MORE ON TARIQ ALI THE OLD TROTSKYITE WHO SOLD HIS SOUL TO MAMMON

High price of war
Peter Wilson, The Weekend Australian, 22 October, 2005

FOUR decades after making his name as one of Britain's leading student radicals and Vietnam War protesters, Tariq Ali still finds his career being shaped by Washington's military entanglements.

The veteran left-winger spent most of the 1970s and '80s producing political history books and documentaries for British television but was jolted on to a new writing path by the 1991 Gulf War.

Techniques he uses similar to John Pilger -making assertions fact by the fact of their assertion.

Tony Blair is not just misguided, he is a ruthless menace to democracy and willing to destroy thousands of lives to suck up to George W. Bush. The shooting on the London Tube of innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was not an accident committed by nervous police but a "public execution" intended to show everybody that the security services meant business. Torture and detention without trial are other weapons deployed by a government "determined to dodge the fact that the recent wave of violence in London was provoked by its own disastrous [foreign] policies". Blair's "repeated insistence that the invasion had nothing to do with the London bombings is simply preposterous", Ali declares, citing opinion polls that show most Londoners agree with him. In fact, the bombings on London's Tube and bus networks would not have happened at all, Ali says, if the British Prime Minister had been voted out of office in May.

Instead of dismissing Islamic extremists as irrational evildoers, Western governments must acknowledge that most Islamic terrorism is a deplorable but understandable response to "the violence that is being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world".

Ali is author of widely regarded book: Clash of Fundamentalisms

Ali insists that terror suspects are being tortured in British prisons - he admits that he can produce no evidence - and accuses Blair of using an unprecedented hold on "state, media, church and party" to curb civil liberties.

  ¶ Saturday, October 22, 2005 0 Comments

 


This post is undergoing regular editing!

FROM SALONS IN SYRIA TO SOLVING HUMAN CONFLICT

Having discovered Joshua Landis' pages a few weeks ago, I'm turning to them quite frequently. Today, a very interesting rip in his post from:

AN AGENDA FOR PEACEFUL CHANGE IN SYRIA
By Hind Aboud Kabawat, 14 October 2005

which reflects much of my thinking on this: the world is changing but governments are the last to recognise these changes or perhaps, to be fair, they may see what is happening but be unable or unwilling to act on new developments and changing attitudes decisively and quickly enough: always a lag phase despite the constant discussion of politics. The internet is both a vehicle for change and a metaphor and analogy for how the change and innovation is working. And there are other natural models which offer ways of overcoming social problems without rescourse to coersion as socialism was bound to do.

Any analysis comes back to "The more people talk with each other the more they are likely to understand and trust each other". Though with the InterWeb it can seem the opposite, with the mass of half-formed idea floating in a sea of ignorance and misinformation. However two aspects of the internet activity are instaneity and changeablity.

It would be foolish to embark on a full-blown essay on what this leads to and could amount to, since this has been extremely well covered by many thousands of brilliant writers and academics.

The Third Way was much reviled. ButEtzioni's communitarianism provides a starting point for examining what it is about our lives that we relly want to change. The communitarian trio of

* state
* market
* community

clearly point to the areas that can be tackled. My interest is to work on the third in order to understand and control the first wo. That is based on a simple axiom: the individual, and then the smll group come before the nation and mechanisms such as finance.

My preference is not reheat the old stew of communitarianism but to look at what globalisation is. A key indication that someone thinks it important is a Google search with a 'z' giving 53,100,000 links. Google: globalization


The Globalisation Website
What is apparent from such primers is that globalisation is not a new phenomenon as some might imagine.


I see the globalisation model - essentially how money, effort and organisation transcend national boundaries and the consequences of this - can be used to define a new globalisation which is based more in values, deeper aspects of culture, stability and change.

A complete definition involves more than economics.{Wiki: globalisation} lists other definitions and mentions where in one defintion it is roughly equated with {wiki: internationalisation}. Though the bottom line is always economies and economics, it is time to think more how people, ideas and attitudes spread and what they can mean for human betterment. With the current ease of communication there is a feeling in the air - a euphoria almost - that somehow this very ease is going to change things, to make things better in a way that economic progress, growth and increased properity, has not and cannot.

The basic idea seems nowadays to be capitalism/industrialisation is good, because while it spreads wealth even more, it will ultimately reduce population growth. We soarly need to re-engage with the debate on population at the same time as sorting out seemly intractible problems in certain part so the world. In the medium term economic growth will further devastate the world: more people, less trees, more polluted air and water, the destruction of habitats and species which may not be reversible. In the long term, with the eventual adoption of worldwide accepted rules (which are actually simply sets of recognitions about what it is to be human) as to how to protect what we have left of the earth, things may improve in all these areas while everyone being better off. But ultimately the economic model is not enough. But of course to say now, "No more growth!" is tantamount to saying "We've got what we want - you have to stay in poverty" in order to save the planet from environmental destruction.

The model I like to think of is the {wiki:immune system} which is essence is also bound by ecological rules. One of the first things you might come up against is autoimmune response, where the body in effect eats itself because it cannot tell the difference between self anf no-self. Many of these are life threatening: {wiki:autoimmune diseases}

While it is said that humans are no longer bound by the rules of evolutionary theory, this is not really true when it comes to our immune systems which constantly adapt to further threats to the body from outside. No increase in brain size but a complex steady-state system (as are bodily heat, oxygen and sugar control) under-the-bonnet mechanism which ensures any new virus or bacteria or chemical has soon got an antibody to counter-act it. This is both only evolutionary and ecological because evolutionary theory works within the principles of ecology.

So why doesn't this model apply in the social world? In simole terms why does the feedback mechaism not work? Why has the obvious failures in Iraq post-2001 not been remedied quickly? Why does a malign state such as North Korea continue to exist? How is it possible that we have allowed the North Koreans have been so cut off from the the rest of the world? Wasn't it our duty to ensure they did not remain in the dark for so long despite the division created by the Korean war? Why are most Africans in abject poverty when its mineral wealth is enormous? This sounds like a recipe for world socialism. Too late and shown time and again to be unworkable. But certainly the United Nations and the sum total of all the other international cooperation have not solved problems people round the world want to be solved. Individuals sit at home worrying about other individuals inthe workd. this has become more possible (the fretting) because of the power of the new media. In fact, so much is propogated so quickly that the disssemination itself often has an influence on events: the young Irish journalist, Rory Carroll, working for The Guardian, kidnapped in Sadr City a few days ago has been released days later. 500 years ago, the poor man would have been hanging by his arms in a fetid dungeon for years before word got out.

It may seem mad to look at the political situation in Iraq and the wider Middle East, or other trouble spots in the world, at the unfairnesses and power plays, in terms of an immune system model. But such a framework is far superior to social notions such as nations, economics and religion, which are always out of kilter with the other aspects of culture. Culture, in the sense of it being what humans make and do, has always spread round the world, from the dawn of humanity, yet it does not even out the bumps, so to speak: niches are formed (people and territory) and social group still remains at loggerheads with other social group, throughout the world. The boiler-room of nation-states - economic activity - has a tendancy to be blind; while one of the major social binding forces, religion, is ineluctably socially and politically conservative: it is always social control (leave aside for now the seeming necessity for ritual and prayer) in the form of rules made by God to be obeyed, or made by God and modified by Man, (or the necessity for social cohesion through recourse to the supernatural, if you want to be less strident) masquerading as something else such as spiritual growth and development, as what people need and long for.

In my worldview, Weltanschauung, an attempt to both create the conditions for true free-trade right across the world and to push religion - its bad effects on society such as division and hatred of the other which is in any case hard-wired into Man through the in-group drive - gently but firmly, out of the public arena into the personal domain, would be the greatest advance we could attempt.

Immedately someone asks, "Since humans are social animals how is it possible to keep religion personal?" "For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them." almost seems to say you can't do it alone. I have always believed God would simply not exist without with community. This might seem both axiomatic and ridiculous in that all religious and non-religious who may study religion, will say that it is about confirming each others' faith. I believe this is where the danger lies. Whereas God is infallible, men are not. What they are congregating for may not be what they say they are congrgating for. How are we to be sure men enter a church on sunday in a little vilage in the middle of England because they see some material advantage in doing so not because they wish to be close to God? We suggest it and many cynics believe such things, but we can't prove it. if a man says he goes with others to pray to his God, we are in a pickle if we say, "No he's not, he's networking".

Dissemulation is so part of being human that a way of associating that gets round these types of difficulties has to be something automatic, obeying rules which we have input, but which takes account of facts such as lying, obfuscation, and red herrings. TO BE EXPANDED

A country like Iraq without religion would be left with its economic and social (including tribal) divisions - a lot easier, presumably, to overcome by dialogue and compromise than religious differences - rather than the mountainous barriers of faith between basically the same people who actually have much the same ambitions, objectives and hopes.

The problem with a world totally free of organised religion - which is what no religion means - is always that freedom also means freedom to believe in God and worship; but freedom to worship often then ends back with the unnecessary social divisions created by religious schism which is a built-in part of religion as any sociology of religion will tell you. A perfect study of schism is the Protestant church in America since the Pilgrim Fathers.

The fact that great percentage of humans still adhere to notions of the supernatural is not so much a condemnation of backward thinking, but a sign of their continuing needs. But religion is not the only way to satisfy those needs or calm the existential anxiety most experience. The continued existence of mass religious observance in the modern world surely indicates other means of satifying those needs have not been found. Certainly greater material comfort might lessen the need for religion, but even the rich or the astro-physist have been known to believe in God.

This thought-stream is liable to be appended, amended, edited and generally altered or even completely deleted at a moments notice



  ¶ Thursday, October 20, 2005 0 Comments

 

IRAQI CONSTITUTION 2005 - women's rights

Institute for War and Peace Reporting


In the early days of this weblog I suggested the acid test of a progressive future for Iraq was the treatment of women. You did not have to be a genius to see many would expect women especially educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers and teachers to cover themselves by edict rather than choice.

Iraqi women were treated as equal even under Saddam - even to torture and death - but now slowly they are covering up through threat of violence and death.

Of course many Iraqi women have always worn the black cloak with face uncovered. Plenty of images from Iraq on TV show them in black from head to toe, though face exposed. You will note (I have many of my father's photographs from his trip to Kirkuk and beyond to show the Kurdish women did not hide their faces) that not all Iraqi covered themselves under religious edict or social tradition.

With the onset of the modern era, with the exponential rise in education in the late 40s and 50s, the massive primary and secondary school building programme and subsequently the colleges and universities created a rapidly expanding middle-class which more and more adopted western styles and fads. When I was in baghdad as a boy in the 50s, a teenage Iraqi from a reasonably affluent fanmily was indistinguishable from one in New York: their film and pop star heroes were American: Elvis was King in Baghdad when Jailhouse rock showed at the cinema half way down Rasheed Street!

The 2005 constitution according to the site above says that Islam is a fundamental source of legislation and that no law must contradict it. This is the catch-22 for women's rights in Iraq. In essence, because the Shia form 60% of the population Sharia law must predominate over (or never be superceeded by) state law, which is exactly what I said several years ago must not happen. For a state to be considered modern and progressive it must have a constitution which prevents religious laws having priority over laws made by men. This seems like it it is going to be impossible in Iraq from now on, unless laws are made which protect freedom of choice in matters of public appearance. It almost seems as if the 2005 Iraqi constitution is a predominantly political device to ensure the Shia majority have a major say in the future.

Sensible laws cannot be made to protect women's rights which would be recognised under international law with this proviso about Sharia. It seems to me like a recipe for federalism, where in the south this will operate while in Kudistan and possibly the centre and Sunni areas it will largely be ignored in favour of more equality laws.

Though Sharia is deemed to treat women equally to men this is patently not true in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. A simple test - simpler than that of whether they will have to cover themselves in Iraq - is that of being allowed to drive. Currently - through force - more and more women in Iraq are both wearing head coverings or whole body coverings. And what are they doing as far as driving is concerned? It is almost certain that fear of being shot at or kidnapped has driven many former women drivers off the street. I do not know if middle- class professional women drove cars in Saddam's time, but they certainly worked in western clothes amongst men, such as architects on site. I have a photograph of a woman architect in The National Geographic magazine from the early 80s with her standing at a building site, to prove this was the case. It will not be happening now.

Michael Rubin, albeit of the American Enterprise Institute and edito of Middle east Quarterly, has a few salient points to make about the consitution in this essentially 'good news about Iraq = the U.S. has done a good job' piece:

With Freedom Comes Politics
by Michael Rubin, Wall Street Journal, 18 October, 2005

  ¶ Wednesday, October 19, 2005 0 Comments

 


Novelist denies 'genocide' claim

Orhan Pamuk threatened with trial and prison by the supposedly democratic Turkish government for suggesting the Armenian massacre perpetrated by the Turkish government of 1917-ish, is backtracking. This is a pity.

The Turks want to come into the EU but are currently refusing think seriously about the EU demand for them to admit responsibility for the massacre of tens of thousands of Turkish Armenians. Unless this is going to be a bargaining chip for the long term. The time scale for entry is 10 years, by which time they might feel they can accept responsibility for the wanton killing of so many innocents.

TO BE ADDED TO


  ¶ Wednesday, October 19, 2005 0 Comments

 


FROM THE DUSTY PIPE TOBACCO-STAINED ARM OF THE ARMCHAIR OF THE ARMCHAIR GENERAL AND AMATEUR POLITICAL PUNDIT, V

Simon Jenkins was for the war and explains some elements of the new Iraqi Constitution:

Visit Baghdad and you can see our golden chance for an exit

The Sunday Times, 16 October 2005

Simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk

Another view on the constution from OpenDemocracy:

Iraq: a constitution to nowhere
Zaid Al-Ali

The Iraqi constitution may lead to the country’s disintegration, says Zaid Al-Ali. How did Iraqis reach this point?

There's nothing much to disagree with Simon Jenkins till he says [my emphasis]:

American and British troops had no right to be in Iraq but they have removed Saddam and authored a new constitution. The only reason for their staying is to maintain security, and that they patently cannot do. The claim that early departure “will make civil war inevitable” is as implausible as it is patronising. Staying is what sets civilians at war with each other.

My suggestion is there will be a surge forward by the home-grown and just-over-the- border- in- Iran Mullah-backed militias as soon as they feel able - with or without the American/British/anon presence. The elections will proceed as planned, 'under' or 'over' this, acording to how they are seen. These groups will want maximum influence in a post-militia, truly political phase. To get this they will push militarily in two areas: (1) consolidate control of the Shia south and as far north to Baghdad as they dare and (2) from within the Shia north of Baghdad. In essence they will physically control the south and much of Baghdad.

Jenkins' point that the central government, though ineffective, could do nothing if not protected by coalition forces, is the tipping point, in one sense. While foreign forces remain, the insurgency will maintain its momentum in the centre while the southern militias will grow and organise - militarily and politically - continuing to vie for supreme power. Other well established political groups (religious, tribal, secular) might determine they cannot operate without strong military arms, so establish or reinforce their own private armies in central Iraq, in essence Baghdad, to defend their interests in the central zone against the increasingly powerful Shia forces based in Sadr city and the south.

Once the Shia have sorted themselves out in the south, they will logically see it is essential to take physical control of central government with a view to the future, elections or no. They will want to skew the constitution further by playing on the get out clauses built into it, or any laws that might be promulgated later to favour their ideology. Totemically, they will want to see no uncovered women in the streets of Baghdad. Their whole political focus will be on continued social control through Sharia. Will a free and diverse media continue to exist in this climate? More and more of the best politicians, alaysts,commentators, educators will be picked off to create the climate of fear necessary to take more control by force.

Meanwhile the secular parties will see, if they do not bolster their social desires and political beliefs with force, they will lose everything they have regained since Saddam against this tide of fundamentalism. As this goes on, more of the middle classes, the academic and technological elite on which the country will depend, will leech out of the country in greater numbers because they cannot work in the increasingly unstable, dangerous and undesireable social strictures progressively imposed. This will then make it easier for less able and narrower-minded, but militia backed politicans to progressively take greater numbers of governmental posts and ministerships.

A relatively stable state will be arrived at with the south as a de facto southern state, a strong Shia state, backed by Iran, with a strong, stable, quite democratic Kurdistan, protected by American airbases, and a powerless central government in Baghdad surrounded by warring Sunni factions whose main motive would be to prevent the centre being taken over by Shia forces, and protect central government even though it is predominantly Shia.

In the immediate short-term with no coalition forces left, the Shia militias in the south would effectively fight to the death to take power in their area. This would satify the elements of the constitution Jenkins identifies in sectio 129.

Once the south is reasonably stable they will turn their minds to how they can assert maximun force in the centre. This will be based on physical control of Baghdad because the Sunni insurgents based on a few predominant tribes and tribal leaders, will control the outlying areas. The Shia authority in the south, backed by their own militia/army, will now be in a position to make more demands within the ongoing delicate democratic process. As in the 1789-93 French revolution, post 1917 Russia, a lot of this power play will consist of destruction of newspaper premises and the assassination of prominent opinion formers

Marc Lynch under his Abuaardvark hat mentions:

Abd al-Bari Atwan, the influential editor of the Arabist daily al-Quds al-Arabi, argues today that not only were the results of the Constitutional referendum a foregone conclusion, but so are the coming Parliamentary elections. The results have been pre-cooked, he claims, to produce "a new government hostile to Iran, as an instrument for the American administration in the coming war against it." And this supposed new government has a name attached to it: Iyad Allawi.

Atwan writes that Allawi "will return to rule by force, as the person acceptable to most Iraqis, in the American imagination... as a secular, nationalist [qawmi] man hostile to Iran, and unacceptable to Sayid Ali Sistani." He reports that Allawi has intensified his contacts with various Iraqi factions over the last few days, in order to create a coalition that will present itself as the broadest democratic- oriented list able to confront the specter of sectarianism and to wage a fierce war against the insurgency. In other words, Allawi will present himself as the Iraqi De Gaulle, the savior for all of Iraq's woes. He is counting, according to Atwan, on Iraqis having a short memory, and not remembering that he was one of the figures most closely cooperating with the American occupation. Atwan wants to remind Iraqis of this history, and probably is trying to kill Allawi's bid before it begins.

This is a man who pops up all the time to assert most confidently about the arab world. Most of what he says is soon forgotten. Often his slant is amazingly unobjective, despite his obvious ear to the ground. He comes over half the time as a mouth-piece of someone or other, rather than a traditional journalist. His basic idea sseem to be to suggest that westerners could not possibly understnad or interpret the situation, only an expert such as himself. Often an edgy, reflexive anti-westesternism, which is slightly smoothed when he talks on British TV, comes into his interpretations, which seem quite obviously too simplistic to bother with. To persistently say the same thing which is 2The west can't possibly undestand how to solve this, it shouldn't interfer and we as Muslims are best set to deal with out own problems" is so far from thre truth. The truth is the Arab worls is congenitally incapable of sorting its affairs, and could do with a neo-colonialist model based on the modern, interconnected world paradigm. Unfortunately, though the Americans seem to have taken the first step down this road, they haven't got the nerve or the imagination or any palns to walk to the end. This would in effect taking over the whole area barring Israel, militarily, in order to solve the Israel problem, and settle the various countries such as Syria and Iran into the modern world.

It seems highly unlikely Allawi will attempt to take power (or that the Americans will stay to back him) unless the whole country descends into murder and mayhem of an extent hitherto not seen. In any case, as soon as it gets that hot the U.S. military will retreat to the North, dropping bombs as the British did 3/4 of a century ago, to dampen down, though not subdue total revolt. There are many other individuals with stronger power bases than Allawi. If the scenario I have painted above is accurate, he will be one small part of the Sunni power base, in the centre, desperately trying to hold off the Shia militias in large parts of Baghdad. They would be able to nothing about the south or Kurdistan.

Meanwhile, the end of year elections will simply cement the religious, tribal divides. This is the default value which has always operated without a demagogue to flatten it out.

  ¶ Wednesday, October 19, 2005 0 Comments

 

THE DUSTY, SMOKE STAINED ARM OF THE ARM-CHAIR GENERAL'S CHAIR, IV

Before forgetting it, must mention very good World service programme on Islam - visiting different Islamic countries done, I think by a Muslim correspondent. Can't find it on internet yet, but will post details when found. He dealt with Malaysia in this weeks part,and will next go to North Africa. This is a must series.

Watching excellent t.v. BBC2 series, Israel and the Arabs. Part II is up to the destruction of Arafat's headquarters by the Israeli Army and the to-ing and fro-ing of U.S. politicians and generals.

::

Arafat has gone. I see clearly (did a long time ago) that he was using the Palestinians to fight his own personal battle. This was wrong. He was both candid and emotional and at the same time a brazen liar. You couldn't help respect him for his constancy in the fight. But there was a telling few minutes in part II of this programme, which involved Prince Faisal visiting the U.S. at the time, 2002, to warn the Americans to rein in the Israelis. I thought after watching it something along the lines of:

"He is actually demonstrating, exposing, in a micro-moment, a short film clip of a close up of his face, what I always believed: the Palestinian-Israel conflict is,was, a proxy war. The Arabs didn't want a Jewish state but they could not, were not couragous enough or well prepared enough, to snuff it out in 1948. The Jordanian Bedouin legions which were still commanded by Glubb Pasha as far as I can recall (or had he left by then?) acquitted themselves well in the Jerusalem theatre but everyone else was hopeless, and lacked the will to throw the Jews into the sea as they had determined to do.

Prince Faisal in America in 2002 represents the complex relationship the U.S. has with Saudi Arabia. A simple example, and what I was thinking as I saw him complaining about the injustice of the Israelis threating Arafat with deportation or even assassination, was that if they removed their investments America would go into a slump, since the U.S. runs on large amounts of borrowed money, some 1-5% coming from Saudi investment. And yet they couldn't do so because it would affect their economies and pockets. Without the investment there was no money to buy in cheap Chinese goods made by workers on virtual slave wages (or as actaul slaves in the remnants of the laogai) and sell them on, nails, hammers, saws, TVs, video cameras, computers for big margins.

The notion of proxy war is important. Part of the analysis must start with looking at Arafat and the Palestinians. Asking the question that Golder Maier asked: "What is a Palestinian?" is til import because it highlights that the history of this thing is not as straightforward, black.white hat, as many imagine.

The article I referred to way back from MEF (though pro-Israeli you can tease out some facts and reasonalble arguments) shows the demographic history of this dispute is distinctly iffy. Though Palestinians still alive still have documentry proof that they own propety and or land in what is now under Israeli control, much of the others were simply Arabs who drifted in from Greater Syria because the Jews in the original settlements were re-vitalising a stagnant agriculture with modern irrigation: a core of genuine Palestinians (oocupants of land there under Ottoman rule) with greater numbers of immigrants who became "Palestinian" through living there for two generations.

To deny this or argue it doesn't have any bearing on the matter, is to refuse to accept reality. But this does not mean that the Palestinians should not have a state: the programme shows clearly that it would be better to have order through a neo-colonisation than this deep-seated, murderous hatred which is now no long a neighbour dispute but a disease which will only be cured when so much blood had been spilt that, like in all wars, the weariness of conflict produces a different mind-set.

it is a shame that the Arab oil states - who were, even in the immediate post-second world war period, quite rich - did not provide the Arabs of the Palestine area the wherewithall to do the same. Instead they looked on with a mixture of indifference, cynicism and political guile, paying for the guerillas movements. In public, they support the Palesinians, behind closed doors they probably view them with the same distain as they do the masses of South Asians who service their countries, such as the thousands who work in Kuwait who we learnt about after the Gulf war of 1992.

The peculariar Byzantine intrigues, fantasies, deceits and delusional thinking well-know to all who either live there who know the area well, and seen in everyday politics in the region, much designed in the hope of letting the mess that ensues do the job of making the Israeli state impossible to run. This now complicated in the last twoenty year aby Iranian revolutionary fervour.

With massive western support (first French, then U.S.) Israel has survived. But Israel and the Arabs gives glimpes of the Israel guts and determination and brains, which you cannot deny despite the mess they too have made as well (settlements, bulldozers, assassinations, imports of western Jews who had homes in America, etc). We go back to the 1967 war when this small country (with plenty of modern equipment, including French Mirages) held half a dozen beligerent Arab countries at bay. Now, this heroism is forgotten with the shabbiness of the unnecessary settlements, the casual killing of innocent Arabs, and the talk of the creeping Nazification of a democratic state under impossible pressure.


  ¶ Tuesday, October 18, 2005 0 Comments