Monday, April 19, 2004
A crime or a mistake?
Tribune column, 23 April 2004
"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute." It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Barely a day has passed in recent weeks without some new Middle-Eastern event bringing to mind Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe's comments on hearing of Napoleon's execution of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804.
From the Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders in Gaza to the Americans' murderous blunderings in Falluja and elsewhere, thoughtful politics and diplomacy have been blown away by the barrels of many guns. Only the Islamist-fascists can have reason to be pleased by the developments of the past month. If Bush and Sharon were on their side, they could hardly have planned things better.
How did things come to such a pass? How, in particular, did the US manage to squander so wantonly the sympathy and goodwill that came its way worldwide after the September 11th atrocities? Was it a crime or a mistake?
Unlike some on the Left, I don't doubt that the motives of most of those who supported the war on Iraq were honourable – particularly in this country, and particularly in the Labour Party. I share many of those motives myself. While others among my friends and political associates were marching in their millions in apparently unequivocal opposition to war, I was torn between that clear-cut standpoint and a deep-felt desire to see Saddam's tyranny destroyed. How else, if not by invasion and occupation, was that to be done? In common with most Iraqis, it would seem, I have still not managed convincingly to resolve that contradiction in my mind.
It's harder to attribute the same honourable motives to the US sponsors of war on Iraq. The smell of unfinished family business between the Bush clan and the Husseins, concealed in the ideological smog of neo-con fundamentalism, and fuelled by oil, arms and Israel, is a pungent one. But even without honour, there can be intelligence, whether military or otherwise. Both kinds have been conspicuous by their absence over Iraq.
I do not consider myself to be an Iraq 'expert'. I have worked on various stories and campaigns over the years about Saddam's use of chemical weapons, his suppression of the Kurds and others, the two Gulf Wars and the effect of UN sanctions on Iraq. As chairman of Medical Aid for Iraq, I was responsible with others in that organisation for getting the first convoy of medical supplies into the country after the 1991 war. Over the next decade, MAI took many other convoys into Iraq, working with and supplying hospitals throughout the country.
That experience alone has meant that nothing that has happened in Iraq since the invasion has come as any surprise. Not the collapse of Saddam's army and the relatively easy initial military victory of the coalition forces. Not the looting and breakdown of civil order that followed the removal of the dictatorship. And certainly not the – at best – ambivalent feelings of most Iraqis towards the occupation forces, towards which they felt simultaneously grateful for the overthrow of Saddam and resentful for their usurping of Iraqi sovereignty.
It was apparent – to me and my colleagues in MAI, at any rate – that the great majority of Iraqis felt equally hostile towards the 'international community' for the sanctions and continuing military action against their country as they did towards Saddam. It was clear that the aftermath of any overthrow of the Ba'athists would be messy, disordered and bloody. It was obvious that any foreign intervention would provoke large-scale resentment and, sooner or later, resistance, and that any such intervention would have be properly authorised, well prepared, tightly restrained and short-lived.
The fact that it has been none of these things illuminates a mindboggingly ignorant approach to international affairs. Did the US and its allies really believe that Iraq would behave like Paris in 1944 or Berlin in 1990? Was there no one around to tell them that Baghdad (and still less Falluja or Najaf) wouldn't be like that? Or didn't they ask anyone? Or listen to their replies?
The alarming thing is that, far from having learned any lessons from what has happened in Iraq over the past year, the US seems intent on repeating its mistakes. After a period of relative restraint (if sniper attacks and other shootings, helicopter gunship raids and the occasional bombing sally can be called restraint), the US administrator in Iraq, L Paul Bremer III, broke seven days of silence this week with a warning that the US military will not "hold back" indefinitely.
"They must be dealt with, and they will be dealt with," he said of the various insurgent forces, without putting a figure on how many more deaths must be added to the 1,000-plus Iraqis and 100-plus coalition soldiers who have already been killed during April.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has declared that, not content with its 'targeted killings' in the occupied territories, it is now prepared to pursue Palestinian leaders in other countries too. One such target, according to the Israeli cabinet minister, Gideon Ezra, is the Damascus-based Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal. "The minute we have the operational opportunity we will do this," said Ezra.
Crimes and mistakes, what passes for western Middle East policy is littered with them.
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Tribune column, 23 April 2004
"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute." It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Barely a day has passed in recent weeks without some new Middle-Eastern event bringing to mind Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe's comments on hearing of Napoleon's execution of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804.
From the Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders in Gaza to the Americans' murderous blunderings in Falluja and elsewhere, thoughtful politics and diplomacy have been blown away by the barrels of many guns. Only the Islamist-fascists can have reason to be pleased by the developments of the past month. If Bush and Sharon were on their side, they could hardly have planned things better.
How did things come to such a pass? How, in particular, did the US manage to squander so wantonly the sympathy and goodwill that came its way worldwide after the September 11th atrocities? Was it a crime or a mistake?
Unlike some on the Left, I don't doubt that the motives of most of those who supported the war on Iraq were honourable – particularly in this country, and particularly in the Labour Party. I share many of those motives myself. While others among my friends and political associates were marching in their millions in apparently unequivocal opposition to war, I was torn between that clear-cut standpoint and a deep-felt desire to see Saddam's tyranny destroyed. How else, if not by invasion and occupation, was that to be done? In common with most Iraqis, it would seem, I have still not managed convincingly to resolve that contradiction in my mind.
It's harder to attribute the same honourable motives to the US sponsors of war on Iraq. The smell of unfinished family business between the Bush clan and the Husseins, concealed in the ideological smog of neo-con fundamentalism, and fuelled by oil, arms and Israel, is a pungent one. But even without honour, there can be intelligence, whether military or otherwise. Both kinds have been conspicuous by their absence over Iraq.
I do not consider myself to be an Iraq 'expert'. I have worked on various stories and campaigns over the years about Saddam's use of chemical weapons, his suppression of the Kurds and others, the two Gulf Wars and the effect of UN sanctions on Iraq. As chairman of Medical Aid for Iraq, I was responsible with others in that organisation for getting the first convoy of medical supplies into the country after the 1991 war. Over the next decade, MAI took many other convoys into Iraq, working with and supplying hospitals throughout the country.
That experience alone has meant that nothing that has happened in Iraq since the invasion has come as any surprise. Not the collapse of Saddam's army and the relatively easy initial military victory of the coalition forces. Not the looting and breakdown of civil order that followed the removal of the dictatorship. And certainly not the – at best – ambivalent feelings of most Iraqis towards the occupation forces, towards which they felt simultaneously grateful for the overthrow of Saddam and resentful for their usurping of Iraqi sovereignty.
It was apparent – to me and my colleagues in MAI, at any rate – that the great majority of Iraqis felt equally hostile towards the 'international community' for the sanctions and continuing military action against their country as they did towards Saddam. It was clear that the aftermath of any overthrow of the Ba'athists would be messy, disordered and bloody. It was obvious that any foreign intervention would provoke large-scale resentment and, sooner or later, resistance, and that any such intervention would have be properly authorised, well prepared, tightly restrained and short-lived.
The fact that it has been none of these things illuminates a mindboggingly ignorant approach to international affairs. Did the US and its allies really believe that Iraq would behave like Paris in 1944 or Berlin in 1990? Was there no one around to tell them that Baghdad (and still less Falluja or Najaf) wouldn't be like that? Or didn't they ask anyone? Or listen to their replies?
The alarming thing is that, far from having learned any lessons from what has happened in Iraq over the past year, the US seems intent on repeating its mistakes. After a period of relative restraint (if sniper attacks and other shootings, helicopter gunship raids and the occasional bombing sally can be called restraint), the US administrator in Iraq, L Paul Bremer III, broke seven days of silence this week with a warning that the US military will not "hold back" indefinitely.
"They must be dealt with, and they will be dealt with," he said of the various insurgent forces, without putting a figure on how many more deaths must be added to the 1,000-plus Iraqis and 100-plus coalition soldiers who have already been killed during April.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has declared that, not content with its 'targeted killings' in the occupied territories, it is now prepared to pursue Palestinian leaders in other countries too. One such target, according to the Israeli cabinet minister, Gideon Ezra, is the Damascus-based Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal. "The minute we have the operational opportunity we will do this," said Ezra.
Crimes and mistakes, what passes for western Middle East policy is littered with them.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
The smallest things
Tribune column, 9 April 2004
Sometimes it's the smallest things that catch you emotionally unawares.
There's a café at the end of my road that the past three decades have somehow passed by. It has one of those tills like an old-fashioned manual typewriter that makes a loud 'terr-ring' sound and throws open its cash drawer when you push down the keys. There's a timeworn Lyon's ice cream sign on the wall, a faded notice saying 'We accept Luncheon Vouchers', and a menu that includes rice pudding and custard for afters.
It's been run by the same couple for as long as I've been going there, which goes back to when Chris Smith and Margaret Hodge were councillors on the local housing committee. A squatter, homelessness campaigner and Labour activist in those days, I used to talk politics there with the regulars over sweet teas and bacon sarnies.
Both the proprietors and the regulars have grown old with the décor (although even 20-odd years ago the place seemed to have more than its share of OAPs discussing operations and whose funerals they'd been to recently). And I've gone there less and less, as the course of my life has taken me away from home more and more. In recent years I've hardly been there at all. An anonymous stranger, I'd imagined myself, sitting there unnoticed among the builders, the council workers from the office opposite and the pensioners fresh from their visit to the nearby Post Office.
I must have been in there just before leaving for Africa on my last trip overseas. And although I have no memory of it, I must have left behind a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. (Yes, I know, but you can't expect me to boycott Kit Kat, Nescafe and Coke, can you?)
The reason I know this is that I called in there the other day with a serious starch and saturated fat craving to satiate. (With three slices, please. White bread, Mother's Pride, and cheap marge.)
I caught a glimpse of an elderly woman nudging her companion and nodding in my direction as I reminded myself what was on the menu (unchanged from when its 1970s-style red mock-leather holder was new). A few hushed words were exchanged with the woman proprietor, who disappeared into the back room before returning a few minutes later to present me with my bottle of Diet Coke.
It was more than six months since I'd left it there, tucked out of sight under the table where I'd been eating. One of the elderly regulars spotted that I'd forgotten to take it with me, but was no longer fleet enough of foot or loud enough of voice to alert me to the fact before I'd disappeared up the road. She'd given it to the café proprietor for safe keeping, and now, many months later, she recognised me on my return and reunited me with my bottle.
I don't know whether I was most touched by the fact that someone had remembered me amidst all the tumult and turnover of the ever-altering metropolis that is London; or that they had kept this bottle for so long in expectation of my eventual return. Either way, it made me feel a part of a community that I had only half recognised as existing at all.
These are the people for whom, every spring when I am in the country, I put out new pots and window boxes at the front of the flat. I do this even though, every spring almost without fail, eventually they get stolen, because I would rather share other people's pleasure in them for a short while than keep them to myself at the back of the flat, where they can't get stolen. Senseless and inconsequential though all this may seem, getting my bottle of Diet Coke back felt like a victory over everyone who would reduce human existence to a selfish scramble for survival.
Anyone who has spent any time in the Poor World will know that the poorest western visitor is wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of most of its inhabitants. It's one of the reasons why, whatever immigration controls we may decide to impose for pragmatic reasons, there is no conceivable moral case against 'economic migrants'.
Sometimes, though, even the most committed socialists can get frustrated when people seem to fail to do all they can to help themselves in their own countries.
I have been involved in trying to set up a website that would enable local people involved in sustainable tourism to publicise their own ventures without having to go through intermediaries, who then cream off most of the profits. Some of my contacts in Kenya were supposed to be getting back to me in January with details of the campsite and other initiatives they operate in the Maasai heartland on the Kenya-Tanzania border.
I had become increasingly frustrated as a result of hearing nothing from them, until I received an email this week. 'Sorry for the delay,' it said. 'We couldn’t email you because the business has been terribly down. We didn’t get even a single [visitor] since November and I haven't had the money to get into Nairobi for emails.'
Sometimes it's the smallest things that catch you emotionally unawares.
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Tribune column, 9 April 2004
Sometimes it's the smallest things that catch you emotionally unawares.
There's a café at the end of my road that the past three decades have somehow passed by. It has one of those tills like an old-fashioned manual typewriter that makes a loud 'terr-ring' sound and throws open its cash drawer when you push down the keys. There's a timeworn Lyon's ice cream sign on the wall, a faded notice saying 'We accept Luncheon Vouchers', and a menu that includes rice pudding and custard for afters.
It's been run by the same couple for as long as I've been going there, which goes back to when Chris Smith and Margaret Hodge were councillors on the local housing committee. A squatter, homelessness campaigner and Labour activist in those days, I used to talk politics there with the regulars over sweet teas and bacon sarnies.
Both the proprietors and the regulars have grown old with the décor (although even 20-odd years ago the place seemed to have more than its share of OAPs discussing operations and whose funerals they'd been to recently). And I've gone there less and less, as the course of my life has taken me away from home more and more. In recent years I've hardly been there at all. An anonymous stranger, I'd imagined myself, sitting there unnoticed among the builders, the council workers from the office opposite and the pensioners fresh from their visit to the nearby Post Office.
I must have been in there just before leaving for Africa on my last trip overseas. And although I have no memory of it, I must have left behind a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. (Yes, I know, but you can't expect me to boycott Kit Kat, Nescafe and Coke, can you?)
The reason I know this is that I called in there the other day with a serious starch and saturated fat craving to satiate. (With three slices, please. White bread, Mother's Pride, and cheap marge.)
I caught a glimpse of an elderly woman nudging her companion and nodding in my direction as I reminded myself what was on the menu (unchanged from when its 1970s-style red mock-leather holder was new). A few hushed words were exchanged with the woman proprietor, who disappeared into the back room before returning a few minutes later to present me with my bottle of Diet Coke.
It was more than six months since I'd left it there, tucked out of sight under the table where I'd been eating. One of the elderly regulars spotted that I'd forgotten to take it with me, but was no longer fleet enough of foot or loud enough of voice to alert me to the fact before I'd disappeared up the road. She'd given it to the café proprietor for safe keeping, and now, many months later, she recognised me on my return and reunited me with my bottle.
I don't know whether I was most touched by the fact that someone had remembered me amidst all the tumult and turnover of the ever-altering metropolis that is London; or that they had kept this bottle for so long in expectation of my eventual return. Either way, it made me feel a part of a community that I had only half recognised as existing at all.
These are the people for whom, every spring when I am in the country, I put out new pots and window boxes at the front of the flat. I do this even though, every spring almost without fail, eventually they get stolen, because I would rather share other people's pleasure in them for a short while than keep them to myself at the back of the flat, where they can't get stolen. Senseless and inconsequential though all this may seem, getting my bottle of Diet Coke back felt like a victory over everyone who would reduce human existence to a selfish scramble for survival.
Anyone who has spent any time in the Poor World will know that the poorest western visitor is wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of most of its inhabitants. It's one of the reasons why, whatever immigration controls we may decide to impose for pragmatic reasons, there is no conceivable moral case against 'economic migrants'.
Sometimes, though, even the most committed socialists can get frustrated when people seem to fail to do all they can to help themselves in their own countries.
I have been involved in trying to set up a website that would enable local people involved in sustainable tourism to publicise their own ventures without having to go through intermediaries, who then cream off most of the profits. Some of my contacts in Kenya were supposed to be getting back to me in January with details of the campsite and other initiatives they operate in the Maasai heartland on the Kenya-Tanzania border.
I had become increasingly frustrated as a result of hearing nothing from them, until I received an email this week. 'Sorry for the delay,' it said. 'We couldn’t email you because the business has been terribly down. We didn’t get even a single [visitor] since November and I haven't had the money to get into Nairobi for emails.'
Sometimes it's the smallest things that catch you emotionally unawares.
Fine words butter no parnsnips
Tribune column, 19 March 2004
Two things strike me immediately about Britain on returning from a long spell in Africa. The first is its affluence: the fourth-richest country in the world, and it shows, despite all the inequalities. The second is the poverty of its ambitions: the inability to utilise this wealth to achieve any sort of meaningful change in the world, whether at home or abroad.
It doesn't do to become nostalgic about a time before you were born, particularly when it was a period that was dominated by the bloodiest conflict in human history. But a smidgeon of research I've been doing on the contrast between those two giants of post-war Labour politics, Nye Bevan and Ernest Bevin, makes it difficult not to despair at our lost sense of the possible in both domestic and international politics.
There, at the end of the second world war, was a battered, bloodied and impoverished Britain. But it was a country that never doubted that it could "afford" a National Health Service. And it was a country that, in spite of all the hardships at home, was prepared to introduce bread rationing in 1947 (after enduring the entire war without it) in order to send grain to Germany, which was on the verge of starvation.
That single act brings into sharp focus the practical, good-sense internationalism of a generation of political activists who had seen little of the world beyond their own borders, except in war. Without access to cheap air travel or the communications revolution of the modern mass media, they had more of a sense of being part of an interdependent world community than any number of the globalised jet-setters who were to follow. Whatever their flaws, the leaders of post-war Britain – and, more importantly, America – knew that there was more to winning a war than success on the battlefield. For all of its Bevanite past, what Tribune reader would not swap the Bevinite transatlantic alliance created in the 1940s for the version that exists today?
It's worth casting a comparative eye back to the 1940s, not least because the Prime Minister is doing likewise in his rhetorical war on terrorism. Tony Blair's speech to Labour's spring conference, hastily re-cast in response to the Madrid bombings, was generally described as "Churchillian", evoking the "spirit of the second world war". While the previous generation faced war with the Nazis, he told us, we face "a war of a different nature to anything before . . . terrorism waged without limits".
If Tony Blair spent more time studying history, rather than pondering his own place in it, he might have more of a sense of proper perspective. Al Qaeda and its allies have the ability to inflict awful pain, as they have shown in one atrocity after another, most recently in Madrid. But terrible as these may be, they do not bear comparison with the terror wrought by the Nazis; nor indeed with the routine toll of deprivation, starvation and disease that kills thousands daily worldwide.
Al Qaeda's are episodic, ugly paroxysms, not a sustained and serious threat to western democracy and freedoms. Some of the technology available to the Islamist-nihilists facilitates actions of a "different nature to anything before", and a globalised world makes possible a globalised terror network.
But unless you count only acts carried out in the last 60 years against countries of the first world, or you believe that terrorism is the sole prerogative of non-national, non-state groups, any half-serious historian would have to say that the world has seen terror "waged without limits" far more often, far more extensively and far more indiscriminately than the very worst that Al Qaeda is capable of attempting. Al Qaeda may have the capacity to hurt, terribly; but, unlike the Nazis, there is not a Christian in Mecca's chance that it can win.
How long it goes on hurting depends on how well we learn our history lessons. It goes without saying that we have to defeat – or, more realistically, contain – the terror networks of Al Qaeda and its ilk; and that there will be a price to be paid in doing so. Much more importantly, though, we must also be prepared to pay the price of the modern-day equivalent of exporting grain to post-war Germany.
Three weeks after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Tony Blair delivered what was widely regarded as an inspirational speech to the Labour conference. He declared that, "The world community must show as much its capacity for compassion as for force." He said that, "The Palestinians must have justice, the chance to prosper and in their own land, as equal partners with Israel." And he described the state of Africa as "a scar on the conscience of the world". "If the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it," he argued. "And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier."
In the weeks that followed there was much talk of a new "Marshall Plan for Africa", in reference to the economic aid programme for the rebuilding of Europe after the second world war. One month to the day after September 11th, the European Union launched its "New Africa Initiative". The following year, the G8 countries formally endorsed the "New Partnership for Africa's Development", or NEPAD.
"Fine words butter no parsnips," one of my African hosts told me (quoting Lenin, although he didn't realise it at the time) after one of the most recent NEPAD pronouncements. Buttered parsnips won't beat Al Qaeda on their own, but anyone with an understanding of history can tell you that they won't be beaten without them.
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Tribune column, 19 March 2004
Two things strike me immediately about Britain on returning from a long spell in Africa. The first is its affluence: the fourth-richest country in the world, and it shows, despite all the inequalities. The second is the poverty of its ambitions: the inability to utilise this wealth to achieve any sort of meaningful change in the world, whether at home or abroad.
It doesn't do to become nostalgic about a time before you were born, particularly when it was a period that was dominated by the bloodiest conflict in human history. But a smidgeon of research I've been doing on the contrast between those two giants of post-war Labour politics, Nye Bevan and Ernest Bevin, makes it difficult not to despair at our lost sense of the possible in both domestic and international politics.
There, at the end of the second world war, was a battered, bloodied and impoverished Britain. But it was a country that never doubted that it could "afford" a National Health Service. And it was a country that, in spite of all the hardships at home, was prepared to introduce bread rationing in 1947 (after enduring the entire war without it) in order to send grain to Germany, which was on the verge of starvation.
That single act brings into sharp focus the practical, good-sense internationalism of a generation of political activists who had seen little of the world beyond their own borders, except in war. Without access to cheap air travel or the communications revolution of the modern mass media, they had more of a sense of being part of an interdependent world community than any number of the globalised jet-setters who were to follow. Whatever their flaws, the leaders of post-war Britain – and, more importantly, America – knew that there was more to winning a war than success on the battlefield. For all of its Bevanite past, what Tribune reader would not swap the Bevinite transatlantic alliance created in the 1940s for the version that exists today?
It's worth casting a comparative eye back to the 1940s, not least because the Prime Minister is doing likewise in his rhetorical war on terrorism. Tony Blair's speech to Labour's spring conference, hastily re-cast in response to the Madrid bombings, was generally described as "Churchillian", evoking the "spirit of the second world war". While the previous generation faced war with the Nazis, he told us, we face "a war of a different nature to anything before . . . terrorism waged without limits".
If Tony Blair spent more time studying history, rather than pondering his own place in it, he might have more of a sense of proper perspective. Al Qaeda and its allies have the ability to inflict awful pain, as they have shown in one atrocity after another, most recently in Madrid. But terrible as these may be, they do not bear comparison with the terror wrought by the Nazis; nor indeed with the routine toll of deprivation, starvation and disease that kills thousands daily worldwide.
Al Qaeda's are episodic, ugly paroxysms, not a sustained and serious threat to western democracy and freedoms. Some of the technology available to the Islamist-nihilists facilitates actions of a "different nature to anything before", and a globalised world makes possible a globalised terror network.
But unless you count only acts carried out in the last 60 years against countries of the first world, or you believe that terrorism is the sole prerogative of non-national, non-state groups, any half-serious historian would have to say that the world has seen terror "waged without limits" far more often, far more extensively and far more indiscriminately than the very worst that Al Qaeda is capable of attempting. Al Qaeda may have the capacity to hurt, terribly; but, unlike the Nazis, there is not a Christian in Mecca's chance that it can win.
How long it goes on hurting depends on how well we learn our history lessons. It goes without saying that we have to defeat – or, more realistically, contain – the terror networks of Al Qaeda and its ilk; and that there will be a price to be paid in doing so. Much more importantly, though, we must also be prepared to pay the price of the modern-day equivalent of exporting grain to post-war Germany.
Three weeks after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Tony Blair delivered what was widely regarded as an inspirational speech to the Labour conference. He declared that, "The world community must show as much its capacity for compassion as for force." He said that, "The Palestinians must have justice, the chance to prosper and in their own land, as equal partners with Israel." And he described the state of Africa as "a scar on the conscience of the world". "If the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it," he argued. "And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier."
In the weeks that followed there was much talk of a new "Marshall Plan for Africa", in reference to the economic aid programme for the rebuilding of Europe after the second world war. One month to the day after September 11th, the European Union launched its "New Africa Initiative". The following year, the G8 countries formally endorsed the "New Partnership for Africa's Development", or NEPAD.
"Fine words butter no parsnips," one of my African hosts told me (quoting Lenin, although he didn't realise it at the time) after one of the most recent NEPAD pronouncements. Buttered parsnips won't beat Al Qaeda on their own, but anyone with an understanding of history can tell you that they won't be beaten without them.
