Israel, The Gaza War and the West

'Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out'. Seumas Milne, Gaza is a crime made in Washington as well as Jerusalem, The Guardian, Wednesday 6 August 2014

The reason why British politicians are hastening to position themselves against Israel's ruthless attack on Gaza has as much to do with dormant principles being awoken as with the fact, contrary to Milne's assertion, that Israel is acting completely in defiance of Washington and London.

That is a thought Seumas Milne never has been prepared to entertain. For him, it's quite clear Israel's assault on Gaza is one done with the connivance of 'the West' because he wants to claim only world opinion and outrage, as represented in and through him and his 'journalism' has led to an attitude shift.

However, Israel, has never, followed Washington's line nor was it ever a puppet of 'US Imperial Power', even during the Cold War. But its foreign policy has become increasingly independent in recent years, especially under Netanyahu who detests Obama and his administration for being 'soft' and pro-Arab.

The rise of Qatar as a major trade partner and gas rich oil emirate prepared to back the Muslim Brotherhood accounted for a gradual shift in the foreign policy of the Western Powers which preceded the 2014 War. Qatar was also prepared to back Gaza by supplying aid for infrastructure projects.

Evidently, the value of the arms deals remained a factor in the reluctance of British and US politicians to say anything condemnatory at the outset of current crisis this summer. But the point is that arms deals are usually tied to perceived strategical objectives and often energy interests.

With the collapse of Syria and the ongoing chaos in Iraq and Libya, the states carved out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire during and after the First world War 1914-1918 are coming unravelled. Across the Eastern Mediterranean and Greater Middle East, a new constellation of alignments have emerged.

The important year was 2011. Though Qatar is not a democracy, it used its gas wealth to support its regional policy of promoting Arab democracy in Egypt and Syria. The Obama administration was, in fact, not for the Egyptian coup in 2013 that restored the old order after the revolution of 2011 ( the 'Arab Spring ').

Nor was Britain. The reason was parly an admission that the old order of the secular dictator dating back to the post-1945 era and Cold War realpolitik was over. But it was also a recognition that Arab democracy was necessary is resentments at the old order were not to boil over into support for terrorism.

The Egyptian coup ended that and had to be accepted as an a fait accompli because of two things. Firstly, Russia was vying for influence in the Eastern Mediterranean with the discovery of the large gas reserves of the Levant Basin and was prepared to step in to supply arms to Sisi's military regime.

Secondly, despite an identification with some of Qatar's regional ambitions in tangent with Turkey, especially as part of the Friends of Syria Group-one dedicated to overthrowing Assad-the better to check Iran and advance a Qatar-pipeline, Egypt remained important as a geopolitical bulwark of stability.

Once Washington overcame its intitial hostility to the coup, it hastened to restore full military aid but it had not expected Israel to have taken that as a green light to impose its own 'solution' to its own problem with the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, that is Hamas, with such exemplary brutality.

The Western Powers have been distinctly cool towards Netanyahu's revival of the 'war on terror' pose put forth under the Bush presidency and, as its diplomats and politicians have pointed out, the killing in Gaza is bad in itself but also makes it harder to assert US and British interests in the Middle East.

Israel, it should be remembered, was hostile to the West's backing for Sunni forces in Syria, brokered by Qatar and Turkey and designed to removed Assad. That's why Netanyahu praised Putin's Russia for negotiating the deal to remove Assad's chemical weapons without a military strike.

That, and the fact Israel has sought cooperation with Russia on arms developments and developing the offshore gas fields discovered in its territorial waters in 2010, hardly shows Israel to be a mere tool of the West just as vulgar propagandists such as Milne blithely assume.

Israel, has never, followed Washington's line nor was it ever a puppet or 'a satrapy' of Us Imperial Power, even during the Cold War. But it's foreign policy has become increasingly independent in recent years, especially under Netanyahu who detests Obama and his administration.

Washington, London and Paris have been gravitating towards Qatar because of energy interests and no longer regard the Israeli-Egypt-Saudi block as the main or important player in the Middle East. The growing consternation at the Israeli onslaught is a product of this changed reality.

The Persecution of Christians, the British Left and the "War on Muslims"

The plight of Christians being persecuted is something that should be of as much interest to 'progressives' whom journalist Owen Jones believes are wary of taking up their plight through 'fear' of being seen to be on the side of 'Muslim bashers' on the far right, something that would indicate that they are somewhat craven.

Jones, however, seems blithely unaware that the dominant propaganda thrust of the anti-war activists he associates with through the Stop the War Coalition is that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were, as George Galloway claims, part of a 'war on Muslims'. 

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were, of course, no more a 'war on Muslims' than the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 was part of a war on Orthodox Christians. The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars were wars to gain geopolitical advantages mingled with fervent hopes of installing democracy.

So the reason why Christians are largely of no concern is that their persecution cannot be said to fit into the crude propaganda narrative that 'Western Imperialism' is pitted against all Muslims everywhere both at home and abroad, one that seeks to harness 'Muslim outrage' to boost anti-government sentiments.

'It is, unsurprisingly, the Middle East where the situation for Christians has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. One of the legacies of the invasion of Iraq has been the purging of a Christian community that has lived there for up to two millennia'.

True, but in Syria it is the legacy of Saudi Arabia and Qatar funding and backing Sunni jihadists as a way of overthrow Assad that has done much to assist groups dedicated to persecuting and murdering Christians to flourish and gain ground as part of a proxy war against Shi'ite Iran.

Anti-war activists have not had a 'consistent line' on the Middle East since sectarian wars have spread across the Middle East as the violence has shifted across the Syria-Iraq border and and put Iran and Presidents Maliki and Assad in direct confrontation with Sunni Islamist insurgents.

Consequently, the propaganda line, as put forth by Seumas Milne for example, has changed into the idea that the invasion and occupation of Iraq itself caused sectarian divisions because it was the intention of the US and Britain to set Sunni against Shia in order to maintain control, colonial 'divide and rule' as a plan.

In fact, the invasion removed a secular dictator and the occupation authorities did not put into effect any plan to use Shi'ite miltias against Sunni ones opposed to Baghdad until the civil war stage of the insurgency broke out after the 2005 elections.

The invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic decision without which the sectarian conflicts could not have broken out and Christians would not have been persecuted. But as Syria after 2011 shows, those sectarian tensions exist and could end in violence irrespective of Western intervention.

In Syria, it is true the US and Britain's alliance with Qatar and Saudi Arabia has meant aligning with regional powers intent on backing and bankrolling Sunni jihadists against Assad who is supported by the Allawi Shia and by many Christians only through fear they would be killed if Assad was removed.

But its a propaganda myth that the US somehow is the 'imperial master' in the Middle East along with Britain. In reality the US has tended to back off from involving itself in the Middle East after 2011 and tends to give tacit backing to Saudi Arabia because of its oil.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar follow their regional interests against Iran by whatever means they think 'effective'. Britain and France have been far more aggressive in wanting the US to involve itself in removing Assad because of their dependence upon Qatar and its liquefied natural gas.

In Britain anti-war activists would be better off understanding that the killing and mayhem in Iraq and Syria, and the threat of ISIS, is partly the cost of Britain being overdependent upon Qatar for energy and the use of its petrodollars to invest in propping up its ailing rentier economy.

Unless Britain finds alternatives to fossil fuels, then there is going to be no end to the prospect of it being dragged into conflicts or effectively backing unsavoury jihadists because ultimately the stability of its high octane consumer economy depends heavily on access to oil and gas.

This is something the left often shirks confronting. Wars for oil or about oil are considered to be about corporate profits and the political elites benefitting. While that's true, the unpleasant fact remains that the living standards of the majority of citizens are heavily tied to cheap oil and gas.

Blair, Islamism and Planetary Plots

Seumas Milne is right that there is a lot of mendacious propaganda flying about in an age when 'public diplomacy' consists of 'framing devices' put forth by the political class. The aim of Blair's speech was to shape perceptions about both his policy towards the Middle East and the course of foreign policy.

It could not have gone amiss that Blair gave the speech at Bloomberg's London HQ. For those fearful that the future could involve Britain being involved in endless conflicts and interventions, with the looming threat of terror hanging over its cities and town, this speech was a propaganda template for that.

So Blair's speech is important because a significant part of the political and media class In London value Blair's ability to stake out a position that can be used by politicians in need of an alarmist way in which to connect Britain's foreign policy with the need for domestic protection.

So it is odd that Milne opines that the reason why Blair's views are taken so seriously 'isn't immediately obvious'.On the contrary, it is immediately evident that Blair did not set out any real policy but was concerned with drawing up the correct battle lines, the propaganda framework for some cosmic struggle.

The substance of Blair's speech was less signification than the way language was used. When Blair referred to 'extremist Islamism' he meant the sort that threatens Britain's interests and so conflated the Muslim Briotherhood In Egypt with malign and openly terroristic forces such as Al Qaida.

However, Milne, himself no stranger to propaganda riffs, then claims,

'..he ( Blair ) also demanded military intervention against Syria – backed by Russia – along with more "active measures" to help the armed opposition, which is dominated by Islamists and jihadists. It's a crazy combination with an openly anti-democratic core'.

The 'Opposition' ( Blair's term for the anti-Assad insurgents ) may be dominated by Islamists and jihadists but the official line of the Coalition government until late 2013 was that the 'rebels' in the Free Syrian Army were mostly democrats fighting against Assad's tyranny and that he 'must go'.

However, if it is clear that the many of the insurgents in Syria are not democrats but many affiliated to Al Nustra and Al Qaida, it raises the question of whether Milne agrees with Blair that the Muslim Brotherhood should be supported or not ( or, at least, in word if not deed ).

After all, it's deeply contradictory of Milne to complain that Blair is demanding 'active support' be given to 'Islamists and jihadists' in Syria while supporting their being crushed in Egypt, unless the supposed purpose of that foreign policy is made plain.

After all, it could be argued that the opponents of the interventionist foreign policy in Britain such as Milne often use doublethink in lauding Islamists when they are being oppressed and condemning them as tools of imperialism when the same Muslim Brotherhood members are against a government Britain dislikes.

British foreign policy does have blatant double standards and has demonstrated a weird Orwellian schizophrenia, supporting the anti-Assad insurgents when it was clear they were dominated by bloodthirsty fanatics who elsewhere would have been portrayed as the existential enemy at home and abroad.

However, it is curious that 'anti-war' activists often demonstrate the same double standards without the even the excuse of being in government. They have the luxury of having things both ways, that when Britain accepts Egypt's coup against Islamists it's evil and when it supports them in Syria it's evil too.

Evidently, the best foreign policy would be one where Britain would not interfere or meddle in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern states, in which case the policy of realpolitik would be preferable (but that's condemned as well ). It which case no attempt should be made to have a foreign policy at all.

When it comes down to it, Western states are embroiled in the affairs of the Middle East because of geopolitical concerns and the fact it contains huge supplies of oil and gas. Until energy independence is aimed at, the region is going to be the site of intense geopolitical and Great Power rivalries.

There are certain 'anti-war' journalists, such as Milne, who prefer the Cold War period and who praise the Soviet Union in retrospect as a check on Western power in the Middle East and its support for the secular dictator Assad. But its not clear why they have the pretence of being concerned with democracy.

The "Islamist Plot" in Britain-The Domestic Impact of Foreign Policy.

It's possible fanatical ideologues such as Education secretary Michael Gove have tried to exploit the existence of a plan to push school academies towards 'Islamisation' for political gain and to try to steal votes from Ukip and co-opt support for an interventionist British foreign policy against 'extreme Islamism'.

But it does not follow that Milne is corrrect in this,

'In Britain, the campaign against Islamist "extremism" is once again in full flow. In fact, it is open season on the Muslim community. For the past few weeks reports have multiplied about an alleged "Islamic plot", code-named Operation Trojan Horse, to take control of 25 state schools in Birmingham and run them on strict religious principles'.

Even if the the Operation Trojan Horse statement comes from a shadowy anonymous source, the evidence of the DfE Report does seem to prove there is a serious basis to the allegations that cannot be routinely dismissed as part of an 'Islamphobic' propaganda campaign.

Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph writes,

'A separate report, by inspectors from the DfE, has substantiated many of the allegations. The report, disclosed in The Telegraph on Friday, accused Park View, Nansen and Golden Hillock of illegally segregating pupils, discriminating against non-Muslim students and “restricting” the GCSE syllabus to “comply with conservative Islamic teaching”.The report said girls at Park View and Golden Hillock were made to sit at the back of the class; some Christian pupils at Golden Hillock were left to “teach themselves” and at Park View a supporter of al-Qaeda was invited to speak at assembly. Aspects of the GCSE curriculum were ignored as un-Islamic, even though needed by pupils for exams..'

More than that radical Islamists such as Salma Yaqoob , formerly of George Galloway's Respect Party, has tried to use the language of the Iraq War in calling the Operation Trojan Horse statement a 'dodgy dossier' and part of a campaign of 'McCarthyism”

So it is not only Gove that is trying to score political propaganda points by linking plan to 'Islamise' schools to foreign policy and a global threat. Yaqoob is simply doing the same but spinning the narrative the other way; that this is part of a plot to 'demonise' Muslims and so justify interfering in Muslim lands.

That claim is handy is if the political agenda is to compare the Ofsted inspectors 'interference' with Brimingham schools with an interventionist foreign policy and so put forth propaganda about a plan to order Muslims about and so create a siege mentality and swell supporters for Islamist organisations.

The claims in the Ofsted Report are either true or they are not true and trying to put a spin on them one way or another cannot change that, unless it is supposed that the report itself was part of a 'political witch-hunt' and ordered to find out what they wanted to to back up the allegations of an Islamist plot.

The danger with this foolish shadow boxing between politicians in government and Islamists is that it could indeed polarise British society. In that sense ideologues such as Milne, who backs any movement or force so long as its anti-Western, and Yaqoob are part of the problem no less than Gove.

After all, Gove in his appalling Celsius 7/7 writes of Islamism as 'one seamless totalitarian threat', one that extends from Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe and Britain, a vast planetary struggle between Good and Evil that actually sounds quite as paranoid as the ideology of radical Islamists.

Woolwich Attack: Rationalising Terror and Propagating Ideology.

There is a difference between journalists attempting to explain why terrorists or assassins believe they are justified in carrying out attacks and using those justifications as a means to rationalise them as a mere reflex action to foreign policies that are said to be bound to cause a response.

Senior Guardian journalist Seumas Milne is an example of the latter as clear from the headline accompanying his reactionto the verdict in sentencing soldier Lee Rigby's killer Michael Adebolajo-Woolwich attack: If the whole world's a battlefield, that holds in Woolwich as well as Waziristan.

Essentially, Milne's attitude towards to Adebolajo's assassination is to use it to hammer home hard propaganda points by quoting the words of terrorists and assassins as if their justifications were self evident and not to be 'condoned' because 'counter-productive'.

This Leninist approach to terrorism regards such violence as Adebolajo's as bad because bad for 'the cause', an 'infantile disorder' to use Lenin's words when criticising 'pointless' anarchist violence in Russia before the Revolution of 1917 that fails to yield results.

Milne opines,

'Quite apart from morality, the impact was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby's killers claimed to be defending, as Islamophobic attacks spiked across Britain.'

That is why Milne loftily writes off morality as something 'quite apart' from the 'counter-productive' nature of the attack. That, in any case, matters less because a soldier who had served in Afghanistan was hacked to death in the streets of London but because it led to a backlash against 'our side'.

The use of language to hint and insinuate that message is clear to anybody who knows anything about how propaganda works. Milne is claiming that what assassins such as Adebolajo must be taken at face value and not to even bother looking in detail at what he actually said.

"We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth ... We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth...I apologise that women had to see this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don't care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are gonna die? No, it's gonna be the average guy – like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so you can all live in peace. Leave our lands and you will live in peace. That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you. Salaam alaikum".

Milne completely discounts the nature of the threat was aimed at the British public, that if 'You people' failed to stop the war then 'You' would become next. The fact it was a soldier who was targeted was intended to give Adebolajo a sort of equivalent status as a foot soldier in a war.

'Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan. So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians'.

It was a discriminate attack on a soldier that was meant to get the public to think that they would be next because they have not prevented a war in Afghanistan being fought. Adebolajo was not even a born Muslim nor from Muslim lands ;attacked' but someone who converted in order to have a creed to fight for.

In that sense, Adebolajo's actions are quite in line with a tradition of political terrorism and assassination that has a pedigree going back to the Russian tradition that culminated in Lenin's bloodthirsty use of mass terror during the construction of the Soviet Union.

The idea that there are no innocent people in this world once the scale of the oppression is so clear means that either people are either for the right cause or against it. By failing to 'do' anything to change governments that carry out oppression in their name they are objectively supporting it and targets.

To mechanically write off all consideration of the psychopathology behind acts of terror and assassinations and killings for political and religions reasons is the gambit of those who have no problem with the idea of murdering their opponents so long as it gets the result they want.

If that means using outrages and atrocities for bolstering one's own propaganda, while affecting a distaste for that killing as 'counter productive', then that's simply the way it has to be in order to wake people up to the killing done in 'our name'. Sp Milne, as a prominent figure in the Stop the War Coalition claims,

'Only the wilfully blind or ignorant can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The surprise should be that there haven't been more such atrocities.'

'You People' had it coming in other words. The position is Stop the War or else expect more bloodshed. This is far from being a pacifist position. But then again, one problem with the 'anti-war' groups in Britain is that they are not led by well meaning people but, alas, cold blooded totalitarian ideologues.

Reflections on the 2013 Uprising in Egypt and the Reaction in Britain.

Journalists in Britain are already attempting to view the mass protests in Egypt, Brazil and Turkey as part of a wider global trend towards revolution against the 'neoliberal world order'. Each uprising has its own particular dynamic but Seumas Milne is already offering his version of these events.

As in 2011, the opposition is a middle-class-dominated alliance of left and right. But this time the Islamists are on the other side while supporters of the Mubarak regime are in the thick of it. The police, who beat and killed protesters two years ago, this week stood aside as demonstrators torched Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood offices. And the army, which backed the dictatorship until the last moment before forming a junta in 2011, has now thrown its weight behind the opposition.

Whether its ultimatum to the president turns into a full-blown coup or a managed change of government, the army – lavishly funded and trained by the US government and in control of extensive commercial interests – is back in the saddle. And many self-proclaimed revolutionaries who previously denounced Morsi for kowtowing to the military are now cheering it on. On past experience, they'll come to regret it.

Milne's interpretation is aptly titled Egypt, Brazil, Turkey: without politics, protest is at the mercy of the elites. Milne does not believe in spontaneous protests. Real democracy means the Jacobin-Bolshevik model whereby tightly organised vanguard elites channel protest into the politically correct direction.

So he knows a lot indeed about how organisation is essential in order to hijack revolutions.

Milne's sole criteria , however, for judging protests is whether they fit into his Manichean worldview of being objectively pro or anti-US. As a consequence, Milne's outlook , as always, seems to be based on the luxury of having things both ways so as to be 'right' no matter what the outcome of the mass protests.

Clearly, given that he has tended to back Islamists in the past, in so far as they were against US backed authoritarian regimes, he cannot now deny the failures of Morsi's regime nor does he bother to mention the fact many do not like its Islamisation of Egypt nor the attacks on the Coptic Christians.

Instead he chooses to use weasel language like this, 

The protesters have no shortage of grievances against Morsi's year-old government, of course: from the dire state of the economy, constitutional Islamisation and institutional power grabs to its failure to break with Mubarak's neoliberal policies and appeasement of US and Israeli power.

To get around these inconvenient facts he uses jargon such 'constitutional Islamisation'. Milne claims there are 'no shortage of greivances' but 'appeasement' of the US is not really up there as a main one: many protesters just seem to not want the US to back Morsi.

Milne's main concern is not that of the protesters, though he affects to be partly on their side, and it boild down to only one thing-whether the new government will be anti-US or not before it has even been constituted.

..the reality is, however incompetent Morsi's administration, many key levers of power – from the judiciary and police to the military and media – are effectively still in the hands of the old regime elites. They openly regard the Muslim Brotherhood as illegitimate interlopers, whose leaders should be returned to prison as soon as possible.

Yet these are the people now in alliance with opposition forces who genuinely want to see Egypt's revolution brought at least to a democratic conclusion.

There is no evidence that undefined 'opposition forces' are 'in alliance' with the army or Mubarak era elites as Milne insinuates . On the streets there is simply the hope that the army, which remains largely secular, will guard against any attempt by the Islamists to mobilise their supporters should Morsi actually be forced out.

That hope may well prove to be naive. But it is what the protesters demanding the revolution to be pushed towards its democratic conclusion actually want as well as an end to Morsi's retention of the structures of dictatorship and attempt to control the state for the exclusive benefit of his party of God.

Milne, by contrast, seems to care more about any revolutionary purity not being sullied by any relationship with the US despite the fact it's aid to Egypt is minute compared with the billions of dollars that oil rich Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are investing under Morsi ( some $10bn so far )

If Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are forced from office, it's hard to see such people breaking with neoliberal orthodoxy or asserting national independence, as most Egyptians want.

By 'such people' Milne means any future government that isn't explicitly anti-American. That concern takes priority over any form of economic recovery to benefit Egyptian people no matter what their particular political allegiances are or mere 'formal' middle class ( i.e "bourgeois" ) democracy.

If Egyptians are split into two rival camps between those who support the Muslim Brotherhood and illiberal general will conceptions of democracy, with the prospect of majoritarian tyrannies, and those who oppose that for various reasons then there is obviously no consensus on what 'most Egyptians' want.

In accordance with doublethink, Milne both accepts that Egyptians want to bring the revolution to a democratic conclusion and denies it. If any new government-even a transitional ' managed change of government'-has the potential to move  towards the US for whatever reason, it isn't what 'most Egyptians' want.

Hence,

Instead, the likelihood is that the Islamists, also with mass support, will resist being denied their democratic mandate, plunging Egypt into deeper conflict.

In other words, if Morsi's pro-US Muslim Brotherhood government is replaced by a more openly democratic Eygptian government that is favourable to the US and does not break with neoliberal policies then that will entail necessary resistance from the Islamists.

The fact is that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square seem to want a proper representational democracy first which protects minorities, is open and not full of cronies and corruption and does not try to impose one version of a Godly regime on all of them the better to enhance the power of the state over society.

Milne,however,  is only interested in 'framing' the perception of the Egyptian revolution for radicals in the West with a veneer of objectivity that can be easily peeled away by looking forensically at Milne's logic and language. He tends to fit the facts into a a rigid propaganda screed.

The Egyptian revolution is far more complicated than Milne is intentionally portraying it. There are two broad currents of popular opinion in Egypt.The first are those who believe in pushing Egypt towards becoming a more Islamic republic under Morsi.

Those who support Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are usually poorer and more uneducated with little understandind of what the procedures of a functioning democracy are beyond imposing the will of the 'Godly' people against those forces that are not.

The second consists of a broad coalition of the educated and more secular minded Egyptians, Coptic Christians and anti-Islamist Muslims who resent the Muslim Brotherhood because its puritanism and incompetence is bad for the economy and the tourist industry.

For years before the 2011 revolution, Egypt was trapped in a cycle of fanatical Islamist revolt and state repression. When terrorists murdered tourists in Luxor in 1997 there was mass revulsion against Islamists who reacted with a ceasefire against Mubarak.

Subsequently, the more moderate Islamists represented by Morsi built up a rival power base and were dedicated to working their way to power through a democratic mandate as a means to impose their brand of state power on society in a way that cannot be other than polarising and divisive.

The problem has been, set against the background of a collapsing economy, that the Morsi regime has been seen to be allowing radicalised Islamists some freedom to persecute minorities such as the Christians in order to retain a populist power base, a strategy that shows continuity with Mubarak's dictatorship.

The opposition to Morsi is based upon those politically minded Egyptians with a memory of constitutional rule for thirty years before Colonel Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak ended the free expression of opinion, imposed military rule and dictatorship.

Needless to say, Nasser is feted by Milne and Galloway and those in the farcical "anti-war" left in Britain which is only against imperialist wars and not revolutionary guerrilla wars that are lauded on the sole basis of "resistance" to any force not utterly hostile to the US.

The Egyptians who want a functioning democracy are being pragmatic and are not focusing their attention on the US. Only embittered monomaniacal ideologues such as Milne and Galloway see every event connected with the Arab Spring in relation to some vast geopolitical struggle against the US.

The point is not that the US has not played a part in shoring up corrupt authoritarian regimes in the Gulf to protect its oil and strategic interests. It is that in Egypt there is a social and cultural unity absent in other Arab lands and the first demand in Cairo is a proper democracy.

Milne is less interested in that than in whether any new government will be anti-US or not. It's his sole criteria for assessing whether a revolution is good or bad. The aspirations of the people on the ground are only as important as ciphers in his messianic geopolitical calculations.

In that sense, ironically, the 'hard left' in Britain follows closely the sort of thinking pursued by fanatical neoconservatives who actually did try to promote choreographed 'Colour Revolutions' from Serbia to Ukraine and Belarus, from Lebanon to Georgia ,that were to benefit pro-US elites.

Milne, however, is trying to impose a vulgar Marxist-Leninist class based analysis on events in Egypt. The reference to the 1848 revolutions in Europe hints at the idea that revolutions must be permanent to achieve true freedom or else they will be co-opted by state power.

Essentially Milne is cunningly setting up his propaganda so that if the military take control in Egypt or oversee a transition to the new state is pro-US, whether democratic or not, it is a 'betrayal'. Then he can say as journalists like to 'I Told You So'.

Thought this may not seem very important, Milne is a leading propagandist for the self appointed extra-parliamentary opposition to Anglo-American foreign policy in Britain.  He is a leading figure on Stop the War Coalition platforms and a supporter of George Galloway whom radical journalist John Pilger regards a man of principle.

Criticism of US foreign policies is one thing but the problem with ideological Anti-Americanism is that-a is clear with Milne-is that the reality on the ground in places such as Eygpt and Turkey is distorted to fit an agenda pleasing to many radical leftists in the West.

Not only does this lead to disinformation, it actually retards any ability to criticise what is actually wrong about Anglo-US foreign policy. Contrary to what many on the radical left believe, the US does not have some almost supernatural ability to manipulate events globally.

This paranoid worldview comes close to conspiracy theorising as what evidence does Milne actually have that the 'middle class' protesters are somehow in league with the army and the remnants of the Mubarak regime ? Milne has none and simply inserts an ideological template for interpreting any future development in place of actual evidence.

Milne wants to portray the Egyptian revolution in class warfare terms, the masses against the 'pro-US state'. He simply ignores the division between the Islamist conception of democracy and the constitutional democratic one supported by many protesters.

The US has interests in the balance of power in the Middle East but it simply cannot control events in the way Milne wants his fans to believe. It's necessary to maintain this fiction so that if or when things go wrong it will be wholly the fault of the US.

No doubt the US will respond to events in Egypt if things spin out of control and that reaction will be judged on whether it is beneficial to Egypt or not. The Anglo-US response to Syria has been largely been malign and based on a form of messianic Cold War thinking towards Iran as an 'existential threat'.

The irony is that the radical left opposition to Anglo-US foreign policies is equally based on a form of Cold War thinking given that "anti-war" groups are full of ex-communists who cannot get over the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and no longer acts as a "systemic alternative".

There are, in my opinion, many in Britain who oppose Anglo-US foreign policies on constructive grounds and would like to put pressure on the government not to totally ignore public opinion in being prepared to play dangerous power games in the Middle East.

But these voices of sanity are drowned out by noisy rabid fanatics who hijack that opposition to espouse positions that rationalise jihadi Islamist terrorism, see the US as a unique and cosmically Evil Empire and often support just any regime on the sole grounds it is anti-US.

It is Orwellian and makes intelligent discussion of events in the Middle East impossible, not least when the British government itself resorts routinely to justifying decisions by oily 'public diplomacy' and there are no confrontational or real debates over foreign policy in Parliament.

The Conflict Between Secular and Islamist Forces in the Arab Revolutions.

Unfortunately, Seumas Milne, a crude anti-Western apologist for the Soviet Union, seems terminally incapable of understanding that there was always going to be a polarisation between secular Arab democrats and the Islamists of Ghannoushi, who anti-Western position was championed because it was based on the undoubted Western backing for secular despots

Milne writes in The Guardian,

."...politics has become increasingly polarised around a dysfunctional standoff over religion and secularism: between the centrist Islamist Ennahda party – which was the main target for violent repression under Ben Ali's dictatorship and won the 2011 elections – and opposition parties, both right and left, which accuse Ennahda of seeking to introduce a theocratic state by the back door"

The question that Milne needs to ask, rather that going on with his usual monomania about the Western Powers ability to "control" and "hi-jack" Arab Spring Revolutions, is whether there is any real basis in the introduction of repressive Islamist measures as certain secularists are suggesting in Tunisia. This is known as proper journalism.

For too long Milne has a one dimensional explanation for Middle Eastern politics, one where any anti-Western Islamist force is justified in using terror and intimidation, bullets or the ballot box to get rid of secular Arab national tyrants of the sort actually lauded by ex-Soviet apologists as Galloway ( who he absurdly aligns himself with in "anti-war" groups as the Stop the War Coalition )

The "inverted orientalism" of far left secular groups in Britain, that any violent Islamist organisation no matter its views, is justified in using violence to fight off "Western Imperialism", is utterly confused by the events of the Arab Spring as have been Western government prizing "investments" and "stability".

It seems Milne has been thrown off course by the response of secular Arab democrats to Islamists, as if they were somehow bound to be united by their hatred of the West. Yet events there have a dynamic of their own that do not conform to Milne's rehashed 1960s style "anti-colonial discourse". The Islamised version of Franz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth'.

It is necessary to be wary of attempts by Western governments to try and co-opt either Islamists or secular Arab democrats who are willing to do the bidding only of the West and to forget the needs of the people who rose up against tyranny.

The important fact is to go beyond the fanatical rhetoric of deranged British extreme Islamists and secular nihilists ( Islamo-Leninists ) and to hope that the efforts of a pluralistic democracy in Arab lands can develop. Western Powers could help only by non-military means, through fair trade and aid.

Tunisia has a chance of this. Libya has descended into chaos, though not on the scale of Syria. The level of Western military intervention in backing jihadist militias was cynical, though certain restraints on Gaddafi via no-fly zones were about the most that could have been done. Minimal attempts to prevent massacre without getting involved were the most that should have been done.

As for the catastrophe in Syria, this is a result of a continuity in the Western Powers being cravenly dependent upon Saudi Arabia, this oil protectorate that is vying with Iran for hegemony in the Middle East with Iran ( whose regime is far less repressive and positively enlightened compared with Saudi Arabia ).

The necessity for the Western Powers is to reduce over dependence upon Saudi oil and start to advocate "regime change " there. The reason it will not is that the minority Sunni rulers are beset, as they are in the far more liberal monarchist Bahrain, by rising Shia discontent, protests crushed with the direct aid of British military equipment.

That allows the West, hostile to Iran, as it acts as a bulwark to control over Central Asian oil and gas, to ally with Saudi Arabia and make a mockery of the cant phrase "Democratic Geopolitics" and tacitly allow it to pour billions of oil dollars into Syria to back unsavoury Islamist jihadists and "rebels".

Should Syria descend into further chaos a widespread conflagration between sectarian forces could erupt in Arab lands between Shia and Sunni: Syria is becoming more like Iraq after 2003 on a daily basis, with sectarian attacks on Mosques and the gruesome beheadings of Allwawite shia soldiers by sunni militias.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/02/tunisia-egypt-need-arab-revolutions-to-spread
In conclusion what events across the Arab land prove is not only the outbreak of anger created by the foolish Western policy of backing dictatorships in the name of "stability" for almost half a century.Not to mention the the criminal idiocy of the Iraq invasion. Yet they also reflect that these tensions pre-date Western involvement.

Despite what unintelligent nihilist ideologues as Seumas Milne are craving to believe, the West did not "cause" these sectarian tensions. It has done much to exacerbate them but the conflict between Sunni and Shia goes back centuries as does Arab rivalry with Iran ( Persia ). Objectivity is vital in these tense times.

History versus Propaganda: The Uselessness of Seumas Milne.

One of the most depressing trends in British domestic politics is how extra-parliamentary opposition to the dangerous and destabilising foreign policies pursued by the USA ( and ,therefore, by the UK ) consist of the dregs of movements that were largely sympathetic to Global Communism of the Leninist type.

In the shape of the former RESPECT Party until 2007, when it was an alliance of atheist militants of the "Socialist Workers Party" and Islamists, and the "Stop the War Coalition", former advocates of totalitarian style politics continue to offer the leading voices against the "interventions" in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

One of the worst is Seumas Milne. In The Guardian, he starts off from the premise that he hates the USA as the embodiment of Global Capitalist Evil with the fervour of the more cliched kind of activist who seems to get off on ramping up outrage and offering little constructive about what could be done.

That is demonstrated in the very nature of an article today where Milne writes, with reference to the riots and protests by some angry Muslims towards the idiotic portrayal of Mohammed in a low bugdet film shot in the US,

...the only surprise is that there aren't more violent anti-US and anti-western protests in the region.

This merely crude and boringly predictable anti-US sentiment, which Milne shares in Britain on behalf of those Muslims outraged by US foreign policies, is considered to be about decades of intervention, meddling, supporting coups and the more recent direct invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The issue Milne evades is the one of whether the "blowback" from the US and UK policy of sponsoring terroristic Islamist movements as proxies is responsible for the protests across what is simplistically termed "The Muslim World" ( ignoring the nature of the vast differences amongst 1.4 billion people ) .

Do the protests in various cities across North africa and the Middle East and Asia reflect spontaneous eruptions of outrage against the tacky Mohammed film made in the USA ? Or do they come from the carefully co-ordinated manipulation by political actors in these areas?

Milne, still embittered by the victory of the USA in the Cold War against the USSR that he portrays as a positive check on US Imperialist power, dates the Islamist terror threat ( as opposed to the wider Islamist movements against the US e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood ) back to the Western support for the mujahadeen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Irrespective of the issues at stake in the NATO occupation of Afghanistan and its failures, Milne has consistently exhibited a certain amount of schadenfreude that the West is being biffed by what he regards as the same forces that inflicted defeat on the Soviet Union.

The US decision to suspend joint Afghan-Nato operations in response to a wave of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police on Nato troops cuts the ground from beneath the centrepiece of western strategy

Yet the attacks on NATO troops are mainly from the Taliban who are Afghans in so far as they live in Afghanistan. But , in reality, they are Pashtuns, one ethnic group amongst the many that live in Afghanistan. This is not a nationalist revolt. This is a factual error.

The US-British invasion of Afghanistan was of course launched in response to the 9/11 attacks: the poison fruit of US-led support for the Afghan mujahideen war against the Soviet Union. Why do they hate us, many Americans asked at the time, oblivious to their country's role in decades of coups, tyranny, sanctions regimes and occupations across the Middle East

The 9/11 attacks came from Al Qaida who were a small minority of the former mujahadeen who fought against the Soviet Union. Most of the mujahadeen fought because they detested the Soviet Union for its atheism and for the PDPA's draconian modernisation policies.
True, President Carter's National Security Adviser Brzezinski did in 1979 exploit the situation to help funnel arms and funds to the USA but most of the money and foreign recruits came from Islamic charities such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni movements opposed to the secular Arab nationalist regimes.

The idea the USA singlehandedly destabilised a "promising" Communist regime in Kabul ( and it was only strong in Kabul ) and induced the Soviet invasion is a myth. It was part of the decision to invade but the responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan belongs to the Communists.

... just as the mujahideen the US backed in Afghanistan later turned their guns on their imperial sponsor in the form of the Taliban and al-Qaida, so many of the Islamists and jihadists who fought against Gaddafi with Nato air cover have their own ideas for the future of their country..

The mujahadeen did not do that as it fragmented into rival factions after the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan. The early 1990s saw warlordism and the Taliban was created by Pakistan to advance its interests in the neighbouring state. Another factual error nailed.
There was no "the" mujahadeen in the 1990s. They turned their guns on one another and Al Qaida was able to find a base there amidst the chaos of a collapsed state. In 2001, the USA backed former factions of the mujahadeen in the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban.

The reason was that the Taliban, by not expelling Al Qaida, were no longer useful in furthering the strategy to build the Trans-Afghan Pipeline from Turkmenistan down through to India, thus blocking off Iranian regional ambitions and diversifying the supply of gas away from Russian control.

The 9/11 Attacks gave the US and NATO a pretext to go into Afghanistan in order to advance its interests and, by extension, build a functioning state. It was an absurdly foolish foreign policy doomed to failure. Yet Milne's grasp of the history of Afghanistan is as shaky as the left wing interventionists he opposes.

Then again, the purpose is not hitorical accuracy or understanding. It is to ramp up pathological hatred.

Western war in the Muslim world has also fed a toxic tide of Islamophobia in Europe and the US. What is it about Muslims that makes them so easily offended, Europeans and Americans commonly demand to know – while Muslims point to cases such as the British 19-year-old who was convicted in Yorkshire last week of posting a "grossly offensive" Facebook message that British soldiers in Afghanistan "should die and go to hell", and ask why they're not afforded that protection.

The police are continually charging people for Twitter comments where no threat or harm to life is present. There is no attempt by British governments to "demonise" Muslims. If anything, they have sought to bend and twist free speech laws to please "the Muslim community".

The fact is, without hyperbole, that the wars in Afghanistan are wars fought to advance strategic interests and control oil and gas supplies. As in the Kosovo War in 1999, the Western Powers will bomb traditional Christian lands to advance their geopolitical interests.

The fact that these wars are interpreted as "anti-Muslim" is only for propaganda purposes and to agitate the Muslim British population in to forming pressure groups to try to change British foreign policy. It should change but not because of pressure, the threat of violence or intimidation in this country.

It should be done by reasoned argument and drawing attention to the dangers in getting dragged into conflicts in the Middle East just in order to engineer the outcome in such a way as benefit our oil interests. Energy independence would avert these hazards and dangers.

Milne never mentions these realities because his ideal is not peaceful co-existence but in sowing antagonistic hatreds of the sort that ideologues on the hard left feed off. It also helps this hack establish his "credibility" , he thinks, amongst British Muslims.

Supporting Arab Revolution in Libya Defeats The Arab Revolution.

The facts are that in any Arab Revolution, Libya or elsewhere, the West has had and retains vital geostrategic interests primarily concerning the stability of the supply of oil. Even so, Seumas Milne, Guardian columnist and Stop the War Coalition activist believes NATO)'s backing of The Libyan rebels is an imperialist hijack".

With devastating logic Milne writes,

"Nato's intervention in Libya is a threat to the Arab revolution, but the forces that have been unleashed in the region won't be turned back so easily"

By intervening in Libya to hold back Gaddafi from "turning back the forces that have been unleashed in the region", NATO has in fact 'turned back' the revolution. By preventing the uprising from from being wiped out, any NATO backed government now threatens to be destroyed by the they revolution backed.

If NATO had let Gaddafi wipe out the rebels, then the anti-Gaddafi forces would have succeeded. But Milne is clear this was not the case,

In Libya, the basis for foreign military intervention has been the claim that Muammar Gaddafi's forces were about to carry out a massacre of civilians in Benghazi after he threatened to hunt down armed rebels "house to house". Violent repression was certainly meted out against a popular uprising, but once insurrection had morphed into war there's little evidence that the regime's troops were in a position to overrun an armed and hostile city of 700,000 people.

Yet according to Milne, there was, therefore, no real way Gaddafi could have crushed the rebels in any case, meaning that either that no bloodshed would have happened or that it would and it is of no business of the West if it had.

Yet what evidence is there that Gaddafi was not in a position six months ago to cause a bloodbath in Benghazi before the insurrection mysteriously "morphed" into a civil war that predated NATO intervention ?

Western oil interests had been served fairly well by Gaddafi prior to the outbreak of violence, though there had been increasing concern that Russia and China had been making inroads with Gaddafi's regime in gaining new oil concessions.

The truth is that once Gaddafi lost de facto control over Libya a civil war would have ensued irrespective of the West. Certainly Gaddafi could not have overrun Benghazi in the way that rebel militias are doing now courtesy of the involvement of NATO and the CIA and MI6.

From the perspective of energy hungry Western states, something was needed to have been done to ensure the world's supply of the best crude oil was not left in limbo, precisely after the debacle following the invasion of Iraq made it all the more important to secure the supply from Libya.

Even if Milne's predictable loathing of the intervention in Libya is a result of his Leninist 'anti-imperialist' stance, as opposed to any interest in the predicament of the Libyan's who wanted an end to dictatorship, his idea that the NTC elites will sell out to Western interests over that of most Libyans is not unfounded.

Libya, like all Arab states wil oil wealth, has a huge burgeoning population consisting of young people, often angry men who want to be rid of unaccountable power often supported by the West as a means of ensuring "stability" and the flow of cheap oil.

Yet new governments beholden to the NATO investment in overthrowing Gaddafi will have a problem with creating a new order that will ensure enough oil revenue will be used to invest in providing work for those who will not be fast tracked into well paid jobs in a revived oil sector.

The situation is as it is now and if the new NTC does not preside over a smooth transition in which not only the emigres and former members of Gaddafi's regime benefit, then the period of transition could well see new infighting and violence.

If the Libyans who fought for the TNC fail to see any benefits from Libyan oil somewhat quickly then resentment will follow. As a Guardian report stated just today that Global Witness campaign group has emphasised,

"Any deals at this time could raise concerns within Libya that international support for the NTC is driven by a desire for access to oil rather than for the benefit of the Libyan people. The NTC is likely to have to honour Gaddafi-era contracts in order to get oil revenues flowing. But no new deals for the exploration or exploitation of oilfields should be considered until an elected government can review existing rules and laws to ensure robust transparency and accountability."

Brendan O'Donnell, senior oil campaigner at Global Witness stated,

"By drawing a line under Gaddafi-era corruption and the mismanagement of public wealth, the NTC could champion resource justice in the transitional constitution and set a great precedent for Libya's future."

The group called for transparency provisions to be written into the transitional constitution that require public disclosure of how Libya manages its oil sector, and disclosure of all revenues associated with it. It also said terms of existing oil contracts should be disclosed, and details of agreements made by the NTC with governments and companies involving sovereign funds or the exchange of cash, crude oil or "IOUs" secured against frozen assets should be made public – and open to scrutiny.

"A transparently managed oil sector could prove the catalyst for much-needed development and stability in the country," said Global Witness. "But any perception that the rebels or Nato countries have their own designs on Libya's oil could stir further division and conflict."

The danger is the NTC fail to do this due to unrestrained greed and ethnic and tribal factions seeking to put their interests before the common good of Libya, which is hardly a nation state but an artificial unity cobbled out of provinces out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

As much as supporters of 'liberal intervention' might see Milne as a cynical commentator who opposes the Western states as "imperialist" from an ideological perspective, the unpleasant reality is that his gloom laden apocalyptic view of further violence could well prove true.

Sane people do not hold to the Leninist position of "the worse, the better" as so-called 'anti-war' fanatics who have hijacked the mood of unease over these wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya hold to, those who are more concerned with their post-Soviet hatred of the USA for having won the Cold War than anything else.

However, the West needs to invest far more money in alternatives to being overdependent upon the oil that fuels Western consumerism. The Sun was more candid about the stakes as far as Britons are concerned when it claimed that the Mad Dog's overthrow meant 4p off petrol prices.

As the Western economies falter on the brink of a double dip recession, access to diverse oll supplies have become of more importance. Yet populist anti-war types never point out the fact that even the poorer members of a consumer society as Britain depend on cheap oil to maintain their living standards.