A new Falklands conflict?

Next month will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. I don't know if they've got an election coming up or something, but they'be been making noise about the islands again.

The Falklands war is still something of a sore point for Britain's political left, what with Margaret Thatcher being Antichrist to them. I've actually sat a British and Irish studies exam on a book that determinedly referred to the "Malvinas conflict". Unsurprisingly, the foreword went to some lengths - for an academic work - to abuse the then-Prime Minister.

To me, hearing leftists talk about the "Malvinas" is bizarre. Surely, apart from any hopefully mythical modern-day Stalinists, the left believes in democracy and self-determination? The population of the Falklands is British and has repeatedly made it clear that they wish to remain British. It's the Argentine claim that the islands are somehow theirs that represents pure imperialism. What makes the left-wing defense of the Argentines even more bizarre is that at the time of the war, Argentina was fighting the so-called "dirty war" against left-wingers and trade unions, with the same military that invaded the Falklands. One can only assume that the British left let their hatred of Mrs. Thatcher distort the picture.

If you wanted to be neutral, I suppose you could call them the Sebald islands after their probable Dutch discoverer, but I don't see any need to, as the Argentinians are, in my opinion, clearly in the wrong. In this case, it's the former colony that is the imperialist. It was on precisely these grounds that the United Nations found Argentina to be guilty of unjustified aggression back in 1982.

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Unfortunately, as much as Britain may have the moral advantage, they are at a decided military disadvantage when it comes to the defense of the islands. Should Argentina decide to invade again, the British would find it much more difficult to retake the Falklands in 2012 than they did in 1982.

By itself, the Argentine air force is hardly a threat. Their newest aircraft is the A-4AR Fightinghawk, an A-4 Skyhawk modernized with F-16 avionics. It's still a Skyhawk, the first examples of which entered service in 1956. Alongside them the Argentines essentially deploy the same aircraft, minus combat losses, that they fought the Falklands War with: Mirage III:s and V:s, and the Israeli upgraded versions of the latter. They also still fly the indigenous Pucará counter-insurgency aircraft, some of which are run on biofuel so they can fight a green counterinsurgency. In other words, Argentina currently maintains more or less the same air force that the British resoundingly defeated in 1982.

After the 1982 war, a major investment was made in improving the defenses of the Falklands. Mostly, this took the form of RAF Mount Pleasant, a brand-new airbase featuring what Wikipedia calls the world's longest corridor. Opened in 1985, RAF Mount Pleasant is home to No. 1435 Flight, which operates four Eurofighter Typhoons. Ground defense is provided by an infantry company from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment. Given its current obsolescent/obsolete state, the four Typhoons at Mount Pleasant and the Royal Navy ships in the area can probably see off the whole Argentine air force. But it's not quite that simple.

In my mind, the best analogy for the Mount Pleasant airbase is Singapore in 1941. The naval base at Singapore had been constructed to house the battlefleet Britain would send to the Pacific theatre. From there, it would have exerted a powerful deterrent - Mahan's "fleet in being" - on the Japanese. The Japanese pre-empted this plan by taking the inadequately defended base before the fleet could be deployed. The outnumbered defending EN forces were destroyed by asymmetric attack: aircraft against a battleship and cruiser. Having lost Singapore, the Royal Navy had to operate from bases in the Indian Ocean, and was unable to retake Singapore. The Navy had been ordered to defend Singapore, but denied the resources it needed.

Similarly, RAF Mount Pleasant could easily house enough air power to deter any Argentine invasion. But what if the Argentines pre-empt this plan? The present complement of four Typhoons may be more than enough to deal with anything the Argentine air force can send their way - in the air. However, a force of only four aircraft is appallingly vulnerable to asymmetric attack on the ground. Should those aircraft be disabled by sabotage or other means and the airbase be taken, how will Britain get it back? Without carrier-borne aviation, which Britain no longer has, any attempt to retake the islands would be in the face of Argentine air superiority. Even their obsolete aircraft could make life very uncomfortable for a naval task force, let alone an amphibious landing, depending on fighter cover from Ascension Island. After the inexplicable decision to retire both the Sea Harrier and Harrier from service, the Fleet Air Arm now operates no fixed-wing combat aircraft, and although the UK still has a single carrier (HMS Illustrious) in service, there are no carrier-capable combat aircraft in her inventory that could fly off her.

So while Britain found it difficult to put together a carrier task force to retake the islands in 1982, the same feat would be impossible in 2012, because the carrier task force simply cannot be assembled. The aircraft don't exist, with even the remaining Harrier GR9 airframes having been sold to the Americans. If the Argentines take the islands with a coup de main, the United Kingdom can't get them back on her own. Having dismantled her power projection capabilities, she would have to rely entirely on her allies for carrier-based air cover. This is a dismal prospect: the Americans are allied with Argentina, and are hardly likely to be interested in a shooting war in Latin America. The Spanish have a carrier, but the prospect of Spain going to war against Argentina over a British colony seems incongruous at best.

If Argentina invaded, British air superiority over the islands could only be realistically re-established by a French or Italian carrier group. That is the state of British sea power in 2012.

The first of the next generation of British aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth class, is due to enter service in 2016. Until then, the Falklands are Argentina's for the taking, because British politicians did what no enemy ever could: destroyed the Fleet Air Arm.

Wireless panic

I'd write about the moral panic taking over Britain's pundits, but I don't have to, because the Economist already did, brilliantly.



What I will make a note of, however, is the disturbing notion that public disorder gives Western countries an excuse to crack down on social networks and mobile communications. British PM David Cameron called for stopping "suspected rioters spreading online messages". As Canada's CBC News put it in a very disjointed article:

When social media helped protesters organize and overthrow corrupt regimes in the Arab world earlier this year, while also providing citizen journalism when mainstream media was shut out, it was lauded as a tool of democracy.



However, when the same methods are used in a scenario like Britain, they are seen as disturbing, says Megan Boler, a media studies professor in Toronto.

More to the point, when social media are used for dissent in the West, we want to censor them, and worse. In an astonishing decision, two UK men were given four-year prison terms for inciting violence via the social media, even though it couldn't actually be proved that anything they posted had had any effect on anyone (CNN).



Social media censorship is already upon us, however. Remember a while back when I wrote about San Francisco's BART police shooting a man? They recently did it again, and when people gathered to protest, BART shut down cell phone service at their stations.



So when the Egyptian government, or the Iranians, censor Twitter to stop popular protests against the regime, we abhor it as horrible censorship and a human rights violation. When California or the UK does it, we, um.



Although to be fair, this double standard is a bit more complicated than that. After all, when Iran blocks Internet use, they're mostly doing it using technology we sold them.



Having said that, it's all still a little ironic.

My princess

After the royal wedding, people were going mad about how hot the sister of the bride, Pippa Middleton, was. I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. I mean, sure, she's cute, but an entire website dedicated to her ass?

And yes, that's exactly how current I keep my current affairs commentary on this blog.

If I ever find myself watching one of those gawk-at-the-royals events, I know which royal I'm going to be gawking at: Zara Phillips.

That's the number she turned up in at the wedding, and heck, I like it. She's a world champion equestrian...

...and a princess by blood, who was ranked number 3 on Forbes's (!) list of the 20 hottest royals back in 2008. And I'm a sucker for athletes:

Occasionally she wears outfits that are maybe slightly less classy than the one in the first picture, but do show off her, erm, other charms:

You can keep your Middletons: she's the only royal for me.

Obama's foreign policy failure

When Barack Obama was elected, one of the campaign's favorite buzzwords was "change". In the field of foreign policy, the Obama administration was going to make America the darling of the world again. Remember the big New Beginning speech in Cairo? And the state visits that US critics called the "World Apology Tour" that were supposed to usher in a new era of American foreign policy?

So what actually happened?

Iraq

Almost two years ago, I predicted that if Obama actually goes through with the US withdrawal from Iraq, the consequences will be catastrophic. If the Iraqis are abandoned to their own devices, or to put it in Vietnam-era terms, the conflict is "Iraqi-ized", the country will face a real danger of collapse.

So far, this has been avoided through a simple ploy; the Obama administration has said it withdrew all US combat troops, leaving just 50,000 troops in the country. Back in the Cold War, it was customary for both superpowers to station troops in third countries but not admit it. Back then, they were usually called "advisers" no matter what they were actually doing. In the terminology of the time, the US has withdrawn all its combat troops, but left five divisions of advisers.

Now, with the supposed withdrawal carried out, Obama can declare victory. David Letterman actually said it best. Remember when George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and delivered his "Mission Accomplished" speech? As Dave put it: "Well, they're trying that again."

The real withdrawal is coming at the end of 2011. In terms of strategy, I believe these deadlines have a horribly detrimental effect on the coalition effort to stabilize Iraq. What the late 2011 deadline does is it gives all the al-Qāʿida -affiliated insurgents a target to prepare for. If you know the Americans are leaving on such and such a date, start planning to overthrow the Iraqi goverment immediately afterward. Until then, stockpile armaments and supplies and expand your infrastructure. I believe this is exactly what they're doing.

This is exactly what happened in late 1974, when the Americans had left Vietnam. Congress signed a bill banning any US military activity in Indochina, and President Nixon was impeached and resigned. Knowing that the Americans wouldn't intervene, the North Vietnamese Army overran South Vietnam in a matter of months. The entire process of Vietnamization, transferring the burden of the war from the American to the South Vietnamese armed forces, had been a complete failure.

There's a very real risk that the same thing will happen in Iraq a little over a year from now. Remember when George W. Bush talked about the axis of evil and all that, including the idea that Iran was supporting the Iraqi insurgency? He was ridiculed for it back then, but now we can read, via the New York Times, what Wikileaks has let us know about Iran's involvment in Iraq.

NYT: Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias

During the administration of President George W. Bush, critics charged that the White House had exaggerated Iran’s role to deflect criticism of its handling of the war and build support for a tough policy toward Iran, including the possibility of military action.

But the field reports disclosed by WikiLeaks, which were never intended to be made public, underscore the seriousness with which Iran’s role has been seen by the American military. The political struggle between the United States and Iran to influence events in Iraq still continues as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has sought to assemble a coalition — that would include the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr — that will allow him to remain in power. But much of the American’s military concern has revolved around Iran’s role in arming and assisting Shiite militias.

As of this writing, the Iraqi political process is still deadlocked, with no government in place. This year, Iraq ranked seventh on the Failed States Index, barely doing better than Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In all likelihood, the US withdrawal will leave behind a country in total disarray, if it isn't completely taken over by the Iranian-supported militias.

Whatever happens, the hurried retreat from Iraq will ensure that the eight-year war will have one enduring result: some 4,000 American soldiers will have died in order to cement Iran's status as the leading power in the Middle East. The only country that directly gains from the chaos in Iraq is Iran.

Over the years, several left-wing commentators have delighted in pointing and laughing at the US attacking Saddam Hussein, because in the 1980's, the West largely supported Saddam's regime. What they either don't realize, or leave unsaid, is that there was a very good reason why the Americans supported Saddam: his Iraq wasn't the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian islamism was seen as a much greater threat than Saddam.

The defining political dynamic of the Islamic countries of the Middle East has been that there is no clear leader. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran have all contended for a dominant position in the region, with the Iraqi-Iranian conflict being, in one sense, precisely about regional dominance. Now Iran is becoming more and more powerful, and the elimination of Iraq as a counterbalance is a major geopolitical victory for Teheran.

It might be worthwhile for the decision-makers in Washington to recall that the reason the United States became embroiled in Iraq in the first place, that is twenty years ago, is because of the threat Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia. Ever since FDR, Saudi Arabia has been seen as a vital ally of the United States in the Middle East; some readers may be surprised to learn that over the years, the Saudis have received more military aid from the United States than Israel. The reason for the Gulf War was the threat Saddam's Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia. If the Obama administration goes through with the policy of withdrawal, effectively leaving behind a failed state under the sway of Iran, all the Iraq War will have accomplished is to change the threat to the Saudis from the Iraqis to the Iranians.

It's ironic that in the 1980's, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war over the dominance of the Middle East. By some estimates, Iran may have suffered as many as one million casualties in the fighting. The war was inconclusive. Twenty years later, the US fought an eight-year war against Iraq, and this time, Iran won.

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Afghanistan

Next summer, according to Barack Obama's timeline, the US will begin to withdraw from Afghanistan as well. If Iraq was seventh on the Failed States Index, Afghanistan is sixth. The post-Ṭālibān government of Hamid Karzai has turned into a dictatorial, corrupt regime reminiscent of South Vietnam at its worst.

The comparison isn't far-fetched: the coalition forces in Afghanistan are fighting an insurgency based in a neighboring country, waiting for the occupying forces to leave so they can take over. The key to Afghanistan is Pakistan, a fact that Obama seemed to recognize in pre-election debates but has resolutely ignored in office.

Just recently, we were told that American's most wanted man, Usāmah bin Lādin, is living comfortably in northern Pakistan, along with second-in-command Ayman aẓ-Ẓawāhirī and the rest of the gang.

The Daily Telegraph: Osama bin Laden 'living comfortably in Pakistan'

Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living comfortably in a house in the north-west of Pakistan protected by local people and elements of the country's intelligence services, according to a senior Nato official.

The latest assessment contradicts the belief that the al-Qaeda leader is roughing it in underground bunkers as he dodged CIA drones hunting him from the air.

"Nobody in al-Qaeda is living in a cave," according to an unnamed Nato official quoted by CNN.

He added that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command, was also living in a house close by somewhere in the country's mountainous border regions.

Pakistani officials on Monday repeated their long standing denials that the Saudi-born terrorist mastermind was being given safe haven.

Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Pakistani intelligence service has been playing a double game. In addition to channeling US and other Western aid for the anti-Soviet insurgency, Pakistani intelligence moved drugs the other way. Afghanistan has been the world's premier producer of heroin for a long time, and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence moves some of the stuff out of Pakistan. The money they make off the operation is used, among other things, to interfere in Pakistan's internal politics and to fund terrorist operations against India.

As part of this lucrative narcotics deal, the Pakistanis have a cozy relationship with the Ṭālibān, who also fund their operations through the drug trade. At the same time, they're supposedly a staunch ally of the United States and totally committed to the war on terrorism. While the intelligence service continues to move heroin for the Ṭālibān, there is a full-blown insurgency going on in northwest Pakistan, which has by all accounts become the most important basing area for the Ṭālibān operating in Afghanistan.

As in Iraq, so in Afghanistan: the US withdrawal will leave behind a failing state that will probably fall to the Ṭālibān. If this happens, the next target of the insurgency will be Pakistan, and in the worst case scenario, Pakistan will fall to Islamism. It's more than probable that the Pakistani government will have to come to terms with the Ṭālibān, possibly meaning a wholesale radicalization of the whole country and an escalation of the conflict with India.

For the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan before a viable government is in place and the Ṭālibān insurgency has been defeated amounts to, for all intents and purposes, abandoning the country to the Ṭālibān. If the Obama administration goes through with the plan, then the entire Afghanistan War will have been fought for nothing.

At best, US troops will leave behind a corrupt dictatorship that will come to some kind of terms with the Ṭālibān. The country will continue to be used as a base for terrorism, which was the reason the US invaded it in the first place.

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What is needed in both Iraq and Afghanistan is not a withdrawal strategy, but a winning strategy. For Iraq and Afghanistan to become viable states that won't collapse like a house of cards as soon as the last American troops leave, the insurgencies need to be defeated. In the case of Afghanistan, this also means addressing the insurgency in Pakistan.

Right now, none of these things are happening. With the Ṭālibān securely based in Pakistan, largely immune from US operations, there's going to be very little stopping them from retaking Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. The situation in Iraq looks slightly better, but again, there's very little standing in the way of the militias restarting a full-fledged civil war, with Iranian support, as soon as the Americans leave.

Both the Iraq and the Afghanistan war were badly conceived, poorly executed and massively expensive policy blunders. The wars in themselves weren't necessarily a bad idea; getting rid of the Ṭālibān and Saddam Hussein is a victory for the entire world. The way the George W. Bush administration went about them was the problem, and now the Obama administration is compounding the problem by essentially abandoning both countries to the islamists. I genuinely hope I'm wrong and nothing horrible happens. It's just incredibly difficult to see how either Iraq or Afghanistan can become anything other than failed states if Obama goes through with the withdrawal.

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Israel

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the Obama administration has also had grandiose plans for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was even described as a top priority.

That said, this is a topic on which the administration, even the President himself, can't seem to make up their mind. A couple of years back, I wrote about how Obama visited Israel as president-elect and strongly supported Israel's reprisal air strikes. On the other hand, Obama had stressed the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and demanded that Israel stop its "settlement" construction. At Cairo, he told the audience that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements".

Any hopes of a fresh approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were dashed quite spectacularly in March 2010. As vice-president Joe Biden was visiting Israel, the Israeli government announced that it was going ahead with a plan to build 1,600 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem, in direct defiance of the Obama administration's demands that Israel halt "settlement" construction.

In diplomacy, this is what is called a slap in the face, and the Obama administration politely turned the other cheek.

This year, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched a new round of talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, going so far as to say that a Palestinian state could be achieved within a year. Anyone who felt skeptical was amply rewarded when the Israelis torpedoed the negotiations by deciding to continue "settlement" building in occupied territory. Again, the Obama administration was apparently powerless to react.

American policy-makers don't always seem to realize how crucially important the Palestinian issue is in the Middle East. Despite Obama's grandiose talk of a new beginning, his administration's policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in many ways been the worst possible choice. He's managed to antagonize Israel and the Israeli lobby in America, while failing to further the peace process or improve America's relations with the Muslim world.

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Russia and Europe

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration announced plans to build a missile defense system based in Eastern Europe. The goal of the system is to defend the United States and Europe against small-scale missile attacks from a country like Iran or North Korea. The system the Bush administration planned would have a very limited capacity, and would be practically useless against a Russian nuclear attack. Nonetheless, the Russians were vocal in their protests against the system. Their opposition has nothing to do with missile defense in itself, but is geopolitical: a US missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic is a very strong guarantee to these countries that the United States is interested in their security versus Russia.

In August 2008 there was the Georgia war, or if you prefer the Sov...Russian nomenclature, the amred conflict in South Ossetia. According to the Russians, they have stationed peacekeepers in the sovereign states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These sovereign states are recognized by a wide variety of free countries, including and limited to Russia, Venezuela, Nauru and Nicaragua.

Nicaragua.

In what was apparently a colossal miscalculation, Georgia attacked the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which gave the Russians the perfect excuse to invade Georgia. This was old-fashioned sphere of influence politics: the Russians consider Georgia to be in their backyard, and they get to decide what happens in their backyard. It was also a brazen violation of international law and an invasion of a sovereign country. To make things worse, the country in question was a member of the NATO Partnership for Peace, and had recently hosted US troops on a joint exercise.

How did the Obama administration react to Russia's actions? By deciding to scrap the missile shield.

Guardian: US scraps plans for missile defence shield in central Europe

Barack Obama today reversed almost a decade of Pentagon strategy in Europe, scrapping plans to deploy key elements of a US missile defence shield.

Instead, he said, a more flexible defence would be introduced, allowing for a more effective response to any threat from Iranian missiles.

The U-turn is arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration, which spent years negotiating to place silos and interceptor missiles in Poland, and a radar complex in the Czech Republic.

The shift is a triumph for the Kremlin, which has long and vehemently argued that the shield is aimed at neutralising its intercontinental missiles; Moscow had warned of a return to a cold war arms race, and threatened to deploy nuclear missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave, surrounded by EU states.

Yes, of course the administration said that Russia shouldn't invade other countries, but this is the only concrete political action they took immediately following the crisis.

Viewed on its own merits, several commentators considered Obama's missile defense U-turn reasonable. That may be so, but this is to ignore the geopolitical significance of the missile shield for Eastern Europe. Viewed from the Kremlin, Obama's move to scrap the missile shield is pure weakness. The Americans come up with a plan; Moscow protests; the Americans retreat.

This wasn't the first time Obama was ready to sell out Eastern Europe, either. in March 2009, Obama approached the Russians on the subject with a letter.

NYT: Russia Welcomes Letter From Obama

The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said Tuesday that his administration was open to overtures from the United States on its proposed missile defense plan, but he dismissed the notion of a deal in which the United States would shelve the plan in exchange for Russia’s help on Iran.

The statement came in response to a report in The New York Times about a private letter from President Obama to his Russian counterpart, saying the proposed missile defense system would not be necessary if Moscow could help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons and nuclear warheads.

On the Foreign Policy website, a blog post described the letter as "Yalta all over again":

"it could also turn out to be a second coming of Yalta -- a sell-out of America's eastern European allies of epic proportions."

The Yalta Conference was held at Yalta in February 1945 between these three gentlemen and their entourages.

One of the topics of the conference was no less than the division of Europe into two spheres of influence. Probably the most infamous example is Churchill's draft proposal, which he pencilled out on a sheet of paper: he suggested to Stalin that they divide up Central Europe between themselves, listing names of countries and percentages of influence each side would have. For example, Romania would be 90% Soviet and 10% Western, with Greece the opposite. On a smaller scale, Yalta was where the Western Allies agreed to repatriate all Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, regardless of their own wishes or their upcoming fate. This meant death for thousands at the hands of Stalin's execution squads.

In short, at Yalta the western allies sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets. The comparison may be exaggerated, but the way Barack Obama's administration has reacted to the Georgian war certainly doesn't show strength. Offering to trade the missile defence of NATO to the Russians in exchange for fuzzy diplomatic guarantees is unlikely to send a strong message that the United States is committed to resisting Russian expansionism, and the failure to react in any way to the invasion of Georgia only strengthens the message. If anything, the weakness of the Obama administration will embolden the Russians to act more aggressively inside what they consider their sphere of influence. As I'm writing this blog post uncomfortably close to the Russian border, I can say that this is bad news for all of us over here.

It isn't just relations with Eastern Europe that Obama seems intent on sabotaging, though. He caused a stir in 2009 by seeming to downplay the UK-US "special relationship", prompting the Daily Telegraph to ask:

DT: Will Barack Obama end Britain's special relationship with America?

A British official said: "I don't think Obama is steeped in the tradition of the special relationship going back to Churchill and Roosevelt. Of course someone of his generation is going to look at it differently. I think what he looks at are the assets that are brought to the table and the expertise you have. This is a definite change of emphasis."

In the six decades since in which Winston Churchill first coined the phrase special relationship, successive American presidents have paid ritual obeisance to the notion that Britain should assume a place at the White House top table.

Now even allies of Mr Obama believe he intends to extract a higher price for access to the corridors of his power.

This might seem overly paranoid, but a year later, Argentina brought out an old hobby-horse: the Falklands. The Argentinians consider the Falkland Islands their territory, but the islands' British-born population does not. Earlier this year, Argentina threatened to blockade the islands, and Venezuela's dear leader strongly supported them. As a blogger for the Telegraph put it:

So far, the mounting Falklands conflict has been met with deafening silence from Washington. Both the White House and State Department have failed to comment on the situation, despite a significant heightening of tensions. Not only is this another striking failure of leadership on the part of the US administration, but it also demonstrates an extraordinary level of indifference towards America’s closest ally.

As far as Europe is concerned, Obama's foreign policy looks worryingly like an effort to appease the Russians at the expense of Europe.

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All in all, I consider President Obama's foreign policy so far to be a total failure. He has brought no leadership and no new vision to US foreign policy. The mere fact of his election, and the rhetoric of the first few months, seemed to raise the world's opinion of the United States, and got him the Nobel Peace Prize. A prize that was earlier given to organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Grameen Bank, and since to an imprisoned Chinese human rights activist, was given to an American president for making a speech. To paraphrase a percentage-jotting alcoholic, never has so much been awarded to so few for so little.

Obama did succeed in raising hope; where he failed was in capitalizing on it. His Middle Eastern policies range from the inept to the potentially catastrophic, and his humiliation by Israel has effectively ended any hope of an outreach to the Muslim world. If his administration has had any impact on relations with Europe, it has been a negative one, undermining the special relationship with the UK, destabilizing NATO and encouraging the Russians in their quest to become a superpower with a Cold War-like sphere of influence.

I haven't really mentioned East Asia, as I don't feel that I'm qualified to comment on it, but suffice to say that the Obama administration has attracted criticism for a soft policy on China as well, preferring to concentrate on economic interests to the detriment of human rights.

One of the many great injustices of a representative democracy is that in foreign policy, as in nearly all other fields, the consequences of Obama's actions will be borne by his successor. If the rest of his term plays out like this, the next guy is getting a bum deal.

Police brutality, part I

Commuter trains are more dangerous places than you might think. So dangerous, in fact, that San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system employs its own police department of some 300 officers, complete with its own SWAT team.

On New Year's Eve, 2009, the BART trains were packed, and at around 2 a.m. a fight broke out on one, involving a dozen people. Several BART police officers moved in to break it up.

What happened next is disputed, although there are a bunch of cell phone videos of the incident. As people were being cuffed, according to one witness, two police officers rushed a young man called Oscar Grant, and one of them punched him in the face. This officer, called Pirone, and officer Johannes Mehserle, wrestled Grant to the ground. Pirone stood over Grant and called him a "bitch-ass nigger" (SF Chronicle).

San Francisco Chronicle:

Video footage played repeatedly in court showed that as Mehserle raised his gun, Pirone had his left knee on Grant's neck. Pirone's left hand was pressing Grant's head into the platform, and Pirone's right hand was holding Grant's right arm - the same one Mehserle said he had struggled with - behind his back.

As Grant was lying on the ground, restrained by the two officers, Mehserle drew his service handgun and shot Grant in the back. Mehserle claims he was trying to use his taser, but confused his gun for the taser and shot Grant by accident. The jury in his case agreed, and he was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

When the verdict was announced, several hundred people disagreed and rioted. Mehserle will be doing prison time, and resigned from the BART police after the shooting. Officer Pirone was fired, as was his partner, for the same incident.

**

This is the first post in a new series on police brutality. I thought I'd lead with the most recent example of totally excessive force, whatever the actual story behind it. More to the point, as the Oakbook points out, in the 12 months before Oscar Grant was killed, law enforcement officials killed 102 people in the state of California. Meaning that every three days, someone was shot by the police, just in California. What makes the Oscar Grant case unprecedented isn't that someone was shot, but that the police officer in question actually went to court for it, and was accused of murder.

Interestingly, the majority of the people shot by the police in California were Hispanic. As a European, I've always found "Hispanic" to be the most confusing "race" in the United States. The way they see it, when you cross the Pyrenees, you cross a racial boundary. I find that somewhat insane. Also, I was never able to understand whether Brazilians count as Hispanic or not. Hispanic obviously comes from Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, so it might include Portugal and Portuguese speakers.

Wikipedia tells me that in the US, Brazilians either are or aren't considered Hispanics. So, depending on which definition you like, I either have a good segue into a Hispanic getting shot on a train or not. If you don't accept that Brazilians are "Hispanic" by American standards, then you can read about an electrician getting shot here and segue from that.

Those of you that follow the news may remember that in July 2005, the British police shot a Brazilian electrician called Jean Charles de Menezes on the Tube. It's a scary story.

On July 22, 2005, the Metropolitan Police and various other arms of the British government were looking for the terrorists responsible for the previous day's failed bomb attack on the subway system (and a bus). Some of them were watching a block of flats where they suspected some of the terrorists, who were of Middle Eastern or African extraction, were staying. de Menezes was staying at the same block of flats with two of his cousins, and had just been called to fix a broken fire alarm at Kilburn.

Armed officers followed de Menezes from his flat to the subway station. The police were instructed to follow him and prevent him from entering the subway system, as he was believed to be a terrorist. It's worth noting at this stage that the only reason anyone thought he was a terrorist was that he lived in a block of flats that was under police surveillance, and looked foreign. Later, in an attempt to justify following de Menezes, the Met photoshopped a picture of him to make it look more like one of the terrorist suspects (Independent).

Being followed by the police, de Menezes made his way to Stockwell station and got on the subway. Some people may remember reports that he ran away from the police and vaulted a security barrier; those aren't true. The person who jumped over the turnstile was one of the officers. Similarly, reports that he was dressed "suspiciously" are untrue.

De Menezes boarded a train perfectly normally and took a seat. Just as he's sat down, several plainclothes police officers ran into the car, knocked him onto the ground and shot him in the head.

As the Telegraph reports, despite claims to the contrary, the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that the officers did not challenge de Menezes in any way or identify themselves.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report said police had given the Brazilian no instruction "that an innocent man would have understood".

IPCC Commissioner Naseem Malik said: "There is no action he could have consciously taken that would have saved him".

The revelations contradicted the Met's insistence that Mr de Menezes failed to obey a challenge by police at Stockwell Tube station.

What happened was that de Menezes was suddenly attacked by people in ordinary civilian clothes. One of them grabbed him, pinned his arms behind him and forced him down into his seat. While he was being restrained, the other officers shot him in the head seven times at point-blank range. One other bullet hit him in the shoulder, and three apparently missed. He died on the scene.

He was never challenged or even spoken to; he was simply grabbed by the police, restrained and executed. And they didn't even know who he was.

In the inquiries that followed, it emerged that the British police were operating under a policy known as "Operation Kratos". There is a report by the Metropolitan Police Authority on it here. One of the provisions of the policy is that if police are facing a suicide bomber, their only recourse is to shoot him in the head. The explosives most suicide bombers carry are so volatile that a gunshot to them would detonate them, say the police, and they believe that if a suicide bomber thinks he has been identified, he will detonate the explosives.

Whether that's reasonable or not, I'm not one to judge. The way it was implemented, though, is nothing short of shocking. The police had no evidence whatsoever that de Menezes was a suicide bomber, and, of course, he wasn't. Witnesses say de Menezes didn't react in any way to the police coming onto the train, and even as he was being restrained and had a gun held to his head, he appeared calm. Despite the fact that his arms were pinned back, totally restraining him, and that he wasn't wearing any kind of bomb, resisting arrest or behaving in a threatening way, the police officers executed him.

No charges were ever raised against any of the officers, and it was determined that they all acted properly and appropriately. The Metropolitan Police apologized for de Menezes's death, but as far as anyone knows, all the officers involved are still serving with the police.

**

One incident that also sprang to mind after the BART shooting was that of Wolfgang Grams, a member of Germany's Rote Armee Fraktion, a Communist terrorist organization. In 1993, Germany's antiterrorist police unit, GSG-9, was arresting Grams on the platform at Bad Kleinen station. Grams and the police exchanged fire, and he shot two officers, one of whom died.

According to the police, Grams then fell off the platform and shot himself in the head. He was airlifted to hospital but died of his injuries there. His death has always been controversial; the officers present maintain that he shot himself, while there are persistent rumors that he was executed by GSG-9. Ordinarily, I'd think "persistent rumors" like that are pure bunk, if it wasn't for the way some of his fellow terrorists died.

October, 1977. Four members of the Red Army Fraction are being held in maximum security solitary cells in Stammheim prison, in Stuttgart. Since September 6, all four had been denied any mail, telephone use or visits, because of allegations that they continued to direct terrorist activity from their cells. They were also forbidden from contacting each other.

On the 18th of October, Gudrun Esslin was found hanged in her cell. Jan-Carl Raspe was found dead by gunshot, as was Andreas Baader. The fourth RAF member in the high security wing, Irmgard Möller, was alive. She had allegedly stabbed herself in the chest four times.

Möller had since told the press that none of the deaths were suicides, and that she never attempted to kill herself. Certainly stabbing yourself in the chest four times is an unlikely suicide method, but it isn't even the least likely one. It's significant that both men died from gunshot wounds, while one of the women was hanged and the other stabbed. One of them, Jan-Carl Raspe, died from quite an unlikely gunshot, too.

There were no less than three bullet holes in Raspe's cell, but the most significant was the one in him. According to the autopsy, Raspe shot himself in the back of the neck. There was an exit wound in his forehead. Anybody reading this is welcome to try to work out how that's physically possible.

Raspe's suicide is only one of a series of unexplained details in the deaths. At least two of the dead terrorists had written to their lawyers that they suspected the prison authorities were planning to kill them. The official explanation is that when an operation that was partly planned to give them their freedom, the hijacking of a German airliner, went wrong, the prisoners decided to kill themselves. Irmgard Möller, though, maintains they didn't even know about what was going on in Mogadishu.

To be honest, I don't know what happened to any of the four people at Stammheim, or for that matter to Wolfgang Grams or Ulrike Meinhof, who also allegedly hanged herself at Stammheim. The reason I'm going through this is that the shooting of Oscar Grant powerfully reminded me of Wolfgang Grams's death.

But surely the idea of police officers, or whoever is supposed to have killed the RAF members, murdering people and getting away with it is ridiculous?

**

In September 1999, a 46-year old Scots decorator was making his way home to his Hackney flat. He'd been to the local pub, and was carrying a table leg that his brother had been restoring with him, wrapped in a plastic bag. For reasons of their own, someone at the pub called to police to report that a man with "an Irish accent" had just been there, carrying a gun in a plastic bag.

A Metropolitan Police armed response vehicle was directed to the site, and found the man, names Harry Stanley. As the officers challenged him, Stanley turned around to face them. As he turned, the officers shot him. He died on the scene.

After several inquests and deliberations, the officers were held to have acted in self-defence, and returned to duty without facing criminal charges. Why they needed to defend themselves against a non-threatening man armed with a table leg, and why they needed to kill him in the process, was a question the British justice system didn't see fit to answer.

Initially, though, the officers were suspended. In protest, over 100 armed police officers turned in their weapons, because they thought it was so unreasonable that their colleagues had been suspended for shooting an innocent, unarmed man.

To be fair, Stanley was carrying a table leg. In April 2009, 47-year-old newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson was on his way home from work during the G20 protests. As he walked past a police cordon, innocuously minding his own business, one of the riot police attacked him from behind, hitting him with a baton and knocking him to the ground. Tomlinson was injured and later died of a haemorrhage. An investigation was underway but nothing has been heard for almost a year.

Finally, any review of people killed by the Metropolitan Police would hardly be complete without mentioning Blair Peach. He was actually attending a demonstration in 1979, on behalf of the Anti-Nazi League. According to fourteen witnesses, Peach was hit over the head by a police officer. The blow broke his skull, and he later died in hospital. An internal inquiry by the Met concluded that Peach was killed by a police officer, but they couldn't identify the officer because none of the officers present would co-operate with the inquiry.

The Peach case is one of the most shocking examples of the blue wall of silence; the refusal of police officers to testify against one of their own, seemingly no matter what they've done. It continues to be universal policy in police forces around the world, even in the West.

**

The point of this rather long post is to introduce the reader to the idea that people are being killed by the police practically every day. According to statistics from the FBI, from 2004 to 2008 over three hundred people were killed by law enforcement in the United States. In four of those years at least one person was killed by the police every day.

Considering the population of the United States, that isn't really a lot. Then again, looking at spectacular cases like Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, not to mention the ones I've talked about here, even one death like Jean Charles de Menezes's is too many.

From mistaking a taser for a gun to executing a Brazilian electrician on the subway, deaths are the most spectacular examples of police brutality. Overall, largely due to nationalist indoctrination, most citizens of Western countries have a ridiculously high level of trust in the police. I think that it's worth reminding everyone that it may not be justified. When de Menezes was executed, the reaction of many people was that he must have done something to deserve it. The idea that the police would murder an innocent person is so impossible to so many people that they'll grasp at any cognitive straw to avoid admitting that the police might do something wrong. This is how the totally false reports that de Menezes vaulted over a ticket barrier or was wearing suspiciously heavy clothes circulated: people wanted to believe that he must have done something.

In fact, he didn't do anything wrong. Neither did Ian Tomlinson or Blair Peach, neither of who even had any kind of criminal record. All of them were simply innocent, everyday people going about their daily lives until they were murdered by the police. And none of the police officers involved were even charged with anything.

So really, this is the most powerful reason to care about police brutality. No matter who you are, it could happen to you.

The Nazi Pope strikes again

A prominent pedophilia apologist recently visited the UK to preach his opinions, which include opposition to science and sexual as well as gender equality.

One of the big points Richard Dawkins made in his book, The God Delusion, is that we apply a totally different standard to religious discourse than we do to any other kinds. Imagine, for a moment, a prominent European politician going on tour to promote the message that women are lesser creatures than men, the only kind of sexuality that should be allowed is heterosexuality, and that science and progress are evil. Instead of science, we should listen to a 2,000-year-old version of L. Ron Hubbard's money-grubbing cult literature. Also, he is the head of a worldwide organization that has been responsible for covering up serial pedophilia committed by its employees. Of course, they blame gay people.

The idea of a secular politician behaving like this just boggles the mind. It's almost inconceivable. However, if he wears a funny hat, suddenly it's perfectly all right.

**

He also took the time to, once again, float the idiotic canard that Hitler and his fellow Nazis were "extreme atheists" (BBC). There was, of course, an uproar, but quite frankly, nearly everyone keeps missing the point. Nazism was not atheism. It's just as simple as that. Nazi ideology effectively contained a whole pseudo-religion in its "occult side", complete with a mythical cosmogony and all the trappings of religion.

The Nazis didn't persecute the Christian churches in Germany because they were atheists who hated Christianity. Hitler himself was personally opposed to atheism. Some of them sought to replace Christianity with Nazi occultism, while most weren't opposed to Christianity as such at all.

So, in short: stop calling Hitler an atheist. He wasn't one, nor was he in favor of atheism. And neither was the Nazi party in general. This whole argument rests on deliberately confusing anticlericalism with atheism, which is hogwash.

Also, the idea that all Christians in Nazi Germany, or even all churches, were opposed to the regime simply isn't true. The vast majority of Christian churches in Nazi Germany collaborated with the regime. The notion that they resisted Nazism en masse is a post-war invention.

An unexpected note of hilarity in all this was the Catholic Church's official comment:

However, the Catholic Church has moved to play down the controversy, saying the Pope knew "rather well what the Nazi ideology is about".

He does indeed. He is, after all, a former member of the Hitler Youth.

That's another thing. I don't know if many people remember the outrage that erupted when Günter Grass revealed that he'd been drafted into the Waffen-SS during the war. In case it isn't obvious to everyone, that's exactly the same level of involvment in the Nazi war machine as that of the pope. However, when a German writer admits he was in the Waffen-SS, international outrage erupts; when the Catholic Church elects a former Hitler Youth member as pope, this is nothing special.

**

To sum up, the British government spent approximately £20 million of taxpayer money to have this guy come over and talk about his opinions.

Great.

Blimey! Somebody call social services!

BBC: Lincolnshire family warned over girl's bus stop walk

A Lincolnshire family have been warned they could be reported to social services for letting a seven-year-old girl walk alone to the school bus stop.

What?

Mark McCullough, from Glentham, said his daughter Isabelle is capable of walking 20 metres (65 ft) to the bus and crossing a road home.

But the county council said it was concerned for her safety and the road was too busy for her to cross alone.

The authority said it wanted to meet with the family to discuss the issue.

What?

'Absolute joke'

Mr McCullough said the county council sent a letter saying the matter may be reported as a "child protection issue".

"This has made me angry. I am happy for Isabelle to walk from home to the end of the road and, if necessary, cross a country lane and walk home.

"I'm not going to wrap my children up in cotton wool. For a seven-year-old not to be able to walk 20 metres to the top of the courtyard and cross a quiet country road is an absolute joke," he said.

Mr McCullough said he could see the bus stop in Chapel Court from the end of his drive.

Denise Carr, the county council's head of transport services group, said: "As a responsible authority, we have expressed our concern that a seven-year-old is standing on a busy road alone each morning, and then crossing the road unaccompanied after school."

What?

Gay conversion therapy

British Medical Association labels gay conversion therapy harmful, discredited

Following a year-long undercover investigation by a reporter, the British Medical Association has determined that “gay conversion therapy” is not therapy, is more harmful to patients than helpful, and should be banned.

Journalist Patrick Strudwick posed as a patient seeking “gay conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy” for a year. In his report on his experience, he described what amounted to psychological torture; Strudwick went to two conversion therapists. One, a Christian, focused on turning him to focus on her god and tried hard to convince Strudwick he’d been sexually abused. The other focused on explaining to Strudwick that he was somehow “wounded”, and that he had to find the source of those “wounds” to discover the roots of his sexuality.

Both of these “therapists” were licensed and receiving funds via the NHS. Strudwick learned that they use methods created by Joseph Nicolosi, the Christian Evangelical American founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.

Receiving funds via the NHS.

It's very fashionable to laugh about Christian fundamentalism in Europe, because it's something those wacky Americans do, and they're all idiots anyway. Maybe we should look a little harder at what's going on around here, too.

You have got to be kidding me

This is unreal.

Guardian: Treasury plan to force banks to lend in poorer communities

Plans to force Britain's banks to pump money into poor communities in exchange for their massive taxpayer bailouts are being drawn up by the Treasury, a senior minister has revealed.

Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, said last week that the time was ripe to consider a UK version of America's Community Reinvestment Act, introduced in the 1970s to prevent banks abandoning deprived areas.

The CRA has resulted in American banks lending billions of dollars in rundown inner-city districts, and, with public anger at the activities of financial institutions running high, Byrne said he was actively considering a similar scheme for Britain.

"It is an interesting idea, which we are exploring earnestly at the Treasury," he told a fringe meeting at last week's Labour conference in Brighton.

The chief secretary added that there were two issues that worried him and his Treasury team – the lack of any hard evidence that particular communities were being frozen out by the British banking industry, and concerns that CRA-induced lending to poor households in the US had triggered the sub-prime crisis.

"These are serious questions for us to explore," Byrne said. "But we wouldn't be looking at it if we didn't think it would be a good idea."

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.

For those of you not keeping score, the financial crisis was, in my opinion at least, primarily caused by two things: reckless mortgages that led to the housing bubble, and reckless financing. The first was based, at least in part, on the CRA; the second was based, at least in part, on the fact that all major Western banks know their governments won't let them go bankrupt, so they can basically do what they like.

So, in order to avoid another crisis like this, what are we doing?

- the Obama administration wants to label certain companies "systemically important", and extend a guarantee that they are never going to go bankrupt (Bloomberg.com)

- the British Labour Party wants to bring subprime mortgages to Europe

Are they even trying to fix anything?

The Surveilled Isle

It's not exactly a secret to most people that, in the words of Carl "CJ" Johnson, "I wanna emigrate from here". One of the destinations I'd been considering was Great Britain, but over the last ten years or so, I've had to drop it off my list of prospective countries to live in for good. Why? Because it's turning into the most frightening surveillance society in the history of the world.

A pinko conspiracy theory? Maybe. Here's an excellent article on the topic from a communist propaganda rag owned by an infamous Bolshevik:

Bloomberg: George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move

Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.''

During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.

And it doesn't stop there. Just this week, two people in Britain were convicted for refusing to unencrypt data they own.

The Register: Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data

Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.

That's right. Five years in prison if you encrypt files on your hard drive and refuse to hand over the keys to the police.

Speaking of the police, it must be said that they're certainly doing their part. As part of their preparation for next month's Labour Party conference in Brighton, the British police are going to do door-to-door searches of the entire city to find Muslims.

The Daily Express: POLICE ‘GESTAPO TACTICS’ OVER TERRORIST FEAR AT LABOUR CONFERENCE

POLICE plans to quiz thousands of people in a seaside resort to check they are not terrorists were branded “Gestapo-style” tactics last night.


Squads of officers will carry out door-to-door interviews to weed out potential threats to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton next month.

Home owners and workers will have to produce passports, birth certificates, driving licences, proof of employment, and even provide the names of referees to show they are of good character.

They will also be quizzed on their religion to see if they have connections with Muslim fanatics. Critics said the “Gestapo” tactics were another sign that Britain is lurching towards an autocratic state.

An autocratic state? Nonsense! Autocracy, dear critics, means a system of rule by a single individual. It is patently absurd to suggest that Great Britain is becoming an autocracy. Try something like this instead:

After all, door-to-door searches to find people suspected of a heinous offense like an ethnicity or a religion were a specialty not of autocracies but of certain other forms of government that tended to have "soc" somewhere in their name.

I suggest anyone even slightly interested in this topic read the brief article from Bloomberg.com that I linked to above. Great Britain is turning into a truly terrifying place. I'll close with a last quote from that article:

In the bowels of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, a windowless room contains a giant bank of TV screens where the city is monitored around the clock. At the touch of a button, officers can focus on any neighborhood and zoom in on people's faces.

Police hunting the killer of five prostitutes in Suffolk were able to gather 10,000 hours of footage from in and around Ipswich.

By 2016, there will be cameras using facial recognition technology embedded in lampposts, according to the Surveillance Studies report. Unmanned spy planes will monitor the movements of citizens, while criminals and the elderly will be implanted with microchips to track their movements, the report says.