Yesterday, prompted by a link Paul Burns provided on my One day that shook the world thread, I did a Google search for reviews of Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky. Not surprisingly, many such reviews were on Trotskyist websites and all the Trotskyist reviews were scathing of Service’s book, including one on the Workers’ Liberty site.
However, what I also found is that the Workers’ Liberty group has broken with what it terms the “absolute anti-Zionist” orthodoxy in which much of the far left is mired, campaigns on the Israel/Palestine issue under the slogan “Israel-Palestine: Two Nations Two States!”, and displays some refreshingly clear and principled thinking about how the Left can best show practical solidarity with the Palestinian national struggle and with progressive and democratic Israelis. Their arguments against calls for a boycott of Israel make particularly interesting reading.
I don’t with to be seen to be endorsing the Workers’ Liberty line on Israel/Palestine chapter and verse. However, those on the Left, and particularly the revolutionary Left, who consider themselves anti-Zionists and may not have found my arguments from 2006 convincing, could do worse than to read and reflect on what Workers’ Liberty has to say.
There’s been some talk about Tony Blair’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq War on the open thread, so it might be best to have a dedicated post to focus comments.
Barack Obama is close to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian deal that will allow him to announce a resumption of the long-stalled Middle East peace talks before the end of next month, according to US, Israeli, Palestinian and European officials.
Key to bringing Israel on board is a promise by the US to adopt a much tougher line with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons programme. The US, along with Britain and France, is planning to push the United Nations security council to expand sanctions to include Iran’s oil and gas industry, a move that could cripple its economy.
Pardon my ignorance, but does this have any chance at all of succeeding, with that well-known man of moderation Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli PM apparently reflecting a general shift to hawkishness in Israeli politics, and a “Palestinian Authority” that doesn’t even rule the Gaza Strip?
The Iraqi people seem to have spoken – and pretty loudly. With the nominal end of US troops in Iraqi cities, “Victory Day” was declared a national holiday across the country, accompanied by considerable celebration.
Iraq, of course, remains a deeply divided country, as this ABC online op-ed suggests. American troops may, theoretically, be out of the cities, but thousands of “advisors” remain part of the Iraqi government’s security apparatus. National reconciliation between the various ethnic and religious groups doesn’t seem to have progressed very far. The country’s ability to secure its own borders is also non-existent, ensuring a continued American presence for years to come.
It’s important to remind ourselves what a complete and utter disaster the Iraq war has been, with thousands of foreign soldiers killed, and many times the number of Iraqi civilians dead as a result (Wikipedia summarizes some studies – 100,000-odd at the absolute low end, and probably several times that). Several trillion dollars spent and still Iraq and the wider Middle East are far more dangerous places than when the invasion occurred.
So, seven years on, was the Iraq war the worst foreign policy decision made by a US president? And where does Australia’s responsibility lie, with a government at the time that, if anything, egged the US on in this monumental blunder?
There’s been a ton of discussion about the role of social media in the protests ensuing on the Iranian election. Two notable posts are those by Rosanna Ryan at ABC Online and my QUT colleague Terry Flew at his eponymous blog. Flew writes:
1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama’s foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the message out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and “are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee” (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don’t write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.
I’m not certain that anyone has been writing off the MSM coverage in toto. It’s very rare that Australian media organisations these days fund good foreign correspondents, but clearly the quality of the reporting from a number of media outlets, particularly some of the British ones, is very high. It seems to me a mistake on either side to reduce this sort of thing to a dichotomised opposition between journalists working in the media and citizen activists and those who mediate their contributions. I think also this sort of dichotomy tends to get confused and conflated in value judgements made about the respective validity of bloggers and citizen journalists in countries with repressive regimes and countries like this one. That’s the case both on the left – say, with Antony Lowenstein to some degree, and certainly on the right – as with David Burchell.
One of the cautions worth noting with this event is that while there is validity in the argument that blogs and social media can play a really positive role in countries with repressive regimes, we also tend to miss the fact that a lot of blogs (for example in Egypt) are full of misogynistic, violent and narrow minded ranting, which would be most distasteful to most Western readers. There’s a tendency to pick up on the ones written by educated middle class folk, particularly those that express themselves in English. It would be wise to exercise some prudence in extrapolating only from those blogs, or from the Twittersphere.
My attention has been drawn (by Sol Salbe via the Australian Broad Left network) to this petition initiated by the Australian Jewish Democratic Society.
I noticed a comment on Facebook that Obama’s speech at Cairo University to the Islamic world isn’t yet posted on the White House website. I checked and at the time of writing, it isn’t. But it’s up on Al Jazeera – full text here. I’m not sure if it’s a transcript released to the press or a transcription.
Somehow I can’t imagine George W. Bush saying this:
The Holy Quran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”
The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth.
As I wrote in 2006, I support Israel’s right to exist and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I am a critic of unbalanced, inflammatory and obsessive criticism of Israel. However, I am also critical of unbalanced, inflammatory and obsessive idealisation of Israel, of the kind that is rife in the polities of various Western countries including Australia and the United States.
In this light I must register my disappointment that the Australian and United States governments, amongst others, have heeded the current Israeli government’s call to boycott the United Nations Durban Review Conference on the purported grounds, generally that the conference could become a forum for anti-Israel rhetoric, and specifically that the proposed Conference Declaration will reaffirm the 2001 Durban Conference Declaration, which was objected to by the US and Israel.
As things stand, the boycott call has been taken up by the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and according to Wikipedia by Sweden. The European Union and several of the EU’s member states are still considering their position. At any event it appears that the boycott of a UN conference on racism wll be confined almost exclusively to countries of the wealthy white West, including several former colonial powers who arguably have unfinished business in relation to their former colonies and the peoples thereof, and four products of British colonialism who certainly have unfinished business with their indigenous peoples. This is not a good look, and the more thoughtful supporters of Israel must wonder whether it is to Israel’s credit, or in its long-term interest, that lobbying by Israel and its supporters has produced such an outcome. Continue reading ‘What if they held a conference on racism and all the whiteys stayed away?’
James Acton, an academic who blogs at the altogether excellent Arms Control Wonk, co-wrote a lengthy article last year on how the world might completely rid itself of nuclear weapons. The beauty of it is that this article actually goes into the nitty-gritty of how this might be achieved (with the emphasis on “might”, the preconditions seem highly unlikely to actually occur any time soon), with serious doses of political realism along the way.
The article, and a collection of responses, have been collected into an e-book are now available to download.
Well worth the read if you’re at all interested in the issue.
An open thread for discussion of the Israeli election…
As a brief discussion starter, it seems to me that commentary which suggests that Likud, Kadima and Labour have all been vying with each other to prove how “tough” they are suggests their theoretical differences in policy approach are somewhat illusory, and that it’s unlikely that any possible result will do all that much to restart the peace process, absent an external circuit breaker.
A cursory inspection of the intertubes today suggests that the right-wing press across the “Anglosphere” is trumpeting the provincial election results in Iraq as variously “the end of the war”, “a model for the Middle East”, “a defeat for Shi’ite Islamism”, “a victory for secularism” and/or “a loss for Iran”. At Obsidian Wings, Eric Martin begs to differ.
I didn’t see any discussion in the Australian media of a mid-January piece by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in The Guardian, where he argues that the “war on terror” was a most unfortunate phrase, and quite counterproductive. Later, Miliband clarified that the British government had deliberately eschewed its use for some time. It would be interesting to take a close look at the rhetoric of the Rudd government, and of Barack Obama, to see whether they’ve been using it. Miliband’s clarification is certainly most welcome.
The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.
The “war on terror” also implied that the correct response was primarily military. But as General Petraeus said to me and others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife.
Of course, these sorts of points have been made for a long time by a lot of the more sane participants in the debate, who were loudly denounced as akin to the enemy within by some. It’s good to see the tide turning at the governmental level.
Update: Speculation that Barack Obama will also be retiring the phrase “war on terror”.
There’s probably literally millions of reactions to Barack Obama’s inauguration on the intertubes today, so I wanted to try to highlight some more specific articles and posts which raise some interesting issues which might otherwise get lost in the crowd. [The text is here.]
Two of the more pressing questions since the election in November have been how Obama will respond to the global financial crisis and from what political position he will seek to govern. Both, in a way, have been answered, but hardly definitively. It’s worth observing in passing – and the point is a crucial one for us here in Australia – that the selective invocation of the mantra “there’s only one President at a time” means that we know very little about what the new administration’s stance on global financial regulatory issues and the governance architecture of the world economy will be. Such decisions as are taken – and paths not taken – will probably be of more lasting moment than how effectively and quickly his fiscal stimulus works to turn around America’s domestic economy. But, in that regard, the addition of tax cuts to the infrastructure investment proposed in his domestic package (to corral in some congressional Republican support, or so it’s being framed) reflects a debate about the composition of any stimulus which is important, and to some degree being played out, in our own context as well. Here, I was intrigued to see Andrew Leonard at Salon’s How The World Works blog suggest that a passage in the Inaugural address shows Obama has come down on the Keynesian side of the argument. (And to see Leonard compare Obama’s eloquence with Keynes’, to the former’s detriment.)
If you’re staying up to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration as 44th President of the United States of America, Crikey has a good guide to coverage and commentary on tv, live streaming, live blogging and twitter. Locally, Hoyden About Town is hosting a livechat. Their website also links to YouTube and audio of notable past inaugural addresses. Here’s FDR:
At The Guardian, Ned Temko looks at past inaugurals, and writing in New Matilda, Aron Paul observes:
Obama’s inauguration may well promise republican and democratic renewal. Paradoxically, however, this year’s is the most monarchic and imperial inauguration ritual that America has ever witnessed.
Discussion on a previous thread on the Israeli/Gaza conflict can be continued on this one.
Linking again to the latest from Open Democracy, I thought both Paul Rogers on Israel’s exhausted strategic doctrine and Khaled Hroub on whether the Israeli actions have increased support for Hamas worth reading.
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The Obama inauguration: some interesting links
There’s probably literally millions of reactions to Barack Obama’s inauguration on the intertubes today, so I wanted to try to highlight some more specific articles and posts which raise some interesting issues which might otherwise get lost in the crowd. [The text is here.]
Two of the more pressing questions since the election in November have been how Obama will respond to the global financial crisis and from what political position he will seek to govern. Both, in a way, have been answered, but hardly definitively. It’s worth observing in passing – and the point is a crucial one for us here in Australia – that the selective invocation of the mantra “there’s only one President at a time” means that we know very little about what the new administration’s stance on global financial regulatory issues and the governance architecture of the world economy will be. Such decisions as are taken – and paths not taken – will probably be of more lasting moment than how effectively and quickly his fiscal stimulus works to turn around America’s domestic economy. But, in that regard, the addition of tax cuts to the infrastructure investment proposed in his domestic package (to corral in some congressional Republican support, or so it’s being framed) reflects a debate about the composition of any stimulus which is important, and to some degree being played out, in our own context as well. Here, I was intrigued to see Andrew Leonard at Salon’s How The World Works blog suggest that a passage in the Inaugural address shows Obama has come down on the Keynesian side of the argument. (And to see Leonard compare Obama’s eloquence with Keynes’, to the former’s detriment.)
Continue reading ‘The Obama inauguration: some interesting links’