A comic from the 1950s managed to predict US policy toward oil-producing nations… Check out panel six in particular!
Art imitates life
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Category Archives: Middle East
Journey of mankind
Catholicgauze has found another gem of a map, this one a timelapse animation showing humanity’s expansion from Africa and on to world domination. There’s plenty of extra material on landmarks such as the Mt Toba eruption and various ice ages. Well worth checking out, but just be aware it will take a long time on a slow connection.
Iraq rant
George W Bush is on increasingly shaky ground. Not only has Congress voted to pull US troops out of Iraq by April 1, 2008 (though he will veto this), but members of his own party are turning against him.
It’s about time.
He has been a disaster for the Middle East. It will take years to repair the damage his administration has done to the region, if that is even possible. Only the Australian defence minister has been forthright enough to admit his country is in Iraq for oil — it would be so refreshing for the US (and Britain) to at least admit this is a factor in keeping them there.
I won’t sit here and pretend a US withdrawal from Iraq will solve everything overnight. It’s scary to think of the future that awaits the Middle East once the occupation ends. A shambles of a nation bordering seven countries… It is worrying that Iraq is ahead of Somalia on the failed states index, as Somalia has essentially been an anarchy for years.
For a vision of where Iraq may be headed based on experiences in Basra, check out this report from the International Crisis Group.
I feel obliged to point out that, according to this map at least, much of the country is under Iraqi government control. However, it does not indicate if control is total, nominal etc. Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki says his nation’s army and police are capable of maintaining order once the US leaves. It is important for Iraq’s self-esteem as a country and the credibility of al-Maliki’s government that they do.
That the US military has begun arming Sunni militia to fight al-Qaida in Anbar province is tacit acceptance that an American victory is impossible. Not only that, it could allow old local grudges to be settled and set the scene for well-armed militias to rule the roost once coalition forces leave.
Bush has made much of the “liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein” and the “return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people” (quotes from this transcript). Liberation from a man the US helped put in power and whom the CIA assisted during the Iran-Iraq war.
Unfortunately Iraqis have used this liberation to catch up on decades of sectarian conflict which was oppressed under Saddam (and it is not the first country where this has happened).
I am not for one second saying that Saddam’s leadership was a good thing. Although relatively stable compared to its successor state, his was a brutal regime and many thousands of people suffered under it.
However, many thousands have suffered in a democratic Iraq. There have been months when as many civilians died as did during the whole of the conflict in Northern Ireland (c. 3,500). America does not have a good track record of encouraging or forcing regime change: just think of Chile, Cambodia and Guatemala.
It was natural that, in the power vacuum following Saddam’s fall, local groups would work to secure their vested interests. Hence the formation of an Iraqi parliament along sectarian lines (and feel free to leave a comment if I’m missing something here).
A fragmented Iraq is a dangerous thing, as it invites external actors. For example, Turkey has 200,000 troops along the border with Iraqi Kurdish territories. I have already written about what could come of this (here and here). Iran must also be looking at the situation, particularly given the history between it and Iraq.
To argue that the move by Republican senators Richard Lugar and John Warner (linked to in the first paragraph) isn’t significant because they have not set a date for the withdrawal of armed forces would be to miss the point — it underscores divisions within Bush’s party and a wider opposition to the war in Iraq.
It would require Bush to re-seek authorisation for the war, authorisation he has had since 2002. Although it would still be up to the president to pull out of Iraq, he would have to submit revised plans by October 16. These plans, the senators urge, would include “a drawdown or redeployment of forces”.
Bush wants to keep things as they are until the US commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, delivers his report in September — and Petraeus, using Northern Ireland as an example, has said countering an insurgency could take ten years or more.
Reports on Iraq are not worth waiting for. This week saw one by the Bush administration that said the Iraqi government had made satisfactory progress toward eight of 18 benchmarks, unsatisfactory progress on eight more and mixed results on the others. You can read the report here.
“I believe we can succeed in Iraq, and I know we must,” Bush has said.
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must realise he can not win. This is surely the time for Bush. A withdrawal plan must be put in place as soon as possible.
Would the situation in Iraq be any different if it was a force of UN peacekeepers? The UN is not the greatest organisation in the world but its cordial relations with Hezbollah in Lebanon demonstrates it has the capacity to sink substantial roots in the region.
It seems Bush is not the only US official with his head in the sand. Writes Anne Flaherty of AP:
At a news conference Friday (July 13), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, said the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions able to fight independently has dropped from 10 to six in recent months despite an increase in U.S. training efforts.
Pace said the readiness of the Iraqi fighting units was not an issue to be “overly concerned” about because the problem was partly attributable to losses in the field.
“As units operate in the field, they have casualties, they consume vehicles and equipment,” Pace said.
Hang on for just one moment please. Did he just say the loss of four battalions wasn’t something to be “overly concerned” about? A battalion can have hundreds of soldiers (I’m unsure of the exact make-up of an Iraqi battalion, but such a unit in the US army has 300-1,000 as far as I know).
That four battalions — lost either through attrition or lack of resources — can no longer act independently is not something that should be dismissed as a matter of no consequence. Their country needs them. I hope they are rebuilt and back in the field as soon as possible — for Iraq’s sake.
I invite your comments and observations.
Doctors and extremism
I have issues with Clive Cookson’s article “Value the ‘great Arab doctor’ ” over on the Financial Times website.
His commentary is about the recent terror incidents in the UK, when a group including several doctors — all from outside Britain — attempted to detonate two car bombs in London and drove a Jeep into the terminal at Glasgow Airport.
Cookson makes a few interesting points and gets off to a relatively good start, followed by this in the second paragraph:
(I)t is naive for the world in general to imagine that the medical profession somehow contains “better” people who are less likely to kill for a cause than those in other walks of life.
I’m not sure if the world really does imagine this given the legacy of men such as Josef Mengele, but I agree it would be naive to do so. No profession can claim its members are all on the straight and narrow.
Then the article falls down:
Once one accepts that violent revolutionaries may come from relatively prosperous backgrounds, then doctors are an obvious recruiting ground for extremism – particularly in the Middle East, where medicine has long been one of the largest and most prestigious professions. The great tradition of Islamic medicine, established during the Middle Ages, still resonates today in the Arab world.
WTF? “An obvious recruiting ground for extremism”? That’s a seriously big jump. I have no idea how he is linking a career’s prestige with extremist viewpoints. Surely a more obvious “recruiting ground” would be a university, where young people feeling lonely or lost in the milieu can be swept up with a cause that gives them purpose. I think the real key to this paragraph is “largest”: it’s logical to assume that a large base will throw up a greater number of oddballs. It does not mean the profession itself is attracting or breeding them.
His use of geography to illustrate this point baffles me even further — if such a “prestigious” profession can inspire violence then surely the same is true in most regions, not just the Middle East. (On a historial note I take issue with his use of the term “Middle Ages” in relation to Islam; it’s an imprecise term more suited to European history.)
The article then makes reference to medicine’s “long history of involvement in revolutionary violence”, with reference to Joseph Guillotin (for whom the execution device is named) in the French Revolution and Che Guevara.
Even more relevant to the events of the past week is the leadership provided by physicians in the Arab world’s revolutionary movements of the late 20th century. George Habash, a paediatrician from a Christian Palestinian background, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which became notorious for hijacking aircraft in the early 1970s. Several senior figures in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including Mahmoud Zahar, Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Mohammed al-Hindi, trained in medicine.
There’s trained in, and then there’s practicing. Habash was not working as a doctor (unlike most of the men in the British incidents) when he became involved with extremism, although I can’t speak about the others referred to above.
I’m not sure if “leadership” by physicians is relevant; Michael Collins was a civil servant and adept bookkeeper, Castro studied law and Mao was an assistant librarian at one point. Are we to think of these professions as being potential hotbeds of revolution? If a civil servant leads a coup d’etat somewhere in the world, are we immediately going to point to Michael Collins as his antecedent?
With hindsight, what is more surprising than the involvement of doctors in a terrorist plot is their incompetence in carrying it out. Doctors are practical people, with a scientific training, who might have been expected to explode a car bomb successfully
Not necessarily. As French anti-terror expert Dominique Thomas has said: “You can find videos on the Internet from Iraq on how to booby-trap a car. But carrying it out is not as simple as people might think.” (And if you want to know about incompetence in carrying out terror activities, read Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA — and those people were supposedly serious terrorists.)
The young men from humble backgrounds who carried out the July 7 attacks in 2005 were more effective suicide bombers than the two professionals who drove a vehicle laden with petrol and gas cylinders into the Glasgow airport terminal.
Since when does professionalism equate to “superior terrorist”? I refer you to the above quote from Thomas. I also refer you to this AFP article, where various analysts make it clear that these doctors were unlikely to have been trained in terror activities.
It’s unfortunate that the point of Cookson’s commentary is left to the very end. After referring to anecdotal evidence of patients “cancelling medical appointments with doctors who have Arab or Islamic-sounding names”, he writes:
Any loss of public confidence in Arab or Muslim doctors – and discriminatory measures that would make it harder for physicians to come to work in Britain from the Middle East than from other parts of the world – would be a tragedy for the NHS. There are still “great Arab doctors” working in Britain today and, if we encourage them, there will be more in future generations.
Which is a very, very good point. The wrongs of a few tearaways should not be visited upon their countrymen. Unfortunately humans are fucked up in this regard and tend to tar everyone with the same brush. Will we ever learn?
Am I making valid critiques of an otherwise very good journalist, or has he just caught me on a bad day? I invite your comments.
Such a lovely show
A Mickey Mouse-type character who preached Islamic domination on a children’s television program was beaten to death in the show’s final episode yesterday, according to Associated Press.
The giant black-and-white rodent, Farfour, was “martyred”, the show’s teenage presenter said. Farfour was killed by an actor playing the role of an Israel trying to take the mouse’s land. Farfour called his slayer a “terrorist” during the sequence.
Farfour had regularly urged Palestinian children to fight Israel.
The show, Tomorrow’s Pioneers, was broadcast on Hamas-linked al-Aqsa TV. It has been take off the air to make room for new programs, apparently.
God only knows what insane shit will be taking its place.
I haven’t been able to find the footage, but here’s a still of the Farfour miming how to hold an AK47:
A shot at redemption
I respect Tony Blair for not taking the easy route.
He could have sat on the back benches for a few years then hit the lecture circuit, making a lot of money for relatively little effort. His post as Middle East envoy will be anything but easy.
Despite his successes in Kosovo and Northern Ireland — and his achievement there must be applauded — Iraq will overshadow his legacy as Britain’s prime minister. He authorised his country’s involvement in an invasion based on lies and an occupation that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as well as shattering his international standing.
The Mideast post is his shot at redemption.
He failed to bring peace to the region as PM, but clearly feels he can now it’s possible to devote his full energies to the situation.
But he has a long way to go to convince the various parties in the region that he is a credible envoy.
He will represent the US, EU, UN and Russia; the European Union and United Nations have made enormous contributions of aid and humanitarian work, while Russia has historic trade relations with a number of Middle East countries. Various policy decisions ranging from total support of Israel to the invasion of Iraq have weakened US credibility.
In an editorial yesterday, The Guardian said Blair’s new role “could be a painful reminder of the most unhappy aspects of his premiership, as he encounters Arab suspicion that he is merely a lackey of George Bush, and Arab anger over Iraq and the Lebanon war of 2006″.
He came in for criticism over Lebanon for doing little to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, a path the US also took.
So this is the baggage he brings to the Middle East. It will take a lot of hard work on his half to become a man all sides can do business with or for this to be seen as more than a political goodwill job.
I believe it is possible for Blair to have some success. By adopting an even-handed approach and by really throwing himself into the job he can win over some — though never all — of his doubters.
The Quartet has said Blair’s first job will be to mobilise international support and assistance for the Palestinians, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has promised to give all necessary assistance in this.
Starting small is the key.
The Hamas situation complicates things, but if Blair can work on getting aid to the people who really need it he may build the foundations for a more concrete solution.
This may be the start of a long road for Tony Blair.
There is no chance of a quick resolution to the many political and social problems affecting the Middle East. There is no hope at all of a lasting peace as long as the Palestinians are split in two. But there is a chance that what he does in the next 12 months can make a difference in the years to come.
One man’s road to redemption could change everything. Maybe Blair will make a difference, maybe he won’t. But good luck to him for at least having the balls to try.