I think my fears, expressed on Friday, that too much of a fuss had been made over the captured boarding party in Iran, were misplaced.
Certainly there was a lot of media attention, but on reflection, the attention was not so much the result of an unhealthy over-sentimental concern whether they lived or died, but was just the latest Reality TV spectacle.
The Sun caught exactly the right note with the headline “We went to Iran and all we got were these lousy suits”.
On the same basis, I think the authorities are right to allow them to sell their stories. Treating global conflict as “I’m a Lieutenant, get me out of here” might make us look decadent, but, let’s face it, we are decadent, and it’s going to be very difficult to appear otherwise.
On the other hand, it also makes us look strong in a strange way. The Iranian regime is fighting for its life, and perhaps hit on the desperate tactic of kidnapping a British naval unit in international waters. If, rather than panicking, we treat the whole affair as a joke or a bit of cheap entertainment, it really drives home the fact that we’re not really even trying. Just imagine how much damage we could do if we actually gave a shit!
Tag: global politics
The 15 in Iran
I didn’t comment on the capture of the Naval personnel in the Gulf, because I think it’s fundamentally a bad idea to make such a big deal out of it. It becomes impossible to use military force effectively if you’re prepared to look at your troops as hostages that way.
If the 15 had been killed by Iraqis two weeks ago the media would pretty nearly have forgotten them by now. If they’d been killed by Iranians, there would be a bit of fuss, but everybody knows that people get trigger-happy on borders sometimes, and it would probably be on the way to blowing over by now.
The British government has been made to look very foolish, not so much by the way the situation was handled, but by getting into it in the first place. It does seem to demonstrate that Blair believes his own propaganda – that Britain has a perfect right to be in Iraq, and no-one else has any right to interfere. As I’ve said before, while Britain’s intervention can be defended, Iran’s taking steps can be defended just as well. Britain’s right to be in control of southern Iraq rests at least in part on possession of superior force. That being the case, there can be no excuse for the navy wandering around the Shatt-Al-Arab with its hands in its pockets as if it was the Serpentine. The accounts I have seen seem to indicate that the boarding party should have been well able to defend itself if not caught unprepared, and that in any case plenty of force was available to protect it had it occurred to anyone that it might be needed. That the party was caught both unprepared and unprotected suggests to me that they did not understand they were in a hostile part of the world among people who did not recognise their God- or UN- given right to be there bossing people around. I find that lack of awareness extremely worrying.
When to leave Iraq
Some of the violence in Iraq is caused by the presence of occupying troops there.
Some of it is caused by rival factions within Iraq.
If the Iraqi government can get to the stage where it is able to control the country and hold it together with just its own forces, the whole regime-change process will have been, by some measures, a success.
Opinions differ as to how likely that is. I am going to assume for the purposes of this discussion that there is a realistic chance it will happen.
If this stage is to be reached, there will come a point where the dangers of staying outweigh the dangers of leaving. I think it would be very optimistic to think that the country will be completely stabilised and pacified while a substantial US and British military presence remains.
Because there is a deep-seated tendency to overestimate risks which are completely outside one’s own control, compared to risks over which one has some control, when that point is reached, it will look as if it is still a long way off.
That is, at the optimal time to leave, it will look far too early. The risks caused by leaving will appear greater than the risks caused by staying.
The time might even have come already. I think there is a considerable risk that, if the Iraqi government were left to try to manage on its own now, it would fail. But there is a risk it will fail anyway. The question is which risk is greater, after correcting for our own biases.
I do not pretend to have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to answer whether the time has come. But, just playing with the basic principles, I am fairly sure that when the time comes, it will not be at all obvious.
The Iran Thing
I’m not well-informed as to the current state of affairs on the ground in Iraq, but there is an important general point that is not being made.
The USA and its allies invaded Iraq with the stated justification that the existing regime was a danger. As I wrote earlier, that is a reasonable justification. One can certainly argue whether the invasion was advisable, but I accept that it was justifiable.
However, whatever strategic interest the allies have in what happens in Iraq, the Iranians have more. Expecting the government of Iran to stand idly by while western countries attempt to fashion a new government there is not only unrealistic but unfair. Of course Iran is going to seek out allies among the factions struggling for influence, and of course it is going to support them, and, in a a situation of civil war, of course that support is going to involve arming them as well as funding them. It would be stupidly reckless of the Iranian government not to arm its allies in Iraq.
Now, if, as is alleged, Iranian-backed groups are fighting against US and British forces in Iraq, there is a problem that needs to be addressed. But pure outrage that Iran could seek to challenge the “rightful invaders” of Iraq will not do. The same logic that puts American and British guns in Iraq puts Iranian ones there too.
One could argue that Iran should refrain from intefering based on an ideal of absolute subservience to the U.N., which recognises the current Iraqi government. I challenge the commentators most hostile to Iran to make that argument with a straight face: I would be quite unable to do so myself.
Alternatively one could take an absolute imperialist line, and say that a Pax Americana is being imposed in Iraq, it will all be for the best, and everybody else better help, stay out of the way, or be squashed. I think that is the line that is taken in effect by the hawkish commentators, but I’m not sure they are really doing so consciously. Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing if such a peace could be imposed without local allies or compromises, but I am sure it is practically out of the question.
I would favour an acceptance that Iran has legitimate strategic interests in the internal struggles of Iraq, and a positive outcome is more likely to flow from some level of cooperation and compromise. Such an approach is made more difficult by the hysterical rhetoric that both parties have used against the other, as well as by the outstanding dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. At the very least, Iran will be seeking assurance that a powerful enemy is not being created on its border, either in the form of a hostile Iraqi administration, or an American base for further aggression. Neither seems likely to me, but governments of every country tend towards the paranoid in assessing the intentions of such unstable regimes.
If the USA does not make it absolutely clear that it has no intention of attacking Iran, then the natural assumption is that it does have such an intention. And that being the case, it would be an essential act of self-defense for Iran to attempt to prevent such an attack by keeping Iraq too unstable. And then, of course, that would be used to show that Iran is part of the problem and that regime change there would be desirable.
The only case in which it would make sense to make a fuss about Iran’s interference in Iraq would be if it was insignificant. In that case it can be used to build up opinion for an attack on Iran, while forcing the interference to continue to escalate wouldn’t matter because it’s not significant anyway. If it is a major problem, the only way to stop it would be to not make a fuss about it, but to try to assure Iran that it is safe. Threats will not be successful, as the more Iran is threatened, the more incentive it has to keep Iraq unstable.
Iran could be expected to favour an outcome in Iraq of a stable representative government, provided it is confident that would not lead to an American leader saying “we have achieved what we set out to do in Iraq, we no longer need the army in Iraq, let’s do the same now to Iran, after all it worked in Iraq.”
Le Figaro front page
John Rosenthal captures the main thesis of my introductory article – that, to the European establishment, Islamic terrorism is a minor distraction from the war with American capitalism – in the front page of today’s Le Figaro.
Michael Wolff
Astonishingly ignorant column in Vanity Fair by Michael Wolff.
“Brand America, which ruled the global marketplace with its vision of cool capitalism, has been discontinued. This is Bush Country now, and the world is recoiling from a new image that makes the U.S. as much a danger to its friends—including chief enabler Tony Blair—as it is to its enemies”
You WHAT?? “cool capitalism”? Capitalism may be tolerated in Britain, more than in mainland Europe, as a necessary evil, but only a handful of lunatic-fringies like me would ever have called it “cool”.
Similarly with the YouGov poll Wolff quotes – I’m sure the results would not have been greatly different in August 2001 or in 1998. Clinton was talked about in very much the same terms as Bush is now. The first reaction in Britain to September 2001 was largely a sniggering “Now they see what it’s like”.
As the infinitely better-informed Robert Kagan wrote in the lecture I mentioned here, ‘Samuel Huntington warned about the “arrogance” and “unilateralism” of U.S. policies when Bush was still governor of Texas.’
If American commentators like Wolff can be so unaware of what is really going on in Britain, of all places, what are the chances of there being any insight into what’s going on in Iraq or Pakistan?
At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam: The major global conflict today is between the EU core and the USA; Britain is very divided regarding the conflict; the antics of primitivist Islam and the war on terror are a sideshow, but may in the long run develop into a proxy war, if the EU position goes from hoping the Islamists can damage the USA to supporting them outright. Blair is as enthusiastic about invading Iraq as he was about invading Yugoslavia, and would have been pushing Bush to invade Iraq had any pushing been necessary.
Online Gambling
This is tricky because it’s about who has the right to be wrong about what.
I think gambling is generally a bad thing. It can be fun, but it can also be generally destructive. While I’m not sure its helpful to throw around words like “addiction”, it’s pretty clear that many people who gamble are behaving very strongly against their own interests.
Should gambling therefore be illegal? Absolutely not. The problems are threefold – you are stopping the harmless entertainment as well as the self-destructive behaviour; you are raising your (and my) judgement as to what is good for someone else over their own judgement*, and you are introducing the plagues of prohibition, including a criminal class and a corrupt enforcement bureaucracy.
However, despite these very strong arguments, the governments of the USA and many of its States have banned gambling (with various indefensible and illogical exceptions for State lotteries, etc).
One of my more eccentric beliefs is in National Sovereignty. If a foreign state (however constituted) wants to get stuff wrong, then unless it directly affects me, it’s really none of my business. They’re entitled to do stuff differently; that’s what being foreign is all about.
That proposition doesn’t flow easily from any theoretical statement of morality or justice. You could build up to it from a concept of democratic rights, but as I don’t restrict sovereign rights to democratic states, that doesn’t help me. For me, sovereignty is a pragmatic rule, a compromise which reduces the amount of conflict between countries – and conflict between countries is one of the major causes of human suffering and poverty. As such, the principle can be overridden in very extreme cases – such as the Rwandan genocide – but those familiar with this blog will be aware that I am very much more cautious than most regarding “humanitarian violence”.
Of course, since no-one is suggesting starting a war to protect the human rights of Americans to play online video poker, I’ve gone off on a slight tangent here. Mind, we did once fight a war for the human rights of the Chinese to take opium, but even those of us who favour drug liberalisation generally give less than wholehearted approval to that project.
There is a kind of consistency to my views: just as Beryl should be free to damage herself by buying lottery tickets (but I would prefer her not to), the USA should be free to damage itself by prohibiting gambling (but I would prefer it not to).**
Now we come to the tricky stuff. What if an American flies to Britain, walks into a bookmaker’s shop in Luton, and puts a bet on a horse.
Well, that’s OK, I think obviously. The US government might choose to deal with the visitor when he gets home (but in fact, according to current law, wouldn’t).
What if the horse race doesn’t run until the visitor has gone home. Can the bookmaker pay the visitor’s winnings, by sending him a cheque or crediting his bank account? The question is whether the bookmaker is simply settling a debt (and the fact that the transaction which gave rise to the debt would have been illegal if it had taken place in the US is beside the point, because the transaction didn’t take place in the US), or whether the payment itself is a transaction with someone in the US which is in breach of US law.
I think the US government is entitled to consider it the latter. Gambling is, after all, not much other than an exchange of money; if you send a cheque to America in settlement of a gambling transaction, you are gambling with someone in America.
Since you are outside US jurisdiction, you are safe, since the US ought to respect your country’s sovereignty.
But if you later travel to the US, their government can justly claim that you have been dealing with the US in a way that is against US law.
To take a parallel but less morally confusing example, if a Nigerian scams me out of a stack of money by claiming to to be MIRIAM ABACHA, and then later comes to Britain on unrelated business, he should be arrested. Exactly what country he was in when he conned me, and what the law is in that country, is beside the point.
When we come to the actual cases that are in the news, most recently Peter Dicks, another question arises. Was he knowingly dealing with the US? I think that matters: if, as far as he knew, he was simply carrying on a legal business, and unknown to him, some of his users were actually in a jurisdiction where the business was not legal, then he hasn’t done anything wrong – it is like my very first example of a bookmaker completing a transaction in Luton with an American visitor.
On the other hand, if he is knowingly transacting business with people in America, he is like the second example of the bookmaker sending a cheque to America – the transaction is taking place between two countries and is illegal in one of them. I would think that in the concrete cases existing, this is the case.
The structure of the internet makes it possible to not know the location or nationality of your customers. This makes the question really difficult. I suppose the US government is still entitled to make its own rules about how careful those who come within its reach should be to avoid acting, while abroad, in a way that it considers illegal. But if it does act against those who as far as they know are behaving totally legally within the jurisdictions they are working in, it is stepping over a line of what is generally considered reasonable behaviour of a state. Note it has not yet done that over the gambling question, as far as I can see.
What I’m really arguing against here is the idea that the internet changes the rules – that if what the server is doing is legal in the place where it happens to be sitting, then no other government should be able to do anything about it. It would be nice if it did, but I say that only because I am generally in favour of freedom, and that would bring more freedom. I can’t defend it in terms of logic or history, though. The internet isn’t the first mechanism to allow people in different countries to deal with each other, and governments have always held that they can restrict or prohibit such dealings according to their own policies.
*It is OK to make a judgement about someone else’s interests – as I have done. It is another matter to deny that person their own (bad) judgement
**That is an analogy – I do not claim that states and individuals should always be looked at in the same way.
The Long War
I’m scrabbling around trying to get a lot of my disorganised thoughts on the War on Terror into proper relation.
The “long war” rationale for the Iraq war is essentially a return to the Heinlein theory that in a world of nuclear weapons, potential enemies cannot be tolerated. The Middle East is a threat for the indefinite future, and therefore must be reshaped politically to remove the danger.
The problem with the theory for me is the scale of its ambition. The project aims at achieving a world, in the relevant 10-30 year timescale, where no medium-sized industrial nation capable of developing nuclear weapons will be hostile enough to be a risk of passing on the weapons to terrorists, or using them.
The strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% successful to be worthwhile, if a partial success would reduce the danger. But a partial success, while reducing the pool of potentially lethal enemies, might well at the same time increase the danger from those remaining in the pool, mostly by increasing their motivation to obtain nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
This is why, in the division of long-term projects I made in the previous piece, the project falls on the “hubris” side. We can be reasonably sure that having more fertile land, or having cheaper energy, 30 or 50 years in the future will be a good thing. It’s difficult to say how good, but the beneficial nature of these things are robust with respect to all sorts of unpredictable developments.
It’s not obvious in the same way that having a military presence in the Middle East will be a good thing. It might well be, but it easily might be a bad thing – there are well-known downsides to empire. The rationale for undertaking the project relies on a number of assumptions about political, technological and economic developments over several decades. They are not silly assumptions, but in combination they are not at all reliable.
Against that objection, there is a “desperation” argument. That says that the long-run prospects as they stand are so bad, that even if an attempt to remove the nuclear threat has a low chance of success, it is a chance worth pursuing, because it’s the best chance we have.
Again, I think that’s too pessimistic. I don’t know how we will deal with the increasing nuclear threat over the coming decades, but as a statement of ignorance of the future, that is not particularly interesting. Something may well turn up. I’m not saying we should assume it must, but the “desperation” argument assumes that nothing will turn up, and I think that is invalid.
A brief history of Nuclear War
In 1945, one nation had nuclear weapons. By 1949, there were two. 1964, five. Today, probably nine.
By now, any industrial nation could develop fission weapons if not actively prevented. Any advanced nation could probably develop fusion weapons.
A matter of a decade or two, it will be possible for half the countries on Earth to make nuclear weapons. A while ago, I suggested that one day a kitchen device would be able to synthesize arbitrary chemicals; if nanotechnology fulfils its promise, then uranium enrichment could become a garage activity. Twenty-five years? Fifty? I can’t see it taking a hundred.
Since 1945, various strategies have been put forward to protect against nuclear attack.
One of the first suggested was world conquest. Robert Heinlein was very insistent in the 40s that the only sane course was for the USA to conquer the entire world before any potential enemy could develop nuclear weapons.
Disarmament was another widely recommended option – stuffing the genie back into the bottle.
The two strategies that were actually pursued were deterrence and non-proliferation. Deterrence worked – and innovations such as submarine-launched missiles reduced the first-strike threat. But as the number of nuclear powers increases, the reliability of deterrence falls, as the possibility of a concealed or deniable attack increase, and there is more chance of a foreign power being desperate or crazy enough to not care about deterrence.
Non-proliferation may have slowed down the spread of nuclear weapon technology, but in the long run, it is failing.
So how bad is the long-run outlook? It is seriously worrying. If, in 2060, the likes of Mohammed Siddique Khan and his associates (or Timothy McVeigh, or David Copeland) can produce a few atomic bombs in a house, it seems inevitable that sooner or later we would see a level of destructive nuclear terrorism which could totally destabilize our society – in the way that present-day terrorism – with home-made bombs, sabotage, and assasination – simply can’t.
What about the nearer future? Say 2025 – enriched uranium is still outside the reach of the hobbyist, but there are 100 or 200 potential or actual nuclear powers in the world. Some of them are politically unstable. Some of them are our enemies. How long can such a situation endure without a society-destroying state or state-sponsored-terrorist nuclear attack?
It’s very difficult to say.
Somehow, I’m just not too worried by all this. It’s just too hard to predict politics that far into the future with any confidence. You can pick one issue – nuclear proliferation – and project and speculate as to how it will develop, which is what I’ve done. What you can’t do is take all the other areas which might change the environment, and predict how all of them will develop over decades. What countermeasures might be developed? How will the world economy change? How powerful will satellite surveillance become? What totally unexpected technological, political or economic development will change the game beyond recognition?
That’s not a conclusive reason for letting the future fend for itself. I’m trying to draw a distinction between the forseeable consequences of our actions, which we must evaluate and include in our calculations, and the attempt to predict and manipulate the state of the world in the far future, which is hubris. Projects which will bring long-term benefits are certainly worthy of consideration, whether they be irrigating the deserts, or developing new energy sources, or anything else useful – we are not sure how valuable their results will be, but if, appropriately discounted, our best estimate is that they will pay for their costs, then they are worth doing. But projects whose value depends on particular assumptions as to the state of the world in the far future – that we will be allied to certain types of government, or that the balance of state versus individual power will move in a certain way – well, given the right assumptions almost any policy can be justified, including policies of “bringing forward” future and actually quite unlikely conflicts to the present.
Update: A more alarming assesment of the current nuclear threat from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Humanitarian Intervention
Chrenkoff asks, since there are 250,000 Iraqis living in Britain, how come none of them are doing suicide bombings?
Separately, Judith Klinghoffer points out that two of the suspects are from Somalia, where the invasion by Westerners was carried out at the urging of the U.N., but was abandoned in the face of strong resistance.
At the same time, the anti-war Neil Craig reminds us of some of the uncomfortable facts about Western intervention in Yugoslavia.
Now my gut feeling has always been against sending armies overseas. It may come as a surprise to my (literally several) readers, and I tend to forget it myself, but if asked outright whether it was the right policy to invade Iraq in 2003, I would say I think it was probably wrong.
There are several reasons why, believing this, I still am generally much closer to the “Pro-war” side than the “Anti-war” side.
I think the policy, mistaken as it may have been, was nevertheless an improvement on the policy it replaced, as I discussed here.