The Battle for Tripoli rages on between Gaddafi's forces and the rebels with it appearing almost certain the Libyan dictator's regime is set to fall and that a new National Transitional Council will assume control with the full military and political backing of the West.
In Britain, The Sun newspaper inadvertently revealed the relevance of Cameron's decision to use RAF jets as part of the air campaign against Gaddafi's forces and the undoubted use of SAS personnel to use sophisticated technology to coordinate the capture of the Libyan capital.
THE downfall of tyrant Colonel Gaddafi will bring joy to motorists by slashing more than 4 PENCE off petrol prices, the AA said last night.
Experts said global oil prices are set to tumble as Libya's production returns to normal when fighting ends - and that will be passed on at the pumps.
The revolution's effects on prices were already apparent yesterday, when Brent crude fell more than one per cent in London to 107.9 dollars a barrel.
The Sun gets it right when they write more candidly about the benefits to Britain in aiding the rebels overthrow Gaddafi. It will mean a 4p reduction in oil prices. This means far more to motorist Britons than abstract arguments about 'humanitarian intervention'.
None of the quality newspapers have bothered to mention the obvious impact on the consumer in such populist terms, despite the fact the popularity of the British government will be boosted by opening up the flow of high grade crude from Libya.
Advanced Western consumer democracies need falling or stable oil prices to maintain their lifestyles. Arab nations need rising prices if the majority of a rising population of young people are going to see benefits from their oil.
Libyan British emigres have been ready to ignore this in the understandably euphoric atmosphere witnessed in Tripoli as Gaddafi's regime crumbles. One, the writer Hashim Matar, wrotes in The Guardian,
The past six months have put an end not only not only to Gaddafi's rule but also to the myths propagated by its extensive PR campaign, managed by companies in London and New York and promoted by western governments and companies wishing to do business with the dictator.
But why have Western attitudes gone from embracing the dictator as happened after 2003 when Britain and the USA led the way in invading Iraq and Gaddafi to now vilifying him to the point of having ruled out any idea of negotiating with him and a settlement between the warring sides ?
Gaddafi had lost de facto authority after the Arab Spring motivated those particularly in the East around Benghazi to rise up against him. When he threatened to exterminate the rebels there, Britain and France saw an opportunity to be rid of him and get a democratic new regime installed.
Yet the problem with the Libyan NTC will be not merely the creation of a democracy and civil society in a land beset with tribal divisions but also whether any new government can oversee a transition that will not repeat the mistakes of Iraq in 2003 after the dictator was removed.
The NTC have claimed there will be reconciliation and nothing resembling "De-Baathification".The create a vaccuum of power in Libya would create the same conditions after Saddam Hussein was removed in Iraq
However, the difficult facing the TNC is not only about the political settlement that will prove acceptable to competing factions but also the terms of the economic reforms which may well be spelt out by Western governments and pliant client elites over the heads of the people.
A US diplomatic cable revealed by Wikileaks that dates back to 2007 at least indicates what is at stake with the removal of Gaddafi,
'Libya needs to exploit its hydrocarbon resources to provide for its rapidly-growing, relatively young population. To do so, it requires extensive foreign investment and participation by credible IOCs [international oil companies]. Reformist elements in the Libyan government and the small but growing private sector recognize this reality. But those who dominate Libya's political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector that could jeopardize efficient exploitation of Libya's extensive oil and gas reserves'.
The Libyan conflict is not exactly "all about oil" as no conflict is ever all about just only one thing. But clearly Western intervention is premised on the geopolitical advantages of 'regime change' in Libya that has echoes of Iraq in a number of ways.
Firstly, the idea that a rapid transition to a stable democracy boosted by oil revenue will act as a model and beacon for other Arab nations undergoing change and reform. One reason the West has released $150 million of oil revenue to win over the rebels.
Many of the rebels have fought through idealism, hatred of Gaddafi, ethnic and tribal loyalties that date back before Gaddafi's secular Arab national socialist regime. These are very strong in the East of Libya ( Cyrenaica ) which under the Ottoman Empire was a distinct province quite different from Tripolitania.
Secondly, therefore, it is important that the new government does not follow an extreme shock therapy neoliberal model of privatisation that without the creation of a strong democratic state first will lead to corruption and unaccountable elites and tribal bosses fighting over the lucrative oil revenues.
Libya has a rapidly growing young population that needs the oil revenue to be chanelled into providing a diversified economy and a degree of state provision for all Libyans. This requires the new government to no cede away control of its oil wealth wholly to the West which prefers lower prices.
This was aimed at in Iraq when the new government there agreed to PSA's ( Profit Sharing Agreements ) that would ensure a fixed price for 100 years to Western nation.
Then there is the evidence of history. Matar states ,
For exactly 100 years now, our country has battled fascism. In 1911 we had Mussolini, then, after a short break under King Idris, in 1969 we had our own home-grown variety of authoritarian rule in the form of Gaddafi...
This is a curious statement. For a start Gaddafi was, of course, not a 'fascist' but an Arab nationalist who espoused a form of 'socialism' in so far as he could appeal to the wretched of the earth in his part of North Africa in common with the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the 1960s.
Moreover, Mussolini was not even in power in Italy until 1922. The occupation of Libya was a more old fashioned imperial adventure that was about controlling oil resources as well. As Mark Mazower has emphasises these aims have not changed despite humanitarian interventionist doctrines.
After the Second World War and formal decolonisation that happened under King Idris it is true that there was more political freedom. Yet the majority of Libyan's remained poor and cut off from the wealth of the Sanussi elites who in the East in Benghazi who backed the monarchy.
This is important as it should not be forgotten that this is how Gaddafi was able to exploit discontent to gain power in the first place and to retain in by encouraging migration of black Africans from sub Saharan Africa to act as a power base in the Fezzan region in the south.
This is one reason to be cautious about what happens if and when the rebels flying the flag of King Idris take Tripoli. As with Baghdad in 2003, it seems Gaddafi will retreat to his ancestral tribal homeland in Sabha just as Saddam tried to rouse the oil poor Sunni regions to rise up.
It is likely that Gaddafi has abandoned Tripoli to flee to the south which has little to lose when compared to the elites who stand to benefit from Gaddafi's demise in the two oil rich northern provinces on the Mediterranean.
All the more reason that the transition to democracy has to be accompanied without mass corruption encouraged by overhasty economic reforms, asset stripping and the creation of new unaccountable elites who will wave goodbye to those who made their victory possible once they gain power and control.
Western states were content enough to bargain with Gaddafi when they thought they could extract what they wanted as regards drilling rights and oil concessions. When Gaddafi lost control, then it was clear that he was no longer useful and incapable of securing stability.
This does not mean that Gaddafi's removal is not a great moment for a vast number of Libyans. Yet whether it will prove a victory that will satisy a substantial number of its people, should the economic settlement give precedence to Western interests at the expense of those who fought for freedom, remains to be seen.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Saturday, 20 August 2011
Another day, Another Attack. Another Attempt to Outrage Rather than Explain.
The cliches of 'war without end' and 'endless war' are staples of populist hacks who want to carve out a living for themselves by exploiting distrust, anger, annoyance, incomphrehension, puzzlement at the British and American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mehdi Hasan, a leading journalist who writes for The New Statesman and The Guardian writes ( Barack Obama's Wars without End August 19 2011),
Another day, another attack. On Friday, the Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's independence day with an audacious assault on the British Council office in Kabul, which killed nine people. The day before, insurgents killed at least 25 people after a roadside bomb ripped through a minibus in the western province of Herat and a suicide car bomb exploded at a US-run base in the eastern province of Paktia.
A decade on from 9/11, bloodshed and chaos continue to plague Afghanistan and Iraq. A US state department report published on Thursday revealed that the number of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan had jumped by 55% last year; in Iraq, attacks were up 9%.
The US-led invasions and occupations of both countries have been a dismal failure – thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars squandered. The presence of western troops in Muslim lands has provoked more terrorism than it has prevented.
Why does an intelligent politician such as Barack Obama have such difficulty understanding this?
Putting more boots on the ground was a gross misjudgment. More US troops have died fighting in Afghanistan during Obama's two and a half years in the White House than in Bush's two terms in office – and, despite the recent decision to start bringing troops home, there will be more US military personnel fighting the Taliban at the end of Obama's first term in office than at the start.
It is clear that the war in Afghanistan is not actually supposed to be a war without end as the US and UK have claimed that troops will be withdrawn by 2014. It seems a war without any conclusive end. But Mehdi does nothing to outline what he thinks the endgame is.
In Afghanistan it is the key remaining war objective to ensure the security environment that will allow the TAPI pipeline to be built. A transit route for gas from Turkmenistan that will give the Western powers a strong stake in the New Great Game for the oil and gas of Central Asia.
The plan is to link Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together economically in a community of regional interest that will ensure the rival IPI pipeline that would bypass Afghanistan completely does not result in the West failing to have a toehold from which it can determine Central Asian supplies of oil and gas.
The TAPI pipeline is scheduled to be completed by 2014. Curiously this is the date when UK and US troops are timetables to withdraw. The pipeline is an essential part of Western geopolitics and it does journalism a great disservice that this obvious fact is seldom mentioned in discussions of what is at stake in this war.
The strand of anti-war opinion in England often fails to take into account the fact that supplies of oil and gas are diminishing and that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are resource wars intended to secure the energy future that underpins the material wellbeing of presumably even the less wealthy in Western lands.
The idea that the war in Afghanistan is about corporate profits and the military industrial complex is simply erroneous. "Liberal intervention" is about what is considered "enlightened self interest". Should TAPI become a reality, then Afghanistan will be integrated into the global economy.
This war aim is believed to benefit the Afghan people who will gain from the transit fees and the investment of corporations in exploiting the copious supplies of lithium which are valuable for producing high tech goods. One reason China is negotiated with Karzai's government for acres to these resources.
The problem is that the Taliban know the strategic value of TAPI and that it has to go through Helmland as most of the land to the east is consists of impassable mountain territory. This is why the conflict has yielded so many casualties for Britain in that region.
Generalised commentaries that consist just in mentioning the scale of Afghan deaths from drones, or else maudlin ones that emphasise British soldiers sacrifices only, both fail to actually deal with the most pressing question: what is all this death and destruction supposed to be for ?
Hasan does no more to enlighten the British public in this regard than ITV's increasingly sinister use of it's news channel to amplify official war propaganda that Afghanistan is a sacrifice of the troops for the home country. Obviously the war it has nothing to do with defence from dangerous enemies but with energy security and geopolitics.
Perhaps, it is thought that the British public is too stupid to understand this. More likely, their could be a lot of anger if it was thought that the war was about a pipeline, one that British far right leader Nick Griffin of the BNP has been keen to exploit in his propaganda about "Bringing Our Boys Home".
However, the idea of evil imperial elites and corporations being alone wholly responsible for unleashing carnage for pure profit only lends credence to the idea that to explain the reason for the continuing war in terms of a pipeline is a 'conspiracy theory'.
The idea that Afghanistan is about what Pilger calls, with repetitive insistence, "rapacious power" is as much a tedious and obsolete propaganda trope as the Establishment propaganda about a war to defend our streets from terror.
Exchange the word 'imperial elites' with 'metropolitan liberal-elites' and the idea of sinister profiteers and callous, unresponsive, and malign sysstem and 'regime' can become a form of propaganda that bolsters the far right in Britain, a left wing war for saving Muslims who are bound to detest Britain anyway and which this foreign policy makes worse.
This is the problem when the media buys in to the official PR spin about a 'liberal intervention' or 'humanitarian war' or what Obama and Cameron 'should', 'must' or 'ought' to do in Afghanistan to ensure peace and a workable settlement without understanding what is the reason for being in Afghanistan
And that the auxiliary objectives ( hospitals, clinics, rights for women, education etc ) are secondary in importance to the geopolitical struggle to get the TAPI pipeline constructed. Without even mentioning the reality behind the war strategy, public discussion is stifled into 'what about the benefits to the Afghans? ' or ' it's all one hypocritical sham'.
The stark fact, the few seem to grasp,, is that the legitimacy of governments such as Britain's depends on the ability of the political class to ensure economic growth and rising consumer prosperity. This is as true of ailing democracies as Britain's as it is of one party systems such as energy hungry China.
Face facts: Afghanistan, no less than Iraq, is a war to promote the future supply of fossil fuels that consumers feel they have a right to expect. Party political popularity and legitimacy in a democratic system are upheld by their ability to supply cheap oil and thus diversify supplies.
Some Objections Considered.
"Although you are right to mention the pipeline as key to understanding the mass murder undertaken by Obomber and Co you seem a little confused as to the underlying intentions of the western intervention in Afghanistan. corporations invest to get profits mate. Sorry it's all about greed and good old fashioned colonialism. Your post is confusing and only serves to obfuscate"
No, I said that the war is not crucially about corporate profits as the driving force, though profits are certainly to be made. But billions of dollars spent on Afghanistan have yielded a paltry return so far. So the war effort is hardly "worth it". The question is who is meant to benefit from the war ?
The idea Afghanistan is only about enriching corporations ( note the word "only" ) is facile. It is more complicated than that, something that does not amount to "obfuscation"but more to the fact that global economies depend upon oil and gas to maintain living standards.
That does not mean that it is ethically right. But distinguishing what 'is' the actual case for competition over fossil fuels is different to claiming this 'ought' to be so.
Governments are not merely only the servants of corporations. The US government actually thwarted US corporate oil interests in Iran as it contradicted their policy. Corporations do not determine foreign policy, though they can be influential and certainly seek to profit from it.
In Afghanistan corporations are set to make profits from mining resources. But the main aim is about hegemony in Central Asia and about the construction of the TAPI pipeline for the geopolitical reasons I have outlined. So silly propaganda about selfless humanitarian intervention is designed to obfuscate.
As regards Pilger, he just sees Afghanistan as about sinister elites doing this only for profit and power. Yet as with Iraq, it is easy to claim this and pretend that western consumer prosperity, that is the interests of the vast masses of consumers, is not also tied up with continued access to cheap oil and gas.
Investing in alternatives to fossil fuels is the clear way out of this and not spending money on futile wars. But to pretend that resource wars are simply about profits is, well, just simplistic. My criticism of Pilger is that he trades in propaganda by just inverting official propaganda on it's head.
In other words, Afghanistan is not about a heroic crusade for democracy ( obviously ) nor about pure profit and power. Both views are wrong and evident untruth put forth by the government are not countered by failing to understand the gravity of the crisis caused by over dependence on fossil fuels.
......."there are strategic interests, but I don't buy the argument that Afghanistan is now primarily about securing real estate for a pipeline".
The pipeline is central to US/NATO interests more for geopolitical reasons than profit as it is about uniting the regional powers under the auspices of Western military force and also about containing and encircling Iran from both the west ( Iraq ) and Afghanistan to the east.
By blocking off the IPI alternative, the West will be able to retain a military and diplomatic stake in determining the supply of fossil fuels from Central Asia and the Middle East. Control over energy supplies is precisely power politics and retaining the capacity to remain a regional and global player where it matters.
'An interesting new factor with regard to the US securing all that fossil fuel is that we don't really need to. Turns out the US has vast supplies of natural gas and production is ratcheting up at a furious pace. (I live in Pennsylvania.) New technology gives access to vast oil deposits in Canada. North America has the potential to once again become a major exporter of fossil fuels".
The US has stockpiled vast reserves of oil and gas, of course. But it still will not be enough and the point is that the US and the European states need diversity of supply. In a world of increasing instability, where fossil fuel producing states are riven with ethnic and sectarian divisions, diversification is the goal.
Moreover, Europe has by far not enough oil and gas and more pro-US states such as Poland see diversification as as means of reducing dependence upon Russia which has shown it wants to use the supply of oil and gas as a tool of diplomacy: annoy Russia and expect a slowdown in gas supply.
The TAPI pipeline will primarily and directly benefit the states through which it runs as regards supply of gas. That fact is often used by certain mendacious commentators to claim that the idea that TAPI is about Western economic interests only is a 'conspiracy theory'.
If it was so, it would be a kind of mere 'conspiracy theory'as the reasoning goes that we could have cut a deal with the Taliban just as Blair said he could have cut a deal with Saddam if the war in Iraq was only about taking the oil.
This is, of course, what the governments of Western nations involved in Afghanistan want their publics to believe. When TAPI is reported in the Western media, it is curiously confined to the economic and financial sections of newspapers as if it were somehow wholly unrelated to the political and military news.
Yet the fact remains that NATO's political and military effort is geared towards securing the pipeline route and it is their blood and treasure that is paying towards this geostrategical gambit of putting the West in a strong bargaining position to determine the future of global energy supplies.
I do believe that in the final analysis, it is all about 'profits', be it financial, political and/or strategic profits. With changing geopolitical and economic conditions, a country might well intervene into another country for one or more reasons, then find other reasons for continuing their intervention.
....it is not inconceivable that some dishonest and devious politicians will intervene on a 'leap from' basis, citing one reason for intervening but intending to be able to make a stronger case for wider intervention once the have intervened and 'created facts on the ground.'
Afghanistan was invaded because the Bush administration believed in 2001 that Al Qaida was a hierarchical organisation akin to something like SPECTRE from James Bond with Bin Laden as the evil No 1 and that by getting rid of the Taliban they could defeat Al Qaida.
This also provided a pretext for getting the pipeline constructed as this had been a long term aim of the US as part of it's strategy for Central Asia throughout the 1990s. The Taliban were after 2001 believed to be unreliable as clients given their role in harbouring Al Qaida.
The idea of 'mission creep' is less convinciing in a sense. Regarding the 'war on terror' and 'war on drugs' and other reasons for 'staying the course' are also attempts to rationalise a conflict that the US and NATO blundered into and for which abstract utopian aims were advanced by 'liberal interventionist' crusaders.
One of the problems now for democratic governments is the 'endgame'. As regards Britain, the loss of 379 soldiers and reports of Afghan villagers being blow up, has in some ultimate sense to have been 'worth it'. If not, the whole decade long war would be seen as futile without gaining something.
The construction of the TAPI pipeline remains the one sole aim that it is believed can make the expense and casualties all part of a successful exercise in 'nation building'. No pipeline and Afghanistan will have little worth investing, no New Silk Route as Hilary Clinton terms it will develop and nothing will have been gained.
If the TAPI pipeline is constructed, this gives the pro-Western Afghan elites the chance to use the hefty transit fees to strengthen the power of the state. Though the reality is that it could just lead to more corruption and squabbling. That can even be seen in other pipeline transit states such as Georgia.
Moreover, the Taliban ( and warlords ) financed by opium profits have money to continue insurgent actions. The drugs follow New Silk routes into Europe for recreational consumers no less than the oil and gas that Western states are likewise addicted to.
Mehdi Hasan, a leading journalist who writes for The New Statesman and The Guardian writes ( Barack Obama's Wars without End August 19 2011),
Another day, another attack. On Friday, the Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's independence day with an audacious assault on the British Council office in Kabul, which killed nine people. The day before, insurgents killed at least 25 people after a roadside bomb ripped through a minibus in the western province of Herat and a suicide car bomb exploded at a US-run base in the eastern province of Paktia.
A decade on from 9/11, bloodshed and chaos continue to plague Afghanistan and Iraq. A US state department report published on Thursday revealed that the number of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan had jumped by 55% last year; in Iraq, attacks were up 9%.
The US-led invasions and occupations of both countries have been a dismal failure – thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars squandered. The presence of western troops in Muslim lands has provoked more terrorism than it has prevented.
Why does an intelligent politician such as Barack Obama have such difficulty understanding this?
Putting more boots on the ground was a gross misjudgment. More US troops have died fighting in Afghanistan during Obama's two and a half years in the White House than in Bush's two terms in office – and, despite the recent decision to start bringing troops home, there will be more US military personnel fighting the Taliban at the end of Obama's first term in office than at the start.
It is clear that the war in Afghanistan is not actually supposed to be a war without end as the US and UK have claimed that troops will be withdrawn by 2014. It seems a war without any conclusive end. But Mehdi does nothing to outline what he thinks the endgame is.
In Afghanistan it is the key remaining war objective to ensure the security environment that will allow the TAPI pipeline to be built. A transit route for gas from Turkmenistan that will give the Western powers a strong stake in the New Great Game for the oil and gas of Central Asia.
The plan is to link Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together economically in a community of regional interest that will ensure the rival IPI pipeline that would bypass Afghanistan completely does not result in the West failing to have a toehold from which it can determine Central Asian supplies of oil and gas.
The TAPI pipeline is scheduled to be completed by 2014. Curiously this is the date when UK and US troops are timetables to withdraw. The pipeline is an essential part of Western geopolitics and it does journalism a great disservice that this obvious fact is seldom mentioned in discussions of what is at stake in this war.
The strand of anti-war opinion in England often fails to take into account the fact that supplies of oil and gas are diminishing and that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are resource wars intended to secure the energy future that underpins the material wellbeing of presumably even the less wealthy in Western lands.
The idea that the war in Afghanistan is about corporate profits and the military industrial complex is simply erroneous. "Liberal intervention" is about what is considered "enlightened self interest". Should TAPI become a reality, then Afghanistan will be integrated into the global economy.
This war aim is believed to benefit the Afghan people who will gain from the transit fees and the investment of corporations in exploiting the copious supplies of lithium which are valuable for producing high tech goods. One reason China is negotiated with Karzai's government for acres to these resources.
The problem is that the Taliban know the strategic value of TAPI and that it has to go through Helmland as most of the land to the east is consists of impassable mountain territory. This is why the conflict has yielded so many casualties for Britain in that region.
Generalised commentaries that consist just in mentioning the scale of Afghan deaths from drones, or else maudlin ones that emphasise British soldiers sacrifices only, both fail to actually deal with the most pressing question: what is all this death and destruction supposed to be for ?
Hasan does no more to enlighten the British public in this regard than ITV's increasingly sinister use of it's news channel to amplify official war propaganda that Afghanistan is a sacrifice of the troops for the home country. Obviously the war it has nothing to do with defence from dangerous enemies but with energy security and geopolitics.
Perhaps, it is thought that the British public is too stupid to understand this. More likely, their could be a lot of anger if it was thought that the war was about a pipeline, one that British far right leader Nick Griffin of the BNP has been keen to exploit in his propaganda about "Bringing Our Boys Home".
However, the idea of evil imperial elites and corporations being alone wholly responsible for unleashing carnage for pure profit only lends credence to the idea that to explain the reason for the continuing war in terms of a pipeline is a 'conspiracy theory'.
The idea that Afghanistan is about what Pilger calls, with repetitive insistence, "rapacious power" is as much a tedious and obsolete propaganda trope as the Establishment propaganda about a war to defend our streets from terror.
Exchange the word 'imperial elites' with 'metropolitan liberal-elites' and the idea of sinister profiteers and callous, unresponsive, and malign sysstem and 'regime' can become a form of propaganda that bolsters the far right in Britain, a left wing war for saving Muslims who are bound to detest Britain anyway and which this foreign policy makes worse.
This is the problem when the media buys in to the official PR spin about a 'liberal intervention' or 'humanitarian war' or what Obama and Cameron 'should', 'must' or 'ought' to do in Afghanistan to ensure peace and a workable settlement without understanding what is the reason for being in Afghanistan
And that the auxiliary objectives ( hospitals, clinics, rights for women, education etc ) are secondary in importance to the geopolitical struggle to get the TAPI pipeline constructed. Without even mentioning the reality behind the war strategy, public discussion is stifled into 'what about the benefits to the Afghans? ' or ' it's all one hypocritical sham'.
The stark fact, the few seem to grasp,, is that the legitimacy of governments such as Britain's depends on the ability of the political class to ensure economic growth and rising consumer prosperity. This is as true of ailing democracies as Britain's as it is of one party systems such as energy hungry China.
Face facts: Afghanistan, no less than Iraq, is a war to promote the future supply of fossil fuels that consumers feel they have a right to expect. Party political popularity and legitimacy in a democratic system are upheld by their ability to supply cheap oil and thus diversify supplies.
Some Objections Considered.
"Although you are right to mention the pipeline as key to understanding the mass murder undertaken by Obomber and Co you seem a little confused as to the underlying intentions of the western intervention in Afghanistan. corporations invest to get profits mate. Sorry it's all about greed and good old fashioned colonialism. Your post is confusing and only serves to obfuscate"
No, I said that the war is not crucially about corporate profits as the driving force, though profits are certainly to be made. But billions of dollars spent on Afghanistan have yielded a paltry return so far. So the war effort is hardly "worth it". The question is who is meant to benefit from the war ?
The idea Afghanistan is only about enriching corporations ( note the word "only" ) is facile. It is more complicated than that, something that does not amount to "obfuscation"but more to the fact that global economies depend upon oil and gas to maintain living standards.
That does not mean that it is ethically right. But distinguishing what 'is' the actual case for competition over fossil fuels is different to claiming this 'ought' to be so.
Governments are not merely only the servants of corporations. The US government actually thwarted US corporate oil interests in Iran as it contradicted their policy. Corporations do not determine foreign policy, though they can be influential and certainly seek to profit from it.
In Afghanistan corporations are set to make profits from mining resources. But the main aim is about hegemony in Central Asia and about the construction of the TAPI pipeline for the geopolitical reasons I have outlined. So silly propaganda about selfless humanitarian intervention is designed to obfuscate.
As regards Pilger, he just sees Afghanistan as about sinister elites doing this only for profit and power. Yet as with Iraq, it is easy to claim this and pretend that western consumer prosperity, that is the interests of the vast masses of consumers, is not also tied up with continued access to cheap oil and gas.
Investing in alternatives to fossil fuels is the clear way out of this and not spending money on futile wars. But to pretend that resource wars are simply about profits is, well, just simplistic. My criticism of Pilger is that he trades in propaganda by just inverting official propaganda on it's head.
In other words, Afghanistan is not about a heroic crusade for democracy ( obviously ) nor about pure profit and power. Both views are wrong and evident untruth put forth by the government are not countered by failing to understand the gravity of the crisis caused by over dependence on fossil fuels.
......."there are strategic interests, but I don't buy the argument that Afghanistan is now primarily about securing real estate for a pipeline".
The pipeline is central to US/NATO interests more for geopolitical reasons than profit as it is about uniting the regional powers under the auspices of Western military force and also about containing and encircling Iran from both the west ( Iraq ) and Afghanistan to the east.
By blocking off the IPI alternative, the West will be able to retain a military and diplomatic stake in determining the supply of fossil fuels from Central Asia and the Middle East. Control over energy supplies is precisely power politics and retaining the capacity to remain a regional and global player where it matters.
'An interesting new factor with regard to the US securing all that fossil fuel is that we don't really need to. Turns out the US has vast supplies of natural gas and production is ratcheting up at a furious pace. (I live in Pennsylvania.) New technology gives access to vast oil deposits in Canada. North America has the potential to once again become a major exporter of fossil fuels".
The US has stockpiled vast reserves of oil and gas, of course. But it still will not be enough and the point is that the US and the European states need diversity of supply. In a world of increasing instability, where fossil fuel producing states are riven with ethnic and sectarian divisions, diversification is the goal.
Moreover, Europe has by far not enough oil and gas and more pro-US states such as Poland see diversification as as means of reducing dependence upon Russia which has shown it wants to use the supply of oil and gas as a tool of diplomacy: annoy Russia and expect a slowdown in gas supply.
The TAPI pipeline will primarily and directly benefit the states through which it runs as regards supply of gas. That fact is often used by certain mendacious commentators to claim that the idea that TAPI is about Western economic interests only is a 'conspiracy theory'.
If it was so, it would be a kind of mere 'conspiracy theory'as the reasoning goes that we could have cut a deal with the Taliban just as Blair said he could have cut a deal with Saddam if the war in Iraq was only about taking the oil.
This is, of course, what the governments of Western nations involved in Afghanistan want their publics to believe. When TAPI is reported in the Western media, it is curiously confined to the economic and financial sections of newspapers as if it were somehow wholly unrelated to the political and military news.
Yet the fact remains that NATO's political and military effort is geared towards securing the pipeline route and it is their blood and treasure that is paying towards this geostrategical gambit of putting the West in a strong bargaining position to determine the future of global energy supplies.
I do believe that in the final analysis, it is all about 'profits', be it financial, political and/or strategic profits. With changing geopolitical and economic conditions, a country might well intervene into another country for one or more reasons, then find other reasons for continuing their intervention.
....it is not inconceivable that some dishonest and devious politicians will intervene on a 'leap from' basis, citing one reason for intervening but intending to be able to make a stronger case for wider intervention once the have intervened and 'created facts on the ground.'
Afghanistan was invaded because the Bush administration believed in 2001 that Al Qaida was a hierarchical organisation akin to something like SPECTRE from James Bond with Bin Laden as the evil No 1 and that by getting rid of the Taliban they could defeat Al Qaida.
This also provided a pretext for getting the pipeline constructed as this had been a long term aim of the US as part of it's strategy for Central Asia throughout the 1990s. The Taliban were after 2001 believed to be unreliable as clients given their role in harbouring Al Qaida.
The idea of 'mission creep' is less convinciing in a sense. Regarding the 'war on terror' and 'war on drugs' and other reasons for 'staying the course' are also attempts to rationalise a conflict that the US and NATO blundered into and for which abstract utopian aims were advanced by 'liberal interventionist' crusaders.
One of the problems now for democratic governments is the 'endgame'. As regards Britain, the loss of 379 soldiers and reports of Afghan villagers being blow up, has in some ultimate sense to have been 'worth it'. If not, the whole decade long war would be seen as futile without gaining something.
The construction of the TAPI pipeline remains the one sole aim that it is believed can make the expense and casualties all part of a successful exercise in 'nation building'. No pipeline and Afghanistan will have little worth investing, no New Silk Route as Hilary Clinton terms it will develop and nothing will have been gained.
If the TAPI pipeline is constructed, this gives the pro-Western Afghan elites the chance to use the hefty transit fees to strengthen the power of the state. Though the reality is that it could just lead to more corruption and squabbling. That can even be seen in other pipeline transit states such as Georgia.
Moreover, the Taliban ( and warlords ) financed by opium profits have money to continue insurgent actions. The drugs follow New Silk routes into Europe for recreational consumers no less than the oil and gas that Western states are likewise addicted to.
Friday, 19 August 2011
The Meaninglessness of the English Riots was their Cause.
Clifford Stoot and Stephen Reicher have offered one more attempt to frame the events of 6-1o August 2011.
Yet another piece of rationalisation of the riots for those who want to lead some 'social response' to the riots which is as flawed as the authoritarian repression model of dealing with the spectre of disorder. Face facts: the riots are an inherent result of addictive compulsive disorders.
There is no morality to the riots any more than morality plays much of a part in decision making across British society, be it the greedy bankers, lying spinning politicians and corporate admen and PR spivs who sell the people want they are conditioned to believe really want, whether the X Factor, celebrities, etc.
Riots generally occur when groups have a sense of illegitimacy about how they are treated by others and where they see collective confrontation as the only means of redressing the situation.
Indeed, by coming together in the crowd, people become empowered and can invert normal social relations. EP Thompson, the pre-eminent historian of crowds, argued that in a world where the powerless are generally invisible, the riot is a form of "collective bargaining".
At the very least ( my italics ) the rioters' problems have become a problem for the powerful and hence the powerful have been forced to take note of issues they had previously ignored.
Where is the evidence that the rioters and looters had specific demands and were trying to increase pressure upon the government to deal with their wants and needs ? Have they conducted a survey of the looters and how they regarded their role in the violence ?
This is a convenient ideological rationalisation of the kind that is designed to console those who need to find a meaning that satisfies their need for meaning and to give a voice to the voiceless to advance their own careers and interests.
Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does. Because our understanding of the nature of crowd action has fundamental implications for how we respond to them.
Obviously. But this response does not matter. It's another interpretation based on an obsolete belief that there are necessarily always rational interpretations of mob behaviour when the irrationality of the mob is generated by pathologies that still are created by a consumer society of entitlement.
Let's face facts: there were riots outside Ikea in Wembley over being first to get into the store to take advantage of the sales offers. Advertising and media ramps up desire for consumer goods as the be all and end all of human existence.
Under New Labour's regime of credit fuelled debt bingeing and easy money, there was cash for the goodies that the rioters used ( laptops, blackberry Iphones etc etc ). Then that dried up and jobs became scarce due to the colossal scale of migration of better educated and hard working Catholic Poles
Migration has not once entered the reckoning of the liberal left as regards the riots, despite them invoking 'alienation'. and unemployment. The figures that show migrants taking the majority of created jobs in the British economy has not been discussed in The Guardian which continually lauded it for the past decade.
If, like Cameron, you see riots as an irrational and pathological phenomenon, then the response is first to repress (why reason with those who have no reason?) and second to look for problems inherent within the communities from which the rioters are drawn.
Thus we see the government pledging a series of new repressive police powers such as curfews (which the police themselves don't want) and looking to uncover the source of moral sickness among disaffected youth.
So this sort of consumerist rioting is not a moral sickness any more than pathologically greedy bankers ? Really ? Perhaps there should be no judgementalism or moralism about the bankers actions then. They are alienated from themselves and others no less than rioters.
If, however, you see the actions as a meaningful response to a shared sense of illegitimacy and lack of alternatives then you need to address the way in which this has arisen. That is, you need to look at the experience of relations between rioting communities and those with power, authority and influence in our society.
The lack of meaning in the lives of those who rioted and were given a sense of identity through acting violently to create a sense of meaning and "empowerment" does not mean the riots were a 'meaningful response'. The meaninglessness of it is as meaningless as an absurd and fundamentally unproductive consumer money economy of which it was a symtom.
The riots had causes but the rioters themselves had no cause and the primary spring was 'because they could' due to social media networking, boredom with life, no direction or higher goal to which to put their aggressive energies and partly identification with a gansta rap subculture that glamourises violence as the way to survive.
Once law and order broke down due to the police being afraid they would alienate "the community", the riots spread with a seemingly unstoppable momentum into sheer criminality and looting. That does not make them 'mindless' or the causes of the riots being down to only criminality but it helps the government to portray it as such.
Yet another piece of rationalisation of the riots for those who want to lead some 'social response' to the riots which is as flawed as the authoritarian repression model of dealing with the spectre of disorder. Face facts: the riots are an inherent result of addictive compulsive disorders.
There is no morality to the riots any more than morality plays much of a part in decision making across British society, be it the greedy bankers, lying spinning politicians and corporate admen and PR spivs who sell the people want they are conditioned to believe really want, whether the X Factor, celebrities, etc.
Riots generally occur when groups have a sense of illegitimacy about how they are treated by others and where they see collective confrontation as the only means of redressing the situation.
Indeed, by coming together in the crowd, people become empowered and can invert normal social relations. EP Thompson, the pre-eminent historian of crowds, argued that in a world where the powerless are generally invisible, the riot is a form of "collective bargaining".
At the very least ( my italics ) the rioters' problems have become a problem for the powerful and hence the powerful have been forced to take note of issues they had previously ignored.
Where is the evidence that the rioters and looters had specific demands and were trying to increase pressure upon the government to deal with their wants and needs ? Have they conducted a survey of the looters and how they regarded their role in the violence ?
This is a convenient ideological rationalisation of the kind that is designed to console those who need to find a meaning that satisfies their need for meaning and to give a voice to the voiceless to advance their own careers and interests.
Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does. Because our understanding of the nature of crowd action has fundamental implications for how we respond to them.
Obviously. But this response does not matter. It's another interpretation based on an obsolete belief that there are necessarily always rational interpretations of mob behaviour when the irrationality of the mob is generated by pathologies that still are created by a consumer society of entitlement.
Let's face facts: there were riots outside Ikea in Wembley over being first to get into the store to take advantage of the sales offers. Advertising and media ramps up desire for consumer goods as the be all and end all of human existence.
Under New Labour's regime of credit fuelled debt bingeing and easy money, there was cash for the goodies that the rioters used ( laptops, blackberry Iphones etc etc ). Then that dried up and jobs became scarce due to the colossal scale of migration of better educated and hard working Catholic Poles
Migration has not once entered the reckoning of the liberal left as regards the riots, despite them invoking 'alienation'. and unemployment. The figures that show migrants taking the majority of created jobs in the British economy has not been discussed in The Guardian which continually lauded it for the past decade.
If, like Cameron, you see riots as an irrational and pathological phenomenon, then the response is first to repress (why reason with those who have no reason?) and second to look for problems inherent within the communities from which the rioters are drawn.
Thus we see the government pledging a series of new repressive police powers such as curfews (which the police themselves don't want) and looking to uncover the source of moral sickness among disaffected youth.
So this sort of consumerist rioting is not a moral sickness any more than pathologically greedy bankers ? Really ? Perhaps there should be no judgementalism or moralism about the bankers actions then. They are alienated from themselves and others no less than rioters.
If, however, you see the actions as a meaningful response to a shared sense of illegitimacy and lack of alternatives then you need to address the way in which this has arisen. That is, you need to look at the experience of relations between rioting communities and those with power, authority and influence in our society.
The lack of meaning in the lives of those who rioted and were given a sense of identity through acting violently to create a sense of meaning and "empowerment" does not mean the riots were a 'meaningful response'. The meaninglessness of it is as meaningless as an absurd and fundamentally unproductive consumer money economy of which it was a symtom.
The riots had causes but the rioters themselves had no cause and the primary spring was 'because they could' due to social media networking, boredom with life, no direction or higher goal to which to put their aggressive energies and partly identification with a gansta rap subculture that glamourises violence as the way to survive.
Once law and order broke down due to the police being afraid they would alienate "the community", the riots spread with a seemingly unstoppable momentum into sheer criminality and looting. That does not make them 'mindless' or the causes of the riots being down to only criminality but it helps the government to portray it as such.
Thursday, 18 August 2011
Beat the Gangs at their Own Game-Legalise All Drugs.
"Together we can beat the gangs" is the view of Iain Duncan Smith who pops up in The Guardian today. He explains,
'Even without the riots this is a phenomenon we should be deeply concerned about. Gangs have created no-go areas and made impossible the very things that could help deprived neighbourhoods to rejuvenate, such as community action and business development. Gangs are both a product of social breakdown and a driver of it'
Was it, though, about criminal gangs only ?
The English riots probably had multiple long term causes and a set of short term triggers. Certain amateurish gangs might have been attracted to using Mark Duggan's death to try and loot and sell the goods elsewhere and make a quick buck. A short cut to pleasure as a consumer right.
More likely, some would-be gang types and those who tap into a subculture of gangsta rap and nihilistic hatred led the way. Through the flashmob mentality spread via Facebook and Blackberry many who would not ordinarily start a riot were encouraged to go out on the rampage by these exemplars of fast track violent consumerism.
In which case, what IDS proposes to crackdown on gangs is a straightfoward attempt to prevent gangs dominating certain patches of London, something Saci Lloyd even mentioned today was a factor that was intimidating youths in certain parts of this city.
Most likely by cracking down on gangs, it could be possible in the longer term to stem gang culture. Blaming cuts only for the riots is obviously short sighted and naive. Poverty played a part in generating the mafia in Sicily. But few would think this was only a result of poverty and not of a certain culture.
But this is England. Not Italy.
So stamping out gangs in London has to go together with something that kneejerk reaction politicians seeking re-election through exploiting populist sentiment have been seldom prepared to do-give up on the futile "war on drugs" and legalise them all. The evils and expense of prohibition are far greater than the evils of drug taking.
This would save a lot of money and take away the main source of income for gangs. If those in the subculture choose to value shooting up heroin, even if they end up dying, which is hardly a loss for society anyway, that is clearly far better than enriching and thus ennobling gang culture through the explicit wealth shown by their leaders.
There is an absurdity of trying to protect youths against themselves, as regards hard drugs, the high price of which, due to their scarcity through the 'war on drugs', results in so much crime against others in 'the community'. This would be far offset by their ability to indulge legally either to the point of death or else take the choice of rehab options cheaper by far than policing the gang entrepreneurs who supply the market.
Given that the consumer society that defines Britain makes a fetish of consumer choice, it is hardly surprising that some who don't have the money to buy the consumer goods that alone define their banal and moronic lives ( the poor ) or the intelligence to rise above it ( both rich and poor ) turn to drugs.
This demand creates huge profits for those utterly fanatical free marketeers willing to supply the goods that are wanted. Which creates gangs and, by extension gang culture: not least because consumer capitalism needs that extra kick of transgression to keep certain bored individuals consuming.
The entire edifice of pop music and telly, trashy pop pap media and the exploitation of the sex urge through it that aims at fixating youths on disposable transient idols, the Radio 1 geared up 'prolefeed' and the X Factor is all part of an economy based on ramping up expectations, excitement and phoney ecstatic consumerist clamouring.
It's obvious that those who 'can't get no satisfaction' through the existing profitable channels for release from the tedium of a consumer society ,in which any long term comittments to God, religion, nation, country, idealistic creed etc, for good or ill does not matter any more will seek outlets.
Craving consumers, whose only aim in life is to consume and gain the job that will afford enough cash to allow the consumption power that will yield branded sportwear, will either turn to even greater reliance Westfield style consumerism or, maybe, drugs. Or looting when the credit fuelled debt binge ended.
Existing interpretations of the riots are mostly obsolete. Certain leftists and liberals look truly pathetic in stating that only inequality and poverty caused these riots or even cuts to youth services. That benefits those in the public sector who want to secure their economic futures in parasitical money economy.
Those on the right, the 'law and order' reactionaries also fail miserably in pretending that the radical free market they continually advocate as a panacea for all ills, apart from the burgeoning nightwatchman state of CCTV cameras and police power, can arrest trends such as drug taking inherent in the pathological nature of consumer society.
'Even without the riots this is a phenomenon we should be deeply concerned about. Gangs have created no-go areas and made impossible the very things that could help deprived neighbourhoods to rejuvenate, such as community action and business development. Gangs are both a product of social breakdown and a driver of it'
Was it, though, about criminal gangs only ?
The English riots probably had multiple long term causes and a set of short term triggers. Certain amateurish gangs might have been attracted to using Mark Duggan's death to try and loot and sell the goods elsewhere and make a quick buck. A short cut to pleasure as a consumer right.
More likely, some would-be gang types and those who tap into a subculture of gangsta rap and nihilistic hatred led the way. Through the flashmob mentality spread via Facebook and Blackberry many who would not ordinarily start a riot were encouraged to go out on the rampage by these exemplars of fast track violent consumerism.
In which case, what IDS proposes to crackdown on gangs is a straightfoward attempt to prevent gangs dominating certain patches of London, something Saci Lloyd even mentioned today was a factor that was intimidating youths in certain parts of this city.
Most likely by cracking down on gangs, it could be possible in the longer term to stem gang culture. Blaming cuts only for the riots is obviously short sighted and naive. Poverty played a part in generating the mafia in Sicily. But few would think this was only a result of poverty and not of a certain culture.
But this is England. Not Italy.
So stamping out gangs in London has to go together with something that kneejerk reaction politicians seeking re-election through exploiting populist sentiment have been seldom prepared to do-give up on the futile "war on drugs" and legalise them all. The evils and expense of prohibition are far greater than the evils of drug taking.
This would save a lot of money and take away the main source of income for gangs. If those in the subculture choose to value shooting up heroin, even if they end up dying, which is hardly a loss for society anyway, that is clearly far better than enriching and thus ennobling gang culture through the explicit wealth shown by their leaders.
There is an absurdity of trying to protect youths against themselves, as regards hard drugs, the high price of which, due to their scarcity through the 'war on drugs', results in so much crime against others in 'the community'. This would be far offset by their ability to indulge legally either to the point of death or else take the choice of rehab options cheaper by far than policing the gang entrepreneurs who supply the market.
Given that the consumer society that defines Britain makes a fetish of consumer choice, it is hardly surprising that some who don't have the money to buy the consumer goods that alone define their banal and moronic lives ( the poor ) or the intelligence to rise above it ( both rich and poor ) turn to drugs.
This demand creates huge profits for those utterly fanatical free marketeers willing to supply the goods that are wanted. Which creates gangs and, by extension gang culture: not least because consumer capitalism needs that extra kick of transgression to keep certain bored individuals consuming.
The entire edifice of pop music and telly, trashy pop pap media and the exploitation of the sex urge through it that aims at fixating youths on disposable transient idols, the Radio 1 geared up 'prolefeed' and the X Factor is all part of an economy based on ramping up expectations, excitement and phoney ecstatic consumerist clamouring.
It's obvious that those who 'can't get no satisfaction' through the existing profitable channels for release from the tedium of a consumer society ,in which any long term comittments to God, religion, nation, country, idealistic creed etc, for good or ill does not matter any more will seek outlets.
Craving consumers, whose only aim in life is to consume and gain the job that will afford enough cash to allow the consumption power that will yield branded sportwear, will either turn to even greater reliance Westfield style consumerism or, maybe, drugs. Or looting when the credit fuelled debt binge ended.
Existing interpretations of the riots are mostly obsolete. Certain leftists and liberals look truly pathetic in stating that only inequality and poverty caused these riots or even cuts to youth services. That benefits those in the public sector who want to secure their economic futures in parasitical money economy.
Those on the right, the 'law and order' reactionaries also fail miserably in pretending that the radical free market they continually advocate as a panacea for all ills, apart from the burgeoning nightwatchman state of CCTV cameras and police power, can arrest trends such as drug taking inherent in the pathological nature of consumer society.
The Reason for the War in Afghanistan the Public is Never Told About.
The death of Lieutenant Daniel Clack brings the total of the British war dead in Afghanistan to some 379 since 2001. This total dead has since 2010 exceeded the 255 British soldiers who were killed in driving out the Argentinian army that invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, a rapid war with decisive aims and a clear victory.
By contrast, the War in Afghanistan drags on and yet still there has been very little attempt in the mass media to tell the truth about a war being fought for reasons that have never been clearly outlined. Instead, the war is reported intermittently on the TV and the press only when another British soldier dies.
For the British people this may well be important. It certainly will be for the families of those who have died in the service of their country.But, of course, Afghanistan is a land far away of which most British people know nothing apart from the fact soldiers keep coming home in body bags.For what purpose the sacrifice is being made is not mentioned.
Many British people remain puzzled about why Britain is in Afghanistan. Various reasons have been forthcoming in the last decade. From defeating Al Qaida to capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden to protecting the Afghan women from the 'Islamofascism of the Taliban', to 'nation building' in failed states, to plain loyalty to the people of Afghanistan.
An example of the failure to enlighten and dwell on the sacrifice was The ITV Tonight programme this evening. It featured the town of Wootton Bassett, where the dead from Afghanistan have passed through on their last journey to the grave, complete with interviews of the relatives and the spirit of sacrifice which links the dead of Afghanistan to the two world wars.
The problem has been that there is little indication ever about whether the sacrifice in Afghanistan really is actually 'worth it' beyond trying to fit it in with 'the war on terror' to protect Britain from another 7/7. This despite the fact Al Qaida no longer has a significant presence in this land and that it is a global network that can plan attacks from anywhere across the globe. Including Britain. As happened on 7/7.
There has been much discussion about 'mission creep' but more likely it seems that whilst the ostensible justifications have shifted another very certain core objective from the outset has not.
The construction of the TAPI pipeline has barely been mentioned at all by the BBC or the press. Yet it remains a key objective of NATO's war and is due to be completed in 2014, the very year in which troops are due to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. The continued delay of the withdrawal is due to security concerns regarding the pipeline transit route.
The Taliban has remained strong in Helmland where the majority of the British casualties have been inflicted, including Lieutenant Clack, and the province through which the TAPI pipeline is set to run through. As the TAPI will provide large revenue to Kabul through transit fees, it the aim of the Taliban to threaten it to extract concessions or NATO withdrawal.
So the rationale of 'staying the course' in Afghanistan has less to do with terrorism and selfless 'humanitarian intervention'. It is more to do with the geopolitical ambitions inherent in the New Great Game for control of the supply of fossil fuels from Central Asia. With TAPI, the prize is Turkmen gas from the Dauletabad gas field.
The plan behind the pipeline is to unite Afghanistan together in a community of mutual interests under the auspices of NATO and US military power. This will shift the regional balance of power away from Iran which has proposed a rival IPI pipeline that would bypass Afghanistan entirely.
Encircling Iran from both the west in Iraq and the east in Afghanistan is foremost in the struggle for hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia. The USA and NATO does not want Iran's rival 'peace pipeline' to freeze out Western influence in the region.
If liquified natural gas does not flow southwards through TAPI, Russia would have a better bargaining position as significant supplies of Turkmen gas would have to flow to the EU, and especially the newest NATO states such as Poland through a state that seeks to use energy as a tool of diplomacy and power politics.
Russia has been brought back towards a repprochement with the West after US President Barack Obama wanted to 'press the reset button' and work with Putin and Medvedev after what influential advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski termed the 'catastrophic diplomacy' of the Bush presidency with regards Iraq
The aim of bringing Russia back on side under Obama order to prevent the prospect of a collusion between Russia, China and Iran in exerting influence over the oil and gas rich states of post-Soviet Central Asia.The result is Russia is willing to invest in TAPI. For Brzezinski, Iraq was less important in the long run than US and Western influence in Central Asia.
The importance of Central Asia and the New Great Game was confirmed once more just last month when the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visiting New Delhi made this quite clear when she advocated the benefits to the nations through which TAPI will run in working together to "create a new Silk Road".
"That means building more rail lines, highways, energy infrastructure, like the proposed (natural gas) pipeline to run from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, through Pakistan into India"
Whether those who thought the Afghanistan War was about some abstract political concern to make the world a better place and advance liberal democracy like it or not, there are strong realpolitik reasons for NATO and Britain as the USA's staunch ally to be in Afghanistan.
It could be possible to justify this geopolitical strategy by arguing that if NATO should conclusively defeat the Taliban and the TAPI pipeline is built, then the economic benefits and regional integration of erstwhile nuclear rivals such as India and Pakistan is in the regional and global interests ( as well as helping Afghanistan prosper and develop).
Yet there is little sign that the war in Afghanistan is, in fact, winnable. Besides, the huge demand for heroin in the West ensures that corrupt warlords and the Taliban can cashin on drug export revenues to keep up their armed opposition to NATO. Only the legalisation of heroin would remove the scale of the profits made from opium.
Unfortunately, winning the 'war on drugs' ( cited once by former Prime Minister Blair as another reason for Britain being part of NATO's war ) is an objective that conflicts with the military effort that aims to defeat the Taliban and get the TAPI pipeline contructed.
As no government based on a committment to protecting its citizens from illegal drugs such as heroin has considered legalising them, the war in Afghanistan will remain a futile crusade. If the lives of dedicated professional sericemen are to be saved, street drugs such as heroin will have to be legalised.
By contrast, the War in Afghanistan drags on and yet still there has been very little attempt in the mass media to tell the truth about a war being fought for reasons that have never been clearly outlined. Instead, the war is reported intermittently on the TV and the press only when another British soldier dies.
For the British people this may well be important. It certainly will be for the families of those who have died in the service of their country.But, of course, Afghanistan is a land far away of which most British people know nothing apart from the fact soldiers keep coming home in body bags.For what purpose the sacrifice is being made is not mentioned.
Many British people remain puzzled about why Britain is in Afghanistan. Various reasons have been forthcoming in the last decade. From defeating Al Qaida to capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden to protecting the Afghan women from the 'Islamofascism of the Taliban', to 'nation building' in failed states, to plain loyalty to the people of Afghanistan.
An example of the failure to enlighten and dwell on the sacrifice was The ITV Tonight programme this evening. It featured the town of Wootton Bassett, where the dead from Afghanistan have passed through on their last journey to the grave, complete with interviews of the relatives and the spirit of sacrifice which links the dead of Afghanistan to the two world wars.
The problem has been that there is little indication ever about whether the sacrifice in Afghanistan really is actually 'worth it' beyond trying to fit it in with 'the war on terror' to protect Britain from another 7/7. This despite the fact Al Qaida no longer has a significant presence in this land and that it is a global network that can plan attacks from anywhere across the globe. Including Britain. As happened on 7/7.
There has been much discussion about 'mission creep' but more likely it seems that whilst the ostensible justifications have shifted another very certain core objective from the outset has not.
The construction of the TAPI pipeline has barely been mentioned at all by the BBC or the press. Yet it remains a key objective of NATO's war and is due to be completed in 2014, the very year in which troops are due to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. The continued delay of the withdrawal is due to security concerns regarding the pipeline transit route.
The Taliban has remained strong in Helmland where the majority of the British casualties have been inflicted, including Lieutenant Clack, and the province through which the TAPI pipeline is set to run through. As the TAPI will provide large revenue to Kabul through transit fees, it the aim of the Taliban to threaten it to extract concessions or NATO withdrawal.
So the rationale of 'staying the course' in Afghanistan has less to do with terrorism and selfless 'humanitarian intervention'. It is more to do with the geopolitical ambitions inherent in the New Great Game for control of the supply of fossil fuels from Central Asia. With TAPI, the prize is Turkmen gas from the Dauletabad gas field.
The plan behind the pipeline is to unite Afghanistan together in a community of mutual interests under the auspices of NATO and US military power. This will shift the regional balance of power away from Iran which has proposed a rival IPI pipeline that would bypass Afghanistan entirely.
Encircling Iran from both the west in Iraq and the east in Afghanistan is foremost in the struggle for hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia. The USA and NATO does not want Iran's rival 'peace pipeline' to freeze out Western influence in the region.
If liquified natural gas does not flow southwards through TAPI, Russia would have a better bargaining position as significant supplies of Turkmen gas would have to flow to the EU, and especially the newest NATO states such as Poland through a state that seeks to use energy as a tool of diplomacy and power politics.
Russia has been brought back towards a repprochement with the West after US President Barack Obama wanted to 'press the reset button' and work with Putin and Medvedev after what influential advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski termed the 'catastrophic diplomacy' of the Bush presidency with regards Iraq
The aim of bringing Russia back on side under Obama order to prevent the prospect of a collusion between Russia, China and Iran in exerting influence over the oil and gas rich states of post-Soviet Central Asia.The result is Russia is willing to invest in TAPI. For Brzezinski, Iraq was less important in the long run than US and Western influence in Central Asia.
The importance of Central Asia and the New Great Game was confirmed once more just last month when the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visiting New Delhi made this quite clear when she advocated the benefits to the nations through which TAPI will run in working together to "create a new Silk Road".
"That means building more rail lines, highways, energy infrastructure, like the proposed (natural gas) pipeline to run from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, through Pakistan into India"
Whether those who thought the Afghanistan War was about some abstract political concern to make the world a better place and advance liberal democracy like it or not, there are strong realpolitik reasons for NATO and Britain as the USA's staunch ally to be in Afghanistan.
It could be possible to justify this geopolitical strategy by arguing that if NATO should conclusively defeat the Taliban and the TAPI pipeline is built, then the economic benefits and regional integration of erstwhile nuclear rivals such as India and Pakistan is in the regional and global interests ( as well as helping Afghanistan prosper and develop).
Yet there is little sign that the war in Afghanistan is, in fact, winnable. Besides, the huge demand for heroin in the West ensures that corrupt warlords and the Taliban can cashin on drug export revenues to keep up their armed opposition to NATO. Only the legalisation of heroin would remove the scale of the profits made from opium.
Unfortunately, winning the 'war on drugs' ( cited once by former Prime Minister Blair as another reason for Britain being part of NATO's war ) is an objective that conflicts with the military effort that aims to defeat the Taliban and get the TAPI pipeline contructed.
As no government based on a committment to protecting its citizens from illegal drugs such as heroin has considered legalising them, the war in Afghanistan will remain a futile crusade. If the lives of dedicated professional sericemen are to be saved, street drugs such as heroin will have to be legalised.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Telling it as it is on "Gangsta" Subculture and the English Riots.
Whilst the "gangsta" subculture is not the only reason for the English riots, it is a major factor in glamourising violence and looting, of taking on 'the cops'. Set against the background of an increasingly deracinated and meaningless consumer society, it is hardly surprising the subculture appeals.
As Tony Sewell wrote in the Daily Mail ( August 15 2011 )
....despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism — or ‘bling’ to use the street term — that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.
That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.
What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions.
It is a milieu that glories in loose women and fast cars, in macho dominance and easy wealth. Concepts of restraint, hard work and personal responsibility are absent. Respect is something to be demanded rather than earned.
So much of the music and the video output is close to pornographic, with women degradingly treated as little more than sex objects. In this world, the highest ideal to which a man can aspire is to be a philandering, gun-wielding gang leader.
Where I believe Dr Starkey is right is that it is now just as likely to be a white or Asian teenager posing on the internet in baggy designer clothes and dripping in gold chains, either waving a weapon of some kind or pointing their fingers at the camera in a grotesque parody of a shooting.
Tragically, this has become the acme of ‘cool’ for a generation of youngsters, regardless of the colour of their skin.
Even the boy whose Spanish-born mother may be evicted from her council house after his arrest for looting last week was photographed in an oversized rapper-style cap and T-shirt with a skull motif.
A key aspect of ‘gangsta’ culture — one that we saw writ large on the streets last week — is an utter disregard for the police and the rule of law. You only have to consider that one of the most controversial rap songs of the past two decades was called Cop Killer to understand the danger posed by these influences.
As Tony Sewell wrote in the Daily Mail ( August 15 2011 )
....despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism — or ‘bling’ to use the street term — that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.
That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.
What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions.
It is a milieu that glories in loose women and fast cars, in macho dominance and easy wealth. Concepts of restraint, hard work and personal responsibility are absent. Respect is something to be demanded rather than earned.
So much of the music and the video output is close to pornographic, with women degradingly treated as little more than sex objects. In this world, the highest ideal to which a man can aspire is to be a philandering, gun-wielding gang leader.
Where I believe Dr Starkey is right is that it is now just as likely to be a white or Asian teenager posing on the internet in baggy designer clothes and dripping in gold chains, either waving a weapon of some kind or pointing their fingers at the camera in a grotesque parody of a shooting.
Tragically, this has become the acme of ‘cool’ for a generation of youngsters, regardless of the colour of their skin.
Even the boy whose Spanish-born mother may be evicted from her council house after his arrest for looting last week was photographed in an oversized rapper-style cap and T-shirt with a skull motif.
A key aspect of ‘gangsta’ culture — one that we saw writ large on the streets last week — is an utter disregard for the police and the rule of law. You only have to consider that one of the most controversial rap songs of the past two decades was called Cop Killer to understand the danger posed by these influences.
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Friday, 6 May 2011
Staking Out a Position on Libya: The Illusions of the Left.
Brian Whitaker has written in The Guardian about the divided opinion amongst the Western "liberal left" on the Western intervention in Libya ( The liberal-left are at odds on Libya, Thursday 5 May 2011 )
The truth is that the far left ( that is those who espouse the StWC line such as Galloway, Pilger, Milne, Ali etc ) have reduced the military intervention in Libya on the side of the rebels only to some form of atavistic oil grab, one that will benefit oil corporations, the elites and the politicians. i.e "rapacious power" as Pilger calls it.
Aside from the fact that the Western powers did not directly cause the crisis in Libya, though Blair had decided to re-establish relations with Gaddafi in 2004 with lucrative oil and arms deals negotiated, the far left fail to grasp the fact that if all conflicts are about oil, then what alternatives to oil can be found.
The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 as David Strahan documents in his Last Oil Shock was undertaken mostly due to "geostrategic desperation", the fact North Sea oil production peaked in 1999, the high price of petrol causing the road haulier strike of 2000 and the public backing the oil tank drivers.
The contradiction is clear: most people who might even declare themselves anti-war are in their lifestyles dependent upon diminishing supplies of oil and gas. Seeing only guilty corporations and foolish politicians as the reason for blundering into wars from Iraq to Afghanistan and now Libya is facile.
Paradoxically, the radical criticism that the decision to get "regime change" Libya or Iraq is "all about oil" is not just obvious but it is also re-assuring and comforting. The myth is by getting rid of these corrupt politicians and "warmongers" and challenging corporate power "we" can change the world.
This line of reasoning appeals to infantile consumers of radical theories and evades the obvious fact that in the boring consumer wastelands of lands such as Britain, with its motorway towns, demand for supermarket produce all year round and low petrol prices, cheap oil must flow.
So wars such as Iraq and being drawn further into the Libyan quagmire ( "mission creep" ) are essentially conflicts over the oil needed to preserve the consumer lifestyles even anti-war activists take for granted ( unless as individuals they have stopped driving, never fly EasyJet and refuse to buy out of season fruit ).
The stark fact is that unless the West reduces its dependence upon oil , then there will be more military interventions to secure oil supplies and, the logic of strategists in the West is that if the West does not secure the oil, then China will without even the pretence of trying to promote democracy.
The reason the Western powers have not tried to push "regime change" in Bahrain is that though the regime has murdered protesters demanding democracy, if it is seen to back them too much then the Saudi regime will feel threatened too and this could effect oil supplies.
A large oil price shock would hit the already faltering economic recovery happening in the wake of the global economic crash of 2008 and no Western government, which serves both the powerful and has to take into account democratic popular opinion, is likely to call for regime change in the Arabian Peninsula.
Libya is not a "oil grab" as the invasion of Iraq was if by "grab" there is the sense of trying to get rid of Gaddafi just to control it all, which would be impossible anyway given Russian and Chinese stakes in the oil field blocks. It is an intervention to secure one of the most important oil supplies to Europe.
Partly, this is about energy diversification and the fact that Gaddafi had lost control of Libya and besides his armies seeming set to create bloodshed in Benghazi, the calculation no doubt was prior to intervention that this would in any case lead to a major source of the world best quality low sulphur oil being disrupted.
"Democratic Geopolitics" is formulated according to the idea of enlightened self interest, though whether it is "enlightened" is one that has to be judged according to the facts in each case and the record from Kosovo, to Afghanistan , Iraq and now Libya shows one of consistent failure.
Those on the left need to stop providing rationalisations for being "anti-war" or "pro-liberation", refrain from what Orwell termed being a "cocksure partisan" who believes that they can shift the world their way by espousing the correct line or framing the way world events must be seen.
Facing unpleasant facts is difficult. Yet unless what is really at stake in wars such as that in Afghanistan are understood ( and it is about the geopolitical benefits of the TAPI pipeline and hegemony in Central Asia-the New Great Game ) then the future looks increasingly bleak.
To avoid being necessarily embroiled and dragged into conflicts such as Libya, then alternatives to oil need to be found and where possible democracy promoted in Arab nations tactfully and diplomatically. The problem with Western foreign policy towards the Arab states is contradictory.
On the one hand the need to maintain secure oil supplies leads to the notion of accepting despots and dictators and, in Britain and the USA's case especially, in arming them and on the other to try to promote democracy by force or by intervention when its seems possible.
The reason is that democratic Arab states would actually be better partners for the West as China tends to prefer to reinforce dictatorships in oil and resource rich regions without bothering even hypocritically to raise notions of human rights or not using force to repress dissent.
In that sense, China has a competitive advantage over the West as it does not get a bad press for having double standards because it holds to no standards other than getting the resources it wants and not even pretending to be interested at all in whether the regime will be "open" or "transparent".
The invasion of Iraq was an oil grab intended to outflank China by installing a democracy that would be more amenable to Western interests and to lead to the sort of domino effect toppling Arab dictatorships in the Middle East and to reduce dependence upon a dysfunctional Saudi Arabian regime.
Now that has happened as a result of the Arab peoples rising up against corrupt autocratic regimes without Western backing, apart from Libya, the West is taking a "wait and see" posture. Western governments cannot take risks with the oil supply by backing democrats who might fail.
This would only lead to autocratic regimes in the Middle East being courted by China and Russia. Another paradox of the liberal left or many leftists, no less than staunch neo-imperialists, is the illusion that Europe and the USA is still the centre of global policy making and can determine the future of the world.
The left in the West, indeed all those who want a future without resource wars, emergency states, increased terrorism and global proxy conflicts over oil and gas, even the possibility of global war, need to look at pragmatic measures in the longer term to reduce dependence upon oil.
Military intervention in Libya, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is dividing public opinion. Many critics see all three as part of the same neo-imperialist project – to install puppet governments and assert western domination over oil supplies.The problem with "liberal-left" responses to the civil war in Libya and the NATO intervention is that attempts to explain why the war is happening and why the Western powers are involved always involves looking at the "motivation" of the Great Powers as if its either "all about oil" or a genuine humanitarian response.
That certainly seems to be the view of Tariq Ali and many who post in the Guardian's comment threads. A constant refrain is that the conflict in Libya is "all about oil".
But the dividing lines over Libya are not exactly what they were with Iraq. Significant voices that opposed the invasion of Iraq are more equivocal about intervention in Libya or even support it.
Professor Juan Cole, one of the most prominent American critics of the Iraq war – and who still calls it illegal – takes an entirely different line on Libya. At the end of March, he wrote on his blog:
"The Libya intervention is legal and was necessary to prevent further massacres and to forestall a threat to democratisation in Tunisia and Egypt, and if it succeeds in getting rid of Qaddafi's murderous regime and allowing Libyans to have a normal life, it will be worth the sacrifices in life and treasure. If NATO needs me, I'm there."
In 2002, Hussein Ibish, of the American task force on Palestine, described war in Iraq as unnecessary, dangerous and completely unjustified. Last week, in contrast, he was robustly defending "Obama's limited engagement in Libya".
Intervention in Iraq was also widely opposed by the Arab public (as well as some of their leaders) and there were serious legal questions as to whether the UN security council had actually authorised war.
In Libya, the humanitarian aspect was more clear-cut and less complicated by other factors. The Gaddafi regime had made explict threats against its population and there were reasonable grounds for believing a bloodbath would ensue.
Also, between the outbreak of the conflicts in Iraq and Libya, the UN had adopted the principle of "responsibility to protect" (supported by various humanitarian organisations) and, in effect, Libya was the major first test of its effectiveness.
Another difference in the case of Libya is that the balance of Arab opinion favoured intervention and the security council clearly authorised it (by "all necessary means"), even if there are disagreements as to whether that includes targeting the Gaddafi regime.
Unlike the runup to the war in Iraq, the Libyan crisis blew up suddenly – which weakens the idea that intervention was part of some preconceived western strategy (despite many claims to the contrary). Unlike George Bush, Barack Obama was initially reluctant to get involved.
Chris Doyle of CAABU acknowledges that oil may have been a background factor, but doesn't see it as the main one. "If Libya has no oil there would be very little interest, but I'm not convinced it's about an oil grab," he said.
The truth is that the far left ( that is those who espouse the StWC line such as Galloway, Pilger, Milne, Ali etc ) have reduced the military intervention in Libya on the side of the rebels only to some form of atavistic oil grab, one that will benefit oil corporations, the elites and the politicians. i.e "rapacious power" as Pilger calls it.
Aside from the fact that the Western powers did not directly cause the crisis in Libya, though Blair had decided to re-establish relations with Gaddafi in 2004 with lucrative oil and arms deals negotiated, the far left fail to grasp the fact that if all conflicts are about oil, then what alternatives to oil can be found.
The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 as David Strahan documents in his Last Oil Shock was undertaken mostly due to "geostrategic desperation", the fact North Sea oil production peaked in 1999, the high price of petrol causing the road haulier strike of 2000 and the public backing the oil tank drivers.
The contradiction is clear: most people who might even declare themselves anti-war are in their lifestyles dependent upon diminishing supplies of oil and gas. Seeing only guilty corporations and foolish politicians as the reason for blundering into wars from Iraq to Afghanistan and now Libya is facile.
Paradoxically, the radical criticism that the decision to get "regime change" Libya or Iraq is "all about oil" is not just obvious but it is also re-assuring and comforting. The myth is by getting rid of these corrupt politicians and "warmongers" and challenging corporate power "we" can change the world.
This line of reasoning appeals to infantile consumers of radical theories and evades the obvious fact that in the boring consumer wastelands of lands such as Britain, with its motorway towns, demand for supermarket produce all year round and low petrol prices, cheap oil must flow.
So wars such as Iraq and being drawn further into the Libyan quagmire ( "mission creep" ) are essentially conflicts over the oil needed to preserve the consumer lifestyles even anti-war activists take for granted ( unless as individuals they have stopped driving, never fly EasyJet and refuse to buy out of season fruit ).
The stark fact is that unless the West reduces its dependence upon oil , then there will be more military interventions to secure oil supplies and, the logic of strategists in the West is that if the West does not secure the oil, then China will without even the pretence of trying to promote democracy.
The reason the Western powers have not tried to push "regime change" in Bahrain is that though the regime has murdered protesters demanding democracy, if it is seen to back them too much then the Saudi regime will feel threatened too and this could effect oil supplies.
A large oil price shock would hit the already faltering economic recovery happening in the wake of the global economic crash of 2008 and no Western government, which serves both the powerful and has to take into account democratic popular opinion, is likely to call for regime change in the Arabian Peninsula.
Libya is not a "oil grab" as the invasion of Iraq was if by "grab" there is the sense of trying to get rid of Gaddafi just to control it all, which would be impossible anyway given Russian and Chinese stakes in the oil field blocks. It is an intervention to secure one of the most important oil supplies to Europe.
Partly, this is about energy diversification and the fact that Gaddafi had lost control of Libya and besides his armies seeming set to create bloodshed in Benghazi, the calculation no doubt was prior to intervention that this would in any case lead to a major source of the world best quality low sulphur oil being disrupted.
"Democratic Geopolitics" is formulated according to the idea of enlightened self interest, though whether it is "enlightened" is one that has to be judged according to the facts in each case and the record from Kosovo, to Afghanistan , Iraq and now Libya shows one of consistent failure.
Those on the left need to stop providing rationalisations for being "anti-war" or "pro-liberation", refrain from what Orwell termed being a "cocksure partisan" who believes that they can shift the world their way by espousing the correct line or framing the way world events must be seen.
Facing unpleasant facts is difficult. Yet unless what is really at stake in wars such as that in Afghanistan are understood ( and it is about the geopolitical benefits of the TAPI pipeline and hegemony in Central Asia-the New Great Game ) then the future looks increasingly bleak.
To avoid being necessarily embroiled and dragged into conflicts such as Libya, then alternatives to oil need to be found and where possible democracy promoted in Arab nations tactfully and diplomatically. The problem with Western foreign policy towards the Arab states is contradictory.
On the one hand the need to maintain secure oil supplies leads to the notion of accepting despots and dictators and, in Britain and the USA's case especially, in arming them and on the other to try to promote democracy by force or by intervention when its seems possible.
The reason is that democratic Arab states would actually be better partners for the West as China tends to prefer to reinforce dictatorships in oil and resource rich regions without bothering even hypocritically to raise notions of human rights or not using force to repress dissent.
In that sense, China has a competitive advantage over the West as it does not get a bad press for having double standards because it holds to no standards other than getting the resources it wants and not even pretending to be interested at all in whether the regime will be "open" or "transparent".
The invasion of Iraq was an oil grab intended to outflank China by installing a democracy that would be more amenable to Western interests and to lead to the sort of domino effect toppling Arab dictatorships in the Middle East and to reduce dependence upon a dysfunctional Saudi Arabian regime.
Now that has happened as a result of the Arab peoples rising up against corrupt autocratic regimes without Western backing, apart from Libya, the West is taking a "wait and see" posture. Western governments cannot take risks with the oil supply by backing democrats who might fail.
This would only lead to autocratic regimes in the Middle East being courted by China and Russia. Another paradox of the liberal left or many leftists, no less than staunch neo-imperialists, is the illusion that Europe and the USA is still the centre of global policy making and can determine the future of the world.
The left in the West, indeed all those who want a future without resource wars, emergency states, increased terrorism and global proxy conflicts over oil and gas, even the possibility of global war, need to look at pragmatic measures in the longer term to reduce dependence upon oil.
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
Propaganda Needs to be Explained and not seen as Mere Media Manipulation.
Adam Curtis who produced the film The Power of Nightmares writes,
The horrific thing about Osama bin Laden was that he helped to kill thousands of innocent people throughout the world. But he was also in a strange way a godsend to the west. He simplified the world. When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries – that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force – came to an abrupt end.Bin Laden's demise was but one event that justifies the continual war on terror. As a media event, it bolsters the notion the war in Afghanistan is about defeating Al Qaeda. Despite the fact Bin Laden was already a has been as regards the global operation of this "network of networks".
Understanding the world became much more complicated until, amid the confusion of a global economic crisis in 1998 and the hysterical spectacle of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Bin Laden emerged as the mastermind behind the bombings of embassies in east Africa.
The continuation of war in Afghanistan is inextricably bound up with the New Great Game for control over the pipeline routes from the Central Asian republics. The TAPI pipeline runs through Helmand where the Taliban is still fighting. The completion of the mission depends on this geopolitical aim being fulfilled.
This is precisely why Cameron, Clinton keep going on about finishing the global war on terror as it provides a rationale for the quest for hegemony in Eurasia. This stark fact is never analysed even by the likes of Adam Curtis, though he is good on the mechanisms of propaganda.
The reality that the Afghan War is a resource struggle through trying to gain hegemony over oil and gas pipeline routes is one few want to face. Yet almost every day the reality is there in the 'back pages' of the FT and business pages of Indian English language media such as this,Construction of the pipeline is due to start in 2013 and is targeted to be completed and operational by the end of 2016. For this, all the four nations will form a consortium that will build and operate the pipeline.TAPI is being pushed by the US as an alternative to the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, while the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is the Lead Development Partner of the project.
Tescopoly and the Destruction of Independent Retailers.
Peter Wilby has written a critique of the way large supermarket corporations are driving out small independent retailers.Across the country the small retailer is being wiped out. In the whole of Britain there are fewer than 1,000 specialist fishmongers, 7,000 butchers and 4,000 greengrocers, and barely 3,000 independent bakeries. In all these categories, the number of specialists has fallen by 90% since the 1950s, and at least 40% in the last decade alone. They have been driven out by supermarkets, which now sell 97% of our food, with four chains accounting for 76%.Next to the motor car, nothing else has so radically changed the look and texture of our environment over the last half-century – creating what the New Economics Foundation calls "clone-town Britain" where every high street has the same shops. Next to the motor car, nothing else has so radically changed the look and texture of our environment over the last half-century – creating what the New Economics Foundation calls "clone-town Britain" where every high street has the same shops.
The age of the motor car is responsible for the decline of the small independent retailer with out of town supermarkets and banal retail parks. With peak oil, increasing global competition for diminishing supplies of oil and high oil prices the high octane consumerism of the times will soon become less viable anyway.
In 2011, the predominance of the supermarkets, the proliferation of Tesco Metro's and Sainsbury's Local's is a threat not only to diversity on the high street too ( a buzzword beloved of trendy leftists ) but will diminish the quality of community life as even check out assistants are being replaced by self service machines.
So jobs will be lost and gained or preserved only in the floodlit wastelands of whole deracinated zones of warehouses where produce is imported from around the globe to provide the consumer with out of season fruit and vegetables all year long.This again is oil intensive and environmentally cretinous.
As is the fact that supermarkets are supremely wasteful of so much food that has supposedly passed its "use by date". The wastage of food can be afforded by huge supermarket chains. But it is a colossal waste of food on an overpopulated planet.
Also, the principle of "economies of scale" works not only to entrench large supermarket corporations. Small bakers were put out of business by chains such as the appalling Greggs and Wenzels which offer bleached flour rubbish. Public taste, the pace of life has led to the decline of small retailers.
Britain is a land where depersonalisation, the disconnection between consumers and the natural environment is being accelerated and ultimately the coming epoch of resource conflicts, high oil prices and global instability will put an end to the infinite supermarket growth retail Utopia.
Unfettered "free markets" are not actually free markets if the power behind the oligopolies depend on the role of government, both local and national, genuflecting to the power of large corporations. If they are given tax breaks, as in neoliberal economies in Central Europe, e.g Poland, it is a rigged market.
In Krakow, there are now special buses provided to ferry people to the Tesco there. Small retailers are closing down. Tesco has the unfettered power to achieve this though money power and the collusion of supine politicians who are the middlemen between corporate power and "the people".
There is nothing natural about these distortions of the free market as the level playing field does not exist. Adam Smith was scathing about such distortions and lived in a period when most enterprises depended on family businesses and limited corporations subject to the same rules of competition as others.
Terms such as 'the free market are abstractions if they are not placed in a historical, political and economic context. That's why evidence about the way Tesco and other supermarkets drive out free market competition need to be based on the empirical evidence regarding how they actually operate.
The Mob Celebration on Bin Laden's Death: Tribalism not Patriotism.
The jubilation in the USA that greeted Bin Laden's killing was vulgar and unseemly. But certain journalists have tried to use it to discern some systemic malaise connected to the idea of being loyal to a nation. Gary Younge makes some good points and states today, (Osama bin Laden's death: The US patriot reflex, The Guardian 3 May 2011 ),The national unity that Barack Obama has sought to harness following the announcement is indeed eerily familiar. Albeit in joy rather than sorrow, it's the same kind of unity that followed 9/11. It is also the same kind of unity that rallies around flags, dismisses dissent and disdains reflection.But he writes,
The patriotic impulse in American society is intense and pervasive. The kind of national fervour reserved elsewhere for occasional events like royal weddings, World Cup victories or major tragedies is a dormant reflex waiting for a trigger.The mob reaction in reaction to Bin Laden's assassination is more akin to "tribalism" or nationalism which is different to patriotism which has often led to an impassioned and sceptical questioning of power, not only of government but of those whom Orwell called "transferred nationalism".
The fact that the neoconservatives used terms such as "Patriot Act" to impose measures that curtailed civil liberties in the USA should not detract from the fact that the word "patriotism", as in "patriot missile" is an Orwellian misappropriation of the word. In the same way that Soviet communist regimes were termed "people's republics".
Younge conflates nationalism with patriotism due to the adherence to the ideology of anti-colonial discourse that derives from the 1960s Leninist radicals and those such as Franz Fanon. Nationalism is only good if it is yoked to victim nations or to hyper identities such as militant Islamism.
It is quite possible to be simultaneously against US global policy, even "neo-imperialism", without being scathing about the ordinary ties and loyalty to a country and being against those who write drivel about "the Iraqi resistance" or support Islamo-Bolshevik movements such as Respect.
Such movements fall under the rubric of what Orwell called "transferred nationalism" and are conditioned by the same power hunger, fanaticism and hatreds that are fomented by bad governments that those who care for their own countries seek to bring an end to. Nationalism is not the same as patriotism. To conflate them is disingenuous.
Monday, 2 May 2011
Gadaffi Foundation Members Rediscover their "Ethical Foreign Policy"
Benjamin Barber, a member of the Gaddafi Foundation until February 2011, has accused those promoting the war against Colonel Gaddafi's forces of "hypocrisy" after one of the Libyan dictator's sons was killed in a NATO bombing raid..... it is the plain stupidity of the Nato commitment to assassination and violent regime change that is most disconcerting. What on earth is the endgame?
The ultimate endgame is control over Libyan oil, just as it was for those fawning on Said Gaddafi before 2011, including those such as Benjamin Barber who lauded the dictator's son as a force for human rights and progress through collaborating with his Saif Foundation which states lots of worthy NGO style guff and public relations.
Such efforts to rehabilitate Gaddafi's regime from Tony Blair to his Third Way guru Anthony Giddens and others associated with the financial largesse of the Gaddafi Foundation in the LSE and within the ranks of New Labour grandees. As Giddens absurdly claimed ( My Chat with the Colonel )
Will real progress be possible only when Gadafy leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite.... My ideal future for Libya in two or three decades' time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking. Not easy to achieve, but not impossible.
A Guardian report made clear the "ethics" of Blair's entourage in this respect,
Lord Giddens, guru of Labour's third way, twice met Gaddafi on trips in 2006 and 2007 organised by Monitor Group, a US lobbying firm. Leaked documents show at least one trip was disclosed in advance to Abd Allah al-Sanusi, blamed for atrocities in the present uprising.
Giddens, 73, was LSE director for six years until 2003, is the author of 34 books published in 29 languages, and is credited with devising the "third way" political philosophy taken up by Tony Blair.
Monitor Group was paid more than £2m by the Libyan government in 2006 to conduct a "cleansing" campaign of its image, according to leaked documents.
A letter sent in July 2006 by executives at Monitor Group to Sanusi, also known as Abdullah Senussi, is about targeting influential academics to emphasise the emergence of "the New Libya".
Once Gaddafi had lost control of Libya, it was clear "regime change" was sought most by Cameron in the UK and Sarkozy in France.
The foreign policy strategy of both those in Demos in the US, or the liberal left in Britain who rationalised closer trade ties with the dictatorship in order to gain oil concessions, such as the deal with BP negotiated by Blair in 2007, and those who saw the breakdown of his power as a chance to get "regime change" is concerned with oil interests.
The charge of hypocrisy lies as much with those who were part of trade delegations selling arms to the Gaddafi regime after he committed a volte face after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 created havoc and made the necessity for oil diversification even more pressing.
In the longer term, Europe needs to wean itself off dependence upon oil and gas supplies from dangerous lands where politics is a pathological struggles over who controls the oil revenues. The reduction of reliance upon the car and a high octane economy is vital to avert a future of resource conflicts
A Rationalisation of Bin Laden's Terrorism.
Let that be it. The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a fork in the road of world politics.Andrew Murray, ( Bin Laden's death is a fork in the road The Guardian, 2 May 2011 )
One way lies a fundamental rethink of US and British policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, a chance to drain the swamp that bred 9/11.
That way is the end of the "war on terror" launched in the aftermath of Bin Laden's atrocious crimes of September 2011. His act of violence became first the cause and rapidly the pretext for many more such acts, vastly more costly in terms of lives lost.
Murray, chairman of the "Stop the War Coalition" in Britain has used the killing of Bin Laden to trot out the usual line that Al Qaeda terrorism is merely a reflex action to US and British foreign policy. Despite the fact Al Qaeda fighters have been active in places outside the Arab and Muslim World such as Indonesia and Chechnya.
There is no need to take the propaganda claims of the Bush administration and the "war on terror" at face value, for if 9/11 was a pretext to go in to Afghanistan and, partly, into Iraq, Al Qaeda's commitment to terrorism and the USA/UK's quest for energy security pre dates both what are essentially resource wars.
The same is true of Russia's role in the war against Chechen insurgents with connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, the assassination of 'Moganned', Al Qaeda's main Saudi born militant in Chechnya occurred recently on April 22nd 2011 and who had entered the Northern Caucasus since 1999 and by 2005 emerged as the handler of foreign funds for the jihad.
Hence Andrew Murray's crude "either-or" interpretation of the relationship between "the West" and "the Muslim World" is an inversion of the clash of civilisations idea: that Al Qaeda is simply the most extreme and violent form of reaction against Western Imperialism in Arab and Muslim lands.
This crude Leninist propaganda line denies the agency of Arab peoples themselves unless they fit into the notion that they are anti-Western as opposed to against the autocrats that dominate them e.g decayed secular dictatorship of Egypt was created by military power under those such as Colonel Nasser.
The absurdity is that one of the greatest admirers of Nasser is none other than George Galloway, an erstwhile ally of Murray in the myriad of groupuscules that try to hi-jack anti-war sentiment amongst British people into support for fanatical ideological agendas-including that of Respect.
Galloway's hero in Nasser executed Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of modern militant Islamism in 1966, one reason the alliance between the hard left and the MAB, influenced very much by Qutb, is based only on hatred of the West as opposed to a principled criticism of Western foreign policy.
Al Qaeda has its own history and agenda: it's original raison d'etre under Bin Laden was less to do with Western foreign policy as such but with antagonism to the corruption of the Saudi regime and not being permitted to fight in the First Gulf War of 1991 against Saddam Hussein and which was blamed later on the US and it's 'occupation' of the Holy Land.
Murray is active in campaigning against the governments cuts: but the British economy and hence living standards would collapse without a steady and secure supply of oil from Saudi Arabia, one reason why the British government simply cannot give decisive public backing to democracy activists in Bahrain.
Obviously, as Malise Ruthven wrote in A Fury for God on 9/11 the long term interests of the Western powers are in having stable democratic regimes across the Middle East. The Arab Uprisings at least provide an opportunity that this could be brought about.
Ruthven also sensibly argued that Islamist solidarity always works negatively: the interests of Arab nations and the political groups within them from Bahrain to Libya and Saudi Arabia to Palestine and Lebanon are diverse and to yoke them all as "anti-Western" is to accept precisely the narrative of Al Qaeda.
This narrative accepts the concept of an Islamic hyper identity in which "the Muslim World" and the ummah is largely united in opposing Western "crusades", a term used repeatedly by neurotic and self promoting radical journalists such as John Pilger who want to motivate Muslim youths as new force for militant challenge to Western power from within.
The rationalisation of terrorism that has continually been offered since 9/11, whether by Pilger, Milne or Galloway, has acted as a ruse to ramp up militancy against the system in Britain as a substitute for the decline of the forward march of the labour movement which has petered out and fragmented.
It is true that it is both vital and justified to criticise the foreign policy and the dangerous over dependence upon the oil that fuels Western high octane car and supermarket societies and that leads to contradictory and botched entanglement and meddling in the Middle East.
But equally so, it is necessary to understand that Al Qaeda was not caused wholly by "the West" but as a spin off from the dysfunctional Saudi regime's investment in the Arab Afghan campaigns against the Soviet Union and an ideology that has an existence in its own right, one rejected in the recent Arab Uprisings.
Bin Laden's Demise, Afghanistan and the War.
Jonathan Steele has written on Bin Laden's assassination by the CIA and US special forces that,Osama bin Laden's killing is a huge victory for the Obama administration and it will go a long way towards giving closure to Americans. But will it also revive the 10-year-old question about the wisdom of the war in Afghanistan, in which half as many Americans have already died as Bin Laden killed on 9/11, not to mention the many more Afghan civilians who have lost their lives in the attack that George W Bush launched on their country in October 2001?Bin Laden's haven in Taliban country was a short-term marriage of convenience, which the Bush administration made no real effort to break other than by its rhetorical demand that the Taliban hand him over or else they would be punished.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban were never always so tied together and often hostile to each other. Now that Bin Laden has been disappeared into the depths of the ocean or "buried at sea", the "war on terror" pretext for continuing involvement in Afghanistan is going to be harder to maintain.
Though the Taliban have sought to use Bin Laden's liquidation as a reason to up the ante with its struggle with the USA and NATO in Afghanistan, the continued killing of civilians by drone bombers and continuation of a futile war that cannot be won will continue to give the Taliban a level of support.
The need to defeat the Taliban permanently in Helmand and the dogged struggle against NATO in areas such as Helmand reflects the underlying geopolitics of the Afghan War: the need to secure the region in order to facilitate the construction of the TAPI pipeline.
In recent months Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders have given numerous hints that they would be willing to break formally with al-Qaida as part of a peace deal that involved a full departure of US troops from Afghanistan. Will Barack Obama now finally put his weight behind exploring that option?This is unlikely precisely because US troops will not depart until the Afghan security forces are trained to guard the pipeline agreed between the regional powers which will bring gas from Turkmenistan through to India and forms part of the US strategy of hemming in Iranian influence from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is not exactly a "war of choice": it is a geostrategic imperative if the West is to gain a commanding stake in controlling the supplies of oil and gas from Eurasia. The fact is that whilst Iraq was a oil grab, Afghanistan is a more sophisticated gambit in the New Great Game.A recent update from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis states,
Despite problems, if the pipeline does succeed in being constructed, it will be due to the US’ uncompromising support for the project. While Washington’s raison d’etre is that it will help stabilise Afghanistan as well as assist the country in its development, not least by allowing it to earn around USD 300 million per annum in transit fees, it would also allow the Central Asian countries to find an alternate market in the east and thereby lessen their dependence on Russia as well as feed the energy-starved South Asian nations.Naturally, the reading public in the UK watching body bags of troops coming home to Wootton Bassett are never allowed to get any real sense of why Britain and NATO are out there and will not be as the electorate, that is the children, must be fed easily digestible sound bites about wars on terror and opium"
However, the US’ main objective is to ensure that the IPI project is effectively killed, thus denying Tehran much-needed revenues for its nuclear programme that will accrue from selling gas to an expanding South Asian market. This is not the first time that the US has pushed through a pipeline project which had appeared unfeasible both from political and business perspectives.
In 2005, despite substantial opposition by business and political circles in both the US and the Caspian states, the hugely expensive and logistically challenging BTC pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey, transiting a fractious Georgia, was built by a 11-member consortium led by BP under pressure from the US government.
The reason: Washington was seeking to provide a route that would not only circumvent transiting through Russian territory and break Moscow’s stranglehold over the European gas market, but would also assist in diminishing Russia’s strategic hold over the Caspian region.To overcome the reluctance of business in underwriting such a costly project and whose economic viability was questionable, the US government made financing from government agencies, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the US Export-Import Development Bank, available.
Anti-Royalism and the Left.
With the Royal Wedding, there have been the usual voices calling for a British Republic, though usually this is based less on coherent arguments for a republic but merely loathing for monarchy as representing class society and privilege. Toynbee opined ( This royal wedding is Britain's Marie Antoinette moment, The Guardian Friday 29 April 2011 )Of course Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had no invitation, being the prime ministers who held back the forces of conservatism for 13 years.
The irony is that by the standards of privilege in Britain, Toynbee is very privileged and had she not belonged to the right family, the Hampstead upper middle class intelligensia, she would not even be in the position to criticise the system of privilege. The lady who criticises those who complain about fuel duty whilst jetting off to her villa in Tuscany.
Polly Toynbee attended Badminton School Girl's School and later Holland Park School, a comprehensive in one of the richest parts of Central London also known as the "socialist Eton" and went up to Oxford University after getting only one A Level. Toynbee cannot change her family background but could have chosen not to send her children to fee paying schools.
Toynbee represents the inertia and sterility of public life and politics, even those on the gilded liberal left, is dominated by those with the "right connections" and elevate themselves to a position to pontificate about the class system that effectively ensures that they are where they are.
From a left wing or liberal perspective it was possible both to want to fight against privilege and the class system without necessarily abolishing the monarchy, even if it could be reformed and scaled down to that of Sweden, the Netherlands or Denmark.
George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn ( 1940 ), when calling for a transformation of the war effort to harness the patriotism of the British people and a democratic socialist state to then created after the defeat of Nazi Germany, did not call for the abolition of the monarchy. He wrote of an English Socialist government that,
It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons.
Curiously, apart from the more unsophisticated and mulishly resentful "class war" bores, much Republicanism comes from the privileged middle classes and their "party" today in London did not excite much interest. Presumably a social democratic position could argue for a reformed monarchy
Just as Timothy Garton Ash argued ( Should a democracy have a King Wills and Queen Kate? You can do worse The Guardian, Thursday 28 April 2011 )
I don't think countries like Sweden, Holland, Denmark and Spain, all of which have monarchs, are worse off than those that have party politicians directly or indirectly elected to be president. Or would you rather have Buckingham Palace occupied by a President Blair?
With one brief interlude, when English revolutionaries experimented with decapitating one of them, there have been kings and queens in England, kings and queens of the English, for more than a thousand years. That is an amazing thing. It is the stuff of poetry. Imagine Shakespeare purged of all references to kingship. Before you abandon a thousand years of poetry, you should be very certain that you will fare better in prose.
There are damagingly undemocratic elements in the British political system – above all, the House of Lords – but the monarchy is not high among them. If we are talking about the power of a single unelected individual, Rupert Murdoch is a far greater threat to British democracy than our hereditary head of state.
According to the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor, no monarch has refused his or her assent to legislation since 1707. Some undemocratic obscurantism still derives from "crown prerogative", and the constitutional doctrine that sovereignty resides in "the crown in parliament", but the lawyer Richard Gordon has shown how the UK could have a thoroughly modern written constitution, firmly based on popular sovereignty, and still keep a hereditary monarch as head of state.
Sensible politics should in Britain entail reform of much of that which is decayed, against the interests on the long term future of the majority of the people, the rentier financial economy, decline of manufacturing in favour of over privileging the City and the reducing the country to a banal Heritage Theme Park.
The cloying media commentary on the Royal Wedding is annoying but it is merely for one day. It is of less importance than having an increasingly deracinated land where economic power and sovereignty has been ceded away and where the "leftism" is often associated with rather silly trendy poses and "identity politics".
The British are known for being a people given to cussedness. Tell them the Royal Family is merely a banal fairytale, that long term commitments to something as abstract as a "nation" are meaningless and to denigrate the entire history of the UK and people will instinctively rebel.
That means that sensible proposals that could challenge existing abuses of a dysfunctional political system, curtail the power of unaccountable corporations, bring about a change as regards the mindless deification of miraculous "market forces" and corruption is less rather than more likely to happen.
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To understand why Breivik exterminated 60 young Norwegians on a social democratic youth camp should not lead to crude rationalisations of the sort offered by Islamists: that if the West did not pursue its foreign policy in the "Muslim World" then these attacks would not happen.
Likewise there are those in the EDL with which Breivik was in ideological tune with that if it were not for the mass immigration permitted and encouraged by Western governments this sort of attack, a "cry of despair" would not have had to happen.
In that sense, the far right understand the value of 'propaganda of the deed'. Such attacks are intended to raise the question of "why" and Breivik's claim that there are other cells working towards his end is intended to intimidate what are considered governments who ignore 'the people'.
For the far right has copied the grievance culture of the Islamists and the model of identity politics and tap into the notion of the poor white former working class who have been left behind by de-industrialisation and 'betrayed' by Metropolitan elites prefer to import immigrant labour than aid the native population.
Another problem is that many on the liberal left tend to assume that racism is an aboriginal sin and that 'other extremists', i.e Islamist fanatics, are not racist but merely fanatics when, in fact, both certain forms of Islamism and the new far right are both what Michael Burleigh calls "political religions'
The idea that 'cultural Marxists' and 'multiculturalist traitors' or the 'liberal left' are directly responsible for degrading Western civilisation and pandering to Islamists has led many on the far right to develop an ideology that has 'the people' as something akin to the politicised Islamist version of the ummah.
Such ideologies have gained traction in places such as Luton and Oldham, away from London, and are made worse by the fact that outside the capital there are entire parts of cities where former working men are left to do menial temporary jobs without any long term stability.
In a deracinated and bored consumer society based on the idea of constant satisfaction, those who feel they cannot get it and need something more to believe in or some higher purpose have turned to political religions to rationalise their anger and to feel some form of 'belonging'.
The rise of new creedal ideologies based on collective and shared victimhood are inadvertently encouraged by groups such as Searchlight focusing obsessively only on race and making reference only to 'extremists' as Nick Lowles did in the Evening Standard ( Monday 25th July 2011 ).
By 'extremists', those such as Lowels mean Islamists but they and organisation such as Unite Against Fascism have gone on street marches in alliance with those who use 'Islamophobia' as a pretext to vent hatred no less that organisations such as the EDL.
True, Lowles has condemned 'Islamist extremism', not least those of the Muslims Against Crusades which he sees as the equivalent of the EDL and the BNP. Yet to single out this group instead of looking at the pronouncements of spokesmen for the MAB is a dereliction of duty.
The reason is that when one leading woman of the MAB and RESPECT, Salma Yaqoob, claimed that the July 7 Bombings of 2005 were a "reprisal attack", this form of rationalisation is not put on a par with Stephen Lennon's comment that what Brievik did was what happens when men in despair are driven to it by mass immigration.
Though it could be said that Islamist terrorism is a reaction to the state terrorism meted out by the USA and UK on Muslim lands, the terrorist response to that in attacking civilians has been replied to by associating the existence of a new non-nationalist form of terrorism with a pan-European terrorist response aimed at those deemed guilty of facilitating the violence.
The double standard is not addressed by many on the left no less than those on the right who warble on about Islamism being 'one seamless totalitarian threat '( Michael Gove ) in order to expedite the propaganda that the wars to in Iraq and Afghanistan were about defeating a civilisational threat and not oil.
There is ample scope for misunderstanding within Britain because of the way politics has become about 'framing' , about propaganda, lobby groups and smug complacency. There is a need to understand that hatred, greed, fanaticism and self interested rationalisations are universal human flaws.