The Human Tide

Weeping refugee in Kos with his children - the face of the future?

This week has seen yet more appalling news about the deaths of hundreds of refugees trying to flee from fighting in the Middle East to the alleged safety of Europe. While over 200 were feared drowned when yet another over-packed boat sank, 70 were found suffocated to death inside a  small freezer truck in Austria, having been abandoned by Hungarian people smugglers.

Yet in the UK, which has taken barely 200 Syrian refugees compared to Germany's 800,000, our Prime Minister's main concern this was was that he and his wife had been swimming in shit off the coast of Cornwall. Poor Camerons worried that their own Government's failure to dispose of human waste properly might lead to them getting tummy bugs after surfboarding in the sea. At least they made it to shore and when they did the people waiting for them were there to protect rather than arrest or abuse them.

Cameron was a leading proponent of the bombing of Libya in 2011. In a few short weeks, British, French and other NATO jets inflicted some £20 billions of damage as well as helped plunge the country into anarchy. After a quick trip to crow over his work and tout for business for his mates in "reconstructing" the country he had just helped devastate, Dave retreated back behind his English Channel defences. And now, although arguably breaking the law in ordering British military action at present in Syria without parliamentary approval, he has continued to refuse to contemplate the consequences of his actions.

Syrian refugees reach Greece. Ordinary people in extraordinary times.

One in four Syrians is now a refugee, while in Libya, millions have fled one part of the country or another. In both places, ISIS and/or al-Qaeda or their offshoots are growing. Gaddaffi may have been brutal in his own way, but under him we never saw Christians paraded on the shores of Libyan beaches and beheaded; women were not burnt alive for alleged witchcraft and black Africans in the country were accorded some degree of equality - whereas now they are routinely murdered. And similarly, in Syria, while in no way endorsing the corrupt cronyism of the Assad dictatorship, a complex web of different faith groups co-existed in peace until weapons from the West's great ally, Saudi Arabia, flooded into the country and helped fuel the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups.

So having participated in making the world infinitely more dangerous, what is our Government doing? Well, the Prime Minister himelf has mainly spent his time stigmatising a mere 3,000 people in Calais who want to come here as a "swarm" threatening to undermine the very way of life of our country. The only idea on any actual action to date seems to be that the Tories want international agreement to invade Libya solely to destroy boats as opposed to do anything about putting right the mess they helped make. If they indeed have their way, how many fishing communities might be destroyed when the invaders decide to sink their boats as well given that they will, of course, become a target for people traffickers whose own boats have been sunk? How will that help anyone?

The bottom line is that our world is now a world of refugees. Earlier this week, I listened in disbelief as a senior BBC journalist questioned a UNHCR representative with "I can see why young men might board boats to Europe to take the risk, but why would a woman take her young children on board?" He seemed either incapable or unwilling to comprehend what it is that people are fleeing from - in Libya, trapped on the narrow strip of inhabited coastline and facing persecution and death, you have three choices: stay and die; go south into the Sahara Desert or go north across the sea to Europe. Which would you choose if it was you, or your children? Or are Cameron and his coterie seriously saying people should stay or even be sent back to exist in the midst of civil wars or under the black flags of al-Qaeda and ISIS?

Of the 11 million refugees across the world, barely 200,000 are in Britain, where we pride ourselves on alleged tolerance and claimed generosity. The majority are to be found in Iran (just under 1 million), Pakistan (2.6 million), in Lebanon (1.1 million), Jordan (2.4 million) and Turkey (1.6 million) and scores of other states, none of them in Europe. While one in every 319 people in Britain is a refugee, the figure is 1 in 310 in France, 1 in 144 in Germany, 1 in 74 in Iran, 1 in 70 in Pakistan, 1 in 31 in Chad, 1 in 4 in Lebanon and 1 in 3 in Jordan. Full tables here. 

Return her to ISIS?

This is not "Europe's migrant crisis" and even with the large numbers coming, we do not face hordes compared to other countries. But there is a global refugee crisis and it will become much, much worse.

Razor wire, patrol boats, hostile media and populist politicians will not solve this. Refugees move primarily for two reasons - to escape poverty and violence. These are growing and with the developed world's cavalier approach to rapidly increasing inequality and the rapacious destruction of our natural resources, both of which have the greatest impact first on the poorest, the numbers now crossing the sea to Europe from Africa and the Near East will be as a trickle compared to what will come.

And the deluge to follow will not be halted unless we take real action to tackle the causes of flight. For that, we will need new international leadership, unbound by the interests of arms-dealing multinational business and free of the prejudice and bigotry of the Trumps and others who are setting the western political agenda for now.

And as for Cameron, as he sits on a sea of crap without a paddle, may he perhaps take some time to reflect on the consequences of his actions. May he consider that the people grasping onto their drowning children as their own lives fade away are coming in an apparently hopeless bid to appeal to him and others of his ilk for sanctuary in a troubled world. It is unlikely, but we can hope that if he does so, he may just conceivably temper his sociopathic hubris with some small degree of compassion towards not a swarm, but rather a tide - a tide of fragile flesh and blood, a tide of lives broken and hopes lost forever; a tide of humanity.

A Desert Called Peace

Not for the first time, the Norwegian Nobel Committee have courted controversy in their choice of laureate for the Peace Prize: this year, it has been granted to the entire European Union for promoting the cause of peace in..er..Europe.

Now, for many who support the European Ideal of a Continent living in peace and harmony with itself, its nations linked fraternally rather than in the constant combat which is much of Europe's tribal history, the EU was once favoured as a potential vehicle for bringing this aspiration to life. But reality has not in truth borne such hopes to fruition and now of all times seems perhaps the least appropriate moment to laud this institution.

Consider that in just the last year:

- leading EU members France and Britain lobbied hard and took the lead in the bombing of Libya, causing literally billions of Euros-worth of damage and killing unknown numbers of Libyans (no count was made). The bombing/missile campaign was at one point so intense that the Britain and France ran out of munitions and had to borrow more from Germany. (Notably, although not part of the EU, Norway also took part in this along with Denmark).

- in spite of the Arab Spring, EU states continued to send Government Ministers and officials out to arms fayres in the Middle East, the Abu Dhabi one in particular being the largest in history, selling weapons indiscriminately. France and Britain are both in the top 4 countries for arms exports in the world. Got the cash? get the guns! Who doesn't remember British PM Dave Cameron's sickeningly hypocritical visit to Tahrir Square in the midst of the protests against the Egyptian military regime? There he was, pathetically hailing the calls for democracy while, in his entourage, arms merchants were busily proffering their business cards to the same military who continued to undermine progress to democracy until President Morsi just a few weeks ago finally asserted some control over the wayward armed services.

In 2010, the European Parliament debated arms exports from the EU - their main findings centred not on the need to curb these revenue earning sales, but rather on the need for greater co-ordination between European arms manufacturers who apparently have not been co-ordinating sales properly with each other. So the EU, supposedly the paragon of free trade, appears to want to stitch up some sort of arms selling cartel to maximise the financial benefits of peddling weapons around the planet.

- and within Europe itself, while there may be little real prospect for the foreseeable future of a war between nations inside the EU, the rising social conflict brought about by the straight-jacket that is the Eurozone austerity programme and the overweening, neoliberal European Central Bank hardly makes Europe a region of tranquillity. Just this week in Greece, the cradle of democracy, we have seen scores of leftwing protesters tortured by the authorities for protesting against the extreme right Golden Dawn party (now the third largest in the country) and in one appalling incident, a young woman protester shackled and marched through Athens by the police to be used as a human shield against protesters demonstrating against the visit of the cuts-wielding German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

This woman was handcuffed and used as a "shield" by Greek police.

On peace, the EU has a mixed and unhappy record: it is true it has at times found just about enough unity to strike out on mildly different initiatives from the USA on the Palestinian question, but to little avail. And when there was a major conflict on its doorstep in Bosnia and Croatia from 1992 to 1995, it seemed paralysed or, even worse, covertly encouraging of the Serbian leadership as it "ethnically cleansed" towns and cities of Bosnian Muslims. Over 100,000 lives were lost and although Europe did fund and participate in the still shaky reconstruction of the country, it failed totally to stop the conflict and we live to this day with the geopolitical consequences - it was there in the Balkans rather than anywhere else that many young Muslims first became attracted to the Islamist claims about the West's hostility to their faith.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been given to surprising recipients in the past - Henry Kissinger received it while he was bombing Laos (though at least he was doing so in secret!) and President Obama was handed it before he even took office in what must be a unique instance of giving a prize in anticipation of some success - given his track record, you might think they would want it back. But then, they hand it to the EU (it feels troubling that this is now seen as a "person" - the prize is meant to be given to a human being under its remit).

Alfred Nobel of course was no man of peace - he invented dynamite and owned the huge arms manufacturing company Bofors, which profited immensely from the First World War. So the whole thing reeks of hypocrisy and we probably shouldn't be too surprised that as the EU sinks further into its current socio-economic mess, the international Establishment may see the award as something to buttress its tattered reputation.

Europe's history has for centuries been one of conflict - interestingly, the only two periods of apparent sustained peace before now have striking parallels to the EU's current dilemma of crisis at home and war abroad. In the eleventh century, the only international institution on the Continent, the Catholic Church, proclaimed crusade and directed the energies of warring nobles towards the Muslim states on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, giving Europe some respite from their constant quarrelling and fighting. The people of the Middle east, however, including many non-Catholic Christians, would have had a rather different experience, far from peaceful.

And earlier still, the Romans conquered almost the entire Continent. They imposed a single currency; they created a single government; they homogenised city society; and they exported their wars into the forests of eastern Germany and the mountains of Persia. The Pax Romana held for several centuries, albeit often turbulently, before collapsing before the German invasions.

And yet when it happened, few mourned Rome. For, as even the Roman historian Tacitus acknowledged, the Pax Romana was not to the benefit of all; it crushed and damaged and imposed a false unity that forever belied its claims of Universal Triumph and Benefit. Rome was an authoritarian regime, its armies and spies crushing opposition when not fighting each other - and so the "peace" achieved was more than a little hollow.

Similarly now: what may appear to be an amazing achievement of decades of peace in Europe needs to be tempered with the fact that this was for a long time set against the context of the Cold War, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and a lot of bloodshed via proxies outside of the Continent. The European Ideal is a wonderful one - but, a bit like the myth of the Pax Romana, it perhaps remains just that - an ideal, not a reality. And so perhaps we should view the Nobel Peace Prize award for the EU as being of the same level of hubris as the Emperors' when held their Victory parades in war after war in supposedly Eternal Rome.

When he recorded the history of his father-in-law Agricola's expedition to Caledonia (now Scotland), he attributed to an enemy chief, Calgacus, the chilling words in which he described the Roman Mission to his warriors: words which echo chillingly through the centuries to whisper in the ear of Europa Moderna:

"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant" - They make a desert, and call it peace.

Attack of the Drones

The last thing you will ever see ...

Under President Obama, the USA has massively increased its use of killer drones - unmanned, remotely piloted aircraft that seek out and destroy targets with aptly named Hellfire missiles at no risk at all to their operatives. The USAF is now training more drone pilots than "real" pilots, taking its warfare in countries like Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan to a new level. And France, UK and USA waged a massive drone war in Libya, taking out an entire regime without a single loss of a pilot - but with many casualties and massive damage left across the fields and deserts of Cyrenaica. Indeed, so complete was the destruction of key Libyan infrastructure, that one NATO commander complained that "It's getting more difficult to find stuff to blow up."

Historically, war has been limited to some degree by the fact that all combatant sides face the risk of casualties. This is what has led, ultimately, to humans seeking to avoid war - but with that element at least superficially removed, what constraint remains, what limits will not be broken?

America has now killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of women and children in supposedly focussed drone assaults to take out supposed (and sometimes real) terrorist targets, killing on an indiscriminately wide scale that in any other context would be decried by the USA itself as an act of terror, a war crime. Their actions are indeed illegal under international law, but the US abrogates itself of signing up to international law, just as it demands everyone else should observe it. The consequences are to turn both it and its British and other allies into pariahs, creating tens of millions of enemies among the vulnerable and poor by depending on brute force to ensure their continued supremacy, until the day comes, of course, when that will no longer be enough. The unending War on Terror is indeed a war of terror, and its unlimited span a self-fulfilling prophecy, a recipe for endless conflict. One of the types of drones is called the Reaper - and indeed, Obama and Cameron and co may want to reflect on the old saying that you shall reap as you sow...

And this is just the beginning. Many nations are now developing robot armies that, in ten or twenty years time will make drones look like stone age weapons - and the bad news for Obama is that, having set this precedent, it won't just be America and its satellites that will have these armaments. As we stand on the threshold of planetary destruction, we are letting our leaders sleepwalk us into armed oblivion. The Age of the Terminator beckons.

So what are we fighting for again?

"Our country can no longer speak with moral authority" 

                                                  - President Jimmy Carter on President Obama's "kill list"

Fighting for western values in the never-ending War against Terror. Bush and Blair used this line over and over; and so too have their successors, David Cameron in the UK and perhaps even more so "Democrat" President Obama.

In the name of this struggle, constitutional freedoms have been set aside, the centuries old principle of habeas corpus has been ripped up, a surveillance society has emerged across the planet, interventionist wars in Iraq, Libya and now Syria have encouraged intolerant strains of Islamism (paradoxically in the defence of supposedly democratic and increasingly aggressive Israel), and a host of new laws have criminalised previously legitimate acts of protest. The British Government is now proposing to hold some trials in secret, without juries, and the Americans are hinting at an attempt to extradite Julian Assange on a capital charge of treason should he ever leave the Ecuador embassy in London.

Meanwhile in South America, in one week two democratically elected leftwing Presidents have been deposed by judicial coups backed by the USA and its corporate masters. And now we also know that, as more American pilots are now being trained to fly remote-controlled drones from the comfort and safety of offices in the heart of the USA, hundreds and even thousands of civilians have already been killed in their strikes, and President Obama is operating a kill list. With this, he is  permitting Americans to assassinate people around the world in an orgy of international criminality which if, say, the Chinese were doing would probably by now have invited threats of nuclear assault from the White House. Often drones are used to undertake dreadfully (and deliberately) misnamed surgical strikes which slaughter dozens and scores of innocent bystanders - such as a recent mission which involved bombing a public funeral.

It makes you wonder, what is it exactly we are fighting for? What are these so-called western values which apparently set us so apart from the rest of humanity? And if they are so precious, why have they been so readily set aside?

"Oh, I got a live one here!" 

Death of a Dictator

Moammer al-Gaddafi is dead. Trapped near his hometown of Sirte by a combination of NATO drones and Libyan NTC fighters, a storm drain was his final refuge as his bodyguards fought to the death around him. Then, filmed as ever these days by mobile phone cameras, he was dragged to a truck, pleading for his life and brutalised to death. His bloodied corpse was then dragged around, still filmed, before being taken to a hospital in Misrata for crowds to come and stare, and photograph a bit more.

The photographs and video footage have been transmitted around the world already - shown on websites, TV channels, newspapers and even described in some detail on the radio. And as the world has gawped and Libyans celebrated, western leaders like Obama, Cameron and Clinton have hailed the moment, declaring their pride.

Gaddafi's regime was a harsh one, no doubt, although many others are worse and to the end the Leader clearly retained the loyalty of many of his compatriots. Thousands died or were tortured in his prisons; his agents killed his opponents at home and abroad (although it remains exceedingly unlikely that he had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing); and he was one of the few African leaders to launch an invasion of a neighbouring state - attacking Chad four times in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He showed little mercy for sure.

And yet, in these final moments, bloodied and humiliated, pleading for his life in front of the cameras, the overwhelming sense was that here was a small, frightened and helpless old man, a human being like all the rest of us, deluded perhaps by his long years in power, but flesh and blood still. In the hands of his captors, he was no longer a threat to anyone. In the frenzy of the moment, after years of persecution, it is perhaps unsurprising that those who seized him killed him. But it does not make it right - and it certainly is nothing for David Cameron to feel proud about, or for Hilary Clinton to breathe a sigh of relief as she claims she did.

No international pariah after all...

These are the same people who happily did business with Gadaffi right up until the uprising against him began., who bought his oil and sold him his weapons and, in Britain's case, trained his security services. While it does seem to stretch incredulity given today's heated incidents to suggest any conspiracy to kill Gadaffi, Clinton's relief may well be as much to do with being spared the embarrassment of a trial and the evidence that would have come out about the West's involvement with the old regime as anything to do with an end to the fighting.

And, yet again, the western media have outdone themselves in lurid excess - the graphic pictures of Gadaffi's final minutes should make any vaguely compassionate person retch: and while in a country as inured to state propaganda as Libya has been, showing his body may serve some purpose in convincing the population that he really is gone, it raises yet more questions about how the international media use the now so readily available means of recording and transmitting the most gruesome and humiliating images to sell copy.

When Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were killed by Italian partisans in April 1945, most newspapers did not print the now infamous photograph of their dead bodies hanging upside down at a petrol station in Milan - that Il Duce's trousers were firmly buckled on and Petacci's skirt carefully pinned up was surrealistically tasteful in comparison to today's Saharan gore-fest. Even as late as 1989, when Ceaucescu was executed by a hastily organised firing squad as he tried to flee Romania, the cameras turned away as he and his wife were shot. But perhaps it was Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006 that showed at once the power of mobile technology - an initial, official video of him walking to the scaffold in apparent calm was soon superseded by several mobile captures of a baying mob remonstrating with him as he tried to pray, and then more of his body falling through the trap door and then his corpse in the hospital. of course, the media just couldn't resist...

That things went even further today with Gaddafi should perhaps be no surprise and it would without question be wrong to ban footage - but the use of frame by frame images of his treatment by his captors on tabloid websites is little more than publishing torture porn to gain an audience. Saw 7 or 8 would struggle to compete with the Daily Mail's series of snuff photos.

More will mourn Gaddafi's passing than the West will ever admit to: his regime was violent and repressive, but it was not without its supporters and in the context of the Maghreb, his government led the way in provision of free health and education services, massively reducing illiteracy rates, and greatly improved the position of women and black Africans in a traditionally patriarchal, Arab society. Many Libyans were sent to the West for their higher education - I recall meeting several at both Glasgow University and Bradford University, all of them proud of their nation's achievements and complimentary of their Leader even in situations where they had no need to be. That, in time, Gaddafi so perverted the dreams of his popular revolution that he brutalised his nation is the truly enduring tragedy for Libya - because today, the violent men who have replaced him, including their western sponsors, by their eager celebration of his killing augur no better future at all for the people of Gaddafi's battered nation.

No page has been turned, no new chapter begun. There is nothing to be proud of - no refreshing rain falls on the deserts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica tonight; only spilled blood mixes in the Saharan sands, a legacy of the hubris that has been and an omen of the hubris still to come.

In better times: the Libyan Leader with the G8 Heads of State, including his nemesis, President Sarkozy of France

Capitalism - Making A Killing

Years ago, American President Dwight Eisenhower made a speech that would simply be unheard of from any US President's lips in recent years - he warned of the growth of a dominant military-industrial complex that would view war as big business and forever drive forward opportunities for conflict in order to maximise their profits. War would be their gain. His words were prescient and remarkable as both a former army general and as a Republican.

There are examples aplenty of how his fears came true in subsequent decades, though given the essential amorality of the economics system of the free market which Eisenhower himself espoused, it really is the logical outcome of the processes inherent in its workings. And yet, the hypocrisy and brazen arrogance of many of those involved remain capable of taking any sane person's breath away.

Former US Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has in recent weeks been highly critical of President Obama's apparent reluctance to get involved in the NATO attacks on Libya. Yet a leading regional newspaper in the USA, the Tucson Sentinel, has just carried this story from Wikileaks, showing how just two years ago Senator McCain and the rightwing ex-Democrat, Joe Lieberman, visited Gadaffi in Tripoli and promised to hurry up an arms deal that the Libyan Leader was keen to get approved by the US Congress.

Indeed, the Senator even tweeted about his "interesting meeting with an interesting man". 

And so, as has happened before with both the USA and other western powers, we sell weapons to people we subsequently declare to be pariahs and we then have a war pitching our weapons against the (usually slightly inferior) ones we have sold them. Back in the first Gulf War in 1991, British subsidies to the arms industry had helped flog weapons to Saddam's Iraq, with British arms companies and Government officials rushing out to Bagdhad to represent the UK at its first legitimate arms fare for a decade. Then, as we went to war with him, he obviously stopped paying the installments agreed for his purchases and so the British taxpayer met the bill for nearly one thousand million pounds worth of Iraqi military effort in the fighting against British and other troops.

But arms merchants, as ever, went laughing all the way to the bank. In the arms trade, it seems you really can make a killing.

Lessons from Libya - and Caroline Lucas on ethical foreign policy

 
As the battle for Tripoli continues, the Gadaffi regime appears to be tottering towards collapse, but huge question marks remain over the future of Libya. The western backed rebels are a loose and contradictory confederation of tribal, political and religious interests; and the intervention of Britain and France in particular in the bombing of the country, which has been largely ascribed as the crucial factor in the rebels' success, is likely to be one requiring payback from any new government. Britain alone has fired over £250,000,000 worth of missles and bombs into a country that last year the Con Dem Government was happy to sell almost as much "crowd control" equipment to, while the British SAS trained the Leader's elite guards (though maybe not so well as it has turned out).

Like Iraq, Libya is one of the few Arab states with a large public sector, boasting clean water, free education (for males and females) and health services unrivalled in the rest of the region. Along with state controlled industries, these are now ripe for the capitalist "liberation" of the economy which has so often gone hand in hand with supposed political liberation in the history of US and UK military intervention. With the rebels already hundreds of millions of euros in debt to the EU for loans to cover their war effort, the level of western influence and pressure on any new administration to comply with European demands for access to the Libyan economy is already massive. Oil is perhaps less of an issue, as it was already substantially in western hands. But public sector privatisation and the sanctioning of the Desertec solar array plan, which Gadaffi's regime opposed, are clearly tempting prospects for western business interests.

While an overwhelming number of British parliamentarians have meekly gone along with Britain's military role, which far exceeded any "mission to protect civilians", Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, was one of just 15 MPs who voted against the intervention (compared to 557 in favour). Today, she has issued a statement which, while welcoming the fall of Gadaffi, warns the West not to intervene, but rather that the Libyans be allowed to run their country free from external interference.

But the lessons from Libya Caroline Lucas calls for include acting on the need for a greater ethical dimension in British Foreign and trade policies - both the last and current British governments happily engaged with Gadaffi in return for cash. And while Deputy PM Nick Clegg talked about Britain aiding freedom in Arab states earlier this week, the same Government he leads with David Cameron just weeks ago happily hosted the Crown Prince of Bahrain, whose regime brutally crushed protests and calls for democracy earlier this year. And who can forget Cameron's opportunistic appearance in Egypt's Tahrir Square at the head of a delegation of arms merchants?

British Governments have to practice what they preach; for now, their policy reeks of the rank stench of rotten hypocrisy and self-serving sanctimony.

Caroline Lucas' full statement can be read here.

Kill all you like - Cameron & the Crown Prince, batting for British business in Bahrain

NATO Uses Up All Its Missiles "Protecting Civilians"

The so-called limited intervention in Libya by NATO, which started out as a minimalistic "no flying zone", has now reached preposterous proportions: in the name of "protecting civilians by any necessary means", the air attacks on the beleaguered country have been so frequent that NATO has run out of missiles.

NATO protecting civilians "by any means necessary."

Yup. The War Powers have been so careful in limiting their precision attacks on Libya, that they have no munitions left. Not even the arms industry, one of the most prolific forms of manufacturing in the world and about the only significant industry still in Britain, can keep up with the demand for munitions.

As reported lately, Austerity Britain has spent over quarter of a billion (yes BILLION) pounds on ordinance to drop on Tripoli. Nearly 500 missiles - Tomahawks costing £800,000 each being the main ones - have been fired from Brtish planes and naval vessels into Libya. The French and Americans have joined in too, with Denmark and Norway showing commitment to bombing far beyond their scale. All in, over 2,000 missiles have been fired into the country, allegedly killing over 700 people and wounding over 4,000 - though it is impossible to verify. So enthusiastically careful have they been, this last week, after some warnings from their military that they were getting short on fuses, Messrs Cameron and Sarkozy went caps in hand to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany.

Although Merkel opposed the intervention originally, she is now happy to get some cash for the German economy as their banks face meltdown in the Greek crisis. And so German shells will tumble onto the Tripolitanian sands for the first time since Rommel's Afrika Korps beat the retreat back to Tunis in 1943.

Isn't it good to know that when there is killing to be done, with the prospect of a financial killing when the "rebels" privatise the Libyan economy, European harmony is so readily attainable? Pass the ammo, Dave...

Taking A Bullet for Dave - The Armchair Arrogance of Corporal Cameron

At least Adolf Hitler had some combat experience, even being decorated on the recommendation of his Jewish Company Kommandant.

As he presides over the "war-in-Libya" but not "war-with-Libya", British Premier Dave Cameron, a man who has never served in a war but happily makes one, yesterday gave vent to his frustration with military commanders who have expressed concern that British forces are overstreteched between their commitments in Afghanistan, Germany and now Libya.

"You do the fighting and I'll do the talking", he admonished them bravely via the living hell of a Downing Street press conference. His ire came as it was revealed that the Libyan adventure - very much his initiative back in February when he rushed round Europe lobbying for a euphemistically titled "no-fly-zone" - has. so far, cost over quarter of a billion pounds of UK taxpayers' money. Each £800,000 Tomahawk missile fired by UK forces at Gaddafi's forces on behalf of the shadowy rebel alliance is the equivalent of a full-equipped NHS hospital ward being lobbed into downtown Tripoli.

Not a sum to be sniffed at, and our Dave has the guts to make clear that this must be seen through to the end. He's ready to have Our Boys get on with the shooting and killing (and being killed) around the globe if needs be. While he will chip in with his gaseous utterings to anyone unfortunate enough to have to listen.

It is fortunate to be alive in Britain now: for 60 years we have been spared a major war. Unlike previous generations, slaughtered in the trenches or mowed down on the beaches of Normandy, relatively few of us have tasted real combat. And even fewer among our political class, most of whom have not even changed a light bulb let alone a bayonet during their graceful ascent from public school via Oxbridge to the Boardroom and Cabinet Office.

It is a well-observed nostrum that in the annals of peacemaking many of the most fervent advocates of peace are former soldiers. Few who have been in a war will willingly entertain another one for any but the most necessary reasons. Notably, in the conflicts in the Gulf in 1991 and 2003, it was politicians rather than military who were the strongest advocates of war - "Stormin" Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander in Desert Storm, argued that the military could and should wait for up to two years for UN sanctions to force Saddam out of Kuwait. But President Bush Snr wanted his glory, as did Junior a decade later, in spite of his own draft-dodging past. And let's not even think about Blair, who wouldn't know one end of a gun from another, but seemingly just loves the smell of gunpowder in the morning.

Yet aren't they so tough, these proud men? Like the later Roman Empire in its sharpest decline, where the bureaucracy and senatorial class adopted military uniforms but simultaneously banned themselves from army service, our politicians are full of other men and women's bravery, ready to take the toughest of decisions from the safety of their offices, the bloody consequences of their actions far out of sight and out of their timid minds.

They are of course put in power and sustained by a massive military-industrial complex, as brilliantly covered by Simon Jenkins in a recent Guardian article here. This shows how, in spite of the removal of the Soviet Bloc and the comparatively fewer threats to national security in recent years, the West continues to spend more and more on weapons and, having acquired them, can't quite fight the urge to find somewhere, even anywhere, to use them. And with the rise of automatic weaponry like drone planes, the ease with which these can be deployed is increasing exponentially.

Dwight Eisenhower

We were warned, sixty years ago. By a politician, yes, but one with spades of military combat experience in the Second World War. President Dwight Eisenhower spoke darkly of the rise of a military machine that, in time, would consume both the industrial and political classes, suborning them to the objective of war.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.  

 ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

As Dave Cameron contemplates his next brave speech, ducking the slings and arrows of verbiage hurled by his suited and sitted opponents across the floor of the Commons, he might do well to reflect, when he does the talking, on just how empty his own words really are.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. (W. Owen)

Libya: Solar's Missing Link

An interesting article today in the New York Times on the Desertec North African solar project, which promises to harness the solar potential of the Sahara to provide Europe with guaranteed, clean, renewable energy. Under the DESERTEC proposal, concentrating solar power systems, photovoltaic systems and wind parks would be spread over the desert regions in Northern Africa like the Sahara and the Maghreb regions. Produced electricity would be transmitted to European and African countries by a super grid of high-voltage direct current cables. As much as 100 gigawatts could be produced and carried to the European mainland, around 15% of total energy requirements.

He's not the sun-king - Gadaffi blocks the new network

Desertec, it is argued, would be enough to help Europe meet its target of 20% of its energy being from renewable sources by 2020, especially when combined with other renewable sources easily tapped by the Continent, including on and offshore windfarms, barrages and ground sourced heat. The North African component is a key part of this project. And for Greens it is a controversial one too.

For while it offers to provide our Continent with clean energy, the political machinations surrounding it are substantial, and inevitably the Arab Spring poses many questions about how  and whether this project should proceed. At its core is an assumption, a need even, for the north African regimes to be friendly to Europe. From Egypt to Morocco, with the notable exception of Libya, the ancien regimes of Arab nationalism have been co-opted to provide solar sites and transmission for Europe. Hence, in part at least, the reluctance to call on Mubarak to go when the Tahrir Square demonstrations began, and the continuing support for some pretty reactionary and brutal governments, especially in Algeria.

Gadaffi's Libya opposes the planned Desertec network

It may also partly explain why the West is keen to see a new regime in Libya. Gadaffi, like his nemesis King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, has been no proponent of renewable energy. Libya has enjoyed a massive income from oil and while the solar project would doubtless convert sunlight into euros (or maybe preferably dollars), oil for now remains more profitable - indeed, tightening supplies in the years ahead promise ever higher dividends for the oil men. Consequently, Libya has declared itself officially not interested in Desertec and it has not been part of the project in spite of both its potential as a site for solar farms and its geographical centrality to the proposed solar network. Will a new Libyan regime, already in debt to Europe for its war funding, take a more emollient view of the renewable project?

Some have questioned the viability of the scheme, and many Greens have argued that it is simply not needed - smaller, more local or regional projects harnessing community and individual resources would, if fostered properly, produce enough for our needs. But the corporations that own and control our energy supplies think very differently - they want massive projects like Desertec so that their monopoly/oligopoly of energy supply will continue even beyond the age of oil. The Desertec organisation, a combination of no less than a dozen privately owned European energy companies, is no exception in spite of its green tinge - although set up as a not-for-profit foundation, its funders and partners, are private companies, making it in essence a "front company" for what is a large, profit seeking conglomerate.

By contrast, microgeneration projects, where communities and even individuals can use assets such as their homes to become producers as well as consumers of energy, threaten and actively undermine the grip of large corporate suppliers. This could well be one reason why the UK Government has effectively destroyed any prospect of significant community microgeneration by announcing the end of funding for most small scale projects.

So it is not just oil that drives energy wars and not just oil that multinational corporations seek to turn into saleable assets. Energy is key to a vast range of human activities, especially those regarded (albeit often rather questionably) as "civilised". As we stand on the threshold of a new age of clean, renewable energy, while we should not automatically turn our backs on large projects like the solar network, let's hope we can at least find politicians with the will to challenge energy companies that seek to prolong their stranglehold on the supply of such a vital resource, whether from fossil or renewable sources.

If we end up turning sunlight into a corporate commodity, what is next? Is only air sacred, or is that a dangerous question not to be asked?

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