Seamus Milne | ukwatch.net

Delusions of war

eddie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:25:18 +0000

During the 1990s, many one-time leftists in the west and elsewhere were drawn towards the idea that human rights could somehow fill the gap left by the decline in socialist politics. In the wake of the Bosnian bloodbath and the Rwandan genocide, that crystallised for some into support for unilateral humanitarian intervention and war.

A decade on, the hopes that were invested in such delusions lie buried in the graveyards of Falluja and Kandahar, the ethnically cleansed Serb and Roma districts of Kosovo and the torture, kidnapping and internment jails run by the self-proclaimed liberators and human rights champions of the war on terror.

As regular readers of comment is free will know, Conor Foley is a veteran aid worker who has seen from the inside how the human rights agenda has been conscripted to legitimise and underpin the US and British wars of occupation and domination of the past 10 years.

Part working travelogue from almost every recent major conflict zone, part political journey and analysis, Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, is an important and thoughtful contribution to understanding why western “humanitarian interventions” – from Somalia and Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone – have largely failed in their own terms and left such a dismal and unstable legacy.

Foley is effective at deconstructing some of the mythology and deceit around these debacles – including the illegal Kosovo war of 1999, which paved the way for the aggression against Iraq, but is still seen as a successful humanitarian intervention by many who balk at the more nakedly imperial Iraqi and Afghan disasters. As Foley reminds us, the Nato bombing campaign was supposedly launched to stop war crimes and ethnic cleansing, grotesquely exaggerated in Anglo-American propaganda. But both increased dramatically as a result: it turned a “simmering crisis into a full-scale humanitarian disaster”. And in the months after Nato troops took over in Kosovo, a thousand people were killed or disappeared as up to 250,000 Serbs and Roma were driven from their homes in the new western protectorate.

But he is at his most insightful about the role played by the battalions of NGOs he has worked among, which follow the conquering armies like missionaries, often urging them on and providing the social infrastructure for the bloated occupation regimes that are then imposed on hostile lands.

As Foley highlights, most non-governmental organisations in the humanitarian line of work are no longer really NGOs at all – they’re increasingly sub-contracted GOs, which get the bulk of their funding from western governments with political strings attached. Foley describes returning to Afghanistan in 2004 to find that “the humanitarian effort had become part of a wider counter-insurgency operation”. The then US secretary of state Colin Powell hailed the humanitarian NGOs as “a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team”. Against such a background, it’s hardly surprising that aid workers come to be seen as targets by some of those fighting occupation.

Steeped as he is in NGO-speak and thinking, Foley can often lapse into loaded terminology and assumptions: he repeatedly uses the term “international community”, for example, when he clearly means the US and its allies. In the same vein, he largely accepts the reasons given by the western powers for their interventions at face value, along with, say, the legitimacy of occupied Afghanistan’s fraudulent elections, in which political parties weren’t even allowed on the ballot paper. And so keen is Foley to dissociate himself from “anti-imperialists” that he reserves some of his sharpest – and least sure-footed – attacks for a writer such as Naomi Klein, over her analysis in The Shock Doctrine of disaster capitalism in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

But in a sense that only strengthens the force of his critique, coming as it does from someone immersed in the ideology and practice of the “humanitarian community” – who has learned from personal experience how calamitous invading other people’s countries in the name of democracy and human rights has proved on the ground. When he describes the role played by western governments and NGOs in Sierra Leone and Liberia as a deeply resented “recolonisation”, you know it’s not meant as a rhetorical flourish.

Far from making another Rwanda less likely, the liberal interventionist wars of the past decade have postponed the development of a genuine rules-based system of international protection by discrediting humanitarian intervention as a mechanism of imperial power enforcement applied only to weak and recalcitrant anti-western states. In the circumstances, Foley’s conclusion that humanitarian NGOs should return to a policy of the strictest neutrality and broaden their focus from individual human rights to the wider inequalities of wealth and power that underlie conflict and humanitarian crises is surely only common sense.

Not the death of capitalism, but the birth of a new order

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:51:44 +0000

As the dust of the credit crash clears and the real world recession kicks in, the ideologues of capitalism are scaring themselves with spectres. “He’s back,” the Times warned its readers on Tuesday over a portrait of Karl Marx. Not only are sales of his masterwork Das Kapital booming, but the virus of the newly fashionable revolutionary has, it seems, spread to the heart of the capitalist camp: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had himself photographed leafing through its pages while Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hailed by everyone from the German finance minister to the Pope.

In the US, John McCain has been lashing out at Barack Obama for his supposed “socialism”, the High Tory writer Simon Heffer excitedly dubbed the state bail-out of the banks “neo-sovietisation”, and the BBC broadcast a prime-time debate last week on whether the crisis signalled the “death of capitalism”. Meanwhile the Economist, the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy, has been trying to mobilise true believers for a fightback: “Economic liberty is under attack”, its current issue thunders. “Capitalism is at bay, but those who believe in it must fight for it.”

Of course, they are running ahead of themselves in a panic. If Marx’s central ideas about class and exploitation were really taking hold across the western world, you can be sure the mainstream media wouldn’t be running quirky, cartoonish pieces and debates about them, but something much more ferocious and alarming.

It’s certainly true that the events of the past few weeks have exposed deregulated capitalism as bankrupt and its ruling elites as greedy and inept. But it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying. That is reflected in public opinion: a Financial Times-Harris poll conducted across the advanced capitalist world this month found large majorities believe the financial crisis has been caused by “abuses of capitalism”, rather than the “failure of capitalism itself” – only in Germany did the proportion blaming capitalism as a system rise to 30%.

As Sarkozy has pronounced: “Laissez-faire is finished.” It is not Marx who has really been rehabilitated in short order, but John Maynard Keynes, out of dire necessity. In the wake of the largest-scale acts of state economic intervention in capitalist history, politicians are now having to make a virtue of it. “Much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense,” the chancellor Alistair Darling declared at the weekend, as he announced plans to bring forward large capital projects and the prime minister defended higher borrowing to counter falling demand.

The symbolic significance of this official return to Keynesianism shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s 32 years since the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan bowed the knee to monetarism, nearly three years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, and announced to his party conference: “We used to believe that we could spend our way out of a crisis, but I tell you … it is no longer possible.” Faced with financial collapse and the threat of a full-scale economic depression, such fancies have now had to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But claims that the current crisis signals the end of capitalism or the birth of a new socialism simply set up a straw man and divert attention from what is in fact at stake. If we’re talking about socialism as a systemic alternative, that is clearly not currently on the agenda in the heartlands of capitalism – or elsewhere, with the arguable exception of Latin America. And both its post-communist collapse of confidence and the weakening of the working class as a social and political force make it difficult for the left to take full advantage of capitalism’s stark failures.

That has led some, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, to conclude that the main beneficiaries of the crisis will be the right, as in the 1930s. There’s certainly a danger of growing support for rightwing populism on the back of mass unemployment; but if the new enthusiasm for Keynesian intervention and public ownership can be channelled to protect those most vulnerable to the crash – rather than make them pay the price for it, as now seems more likely – that need not be the case.

What the crisis is bound to do is increase the demand for alternatives both within capitalism and beyond it. It has already discredited the economic model that has dominated the world for a generation at a cost of endemic instability, rampant inequality and environmental devastation. In its defence of free-market capitalism this week, the Economist argued that, in the past 25 years of market liberalisation, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of absolute poverty and speculated that this decade may see the fastest growth of income per head in history.

But most of that growth and poverty reduction has been in China’s state-directed and still heavily publicly-owned economy, while India’s lesser capitalist success story is so grotesquely unequally distributed that the proportion of its children who are malnourished – at 47% a global leader – has remained almost unchanged for a decade. For the rest of the world, growth was faster and far more equally shared in the postwar decades of Keynesianism and socialism.

An opportunity has now opened up for those political leaders prepared to use this meltdown to reshape the economic system, from Obama to Hugo Chávez. It’s often said that the left has no alternative model after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy. But in reality no economic and social model, left or right, has ever come pre-cooked: all of them – from Soviet power to the Keynesian welfare state and Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism – have grown out of ideologically driven improvisation in particular historical circumstances. Marx himself famously offered no blueprint.

Instead, the pressure to respond to economic need – as in the New Deal or postwar Europe – will shape the way the new economic order develops. Already, the forms of intervention have been sharply different from past crises, with bank nationalisations offering a potentially powerful new economic lever. We are no doubt heading into a new kind of capitalism as well as a period of growing support for more far-reaching social alternatives. But what form it takes will be decided by pressure, from above and below.

Civilian dead are a trade-off in Nato's war of barbarity

eddie — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:04:08 +0000

While the eyes of the western world have been fixed on the global financial crisis, the military campaign that launched the war on terror has been spinning out of control. Seven years after the US and Britain began their onslaught on Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, the Taliban surround the capital, al-Qaida is flourishing in Pakistan and the war’s sponsors have publicly fallen out about whether it has already been lost.

As the US joint chiefs of staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen concedes that the country is locked into a “downward spiral” of corruption, lawlessness and insurgency, Britain’s ambassador in Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is quoted in a leaked briefing as declaring that “American strategy is destined to fail”. The same diplomat who told us last year that British forces would be in Afghanistan for decades now believes foreign troops are “part of the problem, not the solution”.

The British commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. “We’re not going to win this war,” he said, adding that if the Taliban were prepared to “talk about a political settlement”, that was “precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this”. The double-barrelled duo were duly slapped down by US defence secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taliban, which are in fact already taking place under Saudi sponsorship.

This is the conflict western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilisation. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fuelled the very resistance that western military and political leaders are now unable to contain.

In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July – US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin.

By far the most comprehensive research into Afghan casualties over the past seven years has been carried out by Marc Herold, a US professor at the University of New Hampshire. In his latest findings, Herold estimates that the number of civilians directly killed by the US and other Nato forces since 2006, up to 3,273, is already higher than the toll exacted by the devastating three-month bombardment that ousted the Taliban regime in 2001. And over the past year civilian deaths at the hands of Nato forces have tripled, despite changes in rules of engagement.

But most telling is the political and military calculation that underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. “Close air support” bomb attacks called in by ground forces – which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the US tactic of choice – are between four and 10 times as deadly for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and air strikes now account for 80% of those killed by the occupation forces.

But while 242 US and Nato ground troops have died in the war with the Taliban this year, not a single pilot has been killed in action. The trade-off could not be clearer. With troops thin on the ground and the US military up to their necks in Iraq and elsewhere, US and Nato reliance on air attacks minimises their own casualties while guaranteeing that Afghan civilians will die in far larger numbers.

It is that equation that makes a nonsense of US and British claims that their civilian victims are accidental “collateral damage”, while the Taliban’s use of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and classic guerrilla operations from civilian areas are a sign of their moral depravity. In real life, the escalating civilian death toll is not a mistake, but the result of a clear decision to put the lives of occupation troops before civilians; westerners before Afghans.

Dependence on air power is also a reflection of US imperial overstretch and the reluctance of Nato states to put more boots on the ground. But however much the nominal Afghan president Hamid Karzai rails against Nato’s recklessness with Afghan blood, the indiscriminate air war carries on regardless. Given that the US government spent 10 times more on every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill than it does in “condolence payments” to Afghans for the killing of a family member, perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But nor should it be that the occupation’s cruelty is a recruiting sergeant for the Taliban. As Aga Lalai, who lost both grandparents, his wife, father, three brothers and four sisters in a US bombing in Helmand last summer, put it: “So long as there is just one 40-day-old boy remaining alive, Afghans will fight against the people who do this to us.”

That doesn’t just go for Afghanistan. Gordon Brown recently told British troops in Helmand: “What you are doing here prevents terrorism coming to the streets of Britain.” The opposite is the case. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq – and the atrocities carried out against their people – are a crucial motivation for those planning terror attacks in Britain, as case after case has shown. Now the US is launching attacks inside Pakistan, the risks of further terror and destabilisation can only grow.

Senior Pakistani officials are convinced Nato is preparing to throw in the towel in Afghanistan. Both Bush and the two US presidential candidates are committed to an Iraq-style surge, though the number of troops being talked about cannot possibly make a decisive difference to the conflict – and in Barack Obama’s case may be as much about providing political cover for his plans for Iraq. But the strategic importance of Afghanistan doesn’t suggest any early US withdrawal: more likely an attempt to co-opt sections of the Taliban as part of a messy and protracted attempt to rearrange the occupation.

It will fail. The US and its allies cannot pacify Afghanistan nor seal the border with the Taliban’s Pakistani sanctuary. Eventually there is bound to be some sort of negotiated withdrawal as part of a wider regional and domestic settlement. But many thousands of Afghans – as well as occupying troops – look certain to be sacrificed in the meantime.

A rich man's world

JamieSW — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:07:23 +0000

Global financial meltdown may have bought Gordon Brown time, but just as important among many Labour MPs and activists in Manchester this week is fear of the return of full-blown Blairism in the shape of a resurgent David Miliband.

After a couple of months in which the foreign secretary’s bid to position himself as Brown’s main challenger seemed to have come unstuck, his weekend media offensive – with lavish soft focus interviews in the Times and Daily Mirror – sent waves of alarm through the growing ranks of those who want to see Labour respond to the economic crisis by moving away from the discredited market orthodoxies of the Blairite years. Despite Miliband’s unpopularity among MPs and the unions, few doubt the likely impact of a full-on media campaign on his behalf in any post-Brown election (hence his discreet wooing of the Murdoch empire).

Even more worrying from that point of view was the apparent endorsement of Miliband by the health secretary, Alan Johnson, seen by some on Labour’s centre-left and in the unions as potentially the most credible Stop Miliband candidate – though his own Blairite history casts doubt on how viable a vessel he could be for the hopes of those looking for a change of political direction.

In fact, Johnson’s Miliband-flattering interview with the Times stopped short of ruling himself out (“I don’t aspire to that job”) and – despite claims from leading Blairites that Johnson has signed off a deal to run as Miliband’s deputy – the man himself has now let it be known that his remarks have been misunderstood, and no such decision has been taken.

There’s no doubt that the mood running through the conference in favour of a crackdown on City speculators, redistribution and tougher intervention in the economy should benefit any leadership contender prepared to move on from the well-worn New Labour formulas of the past.

But Miliband has made it abundantly clear in his various appearances on the conference fringe that he will be doing no such thing. His speech last night to the pressure group Progress was classic Blair – New Labour was a “coalition, not a faction”, guided by a combination of “head and heart” – and his apparent self-criticism offered little sense of any kind of new political direction. Earlier in the evening, he defended the Iraq war without qualifications, insisting – like Blair – that the rights and wrongs of the invasion and occupation would be left to history.

Brown and Alistair Darling have been making a few more rhetorical concessions to the dominant mood: the prime minister calling for tighter control on “irresponsible” City bonuses and the chancellor today promising the conference to do “whatever it takes” to deal with the upheavals in the markets. But both have stopped well short of promising the kind of decisive action both the party and the public are evidently looking for – and Brown has typically rushed to reassure the City that Labour remains a “party of business”.

That’s obviously not going to satisfy the mood inside the conference and beyond. The call by the Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas for a new 45% tax rate on those earning £175,000 a year to fund tax cuts for low and middle income earners has attracted widespread support. Meanwhile, delegates this morning voted for a radical union-led agenda – including price controls and a windfall tax on the energy companies – to be sent to the party’s national policy forum. Of course, that doesn’t make it Labour policy, but it’s a significant reflection of the new pressure for change.

Outside the conference hall, there are other signs of the wider dissatisfaction with the refusal of New Labour over more than a decade to give any representation to the huge swathe of public opinion to its left. Throughout the conference, a convention of the left – organised by John Nicholson, former Labour deputy leader of Manchester city council – is holding a series of meetings and debates on the alternative to Labour’s record of “wars, privatisation and environmental destruction”.

Labour Campaign Group MPs, such as John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and Katy Clark, have joined speakers from a dizzying array of groups and parties, from Respect to the left Greens, with the aim of bringing together the notoriously fissiparous left inside and outside the Labour party in common action. Some see it as part of another attempt to form a new leftwing party. But what it certainly reflects is the frustration at the effective denial of a voice to millions in the political mainstream – and an early taste of some of the fractious fallout that can be expected to follow a Labour defeat at the next election.

This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe

JamieSW — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:15:34 +0000

At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race – with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies – Roma and Sinti people – whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.

The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies were thieves”, rather than because of their “Gypsy nature”.

Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. The response of Berlusconi’s government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? “That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies,” shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: “The people do what the political class isn’t able to do.”

This, it should be recalled, is taking place in a state that under Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship played a willing part in the Holocaust, during which more than a million Gypsies are estimated to have died as “sub-humans” alongside the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The first expulsions of Gypsies by Mussolini took place as early as 1926. Now the dictator’s political heirs, the “post-fascist” National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi’s government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance’s Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting “Duce” (equivalent to the German “Führer”) and Berlusconi enthused: “We are the new Falange” (the Spanish fascist party of General Franco).

So you might have expected that Berlusconi would be taken to task for his vile treatment of the surviving Roma of Europe at the G8 summit in Japan this week by those fearless crusaders for human rights, George Bush and Gordon Brown. Far from it. Instead, Bush’s spokesman issued a grovelling apology to the Italian prime minister on Tuesday for a US briefing describing his “good friend” Berlusconi as “one of the most controversial leaders of Italy … hated by many”.

It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as “evoking painful memories”. The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it “must be stopped now”. Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies. But, given that the European establishment has long turned a blind eye to anti-Roma discrimination and violence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, along with the celebration of SS units that took part in the Holocaust in the Baltic states, perhaps it’s no surprise that they ignore the outrages now taking place in Italy.

The rest of us cannot. There are particular reasons why Italy has been especially vulnerable in recent years to xenophobic and racist campaigns – even while crime is actually lower than it was in the 1990s (and below the level of Britain). The scale of recent immigration from the Balkans and Africa, an insecure and stagnant job market and the collapse of what was previously a powerful progressive and anti-fascist culture have all combined to create a particularly fearful and individualistic atmosphere, the leftwing Italian veteran Luciana Castellina argues.

But the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People’s party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne’s Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings – just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.

Italy has a further lesson for Britain and the rest of Europe. Berlusconi’s election victory in April was built on the collapse of confidence in the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which stuck to a narrow neoliberal programme and miserably failed to deliver to its own voters. Meanwhile, centre-left politicians such as Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, pandered to, rather than challenged, the xenophobic agenda of the rightwing parties – tearing down Gypsy camps himself and absurdly claiming last year that 75% of all crime was committed by Romanians (often confused with Roma in Italy).

What was needed instead, as in the case of other countries experiencing large-scale immigration, was public action to provide decent housing and jobs, clamp down on exploitation of migrant workers and support economic development in Europe’s neighbours. That opportunity has now been lost, as Italy is gripped by an ominous and retrograde spasm. The persecution of Gypsies is Italy’s shame – and a warning to us all.

Bush Is Trying To Impose A Classic Colonial Status on Iraq

tim — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:59:19 +0000

Whatever the Iraq war was about, we were assured, it definitely wasn’t about oil. Tony Blair called the idea a “conspiracy theory”. It was about democracy and dictatorship, weapons of mass destruction and human rights, anything but oil. Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, insisted the conflict had “literally nothing to do with oil”. When Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, wrote last autumn, “Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he was treated as if he were some senile old gent who’d embarrassingly lost the plot.

That argument is going to be a good deal harder to make from next week, when four of the western world’s largest oil corporations are due to sign contracts for the renewed exploitation of Iraq’s vast reserves. Initially, these are to be two-year deals to boost production in Iraq’s largest oilfields. But not only did the four energy giants — BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Total — write their own contracts with the Iraqi government, an unheard-of practice: they have also reportedly secured rights of first refusal on the far more lucrative 30-year production contracts expected once a new US-sponsored oil law is passed, allowing a wholesale western takeover. Big Oil is back with a vengeance.

It’s a similar story when it comes to the future of the US occupation itself. The last thing on anyone’s mind, we were told when the tanks rolled in, was permanent US control, let alone the recolonisation of Iraq. This was about the Iraqis finally getting a chance to run their own affairs in freedom. But five years on, George Bush and Dick Cheney are putting the screws on their Green Zone government to sign a secret deal for indefinite military occupation, which would effectively reduce Iraq to a long-term vassal state.

In April, I was leaked a draft copy of this “strategic framework agreement”, intended to replace the existing UN mandate at the end of the year. Details of the document, which came from a source at the heart of the Iraqi government, were published in the Guardian — including indefinite authorisation for the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security”. Since then, much more has emerged about the accompanying “status of forces agreement” the US administration wants to impose: including more than 50 US military bases, full control of Iraqi airspace, legal immunity for US military and private security firms, and the right to conduct armed operations throughout the country without consulting the Iraqi government.

This goes far beyond other such agreements the US has around the world and would shackle Iraq with a permanent puppet status. Not surprisingly, it has led to uproar in the country and opposition in the US, where congress will be denied a vote on the arrangement because the administration has chosen not to call it a treaty.

But it also evokes powerful memories in Iraq, which has been down this road before. After Britain invaded and occupied Iraq during the first world war, it imposed a strikingly similar treaty on its puppet government in 1930 in preparation for the country’s nominal independence. Just as in George Bush’s version, Britain awarded itself military bases, the right to conduct military operations, and legal immunity for its forces — though the proposed new US powers and restrictions on Iraqi sovereignty go even further than in the pre-war colonial treaty.

To add to this sense of imperial revival, the four oil companies now preparing to return in triumph to Iraq were the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company, which Britain gave a free hand in the 1920s to dine off Iraq’s wealth in a famously exploitative deal. The Anglo-Iraqi treaty and those bitterly unjust oil concessions dominated Iraqi politics for decades, feeding riots, uprisings and coups until the monarchy was overthrown, the tables turned on the oil companies and the British were finally sent packing by the radical nationalist General Qasim in 1958.

The 50th anniversary of the 1958 revolution appropriately falls next month. But Bush and Cheney seem increasingly determined to force through both their security agreement and the stalled law for the privatisation of Iraq’s oil industry before the US election. The signs are that, despite intense Iraqi opposition, a combination of strong-arm tactics, bribery and some watering down of the most extreme US demands may yet secure the full imperial package.

When Bush contradicted Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier this month on the occupation deal and predicted: “If I were a betting man, we’ll reach an agreement with the Iraqis,” he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about — rather as he did when he explained a couple of weeks ago that he was “confident” Gordon Brown would not after all be cutting British troop numbers in Basra according to any fixed timetable. Meanwhile, Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, is suddenly sounding similarly confident about “progress” on the oil law because “the Americans are very keen”.

Perhaps they are all coming to believe the Bush administration propaganda that the surge has succeeded and Iraq is starting to “fix itself” in time for the US election, as the Economist’s cover story put it last week. Much is still being made of the decline in US casualties and resistance attacks to 2004 levels, even though the factors behind that drop are widely acknowledged to be contingent and precarious. Given the carnage of the past few days alone — including seven US soldiers killed since the weekend and a Baghdad car bomb that butchered 65 people — as well as this week’s withering US Government Accountability Office report on the administration’s claims of “progress” in Iraq, any other view would seem perverse.

What is certain is that, if Bush’s blueprint for indefinite foreign rule in Iraq and the takeover of its oil is forced down the throats of the Iraqi people, resistance and bloodshed will increase. Of course, it’s true that the US and Britain didn’t invade Iraq only for its oil. It was a projection of American power in the world’s most strategically sensitive region, with oil at its heart, which has brought catastrophe to Iraq and great danger to the Middle East and the wider world. That’s why the struggle to restore Iraq’s independence matters far beyond its borders — it is a global necessity.

Corporate cherry-picking isn't delivering the goods

JamieSW — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:09:26 +0000

As New Labour heads for humiliation in the Crewe byelection today, those who want to find a way out of the wreckage need to face up to the lessons of its ideological bankruptcy fast. For more than a decade, Tony Blair and, puffing slightly to keep up, Gordon Brown have always insisted that the only test for their policies is “what works”. That has been the theme tune of their ever more enthusiastic embrace of public service privatisation and commercialisation. Not for them the pickled nostrums of the past: if the corporate world could deliver the goods, it had to be given the freest of reins.

The farce of their claims couldn’t have been more clearly demonstrated than in the liberalisation and creeping privatisation of Britain’s postal service. Far from “working” or delivering the goods, the corporate-skewed opening up of the market is progressively destroying a publicly owned network at the heart of Britain’s social and business life. When New Labour came to power, the Post Office was an effective public monopoly handing over more than £100m profit a year to the public purse. Public and political support saw off successive attempts by the Tories and, more tentatively, Tony Blair to privatise what had become Royal Mail.

But eight years after New Labour began exposing the network to private competition and two years after Royal Mail’s 350-year-old monopoly was finally abandoned, the postal service is in crisis and the universal service which guarantees delivery of mail anywhere in the country at a single price is in peril. A devastating independent review for the government this month found that liberalisation had only benefited big business, brought “no significant benefits” to consumers or small businesses, and created a “substantial threat” both to the future of Royal Mail and the universal service.

Of course, few people needed to be told that the service was deteriorating, when the last five years have seen an end to Sunday collections and fewer and later daily deliveries. But the response of the postal regulator Postcomm, whose ideological passion for markets and unchained competition has been central to this sorry saga, was to demand an intensification of the private treatment: far from stepping back, it last week insisted that part-privatisation of Royal Mail was the only way to prevent a further decline in the service, including an end to Saturday deliveries.

Naturally, Royal Mail’s executives like the idea, from which they would stand to benefit richly. But it’s hard to see how it would help protect the unprofitable parts of the universal service or the threatened network of post offices on which it depends. What has really tipped Royal Mail over the edge are Postcomm’s rigged rules for access to Royal Mail deliveries, which have levered corporate operators into the most profitable parts of the business – they now handle 40% of the profitable bulk mail which previously underwrote remote deliveries – and turned an operating profit of £233m in 2006-7 into a £279m loss this year.

Of course, the growth of the internet and years of under-investment in mechanisation have also had an impact – though online transactions also generate mail. But it is this deliberately engineered leaching off the public sector which has been the decisive factor in delivering a worse service to most users and lower pay and conditions to those employed by the corporate cherry-pickers. Meanwhile the government’s continued drive to close thousands of unprofitable post offices, shutting off social lifelines for some of the country’s most vulnerable people, has directly fuelled the public rejection of New Labour which now appears to have passed the point of no return.

When one Labour rebel recently challenged Brown about the impact of postal liberalisation, the prime minister blamed the European Union. It’s true that EU directives require the opening up of postal and other public services to competition – and those neoliberal catechisms are now locked into the Lisbon treaty, due to face its first popular test in the Irish referendum next month. But Britain, ever more royal than the king, has gone much further, much faster than required to do by Brussels, and has failed to use the protective measures available to keep its “dominant provider” afloat.

Not that there’s much hope of either of the other two main parties taking a more sensible approach. David Cameron’s Tories may have opposed post office closures, but they have carefully avoided committing themselves even to the current level of government financial support and can be safely relied on to head off further down the privatisation and liberalisation path, while the Liberal Democrats now want to part-privatise Royal Mail to raise cash.

What’s needed instead is the debunking of the privatising dogma that has created this crisis, a halt to preferential pricing for private predators, a universal service charge for market entrants, and a broadening of Postcomm’s remit. At the same time there is a huge untapped potential to turn local post offices into far more viable hubs by, for example, making them centres of access to public services and reintroducing public banking facilities.

But then the gutting of the postal service isn’t the only part of the government’s corporate-driven market agenda that isn’t working. As Allan Asher, chief executive of Energywatch, told parliament this week, competition in the privatised energy market is a myth, and British gas and electricity consumers are being fleeced by the “tacit collusion” of a “comfortable oligopoly”.

There is clearly going to have to be a more far-reaching change of course. Tuesday’s compromise agreement between the government, CBI and TUC to give exploited contract and agency workers the same basic rights as permanent staff after 12 weeks is certainly a significant move in the right direction and was greeted with squeals of rage by business lobbyists. But there was also disappointment among Labour MPs and trade unionists: once again, Britain has signed up to less worker protection than most EU states wanted and is now likely to be able to continue opting out of long hours regulation as a result of the deal. It may be too late to avoid defeat, but if Labour is to reverse its haemorrhage of support and lay the ground for a better future, it will have to take more than these faltering steps.

Religion is now a potential ally of radical social change

JamieSW — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:37:36 +0000

The two faces of modern religion were on stark display in Britain this week. In Canterbury, the much-abused anti-war archbishop, Rowan Williams, used his Easter sermon to launch a powerful attack on individualist consumerism and “the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires -enough oil, enough power, enough territory”. Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the conservative Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of Scotland’s Catholics, denounced the government for a “monstrous attack on human rights” through its “evil” endorsement of “Frankenstein” experiments. There are clearly serious arguments about the government’s embryology bill and its licensing of the use of empty animal eggs for short-term human stem-cell research into life-destroying diseases, but the message from the cardinal’s outburst was plain: in his wing of the church, the policing of sexuality and procreation trumps the cause of human suffering and liberation every time.

For the militant secularists whose voices have grown ever louder in recent years, O’Brien’s is the only face of religion that matters. This has been the decade of liberal rage against religion, reflected in the runaway success of books like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. In the eyes of secular absolutists – whose attitudes uncannily mirror those of religious literalists – religion is simply an intellectual travesty, a perverse belief in a supernatural being and an affront to the enlightenment that refuses to die. As the novelist Martin Amis declared recently: “Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally.”

Entirely missing from their perspective is the social context and significance of the religious resurgence they are so anxious to beat back. Panicked by the rise of radical Islamism and the newly assertive religious identity of migrant communities in a secular Europe, the anti-religious evangelists are increasingly using atheism as a banner for the defence of the global liberal capitalist order and the wars fought since 2001 to assert its dominance. At the same time, they are unable to recognise the ethnic dimension of their Islamophobia, let alone the deeper reasons why people continue to search for spiritual meaning in a grossly destructive economic environment where social alternatives have been pronounced dead and narcissistic consumption is king.

Historically, of course, it was the left, rather than liberalism, that was most hostile to religion. From Tsarist Russia to Tibet, after all, organised religion stood with the established order, preaching social deference to the powers that be and leaving hope of justice to the hereafter. But as religion has declined in Europe and elsewhere and capitalism has eroded the ties binding religious institutions to ruling elites, that has become ever less true.

In the wake of the cold war, the pressure on the Catholic church to struggle against godless communism disappeared, and the pope who had played such a key role in its demise became one of the few international figures in the 1990s to speak out against “savage capitalism” and western warmongering. At the same time, Islamist groups which had provided crucial support for conservative pro-western regimes around the Muslim world in the postwar era began to fill the political space left by the decline of Arab nationalism and the left, increasingly drawing their support from the poor and marginalised.

Religion cannot but now find itself in conflict with the unfettered rule of money – a capitalism that seeks to dominate exactly the social and personal arena which religion has always regarded as its own preserve. And as it becomes less useful as an ideological prop for power, religion’s more radical and anti-establishment strains have become stronger. That is the context in which, for example, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela declares Jesus as the first socialist and Che Guevara-style images of the founder of Christianity are carried on demonstrations in Caracas.

Not that there should be any difficulty in extracting a radical social message from religious traditions, though you’d never know it from grim textual exegesis favoured by the militant secularists. The rightwing bishop Michael Nazar-Ali – who recently blamed multiculturalism for supposed “no-go” Muslim areas – tried to argue at the weekend that Jesus had been guilty of “typical Middle Eastern exaggeration” when he warned that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”: a hard case to sustain, given the similar message of downfall for the rich and liberation for the poor in the Magnificat, the sermon on the mount, Jesus’s exhortatory quotations from the prophet Isaiah, or the even more militant epistle of James.

No wonder the medieval church tried so hard to prevent people reading such incendiary stuff in their own language. But similar demands for equality and social justice can of course also be found in Judaism (“you shall not oppress a stranger”), Islam (“a white has no superiority over a black nor a black over a white”), and other religions.

None of that is to deny the strength of regressive trends within religion and its texts, from the Vatican’s opposition to contraception in Aids-blighted Africa, to Hindu nationalism, takfiri Islam, or the power of rightwing US evangelicals (though that is mercifully now loosening). Nor does it in any way imply compromise with social conservatism over women’s or gay rights. But it does highlight the scope for stronger alliances between the secular left and religious progressives against poverty, capitalism and war – an engagement that has the potential to change both sides in other ways, too. The National Union of Teachers’ proposal for secular schools to offer religious instruction as a way out of the faith school controversy is one such positive attempt at engagement.

Just as the French republican tradition of liberation came to be used as a stick to beat Muslims in a completely different social context from which it emerged, so the militant secularists who fetishise metaphysics and cosmology as a reason to declare the religious beyond the liberal pale are now ending up as apologists for western supremacism and violence. Like nationalism, religion can play a reactionary or a progressive role, and the struggle is now within it, not against it. For the future, it can be an ally of radical change.

There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy

JamieSW — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:23:53 +0000

The problem in Iraq, we’re now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn’t have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn’t dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out.

Meanwhile, we’re being subjected to a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge in turning the country round, quelling the violence and opening the way to a sunlit future. In an echo of his notorious “mission accomplished” speech of May 2003, George Bush yesterday proclaimed the Iraq war a “major strategic victory” in the “war on terror”.

All this is self-delusion on a heroic scale. The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, “a day which will live in infamy”. Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead, as Jon Snow’s compelling TV documentary Hidden Iraq underlined this week, they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.

On the eve of war, Tony Blair told parliament that, while there would be civilian casualties, Saddam Hussein would be “responsible for many more deaths even in one year than we will be in any conflict”. Amnesty International estimated annual deaths linked to political repression in Iraq at that time to be in the low hundreds – many more were dying from the impact of western-sponsored sanctions. In the five years since, civilian deaths are estimated at anywhere between 150,000 (the figure accepted by the Iraqi government) and a million-plus, with the Lancet’s estimate of 600,000 violent deaths in the first three years alone having held up as the most rigorous. After five years of occupation, Iraq is ranked as the most violent and dangerous place in the world by an Economist Intelligence Unit index. Two million refugees have fled the country as a result, while a further 2 million have been driven from their homes inside Iraq. This has become the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet.

In the western world, far from the scene of the unfolding catastrophe, such suffering has been somehow normalised as a kind of background noise. But the impact on the aggressor states, both at home and abroad, has only begun to be felt: not only in the predicted terrorist blowback finally acknowledged by Tony Blair last year, but in a profound domestic political alienation, as well as a loss of standing and credibility across the globe. How can anyone take seriously, for example, US or British leaders lecturing China about Tibet, Russia about Chechnya, or Sudan about Darfur, when they have triggered and presided over such an orgy of killing, collective punishment, prisoner abuse and ethnic cleansing?

Given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same token be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the “supreme international crime” of aggression. If it weren’t for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague. As it is, the only Briton to be found guilty of a war crime in Iraq has been corporal Donald Payne, convicted of inhumane treatment of detainees in Basra – while the man who sent him there is preposterously touted as a future president of the European Union.

Those who insist that the immolation of Iraq was the consequence of errors in the execution of an otherwise defensible policy are simply evading their own responsibility and culpability. The likelihood of a bloody quagmire was widely foreseen before the attack. The failure to do so by those who launched the aggression reflects a blindly arrogant refusal to accept that people are bound to resist foreign occupation, however much they detest their own government – particularly in a region that has already been subject to decades of destructive western intervention and exploitation.

Now the same voices can be heard arguing against an end to the occupation on the grounds that withdrawal might trigger even worse violence. Of course no stabilisation of Iraq is going to be bloodless, but such arguments fail to recognise that the occupation itself has fostered sectarian conflict in classic colonial divide-and-rule style – the current US sponsorship of Sunni militias is a case in point. As the US military’s own surveys show, Iraqis of all religious and ethnic groups believe the presence of foreign troops is the main cause of violence and 70% want them out now. Tellingly, violence in Basra dropped by 90% after British troops withdrew from the city to their airport base last summer. Naturally, the green zone government is against a US pullout, because it wouldn’t survive on its own. But only when the occupation forces make an unequivocal commitment to leave will Iraq’s main political and military players be compelled to come to an accommodation.

For the future, so long as the disaster of Iraq is put down to mistakes or lack of planning, the real lessons will not be learned, but repeated – as appears to be happening now in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown has at last promised a full Iraq inquiry when British troops are no longer in the firing line. But any more delay to a proper accounting of what has taken place – including, as the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said at the weekend, the nature of the US-British relationship – will only further corrode the political system. The disaster of Iraq has at least had the effect of demonstrating the limits of imperial power and restraining further US attacks. The danger is, however, that next time they’ll just try and do it differently – without the mistakes.

Either Labour represents its core voters - or others will

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:12:18 +0000

You’d never know it from the way these things are discussed by politicians and the media, but most people in Britain – 53% at the last count – regard themselves as working class. And however hard it may be to agree on definitions of class, that majority is reflected across a range of statistical breakdowns of modern British society. Getting on for 40% of the workforce are still manual workers, for instance; add in clerical workers and you’re getting on for two thirds.

Yet despite the fact that class continues to dominate the country, it’s treated almost as a taboo by the political elite. Even when working-class life does make it into medialand, it’s typically in the form of contemptuous “chav” caricatures, as in the comedy show Little Britain. And when politicians do stray into class territory, they use euphemisms like “hardworking families” or proxies such as child poverty – the object of Alistair Darling’s best pitch to his own party in yesterday’s budget.

So the BBC’s decision to commission a series of programmes about the marginalisation of the working class in New Labour’s Britain should have been a rare opportunity to shine a light on the heart of modern life. Instead, under the banner of “The White Season”, the programmes have been focused entirely on the impact of immigration and race on the white working class, as if it were some sort of anthropological study of an endangered tribe.

The message was unmistakeably clear in the series trailer, where a shaven-headed man’s face is blacked up with writing by brown hands over the words: “Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?” White working people were being written out of the script, we were given to understand, and multiculturalism and migration were to blame. But in reality, it is the working class as a whole, white and non-white, that has been weakened and marginalised in the past two decades. By identifying the problems of the country’s most disadvantaged communities as being about race rather than class, the BBC has reinforced stereotypes and played to the toxic agenda of the British National Party.

It’s also wrong. Of course, mass immigration in the past few years – overwhelmingly from eastern Europe – has had a disproportionate impact on working-class communities: in housing, public services and pay. The government has deliberately used the unregulated European Union influx as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy, and employers have ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages. No one should be surprised if demoralised and powerless people reach for the nearest scapegoat – and it’s no coincidence that some of the worst racism is found in the most economically deprived areas.

But it wasn’t immigration that ripped the guts out of working-class Britain, white and non-white. It was the closure of whole industries, the rundown of manufacturing and council housing, the assault on trade unions, the huge transfer of resources to the wealthy, the deregulation of the labour market, and the unconstrained impact of neoliberal globalisation under both Tories and New Labour. Almost none of that has had a look-in so far in The White Season.

Hopes that Gordon Brown would take the government in a different direction look increasingly forlorn. Labour MPs who invested heavily in Brown are now concluding that Brownism is little more than Blairism without the glitz. Diehard Blairite ministers such as the new work and pensions secretary James Purnell, and business secretary John Hutton, have been given free rein to promote an aggressive pro-corporate and privatisation agenda. Hutton’s declaration this week that Labour should celebrate “huge salaries” and individualism was almost a parody of the early days of high Blairism. But Brown himself went out of his way on Monday to commit the government to accelerated privatisation in health, education and welfare.

Meanwhile, Darling’s budget confirmed his watering-down of the plan to tax the non-dom super-rich and his retreat on capital gains tax under corporate pressure, while Brown has resolutely resisted demands from trade unions and Labour MPs to give equal rights to agency and temporary workers as a way of relieving some of the worst abuse of migrant labour to undercut existing pay and conditions. The prime minister will only allow the issue to be considered by a commission with an employers’ veto. Corporate lobbying has also seen off the threat of a windfall tax on the grotesque profits of the energy companies – which could have given Darling some of the cash he would need to halve child poverty by 2010.

With a gathering economic crisis likely to deliver lower growth next year than Darling predicted and a continuing squeeze on public-sector pay, the political price of Labour’s failure to deliver for its core voters can only grow. The New Labour outriders used to argue that working-class voters could be taken for granted because they had nowhere else to go. Since the 2005 general election, that can no longer wash. Of the four million votes Labour lost, the largest number were from the working class, north and south, white and non-white. As Jon Cruddas, who ran a powerful challenge for Labour’s deputy leadership last year, points out: “Those voters didn’t go to the Tories, they went to the nationalists, the BNP, the Liberals and Respect – or they stayed at home”.

Blairites who insist Labour must once again concentrate on swing voters in southern marginals and “run up the flag” to pacify the rest are, he argues, 15 years out of date and threaten the social coalition needed to win – which can only be rebuilt by focusing far more on housing, insecurity at work, inequality in public services and public-led investment in deprived areas. This is the faultline that is now emerging in the parliamentary Labour party, with the revived centre-left around the pressure group Compass increasingly making the running and Brown tilting unmistakeably towards the Blairite right.

The next test of where this is leading will be the local elections in May, when the BNP, among others, is expected to make significant gains. Unless Labour is prepared to represent the interests of increasingly angry working-class voters, others will certainly fill the vacuum – and the ever narrower three-party stitch-up risks blowing up in the faces of the whole political class.

To blame the victims for this killing spree defies both morality and sense

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:09:43 +0000

The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week’s carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence – or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides – has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a “holocaust” if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks.

So what was the response of the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, to this horrific killing spree? It was to blame the “numerous civilian casualties” on the week’s “significant rise” in Palestinian rocket attacks “and the Israeli response”, condemn the firing of rockets as “terrorist acts” and defend Israel’s right to self-defence “in accordance with international law”. But of course it has been nothing of the kind – any more than has been Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, its continued expansion of settlements or its refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees.

Nor is the past week’s one-sided burden of casualties and misery anything new, but the gap is certainly getting wider. After the election of Hamas two years ago, Israel – backed by the US and the European Union – imposed a punitive economic blockade, which has hardened over the past months into a full-scale siege of the Gaza Strip, including fuel, electricity and essential supplies. Since January’s mass breakout across the Egyptian border signalled that collective punishment wouldn’t work, Israel has opted for military escalation. What that means on the ground can be seen from the fact that at the height of the intifada, from 2000 to 2005, four Palestinians were killed for every Israeli; in 2006 it was 30; last year the ratio was 40 to one. In the three months since the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, 323 Palestinians have been killed compared with seven Israelis, two of whom were civilians.

But the US and Europe’s response is to blame the principal victims for a crisis it has underwritten at every stage. In interviews with Palestinian leaders over the past few days, BBC presenters have insisted that Palestinian rockets have been the “starting point” of the violence, as if the occupation itself did not exist. In the West Bank, from which no rockets are currently fired and where the US-backed administration of Mahmoud Abbas maintains a ceasefire, there have been 480 Israeli military attacks over the past three months and 26 Palestinians killed. By contrast, the rockets from Gaza which are supposed to be the justification for the latest Israeli onslaught have killed a total of 14 people over seven years.

Like any other people, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation – or to self-defence – whether they choose to exercise it or not. In spite of Israel’s disengagement in 2005, Gaza remains occupied territory, both legally and in reality. It is the world’s largest open-air prison, with land, sea and air access controlled by Israel, which carries out military operations at will. Palestinians may differ about the tactics of resistance, but the dominant view (if not that of Abbas) has long been that without some armed pressure, their negotiating hand will inevitably be weaker. And while it might be objected that the rockets are indiscriminate, that is not an easy argument for Israel to make, given its appalling record of civilian casualties in both the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

The truth is that Hamas’s control of Gaza is the direct result of the US refusal to accept the Palestinians’ democratic choice in 2006 and its covert attempt to overthrow the elected administration by force through its Fatah placeman Muhammad Dahlan. As confirmed by secret documents leaked to the US magazine Vanity Fair – and also passed to the Guardian – George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Elliott Abrams, the US deputy national security adviser (of Iran-Contra fame), funnelled cash, weapons and instructions to Dahlan, partly through Arab intermediaries such as Jordan and Egypt, in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war. As evidence of the military buildup emerged, Hamas moved to forestall the US plan with its own takeover of Gaza last June. David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser the following month, argues: “What happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

Yesterday, Rice attempted to defend the failed US attempt to reverse the results of the Palestinian elections by pointing to Iran’s support for Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel’s attacks on Gaza are expected to resume once she has left the region, even if no one believes they will stop the rockets. Some in the Israeli government hope that they can nevertheless weaken Hamas as a prelude to pushing Gaza into Egypt’s unwilling arms; others hope to bring Abbas and his entourage back to Gaza after they have crushed Hamas, perhaps with a transitional international force to save the Palestinian president’s face.

Neither looks a serious option, not least because Hamas cannot be crushed by force, even with the bloodbath that some envisage. The third, commonsense option, backed by 64% of Israelis, is to take up Hamas’s offer – repeated by its leader Khalid Mish’al at the weekend – and negotiate a truce. It’s a move that now attracts not only left-leaning Israeli politicians such as Yossi Beilin, but also a growing number of rightwing establishment figures, including Ariel Sharon’s former security adviser Giora Eiland, the former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy, and the ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz.

The US, however, is resolutely opposed to negotiating with what it has long branded a terrorist organisation – or allowing anyone else to do so, including other Palestinians. As the leaked American papers confirm, Rice effectively instructed Abbas to “collapse” the joint Hamas-Fatah national unity government agreed in Mecca early last year, a decision carried out after Hamas’s pre-emptive takeover. But for the Palestinians, national unity is an absolute necessity if they are to have any chance of escaping a world of walled cantons, checkpoints, ethnically segregated roads, dispossession and humiliation.

What else can Israel do to stop the rockets, its supporters ask. The answer could not be more obvious: end the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed 60 years ago – who, with their families, make up the majority of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, agree a truce, exchange prisoners and lift the blockade. Israelis increasingly seem to get it – but the grim reality appears to be that a lot more blood is going to have to flow before it’s accepted in Washington.

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.

We need to listen to the man from special branch

JamieSW — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:38:55 +0000

A week after the Archbishop of Canterbury dared to float the idea that some role for Islamic arbitration could be recognised in British law, the anti-Muslim backlash grinds on. Never mind that Rowan Williams’s proposal was hedged with qualifications, that elements of sharia already have legal status, that he used the existing practice of orthodox Jewish courts as a model, and insisted such an accommodation could not override equal legal rights for all, notably women. The media and political reaction has been hysterical and ugly: from the Sun’s declaration that Williams had “handed al-Qaida a victory”, to the Express claim that he had “surrendered to fanatics”, to the endless replays of floggings in western-backed states like Saudi Arabia.

It was still going strong yesterday, as Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips insisted the archbishop had weakened Britain against the “Islamist enemy” and the Telegraph reported the Queen was “distressed”. As well she might be. What has been demonstrated in the past week, as Williams should have realised, is that serious debate about equal rights for Muslims or integration as a two-way process is becoming impossible in an atmosphere of growing Islamophobic intolerance. Hardly had the Williams furore kicked off than the minister Phil Woolas had triggered headlines about a “Muslim inbreeding row” with remarks about the health risks of cousin marriages among Pakistanis – a practice traditionally favoured by British monarchs.

It’s hardly surprising that in a climate in which denouncing “Islamists” has become the polite way to attack Muslims, and a literary figure such as Martin Amis can rant about the threat to Europe from the Muslim birthrate and still be treated with respect, public opinion has become inflamed. When politicians and newspapers denounce “preachers of hate”, it increasingly sounds as though they’re talking about themselves. Muslims, meanwhile, inevitably feel beleaguered and, far from spurring integration, the relentless attacks – fuelled by the need to justify war in the Muslim world – heighten alienation.

They also undermine efforts to prevent further atrocities in Britain. Last week, as the archbishop’s sharia storm raged, Gordon Brown banned the leading Islamic cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi from the country. The pretext given was his support for Palestinian suicide attacks during the intifada. But the 81-year-old scholar has been to Britain several times since then – in fact he was encouraged to come by the government after the Iraq invasion because of his opposition to al-Qaida. The real reason for the ban, apart from the competition to appear tough on terror, is his links with the Muslim Brotherhood, the most influential Islamist organisation in the Arab world – but also a particular target for liberal hawks and neoconservatives. They have played a key role in convincing the government to end its engagement with mainstream Islamist groups and sponsor more pliant Muslim bodies.

One man who thinks that’s not just bad for community relations but actually a threat to Britain’s security, is Detective Inspector Bob Lambert, who retired six weeks ago as head of the Metropolitan police special branch’s Muslim Contact Unit. With more than a quarter century at the sharp end of counter-terrorism operations, Lambert is scarcely a bleeding-heart liberal. But he has been unable to speak out publicly until now and is deeply frustrated by the Qaradawi ban. “Qaradawi is clearly useful in countering al-Qaida propaganda”, Lambert told me this week. “He is held in high esteem: how can we think meaningfully about enlisting credible Muslim community support against al-Qaida if we’re not prepared to engage constructively with the likes of Qaradawi?”

The aim of the Muslim Contact Unit, set up in 2002, was to avoid the mistakes made during the IRA campaign of alienating the Irish community, and to work with credible Muslim figures to isolate and counter those prepared to support terror attacks. Lambert points as an example to the crucial role played by prominent Islamist activists, such as the British Muslim Initiative leader Azzam Tamimi, in taking back Finsbury Park mosque in 2005 from supporters of Abu Hamza, now awaiting extradition to the US on terrorism charges.

“The government approach is increasingly to lump all Islamist groups together”, the special branch veteran says. “But Islamists can be powerful allies in the fight against al-Qaida influence. Our experience shows they can be the levers that help get young people away from the most dangerous positions. Issues that are most troubling to people like the oppression of women and gays mustn’t be swept under the carpet, but they also shouldn’t be treated as a block on engagement.”

Lambert also highlights the importance of Islamic activists’ cooperation with the anti-war movement and radical MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway in offering Muslim youth a way to channel their political grievances into peaceful political action. This isn’t about “political correctness or deference to Islamist thinking,” he insists, “it’s a genuine issue of London’s safety”. Groups now promoted by the government, such as the Sufi Muslim Council, may have their role, but from the perspective of countering terrorism they have “neither religious nor political credibility. Let’s be clear who it is that can keep London safe in the runup to the Olympic games”.

Given such a challenge to official orthodoxy there has been opposition to the Muslim Contact Unit’s approach in both the police and government – and reportedly pressure for it to be wound down or disbanded. Its work has been singled out for attack by Dean Godson, research director of Policy Exchange, the Tory-linked thinktank whose recent research on extremist literature in British mosques was found to have been based on faked material. The unit has, Godson argued, been suffering from “ideological Stockholm syndrome”.

In fact, it clearly benefits from the common sense that comes from dealing with the reality of terror on the ground, rather than a blinkered denial of its link with western aggression in the Middle East and beyond. The best way to reduce the threat of attack at home is for Britain to end its disastrous interventions in the Muslim world – though to judge by the foreign secretary David Miliband’s new enthusiasm for liberal interventionism, that’s not going to happen soon. In the meantime, we need to listen to people who know what they’re talking about, like Bob Lambert.

The War that can bring neither Peace nor Freedom

Ellie Keen — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:38:06 +0000

The Afghan war, you will remember, was supposed to be the “good war”. Unlike the catastrophe of Iraq, from which most former cheerleaders still prefer to avert their eyes, Afghanistan was thought to be different. Senior British military figures might wince in private over their Basra humiliation, but would earnestly insist that they were fighting the good fight in Helmand “at the request of the elected Afghan government”. Gordon Brown felt able to tell parliament only six weeks ago that “we are winning the battle in Afghanistan”.

But in the wake of a string of reports that the country is fast becoming a failed state and a humanitarian disaster, as armed attacks on western troops and Afghan forces multiply and Nato splits down the middle over sending reinforcements, that looks ever more other-worldly. The US coordinator on Iraq, David Satterfield, even suggested last month that Iraq would turn out to be America’s “good war”, while Afghanistan was going “bad”. After a conflict that has already lasted longer than the second world war, Paddy Ashdown, rejected at the last minute as UN proconsul in Kabul, was clearly closer to the mark than Brown when he declared: “We are losing in Afghanistan.”

Tomorrow, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, arrives in London to discuss Nato’s Afghan crisis, triggered by Canada’s threat to withdraw its 2,500 troops from Kandahar unless other states bolster the western occupation in the bloodiest areas of the south. But there seems little prospect of anything more than token gestures, after both Germany and France rejected US demands to extend their commitments — despite taunts from the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, about their inability to fight insurgencies. In most Nato states, public opposition to the Afghan war is strong and growing stronger. That includes Britain, where 62% want all 7,800 UK troops withdrawn within a year, a view unshaken by attempts to boost support with military parades and gung-ho Beau Geste-style media reporting from the frontline.

Public cynicism towards Britain’s first co-occupation of a Muslim country in the US’s “war on terror” can only be deepened by the Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s public denunciation last month of the British military role in the south — which had, he said, led to the return of the Taliban. The criticism caused outrage, but Karzai is either a sovereign ruler or he is not. Together with his complaint that he had been strong-armed by the British into removing the governor of Helmand, with disastrous consequences, it clearly cuts the ground from beneath the claim that western troops are simply in Afghanistan to support the government.

Karzai was, after all, installed by the US after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001 and subsequently confirmed in bogus US-orchestrated elections three years later. If even someone regarded as a US-British stooge, whose writ famously barely runs outside Kabul, is reduced to protesting in public that his western protectors are doing more harm than good, that not only makes a mockery of the idea that Afghanistan is an independent state. It also strongly suggests this is a man who recognises that the occupation forces may not be around indefinitely — and he may have to come to more serious terms with the local forces that will.

For all the insistence by Britain’s defence secretary, Des Browne, and others that this is a “commitment which could last decades”, there is no doubt that armed resistance to foreign occupation is growing and spreading. Nato forces’ own figures show that attacks on western and Afghan troops were up by almost a third last year, to more than 9,000 “significant actions”. And while Nato claims that 70% of incidents took place in the southern Taliban heartlands, the independent Senlis Council thinktank recently estimated that the Taliban now has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan, arguing that “the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when”. Meanwhile, US-led coalition air attacks reached 3,572 last year, 20 times the level two years earlier, as more civilians are killed by Nato forces than by the Taliban and suicide bombings climbed to a record 140. The Kabul press last week predicted a major Taliban offensive in the spring.

The intensity of this armed campaign reflects a significant broadening of the Taliban’s base, as it has increasingly become the umbrella for a revived Pashtun nationalism on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, as well as for jihadists and others committed to fighting foreign occupation. The original aims of the US-led invasion were of course the capture of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden, along with the destruction of al-Qaida.

None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the two leaders remain free, while al Qaida has spread from its Afghan base into Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and Afghanistan has become the heroin capital of the world. For the majority of Afghans, occupation has meant the exchange of obscurantist theocrats for brutal and corrupt warlordism, along with rampant torture and insecurity; while even the early limited gains for women and girls in some urban areas, offset by an explosion of rape and other violence against women, are now being reversed. The meaning of “liberation” under foreign occupation can be measured by the death sentence passed last month on a 23-year-old student for blasphemy after he downloaded a report on women’s rights from the internet.

The war in Afghanistan, which claimed more than 6,500 lives last year, cannot be won. It has brought neither peace, development nor freedom, and has no prospect of doing so. Instead of eradicating terror networks, it has spread and multiplied them. The US plans to send 3,000 more troops in April to reinforce its existing 25,000-strong contingent, and influential thinktanks in Washington are pressing for an Iraqi-style surge. But only a vastly greater deployment could even temporarily subdue the country, and that is not remotely in prospect. The only real chance for peace in Afghanistan is the withdrawal of foreign forces as part of a wider political settlement, including the Taliban and neighbouring countries like Iran and Pakistan. But having put their credibility on the line, it seems the western powers are going to have to learn the lessons of the colonial era again and again.

The political choice facing London could not be clearer

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:15:13 +0000

It’s as if the last 25 years had never happened. For the past week we’ve been back in the days of Margaret Thatcher’s war on Red Ken and the Greater London Council. Every morning, the media have brought new revelations of the horrors at City Hall and Ken Livingstone’s manifest unfitness to be re-elected mayor of London. Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists. Only the details have changed: for lesbian workers’ cooperatives, read the Arab women’s network, and for Sinn Féin and the Irish community, substitute Islamist groups and London’s Muslims.

Leading the charge until now has been the capital’s only paid-for daily newspaper, the Evening Standard, which is to all intents and purposes running the Tory candidate Boris Johnson’s campaign for the mayoral election in May. But now most of the national press has fallen in behind, as stories have multiplied of Livingstone’s whisky tippling, alleged dodgy grants to black businesses and a “secret Marxist cell” of advisers intent on turning London into a “socialist city state”, or maybe fomenting a “bourgeois democratic revolution” – the specifics were never quite clear.

The trigger for this retro onslaught was Monday’s almost comically slanted Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Livingstone, presented by the New Statesman’s Martin Bright, who wrote that he felt it his “duty to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours”. Quite how Channel 4 managed to describe an hour of primetime vilification as a “fair and balanced investigation” with a straight face will be a mystery to most of those who watched a programme without a single supportive interview. Instead, we were treated to a hotchpotch of allegations and denunciations from disgruntled ex-employees and political opponents, ranging from the bizarre and sub-McCarthyite to the more serious but unproven.

Among them was an attack on Livingstone’s deal with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to subsidise half-price travel for London’s unemployed, his dialogue with non-violent Islamist groups, the use of public funds to commission research for his dispute over multiculturalism with the then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, and the well-aired fact that several aides have been members of the one-time Trotskyist group Socialist Action – though since they have been working happily with the police and City grandees for the past eight years, that might seem to be of somewhat specialist interest. Most of the real issues that will dominate the mayoral elections – housing, transport, crime, the environment – barely got a walk-on part. But the programme was certainly an effective party political broadcast on behalf of Johnson.

What has given this latest assault on Livingstone a special edge is that the people driving it trade as being on the left: Bright as a representative of Britain’s main centre-left political weekly and Nick Cohen, who has more openly lined up behind Johnson, as an Observer columnist. In reality, both writers share a broadly neoconservative agenda on Islamism and the “war on terror” – though Bright opposed the Iraq invasion – and that is the central issue that has turned them and their allies against Livingstone. Bright wrote a pamphlet for the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange attacking government dialogue with Islamists, warmly praised by the leading US neocon Richard Perle. Cohen famously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s: “I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom.”

As the most powerful British politician to have opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars and supported engagement with mainstream political Islam, Livingstone has naturally attracted the enmity of the neocons. After hearing Bright dismiss Chávez’s administration as a “government with links to Iran and cocaine-smuggling guerrillas and accused of human rights abuses”, it should come as no surprise that he, Cohen and their friends prefer to see a high Tory elected mayor of London rather than the radical Labour incumbent.

To the rest of London, it’s scarcely news that London’s mayor has his faults, or controversial that he should be held to account. It’s right that the less than 1% of the London Development Agency’s budget that went on grants to failed business startups should be properly investigated, even if that isn’t a bad record compared with the private sector. You’d never know it from all the chatter about Bolshevik cabals, but there’s also a strong left critique of Livingstone: for his embrace of the City and property developers, for example, and defence of the Metropolitan police commissioner over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

But that’s not what will be at stake in May’s election. The choice will be between two candidates: one who has pioneered congestion charging and cut traffic by 70,000 cars a day, pushed up the supply of affordable housing, boosted bus ridership by one and a half million journeys a day, abolished fares for under-18s, is preparing to introduce emissions charging and free public transport for pensioners and has played a key role in cutting crime and maintaining community relations during a tense and dangerous period. On the other hand, you have a Thatcherite who thinks it’s witty to refer to Africans as “piccaninnies” and regrets the end of colonialism, is an enthusiastic Bush and Iraq war supporter, opposed the Kyoto treaty, and is against the welfare state and the “teaching” of homosexuality in schools.

The choice could hardly be starker. No other candidate is in with a shout. Despite his record, Johnson’s media profile and geniality mean he is the first serious challenge the mayor has had to face. With Livingstone and Johnson only one point apart in the latest opinion poll, the Tories have scented blood. Johnson’s decision to hire the ruthless Lynton Crosby, who masterminded four election victories for John Howard in Australia, should be a warning. The Tory candidate knows he’ll make little headway among the non-white third of London’s electorate, so expect some dog-whistle appeals to white voters, perhaps dressed up as broadsides against political correctness. A defeat for Livingstone would not just be a blow to the broadly defined left, working-class Londoners, women, ethnic minorities and greens. It would represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond.