Iraq exposes the west’s hypocrisy in the Middle East

It’s right to take military action to protect Yazidi people. But the west’s record on who gets saved and who doesn’t is shameful

• 
• • Carne Ross
  • The Guardian, Monday 11 August 2014 20.30 BST

Kurdish soldiers keep guard on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A friend from Pristina once told me that the happiest day of his life was when he heard Nato cruise missiles over his home town. This was in 1999 when Nato intervened from the air to stop the Serb campaign to drive Albanians from Kosovo. Often military intervention is wrong, but sometimes it is right. It was right in Kosovo, and Libya in 2011, and it is right today in northern Iraq.

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Also read 

Muslim double standards abound

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I resigned from the British foreign office because my government lied about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. My scepticism about western motives runs deep. But the evident suffering of the Yazidis and others, and the imminent threat to the hitherto stable region of Kurdistan, overcomes these doubts. The views of the Yazidis and the Kurdistan regional government are clear. Their views matter most.

But the intervention in northern Iraq highlights the hypocrisy that characterises western policies in the Middle East. Who gets saved and who doesn’t? In Egypt, the west supports an authoritarian dictatorship where thousands, from Muslim Brothers to secular democrats like Alaa Abd El Fattah, are incarcerated in appalling, torturous jails. In Palestine, the US resupplied bombs to Israel during its callous bombardment of Gaza. And in Iraq itself, the US chose currently embattledNouri al-Maliki as prime minister, and continued to support him even after his militias had scythed down Sunnis and imprisoned thousands for their ethnicity. The UK government gives its tacit support to all of this, with a calculated display of rhetorical hand-wringing.

The west has worked itself into a grotesque muddle in the Middle East, supporting dictatorships in some places, calling for others to end; condemning the killings of civilians in one place, in another condoning them. These are the double standards that will be exploited by extremists across the world; a fount of terrorism that will continue to haunt us.

For too long, western policy has been guided by abstract and invented notions of “interests” and “security”, arbitrary guidelines that long ago degraded into “our friends” and “their enemies”. A new doctrine is needed, based on clear principles: protection of civilians, promoting local solutions, consistent rewards and punishments, all included in a comprehensive approach.

As everywhere, the welfare of civilians should come first and guide all policy. This offers a clear signpost in Kurdistan but also Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In cases of violent repression, this means giving populations the means for self-defence. In extremis, it might mean military intervention.

Since Sykes and Picot carved up the Middle East a century ago, the west has imposed its own simplistic designs on the complexities of the region. Instead, it must always facilitate local discussion, without assumptions such as that Iraq should remain as one state. If the Kurds want their own state, we should not be the ones to stop them. Our role should be to aim for a negotiated solution, with clear protections for minorities.

When John Kerry visits Cairo bringing attack helicopters for President Sisi, it cannot be a surprise that the regime pays no attention when he calls for the release of political prisoners. Rhetoric counts for very little. Criticism over the shelling of UN schools in Gaza doesn’t matter when in private officials reassure Israel that support continues. If a government abuses its population or fails to engage in inclusive political dialogue, it should be criticised, then condemned, then shunned and, if it continues, sanctioned. This applies in Saudi Arabia; it should apply in Iraq, but also in Israel.

Western policy does not connect the dots between the interconnected crises of the Middle East. Protecting civilians in Syria means giving the means of self-defence, such as anti-aircraft missiles, to the moderate opposition (which my organisation advises). This would have limited the rise of Isis in Syria, preventing the threat in Iraq and thus the necessity of military intervention. Pounding Isis in Iraq won’t stop the danger re-emerging from Syria. Condoning repression in Egypt will sustain the terrorist threat worldwide.

These principles highlight the mess of western policy. Following them would, in the longer term, help put it right.

One in 10 do not have a close friend and even more feel unloved, survey finds

Study by relationship counsellor Relate finds a divided nation with many left without vital support of friends and family

• Alexandra Topping
• The Guardian, Tuesday 12 August 2014

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and fewer still feel loved. Photograph: keith morris / Alamy/Alamy

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and one in five feel unloved, according to a survey published on Tuesday by the relationship charity Relate.

One in 10 people questioned said they did not have a close friend, amounting to an estimated 4.7 million people in the UK may be leading a very lonely existence.

Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of Relate, said the survey revealed a divided nation with many people left without the vital support of friends or partners.

While the survey found 85% of individuals questioned felt they had a good relationship with their partners, 19% had never or rarely felt loved in the two weeks before the survey.

"Whilst there is much to celebrate, the results around how close we feel to others are very concerning. There is a significant minority of people who claim to have no close friends, or who never or rarely feel loved – something which is unimaginable to many of us," said Sutherland.

"Relationships are the asset which can get us through good times and bad, and it is worrying to think that there are people who feel they have no one they can turn to during life's challenges. We know that strong relationships are vital for both individuals and society as a whole, so investing in them is crucial."

The study looked at 5,778 people aged 16 and over across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and asked about people's contentment with all aspects of their relationships, including their partners, friends, workmates and bosses. It found that people who said that they had good relationships had higher levels of wellbeing, while poor relationships were detrimental to health, wellbeing and self-confidence.

The study found that 81% of people who were married or cohabiting felt good about themselves, compared with 69% who were single.

The quality of relationship counts for a lot, according to the survey: 83% of those who described their relationship as good or very good reported feeling good about themselves while only 62% of those who described their relationship as average, bad or very bad reported the same level of personal wellbeing.

The survey, The Way We Are Now 2014, showed that while four out of five people said they had a good relationship with their partner, far fewer were happy with their sex lives. One in four people admitted to being dissatisfied with their sex life, and one in four also admitted to having an affair.

There was also evidence of the changing nature of family life – and increasing divorce rates – in the survey, which found that almost one in four of the people questioned had experienced the breakdown of their parents' relationship.

When it comes to the biggest strains put on relationships, a significant majority (62%) cited money troubles as the most stressful factor.

The survey also found that older people are more worried about money, with 69% of those aged 65 and over saying money worries were a major strain, compared with only 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds.

When it comes to employment, many of those questioned had a positive relationship with their bosses, but felt putting work before family was highly valued in the workplace.

Just under 60% of people said they had a good relationship with their boss, but more than one in three thought their bosses believed the most productive employees put work before family. It also appears that work can be quite a lonely place too: 42% of people said they had no friends at work.

Nine out of 10 people, however, said they had a least one close friend, with 81% of women describing their friendships as good or very good compared with 73% of men.

Crony capitalism a big threat to countries like India, RBI chief Raghuram Rajan says

MUMBAI: Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan has warned against crony capitalism which he said creates oligarchies and slows down growth. 

"One of the greatest dangers to the growth of developing countries is the middle income trap, where crony capitalism creates oligarchies that slow down growth. If the debate during the elections is any pointer, this is a very real concern of the public in India today," said Rajan while delivering the Lalit Doshi memorial lecture in Mumbai on Monday. 

The last general election was fraught with allegations of the nexus between politicians and business groups.

RBI governor Raghuram Rajan (left) with finance minister Arun Jaitley. 

Rajan extolled the virtues of India's democracy before turning to its darker aspects. "An important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians. By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, opportunity, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression. If there is some truth to these perceptions of crony capitalism, a natural question is why people tolerate it. Why do they vote for the venal politician who perpetuates it?" 

Rajan continued by saying, "One widely held hypothesis is that our country suffers from want of a 'few good men' in politics. This view is unfair to the many upstanding people in politics. But even assuming it is true, every so often we see the emergence of a group, usually upper middle class professionals, who want to clean up politics. But when these 'good' people stand for election, they tend to lose their deposits. Does the electorate really not want squeaky clean government?


Finance minister Arun Jaitley (left), with RBI governor (second from left in front) during a meeting. 

"Apart from the conceit that high morals lie only with the upper middle class, the error in this hypothesis may be in believing that problems stem from individual ethics rather than the system we have. In a speech I made before the Bombay Chamber of Commerce in 2008, I argued that the tolerance for the venal politician is because he is the crutch that helps the poor and underprivileged navigate a system that gives them so little access. This may be why he survives." 

The governor's warning against crony capitalism and oligarchies is a reiteration of his statements four days before the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. In a speech at the Bombay Chamber, Rajan had highlighted that India had the highest number of billionaires per trillion dollars of GDP after Russia. While excluding NR Narayana Murthy, Azim Premji, and Ratan Tata as 'deservedly respected', Rajan had said "three factors — land, natural resources, and government contracts or licenses — are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires. And all of these factors come from the government."

Muslim double standards abound

Tarek Fatah in The Toronto Sun

If there is a God, he has some explaining to do.

On the one hand he tells us Muslims in the Qur’an that we are “the best of peoples, evolved for mankind”, but then showers us with leaders who bring out the worst in the human soul.

If the murderous spree some of my fellow Muslims have embraced is not enough, their hypocrisy of playing the victim card makes the rest of the world cringe in anger, if not outrage.

As I write, Muslims around the world have taken to the streets and social media to protest Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, that has resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 Palestinians.

Undoubtedly the death of 200 Arabs, many of them civilian women and children, is tragic and worthy of condemnation.

However, just next door to Israel almost 200,000 Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs in Syria, but that tragedy has triggered no public demonstrations of anger in Islamic capitals, let alone in Toronto.

Let us examine two military operations by two countries against what they describe as Islamic terrorists belonging to radical jihadi movements.

While Israel’s Operation Protective Edge is making the lead story around the world, few are aware of Pakistan’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb (Strike of Prophet Muhammad’s Sword) underway against the Taliban inside Pakistan.

Israel’s military operations have killed about 200 and displaced about 17,000 Palestinians from their homes in Gaza.

Pakistan’s military operations, on the other hand, have killed over 400 and made over 900,000 Pashtun Pakistanis homeless and destitute in their own country.

While the 17,000 Palestinians are finding shelter in United Nations Relief and Works Agency structures, nearly one million Pakistanis are facing a catastrophe that has triggered neither media coverage, nor international aid or protest.

On Monday, a day after an Israeli missile killed 18 family members of the Hamas police chief in Gaza, Iraqi men in Baghdad slaughtered 28 Iraqi women.

There was plenty of fury over the dead family, almost none for the women, for they were alleged to be residents of a brothel, as if that mattered.

Allah’s “best of peoples, evolved for mankind”, clearly live by a double standard, the one that triggers mammoth support for Palestinians but absolutely none for Pashtuns.

Here’s why. It is not the race or religion of the victim that counts, but the identity of their tormentor.

As long as it’s an Arab army annihilating fellow Arabs or a Muslim military murdering fellow Muslims, too many Muslims simply shrug away our responsibility and say, “leave it to Allah” as the Qur’an supposedly commands.

However, if the Muslim falls victim to the “kuffar” — meaning the Jew, Christian or Hindu — then many of our clerics take to the pulpit and deliver fiery, end-of-times lectures, using the tragedy as a reason to ignite hatred against the other, in most cases “The Jew”.

I wonder if God has heard this mosque sermon by a prominent Pakistani cleric.

“And a time is about to come when Allah would bestow such a success on Islam that there would not be a single Jew left on the face of the earth. … And when the last Jew will be killed from this world, then peace would be established in the world …”

It would appear the depth of hatred many of God’s “best of people” disseminate, needs his attention.

That is, if he is listening at all.​

Mobile phone companies have failed – it's time to nationalise them

It may sound like off-the-wall leftiness, but there are clear and convincing arguments for a nationalised mobile phone network

• 
• • Owen Jones
  • The Guardian, Monday 11 August 2014

Mobile phone companies put profit before the needs of the consumer. Photograph: Alamy

Nationalisation is a taboo among the political and media elite, its mere mention guaranteed to provoke near-instantaneous shrieks of "dinosaur!" and "go back to the 1970s". Imagine the Establishment's horror, then, when a succession of recent polls found that nearly seven out of 10 Britons wanted the renationalisation of energy, and two-thirds of the electorate wanted rail and Royal Mail back in public hands. Even Ukip voters – those notorious bastions of pinko leftiness – overwhelmingly backed the renationalisation of key utilities. While our political overlords are besotted with Milton Friedman, on many issues the public seem to be lodged somewhere between John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx.

Previously state-owned services are one thing: but what about the mobile phone network? Even the very suggestion is inviting ridicule. But if people are so keen for public ownership of rail, why is the case any weaker for mobile phones? They are a natural monopoly, and the fragmentation of the telecommunications network is inefficient. Their service is often poor because they put profit ahead of the needs of the consumer. And rather than being the product of a dynamic free market and individual plucky entrepreneurs, their technological success owes everything to the public sector. It might seem like barking leftiness on speed, but the arguments for nationalising phone networks are less absurd than they might appear.

The eternal irritation of any mobile phone user is the signal blackspot. They affect everyone. Even David Cameron has had to return early from his holidays in Cornwall because of problems with signal "not-spots". Nor is it only a problem for people in rural areas. Richard Brown lives at the top of a hill in Brighton, and he can't get a signal withVodafone, despite its database claiming excellent coverage. "So for £100 I bought a 'Sure Signal' device – or in other words paid £100 to enable Vodafone to deliver me the core service that I am already paying upwards of £30 a month for." It plugs into the router and drains power, but seems to make little difference.

In his south London flat, EE customer Ben Goddard's mobile phone almost always registers no bars. With missed calls from hospitals and family members, he's been forced to install a house phone. "Zero signal in east London," says fellow EE user Dom O'Hanlon. "No attempt to fix, help or offer customer service." EE seem to have abandoned its earlier incarnation as 'Everything Everywhere' because it was so widely mocked as 'Nothing Nowhere'. When Ben Parker switched from EE to Vodafone, he found that his signal did improve, but his data access died, forcing him to depend on Wi-Fi.

If you have tried to deal with the customer service arm of the mobile phone giants, then please do not read on, because you will only relive traumas you would rather forget. After Grace Garland was signed up to EE from her Orange contract, her 4G and internet access all but vanished for several months. Errors at EE's end left her being charged double, and its system believed she had run out of her data allowance, leaving her with no access to crucial work emails. "No one took my concerns seriously," she says. "They told me they had actually subcontracted a lot of their technical support to outside parties who can only be contacted by them by email, making everything slow and ineffectual." Of course, mobile phone companies do not provide detailed data about their national coverage, leaving customers to choose on the basis of factors such as price.

According to OpenSignal – a company that is ingeniously working out national signal coverage by tracking data from mobile users – the average British user has no signal 15% of the time. And here is where the point about a natural monopoly creeps in. Mobile phone companies build their masts, but don't want to share them with their competitors. That means that rather than having a network that reflects people's needs, we are constantly zipping past masts we are locked out of. In many rural areas, mobile phone companies are simply making the decision that there are not enough people to justify building more masts. Profit is prioritised over building an effective network that gives all citizens access.

 Signal failure … a woman struggles to make a call in Hythe, Kent. Photograph: Alamy

To be fair to the government, it is proposing action to compel companies to share masts. But OpenSignal's Samuel Johnson says that this would only cover phone calls and text messages, not data, and would reduce our time without signal to about 7%. Why not force them to share all data? "Well, it'd be bad for competition, because it would hit their profits," he says. Not only that, but even if the government's modest measures are implemented, the potential financial hit to mobile phone companies would deter them from clamping down on the final 7%.

Customers are ripped off in other ways. The former Daily Telegraph journalist George Pitcher has pointed out that the typical "free phone when you sign a long contract" offer is a scam. In a typical £32-a-month contract spread over two years, you're coughing up £768, even though the phone is worth just £200. Get a £15-a-month SIM card-only deal and buy a £10 mobile off eBay instead, he suggests, and you'll save £400. "Perhaps the mobile phone companies could be nationalised and given to the banks?" he concludes. Last part aside, Pitcher has it in one. And then there's the derisory cost to the company of sending snippets of data such as text messages – which can cost the user 14p a pop. Last year, Citizens Advice received a whopping 28,000 complaints about mobile phones, often from customers who could not be released from contracts even if there was no signal in their area.

Neither are mobile phones themselves triumphs of the private sector, or even close. "It's not far-fetched to suggest nationalisation," says economics professor Mariana Mazzucato, "because these companies aren't the result of some individual entrepreneur in the garage. It was all state-funded from the start." As I write this, I fiddle occasionally with my iPhone: in her hugely influential book The Entrepreneurial State, Mazzucato looks at how its key components, like touchscreen technology, Siri and GPS are the products of public-sector research. That goes for the internet, too – the child of the US military-industrial complex and the work of Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the state-run European research organisation Cern in Geneva.

"It's actually the classic case of economies of scale, or a natural monopoly, and the decision you'd have to make is whether it's one firm or the state running the whole thing," says Mazzucato. "When you chop it up, you lose the benefits of cost and efficiency from having one operator." Many network providers spend more money on share buybacks than research and development, retarding further technological progress in the name of profit. And then there's Vodafone, which has become one of the key targets of the anti-tax avoidance movement. It's cheeky, really: leave the state to fund the technology your business relies on, and then do everything you can to avoid paying anything back.

There are many reasons why a fragmented mobile phone network is bad for the consumer. Dr Oliver Holland of King's College London's Centre for Telecommunications Research sympathises with the idea of a nationalised network on technical grounds. This is how he explains it. Each mobile phone company is allotted a slice of the frequency spectrum. But at any given time, lots of customers belonging to one company may be using their mobile phones. "You will probably have a reduction in the quality of the service, because they're all competing for the spectrum." Customers belonging to another company may be using the service less at the same time, leaving their slice of the spectrum to go to waste when others need it. "If you had just one body, instead of dividing the spectrum into chunks, they can use it more efficiently," he says.

The case for nationalising mobile phone companies is actually pretty overwhelming. It would mean an integrated network, with masts serving customers on the basis of need, rather than subordinating the needs of users to the needs of shareholders. Profits could be reinvested in research and development, as well as developing effective customer services. Rip-off practices could be eradicated. It doesn't have to be run by a bunch of bureaucrats: consumers could elect representatives on to the management board to make sure the publicly run company is properly accountable. Neither does nationalisation have to be costly: Clement Attlee's postwar Labour government pulled it off by swapping shares for government bonds. So yes, it might sound far-fetched, the sort of proposal that lends itself to endless satire from the triumphalist neoliberal right. But next time you're yelling at your signal-free mobile phone, it might not seem so wacky after all.

Israel Hamas War & Left Islamist Alliance - Bilatakalluf with Tahir Gora Ep152

Poor basics have brought down the standard of cricket

Test teams are more competitive these days, but it's probably because the fundamentals of backing up, running between the wickets and catching are being ignored

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo

August 10, 2014

 

Are pre-game routines designed to build on cricket's fundamental skills? © Getty Images

The wildly fluctuating series between India and England reflects Test cricket in the last decade. Where there was once domination by West Indies and then Australia, we now have parity, at least among the top five or six teams. Certainly there's a tendency towards home advantage, but as we've seen with India and England, there's very little standing between the top teams.

Is parity better for the game than dominance?

There's no doubt cricket is a more interesting spectacle when there's a genuine tussle, as witnessed in the contrasting Tests played at Trent Bridge and Lord's. Give bowlers some encouragement and the contest can be compulsive viewing.

Unfortunately, parity has come about because the standard of the better sides has slipped a little rather than it being a case of the lesser teams raising the bar. Still, it's preferable having a logjam at the top of the table rather than one standout team followed in the distance by a bunch of also-rans.

Why has parity only been achieved through a dip in standards?

We are constantly told that batsmen are more dominant these days and that fielding standards are better than ever, but the information doesn't match reality. Batting survival techniques have deteriorated. It's power-hitting that has dramatically improved. And while some amazing catches and saves are enacted near the boundary, in the crucial area of the close cordon, chances are too often spilt because simple but critical footwork is lacking. The pursuit of the spectacular has outstripped the desire to master basics.

Much of the pre-game routines are fairy-floss rather than the meat and potatoes that help win cricket matches. One of my main concerns when the idea of international coaches was first mooted was that decisions would be taken to justify a large contract rather than be in the best interests of the player. It seems that many coaches want to leave a monument behind, and consequently there are numerous theories in existence replacing good old-fashioned tried and tested techniques.

It's interesting to reflect on the thoughts of two great practitioners of their art, Australia's Bill O'Reilly and West Indies' Sir Garfield Sobers. O'Reilly once advised a young cricketing hopeful: "If you see a coach coming, son, run a mile." Sobers was even less subtle. When some ill-informed official had the temerity to suggest he didn't have the required qualifications to coach, Garry exploded: "What do you think I got my f#@%&*! knighthood for, singing?"

Sobers deplored the fact that "great cricketers are treated as freaks; admired for their feats but ignored for the way in which they achieved them".

The basics of backing up, running between wickets, catching in the slips, and some to do with ground fielding, are being ignored. There's a tendency to salivate over the latest fashionable theory but gag on tried and tested techniques.

Two classic examples are slip catching and running between wickets. Many chances go down in the cordon because of the failure to initiate the slight turn of the foot that balances a fielder before attempting a catch away from the body. The tendency is to attempt a spectacular catch by simply falling sideways - at the risk of spilling the chance.

Why do batsmen turn blind, not watch the ball leave the bowler's hand when backing up, and insist on running down the on side of the pitch after playing a stroke when that greatly increases the chance of a collision with a partner?

These are violations of simple basics that have brought good results. They should be learnt before a budding cricketer reaches teenage years, and be ingrained in him by the time he reaches voting age.

While many coaches seek fame, players tend to concentrate on methods most likely to earn their fortune. While the former is lamentable, the latter approach is understandable.

No other sport has three vastly different forms of competition, and this complicates the issue of technique, especially in batting. However, Kumar Sangakkara is a classic example of how you don't have to sacrifice the basics in order to succeed in all three forms.

The aim should be to achieve parity by raising the overall standard.