Is this the real reason Blair joined Bush in going to war in Iraq 

I HAD a conversation with an American last week which challenged some generally held assumptions about the US, and made me think very hard indeed. My interlocutor was a deeply intelligent, highly educated, well-travelled man who was wide awake to the nuances of international affairs.

                                                                                                                                   The US is not well, he said. Americans have been traumatised and polarised by the twin tower attacks. The country is neurotic and highly strung. With a paranoid governing elite and a population half of which carries guns and talks in terms of nuking its enemies, this is a country that is not being safely governed and not behaving in a rational predictable way. So nervous was the US government that, at the height of the build up to the Iraq war in 2003, they were expecting a terrorist nuke to explode in Washington or New York at any time.

                                                                                                                                    He thought it important that we in the rest of the so-called First World understood this because, if we assume the US is like us, we are in grave danger of miscalculating in our dealings with her. 

                                                                                                                                   The US is not an omni-powerful, stable, essentially benevolent superpower. In behavioural terms, she is far more like the USSR at the height of the Cold War, or even North Korea now, and it is this image that should inform our dealings with her. She should not be provoked, shunned or isolated. She needs stroking. She needs assuring she is not surrounded by enemies who want to destroy her. She needs sensitive, intelligent managing just as any other maverick state; indeed the more so because of her genuinely awful power. 

                                                                                                                                   My man described himself as a Democrat. He was not a supporter of George Bush, but he believed the US must pursue an interventionist foreign policy, even if it meant trampling on the toes of her allies as well as her enemies from time to time. 

                                                                                                                                   The driving force for this was the prospect of of terrorists using the only weapon of mass destruction - a nuclear bomb - on US soil.

                                                                                                                                   His nightmare was not so much the damage that a nuclear device would inflict, terrible though that would be. What he feared most was the consequent US reaction. There was no knowing at whom a US administration might lash out if it were attacked. In his worst dreams, he saw US nuclear weapons ultimately sending our world into a new dark age. 

                                                                                                                                    He therefore believed the most pressing and dangerous issue facing the First World now is not Islamist terror, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or North Korea, but his own country. 

                                                                                                                                   This analysis leaves open many questions but, given we have yet to hear a convincing explanation of why Bush and Blair attacked Iraq, it offers one more credible possibility. If you accept it, it becomes possible to see British involvement in the Iraq war in a new light. 

                                                                                                                               Could it be that Blair, with excellent insights into the US administration, when presented with the certainty that Bush was going to war, had to make his decision to fight not on the basis of the merits of war but on the need to soothe the powers-that-be in the US? Is it possible that he saw the war not in terms of sorting out Iraq, but in terms of managing the US? Did he, in spite of knowing he risked splitting his government and depleting his political capital, judge that the long term interest of Britain and the rest of the world was best served by ameliorating the US in her rage and trying, however futilely, to guide and control it?

                                                                                                                       "Contemporaries are not final judges but are generally overruled by history" said the musician Arnold Schoenberg. As we watch Blair in the dying days of his government, apparently trying to cut and paste a legacy he can be proud of, consider the possibility that we might one day join him in regarding the Iraq war as his final vindication.

                                                                                                                          Published in The Scotsman  6 June 2006                            back to the top

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The hidden cost of what's in your shopping trolley

                                                                                                                            TODAY I drank from the waters of the Nile. Yesterday, it was from the River Jordan. Tomorrow, it could easily be a taste of the great Zambesi. Am I travelling much these days? Not really: only as far as Sainsbury's. If you look carefully at the labels on the spring onions on sale at your supermarket, or the mange tout, or the oranges, or the okra, you will find they have been grown in and exported from places such as Egypt, Israel, Tanzania and Kenya. And since these products comprise mostly water, it's not too far fetched to suggest it is chiefly water that is being exported when these fruit and vegetales arrive in our shops. So yes, today I drank from the Nile. 

                                                                                                                            Pleasant though it is to eat these delicacies, it is with a feeling of unease that one sees them in our shops. Should we be drinking water from those countries that are short of water? Of course there are complex economic balances to be considered here. Exports are essential for hard currency and water does not always appear where the people most in need can use it. Transferring water long distances in bulk from areas with a surplus to areas in need is not a practical option.

                                                                                                                                   But the fact is more than a billion people - about a fifth of the world's population - do not have access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion - just under half the world's population - lack access to basic sanitation. Many of these people - about 300 million - live in sub-Saharan Africa in the very places that are sending us their vegetables and fruit. In many parts of the world such as India, irrigation of crops for export is over-exploiting groundwater resources, and water levels are falling, thus putting even more pressure on the ruaral  poor.

                                                                                                                                 Lack of decent drinking water is at the heart of many of the afflictions of the developing world. The effect on agriculture and on health is obvious enough. But the time taken to travel to find and carry water - often many hours each day - is time not spent doing other productive things. More often than not, it is women who fetch the water. This means women and girls have less time for education, and remain imprisoned in ignorance. So, in many different ways, lack of water is link to the poverty that we all want to abolish.

                                                                                                                                    To drink, to cook, to wash and to grow the food we eat, each person wherever he or she lives, needs approximately a million litres of water each year to survive.  This amounts to something like an Olympic swimming pool of water for each of us each year. That is purely for survival and takes no account of any of the industrial processes we in the West depend upon to maintain our lifestyle. The great bulk of that swimming pool is taken up in producing the food we eat.

                                                                                                                                     In 2000 the world signed up to the Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, and to halve the proportion without access to basic sanitation by 2015. And here we are drinking their precious water. Surely instead of being part of the problem, we should be spending more time and money helping the poor in these countries getting access to water for their basic needs?

                                                                                                                                   Far be it from us to tell the Kenyans and the Tanzanians what to do with their water. They are responding to market forces fuelled by our taste for exotic and out-of-season fruits, and our ability to pay. But we are not paying the true cost. That, and the damage being done to the environment by flying the stuff halfway across the world, is being borne by others, but we can be sure it will come home to roost in due course. So, I confess to being bewildered at seeing Kenyan snap beans on the supermarket shelves as I hear about the crippling drought in East Africa. Surely there is a disconnect with reality here?

                                                                                                                                  This week the World Water Forum, an international gathering of stakeholders and other interest parties, will meet in Mexico to discuss and to raise awareness of water issues all over the world. In one of the key documents it will consider, we are told that "the 21st century is the century in which the overriding problem is one of water quality and mangement... 6,000 people, mostly children under the age of five, are dying from water related diseases every day". This is a problem which matches AIDS in its scale and lethality and dwarfs the so called "war on terror". But does our commitment of time and resources match it?

                                                                                                                                Much is heard about what we will do when the oil starts to run out in about 50 years - oil we regard as necessary to drive our cars at will. But the really pressing problem  for much of mankind is not oil in future - it's water, now. So I for one will try to make sure  as far as I am able that my million litres comes from rain that has fallen on my own country or other places which really have the water to spare.

                                                                                                                         Published in The Scotsman 20 March 2006                          back to the top

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Sabre rattling is all very well – until you reach the point of no return

In his book Lawless World, human rights lawyer Philip Sands claims George Bush had decided by 31 January 2003 to go to war against Iraq with or without a second UN resolution. Tony Blair is said to have endorsed the decision at a private meeting they had that day. Whatever passed at that meeting, you may be certain the decision to go to war was not made when that first cruise missile was fired at Saddam Hussein on 20 March 2003, and did not depend on any UN resolutions. Rather, the countdown to war probably started in the US long before and was as good as certain when the first American troops were deployed in the autumn of 2002.  

That apparently reversible step of deploying troops into theatre was, in fact, the final step across the line of no return to war. You can’t keep troops deployed, trained and poised in theatre indefinitely: you can do almost anything with bayonets except sit on them. Whether the US administration understood this at the time may be open to question. One hopes that the decision to deploy was taken with the care and scrutiny that any decision to go to war deserves.  But then again, it is just conceivable the decision to deploy was seen as a natural escalatory step in the diplomatic process without its momentous importance being fully understood.

It would not be the first time that we have unknowingly been committed to war. In June 1998, NATO was pondering what to do with Slobodan Milosevic who was then repressing his Kosovar Albanians. The North Atlantic Council in NATO Headquarters directed the military authorities to propose some options. At the low end of the spectrum was the option of an air exercise over Albania. This would, it was hoped, send a warning message. But when General Klaus Naumann, the chairman of the military committee, laid out the options to the 16 ambassadors, he pointed out that before they chose to cross the start line on the road to military operations, they had to be prepared to go to the end of the road. Otherwise they would run the risk of being out-escalated or out-faced. And the end of the road could mean a full scale invasion of Serbia. That advice went largely unheeded and the air exercise went ahead.

The same principle applied when Margaret Thatcher dispatched the Task Force to the South Atlantic. There wasn’t the slightest chance that Galtieri was going to remove his troops from the Falklands without being pushed off, and Thatcher knew it. The minute the first ship sailed, the end result - war - was inescapable.

So, whenever troops are sent as an escalatory measure to put pressure on a recalcitrant tyrant, remember the Falklands, Kosovo and Iraq. If you deploy troops, you have to use them or withdraw them.

Published in The Scotsman 17 February 2006                              back to the top

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Bush must understand: torturers are no better than terrorists

SO, George Bush and Dick Cheney have at last been forced to accept a law which will make it illegal for the CIA to use torture in the “war against terror”. What are we supposed to make of this? Why was this necessary? Were the US authorities using prisons overseas? Was the CIA torturing its prisoners? We don’t know, but the White House’s resistance to the measure can only make us suspect that it was. The implications of this are jaw-dropping.

The new law has become necessary because of a breakdown of trust. The President of the United States was unable to say unequivocally that his administration does not and will not use torture to get information. He wanted to protect CIA members from litigation stemming from allegations of torture. What! Why should they need it? Congress has now had to move to make torture specifically illegal. It looks suspiciously as if we in the West have been led by a regime that condones, and even uses, torture. It makes the Watergate break-in look like a naughty little peccadillo. Bush and his advisors need to understand is this:  if your security forces operate beyond the law - and torture by any measure is beyond the law - they themselves become no better than terrorists. The very existence of Guantanamo Bay is an attempt by the US government to evade the full rigours of the rule of law. Its presence outside the US landmass is used as an excuse to exempt the US from the obligations placed upon it by its very own Constitution. The same applies to these alleged prisons in Eastern Europe.  Any last vestige of moral high ground that we might have had after invading Iraq is blown away if the US are found to be using the same tactics as Saddam Hussein to get information.

 In the so-called “war against terror” it’s worth considering what it is we are fighting for. Both the terrorist and the state are, after all, using lethal force in pursuit of a cause. So, what is it that separates them? Only one thing sets the state apart from the terrorist. While the latter is accountable to nobody but himself, the state is accountable to the law. In democratic countries it is the rule of law, a law put in place by a legislature accountable to an electorate and upheld and maintained by an impartial judiciary, which allows the state to use force in our name. This is the moral foundation for all anti-terrorist action.  It is the rule of law that the struggle is all about.

 The allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and unidentified CIA prisons overseas are part of the battleground. Imagination, deviousness, and perhaps even some dirty tricks may usefully be deployed against those who operate without any known scruples. But in the shadowy, dangerous frontline against terrorists, accountability to the law must remain an abiding principle. In these circumstances it is more important than ever that justice is not only done, but seen to be done. The temptation to cut corners can be very great, as every soldier and policeman who has served in Northern Ireland knows. The security forces knew the identity of many of the terrorists; and yet still these individuals are free men because, at that stage, convictions could not be secured in court. To stand passive next to a man whom you know has slaughtered innocent men, women and children is to experience an eerie and burning frustration. But if the security forces had been let loose to “go and nail them” outside the law, it is unimaginable that the peace process would have developed as far as it has in the Province. The moral high ground is ultimately the only ground we have.

 When fighting terrorists, we must be clear about what principles and values we stand for. If we don’t know what they are, or if we routinely bend them to suit our short-term convenience - or if world believes that ‘the land of the free’ tortures its prisoners - then the “war against terror” is lost before it’s begun.

 Published in The Scotsman 10 January 2006                             back to the top

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Pub smoke and mirrors has little to do with health

THERE is sometimes an element of theatre in government. Like justice, it is not simply enough for it to be done: it often needs to be seen to be done for the customers to appreciate it. In the case of government, political acceptability is the first essential of any policy, and far more important than any consideration of its practical merits. For instance, the plan to make us pay by the mile for our use of the roads by tracking the progress of every car by satellite, if it ever happens, promises to be a hugely expensive, vastly complicated, deeply intrusive dog's dinner.

Moreover, there is no evidence that it will make us use the roads any less, or improve the environment. But somehow, its technical complexity gives it a political acceptability. There is a theatrical attractiveness about it which in some way appeals. It matters not a whit that a far more practical, cost-efficient, equitable, enforceable, collectable, flexible means of making us pay for what we use already exists. The trouble is that raising the tax on fuel has been tried, and found to be politically unacceptable.

The same applies to banning smoking in pubs and restaurants. No-one wants to encourage smoking. It's a dirty, smelly, expensive habit which damages health. It is also out of fashion. Smokers are an easy target. It requires no great political courage for any government to knock smoking.

But how many smokers go home and beat the wife after a night on the fags? How many families have been made destitute because the family fortunes have been puffed away? How many precious lives have been lost because someone chose to drive a car after inhaling too much nicotine? How many unwanted lives have been conceived because a boy and a girl, their sexual inhibitions broken down by nicotine, have found each other irresistibly attractive through the haze of cigarette smoke? How many jobs have been lost because, on the morning after the night before, the effects of the cigarettes smoked rendered the employee unfit for work? How many rampaging football fans have been fired up to their violent excesses by their over-indulgence on the weed? How often have you been woken up in the middle of the night by screaming, shouting, foul-mouthed revellers, addled out of their brains because they had smoked too many cigarettes? That vomit you just managed to avoid stepping in on the pavement - or maybe you were unlucky and didn't avoid it - was it heaved up by someone who had smoked too much?

We already have the choice whether to go to the pub or not, which pub to go to, and whether to stay inside a smoky pub or not. One has some sympathy with non-smokers who work in pubs, but many pubs now ask that smokers don't light up at the bar.

Many pubs and restaurants have smoking and non-smoking areas. And landlords are free to make their pubs smoke-free zones if they wish. If the government really wanted to do something about reducing the damage done by smoking, it would double the cost of cigarettes. But where is the theatre in that?

So while you sit there in the back stalls applauding the measure to ban smoking in pubs, remember that it has very little to do with improving the health of people who go to pubs, people who work in pubs, or people who sit at home and worry while others go to pubs.
Instead, remember that you are the audience in a theatre, and the measure is being introduced for your entertainment; and it is not necessarily the most effective way of addressing the problem.

Banning smoking in pubs is not being done for our health. It is, however, politically acceptable and government is seen to be being done. Like the satellite pay-as-you-go traffic scheme, that doesn't stop it being irrelevant, illiberal or absurd.

Do we really think that relative to drinking alcohol, smoking is a greater evil? If the government were really serious about protecting us from the damage we do to ourselves, to others, and our environment while we are in pubs, they wouldn't ban smoking: they would ban drinking.

Published in The Scotsman 9 August 2005                                 back to the top

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 Fear is the key in this theatre of the absurd  

An average of about 1,000 people a year have been killed by terrorists worldwide over the past ten years - and that figure includes the Twin Towers atrocity.

 Each death indeed represents a shattering tragedy for the families involved. But, approximately the same numbers die each year as a result of lightning strikes. So, statistically, you have about as much chance of being a terrorist victim as you have of being struck by lightning.

 The response of governments around the world to the perceived terrorist threat has been varied, but most have sought to increase security measures. Many have also introduced new legislation to help them combat the terrorist - legislation which inevitably gives those same governments more power and intrudes further upon the private lives of their citizens. They could hardly do anything else. And yet, and yet.

 Terrorism is theatre. Hardly good family entertainment, but a bizarre genre of theatre nonetheless. It is designed to grab our attention, to publicise a cause, and to make us change our behaviour. Kill a hundred, terrify a hundred thousand, fascinate millions. The terrorist wants to terrify.

 However, the damage and destruction he inflicts is relatively minor when compared to other violent and deadly threats that we face daily. While the incidence of lightning strikes is unlikely to increase, did you know that an average of more than 3,000 people each day die in road traffic accidents? Or that 9,000 people are expected to die each day this year of HIV/AIDS-related illnesses?

 How do we relate this to the average of the three a day who will fall victim to terrorists? This is not to trivialise terrorism nor to underestimate its potential horrors, especially if nuclear weapons were to be involved. We require our government to protect us against this. But how much governmental response is theatre, too?

 You can no longer go through airport security with anything much more threatening than a nappy pin on your person. But, once through, you can go to the shopping mall in virtually every airport in the world and buy a weapon with such a noble pedigree that the verb "to bottle" has entered our language.

 Included in the raft of new legislation is the intention to introduce identity cards. This will bring with it the National Identity Register and the collection and storage of information such as fingerprints, iris scans, facial dimensions and DNA profiles. It is meant to be a voluntary scheme to begin with, but how long will it be before it is an offence to be found not in possession of your ID card? Does anyone suppose for a minute that this will make it any more difficult for terrorists to get legitimate ID cards than it is now for determined criminals to get hold of firearms - in spite of draconian measures to restrict their availability? The Twin Tower terrorists and the Madrid train bombers had legitimate ID papers. To what problem is an ID card supposed to be the solution?

 It is the nature of bureaucracies to want to know everything - but do they need to? And as for going to war against Iraq ...

 So, what should our own response to the terrorist threat be?

 Firstly, don’t be terrified. Don’t even be anxious. Keep things in proportion. Yes, we might suddenly find ourselves slammed out of the blue into some vile violent terrorist hell. But we might also be hit by lightning, or a bus - or a tsunami. So, relax and don’t worry about it, and don’t let the media wind you up. Secondly, don’t let our own government get things out of proportion. A baleful, sceptical eye should be cast over all attempts to introduce illiberal laws and to increase government powers and spending on the back of the apparent increased threat. Don’t let them erode further your privacy or your liberty without good cause.

 And, lastly, don’t stand under trees during thunderstorms, mind how you cross the road - and remember to use a condom.

 Published in The Scotsman 1 February 2005                  back to the top

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