| Europe |
| German arrest warrant over Nord Stream blast mystery |
| 2024-08-15 |
| [BBC] German state prosecutors trying to solve the mystery of who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in 2022 have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor. The suspect has been named as Volodymyr Z by German media, who have treated the sabotage like a sensational true crime drama. Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for Germany’s prosecutor general, declined to confirm the arrest warrant, telling the BBC that her office never commented so as not to jeopardise the investigation by giving the suspect a chance to escape. But the Polish prosecutor general's spokeswoman, Anna Adamiak, in Warsaw told the BBC's Adam Easton that a European Arrest Warrant had indeed been passed to them by German prosecutors. When Polish officers went to Volodymyr Z’s home in early July, he had already left the country for Ukraine, she said. He had until then been living in a quiet residential area of Pruszków, a town near Warsaw, German media say. According to an investigation by three German media outlets, including public broadcaster ARD, Volodymyr Z was part of a team of experienced Ukrainian divers who in September 2022 hired a German yacht, sailed out into the Baltic Sea and planted the explosives, blowing up three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. A Ukrainian man and a Ukrainian woman are also suspected of involvement. If the latest media reports are true, that a group of Ukrainian divers blew up the pipelines, it still doesn’t answer the broader question of who ordered the attack. There is so far no public evidence linking it to the Ukrainian or Russian state or for that matter any other country or individual group. For years there have been conspiracy theories around the attack, with unconfirmed rumours that governments in Kyiv, Moscow or Washington were behind the attack. There has also been speculation that Ukrainian or Russian military groups, acting without the knowledge of the Ukrainian government, might have been responsible. Underwater drone footage of the damage to the Nord Stream pipeline The Nord Stream pipelines carried gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea and were a controversial and unpopular symbol of European energy dependence on Moscow. In other words it’s easy to imagine motives for such an attack. For years Eastern Europeans warned Berlin that this dependence on Russian gas made Europe vulnerable. But successive German governments, from Gerhard Schröder’s left-wing coalition to Angela Merkel’s conservative-led administrations, argued that binding Russia to Europe with energy and trade links would help both countries economically and ensure peace. Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 destroyed that hope and mainstream politicians across the political spectrum in Germany have now admitted they were wrong. Related: Nord Stream: 2024-08-03 Grain and Oil: Why the West Can't Block Russian Exports Nord Stream: 2024-07-28 Seymour Hersh: Obama and Kamala threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment on Biden before he dropped out Nord Stream: 2024-07-01 'Gothic gossip': who was molested by the 80-year-old 'Antichrist' Klaus Schwab |
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| Europe |
| Germany agonises over Merkel's legacy: did she hand too much power to Putin? |
| 2022-03-06 |
| [Guardian] After the war in Ukraine led German chancellor Olaf Scholz to pivot dramatically last week on his country’s postwar creeds of faith, attention is shifting to his predecessors, who took Germany down a strategic path towards Russia that became a dead end. The conflict in the east has caused a seismic shift in Germany, where Scholz has made a U-turn on a restrictive stance on weapons exports, announced huge increases in military spending and vowed to wean the country off Russian gas. Since then, all eyes have been on Gerhard Schröder, the unrepentant ex-chancellor who in his final weeks in power shook hands with Vladimir Putin to ratify the Nord Stream pipeline underneath the Baltic Sea. Just weeks later, Schröder slipped effortlessly through the revolving door to become chairman of Nord Stream. The resultant increase in Germany’s reliance on Russian energy, politicians in Berlin now concede, may have led Putin to believe Germany would be too hamstrung to support concerted economic sanctions. As a paid-up lobbyist of energy giant Gazprom, Schröder’s motivation is transparent: on Friday, Scholz called on his party colleague and former boss to sever ties with Russian state-owned companies. Less clear is why Schröder’s course of expanding economic ties with Russia was broadly continued by his successor, Angela Merkel, and whether she did so purely out of passivity or to her political advantage. |
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| Europe | |
| Former German Chancellor Says U.S.-EU Alliance Could Now End | |
| 2020-07-03 | |
 [Saker] A German equivalent to UK's Financial Times and America's Wall Street Journal is the Dusseldorf Handelsblatt or "Commerce Sheet," which headlined on June 30th, "Former Chancellor Schröder: USA Ending Transatlantic Partnership".They reported: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder | |
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| Europe | |
| Baader-Meinhof terrorist may have worked for Stasi | |
| 2011-08-02 | |
Now there is another twist: Horst Mahler, a founding member of the Red Army Faction, was also a Stasi informant. According to German newspaper reports, the revelation comes from a leaked report by state prosecutors re-investigating the shooting of a pacifist by a Berlin policeman during a 1967 protest. According to Bild am Sonntag, which claims to have seen the report into the death of Benno Ohnesorg, Mahler was a so-called inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (informal collaborator) for the East German secret service up until 1970. The outing of any public figure as an IM is a controversial affair, but with Mahler, who is in a Bavarian prison for denying the Holocaust, it is especially striking. If he really was collaborating with the Stasi, it shines a whole new light on his time with the Red Army Faction better known in the UK as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Mahler represented the widow of 26-year-old Ohnesorg in a civil case she brought over her husband's death. He also led the student movement's own investigation into the shooting. The West Berlin policeman who pulled the trigger, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was exposed as a Stasi agent two years ago. The new leaked report even suggests he deliberately fired at Ohnesorg, though he was twice cleared of deliberate homicide. If Mahler was also working for the Stasi a fact his lawyer suggests is unlikely does this mean he was somehow in on a plot to disrupt West Germany by introducing violence into the student protests? Mahler, who was a little older than the other West German student leaders in the late 1960s, also represented Rudi Dutschke, the most prominent spokesman for the German student movement. Later on, when Mahler was in prison for bank robberies and assisting a prison escape, Gerhard Schröder, Germany's future chancellor, became his lawyer. If the leaked investigation into Ohnesorg's death is right, Mahler only stopped being a Stasi informant when he founded the Red Army Faction with Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in 1970. He was arrested shortly afterwards and spent all of the 1970s in jail. The true circumstances of Ohnesorg's death are important because the killing is widely credited as the catalyst for the radicalisation of the West German left, including those who went on to form the Red Army Faction. According to Bild am Sonntag, state prosecutors decided to reopen the investigation into the death in May 2009 after Kurras was outed as a Stasi agent. The newspaper claims the leaked report shows the East German secret police played a bigger role in the shooting than was previously thought. The GDR is already known to have tried to undermine West Germany by funding radical magazines and newspapers plotting its downfall, and, in the late 1970s and 80s, offering sanctuary to Red Army Faction terrorists on the run. Mahler's current lawyer, Mirko Röder, could not be reached by phone on Monday. But the Bild am Sonntag quoted the Berlin-based Röder as saying: "If the prosecutors' findings point to him [Mahler] being an IM, I'm surprised how deeply the Stasi were able to infiltrate the political incidents of West Germany back then." This is another intriguing piece in the wildly unusual jigsaw that is Mahler's life, said Hans Kundnani, the author of Utopia or Auschwitz, a book about Germany's 1968 generation. "Many members of the student movement who had grown up in West Germany and saw themselves as revolutionary socialists romanticised the GDR as the 'better Germany'," he said. "After the death of Ohnesorg, Mahler called for 'resistance' against the Federal Republic, which they saw as a fascist state. In that context, he may have seen the 'anti-fascist' GDR as a potential ally. In a sense, his whole life has been a struggle with the Nazi past." Kundnani met Mahler when researching his book, first at a neo-Nazi retreat in Thuringia and then at his home in a Berlin suburb. "He preferred talking about Hegel than his own life," said Kundnani. "When I asked him whether he accepted that he had changed his views since the 1960s, he said, 'You have to see it dialectically. One changes, and at the same time one remains the same.' " | |
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| Afghanistan | |
| Bundestag gives go-ahead to troop boost in Afghanistan | |
| 2010-03-01 | |
| The Bundestag has backed the German government's plan to raise the number of its troops in Afghanistan by up to 850 - from 4,500 to 5,350 - although the cross-party consensus on the mission looked increasingly shaky. The ruling Christian Democrat and Free Democrat parties were joined by opposition Social Democrats to vote by 429 to 111 for the increase. Guido Westerwelle, foreign minister, called the result "a victory for responsibility and rationality" and pledged it would usher in a "new chapter" in German foreign policy, one now intent on better training for Afghan soldiers and police. Of those who voted against, it is thought that the 76 lawmakers from the anti-war Left Party were joined by some opposition Greens and Social Democrats. Although then Social Democrat chancellor Gerhard Schröder committed troops to Afghanistan in 2002, the party's new chairman Sigmar Gabriel spent the past weeks considering whether the party should now withdraw its backing. Such a U-turn could have helped the SPD set itself apart from the Christian Democrats, with whom they ruled from 2005 until last year. But it could have also have been a hard sell to voters, given the SPD's past backing for the policy. Although the SPD initially demanded the government pledge a date for the withdrawal of German troops, the party accepted a verbal promise from Angela Merkel, the chancellor, that Berlin would "if possible" bring the troops home by 2014. Berlin's plan to send an additional 500 Bundeswehr soldiers - plus keeping on hand a "strategic reserve" of 350 for short-term assignments like securing elections - falls far short of US hopes Germany would commit 2,000 or more.
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| Europe | |
| German FM Opposes Taking Uighur Gitmo Inmates | |
| 2009-05-19 | |
The fate of a group of Guantanamo inmates of Uighur origin is threatening to drive a wedge between the US and Germany. The US has asked Germany to take in nine ethnic Uighur detainees. But now German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, although he supports taking Guantanamo prisoners, is trying to keep the number of Uighurs as low as possible, SPIEGEL has learned. At the end of April, senior US diplomat Daniel Fried, who is responsible for trying to resettle prisoners from the soon-to-be-closed Guantanamo Bay camp, gave the Germans a list of nine inmates that the US wants Germany to take. The prisoners belong to China's Uighur minority, a mainly Muslim group which has been the subject of brutal repression by the Chinese authorities. However Steinmeier is concerned that taking the men would cause a diplomatic spat with China, which considers the men to be terrorists and has demanded their extradition. Steinmeier's staff has been following the American initiative with trepidation, particularly because Fried already served as a secretary of state during the Bush administration. Last week, a senior official from the German Foreign Ministry, Reinhard Silberberg, told the US administration about Germany's reservations during a visit to Washington. Germany could only accept Uighur prisoners if other European countries also took some of them, he said -- that way, at least China's anger would not only be focused on Germany. Berlin only wants to accept some of the nine Uighurs and would like if possible to take prisoners of other nationalities in addition. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry refused to confirm the SPIEGEL report. "We are still at the very beginning of our discussions within the German government and with the US," he told the news agency Reuters Saturday. Steinmeier has received support from former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who warned against accepting the Uighurs. "Such a decision would put a serious strain on German-Chinese relations," Schröder told SPIEGEL. It was indeed correct to support US President Barack Obama in his efforts to close Guantanamo, Schröder said. However "only the US itself can take in the Uighurs without causing serious diplomatic damage," he said. Steinmeier was Schröder's chief of staff from 1999 to 2005 and is also the Social Democratic Party's candidate for chancellor in September's national elections. The US has asked Germany to take the Uighurs, considered by US officials to pose little risk, partly because Germany is home to one of the largest Uighur enclaves outside Asia. Around 500 Uighurs live in Munich. | |
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| Economy |
| Berlin: Obama just another Bush |
| 2009-03-31 |
| Is the financial crisis for Angela Merkel what the Iraq war was for Gerhard Schröder -- namely, a reason to seriously strain Germany's relationship with the U.S.? One need not answer with an unconditional "yes" to be very concerned. Naturally, at the G-20 meeting in London this week, Europeans will celebrate and praise the new American president. There will be beautiful photo opportunities and demonstrative unity. But the dispute behind the scenes has gotten worse. Barack Obama is demanding a much greater financial commitment from Germany and Europe to revive the economy; Mrs. Merkel and the EU are refusing, and instead urging the Americans to regulate their financial markets more rigidly. There's no question, Mrs. Merkel has good substantive arguments on her side. Mr. Schröder had some as well when he opposed George W. Bush before and during the Iraq war. Nevertheless, Americans and the German opposition -- namely, Mrs. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union -- accused Mr. Schröder of dishonesty. After all, his antiwar views were also motivated by electoral strategy and were not entirely free of general anti-Americanism. But come to think of it, isn't Mrs. Merkel, too, campaigning this year? Her defiant self-assuredness in dealing with Washington may be as popular in Germany as Mr. Schröder's antiwar stance was. The difference between the two chancellors is that Mrs. Merkel's way of formulating her position is not aggressive, but subversive. When she defends her financial policies, she likes to remark with a wink that we shouldn't forget where the crisis began. Everyone knows which country she means. Mr. Obama speaks of a global crisis that demands global responses. For the Germans, this is indeed a global crisis -- but one that must be resolved primarily by the U.S., since it originated there. Therefore, German finance companies that became entangled in dodgy speculations are seen as weak victims who were seduced, while the clever American seducers who caused the real-estate bubble must now be punished. Now the victims are claiming the right to say "no" to new stimulus packages. And they are demanding that the U.S. never again be permitted to seduce -- that it be constrained by "more transparency on the financial markets, which Germany called for long ago," as Mrs. Merkel says. Once, there were enormous hopes. With Barack Obama's election, the trans-Atlantic rift that grew in the Bush years would finally be bridged. Now, in the financial crisis, this hope could prove an illusion. Many Germans believe they are being taken hostage by the U.S., and they want to vent their frustrations. They ask whether Mr. Obama's gigantic stimulus programs are similar to the gigantic war programs of Mr. Bush. The new president seems to be reacting just as drastically to this "world crisis" as the Republicans did to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, demanding the same unconditional allegiance from allies that Mr. Bush did. Are the neo-Keynesians as mistaken today as the neoconservatives were then? Isn't American gigantism the biggest problem? In explaining the Americans' motivations, Germans are reaching conclusions as unfriendly and abstruse as those in the run-up to the Iraq war (greed for oil). On March 9, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a cover story on "The Mistake of the Century -- How the Failure of a Single Bank Triggered the World Crisis." It suggested that the U.S. government purposely allowed the investment bank Lehman Brothers to fail. Why? "Germany was apparently the main goal of the speculation" of Lehman Brothers, the magazine said, "because these kinds of securities are permitted in Germany, but not in France or the United States." And, "There is a great deal of evidence that banks targeted the funds of unwitting German retirees in trading Lehman securities." This interpretation of events is widespread in Germany. Even the head of the Protestant church council, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, supports it. More and more, the diffuse anger about the crisis and its consequences is erupting in social unrest; one need only look to Greece, France, Ireland, Iceland or Eastern Europe. The longer the crisis lasts, the more loudly people will point to its originator, the U.S. Mr. Obama is turning into a lightning rod for European thunder. When he travels to the old Continent for the first time as U.S. president, he most likely won't see cheering crowds as huge as the one that greeted him last summer in front of Berlin's Victory Column. Before the Iraq war, George Bush succeeded in splitting Europe into the "old" and the "new." In the financial crisis, the Continent is unified in its opposition toward his successor, Barack Obama. |
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| Europe |
| Ex-RAF leftist turned neo-Nazi lawyer Mahler gets 6 years in jail |
| 2009-02-25 |
| A Munich court on Wednesday sentenced Horst Mahler, a prominent right-wing extremist and former member of the leftist terrorist group the RAF, to six years in prison for incitement of hate crimes. In November 2007, Mahler admitted to distributing an outlawed book by Holocaust-denier Germar Rudolf, called Lectures on the Holocaust. Mahler, 70, also distributed discs of himself giving a speech that called the Holocaust the most momentous lie in world history. His defence attorney plans to take the case to the countrys high court to question the definition of incitement of hatred (Volksverhetzung) in the German penal code. Before he started supporting the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in 2000, Mahler was a member of the left-wing Red Army Faction terrorist group in the 1970s. He also defended several of the RAF's members during criminal trials. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison for his criminal activities as part of the group in 1970. He was released four years early in 1980 with help from lawyer Gerhard Schröder, who later became German chancellor in 1998. More information on Mahler at the link. LINK |
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| Europe |
| Schröder's Teheran visit kicks up storm |
| 2009-02-22 |
 Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder - an opponent of sanctions against Iran - met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Teheran on Saturday. The visit of Schröder, who led a Social Democratic government between 1998 and 2005, was sharply criticized by the Central Council of Jews in German and members of the German parliament. "Mr. Schröder inflicts great damage on the reputation of the German government and the Federal Republic of Germany, Stephan Kramer, the council's general secretary, told the Neuen Presse newspaper. The visit showed support for the Iranian regime and a dictator, Kramer said. "In the interests of human rights," Schröder should cancel the meeting, he said. Schröder arrived on Thursday and coordinated his four-day visit with the German Foreign Ministry. According to Schröder's office, he is conducting a "private visit." German media have reported that Schröder opposes sanctions to force a suspension of the Iranian regime's nuclear uranium enrichment program. Schröder spoke at the Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce on Saturday. When asked if his talk at the business group contradicted the Merkel administration's sanctions policy, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told The Jerusalem Post she did "not want to judge" Schröder's anti-sanctions strategy. It was a "private trip" and the former chancellor's "decision" to travel to the Islamic republic, the spokeswoman said. Schröder told the Iranian Industry and Commerce group that "the Holocaust is an historic fact and there is no sense in denying this unparalleled crime." But the new Iranian ambassador in Berlin, Aliresa Sheikh-Attar, said, "The relations between Teheran and Berlin are too important to be overshadowed by a subject such as the Holocaust." Annual trade between Germany and Iran totals roughly 4 billion, making the federal republic Teheran's most important European trade partner. In January to November 2008, German exports to Iran grew by 10.5 percent over the same period a year earlier. Last year's commerce included 39 "dual-use" contracts, according to Germany's export control office. Dual-use equipment and technology can be used for both military and civilian purposes. The Merkel administration and the Bundestag have steadfastly rejected legislation to curtail the mushrooming trade relationship. Muhammad Nahawandian, the president of the Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce, said, "To find common solutions, we shouldn't forget the recent massacre of people in Gaza and should internationally condemn Israel for it," according to Reuters. Michail Kortschemkin, director of the East European Gas Analysis agency, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily that Schröder is "presenting himself like a sort of Gazprom influence agent" in Iran. Soon after stepping down as chancellor, Schröder accepted Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom's nomination for the post of the head of the shareholders' committee of Nord Stream AG, raising questions about a conflict of interest. The late US congressman Tom Lantos, then-chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, likened Schröder to a "political prostitute" for his behavior. Commentators suggest that he is engaging in lobbying activity in Iran to increase business between Iran and Gazprom. Eckart von Klaeden, Christian Democratic Union foreign policy spokesman, urged Schröder on Friday to cancel his visit with Ahmadinejad to avoid "flattering" the Iranian president. Green Party MP Omid Nouripour, who was born in Teheran, said Schröder "should be campaigning actively for the SPD [Social Democratic Party], which is in such bad shape, rather than passively for Ahmadinejad." Schröder's itinerary has meetings with a who's who of Holocaust deniers and opponents of Israel's right to exist, including with Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki, who opened the "World Without Zionism" conference in Teheran in 2006 and cast doubt on the "official version of the Holocaust." Another meeting is set with Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, who said early this month at the annual Munich Security Conference, "In Iran, we don't have the same sensitivities" regarding whether the Holocaust occurred. Asked if the German Foreign Ministry condemned Larijani's comments, a spokeswoman told the Post that she was not present at the conference and therefore "could not say" if Social Democratic Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeir rebuked Larijani for denying the Holocaust, which is illegal in Germany. Schröder also intends to meet with former Iranian president Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who asserted in an anti-Israeli speech in 2001 that the Islamic world could sustain a nuclear strike, but one atomic bomb would obliterate Israel. In his speech, Rafsanjani said if the world of Islam obtained nuclear weapons technology it could destroy Israel. |
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| Europe |
| Germany: Schröder criticized for blaming Russian conflict on Georgia |
| 2008-08-18 |
| Several German politicians on Monday criticized former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for blaming Georgia for the conflict with Russia over South Ossetia in an interview published this week. Schröder, known for close business and personal ties with Russia, called Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili a gambler in an interview with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and said he sparked the conflict by marching troops into South Ossetia. The former chancellor said he thought Georgia's chances of joining NATO had moved "even further into the distance" following the fighting with Russian forces. Critics on Monday noted that Schröder took a job with Russian energy giant Gazprom immediately after leaving office. The former chancellor now oversees the Russian-German operating company that is building a new Baltic Sea pipeline for natural gas, set to link western Siberia and Germany in 2010. Gazprom has a 51 percent stake in the more than 4 billion project. "I get more and more of a feeling that the former chancellor has a faulty relationship with his former position. As soon as Russia comes into play, his judgment becomes disproportionate and unreasonable in the highest degree," conservative parliamentarian Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg told German newspaper Passauer Neue Presse. Guttenberg, who heads the foreign policy committee for the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria, told the paper that Schröder should also consider himself a gambler for contradicting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who belongs to Schröder's centre-left Social Democratic Party. "Schröder has become Moscow's most prominent voice in Germany," Eckard von Klaeden, foreign policy spokesman for the CSU's national sister party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), told the newspaper. Schröder said in his interview that Russia was not pursuing an annexation policy in the Caucasus, adding that he saw no reason for the concept of strategic partnership between Germany and Russia to be affected by the war. I reject the idea of demonizing Russia. I consider Russia as a part of Europe, he said. CSU chief Erwin Huber said Schröder's comments did a disservice to human rights and weakened the position of the West. "The strategic partnership between Germany and Russia requires a thorough review. It still has its roots in the time of the red-green alliance," Huber said, referring to Schröder's coalition of Social Democrats and the Green party. That government was replaced by Chancellor Angela Merkel's current coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Huber said Russia today is presenting itself as a military power that does not recognize the sovereignty of neighboring states. "Europe can't accept that without acting. The Russians must be told: 'You cannot act like this,'" he said. And thus endeth the lesson on the limits of "Soft Power". |
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| Britain |
| Britain craven in the face of despotism |
| 2008-04-13 |
| 'Magna Carta is such a Fellow he will have no sovereign,' snapped the Jacobean jurist Sir Edward Coke as he fought the arbitrary power of the Stuart monarchy. Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan might have lacked Sir Edward's succinctness, but last week they delivered a defence of the rule of law that was as stirring. The Saudis' successful attempt to bully the Serious Fraud Office was a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, they said, a conspiracy that, shamefully, the Blair government had joined. 'No one suggested to those uttering the threat that it was futile, that the United Kingdom's system of democracy forbade pressure being exerted on an independent prosecutor whether by the domestic executive or by anyone else. No one even hinted that the courts would strive to protect the rule of law and protect the independence of the prosecutor by striking down any decision he might be tempted to make in submission to the threat.' Brave and undeniable, but Whitehall did have a cynical argument against the judges, though not one that would stand up in court. Saudi Arabia is a special case, it runs. Most despotisms are like Zimbabwe, nasty, corrupt and poor. Saudi Arabia is nasty, corrupt but fantastically rich because of its oil wealth. So when it threatens to cancel orders for Eurofighters or suspend co-operation in the war against al-Qaeda unless we obey orders, we can appease it, safe in the knowledge that the Saudi monarchy is a one-off. No one else has the strength to hurt our economy. No precedent is being set. The judges noticed a knowing tone of voice behind the ministers' attempts to explain away the nobbling of the police investigation. Government lawyers seemed to be saying that Saudi Arabia was a regrettable anomaly whose 'threats were a part of life'. But Saudi Arabia is no longer an anomaly and the way the world is moving, threats to the rule of law are going to become a far greater part of our lives. Labour's more intelligent leaders know it. This year, David Miliband announced that the forward march of democracy had halted. The Foreign Secretary didn't just mean that countries such as Zimbabwe had sunk into thug-rule and penury. He meant the belief that societies could prosper only if they embraced representative government was vanishing. He could no longer reassure Aung San Suu Kyi and other dissidents that history was on their side. Europe's most blatant example is Vladimir Putin's Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. 'I don't understand the position of the British government,' a foreign ministry spokesman spluttered. 'It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.' From Leon Trotsky on, the Soviet regime has killed exiles. The difference between the old and the new Russia is that now Russia can buy the support of corporations and capitalists who will excuse their crimes. In The New Cold War, his study of Putin's impact on Europe, Edward Lucas of the Economist argues that the Russian elite has understood that money can be used to undermine freedom because there are many in the West who believe that 'capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom'. So it is proving. In Germany, Russian money now provides a lavish retirement job for Gerhard Schröder, who disgraced the honourable anti-autocratic tradition of German social democracy by taking the roubles of the Russian state energy giant. German conservatives are little better. So frightened is she of Russia's control of Germany's energy that Angela Merkel stops Georgia and other former colonies of the Soviet empire joining Nato and vetoes EU plans to free up the gas and oil markets. When the Foreign Office asked European allies for support after the Litvinenko assassination, Germany was the first to say Britain shouldn't take murder so seriously. I could go on because it is always enjoyable being beastly to the Germans. The sad truth, however, is that among the developed democracies, Britain is the most anxious to prostitute its laws by offering near immunity from prosecution to dictatorial financial interests. For instance, there are 20 Russian conglomerates on the London Stock Exchange, compared with just five in New York. Ken Livingstone explained why the City was the favoured destination for money not only from Russia but from autocracies the world over when he visited China in 2006. He told the regime's tycoons they wouldn't face irksome legal inquiries if they sent their profits to London. 'The Americans have overreacted to the Enron scandal and foreign executives are frightened of the new rules,' he explained. 'We want to tell Chinese businessmen that we will not put you in prison if someone down the management food-chain has forgotten to fill in a form correctly.' So fraudsters enjoy a latitude in the City they don't enjoy on Wall Street. Why credulous voters continued to think Livingstone was left wing after that performance is beyond me, but his description of how the wealthy can escape legal interference was undeniable. The Saudis were outraged by the attention of the SFO because its investigators hardly ever threaten to prosecute. Even when they do, the courts don't back them up. The 'light touch' regulation of the City Gordon Brown boasted about for so many years meant in effect that Britain profited from offering international finance a latitude it couldn't find in New York. We can't shake off our dependence on funny money, as Gordon Brown and David Cameron showed when they reacted to the judges' ruling by moving to curb the power of the judiciary to expose corruption and intimidation. Coke's declarations are magnificent. So, too, are the brave sentiments of today's judges. But a more realistic appraisal was given by Jonathan Swift, who witnessed the founding of the City's money markets in the early 18th century and wrote: 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies but let wasps and hornets break through.' |
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| Iraq |
| VDH : Iraqs Savage Ironies |
| 2007-11-23 |
| Adaptability, self-critique, and persistence will prevail. by Victor Davis Hanson The war in Iraq as all wars is fraught with savage ironies. In the build-up to the invasion, anti-Americanism in Europe reached a near frenzy. It was whipped up by French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and evoked warnings of an eternal split in the Atlantic Alliance. If Iraq had proved a catalyst for this expression of near hatred fueled by long-standing angers and envies it soon, however, proved to be a catharsis as well. Both leaders overplayed their hands when the U.S. had already begun downsizing its NATO deployments in Germany. Elsewhere, Europeans started to have second thoughts about alienating America at a time of rising Russian belligerency, and suffered from increased worry over radical Islamic terrorists at home and abroad. The result is that their successors, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, are staunchly pro-American in ways their previous governments were not, even well before the Iraq War. And given the increased jihadist threats to Europe, worries about Iran, and the consistency of the U.S. effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, these governments may well have learned in a way they did not anticipate in 2003 that there really is no other ally like a steadfast United States, in these unstable times. European youth can print all the anti-war leaflets they wish with splashy photos from Abu Ghraib but their leaders quietly understand not only that the United States did not quit Iraq in defeat, but that it also may be winning an unforeseen victory there. Moreover, they see that this victory has repercussions for the security of their own countries and this will require readjustments to the easy anti-Americanism of the past. The post-war occupation was supposed to be difficult, but few envisioned a bloody four-year struggle. Instead, after the fall of Saddam, al Qaeda chose to escalate its war against the West by sending thousands of jihadists into the new battleground of Iraq in part, to aid the Sunni and ex-Baathist insurgencies in their wars against the U.S., and the Shiites. The violence that ensued left tens of thousands dead, and resulted in nearly 4,000 American battle fatalities. We spent nearly a trillion dollars, as public support dropped from a 70-percent approval of the war to less than 40-percent. Yet it was not the American military that was ruined fighting an unpopular war in the heart of the ancient caliphate, but most likely al Qaeda who has lost thousands, (and, far more importantly, completely destroyed its Pan-Arabic mystique of religious purity). The more the jihadists fought, the more they were killed by the U.S. military while kidnapping, murdering, stealing, mutilating, raping, and outraging Iraqi civilians. Nothing is worse in the Arab world than to be seen as weak and cruel, and al Qaeda proved, eventually, to be both on Al-Jazeera. After Iraq, the al Qaedists reputation has become more akin to the Cosa Nostra, than to romantic Holy Warriors. It was not our intention in going to Iraq to cripple and discredit al Qaeda per se, in some third-party theater; but once the jihadists upped the ante, they also raised the stakes of being defeated with global implications to follow. Polls in the Arab world show a decline in support for suicide bombing, and a radical change of heart about bin Laden. We made all sorts of mistakes in the immediate aftermath of the war. Pundits still bicker over whether we should have disbanded the Baathist army or whether there was anything much left to disband. And by openly allying ourselves with the once-despised Shiites, we alienated the powerful Sunni elite minority that not only had run the country, but alone in Iraq, knew how to administer the infrastructure of a modern state. All that being said, it is difficult to see how we could have immediately reconciled with the Sunnis, given their past alliances with Saddam, and their furor at the results of our one-man/one-vote policy of democratization. It was as if the British had landed at Mobile in 1859, declared slavery over, and expected the Southern white population to join in such a foreign-inspired multi-racial reconstruction. Yet four years later, the Sunni insurgency is largely over but largely over only because it has been defeated by the U.S. military. Tribal sheiks feel that they have restored the honor that was lost in Saddams three-week rout, by fighting the Americans tooth-and-nail for four years. That said, they now have learned that resistance brought them nothing but defeat and, if it continues, abject humiliation. So there is a sort of tragic irony here too. It may well be that the Sunni tribes have learned, only through their failed insurgency, that they cannot defeat the U.S. military; that their Sunni al Qaeda allies were far worse than we are; that the Shiite government is not going away; and that the United States is an honest broker of sorts that is advancing their interests with the Shiite majority. The unexpected result of all this is that it is only now after the Sunnis have fought, lost, and learned the futility of continued resistance that there is a better chance for a lasting stability. It is impossible to imagine that the Southern Plantationists in 1860 would have been willing to reconcile with the North, or that Germans would have come to their senses and rejected Hitler in 1939. If the old dictum remains valid, that a wars reconstruction and reconciliation come after, not before, the defeat of an enemy, then it may well be that the Sunnis had to learn the hard truth, the hard way, about the perversity of al Qaeda, the military superiority of the United States, and the permanence of the Iraqi constitutional government. It is sometimes said that someone must be culpable for not finding a David Petraeus and his team of brilliant colonels earlier in the conflict. I wish it were that easy. But such a conjecture is like saying Lincoln should have known of a Grant or Sherman at the wars outset; or that earlier Union generals, even in error and blunder, did not attrite the enemy and provide both experience (even if by negative example), and some military advantage when Grant and Sherman finally emerged to positions of real influence; or that a Grant and Sherman did not themselves learn the necessary, prerequisite skills for their prominent command in 1864-5, while in obscurity during 1861-2. The emergence of a Patton, LeMay, or Ridgway is usually through a process of distillation, where a military learns only from its mistakes, and only slowly sorts out the right people for the right job at the right moment. We should also remember that we did not suddenly discover the proper strategy for Iraq. We learned it only through the heroic sacrifices of thousands of lost Americans who took a heavy toll on the enemy all through 2003-6, and, in four years of trial and error, provided the lethal experience of what would and what would not work. The wars savage irony even extends to the reconstruction. Iraq by now was supposed to be pumping over 3 million barrels a day during the post-Saddam reconstruction. But due to vandalism, insurgent attacks, corruption, and neglect, the oil industry rarely currently sustains over 2.2. million barrels produced per day despite a capacity to pump 3 million, and a potential some day to produce perhaps over six million per day. Yet, because oil prices, in unforeseen fashion, have more than quadrupled since the war, Iraq finds itself with more petroleum revenues than ever before. Its total oil annual worth may reach $70 billion at the present price in the upcoming year, even without much of a change in production levels. Electricity production has hit 5,000 megawatts per day and is climbing steadily, but consumption has skyrocketed from prewar levels. If Iraqis would consume electricity at prewar levels, they would probably now have power almost 24-hours per day. What the coalition and the Iraqi ministries are trying to do, then, is, at a time of war, protect and restore electrical service, but at the same time increase it threefold to meet increased demand brought on by millions of imported electrical appliances. Nothing is for certain in any war as the savage ironies of Iraq have shown the last four years. Few envisioned the initial brilliant three-week war, and the utter and rapid defeat of Saddam. Fewer foresaw the ensuing bloody four-year occupation. And the fewest of all anticipated that out of that mess, the present chance at stability and a real reconciliation under a constitutional framework could come. The lessons are only the eternal ones: that wars wont be fought as believed and wont end as planned, but that adaptability, self-critique, and persistence, in an effort believed to be both right and necessary, will eventually prevail. |
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