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).
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Sunday, November 01, 2009
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."
"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."
Thursday, October 22, 2009
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
'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
""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
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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."
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."
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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.
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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".
--------
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".
Friday, September 25, 2009
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.
'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.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The media’s MMR hoax
An extract from the excellent Bad Science.
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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.
--------
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.
Friday, September 04, 2009
Bengal tigers face extinction after China rejects trade curbs
Absolutely fucking appalling.
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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.
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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.”
----
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.”
Thursday, September 03, 2009
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!
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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.
--------------
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.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi returns to Libya
As Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi returns to a hero's welcome in Libya, Statfor look at the evidence for his guilt.
Libya: A Hero's Welcome
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
August 26, 2009
...
Like Osama bin Laden’s initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi’s claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and head of the ESO.
Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans — especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher’s government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.
While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project — much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans — is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.
Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered — think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.
The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi’s eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack — al-Megrahi’s superiors — were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi’s cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi’s approval.
Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.
Libya: A Hero's Welcome
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
August 26, 2009
...
Like Osama bin Laden’s initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi’s claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and head of the ESO.
Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans — especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher’s government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.
While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project — much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans — is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.
Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered — think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.
The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi’s eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack — al-Megrahi’s superiors — were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi’s cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi’s approval.
Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.
Monday, August 17, 2009
NHS and alternative health care systems
(Note: am having to start a new thread because of bloody Blogger comment length restrictions. I'm musing on moving our blog to Wordpress for that reason. But anyway, here's the older NHS thread).
--------------
NHS and alternative health care systems
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Tim Harford's fascinating book The Undercover Economist was on health care systems. Astute readers, such as the ImpDec audience, will probably be unsurprised to learn that both Britain's NHS and America's bizarre public/private health care systems are extremely poorly designed and wasteful. After a discussion as to the characteristics of systems likely to do better, Singapore was held up as an example of how to do it.
This article gives a flavour of Singapore's system:
Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Library of Economics and Liberty
JANUARY 13, 2008
All this is in the news because of comments from Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP, disparaging the NHS. It turns out (this is a massively underreported in the discussion) that Hannan also favours the Singaporean model. Having read his comments below, I'm firmly on his side. And I can also say, having lived in Spain and Germany, that their systems worked a damn sight better than ours, and that anyone who thinks the health care argument is between the UK and US models needs to have his head examined. Preferably after a 6 month wait, and in an MRSA infested hell-hole.
The NHS row: my final word
Daniel Hannan's blog
August 14th, 2009
...
As far as I can tell, three separate charges ae being laid against me. First, that I have insulted NHS workers. Second, that I want to impose a US-style healthcare system on Britain. Third, that I have made criticisms overseas that I wouldn’t make in Britain.
Let’s take these in order. Start with how I insulted the 1.4 million NHS workers. Here’s what I said: “I don’t want to imply that, because we have a bad system, it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.” Pretty rude, eh? I suppose I should have learned manners from the NHS’s founding spirit, Nye Bevan, who described Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
The third charge - that I should, as Labour’s Tom Watson puts it, “say it in Britain” - is the most asinine of all. I have been saying it in Britain for years. I’ve written a book all about how to shift power from bureaucracies to consumers. It’s called The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, it’s been in Amazon’s top 30 best sellers for nine months, it has become the best selling political tract in Britan and you can buy it here. In it is a lengthy chapter on healthcare which sets out how Britain compares with other countries in terms of survival rates, waiting times and so on, and proposes to replace the NHS with transferable savings acounts (which, to repeat, since some of my critics seem deliberately mulish on this point, would be met by the state for those who lacked the wherewithal).
Now you can agree or disagree with my views. But to ignore them for ten months, pick them up when they are attacked by John Prescott, and then - then - to complain that I haven’t expressed them in Britain, strikes me as a bit much. Of course, that isn’t how these rows work. Almost no one who has phoned me seems to have watched what I said in full. If they had, they would have seen that I conceded that there is majority suport for the NHS in Britain (although I believe this is partly based on the false premise that free treatment for the poor is a unique property of the British model), and that my views did not reflect those of my party leadership.
Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that.
more...
--------------
NHS and alternative health care systems
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Tim Harford's fascinating book The Undercover Economist was on health care systems. Astute readers, such as the ImpDec audience, will probably be unsurprised to learn that both Britain's NHS and America's bizarre public/private health care systems are extremely poorly designed and wasteful. After a discussion as to the characteristics of systems likely to do better, Singapore was held up as an example of how to do it.
This article gives a flavour of Singapore's system:
Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Library of Economics and Liberty
JANUARY 13, 2008
All this is in the news because of comments from Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP, disparaging the NHS. It turns out (this is a massively underreported in the discussion) that Hannan also favours the Singaporean model. Having read his comments below, I'm firmly on his side. And I can also say, having lived in Spain and Germany, that their systems worked a damn sight better than ours, and that anyone who thinks the health care argument is between the UK and US models needs to have his head examined. Preferably after a 6 month wait, and in an MRSA infested hell-hole.
The NHS row: my final word
Daniel Hannan's blog
August 14th, 2009
...
As far as I can tell, three separate charges ae being laid against me. First, that I have insulted NHS workers. Second, that I want to impose a US-style healthcare system on Britain. Third, that I have made criticisms overseas that I wouldn’t make in Britain.
Let’s take these in order. Start with how I insulted the 1.4 million NHS workers. Here’s what I said: “I don’t want to imply that, because we have a bad system, it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.” Pretty rude, eh? I suppose I should have learned manners from the NHS’s founding spirit, Nye Bevan, who described Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
The third charge - that I should, as Labour’s Tom Watson puts it, “say it in Britain” - is the most asinine of all. I have been saying it in Britain for years. I’ve written a book all about how to shift power from bureaucracies to consumers. It’s called The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, it’s been in Amazon’s top 30 best sellers for nine months, it has become the best selling political tract in Britan and you can buy it here. In it is a lengthy chapter on healthcare which sets out how Britain compares with other countries in terms of survival rates, waiting times and so on, and proposes to replace the NHS with transferable savings acounts (which, to repeat, since some of my critics seem deliberately mulish on this point, would be met by the state for those who lacked the wherewithal).
Now you can agree or disagree with my views. But to ignore them for ten months, pick them up when they are attacked by John Prescott, and then - then - to complain that I haven’t expressed them in Britain, strikes me as a bit much. Of course, that isn’t how these rows work. Almost no one who has phoned me seems to have watched what I said in full. If they had, they would have seen that I conceded that there is majority suport for the NHS in Britain (although I believe this is partly based on the false premise that free treatment for the poor is a unique property of the British model), and that my views did not reflect those of my party leadership.
Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that.
more...
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Russia
Fascinating analysis.
The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
Stratfor Geopolitical Report
October 15, 2008
Russia’s defining characteristic is its indefensibility. Unlike the core of most states that are relatively defensible, core Russia is limited to the region of the medieval Grand Principality of Muscovy. It counts no rivers, oceans, swamps or mountains marking its borders — it relies solely on the relatively inhospitable climate and its forests for defense. Russian history is a chronicle of the agony of surviving invasion after invasion.
Traditionally these invasions have come from two directions. The first is from the steppes — wide open grasslands that connect Russia to Central Asia and beyond — the path that the Mongols used. The second is from the North European Plain, which brought to Russia everything from the Teutonic Knights to the Nazi war machine.
To deal with these vulnerabilities, Russia expanded in three phases. In the first, Russia expanded not toward the invasion corridors to establish buffers but away from them to establish a redoubt. In the late 15th century, under Ivan III, Russia did creep westward somewhat, anchoring itself at the Pripet Marshes, which separated Russia from the Kiev region. But the bulk of Russia’s expansion during that period was north to the Arctic and northeast to the Urals. Very little of this territory can be categorized as useful — most was taiga or actual tundra and only lightly populated — but for Russia it was the only land easily up for grabs. It also marked a natural organic outgrowth of the original Muscovy — all cloaked in forest. It was as defensible a territory as Russia had access to and their only hope against the Mongols.
The Mongols were horsemen who dominated the grasslands with their fast-moving cavalry forces. Their power, although substantial, diminished when they entered the forests and the value of their horses, their force multipliers, declined. The Mongols had to fight infantry forces in the forests, where the advantage was on the defender’s side.
The second phase of expansion was far more aggressive — and risky. In the mid-16th century, Under Ivan IV, Russia finally moved to seal off the Mongol invasion route. Russia pushed south and east, deep into the steppes, and did not stop until it hit the Urals in the east and the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains in the south. As part of this expansion, Russia captured several strategically critical locations, including Astrakhan on the Caspian, the land of the Tatars — a longtime horse-mounted foe — and Grozny, which was soon transformed into a military outpost at the foot of the Caucasus.
Also with this expansion, Ivan IV was transformed from Grand Prince of Moscow to Tsar of All Russia, suggesting the empire to come. Russia had finally achieved a measure of conventional security. Holding the northern slopes of the Caucasus would provide a reasonable defense from Asia Minor and Persia, while the millions of square kilometers of steppes gave birth to another defensive strategy: buffers.
Russia — modern, medieval or otherwise — cannot count on natural features to protect it. The Pripet Marshes were small and could in many cases simply be avoided. There is no one who might wish to attack from the Arctic. Forests slowed the Mongol horsemen, but as Muscovy’s predecessor — Kievan Rus — aptly demonstrated, the operative word was “slowed,” not “stopped.” The Mongols conquered and destroyed Kievan Rus in the 13th century.
That leaves buffers. So long as a country controls territory separating itself from its foes — even if it is territory that is easy for a hostile military to transit — it can bleed out any invasion via attrition and attacks on supply lines. Such buffers, however, contain a poison pill. They have populations not necessarily willing to serve as buffers. Maintaining control of such buffers requires not only a sizable standing military for defense but also a huge internal security and intelligence network to enforce central control. And any institution so key to the state’s survival must be very tightly controlled as well. Establishing and maintaining buffers not only makes Russia seem aggressive to its neighbors but also forces it to conduct purges and terrors against its own institutions in order to maintain the empire.
The third expansion phase dealt with the final invasion route: from the west. In the 18th century, under Peter and Catherine the Great, Russian power pushed westward, conquering Ukraine to the southwest and pushing on to the Carpathian Mountains. It also moved the Russian border to the west, incorporating the Baltic territories and securing a Russian flank on the Baltic Sea. Muscovy and the Tsardom of Russia were now known as the Russian Empire.
Yet aside from the anchor in the Carpathians, Russia did not achieve any truly defensible borders. Expansions to the Baltic and Black Seas did end the external threat from the Cossacks and Balts of ages past, but at the price of turning those external threats into internal ones. Russia also expanded so far and fast that holding the empire together socially and militarily became a monumental and ongoing challenge (today Russia is dealing with the fact that Russians are barely a majority in their own country). All this to achieve some semblance of security by establishing buffer regions.
But that is an issue of empire management. Ultimately the multi-directional threat defined Muscovy’s geopolitical problem. There was a constant threat from the steppes, but there was also a constant threat from the west, where the North European Plain allowed for few natural defenses and larger populations could deploy substantial infantry (and could, as the Swedes did, use naval power to land forces against the Muscovites). The forests provided a degree of protection, as did the sheer size of Russia’s holdings and its climate, but in the end the Russians faced threats from at least two directions. In managing these threats by establishing buffers, they were caught in a perpetual juggling act: east vs. west, internal vs. external.
The geography of the Russian Empire bequeathed it certain characteristics. Most important, the empire was (and remains) lightly settled. Even today, vast areas of Russia are unpopulated while in the rest of the country the population is widely distributed in small towns and cities and far less concentrated in large urban areas. Russia’s European part is the most densely populated, but in its expansion Russia both resettled Russian ethnics and assimilated large minorities along the way. So while Moscow and its surroundings are certainly critical, the predominance of the old Muscovy is not decisively ironclad.
The result is a constant, ingrained clash within the Russian Empire no matter the time frame, driven primarily by its size and the challenges of transport. The Russian empire, even excluding Siberia, is an enormous landmass located far to the north. Moscow is at the same latitude as Newfoundland while the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets are at the latitude of Maine, resulting in an extremely short growing season. Apart from limiting the size of the crop, the climate limits the efficiency of transport — getting the crop from farm to distant markets is a difficult matter and so is supporting large urban populations far from the farms. This is the root problem of the Russian economy. Russia can grow enough to feed itself, but it cannot efficiently transport what it grows from the farms to the cities and to the barren reaches of the empire before the food spoils. And even when it can transport it, the costs of transport make the foodstuffs unaffordable.
Population distribution also creates a political problem. One natural result of the transport problem is that the population tends to distribute itself nearer growing areas and in smaller towns so as not to tax the transport system. Yet these populations in Russia’s west and south tend to be conquered peoples. So the conquered peoples tend to distribute themselves to reflect economic rationalities, while need for food to be transported to the Russian core goes against such rationalities.
Faced with a choice of accepting urban starvation or the forcing of economic destitution upon the food-producing regions (by ordering the sale of food in urban centers at prices well below market prices), Russian leaders tend to select the latter option. Joseph Stalin certainly did in his efforts to forge and support an urban, industrialized population. Force-feeding such economic hardship to conquered minorities only doubled the need for a tightly controlled security apparatus.
The Russian geography meant that Russia either would have a centralized government — and economic system — or it would fly apart, torn by nationalist movements, peasant uprisings and urban starvation. Urbanization, much less industrialization, would have been impossible without a strong center. Indeed, the Russian Empire or Soviet Union would have been impossible. The natural tendency of the empire and Russia itself is to disintegrate. Therefore, to remain united it had to have a centralized bureaucracy responsive to autocratic rule in the capital and a vast security apparatus that compelled the country and empire to remain united. Russia’s history is one of controlling the inherently powerful centrifugal forces tearing at the country’s fabric.
Russia, then, has two core geopolitical problems. The first is holding the empire together. But the creation of that empire poses the second problem, maintaining internal security. It must hold together the empire and defend it at the same time, and the achievement of one goal tends to undermine efforts to achieve the other.
GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVES
To secure the Russian core of Muscovy, Russia must:
* Expand north and east to secure a redoubt in climatically hostile territory that is protected in part by the Urals. This way, even in the worst-case scenario (i.e., Moscow falls), there is still a “Russia” from which to potentially resurge.
* Expand south to the Caucasus and southeast into the steppes in order to hamper invasions of Asian origin. As circumstances allow, push as deeply into Central Asia and Siberia as possible to deepen this bulwark.
* Expand as far west as possible. Do not stop in the southwest until the Carpathians are reached. On the North European Plain do not stop ever. Deeper penetration increases security not just in terms of buffers; the North European Plain narrows the further west one travels making its defense easier.
* Manage the empire with terror. Since the vast majority of Russian territory is not actually Russian, a very firm hand is required to prevent myriad minorities from asserting regional control or aligning with hostile forces.
* Expand to warm water ports that have open-ocean access so that the empire can begin to counter the economic problems that a purely land empire suffers.
Given the geography of the Russian heartland, we can see why the Russians would attempt to expand as they did. Vulnerable to attack on the North European Plain and from the Central Asian and European steppes simultaneously, Russia could not withstand an attack from one direction — much less two. Apart from the military problem, the ability of the state to retain control of the country under such pressure was dubious, as was the ability to feed the country under normal circumstances — much less during war. Securing the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia was the first — and easiest — part of dealing with this geographic imbroglio.
The western expansion was not nearly so “simple.” No matter how far west the Russians moved on the European plain, there was no point at which they could effectively anchor themselves. Ultimately, the last effective line of defense is the 400 mile gap (aka Poland) between the Baltic Sea and Carpathian Mountains. Beyond that the plains widen to such a degree that a conventional defense is impossible as there is simply too much open territory to defend. So the Soviet Union pressed on all the way to the Elbe.
At its height, the Soviet Union achieved all but its final imperative of securing ocean access. The USSR was anchored on the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Urals, all of which protected its southern and southwestern flanks. Siberia protected its eastern frontier with vast emptiness. Further to the south, Russia was anchored deeply in Central Asia. The Russians had defensible frontiers everywhere except the North European Plain, ergo the need to occupy Germany and Poland.
STRATEGY OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The modern Russian empire faces three separate border regions: Asian Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus (now mostly independent states), and Western Europe.
First, Siberia. There is only one rail line connecting Siberia to the rest of the empire, and positioning a military force there is difficult if not impossible. In fact, risk in Russia’s far east is illusory. The Trans-Siberian Railroad (TSR) runs east-west, with the Baikal Amur Mainline forming a loop. The TSR is Russia’s main lifeline to Siberia and is, to some extent, vulnerable. But an attack against Siberia is difficult — there is not much to attack but the weather, while the terrain and sheer size of the region make holding it not only difficult but of questionable relevance. Besides, an attack beyond it is impossible because of the Urals.
East of Kazakhstan, the Russian frontier is mountainous to hilly, and there are almost no north-south roads running deep into Russia; those that do exist can be easily defended, and even then they dead-end in lightly populated regions. The period without mud or snow lasts less than three months out of the year. After that time, overland resupply of an army is impossible. It is impossible for an Asian power to attack Siberia. That is the prime reason the Japanese chose to attack the United States rather than the Soviet Union in 1941. The only way to attack Russia in this region is by sea, as the Japanese did in 1905. It might then be possible to achieve a lodgment in the maritime provinces (such as Primorsky Krai or Vladivostok). But exploiting the resources of deep Siberia, given the requisite infrastructure costs, is prohibitive to the point of being virtually impossible.
We begin with Siberia in order to dispose of it as a major strategic concern. The defense of the Russian Empire involves a different set of issues.
Second, Central Asia. The mature Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were anchored on a series of linked mountain ranges, deserts and bodies of water in this region that gave it a superb defensive position. Beginning on the northwestern Mongolian border and moving southwest on a line through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the empire was guarded by a north extension of the Himalayas, the Tien Shan Mountains. Swinging west along the Afghan and Iranian borders to the Caspian Sea, the empire occupied the lowlands along a mountainous border. But the lowlands, except for a small region on the frontier with Afghanistan, were harsh desert, impassable for large military forces. A section along the Afghan border was more permeable, leading to a long-term Russian unease with the threat in Afghanistan — foreign or indigenous. The Caspian Sea protected the border with Iran, and on its western shore the Caucasus Mountains began, which the empire shared with Iran and Turkey but which were hard to pass through in either direction. The Caucasus terminated on the Black Sea, totally protecting the empire’s southern border. These regions were of far greater utility to Russia than Siberia and so may have been worth taking, but for once geography actually helped Russia instead of working against it.
Finally, there is the western frontier that ran from west of Odessa north to the Baltic. This European frontier was the vulnerable point. Geographically, the southern portion of the border varied from time to time, and where the border was drawn was critical. The Carpathians form an arc from Romania through western Ukraine into Slovakia. Russia controlled the center of the arc in Ukraine. However, its frontier did not extend as far as the Carpathians in Romania, where a plain separated Russia from the mountains. This region is called Moldova or Bessarabia, and when the region belongs to Romania, it represents a threat to Russian national security. When it is in Russian hands, it allows the Russians to anchor on the Carpathians. And when it is independent, as it is today in the form of the state of Moldova, then it can serve either as a buffer or a flash point. During the alliance with the Germans in 1939-1941, the Russians seized this region as they did again after World War II. But there is always a danger of an attack out of Romania.
This is not Russia’s greatest danger point. That occurs further north, between the northern edge of the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. This gap, at its narrowest point, is just under 300 miles, running west of Warsaw from the city of Elblag in northern Poland to Cracow in the south. This is the narrowest point in the North European Plain and roughly the location of the Russian imperial border prior to World War I. Behind this point, the Russians controlled eastern Poland and the three Baltic countries.
The danger to Russia is that the north German plain expands like a triangle east of this point. As the triangle widens, Russian forces get stretched thinner and thinner. So a force attacking from the west through the plain faces an expanding geography that thins out Russian forces. If invaders concentrate their forces, the attackers can break through to Moscow. That is the traditional Russian fear: Lacking natural barriers, the farther east the Russians move the broader the front and the greater the advantage for the attacker. The Russians faced three attackers along this axis following the formation of empire — Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Hitler. Wilhelm was focused on France so he did not drive hard into Russia, but Napoleon and Hitler did, both almost toppling Moscow in the process.
Along the North European Plain, Russia has three strategic options:
1. Use Russia’s geographical depth and climate to suck in an enemy force and then defeat it, as it did with Napoleon and Hitler. After the fact this appears the solution, except it is always a close run and the attackers devastate the countryside. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened in 1942 if Hitler had resumed his drive on the North European Plain toward Moscow, rather than shift to a southern attack toward Stalingrad.
2. Face an attacking force with large, immobile infantry forces at the frontier and bleed them to death, as they tried to do in 1914. On the surface this appears to be an attractive choice because of Russia’s greater manpower reserves than those of its European enemies. In practice, however, it is a dangerous choice because of the volatile social conditions of the empire, where the weakening of the security apparatus could cause the collapse of the regime in a soldiers’ revolt as happened in 1917.
3. Push the Russian/Soviet border as far west as possible to create yet another buffer against attack, as the Soviets did during the Cold War. This is obviously an attractive choice, since it creates strategic depth and increases economic opportunities. But it also diffuses Russian resources by extending security states into Central Europe and massively increasing defense costs, which ultimately broke the Soviet Union in 1992.
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA
The greatest extension of the Russian Empire occurred under the Soviets from 1945 to 1989. Paradoxically, this expansion preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union and the contraction of Russia to its current borders. When we look at the Russian Federation today, it is important to understand that it has essentially retreated to the borders the Russian Empire had in the 17th century. It holds old Muscovy plus the Tatar lands to the southeast as well as Siberia. It has lost its western buffers in Ukraine and the Baltics and its strong foothold in the Caucasus and in Central Asia.
To understand this spectacular expansion and contraction, we need to focus on Soviet strategy. The Soviet Union was a landlocked entity dominating the Eurasian heartland but without free access to the sea. Neither the Baltic nor Black seas allow Russia free oceangoing transport because they are blocked by the Skagerrak and the Turkish straits, respectively. So long as Denmark and Turkey remain in NATO, Russia’s positions in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol and Novorossiysk are militarily dubious.
There were many causes of the Soviet collapse. Some were:
* Overextending forces into Central Europe, which taxed the ability of the Soviet Union to control the region while economically exploiting it. It became a net loss. This overextension created costly logistical problems on top of the cost of the military establishment. Extension of the traditional Russian administrative structure both diffused Russia’s own administrative structure and turned a profitable empire into a massive economic burden.
* Creating an apparent threat to the rest of Europe that compelled the United States to deploy major forces and arm Germany. This in turn forced the Russians into a massive military buildup that undermined its economy, which was less productive than the American economy because of its inherent agricultural problem and because the cost of internal transport combined with the lack of ocean access made Soviet (and Russian) maritime trade impossible. Since maritime trade both is cheaper than land trade and allows access to global markets, the Soviet Union always operated at an extreme economic disadvantage to its Western and Asian competitors.
* Entering an arms race with much richer countries it could compete against only by diverting resources from the civilian economy — material and intellectual. The best minds went into the military-industrial complex, causing the administrative and economic structure of Russia to crumble.
In 1989 the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe and in 1992 the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Russia then retreated essentially to its 17th century borders — except that it retained control of Siberia, which is either geopolitically irrelevant or a liability. Russia has lost all of Central Asia, and its position in the Caucasus has become tenuous. Had Russia lost Chechnya, its eastern flank would have been driven out of the Caucasus completely, leaving it without a geopolitical anchor.
The gap between Kazakhstan in the east and Ukraine in the west, like the narrowest point in the North European Plain, is only 300 miles wide. It also contains Russia’s industrial heartland. Russia has lost Ukraine, of course, and Moldova. But Russia’s most grievous geopolitical contraction has been on the North European Plain, where it has retreated from the Elbe in Germany to a point less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg. The distance from the border of an independent Belarus to Moscow is about 250 miles.
To understand the Russian situation, it is essential to understand that Russia has in many ways returned to the strategic position of late Muscovy. Its flank to the southeast is relatively secure, since China shows no inclination for adventures into the steppes, and no other power is in a position to challenge Russia from that direction. But in the west, in Ukraine and in the Caucasus, the Russian retreat has been stunning.
We need to remember why Muscovy expanded in the first place. Having dealt with the Mongols, the Russians had two strategic interests. Their most immediate was to secure their western borders by absorbing Lithuania and anchoring Russia as far west on the North European Plain as possible. Their second strategic interest was to secure Russia’s southeastern frontier against potential threats from the steppes by absorbing Central Asia as well as Ukraine. Without that, Muscovy could not withstand a thrust from either direction, let alone from both directions at once.
It can be said that no one intends to invade Russia. From the Russian point of view, history is filled with dramatic changes of intention, particularly in the West. The unthinkable occurs to Russia once or twice a century. In its current configuration, Russia cannot hope to survive whatever surprises are coming in the 21st century. Muscovy was offensive because it did not have a good defensive option. The same is true of Russia. Given the fact that a Western alliance, NATO, is speaking seriously of establishing a dominant presence in Ukraine and in the Caucasus — and has already established a presence in the Baltics, forcing Russia far back into the widening triangle, with its southern flank potentially exposed to Ukraine as a NATO member — the Russians must view their position as dire. As with Napoleon, Wilhelm and Hitler, the initiative is in the hands of others. For the Russians, the strategic imperative is to eliminate that initiative or, if that is impossible, anchor Russia as firmly as possible on geographical barriers, concentrating all available force on the North European Plain without overextension.
Unlike countries such as China, Iran and the United States, Russia has not achieved its strategic geopolitical imperatives. On the contrary, it has retreated from them:
* Russia does hold the northern Caucasus, but it no longer boasts a deep penetration of the mountains, including Georgia and Armenia. Without those territories Russia cannot consider this flank secure.
* Russia has lost its anchor in the mountains and deserts of Central Asia and so cannot actively block or disrupt — or even well monitor — any developments to its deep south that could threaten its security.
* Russia retains Siberia, but because of the climatic and geographic hostility of the region it is almost a wash in terms of security (it certainly is economically).
* Russia’s loss of Ukraine and Moldova allows both the intrusion of other powers and the potential rise of a Ukrainian rival on its very doorstep. Powers behind the Carpathians are especially positioned to take advantage of this political geography.
* The Baltic states have re-established their independence, and all three are east and north of the Baltic-Carpathian line (the final defensive line on the North European Plain). Their presence in a hostile alliance is unacceptable. Neither is an independent or even neutral Belarus (also on the wrong side of that line).
Broader goals, such as having a port not blocked by straits controlled by other countries, could have been pursued by the Soviets. Today such goals are far out of Russian reach. From the Russian point of view, creating a sphere of influence that would return Russia to its relatively defensible imperial boundaries is imperative.
Obviously, forces in the peripheral countries as well as great powers outside the region will resist. For them, a weak and vulnerable Russia is preferable, since a strong and secure one develops other appetites that could see Russia pushing along vectors such as through the Skagerrak toward the North Sea, through the Turkish Straits toward the Mediterranean and through La Perouse Strait toward Japan and beyond.
Russia’s essential strategic problem is this: It is geopolitically unstable. The Russian Empire and Soviet Union were never genuinely secure. One problem was the North European Plain. But another problem, very real and hard to solve, was access to the global trading system via oceans. And behind this was Russia’s essential economic weakness due to its size and lack of ability to transport agricultural produce throughout the country. No matter how much national will it has, Russia’s inherently insufficient infrastructure constantly weakens its internal cohesion.
Russia must dominate the Eurasian heartland. When it does, it must want more. The more it wants the more it must face its internal economic weakness and social instability, which cannot support its ambitions. Then the Russian Federation must contract. This cycle has nothing to do with Russian ideology or character. It has everything to do with geography, which in turn generates ideologies and shapes character. Russia is Russia and must face its permanent struggle.
The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
Stratfor Geopolitical Report
October 15, 2008
Russia’s defining characteristic is its indefensibility. Unlike the core of most states that are relatively defensible, core Russia is limited to the region of the medieval Grand Principality of Muscovy. It counts no rivers, oceans, swamps or mountains marking its borders — it relies solely on the relatively inhospitable climate and its forests for defense. Russian history is a chronicle of the agony of surviving invasion after invasion.
Traditionally these invasions have come from two directions. The first is from the steppes — wide open grasslands that connect Russia to Central Asia and beyond — the path that the Mongols used. The second is from the North European Plain, which brought to Russia everything from the Teutonic Knights to the Nazi war machine.
To deal with these vulnerabilities, Russia expanded in three phases. In the first, Russia expanded not toward the invasion corridors to establish buffers but away from them to establish a redoubt. In the late 15th century, under Ivan III, Russia did creep westward somewhat, anchoring itself at the Pripet Marshes, which separated Russia from the Kiev region. But the bulk of Russia’s expansion during that period was north to the Arctic and northeast to the Urals. Very little of this territory can be categorized as useful — most was taiga or actual tundra and only lightly populated — but for Russia it was the only land easily up for grabs. It also marked a natural organic outgrowth of the original Muscovy — all cloaked in forest. It was as defensible a territory as Russia had access to and their only hope against the Mongols.
The Mongols were horsemen who dominated the grasslands with their fast-moving cavalry forces. Their power, although substantial, diminished when they entered the forests and the value of their horses, their force multipliers, declined. The Mongols had to fight infantry forces in the forests, where the advantage was on the defender’s side.
The second phase of expansion was far more aggressive — and risky. In the mid-16th century, Under Ivan IV, Russia finally moved to seal off the Mongol invasion route. Russia pushed south and east, deep into the steppes, and did not stop until it hit the Urals in the east and the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains in the south. As part of this expansion, Russia captured several strategically critical locations, including Astrakhan on the Caspian, the land of the Tatars — a longtime horse-mounted foe — and Grozny, which was soon transformed into a military outpost at the foot of the Caucasus.
Also with this expansion, Ivan IV was transformed from Grand Prince of Moscow to Tsar of All Russia, suggesting the empire to come. Russia had finally achieved a measure of conventional security. Holding the northern slopes of the Caucasus would provide a reasonable defense from Asia Minor and Persia, while the millions of square kilometers of steppes gave birth to another defensive strategy: buffers.
Russia — modern, medieval or otherwise — cannot count on natural features to protect it. The Pripet Marshes were small and could in many cases simply be avoided. There is no one who might wish to attack from the Arctic. Forests slowed the Mongol horsemen, but as Muscovy’s predecessor — Kievan Rus — aptly demonstrated, the operative word was “slowed,” not “stopped.” The Mongols conquered and destroyed Kievan Rus in the 13th century.
That leaves buffers. So long as a country controls territory separating itself from its foes — even if it is territory that is easy for a hostile military to transit — it can bleed out any invasion via attrition and attacks on supply lines. Such buffers, however, contain a poison pill. They have populations not necessarily willing to serve as buffers. Maintaining control of such buffers requires not only a sizable standing military for defense but also a huge internal security and intelligence network to enforce central control. And any institution so key to the state’s survival must be very tightly controlled as well. Establishing and maintaining buffers not only makes Russia seem aggressive to its neighbors but also forces it to conduct purges and terrors against its own institutions in order to maintain the empire.
The third expansion phase dealt with the final invasion route: from the west. In the 18th century, under Peter and Catherine the Great, Russian power pushed westward, conquering Ukraine to the southwest and pushing on to the Carpathian Mountains. It also moved the Russian border to the west, incorporating the Baltic territories and securing a Russian flank on the Baltic Sea. Muscovy and the Tsardom of Russia were now known as the Russian Empire.
Yet aside from the anchor in the Carpathians, Russia did not achieve any truly defensible borders. Expansions to the Baltic and Black Seas did end the external threat from the Cossacks and Balts of ages past, but at the price of turning those external threats into internal ones. Russia also expanded so far and fast that holding the empire together socially and militarily became a monumental and ongoing challenge (today Russia is dealing with the fact that Russians are barely a majority in their own country). All this to achieve some semblance of security by establishing buffer regions.
But that is an issue of empire management. Ultimately the multi-directional threat defined Muscovy’s geopolitical problem. There was a constant threat from the steppes, but there was also a constant threat from the west, where the North European Plain allowed for few natural defenses and larger populations could deploy substantial infantry (and could, as the Swedes did, use naval power to land forces against the Muscovites). The forests provided a degree of protection, as did the sheer size of Russia’s holdings and its climate, but in the end the Russians faced threats from at least two directions. In managing these threats by establishing buffers, they were caught in a perpetual juggling act: east vs. west, internal vs. external.
The geography of the Russian Empire bequeathed it certain characteristics. Most important, the empire was (and remains) lightly settled. Even today, vast areas of Russia are unpopulated while in the rest of the country the population is widely distributed in small towns and cities and far less concentrated in large urban areas. Russia’s European part is the most densely populated, but in its expansion Russia both resettled Russian ethnics and assimilated large minorities along the way. So while Moscow and its surroundings are certainly critical, the predominance of the old Muscovy is not decisively ironclad.
The result is a constant, ingrained clash within the Russian Empire no matter the time frame, driven primarily by its size and the challenges of transport. The Russian empire, even excluding Siberia, is an enormous landmass located far to the north. Moscow is at the same latitude as Newfoundland while the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets are at the latitude of Maine, resulting in an extremely short growing season. Apart from limiting the size of the crop, the climate limits the efficiency of transport — getting the crop from farm to distant markets is a difficult matter and so is supporting large urban populations far from the farms. This is the root problem of the Russian economy. Russia can grow enough to feed itself, but it cannot efficiently transport what it grows from the farms to the cities and to the barren reaches of the empire before the food spoils. And even when it can transport it, the costs of transport make the foodstuffs unaffordable.
Population distribution also creates a political problem. One natural result of the transport problem is that the population tends to distribute itself nearer growing areas and in smaller towns so as not to tax the transport system. Yet these populations in Russia’s west and south tend to be conquered peoples. So the conquered peoples tend to distribute themselves to reflect economic rationalities, while need for food to be transported to the Russian core goes against such rationalities.
Faced with a choice of accepting urban starvation or the forcing of economic destitution upon the food-producing regions (by ordering the sale of food in urban centers at prices well below market prices), Russian leaders tend to select the latter option. Joseph Stalin certainly did in his efforts to forge and support an urban, industrialized population. Force-feeding such economic hardship to conquered minorities only doubled the need for a tightly controlled security apparatus.
The Russian geography meant that Russia either would have a centralized government — and economic system — or it would fly apart, torn by nationalist movements, peasant uprisings and urban starvation. Urbanization, much less industrialization, would have been impossible without a strong center. Indeed, the Russian Empire or Soviet Union would have been impossible. The natural tendency of the empire and Russia itself is to disintegrate. Therefore, to remain united it had to have a centralized bureaucracy responsive to autocratic rule in the capital and a vast security apparatus that compelled the country and empire to remain united. Russia’s history is one of controlling the inherently powerful centrifugal forces tearing at the country’s fabric.
Russia, then, has two core geopolitical problems. The first is holding the empire together. But the creation of that empire poses the second problem, maintaining internal security. It must hold together the empire and defend it at the same time, and the achievement of one goal tends to undermine efforts to achieve the other.
GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVES
To secure the Russian core of Muscovy, Russia must:
* Expand north and east to secure a redoubt in climatically hostile territory that is protected in part by the Urals. This way, even in the worst-case scenario (i.e., Moscow falls), there is still a “Russia” from which to potentially resurge.
* Expand south to the Caucasus and southeast into the steppes in order to hamper invasions of Asian origin. As circumstances allow, push as deeply into Central Asia and Siberia as possible to deepen this bulwark.
* Expand as far west as possible. Do not stop in the southwest until the Carpathians are reached. On the North European Plain do not stop ever. Deeper penetration increases security not just in terms of buffers; the North European Plain narrows the further west one travels making its defense easier.
* Manage the empire with terror. Since the vast majority of Russian territory is not actually Russian, a very firm hand is required to prevent myriad minorities from asserting regional control or aligning with hostile forces.
* Expand to warm water ports that have open-ocean access so that the empire can begin to counter the economic problems that a purely land empire suffers.
Given the geography of the Russian heartland, we can see why the Russians would attempt to expand as they did. Vulnerable to attack on the North European Plain and from the Central Asian and European steppes simultaneously, Russia could not withstand an attack from one direction — much less two. Apart from the military problem, the ability of the state to retain control of the country under such pressure was dubious, as was the ability to feed the country under normal circumstances — much less during war. Securing the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia was the first — and easiest — part of dealing with this geographic imbroglio.
The western expansion was not nearly so “simple.” No matter how far west the Russians moved on the European plain, there was no point at which they could effectively anchor themselves. Ultimately, the last effective line of defense is the 400 mile gap (aka Poland) between the Baltic Sea and Carpathian Mountains. Beyond that the plains widen to such a degree that a conventional defense is impossible as there is simply too much open territory to defend. So the Soviet Union pressed on all the way to the Elbe.
At its height, the Soviet Union achieved all but its final imperative of securing ocean access. The USSR was anchored on the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Urals, all of which protected its southern and southwestern flanks. Siberia protected its eastern frontier with vast emptiness. Further to the south, Russia was anchored deeply in Central Asia. The Russians had defensible frontiers everywhere except the North European Plain, ergo the need to occupy Germany and Poland.
STRATEGY OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The modern Russian empire faces three separate border regions: Asian Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus (now mostly independent states), and Western Europe.
First, Siberia. There is only one rail line connecting Siberia to the rest of the empire, and positioning a military force there is difficult if not impossible. In fact, risk in Russia’s far east is illusory. The Trans-Siberian Railroad (TSR) runs east-west, with the Baikal Amur Mainline forming a loop. The TSR is Russia’s main lifeline to Siberia and is, to some extent, vulnerable. But an attack against Siberia is difficult — there is not much to attack but the weather, while the terrain and sheer size of the region make holding it not only difficult but of questionable relevance. Besides, an attack beyond it is impossible because of the Urals.
East of Kazakhstan, the Russian frontier is mountainous to hilly, and there are almost no north-south roads running deep into Russia; those that do exist can be easily defended, and even then they dead-end in lightly populated regions. The period without mud or snow lasts less than three months out of the year. After that time, overland resupply of an army is impossible. It is impossible for an Asian power to attack Siberia. That is the prime reason the Japanese chose to attack the United States rather than the Soviet Union in 1941. The only way to attack Russia in this region is by sea, as the Japanese did in 1905. It might then be possible to achieve a lodgment in the maritime provinces (such as Primorsky Krai or Vladivostok). But exploiting the resources of deep Siberia, given the requisite infrastructure costs, is prohibitive to the point of being virtually impossible.
We begin with Siberia in order to dispose of it as a major strategic concern. The defense of the Russian Empire involves a different set of issues.
Second, Central Asia. The mature Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were anchored on a series of linked mountain ranges, deserts and bodies of water in this region that gave it a superb defensive position. Beginning on the northwestern Mongolian border and moving southwest on a line through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the empire was guarded by a north extension of the Himalayas, the Tien Shan Mountains. Swinging west along the Afghan and Iranian borders to the Caspian Sea, the empire occupied the lowlands along a mountainous border. But the lowlands, except for a small region on the frontier with Afghanistan, were harsh desert, impassable for large military forces. A section along the Afghan border was more permeable, leading to a long-term Russian unease with the threat in Afghanistan — foreign or indigenous. The Caspian Sea protected the border with Iran, and on its western shore the Caucasus Mountains began, which the empire shared with Iran and Turkey but which were hard to pass through in either direction. The Caucasus terminated on the Black Sea, totally protecting the empire’s southern border. These regions were of far greater utility to Russia than Siberia and so may have been worth taking, but for once geography actually helped Russia instead of working against it.
Finally, there is the western frontier that ran from west of Odessa north to the Baltic. This European frontier was the vulnerable point. Geographically, the southern portion of the border varied from time to time, and where the border was drawn was critical. The Carpathians form an arc from Romania through western Ukraine into Slovakia. Russia controlled the center of the arc in Ukraine. However, its frontier did not extend as far as the Carpathians in Romania, where a plain separated Russia from the mountains. This region is called Moldova or Bessarabia, and when the region belongs to Romania, it represents a threat to Russian national security. When it is in Russian hands, it allows the Russians to anchor on the Carpathians. And when it is independent, as it is today in the form of the state of Moldova, then it can serve either as a buffer or a flash point. During the alliance with the Germans in 1939-1941, the Russians seized this region as they did again after World War II. But there is always a danger of an attack out of Romania.
This is not Russia’s greatest danger point. That occurs further north, between the northern edge of the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. This gap, at its narrowest point, is just under 300 miles, running west of Warsaw from the city of Elblag in northern Poland to Cracow in the south. This is the narrowest point in the North European Plain and roughly the location of the Russian imperial border prior to World War I. Behind this point, the Russians controlled eastern Poland and the three Baltic countries.
The danger to Russia is that the north German plain expands like a triangle east of this point. As the triangle widens, Russian forces get stretched thinner and thinner. So a force attacking from the west through the plain faces an expanding geography that thins out Russian forces. If invaders concentrate their forces, the attackers can break through to Moscow. That is the traditional Russian fear: Lacking natural barriers, the farther east the Russians move the broader the front and the greater the advantage for the attacker. The Russians faced three attackers along this axis following the formation of empire — Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Hitler. Wilhelm was focused on France so he did not drive hard into Russia, but Napoleon and Hitler did, both almost toppling Moscow in the process.
Along the North European Plain, Russia has three strategic options:
1. Use Russia’s geographical depth and climate to suck in an enemy force and then defeat it, as it did with Napoleon and Hitler. After the fact this appears the solution, except it is always a close run and the attackers devastate the countryside. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened in 1942 if Hitler had resumed his drive on the North European Plain toward Moscow, rather than shift to a southern attack toward Stalingrad.
2. Face an attacking force with large, immobile infantry forces at the frontier and bleed them to death, as they tried to do in 1914. On the surface this appears to be an attractive choice because of Russia’s greater manpower reserves than those of its European enemies. In practice, however, it is a dangerous choice because of the volatile social conditions of the empire, where the weakening of the security apparatus could cause the collapse of the regime in a soldiers’ revolt as happened in 1917.
3. Push the Russian/Soviet border as far west as possible to create yet another buffer against attack, as the Soviets did during the Cold War. This is obviously an attractive choice, since it creates strategic depth and increases economic opportunities. But it also diffuses Russian resources by extending security states into Central Europe and massively increasing defense costs, which ultimately broke the Soviet Union in 1992.
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA
The greatest extension of the Russian Empire occurred under the Soviets from 1945 to 1989. Paradoxically, this expansion preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union and the contraction of Russia to its current borders. When we look at the Russian Federation today, it is important to understand that it has essentially retreated to the borders the Russian Empire had in the 17th century. It holds old Muscovy plus the Tatar lands to the southeast as well as Siberia. It has lost its western buffers in Ukraine and the Baltics and its strong foothold in the Caucasus and in Central Asia.
To understand this spectacular expansion and contraction, we need to focus on Soviet strategy. The Soviet Union was a landlocked entity dominating the Eurasian heartland but without free access to the sea. Neither the Baltic nor Black seas allow Russia free oceangoing transport because they are blocked by the Skagerrak and the Turkish straits, respectively. So long as Denmark and Turkey remain in NATO, Russia’s positions in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol and Novorossiysk are militarily dubious.
There were many causes of the Soviet collapse. Some were:
* Overextending forces into Central Europe, which taxed the ability of the Soviet Union to control the region while economically exploiting it. It became a net loss. This overextension created costly logistical problems on top of the cost of the military establishment. Extension of the traditional Russian administrative structure both diffused Russia’s own administrative structure and turned a profitable empire into a massive economic burden.
* Creating an apparent threat to the rest of Europe that compelled the United States to deploy major forces and arm Germany. This in turn forced the Russians into a massive military buildup that undermined its economy, which was less productive than the American economy because of its inherent agricultural problem and because the cost of internal transport combined with the lack of ocean access made Soviet (and Russian) maritime trade impossible. Since maritime trade both is cheaper than land trade and allows access to global markets, the Soviet Union always operated at an extreme economic disadvantage to its Western and Asian competitors.
* Entering an arms race with much richer countries it could compete against only by diverting resources from the civilian economy — material and intellectual. The best minds went into the military-industrial complex, causing the administrative and economic structure of Russia to crumble.
In 1989 the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe and in 1992 the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Russia then retreated essentially to its 17th century borders — except that it retained control of Siberia, which is either geopolitically irrelevant or a liability. Russia has lost all of Central Asia, and its position in the Caucasus has become tenuous. Had Russia lost Chechnya, its eastern flank would have been driven out of the Caucasus completely, leaving it without a geopolitical anchor.
The gap between Kazakhstan in the east and Ukraine in the west, like the narrowest point in the North European Plain, is only 300 miles wide. It also contains Russia’s industrial heartland. Russia has lost Ukraine, of course, and Moldova. But Russia’s most grievous geopolitical contraction has been on the North European Plain, where it has retreated from the Elbe in Germany to a point less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg. The distance from the border of an independent Belarus to Moscow is about 250 miles.
To understand the Russian situation, it is essential to understand that Russia has in many ways returned to the strategic position of late Muscovy. Its flank to the southeast is relatively secure, since China shows no inclination for adventures into the steppes, and no other power is in a position to challenge Russia from that direction. But in the west, in Ukraine and in the Caucasus, the Russian retreat has been stunning.
We need to remember why Muscovy expanded in the first place. Having dealt with the Mongols, the Russians had two strategic interests. Their most immediate was to secure their western borders by absorbing Lithuania and anchoring Russia as far west on the North European Plain as possible. Their second strategic interest was to secure Russia’s southeastern frontier against potential threats from the steppes by absorbing Central Asia as well as Ukraine. Without that, Muscovy could not withstand a thrust from either direction, let alone from both directions at once.
It can be said that no one intends to invade Russia. From the Russian point of view, history is filled with dramatic changes of intention, particularly in the West. The unthinkable occurs to Russia once or twice a century. In its current configuration, Russia cannot hope to survive whatever surprises are coming in the 21st century. Muscovy was offensive because it did not have a good defensive option. The same is true of Russia. Given the fact that a Western alliance, NATO, is speaking seriously of establishing a dominant presence in Ukraine and in the Caucasus — and has already established a presence in the Baltics, forcing Russia far back into the widening triangle, with its southern flank potentially exposed to Ukraine as a NATO member — the Russians must view their position as dire. As with Napoleon, Wilhelm and Hitler, the initiative is in the hands of others. For the Russians, the strategic imperative is to eliminate that initiative or, if that is impossible, anchor Russia as firmly as possible on geographical barriers, concentrating all available force on the North European Plain without overextension.
Unlike countries such as China, Iran and the United States, Russia has not achieved its strategic geopolitical imperatives. On the contrary, it has retreated from them:
* Russia does hold the northern Caucasus, but it no longer boasts a deep penetration of the mountains, including Georgia and Armenia. Without those territories Russia cannot consider this flank secure.
* Russia has lost its anchor in the mountains and deserts of Central Asia and so cannot actively block or disrupt — or even well monitor — any developments to its deep south that could threaten its security.
* Russia retains Siberia, but because of the climatic and geographic hostility of the region it is almost a wash in terms of security (it certainly is economically).
* Russia’s loss of Ukraine and Moldova allows both the intrusion of other powers and the potential rise of a Ukrainian rival on its very doorstep. Powers behind the Carpathians are especially positioned to take advantage of this political geography.
* The Baltic states have re-established their independence, and all three are east and north of the Baltic-Carpathian line (the final defensive line on the North European Plain). Their presence in a hostile alliance is unacceptable. Neither is an independent or even neutral Belarus (also on the wrong side of that line).
Broader goals, such as having a port not blocked by straits controlled by other countries, could have been pursued by the Soviets. Today such goals are far out of Russian reach. From the Russian point of view, creating a sphere of influence that would return Russia to its relatively defensible imperial boundaries is imperative.
Obviously, forces in the peripheral countries as well as great powers outside the region will resist. For them, a weak and vulnerable Russia is preferable, since a strong and secure one develops other appetites that could see Russia pushing along vectors such as through the Skagerrak toward the North Sea, through the Turkish Straits toward the Mediterranean and through La Perouse Strait toward Japan and beyond.
Russia’s essential strategic problem is this: It is geopolitically unstable. The Russian Empire and Soviet Union were never genuinely secure. One problem was the North European Plain. But another problem, very real and hard to solve, was access to the global trading system via oceans. And behind this was Russia’s essential economic weakness due to its size and lack of ability to transport agricultural produce throughout the country. No matter how much national will it has, Russia’s inherently insufficient infrastructure constantly weakens its internal cohesion.
Russia must dominate the Eurasian heartland. When it does, it must want more. The more it wants the more it must face its internal economic weakness and social instability, which cannot support its ambitions. Then the Russian Federation must contract. This cycle has nothing to do with Russian ideology or character. It has everything to do with geography, which in turn generates ideologies and shapes character. Russia is Russia and must face its permanent struggle.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Anti-semitism in France - the appalling story of Ilan Halimi
This is a disgusting tale of Islamic anti-semitism in France. This poor guy was tortured to death over the course of a month and the authorities are denying the facts.
Paris: Prisoner of the Barbarians
Nidra Poller
Standpoint Mag, July/August 2009
In February 2007, a naked, emaciated, mutilated, charred and stabbed man is discovered near railway tracks in the Parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois. He is taken to hospital where he is pronounced dead just before noon. Two days later, the victim is identified as Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew who was abducted while working in a cell phone shop. He was held hostage and tortured for three weeks by a group calling itself the Gang of Barbarians in a housing estate in Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris. Within days, dozens of arrests are made. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana, who had fled to Ivory Coast, is quickly extradited and imprisoned.
The kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi vividly illustrates French society's ills in the first decade of the 21st century. The unrepentant gang leader, Fofana, who called himself (in English) the "Brain of the Barbarians", is the French-born son of immigrants from the Ivory Coast. He is a small-time thug driven by Islamic Jew-hatred. Asocial and amoral, tyrannical and seductive, cruel and clumsy, he thrives on delusions of grandeur drawn from the jihadist playbook. Having botched dozens of other attempts at extortion, he finally succeeded in committing an atrocious murder. Since 27 April, his case has been heard behind closed doors.
The 27 defendants, accused of direct or indirect involvement in Halimi's kidnap and torture, are not all Muslim. But they all allegedly participated in a crime inspired by Islamist anti-Semitism. The police were clearly determined to return Ilan to his family safe and sound. However, they worked with an outdated protocol for dealing with ransom demands, refused to accept that the gang had anti-Semitic motives, never understood their psychology and as a
result failed miserably.
It was virtually impossible to verify what little information was made available when the crime was discovered, because reporting restrictions were imposed during the long inquest. Nothing filtered out, except for the occasional story of Fofana's outrageous threats against judges, the courts and anyone else who angered him. He accused them all of being Jewish. Disingenuous ambiguity clouded the issues — was it really an anti-Semitic crime? Did it have anything to do with Islam? Today there is barely any coverage of the case because of the reporting restrictions. However, there is a Nouvel Observateur blog, run by Elsa Vigoreux, who publishes information from anonymous sources.
The case is being heard in juvenile court because two of the defendants, including Yalda, an Iranian girl who was sent to lure Ilan, were just under 18 when the crime was committed. They could have waived their rights to a trial in camera. They didn't. They could have saved Ilan's life with an anonymous tip-off to the police. They didn't.
Fofana had sent Yalda and another girl to lure Jewish victims in cell phone shops near the Place de la République. Jews had money, he told Yalda, and they stuck together. If the family can't pay the ransom, the community will pitch in. Jews, he told her, lived like kings in France while we lived in misery.
After the crime was uncovered, commentators gave an economic narrative that would hide the truth of murderous Jew-hatred flourishing in a Parisian banlieue. It wasn't really anti-Semitism, they claimed. It was simply that Fofana thought Jews were rich. The police, too, stubbornly clung to the kidnap-for-ransom scenario.
What did they make of the photo the Barbarians sent the family the day after Ilan disappeared? The photo was reproduced on the cover of Choc magazine on 18 May. Withdrawn by a court order, it still circulates on the internet. Ilan's face is completely covered with thick silver duct tape except for his broken, bleeding nose. His hands are bound with the same tape. A newspaper is propped against his chest and he is holding his car keys. ("Key" was the code word Yalda used to signal to the thugs waiting for Ilan behind the bushes.) A black-sleeved hand holds a gun to Ilan's head. Does that look like a kidnapping for ransom? Ilan's eyes and mouth are taped shut. Doesn't that indicate exceptional cruelty and clumsy incompetence? Exaggerated, erratic ransom demands ranged from €5,000 to €450,000 (£4,250-£380,000). Drop-off appointments were made and cancelled. Koranic verses were read against the background of Ilan's screams.
Although Ilan lived with his mother, the police decided that her ex-husband — and his father — should be the kidnappers' sole contact. He took as many as 50 phone calls in one day, all of them peppered with murderous threats and anti-Semitic insults. And yet the police could never trace them.
Ilan was held in a vacant apartment and then transferred to a basement before workmen came to paint the apartment for the new tenants. The duct tape was never removed from his face, his hands were constantly bound, he was naked under a flimsy robe in the dead of winter. He was fed through a straw. His toilet was a plastic bag.
Some of the gang members are charged as accessories, others with direct participation in kidnapping, illegal confinement and torture, with the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They guarded the prisoner, beat him, burned him, cut out chunks of his skin, taunted him, threatened him, deprived him of basic human needs and watched him creep slowly to inexorable death. Twenty-four days, 576 hours, 34,560 minutes of agony.
On 13 February, having failed to get the ransom money, Fofana stuffed what was left of Ilan into the boot of a stolen car, drove to a field near a railway line in nearby Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois, doused him with flammable liquid, set fire to him and stabbed him in the neck and hip.
No one knows what would have happened if the police had grasped the nature of the criminals. How many hostages have been beheaded by jihadis in recent years? Governments, armies and investigators have been stumped by this new type of violence. Maybe the Barbarians would have murdered Ilan immediately had they sensed the police hot on their trail. Nevertheless, the failure to understand the anti-Semitism behind the crime, and the inexplicable bungling of repeated opportunities to flush out the criminals, locate their hideout, trace communications and connect Ilan's abduction to previous attempts with the same target — Jews — and the same operating method cannot be dismissed.
In a riveting, heart-rending book published in April, 24 jours, la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 days, The truth about the death of Ilan Halimi), Ilan's mother, Ruth, recounts her ordeal and explores the larger issues with dignity and fairness. Expressing gratitude and respect for the detectives who stood by her, she nevertheless deplores their failure to trust her intuition about the psychology of the Barbarians who transformed her beloved son into a filthy object to be tormented to death. Unable to understand the Jew-hatred spewing from the mouth of Fofana, says Ruth, agents misled Ilan's father in his communications with the kidnapper.
Shortly after the discovery of the atrocious crime, then President Jacques Chirac dispatched his personal counsel, Maître Francis Szpiner, to represent the Halimi family. But Szpiner is not known as a great friend of the Jews, having been part of the defence team of TV station France 2, which lost an appeal against a libel verdict it had won over a report about the killing of a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in 2000. Al-Dura, who was seen cowering behind his father, became the poster boy of the second intifada.
Media critic Philippe Karsenty had been convicted of libel for writing that France 2's report of the death of al-Dura was a hoax. The Paris court ruled that the extensive evidence produced by Karsenty, including a ballistics report and a detailed analysis of the raw footage, was sufficient cause for suspicion that the scene had been staged.
In his aggressive closing argument, playing on the definition of a Zionist, Szpiner compared Karsenty to "a Jew who pays another Jew to send a third Jew to go to war against the Palestinians."
Two members of Fofana's defence team — Maître Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the wife of Carlos "the Jackal", the Venezuelan-born pro-jihadi serving a life sentence for multiple terror attacks, and Maître Emmanuel Ludot, who represented Saddam Hussein — were interviewed on an Agence France Press video on the opening day of the trial. Angered by hecklers shouting at defendants and lawyers outside the court, they denounced political and media pressure against their client, claiming that President Nicolas Sarkozy was using the case for ignoble electoral reasons.
They also claimed that some of the plaintiffs were backed by a "certain lobby", and that blacks had been attacked by thugs from the right-wing Zionist Betar and the Jewish Defence League groups "when the Halimi family organised a demonstration". Maître Coutant-Peyre declares in the video: "Fofana is a scapegoat." A young lawyer joins them. They discuss the case. He thinks they'll be able to get the court to drop the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They joke about Maître Szpiner. Is the Elysée (the presidency) paying his fees? The young lawyer guffaws. "It's the Crif [the umbrella body of French Jewry]!" he says, provoking derisive laughter, "and the Elysée is funding the Crif." According to leaked information, Fofana subsequently dismissed Coutant-Peyre in an outburst of paranoid anti-Semitic rage, shouting, "Peyre, that's a Jewish name, isn't it?"
In the absence of reliable information about the trial, which is scheduled to run until 11 July, how can one predict the verdict? The death penalty was abolished in 1981. Life imprisonment is a relative concept. Prisons are overcrowded and dangerous criminals are often released early. Confidential sources have told me that Fofana could be "rubbed out" in prison.
Journalists who were present at the start of the trial, until a motion brought by the Halimi family to hear the case in an open court was defeated, reported that Fofana entered shouting "Allahu Akhbar" ("Allah is Great"). Asked to identify himself, he replied in mangled French, "Arabs, African armed revolt, Salafist barbarian." He gave the day of Ilan's death as his date of birth.
Will lawyers, if any are left to defend him, use Fofana's megalomaniac defiance as an argument for diminished responsibility? In 2003 a Muslim neighbour lured a Jewish DJ, Sebastien Selam, into the underground garage of their building, slit his throat, gouged out his eyes with a carving fork, went home and told his mother: "I killed my Jew, I'll go to paradise." He was released after spending a few years in a mental hospital and will apparently never be tried. The anti-Semitic motivation in that case was so thoroughly denied that commentators systematically referred to Halimi's killing as the first anti-Semitic murder in France.
Whenever immigrant youths from the banlieue are concerned, French authorities walk on eggshells for fear of igniting mass revolt. Which brings us back to Eva Vigoreux's Nouvel Observateur blog. We discern a defence strategy aimed at portraying the 26 accomplices as bit players roped in, manipulated and intimidated by Fofana. They took no pleasure in tormenting Ilan and actually tried to alleviate the cruel punishment he imposed.
Michaël Doueib, an earlier Jewish victim of the Gang of Barbarians, is disgusted by their feigned innocence. "They didn't lift a hand to save him," he says. "An anonymous phone call, that's all they had to do." Lured to the same Bagneux neighborhood where Ilan would be jailed two weeks later, tied up and mercilessly beaten, Doueib escaped because residents who heard his screams called the police.
He claims police investigators rejected his offer of information, phone numbers, descriptions and other evidence that could have led them to the gang.
Whatever the verdict, we will be left with the troubling impression that the more this evil of Jew-hatred eats into the tissue of French society, the more it will be shrouded in artificial doubts and fabricated subtleties. This secret trial leaves Ilan Halimi once again illegally confined, isolated, bound and gagged, helpless to awaken dead hearts and warn potential victims.
Paris: Prisoner of the Barbarians
Nidra Poller
Standpoint Mag, July/August 2009
In February 2007, a naked, emaciated, mutilated, charred and stabbed man is discovered near railway tracks in the Parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois. He is taken to hospital where he is pronounced dead just before noon. Two days later, the victim is identified as Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew who was abducted while working in a cell phone shop. He was held hostage and tortured for three weeks by a group calling itself the Gang of Barbarians in a housing estate in Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris. Within days, dozens of arrests are made. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana, who had fled to Ivory Coast, is quickly extradited and imprisoned.
The kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi vividly illustrates French society's ills in the first decade of the 21st century. The unrepentant gang leader, Fofana, who called himself (in English) the "Brain of the Barbarians", is the French-born son of immigrants from the Ivory Coast. He is a small-time thug driven by Islamic Jew-hatred. Asocial and amoral, tyrannical and seductive, cruel and clumsy, he thrives on delusions of grandeur drawn from the jihadist playbook. Having botched dozens of other attempts at extortion, he finally succeeded in committing an atrocious murder. Since 27 April, his case has been heard behind closed doors.
The 27 defendants, accused of direct or indirect involvement in Halimi's kidnap and torture, are not all Muslim. But they all allegedly participated in a crime inspired by Islamist anti-Semitism. The police were clearly determined to return Ilan to his family safe and sound. However, they worked with an outdated protocol for dealing with ransom demands, refused to accept that the gang had anti-Semitic motives, never understood their psychology and as a
result failed miserably.
It was virtually impossible to verify what little information was made available when the crime was discovered, because reporting restrictions were imposed during the long inquest. Nothing filtered out, except for the occasional story of Fofana's outrageous threats against judges, the courts and anyone else who angered him. He accused them all of being Jewish. Disingenuous ambiguity clouded the issues — was it really an anti-Semitic crime? Did it have anything to do with Islam? Today there is barely any coverage of the case because of the reporting restrictions. However, there is a Nouvel Observateur blog, run by Elsa Vigoreux, who publishes information from anonymous sources.
The case is being heard in juvenile court because two of the defendants, including Yalda, an Iranian girl who was sent to lure Ilan, were just under 18 when the crime was committed. They could have waived their rights to a trial in camera. They didn't. They could have saved Ilan's life with an anonymous tip-off to the police. They didn't.
Fofana had sent Yalda and another girl to lure Jewish victims in cell phone shops near the Place de la République. Jews had money, he told Yalda, and they stuck together. If the family can't pay the ransom, the community will pitch in. Jews, he told her, lived like kings in France while we lived in misery.
After the crime was uncovered, commentators gave an economic narrative that would hide the truth of murderous Jew-hatred flourishing in a Parisian banlieue. It wasn't really anti-Semitism, they claimed. It was simply that Fofana thought Jews were rich. The police, too, stubbornly clung to the kidnap-for-ransom scenario.
What did they make of the photo the Barbarians sent the family the day after Ilan disappeared? The photo was reproduced on the cover of Choc magazine on 18 May. Withdrawn by a court order, it still circulates on the internet. Ilan's face is completely covered with thick silver duct tape except for his broken, bleeding nose. His hands are bound with the same tape. A newspaper is propped against his chest and he is holding his car keys. ("Key" was the code word Yalda used to signal to the thugs waiting for Ilan behind the bushes.) A black-sleeved hand holds a gun to Ilan's head. Does that look like a kidnapping for ransom? Ilan's eyes and mouth are taped shut. Doesn't that indicate exceptional cruelty and clumsy incompetence? Exaggerated, erratic ransom demands ranged from €5,000 to €450,000 (£4,250-£380,000). Drop-off appointments were made and cancelled. Koranic verses were read against the background of Ilan's screams.
Although Ilan lived with his mother, the police decided that her ex-husband — and his father — should be the kidnappers' sole contact. He took as many as 50 phone calls in one day, all of them peppered with murderous threats and anti-Semitic insults. And yet the police could never trace them.
Ilan was held in a vacant apartment and then transferred to a basement before workmen came to paint the apartment for the new tenants. The duct tape was never removed from his face, his hands were constantly bound, he was naked under a flimsy robe in the dead of winter. He was fed through a straw. His toilet was a plastic bag.
Some of the gang members are charged as accessories, others with direct participation in kidnapping, illegal confinement and torture, with the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They guarded the prisoner, beat him, burned him, cut out chunks of his skin, taunted him, threatened him, deprived him of basic human needs and watched him creep slowly to inexorable death. Twenty-four days, 576 hours, 34,560 minutes of agony.
On 13 February, having failed to get the ransom money, Fofana stuffed what was left of Ilan into the boot of a stolen car, drove to a field near a railway line in nearby Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois, doused him with flammable liquid, set fire to him and stabbed him in the neck and hip.
No one knows what would have happened if the police had grasped the nature of the criminals. How many hostages have been beheaded by jihadis in recent years? Governments, armies and investigators have been stumped by this new type of violence. Maybe the Barbarians would have murdered Ilan immediately had they sensed the police hot on their trail. Nevertheless, the failure to understand the anti-Semitism behind the crime, and the inexplicable bungling of repeated opportunities to flush out the criminals, locate their hideout, trace communications and connect Ilan's abduction to previous attempts with the same target — Jews — and the same operating method cannot be dismissed.
In a riveting, heart-rending book published in April, 24 jours, la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 days, The truth about the death of Ilan Halimi), Ilan's mother, Ruth, recounts her ordeal and explores the larger issues with dignity and fairness. Expressing gratitude and respect for the detectives who stood by her, she nevertheless deplores their failure to trust her intuition about the psychology of the Barbarians who transformed her beloved son into a filthy object to be tormented to death. Unable to understand the Jew-hatred spewing from the mouth of Fofana, says Ruth, agents misled Ilan's father in his communications with the kidnapper.
Shortly after the discovery of the atrocious crime, then President Jacques Chirac dispatched his personal counsel, Maître Francis Szpiner, to represent the Halimi family. But Szpiner is not known as a great friend of the Jews, having been part of the defence team of TV station France 2, which lost an appeal against a libel verdict it had won over a report about the killing of a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in 2000. Al-Dura, who was seen cowering behind his father, became the poster boy of the second intifada.
Media critic Philippe Karsenty had been convicted of libel for writing that France 2's report of the death of al-Dura was a hoax. The Paris court ruled that the extensive evidence produced by Karsenty, including a ballistics report and a detailed analysis of the raw footage, was sufficient cause for suspicion that the scene had been staged.
In his aggressive closing argument, playing on the definition of a Zionist, Szpiner compared Karsenty to "a Jew who pays another Jew to send a third Jew to go to war against the Palestinians."
Two members of Fofana's defence team — Maître Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the wife of Carlos "the Jackal", the Venezuelan-born pro-jihadi serving a life sentence for multiple terror attacks, and Maître Emmanuel Ludot, who represented Saddam Hussein — were interviewed on an Agence France Press video on the opening day of the trial. Angered by hecklers shouting at defendants and lawyers outside the court, they denounced political and media pressure against their client, claiming that President Nicolas Sarkozy was using the case for ignoble electoral reasons.
They also claimed that some of the plaintiffs were backed by a "certain lobby", and that blacks had been attacked by thugs from the right-wing Zionist Betar and the Jewish Defence League groups "when the Halimi family organised a demonstration". Maître Coutant-Peyre declares in the video: "Fofana is a scapegoat." A young lawyer joins them. They discuss the case. He thinks they'll be able to get the court to drop the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They joke about Maître Szpiner. Is the Elysée (the presidency) paying his fees? The young lawyer guffaws. "It's the Crif [the umbrella body of French Jewry]!" he says, provoking derisive laughter, "and the Elysée is funding the Crif." According to leaked information, Fofana subsequently dismissed Coutant-Peyre in an outburst of paranoid anti-Semitic rage, shouting, "Peyre, that's a Jewish name, isn't it?"
In the absence of reliable information about the trial, which is scheduled to run until 11 July, how can one predict the verdict? The death penalty was abolished in 1981. Life imprisonment is a relative concept. Prisons are overcrowded and dangerous criminals are often released early. Confidential sources have told me that Fofana could be "rubbed out" in prison.
Journalists who were present at the start of the trial, until a motion brought by the Halimi family to hear the case in an open court was defeated, reported that Fofana entered shouting "Allahu Akhbar" ("Allah is Great"). Asked to identify himself, he replied in mangled French, "Arabs, African armed revolt, Salafist barbarian." He gave the day of Ilan's death as his date of birth.
Will lawyers, if any are left to defend him, use Fofana's megalomaniac defiance as an argument for diminished responsibility? In 2003 a Muslim neighbour lured a Jewish DJ, Sebastien Selam, into the underground garage of their building, slit his throat, gouged out his eyes with a carving fork, went home and told his mother: "I killed my Jew, I'll go to paradise." He was released after spending a few years in a mental hospital and will apparently never be tried. The anti-Semitic motivation in that case was so thoroughly denied that commentators systematically referred to Halimi's killing as the first anti-Semitic murder in France.
Whenever immigrant youths from the banlieue are concerned, French authorities walk on eggshells for fear of igniting mass revolt. Which brings us back to Eva Vigoreux's Nouvel Observateur blog. We discern a defence strategy aimed at portraying the 26 accomplices as bit players roped in, manipulated and intimidated by Fofana. They took no pleasure in tormenting Ilan and actually tried to alleviate the cruel punishment he imposed.
Michaël Doueib, an earlier Jewish victim of the Gang of Barbarians, is disgusted by their feigned innocence. "They didn't lift a hand to save him," he says. "An anonymous phone call, that's all they had to do." Lured to the same Bagneux neighborhood where Ilan would be jailed two weeks later, tied up and mercilessly beaten, Doueib escaped because residents who heard his screams called the police.
He claims police investigators rejected his offer of information, phone numbers, descriptions and other evidence that could have led them to the gang.
Whatever the verdict, we will be left with the troubling impression that the more this evil of Jew-hatred eats into the tissue of French society, the more it will be shrouded in artificial doubts and fabricated subtleties. This secret trial leaves Ilan Halimi once again illegally confined, isolated, bound and gagged, helpless to awaken dead hearts and warn potential victims.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Anti-Israel bias in human rights groups
This is basically unparodiable.
Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia
by David Bernstein
Wall Street Journal
JULY 15, 2009
Seeking Saudi Money to Counterbalance "Pro-Israel Pressure Groups
A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?
No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations." (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel "human rights" activists"? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)
Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record. But never fear, HRW "recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers.
There is nothing wrong with a human rights organization worrying about maltreatment of domestic workers. But there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country. In fact, it's a virtual certainty that everyone in Whitson's audience employs domestic servants, giving her a perfect, untaken opportunity to boast about HRW's work in improving the servants' status. But Whitson wasn't raising money for human rights, she was raising money for HRW's propaganda campaign against Israel.
Someone who claims to have worked for HRW wrote to me, "I can tell you that the people on the research and policy side of the organization have little, if any, contacts with people on the donor side." If that's true, apparently this is yet another exception HRW makes for Israel: Ms. Whitson, who gave the presentation to potential Saudi donors, is director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division.
Also, as a Nathan Wagner comments at Opinio Juris: "Surely there is a moral difference between raising funds in free nations through appeals to ideals of universal human rights and raising money in repressive nations through appeals highlighting pressure brought against their enemies. [Moreover], the former type of fundraising does not imperil the organization's mission, but fundraising Bernstein highlights does, since any significant reliance on such funds will necessarily mute criticism of the repressive government."
Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."
Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia
by David Bernstein
Wall Street Journal
JULY 15, 2009
Seeking Saudi Money to Counterbalance "Pro-Israel Pressure Groups
A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?
No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations." (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel "human rights" activists"? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)
Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record. But never fear, HRW "recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers.
There is nothing wrong with a human rights organization worrying about maltreatment of domestic workers. But there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country. In fact, it's a virtual certainty that everyone in Whitson's audience employs domestic servants, giving her a perfect, untaken opportunity to boast about HRW's work in improving the servants' status. But Whitson wasn't raising money for human rights, she was raising money for HRW's propaganda campaign against Israel.
Someone who claims to have worked for HRW wrote to me, "I can tell you that the people on the research and policy side of the organization have little, if any, contacts with people on the donor side." If that's true, apparently this is yet another exception HRW makes for Israel: Ms. Whitson, who gave the presentation to potential Saudi donors, is director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division.
Also, as a Nathan Wagner comments at Opinio Juris: "Surely there is a moral difference between raising funds in free nations through appeals to ideals of universal human rights and raising money in repressive nations through appeals highlighting pressure brought against their enemies. [Moreover], the former type of fundraising does not imperil the organization's mission, but fundraising Bernstein highlights does, since any significant reliance on such funds will necessarily mute criticism of the repressive government."
Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Come to sunny Gaza
The ASA has banned an Israeli Government Tourist Office ad because it included a map that implied that Gaza,the West Bank and the Golan Heights were recognised as being part of Israel (though why the Israeli Tourist Office would want to imply that those areas were attractive holiday destinations is beyond me).
Read the full story and see the ad here.
Read the full story and see the ad here.
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