Curiouser and Curiouser! on the-middle-east

What a surprise

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 20:51:51 +0100

Israel rejects 'biased' resolution. Israel dismisses a UN Security Council vote calling for an end to the Ramallah siege¸ hours after nine Palestinians died in raids on Gaza. [BBC News | WORLD]

» Well golly, who'd have seen that coming?

So angry

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 12:25:35 +0100

Sharon hails 'successful' Gaza raid. Israel's prime minister defends an army operation which killed 14 Palestinians¸ shrugging off international condemnation. [BBC News | WORLD]

» Okay, I don't understand all the issues. I can't claim to have fully appreciated all the claims, counter-claims, greviances and disputes.

But just get the fuck outta their country!

PAX

[Addendum to the above rant: I see a Jewish settler has been killed in an apparent reprisal. I really should stop reading about the Middle East, it makes my head spin. I should probably stop commenting on it too.]

War is not necessary

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 10:05:24 +0100

"I'm not sure which planet they live on". Hawks in the Bush administration may be making deadly miscalculations on Iraq, says Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush's Middle East envoy. [Salon.com]

» Gen Zinni (ret) seems to be a remarkably clear headed leader of men. His analysis of past military actions was thoughtful and a warning to all those who think war in Iraq is either necessary or desirable. If only the Commander-in-chief were half as thoughtful or half the leader.

Visually creative counter-programming

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 10:42:43 +0100

Iraq Opposition..

Some visually creative counter-programming.

[a klog apart]

Pax Americana: clearer still

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 18:29:37 +0000

Covert Iraq oil business. Excellent article with many references, by Larry Chin, Online Journal. The U.S. imported 290 million barrels of crude oil from Iraq in 2001, at below market rates, because of U.N. sanctions. The US was "the main market for Iraqi crude" according to the Middle East Economic Survey. It seems a lot like the threatened war is simply an attempt to eliminate Russia, France and China from the competition from the oil there, and to put the U.S. oil companies in complete control of the resources. more > [Ming's Meta Mechanics]

» And Pax Americana becomes clearer still. I couldn't find it in the article but I'd like to know how much Iraqi oil the UK has imported...

Israelis flatten West Bank shops

Tue, 21 Jan 2003 18:28:30 +0000

Israelis flatten West Bank shops. Bulldozers destroy more than 60 Palestinian shops and businesses Israel says were built without permits, sparking fierce protests. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Gulf War II: This time it's for the economy

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 11:38:59 +0000

Dollars, Euros and Oil. Excellent article by Ciln Nunan: "Oil, Currency and the War on Iraq". It seems to have disappeared from the site, so I'll include it at the bottom as well. Fascinating explanation of some major economic mechanisms involving dollars and euros and oil. A very big reason that the United States is such an economically and militarily dominating country is apparently that U.S. dollar is the de facto world reserve currency. Lots of things are counted in dollars and some goods are only sold for dolars. That means that foreign governments and corporations and banks are keeping large dollar reserves. That essentially amounts to a huge loan the rest of the world is giving to the United States, which will subsidize the U.S. economy. In order to acquire those dollars, the rest of the world has to provide goods and services for those dollars. That allows the U.S. to have a huge import/export imbalance. Last November, 48% more imports than exports. It would be untennable for any other country to run such a deficit.Next major point is that one of the reasons everybody has to have dollars is that the OPEC oil producting countries only accept dollars for oil. Well, not all of them. The only one that does something different is Iraq, which only accepts Euros for their oil, since 2000. And Iran is considering it as well. And the thing is that it might just as well be Euros that everybody used as a reserve currency. It would apparently be a better choice in many ways, because the European economies are more balanced, and the OPEC countries would end up getting more value for their oil. So, now, what would happen if Euros became the only choice for buying oil? Most likely the U.S. economy would plunge, because it would no longer be subsidized in that manner. And EU would probably be quite happy being subsidized in its place. Anybody thinks all this might have something to do with the great urgency to take over Iraq? And why would Britain support it? more > [Ming the Mechanic]

Well now... isn't this interesting. I found it worth reading the whole article to get a clearer understanding of the economics (not a subject I have a strong grasp on).

If the economic beans make five then this is by far the most credible rationale I've heard for America & Britain going to war with Iraq. Presumably an American puppet state in Iraq would swiftly switch back to the mighty $$ for oil deals. Also with a large US presence next door Iran might think twice about undermining the US economy.

From my perspective I would like to see the UK join the Euro. Presumably at that point we'd join France and Germany in opposing the war. Doubtless we would claim more honourable "pacificsm" related reasons than just not caring about the US economy any more.

However what this does show is that Bush has his eye squarely on the domestic economy. He realises that, if Opec drops the dollar, the US is probably boned.

Here is my summary of the article:

The dollar is the de facto world reserve currency: the US currency accounts for approximately two thirds of all official exchange reserves.
In addition, all IMF loans are denominated in dollars.
But the more dollars there are circulating outside the US, or invested by foreign owners in American assets, the more the rest of the world has had to provide the US with goods and services in exchange for these dollars.
The dollars cost the US next to nothing to produce, so the fact that the world uses the currency in this way means that the US is importing vast quantities of goods and services virtually for free.
Since so many foreign-owned dollars are not spent on American goods and services, the US is able to run a huge trade deficit year after year without apparently any major economic consequences.
One of the stated economic objectives, and perhaps the primary objective, when setting up the euro was to turn it into a reserve currency to challenge the dollar so that Europe too could get something for nothing.
Not only would they lose a large part of their annual subsidy of effectively free goods and services, but countries switching to euro reserves from dollar reserves would bring down the value of the US currency.
Imports would start to cost Americans a lot more and as increasing numbers of those holding dollars began to spend them, the US would have to start paying its debts by supplying in goods and services to foreign countries, thus reducing American living standards.
There is though one major obstacle to this happening: oil.
Oil is not just by far the most important commodity traded internationally, it is the lifeblood of all modern industrialised economies.
If on the other hand OPEC were to decide to accept euros only for its oil (assuming for a moment it were allowed to make this decision), then American economic dominance would be over.
Not only would Europe not need as many dollars anymore, but Japan which imports over 80% of its oil from the Middle East would think it wise to convert a large portion of its dollar assets to euro assets (Japan is the major subsidiser of the US because it holds so many dollar investments).
The conversion from trade deficit to trade surplus would have to be achieved at a time when its property and stock market prices were collapsing and its domestic supplies of oil and gas were contracting.
There is little doubt that this was a deliberate attempt by Saddam to strike back at the US, but in economic terms it has also turned out to have been a huge success: at the time of Iraq's conversion the euro was worth around 83 US cents but it is now worth over $1.05.
As oil production is now in decline in most oil producing countries, the importance of the remaining large oil producers, particularly those of the Middle East, is going to grow and grow in years to come.

Business as usual for Sharon

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 08:28:01 +0000

Sharon's world. Bush is on his side, a longed-for Iraq war is coming, and the Palestinians seem to be under control, but the economy is in ruins and his right-wing coalition could be shaky. For Israel's ultimate survivor, it's business as usual. [Salon.com]

I can't escape the feeling that the Bush & Sharon administrations are gradually backing the Arab states into a corner. Where will this lead?

Don't waste your breath

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 16:44:22 +0000

Israel carries out deadly Gaza raid. At least nine Palestinians are reported killed during an Israeli operation in a central Gaza refugee camp. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

I don't know why the BBC bother to keep mentioning dead Palestinians. Don't they realise that they are wasting valuable space that could be taken up with news about celebrities or adverts for hair products?

Arthur Kent: Journalist for our times

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 10:54:08 +0000

Scud Stud lobs a missile at Bush. During the Gulf War, NBC reporter Arthur Kent was famed for his boyish good looks. Today, liberated from the network, he's free to say that Bush is out of control. [Salon.com]

I don't remember Arthur Kent from the first Gulf War. Perhaps because I quickly grew sick of being spoon fed the "ra ra" news coverage and turned it off. However I wish I had caught his pieces.

His is a very thoughtful point of view that we should be hearing more of. The following is just a sample that resonated with me. I'd encourage anyone to read the whole article.

I'm still trying to shake from my mind the disbelief that a modern American administration can be as clumsy, as brusque and as crude as this one. Think back to Sept. 12, 2001: Kids in Paris were wearing American flags out of solidarity with the American people. Countries were lining up, tripping over one another, to come and touch the hem of the cloak of power in Washington D.C. The Bush administration had allies and support and emotional empathy from people around the world. It's gone. Where has it gone? It hasn't disappeared by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein pouring a potion over people. It's gone because the administration has so offended the sensibilities of peace-loving, democracy-loving people that they simply have to take to the streets, or demand of their leaders to tell the Bush administration to stop and to think.

I don't want to see a "coalition of the willing." We need a coalition of the thinking. We need countries and leaders to get together and think. The campaign against terror is a battle of ideas. We have better ideas; we have better societies. You outthink terrorists and you outmaneuver them, economically, socially, politically, diplomatically, as well as militarily. We have got to get into the Muslim world and the Third World in a nonviolent fashion and outperform the al-Qaidas and Saddam Husseins of the world with the promise of a better tomorrow for those people, as well as our own. Otherwise, we lose.

Americans should ask themselves: Whose agenda, besides the Bush administration's, is served by a rush to war? The answer is Osama bin Laden's and those of the people like him. They don't care about the Iraqi people, or Saddam Hussein, but they are confident a deployment of raw, American military power in the Middle East will create more anti-American sentiment, which will help them. If you're falling into your enemy's trap, what's the hurry? Why aren't there smarter solutions? As journalists, these are the questions that we should be prompting the public to ask. Instead, I see coverage about the inevitability of war and the deployment.

Robin Cook resigns

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:41:30 +0000

Resignation.

Robin Cook's 11-minute resignation speech in the British Parliament says it all - highly recommended. [www.gulker.com]

I wish the US had the same tradition of resignation as other nations. When its acceptable for someone to give up their job in the name of principles or shame it makes the institution stronger. Without such traditions we all put on a facade of solidarity, forget how we got here (misbegotten chads) and feed a tyranny of majority. Its expected that Tony Blair will loose several others in the coming days.

John Brady Kiesling's resignation from the state department was more than admirable for a person of conscious. He acted against the grain of tradition. A protest unaccepted by his institutions, a voice needed and one that will cost him personally. We yield to the Hobbsian Leviathan so quickly.

"Let them hate so long as they fear."

Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC), believed to be a favorite saying of the notorious Emperor Caligula.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

I've just read the text of the Cook speech and it is a good one. A lot of people do not like Robin Cook but I would hope that they would see past that and read his words, summarized here:

I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.
I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.
Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.
France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days.
Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution.
The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.
The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.
The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis.
Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.
The threshold for war should always be high.
I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.
Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes.
We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.
Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.
Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.
That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.
I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

Uncomfortable history

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:30:20 +0000

I just read a piece talking about the forgotten legacy of Britains empire:

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way" {2}. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

Now the question arises for me, as I imagine it did for the generations of Germans growing up in the shadow of the 1939-1945 conflict, how I should react to this?

Since the contention of the article is that Europeans (and in particular the British) ignore a history of genocide it seems that ignoring it is not an option. At the same time I can't take any responsibility for it. I did not counsel Lord Lytton in 1876.

What I can do is to acknowledge that the British have no moral imperative derived from a glorius history of bringing enlightenment to the world. We ran an empire and it's an ugly business.

These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our "relative lack of interest in Stalin and Mao's crimes". {8} But at least we are aware that they happened.

That's why I side so vehemently against our involvement with the American efforts to build some kind of empire in the middle east. We have no business there. We're creating an ugly mess that it will take years to clean up after we are finally kicked out.

The problem is that it isn't _us_ that are making the decisions. As Michael S. Rozeff points out:

The higher-ups or rulers who have power produce the big crises and wars. Their subjects, few of whom benefit from them, do not. The masses are not irrelevant, but their impact on major events is secondary. The Iranian people are not making the decisions about nuclear power. They are not issuing threats, and neither are the American and European peoples.

Rulers are men accustomed to gaining and using power. This implies they possess an above average dose of certain characteristics. Benign philosopher-kings don’t become rulers. Those who rule tend to be overly aggressive, rapacious, hard-nosed, opportunistic, pragmatic, cruel, violent, and manipulative. Even if these tendencies are not abundantly present, their power allows freer reign to their worse instincts. Rulers are hawks, not doves. Their number includes more than its share of troublemakers.

Rozeff maintains that those greedy for power live in a rarified atmosphere that sustains and feeds their delusions allowing them to gamble with the lives of the rest of us. That sounds about right to me. What bothers me is the number of people that seem to want to go along with it.

Rozeff suggests it is a failure of culture if the mores of the ruling classes seem into the mind of the people:

If and when the average person begins to go in for contests that are like those the rulers play, it will signal a deterioration in society’s ethical standards. If and when they accept and admire those who win by underhanded tactics, it means that middle-class values are losing ground and the values exhibited by rulers are gaining ground. This is perhaps happening. It has been said that on Survivor "lying, cheating, backstabbing, double-crossing, and betraying happen all the time. Its an accepted part of the game." The question is how accepted these behaviors become among the viewers, or whether they still condemn the villains.

We should look not just to a change of government but to a change of governance for the answer. Successive governments have proved that changing the puppet doesn't fix the problem we have to change the hand inside the puppet too.