Author Archives: markdowe1

Foreign Affairs, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United Nations, United States

The cynical invasion of Gaza by Israel…

GAZA

Intro: Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which began last Thursday, becomes its fourth such war on the Palestinian strip in the past decade

With the Israeli armed forces having kicked off the latest episode in a 66-year-old conflict, the brutality and cynicism of its actions suggests resolution is further away than ever.

Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which began last Thursday, becomes its fourth such war on the Palestinian strip in the past decade. Following its withdrawal from the densely populated enclave in 2005, Israel sent its troops back in 2006 and 2008. In 2012, the offensive was confined to surgical air strikes and a campaign of bombing. In each case, the reason for acting was the same: to halt rocket and missile attacks into Israel by Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that largely controls Gaza. Hamas refuses to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Each time, the sequence of events has become choreographed into one that is utterly and depressingly predictable. Israel responds disproportionately, always inflicting far greater casualties than it suffers. As international accusations and condemnations of Israeli overreaction multiply, a ceasefire eventually happens, either declared unilaterally by the Israeli government or brokered through a third party, most likely Egypt and/or the United States. In the interim, some Hamas leaders will be targeted and killed, and some rocket launch sites and underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel will be destroyed.

In reality, though, nothing is ever likely to change. More arm shipments will flow into Gaza, new Hamas leaders will emerge, and new tunnels will be dug. When equipped and replenished enough the Palestinian militants will once again fire off its rockets, and Israel will ready itself as it will feel compelled to act in light of the provocation and threats it faces. All the while, as the root causes of the conflict remain untackled, the prospects of a final settlement grow ever dimmer.

The new level of fighting may well lead to a new Palestinian intifada. Israel, protected by its barrier wall – declared illegal by the International Criminal Court – from potential terrorist attacks and by its robust Iron Dome anti-missile system from Hamas rockets, seems less interested than ever in a two-state deal. Far from being concerned about the plight of Palestinians and their livelihoods, Israel simply ignores them, pressing ahead with its settlement building programmes on territory that would be part of any future Palestinian state.

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A ground invasion of Gaza, however brief, was always likely to signal an intensification of the Israeli response to the more than 900 rockets which have fallen into Israeli territory over the past 10 days. Fears exist for a much greater troop deployment in the coming days. Some 40,000 Israeli reservists have already been mobilised. But that will only work to fuel Palestinian resistance and intensify retaliatory rocket strikes that now reach much further than within a 25 mile radius of Gaza.

It is these rocket attacks that the Israeli government is determined to stop. For so long as they continue, Israel’s shelling of targets within Gaza will go on. Inevitably, this puts further civilian lives at risk. Without the strongest foreign diplomatic intervention the bloody cycle of tit-for-tat rocket and bombing attacks seems likely to endure. There are no signs of the current hostilities ending any time soon. The latest outbreak in violence is still young by comparison with previous offensives. Exchanges during the outbreak in 2011-12, for instance, lasted 22 days.

The day after Israel launched its current air offensive in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a rare press conference in which he was brutally blunt about the danger he believes the state of Israel to be in. He made clear he could never countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. Mr Netanyahu’s world-view is that Israel is standing almost alone on the frontline against a rising tide of vicious Islamic radicalism. He insists that the rest of the as-yet free world does its best not to notice the march of extremism. Such indifference says nothing of how western intelligence services are battling against the odds to keep their citizens safe or at the outrage following the recent air disaster over the skies of eastern Ukraine.

Mr Netanyahu has also indicted that he considers the current American diplomatic team led by John Kerry as naïve. Netanyahu made plain that ‘no international pressure will prevent us from acting with all force against a terrorist organisation that seeks to destroy us’.

Operation Protective Edge will thus go on until ‘guaranteed calm’ was restored to Israel. A prerequisite for that, it seems, is a cessation of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks.

Either the Israeli offensive in Gaza will go on until Hamas has exhausted its supplies of air-to-ground missiles (the scale of which, this time around, has been astonishing) or international pressure is brought to bear. Despite Mr Netanyahu’s rhetoric, Israel well knows it only has a narrow window for further military force before international opinion swings heavily against it.

For diplomatic intervention to be effective it needs to come from the top, as well as being co-ordinated with pressure from Western leaders as a matter of urgency. An approach centred on de-escalating the current rocket exchanges should be the priority before any other progress can be made in securing a more lasting truce.

 

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Britain, European Court, Government, Human Rights, Legal, National Security, Politics, Society

Surveillance legislation: Conflicts exist between freedom and security…

SNOOPING LAWS

The announcement of a new surveillance law has fostered the suspicion that a voracious security state is elbowing aside the rights of civilians to communicate in private. There may well be cause for mistrust – but such concerns lie in the manner of the law’s introduction, and much less so the provisions it contains.

The UK Government justifies bringing in ‘emergency’ legislation as it intends to keep a full-blown register (a ‘who’s who of public enemies) that will shore up the power of government bodies to gather data on British citizens.

This is a law which has been agreed upon in principle by party leaders at Westminster behind closed doors. The speed of its introduction has raised many eyebrows, not least because this is a process that has not been open to public consultation and one which clearly adds to the impression that the Government is seizing for itself unwarranted powers.

In reality, though, the ‘emergency’ being enacted upon is more banal. In a few years, the law may actually benefit the libertarian cause. The exact cause for adopting parliamentary legislation in the first place is down to a legal case launched by the Open Rights group. Although the organisation is temporarily dormant, it has been made active following an April ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). That ruling would have lifted the requirement for telecommunications companies to keep a wide range of billing data on their customers for a period of 12 months.

Keeping this data available to the authorities is the reason for instigating emergency legislation. This is preferable than to suddenly ‘going dark’, and appears to require no immediate development in changing the status of our security. Important concessions have been conceded: an independent privacy and civil liberties board is to be created, and there will be a review of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). This sets the limit on digital surveillance. The emergency amendments will also expire in 2016, so that new laws can be created once the review has been completed and appraised.

Some critics argue that what we need is smarter surveillance, not yet more of it. This far reaching extension of government spying on our daily lives, they say, would be illiberal and possibly ineffective.

Since this Bill is also about interception (and not just retention of data) many people will want to know what the additional protections will be if we are to have any confidence in such powers. One requirement is greater transparency so that we know how and why this data is being used. Government openness around surveillance can be improved without compromising security.

The Government has promised an annual transparency report. The concerns of libertarians will be whether it is sufficiently comprehensive, but that can only be deduced once the full details are known. In his annual report, the Interception Communications Commissioner, Sir Anthony May, said: ‘The unreliability and inadequacy of the statistical requirements is a significant problem which requires attention.’ Sir Anthony also expressed ‘considerable sympathy’ with those who are hazy and unsure about the details and implications of snooping legislation.

The Government has made a strong case for law enforcement agencies to be given access to communications traffic (which precludes its content as this would require a warrant) in the investigation of serious crime and terrorism.

The Coalition remains divided over how wide the new powers should be. The Prime Minister has indicated that he favours revisiting the option of wider snooping powers, but Nick Clegg remains opposed. But however surveillance legislation evolves it is right that a sunset clause exists in the Bill to curtail its powers in 2016. That forces a renewal by the next Parliament – but only after a wider democratic debate about how best to strike the balance between privacy and security.

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Economic, Financial Markets, Government, Politics, Society

The global economy and the threats it faces…

FLASHPOINTS AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Never has the world been subject to a constant flux of shifting alliances as it is in modern times. The world is once again in turmoil, from Iraq to the West Bank and from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. The geographical stakes and risks are extraordinarily high leading some strategic thinkers to compare the global landscape to that which preceded the First World War a century ago.

When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) produced its April 2014 forecast of 3.6 per cent global output for the current year it added an important caveat. It warned that geopolitical factors, at the time mainly thought to be the turmoil in Ukraine, posed a potential threat to its projections.

There are, however, five major geopolitical flashpoints which currently pose a threat to economic stability:

  • The ISIS advance in Iraq

That a small ragtag of some 30,000 jihadists born out of Syria’s civil war could be a threat to Iraq, with its American trained forces and weaponry, would have seemed inconceivable just a few weeks ago.

But ISIS is well funded, as a result of wealth created from kidnappings on the Turkish border, secret donations from Sunni Gulf states and the seizure of bank deposits in Mozul. It is also battle hardened from Syria.

Its seizure of refineries in Northern Iraq threatens the country’s oil production of 3.4m barrels a day or 11 per cent of the world’s current supply.

Brent Crude has exceeded, once again, $113 a barrel. So far the valuable fields of Baghdad, including those operated by BP, remain in operation. But that cannot be guaranteed even with any form of US-led intervention.

  • Middle East peace process

The recent unification deal between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas led to deadlock with Israel over future negotiations. Then came the kidnapping of three Israel youths from a bus stop on the West Bank; murdered in haste after being wrongly identified as Israeli soldiers. Tit-for-tat followed which has ultimately led to high level tensions in the Middle East with the Government of Binyamin Netanyahu amassing 40,000 troops who appear ready for a land invasion and incursion into the Gaza Strip.

The risk now is of Israel escalating the current difficulties into a much wider conflict with the threat, for example, to Middle Eastern oil lanes and production.

  • Iran nuclear talks

The July 20 deadline set for Iran to relinquish its nuclear ambitions fast approaches.

Despite some rather conciliatory language from President Rouhani of Iran, intelligence suggests little ground has been given on vital issues such as reducing the numbers of centrifuges and ending experiments with intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The US tilt at diplomacy with Iran has been met with heavy resistance in Congress. President Obama has been finding it hard to persuade Capitol Hill to ease the financial and economic sanctions that brought Tehran to the bargaining table in Geneva.

Western oil and banking interests are champing at the bit for an end to sanctions that could re-open Iran as a lucrative market.

  • Ukraine-Russia

Flashpoints continue on the borderlands of Western Europe. President Putin shows no signs of backing down from his efforts to infiltrate and recolonize Russian speaking enclaves in Eastern Ukraine.

The so-called ‘Putin doctrine’ – the idea that Moscow is planning to retake areas of vital Russian interest reaching into the Baltics – is almost certainly a myth because that would mean directly confronting NATO.

But the threat to gas supplies following cut-offs to Ukraine is a clear and present danger that will become worse as time moves on.

The crisis already has led to a Russian pivot towards Asia in the shape of the Chinese natural gas deal in which London-based Glencore is involved in financing.

Creating a secure environment in Ukraine, in which Western assistance is co-ordinated by the IMF (where monies can be released), is proving extraordinarily difficult to enact.

  • South and West China Seas

Many strategic experts see this as the theatre for the next great strategic rivalry with China and the US – that has moved much of its navy into Pacific waters – eventually clashing.

At present the dispute is manifesting itself in proxy stand-offs between Japan and China and Vietnam and China.

There are overlapping claims to islands such as Senkaku in the Okinawa Sea that are claimed by both China and Japan.

Similarly, South Korea and Japan have clashed following large scale Korean naval operations in the region.

There are fears that a collision of war ships, an attempt to run blockades or guns fired in error could provoke an all-out war.

The tensions, serious as they are, could be unexpectedly good news for BAE Systems and other defence firms as surplus Asian nations rebuild their rundown defences.

Nevertheless, a conflict in the region – the locomotive of manufacturing output – could be devastating for Western economies.

General Western Outlook

The immediate highest risks for Western economic output come from an interruption of oil supplies in the Middle East and gas supplies from Russia via the Ukraine.

However, America’s increased oil and gas fracking activities together with new gas finds – such as those off the coast of Israel – make the world a little less vulnerable than it was after the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and the first Iraq war of 1990-91.

More serious long-term threats come from the China seas where a battle for hegemony, not dissimilar to that which caused two world wars, looks to be underway.

Globalisation has produced rich rewards in terms of fast economic development, industrialisation and prosperity.

But it has also brought with it profound new strategic concerns that could damage confidence and crush output at a time when the West is still recovering from the financial and Eurozone crisis.

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