International Politics

I’ve put up a post on my other weblog on the general subject of anti-war leftishness. I’ve put it over there rather than on CT because it’s fair to say that there are a number of different schools of thought among CT contributors on the general subject of war, and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind. Cheers.

Update: And now I’m going to hang it on the reasonably topical peg of this Christopher Hitchens interview.

There was an “article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41921-2003Dec6.html in the Post on Sunday that got surprisingly little attention; it talked about documentary evidence suggesting that small rockets had been modified to carry warheads with radioactive material – and had then disappeared. These rockets had last been spotted in the trans-Dniestrian Republic, a semi-independent corner of Moldova which has developed a nasty specialty in black market and grey market arms deals. As the Post describes it

bq. Transdniester is regarded by experts as a prime shopping ground for outlaw groups looking for weapons of every type. It is the embodiment of the gray zone, where failed states, porous borders and weak law enforcement allow the buying and selling of instruments of terror.

How did this unpleasant little anomaly of a statelet come into being, and why does it persist? As the Post tells the story, it comes down more or less to Russian imperialism; the Russians have 2,800 troops, which they have refused to withdraw, despite repeated requests from the Moldovan government and the international community. Whenever the Moldovans have tried to reassert control over the republic (which lies within their nominal borders), the Russians have made it clear that they’ll defend

“Ken MacLeod’s”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107076468337607417 long essay on the pro- and anti-war left. (via “Norman Geras”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_normangeras_archive.html#107088561122966260).

Extracts from a piece in today’s “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

bq. As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …

bq. “If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.” The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.” …

Underlying the new strategy, the Americans say, is the conviction that only a tougher approach will quell the insurgency and that the new strategy must punish not only the guerrillas but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating. “You have to understand the Arab mind,” Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” …

bq. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” Colonel Sassaman said.

I know this makes sense given the way votes are counted in Australia, but it’s still a very odd paragraph.

In a fascinating glimpse of the immediate reaction to Mr Latham as Opposition Leader, voters elevated Labor to pole position with 42 per cent of the primary vote, compared to 45 per cent for the Liberals. (Sun-Herald 7 December.)

I’m not so upbeat about the poll though. Latham’s entire campaign strategy seems to involve focussing on western Sydney and hoping the rest of the country doesn’t mind being relatively ignored. If he still can’t win the primary vote in western Sydney, the results in, say, regional Victoria could be brutal.

It’s my impression that the warbloggers have gone rather quiet in recent weeks, which I suppose is the best available alternative to admitting that they were wrong on the facts of the matter. Iraq is at best going to be a mess, and at worst a complete disaster. Democracy, whiskey, sexy how are ya. But the damage that has been done to international security institutions is just as bad. The UN’s crisis of legitimacy has gotten most attention, but NATO has suffered very nearly as much. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The “Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29688-2003Dec2.html has a piece today on Rumsfeld’s reaction to a plan for a separate European Union defence planning structure; he suggests it’s a threat to NATO. He’s right – but his own administration has done far more more fundamental damage to NATO, by sidelining it after September 11. NATO no longer has any political purpose for the allies; it’s no wonder that the Europeans are gradually extricating themselves.

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I was going to blog on James Lilek’s “disgusting response”:http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/1103/112103.html to Salam Pax. But Dan Drezner has “beaten me to it”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000898.html.

Assuming that Al Quaida or one of their sub-franchises were behind the recent bombings in Turkey, I’m amazed at some of the writing on the subject in today’s Guardian: especially the leader and Polly Toynbee.

“The leader”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,12700,1090102,00.html :

bq. The use of force in Iraq, now enshrined as a governing principle by Mr Bush, invited a highly aggressive response. That response is in progress. The whirlwind is being reaped.

“Toynbee”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1089947,00.html :

bq. These bombs made yesterday one of the darkest days of Tony Blair’s prime ministership. As if that horror were not enough, too many other disparate pigeons came fluttering home to roost at once. Whichever way he turned, things looked black. They were no mere accidents, for everything that happened came as a direct result of his own decisions, all of them taken against the better instincts of most of his party.

The “war or terror” may have been prosecuted in a stupid way. The Iraq war — nothing to do with the war on terror — may have stoked up Arab resentment against the West. These are reasonable subjects for serious argument. But these writers help themselves quickly, easily and cheaply to the claim that the bombings are a direct consequence of US and British policy since September 11th. To which there are two obvious ripostes. First (an argument too often deployed for rhetorical effect but, I think, applicable here) the bombers set out to do what they did deliberately and intentionally and were not forced to kill and maim many innocent people by Bush or Blair. Second, Al Quaida’s bombing campaign long pre-dates the current US and British governments — remember those East African embassies — and would plausibly have continued with or without the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.

Terrible, “terrible news”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3222608.stm from Turkey (for the second time in a few days).

The “Constitutions, Democracy and the Rule of Law”:http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/c250/symposia/constitutions/constitutions_vid_archive.html symposium is online at Columbia. I’ve only listened to some of the October 17th proceedings: specifically Jerry Cohen’s “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Blame the Terrorists?” which argues that those who put terrorists in the position that they can only use morally unacceptable means thereby disqualify themselves from complaining about the the morally unacceptable acts terrorists then perform. (Thanks to Lwandile Sisilana for email about this.)

[Since my purspose here is merely to link to an interesting item and not to comment myself or to start a debate on CT, I’m going to disable comments — a policy I intend to use in similar link-only items on a selective basis.]

Mary Kaldor (an opponent of the war) has “an interesting piece on Iraq on OpenDemocracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1579.jsp . One of her observations concerns the extent to which both the neo-cons and the Democrats are fixated on how it all plays “back home” :

bq. When I was in the CPA offices in the palace, the Green Zone was hit by mortar fire and we were evacuated to the basement. There, some of the American officials were overheard discussing how ‘the Democrats’ would play it back home, with their eyes on the election not the current situation in Iraq.

and

bq. Third, there is a presidential election coming up in America. Some people want America to fail in Iraq so that George W. Bush will lose the election. This kind of thinking prioritises domestic US concerns above the fate of Iraqis. It is as sick as the preoccupations of the Republicans in the CPA about ‘how will this play in the election?’ No one should support the military opposition to America. And there should be no immediate withdrawal of US troops until a framework for democracy is established.

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Yahia Said’s “account at OpenDemocracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1573.jsp of his return to Iraq is worth a look.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who was in a position to know the reality of what is happening inside Iraq. He painted a gloomy picture of poor preparation (or rather no preparation) for the period after the military defeat of the Iraqi army, of Iraqi attitudes ranging from entrepreneurial friendliness to outright hostility, and of a US army which may be good at warfighting but is utterly incompetent when it comes to peacekeeping. Max Hasting, veteran military correspondent and a man of decidely conservative political views has “a piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-11-08&id=3697 which essentially corroborates this picture. Hastings reports that the British military are very angry indeed with the Bush administration.

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News in from Reuters that despite the French being Old Europeans, obstructionists, allies of Saddam Hussein and French, the American wine consumer has a touch more common sense than the American weblogger. According to the CIVB, the Conseil Interprofessionel du Vin de Bordeaux, there was a 77% increase in the value of Bordeaux wines sold to the USA in 2002-03. This is most likely because a) the dollar has fallen and CIVB measures in euros and b) the 2000 vintage has been released, and is by all accounts pretty sensational (christ knows it’s unlikely to be because of this cheesy marketing site), but even so, the Americans overtook the Germans this year as the biggest export market for the Bordelais.

Onivins, the state agency for the wine trade as a whole, confirms that this trend is being seen across the French wine industry. Although the volume of exports to the USA fell by 3%, the value increased by a healthy 35% in the first half of ’03, better than anywhere in the world except Australia. I suppose that you could rescue hysterical predictions made earlier in the year by claiming that the traitorous upper-class liberal transnational progressivists had upped their purchases of Lafite and Petrus because they hate America, while Joe SixPack had boycotted the unearhtly EU-subsidised hellbroth that pours out of Languedoc. But it seems pretty straw-clutching.

(Big up to Sadly, no! for sterling work on this story, by the way.)

[EDIT]: Oh god you’ve just got to check out the CIVD marketing website. It’s hysterical.