Middle East Rumble .

The Importance of the Middle East

nov 2010
The media in the Middle East carry a lot of Middle Eastern stories, of course, but why
do most of the other media in the world do the same? Asian media strike a better
balance, but Western media, and any other media that basically follow the American
news agenda, focus obsessively on the region. Between a third and a half of all
foreign news stories in the Western print and broadcast media are usually about the
Middle East.
Like fish that never notice the medium they swim in, people tend not to remark upon
this familiar aspect of their media environment. I didnt really become aware of it
myself until I flew into Canada a few years ago, got a copy of the Globe and Mail,
Canadas National Newspaper, and found that every single story on the two pages
of foreign news it offers was about the Middle East.
Eight or nine stories, about Iran and Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, oil and
refugees and Iraq. Canada has troops in Afghanistan, so maybe that one is
understandable, but there was no big war on, no vast crisis, just business as usual.
Yet all the stories that might have been there about Latin America, Europe, Africa
and Asia had been crowded out by Middle Eastern stories. I doubt that anybody at
the paper even noticed how weird that was.
This is a phenomenon that cries out for an explanation, and its not easy to find a
credible one. Its certainly not oil, which is the lazy explanation. Oil is quite important
in the global economy, and the Middle East has a large share of the market and an
even bigger share of the reserves. But its been 37 years since the oil-rich Arab
states once refused to sell their oil, and they couldnt do that again.
Not WOULDNT; its not a question of trust. COULDNT, because it would cause far
too much disruption in their own economies. The 1973 oil embargo took place at a
time when most of the major Arab oil-exporting countries had populations two or
three times smaller than they are now, and when their people did not live in fullfledged consumer societies.
Its different now. The cash flow from oil exports pays not just for imported cars and
plasma-screen TVs, but for the very food that the local people eat: most Arab oilexporting states import half or more of the food they consume. They also have huge
investments in the Western economies that an oil embargo would hurt. Another oil
embargo isnt going to happen, and stories about oil belong on the business pages.
Well, then, how about the fact that the United States has invaded two Middle Eastern
countries in the past ten years, and still has troops in both of them? Does that
explain the obsessive focus on the Middle East?
No, because the obsession was there before the invasions. In fact, the causation is
probably the other way round: the exaggerated importance with which Americans
already viewed the Middle East was almost certainly a contributory factor in the Bush
administrations decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
The main factor in the Afghan decision, of course, was the foolish belief that invading
Afghanistan would somehow help to suppress anti-American terrorism rather than
stimulate more of it. Almost nobody in Washington seemed aware that they were
falling into a trap laid for them by Osama bin Laden. The invasion of Iraq had more
complex and even less rational motives, but was equally driven by the mistaken
belief that this was a very important place.
The greater Middle East contains about ten percent of the worlds population. The

Arab world at its heart is only five percent. The whole region accounts for only three
percent of the global economy, and produces almost nothing of interest to the rest of
the world except oil. So why does it dominate the international news agenda?
The Europeans play a role in this, because the media in the former imperial powers
take a greater interest in their former colonies than in other countries of equal
importance. But the American media really set the agenda, and their fascination with
the Middle East requires a different explanation.
A large part of it is driven by the deep emotional investment in Israel that many
Americans have. Israel is not viewed as just another foreign country, to be weighed
by its strategic and economic importance. It is seen as a special place, almost an
American protectorate, and its foreign policy agenda (which is all about the Middle
East) largely sets the US media agenda.
The other big factor is the lasting American obsession with Iran, which is as great as
the obsession with Cuba. Both countries have successfully defied the United States,
and that has been neither forgiven nor forgotten.
Combine the love for Israel and the hatred of Iran, and you have an explanation for
the American medias obsession with the entire Middle Eastern region. Most media
elsewhere, especially in the West, just follow suit. Its a huge distortion that leads to
the neglect of much important news about the rest of the world, but at least the
Middle East gives good value for money. The news it generates is unfailingly
interesting.
Iraq: A Model Young Democracy
nov2010
There are things we got wrong in Iraq, but the cause is eternally right, wrote
George W. Bush in his recent memoir. The region is more hopeful with a young
democracy setting an example for others to follow.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the young democracy has finally got a new
prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Hes the same one who led the last government,
although every party (including much of his own) wanted to get rid of him after the
election last March. Iraqs ethnic and religious rivalries have become so fierce that
no new and more inclusive coalition of parties could be agreed on.
Its taken eight months of tortuous negotiations to get this far, a world record for the
length of time taken after an election to create a new government. And the jobs not
actually done yet. Maliki now has a month to form a cabinet, which means fierce
rivalry between and within the parties for control of the ministries that are the main
source of wealth and power in Iraq. Even now, the deal could still fall apart.
And what about the al-Qaeda terrorists whose supposed links with Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein were one of Mr Bushs pretexts for the US invasion of the country
in 2003? (The other pretext was Saddams alleged weapons of mass destruction,
but the less said about that the better.)
Osama bin Ladens Islamist extremists actually had no links at all with Saddam
Hussein, nor any presence in Iraq until 2003; it was the invasion that gave them a
role there. And although al-Qaedas fanatical desire to kill Shia Muslims and
Christians, rather than concentrate on the American occupation forces, eventually
alienated even the Sunni minority from them during the surge period in 2007-08,
that has changed too.
Now theyre back, said General Hussein Kamal, the head of the intelligence
division at Iraqs interior ministry, in an interview with The Guardian. Its like 2004
again.They are pure al-Qaeda, not a mixture of groups like before.

2004 was the year when Iraq began its descent into hell. The invasion killed a lot of
people, but the resistance really only got underway in the following year, when the
Sunni Muslims started attacking US troops and the al-Qaeda volunteers among
them also began murdering Shia Muslims in industrial quantities.
That triggered the Sunni-Shia civil war of 2005-2007, which the Sunnis decisively
lost. So the Sunni community turned against the al-Qaeda fighters who had brought
this disaster upon them, and that in turn enabled the US surge to succeed for a
while. But the subsequent years have seen the Sunnis systematically excluded from
any meaningful share of power, and the clock is turning back to 2004.
At no time in the past few years has the killing stopped in Iraq, but now it is ramping
up again fast. On 31 October, al-Qaeda gunmen stormed a Christian church in
Baghdad, killing 58 worshippers and security officers. On 2 November there were
fifteen almost simultaneous bombs in Shia districts of the capital that killed scores of
people and injured hundreds.
On 10 November there were eleven more bombs, this time targeting Christians in
their homes. Half of Iraqs million-strong Christian minority has already fled the
country, and the rest are thinking seriously about following suit. And Iyad al-Allawi,
whose party got most of the Sunni vote in the election and actually won the largest
number of seats, has effectively been frozen out of power by a Shia-Kurdish alliance.
Just like after the previous election.
Under huge US pressure, Allawi has been persuaded to become chairman of the
National Council for Strategic Policy, a new body that has been created precisely to
give him a job. But it is a pretty poor consolation prize, and may turn out to mean
nothing at all. The United States has lost almost all influence in Baghdad (although
there are still 50,000 American troops in the country), and Iran rules the roost.
From the moment that George W Bush decided to invade Iraq and overthrow
Saddam Hussein, it was certain that Iran would be the big winner. Almost two-thirds
of the Iraqi population, although Arab, belongs to the Shia sect of Islam, and Iran is
the one great Shia power. When the post-invasion scramble for power began in Iraq,
it was perfectly natural for Iraqi Shias to turn to Tehran for support against Sunnis in
their own country.
During the eight months of haggling and stonewalling that preceded the deal on 11
November, both Maliki and Allawi spent more time seeking support in Tehran and
the capitals of Iraqs Sunni neighbours to the south than negotiating with their rivals
in Baghdad itself. The country has become a pawn in the confrontation between Iran
and the Arab countries, but Iran has emerged as the clear winner.
Meanwhile, Iraq may be sliding into another mini-civil war, and there is no reason to
think that the quite astonishing level of corruption in the ministries is going to decline.
There are not many countries in the region that want to follow the example set by
this young democracy. They are just hoping that the bloodshed and the hatred do
not spread.
Egyptian Elections
December 2010
Egyptian elections are always highly predictable affairs, but the second round of this
years parliamentary elections on Sunday, 5 December, was completely pointless.
The first round on 28 November showed that the regime was going to suppress even
the marginal role permitted to pro-democracy parties in previous elections, so the
leading opposition parties simply refused to participate in the second round.
Its hardly news that the Egyptian regime rigs elections: Egyptian voters are wearily

familiar with that fact, and the turn-out this time was only 10-15 percent of the 42
million eligible voters. But the rigging has become embarrassingly blatant. The
largest opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members held almost onefifth of the elected seats (88 out of 508) in the outgoing parliament, won no seats at
all in the first round this time.
It had little hope of winning any in the run-off round either, so it declared that it was
withdrawing from the whole charade. The next-biggest opposition party, the liberal
New Wafd party, whose parliamentary presence looked likely to crash to two seats,
did the same. But why, if it was already guaranteed to win, would the regime reduce
the elections to a farce by eliminating even a token opposition in the new
parliament?
The reason why is Gamal Mubarak, the second son of the reigning dictator, 82-yearold President Hosni Mubarak. The latter keeps hinting that he is going to run for
another term as president next year, thirty years after he inherited the job from the
assassinated Anwar Sadat, but his health is poor and few Egyptians believe him.
They think he is really going to push his 47-year-old son Gamal into the presidency.
This would not be a first for the Arab world. Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad, who died in
2000 after thirty years in power, chose his son Bashar to succeed him. The ruling
Baath Party did his bidding because it was safer than having an open power struggle
that might jeopardise its hold on power.
When Libyas dictator Muammar Gaddafy (already in power for over 40 years) finally
dies, he too will almost certainly be succeeded by his son. But these are shameless
one-party states. Egypt is a more sophisticated place.
The Egyptian regime has always tried to maintain a democratic facade, even though
all three of the countrys rulers for the past 56 years have been ex-military officers.
Since Hosni Mubaraks son Gamal has no military background, he especially needs
some form of democratic process to make his power seem legitimate to the outside
world.
What the Mubaraks do not need, at this delicate time, is a large and vocal opposition
in parliament that will denounce next years presidential election as a disgrace to
democracy. Yet that was what they were going to face if they didnt rig this years
parliamentary elections, and to do that they needed to change the rules.
The Egyptian constitution of 1971 required judicial supervision of elections (a judge
for every ballot box), but this never happened in practice until 2000. That was when
the Constitutional Court ruled that preceding elections had been invalid because no
judges were present in the polling stations so in the 2000 parliamentary elections,
the judges did show up.
The presence of judges made it harder for ruling-party thugs to intimidate voters or
even to stuff ballot boxes in the traditional manner. As a result, the opposition parties
actually won significant numbers of seats in parliament in the 2000 elections, and
even more in 2005. So in 2007 the regime changed the constitution: judicial
supervision of elections was abolished.
It was back to the bad old days in this years election, with NDP candidates coming
in first in almost every constituency. Even Washington, the regimes main ally, said it
was dismayed by the chicanery, but at least there will be no criticism from
parliament when Gamal Mubarak is crowned as his fathers heir in next years
presidential election.
There are those who argue that this will be good for Egypt even if it is undemocratic.
Gamal Mubarak is a moderniser who has opened up the economy, they point out,
and besides he represents stability. Egypts recent burst of economic growth, after

decades of near-stagnation, could not have happened without him.

Sure, and Mussolini was a good thing because he made the trains run on time. The
corruption and nepotism at the top of Egyptian society are breath-taking even by
Middle Eastern standards, and the growth does not trickle down even to the middle
class, let alone to the poor. It is a country ruled by and for a narrow elite, and there is
no sign that it will change any time soon.
Why do Egyptians put up with it? Its not enough to blame it on American support for
the Mubaraks, or on fear of the regimes police and spies, although those things do
play a role. Egyptians have just lost hope, and numbly accept what they feel they
cannot change. But there is a lot of anger beneath the despair, and one day it will
come out.
The Egyptian Revolution?
January 2011
By 3 pm on Friday afternoon, the protesters in central Cairo were chanting: Where
is the army? Come and see what the police are doing to us. We want the army. And
that is the main question, really: where is the Egyptian army in all this?
Like armies everywhere, even in dictatorships, the Egyptian army does not like to
use violence against its own people. It would much rather leave that sort of thing to
the police, who are generally quite willing to do it. But in Alexandria, by midafternoon on Friday, the police had stopped fighting the protesters and started
talking to them. This is how regimes end.
First of all the police realise that they face a genuine popular movement involving all
classes and all walks of life, rather than the extremist agitators that the regimes
propaganda says they are fighting. They realise that it would be wrong and also
very unwise to go on bashing heads in the service of a regime that is likely to
disappear quite soon. Best change sides before it is too late.
Then the army, seeing that the game is up, tells the dictator that it is time to get on
the plane and go abroad to live with his money. Egypts ruler, Hosni Mubarak, was a
general before he became president, and he has always made sure that the military
were at the head of the queue for money and privileges, but there is no gratitude in
politics. They wont want to be dragged down with him.
All this could happen quite fast, or it could spread out over the next several weeks,
but it is probably going to happen. Even autocratic and repressive regimes must
have some sort of popular consent, because you cannot hire enough police to
compel everybody to obey. They extort that consent through fear: the ordinary
citizens fear of losing their jobs, their freedom, even their lives. So when people lose
their fear, the regime is toast.
It would require a truly horrendous massacre to re-instill the fear in Egyptians now,
and at this stage neither the police nor the army are likely to be willing to do that. So
what happens once Mubarak leaves? Nobody knows, because nobody is in charge
of this revolution.
The first people out in the streets were young university graduates who face a
lifetime of unemployment. Only days later, however, the demonstrations have
swelled to include people of every social class and walk of life.
They have no programme, just a conviction that it is high time for a change Kifaya!
(Enough is enough), as the nickname of an Egyptian opposition party that
flourished in the middle of the last decade put it. Two-thirds of the eighty million
Egyptians have been born since Mubarak came to power, and they are not grateful
for the poverty, corruption and repression that define and confine their lives. But who

can fix it all?

Washington and the other Western capitals that supported Mubarak for the past
three decades are praying that the revolution will choose Mohamed ElBaradei,
former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as its leader. He flew back
into Egypt last Thursday, and the regime even takes him seriously enough to put him
under house arrest. But he is probably not the Chosen One.
ElBaradei is a diplomat who has spent half of his life abroad and is seen by Western
governments as a safe pair of hands. He would be at best a figurehead, but a
figurehead for what?
Since it would be the army that finally tells Mubarak to leave, the military would
dominate the interim regime. They would not want to put yet another general out
front, so they might decide that ElBaradei is the right candidate for interim leader,
precisely because he has no independent power base. But there would then have to
be elections, and ElBaradei would not even come close to winning.
The likely winner of a genuinely free Egyptian election, according to most opinion
polls, would be the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brothers are not particularly radical as
Islamists go, but the first thing they have promised to do if they win power is to hold a
referendum on Egypts peace treaty with Israel. And most Egyptians, according to
the same polls, would vote to cancel it.
That would end the flow of official US aid and private foreign investment that
currently keeps the Egyptian economy more or less afloat, even though it would
probably not lead to an actual war. And there is no reason to believe that an Islamic
government could make the Egyptian economy grow any faster, although it would
distribute the poverty more fairly.
These longer-term considerations, however, will have no impact on the events of the
next few weeks, when Egypts example may ignite similar revolts against decrepit
regimes elsewhere in the Arab world or not, as the case may be. But its not just
Tunisia any more. Egypt is the biggest Arab country by far, and culturally the most
influential. What happens there really matters.
1989 and the Arab World
February 2011
It was the Egyptian armys statement that brought it all back: To the great people of
Egypt, your armed forces, acknowledging the legitimate rights of the people have
not and will not use force against the Egyptian people. In other words, go ahead and
overthrow President Hosni Mubarak. Its all right with us.
It reminded me of the day of the first big anti-Communist demonstration in Moscow in
mid-1989. There had already been non-violent demos in other Communist-ruled
countries like Poland and Hungary, but this was Russia. The enormous crowd filling
the broad Garden Ring Road was visibly nervous, and I was staying near the edge of
the crowd so I could dodge into a doorway if the shooting started.
Then I noticed that there were Soviet army officers, in full uniform, among the
protesters. It was going to be all right: the military wanted change just as much as
everybody else. Tahrir Square in Cairo today is the same: the army is with the
people.
The army statement in Cairo rang the death knell for Mubaraks regime, even if he
still insists that he will stay in the presidential palace until the election scheduled for
September. That wont happen. A transitional government led by other people will
organise the election. But the echoes of an earlier revolution set me to wondering: is
this the Arab worlds 1989?

In 1989 the collapse of the old order started in the satellitecountries, not in the
Russian heart of the empire, just as the current revolt against the Arab status quo
began in Tunisia, a relatively small and marginal Arab country. The Eastern
European landslide only started to sweep everything before it in November, 1989,
with the fall of the Berlin Wall. So is Hosni Mubarak the Berlin Wall of the Arab
world?
He certainly could be, for Egypt is the most populous Arab country, and the tactics
and goals of the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples closely resemble those of the
peaceful revolutionaries of Eastern Europe in 1989. The Arabs, too, are successfully
using non-violent tactics to bring irresistible moral pressure on tyrannical and corrupt
regimes, and they are demanding just the same things: democracy, justice and
prosperity.
The non-violent formula worked in two to three weeks in Tunisia, and it looks like it
will take about the same time in Egypt. At first the president is defiant and sends
police thugs out into the streets to attack the protesters, but he cannot use massive
violence because he knows that the army would not obey a shoot-to-kill order. Much
like in Eastern Europe in 1989.
Then begins the retreat. First the president promises reforms. Then, when that
doesnt work, he fires the entire government and creates a new cabinet (but its still
full of hated regime cronies). Then he promises to leave power at the next election,
but argues that he must stay for the transition period to guarantee stability. And
finally, he gets on the plane and leaves.
Tunisia has travelled that entire route since mid-December, and Egypt is passing
through the next-to-last stage. Other Arab countries may be on the same road: the
demos began in Algeria and Yemen in December. Theyre only three weeks old in
Jordan, but the king has just fired the entire government and appointed a new
cabinet with orders to carry out true political reforms.
There are hold-outs like Syria, whose president, Bashar Assad, boasted last week
that his regime is secure because it has a cause: confrontation with Israel. More to
the point, the Syrian army probably would open fire on protesters, for it is dominated
by the ethnic minority to which Assad himself belongs.
Iraq is so paralysed by ethnic divisions after the American occupation that no popular
mass movement is possible. Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states almost
certainly face no risk of popular revolution, for their people enjoy great prosperity
because of their oil. Nevertheless, the pressure for change is palpable in most Arab
countries.
Fully half the population of the Arab world might be living under different, more
democratic regimes a year or two from now. The European 1989 delivered precisely
that in just two years; why cant the Arabs do the same?
They can, of course, but the period after 1989 in Eastern Europe was not entirely
happy. The immediate result, in most countries, was a fall in living standards, not a
rise. One major country, former Yugoslavia, was torn apart by war. There were
various smaller wars along the ethnically fractured southern borders of the former
Soviet Union, and Russia ended up back under a gentler sort of authoritarian rule.
The risks for the Arab world are comparable: short-term economic decline, civil war,
and the rise of new authoritarian regimes, probably fuelled by Islamist ideas.
Nothings perfect. But what we are now witnessing in Tunisia and Egypt, and may
also see elsewhere, is a great liberation not just from dictatorship, but from decades
of corruption and despair. Thats worth a lot.

Israel: When Mubarak Goes

February 2011
In his first public comment on the unfolding drama in Egypt, Binyamin Netanyahu,
Israels prime minister, worried aloud last week that the right analogy may be the
Iranian revolution of 1979: Our real fear is of a situationwhich has already
developed in several countries including Iran itself, repressive regimes of radical
Islam.
The non-sectarian, non-party protesters in Egypt who have driven President Hosni
Mubarak to the brink of resignation, suggests Netanyahu, may lose control of their
revolution just as the Iranians lost theirs to the ayatollahs. The Muslim Brotherhood,
an Islamist party that is particularly strong among the poor, might gain a dominant
position in the new Egyptian government.
The Muslim Brothers have always condemned the peace treaty that Egypt signed
with Israel thirty-two years ago, so they serve as a sort of shorthand in Israeli politics
for the nightmare scenario in which Egypt cancels the peace treaty. In fact, you dont
even need the Muslim Brotherhood to make the scenario credible: a majority of
Egyptians dislike the treaty and would like to see it cancelled
Cancellation of the peace treaty would not necessarily lead to war between Egypt
and Israel. Its not even likely to. It would certainly cause a huge rise in Israeli military
spending, but the threat that a post-Mubarak regime would pose to Israel is more
political than strictly military. As, indeed, is the threat from Iran.
The Iranian regime has never attacked any other country, but it does support the
Hizbollah organisation in southern Lebanon, whose militia fought the Israeli army to
a standstill in 2006. The Hamas movement, a Palestinian party modelled on Egypts
Muslim Brotherhood, could become equally formidable militarily with support from
Cairo.
Hamas already controls the Gaza Strip, which shares a border with Egypt. With
Egyptian backing, it might also overthrow the Palestinian Authority that currently
controls the West Bank, for that body has been discredited by its corruption and its
long collaboration with Israel.
Even without a war, therefore, an elected Egyptian government would greatly
compound Israels security problems. Hamas could end up in control of all the
occupied Palestinian territories, and Jordan would have great difficulty in preserving
its own peace treaty with Israel. No wonder Binyamin Netanyahu is concerned.
But Netanyahus own policy, which boils down to avoiding serious negotiations with
the Palestinians and hanging onto the West Bank indefinitely, is not sustainable in
the long run. Palestinians are already moving towards the view that no two-state
solution is possible, and that the right strategy is to accept the unity of all of the
former British mandate of Palestine.
The Israeli army effectively unified all of that land in 1967 and has dominated the
Palestinian-majority parts of it ever since. But the Palestinian birth-rate is
considerably higher than the Jewish population growth rate, even though the latter
benefits from massive immigration, so the day is not far off when Arabs will
outnumber Jews within the old borders of mandatory Palestine, i.e. all the lands
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
When that day arrives, say the proponents of the one-state solution, Palestinians
need merely demand the vote throughout that territory, and Israel as we know it will
be finished. It will become a civil rights issue in which Israel is cast as a new
apartheid regime, and support for it will drain away even in the United States.
Significantly, this is already the implicit strategy of Hamas.

If a new Egyptian government adopts this policy, Israel will not just have a bigger
security problem. It will face an existential problem, albeit one that will only play out
over several decades. What can Netanyahu (or any Israeli leader) do to avoid this
outcome?
There is going to be a new Egyptian government very soon. It will probably not be
dominated by the Muslim Brothers, at least in the early days, for they cannot claim
credit for the revolution. So there may still be a window of opportunity in which an
Israeli offer to allow a Palestinian state on all the land beyond the countrys pre-1967
borders could revive the two-state option.
It is unlikely to remain open for long, however, and it is hard to see how the Israeli
electorate could be persuaded to jump through it in time. Netanyahu, given the
character of his governing coalition, certainly could not do it, and its not clear
whether any other coalition of Israeli parties could either.
At a time when bold steps are called for, Israeli politics is effectively paralysed. But
then, it has been effectively paralysed by the settlements issue for several decades
already, and most of the time available for implementing a two-state solution has
already been wasted.
Given that the emergence of two legitimate and universally recognised states in
former Palestine, the larger of which would be Jewish, should be Israels main
security goal, it has been extraordinarily negligent of its own interests.
And now it may be too late.
Why Now?
February 2011
Why now? Why revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt this year, rather than last year, or
ten years ago, or never? The protestors now taking to the street daily in Jordan,
Yemen, Bahrein, Libya and Algeria are obviously inspired by the success of those
revolutions, but what got the process started? What changed in the Middle East?
Yes, of course the Arab world is largely ruled by autocratic regimes that suppress all
opposition and dissent, sometimes with great cruelty. Yes, of course many of those
regimes are corrupt, and some of them are effectively in the service of foreigners. Of
course most Arabs are poor and getting poorer. But that has all been true for
decades. It never led to revolutions before.
Maybe the frustration and resentment that have been building up for so long just
needed a spark. Maybe the self-immolation of a single young man set Tunisia alight,
and from there the flames spread quickly to half a dozen other Arab countries. But
you cant find anybody who really believes that this could just as easily have
happened five years ago, or ten, or twenty.
Yet there is no reason to suppose that the level of popular anger has gone up
substantially in the past two or five or ten years. Its high all the time, but in normal
times most people are very cautious about expressing it openly. You can get hurt
that way.
Now they are expressing their anger very loudly indeed, and long-established Arab
regimes are starting to panic. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, by far the largest
Arab country, makes it possible that many other autocratic regimes in the Arab world
could fall like dominoes. The rapid collapse of the Communist regimes in Europe in
1989 is a frightening precedent for them. But, once again, why is this happening
now?
Social media is one widely touted explanation, and the al-Jazeera networks wallto-wall coverage of the events in Tunisia and Egypt is another. Both are plausible

parts of the explanation, for the availability of means of communication that are
beyond the reach of state censorship clearly makes mass mobilisation much easier.
If people are ready to come out on the street and protest, these media make it easier
for them to organize and easier for the example of the protestors to spread. But this
really does not explain why they are ready to come out at last.
The one thing that is really different in the Middle East, just in the last year or two, is
the self-evident fact that the United States is starting to withdraw from the region.
From Lebanon in 1958 to Iraq in 2003, the US was willing to intervene militarily to
defend Arab regimes it liked and overthrow those that it did not like. Thats over now.
This great change is partly driven by the thinly disguised American defeat in Iraq.
The last US troops are leaving that country this year, and after that grim experience
US public opinion will not countenance another major American military intervention
in the region. The safety net for Arab regimes allied to the United States is being
removed, and their people know it.
There is also a major strategic reassessment going on in Washington, and it will
almost certainly end by downgrading the importance of the Middle East in US policy.
The Arab masses do not know that, but the regimes certainly do, and it undermines
their confidence.
The traditional motives for American strategic involvement in the Middle East were
oil and Israel. American oil supplies had to be protected, and the Cold War was a
zero-sum game in which any regime that the US did not control was seen to be at
risk of falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. And quite apart from sentimental
considerations, Israel had to be protected because it was an important military asset.
But the Cold War is long over, and so is the zero-sum game in the Middle East. The
Arab oil exporters choose their customers on a purely commercial basis, and they
have to sell their oil to support their growing populations. You dont need to control
them or threaten them to get oil from them; just send them a cheque. Besides, less
than a fifth of Americas oil imports now come from the Arab world.
As for Israel, its military value to the United States has gone into a steep decline
since the end of the Cold War. Nor does it need American protection: it is a dwarf
superpower that towers over its Arab neighbours militarily. So remind me again: why,
exactly, should the United States see stability in the Middle East as a vital national
interest?
The revolutions of 1989 became possible when people in the Eastern European
countries realised that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene militarily to
preserve the Communist regimes that ruled them. Is another 1989 possible in the
Arab world? Well, the Arabs now know that the United States will not intervene
militarily to protect the regimes that rule them.

Libya and Bahrain

February 2011
Watching the extraordinarily rambling and repetitive speech by Colonel Moammar
Gaddafis 38-year-old second son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, on Libyan television on
Sunday night, I couldnt help being struck by how ignorant the man was.
According to Saif, the protests in Libya are the work of drunks, criminals and
foreigners who had been paid to destabilise the Libyan state. (At this time drunks
are driving tanks in central Benghazi.) If everybody does not rally around the
regime, there will be a terrible civil war. (We are a tribal people.) The country will
break into a dozen separate emirates, all foreign investors will leave, and the oil will

cease to flow.
Bereft of its oil income, Libya will have to close its hospitals and schools. Everybody
will fall into a poverty so deep that it will take forty years to climb back out. The
Americans and the British will take over the country. There will be a great plague,
and it will rain frogs and spiders.
I made up that last bit, but he really said the rest of it. How can he imagine that
Libyans will simply swallow this stuff? The regime doesnt let them travel and state
censorship is fierce, but Libyans are literate people and they are not fools. Saifs
threats will not persuade them and neither will his promises.
He offered the concessions that are typical at this stage in the collapse of an Arab
regime. There will be a great public consultation to discuss the countrys future,
including a new constitution. Salaries of government employees will be doubled. If
the people will just stop protesting, everything can change except, of course, the
regime itself.
Gaddafis sons speech sounded just like the final television speeches made by
Egypts former president Hosni Mubarak and Tunisias ex-president Zine El Abidine
Ben Ali before they fled their respective capitals, so it probably wont be long now.
The Gaddafi regime has already lost control of the eastern part of the country, and
on Sunday the street protests spread west to Tripoli.
Saif al-Islam would not do well in exile; the money would not be consolation enough.
He does actually care about the country, and he doesnt understand why its people
do not love him and his family back. Whereas his father Moammar, if he makes it out
safely, will survive with his ego quite undented.
Forty-one years of absolute power have so shaped the character of the Clown Prince
of Arab dictators that nothing can now shake his vainglorious self-regard. Even when
the Libyans finally reject him, he will see it as their loss, not his. He never was very
bright.
Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, heir to the throne of Bahrain, is playing a very
different game. It was he who ordered the army to leave Pearl Square in Manama,
the capital, on Sunday, two days after four protesters were killed and 231 wounded
in a military night attack to clear the square. He understands that the survival of the
monarchy now depends on persuading the majority of Bahrainis that the promise of
fundamental reform is real.
He doesnt yet control the riot police, who wounded several dozen more people with
shotgun fire before they abandoned the square to the returning protesters on
Sunday. So he hasnt yet won the battle within the royal family over what to do next
but he probably will, for it faces the threat of a republican revolution in Bahrain.
The great difference between Gaddafi in Libya and the ruling families of all the other
oil-rich Arab states is that they have the option of retreating into constitutional
monarchy. Gaddafi can only rule or flee, but the al-Khalifas can make a deal.
The opposition parties have agreed to open talks with Prince Salman if he meets
their demands: the current government must resign, political prisoners must be
released, and the killing of protesters must be investigated. All those things will
happen, and then the haggling will begin.
The protesters do not want more killing and they certainly dont want to damage the
tiny countrys wealth. (Bahrains 800,000 residents enjoy a per capita annual income
of $25,000). But they do want an end to the disadvantages suffered by the 70percent Shia majority in a state ruled by a Sunni royal family. They also want a real
democracy, not the current halfway house.
Such a regime would be a frightening anomaly in a region otherwise ruled by

absolute monarchies, but retaining Bahrains royal family would mollify the
neighbours greatly. In Bahrain there is unlikely to be any further bloodshed, and the
outcome will probably be a constitutional compromise.
In Libya, however, there might be more blood and no compromise. As Saif al-Islam
Gaddafi warned in his epic rant: You will see worse than Yugoslavia.The army is
not the army of Egypt or Tunisia. They will support Gaddafi to the last minute.Sixty
years ago they defended Libya from the colonialists; now they will defend it from
drug addicts. We will fight to the last man and woman and bullet.
Or alternatively, the regular army may simply force Gaddafis praetorian guard to
surrender in Tripoli, as it has apparently already done in Benghazi. It could be over in
Libya quite soon, as the old Arab order continues to unravel.
Today Libya, Tomorrow Syria?
March 2011
Last Friday saw the first nationwide protests against the Baath regime in Syria. If
these protests develop into a full-scale revolt, the regimes response may dwarf that
of Colonel Gaddafy in Libya.
The last time Syrians rebelled, in the city of Hama in 1982, President Hafez al-Assad
sent in the army to smash the insurrection. Hamas centre was destroyed by artillery
fire, and at least 17,000 people were killed.
The current Syrian ruler, Bashar al-Assad, is allegedly a gentler person than his
father Hafez, but the Baath Party still rules Syria, and it is just as ruthless as ever. So
what happens if the Syrian revolution gets underway, and the Baath Party starts
slaughtering people again? Do the same forces now intervening in Libya get sent to
Syria as well?
Syria has four times Libyas population and very serious armed forces. The Baath
Party is as centralised and intolerant of dissent as the old Communist parties of
Eastern Europe. Moreover, it is controlled internally by a sectarian minority, the
Alawis, who fear that they would suffer terrible vengeance if they ever lost power.
The UN Security Council was absolutely right to order the use of all necessary
measures (meaning armed force) to stop Gaddafis regime from attacking the
Libyan people. But it does move us all into unknown territory: today Libya, tomorrow
Syria?
The responsibility to protect concept that underpins the UN decision on Libya was
first proposed in 2001 by Lloyd Axworthy, then Canadas foreign minister. He was
frustrated by the UNs inability to stop the genocides in Kosovo and Rwanda in the
1990s, and he concluded that the problem was the UNs own rules. So he set out to
change them.
The original goal of the United Nations, embedded in the Charter signed in 1945,
was to prevent any more big wars like the one just past, which had killed over 50
million people and ended with the use of nuclear weapons. There was some blather
about human rights in there too, but in order to get all the great powers to sign up to
a treaty outlawing war, there had to be a deal that negated all that.
The deal was that the great powers (and indeed, all of the UN members) would have
absolute sovereignty within their own territory, including the right to kill whoever
opposed their rule. It wasnt written quite like that, but the meaning was quite clear:
the UN had no right to intervene in the internal affairs of a member state no matter
how badly it behaved.
By the early 21st century, however, the threat of a nuclear war between the great
powers had faded away, while local massacres and genocides proliferated. Yet the

UN was still hamstrung by the 1945 rules and unable to intervene. So Lloyd
Axworthy set up the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS) to popularize the concept of humanitarian intervention under the name of
Responsibility to protect.
It was purely a Canadian government initiative. You cant allow dictators to use the
facade of national sovereignty to justify ethnic cleansing, Axworthy explained, and
so he launched a head-on attack on sovereignty.
The commission he set up concluded, unsurprisingly that the UN should have an
obligation to protect people from mass killing at the hands of their own government.
Since that could only be accomplished, in practice, by military force, it was actually
suggesting that the UN Security Council should have the right to order attacks on
countries that indulged in such behaviour.
This recommendation then languished for some years. The most determined
opponents of responsibility to protect were the great powers Russian and China
in particular who feared that the new doctrine might one day be used against them.
But in 2005 the new African Union included the concept in its founding charter, and
after that things moved quite fast.
In 2006 the Security Council agreed that we are prepared to take collective action,
in a timely and decisive mannershould peaceful means be inadequate and
national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war
crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. And there they are five years
later, taking military action against Gaddafi.
Ten out of fifteen Security Council members voted in favour of the action, and the
rest, including all four of the emerging great powers, the so-called BRICs (Brazil,
Russia, India and China) abstained. But Russia and China didnt veto the action,
because they have finally figured out that the new principle will never be used
against them.
Nobody will ever attack Russia to make it be nicer to the Chechens, or invade China
to make it change its behaviour towards the Tibetans. Great powers are effectively
exempt from all the rules if they choose to be, precisely because they are so
powerful. Thats no argument for also exempting less powerful but nastier regimes
from the obligation not to murder their own people.
So what about the Syrian regime? The same crude calculation applies. If its not too
tough and powerful to take on, then it will not be allowed to murder its own people.
And if it is too big and dangerous, then all the UN members will express their strong
disapproval, but they wont actually do anything.
Consistency is an overrated virtue.
Libya and Altruism
March 2011
They have committed themselves to a war, but they have no plans for what happens
after tomorrow night. They swear that they will never put ground troops into Libya, so
their strategy consists solely of hoping that air strikes on Colonel Gadaffys air
defence systems (and on his ground forces when they can be targeted without killing
civilians) will persuade his troops to abandon him. They dont even have an agreed
command structure.
So why is this coalition of the willing (which has yet to find a proper name for itself)
doing this? Dont say its all about oil. Thats just lazy thinking: all the Western oil
majors are already back in Libya. They have been back ever since the great
reconciliation between their governments and Gaddafy in 2003.

That deal was indeed driven partly by oil, although also in part by Western concerns
about Libyas alleged nuclear ambitions. (Gaddafy played his cards well there,
because he never really had a viable nuclear weapons programme.) But do you
seriously think that Western governments have now launched this major military
operation merely to improve the contractual terms for a few of their oil companies?
Maybe its just about local political advantage, then. President Nicolas Sarkozy of
France was the driving force behind this intervention, and he faces a re-election
battle next year. Is he seeking credit with French voters for this humanitarian
intervention? Implausible, since its the right-wing vote he must capture to win, and
saving the lives of Arab foreigners does not rank high in the priorities of the French
right.
Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain was the other prime mover in the Libyan
intervention. Unless the coalition government he leads collapses (which is quite
unlikely), he wont even have to face the electorate again until 2014. So what would
be the point in seeking political popularity with a military intervention now? Even if
that were a sure route to popularity in Britain, which it is not.
As for Barack Obama, he spent weeks trying to avoid an American military
commitment in Libya, and his secretary of defence, Robert Gates, was outspoken in
denouncing the idea. Yet there they all are, intervening: France, Britain, the United
States, and half a dozen other Western countries. Strikingly unaccompanied by Arab
military forces, or indeed by anybody elses.
There is no profit in this for the West, and there is a high probability (of which the
interveners are well aware) that it will all end in tears. There is the danger of mission
creep, there is the risk that the bombing will kill Libyan civilians, and there is the fact
that many of the countries that voted for Security Council Resolution 1973, or at least
abstained from voting against it, are already peeling away from the commitment it
implied.
They willed the end: to stop Gaddafy from committing more massacres. They even
supported or did not oppose the means: the use of all necessary measures to
protect Libyan civilians, which in diplomatic-speak means force. But they cannot
stomach the reality of Western aircraft bombing another third-world country, however
decent the motives and however deserving the targets.
So why have the Western countries embarked on this quixotic venture? Indians feel
no need to intervene, nor do Chinese or Japanese. Russians and South Africans and
Brazilians can watch the killing in Libya on their televisions and deplore Gaddafys
behaviour without wanting to do something about it.
Even Egyptians, who are fellow Arabs, Libyas next-door neighbours, and the
beneficiaries of a similar but successful democratic revolution just last month,
havent lifted a finger to help the Libyan revolutionaries. They dont lack the means
only a small fraction of their army could put an end to Gaddafys regime in days but
they lack the will. Indeed, they lack any sense of responsibility for what happens to
people beyond their own borders.
Thats normal. What is abnormal is a domestic politics in which the failure to
intervene in Rwanda to stop the genocide is still remembered and debated fifteen
years later. African countries dont hold that debate; only Western countries do.
Western countries also feel guilty about their slow and timorous response to the
slaughter in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Nobody else does.
Cynicism is a necessary tool when dealing with international affairs, but sometimes
you have to admit that countries are acting from genuinely selfless and humanitarian
motives. Yes, I know, Vietnam, and Iraq, and a hundred years of US meddling in

Latin America, and five hundred years of European imperial plunder all around the
world. I did say sometimes. But I think this is one of those times.
Why is it only Western countries that believe they have a duty to intervene militarily,
even in places where they have no interests at stake, merely to save lives? My
guess is that its a heritage of the great wars they fought in the 20th century, and
particularly of the war against Hitler, in which they told themselves (with some
justification) that they were fighting pure evil and eventually discovered that they
were also fighting a terrible genocide.
This does not mean that all or most of their military adventures overseas are
altruistic, nor does it mean that their current venture will end well. In fact, it probably
wont. No good deed goes unpunished.
Syria: If Assad Falls
April 2011
Its safe to say that we will never see an alliance between Israel and al-Qaeda. Yet
Syrias government-controlled media hint that this evil alliance exists as they grasp at
any explanation, however implausible, that might discredit the anti-government
protests that have shaken the Baath Partys half-century grip on power.
The regimes security forces have killed more than 200 Syrians since the protests
began in mid-March, but government spokesmen insist that they were shot
down by armed elements who also attacked the police and the army. These armed
elements are allegedly in the pay of the Israelis or of al-Qaeda.
Its ridiculous, and nobody believes it, but what else are the official media going to
say? That the Syrian people, without distinction of ethnicity or creed, are moving
towards a non-violent revolution aimed at overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad
and the whole Baathist apparatus of power? They cant admit that, so they tell
preposterous lies instead.
Assads response to the threat has followed the pattern of other Arab dictators who
have already lost power: he makes concessions, but always too little and too late.
On Thursday, for example, he finally declared that the 48-year-old state of
emergency, which allowed the regime to arrest anybody and hold them without
charge, has been lifted.
It wasnt much of a concession, really, since the security forces still have immunity
no matter what they do and the courts are under the regimes thumb. But if Assad
had announced it two weeks ago, it might have taken some of the steam out of the
protest movement. Now its too late: on Friday the protesters came out of the
mosques after prayers as usual, and the regimes troops killed some of them as
usual.
The Syrian regime seems even more unimaginative and inflexible than the regimes
that have already gone under in Tunisia and Egypt, so it really could go down. Its
time to ask what the fall of Assad and the Syrian Baathists would mean for the whole
region. The answer is: it could change everything.
Syria is the lynch-pin of the alliance system that has defined the regions politics
since the late 1970s. That was when Egypt made peace with Israel, and the Islamic
revolution overthrew the Shah in Iran. It was a complete reversal of the old order, for
Egypt had previously led the Arab resistance to Israels conquest of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip, while Iran under the Shah had been Americas closest ally in the
Middle East.
Egypt, in order to regain its own Israeli-occupied territory, effectively abandoned the
Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and became a tacit ally of Israel.

Jordan also made peace with Israel, and after Israels invasion of Lebanon in 1982
the south of that country remained under Israeli occupation for twenty years.
Of all Israels Arab neighbours, only Syria remained a serious military opponent.
Maybe the Baathist regime there would also have made peace with Israel if it could
have got its own occupied territory in the Golan Heights back, but Israel was never
willing to make that concession. So Syria was alone and desperately needed allies
and the only potential ally in sight was the new Islamic regime in Iran.
It was unusual for any Arab country to make an alliance with Iran. It was doubly
strange for Syria to do so, because the Baathist regime there has always been
militantly secular. But international politics makes for strange bed-fellows, so Syria
got into bed with Iran.
When the Hezbollah guerilla resistance to Israeli occupation emerged in southern
Lebanon, it also became a member of this peculiar Syria-Iran alliance. And when the
Hamas movement emerged in the Gaza Strip, it also joined the club.
This ill-assorted group of countries and movements Iran and Hezbollah run by Shia
extremists, Hamas dominated by Sunni fanatics, and Syria a totally secular state
has provided the only real opposition to Israeli policy in the region for the past thirty
years. Without Syria, it would fall apart, and both Hezbollah and Hamas would be
gravely weakened.
That could easily happen if the Baathists lose control in Syria and almost every
other government in the region is deeply worried by the prospect of a democratic
Syria.
Iran fears the loss of its main Arab ally and condemns the Syrian protesters even as
it praises the revolutionaries in other Arab countries. The remaining dictatorships in
the Arab world are appalled that the rot has spread to Syria: if this bastion of tyranny
can go down, what hope is there for the rest of them?
And Israel doesnt even know what to hope for. It loathes the Baathist regime in
Syria and would love to see Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, but it fears that a
democratic government in Syria would be an even more implacable enemy of Israel.
The same goes for the United States, so the Syrian protesters are entirely on their
own. If the Baathists try to solve their problem by massacre, as they have done in
the past, nobody will raise a finger to stop them. But the protesters could still win.
Massacres dont always have the desired effect._
After Bin Laden
May 2011
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Osama bin Laden, the author of the 9/11 atrocity in the
United States and various lesser terrorist outrages elsewhere, has been killed by
American troops in his hide-out in northern Pakistan. At last, the world can breathe
more easily. But not many people were holding their breaths anyway.
President Barack Obama issued the usual warning when he announced that bin
Laden had been killed by American troops in a compound in the city of Abbottabad:
The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our
nations effort to defeat al-Qaeda. Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort.
Theres no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. But that
wasnt quite right either.
No doubt attacks will continue to be made in the Arab world in the name of al-Qaeda,
but the original organisation created by bin Laden has been moribund for years.
Outside the Arab world, there have been no major terrorist assaults for about five
years now, and bin Ladens death is unlikely to change that. The whole enterprise

was never what it seemed.

Bin Laden was a revolutionary before he was a terrorist. His goal was to overthrow
existing Arab governments and replace them with regimes that imposed an extreme
form of the Salafist (Islamist) doctrine on the people instead.
Once all the Muslims had accepted that doctrine, bin Laden believed, they would
benefit from Gods active support and triumph over the outside forces that held them
back. Poverty would be vanquished, the humiliations would end, and the infidels
(the Zionist-Crusader alliance) would be defeated. It was essentially a form of
magical thinking, but his strategic thinking was severely rational.
Successful revolutions bringing Salafist regimes to power were the key to success,
but for the revolutions to succeed they must win mass support among Arab and
other Muslim populations. Unfortunately, only a very small proportion of Muslims
accepted Salafist ideas, so some way must be found to win them over. Thats where
the terrorism came in.
Terrorism is a classic technique for revolutionaries trying to build popular support.
The objective is to trick the enemy government, local or foreign, into behaving so
badly that it alienates the population and drives people into the arms of the
revolutionaries. Then, with mass popular support, the revolutionaries overthrow the
government and take power.
This kind of terrorism has been used so often, and the strategy behind it is so
transparently obvious, that no 21st-century government should ever fall for it. But if
the terrorist attacks kill enough people, it is very hard for the government being
attacked not to over-react, even if that plays into the terrorists hands. The pressure
at home for the government to do something is almost irresistible.
The Bush administration duly over-reacted to 9/11 and invaded two Muslim
countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, on a futile quest to stamp out terrorism which
was, of course, exactly what bin Laden and his colleagues wanted the United States
to do.
However, almost ten years after 9/11, it is clear that bin Ladens strategy has failed
even though the United States fell into the trap he had set for it. Muslims everywhere
were appalled by the suffering inflicted on Afghans and Iraqis, and many condemned
the United States for its actions, but they didnt turn to the Salafists instead.
When popular revolutions finally did begin to happen in the Arab world five months
ago, they were non-violent affairs seeking the same democracy that secular
countries in the West and elsewhere already enjoy. The Salafists have become
virtually irrelevant.
Which is not to say that there will never be another terrorist attack on the United
States. Bin Laden had not been in operational control of al-Qaeda for many years,
because regular communication with the outside world would have allowed US
forces to track him down long ago: the compound in Abbottabad had neither
telephone nor internet connections. The real planners and actors are still out there
somewhere.
The question is: what can the Salafists possibly do now that would put their project
back on track? And the answer the only answer is to goad the United States into
further violence against Muslims, in retaliation for some new terrorist atrocity against
Americans.
There have been no major attempts by al-Qaeda to attack the United States in the
past ten years because it was already doing what the terrorists wanted. Why risk
discrediting President George W. Bush by carrying out another successful terrorist
attack, even if they had the resources to do so?

But the probability of a serious Salafist attempt to hit the US again has been rising
ever since American troops began to pull out of Iraq, and President Obamas
obvious desire to get out of Afghanistan raises it even further. Bin Ladens strategy
has not delivered the goods for the Salafists, but they have no alternative strategy.
Bin Ladens death would provide a useful justification for another attempt to hit the
US, but it wouldnt really be the reason for it and it probably wouldnt succeed,
either. Bin Ladens hopes died long before he did._____
Leaving Afghanistan
May 2011
With a single bound, our hero was free, as writers of pulp fiction used to say when
they saved their hero from some implausible but inescapable peril. Barack Obama
could now free himself from Afghanistan with a single bound, if he had the nerve.
The death of Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, matters little in practical terms,
but Obama could use it as a means of deflating the grossly exaggerated terrorist
threat that legitimises the bloated American security establishment. He could also
use it to escape from the war in Afghanistan.
If he acted in the next few months, while his success in killing the terrorist-in-chief
still makes him politically unassailable on military matters, he could start moving U.S.
troops out of Afghanistan, and even begin to cut the Homeland Security Department
down to size. His political enemies would accuse him of being soft on defence, but
right now the accusation would not stick.
The HSDs reason for being is the terrorist threat. Drive home the point that bin
Laden is dead, and that there has been no terrorist attack in the West at even 1/50
the scale of the 9/11 attacks for the past five years, and its budget becomes very
vulnerable.
Obama promised in 2009 that the first of the 30,000 extra U.S. troops he sent to
Afghanistan in that year will be withdrawn this July. It would be harder to get the
remaining 70,000 American troops and the 50,000 other foreign troops outbut it is
now within his reach.
Since it is politically impossible for a U.S. president to acknowledge military defeat,
for half a century the default method for extracting American troops from lost wars
has been to declare a victory and leave. It was pioneered by Henry Kissinger in the
Vietnam era, it worked for the junior Bush in Iraq, and Obama could use it to get out
of Afghanistan.
It just has to look like a victory of sorts until one or two years after all the American
troops are gone, so that when the roof falls in, it no longer looks like the Americans
fault. Kissinger talked about the need for a decent interval between the departure of
U.S. troops and whatever disasters might ensue in Vietnam, and the concept applies
equally to Obama and Afghanistan.
The case for getting Western troops out of Afghanistan now rests on three
arguments. Firstly, that the Taliban, the Islamist radicals who governed the country
until 2001 and are now fighting Western troops there, were never Americas
enemies. Al-Qaeda (which was almost entirely Arab in those days) abused their
hospitality by planning its attacks in Afghanistan, but no Afghan has ever been
involved in a terrorist attack against the West.
Secondly, the Taliban never controlled the minority areas of the country even during
their five years in power, so why assume that they will conquer the whole country if
Western troops leave? President Hamid Karzais deeply corrupt and widely hated
government would certainly fall, but Afghanistans future would probably be decided,

as usual, by a combination of fighting and bargaining between the major ethnic

groups.
And thirdly, Western troops will obviously leave eventually. Whether they leave
sooner or later, roughly the same events will happen after they go. Those events are
unlikely to pose a threat to the security of any Western countryso why not leave
now, and spare some tens of thousands of lives?
This last argument is of course disputed by the U.S. military, who insist (as soldiers
usually do) that victory is attainable if they are only given enough resources and
time. But Karzais government is beyond salvage, and this months strikingly
successful Taliban attacks in Kandahar city discredit the claim that pro-government
forces are making progress in restoring security.
Western armies have fought dozens of wars in the Third World since the European
empires began to collapse 60 years ago, and they lost almost every one. The local
nationalists (who sometimes calling themselves Marxists or Islamists) cannot beat
the foreign armies in open battle, but they can go on fighting longer and take far
higher casualties.
Afghanistan fits the model. When a delegation from Central Asia visited a U.S. base
in Afghanistan, one of the delegates was a former Soviet general who had fought in
Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. He listened patiently as
eager young American officers explained how new technology and a new emphasis
on winning hearts and minds would defeat the insurgency.
Finally his patience snapped. We tried all that when we were here and it didnt work
then, so why should it work now? he asked. Answer: it wont.
Osama bin Ladens death has given Obama a chance to leave Afghanistan without
humiliation. Just wait a couple of months to guard against the improbable
contingency of a big terrorist revenge attack, and then start bringing the troops
home. Once the Taliban are convinced that he is really leaving, they would probably
even give him a decent interval.
Will this actually happen? Probably not, for in terms of domestic U.S. politics it would
be a gamble, and Barack Obama is not a gambler.___
Libya: Running Out of Options
May 2011
They swore blind that there would never be foreign boots on the ground in Libya,
but as NATOs campaign against Muammar Gaddafis regime enters its third month
it is getting a lot closer to the ground. It started with Tomahawk missiles fired from
over the horizon; then it was fighter-bombers firing guided weapons from a safe
height; now its helicopter gunships skimming the ground at zero altitude. Theyre
getting desperate.
In London on 25 May, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the president and I
agree we should be turning up the heat on Libya. Standing beside him, President
Barack Obama declared that, given the progress that has been made over the last
several weeks, there will be no let-up in the pressure that we are applying.
And you have to ask, what progress? The front lines between Gaddafis forces and
the rebels are still approximately where they were two months ago, except around
the city of Misrata, where the insurgents have pushed the besieging troops back
some kilometres (miles).
Tripoli, the capital, is still firmly under Gaddafis control. There has been no overt
defiance of the regime there for many weeks, and the city is not even suffering
significant shortages except for fuel. Are Obama and Cameron deluding themselves,

or are they just trying to fool everybody else?

Maybe both and meanwhile they are cranking up the aerial campaign against
Gaddafi in the hope that enough bombs may make their claims come true. They
must have been told a dozen times by their military advisers that bombing alone
almost never wins a war, but they have waded into the quagmire too far to turn back
now, and they have no other military options that the United Nations resolution would
allow them to use.
They are already acting beyond the limits set by UN Security Council Resolution
1973, which on 17 March authorised the use of limited force to protect Libyan
civilians. It has become a campaign to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi, and they hardly
even bother to deny it any more.
I believe that we have built enough momentum that, as long as we sustain the
course we are on, (Gaddafi) will step down, said Obama in London. Ultimately this
is going to be a slow, steady process in which we are able to wear down the regime
forces. Well maybe so, and maybe not, but in either case thats not what Resolution
1973 said. No wonder Russia condemned the latest air raids as a gross violation of
the resolution.
Russia did not want to stand by and let Gaddafi massacre innocent civilians, which
seemed imminent when the defences of the rebels in eastern Libya were collapsing
in mid-March, so it let the resolution pass. So did China, India and Brazil, which
would normally oppose any military intervention by western powers in a Third World
country. But it was all decided in a weekend, and they did not think it through.
Neither did France, Britain, the United States, Canada and a few other NATO
countries, which immediately committed their air forces to the task of saving the
rebels. They destroyed Gaddafis tanks and saved the city of Benghazi, but then
what? There was no plan, no exit strategy, and so they have ended up with a very
unpleasant choice.
Either they stop the war and leave Gaddafi in control of the larger part of a
partitioned Libya, or they escalate further in the hope that at some point Gaddafys
supporters abandon him. The US Air Force had a name for this strategy during the
Vietnam War: they were trying to find the North Vietnamese regimes threshold of
pain. They never did find it in Vietnam, but NATO is still looking for it in Libya.
Well never know if Gaddafi would really have slaughtered tens of thousands of
civilians if Benghazi had fallen. He was making blood-curdling threats about what he
would do when the city fell, and he has certainly killed lots of people in the past, but
with the eyes of the whole world on him he might not have done it this time.
Nevertheless, that threat was what created the extraordinary (though temporary)
consensus at the Security Council. It was, for the West as well as for the other major
powers that backed the original resolution, a largely humanitarian action with little by
the way of ulterior motives. (And dont say oil; thats just lazy thinking.)
Gaddafi has been playing by the rules for the last five years, renouncing terrorism
and dismantling his fantasy nuclear weapons programme. He has been exporting
all the oil he could pump. He wasnt threatening Western interests, and yet NATO
embarked on a military campaign that it KNEW was likely to end in tears in order to
stop him.
Let us give NATO governments credit for letting their hearts overrule their heads.
Lets also acknowledge that they have been meticulous and largely successful in
avoiding civilian casualties in their bombing campaign. But it isnt working.
So what do they do now? They can escalate for a few more weeks, and hope that
the strategy that has failed for the last two months will finally succeed. That might

happen, but its not likely to. In which case the only remaining option will be to accept
a cease-fire, and the partition of Libya between the Gaddafi regime and the
Transitional National Council in Benghazi._
Twenty-Five Years of Non-Violent Revolution
June 2011
The Prague Spring of 1968 was a gallant attempt at a non-violent democratic
revolution, but it was crushed by Soviet tanks. Eighteen years later, in the
Philippines, the first people-power revolution succeeded, and since 1986 nonviolent revolutions have driven a great many dictators from power. The most recent
was in Egypt, in February but there never was a guarantee that these revolutions
would turn out well.
It depends partly on how bad the ethnic and religious cleavages are in a country:
Bulgaria and Romania were okay, but Yugoslavia was a blood-bath. It depends to
some extent on how poor and illiterate the population is, although even very poor
countries have made a successful transition to democracy. And it depends on good
leadership and good luck, too. But it is the dominant political phenomenon of our
time.
The revolution in the Philippines succeeded because by the late 80s, everything was
happening in real time on global television. Oppressive regimes that had never had
much compunction about killing people who challenged them didnt feel confident
about doing it before a global audience. They no longer felt free to use massive force
unless the protesters gave them an excuse by resorting to violence themselves.
The Marcos regime that was overthrown in the Philippines in 1986 was a mere
kleptocracy with little ideology beyond a vague anti-communism. When the
infection spread to China in 1989, the outcome was different, because a disciplined
Communist dictatorship WAS willing to kill large numbers of its own people in front of
the television cameras. It understood that if it failed that test, it would not survive.
Less ruthless Communist dictatorships in Europe, longer in power and ideologically
exhausted, did fail the test. The non-violent revolutions that began in East Germany
in November, 1989, and ended Communist rule in the old Soviet Union itself by late
1991, could have been stopped if the local Communist regimes had been willing to
follow the Chinese example, but none of them had the stomach for killing on that
scale.
So about 350 million Europeans got their freedom and almost nobody died. At
almost exactly the same time, the apartheid regime in South Africa released Nelson
Mandela and began the talks that led to majority rule in 1994. A very well-connected
African friend of mine told me later what had actually happened.
In late 1989, after the East German, Czech and Romanian regimes had fallen with
scarcely a shot being fired, the head of the National Intelligence Service, the South
African secret police, went to State President F.W. de Klerk and warned him that if
the African National Congress put half a million people on the street in
Johannesburg, he would only have two options: to kill ten thousand of them, or to
surrender power unconditionally.
If he didnt like either of those options, he should start negotiating the transfer of
power now. So Mandela was released, and eventually there was a peaceful
transition from apartheid to majority rule.
Then theres a long gap, perhaps partly explained by the fact that the number of
dictatorships in the world had already shrunk considerably. An attempted non-violent
revolution in Iran in 2009 was mercilessly crushed. People worried that repressive

regimes might have finally figured out how to counter non-violent revolution. And
then along came the Arab spring.
So the technique is still alive, and it worked in Tunisia and in Egypt. On the other
hand, it has been stamped out in Bahrein, whose fate resembles that of Prague in
1968. And while the revolt in Yemen has probably displaced the old regime, it has
been very violent, and the new regime may be no more democratic than the old.
Same goes for Syria, and of course for Libya. There are no one-size-fits-all
techniques for revolution or for anything else. But the desire for democracy, equality
and fairness survives everywhere, and the least bad technique for trying to achieve
those things is still non-violence. Even if sometimes the revolution succeeds but the
aftermath doesnt.
The original people power revolution in the Philippines was followed by two
decades of political turbulence. Yugoslavia splintered into half a dozen warring
fragments. Russia, though it escaped mass violence, is not exactly a model
democracy.
On the other hand, South Korea, Indonesia and South Africa are now all
democracies. So are Poland, Romania and Taiwan. The aftermath may not be what
most people hoped for in Egypt, and it probably wont be in the case of Syria. But
non-violent revolution works often enough, and its results are positive often enough,
that it is still the most hopeful political development of the past quarter-century.
The glass is half-full, and getting fuller. Even the most wicked and ruthless rulers
must now take world public opinion into account, and we expect them to behave
much better than dictators did in the bad old days. They may disappoint our
expectations, but that is the standard by which they will be judged, and they know
it.____
The Christian Threat
July 2011
Three pieces about Muslims in the same paper on the same day (The Independent,
25 July). The first is a local colour piece about how there are a lot more Middle
Eastern tourists in London this summer. Why? Because France has banned the
Islamic veil (or the Babylonian/Roman/Byzantine/Islamic veil, if you want to be
precise) that covers the face. So the high-spending female shoppers from the Gulf
arent going to Paris any more.
So many of them are going to London instead that big London shops like Selfridges
and Liberty are reporting a 40-45 percent in international visitors compared to last
year. And since Middle Eastern shoppers spend about fifteen times as much as your
average British shopper, they are more than welcome even if many of them look a
little weird to the average British eye.
Two pages on, a story about how rickets, a bone disease that causes stunted growth
and bow legs in children, is making a comeback in Britain. Its caused by a deficiency
of vitamin D, which is produced by sunlight acting on the skin. And its Muslims
(British Muslims this time), who keep their women indoors or make them cover every
bit of skin when they go out, who are the main victims of this disease.
The researcher didnt actually say that, of course. She said: You get women living in
certain communities that perhaps dont go out much because of religious, cultural
traditions. Theyre covered up when they do. They dont get enough access to
sunlight, so they get vitamin D deficientSo (their children will) be presenting with
rickets at around 18 months.
Fair comment, but its striking that nowhere in that story does the word Muslim

appear. It didnt appear in the first story either. Everybody knows that both stories
are about Muslims, but the galumphing etiquette that governs this discourse means
that you mustnt actually say so. Its a well-meaning but idiotic attempt to
compensate for the vicious anti-Muslim rants that youll see every day in other parts
of the Western media.
And finally, on the letters page, an angry complaint by a British Muslim about the
way that Western media jumped to the instant conclusion that the hideous slaughter
in Norway was the work of Muslim fanatics. Now that the architect of the Norwegian
massacre turns out to be a blue-eyed, blonde, white, Christian, right-wing
fundamentalist, inquired Dr Shazad Amin, where have all the so-called experts on
Islamic terrorism suddenly gone?
I look forward to now seeing an equally vigorous explanation of how Norway was
always a key target for right-wing neo-Nazi groups, supported by a plethora of
experts on Christian terrorism to explain the theological basis for these attacks.
If you hold your breath until that happens in the mainstream Western media, you will
turn an attractive shade of blue, but we could try to apply the principle here.
Just as Muslims living in northerly climes with weak sunlight suffer rickets because of
their clothing preferences, for example, so Christians living in countries with strong
sunshine suffer very high rates of skin cancer because of their custom of wearing as
little clothing as possible.
That is not really accurate, of course, because a majority of the worlds Christians
are not white. Whats actually being observed is that people of European descent
(most of whom are at least culturally Christian) get skin cancer a lot if they live in
countries like Australia, South Africa and Argentina.
The fully veiled women shoppers in London are not just generic Muslims, either.
They are almost all women from the Arabic-speaking countries of the Gulf, home to
only a quarter of the worlds Arabs and only about 3 percent of the worlds Muslims.
But this is really just quibbling. The real question is: what can be done about the
obsession with Islamic terrorism in the Western media, to the virtual exclusion of
other kinds of terrorism. It is so strong that even after Anders Behring Breivik claimed
responsibility for the Norwegian horrors and explained his (right-wing, Christian
fundamentalist) motives, internet posts continued to argue that he was just a tool in
the hands of Muslim extremists.
Its the hidden hand theory of politics, and its adherents generally proceed by the
logical process that the lawyers refer to as cui bono: who benefits from this action?
Its hardly an infallible indicator of who is responsible, because you have to allow for
the crazies, and also for those who are miscalculating where their interests really lie.
Nevertheless, its the methodology that the conspiracy theorists prefer.
So, then, who benefited from Breiviks actions? Obviously he believed that it would
serve his own delusional ideology (which he elucidated in a 1,500-page internet
post), but who was really behind it? Im drifting towards paranoia, I know, but stay
with me.
The week before the Norwegian tragedy saw a deluge of revelations of criminality
and a firestorm of media criticism about the conduct of Rupert Murdochs media
empire. Suddenly, all the media attention has turned to Norway and terrorism, and
the Murdochs are off the agenda.
Im not going to say anything that might get me sued, but if you like a really big
conspiracy theory.
Mubarak on Trial

August 2011
Former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was wheeled into court today in a hospital
bed (his lawyers claim he is very ill), and put into the same kind of iron cage that so
many of his opponents were tried in before they were jailed or hanged. The charges
are corruption and ordering the killing of protesters during the Egyptian revolution
last February.
If convicted of the latter charge, he could face the death sentence, but he is unlikely
ever to dangle at the end of a rope. Some 850 Egyptian protesters were killed during
the revolution, but the kill orders were probably never written down, and it will be
very hard to prove Mubaraks personal responsibility for the killings.
No matter. He is 83 years old and in poor health, so even a few years in prison
would be effectively a death sentence. This trial is not about the fate of a few wicked
men. (Mubaraks sons and seven close associates are also on trial.) Its about a new
Egypt where the law must be obeyed even by the powerful.
Its the fact that the trial is taking place that matters, not the severity of the
punishment. But given that the soldiers are still in charge, most Egyptians are still
stunned to see it actually happening.
It was the Egyptian military who intervened on 11 February to force Mubarak to
resign from power and end the killing. Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi
heads the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that serves as an interim
government pending free elections in Egypt. But the Egyptian army has never been
a hotbed of democracy.
Tantawi, 75, was personally close to the deposed dictator. Mubarak is a former
general himself, and the military do not like to see one of their own humiliated in
public. There has also been great pressure from the surviving Arab autocracies not
to have a former ruler put on trial.
Most Egyptians therefore never expected to see Mubarak on trial in open court, but
the military have their own interests to defend. During 57 years of thinly disguised
military rule they have built up an enormously lucrative presence in housing
complexes, banking, and all sorts of other non-military activities. They also get a
huge share of the countrys budget.
The countrys senior officers realise that they have to make a deal with at least some
of the civilian political forces in post-Mubarak Egypt if they want to keep their
privileges. Putting Mubarak on trial is a down-payment on that deal but who are
their prospective civilian partners? A lot of the young people who actually made the
revolution happen suspect that it is the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood was slow to come out in support of the revolution, for it had an
unwritten deal with Mubarak that allowed it to operate as a sort of unofficial
opposition (as long as it didnt challenge his rule). It has put down deep roots in the
poorer sections of Egyptian society thanks to the very effective social services it
provides. Its leaders are middle-aged and elderly men of a conservative disposition.
The young men and women who actually brought Mubarak down, on the other hand,
are overwhelmingly secular in their views. They want a free press and real respect
for human rights. So which group would the military prefer to deal with?
If there were an election in Egypt today, the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim
Brotherhoods new political front, would probably win more votes than any other
party. Well know by next month, because there is actually going to be an election in
Egypt in September.
Paradoxically, it is the liberal, leftist and radical political groups that want to postpone
the election, because they too believe that the Brotherhood will triumph if an election

is held this year. But it would be just the same next year. Over a third of Egyptian
voters are illiterate, and at least half are very poor. The Brotherhood was there to
help them over the long years when the State wasnt.
Behind crowd-pleasing gestures like Mubaraks trial, the military may have already
cut a deal with the Brotherhood: the latter will dominate the new parliament, and in
return they will leave the militarys privileged position alone.
The Brotherhood in power would do some things that the military would not
welcome, like breaking relations with Israel and imposing an Islamic constitution on a
country with a ten percent non-Muslim minority. But if accepting such policies is the
price they must pay to defend their own privileges, the military will pay it.
So is the Egyptian revolution going to be betrayed? In part it will be, at least for a
while; all revolutions are. But this is a long game, and a wise player might prefer not
to take power in Egypt right now. The economy is a wreck, popular expectations are
extremely high, and there will be severe disillusionment when the new,
democratically elected government fails to work miracles.
It might be better to aim to win the election four years from now, when todays victors
have become tomorrows villains. Whether thats a good strategy or not, its probably
the only viable option for the secular parties.
Libya and the Future of Nonviolence
August 2011
Brother Colonel Muammar Gaddafis time is up: the rebels are now in the heart of
Libyas capital, Tripoli. But Libya has seen six months of fighting, at least a thousand
deaths, and foreign military intervention in support of the rebels. This is not the kind
of nonviolent revolution that we have come to expect in the 21st century. Are the
rules changing again?
From Lisbon in 1974 to Manila in 1986, East Berlin in 1989, Moscow in 1991, Jakarta
in 1995, Belgrade in 2000, and Cairo early this year, popular revolutions using
nonviolent tactics have driven dictators from power. Violent revolutions have been
commonplace for over two centuries now, but the great discovery of our own era has
been how to make the dictators quit without shedding blood.
The success of the early nonviolent revolutions was a surprise to almost everybody,
including those who led them, but as time passed and the list of successes
lengthened we grew to think of them as normal. Now, in Libya, we seem to have a
throwback to an earlier time. Its a good thing that Gaddafi is finished, but nobody
can claim that this is a success for nonviolence.
What lessons should we draw from this, especially at a time when several other
attempts to use nonviolent techniques to bring about a democratic revolution, notably
in Yemen and Syria, are struggling to survive? Are there places where these
techniques simply wont work?
Nonviolent revolutions can succeed when the great majority of people in a country
share the same basic identity. If we all belong to the same society, then it is an act of
great moral import for its members to kill one another, or for the rulers to kill the
citizens. So long as the rebels do not resort to force, it is surprisingly difficult for even
a cruel and repressive regime to start using lethal force against peaceful protesters.
We had a vivid demonstration of this in the Egyptian revolution early this year, when
the protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere defied Hosni Mubaraks
regime. He did kill some of them, but he did not dare to use the police or the army.
The killing in Cairo was done by plain-clothes thugs, mostly at night, because
Mubarak simply could not openly repudiate his duty not to kill his fellow-citizens.

The Egyptian revolution triumphed when the army publicly announced that it would
never use force against civilians, and Mubarak and his close associates are now on
trial for murder. But Bashir al-Assad clings to power in Syria and uses the army
openly to kill the protesters there. Yemen is even messier, and in Libya it took six
months of war (and foreign military intervention) to get Gaddafi out. Whats the
problem?
Nonviolence works much less well in countries whose populations are deeply divided
by language, religion, or ethnicity, since it depends heavily on people having a
shared identity. Syria, for example, has a Kurdish-speaking minority, and even the
Arabic-speaking majority is divided into Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims (including the
Alawite minority who dominate the regime), Christians and Druze.
Yemenis all speak Arabic, but their society is divided into Shias and Sunnis and riven
by tribal rivalries of long standing and great complexity. Libya is homogeneous in
language and religion and much more prosperous than Syria or Yemen (thanks
almost entirely to oil), but it is not a fully unified society despite all that. Its an
urbanised, seemingly modern country, but for a great many Libyans, tribal loyalties
come first.
So the revolution in Libya was violent from the start. In Syria, the protests began
nonviolently and have largely remained so, but the regime has not felt constrained to
avoid the use of force and some 2,000 civilians have been killed. In Yemen the
students who launched the protest movement were trying to emulate Egypts
nonviolent democratic revolution, but they have been sidelined by powerful tribal
rivalries.
This is regrettable, but it is not actually surprising. Nonviolence works best in fairly
cohesive societies, which is not what we are dealing with here. And yet.
The remarkable thing in Libya is not that the revolution has been violent, but that the
revolutionaries have worked so hard to keep the tribalism from taking over. What
they are aiming for, quite explicitly, is a Libyan society that is not only democratic but
post-tribal. If the fall of Tripoli is not too bloody, they stand a reasonable chance of
creating it.
The remarkable thing about Syria is that after five months of official killing, the
protesters are still avoiding violence, and are also resisting the regimes attempts to
play on sectarian and ethnic divisions. Even more remarkably, Yemen has not
toppled into full civil war, and the students who started the pro-democracy protests
are still there, camped in the centre of the capital.
Nonviolence has mostly run out of easy societies to transform, which is a measure of
how successful it has been in the past forty years. But even in the most divided
societies it has a role to play, and people who are willing to risk their lives to make it
work. This story still has some distance to run.
Libya: What Now?
August 2011
In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one, said Napoleon, and the Libyan
rebels certainly demonstrated the truth of that. Gaddafi had more soldiers, they were
better trained and much better armed, and they did not lack courage. But the rebels
firmly believed that they were bound to win, and once Gaddafis troops also became
infected with that belief their resistance collapsed.
However, Napoleon also said that God is on the side with the best artillery, and the
rebels had nothing bigger than light anti-aircraft guns. Their real artillery was the
NATO air forces that conducted a five-month bombing campaign on their behalf.

Even though there are technically no foreign boots on the ground in Libya, this
heavy reliance on foreign military support makes the rebels forces beholden to the
West in the eyes of some Libyans and many other Arabs. So they are, but as the
leaders of the revolution try to make the tricky transition from dictatorship and civil
war to an open and democratic country, the influence of the foreigners may prove
useful.
Consider the tasks that the revolutionaries now face. First, the rebel leaders must
prevent their victorious troops from taking revenge on the regimes erstwhile
supporters. The last thing they need is a bloodbath in Tripoli or anywhere else.
Then they must choose some thousands of todays ragtag fighters to serve as a
conventional and disband the rest of the militia forces that sprang up to fight
Gaddafis army. A lot of people who fought for the revolution are going to feel
cheated, and they still have guns.
The revolutionaries must then find a way of dealing with Gaddafi (if and when they
catch him) that does not deepen the already grave divisions in Libyan society. Many
people from Gaddafis tribe and its allies fought for the regime, and half the families
in the country include someone who worked for Gaddafis government at some point
during his 43-year rule.
Then they have to write a constitution, hold a free election, and form a legitimate
government to which the National Transitional Council (NTC) will hand over all its
powers. They also have to restart the economy and get money into peoples hands
as quickly as possible. Many Libyans have not been paid for four months now.
That task will be a lot easier if the countrys foreign currency reserves, much of which
are held abroad in accounts that were frozen by the United Nations during the
conflict in order to cut off Gaddafis cash flow, are now released rapidly to the new
Libyan government. It will also want to borrow a lot of money abroad to repair the oil
facilities that were damaged in the fighting and get exports moving again.
That money will almost certainly be made available, because Libya has enough oil
reserves to repay it tenfold, if necessary. But then the going gets harder.
Many people in the rebel leadership understand that the countrys strong tribal
loyalties are divisive, but keeping them out of democratic politics is not going to be
easy. Its especially hard because there are no powerful civic organisations
(professional associations, trade unions, etc.) to serve as an alternate focus for
political activity.
Moreover, the revolution succeeded early in the east (Cyrenaica), while most of the
west (Tripolitania) stayed under Gaddafis rule almost down to the end. So the NTC,
which is only now moving from Benghazi in the east to Tripoli in the west, has a
strong eastern bias. Yet the west has two-thirds of the population, and it was the
fighters in the west who carried the main burden of the fighting.
Libyan society was atomised under Gaddafi, quite deliberately, in order to make
each individual isolated and powerless when dealing with the regime. Now all those
horizontal links that are collectively known as civil society must be recreated,
without allowing tribal and regional loyalties to take over. Which is why the fact that
the revolution has powerful foreign supporters could be useful to Libya.
Britain and France, in particular, have committed a great deal of political capital to
the success of the Libyan revolution. They carried out more than half of the air
strikes in support of the rebels, while other European democracies and Canada, all
NATO members, did the rest. (The United States only contributed surveillance
capabilities and occasional Predator drone strikes after the first few weeks.)
These European allies need to justify their intervention to their own people, so they

will do everything in their power to make sure that there are no massacres, that
Gaddafi and his close allies, when caught, are handed over to the International
Criminal Court for trial (much better for the stability of the country than trying him in
Libya), and that the process of building a democratic government in Libya goes as
smoothly as possible.
They have a great deal of leverage over the rebel forces at the moment, and they will
use it to keep the revolution on the tracks. Despite all the obstacles to a smooth
transition that Libya faces, the outcome here could be surprisingly positive.
Libya: Is Force an Instrument of Love?
August 2011
Somebody (perhaps a Jesuit) once said: Force is an instrument of love in a world of
complexity and chance. Id be grateful if someone could tell me where that comes
from, but it has stayed with me for a long time because it embodies a kind of truth.
Sometimes you have to use force to protect innocent people from harm. Which
brings us to Libya.
The war there is effectively over, and the Good Guys won. The dictators delusional
son, Saif al-Islam, still promises that victory is near, but he will soon be dead, in
prison, or (if he is lucky) in exile. The only problem is that the Good Guys who
mattered most were actually foreigners.
The National Transitional Council, the shambolic proto-government that claims to run
the rebel-held areas (now more than nine-tenths of the country) is well aware of the
problem. When the United Nations began talking about sending peacekeeping
troops to Libya to help stabilise the country, their reply was a resounding no.
Thats understandable. The NTC has enough difficulty getting other Arabs and
Africans to accept that their revolution is a legitimate, home-grown affair without
having
armed foreigners traipsing around the country. Its painful even to admit that NATO
functioned as the rebels air force, and that they could not have won without it. But
its true.
It was the decision by France and Britain to commit their air forces to the defence of
the rebels in eastern Libya that saved them from being overrun by Gaddafys forces
in the early days of the revolt. Other Western countries sent combat aircraft to join
them (although the United States drew back after the first few days), and Gaddafys
army was stopped just short of Benghazi.
Equally important was UN resolution 1973 in March, which authorising willing UN
member countries to use all necessary means (i.e. force) to protect the Libyan
population from its own government. It specifically mentioned Benghazi, the capital
of the rebel-held territory, as an area to be protected. And even Russia and China
did not veto the resolution, although they had deep misgivings about where it might
lead.
They were right. It led to a NATO-led aerial campaign (supported by a few planes
from a couple of small Arab countries) that went far beyond protecting the Libyan
population from attacks by Gaddafys forces. His troops were struck from the air
wherever they were, on the flimsy argument that they might be planning to attack
civilians one of these days.
Similarly, any building with pro-Gaddafy Libyan troops in or around it was designated
a command and control centre, and therefore a legitimate target. The targeting was
precise, hurting few civilians, but the bombing was intense. Exact numbers are hard
to come by, but the Royal Canadian Air Force, with only six F-18s involved, dropped

240 bombs on Libya in the first two months of the operation, all of them 227-kg.
(500-lb.) laser-guided weapons.
It was these relentless air attacks that eroded Gaddafys forces so much that the
rebel fighters in the west were finally able to seize Tripoli last week. The rebels could
not have won without NATO. So were NATOs actions legitimate, especially since
they stretched the UN resolutions terms almost to the breaking point? Even more
importantly, were they morally correct?
Lets leave the legality to the lawyers, who will gladly argue either side of that
question for a fee. The real question is moral. Was NATO an instrument of love in
this instance? Were its bombs?
Cheap cynicism says no, of course. It was all about oil, or the West seeking military
bases in Libya, or French President Nicolas Sarkozy looking for a cheap foreign
policy success before next years election. But cheap cynicism is sometimes wrong.
You dont get oil more cheaply by invading a country: look at Iraq, which has sold all
its oil at the world market price for the past eight years despite US military
occupation. Why on Earth would the West want military bases in Libya? It already
has them nearby, in Italy. And Sarkozy took a very big risk in sending French planes
to back the rebels, although he must have known that any political boost he got
would be over by next year.
If the foreigners motives really were humanitarian they wanted to stop Gaddafys
atrocious regime from killing his own subjects, and thought that Libyans would be
better off without him then they actually were using force as an instrument of love.
Not love as in the love songs, but love meaning a genuine concern for the welfare
of others
Most resorts to force do not meet this criterion (although those using the force
generally claim that they do). The United States did not invade Iraq out of concern
for the welfare of Iraqis, for example. But once in a while there is a shining exception,
and this is one of those times.
The British, French, Canadians, Swedes, Qataris and so on would not have done it if
it involved large casualties in their own forces. (In fact, they had no casualties.) Most
Western soldiers didnt think the operation would succeed in removing Gaddafy, and
the outcome has been greeted with surprise and relief in most of the capitals that
sent aircraft. But they did it, and that counts for a lot.
The Strategy of 9/11
September 2011
Writing recently in the Washington Post, Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at
the Rand Corporation think tank, claimed that the 9/11 attacks ten years ago were
not a strategic success for al-Qaeda. Hes right. Osama bin Ladens strategy did fail,
in the end but not for the reason that Jenkins thinks.
Jenkins argues that Osama bin Laden believed the US was a paper tiger because it
had no stomach for casualties. Kill enough Americans, and the United States would
pull out of the Middle East, leaving the field free for al-Qaedas project of
overthrowing all the secular Arab regimes and imposing Islamist rule on everybody.
In bin Ladens 1996 fatwa declaring war on America, Jenkins pointed out, he claimed
that the US would flee the region if attacked seriously. Indeed, bin Laden gave the
rapid US military withdrawal from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks
in Beirut in 1983, and the equally rapid retreat of American forces from Somalia in
1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, as examples of American
cowardice.

Other al-Qaeda commanders disagreed, Jenkins says, warning that the 9/11 attacks
would enrage the United States and focus its fury on the terrorist group and its
allies, but bin Laden pushed ahead. When the United States did (invade
Afghanistan), bin Laden switched gears, claiming that he had intended all along to
provoke the United States into waging a war that would galvanise all of Islam against
it.
Jenkins is quite explicitly saying that bin Laden never realised that the United States
would respond violently when his organisation murdered thousands of Americans.
He would have been dismayed when the US invaded Afghanistan and destroyed his
training camps. And therefore, the think-tank expert concludes, the United States did
not fall into a trap that bin Laden had deliberately laid for it when it invaded
Afghanistan.
Well, thats one point of view. Heres another. Bin Laden was fully aware that the
United States would invade Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks, and he
wanted it to do so. He believed that the US would then get mired in a long and
bloody guerilla war in Afghanistan, a replay of the war against the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in the 1980s in which bin Laden himself had first risen to prominence.
Military commanders are always planning to re-fight the last war; terrorist
commanders are no different. Bin Laden hoped that a protracted guerilla war in
Afghanistan, with American troops killing lots of Muslims, would indeed galvanise all
of Islam against the United States.
So why didnt he say that beforehand? Why did he claim that the United States
would flee screaming at the first atrocity, if he really expected it to invade
Afghanistan? Because revolutionaries who resort to terrorism always talk freely
about their goals, but they NEVER publicly discuss their strategy for achieving them.
They cant, because the strategy is so profoundly callous and cynical.
Terrorists generally have rational political goals usually a revolution of some kind.
In bin Ladens case, he wanted Islamist revolutions across the Muslim world, but he
had been notably unsuccessful in whipping up popular support for such revolutions.
So how could he build that support? Well, how about luring the United States into
invading a Muslim country?
Revolutionary groups often resort to terrorism if they think they lack popular support.
Their aim is to trick their much more powerful opponent (usually a government) into
doing terrible things that will alienate the population and drive it into their arms: its
the political equivalent of jiu-jitsu.
They are trying to bring horror and death down on the population by triggering a
government crack-down or a foreign occupation, in the hope that it will radicalise
people and turn them into supporters of the terrorists political project. But the people
they seek to manipulate must believe that it was the oppressors or the foreign
occupiers, not the terrorists, who pulled the trigger. Thats why bin Laden lied about
his strategy.
He probably didnt even warn his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan that he was planning
9/11, because they would not have welcomed the prospect of being driven from
power and having to fight another ten-year guerilla war against another invading
superpower.
Bin Ladens strategy was not original with him: he had been fighting as a guerilla and
a terrorist leader for fifteen years by the time of 9/11, and people of this sort have
ALWAYS read all the standard texts on their chosen trade. The notion of using the
opponents strength against him absolutely permeates the how to books on guerilla
war and terrorism, from Mao to Marighella.

So bin Laden dug a trap, and the United States fell into it. In that sense his strategy
succeeded, and the guerilla war that ensued in Afghanistan did much to turn Arab
and Muslim popular opinion against America. (The invasion of Iraq did even more
damage to Americas reputation, but that really wasnt about terrorism at all.)
In the long run, however, bin Ladens strategy failed, simply because his project was
unacceptable and implausible to most Muslims. And the most decisive rejection of
his strategy is the fact that the oppressive old Arab regimes are now being
overthrown, for the most part nonviolently, by revolutionaries who want democracy
and freedom, not Islamist rule.
Civil War in Syria?
October 2011
Back in 1989, when the Communist regimes of Europe were tottering towards their
end, almost every day somebody would say Theres going to be a civil war. And
our job, as foreign journalists who allegedly had their finger on the pulse of events,
was to say: No, there wont be. So most of us did say that, as if we actually knew.
But the locals were pathetically grateful, and we turned out to be right.
It was just the same in South Africa in 1993-94. Another non-violent revolution was
taking on another dictatorship with a long record of brutality, and once again most
people who had lived their lives under its rule were convinced there would be a civil
war. So we foreign journalists (or at least some of us) reassured them that there
wouldnt be, and again we turned out to be right.
Now its Syrias turn, and yet again most of the people who live there fear that their
non-violent revolution will end in civil war. Its not my job to reassure them this time,
because like most foreign journalists I cant even get into the country, but in any case
I would have no reassurance to offer. This time, it may well end in civil war. Like Iraq.
The Assad dynasty in Syria is neither better nor worse than Saddam Husseins
regime was in Iraq. They had identical origins, as local branches of the same panArab political movement, the Baath Party. They both depended on minorities for their
core support: the Syrian Baathists on the 10 percent Alawite (Shia) minority in that
country, and the Iraqi Baathists on the 20 percent of that countrys people who were
Sunni Arabs.
They were both ruthless in crushing threats to their monopoly of power. Hafez alAssads troops killed up to 40,000 people in Hama when Sunni Islamists rebelled in
Syria in 1982, Saddam Husseins army killed at least as many Shias in southern Iraq
when they rebelled after the 1991 Gulf War, and both regimes were systematically
beastly to their local Kurds.
When the American invaders destroyed Saddam Husseins regime in Iraq in 2003,
however, what ensued was not peace, prosperity and democracy. It was a brutal civil
war that ended with Baghdad almost entirely cleansed of its Sunni Muslim population
and the whole country cleansed of its Christian minority. Only the Kurds, insulated by
their own battle-hardened army and their mountains, avoided the carnage.
So if the Baathist regime in Syria is driven from power, why should we believe that
what follows will be any better than it was in Iraq? The countrys ethnic and sectarian
divisions are just as deep and complex as Iraqs, and although non-violent protest
continues to be the main weapon of the pro-democracy movement, there is now also
violent resistance to the regimes attacks on the population.
This is not to swallow the Baath regimes claim that the army is protecting innocent
Syrians from terrorist armed gangs. The overwhelming majority of the estimated
2,900 civilians killed in the past six months were unarmed protesters killed by

soldiers and secret policemen. But some Syrians especially ex-soldiers who
deserted from their units to avoid having to murder civilians are starting to fight
back with weapons.
Time is running out in Syria. The revolutionaries struggle to keep their movement
inclusive and non-violent, but people are retreating into their narrow ethnic and
religious identities and resistance is turning violent. The most vulnerable minorities,
like the Christians, are starting to think about flight.
If it goes wrong in Syria, it could be almost as bad as the civil war that raged nextdoor in Lebanon for fifteen years: massacres, refugees, devastation. What can be
done to avert that outcome? Perhaps nothing short of foreign intervention on behalf
of the revolutionaries can stop it now, for otherwise the regime will fight on until the
country is destroyed.
Help has to come from outside, and its hard to imagine that happening. NATO
certainly wont take this one on: Syria has four times Libyas population and quite
serious armed forces. Non-military intervention in the form of trade embargoes and
the like is unlikely to work in time, even if the rest of the world could agree on it.
There is already foreign intervention in Syria, of course, but on the wrong side. The
Shia regimes in Iran and Iraq are already giving material support to the Baathist
regime in Syria on the grounds that it is a) Shia and b) steadfast in its resistance to
Israeli expansion. And there is no point in hoping for timely concessions from
President Bashar al-Assad, son of the late, great dictator: he is effectively the
prisoner of the Alawite elite.
The Syrian revolutionaries are on their own. They will probably bring down the
Baathists in the end, but by then the regimes increasingly violent efforts to suppress
the revolt may well have triggered the civil war that everybody fears. Another six
months like the last six months, and it will be all but inevitable.
Sic Transit Muammar Gaddafi
October 2011
When I was in school I used to wonder who Gloria Mundi was and how she had died,
but it turned out to be my defective Latin. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi means Thus
passes the glory of this world. But still, it kind of fits, doesnt it? Sic Transit
Muammar Gaddafi.
Being Muammar Gaddafi must have been a bit like being Mick Jagger. Youve been
playing the same role since you were very young, and everybody loves you for it, at
least to your face. You have actually become the standard by which all others
aspiring to the same role are judged. And after a while, you start to believe that you
really are Mick Jagger, and not just that guy from Dartford who can sing pretty well.
Im not denying that there were differences between the two men. To the best of my
knowledge, Mick Jagger never ordered anybody to be killed. (Neither did Keith
Richards, at least to the best of his recollection, and he swears that he remembers
everything.) Mick Jagger also has better taste in clothes than Muammar Gaddafi
had, especially in his later years when he took to wearing his mothers embroidered
drapes.
Sorry, that was unkind. They were actually ceremonial robes befitting the King of
Africa, which Gaddafi claimed on occasion that he was. It was just that his mother
liked very heavy, gaudy drapes, suitable for an African king (or his vision of an
African king), and his seamstress had a heavy-duty sewing machine, so why not?
Another difference between Jagger and Gaddafi is that Mick is unlikely to end his life
being bombed by the French air force, dragged out of a storm drain, man-handled

into the back of a pick-up truck, and showered with the curses of the men around
him as he bleeds to death. It becomes clearer with every passing day that it is better
to be a rock and roll hero than an Arab dictator, which doubtless explains Jaggers
career choice.
Am I being insufficiently serious here? Should I not be condemning Gaddafis crimes,
and lamenting the fact that he will never stand trial for them, and speculating on
Libyas future after 42 years of one-man rule? Isnt that what pundits are for?
Perhaps, but what would be the point? There are hundreds of other columnists who
are writing exactly that stuff, and none of them knows any more about Libyas future
than I do. Gaddafis crimes have been detailed in your friendly neighbourhood media
at least once a week for the past six months. Nobody really thought he was going to
live to stand trial. So lets talk about something interesting instead.
The interesting question is this: would Gaddafi have ended up as a delusional
egomaniac and a mass murderer if he had not had absolute power over an entire
country for his whole adult life? The answer is almost certainly no. It was the power
that made him that way.
He came from a bedouin family who lived in a traditional herders tent, but he was
sent away to boarding school. His family hired a tutor for him towards the end of high
school, which may explain how he got into the Libyan military academy. His
education was spotty and did not equip him for complicated intellectual endeavours,
but he was not an ignorant man. Millions like him have led productive and blameless
lives.
We do not know whether Gaddafi played well with others when he was a little boy,
but he was certainly popular with his fellow junior officers when he overthrew King
Idris at the age of 27. Contemporary reports portray him as an intensely serious
young man, charming when he needed to be but dedicated full-time to the Arab
cause. Its a profile that he shared with millions of other young idealists in the Arab
world.
So how did he end up as a dangerous but ridiculous monster? Those millions of
others didnt. If some other young officer had led the 1969 coup detat and made
himself the sole ruler of Libya for the next 42 years, Gaddafi might well have ended
up as a kindly retired army officer spending his time with his grandchildren. And quite
possibly that other young officer would have become the monster.
Lord Acton said it 120 years ago: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. By implication, he is
saying that Mummar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, and
the other mass murderers who have tormented the Arab world over the past
decades were shaped more by circumstances than by some intrinsic evil in their
character.
If Actons analysis is right, then countries where the rule of law is supreme and civil
society is strong should not produce such monsters, because they do not allow any
individual to have absolute power. If that were always true, then Hitler, for example,
could not have achieved absolute power, but it is USUALLY true.
So the remedy is obvious, in the newly free countries of the Arab world and
elsewhere, too. Democracy is good, but you also have to build strong civil institutions
and an independent judiciary. Its just a lot easier said than done.
Here Come the Muslim Fanatics
October 2011
Mustafa Abdul Jalil, chairman of Libyas National Transitional Council and the

countrys de facto leader, promised on Tuesday that sharia law would be the basis of
all new legislation, and that this would involve getting rid of certain existing laws
like the ban on polygamy. On the same day Tunisia announced that Annahda, an
Islamic party, had won the most votes in that countrys first free election. Here come
the Muslim fanatics.
Or so the Western media think, at least. Even since the Arab spring began, they
have been worrying aloud about the risk that in overthrowing the dictators, most of
whom were secular rulers, the revolutionaries were simply opening the door to rule
by religious fanatics. And the fanatics would, of course, hate the West and launch
terrorist attacks against it.
This is part of the narrative, mainly of American origin but also widely popular on the
European right, in which Islamist terrorists attacked the West not because of fifty
years of Western meddling in the Middle East, mainly in support of dictators, but just
because they hate our values. Or our freedoms; take your pick. That gets the
West off the hook: it was just an innocent passer-by who got mugged by crazies.
Thats Step One in the process. Then the correct description of the fanatics, which is
Islamist, mutates imperceptibly into Islamic, which just means a person,
organisation or doctrine that prioritises the values of the Muslim religion. But if you
dont understand the difference (and lots of people in the West dont), then you are
likely to think that any political success by an Islamic party means that the terrorists
win.
So an electoral success by an inoffensive Islamic party in Tunisia and some remarks
by an Islamic enthusiast in Libya (who has already promised not to seek permanent
political office in the country, like all the members of the NTC) add up to an victory
for the terrorists. At least in the view of many commentators and analysts in the
West. So let us dissect this notion.
Annahda, at least in its rhetoric, is a moderate Islamic party. Tunisians have voted
in fact for those parties that have been consistently part of the struggle for
democracy and opposed to Ben Alis dictatorship, said party spokesperson Yusra
Ghannouchi, and that is the simple truth. Moreover, Ennahdas leaders have
explicitly pledged to create a multi-party, secular democracy, not an Islamic state.
And although Ennahda came first in the election, it only got 40 percent of the votes.
Since the other five major parties, all centrist or centre-left, will together hold 60
percent of the seats in the new Constituent Assembly, the Islamic party could not
impose extreme religious laws on the country even if it wanted to and it swears it
doesnt.
The struggle will then be over the new constitution, which must be written by the
assembly over the next twelve months. The Islamic party wants a purely
parliamentary system, in which a prime minister is drawn from the largest party
would control the government, provided that his coalition commands a majority in
parliament.
The other, secular parties prefer a presidential system, with a directly elected
president holding executive power including the right to appoint the prime minister
(although the latter would still need a majority in parliament). The attraction of the
presidential system is that it normally involves a run-off election between the two
leading candidates in which the 65-35 advantage of the secular candidate wins
every time. And the secular parties will get their way.
So no Islamist victory there, and not much of an Islamic one. What about Libya?
Victory in Libya came not through non-violent action, but through six months of brutal
war against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi. The people who rise to positions of

influence in an armed uprising waged by volunteers are very different from those
who come to power in normal, peaceful politics. They tend to be flamboyant, good at
violence, and extreme in their views. Mustafa Abdul Jalil is all of those things, but he
is not the next dictator of Libya.
He can promise whatever he wants, but he wont be in power to deliver it. There will
be an election: the foreign air support that gave the rebels victory also gave the
foreigners the leverage to guarantee that. And few of the people elected are likely to
agree with Jalils views on polygamy in particular, or even the political role of Islam in
general.
For all Gaddafis posturing as a son of the desert, Libyans are no longer a tribal
people, let alone a nation of semi-nomadic, socially conservative herdsmen. Nor are
they a desperate rabble ready to follow the first radical to open his mouth.
Four-fifths of Libyans live in cities. They are pretty comprehensively detribalised, and
they have modest but regular incomes and small families. Women have more
freedom and equality than they do in most Arab countries, and the vast majority of
Libyans own their own homes. These are not people who are going to vote for a
return to some imaginary past of devout simplicity.
Repeat three times after me: Islamic is not the same as Islamist. And Arabs are
not fools; they are grown-ups.
The Arab League: The Infection Spreads
November 2011
For most of its 66-year history, the Arab League was a powerless organisation,
dominated by autocratic regimes that made sure it never criticised their lies and
crimes. But suddenly, this year, it woke up and changed sides.
Last March the Arab League suspended Libyas membership because of dictator
Muammar Gaddafis brutal attempts to suppress the revolution, and voted to back a
no-fly zone in Libya. That led directly to the UN resolution authorising the use of
force to protect civilians from Gaddafis army, and ultimately to the tyrants overthrow
and death.
Last Saturday the Arab League acted again, suspending Syrias membership. It did
so because President Bashar al-Assad has not carried out the commitments he gave
the League about ending the violence against Syrian civilians (an estimated 3,500
killed so far), pulling the army off the streets of Syrian cities, releasing the thousands
of recently imprisoned protesters, and opening a dialogue with the opposition within
two weeks.
On Sunday the Arab Leagues secretary-general, Nabil al-Arabi, called for
international protection for Syrian civilians as the organisation lacked the means to
act alone. There is nothing wrong with going to the UN Security Council because it
is the only organisation able to impose such measures, he added. And he said that
during a visit to Tripoli, the newly liberated capital of Libya.
Everybody understood the significance of his saying it there. The Arab League
explicitly rejects foreign military intervention in Syria, and NATO would never take on
Assads regime anyway. But al-Arabi was implicitly saying that what is happening in
Syria now is comparable to what was happening in Libya six months ago, and that all
measures short of war are justified to stop the slaughter in Syria and remove the
dictators regime.
Then on Monday, King Abdullah of Jordan finally said aloud what almost every other
Arab leader has been thinking: If Bashar [al-Assad] has the interest of his country
[at heart] he would step down.

Its particularly striking coming from Abdullah because the two men are not just
neighbours. They both came to power in 1999-2000, replacing fathers who had ruled
over their respective countries for decades, and they were both originally painted as
reformers. True, Bashar al-Assad is not technically a king, but he is equally the
product of a dynasty and here is his closest counterpart in the Arab world publicly
giving up on him.
King Abdullah added that on his way out, Bashar should also create an ability to
reach out and start a new phase of Syrian political life. Decoded, that means that
Syrias problems cannot be ending just by changing horses. The whole Baathist
regime, and the near monopoly of power by the Alawite minority that underpins it,
have to go too.
This is astonishing stuff. One year ago, nobody would have believed it possible that
eighteen of the twenty-two members of the Arab League would vote, in effect, for the
peaceful removal of the oppressive Syrian regime, or that the Jordanian king would
dare to be so frank about his neighbours problems and options. What has wrought
this miracle?
It would be nice to say that the rapid and largely non-violent spread of democracy in
the Arab world has brought enlightenment even to the most deeply entrenched
authoritarian regimes, but it would not be true. Only three of the 22 Arab League
members (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya) have actually had democratic revolutions, and
their example has not transformed the attitudes of all the other members. What
drives this response is mostly fear.
The Arab League said nothing when Bashar al-Assads father slaughtered up to
40,000 Syrians while putting down a revolt in the city of Hama in 1982, but his sons
brutality is simply unacceptable today. Arab leaders can no longer ignore the mass
killing of Arab citizens. Some of them would like to, but uncensored Arabic-language
mass media, broadcasting directly from satellites, have made it impossible.
Everybody knows whats going on.
Moreover, none of the other big countries of the Arab east Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan and Lebanon are very far from Syria. The longer the struggle there goes
on, the likelier it is to topple over into sectarian war and ethnic cleansing. The
neighbours are rightly terrified that the sectarian violence might then spill over into
their own countries as well, so the sooner Bashar al-Assad leaves office, the better.
And finally, there is the remarkable role being played by Qatar, the mouse that
roared. It is one of the smallest Arab states, but its ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
Al Thani, has been both brave and far-sighted. It was he who gave al-Jazeera
television, the first and best of the new satellite-based news operations, a terrestrial
home, and even substantial subsidies.
It was Qatar that took the lead in persuading the Arab League to suspend Gaddafis
regime last March, and then actually sent planes and military advisers to assist the
pro-democracy revolt in Libya. And it is Qatar again, in the form of Prime Minister
Hamid bin Jassim Al Thani, chair of the Leagues committee for dealing with Syrian
problems, that pushed the League into suspending Syria last week.
Whether that will actually produce the desired result in Syria remains to be seen. But
at least they are trying.
Progress Report: The Arab Autumn
November 2011
The Arab Spring was fast and dramatic: non-violent revolutions in the streets
removed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in a matter of weeks, and similar revolutions

got underway in Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. The Arab Autumn is a much
slower and messier affair, but despite the carnage in Syria and the turbulent run-up
to Egypts first democratic elections, the signs are still positive.
Demonstrators in Bahrain were driven from the streets by massive military force, and
Libyas revolution only triumphed after Western military intervention in support of the
rebels. In both Syria and Yemen, originally non-violent protests risk tipping into civil
wars. But there is still more good news than bad.
In October Tunisia held its first-ever free election, and produced a coalition
government that is broadly acceptable to most Tunisians. Some worry that the
leading role that the local Islamic party, Ennahda, gained in the new government
bodes ill for one of the Arab worlds more secular societies, but Ennahdas leaders
promise to respect the rights of less religious Tunisians, and there is no reason not
to believe them.
Last weekend, elections in Morocco produced a similar result, with the main Islamic
party, the Justice and Development Party, gaining the largest share of the votes but
not an absolute majority. It will doubtless play a leading role in the new government,
but it will not seek to impose its views and values on everybody else.
This Moroccan party took its name from the ruling Justice and Development (AK)
party in Turkey, an Islamic party that has won three elections in a row and presided
over the fastest economic growth in Turkeys history. Like the AK Party, the
Moroccan version is socially conservative, pro-free market, and fully obedient to the
secular constitution.
These parties are Muslim Democrats, as one AK Party member in Turkey put it,
comparing them to the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe. They have
nothing to do with radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda. They are simply the natural
repository for the votes of conservative people in a Muslim society, just as the
Republican Party automatically gets the votes of most Christian conservatives in the
United States.
There was no revolution in Morocco: the new constitution that was approved by
referendum last July was an attempt by King Mohamed VI to get ahead of the
demands for more democracy that are sweeping the Arab world. It obliges the king
to choose the prime minister from the party that wins the most seats in parliament,
rather than just naming whomever he pleases, and restricts his freedom of action in
several other ways.
Similar changes are underway in Jordan, where King Abdullah II is also trying to
ward off more radical demands for reform. And even the deeply conservative
monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula all supported the Arab Leagues decision last
weekend to impose sanctions against the brutal Assad regime in Syria, including an
asset freeze and an embargo on investments.
Syria may yet drift into civil war, but its fellow Arab states are taking their
responsibilities seriously: only two Arab countries voted against the sanctions. And
Yemens president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, resigned on 23 November after months of
prevarication and 33 years in power, giving that country at least a chance of making
progress towards a democratic future.
Egypt, by far the biggest Arab country, this week sees the start of parliamentary
elections that will roll across the country region by region until early January.
Demonstrators have re-occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, claiming that the army
wants to hold on to power, but things are not quite what they seem.
The army has already conceded that the new president should be elected by next
June rather than six months later, but the demos on the square were not really about

that. They were an attempt to force the postponement of the parliamentary elections.
The newly formed liberal and secular parties tacitly back the demonstrators because
they fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will win these elections. It may well do so,
because it continued to operate in a semi-underground way during the Mubarak
dictatorship while the old liberal parties just faded away. But the fact that some
parties are not as ready as others for the elections is not an excuse to postpone
them: Egypt urgently needs an elected government.
It will soon have one, and if the Muslim Brotherhood plays a major role in it, why not?
It has long outgrown its original radicalism, and you cant postpone democracy
forever just because you dont fully trust your fellow citizens.
That leaves Bahrain, the one Arab country where the Arab Spring was
comprehensively crushed. But in Bahrain last week, the king received the report of
an independent commission which concluded that there was no Iranian plot behind
the demonstrations, and that many detainees had been blindfolded, whipped,
kicked, given electric shocks and threatened with rape to extract confessions.
Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa expressed dismay at the findings and vowed that
those painful events wont be repeated. That may be a little disingenuous, but its
certainly a step in the right direction. Bringing democracy and the rule of law to the
Arab world was always going to be a difficult and tortuous process, but progress is
being made on many fronts.
The Sunni-Shia War
December 2011
Last Thursday, there were 16 bomb blasts in Baghdad (72 people killed, 217
injured). On Friday, two big car bombs in Damascus killed 40 people and injured
150. Even for Iraq, where there are suicide bombs every week, that is impressive.
For Syria, these were the first terrorist attacks after eight months of non-violent
protests. In both cases, however, perfectly sane people suspect that the government
itself was behind the attacks.
Iraqs Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi accused Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of
planning the attacks. This style of terrorist attack, its well beyond even al-Qaeda to
do it, he said. Those who were behind all these explosions and incidents [were]
part of the [government] security forces. Im sure about that.
Vice-President Hashemi was speaking from the semi-independent Iraqi region of
Kurdistan, where he fled last week after Prime Minister Maliki accused HIM of
plotting terrorist attacks. The Kurds will protect him because they have rejected
Malikis authority over them, but also because they are mostly Sunni Muslims, like
the Sunni Arabs whom Hashemi represents while Maliki, like most Arabic-speakers
in Iraq, is Shia.
Meanwhile, just across the border in Syria, the non-violent revolt against the
dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad has turned nasty. Or at least thats what Assads
regime wants people to believe: We said it from the beginning, didnt we? said
Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mekdad, standing by one of the blast craters. This is
terrorism. They are killing the army and ordinary people.
The regime claims that it was al-Qaeda that did the Damascus attacks, with Israeli
and American backing and that all opposition to the Syrian regime is actually
terrorism. This is a qualitative escalation of the terrorist operations that Syria has
been exposed to for the last nine months, said an interior ministry spokesman.
These two suicide terrorist operations show, once again, the real face of the plot
seeking to shake Syrias stability.

However, the leaders of the Syrian democratic movement think that the Assad
regime probably organised the attacks itself, to support its claim that there is no nonviolent insurgency in Syria, just attacks by armed terrorist groups.
The response of the United Nations Security Council to these events was telling. It
strongly condemned the Damascus bombs and sent its condolences to the victims,
their families and the Syrian people but it did not send condolences to the Syrian
government, which would be its usual practice in such a case. Nobody believes
Assads story.
What worries Arabs even more is the sectarian subtext to this story. Assad in Syria,
like Maliki in Iraq, is a Shia, while the opposition in both countries is mostly Sunni.
The difference is that Assad leads a largely Shia regime that is drawn from the
Alawite minority, barely ten percent of the population, in a country where most
people are Sunni Muslims. Maliki, by contrast, leads a Shia regime in a country that
is 60 percent Shia.
This tells us how likely it is that the regime in question ordered the bombings itself.
Iraqi Shias have been under attack by Sunni fanatics for years, but Maliki is in no
danger of losing power. He doesnt need to persuade Iraqi Shias that some of their
Sunni fellow citizens hate them; they already know that. So why would he attack his
own government?
By contrast, Assad faces the imminent risk of being driven from power. He is in the
last ditch, and his only hope is to convince the disbelieving world that the brave
Syrians who face his tanks unarmed are actually al-Qaeda terrorists. He (or
somebody in his employ) probably did order the bombings.
Behind all this looms a larger question: in the midst of liberating itself from tyrannies,
is the Arab world about to stumble into a Sunni-Shia religious war? The rhetoric is
getting paranoid on both sides, even though the original reasons for these sectarian
rivalries in Iraq and Syria have nothing to do with religion.
Iraqs army, and therefore its politics, were dominated by the local Sunni minority
because the country was ruled for 300 years by the Ottoman (Turkish) empire,
whose state religion was Sunni Islam. Sunni rule was only finally overthrown by the
American invasion of 2003, and the wounds on both sides of the religious divide are
still raw.
Syria is ruled by a Shia minority only because the French colonial army recruited its
local troops from the Alawites, precisely because they were a poor and despised
minority. That way, the French reckoned, they would be loyal to France, not to Syria.
But domination of the military ultimately let Alawites seize political control in
independent Syria.
There is no Shia plot against the Sunni Arab world, just old history that wont go
away. The danger is that Arab rulers start thinking that citizens cannot be loyal to the
state unless they have exactly the same religious beliefs as their rulers.
The European wars of religion a century of slaughter were not really about
doctrinal quarrels. They happened mainly because rulers became convinced that
they could not be safe if some of their citizens belonged to a different sect. Most
countries in the world today are living proof that that is nonsense, but Arab rulers,
both Sunni and Shia, are fast falling into the delusion that it is true. That would be a
disaster.
The Syrian Tragedy
January 2012
The Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in

various countries of the world, said Vitaly Churkin, Russias ambassador to the
United Nations, as the UN began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis last
Friday. He neednt worry. Even as Syria drifts inexorably towards a catastrophic civil
war, nobody else is willing to put troops into the country, so how are they going to
impose anything?
You cant blame them for their reluctance, because Syria isnt Libya. It is a big
country with a powerful army, the core of which will remain loyal to the Assad regime
right down to the last ditch. A good 30 percent of the civilian population will join them
in the ditch: the Alawites (Shia), the Christians, and some of the Kurds and Druze, all
of whom fear that the overthrow of the regime will put the Sunni Arab majority in the
driving seat.
Thats where they should be, of course they are at more than 70 percent of the
population but when revolutions triumphed recently in Tunisia and Egypt, the
subsequent elections brought explicitly Islamic parties to parties. Theres no
evidence that those parties will actually abuse the civil rights of minorities, but given
the increasingly sectarian nature of the struggle in Syria, the minorities there are
frightened by the prospect of Sunni power.
So the minorities will stick with President Bashar al-Assad no matter what his forces
do to the Sunnis, and there are enough of them, given the regimes virtual monopoly
of heavy weapons, to hold out against either domestic insurgency or foreign military
intervention for a long time. Thats why there wont be any foreign military
intervention.
But its getting worse in Syria. Several suburbs of Damascus itself have now fallen
into rebel hands, and Assads forces are shelling neighbourhoods only 5 km. (3 mi.)
from the centre of the city. Since last March, about 5,400 people have been killed by
the regimes military and paramilitary troops, and the 200 observers sent by the Arab
League in December didnt even slow the rate of killing.
In desperation, the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission last week and
called for Bashar al-Assad to hand over power to a deputy within two weeks. That
deputy would then be obliged to form a unity government with the opposition within
two months. In other words, it demanded the end of the regime.
In fact, the Arab League has even drafted a joint resolution with Britain, France and
Germany that threatens unspecified further measures against the Syrian regime if
Assad does not step aside. Nabil al-Arabi, the head of the Arab League, is in New
York this week to present it to the Security Council in person.
Thats the good news. The bad news is that the Syrian regime has already rejected
the Arab Leagues demand, insisting that whats really happening in Syria is attacks
by armed terrorist gangs (i.e. al-Qaeda) backed by Israel and the United States.
Ridiculous, but a lot of Alawites and Christians actually believe it.
The worse news is that Russia will veto the resolution before the Security Council
anyway. Assad is Moscows only real ally in the Middle East, and Russias only naval
base in the Mediterranean is on the Syrian coast. Bad Moscow but the truth is that
foreign military intervention would probably not stop the killing at this point unless it
was truly massive. That wouldnt happen even with a dozen Security Council
resolutions.
The worst news of all is that this probably means that Syria is heading down into the
same kind of hell that Lebanon went through in its fifteen-year civil war (1975-90).
It has just gone on too long. The Syrian protests began as a brave attempt to
emulate the non-violent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The Assad regime would
kill people, of course, but if the protesters stood fast and refused to kill back,

ultimately the regimes support would just drain away. Non-violence was doubly
important in the Syrian case, because if it were a violent revolution various minorities
would feel gravely threatened.
Alas, that non-violent strategy has foundered on the rock of Syrias sectarian and
ethnic divisions. Sunni deserters from the army started fighting back, and all the
other communities took fright. Now its a civil war in which the regime has the heavy
weapons but the Sunni Arabs have the numbers.
Syria is just as complex a society as Lebanon, although we can still hope that the
war does not go on as long. And its entirely possible that the Assad regime, whose
senior ranks are mostly drawn from the Alawite minority (only 10 percent of the
population), has deliberately chosen civil war. Better that than surrender power and
expose the Alawites to the vengeance they fear from all those whom they have ruled
for the past forty years.
This does not mean that the Arab spring was a mistake, or even that it is over. Few
other Arab countries have as divided a population or as ruthless a regime as Syria.
But it is still a great tragedy.
The Syrian Oppositions Great Mistake
February 2012
As the Syrian opposition abandons non-violent protest for armed resistance, many
people think this means that President Bashar al-Assad and his Baathist regime are
in even deeper trouble than before. On the contrary, it means that Assad and the
Baathists are winning.
The Baathists know how to destroy armed resistance. Bashars father, Hafez alAssad, crushed the armed uprising of 1982 with massive military force, destroying
the city of Hama and killing between 10,000 and 40,000 people in the process. He
got away with it, stayed in power, and died peacefully in his bed eighteen years later.
This time, the focus of the Baathist regimes attention is the rebel city of Homs, only
an hours drive south of Hama, and it is clearly willing to do the same thing there.
The people around Bashar believe theyll get away with it this time too and they
may be right.
The Arab League can pass a resolution demanding that Bashar hands over power to
a deputy at once, and that the Baathists form a unity government with the
opposition within two months, but Syrias rulers simply shrug it off. The Arab League
is not going to send troops to Syria.
Besides, the Baathist leadership comes mainly from the Alawite community, a Shia
Muslim minority that accounts for only ten percent of Syrias population. About
seventy percent of Syrias people are Sunni Muslims, as are the governments in all
the other members of the Arab League except Iraq and Lebanon. So the Syrian
Baathists think that the Leagues resolution is merely intended to drive Syrias Shias
from power, and they just ignore it.
A comparable resolution by the United Nations Security Council will never happen,
because Assads Russian and Chinese friends will veto it again if necessary. And
even if such a resolution were passed, no Western country is going to send troops to
intervene in Syria either. The country is too big and the regime is too well armed: this
is not another Libya.
So Assads calculations all have to do with how the confrontation plays out in Syria
itself. In that context, it is greatly to his advantage that the opposition is turning to
violence. Violence is much easier to defeat than non-violence.
Its a quarter-century since non-violent movements began driving oppressive

regimes from power: the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, East Germany, the
Soviet Union, Chile, South Africa, Serbia, Georgia, and most recently Egypt, not to
mention a dozen others. By now, everybody on both sides of the barricades has the
playbook. The tactics of the protesters are governed by strict rules and the regimes
also know and understand those rules.
Non-violent protesters have a whole menu of actions they can take to undermine the
regimes authority: mass demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, stay-at-homes and much
more. They also have a strict rule never to use violence against the regime and its
servants not because the protesters are pacifists, but because non-violence works
better.
It gets better results because if the protesters avoid violence, it is almost impossible
for a dictator to unleash all the force at his command. The regimes troops and police
will kill a few protesters each day, or even a few dozen, but they are psychologically
deterred from mass killing because the protesters pose no direct threat to them.
Whereas if the protesters do attack the regimes security forces, the soldiers and
police are released from this inhibition and will use extreme violence to protect
themselves. If physical force is what decides the confrontation, the regime almost
automatically wins, because the force it can deploy is so much greater. As soon as
the protesters throw the first brick or fire the first shot, the balance of power shifts
radically in favour of the regime.
Nowadays dictators understand this, and do everything in their power to provoke
their opponents into using violence. The Syrian protesters resisted this pressure for
months, clinging bravely to non-violence despite a relentless toll of deaths and
injuries inflicted by Assads regime. But then some of the regimes troops, sick of
killing their own people, deserted from the army and they took their weapons with
them.
Once the Free Syrian Army started fighting back, the internal pressure on Assads
regime lessened dramatically. Its claim that it was fighting armed terrorist gangs
gained some credence, especially among Alawites, Christians, Druze and other
Syrian minorities who fear Sunni Muslim domination in a democratic Syria. And the
willingness of the security forces to use really large-scale violence grew, because
now they were scared for their own safety.
It is a disaster for the Syrian opposition: their death-toll has now risen to hundreds
each week, but the deaths have less moral impact because they are happening in
what is becoming a mere civil war. Ugly and destructive though that will be, Assads
regime has a better chance of survival now than it did when the protests were strictly
non-violent.
Global Civilisation: The Options
March 2012
Reporter: What do you think of Western civilisation, Mr Gandhi? Mohandas Gandhi:
I think it would be a good idea. The quote is probably apocryphal, but if the
Mahatma didnt say it, he should have.
Now we have something close to a global civilisation: most of the worlds people
work in similar economies, use the same machines, and live about as long. They
even know most of the same things and have the same ambitions. So we need
somebody to ask us the same question. Do we really think a global civilisation is a
good idea? And if so, have we any plans for keeping it going beyond a few
generations more?
History is full of civilisations that collapsed, and often their fall was followed by a

Dark Age. In the past these Dark Ages were just regional events (Europe after the
fall of Rome, Central America after the collapse of Mayan civilisation, China after the
Mongol invasion), but now we are all in the same boat. If this civilisation crashes
then we could end up in the longest and worst Dark Age ever.
Our duty to our great grand-children is to figure out how to get through the 21st
century without a collapse. We have all the rest of history to get through, but we
cannot even imagine what the problems and opportunities of the 22nd century will
be, so lets concentrate on what would constitute interim success by 2100.
Interim success in 2100 would be a world in which a recognisable descendant of the
current civilisation is still thriving. The global population might be heading back down
towards the current seven billion by then, having peaked at several billion higher, but
it wont fall faster than that unless billions die in famine and war, so it must be a
future in which a very big population is still sustainable.
Unfortunately, the way we are living now is not sustainable. We have taken too much
land out of the natural cycles in order to grow our own food on it. We are
systematically destroying the worlds major fish populations through overfishing and
pollution. We are also driving most of the larger land animals to extinction.
This is a six-planet civilisation: it would take six Earth-like planets to sustain the
present human population in the high-energy, high-consumption style that is the
hallmark of the current global civilisation. Not all of the seven billion have achieved
that lifestyle yet, but they all want it and most of them are going to get it. And for the
foreseeable future we will have only one planet, not six.
Thats the real problem we must solve if we are to reach 2100 without civilisational
collapse and a massive dieback of the human population. All the other stuff we worry
about, like global warming, ocean acidification and the sixth great extinction, are
really signals that we are not solving the basic sustainability problem. Nor will we
ever solve it by just using less energy and eating less meat. Not at seven billion plus,
we wont.
So we really have only two options. We can go on in the present patchwork way,
with a bit of conservation here and some more renewable energy there, in which
case we are heading for population collapse through global famine, and probably
civilisational collapse as well because of the attendant wars, well before 2100.
Or we can try to float free from our current dependence on the natural cycles. Use
the scientific and technological capabilities of our current civilisation to reduce our
pressure on the natural world radically. Stop growing or catching our food, for
example, and learn to produce it on an industrial scale through biotechnology
instead.
Just achieving food independence would greatly reduce our vulnerability to climate
change, but we need to stop global warming anyway. Otherwise much of what we
call nature will not survive, and half the worlds big cities will be drowned by sea
level rise.
Given how much excess carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere
already through burning fossil fuels, that will probably require direct human
intervention in the climate system: geo-engineering, in other words. We must also
stop burning fossil fuels and move to alternative sources of energy as fast as we
can, but we almost certainly wont move fast enough to avoid runaway warming
without geo-engineering.
The more romantic environmentalists hate this stuff and insist that there is a third
option. They think we can avoid disaster just by learning to live lightly on the planet.
That would be nice, but it cant be done with seven billion people, even if they all

lived like Gandhi. That option disappeared at the latest in the 1960s, when we
passed the three-billion mark.
This civilisation is the distilled essence of a ten-thousand-year human fascination
with technology. It will live or die according to its ability to solve by new technologies
the problems it has created by its own past technological successes.
If we want our great-grandchildren to be happy in 2100 if we want them even to be
alive then we have to start managing some of the planets systems (like the climate
system), and to remove ourselves entirely from some of the others. There is no third
option.
Assad Wins, Syria Loses
April 2012
We, the undersigned armed terrorist groups, hereby promise to stop all violence in
Syria and surrender all our weapons to the Syrian regime. We will no longer carry
out the orders of Israel, the United States, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who
have been financing our campaign of armed terrorism against the Syrian people.
Love, the terrorists of the Free Syrian Army.
As soon as Bashar al-Assads regime in Syria gets written guarantees from the
armed terrorist groups to surrender, announced the Syrian foreign ministry on 8
April, it will comply with its promise to withdraw its tanks and artillery from rebellious
Syrian cities. Sorry, no, theres more. The regime also wants guarantees of
commitment by the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to stop financing
the armed terrorist groups.
The United Nations and the Arab League thought they had a deal. The Syrian
government had promised the mediator, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
that it would remove all its heavy weapons from urban areas by 10 April, and accept
a complete cease-fire by the 12th. But then Damascus announced that the
international community had been mistaken to think that it was really going to pull
its troops out.
Kofi Annan has until now not furnished to the Syrian government written guarantees
about the acceptance of the armed terrorist groups to stop violence in all its forms,
and their readiness to surrender their weapons so that state authority can spread on
all territory, the statement said. In other words, as soon as the pro-democracy side
surrenders unconditionally, peace i.e., the tyranny of the Baath regime will be
restored.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations and the Arab League were doing the best they could,
but with no member country willing to use military force against Syria they had no
leverage whatever. If Bashar al-Assad really pulled all his troops out of Syrian cities,
they would then immediately fall into the hands of the opposition, so he wasnt going
to do that.
The senior people at the UN and the Arab League who approved the deal were
hoping at least to put an end to the Syrian regimes use of massive force against
civilians. Assad was obviously not going to meekly give up power, but many innocent
lives would be saved if he could just be persuaded to stop using tanks and artillery
against cities. He would probably continue killing his opponents on a retail basis, but
the wholesale killing would stop.
However, Assad only agreed to the UN proposal in the first place because Russia
and China needed some diplomatic cover if they were to go on vetoing any action
against Syria by the Security Council. But it turns out that no country is willing to pay
the price in lives of a military intervention in Syria anyway, so it doesnt really matter

what the Security Council says and moving to a lower-profile strategy would have a
significant cost for the regime.
Suppressing the uprising one murder at a time, with the regimes intelligence
services and special forces operating in hostile urban areas, would cost them a lot
of casualties. The regime calculated the likelihood of foreign military intervention,
concluded that it was zero, and reneged on the deal.
It was worth trying to de-escalate the conflict, but it isnt going to happen. Shelling
cities with tanks and artillery is a highly inefficient way of restoring government
control over them, but it keeps the casualties down on the regime side.
So has the Assad regime won despite the deaths of 9,000 protesters? Probably.
Non-violent resistance to tyranny is a powerful tool, but no political technique works
every time without fail, and Syrias Baath Party was always a hard target.
It is a single-party regime that is dominated by and mainly serves the interests of a
minority, the Alawites (only 10 percent of the population), who fear catastrophic
revenge by the majority if they lose power. However, it also has significant support
from other minorities, notably the Christians and the Druze.
Most of the people in these groups have swallowed the guff about armed terrorist
groups, and they are all terrified of majority rule, which they are convinced would
hand power to the Sunni Muslims (70 percent of the population). That was not the
goal of the original protesters, who genuinely believed in a non-sectarian Syrian
democracy, but the Assad regime is adroit at the game of divide-and-rule.
The prospect of a non-violent transition to a democratic Syria that commands the
loyalty of all the countrys religious and ethnic groups has vanished. The people who
tried to make that happen were astoundingly brave, and they kept their protests
entirely peaceful for seven months despite extreme regime violence, but now most of
them have either been killed, or they have taken up arms.
The remaining options are both bad. If Assad succeeds in suppressing all resistance,
Syria will be an even more oppressive and unjust place than it was before. If he only
partially succeeds, it will open the way to an all-against-all civil war like the one that
devastated Lebanon in 1975-1990. There is no plausible third option.
Am I saying that an Assad victory is Syrias best remaining option? No, I cannot
bring myself to say that. But I think that I am writing the epitaph of Syrias attempted
non-violent revolution.
Afghanistan Lies
April 2012
In the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on Sunday, a journalist called the
British embassy for a comment. I really dont know why they are doing this, said the
exasperated diplomat who answered the phone. Well be out of here in two years
time. All they have to do is wait.
The official line is that by two years from now, when US and NATO forces leave
Afghanistan, the regime they installed will be able to stay in power without foreign
support. The British diplomat clearly didnt believe that, and neither do most other
foreign observers.
However, General John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance
Force, predictably said that he was enormously proud of the response of the
Afghan security forces, and various other senior commanders said that it showed
that all the foreign training was paying off. You have to admire their cheek: multiple
simultaneous attacks in Kabul and three other Afghan cities prove that the Western
strategy is working.

The Talibans attacks in the Afghan capital on Sunday targeted the national
parliament, NATOs headquarters, and the German, British, Japanese and Russian
embassies. About a hundred people were killed or wounded, and the fighting lasted
for eighteen hours. There was a similar attack in the centre of the Afghan capital only
last September. If this were the Vietnam war, we would now have reached about
1971.
The US government has already declared its intention to withdraw from Afghanistan
in two years time, just as it did in Vietnam back in 1971. Richard Nixon wanted his
second-term presidential election out of the way before he pulled the plug, just as
Barack Obama does now.
The Taliban are obviously winning the war in Afghanistan now, just as North
Vietnams troops were winning in South Vietnam then. The American strategy at that
time was satirised as declare a victory and leave, and it hasnt changed one whit in
forty years. Neither have the lies that cover it up.
The US puppet government in South Vietnam only survived for two years after US
forces left in 1973. The puppet government in Kabul may not even last that long after
the last American troops leave Afghanistan in 2014. But no Western general will
admit that the war is lost, even though their denial means that more of their soldiers
must die pointlessly.
Its like I see in slow motion men dying for nothing and I cant stop it, said
Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, a US Army officer who spent two tours in
Afghanistan. He returned home last year consumed by outrage at the yawning gulf
between the promises of success routinely issued by American senior commanders
and the real situation on the ground.
To be fair, none of those generals was asked whether invading Afghanistan was a
good idea. That was decided ten years ago, when most of them were just colonels.
But if they read the intelligence reports, they know that they cannot win this war. If
they go on making upbeat predictions anyway, they are responsible for the lives that
are wasted.
It is consuming me from inside, explained Lt-Col Davis, and he wrote two reports
on the situation in Afghanistan, one classified and one for public consumption. The
unclassified one began: Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the
truth when communicating with the US Congress and the American people as
regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become
unrecognisable.
Col Davis gave his first interview to the New York Times in early February, and sent
copies of the classified version to selected senators and representatives in
Congress. But no member of Congress is going to touch the issue in an election
year, for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. So American, British and other Western
soldiers will continue to die, as will thousands of Afghans, in order to postpone the
inevitable outcome for a few more years.
Its not necessarily even an outcome that threatens American security, for there was
always a big difference between the Taliban and their ungrateful guests, al-Qaeda.
The Taliban were and are big local players in the Afghan political game, but they
never showed any interest in attacking the United States. Al-Qaeda were panIslamist revolutionaries, mostly Arabs and Pakistanis, who abused their hosts
hospitality by doing exactly that.
It was never necessary to invade Afghanistan at all. Senior Taliban commanders
were furious that al-Qaedas 9/11 attacks had exposed them to the threat of
invasion, and came close to evicting Osama bin Laden at the Kandahar jirga (tribal

parliament) in October, 2001. Wait a little longer, spread a few million dollars around
in bribes, and the United States could probably have had a victory over al-Qaeda
without a war in Afghanistan.
Its much too late for that now, but al-Qaeda survives more as an ideology than as an
organisation, and most Afghans (including the Taliban) remain profoundly
uninterested in affairs beyond their own borders. Whatever political system emerges
in Afghanistan after the foreigners go home, it is unlikely to want to attack the United
States. Pity about all the people who will be killed between now and then.
Sudan Is Not The Norm
April 2012
President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has been having some fun with language
recently. He has come up with a new name for the Sudan Peoples Liberation
Movement (SPLM), the party that has formed the government of South Sudan since
it finally got its independence from Sudan last July.
Movement, in Arabic, is haraka, but Bashir has started using the word hashara
instead. Hashara means insect, and Sudans official media have obediently taken
up the abusive term. Everybody remembers that the Hutu regime in Rwanda
described the Tutsi minority as cockroaches when it launched the terrible ethnic
genocide in 1994, and its particularly troubling because Sudan and South Sudan are
on the brink of war.
The oil town of Heglig, on the new and disputed border between the two countries,
has changed hands twice this month: first South Sudan drove Sudanese troops out,
then the Sudanese took it back. South Sudans government insists that it withdrew
voluntarily, but the facilities that supplied half of Sudans oil have been
comprehensively wrecked.
The war, if it comes, would be over the control of the oil reserves along the
undefined border, but it would also be an ethnic conflict. The majority in Sudan thinks
of itself as Arab, and looks down on the African ethnic groups of South Sudan.
Members of the Sudanese elite, conditioned by centuries of Arab slave-trading in
Africa, sometimes even use the word abd (slave) in private when referring to
southerners.
The rhetoric is getting very ugly. Bashir recently told a rally in Khartoum: We say
that (the SPLM) has turned into a disease, a disease for us and for the South
Sudanese citizens. The main goal should be liberation from these insects and to get
rid of them once and for all, God willing. It will, he implied, be a total war: Either we
end up in Juba (South Sudans capital) and take everything, or (they) end up in
Khartoum and take everything.
This is nonsense: neither sides army has the logistical support to advance as far as
the other sides capital. But they could certainly kill a lot of people about two million
died in the 22-year war that ended in South Sudans independence and they seem
determined to do it all over again.
So what are we to make of this folly? Many people will simply say Its Africa. What
did you expect? Others, more sophisticated, will lament that mankind is still trapped
in an endless cycle of wars. Almost nobody will say to themselves: Pity about the
two Sudans, but they are just one of the inevitable exceptions to the rule that war is
in steep and probably irreversible decline everywhere. Yet that is what they should
say.
War between countries is not the norm in Africa: there are 52 African countries, and
only two pairs have gone to war with each other in the past twenty years.

Internal wars are much more common, and some, like those in Rwanda, Somalia,
Congo and Sudan, have taken a huge number of lives. But those wars were killing
on average more than half million people a year in the 1980s; now the annual death
toll from internal conflicts in Africa is around 100,000. Its not as bad as people think
it is, and its getting better.
There has been a profound change in attitudes to war not just in Africa, but all over
the world. Most people no longer see war as glorious, or even useful. They dont see
it as inevitable, either, and their governments have put a lot of effort into building
international institutions that make it less likely.
No great power has gone to war with any other great power in the past 67 years.
That is a huge change for the better, for the great powers are the only countries with
the resources to kill on a truly large scale: it would take a centurys worth of Africas
wars at their worst to match the death toll in six years of the Second World War.
This change of attitude has not reached the Sudans, where several generations
have lived in a permanent state of war. It is hard to imagine anything more stupid
and truculent than the decision of Salva Kiir, the president of South Sudan, to halt all
oil production (although it provided 98 percent of his governments budget) because
Sudan was siphoning off some of the oil.
No, wait. That was no more foolish and aggressive than Omar al-Bashirs unilateral
seizure of much of South Sudans oil (which crossed Sudan in pipelines to the sea),
just because the two sides had not reached an agreement on transit fees. Now both
countries are short of oil, strapped for cash and about to waste their remaining
resources on another stupid war.
But at least the rest of world is trying hard to stop them. Even South Sudans closest
friends condemned it for seizing the town of Heglig, and forced it to withdraw. The
African Union has sent former South African president Thabo Mbeki and special
envoy Haile Menkarios to mediate between the two sides. China, which took most of
the oil exports from both countries, has sent its envoy to Africa, Zhong Jianhua, on a
similar mission.
Who knows? They might even succeed. Miracles happen all the time these days.
Egypt Elects a President
May 2012
After eleven demonstrators were killed outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo early
this month, Mohammad al-Assaf, a member of the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces (SCAF), expressed his astonishment that anybody might suspect the military
of wanting to rig the forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt. The armed forces
and its Supreme Council are committed to handing over power at the scheduled time
or even before 30 June, he said.
State television, still controlled by supporters of the old regime, explained that the
people who attacked the demonstrators were local residents of the Abbassiya district
who had grown sick of continued demonstrations. What could be more
understandable than that?
Its so easy to imagine the men of Abbassiya spontaneously rummaging around in
their houses for pistols and shotguns, determined to end the nuisance that made it
almost impossible to get to the new metro station. Then they gathered at 2 am in two
separate groups and simultaneously charged the demonstrators from two different
directions, as random mobs of disgruntled citizens so often do.
Nine of the eleven dead demonstrators were killed by head shots, a sure sign that
amateurs were at work. Only a died-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist would suspect

that the attackers were the same old gang of thugs-for-hire that the old regime
turned to when it wanted to use deniable but lethal violence on crowds of
demonstrators.
Oh, all right then, have it your way. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,
which has been Egypts transitional government since the revolution of 11 February,
2011, was indeed behind the murders or at least, some people very close to the
SCAF were. Thats why the soldiers and police watching all this did not intervene for
six hours. So the question is: what did the senior military hope to achieve by doing
this?
Partly, they were just being their usual clumsy, brutal selves. But they were also
defending their policy of removing all the radicals from the race.
Most of the demonstrators in front of the Defence Ministry were protesting against
the disqualification in mid-April of their presidential candidate, Sheikh Hazem Abu
Ismail of the Nour Party. He was a front-runner in the presidential race, two of the
others being Khairat al-Shater of the Muslim Brotherhood and the old regimes
intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman both of whom were disqualified too.
Abu Ismail was disqualified because the new parliament passed a xenophobic law
demanding that the parents and grandparents of any candidate must be Egyptian
and nothing else. The Nour Party had voted for that law but then it turned out that
Abu Ismails late mother had also taken American citizenship before she died. Or so
the junta-appointed Higher Presidential Election Commission claimed, although he
denied it.
The result of the militarys machinations is that ten of the 27 candidates for the
presidency have been removed, including all the more extreme ones with any
serious prospect of winning the election. The front-runners among the remaining
thirteen are two Islamic candidates and two secular ones, none of whom could be
called extremists.
Mohammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who took the place of the disqualified
Khairat al-Shater, has all the charisma of a cabbage. He may even win fewer votes
than Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former Brotherhood man who is running as an
independent.
On the secular side, is Amr Moussa, a former Egyptian foreign minister and ex-head
of the Arab League, and former air force commander Ahmed Shafiq, who was briefly
prime minister in the last days of the Mubarak regime. All moderates.
Its impossible to predict who will win, because the election on 23-24 May will only
produce two front-runners, who will then face a run-off contest on mid-June. What
can be said with confidence is that the man the armed forces finally hand power over
to at the end of June will not be a radical.
Disappointed? You wanted Egyptians to conduct a radical political experiment you
would never want to see tried in your own country? Tough.
In 1998 there was a similar non-violent democratic revolution in another big Muslim
country. The dictator who was overthrown, like Hosni Mubarak, was a former general
who had ruled his country for more than twenty years. The first elected president
was the leader of a prominent Islamic organisation, which frightened the countrys 10
percent Christian minority.
Islamic parties also gained a dominant position in the new parliament, and the more
excitable observers predicted national disaster. However, Indonesia today is a stable
democracy with one of the worlds fastest-growing economies.
Indonesia is far from perfect. The military still has enough clout to ensure that
defence spending stays high, and the police are more corrupt than ever. But the

mainstream Islamic parties have stopped demanding Sharia law and MuslimChristian violence has practically ended. The place is a genuine but deeply imperfect
democracy like India, say, or the United States.
Nobody in Indonesia wants the former dictator Suharto back, and already almost
nobody in Egypt wants Mubarak back. It will get better in Egypt, though more slowly
than most Egyptians hope.
Mali: The Dreams of Capt. Amadou Sanogo
May 2012
Imagine that you are a junior officer in a West African army. You joined the army at
18, you worked hard, you managed to get sent to the United States four times for
various training courses, but somehow the promotions never came. You have just
turned forty, and in ten or fifteen years you will have to retire on a captains pension.
What to do?
That is Capt. Amadou Sanogo, and in March he finally figured out what to do. He
launched a military coup and declared himself president of Mali. Nice work, if you
can get it but then the roof fell in on his empty head.
A military coup against an elected government rarely lasts long if the general
population is willing to defend it: the soldiers can usually be driven from power by a
general strike. However, Sanogo had some grievances to work with. Mali was
extolled elsewhere as a beacon of democracy, but the government was actually both
corrupt and incompetent.
The main thing you need for a junior officers coup is the support of the ordinary
soldiers. Theres not really much it for the men in the ranks, apart from the
opportunity to loot: theyre never going to sit in the presidents chair, so they have to
be deeply unhappy about the civilian government before theyll back a coup. Happily
for Capt. Sanogo, they were quite cross at President Amadou Toure.
Yet another revolt among the Tuareg ethnic group in Malis desert north broke out
last January, the fourth since 1960. President Toures government was not giving the
army adequate weapons and supplies to deal with it (or at least that was the armys
excuse). The rebels had only seized a couple of small towns on the far-distant
Algerian border, but Malian soldiers were feeling humiliated and neglected.
But while the soldiers were very angry at Toures government by this March, there
was no need for a military coup to change it. National elections were already
scheduled for April, and Toure, having completed two terms in office, could not run
again. How can you justify using military force to remove a president who is leaving
office next month anyway?
You cant, but then nothings perfect. At least the ordinary soldiers at the base Capt.
Sanogo commanded just outside the capital, Bamako, were ready to follow his lead.
So on 22 March he moved his troops into Bamako and declared that he was taking
power because the elected government was not doing enough to halt the rebellion in
the north.
President Toure went into hiding, and suddenly Capt. Sanogo was the most powerful
man in Mali but within a week two things went badly wrong for him.
Sanogo seems not to have realised that ECOWAS, the Economic Community of
West African States, strongly disapproves of military coups in its members (since
each member government fears such a fate itself). He was therefore surprised when
ECOWAS banned all trade across landlocked Malis borders and froze Malis
accounts at BCEAO, the central bank for all the West African countries that use the
CFA franc.

He was even more surprised when the Tuareg rebels took advantage of the turmoil
in Bamako to overrun the entire north of Mali, an area bigger than France, in only
one week. There was little fighting: the Malian army units just fled, as did tens of
thousands of black African refugees. Pale-skinned Tuaregs living in the south also
became targets for violence. Sanogos coup brought about exactly what it was meant
to prevent.
These events, plus the growing shortage of fuel for transport and electricity (Mali
imports all its oil), forced Sanogo to talk to ECOWAS. On 12 April, after only three
weeks in power, Sanogo agreed that the speaker of parliament, Dioncounda Traore,
would become the countrys interim leader until new elections could be held. Sanogo
was paid off with a mansion and a pension suitable for a former head of state.
Only a week later, however, Traore was severely injured by a mob that invaded his
residence while Sanogos troops stood by and did nothing. Sanogo is still running
things from behind the scenes, while Traore is now in France undergoing medical
treatment. And last Saturday the two rival Tuareg rebel groups that now control the
north managed to settle their differences and declared the independence of the
Islamic Republic of Azawad.
For a man whose ambition outran his understanding, Sanogo has accomplished a
lot. In just a month he has ruined an imperfect but serviceable democracy and
divided it into two hostile states: it will take years for Mali to recapture the north, if it
ever can. And in Azawad the fighting will continue, because the black Africans
living along the big bend of the Niger river in the south of that territory do not accept
Tuareg rule.
Those who doubt the ability of mere individuals to change the course of history
should contemplate Captain Amadou Sanogo.
Assad Chooses Civil War
May 2012
There is no doubt that the (Syrian) government used artillery and tanks (in Houla),
said Russias foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday but then he added: There
is also no doubt that many bodies have been found with injuries from firearms
received at point-blank range. We are dealing with a situation where both sides
participated in the killings of innocent civilians.
Russia is at last admitting that Syria is using heavy weapons against its own civilian
population. It could hardly do less, given the scale of Saturdays massacre in the
village of Taldou in the Houla region: at least 108 civilians killed, including 49
children. But while other countries are expelling Syrian ambassadors, Lavrov is still
trying to spread the blame in order to protect Bashir al-Assads regime from foreign
intervention.
While some of the victims in Houla were killed by shellfire, others had been shot at
close range or knifed to death. Assads propagandists insist that the fighters of the
Syrian opposition (the armed terrorist gangs, as the regime calls them) massacred
their own people with rifles and knives in order to put the blame on the government,
and Russia is actively promoting the same story. But it is nonsense, and Lavrov must
know it.
The testimony of eyewitnesses is consistent: after two hours of shelling by the Syrian
army, armed men belonging to the pro-government Shabiha militia entered the
village and went door to door killing suspected activists and their families. The
government in Damascus doesnt care that everybody knows its lying: the whole
point of the massacre is to terrify Syrians into submission, and it knows that NATO

will not intervene.

The victims murdered in Houla last weekend are only one percent of the Syrian
citizens killed by their own government since the anti-regime protests began in
March of last year, but some people hope that this will be a turning point in foreign
attitudes to Assad. They even talk about it as a mini-Srbrenica.
That was the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces in 1995 that finally
persuaded the NATO countries to use force against Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator
of Serbia, but its not going to happen here. The brazen effrontery of the Assad
regime in perpetrating such a massacre even after United Nations/Arab League
monitors have entered the country shows how confident it is that the Western
alliance will not use force against him.
NATO will not go beyond empty threats because it cannot get the support of the
United Nations Security Council for using force against Assads regime (the
Russians and the Chinese would veto it), and because the Syrian armed forces are
so big and powerful that it would suffer significant losses if it attacked.
If there is no foreign military intervention, then Syria is heading into a prolonged civil
war like Lebanons in 1975-1990: the ethnic and religious divisions in Syria are quite
similar to those in Lebanon. If the Syrian regime understands that, then why does it
persist in killing the protesters? Because it reckons that fighting a prolonged civil war
is better than losing power now.
The pro-democracy protests in Syria began soon after the triumph of the Egyptian
revolution in February, 2011, and for six months they remained entirely non-violent
despite savage repression by the regime. (By last September, Assads forces had
already murdered about 3,000 Syrian civilians.) And so long as the demonstrations
stayed non-violent, the vision of a Syrian democracy embracing all sects and ethnic
groups remained viable.
Assads strategy for survival had two main thrusts. One was to divide the opposition.
At the start the protests included Christians, Druze, and even some people from
Assads own community, the Alawites. He needed to separate those minority groups
from the majority of the protesters, the Sunni Muslims who make up 70 percent of
Syrias population.
His other goal was to lure the protesters into using force, because that would license
his own army to use far greater force against them. Eventually, in October/
November, deserters from the Syrian army (who took their weapons with them)
began shooting back at Assads troops, and he had his pretext. After that, he was
free to use artillery against city centres, slaughter whole villages, whatever he liked.
The shift to open warfare also had the effect of frightening most Christians, Druze
and Alawites back into the regimes camp. They bought the regimes lies about the
resistance being run by Sunni Islamist fanatics with al-Qaeda connections (although
it is nothing of the sort), and decided that even Assad and his henchmen were better
than a democracy that brought vengeful Sunni Muslims to power.
So Assad now has about 30 percent of the population on his side, plus most of the
army, all of the heavy weapons, and the worlds nastiest intelligence services. Thats
enough to fight a long civil war, and maybe even enough to win it.
Russia and China will guard Assads diplomatic flank, and the other Arab states will
do nothing beyond sending some money and a few weapons to the rebels. Former
UN secretary-general Kofi Annans six-point peace plan is a dead letter, and NATO
will not intervene militarily. Civil war is Assads best option for survival, and hes not
stupid.

Assads Russian Defenders: Why?

June 2012
The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Syria has suspended its peace mission.
The observers will not be conducting patrols and will stay in their locations until
further notice, said the commander of the 300-strong multinational observer force,
Norwegian General Robert Mood.
This decision by the observer force is fully justified: its observers were being
prevented from visiting massacre sites by the Syrian army, and yet their mere
presence created the false impression that the international community was doing
something. So now the international community will be under even greater pressure
to do something else about the Syrian tragedy. That means military action against
the Assad regime but the Russians will veto that.
Russian diplomacy is not usually so clumsy. None of the Western great powers will
actually send troops to intervene in Syria: the Syrian army is too strong, and the
sectarian and ethnic divisions in the country are far too messy.
So why dont the Russians just promise to abstain in any UN Security Council vote
on military intervention? No such vote will happen anyway, and Moscow would
expose the hypocrisy of the Western powers that are pretending to demand action
and blaming the Russians (and the Chinese) for being the obstacle.
Its stupid to bring such opprobrium on your own country when you dont have to, but
both President Vladimir Putins elective dictatorship in Russia and the Communist
Party in China fear that one day they might face foreign intervention themselves.
There must therefore be no legal precedent for international action against a regime
that is merely murdering its own people on its own sovereign soil.
In reality, there is one kind of justice for the great powers and another for weaker
states, and neither Moscow nor Beijing would ever face Western military intervention
even if they were crushing non-violent protests by their own people, let alone
drowning an armed revolt in blood.
You only have to imagine the headlines that such an intervention would create to
understand that the whole proposition is ridiculous. Security Council votes to
intervene in China to protect protesters from regime violence! American troops
enter Russian cities to back anti-regime revolt! Such headlines are only slightly less
implausible than Martians invade Vatican City, kidnap Pope!
But we are dealing here with the nightmare fantasies of regimes that secretly KNOW
they are illegitimate. They never acknowledge it in public, and they dont discuss it
directly even in private. But they know it nevertheless, and they understand that
illegitimacy means vulnerability.
It doesnt matter that Russia or China can simply veto any UN resolution that is
directed against them. It makes no difference that no sane government in the rest of
the world would commit the folly of sending troops to intervene in either of these
giants. Paranoid fears cannot be dissolved by the application of mere reason.
Both Vladimir Putin and the Chinese leadership are appalled by the growing
influence of the responsibility to protect principle at the United Nations, which
breaches the previously sacred doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of member
states. R2P says that foreign intervention can be justifiable (with a UN Security
Council resolution, of course) to stop huge human rights abuses committed by
member governments.
The Russian and Chinese vetoes on the Security Council give them complete
protection from foreign military intervention, but they still worry about it. And they
look with horror at the phenomenon of non-violent revolutions that has been

removing authoritarian regimes with such efficiency, from the ones that overthrew
Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and almost overthrew the Chinese regime in
1989 down to the Arab ones of today.
Moscow and Beijing have convinced themselves that there is a Western hidden
hand behind these uprisings, even though Western actions (like the US backing for
Egypts President Mubarak that continued until almost the last minute of the
revolution) and Western interests both argue otherwise.
Now, in Syria, they see both of these threats coalescing. First, for eight months, they
watch strictly non-violent protests despite some thousands of killings by the Syrian
state undermine the Assad regime.
Then, when some of the protesters start fighting back and the regime responds with
even greater violence, bombarding city centres and committing open massacres of
villagers, they hear the Western powers begin to talk about their responsibility to
protect, with the (deliberately misleading) implication that they are contemplating
direct military intervention in Syria to stop it.
So Russia and China will veto any Security Council resolution that condemns the
Assad regime, and certainly any resolution that hints at military intervention. Assad
must survive, not because he buys a few billion dollars worth of Russian arms and
gives Russia a naval base in the Mediterranean, but because his overthrow would be
a precedent that, they imagine, might one day be used against them.
Utter nonsense, but it means that the Russians, in particular, will go on taking the
blame for the UNs immobility and lending cover to the Wests pretense that it would
act against Assad if only the Russians would get out of the way. They will protect
Assad right down to the bitter end and it may be very bitter indeed.
Egypt: End Game
June 2012
If we find that Scaf (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) stands firm against
us as we try to fulfill the fulfill the demands of the revolution, said Fatema AbouZeid
of the Muslim Brotherhood as the final results of Egypts presidential election last
weekend rolled in, we will go back to the streets and escalate things peacefully to
the highest possible level.
Now we have a new factor in Egyptian politics, the Egyptian people themselves
she continued. (They) will not accept a return to the old regime in any form, not after
so much Egyptian blood was shed to remove it. Well, maybe.
Theres nothing like an election to make things clear. Now all the cards are on the
table in Egypt, and the last round of bidding has begun. The army has opened with a
very high bid in the hope of scaring everybody else off, and now the other players
have to decide whether to call or fold.
Sometimes, even in long-established democratic states, the players simply fold in
order to avoid a destructive constitutional upheaval. Thats what the Democratic
Party did when the United States Supreme Court awarded the state of Florida and
the presidency to George W. Bush in the disputed election of 2000.
It was an outrageously partisan decision by the 5-4 Republican majority in the
Supreme Court, but if the Democrats had rejected it the United States would have
faced months or even years of political turmoil. If they had foreseen the devastation
that the Bush presidency would cause they might have done otherwise, but at the
time their decision seemed wise.
It is possible that the Egyptian opposition a uneasy amalgam of the secular and
leftist young who overthrew the dictator Hosni Mubarak on Tahrir Square sixteen

months ago and the Muslim Brotherhood (which initially avoided direct confrontation
with the old regime) will also just fold. After sixteen months of upheaval so many
ordinary Egyptians just want stability that the army might win a showdown in the
streets.

The problem is that the Egyptian army has bid much higher than the US Supreme
Court ever did so high that if the other players fold they lose almost everything.
This is a brazen bid to revive the old regime minus Mubarak, and restore the armed
forces to the position of economic privilege and political control that they have
enjoyed, to Egypts very great cost, ever since Gamal Abdel Nassers coup in 1952.
On 14 June, just 48 hours before the polls opened for the second round of the
presidential election, Egypts Supreme Constitutional Court announced that last
years parliamentary election, in which Islamic parties won almost three-quarters of
the seats, was conducted by rules that contravened the constitution.
There was a legitimate question about whether the political parties should have been
allowed to run candidates in the seats reserved for independents. No, said the court,
all of whose judges were appointed by the old regime. But rather than just ruling that
there must be by-elections in those seats, they declared that the whole parliament
must be dissolved.
This bizarre decision presumably meant that the 100-person constituent assembly
created by the parliament to write Egypts new constitution was also dissolved. The
army still swears that it will hand power over to the new democratically elected
president on 30 June but he will now take office with no parliament and no
constitution to define his powers.
Might there have been some collusion between the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces and the Supreme Constitutional Court in this matter? Is the Pope a Catholic?
Last Sunday, only three days after the Court handed down its judgement and just as
it was becoming clear that the old regimes candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, would
probably lose the presidential election, the Scaf issued an interim constitutional
declaration. It effectively gives the military legislative powers, control over the
budget, and the right to pick the committee that writes the new constitution.
Since that committee will not report until the end of the year, in the meantime there
will be no election for a new parliament. There will be an elected president, but he
will not even have authority over the armed forces: the armys interim constitution
strips him of that power, and no doubt its tame committee will write it into the new
permanent constitution as well.
The Scaf cant have come up with all this in just 72 hours after the decision of the
Supreme Constitutional Court on the 14th. There had to be a lot of coordination
between the military and the Court beforehand. You could call this a constitutional
coup, but the more accurate phrase is military coup. So what can Egyptians do
about it?
They can go back to Tahrir Square, this time student radicals and Muslim Brothers
together, and try to force the army out of politics. That will be very dangerous,
because this time, unlike February of last year, the generals may actually order the
soldiers to clear the square by gunfire. Or the opposition, aware that the mass of the
population has no appetite for more confrontation and instability, may just submit and
hope for a better day.
If it does that, the Egyptian revolution is dead.
Syria XIV (or whatever)

June 2012
Kofi Annan does the best he can. At least hes back in harness, doing what he does
best: trying to make peace where there is no hope of peace. The rest of them do the
best they can, too, give or take the odd Russian. Well, not exactly the best they can,
but at least they do enough to make it look like theyre trying. And you cant really
blame them for faking it, because they all know it that it cant work.
On Saturday Kofi Annan, ex-United Nations Secretary-General and now special UN
envoy for Syria, announced that a special action group meeting in Geneva had
come up with a plan to stop the carnage in Syria. Or at least a faint hope. Or not, as
the case may be.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council were there, plus some of
the biggest regional players (but not Iran, which backs the Syrian regime, or Saudi
Arabia, which supports the rebels). They condemned the continued escalating
killing and agreed that there must be a transitional government body with full
executive powers. Then they all went outside and spat into the wind, just to show
how determined they were.
I made up the last bit, but they might as well have done that. The final communique
said that the transitional government could include members of the present
government and the opposition and other groups and shall be formed on the basis of
mutual consent. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed victory, saying it
clearly signalled to President Bashar al-Assad that he must step down. But it didnt,
actually.
An early draft of the communique said that those whose continued presence and
participation would undermine the credibility of the transitional government Bashar
al-Assad, in other words should be excluded, but that wording was gone from the
final document. So Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he was delighted
with the outcome, since no foreign solution was being imposed on Syria.
Meanwhile, the Syrian National Council, the most coherent opposition group, said it
would reject any plan that did not include the unconditional departure of Assad, his
family, and his close associates. Assad himself told Iranian television that no amount
of foreign pressure would make his government change its policy. And on Friday, the
day before the Geneva meeting, an estimated 190 people were killed in Syria, most
of them by the government.
Assads regime has now killed around as many people 16,000, by last count as
his father did in suppressing the last revolt against the regime in 1982. He must take
hope from the fact that his father, in the end, terrorised all opposition into silence,
and ruled on until his death in 2000. Bashar might win, too and besides, what
choice has he, at this point, but to fight until the last ditch?
So many people have already been slaughtered by Assads troops and their Alawite
militia allies that there is no forgiveness left among the opposition. There is so little
trust that a negotiated handover of power could not succeed even if Assad wanted
that. His only remaining options are victory, exile or death.
It bears repeating that this is not how the Arab Spring ended up. Its just how Syria
has ended up, after eight months of non-violent demonstrations in the face of
extreme regime violence gave way to armed resistance. The other Arab revolutions
have not been drowned in blood (with the exception of Bahrain), and some of them,
like Tunisias and Egypts, have already wrought huge changes. Theres even
another one starting up in Sudan right now.
Two things make Syria different. One is its extreme religious and ethnic complexity,
which makes it hard for protesters to maintain a united front against a regime that is

adept at playing on inter-group fears and resentments. The other is that Assad
heads the Syrian Baath Party, an utterly ruthless machine for seizing and holding
power that copied much of its organisation and discipline from the Communists.
Why, then, would we expect it to behave any better than its former twin, the Iraqi
Baath Party that was led by Saddam Hussein? Even the partys role as the political
vehicle for a religious minority was the same: Alawites in Syria, Sunni Muslims in
Iraq. So if you were wondering how Saddam Hussein would have responded to the
Arab Spring, now you know: just like Bashar al-Assad is responding.
(At this point in the argument, the American neo-cons will be getting ready to claim
that the US invasion of Iraq was a blessing for Iraq after all. Not so fast, boys. Iraq is
still not a very democratic place, and at least ten times as many Iraqis as Syrians
have already been killed in the process.)
How long will the killing in Syria last? Until the rebels win, or until they are crushed.
Are they going to win? Nobody knows. Will the neighbouring countries get dragged
into the fighting? Probably not, although Lebanon is seriously at risk. Can Kofi
Annan, the United Nations or the great powers do anything about this? Not a thing.
The Oil Sanctions Against Iran
July 2012
There are cynics among us who would argue that the European Unions oil sanctions
against Iran, which went into full effect on 1 July, are a double triumph for Israels
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
If you assume that the real reason for his apparent hysteria over the alleged threat of
Iranian nuclear weapons is to divert international attention from illegal Israeli
settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, then his strategy has been a
spectacular success. The main reason that Israels allies are imposing these
sanctions is to head off an Israeli military strike against Iran that would destabilise
the entire region and in the meantime, nobody is talking about the Palestinians.
In addition, the wily Netanyahu gets a bonus, for these sanctions really are going to
hurt Iran economically. Iran is Israels most dangerous and implacable enemy, and
suddenly its oil exports, and with them its hard currency earnings, are going to be cut
in half. Not a bad return on an Israeli policy that cost nothing except some
threatening rhetoric.
To be fair, not everybody is convinced that Netanyahus wild talk about attacking Iran
is just hot air. A whole parade of senior Israeli military and intelligence officials has
gone public to say that there is no imminent threat of Iranian nuclear weapons, and
that attacking Iran pre-emptively would be deeply stupid. Clearly, they think
Netanyahu really is a mad dog but many others remain unconvinced.
In any case, the question of the moment is not Netanyahus strategy. It is whether
these sanctions will hurt Iran so much that it will have to give up its cherished
programme for an independent capacity to enrich nuclear fuel in order to make the
pain stop. The answer is: probably not, but theyre going to hurt a lot.
The European Union normally takes about one-fifth of Irans exports. If Iran cannot
find new markets elsewhere, the loss of those exports would be serious but not
crippling. However, at the same time the United States is imposing punitive
measures on countries elsewhere in the world that continue to buy Iranian oil, and
Europe has banned its maritime insurance companies from selling cover to ships
carrying Iranian oil.
European companies still dominate the global market for maritime insurance, so that
matters: South Korea, for example, will stop buying Iranian oil this week. And while

the most powerful countries outside Europe can safely defy the American threat of
punitive measures, knowing that they can negotiate exemptions for themselves,
many weaker countries have no choice but to obey the American demands.
A week ago (27 June), an Iranian official admitted privately that the countrys oil
exports had already fallen 20 to 30 percent from the normal level of 2.2 million
barrels a day. It is estimated that by 1 July, the day all the sanctions came formally
into effect, lost sales of Iranian oil amounted to more than a million barrels a day
that is to say, about half of the usual total.
This is not a trivial matter for Tehran. Given that the price of oil is also significantly
down, and that Iran is now discounting oil sales to its traditional customers heavily to
keep them from defecting, its ability to pay for imports is going to be severely
constrained this in a country where the average price of ten basic foods has
already risen 70 percent in three months.
And there is another matter as well. Iran is already storing oil offshore in tankers, but
that is clearly only a short-term solution to the problem of what to do with the unsold
surplus. It is also cutting back on how much oil it pumps: the latest figures from the
Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries say that Iranian production is already
down by 720,000 barrels per day.
But after a certain point Tehran can no longer deal with the problem by just cutting
production at all its wells; it has to start shutting some of them down completely. Restarting production later can be tricky, and some wells will be permanently damaged
by the shutdown. The longer the sanctions last, the more difficult it will become for
the Iranian regime.
Yet there is almost no chance that Iran will back down. You do not have to assume
that the regime really wants to build nuclear weapons to explain its defiance. This is
a country that has faced a century of exploitation and humiliation at the hands of the
West, and even those Iranians who loathe the regime will close ranks in defence of
their nations right to enrich its own nuclear fuel.
On the other side, President Barack Obama will go on tightening the screws,
because he dares not gamble that Netanyahu is only bluffing about attacking Iran at
least until he has won re-election this November. There is no sign that other oilexporting countries are going to show solidarity with Iran, and there is enough oil on
the market at the moment that nobody else is going to go short of the stuff because
of the embargo.
So it is going to be a long confrontation, and a miserable experience for the average
Iranian. But for the rest of the world, it will just be a news story.
The Arab Spring: Good News
July 2012
The good news about last weekends election in Libya, as relayed by the Western
media, was that the Islamists were defeated and the Good Guys won. The real
good news was that democracy in the Arab world is still making progress, regardless
of whether the voters choose to support secular parties or Islamic ones.
The Libyan election was remarkably peaceful, given the number of heavily armed
militias left over from the war to overthrow the Gaddafi dictatorship that still infest the
country. Turnout was about 60 percent, and Mahmoud Jibril, who headed the
National Transitional Council during last years struggle against Gaddafi, won a
landslide victory.
The explicitly Islamic parties, the Justice and Development Party (Muslim
Brotherhood) and Al-Watan, did far worse than they expected, getting barely 20

percent of the vote in Benghazi, the big city in the east. But they should not have
been surprised.
In Tunisia to Libyas west and Egypt to the east, the Muslim Brotherhood was the
mainstay of resistance to the dictatorships for decades, and it paid a terrible price for
its bravery. It was natural for voters in those countries to reward Islamic parties when
the tyrants were finally overthrown. Gaddafi was more ruthless and efficient in
crushing all opposition in Libya, and the Muslim Brotherhoood had scarcely any local
presence.
So Libya gets a secular government, while Tunisia and Egypt get Islamic
governments but the point is that they all get democratically elected governments,
and stand a reasonable chance of becoming countries that respect human rights and
the rule of law. Tunisia, indeed, has already made that transition, and Egypt, with
one-third of the entire population of the Arab world, is still heading in that direction
too.
The relevant question is not whether a party is Islamic; its whether it is democratic.
The Western prejudice against Islamic parties (and local prejudice as well) comes
from a confusion between Islamic and Islamist groups, the latter being the English
word for fanatical groups that reject democracy and advocate violent jihad against
infidels and heretical Muslims.
This confusion, sad to say, is often deliberately encouraged by Western and local
interests that really know better, but want to discredit those who oppose them. That
phenomenon was much in evidence during the recent Egyptian elections, where the
other major parties, instead of offering serious policy proposals of their own,
concentrated on trying to scare the voters about the Islamic threat.
It didnt work in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhoods party won both the
parliamentary and the presidential elections. This did not please the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces and its allies from the old regime, and they arranged for
the Egyptian Supreme Court to dismiss the new parliament on a flimsy constitutional
pretext.
Egypts newly elected president, Mohammad Morsi, has refused to accept the armys
decrees, and a delicate game is underway in Cairo in which he is trying to discredit
the soldiers and gradually drive them back into their barracks without risking an open
confrontation that could trigger an actual military coup. He will probably win in the
end, because the army knows that the masses would promptly be back in Tahrir
Square if it did try a coup.
And if Egyptians dont like what their Islamic government does, they can always vote
it out again at the next election.
Can Syria Avoid Ethnic Cleansing?
July 2012
In war, moral power is to physical as three parts out of four, said Napoleon, and the
past few days have seen a sudden and drastic shift in the balance of moral power in
Syria. The bomb that killed the three most senior members of the security
establishment last Wednesday may just have been a lucky fluke for the rebels, and
the street fighting in Damascus may end with a (temporary) regime victory. But
everything has changed in terms of expectations.
Until last week, the regime seemed secure in the short term, although potentially
doomed in the long term. President Bashar al-Assads army was well-armed and
apparently loyal, and he still had the support of much of the population. The
opposition was poorly armed and only loosely organised and as Napoleon also

remarked, God is on the side with the best artillery. (If you want to be thought wise,
contradict yourself frequently.)
Perhaps morale is a better word than moral. The reason the regime seemed
secure until last week was not its weapons, but the confidence of its supporters that
their side was still able to win. That confidence has now been profoundly shaken.
The fighting has reached the heart of the big cities, and the rebels have struck even
at the core of the regime, the national security building, to kill key members of
Assads innermost circle.
So it is suddenly occurring to a lot of people who formerly saw the regime as the
protector of their privileges that these guys could actually lose. If they are going to
lose, you do not want to be in the last ditch with them. Maybe its time to change
sides.
About ten minutes later, it will also occur to the same people that many others are
undoubtedly having the same thoughts and that means the collapse could come
quite quickly. This kind of thinking operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy, so the
regimes final slide into defeat could be coming within days or weeks.
That is by no means guaranteed, of course. In material terms the regime is still vastly
superior, and morale is a volatile thing. If the uprisings in parts of Damascus and
Aleppo are crushed quickly and decisively, the morale of the regimes supporters
could recover, and the civil war might continue for months or years more. But
Syrians must now reckon with the possibility of an early collapse of the Baath Partys
49-year-old monopoly of power.
So the question is: what would happen then? The great fear is that it could go the
same way as Iraq and Lebanon, two neighbouring countries that share about the
same mix of ethnic and religious groups (in differing proportions) as Syria itself.
Lebanon tore itself apart in a civil war among those groups in 1975-90, and a
quarter-million Lebanese died. Iraq tore itself apart in 2005-2009, and at least half a
million Iraqis died. Two million people fled the country permanently, including almost
all of Iraqs Christian minority, and the Sunni Muslims have almost all been driven
out of mixed and Shia-majority areas.
Any thinking Syrian, aware of these dreadful precedents, will be frightened by regime
change no matter how much he or she loathes the existing regime. Indeed, the
Assad regimes principal means of garnering support has been to insist that only its
tyrannical rule can protect the Shia, Druze, Alawite and Christian minorities from
the 70 percent Sunni Muslim majority.
It could easily go wrong. The original pro-democracy movement was non-violent and
emphatically non-sectarian. It was mostly Sunni Muslim, but it deliberately sought to
attract the support of the various minorities as well. All the leaders understood that
only a non-sectarian revolution could produce a democratic Syria.
Unfortunately, the Assad regime drowned that non-violent movement in blood, and
instead Syria wound up with a violent revolt that has grown into a veritable civil war.
What the rebels must do now is to end it without a massacre of the minorities. The
price of failure is that the civil war wont end at all.
The most exposed minority is the Alawites, because they have been the mainstay of
the regime. The Assad family is Alawite, as are most senior figures in the military,
intelligence and Baath Party elites. Their dominance has been based on close clan
ties, not on their religion (they are a heretical Shia sect), and most Alawites have
not benefited much from the regime, but they could easily be held responsible for its
crimes and massacred.
If they think they face that sort of future, they will withdraw to their mountainous

stronghold along the Syrian coast (and effectively cut Syria off from the sea). Other
minorities will also take fright and arm themselves, and the country will be trapped in
a long, cruel war of massacre and ethnic cleansing.
So if the Baath regime goes down soon, the rest of the world should be ready to go
in fast with economic help for the post-revolutionary regime, and with multitudes of
observers to document what is actually happening to the minorities and dispel false
rumours. The rest of the world can do nothing to help now, but it will be sorely
needed then.
Egypt: Clean Sweep for the Civilians
August 2012
Egyptian President Muhammad Morsis spokesman did not mince words. He said
that the retirement of all the senior military commanders in the country represented
the completion of the Egyptian revolution. And guess what? The rest of the officer
corps accepted Morsis decision.
Even as the spokesman was announcing that Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the
Defence Minister, and General Sami Enan, the army chief of staff, were being
retired, state television was showing other military officers, Generals Abdel-Fatah alSisi and Sidki Sobhi, being sworn in by President Morsi as their successors.
You could not ask for clearer evidence of the Egyptian officer corps collective
decision to accept the results of last years popular revolution and the subsequent
election that brought Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
Especially since the heads of the air force, air defence system and navy were
removed from their posts at the same time.
Tantawi, 76 years old and defence minister for the past 20 years, was probably
surprised to find himself practically alone in trying to sabotage the newly elected
civilian government. He was chosen by former dictator Husni Mubarak to keep the
military on top, and he worked hard for that goal. However, most Egyptian military
officers are between thirty and fifty years younger than him, and they see the world
differently.
Egyptian military officers are a privileged caste who enjoy a far better living standard
than other government employees of comparable education and skills, but nobody
(at least for the moment) is trying to take that away from them. So if their lifestyle is
secure, why risk it all by attacking an elected government and bringing the mobs
back out into the streets?
Egyptian officers are also, in most cases, patriots who want to see their country
become a prosperous, honestly run place. They knew very well that the old regime
(whose remnants, like Tantawi, still controlled all the senior military posts) had failed
dismally in that regard. Many were reluctant to let an Islamic party like Morsis take
full control of the country even though the voters chose it, but they now seem willing
to take the chance.
Just two months ago it looked like game, set and match to the Supreme Council of
the Armed Forces (SCAF), led by Field Marshal Tantawi, which was essentially the
old regime minus its former head, Hosni Mubarak.
Only 48 hours before the results of the presidential election were to be announced
last June, the Supreme Constitutional Court (whose judges were all appointed by the
old regime) issued a decree dissolving the parliament that was elected eight months
ago. They said the rules on the eligibility of candidates had been misinterpreted in
some districts, but their real aim was to get rid of a parliament where the Islamic
parties had won most of the seats.

Then, as the presidential votes were being counted and it was becoming clear that
Morsi would win, the SCAF issued decrees that gave it the sole right to call a new
parliamentary election and to write the constitution under which it would be held. It
also stripped the incoming president of any right to control the armed forces, and in
particular to appoint or dismiss military officers in senior jobs.
Morsi refused to recognise the legality of these decrees, but he did not openly
confront the military either. He just waited for the military high command to make a
really embarrassing mistake which it duly did.
Islamist fanatics had taken advantage of Egypts revolution, which distracted
everybodys attention from keeping the militants under control, to create bases in the
Sinai peninsula, near the countrys border with Israel. On 5 August, they attacked an
Egyptian border post and slaughtered sixteen guards.
In their own fevered imaginations, they were justly killing collaborators who were
hindering true Muslims like themselves from making attacks on Israel. In the minds
of most Egyptians, they had murdered sixteen innocent young Egyptian men whose
only crime was serving their country. Morsi seized the opportunity to dismiss General
Murad Mowafi, the head of military intelligence, for failing to forestall the atrocity.
Mowafis post made him one of the most powerful men in the country, but nobody
wanted to defend him after such an abject failure of intelligence. He went quietly
and by this action Morsi had successfully asserted his right to remove military
commanders despite the SCAFs June decree to the contrary.
The most important political skill is remembering your ultimate objectives, but biding
your time until some passing event creates an opening for getting what you want.
When the officer corps did not resist Mowafis dismissal, Morsi knew that he could
win a head-on confrontation with Tantawi and his cronies. They knew it too, and so
they went quietly.
Egypt now has a democratically elected civilian government that exercises real
control over both domestic and foreign policy for the first time in its history. What
Morsi will do with that power remains to be seen, but he has certainly won the
chance to use it.
The Fate of Africa
August 2012
Good news from Africa: after two decades of bloody anarchy, Somalia is finally on
the mend. There is something resembling a government coming into being in
Mogadishu, with much help from African Union troops although the countrys most
popular comedian, Abdi Jeylani Marshale, famous for his parodies of Islamic
militants, was assassinated in broad daylight a week ago
Bad news from Africa: the situation in Mali is awful. The military coup in March that
opened the way for Tuareg tribalists and Islamist extremists to seize the northern
half of the country isnt really over. The ignorant and brutal young officers who made
the coup are blocking the arrival of 3,000 African Union troops, Malis only hope of
ever regaining control in the north, because it would undermine their own power.
News about Africa that you dont know whether to cheer or deplore: the major foreign
aid donors have finally got fed up with Rwandas endless military meddling in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States has announced a cut in military
aid, and Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are delaying payment of civilian aid,
until Rwandas president, Paul Kagame, stops backing a rebel Tutsi militia in his
countrys Congolese neighbour.
Everybody sympathises with Kagames attempt to rebuild peace and prosperity in

Rwanda after the genocide that killed about half of the countrys Tutsi citizens.
Everybody understands why he worries about Hutu militias in the eastern Congo. But
he has to stop backing murderous Tutsi militias there, and using them to loot
Congos mineral wealth. (On the other hand, dont destabilise Kagames rule too
much or the genocide might resume.)
Too many names, too many places, too much news. Even Africans cannot keep up
with the news about their own continent. Is Africa going forwards, sideways, or
nowhere at all? Indeed, is Africa any more than a geographical term?
The surfeit of news is inevitable in a continent that contains half a hundred countries.
The sense of chronic crisis and chaos is due to the fact that in such a news-rich
environment, the bad news will always jostle the good news aside. And yes, there
really is an Africa about which you can usefully make large generalisations.
First, the entire continent is finally growing economically. Many African economies
stagnated or even went backwards in the first three or four decades after
decolonisation, but now there is real growth. Local disaster areas remain, of course,
but over the past decade the gross domestic product of those fifty countries has
grown at an average rate of 5 percent.
Manufacturing production in Africa has doubled in the past ten years. Seven of the
worlds ten fastest-growing economies are in Africa. The growth is starting from a
desperately low base, in many cases, but the magic of compound interest means
that a 5 percent growth rate will double the size of the economy every fourteen
years.
So there really is hope that most Africans can escape from poverty in the next
generation but on one condition. The birth rate is declining in most countries, but it
must fall faster. The 2008 UN projections saw Africa doubling its population to two
billion by mid-century, even assuming that the current gradual decline in African birth
rates continues. That means an average population growth over this entire period of
almost 2 percent a year.
If the economy is growing at 5 percent and the population is growing at 2 percent
annually, that only leaves room for a 3 percent growth in average income. That
means a doubling time of about 23 years for African average incomes, so lets
assume that they triple by 2050. Thats not enough.
African average incomes now are so low that tripling them would still not create the
degree of prosperity and security that people in other continents are coming to
expect. Worse, it would not give African governments the resources to cope with the
huge damage that climate change will do to the continent.
The impact of global warming is worst in the tropics and subtropics: huge floods and
semi-permanent droughts will become almost routine in these areas. Africa will suffer
more than anywhere else, because it is the only continent that is almost entirely in
the tropics and subtropics. Feeding the population will become a major problem.
There is enough potential cropland in Africa to feed twice the current population in
the present climate, but its far from clear that this will remain true in a two-degreewarmer world. If African governments invest enough in agriculture now, they can
probably keep everybody fed; if not, the long-term future of the continent is probably
widespread political violence and gradual economic collapse.
Its a race. Grow average incomes fast enough and you probably survive the coming
storm. Otherwise, you lose all you have gained, and more besides. Nobody said it
was going to be easy.
The Syrian Civil War

November 2012
Syria now has a new government-in-exile that allegedly unites all the groups seeking
the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assads murderous regime. But if this is the
best that they can do, Assad will still be in power next year, and perhaps for a long
time afterwards.
It took a week of haggling in Qatar to bring all the fractious Syrian rebel groups
together, and it wouldnt have happened at all without great pressure from the Gulf
Arab countries and the United States. Basically, the Syrian rebels were told that if
they wanted more money and arms, they had to create a united front.
So they did, kind of, but the fragility and underlying disunity of the new governmentin-exile is implicit in its cumbersome name: the Syrian National Coalition for
Opposition and Revolutionary Forces. Its really just a loose and probably temporary
collaboration between different sectarian and ethnic groups whose ultimate goals are
widely divergent.
This new body has already been recognised by the Gulf states as the sole
legitimate representative of the Syrian people, in the words of Qatars Prime
Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim. France, Syrias former colonial ruler, has done
the same, and other Western countries may follow suit (although probably not the
United States). But it wont end the war.
It is a real civil war now; the days of the non-violent Syrian democratic movement
that tried to emulate the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia are long past.
Moreover, it is a civil war whose ultimate outcome is unclear. It is by no means
certain that Assad and the Baathist regime he leads will finally be defeated.
The Syrian government has all the heavy weapons, but it does not have enough
troops to establish permanent military control over every rural area in a country of 24
million people. However, it does have the strength to smash any attempts to create a
rival authority with the powers of a real government in those rural areas, and it still
holds most of the cities: the front line in Aleppo has scarcely moved since last
summer.
How has Assad managed to hang on so long when other Arab dictators fell so
quickly in the early days of the Arab spring? Partly it is the fact that hes not a oneman regime.
The Baath Party which he leads is an organisation with almost half a centurys
experience of power, and plenty of patronage to distribute to its allies. It began
almost as an Arab Communist party (without the atheism), and although its
economics are now neo-liberal, it retains its Communist-style political discipline.
Moreover, the Alawites who populate its higher offices know that they have to hang
together, or else they will hang separately.
The other thing Assad has going for him is the highly fragmented character of Syrian
society. Seventy percent of the population are Sunni Muslims, but the other 30
percent include Shias, Alawites (a Shia heresy), Druze (an even more divergent sect
with Islamic roots) and Christians. All of them are nervous about Sunni Muslim
domination in a post-Assad Syria, and the presence of various foreign jihadis on the
battlefield only deepens their anxiety.
Moreover, the main suppliers of arms and money to the insurgents are Sunni Muslim
countries in the Arabian peninsula, like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, that are not know
for being tolerant of non-Sunni minorities. This has persuaded most non-Sunni
Syrians that they are under attack and thirty percent of Syrias population, with a
big, well-equipped army and air force, can probably fight 70 percent of the population
with only light weapons to a standstill.

In fact, the Syrian battlefield, after only a year of serious fighting, is already coming
to resemble the Lebanese battlefield after the first year of the civil war there. Large
tracts of the countryside are under the military control of the religious or ethnic group
that makes up the local majority, while the front lines in the big cities have effectively
congealed into semi-permanent boundaries.
In Lebanon, the level of fighting dropped a lot after that first year, apart from the
period of the Israeli invasion and occupation in 1982-83, but the country continued to
be chopped up into local fiefdoms until the Taif accord in 1989 led to the end of the
fighting.
There are obviously differences between the Lebanese and Syrian cases, but they
are not big enough to justify any confidence that Syrias future will be different from
Lebanons past. Assad will continue to have access to arms and money from Iran
and Russia, and there will be no large-scale military intervention from outside to tilt
the balance decisively one way or the other.
A split in the Baath Party or a military coup could open the way to national
reconciliation if it happened relatively soon, but that is not likely. Apart from that, the
only thing that might really change all these calculations and break the stalemate is
an Israeli attack on Iran and a general Middle Eastern conflagration. That is not a
price anybody wants to pay.
Morsi Goes Too Far
November 2012
There is no middle ground, no dialogue before (Egyptian President Mohammed
Morsi) rescinds this declaration, said pro-democracy advocate and Nobel Peace
Prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei. There is no room for dialogue when a dictator
imposes the most oppressive, abhorrent measures and then says let us split the
difference.
Morsi won last Junes presidential election fair and square, but many Egyptians
really are frightened that his decree of 22 November sweeps aside the democratic
gains of last years revolution. The decree gives him absolute power, although he
swears it is only for a limited time.
Morsi was already governing by decree pending a new parliamentary election, since
the courts had dissolved the lower house of parliament because the election was
flawed. His latest decree declares that the courts cannot challenge any of his edicts
until that new election takes place.
The decree also states that he can take any steps necessary to defeat undefined
threats to the revolution and nobody can ask the courts to decided whether those
steps are legal and justifiable. In theory, at least, Morsi has given himself greater
powers than the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak, ever possessed.
This is as puzzling as it is alarming, since nothing in Morsis previous history
suggests that he wants to be Egypts next dictator. He is a prominent member of the
Muslim Brotherhood and shares its conservative social and religious values, but that
organisation, the mainstay of opposition to Egypts military dictators during half a
century of tyranny, has moved a long way from its radical and sometimes violent
origins.
So was Morsi a wolf in sheeps clothing, just waiting for the chance to impose Islamic
rule on everybody, including liberals, Christians, and secular Egyptians? How else
can you explain what he has just done? The answer matters, because if Egypt, by
far the most populous Arab country (90 million people), succumbs to a new tyranny,
then the whole Arab Spring was just a brief illusion.

Morsis actions are wrong, but he is not actually aiming at a dictatorship. He just
wants to thwart the Supreme Judicial Council, made up of judges who almost all date
from the Mubarak era, which had already dismissed the first body charged with
writing a new constitution. There were indications that it might be about to dissolve
the second one on the same grounds.
The grounds were legally sound, for the first assembly chosen by parliament
included a large number of MPs who belonged to the Islamic parties, although the
law said that members of parliament could not themselves sit in the Constituent
Assembly. A second Constituent Assembly, chosen in June, once again included
members of parliament in clear defiance of the law, which is why it is facing further
court challenges.
In the last month or so, the prospect that this new body will produce a constitution
based mainly on Islamic law led most of the secular and Christian elements to
withdraw. That deprived it of a voting quorum, but the remaining members, including
many MPs linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, carried on regardless, so there was a
growing probability that a new court ruling would dismiss this assembly too.
Morsi moved swiftly, not only giving himself supreme powers beyond the ability of
the courts to challenge, but specifically forbidding the Supreme Judicial Council to
dismiss the second Constituent Assembly. He also gave that assembly an extra two
months to finish writing the constitution, after which it would have to be approved by
referendum.
Only then (perhaps next May) would a new lower house of parliament be elected
and once the constitution is in place and the subsequent election is past, Morsi
promised, he will relinquish his extraordinary powers. But by then Egypt would have
an Islamic constitution, and almost certainly a lower house of parliament dominated
by the Islamic parties.
What is happening now, therefore, is not the rise of a new dictatorship but rather a
ruthless political manoeuvre aimed at creating a democratic but Islamic Egypt.
Naturally, it frightens a large proportion of the 49 percent of Egyptians who voted
against Morsi in the presidential election earlier this year, and it absolutely terrifies
the countrys 8 million Christians.
Morsis edict has been met with impassioned protest in the streets, and the formation
of a National Salvation Front aimed at uniting all non-Islamist groups to force Morsi
to rescind his edicts. Its leaders include three of the candidates who ran against
Morsi in the election earlier this year. But that may not be enough.
The truth is that the elections produced a parliamentary majority and a president who
want to impose Islamic law, and that its opponents are using various legal devices in
an attempt to stop the process. Moreover, a new constitution imposing Islamic law
would almost certainly get a yes in a referendum.
But the other truth is that majorities in a democracy should not try to impose their
religious and social views on large minorities who do not share them. Morsi is
already showing signs of wanting to compromise but, as ElBaradei pointed out, he
cannot take these extreme measures and then offer to split the difference. Egypt is
in for a rough ride.
The Coming War in Mali
December 2012
You probably havent given much thought to the problems in Mali, but United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has, and his advice on military intervention in that
West African country could be summed up in two words: forget it. Although, being a

diplomat, he actually used a great many more words than that.

Malis 14 million people are almost all Muslims, but there is a deep ethnic divide
between the black African majority in the southern half of the country and the
Tuaregs (only 10 percent of the population) who dominate the desert northern half.
Last March, a military coup in the capital, Bamako, distracted the Malian army long
enough for Tuareg separatists to seize control of the entire north.
The Tuareg separatists had been in business for many years, but an influx of
weapons and fighters from Libya after the fall of the Gaddafi regime gave them a
new impetus. Having driven government troops out of the north and declared the
independent nation of Azawad, however, the separatists were then rapidly pushed
aside by Islamic extremists who declared a jihad against practically everybody.
A military coup in a West African nation, even if the government then lost control of
half the country to separatists, would normally be of interest only to other West
African states. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) might
back military intervention to reunite the country, or it might not, but the rest of the
world would ignore it. Not this time.
What set alarms bells ringing in the United States and Europe was the fact that alQaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) is a major force in the alliance of Islamist
fundamentalists that now controls northern Mali. The mere mention of al-Qaeda sets
Western governments salivating like Pavlovs dogs, and the issue of reconquering
northern Mali suddenly got onto the international agenda.
Western countries have been pushing for a UN Security Council resolution
authorising military action against the rebels for months, and in October they got
their way. The resolution gave regional leaders 45 days to provide plans for an
international military intervention to oust the rebels in northern Mali, and the US
government recently said that war was now inevitable.
At that point Ban Ki-Moon wrote his letter to the Security Council condemning the
rush to military action: I am profoundly aware that if a military intervention in the
north is not well conceived and executed, it could worsen an already fragile
humanitarian situation and also result in severe human rights abuses. Fundamental
questions on how the force would be led, sustained, trained, equipped and financed
remain unanswered.
A military operation may be required as a last resort to deal with the most hardline
extremists and criminal elements in the north, Ban conceded, but before that stage
is reached, the focus must be on initiating a broad-based and inclusive national
dialogue Diplomatic buzz-words, certainly, but he is fighting for time and thats all
he has.
But US drones are already overflying northern Mali on a daily basis. US Defence
Secretary Leon Panetta has refused to rule out direct American support for training
or other operations on the ground in Mali. A real war will soon start in Mali.
It would involve the same kind of UN intervention force that has been fighting the
Islamist al-Shabab militia in Somalia: African countries provide the troops, and
Western countries cover the costs. But whereas the Ugandan, Kenyan and
Burundian armies that are doing the heavy lifting in Somalia are reasonably
competent soldiers, the West African armies that would provide the troops in Mali are
not.
Take the biggest army in the region, for example. As a senior Malian official told The
Guardian newspaper last month, The Nigerian army is in a shocking state. There is
no way they are capable of forward operations in MaliThe Nigerian forces lack
training and kit, so they simply dont have the capability to carry out even basic

military manoeuvres. They have poor discipline and support.

So who will pick up the pieces if the ECOWAS force, already unpopular in Mali, fails
to recover the north? Probably Western troops, but that would trigger powerful antiWestern reactions all over Africa. It might produce a military victory and reunify Mali
by force, but it would be a political disaster. The extremists could not hope for a
better recruiting tool.
This whole operation is being driven by a reflex panic about terrorism. But northern
Mali is a very long way from anywhere else, and there are no flights out.
The better approach would be to wait for the rebels in the north to fall out and start
fighting one another, which they probably will. Meanwhile, train and equip Malis own
army for the task of retaking the north by force, if that ever becomes necessary,
although the fact that it is currently run by the turbulent and ignorant junior officers
who made last Marchs disastrous coup certainly doesnt help.
Still, Ban Ki-Moon is right. Sometimes the best thing to do is as little as possible.
Egypt: The Not So Bad Constitution
December 2012
Egyptian politics over the past nine months has not been an edifying sight, but the
new constitution does not spell the end of democracy in Egypt. It scares the 36
percent of Egyptian voters who rejected it, but their fears are probably misplaced.
The revolution was made in the big cities, mostly by people who were secular in
outlook. However, most Egyptian voters live in rural areas that are devout and
deeply conservative, so three-quarters of the votes in the first free election went to
Islamic parties.
The Freedom and Justice Party, the political vehicle of the Muslim Brotherhood, got
almost half the votes but it did not really get a mandate to impose strict Islamic law
on Egypt. Some of its votes came from people who wanted that, but some came
from people who value the Brotherhoods charitable work, or were just grateful for its
role as the only real resistance during the decades of dictatorship.
The Brotherhoods leadership understood that but another quarter of the votes
went to Salafi parties that have an extremist interpretation of Islam. The Salafis
would obviously steal the votes of the Freedom and Justice Partys more devout
supporters in the next election unless there was some Islamic content in the new
constitution.
The Brotherhoods last political platform in 2007 called for a board of Muslim clerics
to supervise the government. It also insisted that only Muslim men could become
president. The state which we seek can never be presided over by a non-Muslim,
said Mohammed Morsi, who drafted that platform and is now president of Egypt.
Maybe Morsi still privately thinks that, or maybe he has realised that these rules are
unacceptable in a democracy where all citizens are equal. It doesnt matter. The new
constitution does not contain any such provisions, and the main reason is obviously
the Brotherhoods tacit bargain with the armed forces.
The deal, which guarantees the militarys privileges, was necessary to persuade the
staunchly secular armed forces to accept an Islamic party in government, but it had a
price: the new government could not be TOO Islamic. This posed a problem for
Morsi, because Muslim Brotherhood activists wanted to use their political power to
entrench Islamic rules in the new constitution.
So Morsi had to walk a fine line. He had to put enough Islamic language into the
constitution to mollify his own supporters, but not so much that the military would
break their alliance with him. He didnt walk that line very well.

The whole constitutional process was a poisonous battle even before Morsi became
president last June. In April the Supreme Judicial Council, whose members had all
been appointed by the Mubarak dictatorship, dissolved the newly elected House of
Representatives on a flimsy pretext, and also dismissed the constitution-writing
assembly that it had chosen.
But the upper house of parliament is also dominated by Islamist parties, and it simply
appointed another constituent assembly with the same make-up. After that it was
open war.
By October most of the non-Islamists in the second constituent assembly had walked
out, and the Supreme Judicial Council was about to dismiss that body too. Morsis
clumsy response was to grant himself unlimited powers and forbid the judiciary to
dismiss the assembly.
There was an outcry by the opposition, a fractious coalition of leftists, liberals and
Christians, and the protestors were instantly back on the streets. But the constituent
assembly promptly rendered the whole crisis unnecessary by passing the new draft
constitution in a 29-hour marathon sitting, so Morsi cancelled his special powers
and on 22 December, Egyptians ratified the new constitution by a 63.8 percent
majority.
Small crisis, not many hurt. The army got what it wanted: henceforward, the minister
of defence must be a serving officer, and the military will effectively control its own
budget. The parliament cannot even debate it.
The Brotherhood got less of what it wanted, but there are bits of Islamic language in
the constitution to keep the activists happy. For example, Article 2 of the old
constitution (1971) says: The principles of Sharia are the main source of legislation.
The new one still says that, but Article 219 adds: The principles of Sharia include
general evidence and foundations, rules and jurisprudence as well as sources
accepted by doctrines of Sunni Islam and the majority of Muslim scholars. And what
practical difference does that make?
Article 30 states that citizens are equal before the law and equal in rights and
obligations without discrimination, but as in the old constitution, there is no separate
and explicit guarantee of womens rights. Putting that in would have required a major
battle with the misogynist rank and file of the Brotherhood, and the old formula would
be quite adequate if the courts enforced it.
Nervous secular Egyptians fear that these bits and pieces of Islamic rhetoric are the
seeds of a constitutional revolution that will turn the country into an Islamist
dictatorship, but there is little evidence for that.
As for the frantic haste with which the constitution was passed after two years of
revolutionary upheaval, the Egyptian economy desperately needs the political
stability that a new constitution and fresh elections (due in February) will provide. Its
not a plot. Its just the politics of necessity.
Syria: No End in Sight
January 2013
The most frustrating part of covering the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) was that after
a while there was nothing left to say. Syria is starting to feel just the same. Its
horrible, but atrocities are a daily event in all civil wars. Its not going to stop any time
soon, but you can only say that so many times before people get bored and move
on. Except for the people who actually live near Syrias borders, the audience for
news about Syria has already moved on.
Consider, for example, last weeks exhaustive study by the United Nations Human

Rights Commission concluding that 60,000 Syrians have been killed in the civil war
since March, 2011. Thats considerably higher than the previous estimates of deaths
in the war, which were running around 40,000, and the UNHRC hoped that this new
number would finally galvanise the rest of the world into action, but it changed
nothing.
The UNHRCs interns worked hard at the job, tabulating and cross-referencing the
names of the dead, but it didnt have the desired effect. It never does: all numbers
bigger than a couple of dozen just translate as many in the average person
imagination.
Last months news was that the Russians were on the brink of abandoning their
Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, which would surely bring about his rapid
downfall. One must look the facts in the face, said Mikhail Bogdanov, Russias
deputy foreign minister and Middle Eastern envoy. Unfortunately, the victory of the
Syrian opposition cannot be ruled out.
The worlds media, desperate for a different angle on the story, tried to build a new
narrative on that: the Russians will stop defending the Syrian regime, and the United
Nations Security Council, no longer paralysed by a Russian veto, will authorise
foreign intervention, and foreign troops (whose? dont ask!) will go in and stop the
fighting.
However, Bogdanov did not actually say that a rebel victory was desirable. On the
contrary, he said that it would not happen for a long time, if ever, and that such a
victory would ruin Syria. Then the spokesman of the Russian foreign ministry,
Alexander Lukashevich, announced that the media had simply misunderstood
Bogdanov: We have not changed our position, and we will not change it.
Nobody else is going to change their position either, including all those Western
governments that have no intention whatever of committing their troops to the Syrian
civil war, but use the Russian veto as an excuse for their inaction. You cant blame
them: if they sent their armies into that meat-grinder, some of their young soldiers
would die. Maybe quite a lot of them.
And so to this weeks piece of theatre: a widely touted speech in Damascus in which
President al-Assad would propose a way to end the conflict peacefully. He did no
such thing, of course, instead declaring his eternal refusal to negotiate with the
terrorists who are fighting his army. He will only talk to the puppet-masters (an
unholy alliance, he claims, between Israel, Western governments and al-Qaeda), not
to the puppets.
Well, what did you expect? He and his Alawite sect are convinced that they must go
on ruling Syria or face destruction. Hes not actually losing the war, either. Syrians
are deeply divided by sect and ethnicity and class, and enough of those groups are
on Assads side that he can probably hold out for a very long time. By the time he
finally loses (or wins), perhaps years from now, Syria will indeed be ruined.
So why doesnt everybody else do something about it? Because what everybody
else really means is somebody else, but not me. No government is going to order
its soldiers to risk their lives in a military intervention abroad unless it has reasonable
confidence that their sacrifice will not be futile. That assurance is simply not available
to governments that might contemplate intervention in Syria.
Its a quarter-century since the first dictatorial regimes were overthrown by nonviolent revolutions, and the remaining ones have all had time to study the
phenomenon. They have unanimously and quite correctly concluded that their best
chance of survival is to push the protesters into violence. In a civil war, everybody is
in the wrong, and the side with the greatest ability to inflict violence (the regime) may

win.
Some regimes, like the Communists in eastern Europe or the apartheid regime in
South Africa, decided that they would not impose a civil war on the country even if
the alternative was losing power. Others, like the Egyptian regime two years ago,
could not trust the army to fight a civil war on their behalf. But the senior
commanders of the Syrian army are almost all Alawites, and they were actually
willing to fight a civil war rather than surrender power.
Now they have their war, and it will go on for a long time. By the end, there may not
even be a unified Syrian state any more. And no outside force is going to stop it.
Mali Intervention
January 2013
Those days are over, said Frances President Francois Hollande last month, when
asked if French forces would intervene in the war between Islamist insurgents who
have seized the northern half of Mali and the government in Bamako. But the days in
question werent over for very long. Last Friday France sent a squadron of fighterbombers to the West African country to stop the Islamist fighters from taking the
capital.
We are making air raids the whole time, said French Defence Minister Jean-Yves
Le Drian. They are going on now. They will go on tonight. They will go on
tomorrow. Some 550 French combat troops are on the ground already, with up to
2,500 more to follow. Contingents of soldiers from the neighbouring countries of
Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo are scheduled to arrive as early as
next week. It has turned into a real war.
It has also turned into a Western-run war in a Muslim country, despite the
discouraging precedents of Afghanistan and Iraq. The government of Mali has asked
for French help, and on Monday the United Nations Security Council unanimously
supported Frances military intervention. The army of Mali, such as it is, will
theoretically be in charge of the war but everybody knows that the Malian army is
useless.
In fact, the presence of Malis army at the front is usually counter-productive, as it is
brutal, militarily incompetent, and prone to panic flight. The other African armies are
of variable quality, but it is obviously French troops, and especially French air power,
that will decide the outcome of the war. So has France bitten off more than it can
chew? Is this going to end up like Afghanistan and Iraq?
The supporters of the war prefer to compare it with last years Western military
intervention in Libya, another French initiative that was decided over one weekend.
They like that analogy better because the Libyan intervention ended tolerably well,
with the overthrow of the dictator, a democratically elected government, and no
Western casualties. But the differences between Libya and Mali are greater than the
similarities.
In Libya the rebels were trying to rid the country of Muammar Gaddafi, a loony,
friendless dictator, and create a democratic future. The decision to intervene was
made in Paris in only two hectic days, when it appeared that Gaddafis mercenary
troops were about to overrun Benghazi and massacre the rebels. NATO served as
the rebel air force, but no Western troops fought on the ground. And it worked.
With Mali, once again it was decided in a couple of days, and once again France has
taken the lead. Once again Britain is sending some help as well (transport aircraft,
but no troops or combat aircraft), and the United States is providing discreet
logistical support. (US Air Force tankers refuelled the French fighters on their way to

Mali.) But thats where the similarities end.

The West is supporting the government, not the rebels, in Mali. That government,
behind a flimsy civilian facade, is controlled by the same thugs in uniform whose
military coup last March, just one month before the scheduled democratic election,
created the chaos that let the Islamist rebels conquer the northern half of the
country. The young officers who now run the country are ignorant and violent, and
having them on your side is not an asset.
The Islamist rebels are fanatical, intolerant, and violent, but they are well armed (a
lot of advanced infantry weapons came on the market when Gaddafis regime
collapsed) and they appear to be well trained. They have almost no popular support
in 90-percent-Muslim Mali, whose version of Islam is much more moderate, but they
have terrified the population of the north into submission or flight.
The insurgents are not short of money, either, as they receive secret subsidies from
several Arab monarchies in the Gulf that have persuaded themselves, strangely, that
subsidising radical Islamist movements in the far-flung fringes of the Muslim world is
a good way to avoid being overthrown by radical Islamists at home. They are
formidable opponents, and the war to free northern Mali may be long and hard.
Until recently the rebels seemed to be confined to Malis desert north, but last week
they began to advance into southern Mali, where nine-tenths of the countrys 14
million people live. The Malian army collapsed, and Western intelligence sources
estimated that the Islamists would capture the capital, Bamako, within two days. That
would effectively give them control of the entire country.
Mali has long, unguarded borders with seven other African countries, and it is only
3,000 km. (2,000 mi.) from France. So President Hollande ordered immediate
military intervention to stop the Islamist advance, and well all worry about the longterm consequences later. The next Western war against Islamist extremists has
already started, and the question is whether it will end up like Afghanistan.
Nobody would like to know the answer to that more than the French. Except, of
course, the Malians.
Israeli Election
January 2013
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was once seen as a right-wing figure.
Now hes widely considered to be a moderate. But its not Netanyahu who has
changed; Israel has. His governing coalition will certainly win the largest number of
seats in the Knesset (parliament) again in the election on 22 January, but his new
government will contain lots of people who make him look very moderate indeed.
Consider, for example, Moshe Feiglin, one of the ultra-right-wingers who recently
displaced the remaining moderates in internal elections in Netanyahus own Likud
Party. You cant teach a monkey to speak and you cant teach an Arab to be
democratic, Feiglin told the New York Times recently. Youre dealing with a culture
of thieves and robbers.The Arab destroys everything he touches.
Last October, when Likud merged with its hard-right coalition partner, Yisrael Beitenu
(Israel Our Home), it was hailed as Netanyahus political masterstroke. Opinion polls
predicted that the new alliance would win 47 seats in the new Knesset, compared to
the 42 seats they won separately in the last election. But even with Likud-Beitenus
lurch to the right, its still not right-wing enough for many Israeli voters.
Just in the past month, a new party that is even farther to the right, Bayit Yehudi
(Jewish Home), has surged in the polls, and now Netanyahus alliance is predicted to
drop to only 34 seats, while the upstart party gets 15. And what is Bayit Yehudis

leader like?
Naftali Bennett is the 40-year-old son of American immigrants to Israel, a religiously
observant man who made a small fortune in software development before going into
politics. And he has no intention of wasting his time babbling about Israel and the
Palestinians. His solution to the problem is for Israel to annex about 60 percent of
the West Bank, including almost all the land occupied by Jewish settlers, and to rule
the rest forever.
There is not going to be a Palestinian state within the tiny land of Israel, he said in
an interview with The Guardian. Its just not going to happen. A Palestinian state
would be a disaster for the next 200 years. So in the 40 percent of the West Bank
left to them, in Bennetts version of the future, 2.5 million Palestinians would live
under some kind of autonomous authority, permanently supervised by the Israeli
intelligence services.
Most of the issues being debated in this Israeli election are domestic questions about
the economy and the social welfare net, as in any other country, but there is no
doubt that the rise of the right has been fuelled primarily by its hard line on security
and territory. What needs to be explained is why so many more Israelis are attracted
by those policies nowadays than they were twenty years ago.
The founding generation of Zionists in Israel in 1948 were mostly secular and
socialist, and most of them voted for the Labour Party, which dominated Israeli
politics until the 1980s. But the Israel of 1948 contained only two-thirds of a million
Jews. Todays Israel has six million Jews, and most of them are neither secular nor
socialist in their outlook. Nor, in most cases, are they descended from that founding
generation.
The early post-independence waves of immigrants were mostly oriental Jews,
primarily refugees from Arab countries, who were religious and conservative in their
outlook. They were numerous, and had much higher birth-rates than secular Jews.
Then, from the 1980s onwards, came the Russians and other post-Soviet Jews, who
had no sympathy at all for socialism. Together, they have transformed Israeli politics.
About 50 percent of Israeli Jews now identify themselves as traditional, religious or
ultra-Orthodox. Only 15 percent describe themselves as secular. And both the
religious and the post-Soviet Jews are mostly on the right politically in the case of
the ultra-Orthodox, 79 percent of them, compared to only 17 percent of secular
Jews. The new Israel is capitalist, religious and, in many cases, ultra-nationalist.
Did the peace process die because Israelis were becoming more right-wing, or did
the failure of the peace process push Israelis to the right? That may sound like a
chicken-and-egg question, but in fact Israel was already moving right for
demographic reasons at least a decade before the peace process began. By now it
has traveled a long way in that direction.
Together, Netanyahus Likud Beitenu alliance and Bennetts Bayit Yehudi will win
around 50 seats in this election, which puts them within easy range of a majority in
the 120-seat Knesset. Just bring in a couple of the minor parties (some of which are
also quite far over on the right), and they will have a strong right-wing coalition.
Netanyahu will still be prime minister, but he will have to bring Naftali Bennet and
other hard-right leaders into the cabinet.
And then life in the Middle East will get even more interesting than it is already.

Victory in Mali?
January 2013
As usual, a well-trained Western army has gone through a fierce-looking but virtually

untrained force of African rebels like a hot knife through butter. Two weeks ago, the
northern half of Mali was entirely under the control of Islamist militants, whose forces
were starting to advance into southern Mali as well. So France decided on very short
notice to send troops and combat aircraft to its former colony in West Africa.
Today, every town in the north of Mali is under French control, and the surviving
rebels have fled into the desert. But most of them did survive: after losing a couple of
major clashes in the first days of the French drive northwards, the Islamist forces
simply abandoned Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal, the main towns of the north, as soon as
the French forces came near. The easy part of the intervention is now over.
Its not surprising that the French military intervention was an instant success. The
Islamist rebels, like most African paramilitaries (and quite a few African armies, too),
did not even know the basic combat drills that every infantryman in a Western army
has practised until they are second nature. But now come three tasks that are
considerably more difficult.
The first is to deploy an African Union-backed military force, made up of units from
armies elsewhere in West Africa, to take over from the French. You cant just hand
the recaptured towns back to Malis own army, which is so incompetent and rotted by
politics that it would promptly lose them back to the militants.
This force, dubbed the International Support Mission to Mali, has the unanimous
blessing of the United Nations Security Council. International donors met in Ethiopia
on Tuesday and pledged $455.53 million to pay for this force. Malis many
neighbours it has open desert borders with seven other West African countries
have already identified the units they are going to send.
But its going to be weeks or months before those African units actually arrive,
because many of them arent very well trained either. (French and British troops are
being sent to train some of them before they even set foot in Mali.) In the meantime,
the north of Mali will really be entirely under French military rule.
This means that there will be none of the looting, rape and murder that tends to
follow the Malian armys arrival in town, but the French troops are very foreign
indeed. They are not even Muslims, in a country that is nine-tenths Muslim. They
were welcomed as liberators when they rolled into the northern towns in the last few
days, but if they stay for too long they will become first unpopular, and then hated.
Thats just the way things work.
Once African troops replace the French, the next task is to rebuild the democratic
government of Mali, which was destroyed by a military coup last March. The interim
president, Dioncounda Traore, says that he wants to hold elections next July, but
behind the scenes the greedy young officers who made the coup still hold the real
power. They will have to be sent back to their barracks before elections take place,
and that will not be easy.
And the third task is to win the very different kind of war that starts in Mali now.
Retaking occupied towns was easy. Now that the militants have scattered across the
vast deserts of northern Mali, they will launch a different kind of war a war of the
shadows, conducted by raids, bomb attacks and assassinations.
Countries can survive for decades with that kind of low-intensity war going on in the
background, but the only way to shrink it to a manageable level is to make a political
deal. This is not impossible in Mali, because the Islamist fanatics actually hijacked
the revolution from their former allies, the Tuareg separatists.
Most of the people in the north are Tuaregs, desert-dwelling people of Berber stock
and nomadic heritage who are ethnically, culturally and linguistically distinct from the
black African majority in southern Mali. Many of them support the separatist

movement that wanted to create an independent Tuareg state in northern Mali, but
few actually share the extreme religious views of the Islamist militants.
The two groups made an alliance to drive the Malian army out of the north, but the
Islamists then turned on their allies and seized absolute power for themselves. Their
harsh rule was resented by most people, however, and so it should be possible to
isolate the Islamists if the Malian government is willing to make a deal that gets the
Tuareg separatists on its side.
They wont get independence, but they would probably settle for a large degree of
autonomy for the north. It will be hard to get a new Malian government that is elected
almost entirely by the votes of southerners (90 percent of the population lives in the
south) to make that concession, but the alternative is a long, draining guerilla war in
the north.
Was the French military intervention in Mali necessary? Yes, in the view of the
United Nations, the African Union, and most Malians. Was it a success? That
remains to be seen.
Iraq Ten Years Later
March 2013
Why did George W. Bush choose 19 March, 2003 to invade Iraq, rather than some
day in May, or July, or never? Because he was afraid that further delay would give
United Nations arms inspectors time to refute the accusation (his sole pretext for
making an unprovoked attack on an independent country) that Saddam Husseins
regime was working on nuclear weapons.
The US president couldnt say that, of course, and so instead his administrations
spokesmen mumbled about the need to get the war over and done with before the
summer heat made fighting impossible. Yet American soldiers proved perfectly
capable of operating in that summer heat during the ensuing seven years of fighting,
in which over 4,000 of them were killed.
That was nothing compared to the number of Iraqi deaths. At least five times as
many Iraqis have died violently in the decade since the US invasion as were killed by
Saddams regime in the ten years before the invasion. The exact number is
unknown, but Saddams secret police were probably killing less than 2,000 people a
year in 1993-2003. An estimated 121,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the military and
political struggles of the past ten years.
Iraqs infrastructure has still not recovered to its prewar level. More than a million
Iraqis still live in internal exile, unable to return to the homes from which they were
cleansed during the Sunni-Shia sectarian war of 2006-2007. Another million have
fled the country for good, including a large proportion of the countrys intellectual and
professional elite.
Iraq ranks eighth from the bottom on Transparency Internationals corruption index,
ahead of Somalia and North Korea but below Haiti and Equatorial Guinea. The
government in Baghdad, though dominated by sectarian Shia politicians, does little
for the impoverished Shia majority. The Sunni minority fears and hates it. And the
Kurdish ethnic minority in the north just ignores Baghdad and runs a state that is
independent in all but name.
Iraqs courts do the regimes will, torture is endemic, and the swollen army and
security forces (used almost exclusively for internal repression) eat up a huge
share of the budget. And from the perspective of American grand strategy, the main
result of the war has been to weaken the position of the US in the Gulf region and
strengthen that of its perceived opponent, Iran.

The United States spent about $800 billion on the Iraq war, and will eventually spend
at least another trillion dollars on military pensions, disability payments and debt
service. Yet it achieved less than nothing. Why on earth did it invade in the first
place?
Even the defenders of the invasion have stopped claiming that Saddam Hussein was
cooperating with al-Qaeda terrorists who were plotting to attack the United States.
They were also plotting to overthrow and kill Saddam, as everyone with any
knowledge of the Middle East already knew.
The UN weapons inspectors never found the slightest evidence that Saddam had
revived the nuclear weapons programme that had been dismantled under UN
supervision in the early 1990s. The people in the White House who took the decision
to invade must have known that there was no such programme: the way they
carefully worded their propaganda in order to avoid explicit lying is ample evidence
of that.
The strategist Edward Luttwak once suggested that the real reason was that the
invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had been too easy. After 9/11 the American people
really wanted to punish somebody, and Afghanistan had not provided enough
catharsis. So another invasion was an emotional necessity, and (given the American
publics ignorance about the Middle East) almost any Arab country would do.
There was certainly a parallel desire among the neo-conservatives in the Bush White
House to restore American power to unchallenged dominance after what they saw
as the fecklessness of Bill Clintons administrations in the 1990s. That required a
short and successful war that would put everyone else in awe and fear of American
military might but, once again, any weak and unpopular country would have done.
Why Iraq?
The closest we can come to a rational answer is the argument, common in
Washington a decade ago, that permanent military bases in Iraq would give America
strategic control of the entire Gulf region.
The role of those bases would not be to ensure prompt delivery of the regions oil to
the United States at a low price: only 11 percent of US oil imports come from there.
The bases would instead enable the United States to block Gulf exports of oil to
China if the United States found itself in a confrontation with that country. (Geostrategic arguments are often frivolous.)
None of these explanations can justify what was done, and we havent even gone
into the damage done to international law by this blatantly criminal act. But can we at
least conclude that the world, or even just the United Nations, has learned a lesson
from all this?
Probably yes for the United States, at least until memories fade. (Give it ten more
years.) Not so much for the rest of the world, but then most other countries are less
prone to invade faraway places anyway.
Syria: Chemical Fantasies and Grim Realities
April 2013
First of all, dismiss all those news stories saying that the Assad regime has started
using chemical weapons against its own citizens, and that this has crossed a red
line and will trigger foreign military intervention in Syria. It is conceivable, though
highly unlikely, that Assads troops have used poison gas against the rebels. It is not
credible that any foreign leader is going to order his troops to go into Syria and stop
the war.
The evidence for the Assad regimes use of sarin (nerve gas) is flimsy, and its

easy to see why the opposition fighters might choose to fabricate it. Equally flimsy
evidence about alleged weapons of mass destruction was used to justify the
American invasion of Iraq. Why wouldnt the Syrian rebels have a go at the same
game?
Moreover, there is no plausible reason why the Syrian regime would use poison gas.
It would confer no lasting military advantage on the government forces, and the
political costs of being caught doing it would be significant. But even if the
accusations were true, it would make no real difference.
President Bashar al-Assads Russian and Chinese supporters would be
embarrassed, but they would not drop their vetoes at the UN Security Council and
authorise foreign military intervention in Syria. And even if they did authorise it, there
would be no volunteers for the job.
No Western government nor any Arab government, either is willing to put
soldiers on the ground in Syria. Meddling in a civil war is rarely a good idea, and the
Baathist regimes army could inflict very serious losses on an invader. Even
imposing a no-fly zone would mean Western pilots dead or downed, because Syrias
air defences are modern, competent and extensive.
US President Barack Obama may talk sternly about how the use of poison gas by
the Syrian regime would be a game-changer but he doesnt specify just how the
game would change. He also spends much more time talking about how shaky the
evidence is, because he has no idea what he would actually do if it were true. The
one thing we can be sure of is that he would never send American troops in.
So if there is not going to be any foreign military intervention, when is the Syrian civil
war going to end? Not any time soon.
From time to time the rebels overrun an air base here or a frontier post there. This is
usually reported as proof that they are making progress, but half the time they lose
their conquests back to the regime some weeks or months later. The front lines have
scarcely shifted at all in Aleppo in the past six months, and the regime is even
recapturing some of the Damascus suburbs that fell to the rebels last year.
The Syrian army lacks the numbers to hold down large tracts of countryside
permanently, but it has never let the rebels close the main north-south freeway that
links Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Assads divisions even re-opened the
highway linking Damascus to Tartus and Latakia on the coast recently, after many
months of closure. If they are not actually winning the war on the ground, they are
certainly not losing it.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar continue to feed weapons to the rebels, but not in quantities
that would give them a chance of winning. This is probably because they have
become increasingly nervous about the kind of regime that would replace Assads
dictatorship after a military victory. They wanted to replace Assads secular regime
with a government controlled by Sunni Muslims, but they do not want to put a
fanatical Islamist regime in power.
That, at the moment, is precisely what an insurgent victory would produce, for the
jihadi extremists of the al-Nusra brigades are by far the most effective fighters on the
rebel side. The prospect of a radical Islamist regime has also convinced many
moderate Syrians that they must prevent the fall of the Assad regime, even though
they loathe it.
A year ago, the battle for Syria seemed to be turning into a straightforward struggle
between the Sunni Muslim majority, some 70 percent of the population, and the
various minorities, Shia, Christian, Alawite and Druze, who backed the Assad regime
because they feared Sunni domination. Its probably more like 50-50 now, because

many Sunni Muslims are equally repelled by the alternative of a radical Islamist
tyranny.
There are no opinion polls to confirm this shift in Sunni opinion, but the evidence is
there in the loyalty and the combat effectiveness of the Syrian army, most of whose
rank-and-file troops are Sunni Muslims. So what should we hope for, in this almost
hopeless situation?
The least bad outcome, at this stage, would be a stealthy military take-over of the
regime that discreetly removed Assad and his cronies without abandoning the
principles of the secular state, and then isolated the jihadis by reaching a generous
peace settlement with the other elements of the rebel forces. How likely is that? Not
very, unfortunately.
Israel Takes Sides
May 2013
After making two major air strikes in and near Damascus in three days, Israel
informed the Assad regime on Monday that it is not taking sides in the Syrian civil
war. But of course it is.
The Syrian government promptly claimed that these Israeli attacks proved what it
had been saying all along: that the armed terrorist groups that are trying to
overthrow Bashar al-Assads regime (i.e. the anti-regime fighters of the Free Syrian
Army) are really the tools of a demonic alliance between Israel, the United States,
conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the Sunni Islamist fanatics
of al-Qaeda.
That is just as ridiculous as it sounds, but there were always a few little bits of truth in
the Syrian regimes story, and they are gradually getting bigger. Its true that the Free
Syrian Army is getting money and weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and that
the United States supports it diplomatically. So do almost all other NATO members
Its true that the al-Nusra brigades, the most effective fighting force in the Free
Syrian Army, are made up of Islamist extremists whose leaders claim to have ties
with al-Qaeda and that this has not stopped the Arab Gulf states and the United
States from supporting the FSA.
And its true that Israel is now attacking military targets on Syrian territory. It insists
that those targets are actually advanced missiles and anti-aircraft weapons that Syria
is planning to deliver to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, and that may also be true.
Hezbollah fought the Israeli army to a standstill in southern Lebanon in 2006, and
Israel is anxious about what it could accomplish with better weapons.
But even if Israels main worry is that advanced weapons would reach Hezbollah, the
air strikes took place on Syrian territory, and the Syrian regime claims that 42 officers
and soldiers of its army were killed in them. At the very least, Israel no longer feels
that preserving the hostile but stable relations that prevailed for so long between Tel
Aviv and Damascus is a high priority.
Maybe this is just because it now assumes that Assad is a goner anyway, so theres
no point in worrying about whether he will be overthrown, even if what follows may
be an Islamist regime that is even more hostile to Israel. Or maybe the Israelis
believe that Assad will really accept that there is a difference between killing Syrian
troops who are guarding weapons that may be shipped to Hezbollah, and killing
other Syrian soldiers who are not.
They certainly hope that hell accept it. Tzachi Hanegbi, a confidant of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio on Monday that the Netanyahu government
aimed to avoid an increase in tension with Syria by making clear that if there is

activity, it is only against Hezbollah, not against the Syrian regime. (Israel does not
officially admit that it carried out the strikes, so it could not make an official statement
about its motives for them.)
The Assad regime said that the attacks were tantamount to a declaration of war,
and that is true. Its not that the Israelis have decided that Assad must go. Its rather
that they have looked down the road, seen a Sunni-Shia war looming in the eastern
Arab world and decided, rationally enough, that they have to be on the Sunni side.
That war is already underway in Syria, where men from the majority Sunni Muslim
community are the main fighters in a revolt against a regime controlled by Shias of
the Alawite sect. The same sort of war may be re-starting in Iraq, where the Shia
majority who dominate the government have already fought one civil war with the
Sunni minority in 2005-07.
Those two Sunni-Shia wars might then coalesce and spread to Lebanon, where the
Shias of Hezbollah are at odds with the Sunni Muslim and Christian communities.
Weapons, money, and maybe direct military aid would come from Shia Iran to one
side and from the Sunni countries to the south (Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the smaller
Gulf states) to the other. In such a war, Israel would certainly prefer a Sunni victory.
It has no desire to take an active part in a Sunni-Shia war, nor would its intervention
be welcomed by either side. It worries that radical Islamist regimes might come to
power in Syria, in the western part of Iraq, and even in Lebanon if the Sunnis won
such a war. But Israel is at peace with its Sunni southern neighbours, while the Shia
regimes to its north in Syria and Iraq and the Hezbollah group in southern Lebanon
are all its sworn enemies.
If it comes to an all-out struggle, Israel knows which side it wants to win. And in the
meantime, it already feels a lot freer to take direct military action against the Syrian
regime and Hezbollah if it thinks its interests are threatened.
Drums Along the Nile
June 2013
Beware the open mike. On Tuesday Egypts President Mohammed Morsi summoned
senior politicians of all parties to discuss Ethiopias plan to dam the main tributary of
the Nile river. One proposed sending special forces to destroy the dam. Another
thought buzzing the dam site with jet fighters might scare the Ethiopians off.
Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate and a more sophisticated player,
suggested that Egypt support rebel groups fighting the Ethiopian regime. This could
yield results in the diplomatic arena, he said. And none of them realised that their
discussion was being broadcast live by Egyptian state television.
All students of geopolitics are familiar with the legend that Egypt has privately
warned the governments upstream on the Nile that it will start bombing if they build
dams on the river without its permission. The truth of that story is about to be tested.
Last month Ethiopia started diverting the waters of the Blue Nile in order to build the
Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4.7 billion, 6,000-megawatt hydroelectric
project that is the centrepiece of the countrys plan to become Africas largest
exporter of power. Egypt instantly objected, for it depends utterly on irrigation water
from the Nile to grow its food.
Even now Egypt must import almost 40 percent of its food, and the population is still
growing fast. If the amount of water coming down the Nile diminishes appreciably,
Egyptians will go hungry.
A treaty signed in 1929 gave 90 percent of the Niles water to the downstream
countries, Egypt and Sudan, even though all the water in the river starts as rain in

the upstream countries: Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.
That caused no problems at the time, but now Egypt is using all of its share of the
water and the upstream countries are starting to use the water for irrigation too.
The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is the first real test of Egypts tolerance for
upstream dam-building. The reservoir will take 63 million cubic metres of water to fill;
Egypts annual share of the Niles water is 55.5 million cubic metres. So even if
Ethiopia takes five years to fill the reservoir, that will mean 20 percent cuts in the
water Egypt receives from the Nile for five years. And even after that there will be a
large annual loss to evaporation.
The dam that was getting the Egyptian politicians worked up is just the start. Ethiopia
plans to spend a total of $12 billion on dams on the Blue Nile for electricity and
irrigation, and Uganda is negotiating with China for financing for a 600-megawatt
dam on the White Nile. More dams and irrigation projects will follow and the
upstream states are in no mood to let Egypt exercise its veto under the 1929 treaty.
That treaty was imposed when all the countries involved except Ethiopia were under
British rule, and it reflected Britains big investment in Egypt. In 2010 the upstream
countries signed a Cooperative Framework Agreement to seek more water from the
River Nile, effectively rejecting the colonial-era treaty and demanding that Egypt
relinquish its veto and accept a lower water quota.
Thats not going to happen. Mohammed Allam, Egypts minister of water resources
under President Hosni Mubarak when the upstream states signed their agreement
three years ago, warned that Egypt reserves the right to take whatever course it
sees suitable to safeguard its share. The post-revolutionary Egyptian government
cannot afford to be less firm in defending Egypts interests.
The issue will probably be kicked down the road for a couple of years, because the
Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will not be completed until 2015 at the earliest.
But there is big trouble for Egypt (and Sudan) further down the road.
By 2025, a dozen years from now, Egypt will be trying to feed 96 million people,
which would be very hard even with its existing giants share of the Niles water and
all its current food imports. The countries that signed the Cooperative Framework
Agreement will have 300 million people, so by then they will also be extracting very
large amounts of water from the Nile Basin for irrigation.
Without that water, Egypts only options are beggaring itself with massive food
imports (until the foreign exchange runs out), or famine. Unless, of course, it decides
on war but its options are not very good on that front either.
Not only are the upstream countries a very long way from Egypt (the Nile is the
worlds longest river), but they will have strong support from China, which is
financing most of the dams they are now building or planning.
Egypt, by contrast, has repudiated its former American ally, and may find that the US
is reluctant to re-engage even if the government in Cairo can overcome its own
distaste for Washington. Why would the United States want a confrontation with
China over Egypt?
So there probably wont be a war. And Egypt will probably face an apocalyptic food
shortage in ten or fifteen years.
Iran: The New Broom?
June 2013
You certainly cant say that Iranian elections are boring. In 2005, Iranians surprised
everybody by electing the darkest of dark horses, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the
presidency. They didnt know much about him, but at least he seemed different from

all the establishment candidates.

Well, he was different, but not in a good way. By the 2009 election Ahmadinejads
erratic and confrontational style had turned people off, and he should have lost but
he rigged the vote and triggered mass protests that badly frightened the regime
before they were crushed.
Term limits prevented Ahmadinejad from running again this year, which meant that
last Fridays election was clean. So the Iranians pulled off another surprise, electing
Hassan Rouhani, the only moderate candidate among the six contenders, to the
presidency in the first round. Rouhani got 50 percent of the votes; his closest rival
got only 16 percent.
The foreign reaction to Rouhanis victory was instantaneous. The United States
offered to open direct talks with Tehran on Irans nuclear programme as well as on
bilateral relations. Israels Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, by contrast,
predictably warned that there should be no wishful thinking about Rouhanis victory.
So what is he: new broom, or another disappointment in the making?
Especially in the past week, after the reformist leadership decided he was the least
bad alternative and threw its weight behind him, Rouhani has been saying some
interesting things. What I truly wish is for moderation to return to the country, he
told the reformist daily Sharq last Wednesday. We have suffered many blows as a
result of extremism.
It seems that extremists on both sides are determined to maintain the state of
hostility and hatred between (the United States and Iran), he told another
newspaper on Thursday, but logic says that there should be a change of direction.
And he repeatedly promised that both the nuclear issue and the resulting economic
sanctions against Iran would be solved if he became president.
Fine words, but he said most of them AFTER the reformists lost hope for a victory
themselves and gave Rouhani their support instead. But he is still really an insider, a
man whose whole life has been dedicated to preserving the present political order in
Iran.
On the other hand, so are Mohammad Khatemi and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the
two ex-presidents who gave him their backing. They are now seen as reformers
because circumstances change, and so do peoples views. All these men are still
determined to preserve Irans unique combination of theocracy and democracy, but
they understand the need to shift the balance towards democracy, and also to
deliver a reasonable level of prosperity to the voters.
You might think that Rouhanis highest priority, therefore, must be to end the
sanctions that are crippling Irans economy and impoverishing ordinary voters. Not
so: trust comes first. In order to retain credibility with the people who voted for him,
he must first release Irans political prisoners.
There are at least 800 political prisoners in Iran. Most are people who participated in
the green protests against the rigged election of 2009, but journalists, human rights
activists, feminists and leaders of all the minority religions in Iran (Christians, Sunni
Muslims and Bahai) are also in jail. Even amidst great economic hardship, that is
what the crowds in the streets celebrating Rouhanis victory were demanding most
urgently.
After that, of course, he must make a deal with the Western countries that have
waged a long campaign on Israels behalf against Irans alleged intention to build
nuclear weapons. That is not an impossible task, for Iran is certainly not working on
nuclear weapons at the moment: the US National Intelligence Estimates of 2007 and
2011 both say so, and even the Israeli intelligence chiefs agree.

The whole campaign against Iran is based not on evidence but on mistrust: the
conviction in some Western quarters (and most Israeli ones) that if Iran can enrich
uranium, the mad mullahs are bound to build and use nuclear weapons in the end.
But it is Irans right to build nuclear reactors and enrich fuel for them under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it has signed and still observes.
Many in the West are privately uneasy about waging a campaign against Irans quite
legal nuclear power programme when their own ally, Israel, has not signed the NPT
and secretly possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. Now that motor-mouth
Ahmedinejad is gone and a saner leader is about to take the reins in Tehran, there
could be a deal on the nuclear issue.
It would be a deal that preserves the countrys right to enrich uranium, but
strengthens the controls against enrichment to weapons grade (90 percent). As with
the question of releasing political prisoners, however, Rouhani must first get the
assent of the Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei, as the head of the theocratic side of the government, has the power to
veto everything. On the other hand, he also wants to preserve this strange twoheaded beast called the Iranian revolution, and he knows that if it does not retain
popular consent it will eventually die. Western sanctions are bringing the Iranian
economy to its knees, and people are really hurting. So maybe Khamenei will let
Rouhani and his backers save him.
Egypt and Turkey: Democracy in Trouble
July 2013
Egypt and Turkey have the same basic political problem. Democracy can work
despite huge ideological differences, but only if everybody is willing to be very
tolerant of other peoples ideas and values.
Three weeks ago the streets of Turkish cities were full of protesters demanding the
resignation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who won his third straight
election in 2011. Why? Because, they say, he is shoving conservative Islamic values
down their throats.
The Turkish protests have now died down, but this week the streets of Egyptian
cities have been full of protesters demanding exactly the same thing for exactly the
same reason. The Egyptian army has now intervened to remove the Islamist
president, Mohammed Morsi, and the very survival of the new Egyptian democracy
is in doubt.
Neither Erdogan nor Morsi could have come to power in a country that wasnt fully
democratic. Turkey has been a partly democratic country for sixty years, but if a
politician with a religious agenda won, the army would remove him. It even hanged
one prime minister in 1960.
In Egypt, three generals had ruled the country in unbroken succession since the
mid-1950s. Latterly they allowed elections, but their party always won, and the
main religious party, the Muslim Brotherhood, was always banned.
The Turkish and Egyptian generals were mostly devout Muslims themselves, but
they were willing to kill to keep religion out of politics. Islamic parties were a vehicle
for traditional and anti-modern values, and the generals goal was to modernise their
countries so they would be strong enough to stand up to the West.
There was some cynicism in their policy, too. The secular political parties in Turkey
(and in Egypt too, until they finally withered away under 60 years of military
dictatorship) were too fragmented and disunited to pose any real threat to the armys
power, whereas a single Islamic party with broad popular support might do just that.

So religion must be firmly excluded from politics.

In both countries, the generals modernising agenda had considerable success.
Turkey is now a powerful middle-income nation, and at least half of its 75 million
people are secular and modern in their political values. So they wanted the military
out of politics, and finally the army withdrew only to see the new Justice and
Development (AK) Party, a moderate Islamist party led by Erdogan, win the 2003
election.
The Turkish generals let the AK rule because it didnt try to impose its own religious
values on the whole population. It refrained because even in its best result, in 2010,
the AK only won 50.3 percent of the vote and some of that support came from
secular voters who saw it as the best hope for permanently excluding the army from
politics.
Egypt is a much poorer, less educated country than Turkey, but at least a third of the
85 million Egyptians would also qualify as modern people with secular values. They
were the ones who made the revolution happen in 2010 but in the new
democracys first free presidential election last year the Muslim Brotherhoods
candidate, Mohammed Morsi, won 51.7 percent of the vote.
The Muslim Brotherhood promptly started writing its conservative religious values
into the new constitution. More recently, Erdogans AK Party in Turkey passed some
laws that imposed its religious values too.
It wasnt a wholesale assault on the secular society in Turkey they just placed
some restrictions on the sale of alcohol but in both countries it greatly alarmed the
secular part of the population. So it took only the slightest pretext a demonstration
over the destruction of a park in Istanbul, the first anniversary of Morsis election in
Egypt to bring huge crowds of protesters out on the street in every city.
At that point, both Islamist leaders stopped pretending that they governed in the
name of the entire nation. Let them go into mosques in their shoes, let them drink
alcohol in our mosques, let them raise their hand to our headscarved girls, said
Erdogan of the Turkish protestors. One prayer from our people is enough to
frustrate their plans. He blamed the protests on an international conspiracy by
something called the interest-rate lobby.
In Egypt, Morsi vowed to give my life to defend the new constitution written by his
Islamist colleagues last year, and blamed the unrest on a plot by remnants of the
ousted Mubarak regime. The Egyptian army has now suspended the constitution, but
it is a soft coup that will almost certainly leave Morsi alive. Perhaps even free.
The Islamists are to blame for this crisis in both countries, because their political
programme does ultimately involve shoving their values down everybody elses
throats. But the secular parties are also to blame, because it is their inability to unite
behind a single candidate and programme that has let the Islamists win power in
both Turkey and Egypt.
It is hard for democracy to survive in a country where large parts of the population
hold radically different ideas about the purposes of the state and the rights of its
citizens. Urbanisation will ultimately resolve this conflict, for in one more generation
most of the recent immigrants to the fast-growing cities will have adopted secular
values. But in the meantime, Egypt will have a very rough ride. Maybe Turkey too.
End of the Arab Spring?
July 2013
If the people in charge of the various opposition parties in Egypt had any strategic
vision, they would not have launched the mass protests that caused the army to oust

President Mohammed Morsi on 4 July. They would have bided their time and waited
for the next election. Because there is probably still going to be a next election in
Egypt, despite the coup, and now the Muslim Brotherhood might actually win it.
There is a good deal of chatter in the media at the moment about the end of the
Arab Spring, some of it by commentators who can barely conceal their delight.
Egypt, with almost one-third of the worlds total Arab population, was the great
symbol of the democratic movements success, and now Egyptian democracy is in a
mess. But the drama still has a long way to run.
Morsi is now under arrest, as are many other leading members of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and the passionate demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in the
streets of Egypts cities make it hard to imagine that any compromise is possible.
Indeed, Russias President Vladimir Putin warned last weekend that Egypt risks
stumbling into a civil war like the one that has devastated Syria.
Opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, on the other hand, justified the military coup
by claiming that it had been the only alternative to civil war which could, he said,
have been as bad as Somalia. Really? One suspects that he doesnt know much
about Somalia. Indeed, one suspects that he doesnt really know much about his
own country either (he has spent most of his career abroad).
There was no risk of civil war in Egypt before last weeks military intervention, and
there is no risk of civil war now either. What we are seeing is a no-holds-barred
struggle for power between rival political movements, in a system where the political
rules are newly written, hotly disputed, and poorly understood. And all the players
have made some serious mistakes.
The Muslim Brotherhood, on the basis of last years 51.7 percent majority for Morsi
in the presidential election, assumed that it had the unquestioning support of half the
population. This was probably not true.
Many voted for Morsi in recognition of the Muslim Brotherhoods long resistance to
six decades of military dictatorship. Others voted for him in gratitude for the
Brotherhoods unfailing support for the poor, or in disgust at the fact that Morsis only
opponent in the second round of the election was a left-over from the Mubarak
regime.
Perhaps as few as half of them actually voted for the Brotherhoods core project of
Islamising Egyptian law and forcing its own version of Islamic values on Egyptian
society but the Brothers seemed to think they all had. Even if that had been true,
trying to impose fundamental changes on a country with the support of only half the
population was not wise.
Some of the constitutional changes that Morsi imposed, and some of his tactics for
pushing them through, may actually have been the result of political compromises
within the Brotherhood, where he constantly had to fend off the fanatics who wanted
even more extreme measures. Nevertheless, the secular opposition parties
inevitably saw him as an extremist, and genuinely feared that he would somehow
manage to force the whole package on Egypt.
So the secular parties responded with extra-constitutional tactics of their own: mass
demonstrations that were explicitly intended to trigger a military take-over that would
sideline Morsi and the Brotherhood. In only four days of demos, they succeeded, in
large part because the army, a resolutely secular organisation, had its own grave
misgivings about where Morsis government was taking Egypt.
But the army hasnt actually seized power. It has appointed Adly Mansour, the head
of the Constitutional Supreme Court, as interim president, with the task of organising
new parliamentary and presidential elections. It will not be possible to exclude the

Muslim Brotherhood from those elections without turning the whole process into a
farce especially since the Brotherhood will probably be going through some
changes of its own.
The Muslim Brotherhood took little part in the 2011 revolution, and the men at the
top, including Morsi, were utterly unprepared for power. They are now likely to be
replaced by a younger generation of leaders who are more flexible and more attuned
to the realities of power. They might even win the next election, despite all Morsis
mistakes this time round.
Thats the real irony here. If the opposition parties had only left Morsi in power, his
unilateral actions and his inability to halt Egypts drastic economic decline would
have guaranteed an opposition victory at the next election. Now its all up in the air
again.
But democratic politics is far from over in Egypt. Foolish things have been done, but
the Arab Spring is not dead.
Egypt: Worse Than a Crime
July 2013
Two massacres committed by the Egyptian army in one week. At least 130 people
killed in the streets of Cairo for protesting against the military coup. It is worse than a
crime (as the French diplomat Talleyrand remarked when Napoleon ordered a
particularly counter-productive execution). It is a MISTAKE.
It is also a crime, of course. The killing has been deliberate and precise: only trained
snipers could produce so many victims who have been shot in the head or the heart.
General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Adly Mansour, the tame president he has installed,
tell the kind of lies that generals and politicians always tell when this sort of thing is
going on, but the reports of the journalists on the scene leave no room for doubt: this
is murder.
But it is, above all, a mistake. When the army fulfilled the demands of the antigovernment demonstrators in Tahrir Square on 3 July by overthrowing the elected
president, Mohammed Morsi, after only a year in office, it must have known that his
supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood would protest in the streets. And it must have
had a plan for dealing with those protests. Soldiers always have plans.
The simplest plan would be just to wait the protesters out. The Muslim Brotherhood
could put large numbers of people on the streets, but at least in Cairo even larger
number of people would go to Tahrir Square and support the coup. Use minimum
force, contain the demonstrations by both sides, and wait for people to get bored and
go home.
In the meanwhile, push on with the process of rewriting the constitution to remove
the Islamic bits inserted last year by Morsis party and hold a new referendum to
ratify it. By the time fresh presidential and parliamentary elections are held early next
year, the Muslim Brotherhood will presumably have found more modern and
moderate leaders to replace Morsi and in any case the secular parties will win the
election.
Was this really General Sisis scenario for the future when he overthrew Morsis
government? Perhaps: the armys moderate behaviour in the first week after the
coup could support that hypothesis. But it wouldnt have taken long for the soldiers to
understand that things were unlikely to work according to plan.
The problem was not so much the imprisoned presidents refusal to legitimise his
overthrow by cooperating with the military, or the tens of thousands of peaceful proMorsi demonstrators camped out in the streets. Morsis non-cooperation was

predictable and so were the pro-Morsi crowds, but his supporters were patient and
peaceful. Wait another month or so, and most of them would probably go home.
In this scenario, the turning point would have come when Sisi or his advisers finally
realised that the Muslim Brotherhood could wait it out too. Whatever the intervening
process, if the Brotherhood was really free to run again in the promised election next
year, it might win again. That would be catastrophic for the armys very privileged
position in Egypt so the Brotherhood had to be excluded from politics.
That is a charitable take on the armys motives. The likelier explanation, alas, is that
Sisi planned to ban the Brotherhood from the start. Democracy be damned: the
deep state, that permanent collusion between well-fed Egyptian soldiers and
bureaucrats and the foreign military and commercial interests who feed them, is
making a come-back. And the political idiots on Tahrir Square are cheering it on.
Either way, the armys political project now requires the massive use of force: the
supporters of the Brotherhood must be driven from the streets, by murder if
necessary, and its leaders must be criminalised and banned. And other political
idiots, in Washington, London and Paris, are going along with that too.
President Barack Obama is uncomfortable with what is happening, but he wont call
it a coup because then he would be obliged to cut off $1.5 billion a year in aid to the
Egyptian army. Instead, he calls it a post-revolution transition, and promises that
the United States will be a strong partner to the Egyptian people as they shape their
path to the future.
His loyal sidekick William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary (also known as
Tonto), asks the Egyptian authorities politely to refrain from violence because now
is the time for dialogue, not confrontation. Fraid not. Now is the time for murder,
and foreign democrats are holding the murderers coat.
Egypt is the biggest Arab country by far, and so long as the democratic revolution
prospered in Egypt you could still say that the Arab Spring was changing things for
the better, even despite the calamity in Syria. But its very hard to see how the
Egyptians can find their way back from where they are now.
Even worse, the Egyptian coup is stark proof that political Islam cannot succeed by
taking the democratic path. The message it conveys to devout Islamists all over the
Arab world is that Osama bin Laden was right: only by violence can their political
project succeed. Thanks a bunch, General Sisi.
Syrian Dilemma
August 2013
A dilemma is by its very nature a choice between evils, and that is what now faces
other countries over the use of poison gas in Syria. All the options may be on the
table, but none of them are good.
Nobody denies that poison gas was used in rebel-held parts of Damascus on 21
August, not even the Syrian government. Medecins Sans Frontieres says 3,600
patients with symptoms of poisoning were treated at three hospitals it supports in
Damascus after the attack, and that at least 355 of them died. The real total may be
as high as 1,000 dead. Thats a whole weeks normal death toll in the Syrian civil war
in just one day.
After that, however, we run out of facts. The rebels claim that the Baathist regime
was responsible, while the Syrian government says that the rebels did it themselves
in the hope of triggering foreign military intervention. Sending United Nations
inspectors will not settle that argument: if nerve gas was actually used, it must have
come from government stocks, but that doesnt mean that the regime did it.

Everybody knows that the Syrian military have stocks of poison gas, but whats
happening in Syria is a civil war. The rebels have not overrun any of the known
storage sites for Syrian chemical weapons, but they could have secret supporters
inside those sites who smuggled some out to them.
If you apply the old test of who benefits?, the rebels, who are currently losing
ground, have a strong incentive to get the Assad regime blamed for using illegal
weapons. If that gets the United States and other Western powers to impose a no-fly
zone, or bomb the regimes military bases, it helps the rebel cause. So maybe they
acted to provide the necessary evidence: some of them are certainly ruthless
enough.
Its easier to imagine the regime using chemical weapons: its just as ruthless, and it
actually owns them. But it is manifestly not to its advantage to do so. President
Bashar al-Assads troops are winning the war without them, and the last thing he
needs is foreign military intervention. Using chemical weapons could lead to just
such an outcome, and it would be exceptionally stupid for the regime to do so.
On the other hand, armies and regimes have done exceptionally stupid things in the
past, particularly when they are isolated and under great pressure. The emerging
consensus among Western governments, at any rate, is that Assad was responsible.
So what to do about it?
France has already called for the use of force, and the United States and Britain
seem to be teetering on the brink: after a 40-minute phone call last Saturday
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that a
significant use of chemical weapons would merit a serious response. But that is
about the least they could say, in the circumstances.
Earlier in the week, Obama warned publicly that people who call for immediate
action, jumping into stuff that does not turn out well, gets us mired in very difficult
situations, (and) canactually breed more resentment in the region. If you liked
Americas wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he is saying, youll just love the one in Syria
and he knows the American public is not up for it.
US military intervention is unlikely to lead to the outcome American foreign policy
really desires: the preservation of Syrias existing secular state, with a change of
leadership at the top. If Assad is overthrown, hell probably pull the whole edifice
down with him. If the rebels win, its almost certainly the Islamist radicals who will
take over. So if a military intervention is practically bound to end in tears, then why
not just skip it?
Because chemical weapons are classed as weapons of mass destruction, and
there is an international treaty banning their use. If you let Assad get away with this,
goes the argument, he will have breached an important international taboo on the
use of WMD. Well, not really.
Biological weapons (germ warfare) are truly horrifying weapons of mass
destruction, banned by treaty, and nobody has ever used them. Nuclear weapons
can kill by the billions; they have never been banned, but they havent been used in
war for 68 years now. Poison gas, however, is not really a weapon of mass
destruction at all.
When gas was used in the First World War, it was always about capturing the next
line of trenches. After that war it was banned, but it has been used a few times since:
Italy used gas in Ethiopia in 1935; Japan used it against China in 1938; Yemen used
it against rebels in the 1960s; and Iraq used it against Iran and Kurdish rebels in the
1980s. In no case did the casualties reach mass destruction levels.
Napalm, fuel-air explosives and cluster bombs are just as nasty as poison gas, and

perfectly legal. The historic ban on poison gas is a valuable deterrent, but it has
survived some previous breaches, and preventing this one is not worth a war.
Especially if it is, from the point of view of the potential interveners, an unwinnable
war.
Syria: The Pretext and the Real Target
September 2013
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me so the British
parliament decided that it didnt want to be shamed by following another prime
minister into another unwinnable war on the basis, yet again, of shoddy intelligence
reports. It voted 282-275 against committing British forces to the planned American
attack on Syria.
After the vote on 29 August, Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that former
prime minister Tony Blair had poisoned the well by leading Britain into the Iraq war
in 2003 on the basis of false intelligence reports about Iraqs non-existent weapons
of mass destruction. That was why neither the public nor even some members of
Camerons own party now trusted his assertions on Syrian WMD. I get it,
Cameron said, and promised Britain would stay out of the coming war.
On the next day, US President Barack Obama followed the British governments
example by announcing that he would seek the approval of Congress before
launching strikes on Syria. He still felt that the Syrian regime should be punished for
using poison gas, he said, but it turns out that the operation is not time-sensitive
after all. Everything can wait until the US Congress resumes sitting on 9 September.
This came as a great surprise to many people, but it shouldnt have. Obama is
probably secretly grateful to Britain for pulling out, because it has given him an
excuse to postpone the attack maybe even to cancel it, in the end. He foolishly
painted himself into a corner with his tongue last year by talking about a red line
that he would never allow the Assad regime in Syria to cross, but he wasnt elected
to be policeman of the world.
That was the role George W Bush tried to play, but American voters want no more of
the wars that come with it. Obama got US troops out of Iraq, and theyll soon be out
of Afghanistan as well. He doesnt want to end up fighting a war in Syria, and that will
be hard to avoid that if he starts bombing. Once we take action, we should be
prepared for what comes next, wrote General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, only one month ago. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.
Retired General Anthony Zinni, former US commander in the Middle East, expanded
on that with brutal clarity. The one thing we should learn is you cant get a little bit
pregnant. If you do a one-and-done (a few days punitive air strikes with Tomahawk
cruise missiles) and say youre going to repeat it if unacceptable things happen, you
might find these people keep doing unacceptable things. It will suck you in.
Obamas problem is that he has fallen into the clutches of Washingtons foreign
policy establishment, which has enduring purposes and prejudices that usually
overpower the particular views and wishes of passing presidents and Congresses.
Consider its six-decade loathing of Cuba and its 35-year vendetta against Iran. (It
hates to be successfully defied.)
This establishment has no problems with weapons of mass destruction so long as
they are on its side. It has never renounced the right to initiate the use of nuclear
weapons, although they are a hundred times deadlier than poison gas. It didnt even
mind the Shah of Iran working to get them, back when he was Washingtons
designated enforcer in the Middle East. But it has never forgiven the Iranians for

overthrowing the Shah.

Washington then switched to backing its new ally, Saddam Hussein, who used
poison gas extensively in his war against Iran in 1980-88. US Air Force intelligence
officers helped Saddam to plan his gas attacks on Irans trenches, and the Central
Intelligence Agency tried to pin the blame for Saddams use of gas against the Kurds
on Iran instead. Now Saddam is gone and Iraq is Irans ally (thanks to George W
Bushs invasion of Iraq in 2003). But Iran is still the main enemy, and the game goes
on.
Syria is Irans ally, so Washington has always seen the regime in Damascus as an
enemy too. Over a thousand Egyptians murdered in the streets of Cairo by the army
that overthrew the elected government last month is no cause for US intervention,
because Egypt is an ally. Over a thousand Syrians killed in the streets of Damascus
by poison gas requires an American military response, because Bashar al-Assads
regime is the enemy.
Assads regime must not be destroyed, because then al-Qaeda might inherit power
in Syria. But it must be whacked quite hard, so that it dumps Assad and with him,
perhaps, the alliance with Iran. The gas is a pretext, not the real motive for the
promised strikes.
Obama doubts that this will work, and rightly fears that even a limited American
attack on Syria could end up as a full-scale war. The events in London have won him
some time, and letting Congress decide is his best chance to escape from his
dilemma. What could possibly go wrong?
Syria: An Unexpected Rabbit
September 2013
When someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, its natural to be suspicious. Magicians are
professionals in deceit and so are diplomats. But sometimes the rabbit is real.
On Monday morning, the world was heading into the biggest crisis in years: a
looming American attack on Syria, a Russian response that could set off the first
major confrontation between Washington and Moscow since the Cold War, and the
possible spread of the fighting from Syria to neighbouring countries. Or alternatively,
a Congressional rejection of President Barack Obamas plans that would have left
him a lame duck for the next three years.
By Tuesday morning all that had changed. A Russian proposal for Syria to get rid of
all its chemical weapons was promptly accepted by the Syrian foreign minister, Walid
al-Moallem, and the Senate vote on Obamas planned strikes on Syria was
postponed, probably for weeks. If Syria keeps its word, the vote may never be held.
What a difference a day makes.
Now for the cavils. Nothing has been signed. Nothing has even been written up for
signature. Maybe Syria is just playing for time. Perhaps Obama will want to pursue
the Syrian regime legally for the poison gas attacks that he claims it has already
carried out (though he sounded very relieved on hearing the news and didnt mention
any red lines).
The sequence of events, so far as can be made out, was as follows. At the Moscow
G20 summit last week, Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin had a one-toone chat on the side at which one of them broached the possibility of persuading
Syria to give up its chemical weapons entirely. Which one isnt clear, and the idea
was not pursued by either of them.
Yet both men had reason to want such a thing, for the alternative was that Obama
would lead the United States into another Middle Eastern war, not exactly what he

was elected for or that he would not get Congressional approval to do so and end
up completely discredited. Putin would feel obliged to respond to a US attack on his
Syrian ally, but that could end up with Russian missiles shooting down American
planes.
There was then silence until Monday, when John Kerry, the US Secretary of State,
gave an off-the-cuff reply in London to a question about whether Syrias President
Bashar al-Assad could avoid an American attack. Sure. He could turn over every bit
of his (chemical) weapons to the international community within the next week,
without delay, said Kerry with a shrug. But he isnt about to.
Then Kerry got on a plane to fly home, and halfway across the Atlantic he got a call
from the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, saying that he was about to
announce that Russia would ask Syria to put all its chemical weapons storage
facilities under international control, join the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons, and finally destroy them all.
The Syrian foreign minister happened to be in Moscow, so within an hour he
declared that Assads regime welcomes Russias initiative, based on the Syrian
governments care about the lives of our people and security of our country. By
Monday evening Obama was saying that the Russian plan could potentially be a
significant breakthrough, and the pot was off the boil.
The whole thing, therefore, was made up on the fly. That doesnt necessarily mean
that it wont work, but it is a proposal that comes without any of the usual preparation
that precedes a major diplomatic initiative. The reason we dont know the details is
that there arent any. What we do know is that everybody Obama, Putin and Assad
is clearly desperate to avoid going to war, and that gives us reason to hope.
Two things that have to happen fast, if this rabbit is really going to run. First, Syria
has to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and ratify the Biological and Toxin
Weapons Convention right away. That could be done within a week, and it would
legally commit it to getting rid of all its chemical weapons and the factories that make
them.
Secondly, the United Nations Security Council has to pass a resolution demanding
that Syria reveal the size and location of its entire stock of chemical weapons and
place them under international control. France has already put such a resolution on
the Security Councils agenda; the test will be whether Russia vetoes it. It probably
wont.
There is a great deal of suspicion in Washington that this is merely a delaying tactic
meant to stall an American attack and sap the already weak popular support in the
United States for military action. Moreover, it will be hard to send international troops
in to secure Syrias chemical weapons (at least forty storage sites, plus some
weapons in the hands of military units) unless there is a ceasefire in the civil war now
raging all over the country.
But the American military will be pleased, because they were really unhappy about
the job that Obama was giving them, and Obama himself looks like a man who has
been granted a new lease of life. There will be time to try to make this work.
Assad Survives
September 2013
It was already looking likely that President Bashar al-Assads regime would survive
it has had the upper hand militarily in the Syrian civil war for at least six months now
but the events of the past two weeks have made it virtually certain.
Syria has already complied with the two initial demands of the Russian-American

deal concluded over Assads head last week. It has signed the Chemical Weapons
Convention, and it has given a list of all Syrias poison gas facilities and storage
depots to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. That means
that the United States cannot attack it for at least a year.
President Barack Obamas ability to order such an attack was already in doubt
because of opposition in Congress. Now he could not bomb without endangering UN
inspectors, who will be all over the regime-controlled parts of Syria by November to
take control of the estimated thousand tonnes of chemical weapons. Syria has a
year to destroy them all, and until and unless it fails to meet that deadline, bombing
is out of the question.
Even if there are delays, the United States will be uniquely ill-placed to use them as
the pretext for an attack, as it is far behind schedule itself. In 1997 the US agreed to
destroy the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other lethal gases that it
owned within ten years.
Thats thirty times as much as Syria has, but ten years should have been enough.
It wasnt. In 2007 Washington asked for five more years to get rid of all its poison
gas, the maximum extension allowed under the Chemical Weapons Convention. It
didnt meet that deadline either, so last year it announced a new deadline: 2021.
Given its own record, the US will find it hard to use Syrian delays as an excuse for
resurrecting its bombing threats.
The civil war will probably continue during the coming year, and possibly for a good
deal longer. Assads troops have been winning back territory in the centre of the
country, but they have yet to make much progress in the north, the south or the east.
They lack the numbers to finish the job now, but the tide is running in their direction.
Close to a thousand separate rebel units are now operating in Syria, but there is no
unified rebel army. The armed groups can be roughly divided into jihadists (many of
them foreign) who want to create an Islamic caliphate in Syria, and more moderate
groups who originally took up arms hoping to create a democratic Syria freed from
the Baath Partys tyranny.
Most of the less radical groups want an Islamic republic too, but they are repelled by
the extremism of the jihadists. They hoped that the West would destroy Assads
forces and put them in power instead (while keeping the jihadists out), and they are
now very angry at the United States for letting them down. But they are also deeply
disappointed, for the realists among them can see no other way to win this fight.
Many of these fighters would now be open to a regime offer of a ceasefire, an
amnesty, and a gradual transition to a less corrupt and repressive political system,
and the Baathist regime is likely to make such an offer soon (whether it means it or
not). It would not neutralise the jihadists and restore peace to the country, but it
might seduce enough of the other rebels to shift the military balance sharply in
Assads favour.
Much cruel fighting would remain to defeat the jihadists, but at least the country
would emerge intact. Or the war may just go on and on, ending eventually in
partition. But at least we have been spared the spectacle of the United States and its
sidekicks attacking yet another Muslim country, only to realise in the end (as in the
case of the imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) that its excuse for
doing so was false.
The pretext this time was going to be Assads use of poison gas against his own
people. But the timing was weird. (UN inspectors had just arrived in Damascus when
nerve gas was fired at the rebel-held eastern suburbs). The target was pointless.
(Why civilians, not rebel fighters?) And why would Assad use a weapon that might

trigger Western bombing when he was already winning the war without it?
Now the Russians are saying (off the record, so far) that the serial numbers of the
rockets that delivered the nerve gas reveal that they did not belong to the Syrian
army. They were made in Russia in 1967 and sold to Yemen, Egypt and Libya s
Colonel Gaddafy who filled some of them with nerve gas. He had about a thousand
tonnes of the stuff.
A lot of Gaddafis arsenal went missing after he was overthrown two years ago, sold
off by the victorious rebel militias. Some of the nerve gas-filled rockets could easily
have ended up in Syria, in rebel hands, and the temptation to use them in order to
trigger Western military intervention would have been hard to resist. If that is really
the case, then President Obama should be even more grateful to Moscow for saving
his bacon.
Iran: In from the Cold?
September 2013
When Irans new president, Hassan Rouhani, came home from the United Nations
General Assembly meeting last Friday, demonstrators at Tehran airport threw eggs,
shoes and stones. They had heard about his 15-minute phone conversation with US
President Barack Obama, and they were not pleased.
But there were many more Rouhani supporters at the airport, who clearly hoped that
he will make a deal with the United States on Irans nuclear programme and end the
sanctions that are strangling the Iranian economy. I believe we can reach a
comprehensive solution, Rouhanis office tweeted after the famous phone call to
Obama, and most Iranians want to believe him.
Most people elsewhere want to believe him too. We have had ten years of escalating
threats by Israel and the US to attack Iran if it doesnt stop enriching uranium for its
civil nuclear power programme, on the grounds that this is merely a cover for a
nuclear weapons programme. And everybody understands that this could end up as
a big, ugly war.
Thats why Obama took the political risk of becoming the first US president in 34
years to talk to an Iranian leader. When he addressed the General Assembly in New
York, he welcomed the more moderate course taken by President Rouhani, who
took office in August. The roadblocks may prove to be too great, Obama said, but I
firmly believe the diplomatic path must be tested.
Then the chief roadblock arrived: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He was
flying to New York to tell the truth in the face of the sweet talk and the blitz of
smiles, he said and when he mounted the podium at the General Assembly, he
bluntly accused the new Iranian president of being a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Nobody, not even the Israeli intelligence services, accuses Iran of working on
nuclear weapons right now. The US Central Intelligence Agency flatly says that it is
not. The accusation, by Israel, its Western supporters, and some of Irans Arab
neighbours, is that Tehran is building a (quite legal) uranium enrichment capability IN
ORDER TO BE ABLE TO MAKE ACTUAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT SOME
FUTURE TIME.
Iran denies any such intention, of course. We say explicitly that we will be
transparent; we say explicitly that we will not build a bomb, said Rouhani in New
York. No nation should possess nuclear weapons, since there are no right hands for
these wrong weapons.
That last was a subtle slap at the hypocrisy of the United States and Israel, which
have thousands and hundreds of nuclear weapons respectively, for threatening to

attack another country because it is allegedly planning to build them in the future.
But Rouhani is not demanding that Israel give up its nuclear weapons and sign the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, he implicitly accepts the status
quo.
So why doesnt Netanyahu welcome the possibility that Iran now seems willing to
negotiate a deal that would leave it free to make its own enriched nuclear fuel for
reactors, but stop it from making highly enriched uranium suitable for weapons? By
all means insist that any US-Iranian deal be enforceable and free of loopholes, but
why say things like Rouhani thinks he can have his yellowcake (enriched uranium)
and eat it too?
The ten-year confrontation over Irans alleged nuclear weapons ambitions has
served Netanyahu well. It has distracted the worlds attention from the plight of the
Palestinians in the occupied territories. It has also given him enormous leverage in
Washington: much US policy in the Middle East is driven by the perceived need to
keep Israel from launching a unilateral attack on Iran, which would be a catastrophe
for American interests in the region.
But if Netanyahu truly believes that Iranian nuclear weapons would be an existential
threat to Israel, why would he oppose negotiations that might put an end to that
possibility? Exactly what would be lost by giving peace a chance?
What would be lost, if a lasting deal emerged from the negotiations being mooted
between Tehran and Washington, is the ability of successive right-wing Israeli
governments to extort unconditional American military support for Israel, no matter
what it does, precisely because it allegedly faces an existential threat from Iran.
Since the Russian-sponsored deal over Syrias chemical weapons has similarly
sidelined the prospect of an American attack on Syria (which Israel sees as its
second most dangerous enemy), the foreign policy that has sustained Netanyahu for
almost two decades is collapsing.
Without a plausible military threat to Israel and where else could it come from, if
not Iran or Syria? his ability to bully successive American administrations into
ignoring Israels illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land, its clandestine
nuclear and chemical weapons, and much else besides, would slowly drain away. So
Netanyahu will do everything he can to strangle the newborn possibility of an
American-Iranian rapprochement in its cradle.
As the scenes at Tehran airport demonstrate, Rouhani also faces strong opposition
at home from those whose political instincts or interests demand a continuation of
the Iran-against-the-world confrontation that has already lasted for a generation.
Rouhanis initiative has created a great deal of hope, but its enemies are already
working to kill it.
Meanwhile, Back in Iraq
October 2013
The media spotlight on the Arab world shifts focus almost every month: counterrevolution in Egypt, civil war in Syria, an American raid in Libya It rarely stays on
Iraq for long, because the violence there has been going on so long that it has
become part of the scenery. But just be patient a little longer.
Five months ago, a British fraudster called James McCormick was jailed for ten
years for selling novelty hand-held golf-ball detectors (cost $20) to the Iraqi
government as bomb detectors (cost $40,000). Yet the Iraqi security services are still
using the preposterous devices, which dont even have a power source. This tells
you all you need to know about the situation in the country

Its not because the Iraqis are unaware of the problem. McCormick allegedly
received $75 million from the Iraqi government for the useless toys, and at least a
third of that amount would have gone as kickbacks to the government officials who
signed off on the deal. That much lolly was bound to attract the jealousy of rival
government officials, and so there has indeed been an Iraqi investigation into the
deal.
Three local culprits, including Major-General Jihad al-Jabiri, the head of the Defence
Ministrys directorate of combat explosives, even went to jail over the crime. (They
were probably insufficiently generous in sharing their good fortune with other high
office-holders.) But as late as last May Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was still
insisting that the ADE-651 golf-ball detectors were effective and they are still in
widespread use today.
This is beyond bizarre, because Iraq is currently losing about a thousand lives a
month to terrorist bombings. True, five times as many people are being killed each
month in the civil war in neighbouring Syria, but civil wars always kill many more
people than mere terrorism.
The fear now is that Iraq is drifting towards a sectarian civil war as well. Malikis
government, which is dominated by politicians from the Shia majority of the Arab
population, effectively controls only about half the country. The Kurds, who would
really rather be independent, control the north, and have little interest in inter-Arab
disputes. And the Sunni Arabs deeply resent being under Shia rule.
There has been a revolution in Iraq in the past decade, although it was not the
democratic one that the American invaders thought they were bringing. In
overthrowing Saddam Husseins dictatorship, they also ended many centuries of
domination by the Sunni Arab minority. Now its Shia Arabs who rule the roost, and
the Sunnis are largely frozen out of the government, the army, and the civil service.
That may be even more important in alienating the Sunni community from the postAmerican settlement than the constant arrests and torture of Sunnis suspected of
anti-government activity. Unemployment in Iraq is 30 percent, and half the jobs that
do exist are in the gift of the government. They almost all go to Shias, and the
Sunnis have fallen on very hard times.
Mass Sunni protests began almost a year ago, and until last April they were almost
entirely non-violent. Sunni terrorists belonging to al-Qaeda-related jihadist
organisations another by-product of the American occupation were killing about
300 Shias a month, but they had little support in the broader Sunni community.
Then in April the Iraqi (i.e. Shia) army raided a peaceful protest camp in Hawijah,
killing about 50 Sunnis, and suddenly the violent minority of Sunni jihadists came to
be seen as defenders of Sunni rights. In May the death toll from terrorism leaped to
700. By June it was almost a thousand, and by now some of them were Sunnis killed
by Shia counter-terrorists. July, August and September have each brought about a
thousand more victims.
This is heading back towards a civil war on the scale of what happened in Iraq in
2006-2007, under the American occupation, when some 3,000 people were being
killed each month, and the government is doing nothing effective to stop it. But then,
the government does nothing effective in any domain.
The Iraq government gets $100 billion a year in oil revenue, but nothing gets built or
maintained or repaired. Most people live in poverty, while the bulk of the oil income
goes on salaries for government employees, a large majority of whom either dont
show up for work at all, or fail to do any useful work when they get there. The rest of
the money is simply stolen by the governments own senior officials.

The fake bomb detectors are part of that vast haemorrhage of cash, and one
possible reason that they have not been replaced yet is that some people will
obviously make a lot of money out of the contract for whatever replaces them. Until
the question of which people has been decided, nothing will be done.
The soldiers and police using them in the streets dont mind. If they should find a
bomb in a car, the suicide bomber driving it will almost detonate the explosives and
kill them. So a bomb detector that doesnt detect bombs is just fine with them.
Syrias Chemical Weapons: Everybody Wins (Except the Syrians)
October 2013
That prize should have been given to me, joked Syrias President Bashar al-Assad
shortly after the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 11 October. The guests gathered in his palace in
Damascus presumably laughed, out of courtesy to their host, but they all knew that
giving up Syrias chemical weapons hadnt been Assads idea at all.
Al-Akhbar, the Beirut newspaper that reported Assads remarks, has close links with
Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia that is supported by Syria and Iran, and it
accepted Assads regret about the new turn of events at face value. There is no
doubt that the loss of chemical weapons has resulted in a loss of morale and a
political loss for Syria, Assad said.
Since 2003, Syria has demanded that the countries in the region dismantle their
weapons of mass destruction, and the chemical weapons were meant to be a
bargaining chip in Syrias hands in exchange for Israel dismantling its nuclear
arsenal, the Syrian president continued. Today the price (of the bargaining chip)
has changed, and we have agreed to give up our chemical weapons to remove the
threat of the US attacking us.
Hes really doing it, too. Sixty out of a planned hundred OPCW inspectors are
already in Syria, and they have made no complaints about a lack of cooperation by
Damascus. By the end of this month they will have completed their initial verification
visits and confirmed that Syrias account of its chemical weapons and facilities is
accurate and conceals nothing.
They will also have disabled the countrys ability to produce and mix poison gases
and load them into actual weapons by then. The work is cheap, quick and low-tech,
in the words of OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan. The inspectors are just smashing
the control panels on the machines that produce and mix the gases, and destroying
the munitions that would actually deliver the end product with sledgehammers,
grinders and bulldozers.
Significantly, the inspectors have so far found no bombs, shells or missiles that are
actually filled with poison gas, which suggests that Syrias chemical weapons were in
a very low state of readiness. It also greatly eases the next phase of the OPCWs
task, the destruction of the actual chemicals, since it is a tricky and dangerous
business to extract the liquefied poison gas from a projectile that also contains the
explosives to disperse it when it lands.
Syria has an estimated 1,000 metric tonnes of toxic chemicals: around 300 tonnes of
sulfur mustard, a blistering agent, and about 700 tonnes of the nerve agents sarin
and VX. But if none of it is weaponised (loaded into projectiles), and much of the
nerve agent is in precursor form, as separate, less toxic components, then OPCWs
goal of finishing the job by mid-2014 seems feasible. Even if it has to be done in the
midst of a civil war.
Its quite clear that Assad did not plan all this. His forces (or somebody elses) used

poison gas in Damascus, though the attack was pointless in military terms. President
Barack Obama was trapped by his previous loose talk about an American red line
into threatening to bomb Syria. And the Russians got Obama off the hook (and
saved Assad from a severe pounding) by persuading the Syrian leader to renounce
his chemical weapons.
But what has Assad really lost? The chemical weapons, which have lost their
deterrent value over the past few years, were meant to be used only after Israel used
its nuclear weapons, he says, but it was never a very credible deterrent. Israels
unstoppable nuclear weapons could annihilate Syria, whereas the very effective
Israeli civil defence organisation would have made mass casualties unlikely even in
a worst-case Syrian gas attack.
In any case, Syrias chemical weapons have indeed now lost whatever deterrent
value they ever had, for Israel has acquired good anti-missile defences that would
shoot down most incoming Syrian missiles. Syria actually stopped producing new
chemical weapons in 1997, Assad said, because they had lost their military
usefulness.
After that, they were only a low-value bargaining chip to be put on the table in the
improbable event of region-wide negotiations on eliminating all weapons of mass
destruction. (Poison gas is not remotely comparable to nuclear weapons in its
destructiveness, but it is technically WMD.) But Assad is a very lucky man. He
discovered belatedly that his bargaining chip could be traded for something else:
immunity from American attack.
So everybody wins. Obama escapes from the new Middle Eastern war that he
dreaded. Moscow gets huge diplomatic credit for coming up with the formula that
averted that war, and saves its Syrian client as well. Assad regains a measure of
respectability by nobly relinquishing his useless chemical weapons. And the OPCW
gets the Nobel Peace Prize.
The only losers are the Syrian people on both sides of a dreadful civil war, which
looks set to drag on indefinitely.
Iran Nuclear Deal: The Aftermath
November 2013
What will the Middle East look like after Iran and the great powers that are
negotiating over Irans alleged nuclear weapons ambitions the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) sign a deal that ends
the confrontation? Its time to ask the question, because there is going to be a deal.
It didnt get signed in Geneva last weekend, but it came close. The only foreign
minister at the Geneva talks on Friday was Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, but
progress was so rapid that by Saturday almost all the foreign ministers of the P5+1
American, British, French, German and Russian dropped whatever they were
doing and flew in for the grand finale. Only the Chinese foreign minister was absent.
The grand finale has been postponed. There were just too many details to clear up in
a single weekend, and a couple of sticking points that have yet to be resolved. But
the date for the next meeting has already been set (20 November), and nobody went
away angry. We are all on the same wavelength, said Zarif. There is a deal on the
table and it can be done, said British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
There are still some gaps between Iran and some of the other countries present,
Hague said, but they are narrow gaps. You asked what went wrong. I would say that
a great deal went right. Even French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, the one who
apparently dropped a last-minute spanner in the works, said that we are not far from

a agreement with the Iranians, although we are not there yet.

Fabiuss demands were that the reactor in Arak, now nearing completion, should
never be activated, as it would produce plutonium as a byproduct, and that Irans
store of uranium enriched to medium level (20 percent pure) should be brought back
down to 5 percent to move it farther away from weapons-grade (90 percent).
Introduced into the talks at a late stage, his demands brought the proceedings to a
temporary halt.
All the other Western powers closed ranks and insisted that these were joint
demands, but they were not part of the original draft agreement. Speculation was rife
that France was acting on behalf of its customers (for French weapons) on the Arab
side of the Gulf, notably in the United Arab Emirates, who view the deal under
discussion with just as much horror as Israel does. But France can only delay things:
the deal is going to happen.
One immediate consequence of the deal will be that Israel has to stop threatening to
attack Iran. The threat was always 90 percent bluff Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahus own military chiefs would probably refuse to obey him if he ordered
such an attack without American support but now it will be simply ridiculous. Which
will swing the spotlight back to Israels treatment of the Palestinians.
Irans economic isolation will also end, although it may take several years to unwind
all the economic sanctions. The gradual return of prosperity in Iran will make the
current Islamic regime more secure (which may be the main reason that the
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah AliKhamenei, authorised newly elected President
Hassan Rouhani to negotiate the nuclear deal and end the confrontation.)
But the big question is whether a nuclear deal with Iran will cool the rapidly
intensifying Sunni-Shia conflict that threatens to suck in the whole of the Fertile
Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula. The answer, alas, is probably not.
The split is as incomprehensible to non-Muslims as the religious wars of Europe four
centuries ago were to non-Christians, and mercifully Sunni-Shia hostility has never
reached quite that intensity of violence and hatred. But right across the Islamic world
it has been getting worse for several decades now, and the eye of the storm is in the
Middle East.
Iran is the sole Shia great power, so it is inevitably the focus of the fears of Sunni
Arabs and the hopes of Shia Arabs. Moreover, given Turkeys semi-detached
relationship with the region, Iran is in practical terms the greatest power in the entire
Middle East.
For the past decade, Iran has been greatly weakened by the arms and trade
embargoes that the West imposed because of the nuclear issue. Once those
embargoes are removed Iran will regain much of its former strength. This is already
causing great anxiety in the Sunni Arab countries, especially those that face it across
the Gulf.
Even quite experienced people in Washington and other Western capitals dont
realise the extent to which the Sunni Arab countries of the Middle East thought that
their close ties with the Western great powers gave them a kind of guarantee against
Shia power and how betrayed they feel now that they think that guarantee is being
withdrawn.
Sunnis outnumber Shias almost ten-to-one in the Islamic world as a whole, but in the
smaller world that stretches from Iran and Turkey to Palestine and Yemen, the
Middle East, Shias make up more than a third of the population. The war is already
hot and quite openly sectarian in Syria and in Iraq. In many other places (Lebanon,
Bahrain, Yemen) it is bubbling just underneath the surface. It will get worse before it

gets better.
Iran and the US: Neither Blind Nor Stupid
November 2013
We are not blind, and I dont think we are stupid, said US Secretary of State John
Kerry in response to fierce Israeli criticism after the first round of talks about Irans
nuclear programme earlier this month failed to reach a deal. Now the deal is done,
and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is even harsher in his condemnation
of Kerrys handiwork.
Israel has many friends and allies, said Netanyahu, but when theyre mistaken, its
my duty to speak out.What was achieved last night in Geneva (24 November) is
not a historic agreement, it was a historic mistake. Today the world has become a
much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world took a
significant step towards obtaining the worlds most dangerous weapon.
What he meant was that the interim agreement implicitly recognises Irans right to
enrich uranium for peaceful uses. But that right is already enshrined in the NonProliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, and nobody ever thought that Iran was
really going to renounce it. What was at issue was whether it would enrich its
uranium to weapons grade 90 percent pure and make nuclear bombs.
The Plan of Action signed by Iran, the United States, Russia, Britain, France,
Germany and the European Union ensures that it will not, at least for the next six
months. All uranium enrichment above 5 percent is to be halted, and Irans entire
stockpile of 20 percent enriched material the potential feedstock for a dash to
weapons-grade material is to be diluted or converted to a form not suitable for
further enrichment.
Iran is not to install any more centrifuges (the machines used to enrich material), and
large numbers of the existing banks of centrifuges are to be left inoperable. Even
Irans stockpile of 3.5% enriched uranium ( for use in nuclear power reactors) is to
remain the same between now and the end of the six-month period. And there will be
no further work done on the Arak reactor, which might give Iran plutonium, and thus
a second route to a nuclear bomb.
Iran will also allow more intrusive inspections by International Atomic Energy Agency
officials, including daily access to the key enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow. All
it gets in return is $7 billion worth of relief (about $100 per Iranian) on the sanctions
that are crippling its economy. All the main sanctions will stay in place until a final
agreement has been signed if it is six months from now.
Iran can therefore make no further progress towards nuclear weapons while the
detailed negotiations continue, if that is actually what Tehran ever had in mind. Yet
Israeli officials are talking as if the United States has been both blind and stupid.
On Sunday, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said that Israel cannot
participate in the international celebration, which is based on Iranian deception and
the worlds self-delusion. And Naftali Bennett, Israels minister of trade and industry,
warned: If in five years a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be
because of the agreement that was signed this morning.
This is so far over the top that you wonder whether the speakers even believe it
themselves. Israel has talked itself into this obsession with Irans alleged nuclear
weapons project Israeli sources have been warning that Iran is two years away
from a bomb at regular intervals for the past twenty years but the constant talk
about it has also served to draw attention away from Israels settlement policy in the
Palestinian territories.

Israels basic position is that the Iranian regime is entirely composed of evil terrorist
fanatics who should never be allowed to have refined uranium of any sort. The only
recourse is therefore to tighten the sanctions more and more until Irans entire
economy and government crumble and a completely different sort of people emerge
from somewhere to take over the country. No deal can be a good deal.
Israels leaders are dismayed that they can no longer keep their allies and friends
pinned in this extreme position, but endlessly quoting the ravings of former Iranian
prime minister Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is not enough. They would have to
demonstrate that Iran actually intends to attack Israel, and they cannot. So
eventually their allies just moved without them.
As Israels Finance Minister Yair Lapid told Time magazine, Weve lost the worlds
ear. We have six months, at the end of which we need to be in a situation in which
the Americans listen to us the way they used to listen to us in the past. But the
game is not over yet. Israels influence in the US Congress is still immense, and its
Congressional allies are already talking about heaping more sanctions on Iran (in
order to kill the deal, though they dont admit that).
President Obama could veto those new sanctions, of course, but he will find it a lot
harder to get Congress to revoke the existing sanctions if the final deal is done six
months from now. Thats why Iran gets so little relief from sanctions now in return for
its concessions: Obama needs more time to work on Congress. But Israel may still
win this tug-of-war.
Bad Times in Libya
November 2013
A little over two years after the former Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was
captured and killed by rebel militiamen outside the town of Sirte, the Libyan state is
teetering on the brink of collapse. A dozen different militia organisations have more
authority than the central government, and if ordinary civilians protest at their
arbitrary rule they get shot.
That happened in Benghazi, in the east of the country, in June, when 31 peaceful
demonstrators were shot dead and many others wounded while protesting outside
the barracks of the Libyan Shield Brigade.
It happened again in Tripoli just last week, when a militia brigade from Misrata that
has been roosting in the capital for the past two years used heavy machine-guns on
unarmed civilians who were demanding that it go home, killing 43 and wounding
hundreds.
In between, there have been some eighty assassinations of senior police and
government officials. Last month the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was kidnapped by
gunmen of the Libya Revolutionaries Operations Room group. Almost all the east
and the south of the country are controlled by militias who have seized the main
oilfields and ports.
Oil exports, the countrys only significant source of revenue, have dropped from 1.4
million barrels per day last summer to only 200,000 bpd. Deprived of most of its
income, the government will run out of money to pay its employees next month
including the militias that harass it, for it pays them off too. And once the militias are
no longer getting their protection money, things may get even worse in Libya.
Thats the bad news in Libya, but it all follows logically from the nature of the fivemonth war that overthrew Gaddafi in 2011. It was not the militias that defeated him; it
was NATOs air power, which relentlessly bombed his troops and strong-points. But
since the Western countries, haunted by their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq,

had no wish to put troops on the ground, it was the militias who collected the victory.
The militias now have 225,000 members in a country of only 5 million people. Only
about one-tenth of the militiamen actually fought in the war, but in a country with 40
percent unemployment its the best job going, so they do not lack recruits. And from
the beginning what passes for a national government in Libya, lacking any army or
police of its own, hired the militias to enforce its authority. As a result, they have
become the real authorities.
What government there was at the centre has now largely disintegrated. There was
a reasonably free election in 2012, but most of those elected represented tribal,
ethnic or regional interests, and they have now mostly withdrawn from the national
Congress in disgust, leaving the Muslim Brotherhood as the dominant influence in
the government even though it lacks broad support in the country. So the
disintegration continues.
The eastern half of the country, Cyrenaica, with 80 percent of the oil, is now in
practice a separate entity, run by militias that demand federalism but really mean
independence. Prime Minister Zeidan warned in August that any vessel not under
contract to the National Oil Company that approaches the (oil) terminals (in
Cyrenaica) will be bombed, and so far none has dared to but that means nobody
gets the income. It is a truly horrible mess.
Could this have been avoided? Probably not. After forty-two years of Gaddafis brutal
rule there was no civil society in Libya that could support a democratic government
and effectively demand respect for human rights and an end to corruption. Foreign
occupation might have supplied some of the necessary skills to run a modern state,
but would have been violently rejected by Libyans. Besides, there were no foreigners
willing to take on the job.
You have to start from where you are. Libya is taking much longer than the optimists
expected to get to where it needs to be: a democratic state that respects its citizens
and enforces the law impartially. At the moment its not even heading in that
direction: Prime Minister Zeidan worries that it might become an Afghanistan or a
Somalia.
Probably not. The countrys oil wealth can only flow, whether to the warlords or to the
citizens, if there is a reasonable degree of peace and order. That is a powerful
incentive to cooperation, even if much of the negotiation seems to be done with
guns. And there is a kind of civil society emerging in Libya now: those crowds of
protesters that the militias massacred were actually evidence that it exists.
It will be years more before the Libyans manage to sort themselves out, but in the
end they probably will. They will probably remain a single country, too, although a
highly decentralised and federalised one. But its very bad now, and it will probably
get worse before it gets better.
Egypt Referendum
January 2014
General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led the coup against Egypts elected president last
July, has one of the finest collections of military headgear in the entire Middle East.
Perhaps thats why he has still not admitted that he plans to become the next
president: he cant decide which hat to throw into the ring.
His own explanation for his shyness comes straight out of the Aspiring Dictators
Handbook: If I nominate myself, there must be a popular demand, and a mandate
from my army, he told the state-owned paper Al-Ahram.When Egyptians say
something, we obey, and I will never turn my back on Egypt.

Egyptian generals are deeply patriotic people, and three others before Sisi have
sacrificed their own desire for a quiet life in order to rule Egypt: Gamal Abdel Nasser
(1956-70), Anwar Sadat (1970-81) and Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011). In fact, the last
three years have been the only time in the life of the great majority of Egyptians
when a general has not been running the country, and Sisi seems ready to make the
supreme sacrifice too.
A mandate from the army shouldnt be hard to get, since he runs the whole
organisation. And as far as popular demand is concerned, Sisi is clearly planning to
use a yes vote in this weeks referendum on the new constitution as proof that the
people want him for president.
The new constitution will be the third in four years. It replaces the one that was
written and adopted (also by referendum) during the brief, unhappy rule of President
Mohamed Morsi, who took office on 30 June 2012 and was overthrown on 3 July
2013. It removes the Islamic changes that Morsis Muslim Brotherhood wrote into
the last one, which should appeal to secular Egyptians, but thats not what makes it
attractive to General Sisi.
The new clauses that only a soldier could love include one that gives the Egyptian
military the right to appoint the defence minister, and another that says the military
budget will not be subject to civilian oversight. It also retains the much-criticised
clause that allows civilians to be tried in military courts. Sisi reckons enough civilians
will vote for it anyway, some because they hate the Islamists and some because
they are just tired of all the upheavals.
Maybe they will, because the whole Arab world is suffering from revolution fatigue:
the Arab awakening has caused such turbulence that many people would find a
return to the old dictatorships almost comforting. Its true even in Syria, where some
of the rebels are starting to talk about making a deal with the Assad regime in order
to isolate the Islamist extremists and hasten the end of the war.
There has been no war in Egypt, but about a thousand of Morsis supporters were
massacred in the streets of Cairo by the security forces last summer, and the
Muslim Brotherhood has been declared a terrorist organisation. There have been
many thousands of arrests, not only of senior Muslim Brotherhood members but
recently of secular critics of the of the military regime as well.
Egyptians are frightened and exhausted, and Sisi apparently thinks they will
gratefully accept a return to army rule (behind a democratic facade). But his
nervousness is showing: theres barely a wall in Cairo that is not covered with Yes
posters and pictures of Sisi, while people trying to put up No posters get arrested.
Sisi is probably right to be nervous.
In late September, three months after the coup, Zogby Research Services carried
out an extensive opinion poll in Egypt for the Sir Bani Yas Forum in Abu Dhabi. It
revealed that confidence in the army had already dropped from 93 percent to 70
percent, and it probably has gone on dropping.
General Sisi and former President Morsi had almost equal support in the country
46 percent for Sisi, 44 percent for Morsi (who now faces trial for inciting his
supporters to carry out premeditated murder and various other alleged crimes).
But Morsis trial was postponed last week from 8 January to 1 February, allegedly
because bad weather prevented him from being flown from his prison in Alexandria
to Cairo for the trial. Thats a rather long spell of bad weather, and besides its only
two and a half hours by road from Alexandria to Cairo. One suspects that the military
regime did not want Morsi to make his first public appearance since the coup just
before the referendum.

The Zogby poll also revealed that an overwhelming majority of respondents blame
the last military regime, under Hosni Mubarak, for the problems facing Egypt today.
All in all, this is hardly a firm foundation on which to complete the counter-revolution
and build a new military regime.
The likeliest outcome of the referendum on the new constitution this week (Tuesday
and Wednesday) will be a modest majority for the Yes, but on a very low turnout. If
it is lower than the mere 33 percent who voted in the referendum on the last
constitution in 2012, then Sisi may have to reconsider his plan to run for the
presidency.
Syrian Peace Talks
January 2014
It would be interesting to know just what tidbits of information the US National
Security Agencys eavesdropping has turned up on United Nations SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-Moon. He certainly caved in very fast: on Sunday he invited Iran to
join the long-delayed peace talks aimed at ending the three-year-old civil war in
Syria; on Sunday evening the United States loudly objected, and on Monday he
obediently uninvited Iran.
So the peace talks get underway in Switzerland this week after all, and the omens
for peace are not that bad. Unless, of course, you were also hoping for the overthrow
of the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad and the emergence of a democratic Syria, in
which case the omens are positively awful.
The breakthrough may not happen at Geneva this week, but the Russians and the
Americans are now on the same side (although the US cannot yet bring itself to say
publicly that it is backing Assad). Moreover, some of the rebels are getting ready to
change sides. It wont be fast and it wont be pretty, but theres a decent chance that
peace, in the shape of an Assad victory, will come to Syria within a year or two.
What has made this possible is the jihadis, the fanatical extremists of the al-Nusra
Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who have frightened both the
United States and a great many ordinary Syrians into seeing Assads regime as the
lesser evil.
Two years ago, it still seemed possible that Assad could lose. The rebels had the
support of the United States, Turkey and powerful Sunni Arab states like Egypt and
Saudi Arabia, and they still talked about a democratic, inclusive Syria. Assads only
friends were Iran, Russia and Lebanons Hezbollah.
But then the jihadis showed up, alienating local people with their extreme version of
sharia law and scaring the pants off the United States with their allegiance to alQaeda. It took the United States quite a while to admit to itself that it does not
actually want Assad to fall if that means putting the jihadis in power, but it has finally
grasped the concept.
The catalyst was the poison gas attacks in Damascus last August, which forced the
US to threaten air strikes against the Assad regime (because it had already declared
that the use of poison gas would cross a red line). However, President Obama was
clearly reluctant to carry out his threat and then the Russians came up with the
idea that Assad could hand over all his chemical weapons instead.
Obama grabbed that lifeline and cancelled the air strikes. After that there was no
longer any prospect of Western military intervention in the Syrian war, which meant
that Assad was certain to survive, because the domestic rebels were never going to
win it on their own.
More recently, a war-within-the-war has broken out among the rebels, with the

secular groups fighting the jihadis and the jihadi groups fighting among themselves.
So far in January more people have been killed in this internecine rebel war (over a
thousand) than in the war against the regime. And the US and Russia are working on
a deal that would swing most of the non-jihadi rebels over to the regimes side.
General Salim Idris, the commander of the Free Syrian Army (the main non-jihadi
force on the battlefield), said last month that he and his allies were dropping the
demand that Assad must leave power before the Geneva meeting convened.
Instead, they would be content for Assad to go at the end of the negotiation process,
at which time the FSAs forces would join with those of the regime in an offensive
against the Islamists.
He was actually signalling that the Free Syrian Army is getting ready to change
sides. There will have to be amnesties and financial rewards for those who change
sides, of course, but these things are easily arranged. And Assad will not leave
power at the end of the negotiation process.
The jihadis are not at Geneva this week, of course; just the Russians and the
Americans, and the Assad regime and the Syrian National coalition (the Free Syrian
Armys political front), and a few odds and sods to make up the numbers. It is an
ideal environment for the regime and the secular rebels to discuss quietly how they
might make a deal, with their Russian and American big brothers in attendance to
smooth the path.
The fighting in Syria will continue for many months, even if a joint front of the regime
and the FSA is formed to drive out the foreign extremists and eliminate the nativeborn ones. In practice the end game will probably be even more ragged than that,
with all sorts of local rebel groups trying to cut their own deals or holding out until the
bitter end. But the final outcome has become clear, and it is no longer years away.
The Arab Spring Three Years On
January 2014
It has taken a little longer than it did after the 1848 revolutions in Europe, but on the
third anniversary of the Egyptian revolution we can definitely say that the Arab
Spring is finished. The popular, mostly non-violent revolutions that tried to overthrow
the single-party dictatorships and absolute monarchies of the Arab world had their
moments of glory, but the party is over and the bosses are back.
People in the Middle East hate having their triumphs and tragedies treated as a
second-hand version of European history, but the parallels with Europe in 1848 are
hard to resist. The Arab tyrants had been in power for just as long, the revolutions
were fuelled by the same mixture of democratic idealism and frustrated nationalism,
and once again the trigger for the revolutions (if you had to highlight just one factor)
was soaring food prices.
In many places the Arab revolutionaries had startlingly quick successes at first
Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen just like the French, German, and Italian revolutionaries did
in Europes Springtime of the Peoples. For a time it looked like everything would
change. Then came the counter-revolutions and it all fell apart, leaving only a few
countries permanently changed for the better like Denmark then, or Tunisia in
todays Arab world.
The disheartening parallels are particularly strong between Egypt, by far the biggest
country in the Arab world, and France, which was Europes most important and
populous country in 1848. In both cases, the revolutions at first brought free media,
civil rights and free elections, but also a great deal of social turmoil and
disorientation.

In both France and Egypt the newly enfranchised masses then elected presidents
whose background alarmed much of the population: a nephew of Napoleon in one
case, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the other. And here the stories diverge
for a time but the ending, alas, does not.
In France, President Louis Napoleon launched a coup against his own presidency,
and re-emerged in 1852 as Emperor Napoleon III. It had been a turbulent few years,
and by then a large majority of the French were willing to vote for him because he
represented authority, stability and tradition. They threw away their own democracy.
In Egypt last year, the army allied itself with former revolutionaries to overthrow the
elected president, Mohamed Morsi and within a few months, after an election
which will genuinely represent the wish of most Egyptians to trade their new
democracy for authority, stability and tradition, Field Marshal Abdel Fatah al-Sisi will
duly assume the presidency. The counter-revolution is as popular in Egypt now as it
was in France then.
And if you fear that this analogy is really relevant, then heres the worst of it. After the
defeat of the 1848 revolutions, there were no further democratic revolutions in
Europe for twenty years. If that timetable were also to apply to the Arab world, then
the next round of democratic revolutions would only be due around 2035. But it
probably doesnt apply.
There is one key difference between the European revolutions of 1848 and the Arab
revolutions of 2011. The 1848 revolutions were violent explosions of popular anger
that succeeded in hours or days, while those of 2010-11 were largely non-violent,
more calculated struggles that took much longer to win. Non-violent revolutions give
millions of people time to think about why they are taking these risks and what they
hope to get out of it.
They may still lose focus, take wrong turns, even throw all their gains away. Mistakes
are human, and so is failure. But once people have participated in a non-violent
revolution they are permanently politicised, and in the long run they are quite likely to
remember what they came for.
The most promising candidate to succeed Gene Sharp as the world authority on
non-violent revolutions is Erica Chernoweth, a young American academic who cowrote the study Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent
Conflict with diplomat Maria Stephan. A lot of their book is about why non-violent
revolution succeeds or fails, but most interesting of all are their statistics about HOW
OFTEN it succeeds.
Their headline statistic is that violent revolutionary struggles succeed in overthrowing
an oppressive regime only 30 percent of the time, whereas non-violent campaigns
succeed almost 60 percent of the time. By that standard, the Arab world is certainly
under-performing.
There have been only two relative successes among the Arab countries, Tunisia and
Morocco (where the change came so quickly that hardly anybody noticed). There
were two no-score draws: Yemen and Jordan. And there were three abject failures:
Bahrain, Egypt and Syria, the latter ending up in a full-scale civil war. (Libya doesnt
count, as it was a violent revolution with large foreign participation right from the
start.) So far, not so good.
But the most relevant statistic from Chernoweth and Stephans work for the future of
the Arab world is this: Holding all other variables constant, the average country with
a failed non-violent campaign has over a 35 percent chance of becoming a
democracy five years after a conflicts end. Failure may be only temporary. The
game isnt over yet.

Afghanistan
January 2014
Britains prime minister David Cameron rambled a bit on his visit to Afghanistan last
December, but ended up sounding just as deluded as U.S. president George W.
Bush had been when he proclaimed Mission accomplished six weeks after the
invasion of Iraq. British troops were sent to Afghanistan, Cameron said, so it doesnt
become a haven for terror. That is the missionand I think we will have
accomplished that mission.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper was equally upbeat when addressing Canadian
troops just before they pulled out in 2011. Afghanistan no longer represents a
geostrategic risk to the world (and) is no longer a source of global terrorism, he
said. Both men are technically correct, since Afghanistan never was a geostrategic
risk to the world or a haven for terror, but they must both know that the whole war
was really a pointless waste of lives.
Obviously, neither man can afford to say that the soldiers who died in obedience to
the orders of their government (448 British troops, 158 Canadians) died in vain, but
Barack Obama has found a better way to address the dilemma: he just doesnt offer
any assessment of the campaigns success. I never doubted Obamas support for
the troops, only his support for their mission, wrote former defence secretary Robert
Gates, and he was right.
So was Obama, in the sense that he realized the mission, whatever its purpose (the
definitions kept changing), was neither doable nor worth doing. But in fact he did
support it, at least to the extent of not pulling the plug on itand 1,685 of the 2,315
American soldiers killed in Afghanistan died on his watch. Could do better.
Now theres another election coming up in Afghanistan (on April 5); at least threequarters of the remaining foreign troops (perhaps all of them) will be gone from the
country by the end of this year, and the whole thing is getting ready to fall apart. This
will pose no threat to the rest of the world, but its going to be deeply embarrassing
for the Western leaders who nailed their flags to this particular mast.
The election is to replace President Hamid Karzai, who has served two full terms and
cannot run again. It will be at least as crooked as the last one in 2009: 20.7 million
voters cards have already been distributed in a country where there are only 13.5
million people over the age of 18. Karzai is so confident of remaining the power
behind the throne that he is building his retirement residence next to the
presidential palace, but hes probably wrong.
His confidence is based on his skill as a manipulator of tribal politics. Indeed, his
insistence that the U.S. hand over control of Bagram jail, and his subsequent release
of 72 hardcore Taliban prisoners, was designed to rebuild ties with the prisoners
families and clans before the election. But it is that same Taliban organization that
will probably make all Karzais plans and plots irrelevant.
Its not that the Taliban will sweep back to power all over Afghanistan once Western
troops leave. They really only controlled the Pashtun-majority areas of the east and
south and the area around the capital even when they were in power in 1996-2001,
while the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras of the Northern Alliance ruled the rest.
That pattern is likely to reappear, with the Taliban and the northern warlords pushing
politicians like Karzai asideprobably not at once, when most or all of the Western
troops go home at the end of this year, but a while later, when the flow of aid (which
accounts for 97 percent of Afghan government spending) finally stops.
The U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam did not collapse when American

troops went home in 1973, but two years later, when Congress cut the aid to Saigon.
The Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan did not collapse when Soviet troops
withdrew in 1989, but three years later, after the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia
cut the aid. It will happen that way again.
The new part-Taliban Afghanistan that emerges will be no more a source of
international terrorism than the old part-Taliban Afghanistan was. It was Osama bin
Laden and his merry men, mostly Arabs and a few Pakistanis, who plotted and
carried out the 9/11 attacks, not the Taliban.
True, bin Laden et al. were guests on Afghan soil at the time, but it is highly unlikely
that they told the Taliban about the attacks in advance. After all, they were probably
going to get their hosts country invaded by the United States; best not to bring it up.
And there have been no international terrorist attacks coming out of Afghanistan in
the past eight years, although the Taliban already control a fair chunk of the country.
The election will unfold as Karzai wishes, and his preferred candidate (exactly who is
still not clear) will probably emerge as the new president, but this truly is a case of
rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. The second long foreign occupation of
Afghanistan in half a century is drawing to a close, and Afghanistans own politics
and history are about to resume.
Splitting Libya
March 2014
The Red Wadi (Wadi al Ahmar) lies a bit to the west of the old Roman border
between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, but if Libya splits in two it will serve quite well as
the new frontier. The deadline for the fighting to resume there was last Thursday (27
March), but neither side is very good at organising a battle and we will have to wait
for a bit. It will probably happen in the end, though.
Libya has been a chaos of rival militias holding down local fiefdoms ever since the
overthrow of Muammar Gaddafis 42-year dictatorship in 2011, but in the past month
the disintegration has accelerated. A formal division of the country into two
successor states is now a real possibility, but its unlikely to happen without some
further fighting.
There has been some already. Much of the eastern half of the country, Cyrenaica,
has been under the control of a coalition of tribal militias led by Ibrahim Jathran since
last year. He seized control of the terminals on the coast through which two-thirds of
Libyas oil production is exported, and set up the Cyrenaica Political Bureau, which
is acting as a proto-government in the east.
The central government in Tripoli, which was led by Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, was
powerless to stop him. The government has been paying $1,000 per month to about
160,000 members of various militias (out of a total population of only six million) in
an attempt to make them servants of the state, but they dont feel obliged to obey
government orders. And the army that obeys Tripoli is too small and weak to take on
a powerful warlord like Jathran.
Months of stalemate followed, while the countrys oil exports, which account for 95
percent of government revenues, plunged from 1.5 million barrels/day to only
200,000 barrels. (The Zintan militia in western Libya was also cutting pipelines and
occupying oilfields from the western oilfields from time to time.) But matters came to
a head when Jathrans militia started trying to export oil itself from the eastern oil
terminals in early March.
If he could sell Cyrenaicas oil with impunity that would be the end of a united Libya,
so Prime Minister Ali Zeidan threatened to sink a rogue tanker, the North Korean-

flagged Morning Glory, that arrived at one of the terminals controlled by Jathran to
load oil valued at $30 million. Libyas navy had been sunk by NATO planes and its
air force was near mutiny, however, so all Zeidan had to stop it was a tugboat juryrigged with Grad rockets.
Morning Glory managed to get away, and the Islamist-dominated Congress that
passes for a final authority in Libya fired Zeidan for his failure. Morning Glory was
stopped later in the week by a US Navy warship and handed over to the government
in Tripoli, but it was too late for Zeidan, who fled the country fearing assassination.
Congress then ordered the most powerful militia in the west of the country, the
Libyan Shield, to seize the rebel-held ports in the east, but after some clashes they
were stopped east of Sirte. Since then the two sides have glared at each other
across the Red Wadi, waiting for the deadline set by the speaker of Congress and de
facto president, Nuri Abu Sahmain, to expire.
Now it has expired, and nothing has happened yet, but neither has there been any
sign that the two sides are talking. Besides, it is misleading to talk of two sides: the
country has become a jumble of militia-run city-states with rapidly shifting alliances.
But the east-west split is real, and it is getting worse.
It goes back a long way. Even two thousand years ago, in the heyday of the Roman
empire, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were two separate provinces, quite different in
language and religion. Cyrenaica was Greek-speaking, and Tripolitania spoke Latin.
After the empire became Christian in the 4th century AD, Cyrenaica became
Orthodox while Tripolitania was part of the Roman (Catholic) church.
The Arab conquest of both provinces in the 7th century erased those differences of
language and religion. All Libyans now speak Arabic, and the vast majority are Sunni
Muslims. But the regional and tribal divisions of the country are very deep, and the
residents of Cyrenaica have long resented the fact that most of the oil income flowed
to the capital, Tripoli, and the rest of Tripolitania, while most of the oil was actually in
Cyrenaica.
The Cyrenaica Political Bureau says it is a federalist organisation that wants only
the decentralisation of the country and a bigger share of the oil revenues for the
east, but in fact it is already halfway out the door and the army units and air bases
in the east support the rebels.
We are assembling a large force to protect the ports, said Senussi al-Meghrabi. If
they are attacked, it will be civil war. But not a long civil war, probably, for there is
virtually no chance that forces from Tripolitania could conquer Cyrenaica especially
when they are facing their own revolt back home from the powerful Zintan militia,
allies of the exiled ex-prime minister Ali Zeidan. And they control the oil of
Tripolitania.
Egyptian presidential election
June 2014
To the vast surprise of absolutely nobody, Field Marshal Abdel Fatah al-Sisi won the
Egyptian presidential election last week. Moreover, he won it with a majority that
would pass for a resounding triumph in most countries. But it is a disarmingly modest
majority for an Arab Man of Destiny.
Not for Sisi the implausible margins of victory claimed by Men of Destiny in other
Arab countries, like the 96.3 percent that Egypts last dictator, Hosni Mubarak,
claimed in his first election 21 years ago, or the spectacular 100 percent that Iraqs
Saddam Hussein allegedly got in his last election in 2002. No, Sisi just claimed 93.3
percent of the votes, a number low enough that it might actually be true.

Sisis real problem is that even with the media cowed and the full resources of the
state behind him, only 46 percent of eligible Egyptians turned out to vote. He had
confidently predicted an 80 percent turnout.
As an aspiring dictator who overthrew the countrys first democratically elected
president, Mohamed Morsi, only one year ago, Sisi needed a big turnout. At least
1,500 protesters have been shot dead in the streets, and a minimum of 16,000
political dissidents are in jail. Sisi has shut down a popular revolution and he needed
to demonstrate massive public support for what he did.
He didnt get it. Towards the end of the scheduled two days of the election, the
people around him panicked. The interim prime minister, Ibrahim Mahlab, let slip that
barely 30 percent had voted so far and the regime abruptly announced that there
would be a third day of voting. An unscheduled public holiday was declared, and
non-voters were threatened with a large fine.
In the end, Sisis officials claimed a 46 percent turnout, although journalists reported
that many polling booths were almost empty on the third day. But lets be generous
and assume that 40 percent of eligible Egyptians did vote.
If 93.3 percent of those people truly did vote for Sisi, then he has the support of just
over one-third of Egyptians. Other Arab dictators have ruled their countries for
decades with no more popular support than that, but it will probably not sustain Sisi
through the hard times that are coming. Too many Egyptians are struggling just to
feed their families.
Egypts economy is running on fumes, and there would not even be enough bread
for people to eat Egypt is the worlds largest importer of wheat if Sisi were not
getting massive infusions of aid from Saudi Arabia and most of the smaller Gulf
states, which are very happy that he is killing off the Egyptian revolution.
But even the great wealth of the Gulf kingdoms cannot win Sisi more than a
breathing space: all of them together have only about a third of Egypts population.
And there is no good reason to believe that the Egyptian army, which is now
effectively in charge, has the skill to resolve the countrys grave economic problems.
Indeed, its highest priority will be to protect its own massive business empire.
Sisi talks about how Egyptians must work, day and night, without rest to restore the
economy after three years of revolutionary chaos, and his budget plan calls for
slashing energy subsidies by 22 percent in one year. Austerity is not going to win
him any thanks from Egypts poor, however, and his political honeymoon will not last
long.
What will happen after that can be predicted from the results of Egypts only fully free
election two years ago. Mohamed Morsi and another Islamist candidate got a total of
42 percent of the votes in the first round of that election, while the leftist candidate,
Hamdeen Sabahi, got 21 percent. (Morsi won in the second round, when Sabahi and
two other candidates had dropped out.)
We can safely presume that few Islamist supporters voted at all in last weeks
election. Its clear that most of Sabahis former supporters also abstained: he was
the only candidate who dared to run against Sisi, but he only got 3 percent this time.
Islamists and leftists therefore make up the majority of the 55-60 percent who did not
vote for Sisi this time and that is good news for him, because the two groups have
very little in common.
Those who did vote for Sisi were mostly people with no strong ideological
convictions who were simply exhausted by the turmoil of the past three years. They
voted for stability, and believed Sisis promise that he could deliver it. So long as
they go on believing that, a deeply divided opposition poses little threat to him.

But most of the people who voted for Sisi thought that when he said stability, he
really meant an improvement in their living standards, and its most unlikely that he
can deliver that. When they lose faith in Sisi, the opposition will achieve critical mass,
and it probably wont take more than two years. The Egyptian revolution is not over
yet.
young war criminal
June 2014
Whatever else you may say about the young war criminal (as British journalist Alan
Watkins used to call former prime minister Tony Blair), he certainly fights his corner
with great determination. He is condemned to spend his life defending his part in the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, and last weekend he was at it again.
In a 3,000-word essay on his website, Tony Blair wrote about last weeks conquest
of almost half Iraqs territory by the fanatical fighters of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria): We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that we have caused this. We
havent. What he really meant by we, of course, was I. And he would say that,
wouldnt he?
But at least give Blair credit for producing an interesting argument. As for how these
(recent) events reflect on the original decision to remove Saddam, he wrote, (the
argument) is that but for the invasion of 2003, Iraq would be a stable country
today.
Consider the post 2011 Arab uprisings. Put into the equation the counterfactual
that Saddam and his two sons would be running Iraq in 2011 when the uprisings
began. Is it seriously being said that the revolution sweeping the Arab world would
have hit Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syriabut miraculously Iraq, under
the most brutal and tyrannical of all the regimes, would have been an oasis of calm?
So it is a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today, to claim that
but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis.
Blair is employing one of his favourite techniques: winning an argument with a straw
man. Nobody is actually saying that if the United States, Britain and some hangerson had not illegally invaded Iraq in 2003, the country would be an oasis of calm
today. Of course the Arab Spring would have come to Iraq too, and of course there
would be huge turmoil in the country today.
If Saddam Hussein had managed to hang on to power in the face of a democratic
uprising in 2011 that was initially non-violent, Iraq today might be in a civil war
somewhat like that in Syria. And if his dictatorship had been overthrown in 2011,
whatever new government emerged in Iraq would certainly be contending with acute
ethnic and sectarian rivalries today.
But the living standards, infrastructure, and health and educational services of a
quite developed country would not have been massively degraded by a decade of
invasion, foreign occupation and popular resistance. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
who were killed in these events would still be alive (although Saddams secret police
would have murdered the usual thousand or so each year). And above all there
would be no ISIS, nor anything like it.
There were no terrorists in Iraq in 2003. There were people with radical Islamist
ideas, but they kept quiet for fear of Saddams torturers and there werent very many
of them. And there were no weapons of mass destruction either. It was an
exceptionally dumb war, to borrow Barack Obamas famous phrase, and it began the
destruction of Iraq.
It is the deep sectarian divisions in Iraqs Arabic-speaking population (the Kurds are

a separate issue) that are now completing that process of destruction. However, as
with the distinctions between Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims in old
Yugoslavia before the break-up and the Balkan wars of the 1990s, most Sunnis and
Shias in Iraq before 2003 lived side by side with a fairly low degree of friction.
It was the fight against foreign occupation after 2003 that radicalised people in Iraq
and drove so many of them back into narrow sectarian identities. Al-Qaeda in Iraq,
the original name for what now calls itself ISIS, was born in that struggle, and Tony
Blair and George W. Bush were its midwives.
Its striking that Al-Qaeda in Iraqs main target during the occupation was to kill large
numbers of Shias rather than lots of Americans. Its strategy was to provoke a
sectarian war in which Iraqi Sunnis would be losing at first but then their plight
would trigger intervention by Sunni states in the region and lead to a general SunniShia war. It was a convoluted, nasty and deeply unrealistic strategy, but it made
sense in terms of their radical Islamist ideology.
If there had been no invasion, and Saddam Hussein had been overthrown by a
popular revolution only three years ago, there would certainly be great tension in a
newly democratic Iraq now. Sunni Arabs would be having trouble coming to terms
with their minority status (which most were unaware of under Saddam). Shias would
be tempted to exploit their majority status unfairly. Kurds would be pushing for more
autonomy.
But they would be doing so in an atmosphere that had not been contaminated by a
decade of sectarian hatred and savagery. There would be no organisations like ISIS
dedicated to waging a sectarian war. And even if Saddam Hussein had not been
overthrown and Iraq was caught up in a civil war like Syrias, it would have a far less
sectarian character. As would Syrias, for that matter.
Kurdistan big chance
June 2014
Every disaster creates opportunities for somebody. If the Kurds of Iraq play their
cards right, they could finally end up with the borders they want, fully recognised by a
government in Baghdad that has been saved by Kurdish troops.
The Kurds have this opportunity because the large but totally demoralised Iraqi army
has fallen apart over the past week. The Sunni Islamist fanatics of ISIS are now less
than an hours drive from Baghdad, and Peshmerga, the army of the Kurdistan
Regional Government, is the only military force left in Iraq that could take the
offensive against them.
It is very unlikely that the ISIS fighters can take Baghdad. There are probably no
more than 5,000 of them in Iraq, and their stunning recent victories were achieved
more by frightening the Iraqi army to death than by actual fighting. Most of those ISIS
troops are needed to hold down their recent conquests, including the large cities of
Mosul and Tikrit.
ISIS couldnt spare more than a thousand or so of its fighters for a push into
Baghdad, which has seven million people, most of them Shias. The Shia militias,
which are taking in tens of thousands of volunteers a day, dont have much in the
way of military skills, but they would fight and street fighting in a big city eats up
soldierss lives.
Either ISIS will not attack Baghdad, or it will try and fail. However, what remains of
the Iraqi army will certainly not be able to take the offensive and drive ISIS out of all
the territory that has already been lost. Short of direct Iranian or American military
intervention on the ground, the only force that might be able to do that is Peshmerga.

Peshmerga has advanced to take control of territories abandoned by the Iraqi army
that were historically part of Kurdistan, most notably the city of Kirkuk and its
surrounding oilfields, but so far it has not tried to stop the ISIS fighters moving south.
There is no need for Peshmerga forces to move into these areas, said Jabbar
Yawar, secretary general of the Ministry of Pesh Merga Affairs.
But Peshmerga forces are close enough to the roads leading south from Mosul to
Baghdad to cut the ISIS line of communications and stop the advance on Baghdad if
they were ordered to. The ISIS fighters have significant support from the Sunni
population in the area they have overrun, so trying to drive them out of Mosul and
Tikrit would cost Peshmerga many casualties, but its the only force in Iraq that is
even in a position to try.
So the Kurdistan Regional Government must now be considering what price it could
charge Baghdad for that service. As an adviser to the KRG told the Washington
Post, The Iraqi government has been holding the Kurds hostage, and its not
reasonable for them to expect the Kurds to give them any help in this situation
without compromising to Kurdish demands.
What would the Kurds demand in return? What they want most is to recover the
territories that were taken from them by the Baathist regime in Baghdad between the
1960s and the later 1980s. Under Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Kurds
were killed and hundred of thousands driven from their lands. He then changed the
provincial boundaries, and the stolen lands were repopulated with Arab settlers
whom he brought in from the south.
Peshmerga troops have taken back control of much of this land in the past week, but
nothing will be settled unless Baghdad formally restores the old provincial
boundaries. It would also have to accept that a lot of those Arab settlers will be
removed to make way for returning Kurdish families.
Such a concession would be politically impossible in normal times, but if Baghdad
wants Peshmerga to fight for it, thats the price it will probably have to pay. And it
should bear in mind that the Kurds also have another option. They could just hold
those territories by force, and declare independence.
The Baghdad government could do little about it: the advance of the ISIS forces
means that it no longer has a common frontier with Kurdistan. In the past, the Iraqi
Kurds were deterred from declaring independence because Turkey threatened to
invade them if they did Ankara worried about the impact of Kurdistans
independence on the large Kurdish minority in Turkey but things have changed
there too.
Turkey is now the largest foreign investor in Iraqi Kurdistan, and regards the KRG as
a reliable partner. In any case, the Turkish government will have its hands full
dealing with the sudden emergence of a hostile Islamic caliphate along its southern
border. Kurdish independence would still be a gamble, but the odds are that it could
succeed.
One way or the other, Kurdistan is probably going to be a big winner out of this. But it
will probably take the lower-risk course of trying to make a deal with Baghdad first.
ISIS rises in Iraq
June 2014
THE IRAQI ARMYwill have to destroy Mosul in order to save itand its not clear
whether it can do the job even then. It isnt so much an army as a vast system of
patronage providing employment of a sort for 900,000 people.
When fewer than a thousand ISIS jihadis fought their way into Mosul, Iraqs second

city, over the past few days, most of the governments soldiers just shed their
uniforms and fled.
The government troops never felt comfortable in Mosul anyway, for they are mostly
Shia Muslims and the vast majority of Mosuls 1.8 million residents are Sunni. (Or
maybe its only 1.3 million people now, for up to 500,000 of the citys residents are
reported to be fleeing the triumphant jihadis: Shias, non-Muslim minorities, and even
Kurdish Sunnis have faced execution in other areas that have fallen under the
control of ISIS.)
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (an Arabic word that can mean the entire
Levant, including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine) began as Al-Qaeda in
Iraq during the American occupation, but its the Syrian civil war that turned it into a
regional threat.
ISIS actually spent more time fighting other rebel forces in Syria than the Assad
regime, but it gained recruits from all the Sunni Arab countries just by being on the
right side.
It also got access to the money and arms that were flowing into Syria for the antigovernment forces. In the past two years it has established effective control over
most of sparsely populated eastern Syria, and it started moving back into western
Iraq in force late last year.
In January, it seized the city of Fallujah in Anbar province, only 100 kilometres west
of Baghdad, and the Iraqi army was unable to retake the city although it had suffered
about 5,000 casualties, including 1,000 killed, by the end of April. But at least it stood
and fought in Anbar. In Mosul on Monday, it just ran.
It ran although it outnumbered the ISIS fighters who attacked the city by at least 15to-one, and it may not be willing to fight very hard to take it back.
The entire Iraqi government is an institutionalised kleptocracy, as one of Prime
Minister Nuri al-Malikis own ministers said, and the army is no exception. Soldiers
who go unpaid because their officers stole their wages are rarely willing to die for
them.
The only real fighting force left in Iraq is the Peshmerga, the army of the Kurdistan
Regional Government. It is a tough, well-armed force, but it serves what is a
separate state in all but name. It apparently still holds the part of Mosul east of the
river Tigris, which has a large Kurdish population, but it may not be willing to take the
large number of casualties that would be involved in street-fighting to recover the
main part of the city.
At a minimum the KRG would want the Baghdad government to make major
concessions on the revenue and oil-exporting disputes that have poisoned its
relations with the federal government before it commits its forces to a major offensive
against ISIS. Or it may just decide to stand on the defensive in the Kurdish-majority
territory it now holds, and use the crisis to move even closer to its ultimate goal of an
independent Kurdistan.
ISIS has sent the occasional suicide-bomber into Kurdistan, but it realizes that its
main fight is not with the Kurds. Having taken most of Mosul, its forces are
advancing not east into Kurdistan, but south through Tikrit (which fell on Juine 11)
towards Baghdad. It will not try to take Baghdad itself, most of whose seven million
people are Shia, but by the end of this month it could end up in control of most of
western and northern Iraq.
At this point the old Iraq-Syria border would disappear and the Islamic State of Iraq
and al-Sham would become a reality, extending 400 kilometres from Mosul and
Fallujah in Iraq to Deir-es-Zor, Raqqa, and near Aleppo in Syria. It would be mostly

desert and it would control only about five million people and almost no oil, but it
would be ruled by an Islamist organisation so extreme that it has even been
disowned by al-Qaeda.
The remaining bits of the new regional map would be the western half of Syria, still
largely under the control of the Assad regime; the semi-independent state of
Kurdistan; and the densely populated, Shia-majority core of Iraq between Baghdad
and Basra, hard up against the border with Shia Iran. None of this is yet inevitable
yet, of course. Its a war, and wars can take unexpected turns. But its certainly a
possibility.
Its also a possibility that the war could get wider, as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey
all consider whether they need to intervene militarily to protect their own interests.
But thats unlikely to happen this month. Later is anybodys guess.
Iraq time to take a tranquiliser
June 2014
Its time for everybody in Iraq to take a tranquiliser. The media will go on fizzing with
apocalyptic speculations for a week or so, because that kind of talk always sells, but
the war of movement is over.
It never was much of a war: a third of Iraq was captured by ISIS and various Sunni
militias in one week at a cost that probably didnt exceed a thousand lives (plus
however many were murdered by ISIS afterwards). The Islamist radicals have now
reached approximately the limits of the territory in Iraq that has a Sunni Arab
majority, and theyd be mad to throw away all their gains by trying to conquer
Baghdad.
There are lots of young men fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (the
Levant) who would love to be martyred in such an attack, but ISIS is run by grownups. They know that they cant go any farther without running out of the popular
support that let a few thousand fighters sweep through the Sunni lands so easily.
Baghdad is defended by Shia militias that already number in the tens of thousands
and will probably soon pass the hundred thousand mark. Most of them know far less
about fighting than the ISIS veterans, but they are just as keen on martyrdom and
they would outnumber the ISIS fighters twenty-to-one, maybe fifty-to-one. Two or
three days of street fighting in the huge, now mostly Shia city of Baghdad and ISIS
would have no more troops.
So ISIS has advanced about as far as it is going to go. And, by the way, so has the
Kurdistan Regional Government. The KRGs Peshmerga troops now control not only
the disputed oil city of Kirkuk but almost 100 percent of traditionally Kurdish territory
in Iraq, compared to only about 70 percent two weeks ago.
During most of that time the Peshmerga and ISIS observed a de facto ceasefire
while they concentrated on the territory that really mattered to them. There have
been some exchanges of fire between ISIS and Peshmerga in the past few days
along the ill-defined border between their new holdings, but nothing very serious.
There might have been a major clash around Tel Afar, where KRG President
Masoud Barzani offered to commit Peshmerga to the citys defence just before ISIS
attacked, but President Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad rejected his offer. The Kurdish
troops withdrew, and the city fell to ISIS.
Almost certainly, the reason Maliki declined Barzanis offer was that it came with
major strings attached. Having grabbed the territory he wanted, Barzani was asking
the government in Baghdad to recognise Kurdistans new borders. Malikis reason
for refusing, even though it meant losing Tel Afar, would have been that he still

hopes for a third term and could not afford to be seen giving away Arab territory to
the Kurds.
In ideological terms, ISIS would like to incorporate Kurdistan into its ever-expanding
Islamic caliphate, which would erase all borders within the (Sunni) Muslim world, but
in practical terms it knows that it cannot do that, at least for the moment. In
ideological terms, ISIS would also like to convert or exterminate all the Shias in the
world, starting with the 20 million in Iraq, but in practical terms it cannot do that
either.
So the borders of the three successors to the current state of Iraq, Kurdish, Shia
Arab and Sunni Arab, have already been drawn, with the important addition that the
Sunni Arab successor extends across the old international frontier to include eastern
Syria as well. These changes will not be reversed: the Shia-majority rump of the
former Iraqi state that extends from Baghdad to Basra does not have the strength to
restore the old centralised Iraq.
Is this really such a disaster? Not for the Kurds, obviously, and not really for the Shia
Arabs either: they still have all of their own territory (i.e. Shia-majority territory) and
most of the oil. Nor will the Baghdad government which still rules that territory need
US air power to save it. (US President Obama has probably just been stalling until
that became clear).
The problematic bit is the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. They are clearly delighted to have
shaken off the corrupt and oppressive sectarian rule of President Nuri al-Maliki, but
for the near future at least they will have to contend with the unappetising prospect of
being ruled instead by the incorruptible but brutally intolerant leaders of ISIS.
It should be borne in mind, however, that even now the great majority of the armed
men who have created this new Sunni proto-state are not ISIS fanatics. Most of them
are either tribal militiamen or former members of the Baathist-era army that was
dissolved by the invaders after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. They belong to
organisations that have real political power, and they vastly outnumber the ISIS
fanatics.
Those same organisations broke the hold of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the ancestor to ISIS,
in western Iraq in 2007-09, and its entirely possible that in a few yearss time they
will end up doing it again to ISIS. But the borders of the new Sunni Arab state,
stretching from western and northern Iraq into eastern Syria, may survive. Theres no
particular harm in that.
The Caliphate Returns
July 2014
Listen to your caliph and obey him. Support your state, which grows every day,
said Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, announcing the rebirth of the Caliphate in the broad
territory between Aleppo in northern Syria and Diyala province in eastern Iraq. It
hasnt actually grown much more in the past couple of weeks, but it certainly intends
to go on expanding.
The radical Sunni Muslim organisation that conquered almost half of Iraq in a
whirlwind week at the beginning of June has changed its name. Before, it was ISIS,
the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (the old Ottoman province that used to include
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel). But now it wishes to be known simply as the
Islamic State for there can only be one such state, and it should include
everywhere that Muslims have ever ruled.
ISIS propagandists have even produced a map showing the ultimate borders that
their Islamic State lays claim to. Spain and Portugal will be part of it, because they

were ruled by Muslim conquerors during much of the Middle Ages. Iran, too
(although something will have to be done about all those Shia Muslims).
All of India except the southern tip should be under the rule of the Caliph, because
Muslim invaders also ruled there as minorities for many centuries and of course
Serbia, Croatia and Hungary will be part of the Islamic State, for the Ottomans
conquered all the Balkans up to there. Not to mention half of Africa, and Indonesia,
and southwestern Siberia (which was once ruled by the Sibir Khanate for a century
or so).
Theres no point in protesting that Muslims were never more than a small minority in
many of these places, for the lads of ISIS believe that only Muslims indeed, only
Sunni Muslims have rights. The legality of all emirates, groups, states and
organisations becomes null by the expansion of the Caliphates authority and the
arrival of its troops to their areas, al-Adnani helpfully explained.
So much for the fantasy. Whats the reality? A group of jihadis have seized a big
chunk of eastern Syria and western Iraq, erased the border between them, and
declared an Islamic State. As little as ten thousand strong only a month ago, they
have been rapidly growing in numbers as ISISs success attracts new recruits but
they are obviously never going to reconquer India, Spain or Siberia.
They arent going to make a dent in the two powerful states to the north of their
Islamic State either. Iran, being overwhelmingly Shia, is immune to their charms and
far too big to take by force. Turkey, although now governed by an Islamic party, is
still a modern, secular state that is much too strong to attack.
To the west and east ISIS is already at war with regimes that are either very tough
(Bashar al- Assads war-hardened dictatorship in western and central Syria) or very
Shia (the south-eastern slice of Iraq, densely populated and with a large Shia
majority). The Islamic States central position between its two enemies gives it a
strategic advantage, but not a decisive one.
To the south are desert frontiers with more promising territory. Jordans population is
about two-thirds Palestinian, and even among the Bedouin tribes that are the
mainstay of King Abdullahs rule there was some enthusiasm for ISISs victory in
Iraq. If Jordan fell, the Islamic State would reach right up to Israels borders, with
incalculable consequences.
Saudi Arabia would be a much tougher nut to crack, but the salafi religious ideology
that animates ISIS is very close to the fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Islam that
is the Saudi state religion. Thats why the Saudis gave arms and money to ISIS
jihadis in the early days of the Syrian civil war, although they have subsequently
recognised the threat that the organisation poses to the Saudi state.
But even if ISIS gets very lucky, it is unlikely to get farther than that. Egypt blocks its
expansion to the west, although the Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis extremists who are active
in the Sinai peninsula undoubtedly have some ties with it. Even its direct rivals in the
Refound-The-Caliphate business the original al-Qaeda, al-Shabab in north-east
Africa, Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, and their lesser brethren are unlikely to
accept the ISIS leader as caliph.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who now styles himself Caliph Ibrahim, has clearly been
preparing himself for this moment for most of his adult life: he even chose the name
of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, as his nom de guerre. His spokesman does not hide his
soaring ambition: We hereby clarify to the Muslims that with this declaration of
Khilafah (caliphate), it is incumbent upon all Muslims to pledge allegiance to the
Khalifah Ibrahim and support him.
They are not going to do that, and the sheer radicalism and intolerance of ISISs

members make it unlikely that their project will survive unaltered for more than a year
or so even in the territory that now makes up the Islamic State. Nevertheless, it is
extraordinary that the 7th-century caliphate has reappeared even fleetingly in the
modern world. Bush and Blair have a lot to answer for.
Gaza
July 2014
You can see why Hamas doesnt want a cease-fire in Gaza yet. It is continuing the
fight in the hope that international outrage at the huge loss of people being killed by
Israels massive firepower will somehow, eventually, force Israel to give it what it
wants.
Hamas would be quite willing to give up firing its pathetic rockets which have so far
killed a grand total of three civilians in Israel if Israel ends its seven-year blockade
of the Gaza Strip. Dream on.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahus goal is harder to define. Domestic
political pressure to do something about those pesky rockets pushed him into this
war, but now he must produce some kind of success in order to justify all those
deaths: around 1,150 Palestinians and more than fifty Israelis already.
But what kind of success could it be? He cannot destroy all the rockets Hamas
shows no sign of running out of them and even if he could Hamas would just
manufacture more of them later unless he physically re-occupied the whole Gaza
Strip. In recent days, therefore, Netanyahu has redefined the objective as destroying
all the terror tunnels that Hamas has dug to infiltrate its fighters into nearby areas of
Israel.
This makes no sense at all. In order to protect the lives of a few hypothetical Israeli
soldiers who might be killed in the future by Hamas fighters using the tunnels, over
forty real Israeli soldiers have already died. Besides, Israel cant stop Hamas from
digging more tunnels after the shooting stops unless it can find a way to ban picks
and shovels in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu needs a victory of some sort before he accepts a cease-fire, but he
cannot even define what it would be. So, as he said on Monday, We should prepare
ourselves for an extended campaign. Meanwhile, the slaughter of Palestinians
continues, and sympathy for Israel shrivels even in the United States.
Its not that the Israeli army particularly wants to kill civilians (although it is
sometimes very sloppy), but it does prefer to fight a stand-off war with artillery and
missiles in order to spare the lives of its own soldiers. In the crowded Gaza Strip,
that inevitably means killing lots of civilians.
The 1.8 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are living at the same population
density as the residents of London or Tokyo: about 5,000 people per square
kilometre. You cannot use high explosives in this environment without killing a great
many innocent civilians, and Netanyahu knew that from the start, because this is
Israels third war in Gaza in six years.
So the Israelis are being brutal and stupid, and the Hamas leaders are being brutal
and cynical. (Hamas doesnt really use civilians as human shields, as Israeli claims,
but its leaders know that Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli fire provide them with a
kind of political capital.) But this is not to say that the two sides are equally to blame
for the killing. There is a broader context.
Before 1948, only about 60,000 people lived on the land now known as the Gaza
Strip. The vast majority of those who live there now are Arab refugees, or the
children, grand-children and great-grandchildren of Arab refugees, who fled or were

driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war. They are not there by choice.
Israel has traditionally insisted that the refugees freely chose to flee, although
revisionist Israeli historians have debunked that story pretty thoroughly. But which
story you believe doesnt really matter. Fleeing your home in time of war does not
deprive you of the right to go home when the fighting ends. Yet the Palestinians have
not been allowed to go home, and Israel is adamant that they never will be.
The argument of 1948 still applies: for Israel to remain a state with a large Jewish
majority, the Palestinian refugees and their descendants must remain outside it. So
most of them are jammed into this narrow strip of territory on the Mediterranean
coast and latterly they have even grown poorer (unemployment is now 40 percent)
because they now live under a permanent Israeli blockade.
Israel imposed the blockade after they voted for Hamas, a radical Islamist party that
refuses to recognise the legitimacy of Israel, in the 2006 election. Yes, they are more
radical than the Palestinians of the West Bank, most of whom are not refugees. But
there is no going back, and even in the Gaza Strip most Palestinians know it.
The ancestral lands of the Palestinians in what is now Israel are lost as permanently
as those of the American Indians. The peace everybody talks about is really just
about giving them security of tenure and real self-government in the one-fifth of
former Palestine that they still occupy. Unfortunately, that is not even visible on the
horizon.
When Netanyahu is addressing American audiences, he gives lip-service to a twostate solution that includes an independent, demilitarised Palestinian mini-state, but
everybody in Israel knows that he is really determined to avoid it. Israel is therefore
effectively committed to penning in and controlling the Palestinians forever.
When their objections to this situation get too violent, they have to be disciplined.
That is what is happening now. Just like 2009 and 2012.
They began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not
easy to know when the race was over, as Lewis Carrol put it in Alice in Wonderland.
He was describing the Caucus Race, but it sounds quite a lot like the Gaza War,
doesnt it? Whats different is that at the end of the Caucus Race, the Dodo Bird
declared: Everybody has won, so all must have prizes.
/block
After nine days of more-or-less cease-fire, theyre at it again. In the first 24 hours, 60
Palestinian rockets had been launched at Israel (no casualties), and 60 Israeli air
strikes had hit Gaza (11 dead). Thats pretty small beer in a war that has already
killed more than 2,000 people, but they literally dont know how to stop, and the
Dodo Bird is no help at all. The fact is that nobody has won, so nobody can have
prizes.
Thats what the negotiations in Cairo were actually about: prizes. Hamas leaders in
Gaza were demanding an end to the Israeli blockade of the territory and the opening
of air and sea ports in the Gaza Strip. They also wanted over 200 Hamas members
in the West Bank who had been arrested just before the start of this war to be
released. They might as well have asked for the Moon.
Hamas has fired almost 6,000 of its homemade rockets at Israel since the start of the
war, but it has killed only two Israeli civilians (plus one Thai guest-worker). It doesnt
represent even a serious danger to Israel, let alone an existential threat. So why
would any sane Palestinian negotiator think that Israel would feel compelled to make
major concessions to Hamas in order to make the pain stop?
The Israeli negotiators were equally deluded. They understandably dismissed all of

Hamass demands, but then they made equally ludicrous demands of their own.
They wanted Hamas and all other militant Palestinian organisations in the Gaza Strip
to be completely disarmed. That would not only end any possibility that the
Palestinians could exert military pressure on Israel; it would also quite soon end
Hamass rule in the Gaza Strip.
Why would Hamas agree with that? Over 2,000 people have been killed and more
than 8,000 injured by Israels strikes on the Gaza Strip, but thats less than one
percent of the population. Moreover, when the Israeli army actually invaded Gaza on
the ground (to destroy the famous terror tunnels), Hamas fighters managed to kill
64 Israeli soldiers.
That was a particularly futile waste of Israeli lives, since it is hard to believe that 64 of
Israels troops would ever have been killed by random Hamas fighters coming out of
undiscovered tunnels from time to time. Ordinary Israelis, with nightmare visions of
terrorists popping up in their gardens, have bought the official line that the sacrifice
was worthwhile, but none of the tunnels actually extended more than a couple of
kilometres beyond Gazas border.
The Palestinians doubtless think that killing more Israeli soldiers than in the previous
two wars combined was some sort of success, even if they lost many more fighters
themselves, but in the real world it does not give them any military advantage. So no
concessions from either side of any kind.
This was quite foreseeable from the first day of the war, because thats the way the
last two wars ended too. They have all been fought mainly to serve the domestic
political interests of the two governments, rather than to force real concessions out of
the other.
Hamass strategic situation is peculiar: it is very weak and cannot hurt Israel, but it is
virtually indestructible. Israel can hammer the population of the Gaza Strip as much
as it likes, but that will only strengthen their support for Hamas. Whereas Israel is
enormously powerful, but cannot defeat Hamas unless it is willing to re-occupy the
Gaza Strip, which would lead to a steady and ultimately intolerable drain of
casualties among the occupying Israeli troops.
The moves in this relationship are as stately and predictable as a minuet. When
Hamas is under political pressure at home and needs a distraction, it launches a few
rockets at Israel or provides some other provocation that the Israeli government
cannot ignore. Then the Israeli government, under irresistible domestic pressure to
do something, launches some air-strikes, and the dance of death recommences.
Stopping is more difficult, because theres no music to give you the signal by coming
to an end. In terms of domestic politics, both sides have already accomplished what
they came for, but since neither can acknowledge publicly that thats all the war was
really about, they end up raising wholly unrealistic demands at the cease-fire talks.
Thats why the negotiations in Cairo ended in failure: nobody has won, so nobody
can have prizes.
Now that the shooting has started up again, there may be a few more hundred
deaths, but probably not another thousand, because the fighting really is going to
end soon. It just wont end with a political deal, and perhaps not even with a formal
cease-fire. More likely it will just sort of peter out, like these things sometimes do.
Until next time.
The Middle East: New Strategic Realities
August 2014
After half a century of stasis, there are big new strategic realities in the Middle East,

but people are having trouble getting their heads around them. Take the United
States, for example. Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State in President Obamas first
administration, is still lamenting her former bosss failure to send more military help
to the moderate rebels in Syria.
The failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled, Clinton
told Atlantic magazine recently. Shes actually claiming that early and lavish military
aid to the right people would have overthrown Syrias dictator, Bashar al-Assad,
while freezing the al-Qaeda/ISIS jihadis out. If only.
Clinton travels a lot, but she never really leaves the Washington bubble. There are
intelligence officials there who would gladly explain to her that almost all the
desirable weaponry sent to the moderates in Syria ends up in the hands of the
jihadis, who either buy it or just take it, but she wouldnt listen. It falls outside the
consensus.
Yet that really is how ISIS acquires most of its heavy weapons. The most striking
case of that was in early June, when the Iraqi army, having spent $41.6 billion in the
past three years on training its troops and equipping them with American heavy
weapons, ran away from Mosul and northern Iraq and handed a good quarter of
them over to ISIS.
In fact, thats the weaponry that is now enabling ISIS to conquer further territory in
eastern Syria and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Which, in turn, is why Barack Obama has now
authorised air strikes in Iraq to stop ISIS troops from overrunning Irbil, the Kurdish
capital.
By now, he has also presumably abandoned his proposal of last June to spend $500
million to train and equip appropriately vetted Syrian opposition fighters. (They
were then supposedly going to overthrow Assad with one hand while crushing the
jihadis with the other.)
But Obama has not yet dropped the other shoe. A LOT of people have not dropped
their other shoes yet. They all know that the whole strategic environment has
changed. They realise that may require new policies and even new allies. Changing
horses in midstream is always a tricky business, so the realignments are only slowly
getting underway, but you can see where they are going to go.
The proclamation of the Islamic State in eastern Syria and northernwestern Iraq
has huge implications for every country in the Middle East, but for most of the great
powers Russia, the United States, China, India, Britain, France and Germany it is
almost the ONLY thing they still care about in the region. They all have Muslim
minorities of their own, and they all want the Islamic State stopped, or at the very
least isolated, contained and quarantined.
That means that both the Syrian and Iraqi governments must survive, and they will
probably get enough outside help to do so (although it will take time for the US and
the major European powers to switch sides and openly back Assad). The army of the
Iraqi Kurds might hold its own against the Islamic State if it had better weapons, so it
will get them (although Baghdad will not welcome a more powerful Kurdish army).
Containing the Islamic State to the north will be a simpler task, because Iran and
Turkey are very big, well organised states whose populations are relatively
invulnerable to the ISIS brand of Sunni fundamentalism. But to the south of the
Islamic State is Saudi Arabia, and that is a country that faces some tough decisions.
The Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam which is Saudi Arabias official religion is very
close to the beliefs of the jihadis who now rule the Islamic State to their north. Much
of their financial support and even their weapons have come from Saudi Arabia. But
the rulers of that kingdom would be extremely unwise to assume that the jihadis

regard Saudi Arabias current political arrangements as legitimate, or that gratitude

would restrain them.
Nor will the long-standing US alliance with Saudi Arabia endure if Saudi ties to the
jihadis are not broken. Riyadh will have to decide, and it will be aware that its oil is
no longer so vital to the United States that it can have it both ways.
The Iranian-US rapprochement will continue, and the issue of Irans alleged nuclear
weapons ambitions will be settled amicably despite Israels protests. Indeed, Israel
may come under irresistible US pressure to stop whacking the Palestinians or the
Lebanese Shias every couple of years, stop the settlement programme, and get on
with the two-state deal. Washington would very much like Israel to stop alienating the
people it needs as allies.
Further afield, General Sisis new regime in Egypt can count on strong American
support, and may even be encouraged by Washington to intervene militarily in Libya
and shut down the Islamist militias there. Tunisia will be the only remaining flower of
the Arab Spring, although there has also been a certain amount of progress in
Morocco. But in the heartland of the Arab world, war will flourish and democracy will
not.
Imperfect Afghanistan
September2014
We have to recognise that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and its not
Americas responsibility to make it one, said President Barack Obama last May. No,
it isnt, and Afghanistan is a strikingly imperfect society in almost every respect:
politics, economy, security and human rights. But it isnt entirely a lost cause, either.
President Hamid Karzai, who was given the job of running Afghanistan after the
United States invaded in 2001 and subsequently won two deeply suspect elections
in 2004 and 2009, finally left office on Monday, although he didnt move very far. (His
newly built private home backs onto the presidential palace.) On the way out, he took
one last opportunity to bite the hand that fed him for so long.
The war in Afghanistan is to the benefit of foreigners, he said. Afghans on both
sides are the sacrificial lambs and victims of this war. The US ambassador, James
Cunningham, said that his remarks, which were uncalled for,dishonour the huge
sacrifices Americans have made here, but they were, of course, true.
Karzais remarks, though undiplomatic, are just common sense. The United States
did not invade the country to bring democracy, prosperity and feminism to the longsuffering Afghan people. It did so because some of the senior planners of the 9/11
attacks had been allowed to set up camps there by members of the Taliban regime
who shared their religious ideology.
You could argue (and I would) that luring the US military into the quagmire of a long
guerilla war in Afghanistan that would drive millions of Muslims into the arms of alQaeda was precisely what Osama bin Laden was hoping to achieve with the 9/11
attacks. The United States simply fell into the strategic trap that he laid.
Even so, and despite all the rapidly changing reasons for staying the course in
Afghanistan that Washington deployed in later years, the original and abiding motive
in Washington was the perception, accurate or not, that who rules Afghanistan is a
matter of great importance for the national security of the United States.
Over 1,400 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan (together with 400
British soldiers, 150 Canadians, and sundry others), and they all basically died for a
particular US official vision of how American security might be best be assured. How
else could the 13-year US military commitment in Afghanistan possibly be justified to

the American people?

As to whether the long occupation was also in Afghanistans interest, that depends
very much on the stability and success of the two-headed potential monster of a
government that is now being created in Kabul.
Karzai has handed over the reins of power to two very different men, after five
months of bitter disagreement over which one of them had really won last Aprils
presidential election. It was not as blatantly rigged as either of the two elections that
maintained Karzai in the presidency, but it was still pretty dodgy.
In the first round of voting, when there were eleven candidates, the leader was
Abdullah Abdullah, with 45 percent of the vote, and the runner-up was Ashraf Ghani,
with only 31 percent. In the second round, Abdullah Abdullahs vote actually dropped
two points to 43 percent, while Ashraf Ghanis almost doubled to 56 percent. The
age of miracles truly is not past.
Even more suspiciously, the number of people voting in some of the districts that
supported Ashraf Ghani tripled between the first and second rounds of voting. So
Abdullah Abdullah cried foul, and the inauguration of a new president was endlessly
postponed while the ballots cast were audited by an electoral commission that had
been chosen by Hamid Karzai.
There was never going to be a clear answer to the question of who really won the
election, and so after months of drift and delay a deal was struck. Ashraf Ghani, a
former senior official at the World Bank, will be president. Abdullah Abdullah, a
former resistance fighter during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and later foreign
minister under Karzai, will nominate a chief executive officer who will act more or
less as prime minister.
It is, in other words, a traditional Afghan carve-up, with a proportional slice of power
for every one of the countrys ethnic groups. Ghani will ensure that Pashtuns get the
biggest share of the good jobs, and look after the Uzbeks as well. Abdullah will take
care of the Tajiks and Hazaras. But compared to your average Afghan warlord or
Taliban fanatic, both men look pretty good.
Indeed, Afghanistans government and nascent democratic system might actually
survive and prove to be fit for purpose. After three decades of Russian and American
occupation, a significant minority of Afghans (certainly several millions) have been
exposed to many examples of how post-tribal societies run their affairs.
Afghanistan is still a tribal society, so this carve-up of power on an ethnic basis may
be a better option for the country than winner-takes-all politics. And if the United
States and its allies do not abruptly cut off the foreign aid that keeps the whole show
on the road, post-occupation Afghanistan may at least avoid a rerun of the
disastrous civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal and the sudden ending of
Soviet subsidies in 1992.
Terrorism101
October 2014
There was a time, as recently as 25 years ago, when military staff colleges around
the world taught a reasonably effective doctrine for dealing with terrorism. Then it
was forgotten, but we need it back. It would be especially useful in dealing with the
terrorist state that has recently emerged in northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
The doctrine was painfully worked out back in the decades of the 1960s, 70s and
80s, when terrorism was one of the worlds biggest problems. Most of the time, the
strategy worked, whether the threat was the urban terrorists who plagued most Latin
American countries and a number of big developed countries, or the rural guerillas

who fought the government in many African and Asian countries.

The key insight was this: Terrorist movements always want you to over-react, SO
DONT DO IT. The terrorists usually lack the popular support to overpower their
opponent by force, so they employ a kind of political jiu-jitsu: they try to use the
adversarys own strength against him. Most domestic terrorism, and almost all
international terrorism, is aimed at provoking a big, stupid, self-defeating response
from the target government.
The Red Army Faction terrorists, for example, hoped that their attacks would
provoke West Germanys democratic government into severe repression. This was
known, in the works of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, as unmasking the repressive
tolerance of the liberal bourgeoisie and once the West German government had
dropped its mask, the RAF terrorists believed, the outraged workers would rise up in
their millions and overthrow it.
But we never found out if the workers would actually do that, because the West
German government refused to panic. It just tracked down the terrorists and killed or
arrested them. It used violence, but only in legal, limited and precisely targeted ways.
The same approach ended the terrorist campaigns in Italy (the Red Brigades),
Canada (the Quebec Liberation Front), Japan (the Japanese Red Army) and the
United States (the Weathermen).
In Latin America, by contrast, the urban terrorists did succeed in the first stage of
their strategy. Their attacks drove the military in Argentina, Brazil and a number of
other countries to seize power and create brutally repressive regimes. But even this
did not cause the population to revolt, as the terrorists had expected.
Instead, the people kept their heads down while the military regimes destroyed the
revolutionaries (together with many innocent bystanders). Extreme repression can
also eventually succeed as a counter-strategy to terrorism, but it imposes a terrible
cost on the population.
International terrorism has a somewhat better record of success, mainly because
these terrorists are not actually trying to overthrow the government they attack. They
are merely trying to trick that foreign government into using massive violence against
the countries where they really do want to take power. The attacks of the foreigners
will outrage and radicalise the local population, who will then give their support to the
local revolutionaries.
The most successful operation of this kind was 9/11, a low-cost attack that incited
the United States to invade two entire countries in the region where the
revolutionaries of al-Qaeda hoped to replace the local governments with Islamist
regimes. The local population has been duly radicalised, especially in the Sunnimajority parts of Iraq, and thirteen years later an Islamic Caliphate has taken power
in the northern and western parts of that country.
Osama bin Laden would have condemned the extreme cruelty that the new Islamist
state has adopted as its modus operandi, but in essence it is the fulfilment of the
grand strategy that he worked out after the Russians left Afghanistan a quartercentury ago. He could not have predicted that the strategys greatest success would
be in Iraq, for he had no allies or followers there before the US invasion, but he
would still take credit for it.
So now that Osama bin Ladens vision has finally taken concrete shape, how should
we deal with it? (We in this case is practically every regime in the Arab world, most
of the other Muslim countries, and all of the NATO countries, with Russia and China
in supporting roles). ISISs behaviour is abominable, but is there any better option
than simply bombing it from a great height?

Rule one in the old anti-terrorism doctrine was DONT OVERREACT, and it still
applies. That means as little bombing as possible, and only of strictly military targets.
Preferably, it would mean no bombing at all except in specific areas where ISIS
troops are on the offensive.
It means not letting yourself be lured into more extreme action by the public
beheading of innocent hostages and the other atrocities that ISIS stages to attract a
certain kind of recruit. Indeed, it means not launching a major ground offensive
against ISIS (for which the troops are not available anyway), and waiting for events
to take their course within the Islamic State.
Regimes as radical and violent as this one rarely survive for long. The revolution will
eat its children, as so many have before, and it will happen a lot more quickly if they
dont have a huge foreign military threat to hold them together.
Global Terrorism
November 2014
We will not be cowed by these sick terrorists, said British Prime Minister David
Cameron after ISIS produced a grisly video of the mass beheading of Syrian
captives by foreign jihadis who allegedly included British fighters. We will not be
intimidated, said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper after the recent attacks
in Montreal and Ottawa. As if the purpose of terrorist attacks in Western countries
was to cow and intimidate them.
You hear this sort of rhetoric from Western leaders all the time, but Harper went
further, and demonstrated exactly how they get it wrong. (This) will lead us to
redouble our efforts to work with our allies around the world and fight against the
terrorist organisations who brutalise those in other countries with the hope of
bringing their savagery to our shores. They will have no safe haven. Sound familiar?
Sure enough, there are now half a dozen Canadian planes bombing ISIS jihadis in
Iraq (although its unlikely that either of the Canadian attackers, both converts to
radical Islam, had any contact with foreign terrorist organisations). But Harper has
got the logic completely backwards.
The purpose of major terrorist activities directed at the West, from the 9/11 attacks to
ISIS videos, is not to cow or intimidate Western countries. It is to get those
countries to bomb Muslim countries or, better yet, invade them. The terrorists want to
come to power in Muslim countries, not in Canada or Britain or the US. And the best
way to establish your revolutionary credentials and recruit local supporters is to get
the West to attack you.
Thats what Osama bin Laden wanted in 2001. (He hoped for an American invasion
of Afghanistan, but he got an unexpected bonus in the US invasion of Iraq.) The ISIS
videos of Western hostages being beheaded are intended to get Western countries
involved in the fight against them, because thats how you build local support. So far,
the strategy is working just fine.
The Global Terrorism Index, published annually by the Institute for Economics and
Peace, reported last week that fatalities due to terrorism have risen fivefold in the 13
years since the 9/11 attacks, despite the US-led war on terror that has spent $4.4
trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and anti-terrorist operations elsewhere.
But its not really despite those wars. Its largely because of them.
The invasions, the drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa, the whole lumbering
apparatus of the global war on terrorism have not killed the terrorist beast. They
have fed it, and the beast has grown very large. 3,361 people were killed by
terrorism in 2000; 17,958 were killed by it last year.

At least 80 percent of these people were Muslims, and the vast majority of those who
killed them were also Muslims: the terrorists of Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria,
Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and al-Qaeda and
its offspring in other parts of the world (like al-Shebab in north-east Africa).
That is not to say that terrorism is a particularly Muslim technique. Its historical roots
lie in European struggles against oppressive regimes in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and it gained huge currency in liberation struggles against the European
colonial empires after the Second World War. Even the Stern Gang in Israel and the
Irish Republican Army can be seen as part of this wave.
Later waves of fashion in terrorism included the European, Latin American and
Japanese urban terrorist movements of the 1970s and 80s Baader-Meinhof Gang
in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, Montoneros in Argentina, Japanese Red Army
and so on none of which has any political success at all. Specifically Islamic
terrorism really begins only in the 1990s, with the rise of radical, anachronistic forms
of Sunni Islam.
Only about 5 percent of the victims of this latest wave of terrorism lived in developed
countries, but it was their deaths, and their governments ignorant responses to
them, that provided the fuel for the spectacular growth of jihadi extremism. So what
can be done about it?
The Global Terrorism Index has some useful observations to offer about that, too. It
points out that a great many terrorist organisations have actually gone out of
business in the past 45 years. Only 10 percent of them actually won, took power,
and disbanded their terrorist wings. And only 7 percent were eliminated by the direct
application of military force.
EIGHTY percent of them were ended by a combination of better policing and the
creation of a political process that addressed the grievances of those who supported
the terrorism. You dont fix the problem by fighting poverty or raising educational
levels; that kind of thing has almost nothing to do with the rise of terrorism. You have
to deal with the particular grievances that obsess specific ethnic, religious or political
groups.
And above all, keep foreigners out of the process. Their interventions ALWAYS
make matters worse. Which is why the terrorists love them so much.
Israeli Election 2015
December 2014
Binyamin Netanyahu, Bibi to both his friends and his ever-growing list of enemies,
is running for a fourth term as the prime minister of Israel. He called the election, two
years early, because the leaders of two of the parties in his coalition government had
become too openly hostile to his policies. So he is rolling the dice again in the hope
of being able to form some different coalition.
Thats what he always does. His coalitions draw mainly on the centre-right and,
increasingly, the far right, partly because that is where he stands personally on
security issues and partly because Israel opinion in general has been drifting
steadily to the right. But beyond that, he has no fixed policy. His primary goal is to
hold his coalitions together and stay in power.
Netanyahu is hardly unique in this. Professional politicians anywhere tend to divide
into two types, the conviction politicians and the players, with the majority usually in
the latter category. He is a tremendously good player of the game, but it has a
paralysing effect on Israeli politics.
Since he cannot afford to come down in favour of either a real two-state solution

that allows for an independent Palestine or a single Israeli-ruled state that

permanently controls all or most of the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel never
gets to choose between the two. Until, perhaps, now.
Netanyahus excuse for refusing to choose has usually been the lack of a valid
Palestinian negotiating partner, and there is certainly some basis for that. Mahmoud
Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, has not faced an election, even
within his own Fatah party, for ten years. Moreover, Abbas has no control over the
40 percent of the Palestinian population who live under Hamas rule in the Gaza
Strip.
But it is more an excuse than a reason. Genuine negotiations envisaging a Israeli
withdrawal from most or all of the West Bank and a real Palestinian state, even a
demilitarised one, would destroy any coalition Netanyahu has ever built. Going flatout with the extreme right-wing project for a one-state solution incorporating the
whole West Bank but denying Palestinians the vote would do the same. Result:
permanent paralysis.
Indeed, Netanyahu has even encouraged Israelis to believe that this peculiar status
quo can be a lasting substitute for a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. This is a ridiculous proposition, but it clearly has appeal for Israelis who
would like to believe that they can have security without the pain of territorial
compromise.
Meanwhile, however, the outside world has been losing patience. Abbas has been
pushing for a November, 2016 United Nations deadline to end the Israeli occupation
unless two-state negotiations have succeeded by then. And last week the European
Parliament voted to recognise Palestine statehood in principle as part of the twostate solution, with Jerusalem as the capital of both states.
The EU resolution also said that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are
illegal under international law as indeed they are, but it has not been normal for
Israels allies and supporters to say so explicitly. (The European Union has granted
Israel trading privileges so extensive that it is practically a member economically.)
The vote was 498 in favour and only 88 against, and there was a standing ovation in
the chamber afterwards.
The rot is spreading rapidly. Four national Western European parliaments Ireland,
the United Kingdom, France and Spain have recently endorsed resolutions in
favour of Palestinian statehood, and Sweden has actually recognised Palestine as a
state. Other European Union members are on the brink of doing so, and even
Israels final line of diplomatic defence, an American veto, is no longer guaranteed.
The United States has used its veto on the UN Security Council to shield Israel from
resolutions that criticise the country forty-one times in the past forty years. Indeed, it
has used its veto for no other purpose since 1988. Israelis fully expect Barack
Obama to use it a 42nd time to defeat Mahmoud Abbass appeal for a two-year
deadline for an agreement on a two-state solution when it comes before the Security
Council, most likely in January.
They are probably right, but Obama will be sorely tempted to let people think that he
might not use the veto, and perhaps also to push the Security Council vote down
towards the 17 March date of the Israeli election, in the hope of influencing Israeli
voters to turn away from Netanyahu.
Its quite common for Israeli voters to push back when they feel they are under
foreign pressure to make concessions, so this could actually play out to Netanyahus
advantage. A great deal can happen between now and 17 March, so one shouldnt
give too much weight to current polls. But at the moment, the numbers suggest that

Netanyahus gamble on forming a new coalition may not succeed.

And that might open the way to one last attempt to make the two-state solution work.
The Oil War
January 2015
Did you know theres an oil war? And the war has an objective: to destroy Russia,
said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a live television speech last week. Its
a strategically planned war also aimed at Venezuela, to try and destroy our
revolution and cause an economic collapse. Its the United States that has started
the war, Maduro said, and its strategy was to flood the market with shale oil and
collapse the price.
Russias President Vladimir Putin agrees. We all see the lowering of oil prices. he
said recently. Theres lots of talk about whats causing it. Could it be an agreement
between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of
Russia and Venezuela? It could. The evil Americans are at it again. Theyre
fiendishly clever, you know.
We are hearing this kind of talk a lot these days, especially from countries that have
been hit hard by the crash in the oil price. Last Thursday Brent crude hit $55 per
barrel, precisely half the price it was selling for last June. The Obama
administrations announcement last week that it is preparing to allow the export of
some US oil to foreign markets may send it even lower. (US crude oil exports have
been banned since 1973.)
When the oil price collapses, countries that depend very heavily on oil exports to
make ends meet are obviously going to get hurt. President Putin, who has let Russia
get itself into a position where more than half its budget revenue comes from oil and
gas sales (some estimates go as high as 80 percent) is in deep trouble: the value of
the rouble has halved, and the economy has already slipped into recession.
Venezuela, where government spending is certainly more than 50 percent
dependent on oil exports, is in even deeper trouble and, like Putin in Russia,
President Maduro of Venezuela sees this as the result of an American plot. Various
commentators in the West have taken up the chorus, and the conspiracy theory is
taking root all over the developing world.
So let us consider whether there really is an oil war. The accusation is that the
United States is deliberately flooding the market with shale oil, that is, with oil that
has only become available because of the fracking techniques that have become
widespread, especially in the US, over the past decade. Moreover, Washington is
doing this for political purposes, not just because it makes economic sense for the
United States to behave like this.
In order to believe this conspiracy theory, however, you really have to think that a
rational US government, acting in its own best economic interests, would do the
opposite: suppress the fracking techniques and keep American oil production low, in
order to keep its imports up and the oil price high. But why on earth would it want to
do that?
You will note that I am going along with the notion (a necessary part of the
conspiracy theory) that all important business decisions in the United States are
ultimately made by the US government. That is ridiculous, of course, but we dont
need to refute this delusion in order to settle the question at hand, so let it pass.
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) as a means of recovering gas and oil, particularly
from shale formations, has its roots in early attempts dating back as far as 1947, but
it was the development of cheap and reliable techniques for horizontal drilling in the

late 1980s that slowly began to transform the US oil industry.

By 2012, over a million fracking operations had been performed in US wells but in
2012, last years events in Ukraine were unforeseen and the United States and
Russia were still on relatively good terms. Many oil-exporting countries were worried
by the prospect that rising US oil and gas production would shrink American imports
and thereby cut their own profits, but it was still seen as a supply-and-demand
problem, not a strategic manoeuvre.
The operators wanted to make a profit, and Washington liked the idea that rising US
domestic oil production might end the countrys dependence on imported oil from
unstable places so much that it gave tax breaks and even some direct subsidies to
the companies developing the fracking techniques. But thats no more than what any
other government of an oil-producing country would have done.
So did the US develop fracking to hurt its enemies? The dates just dont work for
Russia: fracking was already making US production soar years before Washington
started to see Moscow as an enemy. As for Venezuela, it continues to be the fourthlargest exporter of oil to the United States, at a time when the glut of oil on the
market would let Washington cut Venezuela out of the supply chain entirely.
And Barack Obama is not opening the flood-gates for massive American oil exports
that will make the oil price fall even lower. The US still imports a lot of oil, and will go
on doing so for years. He has only authorised the export of a particular kind of ultralight oil that is in over-supply on the domestic market: only about one million barrels
of it, with actual exports not starting until next August.
If this is a conspiracy, its a remarkably slow-moving one.
The Strategy of the Paris Attacks
January 2015
After Ahmed Merabet, a French policeman, was killed outside the Charlie Hebdo
offices in Paris last week, his brother Malek said: My brother was Muslim and he
was killed by two terrorists, by two false Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace and
love.
It was moving, but to say that all Muslims who commit cruel and violent acts in Gods
name are false Muslims is like saying that the Crusaders who devastated the
Middle East nine hundred years ago were false Christians.
The Crusaders were real Christians. They believed that they were doing Gods will in
trying to reconquer the formerly Christian lands that had been lost to Islam centuries
before, and they had the support of most people back home in Europe.
Similarly, Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly believed they were true
Muslims doing Gods will, and some people in Muslim-majority countries agree with
them. But there is an important difference from the Crusades: the supporters of the
young French terrorists are a minority everywhere, and among Muslims living in
Western countries they are only a tiny minority.
This is not a war of civilisations. Seventeen innocent people killed in Paris is not the
equivalent of the Crusades. For that matter, neither was 9/11. These are wicked and
tragic events, but they are not a war.
There is a war going on, but it is a civil war within the House of Islam that
occasionally spills over into non-Muslim countries. As foot-soldiers in that war, the
three killers in Paris probably did not fully understand the role they were playing, but
they were serving a quite sophisticated strategy.
Two of these Muslim civil wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were ignited by US-led
invasions in 2001 and 2003. Four others, in Syria, Libya, Yemen and the northern,

mostly Muslim half of Nigeria, have begun since 2011. Others go back even further,
like the war in Somalia, or have flared up and then become dormant again, like Mali
and Algeria.
In every one of these wars the victims are overwhelmingly Muslims killed by other
Muslims. From time to time non-Muslims in other countries are killed too, as in New
York in 2001, in London in 2007, in Bombay in 2008 and last week in Paris, and
these killings do have a strategic purpose, but its not to terrify non-Muslims into
submission. Quite the contrary.
The great Muslim civil war is about the political, social and cultural modernisation of
the Muslim world. Should it continue down much the same track that other major
global cultures have followed, or should those changes be stopped and indeed
reversed? The Islamists take the latter position.
Some aspects of modernisation are very attractive to many Muslims, so stopping the
changes would require a lot of violence, including the overthrow of most existing
governments in Muslim countries. But that is the task that the Islamists in general,
and the jihadi activists in particular, have undertaken.
As they are minorities even in their own countries, the Islamists hardest job is to
mobilise popular support for their struggle. The best way to do this is to convince
Muslims that modernisation democracy, equality, the whole cultural package is
part of a Western plot to undermine Islam.
This will be a more credible claim if Western countries are actually attacking Muslim
countries, so one of the main jihadi strategies is to carry out terrorist atrocities that
will trigger Western military attacks on Muslim countries. That was the real goal of
9/11, and it was spectacularly successful: it tricked the United States into invading
not one but TWO Muslim countries.
But smaller terrorist attacks that lead to the mistreatment of the Muslim minorities in
non-Muslim countries also serve the cause. They can create a backlash that
victimises the local Muslim minorities, thus generating yet more proof that there is a
war against Islam.
This strategy actually has a name. Appropriately it is in French: la politique du pire.
Its the strategy of making things worse in order to achieve ones ultimate goal in
this case, revolutions that will sweep away the existing governments in almost every
Muslim country and put the Islamists in power instead.
There is a sub-theme in some of the Middle Eastern wars that muddies the waters a
bit: in Syria, Iraq and Yemen the general radicalisation has also revived and
militarised the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. But even in these
countries most of the killings are of Sunni Muslims by other Sunni Muslims.
There will be more attacks like the ones in Paris, because lost young men seeking a
cause abound in every community, including the Muslim communities of the West.
We cant arrest them all, so we will go on having to live with a certain amount of
terrorism from both Muslim and non-Muslim extremist groups and trying not to overreact just as we have been doing for many decades already.
Egypt Under Sisi
February 2015
The Islamic State franchise in Libya, which is emerging as the main winner in that
countrys chaotic civil war, published a video on Sunday showing 21 Egyptian men in
orange overalls being forced to the ground and beheaded. The video made it clear
that they were being killed for being Christian, people of the cross, followers of the
hostile Egyptian church.

Within hours the Egyptian air force responded with raids on IS camps and training
sites in Derna, the groups headquarters in eastern Libya. Announcing the safe
return of all the aircraft, the Egyptian military authorities declared: Let those far and
near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them. But it didnt really protect
them, did it?
Okay, thats not fair. Everybody knows that you cant protect people once they fall
into the hands of the jihadi head-choppers. An air force is a particularly unsuitable
tool for that job, nor can anyone stop unemployed Egyptian labourers, including
members of the Christian minority, from seeking work even in war-torn Libya. Most of
the victims came from a dirt-poor Christian village in Upper Egypt, and they had to
feed their families somehow.
So the Islamic State fanatics murdered them because killing Christians attracts
recruits from a certain demographic. Then the Egyptian air force flailed out aimlessly,
and the public relations boys wrote the usual guff about the air force being a shield
for the people. So far, so tediously normal but the whole event also serves the
narrative of the Egyptian military regime.
Were not supposed to call it a military regime. The military coup (with substantial
popular support) that overthrew the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013
was allegedly just a brief detour from democracy. But the commander of the armed
forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ended up as president, and the promised
parliamentary elections have still not happened.
Why not? The main excuse Egyptians are offered is that the government is too busy
fighting a huge terrorist threat. And dont mention that the terrorism is largely the
regimes own fault, or that the threat is not so big that normal political life must be
suspended. People who say that have featured prominently among the 40,000 who
have been arrested since July 2013. (16,000 are still in prison.)
What happened in Egypt twenty months ago was a betrayal of the democratic
revolution of February 2011, when peaceful demonstrators forced former general
Hosni Mubarak out after thirty years as president. Few of the urban, relatively well
educated revolutionaries on Tahrir Square supported the Muslim Brotherhood, but
they should not have been surprised when it won the first free election.
Ninety percent of Egyptians are Muslims, and most of them are deeply conservative
rural people. They remembered that the Muslim Brotherhood had been Egypts main
opposition party during the decades of dictatorship. They shared many of its values,
and many of them had benefited from its social programmes for the poor.
They reckoned the Brothers deserved the first go in power, and gave it their votes.
More secular people were appalled when the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated
constituent assembly amended the constitution to give it more religious content,
although the changes were not actually all that extreme. And they forgot that in a
democracy, you can change the government by voting it out. You just have to wait
for the next election.
Victory in the first post-revolution election was a poisoned apple for the Muslim
Brotherhood. Every day its behaviour in power was alienating more people. The
economy was a wreck (and still is). But the Brotherhood was not making irreversible
changes in Egypt, so the right strategy was to wait it out, and then vote it out.
Instead, the naive and impatient revolutionaries made an alliance with the army to
drive the elected government from power. Did they think that the army, despite sixty
years of military dictators in Egypt, was a secret ally of democracy? General Sisi
accepted their support, took over the government in 2013, and put President Morsi in
jail. Shortly afterwards, he began putting the revolutionaries in jail too.

But Sisi needs some excuse for destroying Egypts democratic revolution, and the
excuse is terrorism, the bigger the better. He declared the Muslim Brotherhood a
terrorist organisation, and when tens of thousands of non-violent supporters of the
Brotherhood established a protest camp in Rabaa Square in Cairo he cleared it by
force, killing at least 627 people by the governments own count.
Human Rights Watch has documented at least 817 deaths, and suspects there were
more than a thousand. It was, said an HRW report last August, a premeditated
assault equal to or worse than the massacre of Chinese protesters on Tienanmen
Square in Beijing in 1989. The purpose, as in 1989, was to cow the population into
submission, and it is working in Egypt as well as it did in China.
Terrorism, real and imaginary, helps to distract attention at home and abroad from
what actually happened in Egypt. Even before the ghastly slaughter of innocent
Egyptians in Libya on Sunday, the US Congress had put military aid to Egypt back
into this years budget proposal.
Islamic State: The Worst Case Contingency
March 2015
Its often a good idea, when faced with a really frightening situation, to model the
worst case outcome and see how bad it could get. That can be quite bad, but its
rarely as bad as the half-formed fears that build up if you dont actually analyse the
problem. Like Islamic State, for example.
It began with the conquest of parts of eastern Syria by an Islamist group called ISIS
(Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in 2011-13. Its founders were almost all Iraqis who
had got their start fighting the American occupation of their country. They were
allegedly in Syria to help overthrow Bashar al-Assads dictatorship, but they actually
spent their time conquering territory held by other rebel groups.
Once ISIS had a territorial base in eastern Syria, its fighters surged back across the
border into Iraq in June, 2014 and captured Mosul, Iraqs third-largest city. First the
hopeless Iraqi army and then the supposedly competent Kurdish army crumbled in
front of them. In July ISIS declared the border abolished and proclaimed the
foundation of the Islamic State in the conquered parts of both Syria and Iraq.
A few days later the leader of ISIS, Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi, declared in a sermon in
Mosuls great mosque of al-Nuri that he is the caliph to whom all Muslims owe
obedience. It was a bold step there has been no caliph since 1924 but it had
great resonance among those many Muslims who blamed the collapse of the Islamic
worlds power and prosperity on the neglect of its traditional religious institutions and
values.
Since then, Islamic State has conquered no more territory. Its one big offensive,
against the Kurdish enclave of Kobane along the Turkish border, was defeated after
thousands of ISIS fighters died in the attempt to take it. Aircraft from the US, other
Western countries, and various conservative Arab countries patrol the skies over
Islamic State, bombing anything that looks even vaguely military. Yet it still scares
people to death.
One reason is its sheer ferocity and endlessly inventive cruelty. It crucifies people,
hacks their heads off, burns them alive and posts videos boasting about it all. It
attracts large numbers of recruits from the Sunni Muslims living in the Arab lands
now included in Islamic State, but also thousands of eager volunteers from other
Muslim countries and from the Muslim diaspora in the West.
Islamic State is now collecting pledges of allegiance from like-minded Islamist
fighting groups in other Muslim countries, each of which lends a little more credibility

to its claim to be the new caliphate. In November Islamist groups in Egypt, Libya,
Algeria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia all declared that they acknowledged al-Baghdadi,
now calling himself Caliph Ibrahim, as their leader and guide.
Little more has been heard from the Yemeni, Saudi and Algerian groups, but the
Egyptian group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, controls parts of the Sinai peninsula, regularly
attacks the Egyptian army, and was officially designated a province (wilayat) of the
Islamic State in November. Libya, where Islamist groups have been gaining ground
in the civil war, was carved into three further provinces at the same time.
In late January a former commander of the Pakistani Taleban and ten other jihadi
leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan also acknowledged al-Baghdadis authority ,
and declared that they constituted the new IS province of Khorasan, taking in those
two countries and other nearby lands.
Then last Saturday Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the militant group Boko Haram,
which controls much of northeastern Nigeria, also pledged allegiance to Islamic
State: We announce our allegiance to the caliph and will hear and obey in times
of difficulty and prosperity. We call on Muslims everywhere to pledge allegiance to
the caliph. Its certainly making progress, but how far can it go?
Probably not much further. All the new provinces of Islamic State, like most of the
original ones, are in mainly rural areas, often sparsely populated, and with few
natural resources (except some oil, in Libyas case). They are areas that corrupt and
autocratic governments, many of them distracted by civil war, can simply abandon
for the short term as not vital for their survival.
For Islamic State to seize big metropolitan areas and their resources would require a
level of popular support in those areas that is unlikely to emerge. Big cities are full of
relatively sophisticated people who have something to lose, and are unlikely to see
Islamic State as an attractive solution for their problems.
Without the big cities and their communications facilities especially airports and
harbours there can be little effective cooperation between the widely dispersed
provinces of Islamic State. They will have to go on fighting their own wars with little
outside help, and some they will lose.
The broader struggle against Islamist extremism will probably continue for at least a
decade, and impose heavy costs on the people of the Middle East. But ultra-radical
organisations like ISIS and Boko Haram are likely to break up in bitter theological
disputes a lot quicker than that.
Netanyahu and Irans Bomb
March 2015
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally given his much ballyhooed
speech to the U.S. Congress, and the heavens havent fallen.
He issued the same bloodcurdling warning that Iran is on the brink of getting nuclear
weapons that he has been making for 20 years now, and nobody called him on it.
Instead, the Republican members of Congress, and those Democrats who bothered
to show up, gave him the usual standing ovations.
President Barack Obama was deeply miffed by Netanyahus attack on his policy of
negotiating with Iran, and refused to meet him while he was in Washington.
Secretary of State John Kerry was so outraged by Netanyahus assertion that the
deal he is working on with Iran could pave its way to the bomb rather than block it
that he publicly said the Israeli prime minister might not be correct.
It is unprecedented for an American president to refuse to meet a visiting Israeli
prime minister, or for a senior U.S. official to suggest that the aforesaid prime

minister might be wrong, but the reflexive American support for Israel will survive for
quite a while yet. And Netanyahus gamble may pay off in extra votes for his Likud
Party in the Israeli election on the 17th, which is what the visit was really about.
Netanyahu knows his Israelis, and he has been playing successfully on their
existential fear that somebody else in the Middle East might also get nuclear
weapons ever since he entered politics.
Israelis dont really require proof that the Iranians (or anybody else) are actually
working on such weapons. Indeed, their anxiety on the issue is so deep-rooted that it
resists all the reassurances by Israels own military and intelligence communities that
Iran is not working on nuclear weapons.
Last week, a cache of secret documents about South African contacts with other
countries secret services was leaked to al-Jazeera. It included a 2012 cable from
Israels Mossad intelligence service saying that Iran was not performing the activity
necessary to produce [nuclear] weapons. Did the Israeli public heave a great sigh of
relief? Certainly not.
Last Sunday, 180 former generals and commanders of the Israeli Defence Forces,
Mossad intelligence agency, Shin Bet domestic security and National Police held a
joint news conference begging Netanyahu not to damage the U.S.-Israeli strategic
relationship further by making his inflammatory anti-Obama speech in Congress. Did
ordinary Israelis join in the outcry? They did not.
Polling shows that two-thirds of Israelis would like to see the back of Netanyahu,
mainly because he has presided over a huge rise in the cost of living, and especially
the cost of housing. But on security issues a majority of Israelis are with himso
naturally those are the issues he concentrates on.
The Israelis are probably wrong to worry so much about Iranian nuclear weapons.
There were two periods during which Iran seriously considered making nuclear
weapons and did some preliminary work on weapons design and uranium
enrichment, but in neither case was it about Israel.
The first time was in the 1980s, when Saddam Husseins Iraq attacked Iran (with
American backing) in a war that ultimately cost a quarter-million Iranian lives. At that
time Saddam actually was working on Iraqi nuclear weapons, and Iran felt obliged to
follow suit.
But after Saddam was defeated by Western and Arab armies in the Gulf War of
1990-91 and the United Nations inspectors went in to dismantle Iraqs nuclear
programme, the Iranians lost interest in developing their own nuclear weapons. Then
they got alarmed again and restarted the programme in 1998 when another
neighbour, Pakistan, tested its own first nuclear weapons.
They didnt make much progress, but they kept on working at the problem in a
desultory way until 2002, when an anti-regime terrorist group called Mujahedin-eKhalq (partly financed by Israel) revealed the existence of the weapons programme
and Tehran shut it down. And for the past 13 years, nothing.
The great danger Netanyahu faces is not Iranian nuclear weapons but ejection from
office by Israeli voters. His response has been the same as always: to promote
himself as the only man who can keep Israel safeeven if that means burning his
bridges with an American president who still has two more years in office.
In terms of his own interests, he may be making the right call. His right-wing Likud
Party and the centre-left coalition called the Zionist Camp have been running neckand-neck in recent polling, but if his grandstanding in Washington brings in just a few
more votes he could be back in power until the end of the decade.

Bibis Back
March 2015
Midway through the election campaign Israels leading satirical TV show, Eretz
Nehederet, came up with a new take on the man who has dominated the countrys
politics for the past twenty years. Binyamin Bibi Netanyahu, it suggested, was
cursed as a child to be Israels prime minister for eternity. His only chance to break
the spell was to become its worst-ever leader.
Well, if that was his strategy, he has failed again. Despite having run a government
that delivered too few jobs, stagnant wages, a rapidly rising cost of living, and a fullblown housing crisis it now costs the average Israeli 148 months salary to buy a
home, compared to 66 months for the average American Israelis voted him back
into power in Tuesdays election.
Only a week ago, he was running behind in the polls, but a massive last-minute
scare campaign turned it around. On polling day, Netanyahu even put a video clip on
his Facebook page in which he warned that the rule of the right is in danger. The
(Israeli) Arabs are moving in droves to the polling stations. Left-wing organisations
are bringing them there in buses. And who was paying for those buses? American
money, explained Bibis campaign team.
Israels voting system of strict proportional representation has never given a single
party a majority of the Knessets 120 seats in any election in the states 67-year
history. Netanyahus Likud Party won 30 seats, while its nearest rival, the centre-left
Zionist Union, got only 24. But that gives Likud the first chance to form a coalition
with the required 61 seats, and there are enough smaller right-wing parties to make
up the numbers.
Bibi is back for up to five more years, which would make him the longest-serving
prime minister in Israeli history. But turning the tide had a price, and Israel has not
yet begun to pay it.
Netanyahu won mainly by cannibalising the vote of the parties to Likuds right, but
that strategy required him to say some things out loud that he had previously
conveyed to his hard-right admirers only by nods and winks. The most dramatic shift
came just one day before the election, when he finally said plainly that he would
never allow the creation of a Palestinian state.
I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate (Israelioccupied Palestinian) territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against
Israel, he said. Does that mean that a Palestinian state would not be permitted if he
were re-elected, asked the interviewer. Indeed, Netanyahu replied.
This will come as a vast surprise to practically nobody. Netanyahus entire political
career has been dedicated to sabotaging the 1993 Oslo Accords (which envisaged
Israeli and Palestinian states living side-by-side in peace) and planting so many
Jewish settlers on the Israeli-occupied territories that a separate Palestinian state
becomes physically impossible.
He largely destroyed the Oslo agreement in his first term as prime minister in
1996-99 (the creation of a Palestinian state was scheduled for 1998). Almost 10
percent of Israels Jews now live in the occupied Palestinian territories (east
Jerusalem and the West Bank) that would make up a Palestinian state. But to keep
his American allies and his European supporters happy, he never actually said he
would not allow an independent Palestine.
Netanyahu finally spoke the truth on Monday because thats what the settlers and
their supporters wanted to hear, and he needed those votes in order to survive
politically. But it destroyed the myth, useful to the United States and the European

Union, that there is some surviving peace process that must be protected by
keeping the Israelis happy. The peace process is dead, dead, dead. Has been for
years. There is no two-state solution on the table.
This makes it a lot harder for the US to veto resolutions critical of Israel at the United
Nations, as it has done 51 times since 1972. Without the cover of peace talks, these
vetoes become votes for perpetual Israeli rule over the Palestinian people. And it will
accelerate the broader erosion of the old pro-Israel reflexes of people in Europe and
the US who needed the reassurance that some day, somehow, there would be a just
peace settlement.
Netanyahu made matters considerably worse during the campaign by openly
showing his contempt for President Barack Obama. His panic-mongering speech to
the US Congress, painting Obamas quest for a nuclear deal with Iran as a naive
surrender to Irans alleged desire for nuclear weapons, was an unprecedented
foreign intervention in the US political process. It will not be forgiven or forgotten by
Obama.
His election promise to speed up Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories
(which is illegal under international law) was another nail in the coffin of peace
negotiations. Still, it did help to get Netanyahu re-elected, and for him thats all that
counts.
He still truly believes that only he understands the real and existential dangers facing
Israel, and has the will to do something about them. Except that all he ever really
does is kick those dangers down the road a bit. Unable to believe that a peaceful
settlement is possible or even desirable, he condemns his country to perpetual
conflict
and growing isolation.
Yemen: Another Civil War
March 2015
The last American troops have been pulled out of Yemen after al-Qaeda fighters
stormed a city near their base last Friday. Houthi rebels who had already overrun
most of the country have now entered Aden, the last stronghold of President
Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. And on Wednesday Hadi boarded a helicopter and
departed for parts unknown.
The US State Department spokesman put the best possible face on the withdrawal
of American troops, saying that due to the deteriorating security situation in Yemen,
the US government has temporarily relocated its remaining personnel out of Yemen.
He even said that the US continued to support the political transition in Yemen. But
there is no political transition. There is a four-sided civil war (although one side is
about to collapse).
Why would anybody be surprised? There has been no 25-year period since the 7th
century AD when there was not a civil war of one sort or another in Yemen. (They
are often many-sided wars, and the impression that it was less turbulent before the
7th century may just be due to poor record-keeping.) But this time its actually
frightening the neighbours.
Yemens current turmoil started in 2011, when the dictator who had ruled the country
for 33 years, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, was forced out by non-violent democratic
protesters (and some tribal militias who backed them). Salehs deputy, Abdrabbuh
Mansour Hadi, took over and even won an election in 2012, but he never managed
to establish his authority over the deeply divided country.
Hadi had the backing of the United States and most of the Arab Gulf states

(including Yemens big northern neighbour, Saudi Arabia) because he was willing to
fight the Islamist extremists who had seized much of southern and eastern Yemen.
But his main preoccupation was actually the Houthis, a tribal militia based in largely
Shia northern Yemen.
Angry at the status that the north was being offered in a proposed new federal
constitution, the Houthis came south in force and seized Sanaa last September. In
February, after months of house arrest, Hadi fled to the southern port of Aden, his
home town and Yemens second city, and declared that the capital instead. So the
Houthis came south after him.
Meanwhile Saleh, the former president, returned from exile and made an alliance
with the Houthis despite the fact that he had launched six major offensives against
them back when he was president. Thats what radicalised the Houthis in the first
place, but they needed some national figure on their side as they moved deeper into
the south, and Saleh is at least a Shia. He will have to do. Clear so far? Good.
The third contender for power is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), whose
forces are only a half-hours drive from Aden. As its fighters closed in on Aden last
week, AQAP seized the town next to the airbase where the American forces were
living, and Washington ordered its troops out. But the Houthis got into the city of
Aden first, and it is not yet clear whether AQAP will try to take it from them.
Finally, we mustnt forget the fighters of ISIS (Islamic State), who announced their
presence in the country last month. Their sole operation of note so far has been
suicide attacks on two Shia mosques in Sanaa on Sunday that killed 137 people. But
as Sunni fanatics in a country that is currently being overrun by its Shia minority,
ISIS will not lack for recruits. So the war will continue with three sides: Hadi goes out,
and ISIS comes in.
In conventional terms, Yemen doesnt matter much. It has a lot of people (25 million),
but it is the poorest country in the Arab world. Its oil has almost run out, and its water
is going fast. You could argue that its geographical position is strategic at the
entrance to the Red Sea, commanding the approach to the Suez Canal but its
hard to see any Yemeni government getting the kind of military forces it would need
to close that waterway.
What worries people is the possibility that the jihadis (either al-Qaeda or ISIS) could
come out of this on top. They are certainly not there yet, but many Sunnis will see
them as the best chance to break the hold of the Shias who, despite their internal
quarrels, have collectively dominated the country for so long. In fact, al-Qaeda and
ISIS are now the last organised Sunni forces facing the Houthis.
Shias are only one-third of Yemens population and the resentment runs deep. The
Houthi troops now occupy almost three-quarters of the countrys densely populated
areas, but it would be an exaggeration to say that they actually control all that
territory. They are spread very thinly, and if they start to lose they could be rolled up
very quickly by the jihadis.
That could turn Yemen into a terrorist-ruled Islamic State with five times the
population of the one that sprang into existence last July on both sides of the SyrianIraqi border. The odds are against it, but after that July surprise nobody is ruling it
out.
Yemen: Unintended Consequences
March 2015
The Sunni Arab countries that started bombing Yemen on Wednesday night seem to
think they are fighting an Iranian-backed plot to expand Shia power and influence in

the Arab world. Most other countries find that hard to believe, but even if the Sunni
countries are right, wars often have unintended consequences. This military
intervention is likely to have results that Saudi Arabia and its friends dont like one
bit.
Theyve all shown up for this war. Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies of the Arab
world (Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and even Morocco)
have all committed aircraft to bombing Yemen. Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Pakistan
have offered to send ground troops. And the United States (which just pulled the last
American troops out of Yemen) promises to provide logistical and intelligence
support.
In practice, however, this coalition of Sunni Arabs and Americans is unlikely to
commit large numbers of ground troops to Yemen: the country has been the
graveyard of foreign armies from the Romans to the Ottomans. But if they dont do
that, the (entirely unintended) result of their bombing may be to facilitate the takeover of most of Yemen by al-Qaeda and/or ISIS.
Sunni paranoia about the rise of Shia power has its roots in the American invasion of
Iraq in 2003. So long as the Sunni minority ruled Iraq, it limited the influence of Iran,
the paramount Shia power, in the Arab world. With the US overthrow of Saddam
Hussein and the destruction of Sunni supremacy in Iraq, Irans power automatically
soared and so did its influence in Shia parts of the Arab world.
Iran didnt have to do anything particularly aggressive for paranoia to take off in the
Sunni countries of the Gulf. Of the 140 million citizens of countries that border on the
Persian/Arabian Gulf, about two-thirds are Shias. With a Shia-dominated
government in Baghdad, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Sunni Arab monarchies felt
terribly exposed and began to see Shia plots everywhere.
They see such a plot now in Yemen. The Houthi militia, drawn from the warlike Shia
tribes of northern Yemen, have taken control of all the countrys big cities and most
of its thickly populated agricultural heartland in less than one year. This is not
actually all that rare an event in Yemeni history, and it never required help from Iran
before, but now the hand of Iran is suspected everywhere.
Thats why Sunni countries from all over the Arab world piled in so readily. They
really believe they are fighting the Iranian bogeyman, although there is almost no
evidence of direct Iranian support for the Houthis. (Nor is it easy to think of any
strategic reason why Iran would be interested in Yemen.)
The historical pattern is that these periodic conquests of the country by the northern
tribes usually recede again after a while, because Shias are only a third of the
population and the northern tribes who provide the manpower for the Houthi milita
are only a fraction of the Shias. But this time nobody is willing to wait for the local
Sunni backlash in Houthi-occupied parts of Yemen to push the northerners out.
The coalition is now bombing the Houthis all over the country. How intensively and
how accurately remains to be seen, but if they really succeed in breaking the Houthi
grip on central and southern Yemen, they will create a power vacuum that will NOT
be filled by the legitimate president of Yemen, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, whom
they are allegedly trying to restore to power.
Hadis forces have utterly disintegrated, and Houthi fighters now occupy the
temporary capital that he established in his home city, Aden. (The real capital,
Sanaa, has been in Houthi hands since September.) Hadi left Aden by boat on
Tuesday, which suggests that he has left the country entirely unless he plans to
create another provisional capital on, say, the island of Socotra.
So if the coalition bombs the Houthis out of Aden, but does not commit ground

troops of its own, the real winners will be the al-Qaeda forces that wait just outside
the city. Much the same goes for Taiz, the third city, and even for Sanaa itself: it is
al-Qaeda or ISIS jihadis who stand to profit most from a Houthi retreat.
The only other force in Yemen that could offer any opposition to the jihadis is the
fighters who have rallied to the support of exiled ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh
since he returned to the country. But Saleh is allied to the Houthis and he is a Shia
himself, so its hard to see the coalition switching its support from Hadi to him.
Yet its also hard to see the coalition committing a big army to Yemen. Everybody
who has done that has regretted it. So while Sunni planes bomb Shia fighters, the
jihadis may step in and sweep the board. An unintended outcome, of course, but not
an unforeseeable one.
The Middle East: Iran is Back
April 2015
This (Arab) nation, in its darkest hour, has never faced a challenge to its existence
and a threat to its identity like the one its facing now, said General Abdel Fattah alSisi, now the ruler of Egypt.
And you wanted to say: Not the Crusades? Not the Mongol invasion? Not even the
European conquest of the entire Arab world between 1830 and 1920? You really
think the gravest threat ever to Arab existence and identity is a bunch of tribal
warriors in Yemen?
Sisi was addressing the Arab League summit in Cairo last week that created a new
pan-Arab military force to confront this threat, so overheated rhetoric was standard
issue, but still. The air forces of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours are blasting
Yemen from the air, and there is talk of Saudi Arabian, Egyptian and even Pakistani
troops invading on the ground, but it all smells more of panic than of strategic
calculation.
The panic is due to the fact that the status quo that has prevailed in the Middle East
since approximately 1980 is at an end. Iran is back, and there is great dismay in the
palaces of Riyadh especially because it was Saudi Arabias great friend and ally,
the United States, who finally set Iran free.
It was the agreement in Lausanne last Thursday between Iran and the group of 5+1
(the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) that marked the
end of the status quo. It was about ending the various trade embargoes against Iran
in return for ten to fifteen years of strict controls on Irans nuclear power programme,
but it will also let Iran out of the jail it has been confined to since the 1979 revolution.
Initially that revolution was quite scary for Irans Arab neighbours, because Irans
example in overthrowing the local pro-Western ruler and taking a stronger stand
against Israel was very popular in the Arab street. The solution was to paint Iran as a
crazy terrorist state and isolate it as much as possible from the rest of the region.
The other tactic that the conservative Arab states deployed was to stress the
religious gulf between Iran (which is 90 percent Shia) and the Arab countries (whose
people are at least 85 percent Sunni). The doctrinal differences are real, but they do
not normally make ordinary people see one another as natural enemies unless
somebody (like state propaganda) works hard at it.
Those measures worked for twenty years, assisted by some really stupid Iranian
actions like holding US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days, but by the end of
the 20th century they were losing credibility. What saved the quarantine policy in
2002 was the discovery that Tehran had been working on nuclear weapons design.
The work was a revival of research that had been started during the US-backed Iraqi

invasion of Iran in 1980-88 (when Saddam Hussein certainly was working on nuclear
weapons), and was shut down afterwards. It was restarted in 1998, almost certainly
in response to the nuclear weapons tests by Pakistan, Irans eastern neighbour. It
was Iran being stupid again, but it was probably never about Israel.
The alleged Iranian nuclear threat provided the basis for another decade and more
of political quarantine and trade embargoes that have crippled Iran economically and
isolated it politically. All that came to a sudden end last week with the agreement in
principle in Lausanne (unless the Saudi Arabian and Israeli lobbies in Washington
manage to torpedo the deal in the next few months).
Iran has about the same population and GDP as Egypt, the biggest Arab country by
far, but it is far closer both to the Arab Gulf states and to the Sunni-Shia
battlegrounds in Iraq and Syria (both of whose governments are closely linked to
Tehran). Thats what Sisi was really talking about when he spoke of an existential
threat to Arab existence and identity. However, hes still talking through his hat.
Arab existence and identity are nowhere at risk, and Iran has no need to paint the
Sunni Arab countries as enemies. The Iranian regime may be losing its support
among the young (or maybe not), but it has absolutely no need to inoculate them
against the attraction of Arab political systems and foreign policies by promoting an
Arab-Iranian confrontation. They hold no attraction whatever for young Iranians.
As for the notion that the Houthi militia that now controls most of Yemen is really an
Iranian tool (which is the main justification for the military intervention there), it is
nonsense. The Houthis, like the Iranians, are Shias, but they have their own local
interests to protect, and Iran has no plausible reason to want some sort of strategic
foothold in Yemen. It is a safe bet that there is not now even a single armed Iranian
in Yemen.
If the United States could send troops into Iraq in 2003 in the delusionary belief that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, then Saudi Arabia can believe
that it is fighting Iranians in Yemen now. No country has a monopoly on stupidity,
and Riyadh will probably have ample opportunity to regret its mistake.
More Anti-Terrorism Laws
May 2015
Left-wing, right-wing, it makes no difference. Almost every elected government,
confronted with even the slightest terrorist threat, responds by attacking the civil
liberties of its own citizens. And the citizens often cheer them on.
Last week, the French government passed a new bill through the National Assembly
that vastly expanded the powers of the countrys intelligence services. French
intelligence agents will now be free to plant cameras and recording devices in private
homes and cars, intercept phone conversations without judicial oversight, even
install keylogger devices that record every key stroke on a targeted computer in
real time.
It was allegedly a response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks that killed 17 people in
Paris last January, but the security services were just waiting for an excuse. Indeed,
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the law was needed to give a legal framework
to intelligence agents who are already pursuing some of these practices illegally.
France, he explained, has never had to face this kind of terrorism in our history.
Meanwhile, over in Canada, Defence Minister Jason Kenney was justifying a similar
over-reaction in by saying that the threat of terrorism has never been greater.
Really?
In all the time since 9/11 there had never been a terrorist attack in Canada until last
October, when two Canadian soldiers were killed in separate incidents. Both were

low-tech, lone wolf attacks by Canadian converts to Islam in one, the murder
weapon was simply a car but the public (or at least the media) got so excited that
the government felt the need to do something.
The Anti-Terror Act, which has just passed the Canadian House of Commons, gives
the Canadian Security Intelligence Service the right to make preventive arrests in
Canada. It lets police arrest and detain individuals without charge for up to seven
days. The bills prohibitions on speech that promotes or glorifies terrorism are so
broad and vague that any extreme political opinion can be criminalised.
In short, its the usual smorgasbord of crowd-pleasing measures that politicians
throw out when they want to look tough. It wont do much to stop terrorist attacks, but
that doesnt matter as the threat is pretty small anyway.
France has 65,000,000 million people, and it lost 17 of them to terrorism in the past
year. Canada has 36,000,000 million people, and it has lost precisely 2 of them to
domestic terrorism in the past twenty years. In what way were those lives more
valuable than those of the hundreds of people who die each year in France and
Canada from less newsworthy crimes of violence like murder?
Why havent they changed the law to stop more of those crimes? If you monitored
everybodys electronic communications all the time, and bugged their homes and
cars, you could probably cut the murder rate in half. The price, of course, would be
that you have to live in an Orwellian surveillance state, and were not willing to pay
that price. Not just to cut the murder rate.
The cruel truth is that we put a higher value on the lives of those killed in terrorist
attacks because they get more publicity. Thats why, in an opinion poll last month,
nearly two-thirds of French people were in favor of restricting freedoms in the name
of fighting extremism and the French parliament passed the new security law by
438 votes to 86.
The government in France is Socialist, but the opposition centre-right supported the
new law too. Prime Minister Stephen Harpers Conservative government in Canada
is seriously right-wing, but the centre-right Liberals were equally unwilling to risk
unpopularity by opposing it. On the other hand, the centre-left New Democrats and
the Greens voted against, and the vote was closer in Canada: 183 to 96.
And the Canadian public, at the start 82 percent in favour of the new law, had a
rethink during the course of the debate. By the time the Anti-Terror Act was passed
in the House of Commons, 56 percent of Canadians were against it. Among
Canadians between 18 and 34 years old, fully three-quarters opposed it.
Maybe the difference just reflects the smaller scale of the attacks in Canada, but full
credit to Canadians for getting past the knee-jerk phase of their response to
terrorism. Nevertheless, their parliament still passed the bill. So should we chalk all
this up as two more victories for the terrorists, with an honourable mention for the
Canadian public?
No, not really. Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and all the other jihadis dont give a damn if
Western democracies mutilate their own freedoms, as it doesnt significantly restrict
their own operations. The only real winners are the security forces.
Syria: The Last Chance Saloon
May 2015
The fall of Ramadi to Islamic State troops last Wednesday was not a big deal. The
city was deep inside IS-held territory, IS fighters had controlled 80 percent of it since
March, and we already knew that the Iraqi army cant fight. Even so, Islamic State is
not going to take much more of Iraq. What it doesnt already hold is either Shia or

just not Arab at all (Kurdistan), and that is not fertile ground for Sunni Arab fanatics.
The fall of Palmyra on Friday was a very big deal, because it was clear evidence that
the Syrian armys morale is starting to crumble. It was doing quite well until last
summer and even regaining ground from the insurgents, but the tide has now turned.
After every defeat and retreat, it gives up more easily at the next stop. It may be too
late already, but at best the Syrian regime is now in the Last Chance Saloon.
The Syrian army is very tired and short of manpower after four years of war, but what
is really making the difference is that the insurgents are now united in two powerful
groups rather than being split into dozens of bickering fragments. Unfortunately, both
of those groups are Islamist fanatics.
The Al Nusra Front had to fight very hard for Idlib, the northwestern provincial
capital, in March, but Islamic State met little resistance when it took over the
Damascus suburb of Yarmouk in April. And Palmyra and the adjacent gas fields,
which the regime fought for months to defend last year, fell to Islamic State this
month after just four days.
Its never possible to say when a hard-pressed army will actually collapse, but the
Syrian army is now in zone. If the Assad regime does go under, Islamic State and
the Nusra Front will take over all of Syria. What happens next would be very ugly.
Islamic State and the Nusra Front are both takfiri groups who believe that Muslims
who do not follow their own extreme version of Sunni Islam are apostates, not real
Muslims, and that they deserve to be killed. Around one-fifth of Syrias population are
apostates by this definition Alawites and other Shias and so are the Druze and
Chrisian minorities. They are all at great risk.
True, the Nusra Front has been less outspoken about its intentions than Islamic
State, but thats just a question of timing and tactics. The basic ideology is the same,
and the Nusra Front in power would be committed by its own religious beliefs to
exactly the same murderous cleansing of the population. When religious fanatics
tell you they intend to do something, it is wise to take them seriously.
An Islamist victory in Syria could entail the death of millions. It would also cause
panic in the neighbouring Arab countries, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Yet no
nearby Arab country will put troops into Syria to stop the looming disaster, because
they cannot imagine fighting fellow Sunnis in Syria, however extreme their doctrine,
in order to save the Shia regime of Bashar al Assad.
You dont get the choices you would like to have. You only get the choices that are
on the table, even if you are the president of the worlds only superpower. At this
point Barack Obama has only two options: save the Syrian regime, or let it go under
and live with the consequences.
Its not even clear that he can save it. He cannot and should not put American troops
on the ground in Syria, but he could provide military and economic aid to the Syrian
regime and, more importantly, put US airpower at the service of the Syrian army.
Even that might not save Assads regime, but it would certainly help the morale of
the army and the two-thirds of the population that still lives under his rule. With more
and better weapons and US air support, the Syrian army might be able to catch its
breath and regain its balance. It would be a gamble, and if Obama did that he would
be alienating two major allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But if he doesnt do it, very
bad things may follow.
US planes are already bombing Islamic State (and the Nusra Front too, in practice)
all over northern Syria, but they did not bomb the IS troops attacking Palmyra. That
was a deliberate decision, not an oversight, even though Palmyra would probably not
have fallen if Obama had given the order.

The US President didnt do that because he is still stuck in the fantasy-land of an

American-trained third force that will defeat both Islamic State and the Assad
regime in a couple of years time. Saving the Syrian regime is a deeply unattractive
choice, because it is a brutally repressive dictatorship. Its only redeeming virtues are
that it is not genocidal, and does not threaten all of the neighbours.
Obama may have as little as a couple of months to come to terms with reality and
make a decision. Waiting until the Syrian regime is already falling to intervene is not
a good option; decision time is now. His reluctance to decide is entirely
understandable, but rescuing Assad is the least bad option.
Another Bush Damaged by Iraq
May 2015
He just misheard the question. A basically friendly interviewer on Fox News asked
Jeb Bush, now seeking the Republican nomination for the US presidency: Knowing
what we know now, would you have authorised the invasion (of Iraq)? And he
replied: I would have. When the storm of protest, even from Republicans, swept
over him, he explained that he thought the interviewer had said: Knowing what we
KNEW THEN.
An easy mistake to make. Know now sounds an awful lot like knew then. Besides,
Jeb Bush is on record as claiming that he is Hispanic (on a 2009 voter-registration
application), so the poor man was struggling with his second language. If only she
had asked the question in Spanish, he would have understood it perfectly.
Enough. When you listen to the entire interview, its clear that Bush didnt want to
say a flat No to her question, because that would be a condemnation of his
brothers decision to invade Iraq in 2003. But as soon as he could, he switched to
talking about the intelligence failures that misled his brother into invading the wrong
country. Anybody can make a mistake. So nobodys to blame.
Hillary Clinton, currently the favourite for the Democratic presidential nomination,
uses exactly the same defence. In fact, every American politician who voted in
favour of the invasion of Iraq at the time claims that the problem was faulty
intelligence, and maybe some of them outside of the White House genuinely were
misled.
But the intelligence wasnt faulty; it was cooked to order. There was no plausible
intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so the US intelligence
services were told to find some. There were no Islamist terrorists in Iraq either:
Saddam Hussein hunted down and killed anybody suspected of being an Islamist
activist, because the Islamists wanted to kill him.
The US Central Intelligence Agency agency tried very hard to create a link between
al Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and Iraq. The only thing
they came up with, however, was a rumour that a little-known Islamist from Jordan
called Abu Musab al Zarqawi who knew Osama bin Laden had been in Baghdad
receiving treatment for wounds received in Afghanistan in May-November 2002. (He
was actually in Iran at that time.)
If you were on the White House staff in early 2003, you HAD to know that the
intelligence you were using to justify the invasion of Iraq was false, because you
were one of the people demanding that the spooks manufacture evidence for it.
The decision itself had been taken even before Bushs election in 2000 and the 9/11
attacks in 2001, for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism.
The incoming Bush administration was full of people called neo-conservatives.
They believed that the Clinton administration had failed to exploit the sole

superpower status that the United States inherited after the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991 to put the world to
rights.
What was needed, therefore, was a display of US power that would make all the
bad guys behave. So invade somewhere and take the local bad guy down. Iraq
was the obvious choice, because it was very weak after a decade of arms embargo,
and Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy.
We dont yet know just how disastrous the invasion of Iraq was, because the
damage is still accumulating. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the man who now rules Islamic
State, the terrorist-ruled new country that occupies the easten half of Syria and the
western third of Iraq, started fighting Americans as part of the Iraqi resistance in
2003.
By 2006 at the latest, he had joined the group then called Al Qaeda in Iraq, which
was largely made up of jihadis from other Arab countries who had flocked to Iraq to
fight the infidel invaders. And the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq was none other than
Abu Musab al Zarqawi who parlayed the reputation as a major jihadi leader that
the US intelligence services gave him into a real leadership position in the
resistance.
Through the years that followed, that organisation gained experience in guerilla war
and terrorism, and through several changes of name and leadership (Zarqawi was
killed in 2006) it ultimately morphed into Islamic State. Baghdadi was with it all the
way, and now styles himself Caliph Ibrahim, demanding the loyalty and obedience
of all Muslims everywhere.
So we owe a lot to the neo-cons in George Bushs administration who pushed for
the invasion of Iraq: people like Dick Cheney (Vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld
(Secretary of Defense), and Paul Wolfowitz (Undersecretary of Defense). They just
used the 9/11 attacks as a vehicle for their pre-existing Iraq invasion plans.
It was Wolfowitz, above all, who worked tirelessly to link Irak to terrorism. And guess
who is the most prominent name on Jeb Bushs current team of foreign policy
advisers (apart from George W Bush himself). Why, its the very same Paul
Wolfowitz. The problem with Jeb Bush is not the foolish answers he gives. Its the
company he keeps.
Will Turkey Stop Backing the Islamists in Syria?
June 2015
For Turks, the burning question after last weekends election is whether they will now
get the fully democratic, pluralist country that so many of them want. The defeat of
President Tayyip Recep Erdogans AK Party does open that prospect, although
translating it into reality will be very difficult. But for everybody else, the question is
whether Turkey will stop backing the Islamist insurgents who are on the brink of
winning in Syria.
Compared to the head-choppers of ISIS and the only slightly less extreme Al Nusra
Front that now dominate the military campaign against Bashar al-Assads regime in
Syria, Erdogan the Sultan, as his devoted supporters often call him is a very
moderate Islamist. But his support for those two organisations is the main reason
that they have been winning so many battles recently.
Turkey shares a 800-km border with Syria, and for four years Erdogans government
has left it open for arms, supplies and foreign recruits to flow to the Syrian Islamists.
When Al Nusra seized most of the strategically important Idlib province last March
after three years of trying, Damascus claimed that a major reason for its loss was

that Turkey had jammed the Syrian armys telecommunications.

In March, according to reports by the pro-rebel Al Jazeera network, Erdogan even
made a pact with Saudi Arabia to coordinate assistance to the Syrian rebels most
of which flows through Turkey. But all that could change quite quickly if Erdogans
party cannot form a government that supports this policy and the signs are that it
cannot.
The Turkish election was not about Erdogans policy in Syria. It was, above all, about
his ambition to become a mini-Putin who would dominate Turkey into the
foreseeable future. In order to achieve that goal, he gave up the prime ministership
and got himself elected to the relatively powerless and ceremonial office of president
in 2014. But his intention was to transform the presidency into the all-powerful centre
of political power in Turkey.
Changing Turkey from a parliamentary system to a country ruled by an executive
president would require a constitutional change, which can only be done by a supermajority of three-fifths of the votes in the 550-seat parliament. Since 2002 Erdogans
party had won three successive elections with ever-increasing majorities, so he was
confident that he could pull it off. He was wrong.
Turkish voters didnt even give him a majority of the seats in parliament. Too many
people had turned against this always angry and abusive man who condemns his
political opponents as terrorists, marginals, gays and atheists, and who now
wanted to consolidate his position as the unchallengeable Sultan of Turkey.
Erdogan began as a reformer whose entirely reasonable and legitimate goal was to
end the Turkish states open hostility to the more pious members of its
overwhelmingly Muslim population. It was an historical leftover from the time, some
90 years ago, when Kemal Ataturk trying to build a modern, secular state in the face
of huge opposition from religious conservatives, but it had no place in a 21st-century
democracy.
Erdogan broke the power of the army, which had repeatedly carried out coups in
alleged defence of the secular state, and deeply conservative and religious Turks
who had felt excluded from that state rewarded him with their votes in three
successive elections. But as his confidence grew he stopped bothering to
accommodate the views of the younger and mostly urban half of the population
whose values were liberal and secular.
The Turkish media, once relatively free, came under such concentrated attack that
by 2012 there were more journalists in jail in Turkey than anywhere else in the world.
The governments response to public protests became more and more violent, and
Erdogans determination to gather all power into his own hands became more and
more evident.
More than one-fifth of AK Partys voters abandoned the party in this election. They
werent abandoning their religion; they were just still committed to the partys original
aim of a democratic Turkey that respected everybodys rights (including their own).
Most of them migrated to the new Peoples Democratic Party, which also welcomes
Kurds, gays, and non-Muslim religious minorities and strongly promotes gender
equality.
Erdogan will find it hard to form a coalition with any of the three big opposition parties
in parliament none of which support his policy of backing Islamist extremists in the
Syrian civil war. He will have 45 days to try to form a government, and if that fails
Turkey will probably face another election before the end of the summer.
It is unlikely that the AK Party can improve its position in a second election: once the
illusion of invincibility has been shattered, it is very hard to rebuild. What follows may

be a coalition government made up of opposition parties that find it hard to agree on

most things but none of them share Erdogans fondness for ISIS and its friends. If
Assad can hang on in Syria until the end of the summer, he may yet survive.
Islamic State: More Massacres
June 2015
Last Friday (June 26), in France, an Islamist named Yassin Salhi killed his employer,
Herve Cornara. He attached the victims severed head to the fence around a
chemical plant, together with a cloth saying There is no God but God and
Muhammad is his prophet and then rammed his vehicle into a warehouse full of
chemicals hoping (but failing) to cause a massive explosion.
In Kuwait two hours later, Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen al-Qabaa, a Saudi citizen,
entered a Shia mosque and detonated a bomb that killed at least 25 people. He was
presumably a Sunni fanatic sent by Islamic State to kill Shias, who they believe are
heretics who should be killed.
In Tunisia one hour later, 38 European tourists, most of them British, were
massacred by a 23-year-old man with a Kalashnikov on a beach in Sousse. The
perpetrator, Seifeddine Rezgui, was studying engineering at a university in Kairouan,
an hours drive west of Sousse.
Islamic State, which has carved out a territory in Iraq and Syria that has more people
and a bigger army than half the members of the United Nations, immediately claimed
responsibility for all three attacks. Yassin Salhi may have been a lone-wolf head
case, but in the other two cases the claim was almost certainly true.
But there was another attack that you probably didnt hear about. Kobani, the
Kurdish town in northern Syria that withstood a four-month siege by Islamic State
troops last year, came under attack again last Thursday. About a hundred young
Islamists in Humvees and pickup trucks drove into town and shot 220 people dead in
the streets and in their houses.
So 64 murders that you heard a lot about, and 220 others you heard little or nothing
about. There are hundreds of innocent people being murdered by Islamist fanatics in
Syria every week, so its no longer news. Besides, the motive there is obvious: its
just Islamic State trying to expand its territory in Syria. But as for the others
Britains prime minister, David Cameron, responded to the deaths of 30 British
citizens in Tunisia by trotting out the same shopworn drivel that Western leaders
have been peddling for the past 14 years. The fight against Islamic State is the
struggle of our generation, Cameron declared. Indeed, IS poses an existential
threat to the West.
Maybe Cameron doesnt know what the word existential means. Could somebody
please explain to him that he is saying that Islamic State poses a threat to the
continued existence of the West? Does he really think that is the case?
Forgive me for making a cold-blooded calculation, but sometimes it is necessary.
The population of the West (not counting the countries of Latin America, which dont
play in this league) is about 900 million. Thirty-nine Westerners have been killed in
attacks by Islamist terrorists this month. At this rate, the West will have ceased to
exist in 1.9 million years. If this is an existential threat, its not a very urgent one.
In fact, its not really about the West at all. The European victims on the beach in
Sousse were killed in order to destroy the tourism that provides almost 15 percent of
Tunisias national income, and thereby destabilize the only fully democratic country
in the Arab world. The extremists real goal is to seize power in Tunisia; the Western
victims were just a means to that end.

The bombing of a Shia mosque in Kuwait was intended to increase tensions

between the Sunni majority and the large Shia minority in that country, with the
ultimate goal of unleashing a Sunni-Shia civil war in which Islamist extremists could
take over the Sunni side as they have already done in Syria and Iraq.
Only the lone-wolf attack in France could be conceivably be seen as directed at the
Westalthough that might also have been just a personal grievance wrapped up in
an Islamist justification.
The rest of the killing was about who controls the Muslim countries, particularly in the
Middle East, as it has been from the start. Even 9/11 was about that, designed not to
bring America to its knees but to lure it into an invasion of Afghanistan that Osama
bin Laden believed would stimulate Islamist revolutions in Muslim countries. The
Islamists do hate Western values, but they have bigger fish to fry at home.
Islamic State and the various incarnations of Al Qaeda (the Nusra Front in Syria, Al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, et cetera) pose an existential threat to the nonSunni Muslim minorities of the Middle East, and even to Sunni Muslims whose
beliefs diverge significantly from those of the Islamists. The West should help
governments in the region that protect their minorities, and of course it should try to
protect its own people.
But this is not the struggle of our generation for the West. It should be nowhere
near the top of its own list of priorities.
After the Iran Nuclear Deal
July 2015
The thing to bear in mind about Tuesdays deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries
(the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China) is that without it
Iran could get nuclear weapons whenever it wants in a short tme. It has the
technologies for enriching uranium, it could make the actual bombs any time it likes
(every major country knows how), and the sanctions against Iran could not get much
worse than they are now.
If you dont like the current deal, and you really believe that Iran is hell-bent on
getting nuclear weapons, then your only remaining option is massive air strikes on
Iran. Not even the Republican Party stalwarts in the US Congress are up for
committing the US Air Force to that folly, and Israel without American support simply
couldnt do it on its own.
Then whats left? Nothing but the deal. It doesnt guarantee that Iran can never get
nuclear weapons. It does guarantee that Iran could not break the agreement without
giving everybody else at least a year to respond before the weapons are operational.
Sanctions would snap back into place automatically, and anybody who thinks air
strikes are a cool idea would have plenty of time to carry them out.
So the deal will survive. Israels Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can fulminate
about how it is a an historic mistake that will give Tehran a sure path to nuclear
weapons, but he cannot stop it.
Netanyahu is obsessive about Iran, but even his own intelligence services do not
believe that Tehran has actually been working on nuclear weapons in the past
decade. The Israeli prime minister has burned all his bridges with US President
Barack Obama, and his Republican allies in the US Congress cannot stop the deal
either.
John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, said that the deal will
hand a dangerous regime billions of dollars in sanctions relief while paving the way
for a nuclear Iran, and he can probably muster a majority in Congress against it.

(Congress, as Washington insiders put it, is Israeli-occupied territory.) But he

cannot muster the two-thirds majority that would be needed to override Obamas
inevitable veto.
There will be a 60-day delay while Congress debates the issue, but this deal will go
through in the end. So far, so good but this is not happening in a vacuum. What
are the broader implications for Middle Eastern politics?
Ever since the victory of the Islamic revolution 36 years ago, Iran and the United
States have been bitter enemies. They have not suddenly become allies, but they
are already on good speaking terms. Since almost all of Americas allies in the Arab
world see Iran as a huge strategic threat, they are appalled by the prospect of a USIran rapprochement.
That is not a done deal yet. While Iran strongly supports Bashar al Assads
beleaguered regime in Syria, Washington still advocates Assads overthrow and
arms some of the moderate rebels. It even supports Saudi Arabias bombing
campaign against the Houthi rebels who now control most of Yemen, and publicly
accepts the Saudi claim that the Houthis are mere pawns who are being armed and
incited to revolt by Iran.
But nobody in the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon really
believes that the civil war in Yemen is an Iranian plot. Very few believe any longer
that Assad can be overthrown in Syria without handing the country over to the
Islamist fanatics who dominate the insurgency there. And the most powerful force
among those fanatics is Islamic State, whose troops are already being bombed by
the United States in both Syria and Iraq.
The highest US priority in the Middle East now is to prevent Iraq and Syria from
falling into the hands of Islamic State and its equally extreme rival, the Nusra Front.
Iran is giving both the Syrian and the Iraqi governments military support that is
essential to their survival, so there is obviously the potential for closer US-Iranian
cooperation here.
By contrast Saudi Arabia and Turkey, currently Americas two most important allies
in the region, are pouring money and weapons into the Nusra Front in Syria, which is
why it has been winning so many battles against the Assad regime in recent months.
The prospect of an Islamist regime in power in Damascus is acceptable to Riyadh
and Ankara, but it is deeply unwelcome in Washington.
So yes, a grand realignment of American alliances in the Middle East is theoretically
possible now that the long cold war between the US and Iran is over. In practice,
however, it is most unlikely to happen. The long-standing military and economic ties
between Washington and its current allies will probably triumph over cold strategic
logic, and American policy in the Middle East will continue to be the usual muddle.
Turkey Joins the War Sort Of
July 2015
Last Friday, Turkey joined the war against Islamic State (IS), the terrorist-run entity
that now controls eastern Syria and western Iraq. After four years of leaving the
border open for supplies and recruits to reach IS, the Turkish government sent
planes to bomb three IS targets in Syria.
At the same time, Ankara ended a four-year ban on its anti-IS coalition allies using
the huge Incirlik airbase near the Syrian border. There was rejoicing in Washington,
since coalition aircraft (mostly American) will now be much closer to IS targets in
Syria, and Turkey will also presumably close its border with Syria at last. But there
may be less to this change than meets the eye.

On Saturday, Turkey broke a two-year ceasefire with the PKK, a Kurdish

revolutionary group that fought a 30-year war to establish a separate state in the
Kurdish-majority southeast of Turkey. In fact, since then Turkey has carried out
considerably more air strikes against the PKK than it has against IS.
The Turkish army has even shelled territory controlled by the PYD, the Syrian branch
of the PKK, although the PYD has managed to drive IS troops out of most of the
Kurdish areas of northern Syria.
So which war is President Recep Tayyip Erdoan really planning to fight, the one
against Islamic State or his own private war with the Kurds? And why now?
The only person who knows the answers is Erdoan, and hes not saying. But you
can work it out if you try.
Erdoan has spent more than a decade subverting a secular and democratic system
and establishing his own unchallengeable power. At first he was responding to real
popular demands for equal civil rights for religious people and for an improvement in
living standards. He delivered on his promises, and won three successive elections
by increasing majorities.
But he reduced the once-free mass media to subservience, undermined the
independence of the judiciary, and staged show trials of his opponents. He also
allowed his own political associates to engage in massive corruption.
As his power grew, moreover, he began to indulge his obsessions. He is a deeply
conservative Sunni Muslim who shares the widespread Sunni belief that Shia
Muslims are not just heretics, but heretics whose power is a growing threat.
From the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, therefore, Erdoan supported the
Sunni rebels against the regime of Bashar al Assad, which is dominated by the
countrys Alawite (Shia) minority and he didnt much mind if the Sunni rebels were
head-cutting extremists like Islamic State or not. Thats why the Turkish-Syrian
border stayed open, and the coalition didnt get access to Turkish airbases.
At the same time, Erdoan opened peace negotiations with the PKK, because
conservative Kurds who voted for his party on religious grounds were an important
part of his electoral base. But then his party lost its majority in parliament in last
months election (7 June).
What cost him his majority was the new Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), which
seduced most of his Kurdish voters away. Its liberal, pluralistic, all the things that
Erdoan isnt. But conservative Kurds had already got the religious freedoms they
wanted, and the HDP was also advocating equal political rights for the Kurdish
minority. Of course they switched their votes.
So now, if Erdogan wants to form a coalition government (or even win a new
election), he needs the support of the hard right but they are ultra-nationalists who
loathe his willingness to make deals with the Kurds. To win them over, therefore, he
has started bombing the PKK.
He might be re-starting a Turkish-Kurdish civil war (the last one killed 40,000
people), but thats a risk hes willing to take. And on the side he has dropped a few
bombs on Islamic State to make the Americans happy.
Erdoans problem with Washington was that it finally had the goods on him. A US
Special Forces raid in Syria last May killed Abu Sayyaf, the IS official in charge of
selling black-market oil from IS-controlled wells into Turkey. The American troops
came away with hundreds of flash drives and documents that proved that Turkish
officials were deeply involved in the trade, which has been ISs main source of
revenue.
Turkey has now bombed a few IS targets to show willing but if you look at the

videos, the Turkish planes are launching missiles at single buildings out in open
fields, not exactly where youd expect IS to have weapons stores and command
centres. Its as if the Turkish forces were ordered to hit targets that wouldnt do any
real damage. But least the coalition gets to use Incirlik.
Is Erdoan still in cahoots with IS? Maybe. Is he actively supporting the other big
Islamist group, the Nusra Front, which dominates the battle in western Syria? Yes he
is, quite openly, and the difference between these two terrorist groups is only skindeep. So if youre expecting a radical change in the military situation in Syria dont.
Assad is still losing slowly, the Islamist extremists are still winning, and Turkey is still
playing a double game.
Syria: Russia to the Rescue?
September 2015
US Secretary of State John Kerry has just phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov warning him not to escalate the conflict by increasing Moscows military
support for the beleaguered Syrian regime. He stamped his foot quite hard, telling
Lavrov that his governments actions could lead to greater loss of innocent life,
increase refugee flows and risk confrontation with the anti-Isil coalition operating in
Syria.
What the Russians have actually done, so far, is to send an advance military team to
Damascus of the sort that is normally deployed to prepare for the arrival of a much
larger military force. They have also sent an air traffic control centre and housing
units for its personnel to a Syrian airbase.
It suggests that Moscow is getting ready to go in to save President Bashar alAssads regime. It has given Assad diplomatic support, financial aid and some
weapons over the course of the four-year-old Syrian civil war, but it will take more
than that to save him now. That would include at least an airlift of heavy weapons,
but maybe also direct Russian air support for Assads exhausted troops.
They need it. Since the fanatical fighters of Islamic State (or Isil, as the US State
Department calls it) captured Palmyra in central Syria in May, they have advanced
steadily westward from their new base.
One month ago they captured the mostly Christian town of al-Qaratayn, north-east of
Damascus. (The inhabitants fled, of course). And now IS forces are within 30 km. of
the M5, the key highway that links Damascus with the other parts of Syria that
remain under government control.
The jihadis captured Palmyra, by the way, because the anti-Isil coalition the US
Air Force, in practice did not drop a single bomb in its defence. It made at least a
thousand air strikes to save Kobani, the Kurdish city on the border with Turkey that
was besieged by IS fighters, because the Kurds were US allies. Whereas Palmyra
was defended by Assads soldiers, so the US let Islamic State have it.
One can imagine Kerrys (and Obamas) horror at the idea that by defending
Palmyra they would be seen as protecting Assads brutal regime, but if Islamic State
troops manage to cut the M5 it will be seen as a sign of the regimes impending
defeat. At that point, up to half the people who still live in government-controlled
areas around 17 million may panic and start trying to get out of Syria.
They would obviously include the religious minorities (Christians, Alawites, Druze),
some 5 million people who have good reason to fear slavery, rape and murder at the
hands of Islamic State. The millions of Sunni Muslims who have served the Syrian
government and its army would also be at risk. So lets say 4 or 5 million more
refugees pouring out across Syrias borders, to join the 4 million who have already

fled.
What they left behind would be a Syria entirely controlled by the extremists. The only
remaining question would be whether the jihadis roll on through behind the refugees,
overrunning Lebanon and Jordan as well, or whether they fall to fighting among
themselves.
All three major Islamist groups Islamic State (which Turkey and Saudi Arabia no
longer support), and the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham (which they still do) are
virtually identical in their ideology and their ultimate goals. However, they have some
tactical differences, and Islamic State and al-Nusra fought a quite serious turf war
last year, so maybe they will get distracted again. But even if they do, Syria will be
gone.
This is what the Russians see coming, and they may be willing to try to stop it. When
asked on Friday if Moscow intended to get involved directly in the Syrian fighting,
Russian President Vladimir Putin would only say that the question was premature.
Nobody, including the Russians, likes Assads regime, but it is the least bad
remaining option.
Indeed, it is the only alternative left to a jihadi victory. Most of the moderate antiregime rebels went home or fled abroad years ago, unable to match the jihadis in
firepower, in money or in frightfulness. The notion that the US can now create a
moderate third force able to defeat both the jihadis and the Assad regime is a
shameful face-saving fantasy
Moscow used diplomacy to save the Obama administration from itself two years ago,
when Washington was getting ready to bomb Assads forces in response to a
(possibly spurious) allegation that they had used poison gas on civilians. The only
way Russia can avert disaster this time, however, is to put its own air force into the
fight and maybe its own ground troops too.
If it does, the key question will then be whether the United States lets Russia do the
job that it is too fastidious to do itself, or whether it gives in to the clamour of its
Turkish and Saudi allies and they would be clamouring to stand up to the
Russian intervention.
Since the United States doesnt actually have a coherent strategy of its own, its
impossible to predict how it will respond. For all Kerrys bluster, they dont know yet
in Washington either.
The Russians in Syria: Humbug and Hypocrisy
October 2015
Its a week since the Russians began their air-strikes in Syria, and the countries that
have already been bombing there for over a year the United States and some
other NATO countries are working themselves up into a rage about it. The
Russians are not bombing the right people, they are killing civilians, they are
reckless, dangerous, and just plain evil.
A statement last weekend by NATOs 28 members warned of the extreme danger of
such irresponsible behaviour and urged Russia to cease and desist. When a
Russian warplane attacking Islamist targets in northwestern Syria strayed across the
frontier into Turkey for a few minutes, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that the
Turks would have been within their rights to shoot it down.
The weather was poor, the target was close to the border, and the Russians
apologised afterwards, but NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the
incursion does not look like an accident. So what does he think the motive was,
then? Russian pilots are getting bored, and are having a competition to see who can

stay in Turkish airspace longest without getting shot down?

And the wicked Russians are killing civilians with their bombs, we are told. Yes, of
course they are. So is the American-led coalition with its bombs. Unless you are
fighting at sea or in the open desert, there will always be civilians in the same area
as the legitimate targets.
Its particularly unbecoming for the United States to act holier-than-thou about the
use of Russian air power in Syria, when it is simultaneously trying to explain why
American planes bombed a hospital in Afghanistan last Saturday and killed 22
civilians. Neither Americans nor Russians gain anything by killing civilians; its just an
inevitable by-product of bombing.
But the biggest Western complaint is that the Russians are bombing the wrong
people. Contrary to American and European assertions, they are indeed bombing
the right people, the troops of Islamic State that Western air forces have been
bombing for the past year. But the Russians are also bombing the troops of the
Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. They might even bomb the troops of the Free
Syrian Army, if they could find any.
Dont they realise that these people are trying to overthrow the evil Syrian dictator,
Bashar al-Assad, whereas the cruel and deluded fanatics who serve Islamic State
are trying well, actually, they are trying to overthrow the evil dictator Assad too.This
brings us to the heart of the matter.
Western propaganda makes a systematic distinction between Islamic State (bad)
and the opposition forces (all the other groups). The problem is that there is really
little difference between them: they all want to overthrow the Syrian regime, and they
are all Islamist jihadis except for the tattered remnants of the Free Syrian Army.
The Nusra Front was created in 2012 as the Syrian branch of ISIS (now Islamic
State), and broke away early last year in a dispute over tactics and turf. It is now the
Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Ahrar al-Sham was also founded by an al-Qaeda
member, and is a close military and political ally of Nusra. And until the propaganda
needs of the moment changed, even the United States admitted that the moderate
elements of the Syrian opposition had collapsed.
There are no reliable statistics on this, but a good guess would be that 35 percent of
the rebel troops confronting Assads regime belong to Islamic State, 35 percent to
the Nusra Front, 20 percent to Ahrar al-Sham, and ten percent odds and sods
including the Free Syrian Army. In other words, at least 90 percent of the armed
opposition are Islamists, and probably no more than 5 percent are secular, prodemocratic groups.
There are not three alternatives in Syria. There are only two: either Bashar alAssads regime survives, or the Islamists take over. Really serious Islamists, who
hate democracy, behead people, and plan to overthrow all the other Arab
governments before they set out to conquer the rest of the world.
They are probably being a bit over-optimistic there, but they would be seriously
dangerous people if they commanded the resources of the Syrian state, and they
would be a calamity for Syrians who are not Sunni Muslims. The Russians have
accepted this reality, decided that it is in their own interests for Assad to survive, and
are acting accordingly.
The United States and its allies, by contrast, are hamstrung by their previous
insistence that Assad must go on human rights grounds. They cannot change their
tune now without losing face, so they dont bomb Assad themselves, but they persist
in the fantasy that some other force can be created in Syria that will defeat both
Assad and Islamic State.

Moreover, the leaders of Americas two most important allies in the Muslim world,
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are determined that Assad should go (mainly because he
is Shia, and they are Sunnis), and they would be very angry if the US helped him
survive.
That, plus American anger at Russia over Ukraine and lingering hostility from the old
Cold War, is why NATO is condemning the Russian intervention in Syria so
vehemently. But it is all humbug and hypocrisy.
Erdogans War
October 2015
The death toll from the twin suicide bombs at a peace rally in Ankara on Saturday
has reached 128. The Turkish police were not present to provide security (they never
are at opposition events), but they did show up to fire tear gas at the mourners
afterwards.
Who did it? Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu offered three possibilities: the Kurdish
separatist organisation PKK; anonymous extreme leftists; or Islamic State.
Selahattin Demirtas, the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party that organised the
rally, offered a fourth alternative: people trying to advance the interests of President
Recep Tayyib Erdogans Justice and Development (AK) party.
The atrocity certainly served Erdogans strategy of creating an atmosphere of fear
and impending calamity before the elections on 1 November, in which he hopes to
get back the parliamentary majority he lost in the June elections. But its hard to
believe that the AK Party has suicide-bombers at its disposal: it is an Islamic Party,
but nothing like that extreme.
Its equally unlikely to have been the work of the PKK, because a very large
proportion of the people at the rally were Kurds. Moreover, the PKK is a secular
organisation, which makes it an improbable source of suicide-bombers. The
suggestion that extreme leftists were responsible is ridiculous: what would be their
motive? Which leaves ISIS, aka Islamic State, as the probable perpetrator.
ISIS uses suicide-bombers as a matter of course, and it is certainly angry at
President Erdogan. He treated it quite well in the early years of the Syrian civil war,
keeping the Turkish border open for its volunteers to flow across by the thousands.
He even closed the border to Kurds who wanted to help the defenders of Kobani, a
city in the northern, Kurdish-majority part of Syria a siege that lasted four months
and ended in an ISIS defeat.
Erdogan is a deeply religious Sunni Muslim. He wanted to see the overthrow of
Syrias President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite (Shia) ruling a mostly Sunni country,
and he didnt much care who the opposition were so long as they were Sunnis. He
also didnt want to see a Kurdish mini-state appear just across Turkeys southern
border, so he preferred an ISIS victory over Syrias Kurds.
But his priorities changed after he lost the June election. Now his own power was at
stake, and to keep it he needed a crisis. In fact, he needed a war.
Assuming that the AK Party would not only win its fourth straight election this year
but gain a 60 percent majority of the seats in parliament, Erdogan moved on from ten
years as prime minister and got himself elected president last year. The presidency
is a largely ceremonial office, but with a 60-percent super-majority he could change
the constitution and make it all-powerful.
But his party didnt get 60 percent of the seats in the June election. It didnt get a
majority at all: only 258 seats in the 550-seat parliament. The main reason was that
the HDP, a party demanding that Turkeys one-fifth Kurdish minority be treated as

equal citizens in every respect, including language, managed to get into parliament.
Most of the HDPs voters were Kurds, including many conservative and religious
Kurds who had previously voted for Erdogans party, but its secular and liberal
values also persuaded many ethnic Turks to vote for it. It only got 13 percent of the
vote, but that was above the 10-percent threshold a party must exceed to win any
seats in parliament at all.
The arrival of the HDP changed the parliamentary arithmetic and deprived the AK of
its majority. Erdogan could have opted for a coalition, but he was stranded in the
powerless presidency, unable to change the constitution, and could not even
personally be part of such a coalition government. So he decided to gamble on
another election.
The Kurdish votes were not coming back to the AK Party, and the only other possible
source were the ultra-nationalists who had been alienated by his peace talks with the
PKK. (The talks began and the shooting stopped four years ago, although the official
ceasefire was only declared in 2013.)
Now he needed to re-start the war against the PKK, and that would be most
unwelcome to his American allies. He solved the problem by saying he would attack
ISIS and other terrorists, which got Washington on board but since the Turkish air
strikes began in July, they have hit twenty PKK targets for every strike against ISIS.
Its not even clear that Turkey has finally shut its Syrian border to ISIS volunteers.
The PKK is fighting back, of course, but ISIS has not been appropriately grateful that
Turkey is only bombing it (quite lightly) for diplomatic reasons. It is almost certainly
responsible for all three mass-casualty attacks using suicide-bombers in Turkey this
year.
There is only one consolation in all this: Erdogans electoral strategy doesnt seem to
be working. A poll last month showed that 56 percent of Turks hold him directly
responsible for the new war. The polls also show AKs share of the vote falling, and
that of the HDP rising. Erdogan is facing defeat, and he richly deserves it.
Turkey: Next Stop Civil War?
November 2015
You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the
time, begins Abraham Lincolns famous aphorism about democracy but in a
multi-party democratic system, that is usually enough. In a parliamentary system like
Turkeys, 49 percent of the popular vote gives you a comfortable majority of seats,
and so Recep Tayyib Erdogan will rule Turkey for another four years. If it lasts that
long.
There will still be a Turkey of some sort in four years time, of course, but it may no
longer be a democracy, and it may not even have its present borders. In last
Sundays vote Erdogan won back the majority he lost in the June election, but the
tactics he employed have totally alienated an important section of the population.
Kurds make up a fifth of Turkeys 78 million people. Most Kurds are pious, socially
conservative Sunni Muslims, so they usually voted for Erdogans Justice and
Development (AK) Party which consequently won three successive elections
(2003, 2007, 2011) with increasing majorities.
Then the Kurds stopped voting for Erdogan, which is why he lost last Junes election.
In this months election he managed to replace those lost votes with nationalist
voters who are frightened of a Kurdish secession and simple souls who just want
stability and peace but he had to start a war to win them over.
Erdogan threw Turkeys support firmly behind the rebels when the Syrian civil war

broke out in 2011, mainly because as a devout Sunni Muslim he detested Bashar alAssads Alawite-dominated regime. He kept Turkeys border with Syria open to
facilitate the flow of volunteers, weapons and money to the Islamist groups fighting
Assad, including the Nusra Front and ISIS (which eventually became Islamic State).
He even backed Islamic State when it attacked the territory that had been liberated
by the Kurds of northern Syria. That territory extends along the whole eastern half of
Turkeys border with Syria, and in the end, despite Erdogans best efforts, the Syrian
Kurds managed to repel ISISs attacks. But this was the issue that cost Erdogan the
support of Turkish Kurds.
His solution was to restart the war against the PKK, the armed separatist movement
that is based in the Kurdish-speaking northern provinces of Iraq. A ceasefire had
stopped the fighting between the Turkish government and the PKK for the past four
years, but Erdogan now needed a patriotic war against wicked Kurdish separatists in
order to lure the nationalists and the naive into backing his party.
He duped the United States into supporting this war by allowing US bombers to use
Turkish airbases and promising that Turkish planes would start bombing Islamic
State too.
(In fact, Turkey has dropped only a few token bombs on IS; the vast majority of its
bombs are falling on Kurds.)
The pay-off came on Sunday, when the votes of Turks who fear Kurdish separatism
replaced the Kurdish votes that the AK Party lost last June. The problem is that the
election is now over but the war will continue.
Indeed it will get worse. The Turkish army is already shelling the Syrian Kurds, and
warning that it may invade if the Syrian Kurdish proto-state (known as Rojava) tries
to push further west and shut down the last border-crossing point that links Turkey to
Islamic State.
At home, the independent institutions of a normal democratic state have been
subverted one after another: the media, the police, and the judiciary now generally
serve Erdogan. State television, for example, gave 59 hours of coverage to
Erdogans campaign in the past month. All the other parties combined got 6 hours
and 28 minutes.
So Erdogans AK won the election, but Turkey is no longer a real democracy. And
since the half of the population that didnt vote for Erdogan utterly loathes him, it
wont be a very stable authoritarian state either. In fact, it is probably teetering on the
brink of civil war.
The people who loathe Erdogan because he is destroying Turkeys free media,
perverting its criminal justice system and robbing the state blind he and his AK
colleagues have been enthusiastically feathering their nests will not turn to
violence. The poor will not turn to violence either, even though the economic boom is
over and jobs are disappearing.
But some of the Turkish Kurds will fight, and they will have the support of the Syrian
Kurds just across the border. That will probably draw the Turkish army into invading
northern Syria to crush the Kurds there and once Turkey is fully involved in the
Syrian civil war, all of southeastern Turkey (where Kurds are the majority) also
becomes part of the combat zone.
When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk rescued a Turkish republic from the wreckage of the
Ottoman empire after the First World War, he was determined to make it a European
state. It was a fairly oppressive state at first, but over the decades it gradually turned
into a democracy that operated under the rule of law.
Thats over now. It took Erdogan a dozen years in power to demolish that European-

style democracy, but the job is done. As one despairing Turk put it recently, Turkey
is becoming a Middle Eastern country.
Paris Attacks: The Terrorist Strategy
November 2015
As always after a major terrorist attack on the West, the right question to ask after
the slaughter in Paris is: what were the strategic aims behind the attack? This
requires getting your head around the concept that terrorists have rational strategies,
but once you have done that the motives behind the attacks are easy to figure out. It
also becomes clear that the motives have changed.
The 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001 followed the classical terrorist strategy
of trying to trick the target government into over-reacting in ways that ultimately
serve the terrorists interests. Al-Qaedas goal was to sucker the United States into
invading Muslim countries.
Al Qaeda was a revolutionary organisation whose purpose was to overthrow existing
Arab governments and take power in the Arab countries, which it would then
reshape in accord with its extreme Islamist ideology. The trouble was that Islamist
movements were not doing very well in building mass support in the Arab world, and
you need mass support if you want to make a revolution.
Osama bin Ladens innovation was to switch the terrorist attacks from Arab
governments to Western ones, in the hope of luring them into invasions that would
radicalise large number of Arabs and drive them into the arms of the Islamists. His
hopes were fulfilled by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Once the Western troops went in, there was a steep decline in terrorist attacks on
Western countries. Al-Qaeda wanted Western troops to stay in the Middle East and
radicalise the local populations, so it made no sense to wage a terrorist campaign
that might make Western countries pull their troops out again.
The resistance in Iraq grew quickly and and attracted Islamist fighters from many
other Arab countries. The organisation originally known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq
underwent several name changes, to Islamic State in Iraq in 2006; then to Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria ISIS for short in 2013, and finally to simply Islamic State
in 2014. But the key personnel
and the long-term goals remained the same throughout.
The man who now calls himself the Caliph of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Bahdadi,
first joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq and started fighting the US occupation forces in Iraq in
2004. But along the way the strategy changed, for ISIS eventually grew so strong
that it conquered the extensive territories in Syria and Iraq that now make up Islamic
State. Popular revolutions were no longer needed. The core strategy now is simply
conquest.
In that case, why are Islamic State and Al-Qaeda still attacking Western targets?
One reason is because the jihadi world is now split between two rival jihadi
franchises that are competing for supporters.
The split happened in 2013, when ISIS, having launched a very successful branch
operation in Syria known as the Nusra Front, tried to bring it back under the control
of the parent organisation.
The Syrian branch resisted, and appealed to Al-Qaeda, the franchise manager of
both jihadi groups, for support. Al-Qaeda backed the Syrians, whereupon ISIS broke
its links with Al-Qaeda and set up as a direct competitor.
ISIS and the Nusra Front then fought a three-month war in early 2014 that killed
several thousand militants and left the former in control of most of eastern Syria.

Soon afterwards ISIS overran most of western Iraq and renamed itself Islamic State.
Islamic State and Al-Qaedas local franchise, the Nusra Front, are currently
observing a ceasefire in Syria, but the two brands are still in a bitter struggle for the
loyalty of jihadi groups elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Spectacular terrorist operations against Western targets appeal to both franchises
because they are a powerful recruiting tool in jihadi circles. But Islamic State has a
further motive: it actually wants Western attacks on it to cease.
Its a real state now, with borders and an army and a more or less functional
economy. It doesnt want Western forces interfering with its efforts to consolidate and
expand that state, and it hopes that terrorist attacks on the West may force them to
pull out.
France is a prime target because French aircraft are part of the Western-led coalition
bombing Islamic State, and because its relatively easy to recruit terrorists from
Frances large, impoverished and alienated Muslim minority. Russia has also
become a priority target since its aircraft started bombing jihadi troops in Syria, and
the recent crash of a Russian airliner in Sinai may be due to a bomb planted by
Islamic State.
So the outlook is for more terrorist attacks wherever Islamic State (and, to a lesser
extent, Al-Qaeda) can find willing volunteers. Western countries with smaller and
better integrated Muslim communities are less vulnerable than France, but they are
targets too.
Putting foreign ground troops into Syria would only make matters worse, so the least
bad option for all the countries concerned is to ride the terrorist campaign out.
Horrendous though the attacks are, they pose a very small risk to the average citizen
of these countries. Statistically speaking, its still more dangerous to cross the street,
let alone climb a ladder.