by David Steven | Nov 27, 2011 | UK
Back in 2007, Paul Dacre – editor of the Daily Mail – told a House of Lords Select Committee “in the editorial line and in terms of the leader column, we are consistently against the Human Rights Act.” I think we’ll all agree that Dacre has been true to his word – the paper’s opposition has been remorseless and unyielding ever since.
Apart, that is, from when it wants to bully the Leveson Inquiry – and those witnesses who suspect (quite rightly) that they will be hunted down for all eternity if they testify against the tabloid press. Then human rights – for newspapers, at least – are fine and dandy:
Associated Newspapers is seeking a judicial review of Lord Justice Leveson’s decision to allow witnesses including journalists to give anonymous evidence to his inquiry into media standards.
The Daily Mail publisher wants to reverse a decision Leveson made following approaches from a number of individuals who claimed they wanted to give evidence anonymously without fear of reprisal.
In a claim form issued to the high court, Associated cites four legal reasons to overturn the anonymity ruling.
The publisher said it “fails to give effect to the principle of open justice”; that it would “contravene the principles of natural justice”; and that it infringes the rights of the newspaper group and others under article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which gives the right to free expression. It also argues that Leveson fails to identify a public interest to justify his decision.
Good, also, to see the Mail’s owners ticking off Leveson for not acting in the public interest – which Dacre defines as the freedom for newspapers to “publish what they believe is best for their markets” and “the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency… and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation.”
So let us all join in defending Dacre’s human right to pillory us miserable sinners. After all, it’s good for us and it sells newspapers.
by David Steven | Nov 23, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America
Under President Romney, 310m Americans won’t have any shared interests with any of the 6.7bn other people who insist on living in less exceptional countries:
I believe America is an exceptional and unique nation. President Obama feels that we’re going to be a nation which has multipolar balancing militaries. I believe that American military superiority is the right course.
President Obama says that we have people throughout the world with common interests. I just don’t agree with him.
Mitt – the man who would say anything to be President.
by Seth Kaplan | Nov 22, 2011 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Many Western leaders have called for regime change in Syria. As Barack Obama said in August:
We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.
Both the United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions. Turkey and the Arab League are likely to follow.
Many, including Richard Gowan of GD, bemoan the inability of the United Nations to act more resolutely.
But what exactly are all the leaders, analysts, and pundits promoting change in Syria actually expecting to happen? The Assad regime to simply hand over power and walk away after four decades?
This is highly unlikely. No other group has willingly given up power during the Arab Spring so far. In Libya, it took an eight-month civil war to topple the government. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh continues to hang on, if precariously.
Moreover, the Assads have much more going for them then any of these other rulers. Despite some desertions, Syria’s military and internal security apparatus remains a cohesive force unlikely to disintegrate anytime soon. The economic and political elites are more cohesive, and supportive then those elsewhere—and more fearful of what change might bring. Despite growing hardship, few in Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s two largest cities, have defected. Iran is providing support for its closest ally. Western powers are unlikely to intervene, at least in any way similar to what happened in Libya.
Therefore, the regime is likely to hang on much longer then anyone now forecasts. And if it begins to buckle or actually falls, what follows is unlikely to be pretty. This is especially true given that the Syrian opposition is badly divided:
Seven months into the uprisings, the Syrian opposition has yet to develop a united voice and platform. Unless these disparate groups unite and present a credible and viable alternative to the Assad regime, both Syria’s fearful majority and the international community will find it difficult to effectively push for meaningful change in Damascus.
There are two particularly bad yet highly plausible scenarios for the country’s future if the pressure on the regime continues long enough.
In one, the government grows increasingly anxious about its hold on power, and unleashes an even more brutal crackdown
then what is now occurring, possibly on the scale of what it perpetrated in 1982 in Hama, when over 25,000 people were murdered.
In the second scenario, the government loses control over at least some of its territory, unleashing a sectarian civil war with ugly parallels to what occurred in Iraq in 2006-08 and Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. As Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign
Relations, one of the few people in the West repeatedly warning against the perils of pushing for regime change, wrote a few months ago:
The numbers being killed now will wither in comparison with a possible future civil war, if an increasingly sectarian Syria splinters between the ruling Alawites, the elite and urban Christians, the majority Sunnis, the Kurds, Druze and others. There is no civil society to engineer a peaceful transition, while Syria could plausibly become another Lebanon, acting as a proxy battleground for regional powers.
Unfortunately, there is some evidence that this is beginning to happen in Homs, Syria’s third largest city. As the New York Times reported over the weekend:
As it descends into sectarian hatred, Homs has emerged as a chilling window on what civil war in Syria could look like, just as some of Syria’s closest allies say the country appears to be heading in that direction. A spokesman for the Syrian opposition last week called the killings and kidnappings on both sides “a perilous threat to the revolution.” An American official called the strife in Homs “reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia,” where the very term “ethnic cleansing” originated in the 1990s. . . .
Here it is not so much a fight between armed defectors and government security forces, or protesters defying a crackdown. Rather, the struggle in Homs has dragged the communities themselves into a battle that residents fear, even as they accuse the government of trying to incite it as a way to divide and rule the diverse country.
The risks involved at least partly explain why Turkey, the country with perhaps the most leverage over Syria, has been so reluctant to act more forcefully. They are also a perfectly legitimate reason for Russia and China and some developing countries to oppose a UN resolution (there may be other self-interested reasons involved too of course). As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned last week, “This is all looking very much like a civil war.”
Given this context, it is worth reminding ourselves of a John Maynard Keynes dictum:
We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear…. We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking… It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the
transition…
by Richard Gowan | Nov 16, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Syria is slipping further into chaos. It’s sad to think that the Security Council has been debating the situation there for almost half a year to no effect. Or, to be more accurate, the only effect has been to make lots of diplomats very unhappy, as I explain in the new edition of Pragati:
It’s hard to find a happy diplomat at the United Nations Security Council these days. Western officials grumble about the difficulty of negotiating with India, Brazil and South Africa (the IBSA countries) over the Syrian crisis, to say nothing of China and Russia. The non-Western powers, they suspect, are all plotting to frustrate the U.S. and Europe.
Piffle, reply the supposed plotters. The bleak mood in the Council is a result of the West’s distortion of the UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya. If NATO hadn’t used that as a basis for regime change, there might be real cooperation over Syria. Even the unhappiest European officials accept that other powers’ anger over Libya is genuine.
Does anyone gain anything from the stalemate? Russia arguably does. Earlier in the year it failed to halt Western interventions in not only Libya but also Côte d’Ivoire. As Russia’s main claim to leverage at the UN is its willingness to act as a spoiler, these set-backs made it look a shadow of itself. On Syria, its blocking power returned as it resisted – and in October vetoed – EU and US efforts to pass a resolution sanctioning Syria.
For China, the benefits have been less clear, as it prefers to look pragmatic on the Security Council. Nonetheless it felt obliged to side with Russia over Syria. But the real losers have been the IBSA countries, which have often looked trapped between the West and the Russo-Chinese axis as they have tried to respond to events in the Middle East.
But at least IBSA has emerged as a semi-credible diplomatic force in UN affairs, right? I’m not so sure:
The fact that IBSA voted as a bloc can be interpreted as a success – it is generally recognised that the trio of powers have been significant swing voters in the Security Council this year. But this may only be a temporary phenomenon. Brazil is approaching the end of its two-year term on the Council, and South Africa continues to have a greater stake in acting as the leader of the African bloc than in aligning with India. IBSA’s brief moment of importance in the Council could soon be forgotten, and India’s leverage duly reduced.
