Downsizing Intelligence

Ian Williams: Ignorant intelligence and self-fulfilling prophecies
January 15, 2010 Tribune


Since Christmas Day, everyone in the United States knows that the cricket-box bomber visited Yemen. Luckily for Gordon Brown, the suspicion directed towards Yemen has not touched on Britain, even though the would-be auto-castrato, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, spent more time in London than there.

The US reaction began as typically reflexive, with little in the way of reflection. “Stop the release of Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.” “It’s all Barack Obama’s fault.” The Pentagon chipped in with vague and unsourced reports that a fifth of released internees have “rejoined the militant activity” – as unspecified as the names or countries. In the fevered Islamophobic imagination that the Pentagon has displayed over the decade, regular attendance at a mosque and refusal to eat eggs and bacon for breakfast could count as militant activity.

I cannot be the only person who suspects that kidnapping, incarcerating, torturing and humiliating people for years without trial might leave them with a monstrous grudge against their tormentors, eager to get payback for those wasted years.

However, there is little sense of that in the American media and even less awareness that US support for Israel gives the bulk of the ideological leverage for the preachers who incite the likes of Abdulmutallab to deeds that go so squarely against basic human impulses.

For the media, Yemen was the problem. And it presented a tempting target for a vindictive response, helped along because the government in Sana’a had been playing up alleged Iranian and al Qaida connections to the numerous dissident groups in the country. It says a lot about US ignorance that, after all these years, so many politicians and commentators have still not noticed that the Wahhabi al Qaida actually hates Shi’a Iran – or even that, without tacit Iranian co-operation, Western forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan would be even harder pressed.

In the same vein, adding Cubans, Syrians, Iranians, Nigerians and Yemenis to the list of those who need extra scrutiny and greater humiliation at airports shows more than a hint of going after the “usual suspects”, regardless of what would be more rational. The Cubans have indeed been involved in aircraft bombings – it’s just that it was a Cuban flight blown up by an exile the US refused to extradite.

When ignorant intelligence goes to war hand in hand with such galloping prejudices, the consequences of a massive American incursion into a complex and variegated society such as Yemen would be unimaginable – if it were not that we have actually seen the results in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Nothing could be more calculated to turn Hillary Clinton’s words about Yemen becoming a regional and global threat into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If they but knew it, Yemen is an American conservative dream. It’s a shame they aren’t evangelical Christians or the Republican Party would be holding it up as a model state. It has very little government, while weaponry is everywhere.

I have a treasured photograph of me on a visit to Yemen in a shooting competition with a provincial governor, which could either get me the National Rifle Association vote if I ran in an American election or hauled off as a terrorist suspect, depending on the volatile popular mood.

On the same trip, I could not help noticing that the neo-liberal consensus on downsizing government was over-fulfilling the plan in Sana’a. Not a minister I was introduced to was over five feet tall. The Gulliver-like feeling was reinforced by the tiny doorways on the magnificent old buildings that left me with near-concussion every time I forgot to duck.

In the other sense also, Yemeni government was very small. Not far from the capital, villagers paraded with AK47s on their shoulders and jambiyahs – the phallic knives – jutted from the centre of their belts.

The provincial governor, who took us out to see them, had his own guard, but the demonstration was peaceful. It was the boys and girls of the vicinity lined up with their school books held in front of them. The villagers wanted more funds for the school.

At that time, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was allowing reasonably open elections – and such constitutional methods worked. Since then, he has consolidated his hold on power and money has tended to stick in his vicinity.

Gordon Brown seems to be working on the right lines in seeing economic and institutional development as one of the keys for helping Yemen constitute a stronger and more cohesive society – not to mention a police rather than a military solution to terrorism.

He even seems to have influenced the Americans to hold off on the bombers – although that could be because they can’t find a pharmaceutical factory to destroy, as Bill Clinton did in Sudan – and the demands on the overstretched US military constrain any attempt to send in the marines.

There will always be fanatical religious figures – evangelical ministers, die-hard rabbis and bloodthirsty imams – but as long as the West condones and in effect supports Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and apartheid-like behaviour towards the Palestinians, then the latter will continue to recruit dupes to die for them.

Brown’s conference on Yemen is important, but it is a sideshow to George Mitchell’s mission to Israel. And unless Obama stops the cheques and votes going to Benjamin Netanyahu, Mitchell will fail and the bombers will succeed.

Goldstone, Touchstone for Obama ME Peace Plan

Goldstone as a touchstone for Obama
By Ian Williams

Asia Times 20 October 2009

NEW YORK - The heavy pressure put on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week by the United States and Israel to defer consideration of the Goldstone report, which was on Friday approved by the Human Rights Council, backfired. It not only made the US and Israel look like bullies, but also destroyed the credibility of Abbas and reinforced the image of Hamas among Palestinians. The attempt has also eroded US President Barack Obama's recently improved status among Arabs and Muslims, with the prospect of more damage to come.

International and domestic pressure was fierce enough for Abbas to ask for a reconvened meeting of the Human Rights Council last Thursday and Friday, but despite the outcome of the vote, this has done little to enhance his reputation. The 47-member Human Rights Council approved by 25-6 a resolution on Friday that endorsed the war crimes charges against Israel and Hamas as spelled out in the report.

Compiled by a four-member international fact-finding mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, the report covered war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip in December-January during which an estimated 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. The report recommends that Israel and the Gaza authorities investigate alleged war crimes and, should that not happen within six months, that the UN Security Council should pursue prosecutions.

Israel and its allies have launched a tide of vituperation against Goldstone since the release of the report in September, but it risks splashing back in their faces. They have accused Goldstone, a Jewish pro-Israeli judge whose daughter made Aliyah to settle in Israel, of anti-Semitism. This charge stretches credulity almost as far as their accusation of bias against Goldstone, a judge who is the West's favorite legal maven at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Some of that embarrassment was evident in the statements made by American and other Western allies at the Security Council and at the Human Rights Council. For example, the US and UK's statements at the October 14 Security Council meeting, which considered the Middle East without voting on the report, were carefully worded to suggest that the mandate was biased - but without impugning Goldstone's integrity. Indeed, the mandate had been biased, but Goldstone only accepted the position on the condition, accepted by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, that he would expand it and investigate all sides.

The statements from the Western allies were clearly thrown in as a sop to Israel and its supporters, but only an extraordinarily blinkered Likud politician would draw much comfort from the persistent calls from the US, the UK, France and others that Israel and Hamas should indeed investigate the allegations of war crimes in a transparent and impartial way. Even UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who came into office as a close friend of Israel, joined the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in calling for an impartial investigation - not to mention Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other respected non-governmental organizations.

Much of the strongest vilification comes from commentators who have clearly not read the report. The fact-finding mission found that there was a serious case to answer - not guilt - so even as they damned the report with faint praise, the US and its allies were implicitly endorsing its major conclusion - the need for a credible and independent investigation by both Israelis and Palestinians.

The report calls for a referral to the International Criminal Court only if after six months neither Israel nor Hamas have carried out the investigations. As with Sudan, the ICC does not have jurisdiction against a state such as Israel, unless the Security Council refers it. The ICC's convention actually provides that it only has jurisdiction where the states concerned have failed to investigate and initiate due process where warranted.

Well aware of the type of pressure that would be brought to bear, the Goldstone report also calls for referral to the United Nations General Assembly, which even if it does not have legal teeth, could continue to embroil Israel in unwelcome legal attention. Hot on the tails of the report's release, in early October, Israeli Vice Premier and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon cancelled a trip to Britain in November for fear of arrest on war crimes - the latest in a series of such cancellations. More can be expected.

Interestingly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset (parliament) in September, "We will not allow [former prime minister] Ehud Olmert, [opposition leader] Tzipi Livni and [Defense Minister] Ehud Barak, who sent our sons to war, to arrive at the international court in the Hague." One cannot help suspecting that this statement was a reminder to the White House that despite the Israeli prime minister's vigorous defense of Operation Cast Lead, that it was in fact the Labor/Kadima coalition that planned and initiated it.

There are some calmer voices in Israel, even among supporters of Cast Lead, who think that an investigation is a reasonable price to ward off increasing international isolation. After all, if no crimes were committed, why the noisy reluctance to look into them? In the minds of others, however, is the damning Israeli Kahan Commission report into the massacres at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanon War, even though many believe it soft-pedaled on direct Israeli involvement and more particularly on former prime minister Ariel Sharon's role.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is how the report will play out in relation to Obama's Middle East peace plans. Will he earn that Nobel Prize? His credibility in the region is already suffering from the seeming impunity with which Netanyahu is scorning the US insistence on the settlement freeze that Israel was already committed to.

The US attempt to kill the Goldstone report at the Human Rights Council certainly makes Obama's job more difficult. It will become even more so if the report comes to the Security Council and the US ambassador vetoes a referral to the ICC if Israel did not institute an inquiry.

Indeed, the statements by the US, the UK and France calling for just such an inquiry could have added to the embarrassment of refusing to vote for a call for Israel to do what they all consider to be the right thing. Of course the Palestinians and their allies, one presumes, inadvertently, gave the US and others some excuses, since their resolution was not a straight yea or nay on the report. Even Goldstone himself complained that the actual resolution adopted by the council, while endorsing his report, did not mention Hamas and his call for it to also have an investigation. The resolution also included condemnations of Israeli behavior in East Jerusalem, which, even if justified, fogged the otherwise clear message of Goldstone's more balanced report on Gaza.

Despite heated discussions between Netanyahu and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Britain joined France in not voting at all, so they were not recorded as the abstentions which had been their original declared intent. With their close involvement in the Balkan wars and the subsequent tribunal, it would have been difficult to repudiate the former prosecutor of Balkan war criminals, quite apart from their expressed disquiet about Israeli actions in Gaza. The usual suspects, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine went along with the US in voting against, while the equally predictable non-aligned majority joined by China and Russia went with it.

The report now goes to the United Nations General Assembly and recommends a report back from Ban Ki-moon with his recommendations, which would then be referred back to the Human Rights Council. If Israel does not carry out the investigation mandated by the report, it will almost certainly be referred to the Security Council for action.

An American abstention there would be an act of courage. Indeed, the long process offers multiple opportunities for the White House to let Netanyahu's government know that there are limits to how many slights Obama can tolerate.

If the US cannot persuade its most favored aid beneficiary not to evict Palestinians in Jerusalem, how can it persuade Israel to investigate allegations against its armed forces? And can it trade diplomatic cover in Geneva and New York against Israeli cooperation in the peace process? Indeed the US could take hints from Brown, who reportedly was trying to extract concessions from Netanyahu on the Gaza blockade with the British and French vote in Geneva.

Used in that way, the White House's preferred strategy of procrastination could appear more pragmatic and less pusillanimous.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, (Nation Books, New York).

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Obama's lessons for Brown

Ian Williams: Bush in history’s dustbin and what Obama can teach others
November 9, Tribune
Ian Williams says the President-elect gives Americans a reason to face the rest of the world with pride again, while Gordon Brown could learn a few things from his campaign

BARACK OBAMA’S victory is historic – in terms of centuries and more recent decades. After 230 years, it finally puts truth in the rumours spread by America’s founding fathers about freedom, and government by the people, which at the time they assumed meant white people.

When Obama was born, anyone of his complexion would have had difficulty voting in most of the south. When Ralph Bunche, one of the highest-ranking black Americans in government, was offered a choice between the State Department and the United Nations, he chose the latter, because it was in New York. Washington was still segregated legally.

Even 20 years ago, it was inconceivable for whites and blacks to kiss in a movie, since any such film would be unmarketable throughout large stretches of the United States. A lot has changed in those decades, which is reflected in the age profile of intense Obama support. Forced desegregation of schools and other civil rights policies have worked.

However, we should not neglect the importance of George W Bush in this. His perversely positive legacy is that his melange of myopic malice and incompetence has done as much as Martin Luther King’s hard work to unite Americans of all colours – against him.

But as the world watches the White House race for all its historical significance, there is a more recent historical resonance – not least for those countries foolish enough to imitate the American model too slavishly. Obama has reinvigorated politics across the US and revived the Democratic Party, which in the Bill Clinton era seemed destined to become a mere PO box for corporate donations. Obama insisted on contesting supposedly unwinnable states and building a nationwide base, which is, in a way, the best guarantee that he will not recede too precipitately to unprincipled presidential behaviour.

That very base, those habits of organisation that Obama has built, could turn against him if he fails to deliver. In fact, his own success has now guaranteed that his party now has control of both houses in Congress as well, so he has fewer excuses for backsliding on his promises.

Because of his adept political organisation, Democrats now have secure majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives to back his firm electoral mandate. He will need it to turn the Balkanised federal government around.

As a Senator himself, whose work will have brought in many of the new intake of legislators, he is in a better position than Clinton to work with the Congress.

He clearly has to win over some Republicans, but one can but hope that he avoids Clinton’s mistake of pandering to conservatives in the hope of reciprocation. They will no more accept his legitimacy than they did Clinton’s. Obama will almost certainly face interference from a conservative Supreme Court that is even more committed than in the 1930s to deny central government powers to act for the common good. He will need all the political support he can muster to prevail and reverse the deleterious effects of decades of Republican appointments to the bench.

However, beyond the parochial, Americans can now consign the Bush years to history and face the world with pride. They have put centuries of racism behind it and elected a President who shows signs of knowing where the rest of the world is, as well as knowing that the way to hearts and minds is not crushing testicles in some secret CIA dungeon.

Perhaps now is the time for Gordon Brown, always an assiduous student of the American way of doing things, to take some lessons about building parties and electoral success.

And perhaps he should note that after the economic collapse brought about by neo-liberal economic policies, the most potent issue for American voters in their choice of Obama for President was the debacle of Iraq – a war supported by the British Government.

Brown out on the Economy

Ian Williams: With an almighty boom, neo-liberalism goes bust
September 29, 2008 1:05 pm admin cartoons

THE group of conspirators who caused the major implosion in Wall Street damaged the economy more than Osama bin Laden and al Qaida did when they caused an explosion in the same district. In the latter case, the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, pledged to root out terrorism. In this latest incident, the US government has rushed to give the conspirators $1 trillion as a down payment so they can return and do it all over again.

It is almost 30 years since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher persuaded gullible governments that they should get out of the way of business and leave everything to the “market”. That caused deep economic recessions in both countries and the wave of deregulation that set in is still leaving aftershocks.

In the 1960s, confronted with international financiers, Harold Wilson had castigated the “Gnomes of Zurich” who, with assistance from the City of London and their representatives in the Treasury, spent a decade undermining him and his successor, James Callaghan. Gordon Brown’s lesson from this was that the financial institutions needed to be stroked and massaged rather than confronted. In a country left even more vulnerable since the Tories stripped what few defences the economy had, this was understandable.

But just as the “masters of the universe” in Wall Street fell victim to their own Ponzi schemes, Brown seems to have given them a lot more credit for their sagacity and honesty than they merited. It is one thing to stroke them, but quite another to believe them. Sadly, he has shown signs of that. Just think of the Private Finance Initiative, which began as a super wheeze to build infrastructure without the money appearing on the Government’s books, but which Brown ended up defending even when it became clear it was now a channel for shifting the public money to the financiers and their advisors.

Northern Rock and Halifax were thriving, efficient mutually-owned building societies until the tide of neo-liberal opinion drove them to the stock markets – and disaster. Think of the enterprises, the gas, water and electricity providers, British Airways and British Petroleum built up, despite the Treasury, into efficient and profitable companies.

A Tory Government with a very dubious title to them sold the former water authorities, the fruit of a century of social investment and entrepreneurship by the cities of Britain, to companies whose short-term pumping of their stocks to enhance executive earnings is in direct contradiction to the long-term needs of heavily capitalised infrastructure.

What is different about this latest lesson is how pervasively the cancer of bad debts has spread through the global economy, but the results of keeping government out of business were already apparent to all but the most mesmerised followers of finance. In the US, we had the Savings & Loans scandal, with which John McCain was intimately involved. Almost two decades ago, that cost the federal government as much as $400 billion. Then there was the tech stocks bubble, followed by the energy companies debacle and the airlines’ leaden landing, in each of which deregulation played a starring role. There was the Asian currency crisis and the bailout of Mexican bondholders, all culminating in the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

Now Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive, is trying to stampede the US Congress into giving him unlimited powers to buy the dead assets his former peers were peddling. He wants a minimum of $700 billion to buy up the dubiously-valued assets that his peers in the banks had been peddling furiously to one another. Now no one wants them.

Paulson is trying to avoid conditions, such as requirement that the government get shares in the company in return for taking on toxic debt, or limits on executive pay at companies helped. Deadpan, the Wall Street Journal explains: “He fears that provision would render the programme moot, since many firms might choose not to participate.” They would rather the companies went under than that they forfeited any of the bonuses, options, deferred pensions or golden parachutes. This is about free-for-alls, not free markets.

At the risk of sounding Clintonesque, a paradigm shift is called for. Just because the US government is now nationalising the miasmic swamps of the economy is no reason to rush to take over the commanding heights. However, there is every reason to reconsider the neo-liberal shibboleths that became part of the mantra of “new” Labour.

While the bankers, the gnomes of Zurich and the masters of the universe are all mesmerised with their impending bankruptcy, Gordon Brown can unashamedly return to the roots he had when he wrote ILP leader Jimmy Maxton’s biography. It is time to turn the intellectual tide, abandon the rush to privatise whatever public services have been overlooked and celebrate the real potential of public enterprise. At a minimum, this means better regulation of the City, public infrastructure spending to avert the impending recession and no handouts. As we have been told for 30 years, they pose a moral hazard. Make them pay.

Clinton's Road to Blair's Downfall and Brown's Way Out!

Clinton's Road to Blair's Downfall and Brown's Way Out! Guardian Comment is Free

Swift-boating across the Atlantic: Full text

Swift-boating across the Atlantic

The smear campaign against Mark Malloch Brown owes its tactics to the American neoconservative movement

November 14, 2007 10:00 PM | Guardian CiF full text

If Gordon Brown wants to reassure British voters, and the world, that there is distance between himself and the pathological ideologues in Washington who dragged his predecessor down, he should stomp on any of his officials who are party to the smear campaign against Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch Brown, one of his more inspired appointments.

While at the United Nations, Malloch Brown provoked John Bolton, the US ambassador, into paroxysms of thin-skinned rage, by suggested that the Iraq war was a disaster and that the US had lost popularity. In a similar vein, when the swift-boating of Kofi Annan was under way, he mounted a vigorous defence of the UN against the neocon smear campaign initiated by Ahmed Chalabi when the UN refused to endorse his carpet-bagging rise to power in Baghdad. It is worth noting that far from being the epitome of anti-Americanism, he had earlier been attacked by third-worlders for being too accommodating to the Americans and too nice to the Israelis.

But then, so had Annan. But once he suggested that the war on Iraq was illegal and that the full scale assault on Fallujah was a mistake, that was it. For the American right, you are with them all the way or you are an enemy.

In the US, swift-boating is now a regular tactic emanating from the network of foundations and thinktanks endowed by deeply conservative family trusts, and they have been guaranteed amplification in the Rupert Murdoch media. The tactic is to invent a scandal against a liberal hate figure and run it round around until people think that with so much smoke there must be fire.

This swift boat raid against Malloch Brown began when the Spectator carried a cover article attacking him by Claudia Rosett, an employee of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a neocon thinktank which is financed by an assortment of palaoeconservative family foundations. It is not too surprising that the attack was amplified by the Murdoch press and Labour Friends of Israel.

The substance of the accusation should be a source of pride for Labour: Bush's lame duck administration does not like Malloch Brown. With Democratic majorities in Congress likely to increase at the next election, and a likely Democratic victory in the White House riding on a tide of anti-Iraq war sentiment, that surely makes him an asset. Unless, of course, your idea of being pro-American is being pro-Bush 43.

But since the advance guard of the swift-boat armada has landed on British beaches, it is worth checking the provenance of Rosett and the FDD. Her obsession with the UN almost makes one wonder if a blue-helmeted peacekeeper jumped out of the woodshed and frightened her when she was younger. But above all, try to imagine a journalist employed by a neocon thinktank writing anything positive at all about the United Nations!

Certainly one would have a long and fruitless search for any articles from the FDD or Rosett on the one definite oil-for-food scandal, which is the over $10bn of the UN programme's surplus handed over to the American occupation forces for the development of Iraq, which has yet to be accounted for. Much of it ended up paying for the no-bid contracts of the company that the vice-president of the US formerly headed - but the stunning sound of silence from Rosett and her neocon comrades implies that a scandal is not a scandal unless you can tie it, no matter how exiguously, to a liberal or a UN official.

Rosett can draw a salary paid for by the endowments of some of most reactionary people on the planet, such as the Scaife foundations, but that is not a scandal, while the idea that Mark Malloch Brown, after working for many years abroad, is housed by HMG is insupportable - or that he paid rent to George Soros. One has to remember that for American conservatives, association with the UN or Soros is ipso facto criminal or unethical behaviour.

The well-financed FDD is the Project for the New American Century - a major cheerleader for the Iraq war - in another form. As its own website boasts, it is closely connected with the Iraqis around the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi. Its board included Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich and James Woolsey, not to mention Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and, until her death, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick opposed US support for Britain in the Falklands war, but the Thatcherites at the Spectator seem more forgiving than their transatlantic peers.

Gordon, meet Brown. Shake hands in public and put down the slimers.

Brown Stuff from NeoCons

Latest Guardian Comment is Free on Neocon assault on British Minister

Blairing the issues

My commemorative piece on Brown's visit to the White House and the UN. in the Guardian Comment is Free.

Brown Needs a Bit of Gray

Brown Needs a Bit of Gray
My Tribune column, 27 July 2007

Every mature adult knows that being friends doesn't necessarily imply consent to non-censual screwing, which is why no one with any sense takes as declarations of war the muted declarations of independence from George Bush's policies that some of Gordon Brown's new ministers have expressed.

There is something obsessively dysfunctional about this preoccupation with a relationship, which, rhetoric apart, is not so special at all. The recent total fixation with it has cost Britain considerable clout with the rest of the world, in the Middle East, and with the Commonwealth, while failing to deliver influence in the European Union commensurate with its size and power. After all who wants to listen to the dummy when you can contact the ventriloquist directly in Washington.

Even so, there are indeed very good reasons, economic, political, military and historic, for close British relations between the USA, even though there are equally good reasons why the disparity in power between the two nations necessarily implies some degree of inequality in that relationship. In the early days of Labour government, and indeed before, Britain hovered round a Goldilocks position, not too close to, nor too distant from Washington. As a result it had influence.

A particular case of both the success and the limitations of that more measured alliance was Tony Blair's prevailing on a reluctant Clinton that they should act in the Balkans – and his failure to persuade the President that bombing attacks were symbolic but counterproductive. It took months before the mere threat of a ground attack that Clinton had publicly renounced, had Milosevic running up the white flag over Kosovo. Apart from the deranged Leftists who think that thousands of dead Kosovars a mere peccadillo, most of the world agreed that this was in the end one of Blair's (and Robin Cook's) most positive achievements.


But faced with an American administration that has lost the confidence of its own electorate, at least in part because they can see just how unpopular Bush has made their nation across the world, it makes no sense at all for Gordon Brown to tie himself to the mast of the sinking USS George W. Bush in the same way that Tony Blair did. Real allies tell you when you are about to hit the rocks, they do not stand beside you calling "full sail ahead."

For a start, there is more to close relations with the USA than kowtowing to the President. Only the most naïve foreign potentate would think that a visit to the Queen would necessarily deliver British support for his regime. Of course George W. Bush does indeed have more power than Mrs Windsor - but in many aspects vital to British interests, the President could not deliver even when he was more popular than he was now. Economic relations, trade, open skies agreements, even military production and sales, are in the hands of a Congress that is currently not exactly a Presidential fan club.

However, while Bush may be intellectually challenged and detached from reality in his perceptions, his reactions are all too real, so it makes no sense for the Prime Minister to go much beyond "Up to a point, Mr President," in tactfully disagreeing, while firmly stating his points where they disagree and emphasizing the points of agreement. But while dancing daintily with dogma in the White House, he also needs to cultivate relations with the broader spectrum of American politics.


Of course, there is no way that Britain can rally a domestic lobby with the power of the Israel lobby, (which is, of course, the real "Special Relationship,") nor should it want to. British expatriates in America, although significant in numbers, are British enough not to subscribe to the "my country, right or wrong," scoundrel school of patriotism. But at the very least, Gordon Brown, either directly or through his ministers, needs to charm the majority of the American public and the politicians who represent them while putting some discreet distance between himself and Bush, whose poll rating makes Richard Nixon look positively saintly.

Even so, there are times when the kissing has to stop because it is not getting you anywhere. In the US, as the former speaker of the House Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local." Any domestic lobby (and in case you think this contradicts what I said earlier, AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee is a domestic lobby!) will trump foreign representations.

Experience shows that playing hard to get can win appreciation, while playing tough produces results on Capitol Hill. The EU has demonstrated that with its threat of tariffs to secure the delivery of WTO commitments from a perennially protectionist Congress. So the choice facing the Labour government is not "either Europe or the US." A significant British role in Europe strengthens Britain's hand in the USA.

Indeed, an independent British role in the rest of the world strengthens the hand of a British Prime Minister. There is a lot of ground to be retaken, however. The White House is reportedly understanding that Brown has to put some distance for domestic reasons. While appreciating their forbearance, the new cabinet should also realize that distancing is essential to rebuild British standing in the rest of the world.

Is Sanity Contagious?

Tribune 6 July

Ian Williams

If John Bolton attacked Satan, it would certainly boost the Prince of Darkness's credibility with most of the rational world. So it is no bad thing that the blowhard reactionary, who has moved from being the unconfirmed US Ambassador at the UN to being the confirmed and plentifully paid pundit of choice for Fox News, has attacked Gordon Brown's appointment of Mark Malloch Brown as a foreign office minister.

Rupert's other mouthpiece, the Times, has been at it too, broadcasting Bolton's frothings against both Browns without reminding its readers that the ex-envoy is simultaneously attacking Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration for their alleged reluctance to invade Iran immediately. The Times darkly warns of Bush administration angst at the "mixed signals" that the Prime Minister is sending with his appointments. Of course, anything more complex than nailing a white flag to the pole counts as a mixed signal in the Murdoch-Bolton alternate universe.

In fact, Bolton's attack on both Browns and the State Department raises hope that sanity is contagious and may be spreading to both sides of the Atlantic – it's almost enough to revive hopes for the "special relationship."

With Bush's popularity dropping lower and lower, in both the US and the UK, it is of course very astute of the Prime Minister to put down the markers he has. His appointments of Malloch Brown, John Denham, and David Milliband all radiate strong signals of foreign policy rationality from No 10.

None of these people could remotely be construed as anti-American, but they have certainly disagreed with some aspects of recent American foreign policy. But then, so do most Americans. Malloch Brown in particular came into the UN as an archetypal champion of genuine values of the kind that some in the West are trying to trademark, but he was firm in not surrendering them under the current administration's pressure.

Even so, both Browns, and the rest of the cabinet still have to cope with relations with the USA. Anyone with an historical eye can, of course, see the end of the American Empire, the far-flung battle lines, the sinking fires on the dunes and headlands and all that. In fact, when Kipling foresaw the end of Empire, London was still the world's creditor. In contrast Washington is currently the world's biggest debtor.

But from decline to fall still implies long historical presence. It will be a long time before the Chinese Seventh Fleet steams up the Channel to challenge us directly, while the USA will loom large in the foreign policy of both Europe and the UK for as long as anyone currently in the cabinet is around.

Albeit with less urgency since the end of the Cold War, any British government still has good reasons to maintain friendly relations with Washington, and historically Labour ones even more so. But the purpose of that is to have some leverage on policy, as Tony Blair totally failed to do, and indeed, according to those close at hand, did not even try to do.

It is not a new dilemma. Harold Wilson's tightrope walking to keep the UK in with Washington but out of Vietnam was a virtuoso performance for which the former Prime Minister has not had sufficient credit from his leftist detractors, who, I regret, included myself at the time. Wilson's refusal to capitulate to the very heavy pressure from President Johnson for even the most token British participation in the war demonstrates the residual power that Britain had, and may even still have. LBJ wanted it as a token of international respectability.

In the even more isolated position that George W. Bush's White House found itself in, it is reasonable to doubt whether the disastrous invasion of Iraq could have gone ahead if Tony had imposed conditions.

Similarly, while failing to exercise influence in the White House, recent British behaviour has contributed to the failure of an independent European foreign policy. To be honest, EU foreign policy failed at its first challenge in the Balkans. For a long time, the best argument against a UN Security Council seat for the EU was that it would post a permanent abstention in the face of indecision. But for a time, when most of Europe was social-democratic in outlook there were the beginnings of a common outlook, not totally disrupted by New Labour's love affair with Clinton.

When fickle Albion's affections went to Bush, the British government soon lived down to the reputation that Charles de Gaulle gave it of being an American Trojan Horse in Europe, an even bigger argument against a European Security Council seat was that it would vote perpetually with Washington. Despite the snub to our European partners implied by over-attention to the US, Britain does indeed have influence there. Blair was instrumental in switching a consensus towards uncritical acceptance of the Bush-Cheney eschatological visions of the so-called "War on Terror."

A constructive engagement with EU countries need not reduce leverage in Washington – rather it redoubles it. Similarly, if a UK policy returns to a commitment to development and multilateralism unmitigated by pandering to NeoCons, its influence in the rest of the world will increase, and be reflected in its voice in the USA.

Doormats have uses, but do not have much in the way of influence. The new cabinet seems to reflect that insight.

The Browning of America

The Browning of America

Two cheers and a 'Gordon who?' from the US for Britain's new prime minister.
Ian Williams

Full text of Guardian Comment is Free piece
June 27, 2007 4:10 PM

I greet the coronation of Gordon Brown not so much with joy and rapture unforeseen, but nonetheless with a restrained approbation.

Lots of my American friends and colleagues, a group that almost by definition is fairly savvy about foreign politics, have asked, "who is Gordon Brown?" What they mean is: "what does he stand for?"

For the reporters who went out to do vox pops on the streets of Manhattan, it was a literal question that produced a blizzard of dandruff as people scratched their heads in puzzlement. The incoming British Prime Minister is totally unknown to most citizens of the country with which he will almost certainly be preaching a special relationship. The Blue half of American will remember his fawning on Bush and wonder whether he could be any worse than Blair, while the Red half will wonder how perfidious Albion could replace such a staunch friend of America with a dour unknown Scot with so little pizzazz.

That is a shame, since Brown is the one who quietly and methodically has been financing and implementing the programmes that have made the Labour government attractive enough for British voters to support, despite the Blairish foreign forays and the attempts to treat George Orwell's 1984 as a desirable social programme rather than a dystopic novel.

Regardless of Tony Blair's best efforts at convergence, the political systems of the two countries are widely different even if they are conducted in the same language. Gordon Brown was elected, admittedly unopposed, by his party, and once Blair had been persuaded it was time to take a walk, it was a fairly short and bloodless process. But the British public knew who he was, as did the Labour Party.

In the US the presidential primaries drag on over a year and are effectively restricted to those who are very rich, or are connected enough to the very rich, to buy airtime. Of course, in some ways, that makes it politically less exclusive than British politics. Small-state governors, city mayors and passing millionaires can all put their hat in the ring. The president can be of the opposite party to the legislature, and several, Reagan, Carter, Clinton and Bush the latest, could all take office with no experience in congress at all, and indeed little at national, let alone international politics.

In Britain, the Prime Minister is elected by the majority party in parliament of which he has to be a member, and the constituency, theoretically at least, includes not only Members of Parliament but also ordinary party members and members of the affiliated organizations, like the unions.

So Gordon Brown did not have to be wealthy to get to No 10 Downing Street. But he did have to have the trust of the membership. To ensure unopposed re-election he played on his credentials as a solid party member, determined to rebuild an organization that his predecessor had reduced to a Clintonesque dropping off point for big cheques.

His credentials in the party are much more solid than the flibbertigibbet Blair. Not only did he write a biography of prewar left Labour icon James Maxton he also co-edited the "Red Paper on Scotland," thirty years ago which for American readers refers to Red as in Red Flag, not Republican.

But one of the things that is worth pointing out is the impact of the period in which he entered politics on his economic thinking. Harold Wilson's Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were bedeviled at every turn by a hostile financial system, where international bankers imposed conditions on their social and economic policies which they enforced with runs on the currency and the usual panoply of measures that were later wielded against recalcitrant third world states.

Brown's cautious financial approach has led to fiscal and economic success unprecedented in post-war British governments - the much-vaunted growth rates of Margaret Thatcher were largely recouping the damage she did when she trashed British industry after taking office. Many of his measures, including the independence of the Bank of England, were designed to stroke the bankers and keep them purring while in effect maintaining public spending.

As chancellor of the Exchequer, Brown had far more power in Britain than any comparable figure in American finance. Despite the cosmetic independence of the Bank of England, he combined the prerequisites of the Federal Reserve chair with those of the Treasury secretary, and did not really have to share control of the budget with parliament.

The reductions in unemployment, the increase in the minimum wage, increase in health and education spending are not be sneezed at, either in the context of Thatcher's Britain, nor for that matter compared with the United States.

Which brings us to the question: Is he good for America? It is often forgotten that it was a Labour icon, Ernest Bevin, who invented Nato and the present form of the "special relationship." Harold Wilson the Prime Minister in the 1960s and 1970s wrestled with keeping LBJ happy - without sending troops to Vietnam, which would have made his party and electorate very unhappy.

Brown, a frequent sojourner in Cape Cod, is certainly an admirer of the United States. One can legitimately doubt that he would have been so effusive about the present president if he had been premier hitherto. Certainly the fate of Blair will keep the brakes on Brown's enthusiasm for supporting Washington's wilder adventures, but he will almost certainly maintain, albeit in more restrained form, the myth of the special relationship.

Browning of America

The Browning of America... in the Guardian
quite topical in conjunction with last week's prescient piece of Blair's move to represent the Quadriplegic Quartet in the Middle East

Fail Caesar

Another variant on my Blair/Nixon comparison,
this one from Tribune 18 May 2007

Ian Williams

As Mark Anthony said about another military adventurist who came unstuck:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interréd with their bones!

Anxious for their seats and for the patronage of the incoming Prime Minister, there may be few who care to take an objective poke around the political cadaver of Tony Blair to see what achievements may be secreted there.

In many ways, his going, with the director of public prosecution looming over his shoulder, has shades of Richard Milhous Nixon's impeachment-impelled exit from the White House.

In fact, Blair suffers from the comparison. In terms of actual achievement, despite the murky circumstances under which he was forced to leave, Nixon was the most liberal and progressive president since FDR.

A poke around his bones reveals that Federal spending on welfare and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well desegregation measures all reached a peak during his presidency. He stopped the war in Vietnam, recognised China, fostered détente with Russia, engineered arms control treaties, and ended the US's chemical and biological warfare programs. He ended conscription and was the last president to consider a comprehensive national health service. He passed the Clean Air Act, and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency.

In comparison, Watergate was almost a peccadillo, which allowed both conservatives and liberals, outraged at how he had co-opted the Democratic agenda, to unite against him.

Now back to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, leaving with the purchasable peerages and the disastrous war clouding his reputation.

When Labour was elected Britain’s international standing was high. Robin Cook, Claire Short, Michael Meacher and others, were able to articulate a foreign policy that did indeed have an ethical dimension and certainly won a position of respect in organizations like the UN.

To put the eccentric New Labour “patriotism” campaign in perspective, Blair has left Britain’s international reputation at its lowest since Thatcher tried to cover for Apartheid. He has been told to butt out of the Middle East because of his criminal support for Bush, not only in Iraq, but also for opposing a ceasefire in Lebanon as Israel sowed its cities with cluster bombs. There was more distance between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan than between Blair and Bush, possibly the most unpopular president in the world.

Domestically, how can we reconcile the early New Labour guff about empowering citizens with the ID cards, the ASBOs, the attacks on civil liberties under the guise of anti-terrorism, the overflowing and privatized prisons, the lie detectors for benefit claimants, that intrude upon the life of British citizens?

But let us poke in the ossified remains of the Blair years. One senior minister complained during the first term that the government was actually doing a lot of good, but that they were not allowed to advertise it, and there is a lot of truth in that.

From the perspective of an exile from the Thatcher era, I suspect that those who stayed behind do not always appreciate how much better things in Britain really are now than when Labour first took over.

On my freeze-frame annual visits to Britain, the increasing prosperity has been clearly visible. Northern Ireland power-sharing and the abolition of most of the hereditary peers may still represent unfinished business – but they are further forward than any previous government has managed. The minimum wage, twice the US level, is a major achievement, along with parental leave and similar provisions. The expanding economy, and reduced unemployment and the increased resources for education and healthcare are big steps forward towards a more just society.

But too often it has been two steps forward and one step backward. The university top-up fees in England, the complex and expensive PFA partnerships retract some of those gains. And how many of these achievements were Blair’s rather than of the residual oldish Labourites in the cabinet?

It took twenty years for Nixon’s good to be disinterred, and even now the exhumation is a work in progress. One suspects it will take far less time for Tony Blair’s rehabilitation. He will probably be on the board of directors of Murdoch's News Corporation, which will assure him of an adulatory and amnesiac media across the English-speaking world.

But while we should not underplay the achievements of this Labour government, we should not forget that Blair’s cabal consciously tried to destroy the Labour Party as a mass organization with an active membership and to mutate it into mere PO box for large donations for re-election.

The Peerages for Sale wheeze was a political project that was almost certainly based on an idea by Bill Clinton. Just as Clinton stole the Democratic Party from what he called "Special Interest Groups" like working people, minorities and women, and handed it over to Wall Street, its purpose was to free the prime minister from any remaining accountability to the residual socialism of the unions and the Labour Party. Gordon Brown has always been much more aware of the party as an institution – one of his first jobs is make sure that it is not interred with Blair.