Sticks and Stones

Imad Mughniyeh, a top leader of terrorist organisation Hezbollah has just been killed in a bombing in Damascus. Hezbollah have blamed Israel for the attack, who have denied any involvement. I will take them at their word. But even if Israel had killed him, so what?!

He was on both US and Israeli most wanted lists. Responsible for hostage takings in the 1980s in Lebanon. The leader of a terrorist organisation who would happily, and has happily targeted civilians in attacks to try and coerce the Israeli government into withdrawing from Lebanon (which they did in 2000 - Hezbollah carried on firing rockets into Northern Israel though!). This was a truly awful man, and the world is better off without him, just as it is better off without other terrorists who have met similar fates at the wrong end of an Israeli missile.

Get rid of all those who inspire extremism, perpetuate hatred, and help administer bloodshed.

The message is clear; Israel will not stand for terrorist activity against its civilians, and nor should they. Good riddance Mr Mughniyeh.

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James Fallows wrote an illuminating article about the economic interdependence of China and the US, expounding on a series of topical questions. How independent is the US economy? How strong is it? What is the likelihood of a US economic collapse? Most worrying was the question it dealt with at the end: What would happen if China sold its $1.4 trillion in US Treasury bonds?

The answers are not simple; China buys billions of US dollars daily through a complicated series of fiscal regulations forcing banks to surrender USD to the central bank which then buys US bonds with the dollars. Fallows summarises it neatly:

Spent at CVS, passed to Oral-B, paid to the factory in southern China, traded for RMB at the Shenzhen bank, “surrendered” to the PBOC, passed to SAFE for investment, and then bid at auction for Treasury notes, it is ready to be reinjected into the U.S. money supply and spent again—ideally on Chinese-made goods.

The problem is that this forces interdependence onto both the US and China. While a controlled system in China ensures the US has the money to continue consuming, political tensions and distrust from both nations toward each other makes this a fragile situation. We all remember when the USS Kitty Hawk was not allowed to dock for Thanksgiving in Hong Kong. Another military incident that worries the US was when the Chinese blew up one of their own satellites, spraying debris in the path of many US orbital probes.

Whether these actions are innocent and simply procedural or menacing cannot be known because China’s government is so secretive. Was the blocking of the USS Kitty Hawk a demonstration of regional domination? Was the destruction of the satellite China flexing its technological muscle? Perhaps these situations were, as claimed, simply miscommunications either between the US and China, or within the Chinese government. We cannot know because they won’t let us know.

As China continues fuelling US consumption - which has grown to the extent that it is greater than US production: a very dangerous situation when not propped up by China - both nations will need to be ever more delicate about their political connections and demands. Human rights for the Chinese, free access for CNOOC to buy U.S.–based Unocal… demands abound on both sides.

The next president will have to face this complicated situation, and possibly a devastating fallout if someone misunderstands something (as when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, said last November, “We are worried about how to preserve the value” speaking about their US dollar foreign reserves). It is a delicate situation, and both sides need it to exist to maintain economic stability, even as both sides square off politically over a plethora of issues: Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, Nigeria… the list goes on.

Read the article in this month’s Atlantic, or online at theatlantic.com

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Chanced upon an article in the Wall Street Journal, in response to yesterday’s suicide bomb attack in the southern Israeli city of Dimona - worth a read, to remind ourselves of the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism, and the measures that have and can be taken to prevent these misguided, inhuman and murderous activities;

The news about yesterday’s suicide bombing in the Israeli town of Dimona is that it’s news. In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, 451 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, including 14 suicide bombings. By contrast, yesterday’s attack, which killed one and injured 11, was the first of its kind in more than a year.

This didn’t happen by accident, or because Palestinian radicals have somehow become less hostile to Israel. Responsibility for yesterday’s attack was claimed by the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which is affiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas’s ostensibly moderate Fatah party. Islamist Hamas remains even more ardently dedicated to Israel’s destruction, a point it emphasizes with its rocket barrages at southern Israeli cities close to the Gaza Strip.

Instead, the difference has come because of Israel’s increasingly successful antiterrorist efforts. Key to that success has been the construction of its ostensibly “illegal” security fence, its equally “illegal” targeted assassinations of key terrorist leaders, its “disproportional” attacks on terrorist enclaves in Jenin and elsewhere, and other actions that saved innocent lives but which much of the international community deplored.

One of the most common arguments against Israel’s actions is that it would feed a “cycle of violence.” It’s fair to say that what happened is closer to the opposite. As Israel put pressure on terrorist leaders, they were forced to spend their time running for their lives rather than planning the next attack. As Israel set up physical obstacles to terrorism, the need for large-scale military incursions declined, allowing a semblance of normal life to return for Israelis as well as Palestinians. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Israel proved that terrorists can be defeated — a lesson that applies equally in Iraq.

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Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir made public his disdain for international involvement yesterday by appointing Musa Hilal special adviser to Sudan’s Ministry of Federal Affairs. So who is Musa Hilal, and why did his appointment elicit this reaction from the US State Department?

An answer from the International Herald Tribune:

As chieftain of a clan belonging to a powerful tribe of nomadic Arabs in Darfur, Hilal bears responsibility for the razing of African villages, the killing of villagers, the raping of women and girls and the displacement of 2.5 million people into refugee camps. For these crimes against humanity, the UN Security Council imposed travel and financial sanctions on Hilal and three other militia leaders in April 2006.

When Sudan officials claim the Janjaweed were acting on their own, or that Hilal has “contributed to stability and security,” as President Omar al-Bashir declared Monday, they are contradicting what Hilal himself has acknowledged. In an interview in 2004 with Human Rights Watch, he said he always acted under orders from the Sudan government.

Since February 2003, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has been funding Hilal’s Janjaweed. We’ve been seeing it, hearing about it, reading about it, petitioning against it, and joining facebook groups about it - almost everything short of actually doing something about it.

With the Coalition for International Justice figure currently standing at 400,000 dead and 2.5 million homeless, Darfur remains the most pressing issue of our time. The reason why it usurps North Korea, and Iran is that the mass murder of human beings is more important than ICBMs in concrete bunkers. Iran and the DPRK’s nuclear weapons are a real and pressing threat, but one that can be addressed through diplomacy, tact, and sanctions. In Sudan, we need troops.

After United Nations Security Council Resolution 1769 was passed on 31 July 2007, 26,000 UN/AU troops were sent to Darfur and it finally seemed that things were changing. The media moved on to the U.S. presidential elections, and as troops began to arrive in Darfur, the Janjaweed and Baggara influence began to fade slightly.

Nevertheless, the 8 January 2008 Sudanese army attack on a UN/AU convoy, and the Hilal appointment demonstrate Khartoum’s total unwillingness to allow international intervention in Darfur. So far I have avoided calling it ‘genocide’ because the United Nations, African Union, Amnesty, and Médecins sans Frontières refuse to call it genocide. Their excuse is that there does not appear to be genocidal intent. However, what is happening in Darfur is unbridled chaos. It is rape. It is mass slaughter into the hundreds of thousands. It is a humanitarian catastrophe. It is genocide.

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Each of us has his or her particular chauvinism with which they like to define themselves, be it their nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc., even though in the majority of cases these are determined by the arbitrariness of birth. The most fiercely religious adherents to a given sect tend to have been born and raised in that sect, while the most ardent patriots tend to be those who were born in their country. Notwithstanding the sheer illogic of these self-categorisations, they, like all forms of bigotry, are actually dangerous.

Trotsky, everyone’s favourite internationalist, wrote eloquently and lucidly on the detrimental effects of dividing the human race into arbitrary groups within arbitrary borders. Earlier, Thomas Paine remarked, somewhat throat-lump-inducingly, that he was a “citizen of the world”. And yet today’s so-called ‘liberalism’ seems to pride itself in its so-called ‘multi-culturalism’, which comes down to tolerating all different ways of life.

In it’s furthest extrapolation, this philosophy has led to condoning the atrocities perpetrated, for example, by the fundamentalist Muslim community, both in the West and in Islamic countries. Because these would-be lefties differentiate between themselves and their fellow human beings, they dismiss the stoning, hanging, rape, oppression and murder with a simple “they do it their way, we do it ours”.

No! Whatever happened to that wonderful self-evident truth, that all men were created equal? Why is an Iraqi’s life worth less than an American’s? Why did we in Britain raise such a furore when that moronic (but British) woman Gillian Gibbons was about to get forty lashes, when that is a punishment to which dozens of women, if not more, are subjected to across the Islamic world every single day? Since when did universal human rights cease to be the foremost priority of the liberal left?

It may not be true to say that the USA declared war on the Confederacy, or Britain on Poland, or the Coalition on Iraq, out of a duty to ensure that the human rights of slaves, Jews and gays, or Kurds (to name but a few) were fulfilled, but in my view the ends in these cases justify the means. It may not have been his primary objective, but Lincoln’s actions led to the emancipation of four million human beings. Similarly, had not other countries interceded in the Second World War, who knows how many more would have been slaughtered?

We in the West are very lucky to live in a liberal, free society, for which thousands gave their lives over the generations at every gradation on the long path to freedom. Anyone who imputes that an Iraqi, or a Korean, or an Iranian, does not deserve to live in such a society is, quite simply, racist. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be guaranteed for all human beings, and to say that fellow human beings living under oppressive regimes on the other side of the world is not our problem is both reprehensible and hypocritical.

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