Romania's Communist Dictator Met End 25 Years Ago

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This autumn marks a quarter-century since the demise of the Communist dictatorships in central and eastern Europe. It all began on Sept. 11, 1989, when Hungary, which had opened its border with Austria four months earlier, gave permission for thousands of East Germans who had arrived on “vacations” to leave the country, in order to head for West Germany. 

It was the first time one of the Warsaw Pact nations broke from the practice of blocking citizens of Communist nations from going to the West. Suddenly, the Iron Curtain had been breached.

This quickly had a domino effect, and one after another of these regimes would collapse over the next few months.

Most of the transitions were bloodless, with one terrible exception – Romania. (The dissolution of Yugoslavia and its subsequent descent into civil war and ethnic cleansing was a different matter, and happened in the post-Communist period.)

Why was the Romanian case so different? Because the country’s long-time despot, Nicolae Ceausescu, in power since 1965, had cultivated an image of himself as a great leader and came to believe it.

Unlike the other, relatively drab, Communist satraps in the region, Ceausescu had developed a “cult of personality” that rivaled those of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, and Kim Il-sung in North Korea.

The future “genius of the Carpathians,” as he called himself, was born in 1918 to a peasant family in what was, before the Second World War, a backward Balkan kingdom. A Communist, he spent many of his formative years in prison.

While in prison, Ceausescu had met Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, an influential revolutionary who was installed as ruler of the country by the Soviets when they occupied Romania after the war. Just before Gheorghiu-Dej died of cancer in 1965, he tapped Ceausescu as his successor.

As he consolidated his power, Ceausescu became ever more enamoured of himself. He and his wife Elena – always referred to as “Comrade Academician Doctor Engineer Elena Ceausescu” – began to treat themselves as demigods. 

Elena promoted her own fraudulent reputation as a great scientist, and, though barely educated, made sure that the University of Bucharest awarded her a PhD in chemistry. The contents of her many scientific papers were penned by others.

Meanwhile her husband by the 1980s had become the “torchbearer among torchbearers,” a leader as “unique as a mountain peak,” and a man of legendary brilliance. The Communist Party was placed in the hands of sycophants chosen for their abject loyalty to their leader, who was the very epitome of the Romanian spirit.

While the country was increasingly mismanaged, with impoverished ordinary Romanians going without proper food or shelter, there was little overt opposition to Ceausescu, partly because of the atmosphere of fear created by the dreaded secret police, the Securitate, which had spies and informers everywhere.

By 1985 it employed some 11,000 agents and had half a million informers in a country of 22 million people.

Any criticism was ruthlessly crushed; even typewriters had to be registered with the government, to prevent circulation of anti-regime pamphlets. This was a truly totalitarian state.

Giving full vent to his megalomania, in 1984 Ceausescu razed scores of buildings in the historic centre of Bucharest to begin construction of his massive House of the Republic, a huge palace that would serve as a monument to himself and his wife. The largest administrative building in the world, at 3.7 million square feet, it today houses the Romanian parliament.

But the winds of change sweeping through eastern Europe did not spare Romania. The country’s Hungarian minority in Transylvania, increasingly persecuted by Ceausescu, erupted into open revolt in December 1989. Dissent soon spread, the Romanian army turned against its master, and Ceausescu’s regime disintegrated with amazing swiftness.

Having been out of touch with reality for decades, Nicolae and Elena were totally unprepared for their political downfall. On Dec. 21, addressing a mass rally in Bucharest, they were astonished when the crowd booed and called for their removal.

Though the Securitate remained loyal to the Ceausescus and fought the army, they could not prevail. The couple’s ignominious end came on December 25, 1989, three days after they tried to escape the country. They were captured, tried, sentenced to death, shot by a firing squad, and quickly buried, all within a few hours. 

Ion Ilescu emerged as leader of the anti-Communist National Front. He would serve as the first democratically elected president of Romania from 1990 until 1996, and again from 2000 until 2004.

Ilescu admitted in 2009 that the trial was “quite shameful, but necessary” in order to end the state of near-anarchy that had gripped the country. 

Romanians may never see their likes again – and that’s a good thing.

The Ever Volatile Politics of Greece

Henry Srebrnik [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Greece is in grave economic trouble. Its six-year recession has been deepened by budget cuts tied to $321 billion worth of loans from the euro area and International Monetary Fund. The lenders have demanded a structural overhaul of the economy in return for bailing out the country’s public finances.

This has cost Greece about a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP) and left it with an unemployment rate of 27.2 percent.

The crisis has spawned extremist parties on both left and right. In the recent elections to the European parliament, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) won 26.6 per cent of the popular vote, good for first place, while the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn picked up 9.4 per cent, to emerge as the third-largest political party in Greece.

SYRIZA also controls 71 of the 300 seats in the Greek parliament, while Golden Dawn has 18.

But this is nothing new. Greek politics have always been volatile – and violent. It is a very polarized society.

Our images of Greece often focus on its ancient history – the classical monuments and statues, the temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Parthenon in Athens, the martial city-state of Sparta, and so on.

But today’s Greece is the heir, not of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, but of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, which lasted one thousand years before being destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its religious and political capital was Constantinople (now Istanbul), not Athens.

The fervently Christian Greeks lived under Muslim Ottoman rule for some four centuries, slowly regaining their homeland after winning their independence in 1830 following a lengthy uprising.

While the last full-scale Greco-Turkish War was fought almost a century ago, relations remain tense, especially over the fate of the divided island of Cyprus, which has a Greek majority but is much closer to the Turkish mainland.

Greece was conquered by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1940-1941 and suffered greatly during the three-year occupation that followed. The Germans set up a collaborationist government, which included some high-profile officers of the pre-war Greek regime.

The occupation resulted in mass starvation; more than 40,000 civilians died in Athens alone. As well, the country’s economy was ruined.

Resistance movements were formed, and from 1943 on large areas of the countryside witnessed reprisals by Nazis and their collaborators, including the burning of settlements and massive executions by the Germans; tens of thousands perished.

The main group fighting the Axis occupation was the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM), with its military branch, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). By 1944 the EAM had established its own government in liberated areas. It dominated the country except for the major cities, especially Athens, where newly-arrived British forces supported the pre-war government.

Meanwhile, opposition from rival resistance groups from the centre and right evolved into a civil war in 1944.

In December of that year, British troops in Athens opened fire on a massive unarmed pro-EAM rally, killing 28 demonstrators and injuring dozens, and British troops would continue to battle the Communist-led forces. Greece had been a British client state in the 19th century and was again one.

In effect, the Cold War had begun -- – a full half year before the end of the Second World War itself.  The EAM-ELAS forces were supplied by the new Communist regimes in neighbouring Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. It took five more years, and massive amounts of American aid, before the Communists lost.

The civil war left behind bitterness and suspicion. At least 150,000 people had died, and another 100,000 had fled the country. Many of the anti-Communist military officers would become involved in the 1967 coup that seized power to forestall a scheduled election that would likely have been won by parties of the political left.

The “Regime of the Colonels” brought seven years of dictatorship, repression, and torture. It became illegal to strike, to demonstrate, to oppose the government, and to congregate for any purpose except for church.

The junta fell in 1974, after an abortive attempt to unite Cyprus with Greece, which led to a Turkish invasion and partition of the island.

Today, the country is led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, head of the New Democracy Party, founded in 1974. His coalition government includes members of the left-wing Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and Democratic Left (DIMAR).

Although Greece is once again a democracy, the legacy of dictatorship and civil war continues to haunt the country.

Is a Rogue State More Dangerous than a Failed State?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The demise of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 has led to Islamic militias fighting for control of the country.

The overthrow of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003 has seen the country collapse, as a full-scale insurgency by Sunni Islamists has been mounted against the Shi’ite government in Baghdad.

In Syria, a weakened Bashar al-Assad’s regime is now one combatant in a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war that has resulted in the deaths of at least 150,000 people.

There are some unfortunate places in the world, such as these three, that seem to oscillate between being “rogue” and “failed” states. A lack of genuine consensus on the very nature of the country, and the consequent inability to compromise politically, makes the development of democratic political systems very difficult.

In these states, very deep divisions of clan, tribe or religious sect were temporarily papered over by artificial and enforced attempts at unity, either by a “strongman” who invents his own crackpot political creed, or by an ideologically-based political party that tries to transcend the profound fissures in the polity.

Once the facade of a united country cracks, the country quickly dissolves into militant factions at war with each other. 

Given these horrors, much conventional wisdom has it that such countries become vacuums that breed terrorist movements of one sort or another and as such become dangers to the international order. Afghanistan and Somalia are usually cited as a warning, since both, following their collapse, gave rise to the Taliban and al-Shabaab, respectively.

But are failed states necessarily more of a danger than rogue states? It may be true of Afghanistan, which was always a very weak entity, but not of the others. After all, as rogue states, they did an immense amount of damage, both to their own citizens and in foreign adventures.

Somalia collapsed 23 years ago, so many people forget that under the military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, it was an aggressive irredentist state engaged in trying to bring all Somalis in the Horn of Africa under its rule. Siad Barre advocated the concept of a greater Somalia and fomented violence in Djibouti and Kenya.

In 1977, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ethiopia. In the war, which Somalia lost, each side lost over 6,000 killed. As well, Siad Barre’s final overthrow in the early 1990s cost the country 50,000 killed in internal fighting. 

In Libya, Gadhafi, who gained control in a 1969 coup, crafted his own belief system, the so-called “Third Universal Theory,” outlined in his Green Book, which was required reading for all Libyans.

A mixture of utopian socialism, Arab nationalism and Third World revolutionary ideology, it purported to solve the problems inherent in both capitalism and communism and bring genuine democracy to the Libyan people.

In reality, of course, Gadhafi ran a repressive police state. He also engaged in mischief throughout Africa, arming and bankrolling various terrorist groups in countries such as Chad; even the Irish Republican Army benefitted from his largesse.

He was also responsible for the downing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. It was destroyed by a terrorist bomb, killing all 259 people on board.

Iraq and Syria were both ostensibly governed by wings of the Ba’ath Party. Founded in the 1940s, it espoused pan-Arab nationalism, socialism and anti-imperialism. This too was an attempt to overcome the myriad divisions of ethnicity and religion in the Arab world.

By the time Saddam Hussein gained power in Iraq in 1979, though, the party was a vehicle for a Sunni military dictatorship that held the country in an iron grip. Saddam’s secret police murdered dissidents by the thousands, and unleashed incredible violence against Kurds and Shi’ites.

In 1987-88 alone, the al-Anfal campaign in the north included the widespread use of chemical weapons; in one town, Halabja, a chemical attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people. Dozens of Kurdish villages were destroyed, and at least 50,000 people were murdered.

Saddam was also a menace to Iraq’s neighbours. In 1980 he invaded Iran, precipitating an eight-year war in which as many as one million people were slaughtered. Saddam also conquered Kuwait in 1990, and was only ousted after a major coalition defeated him in 1991.

The Assads have governed Syria since 1970, when Hafez al-Assad seized power and made himself head of the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath. He died in 2000, succeeded by his son Bashar.

Here too ideology was a veneer for ruthless authoritarianism. In 1982, the elder Assad quelled an uprising in Hama led by the Muslim Brotherhood, in which upwards of 40,000 people were massacred and much of the city destroyed.

Syria also gained virtual control over Lebanon in the years 1976-2005 and murdered many political opponents there. Following the alleged involvement of Syria in the assassination of the former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri in 2005, Syria was finally forced to withdraw.  Damascus also sought at times to destabilize Jordan.

Therefore, horrific as things are internally in these countries today, they are at least less of an external threat than they once were.

Conservative Republican Barry Goldwater Lost the Presidential Election in 1964

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The march of conservative Republicans to the White House, which culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, began fifty years ago this summer.

Barry Goldwater, the U.S. senator from Arizona, was nominated by the Republican Party as its presidential candidate in July 1964. He faced Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who had become president after John Kennedy’s assassination a year earlier.

Goldwater rose to prominence in conservative circles with the 1960 publication of his book The Conscience of a Conservative. It explored the perils of power, states’ rights, civil rights, taxes and spending, and the welfare state.

But this was the era of liberal activism, and Johnson’s social reforms, collectively known as the “Great Society,” were designed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period.

A number of eastern establishment moderate Republicans tried to stop Goldwater in 1964, but to no avail. At the Republican nominating convention in San Francisco, Goldwater won on the first ballot, with 883 votes to just 214 for Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, 114 for New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and 41 for Michigan governor George Romney.

I recall watching it on television in Washington D.C., which I was visiting as a teenager.

Already targeted by Johnson as a dangerous right-wing radical, Goldwater responded with this famous retort at the convention: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Rockefeller, Romney, and former president Dwight Eisenhower refused to endorse Goldwater in the general election, and his earlier Senate vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doomed him with moderate Republicans. But he did gain the backing of then Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, who gave a well-received televised speech supporting Goldwater.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s campaign proved devastating, highlighting statements in which Goldwater had advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam and had argued that Social Security be made voluntary. It also tried to link the Republican candidate to the Ku Klux Klan.

Most famous of Johnson’s attempts to scare the electorate into rejecting Goldwater was the so-called “Daisy Girl” television ad, which featured a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting the petals; it then segued into a launch countdown and a nuclear explosion.

Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide, winning only five southern states that had been increasingly alienated by Democratic civil rights policies, along with his home state of Arizona.

Johnson’s percentage of the popular vote, 61.1 percent to Goldwater’s 38.5 per cent, gave him 486 Electoral College votes, against 52 for the Arizona senator. No post-1964 Democratic presidential candidate has been able to match or better Johnson’s performance in the Electoral College.

But Goldwater’s disastrous campaign planted to seeds for an eventual conservative takeover of the Republican Party. “A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away,” he had argued. Today, virtually all Republicans support “small government.”

Two years later, Ronald Reagan won election as governor of California. In 1976 he was narrowly defeated in his bid for the Republican nomination for president by Gerald Ford, who went on to lose to Jimmy Carter. However, Reagan succeeded four years later, and then bested Carter in the 1980 presidential election. The rest is history.

Indeed, by the time Goldwater died in 1998, the Republican Party had moved so far to the right that he had joked, two years earlier, that by comparison he was almost a liberal.

Can Rand Paul Ride Isolationist Tiger All the Way to White House?

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Study after study has demonstrated that, when it comes to foreign policy, there is a wide gap between American elite decision-makers and the general public. And it has grown in recent years, given the massive amount of money and soldiers lost in the inconclusive wars waged since 2001, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

While America’s leaders are internationalists and promote globalization and the economic development of foreign nations, most Americans are more concerned with domestic matters, including their own economic welfare and security.

Will this lead to a new wave of isolationism, a recurring theme in U.S. politics?

The Republican Party was historically isolationist. Three Republican presidents between 1920 and 1932 kept America out of “foreign entanglements” in Europe. America’s armed forces were puny.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, was by inclination more of an internationalist, yet he too was unable to swing American public opinion towards war and the defence of democracy abroad, even as Hitler, Mussolini and Japan were conquering large parts of Europe and Asia in the 1930s.

The U.S. did not have a defence treaty with a single country — including Canada — until 1940. It was only the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that changed all that.

The Cold War saw a sea change in Republican attitudes, and Republican presidents after 1952 were committed to a world-wide system of alliances, particularly NATO, to contain the expansion of Communist states such as China and the Soviet Union.

Even so, it was Republican Dwight Eisenhower who ended the Korean War after his election in 1952, and it was Richard Nixon who slowly wound down the Vietnam War. He also ended the confrontation between America and China.

For all his bravado, Ronald Reagan made sure to stay out of any major conflicts during his eight years in office. But all of this changed with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism in Europe.

The 1991 Gulf War saw Washington engage in warfare in Iraq, followed by Bill Clinton’s wars in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, in the former Yugoslavia. Wilsonian liberal interventionism on behalf of “democracy” and “human rights” became the order of the day. (It didn’t, however, extend to the genocide in Rwanda.)

But George Bush’s wars after 2001 have led to war-weariness — they seemed endless and with no genuine resolution.

Barack Obama won election against John McCain in 2008 as the “anti-Bush,” but his own foreign policy is totally incoherent.

A “dove” by nature and philosophy, he seems unable to make up his mind as to whether to fight terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and so he takes half measures such as drone strikes against jihadis in Yemen and Pakistan, and “leading from behind” in the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011. He has no idea what to do about the war in Syria.

The disputes between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and the Palestinians, are other headaches he wishes would go away, even as they consume his days.

So what now? If we assume that Hillary Clinton gains her party’s nomination for president in 2016, where does that leave those Democrats who seek a less aggressive foreign policy? Unlike Obama, she supported George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and she’s definitely more of a foreign policy “hawk” than Obama is.

She is also an enthusiastic supporter of increased military support to those battling terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is in the midst of a real period of soul-searching. It has voices who call for a more robust military policy abroad, even if it costs taxpayers money, but it also now contains many who feel America has over-stretched itself and faces huge problems at home.

Today, 63 per cent of Republicans believe the Iraq war wasn’t worth it, according to a recent poll. So the long-dormant isolationist wing of the party may be reviving, and coalescing around the improbable candidacy of libertarian Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul has long been wary of foreign intervention and also has spoken out against foreign aid programs.

In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in June, Paul recommended that Washington shouldn’t take sides in Iraq’s civil war.

Responding to attacks by McCain and former vice-president Dick Cheney, Paul noted that “Many of those clamouring for military action now are the same people who made every false assumption imaginable about the cost, challenge and purpose of the Iraq war.”

Paul would face long odds, including opposition from the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned Americans about as he left office. Still, stranger things have happened.

Where are Erdogan and Turkey Heading?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been Turkey’s prime minister since 2003, and also chairs the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), has now been elected president of the republic for a five-year term.

Erdogan, the first popularly elected head of state, had the support of some 52 per cent of those casting their ballots in the election held on Aug. 10. His main rival, diplomat Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the former head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, captured more than 38 per cent of the vote. An ethnic Kurd, Selahattin Demirtas, took almost 10 per cent.

Parliament has in the past chosen the head of state and until now the presidency has largely been a ceremonial position, but this was changed under a law passed in 2010 by Erdogan’s government.

The ruling AKP will need to replace him as premier and party leader. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is seen as a leading candidate.

Turkey’s most audacious leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself, Erdogan has repeatedly stated his wish to use “the full extent of his constitutional powers” to be an “active president.” He apparently plans to change the constitution to establish a fully executive presidency, similar to the French or Russian ones.

Erdogan has been criticized for his increasingly autocratic ways, as he continues to steer Turkey along a more conservative and religiously Islamic path, thus continuing to reverse the political culture of the resolutely secular, indeed anti-clerical, Turkish state founded by Ataturk in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

“Today national will and democracy have prevailed again,” Erdogan told his supporters from his party’s headquarters in Ankara. “Today, greater Turkey has prevailed again.” Some analysts suggest that he will run again in 2019, in order to lead the country during the hundredth anniversary of the modern Turkish state in 2023.

Erdogan confronts a Middle East in turmoil, and his foreign policy has faced setbacks. Along with the small Gulf state of Qatar, he is a steadfast supporter of Hamas, and last year hosted Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal.

Hamas is now involved in war with Israel for the third time in a decade. As a consequence, Erdogan’s speeches have taken an increasingly shrill anti-Israeli tone in recent weeks.

 “Those who condemn Hitler day and night have surpassed Hitler in barbarism,” he said late last month. (The U.S. State Department called the remark “offensive and wrong.”) During an Aug. 2 election campaign speech Erdogan called on the international community to “stop Israel’s desire for genocide.”  He warned that “they will drown in the blood they lust for.”

Erdogan said that a normalization of ties with the Jewish state, in crisis since the death of ten activists during an Israeli raid on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza in 2010, was at this time out of the question.

Meanwhile Erdogan, who fancies himself perhaps the major figure in the region, has lost the support of the Arab world’s most important country, Egypt. From 2012 to 2013, under the leadership of former President Mohamed Morsi, a long-time member of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, relations between the two countries flourished.

But when Morsi was ousted last year and replaced with Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Cairo’s enthusiasm quickly cooled.

Turkey’s Arab neighbours Syria and Iraq are both in the throes of vicious civil wars, and here too Ankara has ended up in trouble. Erdogan, a Sunni Muslim, has strongly opposed Bashar al-Assad’s Shi’ite regime in Damascus, nor is there any love lost between Erdogan and Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki.
As well, the Saudis, who have always considered the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Hamas offshoot) a menace, have also looked askance at Turkey’s embrace of the organization.

Erdogan is now relatively isolated – something a few years ago he would have considered an improbable outcome of his foreign policy, when he and his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced a policy of “zero problems” with Turkey’s neighbours. Many today are joking that it now has become “zero friends.” 

The "Tunnel War" Between Hamas and Israel

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The latest Gaza War has made it clear that Israel can’t win its conflict with Hamas without the massive destruction of Gaza, something the world won’t tolerate.

Israel’s “Iron Dome” defensive system has proved remarkably efficient in destroying missiles and rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza – though one rocket that landed near Ben Gurion International Airport did manage to stop much airplane travel to the country for a few days.

But Israelis can’t sit by as rockets rain down on their country -- bigger and better ones with each war (and maybe someday a nuclear-tipped one, compliments of Iran). So there will probably be more such “Groundhog Day” confrontations to come.

Hamas has proved remarkably adept and creative in confronting the overwhelming conventional military superiority of Israel, especially in its use of its massive network of underground tunnels, which are like an underground city, some reaching deep inside Israel.

According to an article in the Aug. 2 New York Times, of the 32 fortified tunnels that the Israeli military has exposed so far, at least 11 run deep beneath the border into Israeli territory. Others are part of an underground labyrinth inside Gaza connecting buildings, weapons stores and concealed rocket launchers.

Alon Ben David, an Israeli television journalist with experience in security affairs, filed a 25-minute report from within Gaza on Israeli television while accompanying Israeli soldiers as they went from post to post. They could clearly see that in almost every house there was a tunnel opening, hidden explosives, mines, rocket launchers outside, and so on.

An Israeli commander pointed out a command center abandoned by Hamas with plasma screens that were fed by cameras focused on the border fence tracking every Israeli patrol.

Ben David reported that there are also some 5,000 administrative, command or logistical, communication tunnels crisscrossing Gaza, allowing Hamas free movement underground almost all across the territory.

Israeli troops in Gaza have described Hamas gunmen who vanished from one house and suddenly popped up to fire at them from another. Hamas fighters are able to use the tunnels to surprise the forces from behind and to attack those in the rear.

The shafts leading to Hamas’s labyrinth are “inside houses, so we won’t see them from the air,” Eado Hecht, a military analyst who teaches at the Israeli military’s Command and General Staff College and at Bar-Ilan and Haifa Universities, told the Times.

Hamas’ tunnel strategy has proved a potent psychological as well as military weapon and is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of the use of tunnels by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. In that case, too, a vastly superior military power was unable to win a decisive victory.

In any case, Hamas’ fighters are now well-armed, well-trained and well-led. In an article written for the Washington Post on Aug. 1, Robert H. Scales, a retired U.S. Army major general, and Douglas A. Ollivant, a fellow at the New America Foundation, noted that Hamas units “stand and fight from building hideouts and tunnel entrances. They wait for the Israelis to pass by before ambushing them from the rear.”

As Hamas militants combine “their fanatical dedication with newly acquired tactical skills, renewed intervention might generate casualties on a new scale -- as the Israelis have been painfully learning.” Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas’s political wing, would agree.

Israeli casualties in this conflict have been far greater than in the two previous encounters with Hamas, though of course far less than those on the Hamas side. It has been the country’s largest single-conflict military loss in nearly a decade.

Gaza was ruled by Egypt from 1948, when Israel was formed out of most of the British Palestine Mandate, until 1967, when it was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War. At first things were relatively quiet. I visited Gaza in 1967 – I remember seeing a burnt-out Soviet-made Egyptian tank sitting in a street -- and 1972, something inconceivable today.

But by 1987, when Hamas was founded, the tiny strip along the Mediterranean was a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism. Israel would have been wise to return Gaza to Egyptian oversight after 1967 – but that’s all water under the bridge (or sand in the tunnels) now.

The Child Refugee Crisis at the Mexico-U.S. Boarder

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer:

First off, let’s get one thing straight: in the debate over immigration policy in the United States, people toss around phrases such as “illegal immigrants” or “undocumented immigrants.”

You’re not an immigrant unless you’ve legally entered a country. The Latin Americans crossing the Mexican-American border are, depending on the case, either economic migrants or refugees.

Also, the immigration discussion in the U.S. revolves around the issue of national identity. Few Americans, including right-wing Republicans, are opposed to people arriving from Asia, the Caribbean, or Europe, no matter their ethnicity or colour.

The conversation concerns Mexican and Central American Hispanics, who, the critics claim, are in effect pushing the Latin American cultural border further into the U.S., especially in states that were once part of the Spanish Empire and later, within an independent Mexico.

The noted Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington raised these concerns in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity.

He contended that the mass immigration of Latin Americans and the proximity of Mexico make this migration different from all those that came before it:

“Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”

In fact, all or parts of Arizona, California, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming were captured from Mexico during the 19th century American-Mexican War. In 1848, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which called for a defeated Mexico to give up about half of its territory.

And the border has continued to be a sore point between the two countries. It marks the boundary between two cultures, as well as between the world’s most powerful and developed country and much poorer ones to its south.

The border issue has taken on a new urgency in recent months, as more than 57,000 children have crossed into the U.S. since last October. Most are from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, countries with severe issues of poverty and lawlessness.

Some politicians lay the blame on the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law that passed the U.S. Congress nearly unanimously and was signed by President George W. Bush.

It gave new protections to children who were not from neighboring Canada or Mexico, stipulating that their asylum requests be fully adjudicated if they were picked up for being in the country illegally. It requires border agents to take them into custody and within 72 hours turn them over to the Department of Health and Human Services until a hearing can be held.

Administration officials say smugglers have exploited that statute and the long judicial processes that resulted from it, persuading Central American parents to risk sending their children on a dangerous journey to the United States in hopes that they would be able to stay permanently.

President Barack Obama has called the surge an “urgent humanitarian situation,” and recently sent a request to Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to deal with these new migrants. Republican lawmakers, on the other hand, want to amend the 2008 law in order to allow quicker deportations of the arrivals.

Obama met with presidents Salvador Sanchez Cerén of El Salvador, Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala, and Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on July 25. He urged them to exercise what he called their “shared responsibility” to help stem the flow of migrant children toward the border, but the Central American leaders said America shares some of the blame for the crisis.

Hernandez suggested that the demand for illegal drugs in America is in part responsible for the violence that is causing the migrants to flee their homes in Central America. The drug cartels now have a great deal of control over much of northern Central America.

In many areas, drug traffickers operate with impunity. Honduras, for example, has the world’s highest homicide rate, at 83.5 murders per 100,000 people, as compared to one murder per 100,000 for Canada.

And when children become the targets of gang threats, there is often no better option available to their families than to send them north. So in a sense America is both the cause and the victim of this crisis.

Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

If you want to know whether the inhabitants of a certain country share a common sense of national solidarity, a good way to find out is – oddly enough – to look at where their emigrants have settled.

That’s because people from the same geographic area will, for either positive or negative reasons, not necessarily live together as immigrants in a new country. Ethnic and religious diasporas are often an indicator of differences back home.

Positive reasons may revolve around religious institutions and practices. Negative ones are usually the result of some form of oppression or persecution in the country of origin. Often both are involved.

Let’s look at immigrants from France. Historically, French Catholics, as part of the ruling group in France, founded royal colonies, such as today’s Quebec. On the other hand, French Protestants, known as Huguenots, fled the country following the mass murders known as the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre in 1572; at least 25,000 were slaughtered.

They ended up in Calvinist settlements, such as Protestant Ulster, Presbyterian Scotland, Calvinist Holland, Puritan New England, and the Afrikaaner settlements in South Africa. Many anglisized their names – Paul Revere, of American Revolution fame, was from a Huguenot family. His father had changed his name from Revoir to Revere.

It was religion, not language or place of origin, which determined where they settled. (Indeed, French Protestants were not even permitted in New France.)

Most so-called “Lebanese” diasporas are actually made up of Lebanese Christians, mainly Maronites. Arabs from Lebanon, if they emigrate, will move into “Arab” areas.

The same holds true for people from the ethnically contested island of Cyprus. “Cypriots,” who settled in many areas of the British Empire, including London, were usually Greeks, and Greek Orthodox in religion. Turkish Cypriots, less mobile, settled in their own neighbourhoods if they left Cyprus, or in larger Turkish ones.

Armenians, especially following their genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during the First World War, fled to secular nations like the United States, or settled among fellow eastern rite Christians in places like Lebanon. Coptic Christians from Egypt have also followed the same pattern.

The “overseas Chinese,” from countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, have often been the victims of pogroms at the hands of Muslim Malay peoples. In sectarian violence in Malaysia in 1969, sources put the death toll at close to 600 Chinese; in anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998, more than 2,000 people died.

They settle in Chinese neighbourhoods when they come to the Americas. The last placed they’d want to live are in neighbourhoods inhabited by non-Chinese people from their countries of origin. Tamils and Sinhalese from war-torn Sri Lanka also live in separate ethnic enclaves.

Countries such as Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, and Trinidad have large South Asian populations who are often at odds with African-origin citizens (or, in Fiji, indigenous ethnic Fijians). When these people move to North America, they typically live within larger Hindu and Sikh districts – though immigrants of Muslim Indian ancestry from those countries may choose to live elsewhere.

The diasporic people par excellence are the Jews, who have lived among – and often suffered abuse from – various nationalities all over the world.

Most North American Jews, if originally from Europe, arrived from today’s Belarus, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. But when they came to Canada or the United States, these Ashkenazic Jews did not settle among the non-Jewish ethnic groups from those places. Instead, they lived in Jewish areas. This also holds true for Jewish citizens who settled in Argentina and Uruguay.

They may have identified themselves as Hungarian Jews, Polish Jews, Romanian Jews, and so on, but they did not consider themselves to be Hungarians, Poles or Romanians. Those were Christian peoples, who in turn also rarely considered the Jews as fellow compatriots.

The same is the case for Sephardic Middle Eastern Jews in North America or western Europe. They live apart from Muslim Arabs and Iranians.

Some diaspora communities maintain strong political ties with their homelands. This is particularly the case when they retain economic links and have advantages of language, culture and personal ties in doing business with compatriots in their country of origin.

But this is rarely true of those minorities escaping injustice. Jews are typically more concerned with Israel than with the countries which they left.

So if you want to get a picture of ethnic or religious differences “back home,” look to the diasporas of these peoples in their new places of residence.

Songs of War and American Culture

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

You can tell quite a bit about a country’s political culture by the songs it produces during wartime.

In the United States, the trajectory has been from songs celebrating religious patriotism through nationalistic tunes to more nuanced views of conflicts to outright anti-war lyrics.

The American Civil War produced the stirring Protestant anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” American writer Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics after visiting a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington D.C. in November 1861 and they were first published in February 1862.

The song is full of Biblical imagery. Here are the first and fifth stanzas and the chorus:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

The popular martial song “Over There,” penned by George M. Cohan in April 1917 as the United States was entering the First World War, was designed to galvanize American young men to enlist in the army and fight Germany. The two stanzas are aggressively buoyant, patriotic but not particularly religious:

Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.

Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.
Johnny, show the “Hun” you're a son-of-a-gun.
Hoist the flag and let her fly
Yankee Doodle do or die.
Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit.
Yankee to the ranks from the towns and the tanks.
Make your Mother proud of you
And the old red-white-and blue.

The refrain sends out a warning to America’s enemies:

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming
The drums rum-tumming everywhere.
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

Second World War songs are less nationalistic and more sentimental. “When the Lights Go on Again,” written by Bennie Benjamin, Sol Marcus and Eddie Seiler in 1942 is wistful, making no mention of German “Huns” or other enemies. The song, made famous by Vaughn Monroe, expresses the hopes for an end to the war.

When the lights go on again all over the world
And the boys are home again all over the world
And rain or snow is all that may fall from the skies above
A kiss won’t mean “goodbye” but “Hello to love”

When the lights go on again all over the world
And the ships will sail again all over the world
Then we’ll have time for things like wedding rings and free hearts will sing
When the lights go on again all over the world.

By the 1960s, an unpopular conflict led to the predominance of anti-war songs.

The poignant ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” became a hit during the Vietnam War. The first three verses were written by Pete Seeger in 1955, with further verses added by Joe Hickerson in 1960. It was popularized by, among others, the folk song group Peter, Paul and Mary.

The first stanza asks:

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them every one.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

And it slowly works its way up to the “message,” in stanza four:

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, every one.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

By 1967, the Kingston Trio had performed it on NBC-TV, one of the many indications that the American public was turning against the war.

All these songs can be heard on You Tube.

It’s interesting that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have produced no songs of note – perhaps because these conflicts, fought by an all-volunteer military, have had little impact on average Americans.

The Rush to Make Russia a Pariah

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

The tragic downing of a civilian Malaysian airliner over Ukraine on July 17, presumably by so-called pro-Russian “rebels” or “separatists,” which resulted in the loss of 298 lives, has, predictably, further intensified hostility towards Russia. 

On July 21, an editorial in the Washington Post carried the headline “The West needs a strategy to contain the world’s newest rogue state -- Russia.” Calling Moscow’s policies regarding Ukraine “barbaric,” it asserted that Vladimir Putin now heads a “dangerous outlaw regime that needs to be contained.”Two days earlier, an article in England’s Daily Telegraph by John Kampfner called Putin a “pariah” who “must now be treated as such.”

But such rhetoric is truly alarming, the tropes reminiscent of anti-Soviet statements at the height of the Cold War. Is Russia now to be consigned to a new “axis of evil,” in the company of regimes such as the one in North Korea?

The Russians are being accused of presenting propaganda to justify their actions, but we’re not getting the whole story.

The Ukrainians are bombing civilians in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk. There are probably several hundred thousand refugees that have left these cities. The Kyiv government’s “anti-terrorist” campaign against its own citizens is virtually unreported in the U.S. media.

So the airplanes the “rebels” have been shooting down are Ukraine’s military warplanes that have come to bomb the women and children of these cities; hence the Malaysian Airlines disaster.

In 1999, an American-led alliance bombed Serbia for 78 straight days, in order to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein, accused of harboring “weapons of mass destruction.” These countries were thousands of miles from American shores, nor were any Americans there in danger. 

I don’t recall any American newspapers calling the U.S. a rogue state.

Eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, borders Russia, and has a substantial population of ethnic Russians who fear the new nationalistic regime in Ukraine. And they have reason to do so.

The Russians must rue the day when they allowed NATO to move eastwards after the collapse of the Soviet Union, incorporating not just former Warsaw Pact countries but even the Baltic states, formerly part of the USSR itself.

While the Ukrainian military shells towns and drops bombs in eastern Ukraine, the West considers the “separatist” militias in the east Moscow’s pawns and holds Putin responsible for the carnage. Double standards anyone?

The Problematic Identity of Israel's Arab Citizens

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The current Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, the third in six years, has resulted in Israeli Arab protests, led by Balad (National Democratic Assembly), Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), and the Islamic Movement in Israel, in various cities and towns.

Some of the protesters were reported to have waved Palestinian flags as they chanted slogans welcoming Hamas rocket fire at Tel Aviv.

Haneen Zoabi of Balad, the first Arab Israeli woman to represent an Arab party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, has been in the forefront of the recent demonstrations and has called on Palestinians to continue fighting, besiege Israel and refuse to negotiate.

In turn, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch have campaigned to oust Zoabi and her Balad Party from parliament.

All this points to the growing anger and frustration among Arab citizens of Israel, who feel sympathy for their fellow Palestinians and growing alienation from their fellow Israelis. As one person put it, “My state is at war with my nation.”

After all, when someone speaks of an Israeli, what comes to mind is someone Jewish. And no wonder: Israel considers itself the “state of the Jewish people”; its flag, coat of arms, constitution, Hebrew national anthem, monuments, and other iconography all stem from Jewish culture, history and religion.

The Law of Return allows virtually any Jew in the world to become an Israeli citizen as soon as he or she enters the country. The Zionist project involved the “negation of the diaspora” and the “ingathering of the exiles,” after the loss of Jewish sovereignty some 2,000 years earlier.

When the Jewish community declared its independence by creating the new Jewish state of Israel in most of Palestine, resulting in a war, the vast majority of Arabs fled or were driven away.

But a remnant, today’s Israeli Arabs, remained within the borders of the Jewish polity. Although they have full civil and political rights, they are, not surprisingly, alienated from the majority Jewish population.

Today, the Israeli Arab population of 1,658,000 represents about 21 percent of Israel’s more than eight million citizens.  Muslims, including Bedouins, make up 82 percent of the Arab population in Israel, the remainder Christians and Druze (an offshoot of Islam).

Acre, Haifa, Lod, Nazareth, Ramle, and other cities have substantial Arab inhabitants; much of the Galilee has a majority Arab population. The co-called “Triangle,” an area in central Israel adjacent to the West Bank, is also populated by Israeli Arabs: the towns of Umm al-Fahm and Tayibe are the social, cultural and economic centres for residents of the region.

Israeli Arabs tend to be poorer, and their cities and towns receive a lesser share of state spending on infrastructure, education, and other services. Arabs are also underrepresented in higher education and most industries.

However, Israeli Arabs are not just a “minority.” They are the kith and kin of the Palestinian Arabs across the 1967 borders, in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighbouring states such as Jordan and Lebanon.

And their Palestinian (and Muslim) consciousness, dormant in the first decades after 1948, has been growing.

Israeli Arabs in the past have backed various iterations of Communist parties, which had Israeli Arab leaders. Today, twelve Israeli Arabs, representing various parties, including Balad, Hadash, and Ra’am (United Arab List), sit in the Knesset. They seek to transform Israel into a “state for all its citizens,” rather than a solely Jewish one. But no Arab parties have ever been part of Israel’s coalition governments.

The rising sense of Arab consciousness has also led to the establishment of distinctly anti-Israeli groups, in particular the Islamic Movement in Israel, founded in 1971 by Abdullah Nimar Darwish. Today, he remains the spiritual leader of the more moderate southern branch of the movement, which participates in the Israeli electoral process, as part of Ra’am.

Sheik Raed Salah is head of the more radical northern branch, which opposes Israel’s existence. He served two years in an Israeli prison for raising millions of dollars for Hamas.

The northern branch sponsors an annual rally where it claims that Israel plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to have it declared an illegal organization.

Various Israeli politicians have raised the idea of transferring parts of the territory in the “Triangle”-- along with the 300,000 or so Israeli Arab citizens who live there -- to a future Palestinian state in return for annexing West Bank territory, including Jewish settlement blocs.

But right now this is a far-fetched possibility. In the meantime, Israeli Arab anger and frustration grows.

Yemen is a Chaotic and Failed State

Henry Srebrnik. [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Yemen, the poorest Arab state, with a gross domestic product per capita of little more than $1,400 a year, remains a country in political crisis.

Located at the south-western edge of the Arabian peninsula, the present-day Republic of Yemen  was formed in 1990, when the north, an ancient Arab kingdom and then a republic, united with the south, the former British colony of Aden and later a Marxist-ruled “people’s democratic republic.”

Ali Abdullah Saleh, who took power in the north in 1978, ruled the loosely unified Republic of Yemen since its formation, until ousted three years ago.

Yemen is a small petroleum producer, but output from the country’s oil fields is falling and they are expected to be depleted by 2017 -- a major concern, since crude oil exports finance up to 70 percent of its budget.

Yemen’s income from oil exports tumbled by over 64 percent to $73.4 million in May from a year ago, due to attacks on an export pipeline, and the central bank’s foreign asset reserves shrank to their lowest since the end of 2011.

As a consequence, Yemen has relied heavily on aid from multilateral agencies to sustain its economy. It is hoping to get a $550 million loan from the International Monetary Fund this year that could help unlock more donor funds.

Yemen was swept up by the turmoil that spread across the Arab Middle East in 2011. It led to the ouster of President Saleh in February 2011. Vice president Abd Rabbu Mansur Hadi then assumed power.

Hadi was the sole candidate in the presidential election that was held a year later. His candidacy was backed by the ruling General People’s Congress as well as the parliamentary opposition.

Hadi had first served as a military officer in British-run Aden in the 1960s, then under the southern People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and finally, after a 1986 split within the southern regime, in the armed forces of Saleh’s pre-unification Yemen Arab Republic.

Hadi has tried to unify the fractured country. He organized a National Dialogue Conference, a 10-month-long series of peace talks that concluded this past January.

It led to an agreement that Yemen would shift to a federal model of government in the future.

Hadi has also restructured the military, which included the removal of Saleh’s son Ahmed Ali from the head of the powerful Republican Guard.

But fighting in the northern provinces of Sa’ada and Amran, between Shia Houthis, Sunni Salafist fighters, and northern tribesmen continues. On July 8, Houthi fighters captured Omran, one of the main cities in northern Yemen, from Sunni tribesmen.

Meanwhile, another tribal uprising, in the province of Hadramout, and continued fighting in Al Dhale province, underscores the continued secessionist feelings in southern Yemen.

And then there is Ansar al-Shari’a (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), formed in January 2009 from a merger of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches.

It claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the centre of the Yemeni capital that left nearly 100 people dead in May 2012. In December 2013, an attack on the Yemeni Defence Ministry in Sana’a killed at least 56 people.

The United States has been launching drone attacks against the militants. In September 2011 two high-profile members, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both U.S. citizens, were killed in an air strike.

This past April, dozens of fighters were killed in the latest in a string of strikes. They came just days after al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a video showing its leader, Nasir al-Wahishi, speaking before dozens of followers.

But drones alone are unlikely to eradicate the threat the group poses to Yemen. Analysts contend that they will remain a serious menace unless the government can address challenges such as poverty, corruption, and inadequate security forces. Also, the deaths of civilians often leads to increased support for the militants.

“There are many reasons for the increase of membership of al-Qaeda, but we cannot rule out that the use of drones and the popular backlash it produced has increased the recruitment opportunities of al-Qaeda,” Yemeni political scientist Abdulghani al-Iryani told the Reuters news agency.

As for Hadi, he plans to run for re-election next year and will no doubt win. But Saleh left behind a failed state which has little prospect for a transition to democracy and Hadi, despite his efforts, will do no better.

The 2003 Iraq Invasion Was Welcomed by Many

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For decades I have kept files on virtually every country in the world. They consist mainly of magazine and newspaper articles, and students find them handy when researching term papers.

My filing cabinets would soon have no room for new pieces if I didn’t occasionally thin them out, and last week I was doing so with the Iraq files.

It was an interesting exercise, especially when I came across articles on the American invasion in March 2003, because today many read like fantasy and wishful thinking.

As early as Dec. 28, 2001, the National Post printed an article by Rich Lowry, “The Liberal Case for Attacking Iraq.” Lowry, editor of the conservative American magazine National Review, called on even “owlish professors and liberal columnists” to become “left-wing hawks.”

He provided six reasons: Saddam Hussein was flouting numerous UN resolutions (including the calls to destroy his “weapons of mass destruction”); women had little freedom in Iraq; 500,000 children had died since 1991 due to UN sanctions, so the “truly humanitarian position” was to overthrow Saddam, thus eliminating this problem; it was also necessary for effective arms control, would allow Muslims to practice their religion in peace; and allow for proper nation-building.

On Aug. 15, 2002, TV personality Ezra Levant, in another National Post column, “Why Canada Should Declare War,” chided “our pusillanimous European allies” as a bunch of fearful pacifist appeasers. And he accused then Liberal foreign minister Bill Graham of hiding behind the UN, instead of following the lead of the United States.

As war loomed, the National Post’s Andrew Coyne on March 7, 2003, in “12 Arguments Against the War; Rebutted,” did Lowry six better. It would not be a unilateral American action, he wrote, since “more than 30 countries” had declared their support. It met the standards of international law, since Saddam had failed to comply with at least 17 UN Security Council resolutions, and Iraq had never “produced a scrap of evidence to suggest it had destroyed” its “massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.”

Four days later, also in the National Post, University of Toronto political science professor Clifford Orwin made the case for a pre-emptive war. In “America is Justified in Striking First,” he suggested that, because of Iraq’s links with militant groups, the “military aspect of the war on terror does not lend itself to other means.”

Orwin warned that Saddam’s very possession of biological and chemical weapons “qualifies as a global threat. He has used these weapons before and he foresees using them again.” Saddam was, he contended, “a menace to international society.” Finally, the continued oppression of the Iraqi people would end with “their liberation at the hands of the Americans.”

In a follow-up article published on March 21, “The Uncertainty of War,” with the invasion already underway, Orwin remained steadfast in his support and criticized Canada for having “abdicated all responsibility” by refusing its assistance.

Finally, National Post journalist George Jonas, in his March 12, 2003 commentary “Why This Kosovo Dove Became an Iraq Hawk,” also pointed to Iraq’s many violations of UN resolutions, especially Security Council Resolution 1441, passed unanimously on Nov. 8, 2002, which had offered Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”

As the war was winding down, Washington Post correspondent Antony Shadid filed an article on April 10, 2003, “Hussein’s Baghdad Falls,” in which he wrote of thousands of its residents pouring into the streets “to celebrate the government’s defeat and welcome the U.S. forces in scenes of thanks and jubilation.” They were greeted with “flowers, candy and occasionally, kisses.”

An article in the Globe and Mail of Sept. 23, 2003, “Iraq Makes New Pitch for Foreign Investors,” by Mona Megalli, assured readers that security conditions were improving, and that Iraq was “throwing its doors open to investment.”

University of Calgary political scientist Tariq Ismail was so optimistic that he planned to help found a new international university in Baghdad, reported the Calgary Herald on Jan. 24, 2004. It would become, he told reporter Robin Summerfield, “one brick in the foundation to rebuild civil society in Iraq.”

But the real war was just beginning. How did so many get it so wrong?

The Canadian-U.S. Border: Assymetrical, Long, and Peaceful

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Do we now live in a postmodern “borderless” world? Not really.

Most borders have not crumbled like the Berlin Wall. Instead, many boundaries have emerged as a so-called “third space” in between countries, occupied by heterogeneous and hybrid cultures, and inhabited by “halfway populations.” The border between Mexico and the United States is one example.

What about the very long border between Canada and the U.S.? The entire boundary, including small portions of maritime boundaries on the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts, as well as the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, is 8,891 kilometres long, including 2,475 kilometres shared with Alaska.

It is our only land border, and Canada is by far the largest nation having a land border with only one country. Unlike most boundaries, it has been one of amity and peace for more than a century.

One of the foremost students of the border is Roger Gibbins, long-time professor of political science at the University of Calgary and now a Senior Fellow at the Canada West Foundation.

In his 1989 monograph “Canada as a Borderlands Society” he examined the differences between the way Americans and Canadians see themselves vis-à-vis the boundary. Gibbins concluded that while the international border had “very limited penetration into American society,” for Canadians “the border looms very large indeed, and its effects are felt not only in communities proximate to the border but also throughout the country.”

He highlighted the asymmetry of the border relationship, which sees most Canadians living relatively close to the border and thus affected by it, whereas most Americans live far away from the border and do not concern themselves with it.

From Maine in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west, the land border on the American side is sparsely populated. States like Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana have very few people in their northern areas adjacent to the border.

The only places where Americans live close to Canada in this region are some cities along the water boundary between Ontario and the states of New York and Michigan in the Great Lakes region, where major bridges and tunnels connect Fort Erie and Buffalo, Windsor and Detroit, and Sarnia and Port Huron.

It’s a different story on the British Columbia-Washington State line along the 49th parallel. Vancouver is virtually on the border, and on the American side cities like Bellingham and even Seattle aren’t that far away.

However, as Gibbins found out in a study of two neighbouring towns only 10 kilometres apart on either side of that border, the Canadians were far more aware of American culture and politics than the reverse.

Sometimes ethnic groups and communities span the border, especially Aboriginal peoples who predated the formation of the two countries. Native peoples such as the Mohawks do not consider the border as applying to them. The Mohawk First Nation of Akwesasne straddles the intersection of the American-Canadian international border as well as the Ontario-Quebec provincial border, on both banks of the St. Lawrence River.

Most of the land is in New York state, where it is known as the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation. Although divided by borders, the residents consider themselves to be one community. The Mohawks view their territory as a “sovereign nation.”

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, the boundary between Canada and the United States became more apparent. The line itself did not change, but crossing the border became more protracted, less civil and generally more complex.

This “thickening” of the border resulted in delays at many checkpoints, as crossings were placed on alert, and measures were taken to enhance security. I was on an airplane flying between Winnipeg and Montreal that set down in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., on Sept. 11, 2001, where I spent the next three days.

The international bridge linking it to its neighbour on Michigan’s upper peninsula, also named Sault Ste. Marie, was shut and I couldn’t cross into Michigan.

Even so, the Canada-U.S. border remains one of the least militarized in the world.

Do Elections Help in Divided Societies?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The following countries have held parliamentary or presidential elections so far this year: Afghanistan, Algeria, El Salvador, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malawi, Mauritania, Panama, Thailand, and Ukraine.

So what? you might remark. After all, that’s quite a rogue’s gallery.

Yet for many people, elections have become the sine qua non of democracy. Our television screens show us people lined up at polling stations, eager to cast their ballots, and commentators usually let us know how excited these voters are to “finally” have a say in the governance of their country.

But in fact, in states without a robust civil society, the rule of law, protection of human rights, and a political culture that tolerates diversity of opinion, elections may even exacerbate, rather than resolve, deep cleavages within the policy – even if they have been relatively free and honest.

In most such places, though, opposition parties often boycott what they consider to be a foregone conclusion; or, if they do contest the election, they invariably claim – usually correctly – that widespread fraud, intimidation, and other irregularities have rendered the result invalid. In many countries, furthermore, so many parties are in the running that no one ever wins a convincing mandate.

Also, only too often, governments brought to power are fairly quickly dispatched in coups (Thailand), or themselves become highly autocratic and sectarian (Iraq). Some countries seem to be in a permanent state of alternation between civilian and military-authoritarian  rule (Nigeria, Pakistan), or are such failed states, with component groups fielding their own armies, that elections are completely meaningless (Lebanon).

In yet others -- Central American oligarchies such as Guatemala and Honduras – incredible inequality makes for continuous political and criminal violence. Elections are irrelevant, held merely to please some foreign capital like Washington.

Political parties are typically simply the vehicles for non-democratic elements to gain control and impose their own brand of autocracy (and, not coincidentally, gain access to the state’s resources).

Elections can’t paper over issues of what political scientists Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan called problems of “stateness” in places where “there are profound differences about the territorial boundaries of the political community’s state and profound differences as to who has the right of citizenship in that state.”

These are matters relating to the very definition of the country and usually revolve around deep-seated class, ethnic, religious, and/or regional conflicts, often involving repression of aggrieved minorities without a share of power. Each group votes for its champion, so, as political scientist Donald Horowitz has written, elections are little more than a census count. Demographics neatly predict party support levels.

For example: Although Sri Lanka has never ceased to be an electoral democracy, the lack of genuine political power by the minority Tamils led to a vicious decades-old civil war in which tens of thousands of people were slaughtered. In pre-1974 Cyprus, ethnic bloc voting by Greeks meant that the Turks, with fewer people, could never hold power. It ended with partition.

In Africa, political violence broke out after the adoption of democracy in various countries, including Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and Togo, as different ethnic and religious groups vied for power.

Such issues even affect states such as Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and have led to violence, despite the fact that they are, unlike our earlier examples, robust democracies.

So, as author and journalist Robert Kaplan has observed, in many states without a genuine sense of national consciousness, what is left when authoritarian rulers are deposed are tribes, clans, and sects; they have now, for instance, become the most important actors in entities like Libya and Yemen.

Libyans went to the polls June 25 to elect a new parliament. But one of Libya’s most prominent human rights activists, Salwa Bugaighis, was assassinated in her home in Benghazi -- shortly after she had voted.

To make my point at its most basic level, ask yourself this: would you rather have lived in a colony without any internal self-rule at all, but with the rule of law, like pre-1990s Hong Kong, or in a sovereign state with “elections,” like Zimbabwe?

You know the answer.

A Sunni State in the Fertile Crescent?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The various Sunni jihadist groups, in particular the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who are battling the Shia regimes in Iraq and Syria, are attempting to carve out a Sunni emirate in parts of both countries (and possibly also in Jordan).

ISIS formally declared the creation of an Islamic State on June 29, its territory stretching from the northern Syrian province of Aleppo to the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is its new leader.

But this should come as little surprise. These countries are all artificial creations, the fruits of French and British imperialist cartography following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

Syria and Iraq (then known as Mesopotamia) were little more than geographic expressions prior to the 20th century. But the Allies would give them definite boundaries, which more or less remained stable until recent years.

In a secret 1916 accord between a British colonel, Sir Mark Sykes, and a French diplomat, François Georges-Picot, London and Paris agreed upon the division of Ottoman territories should the Turks lose the war.

They were believers in the notion that the people of the region would be better off under the European empires.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement carved up the Fertile Crescent. France obtained Lebanon and Syria, while Britain took Iraq and Palestine (today’s Israel and Jordan). Needless to say, no Arabs were consulted.

The deal was formalized by the newly-formed League of Nations after the war; it allocated these territories as “mandates” to be governed by France and Britain. Though the new Iraq was officially designated a kingdom, it was also effectively under British control.

The colonial powers lumped together Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Christians, and other minorities, with little regard for the animosities these groups had felt towards each other for many centuries.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, pan-Arabists sought to unite the Arab world into one super-state. This failed miserably. Since then, sectarian forms of Islam have replaced secular nationalism as a rallying cry, leading to the present discord in the region.

ISIS’s emergence can be traced to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which arose in response to the American invasion in 2003. The group was active in the insurgency in Iraq, but when civil war broke out along sectarian lines in Syria in 2011, many ISIS members crossed the border to fight with other al-Qaeda-affiliated groups against the Shia Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Now they are back in Iraq again. One of the reasons they were able to easily take cities like Mosul and Tikrit is because these are fundamentally Sunni cities that feel marginalized by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia. Many ordinary Sunnis describe this as a popular revolution against a Shia-led government, not a terrorist onslaught.

Given the growing Shia-Sunni war throughout the region, other states and groups have also lined up with ISIS. A large part of their financing comes from wealthy benefactors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states.

On the other hand, Assad and Maliki depend on arms and money from fellow-Shia Iran. In little Lebanon, itself a microcosm of the region, the country’s Shia militia, Hezbollah, is fighting alongside Syria’s army, while Sunni Lebanese provide aid to the rebels.

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria are to some extent proxy wars that pit Saudi Arabia against Iran.

It seems the arbitrary borders created by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the product of a now long-discredited zeitgeist, may soon themselves become little more than history.

Why Putin is no Hitler

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

At his own request, the upper house of the Russian parliament has revoked President Vladimir Putin’s authorization to invade Ukraine. The Federation Council voted 153 to 1 to cancel its resolution of March 1 allowing Putin to send Russian troops to Ukraine.

Yet American officials remain unconvinced that he has backed up words with deeds. They considered the move positive but symbolic, assuming that it was really meant to undercut European support for additional sanctions. Instead, they mocked Putin by calling it a “charm offensive.”

Ever since the crisis in Ukraine began, with the overthrow of the legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, war drums have been beating in the West.

They have defined as “aggression” Putin’s attempts to make certain Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine don’t get trampled by the nationalist Ukrainians in the west – the heirs of those who fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in World War II.

To add to the insult, people like Hillary Clinton and Prince Charles, who should know better, have glibly compared Putin to – wait for it – Adolf Hitler! I guess even a lesser tyrant like Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of pre-war Italy, or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad won’t do.

The comparison was due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But that’s a special case.
The great majority of the population of the peninsula, almost physically cut off from the rest of the country, is ethnically, linguistically, and religiously Russian. The majority of its population prefers to be ruled from Moscow rather than Kyiv and it has been part of Russia for centuries.

So why has it been Ukrainian? The answer: a dead dictator’s whim.  Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev 60 years ago detached Crimea from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic and gave it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, without consulting anyone – including the population of the peninsula.

It didn’t matter much anyhow, as in reality everyone in the Soviet Union was ruled from the Kremlin anyway. But after 1991, when the USSR collapsed, the Russians in the Crimea found themselves under Ukrainian sovereignty.

At least this time there was a referendum – the result overwhelmingly favourable to rejoining Russia.

But American observers insisted this annexation, which righted an historical injustice, was only the first step on Moscow’s part to grab more Ukrainian territory. CNN for weeks ran almost daily “breaking news” alarmist clips warning of Russian troop movements near the Ukrainian border – as if there was something illegal about a country moving its forces around within its own territory.

In fact, it’s the outgunned “rebels” in the east, not the Ukrainian army, that have been suffering most of the casualties, and have begged Putin to intervene. The Ukrainian military has been using air strikes and artillery attacks against them.

Unlike Hitler, Putin hasn’t sent forces across the border, though there has been enough provocation for him to invoke an international norm like R2P (“responsibility to protect”) to do so.

Instead, he keeps calling for substantive negotiations between the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko – who was elected with virtually no ethnic Russian support.

Putin said that declaring a cease-fire and asking the rebels to disarm without addressing their long-term political grievances would yield nothing. The separatists want increased autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk.

 “If we see there are substantive talks, so that people in eastern Ukraine can finally understand how their legal interests will be guaranteed, then there is a high possibility of success,” Putin indicated.

He also charged that Kyiv not done enough to disarm an anti-Russian group called Right Sektor. Without that, it did not make sense to call on the militias in the east to disarm.

The Ukrainian president has now also signed a sweeping trade deal with the European Union that calls for the establishment of a “deep and comprehensive free-trade area.”

Russia sees the agreement as a serious threat to its own historically close ties to Ukraine. “The anti-constitutional coup in Kiev and attempts to artificially impose a choice between Europe and Russia on the Ukrainian people have pushed society toward a split and painful confrontation,” Putin said. But again, there has been no threat of military action by Moscow.

If only Hitler had been more like Putin! The Second World War might never have occurred.