The U.S.’s friendship with Israel: When Support Threatens to be too Strong

One of the most striking phenomena in the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the way in which American support for Israel often threatens to be stronger than Israel’s support for itself. The latest demonstration of this phenomenon occurred on Tuesday the 5th of November 2009, when the House of Representatives voted on a resolution to reject the Goldstone report.

The Goldstone report is the product of a United Nations Human Rights’ Council-mandated fact-finding mission to Israel and the Gaza strip led by Justice Richard Goldstone. Goldstone’s team was asked to investigate the 22 day war in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. The original mandate mentioned only the possibility of war crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Force, but Justice Goldstone managed to convince the UN to widen it to include investigations of the conduct of both Israel and the Palestinian militants it was fighting. The team examined documents, visited sites of purported violence and spoke to witnesses. Israel disapproved of the mission and would not allow the team access to Israeli documents and witnesses, but Goldstone did manage to speak to the Israeli civilians most threatened by rockets launched from Gaza. Pulling the various sources of evidence together, he wrote a report in which he described some Israeli and Palestinian actions which could very well amount to war crimes, and encouraged both parties to conduct independent credible investigations of the events the report highlights.1

Israel’s official response to the report was to launch a campaign to convince the international community to reject it. But there are many Israeli cabinet ministers who do believe that Israel should establish an independent and credible committee to investigate their Defense Force’s actions in Gaza. Dan Meridor and Michael Eitan of the Likud Party and Avishai Braverman and Yitzhak Herzog of Labor have called for it.2 While they do not like the harsh tone of the report’s condemnation of their conduct, they do believe that an investigation is necessary to establish whether or not the Defense Force acted appropriately.

In fact, the Israeli cabinet never even discussed the report, since defense minister Ehud Barak prevented a security cabinet debate on the need for an investigation. He said that he was worried that an independent investigation would do damage to Israel in the international arena.3 So the ministers who did want an investigation felt sufficiently strongly about it to encourage it outside the context of a cabinet debate. Then there are also some Israeli human rights organisations, and the middle East branches of international human rights organisations, that called for such an investigation.4 According to a Geocartography Institute survey, 32% of Israeli citizens want such an investigation.5 The legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Alan Baker, warned that the Israeli government could not ignore the call by Goldstone and everyone else to institute an official governmental inquiry. He quite reasonably argued that, if indeed Israel has the substantive answers to the accusations leveled by Goldstone, then there is no reason to delay any further the establishment of such an inquiry.6

The official American response, as expressed at the United Nations General Assembly, was to claim that the Goldstone Report was biased against Israel, that it made sweeping legal conclusions and overreaching recommendations, and that it failed to adequately assign responsibility to Hamas for basing its operations in civilian-populated areas.7 The American delegation did not want the report to be passed onto the United Nations Security Council, which was the recommendation of the resolution against which they voted at the UN General Assembly. But while reluctant to discuss the report at the UN Security Council, the Obama administration did not reject the report completely. They still encouraged the Israeli government to set up an independent committee of inquiry to investigate the Defense Force, instead of simply having the military investigate itself.8

On the 5th of November, the House of Representatives voted 344 to 36 in favour of a resolution that condemned the Goldstone report as irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy. The resolution justified this condemnation with reference to passages from the report and more general concerns about a lack of objectivity in the process leading up to the report.9

Justice Goldstone issued a letter to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, listing 16 examples of points in the house resolution that distorted or plainly misrepresented his report. He was happy for the house to assess the report, but the resolution included “serious factual inaccuracies and instances where information was taken grossly out of context.

One example of factual inaccuracy that he cited was that the resolution criticised the report for denying Israel the right to self-defense. The report in fact granted Israel the right to defend themselves, and even the right to defend themselves through military as opposed to diplomatic means. But the report examined how that right was implemented by the standards of international law. the resolution also condemned the report as stemming from a UN mandate that was biased against Israel. But Justice Goldstone extended the mandate of the mission before he accepted the appointment. Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, refused to lead the commission because of the biased original mandate. Once Goldstone extended the mandate, however, Robinson was comfortable with the mission and was terribly disappointed that her comments about the original mandate were being used to undermine the final report.11

Justice Goldstone would have been willing to brief the House of Representatives on the mission and the report, so that those who had not read it could get at least the factual content of the report straight, but he was not invited to testify, even though this is frequently done in difficult cases.

After declining to listen to the author of the report, and in the midst of concerns over the factual accuracy of the House resolution, the house overwhelmingly condemned the Goldstone report as irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration. The Obama administration, 32% of Israelis and some Israeli cabinet ministers and human rights organisations did not consider it to be unworthy of further consideration, since they wanted the events cited in the report to be investigated. So we are left with a situation where some members of the Israeli cabinet, 32% of Israelis and their human rights organisations call for an independent inquiry, and almost all members of the U.S. House of Representatives call for no support at all.

This will take some informed minds back to the reaction to the Clinton negotiations at Camp David in 2000 and the consequent Taba discussions. Arafat rejected the Camp David proposals of July 2000, which even Israeli delegates have since said they would have rejected if they had been the Palestinians.12

Following this, President Bill Clinton formulated a proposal that could serve as the foundation of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in December 2000. It addressed four issues: settlements, borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Without relating all the details here, both sides made some concessions and both sides registered some reservations. This is precisely the outcome that was announced by the White House spokesman on January 3rd, 2001. Former Israeli foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, did not want to call the Israeli document a list of reservations, but when challenged in a debate, he did admit that they submitted a document that contained the differences between their original positions and the Clinton parameters, and he admitted that it contained reasons for Israel’s wish to make a deal that fell short of the Clinton parameters. In his own words, “we have gone a very long way, we cannot go beyond that”.12 That is precisely what Yasser Arafat submitted; the differences between what international law entitled the Palestinians to have and the reasons why the Clinton parameters fell short of that. So whether they are called reservations or not, the parties registered the same sort of things.

Following this, they met again in Taba in January 2001 to discuss the reservations. When these discussions were not successful soon enough, the Israeli delegation withdrew. Shlomo Ben-Ami explained that they were weeks away from an election and needed to pull out if they did not want to commit political suicide. The then Israeli chief of staff, General Mofaz, said publically that the delegation was putting at risk the future of the state of Israel by assuming the Clinton parameters, and minister Haim Ramon commented that Shlomo Ben-Ami was ready to sell out the country for the sake of a Nobel Prize. There was, thus, a lot of political pressure on them to withdraw. This is the account of the Camp David and Taba negotiations that both the Palestinians and the Israeli delegates gave.12 In fact, even the New York Times reported on January 28 2001 that “”Senior Israeli and Palestinian officials concluded nearly a week of stop-and-start negotiations in Taba, Egypt, tonight by saying jointly that they have “never been closer to reaching” a final peace accord but lacked sufficient time to conclude one before the Israeli elections on Feb. 6.” Arguably, the greatest cause in the breakdown of negotiations was then that the new Israeli government did not see their way clear to continue the Taba talks after they came into power.

The American version of these negotiations has come to be known as the Dennis Ross interpretation, since it was strongly defended by Dennis Ross, who was one of the American delegates at the relevant talks. This version of events held that the negotiations fell apart because Arafat insisted that most Palestinian refugees should be permitted to return to the state of Palestine, and/or because he refused to accept the Israeli offer of 97% of the West bank. This version never mentioned the Israeli delegation’s reservations with the Clinton parameters, nor did it mention that negotiations ended because Israel withdrew; the whole story was constructed based on two of Arafat’s reservations and not even an accurate version of those.14

That is also one of the reasons why two of the articles in American media that did assign responsibility to both sides were heavily criticised.15 Assigning some responsibility for the breakdown to Israel, even if one acknowledges that the Palestinian delegation was in error too, is a seriously unacceptable thing to do in the United States, where a balanced view of the matter seems not to be encouraged. Neither is the tendency of negotiators to break ranks and admit that the U.S. was not unbiased. Aaron David Miller, a leading member of Clinton’s negotiating team, publicly acknowledged this some years later, drawing vicious criticism when he wrote, “Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one – Israel.” And “If we knew the gaps were too large (and we suspected they were), we should have resisted Barak’s pressure to go for a make-or-break summit and then blame the Palestinians when it failed. What we ended up doing was advocating Israel’s positions before, during and after the summit.16

Whether one thinks that the responsibility for the breakdown of negotiations rests with the Palestinians or with the Israelis is not really important here. If one wanted to be genuinely objective, then one would probably admit that both sides made some serious mistakes. But whoever one thinks is to blame, one at least has to acknowledge that the Dennis Ross interpretation, which is the version that most American media sources repeated at the time, is at best hopelessly incomplete and at worst simply false. Even the Israeli media did not dare give this account of events, since the Israeli public would have noticed that it differed substantially from the story that their own delegates told. Shlomo Ben-Ami, for example, wrote a book in which he tried to blame the breakdown on the Palestinians, but he could not deny that it was Israel that pulled out of negotiations, neither could he deny that Israel was not happy with the Clinton parameters, neither did he pretend that Arafat demanded right of return for all or even most refugees nor did he pretend that Arafat refused to accept 97% of the West bank.

The American delegates were so desperate to convey the point that the Palestinians were to blame, that they passed a story on to the American public that even Israeli delegates and media knew was not true. And this is just another case of American support for Israel threatening to be stronger than Israel’s support for itself.

These two examples are just two of the chapters in the long story of U.S. politicians’ exaltation of Israel as an object of worship and its accompanying demonisation of the Palestinians. And it is tragic that it is occurring in the context of a courageous effort on the part of some Israelis to break down these characterisations in order to facilitate a respectful atmosphere necessary for peace.

1… See the Goldstone Report here http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf
2… http://www.jewishreview.org/wire/Dilemma-for-Israel-in-Goldstone-inquiry
3… http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1255694852717&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122327.html
4… B’Tselem’s executive director, Jessica Montell, thought that the report was biased against Israel, but argued that the biased statements could be proved wrong only during an independent investigation. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254163545977&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull and http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20091019_BTselem_position_on_the_Goldstone_commission_report.asp. Human Rights Watch argued that the Israeli Defense Force Investigation was not credible http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/23/israelgaza-israeli-military-investigation-not-credible. While some people criticise human rights organizations for being anti-Israel, others again claim that, since they receive financial support from some American corporations, they are not anywhere near as harsh on Israel as they would have been otherwise. So if they are condemned for bias by both sides, chance is good that they are doing their job reasonably objectively.
5… http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122893.html
6… http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1255694838520&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
7… http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2009/11/un-secy-general-to-send-goldstone.html
8… http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3786982,00.html and http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122893.html.
9… http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125593.html
10… A copy of Goldstone’s letter can be found here http://warincontext.org/2009/10/31/goldstone-vs-us-house-of-representatives/ More than 20 House representatives, led by Rep. Jim McDermott, did recognise that the House resolution was inaccurate, and asked that it be changed. For a copy of the letter, see http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/pr091103.shtml.
11… See her condemnation of governments’ use of her early statements to condemn the final report here http://www.theelders.org/media/news/accounting-gaza
12… See a debate between Norman Finkelstein and Shlomo Ben-Ami http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/14/fmr_israeli_foreign_minister_shlomo_ben
13… New York Times, January 28, 2001, “Mideast Talks End With Gain But No Accord.”
14… See Dennis Ross’ book, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.
15… Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (who was a special assistant to president Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs) wrote an article in the New York Review of Books called “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors” in August 2001, Volume 48, Number 13. Deborah Sontag wrote ” Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed” New York Times, July 26, 2001.
16… Aaron David Miller, “Israel’s Lawyer”, Washington Post, May 23, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200883.html

Behind Iran’s Reluctance to Sign a Nuclear Agreement

At the end of three days of talks in Vienna during October 2009), Iran agreed to consider a deal whereby they would ship 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment, from where it would be shipped to France for conversion into fuel rods which Iran could then use in a research reactor.

If accepted, the deal would please the United States and its allies. It would be virtually impossible for Iran to use fuel rods to produce nuclear weapons. In addition, experts estimate that Iran would not have enough fuel on hand to produce a weapon for at least a year after shipping the uranium to Russia. These same experts warn that, if the uranium were to be shipped out in small batches instead of all at once, Iran would be able to replace it with new low-enriched uranium almost as rapidly as it is shipped out. Moreover, if the uranium is not removed very soon, then countries estimate that Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear weapon some time between 2010 and 2015.

Iran has not given an official response to the proposed deal, but some fragments of their thinking have emerged, mostly during speeches in Iranian media. In the most important of these, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran would reject any talks backed by the U.S., since they were Iran’s enemy and could accordingly not be trusted. This has alarmed U.S. officials to the extent that they now seem willing for Iran to send the uranium to a friendly country like Turkey. Iranian and Turkish officials apparently discussed the proposal at an Islamic states conference in Istanbul on Monday, but have not revealed the upshot of these discussions. While Turkey and Iran have good relations, Turkey’s relationship with the U.S. and the EU might be too close for Iran’s liking.

While it is unfortunate that the trust between Iran and the U.S. is so fragile, there are several historical events that help explain it and from which we will hopefully learn something. Such events suggest that much more than just a once-off effort on the single issue of nuclear fuel is required to make Iran want to cooperate with U.S.-led initiatives.

Early this year, Barack Obama apologised for the American interference in the political structure of Iran between 1953 and 1979. It is not a secret that the U.S. installed a group of Iranian leaders and political structures in 1953, nor is it a secret that the U.S. supported the Saddam Hussein military when it was at war against Iran during the 1980s. All the documents have not been declassified, so there is still some doubt about the exact nature of the support and the extent to which it was given. But Iranians are aware of the American support for the military that used biological weapons on them, so it is hardly surprising that the foundation on which current negotiations are based lack the ingredient of trust. Obama, thus, did the right thing when he apologised to Iran, even though there is little beyond satisfaction that Iran is gaining from it now.

In 1979, Iran signed a contract with France whereby they paid for a French nuclear reactor in exchange for access to the reactor’s fuel. The Islamic revolution took place soon after, and France used it to shrug off the commitments that they undertook in the contract. Iran thus paid for a nuclear reactor from which they did not benefit. When new governments take over the rule of a country, the international community holds them responsible for the debt and commitments made by the proceeding governments. That is why almost all countries in the world are paying off debt incurred by previous administrations or paying reparations for the destruction caused by previous governments. France, thus, needs to negotiate with Iran to agree on how France can comply with the 1979 contract.

The original nuclear proliferation treaty should be abandoned and a new agreement should be signed by all countries. The new agreement should make it compulsory for all countries to destroy their arsenals and it should set time-lines for such destruction. Those who do not comply can then be subject to collective international punishment. Alternatively, and this should make everyone’s blood run cold, the proliferation treaty should be scrapped and all countries should be permitted to have as many nuclear weapons as they like. The crucial point is that either everyone should be permitted to have nuclear arsenals, or no one should be allowed to get away with it.

The international community will have to stop threatening Iran with sanctions. Threatening a country with sanctions for doing something that some other countries are allowed to do in a much greater degree will never work. It sets one standard for ourselves and one standard for those we do not like or trust. Allow your one child privileges that the other does not have, and you will see just how hard it is to apply a double standard successfully. Since the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia have been allowed to drag their feet over the destruction of their arsenals for forty years, and since Israel, Pakistan and India have been welcomed into the world nuclear community without signing anything, it should be obvious why Iran feels they are being wronged. And this point holds, whether they are truthful about nuclear technology for peaceful purposes or whether they are lying and actually aiming to produce a nuclear weapon.

The U.S. and its allies will have to work on trust more generally. If they are perceived as working only with their own interests in mind, they will always fall far short of a trusting relationship with countries like Iran. One recent example illustrates this well. The U.S. has often admitted to working with Jundallah, a movement that Iran labels as a terrorist organisation and that admitted to a recent suicide attack on Iran’s revolutionary guard leaders that killed over 40 people in the Iranian province of Baluchistan. Some Jundallah members have claimed American financial and military support after being captured and interrogated. While there is no way of verifying the truth of these claims, Iranians tend to believe that they are true. There are plans for a fuel pipeline between Iran and Pakistan, named the IP pipeline after the two countries. It is meant to run through the Baluchistan province, which is Jundallah’s home ground. Jundallah has various reasons for opposing this pipeline. The U.S. also opposes the IP line, because they are in favour of a trans-African pipeline. If Baluchistan is made ungovernable and unstable through violence, then investors will withdraw and the trans-African line will win automatically. The U.S. has unfortunately built up a reputation as a country that supports its enemies’ enemies, so many Iranians believe that the American government is behind Jundallah’s violence. That is why Iran was so quick to blame them for the recent attacks. There is nothing that any American official can say to relieve these fears. The U.S. supported the Northern Alliance over the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they are now in the process of discovering just how big that mistake was. The result is typically that the old enemy hates them even more bitterly than before, and more often than not the enemy’s enemy turns on them as well.

Lastly, whatever the original merits of American support for Israel, it does take a lot of pressure off Israel to commit to a peace process. Some media sources have spent a lot of time dissecting the recent American and British criticism of Israel, but the crucial point is that so long as they provide millions of tons of military equipment and diplomatic help in the form of vetoes on the United Nations Security Council, there is no urgency for Israel to solve the problems in the region. America will be doing Israel and all the countries in the region a favour by cutting their support for Israel. It is the only way of having even the weakest shot at peace in the region.

Short of implementing steps as comprehensive as these, the hope of cooperating with Iran on anything is stillborn.

Did the Moral Majority Really reject the Goldstone Report?

On Thursday, the 192 nation United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution that urged that the secretary general of the UN passed the Goldstone report on to the UN Security Council for discussion. 114 countries endorsed it, 18 rejected it, 44 abstained and 16 failed to register a vote. The Goldstone report is a UN commissioned document compiled by Justice Richard Goldstone following his fact-finding mission to Israel and the Gaza strip. The UN asked Goldstone to investigate whether war crimes were committed during the three-week war in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009.

In the 575 page report, Goldstone made it clear that his findings were not conclusive and not based on exhaustive investigations. But since his interviews and examination of documents uncovered some events which could amount to war crimes, he encouraged both Israel and Palestinian militant groups to conduct independent credible investigations of these incidents.

One interesting reaction to the overwhelming UN General Assembly support for the Goldstone report was that of Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. He commented that countries like Saudi Arabia and Somalia made up the majority of the countries in the General Assembly, and as a result he rejected the endorsement of the report as a real endorsement. About the majority of the countries in the assembly, he said that, “these are not countries which will teach us about morals; they are the ones we expect salvation from.” He went on to say that the votes against the Goldstone report counted as the moral majority, since they included the world’s strong democracies. In his own words, “it’s not a trivial thing that 18 countries, including those from the Western, democratic world, would vote against the resolution”.1

So who exactly voted for and against the Goldstone report? Here is the list.

Votes for: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Antigua, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Barbuda, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Comoros, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Votes against: Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Poland, Slovakia, FYR Macedonia, Ukraine, United States.

Abstentions: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Georgia, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russian Federation, Samoa, San Marino, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Tonga, Uganda, United Kingdom, Uruguay.

No votes: Bhutan, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Honduras, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, Togo, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

One difficulty with Lieberman’s statement is that the way in which one distinguishes the democracies from the non-democracies, and differentiates those who respect human rights from those that do not, will depend on ones deep-seated and often unquestioned views of the world. For example, British magazine The Economist regularly compiles a Democracy Index by examining surveys and asking experts to answer questions about countries. They do not specify which experts, scholars or journalists or some other type, but they do tell us which areas of functioning the questions focus on. They rate countries based on whether elections are free and fair, the security of voters, the influence of foreign powers on government and the capability of civil servants to implement policies.2

Presumably then, the list would have looked very different if they included questions about the extent to which governments implement policies actually supported by their citizens, the degree to which governments respect democracies abroad, and so forth. These elements are crucial components of a democratic state that respects democratic values, but since their importance is downplayed in western societies, they seem unimportant to most of us.

For example, western democracies adhere to a top-down democratic structure whereby governments make policies and pass them down to the people instead of the other way around. Most NATO countries remain in Afghanistan against the wishes of their populations, only a very weak public option is likely to be included in the American health care system against the populations’ wish to have a more robust one, the majority of people in Britain want their country to scrap their entire nuclear arsenal about which their government is silent, and so forth. That is the result of passing policies from governments to citizens. Moreover, the U.S.’s FBI has shown an alarming trend to arrest and even investigate protesters; the most recent examples include anti-Afghanistan war protesters, Pittsburgh’s G20 conference protesters, public option health care protesters, all in the context of a culture where trade unions have almost been ruled out completely. Further, elections in most western democracies are run by the public relations industry, demonstrated recently when Barack Obama’s presidential campaign won the Advertising Age’s annual Marketer of the Year and his campaign manager won the Brandweek’s Marketer of the Year. Since we all know how the job of advertising is to sell a product, instead of to provide detailed truthful information, we should not be surprised that polls show that citizens either base their votes on the most likable personality or are unaware of the policies of the candidates. In April 2009, a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll found that, with Obama in office for three months, the number of people who agreed with his views on the issues had gone down, while the number who said he had the right personal qualities had gone up. Since Obama did not do anything in the first three months that contradicted his campaigning as a centrist democrat, this poll was probably the result of voters being more familiar with his personality than with his policies beforehand. In September, a ComRes survey for The Independent showed that the British Conservative Party was likely to lose to the Labour Party because of David Cameron’s popularity over Gordon Brown, but that Labour policies were still more popular than Conservative Party policies. Again evidence of personality-based voting. But yes, in western democracies voters are safe and elections are free and fair and civil servants carry out policies; the question of whether these elements alone make a good democracy remains open.

On the other hand, many South-American and even African countries emphasise massive grassroots movements that work on policies and programs, and they encourage the election of government representatives from their own ranks to implement those policies in government; that is, a bottom-up democratic structure. Security of voters is not as good as in western democracies, but voters are more familiar with the issues and policies. Since many of these countries are fighting themselves out of extreme poverty, the available funds and the education level of their civil servants might hinder their ability to implement policies, but at least they are attempting to implement policies that their populations support. A truly legitimate democracy index will have to take these issues into account instead of deeming them to be irrelevant.

Consequently, Venezuela would have been surprised to find itself in the bottom half of The Economist’s list. Their economic policies might be socialist, but Hugo Chavez has been voted in countless times and restored through a mass uprising after having been unseated in a coup in 2002. Similarly, Bolivia finds itself at number 75 out of 167 countries, while many scholars rate them as a particularly healthy democracy. Ecuador is placed at number 88, even though they are currently on the same route as Bolivia. All three these democracies voted in favour of the Goldstone report, but since their democracies are not recognised as such by western popular doctrine, their votes do not dent the “moral majority” vote that Israel is so proud of.

Even when examining The Economist’s list, assuming that it lists countries that western popular doctrine would consider democratic, the Goldstone report did quite well. It was endorsed by Slovenia, Mauritius, Portugal, Malta, Ireland and Switzerland, which are all 6 listed as “full democracies” and in the top 30 on The Economist’s list; and by South Africa, Chile, India, Cyprus and Botswana, that are all 5 between numbers 30 and 40.

The 17 countries in the top 30 that abstained were Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Austria, Spain, Japan, Belgium, United Kingdom, Greece, Uruguay, France, Costa Rica and South Korea. From 30-40 on the list, only Estonia abstained.

This means that the countries in the top 30 democracies that voted against the Goldstone report numbered 7, just one more than those who endorsed it. They were The Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Germany, United States, Czech Republic and Italy. Those countries from 30-40 who rejected the report were Hungary and Israel itself. Consequently, if we count democracies from 1-30, 6 endorsed the report while 7 rejected it, and if we count from 1-40, 11 endorsed it and 9 rejected it.

So precisely where did Lieberman get his “moral majority” from? One possibility is that he counted the abstentions as votes against the report. Clearly, however, by the same reasoning anyone else can count the abstentions as votes for the report. So what do we know of those who chose to abstain?

John Sawers, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, told Israel’s Army Radio that he supported the findings of the report and he encouraged both Israel and the militant Palestinian groups to investigate the events it highlights. He expressed the official UK view at the UN General Assembly meeting, saying that “the Goldstone Report itself did not adequately recognize Israel’s right to protect its citizens, nor did it pay sufficient attention to Hamas’s actions.” Still, even there he emphasised that the events and conclusions in the report could not be ignored.3

The French foreign ministry labeled the facts unearthed by the Goldstone commission extremely serious and deserving of utmost attention. It condemned both the Hamas-launched rockets and the “disproportionate use of force which resulted in the death of many civilians”. In fact, the French UN Ambassador, Gerard Araud, concurred with Goldstone and encouraged both sides to conduct “independent inquiries in line with international standards.”4

Sweden’s foreign minister Carl Bildt said that he supported the Goldstone report, and criticised Israel’s decision not to conduct an independent investigation. In fact, he described Goldstone as a person with high integrity and credibility, and called his report worthy of consideration.5

These are not impressive condemnations of the report, so Lieberman could not have obtained his “moral majority” from the abstentions. We can be charitable and assume that he based his statement, not on a consideration of the world’s top democracies, but on the hordes of human rights violators who endorsed the report. He is right that a world where countries like Saudi Arabia, Somalia, China and Zimbabwe give moral counsel is an astonishingly nasty place.

Clearly, endorsement of the report by hordes of human rights violators might carry some weight against it only if it is not rejected by hordes of human rights violators. If some violators endorse it while other violators reject it, then the violators cancel each other out. This is where our unquestioned and uninformed opinions might creep back into the picture. How on earth does one distinguish between human rights violators and human rights respecters?

Americans and some Europeans will probably argue that the United States respects human rights, but innocent Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, Panamanian, Nicaraguan, Grenadian and Vietnamese civilians (lucky enough to have survived the wars), plus all innocent people held and/or questioned in terrorism-related inquiries since 2001, to name just a few, will laugh this suggestion off the table. Americans might not like it, but it is obvious that a country with the highest number of wars and foreign interventions since the second world war will not stand out as a respecter of human rights to the rest of the world. Since Australia, Canada, The Netherlands and others typically go along with the U.S.’s international adventures, no one other than themselves would rate their human rights records as vastly superior to, say, Saudi Arabia’s. It is not a view that most Americans and Europeans want to hear, but it is popular in countries other than their own. Numerous polls show that public approval of the U.S. is low in countries that are primarily Muslim; that is, in all primarily Muslim countries, approval of the U.S. is below 50%, in many of them below 20%, in some of them even below 10%. In addition, polls conducted in South-America show that their public disapproval of the U.S. is increasing.

Further, since a number of the dictatorships on the rights violator list are massively unpopular in their home countries but propped up by the United States, it is appropriate to condemn both the dictatorship and their benefactors for those violations. It will be useful for Americans to remember that Hilary Clinton could not exactly deny U.S. support for the former Pakistani military government when asked about it by Pakistani students just a week ago. Or no American government has ever denied that they have American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, probably because it is an empirical claim that can be easily proved wrong by anyone that cares to visit the country. American government hands are far from clean in many military governments and dictatorships. So if we are all rights violators, we cannot claim moral superiority over one another on those grounds.

Without doubt, both those who accepted and those who rejected the Goldstone report include democracies and dictatorships. Even more importantly, they both include countries that are guilty of gross human rights violations; some countries violate human rights mainly on their own soil, others violate them abroad, and other unfortunates respect neither the rights of their own people, nor the rights of others in faraway lands.

We are then left to conclude that Lieberman’s “moral majority” was a case of subjective and perspectival rather than critical and objective thinking. He wanted to believe that the moral position was one that rejects the Goldstone report, and he wanted the world to believe this version of morality. And that is the version that he sold us and that many media organisations bought.

1. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1257455198045&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
2. http://www.economist.com/markets/rankings/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12499352
3. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1255547720625&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8308367.stm; http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files_156/israel-palestinian-territories_290/palestinian-territories_2156/situation-in-gaza_6239/goldstone-report-on-the-war-in-gaza-16.09.09_13224.html
5. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3787204,00.html

Our Defense against the Self-Defense Justifications

Israel recently rejected the report compiled by Justice Richard Goldstone that found both Israel and Hamas guilty of war crimes in the Gaza war during December 2008 and January 2009. At the October meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, they pleaded with the international community to understand that they needed to defend themselves from the Hamas-launched rockets and urged other countries to respect their right to self-defense. Hamas, Gaza’s rulers, accepted the report with reservations, and they based their appeal to the international community on their right to defend themselves from an illegal and immoral Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

In 2001, the United States justified their invasion of Afghanistan with the claim that their security situation at home would be precarious so long as Afghanistan hosted terrorist training camps. Al Qaeda, in turn, justified their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the claim that they needed to defend Muslim countries and their people from constant western interference and from violations of their sovereignty. The Taliban is still fighting to defend Afghanistan from international domination, while NATO countries are still working on convincing their citizens that a Taliban-free Afghanistan is a necessary condition for world security.

This phenomenon of justifying military action through self-defense is as old as the phenomenon of military action itself. For centuries, European empires used their right to protect the governments that they installed in their colonies to justify quashing local rebellions, while the populations in the colonies fought the empires to regain their countries’ autonomy.

The reason for utilising self-defense as a justification for violence should be clear. The right to defend ourselves from attack is one that we all recognise from the personal to the national level. If a robber attacks me and threatens to kill my children, most people will be happy to acknowledge that I am fully justified in defending myself, even if this involves killing the robber. By the same reasoning, if someone attacks my country and threatens to kill its citizens, then my government has a responsibility towards its citizens to protect them. An appeal to self-defense is, thus, one that will meet with considerable sympathy.

Matters of international relations are seldom that simple, however, and very few wars are sparked by a single aggressor that attacks another country for no reason at all. Most of us might not want to admit it, but there are some plausible elements in the positions of all the above mentioned parties.

It takes willful devotion to ignorance to deny that the United States provides military support for, and stations troops in, countries where the vast majority of the people find their involvement unnecessary and ultimately harmful. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are just some examples. So the United States’ appeal to self-defense to justify its current wars is not entirely truthful, since it is not entirely blameless in the chain of events that leads to attacks on itself. Similarly, one has to disregard a lot of evidence if one wants to deny that the attacks carried out by Al Qaeda are deliberately aimed at injuring and killing innocent civilians, especially Muslim civilians. The World Trade Center attacks, the London Tube bombings, the Bali nightclub and Jakarta hotel bombings and the recent series of suicide attacks in Pakistan serve as a few examples. Even worse, while some of their members continue to make statements about the need to spread their version of Islam and Islamic law throughout the world, their appeal to self-defense to justify their attacks does not quite ring true.

Even the United States, who is Israel’s most loyal ally, admits that Israel is occupying and continuing to build settlements in areas where international law explicitly forbids it. Israel might not want to accept international law as the law formulated by the International Court of Justice, but it can be argued that this is not a matter of choice. A house robber would not want to accept a formulation of the law which deems his preferred actions to be illegal, but if the law is formulated according to a constitution that is endorsed by the vast majority of his country, then he needs to obey it. So Israel is somewhat dishonest to pass off its violent actions in the occupied territories as acts solely motivated by self-defense, since violent actions that violate law are at least intuitively not accepted as legitimate actions in self-defense. Moreover, the self-defense justification covers the inconvenient reality that so-called extremist Hamas and its friends constitute only a small number of those that are being collectively punished by Israel’s aggression. Similarly, no one can deny that Palestinian attacks on Israel and its basically innocent citizens happened, and continue to happen and that Hamas is far from consistent about whether they recognise the right of Israel to exist. Moreover, while Hamas is officially in massive conflict with some Palestinian extremist organisations, who probably are affiliated with Al Qaeda leaders, legitimate questions can be asked about just how much these groups overlap. Hamas, at least, is then not entirely honest to pass off their rocket attacks as acts in self-defense against the Israeli occupation, because their some-time denial of the state of Israel and their own and their some-time allies’ intense hatred of Jewish people casts doubt on what they would do if the occupation is ever ended.

These are crude characterisations of some of the issues that lie below the surface of these cases, but they should make us aware that military conflicts, and events leading to them, are sufficiently complex to rule out pure self-defense as a justification for them. It is, therefore, regrettable that so many people around the world still allow their governments to deceive them into believing that the sole justification for wars fought in their populations’ name is the right and the need to defend themselves.

This mistake is compounded by our apparent inability to place the same weight on another’s right to self-defense as on our own. Most Israelis, and through their countries’ close association most Americans, frame the security question as what Israel can do about the constant threat of Palestinian terrorist attacks, without investigating the reasons behind such attacks. They thus place a higher priority on Israel’s right to defend itself from Palestinian attacks than they place on Palestinians’ right to defend themselves from Israeli aggression. It is unlikely that Palestinians will phrase the question in these terms, since they think that the balance of the aggression in the region is directed at them, in the form of daily house evictions, the separation of communities and families from each other, the withholding of the freedom to move around, and so forth. They thus place more emphasis on their right to defend themselves from Israeli aggression than they place on Israel’s security concerns. That is why most Israelis perceive the access check points and separation walls to be necessary for their own security, while most Palestinians perceive them as acts of oppression that need to be resisted.

Similarly, many Americans focus exclusively on their own right to defend and protect themselves from terrorist attacks, so they refuse to investigate whether, or refuse to acknowledge that, the United States may be responsible for actions that Al Qaeda members might need to protect themselves from. Al Qaeda members, in turn, deny that the actions they commit in self-defense, especially the indiscriminate targeting of innocent Muslim civilians, go far beyond actions for which a self-defense justification is appropriate and become actions that others need to protect themselves from.

This skewed focus on our own security concerns leads us to authorise as acceptable our own right to defend ourselves, as well as our friends’ right to defend themselves. Unfortunately, the inclination to prioritise our own security concerns typically coincides with an unconditional rejection of the possibility that our enemies, or our friends’ enemies, fear for their lives, freedom and security as much as we fear for our own.

We will, therefore, do well to be sceptical of self-defense as a justification for military action. It is almost always employed as a way of gaining our sympathy; especially sympathy for those with whom we share a country, culture, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Moreover, since self-defense is a right that we are disinclined to question, such a justification is frequently employed to conceal elements of situations that we will be more likely to question. Someone can pass a rolled-up blanket off as a puppy in a blanket, but if the blanket is open, then the mouse on it cannot be passed off as anything other than a mouse.

The actions of both Israel and the Palestinians should, thus, be perceived, not in terms of self-defense, but with reference to which land belongs to whom. Similarly, since both sides have security concerns, negotiations for peace should prioritise ownership of land and sovereignty of states. Below the surface of the war on terror lies questions about the principle that countries should be permitted to govern themselves and be free to rule in the interests of their own people. It involves the balance between a country’s need to cooperate with the international community and its need to prioritise its own citizens.

Wherever these reflections lead us is where we should go. And whenever the red herring of self-defense pokes its head out, we should decapitate it, not in self-defense, obviously.

A New Culture of Appeasing the Most Violent

The way in which some countries have dealt with the recent Goldstone report bears a resemblance to the fear that many have of criticising or making fun of the religion of Islam. This seems to indicate that we might just try a bit too hard to appease the most violent among us.

In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Politiken published an article titled “Profound anxiety about criticism of Islam”. The article dealt with writer Kåre Bluitgen, and his struggle to find an illustrator to work on his book “The Qur’an and the Life of the Prophet Muhammad”. Three illustrators turned Bluitgen’s offer down and explained that they were afraid of working on a book on Islam. Apparently, one illustrator cited the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh , who made a film on the treatment of women in Islam and wrote books critical of religion. Another mentioned an attack on a lecturer at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute in Copenhagen for reading the Qur’an to non-Muslims during a lecture.

The Politiken article sparked an initiative by another Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in which they asked cartoonists to make illustrations of how they saw “the face of the Prophet Muhammad”. The cartoons predictably offended many Muslims worldwide, and details of the massive protests and the arson attacks on the Danish Embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran and the Norwegian embassy in Syria are too horrifying to recount.

The Muhammad cartoon saga was resurrected in 2009, when officials at Yale University Press decided to eliminate reproductions of the cartoons from a book by professor Jytte Klausen. The book was titled “The Cartoons that Shook the World ,”, and was meant to be a scholarly analysis of the cartoons and the motivation for, and the consequences of, their publication. The Yale University Press officials were afraid that a republication of the cartoons would lead to the same violent protests as the original event.

The publication of the cartoons triggered a fierce debate between those who thought that freedom of speech should be upheld at all cost, and those who believed that the cartoons were insensitive to the concerns of Muslims who already felt themselves to be misunderstood, disrespected and under attack by many Western democracies. Insensitivity to the context in which the cartoons were released obviously does not justify the violence of the protests, but it goes some way towards explaining that the violence resulted from an insult sowed in the fertile soil of existing grievances and fears. It is, thus, in part understandable, though no less appalling.

The element of the situation that irk freedom of speech activists the most is the implication that, while everyone else is fair game for jokes and criticism, Muslims need to be excluded. The fact that some Muslims will respond violently to criticism or jokes entitles them to special consideration. In other words, violence pays, since everyone is too scared to make fun of, or criticise, them. After all, Iran’s response to the Danish cartoons was to run a competition to see who could draw the best holocaust denial cartoons. Israel did not react by burning down embassies; in fact, one of their own newspapers ran a contest to discover the best Jew-hating cartoon by a Jewish person. They did not want Iran to beat them at their own game, so the potentially offensive Iranian cartoons spurred them on to make fun of themselves. Compared to violent protests, this is the very healthiest of attitudes.

We should not forget, however, that it is easier for the rich and powerful to take potentially offensive digs from the less powerful than the other way around. But the general point stands that people make fun of other religions much more readily than they do of Islam, because they know that it is common for some Muslims to react violently. And it is precisely this submission in the face of threats of violence that freedom activists are uncomfortable with.

In September 2009, Justice Richard Goldstone released a UN commissioned report on some of the atrocities committed during the three-week war in Gaza that started in December 2008. The four-member investigative team found evidence that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants were guilty of serious violations of international humanitarian law, possibly amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The report recommended that both sides conducted independent credible investigations of their own actions. Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, told Web site Palestine Note that Hamas would comply with the request, though they had some reservations with the report. Some Israeli cabinet ministers want to set up an independent investigation, such as Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Ministers Yitzhak Herzog, Avishay Braverman and Orit Noked. At this stage, however, they are still outvoted, and the only commission that the Israeli cabinet has approved is one to campaign against endorsement of the Goldstone report in the international community.

In a recent meeting with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman asserted that peace talks with the Palestinians could not progress amid international support for the Goldstone report. At a November 4 meeting of the UN General Assembly, Israel’s UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev warned that the report and the debate did “not promote peace – they damage(d) any effort to revitalise negotiations in the region”. These sentiments have been echoed by some Obama administration officials and are at least part of the U.S.’s reason for voting against the adoption of the Goldstone report in the UN Human Rights Council meeting in October.

Since Hamas is prepared to cooperate with the requests in the report, and since they are willing to endorse the report with reservations, the only conclusion to draw here is that international endorsement of the report is harmful to the peace process because Israel would opt out of peace talks if they are held accountable for their atrocities. We are thus encouraged to appease Israel by rejecting the Goldstone report, because if we do not, then they will continue their current actions in the Palestinian territories and refuse to participate in the peace process.

If this is an accurate representation of events, then it is worrying. There is, of course, space for the temporary overlooking of human rights violations in favour of the practicalities of getting a peace process off the ground. South Africans temporarily put such violations aside while the National Party ended apartheid policies and handed political rule over to the African National Congress. But no one ever dared deny that both sides committed sickening crimes against fellow South Africans during apartheid. And there was never any doubt that the country could not move forward unless apartheid-era atrocities were acknowledged and truthfully recounted. This accordingly occurred with the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which offered South Africans the opportunity to come clean, make peace and receive amnesty.

The current Israeli and American government attitude is not to put the Goldstone report aside temporarily while making peace in the region, however. The attitude is to declare it biased and illegitimate and bin it permanently on those grounds. And this risks becoming just another case of placating a violent party because if we do not, then they will continue to be violent. The threat of pulling out of the peace process and the continued violence and occupation that it entails is meant to prompt us to permanently excuse Israel’s actions in Gaza. And this is an unacceptable demand, especially in this context where a peace deal looks decades away. If China demanded that we overlooked their crimes against the Tibetan people while making very few constructive steps towards ending the occupation of Tibet, the international community would not be satisfied.

Israel alone can, of course, not be held responsible for the stalling of the peace process. But the fact that the Palestinians might be failing to meet their obligations does not erase Israel’s obligation to do their Share, in the same way as one driver’s traffic violations does not relieve the rest of us of our duty to drive well. Accordingly, Israel can be held responsible for the ongoing settlement building, which is the current obstacle to peace talks. So long as Israel prioritises its expansion over peace, peace in the region is so far away that excusing war crimes serves no purpose in an almost non-existent peace process.

It is, therefore, important for the international community not to submit to the demands of the violent. We should treat them like we treat everyone else, like we are treating Hamas in this case. Let both sides investigate their crimes and hold their criminals responsible.

Options For and Lessons From Afghanistan

Now that we’re approaching the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, most NATO countries with troops on the ground have been plunged into heated discussions between government officials, military experts and ordinary citizens. The question that everyone is grappling with is what the options are for NATO’s future involvement in Afghanistan. While the initial invasion may or may not have been justified, and while past military and diplomatic strategies may or may not have been correct, one thing that most people would agree on is that NATO has to leave Afghanistan in at least as good a state as it found it in in 2001. There is very little agreement on how to achieve this.

The first possible strategy is to support the current government through financial aid and the strengthening of security forces like the Afghanistan National Army and the Afghanistan National Police. But this is precisely what they have been doing for the last eight years, and it has failed for some clearly understood reasons.

In the past, the biggest problem with this approach was that Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai had employed people who were known to be corrupt and/or violent in his government. In supporting the government, ISAF forces then caused many civilians to shift their support from the coalition forces to the Taliban. Stephen Grey, a British journalist who has written a book on the coalition’s invasion of Afghanistan, gave one example in the 27th of August edition of Prospect Magazine. When the British Parachute Regiment arrived in Sangin in Helmand province in 2006 to protect the district governor and officials, they did not realise that all these officials were from the Alokozai tribe; a tribe whose leader ran a private prison, was infamous for the kidnapping and raping of children and was attempting to seize the drugs trade from its rival tribes. The British military thus unknowingly took sides in an existing tribal conflict. Unfortunately, this situation has not improved with time. More recently, according to a July 12 2009 report by Reuters correspondent Peter Graff, elders in Babaji just north of Laskgar Gah warned the British that they would support the Taliban if the Afghan National Police returned to the area. Or villagers in Aynak complained to Associated Press reporters Jason Straziuso and David Guttenfelder in July 2009 that the police were a bigger problem than the Taliban.

There have been so many allegations of electoral fraud in the August 2009 elections, that it is hard to see how a credible government can emerge from that. If Karzai wins, which he is quietly optimistic about while leading with 54% of the vote with some recounting remaining, he will be accused of having stolen the vote. Given the violence on election day in August, locals and coalition forces alike cannot stomach the idea of a run-off election, which will happen only some time next year after the brutally cold winter. If Karzai loses, it is likely that Pashtun citizens will not accept Abdullah Abdullah as having won it fairly. So how to dig a credible government out of the elections is a question that no one has dared to answer confidently. So if the coalition strategy is to support the current Afghan government, it is destined to fail due to the lack of credibility of that government.

A second possible approach for the coalition is to make it clear to Karzai that they will leave the country unless he replaces all violent and/or corrupt people in his government.

This is not promising either, however. A country that has been in various wars over the last 30 years has very few people who have not become involved at some point with some group that perpetrated some violence or actions in revenge for past violence. In a country that was ruled by the Mujahideen in the early 90s, the Taliban in the late 90s and partly by the Karzai government and informally by the Taliban in the 2000s, it would have been very hard for citizens not to have become involved with one of these groups, even if just indirectly through relations that others in their tribes may have had with them. So however Karzai tries to clean up his government, someone will have grievances against those he ends up employing.

A third possible strategy for the coalition forces is to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan so that they can hold areas more effectively while the building of infrastructure takes place. This will win the hearts and minds of the civilians, because they will see some real progress in their country. This is the strategy proposed by General Stanley McChrystal, who is in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan. The BBC’s Ian Pannell recently used the town of Garmsir, in Helmand province, to demonstrate the potential for success of this clear, hold and build strategy. Pannell tells the story of a town that was abandoned three years ago in the midst of battles between the Taliban and British forces. In 2009, when the American military sent forces to the area, the overall troop numbers were large enough to drive the Taliban away from Garmsir for good, to hold the town and to start building infrastructure and developing effective governance. Pannell visited an Eid fair and described children riding a brightly-coloured wooden Ferris wheel, Men playing volleyball, boys taking part in a wrestling competition and people browsing the stalls. Garmsir illustrates the difference that higher troop numbers can make. This strategy is not without its problems, though.

The biggest problem is that it once again implies that coalition forces will be supporting the current Afghanistan government, which lacks credibility. In addition to supporting a dubious government, an effective clear, hold and build strategy requires effective infrastructure building, community building and distribution of aid. These are responsibilities of the Afghanistan government and of both Afghan and international civilian development agencies. Up to now, such productive development has been scarce. Musa Qala in Helmand province serves as a useful example. The British forces cleared it in December 2007, and have managed to hold it until now. But precious little development has taken place. Without a unity of military and civilian effort, increasing troop numbers is of no use.

Another problem is that an increase in troop numbers will be unpopular in the United States, Britain and other coalition countries. According to a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll, 58% of those asked oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan, reportedly the highest level of opposition since the war began in 2001. And the anti-war sentiments are even stronger in Britain and especially in Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and so forth. While not particularly democratic, acting against public opinion might not be a huge practical problem, since all the credible political parties and candidates in these countries support the war. Ignoring the wishes of the majority of their populations is one of the reasons that Al-Qaeda leaders typically cite in support of their view that western democracies are hypocritical, however, so an increase in troop numbers will damage the reputation of democracy even further in those circles.

One uncomfortable consequence of larger troop numbers is that more people will be killed in the process of clearing and holding areas. In a video that the Taliban made with captured American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, his interviewer made precisely the point that an increase in troop numbers will lead to an increase in the violence. Moreover, as I suggested above, since the division between innocent civilian, violent and corrupt government official and violent insurgent is not as wide as westerners want to believe, even deaths of insurgents will touch the civilian population deeply. This could derail the winning of hearts and minds.

Furthermore, with the increased number of troops clearing and holding areas, some more infrastructure will be destroyed. Some of the areas where fierce fighting has taken place are already almost completely ruined. And reassuring people that their ruined houses will be rebuilt some time is very cold comfort. They will have to sleep outside for a few more years, without a job and regular food supply and many of them would have lost all their possessions that were in their homes. Given how attached we all are to our possessions and to our comfortable lifestyles, this should not be so difficult to understand. So destroying more infrastructure, even accompanied by a promise to rebuild, is not exactly a way of winning hearts and minds.

One aspect that is often ignored is the broader world situation of which the war in Afghanistan is one component. Many experts now believe that it is American involvement in Muslim countries that was the prime motivation behind attacks like the American embassy bombings in 1998 and the airplane attacks in September 2001. All the videos released by Al-Qaeda leaders have stated their objection to American involvement in their countries explicitly. In fact, in a survey that the Wall Street Journal did amongst American Muslims on Wall Street in September 2001, these grievances were unanimously cited as the motivation behind attacks on America. Further, Britain became a prime target for such attacks only after they sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, as is clear from the 2005 London underground bombings. Whether we think that they are right to believe this is not relevant here. What is important is to understand that, since they do hold these views, sending more troops into Afghanistan will aggravate these grievances. The more western involvement in Afghanistan, the more anger there will be towards the United States and its allies. This is an important point to keep in mind when working on a strategy forward, and increasing troop numbers is likely to feed these grievances.

The United States is extremely unlikely to remove their troops from Iraq, since Iraq has always been one of the main stages on which American foreign policy has played out. Together with peace keeping missions all over the world, American soldiers are hopelessly overstretched. Their tours are long and the periods of rest between tours are not long enough. They suffer from depression due to time away from their families and friends. This is clear from the suicide rate among American soldiers that doubles every year. The British army has a similar problem, and Gordon Brown’s speculation about increasing the British troop presence from 9000 to 10000 soldiers has met with objections that the British army is simply not large enough. Reports of both American and British soldiers leaving the military are also becoming more common. These problems have given rise to some fierce criticism of other NATO countries for not pulling their weight in Afghanistan. But most other NATO countries have never been enthusiastic about the war. Many of them see the so-called terrorism problem as an American problem caused by American foreign policy; this is why many countries have allowed their troops into Afghanistan, but to rebuild, not to fight and not to risk breaking down the country further. And the 2003 invasion of Iraq against United Nations advice strengthened this perception of a trigger-happy American foreign policy. So to suddenly count on countries that have never firmly believed in the war to save the mission by sending troops to fight is hopeless, even if the unfairness of it is disregarded.

Another question is whether an increase in troop numbers will actually work to subdue the insurgents so that the country can be re-built. The coalition and Afghan forces combined already outnumber current Taliban fighters by between 100000 and 200000 troops, but because the insurgents fight in the old gorilla fight and run style, they can do a lot of damage with small numbers. Moreover, it appears as if they can increase their numbers effortlessly by recruiting in Afghanistan, Pakistan and several countries around the world, including in the United States and in Britain. So if it’s purely a numbers game, the coalition forces probably lose anyway.

Senator John F. Kerry, a Vietnam war veteran, recently said that in Vietnam, “the underlying assumptions were flawed, and the number of troops weren’t going to make a difference.” We hear a lot about how it is necessary to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists that will launch attacks on the United States and on Britain. But a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for terrorist attacks. While Afghanistan and Pakistan were convenient training grounds in the past, attacks can be planned from anywhere in the world where like-minded people meet. The London Underground bombings in 2005 were planned by British people in Britain, and the FBI has had some success in tracking down Americans set on launching attacks on their own country. If the motivation for the war in Afghanistan is to reduce the likelihood of attacks on the United States and Britain, sending more troops seems counterproductive. If the conviction that American involvement in Muslim countries is unjustified fuels attacks on NATO countries, then using increasing numbers of soldiers with military equipment to fight this rapidly spreading conviction seems illogical.

Another possible strategy is not to send more troops. Simply leave the ones that are there to train the Afghan forces so that they can fight their country’s own fight.

But similar to a point I made above, training the Afghanistan army and police currently implies training those who oppose the Taliban and their friends and relations. If the overall aim is to stabilise the country, picking sides in a local conflict is likely to have the opposite effect. Antonio Giustozzi in his book “Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop”, published in 2009, gives one helpful example. In Helmand province, the current police force primarily consists of the militia of the local warlord, former Mujahideen commander Sher Mohammed Akhundzada. He is a member of the Alizai tribe who dominated the province before the Taliban took control of the south in 1994. Akhundzada became the governor of Helmand province in 2002. Their rivals, the Ishaqzai tribe, ruled the province during the Taliban period. The restoration of Akhundzada to power gave the warlord and his militia the opportunity to use the police to take revenge on their Ishaqzai rivals. So training and supporting the current police force is something that many Afghans will not accept without resistance.

Leaving the Afghan army to fight their own fight also seems somewhat unfair. Since a lot of the current violence was stirred up by international participation, leaving the local forces to deal with it places an undertrained force in a firing line of someone else’s making. In the armies of most NATO countries, a soldier takes approximately 20 years to work himself up to the rank of major, in the Afghan army they have only two-three years to get there. So they are likely to be undertrained. While some of them have a lot of practical fighting experience due to Afghanistan’s stormy past thirty years, being trained in carefully tested methods is likely to be better than practical experience on the battle field. That is why so many British and American commanders have warned that training the Afghan army is a slow process.

Further, the number of soldiers currently in Afghanistan are clearly not managing to tame the insurgents’ ability to attack. So the decision not to increase the number of soldiers both fails to address the insurgency problem and places the lives of the soldiers that are currently there in terrible danger. If we want to send soldiers to these areas, we need to make sure that they are their with the full commitment of their countries. And placing an insufficient number of soldiers there for the tasks they need to do is the same as wondering why that poor watch dog died and failed to defend his family from ten armed robbers. Several senior military figures have recently resigned from the British army. Major General Mackay, who led a brigade in Helmand province in 2007, was a leading proponent for readjusting Britain’s counter-insurgency plan. He is the most senior officer to leave the Army due to concerns over the direction of the campaign. Other high-profile resignations include Colonel Stuart Tootal, Brigadier Ed Butler, Major Sebastian Morley and Major Nick Haston, Mackay’s deputy chief of staff. They all cited a lack of troops and/or equipment in support of their resignations.

Moreover, while this is a minority view, the idea of training the Afghan military makes some people’s blood run cold. In 1980 the US and its allies collected, trained and equipped some Muslim extremists from all over the world to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. This sowed the seeds for Al-Qaeda to develop. While they were fighting the United States’ fight, American support for them continued. But they obviously had their own agenda all along, first demonstrated by the 1981 assassination of the Egyptian president and lately by acts like those in September 2001. Now NATO forces have to fight many of the people that they trained in the 1980s. In addition, when Iraq became involved in a war with Iran in 1980, the US saw their chance of defeating their Iranian enemies. Some recently declassified American documents testify that they strengthened Saddam Hussein and his military by providing them with materials to develop weapons of mass destruction, ignoring the arms embargo against Iraq that existed at the time. In 1990 they ended up having to fight that same Iraqi military, and even some of the American and British soldiers have since mentioned how terrified they were of having Iraqi nerve gasses used on them during the war. The possibility of having to fight a NATO trained Afghan army some time in the future is an appalling prospect.

The American training of armies in Muslim countries is another one of the reasons that radical Muslim networks give for attacks on America. A highly unstable country with a strong internationally backed army and an insurgency problem runs the risk of grabbing too easily at violent solutions to anti-government protests, especially where that population is weak, uneducated, sickly and poor. The accusation of America strengthening Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army while weakening the Iraqi people is one that Al-Qaeda leaders frequently make in their video and audio releases. So training another army for which the United States will be more violently hated seems counter productive – if the aim is to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks, that is.

The approach that the American and British people seem to prefer is to withdraw all troops immediately and leave the Afghans to sort out their own country.

This is again not exactly fair, since the international military involvement over the past eight years is probably responsible for most of the current level of violence.

Even more alarmingly, those who have supported the government and the NATO backed democratic process might be slaughtered, since there will be no sufficiently strong force to defend them from insurgent attacks.

Moreover, as the new head of the British army and some political parties have pointed out, a NATO military defeat in Afghanistan will inspire radical Muslim networks and spur them on to further acts of violence against NATO countries. If they know that they are capable of a military victory over a coalition of almost forty countries, they will believe that they are the mightiest military force on earth. And having an enemy with a record of violent acts who has a firm belief that they cannot be controlled militarily, is not something the US and its allies want. In fact, this thought might even persuade the passive NATO countries to participate more fully, but the message will not be lost on the Taliban that they were victorious over the US, British, Canadians, Dutch, French and Australians and that they ultimately lost only because more NATO countries became involved.

Another strategy that has been suggested is to pay the Taliban fighters to stop fighting. This worked in Iraq, so why not in Afghanistan? If they currently get paid $10 a day, offer them $20 a day. NATO countries combined will easily be able to outbid the Taliban for their support. There will obviously be some committed fighters for whom this is not an option, but estimates are that it will remove the vast majority of them.

This might stop the fighting, but it will create massive further problems. It will produce a morally corrupt nation of layabouts that would have learned that violence pays, quite literally. Why bother work or contribute if one can make money by threatening violence and being paid off? A better but unfortunately long-term option is to pay them to be trained for some occupation that will contribute something to the country. At least if paying people is a way of getting them to stop fighting, the valuable lesson to learn is that people with houses and jobs and incomes are less likely to become involved in wars, because they have lives to lose. This is a lesson that can be of a lot of value in poor countries in Africa and Asia. But at this stage in Afghanistan paying fighters to stop fighting is incompatible with advancing the country politically. One will be teaching them a lesson of, “why bother to find diplomatic solutions if violence pays?”

Further, stopping the fighting will not end more isolated attacks of tribes on each other or villagers on each other. If you’re living in a village and you know that your neighbour or even your new governor used to fight for the Taliban who almost destroyed your village, the chance of revenge is great.

A huge amount of NATO countries’ tax money will be spend paying off fighters that can always fight again if another reward is greater. A better use for tax money is to rebuild Afghanistan and pay them reparations.

The final potential approach is to turn away from military solutions altogether. Remove all NATO troops. Remove representatives from all NATO countries. Hand over the future of Afghanistan to diplomatic efforts between representatives of Afghan human rights organisations, Afghan religious leaders, Afghan tribal elders, and so forth. Since Afghanistan is their country, they are the ones who have the right to choose whether they want to involve the United Nations to assist. If NATO is looking for a genuinely democratic option, this comes the closest to one.

Afghanistan has an organisation of women who have been leading the struggle to defend women’s rights and to establish democratic government. They’re called the revolutionary association of women of Afghanistan, RAWA. They issued a statement just after the American bombing of Afghanistan began in 2001, titled, “Taliban should be overthrown by uprising of afghans.” It suggested that, “despite the claim of the United States that only military and terrorist bases of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban will be struck, and that its actions will be accurately targeted and proportionate, what we have witnessed for the past 7 days leaves no doubt that this invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men and children, young and old, of our country.” They called for a mass uprising to eradicate the plague of the Taliban, one carried out by the people of Afghanistan.

In 2001 abdul Haq, an afghan opposition leader, said that he had started efforts to create divisions in the Taliban. He asked the US to assist with these efforts. He explained how he had established contact with high-level Taliban commanders, tribal elders and ex-Mujahideen fighters. He discussed in detail how such efforts could proceed. he has unfortunately been killed.

In October 2001 a gathering of 1000 afghan leaders in Peshawar in Pakistan committed to overthrowing the Taliban. The group consisted of Islamic scholars, tribal leaders, former Mujahideen commanders, and so forth. They believed that the Taliban could be overthrown by the Afghan people themselves.

If the United States had known about potential military failure by 2009, they would probably have listened to all this advice. Now that coalition military action has devastated parts of the country, destabilised relations between Afghan tribes and civilians, and united the Taliban through hatred for NATO, are some of these plans viable eight years on?

First, there are many rumours that there are numerous Taliban commanders and fighters that are tired of fighting. Then there are those that are fighting purely to get NATO forces out of their country. Some fight for money, and not based on any religious or political principles. Then some fight, not because they support the Taliban, but because they oppose the corruption that they believe is rife in the current Afghan government. These differing justifications for fighting is clearly reflected by the western press’ newly acquired habit to talk about “the Taliban and other insurgents”. These are the ones who would presumably be prepared to negotiate. And they probably constitute the majority of the fighters. So negotiating with, and causing divisions in, the Taliban is still an option. In fact, on the 25th of September 2009 infighting between two groups of Taliban in Herat province left five insurgents dead and injured seven. So it seems that, even without international involvement, divisions between different groups of insurgents are opening up.

The New York Times recently reported that Senator Jack Reed urged President Obama to look at the capacity of Afghan forces and the prospects of reconciliation with moderate Taliban members before sending more troops. The British have been pushing for negotiation for years. The only problem is that, since the Americans and the British are not seen as unbiased and as acting in the best interest of anyone other than themselves, insisting that they be part of negotiations, especially while they have troops on the ground, will anger many Taliban and cause them to refuse to participate. The success of negotiations is likely to depend on the absence of a NATO military presence and of American and British diplomats, as much as the Americans and British governments would resist. This sentiment was clearly reflected in the recent Iranian election protests, during which protesters publically announced that President Obama’s support would weaken their cause. Polls conducted in Iraq at the time of the American invasion in 2003 also showed that approximately 6% of Iraqis thought that America was their to help them, while 94% of them believed that they were there to control Iraq’s oil supplies. The Americans and British thus seem to underestimate just how much they are distrusted, or even hated, in most Muslim countries. Even if one thinks that the people in those countries are wrong to view America and its allies as completely self-interested, the fact is that they do think it. So a strategy for exiting Afghanistan and more broadly for dealing with primarily Muslim countries will have to take the distrust of the US and its allies seriously.

Since the Dutch soldiers are likely to be withdrawn in 2010, their foreign ministry recently commissioned a report from an NGO called The Liaison Office (TLO). They accordingly conducted some research in the Uruzgan Province where Dutch and Australian troops are currently serving. TLO co-founder Dr. Susanne Schmeidl, concluded that western forces could win support of local factions, even in districts where the government controlled less than 5% of the territory. But this can happen only if some things are kept in mind. First, the Dutch were successful in distributing wheat seed to the people because they gained the support of the local Taliban who defied orders from foreign commanders based in Pakistan. The local Taliban told the Dutch soldiers how to get the wheat through to the people. But Dr. Schmeidl added that there was a joke in some villages that goes like this: when the Dutch or the Australians come to the village then only the Taliban take out their weapons to fight them. When the Americans come everyone takes out their weapons to fight them. Whether this is fair or not, it does illustrate the feelings of some local Afghans, and without understanding them, improving their situation will be an uninformed shot in the dark.

An uprising in the civilian population is at least as likely as in 2001. They might be poorer and more sickly and closer to starvation now, but they have had first-hand experience of what happens to the country under Taliban rule. And they know that the threat of NATO military action hangs over their heads if they allow the Taliban to take over.

Further, human rights groups in Afghanistan are now more numerous and stronger than ever. In 2001 they were banned and mostly working from abroad. In 2009 they have had years of active involvement in their country.

Whether tribal divisions can be repaired is something that will emerge only during negotiations. If this is impossible, then western democracies will simply have to back off and allow them to decentralise rule, which is how the country was ruled between 1933 and 1973, its most prosperous and peaceful period.

The concerns regarding a NATO military defeat remain, however. While a country that proposes talks to end a war does not strictly lose that war, this will be the perception that NATO countries will have to live with. But while many probably rightly think of the United States as the world’s most powerful military power, it can be argued that the six years they spent in Iraq and the eight in Afghanistan have done nothing for their international reputation. Interestingly, in recent discussions about the possibility of the US intervening in the growing hostilities between India and China, some Asian countries rejected the US as “A nation in decline”, “involved in costly adventures abroad”, and so on. Even a military victory in Afghanistan cannot mitigate these effects of the amount of time and strain that the recent wars have taken. Whether they win or lose, their actions were never especially decisive and their victory will not be a convincing show of military force, especially when considering that Iraq and Afghanistan were close to defenseless at the start. Saving their reputation should, thus, not prevent withdrawal.

Choosing a diplomatic option in Afghanistan could put NATO countries in danger of attacks like those in September 2001, but since their current actions are putting them under threat of such attacks anyway, this should not turn them away from the peaceful solution automatically. It can also have the opposite effect among some Muslims. If one of the primary reasons for such attacks is American involvement in Muslim countries, then withdrawing military involvement in Afghanistan can help. It will have to coincide with similar peaceful and respectful behaviour elsewhere, however, otherwise it will be perceived as a withdrawal from a war they were losing.

If the governments of NATO countries prefer to continue what many Muslims call aggressive and disrespectful behaviour towards other Muslim countries, and if NATO countries’ citizens think that they thereby place their own countries at a higher risk of retaliatory attacks, then the strategy forward both in Afghanistan and the rest of the world is in the hands of the citizens of NATO countries. It is worth remembering that the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the movement to secure equal rights for different race groups, labour rights movements, and all other examples of social progress, emerged from activism at grassroots level. They were not passed down to the people by benevolent governments. Similarly, if the populations of NATO countries believe that the foreign policies and accompanying aggression of NATO countries are wrong, it’s up to them to change the course of their governments.

Without doubt, a perceived NATO military defeat is disastrous for the reputations of the powerful NATO countries. But there is an important lesson that the Bush administration could have learned, but failed to learn, from the war in Vietnam and from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Some countries or organisations are not as defenseless as they seem, so a decision to attack the seemingly defenseless should be the very last resort, in the same way as a decision to attack a militarily powerful country would be. In August 2002, the United States Central Command’s war plan for the invasion of Iraq estimated that there would be only 5000 American troops left in Iraq by the end of 2006. This was obviously a hopeless underestimation of the strength of Iraqi resistance. Unfortunately, there is a trend to attack those that seem defenseless like Afghanistan and Iraq, and to negotiate with those that will be able to provide substantial military resistance like Iran and North-Korea. This carries the risk of spreading the development of nuclear weapons, since countries that are petrified of being attacked know that this would deter others from attacking. But it also puts the reputations of NATO countries at risk, in case they label as defenseless a country or organisation that is more resourceful than first thought. This is true especially in this age of low-cost low-technology insurgent warfare. So while a strategy that will create the perception of a NATO defeat will be bad in the short term, the long term consequences of having more negotiations, more genuine cooperation, less distrust, fewer wars and more respect for the autonomy of all countries are very much worth having.

Let us not be too naive and idealistic here. It is always possible that Al-Qaeda leaders have lied about their motivations for attacks on the United States and Britain. If these radical networks continue their terrorist acts even after the United States and its allies have removed everything they currently cite as reasons for such attacks, then we should clearly re-think this strategy. Currently many world leaders assume that these networks will continue carrying out attacks even once their grievances have been addressed. But guessing what they might do then based on what they do now is about as accurate as proposing that if I won the lottery I would continue my current job as a rubbish collector. The more cynical view is that world leaders simply do not want to address their grievances, and that this is the reason for continued NATO military involvement in some countries. But since increased military involvement in these countries only fuels their grievances, their hatred of the United States and its allies and their passion to fight for the sovereignty of their countries’ will soon spread so fast that it outruns NATO’s ability to manage it.

Who Suffers Most From Music Piracy?

If a creature from outer space observed us in the late 90s and again today, we cannot blame it for thinking that its observation equipment must have freezed on the same image. Even worse, the image is one of creatures gone hopelessly insane.

Late 90s: Record companies panic because people are downloading music on the internet.

Their first response was to increase CD prices in order to make up the short fall in their revenues. This strategy may have had some temporary success, but was short-sighted. They completely misidentified their preferred outcome. Their preferred outcome was not to increase profit, but to increase demand. A better strategy would thus have been one aimed at increasing demand, not one aimed at restoring profits to pre-music download levels. And increasing prices while demand is dropping led to a further drop in demand. So ultimately misidentifying their preferred outcome made them grab at a strategy that defeated that preferred outcome.

The record companies’ second strategy was to go after both those guilty of downloading and those who facilitated such downloading. Huge law suits shut down services like Napster and financially crippled some of its users for life. This strategy did not even have temporary success, since it was partly unrealistic and partly based on a misunderstanding of human nature. The unrealistic element was to expect that once they subdued one download service, no new ones would take its place. The misunderstanding of human nature was to expect that harsh punishment would serve as a deterrent. They again misidentified their preferred outcome. Their preferred outcome was not to prevent downloading, but to give the downloaders something acceptable that could replace the free downloads. Better strategies would thus have been to work with services like Napster for a workable business model, to talk to its users to investigate why people downloaded instead of bought music and to discuss possible new models with musicians and music consumers. Shutting down Napster and suing its users led to both a hatred of the music industry and to a proliferation of new download services. So ultimately misidentifying their preferred outcome made them grab at a strategy that defeated that preferred outcome.

When record companies finally realised that they had to work with, instead of against, newly available technologies like the internet and digital music formats, they decided to start making deals with media providers that would charge people per song or album downloaded. These resembled CD shops that one visited and where one bought albums or singles. Initially, these were unpopular, since one record company struck a deal with Real Networks, while another worked with ITunes, while others resurrected a legal version of Napster, and while still others made their catalogue of artists available only to Microsoft. This led to a ridiculous proliferation in digital formats, since each media provider released its music in a different format. Downloaders thus found themselves having to visit various websites of media providers in order to download artists signed to different record companies. Further, they had to have several media players installed on their computers in order to play all the different formats. Not surprising, then, that downloaders rejected this as an alternative to free downloads.

With time, this strategy has improved, since record companies realised that such deals would not appeal to downloaders. But many of the old problems remain with almost all such services. ITunes became the most successful of these pay-per-download media providers, mostly because of having the largest catalogue of available downloads and making them available in the standard MP3 format that all players play. . There are still some artists whose music is not available on iTunes, and there are many countries around the world where one is not permitted to purchase downloads from them. But the important point here is that, if iTunes had been a good solution, then downloads of those artists that they do sell would have decreased in the countries with download permission, which is something artists, record companies and even downloaders would argue has not happened.

So why are services like iTunes not a good solution to the illegal downloading problem? Partly because portable media players and hard drives are large enough to store tens of thousands of files on, so music consumers want tens of thousands of songs with which to fill them up. Greedy, you might say, but since current thinking prioritises quantity to most other things, business models must take it seriously in order to stay relevant. Tens of thousands of songs on iTunes will cost millions of dollars, which very few people have. Another reason why iTunes is not appealing is because it charges almost as much for digital albums as for physical CDs. Music consumers are probably right when arguing that, once one rules out the cost of printing and distributing CDs let alone their packaging, music on services like iTunes must be a lot cheaper. And consumers hate being exploited by super wealthy companies. But by miles the biggest problem with iTunes is that, compared to free downloading, it just is not a good deal. Since it is a digital replica of the old CD shop model, it does not directly take on the benefits of free downloading, let alone present an acceptable alternative.

Some media providers realised that consumers wanted tens of thousands of songs, and acknowledged that digital albums could not cost the same as physical CDs. Their preferred business model was to charge consumers a monthly fee for an unlimited number of downloads. This solves the first two weaknesses of iTunes, since music consumers can fill up their portable players and do not have to pay for each individual digital album. But these models have been plagued by numerous technical difficulties.

First, if consumers pay for songs, they want the files to belong to them and to be playable on different computers and different portable players. Record companies typically demand that subscription plans, and even pay-per-song plans, include some form of rights management that restricts what the consumer can do with the files once they’re downloaded. This is obviously aimed at preventing paying consumers from copying files to their friends’ computers and players. But consumers do not want music that they cannot copy onto as many portable players and hard drives as many times as they like. They do not want to pay for files that they can play only a certain number of times. If they’re going to pay for it, it has to be theirs forever. (At present, there are services like spodify that charge a monthly fee for music that consumers can stream through the internet onto their computers. These services have been surprisingly successful, but illegal downloading has not declined. So they do seem to be tapping only into the small number of music consumers that are already trying to do it legally.)

Further, the catalogues of the subscription-based download providers are small, since record companies are reluctant to sign on. This is probably because record companies prefer that consumers pay for each individual album or single that they download. And this again indicates a misidentification of preferred outcome. what they want is not to make money from each individual download. What they want is to ensure that people spend about as much on buying music as they did before free downloading became an option. More precisely, they want people to spend as much money on music as they would have spent if downloading had not been an option. If the average person would have bought one album a month, thus spending fifteen dollars a month on music, charging them a subscription fee of fifteen dollars a month should suffice, regardless of how many albums they download. Insisting on anything more again looks like a money-making scheme.

This is where it is most obvious that record companies put making a lot of money ahead of making a fair amount of money.
The subscription models show some promise even when compared to free illegal downloads. If one wants to download music for free, one has to dig around various websites in order to find the albums one wants – they’re not all available in one place. Further, they’re often not available in the format one wants them in – many downloaders think that the standard MP3 files are too large compared to AAC or OGG files, for example, or of too low quality compared to FLAC or WAV files. Moreover, even within each format files can be of different quality – the standard MP3 format can be encoded in anything from 320kbs super CD quality to 192kbs CD quality to 128kbs near CD quality and even lower. So finding the albums one wants in the format and quality one wants them in for free illegal downloading is not at all straightforward. Even when downloaders find the albums they want in their preferred format and quality, they often discover that the person who encoded and uploaded the files made some mistakes resulting in files that contain strange sounds or that don’t play at all.

If it is possible to have an affordable subscription service that sells all artists’ albums in various formats all on one website, many downloaders will pay to save themselves the effort of the hunt. One thing that indicates this quite strongly is that there are subscription services that illegally host music files for which downloaders are willing to pay and from which musicians get no benefit. The best known of these are Rapidshare, Megaupload and Hotfile. Consumers without backup space at home can back up their whole hard drives by uploading them onto services like Rapidshare. For each file one uploads, one receives a link from which one can download that file again in the future if one’s hard drive crashes, for example. They thus provide a legitimate service that music downloaders use for an illegal purpose. Music downloaders use them to upload files onto and to post the links around the internet so that others can download them. And since all the albums one wants might not be available on Rapidshare, for example, one purchases subscriptions for the others like Megaupload and Hotfile too. Altogether the subscription money downloaders are willing to pay easily works out to between $120 and $160 a year, and all this money that music consumers are willing to pay goes to the wrong people.

The same tendency is clear in countries where internet service providers (ISPs) charge per amount that their members download. Many consumers are prepared to pay their ISP more so that they can download more illegal free music. But it’s not exactly free then, is it? So clearly they are willing to pay; at this stage they’re just paying the wrong people.

Media providers that sell subscription fees for an unlimited number of downloads can, thus, lure many music consumers away from free downloading. Now obviously record companies do not want to lure only some consumers away from illegal downloading, but all of them. And this is where the subscription model collapses. While many consumers will be happy to join subscription models, many will continue to find ways of not paying for their music. Either they won’t mind the extensive search across numerous different websites, or they will join decentralised peer-to-peer networks like the Bittorrent network.

Decentralised peer-to-peer networks involve no companies or central server computers. The network hangs on the sum-total of the individuals that are busy downloading and the files are hosted on their personal hard drives. Given that these downloaders do not mind the amount of time that they have to spend digging around for files and formats and quality, they thus pay nothing in order to download.

Since these networks have no central server that the record industry can shut down, or no company that they can sue for enabling the illegal downloading, the record industry have been dealing with this danger by going after individual downloaders. This is why we have seen a law suit against a single mother that resulted in a two million dollar fine, and one against a college student that ended in a seven-hundred thousand dollar fine. The music industry has also enlisted the help of internet service providers (ISPs) by asking them to cut off the internet access of regular downloaders on these networks. Predictably, all this has only made people hate the music industry more and made others work even harder on securing ways of hiding the web activity of consumers from their ISPs.

Everyone is now encouraged to hide their IP addresses while downloading from peer-to-peer networks, which will ultimately leave ISPs unable to know whether they’re downloading or not. And ISPs do not want to enter into a technology battle with all the software crackers and network hackers that are alive. The music industry thought it could shut all downloading services down and make all downloaded files unusable by creating superior technology to that available to the average computer user. This is a battle they failed miserably. For every one expert that tries to prop up the music industry with superior technology, there are ten trying to defeat it with even more superior technology. So the question becomes: if subscription services will lure only some downloaders away from illegal downloading, what will make the peer-to-peer downloaders go legal?

There is only one option, and it will be a very complex one. Instead of asking themselves “how can we make people pay for music?” the record industry should ask “how can we make sure that artists get paid?” If the paralysed person who invented the wheel chair asked himself “what can I do while lying in bed?” instead of “how can I get around the house?” he would probably never have invented the wheel chair. Old questions lead to old solutions, new questions open up new ones. “How can we make people pay for music?” is the old question of trying to link a sum of money to each album someone has. “How can we make sure artists get paid?” opens up options like getting the money from somewhere other than music consumers, or getting the money from consumers but making them pay for something other than music.

One such option is to build a fee into every hardware device that can play or store music. That would mean that all consumers that buy a hard drive, a computer, a portable player, a sound system and even musical instruments support the music industry. Moreover, each internet service provider in the world can include such a special fee in their monthly charge, which will obviously have to be shared between music, movie and book industries.

The main advantage of obtaining the money from purchases of hardware is obviously that illegal hardware is a lot easier to regulate. Fewer people have the skills to build hardware devices, and those that do will be easier to track down since they have to build them at a specific location and buy the components in bulk from somewhere. Moreover, home-made electronics are likely to be of poorer quality than professionally made ones, and will be sold without warrantees. These potential problems might put consumers off the illegal home-made variety.

How exactly the money will be divided up will be one of the main challenges. If all the music is available on one website from which consumers can download, then the industry can keep records of which artists’ music is the most popular. Accordingly, they can earn more than those that are not so popular. But the scheme will have to be much more complex. We do not want to support only established artists that are already doing well, we also want to give upcoming new artists some source of income while they’re producing their music and building a fan base. So the website will have to be set up in a way that identifies, rewards and promotes new artists. Since the vast majority of radio stations currently play only music they receive from record companies played by artists that have already been signed, however, it stands to reason that a new system cannot be worse than the current one at supporting new artists.

The question of whether consumers will buy into this is complex.
An unsurprising trend might be that more politically socialist or liberal countries would adopt it painlessly, and more conservative countries would hate it. For example, Britain had a drive whereby consumers were charged a bit extra by their internet service providers every month in order to roll out faster internet across the country. This was quite successful, since the British are used to paying for things like the NHS and BBC. In the United States, where people object even to paying extra tax so that the poor can get health insurance, the change would annoy many. But the point is that music consumers have been given every other choice imaginable over the past fifteen years, and have rejected every one. So if this is all that is left, it is at least worth an attempt.

The question of whether the music industry will buy into it is the more important one.

Firstly, record companies will oppose it fiercely, since it will render them redundant. This is partly why they haven’t been very creative when working on the illegal music download problem. The moment one mostly removes physical CDs that need printing, packaging and distributing, and one removes the system whereby artists need to be given a record deal in order to get promoted, record companies are pretty much redundant. For the past fifteen years, record companies have been unenthusiastically playing around with the same old ineffective solutions, precisely because any new solution will be the final nail in the industry’s giant coffin. They have been fighting for their own survival, not for the interests of their artists. They’re making sure that they hold onto the thread by which they’re hanging while their artists are losing truck loads of money. If they had been concerned for their artists, they would not have taken fifteen years to recognise that these same old options are not working. They will have to accept that their only hope for survival is to become management companies, organise concerts, etc.

Secondly, existing artists that made their money before the download era will resist this plan, because artists will not make the riches of, say an Elton John or a Paul McCartney. It is hard to find massive fault with this, however. Do artists really have to be that wealthy? They’re doing something they love doing; something that they would have done even if no one had paid them for it. So if the biggest problem is that artists will no longer make enough money to have 50 cars and houses in 10 different countries, complaints in the general consumer population will be scarce. Furthermore, if people can download your music without having to pay for it directly, you will have more fans, which means more and larger concerts, higher sales of memorabilia and whatever other ways you can think of to make money from a large fan-base.

Short of a complete consumer boycott on all current legal options, however, there does not seem to be a way of getting off the current treadmill. Until artists realise that their record companies are not acting in their best interests, the debate is stuck.

The Humorous and not so Humorous Sides of the American Health Care Debate

The American health care debate is one more demonstration of how societal habits can shape its citizens’ views and attitudes towards issues and people.

When the health care debate started raging in the US, a lot of the rest of the world’s reaction was something like, “what, they don’t have state health care? What happens to sick poor people?” As the debate continued, we learned the answer to this question. “We leave them uninsured and terribly often without any form of health care at all.”

This struck many as just about the worst moral position that a country’s people can have on such an incredibly important, literally life-and-death, issue. We saw the pictures of old people crying in pharmacies and at doctors’ rooms, and of several thousands queuing up outside stadiums for free medical consultations. And our big questions became, “Have Americans not noticed the plight of their own people? Does it not bother them to know that so many people are suffering and dying and they’re not doing anything about it even though they can?”

I’m not unaware of the potential problems associated with a state option. I live in a country with both a state option and private medical insurers. It’s resulted in a situation where public hospitals provide pretty average care because they’re expected to provide for so many people with not enough tax money, and where private insurers are constantly sued for refusing to pay for procedures and medication because they’re trying to make money.

But my country happens to have a near 50% unemployment rate, which partly explains why tax money doesn’t stretch far enough for good quality care. America does not exactly have this problem. So I have a suspicion that, except for a small number of nuanced objections to the state option, the majority of Americans that are opposed to the state option oppose it because they do not want to pay a bit extra in order to provide their poor with health care.

If one suggests slightly higher taxation in order that the poor can have health care (and obviously also things like homes, education, water, and so forth), one is accused of being a socialist: China, Cuba, here we come. The label “socialist” is immediately considered to make one a really bad person so, once you carry that label, everyone feels justified in ignoring what you say.

My first objection is that this passes very glibly over the distinction between liberalism and socialism, and is a common attack of the right on the center or center-left. The theoretical misunderstanding of the distinction is truly annoying.

According to the traditional oversimplified picture of political philosophy, people on the left believe in equality, and hence recommend some form of socialism, while those on the right believe in freedom, and hence recommend some form of free-market capitalism. In the middle are the liberals, who believe in a mixture of equality and freedom, and hence recommend some form of welfare state capitalism.

The typical objections that right-wingers have to state health care is that it violates ones freedom to do what one likes with ones own money in order to respect the principle that everyone is equally entitled to health care. And this is obviously not what is involved here. All Americans will still be free to do whatever they like with the vast majority of their income. And all Americans will be free to choose between a state and a private insurance option. The only freedoms anyone will lose is the freedom of private insurers to make as many billions as they choose to. And possibly the freedom of individuals to spend ALL their money as they please. Such a plan would, thus, allow equality while denying fairly insignificant freedoms. And this is a classic example of liberalism, not socialism.

My second objection to the socialist labeling of state health care proponents is a moral rather than intellectual one. Extreme right-winged free market capitalists think that each person should be free to do as they like, regardless of what their actions, and especially their omissions, do to others. Extreme left-winged socialists think that all people should have equal access to services, products, jobs, respect, etc., regardless of how much it violates the freedoms of everyone. If we spell out the two positions like this, it is obvious what is wrong with both extremes. But it also clarifies what is really right in both extremes.

Would being on the socialist side of centre really be so bad if one keeps in mind that one would find here people that truly care about the wellbeing of those around them? This group would include people who care about whether others have food or starve to death, whether others have access to education or are permanently relegated to menial work, whether sick and disabled people have access to care or whether they have to suffer in silence or die, and so on.

I’m reminded strongly of how hard a time my white racist parents had to explain to my ten-year-old self how christianity was supposed to be compatible with racism. Needless to say, they did not have much success, since I couldn’t understand why white christians associated more with white atheists than with black christians. America calls itself a primarily christian state. I wonder how successful those christian parents are in explaining the compatibility between christianity and their willful disregard for 46,000,000 Americans that will suffer needlessly or even die if they get sick or injured. Sadly, since this problem has existed for centuries, they’re clearly managing.

I have deliberately refrained from writing about the health care issue, since America typically does not take criticism from outside seriously. Have a look at this special American’s humorous take on his fellow countrymen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4
And post it around, it’s great.

Does the Lockerbie Bomber Deserve our Compassion?

Last week Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was freed after receiving a life sentence imposed in 2001. This sentence followed his conviction for taking 270 lives by bringing down Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland. The Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, granted him an early release based on compassionate grounds, since Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer which doctors estimate will result in his death in the next three months. The decision to free him thus means that he will be able to return to Libya to reunite with his family and die comfortably and peacefully with those he loves.

Kenny MacAskill has come under very heavy verbal fire for Megrahi’s compassionate release, mostly from families of those who died in the crash and from American politicians. MacAskill defended his decision by claiming that “compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as a people – no matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated”.

As a South African woman, this is a statement that I do not find surprising. After all, I have an advantage over most Americans in that I watched the miraculous change of my country from a white racist to a fully inclusive democratic regime. The miracle of the change was in the reasonably peaceful way in which it all happened. Between 1990 when Nelson Mandela was freed and 1994 when the elections took place, many white families took measures to protect themselves from the terrible consequences that they expected would follow from an African National Congress (ANC) takeover of government. Many of them went to supermarkets to stock up on tinned and frozen food in case they would not be able to leave their homes for fear of violence or in case the ANC cut off white people’s food supplies by closing supermarkets. Many bought guns to defend themselves from the retaliatory violence that they thought the African community would commit to get even with the whites that oppressed them so cruelly for so many decades. And the fears were not as paranoid as they now sound. Africans in the country were poor to the point of starvation, homeless, powerless to improve their economic standing due to limits on maximum pay and quality of work positions, unhealthy after receiving almost no health care, severely undereducated, traumatised and enraged by the brutal killing of their close family members by South African police, and all this coincided with a renewed awareness of their African ethnic identity and a firy determination that their decades-long struggle for political power was going to succeed, regardless of who had to sacrifice what.

All these fears proved to be unnecessary, primarily because of the attitudes of one man, Nelson Mandela. He did not hate white South Africans and did not seek retribution or revenge, even though they voted for and benefitted from the system that was so cruel to Mandela’s people and to himself. He did not even treat his prison guards with anything but respect, even though they beat him, subjected him to daily hard labour, separated him from his family, refused him reading matter, and so forth. After released from prison, he often spoke out against violence and the infrequent retributive actions of his people. He spoke Afrikaans in public, even though it had up to then been the language of the oppressor. He recommended that the new South African national anthem included part of the old anthem, even though every African in the country must have cringed when singing it. He encouraged as much white participation as possible in his first government. He famously wore the South African rugby captain’s jersey at the 1995 world cup final in support, even though rugby had up to then systematically excluded African participation.

He is certainly a man that would appreciate Kenny MacAskill’s claim that compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as a people – no matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated. And he is a man that is frequently celebrated for his compassionate and forgiving nature on a worldwide scale. So if people honestly admire those qualities that come so naturally to Mandela, why do more people not take him as a model?

The two situations do differ. For one thing, there is a worry about whether Megrahi genuinely was released on compassionate grounds, or whether his release was part of a UK-Libya trade deal. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, told a Libyan television station that Megrahi’s case was “always on the negotiating table”
during trade talks between the two countries. His spokesman said the comments had been taken out of context by international media organisations.

British Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, has said that suggestions that the release of the Lockerbie bomber was linked to a UK-Libya trade deal were untrue and offensive. Former British prime minister Tony Blair visited Libya in May 2007, leading to UK energy giant BP signing a $900m exploration deal. During the weekend, Mr Blair told CNN that the Libyans did raise the issue of Megrahi, but he said he told them he did not have the power to release Scotland’s prisoners.

Now, obviously, if Megrahi’s release was part of a trade plan, then none of my worries about compassion are important since he would then not have been released on compassionate grounds. But most of the American outrage over the release preceded Gaddafi’s television interview and the subsequent speculation about trade deals. It thus seems that they’re not happy with releasing Megrahi on compassionate grounds. The talk about trade deals is a further reason to be unhappy with the release, but was not the original reason behind the unhappiness.

The Scottish Government can make decisions on Scottish justice independent of the UK government, but foreign affairs for the whole of Britain are still dealt with by the UK government. The Scottish Government accordingly asked for legal advice from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and were told that there were no legal reasons why Scotland couldn’t take a decision on Megrahi’s release. So it seems as if they followed proper legal procedure.

US president Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hilary Clinton were some of the first Americans to speak out against the release. American chief of staff Adm Mike Mullen, the top US military officer, and British Tory leader David Cameron followed.

Senator Ben Cardin said that “The terrorist showed no compassion and to give him a compassionate release was wrong. And this understandably seemed a view widely held by the families of those killed in the crash. But do we really want to deal with the terrorists at the same level as they deal with us? Recent history shows that Americans have a fair amount of tolerance for ditching their own moral values in favour of those that get the best results. That is why Cheney and his cronies tried to convince the American people that America needed a prison where prisoners had no access to legal representation and, of course, that the torture of their prisoners was not so bad since it produced valuable information of terrorist plots. Many people could even stomach some prisoners dying in the custody of the American army or interrogators, especially after seeing the videos of the beheadings of Americans in Iraq. Many of us now want NATO forces out of Afghanistan, but instead of being motivated by the numerous deaths of the civilians, which we call “oops, collateral damage”, we are motivated by the much smaller number of soldiers dying, which shows that we do not value lives unless they’re our own. We want the drone attacks in Pakistan to continue, even though they kill many more civilians than terrorists and hit more civilian targets (including schools) than terrorist ones. Americans live in a country whose soldiers were responsible for the slaughter in South and North Vietnam, who was judged by the international court of justice as having invaded Nicaragua illegally in the 80s, who bombed and killed thousands in Panama in 1989 and destroyed working class suburbs like El Chorillo and San Miguelito in their attempt to find and prosecute Manuel Noriega, who supported the government of Turkey with tons of arms in their efforts to wipe out the Kurds in the South-East of Turkey in the 90s, and so the list goes on.

Together with all of this, western countries still try to claim the moral high ground on issues like human rights. But with this claim comes a genuine responsibility not to join the pigs by fighting in the mud. We think that we are morally superior, and we tell everyone that we are morally superior. And a lot of the time we do act in a way that shows that we are morally superior. But in situations that are especially challenging, we always fail this moral superiority test by acting at the level of those with whom we are at war. True moral fiber is revealed by the challenging situations, though, not by the easy ones. So who cares whether Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi showed compassion to the victims of the bombing for which he was found guilty. We despise his actions and his attitudes and we want to distance ourselves from such levels of barbarianism. So then go ahead and give him the compassion that he refused his victims, like Mandela and many other South Africans did. And while the Libyans with their hero’s welcome were sickening to watch, I’m much more comfortable with a sick Libya than with being a vindictive person myself.

FBI boss Robert Mueller said that the action made a “mockery of the rule of law” and that it “gave comfort to terrorists”. American senator Joe Lieberman said it was a “real setback for the anti-terrorist cause”. It will take much more than this article to convince Americans to encourage their government to investigate reasons behind terrorist attacks instead of automatically acting as if they’re pure terrorist actions motivated by nothing plausible. Most crimes and wars have reasons behind them that have some elements of legitimacy. It’s the indiscriminate application of “an eye for an eye” mentality that makes a mockery of law and sets back the anti-terrorism cause. Even Barack Obama recognises that the torture of terrorist prisoners have made the United States more of a terrorist target. And the same holds for a lot of the other American responses to terrorism.

Along this same line, former Scottish Labour first minister Jack McConnell has warned that The release of the Lockerbie bomber has damaged the reputation of Scotland across the globe. I suspect that the release has done exactly the opposite. It has made the point that having a strict rule of law doesn’t rule out the application of the principle of compassion. It has made the point that we can act on terrorism without forgetting that the people we are acting on are fellow humans with similar emotions to ours. It has demonstrated that the whole world has not completely lost its rationality in the torrent of anti-terrorism emotions.

The most disturbing element in the situation is this: as I implied earlier, many South Africans would have taken a release on compassionate grounds in their stride, since this is the type of dialogue that many of us have been raised on. It is not only that it makes us feel better about our own moral standing, but it is also obvious that it works well in practice. It would be sad if the American war against terrorism and its accompanying “eye for an eye” attitudes get entrenched in the psyche of the American youth, not only because it makes one do things that do not live up to a good moral standing, but also because it can be devastating to a country on a practical level.

If it turns out that Megrahi’s release was part of a trade deal, the situation changes somewhat, and I’ll be more than prepared to re-think all of the above. But for now, Mandela as role-model; down with those Bushes and Obamas.

Role of Ignorance and Irrationality in War

A very good friend, a guy that I used to go to school with and am still in touch with 10 years after school, visited me last night. During the course of the night, he told me about a Yemeni Muslim cleric who just released a series of lectures on Jihad. This obviously sparked a discussion about what’s going on in the world. My friend, who I will here call Ian, happens to be a Muslim.

Since I think it is important to learn from people who approach issues from different perspectives, I thought I’d ask him whether he thought that extremists really existed and about how his community typically understood the differences between moderates and extremists. And I was quite shocked about what I found. His view is pretty much that America is responsible for everything that is wrong in the world’s Muslim community.

So yes, he thinks there are extremists, but if it had not been for American interference, they would not have been extremists. So the fact that the extremists kill millions of other Muslims is not blamed on the extremists and does not encourage hatred towards the extremists, but towards America. And every disagreement in the Muslim community is due to American interference.

While I have been criticising American foreign policy for years, one of my strongest views is that, whatever ones opinion, one has to justify it through reasoning or by pointing to evidence. So along this line, I started asking him for his reasons for drawing this universal anti-American conclusion. And he could give very few.

I asked him about specific examples of Muslim on Muslim conflict, and half of them he had never even heard of. Without one example, he claimed that the Muslim political system is the best political system and would have worked if America had not interfered in the affairs of such countries. He had no clue about how the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, except that it was the Americans’ fault, of course. He had no idea what the Iran Iraq war was about in 1980, except again that it was the Americans’ fault. He criticised the Pakistani president for being an American puppet without even knowing that the presidency changed last year.

He claimed that Iran just publically threatened America with a nuclear attack if America attacked them. But that’s not true, since Iran publically denies that their nuclear program is for anything other than peaceful means like electricity generation. Then he claimed that America now has all the world’s oil fields, including the whole of Iraq. I explained that, at least two weeks ago, of the 31 oil contracts up for grabs in Iraq, only 2 had been awarded; one of them to a Chinese oil company. I explained what the conditions of the contracts were and why American companies were worried about committing to those contracts; things he did not know. Then he claimed that America continuously threatened Muslim countries with nuclear attacks. But this is not true, since every country with nuclear weapons has at least one other country with such weapons that doesn’t like them much. So no country will be stupid enough to make such threats.

He ended the discussion by declaring what he thought would be a good solution to the world’s problems, namely, Iran should develop nuclear weapons properly and blast the United States to hell.

Now, my problem is not really with the conclusion that he draws, um, with the exception of the nuclear attack on America, of course. Since I do think that there is a lot wrong with American foreign policy and since I believe that the nuclear proliferation treaty is a joke, I think that some of his conclusions are right. The difference is that I try very hard to support my view with facts and reasoning while he does not. And since I do read, while he does not, I know that some of his anti-American conclusions are too strong.

My problem is that, based on absolutely no detailed information to support his views, he is happy for millions of Americans to be killed. In other words, without really knowing why he hates them, he thinks they should all die. He cannot explain why he hates them, but he considers the fact that he hates them to be vastly more important than the task of justifying why he hates them. It reminds me of a dog handler that sets two packs of dogs on each other. They know they have to fight, because they’ve been told to. And the moment they start fighting, they develop an extreme hatred of each other. And even though they don’t know why, they will keep on fighting and fostering hatred until at least one party is wiped out completely.

This brings me to the “handlers”. Since Ian does not read nonfiction, he must have acquired most of his education about politics and history from religious leaders and members of his community. They’ve obviously fed him the conclusion about America being responsible for everything that is wrong with the worldwide Muslim community, like one would teach a parrot to say “Polly wants a cracker”. He knows which conversations call for this statement, and uses it excessively during such conversations. Now, do the people who taught him this conclusion know why they hold it and pass it on? Or were they taught it by some other uninformed person who were taught it by some other informed person, and so forth.

Now please try not to misunderstand my position here. Ian is my example, because of my talk with him last night. But I think something quite similar is true about many unquestioning people. They believe what they are told without investigating it themselves, and they are prepared to go very far and do really terrible things without ever really knowing why they’re doing it. If I’d spoken to a brain dead American who BLINDLY supported American foreign policy, I would have had exactly the same response; I’m not choosing sides here, I’m speaking out against irrationality, misinformation and ignorance.

I am not even naive enough to think that all rational informed people are likely to reach the same conclusions about things. While critical reasoning is more objective or universal than say cultural practices, it is not as objective as mathematics. So I leave plenty of room for different conclusions being reached from similar premises. My issue is with not having any premises in mind at all, but still being willing to draw really strong conclusions from nothing. And while people’s level of rationality and ignorance are no concerns of mine, how many appalling things they do based on their irrationality should be the concern of everyone.