Jack Straw – shows a girl a good time

Jack Straw knows how to show a girl a good time. When Condoleezza Rice invited him to her home town of Birmingham, Alabama, she showed him the sights of the civil rights struggle, gave him a traditional dinner with her family, and took him to an American football game. What did Jack give her in return? – a wet weekend in Blackburn. Not that the dazzle dampened the Foreign Secretary's ardor as he led his US counterpart round an industrial estate in the Ribble valley and other thrilling sights of the Northwest, he looked like a love-struck school boy.

The visit wasn't a logistical success. "We wish she hadn't been invited here," said a student at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. "Why should we be seen to condone the actions of this woman?"

"When I found out she was coming here to speak to our children, I didn't want her to preach what she did in Iraq," said Rabiya Adam, protesting outside the Pleckgate High School in Blackburn.

A local mosque withdrew its invitation for her to visit. She was booed and heckled wherever she went.

Across northwest England, officials had trouble scraping up people willing to populate events in her honour.

The [Liverpool] Philharmonic Hall scoured its C-list of possible compares for a gala evening in her honour, following refusals by the poet Roger McGough and the actress Cathy Tyson."

She received an honorary soccer jersey in an empty Blackburn Rovers stadium.

Hundreds of protesters stood outside the Blackburn town hall, jeering and chanting, as Rice and Straw arrived to meet with local Muslim leaders.

Rice declared her visit an unmitigated success.

She told a news conference in Blackburn that she'd been "very warmly welcomed" and didn't have a problem with the crowds of angry protesters howling with outrage at her every movement.

"If it is not possible for me to go somewhere and to be willing to encounter people with different views then I'm really not doing my job," she said.

On their subsequent fleeting visit to Baghdad, they urged Iraqis to speed up negotiations on a new government.

"The Iraqi people are losing patience," the US secretary of state. “'What is more, your international allies want to see this done."

The statement was followed up be a call for a strong leader to unite Iraq. This was absurd, given that the war has entered a bloodier phase; everything has become sectarian and ethnic with around 900 Iraqi civilians killed violently in March: There is no longer an Iraqi state to be led.

Three years after the original invasion, supporters of the war should assess the situation with pitiless clarity. Three years is more than enough time to have trained a new generation of police recruits and native soldiers. The continuing insurgency can no longer be regarded as a mopping-up exercise, or a prolongation of the military campaign. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether our troops are containing a civil conflict that would be occurring anyway, or whether they are in fact exacerbating the unrest by their presence. A bit of both, is the honest answer; but, with each day that passes, the truth tilts towards the latter.

She admitted that the U.S. had made "thousands of mistakes" in Iraq, but then later recanted.

"I meant it figuratively, not literally. I was not sitting around counting," she told a news conference.

Rice and Straw are desperately out of touch with the Iraqi reality and how the UK feels about it.

Iraq was a mistake: Neo-cons

Better late than never. After more than three years, the right-wing commentators who sold America on the Iraq war are finally admitting what the rest of us always knew: it was a tragic mistake. William Buckley Jnr, the grand old man of the American Right, recently lamented that one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. And the neo-conservative scholar Francis Fukuyama has just produced a book in which he renounces his belief that the Iraq invasion would trigger a democratic revolution across the Middle East. Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-cons thought they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and will. But Leninism was tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States. In retrospect, the neo-cons made some terrible errors. The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in the area of intelligence. This led to the debacle over the missing WMD and the scandalous lack of post-invasion planning. Another error was narcissism: America's power blinded us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes and to our lack of understanding of foreign cultures. The conclusion of the Cold War also lulled us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We've all learned a tough lesson, and it's been a lot tougher for tens of thousands of dead Iraqis than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.

Lets say, “we quit” to Iraq

The most depressing bit of news I've heard from Iraq lately is a new poll revealing that no less than 88% of Sunii Arab Iraqis support violent attacks on US troops. With this level of public sympathy from the population, the insurgents won't be laying down their weapons any time soon. So where does America go from here? One way in which we could take some wind out of the insurgency's sails would be to announce a target date for the withdrawal of our troops. A two-year timetable, for instance, would encourage the Iraqi authorities to get their house in order and weaken the strongest card the insurgents have: the claim that they're protecting the motherland from imperialist Yankee crusaders. We should also announce unequivocally that we will not keep any long-term military bases in Iraq: the same poll found that 80% of Iraqis believe that the US is seeking such bases. They are right to fear as much, but if we know what is good for us, we will renounce that possibility now. We clung on to bases in Saudi Arabia thinking they would be strategically useful. Instead they became an albatross that outraged Saudi nationalists and spawned Osama bin Laden. Let's not make the same mistake in Iraq.

God, Blair and Iraq

Was Tony Blair's decision to join the US invasion of Iraq informed by his Christian beliefs? We cannot be sure and it hardly matters anyway. Religion is just part of a subtle and, I think, insidious narrative that the PM is now weaving around his decision to go to war. This holds that he agonised over the decision before finally making a choice in good faith. This scenario sounds plausible, moral even. But it's not true. Blair's crime was not that he made the wrong judgement but that he never properly made the judgement at all. He simply went along with the White House because supporting the US was easier than saying no. Blair certainly thought regime change in Baghdad was a good thing, but there is little indication that he carefully weighed the risks and the alternatives. He apparently never asked whether there was a proper post-invasion plan and, if not, why not. Blair says that leadership is about taking tough decisions, but it's also about exercising judgement – and that, he failed to do.

What has Bush Achieved?

Professor Steve Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania says it's easier to cheat democracy than Las Vegas. This is a fact which Bush must know all to well as six years into his presidency it is difficult to think of a single, substantial foreign policy initiative that Bush has pursued that did not involve war, or the threat of it. There is good reason for this. It is the one area in which America reigns supreme, accounting alone for 40% of the global military expenditure and spending almost seven times the amount of its nearest rival, China.

Yet greatness eludes him. For if the last six years have proved anything, it is the limitations of military might as the central plank of foreign policy. Indeed as a previous post indicates Bush now faces record low approval ratings and Iraq's former interim prime minister, lyad Allawi, warned this week that his country was on the brink of collapse.

"If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is," he said on the third anniversary of the American-led invasion. Allawi argued that there was no other way to describe the sectarian violence that he said was claiming 50 to 60 lives every day.

President Bush denied that Iraq had descended into civil war, but suggested that American soldiers might have to stay in the country after he'd left office in 2009. The decision about whether to withdraw troops, he said, would be made by future presidents and future
governments of Iraq. Bush was speaking after US forces launched one of the biggest offensives since the 2003 invasion – an assault involving 1,500 soldiers on insurgents in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Iraq was meant to become a beacon of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. Instead it's a bloodbath. Sunni insurgents mount car bombings and assassinations daily. Shia death squads are kidnapping, torturing and executing Sunnis. Since the desecration of the Shia shrine at Samarra last month, the carnage has increased dramatically. Three years on we can see more clearly than ever that the invasion of Iraq has been an unqualified disaster.

Those people who supported the campaign must be honest enough to admit that this is not how things were meant to turn out. Let's just admit that Iraq has been a catastrophic failure. It could hardly have been otherwise: the invasion was based on a series of premises that were totally mistaken – if not downright fraudulent. We were told that Iraq had WMD. It didn't. We were told that it was a haven for anti-Western terrorists. It wasn't – but it certainly is now. We were told that it would make us safer. Quite the reverse. Instead, we now share with the US the enmity of the Arab and Muslim world, and terrorist attacks against our two countries are frequently justified by the invasion. It was meant to bring democracy. Assuming the central  government survives, the majority of voters are likely to favour an authoritarian Shia regime.

British and American forces in Iraq now face a grim prospect. If the situation continues to deteriorate – as seems all too likely – the choices are stark. Either the Coalition sits back and watches the chaotic unravelling of Iraq, with sectarian militias acting to defend their own communities and attack others, or it tries, probably in vain to enforce a managed partition, decentralising political authority to the Shia in the south, the Kurds in the north, and the Sunnis in the centre.

UN damns Guantanamo

The United States came under pressure to close Guantanamo Bay prison recently following a scathing UN report into the detention camp. In the study – based on interviews with detainees’ lawyers, former inmates and written exchanges with US officials – five UN special envoys accuse the US of violating a host of human rights, including the ban on torture and arbitrary detention. Most of the camp’s 500 inmates have been held for four years without trial. The UN rapporteurs said the US should either charge inmates or free them without further delay.

In one of the strongest remarks yet by a British Cabinet minister, Peter Hain said he would like to see the camp closed. But Tony Blair only went as far as saying the prison was an anomaly that would have to be dealt with sooner or later. The White House dismissed the UN report as a rehash of old allegations.

However, America is demeaning itself with its refusal to understand the world’s dismay over Guantanamo. The White House dismissed the UN report by complaining that the authors never visited the camp, but that’s because they were barred from interviewing inmates. Why should they collude with an administration that so obviously has something to hide? The US is eroding the moral authority of the West but unfortunately, Washington shows no sign of giving up its camps. It recently completed the construction of Camp Five, a state-of-the-art prison block modelled on a federal penitentiary in Indiana, and work is under way on a second structure at a cost of $31m. Camp X-Ray, where the first arrivals were held in makeshift, open-air structures, now lies abandoned. The US authorities have started holding military commissions to try detainees accused of war crimes, but that is likely to involve only a small percentage of inmates, lawyers also say that only 8% of the inmates have been classified as al-Qa’eda fighters.

To support this process the Department of Defence has put all of the released documents on the Guantanamo detainees on-line here and here. Many Guantanamo detainees are in despair, fearful they will never leave, whereas others are baffled. Abdur Sayed Rahman, a self-described Pakistani villager … says he was arrested at his modest home in January 2002, flown off to Afghanistan and later accused of being the deputy foreign minister of that country’s deposed Taliban regime.

“I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan,” he protested to American military officers at Guantanamo. “My name is Abdur Sayed Rahman. Abdur Zahid Rahman was the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban.”

How flimsy is the evidence against some of them? Consider this:

Another Saudi, Mazin Salih Musaid al-Awfi, was one of at least half a dozen men against whom the “relevant data” considered by the annual review boards included the possession at the time of his capture of a Casio model F-91W watch. According to evidential summaries in those cases, such watches have “been used in bombings linked to Al Qaeda.”

Many of those who initially made incriminating statements have recanted claiming the statements were obtained through torture:

The files are replete with retractions. Detainees who had confessed to having ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban or terrorism frequently told the tribunals that they had only made those admissions to stop beatings or torture by their captors.

“The only reason for my original statements is because I was tortured when I was captured,” said a former mechanical engineering student from Saudi Arabia who was accused of training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. “In Kabul, an Afghan interrogator beat me and told me they would kill me if I didn’t talk. They shot and killed someone in front of me and said they would do the same if I didn’t cooperate.”

Like most people in the US, I had no qualms about the camp initially. In the wake of the massacre of 9/11, the distinction between an enemy combatant and a prisoner of war seemed an irrelevant legal nicety. But never did I imagine that detainees would still be languishing in the camp in legal limbo four years later. Surely even security hawks can see that this is both morally wrong and strategically counter-productive. Donald Rumsfeld says inmates can’t be released because they might revert to doing bad things against America. But what difference would 500 or so bad guys make when in Iraq alone active insurgents number at least 20,000, and when the very existence of Guantanamo is among the terrorists’ most potent recruiting agents.

Doing without oil

Planet earth is dying. It is choking on its own emissions, being poisoned by its own effluence and reduced to a skeleton by the inhabitants it has supported for less than one per cent of its lifetime. Some blame the pollution on naturally occurring phenomena such as volcanoes that spout noxious, sulphur-based concoctions into the atmosphere, while others point the finger at vast, overly-flatulent cattle herds The fact is that western industrialisation over the last 100 years has led to drastic and, some say, fatal, climate changes But at last the world’s population is slowly waking up to the problems created by the drive for progress.The Kyoto Protocol, ratified in 2004 by 156 countries, is the first concerted world-wide effort by United Nations member countries to tackle emissions and stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, although the US, which accounts for 25 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, remains notably absent from the list of signatures. In Britain, the Labour government has pledged to slash emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by 20 per cent by 2010, although it is now looking very unlikely that this target will be fully reached: Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions actually increased by seven million tonnes between 2002 and 2003.President Bush has called on America to end its addiction to oil and has set a target of replacing more than 75% of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025 does this mean Bush is going green?

Not necessarily. Whether or not he worries about the impact of fossil fuel consumption on the earth’s climate, he has two other key reasons for wanting to kick the oil habit, one geopolitical the other economic. His geo-political worry is that the West is too reliant on a highly unstable part of the world – the Middle East – that produces some 30% of the world’s petroleum and supplies 17% of US needs. True, that leaves 70% to be gleaned from elsewhere, but the global oil price is still very sensitive to events in the Gulf region. And that reinforces Bush’s other worry, which is fear of what will happen to the Western standard of life when the market starts to register that the oil is running out and the oil price shoots through the roof.

But is the oil really running out?

Not in the short term, no, but we are near to what is called “the tipping point” – the point where half the world’s known petrol reserves are gone – and at a time when demand for oil (notably from China and India) is soaring. Some experts, including geologist Jeremy Leggett, professor at the Royal School of Mines, think the significance of this point will suddenly dawn on people and provoke a crisis. “One apocalyptic week,” he writes in his book, The Empty Tank, “a germ of panic will take root and spread like wildfire through the markets. The price of oil… will begin to climb toward the ceiling. Frantic oil traders will scream at each other on trading floors, eyes wild and hair akimbo.” Such a doom-laden scenario would not occur, however, if the markets were sufficiently confident that technologies were being developed to power our economic systems that did not rely on oil, and which were not that much dearer than oil-based ones.

And are such technologies in the offing?

A few technologies – producing electricity from nuclear power or from “clean coal” (coal whose harmful emissions have largely been contained) – are already almost commercial at current fuel costs, though the political and social costs are far from resolved. But these don’t really affect oil consumption: their main function is to make electricity (which accounts for a third to a half of the West’s consumption of raw energy) or to produce heat for industrial or domestic purposes (a fifth). Oil, by contrast, is mainly consumed in transport (nearly half of raw energy consumption): just 0.4% of Britain’s electricity supply derives from oil. Hence if we’re serious about reducing oil usage, we’ll have to find new ways to power our cars.

Iran defies the West

Iran has embarked on a course that can have no other plausible intent than the development of nuclear weapons. It has spurned generous Russian and European offers guaranteeing civilian nuclear fuel, which would have helped its economy and lessened its diplomatic isolation. The IAEA estimates that, left unchecked, Iran could produce an atom bomb within three years. In the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s belligerent regime, this is a terrifying prospect. The UN must now decide how to handle this grave threat, especially as Iran does have real security concerns not least the presence of a hostile America in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s vital to understand these concerns and seek diplomatic solutions – rather than driving Iran into a corner.

However, diplomacy has been tried, and it has failed. The EU hoped to catalyse political liberalisation by increasing trade with Iran, which tripled between 2000 and 2005. But the Iranian authorities used the hard currency to enhance their military, not their civil society. While Iranian diplomats met their European counterparts in Geneva and Vienna, their government built secret nuclear facilities, blocked inspections, and failed to explain why there were traces of weapons grade uranium on Iranian centrifuges.

Sanctions would probably be ineffective – unless they hit Iran’s massive oil exports, in which case they would be disastrous for the world economy. A US strike on the nuclear sites would be a gift to anti-Western extremists and have every world terrorist reporting for duty. It would also destroy the considerable reservoir of moderate, pro-Western sentiment inside Iran. But that would be better than the alternative. Ahmadinejad’s declared intention is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. If we don’t find a way to destroy Iran’s budding nuclear arsenal before it’s up and running then Israel most certainly will. And nothing would be quite so internationally combustible as an Israeli attack on Iran.

If the US were to succeed in referring Iran to the security council the effects could be terrible. Even if sanctions weren’t imposed, it would deal a blow to Iran’s already collapsing stock market, increase capital flight and wipe out middle class savings. It could also hurt the poor, whom Ahmadinejad claims to represent, by causing rampant inflation. Neither Bush nor Ahmadinejad would benefit from that level of instability; both should be wary of overplaying their hands.

Oil: can America kick the habit?

It was a striking admission from a former Texas oilman. “America is addicted to oil,” George W. Bush declared in his recent state of the union speech. He also made an equally dramatic pledge: to replace 75% of America’s Middle Eastern oil imports by 2025, by investing in alternative technologies – particularly ethanol derived from woodchips, vegetable matter and grass. The beauty of ethanol is that it is renewable, much cleaner than petrol, and existing car engines can be easily adapted to run on it – ethanol already powers 40% of Brazil’s vehicles. It could also be purchased from farmers in the American Midwest, rather than unsavoury Middle Eastern states. In one move Bush has achieved the seemingly impossible: simultaneously delighting both the environmentalist lobby and the right-wing neocons who fear America’s growing dependence on foreign oil.

But I wouldn’t get too excited as Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush Snr and Clinton all launched similar drives for energy self-sufficiency at times of high oil prices or Middle East conflict. None of them came to much once oil prices fell back or tension eased. As for ethanol, that’s just a well-meaning fantasy. It could never be produced at a competitive price, unless the government massively subsidised production – and the investments Bush has pledged have been relatively small.

There’s only one way to persuade the market to ditch dirty technologies in favour of clean ones, and that’s by introducing fuel taxes or emissions regulations. Bush, of course, has a quasi-religious aversion to that sort of thing. Besides, by continuing to pretend that global warming does not exist, the president deprives himself of the most powerful argument for kicking the oil habit. If he had the will to do it, he could harden the legal fuel-efficiency standards for American cars to 40 miles per gallon over the next ten years (a reasonable expectation, even with the current technology). That would save about 2.5 million barrels a day, which is the amount that America imports from the Gulf states. The president may not have proposed any convincing remedies but even so, his admission was welcome. As with any addiction, acknowledgment that there is a problem is the first step to recovery.

IRAN: build roads not nuclear bombs

My gloom about what’s going on in the Middle East only deepened when I read the other day that Mahmoud Ahmadmejad, the president of Iran, has a PhD in traffic management. (He was awarded his doctorate in 1987 and went on to work as a civil engineer). The people of Aradan, the flyblown town where he was born, expected him to continue with his chosen profession. They’ve been amazed to see him rise from obscurity to become, first, the mayor of Tehran and then, last August, Iran’s president.

He’s been instrumental is ensuring that international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme have reached a dead end. The breaking of the UN seals on a nuclear research plant marks Tehran’s clear intent to inflame the EU and US concerns over its nuclear programme. It’s a raising of the stakes by Iran’s hard-line leadership which marks a fateful step towards a nuclear security crisis that the world and the Middle East, let alone the Iranians, can ill afford. Whether the theocrats in Tehran are indulging in brinksmanship or seriously intend to develop nuclear weapons could soon be academic. Long before Iran acquires fissile material it will have scattered politically combustible material that ignite into a nasty explosion. Indeed, three of the EU’s foreign ministers have urged the UN’s nuclear watchdog to refer the country to the security council for sanctions. The US takes over the presidency of the UN security council next month, putting its ambassador, John Bolton, who has taken a hard line on Iran, in the hot seat for the first time.However, economic sanctions, would be difficult to enforce: the regime is awash with cash earned from oil exports, totalling USD36bn last year, and has reportedly been stockpiling medicines and essential supplies to survive a trade embargo for years.It’s likely Iran has been amassing the sophisticated equipment needed to make a nuclear bomb. The country’s government has a network of front companies, official bodies, academic institutes and middlemen working on the project in western Europe and the former USSR. The ballistic missile they are trying to build would be capable of reaching Europe. But Tehran insists it has a right to develop the capability to enrich uranium, which is a key stage in developing a nuclear bomb.Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid. I suspect events are proceeding just as Ahmadinejad wants them to. He has been spoiling for a fight since he was elected. Now it looks as though he has got one. The escalating dispute confronts the international community with potentially its biggest challenge since the Iraq war and will resurrects divisive issues including the true extent of the global WMD threat, the difficulty of pursuing joint action via the UN and perceived double standards over the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Moreover, Ahmadinejad is not secure. He is subject to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His foe, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, retains some power. Tehran is not a Saddamist dictatorship or a Taliban autocracy. It is a shambolic oligarchy with bureaucrats and technocrats jostling for power with clerics. Despite a quarter century of effort, the latter have not created a truly fundamentalist islamic state. Iran is a classic candidate for the politics of subtle engagement.This means strengthening every argument in the hands of those Iranians who do not want nuclear weapons or Israel eliminated, who crave a secular state and good relations with the west. No such argument embraces name-calling, sabre-rattling, sanctions or bombs.Ahmadmejad, is a reminder that it’s often better to stick to what you’re good at: in his case – building roads.