Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, United States

Book Review – Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism & Defeating ISIS

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: In his new book Liam Byrne MP argues that the British government is making critical mistakes in its methods of combating home-grown extremism. Defeating Islamic State will probably mean taking on the digital caliphate.

THE WORLD was caught by surprise in June 2014 when the infamous terrorist group Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. Within the space of just a few short months, like a rapidly spreading avenging fire, it had scorched across Syria and much of Iraq. In so doing, the group carved out an empire stretching more than 400 miles from Aleppo to the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek, a town just 60 miles from the Iranian border.

IS, also known as Isis, or Da’esh, seemed unstoppable at first, but it has now been pushed back, possibly decisively. Since the group inaugurated, it has lost an estimated 45,000 jihadists, as well as a slew of key towns and resources it previously controlled. Its most direct enemies – Kurds, Iraqi troops and Shia militias – are largely contained in Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and are advancing on the group’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.

In this timely book, the Labour MP Liam Byrne, points out that the fight against Isis and its brutal ideology has many fronts. Isis is obsessed with controlling territory, as well as having higher aspirations by creating a global caliphate. For many years, though, the group existed without any territory. With its war on the world going badly, its digital caliphate is becoming ever more important.

Byrne offers up a wide-ranging and discursive study. In his book, he elicits and concentrates on what is arguably the most significant fight of all: the ‘battle of ideas’. Whilst his journey has taken him to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, his most interesting discoveries are found and reported upon within in his own parliamentary constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill. Here, Muslims boast the highest share of the population of any area in the UK.

Byrne is assertive that Isis and other jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda are fundamentally heretical by nature. Essentially, he says, they are death cults, with as much relevance to most Muslims as David Koresh has had on mainstream Christianity. Ironically, however, Isis claims to espouse the purest form of Islam, the creed and doctrine pursued in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad. It believes that it has the power to repudiate and excommunicate apostates, an act known as takfir. But as the world has come to witness, this has metastasised into exterminations and genocide, as Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Muslims in the Middle East can attest.

In the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group, notoriously known to the world as al-Qaeda, morphed with Saddam Hussein’s avowedly secular Ba’ath Party. What emerged was something yet even more ferocious as the terrorist group had a firm apparatus in which to operate from.

The objective of Isis was to trigger conflict between Iraq’s Shia majority, which came to power after the invasion, and the Sunni minority, which hitherto had the reins of power. The group’s global aim was to foment division between Muslims and everyone else.

Mr Byrne is of the firm believe that the British government is making a critical mistake in its methods of combating home-grown radicalism and extremism. He says its doctrine is symptomatic of a ‘clash of civilisations’ which makes Islam the problem. Counter-extremism programmes which operate in the UK such as Prevent are based on a ‘conveyer belt’ theory that specifically highlights religious conservatism as the trigger for radicalisation. But the author, citing security and academic sources, argues that anger and resentment, often engendered by a sense of marginalisation, are more powerful factors.

We should – at the very least – recognise the true nature of the extremist threat we face. The U.S. president-elect’s declared solution to dealing with Isis including heavy bombing and barring all Muslims from entering his country are, though, the very antithesis of proper reason and rationality which seems to be in such short supply these days. For clear insight, we could do worse than reach for Liam Byrne’s excellent and revealing narrative.

–     Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas by Liam Byrne is published by Biteback at £12.99

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Arts, Books, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Book Review: The Great Convergence

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BOOK REVIEW

Intro: Globalisation has developed in waves. First it was free movement of goods, then ideas. The free exchange of people will be the hard part and likely to be problematic.

FORMER US President Bill Clinton once referred to globalisation as “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”. The concept, which has had a major impact on world trade and markets, pushes countries to specialise and swap. Such a force of inertia makes countries richer, but one in which the world becomes smaller. In this book “The Great Convergence”, by Richard Baldwin, the author, a Geneva-based economist, adds an important caveat.  Like wind and water, he argues, globalisation is powerful, but can be inconstant or even destructive. True. How often have we heard and witnessed the erosion of local markets to the price-dominance of globalisation? Unless beloved nations catch up with reality, politicians will be pushed to make grave mistakes.

In an economist’s ideal world, things, ideas and people would flow freely across borders. Reality is less pragmatic, stickier, and often far less mobile in terms of movement. Historically, constraints on trade once bundled consumption and production together, limiting its growth.

Mr Baldwin’s grand theory of globalisation is of a series of unbundlings, driven by sequential collapses in the cost of moving things and ideas across cyberspace. From the domestication of the camel around 1,000 BC to the first commercial steam engine in 1712, the first great wave of globalisation unbundled production and consumption. From 1820, prices in Britain were set by international demand, and consumers were offered an increasing range in diversity of goods and services. Café goers, for example, could sip Chinese tea sweetened with Jamaican sugar.

Although moving goods became cheap, it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that expensive prices for moving ideas became more affordable for most. Mr Baldwin invites readers born in the mid-1960s to remember the price of making an international call at $5 a minute, or the $50 price of sending a single document by an overnight courier. Industries clustered by default. The centres of economic activity emerged in those countries we now know as the G7. In this form of globalisation, national groupings of ideas and workers battled for market share, and became richer in the process. Mr Baldwin uses the analogy of two sports teams swapping players to improve their performance.

Since the 1990s, however, globalisation has changed radically. The internet has lifted the cost of moving ideas, and fuelled a second unbundling. Because co-ordinating international production is now much cheaper, faster and safer, supply chains are afforded the enormous benefit of ignoring borders to go sprawling across the world. Thus, a Canadian aeroplane-maker can direct a team of Mexican engineers. Apple can combine American design with Chinese assembly lines. With many products made everywhere, trade has become, in effect, denationalised.

The pace and speed of change and the now modern ease with which rich-world companies can outsource work have eliminated the old boundaries around knowledge. But in doing so has created a new, more unsettling trade landscape. Once, textile-mill workers in South Carolina had exclusive access to American technology. Although some may suggest that they have lost out to competition from Mexican workers, more accurately they face an altogether more formidable competitor: Mexican workers have been made more productive by American know-how.

Continuing the sports analogy, Mr Baldwin implies that today’s trade is like the coach of a top team being allowed to offer his services to those less successful. The coach gets rich from the double market for his services, while the better team gets a sudden surprise from the newly skilled competition. Mr Baldwin makes the inference that discontent with globalisation stems in part from an “ill-defined sense that it is no longer a sport for national teams”. The sporting parallels offered by the author are well placed and provides the reader with an insightful grasp of the magnitude of issues that globalisation encompasses.

Raising tariffs to placate or appease voters in protecting its national goods and services is a mechanism and tool best suited to the 19th or 20th century, not one that should be utilised in tackling 21st century globalisation. Given the new world of global logistical supply chains, a tariff is like erecting a wall in the middle of a factory. Mr Baldwin’s 21st-century policies involve setting common rules and standards to make companies feel secure that their supply chains will work. These are the goals of trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or Britain’s membership of the European Union’s custom union – both of which are under threat. He says little on how to win over disgruntled voters, save a few lines on support for workers rather than jobs, and a vague plea that gains should be shared between winners and losers.

Critical also of the author is that he appears too sanguine about the politics of globalisation. A bright and rosy vision of the future imagines globalisation totally unshackled from its third constraint, as labour will invariably become replaced with robots and people being more routinely allowed to offer their services remotely.

–     The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalisation, by Richard Baldwin, is published by Belknap at $29.95 and £22.95.

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Arts, Books, Britain, History

Book Review: ‘The History Thieves’…

BOOK REVIEW

the-history-thieves

In this important new book, Ian Cobain offers a fresh appraisal of some of the key moments in British history since the end of WWII.

THIS carefully written and well-researched book takes deadly aim at the official version of modern British history. During our school years, we are taught that we are a decent and tolerant nation, and that the state does not assassinate its opponents, use torture or commit atrocities. Ian Cobain argues that this picture is both complacent and untrue, and he provides chilling evidence and testimony that the British state has routinely committed appalling crimes. Many of them, he argues, have been fought in wars well away from the public eye.

How many people know, for instance, that it was Britain – not the French or Americans – who launched the Vietnam conflict, airlifting the entire 20th Infantry Division of the British Indian Army to Indo-China in 1945 with orders to suppress a Vietnamese attempt to form their own government?

Who knows, too, about the four-year-long war fought by the British in Indonesia in the Sixties, or the decade-long counter-insurgency campaign in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula?

Cobain methodically calculates that British forces have been engaged somewhere in the world every year since at least 1914. Between 1949 and 1970, Britain initiated 34 foreign interventions. No other country, not even Russia or the United States, has such a record.

Yet, for the most part, British people are blithely unaware of any of this. Cobain argues that the reason for their ignorance is a culture of national secrecy more thoroughgoing than that of France or the U.S. He shows that the brutal Oman war went unreported for many years. And when wars did get reported, it was by tame journalists passing on doctored version of events.

Many of these events and wars also remain a mystery to historians. Cobain proves the British authorities have arranged the suppression – or destruction – of documents that portray Britain in a bad light. Thousands of incriminating files have been incinerated or dumped at sea, while others remain hidden in secret archives.

Cobain calls this “an extraordinary ambitious act of history theft”. He maintains “the British state of the late 20th and early 21st century was attempting to protect the reputation of the British state of generations earlier, concealing and manipulating history – sculpting an official narrative – in a manner more associated with a dictatorship than a mature and confident democracy”.

The author explains that the problem is getting worse because of recent legislation pushed through by the Coalition enabling suspects to be tried in secret courts, meaning that defendants do not even know the charges being made against them. The real reason for much of this secrecy, suggests Cobain, is not to ensure justice, but rather to protect the reputation of intelligence officers complicit in crimes such as torture and rendition.

Cobain is an honest and accurate reporter, but there is one serious criticism of the book. It does not give enough voice to the Whitehall figures whose job it is to fight terrorism and make sensitive decisions about British foreign policy.

They have the grave and very difficult task of ensuring atrocities are not carried out on the streets of Britain – and, in recent years, they have been successful in this vital and largely thankless task. Their need to work in secret is all too understandable.

Whilst we have nothing in our recent history comparable to the appalling atrocities committed by the French in Algeria, or the Belgians in the Congo – let alone the mass murders of Stalin, Mao or Hitler – most Britons should continue to believe that we live in a fair and honest country.

Nevertheless, Ian Cobain has written an important book which deserves to change the way we see our recent past. It warns us against complacency, and exposes why we should challenge what we have been taught from a young age.

–     The History Thieves by Ian Cobain is published by Portobello for £20.

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