Announcing no new policies, Mr Bush said: "We must ensure the actions of one country do not contradict or undermine the actions of another.
"In an interconnected world, no nation will gain by driving down the fortunes of another. We are in this together. We will come through it together."
- BBC report
My friend Jose says, “It's hard for me to understand how it is possible that man having been able to land on the moon isn't able to seek the terrorist heads out and do away with the problem?”
This mystifies me, too. With all the stupendous surveillance technology at our disposal, why are we – the West – unable to pinpoint and eliminate our ideological enemies?
It is now 5½ years since the
Frankly, I find this quite incomprehensible, and indeed unbelievable. I vividly remember the somewhat ludicrous spectacle of President Bush – when he had regained his speech after being struck dumb while reading ‘My Pet Goat’ – donning his metaphorical Stetson, cocking his best six-shooter wild west rhetoric, and histrionically proclaiming that “They can run, but they can’t hide. We’ll smoke ‘em out, track ‘em down, cut off their financial bases” – or words to that effect.
And has any of this happened? Not a smidgeon. Despite all the space satellite technology, the lavish international on-the-ground intelligence resources, the boasted “pinpoint weaponry” – which in action on the ground in Iraq seems as scatter-prone as an 18th century blunderbuss – bin Laden and Co. remain unearthed from their presumably quite comfortable, if not luxurious, hideaways “somewhere on the Pakistan/Afghan border” [why is this assumed? Aren’t they more likely to be hiding out in
I find this extremely odd. And not only odd – positively sinister. For what have we – the
Those of us who are appalled by the unconscionable and incompetent behaviour of our rulers in defence of what they choose to term our “free” way of life can grumble away as much as we like on the internet – for now, anyway: I wonder whether we shall be allowed that old-fashioned luxury for very much longer, the way things are going? [See Naomi Wolf again.] But in political terms, our complaints fall on deaf ears. In Britain, mainstream politics has been in the doldrums since our Dear Leader turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to over a million people - maybe two million - marching against the illegal invasion of Iraq and his rentamob of spineless “New Labour” MPs failed to call him to account for his contempt of the people’s loudly articulated will. From then on a sense of electoral impotence has grown, first as a feeling of resigned helplessness, then sullen acquiescence, and now dangerously verging on futile despair. This feeling of impotence is a big component, in my view, of the pervasive depression that is nowadays so widespread.
When will the tide turn? A new politics of mass protest and active democracy is overdue in both
Following on from my Open Letter to Yankee Doodle, there’s an interesting discussion happening on Richard’s Gatwick Forum about the likely shape of a post-UN, post-US ‘full spectrum dominance’, new world order. The question was asked whether Americans realise that their present policy of seeking to impose their will by military force is bound to fail – indeed, has already failed. Richard expressed the opinion that they do realise it, but are unable to admit it. I disagree, for the following reasons:
“You say that 'they' already realise their war ['on terror'; for 'full spectrum dominance'; or whatever] is lost - but I'm not sure they do. 'They' - the men [it's nearly all men] now running the
“As I see it, the trauma of the 9/11 twin towers atrocity has deranged and derailed world politics. It was greeted as a 'wake up call', but its actual impact has been the opposite - to send those controlling
“Unless the great majority of the world's population, who are peace-loving, can assert themselves against these crazed maniacs, I fear the worst. It's symptomatic of our weakness that so far, fewer than 50 people have signed the - entirely apolitical - global petition against violence which some of us launched on the internet six months ago. What has happened to the sane, moderate, democratic, peace-loving solid centre in national and world politics? At the moment, it is nowhere in evidence.”
Reflecting on the inflamed state of global antagonisms, it’s obvious that humanity is passing through a long dark tunnel of inflamed hatred, and that all over the world what Jung called the ‘Dark Shadow’ is uppermost in peoples’ consciousness in the current phase of history.
Every single person in the world knows that he or she is good, and does their best according to their lights [which of course are very varied according to race, religion, culture, family traditions, education, and many other social influences]. We all do whatever we do “for the best” as we perceive it. We also know that there are less satisfactory sides to our character, and that we are capable of, and frequently commit, dishonest, unkind, wicked, and sometimes cruel deeds.
The internal conflict which these different aspects of our inner selves sets up needs to be resolved, and there are various ways of doing this. The most beneficent and constructive is to confront our contradictory impulses and seek to harmonise them as far as we can by reducing the influence we allow the bad side of us to exert upon our conduct. This can be done by increasing self-awareness and self-scrutiny through introspection, therapy, or religion. But for many if not most, that is too austere a path to follow; and so they practise the age-old psychological trick of ‘splitting’ and ‘projection’, internalising the good not merely as “the best of me” but as “ALL of me”, and projecting their bad or discomfiting components outward onto an external Other who becomes ‘the enemy’ and has to be fought.
This is a fatally easy way of escaping from personal responsibility; and it is mass irresponsibility from which the world is suffering so much today. Hardly anyone takes responsibility for their thinking or behaviour any more – whatever goes wrong is someone else’s fault, for which ‘they’ deserve to be punished. And so the escalating cycle of hatred and violence spins on.
Even worse, our habit of perceiving groups, nations, societies, and faiths as monolithic entities, as if they were single giant individuals instead of a composite and complex mixture of a myriad different individuals, allows us to shrug off responsibility and impute blame indiscriminately. ’They’ – the hated other – are ALL guilty, and so we need not worry if we decide to get rid of them, even literally by nuking them. Dehumanising those whom we perceive as our foes permits us to treat them as objects – things – which is the ultimate wickedness.
By demonising our fancied enemies we invite them to do the same to us, and precipitate the holocaust which everyone says they wish to avoid. But do they? There is a destructive urge in some paranoid people which makes them secretly – and increasingly publicly – exult in the prospect of approaching mayhem and disaster. These people are a public menace, and too many of them occupy positions of power and influence.
In the 1980s, when many people were dismayed at the prospect of nuclear war, the psychologist Dorothy Rowe wrote a book called Living with the Bomb. Can we live without enemies? In it, she described the widespread depression and mental ill-health engendered by the precarious state of world peace, and answered her question with the sage observation that unless we exorcise our demons, and learn to live alongside those whom we now regard as enemies, we shall all cease to exist quite soon. In today’s even more precarious state of affairs, her thoughts are even more urgently relevant.
Unless we can stop demonising those with whom we disagree, or fear, we are on the fast track to Doomsday. We must give up ‘magic’ thinking, and press on with building bridges. Instead of seeing only the worst in those we are opposed to, we have to look for the answering spark of innate goodness that exists in everyone. Although I sometimes despair of human nature, that is what keeps me on blogging in the Arena.
Years ago, Lord Wolfenden, who was renowned in his day as the best committee chairman in
[-525.374034-] Legitimacy is coherent only in an agreed-upon context, such as national or international law. Having stepped outside the bound of international law, there is no context whatsoever to confer or deny legitimacy to any party in this conflict. The
Even the first Gulf war, itself entailing deeply immoral activities (notably the refusal to accept Saddam Hussein's surrender and the subsequent "Turkey shoot", the slaughter of retreating Iraqi troops), still preserved at least lip service to the notion of international legitimacy through the United Nations.
The rule of even a bad law is preferable to no law at all. A bad law can at least be discussed and changed; but there is nothing to discuss, nothing to change, when pure power is on the march. At this level, everyone is operating directly from pure immediate self-interest, with no thought at all towards abstract or global principles. No one in this conflict, neither the
Formal definitions of legitimacy emerge from a balance of power. There is no such thing as a priori or objective notions of legitimacy. Moral "legitimacy" (including my own use of "immoral" above) without any explicit, formal definition is nothing more than personal opinion. Formal legitimacy emerges from competing self interest when no one's self interest can dominate by pure power. We agree to be bound by laws (and, more importantly, police and prisons) to refrain from murder, rape, theft, etc. because we do not have the personal, individual power to protect ourselves from these objectionable activities. But if I feel secure that I can protect my own self interest with my own personal power, what motivation do I have for acknowledging the rights of others? Abstract notions of morality by themselves have never proven effective at motivating behavior.
It should perhaps be unsurprising that formal notions of legitimacy are being eroded not only in international relations but in our domestic law. Two things happened. We went from an economically "open" system to a "closed" system: Unrestricted economic growth is no longer possible, and thus physical human labor is losing its value. (Only a fraction of people are capable of "soft", intellectual productivity, which is still relatively open.) Secondly, the balance of powers has been upset, both internationally, with no strong state or alliance to balance the military power of the
What bugs me as a moralist, but even more as an engineer, is the sheer stupidity of our current problems. The almost half-trillion dollars spent on
At some point, at an appalling cost in blood and wealth, some new balance will occur, and we will again turn our attention to abstract notions of morality and ethics, and develop a new formalism of legitimacy. Until then, we are doomed to a brutal competition of self interest that would shock even Machiavelli.
“The [neoCons’] real goal is to force
The Government – which increasingly seems to live in an entirely different world to the rest of us – is making disapproving clucking noises about the amount of depression prevalent in the population, which they doubtless consider entirely unjustified in view of all the blessings of cackhanded administration they shower upon us. Schemes are afoot to provide thousands of hastily-trained therapists [all of twelve weeks!] to remedy this situation; and not content with that, we are now being regaled with proposals to incorporate ‘lessons in happiness’ into schools!
Just how miserable and worried people can be coaxed, commanded or dragooned into being jolly and carefree on the say-so of government ministers and bureaucrats escapes me. If many people are becoming increasingly depressed these days it is just possibly because there is plenty to be worried about. And not only worried, but frightened. In fact, I cannot remember a time since the 1930s of my childhood when people were so preoccupied and dismayed about the world situation and its possible knock-on effects. Even during the Cold War, with its recurring crisis points such as Suez–Hungary and Cuban missiles, feelings that impending doom is a likely possibility were not nearly as widespread as they are today.
Yet our Walter Mitty [“I did it My Way”] retiring-at-a-snailspace Prime Minister – one of the most self-deluded characters ever to have occupied 10 Downing Street – tells us that Britain is “a country comfortable in the 21st Century, at home in its own skin, able not just to be proud of its past but also confident of its future”. If he believes that, he would believe anything. The trouble is that he does believe whatever he chooses, against all the evidence. This, presumably, is a quality of mind bestowed upon him by the ‘gift’ of Faith.
Blair’s policy of ‘liberal interventionism’ smacks of hubris even more than the wild-eyed religiosity of William Gladstone. Practically everyone – even those who still won’t admit it – knows that his cosying up to the wacky Bush-wacking Administration’s
Before the attack on
As a consequence of what many of us regard as the government’s misguided - and sometimes deliberately misleading - approach to these and many other matters, there has been a sharp erosion of trust: between citizens and government, between different sections of the community, and often between individuals. The air is filled with harsh and strident voices talking past each other and shouting one another down. This itself is dismaying. I cannot remember a time when public discourse and argument was more irritable, and often downright bad-tempered, than it is today. This alone gives the lie to Blair’s fantasy of a ‘comfortable’ country.
The fact is, people no longer feel as secure, in their own lives and homes, as they used to. The government does not help by continually issuing fleshcreeping warnings about the high risks of terrorist attacks – or by its unprecedented onslaught upon our traditional and hitherto much cherished civil liberties [“yesterday’s concept”, as the Prime Minister airily dismissed them]. Ostensibly to ‘protect’ us against terrorism, the Blair government has ushered in a snooper’s society in which we are continually watched by umpteen CCTV cameras, are apparently soon to be assailed by the amplified voices of invisible watchers ticking us off if we drop litter in the street, and in the not far distant future are likely to be compulsorily fitted with ‘smart chips’ so that our whereabouts and doings will be ceaselessly monitored.
I for one find this prospect not only highly alarming but deeply depressing. I don’t want or need to talk to a quarter-trained ‘therapist’ about my perfectly realistic fears and indignation: I want a political sea-change which will bring about a U-turn in these imbecile antics of our ‘rulers’.
Any hope from Gloomy Gordon? Don’t make me laugh. But cheer up – you’d better, or they’ll slap an ASBO on you.
Although politically aware and on occasions active since my ‘teens, I have never been a ‘tribalist’ politician. The often vicious infighting and personal mudslinging that takes up so much energy on the part of the ‘politically committed’ I find distasteful and boring. What matters, in my view, are issues – not personalities. Although pretty despairing of the poor calibre of some of those who govern, I have never felt the fierce degree of personal hatred that many evinced towards Margaret Thatcher, or nowadays to Tony Blair. While deploring their stupidity, ignorance and sometimes deceitfulness, I have no wish for them to come to personal harm – still less to administer it myself.
The lengths to which some are prepared to go to vilify those with whom they disagree never ceases to surprise me. This is especially true when the target is somebody regarded as a turncoat by former allies. Reading the political blogs, one can hardly fail to be aware that a prime target for demonisation by his erstwhile comrades of the Left is a writer called Nick Cohen, of whom I must confess I had not previously heard until the current storm broke. His prime offence is, apparently, not only that he supports the war in Iraq, but that he has the temerity to criticise those on the Left who, as he sees it, have because of their ingrained anti-Americanism abandoned their socialist and democratic principles and are turning a blind eye to the totalitarian and theocratic mindset of Islamic extremism.
So the intensity of the abuse being hurled at the wretched Cohen prompted me to read his book What’s Left? How Liberals lost their way to see what all the fuss is about. As I might have predicted, the anguish is a product of Cohen’s hard-hitting, robustly radical defence of democracy, pluralism and free speech against the tergiversations of those elements of the Left who, ever since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, have been seduced into supporting tyranny against democracy and have made themselves the creatures of reactionary, cruel and sometimes murderous regimes.
I am by no means convinced that all the policies which Cohen advocates are the correct ones. His detailed account of the horrors inflicted by Saddam Hussein upon his own people is not a clinching argument for the US-led invasion of
Cohen is rightly scathing, too, of the Stalinist-worshipping Lefties of the 1930s and the Cold War, who obediently turned about tail at Moscow’s crack of the whip in their attitudes to Nazism following the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and again when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 and what had – according to them - hitherto been a wicked “capitalist imperialist” war became a virtuously patriotic one overnight. The mindless relativism of the postmodernist multi-culturalists of the last quarter-century, with their weaselish and implicitly racist defence of primitive practices such as wife-burning and genital mutilation on the specious grounds that these are excusable as manifestations of a different cultural norm from our own, are also castigated, as is the fashionable present-day fad of much of the noisy Left to regard Muslims as ideologically innocent “victims” of the West regardless of their aggressively triumphalist and intolerant Islamic doctrines and frequently violent behaviour.
This failure to distinguish between democratic, liberal, pluralist, tolerant values and their assorted tyrannically totalitarian opponents has, in fact, been the Achilles heel of much Left-wing politics throughout the past century. And it is still alive and well, even in quarters who claim to know better. I find it quite incredible that the much excoriated Tony Blair has just delivered himself of the following sentiments in an article A Battle for Global Values in the January/February 2007 edition of “Foreign Affairs”:
“To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance.
“Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.”
While the final sentence may possibly be true, the preceding statements display a stupendous ignorance of both history and theology, Christian and Islamic. It’s this sort of twaddle that convinces me that our dear prime minister has gone totally round the twist. If he believes that, he’d believe anything. Such as that you can square circles – which just about sums up his foreign and domestic policies.
There may well be millions of peacefully inclined, “moderate” Muslims around the world – though I have never noticed them declaring that they prefer our open, tolerant, free-speech, pluralist democratic society to the putative theocracy enjoined by their holy books and learned preachers.
The challenge which an increasingly assertive Islam poses to democracy as we in the West understand it is the real clash of global values, and it is hard to see how this challenge is going to be successfully and peacefully met unless the issues are candidly clarified and the necessary consequent measures taken to safeguard our democratic way of life against ALL totalitarian threats, from whatever quarter they come.
According to a
While al-Qaeda will continue to operate in
Although al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has not made any recent public pronouncements, he is said to be active in al-Qaeda's planning. Since 2005, the al-Qaeda leadership had been talking to many groups, including Egyptians, Libyans and the takfiri camp (which calls all non-practicing Muslims infidels). Al-Qaeda paid for differences in tactics and ideology among these groups as its structure unraveled and the organization developed into an "ideology" rather than a cohesive group.
As a result, al-Qaeda's global agenda was largely shelved and the international community's financial squeeze definitely hurt. This problem has been overcome, the contact claimed. Even
Several militant Islamic Libyan and Egyptian groups have joined forces with "Jamaat al-Qaeda" under the leadership of bin Laden. Now al-Qaeda has completed regrouping organisationally and financially, major operations can be planned. But to ensure that 2007 would be "the year of al-Qaeda", a "great compromise" had to be made. Before the "Mother of all Battles" [the Gulf War of 1991] bin Laden offered to help the Saudi monarchy fight Saddam Hussein's forces in
Nevertheless, the growing influence of Shi'ite Iran in the Middle East, especially in Iraq after the US invasion of 2003 and Lebanon, concerned al-Qaeda and the anti-Shi'ite Salafi Saudi oligarchs, which included the royal family, scholars, tribes and the state apparatus. In this environment, a speech by bin Laden was aired on Al-Jazeera television in which he called the Saudi monarchy extremely corrupt, the most contemptuous aspect of which was its alliance with US interests. Having said that, he asked the Saudi monarchy to step aside, saying that the mujahideen did not at that stage want to confront it. Rather, the Saudis should leave al-Qaeda alone to fight against Americans in
The speech was, in fact, the beginning of dialogue between al-Qaeda and the Saudi royal family through various Muslim scholars at numerous places in the
ASIA TIMES ONLINE’s contact said that al-Qaeda is so powerful in
The "arrangement" between al-Qaeda and the Saudis reveals a diplomatic double-step by
This includes work on "Abeer" rockets to carry nuclear or chemical weapons. Last October, the insurgent group Islamic Army in
According to the ASIA TIMES ONLINE contact, basic work on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons has now been completed and the next main task is to mount them on suitable missiles - which it is hoped the upgraded Abeer now is. In the meantime, the Maaskar al-Battar camp is preparing to send an additional 10,000 trained youths into
This coincides with al-Qaeda organizing all segments of the Iraqi resistance under its umbrella. It has already declared an "Emir of the Islamic Emirates of Iraq" comprising Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Kirkuk, Salah al-Din and Ninawa, and in other parts of the governorate of Babel. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi has been declared the emir of the state.
This development signifies that in the coming months, al-Qaeda's epicentre will shift from the Pakistani tribal areas of South Waziristan and North Waziristan to
Although many Arab fighters left
Previously,
