A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

How 9/11 showed a West unsure of who it wanted to kill

Posted: 01 Sep 2011

This week’s New Statesman editorial:

Above all, the doctrine of liberal intervention, even on so-called humanitarian grounds, was gravely undermined by the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Blair’s dream of a new, interdependent world order turned out to be no more than the delusion of a western triumphalist who believed that history was moving in his direction and that authoritarian states and premodern theocracies could be bombed into embracing democracy, free markets and the rule of law.

As Rory Stewart, the Conservative MP and former deputy governor of the Iraqi province of Maysan, says on page 32: “9/11 turned intervention into war. Western foreign policy since has been driven by fear, pride and guilt. The US and its allies have exaggerated the threat posed by ‘failed states’. We have overestimated our power to transform those states . . . Emotions, rather than any rational analysis, trapped us in these deserts.”

It could have been so different. The appalling September 2001 attacks did fleetingly create the conditions in which a new world order could have emerged, one founded on the principles of international law, with nations operating not unilaterally but more effectively and transparently through supranational organisations such as the European Union, the African Union and the Arab League. Instead, we had unilateral declarations of war. We had wars fought without any sense of what their ending might be.

The US and the UK no longer speak of victory in Afghanistan, but only of retreat and of striking deals with the hated Taliban, with whom they could have once negotiated from a position of strength rather than weakness. A decade after the attacks of 9/11, western leaders no longer proclaim their desire to reorder the world.

New website emerges and call for cash

Posted: 01 Sep 2011

Regular readers will see that today my new website was launched, designed and structured by Matthew Kerr. Cleaner, easier to navigate and sharper in style, it’s been two years since the last overhaul. It was time.

Take a look around and tell your friends.

Hopefully everything works as it should. If not, please be patient while any outstanding bugs are fixed.

Finally, and I should be saying this more often, any financial assistance you can provide will be much appreciated. The donation button is at the bottom of the website. If you like my work and analysis. If you want to support the importance of independent media. If you like the thought that in the next year I’ll be visiting some fascinating and unique places in Australia and overseas for original reporting.

And I should say this more regularly; thanks for all your seemingly never-ending support. Traffic has never been higher and my work is being shared, re-tweeted and re-blogged in an increasing number of places in Australia and globally.

I can’t do it without you all.

Anybody care that countless billions wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Posted: 01 Sep 2011

American multinational KBR has its tentacles everywhere, including in Australia.

The US-based Project on Government Oversight laments the over-reliance on suspect corporations with little or no accountability.

This is the definition of disaster capitalism:

At least one out of every six dollars spent by U.S. taxpayers on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade–more than $30 billion–has been wasted.

That, and the fact that the government over-relies on contractors for contingency operations, are the key findings in thefinal report issued today by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan (CWC). The eight-member, bipartisan, congressionally chartered commission filed the 240-page report with the House and Senate this morning.

Taxpayers have spent a total of $206 billion on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than $40 billion of this was awarded to KBR. KBR and 21 other companies accounted for more than half of the total. An additional $38.5 billion went to “miscellaneous foreign contractors,” demonstrating once again the difficulty of compiling reliable, accurate contract spending data in those countries. The CWC estimates that waste and fraud have amounted to at least $31 billion and possibly as much as $60 billion (about $12 million every day for the past 10 years) and warns that we may be at risk of losing an equal amount of money if the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are unable or unwilling to sustain U.S.-funded projects after we leave.

Thank you Washington for watching Australian public and democratic protests

Posted: 31 Aug 2011

The infiltration of American (non) intelligence in Australia is almost comical; it certainly hasn’t brought any more love to the fading super-power. FireDogLake reports:

Pro-Cuba, pro-Serbian, pro-Palestinian, pro and anti-Kosovo Independence, Sri Lankan, antiwar and socialist demonstrations were closely monitored by the US Embassy in Canberra, Australia in 2008 and 2009, a secret cable posted by WikiLeaks reveals. The cable also reveals the Embassy kept tabs on Greek, Malaysian, Lebanese, Serbian, Indonesian, Somalian and Sudanese communities in Sydney and Melbourne.

The secret cable is a “security environment profile questionnaire” (SEPQ) sent to the CIA, FBI, US Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department in Washington on March 2, 2009. The US diplomat, who answered the questions, describes both Sydney and Melbourne as cities with communities capable of “mounting very large scale anti-US demonstrations” if “sufficient motivations arise.” During the Israel-Lebanon conflict, 10,0000-15,000 people were brought together for a demonstration.

An itemized list of demonstrations at the US embassy or consulates is included in the cable, suggesting a US official attended each of these demonstrations and attempted to get a head count or regularly contacted police for estimates of how many protesters were present at each demonstration.

…

All demonstrations are described under the section heading, “Political Violence.” Yet, in only one case did a protest turn violent. In February 2008, at the US Consulate Melbourne, anti-Kosovo independence protesters allegedly threw objects and launched flares at the front window of the building. Protesters marching to the Consulate burned a Victoria State Police vehicle.

The diplomat even concludes the demonstrations are “generally peaceful.” Australian protests are found to be “generally peaceful” as well (though the diplomat notes Australian law enforcement thinks “issue motivated groups with anti-war, anti-globalization or environmental protection agendas have become more organized and more prone to engage in demonstration tactics that have led to some violence since late 2006.”)

So, why does the State Department security questionnaire appear to function on the premise that demonstrations are most likely to lead to political violence? Why is there such contempt for protest underneath the data and assumptions presented in this secret cable?

Arab revolutions ain’t all about Wikileaks or censorship but damn fine bravery

Posted: 31 Aug 2011

Despite what Wikileaks may claim – the release of US embassy cables undeniably revealed the depravity of the relationship between Washington and various dictators but they hardly sparked the Arab Spring – social media played a part in the uprisings and subsequent changes. As I argue in the recently released and updated edition of my book The Blogging Revolution, blogging, Twitter and Facebook were important to galvanise support for democratic movements but they didn’t bring down any regimes on their own.

Take one (via Global Voices):

After seeing the huge impact of social media on the Egyptian revolution, Egyptian blogger and Twitter user, Mahmoud Salem (@SandMonkey) decided to collaborate with a local non-profit organisation to help them raise funds using the power of Twitter to offer basic services in an impoverished neighborhood of Cairo.

Ezbet Khairalla is one of the largest unplanned communities in Egypt, with a population close to 650,000 inhabitants. It is a sprawling area of about 12 square kilometres on a rocky plateau that lies in the southern part of Cairo. Although Ezbet Khairalla is located within the boundaries of Cairo, most basic services are missing; not only sewage and garbage collection, but also inadequate education, poor health and social services. Hence the densely populated area is considered fertile soil for crime and social unrest.

To help improve the quality of life in Ezbet Khairalla, Khair Wa Baraka (Peace and Plenty), an organisation founded in 2004, started working on educational, health and environmental programs, especially after their research showed that the most important issue in the community was dealing with both solid and liquid waster (sewage). They also provide medical caravans and pilot educational centres.

With the support of people on Twitter, Peace and Plenty and raised EGP 2 million Egyptian pounds (over $330,000 US dollars as well as awareness for the community. Salem called his initiative “tweetback” (@tweetbackevent), and it relied on the social capital of 20 of power-Twitter users who collectively have around a quarter of a million followers. They each raised money from donors in exchange for giving contributing companies PR among their followers. They also created a buzz about the initiative and helped explain to people how they can help.

Peace and Plenty held a fundraising event on July 26, 2011 at the Marriott hotel in Cairo, where they announced that EGP 1,349,000 ($226,600) had already been raised.

Take two (via Lebanon’s Daily Star):

Finally, social media, the impact of which has been so widely publicized, is unlikely to be pivotal in the elections. World Bank figures show one-fifth of Egyptians use the Internet overall, let alone access sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Despite claims to the contrary, Jan. 25 itself was not a ”social media revolution”; only 8 percent of Egyptians say they used Facebook or Twitter to get their news about the protests, according to Gallup’s data. Social media was not then, nor is it now, the core information medium for the average Egyptian. There are no shortcuts in reaching out to that “man on the street,” and all parties must be perceived as trying to do just that.

Take three (via the New York Times):

The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.

Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled“Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt.

His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?

His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.

To put it another way, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organizing and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, I don’t have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?

It is a conclusion that counters the widely held belief that the social media helped spur the protests. Mr. Hassanpour used press accounts of outbreaks of unrest in Egypt to show that after Jan. 28, the protests became more spread around Cairo and the country. There were not necessarily more protesters, but the movement spread to more parts of the population.

He called this a “localization process.” “You can say it would be hard to measure that,” he added, talking about his research, “but you can test it, what happens when a disruption goes into effect.”

“The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” he writes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”

In an interview, he described “the strange darkness” that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. “We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t — on a mass scale that has interesting implications,” he said.

Murdoch press shamefully allows false charge of anti-Semitism to hover

Posted: 31 Aug 2011

This week Federal Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon was openly accused of anti-Semitism in a letter published in Murdoch’sAustralian for supporting BDS and Palestinian rights.

The following day this appeared in the paper:

The assertion by David Syme (Letters, 30/8) that well-documented human rights abuses by Israel against Palestinians can be dismissed as nonsense is disgusting and reprehensible.

The view that just because the victims are Palestinian that atrocities don’t count has no place in a civilised society. I’d suggest Mr Syme study the myriad reports released by B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN into this matter — could it be that they are all wrong, or is it one big anti-Semitic conspiracy?

Moammar Mashni, Australians for Palestine, Melbourne, Vic

And then today this response:

With respect to Moammar Mashni (Letters 31/8), what I said (30/8) was that Lee Rhiannon is an anti-Semite and was using the Palestinian situation as an excuse or justification for her anti-Semitic agenda.

David J. Syme, Mollymook, NSW

The fact that a supposedly serious paper can consistently publish defamatory material accusing a senior politician of anti-Semitism both cheapens the meaning of the word and proves that Zionist extremists are petrified of any challenge to Israel.