WEAKNESS AND LIES: Putting the Nice before the Nasty

On the BBC recently, a reporter interviewed two young Syrian women outside a café in Syria's capital Damascus, both wore modern, trendy clothes, make-up and had their hair uncovered. One women supported President Assad and said that the presence of government soldiers made her feel safe, the other women supported the rebels and believed that government forces had used the chemical weapons that killed some 1400 people on the 21st August. Neither women had any worries about openly speaking to a BBC journalist and voicing their opinions, despite one of them being highly critical of Assad's Baathist regime.

This brief interview reminded me of similar ones I saw conducted with young students and women in Baghdad, Iraq in 2003, just before the 'Coalition of the Willing' blew much of the city to pieces as part of the West's attack on Saddam Hussein in the cause of regime change and, as it transpired, a pointless search for weapons of mass destruction. Young, educated and intelligent Western style men and women were also interviewed in Tunisia prior to their Arab Spring moment, and in Gaddafi's Libya and Mubarak's Egypt, with some of the women in particular being noticeably free of the usual veils and other trappings of Islamic culture that one often expects to see worn. This is perhaps because a by-product of arab dictatorships and Baathist states, was that any dissent or movements like radical Islam or  other forms of religious zealotry which might challenge the existing status quo were ruthlessly crushed. This was bad for democracy, civil rights, and kurdish tribesmen but ironically good for women, order and preserving the nation state.

Now those women and young men are mainly silent, the women in particular are donning headscarfs and veils again, and the young men are joining armed militias, or have become radicalised as they see their once stable country descend into a mix of social chaos, car bombings, social breakdown and anarchy. Their only other option being to get out of the country and start a new life somewhere else. For many the hope and euphoria offered by an 'Arab Spring' has given way to despair and disappointment, with ideas and dreams of democracy now replaced by ideologues and mob rule.

For nearly twenty years the West has chastised and lambasted the dictatorships of Mubarak and Gaddafi and the quasi fascist Baathist regimes of Hussein and Assad, while ignoring the ills of undemocratic fiefdoms like Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the basis that they supply the West with oil, have copious amounts of money and often act as Middle Eastern power brokers when we need some quiet, behind the scenes diplomacy to smooth things over arab style. 

These, undemocratic regimes, whilst not ideal, suited the arab peoples, and would perhaps, with time, have evolved in their own way to be more 'democratic' and 'western', or equally, given the current climes, have become less democratic and more 'Islamic', again depending on the which direction the winds of change were blowing, The Shah of Iran, was famously pro Western, but also like Assad, and Mubarak, a bit of a dictator with a reputation for being harsh with dissenters and critics. So for the Shah, change came wearing black robes, a long beard and a good line in religious zealotry. 

When the Shah and his family fled Iran he also found that the West's friendship is pretty much worthless with many countries simply slamming the door shut in his face when he came to seek shelter. Equally Iran's highly educated female students, doctors and academics suddenly found that their Persian beauty and luscious locks really upset the Ayatollah's fanatical fans and were forced to stop what they doing, act dumb, cover up, and literally burqa-off! 

Indeed ever since the Shah's hasty exit from Iran the West has seemed to stumble from one ill-advised debacle to another, from Reagan's sending of US troops to Lebanon in 1982, an act of folly that resulted in the deaths of 241 US marines in a single day,  to Operation Desert Storm in 1991 - a war that disastrously failed to finish what it had started and consequently paved the way  for the chaotic state of Western involvement in the Middle East ever since.

Two decades of well-intentioned military and diplomatic manoeuvring has followed, some good, but most disruptive and ineffectual at best, and at worst, alienating and sowing the seeds of further conflict. This period heralded in a new kind of Western military approach where political correctness and a desire to do the right things has resulted in a kind of war-engagement lite with Western forces desperate not to be seen as imperialist or anti-Islamic. 
Military commanders are now often as wary of human rights lawyers and sexual equality violations in the ranks as they are about roadside bombs and snipers. 

Indeed, no sooner had the world seen the US and their Allies go into Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, then everyone involved wanted out as fast as possible. The fact that ten years later the Allies have made little real progress in bringing the war to a proper conclusion based on a definable victory and are instead desperately trying to extract themselves fully from Iraq and Afghanistan is made even worse with the knowledge that as soon as the last Western soldier leaves that both countries tenuous grip on order will go and chaos will ensue. 

The other legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq is that both wars have not only made the Allies timid and scared when it comes to further involvement in the Middle East generally but have created an almost phobic reaction when it comes to 'boots on the ground', a mindset that led directly to the Allied enforced no-fly zone over Libya in 2011 as that way the West could be seen to be doing something but without any real risk to Western lifes. It was also a perfect example of the West's increasing obsession with being seen to be doing the right thing, not just by ourselves, but by our enemies as well. 

Nolonger can we fight a war to defeat an enemy and win the peace, now Allied forces must win hearts and minds as well. Enemy culture and religions must be respected and the horrors of war hidden by 'surgical strikes', 'precision bombing' and drones, and amongst all this targeted killing, wars that used to take days or weeks to resolve now drag on for years, with, bar a few selected deaths and the occasional 'collateral damage', deaths, particularly Allied deaths, kept to 'acceptable' levels.  It is as if the Middle East were some grotesque video game in which players 'take out' opponents but lose points if they whack a civilian and at each level of the game the difficulties increase and the rules change slightly. The players also don't know how many levels there are or what they have to do to win? So as games go this one could go on and on.

It is telling that after George Bush's much maligned 'War on Terror' and numerous verbal faux pas's, that President Obama has been acutely careful not only to do the absolute right thing, always, but to take no risks either, in case the risk also proves to be wrong. President Obama's choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has been equally safe, as in effect by spending her time flying around the world she has been championing Obama's world view that the American President, and by extension the American people, represent 'like' rather than 'might'. As Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton has effectively shaken lots of hands and clocked up lots of air miles, but in terms of foreign policy, she, and by extension, President Obama, have done nothing other than pursue the 'like me' agenda.

This emphasis on being liked also explains the US's embracing of the Arab Spring from the outset, firstly in Tunisia, then as it was fanned by Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, in Egypt and Libya. Both Obama and Clinton could see that the bad guys in this populist scenario were Mubarak and Gaddafi, and despite Mubarak's previous pro Western stance, he was, like the Shah before him, unceremoniously dumped by the US and UK.  This was X-factor politics writ large, the people wanted Mubarak and Gaddafi out and the West, seeing a chance to be both popular and populist at the same time, obliged. What the West hadn't thought through, as they hadn't with Iraq and Afghanistan either, was

happens next?  

The US and the West's championing of the Arab Spring had allowed the Arab peoples to became intoxicated by the idea that change was not only possible but desirable and that if the old regimes resisted and fought back then the US and the West, as they did in Libya, would step in to make change happen. Indeed the West's intelligentsia and politicians really should have known better, but they were so caught up with creating a new arab style "I Have a Dream" moment that reality was put on hold for the duration. Or at least until Gaddafi was dragged out of a storm drain and shot in the head and Christopher Stephens, the US ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, was murdered by a militia led mob. By the time Egypt and Libya began to collapse into violence and anarchy and Syria's arab spring moment had gone from street protest to all-out civil war the West knew that they had messed up. In computer game terms, they were back at the beginning with the highest difficult level possible imposed. Not a good place to be.

Syria, in fact, had ruined everything in the 'nice' stakes. Up until recently the West was somehow managing to avoid the elephant in the room that is Egypt, and the US's illustrious Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, had conveniently stepped down to prepare for a run at the Presidency in 2016 thereby avoiding anything too unpleasant in the way of questions as to why Ambassador Stephens had been left unprotected in Libya… Then civilians started being gassed in Syria and the West finally had to face up to the mess they had inadvertently done so much to create.

Syria's crisis is too extreme to be ignored for there is no disputing the ghastliness of a gas attack or, horrifically, a napalm bomb in a school playground. Yet with no concrete evidence that it was Assad's troops that were responsible for the gas attack and the legacy of two decades of misadventure in the Middle East the West is naturally reluctant to get involved and to take action against Syria. Yet having said that it would and should get involved and bomb 'selected' Assad targets, the West's consensus driven political leaders are now showing democracy and leadership at its worst, and back-tracking as fast as they can. Now damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

In the UK having rushed to get a vote for an, in my opinion, ill-advised attack on Syrian military targets as a way of punishing Assad and his regime for allegedly using chemical weapons, UK MPs have now effectively lost their nerve and rejected any possibility of war. In the US, President Obama, ever mindful of doing the right thing and conversely of not doing the wrong thing, has skilfully absolved himself of responsibility and put it to congress who can now vote for or against military action against Syria. 

A great hurrah has greeted this Presidential act of smoke and mirrors, while in the UK MPs are saving face by congratulating themselves that they have reinvigorated the constitution and stood up for democracy and peace. Yet this is not democracy, it is a kind of dumbmockracy, in which fear of making and taking an unpopular decision has made weak and fallacious men present themselves to the world as strong and resolute when in fact they are neither. Democracy is about doing and standing up for what you believe to be right even if they are unpopular, or in this instance possibly wrong. Better to have said they would do nothing. 

For the last twenty years the West's foreign policy has struggled to balance its new values of political correctness and anti imperialism with both its past and the growing threat of radical Islam within a volatile Middle East. In this the West has been helped considerably by the weakness of a Russia struggling to adapt to its post communist self, and a China where communist orthodoxy was being sublimated by a rush to embrace wealth and capitalism. 

Both countries transformational difficulties ensured that the West has had almost twenty years of being top dog and to establish its new power base and adapt its evolved democratic doctrine to the needs of a 21st Century world. Instead it has frittered away its years of strength by worrying about enforcing and championing issues of sexual politics, political correctness and climatic change and being liked rather than concentrating and consolidating itself as the doctrine of power regardless of whether that made them 'liked'. 

In the background, while the West has been agonising and theorising about governing and exercising its power in a consensual way, other countries have been adapting and growing in strength. Now a reinvigorated Russia and China, along with an empowered Iran, sit behind President Assad's Syria and watch as the West's key countries and  the world's current superpower try to avoid doing what they think is right in order to avoid, effectively, making an unpopular decision. This is niceness at any price and by pursuing this option the West is creating not a safer and fairer world, but are showing off their weaknesses. By doing so they are potentially heralding in a darker and more fractious world. A world in which new old powers will soon re-assert themselves and the established ones will rue the day that they chose to be Mr Nice over Mr Nasty.

© Nigel Wingrove, 2013

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Watching the news, reading the papers and seeing our politicians in the UK, in Europe and in the US could make one feel that the excitement and impending sense of economic doom predicted by so many since the end of 2007, 2008, last year and this year, was over. That the world had moved almost effortlessly from sub-prime crisis, to credit crunch to ‘lets have lunch’ without anyone getting hurt, give or take the odd Greek bank worker and the occasional British Prime Minister voted out of office.

The stock markets have lurched, inched, spurted and crawled inexorably upwards in recent months and commentators and the media instead of using scary words like crash, depression, the Thirties, mass unemployment, social breakdown, collapse, credit crunch are now soothing us with words like; employment, new jobs, low interest rates, controlled cutbacks, bank lending, work force, skills, cohesion and of course everyone's current fave, coalition. Of course there are still a few yobs out there on the fringes swearing and shouting expletives like; double-dip, recession, deflation, inflation, pensions, baby-boomers, pensions, rising unemployment and, lest we forget, Quantitative Easing. But generally the world is calm. Or is it?

The world’s decision to use a Keynesian approach to solving its economic woes has temporarily calmed things, but the stimulus has been at a massive cost, particularly in the US where the home of capitalism has shown itself to be weak in the face of crisis, preferring the soft option, high taxes, Healthcare Reform, and delaying hard choices for the future. Yet that future could only be months away. Already the effects of the first stimulus are waning, consumer spending is slowing again almost before it started rising, house prices are still falling, new house building can barely get it together to erect a flag-pole let alone a new house and meanwhile evermore foreclosures beckon as debt carries all before it. Yet the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration’s only answer is another, bigger, stimulus package, more Quantitative Easing and ever more spending. It’s like having maxed-out all your credit cards, mortgaged and remortgaged the house and borrowed everything you can from the bank and your friends, yet you still believe if you can just borrow more it’ll be alright.

The effects of the first stimulus are fading because it didn’t create anything meaningful and props up businesses that should close. More money will just prop them up longer and create more meaningless jobs and when its removed or its effects wane then the failing businesses and McJobs will go to anyway. Better to get the pain over and build anew than risking a bigger collapse and hyper inflation in the months and years ahead. Stimuluses only work if there’s something to stimulate, if the patient is dying, then sometimes its kinder to let him die..

In the UK too, talk of cuts are beginning to be talked down and the threat of big cuts to social services moderated. The UK though will have to wait until October this year to find out exactly what is to be cut so it would be churlish to harp on and heap criticism on the Breakback Coalition before they have had a chance to show their true colours. I suspect though that given their current moniker that they will be multi-coloured as they try to be all things to all men. In which case they’ll please no one and disappoint all.

The US and potentially the rest of the West could be heading towards a double-dip recession or, in reality in the US, a full-blown, no-nonsense Depression, where nature will do what the governments of Bush, Obama and the Federal Reserve have failed to do and that is to burn away the rubbish so that a new economy and new businesses can rise from the ashes. The only genuine alternative is the half way measure of hacking away at the economic mess through cuts, but it remains to be seen if the UK coalition government has what it takes? If we have then we may avoid America’s fate, if not we to may see the dark clouds of Depression before too long.

TANTRUMS IN THE MACHINE

The dawn of 2010 and the ending of a year, especially the ending of a decade is most always a time for reflection. Thinking back to the beginning of the decade, things were very different. The end of 1999 was a time of hysteria; the media was filled with nonsense about the millennium bug, doom-sayers were predicting the end of the world and media darlings like Naomi Klein had been so inspired by the legions of anti-globalization protestors who had battled the police and the worlds financial leaders at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) shindig in Seattle that year that she had put pen to paper to cash-in on the angst and wrote No Logo - Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

The world, in fact, seemed poised to enter a whole new era of I-care-you-care-but-I-care-more-than-you-care compassion driven economics and the search for a better way. A world where realpolitik had become surrealpolitik and eunuchs had taken over the world machine. And, as befitted the times, the nation at the head of the machine and leader of the most powerful nation on earth cried and hugged as much as he huffed and puffed. Bill Clinton, interns aside, was a popular and charismatic world leader; he cared, he cried, he lied, and the world, generally, loved him for it. Globalization, it seemed, was something that just happened, driven by market forces rather than political forces, and for many represented the worst aspects of capitalism.

In 1999, as a new millennium dawned, the word ‘global’ was the expletive of choice. People, or rather, ‘caring’ people, wanted to protest targeted ‘global’ companies and, in particular, American global companies; McDonalds, Nike, Starbucks and, when they could get at them, US-owned multinationals. Global was a despised concept; it meant, in the minds of earnest ‘caring’ protestors, the worldwide destruction of indigenous businesses, traditional skills, the exploitation of labour and, of course, the absolute desolation of the local environment by ‘global’ companies intent on using cheap third world labour and accompanied by the vampiristic exploitation of the local resources. And, like the vampire, these faceless multinational global bloodsuckers were hated and feared, their presence seen as the harbinger of death and destruction, that at worst they would suck the life-blood out of a country and at best that they were making the world the same and filing it with American uniform trite; junk logos, junk food, junk culture, junk life and all driven by a junk, corrupt, capitalist ideology.

This was to be a decade where the traditional left / right in politics would begin to fragment and where individuals would unit behind a specific cause; Reclaim the Streets, Nuclear Power, anti new roads, saving trees, banning fox hunting, stopping wars, saving the whale, or supporting the Palestinians; where there was a cause there were thousands ready to march. Often these protest groups were loosely linked or collected under the umbrella of anti-globalisation, as indeed were the black bloc anarchist groups that, cuckoo-like, used protests for their own ends and a bit of ultra-violence. Then George W. Bush got elected and some religious zealots decided to take anti-Americanism to a whole new level.

Within two years of the world partying like it's 1999, a group of Muslim fanatics armed with nothing more deadly than a few penknives and their own hateful zealotry high jacked four airliners, crashed two of them into the Twin Towers and another into the Pentagon and a forth almost into the White House and virtually changed the world forever. What they did achieve, aside from killing a large number of innocent people and launching the biggest surprise attack on the US since Pearl Harbour, was to show to the Muslim world just how weak and fractious the West is when under threat and just how fractious, delusional and self destructive the West’s sense of protest has become.

For many on the left, anti-Americanism is endemic and almost a faith and, like all faiths, once one believes in its creed it is very difficult to change. Some felt that the US deserved 9/11, others that it was about time that the USA experienced an act of terrorism that, after years of carnage in Europe and the rest of the world, it would do America good to get a taste of just how horrible terrorism could be. For others, it was a terrible event but one that had been caused partly by America’s rampant globalization and equally gung-ho foreign policy coupled with their support of Israel, which justified and created Arab hatred towards the US. That 9/11 was in fact the US’s own fault.

Though another group saw the attack for what it was, an attack on the West, on the values and way of the life of the West, and on the centre of the West’s strength; the United States of America.

The USA’s reaction and the wider world’s response to it were sympathetic but hesitant and most of all careful not to attack or blame all Muslims for the actions of a few. In fact, the West went overboard in its efforts not to blame or offend Islam by appointing blame to the wider Muslim community and by doing so began to attack itself. Rather than lashing out, the West lashed in. We changed, altered and subverted Western culture and our Judeo Christian religions in favour of Muslim values so as to be seen as inclusive. New laws were rushed through parliament, making criticism of religion illegal and, for religion, read Islam.

When it was the UK’s turn to be hit and four Islamic disciples decided that they were doing Allah’s will by blowing themselves up on London’s underground, killing 52 people and maiming dozens more, the first people that the quota-driven BBC interviewed were not the victims and wounded but Muslims at London mosques to see if they were frightened of being victimised by thuggish Londoners who might blame them for the atrocity. Well boohoo and lucky for them that there was no fiery Iman calling for a ‘kristallnacht‘ style revenge as no doubt there would have been had the bombing happened in reverse and it had been Christians blowing themselves up in an Islamic country.  

What we have had throughout the noughties is the steady and constant self-flagellation style erosion of our culture, beliefs and values in favour of Islam for fear of offending, or being deemed to have offended, Islam or Islamic values. We now self-censor and find ever more ridiculous and craven ways of kow-towing to Islam lest we offend those who would, and possibly will, destroy completely our freedoms and way of life. And why? Because we have no faith in ourselves, or in our values, or in our countries. 

For the last decade we have protested everything and protested nothing. We have damned capitalism and smashed up McDonalds, we have hugged trees and championed same sex marriages, become colour blind on issues of race and ignored our own people in favour of foreign cultures that hate and despise our own culture and which would kill all homosexuals and which stones and burns women who question the decisions of men. Yet still our great Western liberal elite and politically correct soothsayers, bend over backwards to defend and protect Islam. Why? Because Islam is anti-American and anti-Isreal and to many on the left that is better than anything. It maybe be an unholy alliance but for the last ten years it has been the alliance of choice for many on the left, a choice that was made all the more imperative by the arrival of George W Bush in 2001.

President George W Bush was a man whose general demeanour, Christianity-driven Republicanism and slow Southern delivery, peppered with embarrassing Malapropisms, induced hatred and derision on an unprecedented scale. He was also seen as a man who had achieved his position in part because of who his father was. Whatever the reason, Bush failed to deliver as a President and led the US and its Allies into a disastrous war in Iraq, while presiding over, and sowing many of the seeds that would create one of the worst economic crises the world has ever seen.

The combined effect of 9/11 and the failed presidency of Bush ironically changed the forces of protest. Now, at the end of the decade, being ‘global’ is cool. Gordon Brown, the UK’s profligate and pompous prime minister called the economic crisis a ‘global crisis'; that is, it wasn’t his fault... "We need ‘global’ solutions", he said. President Obama, the liberal worlds messiah du jour has globalitus and talks endlessly of ‘global health initiatives’, ‘global warming treaties’, a ‘global currency’ and a ‘global poverty act’. Obama is noble and global and, as befits the Son of God, was awarded a coveted Nobel Peace prize after only a few months in office when he had actually done nothing but espouse his wishes for ‘global solutions’. But no matter the world loves him. They love him because he’s black, because he’s not George Bush, because he knows how to be cool and doesn’t fluff his speeches, and most of all because he’s global without the ‘ization’ bit at the end.

Yet now at the beginning of a new ‘global’ decade where are we? The Reclaim the Street activists have all bought cars, and the anti globalization hordes are making lots of money online, or advising ‘global’ companies how to look cool. Bush has gone and is making, like Mr Blair, vast sums of money talking on the lecture circuit where his Bushisms are seen as quaint and endearing. Iraq is in a bloody mess, its streets strewn with the limbs and entrails of our soldiers, suicide bombers and the countless innocents caught in the middle and the countries that went in now can’t wait to leave. Iraq may fall to Islamic extremism or it might not, all that’s certain is that, whatever happens, no country in the West is going to go back in and help the Iraqi people, which leaves the fanatics, Iran and Syria waiting like vultures to pick at the remains.

In the West, governments have borrowed and printed money on a scale unprecedented in history and despite the current euphoria in the markets there is an upturn, there is, as they say, ‘many a slip twixt cup and slip’ and the world may yet see a crash or social upheaval caused by a market crash. In the US, the great liberal messiah is losing popularity almost as fast as Bush lost his words. 2012 may in fact see the US people elect a curvy woman from Alaska as President, which would be a fitting revenge on the President who said of her; ‘a pig in lipstick is still a pig’, which is an unfortunate phrase coming from a someone who is black, liberal and presumably likes to be seen as a respecter of women...

Yet the decade began with the threat of radical Islam and it is ending with it as well. From the attempted bombing of Flight 253, to the nuclearisation of Iran, to the Islamification of Europe, the West’s way of life is under real threat and the next decade will be crucial in deciding how and where that threat leads. One in the know, of course, is the daughter of anti-porn crusader Bonnie Klein, the journalist and ‘activist’ Naomi Klein who launched the decade with her anti-capitalist diatribe, No Logo. Now having ditched the anti-globalization mantel in 2007 with her book, The Shock Doctrine, she has got in early on the 'stop Sarah Palin getting elected in 2012' bandwagon with the publication of Going Rouge: Sarah Palin An American Nightmare a play on the title of Palin’s best selling book Going Rogue. No doubt Going Rouge will be full of the kind of liberal left bile and invective that was spat at Palin following her sensational arrival as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election and no doubt she will shrug it off but if Klein and her po-faced acolytes are on the warpath already then Palin must be doing something right.

Klein and her kabala of liberal left opinion formers protest anything as long as it's anti-Amercian and anti-capitalist and have been wrong consistently. Their opinions morph from one bogey man, or woman, to another and now that their chosen one is in office they are desperate that it is their politically-correct quasi-Marxist take on the world that sets the agenda for the coming decade. I for one sincerely hope that it isn’t but believe that the fight to save and keep some of the West’s values after another ten years of Islamification, liberal left fifth columnism and political shenanigans will make the next decade one of the most decisive and toughest ever. Happy New Year.