The most remarkable, and disturbing, aspect about the simultaneous release today of 92,000 internal records of US military actions in Afghanistan to the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times is how blind, complacent, negligent or sycophantic the US (and other Western) media have been over a 6-year period (Jan 2004-Dec 2009) in getting anywhere near the truth about the war in that country. Or, putting it another way, how come the US establishment military and political have been able so comprehensively and for so long to conceal the truth? That in itself, apart from the facts which are horrifying enough, deserves detailed investigation and a full-scale inquiry into news management in war situations.
The implications of the change in the US High Command in Afghanistan go a lot deeper than the sacking of a general for mutinous behaviour. Obama had already excessively delayed his endorsement of the Afghan surge strategy because he never believed in it, but could find no politically and militarily viable alternative to replace it with. He felt trapped by its inevitability, but McChrystal and his aides now overplaying their hand against the ‘wimps in the White House’ offers him his best opportunity to re-write the strategy. First signs are that he intends to take it.
What the McChrystal incident has really exposed is the increasing dominance of US militarism in both American politics and society. George Bush defined himself as a war President, propagated the Long War doctrine of the unending worldwide struggle against terror, and demanded unquestioning patriotism as the price for achieving US global hegemony. (more…)
Gordon Brown’s decision to reduce the number of submarines from 4 to 3 is welcome, but it certainly does not amount to even the beginning of a process of scrapping the renewal of Trident. The fourth submarine always had the role merely of providing an insurance policy against all the odds, and its removal will not reuduce the nuclear capability of 168 warheads or their deployment. It will cut the costs of the renewal package by some £3bn, but David Miliband has rightly made clear that a decision to downgrade or scrap Britain’s nuclear force should be made exclusively on grounds of overall defence strategy, not as a mere cost-cutting exercise. By that criterion this decision represents little change. The motive appears to be to offer a contribution to Obama’s drive to reduce the overall number of nuclear warheads in preparation for next year’s review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but on that count the dropping of the fourth submarine fails to meet the objective.
The tectonic plates are beginning to move under Trident. A new report from the IPPR, with authors including Labour’s former Defence Secretary George Robertson and former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, argues that Britain cannot afford much of the defence equipment needed and should revisit plans to renew Trident. Ashdown says “we can no longer afford to maintain museum Cold War armaments”, while Robertson contends that “in the post-9/11, post-financial crisis world, we must be smarter and more ruthless in targeting national resources at the real security risks”. They suggest instead reviewing possible alternatives to Trident or extending the life of the current system. Nor is this such a dramatic development. Over 2 years ago 4 key members of the US defence Establishment – Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry – used the pages of the Wall Street Journal on 4 January 2007 to advocate moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons and calling for progress towards disarmament. In addition the financial meltdown and deep economic recession are also now pushing in the same direction.
Gordon Brown wants to reassure Bush at the Mansion House tonight that the ‘special relationship’ still lies at the heart of UK foreign policy. After a teeny-weeny bit of independence in beginning to withdraw British troops from Iraq, we have to genuflect again. The real question we should be asking is: are we seeking a closer relationship because we believe that US policies are broadly right or simply because that is where the power is?
There is of course no special relationship, almost by definition, since the essential tenet of the neo-con philosophy is unilateralism, Might is Right, and self-interest overrides everything whatever their ‘friends’ may say. We are no more likely to carry influence if we play the deferential courtier than if we play the critical friend. As we found out painfully throughout the Blair years, playing to the American tune unremittingly on every occasion gained not a singly demonstrable concession.
So are American policies right? Of course there is a considerable US-European consensus across a broad spectrum of policy which nobody seriously doubts. But there are some very important areas of discord where we have a responsibility to make our voice heard.
Iraq is a prime example, though far from the only one. It is becoming clear that the US intend a permanent military presence in Iraq as long as Saudi, Iraqi and Iranian oil lasts, amounting in total to more than half global oil reserves. For this purpose the US is strong-arming an oil law through the Iraqi Government which is virtually expropriating all future Iraqi oil revenues which on some official US estimates could reach the stupendous level of £30 trillions, 12 times the UK GNP! The Americans are now building five colossal military bases across Iraq to enforce their will. We should be telling them this is a recipe for an endless insurgency which is not only flagrantly illegal, but an unwinnable quagmire which can only erode the West’s position to the benefit of Iran, China and Russia.
Second, the US won the Cold War in 1989, but then blew it by passing up a priceless opportunity to win over Russia as a long-term ally. Russia let the Berlin Wall be torn down, pulled the Red Army back inside its border, removed the Communist Party from absolute control, and embraced American-style capitalism. Putin went out of his way to aid American forces after 9/11 and did not use his Security Council veto to block the US invasion of Iraq. What has been his reward? The US, exploiting Russian weakness at every turn, moved NATO into Eastern Europe and then into the former Soviet republics. The US bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 despite Russian protests, and is now placing a missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic as well as unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty which has produced stability for 30 years. Is it any surprise that Putin is now so suspicious and uncooperative towards the West? This is fundamentally the wrong policy, and we should be saying that loud and clear to the US before we alienate yet further one of the great powers that should be our ally.
Third, instead of continually fudging his options over Iran, Gordon Brown should be making clear that whilst we support economic and diplomatic pressures to deter an Iranian nuclear bomb, we do not and will not support a military attack on Iran. It would have catastrophic consequences – setting the whole Middle East alight, provoking intensified Iranian intervention in Iraq, seriously disrupting the world oil supply a quarter of which passes daily through the straits of Hormuz, unleashing murderous retaliation maybe as far as Western capitals, All without being able ultimately to prevent an Iranian bomb, and indeed generating a national unity behind the mullahs when otherwise an unpopular regime might steadily unravel because of economic failure.
It is our duty to make clear to the Americans now our strong opposition to their perverse and counter-productive military threats towards Iran. Otherwise, the Cold War will be succeeded by another long term geo-political conflict, only conducted at much higher temperature.
Graphic: Project Gutenberg
Des Browne’s sneaked out announcement that Britain is to provide part of Bush’s Missile Defence System sends out all the wrong messages as Gordon Brown tries to demonstrate that under him things are now different. I suspect that this is only the first of many cases that show that in terms of New Labour’s fundamentals they are not.
Putting out an extremely contentious statement by written answer on the last day of Parliament is certainly back to the bad old days that Jo Moore made famous: latching on to a good day to bury bad news. Nothing new or better here. And it spoils GB’s proclaimed wish to foster greater transparency and involve Parliament more. What is the point of offering Parliament a debate every time the police say they need to hold a terrorist suspect more than 28 days, yet denying Parliament the right to decide whether we should consign our nation to the risk of nuclear attack in a new hyped version of Star Wars?
The central reason to oppose allowing the communications base at Menwith Hill to become part of the US missile system, together with upgrading the Fylingdales radar for the same purpose, is that it will increase our vulnerability, not decrease it. It will put the UK on the frontline in future wars, opening up this country as a prime target at the start of any future Big Power hostilities.
US missile defence is provocative, since it allows the US to launch nuclear first-strike attacks without fear of retaliation. Russia is boud to devise its own counter-system, and after 20 years of building down nuclear stocks, the nuclear arms race will be relentlessly ratcheted up again. the Russians are already known to be developing the RS-24 inter-continental missile which is specifically designed to overcome missile defence systems.
Nor should we ignore that this new space race will be stupendously expensive, and without any guarantee of success. As one military analyst put it, Star Wars is like trying to hit one bullet travelling at 17,000 mph with another bullet also travelling at 17,000 mph. The idea that our security should depend on 100% success at every such encounter is, frankly, sheer madness.
It is outrageous that Parliament has been repeatedly informed that there was no plan to use RAF Menwith Hill for missile defence, and is now abruptly told that a deal has been done with the US behind the back of Parliament and it’s now too late to do anything about it. The truth is, it isn’t. Parliament must insist on a debate and vote on this as soon as it reconvenes, and that vote should be the final say on whether the UK participate in Bush’s Star Wars, not a secret behind-the-scenes Government deal.
The carefully choreographed distancing of UK foreign policy from the US – first announced, then denied, coded message now clearly received – will be received with palpable relief by the Labour Party and the overwhelming majority of British people. The umbilical cord by which Blair insisted on embedding himself in Bush was humiliating, demeaning and ultimately fruitless because it never produced a shred of reciprocity.
However, once again we should look very carefully at what actually happens, not just at a gesture waved in our direction. Two issues immediately stand out.
One is, what would happen if, in the 18 months left to Bush, the neocons in a last fling launched their long-planned strike against Iran, almost certainly bombing raids whether by the US itself or possibly Israel? Would Gordon Brown the next morning come down in favour of Bush or would he repudiate such madness and back the British people? At the one leadership hustings that took place in May, I asked him this question. He evaded it with several minutes of waffle – it won’t happen, diplomacy is winning through, multilateral alliance are being forged, etc. etc. Since he hadn’t answered the question, I immediately asked it again. I was treated to a repetition of the same waffle. It’s worrying he won’t tell us.
The second key issue is, will Brown withdraw British troops from Iraq when the British commander on the spot, Sir Richard Dannatt, says, as he has, that the presence of occupation troops is actually exacerbating, not helping, the security situation, or will he keep them there as long as the Americans insist on having a diplomatic fig-leaf to cover their own occupation? Clearly Bush, success or no success with his surge, is not intending any significant reduction in US forces in the year and a half before the end of his Presidency. It is all too likely that American troops will remain in Iraq, albeit with some limited cuts in numbers, far beyond that. After all, the reason they invaded Iraq has nothing to do with stopping Saddam’s brutalities or replacing him with democracy; they’re there because of the oil. As peak oil rapidly approaches and competition with China intensifies over the remaining repositories of oil left in the world, the US is not going to give up any time soon its priceless economic, political and military prize astride the three countries – Saudi, Iran and Iraq – with far and away the biggest global concentration of oilfields left.
So if Bush clicks his fingers and says No to a full British withdrawal within a 6-12 month period at most, will Gordon Brown defy him, or will our poodledom continue? We are entitled to know.
Today’s Guardian splash seems to be another step on the path of softening up public opinion for a potential attack on Iran. I can understand why American defence officials would want to see their allegations splashed across the front of the war sceptical Guardian. But this is essentially a rehash of a story that has been properly discredited already, when the Pentagon trotted it out last, in February.
These are eerily familiar claims that suit the political agenda of the US more than they suit the facts. Sources speaking on condition of anonymity last time have become “senior US officials.” The apparent threat now is against Bradley armoured vehicles rather than the more heavily protected Abrams tank. But the other claims, particularly about weapons and their sources are the same and were conveniently repeated by Tory defence spokesperson Patrick Mercer in a BBC R4 interview on the Today programme this morning- introduced by a summary of the Guardian article.
Just in case Iran is not bug bear enough, we are treated to claims of a link with al-Qaeda link up across the Sunni-Shiite divide and even more incredulously, that the shelling of the Shiite dominated Iraqi parliament was the work of Shiite militias closely allied to Iraqi Shiite political parties and indeed trained by them. Professor Juan Cole of Michigan University has more on this in his Informed Comment blog.
There is, however, a grain of truth in the report, where it says “General Petraeus’s report to the White House in early September will be pivotal and a decision to being troop withdrawal or continue the surge policy will hinge on the outcome.”
That explains why the story is being peddled by unnamed US sources, but not why the Guardian should choose to believe them.
From today’s Times:
Politics is in a curiously disorientated state in Britain today. On one side, old-style Toryism was voted out in 1997, and has now been replaced by a soft veneer of environmentalism and family-centredness that contrasts sharply with the excesses of private equity capitalism. On the other, the persistent shifting to the right under new Labour has now blown itself out, as the polls indicate, leaving a large segment of political space occupied by mainstream Labour opinion and probably a majority of the electorate as a whole largely disenfranchised.
This key part of the spectrum urgently needs representation to give it fresh direction — not old Labour either, but a modern progressive politics addressing the big issues now being ducked and championing key groups now being marginalised.
First, we need a change of direction to heal the divisions that are increasingly straining the fabric of our society. The Government has made some progress in reducing poverty, but not nearly enough. Inequalities are actually increasing. The average pay of the chief executives of the top FTSE 100 companies is now £46,150 a week, 250 times the minimum wage and 500 times the state pension, while at the same time there are still 12.5 million people, including more than 2 million children, living in households below the Government’s poverty line. This matters because reducing inequality leads to less violence, better health, longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates and higher educational attainment.
We need a new approach to cutting crime if we genuinely believe in being as tough on the causes of crime as on crime itself. It’s not sensible to go on banging people up even faster than we can build new prisons without tackling much harder the causes of criminality, and putting much more emphasis on reducing recidivism. Despite unprecedented increase in the use of custody, reconviction rates have soared. The hardline policy isn’t working.
We must drastically reduce the prison population, confining it to violent and dangerous offenders. We should provide instead secure units in the community where lesser offenders are required to attend compulsory courses on anger control, money management and parenting, and also to receive education and skills training and treatment for drug addiction and mental health needs, and are made to do unpaid work to repay the community.
Probably the best crime reduction value for money comes from parenting programmes and youth inclusion panels, bringing together local services to focus support on 8 to 13-year-olds at highest risk. Of course there are increased costs involved in intensive rehabilitation, but if prison places and reoffending costs can be significantly reduced, there should be a substantial net saving in public expenditure.
We need too to arrest the overcentralisation of power in this country. Key decisions, such as the replacement of Trident and the restoration of nuclear energy, should not be taken without consultation of the Cabinet, Parliament and public opinion.
Indeed, the most direct way to win back public trust and reconnect with the electorate is for the Government to be seen as genuinely accountable, listening and being prepared to adjust in the face of strong public demand.
It also means Parliament reasserting its authority by taking the right to ratify (or not) nominations to the Cabinet made by the Prime Minister, by appointing committees of inquiry where the Government refuses to do so (as over rendition flights), by ending the Royal Prerogative whereby the Prime Minister can unilaterally declare war and authorise military action, and through its select committees tabling its own motions for debate and voting on the floor of the Commons. Giving the public the right to initiate legislation through referendums is another issue to explore.
We also need much more vigorously to tackle the greatest threat facing the world today: climate change. It must permeate every policy area of Government — not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy. It is not enough merely to talk of the end of oil dependence when our electricity generation from renewable energy is, at just 4 per cent, by far the lowest in Europe.
We need an overall plan to meet the scientists’ target of reducing carbon emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. It is a colossal challenge, but a win-win-win-win scenario. It will increase energy efficiency hugely, create large savings for industry and some of our poorest households, protect our economy against sudden destabilising external shocks and safeguard us from climate catastrophe.
Finally, we must stop being subservient to the US. We can’t go on being America’s glove puppet, as we have been over Iraq and Lebanon, and, most worryingly, Iran. We need a foreign policy that robustly reasserts our own essential British interests and our commitment to the UN. The first demonstration of that should be strong opposition to any potential US or Israeli attack on Iran, and insistence that the nuclear impasse must be resolved by negotiation or by UN sanctions, not by violence.
We should take the advice not of the US but of British military commanders on the spot in speeding up our troop withdrawal from Iraq. And we should push for a wider international peace conference for a joint settlement of interconnected Middle East issues that cannot be solved one by one. The latest reports of a US change of heart about talking to Iran and Syria make this now a serious possibility.
It is because I believe that radical new policies of this kind would reenergise politics in this country that I am standing for the leadership of the Labour Party. www.michaelmeacher.info
From
The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country’s oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.
The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up “production sharing partnerships” to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.
No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.
This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq’s oilfields.
This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq’s oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq’s oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq’s oilfields.
Now the plan is being revisited, or as much of it as can be salvaged after the fading of American power on the battlefield made enforced sell-off impossible. This revision of the original plan has been drafted by BearingPoint, a US consultancy firm, at the request of the US government. Significantly, it was checked first with Big Oil and the IMF and is only now being presented to the Iraqi parliament. But if accepted by the Iraqis under intense pressure, it will lock the country into weakness and dependence for decades. The neo-cons may have lost the war, but they are still manipulating to win the most substantial chunk of the peace when and if it ever comes.
It isn’t difficult to see why. The super-giant oilfields of south-eastern Iraq, particularly the Majnoon and West Qurna, together with the East Baghdad field, are the largest concentration to be found anywhere in the world. Oil exploration costs are among the cheapest globally, with the current cost estimated at around 50c per barrel compared with the current retail price of about $60 a barrel. Petroleum geologists have discovered 73 major fields and identified some 239 as having a high degree of certainty. Yet only 30 fields have been partially developed and only 12 are actually on stream. Undrilled structures and undeveloped fields could represent the largest untapped hydrocarbon resource anywhere in the world. While most other Middle East countries are fully exploiting their reserves, large parts of Iraq are still virgin.
This prize is cast in even greater relief by recent assessments of the looming imminence of global peak oil production. The International Energy Agency now estimates that world production outside Opec has already peaked and that world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. Optimists who project large reserves remaining of over 1 trillion barrels base their figures on three illusory premises – inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands whose exploitation would entail colossal economic and environmental costs, exaggeration by Opec countries lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel, or new drilling technologies which may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. In contrast, the pessimists are steadily gaining ground, and against this background Iraq remains potentially the last remaining major breakthrough.
Nevertheless, on every count the latest US plan to get control of Iraqi oil at almost any cost is profoundly misconceived. Even from the point of view of America’s own self-interest, its security is imperilled more by the failure to develop alternative energy options than by the lack of capabilities of its weapons systems. Yet the US government continues to spend about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former. It is still the case that funding the import of oil represents about 40% of the current US trade deficit, yet no vigorous programme in renewable technologies is being supported.
As Senator Richard Lugar and James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, said prophetically in 1999 about growing US dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil, “our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonisingly through developing nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change – or through all of them”.
Secondly, in neo-conservative eyes Iraq was also required as an alternative to Saudi Arabia to provide a military base for the US to police the whole of Gulf oil. It was no longer possible for the US to maintain troops in Saudi Arabia for that purpose without risking the collapse of the dictatorial Saudi regime and its giant oil assets falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. The removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia was the principal demand contained in Osama bin Laden’s fatwa of 1996. This was why, shortly after invading Iraq, the US announced that it was pulling its combat troops out of Saudi Arabia, thereby meeting Bin Laden’s principal pre-9/11 political demand. But unfortunately for the US, al-Qaida is now seeking the removal of US troops from Iraq as well.
Above all, the policy is flawed by its extreme short-sightedness. Even if the US were to win its war in Iraq, which now looks virtually impossible, its incremental gain before the oil runs out would be short-term, while its exposure to intensified and unending insurgency because of perceived US seizure of Iraqi oil rights, especially if extended to Iran, would be disproportionately enormous both in the Middle East and maybe also at home. It is diametrically the opposite of the policy to which the whole world will be forced ineluctably by the accelerating onset of climate change. Perhaps the single greatest gain of the west learning this lesson of weaning itself off its oil addiction is that it would end this interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries simply because they happen to have oil – the central cause of world conflict today.
This piece on the outcome and effects of last night’s vote appears on the New Statesman website, as does an article from a Trident supporter, Tom Watson MP.
Whatever the arguments over the wisdom of retaining nuclear weapons, he and I both seem to agree that the way in which the matter was handled within the PLP and indeed the Labour Party as a whole needs to change drastically if we are to see Labour regain electoral support.
Mr. Michael Meacher (Oldham, West and Royton) (Lab): One cannot but draw encouragement from the fact that when occupants of both Front Benches come together in agreement there must be a good deal to be said for the opposite argument. So it is today. Like others, I do not believe that the Government have adequately or convincingly answered certain fundamental questions about renewing Trident, in particular its true cost, why a decision has to be taken now, whom it is meant to deter, and how it is genuinely compatible with non-proliferation.
Nor has there been a real opportunity to obtain fuller answers, because the process of consultation has been unjustifiably squeezed. There is an unmistakable sense in this latest exercise that both Parliament and the electorate are being bounced into this decision. I still believe that there is a strong case for further and fuller consultation of the electorate before such a momentous decision—which will cost taxpayers some 6 per cent. of GDP—is made.
The argument against renewal of Trident is extremely strong—
Mr. Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South) (Lab): I think that my right hon. Friend meant 6 per cent. of the defence budget, not 6 per cent. of GDP. He may wish to amend the record.
Mr. Meacher: No, I am referring to a cost of £75 billion—I shall discuss that further in a moment—which is roughly 6 per cent. of GDP. It is substantially higher as a proportion of the defence budget.
BBC Online are running an poll on whether we need to build a new generation of submarines to carry Trident D5 missiles. Show your opposition to this premature and politically misguided proposal by voting in this poll.
So far, 4000+ people have voted, more than doubling the numbers of votes cast in a period of about two hours.
