Category Archives: Analysis

For most of its citizens, the EU is a welcome force for good

Miguel Otero-Iglesias writes: In the wake of the Leave campaign’s shocking win in the U.K.’s In/Out referendum, commentators have painstakingly defended Britain’s rampant Euroskepticism as part of a larger trend.

They point to the wave of discontent sweeping through the Union, from Sweden and Denmark in the north, to France, the Netherlands and Austria in the center, and Italy in the south. Influential pro-European pundits have now joined starkly anti-EU politicians such as Nigel Farage in arguing the EU’s disintegration is now irreversible. Today’s dominant view, it seems, is that most Europeans do not want to be ruled by Brussels.

This pessimistic diagnosis is inaccurate. Europeans are angry about how the EU has handled the asymmetric effects of globalization, but the majority do not believe that leaving the Union is the answer. The fact is that Britain — or more concretely, England — is an outlier in the EU in that respect.

The English, especially those forming “Little England,” have always been uncomfortable in the EU. The eurozone crisis only reinforced this feeling. English exceptionalism has many sources: Westminster’s democratic tradition; its imperial past; and its special relationship with the U.S.

English is the world’s lingua franca, and the City of London its most prominent global financial center. Britain is extremely proud of its seat in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons. All this makes a large majority of English believe they are primus inter pares in the EU club.

This sentiment is exceptional. Of course, other European nations are proud too, and believe they are better than their neighbors to some degree. The Dutch have always punched above their weight in international affairs. The Nordic countries are right to brag about their welfare systems, the Mediterraneans about their lifestyle and their food, and the Central and East Europeans about their work ethic and resistance to Soviet rule. And what can one say about the boundless pride of the French? It certainly shares many of the features of English hubris.

Nonetheless, these countries have neither the capacity nor the desire to go it alone. [Continue reading…]

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How Turkey misreads Brexit

Atilla Yesilada writes: The predictive acumen of political scientists is pretty weak, but I daresay that Brexit is a critical threshold for world history, and Turkish politicians sorely misread it.

The EU will face increasing strains after the departure of the UK, which will reflect on Turkey’s relations with it through economic, political and social dimensions. While Ankara considers the EU a spent force, seeking her future and fortune in the Muslim world and the Shanghai Five, neither better democracy nor more prosperity is likely to occur without closer integration with the EU.

The Brexit vote was against globalisation, immigration and, strangely enough, against a very remote event, namely Turkish accession to the EU.

To the extent Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan nowadays associates herself with the leadership of the Sunni Muslim world, Brexit can be said to be a vote against Islam as well. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s military leaders turn to Instagram to promote domestic support for the war in Syria

The New York Times reports: The first news report, to a nation usually kept in the dark about military matters, was shocking: 13 Iranian soldiers, all with links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had been killed in an ambush near the Syrian city of Aleppo. What followed this spring may have been even more surprising. Details about the soldiers appeared extensively in the Iranian news media, which not only gave the names of the dead but lionized them with sweeping life stories. Poster-size portraits were plastered all over their hometowns.

For years, Iran covered up its military activities in Syria and Iraq, so the government could deny any official involvement on the ground. Coffins arrived with the bodies of soldiers who went unidentified, referred to only as “defenders of the shrines” of the Shiite saints. When the bodies began to come home in larger numbers, the state news media began calling them “volunteers.”

No longer. Now every Iranian killed in action is named, his picture published, his valor lauded in elaborate tributes in the hard-line news media and on Instagram accounts dedicated to the fighters. The reason for the change, analysts say, is not some newfound dedication to transparency but a rift between the Iranian establishment’s hard-liners, who control the military, and the moderates.

The hard-liners, they say, want to prevent any decline in Tehran’s absolute support for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and to undermine the moderates, who they fear might be open to a political settlement in which Mr. Assad would step down.

The Revolutionary Guards see publicizing the sacrifices of the fallen as a way to build domestic support for the current Syria policy and squelch any talk of compromise. The Instagram accounts have attracted tens of thousands of followers, most of them supporting the military effort. [Continue reading…]

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The war in Iraq gave birth to today’s ‘trust no one’ politics

Andrew Rawnsley writes: The domestic consequences of Iraq were beyond Chilcot’s remit, but they should be in our scope when we try to explain how Britain ended up in the dark place where it stands today.

The Iraq war is a crucial element of the context that put the Labour party in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn. Anger about the war on the left has played a huge role in obscuring the achievements of New Labour’s time in office. The minimum wage. The peace settlement in Northern Ireland. The record sums invested in public services. The resources redistributed to the less privileged. Continuous economic growth for every quarter of the Blair premiership.

In many minds, the shadow of Iraq loomed so large and so black that it eclipsed many other things that progressives ought to have been proud of. In the leadership contest that followed the 2010 election defeat, the most damaging charge against David Miliband was that he had voted for the war. His brother, Ed, who was conveniently not in parliament at the time, exploited that and won the contest. Eddism then begat Corbynism.

In the leadership contest after the 2015 defeat, Jeremy Corbyn made a large feature of his opposition to the war, successfully tapping the fury that still burns so intensely among many on the left. As I write, Mr Corbyn is continuing to insist that he can carry on as leader even when four out of five of his parliamentary colleagues have publicly declared him unfit for the job. Tom Watson, the fixer of fixers, has just declared that even he cannot broker a way out of the deadlock. It is quite possible that the outcome of the struggle to unseat Mr Corbyn will also be decided by positions taken on Iraq.

It is said by those who think Angela Eagle should not be the leadership challenger that she is disqualified from the role because she voted for the invasion. A war begun more than a decade ago still has that much reverberation in Labour politics.

The long after-tremors of the Iraq war were also felt in the vote to leave the European Union. One seismic event was a trigger for another earthquake 13 years later. We know that a fierce element of the motivation of many Out voters was anger with political “elites”. That building of rage has had many drivers over recent years from the parliamentary expenses scandal to the pain of austerity. One of those sources was surely Iraq, an episode notably corroding of public faith in government because the war was sold on the basis that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

I have never bought the simplistic explanation that Tony Blair simply made it all up. Sir John Chilcot directs most of the blame towards MI6 for supplying intelligence that turned out to be wrong or sheer fabrication by duplicitous sources. Mr Blair’s culpability was representing that intelligence as sound when it was the opposite. Had the mistakes just been down to one over-messianic leader, as many of the other players have sought to suggest to displace culpability from themselves, it would not have been such a damaging episode in our public life. It wasn’t just the infamous dossier and it wasn’t just his personal miscalculations. Iraq was a collective failure of the political, diplomatic, intelligence and military establishments.

I don’t agree with the nihilistic ridiculing of expertise that powered the Out campaign to victory, but I sure can see why “trust no one” had such appeal to such a large audience. [Continue reading…]

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The EU is on the verge of collapse but could emerge from the current crisis stronger

George Soros writes: The post-referendum turmoil has highlighted for people in Britain just what they stand to lose by leaving the EU. If this sentiment spreads to the rest of Europe, what seemed like the inevitable disintegration of the EU could be instead creating positive momentum for a stronger and better Europe.

The process could start in Britain. The popular vote can’t be reversed but a signature collecting campaign could transform the political landscape by revealing a newfound enthusiasm for EU membership. This approach could then be replicated in the rest of the European Union, creating a movement to save the EU by profoundly restructuring it. I am convinced that as the consequences of Brexit unfold in the months ahead, more and more people will be eager to join this movement.

What the EU must not do is penalize British voters while ignoring their legitimate concerns about the deficiencies of the Union. European leaders should recognize their own mistakes and acknowledge the democratic deficit in the current institutional arrangements. Rather than treating Brexit as the negotiation of a divorce, they should seize the opportunity to reinvent the EU – making it the kind of club that the UK and others at risk of exit want to join.

If disaffected voters in France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Poland and everywhere else see the EU benefitting their lives, the EU will emerge stronger. If not, it will fall apart faster than leaders and citizens currently realize. [Continue reading…]

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Is America repeating the mistakes of 1968?

Julian E Zelizer writes: “All of us, as Americans, should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated incidents,” said President Barack Obama following the horrific shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal-justice system.” In an American tragedy of the nation’s own making, Obama will end his historic presidency with racial turmoil rocking the nation. The person whose election brought so much hope about the trajectory of race relations in the United States, a country that has perpetually suffered from the original sin of slavery, is spending these days desperately trying to calm the anger over police killings of African Americans and the protests and violence that have ensued.

Today, America has a president who understands the urgent need to address the problems of institutional racism that have been broadcast to the entire world through smartphones and exposés of a racialized criminal-justice system. But this conflict is taking shape right in the middle of a heated election season—one that includes a candidate who has made draconian proposals for national security and who appeals to the “Silent Majority.” Following the events in Dallas, Donald Trump released a statement that read: “We must restore law and order. We must restore the confidence of our people to be safe and secure in their homes and on the street.”

This is not the first time this has happened. When questions over race and policing were front and center in a national debate in 1968, the federal government failed to take the steps necessary to make any changes. The government understood how institutional racism was playing out in the cities and how they exploded into violence, but the electorate instead was seduced by Richard Nixon’s calls for law and order, as well as an urban crackdown, leaving the problems of institutional racism untouched. Rather than deal with the way that racism was inscribed into American institutions, including the criminal-justice system, the government focused on building a massive carceral state, militarizing police forces, criminalizing small offenses, and living through repeated moments of racial conflict exploding into violence. [Continue reading…]

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America remains an intentionally segregated society

Natalie Y Moore writes: After the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota last Wednesday, the state’s appalled governor, Mark Dayton, said police wouldn’t have killed Castile if he had been white. Here’s a white politician recognising racism and not swatting it away like a pesky mosquito. But we need to recognise that a rigged, racist system of police brutality is indicative of deep-seated institutionalised racism.

Many of our cities are defined by entrenched residential segregation that created black ghettos and continues to perpetuate inequity. This was not by accident. In the 20th century, the government created housing policies that discriminated against black people and favoured white people in terms of wealth building. Despite the idea of “separate but equal” being struck down by our courts, the ideology still lingers in housing and public education. This isn’t about hokey ideas of harmony, of black and white people smiling and getting along just for the sake of getting along. Instead, if we start to address segregationist policies, we may have some hope of creating fairness.

After racial uprisings in US cities in the 1960s, the Kerner Commission released a report, which asserted that our country was moving towards two societies: one black, one white, separate and unequal. The report said: “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood – but the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.”

These words still ring true today.

Police brutality isn’t isolated from other forms of racism. Segregation is about division, disinvestment and uneven resources based on race. In policing, we often see white officers who grew up in homogenous white places placed in black urban settings. These officers enter without understanding racial and cultural differences. It’s a set-up for failure.

Segregation isn’t about choosing to live among like-minded or racially similar people. American segregation is historic and intentional and must be a part of any conversation on race as the root of many of our problems. [Continue reading…]

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Is the ISIS unstoppable?

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Hassan Hassan writes: Before Fayad Tayih abandoned the Islamic State earlier this month, he detected a striking trend: More people inside the self-declared caliphate were signing up to become suicide bombers. Mr. Tayih had been working in an administrative job for the jihadist group in Deir al-Zour, in eastern Syria, at the time. “Those who were working with me noticed the same thing,” he told me over Wickr, an encrypted messaging app.

Statistics released by the Islamic State confirm his observations. According to monthly updates from Amaq, the group’s official news outlet, the Islamic State was carrying out 50 to 60 suicide attacks per month in Iraq and Syria last November. Today the number of such attacks is 80 to 100 per month, an average of two to three operations a day. The trend peaked in March, with 112 members blowing themselves up in Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State is shifting tactics, and not just on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. The group is reverting to insurgency tactics it relied on before June 2014, when it took over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and declared the formation of a caliphate. This operational change has been on plain display in recent weeks: Hundreds of civilians were killed in a spate of suicide attacks attributed to the Islamic State in Turkey, Iraq, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia. In Baghdad last week, more than 280 civilians were killed when a car bomb exploded outside a shopping mall.

Some people have suggested that this is a sign of the group’s desperation and weakness. In fact, it demonstrates its strength and long-term survival skills. The Islamic State has known for years that it would suffer setbacks and have to find ways to adapt. In “The Management of Savagery,” a foundational text for the Islamic State’s ideology and strategy published in 2004, the author pointed out that in the 12th century, Muslims defeated the Crusaders with “small bands” and “separate, disparate organizations.” The group has not forgotten that message. [Continue reading…]

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A week from hell

Charles Blow writes: This was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our nation.

After two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon Heights, Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly ambush at an otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people. The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black Lives Matter” and “about the recent police shootings” and “was upset at white people” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

We seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way out, without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction, without resolutions that will satisfy.

There is so much loss and pain. There are so many families whose hearts hurt for a loved one needlessly taken, never to be embraced again.

There is so much disintegrating trust, so much animosity stirring.

So many — too many — Americans now seem to be living with an ambient terror that someone is somehow targeting them. [Continue reading…]

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Death in black and white

Michael Eric Dyson writes: We, black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that you, white America, will always struggle to understand us.

Like you, we don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.

But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at a peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death on a homemade video recording. This is a difficult point to make as a racial crisis flares around us.

We close a week of violence that witnessed the tragic deaths of two black men — Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile — at the hands of the police with a terrible attack in Dallas against police officers, whose names we’re just beginning to learn. It feels as though it has been death leading to more death, nothing anyone would ever hope for.

A nonviolent protest was hijacked by violence and so, too, was the debate about the legitimate grievances that black Americans face. The acts of the gunman in Dallas must be condemned. However, he has nothing to do with the difficult truths we must address if we are to make real racial progress, and the reckoning includes being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted. [Continue reading…]

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Justice is indivisible

Gary Younge writes: In a country where it’s easier to obtain a semi-automatic gun than to obtain healthcare, a fragile mind can wreak havoc on a fragile political culture. So it was on Thursday night when a sniper opened fire on police at a Black Lives Matter demonstration killing five officers and wounding at least seven others.

Even as events in Dallas unfold there are three key things one can say. The first is that these murders are vile and should be unequivocally condemned. They can in no way be understood or excused as retaliation for the well-publicised recent incidents of police shootings of African Americans. Indeed the effect of such individual acts of violence is not to support the movement against racism but sabotage it. Its enemies will smear it by association; potential allies will be more wary; those within it will be more cautious. Those believed responsible should be found, charged and prosecuted. This is the appropriate response when people cavalierly and wantonly take the life of another. Anything less would lack justice.

Which brings us to the second point. Justice is indivisible. If it is accorded to some and not others it is not justice but privilege. That is why these horrific assassinations should in no way diminish the urgency or importance of the issue of police killings of African Americans or undermine the Black Lives Matter movement. [Continue reading…]

 

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The bomb Dallas police used to kill alleged shooter

Lily Hay Newman writes: Three suspects have been apprehended after Thursday night’s Dallas shooting, which resulted in the death of five police officers and injured six more, plus one civilian. Following a prolonged standoff and negotiation with police, one suspect was killed by an explosion detonated by a bomb robot.

Robots have been proliferating in local policing over the last few years. The technology was largely developed for military and large-scale disaster response scenarios, but has obvious applications in local policing as well. It is used to diffuse or detonate bombs, scout locations with cameras, work in rubble, and do other jobs that are dangerous for officers. The Dallas shooting appears to be the first time a police robot has been used to kill.

Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference Friday morning:

We cornered one suspect and we tried to negotiate for several hours. Negotiations broke down, we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb.

The suspect who was killed claimed that he had planted bombs in the area, but the New York Times reports that officials said they swept the area and didn’t find any. The explosive the robot was carrying that killed the suspect was a police explosive. [Continue reading…]

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Trump is wrong about Saddam Hussein

Hayder Al-Shakeri writes: As an Iraqi, I learned about the values on which the United States of America was built during an exchange semester in the US. I admired those values and respected Americans for believing in them. But Donald Trump contradicts some of those very principles. In a speech on Tuesday, I heard him praise the way Saddam killed “terrorists” without reading them rights or even letting them talk. This is not the American system that I was taught – nor these the values I respected.

“Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Right? He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights, they didn’t talk, they were a terrorist, it was over,” Donald Trump said in his speech.

It is true that Saddam killed many people. Saddam killed men and women, kids and minorities and many others who stood up to him. Most of them were not terrorists, though. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been wasted under his leadership/dictatorship. Iraq, in his opinion, might have looked better during his time, but Iraqis back then suffered greatly.

Saddam led Iraq into long wars lasting several years, during which Iraqis had to fight for what he believed in. He committed genocides against his people and eventually Iraq had up to 250 mass graves spread around in the country. Saddam went after anyone who opposed him – he didn’t care about violating basic human rights or democracy.

Through such acts, Saddam was able to instill terror in his people, making them afraid to whisper a word. That is how Saddam dealt with terrorism, by terrorizing everyone so no one would be able to speak or stand up to him. In that way, the state looked orderly and people seemed in a better place than right now. [Continue reading…]

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Would Donald Trump quit if he wins the election? He doesn’t rule it out

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The New York Times reports: The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.

Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.

Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.

“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race. [Continue reading…]

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Take it from a whistleblower: Chilcot’s jigsaw puzzle is missing a few pieces

Katharine Gun writes: Following the damning Chilcot report, much will be said about the decision to go to war in Iraq. But one thing will be missing: the information I leaked in the runup to the war. It won’t get an airing because I was never questioned or asked to participate in the Chilcot inquiry.

Back in early 2003, Tony Blair was keen to secure UN backing for a resolution that would authorise the use of force against Iraq. I was a linguist and analyst at GCHQ when, on 31 Jan 2003, I, along with dozens of others in GCHQ, received an email from a senior official at the National Security Agency. It said the agency was “mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN security council (UNSC) members”, and that it wanted “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”.

In other words, the US planned to use intercepted communications of the security council delegates. The focus of the “surge” was principally directed at the six swing nations then on the UNSC: Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The Chilcot report has eliminated any doubt that the goal of the war was regime change by military means. But that is what many people already suspected in 2003.

I was furious when I read that email and leaked it. Soon afterwards, when the Observer ran a front-page story: “US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war”, I confessed to the leak and was arrested on suspicion of the breach of section 1 of the Official Secrets Act. I pleaded not guilty and, assisted by Liberty and Ben Emmerson QC, offered a defence of necessity – in other words, a breach of the law in order to prevent imminent loss of human life. This defence had not and, to my knowledge, has still not, been tested in a court of law.

I believed that on receiving the email, UK parliamentary members might question the urgency and motives of the war hawks, and demand further deliberations and scrutiny. I thought it might delay or perhaps even halt the march towards a war that would devastate Iraqi lives and infrastructure already crushed by a decade of unrelenting sanctions. A war that would send UK and US service men and women into harm’s way, leaving hundreds of them dead, disfigured and traumatised. Unfortunately, that did not happen. It couldn’t, for now we know via Chilcot that Blair promised George W Bush he would be “with him, whatever”. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. could have destroyed Iran’s entire infrastructure without dropping a single bomb

Tech Insider reports: The United States had a top-secret operation that gave it the ability to shut down much of Iran’s infrastructure ahead of a full-scale war, without a single bomb being dropped.

The incredible insight into a highly-classified cyber operation called Nitro Zeus was first exposed in the film “Zero Days” and later corroborated by The New York Times, which interviewed intelligence and military officials who were involved.

The film, directed by Alex Gibney, premieres on Friday.

“We spent hundreds of millions, maybe billions on it,” an anonymous National Security Agency source says in the film. “We were inside, waiting, watching. Ready to disrupt, degrade, and destroy those systems with cyber attacks. In comparison, Stuxnet was a back alley operation. [Nitro Zeus] was the plan for a full scale cyber war with no attribution.”

The source, whose face and voice are concealed throughout the film, is later revealed to be an actor reciting lines from testimony offered to Director Alex Gibney by CIA and NSA employees.

The focus of the “Zero Days” film is on Stuxnet — the world’s first cyber weapon — that was used against Iran’s nuclear facilities. But in researching for the film, Gibney found that malicious software was just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. [Continue reading…]

 

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