imperialism | ukwatch.net

Humanitarianism went to war

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:49:41 +0000

Conor Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, comes highly recommended. The author has been obliged to debate the oleaginous Oliver Kamm in the course of promoting his book, so I am doing my part to reduce the necessity of such an indignity. Foley does a number of things fairly effectively: first, he debunks ‘humanitarian intervention’ as an ideology from its origins in the Biafran War (there is some useful detail covering Bernard Kouchner’s early ascent here, though he is much more generous to Kouchner than I would be); secondly, he demonstrates conclusively that key examples of such ‘intervention’ were far from humanitarian in effect (he leaves the question of intent or strategy largely unexamined), for example the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; thirdly, he shows how the regnant discourse of a ‘Responsibility To Protect’ that emerged principally during the Balkans Wars provided much of the legal and moral cover for the invasion of Iraq – indeed, a consistent theme is just how much of the present barbarity was prepared in the decade of vicarious militarism that was the 1990s.

One of the strongest chapters in the book is the discussion of the Kosovo war. Foley takes the time to examine the context in which the KLA emerged, outlines some of their provocative conduct, shows with the help of some personal experience how they were active in ethnically cleansing Serb and Roma in the immediate aftermath of the war, and how their successors have been engaged in murdering members of both groups for years afterward. He nicely dissects Clare Short’s post-hoc rationalising scheme for the war, and shows – with the assistance of the Campbell diaries – that even Blair, the most belligerent of the warmongers, was himself doubtful about what the bombing was supposed to achieve. Those doubts were obviously suppressed by the time Blair made his Chicago speech, adumbrating a new doctrine of interventionism, which explicitly bracketed Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as the main threats to global peace. Rigorously citing figures and context, he debunks the claim that the war prevented a genocide, showing that what was actually exacerbated by the intervention was an insurgency by an extremely dubious gang of ‘Greater Albanian’ nationalists, and a counterinsurgency by the Serbian military. The chapter closes with a quote from Tony Blair in 2001, bragging about the success of an intervention that had made a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, savouring the prospect of “one of the great dictators of the last century” ending up on trial, and citing it as a precedent for future action.

The overarching story of Foley’s is a part-biographical one in which he observes up close how humanitarian organisations, traditionally committed to the politically neutral delivery of aid, end up as often unwitting auxiliaries to war-making states. One of the recurring themes is the way in which human rights and humanitarianism merged, particularly as left-wing politics subsided, into what he calls ‘political humanitarianism’. He notes, for example, that Amnesty International today has over a million members, far higher than the Labour Party. Its advocacy on any particular issue can galvanise substantial constituencies and, even where it does not call for military action, it can provide the moral and intellectual case for such action with an authority that governments compromised by their own bloody actions cannot. Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, makes the argument in my book (you know the one I mean) that this merger of the two trends is a dangerous one. The reason is that when supposedly neutral humanitarian agencies delivering relief end up calling for the enforcement of human rights standards, and then in turn become dependent on those making war, they become co-belligerents. The trust that they require from all sides in order to be able to deliver aid is ruined if they are seen as accessory to one party in a conflict. Further, in order to elicit support, they can all too often end up disseminating misleading or exaggerated information about a given conflict, which can feed into the propaganda for war or produce calls for solutions that are at best counterproductive. In this connection, Foley has been particularly scathing about the calls for military intervention into Darfur from advocacy groups like Save Darfur.

The trouble that ‘political humanitarians’ faced was that their criticisms of various governments were always blunted to the extent that they refused to take a clear position themselves on what might be done in a given circumstance. So, MSF can demand action on Kosovo, but without saying what that might entail, they exposed their urgent appeals to ridicule. And so, in a way that Alex de Waal and others have related previously, ‘political humanitarians’ – quietly at first, but with increasing openness – began to mandate military action as a necessary supplement to their own campaigns. The obvious question that occurs to an outsider is this: why should humanitarians, even those with a commitment to basic human rights standards, have the answers to the world’s problems? How do they come to be the arbiters of just political action? Foley provides a very good sense from the inside of how it felt to be trying to bring about humanitarian outcomes, and how compelling the appeal to military force is when relief workers are trying to deliver people from terrifying physical danger and feel compromised by the bureaucratic structures, legalism and neutralism under which they are obliged to work. But he also shows how arguments for war on humanitarian bases came to be alibis for obvious, outright aggression – as when the Blairite inner circle appealled to international humanitarian norms to justify the invasion of Iraq. Behind all the moral and political arguments foregrounded by this discussion, of course, are immense historical, political and geographical facts which intersect in the fate of the 20th Century Left. (More on which can be found in my own book – you know the one I mean).

Foley is by no means a radical anti-imperialist. He is himself a humanitarian worker with extensive background experience in various ‘theatres’ from northern Iraq to Afghanistan. Nor is he necessarily opposed to all such ventures – he is just far more sceptical about the arguments supporting them than most of his liberal cohorts have been. And if a solution emerges from this book clearly, it is that the UN must be strengthened and reformed, and that multilateral policies should be engaged instead of unilateral ones. Foley doesn’t take seriously the criticism that this refulgent Victorian humanitarianism is implicated in a renascent imperialism – in fact, it has to be said that his handling of these arguments is embarrassingly slight. While Foley is expertly equipped to deal with legalistic arguments about war, there is a basic failure to engage with theory on other levels: those of geopolitics and geoeconomics. To that extent, he seems to grapple with the arguments at their weakest – for example, he dismisses the idea that the invasion of Afghanistan was for the purpose of securing an oil pipeline dominated by Western energy concerns, as if this exhausted the anti-imperialist critique of that invasion. In general, it seems that unless there is some direct economic kickback, then there is no strategic interest involved – although we have just been through a dangerous Georgian spectacle in which the strategic ramifications of US action in Yugoslavia and southern Asia came increasingly to the fore. Similarly, he offers some shockingly blase justifications for the most controversial components of the failed Rambouillet Accords. Of the notorious clause admitting NATO personnel uninhibited access throughout the whole FRY, he dismissively refers to this as a normal part of UN peacekeeping: if this was so, why was it insisted on in the early negotiations phase and dropped in the final Ahtisaari-Chyrnomirdin-negotiated agreement that concluded the war? If it was so essential, why drop it? If inessential, why allow the negotiations to fail partially on account of it? Of the ‘free market’ clause, he says that Kosovo was going through a process of privatization and some stipulation had to be made about future property arrangements. One would not know that privatization in the former Yugoslavia was a deeply controversial matter, and that the process was itself implicated in the break-up of the country. A reading of Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy would have helped here. (More on this in my own book – you know the one I mean). I could go on in this vein, but it would seem to be beside the point, as well unduly diluting the force of my earlier recommendation. Foley is trying to get to grips with how humanitarianism has in different ways been usurped, side-tracked, co-opted and diverted into the blind alley of Western militarism. To that extent, you are unlikely to get a more honest appraisal of how utterly mendacious our governments have been in casting their recent interventions as humanitarian.

A murderous theatre of the absurd

JamieSW — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:19:16 +0000

Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

First question: Why are “we” in Afghanistan? Answer: “To try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme.” Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are “we” in Iraq? Answer: To “plant a western-style open democracy”. Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush’s speeches for “evidence” of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: “The ‘D’ word is not there, but the phrase ‘united, stable and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it.” After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq “was launched as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’”. Moreover, says the BBC man, “in Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy . . . These examples show that these were on Bush’s mind before, during and after the invasion.”

Try to laugh, please.

Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan by “coalition” aircraft, including those directed by British forces engaged in “the country’s rebuilding programme”. The bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of civilians, says Human Rights Watch. Last month, “our” aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two-thirds of them children between the ages of three months and 16 years, while they slept, according to eyewitnesses. BBC television news initially devoted nine seconds to the Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the fact that “less than peanuts” (according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding anything in Afghanistan.

As for the notion of a “united, stable and free” Iraq, consider the no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for ownership of Iraq’s oil. “Theft” is a more truthful word. Written by the companies themselves and US officials, the contracts have been signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, “prime minister” of Iraq’s “democratic” government that resides in an air-conditioned American fortress. This is not news.

Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq’s health, once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from British and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organisation study reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its principal author. This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow Sunday Herald and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by Basra University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the contaminated southern provinces were caused by cancer.

Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from which will come the next president of the United States. Those paid to keep the record straight have strained to present a spectacle of choice. Barack Obama, the man of “change”, wants to “build a 21st-century military . . . to stay on the offensive everywhere”. Here comes the new Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of the militarised society with its 730 bases worldwide, on which Americans spend 42 cents of every tax dollar.

At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease America’s grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure – the fake “war hero” now joined with a Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving, religious fanatic – yet his true significance is that he and Obama share essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.

Thousands of decent Americans came to the two nominating conventions to express the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who believe, with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating. They were intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were patronised or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.

In the meantime, Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, has launched a book about America, his “city on a hill”. It is a sort of Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires with such obsequiousness. The book is called Have a Nice Day.

Try to laugh, please.

NATO Briefing

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:13:02 +0000

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949, as a defensive organisation, in the early years of the Cold War. Its initial members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. The Warsaw Pact was founded in response, by the then Soviet Union and its allies, in 1955. In the 1950s, Greece, Turkey and West Germany joined, followed by Spain in 1982.

At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, but NATO was not. With the disappearance of one superpower, the other did not just fade away and allow a harmonious world to emerge – as we were promised at the time. The US moved to fill the positions vacated by its previous rival. Nowhere is that more clearly demonstrated than with the expansion of NATO.

As the countries of eastern Europe embraced free market economics and multiparty democracy, the US moved rapidly to integrate them into the US sphere of influence via NATO. This was an effective strategy – remember the ‘new Europe’ issue at the time of the war on Iraq – with Poland vigorously backing the US, against the ‘old Europe’ of Germany and France. The first steps towards full-membership were taken via the Partnerships for Peace programme from 1994.

In March 1999, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were all admitted to full membership. Ten days later they found themselves at war with their neighbour Yugoslavia, as part of NATO’s illegal bombing campaign. But the change at that time was not limited to NATO expansion. At NATO’s fiftieth anniversary conference in Washington in April 1999, a new ‘Strategic Concept’, was adopted. This moved beyond NATO’s previous defensive role to include ‘out of area’ – in other words offensive – operations. The geographical area for action was now defined as the entire Eurasian landmass.

In March 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to NATO – not only former Warsaw Pact members, but also former Soviet republics. This has contributed to international tension as Russia sees itself being surrounded by US and NATO bases, including in the Balkans, the Middle East and central Asia.

Over the last few years, the US drive for global domination has become increasingly active in military terms. NATO has become a vehicle for this process, in particular with the war on Afghanistan. This has been a NATO-led war since 2003, when NATO assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), established in 2002. By May 2008, there were around 47,000 troops from 40 countries in Afghanistan under the auspices of ISAF, with NATO members providing the core of the force.

Recently, the US has turned its sights on the strategic area of the Black Sea and south-western Asia. This region is very significant in terms of energy production and transportation. The US backed the change of government in Georgia in 2003, which has led to an increasing pro-western orientation. In 2005, Georgia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace scheme, and Georgia signed an agreement supporting and aiding transit of NATO forces and NATO personnel.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, Albania and Croatia were invited to join. President Bush called for Georgia to be allowed to join the membership Action Plan, which is the next stage towards full membership. This was rejected due to opposition from several countries, led by Germany and France. But Georgia was assured in a special communique that it would eventually join NATO and a review of the deision has been pledged for December 2008.

NATO is also a nuclear-armed alliance, and US nuclear weapons are stationed in five countries across Europe. There is strong campaigning opposition to the nuclear weapons in those countries. NATO also has a nuclear ‘first use’ policy. This is exceptionally dangerous, particularly at a time of global instability where we are entering a new Cold War.

Further expansion of NATO, to include former Soviet republics like Georgia and the Ukraine, must not take place. Such a step, taken together with the development of the US Missile Defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, would be highly provocative and destabilsing. We do not want a new world order based on NATO aggression, pursuing the US military agenda.

Islamophobia: The Bigotry You Can Vent Without Shame

Tim Holmes — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:41:13 +0000

Yesterday evening, Channel 4 showed a wonderful documentary, “Dispatches: It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim“, an example of that rare and precious thing called public service broadcasting. It is my view that every last person responsible, from the tea-boy up, should be given a knighthood. At least.

Journalist Peter Oborne investigated

“the rise of violence, intolerance and hatred against British Muslims….He discover[ed] that for many in the Muslim community, Britain is becoming a very frightening place. Dispatches [met] a range of British Muslims who now live in daily fear, some because their homes are constantly vandalised, others because they or family have suffered devastatingly violent attacks.”

The Language of Hate

Some important and authoritative research was commissioned by the film-makers, which will serve as valuable resources for those fighting Islamophobia in the future. There’s a report by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, which found that

“the bulk of [press] coverage of British Muslims – around two thirds – focuses on Muslims as a threat (in relation to terrorism), a problem (in terms of differences in values) or both (Muslim extremism in general).” “Decontextualisation, misinformation and a preferred discourse of threat, fear and danger, while not uniformly present, were strong forces in the reporting of British Muslims in the UK national press.”

The Cardiff School of Journalism report is a very solid bit of social science research and well worth reading in full. Like the documentary as a whole, it provides a thorough analysis of how a dangerous bigotry is constructed and maintained in public discourse. The British press is shown to constantly present Muslims as an alien presence; a threatening “other”. Rarely if ever in the coverage is it accepted that if a person lives, works, votes, pays their taxes and abides by the law in this country then they are no less British if they are a Muslim than if they are CofE or anything else. Instead, Islamic traditions are presented as a threat to a nebulous concept called “our way of life”, from which British people of Islamic faith are excluded by definition. It is clear that, for the press, “Britishness” means a narrow concept of white Anglo-Saxonism; and that should be a cause for concern to a great many of us besides Muslims.

The other point about the press coverage is that so much of it is simply false, to the point where it appears that many journalists are in the business of systematically lying about the subject. It becomes plain that the assumption you should work from when you see a scare-story about Muslims in the gutter press, or even the broadsheets, (“Muslims Ban Christmas”, “Mosques Beat Churches”, “Gay Muslim Paedophile Asylum Seekers May Cause Cancer/Fall in House Prices”) is that the story is probably false.

Furthermore,

“Oborne conclude[d] that in today’s climate the media say things about Islam and Muslims they would never say about other groups [and this includes supposedly liberal commentators like Polly Toynbee]. When he replace[d] the word’ ‘Muslim’ in some recent headlines with ‘Jews’, ‘Blacks’ and ‘Gays’ and show[ed] them to members of the public, they [found] those headlines deeply offensive”.

A particularly interesting moment came when Oborne interviewed Rabbi Pete Tobias, a expert in the anti-semitism of early twentieth century Britain. Tobias showed Oborne an Evening Standard article from 1911, a time when many Jews were arriving in the UK from Europe. The language was familiar: dangerous and backward people from the east threaten our values and way of life by swamping our communities and refusing to integrate or submit to our superior culture. Chilling to consider that, even after the twentieth century, the essential components of racist discourse are still not being recognised for what they are (see the election of the lovable clown Boris Johnson, for a separate example).

Crucially, the documentary gave many British Muslims the chance to speak for themselves, which makes a change from having other people talking about them. And their responses to the prejudice that had been thrown their way were the best and most telling of all. Asked about the Sun’s political editor’s comment that it is correct to spotlight Muslims because of Islamist terrorism, one Muslim cleric asked, if all rapists are men, then why don’t we spotlight the entire male gender for the issue of rape? A Muslim medical student said that when Muslims like her get abused or attacked by white British people then no one asks broad questions about the defects of white British culture, but when a Muslim commits a terrorist act then every member of the Islamic faith is held guilty of hate-filled extremism until proven innocent.

This gets right to the crux of it. In reality, we do not have a problem with Islam; we have a problem with terrorists. Actually, we have a problem with terrorism and with bigotry towards Muslims, which often manifests itself in Muslims being violently terrorised.

Terrorising Muslims

The documentary makers commissioned a poll, one of the most important results of which illustrated the fact that Islamophobia does a lot worse than hurt people’s feelings. Fully thirty seven percent of Muslims – over one in three – says they have been subjected to hostility or abuse since 7 July 2005 because of their religion. Oborne interviewed people who had had their houses and cars vandalised, been abused in the street, beaten and stabbed, and targeted by fire-bombings.

The information pamphlet accompanying the programme (also well worth a read), describes an incident where

“[o]n Wednesday 7 May 2008 in Bolton a group of young people allegedly chased a group of Muslim men shouting racial and religious abuse. A chainsaw was allegedly held to the throat of one man. A 17-year-old girl and a 22-year-old man have been charged with affray and possession of an offensive weapon, and are awaiting trial”. Elsewhere “[a] Methodist chapel being converted into an Asian community centre in Quenchwell, near Carnon suffered an Islamophobic attack in early June. In the wake of a local row about the plans to create an Asian centre at this location urine was found inside a builder’s helmet. The words “Fuck off you Asian bastards” were written on a table. On the morning of Monday 2 June a pig’s head was found nailed to the door in a clear attempt to offend Muslims. The words “God says fuck off” and a cross were daubed on the door”.

“On 17 April three men were jailed for three years for a campaign of racial harassment lasting nine months against a Muslim colleague, Amjid Mehmood, who was tied to railings and force-fed bacon, which he cannot eat because of his religious beliefs. His attackers filmed the whole incident on a mobile phone. In total, nine separate incidents of racial harassment occurred over the period. A rucksack with protruding wires was put on his locker and his trousers were set on fire. During the Birmingham riots he was driven to an Afro-Caribbean area and told locals were “coming to get him.””

Its never been a secret that the language of racism is spoken with fists and knives as much as it is written in newsprint or insinuated in the statements of politicians. But many powerful people seem happy to ignore this, while the costs are paid by ordinary and entirely innocent Britons of Islamic faith. Violence is of course the logical consequence of a public discourse in which Muslims are constantly demonised and lied about. Thus, the self-styled victims of fictional Muslim aggression become the enablers of actual aggression against Muslims. The press and politicians (like the odious Jack Straw whining about how veiled women discomfort him, or any given right-wing hack complaining about “political correctness gone mad”) portray themselves as the pitiful victims of extremist Islamism. But when Muslims then suffer actual physical aggression as a result of this demonisation, politicians and the press have nothing to say.

Attitudes: differences and similarities

The poll also shows, as other polls have done, that Muslims are not significantly less tolerant than non-Muslims, which sweeps away at a stroke the fantasy of an ultra-conservative Islamist invasion. So we can expect the press to ignore that completely, since it doesn’t fit with the approved story.

Speaking generally, the poll results highlight the sorts of differences in perceptions of Islamophobia that you’d probably expect between Muslims and the rest of the population, which are certainly dismaying, and a serious level of prejudice obviously exists. But I hope I’m not being panglossian in saying that this prejudice is also not as widespread as it could be, given the nature of press coverage and elite political discourse. Note for example that 78 per cent of Muslims and 70 per cent of non-Muslims agree that “there is more … religious prejudice against Muslims in Britain today since the London bombings in July 2005“. Most non-Muslims felt that Muslims were bearing the brunt of unjustified criticism (51 per cent) while 31 per cent felt that the level of criticism was justified. When you subtract the decent people who have just been misled by politicians and the press (and would probably change their minds when presented with the facts) from that third of the population, then you’re left with a small minority of bigots. Which is not to say that a small minority of bigots can’t be very dangerous, but it does help to put a rather frightening picture of British Islamophobia in some sort of context. In a way, it shows what polls often show, that the public are largely decent and reasonable people, and that the political class (media and politicians) is broadly to the right of the general population. Islamophobia is propagated by the political class and a potentially small minority of the public; making it dangerous, but not invincible.

The political utility of hate

Finally, I’d like to make a point that wasn’t made in the documentary but which I think is essential for putting all of this in context. We should bear in mind the central, enabling role that Islamophobia plays in the War on Terror, and the potential usefulness to the political class of this species of bigotry.

The documentary aired 3 years to the day after the London tube and bus bombings. As I wrote at the time, the security services had repeatedly warned the government that Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq strongly increased the chances that attacks like this would occur. The government joined the US invasion of Iraq – a country that posed no threat to us – in spite of these warnings. It is a truism that one is responsible for the predictable consequences of ones actions, so on the afternoon of 7/7/2005 the British government had a serious problem, as indeed did the media that had played a key enabling role in taking the country to into an unpopular war. It was then extremely convenient for these elites to change the subject from Western foreign policy, the known inspiration for these brutal terrorist crimes, and instead place the focus on the Muslim community. And when you observe the people who run our country first starting a war of aggression that has by now claimed probably over a million lives, and then passing the blame for one of the predicted consequences of that war onto one of the most vulnerable communities in the UK (many of whom had actually voted New Labour, incidentally), then you get the measure of the sheer moral bankruptcy of British ruling elite.

It should also not be forgotten that the demonisation of Islam plays a broader enabling role for Western foreign policy. As I noted in this article, which I wrote in response to the controversy over the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad:

“It is no coincidence that those who most enthusiastically peddle the fiction of a “clash of civilisations” also portray the opposing “other” as a force that seriously threatens to destroy “our way of life”, and therefore advocate an aggressive US-led military strategy across the Islamic world. Manichean rhetoric eulogizing the liberal idealism of “our values” and the necessity of defending them against those who “hate our freedoms” has been the very essence of Western pro-war advocacy in recent years. Observing essentially imperial foreign policies being depicted as altruistic endeavours aimed at bringing enlightenment to backward, inferior (if exotic) cultures, or at least at defending us against them, hardly places us in unfamiliar territory. Indeed, subjugation almost invariably goes hand in hand with the deliberate dehumanisation of those who are being subjugated by those responsible for or whose acquiescence is essential to the act of subjugation”.

As competition escalates for strategic control over the planet’s dwindling oil reserves, the need for our esteemed leaders to present aggressive imperial policies in Western Asia within the conceptual framework of a “clash of civilisations” will only increase. Violence against innocent people on the streets of Britain will be but one lamentable but neccessary byproduct of this propaganda campaign, along with the massive violence meted out to the people of the region and the predictable terrorist backlash against our own country. Such are the calculations made by the statesmen who run the world on our behalf.

Conclusion

But while the documentary did not place British Islamophobia into this broader context, it should still be applauded for giving such serious treatment to an important subject, and for speaking out with a strong moral voice against this dangerous tide of hatred. Hopefully before too long, Islamophobia will go the way of anti-semitism and anti-black racism, becoming seen as something you at least don’t say out loud, as a prelude to it and those other forms of bigotry disappearing forever. If that is to happen, then people like Peter Oborne and the Dispatches team will have played their part. If only more of their peers could say the same.

Balfour’s Deceit

Ellie Keen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:28:47 +0000

Michael Makovsky’s study of Churchill’s views on Palestine is a work of immense labour. Its documentation reveals a lot. Consistency was not Churchill’s strong point. He advocated a Jewish homeland as far back as in 1906. If in 1915 Lloyd George advocated grabbing Palestine “owing to the prestige it would give us”, Churchill scribbled to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey “Palestine must be given to Christian, liberal and now noble Belgium”.

Makovsky’s researches fully establish Balfour’s deceit: “The definition of ‘national home’ was left intentionally ambiguous. The Zionists purposely used the term ‘home’ in Basle in 1897, so as not to provoke the Gentiles, but had made conflicting statements since then about whether they intended a state or not. Weizmann considered development of a state a slow process, which certainly would have been necessary for the Jews to become a majority in Palestine. (At the time of the Declaration, there were estimated to be 50,000-65,000 Jews out of a total population of 700,000). Balfour told the War Cabinet on October 31, 1917, that ‘national home’ meant an entity under British or American protectorate which permitted the Jews to ‘build up… a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution’. With ‘centre’, he borrowed the vague term which Herbert Samuel employed in 1915. Balfour did not commit to a definition in public, but privately confided in 1918. ‘My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state.’ The British press mostly understood the Declaration as promising a Jewish state.” Curzon was right after all. But, as Balfour minuted on August 6, 1919, “I am an ardent Zionist.” (Documents, page 330).

The Documents confirm the evidence of deceit. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, a pro-Zionist political officer in the British military administration in Palestine, warned Curzon on September 26, 1919: “The people of Palestine are not at present in a fit state to be told openly that the establishment of Zionism in Palestine is the policy to which H.M.G., America and France are committed. They certainly do not realise this fact.” (Documents, page 472).
Balfour himself was more candid in a talk with Justice Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Felix Frankfurter, who became a judge in the court later. Both were Zionist activists. They met in Paris on June 24, 1919, when Balfour referred to the King-Crane Commission of Inquiry set up by President Woodrow Wilson in order to ascertain what “the people [of the region] really wanted”. Frankfurter pressed the view that “Palestine should be the Jewish homeland and not merely that there be a Jewish homeland” there. Balfour replied that he had tried unsuccessfully to exclude Palestine from the Commission’s remit, “because the powers had committed themselves to the Zionist programme, which inevitably excluded numerical self-determination. Palestine presented a unique situation. We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future.” (Emphasis added, throughout.) That was not what he said in public.
Frankfurter remarked: “No statesman could have been more sympathetic than Mr. Balfour was with the underlying philosophy and aims of Zionism… nor more eager that they should be realised.” (Documents, pages 1277-1278).

Short shrift to Zionists

The King-Crane Commission’s Report gave short shrift to Zionist aims after a thorough probe into the people’s view: “We recommend, in the fifth place, serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish state.

The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made. …The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase [of land].”

It cited Wilson’s emphasis on the democratic principle and said: “If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme… there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people’s rights, though it kept within the forms of law… the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.”

But Henry King, President of the Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, an industrialist from Chicago, could not weaken the British Cabinet’s resolve despite the fact that they were appointed on the Commission by President Wilson. President Wilson’s fortunes were already in decline. Significantly, an ardent Zionist, Herbert Samuel, was appointed as the first British High Commissioner for Palestine. When they fell out later, Lloyd George taunted him: “I made him the first Procurator of Judea since Pontius Pilate.”

Tom Segev rightly holds that “there is no basis for the frequent assertion that the State [of Israel] was established as a result of the Holocaust… That sympathy helped the Zionists advance their diplomatic campaign and their propaganda”. Prof. Peter Clarke agrees. “The escalating crisis for European Jewry under the Nazis had not created the case for Zionist immigration. It simply reinforced it.” (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, page 86). He recalls Churchill’s evidence to the Peel Commission in 1937 – the British government had all along envisaged “a great Jewish state there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country”. Labour was as pro-Zionist. “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews come in,” Hugh Dalton wrote.

Imperial concerns were not absent. The Jewish state, alien to its environment, would be the West’s outpost in West Asia. A reader of the Documents on British Policy is struck by the Arabs’ ardour for unity. The barter of Palestine was of a piece with the disruption of Arab unity. The General Syrian Congress declared on July 2, 1919: “We reject the claims of the Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of Southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish immigration into any part of the country… We desire that there should be no dismemberment of Syria, and no separation of Palestine or the coastal regions in the West or the Lebanon from the mother country; and we ask that the unity of the country be maintained under any circumstances.” If Nasser moved “the Arab street”, it was because he spoke as an Arab, rather than an Egyptian, nationalist. Dismemberment created separate and vested interests.

The sell-out

However, the tragic truth is that not only were Arab leaders of the times inept, but they were also corrupt. Sherif Hussein’s sons, Abdullah and Feisal, were foremost among them. Abdullah took £5,000 to accept the deal by which he was given Transjordan. Among those who sold lands to the Jews were “leaders of the Arab national movement – patriots on the outside, traitors on the inside”, Tom Segev records. Zionist officials prepared a list of their names. Musa Kazim al-Husseini, former mayor of Jerusalem and a recognised leader of the movement, was on the list as were eight other Arab mayors.

“The Arab leaders’ willingness to sell land to the Jews heightened the contempt Zionist figures felt for the Arab national movement. After a meeting with Arab dignitaries, Chaim Weizmann concluded, ‘They are ready to sell their souls to the highest bidder.’ The compact Weizmann reached with Prince Faisal in 1918 had also been based on the assumption that the prince would make money off his peace with the Zionists. One of Faisal’s aides had received a down payment of £1,000 and then demanded more. This experience contributed to the Jews’ conclusion that the national consciousness of the Palestinian Arabs could be bought. Indeed, politicians and petty thieves, dignitaries as well as hoodlums – all offered the Zionists their services in espionage and sabotage, in rumour-mongering, defamation, extortion, and all kinds of intimidation; the supply often outstripped the demand.” The British kept company with the Jewish agency in paying bribes. President Roosevelt told Chaim Weizmann that, in his opinion, the Arabs could be bought. The word “baksheesh” (tip) appears in the minutes of their talks.

Land transfers alone could not have achieved Jewish aims. Recourse to terror was inescapable to drive out the Arabs from their homes. This should not have caused any surprise. The Central Intelligence Agency prepared a paper, “The consequences of the Partition of Palestine”, dated November 28, 1947 (“The View from 1947” by Thomas W. Lippman; Middle East Journal; Vol. 61, No. 1; Winter 2007). It predicted the outbreak of war if a Jewish state was created. In 1943, Roosevelt’s special envoy Col. Harold Hoskins reported that “only by military force can a Zionist State be imposed upon the Arabs”. The CIA’s paper noted the Zionists’ capacity as well as their ambitions. Their fighting forces would consist of 70,000 to 90,000 members of Hagana, the “Zionist army”; the 6,000 to 8,000 members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground organisation that “employs sabotage and terrorism” as its preferred tactics in its campaign for independence; and the “extreme fanatics” known as the Stern Gang or Lehi, about 500 men who, the CIA said, “do not hesitate to assassinate government officials and police officers or to obtain funds by acts of violence against Jews as well as others”.

Its prediction of the Arabs’ victory was proved wrong. The only army worth the name was the Arab Legion of Transjordan led by Sir John Glubb. But King Abdullah, true to form, had secretly agreed with the Jews that he would not go beyond capturing the West Bank. According to the CIA, Arab fears of Jewish expansionism was justified: “In the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement,” though it allocated about 50% of Palestine to the Jews and called for Jerusalem to be a neutral, international city.”

Prof. Ilan Pappe has rendered high service by documenting the Jews’ ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Plan Dalet was formulated by “the Consultancy” on March 10, 1948. “That same evening military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D [Dalet in Hebrew], this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.” He bases his summary on the records of the caucus’ meetings. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were its members.

Ethnic cleansing is recognised in international law as “a crime against humanity”. The International Criminal Court has been created to punish its perpetrators, not to forget the special ICCs for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Plan D of 1948 was a revised version of previous ones, Plan A, B and C. A was drafted in 1937; B in 1946.

They were meshed into C in 1948 which spelt out the actions to be taken. “Killing the Palestinian political leadership. Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters. Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews. Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials (in the Mandatory system). Damaging Palestinian transportation. Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods; water wells, mills, etc. Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks. Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc. Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the village files; lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on.”

A passage from Plan D read: “These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Pappe notes that “the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine’s native people in 1948 is still alive, and continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes discernable, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today”.

It is to this Israel that, on January 11, 2008, President George W. Bush asked the Arab States to “reach out”. He has done nothing to prevent Israel from building new settlements or from violating basic human rights. Israel’s policies are inspired by the ideology that led to its creation. “Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is the ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight – and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.”

Can a state established by deceit and forcible ouster of the people of the land expect them to accept its legitimacy by mere efflux of time? What are 60 years to an ancient people, the Arabs? International recognition of Israel as a state cannot wipe out the facts of history or erase from the memories of the people it has wronged the brutalities it has perpetrated. International law is based on the states quo. For long it legitimised colonial rule. In law the colony was part of the territory of its overlord. It has nothing to do with morality. Israel simply lacks moral legitimacy. Itself a product of terror, it cannot complain if the people under occupation take to arms.

But will that be of any avail to them? Human blood, whether Jewish or Arab, is priceless. Violence has not accomplished and will not accomplish anything. Fortunately, there is growing acceptance within and outside Israel of the facts of history. The Arabs in Palestine can stir the Israelis’ and the world’s conscience by recourse to a non-violent campaign of revolt till justice is done to them in the light of the realities of today, however painful they are.

More cannot be demanded of the Palestinians. As Thycidides said, “It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?”

A system to enforce imperial power will only be resisted

JamieSW — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:55:31 +0000

It might have been expected that the catastrophe of Iraq and the bloody failure of Afghanistan would have at least dampened the enthusiasm among western politicians for invading other people’s countries in the name of democracy and human rights. But the signs are instead of a determined drive to rehabilitate the idea of liberal interventionism so comprehensively discredited in the killing fields of Fallujah and Samarra. First there was the appointment of the committed interventionist Bernard Kouchner as French foreign minister. Then, late last year, the supposedly reluctant warrior Gordon Brown used the lord mayor’s banquet to reassert the west’s right to intervene across state borders.

This month the foreign secretary David Miliband argued that “mistakes” in Iraq and Afghanistan should not weaken the moral impulse to intervene around the world in support of democracy, “economic freedoms” and humanitarianism, whether peacefully or by force. Meanwhile in the US, both contenders for the Democratic party nomination have signed up longstanding liberal interventionists as foreign policy advisers: the academic Samantha Power in the case of Barack Obama; and the 1990s administration veterans Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright in Hillary Clinton’s.

The interventionists, it seems, are back in business. And now Kosovo’s declaration of independence has given them a banner to rally the disillusioned to a cause that gripped the imagination of many western liberals in the 90s. John Williams, the foreign office spin doctor who drafted the infamous Iraq war dossier in 2002, wrote last week that the Kosovo war had convinced him to follow Tony Blair over Iraq – and it would be a “tragedy” if Iraq made future Kosovos impossible. The Independent on Sunday went further, calling Kosovo’s new status a “triumph of liberal interventionism”.

But it’s hard to see much triumph in the grim saga of Kosovo. Nato’s 1999 bombing campaign, unleashed without UN support and widely regarded as a violation of international law, was supposed to halt repression and ethnic cleansing, but triggered a massive increase in both; secured a Serbian withdrawal only through Russian pressure; and led to mass reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma, including almost the entire Serb population of Pristina. After nine years of Nato occupation under a nominal UN administration, crime-ridden Kosovo is more ethnically divided than ever, boasts 50% unemployment and hosts a US military base described by the EU’s human rights envoy as a “smaller version of Guantánamo”.

Its independence – declared in defiance of the UN security council and damned by Russia, China and EU states such as Spain as illegal – is a fraud and will remain so as an EU protectorate controlled by Nato troops. By encouraging a unilateral breakaway from Serbia, without negotiation and outside the UN framework, the US, Britain and France have given the green light to secessionist movements from Abkhazia to Kurdistan.

The claim that Kosovo sets no precedent because it suffered under Serbian rule is absurd. Haven’t the Kurds or Chechens suffered? The difference boils down to power and who is supporting whom, not justice. Of course the Kosovans have the right to self-determination, but they certainly won’t get it as a Nato colony, nor at the expense of other nationalities in the Balkans, where the impact of Kosovo’s declaration on Bosnia and Macedonia could be conflagrationary.

The significance of the breakaway has meanwhile not been lost on the Muslim world, which has long been urged to see American support for Muslim Kosovo and Bosnia as proof of US good intentions, but has been notably slow to recognise the breakaway province. As Yasser az-Za’atra wrote in the Jordanian daily al-Dustour this week: “Besieging Russia is the main reason that led Bush to support Kosovo’s independence. The rise of Russia and China provides a balance to the US and is undoubtedly in the Muslims’ interest. It is not in the Muslims’ interest to secede – not in Kosovo, nor in Chechnya, nor even in China.”

Far from helping to rehabilitate liberal interventionism, the Kosovo experience highlights the fatal flaws at its heart. By supporting one side in a civil war, bypassing the UN and acting as judge and jury in their own case, the western powers exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, bequeathed a legacy of impoverished occupation and failed to resolve the underlying conflict. They also laid the ground for the lawless devastation of Iraq: the bitter fruit of the Kosovo war. At the height of the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, Blair set out five tests for intervention as part of his “doctrine of international community”, a catechism for liberal interventionists much admired by the Washington neoconservatives who followed them. Arguably, only one of the five was met in Iraq.

What’s more, both the US and Britain not only committed military aggression on the basis of falsehoods, they have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan: a humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything that happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Between them, they have also been responsible for torture, kidnapping and mass detentions without trial. The latest allegations of beatings, killings and mutilations of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers at Camp Abu Naji near Amara in 2004 are only the most extreme of a series that include the unpunished beating to death of Baha Mousa in custody in Basra.

But there is of course not the slightest prospect of any humanitarian intervention against the occupiers of Iraq for the obvious reason that they are the most powerful states in the world who act in the certain knowledge that they will never be subject to any such violent sanction for their own violations of humanitarian and international law. But it is exactly that widely understood reality that undermines the chances of a genuine multilateral basis for humanitarian intervention.

As the ability of the US to dictate to the UN weakens, it’s not surprising that pressure to revive unilateral liberal interventionism has grown. But any rules-based system of international relations has to apply to the powerful as well as the weak, allies as well as enemies, or it isn’t a system of rules at all – it’s a system of imperial power enforcement which will never be accepted.

Bringing down the new Berlin Walls

JamieSW — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:49:42 +0000

The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon’s master plan of walling in the population and stealing their land and resources has all but succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off, the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

“[Sharon’s] fate for us,” wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, “was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today – that is what he had in store for us and he nearly achieved it.”

Israel’s and America’s experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it. There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the “international community” whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as “disputed” and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as “Hamas militants” who “refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist” when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the Palestinians’ right to exist.

“What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public,” wrote Uri Avnery, a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January, “is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week…Why doesn’t our government jump at this proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak to Hamas…It is more important to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media co-operate with this pretence.” Hamas long ago offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the “reality” of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Aboutreika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the words “Sympathise with Gaza” in English and Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world expressed their support for him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika’s yellow card said: “It is actions like his that bring many walls down, walls of silence, walls in our minds.”

In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush regime’s despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the Republican nominee for president, wants a “hundred-year war”. That the leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a black man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is both female and black. Look into the murky world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto, a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama’s chief whisperers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and almost anything that matters, including the following announcement, perhaps the most important of the century: “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” Inviting incredulity, these words may require more than one reading. They come from a statement written by five of the west’s top military leaders, an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the club known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke countries that have weapons of mass destruction – with the exclusion, that is, of the west’s nuclear arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because “the west’s values and way of life are under threat”.

Where is this threat coming from? “Over there,” say the generals.

Where? In “the brutal world”.

On 21 January, on the eve of the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that “the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]” is over. The reason he gave was that “the international community” (basically, the west) was facing “serious challenges”. One of these challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no programme to build them, according to America’s National Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown’s Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal at a cost believed to be as much as £25bn. What Brown was doing was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth, provides compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war has now moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as “Apocalypse Soon”. Thus, the wall dismantled by young Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating this new “nuclear threat”. The effect of the Iraq invasion, says a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a “sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks”.

Behold Nato’s instant “brutal world”.

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates “us” from “them”. This is described today as a great divide of religions or “a clash of civilisations”, which are false concepts, propagated in western scholarship and journalism to provide what Edward Said called “the other” – an identifiable target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more than 500 years ago when the privileges of “discovery and conquest” were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed of according to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the “integration of countries into the global free-market community”, the terms of which, noted the New York Times, “require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and wiring of other nations’ internal affairs more deeply than ever before”.

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even “promoting democracy in Iraq”, according to BBC executives responsible for responding to sceptical members of the public. That “we” in the west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and resources of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is taught as serious scholarship in the economics departments of leading universities. This is neoliberalism – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. “Rather than acknowledging,” wrote Chalmers Johnson, “that free trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation for developmental failure – namely, culture.”

What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended, violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of what they call “the left”. At the same time, opponents of the new papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against Hugo Chávez. Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears deflect authentic critiques of Chávez’s Venezuela and prepare the ground for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave New World, might have written: “Opposition is apostasy. Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred.” If the people of Gaza can disobey all three, why can’t we?

Anti-imperialism: what’s in a name?

JamieSW — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:11:07 +0000

In summer 2003, Tariq Ali, Tony Benn and other leading figures in Stop the War Coalition published a ‘guide for the movement’ boldly titled Anti-imperialism. The subject was more controversial than might have first appeared.

When the Stop the War Coalition was founded in late 2001, some activists proposed that resistance to imperialism should be formalised in its constitution, but their motions were defeated, not only in London but in other meetings in cities such as Cardiff. Persuasive and empowering to some, ‘anti-imperialism’ seems problematic to others. Who was – and is – talking about imperialism and can the term be usefully deployed by the anti-war movements? New research undertaken by the University of Liverpool has attempted to find out some of these answers.

According to Martin Empson, of Tower Hamlets Stop the War, ‘the phrase imperialism … is something that’s become commonplace in a way that it wasn’t five, ten years ago.’ Then, imperialism was the stuff of radical newspapers, activist summits and dissident intellectuals. It still is, of course, with sessions on imperialism at Marxism and European Social Forums, and many other conferences dedicated to the subject. At such events, speakers can be heard arguing that imperialism – once dismissed as a closed chapter in history – lives on in globalisation and the war on terror.

But as Empson observed, imperialism has a currency today that it lacked in the past. A few months ago, Financial Times (FT) columnist Gideon Rachman posted notes on his website asking, ‘whether it is analytically useful to think of America as an imperial power.’ Many readers emailed in with their own understandings of imperialism and thoughts on the existence of an ‘American Empire’, with some posts conjuring up images of men in pinstripe suits, stopping for some critical reflection on global capitalism.

Empire lives on

Perhaps we should worry when the FT picks up on this debate: has it become so unthreatening to the neoliberal establishment, a mere conversation piece? Certainly, the left has never had a monopoly over this. The new imperialism was trumpeted by both neoconservative architects of the war on terror and by their allies in the academy. Niall Ferguson, the historian of British imperialism, counsels Americans to embrace their own ‘empire’, accepting the responsibilities as well as the privileges of power. Ferguson has done well out of the British and American Empires: they have got him a chair at Harvard, a job presenting Channel 4 documentaries about ‘how Britain made the modern world’, lucrative publishing contracts linked to his television work and, most recently (in September 2007), a consultancy with the hedge fund GLG partners, which takes his advice on the lessons of imperial history for contemporary investments.

With many different voices on imperialism, we might expect people to be using the term in a variety of ways, and indeed they are. Many on the left, including those in the SWP who took the helm of Stop the War Coalition both nationally and in many local branches, cite orthodox Marxist sources. Lenin and Bukharin’s theories of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, and as a process engendering self-destructively violent competition between capitalist nation states, is brought forward most systematically by SWP activist Alex Callinicos in books such as The New Mandarins of American Power, and by other revolutionary socialists including David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism.

These readings of imperialism are challenged by others on the left – or rather, others who redefine the left. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, somewhat confusingly, that imperialism as we know it is dead, but that ‘Empire’ lives on, and with it global inequalities of unprecedented proportions. Hardt and Negri’s arguments, advanced in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005), are warmly received by those who recognise their analysis of contemporary capitalism: a global system of accumulation said to have transcended nation states and assumed slippery new forms.

Imperialism and related ideas such as Empire are not entirely theoretical for socialists, of course. In Britain the left has not simply applied itself to anti-imperial projects; to an extent it has defined itself through them, both intellectually and practically. Pressure groups such as the Movement for Colonial Freedom and political organisations including the (radical wing of the) Labour Party and the Communist Party agitated for decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century.

The meanings of imperialism multiply further by studying other groups involved in the antiwar movements. Muslims, whose involvement was formalised through the partnership between Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), bring understandings of their own to this term. Many have a firsthand experience of imperialism, as migrants and descendants of migrants from former British colonies including Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Daud Abdullah, Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, traces his understanding of imperialism to his own experiences in Grenada, and to longer histories. ‘We in Latin America and the Caribbean identify with people in Africa with their struggles against imperialism and we share common pain.’ His embracing of Islam in Grenada in 1975 helped him, he said, rebuild an identity that had been assaulted by colonialism. The philosopher Tariq Ramadan argues that resistance to western colonialism has been one of the fundamental threads of political Islam, or Islamism, in the modern period.

Multiple meanings

Since imperialism means different things to different people, it is not surprising that some activists find it a poor political compass. For Dr Azam Tamimi, who led MAB into partnership with Stop the War Coalition, it deflects attention from substantive political issues: ‘Even to us, imperialism wasn’t very clear’ he told me. ‘We were talking about more specific issues. For us Palestine was an issue.’

Others see difficulties in following ideas in general, arguing instead for politics with tangible, understandable and achievable goals. Glyn Robins, Chair of Respect in Tower Hamlets, remembers feeling ‘impatient’ with those who proposed the anti-imperial motion at Stop the War’s inaugural meeting. They seemed to be wasting crucial time ‘arguing about the nature of imperialism’ when the priority should have been to ‘get out there and oppose this imperialism.’

These reservations about anti-imperialism could imply that the notion is no longer of any use. But is that it? In fact, though antiwar activists have different and avowedly imperfect understandings of the term, it is part of the common ground we share in forming a united front.

Superficially, it might seem that now, as the fortunes of US neoconservatives are waning – the Project for the New American Century is already looking last century – imperialism and the need to resist it may seem happily anachronistic. Geographer Neil Smith has argued, on the contrary, that the essence of neo-colonialism remains: in the actions and the more coded language of neo-liberalism, which ‘has always been conservative’ and, at least implicitly, imperialist. Tracing US imperialism beyond its recent overt form, advanced in the second Bush presidency, Smith stresses continuity not only with the obvious precursors of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – US covert and military interventions from Chile to Vietnam – but also the economic globalisation of the Clinton era. So anti-imperialism is needed now just as it was when Bush was in the ascendancy.

As a very general idea, anti-imperialism enables us to think broadly: about global power and inequality. As Martin Empson explains, ‘people have started to talk about a political and economic system as a totality,’ and this understanding is fostered by understandings of imperialism: ‘people start to see why America would want the oil because of what’s happening to its own economy and so on and then the phrase makes sense and takes on a wider importance.’ The very generality of imperialism means that this way of thinking cannot be too narrowly prescriptive: it must continuously be reinterpreted, as we are forced to decide what we mean by it, what we want it to mean. No single group or theorist should attempt to define the term conclusively, as that would only close it down, making it a clearer but a more limited idea.

So, to speak of imperialism is not necessarily to speak very precisely, but it is both to describe the unequal and often violent world in which we live, and to find common purpose with others in changing it.