Sunday, 18 October 2015
ON THE MIDDLE EAST, DONALD HAS IT RIGHT
In 1989 I met Donald Trump several times in Palm Beach in Florida where he was trying to stop jets from a newly expanded Palm Beach International Airport from roaring over his enormous mansion. This was Mar-a-Lago, a magnificent house with 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms which Trump had bought four years earlier without realising it was under the flight path.
I learned about Trump's problem because I knew a Canadian paper and pulp magnate who had bought a house near Mar-a-Lago and was also suffering from the airport noise. He was bitter that the people who had arranged for him to visit his new home prior to purchase had carefully chosen a brief moment when there were no planes passing overhead. The two multimillionaires had set up an organisation that aimed to unite the less well-off people living in West Palm Beach and the plutocrats of Palm Beach, who were not natural allies, in order to get something done about the planes. There was plenty to complain of because, after an airport expansion the year before, there were 200 planes taking off every day.
I had mentioned what was happening in Palm Beach to a friend on a magazine in New York who promptly asked me to write a piece about it. I suspect that the idea was that I would produce a knock-about account of the farcical failure of Trump's self-serving efforts to unite mansion owners, who lived there irregularly, and the less wellheeled but permanent population. In the event, the article was never published, possibly because I wrote that Trump's campaign to reduce the noise level, involving a curfew on night-time flying, a ban on the noisier aircraft and the enforcement of existing airport noise restrictions, seemed perfectly sensible.
In the long term, the agitation combined with the threat of legal action by Trump and my Canadian friend must have worked, since I noticed a year later that Palm Beach airport had just become the first airport in the American South to limit and possibly ban the noisiest planes. But all was evidently not entirely well, because in January this year, a quarter of a century after I had been in Palm Beach, Trump was suing Palm Beach County for $100m (£65m) alleging that officials had pressured the Federal Aviation Authority into a "deliberate and malicious" act by routing planes from the airport over Mar-a-Lago.
I remembered Trump and his anti-noise campaign when watching him in recent weeks being repeatedly interviewed as presidential candidate about the Middle East. The interviewers for television and newspapers were generally hostile, or at least patronising and incredulous, when Trump spoke positively about Russian intervention in Syria, the need to combat IS and the disastrous state of Iraq and Libya. Most of what he was saying was common sense, but it is a measure of the degree to which propaganda slogans have replaced realistic discussion of these problems that his remarks were immediately dismissed or derided by politicians and the media. Asked by an NBC news presenter if Iraq and Libya had been better off when Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were in power, a question most politicians would have dodged, Trump said: "Iraq is a disaster, Libya is not even a country. You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there - it's a mess. If you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there - it's a mess."
This should not be controversial stuff. Many Iraqis and Libyans are glad to have got rid of the old dictators, but they have no doubt about the calamities that have befallen their countries since the change of regime. But how often in the British general election was David Cameron challenged for his part in reducing Libya to primal anarchy? Speaking about the White House's policy of supporting the Syrian armed opposition, Trump truthfully said the administration "doesn't know who they are. They could be Isis. Assad is bad. Maybe these other people are worse." He said he was bothered by "the concept of backing people they have absolutely no idea who they are". Again, US officials admit that they have armed opposition fighters who, on entering Syria promptly handed their weapons over to Jabhat al-Nusra, the local representatives of al-Qa’ida. Trump added: "I was talking to a general two days ago. He said: 'We have no idea who these people are.'" What is striking about these interviews is the self-confidence with which the American and British interviewers regurgitated gobbets of government propaganda and expressed surprise when Trump disagreed with them. The journalists questioning Trump appear to have accepted, without much thought and against all the evidence, the rebranding of al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, which is extremist Islamist and close to the Muslim Brotherhood, as anti-Assad "moderates" from the moment they were attacked by Russian aircraft and missiles.
Trump discounts the widespread belief that Putin wants to destroy these mythical moderates and for some unexplained reason will not attack IS. He has objected strongly to long discredited nostrums such as "nation-building", suggesting in another interview that it is wrong "to tell people who have [had] dictatorships or worse for centuries how to run their own countries".
It is worth viewing or reading these interviews with Trump and taking them seriously, because in Britain and much of the United States, Trump is demonised as an exotic celebrity with no understanding of what is happening in the world.
Also noticeable is the depressing degree to which the interviewers parrot an acritical establishment line on developments in Iraq, Libya and Syria. This media blindness compounds government misjudgements and prevents lessons being learned from previous disasters.
It is not that Trump shows any great clairvoyance, but his words resonate because there is such a vacuum of clear thinking in Washington and Western Europe about the wars that are sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Most politicians are afraid of being pilloried as unpatriotic if they stray far from the official line. In Britain, debate on possible use of British aircraft in bombing IS in Syria ignores the real political and military landscape in which there is a shortage of warplanes to drop bombs and allies on the ground able to identify targets.
It should by now be clear that defeating IS and bringing an end to the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars can only be brought about by agreement between the five main outside powers involved in the war: the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. They alone have influence over allies and proxies inside Syria and Iraq to force them to negotiate seriously. This is very unlikely to happen while all sides inside and outside Syria believe that war still gives them the best chance to survive and to win. It is a measure of the failure of Western leaders to understand the crisis in the Middle East that, in speaking of it, none of them show the same clarity of mind as Donald Trump.
Sunday, 25 October 2015
HILLARY CLINTON IS GUILTY, BUT NOT AS CHARGED
Hillary Clinton was battered for 10 hours on Thursday by Republican Congressmen seeking to blame her for security failings, when she was secretary of state, that led to the murder of United States ambassador Christopher Stevens in the US consulate in Benghazi on 11 September 2012. The Republican purpose in grilling her for so long was a blatant attempt to throw enough mud and make enough insinuations to damage her bid for the presidency. The manoeuvre is wholly cynical, but polls show that it is having an impact on her popularity, if only because it is always possible to throw more accusations than can be rebutted by the accused, however innocent they may be.
Of course, there is a strong case against Clinton's actions in Libya, but they relate to her support for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and not the death of Christopher Stevens in 2012. There is no doubt that she played a crucial role, along with President Barack Obama's advisers Samantha Power and Susan Rice, in the decision by the US to intervene on the side of the anti-Gaddafi rebels. Although France and the UK played a more public role, the US termed its strategy as "leading from behind". Clinton was proud of her action, proclaiming in October 2011 after the killing of Gaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died." She said during the recent Democratic presidential candidates' debate that what she did in Libya was "smart power at its best".
Neither Clinton nor the Republican Congressmen showed much interest in the present calamitous state of Libya
, which is divided into fiefdoms ruled by criminalised warlords reliant on terror and torture. Benghazi is partly in ruins and is fought over by rival factions, while IS has carved out enclaves where it decapitates Egyptian Copts and Ethiopian Christians. NATO's military intervention in 2011 was justified by the claim that Gaddafi was about to massacre the people of Benghazi, which cannot be proved or disproved because it never happened. What is more certain is that, if the old regime was still in power, several thousand migrants from north and west Africa would have jobs on Libyan building sites instead of sailing from Libyan beaches and drowning in the Mediterranean.
Nor was the disastrous outcome as unpredictable as its protagonists now pretend. One of the first policies announced in 2011 by the incoming Libyan transitional government was an end to Gaddafi's ban on polygamy. When a Libyan journalist interviewed a campaigner for women's rights about wearing the veil a couple of years ago, the Libyan Grand Mufti issued a fatwa against him and his television station claiming that they were "promoting the apostate Shiite doctrine and atheism and defaming Islam".
Although Clinton would have been an easy target due to her significant contribution to the disintegration of Libya, her Republican critics avoided the issue. After all, the UN Security Council, NATO, US allies such as David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, and many senior Republicans in the US had applauded military intervention in Libya and would have to take a share of the blame. The political figure who seems to have had the most doubts about becoming involved in Libya was President Obama, who predicted that it might all end unhappily and was only just persuaded to sanction it by Clinton, Power and Rice. Even then, Obama was under the impression that he was backing a humanitarian mission to save the people of Benghazi rather than an all-out effort to achieve regime change. He forecast that any such attempt in Libya would produce a situation similar to Iraq and this is exactly what has happened.
Neither Clinton nor her Republican critics show any real interest in events in Libya in 2011 or in the following years. Their attitude is a perfect example of the degree to which the domestic political priorities of Washington dictate and distort perceptions of developments abroad. This is particularly true of Libya where the Western media was at one in supporting the war in which the brave insurgents would topple the evil dictator Gaddafi and introduce secular democracy. Of course, the perpetrators of these disasters have the advantage that Libya is now so dangerous that few journalists go there to describe the results of the handiwork of the hawks of 2011.
The Republican majority on the House Benghazi select committee, who have spent 17 months and $4.5m (£2.9m) on their partisan persecution of Hillary Clinton, should be more interested in what the US was doing in Benghazi and eastern Libya in 2011 and 2012. It would be useful to know how, what was sold as a humanitarian air campaign to save the people of Benghazi, turned into a successful effort to overthrow Gaddafi. But there are also important questions to be asked about what was going on in the US Consulate and CIA station in Benghazi in the months leading up to the attack on them by Islamists three years ago.
In April 2013, the famed US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published in the London Review of Books an account of what the CIA calls a "rat line" which was created in early 2012 "to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition". This was the result of an agreement between the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to equip the armed Syrian rebels, and much of this weaponry ended up with jihadis affiliated to al-Qa’ida. Hersh says that an account of what happened in setting up of the "rat line" is in a highly classified unpublished section of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report into the death of Mr Stevens in Benghazi which was issued in January 2013.
Under the terms of a secret agreement between the US and Turkey, partly funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, arms from Gaddafi's arsenals were procured in Libya by retired US soldiers through Libyan front companies, with the operation overseen by the CIA and MI6. Normally, the CIA should have reported what it was doing to Congress, but an exception is made for liaison missions and "the involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison mission". Hersh cites a former intelligence officer as saying that the only purpose for the US to keep open a consulate in Benghazi "was to provide cover for the movement of arms". After the murder of Mr Stevens, the CIA abruptly ended the operation which then came under Turkish control.
The story would explain a relationship between the CIA and jihadis in Benghazi that might have led to the Americans being over-confident that they were safe from attack. Western governments have largely blamed Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Gulf monarchies for arming the jihadi opposition in Syria, but the "rat line" shows the complicity of Western intelligence agencies.
Sunday, 15 November 2015
A NEW TYPE OF WARFARE
IS has always massacred civilians in large numbers to show its strength and instil fear in its opponents. In the West, people notice these atrocities only when they take place on their own streets, though IS suicide bombers killed 43 people in Beirut on Thursday and 26 more in Baghdad on Friday. These attacks are almost impossible to stop because they are directed against civilians, who cannot all be defended, and the bombers are willing to die in order to destroy their targets.
IS has claimed it was behind the Paris attacks, saying that France was targeted because of its air strikes in Syria. The use of eight suicide bombers and gunmen in a capital city, guaranteeing maximum coverage by the media, has all the hallmarks of an IS operation.
One ominous difference from the killings earlier in the year at Charlie Hebdo and in a Jewish supermarket, is that attacks, presumably because of IS involvement, are getting more sophisticated and better planned. Recruiting, arming, coordinating and keeping hidden the Paris killers until the last moment implies good organisation. The same was true of the smuggling of a bomb on to the Russian plane before it left the ground at Sharm al-Sheikh on 30 October.
What is the explanation for this recent intensification of IS suicide bombings outside Syria and Iraq? The killing of civilians as complicit in the acts of their governments was always part the ideology of al-Qa’ida, an approach most famously demonstrated on 9/11 in New York. The softest of targets is destroyed by bombers or gunmen intent on killing themselves along with their enemies as a demonstration of religious faith.
But there is a further reason why IS may be intent on showing that it can strike anywhere in the world: for the first time in two years, a period during which IS has created its own state in western Iraq and eastern Syria, it is being driven back by military pressure on a number of fronts.
In the past, it would deal with its numerous but disunited enemies one after the other, but now it is facing attacks on a number of fronts at the same time. The Syrian army backed by Russian air strikes last week ended the siege by IS of Kweiris Airbase west of Aleppo. It was the biggest Syrian government victory for two years. The Syrian Kurds, in cooperation with the US air force, are advancing south around Hasaka, while the Iraqi Kurds, again with American air support, have captured Sinjar city west of Mosul. IS will find it difficult to travel between Raqqa and Mosul and may lose its grip on the oilfields of north-east Syria, from which it has derived revenue.
These developments on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria may seem distant from the butchery in the heart of Paris. But it is important to understand that IS is an effective fighting machine because its military skills, evolved during years of fighting, are a potent blend of urban terrorism, guerrilla tactics and conventional warfare. Its blitzkrieg advances in Iraq in the summer of 2014 were preceded by a wave of suicide bombings using vehicles packed with explosives in Shia districts of Baghdad and central Iraq. The aim was to keep its enemies frightened and off-balance and to show to potential supporters that IS was a power in the land.
Nobody in the outside world paid much attention to the thousands of Iraqi Shia who were killed then and have
gone on dying because of IS terrorist bombings in Iraq. The number of civilians killed in Iraq jumped from 4,623 in 2012 to 9,473 in 2013 and to 17,045 in 2014, according to Iraqi Body Count, an independent website; a high proportion of these killed were Shia victims of IS bombers and murderers. This savagery is now being repeated in the streets of Paris and Ankara, where 102 demonstrators for peace were killed by two suicide bombers on 10 October.
It is part of IS's tactical manual to retaliate against any opponent by any means, with the aim of showing defiance in some spectacular way guaranteed to dominate the international news agenda. Thus, it reacted against US air strikes, which it could not prevent militarily, with videos of American journalists and aid workers being decapitated with horrific deliberation. When cutting off heads ceased to have its previous shock effect, IS burned to death a Jordanian pilot in a cage.
It claims that the killing of civilians is not mindless murder but vengeance: an IS-related group that said it was behind the destruction of the Russian plane and its 224 passengers posted on the internet pictures of the aircraft's wreckage interleaved with shots of buildings in Syria shattered by Russian bombs. IS is making clear that, if any country bombs them from the air, it will reply in kind on the ground, using the methods of urban terrorism backed by a well-organised state. It is difficult to think of any example of this happening before.
These acts of terror require some resources, but no high degree of training since targets chosen are defenceless such as the British tourists enjoying a beach in Tunisia or the people in Paris murdered as they attended a rock concert. Not a great number of Islamic fanatics are needed to carry out these atrocities, the impact of which echoes around the world. IS has had a great number of foreign fighters pass through its ranks and it can usually find committed supporters within the countries it intends to target.
Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 31