Red tape and murder
David Miliband is the Minister responsible for Government policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, including those in fear of their lives.
In a recent webchat on the Number 10 website, Mr Miliband was asked the following question by Justin McKeating: “I would like to ask the Foreign Secretary why the assistance being offered to locally employed staff in Iraq, who are being threatened with reprisals – including torture and death – from local militias, is being rationed according to length of service. Isn’t it perfectly possible for an Iraqi employee who has only been employed for five months to face the same dangers as a colleague who has been employed for twelve months or longer?”
To which he replied “The scheme is open to all existing staff whatever their length of service. For previous staff who no longer work for us, there is a 12 month criteria. I think this gets the balance right. The fortitude of civilian staff alongside military forces has been amazing on the part both of British staff and locally employed staff. The new scheme tries to recognise this.”
Just how good a job of recognising it was noted in The Times yesterday.
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The Middle East: Should I care?
Scoop writes: “I have reached the stage where a mild urge to avoid discussing Middle
Eastern politics, with those I find otherwise intelligent and interesting, has arisen.”
What I find amazing is that the urge is only mild. I have few urges stronger than the desire not to discuss the middle east. I find it hard enough to work out what’s happening in British society, so how I can hope to understand middle eastern ones, especially as the media is vanishingly unlikely to enlighten me?
One reason for this is that that so much “discussion” seems to ignore the principles of methodological individualism in favour of talk about groups. And this just runs into the pronoun problem; when you talk about “Israelis” do you mean all, most, some, a few, what?
And then there’s the sampling problem. The question to ask about any event – in sport, finance, politics, whatever – is: what sample is that drawn from? Where does it lie on the probability distribution? What’s the shape of the distribution? So, does a suicide bombing, say, represent average Palestinian opinion or minority opinion? If so, how small a minority?
I suspect most discussion about the middle east is as fatuous as discussion about God. It’s an expression of tribal sympathies, without bringing any new evidence to the question. And, as Richard says, such dogmatism is simply illegitimate in the public sphere. So, please enlighten me. Could someone point me to a discussion of middle eastern politics which makes sense, which accords with the basic principles of rational analysis I’m used to in economics? If such analysis exists, what proportion does it represent of all discussion?
(cross-posted with Stumbling and Mumbling)
Iran not making nukes shock
The Guardian today leads with the story that a US National Intelligence Estimate, which pulls together the work of the 16 American intelligence agencies, concluded: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme.” Whoops. What are the neo-conservatives going to do now? The article goes on to say:
In a startling admission from an administration that regularly portrays Iran as the biggest threat to the Middle East and the world, the NIE said: “We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” That contradicts the assessment two years ago that baldly stated that Tehran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons”.
…
Although a halt to the nuclear weapons programme is significant, the NIE is far from a clean bill of health for Iran. Tehran is pushing ahead with its uranium enrichment programme, which has only limited civilian use and could be quickly converted to nuclear military use. The NIE warned that Iran could secure a nuclear weapon by 2010. The US state department’s intelligence and research office, one of the agencies involved, said the more likely timescale would be 2013. All the agencies concede that Iran may not have enough enriched uranium until after 2015.
Which, in my view, indicates that while diplomatic pressure must remain on the country to avoid building nukes, there is no viable reason to go to war with the country to protect Israeli sovereignty anytime soon. In case that wasn’t already obvious.
The decision to publish the NIE is aimed at trying to recover the public credibility lost when the agencies wrongly claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the years leading up to 2003.
No shit sherlock.
Annapolis: Oslo for slow learners
Israel and the Palestinians – or one faction of the Palestinians, at any rate – have agreed to talks with a view to a peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.
But yesterday’s announcement in Annapolis takes up no further forward than we have for at least 15 years. This is simply Oslo for slow learners.
The outline of a two-state solution to the root of all Middle East evil has long been easily sketchable on the back of a beer mat; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after. Simple, really.
Except a two-state solution necessarily will not work like that. All it amounts to is the establishment of an aid junkie Bantustan on Israel’s doorstep.
In particular, the Gaza Strip – currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway – will into a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides with no seaport or airport. No one will be able to enter or leave without passing through Israel. Israel will at will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.
This much should be elementary to anybody on the democratic left.
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We cannot let them die
I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be – and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.
We’ll call the first man Employee One. He worked for the British for three years: “I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)”. His British friends knew him as Chris. The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this.
I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening. Here’s an email exchange we had the other day.
1) Are you still in Iraq?
“Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.”
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