Afghanistan, and now?

Afghanistan, and now?

Afghanistan is now dominated and controlled by the Taliban. This has happened a week after the US withdrawal. Joe Biden announces that the mission was never about “state building’;  let’s hope the people of the NATO nations learn that NATO can never act as such a force, and that ‘liberal interventionism’ is recognised as the oxymoron it truly is.

The pictures of those seeking to leave Kabul are heart rending and I for one feel impotent and partly guilty at the same time.

We owe a duty to the people of Afghanistan that want a better life and the first thing to do is consider our national refugee policy and how we welcome them. First we need to let them in, and second to stop sending them back.

We need to welcome them, and ensure that they can live, love and learn. This will involve changing our approach to a number of immigration policy issues.

Priti Patel’s Borders Bill, which arguably breaks international law on the rights of refugees, must be suspended, and the Immigration Act 2014 needs, at the least, major revision. This isn’t a debate on quotas or points and the hostile environment makes it impossible for immigrants to live; we should be proud that refugees want to come here. I’d add that some of my immigrant members are shocked at the injustice they face at work and the lack of remedy. Britain was meant to be famous for fair play.

I’ll leave the foreign policy lessons for another time. …

There’s a reason we made the UN

There’s a reason we made the UN

This is what happens when I don’t real time blog, I get distracted but its a bad day for news. The usual knob heads are ramping up the acts of piracy in the Persian Gulf and blaming Iran. Earlier in the week, a motion virtually supporting an illegal military intervention in Venezuela was debated at GMB Conference. Some people need to be reminded.

Aggressive war is illegal, “regime change” as a goal of military action is a war crime.

States have a right of self defence, any other action needs the approval of the UN Security Council. The UN and the rule of law are our best hope for a better world.

It’s not good enough to say “it’s broken” and our moral judgement cannot supplant this Law.

I have quoted some bits of the UN Charter, below/overleaf.

ooOOOoo …

Bombs away again

Bombs away again

Here we go again! What more do the warmongers want us to do in Syria? The RAF is already participating in the “coalition air intervention”. In 1944, the victorious powers of the 2nd World War created the United Nations, criminalised aggressive war and authorised the UN to determine if, when & how collective military action was required. The UN will not authorise revenge or punishment bombing raids, even if only the Russian veto stops it. The bellicose language used by Trump and the threatened Russian reaction are frightening. Our government should be arguing for restraint and the application of international law not colluding with this disaster. …

A long and eventful weekend

A long and eventful weekend

What a week-end. Jeremy Corbyn is elected Leader of the Labour Party and just as the first thing he did after nomination was to go on a demo, he immediately went to speak to the “Refugees Welcome” demo in Parliament Square. The German suspension of its European borders is a sad reaction to those who won’t pull their weight, which includes the British Government acting in our name. Even after the Government’s belated reaction to the popular will of the masses, we are still below the UN recommended quotas and as with nearly everything done by the Cameron Government, they’re tone deaf, in that they announce a five year commitment and plan to fund the refugee programs with the International Aid budget.

These news events have buried Cameron’s acquiescence in using military action to kill two British citizens who were allegedly ISIS fighters. This will come back to bite him, possibly as badly as new Labour’s decision to go to war in Iraq. I have done a storify sharing my views on the (il)legality of the act. Make no mistake, it’s a massive escalation in the militarisation of the state. In Britain, we suffered and fought a terrorism/counter terrorism campaign for over 30 years while maintaining civil primacy and ensuring that the rule of law was paramount and that the police and courts were our primary defence. …

Stop killing civilians in Gaza

Stop killing civilians in Gaza

This blog has been a personal polemic over most of the last three years, maybe longer. Previously and at times, it’s been more of a diary. The London blogger, Diamondgezeer in this blog about blogrolls and the blogging community reminds me that sometimes I deserve or need to be a bit more introspective and more of a diarist. I need to record on the blog, how I feel about the latest development on the Middle East.  Over the last three weeks the Middle East has exploded, over the last two years on could say the same, and you could ask why I haven’t commented on the events in Syria or the Ukraine,  …

The politics of intervention in Syria revisited

raf typhoons

The Guardian run a retrospective story on Parliament’s decision not to use British military force in Syria after the chemical weapons attacks there. One of the threads in the story is that the old division of powers between the executive and legislature has been irreparably changed. In my mind the precedents and the development of Law needs to be put in the context of the decisions taken about Suez, the Falklands and Iraq, the latter two military interventions both having Parliamentary debates before military action. It should also be born in mind that the US used to have a similar  disposition but changed their laws after Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War. …

It’s guns that made a difference.

It’s guns that made a difference.

With so many articles and other writing stuck in production, I thought I”d knock out a quick blog inspired by at Naked Keynesianism; he posted an article called, The Fiscal-Military State and Western Hegemony. The article has a quick look at a select choice of the literature, and reminds us of Charles Tilly‘s allegedly famous argument that “War made the State, and the State made war”, although I suspect that Tilley was not the first to make this argument. Most interestingly, he argues that where cavalry warfare was in the ascendancy, it acted as an inhibitor to  military technological development and latterly superiority. I would suggest it was the development of cities, and their density in Europe together with their walls that necessitated the invention of artillery to conduct siege warfare and an infantry to protect it. Similarly, the development of naval warfare and overseas empires, incubated by Europe’s geography reinforced, or maybe preceded the evolution of land based cannons.  …