A Time for Magic

“For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense – to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume  toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshipped by you with your mouth, while in your heart – if you have one – you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation!” (Mark Twain, ‘The Mysterious Stranger, 1962, p.235)

So speaks Satan in Mark Twain’s marvellous short story ‘the Mysterious Stranger’, which allows the masterful humourist to lampoon everything from religious fervour to warfare and capitalism, all in the setting of 1590s Austria. And not much has changed, as Satan would have expected.

The only qualification is that there is not much point in drinking to the perpetuation of British culture, such as it is. As Larry Elliott reports in today’s Guardian, manufacturing is falling apart and North Sea oil – once the resplendent cash cow of dynamic entrepreneurial Britain – is pouring off a cliff, being down 30 percent since 2008.

Capitalism was born in these islands and is about to consume their inhabitants, after a good couple of hundred years. The basis of Britain’s pre-eminence was manufacturing – the ability to produce mass consumption goods more efficiently and cheaply than artisan manufacturers (or other experiments with factory production around the globe. Hence the demise of Indian silk weaving.

Yet as all good communists have always suspected, these revolutionary developments in production carried with them the germ of the destruction of the society which bore them. Only in the last thirty or forty years have we seen the creation of what Marx and Engels called “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” across the world and across national boundaries.

Jobs now flow to zones of exploitation across the entire globe. Almost any commodity can be produced at little cost somewhere other than the capitalist “core” economies, who must resort to protectionism or other supports to maintain a manufacturing sector. And when he jobs go, so goes a great deal of the income and demand which sucks in the products of industrial production.

We have seen the benefits of globalization – cheaper commodities, easy credit and financial hegemony – and now we will see some of the drawbacks, which people across the global south have long been subjected to. Unemployment, social chaos, displacement, massive inequality and the militarization of the cities to protect such concentrated wealth.

Hence the desperate desire of David Cameron to protect the City of London in European talks, along with Ken Clarke’s equally desperate desire to maintain Britain’s membership of the European financial community. But, as it was the City which facilitated the capital flows leading to globalization and the credit crisis, buttressing its position will do nothing for industry in this country.

Twain would have recognised this as a pretty routine effort to reinvigorate the divine right of elites to rule over those who support them. The phrase “mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar” could not capture more accurately the financial class which produced the credit crisis and continues to stage a credit strike to British people, industry included.

Such is life. But as Marx and Engels saw (prophetically), “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers….The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

The bourgeoisie itself is being demystified through its incompetence and corruption, but it’s a tortuous process. Meanwhile, bourgeois in the global south take their place in the committee of production, overseeing new rounds of exploitation. As the fantasies that lovers hold about each other are often laid bare as fraudulent when relationships fall apart, it won’t be much comfort to see unmasked the swine who took us all underwater.

The problem is one of agency as much as anything. Marx and Engels obviously saw something in the industrial “proletariat” as a revolutionary force. We have to be more imaginative. We have our occupiers, our millions of strikers, our greens, squatters, dreamers, and our links with groups across the world fighting against concentrated economic and political power. Andy Merrifield’s excellent “Magical Marxism” offers a creative reading of the situation, urging us to adopt an autonomist, spontaneous posture – building movements and spaces which encourage artistic and political activism to converge.

But it’s all so unclear. The pessimists are having a field day. But this is not their time. This is a time to create spaces in which pessimism can be transmuted into hope and commitment. The occupation movement offers a way forward. Climate Camp was quite similar. But we are a long way from turning those examples into a mass movement demanding democratic control of the economy – credit, manufacturing, natural resources and all, still less of greening production and consumption. Or are we? If the bourgeoisie can ensure that “all that is solid melts into air” what can solidarity and imagination achieve?

Pytheas and The Discovery of Britain

Few schoolchildren learn about Pytheas of Massalia, or Marseilles as it is more familiar to British holidaymakers. Yet for a man of undistinguished birth, in a port city thousands of miles away from the British coast, living at a time when travel was both arduous and dangerous, Pytheas played an extraordinary role in the story of Britain.

In fact, it could be said that Pytheas invented Britain. For the Massalian adventurer was the first man to circumnavigate the British Isles, a feat which he achieved in around 320 BC (we aren’t entirely sure of the date). The reason for his obscurity? When he returned, presumably owing to his relatively lowly birth, he could not promote his exploits and the knowledge that he had gained well enough to attract articulate supporters. A book that he produced was influential – entering the work of the geographer Strabo and the polymath Pliny the Elder and probably many more thinkers and chroniclers. But for reasons of his own, Strabo in particular sought to denigrate the reputation of the long-dead Pytheas, preferring to project his own notions of the geography of north-west Europe and ignore the ideas of others. Pytheas’ trail-blazing exploits were left to fade away, but it is long past the time for his acceptance as one of history’s greatest geographers.

This is all admirably discussed in Barry Cunliffe’s concise, but beautifully put together book ‘the Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek’ (Massalia was founded as a colony by Phocean Greeks). As Cunliffe traces, Pytheas almost certainly sailed from near Bordeaux, to Armorica (now Brittany), then to Cornwall, past Anglesey, the Isle of Man and into the Hebrides. He then may well have visited Iceland – Cunliffe engagingly argues that the voyage would have been more than possible – before heading down the eastern coast of the British Isles, and down the channel to his starting point.

For the first time, an individual could say that they had a firm grasp of the scale and shape of Britain. Not only that, but Pytheas was a curious traveller, willing to strike inland and speak to local people. Strikingly, he did not raise a fleet or even command a ship with which to make his explorations. Instead, relying on his social skills, he seems to have hitched rides with fishermen, traders, perhaps even religious travellers, to make his way northwards. Aided perhaps by the cultural affinities between Celtic peoples of Gaul and those of Britain, his social feat is incredible, and there is no indication that he met with friction from local people.

From Cunliffe’s portrait, the Atlantic region of the British Isles emerges as a dynamic maritime civilization, teeming with connections, trading a rich variety of goods, with linkages to the continent. There must too, have been a deep tradition of hospitality to aid the wandering Pytheas, and a confident symbiosis of human creativity and the ocean. No wonder though, that Pytheas was met with scorn amongst some later chroniclers. It remains hard to believe that his voyage was possible, but Cunliffe’s work leaves little room for doubt.

Not least of the evidence for his accuracy were measurements made by Pytheas that were later relied upon by thinkers who sought to calculate latitude and the dimensions of the earth. Pytheas was more than capable of calculating his northern progress and brought back his observations, leaving a valuable legacy for his successors.

What would the curious, worldly Pytheas have made of modern nationalism though? His conception of the Isles as a discrete geographical unit relied upon the kindness and cooperation of their inhabitants. State machineries which distributed the right to travel and remain based on visas and passports would have been alien to him, at least on his travels. When he returned to Massalia, however, if a foreigner, he would have had to turn in his arms – city states anticipated what nations would later become. But as he travelled, he moved through a realm of ambiguity and negotiation, amongst peoples who did not know that they should claim the right to define who should exist on their territory.

Aside from everything else, the voyage of Pytheas is a wonderful teaching tool. After all, how many times have children been asked – in all seriousness – who discovered Britain? In his way, the discoverer was Pytheas, but British people rarely feel the need to lower themselves to the status of those peoples who, history accepts, had to be “discovered” to enter the modern world. But the voyage of Pytheas shows that Britons are no different in this respect.

His epic voyage is another good example of how foreigners were instrumental in the formation of “British” identity. I’ll try to look at this a bit more in the future.

The Reluctant Resistance: The TUC and the Tories

Although Trade Unions in the UK are being pushed by their members to take strike action over pensions and the broader drift of British economic policy, the record of the TUC and many individual union leaders in resisting cuts to public services and job losses has been atrocious.

The TUC head Brendan Barber now talks about “the need for a much more radical approach to responding to the crisis” and assures us that “we have a responsibility to co-ordinate trade unions who take industrial action on this issue. We are certainly prepared and stand ready to do that.”

But nobody should mistake him or other union leaders for reliable allies of working people. When the students were being kettled and seeing their futures evaporate, trade union leaders were almost all silent. It took over a year for the TUC to organize a protest march to bring its members together in opposition to the coalition government’s cuts program – a year of time lost when the agenda was clear to anyone capable of reading a newspaper.

Why is this? Much of the blame must lie with Barber himself, a union careerist and political naïf, who has little courage for a fight but a strong sense of self-importance. Nowhere was this toxic combination of attributes shown clearer than in a cable released by Wikileaks last year.

The cable describes a meeting between Barber and the US Ambassador on December 9, 2009 at which the two discussed the likelihood of a Conservative victory in the 2010 General Election. As the Ambassador reported, “Barber stated that the Tories have actually been “courting” the unions a bit, because they know they would need union support in any effort to reduce public sector employment as a deficit-fighting measure.”

Barber expressed his pleasure at being courted by the Tories, saying that “If the election were to result in a hung parliament, the union movement might actually be in the strongest political position, since all three parties would need its support.”

This is Brendan Barber in private, scheming with the Ambassador of a foreign power. He doesn’t come out well. On one hand, he was astonishingly naïve, suggesting that the union movement, which has long been shedding members, would be in a ‘strong position’ whatever the result of an election in which, he was well aware, all parties were committed to deficit reduction. Since then, the unions have shown very little evidence to the public that their strength has grown due to political developments.

On the other hand, Barber appears slimy and self-satisfied in his position as a midwife for the Tories delivering their noxious economic program. The phrase “because they know they would need union support in any effort to reduce public sector employment as a deficit-fighting measure” bears repeating. A good question for union leaders would be, just how much support have you given the Tories in their deficit cutting crusade, and what rewards have you received in return?

Now, union after union is balloting its members. Workers are putting immense pressure on union leaders to take action against massive increases to their pension contributions and rises in the pension age. The act of striking, however, so long a staple of workers (and absolutely guaranteed under international labour law as a basic right) is still being resisted by those leaders. As Len McCluskey, seen as one of the more radical union leaders, told the Guardian, “Hopefully the government will see the anger and perhaps take a step back, be a little bit more flexible and less intransigent. We have heard union leader after union leader saying they don’t want to do this, but the anger comes from the ordinary men and women in the grassroots.”

McCluskey seems almost embarrassed by the passion coming from the “grassroots” (presumably he sees himself and his other well-paid leaders as beautiful flowers, and certainly not “ordinary men and women.”) And well might Len be shamefaced. After all, in November 2010, he promised us all that “I feel passionate about it. I will stand on the rooftops and shout about it and we will do everything in our power to resist it. We will join together the public and private sector workers.”

Back then, Len was thinking about the March demonstration, which came and went. He wanted it to “[rock] the establishment and [make] them step back” but it was the youthful occupiers of Fortnum and Mason who made the biggest stir, while Trade Unionists were babbling on in Hyde Park (even if Ed Miliband was booed at the rally).

McCluskey was promising to lead a truly radical campaign of resistance, however, even going so far as to liken himself to Nelson Mandela. As he put it, “Do I believe the law is sacrosanct? Absolutely I do not. If there are bad laws not only is it right to oppose them but your duty to do so…[Nelson] Mandela may have taken that position over the laws of apartheid and [Mahatma] Gandhi may have taken that position over the laws of colonialism and imperialism…”

We still await his heroic stand in the streets of London. Right now, what we are seeing is a promise of action on pensions – an issue that unions can legally strike over. But Len’s heroic rhetoric has been well and truly exposed as cynical posturing. And we should probably put Brendan Barber’s concern about pension rights and cuts in the same bracket.

Whatever happens over the coming months – and action will certainly be plentiful – it will be the anger and passion of workers that impels and shapes it. The power of men like McCluskey and Barber has long been an impediment to workers’ own power. They may now, hopefully, discover how irrelevant they can be made by a confident upsurge of organized labour.

After Vickers: The Winter of Hope and Creation

Jayati Ghosh has a characteristically well argued piece in the Guardian today, (although it concludes, perhaps rashly, that “the system’s famed capacity for surviving and re-inventing itself seems, for the moment, to have disappeared.”) The rush to austerity, the unwillingness to tax the wealthy enough, the lack of will to fund large-scale infrastructure and redistributive projects is damning the global capitalist system to depressed demand and disfunction, with no remedies in sight.

This is a recapitulation of much of left-wing criticism during the “great recession”. Three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, however, not much of this good sense has percolated into the minds of policy-makers or high profile journalists and editors. The conventional wisdom remains relatively firm, and the government position is not close to budging on its central demand for rapid deficit reduction and wholesale social engineering to wipe out the debatable “structural deficit.”

The Vickers Report into the structure of the UK’s financial sector is symptomatic of this conservatism. As Ghosh notes, “The Vickers report on controlling the financial sector is well-intentioned but so modest as to tend to irrelevance. It misses essential points about the financial system, and the lengthy grace period it awards to banks (more than seven years before they have to ringfence their operations) risks being completely overtaken by the likely future volatility in banking.”

This is precisely what the Vickers commission was intended to achieve, however – to give the impression of doing something to renovate the unpopular (and dangerously volatile) financial system, while protecting the class position and wealth of shareholders and executives within it. Real alternatives to corporate finance were absolutely shunned. Ghosh argues that “the aim should be more diverse financial systems, with a bigger role for public and co-operative institutions” and I totally concur, but we are far from even being able to mention these ideas in public without being met by blank incomprehension or derision.

Vickers had no intention of straying onto anything so constructive. His whitewash of a report was explicit in its narrowness of vision. Despite recommending that retail and investment sides of financial institutions be separated, his commission refrained from beefing up independent regulation and public oversight of how financial institutions are run. On at least two occasions in the report’s text, the writers counseled that “corporate culture cannot directly be regulated” before offering baseless reassurances that UK banking could be “consolidated” for the “long-term” or that a “separate, consumer-focused culture in UK retail banking” can be constructed.

Any “consumer-focused culture” would presumably magically become distinct from the profit-obsessed culture obtaining in actually existing banks. We have no reason at all to believe this statement, which is essentially religious, placing faith in the probity of people and institutions that have worked assiduously for years to erode any trust in their capacity for ethical trading.

Vickers urges that any reforms of the financial sector should be left to the financial sector to enforce and carry through. Profit-maximizing corporate banks are to be trusted to “ring-fence” retail and investment banking, despite a litany of criminal activities in which they have been engaged. This stretches far beyond the use of ordinary customers’ funds as collateral for gambling on the over-the-counter derivatives exchanges, which played such a key role in bringing the financial system to its knees.

For years, the high street banks had been swindling customers through payment-protection insurance (PPI). PPI was supposed to provide a safety net to ensure that customers could repay mortgages and other debts should they become unemployed or ill. But, as the Vickers Report itself notes, “the market for payment protection insurance (PPI) services has…been found to be a source of excess profits, as well as a common area of mis-selling” as “banks found that they could earn large fees by selling PPI alongside a loan or mortgage, and in many cases through misleading sales techniques.”

Banks hardly ever told potential PPI holders that their policy could be voided if they suffered from a pre-existing medical condition, while many were told that PPI was compulsory, not an optional extra. Banks with-held information about monthly payments to fund PPI policies and the terms of the loan, meaning that thousands of customers took out policies that they clearly could not afford. When these practices came to light, hundreds of thousands of complaints were registered, with a success rate of around 75 percent, leading to multi-billion pound compensation payments by the banks (which had already spent millions trying to rule such compensation payments legally unnecessary).

Such criminality is endemic in profit-centred banking, whether it be in investment divisions (packaging sub-prime rubbish as shiny, desirable credit products) or retail divisions (face to face bilking of ordinary customers). And yet, the Vickers report maintains that “corporate culture cannot directly be regulated”. The co-operatives and publicly owned institutions suggested by Jayati Ghosh cannot be countenanced as a real alternative to the criminal cartel that we currently rely on for credit. In fact, we will have to trust the same feral overclass to regulate credit providers in the future.

There is almost no evidence of political action to create an alternative. The best that Labour can come up with is a derisory call for bad bankers to be “struck off”. Speaking to the TUC, Ed Miliband thundered that “the way our banks work needs to change” and “Not just separating the retail and investment divisions” was needed, which sounded promising. But the alternative offered by Miliband? Only, “greater competition too.”

Competition was one of the mechanisms by which payment protection insurance became such a popular scam – as retail banks scrambled to pour their serpentine lies into the ears of ordinary loan applicants and home owners. The intense competition to inflate share prices among corporate banks was a key driver of risky lending and speculation in the run up to the financial crisis. Competition is not the answer, which may partly have contributed to the reception Miliband met in front of the trade unionists.

What I think is happening here is very simple. Labour and the Conservatives are dependent upon the money earned by the financial sector for their very existence. They also subscribe wholeheartedly to the neoliberal mantras regarding open markets, labour market flexibility and minimal government intervention. More importantly, the political system is constituted largely by dull-minded, image obsessed drones who have no interest in mobilizing public support for radical change and, in fact, despise the public. All of this means that any movement towards an alternative financial system must come from social movements and protest. Miliband’s audience at the TUC knows this. I suspect that Jayati Ghosh was getting at it too. This is the time to bypass the sclerotic heart of politics, for a winter, not of discontent, but of hope and creation.

World In Action

News from around the world that you may have missed…

14 Year-old boy killed by Bahraini security forces
According to the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, a teenage boy was killed after being hit by a tear gas canister in the village of Sitra. Channel 6 News reports that “14-year old Ali Jawad Ahmed was among a small crowd which had gathered overnight in the village of Sitra, an oil hub 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) south of the Bahraini capital of Manama.” Apparently, “The group was engaged in a peaceful anti-government march when security forces allegedly used ‘excessive force’ against the demonstrators.” That force included firing a tear gas canister into the face of an unarmed 14 year-old boy from 7 metres away. []

Striking at Suzuki in India
Workers at the Maruti Suzuki plant in India continue to strike in reaction to the imposition of a “good conduct” bond by management. In the latest development, workers from factories around the plant in Manesar have assembled to show solidarity and, perhaps, launch strikes of their own. As Satyam Verma of the Citizens Front in Support of the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Struggle puts it, “The company has also imposed a dictatorial and utterly illegal ‘good conduct bond’ on the workers and has decreed that any worker who will not sign the bond will be considered ‘on strike’ and will not be allowed to enter the plant.” Over 3,000 workers have struck in response. The strike builds upon earlier actions in July which occurred in response to attempts by the management to impose their favoured candidates as union leaders. After strike action then, the state government promised to recognise an independent union, but has back-tracked since, and now has declared the current action illegal, mobilizing a hefty police response.

Bad Apple
According to the Chinese Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, Apple has been complicit in the discharge of highly toxic substances into water supplies, endangering the health of thousands. As investigative journalist Ma Jun says, “Through the process of our investigations, we discovered several suspected suppliers to Apple that have been the target of numerous complaints from local communities” while chemical discharges have been “expanding.” Allegedly, pollution from the notorious Foxconn plant is so severe that residents nearby cannot open their windows, while workers at the Win Technology factory in Suzhou have suffered illnesses related to the substance N-hexane, used to polish iPhone touch screens.

The findings regarding Apple come after Disney was accused by the campaigning group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom) of serious violations of labour rights in its Chinese factories. According to Sacom, Disney employs child labour and “forces staff to do three times the amount of overtime allowed by law” while worker suicides due to abuse by managers are also documented. The factory concerned is operated by Sturdy Products and manufactures toys for Mattel, linked to popular childrens films such as Cars and Toy Story, making the alleged use of child labour doubly disgraceful.

The Debt to Somalia

According to the United Nations, those affected by drought and famine in the Horn of Africa require $2.5 billion in aid, yet as of today, only $1.4 billion has been offered, leaving over $1 billion still to be donated.

The scale of the crisis is massive. In southern Ethiopia, over 70,000 Somali refugees are gathered in camps. In Kenya, the Dabaab camp is “home” to 440,000 refugees with over 1,000 arriving every day. The whole region of Somalia’s west and south is being emptied by hunger and, to be more accurate, the lack of a functioning government to provide relief. Almost 3.7 million people are categorised as in need of relief, with numbers rising.

There is no prospect of alleviation, at least not in the near future. As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated on Tuesday, “Emergency conditions could persist well into the first quarter of 2012 in southern Somalia, and recovery may not start until the next harvest in August 2012.” Lack of security is prohibiting aid deliveries and development work, while climatic factors have made farming impossible.

Serious illness is taking its place alongside hunger as a primary concern, with a reported increase of 660 percent in measles cases and cases of cholera appearing in Mogadishu. Yet at the same time some see hope in the capital at least. The al-Shabaab movement recently announced that it would be withdrawing from Mogadishu (for the time being), and many are reportedly returning to their homes and businesses. Tit for tat mortar firing has ceased, both from the AU and rebel sides. Some space is being created for the construction of a government and civil society, but that process is made much more frail by the deepening famine.

The seeming decline of al Shabaab is doubtless a good thing for Somalis. The sect has been brutal in extorting money and enforcing disclipine in the areas under its control, which remain extensive. But the deeper truth is that the crisis in Somalia was largely the product of a failed American intervention.

In 2006, the Bush administration sought to install a compliant government in Mogadishu, arming a group rallying under the banner of “counter-terrorism” to rout the Islamic Courts movement, which had occupied the power vacuum in the capital and was, by most accounts, bringing some stability to its politics. The CIA trained force, headed by brutal warlords, was repulsed, leading Washington to seek de facto regime change instead. Ethiopia under the odious Meles Zenawi was enlisted to launch an invasion under the pretext of fears of an invasion of Ethiopia’s ethnically Somali southern region. American planes and special forces assisted, leading to the installation of the Transitional Federal Government around the turn of 2006/2007.

This “transitional” government has remained precisely that, transitional. Protected by the Ethiopian military, it struggled to assert any authority outside Mogadishu. Somalian regions such as Somaliland and Puntland sought to go their own way, and still do. Meanwhile, the remnants of the Islamic Courts movement, and other enemies of the Ethiopians and Americans, fought back. The African Union, under the banner of AMISOM, was brought in to replace the battered and cash-strapped Ethiopians, to little effect. Constantly struggling to raise enthusiasm for the mission amongst African governments, the Uganda-dominated force lapsed into launching mortars into areas of Mogadishu held by rebel forces, killing hundreds or thousands in the process. The rebels acted brutally too, meting out summary “justice” and attacking government and AU held areas.

All of this was facilitated by the relatively obscure, but massively destructive Bush-era intervention to prevent the Islamic Courts holding power in Somalia. Instead of the relatively moderate Courts, with largely Somali membership and a desire to rule, came foreign fighters and new variants of warlords of a more extremist bent. Meeting this with massive force, made the situation worse.

This is all backed up by Human Rights Watch. As HRW argues in a recent report, between 2006 and 2009 “the worst abuses [were] by Ethiopian soldiers…Ethiopians… often indiscriminately attacked civilian areas and looted hospitals.” But HRW has been roundly ignored for years when it has discussed Somalia. Now is no different, with a media blackout on the issue.

The U.S. owes Somalis a great deal for the influence that Washington has exerted on the conflict, yet despite public generosity, the resources available are not nearly enough.

Blabber and Smoke

One of the great environmental protest songs…

Death to Qaddafi, Nuclear Weapons for the Saudis?

How can you square ongoing approval of the orgy of repression and crushed human dignity represented by the al-Saud family with the passion shown by western leaders for regime change in Libya?

Read this from AFP: US, Saudi Arabia to dicuss nuclear cooperation.

Nuclear cooperation!

“With the United States hoping to head off an arms race in response to Iran’s nuclear program, officials from President Barack Obama’s administration plan to head to Riyadh in the coming week for nuclear talks, the sources said…A congressional aide, who requested anonymity as the trip has not been publicly announced, said the visit would be a “preliminary” step to “discuss the possibility of moving forward on a nuclear cooperation agreement.”

And we are continually told that such a thing as humanitarianism exists at the highest levels of government. That foreign policy is made with regard to human dignity and freedom. Well, please dispense with such notions. They really do rather more harm than good.

Neutralisation 101 Pimping Liberal Intervention After Libya

The Guardian has an editorial on the rights and wrongs of the Libyan intervention, the day after the fall of Tripoli was announced (whether or not that can actually be said to have happened yet).

The UK’s liberal bastion has supported the intervention, although not as fervently as it did the wars in Iraq or the ongoing one in Afghanistan. As the editorial argues, “it can now reasonably be said that in narrow military terms it worked, and that politically there was some retrospective justification for its advocates as the crowds poured into the streets of Tripoli to welcome the rebel convoys earlier this week.”

But the Guardian’s own intervention, on the journalistic plane, is ongoing. The current strategy is to frame Libya as a disinterested moral exercise and a humanitarian police action. That is, messy issues such as oil can be dispensed with very easily.

As the editorial suggests, “We…know that Britain and France rushed into the action, and rushed others into it, without much thought and without much knowledge of the country we were proposing to save. Libya was the classic “far-off country of which we know little”.”

This, to me, is hugely rash. In reality, Libya was a place of which we knew very much indeed. After all, several of our elite academic institutions were providing guidance to the family and cronies of Qaddafi, and Tony Blair had made a high profile visit to Tripoli when PM. At that meeting, Blair reportedly promised “co-operation in the training of specialised military units, special forces and border security units.”

Moreover, the UK and Libya agreed to “exchanges of information and views on defence structures, military and security organisations; exchanges of visits by experts and exchange of printed materials in the field of military education and science; exchanges of information on current and developing military concepts, principles and best practice, and the conduct of joint exercises’”

Of course, “exchanges of information” could have no impact upon how much we “knew” of Libya before engaging in regime change there. Nor would the burgeoning work of BP in Libya have provided any knowledge of untapped hydrocarbon potential there.

The Guardian seems to want to bury any perspective on the Libyan intervention which challenges its moralistic, humanitarian fantasy and injects a political economic rationale. Instead, the paper is absurdly using Libya as an excuse to pimp Tony Blair’s own doctrine, expressed in Chicago in 1999 that “stronger states could and should use the means at their disposal, including, as a last resort, their military means, to protect the populations of failing, weak, or oppressive states.”

Tony Blair – the man who promised special forces training for Libya in exchange for oil money.

If the leading liberal left paper in the country cannot dig a little deeper than the surface scum of hyocrisy which passes for foreign policy, then the editors wwill indeed get their wish. As they conclude, “Liberal intervention is neither discredited nor fully validated. Too many very different things were bundled together under its rubric. They need sorting out and Libya may help us to do so.”

 

The Libyan Enigma – SAS Troops Involved Before UN Resolution

Outflanking the lame National Transitional Council and its forces in Benghazi, the Berbers of Libya’s western mountains have fought and won a series of victories, taking them into Tripoli, where they are fighting with what remains of Muammar Qaddafi’s troops.

So the Libyan “revolution” enters another stage, as the various opponents of Qaddafi ready to fight it out between themselves and their various constituencies, and their foreign benefactors prepare to offer sage advice and guidance. The odious autocrat is almost vanquished, notwithstanding the longevity of his son Saad, who popped back into the open last night after supposedly being arrested. A triumph for liberal interventionism and a sign of a warm western embrace for real democracy in the  Middle East?

Well, on that score our temptations to celebrate should be doused by the approbation shown for Libya’s rulers-in-waiting by Bahrain’s royal family and the training provided for Berber guerrillas by Qatari forces. There will remain “good” and “bad” autocracies, while a shield will be placed firmly around the aspirations of peoples in the region by the realpolitikal imperatives shared by the Americans, European nations and native elites be they “transitional” democratic as in Egypt and Libya, perhaps, or authentically undemocratic as in Bahrain.

That’s not particularly controversial. The wildcard element is the reaction of those peoples. Will they allow themselves to be limited and disciplined, as  seems to be occurring in Egypt and Tunisia? Optimists would be point to public participation in Libya’s “revolution.” But this was not a popular uprising in a direct sense. As Pepe Escobar describes for the Asia Times, the precise occasion for the fall of Tripoli coincided with Operation Siren, launched by NATO and involving Libyan units specially trained for the task.

As Escobar puts it, “NATO’s solution was to build a mercenary army – including all sorts of unsavory types, from former Colombian death squad members to recruiters from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who pinched scores of unemployed Tunisians and tribals disgruntled with Tripoli.” When the Ramadan fast was lifted, these hordes descended upon Tripoli, unleashing the present carnage. An unknown number of people, soldiers and civilians alike, have been killed by NATO bombardment during Operation Siren. We do not know how many. We don’t do body counts, of course, and the media are unconcerned, given the general euphoria of “revolution” but the casualties are likely to be many, and horrendous.

So despite the obvious hatred among many for the Qaddafi clan, events in Tripoli are not likely to generate a broad based popular movement. Instead, the military operation lays the seeds of resentment, as in Mogadishu, where the “transitional” government has never lived down killing thousands of people in its CIA-backed bid to get rid of the “Islamic courts” movement. And the rather rag-tag nature of the troops involved, so obviously dependent upon death from above, and not popular adulation or vast competence, will hardly inspire the people of the capital – Libya’s greatest urban centre by far.

So the “revolution” is a strange one. The displacement of Qaddafi, so real and not to be decried, nevertheless is accompanied by an unavoidable cynicism and fear for the people of Libya. This was no heroic uprising. It was from the start a western-driven para-military operation, cloaked in the garments of humanitarian intervention, and the elements involved in planning and executing it will not recede to permit the riotous reality of actually existing democracy.

It may emerge from the wellsprings of revisionism as time goes by, but soon enough we will see the reality of this Libyan war. The Guardian provides a hint in an article recounting the role played by the SAS, but we will need more to be sure.

Richard Norton-Taylor, conduit to the intelligence world, reports that “a number of serving British special forces soldiers, as well as former SAS troopers, are advising and training rebel forces, although their presence is officially denied.”

We do not know how influential British know-how was in facilitating the descent upon Tripoli. What Norton-Taylor does tell us, however, is potentially explosive, for he reports that SAS soldiers “returned to Libya in February this year, even before the UN mandate urging states to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s forces.”

British Special Forces were active in Libya before the UN had  passed a resolution calling for a humanitarian action to defend the people of Benghazi and other cities in revolt. This everyday violation of international law, unremarkable these days, hints at a darker narrative, one which is culminating in Tripoli as we speak.