DavidP

JEM leader killed

2011-12-25T21:35:00.001Z

News on Christmas morning: JEM leader has been killed, according to Sudanese government sources. The BBC's Arabic service correspondent cannot confirm with JEM (Justice and Equality Movement), since they are not answering the 'phone. (BBC WS, 8:00)

RFI's correspondent says she has confirmed with his family ( Tranche afrique, 12h30)

The event disappears from the headlines (no mention on Newshour).

Sudan Darfur rebel Khalil Ibrahim killed ...

But on Africa Today on the 26th, there is analysis from Alex de Waal. The JEM's sources of support in Libya and Chad have dried up, but they may be able to make use of the weapons that have been set loose following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

Posted 2 Jan 2012

Libya: do something

2011-03-17T19:51:00.003Z

So, I will leave the gaps to be filled and skip straight to my conclusions (as at 15 March) ...

How long do you wait when Libyan people have asked for one thing from the outside world, one thing only, repeatedly, that Gaddafi be stopped from attacking them with his air power?

And what do you wait for ? A "legal basis" in the form of a UNSC resolution, that is China and Russia consenting to "inteference in another country's internal affairs ? When even France has taken the lead and recognized the interim national government as a legitimate representative of the Libyan people? When the Islamic Conference, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League recognize the need for a no-fly zone? Or, as in Kosovo, do you take action anyway and defy China and Russia to table a resolution, which you have 3 vetos against anyway?

What else do you need before you help those who carry on fighting, knowing that the only alternative is Gaddafi's torture cells?

How much more does it take before you, sitting comfortably in London (or Washington), stop trying to find excuses for inaction ?

Such as, that a no-fly zone would have little effect, since Gaddafi's forces have been able to take some towns by pounding them with artillery alone (almost). Yes, in some places (such as Zawiya), that's true. But on the main front, between Benghazi and Sirte, it's not.

Update (16/3): what the backing of the GCC is worth, given their support for the crackdown in Bahrain, is questionable.

Libya: no-fly zones now

2011-02-25T15:53:00.008Z

...
insert 18/2 in al-Bayda, 2 policemen hung (RFI, 18:30 + 00:20:00)
...
21/2 Francois Hollande says something like: il faut que l'Europe s'exprime fortement pour éviter un bain de sang (interview on France Inter). But pressure by the West is unlikely to have any effect: things have gone too far for there to be a reconciliation between the people and the regime (we have reached the point de non retour, according to Gilles Kepel on France Inter, 22/2) . ... la revue Maghreb-Machrek ???

Criticism on Sunday (20/2) by US ambassador to the UK of British policy of engaging with Libya: as British ambassador to Libya says, he is also criticising his own government's policy: the US worked hand in hand with the UK on this (Newshour). One of the dissidents / exiles says: we were all in favour, we gave benefit of doubt to the regime, but they didn't deliver anything. ...
However, there is a price that Europe that will have to pay: Gaddafi threatens to stop cooperating over illegal migrants ... he had started to do so recently. This could include those from sub-Saharan Africa, using Libya as a transit country.
...
telephone comms disrupted (4:00) ... Tunisians feared they may be singled out ... (RFI, 18:30 + 00:07:00)

------

(From BBC website, 21 February 2011, updated at 10:55 GMT) Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, appeared on Libyan TV. Someone says: why is William Hague contacting this psychopath ? (C4News)

22/2 Gaddafi's "umbrella appearance" 2:00 local time, thanks God for rain, which proves he is in Libya, not Venezuela (report mentioned by William Hague; France Inter indicates some translations gave 'not Venezuela or France'). Later he makes a much longer and more threatening speech. (C4 News)

Mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa, Rumours flying about even as far as Guinea (Conakry) according to the BBC (WS c17:30).

possibility of no-fly zones ? (Newshour)
23/2 Jon Leyne, in east ... State TV not reporting events from anywhere except Tripoli & Sabha (in the south) ... suggests regime is only in control of these areas. (BBC, Today, 7:15 on website ) leading cleric says: we need no-fly zones (BBC WS).

A military man says: possible to deploy no-fly zones rapidly, but what is the point ? (BBC WS c17:30)

24/2 BBC confirming reports that crews had ejected / parachuted and let their 'planes crash.
...
So many gaps, hope to fill in later ....

But, for me, at this point in time, these actions seem to be necessary, urgently:

no-fly zone
provide supplies, especially medical (humanitarian aid)

Elections in Ivory Coast (Part 3)

2011-01-02T19:42:00.000Z

25 Dec. Though not quite to the same standard - no more cream cakes ! helicopters continue to supply provisions to the UN-controlled area where the Ouattara contingent is based.

In Part 1, I referred to BBC and RFI broadcasts have being taken off the air. This is the broadcasts on FM. They are now only available to people who have a short-wave radio (Twitter , rfi20101230-cote-ivoire-inquietude)

Gbagbo still has his supporters ...

En France, une trentaine d`intellectuels, principalement français et africains, ont appelé ce mercredi dans une lettre ouverte à « enrayer la menace de guerre» qui pèse sur la Côte d`Ivoire, rejetant toute intervention armée dans ce pays en crise (rfi/20101229-cote-ivoire-delegation-cedeao-retournera-le-3-janvier).

Amongst them, Calixthe Beyala, whose views can be read at length here (blackzamurai, ... la crise en Cote d'ivoire http://03e.de/ft38DM - la théorie d'un complot se précise. 1 Jan 2011, c18:35 ).

To be continued.

Elections in Ivory Coast (Part 2)

2010-12-29T21:49:00.003Z

On the BBC World Service's African Perspective, 11 Dec., provides some interesting background, on how things have developed since the death of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993. I would also suggest reading the article on fr.wikipedia (Ces problèmes connaissent une exacerbation à la mort de Félix Houphouët-Boigny en 1993.)

One thing that is not acceptable, as more than one commentator has remarked, is a "power sharing" agreement as in Kenya or Zimbabwe (African Perspective, 22:45; Le telephone sonne, 13 Dec). On the other hand, Guillaume Soro said that a Ouattara government would be open to Gbagbo supporters.

Back to events as they unfold.

Thursday, Ouattara's supporters march on the state-controlled broadcasting centre. They said in advance they would be unarmed - les bras nus - but clearly some armed clashes took place and tens of people were killed. Control of radio and TV is key: no private broadcasters are allowed to operate and since the election exclusively pro-Gbagbo propaganda has been put out (RFI).

Sarkozy gives Gbagbo a deadline of Saturday, which passes. Gbagbo threatens the UN and French forces in the country. The UN extends its mandate. Reports of clashes in the central region include one of a man with his hands above his head who was shot down.

Sunday 19 Dec, BBC WS, World Today (8:05), Stephen Smith, professor at Duke University again made the point that Gbagbo could be a hostage of his own camp with his wife, Simone, a Pentecostalist, having a millenarian vision of his right to rule in perpetuity (she is his first wife (of two, RFI, 20 Dec)). Those around him "have made a lot of money in the last ten years".

20 Dec, it is said that the crunch will come for Gbagbo when, not having access to international bank accounts, he has to pay the salaries of his civil servants and army in December. I think control of money cannot bring this regime down. Power comes from the control of real resources. But maybe I'm wrong. (The salaries were in fact paid - RFI, 24 Dec. The government of Mali denied reports in the Ivory Coast press that they had been instrumental in deblocking the money ... - RFI, 26 Dec.

Pro-Gbagbo demonstrations in Paris: via Twitter : ... Ein Volk, Ein Reich Ein Fuhrer.

21 Dec, Gbagbo seemed to me to have made a big concession in offering to accept an international commission to examine the facts around the election. Others however regard this as a trick to divide Africa (France Inter). BBC WS had somebody from the US State Department who also thought there was no point in taking up Gbagbo's offer, arguing along the lines of this Tweet: "Credible, accredited, and independent election observers have [already] declared the #CotedIvoire election to be fair. #civ2010 (AmericaGovFr , 22 Dec.).

In an echo of events in Ivory Coast, in Gabon the opposition has complained about the way members of the Constitutional court are designated, by people in the ruling party only, but they are in no position to block this process, since they control neither chamber of the parliament. Doubts have recently been raised in a documentary on French television about the elections in 2009 (RFI, 19 Dec.). By contrast, in Guinea, which a year ago looked a real mess, a legal and peaceable transition of power is now taking place.

27 Dec. (BBC WS) The threat of sanctions has caused the price of cocoa to rise, but since there are not actually any effective sanctions in place, the money has continued to flow into the Gbagbo regime. Later they had on Gary Bush with his wacko views - it's all a plot by France, to maintain control of the monetary system via the CFA, to prevent any commercial competition from China etc., the electoral commission is controlled by the French company Sagem, etc.

Elections in Ivory Coast

2010-12-12T19:09:00.010Z

Friday, 3 Dec, Laurent Gbagbo's supporters claim that the results announced by the electoral commission, giving victory to Alassane Ouattara, are not valid, since they were not announced within the required timeframe. It seems everybody is being too tactful to point out that it was the Gbagbo camp that prevented the results from being published (Africa Today, Tues (30 Nov), Weds (1 Dec)).

It is then surprising that François Hollande, former leader of the Parti socialiste in France, called for outside powers, especially the ex-colonial power to avoid interfering, that is to not speak out against Gbagbo. (However, the PS, regardless of having supported Gbagbo in the past, in general have now called on him to step down (1)).

Before long, the ground is shifting: the votes from the Northern provinces are cancelled, on the grounds that voters were intimidated. These of course are the provinces where Ouattara was most strongly supported. The line now, repeated ad nauseam, is that only the Constitutional Council is empowered to pronounce the result. "Gbagbo's ambassador" (Pierre Kipre) on Europe 1 radio (2) .

Some brain-dead people, for example listeners commenting on the BBC WS, say this is just like the US in 2000. So, Bush received only 46% of the vote to Gore's 54, whereupon the Supreme Court knocked out the votes of a few Democrat states, is that what happened then ? These comments seem to come from the West: most listeners in Africa seem to be appalled at the hijack of the vote.

Saturday 4 Dec, BBC WS, Newshour (21:00) has the woman reporting for NPR on. It is suggested that Gbagbo is a prisoner of his own camp especially his wife, Simone, with interests to defend.

(8:00) Sunday 5 Dec, BBC WS, World Today (3), the woman from NPR is on again. BBC WS and Radio France internationale broadcasts have been taken off the air.

Monday 6 Dec, the man named as Ouattara's Prime minister is on Europe 1: although he was formerly Gbagbo's PM, he says that as a Christian he cannot now in conscience continue to work for him (4).

Ivory Coast awaits Gbagbo-Ouattara run-off result, 29 Nov 2010, 13:15.

(1) Laurent Fabius on 13 Dec, Martine Aubry on 6 Dec., both on France Inter, L'invité à 8h20

(2) L'interview de Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, 03/12/2010 - 08:20 - "Ouattara n’est pas le président élu" ... ambassadeur de Côte d’Ivoire, rappelle que le processus électoral n’est pas terminé.

(3) On the radio: the website's "Listen again", 3:00 - ... , was different. This seems to be a better link to use.

(4) 08:20 CET, "Pas question d'aller vers une partition", Guillaume Soro, Premier ministre nommé par Alassane Ouattara, qualifie Laurent Gbagbo de "mauvais perdant".

Updated: 16 Dec

Peoplisation

2010-10-10T20:16:00.000+01:00

Emma Jane Kirby on Sarkozy (*), with maybe the first reference in English media to "peoplisation", a term widely used in French to refer to the celebrity culture taking hold of political life. Derived from, but not to be confused with, the people (le peuple). This page contains most of the points made in the broadcast, but not the one about peoplisation. * Le News, C'est Moi, Wed 6 Oct 2010 20:45, BBC Radio 4

Bernard Kouchner - "l'ouverture a vécu"

2010-10-07T19:51:00.013+01:00

6 Oct 2010 - According to this evening's news on France Inter, Bernard Kouchner is on his way out. Le Nouvel Observateur is publishing a draft letter of resignation from August, in which Kouchner complains of being humiliated: he has been more and more sidelined, as Presidential advisers have been sent on "sensitive" missions (to Damascus, for example), without Kouchner even being informed.
As the report puts it, this example of ouverture, it seems, "a vécu" (has had its day). Kouchner is likely to be replaced in Sarkozy's upcoming reshuffle.

This morning, "a few lines" from the Quai d'Orsay, in which Kouchner affirms his loyalty to the government. But all on the French political scene seem to assume this is "la fin de l'ouverture".

Bernard Guetta comments (mp3 file)

Bernard Kouchner est une très grande figure du 20ième siècle, la sorte d’hommes dont l’Eglise fait des Saints...

Update (11 Oct.): I had noticed, even before this news, that Kouchner seemed to have been very much in the background for a while now. I had not heard him give a major interview for the last year or two. Maybe that was just a function of what I happen to hear. Or because France is so turned in on itself, or at least not much concerned with anything beyond Europe - occasionally some discussion about the Nato involvement in Afghanistan (vaguely hostile, as in Britain, though France is losing far fewer soldiers there).

Incidentally, looking back at the last time I blogged about Kouchner, it now seems there was a "double genocide" of Rwandan Hutus who fled the country (into Zaire / the DRC) being killed in the years that followed 1994.

Correction (13 Oct) : I was wrong to say ' "double genocide" in Rwanda, with Hutus being killed..'

Afghanistan tweets

2009-08-27T00:24:00.002+01:00

A few comments on Twitter:

According to France Inter radio... "Karzai était mis en place par les américains"

Maybe more to follow.

John Simpson on Iran

2009-08-05T21:20:00.000+01:00

A few more thoughts on John Simpson's broadcast (*), prompted by Jeff Weintraub's post.

I agree there was something strange about the broadcast. Of course, working for the BBC, he has to be "balanced" and careful not to step over the line from "analysis" to "opinion".

Still, it was odd that he was a little negative about the outpouring of popular feeling against the regime in Iran. He was more enthusiastic about other such situations, comparing Belgrade 2000, for example, to Berlin 1989 (I think).

He was also though there in Tehran in 1978-9 and the bloodletting that followed that has to be remembered.

Simpson is right in a way, to focus on the manoeuvres at the top. Even without popular support (and, whatever support they had previously, several reports indicate that it has all but evaporated following the events of the election), Ahmadinejad / Khamenei could hold onto power, as regimes that are too numerous to mention have managed to do for decades. But when political elites are divided, things become a little more complicated. The fact that Mousavi has remained at relative liberty shows that he retains some support in the political establishment and, just as importantly, among leading clerical figures, in Qom.

Some news that was breaking Friday / Saturday (24-5 Jul) seemed to me significant. Ahmadinejad was forced to cancel the appointment of a vice-president who did not take a hard enough line, as it happens with regard to Israel. Interestingly, the FT's report ('Iran's supreme leader orders dismissal of vice-president') indicates that Khamenei sent a letter demanding this the previous weekend, but Ahmadinejad attempted to ignore this, until it was made public.

It seems that a familiar logic is at work: when a leadership group becomes detached from public opinion, it turns in on itself and becomes more and more narrowly based. The logic applies to counter-revolutionary situations as much as revolutionary ones.

On the other hand, on the question of the treatment of prisoners, Ahmadinejad is coming under pressure to take a softer line, even from conservative members of the Majlis (parliament). Lindsey Hilsum, on C4 News, went so far as to say that it was the supreme leader who was pressing him to take a softer line, but I don't think this is the case.

* The BBC Radio 4 version was about 28 minutes, edited down 24 minutes for 'Assignment' on the World Service. The latter should be available indefinitely here.

Iran and the US (future)

2009-07-02T21:50:00.001+01:00

The change in direction for Iran that was epitomized by Mir Hossein Mousavi now seems to have passed into the realm of the might have been - for the moment.

The argument is put forward that it does not really matter who is elected president, since the supreme leader ultimately makes the important decisions. But, as Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out on C-Span, Sunday (14), the president is the public face of the regime, especially on the international stage, whereas the supreme leader generally remains behind the scenes - or has done until now.

Edward Luce argues in the Financial Times (*)

[The neo-conservative's ] view is that a democratic revolution in Iran would have positive effects across the region. [.. It] would see the error of its ways on the nuclear programme. [..] None of the four candidates, including Mr Moussavi, argued that Iran should put an end to the nuclear fuel cycle. To have done so would have been electoral suicide. Almost all observers of Iran say that popular support in the country for the nuclear programme transcends political loyalty. It is a nationalist aspiration that is unlikely to vanish with the mullahs.

Mousavi may not have promised to end the drive towards nuclear programme in his campaign, but that does not mean that he would not have negotiated on the subject. And, given the enormous costs to Iran of their nuclear path, who knows how public opinion might not have evolved in the context of dialogue between the Obama administration and an Iran with Mousavi as president? Opinion in Iran is not quite as homogenous as Luce makes out: according to interviews on France Inter before the election, many are aware of the dangers brought by the uncompromising approach to the nuclear issues.

Minimising the policy differences between the candidates seems to me strange. In another analysis, also in the FT (**), Roula Khalaf says:

As Kayhan, the hardline newspaper, said in a recent editorial, Mr Moussavi crossed “red lines” when he described the leader-approved foreign policy of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad as a “disaster”. [..] As [Khamenei] admitted last week, his views are closest to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s. Politicians in Tehran say the leader appreciates the president’s elevation of Iran into a regional power to be reckoned with, as well as his dogged support for a nuclear programme.

By this analysis, President Obama's measured approach is a double-edged sword:

Indeed, the election crisis must be seen in the context of the ayatollah’s apparent anxiety over a changing international environment, in which the America he has despised for so long is suddenly offering a friendly hand.

* 'Global Insight: Obama’s pragmatism avoids neocon trap', 21 June 2009

** 'Man in the news: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei', 26 June 2009, with Najmeh Bozorgmehr.

Also, worth listening to are John Simpson's thoughts, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday (25) - the World Service version can be found here (27 Jun).

Iran and the US (present)

2009-06-28T10:46:00.000+01:00

... a present that may be rapidly slipping into history.

12 Jun - Iranian election day. Almost out of the blue it appeared that sitting president Ahmadinejad was going to be beaten by Mir Hossein Mousavi, but as France Inter warned, beware the discrepancy between the input and the output from the ballot boxes. The point was repeated Monday (15): Le problème disait-elle, sera la concordance entre l’entrée et la sortie des urnes ...

And so it proved. Gary Sick pointed out that, while Ahmadinejad may have strong support among rural voters, these constitute only 24% of the electorate. According to him, Iran seemed to have crossed the line to a state of countries like Egypt where elections are shamelessly falsified (Newshour, Saturday (13, 12:00 GMT)).

I took a look at the blogs. Juan Cole posted this:

Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. [..] But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. [..] The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landslide in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran. The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday

The following week, Libération, I think, reported that there was a belief that Ahmadinejad actually came third, behind Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.

Then there were the massive street protests by the opposition. The Interior Ministry said that all demonstrations had to be authorized, these had not been and were therefore illegal. The BBC's man in Tehran dryly noted that it was not clear whether the Ministry had given any such authorization for Ahmadinejad's rally on Sunday (14). On Sunday (21), it was reported that Jon Leyne was being asked to leave Tehran.

One of the things that has led the Iranian opposition to have got even this far is "la disparition de George W. Bush de la scène politique internationale" (France Inter, Friday morning (19)). There are many other factors, of course, but one is that many Iranians dared to hope for an end to their country's international isolation because of the "outstretched hand" of Barack Obama. The US and its allies responded cautiously to events: any other course would have allowed the protesters to be portrayed as puppets of foreign powers.

I have been a critic of Obama in the past, but here is one reason to be glad that he is in charge. John Bolton attacked the US president for his failure to condemn the election - "they call him 'no drama Obama'" - and, predictably enough, called for overt and covert action to bring the Iranian regime down. But also, John McCain called for the president "to speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed, sham of an election" (Newshour, Wednesday (17)).

But the Iranian government blamed outside powers all the same. The British ambassador was "called in". David Miliband told C4News on Wednesday (17) that complaints had been made about the British media's coverage, especially the BBC's. Miliband also acknowledged that mistakes had been made in 1953. (1953, of course, was when Britain and the US organized a coup to overthrow a democratically-elected government. Cf. Barack Obama in his Cairo speech: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government." I'm not a great expert on this, but the historical record seems to indicate that the responsibility was about 50-50.)

And what were people on the streets of Tehran saying? France Inter spoke to one woman on Friday morning: nous ne sommes pas des poussières – we are not specks of dust, we are the Iranian people and we demand respect.

Then, there were Supreme Leader Khamenei's remarks at Friday prayers, where, rather than seeking any compromise, he threatened that any further protests would be dealt with "firmly". One view put forward was that Khamenei "is committing political suicide" ('Et pourtant elle tourne', France Inter, Friday (19)). One opposition supporter said that from this point "it stopped being just about the election result" (Newshour, Sunday (21)).

On Sunday, Tehran was relatively calm. So have the repressive measures taken by Khamenei / Ahmadinejad managed to snuff out the opposition? There are some reasons for thinking this is not the end of the story.

Firstly, Jeremy Bowen, still in Tehran, said that people continue to come out onto their rooftops and shout "God is Great! Down with the dictator!", more loudly than ever. Secondly, the protests are happening not only in Tehran, but also in other Iranian cities, such as Tabriz and Isfahan. Finally, the great events marking the calendar of the Shi'a calendar, with their emphasis on martyrdom, present more opportunities for trouble in the months ahead.

(To be concluded)

Iran and the US (past)

2009-06-28T10:45:00.001+01:00

A fairly recent past... from 'Iran & the West', shown in March on BBC TV (*).

(Part 2) Negotiations to free French hostages (in Lebanon) were undermined by the opposition - led by Jacques Chirac.

(Part 3) John Bolton, head of arms control at the State Department, took a different view from most of those in the department, but as Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy, said, he was put in the position he was in by the vice-president.

Talking to him, the French negotiator, Stanislas de Laboulaye, said was like talking to a Soviet bureaucrat: when the British, French and Germans flew to Washington for what they hoped would be breakthrough talks, he just read from a prepared paper.

Not that Powell and Armitage could blame Bolton for everything. Condoleeza Rice, when she took over, was horrified to learn that the Department had only half of 1 person specializing on Iran.

* Lapping Productions, produced by Norma Percy.

(To be concluded)

Jeremy Bowen accurate and impartial?

2009-04-21T16:21:00.004+01:00

I almost missed this... If I had not happened to catch the review of the Press on BBC Radio 4 last Thursday. The Independent has leapt to the defence of Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East Editor; they said they had always found his reporting of Israel and Palestine fair-minded and balanced (they would do, wouldn't they?)

The BBC Trust (formerly "the Governors") had upheld some complaints on the grounds of inaccuracy and lack of impartiality. Other points of complaint though were not upheld. Details can be found here.

The complaints date back to an article published on the BBC website at the time of the of “Six Days That Changed The Middle East”, which was broadcast in June 2007 and is still available as an MP3 download. I remember at that time thinking the series showed considerable bias and noting the following blog post - 30.05.07 : ROOTS :

I hear Jeremy Bowen is to do a series of programmes on the 1967 Six Day War. Distrusting his reports generally, I am apprehensive as to what he'll do with it. But we shall see.

But someone evidently that the patience to follow it through the various stages of the complaints procedure. For which I have great admiration.

Surprises from Iraq

2009-02-25T21:56:00.003Z

Jeff Weintraub notes the astonishingly optimistic tone of the BBC's reports of the Iraqi elections.

As he says, the situation in Iraq now has to be seen in the light of the black days of just over 2 years ago (in fact, the black months from spring 2006 to the early part of 2007).

The BBC has been slow in recognizing the improvement in the situation in Iraq (some signs of which were visible from the summer of 2007, although this was not helped by some on the right claiming earlier that we were "on the verge of a major victory").

But Jim Muir is one of the fairest-minded of the BBC correspondants who have reported from Iraq. It is a good job they had him there for the elections: some of the others would have found it hard to swallow their words - not because they reported things as being bad (they were bad), but because they implied there was absolutely no hope of them ever getting better.

Unlike these outsiders, many Iraqis never lost hope, even in the blackest times. Some of them, like journalist Khalid W. Hassan, are now dead. But as Samir Sumaida'ie (*) said, "This is our country: we can't walk away from it."

The turnaround in the last 2 years has been remarkable, though it is right to continue to use qualifiers - about the situation being fragile and not being perfect. Much of this can be attributed to the "surge", which was treated with such scepticism at the time. And it should not be forgotten that, however wonderful President Obama's election victory may be in other respects, he and Hillary Clinton and other Democrats long argued for a policy that would have meant leaving Iraq, not in a reasonably hopeful situation, but in defeat (**).

So, what is left? Even last year people like Peter Oborne were talking about the risk of Iraq "descending into civil war" - two years ago, of course, they were saying it was in a civil war. But even those voices are getting quieter now. Then there are some French commentators who say that the 2003 intervention only strengthened Iran by bringing to power a Shi'a led government: to which, given that Iraq has a Shi'a majority, one might reply "quelle surprise!" or even "quel horreur!" In any case, reports on the election indicate that the more religious parties have lost ground to "nationalist" ones, i.e. ones that are relatively - everything is relative - less pro-Iranian.

In fact, one of the signs of how things have changed in Iraq is that Tuesday last week (10 Feb) Sarkozy and Kouchner were in Baghdad (as French reports point out, six years to the day after Dominique de Villepin made his passionate speech to the UN). This was reported as a "surprise visit": even a visit by the US president is a surprise, of course, in that it is not reported in advance when it is going to happen; but the surprise of the visit by the French president and Foreign Minister was that it happened at all.

* Iraq's Ambassador to the U.S., interview on C-Span, 18 Feb 2007.

** Incidentally, there are unconfirmed reports that Samantha Power may be coming in to the Obama administration (Financial Times, 31 Jan).

The French Doctor

2009-02-09T20:04:00.003Z

Bernard Kouchner is having a few little difficulties: a book by Pierre Péan accuses him of improprieties, of conflict between his private and public activities.

Defending himself in the National Assembly on Wednesday, 'the French Doctor', as the media in France refer to him, did not convince everyone. But on Thursday, the president gave his support. As Jean-Marie Colombani, now commenting for France Inter on Fridays, said, in the light of the targeted attacks by some sections of opinion, "le soutien de Nicolas Sarkozy à Bernard Kouchner est bienvenu."

There are a couple of issues in the background here.

Péan has been criticised for describing Kouchner as a cosmopolite, in the 'thirties a code word for "Jew".

Then, on the issue of the 1994 massacre in Rwanda, Péan is known to be pro-Hutu, even to the point of denying the genocide (*).

In December last year, France Inter had another look at Rwanda, with Patrick de Saint-Exupéry. One of the points that Saint-Exupéry insisted on was the refusal, going to the highest levels of the political establishment like Dominique de Villepin, to fully acknowledge the genocide: either they talk about a "double genocide" - that is the Tutsis were also involved in the killings; or they simply admit a "genocide in Rwanda", that is a genocide of nothing at all; they will not refer to it as a "genocide des Tutsis par les Hutus". Incidentally, the formula the BBC generally uses is "genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus".

* In 2006 there was talk of an action against Péan under France's holocaust denial laws.

The burst tyre

2009-01-03T18:35:00.006Z

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the "68 generation" in Paris, now a German MEP, co-president of the "Green" group, but still a prominent intellectual called on frequently by the French media, around the time of the Beijing Olympics on the irony of his position on China and Tibet being close to that of George W. Bush ('Bush et Cohn-Bendit sur la même ligne?' asks the interviewer.)
An extract can be heard here.

Et Reagan. A l'époque des dissidents, alors que les Giscard d'Estaing, Helmut Schmidt et autres refusaient de recevoir les dissidents, il n'y avait que Reagan et Thatcher qui recevaient les dissidents. Je sais que c'est un vieux problème.

Round about 19 August, the BBC World Service's Europe Today had an in-depth look at the conflict that had broken out between Georgia and Russia earlier that month. As the tension increased, a meeting was arranged of the military leaders of both sides. The representative of the Russian / South Ossetian side did not make it to the meeting because, it is said, of a burst tyre. I was unable to confirm the details of this story, because the BBC had suspended the "listen again" service for the duration of the Beijing Olympics.

Not to worry, I thought, it is bound to be mentioned again. There was indeed considerable coverage subsequently on the outbreak of the conflict. But as for the burst tyre, like Proust's pretty girl with the cigarette (*), I never saw it again.

* Remembrance of Things Past II, Tr. Scott Moncrieff & Kilmartin, Penguin 1983, P912; Sodome et Gomorrhe, Gallimard/Folio 1954, P321.

Update (9 Feb): Daniel Cohn-Bendit can be heard again, in English, via the BBC World Service. This is at 14:00 into the recording: 'Is it your intention to overthrow all the capitalist governments ... ?' although it is not specifically attributed to him at this point (DocArchive: '1968: The year that changed the world?' Part 2).

A technical note

2008-12-14T20:39:00.000Z

On this blog, I have from time to time made available extracts from broadcasts I have heard on the radio. Various experiments have, I hope, lead to an improving quality.
A related topic is: how do you move on from the old, familiar methods of recording from analogue radio to cassette tape? The question was asked recently in the Radio Times and one of the answers was to get a special memory card to record from a digital radio. Well, blow that: there are other ways to transfer sound, with standard audio devices, a PC and the odd connecting cable.

Supposing you have an audio device, such as a cassette player, it is possible to connect the headphone socket to the line-in (blue) port, using a 3.5mm jack cable. You have to be careful to adjust down the output levels of the source device, so as to avoid distortion (clipping). My laptop does not have a line-in port, only one for microphone and I found it impossible to adjust the levels adequately for this. See discussion here.

The Audacity free software is a convenient way of recording and editing sound. The problem is that my desktop PC (which does have a line-in port) is fairly old and runs Windows ME: "Although Audacity is billed as working for Windows 98 through Windows Vista, it has been found to consistently crash Windows ME by going into a loop and generating endless temp files until the hard drive is full." (ehow.com) I don't get that, but it does just hang up after 1 to 2 minutes of recording.

So I end up using Sound Recorder, which comes with Microsoft's Windows, to capture the audio. This creates a WAV file (by default SR records for just 60 seconds, but if you create a blank (silent) file of say 10 minutes, you can leave it recording for longer periods with no worries). The WAV file can be imported into Audacity and, after any editing required, exported as MP3, using the LAME plug-in.

Other source devices can be used: my digital radio has a line-out socket and that gives excellent results. Many programmes, from the BBC for example, are available as MP3 downloads, but sometimes they are just "listen again" (RAM files). To record these, you can just connect the green (speaker / headphone) port back to the line-in port (all for the purpose of fair quotation and comment, of course).

Belgrade calling...

2008-08-21T21:52:00.000+01:00

"Belgrade's Radio Warriors" was shown some time ago on the Storyville strand on BBC4. It was about the B-92 radio station which voiced opposition to Slobodan Milosevic. At times it was banned from carrying news and forced to operate underground as Radio B2-92.

There was one nugget hidden away, buried in text displayed on the screen: in June 2000, BBC World offered them space on their satellite. As one person involved said, after this "everything changed": the broadcasts could now be heard in Serbia's provinces.

08.08.08

2008-08-10T21:03:00.000+01:00

I'm sitting here on a nice sunny day in England and war is breaking out on the other side of Europe. And the BBC World Service is leading with the Olympic Games (at 13:05 and on the 14:00 news. By 16:00, the order had been reversed.)

André Glucksmann on Iraq

2008-08-04T21:38:00.001+01:00

An extract can be heard here (mp3):

(1:20) ... les erreurs des Américains touchant l'Irak me semblent très proche des erreurs des pacifistes, c'était-à-dire la sous-estimation du caractère dévastateur d'une dictature de trente ans qui a fait, rien que à l'intérieur, deux millions de morts selon les Irakiens. Alors, là il [n'] y avait plus de possibilité de penser que simplement on enlevait une dictature de Paname et tout rentrait dans l'ordre.
Les Américains ont été beaucoup trop naïfs et pas assez antitotalitaire. Alors [..], antitotalitaire je l'étais, antitotalitaire je le reste et vous ne me ferez pas dire que l'Irak avec Saddam Hussein c'est mieux [..] que le pastiche, que le cauchemar qui existe aujourd'hui.

(Interview on France Inter, with his son, Raphaël, 1 May).

Reporting Iraq...

2008-06-20T21:27:00.000+01:00

22 May. The BBC's Caroline Wyatt accompanies the British defence secretary to Basra and her report, carried on both the World Service and Radio 4, speaks of the success of the Iraqi government's offensive against sadrist militias there... and in Sadr City, Baghdad.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but the "story" here is almost as much about the BBC carrying positive news on Iraq as about the news itself.

More details can be found in Stephen Farrell and Ammar Karim's report for The New York Times, 'Drive in Basra by Iraqi Army Makes Gains', 12 May 2008.

Which side are you on ?

2008-05-22T21:30:00.001+01:00

Fascism in Britain didn't just go away after the Second World War, according to a recent programme on the BBC. It drew fuel from the situation of the British mandate in Palestine, where Jews were fighting "our boys". Many Jews, with the sympathy of left-wing groups, took "direct action" against fascist rallies.

Seven years after the war, Oswald Mosley returned to public life with a rally at which the chants could be heard: "Two four six eight, who do we appreciate?" "M-O-S-E-L-E-Y;" "One two three, four five six, who will stop the Jew boys' tricks?"

Some British Jews soon went from fighting these now almost-forgotten battles in the streets of London to the impending struggle in Palestine, while a number of Mosley's supporters joined the "Arab Legion" to fight against the emerging state of Israel.

('A rage in Dalston', broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 19 Apr 2008)

China and Tibet

2008-05-21T21:36:00.001+01:00

Nice to know there are still some unreconstructed Stalinists out there. A few weeks ago, I heard a radio interview with someone who was described as a senateur socialiste. A bit of googling turned up the name Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This is the report from Le Figaro.

The repression in Tibet, he claims, is all the fault of the US, who seek to provoke difficulties for their enemies at every turn. Reporters sans Frontières, apparently, are linked to the American neoconservatives. Besides, the Tibetans are so ungrateful, since Chinese rule got rid of a feudal system and brought such advances, in terms of life expectancy and increased levels of schooling.

Needless to say, I do not endorse these views. Needless to say, this is not the PS's official position. Previous remarks on unreconstructed Stalinists can be found here.

'From Trotsky to Respect'

2008-04-17T21:50:00.000+01:00

Geoffrey Wall on the SWP, on BBC Radio 3... having listened to Part 2 (the repeat last night - it should still be on the BBC's website)

For anybody interested in the early history of the SRG / International Socialism / International Socialists, I suggest Jim Higgins' book, which is now available in electronic form (see here).

Everybody agreed that East Germany, say, was 'state capitalist', but there was an arcane dispute about whether the Soviet Union was or a 'workers' state'. I remember going to a discussion in the mid-'70s (chaired by none other than David Aaronovitch, who was not of course a Trotskyist, merely a Communist) called something like "Is the Soviet Union state capitalist?", unaware of the subtext.

(From Trotsky to Respect - Geoffrey Wall looks at the history of the Socialist Workers Party. 2/2, 13 &16 April)

Haditha

2008-04-14T21:38:00.000+01:00

I am watching the film 'Battle for Haditha', which deals with an incident from 2005. Iraqis were provided by al Qaeda fighters with the material for making bombs. And they were paid by them. Not that they had any love for the foreigners: "those f***ing al Qaeda idiots have just murdered the English teacher." As more recent comment has indicated, joining the "awakening councils" (and being paid by the Americans) is now "the best show in town", for the Sunnis.

"Why do you..."

2008-04-10T21:54:00.002+01:00

A bit more on Uzbekistan

Natalia Antelava gets a whole 30 minutes on Uzbekistan, featuring Mark Weil, a theatre director who was stabbed to death in September 2007. His theatre once told the story of a Sufi seer who urinated on a ruler's throne: when asked, "Why did you piss on my throne?" he replied, "Why do you piss on your own people?"

(Crossing Continents, Thursday, 3 April , Monday, 7 April 2008)

Previous related posts: on Uzbekistan; on the BBC scrapping the foreign language service in Kazakh.

Update (20 Apr): the Sufi was a dervish, a philosopher or poet. I have corrected a small inaccuracy in the quotation above. The play was put on a few weeks after the Andijan massacre in 2005.

Five years on (3)

2008-04-08T21:28:00.001+01:00

The Iraqi security forces, backed by the US, are making strong headway. I'd say that the "tough love" approach by the US rapidly advanced the conditions for stability.

The indecision and woolly British approach, underlined by a complete lack of political direction, stand in stark contrast.
....
The UK for once has a lesson to learn from the US. That's what the Iraqis tell me. (Tim Collins in the Radio Times , 8 Mar 2008)

In these 5 years, a convenient and simple narrative has been constructed, with a few lumpy bits left out.

First, "there was no connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda". No doubt there were many exaggerated claims. One standard rebuttal I have heard on the BBC is that Saddam Hussein was indisputably connected with the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, but I have not recently heard anybody mention Ansar al-Islam. There is considerable dispute about this: their base was in Iraq, but in a part, up close against the de facto Kurdish area and Iran, not really under the control of the former regime. However, it remains that the Peshmerga, with the support of the US, drove them from their stronghold in April 2003, though some of them may have escaped to Iran and subsequently infiltrated back into Iraq.

Second, weapons of mass destruction: even Tim Collins says, "I think it's a matter of historical fact now that the nation was misled." It's as well, though, to remember who was the chief misleader: to repeat myself yet again, up until December 2002, Saddam Hussein led his generals to believe Iraq had chemical and biological weapons to fight with.

I did hear one BBC reporter say that the Iraq war has lasted almost as long as the Second World War. Well, only 8 months to go, or 11 if you don't forget the war in Japan (small details like Hiroshima). It has certainly lasted longer than the Spanish Civil War. Actually, I think it is correct to regard that 1936-9 conflict, together with the Second World War, as an almost continuous struggle against fascism.

Five years on (2)

2008-03-25T21:43:00.001Z

E-mail to the Radio Times:

I suppose I should be used to the media's distortions on Iraq, but to describe Saddam Hussein's Iraq as "liberal" beggars belief (David Butcher's review of 'The Iraq war by numbers'). Try asking the Kurds, who are just seeing the 20th anniversary of the attack on Halabja and are still suffering from its long-term health consequences, as the BBC's Jim Muir reports; or the Shi'a in the south, who were massacred after their uprising in 1991.

The programme referred to was Rageh Omaar's on ITV1 on Monday, 17 Mar.

Channel 4 News (17 Mar) report on Iraq was reasonably balanced. They looked at Haifa Street. First, the US surge took on insurgents, with Iraqi army forces, which were mainly Shi'a and accused of human rights abuses. Then, the "awakening council" fought against al Qaeda. Now the street is quiet. (The views of their assistant foreign editor, Tim Lambon, could be found in the New Statesman, recently.)

Peter Oborne's 'Dispatches', though, was the usual stuff.

Jon Snow, in 'Hidden Iraq' (18 Mar), talked about the "positive spin" put on the surge. Does it never occur to him that he is determined to put on a negative spin? Thus, security measures equal "paranoia". He too talked of a "united, secular country" under Saddam. He manages to find a young boy vowing to fight against "the occupation".

Attacks on Sunday (23 Mar). The suicide attack using a fuel tanker on an army base in Mosul appears to be an al Qaeda operation, linked to the Sunni insurgency. Mortars and rockets fired into the "Green Zone" seem to have been carried out by Shi'a militia - David Petraeus told the BBC that they were by Iranian backed forces. One report is that the attack was triggered by the arrest of a member of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia. Another theory is that the upsurge in violence is an anti-Christian thing, timed to coincide with Easter.

Five years on

2008-03-23T18:15:00.001Z

Dominique de Villepin unrepentant, triumphant even, on the French veto in 2003:

si la France a brandi son veto aux Nations Unies, c'est tout simplement parce que si l'on voulait éviter que la résolution en faveur de la guerre ne soit votée, il fallait convaincre les pays des neutres, les pays du tiers monde, les pays du sud, des pays comme le Mexique, comme le Chile, comme le Pakistan, comme l'Angola et ces pays n'auraient pas accepté livrer bataille face aux Américains, si certains membres permanents du Conseil de Sécurité, comme la France, ne prenaient pas toute leur responsabilité parce que cela nous aura conduit alors à leur demander de faire le travail à notre place pour finalement nous débiner in fine et de ne pas mettre notre veto. Donc, il fallait dire que nous allions mettre notre veto pour soutenir la position de ces pays, si nous voulions véritablement tenir tête aux Américains. [… inaudible] cohérent. (France Inter, 19 Mar 2008; Extract here.)

This one’s worth translating in full:

if France brandished its veto at the United Nations, it is quite simply because if one wanted to avoid a resolution in favour of war being passed, it was necessary to convince neutral countries, the countries of the third world, the countries of the south, countries like Mexico, like Chile, like Pakistan or Angola and these countries would not have agreed to give battle faced by the Americans, if certain permanent members of the Security Council, like France, did not fully take on their responsibility because that would then have meant us asking them to do our work for us and allow us at the end to clear off and not impose our veto. So, it was necessary to say that we were going to impose our veto in order to support the position of these countries, if we wanted to truly stand up to the Americans. [… inaudible] consistent.

What’s really being said here? I tried to analyze it in a fairly technical way. But first, the context: asked about Nicolas Sarkozy’s attitude concerning the Iraq crisis, de Villepin said that he was uncomfortable about the style of France’s diplomacy, but he (de Villepin) defended France against the charge of “arrogance” and went on to talk about the importance of using the threat of the veto.

The aim was to avoid a resolution in favour of war being passed. Earlier, he had said that France’s success was in avoiding a resolution that would have legalised the war, which would have been an irreparable step, equating to “a confrontation between East and West”.

But France could simply have simply vetoed the resolution when the time arrived. So, the unstated objective was to avoid France being in a minority, possibly of one, in opposing the war.

The means used was to get the support of other, weaker, countries, to stand up to (give battle to) the Americans.

So, in order to convince these countries, France had to, not only be prepared to use its veto, but, early on, to say (threaten / brandish) that it was going to do so.

L'invité d'Inter also featured Hans Blix.

The urgency of now

2008-03-13T21:51:00.004Z

Asked whether waterboarding is legal, he replies, 'It's torture, pure and simple.' (Walter Pincus on C-Span, via BBC Parl., 5 Feb). But we only ever used it on three people and we stopped in August 2003. So that's OK then.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all, of course oppose torture, but McCain has supported President Bush's retention of "muscular" techniques of interrogation.

Meanwhile, the Democrat's candidates are displaying some nuances on Iraq. On Thursday 10 Jan, Obama said, 'I will end the war responsibly. I will be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were as careless getting in.' (C-span, 13 Jan). On 26 Feb, though, he quoted Martin Luther King's words: 'the urgency of now' apparently ... is to withdraw from Iraq.

John McCain, on the other hand, has said that the US might be in Iraq for 100 years: unwise words, which his Democrat opponents have seized upon with glee. There is a tendency amongst commentators in the UK (for example, on Channel 4 News) to see McCain's policy as merely a continuation of Bush's. There is more to it than that. The first three and a half years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, in spite of some positives (sovereignty for Iraq, elections), saw a failure to provide the basics of order and security. During this time, I believe, McCain called consistently for sufficient forces to be deployed to do that.

A change came about after the Democrats took control of Congress in November 2006, not that they can take the credit for that (much like some theologies believe that God created the world as a reaction to evil, to the fall of Satan/Lucifer and his fellow angels/devils, not that I'm comparing Bush to... ). First, Rumsfeld was sacked (he should have gone in April 2004); then a reasonably competent team was put in place - Gates, Ryan Crocker (I'm not imagining, am I, that after the end of Bremer's period as viceroy, the US went for several months without even an ambassador in Iraq?), Petraeus; above all the "surge". And McCain naturally supported the surge when, lest we forget, reaction was largely, and overwhelmingly in Europe, one of derision at the time.

And still the uncertainty of the Democrats' position goes on. The main reason Samantha Power resigned as one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors was that she called Hillary Clinton a "monster", but as Le Monde (9 Mar) put it, the interview she gave on the BBC World Service "added to her difficulties". There she seemed to play down or minimise (that word relativiser again) Obama's commitment to withdrawal from Iraq ('The Interview', 7 Mar 2008, can be heard here).

Regardless of the nuances, both Democrat candidates have said that they will at least begin to "end the war", that is to withdraw American forces from the struggle against violent extremism, whatever the circumstances on the ground.

If the last 5 years have taught us anything, it is that this is not struggle that can be undertaken half-heartedly. As has been said often enough, the security gains of the last year are fragile: the smallest lowering of the guard can be fatal. Though the number of insurgent attacks taking place fell to November 2007, they have remained stable through to January 2008, at levels that are still unacceptably high. (New York Times, 12 Mar)

I think you should take politicians at their word, at least in the pessimistic direction. So, while anybody who is motivated to vote for Obama or Clinton because of their promises to "end the war" could be disappointed, those who think it vital that the US remain engaged in the struggle have a strong reason to support McCain.

Updated 16 Mar

Update 17 Mar:
Samantha Power's remarks are not actually in the BBC World Service interview I cited, but in another interview - see here. They are talking about withdrawing combat forces within 16 months (not about 1 or 2 brigades per month, as Le Monde had it):

He will of course not rely upon some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or as a U.S. senator. He will rely upon a plan, an operational plan that he pulls together, in consultation with people who are on the ground, to whom he doesn't have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think, I mean it would be the height of ideology, you know, to sort of say, "Well I said it, therefore I'm going to impose it on whatever reality entreats me" ...

...

Ingrid

2008-03-07T22:09:00.000Z

The FARC's release of some hostages has brought more news about Ingrid Betancourt, who has been held by the FARC for more than six years in Columbia (or Ecuador or Venezuela?) that the state of her health seems to have become grave. Pierre Rousselin comments:

Les Farc n'ont aucun avenir en tant que guérilla marxiste-léniniste. Rejetées par l'immense majorité des Colombiens, elles ne ressusciteront pas un passé révolutionnaire qui n'a plus cours. Leur seul espoir est de survivre sur leur magot en tant que narcotrafiquants [survive on the money they make as ..]. Se servir d'Ingrid Betancourt pour exiger une légitimité politique n'a aucun sens. Comment accorder le moindre crédit à une organisation qui combat, à coup d'enlèvements et de tortures, un gouvernement démocratiquement élu ? (Ne pas se tromper d'ennemi, Editorial in Le Figaro, 29 Feb.)

That is comment from a conservative paper, of course. But if Ingrid Betancourt were to die in captivity, it would be another nail in the coffin of the stalinist illusion, that greatest deception of all: the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Another nail, as if one were needed: I don't need to detail all the previous ones, yet it lives on. Still you get people like George Galloway defending the record of Fidel's 49 years in power in Cuba (on Channel 4 News), people defending Hugo Chavez's suppression of opposition media (last May).

A lot has happened in the last week, starting with the Columbian operation that led to the death of a top FARC leader, Raul Reyes. Still you get people who focus mainly on the violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, who are too ready to believe that the Columbian government is lying when it says it has found evidence that Raul Reyes was receiving support from Chavez (I don't know the truth or otherwise of these claims myself) or, like Chavez himself, who regard Reyes as a "true comrade".

The simple truth is: It behoves all of us, especially those who consider themselves to be liberal or of the "left", to unequivocally condemn the actions of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. It shouldn't be necessary to say that. But it is.

The biggest single issue

2008-03-06T21:47:00.000Z

I finally got around to reading Michael Gove's Celsius 7/7. I mentioned Gove in a previous post. You would have thought that with a proper book, as opposed to a post on a weblog, annoying little things like errors of punctuation would be eliminated, yet I noticed two on pages 6 and 7 (in 'embassies in east Africa, and...' - the "," is superfluous; 'Amman, the border' where in the context the "," should clearly be a ";").

Gove trots out the line that 'the 9/11 hijackers [..] spent their last nights at strip clubs' (p20), which I think is a myth.

He argues that Hizb ut-Tahrir should be proscribed, as Tony Blair wished in 2005, because the German government has proscribed it (P100-1), that Tariq Ramadan should be banned, because America and France have banned him (all this in the name of the defence of Western freedom).

Gove quotes Dr Ramadan as saying, "Iraq was colonized by the Americans. The resistance against the army is just." , giving as the source 'Inquiry and Analysis' (266), MERIP (p103).

There are further dubious arguments, such as the crucial importance of the nation state, which, thankfully, he does not develop in the manner familiar from British Conservatives - with regard to devolution in the UK and the EU, only attacking, as US neoconservatives do, respect for the UN (pp73-6).

On Iraq, his views will already be known to many. He is surely right, though. Writing in early 2006, he takes up John McCain's call that 'as the Iraqis stand up we shouldn't stand down. We should use their strength to augment our own in engaging with the jihadists.' He warns: 'Should Iraq's infant democracy collapse then it would be the biggest single victory the Islamists have had, or could conceive of, in our lifetime.' (p131, 134)

Gove acknowledges the help of, among others, Oliver Kamm and the self-proclaimed British neoconservative, Douglas Murray.

Blair en français

2008-03-05T21:15:00.002Z

A few weeks ago, Tony Blair was interviewed on France Inter (without benefit of interpreter). There was another interview on French radio late-Jan., in his role of envoy to the middle east. Then there was his infamous appearance at the conference of the centre-right UMP. The reason for him to want to display his skill in the French language is obvious enough. But it may all come to nought. This is Pierre Moscovici, a potential leader of the PS (Franc Parler on France Inter, 14 Jan - *):

[since the European president] also presides over the Eurogroup, I believe it would be extremely complicated if the European Union were presided over by a man who, whether you like it or not, represents a country that is not a member of the Euro: there we have a whole series of reasons why a British person, even if it's Tony Blair, cannot be president of the European Union.

This ignores the aspect that, if Blair were to become president of the EU, he would not be the representative of Britain. All the same, it is a widely held view in Europe: it was repeated by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Euro MP and leader of the Greens (interview on France Inter, 5 Feb).

* An extract from the Moscovici interview (in French). Again, I apologize for the sound quality of this.

I didn't write much about Uzbekistan last year..

2008-03-04T21:35:00.000Z

The BBC continues to provide excellent coverage of Central Asia, through its correspondent Natalia Antelava. In late-October she reported on the murder of journalist Alisher Saipov who wrote mainly about Uzbekistan. He was killed over the border in Kyrgyzstan. He was 'critical of the Kyrgyz authorities, which he said have allowed President Karimov's influence to spread beyond the borders of Uzbekistan.'

Natalia expanded on the event in 'From Our Own Correspondent':

Alisher had dedicated his entire life to telling the story of a place that many people know little about: Uzbekistan.

There was one other little detail, though, that I heard on France Inter (I think it was Luc Lemonnier, but I couldn't find it on their website). In the run-up to the presidential vote [in late-December], the Uzbek people were receiving plentiful supplies of gas, for once. Things were expected to return to normal as soon as the polls closed.

[18 May] Here is something from the International Crisis Group that I didn't get around to posting before:

Around Rond-Point Schuman, Realpolitikers will present many arguments to support lifting “ineffective sanctions”. But has any good news reached us from Uzbekistan in the meantime? Has the repression of journalists, human rights defenders or non-governmental organisation members softened? Has the situation in the prisons, in the court rooms – where allegations of torture are never taken into account – improved? Or in the cotton fields, where children are obliged to work in conditions close to slavery? ... Diplomacy being what it is and politics having its reasons que la raison ne connaît pas there will be voices in Europe... ("Europe’s Reasons without Reason", 8 February 2007, European Voice. Alain Délétroz, vice-president (Europe) of the ICG).

Update (5 Feb): the BBC WS had a story on the release of a reporter who provided on-the-spot accounts of the events in Andijan. It seems that pressure from the EU is having some small effect...

Françafrique

2008-03-03T20:15:00.000Z

Nicolas Sarkozy hesitated, but finally decided to visit Chad on his way to South Africa (the main purpose of which visit seems to have been to sell some more nuclear power stations), after obtaining from President Idriss Déby a promise to allow an international commission into the whereabouts of 2 opposition figures who disappeared after the failed rebel attack on the capital. A third person who disappeared has recently been "rediscovered".

Various rumours circulate about the two: they may have been detained by the Chadian security service, but many Chadians believe they have been killed.

Sarkozy did not spend long enough in N'Djamena to meet anyone from the opposition, but his new wife, Carla Bruni-S. spent three-quarters of an hour in the French embassy with the wife of Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, one of the missing men. Bernard Kouchner was also supposed to meet members of the opposition the following day. The opposition refused to take part in a meeting that President Déby had reluctantly offered as long as they did not know the truth about the disappearance of their leaders.

As Le Monde's report put it, President Sarkozy did not have time to take note of the fear that still reigns in N'Djamena.

Meanwhile, in the Cameroons, riots have spread from the port of Douala to the capital, Yaoundé, leaving at least 17 dead over the last week. Resentment has crystallized around the apparent decision of President Paul Biya, who has already been in charge for 25 years, to seek a further term in 2011. The US ambassador made known her opposition to this move, but France has been severely criticised for its silence on the matter. Living standards are falling, corruption is particularly bad - the Cameroons are very low in the rankings published by Transparency International. One demonstrator claimed, "We have a privileged caste which lives to the detriment of the majority who are suffering."

The French government is reviewing its military bases. The facility in Chad is a 'provisional' one that has been there since 1986. Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, could be scaled back, as a middle east base in Abu Dhabi is set up. In the west, the status of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) has changed so that it is no longer a permanent base, while it is likely that Dakar (Senegal) will remain as the main naval point of entry and Gabon as a key aerial base.

Just to finish off, while wandering some distance from the original point, the US (and/or Britain?) seem to have removed their objections to a strong and independent European defence structure. As a French military chief put it, Washington realised that these merely "had the result of encouraging most European countries not to spend any money on their defence, relying rather on Nato, that is, the US."

Le Figaro, 28 Feb 2008; Le Monde, 28-29 Feb 2008.

Update 3 Mar: the news is that 1 of the 2 men missing in Chad, Ngarlejy Yorongar, has reappeared in Yaoundé, having escaped from his jailers and made his way to the north of the Cameroons (AFP).

Kouchner claims that people in Chad and refugees from Darfur 'are welcoming' the deployment of the Eufo . He says that France 'fulfilled its obligations' in terms of logistics and providing intelligence, but did not defend the Déby regime (interview on France Inter).

The Iraq diplomacy revisited

2008-02-20T21:30:00.000Z

(26 Nov 2007) Tony Blair on the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the US: in 2001, "I spoke to President Khatami of Iran...from the aeroplane. ... Iran at that point was prepared to be part of this."

Blair on Iraq, April 2002: "My view was always that if you built a strong enough international coalition, then it was possible to avoid military action. It was even possible actually either to get rid of the regime or change its nature fundamentally if the international community stayed together."
Sept. 2002, John Bolton: going to the UN was a waste of time.

Jan 2003: "It became more important for the French, Germans and Russians to stop the superpower taking unilateral action than to deal with Saddam's defiance of the UN Security Council." (Sir Jeremy Greenstock)
20 Feb, Blix 'phoned Blair: "he believed that, in any event, it was important to avoid conflict and I used to keep saying to him, look, that isn't... your job is to just tell us the facts."
On Chirac's "whatever the circumstances" interview on 10 Mar, Sir Stephen Wall recounts a Labour MP saying to him, "Chirac didn't say what your guys are saying he said". Greenstock admitted that his statement "was not a glorious moment" (Cf. Kampfner, p287, Iraq sources).
Sir David Manning, "I felt that the endgame was rushed... I think if the inspections had been allowed to run into the summer, then perhaps you would have got a new dynamic among the key players..." Blair, "I think if we'd got a second resolution, you would have opened up that whole possibility, but you were never realistically going to get that."
(The Blair Years Part 2, BBC, 25 Nov 2007)

(9 Dec) Part 3. Although Blair had in David Aaronovitch an interviewer who is known to be generally sympathetic to his position, the overall editorial tone reflected what might be called the consensus view of the British media. One example from the voice-over may suffice: "When in 2006 ... Israel unleashed a ferocious military onslaught on Lebanon in retaliation, they said, for rocket attacks by Hezbollah." the capture of their soldiers

Digital Radio

2008-02-16T13:31:00.002Z

DAB Digital radio is being portrayed in some quarters as the 21st century's version of Betamax, the video format that lost out to VHS in the 1970s.

News that media giant GCap is to close two digital stations and has sold its digital platform has added to the arguments that the format is unlikely to find widespread favour in the UK. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7238768.stm

When C4 News reported on this earlier in the week, they said that digital radio doesn't work well in cars.

According to the Financial Times, 'Barely 1 per cent of cars in the UK have a digital radio.' No mention of it not working well: the implication is that it's just car manufacturers dragging their feet. But anyway, GCap may have a short term motive: 'It would be a tragedy if GCap does pull out of digital [..] for the sake of fighting off [a bid from] Global [Radio]', said one figure. (9 Feb; there were 2 articles - p13 (the front of the 'Companies..' section) and p16. I'm told that their website no longer charges "occasional visitors")

If there is an excess of capacity (bandwidth) and people are complaining that the quality is less in the UK than elsewhere, why don't they use the capacity to improve the quality (bits per second)? Or would that be too simple?

Protecting Darfur

2008-02-07T19:03:00.002Z

This is an e-mail I sent in response to Darfur dilemmas - An exchange with Alex de Waal (Wednesday, January 09, 2008):
------------------------------------------

the public pressure that most western governments have been feeling on the issue of Darfur has been shamefully weak, not excessive–-and outside the US and (to a lesser degree) Britain, it has been fairly minimal.

I can only speak for the French media, of which I hear quite a bit, but they do have a fair amount of coverage. As it happens, only tonight (14 Jan.) there was another piece on Radio France Inter.

You may also recall a long article by Bernard-Henri Lévy, which was translated both into British English and American English last May.

As you are probably aware, the Darfur conflict has spilled over into Chad and the Central African Republic. There a European, mainly French, force is being deployed (though there are considerable difficulties with this). France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, known for proposing the droit d'ingérence (right to intervene) is a strong supporter of this. Accused of defending [Chad's autocratic and corrupt leader] Idriss Déby, Kouchner responded that the force was to defend villages, women and children (Interview on Europe 1, 11 Jan.)
------------------------------------------

Update: during the weekend 2-3 Feb. rebels, almost certainly backed by Sudan, probably with the aim of preventing the deployment of the Eufo to protect Darfur rebels in Chad, came close to unseating the Déby government. Mixed messages have been coming from Paris. Commentators on the BBC World Service suggested that, infuriated by France's failure to assist him, would block the deployment.

But by 6 Feb, France Inter news was reporting that, since France has given 'significant help' to the Chad government, President Déby was even considering a pardon for the Zoe's Ark six, 'if France asks for it.' Bernard Kouchner, in an interview on Europe 1 that morning, said that the deployment of the Eufo had obviously been put on hold, but he hoped it could begin on Friday. Kouchner said that, whatever you thought of it, the Chad government had been legitimately elected.

Update: It seems that helicopter gunships played a key role in the defence of N'Djamena. French troops defending the airport to allow the evacuation of Europeans, as a side effect it could be argued, also protected the gunships from the rebels (Analysis , BBC World Service, 12 Feb - listen link valid for one week). The rebellion also had a lot of support from within Chad. The Déby government may be using the situation as a smokescreen for cracking down on dissidents. One key complaint against Déby is that he changed the constitution to allow himself to stand for a second time as president.

All that said, it's a difficult situation, but the French actions, side effect or not, could be justified: the possibility of Sudan imposing a more compliant government on Chad was hardly to be welcomed.

Withdrawing from Basra

2008-02-05T20:46:00.000Z

(24 Nov) Kate Clark reports that Basra now is like living under a Shi'a Taliban. She should know: she used to be the BBC's correspondent in Afghanistan under the Taliban (File on 4: Inside Basra: Tuesday 2 October 2007). A full transcript of the programme (74k) is now available.

Yahia Sayid (an expert on Iraq and oil at the London School of Economics):

The pursuit of oil money even as a way of financing the insurgency, with time becomes a goal in and of itself. The criminal activity takes over the political fight eventually. But it’s always mixed in, because you need, if you like, the moral justification, the political justification to sustain the interests of your foot soldiers. It’s never quite possible to just be a thief. ... Oil is both a fuel to the conflict and a prize to be won by the winners.(p12)

The police chief is forced to rely on the support of his tribe in his efforts to purge police who are corrupt and beholden to militias. (p11) She asks a Norwegian expert (Reider Visser) whether it would have been possible to have done it differently, not relying on the militia. Yes, but that would have required more forces. The British spokesman puts his faith in the national police (p16; other reports from around Iraq suggest that local police are less corrupt than the national police). 'Most Basrawis feel bitterly disappointed about the British, but almost all want them to stay' (p18).

[T]he British are pleased that their withdrawal to the airport went smoothly, although it’s alleged that only happened because they did a deal with the Mahdi Army and released many of its prisoners. (p17 - cf Panorama 10 Dec, R4 Today - 0700-0730 at 0714 )

Now parts of the media are waking up to the fact that British withdrawal may be leaving behind a mess in Basra. This, of course, comes after years when the only question has been, 'when do we withdraw?'

In Part 2 of her report for Panorama (17 Dec), Jane Corbin makes a telling point: "further north, the Americans took on the [Shi'a] militias, but the British lacked the manpower and the political will to do this." (my emphasis)

Iron ore

2008-02-03T20:51:00.000Z

Fascinating, I know. Actually, this is quite interesting. Well, I think so. From the Financial Times

China has almost no sources of high-grade iron ore and has to buy from outside. ... Paradoxically, any further consolidation in the iron ore industry would play into the hands of certain players in the steel industry, such as Lakshmi Mittal, chief executive of ArcelorMittal ... who have placed great emphasis on securing their own internal supplies. ( Sparks set to fly over BHP-Rio, FT,10 Nov 2007)

Postscript, 1 Feb 2008: A state-owned Chinese company has taken a stake in Rio Tinto at £60 a share (BHP Billiton is currently offering £49 in a takeover bid).

Iowa...

2008-01-08T21:52:00.000Z

The speeches after the Iowa caucus result: Obama and Clinton... Hillary was surrounded by her supporters - Madeleine Albright and of course Bill (though the picture cut off the top of his face). Barack Obama appeared on his own, reinforcing the image of a potential president, who, we are told, has to take the crucial decisions on his own (via C-span, 6 Jan).

The British media have, of course, reported on several occasions that John McCain's campaign has "come back from the dead" in the last few months. The reasons for this, though, might remain a mystery. Only one correspondent, Claire Bolderson, reported that, since McCain strongly supported the 'surge' in Iraq, indeed advocated a similar policy long before it happened (see here and here), and now things are going somewhat better in Iraq, people are saying, "McCain was right..." (BBC WS, Newshour, 7 Jan.).

A useful summary of the Democrat candidates' latest positions was provided by The New York Times:

Advisers to Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama say that the candidates have watched security conditions improve after the troop escalation in Iraq and concluded that it would be folly not to acknowledge those gains. At the same time, they are arguing that American casualties are still too high, that a quick withdrawal is the only way to end the war and that the so-called surge in additional troops has not paid off in political progress in Iraq.
[..]
Neither Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama nor the other Democratic candidates have backed away from their original opposition to the troop escalation, and they all still favor a quick withdrawal from Iraq. But Mrs. Clinton, for one, has not said how quickly she would remove most combat forces from Iraq or how many she would leave there as president. Former Senator John Edwards, by contrast, has emphasized that he would remove all combat troops from the country, while Mr. Obama favors withdrawal at a rate of one to two brigades a month. Those plans stand in contrast to the latest American strategy of keeping most American combat brigades in Iraq but giving them an expanded role in training and supporting Iraqi forces.
[..]
Update:
“The best leverage we have to get Iraq’s political leaders to do their job is to immediately begin to withdraw our troops,” [Obama’s spokesman, Bill Burton] said. ('As Democrats See Security Gains in Iraq, Tone Shifts', 25 Nov 2007)

Jeff Weintraub had a long and interesting post on Ron Paul. Paul may only have got less than 10% support, just behind Rudy Giuliani, in New Hampshire, but as Jeff says

the real significance of Ron Paul's appeal, and the deeper problem of which it is only one symptom, is that a world-view of simplistic free-market fundamentalism and wishful isolationism has a lot of seductive resonance for many Americans

Bernard Guetta, on France Inter, pays grudging respect to John McCain:

en donnant, hier, cinq points d’avance à John McCain, les Républicains pourraient bien avoir mis en selle un candidat de poids. A 71 ans, sans grands moyens financiers et sans aucun charisme, le sénateur de l’Arizona, n’a rien, a priori, d’un futur Président. Défenseur de la guerre d’Irak et vieux routier de la politique, il a même tout contre lui mais ce militaire, fils et petit-fils de militaire, épouvantablement torturé par les Vietnamiens après qu’ils eurent abattu son avion, se trouve être la plus noble figure du camp conservateur.

Homme de principe, très conséquent dans ses prises de position, il avait vainement mis en garde, comme toute l’armée, contre l’insuffisance des effectifs engagés en Irak. Il dit, aujourd’hui, que l’Amérique ne doit pas s’y permettre une défaite mais c’est le même homme qui a mené bataille, et marqué des points, contre le développement de la torture, encouragé par Georges Bush.

Hostile à l’avortement et au mariage homosexuel, très rigide sur les questions de mœurs, il fait pourtant entendre une voix dissonante dans son camp en critiquant les baisses d’impôt, réclamant une moralisation du financement des campagnes électorales et prônant une régularisation des immigrés clandestins. Il incarne, lui aussi, une forme de rupture. ('Les leçons du New Hampshire', 9 Jan 2008)

Update 2:
A caller raises Ron Paul's views on slavery and the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act (C-span, 6 Jan, phone-in with John "Chip" Saltsman, Huckabee's campaign manager).

Channel 4 News (9 Jan) says that McCain is doing better now that Iraq is no longer so much of an issue... Jon Snow, in his report, says that McCain's campaign has come back since the surge has brought reduced levels of violence in Iraq and his fortunes rise and fall with those of the war (see).

Shi'a, Shi'a

2008-01-08T20:55:00.000Z

(13 Nov) - Radio France Inter reported that Fatah supporters in Gaza insulted Hamas by calling them Shi'a. This was confirmed by a report in The New York Times.

The Hamas police confiscated Fatah flags and posters of Mr. Arafat from the cars of Fatah supporters, and rally participants shouted provocative slogans against the Islamist group, including “Shia, Shia,” in reference to support Hamas gets from mostly Shiite Iran. A vast majority of Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. ('6 Palestinians Killed in Gaza at Fatah Rally', 13 Nov 2007)

Update: the “Shi'a, Shi'a” cry was shown in the documentary 'Inside Hamas', shown on Channel 4, 10 Feb 2008, without any comment apart from the translation in the caption, “Shiite, Shiite”.

Dissidents and Scholars

2008-01-04T21:37:00.000Z

A couple of months ago, Jeff Weintraub had a post on the Mearsheimer and Walt affair, in the light of Walter Russell Mead's critique of them in Foreign Affairs. This is a belated response, but I suppose it is never too late to repeat that it is necessary to be absolutely clear and unequivocal in support of open debate. Most people support the idea of freedom of expression in principle, but the hard part is to apply it in a consistent manner. Back in January last year Amnesty's (UK) magazine and website were full of the abuses at that part of the island of Cuba, Guantanamo, which the US has rented since 1934, but did not find space to mention the other Cuba, which is the state of Cuba: in March 2003, when most of the world's attention was focused on you-know-what, 77 political dissidents were arrested (*). I thought of writing to Amnesty, drawing on an essay of Orwell's from 1945, but, for one thing, I didn't have the time, for another, I couldn't quite find the killer quote. Orwell's essay (a newspaper column, really) is worth reading nonetheless and here I have space to quote it at length (**).

THE OTHER night I attended a mass meeting of an organization called the League for European Freedom [..] an organization [..] dominated by the anti-Russian wing of the Tory Party. [..] More than half of what they said was justified, but curiously enough they were almost as anxious to defend our own coercion of Greece as to condemn the Russian coercion of Poland. [..S]uddenly black became white, and white black. There was [..] none there, apparently, who could see that the forcing of quisling governments upon unwilling peoples is equally undesirable whoever does it. It is very hard to believe that people like this are really interested in political liberty as such.
[..]
The trouble is that for years past it has been just as impossible to extract a grown-up picture of foreign politics from the left-wing press either. [..W]hat difference is there between the russophile press and the extreme Tory press? The one is simply the other standing on its head. The News Chronicle gives the big headlines to the fighting in Greece but tucks away the news that ‘force has had to be used’ against the Polish Home Army in small print at the bottom of a column. The Daily Worker disapproves of dictatorship in Athens, the Catholic Herald disapproves of dictatorship in Belgrade.

To return to Mearsheimer and Walt, I blogged about this back in August. As I made clear, I did not find their arguments convincing. That is not the point. My views were based on the NYT's report on their upcoming book, so I may have missed some subsequent developments, but it was reported at that time that some pressure-groups had managed to bring about the cancellation of an event at the Chicago Global Affairs Council where Mearsheimer and Walt were to have discussed their views.

I had somehow or another got on the mailing list of an organisation called Scholars For Peace in the Middle East, which featured heavily calls to oppose the British campaign to boycott Israeli academics. I contacted them to ask them to distance themselves from efforts to deny Mearsheimer and Walt a platform. They declined to do so.

* Amnesty reported in AMR 25/001/2006 that 60 of the dissidents remained in prison. They did subsequently focus on human rights in Cuba.

** 'As I Please', 26 January 1945

Müntefering's departure

2007-12-23T23:57:00.000Z

I didn't hear much about this on the BBC, either. I heard the following comment on France Inter:

Franz Müntefering, qui avait soutenu la politique de réformes de Gerhard Schroeder, et qui poursuivait la même ligne dans le gouvernement Merkel, s’est senti désavoué par son parti et en a tiré les conséquences. Le S.P.D. a entamé un virage à gauche qui n’augure pas très bien de la cohésion à venir de l’équipe au pouvoir. (Dominique Bromberger, Regard sur le Monde, 14 Nov 2007)

Müntefering has been replaced as the the SPD's leading light in the coalition by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, previously Foreign Minister.

Angela Merkel may be weakened in the short term, but her chances of consolidating her power at the next election appear to be stronger. Earlier, the FT had this: 'One SPD cabinet minister says [SPD chairman Kurt] Beck is focusing too much on proposals popular among the grassroots, damaging the party's wider appeal." (3 Nov) Merkel herself is criticised for a leftward drift, both by Guido Westerwelle, chairman of the FDP, who said Gerhard Schröder 'had proven a more determined leader than Ms Merkel, pushing through unpopular economic reforms' (interview with the FT, 8 Dec) and by the the FT's correspondent, Bertrand Benoit, who contrasts the 'blue-eyed advocate of political honesty' (the opposition leader of 2003) with the 'hard-boiled cynic' of today (15 Dec).

On foreign policy, Bromberger again:

Or, Frank-Walter Steinmeier a été l’un des artisans de ce que l’on appelait en 2003 l’axe Paris – Berlin – Moscou. Il est certainement moins proche de Washington que ne l’est la chancelière. Et encore moins qu’elle susceptible de soutenir une attitude un peu belliqueuse du président des Etats-Unis.

...

Forgotten

2007-11-21T22:04:00.000Z

Some stories come up on the news and then seem to be forgotten.

When Vladimir Putin visited Tehran in mid-October [16 Oct], it was reported that he had made a "significant offer" regarding Iran's nuclear programme, in a meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Ali Larijani. By the following weekend (20/21 Oct), the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, denied that any such offer had been made (BBC World Service news bulletins).

It was hardly any surprise then, when Larijani was replaced as nuclear negotiator.

---

Update (9 Dec)
While the threats of the Turkish army to intervene on a larger scale in northern Iraq rumbled on, another thing that I did not hear mentioned, that may have affected the Iraqi Kurds ability to act against the PKK themselves, was that early in the year numbers of Kurdish forces redeployed to central Iraq as part of the 'surge' in and around Baghdad. Reports in early-December indicate that the Peshmerga have taken action, cutting off supply routes to the PKK (BBC WS).

Bernard and Ségolène

2007-10-14T20:43:00.000+01:00

...and Nicolas, of course. How is French foreign policy developing, now that it is around five months that Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of the Republic and appointed Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister? In June, as I mentioned in a previous post, there was some activity regarding Africa. In mid-July, Kouchner launched an initiative on Lebanon, inviting leaders from the various factions to a meeting near Paris and planning to go to Beirut himself on the 28th. Kouchner prepared for this with a visit to Tehran (BBC World Service).

Then, it was Iraq. On 19 August, I noted, "Kouchner in Baghdad!" (This I saw initially on the iraqslogger.com website, which I had just got around to looking at; when I looked next time a few weeks later, it had gone subscription-only.) The French media speculated that Sarkozy had probably informed Bush when they met during Sarkozy's trip to the US and that France might be able to use its influence with Iran. Kouchner later denied that France had received US permission for the visit..

And so it continued, with Kouchner on 28 Aug. giving an interview with Newsweek, writing 'What France can do in Iraq' in The International Herald Tribune (August 26, 2007).

Then it was la rentrée (return of normal political activity) in France. On 11 Sept., I heard part of an interview with Kouchner on Europe 1. On 13 Sept., there was an opportunity to hear a Kouchner interview in English, on the BBC (details are here). Here he insisted on continuing to talk about Iraq, even when the interviewer tried to move him on to Darfur: "People want to forget about Iraq..." ... "Who wants to forget?" ... "Many people - because they were against the war, as we were, because it is too difficult..."

Finally, on 19 Sept., he was the morning guest on France Inter, where he had the usual 10 minutes of interview, followed by about 20 minutes of questions from listeners, like he had featured on in 2006, before he was a minister. He made many of the same points on Iraq as he had in the BBC interview: the international community needs to get involved, for example building up the justice system; there had been a UN resolution in early-August; but there was no question of European troops replacing American.

Accused of being in favour of the intervention in Iraq, he of course referred back to the article he wrote shortly before the 2003 war. There he argued for getting rid of Saddam Hussein by peaceful and multilateral methods, "as had just been done in Kosovo". As for the claims that he was pro-war, he says, it is like bells that you pull and it rings for years afterwards (ce sont des sonnettes qu'on accroche et puis ça tintent quelques années après). (*)

It was pointed out that the means used in Kosovo were hardly pacific, since they involved bombardment from the air. But Kouchner was allowed to get away with claiming that they were multilateral. But there was no UN resolution for the intervention in Kosovo either. There were differences: in 1999, it was only the Russian veto that stood in the way; in 2003, there was the French veto as well as the Russian and it was likely that the US and Britain would not even have obtained a majority on the Security Council to gain a moral victory, which as we all know don't count anyway. But of course an action is "multilateral" if France is in agreement with it. Otherwise, not.

---

Then there was the question of France returning to the integrated command of NATO. Asked whether this would happen as early as before next summer and so under the current US administration, Kouchner replied that it depended on countries like Spain, Germany and Italy taking up a greater share of Europe's defence burden and so was not likely that soon.

Kouchner says that he is in favour of Turkey's entry into the EU, while the President's position is now that he is not in favour of Turkey's entry, but he will not block anything: there are 35 chapters in the negotiations with Turkey, of which 30 are compatible with a partenariat priviligié. So, these 30 will be opened first of all. This development, we are told, is in the context of Sarkozy's desire to "get Europe moving again" with the mini-treaty to reform its institution.

On Friday 21 Sept., France Inter reported in its morning bulletin that, heckled by protesters in the US concerned about possible war with Iran, Bernard Kouchner replied, "But I agree, stupid."

To be concluded

On 2 Oct., Bernard Kouchner gave another interview, on Europe 1 - speaking about Burma, Iran and, with some vehemence, Rwanda.

Ségolène Royal had just had published in Le Monde an article, Une diplomatie incohérente. Here, as was noted in his interview, she referred to Kouchner only in the form of - ministre des affaires étrangères - By contrast, Nicolas Sarkozy is always 'Nicolas Sarkozy', never 'the president of the Republic'.

She accuses Sarkozy of inconsistency: what the candidate Sarkozy said is different from what President Sarkozy is now saying. On Turkey, he is now closer to the position that she argued for during the campaign.

Ségolène expresses the principle of policy: 'A l'idéologie facile, à l'intérêt étroit, [la France] préférait l'analyse rationnelle des faits...' But, from her criticisms, it is difficult to determine any pattern that would suggest an alternative policy. (The candidate) Sarkozy is said to be too hard on Hezbollah, too soft on Iran; he is getting closer to the US (with regard to Iraq) at a time when even "our British friends" are distancing themselves. (That may be so, but Britain is still closer to the US than France is.)

But in any case, if Britain is moving away from the US, then by implication it is moving closer to France. If the US is now preferring dialogue rather than military force, then it too is moving closer to France. If France, by abandoning its reflex anti-Americanism, is moving closer to the US, all this would be a good thing. Wouldn't it? Unless France's position is so right that it shouldn't be moved from by even one inch. But then, we should be fighting the battles of 2007, not of 2003.

* A brief extract of the interview can be heard here. I apologize for the poor quality of this, but we're breaking new ground here for this blog, technically speaking.

Czech disasters

2007-09-28T20:49:00.000+01:00

I don't know how much longer this will be available: BBC Radio 4's Archive Hour on the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1938. You can listen again here (this is from last Saturday: 'A Quarrel In A Faraway Country', 22 Sep 2007).

The programme really is, as Martin Hoyle says previewing in the FT, "in magnificent form".

Thirty years later, as she recounts in a recent edition of the FT, Miriam Gross at the Observer received a 'phone call from Wystan (W.H.) Auden “I’ve written a short poem about Czechoslovakia, could you publish it in Sunday’s paper?”

The second line ('Deeds quite impossible for Man') reminds me of Coleridge's 'In caverns measureless to Man'.

Electricity

2007-09-21T20:27:00.000+01:00

Back home in time to hear all about the Petraeus_Testimony (*) and the "surge", certainly of media interest in Iraq. The BBC, apart from focusing on the lack of political progress, mentioned more than once the shortages of electricity and the hum of generators that "is everywhere". It will hardly surprise you that they failed to mention that the situation is considerably worse in Baghdad than elsewhere in Iraq. This is according to a report in The New York Times based on a news briefing on 22 Aug. given by the electricity minister, Karim Wahid, attended also by United States military officials.

The government lost the ability to control the grid centrally after the American-led invasion in 2003, when looters destroyed electrical dispatch centers. [..M]inistry officials have been trying to control the flow of electricity from huge power plants in the south, north and west by calling local officials there and ordering them to physically flip switches. But the officials refuse to follow those orders when the armed groups threaten their lives, he said, and the often isolated stations are abandoned at night and easily manipulated by whatever group controls the area. This kind of manipulation can cause the entire system to collapse and bring nationwide blackouts,

This risks 'seriously damaging the generating plants that the United States has paid millions of dollars to repair'.

Such a collapse took place just last week, the State Department reported in a recent assessment, which said the provinces’ failure to share electricity resulted in a “massive loss of power” on Aug. 14 at 5 p.m. It added that “all Baghdad generation and 60 percent of national generation was temporarily lost.” By midnight, half the lost power had been restored, the report said. [..T]hose blackouts deeply undermine an Iraqi government whose popular support is already weak.

In some cases, Mr. Wahid and other Iraqi officials say, insurgents cut power to the capital as part of their effort to topple the government. But the officials said it was clear that in other cases, local militias, gangs and even some provincial military and civilian officials held on to the power simply to help their own areas. With the manual switching system in place, there is little that the central government can do about it, Mr. Wahid said. “We are working in this primitive way for controlling and distributing electricity,” he said. [..T]he country’s power plants were not designed to supply electricity to specific cities or provinces. “We have a national grid,” he said.

He cited Mosul and Baquba, in the north, and Basra, in the south, as being among the cities refusing to route electricity elsewhere. “This greatly influenced the distribution of power throughout Iraq,” Mr. Wahid complained. At times the hoarding of power provides cities around power plants with 24 hours of uninterrupted electricity, a luxury that is unheard of in Baghdad, where residents say they generally get two to six hours of power a day. Mr. Wahid said Baghdad was suffering mainly because the provinces were holding onto the electricity, but he said shortages of fuel and insurgents’ strikes on gas and oil pipelines also contributed to the anemic output in the capital.

Although a refusal by provincial governments to provide their full quotas to Baghdad could easily be seen as greedy when electricity is in such short supply, many citizens near the power plants regard the new reality as only fair; under Saddam Hussein, the capital enjoyed nearly 24 hours a day of power at the expense of the provinces that are now flush with electricity.

The NYT report also highlights an incident in Basra on 25 May:

Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army carried out a sustained attack against a small British-Iraqi base in the city center, and turned [their control of electricity] to tactical military advantage. “The lights in the city were going on and off all over,” said Cpl. Daniel Jennings, one of the British defenders who fought off the attack. “They were really controlling the whole area, turning the lights on and off at will. They would shut down one area of the city, turn it dark, attack us from there, and then switch off another one and come at us from that direction. “What they did was very well planned.” (23 August 2007, 'Militias Seizing Control of Iraqi Electricity Grid', James Glanz and Stephen Farrell)

(*) Petraeus_Slides (pdf )

Effaced

2007-09-20T21:28:00.000+01:00

At Gunwalloe, in Cornwall, there is a fairly famous church almost on the beach. There, on the grave of a lady who died at a terribly early age - her dates, I think, were 1958-1991 - could be read the inscription "Mermaids never drown". I remember seeing it in 1994, I believe. It appeared not to be there in 2007. On the other hand, a search on the web reveals a novel by Muncy Chapman (see, for example, amazon) - published (in paperback) in July 2002.

Ringo

2007-09-15T20:58:00.000+01:00

I'm back. Just to ease myself in gently... The FT's review tells us that 'The very best of Ringo' contains 6 tracks from his 1973 LP, with the rest being essentially padding. I remember that record when it first came out, especially "You're sixteen". After the exuberance of the early Beatles, we were left with the leching drool of a dirty old man: "You walked out of my dreams / Into my car ... You're sixteen / You're beautiful / And You're mine."

Actually, my favourite was "Yellow Submarine", not for any particular merit of the song, but for a couple of amusing things it gave rise to.

There was a BBC comedy show about 20 years ago (Radio-Active, "the first national local radio" ?). One of the sketches featured a phone-in quiz, where huge prizes are offered, obviously with the intention of them never being won. The "competition" is to guess the name of a (pop) song from its intro. "Here's the next one". A few moments silence. Chuckles from the 'jock'. Some smart alec comes on the line: "Beatles, Yellow Submarine". As we know, the song does indeed go straight in, without any intro: "In the town where I was born / Lived a man..." Embarrassed pause. "Sorry, wrong. It was Yellow Submarine by The Beatles."

And that's not even to mention the version that football crowds used to sing.

Guernica remembered

2007-08-27T21:56:00.000+01:00

(25 Aug) I got round to watching 'The Guernica Children'. The British government took the view that removing "useless mouths" from the Basque region, which by this time was an enclave cut off from the rest of Republican Spain, would assist one of the sides in the civil war and so run contrary to the "non-intervention" agreement. Meanwhile of course, Franco's fascist allies in Germany and Italy kept their side of the "non-intervention" pact by providing the 'planes and pilots that carried out the destruction of Guernica.

The programme tells us that there was massive public sympathy in Britain for the Basque people and after the bombing the government was forced to change its position. Some 4000 children were allowed to come to Britain (others went to France and Mexico). In one incident, a British navy ship protected a refugee ship from being intercepted by Franco's navy. It should be remembered, though, that the Basque children received no support from public funds.

Subsequently, the Daily Mail highlighted any misdemeanours committed by the Basque children. Although the campaign was based on fact, it was blown out of all proportion.

One father wrote to his son: 'If they ask you if you are Red, say plainly that you are proletarian, poor, human and christian, that wicked men infringe the sacred mandate and declare war on us; and that if this is being Red, as the murderers say, then we are Red - we are red as the poppy. But we are red because they have shed our blood and our bodies have stained with the red that runs in our veins.'

(Eye Witness Productions, 2005; repeated in April 2007 on BBC4, for the anniversary of the Guernica bombing.)

Reconsidering the war - 2

2007-08-17T10:16:00.000+01:00

Yankee Wombat posts:
Here is John Burns of the NY Times in an interview with Hugh Hewitt giving his view of how a fixed deadline for withdrawal would motivate the Iraqis to come to an accommodation.

JB: Well, you would think it would be so, wouldn’t you, that the threat of withdrawal of American troops, and the risk of a slide into catastrophic levels of violence, much higher than we’ve already seen, would impel the Iraqi leadership to move forward. But there’s a conundrum here. There’s a paradox. That’s to say the more that the Democrats in the Congress lead the push for an early withdrawal, the more Iraqi political leaders, particularly the Shiite political leaders, but the Sunnis as well, and the Kurds, are inclined to think that this is going to be settled, eventually, in an outright civil war, in consequence of which they are very, very unlikely or reluctant, at present, to make major concessions. They’re much more inclined to kind of hunker down.

Then asked about the effect of giving the Iraqis more time Burns replies:

They [Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker] understand that there has to be something of a fire lit under the feet of the Iraqi leaders. It’s a paradox, it’s a conundrum, which is almost impossible to resolve. Now I think the last thing that you need is an Iraqi leadership which is already inclined to passivity on the matters, the questions that seem to matter most in terms of a national reconciliation here, the last thing they need is to be told, in effect, the deadline has been moved back three years.

Asked bluntly if he thinks the war is lost Burns replies:

No, I don’t, actually. I think the war is close to lost, but I don’t think that all hope is extinguished, and I do think, as do many of my colleagues in the media here, that an accelerated early withdrawal, something which reduced American troops, even if they were placed in large bases out in the desert to, say, something like 60-80,000 over a period of six to nine months, and in effect, leaving the fighting in the cities and the approaches to the cities to the Iraqis, I think the result of that would, in effect, be a rapid, a rapid progress towards an all-out civil war. And the people who are urging that kind of a drawdown, I think, have to take that into account. That’s not to say, I have to say, that that should be enough to inhibit those politicians who make that argument, because they could very well ask if that’s true, can those who argue for a continued high level of American military involvement here assure us that we wouldn’t come to the same point three or four years, and perhaps four or five thousand American soldiers killed later? In other words, we might only be putting off the evil day. It seems to me that’s where this discussion really has to focus. Can those who argue for staying here, can they offer any reasonable hope that three, two, three, four years out, the risk of a decline into cataclysmic civil war would be any less? If the answer is no they can’t, then it seems to me that strengthens the argument of those who say well, we might as well withdraw fairly quickly now.

yankeewombat/537, 'Sometimes Narratives Change', 1 Aug 2007. See also his later post.

Another piece worth reading is A War We Just Might Win, from Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution (30 July).

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

...

Elaborating on "The Lobby"

2007-08-16T16:58:00.001+01:00

Mearsheimer and Walt are back, with a book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”.

The names seemed familiar: I remembered Jeff Weintraub writing about them (see here). This was at the time of their paper and the LRB article based on it, in April 2006. One of the most detailed responses was from Benny Morris:

footnote 10 states: "It is also worth noting that the British favored the Zionists over the Palestinians during the period of the British Mandate (1919-1948)." But during the Mandate, both Arabs and Jews were "Palestinians";

There are some other historical truths that many are prepared to overlook:

Moreover, during the 1930s and 1940s, the espoused policy of the leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement, the Muslim cleric Haj Amin al Husseini, was frankly expulsionist about the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine]. He repeatedly stated that he was willing, in his future Palestinian state, to accommodate as citizens only those Jews who had been residents or citizens of Palestine up to 1917--say, 60,000 to 80,000 in all. When asked in 1937 by the Peel Commission what he intended to do with the 80 percent of the Jews who had been born in or come to Palestine after that date, he responded that time will tell. The commissioners understood him to mean that they were destined for expulsion or worse.

In the book, to be published on 4 Sept., we are told "they elaborate on and update their case."

Update (17 Aug): Based on a blogsearch, most of the comments appearing in the roughly 16 hours after my original post seem in large majority to be supportive of Mearsheimer and Walt. Some examples:

Paul Craig Roberts: 'En mars 2006, deux universitaires distingués, John Mearsheimer et Stephen Walt, s'inquiétaient dans The London Review Books du pouvoir du lobby d'Israël [my emphasis].'

ANOTHER BOOK AIPAC IS UNHAPPY ABOUT: 'If Abe Foxman and his cronies are upset by the publication of a new book.... then IT IS DEFINITELY WORTH READING!'

A number focus on the Chicago Global Affairs Council decision to cancel its event with the authors:

Alain Gresh on Le Monde Diplomatique's blog (Quelle surprise!): 'Deux universitaires, auteur d'un rapport très détaillé sur le rôle du lobby [..] devaient parler devant le Chicago Global Affairs Council le 27 septembre 2007...'

I think an advance order from Amazon.com is in order“On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event,”

The pro-Israeli side seems to have shot itself in the foot here. If I am asked to oppose the British campaign to boycott Israeli academics (which I am and I do), I think there must be a certain consistency here - to encourage open debate.

There is an interesting parallel here. A few days ago, I think it was regarding the row about Channel 4's Dispatches documentary, 'Undercover Mosque', somebody dredged up a Front Page Magazine about a Saudi banker's attempts, using British libel laws , 'to stymie the flow of information concerning his apparent misdeeds'. Another alarm bell rang in my head: it does not take long to confirm that they supported the actions to exclude Tariq Ramadan from the United States.

Giving up on Iraq

2007-08-15T14:58:00.000+01:00

It seems that the BBC has all but given up any serious attempt to report on the situation in Iraq. I suppose that if the culture is that it is all "hopeless", this is inevitable. So, for the background to the latest terrorist attacks which have killed around 200 people, I turned to this from The New York Times :

some Yazidis stoned a Yazidi woman to death for dating a Sunni Arab man in April [Other sources suggest that the girl converted to Islam and married her boyfriend] , members of the sect became frequent targets of Sunni attacks. When a video of the Yazidi woman being stoned appeared on the Internet, gunmen stopped minibuses full of Yazidi laborers and killed 23 of them. Many Yazidis have recently moved to villages farther west, where they make up a majority. The deadly assault on Tuesday crushed the hope that there would be safety in numbers — especially near the border with Syria, which American officials have long described as an entry point for foreign fighters.

The BBC's line is that recent operations by US forces merely move the "insurgents" from one area to another, implying that the "surge" is completely futile. Others might argue that, even with the terrible human cost of this latest incident, reducing the level of attacks in Baghdad and its surrounding area and driving the terrorists to a corner of Iraq close to the Syrian border is progress of a sort.

The coverage of the BBC (and C4 News) has been reduced to little more than, "Another British soldier has been killed in Iraq...", "the soldier killed has been named as...", plus of course the big incidents like this one. When did they last have an "embed" with the US forces (or even with the British army in Basra)? Some people have done, though. The first of two accounts worth reading is from Michael Totten, on his weblog:

Many areas of Baghdad have been cleared – even the notoriously violent Haifa Street neighborhood – but insurgents and terrorists need only drive a few minutes to get from one of their strongholds to another part of the city. Gunmen and car bombers from other sectors of Baghdad can and do pass through War Eagle’s area.

Until recently the biggest threat was from the adjacent neighborhood just on the other side of the Tigris. It hasn’t been cleared of insurgents. When the War Eagle outpost was still struck by mortars, they were fired from there over the water. It is the insurgents in that sector [from the Shi'a Jaysh al Mahdi or Mahdi Army, loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr] who apparently have decided to stop attacking the outpost so they won’t hurt their comrades who infiltrated the base.

Those infiltrators in the Iraqi Army are trained every day by the Americans. “They act like our friends,” said Master Sergeant Tyler. “It is a façade to an extent, yes. They get benefits from having a good relationship with us and will do and say anything to keep us on their side.”

This, though, is a worrying sign for Totten:

Nothing makes me more pessimistic about Iraq’s future prospects than this. The Mahdi Army is Iran’s major proxy in Iraq.

Iraq is a bewildering country. I can tell you what I see and what I hear, but I can’t unravel and explain with confidence the contradictions in the hearts and minds of its people.
...
“I think the reason the U.S. hasn’t killed Sadr yet is because they are trying to flip him to their side,” said Hammer. “All it takes is money. [..] He has only 16 percent support among the Shia. I am a Shia. I know lots of Shia in Sadr City who hate and fear him, but he has lots of power and influence.”

With the help of a US Army interpreter named Feris, originally from Syria, Totten talks to an Iraqi civilian

“Jaysh al Mahdi took me,” he said. “They kidnapped me and dragged me off to the mosque where they beat me.” “They beat me with iron sticks,” he said, “and fired a gun in the air next to my head.” Then they shaved his head. The Mahdi Army does this to people they kidnap, to mark them, perhaps, or to humiliate them. “Why?” I said. “Why did they do this to you?” “Because I work here,” [He] said. He works at the outpost as a civilian, not for the Americans but for the Iraqis.

“How do they know you work here?” I said. He gestured toward the building where Iraqi Army soldiers live and sleep. Of course. “The Iraqi Army told them,” he said.
Posted by Michael J. Totten at August 14, 2007 09:58 PM ( via winds of change )

I advise, as well as reading the whole of that post, looking back at his archives for August, July and June (be aware that, apart from the posts on Iraq, there is a marked pro-Israeli viewpoint), even, if you can, doing as he asks and making a donation to support "independent journalism".

The second account is from Der Spiegel's Ullrich Fichtner (with photographer Tina Hager):

The world has become deaf to the word "peace" -- at least when conversations turn to Iraq. It is as if the world were blind to the possibility that the situation in this country straddling the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers could be anything different from the constant stream of increasingly devastating films of the latest car bombings. For most people, Iraq has become nothing but a series of attacks, a collection of images of bombings and victims, a tale of failure, a book about historical guilt and a symbol of the moral decline of the United States of America. (via normblog)

...

sarko-compatible

2007-08-10T12:58:00.000+01:00

From lmsi, on Fadela Amara, formerly leader of the 'Neither whoredom, nor submission' group:

Ce n’est pas d’être sociale-libérale qui l’a fait porter aux nues par tant et tant de bons esprits « de gauche ». Les questions économiques, de son soutien au « oui » pour le référendum, à son soutien à Laurent Fabius lors des primaires du parti socialiste, n’ont jamais été la caractéristique essentielle de son discours. C’est peut-être en tant que « femme de gauche » qu’elle était devenue conseillère municipale socialiste de Clermont-Ferrand. C’est nécessairement en tant que « femme de droite » qu’elle entre au gouvernement de Nicolas Sarkozy. Mais le plus beau est qu’elle n’a pas plus que Besson eu besoin de changer quoi que ce soit de son discours.
[..]
Ce qui rend le cas Amara si significatif, c’est précisément que son engagement n’était pas caractérisé par les questions qui séparent habituellement la « gauche de gauche » du parti socialiste, celles des politiques économiques, et singulièrement celle du « libéralisme », mais par des questions « sociétales », celles pour lesquelles les « valeurs » sont situées au premier plan. Force est de constater que les « valeurs » défendues par Fadela Amara et par tous ceux qui en ont fait une icône laïque et républicaine étaient parfaitement sarko-compatibles. L’ex-présidente de « Ni Putes Ni Soumises » n’a sans doute jamais été mieux à sa place que dans le gouvernement du contempteur de la racaille, de l’homme [..], élu sur la base d’une campagne marquée par un raidissement identitaire et nationaliste [..]

Que l’ensemble des « valeurs » portées par Fadela Amara et Nicolas Sarkozy aient pu être partagées – soient toujours partagées – par des fractions importantes de ce qui se dit être « la gauche » est la meilleure illustration qui soit du brouillage de tous les repères. (Les insuffisances de « la gauche », Réflexions autour des cas Besson et Amara, Laurent Lévy, 6 July)

The key phrase here is 'les « valeurs » défendues par Fadela Amara et par tous ceux qui en ont fait une icône laïque et républicaine étaient parfaitement sarko-compatibles (the "values" defended by Fadela Amara and by all those who have made a secular and republican icon of her were perfectly sarko-compatible).' The background to this is the headscarf ban. Lmsi argue, and I would agree with them, that the ban is a respectable mask for racism, shared by the PS with the parties of the right.

Some of my earlier views can be found here. I came across the following comment :

The moral relativism of the Herderian leftist elites have betrayed these women, (Danny69, Comment No. 401776, 29 Jan 2007 15:30)

If believing that there is no fundamental value that a woman should wear a headscarf, or should not wear a headscarf, makes be a 'relativist', then I'm a relativist. But I've "admitted" that before.

Notes on the translation: Ni putes, ni soumises. 'Neither whoredom, nor submission' is my own translation. I prefer it to various others, such as 'Neither Whores Nor Submissive(s)'.
Melanie Phillips has ‘neither whores nor submission’. Here is an update to the link she gives to the item on Today: Wednesday January 18th 2006 (0714 ... During the riots in November, the voices of girls and women were rarely heard).

Update: I don't want to sound too negative about Ni putes, ni soumises. I'm sure they do much work to campaign against violence to women, which I wholeheartedly support.

Reconsidering the war

2007-08-06T21:25:00.001+01:00

How true is it that the "pro-war left" was always a small battallion, which has been losing troops over time? (See Johann Hari quoted in Oliver Kamm's post , previously discussed here.) Well, there was Norman Geras, who moved to a position of neutrality, and Greg Djerejian of the fairly influential blog the Belgravia Dispatch, who has taken the position that 200,000 or 400,000 troops are needed in Iraq, so what's the point of 30,000.

Then there's Michael Ignatieff. His recent essay in The New York Times magazine is entitled 'Getting Iraq Wrong' and he starts off, "The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq...", but, if you read on, his views are a little more nuanced:

The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.

If we now have (finally) a proper counterinsurgency campaign under General Petraeus, it will take at least 18 months to make a significant difference, or to reach a point where properly equipped and trained Iraqi forces are strong enough to allow US troop numbers to be reduced. Let us assume that George Bush will continue to back the counterinsurgency strategy until he leaves office in January 2009. The Democrat controlled congress will no doubt continue to try to force it to be abandoned.

What will happen after that? John McCain's position is well known (see here). Mitt Romney has also said, "I do support the surge." Of course, this comes with the usual right-wing baggage - tax-cuts for the rich and so on ( C-span / BBC Parliament, 29 Jul). There is a third axis: Romney's credibility as a Republican candidate suffers because he is a Mormon; Rudi Giuliani is seen as too "liberal" in his lifestyle (he's been divorced) and in some of his former positions (pro-gay rights).

All the same, I believe it would be difficult to vote for the Democrats in good conscience.

Last October, I did not think the foreign policy positions of McCain and Hillary Clinton were too different, both having responsible positions on Iraq. Even in January this year, her statements were still just about reasonable (*). But then she said, "If we do not in Congress end this war by January 2009, then I will." (Financial Times, 3 Feb) These changes are summed up in another NYT article from this weekend: "Slowly, Clinton Shifts on War, Quieting Foes".

* 'After Iraq Trip, Clinton Proposes War Limits', NYT, 18 Jan 2007 - Hillary Clinton visited Iraq in the company of Senator Evan Bayh and Representative John M. McHugh; C-Span, via BBC Parliament, 21 Jan.

Update (8 Aug): More comments on Ignatieff at dstpfw. It is also worth reading David Aaronovitch's article in The Times / his blog, from 17 July, where referring to the 8 July editorial in The New York Times entitled 'The Road Home', he says:

Of course a lot of what was written in the editorial was true. I reemphasise the simple point that had I known that 100,000 Iraqis would die after the removal of Saddam Hussein, then I would have argued against military action. But this is a strange moment to abandon Iraq.

...

What’s left? What’s new?

2007-08-01T17:26:00.000+01:00

Oliver Kamm rips into Johann Hari for his critique of Nick Cohen and the "pro-war left" in general. There is more here.

Even when he was on "our side", I tended towards thinking that Hari was a fairly superficial writer. An example can be found in my post Global Justice. These comments were e-mailed to johann@johannhari.com at the time.

A month or two earlier, Hari was found to have engaged in plagiarism (or nicking other people's words) by Chris Brookes ( 18.8.04 ... "Great Coincidences of Our Time: In The New Republic, dated 1 October 2001... ").

Sorry, this is starting to sound like digging up dirt. I am merely trying to say that some people had doubts about him, even when he was the only journalist on The Independent to break from the easy consensus on Iraq.

---

Nick Cohen has responded himself:

[My book] looks at how Anglo-American leftists took up the left-wing opponents of Baathism when Saddam was America’s ally, but dumped them in 1990 when Saddam became America enemy. Opposition to America was more important to them than opposition to totalitarian regimes of the extreme right

It's a shame he didn't read more Orwell, since that's exactly what he accuses "the Left" (or the greater part of it) of doing in its attitude towards Nazi Germany, at least until the Soviet-German pact was broken in 1941.

even the once-respected BBC has admitted to fixing competitions...

That's a trivial aspect to attack the BBC on.

"Bernard Kouchner’s foreign ministry in Paris" is a convenient formulation to mask the fact that he's working for a right-wing president.

Comments are closed. If they were ever open. I have e-mailed these comments to nick@nickcohen.net.

The argument rumbles on...

Update (3 Aug) There are a couple of posts on dstpfw that are worth noting, the first on the threats of libel action, the second on the substantive issues, like the Iraq war.

On the first I have dropped the comment:

By the way, there is a case to be made for the libel laws: George Orwell made it once. But I'll save that for another day.

On the second, Eric summed it up neatly.

Johann preferred a short war to an endless tyranny, he didn't sign up for a long war against people trying to impose a new tyranny.

I don't know if there is a word for this - choosing between two options that didn't actually exist (that is, one of them didn't).

Update (3 Aug, 12:35) Will at a General Theory of Rubbish posted a new days ago about the "Great Coincidences", but he doesn't give the source, as far as I can see.

Staying the course

2007-07-26T20:43:00.000+01:00

John McCain:

My friends on the other side of this argument accuse those of us who oppose this amendment with advocating ‘‘staying the course,’’''staying the course,'' which is intended to suggest that we are intent on continuing the mistakes that have put the outcome of the war in doubt. Yet we all know that with the arrival of General Petraeus, we have changed course. We are now fighting with a counterinsurgency strategy, which some of us have argued we should have been following from the beginning and which makes the most effective use of our strength and does not strengthen the tactics of our enemy. The new battle plan is succeeding where our previous tactics have failed, although the outcome remains far from certain.

The tactics proposed in the amendment offered by my friends, Senators Levin and Reed — a smaller force confined to bases distant from the battlefield, from where they will launch occasional search-and-destroy missions and train the Iraqi military — are precisely the tactics employed for most of the war, which have, by anyone's account, failed miserably. Now, that, Mr. President, is staying the course, and it is a course that inevitably leads to our defeat [..] (Debate in the US Senate, 17-18 July 2007 ( C-span / BBC Parliament, 22 Jul; Congressional Record S9429)

The Republican leader, Mitch McConnell had this:

[Karl Levin] was asked these questions by the press. He said he didn't want to get into a debate as to how many troops will be needed. He said answering that question would be changing the subject. But that is the subject, isn't it? — whether and how many troops we are going to keep in Iraq. (S9432)

...

Khalid W. Hassan

2007-07-25T17:19:00.000+01:00

On Friday 13 July the British media reported that a journalist with The New York Times had been killed. From a link the NYT gave, I realised I had mentioned him in a previous post. Here are some of the details of his killing, from the NYT's bureau chief :

The gunmen opened fire with automatic rifles, pitting Mr. Hassan’s rundown Kia car with bullets. At least one struck him in the upper body, but failed to kill him. [..] Slumped in his seat, he called his mother, then his father, at work as a school caretaker, telling them he had been shot. “I’m O.K., Mom,” he said. [..]An off-duty policeman in a gasoline station line told Mr. Hassan’s father what came next. A second car with gunmen, an Opel Vectra, seeing Mr. Hassan on his cellphone, pulled forward and fired two fatal shots into Mr. Hassan’s head and neck.

[Mr. Hassan] left no doubt his greatest fear was the Mahdi Army, and his cellphone text message shortly before he was killed indicated he was seeking a way out of Saidiya that would skirt a police checkpoint controlled by Shiite militiamen. That led his family to conclude that Mahdi Army spotters, recognizing his car and knowing him to be a Sunni, might have alerted Shiite gunmen lurking along his route.

But on Friday night, 12 hours after Mr. Hassan died, another cellphone message caused friends and relatives to question their conclusion that he had been the victim of [Shiite] extremists. A relative reported he had received a text message warning him to quit his job and “return to God” or suffer a fate similar to Mr. Hassan’s. The message was signed by a group calling itself the Brigade of the Mujahedeen, a hitherto unknown group. Mujahedeen, or holy warriors, is a term usually used by Sunni extremists. ('In a Baghdad Killing, Questions That Haunt Iraq', 14 July 2007, John F. Burns)

John Burns goes on to speak of a previous member of the NYT’s Iraqi news staff who was shot and killed: a "journalist the newspaper relied on in Basra, Fakher Haider". He was mentioned in my post 'The White Ducks of Basra', from 2006.

Khalid Hassan, Photo: The New York Times.

His words from last year:

We still have the problems. We didn't get rid of them yet.

...

deteriorating

2007-07-24T14:06:00.000+01:00

A short AP dispatch recently referred to "the deteriorating security situation in Iraq". According to Jack Kelly in the Washington Times(*), the reporter probably put it that way without thinking much about it. But he's wrong: the situation may be "bad" or "grim" etc., but it's hardly getting worse, Kelly says, referring to al-Anbar.

It's interesting that words like "bad" or "grim" are not sufficient for people, but they have to say it's "deteriorating". Of course, it may be true that the situation in Iraq is hopeless, given the current state of public opinion in the US, but to say that would be to admit a whole set of more complex emotions.

Mind you, he did say two years ago that Iraq was "turning the corner" ('Some people can't accept the truth even when it's handed to them'). But in his recent piece, purely on this semantic point, he's right.

* Via C-span / BBC Parliament, 22 Jul

Letting people of

2007-07-23T15:50:00.000+01:00

Sarkozy is 'Not quite Napoleon', according to Agnès Poirier, Guardian Comment, Tuesday July 10, via Oliver Kamm).

For one thing, he has just banned mass mercy to the nation's prisoners on this Saturday's Bastille day, a measure that was restored by Napoleon in 1802. ... Our supreme leader has actually more in common with another Napoleon ... Napoleon the third,

I thought moving away from letting people of their parking tickets on 14 July was something in Sarkozy's favour: the practice was one of those things that reinforced the image of the French president as a kind of elected monarch.

One small irony: it was Napoleon III who made smoking cigarettes fashionable in Europe; under Sarkozy's watch, smoking is likely to be abolished in French cafés etc.

Update (18 Jul). From subsequent discussions on French radio, it appears that there are more serious objections to the Bastille Day amnesty: it comes at a time when much of France is "asleep", when the public services are not in the best of positions to re-integrate large numbers of ex-prisoners back into society.

Chirac has been questioned about activities as mayor of Paris, from 1977 to 1995, when it is alleged that state funds were used to pay workers for his RPR party. His defence seems to boil down to saying that everybody was doing similar things at the time.

The net seems to be closing in on Dominique de Villepin in the Clearstream affair. Denis Robert is claiming that the judicial enquiries are bearing out what he said in his books: that the trail would lead all the way back to the former prime minister and the president of the Republic. But Chirac is immune from investigation into actions during his presidency. It has been argued that the commission set up by Sarkozy to look into the constitution should consider whether it is still appropriate to sanctuariser the president from prosecution. In the United States, and it must really hurt the French to admit this, the president is subject to impeachment...

Containment, Neocons and other words

2007-07-21T20:20:00.000+01:00

It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s political allegory...

(11 Jul) From the London Review of Books. I dropped a comment on the blog lilarajiva.wordpress. It's still a good film, though, apart from the ending.

"the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising.”

What exactly could the CIA or anybody else outside have done to support the rising? I don't agree with the point made about containment. Surely containment included continuing the battle of ideas with a view to Communism collapsing from its own internal weaknesses? And 1956 did virtually destroy the appeal of Communism in western Europe. Hard on the Hungarians, of course.

---

Jeff Weintraub posts about various scare-words ...

the threat posed by the "very liberal Communists"

Of course, "liberal" has a specific usage in American English. Its meaning is different in British English, not to mention in French.

Historically ... the correct term is "Trotskyist." "Trotskyite" was a derogatory slur...

Correct.

Stalinists, for their part, used to call anyone they didn't like either a "Trotskyite" or a "fascist"--and sometimes both.

In Spain, the Communists, in complete disregard of the facts, accused the trotskyists of conspiring with the fascists. The following passage from Antony Beevor's 2006 book refers to "the anarchists", but exactly the same line was taken towards trotskyists. (The POUM, who Orwell fought with, were trotskyist in tendency, although they were not "pure" enough for Trotsky himself).

On 17 July [1936], just as the anarchists were preparing to defeat the generals' rising in Barcelona, the Comintern 'advised' the Spanish communist politburo: 'It is necessary to take preventative measures with the greatest urgency against the putschist attempts of the anarchists, behind which the hand of the fascists is hidden.' (p36)

Going back to Jeff's main subject, I heard on the BBC World Service last week a Business review or something, on the question of Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal, where the presenter described how the WSJ's opinion pages are a forum for the neo-conservatives and asked whether Murdoch could actually take it to the Left.

I would have thought it more accurate to say that the WSJ is a forum for opinion that is, quite simply, conservative. "Neo-conservative" is used here as an antonym of "on the Left", both terms being perhaps equally meaningless.

Incidentally, I tend to agree with the interviewee, who said that Murdoch is probably happy with the WSJ's opinion pages as they are.

Update (20 Jul): Another word that is being bandied about in the US is "libertarian", in connection with the Republican candidate, Ron Paul. From what I gather watching C-Span, his views can be described as "old conservative" (or paleo-con): isolationist, given to conspiracy theories (from what I remember, many of the old CTs, such as Pearl Harbour, came from the paleo-cons originally, before being taken over by "the Left").

France and Africa

2007-07-10T11:44:00.000+01:00

(29 Jun) One aspect of Sarkozy's speech at Toulon which has generally been ignored is his grande vision of a second union, alongside the EU, one between European countries and the south of the Mediterranean, with Africa beyond. This according to somebody on Le Franc Parler, 4 June, with x, a spokesman on foreign policy for the UMP (*). Algeria has tremendous potential, as does [the rest of] Africa. We need to help them develop. Otherwise, we we will be faced by an enormous wave of migration that we will not be able to cope with. Europe should work with Africa in the same way that North America has worked with South America or Japan has worked with the countries of its region.

We cannot ignore the genocides and civil wars in Africa. We need to address its problems very seriously, he says. At the same time, aid should be conditional on progress in democratisation and transparence. So, the choice of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister is consistent. He is known for championing the right to intervene, for saying to people like Charles Taylor, when you carry out genocide, massacre your people, you will be treated as an international criminal.

To which I add some comments of my own. There is certainly growing chaos in a whole region of Africa, from Sudan / Darfur to the former French colonies, Chad and the Central African Republic. There was a report on C4 News on the latter (last Tuesday) and then an Amnesty report mentioned on the BBC WS. The French still have a military presence in both countries.

On 11 Jun, Kouchner was in Sudan, and of course on 25 Jun President Sarkozy chaired a conference in Paris about Darfur - Condi Rice, China & the Arab League were there, but not the AU. It looks like there will be a "hybrid force", but not until next year. We shall see.

I have also one question on the general issue: if bringing people who carry out genocide to justice is thought such a good idea in France, why was there a near total opposition to the US-led intervention to remove Saddam Hussein? Not just criticism of the many errors of the US administration after the war, but a conviction that the intervention was inevitably, necessarily, bound to fail.

This could be due partly to the French tradition of anti-Americanism, in a wider sense an antipathy toward the "anglo-saxons", which has largely transferred from being against Britain to being against the US nowadays. It is worth, though, noting one thing: while George Bush is held in almost universal contempt, Tony Blair is probably hated less in France than he is in Britain.

Denis MacShane suggested last year that there was a deal whereby France was won over to the German position (against the Iraq war) by Germany offering to support completely the French position opposing reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy in late 2002 (**). MacShane, of course, was Europe Minister in the British government, so he is not an entirely unbiased observer.

Nonetheless, if Chirac could carry out such manoeuvrings without there being any substantial debate, it suggests there is an almost complete consensus among opinion-formers in France, such that Blair (or Brown) would envy.

One final thing: the UMP man points out, and I have heard this before from the French Right, that Britain is the only country in Europe, apart from France, to have substantial spending on defence; so any progress in European co-operation on defence will depend on Anglo-French initiatives.

Update (1 Jul):
* I missed the start and end of the programme. Fortunately, Radio France International's website has a good archives page for Le Franc Parler. The guest on 04/06/2007 was Pierre Lellouche. It is possible to listen again to the programme or to the one of 23 Apr, say, with Bernard Kouchner.

** Review of Gerhard Schröder's autobiography in the FT magazine, 2/3 Dec 2006.

Update (10 Jul): Sarkozy is visiting Algeria and Tunisia. As the BBC WS points out, this is his first trip outside Europe since becoming president.

A lost subtlety

2007-07-04T14:08:00.000+01:00

(28 Jun) - Justin Webb, a BBC correspondent in Washington, reports that the defeat for President Bush over the immigration bill could "open the floodgates", with further defeats possible on the Iraq "surge". No mention, of course, of the aspect that Bush has been defeated for being too liberal.

The best time?

2007-06-25T21:54:00.000+01:00

Talking about being overworked. This is from 12 May ---

"Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers." --Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment, July 23, 2006.
[..]
Gentleman C (head of Middle East 101, the Mossad unit that tracks American and European academics): You'll see that in every war, our military operations have taken less incoming criticism during summer months. We call this the "Away From My Desk" effect. Professors on summer break are less likely to write op-eds and show up in the media. There aren't any students to attend their campus teach-ins, and there's no student press to cover them.

Or maybe not.

Director of Military Intelligence: We in Military Intelligence don't share the Mossad's assessment of the "Away From My Desk" effect. It may be true that the professors manage to fire off more rounds of criticism during the academic year. But these are mostly short-range projectiles--teach-ins and classroom agitprop that don't have a range beyond the campus. Most academics are too preoccupied during the school year to get off medium- to long-range op-eds in the New York Times or The Nation. They're too busy preparing lectures, fixing syllabi, keeping office hours, or quashing rivals in faculty committees.

We think that during the summer, the quality and range of attacks against us actually increase. You've got professors with lots of time on their hands, and the more senior, tenured ones are looking for distractions from their bigger projects. In particular, we think a summer war could expose us to sustained assault by academic bloggers.

GOC Southern Command: I thought sustained blogging by a professor was pretty much tantamount to a suicide bombing.

Director of Military Intelligence: There's ample evidence for that. But we're talking about a group of highly ideological and thoroughly indoctrinated fanatics. They're quite willing to sacrifice career prospects in order to advance the cause. The tenured ones, of course, think they've already died and gone to heaven. They spend most of the year in classrooms full of near-virgins. It's almost impossible to deter a tenured professor.

"Near-virgins": I like that.

sandbox.blog-city.com/israel_lebanon_war_juan_cole, posted Monday, 30 April 2007
Via drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot (5 May).

Attack on the Samarra shrine, no.2

2007-06-18T17:36:00.000+01:00

(15 Jun) With all the news coming out of Gaza and Lebanon, Iraq has been pushed a little down the news headlines from the Middle East. The large-scale reprisals, such as happened after the attack last year and which were feared after last Wednesday's bombs at the Samarra shrine, have not materialised (as yet). The New York Times reported one intriguing detail:

Iraqi and American officials said the minarets’ destruction in Samarra also appeared to be the work of Al Qaeda, and that the explosives that destroyed them were placed inside each minaret. The attackers used the same kind of explosives and method as in last year’s bombing, Ambassador Crocker said.

The explosives consisted of two improvised explosive devices planted under each minaret, each with more than 50 pounds of explosives, an official in the governor’s office in Samarra said. “This work is not easy,” the official added. “It can’t be done quickly.” [..]
A few days before the latest explosion, a new police force was sent from the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry as a prelude to reconstruction. The guards surrounding the shrine ceded to the new police, but those inside refused to leave, according to an American military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Surely forces from a Shi'a-dominated Ministry wouldn't carry out, or collude in, the destruction of their own shrine. Would they?

By the way, the large number of refugees from Iraqi was prominent in the news a month or two ago. It was, though, pointed out by a few people, such as Michel Gabaudan of the UN Refugee Agency (C-Span, 22 Apr), that there was an Iraqi refugee problem before 2003. They were starting to return... until the attack on the Shi'a shrine in Samarra on 22 Feb 2006.

Tax proposals in France

2007-06-18T14:10:00.000+01:00

(8 Jun) Ségolène Royal, was on France Inter's 'Inter-activ'. She returned to the point that she had a short time to prepare, from being designated as candidate until the presidential election, compared to the 5 years Nicolas Sarkozy had.
Policy was decided before the candidate was chosen. It is necessary to accept the "logic of 5th Republic" - of having a strong leader, a leader who is not stifled by the party, rather a party that supports the leader, she said.

The interview also clarified certain points that I may not have fully understood before:

70% of estates are already exempt from inheritance tax: this would pass to 90% under Sarkozy's proposals.
The bouclier fiscale (tax cap) benefits only the 15,000 richest taxpayers.
The government also proposes to exempt interest on prime residences from tax. Ségolène is not opposed to this, but warns that increase in costs and property prices could wipe out any benefits. Controlling them would run counter to liberalism, she said.

But the major point of discussion as far as economic / fiscal proposals has been the TVA sociale, that is increases in Value Added Tax : the new Prime Minister, François Fillon, has described this as a TVA anti-délocalisation (against job-losses to abroad). This is not necessarily a bad thing, as has been shown in Germany, since VAT is imposed on imports, in contrast to taxes and other charges on income. But the PS have been able to portray it as a means of financing tax cuts for the better-off.

Update (17 Jun). I'm listening to the radio: the Socialists seem to have done relatively well. The BBC WS reports that initial results show the UMP with 328 seats, the PS 206. By midnight, the final results are in. It's looking even better: UMP 314, PS 218. So, 40 seats gained by the Socialists from the UMP (compared to 2002). Also, Alain Juppé, who was going to be number 2 in the new government has been defeated. There is no constitutional reason why this should bar him from office (in fact, ministers have to resign their seats anyway), but Sarkozy has said that anyone who stands for election and is defeated cannot be part of the government (- see the FT, 9 Jun).

At 7:00, I heard that Royal and Hollande had split up as a couple: France Inter had just had aired their exclusive interview with Ségolène Royal. The news had been released the previous evening by a press agency, it seems. When the BBC reported the story, they said, rather brutally, that she had accused him of having affairs. In the extract from the interview that I heard, she said that he could carry out his vie sentimentale elsewhere (vie sentimentale = love life).

Correction (19 Jun). After listening to the whole of Ségolène's latest interview, she does not actually mention there anything about the vie sentimentale. But it is supposed to be in a book that was due to come out on Wednesday. Le Monde had this: "J'ai demandé à François Hollande de quitter le domicile, de vivre son histoire sentimentale de son côté..." A download of the interview is available here.

Interview on the French election (Jeff Weintraub)

2007-06-14T16:59:00.000+01:00

(9 Jun) I know it's a long time now since this interview, but I just wanted to make a couple of comments.

On the uneven pattern of migration from Eastern Europe, it's relatively simple really. Only the UK and Ireland allowed unlimited access when Poland and the rest joined the EU in 2004. France, Germany etc. imposed restrictions. Even the British government, though, thought it necessary to impose limits when Rumania and Bulgaria joined at the beginning of 2007.

Spain's immigration "problem", I thought, comes more from the South: all those people from Africa trying to reach Europe via the Canaries.

Italy's policy has certainly been unwelcoming, especially under Berlusconi, but it's worth reading an article from the FT Magazine a couple of years ago that I posted about previously:

Because of its geographic position and long coastline — more than 7,000 kilometres — Italy has now become the first country of arrival for more asylum seekers and migrants than any of its EU partners. A few go overland from the former Yugoslavia, but most arrive by sea...

I also don't altogether agree with your analysis that Sarkozy has received a clear mandate, unlike Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in 1983 and Blair in 1997 got more than 40% but less than 45% of the popular vote, which gave them overwhelming majorities in Parliament.

Sarkozy got 31% of the vote in the first round of the Presidential election (in Britain, of course, there is only one round). Opinion polls now suggest that, with 41% of the vote, the UMP could get as many as 420 out of 577 deputies in the National Assembly (Le Monde, 8 Jun; FT, 9 Jun). So, it appears that having two rounds as against one does not make that much difference. But a two-round system is intrinsically fairer - a transferable vote would be fairer still - and I think it would have reduced Thatcher's majority in 1983.

Maybe the difference in France 2007 is that, in spite of Francois Bayrou's strong showing in the Presidentielle, the centre is weaker, being now split between the old UDF and Bayrou's new party, the Mouvement Democrate (MoDem). (Also, if I understand correctly, for the legislature, the second round is not between the top 2 candidates, but between all those scoring more than 12.5% in the first round.

Update (11 Jun). Listen to this in English, while it's still available: analysis from Alasdair Sandford, one of the BBC's correspondents in Paris (Friday 8 Jun). He concludes that, just as the supporters of the far-left parties switched their support to Mitterand in 1981, so they did to Ségolène Royal, but they are now fewer in number.

On the other hand, Bertrand Le Gendre in Le Monde, 4/5 Jun, argues that the Parti socialiste has come out of the Presidential election stronger, in spite of appearances: its left-wing is shattered, its rival parties on the Left are weakened. They are thus confirmed as the only credible opposition to the Right in a bipartisme (two-party system).

Neither war nor...

2007-06-13T11:33:00.000+01:00

(21 May) A small correction on Bernard Kouchner, occasioned by posts from Jeff Weintraub and Norman Geras.

I know it's been in the FT and the NYT and on the BBC, but I don't think it's altogether accurate to say that Bernard Kouchner favoured the forcible removal from power of Saddam Hussein. I would put it like this:

Most French intellectuals and politicians felt few qualms about supporting a policy to keep Saddam Hussein in power. One exception was Bernard Kouchner.

Shortly before the 2003 war, he wrote an article called 'Ni la guerre ni Saddam' ('Neither war nor Saddam').

Or, as Richard Holbrooke puts it, “he does not come with a visceral anger towards the American ‘hyperpower.’”

Churchill vs Princess Diana

2007-06-12T12:04:00.000+01:00

(20 May) This from Jeff Weintraub ...

To start with the aside

unlike Brighouse, I thought "The Queen" was actually quite a good movie ...

(In reply to Harry Brighouse's 'Its difficult for a republican to watch The Queen, and for several reasons. First, its not very good...')

I enjoyed "The Queen", too. But John Lloyd made an important point recently, in the context of British culture now. See below. The 'actor playing Blair' (Michael Sheen) also appeared as Blair before, in 'The Deal', a TV drama from 2003. Another appendix below (if it makes any sense). This, I think, is exempt from the criticism of the shallow and cynical nature of much political drama.

Five Days in London, May 1940? The story is pretty well known: I remember hearing a radio play about it a year or two ago.

There is another story, from after 1945. After the war, Britain faced terrible economic problems and sought a loan from the US. There were doubts on the part of many Americans as to whether such a loan should be granted, when Britain had such a left-wing government. But on a visit to the US, Churchill said of the leaders of the new government that, although they were Socialists, they were good men, "they served in my wartime coalition."

That seemed to me to be an act of extraordinary patriotism.

('Mortgaged to the Yanks', BBC4, first broadcast 3 Jan 2007, by (Sir) Christopher ('Red Socks') Meyer, former British ambassador to Washington.)
-----------------------------------------------------------

The weak in politics By John Lloyd Friday Mar 30 2007 10:30 [extracts]

Alistair Beaton's play King of Hearts shows a prime minister and leader of the opposition gathered at Windsor. The king, after three and a half decades as heir apparent, has had a stroke a few months after his coronation. He is dying. His eldest son is eminently suited to succeed him – except that he is engaged to a young Muslim woman and wants to convert to Islam. [..] As in his television plays A Very Social Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair, Beaton presents what a significant part of the cultural and media establishment thinks we should think about trust. Briefly, we should never trust the people we elect to govern and manage our society.

As Peter Morgan's script for The Queen tells us, we can, on the other hand, have trust in the monarch. Just as the Queen emerged as the moral centre in the eponymous film, so the fictional Prince Richard, the character modelled on real Prince William in the King of Hearts, is almost the only principled character.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's moral muddle-headedness is contrasted with the steady faith of Nasreen, the Prince's fiancée. And this is the predominant reason why Prince Richard chooses to renounce his role as head of the Church of England and convert to Islam: "Because they believe in something."

Trust attaches only to non-elected authority and to unwavering faith - of whatever content. Here, amid the guffaws, is a radically anti-Enlightenment vision. Whether or not those who promote it are aware of the implications is open to doubt, but this is anti-liberal democracy lite, which can fall back on the rationale that it is satire, or just a laugh at the expense of public figures.
[..]
Trust should be a matter of the head - conferred on those you have reason to believe deserve it. Instead, trust has apparently become at least as much a matter of the heart. [..] If we withhold trust from authority figures because they are authority figures and instead trust those with whom we feel apparently intimate, we have suborned reason to sentiment.

If a climate is being created in which it is wrong in principle to trust public figures (as opposed to using one's reason to determine when to trust them or not), then we are entering a new intellectual age that seeks, through art, to deprive politicians and public figures not just of all credibility, but of all possibility of credibility. Our political conversation and our professed attitudes all point to a gigantic loss of trust. But what is really being lost is our capacity to reason.

us.ft.com - [ft.com/...]
-----------------------------------------------------------
'The Deal' [notes from 2003]

... : totally brilliant - archive footage of Kinnock, Thatcher (also seen slumped in back of car). John Smith smiling at Brown's maiden speech. Brown and Blair making a nuisance in committee [though faced with an overwhelming Tory majority in Parliament], Brown quoting E.M.Forster '2 Cheers for democracy', Blair : no other Western European country interferes with Trade Unions' organisation. Smith holds up 5 fingers to Blair, for years. Smith on the train from London to Scotland joking about Thatcher [talking to one of her MPs about why people voted for him] '30,000 for me, 486 for you'.

Brown to Blair : don't be ashamed of being English - it's your greatest asset. Blair in Islington, worrying about pissing it away in opposition, while his friends make good money. Thatcherwasm.

[Brown on Blair standing as deputy in '92 : even with John's backing, he'd only get 30% of the votes.]

Brown to Smith about Blair : he's just a blow-in.

And I've only watched half of it.

[Brown : have we come this far to go crawling to the T&G (union) ?
Whelan : have we come this far to have a tory leading the party ? ]

Ségolène Royal: the gender effect

2007-06-11T13:03:00.000+01:00

(16 May) This via e-mail

Ms. Royal had repeatedly appealed to the women of France to vote for her in a show of female solidarity. But Mr. Sarkozy ... got the majority of the women’s vote,

I should imagine that Sarkozy also got the majority of the men’s vote. I have a little anecdotal evidence that women may have voted for her in spite of the fact that she is a Socialist. It's interesting, though, that in her closing remarks in the televised debate with Sarkozy, Ségolène held up the example of another female leader, Angela Merkel.

There's something else: Ségolène Royal is one half of a political couple. I don't think it's sexist to mention that, since it's part of the condition of women that they tend to be married to men. It's interesting to compare Hillary and Bill, but I don't really think there are any comparisons. Francois Hollande, her partner, is I think fairly described as a dinosaur of the Left (the French call them 'elephants'). Apart from the usual economic issues, there is another example: the case of Cesare Battisti, a former extremist, wanted in Italy in connection with four murders, whose cause many on the French Left have taken up for some unaccountable reason (This is hardly ever reported outside France, but here is a piece from the BBC).

When the affair was back in the news in March, Le Monde reported that Ségolène has avoided speaking about this publicly, but those close to her say that, in private, there is no secret about the reservations she had when Hollande went to support Battisti, in February 2004. ("Depuis trois ans, elle a d'ailleurs toujours évité ce sujet sensible, pour lequel une parti de la gauche s'était mobilisée. En privé, ses proches ne font pas mystère des réserves qu'elle éprouvait lorsque François Hollande était allé soutenir, en février 2004, l'ex-activiste écroué à la prison de la Santé." )

Sarkozy, le président élu...

2007-05-14T22:01:00.000+01:00

Immediate reactions to the result of the second-round vote: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on French TV, calls for a renewal of the Parti Socialiste along Social Democratic lines; Pierre Moscovici, says that it shows the need to select a candidate at a much earlier stage - Sarkozy had been, at least in his own mind, the Right's candidate since 22 April 2002.

Denis MacShane, on BBC Radio 4's election special, takes a softer line on Ségolène Royal - the French Socialists need to redefine themselves, like New Labour. On the World Service, the following morning, he says, "As I'm on Left, I wanted to see Ségolène Royal as President" (that's not what he was saying in The Observer the week before) and also expresses concerns about Sarkozy's position on Turkey.

The WS also had somebody from Poland on the same programme. Poland is keen to at least keep open the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU. Poland, of course, has strong historical links with parts of Ukraine (the pro-western parts). But Ukraine is seen as being behind Turkey in the 'queue' to join the EU.

In his speech after the vote, Sarkozy spoke against the competition of commemoration, "repentance, which is a form of self-hatred (haine de soi-même)". Commentators later suggested that this was a sop to Le Pen's voters.

Protest at Amir Kabir

2007-05-13T20:08:00.000+01:00

This doesn't seem to have received the attention it deserves:

TEHRAN, May 7 — Students at Amir Kabir University fended off club-wielding university security guards on Monday and went ahead with elections for a pro-democracy association.

Despite the successful election at Amir Kabir, it is not clear that balloting for student associations will be allowed at other universities. The associations, a powerful center of support and communication among student democracy advocates, are a constant irritant to the government, which seeks to maintain strict control over politics and cultural norms.
[..]
Amir Kabir University has long been a center of student political activity. Students there chanted against Mr. Ahmadinejad when he visited the university late last year and set fire to posters bearing his likeness.

[..T]he student democracy advocates said they scored a victory on Monday when they managed to hold their annual elections.

“The students reached the conclusion that the only way was to resist,” said Ehsan Mansouri, a student leader who has been banned from attending classes. “The students guarded the ballot boxes as they were attacked and clubbed severely by the university security guards.”

Protests erupted last week after four student publications appeared with articles that offended religious sensibilities. Student advocates denounced the articles, saying the publications had been forged in an effort to frame the students. Under Iran’s Islamic law, punishment for the offense, technically “insulting religious sanctities,” can be death.
[..]
Conservatives protested last week inside and outside the university, calling for a second cultural revolution. Under the first, which followed the 1979 Islamic revolution, universities around the country were closed, and liberal students and professors were purged.
[..]
The police also started seizing satellite dishes last week. Because the dishes provide access to opposition television channels they are officially banned, but that does not stop large numbers of people from using them.

Reformist politicians [..] became alarmed last week when a former nuclear negotiator, Mohammad Hussein Moussavian, was arrested on espionage charges. To many here, the arrest seemed to signal a new crackdown on social freedoms.

“No one should be surprised if they stage another cultural revolution and shut down the universities,” said Saeed Leylaz, an economist and political commentator in Tehran. “The Islamic Republic has reached a stage that wants to suppress any kind of dissent, even if that means creating a police state.”

Nazila Fathi in The New York Times, 'Beating by Guards Fails to Stop Voting, Iranian Students Say', May 8, 2007. Comment is superfluous. Read the whole thing while it's still accessible.

Ségolène vs Sarkozy, week 2

2007-05-11T22:00:00.000+01:00

The Times has been unremittingly hostile to Ségolène Royal (this, of course, is part of the Murdoch press, that I mentioned in a previous post). For example, 'Ségolène Royal [..] has proved an erratic lightweight, an incoherent debater and an old-fashioned leftwinger with little understanding of how clichéd and dogmatic socialism has failed the country in the past.' ('Chance for France', 16 April)

Criticism has been made of Ségolène's foreign policy "gaffes". The most notable of these was concerning Iran. The criticism was first made by her opponents for the Socialist Party candidacy, then enthusiastically taken up by the British Press, not only in The Times, but also by Denis MacShane in The Observer (29 April).
...
Ségolène Royal, in her call the Monday after the first vote for discussions with François Bayrou, said she was looking to create a broad-based coalition, from far-left to centre, to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy, similar to the one in Italy Romano Prodi assembled to defeat Berlusconi. The discussions, which both sides insisted be open and televised, eventually took place on the Saturday (28 Apr). Bayrou, like the Socialists, has warned of the dangers of electing Sarkozy, comparing him to Berlusconi. I don't quite see it myself. It is one thing to say that Sarkozy has the support of Berlusconi; it does not follow that he is like him in controlling, or wanting to control, large parts of the media.

On Blair's support for Sarkozy, Denis MacShane, former Europe Minister in the Blair government, provides a further indication: 'She spoilt Merkel's plans on Europe by insisting on impossible demands to rewrite the defunct constitution to placate protectionists in the isolationist left in France. [..] Royal was invited to London to meet Blair and Brown but refused to come.' See also Martin Kettle in The Guardian (29 April). Kettle says that it is clear Blair favours Sarkozy, but he continues: "I made a point of asking several MPs the Ségo-Sarko question. [..] Only the Conservatives have no mixed feelings; they are all for Sarkozy. Among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs the reaction is far more conflicted. In many cases they answered that the heart said Ségo but the head said Sarko. A Labour cabinet minister was one of the few unambiguous Royal backers. ... Gordon Brown is ambiguous on this question too. [..] Brown is comfortable with Sarkozy's deregulatory economic instincts and with his openness to America. And yet Brown hesitates. When Sarkozy launched his election campaign in London, Blair met him while Brown made his excuses. Brown has put out feelers towards the Royal camp too, which Blair has not."

---

On Wednesday (2 May) the two candidates engaged in 2 hours 39 minutes of televised debate (Extracts in Le Monde; in English from the BBC; others are my own transcription).

On Turkey, Ségolène said that she was in favour of a pause, but that France has given its word (donner sa parole) and must keep it. Sarkozy said flatly that Turkey cannot be part of the European Union because it is not part of Europe: it is in Asia Minor. But, Ségolène said, we should not slam the door in its face. ... (23h06)

Ségolène was happy enough with her so-called "gaffe" on Iran that she repeated it in the televised debate. 'I would go beyond [Sarkozy's position]", she said. "We must be very firm with them." (23h10)

In her closing remarks, Ségolène chose to evoke the example of another female leader: 'I know that for some of you, it will not be obvious to say that a woman can hold the highest responsibilities. Others are doing it on this planet. There's Angela Merkel [in Germany].' (23h40)

In a highly revealing passage, Sarkozy set out his vision on the economy: 'If employment is taxed too highly, employment will go. If capital is taxed too highly, capital will go. If there is no more capital, no more work, there is no growth. [..] We cannot impose higher taxes than those that are paid in other countries.' (22h17)

Sarkozy wants to get rid of inheritance tax (droits de succession). Again, I find it almost incredible that this has not received more attention (outside France, that is). He also wants to maintain the cap on the maximum amount of tax an individual has to pay (22h17, 22h30).

Bernard Sananès commented: "Elle est quand même très loin d'un discours socialiste traditionnel qui serait anti-entreprise." (21h58) I noted myself a couple of phrases: 'Je suis pour l'entreprise ... je suis d'accord [avec Sarkozy] sur les droits et les devoirs.'

In an article in Le Monde the following morning, Sananès summed up, 'Elle a montré que même si elle ne gagne pas dimanche elle peut être le chef de l'opposition...' ('Ségolène Royal a créé la surprise')

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On Thursday morning (3 May), Ségolène Royal was on France Inter. Asked a question about Sarkozy being a fascist, she replied along the lines of, 'Well, he is supported by Berlusconi and Aznar, who both supported the war in Iraq. I am supported by Prodi and Zapatero.'

She sought to make as broad an appeal as possible: 'I believe the presidential election is a direct contact between a personality and the French people. I am now above the political parties. I want to address myself to each person (chacun et chacune)...' Later: 'I am no longer the candidate of the Socialist Party. I am above and beyond the parties, in direct connection with the country: that is the very meaning of the presidential election (...en liaison direct avec le pays: c'est le sens meme de l'election presidentielle).'

Furthermore, she said, she had taken up François Bayrou's proposal, that any growth above 2.5% should be used to repay debt. (That might seem a fairly theoretical possibility. Cf. the debate, at 21h32)

Bernard Guetta, the station's commentator on international affairs, asks a question about the difficulty of trying to renegotiate on the European constitution, especially on the basis of incorporating social protections ('Ne serait-il pas hasardeux de vouloir renegocier un traite constitutionnel europeen, d'obtenir l'accord de nos partenaires europeens, en particulier sur ce protocole social additionnel que vous souhaitez ajouter au projet constitutionnel?') Ségolène says that she thinks the "social protocol" is a good thing, but will involve discussions and negotiations with each country... Guetta interjects at this point, 'Even with Great Britain?' Ségolène: 'I think we will start with the Euro zone, perhaps. Then we will pull the others along (entraîner les autres), I hope.'

Judt on the French election

2007-05-11T14:47:00.000+01:00

Just a few more points I didn't manage to pull into my last post, being a response to an article by Tony Judt in The New York Times (*). Thanks to Jeff Weintraub for drawing my attention to this, in a e-mail following his post.

On Ségolène Royal favouring Turkey's entry to the EU, it's certainly an unpopular position, as Tony Judt confirms. If Ségolène is uncommitted, which I don't accept, that is much better than outright opposition, since the EU will not have to make its final decision on Europe for 10 or 15 years, if ever.

As for the remark about "a leftist mirror of the agenda of neoconservative strategists in Washington", I don't really understand this, unless it's a reflection of the argument you sometimes hear that something (Turkey in the EU) that Paul Wolfowitz favours is not a good thing after all, that extending the EU is really a way of weakening it. So, Judt appears to criticize Sarkozy for breaking with Chirac on this, while not giving Royal credit for maintaining the same line.

Many of Ms. Royal’s socialist supporters manage to be both anti-American and anti-European...

This reminds me of something Tony Blair said in a recent interview: 'Some parts of the [right-wing] media, he adds, are now both Eurosceptic and anti-American: "Well, work that one out ..." ' In fact, in the case of the French Left, I can understand it, that it's all part of the anti-globalisation argument. Many on the Left - in the Socialist Party and among the sort of people who write editorials in Le Monde - have traditionally stressed the importance of a strong Europe, as a counterweight to the hyperpuissance. But they were outflanked during the referendum on the constitution by those who argue that the EU itself is the problem, that it is too "liberal". Again, the importance of 29 May 2005 can scarcely be overstated.

One or two other points:

But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls.

It would be nice if all this could be properly tabulated, taking what statisticians call a "cohort" of 19-year-olds, say, and showing so many in employment, so many unemployed, so many in prison... From what I've seen, Le Monde Économie does that sort of thing better than the British press. The only snag is that the French do not allow the recording of ethnicity in such figures (**). Something to do with the values of the Republic, apparently. Many in France think the advances supposed to have been made under the Blair government are an illusion. One book that came out last year was called Le Royaume enchanté de Tony Blair.

Finally,

In 1995 [Chirac] became the first president to acknowledge openly France’s role in the Holocaust: “The occupier was assisted by the French, by the French state,”

Here, at least, Chirac appears in a better light than Sarkozy - cf. the remarks I made before, regarding the report in Le Monde, 19 Apr.

* 'France Looks Ahead, and It Doesn’t Look Good', 22 April 2006 ( link requires payment).

Ségolène vs Sarkozy, week 1

2007-05-06T20:46:00.000+01:00

The campaign in France has told us much about how divided the Left is in Europe. In Britain, are we so hypnotized by Blair (and Brown) and their pact with the devil, otherwise known as the Murdoch press, that we fail to see what is happening?

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So, that's the attention-grabbing first paragraph out of the way. As I feared, this is now part of the post-mortem. Ségolène did quite well in the debate Wednesday night, but I still thought she had less than a 20% chance of winning on Sunday (curious, after writing that, I checked on the odds and found that Ladbrokes were offering 5 to 1).

On Sunday (22 Apr), as the results of the first round were announced, BBC Parliament carried live coverage from one of the French TV channels (TF1, I think). Olivier Besancenot called for a vote for Ségolène Royal in the second round, even before she made her speech about an hour and a half after the announcement of the results (21:30 CET). It was quite a long speech: she committed to a new referendum on the EU constitution, positioning herself against Sarkozy's proposal for a mini-treaty and promising that the French people would not have the decision taken behind its back (à son insu).

The BBC's Mark Mardell says that, privately, Britain's Labour government is hoping for a Sarkozy victory, since the last thing they want is another referendum (election special on Radio 4).

Election présidentielle : les résultats du premier tour. One of the far-left candidates, Olivier Besancenot, took 4.1 % of the vote. The 5% threshold is significant, since if a candidate gets more than that he gets funding of 5 million, otherwise 800,000 Euros. This was mentioned by Philippe Gelie, of Le Figaro on C-Span (22 Apr). Details are available on Wikipedia (though I couldn't get their figures to add up): Élections présidentielles sous la Cinquième.

Sarkozy caused some waves in Europe by speaking out against "unrestricted free trade", but according to the Financial Times (31 Mar), one of his advisers has said that he is protectionist in areas where he would be constrained by the EU and "liberal" in areas he could change - in domestic policy. This has not gone unnoticed by the French. J-M Colombani in his editorial in Le Monde: "Nous eûmes donc les allers-retours de Nicolas Sarkozy, se proclamant libéral avant de redevenir classiquement colbertiste. A moins que, comme le disent les Britanniques, il ne soit libéral quand les affaires marchent, protectionniste quand l'Etat est impuissant."

Both candidates have taken positions that move beyond the French consensus on the US and Iraq, Sarkozy in his Press conference on foreign policy in March, Ms Royal longer ago. However, at her rally the Thursday before the first round vote, she is reported to have got her biggest cheer by speaking about France not going down on its knees to the United States. There is more fairly predictable stuff on her website. But if Sarkozy can be allowed to say one thing and mean another on the economy, then maybe Ségolène can be allowed her meaningless posturing on this.

On Turkey, Ségolène has been fairly courageous in taking the unpopular position of favouring their entry to the EU. (*) (Here we might compare the position in Germany, where many of Angela Merkel's foreign policy positions are more attractive than Gerhard Schröder's, but she is far more opposed to Turkey's entry than he is.) Sarkozy has always been opposed to Turkish entry, but, in an interesting sidelight, Michel Barnier, former FM and now adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, interviewed on Thursday, said he used to support Turkey joining the EU, but changed his mind after the French rejection of the EU constitution in the May 2005 referendum.

But Turkey is, literally, peripheral to the discussion about Europe. You may have heard that the Socialists have been accused of conducting the campaign on the basis of Tous Sauf Sarkozy (anything but Sarkozy). In fact, when it comes to Europe, it's more like anything but Britain, i.e. anything but the anglo-saxon, ultra-liberal, model. This view is shared by some quite surprising figures, such as Bernard Kouchner. Even after ten years of Blair government, this is still what Britain means in France.

So, the French look to restart the Franco-German "motor". Here the Socialists may have some advantage, since Sarkozy has made some remarks which, apart from not being strictly true about France having nothing to be ashamed of in its history, are rather insensitive towards Germany:

Le discours musclé sur l'identité nationale, les petites phrases répétées dans lesquelles le candidat Sarkozy a renvoyé à l'Allemagne son passé nazi - "la France n'a pas rougir de son histoire, elle n'a pas commis de génocide, elle n'a pas inventé la solution finale", a-t-il dit à Nice le 30 mars - ne sont pas passés inaperçues. Même si les commentaires sont restés limités. Le Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung s'est contenté de relever les critiques de l'ancienne ministre socialiste Elisabeth Guigou, qui a reproché à M. Sarkozy d'attaquer l'Allemagne. ('La campagne porte en germe des conflits profonds entre Paris et Berlin', Le Monde, 19 Apr)

But the Socialists' call for "reform" of the European Central Bank may well be seen by the Germans as a demand for a more lax monetary policy. Furthermore, Sarkozy's proposal for a mini-treaty to take forward reform of the EU, is more in line with Ms Merkel's position (not to mention Mr Blair's).

One problem for Ségolène Royal is that, unlike Blair, she has not had three years to establish a new image and policies for her party. So, although she may come across as fairly Blairist when interviewed, much of the time, in the long discussions on radio (which I mainly hear) and on TV (I presume), it is others who speak for her. Many of these put forward fairly unreconstucted views on the economy, which it is easy for Sarkozy and his people to demolish as presaging continued stagnation for France.

Ségolène may be the party's candidate for president, but she is not its leader. This is different from the way we do things in Britain, but, bizarrely enough, more similar to the way things are done in the US.

On the face of it, the two candidates' policies on the 35-hour week are not too different: Sarkozy is not actually promising to scrap it, while Ségolène has promised to be flexible in its application, extending it to smaller companies only after negotiation with the "social partners". But the rhetoric on each side is very different. Sarkozy claims to favour for those who get up early (de bonne heure) to go to work. "Work more to earn more"... The Socialists are criticised for having a vision where work is a fixed quantity, a cake to be divided up. On the Socialists' side, the argument is that they are all in favour of people working more, but not of a society where some have the opportunity to work overtime, while others are spectators, in unemployment. Unemployment is the major problem for France, especially among the young, especially among the immigrant communities. Yet it is doubtful that the 35-hour week helps to reduce this, since the restrictions it imposes are detrimental to the performance of the economy. Also, the 35-hour week may not be too popular, especially among the lower-paid.

Ségolène Royal may have had the Spanish PM Zapatero at her rally the Thursday before the first round, but Sarkozy made a tellingly point in an interview several weeks ago, when he described how he asked Zapatero whether he was planning to introduce a 35-hour week in Spain: "he laughed in my face."

All the same, what Sarkozy proposed to mitigate the effects of the 35-hour week, exempting overtime worked from tax, seemed so bizarre that I thought I had misunderstood it, but I later heard it confirmed on the BBC.

I commented about the Contrat Premier Embauche previously. Here Ségolène could do well to take a leaf out of Tony Blair's book. As I noted at the time, Emmanuel of Ceteris Paribus pointed out last year, showing more knowledge of the subject than most people in Britain, how the Blair government modified the employment laws from the Thatcher era.

If we could get beyond the vague rhetoric - about "ultra-liberalism", globalisation and so on, we might see some concrete issues and some proposals that many would find attractive, even in Britain.

Let's have another look at some of the ideas put forward by the minor candidates in the first round. Some of them, admittedly, are not too impressive. Olivier Besancenot, on 19 Apr, had the slogan "pas de subventions aux licencieurs", which might be literally translated as "no subsidies to job-cutters", but probably means rather "no job-cuts by people who receive subsidies". Bernard Kouchner later described Besancenot as being "d'un talent formidable".

José Bové, on 17 Apr, said that the European constitution had been rejected in France was not because people were against Europe as such, but because they were against the Europe that had been presented to them, against an expansion that had left new entrants able to use tax competition to attract jobs. Marie-George Buffet (PCF), on 18 Apr, also spoke about harmonisation fiscale.

Nobody can defend the idea that workers in the "old" countries of the EU have a god-given right for their jobs to be defended against competition from eastern Europe. But the erosion of the tax base by countries aggressively competing against each other to attract companies by cutting the tax rates on them is something around which people could find common cause.

A campaign against tax avoidance might not seem very exciting, but somebody has to pay taxes, and if the rich do not, the poor have to (or see their services cut).

Yet in Britain, we end up with a Labour government that is secretly hoping for Ségolène Royal to lose. Why? Because then they do not want to face having to have another referendum on the European constitution. Why? Because the Press would be largely hostile to the new constitution. Why? Because of the very "social" elements that Ségolène would seek to include.

Aside from the issue of corporate taxes, London and South-East England has become a very attractive place to live for billionaires from Russia and elsewhere, in large part because of a tax regime that lead many to describe the UK as being virtually a tax haven.

On the other side, even internationalists like Bernard Kouchner insist on seeing issues in national terms - France and Germany versus Britain (**).

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* Eventually, I found this on her website:

"La lettre" n°22 - Vendredi 13 octobre [2006]
A propos de l’adhésion de la Turquie à l’Union Européenne, Ségolène Royal a rappelé que le processus "se terminera par un référendum. Un certain nombre de conditions doivent être remplies, par rapport à l’inquiétude des opinions sur la stabilité des frontières de l’Europe. Cette question sera débattue. Il faudra pour que le peuple français se prononce, avoir entre-temps apporté un certain nombre de garanties. Le référendum ne sera pas facile. Il va falloir beaucoup de travail, d’évolution, pour que le peuple français se prononce positivement. Ce travail est entre les mains de tous", (my emphasis)

As I understand it, Chirac had a law passed requiring a referendum before France approves any further enlargement, beyond the two countries that are already close to joining.

- Envoys hope for a ‘friendlier’ France -

** 'Le Franc Parler', France Inter, 23 Apr.

Le vote utile

2007-04-20T20:50:00.000+01:00

Unlike André Glucksmann, I will not be calling for a vote for Nicolas Sarkozy. For many reasons, I think it would be better to vote for Ségolène Royal in the first round of the election in France on Sunday. Firstly, because she is a woman, when many are still saying that a woman cannot be President of the Republic ("who would look after the children?"). Then, because I think she would make a good president.

An expression that has been frequently heard over the last few weeks is "le vote utile". This has been mentioned even by people interviewed on the BBC as "the useful vote" or even "the vote useful". The normal way of referring to it in English is, of course, "the tactical vote".

As Francois Hollande, first secretary of the PS and Ségolène Royal's "partner", pointed out a few weeks ago, there are 3 Trotskyist's among the candidates for the first round. In total, there are 7 candidates on what the French call the "gauche de la gauche", who employ the anti-globalization, anti-(economic) liberalism, rhetoric in one form or another. There was some coverage given, even in the UK, to Jean-Marie Le Pen's struggle to obtain the 500 signatures from elected officials necessary to become a candidate. Quite how the 3 Trotskyist's etc managed to obtain their sponsorship (parrainage) with apparent ease remains a mystery to me. (Only José Bové suffered a "cliff-hanger".) None of these, of course, stand any chance. The most-supported is Olivier Besancenot with around 3 or 4%. One I heard just after Easter, Gérard Schivardi, I thought was a caricature. But they all receive considerable publicity and the vote for the candidates of these grouplets adds up to about 13%. (All of the candidates, who have been given their 20 minutes on the radio, can be heard again at: La présidentielle 2007 sur France Inter.)

Given this, Ms Royal first faces a constant struggle to prove that her socialism is "pure" enough. Then, she must convince the broader French public in order to actually become president. As I think the FT's correspondent pointed out, many thought that Lionel Jospin in 2002 timed his "swing to the centre" too early.

For example, when Ségolène Royal made some proposals to address France's appallingly high youth unemployment, Marie-George Buffet, the Communists' candidate, replied, "No to a CPE of the left". This referred to Dominique de Villepin's ill-fated Contrat Premier Embauche proposal (Financial Times, 7 Apr). Also, the Parti Socialiste has backed itself into something of a corner with its defence of the 35-hour week. Sarkozy looks likely to win votes with his simple slogan of "Travailler plus pour gagner plus" ("Work more to earn more").

The man who eliminated Jospin, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National, is thought to have his support mostly under-stated by the opinion polls. When the last of the candidates had given their interviews Friday morning, the airwaves were given over to the pundits and pollsters. One of them (Jean-Marc Lech) pointed out that the support for Sarkozy plus Le Pen had remained constant at around 42, 43% (mp3 download).

The notion of the vote utile also comes into play with regard to the centrist candidate, François Bayrou. Since he is regarded as having a better chance of beating Sarkozy, many will be tempted to vote for him. Bayrou is seen as a man of the Right - he opposes the 35-hour week, for example - but without Sarkozy's racist overtones. Jean-Marie Colombani caused something of a stir with his signed editorial in Le Monde on Thursday (as I've said before, these are a rarity):

Le 22 avril 2007 ne peut pas, ne doit pas ressembler au 21 avril 2002. [.. L'aspiration à la diversité] doit s'effacer devant un impératif démocratique : éviter la désillusion et la colère qui naîtraient à nouveau d'un débat faussé, amputé. Il est important que notre "cher et vieux pays" puisse, au second tour, dire clairement où il veut aller [..]
[L]e seul projet qui s'oppose à celui de Nicolas Sarkozy et qui s'appuie sur une force politique capable de gouverner est celui de Ségolène Royal. (Impératif démocratique )

Bayrou expressed his fury at this implicit call not to vote for him. That such a reaction should be produced seems very strange to British ears - a newspaper telling its readers how to vote!

Campaigning ends tonight at midnight. Results should be available from around 20:00 (CET) Sunday. There is some concern regarding the web. The embargo on publishing the outcome applies to bloggers also, though how this will be enforced outside the country, especially in francophone countries like Belgium and Switzerland, is open to doubt.

Ségolène Royal has established a lead of a few points over François Bayrou, but much still remains to play for. And, as I've said, Le Pen should never be under-estimated.

Donc, je vous appelle, mes chers camarades français (et françaises), à VOTER SÉGOLÈNE!

Untruth and Iraq - 2

2007-04-18T16:56:00.000+01:00

Further to Robert Malley's remark which I quoted previously, a few days after the interview the International Crisis Group had this: "contrary to the Baker-Hamilton report’s suggestion, the Iraqi government and security forces cannot be treated as privileged allies to be bolstered; they are simply one among many parties to the conflict. The report characterises the government as a “government of national unity” that is “broadly representative of the Iraqi people”: it is nothing of the sort." ('After Baker-Hamilton: What to Do in Iraq', 19 December 2006)

The bit from the ICG report that the FT quoted (23 Dec) was the call for the US to "avoid steps to engineer a cabinet reshuffle aimed at side-lining Muqtada al-Sadr, which would further inflame the situation." This is number 21 (to the Government of Iraq) of their recommendations.

What caught my eye, though, from an initial skim-through, was this:

The argument, advanced by Peter Galbraith that the reality on the ground is already one of de facto partition, is self-serving – a Kurdo-centric justification for the establishment of an ethnically-defined Kurdish state. It is also patently false. The reality is one of widespread chaos in which families are forced to move from relatively heterogeneous pockets to areas in which their “kind” predominates, often finding themselves in nothing better than a bigger pocket. Rather than solving the problem, this only re-orders dividing lines, which remain contested in a constantly-changing pattern of horrendous and endemic violence. Any plan to divide the country up into a Kurdish proto-state and two entirely artificial and highly unstable “Sunni” and “Shiite” regions would therefore exacerbate sectarian violence, drive the country apart, further damage the state, and encourage regional intervention and interference. [P10; in note 12, against the argument that in the December 2005 elections Iraqis “rejected the idea of a unified Iraq”, the ICG says, "While these were sectarian in nature, they in no way suggested that Iraqis were expressing a desire for the country to break up." Galbraith's argument is in “The Case for Dividing Iraq”, Time, 5 November 2006; Galbraith has also written a book which, as the IGC puts it, he tellingly titled The End of Iraq]

This is a tentative effort to get back into commenting about Iraq - something I am not alone in being hesitant to do. The ICG report needs a lot more analysis than this. It's a long time after the event, of course, but the issues have not really changed.

Some background on the issue of Kirkuk can be found here. More recently, the BBC World Service's Analysis took a look at it: "Iraq's constitution says by the end of this year a referendum should be held in the northern, oil rich, city of Kirkuk to decide its future status. The Kurds want to incorporate it into their own largely autonomous, predominantly Kurdish region. Pam O'Toole explains why the Kirkuk referendum could ignite a crisis in the relatively peaceful part of Iraq." (9 Apr, 8:50 & 22:20) Again, Peter Galbraith and the man from the ICG put the opposing points of view.

Tax competition

2007-04-12T21:02:00.000+01:00

Listening to the BBC World Service's World Business Review on Sunday morning might not seem too relevant for us Left-leaning types. In fact, the way corporate taxes have been forced down in recent years is a major engine is a major engine for distributing wealth and income towards the rich and away from the poor, especially those in the developing world. You still have until Saturday to listen to the discussion. This is what could be found on the BBC website.

Only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. Unlike death, taxes can change. More and more countries are using tax as a way of attracting foreign investment and making themselves more appealing to businesses from abroad.
As a result, corporate or company tax rates in the developed world have fallen by about twenty percent over the last twenty years. The trouble is, someone else has to make up the difference...the ordinary tax payer... and usually through bigger taxes on the things he or she buys.
Critics say this adjustment towards direct taxation can hit the poorest in society the hardest...others say lower corporation tax is compensated for in other important ways.
Join Rodney Smith and guests: the Director of the Tax Justice Network, John Christiansen, Krysztof Bobinski, head of the Unia and Polska thinktank in Warsaw, and Professor Michael Devereux from the University of Oxford...in World Business Review.

Some additional notes I made: Ireland built itself up as a "tiger celtic economy" attracting companies like Microsoft to book profits there. Ironically, it is now itself facing tax competition from Eastern Europe... Quite why governments are in favour of tax competition is not at all clear... You end up with a "race to the bottom".
Most of this came from John Christiansen, I think. For further information, see the Tax Justice Network website.

The spark in the tinder

2007-04-12T21:00:00.000+01:00

There was not much attention paid outside France to the incident at the Gare du Nord, where a dispute over a ticket inspection led to serious disturbances which began on the afternoon of 27 Mar and went on until around 1:00am the next morning. One of the columnists in the FT commented the following Saturday. I wrote them the following letter:

Christopher Caldwell (‘Harsh policing goes transatlantic’, March 31/April1) is right to point to the importance of the disturbances at the Gare du Nord and to say, “It was not the style of the police that upset the mob, but the act of enforcing the law at all,’ before he drifts off into despair about irreconcilable differences between the races in Europe as a whole.
There are aspects specific to France in this. And the Left has more to say than stating the obvious.

The police de proximité, which in British political discourse we might describe as ‘Bobbies on the beat’, was introduced by a Socialist government (‘co-habiting’ with the centre-right President), before being done away with by Mr Sarkozy. As an independent expert put it recently, that the policy was not very well implemented then does mean it is wrong in principle. Sarkozy preferred to rely on ‘high-tech’ methods, which meant that when the police did venture into the banlieues, they were viewed as an invading army.

And this is not to mention that the immigrant communities face ‘exclusion’, a proven lack of equal access to jobs.

Update: as those who have travelled there in the last year or two will know, the Gare du Nord is now actually called Paris Nord.

Lebanon, 2006

2007-04-09T21:50:00.000+01:00

The BBC has been looking back on last year's war (*). On the initial attack on 12 July, they say that Hezbollah fired diversionary rockets into Israel, units crossed the border and captured 2 soldiers. A Hezbollah minister assured his cabinet colleagues that this was "business as usual" and not to worry too much about retaliation from Israel.

I start to think I imagined this, but weren't six Israeli soldiers killed during that initial raid? As for it being "business as usual", Hezbollah's rockets were launched against the western part of northern Israel, far from the so-called disputed area of Shebaa Farms, where they normally carried out attacks.

Despite this somewhat shaky start, the programme had some fascinating details - such as that many Arab governments privately had sympathy for the actions Israel took.

In another programme, Philippe Douste-Blazy had some warm words for the role Condoleeza Rice played in eventually ending the war (**).

* The Summer War in Lebanon: Part 1 - Broadcast on Radio 4 - Tue 03 Apr - 20:00 listen.
The programme was also broadcast in the Assignment slot on the World Service on Thursday, for example at 19:00 GMT (edited down from about 37 minutes to 23) - Listen. Of course, this information is too late now, but there's still part 2 to come.
** France Versus the World: Part 1 is about foreign policy. This is available as an mp3 download, which is handy.

The 600,000...

2007-04-08T20:54:00.000+01:00

... killed in Iraq, of course. You may have heard a brief mention on the 6 PM news on BBC Radio 4 (26 Mar), along the following lines: while the British government poured scorn on the figure at the time, it was being privately advised that the report in the Lancet "was right." From the website: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to 'best practice'."

Norman Geras posted in October 2006: "[..] had I been able to foresee, in January and February 2003, that the war would have the results it has actually had in the numbers of Iraqis killed [..] I would have withheld my support. [..] nothing on earth could have induced me to [..] campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside." Unlike Norman, I did comment on the detail of the first Lancet report ("the 100,000") and expressed my doubts about it.

To return to the recent revelations from the BBC, the full story was on the World Service's Newshour at 21:00, which I happened to catch. From this it emerged that British officials believed the methodology to be soundly based, but they still thought the figures too high. Further balance was provided by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute, who thought that the figure probably overstates by 2 or 3 times. That still leaves an appallingly high figure, of course.

One factor, as a BBC correspondent pointed out, is that the headline figure reported at the time of a bombing atrocity is one thing. But of those wounded a high number die needlessly due to the incompetence (that's not quite a strong enough word) of the Health Ministry, run by Muqtada al-Sadr's people.

We should also bear in mind the numbers killed due to the wars inititiated by Saddam Hussein against Iran and Kuwait: 750,000 for 1980-8 and 100,000 for 1990-1 (the so-called "First" Gulf War) seem not unreasonable.

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Still on the subject of numbers, according to the program shown on BBC4 (Racism: a history, Part 2, 28 Mar), around 30 million died in famines in British-ruled India in the late 19th century, due to neglicence and conscious racism (*).

This puts into some sort of context the numbers who died as a result of the “Great Leap Forward” in China in the 1950's - figures vary between 20 million and 30 million people - which make some people wonder why Mao is never quite regarded as a criminal on the same scale as Hitler and Stalin (**).

The BBC programme, which was utterly shattering, suggested that, horrific as the holocaust carried out by the Nazis was, it should be seen as part of a continuum of European races regarding others as inferior.

* For those in the UK with Freeview digital, the series is repeated starting next Tuesday (10-12 April).
** Mao and forever By Richard McGregor Published: August 13 2004

Sarkozy on Foreign Policy

2007-03-12T16:38:00.000Z

Some words from Nicolas Sarkozy about foreign policy were on the evening radio bulletins the Wednesday before last. Strangely, the words he spoke about Iraq were on the 17:00(GMT) bulletin, but absent from the one at 18:00 (Radio France International, 28 Feb). This is from Le Monde's report:

"En Irak, ma conviction est que la solution ne peut être que politique", a déclaré M. Sarkozy. "Il faut réinventer un pacte entre Irakiens qui assurerait à chaque communauté, à chaque segment – et Dieu sait s'ils sont nombreux – de la société irakienne, à chaque Irakien un accès équitable aux institutions et aux ressources de ce pays", a-t-il ajouté. "Ce pacte isolerait les terroristes". S'agissant du retrait des troupes étrangères du pays, Nicolas Sarkozy a signalé "deux écueils [reefs or rocks] à éviter" : un retrait précipité, "qui entraînerait le chaos", et l'absence de toute perspective de retrait, "à laquelle les Irakiens réagiraient par plus de violences et qui ferait le jeu des terroristes". ('Nicolas Sarkozy précise ses propositions de politique étrangère'; my emphasis)

If you want, you can also see what he has to say about other issues.

From the later France Inter bulletin it also appeared that he would put emphasis on principles such as human rights rather than having a policy based on personal relationships. A rupture then, perhaps from Chirac's policy.

Trapped

2007-03-11T20:45:00.000Z

As those who watch TV (or listen to the radio) in the UK will know from the trailers, our old friend, Adam Curtis, is back tonight. Rather predictably making it 'Documentary of the week', the Radio Times says:

If most factual TV is bangers and mash, this is thick-cut, rare steak. Adam Curtis's previous, visionary series The Power of Nightmares analysed radical Islam and the fear of terrorism. Here he takes on an even bigger idea: freedom. [..I]t's [..] quite brilliant TV.

Karl French in the FT also describes 'Power of Nightmares' as 'dazzling'.

There is an everyday kind of myth creation. Take for example the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. This is quite generally referred to now as an attack by Israel on Lebanon (for example, Michael Cockerell in 'Blair: the inside story, Part 3' states that Blair was isolated in supporting Israel's attack), ignoring the fact that it was a response by Israel to Hezbollah's agression. This is a fairly straightforward illustration, but it shows how a sort of "official version" of history can be quickly established, regardless of facts that were generally accepted at the time.

There is, however, a slightly more subtle point to be made about the events of last summer. Much of international opinion at the time focused on the "disproportionate" nature of Israel's response and called for an immediate ceasefire. But now this is largely forgotten and people look back on what is seen as a "defeat" for Israel or a "victory" for Hezbollah. In fact, though there are substantial criticisms that can be made of its military campaign, Israel gained significantly from the ceasefire that was eventually concluded, which it might not have done had it agreed to an earlier ceasefire.

As I said, that is the everyday kind of myth building. But then somebody like Curtis comes along and, by an even more outrageous selection of facts, projects a more far-ranging theory and everybody says, "Oh, so that's how it all hangs together. Except that it doesn't.

I wonder if Curtis's new series will mention Lebanon 2006. We shall see. But I doubt whether I will be bothered to take it apart in the same detail as I did the last one.

Good morning, Kabul!

2007-03-09T15:34:00.000Z

On Friday morning last week I (that is, this weblog) had my first visit from Afghanistan, from Kabul. This really cheered me up. They were doing a Google search for Shukria Barekzai.

Other countries from which I've had just one visit: Uzbekistan (wish I'd looked at the details of that one), Taiwan, Monaco, Colombia, Czech Republic, Serbia and Montenegro, Congo (The Democratic Republic of the), Cote D'Ivoire, Nepal, Iceland, Antigua and Barbuda, Ukraine, El Salvador, Europe (sic), Thailand, Kuwait, Albania, Venezuela, Jordan, Burkina Faso, Hungary, Croatia, Bermuda, Mozambique, Indonesia, Sudan, Uruguay, Slovenia, Belize.

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1 Mar - I have emerged from a period of being extremely busy and went into e-mail: 160 in my inbox, not to mention the spam. I even ran out of MP3 things to listen to, due to not having enough time to download anything. I hope to be able to post a little more frequently from now on.

PS: when I actually get round to posting this, I find I am still a week behind the game. Oh well.

Brief notes: North Korea

2007-03-02T10:27:00.000Z

13 Feb — Following the apparent breakthrough on restraining North Korea's nuclear development, John Bolton is a "sad man" (interview on C4 News). Really, there aren't many "neo-cons" left in the Bush administration. Apart from Cheney.

Hazel Smith of Warwick University summed it up just about right, citing 3 factors: the current moderation on the part of the US administration; China's deep annoyance about North Korea's test last year; and counter-intuitively, she says, North Korea and the US are not ideological enemies - in comparison to Iran (BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight, again 13 Feb).

Brief notes: Paul Bremer, France...

2007-02-19T22:03:00.000Z

12 Feb — Although Paul Bremer was from the State Department, I believe, most of his staff for the CPA were recruited by an office in the Pentagon run by James O'Byrne. Congressman Waxman pointed out that when they asked to speak to this office, they were told that they did not normally speak to the minority group. They said that the Democrats were now the majority, but they still didn't get their briefing. (US Congress, Iraq Reconstruction - Oversight & Government Reform Committee, Tuesday, 6 Feb, broadcast on C-Span / BBC Parliament; Cf. 'House Panel Questions Monitoring of Cash Shipped to Iraq', The New York Times, 7 Feb) As well as Paul Bremer, Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, was questioned by the House Committee.

13 Feb Bernard-Henri Lévy interviewed on France Inter this morning. How he will vote will be determined largely by issues such as Darfur and Rwanda (getting the whole truth about what happened in 1994). He has 'shared a table' with Ségolène Royal and managed to convince her to some extent about the importance of atrocities in Chechnya and the question of Anna Politkovskaya. (A shame Sarkozy is managing to maintain his lead over Ségolène.)

For BHL, liberty and equality must march together, must be our twin emblems (devises). People like Bourdieu (?) and Harold Pinter care only about equality and don't give a toss about liberty (a purely formal, bourgeois value).

Reaction to André Glucksmann's article of a couple of weeks ago ('Pourquoi je choisis Nicolas Sarkozy') continues to rumble on: he has not been 'on the left' for some time, someone says in a discussion on 'the role of the intellectual' (including BHL) that followed the aforementioned interview.

But the part of another interview by BHL that I caught, on Europe 1 last week, was in a way more interesting. The Iraq war? Of course it was a connerie, but anti-Americanism is always pestilentiel.

Untruth and Iraq

2007-01-20T20:48:00.000Z

Rather belatedly, some comments on the Baker/Hamilton report. So, it does not recommend "staying the course", but neither does it recommend "cutting and running". We are not winning in Iraq, but neither are we losing (*), nor is it inevitable that we lose.

The report and the remarks of Robert Gates, Defense Secretary designate, at his Senate confirmation hearing provided the French commentators ample occasion to elaborate on their familiar theme. But in fact they had been at it for weeks before. Bernard Guetta talks about "... désastre irakien ... chaos ...le président iranien, invitant les présidents syrien et irakien à venir s’entretenir avec lui, ce week-end... Le rendez-vous de ce week-end est un camouflet [snub] de première grandeur pour les États-Unis. " (21 Nov 2006, 'Le sommet de Téhéran')

By the way, when Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish President of Iraq, criticized the report, the BBC correspondent described this as "an extraordinary outburst" and suddenly the office of President had become "largely ceremonial".

According to Guetta again, with his "it has, but...", Tony Blair shows how hard it is to quarrel about 'ce mot si justifié de « désastre »', but refuses to recognize that 'sa décision d’intervenir en Irak aux côtés des Etats-Unis était, en elle-même, un désastre'. (20 novembre 2006, 'Blair et le « désastre » irakien')

On the memo, written by national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, which said that while Mr. Maliki seemed to have good intentions when talking with Americans, “the reality on the streets suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what’s going on, misrepresenting his intentions or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient” to transform his good intentions into actions.(NYT, 'Iraq’s Premier Abruptly Skips a Bush Session', 30 Nov), Dominique Bromberger commented "Muni de ce mémo, [George] W [Bush] prend l'avion pour Amman, mais, quand il y arrive hier soir, Maliki n'est pas au rendez-vous. Et c'est seulement ce matin que le chef du gouvernement irakien accepte de le rencontrer." ('George Bush', 30 Nov) But you really needed to have heard the sneering tone in which that was said. The piece ends with a typical whinge about the powerlessness of Europe: "L'unique superpuissance navigue dans une tempête qu'elle a elle-même provoquée. L'équipage tente d'alerter le capitaine mais celui-ci ne veut rien entendre. Et nous, nous n'y pouvons rien."

Baker/Hamilton's call for a direct dialogue with Iran and Syria, and for direct involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict is for Bromberger "la condamnation définitive de la politique pensée par les néoconservateurs et mise en œuvre par George Walker Bush." ('George W Bush et le plan Baker', 6 Dec)

En offrant l’Irak aux chiites et, par là même à l’Iran, l’intervention américaine a totalement bouleversé le Proche-Orient. (Bernard Guetta, 'Contre l’Iran, l’alliance israélo-arabe', 15 Dec) There is, though, an inescapable fact: those Shi'a, to whom the country have been given, are the majority of the people of Iraq.

There was one remark of Guetta's which I think was particularly, if unintentionally, revealing: 'Il se passe ce qui devait se passer, ce que les plus clairvoyants avaient vu et que les aveugles, Tony Blair et Georges Bush, n’avaient pas voulu voir malgré les mises en garde de tant de pays dont la France et l’Allemagne.' ('Blair et le « désastre » irakien') If the neo-conservatives were too optimistic, thinking that because the "cause was right", everything would go well after the invasion of Iraq, without the need for planning or the hard work of rebuilding a post-Saddam state, then surely the converse is also true: the way that people like the French commentators describe everything in Iraq as being as bad as possible - not that things are not bad enough as it is - to assert that there is no hope of the situation improving, is because of their compulsion to prove that they were right - "that which was bound to happen is happening".

---

More of the same on 6 Dec 2006 on 'l'invité d'Inter' ('Tournant de la politique étrangère américaine?'), from Robert Malley - former adviser to Bill Clinton and now the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program Director: 'tellement la situation an Irak est désastreuse... il ne faut plus considérer ce gouvernement Irakien comme le représentant légitime du consensus Irakien, mais comme une des parties [sic] au conflit...'

Kind of enough to put you off the ICG. Unfortunately, Rob Malley did not hang around to take questions from listeners. This was left to François Heisbourg (conseiller spécial de la Fondation pour la recherche scientifique): 'Robert Gates fait partie [..] de la génération de Bush père, ce qu'on appelle parfois aux États-Unis les adultes (chuckle from interviewer), par opposition aux enfants dont [..] l'actuel président américain et donc un début de retour a une vision une peu plus réaliste des choses.'

Bernard Guetta highlights the call for «des discussions directes avec et entre Israël, le Liban, la Syrie et ceux des Palestiniens qui acceptent le droit à l’existence d’Israël » 7 décembre 2006, Une bombe nommée Baker ('direct talks with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to exist), and Syria') But there's the rub: the Hamas government does not accept Israel’s right to exist (though maybe some formula of words can be found).

This is not about destroying the influence of the neo-conservatives, and has not been for the last two years. If you don't like the expression "staying the course", you may find what John McCain says, "we must prevail", a more acceptable format. It is not certain that we will prevail, though the consequences of not doing so would be highly negative. And it is not entirely in 'our' hands, but we should do everything in our power to support the Iraqis, in the hope that some sort of government representative of the majority can be sustained.

As for engagement with Iran, some softening of US rhetoric on 'regime change' would indeed be welcome. But Iran, for example, could be offered support for joining the WTO and aircraft parts how often their 'planes crash), but what they really (this is no trivial thing, when you considerseem to want is a nuclear programme that would come dangerously close to providing the capability of building a weapon. And here, not only the EU, but also Russia and China, agree that this would not be a good thing. The only dispute is what action should be taken to prevent it.

Similarly, it may be possible to talk to Syria about some things, but what they may really want is to regain control in Lebanon.

Further, although agreement between Israel and the Palestinians may be a good thing in itself, it is hard to see that even if peace were achieved there, it would solve Iraq's problems overnight.

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I had a quick skim through the report itself: one passage I noted was the same one that Gregory Djerejian (whose father Edward had a hand in the report) highlighted with various bolds, italics and underlining:

A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals. (my emphasis)

As always, understatement is so much more effective than screaming.

* I did actually write this before the American president used a similar phrase - "the US was neither winning nor losing" (interview with The Washington Post, 19 Dec).

Postscript: I heard a programme on Radio France Inter at 7:15 on Saturday (9 Dec 2006). This is not a time I normally listen to French radio, but what I heard was so appalling that I tracked down the MP3 download on its website. The programme was called 'Contradictoires' and was mediated by Pierre Weill. Ironically, it was billed as "2 personnalités, 2 points de vue opposés sur le fait d’actualité de la semaine". But the two, Claude Cabanes from the Communist paper, l'Humanité and Pierre Rousselin of the more conservative Le Figaro, said more or less the same thing! It starts with Cabanes saying that there does not seem to be sign of a change in direction (along the lines indicated by Baker/Hamilton), since the US military had just launched attacks on insurgents and "the English" had also carried out a big operation in Basra (which seems to have gone pretty well, by most accounts).

As for the rest, I will content myself with transcribing, largely without comment, in the original, the language that was once widely thought of as facilitating clarity of thought:

PW: le plan Baker … vise à sortir les États-Unis du bourbier Irakien...
CC: ...il permet au peuple Américain de regarder le vérité en face ... cette guerre est un désastre absolu après avoir été déclaré sur un mensonge ... en 2003 ce sont les autres qui avaient raison et pas l'Amérique. ...
PR: c'est un virage a 180 degrés que propose James Baker... [Pour les Démocrates] il ne faut pas non plus que cela devienne une débâcle politique nationale...
PW: le rapport Baker dit, il faut négocier avec la Syrie et L'Iran: c'est vraiment une humiliation pour Bush...
CC: je lis tous les jours, il faut aider les États-Unis à sortir du bourbier, mais je n'ai pas du tout envie d'aider George Bush à quoi que ce soit franchement. Par contre, j'ai envie d'aider le peuple Irakien à se libérer d'une armée d'occupation étrangère…. Il faut que l'Amérique répare les dégâts : elle a détruit une nation ... l'Amérique a voulu du pétrole, elle vole du pétrole. … Il va falloir que l'Amérique rende le pétrole qu'elle a volé aux Irakiens.
PR: …il n'y a pas beaucoup de pétrole qui sorte d’Irak.... Il faut … que les États-Unis trouvent un moyen de sortir du bourbier Irakien...

PW: comment rendre ce départ des troupes américains possible sans livrer l’Irak au chaos...
CC: … peut-être la constitution d’une nouvelle force militaire qui ne soit pas suspecte… avec par exemple des Allemands, des Français, des Chinois... on voit bien que il y a maintenant une résistance qui s’organise contre la domination américaine dans le monde : on l’a vue en Amérique latine avec l’élection de Chavez…
PR: …je ne suis pas loin de partager cet idée-là, mais en nuançant dans la mesure où il faut faire la différence entre George Bush et un certain entourage de néoconservateurs qui sont sur le déclin et qui ont souffert un défaite sanglante en Irak.
CC: oui!
PW : Saddam Hussein, il doit avoir le sourire au fond de sa prison…?
CC: …c’est un tyran qui aurait mérité un vrai procès … au lieu de cette caricature de tribunal, tribunal des vainqueurs, quoi...

I will pass quickly over the bits about the US stealing Iraq's oil - even the BBC does not give much space to people expressing that sort of view these days. The most hilarious suggestion concerns the formation of an international force that would be more acceptable to the Iraqis. It would be nice if the French, Germans and so on would get involved. But I wouldn't hold your breath.

Note: so, I've finally finished this post, over a month late. Up-to-dateness is not something to be expected from this weblog, but we hope to provide a quality service.

1976

2007-01-16T21:29:00.000Z

ITV4's 'The Story of Punk' (shown 3 Dec) was much better than BBC Radio 2's 'England's Still Dreaming - 30 Years of Punk' (2 & 9 Dec). Nevertheless, the narrative, and (Sir) Bob Geldof (Boomtown Rat) 's comments, made reference to rubbish piling up on the streets etc. This borrows forward an image from 1978-9, the so-called 'winter of discontent'. Also, the bits about 'everybody seemed to be on strike all the time' would relate more to confrontations with the Heath government, 1970-4.

The more significant events for the period are surely: inflation reaching, I think, 27% in the summer of 1975; the public spending cuts of March 1976; the currency crisis and the government being forced to apply for a loan from the IMF in September 1976.

Update: towards the end of the programme, Geldof also spoke of punk paving the way for Thatcher and how Thatcher also attacked institutions such as the monarchy. I'm sorry, I must have missed that one.

Bombing Germany

2006-12-30T20:50:00.000Z

During the conflict last summer between Israel and Hezbollah, I got involved in something of a discussion about comparisons of Israel's actions and those of Britain (and the US (*)) in the Second World War (see 'The fog of war - 2'). In a subsequent e-mail exchange, I mentioned a programme that had been shown on British TV. I eventually got around to watching this and even later now to writing this weblog entry. It turned out to be quite old (**). It did, however, make two points that I think are worth highlighting.

Chamberlain told parliament in 1938 that targeting civilians would be against international law.

At Nuremburg, no charges for bombing London, Coventry and other British cities were brought against Nazi leaders, not even against Hermann Göring.

* Some of the details were a little hazy in my mind: the British were largely reponsible for the devastation of German cities, but, as Jeff Weintraub pointed out, the US carried out extensive fire-bombing of Japanese cities, not to mention what happened at Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

** 'Bombing Germany' written by Detlef Siebert, BBC / History Channel, Timewatch from 2001 (editor Laurence Rees), contributions from American historian Tami Biddle.

The Left in Britain

2006-12-13T21:55:00.000Z

Lest we forget, car production at the Peugeot plant at Ryton, near Coventry, ended this week. Of course, there was a fair amount of publicity at the time of the closure announcement in April (*), not so much now. It's not a programme I normally watch, but I did catch BBC Midlands Today last week (6 Dec). Fairly upbeat piece about someone moving on to run a hotel in Scotland. A more gloomy view can be found on this blog.

Do you remember this: 'Unions launch one million pound boycott against Peugeot'? It turned out to have little impact.

If union activity is so ineffective and an effective industrial policy from the state is barely on the agenda, what is the British Left about?

Some clues can be gathered from a BBC discussion, 'What is Left? What is Right?' Although this was broadcast in May, it should still be possible to listen to it. There you will hear that people like Claire Fox believe it is possible to create some sort of haven of workers' control in the public services - health, education and so on.

* See also my previous post and comments here and here.

Inaccuracies and omissions

2006-12-09T19:20:00.000Z

(*) Channel4 News, reporting John Reid's statement to Parliament on Monday about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, said that he had "finally" informed us that the British government had called in the Russian ambassador the previous Friday (24 Nov). Actually, the FT (on its front page) Saturday had this: "The Foreign Office said it called in Yuri Fedotov, the Russian ambassador ..."

C4 News again: on Thursday (30 Nov) referred to "US-backed government" in Lebanon. Later, the BBC (World Service) news bulletins described it as a "Western-backed government". I leave it to readers to think how else the Lebanese government might be described.

BBC WS Newshour, discussing the need for more realpolitik in Iraq now, pointed out that in the "first" Gulf War (1990-1) the US gave Syria's a "free hand" in Lebanon. True enough, as far as it goes, and something to which not attention was paid at the time. However, it is possible to be a little more concrete: in October 1990 many people from the Christian militia of Michel Aoun were found murdered in cold blood (see comments in France, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria... ). Aoun returned to Lebanon last year and, strangely enough, is now on the pro-Syrian side. This appears to be in order to gain support for him becoming President (BBC WS Newshour, Friday 1 Dec).

Finally, an even older one: Mudlark (FT, 30 Sept.) resolves to call time waiting at the airport for items that were previously allowed as hand luggage "John Reid minutes". Is everybody going mad? We blame not the would-be terrorists who make such measures necessary, but the government which introduces them.

* I've been so busy lately: no time to write the usual sort of post, one that develops a theme and so on. Even so, I'm over a week late with this.

Update: I have not heard that description of the Lebanese government repeated since. Still, it shows how some media organisations were sucked in, at least initially, by Hezbollah's propaganda.

Update 2 - on descriptions of the Lebanese government: Kim Ghattas in reports on Saturday (9 Dec) was still talking about a "Western-backed government", but BBC WS bulletins, Sunday, had "pro-Western government" (which is fair enough). C4 News had softened to "Western-backed government".

Truth and Iraq

2006-11-30T21:12:00.000Z

Brian Logan, writing about David Hare, in The Times 2 on Monday:

“My plays are very near the knuckle,” he told The Times last month. In another recent interview, discussing Stuff Happens, he claims that “my theory” that “the Iraq invasion was dreamt up by an opportunistic group in the White House who were simply exploiting 9/11 in the most cynical way” was at the time “a very controversial point of view”. Was it controversial? Wasn’t it, in the UK at least, the orthodoxy?

True. But Logan also says:

Stuff Happens was an unenlightening cuttings-job on the machinations leading to war [..], plus some made-up bits promoting Colin Powell as a man of integrity, and George W. Bush as the brains behind the operation. History, it need hardly be added, has since made a mockery of both characterisations.

Really?

Still, it never ceases to amaze me how, in their rush to condemn the Bush government and its Iraq policy, people are prepared to diesregard the truth. 'Iraq Uncovered', a rather dreary documentary film from 2004, shown recently on Five US in Britain, claimed that Richard Armitage, Powell's deputy at the State Department, was a neo-conservative! Well, I'd never heard that one before. There is a specific reason for doubting it.

When it emerged that it was Armitage who leaked the information that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, there was barely a mention, at least in the British media. If it had been more evidence to implicate Karl Rove or even Dick Cheney, we'd never have heard the end of it. As The Washington Post put it:

Armitage's involvement in the matter does not fit neatly into the assertions of Bush administration critics that Plame's employment was disclosed as part of a White House conspiracy to besmirch Wilson by suggesting his Niger trip stemmed from nepotism at the CIA. Wilson and Plame have sued top administration officials, alleging that the leak was meant as retaliation.

But Armitage, the source Novak had described obliquely as someone who is "not a political gunslinger," was by all accounts hardly a tool of White House political operatives. [..] Armitage was a prominent Republican appointee. But he also privately disagreed with the tone and style of White House policymaking on Iraq and other matters. ('Ex-Colleague Says Armitage Was Source of CIA Leak', August 29, 2006)

...

Allies of the al-Sauds

2006-11-24T12:13:00.000Z

On that same thread I mentioned at the end of my last post about Pierre Gemayel, I noticed another comment by Charles Coutinho. He's right, the al-Saud family won the kingdom by conquest. The British initially backed the Hashemite family, but later came to terms with the al-Sauds. There may have been sheer incompetence on the part of the Hashemites, but also they were weakened because they were seen as having betrayed Islam by fighting against the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

As an example of the Saudi-British alliance, before the days of oil, the kingdom was heavily dependent on revenues from pilgrimages to Mecca. When these were reduced during World War II, it received subsidies from Britain and the US.

This was British 'sphere of interest' was later more or less taken over by the US (*). Roosevelt famously met on board ship with the Saudi king during the the war. Any idea, though, that the Americans went behind the back of the British to "steal" their ally is, in my view, way off the mark. The British continued to derive great benefit from their relationship with the Saudi Arabia. In 1985 they signed a large contract for the supply of fighter aircraft and another deal was in the offing earlier this year. The Saudis apparently find it a little less politically sensitive to be supplied by the British rather than the Americans (**).

* See William L.Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 1994 and the last two paragraphs of an earlier post of mine.

** Reports in the Financial Times.

Update: important new evidence has been released today that supports what I say above about the Saudi-British-American relationship. King Ibn Saud refused to agree to the meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, unless Churchill was also present. The British PM, however, wrote to the king saying, "I greatly desire that you meet him..."

Incidentally, the contrasting views of Roosevelt and Churchill about the question of Jewish resettlement are surprising, to say the least. ( The Today Programme, 24 Nov; listen)

The murder of Pierre Gemayel

2006-11-24T12:02:00.000Z

A special programme on Europe 1 the following day (22 Nov).
Pro-Syrian forces, like Hezbollah, would like to bring down the Lebanese government (they only need to assassinate two more cabinet ministers to achieve this), so that they can prevent it voting to pursue Syria in the Hariri investigation.

But why would they have carried out the murder the day after Syria re-established diplomatic relations with Iraq? Is it not more likely that pro-Iranian forces are behind it, asked another commentator. Iran, after all, would look unfavourably (with a mauvais œil) on those very efforts to "engage" on Iraq, with the US, which would leave it isolated.

No, came back the reply, Syria's interest in Lebanon, blocking the Hariri investigation, takes precedence over everything.

Josh Landis at SyriaComment.com was not blogging when I looked. However, commenters have posted Michael Young’s article in the Wall Street Journal and the article in the FT by Roula Khalaf et al.

PSG 2, Hapoël Tel-Aviv 4

2006-11-24T08:55:00.000Z

Update: you knew this post wasn't about football, didn't you? But if you're interested in the match, here it is (in English). I got a lot of hits from this site, though I couldn't actually see where they linked me. More:

TEL AVIV BEATS PARIS IN SOCCER; ONLY 1 KILLED The police officer, who was not identified, was trying to protect a Hapoel Tel Aviv fan set upon by some 150 PSG supporters, police said. The officer lobbed tear gas when the crowd went after the Hapoel supporter then fired two shots

The BBC eventually had something on it. Back to French:

PSG: des insultes racistes et antisémites à l'origine du drame [24/11/2006 12:44] (Nouvel Observateur)
PARIS (AP) -- Des insultes racistes et antisémites ont été proférées jeudi soir par les agresseurs d'un policier qui protégeait un supporter du club de Tel Aviv à l'issue de la rencontre entre le PSG et le club israélien, a indiqué vendredi le procureur de la République de Paris, Jean-Claude Marin.

The original post is below.

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Following a defeat of Paris-Saint-Germain by the Israeli side in a football match...

Le fonctionnaire en civil, dépourvu de brassard «police», tentait apparemment de venir en aide à un supporteur israélien agressé par un groupe de supporteurs parisiens après le match...
Bilan : un supporteur du PSG d’une vingtaine d’années tué et un autre gravement blessé.
...
Il aurait alors fait usage d'une bombe lacrymogène afin de se dégager puis tiré deux coups de feu. Toujours selon les premiers éléments de l’enquête, le policier aurait ensuite été pourchassé par le groupe de supporteurs, puis se serait réfugié dans un Mac Donald's. (report in Le Figaro)

AFP

Remembering "the 'stans"

2006-11-17T18:55:00.000Z

Jeff Weintraub reflects on the assault on freedom of expression in much of the former Soviet Union.

The pattern is uneven. [...] varying degrees of authoritarian repression have long been pervasive in countries like Belarus and most of the Central Asian republics. ...

(The conception of this post began back in the summer, but other issues seemed more pressing then. It is still a little sketchy.)

Central Asia contains two of the very worst dictatorships in the world. Other states in the region though, while far from being perfect democracies, might be described as 'swing countries'. Take Kyrgyzstan for example. The BBC sometimes carries reports from there by their correspondent, Natalia Antelava. Here are a few things that can be found on their website:

Police in Kyrgyzstan have arrested six people on charges of religious extremism and their links to events in the Uzbek town of Andijan in 2005. The arrests came amid heightened security in the south after shoot-outs between police and alleged Islamists near the border with Uzbekistan.

Police say the six have confessed to roles in last year's events in Andijan, when Uzbek troops fired on protesters. Andijan is close to Kyrgyzstan, and many survivors fled across the border. Most of them live in hiding, afraid of the regular incursions by the Uzbek security services, and their numbers are not clear. Uzbekistan has put pressure on its smaller and more impoverished neighbour, Kyrgyzstan, to send those people back. ('Kyrgyz police hold "Andijan six"', 2006/07/20)
[..]
A prominent and popular imam has been killed in the south of Kyrgyzstan, in the town of Korasuv in the Ferghana Valley near the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border. According to his family and local police, the imam - Rafik Kamalov - was shot dead by Kyrgyz special forces. But security officials have not confirmed his death.
[..]
In an interview with the BBC, Kyrgyz security officials confirmed that they had killed three men during a special operation on Thursday night and that all of them were members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan - a banned radical organisation. The officials neither confirmed nor denied that Rafik Kamalov, the Imam of the biggest mosque along the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border, was among them. But family members, who are preparing for the funeral, deny that he belonged to any Islamic group.

For the past month, Kyrgyz security services, often with the help of their Uzbek colleagues, have launched a massive operation aimed at eradicating what the government here calls the serious threat of Islamic fundamentalism. But human rights groups have voiced concern that this label is often used to silence political dissent. ('Popular Kyrgyz imam shot dead ', 2006/08/07)
[..]
Russian prosecutors say they will extradite to Uzbekistan 13 people facing terrorism charges over the 13 May 2005 Andijan crackdown. The men are suspected of crimes including incitement of extremist acts and murder, a Russian official said. But rights groups say the cases against the men, who they describe as refugees, are fabricated.
[..]
The Russian authorities say they have received a guarantee from Uzbekistan that the 13 men, all ethnic Uzbeks, will not be tortured or sentenced to death.
('Russia to return Uzbek "suspects" ', 2006/08/04)

A later report indicated that Russia had suspended the extradition:

The 13 had earlier appealed to the European Court of Human Rights against their extradition. The Russian prosecutor general's office said it was acting in line with the Court's rules, which prohibit deportation while appeals are pending. (2006/08/15)

Just to note one other thing:
Since the uprising in Kyrgyzstan last year, the new president, Bakiyev, has been less of an ally for the US and has turned increasingly to Russia for support. But at least they are allowing the US to keep the military base at Manas, though at a cost of $150m instead of the previous $2m. (FT, 12 Aug 2006.)

There is another aspect: I remember seeing a documentary a year or two ago called something like "Meet the 'stans", where officials in Tajikistan were struggling with very few resources to control the drug traffic coming across the Amu Darya (Oxus) River. I fail to understand why, when we are prepared to put our soldiers at risk in Afghanistan, we are unable to give more help to countries like this (but see update below).

An invaluable book for background is Ahmed Rashid's Jihad: The rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, written in 2001. The general paradigm remains the same.

In a region beset with authoritarianism, Niyazov heads the most dictatorial regime in Central Asia, and his personality cult casts even that of Stalin in the shade. ... Already both the Taliban and the IMU have forged routes through Turkmenistan to help smuggle Afghan heroin to the West with the help of corrupt Turkmen officials.
[..]
'Uzbekistan is leading a region wide crackdown on all forms of Islam that are not state-controlled - repression that is driving entire villages into opposition and forcing religion underground... If a Taliban style threat arises in central Asia, it will be because the dictatorships inadvertently helped to create it.' (New York Times, August 2001)

Update: a report on Channel 4 News this week states that only 15% of Afghanistan's opium production goes north. Most of the smuggling goes through Iran.

No WMDs, no revelation

2006-11-15T12:17:00.000Z

In the magazine included with the FT of November 11/12 2006, Stephen Graubard's Books essay 'Occupational hazards' (published on the website November 3 2006) states:

The most interesting revelations relate to Saddam Hussein, who in December 2002 informed his Revolutionary Command Council, Ba’ath party aides and top military commanders that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction - a surprise for many of them.

Hardly a revelation. This was substantially reported in the Final Report of the Iraq Survey Group (published 30 Sep 2004):

Saddam surprised his generals when he informed them he had no WMD in December 2002 because his boasting had led many to believe Iraq had some hidden capability...
2004/10/cheney-rumsfeld-blair

See also David_Aaronovitch in March this year:

just last week The New York Times reported that Iraqi generals were “stunned” when they were told shortly before the invasion that the chemical and biological weapons upon which they were depending to fight the invaders did not exist.

True, it is something that is not often noted, since it runs contrary to the thesis that 'Bush is a liar'.

The PS candidates

2006-11-14T10:29:00.000Z

Ségolène Royal, Monday; Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Tuesday; Laurent Fabius, Wednesday; rss_link - see note at the end of my previous post. François Hollande will sum up on Friday, after the party members have voted.

Ségolène was not asked about and did not say anything about international affairs.