[Via Boing Boing] Iran is contemplating legislation which would make blogging a capital offence - if it “disturbs mental security in society”.
Archive for the 'Middle East' Category
Last year I wrote that Dr. Mohamed Haneef was an Australian Dreyfus. This year, Turkish trade unionist Meryem Özsögüt is a Turkish Mohamed Haneef.
Ms. Özsögut, a member of the management board of a Turkish public sector union, has been detained for six months allegedly in connection with “being a member of a terrorist organisation” and “for making propaganda in favour of the terrorist organisation”.
More on Ms. Ozsogut’s detention can be read here. A petition to request her release can be signed here.
P.S. The PSI, to which I’ve linked, is an international federation of public sector unions whose Australian affiliates include the Community & Public Sector Union, the Australian Services Union and the Communication, Electrical & Plumbing Union.
There’s been some comment here on a previous thread about why Australia’s withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq has stimulated so little debate - either in the media or in the blogosphere. My comment on why that might be so is here, and I’d add that the rather narrow concept of the political in Australian public discourse tends to mean that issues which are “politically neutralised” are quickly forgotten. That’s most unfortunate - because going to war on the basis of specious legal justifications and distortions and lies about intelligence is hardly a trivial matter. We owe it to ourselves as a nation to ensure this never occurs again, and the risk of it occurring again is surely heightened by a failure to remember.
I want to highlight in this post two exceptions to the rule of silence. First, in the blogosphere, Gandhi has written a comprehensive post analysing the week’s news and developments, highlighting the attempts of some in legal and activist circles to bring John Howard’s actions before the notice of the International Criminal Court, a move supported by Democrats leader Lyn Allison. Similar action in the United Kingdom was the subject of much publicity and debate, but there’s been little reporting of the substance of the brief prepared or its justification in this country. It’s important to remember that John Howard - I suspect on legal advice - ruled out “regime change”, human rights abuses or democratic goals as sufficient conditions for the Iraq War in a speech to the National Press Club on 14 March 2003. According to Howard at the time, only Saddam’s purported possession of weapons of mass destruction constituted an appropriate ground for the decision to go to war. All his later bloviating, by his own standards, was just political piffle.
It may well be that Howard had advice that the only legal justification for war was the resolutions of the UN Security Council regarding weapons inspections. That was certainly the advice given to the British government, as we know after a series of inquiries in the UK. I’m no lawyer, but it might well be that this figleaf provides sufficient legal cover for Howard to escape any culpability for his actions. It may also be that the subsequent UN recognition of the occupation of Iraq would provide some sort of retrospective immunity. Nevertheless, given the enormous importance of clarifying the legal basis or otherwise for wars of pre-emption, it seems to me eminently desirable that such an argument - an argument based on international law - be tested in an international tribunal.
That takes us to the issue of intelligence, because as we now know, Saddam Hussein had ended his WMD program in the 1990s. Continue reading ‘Australia’s War is over II’
Australian combat troops are being withdrawn from Iraq. Some Liberal MPs are still running the cut and pasted “cut and run” line. Others are decrying the withdrawal as a “diversion” from the all important issue of petrol prices. Apparently oblivious to the fact that the Iraq War might have something to do with… petrol prices.
Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:
It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.
I can claim to have anticipated the kernel Professor Rubenstein’s argument in this letter which I had published in the Australian on 24 April 2004:
Continue reading ‘This Anzac Day, Bill Rubinstein agrees with me’
… is already taking shape. 298 days to go.
The Pakistani election is a significant milestone, with a changed approach being signalled to the US envoys who visited there this week and to Bush himself:
Yesterday the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said he warned President George Bush in a phone conversation that he would prioritise talking as well as shooting in the battle against Islamist extremism. “He said that a comprehensive approach is required in this regard, specially combining a political approach with development,” a statement said.
Although his remarks about Pakistan itself weren’t helpful, Barack Obama actually signalled something with his “talk to your foes” thing (bluntly rejected by Hillary in her tough pose). Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who was a strong supporter of the Iraq war back in the day, has drawn parallels between the back channel Blair sought to create with the IRA Army Council and the necessity of eventually engaging even Al-Qaeda itself. Not everyone would go that far, by any means, but there’s an increasing recognition that there should be a recognition that not all Islamists are the same, and that the running sore which has fundamentally distorted both foreign policy and exacerbated the mess in the Middle East is the lack of a Palestinian state. Our own Gareth Evans in an op/ed yesterday suggests engaging Hamas.
Of course, opportunities could be lost, and former Israeli official Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation, in an astute piece of analysis, warns that even a Democratic presidency could slide into neo-conservatism with a liberal veneer. Levy has some suggestions, which would have appeared radical only a few years ago, but now appear feasible:
It’s a bit weird in a way that if you bought the dead tree edition of The Australian today, almost the entire review section or whatever it’s called was devoted to the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War (the topic of earlier discussion here on two threads). Weird because as far as Australian domestic political debate goes, the Iraq War is off the radar - as Foreign Minister Stephen Smith observed in Question Time on Thursday, Brendan Nelson has claimed that John Howard would have pulled Australian troops out this year, and all the rhetoric about “a great victory for the terrorists” from the Coalition disappeared on November 25 2007. Since, with the exception of revelations (interestingly timed) about Saddam Hussein’s regime’s plot to assassinate Martin Indyk (about which Indyk himself appears unconcerned, and which if you read the fine print, appear to be about low level flunkies rather than Saddam and his acolytes) and the killing of an Australian aid worker in the Kurdish region of Iraq in 1993. there’s no actual news, you’ve got to wonder what all this ideological posturing is in aid of.
But we get a reprint of Christopher Hitchens’ article from Slate, and the usual raving and name dropping from Greg Sheridan, and even Geoff Elliott’s article which is quite critical of the current US stance gets christened by a subbie with the headline “Noble fight to depose a monstrous dictator”.
Continue reading ‘The terrorists are were coming to get us!’
On the car radio the other day, I caught a snatch of US Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
After five years of the war in Iraq and more than six in Afghanistan, the selflessness of our heroes continues to make us proud.
War extracts a terrible price. Just in the past three days, 12 more of our heroes have fallen in Iraq. Continue reading ‘Heroes and martyrs’
In the wake of a new IAEA report on Iran, the UN Security Council has voted to impose more sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program, restricting the import of more dual-use technologies, and placing additional travel restrictions on people involved in the program.
If you want to read the IAEA report, it’s available here, though it’s pretty incomprehensible. A more accessible summary is provided by Andy Grotto at Arms Control Wonk: in essence, the Iranians have provided plausible explanations for some of the things they did during the 1990s and early 2000s, but they’ve simply denied the most, um, explosive allegations floating around.
Shlomo Benizri, an Israeli politician from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, has blamed a recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, liberalising laws regarding homosexuality.
Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.
One wonders whether Mr. Benizri’s words have come to the attention of certain political and religious forces in the countries neighbouring Israel, or certain other political and religious forces in Israel’s main supporter, the US. If so, the mind boggles at the possible responses the next time a big one hits either California or Iran.
Words fail me to describe this story.
More power to Human Rights Watch in their efforts to prevent this impending tragedy.
Amnesty International provides more background on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.
Well, not quite, but they reportedly have 100,000 troops, backed by all manner of heavy weaponry up to and including F-16’s sitting on the Turkish border with Iraq. The reason? An attack by the PKK, the Kurdish guerilla group, on an army base in southern Turkey that left 12 soldiers dead and more missing, probably being held hostage. The Turkish PM is threatening to use the massive force assembled at the border to go after PKK bases in Iraq.
According to Juan Cole the USA has turned something of a blind eye to the PKK - who are, after all, conducting attacks on a NATO ally - because the Kurds are the only reliable allies the USA actually has in Iraq.
While it’s still a big difference between putting on a show of force and actually invading, what has it come to when the most westernized Muslim country in the Middle East - one that is seeking to join the EU, no less - is posturing to invade a country under American occupation? All I can say is thank your favourite deity that Australian forces are in southern Iraq, a long way away from this particular brouhaha.
Lately I’ve been having alarming episodes of déjà vu. As the drums of war beat louder for Iran, public utterances regarding the evil doings of Iran become increasingly common. One of the stranger ones is the idea that Iran is arming the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There has been little evidence that Iran is supplying arms to the Taliban. It is possible that Iranian arms are ending up in Taliban hands similar to the way US weapons find their way to insurgent groups. It is a self-evident truths with little critical examination arising from the maxim that the enemy of my enemy if my friend. This thinking ignores the religious and political divides of the region. Which wouldn’t be the first time for US Middle Eastern policy.
With the sad death of an Australian solider in Afghanistan, Brendan Nelson decided he too should get in on drumming up support for a strike on Iran. The evidence is, well bugger all as Nelson admits. Given reports that Australia has “expressed interest” in an attack on Iran, Nelson’s comments aren’t that surprising and simply are an echo of current Bush Administration talking points.
Continue reading ‘Nelson beats the drums of war against Iran’
Well might George W. Bush ask himself that question.
Let’s not forget that Nelson Mandela was a highly educated lawyer. Where have the Iraqi middle class gone? Those who the neo-cons banked on to form the social constituency for “instant democracy” and provide its leaders? Fled.
40% of Iraq’s middle class, it’s estimated, are refugees. Most are in Jordan or Syria. A lucky few are in countries such as Canada and Sweden. Very few have made it to America, where they’re basically not wanted:
An aggressive American intake of refugees would suggest their quick return to Iraq is improbable: that smacks too much of failure for Bush. Moreover, you have to scrutinize refugees from countries “infiltrated by large numbers of terrorists,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff opined recently.
And the secular parties that had a commitment to modernity and national unity? Wiped out through the political system established by the Americans, who empowered the theocratic Shi’ite parties.
Roger Cohen writes:
People who risked their lives for America are dying or being terrorized because of craven U.S. lethargy. Others are in limbo. Bush now says “Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.” That’s too glib; one may be waiting to be saved.
What is, objectively, the greatest threat to Israel’s right to exist?
If you answered Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Syria, Iran, Tanya Plibersek, Julia Irwin or Trotskyist students, you are wrong. According to Israel Jewish environmentalists and scientists, the correct answer is global warming.
Recognition of this reality casts an interesting light on a report in the latest edition of the Bulletin quoting prominent figures in Australia’s Jewish community expressing concern at supposed anti-Israel sentiment in the Federal ALP and heaping praise on the Federal Coalition government.
Continue reading ‘Save Israel from its friends’
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