Failing The “Leftist” Litmus Test.

Palestinian Lives Matter: What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

LIKE THE WAR in Ukraine, the war in Gaza is serving as a remarkable litmus test for the Left. It is testing its moral compass, its understanding of international law, its grasp of geopolitical realities and, not least, its awareness of what the PR mavens call “the optics”. A substantial portion, even, perhaps, a majority, of the Left is failing all of these tests – badly. That this should be the case points to what would appear to be a dangerous cognitive weakness in contemporary progressivism – and to a West under siege.

The moral and geopolitical confusion over the Russo-Ukrainian War is more readily understood than Israel’s war against Hamas. For the so-called “Tankies”, abandoning the cherished image of the Russian people, Nazism’s destroyers, as the world’s saviours, was an emotional wrench. Rejecting the argument that the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was a justifiable response to US and Nato provocation proved equally difficult. None of these considerations excused the Tankies’ defence of Russian aggression, but one could at least see where it was coming from.

That is certainly not the case with respect to the devastating pogrom unleashed upon the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel by the Jihadist terrorist organisation, Hamas. To encounter its historical equal, it is necessary to travel back in time to the genocidal pogroms set in motion by the antisemitic citizens of the Baltic states in anticipation of the Nazi einsatzgruppen’s arrival in 1941. Here, too, one encounters the same indiscriminate and unsparing cruelty, the same savage delight in rape, torture and murder, that characterised the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023.

As was the case in 1941, it is quite impossible to look upon the atrocities of 7/10/23 as anything other than a deliberate turning away from all civilised conduct. Unless, that is, one has already been convinced that against the Jews/Israelis any and all crimes are permitted – and justified.

That this was the belief of the Nazis is well-documented. That a burning desire to rid the world of the “Zionist Entity” is equally evident in every act of Arab aggression towards the State of Israel since 1948. The important distinction being that, while Egypt, Syria and Jordan only wanted to drive the Jews into the sea, the Jihadists of Hamas are religiously committed to making sure that every last one of them drowns.

What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

One possible answer is that they have seen the images of Palestinians shot and killed for daring to oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They have watched, aghast, as Israeli aircraft, Israeli artillery, have pounded the houses and apartment buildings of Gaza to rubble. Seen, also, the tiny victims of such bombardment, and heard the anguished cries of their mothers. “Lex Talionis!”, they cry. “An eye for an eye!”

But the moral vacuity of this position was as obvious to a Galilean rabbi back in 30AD, as it was to the Gujarat lawyer who declared in 1920AD that “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind”. A leftist who turns her face in fury and disgust from the IDF’s brutality on the West Bank, cannot, either logically or ethically, refrain from doing the same in the face of Hamas’ murderous fanaticism.

That Pro-Palestinian leftists cannot see the deeply cynical purpose behind Hamas’ attack is similarly baffling. Notwithstanding the facts of international law concerning the responsibility of all those exercising state (or state-like) authority to protect their citizens from harm, Hamas committed its atrocities in the certain knowledge that Israel – fulfilling its own legal duty to protect its citizens – would feel compelled to destroy those responsible for organising and committing them. That this would entail air and artillery strikes on Gaza was obvious to the whole world. But, Hamas did not shrink from Israeli retaliation, it welcomed it.

Why? Because it knew that if the IDF was coming after them, then it would also be coming after the apartment buildings, the office blocks, the schools and the hospitals from which it launches its rockets, and under which it locates its storehouses, fuel dumps, arsenals, factories and command centres. Does Hamas know that this is a blatant breach of the Geneva Conventions – a war crime? Of course it does. Doesn’t it care that its own people will be “collateral damage” when the Israeli missiles strike their targets? Not at all. A steadily rising civilian death-toll isn’t a bug in Hamas’ strategy, it’s a feature.

There was a time when, to be regarded as a serious leftist, one was obligated to inform oneself as well as possible about world affairs – especially the geopolitics of great power rivalry and its consequences. No longer. One can be a fervent supporter of the Palestinian cause without ever pausing to wonder from whom groups like Hamas and Hezbollah get their military supplies, their military training.

Today’s leftists do not know, or do not care, that it is the hand of the Islamic Republic of Iran that is moving these terrorist pieces on the Middle-East chessboard. The same Islamic Republic that murders women and girls for refusing to wear the hijab. The same Islamic Republic that is committed to the utter destruction of Israel – and is rapidly acquiring the nuclear capacity to do exactly that. Today’s leftists simply do not realise that, if this was the Lord of the Rings, they’d be on the side of Sauron – they’d be cheering on the orcs.

Don’t they care about the optics of all this? When Jewish students in New York have to barricade themselves in their university library, against pro-Palestinian leftists, and all the antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic “allies” standing right there beside them, pounding on the door, trying to get in. Does it not occur to them that people looking at the video clip of that incident posted on X might be reminded of something? When a supposed “leftist” stands up in Auckland’s Aotea Square and urges the multitude waving their Palestinian flags to “Globalise the Intifada!” – i.e. Let’s have pogroms everywhere! – and is cheered to the echo. What does he suppose New Zealand’s Jewish community sees?

Not leftism, but fascism. And so does every other leftist who still understands the meaning of the word.

This essay was originally posted on the Democracy Project website on Tuesday, 31 October 2023.

Money And Morality: Oil And Water.

Familiar Excuses: Those wondering why our Prime Minister was so willing to countenance a reputationally damaging breaking of Air New Zealand's contract with the Saudi Arabian navy should wonder no longer. Pieces are in motion on the Middle East chessboard. The interests of the majority shareholder in Air New Zealand are, accordingly, in flux. Jacinda Ardern has sniffed the wind and smelled Joe Biden’s aftershave.

CAPITALISM IS CHANGING. Twenty years ago, the sole obligation of a capitalist enterprise (other than abiding by the laws of the states in which it operated) was to generate a return on its shareholders’ investment. So entrenched was this notion that it was specifically referenced in the legislation giving effect to the free-market reforms of the 1980s and 90s. Not anymore. In today’s climate, the interests of shareholders are expected to give way to the moral convictions and/or objections of journalists and politicians. The pursuit of profit now comes second to the quest for ethical perfection.

The current furore engulfing Air New Zealand’s commercial relationship with the Saudi Arabian Navy illustrates the many problems associated with mixing money and morality.

A quick Google search established that, in the words of the Sanctions Scanner website, “there are no formal international sanctions implemented against Saudi Arabia”. Following the gruesome assassination of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in 2018, the US Congress briefly considered imposing unilateral sanctions, but nothing came of it. (In matters relating to “The Kingdom” nothing usually does.) Put simply, there was and is no legal impediment to Air New Zealand entering into a commercial relationship with the Saudis. The company saw an opportunity to make money for its shareholders – and took it.

Yes, but, the Saudi navy is blockading the war-torn nation of Yemen, a country constantly teetering on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. Refurbishing the gas turbine engines of its warships places the national carrier in the invidious position of at least appearing to be aiding and abetting the perpetrators of acts which some critics of the Saudi regime have alleged to be war crimes.

Some critics? Therein lies the problem. Yemen finds itself in the unfortunate position of being caught up in the struggle for regional supremacy between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. By means of its naval blockade, and intermittent bombing sorties, the Saudi regime has been able to prevent Iran’s proxies – the rebel Houthi militias – from over-running completely what remains of the Saudi-friendly forces associated with the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Saudis’ extremely restricted military options in this ferociously complex civil war leave them acutely vulnerable to accusations of war crimes. To date, however, international opprobrium has been deemed preferable to an Iranian ally controlling the geopolitically critical entrance to the Red Sea.

Not that the most vocal critics of Air New Zealand’s association with the Saudis have much to say about geopolitics. For the Greens’ Golriz Ghahraman, the fact that people (many of them children) die in wars is sufficient reason for New Zealand to have nothing to do with them. For Valerie Morse, one of the most outspoken critics of New Zealand’s small but innovative arms industry, there can be no excuse for even the most peripheral involvement of Kiwi companies in the production or refurbishment of military equipment – especially a company whose majority shareholder is the New Zealand state.

All very noble and principled of this outspoken duo, whose political stance, in addition to being high-minded, is also (dare we say it?) guaranteed to attract massive support on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Less ethically lustrous, perhaps, is the consideration owed to Air New Zealand’s highly skilled engineering workforce. With their usual flow of contracts stemmed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Saudi refurbishment job was likely seen as a godsend. That nobody asked too many questions about what these refurbished engines might be powering is entirely understandable. Air New Zealand’s engineering capabilities are an important contributor to its international success. Management had every right to assume that, as the company’s majority shareholder, the New Zealand state has a vested interest in keeping one of its airline’s most efficient operations economically viable.

It would have been equally understandable if those involved in, and associated with, the contract saw the whole exercise as part of a much bigger picture. New Zealand is, when all is said and done, still a member of what John Key called the Five Eyes “club”. With the two biggest exporters of arms to the Saudi kingdom being fellow Five Eyes members the United States and the United Kingdom, and with the Aussies revving-up their own arms industry in sympathy, New Zealand pitching-in to the geopolitical working-bee may well have been seen as the shrewdest move – diplomatically-speaking.

The Iranians already possess the capability of closing the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Allowing them to close-off the entrance to the Red Sea would be greeted with alarm and dismay by all those nations dependent on the oil and natural gas reserves of the Arabian peninsula. That’s not just us, by the way, but also our biggest trading partners China and Australia.

To Ms Ghahraman and her Green colleagues, the prospect of so dramatically exposing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels was, no doubt, an alluring one. Unfortunately, the global economy is nowhere near being able to do without coal, oil and natural gas. For many years to come, the strategic criticality of Middle East oil will drive the decision-making of nations much larger and more ruthless than New Zealand.

That the very existence of the Air New Zealand-Saudi relationship came to light at all may be related very closely to the recent political shifts in the biggest and most ruthless nation of them all – the United States of America. On 4 February 2021, America’s new president, Joe Biden, delivered a foreign-policy speech in which he signalled the USA’s unwillingness to let the bloody stalemate in Yemen continue.

“This war has to end,” said Biden. “And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales.”

Those words should not be interpreted as an indication of the USA’s willingness to let the Iranians claim victory – far from it. What Biden’s announcement portends is Washington’s impatience with the Saudi regime’s military inadequacies. Donald Trump may have taken its Crown Prince’s assurances that his armed forces were more than a match for Houthi militiamen, but Biden is much more willing than his predecessor to believe the evidence of his military and diplomatic experts on the ground. Uncle Sam is getting ready to butt some intransigent heads together. Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitions will be put on ice, while the Iranians will be offered an end to crippling US sanctions if they undertake to help broker a lasting peace in Yemen.

Those wondering why our Prime Minister was so willing to countenance a reputationally damaging breaking of the gas turbine contract should wonder no longer. Pieces are in motion on the Middle East chessboard. The interests of the majority shareholder in Air New Zealand are, accordingly, in flux. Jacinda Ardern has sniffed the wind and smelled Joe Biden’s aftershave.

Maybe capitalism hasn’t changed that much after all?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 February 2021.

Who’s Going To Stop Him?

Blank And Pitiless: Having ordered the assassination of the Iranian General, Qasem Soleimani, President Donald Trump promised to reduce the cultural monuments of Iran’s 3,000 year-old civilisation to rubble if a revenge attack was mounted. A breach of international law? Certainly. A war crime? Indisputably. Who’s going to stop him? Nobody.

WHAT WERE THEY thinking? Allowing angry crowds to storm the US Embassy in Baghdad? If such scenes were authorised by General Qasem Soleimani, then he was not the master strategist and tactician his countrymen are proclaiming him to have been. Believing an American president – any American president – could look upon such scenes with equanimity betrayed the most astonishing ignorance of recent US history.

The storming and capture of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 set off 444 days of diplomatic and military humiliation that not only destroyed the presidency of Jimmy Carter, but also created a thirst for vengeance that not even the passage of 40 years has diminished. It matters little that Soleimani was instrumental in clearing the Baghdad embassy compound of demonstrators, simply by allowing such images to imprint themselves upon Donald Trump’s retinas, the General was guilty of the most enormous, and ultimately fatal, error of judgement.

Nor will the American President be in the slightest measure intimidated by the size of General Soleimani’s funeral procession, or by the promises of vengeance offered to his widow by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran’s capacity to inflict harm on the American Empire is considerably less than Queen Boudica’s ability to make the Roman Empire pay for its outrages. The Roman Empire did not have an air force.

In some part of the Iranian Islamic Republic, the unanswerable character of American air power must, surely, be weighing heavily upon the judgements of its public servants and soldiers. A retaliatory strike against the United States that even remotely resembled the assassination of General Soleimani in terms of scale and significance would provoke the USA to, in the memorable quip of the late US Senator from Arizona, John McCain, “Bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb, Iran”.

The armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran have nothing with which to stop an American air attack. Its fighters are too old and its pilots insufficiently trained to take on the state-of-the-art aircraft, air-crews and missile technology of the United States. Everything the Iranians could throw at them would be effortlessly brushed aside by their American attackers. Not only that, but the very instruments of Iran’s self-defence would themselves be among the Americans’ first targets. They would not, however, be the last.

Having rendered Iran defenceless to American (and, almost certainly, Israeli and Saudi) attack, the list of targets would include (in no particular order) the country’s weapons factories, transportation systems, manufacturing enterprises, cement plants, water purification facilities, media networks, state ministries and scientific research centres – especially Iran’s nuclear research programme – pharmaceutical production plants and fertiliser factories. All of the above would be attacked even as Iran’s military and civilian command-and-control centres and all of its major cities were being pounded into dust.

President Donald Trump has further promised to reduce the cultural monuments of Iran’s 3,000 year-old civilisation to rubble if a revenge attack is mounted. A breach of international law? Certainly. A war crime? Indisputably. Who’s going to stop him? Nobody.

There are some who insist that Iran is not entirely helpless. That its little navy has developed weapons and tactics capable of sinking a US aircraft carrier with all hands. But, what then? The snuffing-out of 3,000 American lives in a single attack would, almost certainly, provoke the current American president into ordering a tactical nuclear response. Tehran, or if he was feeling particularly vindictive, the holy Shia city of Qom, would, in a split second, be transformed into a radioactive wasteland.

Impossible? No, sadly, it’s not. The rest of the world would certainly be shocked and horrified by such an act of disproportionate savagery. But, once again, who would/could stop an American president determined to demonstrate to the rest of humanity that America has been made great again – and will not be constrained by any power upon the face of the planet?

Still not convinced? Well, consider this. When 60 Minutes journalist, Lesley Stahl, put the following question to American Secretary of State, Madeline Albright in 1996: “We have heard that a half million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied:  “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

And she was a Democrat!

POSTSCRIPT: When assessing the actions and options of the Iranians it is always wise to recall that it was in their part of the world that the game of Chess was invented. To have avenged the death of General Soleimani without killing a single American (or any other human-being) has to be adjudged a truly inspired move. Forced into a duel by President Trump, Ayatollah Khamenei elected to fire his pistol harmlessly into the air. Honour is satisfied – and the world breathes again.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 January 2020.

Another War With Iran?

A Long, Vicious And Forgotten War: The country which unleashed the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was Iraq. For the duration, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was able to count on the strong support of the United States. The backing of Presidents Jimmy Carter’s and Ronald Reagan’s administrations never wavered, not even when, for the first time since World War One, the Iraqis deployed chemical weapons.

WILL THERE BE a war with Iran? Better to ask: will there be another war with Iran?

So many of us in the West have forgotten that the country, currently being fitted-up as the next Middle Eastern aggressor, endured eight years of extremely vicious fighting, at the cost of at least half-a-million lives, between 1980 and 1988.

The country which unleashed this war was Iraq. For the duration, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was able to count on the strong support of the United States. The backing of Presidents Ronald Reagan’s and Jimmy Carter’s administrations never wavered, not even when, for the first time since World War One, the Iraqis deployed chemical weapons.

The date of the Iran-Iraq War’s outbreak, September 1980, is significant. Eleven months earlier, 52 American hostages had been seized in an attack on the US Embassy in Tehran. When his secret mission to rescue the hostages ended in disaster, President Jimmy Carter quietly appealed to Saddam, who, as a secular Baathist, was no friend of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution”, for help. His reward, providing his army could win them, would be Iran’s most productive oil fields.   

The hostages’ eventual liberation, pointedly timed to coincide with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, came in January 1981. When asked by a reporter if he would ever go back to Iran, one of the freed hostages replied: “Only in a B-52!” Thanks to Saddam’s illegal invasion, however, President Reagan was never required to unleash his strategic bombers on the Iranians. The Iraqi armed forces had become America’s proxy punishers. Iran had humiliated the United States, and for eight terrible years it was required to pay the price.

With another war on Iranian soil looming, it is interesting to register the size of the Iraqi invasion force. Saddam sent 100,000 troops and hundreds of battle tanks across the Iranian border in September 1980, while his air force flew hundreds of sorties against Iranian targets. The scale of Saddam’s invasion bears close comparison with the Anglo-Soviet invasion of neutral Iran in August 1941. That, too, was a massive affair, involving hundreds of thousands of British Empire and Soviet troops.

Remember, these were invasions of Iran – not by Iran. As strategic analyst, Dr Paul Buchanan, observes:

“[I]t should be remembered that modern Iran has not engaged in an unprovoked attack on another country. Although it supports and uses irregular military proxies, it is nowhere close to being the sponsor of terrorism that several Sunni Arab petroleum oligarchies are. In spite of its anti-Israel rhetoric (destined for domestic political consumption), it has not fired a shot in anger towards it.”

This is important. If war is unleashed against Iran, its 80 million citizens will find themselves engaged in a defensive war. Accordingly, the Iranians will enjoy the home-ground advantage. The Americans, and whoever is foolish enough to join them in such a mad endeavour, will find themselves, like the Iraqis, required to fight not only Iran’s people, but also its formidable geography. In addition to confronting human-beings, the United States will be battling snow-capped mountain ranges and waterless deserts.

The Americans are not daunted. When it comes to the Middle East (and its oil) the behaviour of the United States can only be described as unhinged. When Saddam dared to act independently of the US, the debt America owed his country, for its costly – and ultimately futile – war against its Iranian neighbour, was forgotten in a heartbeat.

And it wasn’t just Saddam who paid dearly for his failure to comprehend the full extent of America’s derangement. When US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Astonishingly, the same people who beat the war-drums for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, are beating them again in 2019. President Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, gives every impression of never having seen a square kilometre of Middle Eastern soil which could not be immeasurably improved by being pulverised with US ordnance.

It would be comforting to believe that wiser heads will prevail. Sadly, history suggests otherwise.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 July 2019.

America's Bitter Legacy In The Middle East.

Bitter Lake, Bitter Legacy: The Saudi King, Abdul Aziz, guarantees the United States access to Arabia's almost limitless oil reserves and, in return, President Franklin Roosevelt guarantees the Saudi monarchy's security. The photograph was taken aboard the USS Quincy, moored in the Great Bitter Lake, on 14 February 1945. The so-called "Quincy Agreement" set the course of US policy in the Middle East for the next 70 years.

THE QUESTION CONFRONTING the Democratic Party when it next takes control of the White House will, simply, be: “What now?” The next Democratic President will likely enter office with the two most powerful Islamic nations in the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia, locked in a nuclear arms race. Faced with the prospect of two bitter foes acquiring the means to wipe it off the face of the earth, Israel (which already possesses its own nuclear arsenal) will be screaming at the new Democratic administration to: “Do something – or we will!” Doing something will be unavoidable – but what is it that the United States should do?

On his way home from the Yalta Conference aboard the USS Quincy, in February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt paused briefly in the Great Bitter Lake (half-way along the Suez Canal) to meet with Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia. In many respects this meeting on Great Bitter Lake was as important to the world’s future as Roosevelt’s meeting at Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Arising out of the secret conclave between President and King was the so-called “Quincy Agreement”, by which the United States guaranteed the security of the Saudi monarchy, and the Saudi monarchy guaranteed the United States access to its almost limitless oil reserves.

The tragedy of the Quincy Agreement is that it simply wasn’t necessary. In 1945 the US was the most powerful nation on earth and just a few months away from producing the world’s first nuclear weapons. Under Roosevelt, the Americans had already set in motion the dismantling of the British Empire: a process which would, in the space of two years, force Great Britain to relinquish the “jewel” in its imperial crown – India. That Roosevelt, the Roosevelt of 1940, would not have vouchsafed US protection to the deeply reactionary Saudi dynasty; not when he could have had it swept away by forces dedicated to establishing a modern, secular, democratic republic with just a flick of Uncle Sam’s finger. Unfortunately, that Roosevelt no longer existed. In his place was the gaunt, exhausted figure of the Yalta newsreels: a man barely two months away from death.

It was this dying Roosevelt who resigned himself to preserving not only the Saudi king (and his oil) but also the King of Egypt and the Emperor of Ethiopia. Churchill and the British had convinced him that US strategic interests would be best served by keeping in place every one of the petty kings and potentates that Britain had installed across the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I.

It was a fatal error. For the next seventy years the Americans (aided and abetted at every turn by the British) found themselves obliged to prop-up a corrupt collection of quasi-medieval reactionaries who had set their faces against all the emancipatory forces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and who were doing everything in their power to advance the most extreme and retrograde interpretations of the Prophet Mohammed’s religious teachings.

The alternative course of action: the road not taken; would have seen the full weight of the US thrown behind the secular forces of Middle Eastern nationalism and their quest for cultural and economic independence. Yes, many of these nationalist leaders may have been mildly socialist, like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran, but no more so that the leaders of Sweden or India. With the encouragement and support of the United States, the Arab and Iranian peoples could have constructed modern, open societies to match the magnificent civilisations of their past. Moderate Islamic democracies, forever beholden to the United States for underwriting their freedom, prosperity and independence.

What actually happened, of course, was that when the aforementioned Mosaddegh attempted to establish just such a government in Iran, the CIA (represented, ironically, by Roosevelt’s son, Kermit) and the British secret service, MI6, colluded in mobilising the reactionary Muslim clergy against him and restored to the Peacock Throne the craven and vicious Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – Iran’s hereditary (and now absolute) ruler.

That this anti-democratic behaviour has remained a constant of US policy in the Middle East is due in no small part to the State of Israel. Born out of the acquisition and, later, the expropriation of Arab properties in the former British mandate of Palestine, Israel’s existence has always constituted a major obstacle to the peaceful evolution of a modern and moderate Middle East.

Had the US and Britain been willing to stand behind secular Arab nationalism and the establishment of democratic governments in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Arabia, the Gulf States and Iran, it is possible that Israel may have felt sufficiently secure to negotiate a lasting modus vivendi between the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. From 1956 onwards, however, Britain and America were happy to use Israel as a battering ram against Arab nationalism and, at need, the entire Muslim world. A strategy which has positioned Israel as a nuclear-armed obstacle squarely athwart every path to Middle Eastern peace.

How to respond when the next Democratic President of the United States asks: “What now?” Tell her to reverse every policy the United States has followed in the Middle East since the USS Quincy hove-to in the Great Bitter Lake in February 1945. Yes, it’s a little late for such a radical realignment of US policy – but better late than never.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 11 May 2018.

What Has Trump Just Done?

The Rogue President Of A Rogue State: The world cannot allow itself to be dictated to by a single state or a single individual. This is especially so if that single individual and the nation state he speaks for have stepped outside all the recognised boundaries of reasonable international conduct.

WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY morning (9/5/18) has yet to be fully understood by the peoples of the world. Upon learning of President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, the temptation to simply roll one’s eyes and shake one’s head was hard to resist. Many would have recalled Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and assumed his latest move was in a similar vein.

It is not.

Not only has Trump pulled the US out of the Iran Nuclear Deal (known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – JCPOA) but he has also announced his intention to impose the most stringent sanctions on what he calls “the Iranian regime”. Now, one might assume that this unilateral decision (while serious for those American companies who have, in good faith, recommenced trading with Iran) will leave the rest of the world’s traders unaffected.

It does not.

The world’s trading enterprises, large and small, have been given between 90 and 180 days to extricate themselves from any contracts they may have entered into with Iranian citizens and/or organisations, or face the full wrath of the American government. In other words, the US is telling the rest of the world who it can, and, more importantly, who it cannot, trade with on Planet Earth.

One has to go quite a long way back in history to find a precedent for this sort of behaviour. All the way back, in fact, to Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to prevent the imperial and national entities of Europe from trading with Great Britain. It was, to borrow Barack Obama’s phrase, “a serious mistake”. Not only did Napoleon’s “Continental System” fail to inflict serious damage on the British economy, but it also set in motion the diplomatic and military stratagems that, in just a few years, would bring the French Empire – and its Emperor – crashing down.

The rest of the world then – and now – cannot allow itself to be dictated to by a single state or a single individual. This is especially so if that single individual and the nation state he speaks for have stepped outside all the recognised boundaries of reasonable international conduct.

It is important to state clearly and repeatedly that the JCPOA was signed by the United States, the four other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, Russia, France, the UK) and Germany. The agreement was then endorsed unanimously by the Security Council – giving it the force of international law. Repeated inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have confirmed that Iran is adhering strictly to its undertaking to halt its nuclear programme. President Trump’s unilateral abrogation of the agreement is, therefore, a breach of faith; a breach of trust; and a breach of international law.

Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have described the 1839 treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium as a mere “scrap of paper”. It was his decision to ignore this “scrap” that pushed the British (and her dominions across the seas) into World War I. By tearing up the JCPOA, Trump has not only spat in the faces of the Russians, the Chinese and his closest allies, but also in the faces of every other member of the United Nations. Like the Kaiser, he is convinced that his contempt for the rest of the world will provoke no response of which he need be afraid. The rest of the world, he has been assured, will not jeopardise its relationship with the United States for the sake of Iran.

Maybe not.

World leaders will look at the people around Trump: Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State; John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor; and Rudi Giuliani, the President’s friend and lawyer; and they will see a neo-conservative cabal which is not only unafraid of unleashing war, but in whose estimation the unleashing of war represents the most expeditious and effective means of “making America great again”.

Trump’s tearing-up of the JCPOA will, therefore, be interpreted by the rest of the world as the first step along the road to bringing about “regime change” in Tehran. The probable sequence is tried and tested. Impose an economic blockade to “make the economy scream”. Launch a bombing campaign to degrade Iran’s vital infrastructure. Organise an “uprising” by internal enemies of the Iranian government. (An uprising not unlike the CIA-MI6-sponsored coup that toppled Iran’s only democratically-elected government in 1953.)

The rest of the world, however, will pay a very high price if it opts to appease the United States and its President. Global capitalism cannot operate in a world where goods and services cannot flow freely across borders. If it allows the US to impose economic sanctions (a power formerly reserved to the UN Security Council) upon any nation state it deems to be an enemy and enforces those sanctions in defiance of international trade agreements (not to mention international law!) then the globalised capitalist economic order will fall apart.

China cannot afford to let that happen. Its economy (and the politically vital prosperity it generates) depends upon a world across which goods, capital and labour are able to move freely. Russia, too, cannot afford to remain inert in the face of an economic blockade and/or a military assault upon its Iranian allies. The governments of Germany, France and the UK will similarly have to weigh up the costs and benefits of permitting the United States to control their trade and overthrow governments at will.

Trump’s announcement that he is tearing up the JCPOA and imposing the most stringent economic sanctions upon Iran will either go down in history (assuming there is anyone left to write it!) as the move which set the US on course to becoming an unabashed global tyrant; or, as the actions which precipitated the creation of a global coalition of nations dedicated to the containment of the United States.

Perhaps America’s erstwhile allies should take a leaf out of Benjamin Netanyahu’s book and produce for Trump’s exclusive viewing a short YouTube video explaining Halford Mackinder’s famous formula for global hegemony: “He who controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland; he who controls the Heartland controls the World Island; he who controls the World Island controls the World.” It could show, using simple but exciting graphics, exactly how the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China, when brought together in a self-defensive alliance with Iran, Iraq and Syria (and quite possibly the nations of Africa and South America) would fulfil completely the components of Mackinder’s geopolitical prescription.

Far from making America great again, Donald Trump’s reckless tearing-up of the Iran Nuclear Deal may actually signal the beginning of the end of the United States’ global supremacy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 9 May 2018.

Serbia/Syria - The Parallels Are Frightening.

Two Shots Heard Round The World: Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, was the necessary provocation that allowed the Entente powers to set in motion the General European War that they - and Serbia - had been planning for more than a decade. In Syria, today, there are frighteningly strong parallels with the Great Power intrigues and transformative territorial ambitions that led to the outbreak of war in 1914.

 

SYRIA HAS BECOME the Serbia of the early Twenty-First Century. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, Serbia was Europe’s tinder-box. All the major powers understood the risk Serbia posed, but each of them had too much at stake in the Balkans to hazard bringing the criminal Belgrade regime to heel. The same can be said of Syria. The major powers all have a great deal to lose by ending the Syrian civil war and restoring peace to the Middle East.

 

What this means, however, is that the seething rivalries fuelling the Syrian civil war could, at any moment, draw the major powers into a military confrontation – with profound consequences for the whole world. Just as Britain, France and Russia knew that Serbia could very easily be made the pretext for a war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the United States and its key Middle Eastern allies know that Syria could very easily be turned into a shooting war against the Russian Federation and Iran.

 

The fatal flaw in the great powers’ relationship with Serbia in the early Twentieth Century was that Serbia had geopolitical aspirations that could only be satisfied by a general European War. The Serbian dream was to become the leader of a new South Slav (Yugoslav) kingdom carved out of the Balkan provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That was never going to happen while Austria-Hungary endured. Serbia wanted – Serbia needed – a general European war.

 

In Syria, the raging fratricidal battles are being driven by two, mutually exclusive, geopolitical and religious visions of the region’s future.

 

For Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s beleaguered President, the best outcome of the civil war would be the creation of a Shia Islam alliance extending all the way from Syria’s Mediterranean coast, through Iraq, to Iran’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

For Syria’s Sunni majority, the ultimate goal is the creation of a Sunni Islam alliance embracing Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

 

The success of either of these arrangements would fundamentally derange the geopolitics of the Middle East. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the two leading nuclear powers, the USA and the Russian Federation, both have planes in the air and (some) boots on the ground in Syria.

 

Tipping The Scales: The intrusion of Russian air power in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government has dramatically upset military calculations across the Middle East.

 

President Vladimir Putin would dearly love to have a friendly Shia confederation stretching protectively along the Russian Federation’s southern flank. That the increasingly erratic regime of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would find itself squeezed between the two (and, quite possibly, a newly created independent Kurdish state) only adds to the attractiveness of this outcome.

 

For President Barack Obama, the situation is a great deal murkier. Washington’s unshakeable alliance with the State of Israel leaves it in something of a quandary. Jerusalem already lives in existential fear of an assertive (i.e. nuclear-capable) Iran. It’s reaction to an Iran-dominated Shia confederation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean can only be imagined! But a vertical alliance of Takfiri-driven Sunni states, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, would, if anything, be worse! How long could it be before nuclear-armed Pakistan applied to join this incipient Caliphate?

 

Russia’s much clearer set of objectives is reflected in its much clearer foreign and military policies in the Middle East. It’s straightforward goal is to keep Bashar al-Assad in power and destroy the Turks’ and the Saudis’ Takfiri proxies – which include the Al Qaeda aligned al-Nusra Front as well as the murderous Islamic State. [The Takfiris are Muslims who claim the right to brand as apostate, and make war upon, every Muslim who, according to the Takfiris’ radically literal interpretation of the Quran, is guilty of deviating from the “true” path of the Prophet.]

 

So far, the Russians and their Syrian Government allies are doing pretty well. Thanks largely to Russia’s fighter-bombers, the strategic rebel stronghold of Aleppo is on the point of falling to Assad’s army.

 

To the Turks and the Saudis, the fall of Aleppo would be a disaster. Not only would the rebels’ crucial supply lines to Turkey be severed, but the road to the Islamic State’s Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, would lie open. But, as Ankara and Riyadh both know, the moment the “moderate” rebels and the Islamic State are defeated, the Syrian civil war is over. And if that happens, there will be nothing to prevent the extension of Iranian power all the way to the Syrian coast.

 

Hence the Saudi-Arabian Crown Prince’s excited talk about sending tens-of-thousands of ground troops to Syria via Turkey, ostensibly to destroy Islamic State, but actually to establish a “buffer zone” along Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Russia has warned that any such breach of international law will be answered with military force.

 

On Sunday, Turkish artillery began shelling Kurdish positions across the Syrian border.

 

The parallels with Serbia in 1914 are frightening.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 February 2016.

The Ultimate Guarantor.

Don't Mess With Me! The knowledge that a nation possesses nuclear weapons is usually enough to dissuade its enemies from launching any kind of attack or invasion. For those unfortunate states caught in the cross-hairs of the great powers, it is difficult to imagine a stronger incentive to risk everything on acquiring the ultimate guarantor of national independence.

 

WITH THE IMPORTANT EXCEPTION of Israel, no nation in possession of nuclear weapons has ever been invaded. It is difficult to conceive of a better incentive for any state threatened with aggression to risk everything for the deadly technology History has taught it to esteem as the ultimate guarantor of national independence.

 

Exactly how many nuclear weapons Israel possessed when she was attacked by her Arab neighbours in 1973 is unclear, but she certainly possessed some. Exactly how close she came to using them, however, remains even more historically hazy.

 

To the south, the Israelis had the buffer of the Sinai Peninsula in which to absorb Egypt’s thrust across the Suez Canal. In the north, however, the situation was much more fraught. Had the Israeli Defence Force not been able to halt the advance of Syria’s armoured columns in the first 72 hours of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Golda Meir may have concluded that she had no choice except to threaten Damascus and Cairo with obliteration if hostilities were not halted immediately and their troops withdrawn.

 

In the deadly chess game that is nuclear strategy, the very possibility that Israel might feel obliged to make such a threat, required the United States to signal that a nuclear counter-threat against Israel, issued by the Soviet Union in defence of its Arab allies, would not be countenanced. That signal took the form of advancing the US armed forces to DEFCON 3 – a “Defence Condition” positioned just two perilously short steps away from Armageddon.

 

The Nearest Run Thing You Ever Saw: The Israeli PM, Golda Meir and her Defence Minister, Moshe Dyan, visit the Golan Heights in the hours following the Syrian army's thwarted attack. Had things gone differently, Israel's leaders would have been forced to threaten the use of its small stockpile of nuclear weapons.

 

Fortunately for the world, the Russians were not about to initiate World War III on behalf of Egypt and Syria. With the benefit of hindsight it is also clear that the mere possibility of an Israeli nuclear strike was sufficient for the leaders of Egypt and Syria to limit their military and diplomatic objectives to the restoration of Sinai and the Golan Heights, and the Israeli evacuation of the West Bank and Gaza.

 

In the light of these facts, the Israeli case is not as exceptional as it might, at first, appear. Even when they possessed the military resources to launch a war of annihilation against the State of Israel, the Egyptians and the Syrians dared not do so. No one doubts the willingness of the Jewish people to defend themselves against a second genocide with every weapon at their disposal – including Israel’s atomic bombs. Like the biblical hero Samson, Israel, in extremis, will not hesitate to bring down the Temple upon the heads of its enemies – even at the cost of being crushed itself.

 

These lessons in invulnerability were not lost on Israel’s middle-eastern neighbours. Does anyone seriously suppose that the United States and the United Kingdom would have launched a conventional invasion of Iraq if Saddam Hussein had possessed even a small stockpile of nuclear weapons? And is anyone truly surprised that the revolutionary government of the Islamic Republic of Iran very early on began diverting resources to what Israel and the United States were convinced was an all-out effort to create a nuclear arsenal?

 

That Iran has been persuaded to abandon its, geopolitically-speaking, extremely strategically destabilising nuclear-weapons programme, is not due entirely to the United Nations’ crippling economic sanctions. The Iranians have witnessed the exemplary fate of, first, the Iraqi, and then the Syrian, attempts to construct and operate a nuclear reactor capable of enriching Uranium and/or producing weapons-grade Plutonium.

 

The Israelis call it the “Begin Doctrine” – after Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who, in 1981, authorised a pre-emptive air-strike against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Begin described Osirak’s successful destruction as “anticipatory self-defence at its best”. In 2007 the Israelis did it again. “Operation Orchard” utterly destroyed the nuclear reactor constructed (with North Korean assistance) in the remote Deir ez-Zor region of Syria.

 

Although the Iranians took the precaution of locating most of their nuclear facilities deep underground, their military chiefs were never entirely convinced that the Israelis wouldn’t deploy tactical nuclear weapons to take them out. The bloodthirsty threats of Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (whose bellicosity frightens even his own generals!) upped-the-ante still further. In 2015, sanctioned and intimidated, the Iranians finally abandoned their bid for the ultimate guarantor.

 

One question, however, remains. Does Israel’s acceptance of Iran’s diplomatic assurances have anything to do with Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 January 2016.