My European Union Rant

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Now it is the European Union itself that is in danger, mainly but not entirely because of the economic crisis inherited from Wall Street abuses. (...) A new Europe-wide report by correspondents of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro reveals mounting disillusionment with the European Union itself among the voters of its member states. (...) Britain has made the most news about possible withdrawal from the union since the country’s most recent local elections gave the United Kingdom Independence Party nearly as high a popular vote as the ruling Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. (...) There was an immediate rise in demand among Conservative Party members for a referendum on quitting the EU – which the Ukip promises. William Pfaff

The British are talking about leaving the European Union... to put this conversation in perspective, I would trot out the famous quote of Mahatma Gandhi's, who, when asked what he thought of western civilization replied, "It would be a good idea".

If we agree that the heartland of western civilization is comprised of the countries, including Britain, that make up the European Union and we then consider the millions of Europeans that have been killed (by each other) over centuries in Europe's countless wars, religious and otherwise, and its assorted genocides and the millions of its inhabitants that were forced to emigrate to the ends of the earth to escape poverty and tyranny, and then contemplate its record outside Europe of: slavery, exploitation of natural resources, ethnic cleansings and genocides of peoples of color and then consider that so recently having renounced killing one another and so recently, if reluctantly, also laid down the white man's burden, then it might be a tad early and a trifle frivolous to quibble about an institution which might loosely fit Gandhi's description of a "good idea", namely the European Union?

Really all this talk makes me think of a chain smoker, who having been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and that after having had a lung removed and undergoing intense radiation and ghastly chemotherapy, upon being told that he is in remission goes out and buys a pack of cigarettes. DS

British in need of reality check

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The other day I went to a debate in a big Spanish bank about the EU and the “crisis”, which was held under the “Chatham House” rule so I can use the information, but I can’t reveal the names of the participants. I’ll just say that the star speaker was a very prominent British journalist, specializing in EU affairs. His greatest complaint was that the Germans no longer just signed the checks and silently nodded agreement to everything that the USA, Britain and France requested and that they had a strategic understanding with Russia due to energy.

Listening to him talk, I got the feeling that his reality was much more British weighted than reality itself is.

Germany is the most important country in Europe both economically and demographically and as the journalist pointed out they are no longer docilely following the traditional, "Russia out, America in and Germany down" script. And as the journalist also mentioned, if there is any bailing out to be done in countries like Greece or points east, it will be the Germans who do the bailing. It seems to me that this adds up to a very German slant to things in the near future. Who else is there, when you really come down to it?

Britain? France?

As the journalist also pointed out, the euro-skeptic Tories who detest the EU are set to win the next UK election and if we add to this that the British economy is now like some cratered giant Iceland and its financial industry disgraced (manufacturing left ages ago)... then except for Tommy Atkins, what else has Britain got left to sell, lease or rent?

As for the French, Sarkozy has tardo-Bush popularity levels and his enthusiasm for NATO and Afghanistan are not shared by the French people in any poll I've seen.

Except for the British government and Sarkozy does anybody anywhere in Europe in their right mind really want to see the Germans getting militarized ever again?

Since Af-Pak is going down the drain, at this very moment, the German reluctance to get any deeper involved in the coming debacle makes quite a bit of sense.

I would argue that the official German position fits EU public opinion better than either Britain's or France's.

So to sum up, the Germans are paying the piper and they are no longer reluctant to call the tunes. That for better or worse is the EU of today and tomorrow and the crisis is going to enhance that. They have the money, the population and their policies are more in tune with European public opinion... What could be more obvious? DS

The Blair Enigma

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It occurs to me that Tony Blair defines the era we live in... the only problem being, I can't define Tony Blair. He is an ignis fatuus, a will o' the wisp.

Blair is a man who has no equal in his understanding of the politics of today. A man who can play the system's virtual reality like a Bach organist's toccata and fugue, but who has been utterly ruined by reality/reality in its ageless shape of war.

Perhaps this tells us more about our system's divorce from reality than it tells us about Tony Blair. DS

A Player Who Never Found His Stage - New York Times
Abstract: A little over a decade after he came in as the young hope of a New Britain, Tony Blair, who is expected to announce his resignation date today, is a figure vilified and loathed by his own party and disliked by people in Britain at large. There is, however, one good legacy he bequeaths us, and we should not be ungenerous in recognizing it. That is peace in Ireland. Both sides in the Northern Irish dispute hate the English, and both have good reason to do so. This hatred was a substantial reason successive British prime ministers, many of them doing their very best to undo the mistakes of the past, got nowhere with the Irish.(...) Mr. Blair, however, is a boundlessly superficial person, and he was perfectly happy to swim about in the weird world of Irish politics where words could mean anything you liked. Most of his sentences would be untranslatable. They were even delivered in quite different accents, as though he was more than one person, which in a way he is. This multifaceted quality was very useful in Ireland. He is a naturally pleasant, polite person. And he has courage. These qualities have been an essential ingredient in the Irish peace process. They have led to the Alice in Wonderland situation we now have, in which the government of Northern Ireland has been placed in the hands of two sworn enemies — the extreme Protestant minister Ian Paisley and the former I.R.A. guerrilla Martin McGuinness.(...) Iraq has been a fiasco, but I think he got involved in the calamity because, once again, he is superficial, decent and brave. The superficiality made him think it would be a quick and easy operation, like the military action in 2000 in Sierra Leone, where the British Army nipped in and out to remove a rogue warlord. Alas, his disregard for truth — indeed it seems very unlikely he even quite knows what truth is in this case — led him to think it did not matter what reason he gave for sending in the troops. You have to concede that he has been brave in his unwavering support for the war, but not so brave as the many people who have died as a result of his and President Bush’s calamitous mistake. READ IT ALL

Hearing the message from Tehran

In dealing with Iran, support for possible military action is in the single digits (8 percent).
Public Agenda's Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, conducted in association with Foreign Affairs Magazine

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Depending on what they want to see, commentators are speculating on the possible meaning of the resolution of the captive British sailor crisis. Complex theories about conflict among the "hardliners" and "moderates" in Tehran abound.

People are reading the tea leaves on this too closely, I believe. It is all really very simple. What you see is what you get.

Iran has proved several things. They have proved that they could do something militarily and politically significant anytime they wanted to, they proved they could do it for as long as they wanted to and they could stop doing it at the moment of their choosing. With this simple expedient Iran dominated the world headlines and television news day after day. Plainly put, Iran changed the subject of the conversation. The question stopped being, "what will be done to Iran?" and became, "what will Iran do?". And all this was done very cheaply, if you compare it with passing UN resolutions (and enforcing them) and maintaining a huge naval force in the area. And of course:

"There's been a $5 or $6 premium that's been built into the price of oil over this," said Phil Flynn, vice president and energy analyst at Alaron Trading. "Even though this crisis has ended, the oil market is still on guard that the tensions in the Middle East are going to continue." ABC - NEWS

Another thing Iran did was to test the reaction of Western public opinion to possible armed conflict with Iran... It was extremely tepid. As we can see from the poll quoted at the top less than 10% of the American public is behind military action. Among the allies 0.0%. The only people still hot to trot are some right wing Israelis... who knows, that might be enough to get a war started, but not to finish it.

And as we can see we can see from the "Condi and Nancy Show", American diplomacy in the Middle East, like the US Army is a broken toy. Iran is playing with the disintegration of America's position in the Middle East. "Hard" is really not the same as "complicated". DS

The essential Iran

"Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite.(...)(in) a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular -- 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise -- said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran."
Der Spiegel

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I include below an editorial from the Washington Post, which is typical of the speculation floating around the capture of the British sailors by Iran. Lots of speculation about possible divisions in Iran's leadership; speculations about the success or lack of it of the UN sanctions. Is it really all that complicated? I don't think so.

The United States is making a huge effort to isolate, pressure and intimidate Iran, this has meant an enormous calling in and of extending I.O.U.s. Most countries have been hauled kicking and screaming into this. Despite this full court press, as we can see in the quote from Der Spiegel above, world public opinion is not behind any conflict with Iran. (A similar poll in Spain would show far worse numbers).

Here is another example: Timothy Garton Ash, published an article ln The Guardian yesterday, (reprinted in the LA Times) hysterically demanding that the European Union stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain in this crisis and if they didn't, Garton-Ash demanded, "What is the EU for?". It was interesting to skim through the reader's comments in The Guardian and I suggest you follow the link and read them. Overwhelmingly the readers were opposed to Garton-Ash's arguments. "Boo, fucking, hoo!" one reader wrote in. Another, signed in as "Weeper", if less colorful, was more explicit and neatly summed up what the majority of readers opined.

"Very convenient to be "European" when it suits us while sleeping in US's bed most of the time. Why is Britain now provoking Iran on behalf of the US, hasn't it enough trouble in Afghanistan and Iraq? And the scandal of the prisoners being shown on TV! A lot worse than 650,00 deaths (probably nearer 1 million now, not counting the 1st "Gulf War" and 10 years of sanctions) Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, cluster bombs, DU, and beating Iraqi civilians as shown on UK TV and for which no one was found guilty, don't you think. I hope that the Brits learn such a lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, that they never again set out on another mad imperial adventure on behalf of US/Israel." - "Weeper", commenting on T. Garton - Ash in The Guardian

Bottom line: There is practically no public opinion siding with the USA, what support there is shallow and meant more than anything else to keep up appearances, while hoping that, "something may turn up". The Arab League meeting in Riyadh didn't even mention the hostages!

By simply taking 15 British hostages (balance that cost against the US maintaining two carrier battle groups in the zone) Iran bloodlessly exposes how shallow that support is and how little the USA controls the situation. Meanwhile,the price of oil was climbing toward $70.

Also, any military threat against Iran's atomic installations would have to take into account how simple it would be for Iran to share out the hostages among those installations. That among other things, is what hostages are for. It is hard to imagine, given how thin the support for armed action is, both in the world at large... and in the USA itself, that lame ducks Bush and Blair could try anything more than a "surgical strike" if that. Iran would survive it and its victory in terms of prestige in the third world would be immense.

I don't see anything but lose/lose here for Britain/USA/Israel here. The party that began when H.M. Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia met Franklyn Delano Roosevelt on board the U.S.S. Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of Egypt on February 14th, 1945 is drawing to a close. DS

The Results of Diplomacy - Editorial - Washington Post

(...) Administration officials were encouraged by signs of dissension in the Iranian leadership after the first of two unanimous sanctions resolutions passed the Security Council in late December. Before the second resolution was introduced, there were talks between Iranian and European officials about ways to renew negotiations. Yet the Iranian work on uranium enrichment has continued; there are signs the regime is racing to complete an industrial installation with thousands of centrifuges that it can present to the world as an accomplished fact.

Now Iran is parading captured British sailors before cameras and using their purported confessions of trespassing in Iranian waters as propaganda in a way that suggests an eagerness to escalate rather than defuse confrontation with the West. Yesterday, Britain offered evidence that its service members were captured in international waters and rightly called their treatment "completely unacceptable." Though Iran's foreign minister said a female sailor would be released "very soon," the television broadcast suggested the prisoners had been coerced.

It's widely believed that power in Iran is divided among competing factions, and it could be that hard-liners are seeking to preempt any steps by the regime to comply with the Security Council. It's impossible to predict what might come out of Tehran before the next U.N. deadline in late May. Yet what has happened so far is sobering.

Bush administration officials have been congratulating themselves on the relative speed and deftness with which the latest sanctions resolution was pushed through the Security Council. They are right, in a way: The diplomatic campaign against Iran has been pretty successful by the usual diplomatic measures. Not only has the United States worked relatively smoothly with European partners with which it differed bitterly over Iraq, but it has also been effective lately in winning support from Russia, China and nonaligned states such as South Africa.

Critics who lambasted the administration's unilateral campaign against an "axis of evil" a few years ago ought to be applauding the return to conventional diplomacy. We, too, think it's worth pursuing, especially when combined with steps short of a military attack to push back against Iranian aggression in the region. Still, two years after President Bush embraced the effort, it has to be noted: The diplomatic strategy so far has been no more successful than the previous "regime change" policy in stopping Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon.

Tony Blair and Iraq - William Pfaff

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How Bush got into Iraq is complicated, but we are beginning to have some picture. Ignorance plays a large role in all the hypothesis advanced. In the USA very few people have much of an idea or even care very much about the Middle East, except for the Zionists. Those few knowledgeable people who aren't Zionists are accused of being "Arabists" and generally suspected of being "antisemites", (I put antisemitism in quotes because it is getting increasingly difficult to define the term, it's used for everything from desecrating Jewish cemeteries to criticizing Ariel Sharon and Avigdor Lieberman). But Britain has no such excuse of inbred provincialism. The British actually understand something about the Middle East and the Arab world. It's a mystery why Tony Blair signed on so unquestioningly to Bush's agenda. He might have been listened to, perhaps some of the disaster might have been avoided... at least for Britain. Understanding this mystery will surely teach us much about how the world is organized. DS

Abstract: One continues to be baffled by Blair’s unwillingness, even now, with nearly eight thousand British troops in Iraq, to take an independent line that distinguishes British from American and Israeli interests, and that makes use of Britain’s very considerable expertise and long experience in Iraq and in the Middle East to establish a serious British role as confident and knowledgeable partner of Washington, with ideas of its own. The late East German spy chief Markus Wolf was quoted in one of his obituaries as contemptuously commenting on the “sketchy” knowledge possessed by CIA agents about the countries they dealt with. That certainly can be said in spades about the people in the Bush administration who have dealt so disastrously with Iraq. Fifty years ago we were still in the midst of the Suez adventure, widely said to have broken Britain’s will to independence, reducing it to permanent submission to Washington. (The specific cause, Washington’s threat to force devaluation of the pound sterling if Britain did not halt the invasion of Egypt, has recently been described by one iconoclastic economist as a great lost opportunity, since devaluation would have boosted British exports and prevented a post-Suez economic slump.) The Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Nasserite Egypt was a foolhardy anticipation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, since it too rested on the notion that overturning a single man, Colonel Gamal Abdal Nasser, could transform the region: end the crisis in French Algeria, give Israel security, and make Britain once again a Middle Eastern power. In the event, it was better for Britain that the Suez invasion failed, since an effort to re-impose foreign control over the Suez Canal in an Egypt (nominally independent since 1923) that had just seen the departure in 1954 of the last British troops, would eventually have met enormous international resistance. The Egyptian monarchy was toppled by the “Free Officers” in 1953, and the new constitution installed by Colonel Nasser, the inventor of “Arab socialism,” had made him a great regional hero. The Suez invasion would surely have ended in fiasco. Suez can be blamed on the British prime minister of the time, Anthony Eden, who believed that in Nasser he was still fighting Hitler (just as the Israelis today claim to be doing, in the person of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Hitler is no longer an historical personage but an item in the vocabulary of sterile polemics). Eden had an excuse. He was at the time already a seriously sick man, and was also a pure social product of Britain as empire, as well as of pre-war and wartime diplomacy, ill-equipped to understand populist Arab dictators. Blair has no such excuse for ignoring both expert British opinion on Iraq and common sense, so as to trail after George W. Bush, in the latter’s inadvertent and ignorant imitation of Suez, attempting to dominate the Arab Middle East by overthrowing (what was) its most prominent despot. How Bush’s America has needed a confident and self-respecting British government, one that could recognize another Suez when it saw one, and say so. The prime minister’s advice to the Baker-Hamilton Commission on Tuesday – whatever it was -- comes too late. LINK