Book review: War Made Invisible: How American Hides The Human Toll Of Its Military Machine by Norman Solomon

Book review: War Made Invisible: How American Hides The Human Toll Of Its Military Machine by Norman Solomon
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2023-January 2024

Earlier this year Brown University’s Costs of War project calculated the US-led ‘war on terror’ has led to nearly one million people killed due to direct violence, many more dead from indirect causes connected to the conflict, and 38 million people displaced.

In his new book US writer and activist Norman Solomon highlights how the government, military and media hides the murderous impact of US military interventions from the US public.

Relying largely on secondary sources, he zeros in on the US’s shift away from boots on the ground to a reliance on air power, which significantly reduces the political costs for the government.

‘For the American networks, “war” means troops on the ground in harm’s way, not use of lethal force remotely by the Pentagon,’ media researcher Andrew Tyndall notes, with the volume of coverage reduced accordingly. 

More broadly, Solomon explains ‘the tenor and volume of US media coverage have routinely hinged on who is doing the killing and who is being killed. When American armed forces are inflicting the carnage, the chances of deeply sympathetic coverage of the killed, wounded, and bereaved are greatly diminished.’ However, ‘when the killers are adversaries of the US government, the media floodgates of compassion and human connection open wide.’ The avalanche of emotive news reporting following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amply proves his point.

While I would have liked a more detailed analysis of the propaganda mechanisms that create this mass ignorance, War Made Invisible is nevertheless a very readable reality check about post-9/11 US foreign policy. Thoroughly referenced for those who wish to drill down further, it’s full of illuminating quotes and facts – Professor David Vine is quoted saying the US ‘has at least three times as many overseas bases as all other countries combined.’

UK peace activists will know the book’s thesis very much applies to the UK. For example, in 2013 the Guardian published details of a 2012 Ministry of Defence discussion paper which examined how to assuage ‘casualty averse’ public opinion. Suggestions included the greater use of mercenaries, drones and special forces, with the loss of elite soldiers seen as having a reduced impact on the public and press.

Shockingly, a 2013 UK ComRes poll commissioned by a group of media activists and supported by Noam Chomsky found 59 per cent of respondents thought fewer than 10,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Iraq War. In contrast, a study published in PLOS Medicine journal the same year estimated 500,000 Iraqis had died because of the war.

I would have also liked to see Solomon highlight how activists and social movements are often able to raise awareness of the reality of their government’s military aggression and, under the right conditions and with a herculean effort, can even help curtail or even stop the war. With Israel decimating the Gaza Strip as I write this review, this critical task is as urgent as it ever has been.

Self-defence and the right to resist in Palestine: Marjorie Cohn interview

Self-defence and the right to resist in Palestine: Marjorie Cohn interview
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
11-12 November 2023

“Israel has a right to defend herself.” This supposed moral truism has been repeated incessantly, by public figures on the right and left, since the Hamas terror attacks on October 7.

Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and a former president of the US National Lawyers Guild, has a different view. Ian Sinclair asked her what international law says about Israel’s right to self-defence, and Israeli actions against Palestinians more generally.


There is a consensus across most of the political spectrum in the US and UK that, in the words of UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, “Israel has a right to defend herself” following the Hamas attacks on October 7. What does international law say about this?

The United Nations (UN) Charter requires all states to settle their international disputes peacefully so as not to endanger international peace and security. That doesn’t just apply to states, but also to the settlement of any international disputes. The Charter says no state can use military force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state “or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Although Israel denies that Palestine is a state, the Israeli Supreme Court in the Targeted Killings case recognized the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians to be of an international character. Israel cannot use the Palestinians’ lack of statehood to justify its use of military force.

The only two exceptions to the prohibition on the use of force are when a state acts in self-defense or the [UN] Security Council authorizes force. A state may use military force in self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter “if an armed attack occurs” against a state. The use of armed force for reprisal or retaliation is prohibited.

For an armed attack to give rise to the right of self-defence, it must be directed from outside the territory under the control of the defending state. A state cannot invoke the right of self-defence to defend against an attack which originates inside a territory it occupies. Because Israel has continued to occupy Gaza, it has relinquished its right to claim self-defence in response to the Palestinian attacks.

In its 2004 advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) established the non-applicability of “self-defence” under Article 51 in the situation between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza despite its unilateral removal of settlements. After the 2005 election of Hamas, Israel imposed a blockade against Gaza which is specifically listed as an act of aggression under [UN] General Assembly Resolution 3314.

An occupying force has a duty to protect the people it occupies; it cannot claim self-defence against the occupied. Actions taken by Palestinians to resist the blockade are not “acts of aggression” so they do not allow Israel to claim it is acting in self-defence.

Aside from the illegality of targeting and killing civilians, what does international law say about Palestinians resisting the occupation, including with armed force?

Whether the use of force in the first instance is lawful is a separate question from how that force is carried out. For targeting and killing civilians and taking hostages, Hamas leaders can be charged with war crimes.

The Palestinians, however, have the right to self-determination and the right to resist Israel’s occupation of their territory, including through armed struggle. In 1983, the UN General Assembly reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

Gaza, together with the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are part of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. The Occupied Palestinian Territory is a single territorial unit over which the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination is enshrined in international law, according to the ICJ’s Wall decision.

The legal test for occupation is “effective control,” which exists if the military forces of the adversary could assume physical control of any part of the country at any time. By declaring that “Israel will guard and monitor the external land perimeter of the Gaza Strip, will continue to maintain exclusive authority in Gaza air space, and will continue to exercise security activity in the sea off the coast of the Gaza Strip,” Israel’s 2005 ‘Disengagement Plan’ reveals Israel’s intention to maintain effective control over Gaza.

Israel continues to exert military control over Gaza through a continuous flow of military operations in and against Gaza. Israel exerts administrative control over the population of Gaza through the exclusive control over the movement of goods and people, the civil population registry, and the tax and revenue system.

Israel continuously maintains control over Gaza’s borders, sea and air space, water, electricity, sewage and telecommunication systems. UN Security Council resolution 1860 issued in 2009 states that “the Gaza Strip constitutes an integral part of the territory occupied in 1967.”

Gaza and its inhabitants remain under Israeli effective control and is therefore, occupied. The Palestinians have the right to use military force to resist Israel’s occupation.

Since October 7 the US and UK have made public statements in support of Israel as it pummels Gaza, continues to provide huge amounts of arms to Israel, and has protected Israel from censure at the UN. Does the support the US and UK are giving Israel contravene international law?

The Rome Statute [which established the International Criminal Court] provides that an individual can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court if he or she “aids, abets or otherwise assists” the commission or attempted commission of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. This includes “providing the means for its commission,” with knowledge of the illegal purpose.

In addition to the $3.8 billion a year the US furnishes Israel for military assistance, the Biden Administration is sending overwhelming firepower and providing diplomatic and political cover for Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. Congress is on the verge of appropriating billions of dollars more in aid to Israel.

The US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have called for a ceasefire and urged Israel to rescind its order to 1.1 million Gazans to leave their homes and move to southern Gaza.

The UK supplies the Israeli Air Force and provides components for the F-35 stealth combat aircraft that Israel is using to bomb Gaza. The Campaign Against Arms Trade estimates this trade is worth 336 million pounds since 2016.

US and UK leaders can be prosecuted for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

How do you think Israel should have responded to the October 7 attacks?

The only path to safety and security is through international law, not vengeance and retaliation. Israel should have heeded the UN Charter’s command to settle its disputes peacefully and, for the first time, engaged in real peace talks with the Palestinians.

If Israel really wanted peace, it would end its occupation and blockade of Gaza, its state and colonial violence, and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It would end its system of settler colonialism and apartheid and it would dismantle the Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. And it would allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes with full compensation, as required by international law.

Israel must release all Palestinian prisoners and end its use of torture and administrative detention. There are currently approximately 5,250 Palestinian prisoners (including 39 women and 170 children) in Israeli jails, including nearly 1,350 jailed without charge or trial under arbitrary and unlawful administrative detention.

If Israel truly wanted peace with the Palestinians, it would not work to undermine the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for boycott, divestment and sanctions. They described BDS as “non-violent punitive measures” that would last until Israel fully complies with international law by (1) ending its occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands and dismantling its barrier wall; (2) recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as stipulated in [UN] General Assembly Resolution 194.

Britain’s nuclear terrorism: interview with Milan Rai

Britain’s nuclear terrorism: interview with Milan Rai
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8 November 2023

The Editor of Peace News newspaper and author of the 1994 book Tactical Trident: The Rifkind Doctrine and the Third World, peace activist Milan Rai has recently written several articles about the UK’s nuclear arsenal.

Ian Sinclair asked Rai to respond to the popular framing of the UK’s nuclear weapons being for “deterrence”, and to explain his claim that the UK has carried out “nuclear terrorism.”

There is a consensus in the UK’s mainstream political culture – from the media to politicians to academia – that the UK’s nuclear weapons are primarily used for deterrence. What’s your take?

For the general public in Britain, the idea of using nuclear weapons is so deeply horrifying, so taboo, that it is unthinkable. It isn’t unthinkable for the British military establishment.

The propaganda version of ‘deterrence’ that has been sold to the British public is that the British government only has nuclear weapons to defend Britain itself from nuclear attack and they’re only there in order to be able to threaten nuclear retaliation against a nuclear attack on the territory of the UK.

In other words, British nuclear weapons are focused just on hostile nuclear weapon states, they’re about protecting the British homeland from nuclear attack, and they’re retaliatory weapons. They just sit there, unused, like (incredibly expensive) insurance that you hope you’ll never have to claim.

On all counts, this version of deterrence is a Big Lie.

In fact, British nuclear weapons have also been pointed at non-nuclear weapon states: they have been used repeatedly to threaten countries that posed no possible threat to any part of the UK.

The US has been lucky enough to have had a former nuclear war planner explain the realities of US ‘deterrence’: Daniel Ellsberg, the US insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers, the top secret internal history of the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg wrote in 1981: “The notion common to nearly all Americans that ‘no nuclear weapons have been used since Nagasaki’ is mistaken. It is not the case that U.S. nuclear weapons have simply piled up over the years… Again and again, generally in secret from the American public, U.S. nuclear weapons have been used, for quite different purposes: in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.”

Here is one of the dozen or so examples that Ellsberg listed in his 1981 essay: ‘[US President] Nixon’s secret threats of massive escalation, including possible use of nuclear weapons, conveyed to the North Vietnamese by [US National Security Advisor] Henry Kissinger, 1969-72’.

Here in Britain, there are several known examples of similar threats.

In the 1960s, Britain’s “strategic nuclear deterrent” was the V-bomber force of Valiant, Victor and Vulcan aircraft. In December 1963, V-bombers from Bomber Command were sent out to Singapore during Britain’s 1963-1966 “Confrontation” (war) with Indonesia.

Andrew Brookes, a former Vulcan pilot and a historian of the V-bomber force, wrote that the V-bombers were kept in Singapore longer than usual, “positioned to be seen as ready to eliminate Indonesia Air Force capabilities if they launched air attacks.”

The Sunday Times revealed on 31 December 2000 that RAF Tengah in Singapore started storing 48 Red Beard nuclear bombs in 1962, the year before the V-bombers arrived there. The squadron began low-altitude nuclear bombing exercises, signalling British intentions to Indonesia.

This is one example of how the British state has used nuclear weapons “in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled,” as Ellsberg put it.

RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir David Lee later wrote about the nuclear-capable Victors sent to Singapore: “Their potential was well known to Indonesia and their presence did not go unnoticed.”

Lee added: “the knowledge of RAF strength and competence created a wholesome respect among Indonesia’s leaders, and the deterrent effect of RAF air defence fighters, light bombers and V-bombers on detachment from Bomber Command was absolute” (emphases added).

Lee is pointing us to one of the true meanings of “the deterrent effect” or “deterrence”: creating a “wholesome respect” among the natives in far-off lands that Britain wishes to dominate.

Can you give examples of when the UK has carried out what you call “nuclear terrorism”?

Iraq has been threatened with British nuclear weapons at least four times.

In 1961, Britain sent nuclear-capable Scimitar aircraft to the Gulf on an aircraft carrier, and put strategic nuclear bombers in Malta on alert during a (manufactured) crisis with Iraq.

There were many British (and US) nuclear threats against Iraq in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War. Here are some examples. On 10 August 1990, just eight days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Daily Star reported: “Whitehall sources made it clear that the multinational forces would be ready to hit back with every means at their disposal… [including] using tactical nuclear weapons against [Iraqi] troops and tanks on the battlefield.” On 30 September 1990, the Observer reported (on its front page) a warning from a senior British army officer with 7th Armoured Brigade: if there were Iraqi chemical attacks, British forces would “retaliate with battlefield nuclear forces.”

On 4 February 1991, the Guardian carried this report of a statement by the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd: “Mr. Hurd said that if Iraq responded to an allied land assault by using chemical weapons, President Saddam [Hussein] would be certain to provoke a massive response – language the U.S. and Britain employ to leave open the option of using chemical or nuclear weapons.”

Those threats took place under Conservative governments.

In February 1998, during a crisis over UN weapons inspections, a Labour Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that if the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used chemical or biological weapons in retaliation for a US-UK attack, “he should be in no doubt that, if he were to do so, there would be a proportionate response”. In other words, Cook threatened that Britain or the US would use weapons of mass destruction, either nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, there were more Labour nuclear threats. Then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, on 20 March 2002, that states like Iraq “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons”.

Four days later, Hoon appeared on ITV’s Jonathan Dimbleby show and insisted that the government “reserved the right” to use nuclear weapons if Britain or British troops were threatened by chemical or biological weapons.

All of these were nuclear threats against a non-nuclear weapon state (which posed no military threat to the territory of the British homeland).

These are examples of state nuclear terrorism – by the British government.

You’ve argued that the UK peace movement hasn’t even begun to engage with the fact UK nuclear weapons are tied up with British colonialism. Can you explain what you mean?

The nuclear weapons debate in the UK has been about the rights and wrongs of ‘deterrence’ in the sense of ‘having nuclear weapons to threaten retaliation if the UK itself was ever at risk of being attacked by nuclear weapons’.

By taking part in this Eurocentric debate, we have reinforced the idea that this is all that nuclear deterrence is about.

We have not exposed the history of British nuclear threats which show a very different side to Britain’s nuclear history.

Has anti-war activism or public opinion impacted UK nuclear policy in the past?

The government is clearly terrified of the possible public reaction to its policies and actions in this area, which is why so much effort has been put into distorting the record. For example, it’s clear that after the upsurge of CND in 1958, ministers and military officials became a lot more careful about how they spoke about nuclear weapons.

Where do you think the anti-nuclear campaigners should focus their energy going forwards?

If the British disarmament movement focuses on preventing the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons, it will prioritise holding back British military intervention and calming nuclear danger zones such as the Middle East and South Asia, as well as challenging the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons and exposing British nuclear threats.

Milan Rai is giving a talk on this topic at 7.30pm on Thursday 16 November: Vital Interests and British Nuclear Threats: 30 Years of the Rifkind Doctrine. Registration: http://www.tinyurl.com/peacenews4122.

Beware the anti-democratic liberal centre

Beware the anti-democratic liberal centre
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
24 July 2023

If you have read the seemingly endless work of US dissident Noam Chomsky you’ll know he regularly cites twentieth century US intellectuals to highlight the elitist, anti-democratic thinking of the so-called liberal centre.

The public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who should be “spectators, not participants in action”, while the “responsible men” govern. Therefore, the “bewildered herd” must be “put in their place” by “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” These quotes, Chomsky notes in the 2021 book The Precipice, are from influential progressive US thinkers like Walter Lippmann, Harold Laswell and Reinhold Niebuhr.

John Carey, then Professor of English at the University of Oxford, mapped out similar levels of contempt for the general population in his 1992 study The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. In the book he names and shames canonized British and Irish writers like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence for their often visceral revulsion of the public and popular culture. W.B. Yeats joined the Eugenics Society, while Aldous Huxley and Shaw were sympathetic, Carey notes.

He notes a dehumanising diary entry written by Woolf in Brighton in 1941 – about people she had observed in Fuller’s (presumably the same pub which still serves punters today): “They ate and ate. Something… parasitic about them. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs?”

Are similar hateful attitudes common amongst the liberal centre today? The discourse around Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party, which created the largest political party in Europe, demonstrates fear of popular participation in politics is very much alive and kicking.

Here’s what Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh sneeringly tweeted (and then deleted) in 2016: “You can do analysis of Corbyn and his ‘movement’ (I have done it) but the essence of the whole thing is that they are just thick as pigshit.”

The late novelist Martin Amis was similarly disdainful about Corbyn when he was interviewed in the Guardian Weekend magazine in 2017: “Two E grades at A-level. That’s it. He certainly has no autodidact streak. I mean, is he a reader?”

Lip service is usually given to supporting democracy, but it’s worth attending to deeds, not words. Remember, for example, that the vast majority of Labour Party MPs either cheered on or stayed silent when thousands of people were purged from the party, or barred from becoming members, in an attempt to rig the 2016 leadership contest between Corbyn and his establishment-friendly challenger, Owen Smith.

Chomsky understands what happened: “As in the case of [Bernie] Sanders, I suspect the prime reason for the bitter hatred of Corbyn on the part of a very wide spectrum of the British establishment is his effort to turn the Labour Party into a participatory organization that would not leave electoral politics in the hands of the Labour bureaucracy and would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to a broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.”

This goes way beyond the Labour Party, of course. Here’s Ganesh again, echoing Lippmann and Laswell in his weekly Financial Times column last year: “Key to the smooth running of democracy is the indifference of much of the population, much of the time. Voters are crucial as an eye on things, as a righter of the ship of state when it lists. That requires a measure of knowledge. Round-the-clock absorption is something else. It causes politics to take place in too loud a setting, laws to be made in too hot a smithy.”

The monarchy provides a useful litmus test for people’s views on democracy. And unsurprisingly, many liberals prefer the hierarchical, imperialist, racist, hereditary institution over an elected head of state. Remainiac Ian Dunt, writing in the i newspaper last year, maintained the monarchy “works fine”, before arguing “It doesn’t really matter how we decide the head of state role… all that matters is that it is arbitrary. It must not, under any circumstances, be democratic.” Similarly, National Treasure Stephen Fry, commenting on the coronation of King Charles, told the BBC “the beauty of a King is that it is for everyone”, before warning “imagine the alternative… that is what other countries and republics have… you vote for your head of state”. The horror!

Writing in 2017, Abi Wilkerson noted a few of the core beliefs of this type of elite liberalism: “Politics is about nothing more than the effective administration of the current system”, which means “the best politicians are those with the most experience wielding power” and “that nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals.”

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer’s repeated refusal to commit to increased funding of public services, and his reversal on poverty-increasing policies like the two-child benefit cap, is the embodiment of this technocratic, managerial style of politics.

Wilkerson doesn’t mention it but this is very much the politics of The West Wing, the influential US television series that ran from 1999 to 2006. Written by Aaron Sorkin, the show followed the working lives of serious, Ivy League-educated White House staffers under liberal President Bartlett. Politics is presented less as clashing values and interests and more about simply getting smart people in the room together. Social movements, when they do appear on screen, are often depicted as an uninformed irritant to the adults Trying To Get Things Done.

And when I say influential, I mean influential amongst – you’ve guessed it – the liberal political elite. Many members of the Obama Administration were fans, as were “the Blair, Brown and Cameron camps” in the UK, according to Mark Lawson writing in the Guardian.

All this broadly fits with research conducted by the political economist David Adler, who concluded in the New York Times in 2018 “that across Europe and North America, centrists [compared to those on the far-left and far-right] are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism.”

The deliberate exclusion of the general public from policymaking is particularly palpable when it comes to foreign affairs.

“The [UK] government’s preference is to see both [military] strategy and defence policy as areas to be settled between it and the armed forces, and so far as possible within the corridors of power,” top British military historian Hew Strachan and Ruth Harris concluded in a 2020 RAND report. This elite stitch-up is not new, of course. “British government has long been fearful of public opinion, and even public engagement, in matters to do with defence of the realm,” they explain. Why? Because the government believes “the public is reluctant to support the cost of defence” and “is unpersuaded of the utility of military force”. This hesitancy is a consequence, in part, of the large-scale opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something the elite became enormously concerned about when parliament voted against military action on Syria in 2013.

Mark Curtis, arguably the most incisive critic of UK foreign policy, agrees, arguing in his 2004 book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses that “the public is feared” by the government: “A perennial truth that emerges from the declassified files is the public’s ability to mount protests and demonstrations that divert the government from its course.”

The key problem, as Chomsky, Curtis and other wise people have noted, is that addressing the many political, social and economic crises we face today – in particular the escalating climate crisis – will require huge social movements to lead an unprecedented mobilisation of the general public to apply overwhelming pressure on our rulers and divert them from their dangerous course.

Rather than being reliable allies in this ongoing struggle, liberals’ fear of popular participation in the political sphere is a key barrier to the radical change we so desperately need.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

How opinion polls limit debate on UK foreign policy: interview with Lillah Fearnley

How opinion polls limit debate on UK foreign policy: interview with Lillah Fearnley
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
6 July 2023

In May, Rethinking Security, a network of UK-based organisations, academics and activists working for a just and peaceful world, published a major new report Thinking Inside The Box: How Opinion Polls Shape Security Debates And Policy In The UK by Lillah Fearnley.

An independent consultant specialising in research on conflict, peace, security and peacekeeping, Fearnley tells Ian Sinclair about her key findings, including her analysis of surveys done on UK intervention in Syria and her recommendations for future polling.

Ian Sinclair: Why is opinion polling important to security debates and policymaking in the UK?

Lillah Fearnley: Public opinion polls or surveys, particularly high profile ones that are picked up by or commissioned by the media, can generate debate around security issues and influence policymaking.  When politicians invoke public opinion to justify policy decisions, they often cite opinion poll results. But this relationship is complex in that governments seek both to influence and respond to public opinion and it may, for example, be used to legitimise decisions after the event rather than as a means to ‘listen’ and respond to the public.

Public opinion polling has the potential to influence real world security decisions by government, sometimes in a critical moment when government or parliament are in the process of debating them. For example, politicians may invoke public opinion, as expressed in polls, to justify or oppose UK military intervention. When the results of polls make a media splash, they may also influence the public imagination and debate around these issues.

This being the case, how a situation is characterised, including who or what needs securing, what is deemed a security threat, and what policy responses are therefore legitimate and ‘reasonable’ can be hugely significant. Those asking the questions, polling companies and their clients, have significant power to influence how the issues are presented and shaped. Once survey findings are published, we don’t necessarily stop to think about how questions were asked, what options were given (or withheld) and why, who was asked, or how the issues were framed; we just see the statistic.


IS: How does opinion polling shape the national debate when it comes to security issues?

LF: The focus and framing of questions on security shapes the responses given and can therefore circumscribe the picture provided by the survey. For example, the majority of surveys I reviewed for my research frame security in terms of threats to UK national interests, which are rarely defined in any detail, rather than to people or communities or the planet. This is done almost exclusively through closed questions in which respondents evaluate the severity of a list of predefined threats. The listed threats largely reflect priorities of policymakers. The evidence suggests, however, that when asked open-ended questions about the top security challenges, the responses of the public diverge significantly from these priorities.

Threats that disproportionally affect the security of minority and marginalised groups such as racism, far-right extremism, sexual or gender-based violence are mostly absent. Some surveys include minority or marginalised groups, for example refugees from conflict zones, among lists of possible threats. This begs the question: whose perceptions of security are prioritised? Whose voices are reflected?

It also raises questions about who identifies the list of potential security issues, and who decides what can or cannot be deemed a security threat? Do the security issues presented reflect the general public’s perceived sources of insecurity, or the existing concerns of those who commission the research and set the survey questions? It appears to be the latter.

The way that security threats or challenges are framed (who or what needs protecting from whom or what) is likely to influence what approaches or responses the public deems appropriate and legitimate for building or maintaining security. If security was defined differently – for instance as ‘a shared freedom from fear and want’ – a very different picture of public opinion may emerge.

Overall, there is a far greater focus on militarised responses to building and maintaining security across the surveys than non-military responses to conflict and crises. Peacebuilding or dialogue are rarely explored in high-profile public opinion surveys and when they are it is through hypothetical questions in surveys commissioned by peacebuilding NGOs.


IS: Can you talk about a real world example of when polling restricted the debate in the UK on foreign intervention?

LF: Of the 16 surveys on UK intervention in Syria between 2012-2018 that I reviewed, only six tested public support for non-military approaches to the situation such as diplomatic pressure through economic sanctions, alongside military intervention or support options, although five included the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians. None of these surveys presented dialogue or mediation as a possible means of resolving Syria’s conflict. The omission of non-military intervention options means that awareness of, let alone support for, alternative non-military responses is excluded from the debate at a critical moment when government or parliament are making decisions.

While the polls on UK intervention in Syria during this period did not show a high level of public support for military intervention, the absence of non-military options may have implicitly limited the debate through reinforcing a belief that the use of military force is the only effective response. Polls that exclude non-military options create a false dichotomy between intervening militarily and doing nothing, which is likely to steer public opinion towards the former.


IS: You conclude the majority of opinion polls on security issues “are designed and frame their questions in terms of the prevailing discourse.” Why do you think those who commission polls – often newspapers – and the polling companies themselves end up doing this?

LF: I think this is in part because any public opinion research, whether initiated by the corporate media, commercial polling companies or indeed organisations that are not part of the establishment, such as NGOs, is likely to reflect the underlying assumptions and interests of those selecting and framing the questions. It is likely to also be down to whom they talk to, or more importantly listen to, in setting the questions.

I asked YouGov about this process in relation to survey questions on UK intervention in Syria in 2013. They explained that the options presented in closed questions are usually driven by the options that are being reasonably discussed at the time. They said that the client, for example a newspaper, may make suggestions for question wording and answer options, but the final wording is signed off by YouGov researchers and any options that are seen as irrelevant or leading are removed. This raises the question of who are those discussing what sort of UK intervention is a reasonable and legitimate response? Is it the general public or is it ‘security elites’, those considered to be experts on the issues? I suspect, though I can’t say for sure, that it is the latter. This gives an insight into the way in which public opinion polling may reproduce elite or dominant narratives on security through reflecting back the prevailing discourse.


IS: How do you think opinion polling should change?

LF: When designing survey methodology and questions, pollsters and others involved should ensure that they are not simply seeking public endorsement of elite or government-identified definitions of, and priorities for security, but rather that they are seeking out the full range of perspectives and priorities, including through exploring the public’s own understanding of ‘security’ and threats to it so that responses are not necessarily limited to state-based definitions.

For public opinion surveys to provide a richer, more diverse and more comprehensive picture of UK security perceptions, it needs to be designed in a way that facilitates the inclusion of the perspectives of a broader range of security stakeholders. This depends not just on representative sampling but also on proactively eliciting the views of minority and marginalised groups. It also means ensuring that the wording of questions does not alienate respondents, and that response options presented in closed questions reflect the breadth of potential security concerns of a diverse UK public.

I think it’s crucial that public opinion polling on security recognises the heterogeneity of public experiences of security and insecurity and builds on good practice methodologies for capturing this, some of which I’ve highlighted in my report. Rethinking Security is applying the lessons from the study in the surveying methodologies used in its own Alternative Security Review.

To read Thinking Inside The Box: How Opinion Polls Shape Security Debates And Policy In The UK, and find out more about the Alternative Security Review, visit https://rethinkingsecurity.org.uk.

Why British foreign policy think tanks defend the status quo

Why British foreign policy think tanks defend the status quo
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
29 March 2023

Though it hasn’t received any coverage in the mainstream media, new academic research raises serious questions about British foreign policy think tanks and their influence on policymaking and public debate.

Published in the peer-reviewed International Relations journal, the article from Dr Kjølv Egeland and Professor Benoît Pelopidas, both based at Sciences Po in Paris, starts from the premise that foreign policy think tanks are generally supportive of the current status quo when it comes to nuclear policy. They note, for example, that “many if not most of the world’s top foreign policy think tanks have in recent years treated reformist diplomatic initiatives such as the promotion of nuclear no-first-use postures and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons with either indifference or hostility”.

With this in mind, they investigate if and how “funding patterns impact knowledge production in the field of foreign policy analysis and nuclear policy analysis specifically.” The article is based on interviews with think tank employees and grant managers, and a survey of the funding sources of 45 of the world’s leading think tanks, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in Britain.

“From fine old buildings in Whitehall, Temple, St James’s Square and the Strand” these three organisations “shape much of the foreign and defence policy analysis produced in Britain,” journalist Tom Stevenson recently observed in the London Review of Books.

All three are close to the British government and military, and have revolving door relationships with academic research centres such as LSE IDEAS, the Gulf-funded LSE Middle East Centre and the War Studies department at King’s College London. According to Stevenson, “all have close connections with the intelligence services – after John Sawers retired as head of MI6 in 2014, he took up posts at King’s and RUSI – and an equally close relationship with the national security establishment of the United States.” And all have received significant funding from arms corporations, including companies involved in the nuclear weapons industry. Kjølv and Pelopidas note in 2018 IISS received between $732,000 and $1,079,000 from Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratories, MBDA Missile Systems, Northorp Grumman, Raytheon and Textron. Citing leaked documents, in 2016 Bahrain Watch uncovered that for the previous five years around a third of IISS’s total income came from the repressive government of Bahrain. The latest donor information on the websites of Chatham House and RUSI reveal they receive substantial funding from the Britain’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the US State Department and European Commission. Chatham House also receives funding from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell.

What do funders want? Kjølv and Pelopidas set out four motives: to gain “access to informal networks and arenas where policy is formed and regulations discussed”; to burnish their reputations by associating with prestigious research institutions; to push particular narratives or policy ideas; and finally some donors are interested in “controlling the discourse by fostering dependence and, by extension, self-censorship.”

Summarising their interview with a grant manager for a defence contractor, they note “in addition to the branding motive, grants were provided in the hope that the recipients would think twice about saying or writing anything that would contradict the interests of the contractor.”

Similarly, a former grant manager for the ministry of defence of a nuclear-armed government commented “If you don’t want to have a debate” funding potential critics “is a good option”.

Unsurprisingly, Kjølv and Pelopidas conclude “’stakeholding funding’ has real effects on intellectual freedom”.

Direct censorship is rare, they argue, though not unheard of. In contrast, self-censorship is more common.

“Knowing that existing and potential donors will have strong interests in certain topics or findings, analysts often adjust their language or conclusions or, more commonly, avoid certain topics altogether,” they explain.

“You would of course never propose [to analyse or comment on] something that was antithetical to the funder’s interests or worldview,” one think tank employee told them. Another interviewee noted they had a significant degree of intellectual freedom at the think tank they worked at, but within “certain boundaries,” especially when it came to sensitive areas such as nuclear deterrence and disarmament.

More broadly, the authors conclude that the “most significant way in which funders shape foreign policy analysis is by helping to determine which milieus prosper and which topics and agendas are given attention.” In short, who gets funded and who gets hired to write or speak in the first place. Donors are very unlikely, of course, to provide financial support to organisations and individuals whose views and politics fundamentally challenge their own interests.

Similar ideological constraints are built into the operation of the corporate and state-affiliated media.

For example, last year Times journalist Tim Shipman tweeted “anyone in papers would tell you that editors, still less proprietors almost never tell anyone what to write. It’s a fantasy of the conspiracy minded… I decide what I write.” Of course, this self-serving boast omits to mention the obvious fact that Shipman was hired by an editor at the paper, who themselves were hired by a senior editor, perhaps by the top editor. And the top editor was hired by the owner of the paper. As fellow newshound Adam Bienkov blogged about Shipman’s claim: “He is likely telling the truth. Yet the reason that no such instructions need to be issued is because he is doing exactly what is expected of him.”

The three British think tanks have a symbiotic bond with the media – their staff are regularly cited in news reports, publish articles in the press and appear as objective experts on television news programmes.

“It galls me every time I see Chatham House, RUSI, IISS quoted by journalists as though they are independent think tanks,” British historian – and former Chatham House researcher – Mark Curtis recently told the Warrior Nation podcast. “Actually, they are part of the establishment… they have very particular views on the world, and they are biased organisations that work for establishment interests.”

Writing for Open Democracy in 2015, the academic David Wearing surveyed eleven articles RUSI researchers had recently written for the BBC news website. Noting how many of the articles were written from the British state’s point of view, Wearing highlighted how inconvenient facts, like Britain’s role in the ongoing destruction of Yemen, were omitted or downplayed. Analysing one article about Britain’s bombing of Iraq in 2014 by RUSI’s Shashank Joshi, Wearing notes “so close is the author’s identification with the UK armed forces that three times – twice as ‘we’ and once as ‘our’ – Joshi refers to them in the first person”.

Returning to Egeland and Pelopidas’s research, for an academic journal article their conclusion is surprisingly strong: “responsible scholars, journalists, and other members of the public should stop treating think tanks and university programmes that accept large donations from vested interests as research entities and instead think of them as communications or public relations operations.”

The climate movement has had some success in raising awareness of how the opaque corporate funding of right-wing think tanks like the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Institute of Economic Affairs discredits them as independent commentators.

So while the research published by IISS, Chatham House and RUSI can sometimes be useful if read with a critical eye, it is imperative those working for a more humane British foreign policy also work to make sure these think tanks are treated as the pro-establishment organisations they are.

No Such Thing As A Free Donation? Research Funding And Conflicts Of Interest In Nuclear Weapons Policy Analysis is publicly available online. Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Qatar: what the media isn’t reporting

Qatar: what the media isn’t reporting
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
21 November 2022

‘Qatar Struggles To Shift Focus Away From Workers’ Rights’.

The headline in the Financial Times earlier this month confirms PR-savvy Qatar, hyper aware of the soft power boost hosting the 2022 football World Cup could be expected to create, is having trouble controlling the narrative.

The UK media, and members of the British political elite including Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, have repeatedly drawn attention to the plight of migrant labourers who have built the stadiums in the wealthy Gulf emirate – and also the terrible situation for LGBTQI+ people living there. “Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, attracting punishments of up to seven years in prison,” The Guardian recently reported.

Embarrassing – and important – though these two issues are for Qatar, it is worth taking the time to consider what the UK media, with a few honourable exceptions, isn’t talking about when it comes to the tiny energy-rich state.

For example, one rarely sees a serious exploration of Qatar’s political system which, like many of its neighbours, is an absolute monarchy, according to the CIA World Handbook. The Emir is the Head of State, and he chooses the prime minister, deputy prime minister and council of ministers. 30 of the 45 members of the Advisory Council, or Majlis al-Shura, are elected by popular vote, though legislative drafting authority rests with the Council of Ministers and is only reviewed by the Advisory Council. And it is a deeply repressive monarchy, with Reporters Without Borders noting “Qatari journalists are left little leeway by the oppressive legislative arsenal and draconian system of censorship.” To give one example: in 2012 Qatari poet Rashid al-Ajami was jailed for 15 years – and let out after three years – for reciting a poem, in Cairo, that was “indirectly critical” of the Emir, according to The Guardian.

Second, Qatar’s key role in worsening the climate crisis. As the Guardian explained in May, “the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of ‘carbon bomb’ oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts”. The report cited research by German NGO Urgewald which found state-owned QatarEnergy tops the list of companies with the largest planned expansion of oil and gas in the next seven years, putting it ahead of Gazprom, Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil.

Third, Qatar’s underhand roles in escalating the wars in Libya and Syria. In 2011 – with what the New York Times called “the blessing” of the US – Doha supplied arms to the rebels fighting to overthrow Gaddafi. However, as the New York Times went on to report “American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants.” Similarly, Qatar has also been a key player in the Syrian war, with the Financial Times estimating Doha had provided £3 billion in funding to anti-Assad forces. Like in Libya, questions have been raised about the extent of Qatar’s relationship with jihadist elements in the Syrian opposition. “You have to ask who is arming, who is financing ISIS troops. The keyword there is Qatar,” German Development Minister Gerd Mueller said in 2014. The same year US Treasury Department Under Secretary David Cohen singled out Qatar as an especially “permissive jurisdiction” for terrorist financing, including of extremist groups operating in Syria.

Which leads me to the final fact largely ignored by the British media – the UK’s close relationship with Qatar and the other autocracies in the Gulf.

In May then Prime Minister Boris Johnson described Qatar as “a valued partner for the UK”. This enduring friendship meant £384 million worth of UK military export licences to Qatar were granted between 2015 and 2018, with UK fighter jets stationed at Al Udeid Air Base in the Gulf emirate. In 2017 Britain sold Qatar 24 Eurofighter Typhoon jets in a £6bn deal, which included the creation of a new (temporary) UK-based Typhoon joint UK-Qatari squadron, initially based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

As Dr David Wearing notes in his book AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain, the UK, under both Labour and Tory governments, has played an important role “in the promotion and preservation of monarchical rule in the region”.

One reason these inconvenient facts are rarely mentioned, let alone seriously discussed, is the massive effort and resources Qatar has put into burnishing its image on the international stage, especially in the US and UK.

After the start of the blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in 2017, Doha “hired an army of lobbyists and public relations professionals” to target Washington, D.C., Ben Freeman explained in a 2020 Center for International Policy report. This “extraordinary influence operation” included 33 different firms serving as Qatar’s registered foreign agents in the US, with Qatari foreign agents contacting the offices of more than two-thirds of all members of Congress. In the UK “Qatar has spent more money on gifts and trips for British MPs in the past year than any other country,” the Observer reported last month.

Beyond direct lobbying, Qatar projects soft power through various media outlets, including the popular Aljazeera television news channel – and Aljazeera English for Western audiences.

Like its Gulf neighbours, Qatar has also spent considerable money funding prominent Western research institutes and universities. In 2013 it gave $14.8 million to US-based The Brookings Institution thinktank in 2013, while the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development donated £2.4 million to establish a Professorship in Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2007 the UK’s influential Royal United Services Institute ‘defence’ thinktank opened up a branch in Qatar to “conduct research and organise conferences, on specific security questions affecting Qatar, the Gulf and the broader Middle East… as well as strengthening the traditional close links between the United Kingdom and the State of Qatar.”

In addition, a number of Western universities, such as University College London, have campuses in Qatar, and some Western specialists on the Gulf states, including Professor Gerd Nonneman and Dr Marc Owen Jones, work at Qatar-based universities.

What all this means is that many of the researchers and academics who should be the first port of call for independent, critical analysis and expertise on Qatar and the wider Gulf region are often fatally compromised.

“Donors have usually been able to rely on a culture of self-censorship taking root in the recipient institutions,” academic Dr Christopher Davidson explained about Gulf funding in his 2012 book After The Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies. “It is almost inconceivable… to imagine an academic with no alternative source of income researching and writing a serious critique of a regime that has either paid for his or her salary, scholarship, or the building that houses his or her office”.

To confirm, it’s not a conspiracy, and generally not the result of overt direction. Rather it’s the logical outcome of funding sources, career preservation and conventional human behaviour (“it’s a lot easier to accept and conform than to attack power,” Noam Chomsky pithily noted in a recent interview). And access too – if your academic research relies on visiting one or more of the Gulf states, would you risk this by making public criticisms of the ruling elites in those nations?

It should be noted that Davidson, by publicly drawing attention to this hugely important issue, is a rare voice of honesty amongst Gulf scholars. That many academics working on Qatar and the wider Gulf are steered away from certain topics and conclusions is the great unmentionable in the relatively small Gulf-focussed research community. And journalists, our supposed heroic seekers of truth, are themselves unlikely to draw attention to these squalid compromises, keen to maintain good relations with researchers for quotes and background information, and to visit the Gulf for their own work.

Of course, the British government is more than happy for its close, supportive relationship with Qatar to remain out of sight. As a UK “senior official” was quoted as saying in a 1997 book published by the establishment thinktank Chatham House: “Much of our foreign policy is conducted on the sly for fear that it would raise hackles at home if people knew what we were pushing for.”

In contrast, the job of activists and concerned citizens is to bring the UK’s reprehensible dealings with Gulf elites to the public’s attention.

And the World Cup provides a golden opportunity to push the debate beyond migrant and LGBTQI+ rights, and raise awareness about the UK’s decades-long support for the authoritarian monarchy in Doha at the expense of the democratic aspirations of the general population in Qatar and the rest of the Gulf.

Keeping the spotlight on the West’s ongoing devastation of Afghanistan and Syria

Keeping the spotlight on the West’s ongoing devastation of Afghanistan and Syria
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
21-22 January 2023

Amnesty International’s 1991 Annual Report should be required reading for all media studies and journalism students.

“The Iraqi Government headed by President Saddam Hussein had been committing gross and widespread human rights abuses” in the 1980s, including using chemical weapons, the human rights organisation explained.

The report goes onto note Amnesty International publicised gruesome evidence of the atrocities and appealed directly to the United Nations Security Council in 1988 to take urgent action. “However, the world’s governments and media took only token interest, and none of the UN bodies took action.”

Then something happened. “The response to Amnesty International’s information on Iraq changed dramatically on 2 August 1990, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait.”

“Suddenly, the telephones at the organization’s International Secretariat in London were busy with inquiries about Iraq’s human rights record. Pictures of the victims of chemical weapons appeared widely on television. Exiled Kurds, who had battled for so long to have their stories heard, were invited to speak to the media. Amnesty International’s own reporting of the abuses perpetrated in Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion made front pages across the world”.

What Amnesty International doesn’t mention is the shameful support given to Hussein in the 1980s by the US and UK, meaning it was in their interest not to draw attention to the Iraqi leader’s atrocities. However, in August 1990 Iraq’s human rights record suddenly became useful to the UK and US governments.

This is a textbook example of the propaganda role played by the UK media – how their laser-like focus on human rights abuses is switched on (and off) depending on the UK government’s interests, and not because of anything to do with the human rights abuses themselves.

This sudden shift also occurs after Western military intervention ends. Take, for example, what happened following the saturation news coverage of the Gulf War when deadly US-UK-led UN sanctions were levelled on Iraq in the 1990s.

“During the worst years of the sanctions, the Western media largely ignored the horrifying impact in terms of hunger, disease and physical and mental stunting of Iraqi children – and hundreds of thousands of child deaths,” Milan Rai, the founder of Voices in the Wilderness UK, which campaigned against the sanctions, tells me. “On our sanctions-breaking visits to Iraq as part of the Voices in the Wilderness campaign, we would often be accompanied to children’s wards by journalists from other parts of the world, such as TV Globo from Brazil, but rarely by media from our own countries, the US and the UK.”

Similarly, once Muammar Gaddafi had been lynched in October 2011, and Libya supposedly liberated, the UK media’s attention quickly shifted away from the collapse of the North African country, despite – or because of? – the US-UK-NATO playing a key role in destroying Libya as a viable state.

Today, Afghanistan and Syria have the unfortunate distinction of being nations the Western media, after a period of intense coverage, has largely forgotten about, even though the US, supported by its faithful lapdog the UK, continues to ravage these nations.

In Afghanistan “nearly 19 million people are estimated to remain acutely food insecure in the second half of 2022, with nearly 6 million people still considered to be on the brink of famine,” the Disasters Emergency Committee warned in November.

In August 2022 United Nations special representative Dr Ramiz Alakbarov said “the situation can be best described as a pure catastrophe… you’ve seen people selling organs, you’ve seen people selling children.” (Hat tip: these two quotes were published in Peace News newspaper).

The same month, Vicki Aken, the Afghanistan country director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), explained the causes of the humanitarian emergency: “At the root of this crisis is the country’s economic collapse. Decisions taken last year to isolate the Taliban – including the freezing of foreign reserves, the grounding of the banking system, and the halting of development assistance which financed most government services – have had a devastating impact.”

To be clear, it the US, UK and other Western countries who have undertaken these actions, following the Taliban taking back control of Afghanistan in August 2021. After speaking to several international experts, in December 2021 the Guardian reported “large parts of Afghanistan’s health system are on the brink of collapse because of western sanctions against the Taliban”. Even David Miliband, the warmongering ex-UK Foreign Secretary and now CEO of the IRC, understands the West’s culpability. “We are not punishing the Taliban. It is ordinary Afghans that are paying the price of peace,” he told the Guardian in February 2022. “It is not just a catastrophe of choice, but a catastrophe of reputation. This is a starvation policy.”

Shockingly, in February 2022 US President Joe Biden signed an executive order releasing some of the $7bn in frozen Afghan reserves held in the US to be given to American victims of terrorism, including relatives of 9/11 victims.

In Syria successive waves of Western sanctions have broadened in number and scope over time, a 2022 UNICEF discussion paper explained. “Initially targeting individuals at the beginning of the conflict in 2011” the sanctions implemented under the 2019 US Caesar Act targeted “Syrian government’s financial resources, economic foundations and external actors dealing with the Syrian government.” In addition to these direct targets, the sanctions “create a ‘chilling effect’ that discourages technically legal transactions that business judge to be too risky,” researcher Sam Heller explained in a 2021 report for The Century Foundation US think-tank. This “raises the cost” of “even humanitarian transactions”, he noted.

The same year the World Food Programme estimated 12.4 million Syrians – nearly 60 percent of the population – were food insecure.

After interviewing more than 24 humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and aid workers, in his report Heller noted “The deterioration of Syrian food security is the product of many factors. It is, foremost, the result of an economic crisis that has overtaken Syria since 2019, and the dramatic depreciation of the national currency. Many Syrians can simply no longer afford to feed their families… key imports have also been disrupted, including wheat needed for bread; and fuel, whose scarcity has affected food supply and prices.”

“All this has been exacerbated by Western sanctions on Syria,” he stated.

Similarly, a 2021 report written by Zaki Mehchy and Dr Rim Turkmani for the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics noted sanctions “have directly contributed to… a massive deterioration in the formal economy associated with a weakening of legitimate business and civil society, and increased suffering of ordinary people.”  (Incidentally, the report also argues sanctions have contributed to “greater reliance of the Syrian regime on Russia and Iran, and less political leverage for Western countries” and “the establishment and strengthening of a network of warlords and ‘cronies’ with a vested interest in regime survival and a criminalised economy”).

The role of western sanctions in creating extreme hardship for ordinary Syrians has been understood for years. In 2016 The Intercept obtained an internal email written by “a key UN official” that cited the sanctions as a “principal factor” in the erosion of the country’s health care system. And a 2017 Reuters report was titled Syria Sanctions Indirectly Hit Children’s Cancer Treatment.

More recently, after a fact-finding mission to Syria in November, Alena Douhan, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, concluded “Primary unilateral sanctions, secondary sanctions, threats of sanctions, de-risking policies and over-compliance with sanctions have been exacerbating Syria’s humanitarian crisis, which is already affected by 12 years of conflict and terrorist activity, destruction of infrastructure, COVID-19, a growing economic crisis in the region, and millions of IDPs and refugees.”

She went on to note “the imposed sanctions have shattered the State’s capability to respond to the needs of the population, particularly the most vulnerable, and 90% of the people now live below the poverty line.”

I’m not aware of any polling done on the US and UK public’s awareness of the West’s role in intensifying these two humanitarian crises but given the paucity of media coverage it seems likely it’s very low.

So UK anti-war and peace activists have an important job to do: push past the media’s indifference and concentrate the public’s gaze on the continuing deadly impacts of Western foreign policy in Afghanistan and Syria.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Yemen’s Forgotten Children

Yemen’s Forgotten Children
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
31 December 2022

With Christmas and New Year very much centred around children, how many of us have given a thought over the holiday season to the children of Yemen?

I recently gained an insight into the horrific conditions in the troubled Middle East nation when I watched Hunger Ward. Released in 2020, the MTV documentary is filmed inside two therapeutic feeding centres in Yemen, following two women healthcare workers treating starving children in the midst of the war.

Just 40 minutes long, it’s a harrowing, heart-breaking watch: we see resuscitation being carried out on a baby, and the family wailing in grief after the child dies.

“These children are dying as a result of malnutrition,” Mekkia Mahdi, a nurse who manages the largest network of rural malnutrition clinics in North Yemen, explains. She scrolls through photos of children on her phone: “Amal died, Ibrahim died, Fatima died.”

While Yemen has long been impoverished, the military intervention by the Saudi Arabian-led coalition in March 2015 against the Houthi rebels, who had recently ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, massively intensified the death and destruction. The fighting continues, with Saudi Arabia undertaking a huge bombing campaign, along with an air, sea and land blockade. “Conflict remains the primary underlying driver of hunger in Yemen,” 30 NGOs operating in Yemen, including the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam and the Norwegian Refugee Council, noted in September.

In October the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned the situation in Yemen remained the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. According to a November briefing from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), 17 million Yemenis, over half of the population, are estimated to be food insecure, with 3.5 million acutely malnourished.

“Malnutrition rates among women and children in Yemen remain among the highest in the world,” the WFP reports. “1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and 2.2 million children under 5 requiring treatment for acute malnutrition.”

Sadly, there is no shortage of horrifying statistics highlighting the plight of Yemen’s children. An estimated 77 per cent of the 4.3 million people displaced in Yemen are women and children, according to ReliefWeb, the information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In 2018 Save the Children reported that “an estimated 85,000 children under five may have died from extreme hunger” since April 2015.

By the end of 2021 the United Nations Development Programme estimated the number of direct and indirect deaths due to the war was 377,000. “Of the total deaths, 259,000 – nearly 70 per cent of total conflict-attributable deaths – are children younger than five years old,” the report noted.

Shamefully, the UK (and US) has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in fuelling the conflict, and therefore bears significant responsibility for the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.

Asked by Majella magazine in 2018 “What do you think the UK can do more in the realm of helping the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen?” Alistair Burt MP, then UK Minister of State for the Middle East, replied “At the moment it’s difficult to see what more we can do.”

For once, a Tory politician was telling the truth. In September the Campaign Against Arms Trade estimated that since March 2015 the UK government has licensed at least £23 billion of arms to the Saudi-led coalition. However, as Burt intimates, UK support goes far beyond just selling weapons. “Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” Arron Merat noted in the Guardian in 2019. Appearing in the Channel 4 documentary Britain’s Hidden War the same year, a former Saudi Air Force officer noted Saudi Arabia “can’t keep the [British-made] Typhoon [aircraft] in the air without the British. The pilots they can’t fly it without maintenance and without the logistics.”

We also know British military personnel are based in the command and control centre for Saudi airstrikes, and have access to target lists. And according to a 2019 Daily Mail report British Special Boat Service soldiers are on the ground in Yemen, operating as Forward Air Controllers, requesting air support from the Royal Saud Air Force. On the world stage, the UK provides diplomatic cover for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing slaughter. “The UK is the penholder at the UN over Yemen [the lead country on the security council, with the power to draft resolutions and statements], and some former Conservative cabinet ministers, notably Andrew Mitchell, say Britain has been protecting Saudi Arabia from criticism there,” the Guardian reported in 2018.

All of this extensive support is the reason Dr David Wearing, Lecturer in Lecturer in International Relation at the University of Sussex and author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain, argued in 2018 “The reality is that Washington and London could have stopped the Saudis’ war any time they liked.”

As well as footage from medical centres, Hunger Ward also highlights an aerial bombing of a funeral, showing distressing camera phone footage taken by a survivor in the immediate aftermath of the attack. It was a ‘double tap’ airstrike, the second strike commonly understood to target those coming to the aid of the initial victims.

“The world needs to know the depth of the Yemeni people’s suffering,” the man pleads.

The problem is polling conducted by YouGov in 2017 found just 49 per cent of Britons were aware of the war in Yemen – something that should mortify everybody who works in the mainstream media.

Frustratingly, the rare times the war is reported on, the UK role is often omitted. For example, a 2022 episode of the BBC World Service Inquiry programme, titled What Will End The War In Yemen?  and presented by journalist Tanya Beckett, made no mention of the massive UK (and US) involvement. One can only imagine the depth of ideological training and education necessary for a BBC journalist to ignore the UK’s enabling role.

Of course, some wars –and victims – are more newsworthy than others. Indeed, an analysis of the scale and quality of media coverage given to the Russian attack on Ukraine compared to the Saudi-led attack on Yemen would make an illuminating PhD research project. In terms of solidarity from Britons, Ukraine has been very lucky, with supportive street demonstrations, people flying Ukrainian flags from their homes and on their Twitter profiles, record-breaking donations to humanitarian organisations working to help Ukrainians, and warmly welcoming Ukrainian refugees to the UK.

Far from being apathetic, this shows the British public’s humanity and concern can be lifted to unexpected heights by extensive media coverage of injustice and suffering. With last year’s temporary ceasefire in Yemen having now lapsed, what we now need to do is expand our sympathy and outrage to include those in Yemen, especially Yemeni children, whose lives are being destroyed by the UK’s abhorrent foreign policy.

Hunger Ward can be watched for free on Pluto TV: https://pluto.tv/en/search. Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Book review. The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Book review. The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2022-January 2023

In 2019 the Washington Post published a treasure trove of documents which proved ‘US officials had repeatedly lied to the public about what was happening in Afghanistan, just as they had in Vietnam.’ This industrial-scale deception was spread across the three presidencies of Bush, Obama and Trump.

The papers included notes from over 1,000 interviews with people who played a direct role in the war – taken from huge Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reports unearthed by Freedom of Information lawsuits, Army oral history interviews, Defense Department memos and testimony from senior members of the Bush Administration.

Now summarised in book form, the vast majority of people quoted are from the US military and government, which means the criticisms are highly circumscribed. The gap between rosy official statements and the reality on the ground in Afghanistan is repeatedly highlighted, as is the level of cultural ignorance and bureaucratic inefficiency exhibited by Western forces. However, the idea the military occupation itself was the fundamental driver of the insurgency is never seriously considered.

A veteran Washington Post journalist, Craig Whitlock himself occasionally reveals his own ideological blinkers. Describing Bush’s publicly stated aim of transforming Afghanistan as ‘noble and high-minded’, he notes the US ‘inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government’ and ‘tolerated’ warlords. This massively downplays US culpability – only a few pages earlier he explains the CIA ‘dangling bags of cash as a lure… recruitedwar criminals, drug traffickers, smugglers’, including Abdul Rashid Dotsum, a notoriously brutal warlord, who received $70,000 a month from the CIA, according to a 2014 Washington Post report.

The most eye-opening chapters are those on US-assisted corruption and the strained relations between the US and the increasingly independent Hamid Karzai, leader of Afghanistan from 2002 to 2014. For example, before the 2009 Afghan presidential election, Obama’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke encouraged other candidates to stand to reduce the chances of Karzai winning. Later Karzai impeded the signing of a US-Afghan security pact which would authorise the US to keep troops in the country after 2014, insisting US soldiers be banned from raiding Afghan homes. In response the US threatened to withdraw all of their forces. Karzai prevailed in this dispute, though the US signed the agreement with Karzai’s successor in 2014.

With in-depth references and copious quotes from government documents there is lots of interesting information here. However, there is a frustrating lack of joined-up thinking. If the US repeatedly tried to force Karzai’s hand what does it say about the US’s so-called democracy promotion?

And other than a couple of passing mentions, Whitlock never properly explores why the US government repeatedly lied – because they feared US (and European) publics would turn against the war. It is this insight – that domestic public opinion is always a crucial battleground in Western wars – that is arguably the most important message peace and anti-war activists can take from the book.