Tag Archives: al-Qaeda

Foreign Affairs, Government, Iran, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria, United States

The conflict in Syria spills over into Beirut…

Intro: The urgency of getting all sides to the conflict around the negotiating table

The double bomb attack on the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut marks a horrifying and sinister escalation of the Syrian conflict. Not since 1999 has a suicide bomber struck a non-military target in Lebanon. This is also the first time that the Iranian Embassy has been attacked, although Shia civilians in southern Beirut have been regularly targeted. The Al-Qaeda affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades claim to be behind the atrocity and, if true, the explosions bring an apocalypse in the region that much closer – that fearful day when Lebanon is fully swallowed up in the Syrian civil war.

Since the first uprisings against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in the spring of 2011, many tens of thousands of people have died. But the war itself, and the subsequent refugee crisis it has caused, with millions of people displaced, reaps less attention from the outside world as time goes on.

Diplomatically, many will be expressing a sigh of relief that the West decided against taking military action over Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Evidently, the risk of how the West almost became embroiled in yet another Middle Eastern quandary is clearer to see now and was simply too high. Today, the United States is involved in delicate political and diplomatic negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programmes which may even produce a preliminary deal as early as this week. While much emphasis is being placed on a deal, not even this should distract global attention from the urgency of stopping the Syrian war.

The timing of the attack may be related to the fact that Assad’s forces are gaining ground, with the capture in recent days of a strategic village and the fall of a key rebel commander. The Beirut bombs are a clear and stark reminder that the Sunni rebellion can still strike back with relative impunity. That aside, and with the US so heavily involved diplomatically elsewhere, the risk now is that Assad and his supporters will believe they can win the war by military means. That, though, is not a view that can be allowed to prevail. Assad and his regime has committed too many crimes for the world to sit back and allow the violent anarchy to continue, mayhem which is steadily erupting inside Lebanon and Turkey as time goes on.

The urgency of getting all sides to the conflict around the negotiating table to thrash out a peace deal must now be a priority in light of the Beirut bombs.

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Foreign Affairs, Iraq, United States

Iraqi casualties of war continue to rise…

IRAQ

Recent research suggests that around half-a-million Iraqis died as a result of the war and occupation of their country between 2003 and 2011. Reliability of data on war deaths will always raise questions of a dubious nature because of the difficulties of conducting and reporting a comprehensive survey in a war zone.  Equally, too, there will always be political controversies over the figures presented. In the case of Iraq, a lower-than-expected death toll may be co-opted by those who wish to maintain that intervention was justified, the reverse holding true for detractors who will naturally imply the toll is far too high. Opposing views, however, should not distract from the fact that the tally- count is overly ghastly either way.

Much blood is still being shed in Iraq. The war itself may have officially ended when the U.S. withdrew its troops in 2011, but the death toll continues to rise. The situation is steadily worsening because of the cold-bloodied civil war in Syria. Events over the border have added to the abiding strains on Sunni-Shia relations, as well as providing extremist groups that are active throughout the region – particularly in unstable Iraq – with an incentive to push their own agendas.

Sectarian violence in Iraq reached its peak five years ago, but by any reckoning it is now back on the rise. With more than 5,000 deaths since April, this year is already the bloodiest since 2008.  In September alone, close to 1,000 people were killed – the majority of whom were Shia civilians wiped out by insurgent bombs exploding at public events like funerals or at markets. Such tactics are being used to cause maximum bloodshed.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Prime Minister, has not helped either. By failing to conciliate Iraq’s Sunni majority, his corrupt, Shia-dominated government has pushed the disaffected into the embrace of murderous terrorist groups. So long as the conflict in Syria continues, Iraq will continue to endure the painful repercussions.

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Government, Intelligence, Military, National Security, United States

Bradley Manning and the US court-martial verdict…

BRADLEY MANNING

The US military court ruling on finding the WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning guilty of espionage (but not of aiding the enemy) shows a proportionate sense of perspective after one of the most turbulent episodes in recent US judicial history.

In a highly emotive summing up by the prosecutor, Major Ashden Fein, claimed that Manning was ‘a determined soldier with the ability, knowledge and desire to harm the United States.’ He was not a whistleblower, but a traitor… and Manning had, said Major Fein, ‘general evil intent.’

Nobody ever suggested that this young and disillusioned soldier had deliberately sent military secrets to Al-Qaeda, but the court-martial ruling has proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that his voluntary actions to disclose more than 700,000 documents would ‘lead to them being in the hands of the enemy.’

Manning was responsible for the largest leaking of classified information in US history. His actions sent shockwaves through America’s military and political establishments, but undoubtedly their response to his actions was part of the US mindset that materialised after 9/11 in policies such as extraordinary rendition, waterboarding and events that have transpired since at Guantanamo Bay.

The presiding judge over Bradley Manning’s court-martial, Judge Colonel Denise Lind, struck a very different note saying that the policies of the George W Bush presidency which were responsible have been reversed. Whilst that does hold some credence, the malign consequences linger on, including the compulsion in the United States to silence those, like Manning, who discovered that the exercise of American power on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan was significantly different from the way it was advertised back home.

In many ways a dichotomy has been exposed. American claims of fostering a culture of free information have often been inflated, and its media have certainly failed to take full advantage of those freedoms they did possess. But the high collision of President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ with the explosion of information released by the internet – which WikiLeaks came to symbolise – created in America a national mood of paranoia reminiscent of Stalinism. President Obama’s attempts to cool that feverish atmosphere is slowly being achieved with the winding down of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington’s refusal so far to countenance any large-scale involvement in Syria or Iran.

While both Bradley Manning and the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were guilty of recklessly flooding media outlets with secret and classified information with little concern for what has subsequently happened to the people who had been named, their underhand dealings enabled many to learn about atrocities committed by the US military which otherwise would have been covered up for ever.

Governments and their military establishments are known in wanting to keep their dirty secrets to themselves, but we should also know they must not be allowed to. Freedom of information is one of the cornerstones of democracy, and whistleblowers just happen to be a vital component to the functioning of societies that aspire to be free. Reconciling that to the authority of their rulers will always throw up issues perfectly witnessed in the court-martial of Bradley Manning.

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