The Geography of Recession

A geographical determinist & fascinating view of four political economies (US, Russia, China, Europe). It's supposedly about the recent recession, but is actually far deeper than that.

The Geography of Recession
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Reports
June 2, 2009
By Peter Zeihan

The global recession is the biggest development in the global system in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is hurting most, and why.

Let’s begin with some simple numbers.

As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world. (Figures for China have not been included, in part because of the unreliability of Chinese statistics, but also because the country’s financial system is so radically different from the rest of the world as to make such comparisons misleading. For more, read the China section below.)
















CHART - World GDP Change - April 2009

But didn’t the recession begin in the United States? That it did, but the American system is far more stable, durable and flexible than most of the other global economies, in large part thanks to the country’s geography. To understand how place shapes economics, we need to take a giant step back from the gloom and doom of the current moment and examine the long-term picture of why different regions follow different economic paths.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE FREE MARKET

The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.

Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intracoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.


Map: North American agricultural regions


The real beauty is that the two overlap with near perfect symmetry. The Intracoastal Waterway and most of the bays link up with agricultural regions and their own local river systems (such as the series of rivers that descend from the Appalachians to the East Coast), while the Greater Mississippi river network is the circulatory system of the Midwest. Even without the addition of canals, it is possible for ships to reach nearly any part of the Midwest from nearly any part of the Gulf or East coasts. The result is not just a massive ability to grow a massive amount of crops — and not just the ability to easily and cheaply move the crops to local, regional and global markets — but also the ability to use that same transport network for any other economic purpose without having to worry about food supplies.

The implications of such a confluence are deep and sustained. Where most countries need to scrape together capital to build roads and rail to establish the very foundation of an economy — transport capability — geography granted the United States a near-perfect system at no cost. That frees up U.S. capital for other pursuits and almost condemns the United States to be capital-rich. Any additional infrastructure the United States constructs is icing on the cake. (The cake itself is free — and, incidentally, the United States had so much free capital that it was able to go on to build one of the best road-and-rail networks anyway, resulting in even greater economic advantages over competitors.)

Third, geography has also ensured that the United States has very little local competition. To the north, Canada is both much colder and much more mountainous than the United States. Canada’s only navigable maritime network — the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway —is shared with the United States, and most of its usable land is hard by the American border. Often this makes it more economically advantageous for Canadian provinces to integrate with their neighbor to the south than with their co-nationals to the east and west.

Similarly, Mexico has only small chunks of land, separated by deserts and mountains, that are useful for much more than subsistence agriculture; most of Mexican territory is either too dry, too tropical or too mountainous. And Mexico completely lacks any meaningful river system for maritime transport. Add in a largely desert border, and Mexico as a country is not a meaningful threat to American security (which hardly means that there are not serious and ongoing concerns in the American-Mexican relationship).

With geography empowering the United States and hindering Canada and Mexico, the United States does not need to maintain a large standing military force to counter either. The Canadian border is almost completely unguarded, and the Mexican border is no more than a fence in most locations — a far cry from the sort of military standoffs that have marked more adversarial borders in human history. Not only are Canada and Mexico not major threats, but the U.S. transport network allows the United States the luxury of being able to quickly move a smaller force to deal with occasional problems rather than requiring it to station large static forces on its borders.

Like the transport network, this also helps the U.S. focus its resources on other things.

Taken together, the integrated transport network, large tracts of usable land and lack of a need for a standing military have one critical implication: The U.S. government tends to take a hands-off approach to economic management, because geography has not cursed the United States with any endemic problems. This may mean that the United States — and especially its government — comes across as disorganized, but it shifts massive amounts of labor and capital to the private sector, which for the most part allows resources to flow to wherever they will achieve the most efficient and productive results.

Laissez-faire capitalism has its flaws. Inequality and social stress are just two of many less-than-desirable side effects. The side effects most relevant to the current situation are, of course, the speculative bubbles that cause recessions when they pop. But in terms of long-term economic efficiency and growth, a free capital system is unrivaled. For the United States, the end result has proved clear: The United States has exited each decade since post-Civil War Reconstruction more powerful than it was when it entered it. While there are many forces in the modern world that threaten various aspects of U.S. economic standing, there is not one that actually threatens the U.S. base geographic advantages.

Is the United States in recession? Of course. Will it be forever? Of course not. So long as U.S. geographic advantages remain intact, it takes no small amount of paranoia and pessimism to envision anything but long-term economic expansion for such a chunk of territory. In fact, there are a number of factors hinting that the United States may even be on the cusp of recovery.

RUSSIA AND THE STATE

If in economic terms the United States has everything going for it geographically, then Russia is just the opposite. The Russian steppe lies deep in the interior of the Eurasian landmass, and as such is subject to climatic conditions much more hostile to human habitation and agriculture than is the American Midwest. Even in those blessed good years when crops are abundant in Russia, it has no river network to allow for easy transport of products.



Russia has no good warm-water ports to facilitate international trade (and has spent much of its history seeking access to one). Russia does have long rivers, but they are not interconnected as the Mississippi is with its tributaries, instead flowing north to the Arctic Ocean, which can support no more than a token population. The one exception is the Volga, which is critical to Western Russian commerce but flows to the Caspian, a storm-wracked and landlocked sea whose delta freezes in the winter (along with the entire Volga itself). Developing such unforgiving lands requires a massive outlay of funds simply to build the road and rail networks necessary to achieve the most basic of economic development. The cost is so extreme that Russia’s first ever intercontinental road was not completed until the 21st century, and it is little more than a two-lane path for much of its length. Between the lack of ports and the relatively low population densities, little of Russia’s transport system beyond the St. Petersburg/Moscow corridor approaches anything that hints of economic rationality.

Russia also has no meaningful external borders. It sits on the eastern end of the North European Plain, which stretches all the way to Normandy, France, and Russia’s connections to the Asian steppe flow deep into China. Because Russia lacks a decent internal transport network that can rapidly move armies from place to place, geography forces Russia to defend itself following two strategies. First, it requires massive standing armies on all of its borders. Second, it dictates that Russia continually push its boundaries outward to buffer its core against external threats.

Both strategies compromise Russian economic development even further. The large standing armies are a continual drain on state coffers and the country’s labor pool; their cost was a critical economic factor in the Soviet fall. The expansionist strategy not only absorbs large populations that do not wish to be part of the Russian state and so must constantly be policed — the core rationale for Russia’s robust security services — but also inflates Russia’s infrastructure development costs by increasing the amount of relatively useless territory Moscow is responsible for.

Russia’s labor and capital resources are woefully inadequate to overcome the state’s needs and vulnerabilities, which are legion. These endemic problems force Russia toward central planning; the full harnessing of all economic resources available is required if Russia is to achieve even a modicum of security and stability. One of the many results of this is severe economic inefficiency and a general dearth of an internal consumer market. Because capital and other resources can be flung forcefully at problems, however, active management can achieve specific national goals more readily than a hands-off, American-style model. This often gives the impression of significant progress in areas the Kremlin chooses to highlight.

But such achievements are largely limited to wherever the state happens to be directing its attention. In all other sectors, the lack of attention results in atrophy or criminalization. This is particularly true in modern Russia, where the ruling elite comprises just a handful of people, starkly limiting the amount of planning and oversight possible. And unless management is perfect in perception and execution, any mistakes are quickly magnified into national catastrophes. It is therefore no surprise to STRATFOR that the Russian economy has now fallen the furthest of any major economy during the current recession.

CHINA AND SEPARATISM

China also faces significant hurdles, albeit none as daunting as Russia’s challenges. China’s core is the farmland of the Yellow River basin in the north of the country, a river that is not readily navigable and is remarkably flood prone. Simply avoiding periodic starvation requires a high level of state planning and coordination. (Wrestling a large river is not the easiest thing one can do.) Additionally, the southern half of the country has a subtropical climate, riddling it with diseases that the southerners are resistant to but the northerners are not. This compromises the north’s political control of the south.

Central control is also threatened by China’s maritime geography. China boasts two other rivers, but they do not link to each other or the Yellow naturally. And China’s best ports are at the mouths of these two rivers: Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze and Hong Kong/Macau/Guangzhou at the mouth of the Pearl. The Yellow boasts no significant ocean port. The end result is that other regional centers can and do develop economic means independent of Beijing.


MAP - China - River System


With geography complicating northern rule and supporting southern economic independence, Beijing’s age-old problem has been trying to keep China in one piece. Beijing has to underwrite massive (and expensive) development programs to stitch the country together with a common infrastructure, the most visible of which is the Grand Canal that links the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The cost of such linkages instantly guarantees that while China may have a shot at being unified, it will always be capital-poor.

Beijing also has to provide its autonomy-minded regions with an economic incentive to remain part of Greater China, and “simple” infrastructure will not cut it. Modern China has turned to a state-centered finance model for this. Under the model, all of the scarce capital that is available is funneled to the state, which divvies it out via a handful of large state banks. These state banks then grant loans to various firms and local governments at below the cost of raising the capital. This provides a powerful economic stimulus that achieves maximum employment and growth — think of what you could do with a near-endless supply of loans at below 0 percent interest — but comes at the cost of encouraging projects that are loss-making, as no one is ever called to account for failures. (They can just get a new loan.) The resultant growth is rapid, but it is also unsustainable. It is no wonder, then, that the central government has chosen to keep its $2 trillion of currency reserves in dollar-based assets; the rate of return is greater, the value holds over a long period, and Beijing doesn’t have to worry about the United States seceding.

Because the domestic market is considerably limited by the poor-capital nature of the country, most producers choose to tap export markets to generate income. In times of plenty this works fairly well, but when Chinese goods are not needed, the entire Chinese system can seize up. Lack of exports reduces capital availability, which constrains loan availability. This in turn not only damages the ability of firms to employ China’s legions of citizens, but it also removes the primary reason the disparate Chinese regions pay homage to Beijing. China’s geography hardwires in a series of economic challenges that weaken the coherence of the state and make China dependent upon uninterrupted access to foreign markets to maintain state unity. As a result, China has not been a unified entity for the vast majority of its history, but instead a cauldron of competing regions that cleave along many different fault lines: coastal versus interior, Han versus minority, north versus south.

China’s survival technique for the current recession is simple. Because exports, which account for roughly half of China’s economic activity, have sunk by half, Beijing is throwing the equivalent of the financial kitchen sink at the problem. China has force-fed more loans through the banks in the first four months of 2009 than it did in the entirety of 2008. The long-term result could well bury China beneath a mountain of bad loans — a similar strategy resulted in Japan’s 1991 crash, from which Tokyo has yet to recover. But for now it is holding the country together. The bottom line remains, however: China’s recovery is completely dependent upon external demand for its production, and the most it can do on its own is tread water.

DISCORDANT EUROPE

Europe faces an imbroglio somewhat similar to China’s.

Europe has a number of rivers that are easily navigable, providing a wealth of trade and development opportunities. But none of them interlinks with the others, retarding political unification. Europe has even more good harbors than the United States, but they are not evenly spread throughout the Continent, making some states capital-rich and others capital-poor. Europe boasts one huge piece of arable land on the North European Plain, but it is long and thin, and so occupied by no fewer than seven distinct ethnic groups.

These groups have constantly struggled — as have the various groups up and down Europe’s seemingly endless list of river valleys — but none has been able to emerge dominant, due to the webwork of mountains and peninsulas that make it nigh impossible to fully root out any particular group. And Europe’s wealth of islands close to the Continent, with Great Britain being only the most obvious, guarantee constant intervention to ensure that mainland Europe never unifies under a single power.

Every part of Europe has a radically different geography than the other parts, and thus the economic models the Europeans have adopted have little in common. The United Kingdom, with few immediate security threats and decent rivers and ports, has an almost American-style laissez-faire system. France, with three unconnected rivers lying wholly in its own territory, is a somewhat self-contained world, making economic nationalism its credo. Not only do the rivers in Germany not connect, but Berlin has to share them with other states. The Jutland Peninsula interrupts the coastline of Germany, which finds its sea access limited by the Danes, the Swedes and the British. Germany must plan in great detail to maximize its resource use to build an infrastructure that can compensate for its geographic deficiencies and link together its good — but disparate — geographic blessings. The result is a state that somewhat favors free enterprise, but within the limits framed by national needs.

And the list of differences goes on: Spain has long coasts and is arid; Austria is landlocked and quite wet; most of Greece is almost too mountainous to build on; it doesn’t get flatter than the Netherlands; tiny Estonia faces frozen seas in the winter; mammoth Italy has never even seen an icebreaker. Even if there were a supranational authority in Europe that could tax or regulate the banking sector or plan transnational responses, the propriety of any singular policy would be questionable at best.

Such stark regional differences give rise to such variant policies that many European states have a severe (and understandable) trust deficit when it comes to any hint of anything supranational. We are not simply taking about the European Union here, but rather a general distrust of anything cross-border in nature. One of the many outcomes of this is a preference for using local banks rather than stock exchanges for raising capital. After all, local banks tend to use local capital and are subject to local regulations, while stock exchanges tend to be internationalized in all respects. Spain, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Austria get more than 90 percent of their financing from banks, the United Kingdom 84 percent and Germany 76 percent — while for the United States it is only 40 percent.

And this has proved unfortunate in the extreme for today’s Europe. The current recession has its roots in a financial crisis that has most dramatically impacted banks, and European banks have proved far from immune. Until Europe’s banks recover, Europe will remain mired in recession. And since there cannot be a Pan-European solution, Europe’s recession could well prove to be the worst of all this time around.

After the crunch...

Stefan Karlsson is an interesting economics blogger of what some would call the Austrian school (although he less dogmatic than that implies), here he makes an interesting point about the inherent contradictions in the Government's response (both US and UK's) to the credit crunch.

" Bankers Should Be Blamed-Both If the Make Risky Loans And If They Don't
I noted before that leftist analysis of the economy is very contradictory. They first of all claim that the financial crisis simply is the results of banks making too many risky loans-and that we need radical reform to prevent banks from again making risky loans. But at the same time they also attack bankers for abstaining from lending because new loans are perceived as too risky.

Now Obama is at this again. He first says that bankers caused the crisis by making risky loans-and that now they should approve more loans "to help the recovery" (which even if Obama tries to deny it can only mean loans for borrowers more risky than those who now get loans) because they previously caused a crisis by approving loans for risky borrowers......

Try to figure out the logic in that...

I can't see any "logic" except to blame bankers regardless of what they do and absolve government of any guilt regardless of what it do."

Swiss vote to ban minarets

Excellent newsletter (dated 04/12/09) from Intelligence Squared, giving arguments both PRO and CON their debating topic: "The Swiss have voted to ban the building of minarets. We should applaud them"

--------

THIS IS A RARE EXAMPLE OF GENUINE DEMOCRACY
Unlike in most so-called democratic countries, where governments often sweep troublesome issues under the carpet, Switzerland is obliged to call a referendum on any subject if a petition with 100,000 signatures or more demands it. This particular subject attracted a turnout of 53%, so it is not as if the vote was only carried by a small core of fanatics. The issue touched a nerve with feminists and ordinary people concerned for their way of life, not just right-wingers. The result may not have been what the establishment wanted, but that’s the nature of real democracy. When governments are embarrassed by the results of voter participation, we should rejoice.

ITS BETTER TO AIR GRIEVANCES THAN SUPPRESS THEM
Europe has a fundamental problem to confront in dealing with its Muslims, and the politicians are going to have to pay attention to it sooner or later. So it’s a good thing the issue is being raised now. The flash points differ country by country: in Switzerland it’s the minaret; in France, the headscarf in school; in Denmark cartoons. But at least in Switzerland the people have confronted the issue and felt able to deal with it, whereas elsewhere the political classes just preach multiculturalism and hope the problem goes away. The French, Dutch or English would doubtless have made a similar decision if only they’d had the chance.

THERE’S GOOD REASON TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT MINARETS
Minarets are a way for Muslims to assert themselves. Their traditional function is to provide a platform and a vantage point for the call to prayer (now made unnecessary by microphones and speakers). They’re often built taller than local church spires for the express purpose of asserting the superiority of Islam. "The minaret, for its opponents, symbolizes Islam’s "arrival" in the Alps," writes the Algerian-American blogger, The Moor Next Door. "It stands to proclaim the Muslim presence above other faiths and peoples." But, quite apart from their symbolic threat, minarets do not fit or blend with the architecture and aesthetics of the country. The Swiss are rightly proud of their idyllic alpine landscape and Baroque spires – immortalised on chocolate boxes everywhere - and if they don’t think minarets fit into that, that is their prerogative. If they don’t want a skyline with more minarets in it – good luck to them.

IT’S UP TO THE MUSLIMS TO ADAPT
If Muslims want to be part of a modern Europe, everyone will have to compromise – and that includes Islamic architects. As Taj Hargey argues in The Times, European mosques should stop mindlessly mimicking Eastern design. It would be perfectly easy to create prayer halls that blend into the landscape. Look how the matter has been handled in Boston, says Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times’s architecture critic. The two-year-old Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Centre combines a row of peaked arches, an Islamic trademark, with New England-style red brick, and was jointly designed by Saudi and American architects. “If that's not an assimilation-minded piece of architecture, I'm not sure what is.” The Swiss are right to demand the same.

THE SWISS HAVE STRUCK A BLOW AGAINST INTOLERANCE
Islam has been linked to violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage and much more besides. Even if those problems are not essential to the faith, it remains an expansionist religion, and many Muslims are ideologically committed to spreading its laws, values and attitudes more widely. If those values are incompatible with modern Western ones of liberalism and tolerance, then the Swiss are perfectly entitled to make this symbolic gesture of rejection – tolerance cannot survive if it tolerates intolerance. As for the cries of objection from many Muslim countries, how false these sound when those countries themselves ban followers of other religions from building places of worship. The Grand Mufti of Egypt called the ban an "attack on freedom of belief”. That would have been more convincing had he also criticised the difficulty Egyptian Christians face in building churches in his own country, where they must obtain a permit even for basic repairs.

--------

DIRECT DEMOCRACY IS A BAD IDEA
To see the harm that results when issues are continually submitted to plebiscites you just have to look at California. There, the economy is in tatters, as referendum-driven laws make it impossible for it to balance its books. And all too often, the issues giving rise to the call for referenda are linked to some inflammatory incident that encourages stridency and extremism. A big influence in the minaret vote, for example, was the ongoing spat with Libya (Colonel Gaddafi's son was arrested in Geneva for maltreating a servant last year and Libya has been holding a pair of Swiss businessmen over some trivial offence). So an issue that should really have been a matter of human rights law was decided upon by an ill-tempered majority looking for a chance to gang up on an unpopular minority. As The Times put it: not a good case on which to base a referendum.

BANNING MINARETS MISSES THE POINT
There are fundamental problems with Islam in Europe – women's unequal status under sharia law, the Saudi sponsorship of Wahhabi mosques and more generally the threats from illiberal strands of Islam to the humanist traditions of Europe – but these have nothing to do with the building of minarets, which is a complete irrelevance. Inappropriate buildings can always be prevented by the planning system, and many minarets are anyway attractive and elegant. Banning minarets is populist window-dressing.

THE BAN IS JUST A BIGOTED ATTACK ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
It’s a disgrace that an initiative that singles out a single community, with a clear discriminatory purpose, has been approved. (It is far worse than the French ban on hijabs in schools, which is generalised and also forbids Christian crosses and Jewish yarmulkes.) Minarets are no more a sign of Muslim expansionism than Christian crosses are a sign of the Spanish Inquisition. The minaret ban is just an excuse for bullying Muslims. The right-wing parties behind the ban intially wanted to launch a campaign against Halal slaughter, says Tariq Ramadan in The Guardian, but then realised that this would entail banning Kosher slaughter and upset Swiss Jews – which they wanted to avoid. So they picked minarets as a target instead.

THE BAN IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
How can the Swiss expect Muslims to assimilate when decisions like this make them feel like second-class citizens? Muslims in Switzerland are generally tolerant and liberal. Many are Kosovans and Bosnians who have been European for centuries, and recently suffered ferocious persecution by the Serbs in the Balkans. Fewer than 13% practise their religion, and there has been no ugly violence in response to the ban – in fact, the violence has mostly come the other way, with a pot of paint hurled at the country's largest mosque in Geneva, which has also been hit with cobblestones. Islam is a European religion, and everyone is going to have to come to terms with that. “We face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence,” says Ramadan, and we are going to have to face those challenges together. That means tolerating differences, not trying to stamp them out.

THIS VOTE REPRESENTS TYPICAL SWISS BIGOTRY
The Swiss reputation for tolerance is ill-deserved. The country has a long history of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Historian Jonathan Steinberg points out that Switzerland banned the 8,000 Jews living there from carrying out their traditional ritual slaugher in 1893. The excuse given then was animal welfare – aesthetics provides the same excuse today. Later, Switzerland refused to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Even when Jews began to commit suicide at Swiss border posts, Federal Councillor von Steiger refused them refuge. “The boat is full”, he said. That ugly history of prejudice has now been transferred to the Muslims. The posters encouraging voters to endorse the ban displayed a threatening black-veiled Muslim woman and a forest of missile-like minarets imposed on the pure red and white of the Swiss flag. No one, as The Guardian noted, should mistake the provocative nature of a campaign fought in the Nazi colours of red, black and white. That campaign symbolises the shameful Swiss attitude to outsiders, and the fact it is backed by a vote makes it even more shameful, not less.

Hate crime in the UK - rising or not?

Very interesting, very thoughtful report into the supposed "problem of hate crime" in the UK. In the whole world it's only in the UK & Ireland where it's the victim, not the police, who define whether a crime is a "hate crime" or not, and as you might expect, that makes quite a difference. As the reporter says, "looking at someone funny" could count as one...

----------

Radio 4 - The Report, 26 Nov 2009
Hate Crime in the UK
Simon Cox

----------

How real is the hate crime rise?
BBC News
26 November 2009
Simon Cox

Is Britain the most hostile country in the Western world? That is the implication from new figures out this month from the OCSE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) which puts the UK top of a world league table for reported hate crimes with 46,300 logged in 2008. The figure is far beyond those recorded for other countries, but is the picture really that bleak?

...

----------

BBC: UK hate stats may be overblown
Christian.org.uk
26 November 2009

A BBC report is set to ask whether Britain is really “the most hostile country in the Western world”, or just has a woefully elastic definition of ‘hate crime’. Over 46,000 hate crimes were recorded in Britain last year, placing the nation at the top of an international league table compiled by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

But an investigation by a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Report, asks if the true picture is “really that bleak”. ... It will suggest that the figures may be massively inflated because “if the victim or a witness believes the crime is motivated by some kind of hatred, it will be recorded as a hate crime”.

The Report concludes that this vague and very subjective definition of hate crime “may well explain why some police forces are seeing big rises in their recorded crimes and why the UK tops a list of over 50 countries for hate crimes”. Posing the question: “Does this mean Britain is more hateful than other nations?”, reporter Simon Cox’s answer is a clear “No”.

The investigation cites the example of young trainee policeman James Parkes who received serious injuries when attacked in Liverpool in October. The media reporting of the assault on PC Parkes has focussed on his homosexuality, and Liverpool police are treating it as a ‘homophobic’ hate crime. But The Report heard that PC Parkes was beaten up after he intervened in an altercation between a gang and nightclub doormen while off duty. “If true,” the investigation concludes, “this version would turn an iconic hate crime into a still serious but altogether different kind of assault.”

Investigating the 2008 hate crime figures, The Report finds that much of what is labelled as hate crime is “low level anti-social behaviour or neighbourly disputes that have escalated and got out of hand”. Dr Neil Chakraborti, a criminologist at Leicester University, said “I think it is a fine line between anti-social behaviour and a hate crime,” adding that it can be difficult to judge when low level abuse and harassment become a hate crime.

The Report also warns that the Government’s hate action plan, launched this summer, will only confuse matters more. It says that initiatives like establishing specialist hate crime courts, obliging all public bodies to record and report all hate crimes and incidents and requiring schools to report all bullying with hate elements could be counter-productive. It cautions that if such schemes are implemented “we may end up with a picture of the UK that is much more hateful than the reality and may not reduce the levels of this type of crime”.

...

The Invention of the Jewish People

This book The Invention of the Jewish People is an interesting one. It's apparently kicking up a storm in Israel, which is undoubtedly its intention.

In his book "[Sand] tries to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin, but rather is a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. He argues that for a number of Zionist ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking".

Personally I haven't read the book (yet) and so can't begin to judge the academic thesis. Whatever the academic status, it seems to me this is mostly a straw man argument. The only people I know of who would go to the wall to defend the claim that the jews are a genetically distinct race all descended from Roman-era Israelites would be Nazis, and frankly I really don't mind some renegade academic disagreeing with them. I don't know of any jew who makes this narrow claim, thinks it important to do so, or bases any claims to political rights upon it, and frankly given:

1. the centuries (if not millenia) of organised pogroms and rape against jews
2. the existence of distinct ethnic groups within judaism, such as the Falashas
3. the possibility of conversion to Judaism

you'd be a bit of dickhead to do so.

I really struggle to think of what the modern-day political fallout would be of finding out (shock horror) that many people converted to judaism rather than every last one of the buggers being descendants of original Israelites. Even Zionism itself has not always been concerned with Palestine - among Zionists in the 19th century there was talk of trying to set up a jewish homeland in both Uganda and Argentina before they fixed on the Middle East, which had had a historical jewish community as well as being the location of the cherished Jerusalem.

Inevitably this new 'scholarship' (if that's what it turns out to be) will be seized upon by anti-Zionists and -semites in their droves to further deligitimise you-know-what. Amongst those delighted recipients of the thesis will be, I predict, the usual rabid Islamists, themselves literal interpreters of the Koran, but I'm sure quite happy to latch onto Old Testament debunking if it suits them. And it wouldn't occur to these people that a Pakistani muslim's love for Mecca might be on a par with a Khazar-descended* jew's love for Jerusalem.

Balls to them all, I say.

* see review

--------------------------


Book review: The Invention of the Jewish People
From The Sunday Times
November 15, 2009
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand
The Sunday Times review by Max Hastings

Every nation cherishes its own myths and legends. Most Americans believe themselves to be anti-imperialists, though their ancestors colonised a continent, almost annihilating its native inhabitants. The French fancy themselves descended from ancient Gauls, though like the rest of us they are mongrels.

But Israel’s favoured historical narrative possesses special significance, because it defines the state’s proclaimed right to existence. It holds that the world’s Jews are descended from the ancient tribes of Israel, evicted by the Romans following the fall of the temple in AD70, and today permitted to return to their rightful homeland after almost 2,000 years of foreign persecution.

Shlomo Sand, who teaches contemporary history at Tel Aviv University, rejects most of this as myth. He argues that the alleged history of the Jewish people has been distorted, reshaped or invented in modern times to fit the political requirements of Zionism.

His book, first published in Hebrew, has caused widespread outrage in his native land. But it represents, at the very least, a formidable polemic against claims that Israel has a moral right to define itself as an explicitly and exclusively Jewish society, in which non-Jews, such as Palestino-Israelis, are culturally and politically marginalised.

He disputes the claim that Israel existed for thousands of years as a nation. This, he says, relies chiefly on a willingness to suppose that the Old Testament story is broadly valid, in defiance of archeological and other historical evidence. He refuses to believe that a unified Jewish nation occupied Canaan in the era of David and Solomon, or that the flight from Egypt occurred as described. The Old Testament “is not a narrative that can instruct us about the time it describes” — centuries before it was written — “but is instead an impressive didactic theological discourse”.

He rejects the assertion, dependent on the testimony of the 1st-century Hellenised Jewish historian Josephus, that Jews were forcibly deported from Jerusalem after the fall of the Temple. Rome behaved savagely to defeated rebels, but never expelled whole populations, not least because it required their services.

Historical evidence, says Sand, shows large Jewish communities living all over the Mediterranean, including Rome, before AD70. Cicero complained in 59BC: “You know how numerous that crowd is, how great is its unanimity, and of what weight it is in popular assemblies.”

The author suggests that there was steady economic migration from Palestine after the fall of the Temple, but most Jews remained, eventually to be converted to Islam following the Muslim conquest in the 7th century and afterwards. Some modern Palestinians are more likely to be descended from the ancient Israelites than are modern Israelis who have migrated from Russia.

Acknowledging uncertainty about much that happened in the last millennium before Christ and the first thereafter, Sand dismisses the proposition of Zionist historians that the Jewish communities that grew up all over Europe were descended from Jews driven out of Israel. Many, he says, were indigenous peoples converted to Judaism by small numbers of wandering, literate Jews.

He focuses special attention on the Khazar empire, the Jewish society that flourished around the Volga and Caucasus between the 4th and 13th centuries, and provided seed for the large Jewish communities of eastern Europe. Zionists assert that those Jews had migrated east from Germany. Sand says there is no evidence for this, save that they spoke Yiddish.

He believes, instead, that these were locals who adopted the Jewish religion. He claims that modern Israeli historians refuse to study the Khazar empire honestly, lest they find themselves confronted by evidence that might seem to delegitimise Israel. He writes scornfully of Zionists “entirely caught up in the mythology of an eternal ‘ethnic’ time”.

Sand launches a further broadside at Israeli geneticists who have devoted much energy to identifying a common “Jewish gene” among diaspora communities around the world. He is scornful of such research, perhaps not least because of the ghastly memory of Nazi scientists who pursued alleged Aryan identity.

Sand’s fundamental thesis is that the Jewish people are joined by bonds of religion, not race or ancient nationhood. He deplores the explicitly racial basis of the Israeli state, in which the Arab minority are second-class citizens. “No Jew who lives today in a western democracy would tolerate the discrimination and exclusion experienced by the Palestino-Israelis… The state’s ethnocentric foundation remains an obstacle to [its liberal democratic] development.”

It is easy to see why Sand’s book has attracted fierce controversy. The legend of the ancient exile and modern return stands at the heart of Israel’s self-belief. It is no more surprising that its people enjoy supposing that Joshua’s trumpets blew down the walls of Jericho — at a time when, Sand says, Jericho was a small town with no walls — than that we cherish tales of King Alfred and his cakes.

The author rightly deplores the eagerness of fanatics to insist upon the historical truth of events convenient to modern politics, in defiance of evidence or probability. No modern British historian’s reputation could survive, for instance, claiming the factual accuracy of all the charming medieval stories in Froissart’s Chronicles, which nonetheless bear a closer relationship to events than does the Old Testament.

Yet Sand, whose title is foolishly provocative, displays a lack of compassion for the Jewish predicament. It is possible to accept his view that there is no common genetic link either between the world’s Jews or to the ancient tribes of Israel, while also trusting the evidence of one’s own senses that there are remarkable common Jewish characteristics — indeed, a Jewish genius — that cannot be explained merely by religion.

Jewish faith is visibly declining, in Israel as much as anywhere else. There is much dismay among diaspora communities about the steady increase in the frequency of their members “marrying out”. Yet who can doubt that Jews possess a social identity that transcends any narrow issue of belief? Sand produces some formidable arguments about what Jews may not be, but he fails to explain what it is they are.

His book serves notice on Zionist traditionalists: if an Israeli historian can display such plausible doubts about important aspects of the Israeli legend, any Arabs hostile to the state of Israel can exploit a fertile field indeed.

Yet whatever the rights and wrong of the past, Israel has established its existence. If the Middle East is to advance beyond perpetual conflict, all parties must abandon both claims and grievances rooted in history, and address the now and the future.

Book review: Growing up Bin Laden

Try not to laugh.

--------------------

Book review: Growing up Bin Laden
The Sunday Times
November 15, 2009

Growing up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World by Jean Sasson, Najwa Bin Laden and Omar bin Laden
The Sunday Times review by Robert Harris

Growing Up Bin Laden purports to be the memoirs of his first wife, Najwa (mother of 11 of his children), and her fourth son, Omar, now 28 and married to a British woman. Their accounts have been woven into a fascinating narrative by an American writer, Jean Sasson. Anyone who has read the letters of Stalin’s daughter, say, or the memoirs of Hitler’s entourage, will recognise the same tone of bewildered loyalty warring with appalled disbelief. Indeed, the careers of Hitler, Stalin and Bin Laden seem to have many of the same toxic precursors: an absent father (Bin Laden’s died when he was 10); a strong maternal presence; a grudge against the world, nurtured in childhood; high intelligence, manifested by a prodigious memory (Bin Laden had such a genius for mental arithmetic “men would come to our home and ask him to match his wits against a calculator”) and an inner coldness (“my father…never cuddled me or my brothers”).

Life with such men is seldom congenial, but in terms of sheer domestic awfulness Bin Laden seems to be in a category of his own. Najwa, only 15 at the time of their marriage, describes him as “the most serious man I’ve ever known”, so devout in his Muslim faith that “everything lively was banned”. There was no music in the household, no television, no toys, scant furniture and, even in the heat of Saudi Arabia, no western fripperies such as a refrigerator or air-conditioning. Najwa succumbed to a regime that in the West would be seen as little better than slavery, thickly veiled from head to toe, forbidden to travel alone or set foot out of doors unaccompanied, powerless to control her children’s upbringing (she claims to have borne Bin Laden seven sons and four daughters), obliged to share her husband with three other wives in strict rotation.

Even before he became a terrorist, Bin Laden’s idea of family fun was to make his wives and children go into the desert and sleep in holes in the sand. “No one protested, not even our babies. Everyone did as told, slowly easing our bodies into those dirt holes, waiting for a long, long night to pass.” Laughter was permitted only if the teeth were not exposed. Prescription drugs were forbidden except for dire emergencies: young Omar, a chronic asthmatic, was told to relieve his symptoms by breathing through a honeycomb, a useless remedy. If Bin Laden’s sons failed to conform to his rules, he beat them vigorously with his cane. “Although our father was a quiet figure, and generally spoke softly, his patience hung on a short thread. He was easily angered and could reach a point of violence in an instant.” Bin Laden actively sought out hardship. “Life has to be a burden,” he lectured his son. “Life has to be hard.” Hence the overnight stays in holes.

more...

Winning hearts and minds

Huge Rise in birth defects in Falluja

"Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja's over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems - are unprecedented and at present unexplainable."

'The fake threat from Afghanistan': Peter Hitchens

A rather long blog posting from Peter Hitchens on why the bogus threat to the UK from Afghanistan:

The fake threat from Afghanistan, and do eagles really drop tortoises on people's heads?

A number of correspondents took me up on my (though I say it myself) refreshingly frank admission that I don't know what will happen in Afghanistan if (or rather when) we leave that country, and by implication that I don't think that outcome, whatever it may be, will make much difference to us anyway.

Edward Doyle made a number of statements and assertions which I would ask him to substantiate. First, he refers to something called 'Al Qaeda', on the assumption that there exists a defined, centralised organisation going under this name. Can he tell me: a) where I can find AQ's statement of aims, as opposed to baseless journalistic and political assertions of what those aims are; b)where and when it was founded, and by whom; c) how does it raise and where does it bank or store its funds, and how and to whom does it disburse them? d) what specific aims, methods, etc allow an analyst to decide whether an Islamist terror group is or is not affiliated to AQ, as in ‘such and such an action “bears all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda” ‘. What precisely are these 'hallmarks'? In what way are they different from the modus operandi of any fanatical Islamist terror group, and what reason do we have to assume that they are linked, except in the vaguest sense, with the actions of any other such group, Islamist fanatics existing in places as distant and different as Bosnia, Leeds and the Philippines, and often being from differing and even hostile types of Islam? e) what its political front organisation is, and how we can tell objectively that statements or actions attributed to AQ by journalists or intelligence organisations or governments are in fact connected with it?

Just asking.

Mr Doyle then says that AQ has 'relocated to Somalia'. From where did it do this? How does he know? Who relocated? What does he think about the people who claim it is in fact in Pakistan's tribal areas? Are they mistaken? If so, on what basis are we to judge between him and those who disagree with him, and decide that he knows better. Or does it just depend on which paper he read most recently?

I really don't know what the increased use of the burqa (or more often in this country the hijab and niqab) has to do with this. It is undoubtedly so (the burqa is also almost universal in those parts of Afghanistan we claim to have liberated from Taliban oppression, I might add). That seems to me to have more to do with a general revival of the stricter versions of Sunni Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia during the last 30 years.

And then there's this statement: ‘To be sure, Afghanistan won't turn into a Westminster look-a-like democracy. But it could function in its own way as one, bringing stability to that part of Asia and the prospect of economic development. All this might lead to far better influences being exported from the region.’

Really? How, exactly? This is an enormous 'but if', around about the size of the Himalayas. Yet he skips lightly over it as if it were a sand-castle. Mr Doyle is arguing that men - his neighbours and mine - should be sent to fight and die for a cause. The burden's on him to show good reasons for this. This is a wishful and wholly unrealistic claim of the type I've mentioned before, which falls into the category I've previously mocked, that of ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn't for the houses in between’. Indeed you could, if you had the ladder and the glasses, and it wasn't for the houses. But you haven't, and the houses are there. So you can't.

For example, if Afghanistan functions 'in its own way' which is as a village-based patriarchal clan system, then it won't be a parliamentary democracy. The two are mutually exclusive. See the recent laughable 'elections'.

He then says, quite reasonably: ’There is a real danger, in at least some parts of Britain, that they come to resemble Northern Ireland - opposed community groups with totally different values living cheek-by-jowl, presided over by a liberal elite who understand neither (and of course allowing the BNP to get a foothold all the while).’

But he follows this with a complete non sequitur: ‘Afghanistan is not a liberal war. It's about establishing or maintaining community cohesion over here.’

I am sorry. I simply and genuinely do not understand the connection. I cannot reply to Mr Doyle's reasoning, by which he presumably links his fear for the Ulsterisation of Britain and his belief that our military presence in Afghanistan will prevent this. I cannot reply to it because he appears to have left it out. Has he left it out because he forgot to put it in? Or has he left it out (as I rather suspect) because he has no idea what the connection is? If so, let me reassure him. Nor have I. But in that case, what is his point?

I am asked if anyone has ever been killed as a result of an eagle dropping a tortoise on his head. The Greek classical dramatist Aeschylus is said, by some accounts, to have died in this rather unpleasant and annoying (in that it is so unlikely and rather ridiculous) way. But I am not sure where the database is, that gives statistics on this risk in the present day. When I say that I am as likely to die by this method as I am to die by the hand of a terrorist, I am simply making a point that we are much too scared of terrorists, and that most of us are at no risk whatever of being killed or hurt by terrorist attacks, to which we over-react unreasonably and ludicrously. Compare the stoical response of the British population to the much greater risk from German bombing raids and guided missiles.

Dermot Doyle meanwhile rebukes me as follows: ’We would let so many people down, if we abandoned them to the uncertainty of a future controlled by a bunch of medieval hairy savages, with more wives than teeth, and the eventual consequences for ourselves. Islamic terrorism apart, the single issue of Taliban treatment of females of all ages is worthy of our intervention. We surely cannot sit back and allow a repeat of what we saw in Afghanistan, after the Russian propped regime collapsed.’

It is amusing to see him using the same excuse for our intervention in Afghanistan (emancipation of women) as was employed by Leonid Brezhnev's USSR in the 1970s, for their equally doomed intervention. It is also based on a misunderstanding of reality. Mr Doyle should look into the treatment of women in the non-Taliban areas of Afghanistan (including NGO-infested Kabul) run by our current 'friends', the corrupt and violent warlords who control the country under the figurehead presidency of Hamid Karzai. It does not differ much from the treatment of women under our former 'friends', the Mujahidin whom we financed and armed in their war against the 'progressive' Soviets, and whom we now call 'The Taleban' or 'Al Qaeda'. (People should get hold of the profane but clever and disturbing film Charlie Wilson's War to see the contradictory mess we have got ourselves into with our fantasies of intervention in this part of the world).

The age of imperialism is over. I might regret that, and in fact often do, but it is so. It is none of my business, even if I had the power to do anything about it, how other people wish to order their countries. Unselfishness and neighbourliness are of no worth if they are not effective. As the other Mr Doyle rightly points out, we have more urgent concerns, not being addressed, close to home (where charity begins). What's more, those aims would be achievable, if we tried, whereas cleaning up Afghanistan will be as easy as draining the Pacific with a teaspoon. Do these advocates of war ever look at a map, and see how tiny our presence is, in what is a small part of this rather large country? Do they notice how much of our time is spent in first taking, then abandoning, then retaking the same places?

We intervene in these countries not to do good, but to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. This is why I recommend idealists, who think they can liberate the womenfolk of Afghanistan, to form a volunteer international brigade and go and do it themselves. Actually, only two political figures have ever succeeded in de-Islamising any society. One was Kemal Ataturk, whose work in Turkey is now being busily undone by the AK party, with Western support. The other was Josef Stalin, who banned the veil and brought female equality across Central Asia and the Caucasus. Both men were utterly ruthless. Both, in the long term, failed in their objective. Do we wish to follow their examples? Do we think we shall succeed where they ultimately failed?

In a charming and civilised post, Tom Bumstead says that a linking organisation can be identified which connects terrorist actions in Britain with Afghanistan. Well, I'd subject such claims to the questions I ask above about 'Al Qaeda'. Those in the intelligence business both love constructing these spider's webs (usually post facto) and often need them to get the US government to finance and support their work (this is the fundamental reason behind the adoption of the name 'Al Qaeda' by American intelligence organisations). But let us assume that Mr Bumstead's connections are correct. He goes on: ‘Every real attack on the UK has a link with this group and the UK will not be safe from this particular threat until Al Mujahiroun has been shut down in the UK and in Afghanistan/Pakistan. You ask why a British presence in Helmand is required - the answer is that now that Pakistan is no longer so safe a haven for terrorism as it once was - Afghanistan could take its place unless protected. The forces of civilization need to be on both sides of the border to make this area safe. There is no other area in the world which could breed this kind of terrorism - this is not an idealistic swing in the dark against evil - it is surgically precise.’

Did you spot the sleight of hand? Yes, Mr Bumstead has rather cleverly invented a country . It is called ‘Afghanistan/Pakistan’. It is necessary for his argument because, if there are such 'training camps' and if they are important, and if they do play a role in terrorist actions in this country (an argument for another time) then the trouble is that they are in Pakistan, a member (I think, currently, though this comes and goes) of the Commonwealth with which we have diplomatic relations, and with which we are not at war, and to which we gave independence in 1947. We're not sending British troops there, I think. Pakistan is also incidentally a nuclear power, and would not take kindly to our invading it. Further, Pakistan was also until recently under the control of a military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who we appear to have helped to destabilise (again in the name of 'democracy') in favour of a government which seems far less capable of controlling such things than he was. But that's by the way.

By pretending that Afghanistan and Pakistan are the same country, Mr Bumstead hopes to avoid my question, which he knows perfectly well is coming: ’How does the presence of our troops in Helmand province in Afghanistan in any way influence the existence or operation of Islamist training camps a long way away in Pakistan, a different country? Helmand, according to my map, is a good deal closer to Iran than it is to South Waziristan, the scene of Pakistan's battles with the Taleban (alias the Pashtuns). And that battle is all about the (British Imperial) misplacing of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, leaving large numbers of Pashtuns in a country they don't want to be in, a problem worsened in recent years by the many Pashtun refugees from the Russo-Afghan war, who have settled in Pakistan and so wield political influence there. I need from him simple, easy-to-follow factual explanations as to how this process - of British troops in Helmand preventing terror attacks on Britain - works. I can't make it out myself. And, once again, the burden of proof must rest on those who propose and defend this very bloody and costly military action. I don't have to prove it's futile (though 95 percent of military operations are) .They have to prove it's rational and effective.

One small non-Afghan point. A person styling himself 'Geraint' writes: ’Mr Hitchens's logic is rather faulty. He says the Tories should be destroyed but then says that the obvious successors like UKIP or the English Democrats are Cravat and Blazer brigade or too small. Yet a party starting from scratch would suffer the exact same problems. Besides which he lambasts UKIP yet at the same time praised Norman Tebbit for telling people to go vote for them at the Euro elections. Which is it Mr Hitchens you cannot have it both ways!’

I dealt with this only last week (Google the November 5 posting ‘Please stop trying to get me to endorse UKIP’. Or find it in the archives). UKIP is not 'the “obvious successor” ' to the Tories. As long as the Tories remain unsplit, no serious rival can develop. Any new party will be built out of the ruins of the Tories, and will have to win a large part of the vote which the Tories have hitherto counted upon. It will not be 'starting from scratch'. It will be reordering the conservative forces in this country which exist, but are currently trapped in impotence, or reduced to abstention. They are either too disillusioned to vote, or they are chained by habit and misplaced loyalty to the Useless Tories. That loyalty can only be shaken by a further Tory failure at the election, a real possibility (The last Tory score in the polls was 39 percent, of 67 percent of the electorate, which in reality means the support of about 25 percent of voters as a whole).

Obama

I'm starting a general all purpose Obama thread. Kicking it off with Peter Hitchens' surprising comment on Obama below:

"I never joined in the exaggerated swoon of praise for Barack Obama. But I have some respect – so far – for his unwillingness to be panicked by generals into deepening the futile deployment in Afghanistan.

I was also impressed that, unlike our own leaders, he had the decency to stand and salute the returning dead, whose homecoming George W. Bush tried to keep secret.

If soldiers’ coffins were carried through the Commons, with the maimed following in their wheelchairs, our pathetic frontbenchers might get round to debating this moronic, doomed war, and getting us out of it."

Don't separate the Banks

The Gov'nor of the Bank of England called for Retail Banks to be separated from Investment Banks. George Osborne said he agrees with much of the speech. Brown and Darling have politely disagreed. I don't know enough to make an informed opinion, but in general I think Darling has called it right on most of the big questions on the Credit Crunch. Darling wants Banks to draw up Living Wills instead and so does this guy, Alister Heath:

'ALLISTER HEATH
WHEN the Governor of the Bank of England – and if the Tories are elected, the next chief financial regulator – calls for investment banks to be separated from retail banks, everybody should sit up and listen carefully. King seems deadly serious, and George Osborne said last night that he agreed with much of the speech. While that doesn’t commit the Tories to introducing a UK version of the Glass-Steagall Act, the US law that separated investment banking (such as proprietary trading) from retail and commercial banking, it certainly reopens a nasty can of worms.

On balance, however, King is wrong. There is no real evidence that any fewer UK banks would have gone bust had this separation been in place. It was not proprietary trading that brought down HBOS, it was bad lending to commercial property. Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley and the Dunfermline did not own investment banks. RBS was brought to its knees as a result of a multitude of bad lending decisions, the over-priced takeover of ABN Amro and vast holdings of dodgy “assets”; its collapse was not caused by a giant investment banking bet gone wrong. In the US, it is likely that Citigroup would have required a bailout even had it not owned an investment bank. Generally, the same is true of all of virtually all the recipients of Tarp funds.

The very distinction between “casino” and “utility” banking, while theoretically meaningful, is nonsensical in practice. The most dangerous banking activities are lending against property, a utility function; the financial system was destroyed by undercapitalised banks holding property-based assets such as CDOs which subsequently collapsed in value together with the housing market. That had nothing to do with proprietary trading, which is less systemically risky than old-fashioned lending.

In fact, Glass-Steagall has been shown to be worse than useless by academics including Eugene White of Rutgers, Randall Kroszner and Raghuram Rajan of Chicago, and Carlos Ramirez and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason. Unified banking is safer and less prone to collapse than artificially segmented institutions.

I strongly recommend to readers who think that King is right to read a powerful tome by George J Benston of the University of Georgia. It is a bit of a mouthful, but The Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking: The Glass-Steagall Act Revisited and Reconsidered demonstrates that commercial banks involved in security markets did not fail in large numbers or cause the 1930s crisis. Tabarrock, meanwhile, argues that Glass-Steagall was the product of an attempt by the Rockefellers to raise the costs of their rivals, the House of Morgan.

There must be no more bailouts. Banks of all kinds that become insolvent should be allowed to go bust in a controlled, gentle manner that doesn’t endanger the economy or take decades to unravel (depositors could still be insured, but that is a separate question). We need new resolution procedures and living wills; meanwhile, banks need to hold much greater amounts of liquid capital and central bankers mustn’t stoke any more bubbles with excessively low interest rates. But we shouldn’t force universal banks such as HSBC, Barclays or JP Morgan to break themselves up. Doing so may even make the system more, rather than less, prone to failure.'

link here

Oliver Kamm knocks some sense into Gary Younge

Oliver Kamm swats some nonsense from Gary Younge (also, in passing, Kamm dismisses as equal drivel Islamic conspiracy theories indulged in by Phillips, Steyn and Pipes, all of whose articles feature regularly on this site).

""Jack Straw started it all"

In The Guardian Gary Younge blames Jack Straw for the BNP. How so?

"New Labour's race-baiting rhetoric gave the state's imprimatur to the notion that Britain's racial problems were not caused by racism but the existence of non-white, non-Christian and non-British people."

What race-baiting rhetoric would that be?

"Three years ago this month Jack Straw argued his case for urging Muslim women who attend his MP's surgery to remove their niqab."

Where do you start with this risible piece of demagoguery? I'm pro-immigration; the claims of such figures as Geert Wilders about a Muslim takeover of Europe, or "Eurabia", are unadulterated alarmism and inflammatory nonsense. But the notion that Straw's request (not "urging") to Muslim women is the soft end of "race-baiting" is no less ignorant. To request, or even (as I would) to insist, that religious symbols play no part in public life is a constitutional principle, not a racist act."

Link here

Oliver Kamm - 'Ostalgie'

Oliver Kamm is an infuriating but must-read writer. An unrepentant Blairite, ex investment banker and very pro EU. There's lots I disagree with, but he's smart and argues his case very rigorously.

Here he is taking a swipe at the Daily Mail. Extraordinarily and counterintuitively the Daily Mail carries an article looking back with nostalgia at life in Communist Hungary.

"If the Mail titles ever ceased publication, I should be sorry on more grounds than merely the loss of press diversity. I find it useful that a single stable should encompass so many things I deride or despise: economically illiterate anti-Europeanism; social authoritarianism; mean-spirited, sneering hostility to homosexuals; crank conspiracy theories; support for Intelligent Design; utterly bogus, unfounded scaremongering about evidence-based medical science; and so many others.

But this is a new one on me. The Mail on Sunday carries an extraordinary article entitled "Oppressive and grey? No, growing up under Nazism was the happiest time of my life" by Susanne Clark. According to Mrs Clark, a state that is typically portrayed in western media as an unrelenting tyranny was more of a rural idyll - all in all, "rather a fun place to live". She says:

"Some of my earliest memories of living at home are of the animals my parents kept on their smallholding. Rearing animals was something most people did, as well as growing vegetables. Outside Berlin and the big towns, we were a nation of Tom and Barbara Goods.

"My parents had about 50 chickens, pigs, rabbits, ducks, pigeons and geese. We kept the animals not just to feed our family but also to sell meat to our friends. We used the goose feathers to make pillows and duvets."


Mrs Clark is especially interesting in her account of membership of the Hitler Youth:

"Many in the West believed it was a crude attempt to indoctrinate the young with Nazi ideology, but being a German Maiden taught us valuable life skills such as building friendships and the importance of working for the benefit of the community. 'Together for each other' was our slogan, and that was how we were encouraged to think.

"As a German Maiden, if you performed well in your studies, communal work and school competitions, you were rewarded with a trip to a summer camp. I went every year because I took part in almost all the school activities: competitions, gymnastics, athletics, choir, shooting, literature and library work.

"On our last night at the Bund Deutscher Mädel camp we sang songs around the bonfire, such as the Hitler Youth anthem, the Fahnenlied, and other traditional songs. Our feelings were always mixed: sad at the prospect of leaving, but happy at the thought of seeing our families again. Today, even those who do not consider themselves Nazis look back at their days in the Hitler Youth with great affection."

You think I'm making this up? Well, I've changed one or two words. The author's name is Zsuzsanna, not Susanne, Clark. And instead of Nazi Germany she is writing of Communist Hungary. She was a member not of the Hitler Youth but of the Young Pioneers, where she sang about squirrels rather than banners. Excepting the reference to Berlin, everything else is as she has written it.

But my analogy is fair. The totalitarian oppression of Eastern Europe after WWII was a difference of tempo, not of type, from Nazi Germany. Mrs Clark has what I suppose we should gratefully take as the fearless free spirit to acknowledge that "Communism in Hungary had its downside", but "despite this, I believe that, taken as a whole, the positives outweighed the negatives". So let's look at some of the negatives.

The regime of János Kádár in Hungary came to be seen in the West as more liberal than the other Soviet satellite states. This was true (and even then only partially so) only in economics, not in politics. The regime was founded in terror. After the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Kádár was installed as party chief not by the people but by the Soviet Union. He immediately became known as Hungary's Quisling.

Kádár pledged not to arrest the deposed leader Imre Nagy, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. Tragically, Nagy believed him. Nagy decided not to seek asylum but emerged, and of course was promptly arrested. Nagy and his comrades were imprisoned in Romania for 18 months, before being sent back to Hungary in June 1958. They were given a secret trial. The inevitable verdict was guilty; the inevitable sentence was death. Nagy was buried in an unmarked grave. Many of his compatriots shared a similar fate. The regime's own figures put the number of political executions at 2,000. The true figure was many times this. Thousands were incarcerated or exiled, or simply removed from public life. Scores of thousands were deported to the Soviet Union and disappeared. Kádár broke Hungary's political life. Hungary became a state without politics.

I heard about some of this at the same time as, I guess, Mrs Clark was undergoing her healthy outdoor pursuits with the Pioneers. The Kádár terror provoked an exodus to the West. For no reason I ever understood, many Hungarians settled in Leicester, where I grew up. I got to know one of these freedom fighters, Péter Mandoki. After settling in Leicester, he had met and married a local girl. Their daughter, Anna, became and has remained ever since one of my dearest friends. After the collapse of Communism, Anna learned Hungarian, travelled to the country to meet her lost family, and eventually settled in Budapest in 1991 where she worked as an accountant. I used to go to stay with her there or we'd meet in Prague. Even with my partial knowledge and limited experience of the culture, the sense of nations emerging from a stunted, tyrannised past was palpable.

A few years ago, Anna, now having emigrated to Melbourne, sought out the equivalents of her father: Hungarian émigrés who had fled to Australia after the 1956 uprising. She interviewed them for a book that she later published. There is a passage in which one of her interviewees describes the games of a young boy of that time, playing with his toy soldiers. The soldiers in best condition are (if you can imagine it) UN forces, and those in the ugliest condition are Soviet troops. "Itt vannak ENSZek!" cries the boy: "The UN troops are here!"

But of course the UN troops were not there. They never came. Those who hoped in vain for the UN's arrival, however, can now find in the Mail on Sunday the gratuitous insult from Mrs Clark that theirs are "the perspectives of wealthy emigrés or anti-communist dissidents with an axe to grind". It seems redundant, so I hope it will not appear ungracious, to add that Mrs Clark, who has been hawking her experiences in the Young Pioneers for some years, is an awesomely silly woman to whom history has never happened."

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament

Scary stuff. The colleague who brought this to my attention thinks, via Guido Fawkes' blog, that it may pertain to Trafigura.

--------

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament
Guardian
12 October 2009

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting. The editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque world in which we cannot tell the public anything about information which is being suppressed, nor the proceedings which suppress it. It is doubly menacing when those restraints include the reporting of parliament itself."

The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that "whatever comments are made in parliament" can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.

He said: "Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of 'Colonel B', granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of 'national security'. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published."

The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the king – over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes's battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, "it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to".

School seeks dinner lady. Humans need not apply.

This brilliant article in today's Guardian by Jenni Russell brings home how New Labour have enormously empowered petty dictatorial bureaucratic authority and poisoned the relationship between adults and children in the public space with suspicion and fear.

'It was never in any election manifesto, and yet it will be one of this government's most disastrous legacies. The transformation of the relationship between adults and children into one of caution, suspicion, confusion and fear will outlast many other Labour reforms. Stealthily, and without open political debate, we have moved from the assumption that all adults have a role in socialising children, towards a new and uncertain world in which contact with children is increasingly regulated by officials and the state. It is a kind of collective madness, in which the boundaries of what we are allowed to do shift too fast and too secretly for us to keep up.

This week a dinner lady at a village primary school was sacked for telling a child's parents that she was sorry their daughter had been attacked in the playground at school. Carol Hill had found seven-year-old Chloe David tied up by her wrists and ankles, surrounded by four boys, having been whipped with a skipping rope across her legs. Hill had rescued the child and taken the boys to the headteacher.

That night she bumped into the parents, who were friends of hers, and offered her sympathy. It instantly became clear that the parents had not been told the story by the school. Their daughter had arrived home traumatised and refusing to talk about what happened, with a note saying only that she had been "hurt in a skipping-rope incident". As soon as the school discovered that Hill had told the parents the truth, she was first suspended for several months, and then sacked by the governors for "breaching pupil confidentiality".

This is a new world, in which schools may effectively lie to parents about traumatic events affecting their children, and yet where the only offence committed is by a person who unwittingly breaks that official secrecy. It is no longer the proper role of adults, even those in a tiny village, where everyone knows everyone else, to discuss the behaviour of children. It is for the state to define who may speak and who must be silent.

To officialdom, this is perfectly acceptable. What happened in Essex isn't an aberration, but evidence of a new philosophy in action. It's one that expects people to act not as concerned adults, but as automatons. Yesterday morning the chief executive of the National Association of Headteachers was asked what he thought Hill should have done in the instant that she realised Chloe's parents were in the dark. His response? That she should have refused to comment, and then followed "proper procedures and processes" within the school if she was unhappy with what the family had been told.'

Read the full article here.

The media’s MMR hoax

An extract from the excellent Bad Science.

--------

The media’s MMR hoax
August 30th, 2008
Ben Goldacre

Dr Andrew Wakefield is in front of the General Medical Council on charges of serious professional misconduct, his paper on 12 children with autism and bowel problems is described as “debunked” – although it never supported the conclusions ascribed to it – and journalists have convinced themselves that his £435,643 fee from legal aid proves that his research was flawed. I will now defend the heretic Dr Andrew Wakefield.

The media are fingering the wrong man, and they know who should really take the blame: in MMR, journalists and editors have constructed their greatest hoax to date, and finally demonstrated that they can pose a serious risk to public health. But there are also many unexpected twists to learn from: the health journalists themselves were not at fault, the scale of the bias in the coverage was greater than anybody realised at the time, Leo Blair was a bigger player than Wakefield, and it all happened much later than you think.

...

2002 was in fact the peak of the media coverage, by a very long margin. In 1998 there were only 122 articles on MMR. In 2002 there were 1,257. MMR was the biggest science story that year, the most likely science topic to be written about in opinion or editorial pieces, it produced the longest stories of any science subject, and was also by far the most likely to generate letters to the press, so people were clearly engaging with the issue. MMR was the biggest and most heavily covered science story for years.

It was also covered extremely badly, and largely by amateurs. Less than a third of broadsheet reports in 2002 referred to the overwhelming evidence that MMR is safe, and only 11% mentioned that it is regarded as safe in the 90 other countries in which it is used.

While stories on GM food, or cloning, stood a good chance of being written by specialist science reporters, with stories on MMR their knowledge was deliberately sidelined, and 80% of the coverage was by generalist reporters. Suddenly we were getting comment and advice on complex matters of immunology and epidemiology from Nigella Lawson, Libby Purves, Suzanne Moore and Carol Vorderman, to name only a few. The anti-MMR lobby, meanwhile, developed a reputation for targeting generalist journalists, feeding them stories, and actively avoiding health or science correspondents.

Journalists are used to listening with a critical ear to briefings from press officers, politicians, PR executives, salespeople, lobbyists, celebrities and gossip-mongers, and they generally display a healthy natural scepticism: but in the case of science, generalists don’t have the skills to critically appraise a piece of scientific evidence on its merits. At best, the evidence of these “experts” will only be examined in terms of who they are as people, or perhaps who they have worked for. In the case of MMR, this meant researchers were simply subjected to elaborate smear campaigns.

The actual scientific content of stories was brushed over and replaced with didactic statements from authority figures on either side of the debate, which contributed to a pervasive sense that scientific advice is somehow arbitrary, and predicated upon a social role – the “expert” – rather than on empirical evidence.

Any member of the public would have had very good reason to believe that MMR caused autism, because the media distorted the scientific evidence, reporting selectively on the evidence suggesting that MMR was risky, and repeatedly ignoring the evidence to the contrary. In the case of the PCR data, the genetic fingerprinting information on whether vaccine-strain measles virus could be found in tissue samples of children with autism and bowel problems, this bias was, until a few months ago, quite simply absolute. You will remember from earlier that Wakefield co-authored two scientific papers – known as the “Kawashima paper” and the “O’Leary paper” – claiming to have found such evidence, and received blanket media coverage for them. But you may never even have heard of the papers showing these to be probable false positives.

...

[...]British journalists have done their job extremely well. People make health decisions based on what they read in the newspapers, and MMR uptake has plummeted from 92% to 73%: there can be no doubt that the appalling state of health reporting is now a serious public health issue. We have already seen a mumps epidemic in 2005, and measles cases are at their highest levels for a decade. But these are not the most chilling consequences of their hoax, because the media are now queueing up to blame one man, Wakefield, for their own crimes.

It is madness to imagine that one single man can create a 10-year scare story. It is also dangerous to imply – even in passing – that academics should be policed not to speak their minds, no matter how poorly evidenced their claims. Individuals like Wakefield must be free to have bad ideas. The media created the MMR hoax, and they maintained it diligently for 10 years. Their failure to recognise that fact demonstrates that they have learned nothing, and until they do, journalists and editors will continue to perpetrate the very same crimes, repeatedly, with increasingly grave consequences.

Bengal tigers face extinction after China rejects trade curbs

Absolutely fucking appalling.

----

Bengal tigers face extinction after China rejects trade curbs

The biggest threat to the 1,300 Bengal tigers left in the wild is a rampant demand from China for tiger skins, penises, teeth, whiskers and bones. Many of the parts are ground up and drunk as a libido-enhancing tonic. Although China has bred around 4,000 tigers in farms across the country, the bodies of wild tigers are more highly prized.

Tiger poaching and the smuggling of skins is now the second most common crime along the Indo-China border after the trade of narcotics. According to the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), 66 tigers were lost in 2009, with one third being shot by poachers. Two decades ago, there were as many as 15,000 tigers roaming wild in India.

----

Tiger economy
The Times
September 3, 2009

The world’s dwindling tiger colonies are facing yet another threat, this time from China’s plan to sanction the use of lawfully sourced tiger pelts. The fear is that, by loosening its ban on the trading of any tiger parts, China will spur poaching in India, which is home to the largest remaining wild tiger population.

China argues that while it may be host to only 30 or 40 tigers living in the wild, it has 5,000 more that have been reared on farms. Such farms were created as tourist attractions, but few doubt that their owners hope to use the cats to produce health tonics. Tiger bone wine is especially prized as a pick-me-up. Though pricey, it grows ever more affordable the richer the Chinese get.

What worries conservationists is that once any trade in tiger parts gains official blessing, policing the traffic will become difficult. India fears that as demand for tiger products grows, it will find itself becoming an even more attractive target for poachers: breeding tigers in captivity in China looks promising, but it will always cost more than slipping a poacher as little as £5 for a carcass that traffickers then transport to China.

India already detects China’s swelling wealth, and a companion rise in its appetite for traditional medicines, as a factor in the decline of its own tiger numbers. Pressured also by a loss of both habitat and prey, India’s tiger population shrank to just 1,411 in February last year from 3,642 in 2002 and 40,000 or so a century ago. India fears that any further incentive for poaching might drive tigers to extinction in the wild.

However heady their benefits, tiger bone tonics are hardly worth the risk of a beast of such fearful symmetry vanishing for ever from our jungles.

----

Fears for Indian tiger after Chinese green light for sale of animal products
The Times
September 3, 2009

Only about 30 to 40 tigers survive in the wild in China. But about 5,000 live in tiger farms, where they are bred at great speed. Ostensibly the farms are tourist attractions but it is widely believed that their owners hope to use the animals to produce expensive tiger tonics. The income from visitors to the farms would be dwarfed by the profits from sales of tiger bone wine.

India boasts the world’s largest population of tigers in the wild. Indian conservationists believe that the rapid decline in tiger numbers in the country is a direct result of China’s economic rise and the related increase in demand for traditional medicines. The Indian tiger population stood at 1,411 in February last year, according to an official count, down from 3,642 in 2002 and an estimated 40,000 a century ago.

Ashok Kumar, of the Wildlife Trust of India, a conservation organisation, said that any relaxation of Chinese rules would have a catastrophic effect on the Indian tiger population.

“In all our communications with the Chinese we have been led to believe that the ban is firmly in place,” he said. “We were not aware of this document, [which] could have a huge effect on wild tigers in India by stimulating demand for medicines in China.”

A nuclear-armed Middle East?

Irritating Blogger restrictions mean I couldn't add this as a comment to the existing Iran thread. Come on guys, sign up to Wordpress!

--------------

A Mad Call to Arms
Shmuel Bar
Standpoint Magazine September 2009

...

The prospect of nuclear (Iran-Israel) or a "polynuclear" Middle East has been debated for some time in academic and policy circles, giving rise to a number of theories regarding the relevance of the lessons of the Cold War to such a situation. Some invoke the experience of the Cold War to argue that a "polynuclear" Middle East can still be averted. Others argue that a nuclear Middle East may even provide a more stable regional order based on the Cold War doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD).

...

[T]he Iranian drive for nuclear weapons was originally motivated by Iraq's WMD capabilities under Saddam Hussein, but continued not only as a strategic response to the perceived threat from the US and Israel but also as an umbrella under which it can achieve what it perceives to be its well-deserved hegemonic status in the region. Nuclear weapons are also seen by Iran as compensation for humiliation at the hands of the West and as a "membership card" to an exclusive club of nuclear powers. These goals will not be served by Iran achieving a threshold status. Domestic pressures also would make it difficult to forego the nuclear programme. The cost of the nuclear project, the prestige of key figures in the regime and the affront to national pride if Iran were to be coerced into giving up the programme will all play a role. This last consideration has become even more important since the 12 June elections and the subsequent challenges of the opposition to the very legitimacy of the regime.

...

Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation may not remain restricted to states. Weapons of mass destruction may filter down to non-state entities in such a scenario in two ways: to any of a plethora of quasi-states with differing levels of control (Kurdistan, Palestine), terrorist organisations (al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad) and rival ethnic groups for whom the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a hostile state would be an incentive to acquire at least a limited WMD capability; and to "proxy" or "surrogate" terrorist groups, such as Hizbollah.

...

The bipolar paradigm of the Cold War differed fundamentally from the complexities of multipolar deterrence that will emerge in the Middle East. And the existence of a credible "second-strike" capability on both sides, which characterised the Cold War from an early stage, will be absent from the Middle East for the foreseeable future.

...

The Cold War was in essence a bilateral struggle between American and Soviet blocs, which simplified the signaling of intentions and prevention of misunderstandings. ... A "polynuclear" Middle East will be fundamentally different and less stable.

...

[T]he essence of MAD was the existence of a credible "secondstrike" capability. ... [F]or the foreseeable future, there will be no balance of MAD in the Middle East.

...

It may be argued that the Middle Eastern regimes are no less rational [than the US/USSR], and therefore will not embark on a course that will lead to their utter destruction.

...

This argument suffers from two key flaws. First, rationality of the players is no guarantee of a rational outcome. As the late US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, pointed out regarding the Cuban missile crisis: "Kennedy was rational, Khrushchev was rational, Castro was rational, rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies." Second, the ability of the US and Soviet leaderships to make decisions on strategic issues with minimal "irrational" input was much greater than that of the regimes in the Middle East. Strategic decision-making was effectively separated from domestic pressures. Leaders in Washington and Moscow did not have to take into account crowds in their respective capitals demonstrating — as they have in Pakistan — with models of nuclear bombs and calling to use them against historic enemies or with apocalyptic or suicidal traditions. The leaders of both countries identified with their constituent populations enough so that they could be deterred by "counter-population" and "counter-value" threats.

In both these aspects, the Middle East differs. The predominance of religion and honour in Middle Eastern culture sets it apart. The history of the region is replete with chronicles of catastrophes foretold. Leaders have brought their nations to — and beyond — the brink of catastrophe with decisions fuelled by domestic pressures, honour, existential hostility (Arab-Iranian/Sunni-Shia/Arab-Jewish) and religion. Religious and nationalistic fervour have led Arab countries to countless military debacles and regimes in the Middle East have shown a predilection for brinkmanship and for perseverance in conflicts despite rational considerations against such behaviour. A case in point is the continuation of the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s at enormous costs in human lives and material, due to Khomeini's insistence that the elimination of Saddam Hussein was a religious duty and that the war could not end without achieving that goal. Another case in point is the Arab decisions which precipitated the 1967 Israeli-Arab war with the consequences of the loss of Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan. Saddam Hussein continued to brandish weapons he did not have in order not to lose face within the region, even at the price of providing the US and its allies with a casus belli.

There are no grounds to believe that the possession of nuclear weapons will fundamentally change these patterns of behaviour. The level of identification of the regimes and the leaderships with the populations that would bear the brunt of a nuclear exchange also plays a pivotal role in their risk calculus. For many of these leaders, victory or defeat is measured only by their own survival. A sectarian regime is more likely to adopt an après moi le deluge attitude and to engage in nuclear brinkmanship.

The role of religion in this regard certainly defies comparison with either Judaeo-Christian or East Asian culture. Islamic clerics and legal scholars do not refer to the use of WMD as a taboo, as has become the rule in the West. The lack of distinction in Islamic law of war (jihad) between "combatants", who may be killed, and "non-combatants", who may not be harmed, makes utter rejection of the use of such weapons legally untenable. Sunni scholars widely agree that the acquisition of nuclear weapons is at least permissible if not obligatory for Muslim states, on the grounds that they are obliged to maintain parity if not superiority over "the enemy", and to "make the enemies of the ummah tremble". A fatwa by the Saudi Sheikh Nasser bin Hamid al-Fahd in May 2003 concludes that use of such weapons against the US may be seen as "obligatory". The fatwa is based on various verses in the Koran, which allow Muslims to use against their enemies any type of weapons that the enemy possesses, and on the Islamic code of lex talionis.

Shia political-legal thought is not very different. Upon his accession to power in 1979, Khomeini suspended the Shah's nuclear programme, but it was revived while he was still alive on the basis of "expediency" (to counter Iraq's programme). During negotiations with the international community over Tehran's nuclear programme, the Iranian negotiator Sirus Naseri released the "news" on 14 September 2005 that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei, had issued a verbal fatwa during Friday prayers, declaring the use of nuclear weapons as "haram" — forbidden by Islamic law. However, the wording of Khamanei's purported fatwa was not published by the Office of the Leader and was nowhere to be found in the Iranian media. This raises serious questions over its very existence. This constructive ambiguity leaves the regime the option to justify brandishing and use of nuclear weapons if the occasion arises.

One aspect of the influence of religion is difficult to assess: the role of apocalyptic beliefs and putative direct communication with the deity or his emissary. The claims by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he communicates with the Hidden Imam should be taken seriously. Even if he himself has doubts regarding the real nature of the epiphany that he has experienced, the claim that he has received "extended assurances" from Heaven can seriously constrain his capacity to retreat from potential conflict. The eminent scholar of Middle Eastern culture and politics, Professor Bernard Lewis, has argued that, to a leader or leadership group which fervently believes in the imminence of the apocalypse, mass destruction would not be a threat but a promise. Muslim belief — both Sunni and Shia — in the appearance of a Mahdi who will fight on the side of Allah's soldiers (if only they show themselves worthy of him by proving that they rely only on divine provenance) heightens the risk. Even without going as far as to impute apocalyptic goals to regional leaders, it may be argued that their domestic posturing in claiming divine protection from any devastating reprisal will feed the potential for escalation.

...

The countries of the Middle East will probably be more predisposed than the Cold War protagonists to brandish their nuclear weapons, not only rhetorically but through nuclear alerts or nuclear tests, leading to escalation. Once one country has taken such measures, the other nuclear countries of the region would probably feel forced to adopt defensive measures, leading to multilateral escalation. However, such multilateral escalation will not be mitigated by Cold War-type hotlines and means of signalling and none of the parties involved will have escalation dominance. This and the absence of a credible second-strike capability may well strengthen the tendency to opt for a first strike.

True, we may safely assume that the leaders and peoples of the Middle East have no desire to be the targets of nuclear blasts. However, the inherent instability of the region and its regimes, the difficulty in managing multilateral nuclear tensions, the weight of religious, emotional and internal pressures and the proclivity of many of the regimes in the region towards military adventurism and brinkmanship do not bode well for the future of this region once it enters the nuclear age.