Big Sticks and Small Carrots

When the Prince of Darkness starts talking about “serious consequences” for Iran, it provokes a troubling sense of deja vu. When Little Tony Blair joins in with a textbook evocation of the Nazis, that feeling is only reinforced.

There are differences between Iran and Iraq however. We should not lose sight of the fact that the Iranians actually could develop geopolitically significant weapons of mass destruction in a matter of years if they so desire. The IAEA does have real concerns regarding the purposes of Iran’s nuclear programme and Larijani’s resignation and his replacement with an Ahmadniejad ally suggests that Iran’s Supreme Leader is inclined to favour the President’s hardline approach. The Iranians insist that their programme is for exclusively peaceful purposes and it may well be but questions undoubtedly remain.

In truth, it is perfectly possible that the Iranians want nuclear weapons or, more likely perhaps, the capacity to build nuclear weapons if the regime is threatened. Given what has happened to Iraq and given also the constant belligerent “axis of evil” rhetoric, it would hardly be surprising if the Iranian regime was seeking to acquire a means of defending itself. Indeed, it can be argued that this would be the most rational strategy it could adopt. There are not many government’s in the world who would not attempt to defend themselves and their countries from a perceived threat.

The Iranian nuclear programme pre-dates the invasion of Iraq of course but it isn’t a huge leap to suggest that it is that unprovoked attack on their neighbour along with an essentially explicit suggestion that they’d be next which has made them so unwilling to compromise on this issue.

If (and it is still if) they are attempting to acquire the means to build nuclear weapons, what could be done to stop them? The answer is not a lot, especially if you’re the government’s of the US and UK.

For a start, moral authority on this issue isn’t helped by the fact that these countries have no genuine intention of abiding by the disarmament pillar of the NPT. Indeed, the UK, by adopting the precautionary principle in renewing its Trident capability, has implicitly admitted that it has no intention of abiding by the disarmament pillar at any point in the foreseeable future. The UK government will still insist that the rest of the treaty is fully implemented by other countries but the bits they consider to be detrimental to the UK’s national interest will simply be ignored. Not the loftiest of positions then.

In practical terms, the options are extremely limited. A land invasion of Iran is a non-starter. Even if the chicken hawks could create the political climate which would allow it, there simply aren’t enough troops to do the job. The Iranian regime knows this and it may well be a further reason for their refusal to compromise. They’re holding the best hand and they know it.

With an invasion ruled out, the favoured strategy of the armchair generals appears to be some form of limited strategic bombing campaign targeting Iranian nuclear facilities. There are so many problems with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. First of all, Iraq should have been a graphic and bloody illustration of the inexplicably overlooked fact that “the other side” also has a significant say in the scope, scale, tactics and outcome of any military action. The armchair generals still don’t seem to understand this most basic rule of warfare.

A “limited” campaign will be far from limited when the Iranians respond in the ways the US military is least able to deal with. Coalition forces in Iraq would be a prime target. The notion of a “limited” military effort is a dangerous fantasy, as facile as the infamous belief in “sweets and flowers”.

And what would be the result of this “limited” bombing campaign? It may be a setback for the Iranian nuclear programme if certainly facilities are destroyed but it certainly wouldn’t provide any guarantees or offer any sort of long term solution. It would, however, create a tremendous backlash of Iranian nationalism as well as renewed support for the regime. If the Iranian government is trying to acquire the ability to build nuclear weapons, they’re not going to stop because of this. In fact, it’d only increase their determination.

Attacks like these would also create a further wave of anti-Western sentiment among (some) Muslims and give further credibility to bin Laden’s “the West hates Islam” propaganda. The long term damage will almost certainly far outweigh any potential benefits. Unfortunately, this option still looks the one most likely to be implemented by the Bush administration.

If they manage to resist the bombing, that leave sanctions or covert attempts to foster regime change. Neither looks like having a high chance of success in the current climate. If the Iranians really want to develop a nuclear weapons capability, it’s hard to see what will stop them achieving it.

There are a lot of “ifs” in all of this. After Iraq, those who continue to strip away caveats and express a certainty they can’t possibly substantiate are probably lost causes. It is certainly possible, however, that one of the most significant consequences of the Iraq war could also be an irony of truly gargantuan proportions. A war built on the lie that there was an urgent need to disarm Saddam of non-existent WMDs along with the idiotic fantasy that it would stabilise the region could result in a nuclear capable Iran in an increasingly unstable Middle East.

In a way, the most worrying thing is that many of those who were influential in the original decision to invade Iraq are still in positions of power. It’s hard to imagine a group of people who are less qualified to deal with the Iranian situation.

The news that Turkey’s parliament has authorised attacks into Kurdish Iraq in order to stem the flow of PKK activities directed against them comes as no great surprise.

Before the war, the Turkish government specifically warned that it could destabilise their northern border region and sought assurances from the US that this would not be allowed to happen. In particular, the Turks insisted that the US government should provide a guarantee that it would not allow the formation of an Independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq after the removal of Saddam. They feared that this would stir up their own sizeable Kurdish population and lead to threats to Turkey’s territorial integrity.

The requested assurance was given by the Bush administration despite the fact that the war was allegedly about empowering Iraqis to take control of their own destiny. There was no way in which the US government could be sure they could fulfil their promise if they really were serious about introducing democracy in Iraq. The guarantee was just one small contradiction in a much larger swamp .

The Turks were certainly not convinced. Ultimately, despite the massive pressure put on them and the offer of huge bribes financial incentives, they refused to allow the US military to use Turkey as a launch pad for the invasion. But the Turkish warnings, like so many others, were ignored as the Bush administration steamrollered its way to war.

Now, with an increasingly autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq and growing cross border instability, the Turks are preparing to take matters into their own hands. The US adminstration’s calls for Turkey not to take unilateral military action is risible given their own penchant for violent unilateralism.

And so, the neo-conservatives fatally flawed plan use violence to turn the Middle East into a beacon of democratic peace and stability continues to unwind bloodily. No doubt there will be some who will again argue that this was an unforeseeable consequence of the invasion. These people will be poorly informed or in complete denial or lying.

Irving Kristol once said that “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”. What a git.

There are many people who believe that the stated priority given to promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East is just so much hot air designed to obfuscate the real motivations behind British foreign policy.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the British government’s involvement and support for the BAE deal to sell 72 Typhoon fighter jets to the Saudi government. This billion pound arrangement to sell highly sophisticated military aircraft to a regime which is corrupt, non-democratic, staunchly authoritarian, a serial abuser of human rights and a regular practitioner of torture cannot be explained by reference to the rhetoric of the “war” on terror. It can only be explained through the prism of narrow national interest considerations coupled with an admission that the promotion of democracy is not the dominant foreign policy influence claimed by the rhetoric.

There are those who will quite happily agree with this assessment and argue that it is nevertheless right to support this deal precisely because governments should pursue their narrow national interest above all other considerations. I don’t have any complaint about that; disagreement yes, but no complaint. There is an entirely separate argument to be had as to the best way to promote the national interest. I’d argue that this deal is likely to be damaging to the national interest, particularly in the longer term,. I’d further argue that decisions taken in pursuit of the national interest are often based on a narrow short term views and are often harmful in the longer term (politicians generally don’t do long term very well).

I do have a complaint when the government insists that it is absolutely committed to promoting democracy and opposing oppressive regimes and refuses to accept that selling powerful military equipment to a regime like the House of Saud flatly contradicts that assertion. The result is that the entire premise of the foreign policy debate as framed by the government is built on a myth. This is not only starkly hypocritical but it also effectively negates the ability of the people to meaningful debate foreign policy with the government.

It is, ironically, entirely undemocratic.

Last week, Neil Clark wrote an extraordinary piece on Comment is Free opposing the campaign to pressure the government into giving political asylum to Iraqi employees of the British. Unsurprisingly to most, but shockingly for Nick Cohen, an overwhelming number of comments condemned Neil’s position. CiF had to shut down the thread after only three hours.

The central thesis of Cohen’s book is that liberal people have turned their backs on the victims of totalitarian movements. How then does he explain the enormous response to Clark’s article? It’s clear that “liberals” lined up in droves to argue that our government should protect these Iraqis who are at particular risk from death squads. Is this not exactly the sort of thing which Cohen maintains no longer happens? It seems pretty clear that in the real world, Clark’s view is very much a minority one.

In any event, Clark’s article didn’t make sense to me so I decided to see if I could narrow down the reason why he arrived at the conclusion he did. On his website, he has now written a number of posts attempting to defend his stance. After reading them, I did try to engage with Neil in the comments to the last of those posts and he did offer one reply. My next question, however, has not seen the other side of the moderation queue. My guess is that the Blogger gremlins ate it; this seems to happen surprisingly often when you ask awkward questions of certain bloggers.

There’s lot’s of stuff there but ultimately, it all boils down to this from the original article:

If more Iraqis had followed the example of the interpreters and collaborated with British and American forces, it is likely that the cities of Iran and Syria would now be lying in rubble.

The argument is that if Iraq had stabilised as the Bush administration thought it would, they’d have then moved on to invade other countries in the Middle East. In effect, by working with the occupying forces, the “quislings” were aiding and abetting the neo-con project.

It is certainly true that the Bush administration did want to use military force to reshape the entire Middle East. The “axis of evil” rhetoric was not just rhetoric. General Wes Clark recalled asking another general at the Pentagon whether the administration was still set on invading Iraq back in late 2001. The answer:

“Oh, it’s worse than that… I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “…This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Given the scale of their ignorance as to what would happen when they invaded Iraq, however, this plan was never realistic. The neo-con project, as was, was defeated the day Bush ordered the invasion. It is important to keep attacking the simplistic notions of the neo-con “Bombing for Freedom” brigade and yes, many neo-cons still want to take military action against Iran but they have been hugely weakened both politically and militarily. The sweeping land invasions they’d dreamt of are still alive only in the heads of the most deluded armchair generals.

With that in mind, in the anarchy of post-Saddam Iraq, attempts to limit human suffering should be given top priority. Iraqis have already suffered far more than pampered Westerners like ourselves can ever understand.

Furthermore, despite the many failings of this catastrophic war, Iraqis should not be punished for attempting to help turn their country into a stable, peaceful, tolerant democracy. You could argue that some were naive for believing that the coalition could deliver what it promised but that goal itself does have value. Who could possibly blame Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam from attempting to help build a better country by working with the coalition? Understandably, they just did what they believed was best for themselves, their families and their country. After failing to deliver on its promises, the government of this county owes a specific duty of care to these people.

It has been argued that the government owes a duty of care to all Iraqis whose lives are in danger because of the invasion. I agree in principle but it simply, tragically, isn’t realistic to suggest that the government would offer asylum to the approximately 4 million people who’ve been displaced by the violence in Iraq.

The We Can’t Turn They Away campaign is a practical effort to achieve what is hoped to be a realistic goal. It’s about saving the lives of as many people as possible in the aftermath of this most bloody of interventions. Please do consider writing to your MP before it’s too late.

Here’s yet another post bashing the US, UK and Israeli governments. He never writes about China’s human rights abuses. Typical America hating leftist…

It’s an old chestnut but it does seem surprisingly common considering just how easy it is to refute. It’s all about degrees of separation; as a UK citizen, my first concern is to the UK government’s policies and actions. In a democracy, it is every citizens right, you might even say duty, to try to ensure that their government lives up to certain standards of behaviour. Scrutiny and criticism of your democratically elected government is not only acceptable, its an essential part of the democratic process.

From that key principle, it’s easy to see why the closest allies of your democratically elected government should also be subjected to greater scrutiny than distant governments over which your own has little or no influence. It’s a sort of responsibility chain; the closer to home, the more responsible you are and the more influence you can generally exert. In short, it’s about trying to keep your own house in order.

This above is so obvious that it feels a bit silly typing it but it does appear that it needs to be said. Anyway, for the reasons above, I feel the need to mention the latest report from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

[T]he committee, in its report entitled Global Security: The Middle East, said a quicker response from the government in July last year “could have led to reduced casualties amongst both Israeli and Lebanese civilians whilst still working towards a long-term solution to the crisis”.

It called some of Israel’s military actions in Lebanon during the war “indiscriminate and disproportionate”.

It particularly highlighted the attacks on United Nations observers and the dropping of more than 3.5 million cluster bombs (90% of the total) in the 72 hours after the UN Security Council passed the resolution which effectively ended the war.

So the committee has concluded that the British government, by refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire, helped enable the continuation of the conflict. At the time, Blair waffled as people died. And why did the government adopted the policy it did when it refused to call for an immediate ceasefire?

From the full report (article 100):

At the time of the conflict, many believed the United States was obstructing calls for an immediate ceasefire to give Israel a chance to defeat overwhelmingly Hezbollah’s militia. The BBC journalist Ed Stourton raised this theory with John Bolton, who had been the US Ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the war. Mr Stourton asked him if the US had been “deliberately obstructing diplomatic attempts” to bring an end to the war so that “Israel could have its head.” Mr Bolton asked “what’s wrong with that?” and added that he was “damn proud of what we did.”

We wrote to Dr Howells to ask him about Mr Bolton’s comments. In his reply, he asserted: The UK was certainly not involved in collusion with either the US or Israel to support the continuation of hostilities or to block a ceasefire. Whilst I cannot speak for the US position [on] this matter, I do not believe they acted differently.

The committee offers three possible reasons for this discrepancy.

1. Mr Bolton misled Stourton by suggesting that the US blocked diplomacy at the UN because it wanted to give Israel the opportunity to destroy Hezbollah.
2. The US did indeed block attempts to find a quick diplomatic solution to bring about a ceasefire, but that the UK was not made aware of this collusion with Israel.
3. The UK was in fact brought into, or at least aware of, the efforts to obstruct the diplomatic process.

The committee does not reach a conclusion as to which possibility might be the truth but it seems unlikely that Bolton would have lied. To what end? In fact, giving the Israelis the time and space and cluster bombs so that they could teach Lebanon a lesson fits exactly with the type of thinking which is so common in the Bush administration. It also ties in exactly with what Ehud Olmert said as hostilities began: “Lebanon is responsible and Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions”.

Given the above quotation, it is perhaps unsurprising that a UN report found that there was “a significant pattern of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF against Lebanese civilians and civilian objects, failing to distinguish civilians from combatants and civilian objects from military targets… Further, the Commission is convinced that damage inflicted on some infrastructure was done for the sake of destruction.” It is hard to avoid concluding that the Israeli government decided to adopt a policy of collective punishment against the Lebanese people in an attempt to pressure them into doing something about Hezbollah.

What’s wrong with that? Well, morals aside, it’s specifically outlawed by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The British government, silent during the conflict, has remained silent in its aftermath. It has not condemned the dropping of 3.5 million cluster bombs after the conflict was essentially over nor has it condemned the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure for no useful military purpose. That continuing silence can only be seen by Israel and indeed by the rest of the world as a tacit approval of the actions of the Israeli government and the IDF. It seems to me that there is something very wrong with that.