Category Archives: Analysis

Syriza’s unlikely coalition ally

The Guardian reports: Syriza just missed out on the 151 MPs it needed to govern alone after Greece’s election, winning 149 seats with a 36.3% share of the vote. The party has formed a coalition government with Independent Greeks, who took 13 seats.

The populist, rightwing Independent Greeks (Anel) would at first sight make for a strange bedfellow for the radical leftists Syriza and the deal makes an unusual alliance, but they are brought together by a mutual hatred for the bailout programme keeping Greece afloat.

The two parties have vastly diverging world views, standing well apart on issues such as illegal migration, Greece’s ever-fractious relationship with Nato rival Turkey, gay marriage and the role of the Greek Orthodox church.

Under their leader Panos Kammenos, who defected from the centre-right New Democracy party to form Anel at the height of the crisis in February 2012, the group has proved to be rabidly nationalistic in foreign affairs. [Continue reading…]

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American Sniper illustrates the West’s morality blind spots

Gary Younge writes: Say what you like about the film American Sniper, and people have, you have to admire its clarity. It’s about killing. There is no moral arc; no anguish about whether the killing is necessary or whether those who are killed are guilty of anything. “I’m prepared to meet my maker and answer for every shot I took,” says Bradley Cooper, who plays the late Chris Kyle, a navy Seal who was reputedly the deadliest sniper in American history. There is certainly no discursive quandary about whether the Iraq war, in which the killing takes place, is either legal or justified. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis,” wrote Kyle in his memoir, where he refers to the local people as “savages”.

The film celebrates a man who has a talent for shooting people dead when they are not looking and who, apparently, likes his job. “After the first kill, the others come easy,” writes Kyle. “I don’t have to psych myself up, or do anything special mentally. I look through the scope, get my target in the crosshairs, and kill my enemy before he kills one of my people.”

Americans are celebrating the film. It has been nominated for six Oscars and enjoyed the highest January debut ever. When Kyle kills his rival, a Syrian sniper named Mustafa, with a mile-long shot, audiences cheer. It has done particularly well with men and in southern and midwestern markets where the film industry does not expect to win big. And while its appeal is strong in the heartland it has travelled well too, providing career-best opening weekends for Clint Eastwood in the UK, Taiwan, New Zealand, Peru and Italy.

And so it is that within a few weeks of the developed world uniting to defend western culture and Enlightenment values, it produces a popular celluloid hero who is tasked not with satirising Islam, but killing Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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Brutal treatment of migrant children held in ‘ice boxes’ by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

The Guardian reports: Imagine being taken into a room. It is cold – very, very cold – and you shiver under the single layer of clothes that is all you are allowed to wear. The room is concrete and entirely bare: nothing on the walls, no furniture, no bedding of any sort other than the thin sheet you have been given. The only window allows guards to look in at you, but gives you no view of the world outside.

You sit in the room, huddled on the cold, hard floor, seeking warmth under the sheet. The room is lit by neon lights that are kept on 24 hours a day, and after a while you lose track of time. Is it day, is it night – you no longer know. Though there are many other people in the room with you, they are all strangers and no-one speaks to you. You are utterly alone.

And you are 7 years old.

Carla (not her real name) was 7 years old when she was picked up by officers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) last June, after she crossed the Mexican border into the US near Hidalgo, Texas. At the end of a grueling 10-day journey from El Salvador, which she left to escape danger and poverty and in the hope of being reunited with her parents in New York, she was taken by border patrol officers to a temporary holding station.

For the first two days, Carla had the company of her cousin, a woman in her early 20s, who had made the journey with her. But then her relative was separated from her and released. For the following 13 days – as official immigration papers record – Carla was detained in the concrete room, surrounded by about 15 other undocumented immigrants like herself. [Continue reading…]

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How the FBI trains terrorists

Lyric R Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe write: People think that catching terrorists is just a matter of finding them – but, just as often, terrorists are created by the people doing the chase.

While making our film (T)ERROR, which tracks a single counter-terrorism sting operation over seven months, we realized that most people have serious misconceptions about FBI counter-terrorism efforts. They assume that informants infiltrate terrorist networks and then provide the FBI with information about those networks in order to stop terrorist plots from being carried out. That’s not true in the vast majority of domestic terrorism cases.

Since 9/11, as Human Rights Watch and others have documented, the FBI has routinely used paid informants not to capture existing terrorists, but to cultivate them. Through elaborate sting operations, informants are directed to spend months – sometimes years – building relationships with targets, stoking their anger and offering ideas and incentives that encourage them to engage in terrorist activity. And the moment a target takes a decisive step forward, crossing the line from aspirational to operational, the FBI swoops in to arrest him. [Continue reading…]

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Greece shows what can happen when the young revolt against corrupt elites

Paul Mason writes: The fact that a party with a “central committee” even got close to power has nothing to do with a sudden swing to Marxism in the Greek psyche. It is, instead, testimony to three things: the strategic crisis of the eurozone, the determination of the Greek elite to cling to systemic corruption, and a new way of thinking among the young.

Of these, the eurozone’s crisis is easiest to understand – because its consequences can be read so easily in the macroeconomic figures. The IMF predicted Greece would grow as the result of its aid package in 2010. Instead, the economy has shrunk by 25%. Wages are down by the same amount. Youth unemployment stands at 60% – and that is among those who are still in the country.

So the economic collapse – about which all Greeks, both right and leftwing, are bitter – is not just seen as a material collapse. It demonstrated complete myopia among the European policy elite. In all of drama and comedy there is no figure more laughable as a rich man who does not know what he is doing. For the past four years the troika – the European Commission, IMF and European Central Bank – has provided Greeks with just such a spectacle.

As for the Greek oligarchs, their misrule long predates the crisis. [Continue reading…]

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Syriza’s pragmatic radicalism

Ed Rooksby writes: Unsurprisingly the imminent prospect of a left government committed to breaking with the brutal reign of austerity has alarmed the powerful within and beyond Greece. In a thinly veiled attack on Syriza, for example, the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently warned Greeks about electing ‘extreme forces’ into power and suggested, rather in the manner of a threat, that they ought to consider ‘what a wrong election result would mean for Greece and the eurozone’.

But what’s remarkable about this is that, for all the warnings of ‘extremism’, Syriza’s demands are in fact rather modest and indeed eminently sensible. At the core of its programme are pledges to negotiate the cancellation of 50 percent of Greece’s crippling debt, lift austerity and boost growth and employment through public investment. These proposals are accompanied by a range of measures designed to address what Syriza rightly calls the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Greece such as promises to provide free electricity and subsidised meals and housing for the poor.

Given the economic and social catastrophe that austerity has visited on Greece—over 25 percent unemployment, an economy that has contracted by a quarter, wages and pensions slashed, soaring rates of homelessness, suicide and infant mortality—these are hardly outlandish or utopian proposals. They pivot on the simple, obvious truths that the national debt is unpayable, that austerity is generating nothing but misery and, further, on the rather basic ethical demand that every citizen should have enough to eat, decent housing and access to the basic resources that will allow them to live with dignity. There is nothing extreme about this—indeed, surely the real extremists are those who insist on further austerity, further hardship and humiliation for ordinary Greeks. [Continue reading…]

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Greece’s Syriza set to sweep election in anti-austerity triumph

Reuters: Greece’s leftwing Syriza looked set for a comfortable victory over the ruling conservatives, an exit poll showed, with a chance of winning a full majority to face down international creditors and roll back years of painful austerity measures.

Syriza could gain 35.5-39.5 percent of the vote, well ahead of the conservative New Democracy party of outgoing Prime Minister Antonis Samaras on 23-27 percent, according a joint exit poll for Greek television stations issued immediately after voting ended. Other individual exit polls showed similarly strong leads for Syriza.

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Why the Greek election is so important

By Theo Papadopoulos, University of Bath

This Greek election is the most important in recent memory. If the pollsters are correct, Syriza will win by a large margin and end four decades of two-party rule in Greece.

Since 2010 – and as a result of austerity measures – the country has seen its GDP shrink by nearly a quarter, its unemployment reach a third of the labour force and nearly half of its population fall below the poverty line.

With the slogan “hope is coming” Syriza, a party that prior to 2012 polled around 4.5% of the vote, seems to have achieved the impossible: creating a broad coalition that, at least rhetorically, rejects the TINA argument (There Is No Alternative) that previous Greek administrations have accepted. In its place, Syriza advocates a post-austerity vision, both for Greece and Europe, with re-structuring of sovereign debt at its centre.

How significant is this victory for Europe and the rest of the world? Comments range from grave concerns about the impact on the euro and the global economy to jubilant support for the renewal of the European left. For sure, Syriza is at the centre of political attention in Europe.

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Egypt: Power, the January 25 revolutionaries, and responsibility

H.A. Hellyer writes: During the 18-day uprising in 2011, the revolutionaries gained a certain type of power. Their theoretical perspective, though imprecise, became manifest through popular mobilization. With that, the revolutionaries were able to fundamentally disrupt the workings of the state, provoking and forcing it to change direction, resulting in the removal of Mubarak. At the same time, they also missed the opportunity to harness and develop that power.

In 2011, when the military’s transitional road map was put to a referendum, the revolutionaries had considerable political capital. That capital, however, was not capitalized upon. Revolutionaries generally mobilized for a “no” vote, but provided little in the way of a plausible alternative. They lost the vote. Their failure to properly express a well-developed political vision meant they missed a key opportunity to set the agenda of the post-Mubarak period.

A year later, the revolutionaries had the option of coalescing around a single candidate for presidential elections. It is likely that such a candidate would have prevailed. Instead, the revolutionary vote was split, leading to a run-off between Mubarak’s last prime minister, and the non-revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood. Some will claim the revolutionaries played a critical role in that run-off, by ensuring the former regime candidate lost. They did – but the very occurrence of such an abysmal run-off would have been impossible had there been a single, pro-January 25 revolution candidate.

Arising from that election was a presidency that the revolutionaries eventually, and correctly, opposed. Pro-revolutionary figures were the first to demand presidential elections: a laudable, democratic escape route from the prevailing political impasse, with revolutionaries en masse endorsing the demand. There were, however, other, less scrupulous forces that opposed the Brotherhood’s presidency. The key political party opposition umbrella was the National Salvation Front, which later backed the Tamarod group that called for the June 30 protests. More of the revolutionaries should have focused more intently on pressing Front members to distinguish themselves and the Front from more insidious forces, as well as interrogating Tamarod and its backers.

In short, at a time that could have made a critical difference, the revolutionaries did not realize the need to take initiative. As the protests to fulfill the democratic demand for presidential elections drew nearer, it was only a small group of revolutionaries that were dubious about the outcome. The rest merely made various public calls against military intervention when they should have focused on holding the main umbrella group, the National Salvation Front, to that anti-intervention principle as a condition, and established protocols to be followed if that intervention happened. That was their only leverage. [Continue reading…]

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The ISIS ideology: Spreading by the sword what it asserts as ‘the true message of Islam’

Hassan Hassan reports: Little is known about what goes on inside training camps run by Isis in areas under its control in Iraq and Syria – particularly its religious component. The Isis ideology is generally viewed as identical to al-Qaida’s or the Saudi version of Salafism – adherence to fundamental Islamic tenets – and so there does not seem to be a serious effort to study it more closely. There is also a tendency to play down the role of religious ideology as a recruitment tool, since the motives of many Isis members have little to do with religion.

Another problem that muddles understanding of Isis’s appeal is that politicians tend to deliberately misrepresent the role of ideology to undermine the group’s propaganda, while objective observers often have no access to Isis associates beyond social media. As a result, a flawed understanding of the ideological appeal of Isis is common, despite its central role in the fight against it. Both the commander of the American special operations forces in the Middle East, Major General Michael Nagata, and the general in charge of leading the international coalition against Isis, John Allen, have emphasised that the ideology of Isis is insufficiently understood and that ideological delegitimisation is crucial in the effort to defeat it.

So what specific ideas, stories and narratives do new members learn at these camps? What does Isis tell its new recruits to make them so zealously committed to its ideology? More important, does the Isis ideology serve to attract or merely retain new recruits?

As part of research involving in-depth interviews with Isis members for a book about the organisation, American analyst Michael Weiss and I have identified half a dozen categories of Isis members according to the factors that drew them to the group. In at least two of those categories, religion more than anything else has been the driving force. But these two demographic components – long-standing takfiris (radicals who adhere to teachings that declare fellow Muslims as infidels) and young zealots – are more central for Isis than other members because they formulate the group’s identity and ensure its resilience. In addition, the appeal of Isis outside its conflict zones tends to be primarily ideologically driven. [Continue reading…]

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Japanese reporter’s bid to save friend led to ISIS abduction

Before the apparent murder of the Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa, Reuters reported: It is an unlikely friendship that ties the fates of war correspondent Kenji Goto and troubled loner Haruna Yukawa, the two Japanese hostages for which Islamic State militants demanded a $200 million (132.34 million pounds) ransom this week.

Yukawa was captured in August outside Aleppo. Goto, who had returned to Syria in late October to try to help his friend, had been missing since then.

For Yukawa, who dreamed of becoming a military contractor, travelling to Syria had been part of an effort to turn his life around after going bankrupt, losing his wife to cancer and attempting suicide, according to associates and his own accounts.

A unit at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been seeking information on him since August, people involved in that effort said. Goto’s disappearance had not been reported until Tuesday’s video apparently showing him and Yukawa kneeling in orange t-shirts next to a masked Islamic State militant wielding a knife.

Yukawa first met Goto in Syria in April and asked him to take him to Iraq. He wanted to know how to operate in a conflict zone. They went together in June.

“He was hapless and didn’t know what he was doing. He needed someone with experience to help him,” Goto told Reuters in August.

Yukawa then returned to Syria in July on his own. Goto, 47, returned to Japan. Yukawa’s subsequent abduction haunted Goto, who felt he had to do something to help the man, a few years his junior. [Continue reading…]

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The failure of the Free Syria Army

Loubna Mrie writes: Last year was disastrous for the original moderate, secular, democratic goals of the Syrian revolution.

As the Syrian civil war enters its fourth year, the revolution has shifted from a movement clamoring for social and political change to an all out sectarian conflict. In the process, it has become a proxy war pitting global and regional powers, frustrating diplomatic efforts to solve it.

Part of the blame for the war’s current messiness lies with the group that originally carried the banner of revolution – and citizens’ hope for a better Syria. The Free Syrian Army (FSA), a loose coalition of moderate rebel brigades, has lost ground to both extremist organizations such as Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and more moderate Islamists. Increasingly, civilians are abandoning the FSA and embracing jihadist organizations, while FSA fighters are leaving to fight with other groups. The Free Syrian Army has found itself hamstrung by widespread corruption and an inability to provide basic public goods including humanitarian aid and law and order.

On all fronts, the organization is losing ground. Only a major overhaul can possibly save this endangered species. But before Syrians initiate any kind of overhaul – we need an analysis of what, exactly, went wrong with the FSA’s strategy. In other words, how did we get here? After conducting interviews and research in Syria for the past two years, I found that there are three factors that have lead to the FSA’s loss of credibility, which has, arguably, helped lead the war into its brutal stasis. [Continue reading…]

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After King Abdullah, continuity

Frederic Wehrey writes: A king has passed in Saudi Arabia. And yet, despite the breathless speculation over the seismic effects of succession, the kingdom’s foreign policies are likely to remain unchanged. What is often overlooked is that Saudi foreign policy has been remarkably consistent since the reign of King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz. The Al Saud family is a tightly knit, conservative coterie that shares a similar vision of the world and Saudi Arabia’s place in it.

There are several indications to suggest that the Saudi succession is unlikely to lead to major changes in policies over the short term. King Abdullah had been largely incapacitated before his death, functioning for, at most, a couple hours a day. The new king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz, and Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz had represented King Abdullah at various functions in the past few years. The new head of the royal court is also the new defense minister, Mohammed bin Salman. At only thirty-four years old, he’s a young son of King Salman, but he has been head of Salman’s court as crown prince. As Salman’s health has deteriorated (he’s reportedly suffering dementia), Mohammed bin Salman has grown very powerful and influential over his father, which has made many Saudi royals very concerned about his power.

On particular issues, Saudi Arabia is unlikely to significantly change its policies with the death of King Abdullah. The general contours of U.S.-Saudi relations, particularly against the Islamic State, seem to be under the control of the new deputy crown prince, the Minister of Interior Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The centerpiece of U.S.-Saudi relations has always been at the interior ministry–intelligence level. The elevation of Mohammed bin Nayef’s position to handle the Syria portfolio last year only cemented this bond. [Continue reading…]

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Greece’s solidarity movement: ‘it’s a whole new model — and it’s working’

The Guardian reports: “A long time ago, when I was a student,” said Olga Kesidou, sunk low in the single, somewhat clapped-out sofa of the waiting room at the Peristeri Solidarity Clinic, “I’d see myself volunteering. You know, in Africa somewhere, treating sick people in a poor developing country. I never once imagined I’d be doing it in a suburb of Athens.”

Few in Greece, even five years ago, would have imagined their recession- and austerity-ravaged country as it is now: 1.3 million people – 26% of the workforce – without a job (and most of them without benefits); wages down by 38% on 2009, pensions by 45%, GDP by a quarter; 18% of the country’s population unable to meet their food needs; 32% below the poverty line.

And just under 3.1 million people, 33% of the population, without national health insurance.

So, along with a dozen other medics including a GP, a brace of pharmacists, a paediatrician, a psychologist, an orthopaedic surgeon, a gynaecologist, a cardiologist and a dentist or two, Kesidou, an ear, nose and throat specialist, spends a day a week at this busy but cheerful clinic half an hour’s drive from central Athens, treating patients who otherwise would not get to see a doctor. Others in the group accept uninsured patients in their private surgeries.

“We couldn’t just stand by and watch so many people, whole families, being excluded from public healthcare,” Kesidou said. “In Greece now, if you’re out of work for a year you lose your social security. That’s an awful lot of people without access to what should be a basic right. If we didn’t react we couldn’t look at ourselves in the mirror. It’s solidarity.” [Continue reading…]

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Inexperienced Colorado judge sends wrong message to potential ISIS recruits and their families

There is a strange and cowardly convention in American journalism and society at large that treats criminal action as a mark of adulthood.

If an eighteen-year-old gets shot, there is a reasonable chance that he or she will be referred to as a teen, but whoever pulls the trigger is supposedly an adult — and the worse the crime, the more likely a child is going to be tried as an adult.

The United States and many other countries could learn a lot from Germany.

As Andrew Neilson writes: “Germany sentences young adults under either juvenile or adult law based on an assessment of a young adult’s maturity. The courts have a choice based on the person they see before them.”

Any legal process that has the capacity to determine an individual’s guilt should also be able to make a judgment about their level of maturity.

Shannon Conley and Judge Raymond Moore.

Shannon Conley and Judge Raymond Moore

Shannon Maureen Conley is a Colorado teenager who just got sentenced to four years in prison for attempting to go to Syria to join ISIS. Most press reports refer to her as a woman — I guess she entered womanhood the minute she declared jihad.

The gray-haired judge, Raymond P. Moore, who is in his early sixties, conceded that Conley was naive but said at sentencing: “I need to send a message.”

Like most people who use that expression, Moore didn’t spell out exactly what the message was, but given that despite his mature appearance he has only been a judge for less than two years, my suspicion is that he was less concerned about his message than he was afraid of showing any leniency — possessed by a fear that guides the actions of thousands of government officials across America who are terrified of being viewed as soft on terrorism.

Three other Denver teenage girls were stopped in Germany last Fall as they attempted to make their way to Syria where they apparently intended to marry ISIS fighters. They were returned to their parents without facing charges. Presumably the officials involved in that case felt that everyone’s interests would be better served by returning these kids to their homes rather than locking them in prison cells.

No doubt Moore thought he was sending a strong message to potential ISIS recruits, but in doing so he has sent the wrong message to their parents. No one wants to see their child risk their life by going to join ISIS, yet neither do they want to see them thrown behind bars because of naive, ill-informed, and youthful idealism.

Anyone who actually reaches Syria or Iraq and takes up arms with ISIS is willingly entering a war and will suffer the consequences of that choice, but prior to crossing that threshold — and especially if that individual has yet to exercise the autonomy of an adult — they should be shown some kindness.

By failing to follow that course, the Colorado judge has probably made it likely that kids contemplating running off to Syria will take even greater care to avoid detection, and parents who learn about such plans will be more hesitant about alerting the authorities.

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