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Victory in Iraq? Not so much

JamieSW — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:35:40 +0000

“They create a desolation and call it ‘peace’” – Tacitus

US Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin last week accused Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama of failing to recognise the “coming victory in Iraq“. What’s the nature of this “victory” that Palin’s talking about? Has the US finally won the Iraq War?

Not so much.

For the last few months its been taken as read by many in the political mainstream that the “surge” of extra US troops into Iraq “worked” in quelling the violence that had been reaching cataclysmic levels by late 2006. In fact, this is a vast over-simplification, if not a self-serving lie put about by the war’s supporters. A number of other factors have contributed to bringing down the levels of daily killings (which still remain extraordinarily high). The “surge” is merely one of these, at best is possibly the least of them, and at worst has in some respects been a countervailing force.

The principal factors behind the decline in violence are:

the unilateral ceasefire of Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Shia militia;

the decision made by nationalist Sunni insurgents, before the “surge” was conceived of, to concentrate their fire on the extremist “al-Qaeda” elements amongst them that had been responsible for the major attacks on Shia civilians; and

the fact that the civil war in Baghdad has essentially played itself out, with Sunnis and Shia respectively expelled from mixed communities, the two groups divided, and no more ‘sectarian cleansing’ to be done (the outcome being a net win for the Shia forces).

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

The Mahdi Army ceasefire may have been called with one eye on the coming influx of US troops, but it was still a unilateral decision. The fact is that Moqtada al Sadr continues to defy the US, five years after the occupiers set out to “kill or capture” him; as we saw in March when attempts to go after his Mahdi Army met with humiliating defeat. The US always wanted al-Sadr out of the way. By now, he’s more powerful than ever. No US “victory” here.

Then there’s the decision of Sunni nationalist insurgents to turn on al Qaeda, i.e. the foreign religious extremists who had come to Iraq to wage jihad both on the US and the Shia population. This has been hugely significant, and one cannot discount the effect of the US decision to stop fighting these nationalists guerrillas (who were always the bulk of the insurgency) and to pay them to concentrate on fighting and killing off al Qaeda. But the Sunni backlash against the religious extremists was not a US invention. It began as far back as 2005, and US backing for the movement was as much a pragmatic recognition that (a) it could not defeat the nationalist insurgency and (b) only those nationalists could defeat al Qaeda. Paying people to stop shooting at you and to instead fight some other people that you can’t beat either is not in anyone’s definition of “victory” as far as I’m aware.

And as for the third and possibly most important factor – the final Shia victory in the sectarian “Battle of Baghdad” which saw mixed neighbourhoods purged and thousands driven out of their homes – this is not merely a question of the US not being able to take credit for the relative peace that came after the civil war burnt itself out. No small amount of blame attaches to the US military itself for these gruesome events. As Michael Schwartz has argued in this indispensible analysis of the “surge” in Baghdad, US tactics may actually have facilitated the sectarian cleansing and effective Shia takeover. Either way, violence appears to have petered out in large part because one group of armed thugs achieved victory over the other, at massive cost to the civilian population, and not because the US stepped in as peacekeeper to enforce an early end to the fighting.

So the US mostly isn’t fighting the Shia nationalists anymore because the Shia nationalists stood down of their own accord. It mostly isn’t fighting the Sunni nationalists any more because (a) its paying them to fight Al Qaeda instead (which they were already doing) and (b) it couldn’t beat them anyway, so its had to learn to live with them. It isn’t fighting Al Qaeda anymore because its paying the Sunni nationalists to do that for it, since it couldn’t beat Al Qaeda itself. And the Sunni and Shia aren’t fighting each other anymore (or are doing so a lot less) because that battle’s (mostly) over (at least in Baghdad) and the Shia won. The case for saying that US “surge” has “worked” and that Washington can soon declare “victory” is, therefore, a little on the thin side.

What’s also misguided is the related insinuation that Iraq has become in some way peaceful. Iraq is still one of the most violent places in the world, with levels of daily killing equivalent to those of the Lebanese civil war. Last month at least 360 civilians were killed and more than 470 wounded in violence. Adjust that for the size of the total population and you’re talking about the equivalent of 800 plus British deaths and over a thousand injuries in political/military violence over 31 days. Imagine that occurring in a Soviet-occupied United Kingdom, while Kremlin leaders prattle on about “victory” and “success”. And remember that these are just the deaths that journalists and officials know about and are able to verify.

Yes, things aren’t as bad in Iraq as they were in 2006. But the fact that the blood now washes up to your waist, as opposed to your neck, doesn’t make Iraq something other than a bloodbath. Demanding that people accept some of the worst levels of violence on earth as some sort of good news story displays a pretty low regard for human life on Palin’s part.

The people best placed to judge the success of US military strategy are those who have to live with it on a daily basis: the Iraqi public. They don’t get interviewed at length by the major news networks, or write op-eds for the Washington Post, but their opinions are relevant nonetheless. By March 2008, when this [.pdf] poll was taken, it was already close to being conventional wisdom in the West that the “surge had worked”. Clearly a lot of Iraqis hadn’t received the memo.

The poll asks whether the “surge” has helped in the five areas where beneficial effects were promised: security where troop levels have increased, security in other areas, conditions for political dialogue, the ability of the Iraqi government to operate, and the pace of economic development. On each of those areas, the proportion of Iraqis saying the “surge” had been beneficial ranged between 21 and 36 per cent. Between 42 and 53 per cent said it has made things worse. The balance was made up by those saying it had made no difference. So in each area, between 63 and 79 per cent of Iraqis say the “surge” had made things worse or made no difference. That’s between 63 and 70 per cent in the case of security and 79 per cent in the case of political reconciliation (the latter of which we’re given to understand was the overall purpose of the “surge”).

Of course, the real aim of the “surge” was for the US to get Iraq properly under its control, not to perform an act of altruism or humanitarian relief work from which it has nothing to gain for itself, though that is exactly how the “surge” has been described, practically without exception, in our media and amongst our politicians. The question of whether it is for one country to forcibly place another country under its control, for its own purposes and against the wishes of majority of people in the latter country, is hardly one that should be ignored – though it has been. In any event, the “surge” appears to have failed in this respect. With the Iraqi government apparently now moving to reject the US demand for a permanent military presence and privileged access to oil reserves, the real reason for the 2003 invasion. What was supposed to be an US-client government in Baghdad now thumbs its nose at Washington and sidles up to, of all people, the Iranians. Do Palin and McCain really call that success, even on their own warped terms? Apparently dishonesty and greed now battle it out with rank stupidity for control of the United States government.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq devastated the country, driving well over 4 million Iraqis out of their homes (or around one in every six of the population) and killing perhaps a million (or around one in every twenty-nine of the population) according to the best estimates available. The refugees included many of Iraq’s former professional classes, driven into poverty and marginalisation in neighbouring countries, their children into malnutrition, their daughters into prostitution. Those left behind fare little better, be they the maimed, the bereaved, the unemployed, the impoverished, the imprisoned or the tortured. Nothing can erase the suffering that has taken place over the last five years, or return the hundreds of thousands of dead to their loved ones. This tsunami of grief was delivered to Iraq by an aggressive war of choice, instigated under a cloak of propaganda and straightforward lying, that was aimed at no more lofty a goal than the acquisition of greater wealth and power. To talk of “victory” in Iraq is obscene, as indeed is any reaction from anyone in Britain and America other than outright cringing shame.

Yet not only is it a commonly accepted truth, here and in the US, that the “surge has worked”, but early backers of the “surge” are now lauded as wise sages of military and foreign policy. A little over a year ago John McCain’s bid for the White House was seen as little more than the quixotic last gasp of a failed militarist, his approval rating for the Republican candidate languishing in the single digits. McCain’s subsequent political resurrection rested almost entirely on the notion that “the surge worked”, as he had doggedly insisted it would, and it is in many ways to this misapprehension that we can attribute the now present danger of a McCain-Palin Presidency from January 2009, with all the chilling prospects that raises for the United States and the world.

Iraq: image and reality

JamieSW — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:26:29 +0000

Has Iraq finally turned the corner? George Bush certainly wants us to think so. And at first sight, his arguments look convincing. Large sections of the country – including the capital city Baghdad and the restive Anbar province in the west – are being handed over to the Iraqi army.

The Shia insurgency led by Moqtada al-Sadr has been contained and demobilised, while Sunni resistance fighters have been rebranded as “awakening councils” and now cooperate with US occupation forces.

The US can point to a tenfold decline in attacks on its troops from a peak of 2,000 a month in summer 2006. There has also been a marked fall in the numbers of civilian casualties from its peak of 3,500 a month in early 2007.

The US is now confidently predicting that it will finally be able to start drawing down its troops. The “surge”, Bush’s gamble to stabilise the occupation, is being paraded as a success.

But in fact Iraq is poised to enter a new era of instability – and the US is finding itself trapped by a series of dirty deals that are coming back to haunt it.

Foremost among these is the deal the US hoped it could forge with the Shia‑dominated Iraqi government.

This deal, known as the “status of forces agreement”, would have granted the US the right to stage military operations inside Iraq without Iraqi government approval, and the right to launch wars on other countries from permanent bases on Iraqi soil.

But progress towards the agreement has been grindingly slow. Talks on Iraq’s oil resources, electoral reform and amnesties for members of Saddam Hussein’s regime have all stalled.

Meanwhile the Kurds are blocking constitutional reforms that will claw back the autonomy granted to them in the earlier phase of the occupation.

Trapped by allies

The main problem for the US is that it has found itself trapped in an alliance with an Iraqi government that wants to shake free from its control. Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has also declared that he is not bound by US promises to Sunnis and Kurds.

Maliki’s legitimacy rests on the authority of Shia religious institutions represented by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and on cooperation with the Iranian government to reign in Sadr’s Shia resistance forces.

In return both Sistani and Iran want Maliki to block key US demands in the status agreement, force the US to set a firm date for the withdrawal of combat troops, and prevent the US from using Iraq as a base for an attack on Iran.

For now it looks as if Maliki’s gamble is paying off. In April this year the Iraqi government launched an offensive on Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra and the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad.

After several days of fierce fighting, the Iraqi army fell apart, swapped sides or went home. But on the verge of a major military victory – and much to the dismay of his supporters – Sadr called a halt to the uprising under instructions from the Iranians.

Today Sadr is a virtual prisoner in Iran. He travelled there ostensibly on a pilgrimage to the religious city of Qom in order to study for key religious exams. It is now widely accepted that he is being kept under house arrest by the Iranian authorities. Under pressure from Iran, Sadr has ordered his armed supporters to disband.

Sadr has occupied a contradictory position inside Iraq. When his movement was part of a nationwide insurrection, his popularity and power grew across all sections of society.

But he lost control over many of his supporters when Shia areas came under fierce sectarian attacks from elements of the Sunni insurgency.

Some joined the sectarian conflict, driving Sunnis out of mixed neighbourhoods. Others defected to Maliki’s coalition, while a third section attempted to hold together the unity forged during the national uprising that exploded in April 2004.

Sadr was eventually able to demobilise the sectarian gangs within his organisation – but the damage had already been done. He was declared an enemy and an agent of Iran by the majority of Sunni resistance organisations. Isolated from the wider insurgency, Sadr’s fighters found themselves standing alone against the full might of US firepower.

Resistance

As a prisoner of Iran, Sadr’s hands are tied. But his supporters are not defeated. His last instructions ordered the Mahdi Army to change its name, and for his supporters to bury their weapons and avoid military confrontations for now.

Maliki and the US are relying on the goodwill of Iran to hold back the Shia resistance. But this could all unravel if the US presses ahead with its threat of war against Iran.

A second problem for the US rests with a deal it forged with Sunni resistance organisations.

In the summer of 2007 a large section of the Iraqi resistance inside Sunni areas called off its military campaign. It agreed to cooperate with the occupation to drive out fighters loyal to Al Qaida – who, despite their opposition to US imperialism, launched attacks on Shia Muslims that they considered to be “apostates”.

The Al Qaida elements were always a minority inside the resistance in Iraq, but their campaign of suicide bombings directed against US forces made them a potent enemy.

But the areas liberated from US control by the Sunni resistance found themselves transformed into bases from which Al Qaida launched a murderous campaign against Shias. The results were disastrous – thousands of innocent people were killed in mass sectarian slaughters.

Areas that had been models of Shia-Sunni unity saw each turning against the other. Haifa Street in central Baghdad was transformed from a front line between the resistance and occupation into one pitting Shia forces against Sunni ones.

The tactics and aims of Al Qaida alienated vast numbers of Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, many of whom had close ties with Shias. Soon sections of the Sunni resistance began to turn on them.

The US, faced with a withering guerrilla campaign, resolved to make peace with Sunni insurgents. Secret talks were held in Jordan where the US pledged to halt its attacks on Sunni areas in return for resistance helping to expel fighters allied to Al Qaida.

As news of the talks leaked out Al Qaida declared an all-out war on other Sunni resistance organisations. At the peak of the insurgency they demanded that all Sunni organisations accept their leadership. Key resistance leaders were assassinated, among them the head of the influential 1920 Revolution Brigades.

Meanwhile the US recognised the formation of the “awakening councils” and turned the former insurgents into their new allies. Over 100,000 of these former resistance fighters were paid $300 a month to attack Al Qaida rather than US troops.

Within a few months Al Qaida forces found themselves isolated and in full flight. Thus the US was able to buy peace in key Sunni regions.

But problems for the US are stacking up rapidly. The former Sunni fighters were given promises that they would be incorporated into Iraqi security forces. Maliki has now declared those promises worthless.

And last week the US announced that it would halt the $300 payments from 1 October. Meanwhile the Iraqi government has declared the “awakening councils” to be an illegal militia and ordered their arrest.

Sunni leaders have been dismayed by these developments. They boycotted the recent ceremony marking the US’s official withdrawal from Anbar – and they are refusing to cooperate with the Iraqi government. The US is taking a dangerous gamble by cutting its new allies loose in this manner.

Ethnic conflicts

Finally, Iraq faces the prospect of open‑ended ethnic confrontations between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds in the north of the country. At stake is Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city that is one of the biggest material prizes in Iraq – beneath it lies a huge oil reserve.

Kurdish parties swept to power in northern Iraq on the back of the US invasion, backed by their Peshmerga guerrilla army, originally built to fight Saddam’s regime. These parties hoped their alliance with the US would allow them to fulfil a long-cherished desire for independence.

The regional Kurdish authorities have signed separate oil deals, imposed distinct laws, and operate their own judiciary, police and army.

But the Kurdish region is hopelessly surrounded by hostile forces. To the north lies Turkey, a key US ally that fears Kurdish independence could trigger secessionist moves by its large Kurdish minority.

To its east lies Iran, which fears the Kurdish region will become a staging post for the US to foster a rebellion among its own Kurdish minority. And to the south lies the Iraqi government, which wants to re-establish control over the oil-rich regions of the north.

Now the Kurds are finding out that the US considers them expendable. As part of the concessions made by the US to both Shia and Sunni groups, the tentative moves towards Kurdish autonomy will be reversed.

The looming struggle over Kirkuk could trigger a protracted ethnic struggle in a region that has until now escaped the full horrors of the Iraq war. Dozens of Kurdish demonstrators were killed last month when they stormed the offices of a Turkmen party.

This protest followed a suicide bomb attack on Kurds. And the Iraqi government is refusing to organise a referendum on the status of Kirkuk that had been promised by the US.

So behind the veneer of success lie deep and dangerous problems for the US occupation of Iraq. It has created precarious alliances with Shia, Sunni and Kurdish forces, playing them off against each other to foment sectarian divisions and head off a unified national resistance movement

But now it finds itself hostage to events that it had lost control over long ago. Iraq remains a quagmire for the US – and its occupation remains in a permanent state of crisis.

Supporting occupation - Gordon Brown in Israel

JamieSW — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:43:49 +0000

Whoever scheduled Gordon Brown’s recent visit to Israel is surely out of a job. Brown’s dreary, etiolated performance – appropriate for a political corpse – was rendered even flatter by its proximity to Barack Obama’s headline-hogging whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East. Despite the differences in style, however, both politicians took to the podium in Israel with a similar message: one of support for the latter’s rejectionist expansionism.

The political background to Brown’s trip was almost without exception one of misery and despair. The Israeli government, despite its flowery rhetoric, has continued to pursue long-held policies designed to fragment the West Bank and prevent the emergence of anything resembling a coherent Palestinian state. The West Bank today consists of a series of isolated cantons, surrounded on all sides by Israeli infrastructure and security forces, between which movement and economic activity is extremely difficult. The UN last year estimated that Israeli military and settlement infrastructure together make nearly 40% of the West Bank inaccessible to Palestinians. Freedom of movement is drastically curtailed through a vast network of checkpoints, roadblocks and Israeli-only roads that serve, to quote the World Bank, “to expand and protect settlement activity and the relatively unhindered movement of settlers and other Israelis in and out of the West Bank”[1] The humanitarian, social and economic consequences of this enforced cantonisation (.pdf), “intimately linked to maintaining settler access and … quality of life”, are “profound” – indeed, it is “at the root of the West Bank’s declining economy.” Unemployment in the West Bank between July and December 2007 reached 25%, double the average regional rate. Overall, levels of employment in the occupied territories were “amongst the highest in the world“, with refugees being hit even harder. The Palestinians “continued to have the worst performing economy in the Middle East-North Africa sub-region” – a state of affairs that, as discussed below, has been engineered deliberately by Israel and its international backers, including Britain.

Gaza, meanwhile, is undergoing a humanitarian crisis of “unprecedented” (.pdf) proportions. The Gazan economy has “collapsed”, its population intentionally reduced to a state of “abject destitution” through sustained economic and military siege. Although the Israeli blockade has eased somewhat since the ceasefire agreement with Hamas, conditions in Gaza remain grim (.pdf). 45% of the population is unemployed, 95% of factories have shut down and entire industries have been decimated (.pdf). Over half of Gazan households now subsist below the poverty line, while 35% of Gazans are surviving below the ‘deep poverty’ line of $457 a month for a family of six.[2] In December 2007 the World Bank warned of an “irreversible” economic collapse in Gaza, outlining a worst-case scenario of 44% unemployment – a scenario that, as noted, has already been exceeded.

Given the gravity of this situation, one might have expected Gordon Brown to confront the Israeli government with some harsh truths. If he did so, he certainly didn’t do it in public. His “historic” speech before the Knesset made no mention of the occupation, or indeed of Palestinian suffering at all. Instead Brown produced an unqualified paean to Israel’s magnificence, lauding it as the very embodiment of “democracy”, “liberty”, “justice”, “idealism”, “bravery” and “perseverance”. At times he reached for New-Age mysticism in the struggle to fully evoke his passion for the Israeli state, babbling to a no-doubt baffled Knesset of “liberty’s torch”, “justice’s mighty stream” and “tolerance’s foundation of equality”, before proceeding to outline a vast “conflict of ideas” in which Britain and Israel “stand together” on “the side of openness”. Brown referred to “the achievement of 1948: the centuries of exile ended”, failing to mention that the same year saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who, along with their descendants, continue to live in exile today. He spoke of “the age-long dream realised, the ancient promise redeemed – the promise that even amidst suffering, you will find your way home to the fields and shorelines where your ancestors walked”, apparently unaware of same yearning possessed by Palestinians living in squalid refugee camps just a few hours away.

Brown pledged to Israel Britain’s “true friend[ship]”, the two states sharing “an unbreakable partnership based on shared values of liberty, democracy and justice”. Leaving aside the absurdity of attributing these “values” to either the British or Israeli state, it is unclear who exactly Brown was speaking for. Surely not the 65% of Britons who view Israel’s influence in the world as “mainly negative”, or the 79% who want the UK to avoid taking sides in the conflict. Whereas Brown has praised Israel for bearing “burdens for peace in every generation”, 57% of the British public think that Israel is failing to do its part to resolve the conflict, thereby placing Britain’s population – though not its leadership – in line with world public opinion, the UN, the International Court of Justice and numerous independent, respected human rights organisations.

Virtually the only allusion Brown made throughout his whole trip to the horrific injustices being inflicted on the Palestinians was a reference to the wall following his meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, describing it as “graphic evidence” of the need for justice for the Palestinians, a “secure” Israel and a viable Palestinian state. In fact the wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, is “graphic evidence” principally of Israel’s intention to annex a large portion of the West Bank, making a “viable and economically sustainable Palestinian state” an impossibility. Its route, which “cuts deep into the West Bank” (.pdf) to encircle the major settlement blocs, “was not based on security considerations, but to perpetuate and expand the settlements”.[3] It is difficult to see how Brown can reconcile this clear rejection of a two-state settlement with his praise for the Israeli government’s “vision of peace and reconciliation”.

‘Economic roadmap’

But enough with the fluff. What actual, concrete policy proposals did Brown suggest? Apart from repeating Britain’s official position on a final settlement, which is in accord with the international consensus[4], and making a vanishingly brief pro forma request for Israel to freeze construction in and begin withdrawing from the settlements, Brown’s main theme was his “economic roadmap”, which looks to be nearly as redundant as its political counterpart. The plan essentially appears to be to throw lots of money at the Palestinian Authority, encourage the reforms being carried out by Fayyad and stimulate investment in the West Bank by organising conferences, constructing business parks, and so forth. This is all fine as far as it goes. Improving the economic situation in the West Bank is both a humanitarian imperative and a necessary measure to increase the stability and effectiveness of Palestinian institutions. However, as the International Crisis Group points out (.pdf), there is “a natural ceiling” to potential economic and security development while the territory remains under occupation. Indeed, Fayyad may “already be bumping” against this ceiling, since the “political context” has failed to keep up with his economic reforms. Despite the large amount of donor aid and other measures that have been pursued in the past year to stimulate the Palestinian economy, the World Bank reports that economic indicators “have not changed considerably”, failing to reverse “the impacts of the aid boycott in 2006 and 2007”. “The contributing effects of the closures and movement restrictions” to the stifling of the Palestinian economy “cannot be overestimated”, with the result that PA reforms and international aid “remain necessary but insufficient preconditions for economic recovery”. This analysis is shared by the House of Commons International Development Committee, which concludes (.pdf) that,

“Increased donor assistance, while welcome, will not be sufficient to turn around the economic downturn which has pervaded the Palestinian economy since 2000 without significant and long-term removal of such restrictions.”[5]

In this light, it is noteworthy that Brown’s economic proposals were not accompanied by anything similar on the political front. He had nothing to say, for example, about the disastrous political division between Hamas, the de facto authority in Gaza, and Fatah, the de facto authority in the West Bank.[6] This apparent oversight can be understood in the context of Britain’s far from insignificant role in engineering the internal Palestinian conflict. After Hamas was elected in January 2006, Britain, along with the U.S. and the rest of the EU, subjected Palestinians to what the UN special rapporteur for human rights described as “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times” – the “first time”, he noted, “that an occupied people has been so treated.”[7] This “collective punishment”, a clear attempt to “compel Hamas to change its ideological stance, or to bring about regime change”, had catastrophic social and economic consequences. The number of Palestinians living in ‘deep poverty’ soared by 64% in the first half of 2006, while by early 2007 nearly half of Palestinian households were malnourished, to give just two representative examples of the shocking suffering the British government helped to inflict on an occupied, civilian population.[8] The blockade helped drive (.pdf) the PA to “the edge of collapse”, reducing it to “an utterly broken pseudo-government” that had “virtually ceased to function”. This was all carried out with the expectation that it would increase the risk of internal Palestinian violence. When, despite the international sanctions and a brutal Israeli military assault,[9] Abbas formed a government of national unity with Hamas in a desperate attempt to end the slaughter, the Quartet, including Britain, moved quickly to avert the threat. The diplomatic and economic boycott was maintained and, inevitably, the government collapsed.[10] In parallel the U.S., and to a lesser extent Britain, were busy arming, financing and training an elite Fatah militia[11] with the goal of destroying Hamas. This attempted coup against the elected Hamas government was a principal cause of the internecine Palestinian violence that ultimately led to the forcible takeover of Gaza by Hamas in June 2007, in what the International Institute for Strategic Studies describes as “a pre-emptive coup”.[12]

Today, the British government continues to insist that Hamas be isolated until it satisfies the specious Quartet “principles”[13], accurately described by a former chief of Israeli military intelligence as “ridiculous, or an excuse not to negotiate”, despite the fact that “a new Fatah-Hamas power-sharing arrangement is a prerequisite for a sustainable” attempt at peace. The International Crisis Group expresses a near consensus among serious analysts of the conflict when it concludes that the “imperative of Palestinian national reconciliation remains as urgent as ever.”[14] British parliamentarians appear to agree, with the relevant select committees repeatedly urging the government to engage with Hamas and encourage Palestinian reconciliation. The Foreign Affairs Committee argues (.pdf) that “the decision not to speak to Hamas in 2007 following the Mecca agreement has been counterproductive”, recommending that the government “urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas” and promoting efforts to reach “a negotiated settlement with Hamas with a view to re-establishing a national unity Government”. The International Development Committee similarly concludes that “it remains important to bring Hamas into dialogue and into the peace process”, since “without some kind of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, and without international engagement of all stakeholders, the peace process will not succeed.” The Committee makes the obvious point that while Hamas’ acceptance of the Quartet conditions will plainly have to be part of any final settlement, to insist that they be met as preconditions to negotiations simply presents “an unnecessary obstacle to practical progress”.

Rather than promote Palestinian unity and engage constructively with the Palestinian leadership, the British government has, quoting Human Rights Watch, remained “tacitly or openly” complicit in “a policy of protracted collective punishment” instituted in response to Hamas’ electoral victory in early 2006 and intensified following the movement’s takeover of Gaza in June 2007. The siege of Gaza, officially condemned by the British government as a violation of international law, has caused “a marked and clear deterioration” (Amnesty International) in an already disastrous humanitarian situation, to the point where “life … is a daily struggle, even to get enough to eat.” To give just one illustration of the effects of the blockade, “[t]he proportion of deaths among hospitalised neonates at Gaza’s pediatric hospitals … increased from 5.6% during the period January-October 2006 to 6.9% during the corresponding period in 2007.” Interestingly, both the Department for International Development and the British government itself are of the view (.pdf) that the blockade, recognized by the International Development Committee as “amounting to collective punishment”, is “part of a political strategy to get Hamas to sign up to the Quartet principles”, with the border closures intended to further the “political objective” of “isolating Hamas”. That is, the British government freely acknowledges that Israel is guilty of deliberately targeting the civilian population of Gaza in the service of political goals, otherwise known as terrorism.[15] Such is the alliance of “liberty, democracy and justice”.

The Annapolis process

Presumably to justify his failure to propose any significant steps to advance the political process, Brown pointed to the “Annapolis process” as “a real opportunity” to progress towards a two-state settlement. The Secretary of State for International Development has similarly described Annapolis as “the only show in town”. In reality, Annapolis represents a continuation of a long-held strategy, described above, to weaken and isolate Hamas.[16] Israel’s view of Annapolis is made clear by its behaviour following the conference last November. This year has seen “an unprecedented escalation in human rights violations in the Gaza Strip” (.pdf). In the first quarter of 2008 more Palestinians were killed in Gaza than in the corresponding periods in the three previous years combined and then doubled. More Palestinians have been killed since the conference than were killed throughout the whole of 2007. Restrictions on movement in the West Bank have continued to increase, in violation of numerous promises and in the context of a more than 60% increase (.pdf) in checkpoints and closures since August 2005. Settlement activity, described by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as “the single biggest impediment to realising a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity”, has increased dramatically, in violation of the Roadmap, the Annapolis declaration and international law. In the 11 months prior to the Annapolis summit, Israel published tenders for 100 housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since Annapolis it has sought bids for more than 1,700 homes, an increase of more than 1,600%. Last week an Israeli ministerial committee approved plans for the construction of 20 homes in the settlement of Maskiot, east of the annexation wall, while earlier this month the settlement of Ariel received final approval for the construction of 27 factories, a move that will triple the size of its industrial park. This is the reality of the “process” Brown hails as offering “a real opportunity to move forward”.

As noted, Brown did briefly condemn the settlements and urge Israel to begin withdrawing from them. However, when pressed to outline any concrete steps he would take to exert pressure on Israel to freeze its settlement activities, Brown refused to answer. The International Development Committee notes in this regard that the Quartet has not “exert[ed] sufficient pressure on Israel to open the crossings”, while the British government “often stops short of explicit condemnation of the closures and the restrictions.” Oxfam similarly condemns the international community’s response to the crisis in the West Bank and Gaza as “wholly inadequate”, adding that “the UK government should have acted more robustly, undertaking practical steps, to secure the opening of the Gaza crossing points and address settlement expansion in the West Bank.”

Were the British government genuinely interested in advancing prospects for a two-state settlement, there are clear steps it could take. It could use its position within the EU and its “considerable” influence over Fatah to promote Palestinian national reconciliation and initiate diplomatic engagement with Hamas. It could ban the import and export of settlement produce from the UK. Arms sales to Israel, totalling £14 million last year alone, could be conditioned on respect for international law.[17] Concrete measures could be taken to oppose Israel’s continuing construction of the annexation wall, in accordance with Britain’s legal obligations[18]. The EU-Israel Association Agreement, which gives preferential access to Israeli exports, could be suspended in the light of Israel’s gross human rights violations. Instead the EU recently upgraded its bilateral ties with Israel, a move supported by the British government despite Fayyad’s pleas to condition the upgrade on a freeze in settlement construction.[19]

As it is, the UK has not only failed to adequately oppose Israeli crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, but has actively taken part in and facilitated them. This represents a complete abdication of our legal and moral obligations, particularly disgraceful given Britain’s clear historical responsibility for the Palestinians’ plight, and amounts to complicity in the systematic destruction of any basis for a viable two-state settlement of the kind the British government affects to support.

[1] The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem similarly concludes that “a substantial proportion” of the restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank serve interests other than security, for example “to create a rapid and convenient road network for the settlers”. B’Tselem’s “inescapable” conclusion is that the restrictions constitute “collective punishment”, a violation of international law.

[2] This sharp increase in poverty, for those who care about such matters, appears to be having the entirely predictable effect of driving Palestinians towards Hamas.

[3] This obvious point was acknowledged by the then-leader of the Labor Party and current Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2003, when he noted that the route of the wall “is following a certain vision of the future”, constituting a “political fence” as opposed to a “security” one. The House of Commons International Development Committee similarly concludes (.pdf) that the wall’s “route into the West Bank appears to protect the presence of major settlement blocs in the West Bank rather than the security of Israel.” The UN OCHA has described the wall as a “de facto border” (.pdf), while Amnesty International views it as an “unlawful land grab” aimed at “facilitating the expansion and consolidation of unlawful Israeli settlements”.

[4] In Brown’s words, “an agreement based on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem a capital for both states, and for fair and agreed arrangements with refugees”.

[5] The International Development Committee notes further that, “the economic forecasts remain poor without a fundamental change in the current restrictions on movement and access”. The Gazan economy has “collapsed since the June 2007 closures”, while the economic situation in the West Bank has improved “only marginally”. The World Bank similarly emphasises that “Palestinian economic revival is predicated on an integrated economic entity with freedom of movement between the West Bank and Gaza and within the West Bank”.

[6] Although Western politicians and media prefer to focus on the dubious legal legitimacy of the Hamas government in Gaza, the fact is that neither administration is ruling in accordance with Palestinian law – see, for example, the ICG report cited above p.1; footnotes 1-3.

[7] Recall that this vicious punishment was meted out to a population already suffering sub-Saharan levels of malnutrition and undergoing “the worst economic depression in modern history”.

[8] For more, see (for example) Oxfam International, which in February 2007 warned that “conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories [are] close to melt-down”. It continued:

“Since 2006 poverty has shot up … Two thirds of Palestinians now live in poverty, a rise of 30 per cent last year. The number of families unable to get enough food has risen by 14 per cent. More than half of all Palestinians are now are ‘food insecure’, unable to meet their families’ daily requirements without assistance. The health system is disintegrating.”

This horrific human suffering was, to repeat, a direct and predictable consequence of international actors, including Britain, using “international aid as a battering ram to force through political change” (Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam).

[9] In 2006 Israeli actions left 660 Palestinians dead, 141 of whom were children and at least 322 of whom were civilians uninvolved in the hostilities. Most of the civilian deaths were “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.” The military assault, focused primarily on Gaza, was intended to weaken or topple the Hamas government by collectively punishing the Palestinian population. The UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories wrote at the time that, “[r]egime change, rather than security, probably explains Israel’s punishment of Gaza”.

[10] As the International Crisis Group reported last year,

“it would be disingenuous in the extreme to minimise the role of outside players [in the collapse of the national unity government], the U.S. and the European Union in particular.

By refusing to deal with the national unity government and only selectively engaging some of its non-Hamas members, by maintaining economic sanctions and providing security assistance to one of the parties in order to outmanoeuvre the other, they contributed mightily to the outcome they now publicly lament.”

The International Development Committee similarly reports that “the international community withheld support for the National Unity Government—itself an attempt to establish a stable and functioning government in the territories—and bolstered one side against the other which increased tension between Hamas and Fatah”, adding that, “if this National Unity Government had been given greater international support it could have provided a gateway for greater dialogue and negotiation and at the very least kept the Palestinians united”. Countering this diabolical threat of Palestinian unity was precisely the objective driving U.S./Israeli policy, supported fully by Britain and the rest of the EU. See footnote 12.

[11] Of note in this regard is Brown’s statement following his meeting with Fayyad that the British government is “expanding the offer that we have already made of training for Palestinian police and security forces”.

[12] The IISS explains the “debacle in Gaza” as a “direct result of the policies advocated by Fatah’s ‘old guard’ … [and] US officials in charge of Palestine policy”. The International Development Committee, noting “reports of a controversial US sponsored plot to oust Hamas from power”, likewise concludes that “the building-up of Fatah security forces with the assistance of donors led Hamas to take control of Gaza in June 2007”. See “The Gaza Bombshell”, David Rose, Vanity Fair, for the definitive account of the U.S./Israeli plans to topple Hamas. For further discussion see: “Document details ‘US’ plan to sink Hamas”, Mark Perry and Paul Woodward, Asia Times; “UN was pummelled into submission, says outgoing Middle East special envoy”, Rory McCarthy, The Guardian; “Our Second Biggest Mistake in the Middle East”, Alastair Crooke, London Review of Books; and my article, “Engineering a coup in Gaza”.

[13] The “principles” demand that Hamas 1) renounce violence, 2) recognise Israel’s “right to exist”, and 3) respect previous agreements. Illegitimate in themselves, these conditions can in any event be immediately dismissed on the grounds that Israel violates all three on a scale that dwarfs anything attributable to Hamas.

[14] This view is shared by, for example, Ephraim Halevy, former chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency; Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell; Palestine scholar and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment Nathan J. Brown (.pdf); veteran diplomats and political analysts Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Lee Hamilton and other mainstream, respected foreign policy analyists; and the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (.pdf).

[15] It is no accident that the Fourth Geneva Convention groups “collective penalties” together with “measures of intimidation or terrorism” – the two are largely the same thing. The Israeli government is fairly open about its terrorist policy in Gaza, with Ehud Olmert stating:

“As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza’s resident can walk and have no fuel for their cars, as they live under a murderous regime … We won’t allow a situation in which people in Sderot walk around in fear day and night, while Gazans lead a completely normal life … We won’t allow for a humanitarian crisis, but have no intention of making their lives easier. And the harder their lives, excluding humanitarian damage, we will not allow them to lead a pleasant life. [my emph.]

Dov Weisglass, senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, summarised Israeli policy in late 2006: “We have to make them [the Palestinian people] much thinner, but not enough to die”. One Israeli border officer defined his mission in similar terms: “no development, no prosperity, only humanitarian dependency” (.pdf).

[16] Middle East expert Henry Siegman, describing the “peace process” as possibly “the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history”, notes that what became known as the ‘Annapolis peace process’ is in fact motivated by a U.S./Israeli “determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state”. See also “Gaza’s Future”, Henry Siegman, London Review of Books.

[17] The Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports:

“Israel has used F-16 fighter aircraft and Apache combat helicopters to bomb Lebanese and Palestinian towns and villages. These contain significant UK components including missile triggering systems for Apaches and Head-Up Displays for F-16s.”

For more information, see Stop Arming Israel.

[18] The ICJ ruled that every party to the Fourth Geneva Convention – including Britain – is legally obliged to “see to it that any impediment, resulting from the construction of the wall, to the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self determination is brought to an end” and to “ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law”.

[19] The International Development Committee, which has repeatedly called for the Agreement to be suspended, expressed “surprise” that “the EU has decided to upgrade its relationship with Israel while it continues to flout international law”.

The war in Afghanistan is not a noble cause

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:42:55 +0000

The most noble cause of the 21st century was how Des Browne, the defence minister, described the war in Afghanistan.

This isn’t just a grotesque and insulting way to describe a war in defence of corrupt government, warlords and opium poppy production. It is part of a concerted attempt to rebrand Afghanistan as the good war, the war worth fighting and dying for, the war worth spending billions of pounds to maintain.

No less than Princes William and Harry have been enlisted for this cause, with church parades, memorial services, and pictures of the coffins of dead soldiers returning home. Special reports from the troops in Afghanistan pop up on the news, all stressing the valuable and important role of the troops in helping the Afghans to fight terrorism.

Ministry of Defence spin doctors are working overtime to present this war in all its patriotic glory just as the figure for British soldiers dead has shot over the 100 mark and looks set to continue going up.

George Bush’s visit in June provided the opportunity for Gordon Brown to announce more troop deployment in Afghanistan, as well as increasing sanctions on Iran.

This war has now been going on for nearly seven years. It was the first war George Bush launched in his “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks. Its aim was to root out Osama Bin Laden from his mountain hideaway, overthrow the Taliban government and destroy Al Qaida. Even Bush has publicly distanced himself from his cry of “Wanted dead or alive” about Bin Laden. The reason is simple: the aim of the Afghan war was not achieved.

The Taliban was defeated easily by the world’s greatest military power and its allies, but Al Qaida was not rooted out, Bin Laden was not captured and none of the promises made to the Afghan people were kept.

Tony Blair announced that “we will not walk away” in the aftermath of the war. He was right. The troops remained, but little was done to help to improve the lives of the Afghan people. Ten times as much is spent on the military as on reconstruction in the country, which remains one of the poorest in the world. Much of that reconstruction is in any case military related.

The Economist magazine published recently a scathing report about the US-backed Afghan government, highlighting its corruption, dependence on warlords and inability to control large parts of the country. There is a quota for the number of women in the Afghan parliament but the society remains as difficult for women as ever. Despite claims by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair in 2001 that women would be liberated by the war and the overthrow of the Taliban, most women still wear the burqa.

Most of the British casualties have occurred in the past two years in Helmand province, despite claims by then defence secretary John Reid that he hoped British troops could go to Helmand and operate “without a shot being fired”.

Britain and the US are intending to pour more troops into Afghanistan. In Iraq, British troops play a political, not military, role as they sit it out at Basra airport. Even the US is engaged in “secret” talks with the Iraqi government about the conditions of withdrawal, although this would involve maintaining US bases, giving US troops immunity from prosecution, controlling much of the airspace and much else.

There is no such talk in Afghanistan, where a serious war is continuing and threatens to escalate, drawing in Pakistan. The Taliban is stronger than it has been since 2001 and there is widespread Afghan opposition to the foreign troops, as many civilians are caught in airstrikes or are forced to become refugees to avoid the war.

We should not allow Bush and Brown to escalate the war. Its human and financial costs will only grow. We are also seeing the effects here. The vote in parliament to extend detention for terrorist suspects without charge to 42 days was one of the most shameful of recent times. The most right wing party in parliament, the DUP, were promised up to £1 billion (plus no extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland) in order to give their nine votes to the government. Many Labour MPs who voted for the change clearly did not believe in it but thought it a good way to wrongfoot the Tories.

The demonstration opposing Bush was met by restrictions, police violence and arrests. So when we said if they wage war there they will also wage it on us here, we were right.

A bankrupt and unpopular government is attacking the civil liberties which have been fought for over hundreds of years. They are doing so because protest and dissent give the lie to their propaganda about the war and make it harder for them to keep enlisting teenagers to die in the killing fields of Afghanistan. That’s why we have to keep protesting.

Who's Actually Winning in Iraq?

Ellie Keen — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The American occupation of Iraq follows the same course as that of British rule after the First World War. At first there was imperial over-confidence following military victory and a conviction that what Iraqis did was of no importance. Then there was the shock and surprise of an Iraqi rebellion against the British in 1920 and the Americans after 2003. In both cases the occupiers responded by establishing an Iraqi national government but with limited powers. In 1930 under the Anglo-Iraqi treaty Iraq achieved nominal independence and joined the League of Nations but Britain retained two large bases and remained the predominant power in 1raq. Iraqi governments were tainted and lacked legitimacy because of Iraqis’ perception that their rulers were foreign pawns until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.

America is now behaving in much the same way. It is negotiating a security agreement to replace the present UN mandate. It is to all intents and purposes a treaty that will determine future relations between Iraq and the US. It is not being called a treaty only because President Bush does not want to submit it to Senate approval. But in effect it continues the occupation under another name. The US will keep possession of over 50 bases though there will be a few Iraqi soldiers manning an outer perimeter so the US can say they will be in Iraqi hands. American soldiers and contractors will have legal immunity. The US will be free to carry out operations against ‘terrorists’ without informing the Iraqi government so it can arrest Iraqis or carry out military campaigns as and when it feels like it. Some of the Iraqi negotiators have been horrified by the extent of the American demands which would mean long term American control. But the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whatever his private misgivings, believes that at the end of the day he relies on American backing. His coalition of Shia religious parties, Sunni representatives and the Kurds feel the same way.

The Iraqi-American security agreement, which Bush wants signed by July 31, is a better barometer of where real power lies in Iraq than military developments on the ground. It comes just as the Iraqi government is trying to regain control of the largest cities in the country. It has launched three military offensives since the end of March against Shia militias and Sunni insurgents, sending its army into Basra, Sadr City in Baghdad and Mosul. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers have moved into Shia districts once dominated by the Mehdi Army which follows the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. In the Sunni Arab city of Mosul the government claims it is crushing the last remnant of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and has arrested over 1,000 suspects. The aim of the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is to show that the Iraqi state, feeble and dependant on the US since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is back in business. The operations in Basra and Mosul have bombastic names – ‘Charge of the Knights’ and ‘Roar of the Lion’ – in a bid to underline Maliki’s intention to show that the Iraqi army is the strongest non- American military power in Iraq.

At first sight the government seems to be succeeding after initial failures. The attack on the Mehdi Army in Basra on March 25 at first made no headway and Iraqi soldiers even ran out of food after a couple of days fighting. They had to be heavily reinforced by American advisers calling in US air strikes and British artillery fire. But, after a few weeks, government soldiers were taking over in districts long held by the Mehdi Army. In Sadr City—with a population of two million it is less of a district of Baghdad than a twin city—the Americans again bore the brunt of the fighting. Some 1,000 Iraqis, 60 per cent women and children according to the UN, were killed in seven weeks. In both Basra and Sadr City the clashes ended because Muqtada al-Sadr called his men off the streets under ceasefires brokered by the Iranians. The Iraqi army moved in though without the Americans. Maliki may not have won the decisive military victory he claimed, but his government looked stronger at the end of the fighting than at the beginning.

The crucial political and military question in Iraq is whether the Iraqi government’s success will be long lasting or temporary. Will it lose control once again if al-Sadr orders his militiamen back into the streets? Are al- Qa’ida and other Sunni insurgents simply lying low and waiting for American troops to leave? Again and again in the last five years, the US and its Iraqi allies have genuinely believed that they were winning on the ground only to see their supposed successes evaporate when their opponents launched a counter-attack. But for the moment at least Maliki’s grip on central government is stronger than ever. A year ago the Americans and the Kurds wanted him replaced, as did the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), the biggest Shia party in his governing coalition. But Washington soon began to stress privately that it wanted Iraq to appear as politically stable as possible during an election year in the US, while the Kurds and ISCI came to believe that they could get most of what they wanted with Maliki in power. For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, many Iraqis think the present government might last.

This may be misleading. The government’s position looks stronger than it is because its opponents are waiting for the Americans to leave or draw down their forces. Al-Sadr does not want to fight now because he sensibly wishes to avoid a direct military confrontation with the US army, which his lightly armed militiamen are bound to lose. This has been his strategy ever since his militiamen fought ferocious battles with the US Marines in Najaf in 2004. The Iranians are playing a more and more overt role in Iraq this year and do not want to see an intra-Shia civil war between ISCI and the Sadrists. The Iraqi Minister of Defense says that the Iraqi army will not be strong enough to stand on its own against insurgents until 2012. A further weakness of the government is that it faces crucial provincial elections in October which its constituent parties may well lose. One US military intelligence estimate is that in a fair poll the Sadrists would win 60 per cent of the vote in overwhelmingly Shia southern Iraq. The surprise government offensive at the end of March may have been launched in order to make sure that the vote can be fixed in favor of the government parties. A more Machiavellian explanation is that ISCI expected the Iraqi army to fail and wanted to lure the American army into a military confrontation with the Sadrists.

The government parties supporting Maliki now make up what some Iraqis called ‘the Council of Five’. There are the two Kurdish parties—the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdkistan—the Dawa party to which Maliki himself belongs, ISCI and the Islamic Party of the Sunni. Their aim seems to be to be eliminate their domestic Iraqi opponents while they still have the backing of American firepower. It is a brutal plan but it might come off. Maliki could become the Iraqi version of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Like Putin, Maliki controls the state machine, a large if unreliable army and benefits from the high price of oil so he has control of over $40 billion in unspent reserves. Iraqis do not trust their own government but, like Russians when Putin first came to power in 1999, they are desperately war weary. Many people will support anybody who provides peace and security. But the analogy should not be carried too far. Putin’s enemies were fictional or in distant Chechnya, while Maliki’s opponents are real, dangerous and close by.

I was in Mosul, a city of 1.4 million people on the Tigris river in northern Iraq, on the day the government forces started their ‘Roar of the Lion’ offensive at 4 am on May 10. As had happened in Basra and Sadr City a few weeks earlier there were thousands of government troops and police guarding every street and alleyway. The entire civilian population had disappeared indoors or had fled the city. The operation, supposedly aimed at depriving al Qa’ida of its last bastion in Iraq, had been promised by Maliki some months earlier after a previous chief of police of Mosul was assassinated by a suicide bomber with explosives hidden under his police uniform. But its actual timing had caught people in Mosul by surprise so they had no time to stock up on food. Nobody was venturing onto the streets because of a curfew. In the first hours of the operation US troops shot dead men, a woman and a child in a car which failed to stop at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul because, according to a US military statement, the two men were armed and one man inside the car made ‘threatening movements.’

I have been visiting Mosul ever since the Kurds and Americans captured it in 2003. Each time I go there the Kurdish authorities, who effectively run the city, allocate more armed guards to protect what ever official I am travelling with. We began the journey from Arbil in a convoy of white pick up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun in the back manned by alert- looking soldiers, some with black face masks, escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the old Baathist headquarters on the left bank of the Tigris. The official border between Kurdistan and Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, is the Zaab river, very low this year because of poor rainfall. But the real frontier is further down the road at a small village called Ghazik after which the road becomes increasingly dangerous. At a bridge near Ghazik police were stopping trucks and cars whose drivers had not heard of the curfew declared late the previous day. A few miles further on in a Chaldean Christian village called Bartilla we turned into a fort and exchanged our pick-ups for more heavily armoured vehicles with small windows like spy holes with thick bullet proof glass.

People in Nineveh province were taking the curfew very seriously. There are kilns processing gypsum along the road through the plain east of of Mosul city but none of them was working. Even the dreary tea houses serving food to truck drivers were closed. The Kurdish minority in east Mosul city live close to a small hill on top of which there is the mosque of Nebi Yunis, where the Prophet Jonah is supposedly buried. Usually the Kurdish districts of the city are filled with street traders but during the present operation the metal grill of every shop was down. The operation was being carried out by 15,000 troops, the three brigades of the 2nd and 3rd divisions that are normally stationed in Mosul and an extra brigade from Baghdad. I could see the black vehicles of Interior Ministry special commandos with a yellow tiger’s head insignia on their doors. American drones and helicopters passed over head but I did not see any American troops patrolling the city. There was the occasional burst of machine gunfire in the distance but no street fighting.

On the face of it the government had control of Mosul. This was not difficult to do because, unlike Baghdad and Basra, insurgents had never taken over entire districts. But everything in Nineveh province is a little different from what it looks. “The province is more like Lebanon,” said Saadi Pire, the former leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the city, “than anywhere else in Iraq.” It is divided between the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds and Christians, but many of the Kurds belong to the Yazidi sect which believes in a mixture of Zoroastrianism, Islam and Christianity. Their chief divinity is the peacock angel who rules the cosmos with six other angels. Last year a Yazidi girl who converted to orthodox Islam to marry her boyfriend was beaten to death by her relatives and in revenge Muslim Kurds dragged 23 Yazidi workers off a bus near Mosul and shot them dead. The government in Baghdad might claim that it was pursuing al Qa’ida in Mosul, but real power struggles in northern Iraq revolve around sectarian and ethnic differences. The Sunni majority in Mosul certainly see the ‘Roar of the Lion’ operation as being directed against them. Any al- Qa’ida in Mosul had long left the city for the country or had temporarily moved across the nearby Syrian border. Everybody I spoke to in Mosul expected they would be back.

In Baghdad there is also a sense that we are seeing a lull rather than end to violence. Places I used to know well still get destroyed. I used to eat in a restaurant in the al-Mansur district of west Baghdad called the Samad. It opened soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein, served good food and somehow survived the next five years of violence. But at 5pm on 8 May some policemen parked their vehicle outside the restaurant and went inside to eat. A few minutes later a large car bomb parked beside the police car blew up and destroyed the Samad, killing seven people and wounding a further 19. The explosion caused a massive traffic jam. Ambulances and the fire brigade could not get through and the building beside the Samad caught fire and burned to the ground. Though the Iraqi government is claiming that al Qa’ida has been driven from Baghdad and Anbar province to the east, this is not really true. In January I went to see Colonel Ismail Zubaie, the police chief of Fallujah, who was a former insurgent fighting al-Qa’ida who had cut his brother’s throat. He seemed to be in full control of Fallujah. But in May fighters from al Qa’ida confronted Colonel Ismail’s uncle, who was a teacher, and shot him dead. The next day they sent a suicide bomber to blow up the tent where his relatives were receiving mourners. The operation, clearly an elaborate attempt to kill Colonel Ismail, shows that al Qa’ida remains well organized and with agents everywhere in the Sunni community.

The Americans lost only 21 soldiers killed in Iraq in May which are the lowest monthly casualties since February 2004. But these do not mean that the chief Republican contender senator John McCain is correct in believing that with enough resolution the American army is on the road to victory. Paradoxically, the Americans are now benefiting from their failure to turn Iraq into a virtual American colony in 2003-4. Iran and Syria no longer fear, as they once did, that as soon as the US had gained complete control of Iraq it would try to overthrow their governments. There may be those in the White House who still privately dream of doing just that, but Iraq’s neighbors no longer feel they must destabilize Iraq in order to avert the American threat to themselves. American casualties are also down because the Sunni Arab and the Shia Arab communities in Iraq are not only divided but fighting low level civil wars. Part of the old anti- American Sunni resistance has turned on al Qa’ida and allied itself to the Americans. The Sunni were driven out of most of Baghdad by the Shia militias in the sectarian civil war of 2006-7 and are increasingly marginalized. Among the Shia, once known for their impressive unity after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, internecine battles between the Shia parties in government and the Sadrists have become bloodier and more frequent.

The main supporters of Nouri al-Maliki’s government are the US and Iran. This has never been admitted by Washington but from the Iranian point of view the present Shia-Kurdish government in Baghdad is as good as it is going to get. It does not want to overthrow Maliki, but it does want to reduce American influence on him. The fighting in Basra and Sadr City between the Mehdi Army and the Iraqi government backed by the American army between March and April was in each case brought to an end by Iranian mediation. This has become very public. To arrange the ceasefires in Basra and Baghdad President Jalal Talabani twice went to see Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the Iraq-Iran border, though President Bush has denounced the Quds brigade as terrorists orchestrating attacks on US forces in Iraq. Iranian influence in Iraq is stronger than ever and the Iranians are increasingly willing to flaunt it. When the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad visited Baghdad this years his visit was announced in advance and he drove through the city by car. When President George W Bush comes to Baghdad it is a kept a secret until the last moment, he moves only by helicopter and he has never ventured outside the Green Zone.

Suppose Barack Obama wins the US presidential election America could withdraw its forces from Iraq over the next eighteen months without provoking an explosion of violence but only if it first had an agreement with Iran and Syria. An increase in Iranian influence in Iraq has been inevitable since 2003. Once the US had decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein the beneficiaries were always going to be the Shia religious parties, because they represented the majority of Iraqis, and they would be supported by Iran. Many of America’s problems in Iraq over the last five years have happened because Washington believed it could prevent or dilute the triumph of Iran and the Shia in Iraq.

Iranian strategy in Iraq is to keep the pot boiling but not over-boiling. They do not want the present government displaced. “The Iranians are very good at creating crises in Iraq and then solving them,” one Kurdish leader told me. Iran wants a weak Iraq, incapable of posing a threat to Tehran, and allied to itself. It wants a Shia government in power in Baghdad and the Americans out. “The three great powers of the Gulf historically are Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia,” the same Kurdish leader told me. “If Iran and Iraq act together then they will dominate the Gulf.” It may not be as easy as that. The Iraqis like the Iranians no more than they do the Americans. Muqtada al-Sadr, who is calling for an American withdrawal, has always been an Iraqi nationalist as suspicious of Iran as of the US. Paradoxically, the Shia governing parties in Baghdad, ISCI and Dawa, have traditionally had closer links with Iran than the Sadrists. ISCI was founded by the Iranians in Tehran in 1982 to be their puppet if they succeeded in defeating Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. It is still heavily influenced by them, but at the end of the day neither ISCI nor the Sadrists want the Americans nor the Iranians to treat Iraq as a client state.

Probably the most astute politician in Iraq is Muqtada al-Sadr, who has chosen not to tell his militiamen to fight for the enclaves they controlled in Basra and Baghdad. Instead in the last days of May he called tens of thousands of his followers into the streets to protest against the a new bilateral pact between the US and Iraq that is being secretly negotiated and would govern the future political, military and economic relationship between Washington and Baghdad. “Why do they want to break the backbone of Iraq?” asked Sheikh Mohammed al-Gharrawi addressing crowds in Sadr City. “The agreement wants to put an American in each house. This agreement is poison mixed in poison, not poison in honey because there is no honey at all.”

This opposition to the occupation can only grow if Senator McCain wins the US presidential election and tries to win an outright military victory in Iraq. The US can only stay in Iraq so long as it is allied to a large part of the Sunni or Shia communities. The occupation has always depended on ‘divide and rule’. If the US is ever faced with a united opposition by both Shia and Sunni in Iraq then it will have to leave. Everybody in Iraq overplays their hand at one time or other. The US position in Iraq has slightly improved over the last year but the improvement is limited. But by trying to impose a security pact on Iraq that would turn Iraq into a client state the Washington is fueling a fresh insurgency. It is discrediting the Iraqi government and the ruling parties who will be seen as foreign pawns. If McCain wins the presidential election and tries to put the security agreement into operation then neither the occupation nor the resistance to it will end.

BBC's Pro-Israeli Bias

Ellie Keen — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:50:19 +0000

In its near 86 year history, BBC has a long, unbroken and dubious distinction. Today it’s little different from its corporate-run counterparts in America, Britain and throughout the world. In fact, on its tailored for a US BBC America audience, what passes for news matches stride for stride what people here see every day – mind-numbing commercialism, shoddy reporting, pseudo-journalism, celebrity and sports features, and other diverting and distracting non-news that should embarrass correspondents and presenters delivering it. It offends viewers and treats them like mushrooms – well-watered, in the dark, and uninformed about the most important world and national issues affecting their lives and welfare.

That’s the idea, of course, and has been since BBC’s inception. John Reith was its founder and first general manager. Reassuring the powerful, he set the standard adhered to thereafter: “(You) know (you) can trust us not to be really impartial.” BBC never was and never is.

Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about “honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure.” How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task

- to function as a “propaganda system for elite interests.” On all vital issues – war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East’s longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is “reliable” – pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever.

This article covers one example among many – BBC’s distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it’s fully in step with its American and European counterparts – Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don’t; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC’s coverage exacerbates it.

Key BBC Terms In Its Israeli – Palestinian Coverage

In October 2006, Electronic Intifada.net listed BBC’s “key terms” in its conflict coverage – to “find a balance” that, in fact, tilts strongly toward Israel.

For example:

— pre-meditated assassinations are called “killings” or occasionally “targeted killings” if Israeli sources say it;

— the separation or apartheid wall is called a “barrier, separation barrier, West Bank barrier, (or simply) this wall;” sometimes “fence” is used as well; no hint of its real purpose or that the World Court ruled it illegal; no mention either that it’s unrelated to security and simply a land-grab scheme and effort to heighten Palestinian isolation;

— East Jerusalem – BBC recognizes West Jerusalem as part of Israel; East Jerusalem is considered occupied with its status “still to be determined in permanent status negotiations between the parties….We recognize no sovereignty over the city;” The phrase “Arab East Jerusalem” is avoided; so is any mention that Israeli settlements encroach on it and aim to annex it entirely; Palestinians want the city for their capital; it belongs to them; Israel won’t allow it; BBC won’t explain it;

— Gaza – Israel nominally disengaged in summer 2005; in fact, it never did; it merely redeployed its forces, and maintains rigid control over the territory’s land, coast and airspace; it invades and attacks at will and maintains a brutish mediaeval siege; all movement in and out of Gaza is restricted; so are Gazans’ access to food, water, health care, fuel, electricity and other life essentials; the result is a deep humanitarian crisis; BBC ignores it; instead it merely refers to an “end to Israel’s permanent military presence,” not an end to its occupation, repression, continued incursions, mass killings, targeted assassinations, and systemic use of torture;

— The Green Line – it separates Israel from the West Bank, but BBC reporting blurs it; it doesn’t call it a border because that implies internationally recognized status; instead it fudges by calling it “the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank;”

— Intifada – more fudging when referring to causes; value judgments are avoided; so is truth; don’t say Ariel Sharon’s September 29, 2000 Haram al-Sharif provocation incited a popular uprising; package his visit with Palestinian frustration over a failed peace process and say it “sparked the (second) intifada (rather than it) led (to it or) started (it);”

— Jewish – distinguish between “Israeli” or “Jewish” to avoid religious or racial connotations; stress political ones instead; ignore how Israelis stress Jewishness by relating to “the promised land,” one “without people for a people without a land,” a Jewish homeland, Israel’s biblical connection, and raising the issue of anti-semitism against harsh Israeli critics; when they’re Jewish call them self-hating;

— Occupied Territories or Occupation – BBC refers to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, not the Golan Heights; after Israel “disengaged,” Gaza is in political limbo; BBC distinguishes between the “occupied territories” and Palestinian Land or Palestinian Territories; calling Gaza and the West Bank “disputed territories” is preferred; in fact, there’s no dispute; they’re both Israeli occupied Palestinian land;

— settlements and outposts – BBC distinguishes between them when, in fact, they vary only in size; BBC avoids calling them illegal; they’re all illegal but adjectives aren’t used unless they’re vital to a story; in all reports, BBC is one-sided; it stresses that Israel disputes international law; anti-Israeli value judgments aren’t made; the rule of law is dismissed; Palestinian rights are ignored; the growing number of Israeli settlers is fudged, downplayed and generally not mentioned;

— Palestine – BBC acknowledges that no independent state exists but the “peace process” aims to create one; unmentioned is that negotiations are fake and their reports try to hide it; so do deceptive words to appease pro-Israel critics; BBC obliges them;

— “relative calm” or “quiet” periods – it refers to quiescent Palestinian resistance, no Israeli deaths, but not ongoing Israeli attacks and killings;

— right of return – BBC ignores international law and UN Resolution 194; it promotes the Israeli position instead; and

— “terrorists” – a loaded term applying only to Palestinians; never Israelis; most often other words are used like “bomber, attacker, gunman, kidnapper, insurgent (or) militant;” Palestinian self-defense is never called resistance, and Israeli incursions aren’t ever called aggression.

Media “Rules of Engagement” in Covering the Middle East

In June 2002, Robin Miller listed “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement.” BBC’s Israeli-Palestinian coverage adheres to them rigidly:

Rule 1 – “View the Middle East (ME) through Israeli eyes;” Palestinians are terrorists and aggressors; Israelis are victims who retaliate; self-defense is their motive; so is avoiding the truth;

Rule 2 – “Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as (truthful) hard news;” avoid any information that contradicts them;

Rule 3 – “Ignore the historical context;” avoid mentioning six decades of dispossession, occupation, and hundreds of preceding years during which Palestine was the Palestinian homeland; also suppress the idea that a Jewish homeland first originated with Zionism’s late 19th century’s founding and didn’t exist prior to that;

Rule 4 – “Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation;” say nothing about Geneva, UN Resolution 194, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and all other recognized international human rights laws;

Rule 5 – “Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis;” this rule is ironclad and unforgiving; open debate isn’t tolerated; facts are suppressed; aggressors are called victims; self-defense is called terrorism; news is carefully “filtered,” minds manipulated, and truth conspicuously absent; BBC excels at it and lets Israel get away with murder;

Rule 6 – “Muddy the waters when necessary;” major US media do it; so do human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; they tread lightly on Israeli-Palestinian issues and slant their views accordingly; so does BBC;

Rule 7 – “Credit all Israeli claims (as fact), even if wholly unfounded;” if Israelis say it, it’s true; BBC approves;

Rule 8 – “Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident;” if Palestinians say it, it’s false or at best an unsubstantiated claim; most often ignore, downplay or fudge it;

Rule 9 – “Condemn only Palestinian violence;” treat it as a crime against innocent Israeli victims; ignore any reference to self-defense against Israeli aggression and rule of law violations; and

Rule 10 – “Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights;” better still – ignore it or condemn it as biased or anti-semitic.

Add one more rule for good measure. Repeat any lie often enough and most people will believe it. It’s foolproof and works every time.

Independent Analysis of BBC’s Israel – Palestine Coverage

In 2005, the BBC commissioned a study to review the impartiality of its Israeli – Palestinian coverage. It consisted of an independent panel, the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough University, and British – Israeli international lawyer Noam Lubell.

Their published April 2006 findings weren’t what the broadcaster wished. Highlights from them showed BBC coverage:

— rarely covered daily Palestinian hardships and repression under occupation;

— was incomplete, misleading, and failed to consistently provide a full and fair account of the conflict;

— overlooked important themes; in the study period it most notably ignored Israeli annexation of land in and around East Jerusalem;

— omitted a substantial amount of important news vital to Palestinian concerns;

— failed to convey the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience; specifically that one side is dominant and the other under occupation and forced to endure dependence indignities and hard line repression;

— seldom used the term occupation; mentioned military occupation only once during the study period;

— reported nothing about nearly four decades of occupation and repression;

— misportrayed Israel’s Gaza disengagement as a positive step; failed to clarify it as a ruse and that Gaza remains occupied, invaded and attacked at will;

— failed to report Israeli assertions that relocating Gaza settlers would strengthen Israel’s control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem;

— never clarified that Gaza settlements were illegal; that Gazans face ongoing hardships and stressed instead the “controversy” of withdrawing among Israelis;

— misused or misportrayed the term “terrorism” and only applied it to Palestinians;

— omitted any reference to historical background and failed to put stories in proper context;

— provided inadequate analysis and interpretation of key events and issues;

— failed to explain the meaning of Zionism;

— failed to provide background of the 1967 and 1973 wars;

— consistently misportrayed Hamas; described it as formally committed to Israel’s destruction; ignored Hamas’ acceptance of the Arab peace proposal and its willingness to recognize Israel in return for an end to the occupation;

— mischaracterized the Oslo Accords as positive; ignored its deficiencies and betrayal;

— mentioned the Intifada with no explanation of cause or justification;

— failed to cite international law and UN resolutions; their call for an end to Israel’s occupation; and the fact that Israel ignores international rulings contrary to its interests;

— ignored Palestinians’ legal right to return or restitution if they choose not to;

— ignored humanitarian and human rights laws;

— failed to explain extrajudicial executions are illegal;

— mischaracterized the Separation Wall that the World Court ruled illegal;

— misrepresented the status of Jerusalem;

— gave unequal access to Israeli officials and spokespersons; stations none of its correspondents in Occupied Palestine; has them all inside Israel; results in a huge disparity in reports favoring Israel while disparaging Palestinians;

— misportrayed Israelis as peace-seeking and Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as aggressors;

— stressed Israeli victimhood, the importance of Israeli deaths and injuries, and relative unimportance of a disproportionate number of Palestinian ones;

— responded to criticism defensively; continued to repeat past errors cited; showed deference to Israeli issues and the pro-Israeli Lobby;

— ignored its own established editorial standards, including on terminology; as a result, consistently showed bias, a lack of clarity and precision and did little to improve comprehension and understanding;

— overall – BBC falls far short of fair and impartial reporting and has done little to redress pointed out deficiencies; one positive note – the analysis found no evidence linking anti-Semitic behavior to BBC reports; it also found none dispelling it.

Glasgow University Media Group Study of Middle East News Coverage – It’s “Bad News from Israel” and BBC

Researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry conducted the study between 2000 and 2002, and their above quoted 2004 book title discusses it. Little has changed from then to now, BBC’s reporting highlights it, and it’s “bad news” for kept-in-the-dark viewers of major UK news and current affairs coverage.

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn agrees and explained in his unsparing comments about his former employer. He called it “dishonest – in concept, approach and execution….(it) favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa.” It depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “as a battle of two (equal) forces (with equally) right and wrong responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.” As the UK and world’s leading broadcaster, BBC is justifiably blamed.

“Bad News from Israel” explains how – by consistently showing pro-Israel bias in virtually all its reporting and at times in the extreme. Beyond the book’s timeline, correspondent Chris Morris’ January 2004 “Lost hope in Mid-East conflict” report is a case in point. It’s about an expectant Palestinian woman confronted at a checkpoint. Prevented from passing, she gives birth and miscarries.

Morris is sympathetic but sides with the soldiers.

“You can’t blame (them, he says) for being jumpy at checkpoints….because there are Israeli victims too, children among them, killed by snipers and suicide bombers from the West Bank. What would you have done?

Would you have taken the risk? Or would you have played it safe, fearful of a trap? And so it goes on – another week in the Middle East.”

Even worse, the greater issue is ignored – an instance reflecting daily life in Occupied Palestine plus regular killings and abuse. Morris turns a blind eye.

He highlights suicide bombings instead – “A Palestinian mother in her early 20s blows herself to bits and takes the lives of four young Israelis, after tricking them into believing she was ill.” He continues – “A Jewish settler is killed on the West Bank, leaving five children without a father, including triplets just three months old.” Reports like his are commonplace on BBC. Israeli lives matter.

Palestinian ones don’t. Philo and Berry document the evidence.

Their study covers what media should report, a content analysis of their coverage, and how focus group interviews show how viewers are ill-served and left uninformed. Below are some results that apply to today:

— little or no historical context was provided; origins of the conflict were omitted; in the 2000 timeframe covered, BBC (and ITN) devoted 3500 lines of text to the Intifada, but a scant 17 to context or history;

— reporting consistently was pro-Israel and justified the most extreme actions and lawlessness; at the same time, Palestinian resistance was highlighted and condemned as terrorism;

— in the authors’ words: “There (was) no evidence from our analysis to suggest that Palestinian views were given preferential treatment on the BBC. The opposite (was) in reality the case;”

— BBC justified Israeli violence as “response” or “retaliation;” in contrast, Palestinian resistance was called “horrific,” an “atrocity,” “terrorism,” or even “mass murder;”

— some BBC reports were rife with errors whether intentionally or from ignorance;

— reports focused on Israeli security and right to exist; comparable Palestinian rights got little mention; nor did their impoverishment, deplorable daily existence, or a brutish four-decade military occupation;

— Israeli deaths were highlighted; Palestinian ones played down or ignored; regular Israeli incursions got little mention or weren’t reported;

— as a result, only 4% of focus group respondents knew Palestinians were driven from their homeland; only 10% that Israel occupied Palestine; some believed Palestinians were the occupiers; some viewed the conflict as a border dispute; 80% didn’t know the origin of Palestinian refugees or that they were dispossessed; two-thirds didn’t know Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli ones; more knowledgeable respondents had access to books and other material that dispel BBC bias and inaccuracies;

— senior BBC journalists interviewed told researchers that they were instructed not to give explanations; to dumb-down the news for easy listening and do it in “20-second attention span” segments; researchers believe BBC has it backwards; this type reporting alienates viewers; accuracy and more context enhances viewership; under heavy Israeli Lobby pressure, BBC and other major media report propaganda; truth is the first casualty, and viewers remain uninformed; today it’s worse than ever.

BBC’s Coverage of Gaza Under Siege

BBC reports little about Gaza under siege and the humanitarian crisis it caused. Instead, accounts like its January 2008 one are common. It’s headlined “Gaza’s rocket threat to Israel” and highlights homemade Qassams “fired by Hamas and other Palestinian militants at Israeli population centres near the Gaza Strip.” They’ve “killed 13 people inside Israel, including three children. In some months, more than 100 launches have been recorded by the Israelis.”

No mention is made of Israeli incursions, their frequency, the use of F-16 air-to-surface missiles, their accuracy and destructive power, high-tech battle tanks in civilian neighborhoods, and other sophisticated weapons freely used, including illegal ones. Nor is there mention of hundreds of Palestinian deaths, injuries, inflicted Israeli destruction, and use of Palestinians as human shields. Instead, the Israeli town of Sderot is highlighted because it’s “the only large Israeli population centre within the original Qassam’s range.” BBC describes them in detail to over-hype their destructive potential. In fact, they’re crude, inaccurate and limited in range. They hardly compare to Israel’s high-tech weapons that when unleashed against a civilian population are devastating.

Later in BBC’s report, it admits “Qassams are very primitive missiles and their main effect on Israelis in the area is psychological torment (and that) Israeli casualties have been relatively light.” In contrast, Israeli attacks on Palestinians kill and injure many hundreds and inflict immense psychological terror against a civilian population. It’s gone on for six decades, shows no signs of ebbing, but BBC won’t explain it.

Nor does it report on Gaza under siege, the collective punishment of its people, the humanitarian crisis it caused, and Israel’s lawless act that BBC should expose and denounce. Instead it features reports like a May 10 one about a “Gaza mortar attack kill(ing an) Israeli.” Israeli air strikes followed, five Hamas members were killed and four others injured. BBC featured an Israeli government spokesperson saying “We hold (Hamas) accountable for today’s attack and the murder of civilians.” No Palestinian response was aired, and BBC merely ended saying that “The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since last June when they ousted their rivals from the Fatah movement.” No context, no background, no fair and impartial reporting, no truth, and no possible way for viewers to understand.

BBC suggests that Palestinians are responsible for their own condition, that a humanitarian catastrophe is their fault, and that Israel has every right to terrorize and starve them to submission for its own security and self-interest. By BBC’s standards, Israel may rightfully lock down 1.5 million people, collectively punish them, continue a repressive occupation, and refuse to negotiate in good faith, or at all. BBC is dismissive. Palestinian suffering is inconsequential, yet consider its outrage from a single Israeli death. It’s also contemptuous of Hamas, ignored its months-long unilateral ceasefire, and refuses to report its willingness to recognize Israel in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders.

BBC views the conflict from an Israeli perspective. It features government officials to explain it, and reports whatever they say as fact. This turns reality on its head, makes lawless actions justifiable, results in double standard journalism, and lets Palestinians suffer the consequences. Why not and who cares. They’re just Arab Muslims in the land of Israel where Jews alone matter and not a hint of even-handed reporting exists. Now more than ever in the conflict’s seventh decade, and BBC’s reporting exacerbates it.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com