“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” — Sun Tzu

The shiny new American M16s and camouflage uniforms of some groups of ISIS fighters might give a clue to the question no one in our compliant mainstream media is asking. How did ISIS become well-armed, well-funded and well-trained? Now this tragedy (farce) is being played out in an equally ill-conceived response.

Not only does the Obama administration ignore Sun Tzu’s age old warning, it also wants war on the cheap, providing air support while locals do the fighting, hoping also that it weakens possible adversaries. It wants war without significant troop involvement (and casualties), at least until it leaves office and hands the problem over to its successor. A look at the disastrous policy making in the area covering not just this administration but several others is in order.

Three decades ago, this country was aiding Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against the then new fundamentalist regime of the Ayatollahs in Shia Iran. At the time, Iraq’s government was secular with a Christian prime minister. US help blunted a final Iranian offensive resulting in a stalemate. After the end of that war, and lacking clear signals from the US, the uncontrollable Saddam was off his leash.

The US failure to clarify its position led to his Kuwait adventure, and subsequently to the first US-Iraq war. Saddam’s defeat, however, was followed not by Saddam’s removal but by more suffering for the Iraqi people through economic sanctions. One result was the death of a half-million children for lack of medicines and other necessities.

It did not stop there. In the wake of 9/11 came Bush II’s mega-dollar war based on false claims. Iraq was occupied, and the fateful and disastrous decisions (de-Ba’athification, the disbandment of the old Iraqi army and political sectarianism) to follow led to what has become essentially a Shiite regime in Baghdad and a Shiite army hounding Sunnis.

That some Sunni force would emerge was inevitable; that it came from Syrian rebels assisted indirectly by the US is not only tragic and ironic but also the result of a continuing deeply flawed policy targeting secular regimes. We are now back in Iraq fighting fundamentalist Sunni forces in the form of ISIS the so-called Islamic State.

US policy in Iraq has been a succession of failures: first the failure to impress on Saddam the unacceptability of a Kuwait invasion; then, after the first war became inevitable, the failure to remove Saddam and continue a secular regime under another leader; and the appalling failure after the second war to maintain a secular regime (like the Ba’ath Party which kept fundamentalists in check). The first would have prevented two expensive wars; the last the necessity for the present one. The lessons have still not been learned for the US continues its effort to oust a secular government in Syria.

The latest Iraq intervention, namely, the plan to fight ISIS, is irrealizable both operationally and strategically. On an operational level, it relies on arming and training the moderate almost non-existent Syrian rebels of the Free Syrian Army. One need only consider the time, training and money spent training the Iraqi army and its abysmal performance against ISIS to assess the chances of success. Moreover, the Free Syrian Army smashed repeatedly by ISIS signed a non-aggression pact, and, so far, have declined to join Obama’s effort.

Strategically the situation is almost farcical: Fighting ISIS in Iraq, the US is placed on the same side as Iran and its Shia sphere of influence, i.e. the Iraqi Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, the Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad. In Syria, from where ISIS originates and is the strongest rebel group fighting the Assad regime, the US is on the opposite side, i.e. against the Assad regime and its supporters (who happen to be the same Iran, Hezbollah, and the Shia government in Baghdad).

Thus the policy upends itself with the invisible wall of the Syria-Iraq border. About the only consistency for the Democrats recalls the so-called invisible wall, between commercial and investment banking, for which the Democrats traded the real wall of Glass-Steagall. The financial disaster was not long in coming.

There are over a billion Sunnis to about a 100 million Shia in the Muslim world who, until recent fundamentalism took hold, lived fairly peaceably together, or in their own countries — principally Iran for the Shia, and the rest of the Muslim world for Sunnis.

In a recent Vice Media documentary, many in the Sunni population under ISIS control in Iraq actually favored ISIS rule over what they characterized as Baghdad’s Shiite Army. It is not unlikely then that US actions will anger the Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere. Concurrently, arming Syrian rebels against the Shia-backed Assad regime, will inflame the Shia. Piling on sectarian hatred raises the danger level for the US in an already steaming Muslim world that blames it for Israel’s recent pointless Gaza invasion killing over 2000 — pointless because Israel in the end was forced to accede to Hamas’ demands for easing some of the border controls imprisoning Gazans — and even more for the lack of sympathy for the victims, two-thirds civilian and mostly children, women and old men.

Meanwhile, the Iraq-Syria two-step is being lauded by the same Washington pundits who brought us the multi-trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, their civilian misery, and their Islamic fundamentalist consequences, as well as the chaos in Libya and its aftermath … a fundamentalist resurgence in Central and West Africa.

Arshad M Khan (ofthisandthat.org) is a retired professor and occasional contributor to both print and electronic media.

The post ISIS Crisis: Self-Made And Lacking Coherent Response appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Ömer Aydoğan

In August, the German government decided to deliver military supplies to the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government in September to help them in their fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS). “It is not only a question of alleviating the suffering of the people, but of preventing this suffering”, said Chancellor Angela Merkel in the German Bundestag.

The first shipment of German weapons to aid the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq have left the country on Thursday, transported by a plane belonging to the Royal Netherlands Air Force. The German military stated that the delivery had been scheduled to depart on Wednesday, but that the flight was delayed due to a technical problem, which was later repaired at the airport by Dutch technicians.

The delivery includes 520 G3 assault rifles, 20 heavy machine guns, 50 anti-tank rocket launchers, protective eyewear, and medical equipment. The total value of the first shipment of German weapons is about 70 million euros (89 million US dollars). Further weapon deliveries are scheduled for the beginning of October.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen also arrived on Thursday in Erbil to meet with Iraqi Kurdistan’s President Massoud Barzani. At the press conference following the meeting Leyen stated “We assure you that we are beside you to tackle this crisis”, adding, “It is clear that a lot of support has arrived but more is needed”.

Barzani stressed the importance of international support, adding that the region is in need of further military aid. “We hope to get more advanced weapons regardless of quality or quantity to boost the morale of our fighters”, Barzani said.

According to the BBC, “Germany has already sent humanitarian aid to the Kurdish region to help refugees displaced by IS, which is persecuting Shia Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities.”

The post First Shipment Of German Weapons Arrives In Iraq appeared first on Eurasia Review.

China has one of the worst records on human rights. Its inhuman and savage treatment of Uyghur (also spelled as Uighur) Muslim minorities living in the far western Xinjiang region (East Turkistan) is one of the worst our world is witnessing outside how the Rohingyas are treated inside Myanmar.

Beijing’s leaders do not tolerate any dissent and consider anyone questioning their Draconian measures inside Xinjiang an enemy of the state. On September 23, Tuesday, a Chinese court imposed a life sentence on Professor Ilham Tohti (born October 25, 1969), a Uyghur economist who taught at Beijing’s Minzu University, on separatism-related charges. The Urumqi People’s Intermediate Court handed down the sentence after a two-day kangaroo trial of Prof. Tohti. The court also ordered the confiscation of all of his possessions. The 44-year-old defendant was calm during the session but shouted “I don’t accept this!” when the sentence was read out. It is the most severe penalty in a decade for anyone in China convicted of illegal political speech. Political activist Wang Bingzhang was the last person to receive a life sentence for political speech when he was convicted in 2003 after starting a pro-democracy publication outside China and founding two opposition parties in the country.

Professor Tohti, widely recognized around the world nowadays as China’s Mandela, is known for his research on Uyghur-Han relations and is a vocal advocate for the implementation of regional autonomy laws in China. In 2006 Tohti founded a website called, Uyghur Online, which published articles in Chinese and Uyghur highlighting issues affecting the ethnic group. In mid-2008 authorities shut down the website, falsely accusing it of forging links to extremists in the Uyghur diaspora.

In a March 2009 interview with Radio Free Asia, Prof. Tohti criticized the Chinese government’s highly provocative and discriminatory policy to allow migrant workers into Xinjiang Uyghur while the native Uyghurs remain unemployed inside the province and their young women moving to eastern China to find work. He also criticized Xinjiang Uyghur Governor for stressing the stability and security of Xinjiang while neglecting basic human rights of the Uyghur people. That same month, Tohti was detained by authorities, accused of separatism, and interrogated.

On July 6, 2009 after ethnic rioting broke out between Uyghurs and Han in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the Uyghur Online was cited in a speech by the regional Governor as a catalyst for the violence. On July 8, 2009, Radio Free Asia reported that Tohti’s whereabouts were unknown after he had been summoned from his home in Beijing. The Chinese dissident Wang Lixiong and his Tibetan activist wife Woeser started an on-line petition calling for Tohti’s release, which was signed by other dissidents including Ran Yunfei. The Amnesty International, PEN American Center and Reporters Without Borders also issued appeals or statements of concern on his detention.

Prof. Tohti was released from detention on August 23, 2009 along with two other Chinese dissidents, Xu Zhiyong and Zhuang Lu, after pressure on Beijing from the international community. Tohti was warned against criticism of the government’s handling of riots. The authorities also prevented him and his family from leaving Beijing.
Chinese authorities arrested and detained Professor Tohti again in January 2014 along with seven of his students. They removed computers from his home. He was held at a detention center thousands of miles from Beijing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

On April 1, 2014, Professor Tohti was awarded the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, an American human rights award given to writers anywhere in the world who fight for freedom of expression. According to the statement from PEN, Tohti, was “long harassed by Chinese authorities for his outspoken views on the rights of China’s Muslim Uyghur minority. Tohti represents a new generation of endangered writers who use the web and social media to fight oppression and broadcast to concerned parties around the globe. We hope this honor helps awaken Chinese authorities to the injustice being perpetrated and galvanizes the worldwide campaign to demand Tohti’s freedom.”

Last week, Prof. Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment in a kangaroo court. The court ruled that Ilham Tohti had “bewitched and coerced” students into working for the website and had “built a criminal syndicate,” according to the government’s official Xinhua News Agency. “Tohti organized this group to write, edit, translate and reprint articles seeking Xinjiang’s separation from China,” Xinhua said. “Through online instigation, Tohti encouraged his fellow Uyghurs to use violence.”

During the trial, prosecutors cited Ilham Tohti’s lectures and online writings, including his discussion of the different roots of the Han Chinese and Uyghur peoples. Speaking in his own defense, Ilham Tohti denied that he had encouraged separatism while addressing Xinjiang’s cultural and legal challenges.

Amnesty International stated that Tohti’s legal team were never shown evidence and furthermore denied access to their client for six months, and condemned the trial as an “affront to justice”. On September 24, 2014, the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry criticized what he called a ‘harsh’ sentence, and called for Tohti’s immediate release.

Prof. Tohti’s lawyer Li Fangping also complained of the harsh sentence. “Of course, this life sentence is too much,” Li said by telephone from outside the courthouse. “But he has said that no matter what the result, this should not lead to hatred. He has always said he wants to create a dialogue with the Han Chinese.” The life sentence will leave Ilham Tohti’s wife, Guzulnur, with no means to take care of their two young children, Li said.

Ilham Tohti’s 20-year-old daughter, Jewher Ilham, said in Indiana, where she is studying, that she will continue to fight for her father’s release. Her father was arrested in January 2013 at Beijing’s main airport as he was boarding a plane to take her to school in the United States.

“He wanted me to stay in a land that has freedom,” she said. “I’m speaking out for him. I won’t stop.”

The European Union condemned the sentence, calling it “completely unjustified,” and urged that he be released immediately. “The EU deplores that the due process of law was not respected, in particular with regard to the right to a proper defense,” it said in a statement. After his arrest, Ilham Tohti was held for about eight months without being able to meet with his family or lawyers.

“Ilham Tohti worked to peacefully build bridges between ethnic communities and for that he has been punished through politically motivated charges,” William Nee, a China researcher at human rights group Amnesty International, said in an e-mailed statement. “Tohti is a prisoner of conscience and the Chinese authorities must immediately and unconditionally release him.”

Chinese writer Wang Lixiong said on Twitter that the government had created a “Chinese Mandela,” referring to South African leader Nelson Mandela, who was jailed for 27 years before becoming president. Columbia University Tibet specialist Robert Barnett called the sentence “deeply shocking.”

As I have written in the past, ethnic tensions have run high and flared into violence in Xinjiang, where many of China’s Uyghurs live under a very hostile and oppressive condition. There is no doubt that the harsh sentence against Professor Tohti again demonstrated Beijing’s intolerance of criticism from even the most conciliatory of voices. By imposing a life sentence, surely, China has not learned the basics of nation-building in the 21st century.

If Beijing is genuinely serious about territorial integrity it must learn to accept criticism of its inhuman and discriminatory policies and follow a path of reconciliation with the Uyghurs and Tibetans, who are denied basic human rights, and work towards creating a sense of belonging to them, away from its faulty Hanification policies that only breed hatred and nurture secession.

In this age of information technology, Beijing simply cannot fool anyone with its Goebbels- and Mao Tse Tung- era propaganda but only its dogmatic, brain-dead Hans who are unwilling to wake-up and see the world as it is. It must learn to adapt for greater good of everyone living inside China, and not just the majority Hans. Uyghurs matter! Their Mandela needs to be released immediately.

The post China’s Draconian Sentence Against Her Mandela Is Suicidal – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Parameswaran Ponnudurai

Former Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping would be turning in his grave at the ongoing debate over Beijing’s recent decision that effectively ruled out promised open elections for Hong Kong’s chief executive and lawmakers.

Deng’s “one country, two systems” model—based on which the former British colony’s future would evolve after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997—is at the heart of the current wrangling between Chinese leaders and the pro-democrats in Hong Kong after Beijing decided it would vet candidates for the first popular elections in Hong Kong in 2017.

Democratic lawmakers in Hong Kong have threatened to veto the plan by China’s main legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC) requiring candidates for Hong Kong’s next leader to be screened by a committee heavy on Beijing backers as well as business leaders—making it unlikely that those opposed to the Chinese leadership will appear on the ballot.

The plan rejects genuine universal suffrage and contradicts the “one country, two systems” model introduced by the late Deng, who had promised that Hong Kong would keep its civil liberties and gradually transition to democracy while the mainland practiced socialism.

The pan-democrat camp comprising political factions in Hong Kong that support increased democracy under the “one country, two systems” is calling for universal suffrage in accordance with “international standards.”

But Chinese officials claim there are no such requirements under the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, which was written following the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong that set out arrangements for the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong to China under the 1984-designed “one country, two systems” model.

Is Beijing’s decision to restrict electoral reforms in Hong Kong a breach of an international contract based on the terms of Britain’s handover?

“Although the Joint Declaration, a bilateral—international—treaty, does not talk about universal suffrage, it can be said that the Basic Law entrenches China’s basic policies— including universal suffrage—towards Hong Kong mentioned in the declaration,” Surya Deva, Associate Professor at the School of Law in City University of Hong Kong, told RFA.

“If we make a combined reading of the two instruments—Joint Declaration and Basic Law—then the NPC Standing Committee’s decision breaches what the Chinese government had promised to the UK government,” he said.

University students and lecturers in China’s special administrative region, as Hong Kong is now called, have threatened to boycott classes beginning next week, expressing disgust at Beijing’s assertion that it has the sole prerogative over choosing the election candidates.

And pro-democracy activists have vowed a civil disobedience campaign to bring Hong Kong’s financial hub to a standstill in upcoming protests over what they call “fake Chinese-style democracy.”

Why did Beijing pursue this line of action?

Chinese leaders are concerned that any vibrant democracy in Hong Kong could lay the groundwork for similar demands in mainland China that could cause a possible breakup of the country.

“The Chinese in Beijing are making their calculations not only based on what they see in Hong Kong but their own real concerns about the possibility of a color revolution in China,” Jonathan Pollack, a China expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, told RFA.

“These are the things that agitate more than anything else—that may explain in part the decision [on elections in Hong Kong],” he said.

Firm control

China’s President Xi Jinping, haunted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “color revolutions” that toppled the regimes in former Soviet republics, looks determined to keep his one-party communist state in firm control of the country.

He has launched a campaign to fight corruption targeting both “tigers and flies” but has locked up anti-graft crusaders and stepped up a crackdown on grassroots political activism and online dissent.

The reversal of the democratization trend in Hong Kong has dented the international credibility of China, already the world’s second largest economy, which has pledged to be a more responsible rising power in the world stage, said George Chen, financial editor for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, now participating in a fellowship program at Yale University in the United States.

“If Beijing can so easily break its promise for Hong Kong, then the rest of the world must ponder whether the Chinese government will live up to other international commitments,” he said in an article on YaleGlobal Online, a university publication.

Chen warned that the one country, two systems scheme “is now at the risk of collapse due largely to increasing interference, directly or indirectly, by Beijing in various aspects from local elections of legislators to freedom of the press, for decades widely considered one of Hong Kong’s core values alongside the rule of law.”

He also suggested that China is concerned that any Western-style democracy in Hong Kong could act as “a beacon for supporters of democracy in mainland China, in particular those most-developed cities including Guangzhou and Shanghai where the fast-increasing middle-class has strong desire for social justice and political reform to protect interests of local residents.”

“Given the porous nature of communication between Hong Kong and the mainland, freedom granted to Hong Kong people to elect candidates not vetted by Beijing would have a subversive effect on China,” he said.

Beijing’s decision on Hong Kong has also doused hopes in Taiwan of maintaining the island’s vibrant democracy if it integrates with the mainland.

Deng’s “one country, two systems” model is the starting point for any discussions for eventual reunification of Taiwan.

“I think the operative test case, if you will, is whether or not there is a tolerably satisfactory outcome here [in Hong Kong] that would in theory at least over the longer run convince the citizens of Taiwan there is a basis on which they can arrive at a negotiated agreement with the mainland” Pollack of Brookings said.

“But clearly to the degree that there is such dissatisfaction in some circles in Hong Kong, it doesn’t for the moment suggest a very good precedent.”

Beijing views Taiwan, which has developed its own democratic, capitalist system since Chinese nationalists fled there from the mainland in 1949, as a province of China that must one day be brought back into the fold.

‘Not tolerate reform’

Brad Glosserman, the Executive Director of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the ruling Chinese Communist Party “would not tolerate any potential reform that would even open the door to a challenge to its authority and its legitimacy and its ability to maintain control over the country.”

“So obviously the degree to which Beijing has drawn a line in [Hong Kong] has demonstrated that there are very definite limits that Beijing is not prepared to cross,” he told RFA.

The Hong Kong case has also raised doubts about Beijing easing controls in the restive autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.

Deva of City University of Hong Kong believes the push for greater democracy in Hong Kong would increasingly get connected with the struggle of the people of Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.

“Since people living in these regions or jurisdictions have a different language, culture, religion, sociopolitical system, and freedoms, they do not wish to buy the ‘uniformity’ notion sold by the central government,” he said.

“But if Beijing continues to impose its wishes on these people, they would react against such homogenous imposition of views, though in different ways, like Taiwan may not wish to unify because of the Hong Kong experience.”

“The current Hong Kong universal suffrage saga may also open the possibility of more cooperation and collaboration amongst democracy and freedom-oriented activists across these regions.”

The post Hong Kong Crisis Tests China’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ Model – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Antonio Anup Gonsalves

In an effort for religious reconciliation, the Sri Lankan government has commissioned a symphony from a Buddhist composer to commemorate Pope Francis’ voyage to the nation which will take place in January.

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo presided over a Sept. 17 performance of the Soul of Christ Symphony, composed and directed by the nation’s renowed composer Vajira Indika Karunasena, who is a Buddhist.

“The visit of the Holy Father is a landmark occasion for Sri Lanka,” Cardinal Ranjith said. “We warmly welcome Pope Francis to our country, which is rich in religious and cultural values.”

“We must use this occasion to demonstrate to the world our values.”

The symphony was commissioned by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, the nation’s public radio network. The idea for the symphony was that of the SLBC’s chairman, Hudson Samarasinghe.

The symphony has also been released as a CD in Sri Lanka in preparation for Pope Francis’ Jan. 13-14 visit, which will be the third time a Roman Pontiff has made an apostolic voyage to the “Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”

Cardinal Ranjith cited the importance of religious reconciliation in his address, and emphasized that the Pope’s visit “is an honor for Sri Lanka.”

“Pope Francis is rich with inner, spiritual strength, and that is visible daily in the way he desires to visit and meet the people, the way he talks, and how he treats everyone alike,” he said.

“He shows a great vocation in discipleship, that is, to show God’s love to all, to embrace everyone in that love, and show respect and dignity to everyone equally,” Cardinal Ranjith added.

The cardinal thanked the SLBC, as well as Samarasinghe and Karunasena for helping to make the Pope’s visit a fruitful one.

Rambukkana Siddharatha Thero, a respected Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, also complimented the SLBC and Samarasinghe on their efforts for religious reconciliation.

In addition to the presentation of the symphony, the event included performances by Angeline Gunatillake of a tribute song to Pope Francis, and a performance by Chilaw of a Marian hymn composed by one of its members, Juan Pinto.

Priests, artists, musicians, and actors also took part in the event.

Cardinal Ranjith outlined the schedule for Pope Francis’ upcoming visit. He will arrive in Colombo the mornig of Jan. 13, visiting the nunciature and the archbishop’s residence to meet with the Sri Lankan bishops, and then will visit president Mahinda Rajapaksa and religious leaders.

The cardinal also noted that a commorative stamp will be issued that day.

The following day, Pope Francis will canonized Bl. Joseph Vaz, a 17th century Oratorian known as the “Apostle of Ceylon.”

The Pope will also visit the Madhu Shrine for a prayer service, then return to Colombo to leave for the Philippines the next day.

The post Buddhist Composes Symphony To Mark Pope’s Sri Lanka Visit appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Iran’s President Hassan Rohani says talks over the country’s nuclear energy program have made little progress, calling on the P5+1 group to speed up the process by showing flexibility.

“Since the previous negotiations until today, we have really shown the required flexibility and now it is the other side’s turn to show flexibility, so that the issue can be resolved,” Rohani said.

“The time remaining to reach an agreement is short and the progress we have witnessed over the past days has been very very slow; it needs to be faster, so that we can reach the agreement based on the realities,” the Iranian chief executive pointed out.

Rohani noted that any nuclear deal should recognize Tehran’s right to enrichment on Iranian soil and include total removal of sanctions against the country.

Iran seeks a win-win agreement which both guarantees the Iranian nation’s rights and allays the concerns of other countries, he said.

“In the nuclear talks, I had really never seen as serious a tone as the one I witnessed in recent days, and I have no doubt about it as I have followed up past negotiations as well,” the Iranian president pointed out.

Rohani said that all countries are awaiting the swift settlement of the nuclear issue, so that they can promote their economic relations with Iran.

“Iran is a very important country with enormous potential in the region and this agreement will be definitely to the benefit of all countries, not only economically, but also politically and also with regards to peace, stability and security,” he noted.

A top Iranian negotiator in nuclear talks with the P5+1 group says the Islamic Republic and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany have not reached an agreement on major issues.

Abbas Araqchi, who is also Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, said although a preliminary understanding exists between the two sides, they are still discordant on major issues.

“We have not yet arrived at a mutual understanding that can serve as the basis of an agreement,” but there has been progress with regard to the details of technical issues, Araqchi added.

“We are absolutely ready to make the negotiations work out, and the same resolve can be seen in the other side as well. Naturally, they have their own stances and we have our own and it takes time to bring them close,” the Iranian official said.

The official noted that Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, his American counterpart, John Kerry and EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, held a tripartite negotiation on anti-Iran sanctions.

“As you know, sanctions is one of the main topics of negotiations and these sanctions have been for the most part imposed [on Iran] by the United States or Europe. As a result, most of our talks are with the United States and Europe,” Araqchi noted.

He noted that the tripartite meeting has been relatively constructive, adding, “This can be a good sign that a common understanding will be probably reached at.”

Earlier, Araqchi said nuclear negotiations between Iran and the six countries – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – have reached a breathtaking point and both sides have entered into many details.

Acknowledging that the two sides are still divided over “key issues,” Araqchi said, “We will by no means leave the negotiating table, but will not retreat an iota from Iran’s rights either.”

The post Iran’s Rohani Calls On P5+1 To Show Flexibility appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Ronn Pineo

“I’m convinced that capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity and the environment, enemy of the entire planet.” — Evo Morales1

Bolivian President Evo Morales has won six nationwide elections since his presidential victory in 2005, and on October 12th he will make it seven. His party, the Movimiento a Socialismo (MAS or Movement Toward Socialism) will also sweep to victory in the 130 seat lower chamber of congress. There is no serious contender to Morales. The leading opposition candidate, conservative businessman Samuel Doria Media of the center-right Unidad Nacional (UN or Democratic Union) is trailing badly, limping in the polls at around 16 percent. Other candidates are even further behind, including center-left urban La Paz party, Moviemiento Sin Miedo (MSM or Movement Without Fear) candidate Juan del Granado, a former La Paz mayor; Partido Verde (PVB or Green Party) standard-bearer Fernando Vargas, head of an indigenous opposition movement; and former president (2002-2003) Jorge Quiroga of the centrist Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC or Christian Democratic Party).2

To win in the first round of voting Morales will need at least 50 percent of the vote, or failing that, 40 percent with at least a 10 percent lead over the nearest competitor. He will do both easily; polls show Morales now at 56 percent, 39 percentage points ahead of Doria Media.3 A fifty person team from the Organization of American States will be on hand to certify the election.

Morales was not supposed to be a candidate this time. Under the new constitution, no immediate reelection for a third term in the presidency was to be permitted. However, in 2013 the Supreme Court, a body highly sympathetic to the MAS, ruled unanimously that Morales could run in the 2014 election, reasoning that his first term came before the new constitution in 2009 and therefore should not count against the two-term limit. There is talk now about changing the constitution, after the October balloting, to allow for unlimited presidential reelection.

The Past as Prelude

Democracy is strong in Bolivia today, but it certainly has not always been so. With over 190 coups in the nation’s troubled history–a hemispheric record–Bolivia had long been the butt of endless jokes about quintessential Latin American instability. Far from democratic, the government was often brutally repressive, with the generals governing from 1964 until 1982, sometimes directly and sometimes deploying pliant civilian figureheads.

The 1980s brought a time of two significant transitions for nearly all Latin America. The region moved from military governments toward democracy, albeit a form of western-style liberal democracy that could offer free elections, but too often ones with narrowly limited choices. At the same time Latin America transitioned away from state-led economic development policies to the embrace the Milton Friedman vision of unbridled free market policies, or neoliberalism.

The 1980s were a “lost decade” for economic progress in Latin America and Bolivia. The nation fell into an extreme economic crisis, with a mounting foreign debt and out of control inflation, reaching over 11,000 percent in 1985. In response the incoming president Víctor Paz Estenssoro (president 1952-1956, 1960-1964, and 1985-1989) looked to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to help design Bolivia’s conversion to free market policies. “Bolivia is dying on us,” Paz Estenssoro declared as he announced his program of neoliberal shock therapy, the New Economic Policy (Executive Decree 21060) on August 29, 1985.4 Pressing the economic reset button, Paz Estenssoro raised taxes, eliminated price controls on basic necessities, froze wages, eliminated rights and protections for union workers, and generally deregulated the economy. Advisor Sachs helped make the necessary arrangements with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, accepting their recommendations for implementing a punishing structural adjustment program and maintaining tight focus on the goal of paying the interest due on the nation’s foreign debt. These neoliberal economic policies extracted an immediate and severe human cost, but Paz Estenssoro dealt with the mass protests and strikes by imposing a three-month state of siege. The economy suffered massive job losses, in the state oil company, in industry, in mining, while the number of those seeking to scrape out a living in the informal sector exploded. Paz Estenssoro could point to only one economic victory: inflation in 1987 fell to 11 percent for the year.5

Paz Estenssoro needed U.S. financial aid and U.S. support with the World Bank and IMF, but Washington wanted something in exchange: compliance with U.S. directives to carry out an assault on coca production. Responding to U.S. pressure, Paz Estensorro adopted Law 1008 in 1988, moving hard to crack down on local coca growers, cooperating in the U.S.-led Operation Blast Furnace.6

Presidents Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993) and Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997) deepened Bolivia’s free market impulse. Sánchez de Lozada, a multi-millionaire mine owner, University of Chicago trained free market disciple, and intellectual author of the New Economic Policy decree 21060, pushed through the Capitalization Law of 1994, bringing a rash of privatizations, peddling off at fire sale prices the national electrical company, state-run railroad, and the national oil and gas company.7

Believing that the less government there was the better all things would be, Sánchez de Lozada moved to downsize government, decentralizing political power with the enactment of the Law of Popular Participation in 1994 and the Law of Decentralization in 1995.These measures promoted the formation of new municipal governing authorities and re-directed a fifth of national revenues down to the local level. While Sánchez de Lozada’s actions were an effort to pass off national government responsibilities and sidestep paying for social needs, this initiative had an unexpected result. The laws actually served to invigorate local government. Social movements formed to pressure municipal authorities, and local governments came to be the political focus point for anti-neoliberal agitation. With the union movement crushed, social movements and municipal governments stepped in to fill the political void and pressure for addressing the needs of ordinary people.8

When in 1994 the United States again threatened to withdraw aid, Sánchez de Lozada hardened the anti-coca push as well. The first coca growers protest march followed that August. The coca growers union, which organized the protest, had emerged as a direct result of the U.S. decision to bring its war on illegal drugs into the coca fields of Bolivia. At the head of the movement was Evo Morales.

In 1997 Hugo Bánzer followed in the presidency, serving until 2001. Trained in the infamous School of the Americas, Bánzer had previously been the nation’s military dictator, 1971 to 1978. As president Bánzer’s signature initiative, Plan Dignidad, sought to root out remaining coca production. By 2001 Bolivia’s coca production had fallen to less than a third of what it had been just six years earlier, a real “Andean success story,” the U.S. State Department cheerily announced.9

The Tipping Point: Bolivia’s Water and Gas Wars

One critical aspect of neoliberalism in Bolivia was the privatization of potable water service, a step mandated by the World Bank as a loan condition in 1997. Acting in November 1999, Bánzer moved to privatize all potable water in the nation, Law 2029. Bánzer sold off water rights in the city of Cochabamba to Agua del Tunari, a consortium owned by Italian interests and the U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation. The company soon raised potable water rates an average of 35 percent and began charging people for collecting rainwater or for drawing water from their own wells. As the chorus of objections began to rise, the World Bank recommended taking a hard-line stance, advising that “no subsidies should be given to ameliorate the increase in water tariffs.”10

Vast protests, the “water wars,” erupted from November 1999 to April 2000, initially centered in Cochabamba but by September spreading to the capital of La Paz as well. In April, Bánzer ordered a state of siege, but was met by continuing, massive, and determined opposition on the streets. In the end Bánzer was forced to back down. He could not impose by force a measure so universally unpopular and manifestly unfair. Aguas del Tunari was asked to leave Bolivia. Shortly thereafter the 75-year-old Bánzer resigned for health reasons–cancer of the liver and lungs–and Vice President Jorge Quiroga finished what was left of the presidential term.

The 2002 general election brought the return of Sánchez de Lozada, running against a wide array of candidates, including the leader of the coca growers union, Evo Morales. Just four days before the balloting the United States Ambassador Manuel Rocha decided to weigh in. “I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if you choose the candidate who wants Bolivia to go back to being a cocaine exporter, that will put the United States aid at risk,” he announced. Comparing coca growers to members of the Taliban, Rocha warned that “a Bolivia led by the people who have benefited from drug trafficking cannot expect the United States markets to remain open for traditional textile exports.” 11

The ambassador’s comments did not have the desired effect, instead launching a groundswell for Morales who enjoyed a sudden surge in the polls. (Teasingly, Morales publically thanked Rocha and began to refer to him as his “campaign manager.”) Thanks to Rocha, Morales nearly rallied to win the 2002 election. Morales took 20.9 percent of the votes cast to 22.5 percent for Goni. The election was thrown into congress which selected the leading vote getter, Goni, to serve as Bolivia’s next president.

In 2003 the IMF mandated more austerity measures, and Goni, ever a neoliberal true believer, readily agreed to their implementation. Fresh rounds of mass opposition emerged in the presence of sharp tax increases, privatizations, the sale of Bolivian natural gas to foreign firms, and the announcement of the construction of a gas pipeline to Chile. The outpouring of popular resistance came to be known as Bolivia’s “gas wars,” centered in the highland city of El Alto and spilling out into adjacent La Paz, September through October of 2003. Determined to show strength, President Sánchez de Lozada ordered the smashing of the protest movement. The ensuing police and military repression left some 67 to 97 peaceful protestors dead, some raked by gunfire from helicopters passing over. A nationwide torrent of anger and grief followed, finally resulting in Goni’s resignation on October 17, 2003. He fled to Miami as Bolivians celebrated in the streets. He had lasted in office just 15 months.12

But the water and then the natural gas protest movements had not merely forced a stop to neoliberal excesses and toppled the second Sánchez de Lozada government. Coming together, activists had begun to articulate a reform plan, what came to be called the “October Agenda,” calling for a rollback of neoliberal water and gas measures, the end to the flat tax, and, most importantly, the convening of a constitutional convention. As Bolivia observer and author Kepa Artaraz has correctly noted, what Bolivia was experiencing was a “double crisis of legitimacy,” a widespread belief that neoliberalism had failed and that liberal democracy was not responsive to the popular will. But, as Artaraz adds, “the political questions and the proposed alternatives did not come from traditional forces and actors from the left, such as trade unions, as they had been decimated by the neoliberal attack.”13Rather, it came from Bolivia’s budding social movements growing up at the local level around the newly formed municipalidades. The dual transition to a U.S.-style liberal, representative democracy, and the U.S. inspired and mandated free market policies, had, in the end, come to dual failures.

Vice President Carlos Mesa Gisbert assumed the presidency from Goni, calling a July 2004 national referendum on the re-nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas. The measure passed overwhelmingly. Still, social conditions remained a matter of widespread concern. Circumstances were worst in the countryside, where under neoliberalism the proportion of people living in extreme poverty had risen from under two-thirds in 1997 to over three-quarters by 2002. In 2005 Bolivia’s per capita GDP was lower than it had been in 1998.14 As protest mounted against Mesa—his brief administration faced over 800 mass demonstrations—he gave in to popular pressure. Mesa resigned on June 6, 2005, leaving Supreme Court Chief Justice Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé as caretaker president.

Bolivians were evidencing their complete disaffection with the country’s three dominant political parties: the chameleon-like Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR or Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), initially left, then centrist, and finally neoliberal; the center-left Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR or Revolutionary Left Movement); and the right-wing Acción Democrática Nacionalista of Hugo Bánzer (ADN or Nationalist Democratic Action). Since the restitution of democracy in 1982 the three parties had ruled Bolivia by forming governing pacts. But in the 2005 presidential vote they took a combined total of less than a third of the vote.15

Bolivian voters plainly had arrived at the view that the existing political system was without legitimacy. To the wide majority, Bolivia under the old pacted political system had been a sham democracy, one dominated by the moneyed interests, snaked through with corruption, and presenting voters no authentic choices, forcing them to try to pick between near identical elites who did the bidding of foreign capital. Voting only granted legitimacy to what was a rigged game. As analyst Raúl Madrid sums up, “the rise of the MAS [was] driven by … growing disenchantment with market-oriented policies and the parties that implemented them.”16 Madrid is right, but there is more to it.

Diminishing U.S. Influence in Bolivia

Bolivia’s economy is less than one-thousandth the size of that of the United States. Given the considerable asymmetry between the two nations, the United States has long used its considerable power advantages to compel Bolivia to bend to its wishes. Beginning in 1985 the U.S. demanded that Bolivia press forward on two fundamental policies: the adoption of free market economic policies and an aggressive assault on coca leaf production. For Bolivia the problem was that these two policies could not be pursued at the same time.

Neoliberal policies brought fiscal austerity, the elimination of virtually all programs that aimed at reducing poverty, coupled with sharp reductions in employment, especially as a result of the end to government support for the lagging tin mining industry. Due to these measures, tens of thousands of miners were thrown out of work, dumped into an economy that was not creating jobs, while the government did nothing to help them or their families. The one growth area that the Bolivian economy could offer was in coca production, responding actively to booming U.S. demand for cocaine. As a direct result, former miners, well-schooled in labor militancy, poured into the Chapare region and took up coca farming. There they met the determined military opposition of the United States and Bolivian government. And this was the paradox at the heart of U.S. policy. Compelling Bolivia to launch neoliberal policies while aggressively pursuing a war on coca growers led to a time of extraordinary crisis. The contradictions of the U.S.-imposed policy agenda were so severe that the U.S.-backed regime suffered a complete collapse.

It is possible that Bolivia could have moved to neoliberal policies on its own, but the unbending nature of the implementation of these measures was a result of U.S. pressure, either directly or through the World Bank and the IMF. The new free market philosophy was not a Bolivian creation, it was made in America, especially at the University of Chicago, and the depth of its adoption in Bolivia was in large measure a result of U.S. demands. On the other hand, it is not possible that Bolivia would ever have launched the coca eradication programs on its own. Coca is part of daily life for most Bolivians, from the city people who drink it as tea for breakfast to the rural indigenous who chew it throughout the day. The spike in new demand for coca for making cocaine, and then the war on cocaine, were entirely U.S. creations. Bolivia would never have grown more coca if not for U.S. consumer demand, and Bolivia would never had undertaken a war on coca production if not for considerable and sustained U.S. pressure. U.S. pressure demanded that Bolivia launch an unflinching implementation of neoliberalism and a military assault on coca both at the same time, and it was doing both of these things at once that led to the collapse of the old regime in Bolivia. Therefore it is fair to conclude that it was U.S. power and U.S. overreach that led to emergence of the Movement Toward Socialism’s Evo Morales in Bolivia, elected to the presidency in 2005.

Evo Morales to Power

On December 18, 2005 Evo Morales won the presidency with 53.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for a winning candidate in the nation’s history. “¡Causachun coca! ¡Wañuchun yanquis! (Long live coca! Death to the Yankees!),” he exalted in his native Aymara language, giving the protest cry of the cocaleros.17 When he took office in January 2006 Morales immediately embraced the street protestors’ “October Agenda,” moving to gain a larger share of natural gas export profits and to rewrite the constitution.

In May 1, 2006 Morales declared the partial nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas industry, with Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) gaining majority control from the Spanish and Brazilian corporations that held the natural gas fields, pipelines, and refineries. Morales increased Bolivia’s share of the profits to 82 percent. Before 2005 Bolivia had taken but 18 percent of the profits, a rate that had risen to 50 percent under President Mesa.18

Gaining control of this resource was pivotal. Bolivia enjoys the second largest natural gas reserves in Latin America, after Venezuela. Since Morales has taken office Bolivian natural gas production has more than doubled, and proceeds from sales have increased from 5.6 percent of GDP in 2004 to 25.7 percent by 2008. Today natural gas makes up nearly half of Bolivia’s exports by value, with over half flowing to neighboring Brazil. Gas sales are also the key component of government revenues: whereas in 2002 natural gas income made up just 7 percent of government earnings, they now constitute over half of the national government’s earnings.19

In gaining control of Bolivia’s key export Morales had achieved a minor miracle, standing up to foreign firms and opening a significant source of financial resources for his government and nation. Still, one complaint from the impacted companies did seem fair. Under neoliberalism Bolivia had opened its natural gas fields to foreign firms, offering generous terms if they would bear the costs of searching for, locating, and ramping up production. After they did this, Bolivia changed the terms of the deal, demanding more money. It was bait and switch, and the foreign firms have a right to be angry. But it is also a done deal. By the end of 2013 the state-owned portion of the economy had reached 35 percent, up from the low of 17 percent under the prior neoliberal governments. 20 Telecommunications, under the Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Entel) which used to be Italian owned, is now also run by the state, as too is electricity generation. In 2012 Morales moved to nationalize tin and zinc production. There will be more moves in this direction.

Bolivia’s economy today has been reoriented, its leading trade partners shifting. South Korea, which purchases much of Bolivia’s booming soy production, and Argentina, a key buyer of natural gas, are now the leading markets. The United States has fallen to fourth place as a destination for Bolivian exports.21

The Drafting of a New Constitution and the Media Luna Conflict

In the summer of 2006 voters selected members for a Constitutional Assembly, and on August 6 delegates convened in the city of Sucre. In December 2007 the Constitutional Assembly approved a draft, but the charter remained unratified, the nation locked in political turmoil between Morales and the supporting social movements that sought fundamental reform, and those who wanted to turn back to the past.22

The élite, especially those from Santa Cruz and the surrounding lowland media luna, or half-moon district, were outraged at what they regarded as Aymara Indian Morales’ usurpation of their birthright, their self-arrogated entitlement to rule over the lives of the indigenous majority. In May 2008 the media luna departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija, and Pando moved toward session, holding an unauthorized autonomy vote. Both the Organization of American States and the European Union refused to send election monitors, citing the illegality of the referendum. MAS voters boycotted the unsanctioned election and so, predictably, those who voted in this extra-legal ballot favored severing ties with the rest of the nation.23

Bending to the demands of the anti-MAS movement, on August 10, 2008 Bolivia held a recall election on the Morales presidency. Morales won a resounding victory, taking two-thirds of the vote. The separatists, incredulous over their stunning and lopsided defeat, organized into the Consejo Nacional de Defensa de la Democracía (CONALDE or National Council for the Defense of Democracy), and recruited paid thugs to attack government buildings and prey upon pro-Morales activists. The separatist movement seemed to be gaining in support when, on September 11, 2008, at least thirteen pro-MAS protestors were murdered in the far eastern Pando department. Ordered by the opposition governor Leonel Fernández, this ugly episode served to deeply discredit the separatists. The movement proceeded into sharp decline.

The day of the attack Bolivia expelled U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg, accusing him of assisting in organizing the violent opposition to Morales. The U.S. ambassador had met openly with the separatist movement. Said Morales, “we do not want people here who conspire against democracy.”24 In retaliation, U.S. President George W. Bush expelled the Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzmán and placed Bolivia on a list of nations not cooperating with the war on illegal drugs. The United States also put trade restrictions in place, canceling Bolivian participation in the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) program. Morales responded by kicking out the remaining U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agents later that year, and subsequently expelled USAID workers.25 Normal diplomatic relations, broken in 2008, have still not been restored between the two nations.

In October 2008 two-thirds of the constitutional assembly agreed upon an additional series of revisions to the constitution, what some Bolivians regard as the “third draft,” a watered-down compromise version of the stronger document initially proposed by indigenous and left-wing groups. In a referendum in January 2009 Bolivian voters approved the new constitution, with an amazing 90 percent turnout and more than 60 percent backing the new national charter. At the celebration parties in the street, Morales joined the revelers, and he wept.

The constitution formalized a broad agenda of progressive social and economic reforms, with several new poverty reduction programs, especially conditional cash transfer initiatives; the extension of educational services; infrastructure development; assurances of indigenous rights; and a series of re-nationalizations of utilities and public services. The constitution enshrined the indigenous community (or ayllu) values of ama sua, ama llulla, ama qhella (don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t be lazy). The constitution denounced neoliberalism, called for an active role for the state in guiding the economy, and explicitly forbade the privatization of water.26 The document reflected much of the October 2003 Agenda. It was what people had voted for. Democracy was working.

Morales called for general elections under the new constitution, and in December 2009 won reelection with 64 percent of the vote. Conservative opposition candidate Manfred Reyes Villa, hampered by a fraud indictment, and running mate Leopoldo Fernández, campaigning from his jail cell where he waited to face murder charges, took just 38 percent of the vote. The media luna secessionist movement was effectively over. The MAS was emerging as the ruling party in a single party state.

Explaining Morales’ Success

Bolivia’s recent economic growth under Morales is, as Tulane’s Martín Mendoza-Botelho has observed, “one of most prosperous periods in the nation’s history.”27 Bolivia’s per capita GDP has doubled since he came to office, rising from $1,182 USD in 2006 to $2,238 USD in 2012. Under Morales GDP growth has averaged 5 percent a year, and the 2014 estimate is projected at 5.5 to 5.7 percent. Bolivia’s GDP growth rate is second in Latin America only to Panama (estimated 6.7 percent for the year).28 Much of this solid economic performance can be attributed to strong natural gas prices.

Morales should probably not try to take credit for Bolivia’s winnings in the “commodity lottery,” the inevitable boom-bust cycle in raw material prices. Still, he can take credit for the building up of Bolivia’s financial reserves. In fact, Bolivia presently boasts the highest proportional rate of financial reserves of any nation in the world, with Bolivia’s rainy day fund totaling some $14 billion USD, or nearly two-thirds of total annual GDP. Even the IMF is impressed by this accomplishment, lavishing praise on Morales’ fiscal prudence. It is not clear that Morales really welcomes the IMF’s avuncular head patting given that he has long refused any new IMF accords. Indeed the IMF stamp of approval has triggered some second thoughts among Bolivian government economists, pondering whether maybe they have been overly cautious.29

Vastly more important than economic growth is poverty reduction, for it is absolutely possible to have the former but not the latter. In the years from 1990 to 2002 about two-thirds of the population of Bolivia lived in poverty, according to United Nations estimates. In 2005 still over half of the population lived in poverty. Today it is less than a third. Income inequality has also come down under Morales and the MAS. In 2002 the richest 20 percent took 58 percent of the income while the poorest 20 percent received 2.2 percent. In 2011 the share of the poorest fifth had doubled to 4.4 percent while the portion going to the richest fifth had dropped to 43 percent. Put another way, the ratio of the share of income of the top 10 percent to the poorest 10 percent had dropped from 128 to 1 in 2005 to 60 to 1 in 2012. Inflation has also been tamed, falling from 11.8 percent in 2008 to 4.7 percent in 2012, one of the lowest rates in Latin America.30

Social Programs

What most distinguished the Morales administration is its commitment to provide government programs to assist those in the nation’s 11.5 million population most in need. The Bono Juana Azurduy de Padilla or Bono Madre Niño Niña Program extends small cash payments for expectant mothers when they see a doctor, with $7.25 USD paid to mothers for each of up to four doctor visits; $17 USD if they have the birth in a medical facility; and $18 USD to return for follow-ups for both mother and child after delivery. This program spent $15.6 million USD in 2012, helping 133,00 mothers and half a million children.31

The Bono Juancito Pinto Program (named after a twelve year old drummer boy from the nineteenth century War of the Pacific) actually started under President Bánzer back in 2000 but now has been greatly expanded by Morales. This program involves cash payments to mothers who keep their children in school (public schools only, not private) up through the eighth grade. Families receive $14 USD twice a year, once when school starts and again at the end of the school year. Bono Juancito Pinto cost $55.8 million USD in 2012, and helps nearly 2 million people.32

The Bonos Renta Dignidad Program provides retirement benefits to Bolivians over 60 years old. This program is a significant expansion of the previous 1997 Bonosol initiative begun under Sánchez de Lozada. Dignidad is the most expensive of the three social support initiatives, costing a third of a billion dollars annually. The program helps nearly a million elderly Bolivians, providing $344 to $432 USD a year in retirement support. Together, these three initiatives reach about a third of all Bolivians, roughly 3.3 million people, and help three of every four families in the nation.33 The benefits have become socially institutionalized as a common expectation. Even the opposition candidates in the forthcoming election are pledging to continue these popular social programs.

There are other initiatives. Some 900,000 impoverished Bolivians have access to price-controlled electricity. Morales also launched a feeding program, desnutrición cero, providing free school lunches. At the same time Morales has quadrupled the number of land titles transferred to small holders, positively impacting nearly one million Bolivians. The literacy campaign Morales launched has likewise been a great success, and in 2010 Unesco declared that Bolivia had eradicated illiteracy. Meanwhile, highway building has doubled under Morales and a rush of government spending has helped stimulate a construction boom. Bolivia’s economy is at nearly full employment.34

The Economic Plan

Morales’ economic development strategy, announced in June 2006, is called the Bolivia digna, soberana, productiva y democrática para vivir bien, or the Bolivian dignity, sovereignty, productivity, and democracy plan to “live well” or “live correctly.” The phrase “vivir bien” is hard to translate into English. Derived from the Quechua concept of “sumak kawsay,” and the Aymara “suma qamaña,” the idea is to live in harmony with nature, placing spiritual well-being over acquisition of material goods, and emphasizing “collaboration over competition, sharing over accumulation, solidarity over disagreement, cohesion over discord,” “ñandereko (harmonious life), teko kavi (good life), … and qhapaj ñan (noble life).”35These notions, solemnly enshrined in the new constitution, are ignored in practice.

Instead, Morales has followed an extractive, raw material dependent, economic policy. This pattern of “narrow-based economic development … that depends on primary natural resource exports,” researcher George Gray Molina explains, leaves Bolivia “highly vulnerable to changes in world commodity prices.“36 It is this decision to aggressively exploit Bolivia’s natural resources, above all natural gas, that has done the most to drive some erstwhile Morales supporters into open opposition, especially indigenous and environmental groups. Morales has decided to take advantage of high natural gas prices to fund poverty reduction, and hope the impact on sacred Pachamama, mother earth, is not too severe.

The Run Up to the October Election

Morales has taken a number of steps to buttress his popular support in the upcoming balloting. One key move is to ramp up his small-scale infrastructure program, “Bolivia cambia, Evo cumple,” (“Bolivia is changing, Evo delivers”). Since coming to office he has spent roughly half a billion dollars on this local infrastructure initiative, much of it funded by Venezuela. Needless to say, the schools, clinics, potable water projects and the like are quite popular, and the president tries never to miss a ribbon cutting, especially with the election approaching.37

In November 2013 Morales declared a special double holiday bonus instead of the usual one month additional pay benefit at Christmas time, the aguinaldo. Then on August 27 this year the administration announced a 10 percent pay bump for workers in nine key state-run enterprises, with the increase back-dated to the first of the year. Workers in the oil industry, electrical workers, TV employees, and mining companies, among others, all got the raise. The Morales administration also added on an extra month’s bonus to seniors, recipients of the Renta Dignidad, with monthly payments rising to $36 USD to those with no pension and $29 USD for those who receive some additional form of pension. Meanwhile, the government’s price controls on gasoline, electricity, potable water, flour, sugar, rice, bread, milk, and chicken remain in place. The government also ended all fees for obtaining copies of official documents, including birth certificates, high school diplomas, and the like.38

The Opposition

As in much of Latin America, one continuing problem in Bolivia has been that, as researcher Benjamin Kohl notes, “the right-wing-controlled media feed[s] … the … fears [of voters] through deliberate misinformation.“39 Only one of the top twelve communications companies in Bolivia supports Morales.40 All the others are in the right-wing opposition camp. Yet despite the fact that Bolivians have, on average, far less education than do U.S. voters, they have proven themselves to be less easy to manipulate. This stems in large measure from the historic desperateness of their socio-economic circumstances. They cannot afford to be deceived. Another potential threat, a military coup, seems at this time to be minimal. As Kohl notes, “military support for Morales can be explained by significant salary increases and grants of military hardware.”41 For Morales the most important opposition groups are no longer on his right flank.

Instead, the most serious opposition Morales faces is from groups and causes on the left, often coming from indigenous people. In Bolivia today some 41 percent of Bolivians self-identify as indigenous; some 2.5 million Bolivians speak Quecha and another 2.1 million speak Aymara. The flashpoint issue in this regard involves a 182 mile road project to cut a road through the 3,860-square mile Isiboro-Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, or TIPNIS.

The TIPNIS area had been designated a national park in 1965, and then an indigenous reserve in 1990, homeland to the Moxeño-Trinitario, Yuracaré, and the Chimáne indigenous peoples. Together these groupings comprise about 10 percent of the population in the region, a total of about 8,000 to 12,500 people.42

The proposed highway would open up important new commercial links for area farmers and ranchers. There is really no other practical route for this road, designed to connect the Cochabamaba region to Trinidad, Beni in the far northeast of the nation. The road will cut travel time from two to three days to just four hours. One leading concern of the TIPNIS indigenous people is that building the road through would open up the area to yet more colono squatters from the sierra. Over 20,000 colonos live in the reserve already.43

Morales signed a construction contract with a Brazilian firm in 2008, but the 2009 constitution called for a process of prior consultation with impacted indigenous groups. Despite this new mandate, Morales did not reach out to the indigenous communities until they began to protest in March of 2011. In August 2011 Morales announced that he was standing firm, declaring that the road was going forward, “like it or not.”44

Accepting the challenge, over a thousand protestors staged a 360-mile march to the capital. When police sought to break up their approach to La Paz, seventy protesters were injured. Who is to blame remains an open question. President Morales accepted no direct responsibility for the violence, but he did ask for forgiveness. Then, on October 24, 2011, Morales canceled the road project (Law 180) and ruled the park “untouchable” for further development.45

Morales interpreted the law to mean the halting of virtually any sort of economic activity in TIPNIS, even that favored by the indigenous living in the region. This was enough to forge a coalition of developers, colonos, and some indigenous groups in the region to push to allow the road after all. These groups staged their own march to La Paz, demanding that the road construction go forward.

In February 2012 Morales implemented Law 222, calling for a vote, or consulta, on the road. The plebiscite showed that eight of ten voters backed the road construction, evidently holding to the view that the highway would provide greater access to employment opportunities, health care, and education. Morales revoked the earlier Law 180, but the road project is on hold until after the election.46

Other opposition movements have pushed their agendas. In August 2010 the central highland city of Potosí went through nineteen days of marches, punctuated with rioting, with protesters charging that the MAS was not delivering on promised government infrastructure development in the city and region.47 Demonstrators also said that they wanted an international airport for the city. The movement died down, however, without winning a clear commitment from the government to provide more money.

In December 2010 widespread protests erupted in response to a proposed end to government gasoline subsidies; the measure would have triggered a 73 percent price hike at the pump. Morales backed down on this initiative in the wake of the gasolinazo protests. In January 2012 other demonstrations emerged after Morales signed Presidential Decree 1126 establishing workplace rules for health care workers. Hospital workers went out on strike, halting delivery of medical services throughout much of Bolivia. After 52 days on strike, Morales reached a compromise accord with the health care workers, repealing Decree 1126 and restoring lost wages from the walkout. This year there have been strikes by transport workers, students, farmers, and junior ranking members of the military.48 It is a restive democracy that Bolivia now has.

Conclusions

Democracy in Bolivia will not fit into U.S.-centric models of political parties, elections, and liberal representative government. As Kohl and Bresnahan have noted, there is a strong “difference between Western-liberal-individualist and communitarian indigenous (Andean) democracies.49 Kohl and Bresnahan write that:

Whereas Western[ers] … have been socialized in a one-person, one-vote ideal of democracy, in many Andean communities democratic deliberations take place at the level of the community itself. Communal decision making of this type is commonly seen, for example, in decisions on land use. The ‘community’—which is defined in different ways according to the setting—decides on how to rotate land, guarantee access to pastures, assign land in colonization zones, etc., through a consensual process. Thus it is not surprising for a similar community consensus to be reflected in voting behavior, especially among indigenous groups that see that the MAS will represent their interests.50

The MAS is, as researcher Santiago Anria correctly notes, “a hybrid organization … participating in representative institutions without abandoning nonelectoral street politics.”51 Bolivians like it this way. Latinobarómetro polling shows that popular satisfaction with democracy in Bolivia has risen from under a quarter of those surveyed in 2005 to more than half in 2009. President Morales has not given up his involvement in Bolivia’s social movements, and even now remains head of the coca growers union. He is often seen crossing over and joining the people protesting in the streets.52

Democratic governance in Bolivia in more activist, inclusionary, direct, and participatory than that in the United States and the West. Politics in Bolivia are not so much about elections these days. At polling time the left sets aside its differences and votes for Morales and the MAS. But as we are seeing, it is between the elections that normal politics begin. The left fractures, and communities and various associations begin to clamor for attention to their needs.

In Bolivia, as in Ecuador and Venezuela as well, the right is in retreat. Indeed, the right is becoming, or has become, all but irrelevant as a political force. In Bolivia the violent overreach of the right in 2008 severely reduced its national political influence. The parties of the right have been reduced to rump voting clubs, the remnants of prior political configurations. Instead, democracy in Bolivia is the contestations, the testing of relative strength, of President Morales and the MAS, and social groups expressing their politics directly, on the streets, in protests, marches, in highway blockages. Between elections politics begin in earnest, as the cycle of left-wing pressure begins anew. This is what democracy looks like in Bolivia.

In 2009, at her confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Bolivia under Morales was pursing “policies which do not serve the interests of the … [Bolivian] people or the region.”53 U.S. political observers like former Secretary Clinton don’t know what to make of Bolivia and Morales, don’t have language to talk about it, and may not like it, but Bolivians do not care anymore. But for those in the United States and the West who are disillusioned with politics, the new Bolivian democracy should provide considerable inspiration, demonstrating vividly the parameters of the possible.54

Ronn Pineo, Senior Analyst with the Council Of Hemispheric Affairs and Chair of the Department of History, Townson University.

Notes

1. Morales, quoted in, William Powers, Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia’s War on Globalization (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 133.

2. Robert Kozak, “Bolivia President Evo Morales Leading in Election Poll: Socialist Leader Boosted by Strong Economic Growth, but Nationalization Moves Remain a Concern,” Wall Street Journal August 5, 2014, online.wsj.com; “Opposition Electoral Alliance Unlikely,” Latin American Weekly Report 12 June 2014, 5-6; and Jeffery R. Webber, “Managing Bolivian Capitalism,” www.jacobinmag.com, 2014.

3. “Morales Leaves Nothing to Chance in Bolivia,” Latin News Daily Report 28 August 2014.

4. Paz Estenssoro, quoted in Martín Sivak, Evo Morales: The Extraordinary Rise of the First Indigenous President of Bolivia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 41; and see Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107, 110.

5. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism,109; Kepa Artaraz, Bolivia: Refounding the Nation (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 22, 23, 29; Herbert S. Klein, “The Historical Background to the Rise of the MAS, 1952-2005,” chapter in, Adrian J. Pearce, Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia: The First Term in Context, 2006-2010 (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, nd.), 50; Roger Burbach, Michael Fox, and Federico Fuentes, “Bolivia’s Communitarian Socialism,” chapter in, Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First Century Socialism (London: Zed Books, 2013), 81; Jeffery R. Webber, “Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. Part I: Domestic Class Structure, Latin-American Trends, and Capitalist Imperialism,” Historical Materialism 16 (2008), 37; Raúl Madrid, “Bolivia: Origins and Policies of the Movimiento al Socialismo,” chapter in, Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, The Resurgence of the Latin America Left (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 243.

6. Martín Sivak, “The Bolivianisation of Washington-La Paz Relations: Evo Morales’ Foreign Policy Agenda in Historical Context,” chapter in Pearce, Evo Morales,155; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism, 114.

7. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism, 115; Artaraz, Bolivia, 245.

8. Klein, “Historical Background,” in Pearce, Evo Morales, 57; and Artaraz, Bolivia, 47-48.

9. The U.S. Department of State, quoted in, Powers, Whispering in the Giant’s Ear, 207; and see Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism, 116.

10. The World Bank, quoted in, Degol Hailu, Rafael Guerreiro Osorio, and Raquel Tsukada, “Privatization and Renationalization: What Went Wrong in Bolivia’s Water Sector?” World Development 40:12 (2012), 2565; and Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, “’Less Than Fully Satisfactory Development Outcomes’: International Financial Institutions and Social Unrest in Bolivia,” Latin American Perspectives 36:3 (May 2009), 69.

11. United States Ambassador Rocha, quoted in Sivak, Morales, 87; and Sivak, “Bolivianisation of Washington-La Paz Relations,” in Pearce, Evo Morales,144, 159.

12. Powers, Whispering in the Giant’s Ear, 240; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism,134; Kohl and Farthing, “’Less Than Fully Satisfactory,’” 70; Benjamin Kohl and Rosalind Bresnahan, “Introduction: Bolivia Under Morales, Consolidating Power, Initiating Decolonization,” Latin American Perspectives 37:3 (May 2010), 5-17; and Benjamin Kohl and Rosalind Bresnahan, “Introduction: Bolivia Under Morales, National Agenda, Regional Challenges, and the Struggle for Hegemony,” Latin American Perspectives 37:4 (July 2010), 5-20.

13. Artaraz, Bolivia, 8.

14. Madrid, “Bolivia,” in Levitsky and Roberts, Resurgence, 243.

15. Germán Darío Valencia Agudelo, “Bolivia, 2003-2008: un período de profundas transformaciones políticas y económicas,” Perfil de coyuntura económica (Antioquia, Colombia) 12 (December 2008), 180; and George Gray Molina, “The Challenges of Progressive Change under Evo Morales,” chapter in, Kurt Wyland, Raúl Madrid, and Wendy Hunter, editors, Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58.

16.Madrid, “Bolivia,” in Levitsky and Roberts, Resurgence, 239; Valencia Agudelo, “Bolivia,”184; and Artaraz, Bolivia, 42.

17. Morales quoted in, Sivak, Morales, 42; and Sivak, “Bolivianisation of Washington-La Paz Relations,” in Pearce, Morales, 161.

18. Gray Molina, “Challenges,” in Wyland, Madrid, and Hunter, Leftist Governments, 65.

19. “Bolivia Earns $16 Billion Since Nationalizing Energy,” green left Weekly May 20, 2013; Benjamin Kohl, “Bolivia Under Morales: A Work in Progress,” Latin American Perspectives 37:3 (May 2010), 116; Mark Weisbrot, Rebecca Ray, and Jake Johnston, “Bolivia: The Economy During the Morales Administration,” Center for Economic Policy Research, December 2009, 12; Emily Achtenberg, “Contested Development: The Geopolitics of Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict,” Nacla: Report on the Americas 46:2 (2013),9; “Bolivia’s Rentier Republic: Evo Morales is Popular but not Invulnerable,” The Economist May 3, 2014, www.economist.com; and Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries: The Extractive Economy and Resource Nationalism in Bolivia, Political Geography 31 (2012), 230.

20. “Participación del Estado en la economía permitió cambiar la imagen financiera del país,” Agencia Boliviana de Información 26 December 2013.

21. Weisbrot, Ray, and Johnston, “Bolivia,” 25; and Manuel Mejido Costoya, “Politics of Trade in Post-Neoliberal Latin America: The Case of Bolivia,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30:1 (2011), 87.

22. Madrid, “Bolivia,” in Levitsky and Roberts, Resurgence, 253.

23. Kohl, “Bolivia Under Morales,” 110.

24. Morales, quoted in, Madrid, “Bolivia,” in Levitsky and Roberts, Resurgence, 247.

25. Mejido Costoya, “Politics,” 86.

26. John Crabtree and Ann Chaplin, Bolivia: Processes of Change (London: Zed Books, 2013), 24; Artaraz, Bolivia, 60, 73-75.

27. Martín Mendoza-Botelho, “Bolivia 2012: Entre Buenos y Malas Noticias,” Revista de ciencia política (Santiago, Chile) 33:1 (2013), 36.

28. Hedelberto López Blanch, “La bonanza económica y social de Bolivia,” Rebelión 7 December 2013; Katu Arkonada, “Bolivia: A Balance Sheet for the ‘Process of Change,’” green left Weekly February 4, 2013; Kozak, “Bolivia,” Wall Street Journal August 5, 2014; “Morales Leaves Nothing to Chance,” Latin News Daily Report 28 August 2014; “Labour Unions,” Latin American Weekly Report 5 December 2013, 7.

29. Mendoza-Botelho, “Bolivia,” 36; “Bolivian Political and Social Landscape: Primer for Pending Presidential Elections,” Andean Information Network, August 1, 2014, ain-bolivia.org; Fernando Molina, “Why is Evo Morales Still Popular: The Strengths of the MAS in the Construction of a New Order,” translation and introduction by Richard Fidler, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, July 14, 2013, originally published in the May-June issue of Nueva Sociedad.

30. Valencia Agudelo, “Bolivia,” 181; “Bolivia’s Rentier Republic,” The Economist May 3, 2014, www.economist.com; United Nations. ECLAC. Social Panorama of Latin America, 2013, 16; Frederico Fuentes, “Bolivia: Nationalisation Puts Wealth in Hands of the People,” green left Weekly May 28, 2013; and Mendoza-Botelho, “Bolivia,” 36.

31. Mendoza-Betelho, “Bolivia,” 39; and Weisbrot, Ray, and Johnston, “Bolivia,” 15.

32. Mendoza-Betelho, “Bolivia,” 39; and Weisbrot, Ray, and Johnston, “Bolivia,” 15.

33. Mendoza-Betelho, “Bolivia,” 38-39; and Weisbrot, Ray, and Johnston, “Bolivia,” 15.

34. Molina, “Why is Evo Morales Still Popular,” Links July 14, 2013.

35. Artaraz, Bolivia, 109, 209.

36. Gray Molina “Challenges,” in Wyland, Madrid, and Hunter, Leftist Governments, 70.

37. Molina, “Why is Evo Morales Still Popular,” Links July 14, 2013.

38. “Morales Leaves Nothing to Chance,” Latin News Daily Report 28 August 2014; and Molina, “Why is Evo Morales Still Popular,” Links, July 14, 2013.

39. Kohl, “Bolivia,” 114.

40. Valencia Agudelo, “Bolivia,”194.

41. Kohl, “Bolivia,” 111.

42. Achtenberg, “Contested Development,” 6, 8; and Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints,” 230.

43. Achtenberg, “Contested Development,” 6, 9; and Crabtree and Chaplin, Bolivia, 16, 17, 30-31.

44. Morales, quoted in Achtenberg, “Contested Development,” 6.

45. Achtenberg, “Contested Development,” 7; and Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints,” 230.

46. Achtenberg, “Contested Development,” 7-8, 10; Mendoza-Betelho, “Bolivia,” 41; and Arkonada, “Bolivia,” green left Weekly February 4, 2013.

47. Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints,” 233.

48. Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints,” 233; Mendoza-Betelho, “Bolivia,” 42-43; and “Bolivia’s Rentier Republic,” The Economist May 3, 2014, www.economist.com.

49. Kohl and Bresnahan, “Initiating Decolonization,” 12.,

50. Kohl and Bresnahan, “Initiating Decolonization,” 12.

51. Santiago Anria, “Bolivia’s MAS: Between Party and Movement,” chapter in, Maxwell A. Cameron & Eric Hershberg, editors, Latin America’s Left Turns: Politics, Policies & Trajectories of Change (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2010), 103.

52. Madrid, “Bolivia,” in Levitsky and Roberts, Resurgence, 254; and Artaraz, Bolivia, 5.

53. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, quoted in Artaraz, Bolivia, 152.

54. Artaraz, Bolivia, 6.

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By Vikram Sood

The Islamic State of Iraq and Shams (ISIS) is neither a magical nor a mythical creation but the creation of vested interests. The Afghan Mujahedeen, followed by al-Qaeda and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), were creations of the Cold War. The Taliban followed. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq when US troops landed ostensibly to eradicate it and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Al-Qaeda in Arab Peninsula (AQAP) happened subsequently. In short, the ISIS menace today is a result of assaults on Syria since 2011. The organisation may have its ideological territorial battles with AQ fronts like the Jabat al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria, but the truth is that the ISIS was helped along by the West and other Arab nations — notably Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both close to the West and fearful of Iran — with money and arms training to try and dislodge Bashar Al Assad in Syria.

It may be argued that since the West indirectly created the problem, they should be solving the problem. Unfortunately, this is not how the real world functions. As US President Barack Obama underlined in his strongest statement yet about fighting ‘ISIS’s brand of evil together’ from the UN in New York on Wednesday, ISIS and al-Qaeda now pose a menace to the rest of us, India included. ISIS may be attracting a great deal of attention in the West because of the beheadings and kidnappings of foreigners and other Sunni non-conformists, and is not concentrating on India and other regions yet.

It is more likely that other terrorist organisations could copy ISIS tactics in Afghanistan to frighten Indians away. India will have to be prepared to handle this.

The most lethal weaponry will not ensure a military annihilation of the enemy. But the menace has first to be contained militarily before it can be defeated ideologically. Meanwhile, ISIS has acquired a state, the Islamic State (IS) led by Abu Bakr Baghdadi, who heads a brutal vicious ‘regime’ in the name of purifying Islam. Islamic nations are not sure how they want to respond to this — with military strength or through appeasement and acquiescence. The battle against this is going to be equally brutal.

Switch off their oxygen

The world does not need international real-time coverage of this fight. What the world needs is an international coalition that has an immutable definition of terrorism with no caveats, which ruthlessly starves the ISIS of finances, weapons, recruits, food and propaganda. If a sanctions regime has legitimacy, it is here.

Meanwhile, the September 3 video release featuring Ayman al-Zawahiri’s announcement of forming a new branch in the Indian subcontinent could be the result of turf battles between al-Qaeda and IS. We must, however, remember where this is coming from and recall that it is Pakistan, with the help of Taliban in Afghanistan, which is associated with the birth, growth and rise of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda may have developed its branches or assigned franchise to different parts of the Arab world and into Africa, but its main players remained safe in Pakistan.

The more urgent problem for India is going to be the renewed talk by al-Qaeda about its alleged interest in India. Noted expert Tufail Ahmed points out that al-Qaeda and its associates have remained active in our neighbourhood and the Arab peninsula. In fact, an anti-Indian group was noticed in mid-2013. This group, Ansar ut-Tauheed fi Bilad al-Hind (Supporters of the Islamic Monotheism in India), had trained some Indians in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. Whatever be the number of terrorist-jihadi organisations active in Pakistan and Afghanistan, their essential feature is the control and direction that the Pakistan military exercises on them as it does on others.

Pakistan-in-waiting

Pakistan has begun preparations to take control of Afghanistan once the Americans leave. This also means excluding Indian influence from Afghanistan. Apart from bolstering and strengthening its assets like the LeT, the Haqqani Network in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar, renewed threats from al-Qaeda have been thrown in.

According to Arif Jamal, author of Call for Transnational Jihad: Lashkar-e-Taiba 1985 to 2014, the LeT today comprises about 3,00,000-5,00,000 active members under arms.

Global ambition

This is an alarmingly large number and as long as Pakistan and the LeT agree that the targets are only Afghanistan and India, this will work. But once the jihadis wish to pursue their global ambitions, the LeT could easily be a threat even to Pakistan. Also, the LeT is an Ahle Hadis outfit and ideologically closer to the Wahabbi al-Qaeda. Which makes these threats continue to be lethal.

The US-led bombing of ISIS has begun. But its chances of a complete success remain bleak. The inevitable collateral damage will create new terrorists as one hears of jihadis morphing with new groups like the Khorasan. There is no substitute to human intelligence and boots on the ground. ISIS may even have made its appearance in Pakistan.

The threat to India and Indian interests will still come from Pakistan-based terrorist forces. The name of the terrorist regiment or the colour of its uniform is not important. Conceivably, the first test for the Modi government will be in Afghanistan.

(The writer is an Advisor to Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)

Courtesy: The Economic Times, September 26, 2014

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Unemployment and employment rates are only so helpful for making staffing decisions. Executives looking to understand the labor market’s internal workings may seek a more comprehensive view.

To better understand Spain’s labor market trends, Meta4 and IESE have developed the first labor dynamism index (LDI). Carried out by IESE’s Marta Elvira and Stefano Visintin, the LDI is to be updated every six months with monthly and quarterly data from almost 800 privately held companies in Spain, operating in 21 different sectors.

The LDI tracks mobility and flexibility within the labor market. It registers when a company makes a change in a job contract or replaces a worker with another worker. Importantly, it picks up on job movements that do not directly depend upon the state of the economy — i.e., outright job creation or elimination. The first LDI report indicates that labor dynamism is growing in Spain.

The Overview

In the period studied — from January 2010 through June 2014 — the turnover rate for Spanish jobs was 20 percent from quarter to quarter. Of that 20 percent, less than a third of the movement (30 percent) was due to the outright creation or elimination of jobs. The rest — that is to say, 14 percent of total jobs or 70 percent of the job changes — corresponds to labor dynamism. In short, the LDI for the period studied is 14 percent.

The Trend Toward Greater Dynamism

Spain’s LDI moved from 12.5 percent in mid-2010 to 16.4 percent in mid-2014. Despite overall stagnation in the economy, the level of labor force dynamism has clearly risen.

Increasing staff rotation may occur for the sake of corporate efficiency, for demographic reasons (i.e., replacing retired staff members), and/or to redeploy staff in growth areas (i.e., cutting the marketing department in order to add to headcount in R&D). Employees may leave their jobs voluntarily to pursue new opportunities or take care of family members, leaving those jobs open to new hires.

From 2010 to 2014, two clearly distinct periods emerge. First, between 2010 and 2012, labor market dynamism was stable. Then, over the course of 2013, it posted a significant rise. From the first quarter of 2012 to the second quarter of 2014, a gain of more than four percentage points was recorded.

A rise in the LDI during economic expansion indicates dynamism in which employees may find opportunities to move into better positions. On the other hand, a rise in the LDI during times of economic stagnation may signal that companies are seeking greater flexibility in staffing — using fixed-term work contracts, for example.

In the case of Spain, as the economy continues to stagnate, the results may indicate that corporate efficiency is increasing. However, Spain’s elevated LDI also points to lower retention rates for fixed-term hires and less training for these short-term workers.

Reasons to Leave

Homing in on the reasons employees left positions, the study found that the number of voluntary resignations fell from 10 percent to seven percent. This indicates uncertainty about the job market.

At the same time, the number of involuntary departures stemming from contract expirations rose from 2010 to 2014. In particularly, the number of short-term contracts lasting less than a month grew in importance since 2012. In 2013 and 2014, up to two-thirds of all job departures have been caused by contract expirations.

The post Spain’s Labor Market Is Growing More Dynamic appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Steve Breyman

Every national peace group (large and small, new and old, religious and secular) opposes Barack Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq, and its recent extension to Syria. Their opposition extends to Obama’s Congress-sanctioned arming of “moderate” Syrian rebels (for which legislators found half a billion dollars).

The anti-war movement’s antagonism is sturdy and reasoned. It’s based on irrefutable historical, political, economic and cultural analysis focused on the past thirteen years of bloody, wasteful, failed war on Afghanistan and Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, Libya and Somalia. Find some here, here, and here.

The groups don’t merely oppose more war. They also advance positive agendas of alternatives to bombing. United for Peace and Justice (an umbrella coalition under which many US peace groups cohere) recommends five “better choices”: (1) make diplomacy and humanitarian assistance the priority; (2) seek improved relations with Iran to end the fighting in the region; (3) work through the United Nations to halt the flow of financing and weapons to ISIS; (4) re-start UN-directed negotiations to end the civil war in Syria; (5) mobilize to solve the real problems in the region—poverty, hunger, drought, joblessness.

David Swanson of World Beyond War (and Secretary of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet) has these suggestions as to what “What to Do About ISIS”: (1) stop bombing; (2) stop shipping arms; (3) be skeptical of humanitarian claims; (4) apologize to ISIS leader al-Baghdadi for brutalizing him in Abu Ghraib; (5) make restitution for damages inflicted on Iraq; (6) apologize for advancing war in Syria; (7) begin withdrawing US forces from overseas; (8) work through the United Nations; (9) have the US join the International Criminal Court, etc.

Sound as this advice is, policymakers are unable to take it. For Obama, Congress and the Pentagon, there is no alternative to airstrikes on the Islamic State, and to arming Syrian rebel moderates. Add the structure of US national security policy—its institutions, practices and tools—to alliances with authoritarian regimes, past mistakes and ‘policy momentum,’ corporate power, the ideologies and worldviews of officials, and the lack of genuine American democracy. The sum of these addends restricts decision-makers’ options to war, and more war.

Consider the five-point program—”How to Combat ISIS Without Bombs”—put forward by Win Without War (WWW; another coalition that includes Global Exchange, Pax Christi, Tikkun, Peace Action, Greenpeace, NOW, and numerous other groups):

• Hit ISIS economically

• Crack down on ISIS’s weapons supply

• Address political grievances of local populations

• Lead a multinational international response

• Provide humanitarian aid.

Like the recommendations above, policies predicated on these alternatives are vastly superior to blind plunging ahead with airstrikes and weapons deliveries. Each, however, runs up against deep-grained US foreign policy standard operating procedures and non-military options foreclosed by past mistakes.

ISIS’s Finances

To “hit ISIS economically” requires cracking down on those who finance the organization and the banks that store the loot. The War on Terror spawned several new offices to restrict the funding of designated terrorist organizations and individuals across DC in the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce and Treasury. This effort (unlike that aimed at Mexican drug cartels) made some inroads (it’s hard to independently know how significant), but not without bogus “material support for terrorism” charges being leveled against several charitable organizations and generous individuals. In the face of strong paper regulations forbidding banks to service terrorists and other organized criminals, Wall Street averages about a major scandal a year since 9/11.

Two factors complicate the mission of squeezing terrorist finances: (1) considerable funding for jihadi groups comes from individual citizens of erstwhile US allies in the Persian Gulf (a problem dating from the proxy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan), although there’s little or no evidence that ISIS is dependent on foreign donors; and (2) ISIS is to a large extent self-financing.

US efforts to get Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil sheikdoms to shut down the money funnel have run into obstacles at the very highest levels of government; presidents and secretaries of state are unwilling to jeopardize relations with the hydrocarbon kingdoms over the matter. ISIS’s wealth (some estimates have it as high as $500 million) is the result of kidnappings for ransom, robberies, protection rackets, and illicit sales of Syrian and Iraqi oil. The group is said to demand 10-20% of receipts from businesses in the towns and cities it controls.

Win Without War suggests targeting the “Turkish, Iraqi, and other oil dealers who are purchasing the oil on the black market“—a sensible course of action—but Turkish authority (let alone US) does not extend far along its 750 mile border with Syria and Iraq where smuggling of all sorts has been a way of life for decades (Turkey’s war against its Kurds made licit livings difficult to make). And the estimates of $1-2 million per day for ISIS coffers from oil sales appear wildly overblown.

Restrict ISIS’s Weapons Supply

Win Without War wisely recommends that President Obama pressure Turkey to restrict the flow of weapons and foreign fighters across its border with Syria. Obama recently talked with the new Turkish president about doing just that. And he convinced the UN Security Council to criminalize participation in armed jihad. But as with crude oil smuggling—and the trafficking of contraband over the US-Mexico border—attempts to interdict the flow of militants and weaponry across long, rugged international boundaries against the efforts of determined professional smugglers leads to hugely expensive, frequently brutal, only partially effective, metastasized and militarized border control-industrial complexes. Consider too that weapons (and oil) smuggling is highly lucrative and leads to official corruption and the obstacles become clear.

That considerable heavy US weaponry—including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery—already fell into Islamic State’s hands following the Iraqi Army’s humiliating defeat in Mosul (and more recent defeats in Anbar) at the hands of what were once lightly armed extremists did not deter Obama or his bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill from deciding to send more lethal assistance, and to train handpicked Syrian rebels in its use. They were not deterred either by the knowledge that some unknown but nontrivial number of formerly “moderate” Syrian insurgents now fight for ISIS and other non-preferred networks.

Cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties (including by the boondoggle F-22, it’s first use “in combat”) appear to politicians and bureaucrats the superior option; they supply deep gratification for those who see them as legitimate tools, that sense of satisfaction anti-smuggling efforts experience rarely.

Local Political Grievances

Win Without War would have Obama attempt to heal the wounds inflicted on Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis by their Alawite and Shi’a dominated governments so as to deprive ISIS of local support. They point to the “Anbar Awakening”—where the US Army used suitcases of $100 bills to sway tribal militia leaders from their support of al Qaeda in Iraq—as a model.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq, de-Baathification, and bungled reconstruction paved the way for Shi’a dominance of Iraqi politics. Washington appears to understand the need for the Iraqi political system to fairly include Sunnis. This is why John Kerry engineered the replacement of Nouri al Maliki by Haidar al Abbadi. But years of support for the sectarian al-Maliki whose policies deeply alienated Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds will not be easy to undo. And the prospects for resolution of the Syrian civil war, called for by WWW, seem lower at present than they did earlier this year at the failed peace talks in Montreux.

Washington can’t even sort out its own “local political grievances;” fixing the mess it made of Iraqi politics is inconceivable. It’s far easier just to bomb the bastards.

Multilateral International Response

WWW suggests building a coalition that would reduce the recruitment of Westerners to ISIS rather than one that supports US airstrikes against the militants. The peace activists understand ISIS thrives because of conflicts in Syria and Iraq “fueled by foreign interests,” and thus urge Obama to involve “all the parties including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others.”

The War on Terror-Industrial Complex prefers to spy on “radical” imams and mosques to reforming its foreign policy or engaging with communities from which potential Western jihadis come. US foreign policy has worked to isolate Tehran since 1979, ratcheting up the pressure of sanctions periodically as during the last few years over Iran’s nuclear research program. John Kerry can’t make up his mind whether to include Iran in the anti-ISIS coalition; he shut Iran out of the Paris conference he organized but then backtracked within a day or two muttering about a possible role for Iran against the Wahabis.

Humanitarian Aid

WIW recognizes that the Obama administration has provided more assistance to Syrian refugees than any other government. But US aid has been no where close to what’s needed to meet the needs of the millions—1.4 million in tiny Lebanon alone—short of food, clothing, shelter, medicine and schools. Elected national Americans leaders are always able to find enough money to wage war, but never able to find enough to alleviate misery.

The US did next to nothing on its own to aid the starving Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus. And the US has failed to support the democratic Self-Administration Zones in northern Syria, even though as Michael Beer of Nonviolence International reports, these “autonomous governments are secular, have a 40 percent quota for women in leadership positions, and are committed to a united Syria and a pluralist Syria.”

At the same time, US humanitarian aid is considerably greater than that provided by its Gulf Arab coalition partners. Rather than solicit support for its bombing campaign, the US ought to cobble together sufficient donors to meet the needs of the innocents displaced by war in Iraq and Syria.

Conclusion

Barak Obama and the US Congress just made the same mistake in regard to Islamic State that George Bush and the US Congress made regarding al Qaeda following 9/11: they ‘declared war’ on a smallish bunch of brutal criminals thereby elevating their status and opening the flood gates of recruitment after being attacked by the Great Satan. They stepped right into the trap set for them by al Baghdadi: the beheading videos were designed to elicit a violent response from Washington. It worked: ISIS is now the organization of choice for aspiring jihadis.

Obama and Congress are unable to choose diplomacy and humanitarian aid over war with ISIS for several interrelated reasons. First, most of those who make and implement US national security policy have distorted and fantastical worldviews. They believe the US can act as both world policeman and benign hegemon. They justify most any level of violence and collateral damage in service to policy ends—”destroy ISIS”—impossible to achieve. They see US bombs as problem solvers, and disregard all contradictory evidence.

Second, today’s policy has implications—some very long lasting—for tomorrow’s, as yesterday’s has for today’s. Policies gather momentum and lose malleability over time. Policies enroll supporters, generate enormous sums for contractors, and shunt aside dissenters. Decisions made, weapons bought, money spent, bureaucracies shaped during the War on Terror echo into the future. US policy has become little more than a New Enemy Creation Process. Even if Obama (and it’s clear he does not) or the next president wanted to make a clean break, to finally bring an end to the War on Terror, it would, and will be, a very difficult undertaking.

Third, the failure of Congress and the American people to rein in presidential war making powers, to challenge even the serial illegal actions of successive presidents, reduces the prospects for the stem to stern overhaul of US policy necessary to follow the sane advice of peace groups. Fourth, the interests vested in the War on Terror-Industrial-Complex represent some of the most powerful political-economic actors in the country; their hold over policy cannot be underestimated.

Surprise as to the lopsided authorization for Obama’s direct war against ISIS and indirect war against al Assad evaporates in light of this analysis. Reasonable observers may have thought that thirteen years of experience, pain, shame and waste would be sufficient to at least teach officials what to avoid this time. Yet here they go again complete with deployment of “boots on the ground” regardless of the president’s claims to the contrary.

- Steve Breyman is author of Movement Genesis and Why Movements Matter. He is a former William C. Foster Visiting Scholar Fellow at the US State Department. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: breyms@rpi.edu.

The post Why Obama Must Bomb ISIS – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Mukul Sanwal

The Modi-Xi Summit has evoked mixed responses from analysts. They have largely focused on existing concerns – talks on settling the boundary issue; whether a global power really intends to support the rise of a possible rival; India is being edged out of the emerging multi-polar world order. These formulations ignore the complexity of the relationship because it concerns each of these interconnected elements.

The Summit outcome recognizes that the border is un-demarcated. The principles for settling the boundary agreed in 2005 have been reiterated detailing steps for a final settlement, now described as a strategic goal. A settled border will enable us to review our military doctrine of fighting on two fronts and divert much needed resources for infrastructure development.

There has been considerable political movement recognizing the problem in terms of tension between two rising powers seeking to establish their territorial integrity rather than letting a colonial legacy dominate bilateral relations. An early demarcation of the boundary should be our litmus test for the partnership.

But can the two leaders go further and recognize the regional strategic interests of each other in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans? What about full support for India’s membership of the Security with the two countries working together in that forum?

At the global level, the most significant economic transformation the world has seen is currently making Asia—once again—the world’s economic centre of gravity. The scale and speed of the economic rebalancing occurring from the West to the East and South is many times larger than was witnessed during the Industrial Revolution. By 2060 these China and India will have a little less than half of world GDP with OECD’s share shrinking to one-quarter. In this changed context, instead of managing the competition in the relationship with China, the Modi-Xi Summit has provided the opportunity to re-frame issues and collaborate for an Asian century of prosperity.
Both India and China share the goal of democratization of multilateralism for sharing prosperity, seeking a greater role in shaping global affairs to replace the G7 grouping of developed countries, which has so far been deciding the global agenda. Already the first steps have been taken in this direction with establishment of the New Development Bank. Here, too, cooperation has triumphed over conflict. India agreed to its headquarters in Shanghai and China has not retained for itself the position of the head of the new bank or the supervisory bodies, thereby recognizing the emergence of a multi-polar world order.

At the global level, the compartmentalized arrangement between the United Nations General Assembly, Bretton Woods Institutions and the Security Council is not able to respond to trade-offs between economic growth and global ecological limits. By 2060, in Asia and other developing countries demand for food, water and energy is expected to double, and reshaping a global system that served the natural resource and human security needs of one-fifth of the global population for a shared vision of prosperity for four billion people who have yet to benefit from globalization will provide the legitimacy for new global rules.

The focus will have to be on use and distribution, rather than scarcity, of natural resources. Technological innovation will be a key driver, requiring a review of the Intellectual Rights Regime, which ignores societal concerns. New approaches responding to new challenges will be needed in areas such as energy, water, and food and cyber security. In climate change there is already a close collaboration with China. A shared global vision will overcome both the global rulemaking deficit and competition inherent in the re-emergence of two Asian giants, without unduly antagonising the others.

Economic cooperation should also be taken up a notch away as it benefits both, and will build trust and dispel notions that China will not support our economic growth for geopolitical reasons. China is already India’s largest trading partner. Premier Xi has made India an offer of linking manufacturing and back-office software expertise, and China’s investment in manufacturing in India will help to reduce the $30 billion trade deficit. The two countries need to go beyond this rebalancing.

India has the capacity for global leadership in developing new pharmaceuticals and crop varieties, as we are the only country with both extensive endemic biodiversity and a world class endogenous biotechnology capacity, along with global leadership in software development. China has developed global leadership in solar energy and information technology hardware. Together these are the foundation of the knowledge-based economy that will dominate the world a decade from now. Joint research for the next wave of innovation will be the real win-win dividend for both – keeping out of the middle income trap.

The time has come for India to move beyond notions of balance of power by adopting a vision of shared prosperity. Developing ASEAN as an economic and diplomatic bloc will enable the Asian Century, as the region has more than half the global population and the potential to have more than half the global wealth by 2050, and support a relationship with China based on multilateral rules.

Prime Minister Modi must now implement the BJP manifesto’s approach to foreign policy, for which he has the nation’s endorsement, by fleshing out the details with a bold vision for the future, instead of the reactive approach that we have adopted so far.

Mukul Sanwal is Ex civil servant and UN diplomat

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/IndiaandChinaReadytoMeetHalfway_msanwal_240914.html

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By Jeremy Black

The Scottish referendum on 18 September 2014 was of crucial significance for Scotland, the United Kingdom, and, indeed, the world. The last comes first because, however lesser a power than in the past, the UK is still a major strategic force, not least as an important military power and a state willing and able to use that power. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the referendum was the undisguised wish on the part of anti-Western states for the breakup of the UK. Putin’s Russia saw an opportunity for a major weakening of NATO – both in military terms and with reference to broader political cohesion. The naval and air bases in Scotland are of importance not just to the UK but also to NATO, notably the USA. They provide a crucial opportunity for the forward deployment of power into and beyond the North-East Atlantic, a deployment aimed against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and directed against Russia thereafter. Moreover, this military capability provides a crucial backup for NATO’s northern flank, specifically Norway. It would also have been difficult to see Britain continuing as a nuclear power had the submarine base on Holy Loch been dismantled as the Scottish National Party (SNP) intended.

The impact of NATO coherence would have been highly significant, and not least at a time of concern about how best to respond to Russian expansionism and aggression. An SNP victory would have been regarded, both in Russia and in NATO, as a success for neutralism or, at the very least, a vote against any meaningful resistance to Russia. Such a vote would have encouraged neutralism elsewhere, a neutralism that would have weakened NATO and, thus, helped lead America towards neutralism.

There is also a wish on the part of China for the collapse of the UK. Following on from China’s interest in Iceland has come a sense of opportunity in an independent Scotland. This was linked to the greater geopolitical significance of the Arctic, and, therefore, the approaches to the Arctic, as the ice melted. Partly due to this Chinese interest, there was great concern on the part of other powers wary of China. Indeed, I followed part of the last stage of the campaign in Japan, where government, strategic and military commentators were all greatly concerned about the breakup of the UK and its impact across the world.

At the level of the European Union (EU), the campaign underlined the risk of the disintegration of other nation states, notably Spain and Italy. The prospect for Catalan independence has receded, as, even more, has separatism within Scotland. With this, the idea of the EU as a state of the regions has become less plausible, although that will not prevent support for that concept at the level of the EU.

The size of the Yes vote was in part a product of disillusionment with existing nation states. Such a product was not simply a matter of (relative) economic failure, recession and austerity, although all played a role. There was also the failure of the existing system, a failure that spoke to broader currents. Existing national narratives of achievement, however flawed and partial, could not capture the experience and commitment of many who were scarcely political radicals.

In the case of Scotland, there was also a reconceptualization of nationalism. From the perspective of the SNP, Scotland had been regionalized from the 1940s as Great Britain and the United Kingdom ceased to be imperial and multinational and, instead, became an English-dominated Little Britain. In the event, the referendum indicated that this reconceptualization was limited. While 1.6 million voted for independence, the Yes campaign failed to pass 45 percent of the voting figure. The high turnout – 84 percent and up to 91 percent in some areas – was unprecedented, since 1951, for a UK election at this scale. This result and turnout suggested a clear verdict, and one that is unlikely to be reviewed again for a generation.

At the same time, the campaign said a lot that was disappointing about the state of Scottish and UK politics. The SNP response to failure, as seen not least in the concession speech the morning after the vote by Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister, was a “we wuz robbed” approach. Salmond’s campaign argument that the election was one of hope versus fear was repeatedly reiterated. Salmond argued that the Yes campaign was a “mass movement of people,” one thwarted by a scare and fear of enormous proportions. The latter reflected the classic response by populist politicians when confronted by an unwilling electorate: the idea of false consciousness. In the case of the SNP, this was blamed not on the electors but on the “Westminster establishment,” the “bankers’, big business’, and the usual list of culprits.”

This was an approach that failed to give enough credit to the Scottish electorate which had a great opportunity for listening to arguments during a long debate. The mechanics of the election reflected this. The ‘Yes’ campaign enjoyed a significant August surge, one that led to much speculation about the independence cause breaking through. In the event, this speculation almost certainly continually underestimated the persistent strength of the ‘No’ side. “The silent have spoken” declared Alistair Darling, the “Better Together” leader, the morning after the vote. Darling presented the vote as one for “unity over division” and “positive change over needless separation,” one that reaffirmed “our place within the Union.” All of these points were well-founded, but there was also a tendency to underplay the political risks involved in the entire episode. Had the ‘Yes’ campaign won, then many commentators would have seen the result as a product of poor decisions by both Blair and Cameron. In the first case, the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1999 was a key product of Blair’s determination to “repackage” national identity with sound bites such as “New Britain” and “A Young Country.” Longstanding constitutional, political, and governmental practices were altered. The Scottish Parliament gained tax-varying powers and a capacity for a substantial legislative programme on domestic affairs. Considerable differences between Scotland and England swiftly opened up, notably as a result of the different cost structures put in place under legislation, notably the 2001 Graduate Endowment and Student Support Act and the 2001 Regulation of Care Act. In large part, there was a matter of political calculation by Blair, with the determination to use a Scottish Parliament in order to prevent an independence that would have denied Labour in Westminster the support of Scottish MPs. It was typical of Blair that self- and partisan-interest were sold with rhetoric.

That set up a problematic situation that Cameron sought to thwart by lancing the drive for independence by holding a referendum, which was the policy of the SNP government elected in Edinburgh in 2011. At the time, this seemed an adroit move to Unionists, but the risks were seriously underplayed. This was the case not only with Scotland, but also with the process of constitutional change that the vote has set in play. The promise, by Cameron and other national party leaders, that a vote for staying together would lead to the devolution of more power to Scotland, a possibly unnecessary promise, left the constitution unclear and threw the “English Question” into particular prominence, namely the issue of how far England, and indeed Wales and Northern Ireland, should have rights comparable to those of Scotland. This issue creates problems of further instability; at the same time that the possibility of constitutional renewal also opens up new opportunities. Cameron called for “a balanced settlement.”

The roles of Blair and Cameron are also instructive. They indicate the significance of individuals and particular conjunctures and contingencies. The latter extended to particular results, with ‘Yes’ majorities in a few important cities and areas, notably the largest city, Glasgow, as well as Dundee, with ‘No’ majorities in many more, notably Edinburgh, Aberdeen and key areas such as Fife. As a result, Cameron was able to declare that ‘our country of four nations’ had been kept together.

The role of individuals underlines the extent to which counterfactuals are also significant. That is not the approach taken by many historians. They tend to prefer great causes, causes they generally champion, but it is necessary to understand the role of specificities and particularities. For example, the asymmetrical nature of the “four nations” is crucial, with England having eighty-six per cent of the UK population. Thus, a separate English Parliament, of “English votes for English laws” as Cameron declared on 19 September, would be disproportionately significant in the UK. It might well be the case that a Labour-dominated UK government found itself opposed by a Conservative-dominated English Parliament. This scarcely offers an easy outcome. Cameron faces much anger from Conservative backbench MPs, and this is focusing on more rights for England. Pressure from the populism of UKIP is particularly significant. UKIP has been able to take up the case of England. This raises serious problems for the UK.

Thus, the idea that the referendum vote in Scotland has solved UK political problems, notably its asymmetric Union, is misfounded. There is much uncertainty ahead, even though it is less to the fore than it was when voting started on 18 September.

About the author:
Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is author of The Power of Knowledge: How Information Technology Made the Modern World (Yale, 2014), War and Technology (Indiana, 2013), and over one hundred other books. His forthcoming book is A Short History of Britain.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

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The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is the most successful regional grouping in the developing would. Its latest project is to establish an ASEAN Economic Community by 31 December 2015, consisting of economic, political-security, and social cultural components. This column argues that giving commitments more teeth is the key challenge to be overcome in realising the ASEAN Economic Community if it is to be more than a political exercise in solidarity.

By Jayant Menon

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the most successful regional grouping in the developing would.  Born as a politico-security pact in the aftermath of the Viet Nam War in 1967, it started with five countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.  Brunei Darussalam joined in 1984, followed by Viet Nam in 1995, Lao PDR and Myanmar in 1997, and finally Cambodia in 1999, bringing the total to 10 countries. Apart from expanding its membership, ASEAN has evolved to embrace an ambitious economic agenda. Its latest project is to establish an ASEAN Community by 31 December, 2015, consisting of three components: Economic, Political-Security, and Social Cultural.  If ASEAN were one economy, as the ASEAN Economic Community intends it to be, it would be seventh largest in the world with a combined GDP of $2.4 trillion in 2013. With over 600 million people, ASEAN’s potential market is larger than the EU, and has the world’s third largest workforce (Hill and Menon 2012).

The following three questions are fundamental to the ASEAN Economic Community, and are addressed in turn, below: (i) What are the achievements to date in terms of realising an ASEAN Economic Community?; (ii) What are the remaining challenges; and (iii) Is the deadline likely to be met, and will it matter?

Achievements to date

There have been a number of noteworthy achievements by ASEAN member states on the road to ASEAN Economic Community 2015:

• Tariffs. This is a success story of political commitment for ASEAN member states. Following the implementation of the ASEAN Free Trade Area, common effective preferential tariff rates are virtually zero for ASEAN-6. More than 70% of intra-ASEAN trade is conducted at zero most-favoured nation tariff rates, and less than 5% are subject to tariffs above 10% (WTO 2011).
• Trade facilitation. The five original member states of ASEAN have live implementation of national single windows already with planned full rollout to all significant ports and airports by 2015.
• Investment liberalisation and facilitation. The original ASEAN member states are near achieving international best practices while the newer members have to catch-up.
• Services liberalisation. Mutual recognition agreements or their equivalent have been agreed for three types of goods and seven professions, and a “‘framework agreement”’ has been concluded.

Remaining challenges

But challenges remain within each of the ASEAN Economic Community’s four pillars.

The biggest challenges relate to Pillar 1 – creating a single market and production base. This is despite the fact that the single market concept is nowhere near as ambitious as that in Europe (Lloyd 2005).  To hasten progress in this pillar, ASEAN needs to prioritise the following:

• Eliminating non-tariff barriers, which are increasingly replacing tariffs as protective measures (Soesastro 2006);
• Strengthening trade facilitation by ensuring live implementation of national single windows in the newer member countries to complete the ASEAN Single Window; and
• Further liberalising investment and services trade  by improving the business climate and reducing the cost of doing business, including prescribing standard rules governing licensing and other regulatory regimes; and
• Expanding the number of mutual recognition agreements and ensuring that they are implemented in a way that leads to increased skilled labour mobility.

Pillar 2 aims at creating a highly competitive economic region. In order to do this, competition policy needs to be improved, and intellectual property rights protection strengthened. These are difficult areas of reform, and questions remain as to how effective a role a regional approach can play compared to national action or a multilateral approach. Nevertheless, there are potentially considerable benefits regionally from the harmonisation of standards and regulatory convergence, particularly in developing a regional market.

Pillar 3 involves creating a region of equitable economic development. ASEAN is significantly more diverse than Europe, in economic, political, cultural, and linguistic terms. The huge disparities in income and levels of development that currently characterise ASEAN are inconsistent with the concept of an economic community, however defined. Sub-regional arrangements such as the Initiative for ASEAN Integration have been proposed to accelerate integration of the newer members- Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam- into ASEAN.

While sub-regional zones can potentially help reduce development gaps and support the growth of global value chains, the reality is that neither the Initiative for ASEAN Integration nor other sub-regional initiatives will have the resources, or the ability, to fully address the development divide. Unlike in Europe, the wealthier countries of ASEAN are very small- Singapore and Brunei- and cannot finance the kind of transfers required in order to make a dent in filling the huge developmental gaps. While these initiatives and support from bilateral and multilateral donor agencies can play a part, the solution must come from within the countries themselves, and through broader economic reforms that promote trade and investment, and thereby enable them to catch-up. Indeed, this is what they have been doing, and what has been happening (Menon 2013).

Finally, Pillar 4 is about creating a region that is fully integrated into the global economy. The biggest strides have been made in this pillar, which has enabled ‘Factory ASEAN’ and global value chains to thrive. This underlies the fact that liberalisation thus far has been driven more by market forces than by regional agreements; and that the shift in focus from unilateral liberalisation to preferential liberalisation through trade agreements has not led to further external opening or domestic reform, since these trade agreements tend to be “weak” and “trade-light.” (Sally 2013; WTO 2011). ASEAN’s long-standing commitment to openness is a defining trait, and should continue if regionalism is to be sustained, let alone prosper.

Each of the four pillars presents a demanding set of challenges to be met if the ASEAN Economic Community is ever to be realised. Cutting across all of them is a need for greater engagement with the private sector and the broader community. Although the ASEAN Economic Community is a government-led agenda, it cannot succeed without fully engaging the business sector, and the public at large. Preparedness of the private sector has been astonishingly low, while awareness of the public equally abysmal (ASEAN-BAC 2013). This needs to change quickly if the ASEAN Economic Community is to make a difference.

Will the 2015 deadline be met?

Although ASEAN has come a long way towards realising its goal, the veracity of the challenges that remain suggests that it will fall short of the approaching deadline.  Indeed, ASEAN’s latest self-assessment from March 2013, the ASEAN Economic Community Scorecard, suggests that the region had reached only 77.5% of its targets between 2008-March 2013.

Recognising that the deadline will be missed is important to ensure that work continues past the 2015 deadline. Indeed, many of ASEAN’s working groups, task forces and the like seem almost preoccupied, somewhat prematurely, with a post-2015 agenda, confirming recognition of this reality. Moreover, the Scorecard reveals that the pace of reform seems to have slowed down rather than picked up, partly due to having to move on to the more difficult parts of the reform agenda.  Even if the pace were to pick up now, the real test for the ASEAN Economic Community will lie in the years beyond 2015.

Apart from hitting the remaining targets, the bigger challenge of implementing the accords legitimately lies beyond the deadline. This is no easy task when considering that domestic laws, or even the Constitution, may have to be amended to accommodate ASEAN Economic Community accords. The flexibility that characterises ASEAN cooperation and institutional arrangements, the so-called ASEAN Way, could give member states a pretext for non-compliance – and there are enforcement issues. Giving commitments more teeth is the key challenge to be overcome in realising the ASEAN Economic Community if it is to be more than a political exercise in solidarity. We should therefore view 2015 as a milestone rather than a hard target, and not a destination but rather as part of a journey (Severino and Menon 2013).

Finally, as recent disputes over property rights in the South China Sea have shown, progress on the economic front cannot be divorced from geopolitical issues facing some ASEAN member countries. Indeed, these events have reminded us that ASEAN was born as, and in many ways designed to be, a politico-security pact, and that the economic agenda is a more recent experiment. Given the interdependence between economics and geopolitics, however, the institution will have to weather the challenges that the latter poses on its cohesion if it is to progress on the former. So far, it has avoided getting involved in the geopolitics without creating too much discontent amongst its ranks.  Just how long it can continue down this path of ignorance before risking collateral damage to its structural integrity remains to be seen.

References

ASEAN Business Advisory Council (ASEAN-BAC), 2013. ASEAN-BAC Survey on ASEAN Competitiveness, 2013, Singapore: ASEAN-BAC.

Hill, H and J Menon (2012), “ASEAN Economic Integration: Driven by Markets, Bureaucrats, or Both?“, in M.E. Kreinin and M.G. Plummer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Commercial Policy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 357-386.

Lloyd, P (2005), “What is a Single Market? An Application to the Case of ASEAN”, ASEAN Economic Bulletin, 22 (3), pp. 251-265.

Menon, J (2013), “Narrowing the Development Divide in ASEAN: the Role of Policy”, Asian-Pacific Economic Literature 27(2), pp. 25-51.

Severino, R and J Menon (2013), “The ASEAN Community: An Overview”, in Basu S, J Menon, R Severino and O Shresta (eds.), The ASEAN Economic Community: A Work in Progress, ADB and ISEAS, Singapore, pp. 1-30.

Sally, R (2013). “ASEAN FTAs: State of Play and Outlook for ASEAN’s Regional and Global Integration:, in Basu S, J Menon, R Severino and O Shresta (eds.), The ASEAN Economic Community: A Work in Progress, ADB and ISEAS, Singapore, pp. 320-81.

Soesastro, H (2006), “Regional Integration in East Asia: Achievements and Future Prospects”, Asian Economic Policy Review, 1 (2), pp. 215-234.

WTO (2011), World Trade Report 2011, Geneva, WTO.

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Police in central Japan say they have found bodies of 31 hikers near the summit of Mount Ontake, a volcano that erupted without warning on Saturday, spewing ash, rocks and steam.

Officials confirmed four deaths while 27 others were described as being in a state of “cardiac arrest,” a term Japanese authorities often use to describe the dead until doctors can examine the body.

More than 550 Japanese police, firefighters and military troops ascended the slopes of 3,067-meter (10,121-foot) Mount Ontake Sunday, searching for survivors and casualties from the eruption.

Rescue workers endangered

However, rescue efforts were called off mid-afternoon Sunday because toxic volcanic gases were building and it was becoming too dangerous for emergency workers, an official at the Nagano prefectural government told the French news agency AFP.

“The rescue team suspended their operation because of the increasing concentration of sulphurous gas in the area,” the official said.

A suffocating blanket of ash up to 20 centimetres (eight inches) deep covered a large area of the volcano, and had forced up to 150 to seek refuge in mountaintop shelters at one point.

Local officials believe 45 to 49 people sheltered overnight in cabins on the mountain, although details remained unclear. NHK News, Japan’s national broadcaster, reported the stranded hikers were expected to try descending Sunday.

Popular autumn spot

The mountain is popular among walkers, particularly in late September when the turning of the autumn leaves makes for dramatic scenery.

Officials said one person was rescued from under a thick layer of ash, and other hikers were seriously injured.

However, AFP and The Associated Press reported that emergency helicopters rescued seven people, including two who were able to wave at a Self Defense Force helicopter.

Some were unable to descend on their own, or unwilling to take the risk, AP reported.

The volcano, which sits on the border of Nagano and Gifu prefectures west of Tokyo, had its last major eruption in 1979.

“It was like thunder,” a woman told public broadcaster NHK of the first eruption at the volcano in seven years. “I heard boom, boom, then everything went dark.”

Hikers who descended from the volcano reported scenes of horror, with stones raining down and hot ashes filling the air, AFP reported.

Video footage shot inside a cabin, taken shortly after the eruption and shown on NHK, revealed the screams of terrified hikers as rocks thundered against the roof and walls.

Flights delayed

Tokyo’s Haneda airport said incoming domestic flights were experiencing delays of about 40 to 50 minutes because they were forced to change routes. International flights to and from Haneda were not affected by the eruption, the airport said.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who returned from the United States on Saturday, said he had ordered the military to help in rescue efforts.

“I instructed to do all we can to rescue the people affected and secure the safety of the trekkers,” Abe told reporters.

Kiso Prefectural Hospital, near the mountain, said it had dispatched a medical emergency team.

“We expect a lot of injured people so we are now getting ready for their arrival,” said an official at the hospital.

Mari Tezuka, who works at a mountain hut for trekkers, told Reuters: “It’s all white outside, looks like it has snowed. There is very bad visibility and we can’t see the top of the mountain.

“All we can do now is shut up the hut and then we are planning on coming down… This is a busy season because of the changing autumn leaves. It’s one of our busiest seasons,” Tezuka said.

The Japan Meteorological Agency warned people to stay away from the mountain, saying hot debris could fall within a four-kilometer radius.

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You would think war-themed video games copy real life, and not the other way around. Not this time. A Washington think tank has hired the maker of the acclaimed “Call of Duty” game to envision the kind of future wars the US could be fighting.

The key reason for this, according to the Atlantic Council think tank, is that, with all its money and capabilities, America really isn’t thinking creatively about the various threats it could face in the 21st century.

Dave Anthony, the creator of the billion-dollar Call of Duty franchise, will be joining other authors, screenwriters and entertainment figures in an initiative called ‘The Art of Future War Project,’ set to launch next week, according to AFP.

The idea came rather suddenly, when former Pentagon official Steven Grundman walked in on his son playing ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II,’ which depicts a 2025 cold war between China and the United States. In it, the two superpowers are vying for rare earth elements in secret missions.

“He was struck how realistic our portrayal in ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II’ was of a future conflict,” Anthony told the news agency.

“It occurred to me that the perspective of artists on this question is compelling and insightful, and it’s also different,” Grundman was cited as saying by the Washington Post. “One feature that struck me was the combination of both familiar technologies and novel ones.”

“I didn’t want to satisfy myself with an approach everyone was doing,” he added. “It’s a crowded field of ideas,” Grundman said, explaining his belief why military think tanks alone aren’t up to the task.

According to Anthony, the game itself was the result of brainstorming by a number of creative professionals of all sorts, including Batman screenwriter David Goyer, as well as Oliver North, the former marine who later became a TV personality at the height of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, when US officials secretly sold weapons to the Islamic state, despite there being an arms embargo.

“You get everybody in a room like that, and all the different perspectives come together,” Goyer said. “That combination was fascinating. What I would like to bring to Washington is that kind of thinking.”

Anthony himself also believes that the real-world Pentagon could benefit from fantasy-based thinking for the simple reason that the US isn’t preparing even for the scenarios it knows it might face, often on the pretext that there isn’t adequate funding, or that certain bridges can be crossed when reached.

So the project will attempt to “set up” the government to think of those sorts of danger. The Council admitted also that national security decision-makers could do with some “new voices” to give them a push, where imagining the mix of existing and future threats may be concerned.

“Writers, directors and producers and other artists bring to bear observations derived from wholly different experiences in the creative world,” it said in a statement.

“They can ask different kinds of questions that will challenge assumptions and status quo ways of tackling some of today’s toughest national security problems.”

Anthony is set to appear in Washington on Tuesday with the kind of presentation common to the entertainment sphere – stylish videos. One of them will be presenting a Las Vegas rendition of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when a series of coordinated bombings and shootings carried out by Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, allegedly with secret help from Pakistani intelligence elements.

Anthony went further, saying that he sees parallels between government work and running a multi-billion dollar entertainment venture, in the way that both are high-pressure environments with many players and idiosyncrasies in decision-making, all of which require overcoming.

He believes that US military thinking is somewhat stale, and that it streamlines when it comes to making brave and risky decisions, and that’s one other thing he hopes to combat.

“The way I like to think about it is the next attack has already happened, someone has already thought of it. How do you look at all the ideas that are out there?”

“The problem is the next attack is very unlikely to be the same as the previous attack,” Anthony said, adding that even today’s Islamic State campaign by the Obama administration is ill-equipped to predict how the Islamist terrorists will strike back.

“I think this is going to be the next 9/11,” he said.

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Even though it ultimately failed at the ballot box, the recent campaign for Scottish independence should cheer supporters of the numerous secession movements springing up around the globe.

In the weeks leading up to the referendum, it appeared that the people of Scotland were poised to vote to secede from the United Kingdom. Defeating the referendum required British political elites to co-opt secession forces by promising greater self-rule for Scotland, as well as launching a massive campaign to convince the Scots that secession would plunge them into economic depression.

The people of Scotland were even warned that secession would damage the international market for one of Scotland’s main exports, whiskey. Considering the lengths to which opponents went to discredit secession, it is amazing that almost 45 percent of the Scottish people still voted in favor of it.

The Scottish referendum result has done little to discourage other secessionist movements spreading across Europe, in countries ranging from Norway to Italy. Just days after the Scottish referendum, the people of Catalonia voted to hold their own referendum measuring popular support for secession from Spain.

Support for secession is also growing in America. According to a recent poll, one in four Americans would support their state seceding from the federal government. Movements and organizations advocating that state governments secede from the federal government, that local governments secede from state governments, or that local governments secede from both the federal and state governments, are springing up around the country. This year, over one million Californians signed a ballot access petition in support of splitting California into six states. While the proposal did not meet the requirements necessary to appear on the ballot, the effort to split California continues to gain support.

Americans who embrace secession are acting in a grand American tradition. The Declaration of Independence was written to justify secession from Britain. Supporters of liberty should cheer the growth in support for secession, as it is the ultimate rejection of centralized government and the ideologies of Keynesianism, welfarism, and militarism.

Widespread acceptance of the principle of peaceful secession and self-determination could resolve many ongoing conflicts. For instance, allowing the people of eastern Ukraine and western Ukraine to decide for themselves whether to spilt into two separate nations may be the only way to resolve their differences.

The possibility that people will break away from an oppressive government is one of the most effective checks on the growth of government. It is no coincidence that the transformation of America from a limited republic to a monolithic welfare-warfare state coincided with the discrediting of secession as an appropriate response to excessive government.

Devolving government into smaller units promotes economic growth. The smaller the size of government, the less power it has to hobble free enterprise with taxes and regulations.

Just because people do not wish to live under the same government does not mean they are unwilling or unable to engage in mutually beneficial trade. By eliminating political conflicts, secession could actually make people more interested in trading with each other. Decentralizing government power would thus promote true free trade as opposed to “managed trade” controlled by bureaucrats, politicians, and special interests.

Devolution of power to smaller levels of government should also make it easier for individuals to use a currency of their choice, instead of a currency favored by central bankers and politicians.

The growth of support for secession should cheer all supporters of freedom, as devolving power to smaller units of government is one of the best ways to guarantee peace, property, liberty — and even cheap whiskey!

This article was published by The Ron Paul Institute.

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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Turkey, called for a three-pronged strategy that would ensure a no-fly zone, a safe area for people fleeing conflict in the region and a programme to train and equip groups in Syria and Iraq. The Turkish President delivered the keynote address to open the World Economic Forum Special Meeting on Unlocking Resources for Regional Development, taking place in Istanbul on 28-29 September.

Welcoming the resolve of the international community to act decisively, Erdoğan called for efforts to target not just groups in Iraq but also in Syria. “Air strikes alone are not enough. There must be a ground dimension with the Iraqi army and the Pashmerga to the fore. If other countries can support that effort, so much the better”, he said.

In addition to Turkey’s efforts to protect its southern border, the President underscored the burden his country is bearing to support a refugee population that now tops 1.5 million. He noted the discrepancy between the $150 million his country has received from the international community and the much higher amount that Turkey has provided to the refugee programme.

Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, President of Mali, deplored the use of religion by terrorist forces. “Islam is a religion of peace and must not be seen as an instrument of terror”, he said. Calling for a concerted international response to the global cancer of terrorism, he also urged greater efforts by Islamic countries to explain Islam’s underlying precepts. “It is poverty and vulnerability that lead to terrorism, not religion,“ he said.

President Erdoğan called for changes in current international institutional arrangements which, he said, are no longer relevant in the wake of major political and economic shifts. “Things have changed since the end of the Second World War and we can no longer have five permanent members of the UN Security Council determine the fate of the world.” He suggested that a more equitable system would see all UN member countries rotate on the Council.

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, described current arrangements as “an old system for new challenges” and said that Turkey’s remarkable development over the past 12 years warranted a bigger role in the UN. Emphasizing that he was not looking for a permanent seat for his country on the Security Council, President Erdoğan underlined his commitment to enhance Turkey’s role on the international stage, particularly on trade, energy and climate change. He has instructed Prime Minister Davutoğlu to focus his attention on domestic issues while he will devote more time to international affairs.

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Saudi Arabia has said “unprecedented challenges” facing Yemen since Shiite rebels took over the capital could threaten international security, and called for swift action to deal with instability in its southern neighbor.

The Kingdom welcomed an agreement signed in Sanaa on Sept. 21 to form a new government incorporating the Houthi rebels and some Yemeni southern separatist forces.

Under a security annexe to the accord, Houthis had been expected to leave Sanaa in return for their inclusion in the new government.

To date they remain in place.

Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told the UN General Assembly that hopes for an end to the crisis had been wrecked by the Houthis’ failure to honor the deal.

“The lack of implementation of the security annexe of the agreement and the lack of implementation of the agreement itself in the required manner by the Houthi group has dashed these hopes,” he said, according to Reuters. “Yemen faces accelerating and extremely dangerous conditions that require us all to look and propose the necessary solutions to confront these unprecedented challenges.”

Prince Saud said Yemen’s violence “will no doubt extend to threaten stability and security on the regional and international arena that could prove difficult to put down regardless of the resources and efforts that may be exerted.”

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By Saad Dosari

The world has finally decided to confront the threat of the Islamic State. It was just about time. Waves of jet fighters coming from an international coalition have started to roam the skies above Syria and Iraq targeting locations and supply lines the IS is using to sustain its terror.

Since the IS started to attract media attention, it spared no effort to demonstrate how a human being can stoop so low.

The most outrageous and unfortunate thing is that they used the name of Islam to further their diabolical designs, reviving fears and dreadful memories their evil twin, Al-Qaeda, had planted in the hearts and minds of the whole world toward this peaceful religion. Sadly for Islam, it had to be used by groups of lunatics as a justification for their greedy pathetic existence. Needless to say, this great religion has nothing to do with these crazy people. The teachings of Islam are different from their skewed interpretation of this religion.

What makes this better-late-than-never strike against IS a bit different is that it brings many Arab nations together in the international coalition. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar are all taking part in this military action. These countries’ decision to be part of the coalition should surprise no one. Had they not taken part in these efforts, it would have been surprising. After all the threat is wandering loose in their backyard.

As the strikes continue, Prince Khaled bin Salman, the son of Crown Prince Salman, and the United Arab Emirate’s female pilot Maj. Mariam Al-Mansouri participation in the attack had captured the news along with the air strike itself.

For the Kingdom, a number of analysts saw the Saudi conformation that the Prince Khaled bin Salman was one of the pilots who led the attack as a message that the Kingdom was serious about its participation in the coalition, as it was sending one of its royal family members into the war to prove it.

The Saudi participation in the strikes is a proof enough that the country is taking the threat of IS seriously. It is a message to the whole world that we are standing with you in the fight against terrorism.

The UAE major has brought the sensitive gender bias topic to the surface; apparently, the whole world forgot that she was a high rank pilot, that she did not only participate in the coalition but actually led her country’s squadron, and focused on the fact that she is a female who hit IS.

Most of the comments about her participation were revolving around mocking IS, with their extreme prejudice against women, and how they had been bombarded by a woman! This is disrespectful, to say the least. It proves that women participation in certain arenas is still way from being recognized and appreciated. Maj. Al-Mansouri was not a woman who hit IS, she was a qualified pilot who led her county’s squadron to do so, period.

At the end, and as the world finds itself obligated to stand up to face the terror of IS, we better not forget to address the circumstances that created this group; the chaos in Syria, the troubles in Iraq, and most of all, the dark ideologies that are capable of bringing such hatred and ugliness out of a human being. Any war on terror does not start nor end on the battlefield; it is a clash of ideas, starts and ends in the minds, and in the hearts.

@smaldosari

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Now before some of you become so scandalized you start firing off comments and tweets, read what I say carefully: there is anti-Semitism both in Europe and elsewhere.  And it is a phenomenon that, given Europe’s ugly history, must be taken seriously.  It is right and proper to denounce individual incidents of violence and hate speech where and when they occur.  It is right to combat the obscenity of the Euro-right’s political anti-Semitism whether in France, Germany or Hungary.

But there is no pending European Holocaust.  Despite hyperbolic claims like this, “these are the worst times since the Nazi era” or this “synagogues are burning again in Germany in the night,” there is not even a serious, widespread attack on the Jewish community in Europe.  The rumors of the destruction of European Jewry are vastly overstated.

The question is why articles in mainstream publications are advancing some of these claims; and why Israeli politicians boost them so assiduously.  As to the first question: reporters are not historians.  They are looking for trends and seeking to be the first to note them.  For some reporters any incident that comes in twos or threes becomes a trend.  It’s one thing when the trend concerns fashion or social issues.  We’re used to such overstatement and when a reporter gets carried away, the stakes aren’t as high.  We can assume that readers or other journalist will exercise caution and criticize it mercilessly.

But when the subject is as fraught with historical significance and involves violence and death, past and present, then such exaggeration or overstatement carries heavy consequences.  That’s why it’s so important to get things right.  To be sure what you write is based on facts and not ideology or sensationalism.  Unfortunately, some of our better media sources have fallen prey to this disease.  More on this follows.

The most glaring weakness of such analyses is that they either omit entirely or downplay the political context of so-called anti-Semitic actions in Europe.  Muslims and Arabs in Europe and elsewhere were not born anti-Semites.  Nothing in their religion justifies anti-Semitism.  In fact, quite the contrary.  Anger and hatred derives from a source.  That source is the Israeli-Arab conflict.  The anger of European Muslims is not the same as traditional anti-Semitism.  It cannot be compared to the Nazi era.  No matter what hot-headed protesters may say during rallies when they express their anger and disgust, no one contemplates the wholesale murder or even expulsion of Jews from Europe.

That’s why articles like this one which speak about European anti-Semitism while hardly voicing a word about the context of the current wave which originates in Israel recent devastating assault against Gaza, do a disservice to both European society and journalism itself.  We cannot learn much about what is really happening if journalists refuse to understand reality in all its complexity.  Other articles like this one do acknowledge that European protests against Israel emanate from the war against Palestine, but they refuse to make any distinction between historical anti-Semitism and contemporary anti-Israelism.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that such ugly rhetoric shouldn’t be condemned and aggressively combated by politicians and other social leaders.  But again, it’s important to place these expressions in a historical and political context.

Reporters will take a single statistic such as the rise in emigration by French Jews to Israel without understanding that even if 6,000 leave this year, 500,000 remain.  This also omits the reverse side of the coin: there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli emigrants who’ve taken up permanent residence in European cities, especially Berlin.  Many of them left Israel because they are disgusted with the endless cycles of war and violence and refused to force this life on their own children.

Why would reporters or European Jews be surprised that social media reflect, or even amplify some of these hatreds?  A passage like this one makes me wonder whether the reporter and his subject are either naive or disingenuous:

…Since the start of the conflict in Gaza this summer, many describe social media, especially Facebook, as a swamp of hatred.

“I have friends who are never political and they are posting things about Gaza every day,” said Ms. Frommer, the employee of the nonprofit organization. “It seems like an obsession. Is your obsession because you want to save children, or because you have a problem with Jews?”

The fact that a European Jew would discount the good faith of those who protest the death of Gazan children; and the fact that she wouldn’t understand that apolitical individuals are so shocked by the outrageousness of Israel’s actions that even they are aroused to protest.  This should tell her much more about the evil Israel is doing than she allows it to.

The same  journalist claimed some Muslim neighborhoods are “no go” zones for Jews, without understanding that similar types of ethnic hostility have been a factor of urban life for centuries.  Some of the articles neglect the failure of European countries themselves to integrate poor Arab and Muslim immigrants into their own educational, vocational and employment systems.  If Europe’s Muslims are angry at Israel or even at Jews, they are angrier at their host governments for promises unfulfilled.

Why should reporters use a single incident when Muslims patrolled a neighborhood in Germany dressed with signs identifying themselves as “Sharia police,” when ultra-Orthodox Jews in London erected signs exhorting all Jewish women in the neighborhood to walk only on one side of the street, segregated from men.  Why is the Muslim example more alarming than the Jewish one?

Current European anti-Israel outbursts which are often conflated with anti-Semitism, are directly related to anger at Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian land, at Israel’s vicious wars and massacres which have cost tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian lives over the decades.  Whenever Israel asserts its military might and attacks Palestine or Lebanon, blood flows in the streets of Arab lands and other Arabs are naturally angry about this.

Expecting that every Arab who participates in a protest will understand the sensitive history of the Jews in Europe and adapt their slogans, banners and actions accordingly is far-fetched.  Though of course, when those phenomena rear their ugly heads they should be called out.

Gen. David Petraeus once famously conceded that the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict endangers the lives of U.S. military personnel throughout the region by heightening tension and fueling terror attacks.  Though the Israel Lobby derided him for expressing views so supposedly hostile to Israel, he never retracted them.

In truth, Israel can expect all this clamor against it every time it attacks its Arab neighbors.  And the worse the carnage and mayhem is, the worse the response will be.  I liken it to the political corollary of Newton’s law: for every bad action there will an equal and opposite reaction.  Except in this case, the Arab-Muslim response is nowhere near as violent as the Israeli actions which precipitate it.

Yes, Jews have been killed in Europe in the past few years.  And such acts have rightfully been condemned, investigated and punished by those in power in Belgium and France, where such attacks occurred.  But if you compare the carnage on one side it pales in comparison to the carnage on the other.

It is simply unreasonable for Israel or world Jewry to expect that there will be no blowback from Israel’s actions in the world.  Israel may not kill with impunity without paying a price for it.  Again, this is not to justify Arab retaliation against Israel.  But to regard such acts as originating in some ancient Islam-inspired blood feud is ridiculous.

There is only one way to end the stream of Euro-violence, to end Israel’s spilling of Arab blood in the region.  As long as Israel continues its endless wars there, the counter-violent response will continue.  Israel must settle the conflict.  As long as it does not, it has no right to complain at the response.  As the noted scholar of anti-Semitism, Steve Beller writes:

If Israel continues its attitude of defiance of international legal norms and of the wishes of the international community as regards settlements, then this is almost inviting a real resurgence of a form of historical anti-Semitism, together with, ironically, a xenophobia exacerbated by Islamophobia.

Though this is a chilling statement, it reveals just how much is at stake for world Jewry.  Continue down the path of absolute pro-Israelism and you risk an attack on not just Israel, but all of us.

It’s an error to label hate or violence directed at Israel as conventional anti-Semitism.  It should probably be called anti-Israelism.  Beller says:

Calling…hostility to current Israeli policies…and towards the Jewish communities who are usually explicitly…supporting these policies, ‘antisemitism’, or even the relatively recent ‘new antisemitism’…[is] a deliberate attempt by Israel and its supporters to obfuscate the actual political and moral situation, and to smear Israel’s opponents with the guilt of the Holocaust. Let us call these protests ‘anti-Israeli’, ‘anti-Zionist’…but I do not think they have the same causation as historic antisemitism, and it is misleading to continue dragging this term in here.

There will be those who point to the slogans which explicitly ape those of the Nazi era and ask why we shouldn’t call this classic anti-Semitism.  The reason is that Israel’s leaders and the Israel Lobby have themselves conflated Israel with the Jewish people.  When Bibi shreis that Iran wants to nuke us, he doesn’t say it wants to destroy Israel, he says it wants to destroy the “Jewish people.”  When Shimon Peres seeks to dramatize the so-called Iranian nuclear threat he calls an Iranian bomb a “flying Holocaust.”  This further reinforces the notion that the Muslim world seeks to exterminate the entire Jewish people.

By deliberately confusing Israel and Jews, pro-Israel forces invite their opponents to do the same.  If the Arab world sees Israel speaking on behalf of world Jewry; if they see the Israel Lobby insisting that the single unifying element in Jewish identity is fealty to Israel–then such confusion is understandable.  As Beller wrote:

If the leadership of…Jewish communities adopt an approach of complete solidarity with the aggressive foreign policy of Israel, as a sovereign state separate from the countries in which those Jewish communities live, then this is an externalized relationship of conflict…

If Jews wish to end such confusion, they must loudly and deliberately set a border between themselves and Israel.  To be a Jew is not to be an Israeli.  In saying these things, I’m not asking Jews to abandon their identification with Israel.  But there must be a clear distinction between who we are and who they are.  And there should be a clear distinction between the foreign policy interests of states like the U.S. and Israel.  Contrary to the Israel Lobby mantra, there should be daylight between political leaders and policies of both countries.

It’s not surprising Israel would seek to conflate Zionism and Judaism.  It’s a lot harder to attack Israel when you also have to attack all of world Jewry.  It’s also a lot harder to attack Israel when it invokes the specter of the Holocaust and its ruinous legacy of anti-Semitism.  Israel would much rather force its opponents to defend themselves from such charges so it doesn’t have to explain or defend the bloody pursuit of its own political interests in the region.

When I used the term “hoax” in the post title, I meant to say that the abuse of anti-Semitism by pro-Israel forces constitutes a fraud that must be called out.

The ultimate irony for Herzlian political Zionism is that the creation of Israel has disproven one of the movement’s key tenets: founding a Jewish state was supposed to normalize the Jewish people.  It was supposed to empower them as European peoples were empowered by the states in which they held sovereignty.  Jewish power would create Jewish security.  Unfortunately and tragically, it’s done just the opposite.  To be a Jew in the world has never been more dangerous since World War II.  Not only are Israelis endangered in their own land, Israel’s intransigent rejection of political compromise (just this week, Bibi Netanyahu called the Arab League peace initiative an artifact of a bygone era), has brought all Jews into the crosshairs.  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

The embrace of classical Zionism by Diaspora Jewry has impoverished Jewish life outside Israel.  We are left with no independent identity.  We have no traditions of our own.  We are the shadow and Israel is the sun.  All sustenance derives from the source and that source may only be there (in Israel).  This denies the richness and success of centuries of Jewish life after the destruction of the Second Temple.  We do have valued traditions, rituals, art, culture, music that derives from the genius of Diaspora.  This must never be dismissed or devalued.  We must cultivate our independence.  We must produce separately.  We must not be a satellite or extension of anything.

I despair that this is possible.  Throughout the Diaspora, Jewish leaders have thrown in their lot with Israel.  I call it the closing of the Diaspora Jewish mind. They have turned Israelism into a religion that displaces Judaism.  They have allowed a violent, hateful settlerism to become a legitimate expression of Judaism.  They have allowed us to be hijacked in service to a political enterprise rooted in theft, oppression and ethnic cleansing.  It is not enough to protest against this.  It’s not enough to deliver sermons from pulpits.  It’s not enough to “shoot and cry” as Israelis say.  There must be action: assertive, even aggressive action.  We must take back our religion and expel those who have debased it.

But a single example, is the refusal of mainstream Jewish groups like the Reform movement to dissociate themselves from the Conference of Presidents and its insular pro-Israelism under the leadership of the far-right, Malcolm Hoenlein.  When Hoenlein rejects J Street’s membership, no one makes him pay a price.  No one leaves the table and starts a new more inclusive entity.  If you are timid, if you don’t have the power of your convictions (remember Yeats’ “the best lack all conviction?”), you have only yourself to blame when those who have more energy and conviction outsmart you.

I have no faith in Diaspora Jewish leaders.  The Pierre Mendes Frances, Nahum Goldmans and Arthur Hertzberg’s are long gone.  In their day, they could stand up to the Kahanes and tell them forcefully: not in my name.  And they were believed.  In their place, today we have right-wing pro-Israel ciphers like Ronald Lauder or milquetoast moderates like Dennis Ross or Martin Indyk.  They have neither powerful convictions, ideas nor stature.  They represent the Jewish Organizational Man.  They won’t stand up to anyone when it comes to saying: thus far and no farther.

If there are any readers who believe this topic is a critical one, as I do, and have some money tucked away, a few thousand dollars would enable me to organize a public event on the subject which I’d love to do featuring speakers like Steven Beller and Antony Lerman (among others).  The event would be videotaped and uploaded to YouTube to create better public awareness of the issues.

NOTE: This week, WBEZ did a radio interview with me about Unit 8200 and the inspiration it could offer to the NSA to expand the surveillance state against us.  Give a listen and promote it for me, please.

This article appeared at Tikun Olam.

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