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.

British Jihadi Islamists and the Syrian Conflict.

'Counter-terrorism officers, fearful that some of those fighting in Syria will return to Britain radicalised with the ability to carry out violent acts on British soil, hope that female family members will curb the numbers of people intent on taking up arms against the Assad regime'.( Syria crisis: stop your sons joining war, urges Met police, Guardian 24 April 2014 )

Much about the Syria-related terror threat does not add up. The Metropolitan Police may have though 'counter terrorism' depends on educational campaigns and social work 'in the community' to prevent Muslims going to Syria. Yet this depends on the bizarre notion they have not been radicalised already.

By definition, British Muslims who went to fight in Syria or are intending to join the struggle, are radicalised. In the Age of the Internet, British Muslims have access to information and have been able to cross the border from neighbouring Turkey with ease.

The Metropolitan Police are wasting their time. If British Muslims have decided to go and fight along with jihadists, then it is supposed to be the task of MI5 and MI6 to monitor those involved in terror plots before they go, meaning they could be stopped on the border, or to keep tabs on them if they return.

Should British citizens get killed in Syria fighting against Assad, it is the responsibility of those who decided to go. If they join Al Nusra or other groups of fanatics, the chances are they will get killed (in which case they pose no danger to Britain ) or they can be monitored on their return.

The probability is that the British secret services are playing the usual power game in using British born jihadists as 'assets' in order to gain more intelligence or, in fact, to use them as proxies in the struggle to remove Assad. This has been the pattern since the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

This extremely dangerous game, where known Al Qaida affiliated operatives have been allowed to pass across the borders and not arrested, was once part of the Covenant of Security, the policy of permitting exiles and jihadists to settle in Britain so they would not attack it but could be used by MI6.

Since the 'war on terror' got going after 2001, that policy was formally dropped. Even so, the shadowy power game has continued. The security services most likely want British born jihadists in Syria so they can gain intelligence and have agents within groups espousing violent Islamist ideology.

Some radical groups patronised by the British establishment as part of a 'counter-extremist' strategy have, according to historian Mark Almond, have acted as a conduit for Islamists to go and fight in Syria and that the strategy of collusion could lead to blowback.

Since the threat of Al Nusra has grown disproportionately, the British government by late 2013 seemed to have grasped the fact that their strategy for Syria was counter productive and could risk bringing terrorism back directly into the cities and towns of Britain and other backers of the Syrian insurgents.

The threat of terror is, however, always of utility to British governments that have wanted to harness jihadists to destroy states controlled by those hostile to Britain's geopolitical interests and over pipeline routes ( e.g Syria ) and regions with copious oil and gas.

British citizens are going to have to get used to the fact that Britain's high octane consumer society depends on these hazardous strategies for control over pipeline routes from Eurasia and the violent consequences of being locked into a struggle for mastery over diminishing natural resources across the globe.

Blair's Speech and the New Great Game.

Tony Blair's speech, as with everything this man utters, is a carefully calibrated public diplomacy missive better called a propaganda offensive. The timing is instructive; Blair is upgrading his profile in the Middle East because the crisis in Ukraine is set to lead to EU states searching for alternative energy sources.

It was interesting that Blair claimed the Ukraine Crisis would distract attention away from the Middle East. And why his fellow strategist and sinister operative John McTernan is 'on message' to explain just what Blair meant to those who could regard him as an important critic of Western foreign policy.

As is standard with propaganda, words and meaning must be prized apart from their conventional uses

'Libya and Syria are at the heart of Blair's argument: action started by this government but left incomplete. The passage on Syria is a direct attack on Cameron and Nick Clegg, and their inaction'.

Firstly, the Coalition government were not 'inactive' over Syria. They continually called for Assad 'to go'. Sarkozy set up the Friends of Syria group in Istanbul in 2012 to create a unified opposition with the intention of ousting Assad and installing a client state.

Secondly, Britain and France in particular were highly active in agitating for a missile strike on Syria, far more so even than a more energy independent 'post shale revolution 'USA. Their main client in the Middle East is Qatar which is in rivalry to build a pipeline from the South Pars gasfield which it shares with Iran.

Britain and France have increasingly sought to diversify the gas supply away from dependence upon Russia. One reason why Qatar's copious production of liquefied natural gas is a lucrative opportunity whereby its petrodollars from selling it get invested in the London and Paris property market and arms.

'Not a defence of liberal intervention, but a scrupulous account of the costs of doing nothing – particularly where the coalition has called for regime change. And, typically, looking at the bigger picture. The Middle East matters.. It matters because of oil and gas and our economic dependence on them'.

That statement matters. Essentially, with Russia and the US in a dangerous stand off over Ukraine, like Syria another pipeline transit route between east and west, Blair is trying to revive the idea that democratising the Middle East could provide EU states with better energy security.

Yet 'liberal intervention' was what was on offer when NATO facilitated the victory over the Gaddafi regime in Libya and what was on offer with the West's humanitarian concern over the East Ghouta gas attack in Syria. The reason no action was taken in Syria was increased concern over Al Qaida's presence.

The Libyan intervention made a bad situation worse. It enabled Gadaffi to be removed only for immediate ( and highly predictable ) squabbles over Libya's oil production capacity to divide the rebels ensuring another failed attempt at regime change backfired.

Now jihadists from Libya are known to have gone to Syria. The danger is, should Egypt fall into increased chaos, that the entire Maghreb could become a zone of carnage and bloodshed. Al Qaida affiliates are already operating in the Sinai Peninsula and fighting the Egyptian military.

As in Syria, the reality in Egypt was that the US and US tacitly accepted a military coup, even if the Muslim Brotherhood's bungling policies and attempts at institutional takeover has divided Egypt and led it even further towards economic and political collapse.

The Western Powers need to stop pretending that they can control events in the Middle East. Energy security has to be attained by decisive policies to move away from the great car economy and to find alternatives to oil and gas as well as dealing cautiously with Russia over Ukraine.

Blair's understanding on the Middle East is both simplistic and deranged. But his siren calls for radical and decisive action and drawing up of cosmic battle lines between Good and Evil remain potentially lethal if politicians and the media hail it as delivering a solution to an a looming energy security crisis.

Tony Blair: Fictions and Contradictions.

'Tony Blair's speech this week at Bloomberg in London reveals a growing support for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. A decade ago, Blair was justifying wars in the Middle East on the grounds that they would launch a democratic revolution and sweep away Arab despots'.The hypocrisy of Tony Blair's Middle East vision Arun Kundnari, Guardian 24 April 2014)

To point to Blair's hypocrisy is to state the obvious. The question few journalists ever bother dealing with is why western politicians have held to such double standards. With Blair, the criticism even in 2003 was about why remove Saddam in Iraq but then back Saudi Arabia's despotic theocratic state.

The reason is western energy security, that is access to oil and gas reserves in a world of rapidly industrialising Great Power rivals to both the US and EU states, not least that of China, India, and, partly, Russia. With supplies of oil struggling to keep pace with global demand a resource race is on.

The Second Iraq War in 2003 was launched with reasons that had nothing to do with the cosmic battle between 'extremist Islamism' and the forces for secular democracy. By getting rid of Saddam Hussein, Blair seems to have believed it would trigger off a domino effect with neighbouring states.

The plan was for a sucessful model democracy to act as a force for democratisation across the Middle East. If Blair could be criticised for that, and what went catastrophically wrong, then it is hardly surpising he has now had to go back on that and pose as a wise realist in 2014.

The shift in Blair's 'thinking' is, as always, explained by his need to reposition himself and to rationalise to himself and the media classes why the Iraq War was 'the right thing to do' and that it was 'extremist Islamism' and a violent jihadist death cult that unexpectedly wrecked his plans for Iraq.

It's difficult to understand why Arun Kundnani is so surprised that Blair has 'embraced Arab despots whose regimes, he says, are necessary bulwarks against Islamism'. In Egypt, Blair regards the coup as a military takeover, a transitional stage in a longer term democratic process.

To a certain extent, Blair is embarrassing the Western powers by using his international public position as Special Envoy to the Quartet to be so forthright in his support for the Egyptian coup. The position is largely meant to be a useless and token one for Blair to occupy. and he's largely detested by both sides.

Elsewhere, Blair has not, in fact, embraced the Syrian government as a defence against Islamism. On the contrary, Blair states not that 'Assad must go' but that he 'should go' after an agreement has been made between the two sides. However,

'Should even this not be acceptable to him, we should consider active measures to help the Opposition and force him to the negotiating table, including no fly zones whilst making it clear that the extremist groups should receive no support from any of the surrounding nations'.

Blair has not 'embraced' Assad but is emitting vague and obliquely menacing messages about 'the Opposition' having 'fissures and problems around elements within', meaning, in ordinary language, that the insurgents contain violent jihadists affiliated to Al Qaida and other Islamists.

Naturally, Blair cannot use the term 'extremist Islamists' to a significant part of the Free Syrian Army because that would mean admitting the West has backed the very 'extremists' Blair has condemned elsewhere in Egypt, most obviously the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

'Islamist extremism' is a conveniently flexible propaganda term. 'Extreme' means against Western strategy, in particular the oil and gas interests Britain has in Egypt and in the Syrian Civil War where it backs Qatar and Turkey who, in turn, fund and support the Muslim Brotherhood.

In order to get around that obvious fact, Blair uses the term 'extremist groups' to insinuate that he could mean those being backed by Saudi Arabia in their proxy war against regional  rival in Shia Iran. Only he could not mention it by name, so it could be taken to mean only Iran and its ally in Lebanon's Hizbollah.

These foreign policy contortions, the use of abstract language and a simplified worldview are a means by which Blair can make himself useful in 'framing the debate'. Whether it bears any connection to reality is not so important as 'shifting perceptions' in the west as regards the Muslim World.

Partly, Blair wants to rehabilitate his image by claiming what happened in Iraq would have happened anyway after the Arab Spring just as it has unfolded in Syria. To 'engage' and 'commit' to intervention earlier, as he was in Iraq, would have prevented massacre and carnage. He needs people to 'believe' this.

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Responses and Replies,

In part I think he is trying to "frame the debate" so as to move the focus before Chilcot reports. I think that he also realises that western policy has got itself into a dead end in the region as the contradictions have become too obvious (particularly in Syria). Blair seems to think that he has to help to resolve some of those contradictions, by hinting at the problem of jihadis in Syria and the amount of support they have received from Saudi Arabia. Western policy makers cannot go on pretending that these problems don't exist - they have become too obvious and it is an embarrassment that western pronouncements ignore them. Yet Blair has framed them in a way that doesn't shine too much light on them (and doesn't say much about what to do about them).

The contortions are obvious, but western policies in the region are full of contradictions. A few contortions are necessary to resolve some of those contradictions. Blair is unaccountable, so he doesn't have to admit that what he is saying now contradicts what he said 12 years ago.

Blair would have us believe that had the western powers took decisive military intervention from the outset of the Syrian conflict, by using air power as in Libya, then Assad could have been removed before Al Qaida had a chance to exploit the chaos caused by civil war.

The point Blair misses is that the western powers ( the US, France and UK ) were active and engaged in trying to get Assad to go by supporting Arab backers of 'the Opposition' through the Friends of Syria Group. They made it plain 'regime change' was the goal.

The mistake was not in refusing to use decisive military intervention. Blair only claims that to make his decision to join the US invasion of Iraq one of many decisions about the problem of action or inaction which both can have bad consequences in his view.

Had the western powers carried out a Libyan style air campaign against Assad, the result would have been similar-chaos.Ground troops, i.e a full scale invasion, would not have been on the cards as Syria has little oil and the Iraq invasion had discredited that option.

Blair's entire screed is based on a mixture of geopolitical fantasy and retrospective wish thinking, 'if only' this or that would have been done and attention and commitment paid to the Middle East it would not be in the mess it's in now.

'I'm surprised that Blair and others in the West haven't begun arguing more openly for the need to fight for resources (strategic interests) instead of camouflaging it with other agendas (fighting extremism, promoting democracy etc.). He did refer to this in this speech, but that has largely been ignored in the media'.

Blair did refer to it in passing and, at least, mentioned it as one very important factor why the Middle East matters. The media ignored it because it routinely screens out any mention of the role of natural resources in driving conflicts before the public.

There is a sort of taboo on mentioning minerals, oil and gas. Partly so as not to 'rock the boat' and also because an advanced consumer society could not function without access to the relatively cheap oil and gas that fuels the economy and high octane lifestyle western nations are accustomed to.

That basic reality has to be denied because, humans can only bear so much reality' and so a sort of geopolitical wish thinking takes over and predatory struggles over resources have to be seen as secondary to ennobling causes such as 'democracy promotion' and 'our values'.

This does not mean western politicians such as Blair do not mean that they believe western military intervention is not about spreading democracy, the rule of law and human rights. It is just that when energy security is threatened, these get sacrificed.

Blair's Speech on Islamism: On the Reaction.

The response to Blair's speech consists of the usual dreary political bores and hack journalists trying to muscle in so as to gain credibility from lauding it as either sage wisdom and a fundamental moral stance or else as the utterings of an evil demonic warmongerer.

On the pro-Blair side, Denis McShane is wholly mendacious when he claims 'Just read Blair speech. Ignore headlines. This is Fulton Mark 2. Bien pensant left then refused to challenge Stalinism. Orwell knew better'. Well, if it's read correctly, the speech is clearly Orwellian in the negative sense.

For example, Blair refers to 'extremist Islamism' when he supports the Egyptian military government's coup against the Muslim Brotherhood and omits to mention the way it massacred protesters in the streets of Cairo. At the same time he refers to the Islamists opposing Assad in Syria as 'Opposition'.

The use of euphemism and clipped soundbite statements makes what was a bloody coup sound as though part of a mere political transition, with no mention of the killings, arbitrary imprisonments, use of torture; that is, the actual reality of events in Egypt in August 2013 to the present.

'The revolt of 30 June 2013 was not an ordinary protest. It was the absolutely necessary rescue of a nation. We should support the new Government and help. None of this means that where there are things we disagree strongly with – such as the death sentence on the 500 – that we do not speak out'.

The use of two negatives in one sentence is used to insinuate that Western governments have, in fact, spoken out about the political murders carried out by a government backed by western governments when the US and EU have refused even to call the coup in Egypt a coup.

Orwell defined doublethink in 1984 as 'Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them'. In Blair's case, Islamism is 'extreme' when it threatens western backed regimes but Opposition needing support when that benefits power interests.

In Syria, Blair makes it clear that even if people are aware the enemies of Assad contain a lot of the vicious jihadists that would be opposed as part of a global force for evil if theyy were not fighting on the side dedicated to removing an ally of Iran and Lebanon's Hizbollah.

'We are now in a position where both Assad staying and the Opposition taking over seem bad options. The former is responsible for creating this situation. But the truth is that there are so many fissures and problems around elements within the Opposition that people are rightly wary now of any solution that is an outright victory for either side'

This entire paragraph is written with lots of abstract nouns in a deliberately vague way so as to obscure the fact that the 'extreme Islamists' Blair sees as a global menace elsewhere are an important part of the armed insurgency at war with Assad's forces in Syria.

As a consequence, Blair calls for an agreement with Assad that would 'see him stay on for a period', after which he would be called on to go, as if that would somehow solve the Syrian civil war and that the entire conflict hinges on the malign will of one leader.

'Should even this not be acceptable to him, we should consider active measures to help the Opposition and force him to the negotiating table, including no fly zones whilst making it clear that the extremist groups should receive no support from any of the surrounding nations'.

Note again, the abstract language that concentrates on what western powers can do to get rid of Assad and only adds in the essential fact later that jihadists in Syria are part of the Opposition and are backed by Turkey ( a NATO power ), Qatar, a major Gulf ally and investor in London, and Saudi Arabia.

To grasp the very dangerous nature of global power politics and the race to control resources, of which the Second Iraq war was a prime example, requires understanding first if the sort of insane geopolitical agenda and propaganda deployed by Blair can stand any chance of being opposed.

For just as preposterous are those posing as 'anti-war' and principled by drawing attention to Blair's hypocrisy instead of to the fundamental reality behind the reason why Blair supports the Egyptian military against the Muslim Brotherhood and, like the rest of the political class, Islamists against Assad in Syria.

That reason is clearly oil and gas for reasons spelt out by Blair himself,

 'the Middle East remains of central importance...it is still where a large part of the world’s energy supplies are generated, and whatever the long term implications of the USA energy revolution, the world’s dependence on the Middle East is not going to disappear any time soon. In any event, it has a determining effect on the price of oil; and thus on the stability and working of the global economy'.

 However, George Galloway, the Bradford MP for RESPECT, claims via Twitter,

'Under pressure @TheBlairDoc the war criminal Tony Blair has finally lost it. And in the heart of "the City" for which he sacrificed us all'.

The fact that Blair chose to give the speech in London in Bloomberg's HQ hardly amounts to evidence that Blair invaded Iraq to benefit the City or financial interests. That could sit well with those keen on conpiracy theories and who watch his shows on Iran's Press TV but it's a mendacious claim.

Ben White calls for protest against Blair,,

'After yet another much publicised op-ed by a man who should be scribbling his musings in a prison cell, it is time we sent a message to Tony Blair. A petition is, perhaps, a strange choice of protest form given Blair's track record in laughing off popular opinion. But at the very least, it will remind him that for every corporation and foreign government willing to top up his bank account, there are many more people wishing he would simply Shut Up and Go Away'.

Until Blair is put in a prison cell or formally indicted as a war criminal, Blair is not going to go away and he simply is not going to care what a group of nonentities think or write on a petition calling on him never to speak in public again. Britain has free speech and is a democracy. He can say what he likes.

Few on the 'anti-war' left or those protesting against Blair really want him to shut up as they enjoy the sensation of outrage, wearing bloodied Blair masks, yelling 'Bliar' and feeling themselves morally superior to Him ( as if this somehow needed continual in group affirmation ).

Such protests ignore the fact that Blair joined the US invasion in 2003 so as to guarantee Britain's energy security, to safeguard the supply of cheap and plentiful oil that underpins the high octane consumer society many protesters and most British citizens enjoy.

The conversion of Blair into a sort of Emmanuel Goldstein figure is a convenient one that diverts attention away from the fact that the political class backed the war in Iraq or that the interest Britain has in the Middle East is closely bound up with energy interests and investment in the UK economy.

The most important thing to recognise if Britain is going to repudiate the sort of politics represented by Blair is that it needs to aim at energy independence and not to depend so much on states such as Qatar for liquified natural gas and petrodollars to boost London's property market.

Even so, the easy explanation for Blair's involvement in Iraq or calls for intervention ( 'it's all about profit for corporations and the super rich' etc ) are so stupid that they play into the hands of those such as Blair who can laugh off that form of 'public opinion' as mere 'conspiracy theorising'.

Blair: Energy Geopolitics and the Global Struggle with 'Islamist Extremism'.

Blair's speech on the need to combat 'Islamist extremism' on a global scale is both deluded and dangerous. For a start, Islamism is a broad political trend. By adding the flexible word 'extremism' as a means to differentiate which Islamists are acceptible ( or not extreme ) is a formula for open ended conflict.

Far from Blair being an irrelevance in this sense, the former Prime Minister is advocating a foreign policy that many are in fact pursuing at present but with a more robust attitude. As with anything Blair proclaims, the aim is to safeguard his legacy and to make out that he was right all along about the need for a 'Global War on Terror'.

In order to do that Blair empahasises the need for correct propaganda and framing of the global conflict, one quite obviously about western access to resources such as oil and gas from the Middle East and Africa. Thereby, opinion can be mobilised on the basis of a moral cause and purpose instead of being seen as ruthless realpolitik.

"The important point for western opinion is that this is a struggle with two sides. So when we look at the Middle East and beyond it to Pakistan or Iran and elsewhere, it isn't just a vast unfathomable mess with no end in sight and no one worthy of our support. It is in fact a struggle in which our own strategic interests are intimately involved; where there are indeed people we should support and who, ironically, are probably in the majority if only that majority were mobilised, organised and helped.

Amidst the evident absurdity ( a struggle by definition involves two sides and not one, though it may involve more than two ), Blair is agitating for western intervention ( i.e meddling ) in the affairs of all states where Islamism is a force to try and impose the right ( that is to say pro-western ) government in power.

There is an Orwellian doublethink inherent in a strategy which means supporting Qatari and Saudi Arabian use of Islamist jihadists in Syria to fight Assad but backing the Egyptian military against the Muslim Brotherhood, even when it carries out a coup and guns down protesters in the streets of Cairo.

The reason why that freedom to define Islamists as 'extremists' or not is important for Blair is clear; those Islamist militants who threaten western oil and gas interests across the globe ( Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Egypt ) are 'extremists' who pose a danger to energy security.

However, those Islamists in lands such as Syria who are used as proxies to remove leaders such as Assad who leans towards Russia and Iran are not 'extremists'. No, the jihadists in Syria are part of a battle for freedom. Not least, the pipeline interests Qatar and Turkey have for a Syria without Assad.

This is what is meant when Blair opines,

'what is absolutely necessary is that we first liberate ourselves from our own attitude. We have to take sides. We have to stop treating each country on the basis of whatever seems to make for the easiest life for us at any one time. We have to have an approach to the region that is coherent and sees it as a whole. And above all, we have to commit. We have to engage".

Whether British people like it or not, Blair still represents the way global politics is heading ( at least as far as British politicians are concerned ). Spouting 'warmonger' or 'Bliar' is both boring and doltish. The need is to understand what Blair means and what interests are truly at stake.

For the fact is that Blair joined the 2003 invasion of Iraq as part of a geopolitical move to control it's large oil reserves in the period before shale oil and gas had become big business in the US and energy independence a goal. Put bluntly, unless alternatives to oil and gas are found, western intervention in the Middle East is set to go on.

Blair, after all, makes energy security the first and foremost of his reason to 'engage' with the Middle East, as,

'it is still where a large part of the world’s energy supplies are generated, and whatever the long term implications of the USA energy revolution, the world’s dependence on the Middle East is not going to disappear any time soon. In any event, it has a determining effect on the price of oil; and thus on the stability and working of the global economy.'

While Blair can be criticised for Iraq, it's no use turning him into a hate figure as though British people could pretend their high octane consumer lifestyles where somehow disconnected with the need for stable and falling oil prices. That's a lesson Blair learned after the road haulier's strike of 2000 over petrol prices threatened his government

Cameron, Faith and Missionary Atheists.

It's Good Friday.

In the last few days PM Cameron has started to make utterances on Britain as a Christian Nation, most likely because he wants to 'moralise' his economic policies at a time when the Church of England is criticising him over growing levels of poverty and the dependence on Food Banks more and more British citizens are having

On this Polly Toynbee, one of the most stupid and boringly partisan columnists in the British media,  prattles forth in The Guardian,

'It's mostly toe-curling stuff. Alastair Campbell never gave better advice than in warning politicians off doing God: it's horrible to behold. Sincere or not, they become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, as did Cameron talking of "our saviour"'

True, but the politician he gave that advice to most was Tony Blair whose entire time in office was marked by an evangelical zeal and kitschy uplift. By comparison Cameron seems to be quite moderate in 'doing God', though he has decided to start bringing God in order to bolster his moral credentials.

Toynbee warbles on,

'At a time of anti-Muslim attacks, when Islamist extremism is feared for its terrorist potential, Cameron's "Christian country" is soaked in white nationalist significance'.

No it isn't. The most fervent Christians are often from Afro-Carribean and African British citizens who keep alive inner city churches and chapels.Moreover, at the present time, 2014, 'Islamist extremism' is not feared as much as it was under Blair in the early part of the last decade. This is guilt fuelled politics enlivened by a weird racial obsession.

'He has great verbal agility in sounding eminently moderate and reasonable while planting darker ideas. Behind a harmless love for country churches is a whiff of Lynton Crosby's culture war politics'.

That's one reason why it is better to keep an established C of E. It tends to warn governments about the unethical effect of their policies. The alternative is to allow more 'privatised' faith groups and US style hucters to start to dominate the tone and direction of politics.

Asked in the 2011 census "What is your religion?", 59% said Christian – surprisingly few as most people saw it as a question of culture rather than belief.

There is no reason why is should not be a question of culture, unless Toynbee thinks that secular humanists and atheists should be on some universal mission of conversion to persuade people to proclaim they are atheists on the census. It's curious Toynbee is so obsessed with beliefs.

'Take schools, where a third are under religious control. They take many fewer free-school-meals pupils and pews near good C of E schools swell unnaturally with new parents. Selection makes them popular, yet even so a majority want them abolished'.

England has a free society. The case would have to be for removing funding from faith schools and not for a majoritarian form of coercion in which schools that are disliked are abolished. A majority could well want a mosque demolished or closed down in their town.

Toynbee clearly has an authoritarian outlook. The reason C of E schools thrive is because they are better at teaching subjects that comprehensives. The best thing to do is to try and raise standards in these failing schools instead of trying to level down in the name of abstract ideals of equality.

'Like all humanity, the religious are both good and bad. The C of E is good on food banks, bad on sex and death. Faith makes people no more virtuous, but nor do rationalists claim any moral superiority. Pogroms, inquisitions, jihadist terror and religious massacres can be matched death for death with the secular horrors of Pol Pot, Hitler or Stalin'.

That is not borne out by Toynbee's belief in the majoritarian popular will in opposing or for abolishing faith schools. This bland generalisation ignores the fact that communism was often both both rationalistic and pseudo-religious. Nazism was a pseudo-religion and its ideologues despised Judeo-Christian ethics.

'The danger is where absolute belief in universal truths, religious or secular, permits no doubt. Politicians do well to stay clear of the realm of revealed truth. Cameron will win back few voters by evangelising for Britain as a "Christian country"'

Cameron is not claiming he has any absolute belief in universal truths. He has explictly rejected doctrinal correctness. It was Blair with his missionary zeal to use military force to liberate the globe from tyranny ( one supported by a good number of militant atheists and liberal leftists in Britain ) who held to that creed.

France's Creeping Mission in the Central African Republic.

'Raising awareness of a tiny African country today as she trudges around Whitehall is Oxfam's humanitarian policy adviser, Emma Fanning, who has recently returned from the Central African Republic. The UK has a vital role to play in the face of massive human suffering, she says' ( Twenty years after the genocide, we have learnt nothing from Rwanda. Linda Melver, The Guardian, Friday 4 April 2014 )

'Humanitarian intervention' again. EU troops have already been sent to CAR, mostly France the ex-colonial power until 1960, in order to try to stabilise the country and thus procure control over its copious resources of gold, oil uranium ( important for France's nuclear power plants ) and diamonds.

The idea that European powers such as Britain have a missionary role to play in Africa, one which has a moral duty to bring peace and prosperity to benighted lands and, of course, benefit itself economically, has been advocated consistently by liberal internationalists once more since the end of the 1990s.

In the first decade of the 21st century, both Britain and France saw the emergence of the 'military-humanitarian complex', wherby groups such as Oxfam and Save the Children have been coopted by government and politicians to advance European power interests and alleviate humanitarian distress.

The question that has remained unresolved in other mineral rich lands such as Afghanistan, where western troops mission to defeat the Taliban and ensure the construction of the geopolitically vital TAPI pipeline, is whether decisive political intervention to remove a bad regime has made things better or worse.

France's foreign policy has continued to use the humanitarian imperative as a way of giving a means to legitimise its pursuit of access to resources. Sarkozy and Hollande were particularly keen on a military strike on Syria to remove Assad so as to advance its oil and gas interests in Qatar and weapons sales.

With regards CAR, the African Union already has peacekeepers on the ground. The reason France was so keen to muscle in December 2013, as it had repeatedly attempted to meddle in CAR and get a regime that would be more useful in securing its resource interests.

This is in continuity with attempts as recent as 2006-2007 to use Dassault Mirage jets to bombard insurgent positions opposed to President Bozize who won the elections in 2005 ( after staging a coup in 2003 ) but has always ruled in order to benefit only his own cronies.

Britain is unlikely to want to get involved in CAR unless it were to have greater mining interests. The main interest France has is in continuing to preserve its uranium mining concessions and in diamonds, one reason it bankrolled the regime of Emperor Bokassa I in the 1970s.

In 1979 French paratroopers removed Bokassa in Operation Barracuda when his regime started slaughtering students and schoolchildren in the poorer areas of Bangui. The difference this time is that the Seleka rebels are not the only insurgents and, as in Syria, many are vying with one another over resources.

Civil war and ethnic cleansing, chaos and near genocide are hardly conditions under which Britain would contribute troops while France has made it clear that it's troops are not there to save Bozize's regime so much as protect its biggest uranium mining investment at Bakouma from anti-Bozize insurgents.

Compare and contrast what Hollande was saying as regards the CAR with France's outrage at Assad's inhumanity in Syria and the duty to intervene, one paralleled in Britain by William Hague following Assad's alleged CW attack in Ghouta, and it's clear humanitarianism is not much of a consideration,

“If we are present, it is not to protect a regime, it is to protect our nationals and our interests, and in no way to intervene in the internal affairs of a country...Those days are gone.”

The problem now is that with Bozize having been deposed, the conflict in CAR over who grabs what is set to intensify as the country descends into sectarian warfare between Christian militias and Islamists. As with Afghanistan, there is already talk of 'mission creep' and being sucked into a deepening war.

Rwanda, Tony Blair and the Missionary Position on Africa.

'For the last five years, my foundation – the Africa Governance Initiative – which provides countries with the capacity to deliver practical change, has been operating in Rwanda. Though there have been criticisms of the government over several issues, not least in respect of the fighting in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the progress has been extraordinary'. ( 20 years after the genocide, Rwanda is a beacon of hope, Guardian, Sunday 6 2014 )

So pines Tony Blair, ex-Prime Minister of Britain and now a man on a mission to save Syria through advocating intervention there as well as using the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide of 800,000 Tutsis to renew his duty to help developing lands overcome their demons.

The true aim of foreign aid being is to use aid to tie the African governments closer to Britain and so allow UK based companies such as Pella Resources Ltd to extract casselite ( tin ) and tungsten from the Musha and Ntunga mining concessions in Rwamagana District in the east of Rwanda.

UK Development secretary Justine Greening also showed renewed concern for Rwanda in 2013 and putting its development on the right track. That followed on from controversy in 2012 that Kagame's regime was stoking up the war in neighbouring Congo by backing the M23 militia group.

Clearly, between 2012 and 2013 British policy took a decisive swing towards favouring the current President Paul Kagame. Apart from the careers in the beneficent humanitarian development and 'soft power' sector of the British economy, clearly there is a certain interest Britain has in Rwanda.

As for Tony Blair's interest in Rwanda, it gives him a chance to outline what might have been done in Africa back in the 1990s in promoting development and 'good governance' had there been enough 'goodwill'. Hence Blair's 'Africa Governance Initiative'.

The problem is that his close friendship with Kagame was criticised after the Rwandan president was accused of war crimes and authoritarianism in a UN Report, by Human Rights Watch and even the White House. It is said Blair defends Kagame because he believes he can persuade him to reform Rwanda.

But though Rwanda itself is not one of the largest exporter of minerals, neighbouring Congo is-via Rwanda and the process of resource smuggling.Indeed, the M23 rebels are paid for via the revenue accrued from tin, tungsten and tantalum smuggled in from Congolese mines.

Much of the backing given to Kagame from the US and emissaries such as Blair is connected to controlling the resources of war torn Congo in a New Great Game against its main rival in China which seeks to dominate supplies of precious rare earths used in flat-screen televisions, smart phones and laptop batteries.

The idea that cynical realpolitik can co-exist with humanitarian principles on the basis that western involvement for political reason has higher motives in mind and, in any case, the west is better-it gives aid promotes good governance-is both self serving and can only make Africa's condition worse.

A Bleak Future of Conflict for Egypt.

'General Abdul Fattah al Sisi, who last week announced his candidacy for president and will almost certainly get the job. And I can't help comparing the behaviour of the institutions around Mubarak with the current behaviour of the state institutions'. ( Khaled al-Berry ,Why Egypt is in a spiral of despair The Guardian 2 April 2014 )

One reason for the militancy of the Muslim Brotherhood is the fact that it is seen to represent poorer sections of Egyptian society. It appeals especially those migrated into Egypt's burgeoning and overpopulated cities, especially Cairo, from rural areas for work and a university education to improve their life chances.

Unfortunately, Egypt's economy has struggled to keep pace with the population growth. The 'Arab Spring' was as much a revolt of the hungry due to the high price of bread as there is not enough land within Egypt to grow enough wheat and the global crop was affected by the 2010 fires in Russia.

Moreover, oil revenue has declined as peak production rates were reached in 1996 and have been declining since. That has led to a balance of payments crisis and the IMF demand to cut subsidies on fuel and bread, measures that the MB's President Morsi agreed to and that failed to stem popular anger.

The return of a Mubarak era strongman in the form of Sisi was always highly probable given the combination of economic collapse, political instability and the consequent fear that the MB's attempt to 'Islamise' Egypt would drive up militancy and drive off tourists and hence a much needed source of income.

The problem is that the reimposition of an effective secular military leader, after the way the MB was crushed and its leaders jailed or purged from administrative positions, is that it has led to militants seeing Sisi as Sisi's supporters also see Islamists; as tools of US imperialism.

Sisi's military regime continues to be supported by the USA as part of its geopolitical strategy of protecting Israel as well as the Suez Canal and the oil and gas pipelines running through Egypt. Militants from the poorer underclass and bedouins have sought to threaten the security of North Sinai.

Since August 2013 an effective civil war has been raging on the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian military's ruthless counter-terrorist measures against the Bedouins having the opposite effect of pushing even more from these poorer regions of Egypt towards belonging to Islamist guerilla groups.

One reason the British government is considering a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain is the fear of 'blowback' from those angry at the way the west allowed Sisi to crush what was considered by many in Egypt a democratically elected government in order to preserve its interests such as the BG group's stake in Egyptian gas production.

Egypt's economic crisis is not going to abate unless it attains political stability but if that comes at the cost of an election in which the Muslim Brotherhood is banned, it is hard to see how deep divisions and the threat to Egypt's tourist revenue from jihadist attacks can be prevented.

Moreover, pipelines pumping oil and gas within and through Egypt have been targeted as they have in Algeria and Libya in the past. The pipeline to Israel was attacked in 2012. Fears of an attack on the Suez Canal's container traffic of oil and gas persists. The prospect for peace in Egypt looks extremely bleak.

Being Hard on Britain's "Soft Power".

Here we go again. More on how Britain must advance its 'soft power' role. Indra Adnan writes this in the Guardian today( Soft power: Britain is losing its grip on this key asset ? )

Britain is weakening rather than bolstering its soft power institutions. Twenty-five countries have launched English-speaking world-affairs news outlets: we have cut funding to the BBC World Service, closing 22 bureaus (including the Ukraine) since 2011.Instead of harnessing institutions such as these, which reliably attract goodwill and trust, David Cameron has placed a commerce-oriented advertising campaign proclaiming "Britain is great" at the heart of its operations at No 10

Perhaps, it might be better to get a grasp on reality and realise that Britain isn't actually at all that great. It is valued by immigrants only as a fast track cash machine as opposed to some wonderful land of opportunity as it was re-presented under the Blair regime with "Cool Britannia" and all that mind numbing upbeat boosterism.

Reality is more important than mere image and enough people know enough now to know Britain is actually increasingly a worse place to live in relative to other nations than at any time in modern history. Outside London's globalised super economy there is nothing much to impress any more.

Town centres are either full of tawdry clone stores of half the shops boarded up.There is no sense of living in a community and hence the repeated incantation of the word "community" as a buzzword and copious drivel about a 'society fundamentally at ease with itself'.

London itself is only a city that attracts either the super rich, oil sheihks and kleptocrats or else the huddled masses from poorer nations to work in its low wage service sector jobs. The reality is one of cut throat competition and fear between groups of immigrants who economically undercut one another.

The reality is is a fragmented United Kingdom on the cusp of disintegration. Britain's foreign policy is a disgrace, an entirely self serving one of grovelling to states such as Qatar so that we can get its gas and its petrodollars can be invested in British made military hardware and London's property market.

The property market alone seems to drive the economy .Belief and trust in decayed institutions has waned and dwindled as the sovereign consumer works harder and harder to merit the right to own a banal legostyle brick box and spend on goods that help stave off despair and loneliness.

People living in Britain are increasingly miserable, liable to divorce, binge drinking and drug taking because they have no other form of overcoming their atomised status. This is known by those in Britain and those who come to witness the place from outside and are shocked to see whole swathes of British cities where few even speak English

It is just as well money is not being spent on 'soft power' because it is the hard realities that are those that now have meaning within and beyond Britain's shores. As it has become a global entrepot, it has also become a centre for global terror plots and plans so that foreign and domestic policies merge.

The consequence is an increasingly authoritarian security state monitoring its citizens because of the brutal power games the British government is playing in regions where there is oil and gas at stake. Naturally, these realities are seldom explicitly mentioned but outsiders realise Britain's essentially cynical global role.

No amount of investment in spin and soft corporate propaganda is going to be able to acheive anything other than create a hallucinatory view of Britain as an kleptocrat investor's paradise of prestige property and sports amenities, one that's a vision of a future dystopian hell for those who view and see the reality from below.

On North Korea.

Maybe in the light of North Korea being compared to the Nazi regime due to UN reports revealing the extent of its concentration camps and mass executions some in Britain might have cause for reflection that one prominent figures in the Stop the War Coalition actually look upon this totalitarian model state with sympathy.

The leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain called Andrew Murray, a sometime contributor to the Morning Star and Reader's Digest magazine, stressed this in 2003,

"Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear".

He wrote this with reference to 'the Party' because the US under the Bush administration had referred to North Korea as part of an "Axis of Evil" and was preparing to invade Iraq in that year. Those journalists who supported that invasion have been rightly criticised.

Yet those such as Murray are still allowed to shield behind their ostensibly good work in the Stop the War Coalition as something that is less important than their pronouncements in sympathy with mass murdering totalitarian regimes such as North Korea.

It is about time those truly concerned with being against senseless wars and militarism also were consistent in holding such vile individuals to account and refusing to countenance their position as leading voices in protest against intervention in Syria.

It is impossible to have a sane opposition to the growing trend towards militarism if those allowed to be leading voices in the 'official anti-war' groups in Britain are those who sympathise with a North Korean regime that starves and murders so many of its people.

But, then again, North Korea is a Lodestar for all those obsessed with the idea that it is uniquely, always and everywhere the US Empire that is the 'root cause' of every global ill and who remainn indifferent to the reality on the ground in North Korea.

There is little chance of any form of intervention to try and remove the regime of Kim Jong-un because none of the regional and global powers has any real ability to put pressure on North Korea let alone the willpower to intervene. The comparison with Middle Eastern regimes is also not a good one.

Unlike Iraq and Syria, there have not even been any attempts at internal revolt or rebellion so deeply entrenched and powerful is the hold of the Juche totalitarian state. The DPRK, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, functions as though it took Orwell's 1984 as a model of good governance.

Even China has failed to restrain Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. The entire purpose of King Jong Il's nuclear programme and satellite missile launches was to impress upon the world not only that the leadership was erratic and dangerous but also the message to the people that nobody can liberate them.

The execution of Kim Jong-un's uncle in December 2013 was in continuity with the strategy of keeping those within and without North Korea in fear of the sheer unpredictability of the regime and not to be able to predict its next move and keep the world guessing.

The December purges meant that the opening up of free trade with China, a policy which Jang Song Taek was responsible for, would not lead to alien ideas that might disturb what the repellent British apologist for North Korea, George Galloway, called its 'coherent, pristine and innocent culture' .

The US and South Korea have no way of removing the North Korean dictatorship and both the latter and China and Russia fear the destabilising consequences of what would happen if the regime was to collapse or feel threatened enough with its nuclear weapons.

In addition, neither Russia not China has any geopolitical interest in a re-unified Korea that would be pro-US right on their eastern borders, so the DPRK acts as a sort of militarised buffer state in which no power has any real interest in destabilizing it.

China has its trade links and a policy across the globe of non interference with the internal policies of the dictatorships it deals with on a 'no strings attached' basis. Even increased trade has been incapable of any thawing of North Korea's stance towards the rest of the world.

Without any resources the world could be interested in, the North Korean regime seems set to last indefinitely .It is ethnically homogeneous. There are no sectarian divides. It uses its nuclear missiles and sabre rattling to intimidate the rest of the world into accepting it as a fact lest it do something crazy.

As Orwell put it in 1984-“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” 

A Note on Global Military Expenditure and the Quest for Natural Resources.

One of the peculiarities of radical 'anti-war' critics, who regard war as the inevitable outgrowth of 'capitalism' and 'imperialism', is how they seem more obsessed on using evidence of increased military expenditure and actual armed conflicts in the post Cold War world as proof of the validity that their ideological obessions are true.

Richard Seymour, a staunch critic of western military intervention in the previous decade and author of The Liberal Defence of Murder writes in The Guardian

'there is no inherent reason why geo-economic competition should lead to defence spending consuming trillions of dollars of value each year'.

Actually, there is. Modern geopolitical competition and the potential for conflict in the post Cold war world is mostly about rival power blocks competiting control over supplies of resources,such as oil and gas, that are diminishing relative to the huge demand for them caused by global industrialisation.
As Seymour is a militant progressive and a sort of ideological Marxist, with a nostalgia for some mythical idea of global communist revolution, he has to see increased militarism across the world as the function of the USA's military-industrial complex spurring on economic growth and 'state building strategies'.

Obviously, there is a military industrial complex. Yet , apart from that and the colossal profits it makes and the research and development it stimulates, the reason for increased global military spending lies in 'extractive states' using oil and gas revenue to build up their military capacity.

Hard facts rather than the sort of windy ideological platitudes on offer by Seymour confirm that. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)’s Year Book 2013 is packed with necessary facts and figures needed to comprehend global arms expenditure. It notes,

“rising military spending for the USA, as the only superpower, and for other major or intermediate powers, such as Brazil, China, Russia and India, ( that ) appears to represent a strategic choice in their long-term quest for global and regional influence; one that they may be loath to go without, even in hard economic times”,

Seymour ignores the evidence that connects increased global military expenditure on the quest for control over resources as he is confined to tired ideological contructs about 'western imperialism' that can be 'unmasked' and, therefore, state power on a global scale can be 'challenged'.

It is very comforting to believe that only the west is responsible for driving on military expenditure, with the US being focused on. If 'US Imperialism' and its 'hegemonic project' is defeated somehow ( by Islamist or Marxist revolutionaries for example ), the world will be necessarily transformed for better.

These preoccupations are largely parochial. Even if 40% of all global military expenditure still comes from the US, the startling increases are to be found elsewhere in states such as Russia, Brazil, China and India which have ambitions as regional superpowers. Seymour is not, however, much bothered by them

More intelligent critics of militarism who are prepared to do actual research offer a far more interesting perspective on the very real potential for conflicts and proxy wars over regions though integral to the continued security of energy supplies to developed and developing nations.

One such example in Michael T Klare whose chilling books on resource wars such as Blood and Oil, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet and The Race for What is Left detail what is really at stake in the post Cold War age. Anyone ignoring the race for resources is not worth taking seriously.

“With energy demand on the rise and sources of supply dwindling, we are, in fact, entering a new epoch — the Geo-Energy Era — in which disputes over vital resources will dominate world affairs. In 2012 and beyond, energy and conflict will be bound ever more tightly together, lending increasing importance to the key geographical flashpoints in our resource-constrained world.'

The odd thing about radical critics of capitalism is how their 'explanations' for the Iraq War only tend to mention US Imperial projects, 'hegemony', the need for profits and, in relation to that, the control of oil in order to benefit large energy corporations.

The truth is that the possibility of war and conflict has become greater in the 21st century because of a massive increase in global energy consumption and the fact that access to those resources from diverse regions, and in areas riven with sectarian and ethnic tensions, is regarded as part of national security.

Syria: The Failure of the Geneva II Conference and Energy Power Politics.

The Geneva II talks between those representing both sides in the Syrian Civil War have  been suspended without any set date for their resumption. The appalling scale of the killing of civilians goes on without any prospect of resolution. At present the death toll is estimated at around 140,000 dead.

Jonathan Steele writes in the Observer,

'Rather than trying to score propaganda points or blame the other for Geneva's lack of progress, Washington and Moscow need to build on the common ground between them. Neither wants the total collapse of Syria's institutions or its secular multicultural tradition'.

Steele is right to emphasise the fact that neither global power has an interest in Syria's secular institutions being overthrown and the country becoming dominated by Islamist fanatics and a base for those affiliated to Al Qaida. The spectre haunting them is Syria becoming like Afghanistan in the 1990s.

The problem is that the West ( the USA, France and Britain ) are reluctant to put too much pressure on Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Saudi Arabia is intent on financially backing jihadists to overthrow Assad just as Qatar is giving aid and arms to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

True, Washington has been prepared to engage with Iran over its nuclear programme to the displeasure of Qatar. Getting Iran to work with other regional players such Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey is going to be difficult because of the lucrative energy interests at stake in this war.

Having been prevented in 2013 from launching missile strikes against Assad by Russia negotiating with the Syrian state to surrender its arsenal of chemical weapons, the US has sought to take a more diplomatic direction and exploit the new Iranian president's desire for sanctions on it to be removed.

Western policy, indeed, has been based on the fear of Iran shoring up Assad as a client and thus being able to realise its plan to export LNG from the South Pars gas field via pipeline by 2016. The pipeline would go through a Shia dominated Iraq via Syria onto the Eastern Mediterranean and hence EU markets.

France and Britain have been far more reluctant to do anything that would challenge Qatar over its backing for jihadists than the US. One reason is  the rival Qatari pipeline that would bring LNG to Europe direct instead of having to be loaded onto tankers rounding the Iranian controlled Straits of Hormuz.

Both France and Britain have become ever more dependent upon Qatari LNG. Consumer complaints about high gas prices in Britain mean the need to accept the emirates policy in Syria as it helps in enabling British corporations such as Centrica to strike deals over LNG rather than see it shipped elsewhere.

One additional reason for the stalemate at Geneva II and why France and Britain want Assad to go and a regime favourable to its energy interests to be installed is the that both depend on a colossal amount of investment from Qatar vital to boost their ailing economies.

As regards Britain, Milad Jokar points out,

'The Qatari investments are also important in Great Britain. With 20 percent of the shares of the London Stock Exchange, Qatar is the main shareholder of Barclays. The Emirate has also invested massively in the Olympic Games, it has financed 95 percent of the highest building in London (the Shard).'

The US, in its turn, has broad strategy of isolating Iran by thwarting its influence west through a pipeline via Syria and to the east through the planned pipeline to Pakistan. By retaining influence in Afghanistan, thus ensuring the war aim of construction of the TAPI pipeline, Iran's regional power against the USA's Gulf allies can be degraded.

These salient geopolitical factors are all part of the New Great Game for control over supplies of oil and gas that are being used up and diminishing across the globe with worldwide industrialisation. Those concerned with the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria need to be concerned with it and urgently..

Drone Warfare and Resource Conflicts

News that Britain's RAF have fired missiles during the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan comes as no surprise as the UK is at the forefront with the US in applying this technology to the new challenge of 21st century warfare: containing and killing Islamist militants and securing access to resources.

The use of drones in covert operations in Afghanistan has been veiled in secrecy because they are a major military tool that is being tested out in preparation for a new epoch of resource wars. Afghanistan remains a theatre of operation for the British and US through military experts and private sector mercenaries.

The future of warfare is going to consist not, as in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014, of having combat troops on the ground and suffering casualties against those such as the Taliban in some struggle for 'nation building'. It will be to protect mineral resources, fortified compounds and pipeline routes.

The Afghanistan War has continued for thirteen years with relatively heavy British casualties. Apart from the fact these are British troops, the problem is in 'perception management' with regards convincing the public that wars fought for purposes that are difficult to mention means drones are convenient.

Wars for the minerals such as lithium in Afghanistan and the construction of the TAPI pipeline and other infrastructure projects vital for advancing Western geopolitical ambitions in Central Asia require drones to be used in order to fend off Taliban attacks on the New Silk Route project.

As the earlier nation building plans of the 2000s in both Iraq and Afghanistan are now considered to be too expensive after the 2008 economic crisis, requiring ground troops over a long term, a new shift has seen  focus on protecting strategic zones with drones and training regional militias in places such as Somalia too.

For the US, that means defending sea lanes and strategic areas such as Yemen which is strategically located between Saudi Arabia and Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa where more than 3 billion barrels of oil a day pass the country's coast on their way west.

Drones are in use in Yemen and Somalia against Al Qaida affiliates such as Al Shabaab that are threatening to disrupt international commerce and the flow of vital hydrocarbons north towards the Suez Canal. As in Afghanistan, so too in Somalia  and Yemen is it the protection of resource interests ultimately at stake. 

It could be argued that drones are useful and good in rolling back terrorist attempts to attack the West's vital interests. But evidence shows in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan that drones sometimes kill civilians, thus recruiting new jihadists in these lands and even in the West due to recent patterns of migration.

Tony Blair on 'Religious Extremism'

'The fact is that, though of course there are individual grievances or reasons for the violence in each country, there is one thing self-evidently in common: the acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. It is a perversion of faith-

'Tony Blair on 'religious extremism' as the force for global conflict in The Observer, January 27 2014)

'Well, I think if you have faith about these things, then you realise that judgment is made by other people...If you believe in God, [the judgment] is made by God as well.".

Tony Blair to Michael Parkinson in 2006 on the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Likewise, the decision to invade Iraq could be considered to be at least partly motivated by a perversion of faith, a belief that both all dictatorships and all terrorism were alike motivated by a seamless global geopolitical Evil that could be comprehensively defeated by the USA and Britain.

Of course, the invasion of Iraq was based on geopolitical calculations,namely the idea of controlling the second largest oil supplies on earth and spreading democratic revolution across the Middle East through a 'domino effect' that would be stages in rolling back Assad's Syria and the Ayatollah's Iran.

Blair's evangelical zeal was probably far more sincere than Bush's born again Christianity but in both cases the war was about calculated strategies leavened by a militant and missionary foreign policy that appealed to scores of atheists, most noticeably the Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens.

There were some prominent atheists who disagreed with the Iraq War and chose to do it on the basis alone that the US was dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, such as President GW Bush pretended to be, and the fact that Blair was prepared to invoke God and religion in his decision for war.

Dawkins, however, remains largely ignorant of global geopolitics and peddles the banal idea that wars are all 'the fault of religion' or that only societies in which religion is predominant could wars be aided and abetted enthusiastically, the parochial conceit of those reaching maturity in a more secular Britain in the 1960s and 70s.

Most of the violence perpetuated by terrorists globally is largely due to politics and politicised versions of religion-or 'political religions'- that gain ground in lands beset with conflicts over territory, scarce resources from oil to diamonds and even water, and great power conflicts. This is the case in the Middle East.

Syria's crisis is a consequence of global climate change, increased scarcity of cheap food, an incompetent dictatorship that represented certain minorities which could no longer ensure sufficient living standards for all and the geopolitical contest between regional and global powers over pipeline routes and access to oil and gas.

Syria's civil war is in reality a series of civil wars between minorities created by the fracturing of the artificial state into warring factions that want to break away ( such as the Kurds into a new oil rich state ) and the Sunni Muslims who have less of a stake in gaining from new gas pipeline projects from Shia Iran and Iraq.

The way Blair draws attention to the Syrian Crisis at present is always, however, with a view to portraying it as a consequence of sectarian divisions and 'perverted faith' that has ramped up casualties without US and British intervention to levels surpassing his mendaciously low figure of 100,000 deaths in the Iraq War.

'At present, our screens are dominated by the hideous slaughter in Syria. We have to hope that the peace negotiations succeed. But with more than 130,000 dead – and, on some accounts, the total is nearer 200,000 – millions displaced and the country in a state of disintegration...'

When Blair gives his opinion on any matter of global significance, it is invariably connected to his attempt to consolidate his image as a 'visionary' statesman and guarantee his 'legacy' in world politics. And that, in turn, means attempting to rationalise the catastrophic impact the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has had.

Contrary to the claims that Blair is a 'psychopath' and a mere 'warmonger', Blair does have a conscience which is why he seems to be obsessive in trying to prove that his decision to back the US invasion was justified in the light of some broader providential plan for the world.

By claiming contemporary terrorist atrocities are part of a 'clear common theme' and that other world leaders must 'start to produce a genuine global strategy to deal with it', Blair is trying to argue that the hitherto underestimated potency and power of religious based terrorism derailed his plans for Iraq.

The line Blair takes is that had it not been for 'the acts of terrorism...perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion', then democracy would have come to Iraq relatively quickly and it is they and not him who bears responsibility for the vast majority of the bloodshed.

'All over the region, and including in Iraq, where exactly the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future, such a campaign has to be actively waged. It is one reason why the Middle East matters so much and why any attempt to disengage is so wrong and short-sighted'.

Moreover, by maintaining that the sort of sectarian based religious violence is a 'growing' global threat, Blair can relativise the significance of the bloodshed in Iraq as one that is part of a wider trend that was just emerging at the time of his decision to invade Iraq to free it from a secular dictator.

The purpose of this propaganda is that Blair can absolve himself from the responsibility for the carnage in Iraq by trying to have it that this sort of sectarian violence was bound to break out anyway sooner or later. Just as governments have had to be 'engaged' over Syria, so too did he earlier with Iraq.

This way of 'framing' events in the Middle East over the past decade is meant to salvage Blair's reputation and it is motivated by vanity and egotism. All his efforts since being officially out of office are geared towards ensuring that he is retrospectively vindicated by History.

Even so, if that were the only aim Blair has, he could easily keep writing post ex facto justifications for the Iraq War and collecting vast amounts of money from his global lectures and speeches. But-and this is why Blair does have a conscience-he seems intent on promoting 'global harmony'.

Blair is obsessing with his 'place in history' because he does not want to be remembered only as the man whose decision brought widespread death and destruction to Iraq. So his 'TonyBlairFaithFoundation' is there 'to promote greater knowledge and understanding between people of different faiths'.

As a fairly recent convert to Catholicism, Blair can shift away from the Protestant idea of 'justification by faith alone' to one of atoning through a devotion to doing good work in the world by funding educational and exchange programmes and university courses to students across the world of faith.

Blair's message is that what happened in Iraq did not have to be that way. In fact, he was warned by numerous experts on the Middle East that an invasion to remove the secular dictator was going to lead to an outbreak of sectarian and ethnic tensions. Blair 'believed' it did would not happen that way.

So Blair is bound to blame violence on an 'abuse of faith' because his own decision to invade Iraq was based on a messianic faith based crusade to liberate the Middle East, one given impetus by the fact he had liberated the Muslim Kosovans in 1999 and the Afghans from the Taliban after 2001.

Blair is not going to cease trying to make up for-in his own way-the bad done in Iraq and that he blames on the evildoing of sectarian terrorists and not on himself because he believes he had the best of intentions. Blair knows all about faith based violence because his decision to go to war was based on it.