Author: heathlander

This evening, despite the opposition of a majority of the public and a significant number of Labour MPs, Parliament voted to renew the Trident nuclear missile system, giving a big `fuck you’ to international law and the principle of non-proliferation.
409 MPs supported the government’s proposal; 161 opposed it.

There was a sizeable Labour revolt, but the support of the Conservatives ensured the bill passed. Watching the debate in Parliament today, it was clear that the Liberal Democrats are not against the principle of a British nuclear “deterrent” at all. Rather, they knew the bill would pass whatever they did, and simply wanted to present themselves as a voice of dissent without actually dissenting at all. Hence the absurd Lib Dem position that Britain does need a nuclear deterrent, but that the decision to renew it should be delayed until after 2010. The inconsistency of the Lib Dem argument was highlighted and mocked throughout today’s debate, and rightly so. This, unfortunately, did the case against renewing Trident no good at all. The cowardice of the Lib Dems means that, once again, the majority of the British public were left without representation in the House of Commons.

According to Tony Blair, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) “makes it absolutely clear that Britain has the right to possess nuclear weapons”. In fact, what the NPT does is commit nuclear states to a gradual reduction in nuclear armaments, culminating in complete disarmament. In a December 2005 Matrix Chambers legal opinion, Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin (LSE) concluded that replacing the Trident missile system would likely constitute a “material breach” of the NPT. In July 1996, the International Court of Justice concluded unanimously that, “[t]here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control”.” At the NPT Review Conference in 2000, Britain committed to an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.”

The government claims that since it is proposing to reduce Britain’s stockpile of operationally available warheads by 20%, it is complying with the NPT. In reality, as Rebecca Johnson points out, “Britain’s legal obligations are not merely to reduce the arsenal, but to eliminate it.” She continues,

“The withdrawal and ultimate decommissioning during the 1990s of obsolete weapons such as nuclear artillery and nuclear depth and free-fall bombs was, of course, welcome, but the Article VI obligation is not just to reduce the nuclear arsenals, but to eliminate them.

By no legally admissible reasoning would it be consistent with these obligations for Britain to procure new submarines to carry continuously refurbished US ballistic missiles with up to 160 refurbished or possibly new warheads, with the intention of having this renewed nuclear weapon system come into service in 15-20 years time and run for up to 30 years after that.

The White Paper is not promising to reduce its existing Trident system, which would be welcomed as a step towards giving it up altogether. However it is dressed up, the White Paper’s actual proposal is to maintain at least 80 % of Britain’s nuclear weapons for a further 30 plus years, representing an overall increase in capability and longevity.

This is not disarmament, but “nuclear re-armament”, as noted by Kofi Annan. In pursuing the renewal or modernisation of existing arsenals, the outgoing UN Secretary-General warned that the nuclear weapon states “should not imagine that this will be accepted as compatible with the NPT”.”

In fact, the extent of the government’s contempt for democracy and the law is such that the UK continued to research and design new nuclear warheads at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston (which received (.pdf) £1 billion additional funding from 2005-8) even as Tony Blair went through the democratic motions in Parliament. The Ministry of Defence today admitted that the Trident nuclear missiles are being secretly upgraded to increase their accuracy and ability to attack a wider range of targets. Labour MP Joan Ruddock commented,

“This is further evidence of enhancing the warfighting capability of Trident and gives the lie to the claim in the white paper that it is a matter of simple deterrence.”

The attempts by government ministers and Tory MPs to defend the decision to renew Trident have been laughable. Witness, for example, Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett and Defence Secretary Des Browne warning Labour MPs – only 49% of whom support a British “nuclear deterrent” – that they must vote with the government or else,

“The Tories will say that they saved our nuclear deterrent and only they can be trusted to protect the nation. They will remember this and use it at the ballot box.”

We’re talking about an issue upon which the survival of the human species may well depend, and all Margaret Beckett and Des Browne care about is how it will play out at the next election. In February, Des Browne said that Mutually Assured Destruction is not an “outmoded concept”, explaining,

“As far as we’re concerned in this government, we are committed to maintaining a minimum deterrent and one credible to any potential aggressor.”

Of course, if the government truly believes that Britain needs nuclear weapons for security and self-defence, it must also accept that Iran, North Korea and every other country in the world needs them too. In the words of Nobel laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat,

“If some nations – including the most powerful militarily – say that they need nuclear weapons for their security, then such security cannot be denied to other countries which really feel insecure. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is the logical consequence of this nuclear policy.”

Not so, said Conservative MP James Gray in the House of Commons earlier today. After comparing a nuclear Britain to a gun-carrying policeman, he argued that it is entirely consistent to advocate a British nuclear weapon whilst condemning, for instance, an Iranian one. It is clear, he explained, that “we are the good guys and they are not.” When confronted with this level of ignorance, it’s difficult to know how to respond. Has James Gray been walking around with his eyes shut for the last four years? Or the last four decades? When Britain facilitated the Indonesian genocide of 200,000 East Timorese, and supported the brutal Israeli aggression against Lebanon last year, and enforced the genocidal sanctions against Iraq for a decade, killing close to a million people, were we the “good guys”? Moreover, how can anyone liken Britain, a country that committed the “supreme international crime” (as defined at Nuremberg) against Iraq only four years ago, to a “policeman”? Britain is, completely uncontroversially, a major criminal state. It is a repeat offender, guilty of gross war crimes and consistent contempt for the law. To use Gray’s analogy, renewing Trident is equivalent to giving a criminal a tank.

In reality, there is no defensive justification for retaining Trident. According to the government’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review (.pdf),

“there is no military threat to the United Kingdom or Western Europe. Nor do we forsee the re-emergence of such a threat.”

A July 2006 Defence Committee report supported this analysis, concluding,

“The most pressing threat currently facing the UK is that of international terrorism. Witnesses to our inquiry overwhelmingly argued that the strategic nuclear deterrent could serve no useful or practical purpose in countering this kind of threat.”

The Ministry of Defence has itself acknowledged that “there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or NATO? it is now clear that we no longer need to retain a capability against the re-emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat”, whilst a NATO assessment concluded that, “large-scale conventional aggression against the alliance will be highly unlikely”.

The government’s response to this is the “insurance policy” argument – that Britain should maintain a nuclear “deterrent” because, although we do not currently face a conventional military threat and although we do not foresee one occurring, we cannot accurately predict what the world will be like in 30-50 years time. Speaking today, Tony Blair argued this exact point:

“I believe it is important that we recognise that, although it is impossible to predict the future, the one thing? that is certain, is the unpredictability of it.”

Of course, no one can ever know for sure what the world will be like decades into the future, and so this is actually an argument for retaining nuclear weapons indefinitely. The “insurance policy” argument is, in any event, complete nonsense, since it assumes that Britain’s nuclear policy operates in an isolated bubble and has no effect on the world around us. As I wrote last year, the “insurance policy” argument,

“assumes that `the future’ will not be affected by the replacement of Trident. In reality, the disarming of the UK would greatly improve Britain’s standing with the majority of the world and, combined with greater efforts at multilateral disarmament (as required by law), would greatly reduce the threat of proliferation and of nuclear war?

The argument that we should retain the nuclear deterrent as an `insurance policy’ imagines a highly unlikely but quite frightening scenario where Britain stands alone against a serious military threat, conventional or nuclear, from another state. But the point is that by replacing Trident we are actively increasing the likelihood of such a situation occurring. Trident, then, is not an `insurance policy’, unless it is an insurance policy that, upon signing, increases the chances of an accident.”

There is simply no way to reconcile the pursuit of global disarmament with the renewal of Trident. At least those who are pro-Trident should be honest about that. So, for example, Conservative MP Olga Maitland argued that a nuclear-free world “will never be the case”, and that therefore Britain should keep its nuclear deterrent. That, at least, is a consistent position, unlike anything put forward by the Labour government, which pretends to care about proliferation whilst at the same time working to increase it. It is interesting that Olga Maitland doesn’t bother to provide any evidence for her claim that global nuclear disarmament is impossible. In fact, the WMD Commission, chaired by former Director General of the IAEA Dr. Hans Blix, reported (.pdf) last year that,

“Weapons of mass destruction cannot be uninvented. But they can be outlawed, as biological and chemical weapons already have been, and their use made unthinkable. Compliance, verification and enforcement rules can, with the requisite will, be effectively applied. And with that will, even the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons is not beyond the world’s reach.”

Of course, stopping nuclear proliferation isn’t going to be easy. It is, however, necessary for our survival. The WMDC report made a total of 60 concrete recommendations to work towards global nuclear disarmament. See Recommendation No. 7, for example:

“The nuclear-weapon states parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty should provide legally binding negative security assurances to nonnuclear- weapon states parties.”

Unsurprisingly, when countries like Britain and the U.S. go around invading whoever they want, taking no notice of international law or the UN, a powerful incentive is provided for countries like Iran to develop their own nuclear “deterrence”. Indeed, the invasion of Iraq was virtually an instruction to Iran that it better get a nuclear weapon, or else face Western attack.

Another recommendation the report made was to make the Middle East a nuclear-weapons free zone. Iran has, of course, been pushing for this for years. Instead of supporting this eminently sensible idea, the West (including Britain) has backed the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons programme, and has supported Israel in all of its campaigns of terror and aggression against the Palestinians and its neighbours.

Certainly, any serious attempt at nuclear disarmament would have to involve strengthening multilateral institutions and the NPT, as opposed to undermining them. For the UK to renew its nuclear deterrent despite facing no conventional military threat sends a very clear signal to the rest of the world: nuclear weapons are here to stay. As the WMD Commission reported, a primary reason for the stagnation in nuclear disarmament efforts has been “that the nuclear-weapon states no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously – even though this was an essential part of the NPT bargain, both at the treaty’s birth in 1968 and when it was extended indefinitely in 1995.”

In other words, the consequence of the government’s decision to renew Trident will be to undermine efforts at disarmament and to encourage proliferation around the world. As Kofi Annan put it (.pdf),

“the more that those states that already have [nuclear weapons] increase their arsenals, or insist that such weapons are essential to their national security, the more other states feel that they too must have them for their security”.

Tonight’s vote for rearmament is just the latest act in the Blair government’s long campaign for proliferation. With the invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Blair helped establish the principle that the use of force in international relations will be unilateral and preventive, and will not be subject to the authority of the United Nations or international law. The lesson of the Iraq invasion in particular was learnt by many countries across the world – if you want to be safe from a Western attack, get a nuclear weapon, quick!

The NPT was a reaction to the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the nuclear holocaust that very nearly resulted from it. The principle was clear: non-nuclear states would agree to refrain from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for help with civilian nuclear technology and, crucially, the gradual disarmament of the nuclear states. The NPT was not designed to protect the nuclear states from any challenge to their dominance. It was not intended as a tool to protect the status quo. Either nuclear weapons states start disarming, or there is no NPT.

A world in which some states have nuclear weapons while others don’t is completely unsustainable, not to mention unjust. We face a choice between nuclear weapons for all or for none, and today Parliament chose the former. In doing so, it placed Britain’s relationship with the U.S. and the British conceit of being a world power above the security and lives of potentially billions of people. If nuclear proliferation is allowed to continue unchecked and if we do not begin to take the steps necessary for global disarmament, nuclear war is an inevitability. In the words of Dr. Hans Blix,

“So long as any State has such weapons – especially nuclear arms – others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any State’s arsenal, there is high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use could be catastrophic.”

The 1996 Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons likewise concluded that the “proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”

There are other arguments against renewing Trident as well, of course. For one thing, the system’s complete dependence (.pdf) on the U.S. results in a Britain totally subservient to U.S. foreign policy. As Labour MP Michael Meacher put it today,

“The US provides this kit to us not because they believe we are necessary for the defence of the West but because it makes us subservient to US foreign policy, as we have already seen over Iraq and Lebanon and as we could still well see over Iran. The question we need to answer tonight is whether Britain is really a safer place if we trigger a spate of nuclear proliferation across the world leading to regional arms races and a world of 40 or more nuclear states.”

The idea that dependence on the U.S. for our nuclear deterrence necessitates support for U.S. foreign policy is neither new nor controversial. A secret 1988 British government assessment, entitled `The Dangers of Becoming an American Satellite`, concluded,

“The UK, in its relatively weak position, is already greatly dependent upon United States support. It would be surprising if the United States did not exact a price for the support, and to some extent it does so?the more we rely upon them, the more we shall be hurt if they withhold it.”

Indeed the United States has exacted a price for our support – subservience. We are paying that price in blood on the battlefields of Iraq. The United States often follows policies that are harmful to British interests (and usually harmful to American interests as well) and, due to our complete dependence on the U.S. for our nuclear deterrent, we are bound to follow those policies, as with Iraq. In replacing Trident tonight, Parliament has, in effect, re-forged our shackles and handed the master back his whip.

Tonight’s vote for Trident was, in effect, a vote for nuclear proliferation across the world. There is not a single pro-Trident argument employed by the government and its supporters that could not equally apply to every other state on the planet. Genocide, aggression, the undermining of international law, the invasion of Iraq, collusion in CIA torture flights, the erosion of civil liberties at home and now nuclear proliferation – Tony Blair, your `legacy’ is complete.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

“All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

– International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 1.1

“All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.”

– International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 1.2
West Papua has been under military occupation since 1963, when the UN handed control over the province to Indonesia without consulting the indigenous people. I’ve discussed the topic before, but here is a very brief outline of the background to the conflict:

`Prior to 1961, West Papua was a Dutch colony, but in 1952 the Netherlands recognised the West Papuans’ right to self-determination in accordance with Article 73 of the United Nations Charter. Indonesia felt differently and claimed the territory for itself. However, it declined the Netherlands’ invitation to stake its claim before the International Court of Law. A West Papuan government was set up in May 1961, tasked with the preparation of the country for full independence in 1971.

Seventeen days later, Indonesia launched a small paratroop invasion. The invaders were arrested by the West Papuans. In January 1962, Indonesia provoked a small naval battle, but again the fledgling West Papuan state survived. Unfortunately for the West Papuans, however, Indonesia had some powerful friends.

In the `New York Agreement` of 1962, the U.S. forced the Netherlands to surrender West Papua to Indonesia and the Australians to reverse their policy of supporting West Papuan independence. The Agreement, conducted without the presence of a West Papuan representative, effectively transferred control of West Papua to Indonesia.’

Indonesia assumed control of West Papua in 1963. The New York Agreement stipulated that a act of self-determination, involving all adult West Papuan men and women, would be held to determine the final status of West Papua. Indonesia finally got round to organising the referendum in 1969 – its policies in the intervening years were described in 1968 by a U.S. Consular official:

“The Indonesians have tried everything from bombing them [the West Papuans] with B-26s, to shelling and mortaring them, but a continuous state of semi-rebellion persists. Brutalities are undoubtedly perpetrated from time to time in a fruitless attempt at repression.”

Eliezer Bonay, Indonesia’s first governor of West Papua, estimated in 1981 that 30,000 West Papuans were killed in the six years of Indonesian occupation prior to 1969 `Act of Free Choice’. It was obvious to everyone that a free and fair act of self-determination would result in an overwhelming vote for independence. The U.S. ambassador to Indonesia observed (.pdf) at the time that “85 to 90 per cent” of the population was “in sympathy with the Free Papua cause”, whilst a secret 1969 British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) briefing stated,

“Privately, however, we recognise that the people of West Irian (West Papua) have no desire to be ruled by the Indonesians who are of an alien (Javanese) race”.

West Papuan independence was unacceptable to Indonesia and its allies (including the U.S. and Britain). As a 1969 British Foreign Office communication put it,

“The plain fact is that there is no other solution than for Indonesia to keep West Irian; no one is thinking in different terms; and no Government is likely to complain so long as the decencies are carried out.”

Indonesia carried out the “decencies” alright – in George Monbiot’s words, “1,022 men [or a fraction of 1% of West Papua’s population of 800,000] were selected by Indonesian soldiers, taught the words “I want Indonesia”, then lined up at gunpoint. One man who refused to say his lines was shot. Others were threatened with being dropped out of helicopters. This rigorous democratic exercise resulted in a unanimous vote for Indonesian rule”. This so-called “Act of Free Choice” was in reality a complete sham, and moreover it was a sham actively colluded in by the United States, Australia, Britain and the United Nations. Whereas the UN mission to organise and monitor the 1999 elections in East Timor consisted of over 1,000 individuals, including hundreds of police and electoral officials, only 16 UN workers (including administrative staff) were sent to West Papua – a territory many times the size of East Timor – in 1969 to monitor the act of self-determination. As John Saltford writes,

“the comparison demonstrates the immense difference between a genuine attempt to monitor a democratic referendum and one that was not genuine.”

Indeed, no one was under any delusion that Indonesia would permit a free vote – in May 1968, the U.S. Ambassador to Jakarta reported (.pdf) that, `It is the opinion of most observers in the area that Indonesia will not accept independence for West Irian and will not permit a plebiscite which would reach such an outcome.’ An Indonesian member of Parliament declared, “We are going through the motions…But West Irian is Indonesian and must remain Indonesian. We cannot accept any alternative”, and Henry Kissinger advised (.pdf) President Nixon to “avoid” discussing the “act of free choice” on his trip to Indonesia in 1969.

Everyone knew that the “Act of No Choice” (as West Papuans sometimes refer to it) was a fraud. C.V. Narasimhan, the then-UN Under-Secretary General responsible for overseeing the New York Agreement, has described the Act of Free Choice as “a whitewash. The mood at the UN was to get rid of this problem as quickly as possible….nobody gave a thought to the fact that a million people had their fundamental rights trampled.” In July 1969, the U.S. Embassy described (.pdf) the process as “unfolding like a Greek tragedy, the conclusion preordained.” The telegram continued:

“The main protagonist, the GOI [Government of Indonesia], cannot and will not permit any resolution other than the continued inclusion of West Irian in Indonesia. Dissident activity is likely to increase but the Indonesian armed forces will be able to contain and, if necessary, suppress it.”

In other words, West Papua was illegitimately annexed to Indonesia, with the entire international community (bar a few African states) doing nothing as the UN shamefully “took note” of the farcical `plebiscite’ and recognised as legitimate Indonesia’s colonisation. The reason for the international community’s collaboration with Indonesian aggression was expressed bluntly by Robert Kromer, CIA advisor to John F. Kennedy, who explained that,

“A pro-bloc, if not communist Indonesia, is an infinitely greater threat … than Indo possession of a few thousand miles of cannibal land.”

The international community was always going to recognise the result of the act of self-determination regardless of its legitimacy because, as J.M. Sutherland put it in a secret April 1968 internal UK Foreign Office memo, “no other power is likely to conceive it as being in their interests to intervene”. Sutherland continued, “I cannot imagine the US, Japanese, Dutch, or Australian Governments putting at risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia on a matter of principle involving a relatively small number of very primitive people.” According to a representative of the UK mission to the UN in 1969,

“the great majority of United Nations members want to see this question cleared out of the way with the minimum of fuss as soon as possible… the Secretariat, whose influence could be important, appear only too anxious to get shot of the problem as quickly and smoothly as possible.”

The British had long recognised that Indonesia was an important country, both strategically and economically. As the Foreign Office put it in 1958, Indonesia is “a country with a vast population and great potential wealth, and one in which United Kingdom interests are by no means negligible” (Mark Curtis, Unpeople; p. 191). They were not about to risk a valuable relationship with Indonesia over a small, unimportant dispute over a bunch of “primitive” tribespeople. It was important for Britain to keep Indonesia on side, in part because Indonesia itself presented great economic opportunities for Britain and in part because an “unstable” Indonesia threatened Britain’s post-colonial interests in Malaysia. A now-declassified 1964 Foreign Office document called for the “defence” of Western interests in South-East Asia, a “major producer of essential commodities. The region produces nearly 85 per cent of the world’s natural rubber, over 45 per cent of the tin, 65 per cent of the copra and 23 per cent of the chromium ore.” (John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World; p.30)

Likewise, the U.S. was worried that Indonesia might align itself with the Communist bloc (it had just a few years earlier assisted General Suharto in massacring up to a million suspected Communists), and in any case it didn’t want to jeopardise the exclusive 30-year mining license (extended by another 30 years in 1991) Indonesia had sold to U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan to extract West Papua’s valuable natural resources just a few years earlier in 1967. John Pilger writes,

“In November 1967, soon after Suharto had consolidated his seizure of power, the Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary conference in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, led by the banker David Rockefeller. Sitting opposite them were Suharto’s men, known as the “Berkeley mafia”, as several had enjoyed US government scholarships to the University of California at Berkeley. Over three days, the Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector. An American and European consortium was handed West Papua’s nickel; American, Japanese and French companies got its forests. However, the prize – the world’s largest gold reserve and third-largest copper deposit, literally a mountain of copper and gold – went to the US mining giant Freeport-McMoRan. On the board is Henry Kissinger, who, as US secretary of state, gave the “green light” to Suharto to invade East Timor”.

The Freeport mining corporation operates Grasberg, the largest single gold deposit in the world and the third largest open-cut copper mine. It is one of the, if not the, biggest single sources of revenue for the Indonesian government, paying generous royalties – which, together with taxes and dividends, totalled $1.6 billion last year – in return for subsidies and protection by the TNI (the Indonesian gangster-army), described by Pilger as “among the world’s most seasoned terrorists”. A joint statement by 12 human rights organisations in March 2003 concluded,

“The payment of money by Freeport to the armed forces and the fact that the armed forces have been able to make use of transnational facilities when violating human rights and committing violence means that the transnationals are themselves directly involved in and contribute towards this violence and these abuses.”

Freeport Indonesia is almost 10% owned by the Indonesian government, and reported revenue of $5.79 billion last year. With this volume of money involved, we should not be surprised when our governments stampede to get a slice of the pie, trampling on human rights and international law in the process.

Fast-forward to today, and the Indonesian occupation of West Papua is still going strong. More than 100,000 West Papuans, or 10% of the population, have been killed, whilst an illegal “transmigration” programme, supported by the World Bank, has resulted in over 750,000 Indonesians, many subsidised, re-settling in West Papua, where they now constitute around 40% of the population, and are the majority in the capital city and many other urban locations. Freeport-McMoRan has been given virtual free rein to resettle indigenous tribes that get in the way of its mining activities – the highland Amungme tribe, in particular, has suffered, with their displacement to the lowlands causing many to die of malaria. Freeport has extensively damaged the West Papuan environment (.pdf):

“The ecology of West Papua is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, with up to 7% of all plant and animal species being found there. Freeport’s mining operation in West Papua has destroyed this environment, which the Amungme and Kamoro hold sacred and subsist on. The mine has taken 120 meters off of the top of a sacred Amungme mountain. Freeport dumps millions of tons of silt-like tailings into the local river system, polluting it with metals and turning a miles-wide lowland river area into a dead, barren landscape. The river is now almost entirely devoid of any life. They pile toxic waste rock thousands of feet high at dumpsites in the surrounding area including at a sacred lake used by the Amungme. Filling valleys with mine waste that leaches copper, acid, and mercury into the ground, they have polluted springheads tribal people miles away use for drinking water. The rainwater run off from these toxic landfills has resulted in even more pollution. Local people have died when Freeport poisoned the water people drink, and the piles of waste have resulted in landslides.”

There is this myth that the Indonesian human rights violations in West Papua stopped with the fall of General Suharto in 1998. In reality, although the situation has improved somewhat, the oppression and the crimes continue. In February, Human Rights Watch reported that at least 18 West Papuans are serving sentences in Indonesian jails in violation of international law for the “crime” of peacefully expressing their opinions by raising the West Papuan flag, or attending meetings on self-determination, etc. etc. Such activities are labelled “treason” or “spreading hatred” by the Indonesian government. Amnesty International reported in 2005 that at least 62 prisoners of conscience have been convicted and sentenced to prison terms in Indonesia since 1998. On December 1 2004 (West Papuan `Independence Day’), some 200 people gathered to peacefully raise the Morning Star flag, a symbol of West Papuan freedom and therefore banned by Indonesia. Indonesian police descended on the crowd, firing rubber bullets and beating people with batons. They arrested and beat Filep Karma and Yusak Pakage, and charged them with treason for having “betrayed” Indonesia by raising the flag. They were convicted in May 2005 to 15 and 10 years in jail respectively. Amnesty International considers the two men to be prisoners of conscience.

In 2002, Amnesty International stated that human rights violations in West Papua are a “daily reality”, whilst in 2006 Human Rights Watch reported,

“[a]n ongoing, low-level armed insurgency in Papua, in the easternmost part of Indonesia, has resulted in crackdowns by Indonesian security forces with ensuing human rights violations. Since 2005, there has been a visible build-up of troops in the province with reports of widespread displacement of civilians, arson, and arbitrary detention in the central highlands region.”

The U.S. State Department summarised Indonesian violations of West Papuan rights in 2004:

“The Government’s human rights record remained poor; although there were improvements in a few areas, serious problems remained. Government agents continued to commit abuses, the most serious of which took place in areas of separatist conflict. Security force members murdered, tortured, raped, beat, and arbitrarily detained civilians and members of separatist movements, especially in Aceh and to a lesser extent in Papua.

Some police officers occasionally used excessive and sometimes deadly force in arresting suspects and in attempting to obtain information or a confession. Retired and active duty military officers known to have committed serious human rights violations occupied or were promoted to senior positions in the Government and the TNI. Prison conditions remained harsh.

The judicial system was corrupt, which contributed to the failure to provide redress to victims of human rights violations or hold perpetrators accountable. Security force violators sometimes used intimidation and bribery to avoid justice. Land disputes generated numerous human rights abuses. These frequently involved forced evictions, some accomplished with lethal force. As in previous years, the Government jailed some peaceful antigovernment protestors for “insulting the President” or “spreading hatred against the Government”…

Komnas HAM [the Indonesian Human Rights Organisation] concluded that military forces tortured villagers and committed other gross human rights violations. The Government did not report any progress in prosecuting those responsible for this or other acts of torture committed in Papua in 2003 or 2002, including the torturing to death of Yanuarius Usi…

In areas of separatist conflict, such as Aceh and Papua, police frequently and arbitrarily detained persons without warrants, charges, or court proceedings…

Although the Papua Special Autonomy Law permits flying a flag symbolizing Papua’s cultural identity, police prohibited the flying of the Papuan Morning Star flag, identified with the armed separatist struggle…

During the year, indigenous people remained subject to widespread discrimination, and there was little improvement in respect for their traditional land rights. Mining and logging activities, many of them illegal, posed significant social, economic, and logistical problems to indigenous communities. The Government failed to stop domestic and multinational companies, often in collusion with the local military and police, from encroaching on indigenous people’s land.”

In recent weeks, large numbers of Indonesian soldiers have been deployed to the Punkak Jaya region of West Papua, causing an estimated 5,000 tribespeople to flee into the jungle. A similar operation was conducted in 2004, with 6,000 West Papuans fleeing their homes, and 23 dying of starvation. Independent human rights NGOs are almost totally banned from West Papua, as are foreign journalists, so it’s often difficult to determine the extent of the atrocities committed by Indonesian forces during the course of operations like these.

In 2001, the Indonesian government negotiated a “Special Autonomy” law which aimed to appease the growing West Papuan drive for independence without actually granting them independence. It allowed West Papuans to exercise democratic rights to a greater extent than previously, and gave them a greater share of the profits of West Papua’s natural resources. Unfortunately, Indonesia never properly implemented it, opting instead to divide the province into three, adopting the age-old strategy of “divide and rule“. Of the extra money (.pdf) that has been given to West Papua, a lot of it “goes back to Jakarta or outside Papua, via individual or institutional means.” According to Rev. Socratez Sofyan Yoman, President of the Fellowship of Baptist Churches of West Papua,

“Special Autonomy has brought only great misfortune and is not very different from the `Act of Free Choice 1969′ (PEPERA 1969). Special Autonomy is PEPERA 1969 Volume II. Accordingly, killings and systematic violence have increased significantly using the excuse of OPM membership and separatism. Violence by the Indonesian military forces has increased. West Papuan people have been pursued, detained, terrorised, intimidated, imprisoned, tortured, raped, killed and disappeared.”

ELSHAM, a leading human rights NGO in Papua, agrees that the Special Autonomy law has not brought significant benefits to the majority of West Papuan people. “During the five years since the enactment of Special Autonomy, there has been no significant change and the human rights situation has only got worse with an increase in the number of violations”, it reports.

Despite West Papua’s valuable natural resources, West Papua is one of Indonesia’s poorest regions, and within the province the indigenous people are gnerally poorer than the migrants. More than 50% of children under five are malnourished, whilst the literacy rate is 44 per cent for women, and 58 per cent for men. The maternal mortality rate is three times greater in West Papua than in the rest of Indonesia.

A 2003 Yale Law School report (.pdf) states,

“Since Indonesia gained control of West Papua, the West Papuan people have suffered persistent and horrible abuses at the hands of the government. The Indonesian military and security forces have engaged in widespread violence and extrajudicial killings in West Papua. They have subjected Papuan men and women to acts of torture, disappearance, rape, and sexual violence, thus causing serious bodily and mental harm. Systematic resource exploitation, the destruction of Papuan resources and crops, compulsory (and often uncompensated) labor, transmigration schemes, and forced relocation have caused pervasive environmental harm to the region, undermined traditional subsistence practices, and led to widespread disease, malnutrition, and death among West Papuans. Such acts, taken as a whole, appear to constitute the imposition of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the West Papuans. Many of these acts, individually and collectively, clearly constitute crimes against humanity under international law.“[my emphasis]

The paper concluded, “the historical and contemporary evidence set out above strongly suggests that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. In other words, Indonesia has committed genocide against the West Papuan people.

International complicity in the occupation of West Papua continues today. The United States has consistently provided Indonesia with vast quantities of arms – roughly $1.25 billion’s worth since 1975, when Indonesia invaded East Timor with the approval of the Ford administration and proceeded to massacre 100,000 people (out of a population of 700,000) in five years. 90% of Indonesia’s military arsenal was made in the U.S. Since the killing of 271 unarmed and peaceful democracy demonstrators in 1991, the U.S. has imposed various degrees of military sanctions on Indonesia. A total ban on defence exports to the country was imposed after the killing spree in 1999, which left over a thousand East Timorese dead and destroyed 70% of the country’s infrastructure. The Bush administration ended the ban last year, calling Indonesia a “strategic partner”, despite Indonesia’s ongoing human rights abuses, and despite the fact that not one officer responsible for the 1999 massacre has spent a single day in jail.

Australia has also cooperated extensively with brutal Indonesian governments. The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) briefly summarises Australian involvement:

“The Australians have long been complicit in providing diplomatic and military support to Indonesia’s regime, partly due to their desire to obtain allies against Communist influence in South-east Asia from Vietnam and China, and partly due to their desire to exploit the rich natural resources around Timor and the Indonesian archipelago. The economic motive for Australia has become more significant in recent years as China’s increasing energy shortages have made the need to ensure protection of such resources for Australian exploitation more urgent.

Until recently, Australia had always turned a blind eye to the brutal Indonesian actions in East Timor. In January 1978 Malcolm Fraser’s government gave de facto recognition to Indonesia’s annexation, allowing drilling in the oilfields of Challis and Jabiru in the Timor Gap to begin. In 1985 the Labour government under Bob Hawke recognised the integration of East Timor into Indonesia, and in 1989 Australia and Indonesia signed a treaty dividing the Timor area into zones with exploration rights allocated to each country. Between 1986 and 1991 the Australian government gleaned AUS$31 million from the sale of permits to oil companies to exploit natural resources in the region.

In May 1997, Australia and Indonesia agreed a $1 billion military package to protect the Natuna gasfield in the South China Sea, including provision for airborne early-warning systems, maritime patrol aircraft, frigates, SAMs and air-surveillance radar. The Australians had already sold the Indonesians 20 Nomad maritime patrol aircraft which arrived in January 1997.

In November 1997 military ties between the two countries were increased with the expansion of the exchange scheme of Indonesian and Australian officers for training purposes, as well as the holding of joint naval exercises with the Germans in the same month. The IISS listed Australian military aid to Indonesia in 1996 as worth US$4 million, in 1997 it was worth US$4.5 million and in 1998 US$3.5 million.”

The Australian government has explicitly stated many times that it respects Indonesia’s “territorial integrity” (i.e. it respects Indonesia’s right to steal West Papuan land and abuse West Papuan rights), and last year the two countries signed a security treaty, which involved “significant military-to-military co-operation, intelligence sharing and joint naval and surveillance patrols. Ties between armed forces will be strengthened by exchange and training programs.”

Britain, too, is heavily complicit in Indonesian war crimes. As historian Mark Curtus points out, “Britain has extensive business interests in West Papua, with Rio Tinto, the world’s largest mining company, set to own 40 per cent of the Freeport copper and gold mine, the world’s largest, and BP set to initiate a large gas project in the territory.” (Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit; p. 197) Hence, in June 2001 British ambassador Richard Gozney made a statement supporting Indonesian military operations in West Papua, since they would ensure protection for a BP site there. Hence, Defence Minister Geoff Hoon said that the Indonesian government should “respond appropriately to separatist movements”. Hence, Tony Blair pledged British support for Indonesia’s “territorial integrity” in February 2000. (Ibid.) Britain continues to sell BAE Hawk aircraft to Indonesia, in the full knowledge that they may well be used to perpetrate war crimes or human rights abuses. Indonesia has used Hawk aircraft in the past to oppress the people of West Papua, Aceh and East Timor, but that apparently means nothing to the arms dealers in Whitehall.

We should not be at all surprised at this overt support of Indonesian oppression. Britain was complicit in General Suharto’s murder of up to a million suspected Communists in 1965, and was a major arms supplier to Indonesia throughout its genocide in East Timor, in which 200,000 people (or a third of the population) were slaughtered. Britain sold General Suharto – described variously as “one of our best and most valuable friends” by Margaret Thatcher, “our kind of guy” by Bill Clinton, “the man of the world of the second half of this century” by then-Australian Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer (John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World; pp. 22-3) and the man who oversaw “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century” by the CIA – Scorpion tanks, Heckler and Koch machine guns, armoured cars and water cannons, as well as Hawk aircraft, knowing full well the repression and massacres he was committing with them.

Ironically, during Labour’s first year in government, Britain was the world’s leading supplier of arms to Indonesia, when, despite the late Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy” speech, Blair used the Official Secrets Act to approve 11 arms deals with Indonesia. During the first three years of the Labour Government, 83% of Indonesia’s arms imports were from the UK. In 2003, the government approved a 20-fold increase in arms sales to Indonesia, despite guidelines preventing weapons sales to countries where they could be used for internal repression (as they undoubtedly have been in Aceh and West Papua). Here’s what the U.S. State Department had to say about Indonesia that same year:

“The Government’s human rights record remained poor, and it continued to commit serious abuses. Security force members murdered, tortured, raped, beat, and arbitrarily detained civilians and members of separatist movements…

In the easternmost province of Papua, where separatist sentiment has been strong for decades, there was no improvement in the human rights situation. The most serious violations took place in the Central Highlands, where at least one, and perhaps as many as 10, extrajudicial killings occurred, in addition to numerous acts of torture and politically motivated arson.”

In December 2004, the British government finally acknowledged that the 1,022 West Papuan “handpicked representatives” in the `Act of Free Choice’ were “largely coerced into declaring for inclusion in Indonesia”, but of course they’ve known this for decades. The 1969 British FCO briefing, cited above, reported that “the process of consultation did not allow a genuinely free choice to be made”. Bizarrely, despite accepting that the right of self-determination has so far been denied to the West Papuan people, it remains British government policy to support the Indonesian occupation. As Baroness Royall put it in a recent House of Lords debate,

“the UK does not support independence for Papua. Like the vast majority of other international players, we respect Indonesia’s territorial integrity and have never supported Papuan independence.”

At least she’s honest. Lord Harries of Pentregarth explained the reason for this morally bankrupt stance:

“A number of powerful countries have strong economic ties to Indonesia, not least in the arms trade, and will be only too anxious not to make a fuss about this matter, as they were anxious not to make a fuss about it at the time of the so-called “Act of Free Choice” in 1969. We are, of course, one of those countries.”

Britain has continued to fuel and facilitate Indonesia’ oppression of the people of West Papua and Aceh, even as it claims to be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to “liberate” their people from tyranny. This reveals a lot about the sincerity of the official humanitarian justifications for the invasion of Iraq. Supposedly, it was necessary to launch a full-scale military invasion, with a massive human cost, in order to save the Iraqi people from the Saddam Hussein’s repression. In contrast, all it would take to free the West Papuans from Indonesian oppression is to cease participating in it. Apparently, however, halting arms sales to Indonesia is neither “realistic” nor “practical” (then-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, speaking in July 1997), unlike the hugely expensive and strategically disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Both Britain and the U.S. were complicit in Saddam’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, Suharto’s genocide of the East Timorese and in the genocide of close to a million Iraqis through the post-Gulf war decade of sanctions. Today, we continue to facilitate the genocidal Indonesian occupation of West Papua. Continuing Western complicity in the oppression of the West Papuan people speaks volumes about the true extent of our supposed commitment to human rights, democracy and freedom.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Iraqi insurgents’ claim to be “fighting for the liberation of their country” is, according to Prime Minister Tony Blair, “a palpable lie.” Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether it is appropriate for Blair, a man who deceived his country into an illegal war, to accuse others of lying. More important is that in one respect, he is right: it does indeed seem “palpable” (i.e. clear or obvious) to most people that the Iraqi resistance has no legitimacy. Rather, the insurgents are just a bunch of crazy-psycho-terrorists who hate democracy and freedom so much that they are willing to kill other Iraqis to fight it. It is not difficult to see how people could have got that impression.
On October 30, 2003, the chief foreign policy commentator for the liberal New York Times, Thomas Friedman, wrote:

“The people who mounted the attacks on the Red Cross are not the Iraqi Vietcong. They are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge–a murderous band of Saddam Hussein loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists, who are not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.

The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the US in Iraq because–unlike many leftists–they understand exactly what this war is about. They understand that US power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world during the cold war. They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched–a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.”

In a speech in 2004, President Bush described the insurgency thus:

“They seek the total control of every person in mind and soul; a harsh society in which women are voiceless and brutalized. They seek bases of operation to train more killers and export more violence. They commit dramatic acts of murder to shock, frighten and demoralize civilized nations, hoping we will retreat from the world and give them free reign. They seek weapons of mass destruction to impose their will through blackmail and catastrophic attacks.”

In June 2004, ITV News described the insurgents as “determined and brutal terrorists”. Liberal commentator Michael Ignatieff branded the resistance “hateful” in the New York Times on June 27 2004, whilst in July, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme – Newsnight – reported that insurgent attacks were “blighting US attempts to bring peace and stability to Iraq”. On October 1 2004, the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell described a series of insurgent attacks as “intended to undermine the future”. In September, the same journalist reported,

“As is so often the case in this conflict it’s the Iraqi civilian population which suffers the greatest loss of life – either as a result of mistakes by the Americans, or, far more frequently, of course, as a result of the bombs and the bullets of the insurgents.”

In July 2005, a Guardian article approvingly cited a spokesman for Iraqi President Jalal Talabani as saying,

“Take a good look at these figures. They show that the real aim of the insurgents is simply to kill as many people as they can.

“All civilians are targets: young and old, male and female, Sunni, Shia or Kurd. It should also tell you more and more about those who talk of “an honest resistance”.

On September 1 2006, Edward Wong reported in the New York Times that,

“Since Sunday, more than 300 Iraqis have been killed in bombings, murders and a deadly pipeline explosion…The violence is generally believed to be the work of insurgents, militias and criminal gangs embroiled in Sunni-Shiite sectarian strife”,

thereby grouping “insurgents” with “militias and criminal gangs”, involved in “Sunni-Shiite sectarian strife” as opposed to fighting the occupation.

Of course, the insurgency has no “popular support” (Charles Krauthammer, FOX News, May 2004), or else the extent of Iraqi support for the insurgency is “unknown” (USA Today, May 2004).

Writing in The Guardian yesterday, Peter Beaumont depicts the insurgents as brutal and immoral “jihadi fighters”, who “use human shields and force children to run weapons for them.” Meanwhile, the occupying forces are painted as benevolent bystanders, trying their hardest to combat the evil jihadis whilst sparing innocent civilian lives.

The demonisation of the Iraqi insurgency is understandable. It is in the interests of the political elites, and the corporate media that serve them, to portray any opposition to Western imperial policies as illegitimate, terroristic and barbaric. That an imperialistic or occupying power will attempt to demonise any resistance to it is a historical universal, as writer and activist Tariq Ali points out:

“Every resistance movement against imperialism has been categorised as terrorist < the Mau Mau in Kenya were demonised and brutally tortured by the British; the Algerian FLN by the French; the Vietnamese by the French and the Americans.

Today Israel’s Ariel Sharon refers to Palestinians as terrorists, Russia’s Vladimir Putin crushes the Chechens in the name of fighting terror and Tony Blair is assaulting traditional civil liberties in this country in the name of fighting terror. It’s hardly surprising that the Iraqi resistance is characterised in the same fashion.”

A quick examination of the reality, however, tells a very different story. Firstly, the Iraqi resistance is overwhelmingly indigenous. According to Major General Joseph Taluto, “99.9 per cent” of militants captured fighting U.S. forces in Iraq are Iraqi. When U.S. and Iraqi soldiers `methodically swept through Tall Afar’ in the largest counter-insurgency operation of 2005, they killed nearly 200 insurgents and detained close to 1,000. All those detained were Iraqi. Serious analysts of the occupation have long recognised that, in Scott Ritter’s words, the “anti-US resistance in Iraq today is Iraqi in nature, and more broadly based and deeply rooted than acknowledged.” In a recent article for the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, Stephen Zunes writes (.pdf) that “the al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists and the foreign fighters upon whom the Bush administration has focused represent only a small minority of the insurgency.” The U.S. and UK governments, together with the Western media, focus disproportionately on the very few foreign fighters present in Iraq to minimise Iraqi opposition to the occupation and to delegitimise the resistance. In addition, as Zunes explains, branding the entire resistance movement “terrorists” (or by focusing disproportionately on al-Qaeda’s small role in the insurgency, thereby associating the insurgency as a whole with terrorism) enables Bush and Blair to present Iraq as a front in the “war on terror”, whereas in fact it is nothing of the sort, and to “portray the US invasion and occupation of Iraq not as an act of aggression – as most of the international community sees it – but as an act of self-defence. By extension, it seeks to portray those who oppose the ongoing US occupation as appeasers or even supporters of totalitarianism and violence.” According to Zunes, the number of foreign insurgents fighting with an agenda even remotely resembling that described by President Bush above constitutes “well under 5 per cent of the armed resistance.”

Speaking yesterday, Tony Blair encapsulated perfectly this fallacy about the Iraqi resistance:

“These forces that are operating in Iraq at the moment are not the fault of a lack of planning or administration. It is a deliberate attempt [by] external extremists, like al-Qaida [and] like elements connected to Iran, who are linking up with internal extremists to thwart the will of the majority.”

Why mention al-Qaeda, which represents a tiny proportion of the insurgency, except in order to demonise the resistance by associating it with the ultimate bogeyman? This extract from Blair’s speech also contains another major misrepresentation of the resistance: that it is composed of “extremists” who are thwarting the “will of the majority”. In reality, it is the Coalition forces who are opposing the will of the majority in Iraq (not to mention their own countries), as illustrated by poll after poll after poll after poll after poll after poll. Numerous polls also demonstrate that insurgents who attack Coalition forces do so with widespread popular support. Only two conclusions can be drawn from Blair’s insistence that the Iraqi resistance is not backed by the Iraqi people: he’s either living in a fantasy world, or he’s bullshitting again.

Another frequent technique used to demonise the Iraqi resistance is to insinuate (or state outright) that it is composed entirely of terrorists who target and murder innocent civilians. Once again, this simply isn’t the case. While it is true that Iraqi insurgents occasionally target civilians, the vast majority of insurgent attacks target Coalition or Iraqi Security forces. Suicide bombings in crowded markets, and other atrocities like them, are usually either sectarian in nature (the insurgency is separate from the sectarian conflict, despite the deliberate conflation of the two by the media and government officials) or are perpetrated by the few foreign jihadis that are operating in Iraq (for example, Al-Qaeda). According to an August 2006 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, of 1,666 bombs exploded in Iraq in July, 90% were aimed at U.S.-led forces. Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate in February 2006, reported that,

“New data reveal, surprisingly, that the vast majority of the Iraqi insurgents’ attacks are still aimed not at Iraqi security forces or at civilians, but rather at U.S. and coalition troops. In other words, as much as was the case a year or two ago, the Iraqi insurgency is primarily an anti-occupation insurgency”.

(via lenin)

The “new data” he was referring to was a report (.pdf) compiled by the multinational military command in Iraq, which contained the following graph:

It clearly shows that the vast majority of insurgent attacks have targeted Coalition forces, not civilians.

To summarise, then: the resistance to the occupation of Iraq is legitimate. It has the support of the majority of the Iraqi people, and by and large it does not target civilians.

It is in this light that we should examine the Bush administration’s attempts to vilify alleged Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents, possibly with a view to providing a pretext for a war with Iran. In Bush’s words,

“My job is to protect our troops, and when we find devices that are in that country that are hurting our troops, we’re going to do something about it, pure and simple.”

Many analysts – Milan Rai and Media Lens, to name two – have done an excellent job in demolishing the “evidence” provided by the Bush administration blaming Iran for insurgent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. As Juan Cole has pointed out, the charge against Iran is nonsensical in and of itself, since the only Iraqi groups Iran could plausibly be supporting are Shi’ite militias, whereas the vast majority of attacks on U.S. troops are perpetrated by Sunnis. Moreover, the groups Iran is being accused of supporting are the very same ones being supported by the U.S.

However, it is certainly conceivable that at some point in the future, the Bush administration will be able to provide genuine evidence of Iranian aid to militant groups in Iraq. Will it then follow that an attack on Iran is justified? The question is an interesting one: should we despise Iran for aiding the insurgent attacks that are killing our troops, or should we respect them for it? Certainly, it is taken as a given across the board that American aid to resistance movements is noble and just. As Noam Chomsky explains,

“There’s a somber debate underway about whether Washington really has evidence about Iranian support for anti-occupation forces, or whether it’s a replay of the deceit preceding the Iraq invasion. Strikingly, there is no debate about whether support for anti-occupation forces would be justified — particularly when US-run polls show that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis want them out, either immediately (2/3 in Baghdad according to US-polls) or soon. The debate is intriguing.

There was no debate in the 1980s about whether the US had the right to provide support to anti-occupation forces in Afghanistan (there was some debate about whether it would be costly to us, but not about the right). It was taken for granted that the US had the right to support resistance to aggression. In Pravda there wouldn’t have been a debate about whether the US and its allies (Britain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,…) were in fact providing support for the resistance to the Soviet occupation, because there was no doubt about it. The US was proudly proclaiming it. True, the cases are not identical, only analogous. The Soviet invasion, though criminal, was based on real security concerns on its borders, while the US invasion had no credible pretext. And there are other differences. But the point is that the right of the US to use force and violence and the illegitimacy of any resistance to it is a Holy Doctrine, which cannot be questioned in polite society, even thought about.

Therefore debate is confined to the marginal question of whether Iran is in fact providing support to forces opposing the US occupation. Similarly, the debate over US tactics is restricted to the question of what is likely to work. That was not the debate over the Russian invasion of Afghanistan — though I presume it was in Moscow.”

Michael Perry, writing for Antiwar.com, says similar things:

“But let’s go even further and say, for the sake of argument, that the Iraqi insurgents are receiving officially authorized aid from the Iranian state. It is true that having a neighboring nation in chaos does not generally benefit any country, but the Iranians have been under the gun from the U.S. for a very long time – decades, in fact. The recent threats and provocations from the Bush administration make it clear that Iran is an imminent target. I’m quite sure the Iranians realize that the quagmire in Iraq is the primary impediment to an American invasion of Iran. Troubles for U.S. forces in Iraq may buy the Iranians more time. Could the Iranians be so blind to their own self-interests?

Beyond the practical justifications for Iranian involvement in Iraq, there are also moral rationales. If Russia were to invade Mexico, at least some in the U.S. government would support the Mexican insurgents against the Russian occupiers. And most Americans would back such assistance. Aiding one’s neighbors against an unwelcome occupation is not only reasonable, it is generally considered worthy of respect.”

Throughout mainstream commentary, there is an unspoken assumption that if it were true that Iran is helping Iraqis to attack Coalition troops, the U.S. would be justified in retaliating. There is certainly no suggestion from any “respectable” publication that the resistance in Iraq is justified, and that therefore Iran should be praised for supporting it. That such an obvious argument has been totally excluded from the mainstream debate tells us a lot about the honesty of our intellectual culture and the integrity of our “free press”.

The issue of “supporting the troops” is a sensitive one – families who have sons or daughters serving in Iraq do not want to hear that attacks on them may be justified. That is completely understandable – the soldiers serving in Iraq are just kids, often from a deprived background, who trusted and were let down by their governments who sent them into an illegal and immoral war of choice. Indeed, the wish to shield the troops from further harm is a major factor in the movement to bring them home. But we must not let the Bush administration’s hijack of our strong, emotional desire to protect the troops convince us that an attack on Iran would be justified in order to defend them.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Australian newspapers reported on Wednesday that United States is to build a new military base in Geraldton, Western Australia. The facility will join existing major U.S. spy bases in Australia at Pine Gap and North West Cape. The decision was announced formally after three years of secret negotiations by Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, who went on to state that several more of these “ground stations” may be built at other locations across Australia. The purpose of the new base is to `provide a crucial link for a new network of military satellites that will help America’s ability to fight wars in the Middle East and Asia.’ Great.
Australia is already heavily tied up with American foreign policy – Blair is often branded “Bush’s poodle”, but the label could just as easily be applied to the hawkish Australian Prime Minister John Howard – he is often mocked for his desire to be the “deputy sheriff” of the United States. Howard, like George Bush and Tony Blair, lied his people into the Iraq war, claiming military action was necessary to combat Saddam’s WMD arsenal, which apparently constituted a “direct undeniable and lethal threat to Australia”. In fact, Australia only contributed some 2,000 troops to the initial invasion – hardly enough to significantly affect the outcome of the war. Rather, Australian involvement was more symbolic; a gesture of solidarity with the United States in its quest for global hegemony. Or, more accurately, an attempt to curry favour with the world’s superpower and give Australia the semblance of political clout and international influence by hanging on to the U.S.’ coat-tails – a strategy Tony Blair should be very familiar with.

The new military base will, as the New Zealand Herald puts it, result in Australia `being locked deeper into America’s global military agenda’:

`Canberra has already tightened its security co-operation with the US through a range of measures including participation in the proposed “son of Star Wars” national missile defence system, increased training, and new military hardware designed to enable Australian troops to fight with American forces abroad.’

Philip Dorling, visiting Fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said that once the base is operating, it will be almost impossible for Australia to be fully neutral or stand back from any war in which the U.S. is involved:

“Once again the Howard Government is extremely eager to add another strand to Australia’s alliance with the US.

“If the Americans are involved in conflict anywhere in the Indian and Pacific oceans, basically our half of the hemisphere, Australia will be directly involved by providing vital intelligence and communications links.”

He also noted that the base would become a target for enemies of the United States. Denis Doherty, national co-ordinator of the Australian Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition, agrees:

“US bases make Australia a target for nuclear and terrorist attacks…They increase the US hold on Australian foreign policy, undermine Australia’s security and add even more to the already out-of-control Australian military budget, which is running at A$55 million a day.”

Dr. Michael McKinley, senior lecturer in international relations at the Australian National University (ANU), described the construction of the base as “a serious surrender of national sovereignty”. “The Australian Government will not be able to withdraw its support for a US military operation, even if it disagrees with it”, he explained.

Interestingly, the announcement about the military base came just as the U.S. formally refused to sell Australia any F-22 Raptor aircraft (the most advanced warplane in the world). The regional hierarchy is clear – no matter how much Australia tries to cosy-up to the U.S., there will only ever be one top-dog in the hemisphere.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that 60% of Australians view the U.S. as having a “negative” influence in the world while 69% of Australians feel that Australia takes “too much” notice of the U.S. in its foreign policy, the Howard government’s agreement to bind Australia still further to American foreign policy by permitting the construction of yet another U.S. military base on Australian soil `is unlikely to draw serious political opposition`. On the contrary; the opposition party has already declared its full support for the government on the issue. As ABC (the Australian public service broadcaster) radio reported yesterday, this has been “a week when both sides of politics have been stressing the importance of the US alliance”. “All week”, reporter Peta Donald explained, “the Government and the Opposition have been trying to outdo each other on the question of who is a better friend of the United States.”

Evidently, when it comes to support for servility to the United States, Australia is suffering from a definite democracy deficit. In this, as we shall see, it is not alone.

The United Kingdom also enjoys a close relationship with the United States. Ironically, it was Britain’s nostalgic desire to retain an influential political presence on the world stage that led to its increasing dependence on and servility to the United States (the 1956 Suez crisis, in particular, made it clear that Britain was no longer a world power in its own right).

As with Australia, there is a clear and definite gap between public opinion and political will on Britain’s relationship with the U.S. For example, the British public view President Bush as a greater threat to world peace than President Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il and Hassan Nasrallah, and yet Tony Blair is having to defend our “special relationship” with with the U.S. and not with Iran, North Korea or Hizbullah. Indeed, we are left with the absurd situation where all the main political parties support Britain’s close alliance with the U.S. despite the fact that the majority of the public view the American president as one of the greatest threats to world peace on the planet (second only to Osama bin Laden). The British public also see the U.S. presence in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace than Iran, and yet all the major political parties argue for continued cooperation with the U.S.-led occupation whilst advocating sanctions against Iran.

Britain’s nuclear “deterrent”, Trident, is an excellent example of how our desire for power and influence has left us hopelessly subordinate to our master across the Atlantic. Firstly, whilst marketed as an “independent” deterrent, Trident is in fact nothing of the sort. Dan Plesch summarises the extent of U.S. involvement in our Trident programme:

`But can this system be called independent when so much of it is, as modern business-speak would have it, sourced in America? The deterrent is carried in four Vanguard-class submarines that were designed and built in Britain, incorporating US components and reactor technology. The delivery system is the Trident D-5 missile, which is designed, made and stored in the United States. The firing system is also designed and made in the US. So is the guidance system. The computer software is American. The warhead design is based on the US W-76 bomb. The warheads are produced by Aldermaston, which is co-managed by the US firm Lockheed Martin and uses a great deal of US technology. Some vital nuclear explosive parts are imported, we now know, from the US, as are some non-nuclear parts. The warhead factory is a copy of a facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The submarine maintenance base is also 51 per cent owned by Halliburton of the US.’

Moreover, Trident is not even operationally independent. That is, it would be very difficult if not impossible for the UK to launch a Trident nuclear missile if the U.S. was opposed to it. As Plesch reports (.pdf),

`The pro-replacement argument boils down to the need to have a weapon in case we face 1940 [i.e. a situation where the UK stands alone against a serious military threat from another state] again, but the irony is that in an obvious worst case of facing a hostile or neutral US the US would have every incentive and ability to remove the UK capability or prevent it from being used. In such circumstances a US-sourced system would be worse than useless if the public and the political elite had been left with the comfortable delusion that the weapon was independent.’

The result of our “prolonged and humiliating dependence on the United States” (in the words of former Chancellor Denis Healey) is that we are almost inextricably bound to U.S. foreign policy. As Dan Plesch writes, `Did Britain have to invade Iraq? No, but if we had not, when the Mutual Defence Agreement came up for renewal in 2004 would John Bolton have recommended to his president that Britain was worthy of another ten years of nuclear supplies “in light of our previous close co-operation”?’ It’s unlikely.

A secret British government assessment released in 1988, entitled `The Dangers of Becoming an American Satellite`, concluded:

`The UK, in its relatively weak position, is already greatly dependent upon United States support. It would be surprising if the United States did not exact a price for the support, and to some extent it does so…the more we rely upon them, the more we shall be hurt if they withhold it.’

As I have written before,

`Indeed the United States has exacted a price for [its] support – subservience. We are paying that price in blood on the battlefields of Iraq. The United States often follows policies that are harmful to British interests (they are usually harmful to American interests as well) and, due to our complete dependence on the U.S. for our nuclear deterrent, we are bound to follow those policies, as with Iraq. Replacing Trident would be like re-forging our shackles and handing the master back his whip.’

And yet, that is precisely what the government is proposing. When confronted with the initial estimate of the cost of replacing Trident – £25 billion – 54% of the British public were opposed to it (only a third were in favour). However, defence officials have now confirmed that the full cost of renewing Trident, including £1.5 billion per year in maintenance, will be closer to £65 billion over 30 years. Doubtless, if another opinion poll were conducted using the true cost, the percentage of the public who oppose renewing Trident would be much higher. Despite this, not a single major political party opposes the renewal of Trident (the Lib Dems argue for delaying the decision until 2010).

British subservience to the United States does not only damage the democratic system at home. By associating Britain so closely with disastrous U.S. foreign policy, most notably with the Iraq war, our government has sacrificed the security of the British people. Virtually every intelligence agency and every sensible analyst now agrees that the Iraq war made American and British citizens less secure. The price of following U.S. foreign policy so unquestioningly is not measured in pounds alone (the UK has the second biggest defence budget in the world, despite facing no conventional military threat whatsoever). It is measured in blood.

The problem is that the United States’ explicit goal is global hegemony, as it has been ever since the end of WWII (prior to that it was merely regional domination, through the Monroe Doctrine). Its foreign policy is formulated with the aim of furthering that goal, as well as advancing the interests of the American business elite. U.S. foreign policy is not intended to further the interests of client states such as Australia and the UK. Indeed, as we have seen, it is often disastrous for these countries.

In the Middle East, for example, Israel’s almost total dependence on the diplomatic and military aid provided by the United States has turned it into a virtual U.S. army base. Almost unquestioning support and adherence to U.S. policies and designs for the region is a given, even when the costs to Israel of these policies are enormous. For example, we recently learned that secret Israeli-Syrian negotiations were conducted between September 2004 and July 2006 that resolved most of the issues standing in the way of a peace. The discussions ended with the advent of the Lebanon war, but since then Syria has several times requested a resumption of peace talks “without preconditions”. Israel has simply rejected the idea out of hand, despite overwhelming support for such talks amongst the Israeli public. Prime Minister Olmert has openly stated that his reason for refusing to engage Syria in talks, which, if successful, would contribute far more to Israeli security than a hundred Lebanon wars, is that the U.S. favours a strategy of isolating Syria. As he explained:

“At a time when the president of the United States, Israel’s most important ally, with whom we have a network of strategic relations — when he is fighting in every arena, both at home in America, in Iraq and in other places in the world, against all the elements that want to weaken him — is this the time for us to say the opposite?”

U.S. control over Europe is such that it is pressuring members of NATO (which has no reason for existing other than to facilitate U.S.-led aggressions that are not approved by UN (e.g. Afghanistan) and to provide another market for the American defence industry) to increase their defence spending, buying from U.S. firms of course, despite the fact that Europe currently faces no conventional military threat, and will not do so for the forseeable future. A recent EU report confirmed that European countries, including Britain, France, Germany and several eastern European states, actively colluded with or turned a blind eye to CIA `torture flights’, such was their determination not to upset the boss.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is correct to say that a “unipolar world”, where “there is one centre of authority, one centre of force, [and] one centre of decision-making” has “nothing in common with democracy”. It is not that the U.S. is uniquely evil; rather, it is uniquely powerful and whenever huge amounts of power are concentrated in few hands, corruption, dictatorship and oppression inevitably follow. As David Clarke writes, the U.S.’ long history of aggression and terrorism is not “a reflection of the American character”, but is rather an “inevitable consequence of unrestrained power.” The horrific consequences of an all-powerful global hegemon can be seen with a quick look through even recent history. Putin is not being hyperbolic when he describes the “almost unrestrained hyper-use of force – military force – in international relations, a force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts”. The U.S. has always granted itself the de facto right to act unilaterally, but the Bush administration has gone one step further and openly declared that the U.S. reserves the right to wage unilateral preventive war, in complete violation of international law and norms, to protect its “interests”. This policy of unilateral aggression has resulted in the deaths of millions of people in the latter 20th century alone and, with increasing nuclear proliferation, the consequences for humanity in the 21st century could well be a lot worse.

Putin is right to call for a multi-polar world. Britain should concentrate on strengthening the EU as a counter-weight to U.S. power – in this, they could do a lot worse than to learn from the phenomenal progress that has been made by some South American states – Chavez’ Venezuela and Morales’ Bolivia, to give two examples – in increasing the independence of individual states and the region as a whole. But we must also understand that without a system of international law that is effectively enforced and universally applied, states will always perpetrate crimes and aggressions against each other. As Putin said, “We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law…It results in the fact that no one feels safe”.

The latter 20th century was characterised by the growth of an unrivalled and unrestrained superpower, and the terrible atrocities that resulted from this. If we are interested in working towards peace and freedom, we must make sure that the 21st century is characterised by a just distribution of power and the development of an effective and democratic UN. A critical first step is for countries like the UK and Israel to make a conscious decision to commit themselves to working with and integrating into their respective regions, at the expense of their current servility to the United States. Spreading freedom is a good idea – indeed, it may well be critical to the survival of the species – but it is not done, as George Bush would have us believe, by granting the global superpower yet more power and more authority to do as it wishes. As commonsense should dictate, precisely the opposite is true. It’s time we started taking the ideas of democracy and freedom seriously, and we must begin by placing a check on the unhealthy and dictatorial power currently wielded by the United States of America.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

“Slowly, painstakingly, but inexorably, Hamas is moving away from its traditional notion that Palestine is an Islamic waqf [land-in-trust] `from the river to the sea…Hamas is signaling that it accepts Israel as a political reality today and is intimating that it would accept a final agreement with Israel `according to the parameters of the [1991] Madrid conference and U.N. resolutions,’ says Palestinian analyst Khaled Hroub, an authority on the Islamist party.”

– Graham Usher, veteran Palestine correspondent for The Economist (Middle East Report Online, 21/8/05)

“[There are] signs of pragmatism [from Hamas]…far more than Fatah, Hamas has proved a disciplined adherent to the cease-fire, and Israeli military officers readily credit this for the sharp decline in violence. In recent statements, Hamas leaders have not ruled out changing their movement’s charter, negotiating with Israel or accepting a long-term truce on the basis of an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines…today, their electoral platform is in these respects closer to Fatah’s outlook than to Hamas’ founding principles.”

– Robert Malley, former Middle East policy director of the National Security Council under Clinton, reporting for the International Crisis Group (18/1/06)

“Hamas is clear in terms of [both] the historical solution and an interim solution,…We are ready for both: the borders of 1967, a state, elections and [a peace] agreement after ten to fifteen years of building trust.”

– Usama Hamdan, chief Hamas representative in Lebanon (2003)

“The charter is not the Koran…Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about political solutions…The realities are different…[If Israel reached a stage where it felt able to talk to Hamas] I don’t think there will be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis.”

– Mohammed Ghazal, a Hamas candidate representing Nablus, speaking to Reuters. A week later, he was `arrested’ by Israeli soldiers. (21/9/05)

“We can accept to establish our independent state on the area before ’67, and we can give [Israel] a long-term hudna…More than that, under certain conditions…And after that, let time heal…Give us one or two, 10, 15 years time in order to see what is the real intention of Israel after that.”

– Hamas hardliner Mahmoud Zahar, later appointed Foreign Minister (29/1/06)

“If Israel declares that it will give the Palestinian people a state and give them back all their rights then we are ready to recognize them.”

– Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh (26/2/06)

“Everybody in Hamas says `yes’ to the two-state solution,…The problem comes from the fact that the Israelis so far [have not said they] accept the 1967 borders between the two states.”

– Hamas parliamentary speaker Aziz Duweik (May 2006)

All the above quotes, except where otherwise stated, come from an excellent article by Seth Ackerman for media-watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting), entitled `Nixed Signals`, in which he analyses and demonstrates how the mainstream media in the United States have consistently misrepresented Hamas’ position on peace with Israel.

Now, of course, I could just as easily find a few statements by Hamas members that say the opposite, that argue against any acceptance of Israel even inside the pre-1967 borders (in fact more easily, since statements of this nature are actually reported). This is to be expected – the Hamas movement is not homogenous by any means, and incorporates both hardliners and `moderates’ whose views are similar to those of Fatah. Hamas’ position on peace with Israel is ambiguous, for sure, but it is simply wrong to write them off as “sworn to Israel’s destruction”. It’s wrong for two reasons – firstly, as discussed above, Hamas’ position is ambiguous on the issue, and in fact most specialists on Hamas agree that there is a growing consensus within the Hamas movement advocating a two-state solution based on international law. Secondly, it is wrong because it depicts Hamas as some fanatical group, immune to change or reform, on a divine mission to liberate the whole of historical Palestine or to kill all the Jews. This just isn’t true – in his article, Ackerman cites a report by Israel’s leading specialists on Hamas, Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, which cautions that, despite its fanatical image, Hamas “is not a prisoner of its own dogmas. It does not shut itself behind absolute truths, nor does it subordinate its activities and decisions to the officially held religious doctrine.” On the contrary: Hamas possesses an “ability to justify controversial political conduct in religious terms” and a “willingness to exist with internal contradictions.” Mishal and Sela conclude that, “[w]e cannot rule out the possibility of a significant shift in Hamas’ relations with Israel to the point that what seems ideologically heretical in the present might become inevitable in the future.”

I’ve made a similar point before – in this conflict, as in others, religion and ideology are used when they’re convenient, and discarded or “re-interpreted” or ignored when they aren’t. The fact that the Hamas Charter still calls for the destruction of the state of Israel is meaningless – when it was drafted in 1988 it was politically convenient for Hamas to spout an Islamist ideology of uncompromising militancy. Today, when Hamas is no longer politically marginalised and, in fact, heads the Palestinian government, it isn’t. (Incidentally, while we often hear talk of how terrible the Hamas Charter is, no one ever seems to talk about the charter of the Likud party, which “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”) The reason for the ambiguity in Hamas’ position on the issue is because a) there remain some hardliners in the movement and b) Hamas demands reciprocity. In other words, it isn’t willing to make concessions in the absence of an Israeli willingness to do the same. As I say, most respected observers of the conflict agree that if serious talks were held, based on an Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line and the creation of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, Hamas would agree to a two-state settlement.

Israel’s position is, on the other hand, not ambiguous at all. As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, not a single Israeli leader nor a single mainstream Israeli political party has ever advocated a two-state settlement based on international law. This includes the current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who declared, whilst still Deputy PM to Ariel Sharon, that Israel “should forever keep the city of Jerusalem undivided”. He also stated that he doesn’t support the Geneva Accord because it “implies a complete withdrawal to the 1967 lines” and it “implies the redivision of Jerusalem”, both of which are “totally unacceptable”. What, after all, was Kadima’s “realignment” policy if not one of unilateral annexation of Palestinian land?

Whereas Hamas has made explicit overtures (not just verbal – Hamas self-imposed and largely kept to a ceasefire for over a year) suggesting that if Israel deigned to talk to them, they would be willing to negotiate based on the internationally accepted two-state solution, Israel has been consistent and crystal clear in its flat-out rejection of such a settlement. It is pretty clear to anyone who looks at the conflict honestly that it is the Palestinians who are in need of a partner for peace, not the other way around.

After Hamas was elected last January, Israel didn’t capitalise on Hamas’ many offers of negotiations for a two-state settlement. Instead it, together with its international backers, embarked on a policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian people, which, through severe economic strangulation and brutal military force, was designed to force the collapse of the Hamas government from within. Why was Israel so opposed to a Hamas government? Because, as Council on Foreign Relations Middle East specialist Henry Siegman writes,

“Hamas is not opposed to negotiations with Israel, provided…that negotiations, when they are resumed, will take the pre-1967 border as their starting point.”

Or as Danny Rubenstein, writing for Ha’aretz, predicted nearly a year before the January elections, a Hamas government would “change [the rules] in the Israeli/Palestinian negotiating process. The Palestinian positions will stiffen enormously.” The type of “peace process” desired by Israel was explained by a former Labor party cabinet minister last June:

“Sure, Olmert will have talks with Abu Mazen [i.e., Abbas]. But those talks won’t lead anywhere because we have no interest in their successful consummation. We can then turn to our friends in the U.S. and Europe and say, “You see, we tried, unsuccessfully; we now have no choice but to go to realignment.”

A Palestinian government openly calling for negotiations with Israel while insisting that those negotiations be based on the internationally agreed settlement to the conflict is, to use Olmert’s phrase, “totally unacceptable” to Israeli planners. If Hamas continued to call for a settlement with Israel based on international law, Israel would come under increased pressure to engage in negotiations with them. These negotiations would not be like those in 1993 or those in 2000, because this time Israel would face a partner that would actually stand up for Palestinian interests and demand that Palestinian rights be respected. For an Israel so deeply committed to expansion, the risk of such a situation developing was intolerable. That left only one solution: the Hamas government had to go.

All of this was done quite openly. A New York Times article published on February 14 2006, entitled `U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster`, began with the following paragraph:

“The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.”

“The intention”, it continued, “is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.” That, incidentally, is textbook collective punishment, a crime under international law. It is also an eerily precise prediction of what did end up happening last year. U.S./Israeli strategy was, it seems, a huge success. Its only failing so far is that the Hamas government remains in office, but there’s still time yet.

An article in Ha’aretz last October was similarly candid about the motives behind U.S./Israeli policy towards Hamas:

“Israeli sources say that the United States is interested in the fall of the Hamas government currently in power in the Palestinian Authority…

“During the Quartet meeting in London, the Americans expressed their satisfaction with the results of the boycott of Hamas’ government, which has undermined its standing among the Palestinians…

“However, the U.S. administration is also certain that the sanctions against Hamas will inevitably result in a violent confrontation between Hamas and Fatah, and in such a scenario, they would prefer to strengthen the “good guys” headed by Abbas.”

So, to summarise so far: the election of Hamas presented a threat to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land because Hamas was increasingly calling for negotiations with Israel based on the international consensus of a two-state settlement. To combat this, Israel and the U.S. launched a PR campaign to demonise Hamas as a fundamentalist terror group sworn to destroy Israel and embarked on a policy of collective punishment to try and turn Palestinians against their government. The sanctions led, predictably, to a civil conflict in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel went about arming and training the side they wanted to win. In other words, they were backing, and are continuing to do so, a coup in Gaza.

Last week, Hamas and Fatah agreed in Mecca to form a new government of national unity in an attempt to end the international sanctions that have resulted in “unprecedented levels of unemployment” in an area that was already “experiencing the worst economic depression in modern history” and where approximately 70% of the population live in poverty. The new government will “respect” previous agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority, but will not recognise Israel or renounce violence (the two major “Quartet principles”). As a result, it is likely that the “Quartet” (U.S., UN, EU and Russia) will continue to withhold aid from the Palestinians. It is important to realise that Hamas made a huge concession by agreeing to respect previous agreements. As Henry Siegman writes,

“The insistence of Olmert and President Bush that Hamas must fully meet the conditions imposed for the lifting of the draconian boycott on the Palestinian Authority guarantees that even if Palestinians succeed in forming this unity government, nothing will change. For why would Hamas agree to accept all previous agreements if Israel is allowed to violate them? The road map clearly prohibits the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and Israel’s continued construction in east Jerusalem is intended to foreclose a Palestinian presence there, again in violation of the road map. Insofar as both Israeli violations are intended to create irreversible facts on the ground, they constitute far more egregious impediments to a peace process than Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, which can be reversed at any point simply by uttering a few words.”

However, all signs indicate that unless the new government recognises Israel and renounces violence, there will be no lifting of sanctions and the Palestinian people will continue to suffer horrendously. In a statement on February 10, the Quartet “reaffirmed its statement of February 2 regarding its support for a Palestinian government committed to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap.” The United States withheld comment, but reiterated its belief “that the government should be clearly and credibly committed to the principles reiterated by the Quartet”. The UK also refrained from commenting, although just prior to the Mecca Agreement Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett stated,

“We have said consistently from the beginning that we believe that any government should be based on the Quartet principles…If nothing new changes from the position there’s been hitherto, I’m afraid the position will stay the same.”

Ehud Olmert’s response was that “Israel neither accepts nor rejects the [Mecca] agreement”, while reaffirming that the “international community, led by the Quartet, has clearly determined” that the Palestinian government must abide by the aforementioned Quartet principles, and “insist[ed] that the Palestinians fully comply with them all.”

It is important to bear in mind that each new day brings more suffering for the Palestinians, who have been starved and bombed into submission for close to a year. When Margaret Beckett says that Britain needs more time to “study these proposals carefully”, she is demonstrating a shocking lack of concern for Palestinian welfare. If democracy and international law mean anything, there was never any justification for imposing sanctions on the Palestinians (and certainly not for bombing them, as Israel did for most of last year, killing 683 Palestinians in the process). There is even less justification now, after the threat of Palestinian democracy has safely been averted and the elected Hamas government has surrendered, making huge concessions to unreasonable Quartet demands. The sanctions must end immediately. The only way our leaders have been able to justify this collective torture of an already desperate people is by demonising Hamas as a fanatical, extremist group obsessed with destroying Israel and unwilling to make any compromises. As detailed above, this is a complete fabrication.

In a recent Newsweek article, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted as saying,

“You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, `Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start’.”

He’s right, of course. Powell was referring to Iran, another victim of U.S. demonisation and misrepresentation, and of the sanctions that followed, but the same principle applies here. Even if it were legitimate to demand from Hamas that it renounce violence and recognise Israel’s “right to exist” even as Israel continues to use massive violence against the Palestinians and continues to block the existence of a Palestinian state – and it’s not – it is completely illegitimate to formulate these demands as pre-conditions to negotiations.

Henry Siegman writes that “it is a terrible mistake for U.S. policy, and certainly Israel [sic] policy, to seek to overthrow Hamas” because Hamas, unlike Fatah, is truly in a position to bring peace. What he fails to understand is that it is U.S. and Israeli policy to overthrow Hamas precisely because Hamas is capable of bringing peace.

Concluding a recent lecture in Amsterdam, Prof. Ilan Pappe stated,

“You have to boycott them, you have to sanction them until they will come to their senses, just like you did to South Africa. Nothing else will work.”

Because he is an honest observer of the conflict, Prof. Pappe is talking here about Israel, not the Palestinians. Pappe thinks, and I agree with him, that the only way to stop Israel is from the outside. It will not happen from within. That means that those of us living in states that have an ability to influence Israel’s behaviour, most notably the U.S., have a responsibility to see through these lies about Hamas and to demand that our governments stop blackmailing the Palestinian people into toppling their democratically elected leadership. More generally, we must demand from our leaders that they force Israel to accept a just settlement, enforcing sanctions against it until it does. The Palestinian people, including most members of Hamas, are desperate for a peace. They are, quite literally, dying for it. Those of us who care about human rights and democracy and freedom must realise that it is not the case that our governments are trying and failing to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Rather, our governments are trying and succeeding in preventing such a peace from occurring. We must realise that on this issue there is absolutely zero difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in the U.S., or between Labour and the Conservatives in UK. Radical change is needed to prevent more needless Palestinian and Israeli deaths in the service of the occupation and, if we want to avoid yet more complicity in murder, it is needed fast. In the meantime, forcing our leaders to resume humanitarian aid to a people who, thanks to our policies over the last few decades, depend on it for survival would be an excellent start.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Writing for The Guardian on Thursday, Timothy Garton Ash argues that although we must stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we shouldn’t bomb it to do so. In his words,

“The cure would be worse than the disease.”

Certainly, it would. According to Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research Group, an attack on Iran would be “the start of a protracted military confrontation that would probably involve Iraq, Israel and Lebanon as well as the United States and Iran, with the possibility of west Gulf states being involved as well.” Dmitriy Sedov goes further, warning that a strike on Iran would be the “beginning of an epoch of nuclear wars.” In the words of Sir Richard Dalton, Britain’s ambassador to Tehran from 2002-06, any attack would be “a disaster for Iran, the region and quite possibly the world”.

But considering the facts, and considering recent history, is it really appropriate to label Iran as the “disease”, to which American military action is the “cure” (albeit, as Garton Ash observers, not a very effective one)? Is it responsible to continue to portray Iran as a security threat even as the American/Israeli drumbeat for war grows louder by the day?

We recently learned that the U.S. ignored a diplomatic overture by Iran in 2003, in which Iran proposed negotiations based on: Iran taking action to reduce Hizbullah to a “mere political force” in Lebanon, “transparency” over the concerns of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, “enhanced action” against al-Qaeda in Iran, a halt in Iranian support of “Palestinian opposition groups” (e.g Hamas and Islamic Jihad), “pressure on these organisations to stop violent actions against civilians within the 1967 borders” and an “acceptance” of the two-state solution regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, as defined by the Arab Peace Initiative. In return, the U.S. would halt “hostile behaviour” towards Iran, abolish sanctions against Iran, combat “anti-Iranian” terrorist groups in Iraq and the U.S., acknowledge Iran’s “legitimate security interests” in the region and allow Iran “full access to peaceful nuclear technology, biotechnology and chemical technology”.

The U.S. ignored the overture, doing nothing to follow up on the Iranian offer of discussions. Was this due to, as Flynt Leverett (a former aide to Condoleeza Rice) would have it, “some combination of ideological blindness and incompetency”? No; as Dan Kovalik writes, the American dismissal of Iran’s peace overture, together with everything else that is happening with regards to Iran right now, “leads to one and only one conclusion: that the Bush administration is not interested in peace with Iran”.

Looking at the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, even the recent history (since we all know how forgetful our amnesiac press can be), the idea that U.S. intervention could be the “cure” for anything in the region is not one that springs to mind. Last year, the U.S. was complicit to the level of a partner in Israel’s brutal aggression against Lebanon. The United States sent weapons shipments to Israel during the war and repeatedly delayed and blocked a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. As a result, over 1,000 civilians, roughly a third of them children, were killed, and some 970,000 people were displaced. According to Amnesty International, the “evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was deliberate and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than “collateral damage””. Human Rights Watch likewise reported that Israel consistently failed to “distinguish between combatants and civilians.”

After the first Gulf war, the U.S. led the way in enforcing a decade of “genocidal” sanctions against Iraq. That description comes from Dannis Halliday, a former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq who resigned in protest in 1998 over what he termed the “illegal and immoral” sanctions regime, which amounted to a “deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq”. “We are in the process of destroying an entire society”, he said. The sanctions were responsible for the deaths of roughly a million people, half of them children. When asked for her opinion on the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.”

The sanctions continued right up to the illegal U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The invasion was an aggression, defined at Nuremberg as the “supreme international crime”, and has so far killed approximately 650,000 Iraqis. It was condemned recently by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as a “war of choice” and “a historic, strategic and moral calamity.” Testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Brzezinski described the invasion of Iraq as born of “Manichean principles and imperial hubris.” Brzezinski went on to lay out a “plausible scenario” for a future war with Iran, which would involve:

“Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a `defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

This prediction looks to be an accurate one. U.S. politicians have been on the propaganda offensive in recent days, trying to blame Iran for insurgent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. In reality, as the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) recognises, Iranian support for Iraqi militias is “not likely to be a major driver of violence…because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics”. Veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn is similarly sceptical, writing,

“No serious observer of Iraq since the US invasion believes for a moment that Iran has sustained the Sunni insurgency or played an essential role in the rise of the Shia militias.”

In any event, Iran is not even being accused of supporting the Sunni insurgency. Rather, it is alleged that Iran is supporting the same Shi’ite militias that we are are supporting. As Juan Cole writes,

“some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops…

If Iran is providing materiel (sic) to anyone, it is to U.S. allies. Tehran may be helping the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary, but the U.S. is not fighting that group.”

Republican congressman Ron Paul confronted Secretary of State Rice on Wednesday over the administration’s “unproven accusations of Iranian support for the Iraqi insurgency” and “unproven charges against Iran’s nuclear intentions”. Indeed, the U.S. government has already been found guilty of producing misleading intelligence on Iran – late last year, the IAEA branded a congressional report into Iran’s nuclear programme as “outrageous and dishonest”, “erroneous” and “misleading”. Now, it seems, they are at it again.

On February 2, National Security spokesman Stephen Hadley admitted that a briefing on Iran was held back because it was “overstated” and not “focused on the facts”. Hadley implies that the White House delayed the release of the briefing after deciding it was too loose with the facts, but a recent article in the National Journal disagrees, stating that it was the “intelligence community” that pressured White House officials into re-writing the dossier. All the signs are that the Bush administration is once again fixing intelligence around the policy, as it did with Iraq. “It’s absolutely parallel,” according to former CIA counter-terrorism expert Philip Giraldi. “They’re using the same dance steps – demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux.”

The Guardian reports today that despite official denials, “US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage”. It cites Vincent Cannistro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, as saying,

“Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place…

We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.”

If we accept for a moment that Iran is planning to develop nuclear weapons (even though there is no proof of this at all), we must also understand that it is doing so for entirely understandable reasons. They have nothing whatsoever to do with “destroying Israel” or turning the whole world into a caliphate, and everything to do with Iran’s rational, perceived self-interest. As Ray Tayekh, Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, writes,

“It is important to note that Iran’s policy toward Iraq, as elsewhere in the Gulf, is predicated on carefully calibrated calculations of national interest, as opposed to a messianic mission of advancing the revolution…

“From the outset it must be emphasized that for all the factions involved in this debate, the core issue is how to safeguard Iran’s national interests. The Islamic Republic is not an irrational rogue state seeking such weaponry as an instrument of an aggressive, revolutionary foreign policy. This is not an “Islamic bomb” to be handed over to terrorist organizations or exploded in the streets of New Yorkor Washington. The fact is that Iran has long possessed chemical weapons, and has yet to transfer such arms to its terrorist allies. Iran’s cautious leaders are most interested in remaining in power and fully appreciate that transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists could lead to the type of retaliation from the United States or Israel that would eliminate their regime altogether. For Iran this is a weapon of deterrence and power projection.”

Iran is surrounded by hostile nuclear powers (Pakistan to the East and the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan) and has been repeatedly and explicitly threatened with attack by both the U.S. and Israel, two nuclear states with a history of aggression (the U.S. does not even hide this fact; the National Security Strategy openly affirms America’s right to conduct preventive strikes – prevention, under international law, is indistinguishable from aggression). Apart from mere self-defence, a nuclear Iran would also be less restrained in its dealings with other states. The balance of power in the region would shift slightly away from the U.S. and its client states towards Iran. That is, of course, completely unacceptable to the U.S., hence the current manufactured “Iran crisis”, ostensibly about an Iranian security threat but in reality aimed at securing U.S. domination by crushing a potential rival.

We should not be surprised at this; protecting and furthering U.S. hegemony abroad has been the central pillar of the post-Cold War neocon doctrine (which in turn should not surprise us, since it has also been the central doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War). As far back as 1992, a leaked draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) document, crafted by “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, called for `massive increases in defense spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive–or preemptive–force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn’t suit U.S. interests.’ In 2007, we can see that the Bush administration has followed this strategy to the letter. The DPG states,

“Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the United States must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.

Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. (my emphasis)”

The White House was forced to reject the draft DPG after the massive stir it caused when leaked to the public. However, the re-draft kept many of its core doctrines, even if the language was softened-up.

When Zalmay Khalilzad first showed the draft to then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, he was reportedly impressed, replying, “You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world.”

A nuclear Iran would be a significant threat to U.S. and Israeli domination of the Middle East, hence the Bush administration’s determination to prevent Iran from gaining the capacity to quickly develop nuclear weapons should it choose to at some point in the future. As military historian Martin van Crevald writes,

“In the 1950s it was America’s own clients, Britain and France, who were regarded as the offenders and put under pressure. Between 1960 and 1993, first China, then Israel (albeit to a limited extent) and finally India and Pakistan were presented as the black sheep, lectured, put under pressure and occasionally subjected to sanctions. Since then, the main victim of America’s peculiar belief that it alone is sufficiently good and sufficiently responsible to possess nuclear weapons has been North Korea.

As the record shows, in none of these cases did the pessimists’ visions come true. Neither Stalin, Mao nor any of the rest set out to conquer the world. It is true that, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington’s ability to threaten them or coerce them declined…

Given the balance of forces, it cannot be argued that a nuclear Iran will threaten the United States. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fulminations to the contrary, the Islamic Republic will not even be a threat to Israel. The latter has long had what it needs to deter an Iranian attack…

The main countries to feel the impact of a nuclear Iran will surely be those of the Persian Gulf. This is not because Tehran is likely to drop a bomb on Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates; rather, the Iranian regime may feel less constrained in dealing with its neighbors across the Gulf. (my emphasis)”

So, a nuclear Iran would present a challenge to U.S. hegemony in the resource rich and strategically invaluable Middle East. It is therefore easy to understand why the Bush administration is so opposed to the idea of a nuclear Iran. However, given the disastrous record of U.S. and Israeli intervention in the region, why should we we share its view? It would be more appropriate for Timothy Garton Ash and others to frame the question thus: would the cure of a nuclear Iran be worse than the disease of U.S. dominance of the Middle East? I, for one, am not so sure that it would be.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

I’m surprised that this still needs saying, but, evidently, it does. The current civil conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is not an internal Palestinian matter. Any attempt to analyse the fighting between Fatah and Hamas militants without discussing the critical role played by Israel and sections of the international community in engineering the crisis is nothing less than a misrepresentation of the entire situation.
The connection between Israeli and Western policies and the current Palestinian civil conflict is clear, and hardly disputed among serious analysts of the region. Amira Hass, a respected Israeli journalist, sums the situation up perfectly:

“The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called `what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.`”

Israel and its international backers have been collectively punishing the Palestinians, a people already in dire straights, since last January, when they had the temerity to vote the “wrong people” into power. The Palestinians have, in the words of John Dugard (UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories and the father of modern human rights law in South Africa), been “subjected to economic sanctions – the first time an occupied people have been so treated.” Dugard recalls when “Western states refused to impose meaningful sanctions on South Africa to compel it to abandon apartheid on the grounds that this would harm the black people of South Africa”, and notes that “[n]o such sympathy is extended to the Palestinian people or their human rights.” Instead, the international community has imposed “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions…in modern times” on a population where the majority of people were already dependent on aid merely to put food on the table.

Patrick Cockburn, a veteran journalist for The Independent, visited Gaza last September and described the scene vividly. “Gaza is dying,” he wrote. “The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation.” “A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area of the world. Israel has stopped all trade…The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.”

The UN reported in July that 70% of Palestinians live in poverty, and a World Bank report in September concluded that the Palestinians face “a year of unprecedented economic recession — real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006, and poverty [will] affect close to two thirds of the population.”

In addition to economic strangulation, Israel used massive violence to increase the pressure on the Hamas government. Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, wrote in December that,

“Most [Palestinian] civilian deaths have been the result of deliberate and reckless shooting and artillery shelling or air strikes by Israeli forces carried out in densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip.”

She also noted that the Gaza Strip “is in the grip of a deep humanitarian crisis as a result of the blockade imposed by the Israeli authorities.”

Describing last year’s `Operation Summer Rains’, a campaign of brutal collective punishment designed to force the collapse of the Hamas government from within, senior Ha’aretz correspondent Gideon Levy wrote that the IDF “has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately”.

We must be honest with ourselves about what exactly has happened and why. Israel and its international supporters have starved and bombed the Palestinians for close to year because they elected into government a party that represents Palestinian interests, as opposed to those of Israel and the West. It has been openly stated that this campaign of terrorism against the Palestinians will not end until they overthrow Hamas, or until Hamas adopts policies more favourable to Israel and the West. This is blackmail of the most despicable sort.

Consider British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett’s words, when she met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem today. According to Beckett,

“We have said consistently from the beginning that we believe that any government should be based on the Quartet principles…If nothing new changes from the position there’s been hitherto, I’m afraid the position will stay the same.”

In other words, even if Fatah and Hamas somehow manage to reach a compromise deal that will end the disastrous internal fighting in the territories, Britain and the international community will likely continue to withhold the aid upon which millions of Palestinians depend for survival. Britain will accept nothing less than total capitulation to Quartet demands before it will help end the sanctions regime that, according to Harvard’s Dr. Sara Roy, has caused “unprecedented levels of unemployment” and that, according to senior UN economist Rhaja Khalidi, has resulted in a Palestinian economy that “is now barely functioning.”

We have to be clear about this: the United States and Britain, two states that, through their diplomatic, military and (in the case of the U.S.) financial support for Israel, are deeply complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and in the countless atrocities and war crimes Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinians over the decades, are using humanitarian aid as a political weapon to try and force regime change in the Occupied Territories. After decades of facilitating Israeli policies of, in Dr. Roy’s words, “expropriation and deinstitutionalization” that “long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development, ensuring that no viable economic (and hence political) structure could emerge”, we are now using the Palestinians’ last remaining lifeline as a political weapon. What we have done and are continuing to do to the Palestinians is simply obscene. Britain has a moral duty to the Palestinians to provide them with as much aid as they need, if nothing else because of our complicity in reducing them to the state they are currently in. Of course, this means more than just financial aid – both Britain and the U.S. have a duty to do all they can to end the occupation and force Israel to accept a just settlement (as opposed to doing all they can to block a settlement, which is what has been happening up ’till now).

So how does Beckett justify this policy of withholding aid from the very people we helped pauperise? In Ramallah earlier today, when Beckett met with Palestinian officials (none from Hamas, of course), she said:

“We have said for some considerable time that if a National Unity Government could be formed, based on the Quartet Principles we would be happy to deal with.”

Let us remind ourselves of those Quartet principles:

1. Hamas has to renounce violence.
2. Hamas has to recognise Israel right to exist.

When evaluating those demands, we must bear in mind what Prime Minister Tony Blair said in Washington last December, when he affirmed the importance of being “even-handed and just in the application of our values”. In other words, we have to make a distinction between legitimate moral principles and sheer hypocrisy.

The demand that Hamas renounce violence is, in and of itself, completely unjustified. The Palestinians are legally entitled to resist the Israeli occupation, using violence if necessary. But putting that aside for a moment, it is surely obvious to even the most casual observer of the conflict that Israel employs violence on a far greater scale than any Palestinian organisation does. The casualty figures alone are testament to this: last year, according to B’Tselem, Israel killed a total of 683 Palestinians (at least 322 of whom were not engaged in hostilities at the time they were killed), whereas only 23 Israelis were killed by the Palestinians (17 of whom were civilian). That’s a ratio of roughly 1:30. Of course, the predictable response to this is to say that Israel doesn’t intend to kill civilians, whereas Hamas does. Whilst, as I say, predictable, this response has no basis in reality. Turning to the human rights organisations, we can see that in the past year alone Israel has committed numerous war crimes against the Palestinians, either deliberately attacking civilian targets or else firing indiscriminately into civilian crowds. To quote Amnesty International,

“Deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, also accused Israel of committing war crimes:

“B’Tselem determines that the bombing of the power plant was illegal and defined as a war crime in International Humanitarian Law, as the attack was aimed at a purely civilian object. It also was an act of collective punishment.”

The UN Human Rights Council likewise concluded that Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip last year breached international humanitarian law. John Dugard reported that even before the beginning of `Operation Summer Rains’ on June 25,

“It seemed clear to me that the Government of Israeli had embarked upon a siege in order to bring about regime change. In the process little attention was being paid to human rights, as shelling and sonic booms violated the fundamental rights to life and human dignity, and even less attention was paid to the constraints of international humanitarian law; it was already clear that collective punishment was to be the instrument used to bring about regime change.”

So, while the EU and the U.S. are demanding that Hamas must “renounce violence”, Israeli violence, which is of a much larger scale, is deemed acceptable. Indeed, the U.S. does not just accept Israeli violence; it actively works to facilitate it. Moreover, all of this is ignoring the important fact that there is a qualitative difference between Israeli and Palestinian violence – namely, that the Palestinians are fighting in self-defence, whereas Israel is fighting an aggression. The first demand of the Quartet can, then, be dismissed as unreasonable and hypocritical.

The second demand of Hamas is that it recognise Israel’s “right to exist”. The concept of states having “rights” is truly bizarre, being as it is, in the words of independent journalist Jonathan Cook’s, “not only strange but alien to international law.” In his article, `The Recognition Trap`, Cook notes that,

“the Palestinians’ problems did not start with the election of Hamas. Israel’s occupation is four decades old, and no Palestinian leader has ever been able to extract from Israel a promise of real statehood in all of the occupied territories: not the mukhtars, the largely compliant local leaders, who for decades were the only representatives allowed to speak on behalf of the Palestinians after the national leadership was expelled; not the Palestinian Authority under the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, who returned to the occupied territories in the mid-1990s after the PLO had recognised Israel; not the leadership of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” who first called for an end to the armed intifada; and now not the leaders of Hamas, even though they have repeatedly called for a long-term truce (hudna) as the first step in building confidence.

Similarly, few Palestinians doubt that Israel will continue to entrench the occupation — just as it did during the supposed peace- making years of Oslo, when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the occupied territories — even if Hamas is ousted and a government of national unity, of technocrats or even of Fatah takes its place.”

Cook also corrects the false impression that it would do no harm to the Palestinians to “recognise” Israel. As he says, to do so would in effect “signify that the Palestinian government was publicly abandoning its own goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian state.” Why? Because Israel has so far refused to “demarcate its own future borders”, thus leaving as “an open question” what it considers the “existence” it is demanding Hamas “recognise” to be. “We do know”, Cook notes, “that no one in the Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel’s borders that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close to it.” Thus, demanding that Hamas “recognise Israel” is effectively asking it to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation. Once again, this is a completely unreasonable demand in and of itself.

But putting that aside for a moment, as before, a quick look at the facts will immediately lay bare the breathtaking hypocrisy evident in the Quartet’s second “principle”. While it is true that Hamas has not recognised the “right” of Israel to exist (although its language has been getting more and more ambiguous in this regard), it is also uncontroversially true that, as Norman Finkelstein explains, no Israeli leader, no major Israeli political party and no high-ranking Israeli official has ever recognised the right of a Palestinian state to exist on the areas designated to it under international law (that is, the whole of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem). What’s more, unlike Hamas, Israel has not only refused to recognise the right of a Palestinian state to exist in words, but it has actively pursued policies designed to ensure that no viable Palestinian state can ever exist for close to 40 years. Despite this, no one is talking about placing sanctions on Israel. John Dugard’s confusion as to why the PA is being punished as opposed to Israel is therefore completely understandable. He writes,

“This [the imposition of sanctions on the PA] is difficult to understand. Israel is in violation of major Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with unlawful territorial change and the violation of human rights and has failed to implement the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, yet it escapes the imposition of sanctions. Instead the Palestinian people, rather than the Palestinian Authority, have been subjected to possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.”

So, to summarise so far: Israel and the international community have worked tirelessly to topple the Hamas government ever since it was elected last January, by collectively punishing the Palestinian people until they overthrow it from within. The West has justified its crippling economic sanctions on the PA by conditioning aid on Hamas’ fulfilment of two absurd demands that, if applied consistently, would necessitate equally rigorous (if not far more so) sanctions on Israel. As a result of this blackmail, the Palestinian economy, which was already “experiencing the worst economic depression in modern history” (according to the World Bank), has essentially shut down, plunging millions of already desperate people into the depths of poverty.

That is the situation and the context in which to examine the current internecine fighting in Gaza. Any sensible analysis must also take into account the following relevant facts. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President and a leading Fatah politician, has openly sided with the occupiers throughout the concerted international campaign of aggression against the Hamas government. The collaboration began with the elections last January, when Fatah accepted U.S. money to help finance its campaign. When Israel’s theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian tax revenue combined with the economic sanctions resulted in roughly a million Palestinian civil service workers having to work without pay for months on end, President Abbas used this as an excuse to attack Hamas, despite knowing that the crisis had nothing to do with Hamas’ mismanagement of the economy and everything to do with outside intervention. Abbas has endorsed the ridiculous and hypocritical demands made of Hamas by Israel, the U.S. and the EU, and has accepted tens of millions of dollars in military aid from the U.S. to roughly double the size of his private army. He has even allowed his soldiers to be trained by U.S. forces. The purpose is clear: in the coming conflict between Fatah and Hamas, Abbas’ security force is now in effect a proxy army for the United States and Israel. Fatah has openly and brazenly collaborated with the enemy against the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. As I have written before, there can really be no doubt about the current alliance between Fatah and the U.S./Israel, as illustrated by the following incident (which happened last October):

“A US volunteer was kidnapped by a previously unknown group and held for a day in Nablus. He was on Thursday freed unharmed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and brought to the mayor’s office accompanied by 20 al-Aqsa militants. The U.S and Fatah, and by extension the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, are now firm allies, out of common interest more than anything else. The U.S and Israel need Hamas out of office, because they know that Hamas will stand up and demand from them that Palestinian rights are upheld. Fatah, history has shown, will not.”

In short, then, there is no Palestinian “civil war”. The current violence is instead best understood in terms of a coup by Abbas and Fatah, who are acting as proxies for Israel and the United States, against the Hamas government. Unfortunately, the Hamas government could well go down as the latest in a long line of democratically elected governments overthrown by the United States after they espoused policies unfavourable to U.S. interests: Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Allende (Chile, 1973), Aristide (Haiti, 1991), Chavez (Venezuela, 2002), Aristide (Haiti, 2004)…could `Haniyeh (Palestinian Authority, 2007)’ be next? Unfortunately for the security of both Israeli and Palestinian civilians and for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, the list of U.S.-backed coups looks set to grow even longer in 2007. The question is: will we allow it to happen again?

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Jeremy Bowen, the BBCs Middle East Editor (a position he’s held since it was created in 2005) is in trouble with some for a recent internal memo he sent to colleagues regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Here is the offending document, entitled, `Mini briefing on the Israeli (sic) and Palestinians`:

`—Original Message—
From: Jeremy Bowen
To: Editorial Board; Newsg World-Bureaux-Eds; Newsg World Asseds; News Leadership Group; Mark Byford & PA; Simon Wilson-NEWS; Jerusalem Bureau;
Newsg World-Affairs-Unit
Sent: Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007
Subject: FW: Mini briefing on the Israeli and Palestinians

2007 has started as unpromisingly as 2006 ended. The outlook is bleak because of fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides.

Israel’s major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.

What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.

The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile.

The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse. On Thursday six people were killed in clashes between them in Gaza. The death of a major figure on either side would spark something much more serious.

In Israel the political turmoil that followed the inconclusive war with Hezbollah last summer continues unabated.

There are signs that PM Ehud Olmert is trying to set up his coalition partner Amir Peretz as a scapegoat for Israel’s problems during the war and since, by ousting him from the defence ministry. Olmert may be hoping he’ll get away with it because Peretz’s position as Labour leader is already under attack from within his own party. Peretz’s people say that if Olmert tries it, the government will fall.

Even if does manage to demote Peretz, he probably won’t improve his parlous position in the polls. It is exactly a year since Ariel Sharon’s stroke, so Israelis are comparing their lost leader with the one they have now, and finding him wanting. An air of incompetence hangs around Olmert when it comes to military matters. Typical was the timing of the raid in Ramallah, which ruined yesterday’s summit with Mubarak which was supposed to bring closer the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Olmert wants to replace Peretz at the defence ministry with Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister. Barak is a retired general, former head of the Israeli army and its most decorated soldier. (Among his many exploits was disguising himself as a woman during a raid in Beirut to kill various Palestinians). The feeling in Israel is that 2007 will be a year of wars, so aside from coalition politics Olmert wants to have a warrior next to him when they make the tough decisions. The intray could include whether or not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Another serious problem for Olmert is that yet another corruption scandal is lapping close to him. This time the head of the PM’s office in Jerusalem is under house arrest for her alleged role in corruption in Israel’s tax authority. Olmert is not yet implicated, though he’s already been under investigation over separate allegations.

The political crises in Israel – and violent political disintegration among the Palestinians – are not just internal matters. They make it impossible for the Israelis and the Palestinians to engage in a meaningful political dialogue, assuming that their protestations that they want one are true. (The one meeting that Olmert has had with Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be called a process.)

Only strong Israeli and Palestinian leaders would be able to make the tough choices necessary to relieve the serious pressures that are building up in the holy land. To persuade their people to make the necessary concessions, they would need a strong political base, which neither Olmert nor Abbas possess.

Because they are weak – many would say lame ducks – don’t expect any progress. And since an uneasy status quo cannot hold, no political progress will equal more violence.’

Not exactly what one would call a radical analysis, and yet this internal briefing has led to calls for Bowen to be fired.

Andrew Balcombe, chairman of the Zionist Federation of Britain and Ireland, has written to the chair of the BBC Trust declaring,

“This simply does not represent balanced reporting and does not contribute to BBC viewers’ understanding of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this way Bowen is doing a disservice to the BBC’s customers.”

Firstly, it should be noted that Andrew Balcombe is absolutely right: this internal memo doesn’t represent balanced reporting. Indeed, it doesn’t represent reporting of any sort, because it is an internal memo. Ditto Balcombe’s complaint that Bowen’s briefing doesn’t contribute to “viewers’ understanding” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. More importantly, what does Balcombe mean by “balanced reporting”? The view expressed by Bowen – that the growing civil war in Gaza is due primarily to the external pressures the Palestinians have been subjected to by Israel and the international community – is shared by virtually every serious analyst of the conflict, from prominent Israeli journalists to high-level UN officials to respected scholars. It is also plain common sense: if you starve, bomb and humiliate the Palestinian people relentlessly for close to a year, all the while blaming the Hamas government and arming Fatah, what do you think is going to happen? As Amira Hass writes,

“The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called `what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.`”

Israel has played the “divide and rule” strategy very well. Bowen is correct to say that “Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting”. Indeed, the stated aim of the suicide bombing in Eilat a few days ago was to try and re-unite Palestinian resistance movements against the occupation, as opposed to fighting each other.

And yet, despite being a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence, Bowen’s views are criticised as not being “balanced”? What, then, is “balanced”? For Balcombe, it seems, being “balanced” essentially boils down to not being critical of Israel, or, at the very least, being at least as critical of the Palestinians as of the Israelis.

In reality, however, that’s not “balanced” at all. There is no symmetry whatsoever in this situation – Israel is the occupier, the Palestinians are the occupied. Israel is the fourth ranking military power in the world, backed by the unrivalled global military superpower, whilst the Palestinians are essentially defenceless. Israel is the aggressor, whereas the Palestinian resistance movements are fighting in self-defence. The fundamental dynamic of the conflict is one of an occupier and the occupied, an oppressor and the oppressed. To treat Israel and the Palestinians with equal criticism (or to make equal demands of them) would be utterly absurd, and yet that is what Balcombe is demanding of Bowen.

Stephen Pollard, a “respected” journalist according the Jerusalem Post (I don’t see how anyone who describes Melanie Phillips’ blog as “peerless” and Oliver Kamm as “the master” could possibly be “respected” by anyone, but I suppose it’s possible), was also critical of Bowen, writing,

“If this is what passes for high-level analysis at the BBC, is it any wonder its reporting is so poisonous?”

Pollard’s main problem, it seems, lies with the following section of Bowen’s memo:

“Israel’s major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.

What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.

The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile.”

According to Pollard, this shows that in Bowen’s view, “Israel is to blame for almost everything. The Palestinians are not responsible for anything; Israel is the culpable party.” The fact that Bowen explicitly mentions the “fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides (my emphasis)” is evidently not enough – what Pollack wants is for Bowen to focus on Palestinian responsibility at a length comparable to his focus on Israeli responsibility. Anything less is simply “poisonous”. In reality, as I say, there is no symmetry between the two sides, and more coverage should be given to Israeli crimes and atrocities than to the crimes of the Palestinian resistance (not least because we are complicit in Israel’s actions in a way that we are not with Palestinian actions).

Another mainstream commentator to have jumped on Bowen’s memo as proof of anti-Israel bias at the BBC is The Times` comments editor, Daniel Finkelstein, who is “astonished” at the “unbelievable degree of bias” required to “blame Palestinian civil strife entirely on the Israelis.” “Are the doctrines and behaviour of the groups themselves not part of the explanation”?, Finkelstein asks. “The murderous militancy of Hamas? The corruption of Fatah?”

The answer is that of course the Palestinians bear some responsibility for the civil conflict. To think that Bowen, by pointing out in a brief memo (it was entitled “Mini” Briefing, remember) the main cause of the inter-factionary violence (undoubtedly the policies of Israel and sections of the international community), is denying this is absurd.

In an interview in today’s Independent, Bowen spells it out:

“We all come from somewhere; we all have a prism through which we see the world; we all have an education, and views and experiences. It’s a false objective to be objective.

“But I think I can be impartial by trying to disentangle all the threads that make up a story. That’s an ambitious thing to do in two and a half minutes on TV. You have got to be aware of what your own prejudices and principles are and put them to one side in a box.”

It is, however, impossible to deny that the BBC’s coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict is biased – it is biased, contrary to what Finkelstein, Pollard and Balcombe would have you believe, towards Israel. This bias results from the very idea of what constitutes “balance” that Balcombe and co. are criticising Bowen for departing from. This faux sense of journalistic “balance” holds that simply reporting what those in power say without comment is “neutral”, whilst reporting the views of ordinary people who are affected by the decisions of power constitutes “bias”, unless accompanied by opposing views. However, the views of ordinary people only have to be accompanied by opposing views if we as a society are supposed to disagree with what they say, or if our views on the matter are not particularly important to the establishment agenda. Thus, it would be almost inconceivable to quote a Palestinian doctor describing the suffering Israel’s policies are causing without also quoting an Israeli official talking, for example, about the threat of terrorism. It would be entirely acceptable, however, to quote an Iraqi civilian describing the suffering he endured under Saddam Hussein without providing a counter-quote by a member of Saddam Hussein’s government (and the same is true with all official enemies). Another big no-no is to include relevant factual information, such as international law or the conclusions of official bodies (e.g. the UN) or relevant history, to allow the reader to evaluate for themselves the accuracy and sincerity of the opinions quoted. This is true across the board, with one qualification: when it comes to reporting on official enemies, the media suddenly switch their critical faculties back on, and treat everything with a healthy degree of skepticism (even cynicism). Rational analysis and attempts to discuss the bigger picture also become permissable. Hence, for example, it is considered acceptable to call North Korea a “client state” of China, whilst the term is never used to describe Israel’s relationship with the U.S.

The BBC subscribes wholeheartedly to this false sense of “balance”, which inevitably results in it becoming little more than a mouthpiece for establishment propaganda. This also applies to its coverage of the Middle East. Take, for example, this article on the Israel/Palestine conflict by Jeremy Bowen from July 2006. Although not a bad piece, he creates a false sense of symmetry between each side by constantly repeating phrases like “it is usually a tale of two stories” and “neither side has been prepared to pay what is needed in lost dreams and hard choices”. The truth it has nothing to do with “dreams” and everything to do with rights. The Palestinians have been willing to make huge compromises on their rights to achieve a peace, whereas Israel has compromised on nothing.

Bowen writes that,

“The Israelis and Palestinians are levelling the same accusations against each other, accusing each other of terrorism and oppression. Both believe that they are acting in self defence.”

Perhaps – but that doesn’t mean both sides’ accusations are of equal merit. It is impossible to judge for ourselves because Bowen neglects to include the relevant information to allow us to do so. And what makes Bowen so sure that the Israeli government believes it is acting “in self-defence”? The fact that the government says so is surely irrelevant, since governments claim to be acting in self-defence even when they demonstrably are not all the time. The evidence would appear to point the other way – indeed, Bowen himself notes further down the article that the Palestinian resistance has never, “not for a second”, threatened the existence of the Jewish state. In Bowen’s view, which side is right is not important; what matters, he says, is that “the people who hold these views believe that they are true”. But, again, what makes him say that, other than the meaningless proclamations of government officials?

Towards the end of the article, Bowen once more creates an artificial symmetry between the two sides, writing that,

“The most important lesson for Israel is that force does not work”

and, similarly,

“The most important lesson for the Palestinians is that force does not work.”

Whilst it can be sensibly argued that the use of terrorism is currently harming the Palestinian cause, how can the same be said about Israel? Massive use of violence has enabled Israel to perpetuate the occupation, in defiance of international law and the overwhelming majority of the international community, for close to 40 years, continuing to build illegal settlements and annex more land to this day. Is that not a clear indication that, for Israel (or, more accurately, for Israel’s leadership), violence most certainly does work? The only way one could avoid this conclusion is by ignoring all the evidence and treating, as Jeremy Bowen does, Israel’s stated motives as sincere.

It is this kind of subtle bias, that works to restrict debate to within “acceptable limits” (so, for example, you are allowed to criticise certain policies but not to question the sincerity of the stated motives behind them) that permeates throughout the establishment press (BBC included), and which gives lie to the claims by pro-Israel advocates of a media bias against Israel. The truth, as is so often the case with mainstream coverage of the Middle East, is the exact opposite.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Everyone, it seems, is talking about the upcoming invasion of Iran. Mark Cliffe, chief economist at the ING Group, argues that,

“Financial markets are assuming that an Israeli and/or US attack on Iran is unlikely. However, bellicose rhetoric from Israel and an imminent build-up of US forces in the Gulf suggest that they could be in for a shock,”

while the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, has warned that a U.S. attack on Iran is a “50/50 proposition”.
Sam Gardiner, a retired colonel with the U.S. Air Force, writes ominously that,

“The pieces are moving. They’ll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.”

Col. Gardiner predicts that,

“As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike.”

Worryingly, a Bulgarian news agency today reported that “American forces could be using their two USAF bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania’s Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April”. “The USAF’s positioning of vital refuelling facilities for its B-2 bombers in unusual places, including Bulgaria, falls within the perspective of such an attack,” the report continued. The news agency cited Col. Gardiner, referred to as a “US secret service officer stationed in Bulgaria”, as its source.

Paul Craig Roberts writes how the “entire world” knows of the planned attack on Iran, and describes how, at the January World Economic Forum conference in Davos, the “Secretary General of the League of Arab States and bankers and businessmen from such US allies as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all warned of the coming attack and its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and the world.”

Writing for Global Research, General Leonid Ivashov, a former chief of the General Affairs department in the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Defense and former Joint Chief of Staff of the Russian armies (and much more besides), states confidently that,

“the US will use nuclear weapon against Iran. This will be the second case of the use of nuclear weapons in combat after the 1945 US attack on Japan.”

General Ivashov continues,

“Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc.”

John Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agrees, saying, “To be honest, I’m afraid it will be Iraq all over again.”

Michael Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, notes that the 2005 Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (.pdf) (‘the current U.S. doctrine on when and under which circumstances to use nuclear weapons’, to quote Wikipedia) explicitly permits the preventive use of nuclear weapons:

“Military forces must prepare to counter weapons and capabilities that exist or will exist in the near term even if no immediate likely scenarios for war are at hand. To maximize deterrence of WMD use, it is essential US forces prepare to use nuclear weapons effectively and that US forces are determined to employ nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use (my emphasis)”,

and comments further that at no point since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 has “humanity been closer to the unthinkable”: a “nuclear holocaust”.

Now, I personally do not know for sure whether the U.S. or Israel will attack Iran. It certainly looks likely and, with President Ahmadinejad coming under increasing pressure at home, the window of opportunity for military action is closing fast. What’s more interesting is General Ivashov’s description of the essential role the media and the “informational warfare machine” more generally will play in facilitating an attack on Iran. As we know from the Iraq war and countless aggressions before it, the mainstream American and British press have a tendency (or, more accurately, a compulsion) to, in times of war, revert to a stance of unquestioning support for power. An academic study into media performance in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq found that “coverage mainly served to reinforce official justifications for war” and described the tendency of the media to “accept the official position” which “enabled the coalition’s moral case for the war to go by default.”

A brief examination of current reporting on Iran illustrates that, true to form, media coverage currently serves to reinforce official justification for conflict with Iran.

This BBC article, for example, describes how, “Some Western nations fear Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.” Then, in a ridiculous attempt at journalistic “balance”, the BBC provides a countering view: “Tehran insists its programme is for peaceful uses only.” Except, of course, this isn’t the correct counter-view at all. Surely it would be far more sensible to quote the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the respected (though by no means impartial) authority on this issue, which has repeatedly stated that there is zero evidence of any secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. This misleading juxtaposition of views about a possible Iranian nuclear weapons programme, which gives the false impression that it is just Iran’s word against the U.S.’, is standard throughout mainstream reporting.

Anne Penketh’s recent article in The Independent is a good example of another technique employed by the media that is critical to persuading the public to support a war: demonisation of the enemy. In this case, Penketh (mis)quotes President Ahmadinejad as threatening to “wipe Israel off the map”. As Professor Juan Cole and several others have repeatedly pointed out, Ahmadinejad said no such thing. It is interesting that this misquote is cited so often by the media, whilst explicit threats made against Iran, for example Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh’s promise to prevent Iran’s nuclear programme “at all costs”, are barely reported. Penketh’s piece also illustrates perfectly the way a seemingly balanced and objective article actually serves to restrict debate. You’ll notice that Penketh discusses whether or not an attack on Iran would be “productive”, what the likely Iranian response would be and the likelihood of a “regional war” developing as a consequence. International law is not mentioned once. The fact that, by threatening Iran, Israel and the U.S. are violating the UN Charter is not considered relevant, whilst the official stated motive of U.S./Israeli “concern” over Iran (that they are worried about its nuclear programme) is simply taken for granted. Relevant history is not even mentioned, let alone used to evaluate what the actual motives for aggression against Iran might be.

This should all be familiar from the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when the media restricted the limits of debate to whether or not the war would succeed, whether or not Iraq had nuclear weapons, how the war should be fought and so on. Rational discussion of underlying U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region, using relevant history to analyse statements of intent made by Bush and Blair, was almost non-existent, as was any suggestion that even if Iraq did have nuclear weapons, military aggression would still be unjustified.

So far I have focused on the bias evident in what the media has reported about the Iran “crisis”. But, equally important (if not more), is what hasn’t been reported. There is, for example, no analysis of the very real threat Iran faces from Israel, the U.S. and its neighbours (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq). There is virtually no attempt at understanding things from Iran’s point of view, and little awareness is shown of the outrageous hypocrisy of the U.S./Israeli condemnation of Iran’s nuclear programme. International law is treated as if it didn’t exist, whilst (as with Iraq) no attempt is made to discuss the possible motives for an attack on Iran by examining the relevant historical record. As with Iraq, “oil” is considered a dirty word when discussing possible reasons for invading. Whilst the media regularly quotes hostile rhetoric from Ahmadinejad, it almost never discloses the fact that, in reality, the President of Iran has no power whatsoever over matters of foreign or nuclear policy. He was elected on a platform of domestic economic reforms and his “fiery” speeches are simply an attempt to distract the Iranian public from the fact that he has not fulfilled his promises. As the increasing domestic political pressure on him shows, it isn’t working.

The “Iran crisis”, manufactured by Israel and the U.S., can be summed up thus: Iran has been accused by the U.S. and Israel of developing nuclear weapons, despite a complete lack of evidence to support this assertion. The NPT, to which Iran (unlike Israel, India and Pakistan) is a signatory, guarantees the inalienable right of a country to develop civilian nuclear technology and, as far as we know, Iran is simply exercising this right. The IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that it has no evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Iran has largely complied with IAEA weapons inspectors, voluntarily submitting itself to the most rigorous inspections of any state in history. The main reason for thinking Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons is that, as military historian Martin van Crevald put it, if they aren’t, “they’re crazy”. In other words, considering the major threat Israel and the U.S. pose to Iran, it would make sense for Iran to want a nuclear deterrent. Even if Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, its nuclear technology is “archaic” and its efforts to produce enriched uranium are “in chaos”. Experts estimate that Iran will not be able to manufacture a nuclear weapon for at least 10 years.

Israel and the U.S. have engaged in a persistent and aggressive campaign of verbal and, more recently, physical threats against Iran, in violation of international law. Whereas Iran has repeatedly called for the Middle East to be a nuclear weapons-free zone (a policy opposed by Israel and the U.S.) and denounced nuclear weapons as “un-Islamic”, the official policy of both Israel and the U.S. allows for preventive military action including, in the case of the United States, a preventive nuclear strike. Both Israel and the U.S. have a long history of aggression (the U.S. most recently in Iraq and Somalia, Israel in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories). Iran, on the other hand, has not attacked a country outside its borders for 200 years. Even if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would not use it against Israel, because to do so would, in effect, be an act of suicide.

The U.S. claims Iran is “interfering” in Iraq, and has even gone so far as to authorise U.S. troops to “kill or capture” any Iranian intelligence agents they discover in Iraq. As Juan Cole points out, “no hard evidence” has yet been made public to show that Iran is providing high-powered weaponry to forces in Iraq. At any rate, Cole continues, Iran would only be arming Shi’ite groups, and “99 perecent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups.” These groups receive outside help from countries allied to the U.S., like Saudi Arabia. As Cole notes, “Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops.” In any event, the idea that America could dare criticise anyone else for intervening in Iraq is laughable. It is the U.S. that illegally invaded Iraq almost four years ago, and it is the U.S. that is maintaining an occupation against the wishes of the Iraqi population. In the past six weeks, U.S. forces have twice abducted Iranian officials inside Iraq. Iran has refrained from responding in a similar manner.

The U.S.’ interests in attacking Iran have nothing whatsoever to do with security and everything to do with the control of energy resources and a maintenance of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.

Compare this reality with the picture provided by the media: Iran, a “belligerent” and “defiant” state that is very likely seeking to wipe out the Jews, is trying to develop nuclear weapons. The U.S. and Israel, concerned for their safety, are attempting to stop this from happening using diplomacy and sanctions. However, if all else fails, they may use force as a last resort.

The gap between the image and the reality (to borrow a phrase) is as massive as it is unsurprising.

The consequences of a strike, conventional or otherwise, on Iran would likely be devastating. We cannot rely on the corporate media to challenge power and to properly inform the people about a future war with Iran. Indeed, all signs indicate that the propaganda machine is already working flat-out to prepare the public for war (“watering the turf”, as one British military source puts it). It falls to us, as citizens in the most powerful democracies in the world, to ensure that our money and our lives are not used to fight yet another unnecessary, immoral and illegal war for the benefit of a tiny, elite minority. Let’s just hope we are not already too late.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Is discrimination against homosexuals acceptable? That, amazingly, is the question currently being debated in British society. The Equality Act of 2006 (.pdf), which comes into force on April 6th, made discrimination “in the provision of goods, facilities and services” illegal. At the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair – an Anglican whose wife is a Catholic – proposed an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies, on the grounds that, in the words of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales,

“Catholic teaching about the foundations of family life, a teaching shared not only by other Christian Churches but also other faiths, means that Catholic adoption agencies would not be able to recruit and consider homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents.”

Blair was supported by Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly, a member of Opus Dei, a secretive cult that bases its teachings on the doctrine of the Catholic Church (a much larger and more prominent cult).

The row can essentially be summed up thus: the law bans discrimination in the provision of goods and services. Catholic dogma, on the other hand, insists on it.

I hesitated when I first read of these supposed “conflicting pressures“, thinking there must be some nuance or hidden complexity to the argument that I was missing. If there was, I still can’t see it. This is a straight out contest between the rule of law and religious doctrine. In a supposedly democratic, progressive and secular society such as ours, there can only ever be one winner. In Britain, the rule of law reigns supreme and applies to everyone, including those who subscribe to religious cults. As Lord Falconer put it:

“We do take the view in this country that you shouldn’t be discriminated against on that basis [of sexual orientation] and think that applies to everybody, whatever your religion.”

“We have committed ourselves to anti-discrimination law, on the grounds of sexual orientation, and it is extremely difficult to see how you can be excused from anti-discrimination law on the grounds of religion.”

Despite the seemingly obvious answer to the question of ‘state vs. church’, many people have argued, publicly, in favour of the idea that people should be allowed to discriminate against homosexuals if their religion tells them to. There’s a simple way of gauging the validity of their arguments – just substitute the word “black” or “Jew” for the word “homosexual”. Discrimination against black people and Jews is far more taboo, evidently, than discrimination against homosexuals, but unless you subscribe to the view that homosexuals are somehow less worthy of equal rights than blacks and Jews, there really is no difference in terms of legitimacy between racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia.

So, when Cardinal O’Connor writes in a letter to the Prime Minister (from which I quoted above), that it would be “unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics” to force Catholic adoption agencies to stop discriminating against homosexuals, he is effectively taking the position that it would be “unreasonable” and “unjust” to force organisations to stop discriminating against black people.

When Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes a letter to Tony Blair expressing the Church of England’s solidarity with Catholic homophobia, stating that “[t]he rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation”, he is effectively arguing that the law should only apply to those who lack personal convictions, and so for all intents and purposes must cease to exist. If it were my personal conviction that Christianity, as with religion in general, is an extremely dangerous and fanatical cult, and that the foundation of a healthy family should lie in atheism, would the Archbishop support my right to discriminate against Christians? Does he support the right of those who sincerely believe that it is their moral duty to go around murdering people to do so unhindered by the law?

When Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a former Conservative Lord Chancellor, declares,

“Sexual orientation is one thing – that’s a tendency towards a particular type of sexual activity but practice is a different thing”,

he is referring to standard Catholic dogma, which states that homosexuality is not in itself a sin, but acting upon it is. He should be treated with as much respect as someone who declares openly that, although being Jewish is not in itself wrong, acting Jewish is. Lord Mackay continues:

“They [the harassment provisions outlined in the Sexual Orientation Regulations of 2003] are very difficult to understand but it could well mean that if you teach in a school, particularly in an advanced class, that homosexuality is wrong, you would be guilty of breaching these provisions.”

This is, apparently, a negative thing. Presumably, Lord Mackay would also have a problem with a ban on teaching a class of schoolkids that having sex with black people or Jews is wrong.

Imagine if an adoption agency declared that, as a matter of “conscience”, it could not consider black couples as fit to adopt a child, because it sincerely believed (for whatever reason) that it is sinful to base a family on the union of two black people. Would we find that acceptable? Would the spokesman for the Prime Minister declare that the PM is seeking a “solution that meets the needs of both sides”? Would the Daily Telegraph publish an editorial in favour of the adoption agency?

Cardinal O’Connor, in his letter, describes the “excellent and highly valuable” service Catholic adoption agencies provide, before warning that the anti-discrimination legislation would force these agencies to close. Such a situation would be, writes O’Connor, a “wholly avoidable” and “unnecessary tragedy”. The Daily Telegraph editorial likewise proclaims piously that “the real focus in this controversy should remain on the interests of [the 4000] children [waiting] to be adopted”. Dr. Williams employs the same device, writing that “[i]t is vitally important that the interests of vulnerable children are not relegated to suit any political interest.”

This is blackmail. What the pro-discrimination lobby is doing is presenting us with a choice between the welfare of thousands of children (which would undoubtedly be adversely effected by the closure of Catholic adoption agencies) and the principle of equality under the law. We must reject with disgust this “sordid” attempt to “try and blackmail Parliament and government by threatening to close down…valuable work in adoption and other areas…using vulnerable groups like children in care to fight [an] ideological battle.”

The current religious protests against anti-discrimination laws simply reinforces what last year’s gay pride rally in Jerusalem already taught us: that virulent homophobia is one of the few things that can unite the various faiths. The Church is “battling to stop progress” and to “return us to the dark of prejudice and irrationality.” We must fight it with all the energy we can muster.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander