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    ISIS in Ireland and France

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    Not a season has passed since 2015 without a terrorist attack from ISIS or Al-Qaeda in France. Interventions in the Middle East, perceived discrimination against Arabs including ghettoisation and stringent or doctrinaire secularisation are the primary reasons for the attacks, though many have also been random, typically ‘franchised’ retrospectively from ISIS. Ireland is no model of racial tolerance and has not been generous in accepting refugees from conflicts in the Middle-East, including Syria. 1400 members of the Irish Defence Forces operate in Syria, Lebanon and Morocco on Peace Support Operations with the UN. Although Ireland has not participated in the war against terrorism in the Middle East, it is not impossible that one day it would suffer an attack. It is believed there are around 150 radicalised Muslims living in Ireland and that there are terrorists supporting ISIS financially from Ireland. For example, an electrician in his twenties named Hassan Bal was arrested in Waterford after confessing he had financed ISIS. He gave 400 in October 2015 in a city in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Stevo Maksimovic who was apparently supporting the terrorist group. Bal was jailed for 20 years. Last year, two men from Morocco and Algeria were arrested in Dublin suspected of assisting the financing of ISIS but the Garda didn’t have enough evidence to jail them and they were later released. It is understood the Garda Special Detective Unit was conducting several surveillance operations on people suspected of supporting terrorism in Ireland. Also in 2017, Humza Ali – a bricklayer from Birmingham – tried to travel to Syria via a Dublin-Istanbul flight. Turkey refused him entry. He went back to England where he had been before he had travelled to Ireland by boat and ferry. The man and one of his accomplices, Ali Akbar Zeb, had been sharing photos and videos on WhatsApp to promote the terrorist group. It is believed they were training for an attack. Last year, an Irish woman named ‘Sister Aaliya’, from Limerick who had become radicalised to Islam, claimed she had heard ISIS terrorists talking about running a 2.8m fund from Dublin. The men linked to this financing were planning a terrorist attack in the capital. Assistant Garda Commissioner Michael O’Sullivan revealed last month that the Garda has been ordered to use barriers on busy streets like Grafton Street in Dublin. He claimed to be worried about people coming back to Ireland after having travelled to Syria or Iraq in support of ISIS. Security specialist Dr Tom Clonan thinks terrorist attacks are possible in Ireland. He told Village that, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in London, there were “40 Irish passport-holders who have gone to engage in jihad in the Middle-East”. The reason why Islamists do not attack on the soil of Ireland, he says, is because Muslims are integrated in this society. The Defence Forces are ready to deploy 500 soldiers if terrorists attack. However, civilians inevitably get killed before any police intervention. Even though France has long been on high alert, there are continuing fatalities. The state of Emergency declared there following the November 2015 Paris attacks only expired, after five extensions, in November 2017. In Ireland the state of emergency only expired after peace in Northern Ireland in 1995, and the Emergency Powers Act still allows internment, the juryless Special Criminal Court and draconian provisions for detention. However these are measures frmo a different era and with a different focus. It is believed our information technology and architecture; and our security and intelligence systems are over 20 years out of date. Two years ago, the association of Garda Sergeants said the Garda was not equipped or trained to deal with the terror threat here. The best way to avoid terrorism, according to Tom Clonan, is to stop interfering and bombing the Middle-East. “Muslims have been treated so badly since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the war in Syria. It is a major cause of radicalisation because people are suffering.” ISIS attacks are sadly frequent in France, the European focus for ISIS. 11 terrorist attacks, starting with Charlie Hebdo, have been committed since 2015 alone – resulting in 245 dead. 17 attacks have failed and 50 were foiled. 9 cases out of 11 targeted French police. Certainly Ireland has not been affected by terrorist attacks. However, the truth is that nobody knows the percentage chance that situation might change. After the murder of an Irish tourist in Tunisia three years ago, Tom Clonan thinks Ireland should have raised its terror threat level from Moderate to Substantial, the level before Severe and Critical. The 2017 Stockholm attack shows neutrality and non-interventionism are not definitive shields against attack, even if Ireland were not facilitating US troop and ordnance movements through Shannon. Clonan changed his mind after Stockholm: “Now terrorist attacks in Ireland are a distinct possibility”. Marianne Lecach

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    As sad as Assad

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    Unthinkable suffering The Syrian army’s apparent chemical attack on Douma on April 7 was the worst atrocity of an infernal six-week military campaign in Eastern Ghouta. This in turn was the latest horrific chapter in a war lasting seven years which has brought unthinkable suffering to millions of innocent civilians. The relentless bombardment of Eastern Ghouta, backed by Russia and Iran, follows a cruel siege of the area lasting almost five years. These events reflect the most destructive and tragic elements of human nature: when ruthless powers encircle and terrorise the vulnerable, unchecked by any higher authority. The scenes being broadcast from the region are glimpses into an abyss of inhumanity – children being dragged from underneath rubble, parents convulsed with grief, neighbourhoods reduced to debris. The repeated bombing of hospitals and obstruction of aid convoys entering Ghouta are the most depraved aspects of the Syrian army campaign. They are examples of what Holocaust survivor Primo Levi called “useless violence” – suffering inflicted for its own sake and for no other purpose. Putin’s geo-political game Russian President Vladimir Putin has been providing military and diplomatic support to Bashar al-Assad since 2015 when he was losing the Syrian civil war – partly to secure Russian economic interests and partly to assert Russia’s dominance over the US in the region. The civilians of Eastern Ghouta are pawns in Putin’s geo-political game, and it appears he faces little consequence for directing this inferno of mayhem and bloodshed from Moscow. The wholesale destruction of Eastern Ghouta resembles the fate suffered by Aleppo and Homs earlier in the Syrian war and by Grozny, capital of Chechnya, during Putin’s first venture in politicised mass killing, a year into his reign. In each of these war zones the wretched plight of civilians incited him to an extreme of merciless aggression. Putin and al-Assad appear to share a psychopathic relish for attacking the weak. Aerial footage of Aleppo after the worst bombardments in 2016 showed apocalyptic scenes of ruination. The Russian and Syrian forces may as well have dropped a nuclear bomb on this once thriving, exotic city. Night after night on our television screens we are witnessing similar destruction and misery visited upon another mass of civilians, and hearing the same lies from Russian and Syrian officials who deny appalling events that are plain for all the world to see. Footage now emerging of Eastern Ghouta reveals almost a carbon copy of the haunted, hollowed-out cityscape that remains of Aleppo. Syria abandoned Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations, set out at its inception in 1945, committed members to “tak[ing] effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace”. Humanitarian protections for civilians in war zones were enshrined in the UN’s Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Grave breaches of these conventions include “wilful killing”, “wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury” and “making the civilian population or individual civilians the object of attack”, all of which have without question been perpetrated on Eastern Ghouta. The UN as it currently stands is nothing more than a politically redundant talking shop for Syria. Hand-wringing about the awfulness of the latest atrocity is invariably followed by diplomatic paralysis. Where power is concentrated most – among China, the US and the EU – moral courage appears absent. The US government, supported by the UK and France, mounted a sharp military response to the chemical assault on Douma, as it did last April when 80 civilians were killed by nerve agents dropped by Syrian army planes in Idlib province. We could ask why the relentless killing of civilians by every other weapon imaginable does not warrant intervention. As before, it is likely that such a measure will not be followed by substantive protections for Syrian civilians who will remain at the mercy of al-Assad and Putin. It primarily served as a show of US military might and of Trump’s willingness to impose a supposed tougher line than Obama on chemical weapons. It   also conveniently shifted public attention from the Mueller investigation into Trump’s alleged links with the Russian administration during his election campaign. An international peace-keeping force The Syrian conflict is a complex and deadly quagmire, involving armies and militias from several countries. Any attempt to resolve it is fraught with risk. And yet the choice to allow this slaughter of innocents to continue is a defilement of our collective humanity. If a large international peace-keeping ground force were based in Syria Putin would be far more cautious in the use of his military power there, and in his sanctioning of al-Assad’s violence. This would require courage from several of the world’s most powerful nations and would involve some risk to the domestic popularity of their leaders. It would be a show of collective strength to cold-blooded autocrats who answer to nothing else. A long-term political settlement is another challenge altogether, but in the interim this would give some protection to civilians caught up in the war. Putin and his allies have been emboldened for too long by having no limits placed on their behaviour and by the implied international attitude that the lives of Syrian civilians are not of much value to the rest of the world. Liam Quaide Liam Quaide is a clinical psychologist and the Green party election candidate for East Cork

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    The Right to have Rights

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    Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the right to have rights’ was coined in her 1958 book ‘The Human Condition’. The condition of being stateless, of being a displaced person, which began its modern history in Europe with World War I, has been experienced since by untold millions who have had to listen to the claim that ‘human rights’ are universal and fundamental – but not for them. Once we had the glamorous figure of the cosmopolitan, the person who belonged to the world, the global community; that figure has been displaced by the refugee, who belongs nowhere, but is to be found everywhere in the paradigmatic settings of the modern and contemporary world – the prison camp, the internment zone, the refugee camp, the ghetto, the jail, the arena of suspension where people live in a place that is always outside the country that it is inside. Arendt pointed out that the creation of such places and conditions is a political decision, not just a terrible catastrophe. It is the prevailing form of the penal colony, the new home that we have built to house the theory of human rights. Since Arendt, and most especially in the indebted work of Giorgio Agamben, it has become clear that the concentration camp of the twentieth century was not some historical anomaly, but that it is actually one of the paradigm sites of Western modernity. The internment camp is a zone of suspension, of ‘rendition’, a place that is always outside the country it is inside – Guantanamo is the best-known example, although there many such places – our best- known example was The Maze in Northern Ireland. Those entrapped there expose the hollowness of any claim to universal human rights, to having rights just on the basis of being human. Arendt said it plainly: the refugee, the displaced person, has regularly been denied the right to have rights. The denial is a political decision. It takes its most popular form in the denial that there are any ‘political prisoners’ in the denying country, although enemy countries are full of them. Its political nature has been counterpointed more clearly since 1948, since the United Nations began its series of declarations of Human Rights, unabated since that date; rights of men, women, children, of minorities, of the disabled, of all indeed who can be characterised as having been ‘excluded’, which means that even the ‘poor’, a constituency which enlarges globally by the hour, faster than ever since the almost perpendicular rise of neo-liberalism in the decades before and after the financial crash. Reading these rights, as ‘declared’ (whatever that means), in that bland United Nations universalistic rhetoric, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Such noble vacuities, such actual atrocities – produced by the same state systems that have prevailed since 1945. It was part of Arendt’s long argument, which began in 1943 with her essay “We Refugees” (about Jewish migrants who had become ‘stateless’, that condition in which they had no rights) that asked why European civilisation had so successfully produced the barbarism that made statelessness pandemic and human rights so unavailable to the millions of ‘displaced persons’ of World War II. Part of her answer was that this barbarism was so successful precisely because it was so concealed within or behind the declarations of universal rights and justice which the West, in the case of the American and the French Revolutions, had made central to the powerful ideology of what mutated into Western ‘freedom’. Arendt’s question then was: how could such an ideology be developed (as through the UN declarations) and simultaneously traduced (as in American foreign policy)? It is too feeble an explanation to put it down to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy on this scale occurs when the people who most sincerely believe in the peaceful principles are those who most regularly betray them in violent action. The British spent three centuries in perfecting their international reputation as hypocrites, a nation that believed itself to be peaceful even as it waged endless wars. Now that role has been assumed, largely, by the Americans. But, to achieve world domination is one thing; world hegemony is another. That’s what the World Wars were fought for. Arendt achieved notoriety with her reporting on the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which was published in book form as ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’, where she developed the central figure of the ‘desk-murderer’, the bureaucrat who administered the death-camps. But her key point was that this was a show-trial, that pretended to be an example of universal justice triumphing over universal evil. Rather, it was in fact a national victory of the Israelis over their Nazi persecutors. In this exemplary instance, we are shown how the language of universalism can be used as a disguise for a state’s policies. The jurist who had the ambition to do that for a successful Nazi state, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), described in his ‘Nomos of the Earth’ (1950), how the European system of international law had been replaced by an American one, with the UN as its legislature and the International Tribunal or Court as its executive. In effect, the language of universal rights was used to ratify the aims of American foreign policy; Nuremberg, Tokyo, Damascus, the Hague were, like the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, elaborate pretences that something objectively true was being defended from the current version of sectarian betrayal – war criminality, terrorism, the new terms of ‘war crime’ and its flourishing neighbourly companions, such as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Danilo Zolo has demonstrated in Victor’s Justice how the Kosovo war of 1999, that infamous intervention (to be followed by interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan , Libya and elsewhere, saving the ‘people’ of those countries for democracy, largely by killing and dispossessing them), with its International Court at the Hague, which could try anybody but Americans, is the most egregious example so far of how the language of universal rights has been perverted

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    Democracy and war

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    DEMOCRACY AT HOME General Election 2016 has thrown up an utterly unpredictable result with Fianna Fáil in the ascendant. At the time of writing the consequences of the vote including who will survive as leaders, who will be in government and who will lead the government could not be less predictable and, without resorting to metaphysics, will reflect only opaquely the will of the people. Yet we carry on as if this did not reflect in any way on the integrity of our democracy. DEMOCRACY ABROAD The Brexit referendum should have been framed on whether the UK will be in the EU, in EFTA, or independent. But, as always in these islands, the third option, the middle one, has been omitted. The outcome, therefore, is bound to be inaccurate. And given the divisive nature of the in-or-out, stay-or-leave question, it is highly likely that the ‘leave’ option will win. In a three-option poll, the ‘leave’ option will probably lose. On 20th Dec last year, Spain went to the polls… and two months later, Spanish politicians are still arguing about who should be in government. But this is par for the course. As happens in so many democracies, open and transparent elections are followed by closed and opaque discussions, as various parties wheel and deal behind closed doors, trying to concoct a majority coalition. In 2013, Germany’s four parties took 67 days to sort something out. In 2010/11, Belgium’s dozen took 451 days! Will Ireland have the same sort of uncertainty? Democracy is for everybody, not just a majority. Conflict zones like Syria and Ukraine need inclusive governance, governments of national unity. Inter alia, this should mean that elections are preferential and proportional; that power is shared in both joint presidencies and all-party coalition cabinets; while the third ingredient is preferential voting and collective responsibility in parliament. Sadly, while we preach at least some of these ideals abroad, we practice the very opposite at home: majority rule in the Dáil and the Commons, and divisive majority voting both in parliaments and national referendums. Before the Scottish referendum of 2014, it was widely assumed that ‘devo-max’, the middle option for maximum devolution, would get about 60 per cent. The ballot, however, included only the two other options, status quo and independence. The result, therefore, was a highly inaccurate nonsense. There are times, as with the election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, or our own recent referendum on same sex marriage, when democracy is wonderful. On other occasions, as in the Balkans, it was downright dangerous: the 1990 elections there were little more than sectarian headcounts and “all the wars in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum”. (Oslo- bodjenje, Sarajevo’s main newspaper, 7.2.1999.) It must also be remembered that Napoleon became the Emperor by a popular vote, one in which he, literally, dictated the question. Hitler, too, came to power ‘democratically’. In the 1924 elections, the National Socialists won just 14 seats but, in the wake of the great depression, this rose to 107 (17.6%). The subsequent history consisted of weighted majority votes in parliament (like the Enabling Act of 1933), simple majority votes in referendums in which, again, the dictator di tated the question, and war. DEMOCRACY AND WAR The focus of this article is Westminster’s democracy and the decision to go to war in Syria. Would the outcome of the debate on bombing in Syria have been different if the chosen methodology of decision-making in parliament were not majority voting? In other words, would the House have made a different decision if the procedures had allowed for a more pluralist decision-making methodology? First of all, a little background. In 2002, in the UN Security Council debate on Iraq, Resolution 1441, both France and Germany objected to the phrase “serious consequences” in Clause 13. Yet both voted in favour of that resolution. The outcome, described as “unanimous”, was (not the but) a cause of war, of the invasion of Iraq on 20.3.2003, and of the sorry story since, not least in Syria. But that outcome – 15-nil – was not unanimous! France and Germany did indeed object to the above clause, and perhaps would have objected to other paragraphs if but the procedures had catered for such criticisms. Maybe other Council members, one or other of the ten temporary non-veto powers, which at the time included Ireland, might have had policy proposals worthy of consideration. Unfortunately, binary voting means questions are dichotomous. So countries vote in favour, perhaps because the resolution is better than nothing, perhaps because of the need for international solidarity, we don’t know. There is the main resolution; there may be amendments to this clause or that, or even perhaps a wrecking amendment; but everything is yes-or-no; it is this methodology which is at fault. Majority voting was, yes, a cause of war. A MORE INCLUSIVE PROCEDURE A more accurate methodology would allow the UK and USA to propose one draft Resolution 1441; option A. If France and Germany objected to Clause 13 or whatever, they could propose an alternative wording, even if only for this one clause, whence their preference would be a slightly revised but nevertheless complete package, option B. Syria, then a temporary member of Council, might have preferred another complete package, option C. Ireland could have preferred a more obviously neutral option D, and so on. Naturally enough, countries might seek to come together in groups to favour this or that option but the first principle would remain: everything should be on the table, (computer screen and dedicated web-page). The subsequent debate would allow for questions, clarifications, composites and even new proposals (although of course, at any one time, any one country could sponsor only one motion). At various stages, participating countries could express their preferences, so to indicate where the eventual consensus might lie. Then, at the end of the debate, all concerned would cast their preferences on a final (short) list of about five options. The winning outcome,

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    Britain was responsible for The Rising and WWI

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    As July 1, the centenary of the start of the Battle of the Somme – a asco in which one million soldiers were killed or wounded to make a six-mile advance for the Franco-British forces, comes nearer we will no doubt be asked to counterpose once again the heroism of the Easter Rising participants with the heroism of the combatants in the Great War. Heroism is surely an ambiguous category. Can heroism in a discreditable cause be admired? Is not indignation the most appropriate retrospective response to the politicians and generals who sent millions to their deaths in that mass slaughter? And compassion, rather than admiration, for those who followed their lead? The 1500 or so Irish volunteers of 1916 were taking on the British Empire at the height of its power. History has by now justified their cause by passing a negative judgement on that and other territorial imperialisms. The Easter Rising inaugurated the first successful war of independence of the 20th century, an example which many other colonial peoples have since followed. It set in train the events that led to the establishment of an Irish State. As the world moves from some 60 States in 1945 to 200 today and to a probable 300 States or more over the coming century, it is unlikely that either history or historians will look negatively on that Irish pioneering achievement. The 1914-18 war was by contrast a war between Empires which unleashed a catastrophe on mankind whose effects still haunt us. Quite apart from its 17 million deaths, 20 million wounded and economic devastation, its disastrous winding-up in the Treaty of Versailles gave us Hitler and World War II. The Great War was a conflict between empire-hungry politicians and powerful economic interests in the main belligerent countries. The recent academic consensus on how it started tends to spread responsibility between on the one hand the governments of the Entente Powers – France, Britain and Russia and on the other the Central Powers – Germany, Austria- Hungary and Turkey. The title of Cambridge historian Christopher Clarke’s best-selling book ‘Sleepwalkers’ implies that both sides drifted into a disaster none of them foresaw or intended. They were all equally foolish or criminal, and so equally responsible. Traditional left-wing characterisation of 1914- 18 as an “inter-imperialist war” implies a similar conclusion: that as all the imperialisms were bad, they were all equally guilty for the war. It is true there was a war party in each big power on either side. But neither logically nor historically does that mean that they all contributed equally to starting it Unsurprisingly, Christopher Clarke’s conclusion has gone down well in Germany. Germany was forced to accept sole responsibility for starting World War I in the ‘war guilt clause’ of the Treaty of Versailles. For decades English language historians echoed that verdict complacently until the Australian Clarke came along with his revisionism. Further revisionism may be called for. Some historians now contend that the prime responsibility for causing War War I rests with Britain. Their thesis seems convincing. Their argument goes like this: The economic and political rise of imperial Germany from the 1890s onwards threatened British global pre-dominance. German economic competition was making inroads into the British Empire. Britain was a naval power, with a small army. The only powers with land armies strong enough to crush Gemany were France and Russia. They could attack Germany from East and West while the British navy could blockade its ports. The central aim of British foreign policy in the decade before 1914 was to encourage a Franco-Russian alliance against Germany which Britain could join when a favourable moment came. For centuries Britain’s main continental enemy was France, with which it fought many wars. In 1904 Britain concluded the Entente Cordiale with France, ostensibly to sort out their colonial interests in Africa. This was not a formal military alliance, but secret joint military talks directed against Germany started at once and continued up to 1914. As for Russia, that was the land of serfdom, the knout and anti-Jewish pogroms in the eyes of British public opinion during the 19th century. Russia threatened Britain’s empire in India. It was the cause of “the great game” between their respective intelligence services, which Kipling fictionalised in his novel ‘Kim’. Britain and France fought Russia in the Crimean War of the 1850s to prevent it moving in on the weak Turkish Empire to take Constantinople and the Dardanelles, which was a longstanding Russian dream. In 1907 Britain upended this policy and came to an agreement with Russia on their respective spheres of in uence. From that date British policy-makers worked together with France and Russia towards bringing about a war with Germany in which Turkey would be pushed into joining Germany’s side. If victorious, France would get back Alsace-Lorraine, which it had lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Russia would get Constantinople and the Dardanelles. And Britain, France and Russia between them would divide up the rest of the Turkish Empire, including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. The war aims of the Entente Powers were set out in the secret treaties which the Bolsheviks released in 1917 following the Russian Revolution. These tell us what ‘the war for small nations’ was really about – that of cial propagandist phrase which many people in this country who do not know their history are still liable to trot out to explain Britain’s involvement in the Great War. Who were the British politicians who orchestrated this scheme to crush Germany for a decade prior to Sarajevo? They were the ‘Liberal Imperialists’ who were in office from 1906 – Asquith as Prime Minister, Grey as Foreign Secretary, Haldane as War Minister and Churchill as Naval Minister, interacting intimately with the Tories’ Arthur Balfour, Alfred Milner and Bonar Law, for the key people on both front benches were at one in their anti-Germanism. And what of poor little neutral Catholic Belgium – leaving aside its bloody

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    World War 1 and the Middle-East

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    If Colonel Gadaffi were still running Libya there would not be mass migration across the Mediterranean, with thousands drowned because of unscrupulous traffickers. Gadaffi was guilty of the sin of all those secular dictators. He was too independent of ‘the West’. Britain and France, backed by America, bombed him out of existence. Their excuse was that he intended assaulting civilians in a provincial town. They got the cover of a UN Security Council resolution, which a weak Russia failed to veto. Now Libya is a failed state racked by civil war. Where do these Mediterranean migrants come from? Many are from Syria, another state afflicted by civil war encouraged by the West. Since 2011 the Syrian rebels against the Assad regime have been covertly financed and armed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, with the CIA and Israeli intelligence overseeing the details. Recall the House of Commons vote which denied Tory Premier David Cameron permission to bomb Syria by 285 votes to 272 in 2013. Encouraged by the US, Cameron and France’s Hollande wanted to repeat in Syria the regime- change they had brought about in Libya two years before. It was surely Ed Miliband’s finest moment as Labour leader that he refused to go along. 30 Tories and nine Lib Dems voted against Cameron too. This House of Commons No in turn gave the US Congress the impetus to stop Obama’s impending assault on Assad. In Syria the pretext was to be that Assad used chemical weapons against his foreign-financed rebels. If these rebels succeed in overthrowing the Assad regime, the country’s Christians, Alawites and many Shia Muslims are likely to have their throats cut. The paradox now is that support for the Assad regime in Syria and its Shia-backed counterpart in Iraq looks like being the best hope of holding back the ISIS monster which these ‘rebel’ groups with their dubious sources of arms and finance have spawned. America needs Iran and its clients as allies, not opponents, in the region. Najibiullah in Afghanistan, at the time of the Russian intervention there, was the first of the secular dictators America sought to overthrow by backing the mujahideen fundamentalists against him. Osama Bin Laden was on the US payroll then. Najibullah was executed by the Taliban in 1996. Saddam Hussein was the second, overthrown by Bush and Blair in their 2003 invasion of Iraq. When Saddam ruled Iraq, Sunni, Shia and Christians lived peaceably side by side. Now Iraq too is well on the way to being a failed state, racked by the Shia-Sunni conflict which America encouraged until the tormented politics of the region spawned ISIS. Najibullah, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi and Assad were certainly dictators but the West did not realise that worse could follow. Since Bush invaded Iraq the USA has become self-sufficient in oil because of the fracking revolution. America no longer needs Saudi oil as it once did. This is the basis of Obama’s turn towards Iran, which in turn causes consternation among the Saudis and Israelis. The Saudi-Israeli response is to try to up Sunni-Shia antagonism further, building on what the Americans had started, seeking thereby to undermine Iran’s clients in the Iraqi and Syrian governments and in the Lebanese Hezbollah, in the hope of stymying a US-Iran deal. A seminal book on the historical background to the region’s current anguished politics, is James Barr’s ‘A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that shaped the Middle East’. The catastrophe in the Middle East is rooted in Western power-grabbing for the provinces of the Ottoman Empire a century ago in World War 1. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan were all Ottoman provinces then. The different religious communities had lived peaceably side by side in them for centuries. Getting hold of them was one of the war aims of imperial Britain and imperial France in 1914. It was why Britain and France pushed Turkey into an alliance with Germany in the first months of the Great War. What was presented to British and French public opinion as a war to defend the rights of small nations and to prevent ‘poor little Belgium’ from falling under German rule, was seen by these countries’ Governments as an opportunity to expand their empires in the Middle East at the expense of the Turks. Britain particularly wanted to gain control of Palestine and with it the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal, that vital route to Britain’s empire in India. The Bolsheviks published the secret treaties between the Entente Powers within a month of the 1917 Revolution, while simultaneously repudiating them and announcing Russia’s withdrawal from the War. The British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted. The most important secret treaty was the agreement in March 1915, just one month before the Gallipoli operation, promising Russia control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles after the war, in return for Russian agreement to support British interests in Persia, next to India. Britain had fought the Crimean War in 1854 to prevent Russia taking Constantinople and establishing itself on the Mediterranean. For the same reason Disraeli risked war with Russia in 1878 and sent the British Mediterranean fleet through the Dardanelles at the time. In the lead-up to World War 1, however, a century of British rivalry with Russia – the “Great Game” that was given literary form in Kipling’s novel ‘Kim’ – was abandoned in order to induce Russia to join France in encircling Germany. Russia and France together were the only European land powers that could crush Britain’s rising commercial rival, Germany. As a seapower Britain could help in that defeat, but only land power and large armies could ensure a decisive victory. In early 1915, with stalemate on the Western Front based on static trench warfare from the Channel to the Swiss border, the British and French Governments were worried that Russia might pull out of the war altogether in view of the pasting its armies were taking at the time from

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