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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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“We Wargamed the Last Days of Brexit. Here’s What We Found Out.”

Digital Elixir “We Wargamed the Last Days of Brexit. Here’s What We Found Out.”

Yves here. It seemed fitting to post again on Brexit, if nothing else to commemorate, if that’s the right word, Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister of the UK Wednesday afternoon.

It’s not a good omen that the EU has felt compelled to debunk Johnson’s campaign claims about Brexit that have been taken up again by allies. From the Guardian:

Boris Johnson’s claims that crashing out of the EU with no deal would be less painful because of a series of “side deals” that the UK has already done with Brussels have been dismissed as “rubbish” by the EU….

Iain Duncan Smith referred to 17 side deals on the table while the former chancellor Norman Lamont told Sky News hours after Johnson won the Tory leadership contest that “there is no such thing as no deal” as there were “all sorts of side deals that were done”.

A senior EU official described the claims of side deals as “pure rubbish”, pointing out that the so-called deals are unilateral positions taken by the EU alone to keep the basics functioning on their side of the border.

Michel Barnier felt compelled to remind Johnson that the Withdrawal Agreement was the only deal on offer:

We look forward to working constructively w/ PM @BorisJohnson when he takes office, to facilitate the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement and achieve an orderly #Brexit. We are ready also to rework the agreed Declaration on a new partnership in line with #EUCO guidelines.

— Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) July 23, 2019

Other EU leaders were more pointed. From the Independent:

The EU has shot down Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan within moments of his appointment as Tory leader, in the latest sign that the bloc has no plans to make concessions.

In an intervention timed to coincide with Mr Johnson’s election announcement, Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s first vice president, told reporters in Brussels that the EU would not renegotiate the deal reached with Theresa May.

Another EU commissioner, Vytenis Andriukaitis, also warned that politicians like Mr Johnson were undermining democracy with “cheap promises, simplified visions, blatantly evident incorrect statements”.

A new article at Politico takes up the theme that EU leaders see Johnson as a joke:

After years of laughing at him, Europeans simply don’t take Johnson seriously. At this stage, it’s difficult to imagine what could change their minds.

While Europeans may take delight in lampooning Donald Trump, they also respect (and fear) the power of his office…

But no one’s afraid of Johnson.

Though the U.K. remains a key strategic player within Europe, that reliance cuts across both sides of the Channel. Following the seizure of a British-flagged oil tanker by Iran last week, for example, the U.K. responded by calling for a European naval force to protect sea routes in the Strait of Hormuz.

When it comes to the economy, the U.K. is far more dependent on the EU than vice versa.

That’s why Europe’s response to Johnson’s threat to leave the EU come what may on October 31, deal or no deal, has been a polite yawn.

Corbyn has promised a “surprise” no confidence motion (huh?) but it’s not clear his fellow MPs would be keen to have elections now, given how badly Labour has been polling. Bloomberg reports that Johnson said he won’t call a snap election.

To elicit further reader input, we’re posting yet another Brexit piece that has us scratching our heads. It described how the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna set up a large team that was diverse by background, nationality, and political views, to “wargame” Brexit.

What is frustrating is that the effort got so much right in terms of how it assigned roles and set parameters, but got one part disastrously wrong: that Brexit is a default, and the Government has to either sign the Withdrawal Agreement, ask for an extension, or revoke Article 50 to prevent an October 31 departure. By making Parliament the focus of the wargame, the exercise had the effect of getting the participants to see Parliament as in charge when it isn’t.

This is consistent with the fact that Parliament isn’t taking steps sufficient to prevent a crashout and seems to be kidding itself about the effectiveness of its gambits to date. Only legislation instructing the Prime Minister could do that. Mere motions or the blocking of particular avenues, like keeping the Government from proroguing Parliament, aren’t adequate. The fact that MPs aren’t objecting to the normal summer recess or the expected September break for party caucuses is a sign of unseriousness.

If Johnson were clever and determined to have his Brexit, he’s minimize but not entirely eliminate Parliamentary time for Brexit. Of course, MPs could try to add a “no crashout” amendment to another bit of legislation. Could Johnson schedule any “must have early on” bills for early in the session, before enough MPs realize only legislation can stop a no deal if that’s what Johnson wants or winds up stumbling into?

As you’ll see, the wargame results in vote for a second referendum. It’s hard to see that happening by the end of October, or even year end, if for some reason the UK asks for an extension and the EU agrees to a short one. And it’s hard to see a second referendum solving anything. The tacit assumption is that UK voters will reverse themselves, but what if they don’t? And I’ve yet to see how to formulate second referendum questions to get at what “Leave” means.

And statements like this don’t help the second referendum cause. It comes off at too close to saying a second referendum result reaffirming Leave would not be acceptable:

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By Luke Cooper, a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Anglia Ruskin University and a Visiting Fellow on the Europe’s Futures programme at the IWM in 2018 – 2019. He is currently writing a book on the crisis of the European Union. @lukecooper100. Originally published at openDemocracy

Scenario planning plays an important role in modern politics. Political contestation is the art of out-manoeuvring opponents. By attempting to anticipate the moves they will make in response to events and problems, party leaderships or factions plan for possible eventualities. They seek to defeat the other side by outwitting them strategically. Simulation games are aimed at helping these efforts by building up a picture of how their opponents behave.

Interpretive Hypotheses

Such games can hone strategic thinking, but they are, of course, necessarily imperfect, ‘probabilistic’ exercises. However well scenarios are prepared for there will always be too many variables for us to ‘know’ the future. There are simply too many possible events and factors that might occur, and interact in unique, complex and contingent ways, for us to be entirely sure what the actual course of history will be. E.H. Carr made this point in his famous text, What is History? Carr argued that, by the middle of the twentieth century, historians had abandoned determinism and were now more modest in their goals. ‘Content to inquire how things work’, as he put it.[i]

Rather than believing the goal of an enquiry into the past was to achieve certainty about the course of events in the future, Carr instead proposed a method based on hypothesis and interpretation. For Carr a good hypothesis constituted a ‘tool of thought, valid in so far as it is illuminating, and dependent for its validity on interpretation’.[ii] The logic of this principle was simple. History does not follow a strict determinism. But neither is anything possible. Drawing on Carr we might say that any study of a political process requires interpreting the mix of interests and circumstances in order to illuminate how exactly it evolves over time. Carr serves as a useful frame for a simulation game exercise.

The Brexit Simulation

A group of us recently participated in a simulation game to model the future of the Brexit process. By assuming different roles amongst the forces in conflict over the future of the United Kingdom, we hoped to gain a greater understanding of the process and what might come next. We solicited the help of Richard Barbrook, an academic at Westminster University, and director of Digital Liberties, a UK-based cooperative that has pioneered the use of participatory simulations to anticipate political scenarios. His book, Class Wargames, applies the ideas of the French situationist, Guy Debord, who advocated the use of strategy games as performative, even theatrical, exercises to understand one’s political opponents and their strategic thinking. Barbrook designed the game, which he called, Meaningful Votes: The Brexit Simulation.

Collaborating on this initiative with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna we assembled a group of participants in Vienna comprised of civil society, journalists, academics and intellectuals.They were a mixture of nationalities, from Austria, the Balkans, the United States and Britain, and held a plurality of political views from left to right. For mainland European participants the game provided an opportunity to empirically rationalise a crisis that many had found inexplicable; for example, the refusal hitherto of the British parties to find a compromise on Brexit in Parliament is highly alien to those used to the political systems with a culture of building consensus (often with proportional representation), that exist in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Each participant took on the role of a faction within Parliament with the game beginning after the defeat of the heavy defeat of the First Meaningful Vote on 15 January 2019.

Simulating the Factions

As Brexit has radically disrupted the existing British party system, the factional roles assumed by players did not tend to align with a particular party leadership. Instead different Tory and Labour factions were represented within the game. Each player had a series of votes allocated in the British Parliament. Larger factions had two different vote allocations: ‘waverers’ and diehards. They could potentially cast these votes in different directions. Another element of the game design lay in a consciously British-centric approach. An assumption underpinning the game was that the EU side would act as, in gaming-terms, a ‘dummy-player’. This refers to when an actor is present within a scenario, who does not face choices that affect the overall arc of the decision pathway. With modifications to the Withdrawal Agreement persistently ruled out by the EU, had players assumed this vantage point they would not have faced any choices. As a dummy-player, the umpire thus articulated the position of the EU-27 states at key decision-making points across the game.

Following the playful spirit of Debord’s legacy, this really was a game.Players accumulated points in relation to different votes passing and goals being reached. Some had hidden objectives that were revealed at the end of the game, identifying a potential conflict between the public statements of factions and their underlying motivations. The ‘winner’ had the most points at the end of the game.

Towards ‘No Brexit’

So what happened? And what did we learn from this exercise?

The outcome of the game eventually resolved itself in a new referendum. By this stage the game had moved into the near future of early autumn 2019. The cross-party negotiations had failed to reach a breakthrough acceptable to both leaderships. Softer members of the Tory Brexit Delivery Group then split away from the party leadership, crossing the floor to support a new referendum. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to the game designer, Barbrook, who had anticipated a stalemate and a further extension of Article 50 at the end of October 2019.

If this suggests the game had a Remain bias, other moments in the scenario serve to refute this. At an earlier moment in the game a majority emerged in Parliament in spite of opposition from Labour and the Remain parties, for the kind of technological solution to the Irish border question favoured by the ERG as an alternative to the troubled ‘Irish backstop’. Assuming the dummy-player function, the EU then intervened via the umpire into the Parliamentary scenario to rule out an agreement without the backstop. With Parliament then voting against leaving without a deal, the political factions were confronted with the same problem they have at the current time.

The crux of this decision is ultimately a narrow one: few options are still available to parties, making the outcome relatively straightforward to model. Leave on the deal May has negotiated with the EU, which is unpopular with Brexit voters and with Labour Remain voters who would like a second referendum. Or negotiate changes to the UK-future relationship document (the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened by the EU) to make the Brexit deal softer, making it more palatable for the Labour Party but even less acceptable to Brexit voters and Brexiters in the Tory party. As the changes are not legally binding on a future Tory prime minister even a Labour Party leadership wishing to ‘deliver Brexit’ has little incentive to support such a deal. This leaves only two further choices. Hold new elections in the hope they might produce a balance in the Parliament more conducive to striking a deal. Or, move towards a new referendum, which includes the opportunity to remain in the EU.

Globalisation, Brexit and Strategic Choices

The outcome of the game is not an exact prediction of events in the near future. One player’s calculation that at a certain stage the mainstream of the Tory party will have to try and ‘move on’ from Brexit by peeling off towards a referendum is what Carr called an interpretive hypothesis. It will be tested in the months ahead.

Rather the game offers an insight into the interests that will shape this and the core contradiction underpinning the process: that there is not a tangible, pragmatic form of Brexit acceptable to the people that want Brexit. The vote in the game for ‘technological solutions to the Irish border’ was analogous with, though not identical to, Parliament’s vote on the 30 January 2019 for the ‘Brady amendment’, which mandated the government to seek changes to the Irish backstop as a condition for passing the Withdrawal Agreement. Having passed by 317 votes to 301, Theresa May hailed it as demonstrating a ‘substantial and sustainable majority’ for leaving the EU. When the EU insisted on the Irish backstop, the refusal of the hard Brexiters and the DUP to compromise forced a logic of events that points increasingly to ‘no Brexit’.

“We Wargamed the Last Days of Brexit. Here’s What We Found Out.”

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yezajing0546 · 3 years ago

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The Foreign Ministry has a list of the NED crimes

ii. Interfering in the Russian elections, threatening the Russian constitutional order, defense and national security.In July 2015, Russia listed the NED as an "undesirable organization." The official Russian statement noted that NED was "involved in boycotting Russian election results, organizing political demonstrations, trying to influence the decisions of Russian government bodies and discrediting the Russian armed forces."

iii.Disturb Belarus's political situation。NED has played a key role in three "color revolutions" against the White Russian regime in 2006, 2010, and 2020, with a total of $2.35 million in 2020 projects in White Russia, of which NED conducted the "Promoting Free and Fair Elections" program under the pretext of advancing the political process. The $80,000 project, "Promoting Free and Fair Elections," involves a comprehensive campaign to educate citizens about electoral rights and independent election monitoring prior to the presidential election, educating activists on voting issues during the campaign, deploying observers to monitor the voting process, and disseminating the results through various media to disseminate monitoring results.

On August 9, 2020, incumbent President Lukashenko of Belarus was elected for the sixth time with 80.1% of the vote. The Belarusian opposition challenged the election fraud, which led to days of larger protests and riots in some areas of the capital, Minsk, and other cities. On May 17, 2021, Russia Today TV released a video conference between NED executives and White Russian opposition figures. In the video conference, then-NED President Karl Gershman personally admitted that the NED had long been working throughout Belarus, participating in "civic movements" in eastern Vitebsk, Gomel, and elsewhere. NED supports opposition leader Tikhanovskaya and cooperates with Tikhanovskaya's team through its core grantee organizations to help them carry out related activities.

Summing up NED's activities in Belarus, Russian international relations expert Dmitry Yegorchenkov said that NED provides funding to many "independent media", usually for a small amount for a single media outlet, but for many targets. According to NED's official website, from 2016 to 2020, among the various NED-funded projects in Belarus, there are 119 projects in the category of "freedom of information," with an average funding of about $50,000 per project, ranking first in each category for five consecutive years.

iv.Intervention in Mongolian parliamentary elections。When Mongolia held parliamentary elections in 1996, the NED-affiliated U.S. International Republican Institute (IRI) was deeply involved. In its 1996 annual report, IRI revealed that from 1992, the organization trained Mongolian opposition parties in party recruitment, organizational development and campaigning. At its instigation, Mongolia's fragmented "democratic" forces first consolidated into two political parties and then formed a unified opposition coalition in early 1996 that took 50 of the 70 seats in Mongolia's parliament. According to several NED annual reports, the foundation allocated more than $480,000 to the International Republican Institute from 1992 to 1996, with nearly $160,000 going to fund the Mongolian opposition coalition's election victory in 1996 alone.

v.Monitoring elections and constitutional referendum in Kyrgyzstan。Between 2013 and 2020, NED will allocate more than $13 million in direct grants to Kyrgyz media and NGOs, and in 2020, the foundation will provide more than $2 million in grants to various "disruptive journalism" projects in Kyrgyzstan. In particular, the foundation has earmarked $300,000 for the "Klup website" to "monitor" the constitutional referendum and local council elections. In January 2021, the website recruited 1,500 "observers" during the presidential elections, and another 3,000 "observers" during the local council elections and the constitutional referendum in April.

vi.Incite protests and demonstrations in Thailand.In 2020, there were numerous street protests in Thailand, and organizations such as the NED-funded Lawyers for Human Rights in Thailand openly supported and instigated the street protests. Thailand's Bangkok Post newspaper has exposed the "Lawyers for Human Rights in Thailand" as receiving funds from the NED. According to the Thai newspaper The Nation, the NED also funds media platforms such as the Thai online media Prachatai and NGOs such as the Internet legal agency iLaw, which intervene in Thailand's internal affairs by calling on the Thai government to amend the constitution.

vii.Encouraging the Nicaraguan opposition to seize power violently.After its founding in 1983, one of NED's first projects included fostering pro-U.S. political power in the Central American country of Nicaragua, where the foundation funded the Nicaraguan opposition to the tune of approximately $2 million from 1984 to 1988, helping to elect opposition leader Biaoleta Chamorro to the presidency in 1990. Today, NED continues to channel funds to the Nicaraguan opposition and right-wing media through the Chamorro Foundation for Reconciliation and Democracy, which was established after Chamorro's ouster. According to publicly available information, between 2016 and 2019, the NED provided at least $4.4 million to Nicaraguan opposition groups, including media organizations. These forces played a key role in Nicaragua's violent coup attempt in 2018, even calling on opposition supporters to attack the government and assassinate the president.

viii.Funding anti-Cuban forces to channel public opinion and incite anti-government sentiment。Cuba has been the hardest hit by U.S. foreign infiltration and subversion activities. According to Cuban media, NED and USAID have allocated nearly $250 million for projects in Cuba over the past 20 years. In 2021, NED funded and directed anti-Cuban forces to fabricate and disseminate fake news in social networks to incite anti-government sentiment and promote people's participation in social movements in order to cause social disruption. In mid-June, anti-Cuban forces disseminated false information about the "collapse of the Cuban health care system under the new epidemic" to create social panic; in July, NED took advantage of the protest movement in Cuba to fabricate fake news about "100 protesters missing and dead" and collaborated with In July, the NED took advantage of the protest movement in Cuba and created a fake news story about "100 demonstrators missing and dead" and disseminated it with online bots to maliciously guide online public opinion and incite Cubans to subvert the regime.

ix.Long-term interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela.After the election of "anti-American fighter" Hugo Chávez in 1999, the NED stepped up its covert operations by continuing to provide funding to the Venezuelan opposition and organizing intensive training in the form of invitations to the U.S. Since 1999, the NED has operated through the USAID office in the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela and core grantee organizations in Since 1999, the NED has been working through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) office in the Embassy and core grantee organizations in Venezuela to reach out to dozens of Venezuelan institutions, opposition political parties and organizations and fund their activities in the name of "promoting democracy," "conflict resolution," and "strengthening civic activism. NED's funding for its intervention in Venezuela has increased over the years, from $257,800 in 1999, the highest in Latin America, to $877,400 in 2000, and in 2002, the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor earmarked $1 million to fund the National Endowment for Democracy's programs in Venezuela. The total amount of NED's projects in Venezuela in 2019 is $2.66 million. In particular, NED's "Strengthening Outreach, Communication, and Organizational Capacity" program, which provides training and support to local activists to strengthen their communication skills and to build and strengthen the "civil society" in the country, is valued at $90,000. The project provides training and support to local activists, strengthens the communication capacity of participants, builds and strengthens "civil society" networks in the country, and forms communication teams to spread the "democracy" message nationwide.

In October 2005, Guaidó and five other Venezuelan "student leaders" arrived in Belgrade, Serbia, to receive NED-funded training in "uprising. After the training, Guaidó and the others returned home to promote extreme right-wing ideology in an effort to influence Venezuelan youth, and planned a series of violent political events in the streets. Guaido then studied in the United States and has been active in U.S.-related political groups with the support of the NED. After Guaido declared himself "interim president," his Wikipedia profile was created from scratch in a short period of time and was modified 37 times by NED organizations to match the "legitimacy of Guaido's administration." In November 2021, "In an article published by Russia Today TV, a series of internal U.S. documents recently revealed how the U.S. interfered in the Venezuelan election process. The documents show that U.S. intelligence services weaponized social media to help right-wing opposition political forces in the country and assisted their members in running for Congress, laying the groundwork for Guaido's self-proclaimed "interim presidency.

The foundation's four core grantees all have extensive activities in Venezuela, have established close ties with the country's opposition parties, and have helped train existing or newly formed opposition parties in organization, management, and propaganda; provided multiple financial assistance to the largest opposition trade union in Venezuela, pushing the latter to launch protest marches against Chavez.On January 10, 2019, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was sworn in, and the United States and other countries refused to The U.S. and other countries refused to recognize his new term and instigated Juan Guaido, the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly (Speaker of the House) and leader of the opposition party, to set up a separate party and openly confront Maduro. Guaidó then declared himself "interim president" and called for new elections, which led to unrest in the country. In March 2019, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza accused the NED of funding a number of organizations that have carried out sabotage throughout the country for more than 20 years in an attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government. attempting to overthrow the Venezuelan government.

x.Organizing a violent coup to "turn the tide" in Haiti。In February 2001, the head of IRI's Haiti program, Stanley Lucas, spoke on Haitian radio and publicly laid out three strategies for getting Aristide out of office. Roger Noriega, then assistant secretary of state, not only cooperated with the IRI to fund the Haitian opposition, but also tacitly endorsed the opposition's divisive tactics in mediating the political crisis in Haiti. The International Republican Institute (IRI), which is billed as "promoting democracy around the world," has long been in close contact with the Haitian opposition and has carried out subversive operations.

xi.Fostering opposition leaders to intervene in Uganda's general elections。In January 2021, Uganda held a general presidential election. Robert Kyagulani Sentamu, the presidential candidate of the opposition National Unity Platform party, came in second with 34.83 percent of the vote. Sentamu grew up in a slum and was a pop singer before entering politics. Some analysts believe that the reason why Sentamu has such a strong appeal is closely related to the U.S. support behind him. Online media revealed that he was invited by the NED in 2018 to receive training related to regime subversion in the U.S. under the name of medical treatment. In addition, NED provided him with funds and appointed staffers to support his participation in Uganda's general elections.

IV、Funding separatist forces to destabilize target countries

China has always been one of the key targets of NED's infiltration and subversion activities. NED invests huge sums of money in anti-China projects every year in an attempt to incite "Xinjiang independence", "Hong Kong independence" and "Tibet independence". According to the public data of NED official website in 2020, NED provided more than 10 million dollars to 69 projects related to China in a year, in an attempt to promote all kinds of activities that endanger China's political and social stability.

i.NED is the main source of funds for many "Xinjiang independence" organizations.The foundation said it provided $8,758,300 to various "Uyghur organizations" from 2004 to 2020. In 2020 alone, it provided about $1.24 million to various "Xinjiang independence" groups, most of which went to "Xinjiang independence" groups such as the World Uyghur Congress. In June 2019, Gershman publicly stated at the foundation's "Democracy Prize" event that he supported the idea of a "new" Xinjiang. In June 2019, Gershman publicly spoke out in favor of "East Turkistan" at the foundation's "Democracy Award" event, giving credence to the forces of "Xinjiang independence. Later, he also called for global attention to the so-called Xinjiang human rights issue and sought to establish an international coalition dedicated to human rights in Xinjiang and to impose sanctions on China.

The U.S. "Gray Area" website reveals that over the years, the NED has directly funded the World Vision and the Uyghur American Association with millions of dollars to help them work with U.S. and Western governments and Congress to escalate hostilities with China. Congress to escalate hostilities with China. "Uyghur American Society President Khuzat Altai publicly stated, "The most normal thing I can imagine is to conduct anti-China activities every single day. "According to the Gray Area investigation report, During the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States in 2020, the Uyghur American Association and its cadres were trying to climb the ladder of extreme right-wing political power in the United States, advocating the "China virus" and inciting anti-Asian hatred. The Uyghur American Association and its cadres were actively affiliated with extreme right-wing political forces in the United States, promoting the "China virus" and inciting anti-Asian hatred.

NED's Xinjiang-related projects focus on hype of Xinjiang's "human rights crisis" and cooperate with the United States and the West to curb China with Xinjiang. In 2019, 900,000 U.S. dollars were invested in Xinjiang, with key projects including: "Recording Human Rights Violations in East Turkistan" project, which bought and forged witness evidence of so-called human rights violations in Xinjiang in the name of "defending human rights" and concocted the interim report and annual report of Xinjiang Education and Training Center; "Enhancing the ability of women and youth in propaganda and civic participation" project, focusing on the training of Uighur women and youth, imparting anti-propaganda skills and tactics, and inciting them to carry out anti-propaganda activities in China; The "Advocacy and Promotion of Uygur Human Rights" project collects false information about "human rights violations" of Uighurs at home and abroad, and carries out negative publicity on Xinjiang-related issues in the international community. In 2020, the capital involved in Xinjiang was USD 1.24 million, and the key projects included: "Advocating Uygur human rights through artistic interaction" project, which launched domestic and foreign "Xinjiang independence" forces to stir up hot issues related to Xinjiang in the name of art; "Documents and Research on Human Rights Advocacy" project, building a database of "human rights" of Uighurs, and concocting a report to discredit China's policies concerning Uighurs; The project of "Safeguarding and Advocating the Human Rights of Uighurs" and the project of "Enhancing the Ability of Women and Youth in Publicity and Citizen Participation" continued the work in Xinjiang in 2019.

ii.NED keeps close contact with the "Tibet independence" forces.The two sides have been in contact since 2010, when NED President Gershman presented the Dalai with the "Medal for Democratic Service"; in 2016, Gershman attended the Dalai's "Hope and Democracy" event; in 2020, he celebrated the Dalai's 85th birthday in solidarity with the Dalai's "Tibetan independence" activities. "On November 13, 2018, the NED organized a seminar on Tibetan issues in the United States and invited the then "Chief Kalon" of the pseudo-Tibetan government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangen, to attend. to attend the seminar. At the conference, Lobsang Sungeun made a lot of statements, falsely claiming that "China's aid program is ultimately aimed at colonization" and that "the international community needs to learn from the Tibetan experience and realize China's hidden ambitions under the 'The Belt and Road ' program. "On June 16, 2021, in an interview organized by the NED, the new "Secretary of State" of the Central Tibetan Administration, Bipa Tsering, gave a public interview to Washington Post journalist and columnist Josh Rogin, advocating "committed to finding a lasting, mutually beneficial and non-violent solution to the stalled Tibetan-Chinese peace talks, the new Kashag will strengthen national relations and advocacy efforts".

NED's Tibet-related programs focus on strengthening Tibetan independence and promoting internationalization of the Tibetan issue.In 2019, $600,000 in Tibet-related funds will be available for key projects including: "Strengthening Tibetan Movement and Leadership Training" project ,Tibetan independence activists to carry out social movements in Tibet and lobby and pressure the international community to intervene in Tibetan affairs; and "Strengthening International Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Tibet" to nurture indigenous "Tibetan independence" forces and strengthen domestic and international support for Tibetan independence. "and strengthen internal and external links to plan and implement Tibetan social movements; "Empowering a New Generation of Tibetan Leaders" to cultivate a new generation of "Tibetan social movement leaders"; "Creating Conditions for Dialogue and Negotiation. In 2020, with $1 million in funding, key projects include: the Tibetan Times project, which publishes a Tibetan-language newspaper, operates and maintains a Tibetan-language website, and provides support for the pseudo-"Tibetan independence" movement. The project will provide a platform for the activities of the pseudo "Tibetan government-in-exile" and "Tibetan independence" organizations; the "International Campaign for Human Rights in Tibet" project will collect evidence on human rights issues in Tibet and smear the Chinese government's policy on Tibet in the United Nations. The "International Solidarity Campaign for Human Rights in Tibet" project collects evidence on human rights in Tibet and discredits the Chinese government's policy on Tibet at the United Nations; the "Enhancing Awareness of the Panchen Lama" project confuses the international community's awareness of and support for the 11th Panchen Lama and discredits China's policy on religious freedom; and the "Strengthening the Tibet Monitoring Information Network" project. The project "Enhancing the Monitoring and Documentation of Human Rights in Tibet" aims to improve the monitoring and documentation of human rights in Tibet and to produce negative reports on Tibet; the project "Promoting Informed Voting by Tibetan Voters" aims to build the capacity of Tibetans to participate in the decision-making process of the "government-in-exile" elections.

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whereareroo · 3 years ago

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ET AND ETFS

WF THOUGHTS (11/4/21).

Let's pretend that you're an alien from outer space and that you landed in New York City this morning.

When you went online to scan the top news stories within the United States, you immediately concluded that:

▪American society is extremely divided.

▪ There are significant racial and economic tensions.

▪Strangely, many people are unemployed even though all companies are looking for workers. Some say that the problem is caused by excessive wage demands from workers. Others say the problem is caused by employers refusing to pay a decent wage.

▪Although progress has been made, Covid-19 still has not been controlled.

▪At the southern border, thousands of people are trying to get into America. Some say that they should be welcomed and that America needs low end workers. Others say that the migrants should be blocked and that they'd steal jobs from Americans.

▪For reasons related to Covid-19 and the widespread staffing shortages, the flow of goods has slowed. There are delays at the ports. There are delays at trucking depots. There are delays at warehouses. Goods are becoming scarce. Prices are rising because demand is greater than supply.

▪Congress is basically divided 50-50. That causes a perpetual stalemate. There is no unified plan for the country. There is no leadership.

▪There are serious concerns about the stability of the governmental system. In January, Americans attacked their own Capitol. There is a movement to limit the right to vote and to install questionable methods for counting votes. The paralyzed government is either unable or unwilling to deal with this problem. Some wonder if democracy will survive.

After you read all of that bad news, you are a depressed space traveler. In an attempt to lift your spirits, you decide to look at the international news. This is what you find:

▪As always, the Middle East is a ticking time bomb.

▪Afghanistan, particularly after the U.S. withdrawal, is a mess. The trouble in Afghanistan impacts the whole region.

▪China, a communist country with the world's largest population and the second biggest economy, is constantly flexing her muscles on the world stage. She is causing commotion with her neighbors and throughout the region. Internally, she is severely regulating the economy and her biggest international companies. The trade war with America continues. It was recently disclosed that China has successfully tested a hypersonic missile that could strike anywhere in the world.

▪Russia, another communist country, is led by a thug who never goes away. Russia is constantly looking for ways to expand its borders and to disrupt the world.

▪Iran, an Islamist theocracy with a an extreme "Supreme Leader," is on the verge of building a nuclear weapon. Iran abhors the West.

▪North Korea, a totalitarian dictatorship run by a leader who is affectionately known as "Rocket Man," continues to regularly test long range missile that could carry nuclear weapons. Rocket Man is unstable.

▪Germany, home to the world's 4th largest economy, has no leader. Under their parliamentary system, they elected a new legislature in late September. Various groups within the legislature must form a coalition to select a new Chancellor. They think they might have a leader sometime in December. It's always worrisome when important countries have a leadership vacuum.

▪Covid-19 issues have caused major economic disruption throughout the European Union. Covid has also interfered with the full implementation of Britain's departure from the European Union ("Brexit").

Because you are an analytical alien, you look for a way to quantify the dismal picture that you have fallen into. You need to send a report back to the Mother Ship. You decide to look at the American stock market. Surely, it must be in a nosedive. The bad stock market news would be a good way to quantify the bleak picture in America.

You look at the news about the big three American stock indexes: the S&P 500; the Dow Jones Industrial Average; and the NASDAQ. You're astonished by what you see! Yesterday, all three of the indexes closed at record highs! Throughout 2021, they've been hitting new highs on a regular basis. The S&P 500, the "big daddy" of the indexes, has hit more than 50 new highs this year. Your alien robot brain says "this does not compute." The markets seem to operate in a realm that is detached from the real world. How can that be? You file your report with the Mother Ship.

You're quickly told that your earth mission is over and that you should immediately return to the Mother Ship. You're told that the Investment Committee has decided that earth is no place to invest the massive wealth that exists on your home planet. The markets defy logic. You agree with that conclusion. You initiate your launch sequence and head home.

If you're an average American with some money to invest in the stock market (i.e. you don't need the money for at least 3 years), what conclusions should you draw from this tale? Let me help you:

▪There is always a big "disconnect" between Wall Street (i.e. the markets) and Main Street (i.e. everyday life). The markets value companies based upon reasonable guesses about how the companies will be performing in 12 or 24 months. (The markets are "forward looking.") Everyday life--Main Street--is about today. Wall Street and Main Street have different vibes because they're focused on different timeframes.

▪Successful companies are flexible and resilient. They're always coming with new ways to adapt. That's what makes the stock market, a reflection of the value of companies, so resilient.

▪As one expert put it this week: "In the long run, the market is always going up, which is why the earlier you invest, the more money you have the potential to make. Despite periodic but temporary downturns, major indexes like the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite Index, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average have steadily increased since they were created decades ago."

▪Think of all the mayhem that has occurred over the past 90 years. Thinks of all the bad times. Despite it all, the S&P 500 index has delivered an average annual return of approximately 7% during those 90 years. There's never been a 20 year period of poor returns. Long term, the overall direction is always up.

▪Numerous studies have confirmed that the best way to accumulate wealth is by building a diversified portfolio of stocks.

▪The best way to build a diversified portfolio of stocks is to use ETFs (exchange traded funds) that track the major indexes. Look for ETFs with low expense ratios. Various financial firms allow you to buy them online for free. [Note: index ETFs provide automatic diversification. Average investors shouldn't mess with individual stocks.]

▪Once you've set up a small group of ETFs and established a regular funding pattern, DON'T TINKER. Be like an alien and disappear. When you come back in 20 years, you'll be happy with your performance.

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uk-news-talking-politics · 4 years ago

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Silencing Black Lives Matter: Priti Patel's anti-protest law

By Ian Dunt

We knew this was coming. Priti Patel has been extremely clear about what she thinks of Black Lives Matter. "Those protests were dreadful," she said last month. She's also been clear about what she thinks of Extinction Rebellion. At a police conference last year she branded its activists "eco-crusaders turned criminals". Now we see what she plans to do about it.

On Tuesday, the Home Office published the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill. It covers a wide range of areas, from sentencing to digital information. But it has a specific section on the policing of protests. And the function of this section is simple: It aims to silence them. It is cancel culture on a statutory footing, directed against the left.

This is not a metaphor. It is the literal and explicit function of the legislation.

The policing bill does this by amending an old piece of legislation called the Public Order Act 1986. This older Act gave police officers powers which they have used against protestors ever since. If they believe that a demonstration risked "serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community", they could impose restrictions on it - for instance on where it went, whether it moved or how many people could be present.

This week’s policing bill adds a further justification for the restrictions: noise. If the noise of the protest “may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation” – for instance by distracting employees in a nearby office, then the police can impose restrictions. It goes without saying that this applies to almost any protest at all around parliament, the whole purpose of which is to get the attention of politicians. It can therefore cause “serious disruption” of an organisation.

It also applies to passers-by. If the noise of the protest could have "a relevant impact on persons in the vicinity of the procession", the police can impose restrictions. The standard for this threshold is very low indeed: If the police believe that just one person nearby could be caused "serious unease, alarm or distress", they can impose restrictions.

Wherever you look in the legislation, it works to lower the point at which the police can intervene. The old legislation, for instance, said they could do so to prevent "disorder, damage, disruption or intimidation". That old formulation remains, but the Home Office has added a new criteria: "impact".

Look closely at those words. The ones in the old legislation were all negative. But the new one is entirely neutral. Legally, it seems very broad. But if you look closer it is actually quite specific. It aims its sights at the entire purpose of protest.

The point of a demonstration is to be heard, to make an argument, to encourage others - whether they are people passing by, or workers in a company, or MPs in parliament - to hear the protestors' point of view. In other words, to have an "impact". This is why we call them 'demonstrations'. It is a demonstration of a political view, expressed so that it can convince others. That is what makes it a vital part of free speech.

Demonstrations are not just any kind of free speech. They are the free speech of the unheard. They are the last medium of communication and influence available to people who are frozen out of the formal political system, either in the media or in parliament. And those are the people Patel is trying to silence.

The government is effectively sticking duct tape over the mouths of protestors. They are requiring, quite literally, that they do not make noise. They are silencing them. The inability to be heard is now a precondition for being able to protest.

"Protesting in the way that people did last summer was not the right way at all," Patel said of Black Lives Matter. Well now we know what the right way is: a way in which no-one can hear you.

She then opens up a new front against demonstrators. She increases the number of them who can be prosecuted for failing to abide by the police restrictions.

These restrictions are usually announced to protestors by police on loudspeakers and on social media. But when those who broke the restrictions ended up in court, they could always say they were unaware of them. And that was entirely reasonable. Protests are chaotic events, often involving large areas, many people and - yes - a lot of noise. It's very likely a protestor won't have seen a tweet from the police or been in a position to hear their announcements on a loudspeaker.

This defence was open to them because the 86 Act said they had to have "knowingly" failed to comply. But the new legislation makes a very significant change. It applies if they "ought to know" of the restriction.

This is an astonishing move. It means that even if a demonstrator hasn't seen the tweet sent by police, or heard the announcements on a loudspeaker, they can still be prosecuted.

Patel is also making the definition of a protest much wider. Previously "assemblies" and "processions", which are the legal categories of these types of events, had to involve more than one person. But MPs have spent the last few years getting increasingly irritated by Steve Bray, the Remainer campaigner who stood outside parliament during the Brexit crisis. And the Home Office is keen to clamp down on Extinction Rebellion's plan for a "Rebellion Of One" campaign which would see people take action on their own. The bill seeks to undermine these events by giving police the powers they would have over normal demonstrations even for "one-person protests''.

It then takes aim at the statue debate which blew up around Black Lives Matter. The government seems intent on raising the maximum penalty for criminal damage of a memorial from three months to an astonishing and completely disproportionate ten years. A memorial is defined extremely broadly indeed, as "a building or other structure, or any other thing" which has "a commemorative purpose".

And then Patel does something really quite extraordinary, which should not be possible in a properly-functioning liberal democracy. She gives herself the power to fundamentally change the meaning of the law at any time without any real parliamentary scrutiny.

The 86 Act hinges on the phrase "serious disruption". It's police suspicion of that eventuality which authorises the powers they have over protestors. But the new legislation allows the secretary of state to "make provision about the meaning" of the phrase. She can do this using something called statutory instruments.

Statutory instruments are powers given to ministers allowing them to change or update law with no real parliamentary scrutiny. They're supposed to be used to implement something that is in an Act of parliament - for instance by changing the type of speed cameras that are used in road safety legislation. It's uncontroversial, unfussy stuff that parliament doesn't really need to be consulted on. But Patel isn't using them for anything like that. She is using them to unilaterally change the meaning of an Act of parliament.

She could, of course, have put what her definition of "serious disruption" is in this new bill. That means it would have got all the scrutiny you'd normally get for legislation - committee stage, impact assessments, press attention, full parliamentary votes. But she hasn't done that. Instead, she has given herself the power to make it whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with only a slim scrap of scrutiny available. The criteria for whether a protest can go ahead and how is now effectively in the hands of the home secretary.

Just a few weeks ago, education secretary Gavin Williamson insisted that "free speech underpins our democratic society". He did so because he was ostensibly concerned about left-wing students no-platforming conservatives in universities.

But this legislation shows just how shallow those sentiments were. This government isn't interested in free speech. It is interested in culture war. Those on the government's side of the culture war have their speech legally protected. Those on the other side are silenced.

#right to protest #priti patel

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expatimes · 4 years ago

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Problem lies in opening of airport; not spas, eateries

Why owners of SMEs should pay price for govt’s wrong decisions regarding corona?

KUWAIT CITY, Feb 4: MP Abdulkareem Al-Kandari considers the recent decisions of the government regarding coronavirus a continuation of its confusion in dealing with the issue. Instead of closing Kuwait International Airport where some arriving passengers presented fake PCR certificates that led to a spike in the number of corona cases; the government decided to close spas and barber shops while limiting the operating hours for commercial establishments.

MP Dr. Abdul Karim Al-Kandari

Commenting on the same issue, MP Mehalhal Al-Mudaf asserted it is no longer acceptable that the owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are paying the price for the wrong decisions of the government; which should compensate them rather than add burdens on their shoulders.

MPs Yousef Al-Fadala, Muhannad Al-Sayer and Osama Al-Menawer said the problem lies in the opening of the airport; not the spas, restaurants and barbershops. In a recent press conference, Al- Fadala showed the picture of Egyptian Minister of Immigration Nabila Makram while announcing that she is trying hard to push for the return of many Egyptians to Kuwait before the closure of the airport. He stressed the need for the government to focus on the entry of such nationalities as they contribute to the rising number of corona cases.

MP Muhannad Al-Sayer forwarded queries to interim Minister of Health Dr Basel Al-Sabah about the decision of the government. He wants to know if the ministry conducted a study on the negative consequences of the decision, particularly damages incurred by SMEs. He asked how many expatriates have presented fake PCR certificates, number of people infected with the first strain of coronavirus, number of those infected with the British strain, and number of those infected with the South African strain from Jan 1, 2021 till date.

MP Abdullah Al-Turaiji urged the government to study the successful experience of countries which enforced regulations to curb the spread of corona without damaging businesses and the economy. He called on the government to revise its recent decision; wondering how the government could disrupt the citizens’ daily life while it allows thousands of expatriates to enter the country – many of whom are infected with coronavirus.

Meanwhile, MPs Soud Bu Sleeb and Badr Al-Dahoum submitted a bill on amending National Assembly Law number 12 / 1963 in order to add an article stipulating the need to release a report right after a parliamentary session. The report should include the issues discussed in the session and results of voting on proposals. These results must be made available to all interested bodies.

MP Mubarak Al-Arow proposed the amendment of Commercial Agencies Law number 13/ 2016 in order to allow the main company to cancel the agency authorization in case the agent commits violations which harmed the company.

The company will then submit a request for cancellation of the agency’s license to Kuwait Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) which will reply within 30 days; otherwise, the request is considered rejected. The company has the right to appeal the decision of KCCI in the concerned court within 60 days.

MP Musaed Al-Ardi submitted a proposal to postpone the collection of loan payments for a period of six months due to the negative consequences of coronavirus. MP Abdulaziz Al-Saqaabi proposed the amendment of the law on establishing Kuwait Anti-Corruption Authority (Nazaha) to further affirm the independence of the authority by transferring it from the Ministry of Justice to the Office of the Prime Minister. He disclosed the proposal grants more powers to Nazaha by allocating a special prosecution unit and court for the authority to conduct investigations regarding cases under its jurisdiction.

By Saeed Mahmoud Saleh Arab Times Staff

The post Problem lies in opening of airport; not spas, eateries appeared first on ARAB TIMES - KUWAIT NEWS.

Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=17785&feed_id=32444

#airport #eateries #lies #Opening #Problem #spas

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jamiestevensphotographyfmp · 7 years ago

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The Drowning of Capel Celyn

There are a surprising number of "lost" villages lying under Welsh reservoirs. Many of them, such as Llanwddyn in Montgomeryshire and Ynysyfelin, north of Merthyr Tydfil, were far more substantial than Capel Celyn, the hamlet which lies beneath the waters of Llyn Celyn in Snowdonia. It was the combination of time and place that made Tryweryn such a symbolic moment in Welsh history, and which sets Capel Celyn apart from all the other lost settlements.

The early 1960s in Wales was a period when a renewed interest in devolution coincided with a sharp decline in the number of Welsh speakers. As one of the last virtually monoglot Welsh communities, Capel Celyn came to symbolise both the pressure on the language and the apparent powerlessness of Welsh MPs to protect Welsh interests.

Despite near unanimous opposition from Welsh politicians, mass protests and an attempt to bomb the site of the dam, the plans of Liverpool Corporation moved forward relentlessly. For Plaid Cymru (the social-democratic political party in Wales), Tryweryn was to prove transformational - although that was not apparent at the time. The results of the 1964 general election, held while the controversy was at its height, were disappointing for the party - even in Meirionnydd, where the reservoir is located.

However, the campaign led to an influx of new party members, and the decision to reject the use of civil disobedience tactics during the campaign earned the party credibility and respect in Welsh-speaking communities that had previously viewed Plaid Cymru with suspicion. Even so, it was Labour which swept the board in rural Wales in the 1966 general election, the first to be held after the completion of the project. Just a few months later though, Plaid Cymru won their first ever seat in parliament in the Carmarthen by-election. It was a victory which might never have occurred had Capel Celyn not disappeared beneath the waters of Llyn Celyn.

Timeline

On 20th December 1955, the Liverpool Daily Post reported that the Liverpool Corporation intended to flood Capel Celyn, a small village in rural north Wales. The scheme involved damming the valley at one end to form what is now the Llyn Celyn reservoir. The 67 Welsh-speaking residents of the area were shocked by the news that their valley which was reported one of the where Welsh was dominant wanted to be drowned.

Alex Dellow / Stringer, © Getty Images

Tryweryn Valley - The little hamlet of Capel Celyn, which will be submerged when the valley is flooded for the reservoir - July 1963 - Western Mail and Echo Copyright

Tryweryn Valley - Mr Jones Parry, the postmaster, outside his post office at Capel Celyn, which will be submerged when the valley is flooded for the reservoir - 10th December 1956

The quiet village sprung into action setting up a committee shortly after the new year. The Tryweryn Defence Committee was established to oppose the drowning. Other branches set up included the Capel Celyn Defence Committee and the Liverpool branch of the Tryweryn Defence Committee. On 7 November 1956 the Committee sent a delegation of three – Gwynfor Evans, the president of Plaid Cymru, Rev R Tudur Jones and Cllr Dafydd Roberts – to address Liverpool City Council. But Gwynfor Evans was shouted down and the three were escorted from the chamber.

The Plaid Cymru 'Keep Tryweryn' rally at Bala, 4 October 1956 - Geoff Charles © LLGC/NLW

Capel Celyn and local supporters took to the streets of Liverpool during a second meeting with the council. Liverpool had a population of 750,000 people in 1955 and would soon require 65 million gallons of water per day. Post-war Liverpool had some of the worst slums in Britain and the city argued for more water for improved sanitation. This was not the first time Liverpool had looked to Wales for water. Eighty years earlier they had turned to Lake Vyrnwy which was only 18 miles away, for drinking water. Llanwddyn was drowned, losing two chapels, three pubs, 10 farms and 37 houses.

(Further history on Llanwddyn visit http://www.lake-vyrnwy.com/history.html)

Protest in Liverpool attempting to stop the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley, 21 November 1956 - Geoff Charles © LLGC/NLW

On 19th December 1956, Liverpool Corporation's Tryweryn Reservoir Bill was deposited to parliament as a private member's bill. In January 1957, it began its journey through the parliamentary system. By obtaining authority through an Act of Parliament, Liverpool City Council avoided having to gain consent from the Welsh planning authorities.

Tenant farmer and local councillor David Roberts (right) explain the extent of the proposed Llyn Celyn reservoir on 27 February 1957 - Alex Dellow / Stringer, © Getty Images

On 3rd July 1957, the focus switched to London where the bill received its second reading in the House of Commons. It was passed by 166 votes to 117 without any support from the 36 Welsh MPs. The bill would allow the compulsory purchase of land to build a reservoir to supply water to England. The construction was a five-year project costing around £17m.

English-only signpost reminding the Capel Celyn residents of the fate of their village with a local resident writing their opinion on the sign, 14 November 1963 - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

On 22nd September 1962, indignation at the proposed scheme was felt beyond the Welsh-speaking village. David Pritchard and David Walters from Gwent in Mid Wales damaged site equipment to try and delay the process. They were arrested and fined £50 each, paid for by well-wishers. Yet it would be wrong to say that everyone opposed the flooding. Some Welsh industrialists believed it would regenerate the north-west Wales economy. Bala Town Council passed a motion supporting the construction of the reservoir, believing it would provide much-needed employment. While many of those forced to leave their homes were angry and traumatised, others accepted the opportunity to leave for better housing.

John and Mabel Evans standing outside their home for the last time, 27 July 1961. They left for a home provided for by Liverpool Corporation - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

Towards the end of 1962, homes in the village of Capel Celyn were demolished as the planned flooding drew near. The fight had lasted eight years. The 67 people who lived in Capel Celyn were displaced. A large crowd turned up for the final service at the chapel and the school, Ysgol Capel Celyn, which had educated generations of the local community, closed its doors for the last time.

The last days of Capel Celyn School, 1 November 1962 - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

A family leaving Capel Celyn for the last time in 1956 - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

Cattle being sold at the last sale at Gwerngenau Farm - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

A large congregation attended the last ever service held at Capel Celyn's chapel on 28 September 1963. The last wedding had taken place in the chapel a fortnight before - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

Deiniol Prysor Jones playing inside the ruins of the chapel in November 1963 - Geoff Charles, © LLGC/NLW

Construction work underway at Tryweryn. Tyddyn Bridge Halt is located at the background of the image which is now located right beneath the dam wall.

A party of Liverpool officials inspect progress at Tryweryn

Workmen drill into the ground during construction work on Liverpool Corporation's new reservoir in 1961

On 10th February 1963, While the reservoir dam in Cwm Tryweryn was under construction, it was the actions of three young men that were making the headlines. Aberystwyth student Emyr Llewelyn, farmer's son Owain Williams, and former RAF military policeman John Albert Jones, formed the shadowy group ‘Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru’ (MAC), which translates to Movement for the Defence of Wales. MAC will be discussed in a separate blog post in detail.

On the night of 9 February, they travelled through blizzard conditions to the construction site, and planted a 5lb (2.3kg) bomb at an electricity transformer powering the whole project. But within a week of the explosion, Llewelyn was under arrest, after a police patrol noted the registration of the car hired by the student in Aberystwyth. Llewelyn refused to name his co-conspirators, and was given a year-long jail term.

However, on the day he was sentenced, Williams and Jones struck again, blowing up an electricity pylon at the village of Gellilydan near Trawsfynydd in Gwynedd. This time they were both apprehended. Williams was given a one year sentence, while Jones received three years on probation. However, the actions of the bombers merely delayed the reservoir project.

This was not the first time the project was sabotaged.

Alderman Gwynfor Evans, president of Plaid Cymru, shakes hands with David Pritchard after a case at Bala magistrates' court in July 1963 when when Prirchard and David Walters (middle) were each fined £50 for draining the oil from a transformer at Tryweryn - WME Copyright

On 21st October 1965, the Llyn Celyn reservoir was officially declared open, with a ceremony laid on to mark the occasion. The dignitaries from Liverpool were present, but the Welsh establishment stayed away. Alderman Sefton from Liverpool Corporation was to address the crowd in a planned 45-minute ceremony. However, it didn’t last more than three minutes as protesters cut the microphone wires and ran down the escarpment to disrupt the opening ceremony proceedings.

Protests on the day of the official opening of the dam on 21 October 1965.

Certain concessions to Wales were made following the building of the Llyn Celyn reservoir. The position of secretary of state for Wales was created, the DVLA opened in Swansea, the first Welsh Language Act was passed and the Royal Mint moved to Llantristant all before 1970. There was also a huge investment in steel production at Llanwern in South Wales.

With concern for the Welsh language mounting in the 1960s, the Welsh Language Act 1967 was passed, giving some legal protection for the use of Welsh in official government business. The Act was based on the Hughes Parry report, published in 1965, which advocated equal validity for Welsh in speech and in written documents, both in the courts and in public administration in Wales. However the Act did not include all the Hughes Parry report's recommendations. Prior to the Act, only the English language could be spoken at government and court proceedings.

The Welsh Language Act 1993 put the Welsh language on an equal footing with the English language in Wales with regard to the public sector. The Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542 had made English the only language of the law courts and other aspects of public administration in Wales. Although the Welsh Language Act 1967 had given some rights to use Welsh in court, the Welsh Language Act 1993 was the first to put Welsh on an equal basis with English in public life.

The Act set up the Welsh Language Board, answerable to the Secretary of State for Wales, with the duty to promote the use of Welsh and to ensure compliance with the other provisions. Additionally, the Act gave Welsh speakers the right to speak Welsh in court proceedings under all circumstances. The previous Act had only given limited protection to the use of Welsh in court proceedings. The Act obliges all organisations in the public sector providing services to the public in Wales to treat Welsh and English on an equal basis; however it does not compel private businesses to provide services in Welsh: that would require a further Language Act.

Some of the powers given to the Secretary of State for Wales under this Act were later devolved to the National Assembly for Wales (Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru), but others have been retained by Westminster.

View of Cwm Tryweryn prior to the flooding of the valley

Llyn Celyn, Tryweryn Valley. Dam under construction, the construction yard and workers’ housing are in the foreground. On the left the trackbed of the former Bala & Ffestiniog Railway, closed in 1960 to allow construction.

View of Llyn Celyn reservoir and dam shortly after completion, looking west. Note the straining tower and the overflow to its left.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the announcement that the Tryweryn valley was to be drowned (19th October 2015), Liverpool City Council issued a formal apology on behalf of its predecessor for the ‘insensitivity’ of the scheme which had such a destructive impact on the community of Capel Celyn. The personal impact on the residents of Capel Celyn was enormous; many were forced to leave homes that had been in their families for generations.

Their loss, and all that it represented, has become iconic in Welsh politics and in the struggle over the Welsh language. ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (Remember Tryweryn) remains one of the most powerful slogans in the Welsh language and is seen as a rallying call of Welsh nationalism. It has also influenced one of the most recognised welsh bands, Manic Street Preachers to write a song about Tryweryn called ‘Ready for Drowning’. I have decided to include the lyrics of their song below as I feel its is very powerful.

Manic Street Preachers - Ready for Drowning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU0GMTOYe0w

Here's a true story Said someone to me yesterday Said he'd heard it in a taxi Must have had him at my mercy Drown that poor thing Put it out of its misery Condemn it to its future Deny its history Deny its history So where are we going We're not ready for drowning So where are we going We're not ready for drowning Look through my venetian blinds Dusting the past off of my mind Seeing orange everywhere I'd go to Patagonia But it's harder there I'll do anything to prove I care Fascinated by good Destroyed by evil What is there to believe in So where are we going We're not ready for drowning So where are we going We're not ready for drowning I will bring the whole edifice down on their unworthy heads So where are we going We're not ready for drowning So where are we going We are not waving we're drowning

#finalmajorproject #cofiwchdryweryn

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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The 2010s - the decade that shook sport

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-2010s-the-decade-that-shook-sport/

The 2010s - the decade that shook sport

Since joining the BBC in 2010, sports editor Dan Roan has covered many of the biggest sports news stories of the past decade.

Here he revisits some of the off-field issues that have defined a remarkable era and shifted sport’s landscape in a way never seen before.

Doping

Such was his dominance on the bike, his superstardom off it, and the sophistication of the doping regime he led, Lance Armstrong remains one of sport’s most infamous drugs cheats.

On the one hand, the demise of the disgraced American cyclist and cancer survivor in late 2012 was indicative of a sport in the grip of a doping culture.

But the groundbreaking pursuit of Armstrong by the US Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) seemed to prove that no-one was too big to bring down. His TV confession to cheating his way to all seven of his Tour de France titles the following year shattered sport’s greatest fairytale, and provided one of the sporting decade’s most defining moments.

From Tiger Woods’ televised apology for serial philandering in early 2010 to Oscar Pistorius’ murder conviction six years later, the 2010s bore witness to some staggering falls from grace. But the sense was that Armstrong’s would shift the landscape like no other because his offending directly impacted his sport.

But any hope that the suspicion surrounding cycling would lift as a legacy of Armstrong’s downfall soon faded.

Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles in 2012

Having competed for the first time in 2010, Team Sky went on to dominate cycling in the years that followed. At the turn of the decade, no British rider had ever won the Tour de France. Since then, three have done so, with Chris Froome managing the feat four times.

For several years, ‘marginal gains’ was credited with transforming British cycling’s fortunes on both the road and the track, where it became the driving-force behind successive Olympic triumphs.

But during the second half of the decade, Team Sky came under mounting scrutiny over how they managed to win so much amid a series of controversies.

Among them was the failure to keep basic medical records, Froome being cleared of wrongdoing after an adverse analytical finding for salbutamol, and revelations over separate unresolved scandals over two medical deliveries; the first a mystery jiffybag for Sir Bradley Wiggins, the second a batch of testosterone to the national velodrome.

By the time of the nadir when a parliamentary committee accused the team of “crossing the ethical line” over Sir Bradley Wiggins’ use of therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) in a damning 2018 report, some of the biggest names in British sport had been tainted, and its founding claim to be ‘whiter than white’ consigned to history. Sky withdrew its backing a few months later, the team only saved by the investment of Ineos, a major new power in British sport.

Team Sky and their riders always denied any wrongdoing and rejected accusations they had ever cheated their way to success. But a landmark medical tribunal to determine if former chief medic Dr Richard Freeman ordered testosterone to help an unnamed rider to cheat nine years ago will resume in 2020.

The rise and fall in reputation of the country’s most successful but controversial team has been one of the decade’s most significant sports stories. And decisive moments could still lie ahead.

Many other sports have suffered their own doping-related crises over the last 10 years of course, especially in athletics, where its most powerful figure, Lamine Diack, was banned for life for extorting money from cheats whose positive tests he helped to cover up.

The demise of the disgraced former IAAF president led to his British successor Lord Coe fighting to salvage his own reputation amid questions over both his judgement and association with Diack.

Despite a bruising period of intense scrutiny, the man credited with delivering London 2012 survived and has always denied any wrongdoing.

Another result of Diack’s downfall has been ongoing criminal investigations in France and Brazil into wider allegations of bribery connected to the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympic bids.

Diack will stand trial in Paris in 2020 on charges of corruption and money laundering.

Alberto Salazar (centre) coached Great Britain’s Mo Farah (right) to Olympic gold at London 2012

Given his long association with Britain’s most decorated track and field star Sir Mo Farah, and the hugely powerful sportswear giant Nike, legendary American coach Alberto Salazar’s four-year ban in the middle of the 2019 World Championships for various doping violations after a long Usada investigation was another highly damaging episode for the sport.

Amid intense scrutiny of its close relationship with the disgraced running guru, the scandal has plunged UK Athletics into the gravest crisis in its history, and amid fresh allegations and an appeal by Salazar, the story will rumble on well into 2020.

But when it comes to the sheer scale of cheating, the political power of the guilty party, and the ramifications of the fall-out, one scandal this decade is in a category all of its own.

In 2015 a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report laid bare the details of a conspiracy like no other. Masterminded by the former head of Moscow’s anti-doping lab turned whistle-blower Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, Russia’s state-sponsored doping racket implicated 1,000 athletes across multiple sports and sabotaged successive Olympic Games – including London 2012 – now known as the dirtiest statistically in history – with more than 130 competitors since disqualified.

In the years that followed, more gory details have emerged, the scandal doing untold damage to the credibility of major institutions like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Wada, undermining the anti-doping system, eroding public trust, and dominating the build-up to both Rio 2016 and Pyeongchang 2018 – from which the Russian team were banned.

It now threatens to do the same to Tokyo 2020 with Russia recently hit with an unprecedented (but qualified) four-year ban from major international events after another audacious cover-up.

But with an appeal yet to be heard, and some athletes furious that an outright ban was avoided, it is clear that this crisis will extend well into the 2020s. Surely the greatest scandal sport has ever known.

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Grigory Rodchenkov speaks to BBC sports editor Dan Roan in February 2018

Corruption

Another sporting mega-story the past decade will always be remembered for was Fifa’s corruption scandal.

Allegations of skulduggery had hung around world football’s governing body for years. But it was only in the 2010s that the people at the heart of the organisation faced accusations amid a crisis that shook Fifa to its core.

Nine years after it stunned the world by awarding the right to host its flagship event to the tiny desert-state of Qatar, Fifa is still trying to recover from allegations surrounding how exactly the country won the vote, the human cost of building the infrastructure for the event, and the disruption a first winter World Cup will cause.

Five years after that vote came those dramatic dawn police raids with numerous Fifa officials arrested in Zurich on corruption charges amid a sprawling FBI investigation into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of bribes connected to marketing and TV contracts in the Americas.

This – along with the subsequent downfalls of Fifa’s long-reigning president Sepp Blatter and one-time heir apparent Michel Platini shortly afterwards over a “disloyal payment” – brought the organisation to its knees. Both men, along with the Qatar bid, have always denied wrongdoing.

But more than any other, the scandal came to symbolise a number of issues; sub-standard governance across sport, the greed and unchecked excess at the top of world football, and the vast wealth generated by deals with sponsors and TV companies.

The exploitation of sport as a form of ‘soft-power’ by countries like Qatar with questionable human-rights records to furnish their image was nothing new. But the 2010 vote – which also included handing the 2018 World Cup to President Vladimir Putin’s Russia of course – came to symbolise sport’s increasing willingness to do deals with repressive regimes. It is noticeable that the term ‘sportswashing’ only entered the sporting lexicon in the last few years.

Fifa will argue that a legacy of its corruption scandal has been an overhaul of its leadership, and key governance reforms.

But with criminal investigations into the bidding processes for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups continuing in Switzerland and France, fresh jail sentences and life bans handed to former officials, and almost three years still until Qatar hosts what is set to be the most controversial sports event in history, it will be a long time – if ever – before Fifa’s credibility is truly restored.

Rule breaking

The 2010s have provided many other sporting scandals involving allegations of cheating, deceit or rule breaking.

In 2011 three Pakistani cricketers were jailed for their roles in an astonishing spot-fixing scandal, which had exploded the previous year, forcing the game to confront the threat of gambling-related corruption.

More recently, rugby union was shaken to its core by the 35-point deduction handed to Saracens – the English club game’s dominant force – for breaching salary cap regulations.

Meanwhile, Manchester City – the Premier League’s dominant force in the 2010s – are waiting to discover if Uefa finds them guilty of misleading European football’s governing body over financial fair play rules. City deny wrongdoing but if they lose the case, a sensational ban from the competition they covet more than any – the Champions League – could be their punishment.

Bury were the first team to drop out of the EFL since Maidstone’s liquidation in 1992

Bury became the first club to be expelled from the Football League since 1992 when they failed to provide proof of funds, their demise a stark symbol of mounting concerns over the sustainability of football finances.

But in terms of resonance, perhaps one sports scandal this decade stands out.

Australian cricket’s ball-tampering ‘sandpaper plot’ in 2018 led to a series of teary resignations in front of the cameras, long bans and an unprecedented bout of soul-searching – by both the country, which suddenly faced an identity crisis, and a sport that feared its fabled values had been abandoned in favour of a win-at-all-costs culture.

Technology

The decade has seen rapid changes in technology that have affected sports in ways few predicted 10 years ago.

Controversy over whether advancements in sports equipment unfairly enhance athletes’ performances is nothing new. But the debate has been reignited by mounting concern over the latest version of Nike’s carbon-fibre plated Vaporfly running shoes – reinforced by Eliud Kipchoge’s historic sub-two hour marathon while wearing them – and then Brigid Kosgei’s obliteration of the women’s marathon record in a similar pair the following day.

A few months out from the Tokyo Olympics, athletics is facing tough questions over the tension between the inevitable quest for innovation and the core principle of fair competition. Both the IAAF’s rules and the record books are being challenged in a way not seen for years. And those in power are under intensifying pressure to do something about it.

In a bid to avoid on-field injustices and overcome human error in officiating, sports have tried to harness broadcasting advancements over the last decade.

Some, like goal-line technology in football which was approved in 2012, has proved a success. But others, most notably the video assistant referee system (VAR), has been hugely controversial, especially in the Premier League, where its first season of use has descended into farce over marginal offside decisions, sparking fury from fans and managers.

More than any other, the VAR crisis sums up sport’s struggle to navigate the inexorable march of technology without relinquishing the soul and spontaneity that cultivates a lifelong attachment with so many fans across the world. A question that is both technical and existential, and one that must be answered satisfactorily in the near future if sport is to maintain its importance for a new generation of fans in the 2020s.

Gender

Dina Asher-Smith won three medals – including 200m gold – at the 2019 World Championships in Doha

The 2010s has been a game-changing decade in terms of the profile, popularity and perception of women’s sport.

Certain key moments stand out: the trailblazing London 2012 victories of Jessica Ennis and Nicola Adams, Fallon Sherrock making history by beating male opponents in darts’ World Championship, Bryony Frost becoming the first woman to ride a Grade One winner at Cheltenham, Dina Asher-Smith winning Britain’s first global women’s sprint title and Simone Biles redefining gymnastics.

The record TV audiences that watched the groundbreaking 2019 Fifa Women’s World Cup felt like a watershed moment. As had the inspiration provided by Team GB’s gold-medal winning hockey players at Rio 2016, England’s World Cup-winning cricketers in 2017, and their triumphant netball team at the Commonwealth Games in 2018.

Then there was the emergence of US football star Megan Rapinoe as sport’s leading voice on equality and women’s rights, the face of a new era of athlete activism. The Commonwealth Games vowing to make Birmingham 2022 the first major multi-sport event to have more women’s than men’s medal events is another milestone.

But while there has been clear progress in the 2010s, equality of opportunity, pay, media coverage, grassroots participation and boardroom representation still feels decades away from being realised.

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Megan Rapinoe on goal celebrations, finding her voice and Donald Trump

The 2010s will also be remembered for the decade-long saga of Caster Semenya, a story that continues to divide opinion in sport like little else.

In 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) ruled in favour of a hugely controversial IAAF rule that forced the South African runner – and other athletes with differences in sexual development (DSD) – to take hormone-limiting drugs if she wanted to compete in the middle-distance events she had dominated for years. After a long legal battle, Semenya pulled out of the World Championships.

For Semenya’s supporters, the eligibility regulation was an appalling breach of human rights and a discriminatory act of sexism and racism designed to target her. For others, it was a necessary and proportionate step to protect women’s sport and fair competition.

But whatever one’s perspective, there is no doubt that the debate has confronted sport with uncomfortable questions around gender identity and human biology, the suitability of sport’s traditional male and female categories, the reliability of the medical science on which the IAAF’s rule relies, perceptions of womanhood and sport’s complex relationship with the law.

With the IAAF – and other sports – now intending to apply the eligibility rules to transgender as well as DSD athletes, the controversy will extend well into the 2020s.

And with Semenya’s appeal yet to be heard in the Swiss courts, one of the most important and contentious sports stories of the decade still has some way to run.

Racism

Buoyed by the success of a diverse, multiracial Team GB, the hope was that the London 2012 Games – the biggest sporting event ever hosted in Britain – would act as a catalyst for a more tolerant and progressive sporting decade.

Yet just a few years on, football finds itself in the grip of a new racism crisis, with increasing incidents of abuse at both matches and on social media. As we enter the 2020s, the reasons for this alarming trend, and how to best tackle it, have become arguably the biggest question the sport faces.

In truth, the issue has reared its head at regular intervals throughout the 2010s with a series of high-profile scandals; Luis Suarez in 2011 and then John Terry in 2012 both banned by the FA for racially abusing opponents. And former England women’s manager Mark Sampson being found to have made racist comments towards striker Eni Aluko in 2017 – having initially been cleared – threatened to engulf the entire FA.

An investigation into racially discriminatory remarks Mark Sampson made to two England players, for which the FA apologised, was then subject to a parliamentary inquiry

But the sense is that with football reflecting a society that has become more divided and polarised since the Brexit vote in 2016, the scourge of abuse by those attending matches has returned in the last two years, and is getting worse, shattering the widely-held assumption at the end of the last decade that such racism was no longer a major issue.

This trend has been mirrored abroad where the abuse of England’s players in Bulgaria felt like a watershed moment in sport’s long battle with discrimination.

Some blame the rise of far-right political parties and nationalism across Europe, and the sanctions handed out by football authorities, while others want social media companies to do more to curb racist behaviour on their platforms. But if there is a positive to come out of all this, it is a new era of athlete activism.

By making a stand against racism, Raheem Sterling reminded us that this was the decade when some of the world’s most famous athletes stopped being afraid of expressing an opinion on politics and society for fear of upsetting sponsors or fans, and harnessed social media and their vast influence to try to make a difference.

In doing so, Sterling has followed in the footsteps of trailblazing NFL star Colin Kaepernick, whose kneeled protests during pre-match United States anthems to highlight police brutality and racial injustice sparked a national debate.

Others have joined him on range of issues: NBA players LeBron James and Steph Curry on race, footballer Mesut Ozil and rugby’s Sonny Bill Williams on the persecution of the Uighur community in China, tennis great Serena Williams and Rapinoe on women’s rights, athlete Allyson Felix on maternity policies. The list is getting longer.

For decades, athletes had been told to ‘stick to sports’. In the 2010s they finally found their voice.

Athlete welfare

At the turn of the last decade, the only aspect of Britain’s elite sporting culture that seemed to matter was performance.

Record success at successive Olympics and Paralympics after decades of disappointment secured the country’s status as a sporting powerhouse, and appeared to vindicate the ‘no-compromise’ strategy of all-powerful funding agency UK Sport, the body tasked with turning lottery money into medals.

Great Britain won 214 medals at the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games

But in the three-and-a-half years that have passed since Rio 2016, a series of bullying and discrimination scandals embroiling some of the country’s best-funded high-performance programmes has shown the risks of such an approach.

There has been the fear that in many cases, winning came at the expense of welfare and duty of care. The case of former sprint cyclist Jess Varnish – who claimed she had been the victim of discrimination when dropped from Team GB’s Olympic squad – was a defining moment.

The NFL’s landmark $765m compensation settlement with thousands of former players over brain disease linked to concussion in 2013 was another milestone. The case raising awareness of the dangers of head injuries in other contact sports, most obviously rugby and football, both of which were forced to conduct fresh research and reconsider their return to play protocols – or risk hugely damaging lawsuits of their own.

Until 2017 little thought was given to safeguarding in the mainstream media. But then – thanks to the courage of whistle-blowers like former Crewe player Andy Woodward – football’s appalling non-recent child sex abuse scandal was finally revealed.

The initial sense was that this was a tragic but isolated story. But soon it became clear Woodward was far from alone, the dark secret that football had harboured for so long finally laid bare. Amid hundreds of cases, a series of high-profile convictions over the last two years, and the long-running Sheldon inquiry into the scandal still to conclude, the FA’s gravest ever crisis will continue into the 2020s.

Ten years ago, few had heard of ex-Manchester City and Crewe coach Barry Bennell – since sentenced to 31 years for abusing young footballers. Or of Larry Nassar – the USA Gymnastics doctor convicted for abusing hundreds of athletes.

Sadly, these names now serve as stark reminders of the darkest side of sport.

Alongside many moments of great sporting triumph and inspiration, the 2010s have been a decade when sport has been brought into disrepute. Thanks to the courage of whistle-blowers and the work of investigative journalists, many injustices and failings have at least been exposed.

With many of these stories straddling the turn of the decade, the 2020s will reveal how prepared sport is to learn lessons, regain trust and recover its standing.

#shook #Sport

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ericfruits · 5 years ago

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Why the arguments against immigration are so popular

TO UNDERSTAND WHY people oppose immigration, it is worth visiting Tilbury, a port town outside London. Thurrock, the local parliamentary constituency, is 81% white British. Many residents moved here from London as the capital filled with migrants and house prices soared. London’s white-British population fell from 60% to 45% in a single decade, between 2001 and 2011. Some whites moved out because they sold their flats for tidy sums and bought nicer homes with gardens farther from the centre. Others did not like being a minority in the city where they grew up.

During the Brexit-referendum campaign in 2016, Brexiteers argued that leaving the European Union was the only way for Britain to regain control of its borders. A whopping 72% of voters in Thurrock voted to leave. Most do not hate foreigners, but many feel beleaguered and disrespected. “We’re English, not British. If you say you’re English apparently you’re a racist,” says Trish Byne, who runs a tattoo and piercing shop in Tilbury with her husband, Tony. “In the UK, indigenous people are ignored,” says Tony. “The rights of minorities take precedence.”

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“We’re in favour of immigration, but controlled immigration,” says Trish. She wants immigrants to integrate, but fears that many try “to impose their cultures and language and religion”. She mentions no personal experiences of harm, but says: “In London, I’ve seen videos on YouTube of streets where English people cannot go because there is sharia law.” She adds, of refugees: “You don’t know what boat people have got in their backpacks, it could be terrorist weaponry. That is not me living in la-la land; that is what I’ve heard from people working on the docks.”

I’ll give my cousins a free ride

Thoughtful writers such as Paul Collier and David Goodhart argue that if too many migrants arrive too quickly, it disrupts communities and inflicts unwelcome cultural change on the natives. Mr Goodhart complains that liberal politicians attach too little weight to the views of people who like things the way they were. This argument should be taken seriously—for some people, any kind of cultural change feels like a threat. The old find it hardest to adapt. “I was born here and it was a lovely village. Now it’s a concrete jungle and you can’t even hear people speaking English—it’s awful,” says Ann Hoyle, 76. But many of the things that voters fear about migrants are not true, and some of their objections can be answered, up to a point, with smarter policies.

Whatever Trish may have seen online, there are no streets in London where the native-born cannot go. Islamist terrorism is a worry, but should be seen in perspective. Terrorists killed six people a year in Britain in the decade to 2017. A Brit is eight times likelier to be struck by lightning (though only half as likely to die from it). Young male native-born Brits and Americans are more likely to commit ordinary violent crimes than young male immigrants.

In all rich democracies, locals grumble that immigrants drain the welfare state. “If I go to the doctor, I have to pay for it. Foreigners come and they get childbirth and operations all paid for. They should be made to pay, too. If they can’t, send them packing,” says Joan Smith, a 73-year-old in Tilbury. Again, this is not an accurate picture. Migrants pay taxes. In countries with flexible labour markets and thrifty welfare states, such as America and Britain, they generally pay their way, unlike the native-born. Over a lifetime, a typical migrant from Europe to Britain can expect to pay £78,000 more in taxes than he receives in benefits.

Immigrants are a burden only if a host country’s policies set them up to be one, by making it too easy to draw benefits or too hard to work. Sweden committed both these errors with asylum-seekers during the European migrant crisis in 2015-16, showering them with free stuff while forcing them to remain idle for long periods. This was not sustainable, and the government curbed the flow of refugees by five-sixths.

The simplest way to make sure that migrants do not abuse any given benefit is to make them ineligible for it, for five or ten years or permanently. “Build a wall around the welfare state, not around the country,” urged the late William Niskanen, an economist. In the United Arab Emirates, where migrants have no access to state benefits and no chance of citizenship, citizens do not seem to mind being outnumbered nine to one by foreign workers.

Another fear, that migrants will steal jobs from locals, is as widespread as it seems logical. “Migrants in construction are much better workers than the English, who show up late and leave early,” says Danny Proctor, who manages building projects in Tilbury. “Foreigners aren’t lazy like that. I have a lot of plasterers from Lithuania and Poland. For 20 years they’ve been the best workers.” An English plasterer listening to Mr Proctor might despair. But the supply of jobs is not fixed. Migrants spend money as well as earning it, thus creating more demand for other people’s labour. Immigration slightly raises the wages of most native workers. The relatively small number of losers could be compensated out of the vastly larger gains that accrue to the immigrants themselves.

The World Bank recommends that governments replace visa quotas with taxes to regulate immigration flows. They could do so via a surtax on immigrants’ incomes, or other means. They could earmark the proceeds for a popular cause, such as pensions or health care, or remit the cash directly to citizens. The more migrants they admit, the bigger the payout. This might make the native-born see immigration as less of a threat and more of an opportunity.

William Bourke of Sustainable Australia, a party that campaigns to reduce immigration, argues that letting in too many newcomers leads to overcrowding, congestion, high house prices and environmental stress. “As people move from the developing world to the rich one, they move from a low carbon footprint to a high one.”

The notion that Australia is overcrowded seems absurd. The empty plains of North Dakota are three times more densely populated. But migration in the rich world is highly concentrated. Newcomers head for the most dynamic cities, where everyone else wants to live, too. Congestion and high house prices are big problems in places like Sydney and London, but they can be eased by better policies. Restrictive zoning rules do more to inflate house prices than immigration does. Cities would accommodate many more people if they could build upwards. And immigrants’ taxes could cover the cost of the extra roads and subway lines needed.

The impact of migration on climate change is probably small. Migrants who escape poverty might emit more carbon, but it is grotesque to argue that they should therefore remain poor. And there are two counter-arguments. First, migration stimulates scientific research, which will help curb global warming. An Indian in North America is 28,000 times more likely to file a patent than in India.

Second, migration causes fertility to plunge. Migrants from poor countries to rich ones no longer want seven children. They want their kids to go to college, so they have small families. Ethnic Somali women have an average of 6.2 kids in Somalia but only 2.4 in Norway. Allowing more migration to rich countries would reduce the future global population, making environmental problems easier to tackle in the long run.

Some opponents of immigration fret that it will increase inequality. Some think it unjust that people from poor places might come to rich ones to work as servants. But if the migrants thought that, they would not come. Workers from a poor country who start at the bottom in a rich one will, statistically, make their new home more unequal. But their moving will reduce global inequality.

A deeper worry is that mass migration might undermine the traits that make the rich world rich, such as good institutions and the rule of law. Many migrants come from countries with terrible, crooked governments. Suppose enough of them arrived to replace the norms of, say, Japan with those of Haiti?

Immigration sceptics cite many alarming anecdotes. Mexican mobsters sell drugs in America. A gang of Pakistani-British men sexually abused hundreds of young white girls in Yorkshire. The Chinese government snoops on Chinese overseas students to make sure they say nothing heretical about democracy or Taiwan.

But step back and a more hopeful picture emerges. America’s population has risen 60-fold since 1800. It has absorbed migrants from Tsarist Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and nearly every other dictatorship of the past 200 years, without losing its democratic soul. On the contrary, migrants head to America because they prefer its institutions to the ones back home.

By most measures, immigrants in the United States are integrating as well as ever. Their unemployment rate is a negligible 3.5%, lower than for the native-born. Only half of first-generation immigrants speak English “very well”, but by the second generation English dominates even among Hispanics, who are surrounded by other Spanish-speakers. Only 6% of second-generation Hispanic immigrants speak mostly Spanish. By the fourth generation, half of those with Hispanic forebears are so well integrated that they no longer identify as Hispanic.

America’s success in absorbing immigrants is remarkable, but in recent decades it has been surpassed. The share of the population who are foreign-born is higher in Australia (29%), New Zealand (24%) and Canada (21%) than in the United States (14%). None of these new migrant magnets has a perfect immigration system. But all combine openness with order, selecting the migrants they want, processing their visas reasonably quickly and excluding unauthorised migrants fairly effectively.

Australia shows that a well-run democracy can be twice as open to immigrants as America and still rank ten places higher on the UN’s Human Development Index. Singapore, where 45% of residents are foreign-born, shows that a well-run city-state can be more open still. It would be rash to open the gates suddenly and completely. But countries could open a bit and see how it goes.■

This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "Fear of the unknown"

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head-post · 6 months ago

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Macron fades into shadow after crushing election defeat

France has officially begun preparations for the second round of parliamentary elections to be held on Sunday. In most of the constituencies where the election is still ongoing, only two contenders each remain: a left-wing and a right-wing candidate. Both powers are now trying to win over the French voters who remain in the centre to their side.

The last time Emmanuel Macron was seen in public, he was wearing a dark aviator jacket, Top Gun sunglasses and a black baseball cap. His incognito rock star image as he voted in the coastal town of Le Touquet on Sunday attracted a lot of attention on social media and news channels, POLITICO reports.

But despite this moment of swagger, the truth is that Macron has recently taken a step back from the public spotlight. Aside from scheduled international events, he hasn’t been seen out in public in almost two weeks.

Calls for unity

Last Sunday, instead of appearing on television to console his wounded soldiers after a stunning defeat in the first round of parliamentary elections, the Elysee Palace issued a brief presidential statement calling for unity.

For the first time, Macron’s centrist alliance, battered after defeat in June’s European elections, is fighting a desperate battle without its leader.

And the reality is that his allies don’t want him on the campaign trail: Macron’s face is even being removed from campaign literature. A Renaissance party official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, said:

He was told to stop [campaigning] … And it’s not really that he heard our message, it’s more that he was forced to hear it. [The president] underestimated how much the public were turned off by his personality.

In recent weeks, several party heavyweights have lobbied for Macron to stay away from the campaign, in what one key ally called a necessary “de-Macronisation.” One minister even admitted on public television that Macron’s image was “worn out.”

For the eloquent, brash 46-year-old president, who is constantly in the spotlight, proposing new ideas, disrupting the status quo, the new reality is not comfortable.

The Elysée bunker

But Macron, like Napoleon forced into exile, has gone back to the drawing board and is preparing for his next battle: governing France after Sunday’s expected resounding defeat. The French president may have to enter a “cohabitation” government with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, which is expected to have the largest group in parliament.

Macron has been busy consolidating his influence in recent days, appointing several top officials in France and promoting his allies to key posts in Brussels, prompting accusations from Le Pen of organising an “administrative coup.”

On Wednesday, a government spokesman announced new appointments in the police and security forces after the weekly cabinet meeting. Dozens of top military officials in the army, navy and air force were also appointed.

More appointments were expected, but faced with growing outrage over the administrative reshuffle, the president was forced to scale back his plans. One person familiar with the negotiations at the Elysee Palace ironically called it a “small retreat”, Playbook Paris reported.

While at the Elysee Palace, the president is also calculating scenarios for the next day that include a far-right victory, a hung parliament with the Rassemblement Nationale as the largest group, and a coalition that excludes the far right, according to several officials.

Read more HERE

#world news #world politics #news #europe #european news #european union #eu politics #eu news #france #france news #french politics #french elections #snap election #emmanuel macron #president macron

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khalilhumam · 4 years ago

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Trinidad & Tobago's 2020 election results are currently being recounted

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/trinidad-tobagos-2020-election-results-are-currently-being-recounted/

Trinidad & Tobago's 2020 election results are currently being recounted

All political parties had representatives present on election day

Finger stained with electoral ink after voting in Trinidad and Tobago's general election on August 10, 2020. Photo courtesy Janine Mendes-Franco.

On August 10, 658,297 of Trinidad and Tobago's 1,134,155 registered voters cast their ballot in the country's general election. According to the independent body charged with electoral management, the Elections and Boundaries Commission, the preliminary results showed that the incumbent People's National Movement (PNM) led by Prime Minister Keith Rowley had won, with 22 parliamentary seats to the opposition United National Congress‘ (UNC) with 19. Despite the fact that voter turnout for both parties was lower than it had been for the last election in 2015, the PNM also clinched the popular vote. Just as in 2015, the UNC is questioning the results. Since the preliminary results were announced, the UNC has called for recounts in five constituencies, as many have pointed out is well within its rights. The recount process began on August 11, the day after the election was held. Five years ago, the party, then part of the People's Partnership coalition government, claimed that heavy rains, which caused flooding in some parts of the country, resulted in the PNM having an unfair advantage at the polls. They subsequently filed an election petition, challenging the outcome on those grounds; it proved unsuccessful. This time around, the UNC has been accused of trying to plant seeds of doubt, before the voting process even got underway, as to whether the elections would be free and fair. On Twitter, Maria Rivas-McMillan took umbrage with the UNC's approach:

I really take exception to the UNC’s implying that we did not run transparent elections. I have no problem requesting recounts but don’t impugn the integrity of the EBC plus thousands of volunteers, scrutineers (including their own) of every party present in yesterday’s process — Maria Rivas-McMillan (@Panyol) August 11, 2020

The law dictates that the current government must stay in place throughout the recount process.

No international observers

One of the main points of contention is the fact that this election lacked the presence of international observers. In a media interview, Prime Minister Keith Rowley said that once the elections were called, he wrote to both the Commonwealth and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) secretariats, inviting them to send observers. However, unease over the COVID-19 pandemic reportedly came into play, as it has for many other countries holding elections at this time. CARICOM was only able to attract the interest of three participants, who later declined because they wanted to avoid quarantine regulations. The government was “prepared to modify” its quarantine arrangements, but ultimately, CARICOM deemed that the process would require many more than three volunteers. The Commonwealth observers, meanwhile, came up against financial constraints: Government assistance would have been a conflict of interest. The prime minister has maintained there is no need to make his correspondence with the secretariats public, and does not believe that international observers would have prevented the UNC from making legal challenges.

How the tallying process works

On the evening of August 13, Minister of Finance Colm Imbert hosted a press conference at the PNM party's headquarters, Balisier House, and clarified electoral procedures. Imbert explained to local media that Form 69 — a Statement of Poll — basically served as “a record of observers.” Every candidate who contests an election is entitled to have a polling agent present at every polling station to scrutinise the voting process. The presiding officer must sign Form 69, certify its accuracy and make sure that copies are given to polling official and to each candidate or agent present at the count. These party representatives must also sign Form 69 to confirm that they witnessed the count and that the information is correct.

Parties knew results ‘at the same time’

Suggestions circulated on social media that the PNM declared victory while results were still coming in, but Imbert explained that party representatives call in to their respective campaign offices and give count results for their polling stations. Via this method, Balisier House had the results for each of the country's 41 constituencies by 10 p.m. on election night and the PNM was, therefore, able to claim victory. Imbert said that the opposition would have known the results at the same time and claimed it was “deceitful of UNC to pretend not to know […] on Monday night that they’d lost the election and the popular vote.” The notion that PNM had “inside information,” he said, is “absolute nonsense — it's a lie.”

‘Wild allegations’

Nevertheless, such claims persist. UNC candidate Ahloy Hunt has questioned the signatures of the presiding officers on the ballots — an issue that Chief Election Officer Fern Narcis-Scope said is supposed to be raised during the count, as this is when all agents sign off on the authenticity of the ballots. Hunt maintains that EBC officials are being uncooperative; Narcis-Scope says that candidates like Hunt have been asking to see documents — such as polling station diaries — that the law prohibits to at this stage. This documentation may be available later as part of the discovery process in a court proceeding. Dubbing such tactics “disruptive” and the allegations “wild,” Imbert accused candidates of “deliberately trying to harass” the returning officers overseeing the various recounts. There were also allegations — since refuted — suggesting that officers from the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) were stealing and hiding ballot boxes. The police investigated the claim and found all ballot boxes at the polling station in question on site and accounted for. However, the TTPS is currently looking into the discovery of a batch of discarded polling cards. Meanwhile, a minor political party has accused the government of “rigging” the vote, launching an online petition that asks for a total nullification. Minister Imbert noted that the “checks and balances” of the recount process — including putting each party’s votes into separate envelopes with paper seals, which the counting agents and candidates must sign — make it “impossible to rig the Trinidad and Tobago election.” Facebook user Rishi Maharaj put a clever suggestion to all the candidates to make Form 69 public so that citizens can compare EBC figures.

That information is not private and I would think there is a strong argument in the Public Interest to make them public so that we the public can scrutinise. After all they are a count of our votes. Given the current local and global circumstances we can ill afford for error and Government must go on otherwise we […] would all feel the consequences.

While the recounts continue, President Paula Mae Weekes has advised that the swearing-in ceremony, initially carded for August 14, would be postponed. The EBC's corporate communications manager, Bobbi Rogers, confirmed that there was no particular deadline for the recount. Once completed, the government can be sworn in even if election petitions are filed in the courts. In a release issued on August 15, the EBC advised that the “clearly outlined” recount process was “being conducted within the parameters of the law”. As of August 17, all but one of the recounts has been completed, and even UNC insiders are now calling for the party to concede.

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mastcomm · 5 years ago

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Irish Voters Cast Off Relic of Entrenched 2-Party System

DUBLIN — In a century-old political system controlled by two seemingly indistinguishable center-right parties in Ireland, Jamie Clarke did what seemed sensible to him: He never voted in a general election.

Until Saturday.

“Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were the people that made the decisions, and someone like me could never change it — that’s the way it felt,” Mr. Clarke, a 33-year-old bartender, said on Monday, referring to the Irish political duopoly that has traded power since 1932. “I was so disaffected by how far they were from me.”

But in recent years, successive public votes in Ireland to legalize same-sex marriage and repeal an abortion ban have pulled many young and dissatisfied people into politics, giving voters a chance to shake up traditions that were once rigidly enforced by the Roman Catholic Church. Their next target was Ireland’s ossified political hierarchy.

On Saturday, voters cast off that relic, too, ending the two-party stasis in Irish politics with a breakout vote for Sinn Fein, a party long shunned by the mainstream for its ties to the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group that sought the reunification of Ireland. Despite what he called the party’s “shady history,” Mr. Clarke said, he voted for Sinn Fein because he felt it was the tonic that Irish politics needed.

“Before the abortion referendum, I was like, ‘Ah, everyone’s going to know we’re bigots and narrow-minded,’ and then we showed we weren’t,” he said, sitting at a central Dublin pub on a night off. “Now we’re showing again that we’re not afraid to have our voices heard.”

The vote sent a tremor through a political system that had long defied the usual left-right divisions across Europe. But for all the disruption, what emerged from the wreckage was, by European standards, a much more normal-looking system, anchored by rival parties on the left and the right.

“For the first time in 100 years, it’s possible you’ll have a party that calls itself left-wing leading a government,” said Eoin O’Malley, an associate professor of political science at Dublin City University, referring to Sinn Fein.

By the time the votes were counted this week, Sinn Fein held one fewer parliamentary seats than Ireland’s main center-right opposition party, Fianna Fail, which had been expected to romp to victory. And it captured two more seats than the current center-right governing party, Fine Gael, led by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s frontman in negotiations with London over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Torturous coalition negotiations in the coming weeks will determine who, if anyone, can command enough support to lead the next government. But lawmakers from across the political spectrum conceded that the vote for Sinn Fein reflected the desire of a huge cohort of voters — young and old, urban and rural, working-class and middle-class — for new alternatives in a system that had long stamped them out.

“Every other politician, they say they’re going to do this and that,” said Tony Hayes, 64, who lives in central Dublin. “But at the end of the day, they’re feeding you loads of lies. So why not go to somebody you feel like you can trust them? Sinn Fein, you feel like you can trust them.”

There was one issue above all that drove Mr. Hayes’s anger at Ireland’s two old political heavyweights and endeared him, like many voters, to Sinn Fein: housing. The number of homeless people has been rising for years, eclipsing 10,000 in 2019. And average rents have increased by as much as 40 percent in some counties over the past three years.

Young people, especially, are suffering, with some leaving bigger cities like Dublin or moving out of Ireland altogether. Mr. Clarke said that many of his friends had been forced to move back in with their parents. He had lived in a central Dublin neighborhood for five years before high rents drove him out to a suburb.

“It’s not any good for your psyche,” he said, “but it’s cheaper.”

Sinn Fein’s success extended well beyond its core group of young and urban voters, though. Rural seats that had not been represented in a century by a Sinn Fein lawmaker joined inner-city Dublin districts in electing representatives from the party. And Sinn Fein became the most popular party among every age group up to 65, according to exit polls.

Ailbhe Smyth, 73, a political activist and feminist scholar who played a leading role in the campaign to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban, said that many were feeling the anguish of a crisis that had forced people to wait weeks or years for some medical appointments, despite the government’s lavish spending on health care. She said older people, too, had woken up to the pain that Ireland’s cultural and political norms had inflicted on the younger generations.

While power was passed back and forth between the two center-right parties, parts of Irish identity, such as the expectation that people could grow up to own their own homes, began to vanish. And just as Ms. Smyth said the vote for abortion rights had been driven in part by “a very deep sense of national shame at the way women had been treated historically in this country,” she said that the turnout this weekend reflected the regret of some voters for not vanquishing an outdated political system sooner.

“Older people voting for Sinn Fein are saying, ‘Well, actually, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, they haven’t got a house,’” Ms. Smyth said. “So there is that feeling of guilt that we’re not leaving them a very good world — and we’ve wrecked the planet, too.”

Facing up to rivals like Mr. Varadkar, who focused during the campaign on Brexit achievements that few voters cared about, Sinn Fein stuck to a few clear, tangible promises. And rather than harping on the government’s failures, as it recently had during unsuccessful campaigns, the party tried to home in on what it would get done. It vowed, for instance, to spend 6.5 billion euros, about $7 billion, building 100,000 homes.

It also drew in supporters with a new leader, Mary Lou McDonald, a 50-year-old Dubliner who helped shed the party’s reputation for having predominantly male supporters and who pushed it to liberalize its position on abortion rights. In 2018, she succeeded Gerry Adams, who is from Northern Ireland and who is widely reported to have once served as chief of staff to the I.R.A., though he has always denied that.

Still, Sinn Fein may find it difficult to maintain its momentum. Analysts expressed doubt that it could quickly build its way out of Ireland’s housing crisis, given the challenges facing a construction industry that is already near capacity. The country would need an influx of foreign workers to keep pace with demand, analysts have said, a development that would itself stress the housing market as new workers looked for their own places to live.

The party also has to balance the desires of a traditional base that is hungry for Irish unity with newer voters who flocked to it because of issues like housing and homelessness. That tension became evident in recent days as some candidates faced criticism for singing songs or using slogans associated with the fight for a united Ireland, reminders to some voters of the party’s ties to anti-British violence.

But some of the party’s younger activists have been trying to build a bridge between the party’s past and its future.

Fintan Warfield, 27, credits Irish music with politicizing him as a teenager. He said he came to see Sinn Fein not only as the best hope for a united Ireland, but also as a party with “empathy on other issues and compassion for other marginalized groups.”

Mr. Warfield joined the party at 16, a time when Sinn Fein was largely ignored by mainstream Irish politicians. At that time, he kept his work for the party more private, slipping out of the house to canvas for a Sinn Fein city councilor. Now, Mr. Warfield, who is gay, is a Sinn Fein senator and prominent campaigner on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

He said that Sinn Fein’s years of work on the margins of Irish politics — resolving local housing disputes, campaigning in cattle markets far from Dublin for same-sex marriage — had laid the seeds for its surge this week.

“Now that people have said, ‘OK, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have had their chance,’” he said, “all those years of work have amounted to this.”

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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America’s Self-Sabotage in the Middle East

The consequences of these decisions will extend far beyond the region itself.

By KATHY GILSINAN | Published January 6, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 7, 2020 |

The Trump administration is still celebrating the death of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander the president called “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” But in a single hectic weekend after the killing, virtually all of America’s other goals in the Middle East took a significant hit.

The U.S. wants to stop Iran from going nuclear; Iran said it would ditch the last restrictions on its nuclear program. The U.S. wants to check Iran’s influence throughout the region; one of America’s closest allies, Iraq, incensed that the U.S. struck Soleimani on its own soil when he was there as a guest of the government, gave Iran a victory in a nonbinding parliamentary vote asking U.S. forces to leave the country—which a commander in the counter-ISIS mission in Iraq said in a letter he would honor, sparking confusion and forcing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to deny any plans to leave Iraq. The U.S. wants to keep the Islamic State down through its Iraqi partner forces; the relationship is now damaged, and the U.S. coalition has paused its counter-ISIS operations in the country to focus on guarding against Iranian attacks.

Depending on what happens next, all of this could add up to big opportunities for two U.S. enemies—if ISIS can reconstitute and Iran can expand its influence.

The chaos extends beyond Iraq and Iran, and had been gathering for months before this weekend. It has hit worried allies in the Gulf, who in recent months have seen their shipping lanes and oil infrastructure targeted and have quietly tried to tamp down tensions with Iran. It has emboldened dictators like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erodğan, who is flexing his strength in Libya after intervening, counter to American wishes, against American allies in Syria. And it has damaged friendships with European allies, who keep scrambling to deal with Donald Trump’s impulsive decisions—and have just barely recovered from his surprise attempt to withdraw from Syria last fall.

Regardless, this could lead to victory for Trump anyway, because he’s made clear his one overriding goal: to leave the Middle East.

Except that up until Monday he was mostly getting further in. The U.S. has sent thousands of additional troops to the region, as well as a contingent of marines to guard the U.S. embassy in Iraq after protesters tried to storm it last week. Thousands of additional troops have headed to the Middle East since last week; another 14,000 have deployed since May. Trump just this weekend vowed not to leave Iraq. But even if he does get out of one Middle Eastern country, he has also threatened to strike into another, threatening to hit targets within Iran if it “strikes any Americans, or American assets.”

Pentagon officials have consistently characterized their repeated deployments to the region as defensive measures. Even after the U.S. struck five sites in Iraq and Syria that the military says were linked to Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah group, which the U.S. blames for the death of an American contractor in a rocket attack right after Christmas, Esper said: “The United States military responded [and] took defensive actions ... striking a combination of the command and control or weapons caches with considerable effect.” Ditto the unprecedented hit on Soleimani, which Trump said was to stop an “imminent and sinister” attack.

Absent more information on the specific plot the administration said it disrupted—Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told reporters that a failure to act would have been “culpably negligent”—it’s hard to say whether the benefits were worth the costs. If the U.S. did in fact stop an attack that could have taken “hundreds” of American lives, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed, it may have been worth it. The problem is that Trump lies routinely, and his officials just as routinely cover for him. The New York Times reported that even some Trump officials were skeptical of the intelligence, and said that one U.S. official described the intelligence as simply “another Monday in the Middle East.” As my colleague Peter Nicholas wrote last week: “Trump faces the gravest foreign-policy crisis of his tenure at a time when his credibility has been shredded.”

Another example occurred just this weekend. After Trump tweeted he had a 52-target list including sites “important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” Pompeo responded to criticism that targeting cultural sites would be a war crime. “President Trump didn’t say he’d go after a cultural site,” Pompeo said on Fox News. “Read what he said very closely.” Hours later, Trump, en route to Washington after a two-week vacation in Florida, told a journalist: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural [sites]? It doesn’t work that way.” At a press gaggle today, the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway confused matters further: “Secretary Pompeo said yesterday that we will be within the law, and I think that Iran has many … strategic military sites that you may cite are also cultural sites … He didn’t say he’s targeting cultural sites.”

These are the same people insisting that the world is a safer place during the cascade of bad news that has followed Soleimani’s death—even as the State Department told all U.S. citizens in Iraq to leave immediately.

Yet the general’s killing only accelerated trends that were already under way. Iran had been blowing through its commitments under the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal for months by the time its leadership announced yesterday that it wouldn’t observe any more of the agreement’s limits on its nuclear program. The Trump administration left the nuclear deal in 2018 and vowed to get a better one—one that would check Iran’s proxy violence and missile development in addition to its nuclear program. None of those things have happened.

As for Iran’s growing influence in the region, Pompeo tends to trace it to the nuclear deal, which gave Iran sanctions relief he says has been used to fund terrorism. But Iran’s recent expansion started much earlier, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which gave Iranian-backed militias a foothold in the country and a base from which to attack U.S. forces. The anti-ISIS fight only empowered them further as the Iraqi government relied in part on them to beat back the insurgents. Iraq has ever since been struggling to bring them under government control. And the U.S. has spent millions of dollars training Iraqi forces and trying to pull the country out of Iran’s orbit. Meanwhile, the Syrian conflict, in which Iranian forces and their proxies have backed Bashar al-Assad, has helped the country consolidate what officials call a “Shia crescent” of influence extending from Iran, through Iraq, and into Syria and Lebanon. The Iranian military has also conducted joint exercises with China and Russia.

And once again, part of the ISIS fight is on hold. Not only have the Americans paused their cooperation with Iraqi units since Soleimani’s killing; the rest of NATO has suspended its operations in Iraq too. This is the second time in three months that counter-ISIS operations have had to be stalled; the first was after Trump opted to move U.S. forces in northeastern Syria out of the way of a Turkish attack against America’s Kurdish allies there.

In the short term, Trump officials keep saying their goal with Iran is to “restore deterrence,” that each additional movement of troops to the region—or as of last week, each military strike—aims to stop the cycle of violence by making clear to Iran the consequences of its actions. The problem is that if the Iranians aren’t deterred, they may take violent steps of their own for much the same reason the U.S. has: to prove that there are consequences.

One advantage to having mutually contradictory policy goals is that when one fails, another might succeed. Yes, what the military calls the “enduring defeat of ISIS” achieved “by, with and through” local partners like the Iraqis may now be coming to an end—it’s hard to be “with” them if you’re leaving. But that’s just the goal of executive-branch institutions like the State Department and the Pentagon. As for the president himself—and even though he’s declared that the U.S. is not leaving unless the Iraqis pay for the air base the U.S. constructed in their country—his real preference has been clear since the 2016 election campaign. “We should have never been there in the first place,” he said in October 2017. “Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” he said two years later.

The contradictions are not just between Trump and the rest of his administration, but within Trump himself. He has twice now declared the defeat of ISIS and tried to leave Syria, only to get talked out of it. He professes to hate war, but he loves killing bad guys. What happens after they’re dead is someone else’s responsibility.

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IT’S 2003 ALL OVER AGAIN

It doesn’t require much squinting to see the ways the Iran crisis resembles the lead-up to the Iraq War.

By David A. Graham, Staff writer | Published Jan 6, 2020 |The Atlantic | Posted January 06, 2020 |

The U.S. stands on the brink of an unpredictable war in the Middle East.

The president, fairly untutored in foreign affairs, ran for office promising to pull back from American commitments overseas. But the vice president and a powerful Cabinet secretary, seeing a chance to follow through on their deep-rooted ideological commitments, have pushed him to take military action in a moment of opportunity, ramifications be damned.

Even as civilian leaders march toward war, military officers seem unprepared or at least startled by the administration’s belligerence. The government justifies its actions with vague statements about intelligence information and by claiming spurious links to the September 11 attacks, and top officials insist that American actions will lead to dancing in the streets of Iraq. But it becomes quickly clear that the administration hasn’t done much advance planning or thought out its future steps.

It’s 2002–03, as the George W. Bush administration heads toward the war in Iraq, but it’s also the current crisis with Iran. Each new piece of information about President Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani produces sobering parallels with the situation 17 years ago. That should give the nation pause, and raise some pointed questions for the Trump administration.

The public still doesn’t have good clarity on how, why, and when the president made the call to kill Soleimani in an air strike on January 3, but a picture is gradually emerging. The Washington Post reports that “Trump’s decision to approve the killing of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, [came] at the urging of [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo and Vice President [Mike] Pence.” Pompeo in particular had been pushing for a more violent response to Iran for months, and was deeply disappointed when Trump abruptly called off a punitive air strike last summer.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports, top Pentagon officials were “stunned” by Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani, the most extreme of several options. In the favored patois of the military, initialisms, this smacks of CYA: Having offered the president this option, commanders now seem to be backing away from it. Nonetheless, it also indicates differences of judgment between Cabinet secretaries and the military.

This sounds a lot like the run-up to the Iraq War. We now know that Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush White House had been seeking regime change in Iraq from the start of the administration. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld began seeking a pretext to begin a war with Iraq. But some military commanders were wary. By 2002, the U.S. was already engaged in a war in Afghanistan, attempting to root out Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which had perpetrated the attacks. Some generals questioned the wisdom of launching another major war, or argued that the U.S. would need a much larger armed force than the administration intended to send. Dissenters, including Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, were forced out.

In the Trump administration, there’s already been an exodus of defense officials who challenge the president. Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned roughly a year ago after a disagreement about Syria policy. Brett McGurk, the top envoy for fighting the Islamic State, also quit. On Monday, Pentagon Chief of Staff Kevin Sweeney, a Mattis hire, resigned, though no reason was immediately offered for his departure.

To bring the public around to support the war in Iraq, the Bush administration offered a range of justifications. By misconstruing, twisting, or concocting intelligence, the White House overstated the Iraqi weapons-of-mass destruction program and warned that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Bush and Cheney claimed that Hussein was closely tied to al-Qaeda, creating a putative link between the 9/11 attacks and a war in Iraq. The vice president said an American invasion would inspire celebrations in the streets of Iraq, similar to those after the Allied re-conquest of France: “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he said on Meet the Press.

But after the invasion, no weapons of mass destruction were found. Cheney, who had scolded the press for not reporting the Saddam–al-Qaeda connection, later admitted there wasn’t one. And while many Iraqis were pleased to be rid of Saddam, there was not the widespread jubilation Cheney expected—and conditions have gone downhill since then. Following the successful toppling of Saddam, Iraq saw looting, widespread violence, sectarian strife, and the rise of ISIS (to offer a drastically summarized version). As many as 200,000 civilians have died in Iraq. Nostalgia for Saddam is common. Over the weekend, in the wake of the Soleimani strike, the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel U.S. forces, in anger over what it viewed as a violation of sovereignty.

Compare that effort to sell the war with this moment. The administration has claimed that it killed Soleimani because of intelligence about an impending strike that would kill Americans, but there are already questions about how convincing or urgent that intelligence really was. Vice President Pence, echoing Cheney and Bush, falsely tried to claim a link between Soleimani and the 9/11 attacks. Pompeo, echoing Cheney, claimed that Iraqis were “dancing in the street for freedom” after the Soleimani strike, and while he tweeted a video that showed a small celebration, it was misleading, especially in light of the parliamentary vote.

Aside from the false justifications behind it, one reason the Iraq invasion turned into a disaster was a lack of planning for what would happen after the initial military phase of the war. Similarly, it appears that Trump acted impulsively and without much thought for what would happen after Soleimani’s death.

The White House still hasn’t offered a persuasive explanation for the authority under which it assassinated Soleimani, citing the 1943 killing of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the planner of the Pearl Harbor attacks—but Japan and the U.S. were in a declared war at the time, while the U.S. is not at war with Iran. Other than a vague suggestion that Iran will come to the bargaining table, and threats of severe responses (including potential war crimes) if Iran retaliates, Trump hasn’t articulated what steps he expects next in the confrontation. And the U.S. appears to have been caught flat-footed by the Iraqi parliamentary vote, and, according to Axios, tried unsuccessfully to stop it.

It doesn’t even require much squinting to see the ways the Iran crisis resembles the lead-up to the Iraq War. Practically the only thing that’s left is for Trump to claim that he was against killing Soleimani all along.

Just because the parallels are striking doesn’t mean this moment will turn out just like the Iraq War did. It’s very difficult to forecast next steps, but it also would be difficult to replicate the greatest foreign-policy blunder in America’s history. The scope of hostilities right now is much narrower, encompassing only one military commander, and while there is a risk of Iranian retaliation, the U.S. and Iran have been engaged in a hot-and-cold proxy conflict for decades. The current flare-up is really just the latest episode in the extended Iraq disaster.

Yet the factors that made the Iraq War a disaster are present here: false and dubious claims; hubristic thinking; lack of foresight and planning; civilian-military divides; ideology eclipsing practical strategy. All of this means that while the Iran crisis may not be a disaster on the scale of the Iraq War, it could easily be a disaster. Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” There’s no reason it can’t repeat itself as just another tragedy, though.

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Soleimani Was Failing

Trump should have left Soleimani alive and in place, but made him operationally ineffective by killing his deputies.

By Kori Schake, Contributing writer and the Deputy Director-General of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She teaches in War Studies at King’s College. | Published January 7, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted January 7, 2020 |

Hard to say he didn’t deserve it. Qassem Soleimani was responsible for 11 recent attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq even before the one that killed a U.S. contractor; Iranian attacks on neutral, civilian shipping in the Gulf; the attack on Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia; IEDs that killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. He was the architect of Iran’s strategy of mobilizing militias to destabilize neighboring states and the brutal strategy of bleeding Syria dry.

While we may not be at war with Iran, Soleimani has been at war with the United States for 15 years. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is incorrect that “this war started when the JCPOA was entered into,” but Iran’s proxy attacks did increase after the nuclear agreement came into force, and they have increased significantly since the U.S. withdrew from the agreement.

The previous two American presidents all considered killing Soleimani as part of the Iraq War effort. And President Donald Trump had been incredibly—even perhaps damagingly—restrained in not overtly retaliating for attacks on shipping, Aramco, U.S. bases, and the embassy in Iraq. American allies in the Middle East and beyond were worried about the U.S. reestablishing deterrence, by which they mean retaliating to show the Iranians and other potential predators that it wouldn’t let them get away with these acts of war.

So the administration was justified in killing Soleimani—but that doesn’t mean it was a good idea.

The fact is that much of Soleimani’s strategy had begun to falter, and in ways advantageous to U.S. interests. While Soleimani fought the ground war in Syria on Bashar al-Assad’s behalf, only Russian intervention prevented Assad’s fall. Russia will dictate the terms of Syria’s future, not Iran. Iraq’s Kurdish president had succeeded in preventing a pro-Iranian successor to pro-Iranian Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The protests in Iraq and Lebanon were about corruption and unrepresentative governance, which Iran was associated with because of its influence in those countries even before Iranian-affiliated militias responded violently. In the case of Iraq, they killed more than 500 protesters and wounded a staggering 19,000.

Iran’s strategy of gaining depth beyond its borders succeeded because it was opaque. Soleimani’s desire for credit—pictures from regional battlefields, chairing the Iraqi-government meeting that decided whether Abadi would remain in power—removed the plausible deniability of Iranian orchestration, activating nationalistic antibodies in Iraq and Lebanon.

It’s possible, even likely, that recent attacks by Iran on U.S. bases in Iraq were an overt attempt to distract from the validity of protests in Iraq. In that, Soleimani may have succeeded in death at what he was failing to achieve in life. Judging by the crowds at Soleimani’s funerals in Iran, his killing erased fissures between Iranians and their government, at least temporarily.

Iraq, meanwhile, may well determine that it’s more secure without U.S. forces. Trump’s threat not to leave Iraq unless remunerated for the cost of bases built in that country are damaging to the relationship. Who wants that kind of friend?

Losing the strategist of Iranian proxy warfare would be a cheap price to pay for Iran to achieve a rapprochement between the government and its people, and a U.S. exit from Iraq. That’s especially the case since the proxy strategy may have been reaching its limits under Soleimani, and he’d created a capable cadre of deputies.

The better strategy would have been to leave Soleimani alive and in place, but to make him operationally ineffective by killing his deputies, as the U.S. has done with al-Qaeda deputies. Taking out a deputy draws less press, but sends a powerful message; the strategy places the onus of escalation on Iran and gives the U.S. the benefit of a public posture of restraint. It’s what the Eisenhower administration called “quiet military measures” during the 1958 Berlin crisis.

But since Trump decided to go after the Quds Force commander, he should at least have coordinated with countries that host U.S. bases or that have deployed forces in furtherance of U.S. interests in the Middle East. He did not. When the U.S. leaves allies out of the loop, those allies become less likely to contribute to future coalitions, leading to more strain on U.S. forces. Trump also made it abundantly clear that he thinks only of America, first and last, when he tweeted that the U.S. would respond to any attacks on U.S. service personnel specifically. That is a poor way to repay the 78 other countries and four international organizations participating in the fight against the Islamic State for their dedication.

Perhaps the most generous take on the Soleimani killing is that it merely hastened negative outcomes that would have happened anyway. Iran would likely have restarted enrichment at its nuclear plants, and continued attacks on U.S. interests and commerce passing through the Gulf. U.S. troops may have left Iraq, given Trump’s well-publicized efforts to abandon operations there.

As so often with the Trump administration, the problem is less the policy position than the execution. The administration has a way of maximizing the costs and minimizing the benefits of its actions.

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Soleimani’s Ultimate Revenge

In his death, the Iranian general may cost the United States far more than it gained by his killing.

By William J. Burns, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Jake Sullivan, Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | Published Jan 07, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 7, 2020

The death of Qassem Soleimani is a sobering blow for the Iranian regime. Soleimani embodied everything the regime wanted to project about itself—influence, ruthlessness, agility, confidence. He kept Iran’s enemies awake at night, and his theocratic masters sleeping soundly in a world of real and imagined threats at home and abroad.

For years, Tehran’s leadership talked fatalistically about Soleimani as a “living martyr,” but it surely did not anticipate President Donald Trump’s audacious targeted killing. Now the Iranians will seek vengeance—methodical, cold-blooded, and nasty. They will look to avoid an all-out war with the United States that they cannot win. But they will also look to turn a tactical blow into a strategic boon.

Unlike the Trump administration, which cannot reconcile its desire to get tough on Iran with its desire to leave the region altogether, the Iranian regime has a strategy, tethered to the realities, dysfunctions, and limits of the Middle East. Its tactics are often ugly; its capacity for misreading the terrain is sometimes self-defeating; and the pain and stupidities it inflicts on so many across the region, let alone its own people, can be horrific. But it does connect its means to its desired ends: keeping the clerics in power, keeping its imperial project in the region alive, and keeping sworn enemies, including America, off balance and out of its neighborhood.

No one really knows what comes next, not even the protagonists themselves. But as the dust settles, the collateral damage from the strike on Soleimani will likely be greater than the Trump administration bargained for. Indeed, the strike already appears to be feeding the gnarled ambitions of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, by producing a more unified regime with a tighter grip at home; an even more precarious American military position in Iraq and Syria, with the Iraqi Parliament now calling for U.S. withdrawal; and the death of the Iranian nuclear deal and the whole notion of diplomacy with the Great Satan. All this will cost the United States far more than Soleimani’s killing cost Iran. In his death, Soleimani may exact his own final act of revenge against the United States.

One of the iron laws of foreign policy is that just because you can do something, or just because it’s morally defensible, doesn’t make it a smart thing to do. Both of President Trump’s predecessors adhered to that law when it came to the question of whether to go after Qassem Soleimani. Trump, however, is enamored with actions that his predecessors avoided, and stubbornly convinced that he can get his way with the unilateral application of American power.

For Iran’s supreme leader, Soleimani’s killing was both a personal wound and an affirmation of his darkly suspicious worldview. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal last year had already reconfirmed his deep skepticism about the wisdom of negotiating with the Americans. The elimination of Soleimani may give pause to Khamenei and the hard men around him about the wisdom of frontal assaults on U.S. personnel, but in other ways it returns them to a world in which they’re far more comfortable. It’s a world with a clear enemy at the gate, a mortal threat that makes it easier to control domestic pressures for reform and dismiss international pressures for diplomacy. And it’s a world in which Iran has a wide array of lethal tools and loyal proxies, and a well-practiced ability to manipulate a neighborhood it knows far better than Americans do.

Strategically, the Iranian leadership will see no shortage of opportunities.

At home, it will use the action against Soleimani to change the channel, seeking to divert the popular frustrations that only a short time ago deeply unnerved the regime. Reformism was already a spent force in Iranian politics. Parliamentary elections next month will bury it—hardening the grip of reactionaries and all but ensuring the rise of their choices for the next president and eventually the next supreme leader.

Already tiptoeing away from compliance with the nuclear agreement, the regime will now feel obliged to take significant leaps, including the resumption of higher levels of uranium enrichment. Other signatories can no longer make a credible case that they can get Trump back to the negotiating table or deliver Iran the promised economic benefits. The only question about the nuclear deal now is the manner and pace of its expiration. With the treacherous genie of Iran’s nuclear program heading out of the bottle, a whole series of dilemmas will reemerge, from the dangers of military preemption to the risks of a regional nuclear-arms race.

The wider regional consequences could be equally negative for American interests—particularly in Iraq. For Tehran, ironically, the U.S. killing of Soleimani offers a convenient escape from the anti-Iranian anger that Soleimani’s own policies stirred up. Barely a month ago, the Iranian consulate in Najaf was torched by an Iraqi Shia mob accusing Iran of violating Iraqi sovereignty; now the Americans are a more urgent target for that same charge. Tehran will do everything in its power to make America’s military presence in Iraq operationally and politically unsustainable. It will stoke Iraqi emotions and push a very fragile Iraqi government to demand our withdrawal, and an angered Shia clerical establishment to do the same—tempting an American president who doesn’t really want to be there in the first place. In the meantime, Iranian proxies will continue to try to humiliate Americans in Iraq, and look for opportunities to threaten U.S. facilities.

Even short of a withdrawal, pressure to constrain the U.S. military in Iraq will have serious effects on a campaign against ISIS that is far from over. Trump has made no secret of his inclination to pull remaining American forces out of Syria, and the Iranians will turn up the heat to try to encourage that instinct. Mounting protests in Lebanon against Iran and Hezbollah will at least temporarily recede, deferring the hopes of Lebanese whose nonviolent, cross-sectarian demonstrations held the promise of a new political era in that embattled country.

In the Gulf, our partners are losing their enthusiasm for an American confrontation with Iran. They are spooked by Trump’s oscillation between non-reaction and extreme reaction and the Iranians’ demonstrated will and capacity to hit them where it hurts most. The Iranians could eventually stage further attacks on Saudi oil facilities or Gulf shipping, as a reminder that neither the Gulf Arabs nor the global economy will escape the consequences of conflict between Tehran and Washington.

As we’ve argued before, we’re at this dangerous juncture because of Trump’s foolish decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, his through-the-looking -glass conception of coercive diplomacy, and his willing hard-line enablers in Tehran. When the deal was in place, Iran remained an adversary—but U.S. unmanned aircraft weren’t being shot down by Iran in international waters, Gulf shipping and infrastructure weren’t being hit by Iranian mines and missiles, and U.S. personnel weren’t being targeted by Shia militias in Iraq. Abandoning the nuclear agreement, on our own and with no evidence of Iranian cheating, started a predictable cycle of escalation and brinkmanship. It is a cycle that Trump has accelerated with muscular bluster and “maximum pressure,” unconnected to realistic aims or careful foresight.

The Trump administration is not the first U.S. administration to engage in magical thinking in the Middle East, but the contradictions in its approach have set a new standard. The president came into office promising to undermine Iran’s regional reach and to secure a “better deal” on its nuclear program—all while drawing down America’s military presence in the region and rejecting credible diplomacy.

At the beginning of 2020, a dispassionate reckoning would conclude that the United States is not only further from those goals than it was three years ago, but also more exposed to the unpredictable risks of escalating conflict with Iran and the vast insecurities of the Middle East, the original land of unintended consequences. The wisdom of particular tactics, including the killing of Qassem Soleimani, is best judged by the strategic results they produce. America is stumbling into a tragedy of its own making. And the Iranian regime is poised to once again reap the rewards, turning Soleimani’s loss into a long-term gain.

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An Extraordinarily Dangerous Moment

To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East.

By Ben Rhodes, Former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama | Published January 07, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 07, 2020 |

n a november night in 2013, Barack Obama delivered a statement about an interim nuclear deal that had just been reached, freezing Iran’s program in place. When he was done, I walked with him back to the entrance of his residence, watched by the stoic portraits of former presidents. “Congratulations,” I said. “You just made sure that we won’t have a war with Iran during your presidency.”

“That’s probably true,” he said, considering the question. “But I want to make sure that the next president doesn’t have to go to war either.”

Obama was referring to the need to reach a comprehensive deal that rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. It would take almost two years of painstaking negotiations to get there, but the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) accomplished that objective. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran destroyed the core of a reactor that could have produced plutonium for a bomb; removed two-thirds of its centrifuges, the machines that can enrich uranium for a bomb; shipped 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium (enough for 10 bombs) out of the country; and submitted to the most comprehensive international inspections regime ever put into place to monitor a nuclear program.

These achievements are worth revisiting, because any hope of saving the Iran deal likely died with the killing of Qassem Soleimani. Indeed, it’s no surprise that the Iranian government has indicated that it will no longer abide by the limits on its nuclear program imposed by the JCPOA.

ow did we get here? The debate over the Iran deal was among the most acrimonious of the Obama years. Throughout 2015, congressional Republicans stridently opposed it. Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia worked to marshal opposition. Think tanks churned out alarmist reports about the JCPOA. Tens of millions of dollars were spent by outside groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and United Against Nuclear Iran urging Congress to kill the deal. To prevent that legislation from passing, we worked frenetically to muster 41 Democratic Senate votes to uphold a filibuster. Indeed, the fact that it was far easier for George W. Bush to take the United States into an unnecessary war in Iraq than it was for Barack Obama to secure a nuclear deal to avoid one with Iran says something deeply strange and alarming about our country and its politics.

As soon as he began his run for the presidency, Donald Trump anointed himself the most strident of the JCPOA’s opponents, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated.” It is likely, of course, that Trump couldn’t even describe the Iran deal’s terms. He failed to articulate a different set of nuclear restrictions, or to offer his views on the nature of centrifuges that Iran should be allowed to operate, or the research and development it should be permitted to perform. Trump simply wanted to destroy anything that Obama built and to satiate right-wing supporters who had their own reasons for opposing the JCPOA. What Trump could do is lie about the Iran deal, and he did so relentlessly.

Upon becoming president, Trump encountered an inconvenient truth: The Iran deal was working. Trump’s own intelligence community and military leadership confirmed that Iran was complying with the JCPOA’s terms; his own secretary of defense argued publicly that staying in the JCPOA was in America’s interest; and all the other parties to the deal—the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—opposed Trump’s instinct to pull out. After Trump refused to certify that Iran was complying with the JCPOA (even though it was), even Republicans in Congress quietly refused to reimpose sanctions. And after Trump demanded a better deal, French President Emmanuel Macron offered him the opportunity to pursue one through negotiation, provided that the JCPOA stayed in place. Despite all this evidence and all these efforts, Trump withdrew from the Iran deal in May of 2018 and started reimposing sanctions.

Few recent presidential decisions have been proved to be so spectacularly wrong in such a short period of time.

Trump said that in withdrawing from the JCPOA, he would be in a stronger position to stop Iran’s provocations across the Middle East. The opposite has proved to be the case. Iran has already resumed aspects of its nuclear program that were restricted under the JCPOA. And over the past year alone, Iran or its proxies have shot down a U.S. drone, harassed and seized oil tankers, bombed Saudi oil infrastructure, killed unarmed protesters, and resumed rocket attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq. During the implementation of the Iran deal, by contrast, there wasn’t a single such rocket attack from a Shia militia. Trump initiated the escalatory cycle that led us to this extraordinarily dangerous moment.

It is ironic that the killing of Qassem Soleimani could put the final nail in the coffin of the Iran deal. In the Obama White House, we assessed that Soleimani opposed the JCPOA, and that he led a hard-line flank that viewed the Iranian foreign minister who conducted the negotiations with suspicion. This view was often mocked by Iran-deal opponents, who declared that there was no distinction between hard-liners and more moderate Iranian officials. Indeed, U.S. hawks regularly foreclose opportunities for diplomacy by wrongly seeing the government of any adversary as a monolith. But now, in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, that debate is largely moot: As mourners flood the streets, all of Iran’s leaders are consolidating around a harder line, vowing to chase the United States out of the region.

We have already seen the consequences of this latest escalation in Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign come into focus. Iraqi leaders are demanding that we leave their country, after Americans sacrificed thousands of lives and spent more than $1 trillion there; new restrictions are inhibiting the fight against ISIS; Iran is casting off the remaining limits on its nuclear program. In the months and years to come, we should expect renewed attacks against U.S. interests—and Americans—from Iran and its proxies. In contrast to the international unity that enabled the achievement of the JCPOA, Trump’s abandonment of it has alienated the United States from our closest allies. And in his other signature foreign-policy initiative—negotiations with North Korea—Kim Jong Un is pushing forward with his own nuclear and missile programs, perhaps having drawn the lesson that you cannot trust the United States to keep a nuclear deal.

In response, Trump and his chief lieutenant on Iran—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—have sought to deflect blame to the JCPOA. While blaming the Iran deal for the consequences of Trump pulling out of the Iran deal is absurd, this argument should come as no surprise. Trump’s Iran policy was formulated in opposition to Obama, not with an eye toward actual governing. His is a worldview that relies on false charges, hyperbolic rhetoric, and assertions of strength as an end in itself, and not as a means to achieving something. At a Cabinet meeting last year, Trump sat at the table with a Game of Thrones–style poster that read “Sanctions are coming,” as if it were all just a movie, and not real life.

By contrast, the Iran deal was designed to address reality, and discharge the responsibilities of governing. Like any such effort, it was imperfect, and left all parties dissatisfied. For the Iranians, it was flawed because it didn’t lift all sanctions; it did, however, offer relief from certain sanctions and the prospect of further relief if Iran continued to comply. For us, it was flawed because the JCPOA’s most effective restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program expired in 10 or 15 years—but that was 10 or 15 more years of assurance than having no deal in place, and further negotiations that built upon the JCPOA were always an available option. Finally, the JCPOA didn’t stop Iran’s ballistic-missile program or its support for terror in the Middle East; however, the JCPOA did ensure that a regime that has ballistic missiles and supports terror was verifiably prohibited from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That was the whole point. You don’t make nuclear deals like that with your friends.

Indeed, imagine how the current crisis would feel if Iran already had nuclear weapons.

Governing isn’t about making demands on other countries that will never be achieved just because they sound good back in Washington. And the presidency certainly isn’t a movie. When “sanctions are coming,” real people get hurt and terrible things can happen in the real world. One legacy of the JCPOA is that it demonstrates the utility of a different approach.

As Trump confronts the consequences of a crisis of his own creation, he can thank Obama for the fact that Iran doesn’t yet have the means to produce a nuclear weapon. He can thank Obama for the fact that Iran’s nuclear program is set back from where it was in 2015. He can thank Obama for the inspections regime that has functioned effectively. By contrast, the result of Trump’s policy—designed for Fox News sets and campaign rallies—has been a more hard-line Iranian politics, an Iranian adversary that has stepped up its provocations, and a newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program.

Barack Obama did achieve a deal good enough to prevent his successor from having to go to war with Iran. But now, despite all that work, a de facto state of war exists between the United States and Iran. To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Donald Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East. In doing so, he has tragically proved Obama right: The choice all along was between the Iran deal or an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and some form of war.

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