Lebanon again

"Bombing neutrals, persuadables, and friends is strategically stupid. And cruel."

This is from Michael Totten's blog (see comment by Michael at July 15, 01.10 pm), which I like a lot. If you were to map the the blogosphere he seems to be generally associated with the rightwing of American blogs - perhaps on the basis that he has written about how 9/11 changed his previously what Americans call "liberal" (i.e. leftwing) views. But he decided that he had to go and see for himself and headed off to the Middle East as a freelance journalist. His writing from there has been consistently interesting and fair and makes him well worth reading. Yet now he seems to have run into problems with many of his pro-Israel readers and commenters who are unwilling to countenance the thought that Israel's bombing campaign can be anything other than a strategic masterstoke and a moral act of the highest order. Totten argues convincingly that it is neither.

The rant from "Lebanon Profile" in the same comments thread (it can be read seperately here) who blogs at the Lebanese Political Journal is also well worth reading for those out there who feel the Lebanese shouldn't complain as the bombs rain down because it's their fault for not disarming Hezbollah.

Israel - Lebanon

Beirut (photo AP via the BBC)

Haifa (Getty via the BBC)

I spent much of friday, probably like many others who are interested in international affairs, discussing on an internet group what is happening between Lebanon and Israel. On this UK based site I seemed to end up as the minority supporting Israel's right to respond to Hezbollah's act of aggression against Israel. I have no problem in describing it that way: all the "mainstream media", who partisan Israel supporters are normally so willing criticise, describe it; Hezbollah launched rockets against a town in Northern Israel and having used that aggression against civilians as distraction, then crossed into Israeli territory to attack some Israeli soldiers, killing a number and grabbing the two others as prisoners. The leader of Hezbollah,Hassan Nasrallah, has said that the operation had been planned months in advance and therefore this can't be seen as anything but a provocative act of aggression. Hezbollah knew Israel wouldn't sit on it hands and politely say "please will you give us our soldiers back?" and therefore what follows is their fault.

And yet...

After the attacks Israel faced a choice - they could choose the level on which they responded. It is obvious that they would have to try and get their men back. No army will have morale if the soldiers think that they expendable to serve a political whim, and with a citizen-army such as Israel's this is even more the case. So intervention to try and stop the kidnapped soldiers being moved and to try to recover them was to be expected. Likewise who didn't expect the IDF to try and destroy the katusha rocket launchers that have been sending random death and destruction into northern Israel? But the scale and the extent of attacks and the blockade has gone too far for a number of reasons. I see this through two personal perspectives:

Firstly, I have a friend in Beirut. I know that she as a young, independent and assertive woman is no fan of Hezbollah who, as an Islamist party, can only be described as ultra-conservative on all social matters. She also comes from one of the other Lebanese confessional groups that make up the fragile balance in that country. I remember the excited emails she sent me a year ago as she and her friends went out to the streets night after night to join the anti-Syrian protests after the murder of Rafik Hariri. That democratic revolution, that the Bush administration with little justification tried to claim for its own, improved Israel's situation but we all know that the Lebanese situation is still far from perfect. There is a UN resolution requiring Hezbollah to disarm and the Lebanese government has done nothing to implement this, but as the air raids continue why does Israel want people like my friend to suffer? People who do not support the Hezbollah state within a state? Someone who in so many ways should be Israel's natural friend - but who can be a friend when they watch their city bombed by Israeli jets for the third or fourth time in their life?

Secondly I have another friend, this time a fellow Brit, living in one of the wealthy Gulf emirates. He lives in one of those parts of the Arab world that are getting called "the New Arab World", typified by oil wealth and many of the trappings of a western consumer society. He argues that in his experience of the Arab world is that it is split between what you could loosely describe as "rural" and "urban". The rural tends to be conservative, xenophobic, prickly and backward looking whilst the urban is riding the wave of globalisation and becoming - in a positive way - not so dissimilar from the rest of the world. He argues that Beirut in particular had become the central node of that forward looking, cosmopolitan section of the Arab world and therefore the bombing of Beirut airport especially was symbolically significant and shocking to outward-looking wealthy and middle-class Arabs from all over the Middle East. He is somewhat nervous about the anti-Western backlash that he believes is likely to result. This will also not help Israel.

So I do not question Israel's right to react, but I do question her chosen methods. Here's hoping that all the people of both Israel and Lebanon see peace sooner rather than later.

The NatWest 3 vs. Larry "the Chef" Zaitschek

Larry "the Chef" Zaitschek - come on... you couldn't make this stuff up!

Following on from my post from a couple of days ago, I was tipped off by "Tiggs" on UKC, where the NatWest three extradition is being debated, that according to Alun Jones QC representing the extraditees (is that a real word?) who was being interviewed on the BBC, it is Senators Kerry and Kennedy who are holding up ratification of the US-UK extradition treaty in the US Senate. Kerry and Kennedy - it's too clichéd to be true surely? I've been digging a bit on whether the "Irish Lobby" is really behind the resistance to the treaty's ratification and can't come up with much beyond the usual suspects in the British media who are willing to make allegations but haven't given huge amounts of evidence to back them up, such as Boris Johnson. I find Boris deeply, deeply annoying so would normally take anything he says with a pinch of salt but similar things are being said by theIndy's business columnist, Jeremy Warner, by the Guardian's pet compassionate conservative (I bet you didn't know they had one of them) Jesse Norman, and by Sir Menzies Campbell leader of the the Lib Dems.

Larry "the Chef" Zaitschek's walk-on cameo in this drama is that he is according to the British authorities is the only person that they have asked to be extradited from the US recently. He is accused of being involved in the break-in at Castlereagh Barracks in Northern Ireland in 2002. Castlereagh is an intelligence centre for the British Army in Northern Ireland and information stolen in the break-in related to informers in the IRA. The story is convoluted to say the least - many including the former Northern Irish Police chief Ronnie Flannagan said that it was an inside job involving "rogue elements" within in security forces. Then later it was decided it was the Provos after all. What Larry "the Chef" Zaitschek had to do with all this isn't apparent to the public - he got the nickname not because he has penchant for filleting his victims with a steak knife as any Soprano's fan might expect, but for a rather more mundane reason: he is a chef. Oddly the only Stakeknife in this story wasn't Larry's but MI5's.

All rather bizarre. If anyone is so inclined they can read more about Castlereagh and the unfortunate Larry/evil terrorist mastermind Zaitschek (delete as appropriate) here and here.

Shehzad Tanweer video

A bit behind the news but I just watched the Shehzad Tanweer video that was released on the anniversary of the London bombings last Friday. Tanweer detonated the bomb on the tube near Aldgate station. The video is interesting in a number of respects.

Firstly, because it includes Ayman al-Zawahiri, it is being used as evidence that the Qaeda al-Jihad core who are presumed to still be hiding in the Afghanistan/Pakistan borderlands were directly involved in planning the attack. I heard one commentator on the radio – sorry, I forget who – saying that this was far more scary than if the group had been “self starters” who had not been in contact with the al-Qaeda core. I would disagree with that: if al-Qaeda was involved it suggests that if the surviving leaders are captured or killed it would lessen the risk of terrorism. A self starter group shows two things: 1) that the ideology alone of al-Qaeda is attractive enough to make some young men kill and 2) that staging a complex multi-target bombing campaign is something that can be done by “keen amateurs” with no training. This in particular is a very worrying thought. If, for example, the BBC’s Frank Gardener is right and we can take this as evidence of a 7/7–al-Qaeda core link, then it is almost reassuring that this was truly a global-terrorist plot masterminded by an evil terrorist genius (Zawahiri) rather than a bunch of underachieving Leeds lads who decided one day that they wanted to kill lots of their fellow citizens.

Having said all that – the video itself can not be taken as proof of the link. Tanweer is speaking in front of the same background as Mohammed Sidique Khan was (see photo left) in the video that was released of him in September of last year. At that time there was discussion of various issues arising from the video, such as unusually for a “martyrs testament” Khan was not armed (compare this to al-Zawahiri in the Tanweer video who is sitting next to a gun, as bin Laden always does). This led some to suggest that it could have even been filmed in the UK where access to weapons is very difficult. It isn’t certain either way but it could be that al-Sahab, al-Qaeda’s media arm, could have received the videos of Khan and Tanweer after the attacks in London and stitched them together with al-Zawahiri at a later point. The Tanweer video is very slick right down to the “Crime Watch”-style reconstruction of the explosives training the Yorkshiremen are said to have received in Qaeda al-Jihad base, but nothing in it would seem to prove that it couldn’t be a case of al-Qaeda taking credit for actions of people they didn’t know about. A story in the Telegraph from a couple of days ago has Pakistani intelligence saying they know the name of the man who connected the Yorkshiremen to al-Qaeda, but the Metropolitan police are continuing to say that they don’t know how connected they were and this was after the release on to the internet of the Tanweer video.

The other interesting thing about the video is presence of Adam Gadahn, a.k.a. Azzam the American. If I remember correctly, Azzam the American used to cover his face but since his identity became public knowledge he seems to have given up on that. It’s interesting to speculate as to whether his contribution to the video, which is somewhere between an undergrad political science presentation and a crazy-religious-man rant, just reflects him or whether it is part of a wider al-Qaeda effort to politicise their message. One of the most interesting comments made by the video’s voice over is: “The love of martyrdom for the sake of Allah was not motivated by poverty, unemployment, and emptiness, as some mercenary media outlets try to portray to us. It was motivated by the love of Allah and His messenger.” Gadahn seems to suggest much more political motivations as opposed to the this religious explanation.

I’ve always been prejudiced against heavy metal mainly for its crimes against fashion and music – but interestingly Gadahn was supposedly well into death metal before his fateful conversion to the violent Jihadi version of Islam. The two things probably aren’t connected but you never know…

23:19 update (yeah, I know I really should have better things to be doing at this time of night) There was one word that Tanweer used that I didn't know: dunya. The context he uses it in is: "Oh Muslims of Britain, you, day in and day out on your TV sets, watch and hear about the oppression of the Muslims, from the east to the west. But yet you turn a blind eye, and carry on with your lives as if you never heard anything, or as if it does not concern you. What is the matter with you that you turn back not to the religion that Allah has chosen for you? You have preferred the dunya to Allah, His messenger, and the Hereafter." As a slightly lazy researcher, I turned like so often before to the collective brilliance of British climbing community* (who tend to hang out at UKclimbing.com like teenagers at bus stop up to no good), and once again got a perfect answer within minutes: dunya is both Urdu and Arabic for "world" and in this case means the secular world. Many thanks to Masood for the help with the Urdu.

*For any fellow UKCers reading this - note I said "collective brilliance". That doesn't make you as an individual brilliant at all. ;-)

Terrorists and freedom fighters?

We'll start today's post with a fun game - one of the pictures below shows some plucky freedom fighters, the other shows some dastardly terrorists. See if you can spot the difference (the game only works if you aren't a postmodernist). The answer can be found at the bottom.

I haven't really been following the story of the "NatWest Three" very closely. In brief three British bankers have been charged with some kind of money-laundering offences in the US in connection with the Enron collapse. They claim that a) they're innocent and b) the US has no jurisdiction over them as the contested activities took place in London, not the States. It would never have become much of a story if it hadn't been that the US is trying to extradite the men on the basis of a updated extradition treaty that the US and UK signed after 9/11 that was designed to help move terrorist suspects more rapidly between the countries. The political outrage in Britain is not even over that it is suspected white-collar criminals who the US is trying to use the treaty extradite, as opposed to terrorist suspects. Rather it is that the US is yet to ratify the treaty meaning that the UK can't extradite from the US on the same basis as the US is trying to do to British citizens. The Times has a good easy to follow explanation of the situation here.

But what sparked my interest is why the US hasn't ratified: the blame is being laid squarely at the door of the Irish-American lobby in Washington, who British commentators (such as Sir Menzies Campell, leader of the Liberal Democrats speaking on BBC Radio 4 this morning) accuse of trying to protect suspected IRA terrorists or terrorist-fundraisers in the US from the British legal system. The FT quotes the Irish Freedom Committee*, as saying the treaty would represent the "ushering in of British law in the US once again". Yep - and they better watch out or the Red Coats might be back to burn down the White House once again just to make the point!

The Republican lobby in the United States had the wind knocked out its sails on 9/11, suddenly supporting "the freedom fighters" wasn't quite as romantic a proposition as before. But it is interesting that if these stories are true, the lobby remains influential enough to stop Congress from ratifying a treaty with the country's closest and most loyal ally leaving the, supposedly much loved in America, British prime minister swinging in the breeze once again.

*It should be noted that these guys seem, well, a bit hardcore/bonkers. Presumably the FT was looking for a juicy quote and 30 seconds on the IFC's website will give you plenty.

P.S. the answer to the quiz is according to an unhappy-looking cat being put in box, they are of course both at the same time.

Ambling into a war - the UK in Afghanistan

Unless you are a Taliban supporter, there isn't really much 'politics' in the Afghanistan mission. The democratically elected, and UN-recognised, government of Afghanistan has asked for the presence of the international force to assist in security operations and nation building. Just about everyone accepts that the instability in Afghanistan prior to 2001 that allowed al-Qaeda to openly operate was not a good thing. There are 'war-mongering imperial and ex-imperial powers' (the US and UK) taking part in the mission alongside 'cheese eating surrender monkey euro-weenies' such as Finland and Germany, so everyone should be happy.

Except no one really cares anymore: Afghanistan is just "soooo 2002 darling!" And hence the fact that there is war on there seems to come as a surprise. I was listening to Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times correspondent, on the 8.1o interview from the Today Programme (get it through iTunes as a podcast or right click and "save link as" this) about her experience being ambushed and caught for two hours in a vicious firefight when the Taliban attacked the Paras she was with. Perhaps it was just her voice but it sounded like she was about to cry as she recounted the story; I most certainly would have been in a similar situation. What leaps out from her account (you can read her very good article here) is firstly the problems with communications that the soldiers had and secondly the inability for the British forces to be able to provide air support.

If this kind of thing keeps happening and British soldiers die as they did elsewhere in Helmand province that day, suddenly all support for the British presence in Afghanistan will start flowing away. I'm absolutely not a military expert, but it seems all through my life I've been hearing about the general rubbishness of the British military's communication systems. Why is this? Perhaps it is because once you actually do manage to call for help - they've got nothing to send anyway. As Alex, the Yorkshire Ranter, who seems to know a lot about this sort of thing, said in a recent post on the same subject:
"AAC Apaches are expensive, RAF Harriers are noisy, but not having to rely on the USAF for your air cover is priceless."

Ronaldo (the Portugese one)

I'm really not that much of football fan, but this made me laugh. Thanks to the anonymous artist who produced such a masterpiece!

Oh no. Not again...

40 years of hurt... etc. But in the best traditions of European integration: "Allez le Bleus!!!"