Michael Glackin

The time for talk on Syria is over

2012-02-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday, February 14 2012
By Michael Glackin

Here’s a thought. Imagine that Russia and China had supported the recent diplomatic maneuvers at the U.N. Security Council to further isolate Syria. What difference would it have made to the innocent people currently being gunned down by President Bashar Assad’s troops? Absolutely none.

The limits of diplomacy are laid bare in the daily death toll on the streets of Homs, where more than 400 civilians are understood to have been killed in the government’s offensive against the city. The United Nations estimates that more than 5,000 civilians have been killed by Syrian security forces since the first demonstrations began 11 months ago, with some estimates putting the figure much higher. In Homs, Idlib, Hama and Deraa the British government believes that thousands of Syrians have suffered torture and sexual violence, including possible instances of the rape of children.

Assad is a desperate man who no longer cares that he presides over what is now the most violent country in the Middle East. And the murder, or “some mistakes committed by some officials,” as the Syrian president memorably described the human carnage during an interview with American journalist Barbara Walters, will continue in the absence of decisive action by the rest of the world.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom have firmly ruled out military action and insist that they have no intention of arming the still bitterly divided Syrian opposition. British Foreign Secretary William Hague was at pains in the first week of February to stress that his government has had “no contact” with the Free Syrian Army during its consultations with Syrian opposition groups.

It remains to be seen whether the Arab League has the stomach to fight a war with one of its members, despite increased speculation that Qatar has been supplying military aid to the rebels. At an Arab League meeting on Sunday, however, Arab states said they would seek to provide Syrian opposition groups with political and material support. Turkey has also been more vocal in the past week, but has had to tread carefully amid fears that its outspokenness might drive Syria’s Kurds into Assad’s arms.

Hague said that the U.K. and other nations would look for a resolution at the U.N. General Assembly, though these are non-binding. Saudi Arabia has circulated a draft similar to the one that was vetoed by the Security Council. The foreign secretary also outlined proposals for a “Friends of Syria” group of countries under the aegis of the Arab League, which would increase sanctions against the Assad regime.

In reality the “Friends of Syria” proposal is the outcome of the British government and Western countries in general casting around for a new policy toward Syria and failing to find one. Last year, the Cameron government appointed Frances Mary Guy, a former ambassador to Lebanon, to coordinate relations with Syria’s opposition – or as one official put it more pithily, “to knock their heads together.” A Foreign Office official told me on Feb. 9 that Guy was “getting to grips” with the task. “The Syrian opposition is not at the same stage as the Libyan opposition, it will take time,” the official noted.

In plain English that means the head-knocking has failed. Guy has met with opposition leaders in London, Paris, Ankara and Istanbul, but despite her travels, insiders concede that creating a credible – never mind representative – opposition, is all but impossible.

Many of the groups refuse to even speak to each other. Just one example of the task facing Guy is that the U.K., along with France and the U.S., has urged the main opposition coalition, the Syrian National Council, to “reach out” to the Kurdish National Council, which represents the majority of Syrian Kurds. However, despite tentative negotiations between the two groups, that plea has not led very far. Many Kurds view the SNC as a front for Turkish ambitions in the region. Then there are the stark divisions between the SNC and the rival National Coordination Body.

At the same time, the opposition has no regional foothold in Syria as did the Libyan rebels in Benghazi. Privately, British government officials admit there is no plausible route to the opposition seizing power, even if it were actually capable of forming a government.

Russia and China have defended Assad only partly to protect their business interests. Russia’s navy has access to the Tartous port, however Russian arms sales to Syria, worth between $700 million and $1 billion, account for an estimated 7 percent of Russia’s annual global arms sales, which is not particularly high. Chinese exports to Syria have risen sharply in recent years, but traffic along the so-called “New Silk Road” is decidedly one way these days. China exports around $2.5 billion worth of goods annually to Syria, and has invested in a number of its oil production and exploration projects. Syrian exports to China are worth less than $6 million.

Against this background Russian and Chinese diplomatic moves are nothing short of shameful. But if we accept that arming Syria’s divided opposition is not sensible and that military intervention, even by the Arab League, is a non-starter, what else can be done?

In the absence of meaningful action, the West, Russia, China and the Arab League can do one thing: They can demand that Syria open up Homs and other cities under siege to international aid agencies. Indeed, that is precisely what the Arab League intended to do by proposing on Sunday that the U.N. deploy a peacekeeping force in Syria. The Arab states know the divided Security Council will not to pass such a decision, but are calculating that a compromise resolution will advocate support for a humanitarian mission.

Homs is a humanitarian disaster and it shames the international community to allow it to remain so. That is surely something that everyone can agree on. Providing the means to enable relief agencies to help those who are enduring the unendurable, whether it is done through the offices of Russia and China or some other means, is surely the very least that diplomacy in this day and age can achieve.

The “Friends of Syria” group, when it meets on Feb. 24, will no doubt come up with new words of condemnation and fresh sanctions. But while it deliberates, murder and mayhem reign in Syria. The time for talk should be over.

A British warning to Syria's opposition

2011-11-25T02:17:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Friday November 25 2011
By Michael Glackin

On a dry, chilly Damascus night in late 2004, I shared a pot of sweet strong coffee with Abdullah Dardari, then Syrian deputy prime minister for economic affairs and the man charged with dragging the country’s moribund economy into the 21st century.

As he outlined his plans for opening up Syria to foreign investment, creating new jobs, and increasing prosperity, I pointed out that economic reform had a habit of being a catalyst for political reform, something that was unlikely to find favor with the ruling Baath Party.

Dardari smiled and assured me that political change was part of President Bashar Assad’s plan for Syria. His exact words were: “The understanding that there is a need for political and judicial reform is there. It’s not a taboo subject. I am not a Baath Party member, but if you look at what’s happening in the party today there is recognition of the need to develop the political system.”

Well that was then. In the event, Syrians got neither political nor economic reform. Dardari, the only reform-minded senior politician within the Syrian regime, was ousted in March when Assad sacked Mohammad Naji al-Otari’s Cabinet. Dardari’s removal came partly because Assad had grown tired of criticism within the Baath of his largely failed attempts to attract foreign investment – a pretty impossible task considering the Kafkaesque bureaucracy underpinning Assad rule. It came also because removing a well-known reformer sent a signal to Syrians that institutional changes of any sort that undermined Assad’s grip on power (Dardari’s tentative reforms increased unemployment, and with that anti-Assad sentiment) would not be part of Syria’s future.

Assad’s new government, unveiled in April, was a retreat to the bunker. Assad is increasingly isolated, with only Russia and China preventing global sanctions from being imposed on Syria, and just Yemen and Lebanon offering lukewarm Arab support. He has now dug in, surrounded by family and cronies. But the forces enveloping his regime – European and American sanctions, international disapproval, and unending street protests verging on civil war – look overwhelming.

It is the realization that the game finally looks over for Assad that is currently exercising the British government. Particularly against the backdrop of current events in Egypt, the United Kingdom is very worried about what will happen next in Syria.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s warning to Syria’s disparate opposition groups to “put aside their differences” was the diplomatic equivalent of a clip around the ear to squabbling children. Hague’s meeting this week with opposition representatives may have, in the words of the government, “intensified the U.K.’s engagement with the opposition.” In reality, it has given London a rude awakening about the caliber of Assad’s opponents.

In contrast to its approach to opponents of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya, Hague insisted the U.K. would not recognize the Syrian opposition while it remains so fractured and poorly coordinated. When you consider that the Libyan opposition was no paragon of unity, you get a good idea of how highly the British government rates the Syrian opposition.

The problem for the U.K. is, as Hague alluded to after his meetings with members of the Syrian National Council and the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC), as well as individuals aligned with neither group, is that the Syrian opposition isn’t in any fit state to fill the vacuum if Assad is removed from power. Worse still, privately the government fears such a disunited opposition runs the risk of jeopardizing the goal of overthrowing Assad’s regime.

Unlike the Libyan opposition, which was based in eastern Libya, Syria’s opposition is spread across the Middle East, Turkey, France and the United Kingdom. The SNC includes the Muslim Brotherhood, which backs Turkish military intervention to overthrow Assad. The Brotherhood has a very different vision of a post-Assad Syria than others in the SNC. The NCC still favors talks with the Assad regime. And the hastily formed Free Syrian Army, composed of army deserters whose leader has been given refuge in Turkey, wants to be recognized as the military wing of the opposition, something the SNC won’t countenance.

Meanwhile Syria’s Kurdish population is understandably wary about Turkey’s increasingly high-profile involvement in the current turmoil. Ankara’s denunciations of the Assad regime are growing more bellicose, and there is speculation that Turkey will send troops into Syria to create a buffer zone for those fleeing the continuing violence.

Kurdish groups have also held meetings with representatives of the British government and warned that any military intervention by Turkey is likely to result in Kurds taking up arms to oppose them. Whether Turkey, whose president, Abdullah Gul, visited London this week, wants to become involved in military action is a moot point. But Ankara’s criticism of Assad is getting close to fever pitch. Earlier this week Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Assad to Adolph Hitler.

Any armed confrontation with Turkey could play into Assad’s hands. However, as the situation grows ever more violent, Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, fear that Syria’s continuing instability will spread across the region if decisive action is not taken soon.

It remains to be seen what the Arab League will decide to do after its suspension of Syria’s membership in the organization. The United Nations will not repeat its actions in Libya. Much as the United States, France and the U.K. – not to mention Saudi Arabia – would like a pro-Western Syria to act as a counterweight to Iran, the West has firmly ruled out military action or no-fly zones in a country of much greater global strategic importance and sensitivity than Libya.

As one British government insider succinctly put it: “There is a lot at stake here, but ultimately the opposition needs to get its act together, look beyond their own egos and aims, and consider the needs of the Syrian people.” Like Assad, it appears the West has no Plan B.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

The West can’t afford to lose in Libya

2011-08-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Wednesday, August 10 2011
By Michael Glackin

“Of course, you mustn’t call them rebels anymore,” a minor but informed cog in the wheel of the British government told me the other day during a discussion about Libya. “These days we only use the term National Transitional Council – NTC for short. They are essentially the de facto government in waiting.”

I mention this only because, despite almost six months of bombing and bloodshed, insisting on calling the rebels the NTC appears to be the only new idea Her Majesty’s government has had in addressing the stalemated conflict in Libya.

Policy remains wedded to the maxim that it is “just a matter of time” before Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi crumbles and the NTC steps in to fill the vacuum. But in reality, all those six months of nightly airstrikes have achieved is to turn a halfhearted military action into a wholehearted farce. The Foreign Office is worryingly starting to sound like Iraq’s former information minister during the 2003 invasion, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (mocked as “Comical Ali”), who famously announced the U.S. military was on the verge of surrendering to Iraqi forces the day before coalition tanks rolled into Baghdad.

A Foreign Office spokesperson insisted to me last week that “the tide is moving inexorably against Gadhafi. Pressure is increasing on all sides, politically, economically and militarily. Militarily there is steady progress across the board. Reports suggest that morale amongst the regime’s forces is low. Economic sanctions are restricting Gadhafi’s ability to wage war on his own people. We will sustain our actions for as long as is necessary. Time is on our side, it is not on the side of Gadhafi.”

So just as Vladimir and Estragon waited hopelessly for Godot, in Samuel Becket’s absurdist play “Waiting for Godot,” British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Libyan rebels, sorry the NTC, wait, and wait, for Gadhafi’s fall. But as the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months, Gadhafi’s grip on power is as firm or tenuous as it was when the NATO airstrikes began, while the integrity of the rebel forces, and the West, is in tatters.

Cameron, Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama have primarily relied on airstrikes in Libya to avoid Western military casualties on the ground. Instead of having the courage to take decisive action, they have adopted a strategy that has dragged the war out and led to the deaths of increasing numbers of civilians. These are the very people that the United Nations mandate for action in Libya was supposed to protect.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, the West’s lack of resolve in Libya has also emboldened Syrian President Bashar Assad to crush his political opposition. The Syrian dictator has been killing his countrymen without fear of reprisal from Western democracies, whose leaders look increasingly unsure of themselves on the global stage.

Right now there isn’t much left to bomb. That’s why, last week, NATO bombers destroyed three Libyan state TV transmitters and killed three reporters in order to, in the words of the British Defense Ministry, “disrupt the broadcast of Gadhafi’s murderous rhetoric, which has repeatedly sought to incite violence against fellow Libyans”.

There is speculation that a militant Islamist rebel militia, the Al-Nidaa brigade, which is linked to the still-unexplained murder of rebel army commander Abdel-Fattah Younis, had been receiving coded orders via state television. The bombing came as NTC fighters stormed an Al-Nidaa base in Benghazi days after the brigade freed more than 200 prisoners from jail in the city. Many of the prisoners are reportedly linked to militant Islamic groups.

Gadhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, sat for a bizarre interview with The New York Times last week in which he claimed that an alliance now existed between the regime and Islamist cleric Ali Sallabi. This was subsequently dismissed by the Gadhafi regime itself, by the NTC and by the British government. But the fact that the regime had conducted talks with Sallabi, particularly in the wake of Younis’ death, suggests there are splits in the rebel camp, which run deeper than previously thought.

We now have a divided and possibly splintering rebel force, Gadhafi still ruling over half the country, and American and European attention focused on economic woes at home. Intervention lite has reduced the West to a laughingstock. One British government insider joked that the only way out of the stalemate was for Gadhafi to suffer a stroke, as there was “precious little left to bomb now.” Short of mortal illness or assassination, a negotiated settlement with the Libyan leader looks ever more likely.

Last month British Foreign Secretary William Hague and his French counterpart, Alain Juppe, signaled Gadhafi could even stay in Libya if he stood down now. Such an outcome is unlikely, but Seif al-Islam’s talks with Sallabi also appear to have touched on this issue, although Sallabi insists Gadhafi cannot remain in Libya. Increasingly, British officials are saying that what happens to the Libyan leader is up to the Libyan people, not the international community, even though Gadhafi was indicted by the International Criminal Court earlier this year.

You don’t have to be a hard-bitten realist to acknowledge that if you intervene in someone else’s civil war you should choose the side most likely to win, and then make sure that it does. Intervention in Libya remains the right thing, but war is all or nothing. And the longer this war goes on, the less likely are we to see any sort of political outcome that benefits Libya’s long-suffering people or the wider world.

Time may not be on Gadhafi’s side, but it is fast running out for the West as well. Gadhafi only has to survive. The West needs to finish what it started before its inaction totally discredits its leadership and values. Otherwise, the “Arab spring” will face a very bleak winter indeed.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.

Did Murdoch spur Cameron’s Afghan flip?

2011-07-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Friday July 22 2011
By Michael Glackin

The conflagration engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has accounted for more high-profile scalps than Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Last week Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Murdoch’s British print business, quit just hours before she was arrested by the police over her role in the now notorious phone-hacking scandal. Andrew Coulson, a former senior British government adviser and close confidante of Prime Minister David Cameron, has also been arrested, and the scandal has even forced two of the United Kingdom’s most senior policemen to resign in disgrace.

Across the Atlantic, the head of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch acquired in 2007, has also resigned over the hacking scandal. The FBI is now investigating whether reporters working for Murdoch’s newspapers hacked the phones of victims of the 9/11 attacks. An increasing number of American politicians are calling for wider probes into his businesses.

It’s a postscript now to add that all this has resulted in the closure of the U.K.’s biggest selling newspaper, News of the World, the costly abandonment of a $12 billion bid by Murdoch to become the sole owner of the British satellite television station BSkyB, and a decidedly shaky performance by Murdoch himself (even before his wife beat off an attacker armed with a plate of shaving foam) before a House of Commons select committee on Tuesday investigating the scandal.

And this scandal, which began with the exposure of illegal practices by some journalists, has grown to lay bare police corruption and the dubious coziness between Murdoch’s newspapers, particularly The Sun and News of the World, and politicians and police.

Bookmakers are offering odds of 4-1 that Cameron will be forced to resign, down from 100-1 two weeks ago, as the scandal creeps closer to his door. Cameron is linked to this sordid affair via Coulson, who was editor of News of the World when its reporters hacked into the cell phone voice mails of royals, celebrities and, appallingly, murder victims and the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is ironic that Cameron was in Afghanistan when the scandal returned to dominate the British news agenda two weeks ago, for there exists a subtle link between Cameron, the Afghan war and Murdoch.

Prior to becoming prime minister, and unlike his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Cameron was known to be lukewarm about the need to court the Murdoch empire. Cameron briefly worked in television before entering politics and believed that the power of the print press, whose readership is declining, was overrated when compared to television stations, whose audiences continue to expand.

More importantly, at the time Cameron was also lukewarm about pursuing the war in Afghanistan, at a moment when public opinion was rapidly turning against British participation in the conflict. But less than a year before the election that saw him become prime minister, Cameron suddenly struck a hawkish note on the war. The change in heart stemmed in large part from a realization among Cameron’s advisers that Labour could still win and, therefore, that the support of The Sun and News of the World was vital for a Cameron victory.

Murdoch has been a vocal supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has argued that the Iraq war in particular might lead to lower oil prices, therefore to the betterment of Western economies. In 2007, in the run-up to the Australian election, Murdoch publicly warned against withdrawing Australia’s small force in Iraq, a policy supported by the country’s Labour Party, then in opposition. Murdoch, who insisted he knew “a bit about this,” said that such a withdrawal would “rupture” the coalition campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cameron came on board in October 2009, just days after The Sun backed him to become prime minister. In an “exclusive” interview with the newspaper, he criticized the Labour government’s halfhearted commitment to the Afghan war, observing: “Our military is at war in Afghanistan but quite frankly Whitehall isn’t. If I’m prime minister, Whitehall will go to war from minute one, hour one, day one that I walk through the door of Downing Street if I am elected.” Despite declining public support for the Afghan conflict, Cameron also told The Sun that he would deploy more troops to ensure victory.

Downing Street insists today that “there is absolutely no linkage” between its policy in Afghanistan and Murdoch’s views. But part of the problem of the coziness between the Murdoch empire and politicians of all hues is that no one is entirely clear where his influence ends and government policy begins. A commitment from Cameron to vigorously pursue the Afghan war was perhaps not a top priority for Murdoch, but it could have been a sign that Cameron would toe the Murdoch line.

Realistically, the fallout from Murdoch’s woes won’t make any difference to British policy in Afghanistan. Both the United Kingdom and the United States are moving toward the exit. A Foreign Office official confirmed that the first phase of the transition process, which will see Afghan security forces take the lead on security operations in all provinces by 2014, starts this month. And Murdoch’s papers, having gone from “Backing our Boys” fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to “Hacking our Boys,” are unlikely to argue if the timetable is accelerated.

Despite his Afghan conversion, it’s unlikely that the Murdoch affair would have impacted on Cameron had he not hired Coulson. It’s his judgment in belatedly backing a war he cared little for in return for Murdoch’s approval that is more damning. Cameron’s decisions have trapped him in a vise of his own making. If he does become the highest profile victim of this scandal he really will only have himself to blame.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star

Britain exudes democratic hypocrisy

2011-06-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

By Michael Glackin
The Daily Star
Friday June 3 2011

“We believe, not simply in the rights of nations, but the rights of citizens.” Thus spoke U.S. President Barack Obama during his speech before the British Parliament last month.

It was a wonderful address, articulating the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s democratic values which, Obama said, inspired the Arab Spring and encouraged a people that “longs to determine its own destiny.” It was also nonsense.

It was rather like what British Prime Minister David Cameron said following the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In that speech he apologized for the U.K.’s role in supporting autocratic regimes in the Middle East and said that his government would in the future support “peaceful protest” and “freedom of speech” and “the rule of law.”

And here’s some more nonsense. Ask any British government official why the kind of military intervention under way in Libya is not equally justified in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria and the standard answer you will receive runs along the lines of, “We can’t solve every problem, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t solve this problem.” Some might also point to the logistical difficulties of a military intervention in the Gulf.

Really? Let’s pretend for a moment that politicians were honest about the reasons for not lifting a finger to prevent civilian deaths in Arab countries different than Libya. They would say, unequivocally, that while the U.K.’s strategic interests are well served by the fall of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, those same interests are not served by the fall of regimes elsewhere in the Middle East or the Gulf.

Why? In Libya, it’s worth pointing out that the country was in a state of civil war before the West intervened, one where a sizeable chunk of territory was under the control of those opposed to Gadhafi. The U.K., France and the U.S. believed a limited military intervention would tilt the balance toward the rebels and rid the world of a despot, with little wider geopolitical upheavals. Their intervention was overdue and has not been entirely effective, yet it was commendable and right.

But in terms of the Gulf, what the West wants is stability, and if politicians are honest, they are not overly particular how that is achieved. Central to British policy at the moment – and that of the U.S. – is the degree to which the wave of political unrest across the region will work to the benefit of international bogeyman Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accused Iran of attempting to hijack the region’s democracy protests in a bid to “destabilize” America’s allies in the Gulf. Bahrain has also accused Hezbollah of involvement in the protests in Manama. And straight from its success in suppressing dissent at home, Iran is understood to have supplied Syria with crowd-control equipment and technical help in blocking and tracing Syrian protestors’ use of the Internet and mobile phones.

It is worth pointing out that Egypt’s transitional government has already extended an olive branch to Tehran, ending years of sour relations. It has also opened its border with Hamas-controlled Gaza. It’s hardly a dramatic realignment of the balance of Middle East power, but goes some way to explaining why the G-8 is offering the giant carrot of Western aid to Egypt and others, despite the fact that so far only two regimes have been toppled by the wave of unrest across the region.

It is against this backdrop that the U.K. chooses to ignore events in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen.

Yemen is a deeply unstable country that has battled separatists in the south and Shiite insurgents in the north. Even allowing for President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s interest in hyping up the threat, the country is increasingly recognized as an Al-Qaeda stronghold. Saleh has been viewed in the U.K. as a crucial ally in countering that threat. Last year the British government announced it was looking to “substantially increase” the amount of aid it gave to Saleh’s government to prevent Yemen from becoming a “second Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile Bahrain, host to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, is also America’s largest military base in the region and a crucial ally of Washington and London. If something akin to British and American democracy replaces the Al-Khalifa regime, it means that the government could be dominated by Shiites, which in turn raises the specter of increased Iranian influence in a critical strategic outpost of the U.S. military.

Moreover, if the opposition prevails in Bahrain, neighboring Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most important ally, would have to address the demands of its own Shiite population. Hence the only foreign military intervention in Bahrain has seen Saudi and other Gulf units arriving to help contain the protest movement.

Bashar Assad, though no friend of Washington, is seen as critical to regional stability and any hope of a peace deal with Israel, since Western governments resumed courting him three years ago and he made his peace with Saudi Arabia. The British government also fears that the collapse, or even the weakening, of the Assads might open up a regional can of worms and lead, among other things, to a resurgence of Kurdish nationalism, which could impact Iraq and Turkey.

Therefore, for all the rhetoric, and commendable action in Libya, there are defined limits to how far the U.K. and the West will go in supporting human rights, free speech and democracy.

The West saved Benghazi, but it should explain why bloodshed elsewhere is not, in political terms, worth getting in a fight over. Sadly, the best that those seeking human and political rights in other Arab countries can hope for is that the eventual toppling of Gadhafi will send a message to their leaders. It would be nice if Cameron and Obama would just admit this rather than indulging in empty rhetoric while those seeking the ideals they espouse are being eliminated.

Intervention lite isn't working in Libya

2011-04-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Friday, April 8 2011
By Michael Glackin

Wanted: Accommodation for a soon-to-be-retired dictator. Will live in a tent, but must provide enough room for female bodyguards and occasional pop concerts by international superstars such as Beyonce and Mariah Carey.

Laugh if you will, but the idea of allowing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to spend his dotage in exile is becoming increasingly attractive to the British government, amid the realization that, despite two weeks of coalition airstrikes, the war to oust him has now reached a stalemate. At last month’s London conference on Libya, British Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted that the government was “not engaged in looking for somewhere for [Gadhafi] to go”; but then he quickly added, “that doesn’t exclude others from doing so.”

Unfortunately, a week remains a long time in politics and the failure of the West’s military operation, at least in its current form, to topple Gadhafi appears to have emboldened the Libyan leader. Last month Mohammad Ismail, a confidante of Gadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam, offered the West a way out by proposing Seif as leader while his father headed to his Elba in either the Libyan desert or Sudan. But this week, Abdelati Laabidi, Gadhafi’s deputy foreign minister, was busy touting the idea that Gadhafi himself should lead Libya’s transition to democracy, in return for a cease-fire.

All this comes at the same time as it has emerged that NATO’s bombing campaign is running short of aircraft, following America’s withdrawal of its fighter planes earlier this week. So as Libya settles into a de facto division between the rebel-held east and Gadhafi-held west, what else is the coalition doing to secure Gadhafi’s removal?

Talk at the London conference of arming rebels is a non-starter. It is being raised as a feeble alternative to deploying coalition troops, something the United Kingdom and the United States in particular are desperate to avoid. First, it is doubtful that the largely untrained rebels could operate the sophisticated weaponry they require to take on Gadhafi’s military might; and second, fears persist, particularly in Washington, that such weapons could fall into the wrong hands.

Indeed both the U.K. and the U.S. have now dispatched teams of diplomats to Benghazi in a bid to “better understand” who the rebels are, amid fears that many are allied to Al-Qaeda. The Foreign Office remains tight-lipped. But insiders say the primary focus of the British government now is to prevent Gadhafi from regaining control of any more of Libya by continuing the airstrikes, while at the same time encouraging members of the regime to abandon their leader.

This brings us neatly to the many conspiracy theories surrounding the arrival in the U.K. of Libya’s former foreign minister, Moussa Koussa. Initially some believed he had brought a secret message from Gadhafi, hard on the heels of Ismail’s secret visit. Another interpretation was that he believed the regime is doomed and that facing British justice would be preferable to facing rebel justice.

Because the West is so urgently trying to engineer an end to the war that allows them to avoid dispatching soldiers, not surprisingly there is little talk from the government of Gadhafi being hauled in front of the International Court of Justice, as this might hinder a negotiated outcome. Although the government insists that Koussa was not offered immunity from prosecution, it is hardly likely that a man with his background would have headed to the U.K. if he expected to pay for his past misdeeds. It is worth noting that Washington quietly removed Koussa Monday from its list of Libyan officials subjected to financial sanctions. Moreover, if the threat of legal proceedings in the West was left hanging over Koussa, it would hardly help the British policy of encouraging other regime figures to abandon Gadhafi.

Indeed speaking before Parliament earlier this week, Hague stated that those Libyans who deserted Gadhafi and came to the U.K. would be “treated with respect.” And despite the fact that Koussa spent two decades running Libya’s foreign intelligence service, the government has been careful to downplay claims that he was a key figure in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.

That said, Koussa may well face a court case brought by victims of Irish Republican Army bombings in the U.K., in which Libyan-supplied Semtex explosives were used. Court documents filed in the U.S. three years ago claim that Koussa oversaw the supply of Semtex to the IRA during its bombing campaign in the U.K. during the 1980s and 1990s. Lawyers representing the victims may well seek an arrest warrant for the Libyan, similar to the warrant that British magistrates issued for the former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and which forced her to cancel a trip to London in 2009.

Will Gadhafi, Koussa, and other Libyan officials eventually end up in court? Or will Gadhafi head off into the sunset to enjoy a happy exile with his family and friends? The multitude of possible outcomes stems from the coalition’s reluctance to follow through on the logic of its decision to remove Gadhafi from power. Intervention lite is not working. It is time for the West to show that it has the courage of its convictions by ending this war and Gadhafi’s tyranny.

Britain plans for regime change in Libya

2011-03-25T04:07:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Friday, March 25 2011
By Michael Glackin

After a series of embarrassing fumbles, the British government appears to have finally come to grips with how to deal with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Or has it?

When it comes to Libya, Prime Minister David Cameron has been guilty of more flip flops than an Olympic gymnast. Still, his role in the United Nations’ decision to protect innocent civilians should be welcomed. Unfortunately, while the West sat on its hands for a month, Gadhafi launched a vicious rearguard action against the myriad forces opposed to his regime, leaving thousands dead and allowing him reassert control over the west of the country.

The problem now that the West has finally taken action is to determine what happens next. A Foreign Office official told me that the British government’s objective in opposing Gadhafi is to ensure that there is “a unified Libya under a central government that is more open and democratic, not run by Gadhafi, which does not pose external threats either in the region or more broadly.”

This is a huge change from Cameron’s earlier statements – not to mention the United Nation mandate which does not mention regime change. Increasingly, the statements from the government are starting to resemble former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ever shifting objectives in Iraq. The Foreign Office official declined to explain how Gadhafi would be deposed, but British policy, and with it that of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the United States President Barack Obama, still appears to be tied in to three doubtful outcomes.

First, the hope that coalition air attacks on Gadhafi’s military machine, which have successfully grounded Libya’s air force and destroyed its air defenses, will push the Libyan leader’s armed forces to desert him to the extent that his regime implodes.

Second, and much more unlikely, is the hope the bombing has done enough damage to enable the rebels in the east to mount their own counterattack against Gadhafi’s forces. Unfortunately the rebels holed up in Benghazi are a ragtag bunch and extremely unlikely to topple the regime on their own. According to defense analyst Anthony Cordesman, from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the rebels are “divided, lack discipline and structure and are both poorly supplied and untrained in using advanced weapons.” It is unlikely that the West will send these people arms and the American-European coalition does not want to be transformed into the aerial arm of the rebellion.

The third outcome is what politicians like to call “decapitating” the regime, or more simply killing Gadhafi. The United Kingdom’s chief of the defense staff, Sir David Richards, was slapped down by the government for insisting that assassination was not an option after coalition planes dropped a bomb on Gadhafi’s private compound last weekend, in what looked like an obvious attempt to kill him.

All three options are weak platforms to support the view that military action will be short and accelerate Gadhafi’s demise. In fact, far from Gadhafi’s regime collapsing, it is actually the coalition that is now showing distinct signs of breaking apart.

Partly, that’s because several key questions remain unanswered. It is unclear who would take over were Gadhafi to be overthrown or killed. Readers of American diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks will also be aware of concerns within the U.S. government that eastern Libya is a hotbed of Islamic extremism. Any new Libyan government is likely to require a good deal of support from the West, and it is against this backdrop that many in the U.K. are firmly opposed to the current intervention, and to further involvement in Libya.

Media reports that firing a single U.K. Tomahawk missile costs around $1.4 million, at a time when Gulf Arab countries are filling their coffers on the back of sky-high oil prices, sits equally badly with many in the British public. That is particularly the case when at least three of the Gulf states – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen (not to mention Syria) – are using force to crush pro-democracy movements.

Hardly helping matters is that Washington has been looking for the Libyan exit since the first coalition airplane took off. Barack Obama’s interest in foreign affairs seems limited to finding destinations for state visits with his photogenic wife. This poses a problem for Sarkozy and Cameron. Despite France being the first in the air last week, around half of the missions currently being conducted over Libya are being carried out by American pilots and, so far, all combat operations have taken place under American command.

Moreover, while Sarkozy and Cameron are united in support of military action, the European Union is not. The EU’s foreign affairs chief, the hapless Baroness Ashton, sided with Germany in opposing the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. Then there’s the unconcealed opposition of key NATO member Turkey to both the no-fly zone and to any further military action.

As things currently stand, it seems inevitable that the coalition will have to put boots on the ground at some point. The promise implicit in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 that there will be “no occupation force” does not necessarily rule out a temporary deployment of troops. Whether this is done through the dispatching of Arab troops remains to be seen. Bearing in mind that Qatar is the only Arab state that has committed any active military support to the current operation – four warplanes – it is more likely that the West will have to act alone, raising the specter of the bloody occupation of Iraq.

The coalition has saved Benghazi, but if Gadhafi survives this will create a stalemate, as it did in Iraq after 1991. At the time, Saddam Hussein’s regime survived while Iraqis continued to suffer. To believe that “intervention lite,” in the shape of a no-fly zone, can successfully safeguard Libyan civilians ignores recent history and Resolution 1973 itself. Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy have encouraged Libyans to stand up against Gadhafi’s repression and it would immoral to leave him in place to harm his people as the west abandoned Shiite rebels to their fate in Iraq. Anything less than Gadhafi’s departure prolongs the agony of those whom the coalition insists it is protecting.

Rarely has the West more clearly exposed itself to charges of hypocrisy in its policy and dealings in the Arab world than in its cozying up to Gadhafi in recent years. But now, it has no other option than to see what it has started through to its logical conclusion.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star.

The U.K. vacillates on Mubarak money

2011-03-01T01:21:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday, March 1 2011
By Michael Glackin

Fresh from savoring post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt first hand, the British prime minister, David Cameron, offered the Arab world a mea culpa for what he called the United Kingdom’s “double standards” in supporting autocratic governments in the region.

Cameron lamented that past governments “faced a false choice” between British interests and values. The U.K.’s interests, he said, will now lie in “upholding our values, in insisting on the right to peaceful protest, in freedom of speech and the Internet, in freedom of assembly and the rule of law.”

Unfortunately, while the prime minister was impersonating a statesman, he was also busy being a salesman. He touted the virtues of British defense companies – whose executives accompanied him across the Middle East – even as equipment and arms sold to Moammar Gadhafi by the U.K. were being used to murder peaceful protesters attempting to assemble freely in Libya.

So it was probably just as well that Cameron inserted a few of his own double standards into his speech. For while stressing democratic values, he also insisted that he respected the right of leaders to manage reform at their own pace.

This double standard is essential. For the following day Cameron was in Qatar – a country with no political parties and where the last election was held more than 40 years ago – presiding over the signing of a $3 billion gas supply deal between Qatar and the British group Centrica. The Qataris also sounded Cameron out about the possibility of investing in government-owned British banks.

What passes for Qatar’s political system is a long way short of what Cameron is enthusiastically calling for in Egypt. Qatar is not Libya of course, but then again neither, despite its many appalling aspects, was Mubarak’s Egypt. The simple difference is that the Qatari royal family’s relatively benign autocracy retains a much firmer grip on power than Mubarak could manage after 30 years. The great 19th-century statesman Lord Palmerston famously said that Britain has no permanent allies, only permanent interests. That remains the hallmark of Cameron’s policy. Values are measured in hard cash.

In fact every aspect of the British government’s current reaction to events in the Middle East is riddled with double standards. Take the cash piles dotted around the globe by the Mubarak family and the Gadhafi government. Witness the speed with which the U.K. and the European Union reached agreement to freeze the assets of ousted Tunisian President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali and his cronies. France has confirmed receiving an Egyptian request for similar action against Mubarak family assets. The U.K. has also received an Egyptian request, but will not confirm which assets Cairo wants frozen. It matters little since neither Paris nor London has acted on the requests, even though the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity estimates that around $57 billion in illicit assets left Egypt between 2000 and 2008.

Bizarrely, Switzerland, banker to many a despot in the past, moved with commendable speed to freeze the assets of President Hosni Mubarak, his family, and his former ministers. The Swiss will now assess whether the money came from illicit activity.

Mubarak has close ties to London’s financial community through his son Gamal. Gamal owns half of Cyprus-based Bullion Company, which owns London-based investment fund Medinvest Associates, which Gamal helped set up in 1996 before leaving in 2001. Medinvest, Egypt’s first private equity fund, invested in Egyptian companies and public-sector organizations during the large scale privatization of the Egyptian economy undertaken by Mubarak in the 1990s. Gamal also has an 18 percent stake in EFG Private Equity, a subsidiary of London listed Egyptian investment bank EFG-Hermes.

But rather than act unilaterally and freeze these assets as the Swiss have, the British government is keen to secure agreement with the European Union. Why? Insiders at the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office and Serious Organized Crime Agency, which investigate financial crime, say they have made inquiries and can act quickly if the go-ahead comes from the politicians. But for the U.K. to act alone requires proof of wrongdoing. Unlike Switzerland, the U.K. is not prepared to freeze first and ask questions later. In contrast, an EU decision to freeze the assets requires no such proof, merely agreement among European leaders.

Government officials insist that this is the speedy route. However, there may be another reason why the U.K. wants to pass the hot potato to the EU. Egypt has also asked that the assets of Ahmed Ezz, an Egyptian politician and owner of London-listed Ezz Steel, Egypt’s biggest steel company, be frozen. The main charge against Ezz, who insists he is innocent, is that he took control of a state-owned steel company illegally during the privatization program thanks to his links with Mubarak’s regime.

A similar charge could be leveled at some very rich Russians currently residing in London – the so-called oligarchs. Their fabulous wealth, speedily acquired and taken West during the chaotic privatization of Russia’s heavy industries during the country’s transition to a market economy, is largely attributable to connections to corrupt politicians. And it may explain why the U.K. is so reluctant to start freezing assets on that basis, when it is allowing billionaire Russians to enjoy the fruits of what many would argue are similarly ill-gotten gains. Far better to wait for the EU to act, allowing the U.K. to avoid setting what would be an awkward precedent.

Meanwhile, Libya’s cash is even easier to trace than Egypt’s. Moammar Gadhafi’s investment vehicle for Libya’s oil money, the Libyan Investment Authority, has stakes in commercial property across London. It is also the fifth largest shareholder in Pearson, which owns Penguin Books and publishes The Financial Times.

It seems bizarre to expect the U.K. to be capable of coordinating an international no-fly zone over Libya or sanctions on the country, or to take any action to stop the bloodshed, when it can’t even implement a standard financial transaction without passing the buck to the EU. Standards, even double standards, clearly aren’t what they used to be.

The BBC is shaken, rattled, and rolled

2010-12-01T03:58:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Wednesday December 1 2010
By Michael Glackin

As everyone in Lebanon is now aware, BBC Television abruptly cancelled
the broadcast this month of “Murder in Beirut,” a documentary about
the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, only
days before it was due to be aired.

The BBC initially said the program, made by ORTV, a United
Kingdom-Saudi Arabian production company, had been pulled because it
had not yet complied with the corporation’s editorial guidelines. I
contacted the BBC for details about which editorial guidelines the
program had not met. A BBC spokesperson informed me that the program
had not in fact fallen short any of the BBC’s editorial guidelines,
but was still in the process of being verified, because the film was
“a work in progress.” The BBC failed to provide anything on which
material required verification.

The program maker, Christopher Mitchell, was unavailable for comment
and ORTV declined to comment. However, sources close to the BBC
dismiss the corporation’s official, rather opaque explanation and
insist that compliance with BBC guidelines or verification of its
facts was not an issue in the decision to pull the program. Indeed,
the program was originally completed more than a year ago, and no
fewer than four senior BBC Middle East specialists vetted it, and
recommended content changes that were then incorporated. As an insider
put it: “‘Murder in Beirut’ has been very much through the BBC’s
editorial mill.”

The vetting team is understood to have included Malcolm Balen, the
BBC’s Middle East “watchdog.” Balen is the author of a report the BBC
commissioned on its own Middle East coverage in 2004. The report was
prepared in response to accusations of bias from both Israel and the
Arab world, but was mostly prompted by a perceived anti-Israeli
predisposition at the BBC. No one outside of the BBC’s top brass has
ever seen Balen’s 20,000 word report and the BBC has fought a long and
expensive legal battle to prevent its publication – spending somewhere
in the region of $400,000 in British courts to keep it secret.

BBC insiders have said that “Murder in Beirut” went through an
extensive vetting process and the first episode was expected to be
broadcast on November 20. So, bearing in mind the program had been
scrutinized and amended by the BBC’s own Middle East specialists, why
was it so abruptly pulled from the schedule?

It appears that once the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which is close to
Hizbullah, revealed much of the contents of “Murder in Beirut” and
attacked the program for accusing Hizbullah of having participated in
the Hariri assassination, senior people in the BBC’s Middle East team
took fright at the impact the program might have and recommended that
it be pulled. An insider told me: “Basically they were worried about
exacerbating tension in Beirut, how Hizbullah would react.”

Last week the BBC correspondent in Beirut, Jim Muir, wrote that the
recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary on the Hariri
assassination, which reported that Hizbullah would be implicated, had
a “bombshell effect in Lebanon.” Although, curiously, he added that
the film might also “have the effect of reducing the impact of the
eventual [Special Tribunal for Lebanon] indictments,” because by the
time the indictments are handed down “they might be seen as old hat.”

Confused? Muir’s point was actually made earlier by UN prosecutor
Daniel Bellemare but was, oddly enough, reiterated at the weekend by
Hizbullah MP Nawwar al-Sahili, who warned that the CBC was fueling
religious tensions. Well, he would say that wouldn’t he?

Among the laughable aspects of the BBC’s actions in this affair is
that the publicity surrounding the decision to pull the program
prompted CBC to bring forward the transmission of its own documentary,
enabling it to scoop the BBC. But it doesn’t stop there. A version of
ORTV’s program was shown last week by German broadcaster WDR. To
paraphrase Oscar Wilde: To be scooped once might be regarded as a
misfortune, but to be scooped twice looks like carelessness. Or
spinelessness.

Of course, the fact that two films covering the same ground have now
been aired gives the BBC an excuse not to show “Murder in Beirut.” The
story has been told; there’s no point in doing anything else on it.

It is worth pointing out that the BBC is no stranger to running away
from the conclusions drawn by its programs. In 1985, it caved into
pressure from the British government and pulled a documentary about
Northern Ireland that focused on Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness,
then relatively unknown outside Northern Ireland, as well as the
hardline Unionist politician Gregory Campbell. That decision led to a
strike by BBC staff. The film was eventually shown later in a revised
form, a fate I suspect “Murder in Beirut” will share, probably after
indictments are handed down by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

But by pulling “Murder in Beirut” in the manner that it did, the BBC
once again raised the issue of how it reports on the Middle East amid
a continuing onslaught of accusations that its coverage is biased and
inaccurate. Last year the BBC Trust upheld a complaint from Israeli
supporters that a report by its Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, was
inaccurate and not impartial. There have also been accusations from
the Arab world, most recently when the BBC was criticized for refusing
to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies for Gaza in the
aftermath of the Israeli attack. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of
the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel prize winner,
refused to accept interview requests from the BBC in protest.

Many in the BBC say the decision not to broadcast the Gaza appeal was
a clumsy attempt to over compensate for the fact that the Balen Report
was understood to have concluded the BBC’s coverage was biased against
Israel. Against that backdrop it may be that the BBC once again over
compensated – this time for the Gaza decision – when Al-Akhbar
attacked “Murder in Beirut.”

All journalists put up with criticism. It comes with the territory,
whether you are reporting on flower shows or global events. But to
borrow a phrase from American war reporter Martha Gelhorn, reporters
should at least record truly, because “it is something no one else
will do.” Not only has the BBC failed to follow even that simple
maxim, it appears to have allowed a fear of how Hizbullah or Syria
will respond to dictate whether Gelhorn’s truth should be told at all.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Britain embraces the pageantry of retreat

2010-11-26T03:12:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Friday 26 November 2010
By Michael Glackin

Next year Britain will remind the world of what it does better than anyone. The nuptials between Prince William and Kate Middleton, announced last week, will allow the United Kingdom to display its unmatched talent for pomp and pageantry to a global audience.

Unfortunately, last week also saw a pair of other announcements that relate to something the UK is no longer does quite as well as it used to. Being a global military power.

General Sir David Richards, the head of the British armed forces, finally broke ranks and revealed what many of his military colleagues and a number of politicians have been saying for some time: It is impossible to defeat Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with military force. Of course, neither the Taliban or Al-Qaeda can defeat the West’s military forces either, but they don’t have to.

The military has long believed that the Afghan war is unwinnable, just as it eventually did in Iraq, but Richards is the first to say it openly. And the reason the general felt confident enough to voice his opinion openly was because, as last week’s NATO summit in Lisbon made plain, the West’s political appetite for this war is now at an end.

US President Barack Obama used the Lisbon summit to insist that full responsibility for security in the country will pass to the Afghan army and police “by 2014,” as he reiterated his plan to start withdrawing American soldiers from Afghanistan within the next eight months.

NATO officials were at pains to downplay the increasingly indecent haste to beat a retreat from Afghanistan by insisting “events, not calendars” would dictate the withdrawal timetable. But it is obvious that the West’s focus in Afghanistan is to cut a deal and clear out.

In mid-November, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, stated that his government’s 2015 deadline for a British withdrawal was set in stone, regardless of whether large tracts of the country remained violent or the Afghan government remained corrupt. He said Britain’s presence in Afghanistan was to make sure the country did not pose a threat to “Britain’s security,” before adding: “This does not mean we will necessarily arrive at a situation where every valley of Afghanistan is entirely peaceful, where there are no difficulties in the governance of Afghanistan, where it has reached a point where it’s not 190th on the corruption league.”

Well, that last point is good news at least for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But Hague’s comments underline how much British ambitions for Afghanistan have shrunk. From lofty plans to establish democracy, the UK and the West narrowed their ambitions to achieving “stability” in the country. Now it appears even that isn’t important. The West wants to clear out in five years at the latest and leave Afghanistan to its own devices, protected by what passes for a national army.

The elephant in the room is the fact that no one in NATO’s military command, indeed no one at all other than perhaps Karzai, believes the Afghan army will be capable of maintaining order by 2015. Earlier this year a US government report from the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction revealed that just 23 percent of Afghan soldiers and 12 percent of police were capable of working unsupervised, and that there was widespread absenteeism, corruption and drug abuse among Afghan forces.

It is against this backdrop that both Richards and the American commander, General David Petraeus, have spoken of the need for many thousands of NATO troops to remain in Afghanistan to support the Afghan army as a back-up force until 2030 at least. However, there is a political imperative at work thousands of miles away from the dusty battlefields of Helmand and Kandahar and the moth-eaten government in Kabul. Obama faces an election in 2012, while the British prime minister, David Cameron, faces one in 2015. Both want to be able to wave significant troop withdrawals at their respective electorates at those crucial dates, while everyone still remembers that they inherited the Afghan war from their predecessors.

At the same time there is recognition within the British security establishment that none of the terror plots aimed against the UK have been hatched in Afghanistan. Indeed neither was the Madrid or Bali bombings. These days Al-Qaeda hangs its shingle in Pakistan.

Moreover, there is now an increasing emphasis within the British government on the need to direct attention to other potential centers of terror, most notably Yemen. The government has confirmed it is looking to “substantially increase” the amount of aid it gives to Yemen in a bid to prevent it from becoming what one official described as “a second Afghanistan.”

And lest we forget, these days Karzai is second only to Taliban in the frequency of his condemnation of NATO strategy. Some of his criticisms are justified, particularly concerning the large number of civilian casualties, but it also serves as another reason why the West is keen to wash its hands of Afghanistan.
The Afghan war is entering its 10th year for the United States and its allies in NATO. But for Afghans it has been going on for more than 30 years. There was never going to be a clear-cut military victory in Afghanistan. But the last week shows we are getting closer to the messy, inconclusive, endgame that was always going to mark the end of this phase of Western involvement.

Whether it finally ends decades of misery for Afghans no longer appears to matter. But at least we have a royal wedding to look forward to in the UK. When Britain last staged a military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1842 it was at the height of its global influence. Then British forces were effectively run out of Kabul by Muhammad Akbar Khan and around 16,000 British soldiers and civilians were massacred in the mountain pass of Khurd Kabul. There were no royal weddings that year. Rule Britannia.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Gulf arms buying: old wine in new bottles

2010-09-28T00:19:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday September 27 2010
By Michael Glackin

Head for the caves. It appears that an “unprecedented arms race” is under way in the Middle East as oil-rich Gulf states embark on what The Financial Times has called “one of the largest re-armament exercises in peacetime history.” Apparently, Gulf states, alarmed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, are stumping up more than $120 billion over the next four years in a move that will also “generate fear in Israel.”

The catalyst for the doom laden headlines was the news that the United States is selling $67 billion worth of aircraft and military hardware to Saudi Arabia. In what is the largest US arms sale of its kind, Saudi Arabia has agreed to pay $30 billion up front for fighter jets and helicopters, with the balance following at an undisclosed date. Meanwhile the United Arab Emirates is set to splash out $35 billion on mainly US made military hardware, closely followed by Oman, which is poised to spend $12 billion and Kuwait which is spending $7 billion.

Back in 1975, the late US senator, Edward Kennedy, warned of a “major arms race in the Persian Gulf,” and called for a moratorium on US military sales to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel. At that time those three nations accounted for more than 75 percent of America’s total arms sales of $8 billion. Washington was accused of trying to buy influence with Iran and Saudi Arabia to combat the sharp increase in oil prices as OPEC’s Arab members used the “oil weapon” in the aftermath of October War, precipitating the mid-70s energy crisis in the West.

There was also a sharp increase in Middle East arms sales in 1991, in the wake of the first Gulf War and periodic arms build ups ever since.

Why is this arms race any different?

Well in reality it isn’t. Most observers have highlighted the threat posed to the region by Iran, but that threat has been present for many years. In reality the latest round of purchases stem from an internal shake out of military capacity as cash-rich Gulf states update their hardware for a new era that includes not only the problem posed by Iran’s growing strength, but the increasing threat of domestic terrorist attacks.

Respected defense expert Anthony Cordesman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington told me last week that this kind of arms build up is cyclical. “Everyone keeps talking about the ‘arms deal of the century’ but it never is. Iran is not a new threat; it has been the driving force behind Saudi planning since 1981. The current purchases will have a deterrent impact on Iran but remember that as part of these purchases Saudi Arabia is getting the mobility to deal with complex tactical environments such as the Yemeni border, or a terrorist attack on one of its energy facilities. The Red Sea area and the Indian Ocean are also becoming more unstable. There is no one driving factor in all this.”

It is worth pointing out that the deals, which still have to be approved by the US Congress, represent a coup for the administration of President Barack Obama. The Saudi deal alone will protect the jobs of around 80,000 American defense industry workers as Obama heads into crucial mid-term Congressional elections. From seeking to buy influence to keep oil prices low in the 1970s, America now wants recycled petrodollars to support its beleaguered blue collar workers.

That said, it is also impossible to ignore the concerns with Tehran’s increasing bellicosity. While no one would ever go overboard in stressing cooperation between the Gulf states, regional arms sales have accelerated in unison since Iran embarked on a series of high-profile missile tests in recent years. A large chunk of the money being spent over the next four years is for missile defense systems.

And apart from guaranteeing American jobs, the deals also underline Washington’s determination to support its regional allies against both Iran – after Obama’s ill fated “back passage” strategy yielded little – and the continuing threat posed by a myriad fundamentalist terror groups. To this end, Washington is arguably looking to provide the kind of cover to the Middle East or, more accurately, to friendly Gulf states and of course Israel, that it provided to Western Europe during the Cold War – only this time at something akin to a cash profit.

It is also worth pointing out that the military hardware finding its way to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, though vastly superior to Iran’s current arsenal, remains short of the sophistication and power that the US is sending to Israel. Cordesman points out that Washington has not offered Saudi Arabia the systems that enable advanced long-range weapons to be attached to the F-15 fighters it is buying. Israel is also set to buy a number of F-35s, a much more advanced fighter jet.

Such imbalances make a nonsense of talks of “an arms race.” But more importantly the current spending spree does nothing to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Right now the real problem facing the Middle East is the increasing likelihood that Israel will do to Iran what it did in 1981 to Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor – before Tehran’s nuclear facilities are active enough for an attack to cause radiation leakage that might cause widespread harm to civilians. Time is fast running out in this race.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

Lazarus in Libya, ignominy in London

2010-08-20T02:41:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Friday August 20 2010
By Michael Glackin

On this day last year, in the company of fellow journalists and a plethora of television crews from the UK, the US and the Middle East, I was ushered into a small, stuffy room in the bowels of the Scottish Government Building in Edinburgh.

Inside the overcrowded basement, Scotland’s justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, announced to us that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of the worst terror atrocity in British history – the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people – had just been released from prison and was en route to a waiting jet that would take him home to his family in Libya.

Megrahi, whose conviction in 2000 had been questioned by many, including some of the victims’ families, was released on “compassionate grounds” because he was suffering from “terminal cancer” and had just three months to live.

When I asked MacAskill if he believed Megrahi was innocent he insisted the Libyan was guilty. He solemnly intoned that Megrahi now faced “a sentence imposed by a higher power. It is terminal, final and irrevocable. He is going to die.”

Well, we’re all going to die. But Megrahi was supposed to die within 12 weeks of MacAskill’s somber pronouncement. Indeed, this was the sole reason for his “compassionate release” under Scottish law.

One year on, Megrahi is of course alive and, if not entirely well, he is yet expected to remain among the living for another year at least. Indeed one respected cancer specialist predicted that he would be around to enjoy the London Olympics in 2012 and perhaps even the next World Cup in 2014. It’s the greatest recovery since Lazarus.

The decision to free the Lockerbie bomber was always contentious, but in the last year it has descended into farce, enveloped by conspiracy theories about oil deals, political double-dealing, cover-ups, and now bogus medical evidence.

Megrahi was released after the Scottish prison service’s director of health and care, Dr. Andrew Fraser, announced that his cancer was resistant to “any treatment.” But it has since emerged that the cancer specialists most familiar with Megrahi’s case were not consulted before his release, and that one of the specialists who did see him was actually being paid by the Libyan government.

Moreover, it has also emerged that a standard chemotherapy medicine, Taxotere, was not administered to Megrahi. The prisoner couldn’t receive the treatment inside prison, but the medicine could surely have been administered at a local hospital.

No one appears to have an answer for how doctors diagnosed Megrahi’s cancer as untreatable when he hadn’t received chemotherapy, but it suited the overall plan of the British and Scottish governments to ignore this fact in their desperation to return him to Libya. And ignore it both governments surely did because Megrahi’s application for compassionate release, made just weeks before he was freed, actually referred to the possibility of his undergoing chemotherapy to treat the cancer once he was free.

The medical revelations fit in neatly with conspiracy theorists who believe trade – Libya has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the UK in the past year – and oil are at the heart of Megrahi’s release.

In March 2007 Premier Tony Blair agreed to the so-called “deal in the desert” with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. This included provisions for a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) between the two nations, designed solely to repatriate Megrahi. During the visit, Blair also witnessed the inking of a $900 million gas and oil exploration deal between oil giant BP and Tripoli.

The Scottish government had asked the British government to exclude Megrahi from the PTA, but in late 2007 BP successfully lobbied Blair, warning that failure to agree to the PTA on Libyan terms could hit British commercial interests – or more specifically BP’s exploration deal with Libya. which was awaiting ratification. Indeed, a leaked letter revealed that then-British Justice Secretary Jack Straw wrote to MacAskill in December 2007 and told him that it was “in the overwhelming interests of the UK” to let Megrahi return to Libya.

BP insists it never mentioned Megrahi when lobbying for the PTA, but of course there was no need to since there was no one of similar significance among the 26 Libyans held at the time in British prisons.

The Scottish government insists it “had no contact from BP” while considering Megrahi’s release, and of course Megrahi was not released under the PTA, but freed on compassionate grounds.

Will we ever get to the truth in this affair? Prime Minister David Cameron called for an independent inquiry into the Megrahi release while he was in opposition, but has refused to countenance one now that he is in power.

So to mark the anniversary of Megrahi’s release, let me offer an alternative. Megrahi was due to have an appeal heard against his conviction in 2009, which he abandoned to facilitate his release. Megrahi’s lawyers planned to introduce documents that were not made available at Megrahi’s trial. Chief among these was evidence from the US Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing by Iran to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by an American warship, killing 290 people. Many believe Syria's role in the bombing was swept under the carpet after Syrian president Hafez Assad supported the US led alliance to oust Iraq from Kuwait in early 1991. Megrahi was not formally indicted for the crime by the United States and the United Kingdom until November 1991.

If Megrahi were allowed to launch his appeal from Libya it would perhaps go some way toward shedding light on what happened the night Pan Am 103 went down, as well as the process surrounding his conviction and discharge from prison. The evidence against Megrahi was dubious, but the reasons given for his release were equally so.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Any substance to David of the East?

2010-08-06T03:56:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Friday August 6 2010
By Michael Glackin

The art of diplomacy, according to American historian Will Durant, is “to say nothing, especially when speaking.” During his recent whistle stop tour of foreign capitals, British Prime Minister David Cameron appeared to have gone out of his way to ignore that maxim.

In just a few days Cameron debunked the belief that the United Kingdom enjoyed a special relationship with the US by declaring that the UK was no more than a “junior partner” of Washington. He also irritated the Israeli government by calling Gaza a prison camp. And he enraged Pakistanis by saying their country exported terrorism. Each statement was correct (except the first, which greatly overestimated British importance). But to say Cameron’s language was undiplomatic was an understatement.

Cameron’s comments about Pakistan in particular were, in diplomatic terms, brutal. “We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country [Pakistan] is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror whether to India, whether to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the world.” For Cameron’s admirers those remarks – which unlike his Gaza comments were unscripted – represented a welcome blast of honesty in British foreign policy.

But as people in the Middle East in particular know, talk is cheap. In politics actions are what count, and whether Cameron’s bold words marked a departure from the years of failed strategies in both the Afghan conflict and the Palestinian issue was a moot point.

Interestingly, government officials refused to be drawn out on whether this cascade of candor heralded a new approach to foreign affairs, or in view of Cameron’s Gaza remarks a tougher attitude toward Israel. Instead, an official at Number 10 Downing Street repeated to me – seven times – that the prime minister’s comments spoke for themselves, and steadfastly refused to clarify what, if anything, their impact would be on wider British policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Cameron’s summary of Pakistan’s ambivalence to terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere revealed nothing new, although when he said that he “cannot tolerate” this situation any longer you suspected that he was talking less about banging heads together in Islamabad and more about his own plans to beat a hasty retreat from a never-ending war.

There have been moans for some time in Washington that Pakistan’s main intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, “looks both ways” in its dealings with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Last year US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “to a certain extent, they [Pakistan] play both sides.” More recently the WikiLeaks website published US military documents indicating the ISI was aiding the Taliban.

The ISI of course had close links with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union, and later the Taliban. It has been criticized for failing to crack down on the Haqqani network, the group led by former Mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani. He was once generously bankrolled by Washington, but is now linked to both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and launches regular attacks in Afghanistan from Pakistan.

Pakistan would argue it is fighting a fierce battle with the Taliban, not just along its northwest frontier, but in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, where suicide bombers have unleashed devastating attacks. This point will be made by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari when he meets with Cameron in London on Friday. He might also mention Pakistan’s army, which casts a long shadow over Pakistani politics and is furious with Zardari for traveling to the UK despite Cameron’s criticism. The army may yet decide that Zardari is surplus to the requirements of Pakistani politics, throwing the west’s Afghan strategy into further turmoil.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s comments on Gaza were actually a repeat of comments he made in Parliament earlier this year. Nor was he the first British official to describe the plight of those living in Gaza in this light.

More than 20 years ago, Foreign Office Minister David Mellor outraged Israel when he upbraided an Israeli colonel in protest at the behavior of his soldiers in Gaza during the first Palestinian intifada. Mellor, who had links of a sort with the Palestinians via his relationship with Mona Bauwens, a daughter of the late PLO official Jaweed al-Ghussein, also used some undiplomatic language to describe living conditions in Gaza.

Yet Israel retains an iron grip on Gaza’s borders and only allows in a very limited quantity of supplies. Israel insists the blockade will continue while Hamas runs Gaza’s government, yet Palestinians elected Hamas precisely because nothing had changed since Mellor’s visit years ago.

You could be forgiven for thinking Cameron’s primary policy last week was simply to ingratiate himself with his multiple hosts. His warnings about Pakistan went down well in India, a country that regularly accuses its neighbor of complicity in terror attacks in Kashmir and elsewhere. The UK is also keen to forge increased business links with New Delhi as the nucleus of global economic growth switches east.

And Cameron’s Turkish hosts were no doubt delighted to hear his pronouncements on Gaza, not to mention his support for Turkey’s membership of the EU and his criticism of the Israeli attack against the international relief convoy to Gaza in which nine Turks died.

Oliver Miles, a former diplomat who has been critical of British policy in the Middle East, said this week: “I’d rather have a prime minister who believes he is clever enough to speak out in public than one who believes he is clever enough to solve the world’s problems by going to war.”

Well so say all of us, but only time will tell if David Cameron’s comments actually amount to anything more than hot air.

Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Little is new in the 'New' Conservatism

2010-05-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Friday May 21 2010
By Michael Glackin

The new coalition government in the United Kingdom, including the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, is in place. Such governments are rare in British politics and this one, the first since World War II, has promised a sea change in the way the country will be run, a change that will “take Britain in a historic new direction.”

To this end, Foreign Secretary William Hague traveled to Washington last week for some tough talking about how the UK would conduct its foreign affairs while pursuing this “historic new direction.” On arrival Hague warned US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton that the days of Britain’s being America’s poodle were over. Hague told Clinton he wanted a “strong but not slavish” relationship with the United States.

Well that much was new. Unfortunately he then went on to sound more slavish than Mr Burns sycophantic assistant Smithers in the Simpsons.

He hailed Britain’s “unbreakable alliance” with the US and praised Clinton as “an inspiring example to other foreign ministers and aspiring foreign ministers around the world.” He didn’t quite kneel down as some feared he might after praising the “sheer warmth of the welcome” his government had received from Washington. However, he confided that he had traveled to the US especially quickly in order “to show we reciprocate that warmth.”

When it came to practical politics, Hague insisted that his government would not deviate from the strategy of its predecessor on Afghanistan, adding that Britain’s 9,500 troops would stay in the country until “their job is done.” He also supported the US on the need to pursue vigorous sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program through the United Nations Security Council. Hague even promised to pressure Britain’s “European allies” into imposing the type of economic sanctions on Iran that the US already has in place.

You could be forgiven for asking yourself, “What’s new?” In reality, Hague’s embarrassing trip to Washington showed that nothing had changed, a reality confirmed by Foreign Office sources this week. Even the tougher British stance on Iran was not what it seemed. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are due to be aired again at the United Nations in the coming weeks and it’s probable that the previous British government would have indulged in the same tough rhetoric heard during Hague’s trip to Washington, in order to show a united front to Russia, China and Tehran ahead of a new sanctions vote.

Even Hague’s promise to pressure Britain’s “European allies” over Iran was a continuation of policy started by the Gordon Brown government. Up to now, however, this has been derailed within the European Union by Germany, which has trade links with Tehran.

Hague’s hastily arranged trip was a rather clumsy attempt to publicly display that the new British coalition was firmly behind the US. It was also to allay fears in Washington that the Liberal Democrats, who have called for more distance between the two nations, will be in a position to call any shots in the new government’s foreign policy.

In addition to confirming that it is business as usual with Washington, the trip underlined the Conservatives’ antipathy to the European Union in that Hague chose to visit the US before European capitals. This was deemed necessary because the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has advocated closer ties with the European Union than with the US. He recently said that Britain needed to release itself “from that spell of default Atlanticism,” and warned of the “dangers of a subservient relationship with the United States.”

More worryingly for Washington in the short term is that Clegg has also declared his firm opposition to military action against Iran.

However, Clinton was right to dismiss fears that foreign policy differences between Washington and London would cause problems in the pursuit of their shared objectives. The Liberal Democrats have little sway on foreign affairs in the coalition, beyond a consultation role, and the official policy of the new government toward Iran is unequivocal: It does not rule out military action if Tehran fails to fall into line over its nuclear ambitions.

But business as usual is only likely to be sustainable in the short term. There are a number of pressing issues in the government’s in-tray that will demand fresh thinking in the coming months.

A fresh strategy on Afghanistan is unlikely to be contemplated until both the US and the UK assess the results of the massive military operation planned later this year for Kandahar, a city the Taliban have successfully held throughout the war. But it is clear that fresh ideas are needed. This is already visible in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s peace conference, or jirga, scheduled for this month, which is intended to secure a consensus on how to reconcile with the Taliban.

Also in the government’s in-tray is whether the UK will be more forceful in helping produce a commitment from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to start meaningful negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

So far the “historic new direction” of this British government doesn’t appear to include any new answers.
Michael Glackin is former managaging editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star

A Mideast absent in Britain's elections

2010-05-05T02:48:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Wednesday 5 May 2010
By Michael Glackin

You know British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is in trouble when he has to ask his predecessor, Tony Blair, to campaign on his behalf. Last week the former prime minister, the man Brown kicked out of office two years ago, took a break from his lucrative overseas engagements to tell voters that Brown had “every chance” of staying in power.

It was hardly a ringing endorsement. But, trailing badly in opinion polls and after earning the wrath of the nation for calling a widowed grandmother “bigoted” for questioning his policies, a visibly tired Brown will take whatever support he can get right now.

But despite the reappearance of the politician who involved Britain in more wars than any of his predecessors, you could be forgiven for forgetting that this election is being held against a backdrop of an increasing unpopular conflict in Afghanistan, because so far, the politicians aren’t talking about it.

Despite this, when voters go to the polls on Thursday it will mark the end of what has been one of the most exciting general election campaigns in a generation. Brown, who became prime minister without facing a vote, will likely be voted out of power. But for the first time in almost 40 years no one actually knows what kind of government will replace him.

A single phenomena has made this election different. The first ever televised debates between the leaders of the three main parties have created an interest in this campaign that has been absent from recent elections. It also looks set to end the two-party monopoly on political power that has dominated British politics.

From barely making up the numbers within the British political system, the centrist Liberal Democrats, who have less than 10 percent of seats in Parliament, are suddenly serious contenders. The change in the party’s fortunes is attributable to a combination of public skepticism in the credibility of Conservative leader David Cameron and the success of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in the televised debates, which led to an extraordinary surge in support for his party.

The final result is unpredictable. Opinion polls indicate Clegg and his party may emerge as kingmakers enabling them to win enough seats to form a coalition government with one of the two bigger parties. Clegg insists he will not work with Brown, so short of an improbable Labour victory Brown is surplus to post-election requirements. However, many in Clegg’s party insist they won’t work with the Conservatives. Meanwhile, some polls indicate Cameron could win enough seats to form a government with the support of small nationalist parties who account for around 3 percent of parliamentary seats.

Confused? We all are. But what will all this mean for British policy in Afghanistan or the Middle East?

Nothing actually. All three parties support the war in Afghanistan and none has offered an alternative to the current strategy of propping up the inept and corrupt regime of President Hamid Karzai. Brown’s principal policy remains helping create a 300,000-strong Afghan army and police force and handing over districts and provinces to them later this year. Cameron agrees and beyond some tinkering to the command system between Whitehall and the British Army nothing will change in the short term if he takes power.

Clegg, on the rare occasion he has discussed Afghanistan in anything resembling detail, appears keen to put Britain’s entire war effort in the hands of the European Union. However, in essence, his party supports the current policy.

Strangely, Afghanistan, the prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear power, Israel and its creative use of British passports, Palestine, or the continuing threat of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism, have hardly been mentioned during this campaign. Equally strangely, at the time of writing, only three British soldiers (one in an accident) had been killed in Afghanistan since Parliament was dissolved and the election campaign officially started on April 12. Speculation is rife that the army is under orders to restrict operations during the election campaign. A conspiracy theorist could have a field day with all this.

Only half of one of the three televised debates was devoted to foreign policy, around 45 minutes in total. Just 10 minutes of that was spent discussing the war in Afghanistan, now in its 10th year, and that consisted largely of all three leaders spewing out the same platitudes, praising the work of the troops and stressing the importance of fighting the war to keep the streets of Britain safe. This at a time when bodies of British soldiers killed in the conflict return to the UK on a regular basis and public support for the war is at an all-time low.

Brown did mention the role of Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia, but there was no discussion about what the UK’s approach should be to dealing with the threat this poses. Even after the attempt on the life of the British ambassador in Yemen, the issue hasn’t been mentioned. Instead voters were treated to an argument about the UK’s tortured relationship with the European Union and a surreal discussion about Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain later this year.

The turgid discussion about the EU was an attempt by Brown and Cameron to put a dent in Clegg’s growing popularity – he’s a proponent of strong ties with the EU rather than the United States.

Interestingly, under a project called Give Your Vote, hundreds of people in Afghanistan will be voting in the election courtesy of Britons who have agreed to donate their vote to people in the developing world. Afghans taking part in the project watched the foreign policy debate. Many fear Clegg’s insistence that the UK should distance itself from the US signaled a weakening of Britain’s commitment to Afghanistan.

Consequently, it appears the Afghans will “vote” Conservative this week. It’s ironic that this by-product of the Afghan war may contribute to Gordon Brown’s political demise. Perhaps it’s Blair’s final victory over his onetime bitter rival.

Whoever those Afghans vote for, they will at least have the comfort of knowing their vote will count in at least one election this year.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star.

Innocent in Iraq, insists Gordon Brown

2010-03-08T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday 9 March
By Michael Glackin

Some years ago, while idly browsing the shelves of the Way In bookshop on Hamra Street in west Beirut, I came across the autobiography of American actress Shirley MacLaine. MacLaine, it turns out, had an affair with the famously monosyllabic star Robert Mitchum, and joked in her book that she made a point of asking him the time whenever they were together, just so she could “get a straight answer.”

I was reminded of this last week while watching the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war. At one point during his testimony the audience laughed out loud as panel member Sir Roderic Lyne repeatedly failed to illicit a straight answer as to whether Brown had been aware that his predecessor, Tony Blair, made an early commitment to offer US President George W. Bush military support to oust Saddam Hussein. In the end, Lyne gave up.

The exchange sums up the futility of the Iraq inquiry, established to examine the decision to go to war and failures in postwar planning. The inquiry panel’s overly deferential approach to witnesses and long-winded questions that are rarely properly answered have become a national joke.

Some inquiries shed light on the issue they are examining; others merely generate heated emotion. The Iraq inquiry has managed neither. It is the least forensic examination that could have been conceived. The panel members, distinguished academics and civil servants, have looked hapless in the face of politicians used to dealing with far more awkward questions from the media. Their shortcomings were brutally exposed during Blair’s appearance in January, and again highlighted during Brown’s testimony.

Brown is adept at shifting blame and avoiding answering questions. He insisted that he stood by the decision to topple Saddam Hussein, (“the right decision made for the right reasons,” he said) because “the international community had to act.” Curiously, the panel did not think to ask why the “international community,” in the shape of the United Nations, refused to act and left it almost entirely to the United States and the United Kingdom to do so.

Despite his support for the war, Brown insisted that he was “not aware of” the now infamous letters between Blair and Bush that appeared to commit the UK to war while the pair was publicly pursuing a diplomatic solution in 2002. Brown, who has long despised Blair for standing in the way of his own ambition to be prime minister, was barely on speaking terms with him during that time. But as the second most powerful British politician then, it is inconceivable that he was unaware of any commitments made by the prime minister to support an invasion.

Brown added he knew nothing of the initial doubts that the UK’s attorney general – the government’s chief legal adviser – had expressed about the legality of the invasion. The botched reconstruction of Iraq was “regrettable,” but that was Washington’s fault because it had failed to heed his warnings to prepare properly for after Saddam’s removal.

In fact Brown wasn’t responsible for anything. In response to claims that he failed to properly fund the military during his time as chancellor of the exchequer, Brown insisted that “every request the military commanders made to us for equipment was answered.” Yet when asked if he was aware that the military chiefs had threatened to resign over concerns about military funding in 2004, Brown responded: “I can’t remember all the conversations I had.”

One would have thought that a threat by the top brass to quit while the country was fighting two wars would be a fairly memorable occasion, but again the panel failed to press Brown on the point. And so it went on.

He expressed sadness for the deaths of British troops and Iraqis in the conflict, a calculated contrast to Blair’s refusal to do so, but sidestepped questions submitted to the inquiry by the families of soldiers killed in controversial lightly armored Snatch Land Rovers in Iraq. The military insist it had to use Snatches because the Treasury had failed to provide cash to purchase properly armored vehicles. Brown said that was the army’s fault. “It is not for me to make the military decisions on the ground about the use of particular vehicles,” he said.

Considering that earlier witnesses to the inquiry, including the former defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, had insisted that military action in Iraq and Afghanistan was hampered by a lack of funds, it was inevitable that this point would be challenged. But bizarrely it was not the inquiry panel that took issue with Brown’s statements. It fell instead to two former army chiefs, who within hours of Brown completing his evidence accused the prime minister of misleading the inquiry. One insisted the military had been “starved of funds” by the former chancellor.

The funding row centers on the fact that while Brown had provided increased cash for the military’s urgent operational demands through an emergency fund, he systematically imposed deep cuts on the military’s regular budget. This meant the army lacked equipment, particularly helicopters and heavily armored vehicles, when it went into battle.

The distinction between the two funding mechanisms was blithely ignored by Brown in his evidence. The inquiry panel also failed to make the distinction, allowing Brown to bury their questions in a raft of statistics.

Immediately after he gave his evidence, Brown flew to Afghanistan to meet current military commanders. A cynic might say that his trip had more to do with grabbing another photo opportunity ahead of the general election that is likely to take place in May. Noticeably, he was wearing a watch, so based on the Shirley MacLaine reminiscence, he may have been able to give at least one straight answer to inquisitive soldiers.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

The Dubai killing and European tolerance

2010-02-22T13:55:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday 23 February 2010
By Michael Glackin

In diplomatic circles, Israel increasingly resembles a distant relative who drunkenly turns up at family functions, does something embarrassing, and leaves the rest of the family wringing its hands in bewilderment.

Whether or not firm evidence emerges linking Mossad to the murder of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19 (and as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was at pains to point out last week, there is currently no proof of Israeli involvement), it is clear there are few better suspects if you follow the old adage of “Who benefits?”

It is equally clear that Ireland, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, whose passports and citizens’ names were used by the 11-member hit squad, do not want to make a fuss about the affair. While various politicians were busy feigning concern last week, there is a tacit acceptance among Western governments that events like the murder of Mabhouh are merely things Israel is liable to do from time to time, and that these are best ignored or forgotten as quickly as possible.

The laughably fruitless 15-minute meeting in London on Thursday between the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, and Sir Peter Ricketts, the permanent secretary who heads Britain’s diplomatic service, underlined this point. Prosor told reporters after the meeting that he “was unable to add any information and could not shed new light” on the affair. Meanwhile, despite its concern over the circumstances surrounding the assassination, the Foreign Office was unable to say whether Israel was even cooperating with the British Serious Organised Crimes Agency (SOCA) investigation into how British passports in the name of six British nationals living in Israel were used by the hit squad.

In the mid-1980s, Mossad was forced to promise never to use British passports to help its agents carry out covert operations. The intelligence agency did so when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, effectively closed down its British operation after the discovery of a bag of forged British passports lost by a Mossad agent. And five years ago Israeli agents were arrested in New Zealand trying to acquire a passport in the name of a quadriplegic. Again, Israel had to promise not to repeat the exercise.

There are a lot of reasons why the UK wants the Mabhouh assassination to quietly fade away. British diplomatic relations with Israel are already strained. Aside from the perennial complaints from Israel about the “Arab bias” of the British Broadcasting Corporation in its reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is also the matter of a British court issuing an arrest warrant last year for Israel’s former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. Livni was forced to cancel a visit to the UK after pro-Palestinian groups applied to the courts to issue the warrant because of her role in war crimes allegedly committed during the Gaza war.

Amid the political bickering, intelligence-sharing over terror groups between the British and Israeli secret services has also been threatened, without so far being terminated. Indeed, despite official denials, it is clear that the Brown government knew some time ago that British passports had been used by Mabhouh’s killers. An Irish Foreign Office spokesperson confirmed that Irish officials first looked into reports of Irish passports being used by the assassins as far back as February 5.

In fact, speculation is rife that MI6 was tipped off that Israeli agents were going to carry out an “overseas operation” using fake British passports. The British Daily Mail even had a member of the Mossad saying that the Foreign Office was told about the assassination a few hours before it took place, although the identity of the victim was not disclosed.

All this comes at a time when pressure is mounting on the government to hold a public inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the war on terrorism after British judges ruled that the country’s intelligence personnel had been complicit in the torture of terrorism suspects. Fears persist that the British failure to take a firm stand on the Mabhouh case, such as the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, will play into the hands of Islamist terrorist groups seeking to recruit members within the UK’s borders.

The rather subdued hue and cry shifted to Brussels yesterday, where Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, met the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, along with the ministers of the other European Union member states whose passports were used in the assassination. Nadim Shehadi, an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Middle East program in London, believes all four governments are keen to bury the issue. “By dealing with it at the European level, within the council of ministers, they are signaling they want the issue to die quietly. It’s quite obvious no one really wants to do anything.”

Perhaps this best explains why Israel seems to be enjoying all the publicity. On the day Prosor met with Ricketts, the Israeli Embassy’s official Twitter feed posted a joking reference to the killing, and the fact that two of the assassins were dressed in tennis gear: “You heard it here first: Israeli tennis player carries out hit on Dubai target.” The headline linked to a report on the victory by the Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer, who had reached the finals of the Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships. Peer is probably more upset about the crass joke than any Western government is about the assassination.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Blair regretted nothing; learned nothing

2010-02-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday, February 2 2010
By Michael Glackin

Quite why anyone should be surprised by Tony Blair’s “Je ne regrette rien” performance at the British government’s Iraq inquiry in London last week is a mystery. Did anyone really expect him to express regret?

His failure to express remorse for the deaths of 179 British servicemen he ordered into Iraq while sitting in a room surrounded by their bereaved families – let alone the 100,000 plus Iraqis who died during the invasion and its aftermath – was crass in the extreme, but it is simply another illustration of the cocoon of self-belief the former prime minister has wrapped around himself.

“We didn’t end up with a humanitarian disaster,” he told the inquiry, ignoring all the thousands of dead, the 4 million or so refugees and the utter destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. “If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are,” he insisted, oblivious to the spate of terror attacks perpetuated by Islamist extremists that have occurred in Europe since 2003 and continue to wreak havoc on an almost daily basis in Iraq.

Not only would Blair invade Iraq all over again, but he spent much of his six hours in front of the inquiry urging the West to take military action against Iran, and citing the same arguments used to justify overthrowing Saddam.

Except of course, Blair’s self-belief and conviction did not always tally with the facts and it is to the inquiry panel’s shame that it failed to press him on the glaring contradictions in the reasons he gave for going to war, and the reasons he gave Parliament and the public in 2003.

Indeed the inquiry panel, chaired by former civil servant Sir John Chilcot and including another former civil servant, Baroness Usha Prashar, the United Kingdom’s former ambassador to Russia Roderic Lyne and historians Lawrence Freedman and Martin Gilbert, seemed cowed by Blair. Despite his nervous start, Blair gave a defiant performance batting away the panel’s long-winded, largely unchallenging questions and reminding everyone of his skills as a communicator.

The inquiry was never going to tell us anything new about the reasons why Blair supported US President George W. Bush in his desire to oust Saddam Hussein. What it did reveal is how much Blair has shifted his position from his original cheerleading for war based on the threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Blair’s bizarre insistence in his testimony that his “tolerance” of Saddam’s regime changed after the 9/11 attacks was nonsense. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorists believe Iraq was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Blair certainly doesn’t, but he still managed to hint at a possible link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, telling the inquiry that “[Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi [late leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq] did go to Iraq prior to the invasion.”

Conceding there was no solid link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, Blair insisted instead that “suppressed and failing states,” such as Iraq under Saddam, become “porous” and thus easier for terror groups to infiltrate. He also talked vaguely about the “calculus of risk” and Saddam’s ability to “reconstitute” his [presumably old or decommissioned] weapons of mass destruction and pose a risk in future. All that’s a far cry from telling Parliament before the invasion that Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction program is active, detailed and growing.”

Moving on to the occupation, Blair told the inquiry that no one could have predicted that Al-Qaeda and Iran would try to destabilize the coalition’s efforts in creating a government once Saddam was toppled. Really? If, as Blair insisted, Iraq was “porous” surely it was obvious that insurgents such as Al-Qaeda and other Iranian-backed terror groups would quickly move to fill the void left by Saddam’s ousting.

Yet the inquiry panel failed to bring Blair to account on any of these contradictions in his reasons for going to war and failures to provide security in its aftermath.

Why? Perhaps because one of the other things the Iraq inquiry has revealed is the chumminess of the British establishment. Several of the panel members are hardly people likely to press the former prime minister. Freedman wrote significant portions of Blair’s famous Chicago Speech in 1999 in which the prime minister, in the wake of the West’s intervention in Kosovo, argued for international military intervention to prevent humanitarian disasters and achieve regime change. In suggestions for the Chicago speech Freedman had written: “Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men – Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.” His suggestions included a justification that intervention without a United Nations mandate can be necessary because the UN is often constrained by the Security Council’s unwillingness to support military action.

Meanwhile, Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, claimed in 2004 that Blair and Bush were a modern day Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chilcot and Prashar, in turn, received honors during Blair’s premiership: a knighthood in the case of Chilcot and for Prashar a seat in the House of Lords.

In short, Blair wasn’t exactly facing the Spanish Inquisition.

Ultimately, Blair’s testimony, and that of earlier witnesses, reinforces the view that he arranged the intelligence on Iraq weapons of mass destruction to suit his political desire to back Bush. Why he was so keen to do so remains a mystery for now, but his testimony also confirms that Bush-Blair was a lopsided partnership. Blair admitted his relationship with Bush was not one of quid pro quo, where the United States would reciprocate British support. Thus Blair was unable to get Bush to advance the paralyzed Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “You could describe me as a broken record in that period” he told the panel describing his many unsuccessful pleas to Bush that movement on the Palestinian issue would help to solve their problems in Iraq.

Broken record? Lap dog might be a more appropriate description, and whatever Blair’s confident but twisted view of the war and its aftermath, that is how he is likely to be remembered in the world outside his cocoon.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

Gordon Brown's small Afghan games

2009-11-26T14:14:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Friday 27 November 2009
By Michael Glackin

Winston Churchill famously described Russia as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. He could just as easily have been talking about current Western policy in Afghanistan.

Last week, British Premier Gordon Brown announced plans to host a conference in London next January involving NATO and the Afghan government. The gathering would set out an Afghan exit strategy and establish “a timetable for transfer [of power] starting in 2010.”

But just days after Brown floated his timetable for the United Kingdom’s military exit from Afghanistan, his foreign secretary, David Miliband, warned that “artificial timetables just give succor to your enemy.” Miliband insisted the UK was in Afghanistan for the long haul, because the government in Kabul would collapse within weeks if NATO troops left. Oddly enough, last month the newly installed head of the British Army, General Sir David Richards, warned that British troop numbers in Afghanistan couldn’t be reduced until 2014 at the earliest, a date with which Afghan President Hamid Karzai hastily concurred last week.

So, is the UK cutting and running – remember Basra – or digging in? Last week, I spoke to the Foreign Office in a forlorn attempt to clarify British policy. An official insisted that the prime minister was not talking about withdrawal, and bizarrely he added that “no one is putting a timetable” on an exit. The official added that the UK’s strategy remained centered on building up Afghan institutions, the army, police and political system, so that Afghans could run everything themselves “at some point.”

I admit I was still confused, but a later inquiry to the Defense Ministry about how many coalition and Afghan troops were currently in Helmand Province alongside British forces turned confusion to farce. Astonishingly, the Defense Ministry didn’t know, and referred me to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul. I duly contacted a very helpful chap at ISAF who informed me there were 15,000 coalition troops in total in Helmand, but that he had no idea how many Afghan soldiers were in the field. Let’s hope someone figures it out before Brown’s 2010 transfer. It’s one hell of a way to run an eight-year-long war.

Karzai has said that he will send 5,000 Afghan trainee troops to help in Helmand, but the Defense Ministry in London confirmed it had no idea when these troops would be dispatched. Based on all this, the chances of Helmand being handed over even in five years are slim to say the least, even if ISAF and the DefenseMinistry finally work out how many Afghan soldiers there are in the province to transfer security to.

Meanwhile, the government of the “re-elected” Karzai was last week declared by Transparency International the second most corrupt in the world, second only to Somalia’s. Brown has warned Karzai that he is not prepared to put the lives of British soldiers “in harm’s way” if the Afghan president fails to stamp out corruption. But as Miliband’s comments made clear, the threat is an empty one. It’s true that Brown has still not made good on his much-touted announcement to boost British troop numbers to 9,500, but that is because he is waiting for US President Barack Obama to decide how many soldiers he will commit to the Afghan conflict, with the announcement expected early next week in Washington.

Therefore, in place of anything resembling a firm policy, the prime minister dangled an ill-conceived and entirely unrealistic prospect of a military withdrawal before the British electorate, in order to fill the void. While Brown studiously avoided using the word withdrawal, his inference was as clear as it was cynical. It was a desperate attempt to shore up crumbling public support for the Afghan war, and for his government, ahead of next year’s elections, which must take place by June at the latest.

Brown wants to be able to tell voters that the process of withdrawing British troops is under way on his watch, even if no troops actually leave Afghanistan before the UK goes to the polls. Weekend leaks from the armed forces suggested the government was putting them under pressure to send a small number of troops home before the end of next year. Thus, British strategy is now subordinated to getting Brown re-elected.

The impression that British policy in Afghanistan now owes more to the Marx Brothers than Churchill was further underlined following a recent military briefing in London.

Those interested in financial markets will have noticed that the price of gold has soared this year. This is good news for the Taliban, who, following an alleged change in tactics by the British Army, are poised to receive “bags of gold” from soldiers in a bid to tempt them to lay down their arms. This “bags of gold policy,” outlined in a Defense Ministry briefing last week, is already being pursued, albeit with cash, not gold, by French and Italian forces in Afghanistan. Such payments could provide the Western powers with enough breathing space to allow international development programs to take root and provide real benefits to Afghans.

Except that according to the Defense Ministry the story is not true. It appears that “bags of gold” is merely a metaphor for stepping up development programs to provide work and benefits enabling “moderate insurgents” to see that there are alternatives to the $10 a day they are paid to take up arms with the Taliban. It appears that the British government believes bribing insurgents is something best left to the continentals.

That’s a shame. The handing of British gold to Afghan insurgents actually has a long and successful history. During the Great Game era of the late 19th century, the emir of Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman, received large supplies of gold and guns from Lord Dufferin, then viceroy of India, to maintain order in Afghanistan and keep Tsarist Russia at bay.

Mind you, Lord Dufferin probably knew how many Afghan troops he was paying for.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Tony Blair's record as 'Quartet' envoy displays distinct lack of substance

2009-11-06T04:54:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Friday November 6 2009
By Michael Glackin

During a trip to Nablus earlier this year, Tony Blair insisted that improving conditions for Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank was proof that a Palestinian state can be “built from the bottom up while it’s being negotiated from the top down.” Blair was referring to the removal of three Israeli checkpoints around the city.

It was a typical snappy, political sound-bite of the kind Blair, special envoy for the Middle East “Quartet” – the United States, Russia, the European Union and United Nations – excels in. Remember the one about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “which could be activated within 45 minutes?”

Unfortunately, like the sound-bite he used to win support for the invasion of Iraq, Blair’s comments in Nablus were untrue.

Firstly there are currently no meaningful “top down” negotiations between the governments of the Palestinian Authority and Israel, nor indeed anyone else it seems. Secondly, the “bottom up” improvements that Blair was extolling, the easing of restrictions at Israeli checkpoints, only exist in a handful of places and are seen by many Palestinians as a sop for the lack of meaningful political progress to improve their plight.

These small improvements in the everyday lives of people shouldn’t be overlooked of course, but in reality they are not much to show for more than two years in his role as Quartet envoy and hardly evidence that Blair is slowly laying the economic foundations of a viable Palestinian state. This year Israel has removed 11 checkpoints, but according to the UN there are still more than 600 checkpoints and unmanned barriers choking the free movement of goods and people throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

So what exactly has Blair achieved during his two years as Quartet envoy?

Well for one thing, he has succeeded in rapidly turning himself into a multi-millionaire. It is estimated Blair has made around $24 million since he stepped down as prime minister in 2007. He is of course unpaid in his role as part-time Quartet envoy – although his expenses are picked up by taxpayers – but he appears to have found his Middle East role a useful way to generate cash for himself.

Last weekend it was reported that Blair had held talks with UK supermarket giant Tesco about helping the superstore establish itself in the Middle East for a fee of $1.6 million. The talks, which ended without agreement, have increased accusations that Blair is utilizing his unpaid role in the Middle East to feather his own nest by promoting his private political and economic consultancy, Tony Blair Associates (TBA).

TBA, which Blair runs with his former Downing Street chief of staff Jonathan Powell, was established shortly after he was forced out of government by current UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Earlier this year, Blair was in Saudi Arabia in his peace-envoy role to hold talks with King Abdullah on the situation in the Gaza Strip. He was accompanied by Powell, although Powell has no role in the peace process. After the meeting the pair also met Prince Al-Waleed, King Abdullah’s nephew, who has no political role but is widely recognized as the wealthiest and smartest businessman in the Middle East. TBA’s clients are understood to include members of the royal families of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, countries Blair has visited in his role as Quartet envoy.

Last month a friend of Blair’s told the Sunday Times newspaper that TBA “had been set up to make money from foreign governments and companies. There’s a focus on the Middle East, because that is where the money is.”

On top of all that, Blair also represents US investment bank JP Morgan in the region in return for an estimated annual fee of $3 million. Beyond the Middle East there’s also the $800,000 Blair earns for representing Zurich Financial Services and a $7 million advance on his memoirs he received from publisher Random House in 2007. He is also reputed to earn up to $300,000 for each talk he gives on the global lecture circuit.

But what has been good for Blair’s finances has not been so good for Palestinians who remain burdened by Israeli restrictions, with movement into and through the West Bank strangled by checkpoints.

This week the Israel relaxed its blockade on Gaza to allow in tea and coffee. Both had been on a long list of items prohibited by the Israelis for security reasons along with cooking oil, dairy products, flour and frozen meat.

Another successful example of Blair’s “bottom up” theory? Hardly.

The blockade, imposed following the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007 continues and still includes the closure of Karni, one of the largest and best-equipped commercial crossings, continuing restrictions on the import of industrial, agricultural and construction materials, the suspension of almost all exports and a general ban on the movement of Palestinians through Erez, the only passenger crossing to the West Bank.

The bizarre ban on pens and pencils also appears to remain in place. The World Bank warned this year that the impact of the blockade on Gaza has been so severe, that it is unlikely many of the area’s fledgling businesses will be able to recover if and when the blockade is eventually lifted.

Other areas where Blair has become directly involved, such as his commendable attempts to persuade Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu to allot the promised bandwidth for a second Palestinian mobile-phone company, operated by Wataniya Palestine, and which Blair said was “an important indicator of whether Palestinians are going to be allowed to run an economy properly” have also failed. Wataniya finally launched this week but not on the promised bandwidth it needs for the business to be viable.

In fairness to Blair the political process, under the aegis of US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has also failed to deliver and US President Barack Obama’s demand for a one-year freeze on settlement construction has been ignored. But given Blair’s narrow economic remit he has achieved next to nothing. Based on results, Blair’s role has been revealed as a non-job, save for providing him with a political calling card to present when selling his other wares.

Blair’s burning ambition to become the first president of the European Union appears to have been scuppered by European leaders over his support for former US President George W Bush’s war on Saddam Hussein. But they didn’t have to go that far back to find his flaws.

Blair is an extremely accomplished communicator, a skill not to be overlooked in modern politics, but one that should compliment political acumen and leadership, not serve as a substitute for it.
There must be substance behind the sound-bite, and frankly, Blair’s record as Quartet envoy displays a distinct lack of that particular commodity.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Strings attached to a shaky policy

2009-10-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
October 15 2009
By Michael Glackin

Am I alone in being confused by the UK’s commitment to increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan?

On Wednesday UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced to Parliament that he was sending an additional 500 troops to Helmand Province. But rather bizarrely Brown said the increase was conditional on the Afghan government supplying more of its own troops for frontline action, and other NATO countries making an increased contribution – a barely concealed swipe aimed at Germany, France, Spain and Canada to shoulder a bigger share of the fighting as Britain and the US suffer increasing casualties. Brown also said the increase was conditional on the right equipment being available to ensure all additional troops were properly equipped, something that his own government is responsible for.

Does this mean that if none of the above happens the additional troops won’t be sent? The Defense Ministry told me that was “a fair assumption,” but expressed optimism that all the prime minister’s conditions would be met.

Really? While the Afghans are capable of putting more of their own troops in the line of fire and London will ensure, following criticism that it has failed to in the past, that its troops are equipped for the job they are given on the battle field, the odds on Britain and America’s NATO allies answering Brown’s call are slim.

Of the largest troop contributors outside of the US and Britain, only France is likely to offer to send a small number of troops. German leader Angela Merkel is under pressure to set a timetable for a withdrawal, while Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged to pull his country’s troops out by 2011. Meanwhile Spain agreed last month to send an additional 200 soldiers bringing its total force in Afghanistan to around 1,000 and is unlikely to go beyond that number.

When Brown calls for further commitments from NATO he means the US. But there is a degree of uncertainty over the current policy of US President Barack Obama, who is considering a proposal by the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to send in an additional 40,000 troops.

NATO meets next week in Bratislava. It is unclear whether Obama will announce a decision on troop numbers there, but it is extremely doubtful Brown would have chosen to increase UK troops if he wasn’t certain that Obama was going to do the same thing. Though whether Obama commits as many as 40,000 US soldiers remains a moot point.

The decision to deploy more troops comes just days after General Sir Richard Dannatt, who stood down as head of the army in August, accused Brown of overruling his advice to send an additional 2,000 troops to Helmand Province – which would have brought the total number of UK troops to around 9,500 – because it would cost too much money.

When yesterday’s increase is added to the 700 or so troops Brown sent as a temporary force in the run up to the Afghan elections, which has since become a permanent force, British troop forces will be at roughly the level Dannatt wanted.

So why the change? Well, Brown made the announcement just minutes after he read out the names of the 37 British soldiers killed in Helmand over the summer, and less than a week after Dannatt’s exposure of his refusal to send more troops on the grounds of cost. He can now say he is at least doing something.

But the additional troops, and indeed the announcement last week that Dannatt had been appointed by the opposition Conservative Party to be their adviser for defense policy, merely serves to underline the lack of policy and leadership from all political parties in the UK on the Afghan war.

In place of a policy, the Conservatives have come up with a gimmick appointment of a general whose criticism of the government now looks politically motivated rather than out of concern for his soldiers. Meanwhile Brown, who told Parliament that it has been a “particularly difficult summer for our armed forces” once again failed to offer a coherent outline of what the UK’s aspirations and role is in Afghanistan, let alone provide a strategy for winning what is increasingly looking like an unwinnable war.

The great problem with British, and indeed Western, policy in Afghanistan is that it still doesn’t appear to understand what can and cannot be achieved by military power. The army cannot defeat the Taliban and its fellow travelers alone. Defeating the militants and establishing stability in Afghanistan requires a political solution. But the West has had eight years to set about the task of nation-building and so far has failed to create anything resembling a functional and stable state.

The deeply embarrassing debacle of Afghanistan’s presidential election has left what passes for the political process in Kabul in turmoil. While the UN probe into ballot rigging continues there remains the distinct possibility that there may have to be a further round of elections. Indeed it was noticeable during his statement to Parliament that Brown was careful to stress he had received assurances from both the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, that the Afghans would deploy more troops to fight alongside the British in Helmand.

The row over election fraud places more pressure on Brown to justify the British presence in Afghanistan as the death toll rises without any military or political end in sight. This is why Brown was reluctant for so long to commit more troops. He fears putting more soldiers in the line of fire merely gives the Taliban more British troops to shoot at and kill. This is the same dilemma facing Obama and hence his reluctance to immediately accede to General McChrystal’s demands.

While the military insist the war will be lost unless more troops are sent, Both Brown and Obama have belatedly come to realize that the military solution won’t work regardless of how many troops they deploy. How long before a Vietnam-type blame game between politicians and soldiers over who lost the war?
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Pan Am Flight 103: the mystery continues

2009-08-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
August 19 2009
By Michael Glackin

By the end of this week, Abdulbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person to be convicted in the December 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which killed 270 people, may be released from a Scottish prison and return to Libya. Megrahi, a former Libyan secret service agent, is unlikely to enjoy his newfound freedom for long. His release, or transfer to a prison in Libya, is due to the fact he has terminal cancer, with a life expectancy measured in weeks rather than months.

The New York-bound Pan Am flight blew up as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. So when Megrahi eventually came to trial, a dozen years after the event, he was tried by a specially convened Scottish Court that sat in The Netherlands. Megrahi was given a life sentence by three Scottish judges who found him responsible for putting a suitcase containing a bomb aboard a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. From there the suitcase went on to London and was transferred to the New York flight that exploded less than 40 minutes after take-off.

Megrahi was positively identified by a witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who claimed he had sold clothes to Megrahi which were later found scattered over the crash site and had been in the suitcase containing the explosive device. However, it is now alleged that Gauci was offered a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and a place in a witness protection program. It also emerged during Megrahi’s failed appeal in 2002 that the bomb may have been planted in London, not Malta.

Megrahi’s defense team was also denied access to official government papers that were made available to Scottish police. After conducting an exhaustive three-year review of the case, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission reported in June 2007 that there may have been a miscarriage of justice in Megrahi’s case.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the attack, is considering taking legal action against the Scottish Court because he believes it deliberately suppressed crucial evidence from Ray Manly, a retired security guard at Heathrow Airport, who revealed in 2002 that Pan Am’s baggage area at Heathrow was broken into 17 hours before Flight 103 took off for New York. Swire believes this was probably when the bomb was planted, and he is convinced of Megrahi’s innocence.

But if Megrahi didn’t do it, who did?

In October 1988, two months before the bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians arrested were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), headed by Palestinian born former Syrian Army officer Ahmad Jibril.

The three judges at Megrahi’s trial rejected the argument that Jibril and the PFLP-GC had carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by an American warship, which killed 290 people.

However, a number of intelligence documents indicating PFLP-GC involvement were not made available at the trial. Chief among these was evidence from the US Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan. Megrahi’s lawyers had planned to introduce this evidence – also seen by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission – in a fresh appeal against his conviction this year, which was abandoned to facilitate his release.

The conspiracy view is that after Syrian President Hafez Assad supported the US-led alliance to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. Megrahi was not formally indicted by the United States and the United Kingdom until November 1991.

The PFLP-GC is not the only suspect. When German police raided the Frankfurt apartment in the weeks before the bombing, they also arrested members of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front. It emerged that the group’s former leader, Muhammad Abu Talib – who is currently serving a life sentence in Sweden – was in Malta two months before the bombing. He was cleared of involvement during Megrahi’s trial, despite the fact he had circled the date of the bombing in a calendar found at his apartment.

The final part of the jigsaw is the Libyan angle. The PFLP-GC was subcontracted dirty deeds for Iran and Syria, but also Libya when the African state was at the top of the West’s list of terrorist states. Libya’s intelligence service worked closely with a range of terrorist groups. It is possible, even likely, that Megrahi had contact with the PFLP-GC, but not credible that he masterminded and executed the entire Pan Am bombing.

Megrahi’s abandonment was perhaps facilitated by Libyan reasons of state. In 2003, after the US-led occupation of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair took the lead in persuading the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi, to give up on Libya’s nuclear program, the first step in his international rehabilitation. That same year, the Libyan government paid $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of those killed – around $10 million per victim. In 2004 international sanctions imposed on Libya were eased and a raft of Western oil companies signed multi-million dollar contracts to explore and develop oil and natural gas in the country.

You don’t have to be a cynic to see that Libyan compensation payments and the continued incarceration of Megrahi were a small price for Gadhafi to pay to repair his reputation and open the floodgates of Western investment. In 2005 Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem denied Libyan involvement and said the compensation payments were simply to “buy peace and move forward.”

The full truth about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 may never be known. But what we do know now strongly indicates that the guilty remain unpunished.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

British patience wanes for the Afghan war

2009-07-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
20 July 2009
By Michael Glackin

Last week, on a sunny afternoon in the sleepy English market town of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, around 4,000 people gathered and stood and watched as eight coffins carrying the remains of eight British servicemen were driven through the streets. It is a ritual that people in the town, which is close to RAF Lyneham, where the bodies of fallen servicemen are regularly flown into, are becoming numbingly used to.

But last week’s procession was different. The eight soldiers were killed in a bloody 24 hours of violence in Afghanistan, on what was the United Kingdom’s darkest day of combat. And their homecoming came at a time when the British public is becoming disillusioned and angry with the UK’s involvement in the eight-year Afghan war, an attitude that a raft of opinion polls in the last month has only confirmed.

As the death toll mounts, no victory over the Taliban is in sight. No political solution is on offer, save another term for the inept administration of President Hamid Karzai, who heads, according to Transparency International, the fourth most corrupt government in the world. The number of British troops killed in Afghanistan is now larger than British losses in Iraq. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is now regularly accused of being complicit in many of those deaths for sending troops into battle without adequate equipment.

The accusation is not new. It was made last year by the Oxfordshire coroner Andrew Walker during numerous inquests into the deaths of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is now being made by senior military chiefs, both former and current commanders. And last week, Parliament’s Defense Select Committee said a lack of helicopters was undermining operations and troop protection in Afghanistan.

Brown has faced a barrage of criticism over his government’s failure to supply front-line troops with the helicopters they need to take the fight to the Taliban. Official figures show that just 43 percent of combat helicopters were ready for action in June, even as commanders on the ground complained of a shortage. It even emerged last week that the head of the armed forces, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was traveling around Helmand province in an American Black Hawk helicopter because there wasn’t a British one available.

Despite the sharp increase in casualties Brown has insisted the shortage of helicopters has not cost lives. But when he faced Parliament’s powerful Liaison Committee last Thursday he sidestepped the issue, saying he could not discuss the numbers of helicopters in Afghanistan for security reasons. In a series of terse exchanges with the committee, Brown also refused to answer claims that earlier this year he rejected pleas from the military to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan by 2,000 men.

As public anger grows over both the rationale for the war and its prosecution, the government has accused Dannatt, who also called on the government to reconsider the resources and troop numbers it had committed to Afghanistan, of playing politics. However, Dannatt’s views are also representative of most Britons and, increasingly, many politicians. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said last week that lives were being “thrown away” in Afghanistan.

In contrast, last week Brown called the war a “patriotic duty.” Perhaps. But it was Samuel Johnson who famously declared that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. Frankly, when it comes to Afghanistan, that is what Brown looks like. As prime minister, he has been keen on photo opportunities with soldiers. He has even inaugurated a British version of America’s Veteran’s Day. Yet while he was finance minister he steadfastly refused to properly fund the military. One of Dannatt’s predecessors, General Lord Guthrie, in charge during the early stages of the Afghan war, has stated that Brown had caused the deaths of servicemen because he was “unsympathetic” to military appeals for funds as finance minister. As the general put it: “[Prime Minister Tony] Blair found it difficult to deliver Brown in the Treasury.”

Brown’s contempt for the military stemmed from his acrimonious relationship with Blair. Brown felt that Blair had cheated him out of becoming prime minister. When Blair wanted to use the military to pursue his political agenda, Brown did what he could to avoid paying for this. Blair was too spineless to stand up to Brown.

It is of course a brutal reality of war that soldiers die in combat zones. Combat deaths are, as the Duke of Wellington observed, “the butcher’s bill.” And it is hardly unusual for the military to demand more funding. However, the current row has left the public questioning whether the government still believes in the war.

What Brown needed to do during his testimony to the committee last week was to make plain to everyone what exactly British war aims are in Afghanistan, and whether there is anything like a realistic chance that they can be achieved. He failed to do that, and his failure will further convince the public that British troops are dying in a faraway land for no good reason at all.

If Brown still believes that the war is necessary to combat terrorism and build something akin to a stable government in Afghanistan, then he has to “deliver” and put his full weight behind achieving this. If he doesn’t, he should have the moral courage to withdraw British troops now.

Sadly, the importance the government places on the war can perhaps best be seen in the fact that while 4,000 people turned up in Wootton Bassett to greet the arrival of eight dead soldiers, there was not a senior member of government among them.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

The UK seeks business as usual with Iran

2009-06-26T02:41:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
June 26 2009
By Michael Glackin

Britain and Iran appear to have paused for breath in the increasingly acrimonious war of words that climaxed with this week's tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats. For British Prime Minister Gordon Brown the expulsions marked an unwanted escalation of the current tension between the two countries.

While the world has watched in admiration at film footage of Iranians taking to the streets to protest the dubious election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, politicians in London - and Washington - fear their fragile strategy of engaging Iran's ruling regime could be shattered by recent events.

And the harsh reality is that the United Kingdom has gone as far as it intends to in its criticism of Iran. As the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reasserts his control over affairs through ever greater force, the British government is now looking to return to what passes for business as usual with Iran.

Indeed there are many in government who are at a loss to understand why Britain was singled out for such strident criticism by the Iranian regime. Khamenei denounced Britain as "the most treacherous of foreign powers," and for good measure insisted that the Brown government was orchestrating the street demonstrations. It was this claim in particular that resulted in the expulsion of the two British diplomats from Tehran and Britain's carbon-copy response.

There is a school of thought, in the West at least, that Khamenei and his fellow travelers have found themselves caught in the headlights by US President Barack Obama's overtures to the Muslim world in his Cairo speech. Consequently the UK, Iran's old familiar enemy, or "Little Satan," found itself promoted to the role of national enemy number one.

The UK of course has a bit of a history in Iran. If we just take the period after the outbreak of World War II, the British helped depose the country's then leader, Reza Pahlavi, installing his son Mohammad, the last shah, in his place. Later, in 1953, Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, who nationalized the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, was ousted in a coup organized by the Americans and the British. More recently the UK has sided with the US in calling for tougher sanctions against Iran for continuing with its nuclear program.

But even the most ardent anti-British conspiracy theorist would be hard pressed to believe that Brown had orchestrated the last fortnight of street demonstrations that have taken place across Iran. Brown couldn't even organize enough of his supporters to go out and vote for him in the UK during this month's European and local elections in which his party suffered a humiliating defeat. The idea that he somehow had the means to get Iranians into the streets beggared belief.

It is true that Brown's criticism of the Iranian government's behavior over the last fortnight has been slightly less restrained than that of Obama, at least early on when the demonstrations started. While White House officials initially said Obama was merely "concerned" about events following Ahmadinejad's election victory, Brown said the violence being meted out to demonstrators was "unacceptable" and "deplorable."

But words are cheap, and that was as far as Brown was willing to go until Iran took the decision to give two of Britain's diplomats in Tehran their marching orders. Once that happened, the British government had no choice but to expel two Iranian diplomats in response. Now Brown is desperately keen to draw a line under the whole affair.

Sources within government insist there are no plans to increase existing sanctions or take any further action against Iran. A Foreign Office insider told me this week: "We are not stepping anything up." Indeed, following the diplomatic expulsions the British government is keen to "keep the door open" to allow the Iranian regime to "improve relations."

Iran's nuclear program is what is driving Brown's, and indeed Obama's policy, not civil rights or outrage over the deaths of innocents. An official statement on the expulsion of the diplomats sent to me by the Foreign Office devoted more space to concerns about Iran's nuclear program than it did to the bogus election result and the deaths of demonstrators.

There is also the real fear that Britain's embassy in Tehran could be targeted. Earlier this week the government evacuated the families of embassy staff and there have been reports of British nationals being arrested in recent days.

This is the backdrop to Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband's insistence this week that the outcome of Iran's presidential election was for the country's people alone to decide. The Council of Guardians, the unelected committee overseeing Iran's elections, took Miliband and Brown at their word. On Tuesday the council upheld Ahmadinejad's victory despite admitting a day earlier that there were a number of voting inconsistencies. For the record these inconsistencies included the fact that the number of votes in 50 cities exceeded by 3 million the number of voters actually registered.

So despite the row marked by the expulsions and a clear stepping up of Obama's rhetoric in recent days, the reality is that the UK wants to move on before things get any worse. There are no easy answers when it comes to Iran. That's the problem with despotic governments.
Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Can the UK afford its Washington ties?

2009-06-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
1 June 2009
By Michael Glackin

A week, they say, is a long time in politics. And so it seems like an eternity since British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proclaimed to the nation that he had a "moral compass" that guided all his decisions and underpinned his policies. Today, less than two years on, his moral compass looks more like a defective traffic direction finder, the kind you rip out of your car because it can't tell right from left, or in Brown's case, right from wrong.
In case you missed it, the United Kingdom is enduring an unending moral sclerosis within Parliament. Members of Parliament from all parties have been exposed for scandalously misusing their generous expense allowances to line their own pockets, enriching themselves and their families. The public outrage is such that some parliamentarians have returned money or decided not to seek re-election. So far, a minister and the Speaker of the House of Commons have been forced out of office.
A fish of course rots from the head down. Brown has been exposed for using taxpayers' money to pay his brother for "cleaning services," and he has also claimed tens of thousands of pounds of public money for running and renovating two different homes. The prime minister's manipulation of the system is far from the most blatant. But the expenses scandal is just the latest to envelop him and call into question his cultivated image as a model of probity and integrity.
The impact of all this on British policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan should not be overlooked. In his struggle to hold the fast disintegrating ring at home, Brown has given up foreign affairs unless it offers him a decent photo opportunity. Unfortunately, the only international photo worth having today usually involves US president Barack Obama, and much to Brown's chagrin opportunities for him there are very limited.
Even allowing for the usual fawning over American presidents that British politicians indulge in to give credence to the "special relationship," Brown's overt desperation to get close to Obama in the hope that some of the president's stardust might fall on him has been embarrassing.
Obama knows a lame duck when he sees one and is already looking beyond Brown. When the president visited the UK in April for the G-20 summit he went out of his way to meet the opposition Conservative leader David Cameron. It was also noticeable that US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton took time out to hold a meeting with the Conservative's shadow foreign secretary, William Hague.
The "special relationship" isn't so special these days. Unlike Tony Blair and George W. Bush, or indeed Blair and Bill Clinton, Brown does not enjoy a close personal bond with Obama. At the same time, unlike many of his predecessors, Obama has no great affection for the UK. Whereas Clinton was a former Rhodes Scholar who enjoyed Oxford University and much else that the swinging 1960s in England had to offer, Obama was exposed to a very different side of British culture which saw his grandfather tortured by British soldiers during Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion.
Right now the US president is angry at the UK's response, not to mention the rest of Europe, to his call for more military aid in Afghanistan.
Brown was of course the only Western leader to offer substantial help, and Britain remains the principal contributor of troops to the Afghan conflict after America. But Brown's decision to send just a temporary force of 700 British troops to join the 8,300 already in Helmand and provide security during the August election, fell way short of the thousands of troops Obama was hoping to get from the prime minister as the UK pulls out of Iraq. It also falls short of the 10,000 permanent troops British military chiefs insist is necessary to bring stability to the Helmand-Kandahar region.
But Brown has domestic reasons for resisting Obama's and his own generals' pleas. The human sacrifice - this weekend saw the death of the 164th British soldier in the conflict - and the increasing financial burden, which will see the cost of the conflict hit $3.6 billion in 2008-2009, up from $2.4 billion the year before, are fast becoming unacceptable to UK voters. Meanwhile new laws proposed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai sanctioning child marriage and marital rape leave many voters questioning what kind of regime British troops are dying to establish in Afghanistan.
Consequently, much as Brown wants to bask in the glow of the "special relationship" he has no intention of adding to his many domestic woes by sinking deeper into an unpopular war. Brown's priority is political survival and further commitments to Afghanistan do nothing to help him in that quest.
Although Brown will almost certainly lead his party into a humiliating defeat in June's European Parliament elections and later national elections, the current scandal surrounding parliamentary expenses may lessen the scale of the defeat because support for the Conservatives has also been hit. Brown may even decide to take a calculated gamble and call a national election in the autumn, six months before he has to, and before he is tainted by anything else.
But whenever the election takes place, the UK will have a new government. And while it too will extol the "special relationship" it will be just as unwilling to pay the price demanded by Washington for it as the current government. The country needs some time alone with its scandals.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

The UK chats up Hizbullah ... again

2009-03-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

Friday 20 March 2009
The Daily Star
By Michael Glackin

How angry is the White House with the United Kingdom for opening talks with Hizbullah? Judging by the tirade of criticism that emanated from the US State Department last week, the answer is very angry indeed.

Despite the fact that President Barack Obama is making overtures to those the Bush White House once deemed untouchable, it is clear from the comments coming out of Washington that this new policy has its limits.

The US of course has a particular problem with Hizbullah, which it believes was behind the bomb attack that killed 241 US Marines in Beirut in 1983. But you could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the White House, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, "doth protest too much" and is privately content with the UK's attempts to fly solo.

This would perhaps better explain why the UK suddenly appears to be abandoning its recent record of unquestioning acquiescence to US policy and is publicly cocking a snook at its ally, the special relationship and the most popular leader in the world at the moment.

It's worth pointing out that these latest talks, which were officially sanctioned in the summer of 2008, actually represent a resumption rather than an entirely new policy. UK talks with Hizbullah go back as far as 2001 and only stopped during the turmoil following the Hariri assassination. Therefore, over the last eight years or so the UK has spent more time talking to Hizbullah than ignoring it.

The catalyst for the current resumption was Hizbullah's decision to join Lebanon's national unity government in May 2008. A Foreign Office official told me this provided the British government with a "window of opportunity to engage Hizbullah by opening low level talks to encourage it to play a more positive role in politics." The Foreign Office insists it is talking to what it calls Hizbullah's "political wing," and will not hold discussions with the movement's "military wing."

Of course, this "window of opportunity" opened because Hizbullah, its "military wing" included, orchestrated a wave of civil unrest, followed by a military takeover of western Beirut, that substantially weakened the democratic government, including a parliamentary majority that had been targeted by a succession of (unsolved) murders of several of its members.

It is this, among other things, that has apparently so annoyed the Americans. While the UK has opted to compartmentalize Hizbullah's political, social and military functions, Washington insists that Hizbullah's leadership is so integrated that any attempt to separate its various activities is foolhardy.

But one cannot escape the feeling that the Obama administration is perfectly at ease with the UK's engagement of Hizbullah. In the space of a few months Obama has moved away from the Bush policy of isolating so-called rogue states to engaging them. Obama is preparing, according to The Los Angeles Times, to send a secret message to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, inviting him to open a clandestine "back channel" for direct talks between Washington and Tehran. Indeed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has invited Iran to this month's international conference on Afghanistan at The Hague. Meanwhile US officials, among them the acting US assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, have begun talks with Syrian officials.

Arguably, British policy is merely seeking to get a step ahead of the US, as opposed to its previous policy of following Washington's lead. The Foreign Office is keen to stress that the move to engage Hizbullah should be seen "purely within the context of Lebanon's political scene." However, insiders concede it is also part of a "wider approach" in the Middle East.

The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, has already broken bread with President Bashar Assad in Damascus. Last weekend a former minister, Clare Short, a left-wing Labor parliamentarian, also visited Damascus where she met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and called for the UK to end its boycott of the Palestinian group. The meeting was well publicized, in contrast to several low-profile visits that other British politicians have made to Meshaal over the last year.

Short was not representing the government of course, and for the record the Foreign Office still insists there are "absolutely no plans" to open talks with Hamas. An official told me: "If there's a lesson for Hamas in our low-level talks with Hizbullah it is that if it decides to agree to the Quartet principles, the door would be open." Perhaps I missed Hizbullah's announcement that it was renouncing violence, throwing down its arms and recognizing Israel. But there is clearly a pattern emerging that a more softly softly approach, which for now includes contact with Hizbullah, but before long is likely to include Hamas too, is now central to UK policy.

The previous policy of isolating enemies and promoting liberal democracy is in pieces, broken by its own failure. The West has so far failed to thwart Iran's ambitions to become a nuclear power. Israeli military actions have strengthened both Hamas and Hizbullah. Security may have at long last improved in Iraq, or at least enough for coalition troops to depart, but Afghanistan remains a disaster and neighboring Pakistan is now a political basket case as well. Large parts of Pakistan's northwest are firmly under the control of the Taliban with tacit government approval. The West cannot allow Pakistan to become another Afghanistan any more than it can sit back and allow Iran to join the nuclear club.

The UK, like the US, wants to draw a line through what has gone on before and clearly feels the interlocking relationships between Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas is a good place to start. The fates of all four are inextricably entwined, and with them the future of Lebanon. The question that remains unanswered is what price Lebanon will pay for this change of policy, particularly in the run up to elections in June?

When I put this question to the Foreign Office the official said: "We don't seek to empower one movement over another. We are supportive of the Siniora government and our talks with Hizbullah do not change that."

So that's alright then. But official talks offer Hizbullah, or its political wing, an official sanction that may well undermine political parties that don't have a "military wing," those that rely on elections to bring down governments.

The government often cites the lessons learned through the peace process in Northern Ireland when discussing the Middle East. But it is worth remembering that the moderate political parties quickly lost ground to the extremists once the government opened a dialogue with them. The two moderate Northern Ireland politicians who won the Nobel Prize in 1998, John Hume and David Trimble, both lost their parliamentary seats to more extremist parties a few years afterward.

Of course the advances in Northern Ireland, notwithstanding the recent outbreak of violence, have been fantastic. But crucially the IRA leadership told the British government that "the war was over" before formal talks began. Has Hizbullah given a similar assurance? I doubt if it was even asked.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.

The gun gets an olive branch

2009-03-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 18 March 2009
NOW Lebanon
By Michael Glackin

Britain reaches out to Hezbollah

Those in Britain with an interest in political Islam suffered a blow over the weekend when it emerged that a Hezbollah official, Ibrahim Moussawi, would not be allowed into the United Kingdom to lecture on the subject at the School of Oriental and African Studies later this month.

The Home Office, the department responsible for the banning order, does not comment on individual cases, but department insiders told me that Moussawi’s application for a visa was denied on the basis that his presence in the UK “was not conducive to the public good.” It’s worth pointing out that Moussawi can appeal the decision, although the process is unlikely to offer him much comfort.

Moussawi will probably feel hard done by. Quite why his presence is now suddenly “not conducive to the public good” after he happily visited Britain’s shores last year and in 2007 without interference is a bit of a mystery. During Moussawi’s previous trips, Hezbollah was a proscribed movement. Now when the British authorities are openly talking to Hezbollah, he has suddenly found himself persona non grata.

Confused? Well it’s not the only confusing occurrence in the UK’s relationship with Hezbollah in the last week. Earlier this month Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell, whose remit includes the Middle East, caused consternation when he announced that the government had just “reconsidered” its policy toward Hezbollah and would now talk to ‘‘carefully selected’’ contacts within the movement’s “political wing” – by which he meant members of parliament.

Unfortunately for Rammell, the policy he thought he was unveiling has been in existence for almost a year, and was first revealed in July 2008, five months after Moussawi’s last visit to the UK. In fact, the policy is even older than that. In December 2001, then-British Ambassador to Lebanon Richard Kinchen met with the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. This “official contact” lasted until 2005, and ended because of a combination of factors, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and the fact that it was yielding little positive results.

Putting aside Rammell’s blushes, not to mention his ignorance of his own department’s policy, the catalyst and purpose for this not-so-new approach was explained to me by a friendly but unenlightening Foreign Office spokesperson. She told me that Hezbollah’s decision to join the Lebanese national-unity government – which of course came about after it brought the country to a standstill and used force against the existing government – provided an opportunity for the UK to “engage Hezbollah.”

This meant that the British ambassador in Lebanon has been given permission to open what the Foreign Office describes as “low-level talks” with the aim of “encouraging Hezbollah to take a more positive role in the political process.” The government’s objectives are straightforward: “We want Hezbollah to disarm and stop supporting terrorism and participate in Lebanese politics as a democratic party. This dialogue helps us communicate these points to Hezbollah,” the spokesperson said.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Hezbollah was already aware of what the UK and most Western governments wanted them to do for some time now. But in the spirit of this engagement, Moussawi was probably looking forward to explaining how these aspirations fit in with Hezbollah’s view of “political Islam” to a British audience, which was set to include a number of Foreign Office staff members.

Actually, Moussawi found himself caught up in purely domestic row. The government was heavily criticized after it banned Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders from entering the UK earlier this year for a screening of his controversial film “Fitna” – which links Islam to terrorism – at the House of Lords. The government faced accusations of being tough on critics of Islam and soft on Muslim extremists. The public perception that the British government is soft on Muslim extremism was further evidenced for many when a handful of such extremists were allowed to protest last week during a parade for soldiers returning from Iraq.

Moussawi aside, the new British policy toward Hezbollah is broadly in line with Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s speech in India earlier this year, when he poured scorn on the idea of the “war on terror”. It can also be viewed as part of what US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton calls America’s “smart diplomacy”, although the White House insists, for now at any rate, that it will not talk to anyone from Hezbollah.

Has the UK’s olive branch to Hezbollah achieved anything?

The Foreign Office insists it is too early to say if the approach is working. The spokesperson said, “The jury’s still out. We’ll assess it on a regular basis. There is no open-ended check here.” But with Lebanon’s elections just under three months away, there may be some who think this very public rapprochement with Hezbollah, by a government that just a year ago was one of its most vociferous critics, will be money in the bank for the party on polling day. Maybe Rammell isn’t as ignorant as we thought.
Michael Glackin, a UK based journalist and former managing editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut. The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of NOW Lebanon.

British Conservatives and the Middle East

2009-03-02T13:18:00.000-08:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday 3 March 2009
By Michael Glackin

Gordon Brown's government is in its death throes, propelled there by a recession, rising unemployment and a succession of revelations highlighting ministerial sleaze. The odds on Brown being prime minister after an election, which he must call before May 2010, are long indeed.

The latest opinion polls reveal the government is trailing the opposition Conservative Party by 16 points and is now just three points ahead of the much smaller Liberal Democrats.

So what can the Middle East expect from a future Conservative government?

Speaking to me earlier this month David Lidington, the Conservative shadow minister for foreign affairs and the party's Middle East spokesperson, outlined what the region could expect from a Conservative government, and made it clear that lofty ideals such as democracy will no longer be the yardstick for measuring political progress in the region.

"The experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has given us a more sober assessment about how difficult it is to introduce political reform," Lidington told me. "I think we've learned that it is very difficult to impose democracy by force, particularly by foreign force, and that democracy in terms of votes and competing political parties is not enough."

Lidington said a Conservative government would remain "very interested" in human rights and democratic reform, but it is clear that stability, not democracy, will be the guiding principle of Conservative Middle East policy. "We are not starry eyed about the ability of Britain or even a country as powerful as the United States simply to snap its fingers and impose such a system on places with their own cultures and histories," he explained. "I would hope that we will see the development of democratic and plural institutions in the Middle East in different countries, but in each country it will have to be in a fashion that takes account of the particular history and culture of that nation."

On one level this "more sober assessment" is a reflection of the policy shift in the corridors of power of Washington and London. But this sort of realpolitik in Middle East affairs has never been far from the surface of Conservative policy. When the American and British government, along with France, cold shouldered Syria in the wake of the 2005 assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, the Conservative Party continued to talk to President Bashar Assad's regime.

Lidington has long believed Western attempts to isolate Syria have failed. Britain and France have already undergone a Damascene conversion and the obvious desire of US President Barack Obama to bury the hatchet that his predecessor waved over Assad's head is the latest vindication of his party's policy of maintaining a dialogue with Damascus.

But you get nothing for nothing in international diplomacy, and as the West rushes to bring Syria in from the cold, many people in the Middle East, particularly the Lebanese, wonder what price will be paid for this rapprochement? Many wonder whether the Hariri Tribunal, which begins operating this week but will not hear testimony before next year, might now grind to a halt as Syria's international rehabilitation gathers pace.

No says Lidington. "We haven't moved from our position supporting the Hariri Tribunal. But, we do take the view that you need to talk to governments even when you have the most profound differences with them. I certainly take the view that efforts to isolate a government are rarely effective and probably breed greater risk of misunderstanding. That doesn't mean you take on trust everything that another government says to you, you have to sup with long spoons."

But why stop at Damascus? If you can use a long spoon to sup with a regime that the UN has implicated in a terror attack on another state then why not use it to sup with Hamas, or Hizbullah? Both groups have successfully contested elections that were more open and democratic than those won by Assad and the Baath Party in Syria. Both groups are also crucial to any hopes of stability in the region. Do they not fall into the "more sober assessment" category?

Lidington agrees both groups are central to creating a stable Middle East, but insists the United Kingdom must distinguish between the governments of a sovereign nation, in this case Assad and Syria, and a group which "openly advocates violence."

"I would accept that Hamas has electoral support and it does represent a significant strand of Palestinian opinion," he said. "But I think that if we are going to deal with it as a party to Middle East diplomacy that can only be on the basis that it has committed itself to being a political movement rather than a movement based on violence."

Lidington concedes his party has what he calls "channels of communication" with Hamas through some of its backbench MPs and contacts in various NGOs, but insists no direct talks will take place until Hamas renounces violence for good and formally recognizes Israel.

Despite this there is strong support within the Conservative Party for direct talks with Hamas. Former Conservative ministers Michael Ancram and Chris Patten, both of whom were involved in the Northern Ireland peace process, recently called for the scrapping of preconditions on talks with Hamas, insisting the group should only be required to halt its violence, not renounce it entirely, to join peace negotiations.

Bearing in mind the Conservatives' willingness to cock a snoot at both the US and UK government over Syria, it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see a situation where a Conservative government would be prepared to break bread with Hamas or indeed Hizbullah if it felt it was in the UK's wider interests. While describing Hizbullah as a terror group on the one hand, Lidington also insists it is "an authentic movement," because of its strong electoral support, and as such would have to be part of any Middle East peace settlement.

"You cannot disentangle Hizbullah from broader questions of the Middle East. If you think about prospects of a deal between Israel and Syria over the Golan you can sketch quite easily the territorial demarcation lines; but I cannot see any Israeli government finalizing a deal without some firm assurances concerning the supply of arms to Hizbullah across Syrian territory. When you start getting into that discussion you're immediately talking about the relationship of Hizbullah to Iran as well. These are all part of a broader regional picture."

Whether you see the Conservative Party's "more sober assessment" of the region's future as a long overdue correction or a contradictory and indeed dangerous policy, one thing is certain: The West now appears to view the idea of Middle East democracy with the same disdain it once had for Soviet Communism. It is fast becoming the doctrine that can no longer speak its name in this part of the world.
Michael Glackin is former manging editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

British reserve

2009-01-20T10:09:00.001-08:00

20 January 2009
Now Lebanon
By Michael Glackin
Despite the criticism at home directed at the UK’s Labour government for its stance on the Israeli offensive in Gaza, the UK’s Mideast policy has little impact; the policy that matters is on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Most of my family were killed in the Holocaust. In Poland, my grandmother was shot dead in her bed by a German soldier. She was too ill to get up you see, so he shot her. But none of that justifies Israel murdering Palestinians."

Sir Gerald Kaufman, veteran Labour Member of Parliament and former minister was talking to me just before he had to rush off to take part in a parliamentary debate on the latest Gaza conflict late on Thursday afternoon.

Kaufman, who is Jewish, is a long standing supporter of Israel, though a vociferous critic of both its current government and of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. But Kaufman is not blind to the Real Politik of the Middle East. He voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq, and more recently voted against a parliamentary investigation into the war.

During Thursday's three hour debate he told parliament the Israeli government was "cynically exploiting the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians". He said the Israeli claim that 500 of the 1,000 Palestinian victims of the conflict were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."

The debate revealed how out of step the UK government's inertia on the continuing violence is with parliamentarians of all political parties. It also follows two weekends of demonstrations in most of the UK's major cities against the Israeli offensive.

Opposition Conservative MP Hugo Swire, who chairs the Conservative Middle East Council and also supported the invasion of Iraq, called on the government to open talks with Hamas. He insisted the elected Hamas administration in Gaza had a more democratic mandate than Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas has of course ruled by decree for the last two years and the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah has not met for more than a year.

Another Conservative, former Northern Ireland minister Michael Ancram, said he had spoken to Hamas leaders who were willing to acknowledge the existence of Israel, but added Israel's actions made it harder for moderates to win support.

In addition to several calls for economic sanctions against Israel, a number of MPs called on the government to recall the UK ambassador from Israel and expel the Israeli Ambassador from the UK.

But lively as the debate was, it is extremely unlikely to have any impact on what passes for government policy on the conflict.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband missed the debate because he was visiting India. But speaking in parliament earlier in the week he insisted the ill fated UK authored UN resolution calling for a cease fire was evidence of the government's hard work and commitment to solving the conflict despite the fact that it was ignored by both sides and only passed after America agreed to abstain rather than use its veto. If this kind of abject failure is how the government measures success I'd hate to see what it considers failure.

Miliband firmly ruled out severing diplomatic ties or imposing sanctions, insisting that would simply isolate Israel. He also ruled out talks with Hamas. He did call for abuse allegations made by both sides to be investigated, although he neglected to say who should investigate them.

Israel has twice bombed United Nations buildings in Gaza during this offensive – insisting missiles had been fired from the premises, something the UN vehemently, and it seems quite rightly, deny. Therefore it is unlikely Tel Aviv will consider a UN led investigation to be entirely impartial. Mind you, considering the UN's long running probe into former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri's murder has so far yielded little, this may be a good thing. For the record, the Foreign Office had no idea who would carry out such an investigation either.

Meanwhile, as the violence in Gaza intensified, Quartet Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair was busy accepting the presidential medal of freedom from outgoing US president George W Bush for his support in the war on terror – a phrase Miliband poured scorn on during a speech in Mumbai this week.

Yet for all the criticism of the government, it should be remembered the UK is a bit player in all this. For that matter so too are the Palestinians. Israel has the support of the world's only superpower, and in reality, as the last eight years have shown, it doesn't have to talk to anyone outside of Washington. Hence Hamas - whose electoral success represents Palestinians anger at the failure of anybody to do anything about their plight - and with it Gaza, remain beyond the Pale.

The obscenity here is that Israel is well aware that negotiations with a weakend and all but bankrupt Abbas, such as the now dead in the water Annapolis talks, are pointless. Having been ousted from Gaza, Abbas' authority is now seriously under threat in the West Bank. Annapolis, which Abbas supposed would lead to a comprehensive agreement with Israel by the end of 2008, has instead led to the death of at least 292 children in Gaza since the offensive started, none of whom voted for Hamas in the last election, along with the death of more than 700 adults.

Will this change when the new administration starts work this week?

The former Northern Ireland minister Ancram made a telling point during the parliamentary debate when he said peace in Northern Ireland was only achieved when the White House became heavily involved and former US senator George Mitchell took charge of chairing the talks process. He called on incoming president Barak Obama to make a similar commitment to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the government here will continue to watch and wait until Israel decides its time to stop hostilities. Welcome to 2009.
Michael Glackin is a journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Brown preaches morals he doesn't have

2008-10-21T01:45:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 21 October 2008
The Daily Star
By Michael Glackin

The turmoil on the world's financial markets is getting serious. I bumped into a stock broker acquaintance the other day who complained he hadn't enjoyed a decent night's sleep in months. Feeling rather sorry for him, I asked how much money he had lost. "I haven't lost anything", he told me. "All my cash is stuffed under my mattress, has been for months. It's safer there but makes my bed a rather uncomfortable place to sleep."

Unfortunately his clients are not so fortunate, and so my acquaintance is probably one of the people British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had in mind last week when he criticized bankers, fund managers and other financiers for what he called a "lack of morals." As the world financial meltdown intensified, despite heavy government intervention across the globe, Brown insisted "financial markets need morals."

Brown is fond of pontificating about morals. Not so long ago he boastfully told us he had a "moral compass" that guided his decision making and underpinned his political principles. But frankly, far from lecturing people on morality, Brown could do with discovering a few morals himself.
The plight of Iraqi interpreters working for the British Army in Iraq offers a good example of the prime minister's duplicity when it comes to moral standards.

Twelve months ago Brown's government introduced the British Locally Engaged Staff Assistance Scheme. The scheme was supposed to help those Iraqis who had put their lives at risk working for Britain's armed forces in Basra - doing everything from interpreting to washing soldiers' uniforms - to settle in the UK.

Around 20,000 Iraqis have worked for the British armed forces since the invasion. Many of them, along with their families, have suffered intimidation, abduction, torture and murder at the hands of militias who see them as "enemy collaborators." Fearing for their lives many are now in hiding and want to leave Iraq.

However, instead of helping these people, the British Locally Engaged Staff Assistance Scheme actually erected a series of insurmountable hurdles which prevent Iraqi interpreters and others employed by the British in Iraq from ever getting into the UK.

Under the scheme there are 600 resettlement places for Iraqi staff and their dependants in the UK over the next two years. Up to September, there have been more than 1,100 applications for those 600 places. Official figures reveal that more than 500 of those applicants have been assessed as ineligible for resettlement in the UK.

The criteria for the scheme are very strict. Only those who have worked as interpreters or other similarly skilled or professional roles for a minimum of 12 consecutive months from the start of January 2005 are eligible to apply for resettlement. In fact, according to Leigh Day & Co., a law firm that is representing some of the Iraqi interpreters, only 158 former staff are actually being considered for resettlement in the UK. But it gets worse. When I spoke to the Foreign Office last week, a spokesperson told me that only 23 Iraqis have actually arrived in the UK under the scheme, which has now been running for a year.

In short, it would be easier to break into Fort Knox in broad daylight dressed as Osama bin Laden than get into the UK via this scheme. Meanwhile, dozens of Iraqis who have worked for the British Army are being murdered and threatened on a regular basis.

One interpreter had his application rejected because he had only worked for the British Army for 11 months and three weeks, just six days short of the required 12 months. Four interpreters he worked with during his time with the army have all been murdered. After escaping one attempt on his life he is currently in hiding outside Basra.

Another interpreter, who worked for British forces for six months, was forced to flee to Syria after his father was kidnapped, tortured and murdered. The killers telephoned him to tell him he would be next and played a tape recording of his father's screams while being tortured. Despite being married to a UK citizen he has been refused a visa to come to the UK to join her.

Another Iraqi, who worked as a laundry assistant and whose original employment with the British Army was subcontracted out to a Western private contractor (KBR), fled to Syria after surviving two attempts on his life. His application to settle in the UK under the scheme was rejected because his employment had been transferred from the UK government to an independent contractor.

The Foreign Office told me that most Iraqis employed by the army have opted to take a one-off cash settlement from the government to remain in Iraq rather than apply for UK resettlement. But Leigh Day & Co. insists this is because most Iraqis believe there is little real chance they will ever be allowed to settle in the UK.

The UK scheme does not compare well with what Britain's coalition partners are doing. Poland for example, which has already resettled 25 of its former Iraqi workers and their families in Poland - more than the UK has managed over the same period - only requires evidence of six months of employment with its forces. America, Australia and Denmark also operate a much less restrictive system. Under one of the American schemes there is no minimum term of service requirement at all, while another scheme covers all workers employed by US subcontractors, something the UK scheme does not.

But you could be forgiven for wondering quite why the interpreters expected the government to behave in a moral and responsible way toward them.

The Gurkhas, legendary Nepalese soldiers who have fought as British soldiers in just about every war the UK has waged over the last 150 years, were forced to go to court this month after the government refused them permission to settle in the UK. In the First World War their service included battling the Ottomans during the Arab Revolt alongside the Arab armies of Faisal and Abdullah with Lawrence of Arabia. More recently they have fought in the Falklands, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Despite this Brown's government insisted the Gurkhas had "no strong ties" to the UK and refused a large number of Gurkha veterans the right to settle in Britain. The High Court thought otherwise, and ruled the UK government's policy toward the Gurkhas was unlawful.

Unfortunately a similar move on behalf of Iraqi workers was thrown out by the High Court last month. Leigh Day & Co. barrister Daniel Leader acknowledged the ruling means the legal route to get justice for the Iraqi interpreters and others is effectively closed but added: "We will be working to highlight the plight of our clients and it is hoped that the government will adopt a more humane approach to people who have risked their lives for the British Army."

Never mind the moral compass, someone should pass Gordon Brown a dictionary so he can look up what the word moral actually means. Brown may not be able to shore up the global financial system, but he can definitely act to save the lives of people who have served his cause in Iraq.
Michael Glackin is a journalist and former managing editor of Lebanese newspaper THE DAILY STAR.

An Irishman offers advice in Beirut

2008-08-04T16:03:00.001-07:00

Monday, 4 August 2008.
The Daily Star
By Michael Glackin

Beirut played host last week to Raymond McCartney, elected member of Northern Ireland's new devolved parliament. Although little known outside of his native Northern Ireland, McCartney's views on what social scientists call "conflict resolution" make him a much sought after speaker around the world. He arrived in Beirut two weekends ago to take part in a conference organized by the London-based Conflicts Forum, examining how political groupings on the margins of society can eventually move forward to occupy the center stage.

It's a journey he and his political party, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA,) have already made.

Not so long ago McCartney was deemed beyond the political pale. A member of the IRA, which opposed British rule in Northern Ireland, McCartney was convicted of two murders while a teenager in 1979 and spent 15 years in Northern Ireland's notorious Maze Prison.

During his incarceration he and other Republican inmates refused to wear prison uniforms, part of their insistence on being treated as political prisoners, not criminals, by the British government. He and others went naked, wrapping themselves in prison-issue blankets. McCartney was among those who refused to leave their cells to wash or use toilet facilities and instead daubed their excrement on the walls of their cells.

The conflict between the "blanket" protesters and the United Kingdom's government culminated in McCartney going on hunger strike for 53 days in 1980, the first wave of the hunger strikes that the following year culminated in 10 Republican prisoners starving themselves to death. A giant mural of a young, long haired and gaunt looking McCartney, wrapped in his prison blanket, still stares out from the gable end of a house in Derry City's Bogside area as a tribute to the hunger strikers.

Today McCartney is a respected politician. His murder convictions were quashed last year by the same British courts that condemned him years earlier. As a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, representing Sinn Fein, he now works closely with the British government whose prisoner he once was and whom he almost died opposing. The now middle-aged and gray-haired McCartney is both beneficiary and part of the new political establishment created by the peace process of recent years.

As a member of the Northern Ireland's International Development Committee he now travels across the globe, from South Africa to the Middle East and Basque region of Spain, discussing conflict resolution. History is riddled with examples of men labeled terrorists one day and statesmen the next. In this part of the world Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat spring to mind, though the most globally recognized and revered is the former South African President Nelson Mandela.

But what can someone with McCartney's experience as a former political prisoner turned statesman offer to the myriad conflicts that beset the Middle East? McCartney concedes that he can provide few concrete solutions and structures to deal with the issues facing Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan or Lebanon. "I'm simply in Beirut to outline my experience," he told me before traveling to Lebanon. "That allows people in similar struggles to relate my experience to their own and maybe use what's of benefit to them."

McCartney expected to meet Lebanese people "from various factions" during his short stay, including Hizbullah. He will find an informed audience. In the handful of meetings I had with Hizbullah officials while based in Beirut I was always impressed by their knowledge of the situation in Northern Ireland. It was a good deal better than that of the average Irish American. But Hizbullah officials were always at pains to insist they were not following the same path as Sinn Fein, that of abandoning arms for political progress or even political power.

McCartney agrees that it's difficult to draw direct parallels, but adds there are what he calls "general principles" for resolving conflicts within rival groups that could be used in Lebanon and elsewhere. "Conflict resolution success processes have common threads, inclusivity, representation and equality," he explains. "Everyone has to see and treat everyone with equal respect. You cannot have a framework of resolving conflict based entirely on your terms. You have to have a mutual understanding of everyone's views."

A leadership that knows when to take the gun out of politics is crucial too, but that is something the Middle East, on the whole, has, so far at least, to grasp. This is arguably where British government officials, including current Middle East envoy Tony Blair, who continually raise the peace process in Northern Ireland as a template that can be utilized for the Middle East make a serious error.

In Northern Ireland the British government negotiated directly with those who could deliver the hard-line gunmen, those who in effect controlled them. That single point of contact does not appear to exist within Hamas, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban. It does of course exist within Hizbullah, but there is more chance of US President George W. Bush being offered the keys to Tehran than Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah ordering Hizbullah to disarm and commit itself solely to the political process.

While not wishing to discuss the issue of Hizbullah's weapons directly, McCartney makes it clear he believes the party's reluctance stems from a lack of political progress. "Ability to deliver people is one thing," he says. "But political progress is the paramount requirement."

"The key to the process in the north of Ireland was people could see that politics were working. Ability to deliver is meaningless if you're faced with a political vacuum. Things had to be achieved and aims have to be realized to keep people on board. The political process has to deliver meaningful change, otherwise the ability to deliver people counts for nothing."

Arguably, political progress in the Middle East is bedeviled by the inability of various parties to compromise. But can a visitor from Northern Ireland provide those in the region with good ideas for how to do so? Raymond McCartney doubtless hoped so as he made his way through Lebanon, where compromise has not been the highest priority lately.
Michael Glackin is a freelance journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Amid worsening wars, Brown spins

2008-06-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

By Michael Glackin
Friday, 20 June 2008
The Daily Star

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is scheduled to make "an important strategy announcement" on Iraq next month. Much to US President George W. Bush's chagrin it will involve troop withdrawals, which are likely to take place in the last quarter of this year.

But it will not, military insiders assure me, involve the withdrawal of all British forces from Iraq by the end of the year, as some government officials were suggesting last week. That particularly tasteless bit of spin came as the number of British troops killed in Afghanistan has reached 106. You don't have to be a cynic to see the connection. But Brown is increasingly relying on spin these days as his political reputation unravels.

A humiliating by-election defeat recently was followed by the government scraping to victory in a parliamentary vote to extend the number of days terror suspects can be held without charge, from 28 days to 42. Thirty-six of Brown's own parliamentarians voted against him, forcing the prime minister to appeal for the support of nine Ulster Unionist members to win. Meanwhile, breaches in domestic security have resulted in top secret intelligence documents related to Al-Qaeda, Iraq and British defense matters being lost or stolen on three separate occasions in less than a week.

Unfortunately foreign affairs do not offer Brown much respite from his domestic woes. Military sources insisted to me last week that current British troop levels in Iraq of 4,000 would be maintained for the "foreseeable future." Another said there was a chance that around 500-1,000 of the current force could be withdrawn, but that would not occur until September or October at the earliest, because Iraqi troops are still not capable of handling the situation in Basra on their own. The military insider said: "Iraqi forces are a brigade down at the moment. They're not up to full strength, let alone trained strength. Any drawing down of troops cannot happen until these two issues are addressed."

Currently there are around 30,000 Iraqi troops in southern Iraq spread among three brigades.
A Defense Ministry source added the security situation in Basra remained "fragile." "There is still an insurgency and that still needs to be dealt with," he said. Since the row with the Iraqi government over Brown's attempt to reduce the British force by almost half earlier this year - which embarrassingly left British troops on the sidelines during the initial phase of the operation to crush Shiite militias in Basra last April - British military policy has changed.

Although a majority of British soldiers remain concentrated at the Basra air base on the outskirts of the city, a number of troops have now been embedded in Iraqi units operating in the south in a bid to improve the performance of Iraqi forces in the field. In addition, training of Iraqi forces now focuses on urban fighting rather than battlefield training.

The change in policy, which stems from Iraqi failures during the battle for Basra, is a departure from the British government's earlier cut and run policy. But it is still about paving the way for the United Kingdom's exit, albeit less hastily, within the next two years, before the next British election. That will of course free up troops for the conflict in Afghanistan. The milestone of the death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan last week reopened the debate about what purpose the British presence in the country is serving.

Defense Minister Des Browne insisted a few days ago that the West is winning the war, as he announced an additional 230 British troops would be sent to Afghanistan. Contrary to Browne's assessment, however, General Sir David Richards, the commander in chief of British land forces, told the Defense Ministry's in-house journal: "Though things have improved, don't think for one minute we can believe that we are winning."

A few days ago, 400 Taliban fighters, who escaped from a jail in Kandahar following a Taliban rocket attack on their prison, seized villages near the main British airbase there, a move that threatens the facility providing the main air link with the UK. And last weekend four US marines were killed by a roadside bomb in Farah. Total allied combat deaths in Afghanistan for the month of May exceeded the toll in Iraq during the same month.

The small area where the writ of Afghan President Hamid Karzai runs is shrinking further as insurgent attacks occur in areas, such as Herat, that a year ago were considered safe. The Taliban even came close to assassinating Karzai a few months ago. Outgoing NATO commander Dan McNeil has said that there has been a 40 percent increase in attacks this year as the Taliban moves away from direct confrontation to attacking troops with improvised explosives and suicide bombers.

As the security situation deteriorates, infrastructure and development work becomes further stalled. Political progress is virtually nonexistent and Karzai's administration is riddled with corruption. Many in the UK looked on aghast at the $21 billion pledged to Afghanistan last week. Billions of dollars have already been spent since the invasion and more than 800 allied troops have been killed, not to mention thousands of innocent Afghans. Throwing more money at the country will hold the ring for Karzai in Kabul, but it will not provide a long-term solution to Afghanistan's woes.

Against this backdrop an additional 230 British troops is hardly the cavalry arriving over the hill to save the day, no matter how much the Brown government spins it.

Michael Glackin is a freelance journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Gordon Brown is hurt, but not dead yet

2008-05-28T09:02:00.000-07:00

Michael Glackin
The Daily Star

Tuesday 22 April 2008

Despite appearances to the contrary, the knives are not quite out yet for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They are certainly being sharpened. But no one is willing to step forward and wield the blade, even though critics within government who behind closed doors had accused him of being neurotic and paranoid are starting to emerge into the open.

Last week Labor peer Lord Desai opined that "Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was." He insisted Brown was "indecisive" and "weak" and that Labor parliamentarians were actively considering who should succeed him as leader.

Desai is a peripheral figure in Labor politics. But Brown's acolytes are also starting to speak out. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, a member of Brown's trusted inner circle, stunned Westminster by conceding the government needed to "sharpen up" and give a "clear message" about what it was doing. Brown has been partly damaged by the impact of the global credit crunch on the United Kingdom. But it is the lack of direction of his government and his indecision when faced with big issues - epitomized by his allowing election speculation to mount last year - that is causing concern among Labor parliamentarians.

Iraq and Afghanistan are also contributing to Brown's woes, although arguably the ineptitude of his defense secretary, Des Browne, serves as a useful lightning conductor for the prime minister. A fortnight ago the High Court rejected Browne's attempt to prevent coroners' courts from criticizing the government for servicemen's deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. The court ruled that families of soldiers killed in action could even sue the government under human rights laws.
And last week it emerged that Browne had misled Parliament over the fiasco last year when 15 British sailors were taken hostage by Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf. Browne had insisted that the sailors were seized in Iraqi waters, but government documents now reveal that they were in fact located in disputed territory.

The government could conceivably withstand all these embarrassments were it not for the fact that British policy toward Iraq, indeed like most things at home as well, is drifting along in much the same confused manner as were the 15 sailors. The confusion, or ineptitude, was apparent again when the prime minister recently traveled to Washington, only to find himself eclipsed by Pope Benedict's visit to the city.

Although the rapport between US President George W. Bush and Brown was warmer than during Brown's visit last year, Bush still doubts the prime minister's commitment to the war in Iraq. Bush will soon be gone, but Brown is also viewed with suspicion in Baghdad where his desire to escalate the withdrawal of British troops, begun by Blair, spooked the perennially fragile Iraqi government.

The Iraqi pullout, which would have reduced British forces from 4,000 to 2,500 this year, has now been abandoned because of the fighting in Basra. But until this past weekend, British forces were embarrassingly restricted to providing air cover and medical aid in the battle between Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army. One can argue there is little point in having troops in Basra if they are not going to fight when needed. But equally, if they are going to fight, then military sources insist the 4,000-strong force must be increased. On this, Brown remains silent, underlining for many his indecision when facing big issues.

Even Brown's much touted, and frankly turgid, speech on foreign policy in Boston last week failed to provide any clues on where he stands. Brown reiterated Blair's vision of "liberal interventionism" outlined in Chicago in 1999 when NATO bombing was forcing Slobodan Milosevic to pull his Serb forces out of Kosovo. But while Blair's interventionism was based on a US-British alliance, Brown's, as stated in his speech, centers on working through global institutions like the United Nations. This is unlikely to chime any more with the next president of the United States than with Bush if US interests are threatened by, let's say, Iran. But lest we forget, five years ago Brown voted in Parliament to invade Iraq, despite a lack of UN support. Moreover, few would dispute that intervention in Kosovo was just, and that too was carried out without UN approval.

Brown's criticism of Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe in New York was a similar hypocrisy considering his willingness to be photographed alongside aggressive track-suited Chinese security guards in Downing Street when the Olympic torch came to London. The security guards are part of China's People's Armed Police, the force spearheading Beijing's brutal crackdown in Tibet. Moreover, China is a key supplier of arms to Zimbabwe. Small wonder people accuse Brown of lacking direction.

The tipping point for Brown may well come next month. The government is reconciled to a humiliating loss in upcoming local elections, but is also facing defeat in Parliament on two key government policies. Labor parliamentarians are expected to rebel against their government when Parliament votes on extending the time allowed to detain terrorism suspects without charge to 42 days. Another revolt will occur over plans to increase taxes on some of Britain's least well-paid workers, as Brown attempts to shore up the finances of his cash-strapped government.

Yet Brown is safe in his job. His most likely successor, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, refused to stand against him last year and is unlikely to rock the boat now. Moreover, Brown has waited a long time to get the reins of power in his hands. He will not relinquish them willingly and Labor cannot afford a bloody battle to oust another prime minister barely a year after allowing Brown to evict Blair. But while Brown will likely ride out this storm, he would do well to remember that just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean people aren't out to get you.

Michael Glackin is a freelance journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star

A man who helped push the Middle East into chaos

2008-05-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star

Tuesday June 26, 2007
By Michael Glackin
In May 1997 Tony Blair was swept into power on an enormous wave of optimism. Britain 's youngest prime minister since 1812, his approval ratings were the highest of any postwar British leader. He won three elections, two of which, prior tothe Iraq War, were landslides. Yet tomorrow, 10 years on, Blair will leave office, pushed out against his will and carried out on the political equivalent of a dust cart: unwanted by his party, unloved by the public.
Blair's demise dates from the day he made the ill-fated decision to support US President George W. Bush in his quest to oust Saddam Hussein. Blair, who famously said "mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war," became the leader who put more British soldiers in harm's way than any post-World War II prime minister. And many, along with millions of fathers, mothers, daughters and sons in the Middle East, are set to remain in harm's way long after he has gone.
Of course, it was all to make the world a better, safer place. But Blair's foreign policy legacy, as he heads off to justify his actions and hit the lucrative lecture circuit, is a Middle East close to meltdown and a world facing a more uncertain and dangerous future. Ironically, The Financial Times reported yesterday that Blair might be named as the new Middle East envoy of the Quartet.
Less than two years ago Blair joined Bush in taking credit for free elections in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon. Today they must take the lion's share of the blame for the current turmoil and instability in each of these countries.
Recently, Hamas militants took over Gaza in the latest escalation of its civil war with Fatah for control of the Palestinian territories. In Lebanon , Walid Eido became the latest anti-Syrian figure to be assassinated as the government propelled to power by the 2005 "Cedar Revolution" continues to totter while an emboldened Hizbullah and Syria plot to bring it down. Iraq 's bloody civil war goes from bad to worse while the United Kingdom beats a hasty retreat and America starts looking beyond Bush and toward the exits. And last week Britain 's ambassador to Afghanistan , Sherard Cowper-Coles, warned the UK might have to remain in the country for decades to protect Afghans from the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the influence of the Middle East states that defied Blair and Bush - Iran and Syria - is increasing to such an extent that they are now being increasingly courted by the West to solve the problems Blair's policies helped create. While Blair could not have prevented Bush from invading Iraq , he could have used his influence to make the US president more flexible on Palestine . Instead Blair made Britain 's foreign policy subservient to Washington 's, earning his sobriquet of "Bush's poodle."
Hamas won a clear election victory in the Palestinian Authority that Blair and Bush chose to ignore, preferring instead to negotiate and fund a corrupt Fatah under President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas could not deliver the gunmen, nor as the parliamentary elections conclusively proved, the wider public. Bush and Blair weakened Abbas further by ignoring his pleas to end Western sanctions imposed on the Palestinian Authority in the wake of Hamas' election victory. The resumption of aid last week was too little too late. Abbas needed a meaningful peace process. Blair and Bush delivered neither and, as such, bolstered the standing of Hamas.
The result is the West Bank and Gaza are now divided by ideology as well as geography and another Middle East powder keg has been ignited.
In Lebanon , Blair's refusal to condemn Israel 's bombing of Lebanese civilians last year weakened the pro-Western government at the same time as Israel 's military incompetence strengthened Hizbullah and with it Syrian President Bashar Assad. Two years ago Syria was forced out of Lebanon and Assad feared being on the wrong end of a US assault. Today Blair's government, followed by others, has beaten a path to his door to ask for help in combating Islamist terror groups. Yet only the bumbling Inspector Clouseau could fail to link Damascus to the series of murders in Lebanon that began with the assassination of Rafik Hariri.
Iraq remains a catastrophic human tragedy that worsens at every turn. No one could fail to be moved by the millions of Iraqis marching to vote in the National Assembly elections in 2005, Iraq 's first free elections. One could argue at the time that the sight of people risking their lives to vote for a better future, despite the turmoil caused by the invasion, might vindicate Blair and Bush's decision to go to war. But two elections later - one to ratify the Constitution and new parliamentary elections - the voters have shown more courage and vision than the politicians, whose failure to properly plan and execute the occupation and restructuring of Iraq has allowed festering sectarianism to explode in an orgy of violence.
The prospect of Iraq being spilt into separate states grows more likely. Blair has already abandoned the country and moves for a US pullout could begin as early as September when the US commander, General David Petraeus, delivers his progress report on America 's "surge" strategy, Bush's last-ditch attempt to finally bring order to the chaos.
Blair's failures in these countries have also jeopardized the initially successful war to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan . The US and British decision to open up another front in the"war on terror" in Iraq and spread increasingly thin military resources has emboldened the Taliban. As recent developments in Afghanistan make clear, the war in is no longer confined to the south of the country and threatens to spiral out of control.
The scale of the failure of Blair's foreign policy can be measured in death, carnage and misery across the Middle East, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris. Nero supposedly played his lyre while Rome was devoured by a fire he started. Blair's lucrative employment on the US lecture circuit will offer a modern example of the Roman emperor's vanity, while the Middle East remains enveloped in a conflagration partly of Blair's making.
Michael Glackin is a journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.

Britain tiptoes away in the darkness

2008-05-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star

23 February 2007
By Michael Glackin
"What all of this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be. But it does mean that the next chapter in Basra's history can be written by the Iraqis." With these words British Prime Minister Tony Blair formally announced the start of the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. It is the end for a government involvement in the bloody quagmire that Iraq has become since the US-led invasion in 2003. It is an admission of defeat.
The reality of Blair's astounding and tasteless understatement is that British troops are exiting a country in the throes of civil war. One where poverty and death are endemic, and corruption within all branches of government is rife.
The great beacon of democracy that Iraq was to symbolize for the entire Middle East will remain unlit as Britain tiptoes away in the darkness.
But to hear Blair talking on Wednesday you could be forgiven for thinking that none of this had anything to do with him.
It has been clear for some time that the endgame in Iraq was not going to be defined in the simple, clear terms of victory or defeat. But the idea of leaving Iraq in a better shape than Blair and US President George W. Bush found it appears to have been abandoned. Along the way, the entire Middle East has become a much bigger powder keg of trouble than it was before the invasion.
Withdrawal is the right thing to do, but the sheer hypocrisy of Blair and his government in claiming their Iraq mission has now been successfully accomplished beggars belief. Running for the door before you have fully cleared up a mess you've created is hardly a job done.

But against the backdrop of seemingly never-ending violence, Blair steadily reduced the scope of his ambitions until they became meaningless but easier to fulfill.

And make no mistake, where Blair has trod this week, Bush will follow once his last-ditch "surge" has run its course, whatever its outcome. No one wants to inherit Iraq when its principal authors leave office.
Wednesday's announcement was not a surprise. The Blair government has been briefing that a pullout, or "drawdown" as officials prefer to call it, would begin in earnest for months. A succession of senior soldiers - most notably the head of the armed forces, General Sir Richard Dannatt, last year - have warned British troops are no longer serving a useful purpose in Basra, and are now exacerbating the situation.
Dannatt's unprecedented intrusion into politics proved to be a defining point in the ill-fated Iraq mission. The British public, never wholehearted supporters of the decision to invade Iraq, became increasingly weary following Dannatt's attack on the war. In addition to thousands of Iraqis killed since the invasion, 132 British soldiers have died serving in Iraq since March 2003. The latest, Private Luke Simpson, was being buried at the same time as Blair was announcing the withdrawal to Parliament.
Blair is weary too. When government colleagues ask about policies on various issues, he reportedly answers: "Well, I won't be around for that."
Because of this, his power and grip on Cabinet colleagues is eroding fast.
Senior government official Peter Hain recently felt confident enough to slam Bush for being "the most right-wing" American president in memory.
Not so long ago, criticizing Blair's partner in the war on terror would have cost Hain his job.
Blair, a politician besotted with his legacy, has been desperate to have the start of a withdrawal in place before leaving office this summer. The beginning of the drawdown, which will reduce troop numbers in Basra from 7,100 to 5,500, is expected in May or June. This is likely to coincide with an announcement from the prime minister of a timetable for his departure from 10 Downing Street. A further 500 troops will be sent home by the end of the summer and, if all goes according to plan, there could be a further withdrawal before the end of the year. By the end of 2008, a majority of the remaining troops will be withdrawn. However, it is understood that a brigade-sized force of around 2,000 soldiers will remain garrisoned in Basra as a backup to Iraqi security services.
The speed of the withdrawals is much slower than many had forecast.
The army is understood to have recommended a much faster timetable, but concerns in Washington about Britain's dwindling commitment curbed the government's enthusiasm. Behind the supportive statements from Washington on Wednesday, the White House is greeting the withdrawal through gritted teeth. Although the withdrawn troops are likely to end up being dispatched to Afghanistan at some point, it is no secret that Washington was keen to redeploy them to Baghdad to help US troops.
Washington is also worried that arms smuggling from Iran will increase once British troops leave Basra. Basra isn't pacified, it is simply as good as it is going to get for now. The Bush administration fears withdrawal will open the floodgates to a fresh round of violence between Shiite militias in the south as they seek to fill the vacuum left by the British.
The US ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said as much last month when he admitted he would prefer British forces to remain at their current levels. When surging, you need all the surge you can get, and a 23 percent reduction in British troops while the US is increasing its numbers by 14 percent indicates a diminishing commitment in any language.
Despite this, British Defense Minister Des Browne, a close ally of Blair's likely successor, Finance Minister Gordon Brown, insisted that the United Kingdom and the US remain "on the same page" in terms of policy.
Having promised democracy and investment, the UK helped create a bloodbath. The next chapters in Iraq's history may well be written by the Iraqis, but they are stuck with a script authored by the West. And the pages look set to get even bloodier.
Michael Glackin is a freelance journalist and former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, for which this commentary was written.

Engaging Syria over Gemayel's dead body

2008-05-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star

Friday 24 November 2006

By Michael Glackin
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a man in a hurry. He is desperate to tie up as many political loose ends as he can in the coming months, the tail end of his premiership, which will end by the summer of next year. On Wednesday, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett told Parliament that British troops might hand over all of southern Iraq, including Basra, to Iraqi forces by spring. Although the Foreign Office insisted this did not mean all troops would be leaving, it reflects a fresh determination by the government to extricate itself, sooner rather than later, from an ill-fated military adventure that cannot be won and which even Blair was forced to concede last week had been a disaster.

Ready or not, Blair is hoisting the exit signs in Iraq. Hence his desire to "reach out" to Syria to help in Iraq; or more accurately get it to tighten its border to make the departure of British soldiers easier, and then fill the vacuum left behind once the pullout begins in earnest. But if last Tuesday's Mafia-style hit on Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel proves anything, it is that the United Kingdom's desire to bring Damascus in from the cold - a desire shared by a number of former American officials, most prominently the one-time secretary of state, James Baker - is misguided, to say the least.

You do not have to be Hercule Poirot to realize that despite its denials, Damascus must be a prime suspect in this latest murder. Gemayel is the fourth anti-Syrian public figure to be murdered since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri last year. Syria has also worked hard to bring down the elected government of Lebanon through Hizbullah, freshly emboldened by its resistance in the war against Israel last year. The result of the ballot box in Lebanon is increasingly under threat of being overturned by the bullet and the bomb. But talk in Britain and America this week of defending Lebanese democracy - just months after the West's failure to intervene more actively during Israel's deadly bombardment - sounds hollow and sits ill with attempts to court a Syrian regime that continues to undermine that very democracy. Blair's office insisted on Wednesday that Syria's conduct in Lebanon "was one of the criteria by which we would judge whether they were playing a constructive role or not in the Middle East as a whole." Well maybe. But in reality few believe it will stop Blair from pursuing an understanding with Damascus as the prime minister embarks on what many in Britain now see as a "unite and quit" strategy in Iraq.

Blair's desperation to extricate himself from the Iraqi labyrinth was most recently seen in his decision to dispatch his chief foreign policy adviser, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, to Damascus to sound out President Bashar Assad on helping with Iraq as well as on resuscitating whatever is still breathing of the all-but-dead Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The idea of course is to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran with the carrot of a friendlier Western policy toward Damascus. It is understood that the US was also considering sending Ambassador Margaret Scobie back to Damascus next month, a move that is unlikely to take place now. But Western attempts to openly court Syria, and indeed to a lesser extent Iran (one-third of Washington's axis of evil), are wrongheaded for a raft of reasons.

Despite Syria's halfhearted approach to border security and Iran's backing of various Iraqi Shiite militias, it is highly questionable whether either country has any real influence over what has now become a full-blown civil war in Iraq. Second, Syria and Iran both have their own interests in Iraq and in the wider region, and unless I've missed it, so far those interests have not coincided with those of the US or Britain.

While issues like the return of the Golan Heights and a fresh Palestinian-Israeli peace process can be fudged into another of those meaningless face-saving formulas the Middle East is so familiar with, other issues cannot be so easily dealt with. Tehran is determined to join the nuclear club, while Damascus wants to restore its hegemony over Lebanon. Assad also wants to thwart the mixed Lebanese-international tribunal put forward by the United Nations to try suspects in the Hariri assassination and thus avoid seeing senior officials from his regime in the dock. Is Blair, and perhaps Washington too, really prepared to pay for engaging Syria and Iran by compromising on all those issues?

One hopes the answer is no. But there is of course a horrible sense of deja vu in all this. Less than 16 years ago the fathers of the current presidents of the US and Syria came to an agreement over Iraq: In exchange for joining the international coalition forming to oust the Iraqis from Kuwait, Syrian President Hafez Assad was granted leeway to impose his control over all of Lebanon.

It was all about the "bigger picture" then, and still is today. But not so long ago, officials from the US and the UK were insisting that Lebanon was integral to their wider vision for the Middle East, even a catalyst for change in the region, not a bargaining chip. The brave new world which those who support engagement with Syria want to usher in in the Middle East is starting to look increasingly like the same old one.
Michael Glackin is a freelance journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

False Dawn in Saudi Arabia

2008-05-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

Morning Star
Tuesday 29 January
By Michael Glackin
In 2005 thousands of Shias in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia queued from dawn outside polling stations to vote in the kingdom's historic local elections. Women were not allowed to vote of course, and only half the members of local councils were actually elected with the remainder appointed by the government. But despite this, those who stood in the early morning light waiting for the polling booths to open - and inspired in part by the sight of Iraqi Shias braving bomb attacks to vote in their own elections - hoped it would mark the first tentative step towards ending years of inequality and discrimination.
Unfortunately, as so often in the Middle East , it proved a false dawn. The local councils turned out to be more impotent than even cynics predicted and talk of Shias using the authority of elected office to push for equal rights is no longer heard. Indeed two years on from the elections the plight of Shias in Saudi Arabia has in some respects worsened.
Jafar Al Shayeb, a Shia politician who was successfully elected chairman of the local council in Qatif, a predominately Shia city, admits the councils have failed to be the catalyst for change that Shias had hoped for. "It's true," he says. "The municipal council has very little authority regarding local community issues, especially religious and political ones. Shia community issues are far beyond the council."
Al Shayeb lived in exile for many years. He returned to the kingdom in 1993, when King Fahd relaxed some of the restrictions imposed on Shias in exchange for their ending active opposition to the regime from abroad. He believes some things have improved since his return, albeit due to benevolence from above rather than political power from below, but concedes the situation is far from perfect.
"Many types of harassment still take place" he explains. "Such as being held in prison for holding some religious ceremonies, distributing religious books and building religious places without a permit, which is hardly ever granted."
Discrimination has long been a fact of life for the Saudi Shia. They are prevented from building mosques, kept out of the upper ranks of the army and the security services, and deprived of senior jobs in the bureaucracy. Things are even worse for the much smaller Ismaili Shia community that inhabits the south of the kingdom where last year a judge annulled a marriage on the basis that the husband was "inadequate" because he followed the Ismaili creed and not the Wahhabi creed of his wife.
Shia are estimated to comprise between 1.5 to 2 million of a population of around 25 million, but form the majority in the kingdom's eastern province, the strategically sensitive heartland of Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. Despite a government policy to move Sunnis into the region, Shias remain the majority in large cities such as Qatif and are at least a sizeable minority in others such as Dhahram, home to Saudi Aramco, and Al-ahsa.
"The Saudi government has encouraged Sunnis to move to the eastern province by giving them jobs while qualified Shias were denied," says Ali Al Ahmed, a Shia from the eastern province and director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a Washington based think tank. "There is a real sense today that Shia are under occupation and the situation is getting worse."
Al Ahmed's view is confirmed by humanitarian groups active in the region. "There were signs of improvement in treatment of the Shia a year or so ago," says Human Rights Watch Middle East specialist Christoph Wilcke. "But within the last 10 months we have seen signs of regression."
The long standing emnity between Saudi Arabia's dominant Wahhabi creed of Sunni Islam, which views all Shia as heretics, reached its apogee following the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the establishment of Aytollah Khomeini's Shia theocracy. Emboldened by events in Iran, Shias in the eastern province rioted precipitating a crackdown by Saudi authorities that left at least a dozen people dead and many more in gaol. The crackdown also resulted in a ban on the publication and distribution of Shia books and an increase in day to day harassment of Shias by police.
Many of the restrictions were later eased, most notably King Abdullah's decision while he was crown prince to allow Shias to observe the Ashura holiday, but the re-emergence of Iran as a regional power – not to mention its nuclear ambitions - combined with a Shia led government in Iraq has intensified Sunni suspicions that the kingdom's Shias are fifth columists for outside forces who desire to annex the kingdom's oil wealth. These tensions were exacerbated further by the 2006 war between Lebanon's Shia militia Hizbullah and Israel and the filmed images of Iraqi Shias joyfully carrying out the execution of Saddam Hussein.
"Following Saadam's hanging, two senior Saudi clerics [Abdullah Bin Jebreen and Abdul Rahman al Barak] issued fatwas on the entire Shia population," says Wilcke. "And now Shias who are found during police stop and search checks with photographs of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah on their mobile phones are arrested. The same thing happens to anyone who displays pro Nasrallah stickers on their cars."
Despite such incidents, Al Shayeb believes improvements remain possible by working through what passes for Saudi Arabia's political institutions. He believes the Majlis al-Shura, the 150 strong all male all appointed consultative council that advises the king and in some cases can initiate legislation is becoming increasingly proactive.
In addition King Abdullah’s announcement last year that he intends to create a supreme court, an appeals court and new general courts to replace the Supreme Judicial Council represents a substantial curb on the hitherto unchecked powers of the conservative clerics who lead the judiciary.
And a couple of months ago al Shayeb's council succeeded in overturning a law which restricted the size of basements in Shia homes in Qatif, a law designed to prevent basements being used for Shia prayer meetings.
It remains the council's sole success.
Another visible sign of change is the construction of the large Shia mosque in Al-ahsa .
But Al Ahmed disagrees. "Yes Shias have opened a Mosque in Al-ahsa but they are still discriminated against elsewhere. Saudi Arabia does not have one Shia diplomat in the ministry of foreign affairs. There are no Shia heads of universities or at the head of public companies. Shia girls cannot get into college in the east. What are the consultative and local councils doing about these things? Nothing because they are powerless."
Nowhere is this discrimination more evident says Al Ahmed than in the hiring and promotion of staff at Saudi Aramco, the giant national oil company headquartered in Dhahran, just south of Qatif. Saudi Aramco has consistently denied such charges.
"Shias traditionally worked in senior positions in Saudi Aramco," says Al Ahmed. "But during the 1980s the government suspended the hiring of Shia workers and that lasted until the mid nineties except in very rare cases. It is better now, Shias now account for around 50 per cent of Saudi Aramco's work force, but there are still no Shias at board level."
Saudi Aramco would not specify how many Shias it employed in senior positions but a spokesperson insisted: "Hiring and personnel policy is to seek the best person for any given position, while giving preference to Saudi nationals. Therefore, Saudis of all backgrounds are represented throughout the company, from new hires to executives."
He added: “"Our information systems aren't geared for tracking information like an employee's sect. Saudi Aramco is a global commercial enterprise, and promotions are based on merit alone."
Of course, dread of the so called "Shia crescent" stretching from Iraq through Iran to Lebanon is particularly keenly felt in the oil rich east where fear of attacks on installations, home to 90 per cent of the kingdom's black gold, has seen a huge increase in security around oil facilities.
Yet Shia hardly share uniform political interests. Iraqi Shias, who owe their new found status entirely to American military power, are no lovers of Lebanon's fervently anti American Hizbullah. At the same time, Iran is involved in a bitter dispute with the predominantly Shia government of Azerbaijan over oil rights in the Caspian Sea which has seen one high ranking Tehran official ominously warn Iran may have to "reclaim" northern Azerbaijan, an area that formed part of the Persian Empire two centuries ago.
But such subtleties are lost in the cauldron of Saudi Arabian politics where King Abdullah must balance even snail pace reform with the Wahhabi religious base on whom the House of Saud relies for its legitimacy.
And for all Al Shayeb's optimism things could still get worse.
Many younger Shias, emboldened by the success of Nasrallah and Hizbullah's "divine victory" during Israel’s hapless but bloody invasion in 2006 and are no longer content to hang around waiting for the change al Shayeb is convinced will eventually come.
"Younger Shias are mesmerised by Nasrallah," explains Al Ahmed. "It is he and Hizbullah, and to a lesser extent Iran, that young Shias in Saudi Arabia see as a model. It is a disturbing development."
While both Wilcke and Al Shayeb play down the notion of a more militant youth, there is a very real fear that violence between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq will spill over into Saudi Arabia, as battle hardened Saudi Sunni militants currently causing mayhem there return home.
This is part of the reason why the fate of Shia in Saudi Arabia is likely to depend in large part on events in Iraq and of course what happens in the current stand off between the US and Iran as much as events within the kingdom.
Against this backdrop is it realistic that councils such as the one in Qatif where Shia representatives control 50 per cent of the seats - more than in Al-asha and other eastern cities where the figure is 40 per cent or less - have any meaningful role to play in determining the future?
Although the councils have no real political power, they do at least provide a public forum in the eastern province that enables Shia men, who for all the shortcomings of the process are accountable to the narrow electorate that voted for them, to discuss the problems Shia face with Sunnis who live alongside them. Moreover, even Al Ahmed agrees the councils provide a useful role in giving Shias experience of how government administration works. "Through the councils, despite their weakness, you can educate and train people in government and that is a good thing," he says.
But power that emanates from above can easily be taken away again. And the fear remains that even the current begrudging reform process could be abandoned as US pressure on the House of Saud to liberalize recedes in the wake of the continuing bloodbath the attempt to establish democracy has caused in Iraq.
This is particularly pertinent against the backdrop of the fractious succession process that exists within the House of Saud. While 82 year old Abdullah's successor will be the octogenarian Crown Prince Sultan, contrary to custom there is currently no designated second in line to the throne, a deliberate oversight due to rivalry within the family. The choice of a successor to Sultan, should he succeed Abdullah, will be left to the so called Allegiance Institution, the committee established by Abdullah last year, composed of the sons and grandsons of the kingdom's founder Abdul Aziz.
Under the new rules the committee can vote for one of three princes nominated by the King for the post of Crown Prince. However, if it rejects the King's nominations it can put forward its own choice which the King can either accept or put to a vote of the Allegiance Institution.
In many ways the Allegiance Institution formalizes what has traditionally occurred anyway, but it has given rise to much political intrigue and jockeying for position within the House of Saud, particularly among those who want power to pass to the next generation, Abdul Aziz's grandsons.
"The House of Saud is not united," says Al Ahmed. "And if the family is not united about the succession the situation for Shias, indeed for the whole country, could become very fluid. A lurch back to repression could easily happen."
But Al Shayeb insists the fledlging reforms undertaken in Saudi Arabia are permanent and will improve life in the kingdom for not just Saudi Arabian Shias but for all Saudi Arabians. He says: "I remain optimistic about the future. I feel the Shia community and the government understand each other in a better way now. They both want to work to bridge the gap created by long years of tension."
Time will tell whether his optimism is well founded, or whether like those who stood in the dawn two years ago, he will be disappointed.
Michael Glackin is a journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

To talk, or not talk, with the Taliban?

2008-05-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday 15 January 2008
By Michael Glackin
"Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals." So spoke Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller's famous World War II novel "Catch 22." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown must have a soft spot for Heller's antihero. The expulsion from Afghanistan last month of two private individuals close to, but with no formal attachment to, the United Kingdom government after they held talks with Taliban leaders in Afghanistan fits in neatly with Minderbender's theory of how to win a war. But despite the denials, it is hard to conceive that Irish-born European Union official Michael Semple or Northern Ireland-born United Nations worker Mervyn Patterson were not acting without at least the tacit blessing of the British government, even if Afghan President Hamid Karzai was kept in the dark.
Quite why Brown continues to insist that direct talks with the Taliban are not happening is a mystery. Four months ago both the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Office confirmed to me that contacts with the Taliban and its fellow travelers were going on through various channels "on the ground." It was an operational decision, the Defense Ministry insisted, not policy. But even allowing for that, reports that the British foreign intelligence division MI6 had also been negotiating with Taliban leaders should not come as a surprise either. Lest we forget, in Iraq the UK successfully negotiated a deal with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army to ease a British military withdrawal to the departure lounge of Basra Airport last year.

But unlike Iraq, where the UK is leaving behind a mess (around 40 women have been killed for supposed "un-Islamic behavior" since September in Basra), there is no easy exit from the Afghan conflict. However, plainly, a variant of the Basra model - reaching out to elements of the Taliban and tribal leaders who might be "reconciled" to the Karzai administration - is a central aim in the Afghan war. It's all a bit reminiscent of the Great Game era of the 19th century when Britain and Russia vied for supremacy in the region.

Reports indicate that Semple and Patterson held secret meetings with a Taliban leader, Mansour Dadullah, who has waged a bitter war against the British Army in Helmand Province, to try to persuade him to break with the Taliban and form his own political party and militia. Soon after, a statement from the Taliban leadership released via the Islamic Press Agency, said Dadullah had been sacked for refusing to obey orders. It warned his followers to break of all contact with him and pursue their jihad. Of course Karzai has been talking with the Taliban for some time now and last year even made an appeal for talks with Taliban leader Mullah Omar. His annoyance with the Semple-Patterson talks came from the fact that his still weak position would be weakened further if he were bypassed in talks with the enemy.

At the heart of all this is the grim realization within the British government that there are limits to what military action in Afghanistan can achieve. The Soviet Union lost its war there with 300,000 troops; the UK- and United States-led international force is fighting with less than 45,000. The Taliban may not be able to defeat the West's military might, but the West cannot ultimately defeat the Taliban either. To break the stalemate, Brown, upon his return from last month's flying visit to Afghanistan to meet Karzai, unveiled what he called his "new strategy" for the UK's role in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, most of it turned out to be old hat. Brown did say he would increase support for Helmand's "community defense initiatives," where, as he put it, "local volunteers are recruited to defend homes and families modeled on traditional Afghan arbakai." But this plan was shot down was last week by the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, US General Dan McNeill, who fears it will fuel inter-tribal fighting in the south.

Brown's announcement that the UK would, between 2009 and 2012, offer around $900 million in development aid and something called "stabilization assistance" was nothing particularly new either, because the money promised does not substantially increase current British financial support. Indeed the cash remains some way below the amounts the UK is putting into Iraq - which, in addition to having large oil revenues to rely on, also has less people than Afghanistan. Set Brown's investment against President George W. Bush's request to Congress for an extra $8 billion just to fund Afghanistan's new security forces and it looks half-hearted.

Ultimately perhaps, Brown knows that Karzai's tenuous grip on power can only be strengthened by persuading local leaders to back him. And the prime minister also knows that the need to get their backing has become more urgent in the wake of last month's assassination of the Pakistani opposition politician Benazir Bhutto. If civil unrest in the wake of Bhutto's murder forces Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to divert forces from the border areas, the Taliban could well be in a position later this year to reverse many of the losses they suffered to the coalition forces.

Against this backdrop, Western states may struggle to hold the ring in Afghanistan, although British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has unveiled what he called a "diplomatic surge" in the Middle East and Asia - increasing diplomatic staff in the region by 30 percent. Maybe he plans to talk the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to death.

As in Iraq, there will be no definitive military victory in Afghanistan. But the elephant in the room appears to be a realization by the UK that longstanding sectarian and tribal differences have made new democratic procedures and the Afghan government the West has established unworkable. Through his willingness to bring some Taliban fighters in from the cold, Brown is happy to concede, as he has in Basra, that the kind of democracy envisaged at the onset of the invasion in 2001 was more a lofty aspiration than a reflection of reality on the ground.

Michael Glackin, a journalist and former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.

War is emptying Britain's wallets

2008-05-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star

Tuesday 4 March 2008
By Michael Glackin
How much does a war cost? Not just the cost of military firepower, but the cost of compensating the families of dead soldiers, looking after injured soldiers and the war's wider impact on a country's economy? In the case of the war in Iraq the figure for the United States alone is a minimum of $3 trillion if you take the word of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In his book "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict," co-written with Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, Stiglitz forensically dissects America's war costs. Unusually for an economist, Stiglitz's prose is crisp and clear, but the title undersells things a bit, since Stiglitz believes the ultimate cost to the US will be nearer $5 trillion. That's a lot of money, particularly compared with current White House estimates of $645 billion - a figure itself way above Washington's initial estimate of $50-60 billion.
When I spoke to Stiglitz during his visit to London last week he insisted he had been conservative in his estimates. "We were aware people would say 'he's a Democrat and against the war.' There are a few minor quibbles but the general judgment is we've been conservative," he says.
Stiglitz factors just about everything into his estimates, from troop pay and equipment to more hidden costs, including long-term veterans' healthcare benefits, replacing military equipment, interest on money borrowed to pay for the war (the Iraq war has been paid for largely through deficit spending), and the impact of the war on the price of oil. He also throws in his view that there is a direct correlation between the current crisis in global financial markets and the cost of the conflict.
For good measure Stiglitz also has a stab at crunching the United Kingdom's numbers, estimating the cost of British participation in Iraq and Afghanistan through to 2010 to be at least $40 billion, more than two-thirds of which is attributable to the Iraq war.
Is he correct? I've no idea. But at least he's come up with a figure. When I asked the UK Treasury, the government's finance department, for an overall estimate, I was tersely informed they did not have one. Instead they referred me to the Ministry of Defense, which in turn, and quite correctly, referred me back to the Treasury. When I explained the Treasury had referred me to them, they suggested I contact Number 10 Downing Street. The prime minister's office, you've guessed it, referred me back to Defense and Treasury. Mindful of my phone bill, I gave up.
It seems bizarre that the Treasury, the government department that holds the purse strings of all government spending, has no idea of how much money has been spent in Britain's two wars. Even more bizarrely, they refused to comment on Stiglitz's estimates.
Stiglitz is amused and surprised by the Treasury's ignorance. "Parts [of the costs] are relatively easy to account for and are really part of good government, such as costs of operations and injured people. Other parts, the ones based on economic assumptions, are harder to quantify but really should still be tracked by someone in the Treasury," he says.
Stiglitz calls the British system of funding the war "opaque," which partly explains why he was unable to separate spending in Afghanistan from Iraq. In his book he states that before the war, when Gordon Brown was in charge of Britain's finances, he set aside 1 billion pounds (about $2 billion) for war spending. Brown also allocated cash to a Special Reserve fund, a cash pot that allows the Defense Ministry to supplement its regular budget. Stiglitz makes the point that because funds from the Special Reserve are drawn down by the ministry when required, without approval by Parliament, it makes it harder to quantify how much is being spent. But Stiglitz estimates the UK has so far spent almost $19 billion on military operations alone in Iraq and Afghanistan. In crude terms that's the price of a lot of hospitals and schools at a time when the government is under fire for failing to adequately fund healthcare and education.
Considering the scandals that have erupted over the government's failure to properly equip soldiers in the field - last month an inquest found that a soldier in Afghanistan was "unlawfully killed" because the Defense Ministry failed to provide him with proper equipment during Brown's tenure as chancellor of the exchequer - you could be forgiven for wondering where all the money has gone.
But $40 billion is paltry when compared with the $200 billion worth of debt that Brown has taken onto the government's books by nationalizing Northern Rock, an inept high street bank plunged into crisis by the global credit crunch and whose plight last year caused the first run on a bank in Britain in more than a century.
The fact is Iraq has slipped down the political agenda in the UK. Notwithstanding last weekend's killing of a British airman in Basra, the war in Iraq is over as far as Brown is concerned. Afghanistan still looms large of course, but tough as the fighting there is, it's a war most people still largely back. Even Prince Harry has done a tour of duty there.
Brown at the moment is more concerned with the issue of banning plastic bags in supermarkets to help reduce global warming. He even took time to write a column on the issue for The Daily Mail, middle England's favorite newspaper. Oddly enough the government's marketing department used more than 1 million plastic bags last year in the cause of promoting itself. The Treasury couldn't tell me how much that cost either.
Michael Glackin is a journalist and former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.

Conflict is costing trillions – 'they can explain the benefits'

2008-05-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

Independent on Sunday
Sunday 9 March 2008
By Michael Glackin
Joseph Stiglitz's latest book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, is provoking its very own war.

The Nobel Laureate and former World Bank chief economist estimates that the cost of the US involvement in the Iraqi war is $3 trillion – including everything from military spending and long-term healthcare for veterans to interest on money borrowed to pay for the war and the impact of the conflict on the price of oil.

He also estimates that the cost of Britain's participation in Iraq and Afghanistan through to 2010 will be at least £20bn in direct military and social costs. But his critics, on the right of the US political spectrum, are having a field day demolishing his figures. A review in the Financial Times by Tunku Varadarajan of The Wall Street Journal accuses Stiglitz of having "entered into territory where it is fraudulent to offer up the omniscient exactitude of three trillion". He is also criticised for failing to detail the benefits of the war.

But speaking during a visit to London last week, days before he was due in Washington to give testimony on war costs to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, Stiglitz dismisses the criticism. "You know, the Bush administration has never challenged the numbers themselves. Of course, they said we hadn't counted the benefits. Well fine. We said we would look at the costs and let other people explain the benefits."

Stiglitz spits out statistics and economic paradigms supporting his case. Far from exaggerating the figures, he insists the real cost of the conflict to the US is likely to be nearer $5 trillion. "We were conservative in our accounting because we were aware people would say 'he's a Democrat and against the war'. But if you go through our costing item by item, there's no debate. Look at the number of injuries and there's no debate about that either. There are a few minor quibbles but most of the numbers in the book have been verified by the Congressional Budget Office as well as the Joint Economic Committee."

Getting a precise figure is no easy task. A request to the British Treasury last week ends with the terse response: "The Treasury does not have a figure on how much the war has cost." Stiglitz expresses a combination of amusement and surprise at such ignorance. "Well parts [of the cost] are relatively easy to account for and are really part of good government, such as costs of operations and injured people. Other parts, the ones based on economic assumptions, are harder to quantify but should still be tracked by someone in the Treasury."

He says Britain's system of funding the war is opaque, which partly explains why he was unable to separate UK spending in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his book he states that before the war, Gordon Brown, while Chancellor, set aside £1bn for war spending and also allocated cash to a Special Reserve – a cash pot allowing the Ministry of Defence to supplement its regular budget. Stiglitz makes the point that because funds from the Special Reserve are drawn down without approval by Parliament, it is harder to quantify how much is actually being spent. At any rate, he estimates that the UK has so far committed almost £9bn in military spending alone to Iraq and Afghanistan, 76 per cent of it in Iraq.

Having spent years working in Bill Clinton's White House, turning the large deficit Clinton inherited from George Bush senior into a budget surplus, Stiglitz makes no secret of his contempt for the current president, whose policy of delivering tax cuts to the wealthy while fighting two wars has left America with its largest-ever deficit.

"Part of the problem is that the war has almost been too easy for American people. We've financed it through deficit spending, so there have been no tax rises, but it's a cost that will continue for generations. You know this war has been funded by 24 separate Bills – that's how the administration has been hiding the total costs. It even tried to hide the number of casualties to hide the true costs."

To ensure greater clarity, Stiglitz believes Britain and America should levy a specific tax to fund conflicts in future. "People should know how much a war is costing them, and I think once a conflict has lasted more than three months, it should be funded by a war tax," he explains. "A tax would make the connection of cost and war much more clearly. War is expensive and you should not be allowed to fight one by borrowing."

Despite his links to the Clinton administration, Stiglitz is backing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton's rival, this time round. Who knows, if Obama goes all the way, Stiglitz may well find himself in a position to implement his war tax, regardless of the arguments about his mathematics.

Michael Glackin is a journalist and former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

An annivesary celebrated with gag orders

2008-05-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Daily Star
Tuesday 1 April 2008
By Michael Glackin
A good deal of political hot air was expended in the United Kingdom marking last month's fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Although it was noticeable that there were no parades in Iraq celebrating what Prime Minister Gordon Brown described as the country's "liberation," we in the West got very excited about the whole affair.

US President George W. Bush treated us to his own version of French chanteuse Edith Piaf's classic song, "Je ne regrette rein," or I regret nothing. Failures in postwar planning, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and the continuing carnage in Iraq are mere details it seems. In the UK, Brown marked the occasion by having his government launch legal action to prevent coroners from using inquests into military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq as an excuse to blame the Defense Ministry and Brown himself for having played a role in their killings.

Because bodies of British servicemen are brought back to Britain through a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, it falls to the area's local coroner to conduct a formal inquest into their deaths. In the UK it is the coroner's legal duty to ascertain the cause of death, and to report any irregularities or failings that may have contributed to it.

It is, to say the least, a highly unusual move by a government in any democracy to attempt to silence an independent law officer. But the Oxfordshire coroner has consistently found the Defense Ministry at fault for many of the deaths of service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than one inquest has accused the ministry of "serious failings." Defense Secretary Des Browne insists the phrase "serious failings" is tantamount to blaming the government for the deaths, and fears families of dead soldiers will use the coroner's critical comments to sue for compensation.

The particular coroner the government most wants to silence is Oxfordshire's assistant deputy coroner Andrew Walker. While investigating the death of Lance Corporal Matty Hull, who was killed in a "friendly fire" incident involving an American A-10 plane in Iraq in 2003, Walker attacked the Pentagon for its lack of cooperation and delivered a verdict that the lance corporal's death was unlawful. During the inquest into the death of ITN journalist Terry Lloyd, who was killed when caught in a crossfire between the United States military and insurgents in Iraq in 2003, Walker recorded a verdict of unlawful killing and again criticized the US for failing to cooperate with the inquest.

But it is Walker's criticism of the Defense Ministry, but also the Treasury when Gordon Brown was chancellor, that has stuck in the craw of the government. Walker has consistently blamed shortages of military equipment for contributing to the deaths of a number of servicemen.

During an inquest last month into the death of Captain James Philippson, who died during a gun fight with the Taliban in Helmand Province in 2006, it emerged that Philippson and his unit lacked the necessary night-vision goggles, machine guns, and grenade launchers when they went into battle. Walker said, "To send soldiers into a combat zone without basic equipment is unforgivable, inexcusable and a breach of trust between the soldiers and those who govern them."

The government's cynical move to prevent coroners making these kinds of comments comes just after it emerged that Walker's contract as the Oxfordshire assistant deputy coroner will not be renewed. He will instead take up a post as coroner in London where he is unlikely to preside over any other military-related inquests.

It is impossible to say with any certainty that Walker's change of job is linked to his criticism of government. But what is clear is that for a war that was intent on bringing democracy and open government to Iraq and Afghanistan, it is extremely ironic that the British government is expending much energy in trying to silence people and keep things secret.

Without these inquests and judgments, the British public, not to mention the families of those killed, would be kept in the dark about the exact circumstances of soldiers' deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. But sadly this is how Brown's government wants things to be done. Under the guise of protecting national security the government also wants to lock people up without charging them for 42 days. It is, similarly, pressing ahead with the introduction of national identity cards, something last used in Britain during the dark days of World War II.

And two weeks ago Brown again sidestepped calls for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the British decision to go to war in Iraq, insisting he would hold one "when it is appropriate." Bearing in mind Brown's intense dislike of Tony Blair, the architect of the war, an investigation may well be in the cards at some point. But considering Brown's own support for the war, don't hold your breath waiting.

Meanwhile, the much-heralded final pullout of British troops from Basra airport is now likely to be delayed until 2009. Basra hasn't been under Iraqi government control for months and the "success" of the British Army's work there is evidenced by the current fighting, with the Iraqi Army trying to reclaim the city from the destructive and murderous grip of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, which has ruled Basra since the British soldiers withdrew to the airport.

The government in London can gag coroners, deny inquiries, and erode civil liberties all it wants, but it cannot gloss over the reality of Iraq five years after its "liberation." The country has been broken by the invasion, and the West has no idea about how to put it back together again.

Michael Glackin, a former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a freelance journalist.