Hints Of New World Order Must Await Tillerson-Lavrov Meeting

Hints Of New World Order Must Await Tillerson-Lavrov Meeting

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

Pundits in Washington are beginning to hope for continuity in US foreign policy under Donald Trump. For their optimism, they are falling back on hints from the new administration.

Look, they say, Israel is being warned to curb settlement construction; Russians must withdraw from Crimea; Iran is on notice: no more missile tests.

If this, indeed, were true then the skirmishes between the Intelligence community and the Trump campaign which continued well into the President’s inauguration, would appear to have been settled in favour of the agencies, the Deep State, with the media in tow.

If the Washington Pundits are anywhere near the truth, it may please them to know they are in company. Syrian President Bashar al Assad declared a week ago that he expected “no change in US policy towards Middle East”.

What then does one make of the allegation which Trump repeated atleast since August, 2016: “Obama and Hillary founded ISIS?” This reporter has written several stories since 2012 about US ambassador in Damascus, Robert Stephen Ford, a great favourite of Hillary Clinton’s, playing an overt role in the Syrian insurgency. Some of it was eye witness account.

More recently, Trump has reiterated that he hopes for friendlier relations with Putin. He looked forward to greater cooperation with Moscow in managing the chaos in West Asia.

Is there a contradiction between this line and the new US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley warning Moscow on Crimea?

These are significant signals but they will be fitted into coordinated policy only after the new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, finds his feet in the State Department. Until then even National Security Adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn’s tough statement on Iran must be seen as premature. It may point to some turf fights that will keep the White House abuzz for sometime.

Serious games will begin when Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Tillerson hold their first meeting.

If there is to be anything resembling goodwill between Washington and Moscow, Lavrov will have to acquaint Tillerson with a great deal of what Moscow has been doing recently.

Libya, for instance. Moscow has been coordinating policy with Egypt to control a country with more than one power centre.

On December 20, Foreign Ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran met in Moscow to discuss Syria. The US was managing its transition during this period. The meeting was followed by a joint air campaign by Russia and Turkey against the Islamic State. The summit in Moscow was preceded by the dramatic killing of the Russian ambassador in the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Maronite Christian leader, Michael Aoun’s election as President of Lebanon would not have been possible without Hezbullah’s help. For this development too the credit goes to Syria, Iran and Russia.

Yemen will be a test for the Trump administration. Will he continue to support Saudi Arabia’s disastrous war in the Arab World’s poorest country? Who knows, in the interest of American prosperity, he may like to encourage Saudis to spend their last penny buying US arms.

An important meeting, which caught New Delhi on the wrong foot, was the Russia, China, Pakistan conclave in Moscow focused on the future of Afghanistan. National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval’s subsequent visit to Moscow covered this development. He must supervise a new regional strategy before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to St. Petersburg in early June. The Moscow meeting on Afghanistan places a huge question mark on US expenditure in blood and treasure in that country over the past 12 years. Taleban, whom the US has been fighting all these years, are now to be enlisted in the war against the Islamic State and various offshoots of Al Qaeda. Russian Caucasus and Xinjiang are menaced by this, expanding variants of Islamist militancy. Taleban are a regional force spread on two sides of the Durand line. This must be a source of worry for Islamabad. The President of Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has cancelled military exercises with the US. He has held out a hand to Moscow and Beijing.

This is just some of the agenda Tillerson has to prepare himself for. To begin with, he will have to digest the implications of a ban on seven Muslim dominated countries to travel to the US.

Iran being listed among Muslim countries on whom the ban applies, makes no sense unless Trump or those around him are keen to pick a fight with Tehran to please Riyadh and Jerusalem. No act of terrorism in the genre of suicide bombing, has yet been traced to Tehran. Nor does Hezbullah’s unwavering support to the Palestinian cause make it a militant menace. In this devilry, it has Iran’s total backing.

During the campaign, and since, Trump has maintained that he will seek Russian support in “bombing the shit out of Islamic terrorism”. Moscow and Iran are with him on that page, indelicate language notwithstanding.

The contradiction with the Deep State will arise when, in the course of hammering Islamic terrorism, White House does not make allowance for militants who were trained and harboured as a western asset. That will require a case by case bargaining.

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Will Trump Era Provide Respite To Those With Destroyed Countries?

Will Trump Era Provide Respite To Those With Destroyed Countries?

                                                                                      Saeed Naqvi

The procession of breast beating “liberals” doesn’t seem to end, not since Donald Trump eclipsed their most shining star – Hillary Clinton.

True, Hillary would be graceful at the Inaugural Ball.

Favours to none, to all

she smiles extends.

Oft she rejects but

never once offends.

Melania would be a novice by comparison. But here we are talking about aesthetics and class? Why then pull out John Stuart Mill to measure the order just ushered in.

The argument that Hillary would have made a better President because she knew every nook and corner of Washington, White House and Foggy Bottom is precisely why she lost. It set her up as the Establishment which was remote from the people who found solace in a person who did not even look like a politician.

On the “Liberal” yardstick, both falter.

Two images of Hillary are etched on my mind. I had just returned from Syria in early 2012.  I wrote a paper for the Observer Research Foundation explaining why Bashar al Assad was nowhere near falling.

In fact, regime change was simply not possible by cross border terrorism supporting Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda inspired restiveness in places like Hama, Homs and Daraa all being amplified by the western media as a full blown civil war. This was in 2011-12.

I can never forget some frames. Hillary Clinton comes into focus, repeatedly, with an imperious wave of the hand: “Get out of the way Assad” and “Stop butchering your own people”.

The second image of Hillary concerns Libya. Anybody with even an elementary knowledge of ground realities in Libya knew how the British and other western intelligence had with great diligence stoked an insurgency. The matter had been discussed in British Parliament. Prime Minister David Cameron had a series of skirmishes with his army chief Gen. David Richard on the Libyan misadventure.

Americans entered the Libyan drama late, but, being Americans, they chose to take the credit. A front page cartoon in a European newspaper shows a fire in the distance. In the foreground is Uncle Sam, looking like a butler, waiting outside a garden umbrella where some European grandees are sipping campari. One of them snaps his fingers: “go put out that fire”.

That is when Hillary embarked on the mission. The indelible image she left on my mind was a split TV screen. One half of the screen is Qaddafi being sodomized by a knife; on the other is a triumphant Hillary shrugging her shoulders: “I came; I saw and he died.” Never will there be a more macabre play on “Vini, Vidi, Vici”.

Where is the great “liberal” spirit seering through all of this?

Why then are the “liberals” everywhere beating their breasts at her defeat? Do they see Trump as “illiberal” by comparison?

The two images of Hillary’s involvement with Syria and Libya would probably be justified by falling back on the classical Wilsonian approach. After the victory in the First World War, neither Britain, France or other allies quite envisioned the peace settlement the way Wilson did. After armistice, Woodrow Wilson began to draft in his mind a plan for a “just democracy throughout the world”. For democracy and freedom to be secure in the United States, the sapling will have to be nurtured everywhere. Like these moral values, wealth too would accompany good governance and enterprise as part of God’s plan.

Liberal ideals would spread gradually almost by imitation. It can be argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was also, in large part, by imitation. But in both, Syria and Libya, the Liberal argument would have to be contrived, that it was important to defeat the two tyrants who were brutalizing their own people. Woodrow Wilson envisioned the expansion of the Liberal ideal by example and gentle persuasion. He never envisaged a post World War II American pre eminence on a scale where Judge, jury, executioner and the dispenser of information would all be one and the same.

Now consider the casualty figures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen – a total of over a million dead and 15 million displaced. The wars begun by George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz were continued by Barack Obama. He simply could not dismount. What liberal ideal is involved in these unspeakable horrors?

Remember Obama had promised to shut Guantanamo Bay as soon as he entered the Oval office. Every time he tried, he found himself glaring at an intelligence file for Eyes Only. An unnerved Obama backed away.

That is the kind of turf the Intelligence Community is obstinately holding onto in its continuing battle with the Trump White House.

That the establishment, media and the intelligence community are out to embarrass Trump on the legitimacy of his election is not without its irony. George W Bush too had stolen the 2001 election in Florida. But there is a difference. The establishment was on his side then.

The American liberals we learnt to revere in our school was Clarence Darrow, Ed Murrow and writers like Arthur Miller with their gaze of irony on the American Dream.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, globalization was marketed as unbridled capitalism, breeding crony capitalism everywhere. The world has flinched from that world order. Brexit and Trump are a consequence. We are transiting from one world order to the other. Millions will view the transition with hope. Liberals should have these multitudes in their ken too.

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Coming Trump World Order: Western Intelligence On Sixes and Sevens

Coming Trump World Order: Western Intelligence On Sixes and Sevens

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

Pardon my naiveté, but I cannot for the life of me, comprehend why the entire US establishment, with the Intelligence Community in the vanguard, is in convulsions about the alleged Russian efforts to hack into the US elections which brought Donald Trump to power. The CIA must be lazy if it doesn’t hack into Moscow, Beijing, everywhere.

The Washington Post on December 23 published a story by Lindsey A. Rourke, under the headline: “The US tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War”.

As a journalist, I have been witness to efforts at regime change or attempted assassination of leaders. Ronald Reagan bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986, killing Qaddafi’s six month old daughter. Qaddafi barely escaped.

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was so moved that he arranged for a delegation of non aligned foreign ministers to Tripoli to commiserate with the Libyan leader.

The Reagan White House was not pleased. The power a particular Indian ambassador to Washington had acquired depended largely on extraordinary access to key officials around the President. To preserve this priceless access, Rajiv Gandhi was persuaded to sack Foreign Minister, Bali Ram Bhagat. His guilt? He led the “peace” delegation to Tripoli – at Rajiv’s behest.

In 1987, in Managua, Nicaragua, Cardinal Ovando Bravo led me to Mother Mary’s statue in the centre of town which had not stopped “shedding tears” eversince the Daniel Ortega led Sandinistas came to power. Mary’s tears were not in vain. God was working through the US who were financing and arming the anti Sandinista Contra rebels. Mysterious were God’s ways. The money for the Contras came from a secret fund in Iran (Devil incarnate for neo cons) which was receiving arms from the US for this extraordinary munificence.

It might be argued that the examples listed above belong to the Cold War era. Well, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, all victims of US interventions, are clearly post cold war enterprises. Agreed, the creation of the Islamist Mujahideen did result in the Soviet Union vacating Afghanistan, but at the cost of the Afghan nation. Zbigniew Brzezinski placed the matter in a kind of perspective: “Our aim was to defeat the Soviet Union” he said. “And not worry about stirred up Muslims.”

The tizzy in which the US intelligence community finds itself, might be a good occasion to revisit the Syrian story to which I am witness from the very beginning. I extricate myself from a group of Arab experts at the Semiramis hotel in Damascus, to keep an appointment with Bouthaina Shaaban, senior adviser to President Bashar al Assad.

How do you explain US ambassador, Robert Stephen Ford and his French counterpart, holding meetings in Hama, Homs and Darra with rebel groups, in full public gaze? I ask her.

Ms. Shaaban, elegant and articulate, shrugs her shoulders. “Just shows how much we have been penetrated.” Ford, it is commonly known, was a great favourite of Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.

Among the senior Arabists in Damascus at that time is also, Edward Lionel Peck, a former US ambassador to Arab countries. His disgust with Ford’s behaviour is contained in a letter he wrote to members of the group who were in Damascus with him. There is such universal endorsement of the Ford school of diplomacy which borders on the Secret Service type operations, that I feel obliged to give Peck as much airing as I can. He wrote: “I have been dismayed by the accolades and support given to Ambassador Ford, our man in - and now out of Syria, for stepping well out of the traditional and appropriate role of a diplomat and actively encouraging the revolt/insurrection/sectarian strife/outside meddling, call it what you will, that is still going on. It is easy to imagine the US reaction if an ambassador from anywhere were to engage in even distantly related activities here. I fear my country remains somewhat more than merely insensitive, and is sliding into just plain rampant and offensive arrogance.” Will Trump put an end to such shenanigans?

There is something strained and edgy in the way the neo cons, the media, with the Intelligence Community in front, have mounted a virtual war on the incoming administration. It is actually a kind of blackmail. The message seems to be: you will get more of the same if you deviate from the ongoing policy which sees Vladimir Putin as arch enemy.

Trump’s commitment to “bomb the shit” out of terrorists, threatens to expose the doublespeak of established policy on Syria too. So far the US and its allies have pursued a policy riddled with ambiguity: fight IS and al Nusra but also oust or atleast weaken the Assad regime, a paradox which, in the given circumstances, cannot be reconciled. The Russian policy is more straightforward: fight the IS and Nusra in which the regime troops can be decisive.

Trump is quite clear: seek Russian cooperation to defeat terrorism. Who can quarrel with this line? The moment of reckoning may also have arrived in Afghanistan, where the Taleban are to be mobilized by Russia and China to fight IS and Al Qaeda. Can Trump be far behind? That’s the tricky one.

In brief, with Trump’s arrival on the scene, the stranglehold of the Intelligence Community on foreign policy may well weaken.

The world of western Intelligence is therefore all upside down.

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Keep Your Fingers Crossed In New Year: Beware Ides Of March

Keep Your Fingers Crossed In New Year: Beware Ides Of March

                                                                                       Saeed Naqvi

“Ek din keh leejiye jo kuch hai dil mein aapke

Ek din sun leejiye jo kuch hamare dil mein hai”

(Some day speak out everything in your heart.

But one day also listen to what we have in our hearts.)

You would imagine that this simple arrangement of words, a polite satire on the Prime Minister’s repetitious style of one-way communications (though in waist coats of diverse colours) would go down well with audiences who have stood in queues outside their banks. Wrong. A verse like this would break their trance.

Don’t forget our important tiraths, or pilgrimages – Amarnath, Vaishno Devi, Sabrimala, Shravanabelagola, to name just a few, demand arduous journeys on foot before that moment of rapture, a sighting of the deity. It is in this framework that the Indian has been mobilized for some higher purpose. Not for him to reason why, not at the moment.

The man in the queue should not be confused with the elite who never had to stand in line and who see limited currency supply as a boon, a welcome route to automatic thrift. If I tipped a bearer Rs.100 before November 8, I now tip him only Rs.20 and the recipient, a born fatalist, is even happier. This in fact is the new norm. Economists will study the downstream consequences of this abrupt slowing of cashflow for months to come.

Never in history has every citizen been in possession of data which would be the envy of social scientists worldwide. In the past 60 days I must have asked questions on demonetization of, say, an average of five persons each day – spread over Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh.

What are my findings? Broadly, there are two categories of responses which, quite strangely, remind me of Mandal Commission and its consequences. Let me explain why:

The majority of the educated speculated about black money, remonetisation of banks, a degree of collusion between bank employees and corrupt depositors who transformed astronomical sums of old money into new, the problem the middle level stores and shops were having in acquiring swipe machines and so on. But this lot was almost without exception, over a period of time, beginning to give Narendra Modi a benefit of doubt: things will improve. This was the growing refrain. In the late 80s and 90s when reservations were being increased, this lot would have been the savarnas, the upper castes opposed to rapid Mandalization.

Have those averse to sustained mandalized politics, spotted a possible equalizer in the travails of demonetisation? The uneducated, the dalits on whose back a new mandalised leadership consolidated itself in state capitals, have to this day continued to sell fruits and vegetables in carts, pavement stalls; lounging between parked cars are daily wage workers, carpenters, barbers, street cobblers, rag pickers – the list is endless.

“Many of these do not even know how to make phone calls”, says Prakash the contractor in Kotla Mubarakpur. How will they ever enter the cashless economy? These are the ones who have returned to their villages only to find their banks unable to give them any cash. Such stories reinforced by the narratives of their relatives and clans grow with geometrical progression – this is the overwhelming majority in the country side. For this multitude, Modi is quite the opposite of the hero TV channels project him as. This population is totally at a variance from the city dweller in the queue – “things will improve”.

Obviously, the two categories of voters will support opposite sides in the coming elections to UP, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa.

Uttarakhand was carved out to insulate the Hill savarnas from the ravages of UP’s Mandalized politics. The state has two dominant castes, Brahmins and Thakurs, both on the right side of the demonetization divide.

It is in UP where the wretched of the Earth, further dispossessed by the currency crunch, will expend their anger against Modi. Post Mandal, Yadavs, backbone of the Samajwadi party, have emerged as the most powerful intermediate caste. They do not rank with the poorest. Dalits do. And they are mostly with Mayawati. Will the formidable leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party be the biggest beneficiary of the currency mayhem? Muslims are badly hit too. Whether they will be seduced by SP or BSP, popularity currents on election night will dictate.

That Modi remains unchallenged after he made the nation stand outside its banks, for 60 days and more, would have been incendiary material had there been leaders of sufficient caliber to light the match, Hindu fatalism notwithstanding. Mamata Banerjee has spunk but no supporting character outside Bengal. Punjab, therefore, is consequential for Modi in this context.

Despite the media unabashedly playing the Corporate hand, ground reports from Punjab are favourable to AAP. Arvind Kejriwal, persistently reviled by the media, an unfriendly Lt. Governor, a piqued BJP and Congress, will acquire an aura if he wins. By the way, how is he faring in Goa?

What is playing out in Lucknow is a combination of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Lear. In Ferdowsi’s tragedy, Rustam slays his own son Sohrab. Lear goes mad, having been betrayed by his own progeny.

The more courtiers around Mulayam Singh egg him on for action against his son Akhilesh Yadav, the stronger will be the electoral storm gathering in the young chief minister’s favour. With Mulayam’s mental faculties in question, the conspirators are egging the aging Rustam to politically slay Sohrab.

Should Akhilesh prevail in these series of rounds, well, Modi will have to take note of another political contender for the 2019 general elections. Meanwhile, state elections will ominously bring into focus the fateful Ides of March which is when results will start pouring in.

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