestic as well as foreign.

Cameron leads a wobbly government in coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party, which has all but abandoned many of its policies on civil liberties, minority rights, the nature of Britain’s relationship with the European Union and the welfare state. In essence, the Liberal Democrats, whose leader Nick Clegg has the title of deputy prime minister with no portfolio, have become the enablers keeping in power a Conservative Party that is itself fatally divided over how far right to move on some of the most fundamental issues.

Britain’s Conservative prime minister, his finance minister George Osborne, and a group of ministers to the right, are enforcing draconian cuts that, many experts complain, are making economic recovery more difficult. The Liberal Democrats have become supporters of war. A former Liberal Democrat leader, now a party grandee, Lord Paddy Ashdown, recently defended President Obama’s drone wars that, according to several authoritative studies including one by Stanford and New York Universities, have killed thousands of innocent people. In an astonishing defense of Obama’s “kill list,” Lord Ashdown asserted that the president’s policy had more accountability than ever before. A U.S. president secretly ordering to kill specific individuals, and others who happen to be in the targeted area, without Congressional or judicial scrutiny, is somehow “more accountable than ever”? One does not know what to say––except that power has clearly elevated Lord Ashdown and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg to a different planet.

Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Cameron went to India to seduce politicians in government and big business with a basket of offers. He reminded his hosts of India’s colonial links with Britain, and sought to press the Indian government to buy Eurofighters, in which Britain has a stake, instead of French multi-role combat planes already being negotiated. Cameron had been promising his party MPs that he would be pushing the deal aggressively, failing to realize that the Indians do not like being told by the British, especially by a Conservative prime minister. In such an event, the Indian response would likely be to buy from any one except India’s former colonial rulers.

Cameron leads a party which continues to live in the Churchillian past. He simply misread India’s historical development, and was badly advised as he embarked on his visit. Cameron failed to accept the reality that India, a country twenty times larger in population than the United Kingdom, was not a client state that could be pressured. The Indians would be courteous in welcoming him, but were quite capable of turning the tables, and would rebuff unwanted offers. The signs were there some while ago when India told Britain that it did not want a few hundred million pounds worth of British aid, describing it as “peanuts.” The British government’s increasingly hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies to placate the political right at home were alienating many Indian residents and new students coming to Britain. The consequences of this went largely unnoticed in Cameron’s circle.

There is an unmistakable propensity in today’s Britain to blame “immigrants” and “asylum-seekers” for all the ills––from filth to chaos and crime in the streets, as well as unemployment among white Britons. Alienation and frustration of those less fortunate are alarming, but their causes are easier to explain. However, the eagerness of the political class to join in the chorus of xenophobic hysteria, and to craft legislation to placate the Right are much harder to understand because of the risks this entails. News reaches distant places with lightning speed in a globalized world. Indian students, increasingly better informed and direct, told the BBC, as Cameron sought to woo them, that they thought the British attitudes were a “little racist.” They would rather seek other destinations for education, or stay in their own country.

As he visited the historic Golden Temple of Amritsar and the nearby site of the 1919 Jallianwala massacre of hundreds of men, women and children, committed on the orders of General Reginald Dyer, Prime Minister Cameron described the episode as a “deeply shameful event.” But he stopped short of issuing an outright apology. That was not enough for historians and ordinary citizens alike in India. Among other questions raised was whether the British government would please return the Koh-i-noor to India. The world’s most precious diamond had been taken to Britain following the imperial power’s annexation of the Punjab into the Empire in 1849. For ten years prior to that, the British administrators had failed to execute the last will of the Punjab ruler Ranjit Singh, who had the diamond until his death. Cameron could not have agreed, so he said that he did not believe in “returnism.”

By the time the British prime minister met his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh in Delhi, the deal to sell AgustaWestland helicopters to India seemed to have been scuppered. It was suggested to Cameron that Britain cooperate with the Indian authorities in providing more information about allegations that the Anglo-Italian helicopter manufacturer based in the United Kingdom had attempted to bribe influential figures to secure the deal with India. The British prime minister promised to do so, and returned home, leaving a “wish list” behind.

[END]

Mali and the Return of the “Long War”

CounterPunch, January 30, 2013

The bloodshed at the In Amenas gas facility in Algeria has brought into focus the deteriorating situation in north and west Africa and the role of France in the region. The rhetoric of the long war against terrorism is back. So is Western military involvement in yet another region. About fifty of the more than eighty people killed in the Algerian siege were foreign and local Arab hostages, captured in the country’s vast southeastern desert.

On the surface, it was difficult to agree with the Algerian government’s assertion, greeted by reluctant nods in Western capitals, that the military operation by Algeria’s special forces was a success. All except a few militants were also killed. But they almost certainly went there to die, and kill as many of their hostages as they could to gain worldwide publicity.

Escape across open desert when the Algerian military and others had their eyes on the besieged gas facility was a forlorn hope. The Algerian prime minister, Abdelmalek Sallal, said that among the hostage-takers were Canadian citizens, and the militant group had help of inside knowledge. Canadian passports were found on two charred bodies, and Britain’s Channel 4 News reported there being gunmen also from Algeria, as well as Mali, Niger, and Libya, from where they drove to the remote facility some fifty miles away. These emerging facts contradicted the British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s denial that Western intervention in Libya had fueled the spread of extremism in north and west Africa.

William Hague, indeed the British and French governments, are in a difficult position. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan rejected the notion that events in Algeria had nothing to do with Mali to the South and Libya to the east. The fall of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya led to the collapse of his armed forces, and made large numbers of soldiers of Tuareg tribes, who had fought for Gaddafi, leave for neighboring countries including Mali, where a Tuareg rebellion was under way. We have seen this phenomenon before, in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Now it is unfolding in North Africa and the Sahel region, dry and barren, with increasing ferocity.

Just as Afghanistan was a United States-led venture from the beginning, Britain and France were particularly aggressive Western players in Libya, ultimately pushing President Barack Obama to join the campaign with U.S. military power to overthrow Col. Gaddafi. We saw France under Nicolas Sarkozy, and Britain under David Cameron, take the lead in political terms in Libya, with Obama “leading from behind.” Arrangements of this kind suit Obama, for he can create the illusion that America is not a unilateralist superpower like it was under George W. Bush. In fact no military venture can possibly succeed without U.S. approval, indeed participation in some form. The distinction is academic.

Francois Hollande

The leaders of France and Britain have an uncanny resemblance in their passion for war. When they were not  in power, Hollande and Cameron appeared reluctant supporters at best, and at times critical of their leaders’ enthusiasm for foreign military expeditions. Now, as they struggle with acute economic difficulties and mass discontent at home, Hollande and Cameron have been quick to assume the status of war leaders.

The French-led intervention, with growing British involvement, in Mali, and possibly in other failing states, risks a scenario similar to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Both France and Britain seek to entice the United States to take on an increasingly bigger military role. Awareness of history and present interests in the region are important to avoid naïve acceptance of official rhetoric of the long or generational war. France is the ex-colonial power of Mali, and Britain’s young prime minister shows the old imperial temperament long after the British Empire was lost.

David Cameron

Britain and France connive with Mali’s military junta which is barely in control of events following two coups in 2012 that destroyed an imperfect democratic system in that impoverished country. It would have been far more preferable to intervene to strengthen the political institutions and thus prevent the insubordinate military officers. Are such follies a symptom of a pathological instinct in great powers of the past and present to leave it till it is too late, and then go with all guns blazing? Or is their aim to control territory and resources of others through client regimes?

Chinese investment in Africa over the years also must be checked for the West’s access to energy and raw materials. France had made a strategic decision to go for nuclear power in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Four decades on, more than three-fourths of electricity needed is generated in about sixty nuclear plants spread all over France. Mali’s confirmed and potential deposits of uranium amount to seventeen thousand tons or more; then there is gold; and Mali, Niger, Libya as well as Nigeria together have vast oil wealth. There is a lot to fight for, but there could be a heavy price to pay.

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