The Syrian Tragedy

By Gwynne Dyer

“The Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in various countries of the world,” said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, as the UN began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis last Friday. He needn’t worry. Even as Syria drifts inexorably towards a catastrophic civil war, nobody else is willing to put troops into the country, so how are they going to impose anything?

You can’t blame them for their reluctance, because Syria isn’t Libya. It is a big country with a powerful army, the core of which will remain loyal to the Assad regime right down to the last ditch. A good 30 percent of the civilian population will join them in the ditch: the Alawites (Shia), the Christians, and some of the Kurds and Druze, all of whom fear that the overthrow of the regime will put the Sunni Arab majority in the driving seat.

That’s where they should be, of course – they are at more than 70 percent of the population – but when revolutions triumphed recently in Tunisia and Egypt, the subsequent elections brought explicitly Islamic parties to parties. There’s no evidence that those parties will actually abuse the civil rights of minorities, but given the increasingly sectarian nature of the struggle in Syria, the minorities there are frightened by the prospect of Sunni power.

So the minorities will stick with President Bashar al-Assad no matter what his forces do to the Sunnis, and there are enough of them, given the regime’s virtual monopoly of heavy weapons, to hold out against either domestic insurgency or foreign military intervention for a long time. That’s why there won’t be any foreign military intervention.

But it’s getting worse in Syria. Several suburbs of Damascus itself have now fallen into rebel hands, and Assad’s forces are shelling neighbourhoods only 5 km. (3 mi.) from the centre of the city. Since last March, about 5,400 people have been killed by the regime’s military and paramilitary troops, and the 200 observers sent by the Arab League in December didn’t even slow the rate of killing.

In desperation, the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission last week and called for Bashar al-Assad to hand over power to a deputy within two weeks. That deputy would then be obliged to form a unity government with the opposition within two months. In other words, it demanded the end of the regime.

In fact, the Arab League has even drafted a joint resolution with Britain, France and Germany that threatens unspecified further measures against the Syrian regime if Assad does not step aside. Nabil al-Arabi, the head of the Arab League, is in New York this week to present it to the Security Council in person.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Syrian regime has already rejected the Arab League’s demand, insisting that what’s really happening in Syria is attacks by “armed terrorist gangs” (i.e. al-Qaeda) backed by Israel and the United States. Ridiculous, but a lot of Alawites and Christians actually believe it.

The worse news is that Russia will veto the resolution before the Security Council anyway. Assad is Moscow’s only real ally in the Middle East, and Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean is on the Syrian coast. Bad Moscow – but the truth is that foreign military intervention would probably not stop the killing at this point unless it was truly massive. That wouldn’t happen even with a dozen Security Council resolutions.

The worst news of all is that this probably means that Syria is heading down into the same kind of hell that Lebanon went through in its fifteen-year civil war (1975-90).

It has just gone on too long. The Syrian protests began as a brave attempt to emulate the non-violent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The Assad regime would kill people, of course, but if the protesters stood fast and refused to kill back, ultimately the regime’s support would just drain away. Non-violence was doubly important in the Syrian case, because if it were a violent revolution various minorities would feel gravely threatened.

Alas, that non-violent strategy has foundered on the rock of Syria’s sectarian and ethnic divisions. Sunni deserters from the army started fighting back, and all the other communities took fright. Now it’s a civil war in which the regime has the heavy weapons but the Sunni Arabs have the numbers.

Syria is just as complex a society as Lebanon, although we can still hope that the war does not go on as long. And it’s entirely possible that the Assad regime, whose senior ranks are mostly drawn from the Alawite minority (only 10 percent of the population), has deliberately chosen civil war. Better that than surrender power and expose the Alawites to the vengeance they fear from all those whom they have ruled for the past forty years.

This does not mean that the “Arab spring” was a mistake, or even that it is over. Few other Arab countries have as divided a population or as ruthless a regime as Syria. But it is still a great tragedy.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 13. (“In desperation…regime”; and “Syria…years”)

Scotland: Begging the Question

By Gwynne Dyer

The answer to a question often depends on how you ask it, and Alex Salmond is doing all he can to get a “yes”. Scotland’s separatist First Minister wants independence for his country, which has been part of the United Kingdom for the past 300 years, and he has just revealed the question he wants to ask in the referendum he has promised: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?”

It seems to be a simple question, but it’s psychologically loaded. A more neutral question would offer the Scottish voters two choices: “Scotland should become independent” or “Scotland should remain in the United Kingdom.” Tick one box. But if he did that, most of the voters would surely vote for the status quo.

People don’t usually choose to leap into the unknown unless they are brimming with self-confidence or living in intolerable misery. Neither applies to the Scots, so Salmond twists the question a bit: “Do you agree (with all the rest of us, implicitly, or at least with all sensible people) that Scotland should be an independent country?” People also don’t like to contradict the (implicit) majority, so putting it that way might win a few thousand extra “yes” votes.

In his heart, Salmond would probably prefer a more inflammatory question like “Do you want to seize Scotland’s independence back from the Sassenach (Saxon, i.e English) oppressors, or would you rather live as slaves?” That would delight the tartan super-patriots who are his core constituency, but it would alienate the moderate middle whose support he must gain to win the vote.

A more promising tack would be the one that the Quebec separatists in Canada took in their 1995 referendum: “Do you agree to the independence of Scotland if we promise that it won’t hurt a bit: the English will still be our friends, we’ll be richer than we are now, and we can even go on using the pound. In fact, you’ll hardly notice the difference, except that you’ll feel much better about yourself.” (I’m paraphrasing a bit here.)

The question in Quebec’s 1995 referendum was actually: “Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”

“Do you agree?” again: everybody knows that trick. “Sovereign”, a positive, vague word, not “independent”, an explicit word meaning irreversible change. (Salmond has missed a trick there.) And “the agreement signed on June 12, 1995”, which the average ill-informed voter would assume is some reassuring deal with the federal government, when actually it was just a joint statement by Quebec political parties.

The 1995 referendum in Quebec came close to yielding a majority for “yes”. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien responded by passing a “Clarity Act,” which stated that the question in any future referendum on secession must be accepted as clear by the federal House of Commons; that any question not referring solely to secession would be considered unclear; and that a simple majority of 50 percent of the votes plus one would not be enough to mandate such a large and irreversible change.

The Canadian “Clarity Act” has subsequently become the international standard for secession referendums. It is regularly cited in Spain, for example, as the standard that a Basque or Catalan referendum on independence would have to meet, and in Belgium with regard to Flemish or Walloon secession. It has similarly limited Alex Salmond’s freedom to shape the Scottish referendum question, which is why it is relatively clear.

Salmond still has two cards up his sleeve. One is a proposal to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in the referendum, on the calculation that the younger they are, the likelier they will be to support radical change. (The normal voting age in the UK is 18.)

He is also still talking about adding a further option in the referendum for “maximum devolution” of power to the Scottish government, a halfway house that would leave the United Kingdom government responsible for little except defence and foreign affairs. But he will probably end up trading that for an agreement with London to postpone the referendum until late in 2014.

He needs to postpone it because Scottish independence would lose by a majority of almost two-to-one if the referendum were held today. But if Salmond has more than two years to pick quarrels with London that will incense Scottish nationalists, he might be able to change that.

Just two months before the independence referendum in Quebec, only one-third of Quebecers planned to vote “yes”. On the day, almost half did (49.5 percent). Even more than in normal politics, questions of national independence tend to be decided on emotional grounds – and once the question is on the table, it is there forever.

Quebec has held two referendums on independence, in 1980 and 1995. The voters rejected it both times, but the separatists are still waiting for a third opportunity. (English-speakers in Quebec call it the “neverendum”.) Must get a winner one day.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 7. (“The question…parties”)

Sucking Up To Armenians

By Gwynne Dyer

I go to France quite often, but after this article is published, I may be liable to arrest if I set foot in the country.

The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law next month, just in time for the presidential elections.

It won’t just be a crime in France to deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, were killed in eastern Anatolia in 1915, and that it was the responsibility of the Turkish state. That is a historical fact, and only fools, knaves and Turkish ultra-nationalists deny it. It will also be a crime, punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros ($58,000), even to question the use of the word “genocide.”

“Genocide” doesn’t just mean killing a lot of people, even a lot of civilians. If it did, then the United States would be guilty of genocide because of Hiroshima. Genocide is a deliberate attempt to wipe out much or all of a specific ethnic, linguistic or religious group.

Words matter. The descendants of the Armenians who were killed in 1915, most of whom now live in Lebanon, France, or the United States, desperately want what happened to their great-grandparents to be defined as a genocide and not just a calamity of war. They have even been accused of “Holocaust envy”: the belief that they are being short-changed if the Armenian tragedy is not given the same status as the Nazi genocide of the European Jews.

The state of Israel, interestingly, has never been comfortable with this claim, and avoids the word “genocide” when discussing the massacre of the Armenians in 1915.

Of course, this might just be a Jewish desire to ensure that no other group’s tragedy is seen as comparable to that of the European Jews. But there are concrete reasons for the Israeli unease with the simple equation: Jewish holocaust = Armenian genocide.

About half of the Jewish population of Europe in 1939 was dead by 1945; about half of the Armenians living in eastern Turkey in 1914 were dead by 1918. But what distinguishes the Holocaust from most other atrocities is not the number of deaths, or even the proportion of the population that was killed. It is the motivation behind the killings.

The European Jews were killed as an act of deliberate German policy: a peaceful civilian population was rounded up and transported to camps where they were systematically murdered. What happened to the Armenians of Turkey was less systematic, and probably unplanned.

There is no equivalent in Turkish history to the Wannsee conference of January, 1942 at which the Nazis planned the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” The mass deportation of Armenians in the First World War, during which hundreds of thousands of them died, took place as Russian troops invaded eastern Anatolia and Armenian revolutionary groups staged uprisings in support of them.

The Armenian uprisings of 1915 were tiny and ineffectual, but the Dashnak and Hnchak revolutionaries had indeed been conspiring with both the Russians and the British to support planned invasions of eastern Anatolia. The British attack was switched west to the Dardanelles quite late in the planning process, but the Russian offensive actually happened.

The Turkish government was panicked by the uprisings behind the front and ordered the mass deportation of the civilian Armenian population to Syria. Regular Turkish troops could not be spared from the fighting, so most of the job of “guarding” the columns of Armenian deportees marching through the mountains to Syria was given to Kurdish tribesmen, who proceeded to rob, rape and murder them in huge numbers.

But Armenian civilians living in the cities of western Turkey were not massacred or deported in 1915. Many Armenians in eastern Turkey who were rich enough to buy train tickets to Syria only had to walk where the tracks had not yet been laid. Most of the Armenians who made it to Syria alive were held in camps there, but they were not murdered and burned in ovens. It was horrible, but does it qualify as a case of genocide?

Successive Turkish governments have undermined their own case by insisting that it didn’t happen at all. That is dishonest and stupid. There were certainly horrendous massacres, though the exact numbers of dead cannot be known. However, the use of the word “genocide” remains open to question – but it will soon be a criminal offence in France to say so.

Have the French politicians gone mad? Not at all. It’s election time, and there are half a million voters of Armenian descent in France.

The Armenian massacres were officially recognised as a genocide in France just before the 2001 elections. A law criminalising any questioning of that definition was passed by the National Assembly just before the 2007 elections, but narrowly rejected by the Senate. This time it made it through the Senate, too. So if you’re in France, watch what you say.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 9. (“The state…genocide”; and “The European…unplanned”)

The Risk of Islamist Coups

By Gwynne Dyer

The eastern half of what used to be Pakistan narrowly escaped a military coup last month. Brigadier Masud Razzak, the spokesman of the Bangladeshi army, announced on Thursday (19 January) that “A band of fanatic officers has been trying to oust the politically established government. Their attempt has been foiled.”

They had “extreme religious views,” he said, and revealed that some of the sixteen conspirators, all of them current or former military officers, will soon appear before a military court. For a country with a dismal history of military coups, some of them very violent, it was a heartening outcome. But it was also a reminder of where the real danger lies in the subcontinent.

If the country called Pakistan that got its independence from Britain in 1947 were still a single state, it would be the fourth biggest nation on the planet, with over 300 million people. However, its two halves were separated by 1,500 km (1,000 mi.) of Indian territory, and had little in common apart from having Muslim majorities. That Pakistan only lasted 24 years, and broke apart amid much bloodshed in 1971.

Since then, the two successor states have taken different paths. Bangladesh has no major disputes with its giant Indian neighbour, and spends relatively little on its military. The part that is still called Pakistan, on the other side of India, has a huge territorial dispute with India over Kashmir, a history of wars with its neighbour, and very serious armed forces. It also has a history of coups. And Islamist fanatics in the officer corps. And nuclear weapons.

There are reasons to hope that the worst days are past in both countries. The military relinquished supreme power in Bangladesh twenty years ago, and the country is a functioning (but very turbulent) democracy. Pakistan also has a democratic government now – the army officially left power in 2001, although a general went on running the government until 2008 – but the army still overshadows it.

But it is not generals seizing power in Pakistan that worries foreign governments. It is the fear that middle-ranking Islamist fanatics in the army might stage a successful coup and get their hands on those nuclear weapons. They would be people quite similar in their beliefs to the officers whose coup has just been foiled in Bangladesh – but Bangladesh doesn’t have nuclear weapons.

A coup by Islamist officers in Bangladesh would be seen by most foreigners as deeply regrettable but mostly of only local interest. A coup by Islamist officers in Pakistan would unleash the Mother of All Panics.

An Indian strategist once told me, off the record, what he thought would happen about six hours after news of an Islamist coup in Pakistan reached the rest of the world. There would be a huge “traffic jam” over Kahuta and other major Pakistani nuclear weapons facilities as the Indian, Iranian, American and Israeli air forces all tried to keep the nuclear weapons out of the hands of the fanatics by destroying them.

It wouldn’t succeed, because Pakistan already has more than fifty nuclear weapons, and it keeps them dispersed precisely to thwart that kind of attack. The Israeli air force couldn’t really reach Pakistan (although Pakistan has missiles that could reach Israel). A few other details in the strategist’s scenario also ring false – but it is basically credible.

So how likely is an Islamist military coup in Pakistan? About as likely as it is in Bangladesh, which is to say unlikely, but not unimaginable. In this one thing, the two armies are alike – and quite different from those of most other Muslim countries.

In almost all other Muslim countries, the armies take great care to ensure that Islamist officers do not rise very high in rank: they may make captain, but they won’t make colonel. This is because the generals know that they can’t be trusted. The generals themselves are mostly faithful Muslims, but they must protect the integrity of the military institution they serve, and that means no Islamists in positions of real power.

Islamists, by definition, cannot give their full loyalty to the army or the state. Ultimately, they serve an imagined Islamic caliphate that would sweep away even the country they are supposed to serve. Their lesser loyalties are purely tactical and transitory. So the armies have never let them near real power – except in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In both cases, this anomaly was created by military dictators who made pragmatic alliances with religious extremists as part of their strategy for holding on to power. General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan and General Ziaur Rahman in Bangladesh allowed Islamists to be promoted into the higher ranks in their respective armies, and although they are now long gone that policy continues, especially in Pakistan.

All previous military interventions in politics in Pakistan have been done by the army as an institution, acting in obedience to its lawful commanders. That kind of thing would not radically change Pakistan’s policies towards the rest of the world. But if middle-ranking Islamist officers were to break the chain of command and seize power, like their comrades in Bangladesh intended to do, then all bets would be off.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9 and 13. (“It wouldn’t…credible”); and (“In both…Pakistan”)

Taiwan: Waiting for China

By Gwynne Dyer

The most important thing in Taiwanese politics is always left unsaid. When I interviewed Ma Ying-jeou in 2008, just before he won the presidency for the first time, he was happy to talk about the details of his plans for better relations with the People’s Republic of China: direct flights, more trade, and the like. But ask him about the long-term future, and all you got was platitudes.

Ma has just been re-elected for a second term as president (14 January). “We’ve won,” he told jubilant supporters. “In the next four years, ties with China will be more harmonious and there will be more mutual trust and the chance of conflict is slimmer.” All true, but it still does not address the question of where all this harmony is taking Taiwan.

In his first term, Ma did everything he promised. Direct flights to the PRC resumed in late 2008, a 2009 agreement between Taipei and Beijing facilitated investment flows between the two countries, and a comprehensive trade deal was signed in June 2010.

Ma’s victory this time was smaller than in 2008: then he had a lead of seventeen percentage points; now he’s down to six. But that’s probably due mostly to the country’s slow economic growth and the widening income gap between rich and poor in recent years. There is no evidence to suggest that he lost votes because he was getting too close to China.

So here’s the question. If Ma, like almost everybody else in Taiwan, has no desire to live under Communist rule, then why is there majority support for closer ties with a giant neighbour (about 65 times as many people) that refuses to recognise the legitimacy of Taiwan’s government? Beijing even threatens to attack Taiwan if it ever declares independence from China. What can the Taiwanese be thinking?

This is where it all goes silent, except for the platitudes. But with a little thought you can figure out the logic behind the position of Ma and his supporters in the Kuomintang Party.

They know that Beijing could do terrible damage to Taiwan if it attacked, but they also know that it won’t actually do that unless Taiwan formally declares independence from China. Beijing is willing to live with the present ambiguous relationship for a long time to come, if necessary.

Meanwhile, Taiwan has to make a living, and it has been losing market share to China’s cheaper exports for two decades now. The favoured solution is to invest in mainland industries and subsidise Taiwan’s much higher living standard with the profits. Mainland Chinese investment in Taiwan’s hi-tech sector would not hurt, either. Time for better relations with the mainland, then – but what about the future?

The thinking goes like this. We can cozy up to China now because it serves the interests of a great many people on both sides, and it doesn’t really endanger our de facto independence. Taiwan is not disarming, and China still can’t move an army across the 180-km (110-mile) Strait of Taiwan; its navy isn’t strong enough. As for the long run, it will take care of itself, because the Communist regime in Beijing will not last forever.

Nobody knows when it will end, but most politicians in Taiwan have a fair idea of how it will end. Sooner or later the Chinese economy will stumble into a recession – the enormous housing bubble in China is currently the most likely cause – and unemployment will soar. People’s mortgages will be underwater, banks will fail, and the regime’s credit will run out.

Ideology is dead in the People’s Republic. The regime insists that it gives the people “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but in fact it gives them “unbridled capitalism with Chinese characteristics” – including a plague of corruption that mainly benefits Communist Party members. All this is tolerable while everybody’s income is rising; it is no longer acceptable when incomes are falling.

China is a capitalist country, and it has not been granted some special exemption from the business cycle. Every once in a while, in capitalist economies, a major recession comes along. This is hard enough to manage in a democracy. It is potentially lethal for a dictatorial regime whose only remaining credibility is its reputation as an economic miracle-maker.

So Taiwan’s best strategy is just to wait. Make deals on trade and investment, keep talking to Beijing to reduce the risk that some hothead will launch missiles at Taiwan, but don’t get into talks about reunification with a Communist-ruled China. It’s not hard to avoid such talks, since Beijing doesn’t recognise the Taipei government as a legitimate negotiating partner.

And wait. The wheel will turn, and eventually there will be a different, democratic China that Taiwan can safely rejoin (though it will certainly still insist on retaining a lot of autonomy). Meanwhile keep the mainland regime sweet, and make some money.

The United States government, by the way, completely agrees with this unspoken strategy. The last thing Washington wants is to be dragged into a war with China by its defence guarantee to Taiwan, and it was quietly delighted to see Ma win the election. So was Beijing. No crisis here.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3, 10 and 15. (“In his…2010”; “Nobody…out”; and “The United…here”).

Malaysia: Sodomy and Democracy

By Gwynne Dyer

Anwar Ibrahim is an unusual man in two respects. One is that the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia is probably the only senior politician in the world to have been charged with sodomy (which is a crime in Malaysia). Not only that: he was charged with sodomy twice, in trials ten years apart – and the charges were dismissed both times. The last time was just last weekend (9 January).

The other unusual thing about Anwar is that he has managed to build a real opposition alliance in Malaysia, which may well end the ruling party’s half-century grip on power in the forthcoming elections. As you might expect, these two facts are not entirely unrelated.

The reason that the National Front coalition has ruled Malaysia ever since independence in 1957, even though Malaysia is a democracy where you would expect an occasional change of government, is fear. Many Malaysians of all ethnic groups fear that the National Front is the only thing that keeps the lid on the bubbling pot of ethnic resentments.

For many centuries the dominant ethnic group in the country was the Malays, but under British rule a huge wave of immigration from China and the Indian sub-continent reduced the Malays to only 60 percent of the population. Almost all of the Malays were Muslim; few of the others were. But the bigger problem was that the Malays ended up much poorer than the newcomers.

In 1969 there were bloody riots in Kuala Lumpur that killed at least hundreds of people, and perhaps as many as 2,000.

The country was already growing fast economically (it has averaged 6.5 percent annually for the past fifty years), and all the ethnic elites were terrified that more violence would kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs. So they made new rules that would placate the angry Malay majority by giving them priority in employment, education, business, and access to cheap housing and assisted savings.

Those rules are still in effect, and the National Front, Malay-dominated but embodying leading members of all communities, won eight successive elections because its “New Economic Policy” (which was really about race) was seen as the only formula for domestic peace. However, time passes and circumstances change.

Malaysia is now a middle-income country where differences in income and education between the various ethnic groups have narrowed considerably. The National Front, after so long in power, has spawned a multitude of corruption scandals. And then along comes a Muslim, part-Malay politician who threatens the status quo.

Anwar Ibrahim began as a student leader demanding an even more privileged place for Malays and Muslims in Malaysia, but he has travelled a long way since then. Mahathir Mohamad, the autocratic prime minister who ruled from 1981 to 2003, picked him as a potential successor and rapidly promoted him to deputy prime minister, but then in the late 1990s they fell out.

Their quarrels were over issues like Mahathir’s toleration of corruption, but the basic problem was that Mahathir did not tolerate dissent. Anwar was dismissed as deputy prime minister in 1998, and immediately afterwards he was charged with corruption and sodomy. The aim was not only to jail him but to discredit him in the eyes of pious voters.

Anwar was jailed in 1999, but his sodomy conviction (based on highly implausible evidence) was overturned by Malaysia’s Federal Court in 2004. Having served five years on the corruption charge, he returned to politics, but now as the leader of the People’s Alliance, an improbable coalition of Islamic, Malay nationalist and ethnic Chinese parties. And in the 2008 election, the People’s Alliance won one-third of the seats in parliament.

So Anwar was immediately charged with sodomy again. Even fewer people believed it this time, and a week ago, quite contrary to expectations, a court threw the charges out. “To be honest I was a little surprised,” Anwar said afterwards. And now that he has emerged from that shadow, he stands a good chance of winning the election that must be held this year or next.

Thirty percent of the voters are undecided, and at least half the seats in the country are up for grabs. If the People’s Alliance wins, it will be because Malaysians of all ethnic groups believe that the “New Economic Policy” (which could be called the “New Ethnic Policy”) is an outdated relic that facilitates corruption, and prefer a government that treats all Malaysians the same regardless of their religion or ethnicity.

Then Anwar and everybody else will find out whether the country has really outgrown its ethnic obsessions.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraph 8 (“Malaysia…quo”).

Defence Budgets and Cavemen

By Gwynne Dyer

If you’re not allowed to enslave people any more, or even loot their resources, then what is the point of being a traditional great power?

The United States kept an army of over 100,000 soldiers in Iraq for eight years, at a cost that will probably end up around a trillion dollars. Yet it didn’t enslave a single Iraqi (though it killed quite a lot), and throughout the occupation it paid full market price for Iraqi oil. So what American purpose did the entire enterprise serve?

Oh, silly me. I forgot. It was about “security”. And here it comes again, on an even bigger scale.

Last Friday, at the Pentagon, President Barack Obama unveiled America’s new “defence strategy.” But it wasn’t actually about stopping anybody from invading the United States. That cannot happen. It was about reshaping the US military in a way that “preserves American global leadership, maintains our military superiority,” as Obama put it.

Curiously, President Obama was not wearing animal skins and wielding a stone ax when he made this announcement, although his logic came straight out of the Stone Age. Back when land was the only thing of value, it made sense to go heavily armed, because somebody else might try to take it away from you.

It doesn’t make sense any more. China is not getting rich by sending armies to conquer other Asian countries. It’s getting rich by selling them (and the United States) goods and services that it can produce cheaply at home, and buying things that are made more cheaply elsewhere. It hasn’t actually made economic sense to conquer other countries for at least a century now – but old attitudes die hard.

If you analyse Obama’s rhetoric, he’s clearly torn between the old thinking and the new. The new US strategy is all about China, but is it about China as an emerging trade partner (and rival), or is it about China as the emerging military superpower that threatens the United States just by being strong? A bit of both, actually.

“Our two countries have a strong stake in peace and stability in East Asia and an interest in building a co-operative bilateral relationship,” said Obama. “But the growth of China’s military power must be accompanied by a greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region.”

Would it help if China were to promise that it has no intention of attacking anybody? Of course not; it already does that. “Clarity about its strategic intentions” is code for not developing military capabilities that could challenge the very large US military presence in Asia. After all, the Pentagon implicitly argues, everybody knows that the US forces are there solely for defence and deterrence and would never be used aggressively.

Well, actually, the Chinese do not know that. They see the US maintaining close military ties with practically all the countries on China’s eastern and southern frontiers, from Japan and South Korea to Thailand and India. They see the US 7th Fleet operating right off the Chinese coast on a regular basis. And they do not say to themselves: “That’s ok. The Americans are just deterring us.”

Would Americans say that about China if Chinese troops were based in Canada and Mexico, and if Chinese carrier fleets were operating just off the US west coast all the time? No. They’d be just as paranoid as the Chinese are. Indeed, they are pretty paranoid about the rise of China even though the shoe is on the other foot.

For the first time in history, NO great power is planning to attack any other great power. War between great powers became economic nonsense more than a century ago, and sheer suicide after the invention of nuclear weapons. Yet the military establishments in every major power still have a powerful hold on the popular imagination.

In effect, the new US defence strategy says that for the United States to be safe, everybody else must be weaker. This displays a profound ignorance of human psychology – unless, of course, it is just a cynical device to convince the American public to spend a lot on “defence”.

The armed forces are the biggest single vested interest in the United States, and indeed in most other countries. To keep their budgets large, the generals must frighten the tax-paying public with plausible threats even if they don’t really exist. The Pentagon will accept some cuts in army and Marine Corps manpower, and even a hundred billion dollars or so off the defence budget for a while, but it will defend its core interests to the death.

Obama goes along with this because it would be political suicide not to. Beijing has its own powerful military lobby, which regularly stresses the American “military threat,” and the Chinese regime goes along with that, too. We left the caves some time ago, but in our imaginations and our fears we still live there.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 13. (“Would…foot”; and “In effect…defence”)

The African National Congress at 100

By Gwynne Dyer

“It’s a bittersweet victory,” said William Gumede, a distinguished South African academic, about the hundredth anniversary of the African National Congress (ANC), which opens with a enormous party in Bloemfontein on Sunday. “This is our tipping point. From here things will go downhill. No liberation movement has moved upwards from this point.”

It’s a grim prognosis, but Gumede, author of “Thabo Mbeke and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC,” insists that South Africa is no exception to the rule. “Every African country thought it was exceptional. If you look at the archives of Nigerian papers at the time they got independence (1960), everyone in Nigeria, in Africa and indeed the world over thought they were exceptional. No one wanted to criticise them.” But then it all fell apart.

It has not fallen apart yet in South Africa. Eighteen years after Nigeria got its independence, there had been a terrible civil war, the generals were already ruling the country, and the average income was lower than it had been in late colonial times. Whereas eighteen years after the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, it is still a more or less peaceful democracy, and the living standards of the poor have at least not declined.

But maybe that was just because South Africa was fortunate to have an extraordinary generation of leaders: men like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo who were intelligent, incorruptible and dedicated to democracy. Without them at its head, can the ANC be trusted? A lot of people doubt it.

Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki as his successor because he trusted him to keep the government clean and democratic, but there was already something wrong there. However saintly Mandela was, the way he imposed Mbeki as leader of the ANC, and therefore president of the country, was considerably less than democratic.

Mbeki turned out to be more autocratic than Mandela had hoped, but his overthrow in an internal ANC coup in 2008 was hardly a triumph for democracy either. Of the two men who played the biggest roles in organising that coup, one, Jacob Zuma, is now president of the ANC and the country, while the other, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, spends all his days plotting to take his place.

Zuma, a man who has faced multiple charges of corruption and rape, miraculously emerges unscathed from the courts each time, and his co-conspirator in the main corruption case, Shabir Shaik, has just been released from prison for “medical reasons.” Malema, an accomplished demagogue, has built his popularity among the poor black majority on barely disguised racial incitement against whites, mixed-race people and other minorities.

Politics is a tough old game in every country, but there is a systemic problem here: the ANC doesn’t do democracy well. Gumede put his finger on it when he pointed out that the ANC, like other African parties that fought liberation wars, had a military structure. “They tended to centralise; there was not much internal democracy. When they came to power they couldn’t break away from this culture, which undermined internal democratic processes.”

Dozens of heads of state and an estimated 100,000 ordinary South Africans are flocking to Bloemfontein to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ANC. They honour it because it brought freedom to the black majority in South Africa without destroying the country’s democratic institutions in the process. South Africa still has free elections, free media and a justice system that is free from government influence (most of the time).

But that has been relatively easy up to now. The ANC still enjoys mass support because of its heroic past, so it has won every national election so far without having to break the democratic rules. The question is: what will it do when it can no longer win without breaking the rules?

That day is probably not very many years off. The ANC’s share of the vote has been falling steadily, partly because of its perceived corruption but largely because almost two decades in power will erode the popularity of any political party. The election in 2014 will probably be the last in which it can hope to win a parliamentary majority honestly.

The most important crisis in South Africa’s history will occur when it loses the election after that. Only if the ANC then goes meekly into opposition can we conclude that South Africa really is an exception to the rule that liberation movements don’t do democracy.

The rule doesn’t mean that Africa is doomed eternally to political oppression and corruption. A number of African countries have passed through that long tunnel and emerged on the other end as flawed but generally law-abiding democracies: Kenya, Zambia, and Mozambique, for example. But it would be much better not to go into the tunnel at all.

The ANC will really deserve the admiration of the world if it can leave power without a fight. At the moment, the odds on that happening are no better than even.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 13 and 14. (“The rule…even”)

Agony Aunt Passes Judgement

By Gwynne Dyer

It’s getting harder for freelance journalists to make a decent living, so recently I’ve had to branch out into the advice column business. The people who write in seem pretty flakey, on the whole, but sometimes their letters cast a useful light on larger issues. For example:

Dear Aunt Gwynne:

People say I am beautiful and my men friends tell me that I am very accomplished, but I have a problem. I married my high-school sweetheart, but he was in the construction business and he went bankrupt in the crash. We are now divorced and I have lots of new boyfriends, but I really want security this time and it’s so hard to choose.

My Chinese boyfriend comes from a rich family who are also in the construction industry. That means they have to give a lot of bribes, but I’m used to that. The problem is that he is not a Communist Party member, and nobody in his family is a senior regime official. What if they execute him for bribery?

I don’t really know what my Russian boyfriend does for a living, but I think it’s not exactly legal. He has tons of money, but his bodyguards never leave his side, so the bed is quite crowded. He bribes all the right people, he says, but sometimes he talks about politics and that scares me. What if the government decides he is an enemy?

The other guy is an Indian, and his family is in the construction business too. He’s really sweet and I like him best, but nothing works in India. Also, I just read that they’ve passed a law in India that would make it dangerous to bribe people, and then the whole family would go out of business. I don’t know what to do. Please help.

Perplexed of Beverly Hills

Dear Perplexed:

You have my sympathy: anguish can strike at every socio-economic level. Let’s take this one piece at a time. I agree that the Russian boyfriend is problematic. Criminality is no obstacle in itself, but if your boyfriend is thinking of dabbling in Russian politics, he will soon be neither free nor rich. You should move on.

Your Chinese boyfriend sounds better, but his lack of connections really is a potential problem. Bribery is as common as spitting in the street in China, but the regime does jail or execute somebody once in a while to show it cares. The chances are no more than one in fifty, but to be really safe one should be a Communist Party member. Only one in a thousand of them ever get punished. Can your boyfriend get a Party card?

If not, you really should consider the Indian boyfriend. Poor infrastructure is not a problem that affects the rich in India, and bribery is a perfectly normal part of life for everybody. I wouldn’t worry about the new law that the Indian parliament passed.

The lower house did vote in favour of a tough anti-corruption law, but they made sure that the new anti-bribery ombudsman would have no control over the Central Bureau of Investigation, which actually carries out the corruption investigations (when it feels like it). Besides, the upper house of parliament failed to vote on the new law last week, so it’s probably not going to happen at all.

Eight similar anti-corruption bills have failed to make it onto the books in India in the past 43 years, so why should this one be different? And why do you feel that you have to outsource your husband anyway?

You seem to be American, from your address, and there are plenty of rich Americans. In the United States bribery is called “political contributions” and it’s perfectly legal. And if Americans are rich enough, they don’t pay any taxes at all. So head up, chest out, stomach in, and get on with it. Corruption is only a problem for the little people.

Aunt Gwynne

Putting my journalist’s hat back on, I must admit that I was cutting a few corners in that answer. In Transparency International’s “Corruption Perceptions Index”, Russia is actually ranked as much more corrupt than China or India. It ranks at 143 (higher numbers means worse corruption) out of 183 countries, tied with Nigeria, East Timor and Togo.

India and China do much better, coming in at 95 and 75 respectively. And the United States, with a rank of 25, is only a little more corrupt than Chile, Qatar and the Bahamas.

Indeed, corruption in the United States is mainly a political problem. The petty corruption that make daily life so wearing in most developing countries barely exists there. Why don’t most Americans take bribes? Because they earn enough that they do not feel compelled to demand bribes to do their jobs.

Anti-corruption commissions and the like can make dents in the problem, but the only long-term solution is to pay people a living wage, which generally happens only when you give them a democratic voice. There is no moral gulf between New Zealand (ranked number one on the scale) and Uzbekistan (ranked 177); just a huge difference in politics and in living standards.

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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9 and 14. (“The lower…at all”; and (“Indeed…jobs”)

NB: You may want to italicise the letter and response, as layout could be a problem with this one.

2011 Year-Ender

By Gwynne Dyer

Every year brings changes, but some years really are turning points: 1492, 1789, 1914, and 1989, for example. Does 2011 belong in the august company of such Really Important Years? Probably not, but it definitely qualifies for membership in the second tier of Quite Important Years.

Three big stories ran right through the year, any one of which would have qualified 2011 for membership status. The Arab Spring is an epochal event, even if democratic revolutions may fail in some countries in the end. The euro crisis threatens the European Union with collapse and confirms the shift of economic power from West to East. And the struggle to prevent disastrous climate change was abandoned for the rest of the decade.

The name, it should be noted, is the Arab Spring, not the Muslim Spring, because a majority of the world’s Muslims already live in countries that are democratic: Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even Iran (in roughly descending order of how democratic they really are). But the Arab countries seemed remarkably impervious to democracy – until it suddenly became clear that they weren’t.

The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were not just about elections. They were revolts against the arrogance and corruption of the ruling elites, against poverty, against the reign of fear that underpinned all of those regimes. But there was and still is a genuine democratic idealism at the heart of these revolutions, and despite all the disappointments and detours that will inevitably follow, something profound has changed in the Arab world.

Similar revolutions could well succeed to other Arab countries in the coming year, but in some cases they may not even be necessary. Formerly autocratic monarchies like Jordan and Morocco are in full retreat, hoping to safeguard their privileges by granting political freedoms to the people. And the long and increasingly bloody struggle in Syria could still end in a relatively peaceful transition to democracy, not a civil war.

We should have learned not to underestimate people by now. The Arab Spring is the culmination of a wave of non-violent revolutions that started in Asia in the 1980s (Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, plus failed attempts in China and Burma). They spread to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in 1989-91, ended apartheid in South Africa in 1994, and brought down Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000.

Then there was a decade-long gap, but now they’re back, and not just in the Arab world. The ruthless Burmese regime is retreating from power under relentless pressure from the pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and even Vladimir Putin in Moscow must suddenly feel vulnerable as he watches the crowds come out in Russia to demand their country back. Non-violence works. It will even work in China eventually.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. The decade-old euro, which aspired to become the common currency of the European Union and even a rival to the US dollar, is in acute danger of collapse, and the efforts of European leaders to save it have been comically inept. Seventeen of the 27 countries in the EU, including all the big economies except Britain’s, use the euro, but that number may drop sharply in the next few years. It might even drop to zero.

The euro was a political project from the start, and it may also die of politics. The initial idea was that a common currency would bind the EU members closer together, but it never made any sense for low-productivity economies like Spain, Italy and Greece to use the same currency as high-performing economies like Germany.

The only way it could have worked was for the richer countries to subsidise the poorer countries forever (like the richer regions of France or Japan subsidise the poorer regions). Then, provided that there was also a powerful central bank to stop the poorer countries from borrowing too much (because they now had a strong currency, which let them borrow almost unlimited amounts of money at very low rates), the whole project might work.

The richer countries like Germany and France had no intention of subsidising the poorer ones, and they wouldn’t allow a powerful central bank either, but the project went ahead anyway. The euro might have stumbled on, amid growing difficulties, for another decade – but the international financial crisis of 2008 put an end to that.

When the tide goes out, as legendary investor Warren Buffett put it, you find out who’s been swimming naked. The European economies were as naked as jaybirds, and so the vultures began to circle (to mix a metaphor). Every month of this year has seen another “crisis summit” meeting of EU leaders, but they have produced no credible solution to the euro’s problems because the richer countries are still unwilling to subsidise the poorer ones.

There are three possible outcomes to this mess. One is that the poorer countries simply bail out of the euro and revive their old separate currencies, which would cause some serious bank crashes in Europe and collateral damage elsewhere. The second is that the euro as a whole collapses, causing severe damage to all the Western economies including the United States. The third is that the European Union itself fall apart.

Option one is almost certain to happen. Option two is getting more likely by the month. Option three is still relatively unlikely – which is just as well, given what a disunited Europe used to be like. But the sheer vulnerability of what are still technically the world’s most powerful economies is now plain for all to see.

The power shift from the old Atlantic world to the emerging economies of Asia was going to happen eventually in any case: the five centuries when the Europeans and their overseas kin were global top dogs are at an end. But the arrogant risk-taking, blind greed, and sheer ignorance that caused the crash of 2008 and its after-shocks are making the shift happen a lot faster.

And so to the really bad news. The Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than even the pessimists feared, massive floods are devastating huge areas (Pakistan, Thailand, Australia), and sea level is rising at twice the predicted speed, but nothing will be done about it for the next ten years. That, effectively, was the decision – or rather, the non-decision – taken at the annual climate change summit in Durban in December.

It has been clear since the debacle at Copenhagen in 2009 that a global agreement to curb the warming was in grave trouble, but the deal in Durban may have been worse than no deal at all. The only existing agreement, the Kyoto Protocol of fifteen years ago, has been extended for another five years, but it only limits the emissions of the developed countries, and even they will not be required to meet any stricter targets than those they accepted in 1997.

The emerging economies, whose emissions are growing very fast, still face no restrictions at all, although China is already the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The target date agreed for a new, more ambitious global agreement is now 2015, but they won’t even start talking about that until 2013. And even if they do make a new deal by 2015, which is far from certain, they have already agreed that it will not go into effect until 2020.

It is not the first time that short-term self-interest has triumphed over the long-term common interest, but it may be the worst time. By 2020 it will probably be impossible to prevent the rise in average global temperature from exceeding 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), which is generally agreed to be the point of no return. After that, we will probably find ourselves in a new world of runaway warming. We know it, and yet we do nothing.

Compared to these huge changes in world politics, the global economy, and climate policy, everything else that happened in 2011 was very small potatoes, but some of it was very interesting.

Three bad men died, two of them violently: North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden. Four Latin American countries – Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru – elected new presidents. Five African countries – Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Zambia – achieved higher economic growth rates than Brazil (though that was partly due to higher commodity prices).

An earthquake and tsunami devastated a large area of northern Japan, and the radioactive emissions from damaged nuclear reactors – about one-tenth of what came out of Chernobyl in 1986 – caused a global mini-panic. But in the end, the only country that announced a plan to shut down its reactors was Germany. (They’ll burn coal instead. Oh, good.)

American troops finally left Iraq in December, still insisting that they had accomplished their mission, whatever it was. NATO deployed its air power to help the rebels win in Libya, but it isn’t going to Syria. And the final shuttle flight from Cape Canaveral went into orbit in July. Dr Mike Griffin, the former head of NASA, said that “the human spaceflight programme of the US will come to an end for the indefinite future” – but the Russians and the Chinese are still sending people into space, and the Indians and the Europeans are working on it.

The multi-national African “peacekeeping” force that is fighting in Somalia grew dramatically in size, although that is no guarantee of success. Sudan split into two countries. And Nigeria faced a growing terrorist threat from the Islamist “Boko Haram” sect.

The race to become the Republican presidential candidate in the United States started as farce and went straight downhill, with each “anybody but Mitt Romney” contender less plausible than the one before. It resembled the old film “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” about a 1910 air race from London to Paris, in which a collection of extremely weird pilots in ramshackle biplanes and triplanes took turns being briefly in the lead and then crashed and burned. So Barack Obama will probably be back in 2012.

There were widespread riots in England in August, and the “Occupy” movement spread across the United States like measles (and went away almost as quickly). They were both really about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, but they had as little visible impact on how governments do business as anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare’s televised hunger strike in India.

India probably grew faster than China this year, though the final figures are not in – and India’s economy, unlike China’s, is not threatened by the biggest housing bubble in the history of the world. That race, if it really is a race, may have an unexpected result, though we will have to wait a couple of decades to know for sure.

Oh, and the world’s population reached the seven billion mark in 2011. It passed through one billion around 1800, and was still only 2 billion in 1940. Enough said.

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I’m not going to suggest which paragraphs to cut if you want a shorter piece, because papers in different continents will have different interests. But any of the last eight paragraphs can be cut (except the very last) without affecting the flow of the piece. For deeper cuts, you could drop one of the three big chunks on non-violent revolutions, the euro crisis, or the climate, though that would require some editing work.