Wednesday, October 21, 2015

New Government. New faces.

Already I am beginning to get tired of Justin Trudeau's voice and image.  But that is not his fault, just the overkill of broadcast journalism.  He ran a good campaign and the Liberals deserved to win, although they got some fortunate help from what turned out to be blunders by opposing parties.

The NDP were outflanked on the left by the Liberals.  Thomas Mulcair in his campaign tried too hard to reassure voters that things wouldn't change too much, at least on the economic front.  He wanted to convince voters, especially in Ontario, that the NDP were not a 'tax and spend' party, and that they wouldn't run deficits the way Bob Rae's NDP government in Ontario had done.  So right from the early days of the campaign he promised to balance the budget. I think most voters realized that if he were to keep this promise then he would have little room for any of the programs he wanted to introduce e.g. universal child care.  That meant his credibility was open to question, especially after the Conservatives tried to play up how he had switched parties - from a Quebec Liberal to the NDP - and how he had publicly expressed admiration for Margaret Thatcher.  

The Conservative blunder was over the niquab issue.  It backfired, not so much because it wasn't successful in Quebec, but rather because it was too successful.  It pulled a lot of support from the NDP - Quebec was the party's base in the last election - and when this started showing up in the polls, the Anyone-But-Harper voters in the country at large, saw that the best way to defeat Harper was to go with the Liberals.  The Liberals too opposed Harper on the niquab ban, but unlike the NDP did not lose support in Quebec over it - mainly because they didn't have a lot of support there to begin with, but also because what support they did have was concentrated in the greater Montreal area, with urban voters more used to, and tolerant of, differences than many in other parts of the province where the NDP had its support. Harper also probably overegged the pudding when he went on to describe setting up a snitch line for reporting "barbaric cultural practices".  Perhaps this generated a revulsion among Canadians at large who didn't like the idea of the government trying to police cultural standards.  I can see why many Canadians from ethnic backgrounds would have been seriously turned off of the Conservatives by this action, not to mention those among what Harper had called "old stock Canadians" of a more liberal and tolerant nature.

So much for the post mortem.  What about the future? In jest I have been saying that the Liberals should create a Ministry for the Repeal of Odious Legislation of the Harper Government.  There would certainly be enough to keep them busy for a good long while.  They could start with the Fair Elections Act, which was anything but.  While at that task they could consider alternative electoral systems.  My favourite, which would not require too radical a change, is to consider preferential ballots in the way they do in Australia.  Apparently this system has been used in Canada before - it was used in BC until being abolished by WAC Bennett, in the sixties.  An interesting aside on this system is that it was proposed by the Victorian-era Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll.

Other targets for the Ministry for Repeal would include the bills, passed by the Harper government, as it liked to be called, which loosened environmental standards;  muzzled Government scientists; and the vindicative criminal justice bills including those involving mandatory sentencing.   

A further bill outlawing the practice of hiding legislation in thousand page budget bills should be passed.  Perhaps a first task would be to read through all these pages of verbiage and find out what is actually in them!

Such an act prohibiting omnibus legislation wouldn't normally be necessary with honourable people running the show, but this deceptive practice became common under the secretive and paranoid Conservative government.   

When it comes to external affairs Trudeau has already begun to move. Apparently he has told Obama that Canada will cease participating in the bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria.  Also cancellation of the F35 fighter jets is on the cards.  He wants to improve relations with Iran, presumably with a reopening of embassies.  

Of course a big issue for the new government is climate change policy. It is perhaps too soon for Trudeau to announce a new policy at the upcoming meeting in Paris, but he could at least announce an ambition to do at least as much, or more than, whatever the US offers.

There is a lot to do!  Certainly much bad stuff that Harper brought in needs to be rolled back.  Justin Trudeau promised a lot in general terms on election night.  Let's hope he is able to translate those good intentions into practical policy.  

PS. One good result of the election was that several of the more obnoxious Conservative members lost their seats, and we won't have to see them on TV any more.  Specifically:  PM Spokesman Paul Calendra;  Minister for Immigration Alexander;  Finance Minister Joe Oliver (he was more insufferable in his previous role as Natural Resources Minister).  Its too bad that the champion of contemptuous bad manners, Pierre Pollievre retained his seat, along with the parliamentary thug, Peter van Loan.  Also gone (to jail) is Dean del Mastro.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Foul! You're Bombing our Jihadis!

The hypocrisy of the US and NATO criticism of Russian bombing in Syria is stunning. 

"They are not bombing ISIL.  They are recklessly killing civilians!"  

As if NATO bombing were somehow insulated from inflicting death and destruction on non-combatants.  
And as if the targets of the Russian attacks were not Islamic jihadis, intent on destroying anyone and anything who disagree with their Wahabbi inspired brand of Islam. 

The Nusra Front, which so far seems to be the main target of the Russian bombs, started life as the Syrian branch of ISIS (ISIL, Daesh). After internal disagreements (probably power struggles for control) they broke away and adopted the name al-Nusra.  Fighting with Nusra are fighters who still call themselves al-Qaeda, still nominally commanded by bin Laden's colleague, Ayman al-Zawahiri.  These groups are fighting to overthrow the Assad regime, and replace it with some kind of fundamentalist mediaeval Islamic state.

But because they are fighting Assad, they somehow became acceptable to the US, whose priority in Syria is to remove Assad. There are Wikileaks documents showing US plans for such a regime change going back to 2007.  So on the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' somehow the non-ISIS jihadi opposition became "moderate" jihadis, ones who we could support.   

Russia has no such illusions, and is clear that it wants to support the Assad regime.  So it is fighting all of Assad's enemies.  So far they seem not to have done much against ISIS, but no doubt that will happen when they have inflicted sufficient damage on the Nusra crowd, for the Syrian army to recapture territory lost to them.  

And when they do turn their bombs on ISIS I am sure that they will be far more effective than NATO has ever been.  We have had over a year of NATO bombing and during that time ISIS has got stronger capturing new territory, including Palmyra and its World Heritage Roman ruins.  The most technologically advanced military in the world couldn't even hit a convoy of unprotected ISIS white Toyotas crossing the desert on their way to take Ramadi.

Is this because the NATO airforces are incompetent?  Or because they have inadequate intelligence?  Or because somehow ISIS is too canny to be caught?  

Of course it is not.  It is because NATO doesn't want to destroy ISIS all the time that Assad is in power. I am confident that the thinking in Washington is that they will deal with ISIS after Assad has gone.  

The removal of the Assad regime has always been the US number one priority.  But they could not sell another regime-change war to the American public.  So they provided weapons, financing and expertise to an assorted bunch of groups fighting Assad, including a lot of extreme jihadis.  The few non-extremist opponents of Assad have for the most part been destroyed or taken over by one or other of the jihadi groups.  Many of the weapons and foot soldiers ended up with ISIS.  But after ISIS's barbaric public executions of foreigners including Americans, something had to be done, so a bombing campaign was initiated.   But it has always been a half-hearted affair.  Enough to convince the public back home that they were fighting the evils of extremist terrorism ('we fight it over there so we don't have to fight it over here'), but not enough to inflict real damage on ISIS.

But that is about to change.  I am prepared to wager that Russia, allied with Syrian Army and Kurdish troops, will do more damage to ISIS in a few weeks than the US with its various allies has done in nearly two years.

What happens then is another question.  Hopefully the US will give up on its regime-change obsession and peace talks can begin.  The Syrian people have suffered too much and much of the suffering can be put at the doors of outside agents.  I suspect a lasting peace, maintaining Syria's territorial integrity, can only be reached if there is an agreement between the outside actors to support a strong central government.  Unfortunately that still seems a long way off. 






Friday, October 2, 2015

Vladimir Putin's Address to UN.

No doubt Vladimir Putin is not a very nice person. Nor Bashar el Assad. Just to survive, yet alone rise to (or stay at) the top, in the worlds they inhabit, one doubtless needs to be very ruthless.
But Putin is not Hitler, intent on world domination, and it would make sense to pay attention to what he has to say. In his speech to the UN Security Council he made some sharp and uncomfortable observations. Of particular importance I think was of the need for all countries to respect the sovereignty of others - a principle laid down with the Peace of Westphalia over 350 years ago, but seemingly violated at will since the end of the Cold War.

He admits to Soviet misdeeds in this realm and goes on to castigate the US and NATO for destroying states in North Africa and the Middle East - Libya, Iraq and, although he doesn't mention it by name, Syria.   Another example carried out by the Saudis, with US complicity, is Yemen  “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross after visiting Yemen.

He could also have mentioned how the US has developed the art of illicit de-stabilization and regime change since the Second World War. During the Cold War these operations were predominantly carried out in Latin America, their so-called "backyard"  - Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1961), Chile (1973), Cuba (unsuccessfully, 1959), Nicaragua (1980s) but there were also other operations closer to the Soviet Union  for example in Iran (1953).  Since the ending of the Cold War it has got completely out of hand - Iraq, Libya, Syria and ongoing covert operations against the government of Iran, not to mention US involvement in Ukraine and the destabilization of Venezuela.

And the results of these so-called "democracy-promoting" exercises? Well as Putin says, “An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions. … Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster."

He describes how ISIS emerged from the ruins of Iraq - many former Iraqi army soldiers, who no longer had a position, but still had weapons, joined Al Qaeda in Iraq; then fighters from Libya started finding their way to Syria along with weapons from Qadaffi's arsenals funnelled by the CIA; and units trained by the US and Gulf State allies, as the so-called "moderate opposition", started defecting. And so ISIS was born.

Another thing Putin warns against is using terrorist groups to achieve political ends. It seems now common practice in the ME. But while the US and the West fulminate against terrorism, they have been as bad as anyone in using jihadi groups for their own ends, going back at least to the US use of mujahadeen in Afghanistan, out of which emerged Al Qaeda.   Probably the CIA are currently supporting some of the imagined "more moderate" jihadi groups in Syria.

All in all it is not a pretty picture. And not one which is clearly accepted in most of the western media. It is easier to divide the world into 'goodies' and 'baddies'. Of course our side are the 'goodies' in the white hats. Putin is portrayed as wearing a black hat, but clearly he understands what is going on. Maybe he doesn't wear a white hat. But he points out that our side doesn't either. And he pleads for a better way of conducting international relations.