On Saturday Bernard Kouchner showed why he’s Europe’s Coolest Foreign Minister by swooping into Nasiriya, Iraq, just after a shoot-out to offer reconstruction aid. Part of me thinks “about time” given that (as I pointed in January) French aid to Iraq has been pretty piffling to date. But this gesture provides timely proof of a trend that Daniel and I highlighted in a piece on the ECFR website on Thursday: the emergence of a new consensus in Europe on the need to do more for Iraq.
European diplomats have privately admitted for some time that they could not ignore Iraq forever. But in recent weeks, private talk has given way to public statements. A visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Brussels in April proved a catalyst: the European Commission trumpeted its desire for “an energy security partnership”.
Getting from private to public statements is a step forward. Shifting from rhetoric to real engagement in Iraq will be an even bigger one. What such engagement will look like is uncertain but parts of it are clear. More, better-targeted aid? Yes. Assisting UN mediation? Yes. Support for what Barack Obama calls a “diplomatic surge” across the Middle East? Absolutely. New troops? Not a chance.
Regular readers may faintly recall that I’ve banged on about this whole EU-Iraq thing before, picking up on a February report from the European Parliament that advocated greater engagement. It is actually one of the few issues on which the authors of this blog fundamentally disagree, as evidenced by a somewhat tipsy argument on the topic between Alex and I at Odeon some months ago. Alex thinks (as far as I can recall) that the EU isn’t relevant to Iraq, and shouldn’t try to be. Daniel and I think that it has do more, partially for humanitarian reasons but also to avoid Middle East meltdown and improve post-Bush transatlantic links.
Up until the start of this year, making this case was a rather lonely business (although I should immediately add that there have been people making it far longer than I – Richard Youngs published a great paper on the subject back in 2005, for example). But it is finally getting traction among the commentariat.
Check out Pierre Schori’s piece for ECFR and (as it’s not just people involved with ECFR that believe this stuff) this Guardian online op-ed by Berlin’s Thorsten Benner. And Guido Sternberg of SWP, also in Berlin, has said wise things on the subject for Der Spiegel online. OK, that’s not exactly a flood of commentary in favor of all-out support for Iraq, but it’s a start. I’ll keep you updated as it grows.
UPDATE: our ECFR piece has now received various comments, one of them linking to this interesting online symposium on why Iraq is a European security issue, published late last year. Good stuff.
Back in February, I wrote a couple of posts comparing the potential effects of social networking technologies. One referred to a talk by Clay Shirky which was positively ebullient about the potential of networking tools that can “aggregtate non-financial motivations … get people together outside of managerial culture and for reasons other than the profit motive” – how, in other words, they can produce coherence and order.
The other quoted a New Yorker article by George Packer which criticised the role of the blogosphere, both left and right, in framing perceptions of Iraq, which (I argued) illustrated the opposite – in other words, how participatory media can produce incoherence: chaos, disorder, cacophony, where the very idea of anyobjective truth is lost amidst the blizzard of commentary, opinion and white noise.
Against that backdrop, consider another phenomenon made possible by new networking technologies: flash mobs. By and large, flash mobs are fun, light-hearted and harmless, as when there was a pillow fight in London’s Trafalgar Square a year or two back.
But if that’s an example of the ‘Shirky side’ of flash mobs, note the news this morning of how they can have a ‘Packer side’ too. As of midnight last night, drinking was banned on London’s Underground system – so in advance of the ban, three Facebook groups organised a final cocktail party on the tube. Fun, light-hearted and spontaneous, right? Not entirely, as this report makes clear:
A night that started in a celebratory mood soon turned sour as thousands of revellers poured into London’s Tube stations. Four train drivers and three other London Underground staff were assaulted, one police vehicle was damaged and two officers assaulted and another injured. A spokesman for British Transport Police said 17 people were arrested for offences such as assault, drunk and disorderly, assault on police, public order-related offences and drug offences.
The Tube stations closed by police were Liverpool Street [see YouTube below], Euston, Euston Square, Aldgate, Gloucester Road and Baker Street. Eyewitnesses said there were nightmarish scenes on trains and in stations as thousands of drunken partygoers began fighting and vomiting as the night drew to a conclusion … The spokesman said there was a “large amount” of disorder reported to police and “multiple instances” of trains being damaged leading to them being withdrawn from service.
There’s a great article in this week’s New Yorker about a new form of therapy designed to treat the estimated 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are returning to the US with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The therapy is based on virtual reality – using a specially-modified version of the game Full Spectrum Warrior, which was partly designed by the Pentagon as a training programme, though civilians can also buy it and play it on their PCs or consoles.
The special therapeutic version, called Virtual Iraq, uses a head-set that fully immerses the player in the environment. Psychologists then use it to re-expose the patient to the incident that caused their trauma, the incident which is lodging in their memory like shrapnel, and not letting them get on with their life.
The programme can be modified to quite detailed specifications – the psychologist can take the patient to a number of different environments, such as walking through a market, or driving along a road in a Humvee, and can introduce elements such as helicopters flying over head, people shouting in Arabic, even ‘the smell of burnt hair’.
Yesterday’s Brooking’s event on the US and Europe (see this post) included three panels – one on the Presidential election; one on the French EU presidency; and one on Russia.
The Presidential panel combined general rejoicing at the imminent (243 days and counting) departure of George Bush (“somewhat less popular in Europe than Satan”) with caution that expectations may be too high at what will follow.
Gary Schmitt, from the American Enterprise Institute, who advises McCain, thought that Republicans had become much more realistic about the need for transatlantic ties. McCain’s speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy got a plug (and not just from Gary, but from other speakers too):
The debate in the transatlantic relationship – over who is to lead and who to follow, whether to act in concert or unilaterally, or if the bonds that unite us are stronger than interests that divide us – that debate is over. Our interests, though not always perfectly congruent, are rarely diverging.
The Obama narrative, meanwhile, is ‘deeply attractive’ to Europeans, according to Laurence Freedman, currently promoting his new book, on American and the Middle East – A Choice of Enemies. The Bush administration was forever tarnished in European eyes by Guantanamo Bay, Iraq Abu Ghraib, he said. At a time when Europe is populated by a cast of ‘weak leaders’, a new President will have the opportunity to make a clean break from the past (close Guantanamo) and generate real leadership for the US. (more…)
In The Next Attack, Benjamin and Simon argued that:
It is unlikely that even in his feverish reveries, Usama bin Laden could have imagined that America would stumble so badly and wound itself so grievously. By occupying Iraq, the United States has played into the hands of its opponents, affirming the story they have been telling to the Muslim world and adding to their aura as true warriors in defence of Islam…
There is, as has so often been said, a war of ideas going on, a battle for hearts and minds. Unfortunately, America has wound up on the wrong side.
Of course, this was pretty predictable. Every effective terror movement in history has been fuelled by the adverse reaction of its host society. The Bush administration has simply proved particularly obtuse and self-destructive- a fact for which Al Qaeda is appropriately grateful. In 2004, bin Laden mischievously quoted an unnamed British diplomat speaking at Chatham House (!) to support his assertion that ‘it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’ own goal’.
Benjamin and Simon’s policy prescription for the US can be summed simply as: stop scoring own goals. They call for a ‘deep and dramatic’ engagement with the Islamic world and point to Turkey’s relationship with the EU as a model. It has moved from military repression to relative liberalism, they suggest, albeit a liberalism that has an Islamic hue.
‘These changes, as well as the speed with which they have taken hold, are nothing short of remarkable,’ they write. ‘That they have happened at all is due to one thing: the prospect of membership in the European Union. The transformative potential this prospect has held has been clear to American policy makers for years, and, wisely, they have supported Turkey’s bid consistently and vocally.’
Of course, US support for Turkish accession to the EU is somewhat problematic. George Bush pushed this line in 2004 despite attempts from the French and others to warn him off. ‘Including Turkey in the E.U. would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the clash of civilizations as a passing myth in history,’ he said.
It’s hard for Europeans to be lectured on this issue by a man who believes that the US is in the midst of a Christian revival prompted by the ‘confrontation between good and evil’ (his words) that America finds itself in. Or from a guy who said this in 2001:
Oh, I know there’s some voices who want to wall us off from Mexico. They want to build a wall. I say to them, they want to condemn our neighbours to the south in poverty, and I refuse to accept that type of isolationist and protectionist attitude.
And then signed a bill to build a 700 mile fence along the Mexican border in 2006 – part of a desperate attempt to shore up his approval rating with the shrinking portion of Americans who represent his base.
