The Daily Star
July 30, 2013
By Michael Glackin
Do you remember Geneva II? It’s the high powered diplomatic conference on Syria that a British government official told me was “the priority” in efforts to bring about regime change in Damascus.
Perhaps you recall that the United Kingdom overturned the European Union arms embargo on Syria in a move intended to bolster the Syrian National Coalition’s negotiating power when it came face to face with regime representatives at Geneva II? The dubious logic was that if the U.K., along with France, could supply arms to the rebels, Syrian President Bashar Assad would take fright and rush to negotiate an end to the war – or “step aside” from power, to borrow U.S. President Barack Obama’s curious phrase.
Few were really convinced by the West’s rhetoric about Geneva II, and in the end it has amounted to absolutely nothing. The conference was supposed to take place in June, then it was delayed until July, and now it has fallen off the agenda completely. British government insiders concede Geneva II will not take place before September “at the very earliest” and admit it may not happen this year at all.
Why? Because after more than two years of strong words and no action from the West, Assad has finally regained the upper hand in the Syrian conflict, not just on the ground, where increased help from Iran, Russia and Hezbollah has firmly tilted the balance in his favor, but also in terms of the West’s political calculations.
Obama may now be willing to send arms to the rebels, but the limited and relatively light weaponry he intends to send – automatic weapons, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades – will not achieve the change of regime that Washington and London desired so much but were unwilling to decisively help bring about.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron, increasingly out of his depth, cannot even match Obama’s fruitless token assistance. A revolt within his own party against moves to arm the rebels means that Cameron couldn’t send a pea-shooter to the rebels without first holding a vote in parliament, a vote that he would certainly lose.
Most Conservative parliamentarians are against arming the rebels, either fearing it will simply increase the killing in Syria or because they believe British weapons will end up in the hands of violent Islamists. Arming the rebels is also opposed by the opposition Labour Party, which despite voting as one for the Iraq war, is now against involving the U.K. in what one parliamentarian described to me as “more Middle East adventures that can only cause us harm.”
Washington’s decision to arm the rebels with even light weaponry now puts it in a proxy war against Iran, and with it Hezbollah, which may well play into the party’s hands. Imagine if you will the reaction to footage on the Internet or on television showing Hezbollah waving U.S. weapons they have just captured from rebels?
Crucially, even the language of the conflict is changing within the British government. From confident statements about Assad’s imminent downfall, government officials now talk about the rebels “going underground” and embarking on a clandestine terror campaign in the expectation that Assad will soon resume control of most of the country.
So, from arming rebels and discussing no-fly zones, British policy now appears to rest on some kind of secret resistance that carries out an Irish Republican Army like terror campaign. No prizes for guessing who will be leading the battle there: the Nusra Front.
The West has watched a fledgling struggle for civil rights turn, first, into a fully fledged civil war, and more worryingly now, a conflict that is perilously close to cracking open sectarian fault lines throughout the Middle East, endangering the stability of the region.
Of course, there has been a complete lack of international consensus on removing Assad, but singling out Russia and China as the international bogeymen conveniently ignores the fact that neither Washington nor London was prepared to match their words with action. The debacle of post-invasion Iraq has dominated the West’s political calculations from the first day that Assad’s troops fired on unarmed civilian demonstrators.
But it isn’t just the shadow of Iraq that has hung over the West’s failure to match its lofty words with deeds. The inability of rebel forces to organize and at least bury, if not overcome, their political divisions has made them an unreliable partner.
The SNC has accused the West of betrayal, but the growing sectarian extremism of opposition forces on the ground, the ritual slaughter of those opposed to its agenda which, as the United Nations has said, is on par with the atrocities of the Assad regime, though not on the same industrially organized scale, has played into Assad’s hands.
All this has underlined the fact that a coherent political opposition never really existed until the West invented it in the shape of the SNC in 2012. And yet, Western states had the capability of influencing events in Syria at any time during the last two years, long before the death toll reached the estimated 100,000 at which it currently stands, long before Hezbollah proved to be a game-changer for Assad, and long before the entire country reached the point of no return.
A determined show of strength from the outset, a proper engagement with Russia, something akin to leadership in Washington could have prevented this tragedy. Now events on the ground appear to have passed beyond the ability of any outside player to influence the outcome.
Arming rebels? If only Western decision-makers could grow something akin to a spine when dealing with tyranny. Talk is always the cheapest form of currency in politics, but rarely has coinage been so debased than in the West’s shameful reaction to the Syrian conflict.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 30, 2013, on page 7.
Friday, 16 August 2013
An open highway for Britain’s snoops
The Daily Star
July 19, 2013
By Michael Glackin
No one should be surprised that the British Parliament’s intelligence and security committee concluded Wednesday that the country’s intelligence surveillance division, GCHQ, did not break any laws in its use of America’s Prism surveillance program, which has provided access to the content of millions of private communications. The British government has been saying the same thing for weeks, ever since Edward Snowden, a contractor who worked with the National Security Agency, exposed the shocking extent of government intrusion into our day-to-day lives.
However, the committee, which carried out a hastily arranged investigation into Snowden’s allegations, conceded it had only focused on intelligence information that GCHQ had requested from the United States on particular suspects, where a warrant had been granted, as required by British law, and signed by a minister. Small wonder then that it found no evidence of law breaking.
It did not examine the many instances in which the NSA voluntarily sent information it had gathered through Prism to GCHQ. This was a serious omission since most of the surveillance data GCHQ received via Prism was passed in this manner.
The inquiry also focused only on the content of private communications that had been intercepted, ignoring the vast amount of metadata that Prism has harvested and shared.
The committee did at least call on the government to review whether current legislation governing access to private communications “remains adequate” for the level of access GCHQ has with the Prism program. But its principal message to the snoopers was to carry on intercepting vast amounts of information, including billions of private emails and messages, without parliamentary knowledge or approval.
The legality of the blanket surveillance programs revealed by Snowden will be more thoroughly tested in separate legal actions in the United States and the United Kingdom. But whether these will shed any further light on the issue is a moot point. The British legal challenge, launched by Privacy International, will almost certainly be heard in a secret court rather than in a public hearing.
What we do know is that the conclusion of the intelligence and security committee, and the assertions from Downing Street and the White House that no laws have been broken, betrays how easily governments can corrupt the law under the guise of national security.
They get away with it because the NSA and GCHQ share their surveillance information, and there is no legal regime within the U.K. to govern this information sharing. Consequently, the government can state correctly, if disingenuously, that no law has been broken. By obtaining private information from the NSA, instead of conducting the interception and collection itself, GCHQ is neatly sidestepping the flimsy protections safeguarding individual privacy in the U.K.
At the same time, information from GCHQ’s equivalent of Prism, Tempora, which harvests millions of emails, telephone calls and Skype conversations from the undersea cables carrying Internet traffic in and out of the U.K., is shared with the NSA, enabling the U.S. agency to circumvent America’s much stronger legal safeguards.
But this mutual back scratching is only part of the complex picture. Because in reality, while there doesn’t appear to be a legal framework to govern any of this activity, there is what can be best described as a legal tool, one that provides the snoopers with all the leverage they need to do their spade work regardless of the legal niceties.
That tool in the U.S. is the foreign intelligence surveillance court, known as the FISA court, a secret body set up in 1978 to monitor federal phone tapping, but which now effectively rubber stamps the illegal snooping into the private lives of millions of Americans.
According to critics of the surveillance programs, the FISA court has consistently violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which entitles Americans to be secure “in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The FISA court decides, in secret judgments, what is “unreasonable” and so far has found little that is unreasonable in the NSA surveillance operations, which trawl the Internet communications and phone calls of millions of law-abiding individuals. The FISA court doesn’t provide a quasi-legal fig leaf for the illegal and unconstitutional activities of the NSA’s Prism program; it actually aids and abets the activities.
Because it operates in the shadows, we do not know if there is one recorded instance of the FISA court ever overruling an NSA request to harvest and store information on Americans. But we do know that Yahoo fought against being press ganged into allowing Prism access to its servers in a case heard before the FISA court in 2008. The FISA court overruled Yahoo’s protests and forced the company to participate in the program.
A similar toothless watchdog exists in the U.K., the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which was set up to scrutinize the activities of GCHQ and other agencies under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA.
Despite the adage that “no one over 40 understands the Internet” the ICCO is headed by a 72-year-old retired judge and has less than 10 full-time staff members to review the interception activity of not just all British spy agencies (which employ around 10,000 people in various surveillance activities alone), but also the Metropolitan Police, the U.K.’s Revenue and Customs department, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Defense Ministry.
To believe that a retired septuagenarian and a handful of civil servants can adequately oversee the activities of all these agencies or provide accountability is laughable. The ICCO’s inadequacies were laid bare in The Independent newspaper this week which revealed that publication of the office’s annual report had to be delayed and revised because it failed to even mention Prism and Tempora.
Like the FISA court, the ICCO doesn’t provide meaningful scrutiny of surveillance efforts. It merely allows the intelligence agencies to get on with it, unhindered, without the knowledge or approval of the British people or elected politicians.
However governments describe all this, it seems clear that the rule of law, the cornerstone of any democracy worthy of the name, is being turned inside out to allow unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of the innocent by faceless intelligence officials and spineless ministers. Legal or not, surely this represents a betrayal of public trust, democracy and accountability.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 19, 2013, on page 7.
July 19, 2013
By Michael Glackin
No one should be surprised that the British Parliament’s intelligence and security committee concluded Wednesday that the country’s intelligence surveillance division, GCHQ, did not break any laws in its use of America’s Prism surveillance program, which has provided access to the content of millions of private communications. The British government has been saying the same thing for weeks, ever since Edward Snowden, a contractor who worked with the National Security Agency, exposed the shocking extent of government intrusion into our day-to-day lives.
However, the committee, which carried out a hastily arranged investigation into Snowden’s allegations, conceded it had only focused on intelligence information that GCHQ had requested from the United States on particular suspects, where a warrant had been granted, as required by British law, and signed by a minister. Small wonder then that it found no evidence of law breaking.
It did not examine the many instances in which the NSA voluntarily sent information it had gathered through Prism to GCHQ. This was a serious omission since most of the surveillance data GCHQ received via Prism was passed in this manner.
The inquiry also focused only on the content of private communications that had been intercepted, ignoring the vast amount of metadata that Prism has harvested and shared.
The committee did at least call on the government to review whether current legislation governing access to private communications “remains adequate” for the level of access GCHQ has with the Prism program. But its principal message to the snoopers was to carry on intercepting vast amounts of information, including billions of private emails and messages, without parliamentary knowledge or approval.
The legality of the blanket surveillance programs revealed by Snowden will be more thoroughly tested in separate legal actions in the United States and the United Kingdom. But whether these will shed any further light on the issue is a moot point. The British legal challenge, launched by Privacy International, will almost certainly be heard in a secret court rather than in a public hearing.
What we do know is that the conclusion of the intelligence and security committee, and the assertions from Downing Street and the White House that no laws have been broken, betrays how easily governments can corrupt the law under the guise of national security.
They get away with it because the NSA and GCHQ share their surveillance information, and there is no legal regime within the U.K. to govern this information sharing. Consequently, the government can state correctly, if disingenuously, that no law has been broken. By obtaining private information from the NSA, instead of conducting the interception and collection itself, GCHQ is neatly sidestepping the flimsy protections safeguarding individual privacy in the U.K.
At the same time, information from GCHQ’s equivalent of Prism, Tempora, which harvests millions of emails, telephone calls and Skype conversations from the undersea cables carrying Internet traffic in and out of the U.K., is shared with the NSA, enabling the U.S. agency to circumvent America’s much stronger legal safeguards.
But this mutual back scratching is only part of the complex picture. Because in reality, while there doesn’t appear to be a legal framework to govern any of this activity, there is what can be best described as a legal tool, one that provides the snoopers with all the leverage they need to do their spade work regardless of the legal niceties.
That tool in the U.S. is the foreign intelligence surveillance court, known as the FISA court, a secret body set up in 1978 to monitor federal phone tapping, but which now effectively rubber stamps the illegal snooping into the private lives of millions of Americans.
According to critics of the surveillance programs, the FISA court has consistently violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which entitles Americans to be secure “in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The FISA court decides, in secret judgments, what is “unreasonable” and so far has found little that is unreasonable in the NSA surveillance operations, which trawl the Internet communications and phone calls of millions of law-abiding individuals. The FISA court doesn’t provide a quasi-legal fig leaf for the illegal and unconstitutional activities of the NSA’s Prism program; it actually aids and abets the activities.
Because it operates in the shadows, we do not know if there is one recorded instance of the FISA court ever overruling an NSA request to harvest and store information on Americans. But we do know that Yahoo fought against being press ganged into allowing Prism access to its servers in a case heard before the FISA court in 2008. The FISA court overruled Yahoo’s protests and forced the company to participate in the program.
A similar toothless watchdog exists in the U.K., the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which was set up to scrutinize the activities of GCHQ and other agencies under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA.
Despite the adage that “no one over 40 understands the Internet” the ICCO is headed by a 72-year-old retired judge and has less than 10 full-time staff members to review the interception activity of not just all British spy agencies (which employ around 10,000 people in various surveillance activities alone), but also the Metropolitan Police, the U.K.’s Revenue and Customs department, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Defense Ministry.
To believe that a retired septuagenarian and a handful of civil servants can adequately oversee the activities of all these agencies or provide accountability is laughable. The ICCO’s inadequacies were laid bare in The Independent newspaper this week which revealed that publication of the office’s annual report had to be delayed and revised because it failed to even mention Prism and Tempora.
Like the FISA court, the ICCO doesn’t provide meaningful scrutiny of surveillance efforts. It merely allows the intelligence agencies to get on with it, unhindered, without the knowledge or approval of the British people or elected politicians.
However governments describe all this, it seems clear that the rule of law, the cornerstone of any democracy worthy of the name, is being turned inside out to allow unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of the innocent by faceless intelligence officials and spineless ministers. Legal or not, surely this represents a betrayal of public trust, democracy and accountability.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 19, 2013, on page 7.
Britain’s snoops circumvent parliament
The Daily Star
June 18, 2013
By Michael Glackin
Somebody posted a witty tweet the other day. Responding to the revelation that the U.S. National Security Agency, which engages in signals intelligence and eavesdropping, has been busy tapping into the central servers of leading American Internet companies, someone tweeted, “Your Gmail, Google, Facebook, Skype data all in one place. The NSA just beat out like 30 start-ups to this idea.”
No doubt the NSA has the tweeter’s details and inside leg measurements on file by now. However, the pervasive invasion into our privacy that PRISM represents is no laughing matter.
PRISM is a U.S. government program which, since 2007, has been collecting audio, video, photos, emails and documents from non-Americans whose information passes through servers located in the United States. This enables America’s spooks to learn and collect a great deal of information about their foreign targets, and the servers that have been accessed belong to such major companies as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, as well as various telephone companies.
Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook have denied the NSA has “direct access” to their servers, while Microsoft said it only complies “with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.”
GCHQ, the British government’s equivalent of the NSA, has had access to much of PRISM’s material since late 2010, according to a report in The Guardian. Along with The Washington Post, the paper was given details of PRISM by Edward Snowden.
There are many who say “so what?” If you are not doing anything wrong, they argue, then you have nothing to fear from the NSA or GCHQ. They are wrong. You do not have to be a paranoid privacy conspiracy theorist to see the dangers inherent in what the U.S. and the U.K. are colluding to do. The revelations come less than a month after the British government was forced to scrap a proposal to allow the security services access to the online communications and Internet browsing history of individuals – the so-called “Snoopers Charter” – following strong opposition from the government’s own parliamentarians.
Yet if Snowden’s allegations are true, and what has been published is convincing in its detail, then the British government already has its Snoopers Charter. GCHQ’s access to PRISM data allows it to circumvent both the existing legal process required to obtain personal material from Internet companies and, more worryingly, ignore the will of parliament. Powers allowing for greater surveillance of British citizens that the elected parliament has authorized are already being used by government agencies through a backdoor deal with the NSA.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted last week that the claims GCHQ used data from PRISM to circumvent British law were “baseless.” But The Guardian reported that in the year leading up to May 2012, the first full year the U.K. had access to PRISM data, GCHQ was able to generate 197 intelligence reports for the British security services. This was more than double the number generated in the previous year when the U.K. first gained access to the program.
I lived in Eastern Germany not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The powers used by the NSA bear a chilling resemblance to the way former East Germans recounted how their lives were devastated by the Stasi’s intrusions into their privacy, intercepting their mail, listening to their calls, getting gossip from their neighbors. How the Stasi would have loved to be doing their job in the Internet age.
And where does all this end? How long before governments decide that it’s not just terror or criminal behavior they are interested in?
The U.K. Anti-Terrorism Act, introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in 2001, is a case in point. This act was hurriedly passed into law immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Even against that backdrop, it was still labeled by one critic as “the most draconian legislation parliament has passed in peacetime in over a century,” particularly since many of its measures, despite the act’s official title, were not specifically related to terrorism.
This legislation was most famously used not to fight terror, but to fight an ally. At the height of the global banking crisis in 2008, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown used the act to freeze all Icelandic assets in the U.K., after Reykjavik failed to guarantee British deposits held by Icelandic banks. The move effectively put Iceland on par with states that sponsored terrorism, and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. It was a disgraceful use of the legislation against a nation that was not only a member of NATO, but also had troops serving in Afghanistan in the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit.
The 2001 act also allowed communication service providers to retain some data, though not content, so this could be accessed by security services investigating criminal and terrorist activity. What is clear is that when governments can already bend existing law to an extent that was never anticipated by citizens, you have to wonder why they even bother with parliament at all.
While often the British Parliament is merely a rubber stamp for the executive arm of government, occasionally it can rise to the occasion, as it has by rejecting the Snoopers Charter. Sadly, the opposition Labor Party, which preaches liberty but practices control, is set to back the government, enabling it to reintroduce the Snoopers Charter. Labor insists it is a “vital tool” in combating terrorism.
Of course there are terrorists and others from whom the U.K. needs to be protected. But we must also ensure that by protecting our way of life we do not trample over the civil liberties that underpin the way of life we are trying to protect. The hard-earned rights and liberties of people pursuing their daily affairs must be safeguarded too.
The great statesman of revolutionary America, Benjamin Franklin, put it well when he said: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Or to put it another way, there are none so dangerous to democracy as those who seek to protect it from its own virtues.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 18, 2013, on page 7.
June 18, 2013
By Michael Glackin
Somebody posted a witty tweet the other day. Responding to the revelation that the U.S. National Security Agency, which engages in signals intelligence and eavesdropping, has been busy tapping into the central servers of leading American Internet companies, someone tweeted, “Your Gmail, Google, Facebook, Skype data all in one place. The NSA just beat out like 30 start-ups to this idea.”
No doubt the NSA has the tweeter’s details and inside leg measurements on file by now. However, the pervasive invasion into our privacy that PRISM represents is no laughing matter.
PRISM is a U.S. government program which, since 2007, has been collecting audio, video, photos, emails and documents from non-Americans whose information passes through servers located in the United States. This enables America’s spooks to learn and collect a great deal of information about their foreign targets, and the servers that have been accessed belong to such major companies as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, as well as various telephone companies.
Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook have denied the NSA has “direct access” to their servers, while Microsoft said it only complies “with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.”
GCHQ, the British government’s equivalent of the NSA, has had access to much of PRISM’s material since late 2010, according to a report in The Guardian. Along with The Washington Post, the paper was given details of PRISM by Edward Snowden.
There are many who say “so what?” If you are not doing anything wrong, they argue, then you have nothing to fear from the NSA or GCHQ. They are wrong. You do not have to be a paranoid privacy conspiracy theorist to see the dangers inherent in what the U.S. and the U.K. are colluding to do. The revelations come less than a month after the British government was forced to scrap a proposal to allow the security services access to the online communications and Internet browsing history of individuals – the so-called “Snoopers Charter” – following strong opposition from the government’s own parliamentarians.
Yet if Snowden’s allegations are true, and what has been published is convincing in its detail, then the British government already has its Snoopers Charter. GCHQ’s access to PRISM data allows it to circumvent both the existing legal process required to obtain personal material from Internet companies and, more worryingly, ignore the will of parliament. Powers allowing for greater surveillance of British citizens that the elected parliament has authorized are already being used by government agencies through a backdoor deal with the NSA.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted last week that the claims GCHQ used data from PRISM to circumvent British law were “baseless.” But The Guardian reported that in the year leading up to May 2012, the first full year the U.K. had access to PRISM data, GCHQ was able to generate 197 intelligence reports for the British security services. This was more than double the number generated in the previous year when the U.K. first gained access to the program.
I lived in Eastern Germany not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The powers used by the NSA bear a chilling resemblance to the way former East Germans recounted how their lives were devastated by the Stasi’s intrusions into their privacy, intercepting their mail, listening to their calls, getting gossip from their neighbors. How the Stasi would have loved to be doing their job in the Internet age.
And where does all this end? How long before governments decide that it’s not just terror or criminal behavior they are interested in?
The U.K. Anti-Terrorism Act, introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in 2001, is a case in point. This act was hurriedly passed into law immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Even against that backdrop, it was still labeled by one critic as “the most draconian legislation parliament has passed in peacetime in over a century,” particularly since many of its measures, despite the act’s official title, were not specifically related to terrorism.
This legislation was most famously used not to fight terror, but to fight an ally. At the height of the global banking crisis in 2008, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown used the act to freeze all Icelandic assets in the U.K., after Reykjavik failed to guarantee British deposits held by Icelandic banks. The move effectively put Iceland on par with states that sponsored terrorism, and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. It was a disgraceful use of the legislation against a nation that was not only a member of NATO, but also had troops serving in Afghanistan in the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit.
The 2001 act also allowed communication service providers to retain some data, though not content, so this could be accessed by security services investigating criminal and terrorist activity. What is clear is that when governments can already bend existing law to an extent that was never anticipated by citizens, you have to wonder why they even bother with parliament at all.
While often the British Parliament is merely a rubber stamp for the executive arm of government, occasionally it can rise to the occasion, as it has by rejecting the Snoopers Charter. Sadly, the opposition Labor Party, which preaches liberty but practices control, is set to back the government, enabling it to reintroduce the Snoopers Charter. Labor insists it is a “vital tool” in combating terrorism.
Of course there are terrorists and others from whom the U.K. needs to be protected. But we must also ensure that by protecting our way of life we do not trample over the civil liberties that underpin the way of life we are trying to protect. The hard-earned rights and liberties of people pursuing their daily affairs must be safeguarded too.
The great statesman of revolutionary America, Benjamin Franklin, put it well when he said: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Or to put it another way, there are none so dangerous to democracy as those who seek to protect it from its own virtues.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 18, 2013, on page 7.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
The U.K. leads on Bashar Assad’s exit
The Daily Star
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
By Michael Glackin
And so to Geneva. Two years and an estimated 70,000-80,000 civilian deaths later, the United States and Russia are poised to bring representatives of President Bashar Assad’s regime together with his opponents in the Syrian National Coalition, or SNC, over the negotiating table. Ironically, they will meet in a city whose name is forever linked with protecting civilians caught up in war zones.
There is still no firm date for the conference, dubbed “Geneva II,” and at the time of writing no firm guarantee that the SNC will attend. The Syrian opposition groups are busy arguing over whether they should negotiate with the Assad regime, and whether they should even participate while Hezbollah has fighters in Syria aiding Assad.
Meanwhile, a United Nations report released this week reminded us again of the human cost of this bloody conflict. It revealed harrowing details of Syrian children being taken hostage, forced to watch torture, and even participate in beheadings. The report accused both sides of abuses but insisted that rebel actions did not “reach the intensity and scale” of abuses committed by pro-government forces.
Geneva II coincides with the United Kingdom and France’s success last month in forcing the European Union to abandon its arms embargo on Syria. Both events are linked, and are taking place at a time when Assad is increasingly emboldened and when the West is fast running out of ideas to bring about his downfall, amid a worsening refugee crisis in Lebanon and Jordan and threats by the Free Syrian Army to take their war into Lebanon against Hezbollah.
A Foreign Office official told me that Geneva II is now “the priority” in the British government’s efforts to push for regime change in Syria. Lifting the EU arms embargo is intended to increase the Syrian opposition’s leverage ahead of the conference. The theory is that by floating the prospect that France and the U.K. could supply arms to the rebels, Assad will be more willing to negotiate an end to the war and presumably negotiate himself out of a job at the same time.
But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome. First, Assad, like everyone else, is aware that the idea of arming the rebels is an Anglo-French project. There is no support for such action in the rest of the European Union, or indeed Barack Obama’s White House. It is worth pointing out that 25 out of 27 EU governments opposed the lifting of the arms embargo. Last month’s vote simply meant that the U.K. and France are now free to send arms if they wish, since the embargo needed unanimity among all 27 governments to continue.
The U.K. and France have been free to send arms since May 31, but British Foreign Secretary William Hague still insists that lifting the embargo does not necessarily mean the U.K. will supply the rebels with weaponry. In the parlance of modern politics, the decision is a “game changer,” but only if France and the U.K. actually ship arms, and at the moment there is little sign of the U.K. doing that.
Second, any move to arm rebels at this late stage will simply prompt Russia to step up its supplies to Assad’s forces, matching or exceeding any weapons sent to the rebels. Russia’s efforts will likely see the arrival in Syria of sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Iran will also increase its support for the Assad regime. With this in mind, the French and British effort to arm the rebels at this stage looks like a belated, tawdry and futile attempt to be seen as doing something, after spending two years watching Syria’s suffering from the sidelines.
At the same time, so far Geneva II has only served to underline the increasing fragmentation of an already hapless Syrian opposition, which is now more divided than it was at the first Geneva conference last year.
Indeed, the Foreign Office informed me that there is “a lot of work going on behind the scenes” spearheaded by the U.K.’s envoy to the opposition John Wilkes, who must ensure the opposition is in as “good a shape as possible” for the conference, whatever that means.
But attempts by London to build up the capability of the opposition, to unify it and help it rise to the task of governing Syria have so far been a disaster. Which is why the British desire to end the arms embargo and place so much hope in Geneva II has a rather desperate feel about it. In the absence of a coherent strategy toward the Assad regime, the West has allowed itself to sleepwalk into a situation where it is now suddenly betting on long shots to topple Syria’s president.
If, and it’s still a big if, the U.K. does send weapons, Hague insists it would ensure that the arms go to so-called moderate rebels, and not extremists such as the Nusra Front. But how exactly will France and the U.K. vet those to whom they sell arms?
Much of the fighting on the ground is being led by Nusra. It is inconceivable that rebel groups, given arms by the U.K. or France, would not send them on to Nusra if they were in need of them to achieve a critical victory. This is war after all, and an ugly one at that, not a game of cricket.
Moreover, less than a year ago, in an interview with Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Wilkes insisted the U.K. would not provide funding to groups inside Syria because the government could not be certain of where the money would end up. If the government couldn’t verify where money was going eight months ago, how on earth will it verify where arms are going to today? What has changed?
Unfortunately when I asked the Foreign Office official how they would vet the rebels and differentiate good rebels from bad rebels when sending arms, the official declined to answer what she insisted was “a hypothetical question.” Hypothetical? Small wonder that Assad is feeling more confident the longer the Syrian conflict goes on.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 11, 2013, on page 7.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
By Michael Glackin
And so to Geneva. Two years and an estimated 70,000-80,000 civilian deaths later, the United States and Russia are poised to bring representatives of President Bashar Assad’s regime together with his opponents in the Syrian National Coalition, or SNC, over the negotiating table. Ironically, they will meet in a city whose name is forever linked with protecting civilians caught up in war zones.
There is still no firm date for the conference, dubbed “Geneva II,” and at the time of writing no firm guarantee that the SNC will attend. The Syrian opposition groups are busy arguing over whether they should negotiate with the Assad regime, and whether they should even participate while Hezbollah has fighters in Syria aiding Assad.
Meanwhile, a United Nations report released this week reminded us again of the human cost of this bloody conflict. It revealed harrowing details of Syrian children being taken hostage, forced to watch torture, and even participate in beheadings. The report accused both sides of abuses but insisted that rebel actions did not “reach the intensity and scale” of abuses committed by pro-government forces.
Geneva II coincides with the United Kingdom and France’s success last month in forcing the European Union to abandon its arms embargo on Syria. Both events are linked, and are taking place at a time when Assad is increasingly emboldened and when the West is fast running out of ideas to bring about his downfall, amid a worsening refugee crisis in Lebanon and Jordan and threats by the Free Syrian Army to take their war into Lebanon against Hezbollah.
A Foreign Office official told me that Geneva II is now “the priority” in the British government’s efforts to push for regime change in Syria. Lifting the EU arms embargo is intended to increase the Syrian opposition’s leverage ahead of the conference. The theory is that by floating the prospect that France and the U.K. could supply arms to the rebels, Assad will be more willing to negotiate an end to the war and presumably negotiate himself out of a job at the same time.
But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome. First, Assad, like everyone else, is aware that the idea of arming the rebels is an Anglo-French project. There is no support for such action in the rest of the European Union, or indeed Barack Obama’s White House. It is worth pointing out that 25 out of 27 EU governments opposed the lifting of the arms embargo. Last month’s vote simply meant that the U.K. and France are now free to send arms if they wish, since the embargo needed unanimity among all 27 governments to continue.
The U.K. and France have been free to send arms since May 31, but British Foreign Secretary William Hague still insists that lifting the embargo does not necessarily mean the U.K. will supply the rebels with weaponry. In the parlance of modern politics, the decision is a “game changer,” but only if France and the U.K. actually ship arms, and at the moment there is little sign of the U.K. doing that.
Second, any move to arm rebels at this late stage will simply prompt Russia to step up its supplies to Assad’s forces, matching or exceeding any weapons sent to the rebels. Russia’s efforts will likely see the arrival in Syria of sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Iran will also increase its support for the Assad regime. With this in mind, the French and British effort to arm the rebels at this stage looks like a belated, tawdry and futile attempt to be seen as doing something, after spending two years watching Syria’s suffering from the sidelines.
At the same time, so far Geneva II has only served to underline the increasing fragmentation of an already hapless Syrian opposition, which is now more divided than it was at the first Geneva conference last year.
Indeed, the Foreign Office informed me that there is “a lot of work going on behind the scenes” spearheaded by the U.K.’s envoy to the opposition John Wilkes, who must ensure the opposition is in as “good a shape as possible” for the conference, whatever that means.
But attempts by London to build up the capability of the opposition, to unify it and help it rise to the task of governing Syria have so far been a disaster. Which is why the British desire to end the arms embargo and place so much hope in Geneva II has a rather desperate feel about it. In the absence of a coherent strategy toward the Assad regime, the West has allowed itself to sleepwalk into a situation where it is now suddenly betting on long shots to topple Syria’s president.
If, and it’s still a big if, the U.K. does send weapons, Hague insists it would ensure that the arms go to so-called moderate rebels, and not extremists such as the Nusra Front. But how exactly will France and the U.K. vet those to whom they sell arms?
Much of the fighting on the ground is being led by Nusra. It is inconceivable that rebel groups, given arms by the U.K. or France, would not send them on to Nusra if they were in need of them to achieve a critical victory. This is war after all, and an ugly one at that, not a game of cricket.
Moreover, less than a year ago, in an interview with Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Wilkes insisted the U.K. would not provide funding to groups inside Syria because the government could not be certain of where the money would end up. If the government couldn’t verify where money was going eight months ago, how on earth will it verify where arms are going to today? What has changed?
Unfortunately when I asked the Foreign Office official how they would vet the rebels and differentiate good rebels from bad rebels when sending arms, the official declined to answer what she insisted was “a hypothetical question.” Hypothetical? Small wonder that Assad is feeling more confident the longer the Syrian conflict goes on.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 11, 2013, on page 7.
Sunday, 14 April 2013
On the Palestine tragedy, America ignored Margaret Thatcher
The Daily Star
By Michael Glackin
At the height of Lebanon’s Civil War during the early 1980s, British troops, serving with the Multi-National Force in the country, found themselves being shelled by Druze militiamen operating from the surrounding mountains. On hearing the news, during a lunch with her soon to be installed Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered Heseltine to telephone Walid Jumblatt immediately and tell him that she wanted the shelling to stop. Needless to say the shelling stopped.
Such was the appeal of the Iron Lady, or Iron Man as the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat once called her. In terms of the Middle East, Thatcher is principally remembered for urging U.S. President George H. W. Bush not to go “wobbly” in the buildup to the first Gulf War, and her ill-fated attempts to strengthen what she saw as moderate Arab and Israeli factions and politicians in a bid to solve what she called the issue of “abiding importance” in the Middle East.
But it is almost forgotten now that Thatcher, despite her fierce opposition to organizations she deemed to be involved in terrorism, was also responsible for opening up talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1980s.
For most of her premiership she refused formal governmental talks with the PLO over its refusal to recognize Israel and renounce terrorism. But as far back as 1982 she allowed Douglas Hurd, then a junior Foreign Office minister, to meet Farouq Qaddoumi, a senior PLO figure in Tunis. It was the first encounter of its kind, and those discussions later led to formal talks, paving the way for meetings between Arafat and the Reagan White House later in the decade.
In the event this, and more public attempts to forge agreements between moderates on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide, amounted to nothing in the crucible of Middle East politics.
But Thatcher at least attempted to pursue an independent strategy in the region, one aimed at overturning the status quo, rather than slavishly following U.S. policy as her successors had done. Despite her close relationship with President Ronald Reagan she was deeply critical of his intervention in Lebanon and had warned him against retaliatory action in the wake of the suicide truck-bomb attack which killed 242 American troops in Beirut.
Despite her support for Israel she cared little for Likud prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Part of her antipathy toward Begin stemmed from his role in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem during the final years of Britain’s mandate in Palestine in 1946, killing 91 British soldiers. She famously described him as a man who “could kill the whole [peace] process.”
She also continued the policies of previous British governments and refused major arms sales to Israel. This policy in particular annoyed Begin. He wrote to Thatcher demanding to know how Britain could refuse Israel defense equipment when it was happily selling sophisticated arms to Middle Eastern states.
Thatcher ignored the letter, refusing even to allow the Foreign Office to send a formal reply.
Her relationship with Begin cooled further with the outbreak of the Falklands War in April 1982 and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon two months later. Israel was selling arms to Argentina, but Thatcher’s wrath was reserved for Israel’s attack on Lebanon, which she considered a carbon copy of Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands.
Her government introduced a fresh arms embargo on Israel and rescinded an invitation to attend a British Army Equipment Exhibition.
For his part, Begin accused Thatcher of hypocrisy, insisting Israel was simply doing what the United Kingdom was doing in the Falklands, namely defending its citizens.
Thatcher consistently warned that Israel could not gain security by expanding its borders – something then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon later agreed with. She believed instead that embracing the principal of “land for peace” was Israel’s best option, remarking that Palestinians should be “restored in their land and dignity.”
That said, she had a number of reservations about the practicality of an independent Palestinian state. She doubted it would be truly independent and would likely fall under the influence of Syria or factions such as Fatah. Her preference was for Palestinian self-determination as part of a federation with Jordan, a plan that at the time had the support of both King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, with whom she enjoyed good working relationships.
Thatcher had visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Syria, along with her husband Dennis, and both were appalled by the conditions. She once remarked that she wished Israeli appreciation of the human rights of Soviet refuseniks was matched by appreciation of the plight of landless and stateless Palestinians.
At the same time, she made the point that the PLO, which effectively ran the Palestinian refugee camps, had a vested interest in maintaining their Spartan conditions, since the ensuing discontent meant the camps could remain a permanent recruiting ground for what Thatcher called the PLO’s “revolutionary struggle.”
It was during her last days in office that she famously urged Bush to drive Saddam Hussein’s invading Iraqi army out of Kuwait, when he appeared to be wavering. As she pointed out in her memoirs, the desire for swift action against Iraq stemmed in part from her experience in the Falklands, but primarily from a desire to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil from a similar fate. Thatcher reasoned that if the Iraqis crossed the border into the kingdom, their troops could annex the Gulf “in a matter of days,” giving Saddam Hussein control of 65 percent of the world’s oil reserves, from which he “could blackmail us all.”
Ultimately Thatcher failed to have a meaningful, long-term impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict or indeed the wider Middle East. While to the wider world she restored Britain’s global presence and pride, the leverage to end the Palestinian tragedy rested entirely with the U.S. While Walid Jumblatt may have heeded Thatcher, Washington did not.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 13, 2013, on page 7.
Monday, 8 April 2013
Syria’s opposition blames the West for extremism in its ranks
The Daily Star
Friday, March 29, 2013
By Michael Glackin
Talk of the opposition Syrian National Coalition being thrown into disarray by the recent resignation of its president, Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, is wide of the mark. The coalition exists in a state off perpetual disarray and division; Khatib’s resignation merely put the chaos in plain view.
Headless chickens have more direction than the National Coalition, and have infinitely more certainty about their fate. Two years on from the start of the uprising against the rule of President Bashar Assad there is still no certainty about how or when Syria’s bloody conflict will end, or what will happen to heal Syria and its long suffering people when it does.
Just to add to the general disarray, the National Coalition’s general assembly announced it would not accept Khatib’s resignation and he remains in place as “caretaker president.” A National Coalition insider said the coalition is due to hold talks with Khatib and indicated he may even withdraw his resignation in the coming days.
Nonetheless, from the perspective of the West, a few things have become clearer. The extremist Islamist tendency is clearly on the rise within the Syrian opposition, and according to Khatib and his supporters the blame for that must be laid at the door of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union for what he perceives as their failure to offer moderates within the National Coalition meaningful support.
Yet despite this, and Ghassan Hitto’s “election” as interim prime minister, British and Western policy toward the National Coalition will not soon change. Lukewarm support will continue. Syria’s rebels will not be armed by the West. And many more innocent Syrians will die.
The Arab League may well have taken down the Syrian national flag and hoisted the opposition’s colors to the mast, but that doesn’t amount to much if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan, or if you are caught in the grip of the relentless killing across Syria.
As for Khatib, he was on borrowed time after he offered talks between the National Coalition and the Syrian government. Despite halfhearted pledges of support for this policy in public, senior opposition figures, many of whom have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, were furious. The sudden elevation of Hitto, a virtually unknown information technology executive who joined the opposition last year after living in the U.S. for 30 years, was clearly intended to undermine Khatib.
Until last week the National Coalition had steadfastly avoided appointing an interim prime minister for fear of exacerbating divisions within the coalition and between its supporters in both the Gulf and the West. But insiders said Khatib’s increasingly “go it alone” policy, primarily his offer to talk to the Assad regime, which took place without consultation with other National Coalition officials, prompted his opponents to act.
It’s also not a coincidence that one of Hitto’s first pronouncements was to firmly rule out any talks with the Assad regime. Hitto is widely seen as a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood and his election was reportedly pushed by Qatar and Turkey, who are increasing their influence in the National Coalition as the Syrian civil war drags on.
But the National Coalition’s representative in the U.K., Walid Safur, insists that the talk of extremists and the Muslim Brotherhood taking control of the opposition is inaccurate. Speaking to me Wednesday, he said: “We’re a democratic movement, one that allows freedom of expression, unlike the Assad regime which kills those with opposing views. There are differences, but we are united on the major issue, which is to free Syria from the murderous regime of Bashar Assad.”
That said, Safur acknowledged the sharp rise in the number of extremist Islamist groups within the opposition’s ranks on the ground. He said: “The spread of elements such as the extremists has happened because the West has taken an ethical decision not to help the Syrian people overthrow Assad. Those elements are helping the Syrian people, if the West wants to prevent this it needs to step in and do more to help.”
But in a classic “Catch 22,” help is not forthcoming because the mistrust and disunity within Syria’s opposition, and the nature of many if the armed factions inside Syria, such as the extremist Nusra Front, have left the West reluctant to intervene more resolutely.
Consequently, despite the U.K.’s much publicized attempts to lift the European Union ban on arming the rebels, the Foreign Office insisted this week that it has not called for the opposition to be armed. An official explained the policy to me in detail. He said: “We haven’t taken a position on arming the opposition. The ability to send arms to the rebels and actually sending arms are not the same thing. If we have the ability to send arms it sends a clear message to Assad, but we haven’t made a decision about actually sending arms.”
Well, one can only hope such a policy is clear to Assad because it’s probably as clear as mud to most other people. But it reflects that the British government is aware that extremist groups are gaining more influence within the opposition and finding room to operate in Syria.
The Foreign Office official told me, “This is why we continue to support moderate opposition to boost their appeal and effectiveness over extremists. There remains a need to build up moderate opposition on the ground to counter extremist influence.”
Yet the events of the last week underline that despite creating the National Coalition to serve its own purposes, the West has, until now, lost the battle to bolster moderate elements within the opposition, and so far appears to be strengthening the extremists instead. Even headless chickens can survive long enough to hatch bad eggs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
Friday, March 29, 2013
By Michael Glackin
Talk of the opposition Syrian National Coalition being thrown into disarray by the recent resignation of its president, Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, is wide of the mark. The coalition exists in a state off perpetual disarray and division; Khatib’s resignation merely put the chaos in plain view.
Headless chickens have more direction than the National Coalition, and have infinitely more certainty about their fate. Two years on from the start of the uprising against the rule of President Bashar Assad there is still no certainty about how or when Syria’s bloody conflict will end, or what will happen to heal Syria and its long suffering people when it does.
Just to add to the general disarray, the National Coalition’s general assembly announced it would not accept Khatib’s resignation and he remains in place as “caretaker president.” A National Coalition insider said the coalition is due to hold talks with Khatib and indicated he may even withdraw his resignation in the coming days.
Nonetheless, from the perspective of the West, a few things have become clearer. The extremist Islamist tendency is clearly on the rise within the Syrian opposition, and according to Khatib and his supporters the blame for that must be laid at the door of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union for what he perceives as their failure to offer moderates within the National Coalition meaningful support.
Yet despite this, and Ghassan Hitto’s “election” as interim prime minister, British and Western policy toward the National Coalition will not soon change. Lukewarm support will continue. Syria’s rebels will not be armed by the West. And many more innocent Syrians will die.
The Arab League may well have taken down the Syrian national flag and hoisted the opposition’s colors to the mast, but that doesn’t amount to much if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan, or if you are caught in the grip of the relentless killing across Syria.
As for Khatib, he was on borrowed time after he offered talks between the National Coalition and the Syrian government. Despite halfhearted pledges of support for this policy in public, senior opposition figures, many of whom have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, were furious. The sudden elevation of Hitto, a virtually unknown information technology executive who joined the opposition last year after living in the U.S. for 30 years, was clearly intended to undermine Khatib.
Until last week the National Coalition had steadfastly avoided appointing an interim prime minister for fear of exacerbating divisions within the coalition and between its supporters in both the Gulf and the West. But insiders said Khatib’s increasingly “go it alone” policy, primarily his offer to talk to the Assad regime, which took place without consultation with other National Coalition officials, prompted his opponents to act.
It’s also not a coincidence that one of Hitto’s first pronouncements was to firmly rule out any talks with the Assad regime. Hitto is widely seen as a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood and his election was reportedly pushed by Qatar and Turkey, who are increasing their influence in the National Coalition as the Syrian civil war drags on.
But the National Coalition’s representative in the U.K., Walid Safur, insists that the talk of extremists and the Muslim Brotherhood taking control of the opposition is inaccurate. Speaking to me Wednesday, he said: “We’re a democratic movement, one that allows freedom of expression, unlike the Assad regime which kills those with opposing views. There are differences, but we are united on the major issue, which is to free Syria from the murderous regime of Bashar Assad.”
That said, Safur acknowledged the sharp rise in the number of extremist Islamist groups within the opposition’s ranks on the ground. He said: “The spread of elements such as the extremists has happened because the West has taken an ethical decision not to help the Syrian people overthrow Assad. Those elements are helping the Syrian people, if the West wants to prevent this it needs to step in and do more to help.”
But in a classic “Catch 22,” help is not forthcoming because the mistrust and disunity within Syria’s opposition, and the nature of many if the armed factions inside Syria, such as the extremist Nusra Front, have left the West reluctant to intervene more resolutely.
Consequently, despite the U.K.’s much publicized attempts to lift the European Union ban on arming the rebels, the Foreign Office insisted this week that it has not called for the opposition to be armed. An official explained the policy to me in detail. He said: “We haven’t taken a position on arming the opposition. The ability to send arms to the rebels and actually sending arms are not the same thing. If we have the ability to send arms it sends a clear message to Assad, but we haven’t made a decision about actually sending arms.”
Well, one can only hope such a policy is clear to Assad because it’s probably as clear as mud to most other people. But it reflects that the British government is aware that extremist groups are gaining more influence within the opposition and finding room to operate in Syria.
The Foreign Office official told me, “This is why we continue to support moderate opposition to boost their appeal and effectiveness over extremists. There remains a need to build up moderate opposition on the ground to counter extremist influence.”
Yet the events of the last week underline that despite creating the National Coalition to serve its own purposes, the West has, until now, lost the battle to bolster moderate elements within the opposition, and so far appears to be strengthening the extremists instead. Even headless chickens can survive long enough to hatch bad eggs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
Friday, 8 March 2013
Blair, still the unrepentant preacher
The Daily Star
Friday, March 8 2013
By Michael Glackin
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has given up trying to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq or persuade people that “it was the right decision.” His weariness is understandable. Blair has changed the reasons for supporting America’s decision to invade so many times, he has probably lost track of what it is he is justifying.
Yet Blair also remains unrepentant and is still preaching. Speaking on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the invasion, Blair admitted that life in Iraq, where sectarian killings continue, was not what he had hoped it would be following the downfall and execution of Saddam Hussein. Yet despite this he insisted the situation for Iraqis would have been terrible had the dictator remained in power, adding that Saddam was “20 times worse” than Syrian President Bashar Assad.
It’s easy to knock Blair. His vanity, his messianic belief in himself and his judgments, his clear deceit in going to war on intelligence he surely realized was flawed. A year before the invasion, he wrote to his chief of staff Jonathan Powell: “the immediate [weapons of mass destruction] problems don’t seem obviously worse than three years ago. So we have to reorder our story and message. Increasingly, I think it should be about the nature of the regime.”
In short Blair wanted a war. And he wanted it because he believed there was a moral case for it. It had nothing to do with WMD and he never cared about gaining United Nations support. In that same memo Blair wrote: “A political philosophy that does care about other nations – e.g. Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and is proud to change regimes on the merits, should be gung-ho on Saddam.”
The crude language displays a distastefully cavalier attitude to the hundreds of thousands of lives that would be lost on Blair’s desire for a “gung-ho” approach to Saddam. But playing devil’s advocate, one could say that his decision-making in the runup to the Iraqi invasion was informed by both the failures and successes of the international community in dealing with what were considered to be “rogue states.”
Wind the clock even further back to 1994 and Rwanda. The United Nations had boots on the ground. It had, by all accounts, been warned in advance that a genocide against the country’s Tutsis was imminent. Yet the U.N. Security Council did nothing. More than half a million men, women and children were massacred, including 2,000 refugees who had taken refuge in the Don Bosco School in the Rwandan capital of Kigali under the protection of Belgian U.N. peacekeepers. The peacekeepers were ordered by the U.N. to abandon the school, leaving it to Hutu militants waiting outside its gates, drinking beer. Once the Belgians left, the militants entered and massacred almost everyone.
The lesson Blair drew from Rwanda was that the U.N. is incapable of preventing human tragedies. Its membership, as we can see today over Syria, cannot speak with one voice and so shrinks from decisive action when it is most needed.
NATO’s belated attack on Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, generally seen as establishing the template for Blair’s “humanitarian interventionism,” stemmed in large part from global guilt over the U.N.’s failure to intervene in Rwanda as much as from disgust with the carnage in the former Yugoslavia and the Western hand-wringing that accompanied the conflict throughout the 1990s.
Blair persuaded then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, who had regretted his own failure to act in Rwanda, to join him. This “humanitarian intervention” was based on a simple premise: If the U.N. does not act to prevent, in Blair’s words during his famous Chicago speech in April 1999, ”a humanitarian crisis or gross oppression of a civilian population,” then individual states might do so themselves.
It was in essence a rebranding of Clinton’s earlier calls for “a coalition of the willing” when the U.S. president sought international support for possible action against North Korea in 1994.
The successful British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 stretched the premise further. Acting unilaterally, the troops rescued a failing U.N. operation that was on the point of losing control to the vicious militias, “gangsters” as Blair described them, who had taken hundreds of peacekeepers hostage and were poised to oust the country’s elected government. It was an overwhelming success and Blair has since said that it was one of the things of which he is most proud.
Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. I covered the government’s party conference in 2001, weeks after the attack and listened as Blair gave a speech outlining a world of “humanitarian intervention.” I left the conference thinking he might invade Zimbabwe – which he dearly wished to, North Korea, and probably China too, never mind Afghanistan or Iraq.
But while we ignore the international backdrop to the Iraq invasion at our own peril, none of this excuses what became one of the greatest military follies of modern history. Ten years on Iraq is a long way from being a functioning democracy. In the last week alone dozens of Iraqis have been killed in outbursts of the sectarian violence unleashed by the invasion. The Middle East is more volatile today. The invasion radically altered the region’s balance of power, to the advantage of Iran – a greater threat to the West than Saddam ever was.
The war in Iraq crushed British and more importantly American self-confidence, decidedly curbing Washington’s willingness to become involved in far-flung conflicts. Because of the conflict, the West remains firmly on the sidelines in Syria, effectively acquiescing in the continuing slaughter, just as it did in Kosovo until 1999.
Iraq exposed the limits of Blair’s doctrine. Sierra Leone, Kosovo and other smaller interventions failed to provide a consensual template for “humanitarian intervention.” All they did was give Blair dangerous over-confidence in his instincts and beliefs. The former British prime minister should now acknowledge these facts and take responsibility for them. Sadly, he refuses to do so. Unlike Pope Benedict XVI, Blair really does think he’s infallible.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
Friday, March 8 2013
By Michael Glackin
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has given up trying to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq or persuade people that “it was the right decision.” His weariness is understandable. Blair has changed the reasons for supporting America’s decision to invade so many times, he has probably lost track of what it is he is justifying.
Yet Blair also remains unrepentant and is still preaching. Speaking on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the invasion, Blair admitted that life in Iraq, where sectarian killings continue, was not what he had hoped it would be following the downfall and execution of Saddam Hussein. Yet despite this he insisted the situation for Iraqis would have been terrible had the dictator remained in power, adding that Saddam was “20 times worse” than Syrian President Bashar Assad.
It’s easy to knock Blair. His vanity, his messianic belief in himself and his judgments, his clear deceit in going to war on intelligence he surely realized was flawed. A year before the invasion, he wrote to his chief of staff Jonathan Powell: “the immediate [weapons of mass destruction] problems don’t seem obviously worse than three years ago. So we have to reorder our story and message. Increasingly, I think it should be about the nature of the regime.”
In short Blair wanted a war. And he wanted it because he believed there was a moral case for it. It had nothing to do with WMD and he never cared about gaining United Nations support. In that same memo Blair wrote: “A political philosophy that does care about other nations – e.g. Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and is proud to change regimes on the merits, should be gung-ho on Saddam.”
The crude language displays a distastefully cavalier attitude to the hundreds of thousands of lives that would be lost on Blair’s desire for a “gung-ho” approach to Saddam. But playing devil’s advocate, one could say that his decision-making in the runup to the Iraqi invasion was informed by both the failures and successes of the international community in dealing with what were considered to be “rogue states.”
Wind the clock even further back to 1994 and Rwanda. The United Nations had boots on the ground. It had, by all accounts, been warned in advance that a genocide against the country’s Tutsis was imminent. Yet the U.N. Security Council did nothing. More than half a million men, women and children were massacred, including 2,000 refugees who had taken refuge in the Don Bosco School in the Rwandan capital of Kigali under the protection of Belgian U.N. peacekeepers. The peacekeepers were ordered by the U.N. to abandon the school, leaving it to Hutu militants waiting outside its gates, drinking beer. Once the Belgians left, the militants entered and massacred almost everyone.
The lesson Blair drew from Rwanda was that the U.N. is incapable of preventing human tragedies. Its membership, as we can see today over Syria, cannot speak with one voice and so shrinks from decisive action when it is most needed.
NATO’s belated attack on Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, generally seen as establishing the template for Blair’s “humanitarian interventionism,” stemmed in large part from global guilt over the U.N.’s failure to intervene in Rwanda as much as from disgust with the carnage in the former Yugoslavia and the Western hand-wringing that accompanied the conflict throughout the 1990s.
Blair persuaded then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, who had regretted his own failure to act in Rwanda, to join him. This “humanitarian intervention” was based on a simple premise: If the U.N. does not act to prevent, in Blair’s words during his famous Chicago speech in April 1999, ”a humanitarian crisis or gross oppression of a civilian population,” then individual states might do so themselves.
It was in essence a rebranding of Clinton’s earlier calls for “a coalition of the willing” when the U.S. president sought international support for possible action against North Korea in 1994.
The successful British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 stretched the premise further. Acting unilaterally, the troops rescued a failing U.N. operation that was on the point of losing control to the vicious militias, “gangsters” as Blair described them, who had taken hundreds of peacekeepers hostage and were poised to oust the country’s elected government. It was an overwhelming success and Blair has since said that it was one of the things of which he is most proud.
Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. I covered the government’s party conference in 2001, weeks after the attack and listened as Blair gave a speech outlining a world of “humanitarian intervention.” I left the conference thinking he might invade Zimbabwe – which he dearly wished to, North Korea, and probably China too, never mind Afghanistan or Iraq.
But while we ignore the international backdrop to the Iraq invasion at our own peril, none of this excuses what became one of the greatest military follies of modern history. Ten years on Iraq is a long way from being a functioning democracy. In the last week alone dozens of Iraqis have been killed in outbursts of the sectarian violence unleashed by the invasion. The Middle East is more volatile today. The invasion radically altered the region’s balance of power, to the advantage of Iran – a greater threat to the West than Saddam ever was.
The war in Iraq crushed British and more importantly American self-confidence, decidedly curbing Washington’s willingness to become involved in far-flung conflicts. Because of the conflict, the West remains firmly on the sidelines in Syria, effectively acquiescing in the continuing slaughter, just as it did in Kosovo until 1999.
Iraq exposed the limits of Blair’s doctrine. Sierra Leone, Kosovo and other smaller interventions failed to provide a consensual template for “humanitarian intervention.” All they did was give Blair dangerous over-confidence in his instincts and beliefs. The former British prime minister should now acknowledge these facts and take responsibility for them. Sadly, he refuses to do so. Unlike Pope Benedict XVI, Blair really does think he’s infallible.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
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