Endgame in Iraq and Afghanistan

The endgame has begun for American and other western military involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decisions in Washington and London are being taken that will dramatically transform both of these conflicts.

Here are some straws in the wind:

* Today Gordon Brown, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer, replaced Tony Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister. The Scottish politician, who made a famous deal in 1994 not to oppose Tony Blair’s run for the leadership of the Labour Party, now takes charge of Britain’s foreign engagements. The war in Iraq, and to a lesser extent the mission in Afghanistan, has been intensely unpopular with the British people, especially with Labour Party members and supporters.

While Brown endorsed Blair’s support for the U.S. initiated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his priorities as he prepared to take over as Prime Minister have been on domestic policy. Brown is certainly pro-American, but he has no intention of developing a close personal relationship with George W. Bush of the kind that Blair had. Brown knows that to win the next British general election---it must be held by 2010, but Brown could call it as early as the summer of 2008---he must not be labeled “Bush’s New Poodle”. There have been stories in the British media speculating that Brown intends to bring most British troops home from Iraq over the next twelve months. While he is unlikely to castigate Blair’s wars, in which he is also implicated, winding down the mission in Iraq would send a very clear message to the British electorate and to the beleaguered Bush administration in Washington.

* In Washington, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday that was harshly critical of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq. The Senator, who has been a staunch Bush loyalist said: “The costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved….Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”

Lugar told reporters that President Bush had limited time to change the course of the war because of the 2008 presidential campaign.

“We’re heading into a very partisan era,” he said. “The president has the opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy. I don’t think he’ll have that option very long.”
Lugar’s message was abundantly clear even though the White House is publicly ignoring it: it is time to make a deal in Iraq and to start bringing American troops home. When someone like Richard Lugar abandons his support for the Bush stay-the-course strategy in Iraq it means that the American political establishment has reached a consensus that the war has failed and has to be brought to an end.

* A few days ago, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai blasted the U.S. and NATO forces for their indiscriminate killings of civilians and demanded a change in military tactics. Karzai, who has long insisted that a deal needs to be made with the factions of the Taliban that are made up of Afghans as opposed to those tied to Al Qaeda, is as good at reading the tea leaves as anyone else. He knows that Western missions in Afghanistan don’t enjoy much public support in their own countries. He wants a deal, and he wants it soon.

* Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper mused that for Canada to continue its mission in Afghanistan after February 2009, there would have to be a broad political consensus in favour of the refitted mission. Harper knows that Canadians have no appetite for a continuation of their military role in southern Afghanistan beyond February 2009. He’s been on the wrong side of public opinion on the war from day one, which is a major reason his party is stuck with about 33 per cent of voters telling pollsters they would vote Conservative. Harper is softening the message so he can get back on track to the 40 per cent range he needs to win a majority of seats in the next election. If a conservative spear-carrier like Harper has figured out that change is in the wind, it is a sure sign that even those in the lower ranks of decision-making within the Anglo Sphere have been brought into the picture.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been sold to the public as struggles in the world-wide War on Terror and as theatres in the combat between freedom and the enemies of freedom. In fact, both struggles have been imperial wars, launched by Washington, with the support of the coalition of the willing in Iraq and NATO in Afghanistan, to secure control of strategic resources and territory. In both cases, the Bush administration’s strategy has imperiled the U.S. position in the region and in the world. The American political establishment has had enough. For the sake of the ability of U.S. petroleum companies to operate in the Middle East, and to sustain the U.S. strategic position in the region, the war in Iraq has to be wound up. In Afghanistan similarly, the U.S. establishment has concluded that the war is not worth the risk of a showdown with Pakistan, which would be needed to defeat the Taliban. The Pakistani regime of Pervez Musharraf is already imperiled for domestic reasons and Washington cares much more about Pakistan than it does about Afghanistan.

The U.S. is likely to wind down its operations in Iraq following a political deal with Iraqi and non-Iraqi players that will allow the Americans to save face and to pull out most of their troops. That does not mean that armed struggle over the future shape of Iraq will end, just that the American military occupation will conclude, perhaps with U.S. military bases left behind in the country, and certainly in neighbouring Kuwait.

In Afghanistan, the likeliest outcome is a deal between the Karzai regime, regional warlords, and elements of the Taliban to create a more broadly based government. With this, the American, NATO and Canadian missions in Afghanistan will be transformed and most western troops will go home. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the end of the Western missions will not terminate armed struggle over the future shape of the country.

For the sake of Western pride, the settlements in both wars can be expected to include a few undertakings about human rights, the rights of women in particular, commitments almost certainly not worth the paper they will be written on.

No Fly List, Other Spook Lists, and the Court of Star Chamber

The federal government’s No Fly list came into effect this morning. Ottawa’s list includes the name, date of birth, and gender of persons who supposedly could pose a threat to aviation safety, if they were to board a flight.

The No Fly list is being provided to all airlines that fly within Canada or in and out of Canada. The list is administered by Transport Canada. It has been compiled secretly, no one will say by whom, and no one will tell us how many names are on the list.

According to a Globe and Mail story, the Canadian No Fly list is expected to contain fewer than one thousand names. The Globe provides no source for this.

The United States has a similar No Fly list and one of the reasons Ottawa is drawing up its own list is to reassure Washington that we are doing all in our power to aid in the War on Terror. The American list, which contained as many as 70,000 names at one point, has been the cause of numerous “false positives”---people with the same name or similar names to those on the list---being barred from taking a flight. Among those caught in the net have been Senator Edward Kennedy, and Edmonton Conservative MP John Williams.

The way the Canadian system works is as follows. All passengers when they are at the airline counter to pick up their boarding passes will have their names checked against the No Fly list. If the passenger’s name is on the list, the airline employee hands the person a printed form that explains that he or she is on the No Fly list. Instructions are included about how to contact Transport Canada and how to appeal for the removal of one’s name from the list. Once the printout has been handed to the rejected passenger, the airline ceases to be involved.

You could be in Toronto, Tokyo, Cairo or Washington when this administrative fiat comes down on you. That’s tough. There’s no way to find out before you plan your trip whether you’re on the list. And just because you’ve been allowed to fly to Paris doesn’t mean that your name won’t be added to the list before your return flight home. You can, of course, take a passenger ship home if one is available. That is unless the security forces in the airport pick you up when they see that you haven’t been allowed to board your flight. That might not happen in Moncton, but I’d be less happy-go-lucky about this in Beijing or New York.

What about the rights of other passengers to board their flights in the most secure possible circumstances, you were about to ask? Don’t their rights trump those of the people whose names were put on the No Fly list for a very good reason? People with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, the old saying goes.

We’ll return to the rights issue, but first the security question. Any sensible person will agree that people are entitled to the best possible security protection when they board an aircraft. Few who have examined the matter would claim that Canada’s procedures provide the best possible security. The major hole in this country’s arrangements---from the time of the bombing of Air India in 1985 to the present---has been the failure to X Ray all baggage being loaded onto aircraft, and where there have been specific warnings, to use other measures as well, such as the use of sniffer dogs. This costs money. Let’s spend it.

The American experience with a No Fly list has done nothing useful except to provide jokes for late night comics. Almost no one thinks that future terrorists who board a plane will carry ID that will show up on the No Fly list.

This takes us back to the rights question.

The idea of drawing up a secret list and asking airlines to administer it is frightening. Foreign airlines and governments will get to know your name is on the list..

People on the list are presumed to pose a terror threat. If this is true they ought to be arrested and charged with a criminal offence. Instead, we’ve cooked up a new category of person----someone too innocent to be charged with an offensive, but too guilty to be allowed to board an aircraft.

Those who are on the list are not permitted to face those who have accused them in a transparent judicial proceeding.

Those on the No Fly list are not allowed to fly inside Canada. Worse still, they have had their right to travel internationally effectively removed. One of the rights guaranteed in the Canadian Constitution is that of mobility. Section 6: 1 reads: “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.”

This is not the first time that “spook lists” have been drawn up to harass citizens. I have had some personal experience with this.

In the late 1980s, when they were in their late seventies, my parents who had quit the Communist Party of Canada in 1956, were flying back to Toronto from Europe. Their flight was re-routed to Chicago due to bad weather. When the passengers deplaned in Chicago, my parents were taken aside and held by a U.S. government agent in a special holding room. When there was a flight available to Toronto, they were escorted onto the plane by an agent. Three decades after they had left a legal political party, they were still not allowed to enter the Land of the Free.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was involved in the Waffle Movement in the NDP, an open and democratic political movement. In March 1971, the Security Service of the RCMP, in a brief on the Waffle group submitted to the Solicitor General of Canada Jean-Pierre Goyer, noted that:

The prime aim of the Waffle Group within the NDP is the establishment of an independent socialist Canada to be achieved through the existing structure of the New Democratic Party. The Waffle group hope to change the NDP from within and radicalize the NDP socialist policies. Considering the Waffle group as a whole, it is felt they will be a viable political force within the NDP.

Apart from their assessment of the political viability of the Waffle, the spooks got the story right. What matters is that the Waffle was neither the first nor the last political movement to be spied on by the security forces of the Canadian government. Trade unionists, student activists, socialists, anarchists, and Quebec sovereignists have had their phones bugged and their names entered onto spook lists.

The idea that we would allow the government of Canada to ask its thoroughly discredited security agencies to draw up a new spook list---the No Fly list---is appalling. On the list will undoubtedly be some who are being profiled because of their religion or their ethnicity. In addition, the list could contain the names of political activists, writers, odd balls or people not to the liking of the current government. The point is that we can’t find out what criteria have been used to draw up this list.

Truly worrying is the creation of categories of citizens whose rights are removed in the absence of any judicial process. By judicial proceeding, I mean a criminal trial, of course. But I also mean an administrative hearing in which a non-criminal complaint could be made. In both of these cases, the accused person would have the right to a defence.

The No Fly list is the kind of secret, arbitrary injustice that was meted out by the Stuart monarchs in England by the infamous Court of Star Chamber. The horrors committed by the Court of Star Chamber motivated England and later Canada to embrace the principle that no one should be secretly charged with an offence and that everyone has a right to hear the charges against him or her and to a defence in a transparent proceeding.

It won’t be long before outraged people complain about the ways the No Fly list has negatively affected them. Let’s hope that we are not serving up another Maher Arar to some arbitrary government when some hapless Canadian citizen tries to fly home from a less than civil libertarian foreign city.

Sarkozy's "Tidal Wave" Does Not Materialize

Since his election to the presidency of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy has acted like the cat who swallowed the canary. At meetings at the Elysee Palace with underlings and with foreign leaders in Paris and abroad, he has swaggered, grinned and draped his arm over others as though his natural right to rule is accepted by all.

In the first round of the French legislative elections last weekend, it looked like Sarkozy’s good fortune was continuing. Analysts declared that “a blue wave” was sweeping France and that Sarkozy’s UMP would win a crushing majority of seats. Sarko’s hand-picked Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, was in triumphalist mode at campaign stops during the past week. He predicted the demise of the left, speaking of the Socialist Party as the voice of the past. He urged French voters to board the Sarkozy vehicle to the future, claiming that France was headed for a major transformation, and that those left behind would count for little.

To illustrate his fitness for office and his insistence on change, Sarkozy put on his shorts and running shoes, as did Fillon, and the two ran around the Bois de Boulogne.

"There is a demand for change,” the president declared. “Never have the risks of inertia been so great for France as they are now in this world in flux where everyone across the world is trying to change quicker than the others, where any delay can be fatal.”

Sarkozy’s words were code language for the president’s intention to launch a full-scale assault on social programs and the rights of workers to organize and to strike. Among Sarkozy’s most cherished objectives is the elimination of the thirty-five hour work week for many companies in France, in favour of longer hours on the job. He also intends to dramatically cut the number of public employees. Make France a less egalitarian, lean-mean wealth creating machine---that is the Sarkozy recipe.

The president’s plans to rout the left and ditch the French social model in favour of one much closer to those in the United States and the United Kingdom ran into unexpected resistance this week, however. Sarkozy’s plan to switch the financing of French health care from payroll charges to a higher sales tax was used by Socialist leader Segolene Royal to great effect during the last week of the legislative campaign.

When it became clear to voters that the new president was proposing to finance a tax cut for the rich with higher taxes for the middle classes and the poor, many voters rallied to the side of the Socialists.

The UMP, which had been expected to win an enormous majority in the second round of voting ended up with between 319 and 329 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, according to exit poll projections. Meanwhile the Socialists increased the number of seats they held in the National Assembly from the 149 seats they won in 2002 to between 202 and 210 seats.
The next round in the struggle over France’s future will be partially determined in the new National Assembly. But the struggle is almost certain to be decided in the streets. When the Fillon government acts to implement the blueprint of Nicolas Sarkozy, wage and salary earners, students and political militants will resist. They will call strikes and they will take to the streets. How many of them answer the call to resist and how determined they are will make a very great difference to how things turn out.

The Socialist Party, buoyed by the stronger than expected showing in the the legislative elections, is about to undergo a dramatic internal struggle for power. Not only will the “old elephants”, such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, try to gain control of the party, there will be an all-out fight between the members of the party’s “first couple”. Segolene Royal and her partner Francois Hollande have announced that their personal relationship is at an end. Their separation will be political as well as personal. Royal wants the top job in the party, that of First Secretary, which is now held by Hollande.

Dumb and Dumber: Bush and Harper on Missile Defence in Eastern Europe

Why has the Bush administration decided to provoke Russia by announcing that the United States will install a part of its anti-ballistic missile system in the Czech Republic and Poland?

One could imagine that such a strategically important move was the outgrowth of penetrating thinking in the White House and the Pentagon. But, it is no such thing. It’s just plain dumb.

First, some background on anti-ballistic missiles.

To many, the idea of an anti-ballistic missile system may sound benign. After all, it’s a defensive weapon, whose only capability is to intercept incoming missiles.

In reality, defensive weapons have offensive implications. The distinction between them is a phony one. That is because the deployment of a defensive weapon that negates a potential foe’s offensive weapons, upsets the military balance and can trigger an arms race. What the Bush administration has in mind with missile defence is precisely to change the military balance in its favour.The Bush administration believes that if the United States is successful in developing and deploying a system that can reliably shoot down approaching enemy missiles, it will protect the U.S. from attack. But it will do much more than that. A workable missile shield would liberate the United States to do what no power has been willing to do since the last days of the Second World War---use nuclear weapons as a viable policy in certain extreme circumstances.In March 2002, the details of a secret Pentagon report were revealed on the front page of the New York Times. In its Nuclear Posture Review, the Pentagon pointed to the need to produce new nuclear weapons with a lower yield than strategic nuclear weapons, weapons that would produce less radioactive fallout. The Review spelled out the possible use of nuclear weapons by the United States against non-nuclear powers, such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya, all of them signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. What made this so shocking is that the Review countenanced an explicit violation of the treaty, which was signed by 182 countries, including Canada.In 1978, to give nations an incentive to sign the non-proliferation treaty, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain formally pledged never to launch a nuclear attack on signatories to the treaty, except in a case where a non-nuclear state attacked a nuclear state in tandem with another nuclear state. Again in 1995, France and China joined these three states (with Russia in place of the Soviet Union) in reiterating this pledge. As former U.S. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara and Thomas Graham Jr. wrote in a newspaper column "the Pentagon plan undermines the credibility of that pledge, which underpins the Nonproliferation Treaty. To strike directly at this pledge of nonuse is to strike at the treaty itself." "If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon," said the New York Times in an editorial "and contemplating preemptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state."To develop new nuclear weapons that can be used with impunity behind the protection of the missile shield is the reason the Bush administration opposes the U.S. signing on to the nuclear test ban treaty. Make no mistake about it----the deployment of a missile defence system is being done largely for offensive, not defensive, reasons.

Flash forward to the U.S. plan to deploy anti-ballistic missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland. (Mind you these anti-missile missiles don't even work yet.)

Such a move can only be interpreted as an aggressive act against Russia. To set up weapon systems on Russia’s doorstep whose only conceivable use is to degrade the value of the Russian nuclear capability as against that of the U.S. is the kind of act that would prompt a rebuke from any Russian government. Now we have Putin saying he will deploy Russian missiles to target European cities. Technically, that doesn’t mean much since they can target European cities already, but the political signal to Europeans is not one they want from a nuclear power on whom they depend for so much of their oil and natural gas.

What makes this even weirder is that Bush claims these anti-missile missiles are meant to protect against Iranian and Korean nukes. That you would put a missile shield in eastern Europe to protect against Pyonyang’s nukes doesn’t even pass the laugh test. And to use Iran as your rationale is just as peculiar. Everyone agrees that Teheran is at least a few years away from having a nuclear bomb let alone one it can mount on a missile. To prevent Iran from proceding to develop nuclear weapons, the U.S. needs the cooperation and collaboration of Russia. An angry Kremlin is highly unlikely to put pressure on Iran to help the Bush administration out of a jam in the Middle East.

I can only conclude that having overstretched its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and perhaps on the verge of attacking Iran, the U.S. has decided to pick an entirely unnecessary fight with the Russians. How would Bush like it if some nuclear power set up a missile shield somewhere in Latin America, in Venezuela for instance?

And then there’s Stephen Harper.

This guy goes to Paris and makes a comment siding with Bush on the anti-missile deployment in the Czech Republic and Poland. I used to think Harper had brains. But here he’s playing “dumber” to Bush’s “dumb”. As the leader of a middle power, the prime minister of Canada is not required to support Washington on this kind of thing. What Harper did will not even be reported by the U.S. media. But it will make the Putin government mad at Canada. Surely, our role ought to be to encourage the nuclear powers to cool their behaviour and their rhetoric, not to further enflame the situation.

I guess Harper’s reflexive pro-Americanism kicks in before his cortex even gets hold of what’s at stake.

Stephen Harper's Canada: Associate States, Foreign Owners, and a Double-double of Greenhouse Gases

Before becoming prime minister, Stephen Harper dismissed Canada as a Second World country, with a socialist welfare state that he abominated. Famously, he advised his fellow Albertans to construct a firewall around their province to protect themselves from the contaminating winds that blew from Ottawa and Central Canada.

Harper doesn’t need a firewall anymore.

Even though he leads a minority government, Harper is well on the way to constructing his kind of Canada. It is made up of Associate States, the kind that should gladden Jacques Parizeau’s heart. To be fair Alberta’s quasi-secession was consummated with the onset of NAFTA in 1994, a deal which guarantees American access to Alberta petroleum even in the event of shortages in the rest of Canada. Lotus Land is another Associate State, as is Quebec. (Harper dreams of Mario Dumont’s Nouveau-Union Nationale winning the next Quebec election.) Finally there is the rump of Canada, consisting of the Associate State of Ontario, whose manufacturing sector is hemorrhaging. Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Atlantic Provinces would prefer to stay in Canada if they could find it.

In Harper’s Canada, ersatz nationalism is served up at American owned Tim Horton’s. It is celebrated on Hockey Afternoon in Canada, as the American management of the NHL in New York schedules daytime games in a hopeless effort to sell Canada’s national sport to the sunbelt. Don Cherry, who once coached a team whose tactic was to keep the home ice so lousy that no one could skate on it, is heading back to the States to sell his version of roller-derby.

And Canada is for sale. Foreign takeovers are transferring tens of billions of dollars worth of Canadian industry to outside owners. Stelco, established decades ago to ensure a Canadian presence in the steel industry, may be the next to go. The Harper government is happy to sell Canada to Texas oilmen, Russian gangsters or the corporate front-men of the authoritarian Chinese state. God forbid that Ottawa do anything to keep crucial sectors in Canadian hands. Ironically, Harper doesn’t even mind government takeovers of Canadian industry, as long as the governments are foreign.

Let the whole country be bought, gutted and flipped.

Investors who hate the planet are rushing to expand petroleum output from the oil sands. The rest of us are buying new light-bulbs while the emission clouds from the oil patch mushroom. Albertans are getting almost nothing in royalties for their oil as northern Alberta is reduced to a moonscape. And everyone knows that the Bush administration and Steve “Big Oil” Harper will talk about the global environmental crisis and do nothing.

On Hockey Afternoon in the Associated States, you can watch the tough new Canadian military recruiting young men and women who need a job. Who said anything about peacekeeping?

Ball hockey in Kandahar, followed with a double-double. That’s Canada.