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The Drunken Scotsman

By Steve Hynd

My homeland has always had a reputation as a boozing nation. In fact, alongside our likewise hard-drinking cousins the Irish, the joke is that without alcohol we would have conquered the world. And we had a good stab at it even so, as the engine room of the British Empoire and originators of many of the ideas that ended up in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as a light for the world.

But alcohol has always been Scotland's bane, it's escape from social and economic deprivation that caused more poverty and heartache in return. Never more so than in recent years when it has fuelled a kife-and-yobs subculture which has seen violence soar to ignominious world-record levels (although murder rates are still lower than America's proving that guns don't kill people but they certainly help a lot). Moreover, when teens rebel against their elders they rarely err on the side of abstinence, and so Scotland has a problem with hard drugs which is a direct consequence of its drinking culture too.

So, a new study has been published which claims to show that, after taking into account road deaths and cancers caused by hard boozing, Scotland's drinking problem accounts for better than one in twenty of all deaths. That's one death every three hours and far higher, almost double, what earlier estimates had said. There are calls for the political parties to put aside their usual partisan sniping and take concrete action - including price fixing.

Dr Peter Terry, chairman of the British Medical Association Scotland, urged political parties to unite behind the SNP government's plans for minimum pricing to combat alcohol abuse.

Speaking at the BMA's annual conference, he said: "We must first stop the year-on-year increase in alcohol-related illness.

"The minority SNP government has proposed some quite radical legislative suggestions to tackle this problem, including a minimum unit price. In Scotland this suggestion will require the support of MSPs from the other political parties.

"I implore them to put party differences aside and provide that support. They, and the Scottish people they represent, must address the exponentially growing problem of alcohol-related disease in all its forms and the only proven way to do that is to include legislation on the price of alcohol as part of that strategy."

Labour spokesperson Cathy Jamieson endorsed Dr Terry's call for political unity.

She said: "We need a national consensus to tackle Scotland's hard-drinking culture involving all of our political parties, health organisations, the police and the industry itself. Labour has suggested a ban on billboards advertising alcohol near schools and a mandatory code of practice for retailers, but we will look seriously at any credible proposals from any source that will reduce the level of problem drinking in Scotland."

Tory health spokesperson Mary Scanlon warned the government should not rely on pricing as a "single tool solution".

The aim with such a price fixing policy would be to set the unit price high enough to deter, but not so high as to create a black market demand. Increasing the price would most effect young drinkers, who are most likely to binge-drink and suffer a higher than average number of alcohol-related deaths. But the Tories are also right that existing legislation, like that against licensed stores selling to under-age drinkers, is more often observed by breaking it than not.

Scotland has always had a drink problem, but now it is being forced to admit the true severity of that problem. One death every three hours in a population of about 5.5 million. Yet Scotland isn't that much more of a boozy culture than, say, Texas where I now live - and Texas' drunk-driving limits and enforcement are a joke by Scottish standards for just one example. Scotlands rude awakening should be an alarm call for others too.

The Next Neocon Government

By Steve Hynd

British Conservative leader David Cameron is considered a dead certainty to become the next prime minister of the UK by just about everyone. Cameron's talked a lot about caring conservativism, just as Bush did - and according to journalist Neil Clark, like Bush his time in office will be playtime for the neocons.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.

The Society supports the 'maintenance of a strong military' with a 'global reach'; among its international patrons are the serial warmonger Richard 'Prince of Darkness' Perle, a former staffer of Henry Jackson who was considered one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, and Bill Kristol, the influential American journalist, formerly with the New York Times, who called for military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2006.

As for Osborne, Cameron's Shadow Chancellor and right-hand man; he praised the "excellent neoconservative case" for war against Iraq.

There are other strong neocon influences on Cameron. Policy Exchange, which has been described as the Tory leader's 'favourite think-tank', and which will have an open door to Number 10, was set up in 2002 by Michael Gove and fellow hawk Nicholas Boles, a member of the Notting Hill set who the Tories plan to parachute into the safe seat of Grantham and Stamford at the next election. Dean Godson, the group's research director and adviser on security issues, has been described as "one of the best connected neoconservatives in Britain".

All three would have prominent positions in Cameron's cabinet, alongside fellow hawks William Haig, Chris Grayling and Liam Fox. And as for David Cameron himself:

Although he said that Britain should learn from the 'failures' of neoconservatism in a speech in September 2006, and denied that he was a neocon himself, Cameron's public pronouncements on foreign affairs since then certainly give the Tory uber-hawks no grounds for believing that they have backed the wrong man.

Last summer, during the South Ossetia conflict, he called for Russia to be expelled from the G8, for Georgia's Nato membership to be "accelerated" and lambasted the British government for allowing Moscow's "aggression" to go unchecked.

He has consistently called for a tougher stance on Iran, warning that "every week, every month that goes by brings Iran closer to possessing a nuclear weapon." And, while staying largely silent on Israel's military assault on Gaza, he has declared his belief in Israel to be "indestructible" and pledged that he would be an "unswerving friend" to the country if he became Prime Minister.

Neoconservativism isn't dead, nor is it even a spent force. The trans-Atlantic ties between neocon groups are still strong and they look ready to become Wormtongues to yet another major Western leader of a nuclear power in the very near future. That won't lead anywhere good.

The Wrong Kind Of Clear

By Steve Hynd

The counter-insurgency paradigm for Af/Pak, as it was for Iraq, is "clear, hold and build". We've seen often enough that this paradigm has hit problems in Iraq, particularly with the "build" part - corruption and graft stopping construction or a total failure of the effort to build reconcilliation between feuding factions. But British troops have found, in Afghanistan, a new flaw - this time in the "clear" portion of the COIN mantra. The locals, getting wind of a major British operation and knowing full well that the "collateral damage" this would entail would be inflicted on them and their children, got the hell out of Dodge and left the field entirely to the Taliban.

The aim was to claim a lawless part of Afghanistan's troublesome south for the distant and disliked government far away in Kabul. They would seize the area, put up fortifications to limit movement and impose some order and authority.

But, despite the strict secrecy that cloaked the operation, the local people seemed to have got wind of it and – scared by the prospect of intense fighting – voted with their feet.

The day before the soldiers began their operation, drones monitoring the area showed people evacuating their homes, leaving Babaji in the hands of militants.

During the first three days of their two-week stay in the area, which will end when troops from the Welsh Guards relieve them, the men of the Black Watch battalion endured persistent attacks of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. With the enemy hiding at a distance, in bushes and abandoned compounds, most soldiers never saw their foes. Only the snipers and the men monitoring the live video feeds from circling drones got sight of their quarry.

"They are so well camouflaged you can't see anything," said Rob Colquoun, a section leader, in charge of a team of snipers who killed 18 Afghans in one afternoon.

... "Running around, getting into fights and killing a few enemy is all very well and good, but my main concern at the moment is that we haven't talked to any local nationals or really got out our main message to the community that this time we are here to stay," said Major Steele.

If there's no-one there to "build" for, COIN's "clear, hold and build" doctrine has a problem.

The Brits eventually found an old man who hadn't evacuated with the rest and three senior officers promptly and comically descended upon him to do their "population centric" bit. He wasn't having any of it.

"Last year a big British bomb in Nowzad killed 600 people," he said. "Another 170 were killed at a wedding party."

..."I'm 80 years old and I have seen many governments and none of them have been any help. Why should I believe that this one will help?"

So the officers split for their forward operating base (FOB) before they could be attacked and take casualties. Later that day, the UK troops called in an American B-1 bomber to clear one guy out of a deserted compound which had been someone's home. It isn't just among US officers that FOBbit-based, casualty averse "force protection" instincts get in the way of "hearts and minds".

Fungibilility and non-inteference

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By Fester:

The United States and the West have very little leverage in Iran. Global trade is falling fast, global credit is far less available now than it was three years ago, and oil prices are going up again in dollar terms past Iran's break even point. The US military is tied down in two wars, the rest of NATO either can not or will not deploy additional forces to Afghanistan to act as fungible units to free up US forces. There are not too many obvious and effective leverage points avaialble to nation states that want to lend support to the protesters or to harm the current regime.

The only plausible leverage point is economic. A complete embargo on the oil as a means of pressuring the ruling elite is being proposed. We know that sanctions have worked wonders on quickly overthrowing the Castro regime in Cuba.... instead of allowing the elites to blame outside actors for their own failings.
Raymond Lears at the Huffington Post proposes this idea without thinking through the consequences.

Though the United States does not currently import Iranian crude, the fungiblity of oil is such that our government espousing such a boycott would carry a meaningful impact. The cutoff of Iranian oil shipments through a buyer's boycott is entirely feasible in the structure of today's oil market. Inventories throughout the world are filled to overflowing, supertankers are loaded with 100's of millions barrels oil, lying at anchor at sea waiting for customers or storage on shore....Without the income from oil, Iran's dictatorship will be increasingly vulnerable.

There are several significant practical road blocks to this.

First is the political-economic one of domestic political support in Europe or Japan --- all of those economies are under as much or more pressure than the US economy with consumers retrenching, concerns about jobs and concerns about debt levels --- where is the political support for individuals to pay another ten to fifteen percent per gallon/liter if the boycott was 100% effective? That to me seems like the quickest way for a government to lose its mandate as they would be effectively be placing a regressive tax that would mainly be a transfer from oil consumers to non-Iranian oil producers.

The countervailing effect is that the boycott would not be effective as Iran would still be able to export several million barrels of oil per day to a different customer set.

We know that China has two primary current foreign policy concerns. The first is to maintain its supply lines for crucial raw materials. This is fueling the expansion of Chinese trade with Brazil and Australia as well as backing the Chinese influence push into Africa. Iran already has decent to good ties with China and as a customer of last resort, those ties would strengthen. The second major foreign policy concern for China is a concerted effort to push for a precedent of international non-interference in the internal affairs of nation states. China and its oil buyers will not be a part of a buyers' embargo.

The end result is public diplomacy masturbation as the embargo would be toothless while giving the current hardliners a validation of their story that they and the rest of the Iranian people are being pressured by foreign, colonialist influences. That is not a good solution

Gordon Brown's No Good Very Bad Day

By Steve Hynd

I'm watching the decimation of Labour's sitting councillor's in the local elections in England and Wales today with some interest. Tom Clark at The Guardian puts the depth of the debacle bluntly:

Making sense of the emerging election results for Labour is easy: they're dreadful. The BBC is projecting a 23% nationwide vote share – third place by a distance, a full five points behind the Liberal Democrats, and the worst since BBC records began. I'm not aware of a series of national vote shares going much further back, but I'd be confident in saying it is the party's worst showing since the second world war, and it may even be its worst since the first.

But although the Tories are picking up seats at every turn, they shouldn't be lighting candles on a celebration cake. A goodly bit of humility would be warranted. They've been badly damaged by the MP's expenses scandal too, if not as badly as Brown and Labour.

their vote share is poor – 38%. That is, for example, very similar to the 37% that Neil Kinnock chalked up in the 1989 Euro-elections, hardly an inspiring comparison for a party that believes it is on the very cusp of power, and a sign that voters are angry at the wealthy Conservatives who've asked them to fund duck islands and moat repairs.

Clark writes that picking up local seats so dramatically will boost Tory confidence of several upsets in a general election, but I'd note that party strategists would do well to remember that the UK has a history of protest voting for "the other guy" in local elections. It was a constant thorn in Maggie Thatcher's side that her parliamentary majority never translated into supremacy at the local level, for example.

Still, it's been clear for some time now that David Cameron would be the next PM whenever the general election was finally called. Today's disaster for Labour will hurry that day along, as will the litany of denunciations and resignations as Brown tries to reshuffle the deckchairs, and his cabinet. The Prime Minister refuses to quit though - if he's going he'll have to be pushed.

Now, for those American leaders who could care less, a final thought. George W. Bush's presidency was explicitly modelled after Thatcher's by his brain, Karl Rove - and history repeated itself as America's Blair, Barack Obama, swept the conservatives into the wilderness after years of rightwing excess, just as happened before in the UK. But Obama worries the hell out of me. Blair turned out to only talk a good progressive game and in his demands for presidential power, secrecy, continuing harsh laws in the name of fighting terrorism and his intent on doubling down on interventionist adventurism Obama reminds me all too much of the man now well known as Tory Blur. Then came Brown, a uncharismatic non-entity of a leadership figure...and it's highly unclear that the Dems in the U.S. have a man who could follow Obama except as a Brown to his Blair.

I suppose what I'm saying is - Dems should beware of the hubris of power and ignore the tendency towards a "not invented here" mindset to watch and learn from the rising and falling currents of political fortune as seen in the UK.

Update: James Joyner says Brown is on borrowed time : "The bottom line is that Brown isn't doing a good job of governing.  He's been holding on for dear life for a considerable period, hoping to ride out the rough patch, and things are only getting worse. " I think James is spot on. But Brown has already shown a gruff tenacity in clinging to power for so long despite setbacks galore. Maybe the question we should be asking is how come his opponents can't finish him off.

Lock up the good china, the Conservatives are coming

By BJ Bjornson

This is just embarrassing

Three sterling silver flower baskets sold off by the government at bargain-basement prices on a government website were on loan to Rideau Hall from Buckingham Palace, Sun Media has learned.

Richard Legrand, who worked at the governor general's residence for 35 years, says he was told when he started at Rideau Hall in 1968 that the ornate pierced silver flower baskets were among several items borrowed from the British royal family.

"Those three baskets were on loan from Buckingham Palace, including two huge candelabra that we used on the diningroom table for state events."

Whenever Queen Elizabeth II visited Canada and stayed at Rideau Hall, the silver baskets filled with flowers were placed in the suite where she slept, said Legrand who retired in 2003.

"This was a special treat because we knew they were English, we knew they were from Buckingham Palace."

We know our government's are usually thieves, but generally its more figurative, or at least of the white collar/embezzlement variety. Hocking other people's stuff like a cheap pawn shop is a new low.

Economic Inefficiency as Damning Evidence....

By Fester:

The United States massively and expensively subsidizes local sugar production which means consumers pay higher prices and my soft drinks don't taste quite as good as they could.  We do this because of domestic political constraints and interest group politics that lock in preferential treatment to small, vocal and wealthy groups who are able to scream far louder for concentrated benefits than the mere murmurs from the vast majority of people who are minimally harmed by this policy. 

It is a stupid policy, but there is a rational explanation for the policy that is rooted in internal domestic politics.  There are plenty of policies that are less than economically efficient but make ideological or political sense. 

Dave Schuler is arguing that economic inefficiency is an indictment on Iranian nuclear ambitions:

Finally, while Iran has a right to pursue the peaceful application of nuclear energy doing so to maintain energy independence makes little sense and it’s a waste of Iran’s resources to do so. They can get more results for less money simply by modernizing their oil production facilities.

National prestige projects, of which nuclear energy is one, rarely have to pass cost benefit analysis.  It would be far more efficient for Iran to open up its entire energy sector to foreign investment and control, but there are strong ideological constraints that prevents this from happening.  It would be more efficient for the US Navy to buy foreign designed and built corvettes but ideological and political constraints prevent this as well.

Dave assembles a bit more evidence to argue against peaceful Iranian nuclear intentions, and that evidence is more convincing, but the economic efficiency angle is damn weak. 

You Can't Trust The Dully Torygraph

By Steve Hynd

A goodly number of my blogging friends have recently posted about a story from the UK's Daily Telegraph which quoted the former Abu Graib abuse investigator, retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba, as saying that the pictures from Abu Graib that the Obama administration were supressing showed "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency".

The pushback was swift and fierce. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters that the Telegraph had shown "an inability to get the facts right," while White House press secretary Robert Gibbs took things one giant step further by launching a general assault on the British press. "You're not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other," he said.

I didn't write about the story, because there was something about it that made me uncomfortable - the Telegraph's history of only passing aquaintance with journalistic integrity. In an email to a friend last week I wrote: "I'm fairly sure even the notoriously spin-full Dully Torygraph wouldn't make up s**t and present it as a direct quote of a retired US general, but it is possible - the Torygraph has a terrible reputation for warping and wholesale-creating stories." I wasn't the only one to feel that way.

Now, Gen. Taguba has confirmed to Salon that the Telegraph took his words and played with them.

 Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba denied reports that he has seen the prisoner-abuse photos that President Obama is fighting to keep secret, in an exclusive interview with Salon Friday night.

On Thursday an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that Taguba, the lead investigator into Abu Ghraib abuse, had seen images Obama wanted suppressed, and supported the president's decision to fight their release. The paper quoted Taguba as saying, "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

But Taguba says he wasn't talking about the 44 photographs that are the subject of an ongoing ACLU lawsuit that Obama is fighting.

"The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said -- but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

So Taguba says he has seen so-far unreleased photos of rape, but the Telegraph made up the connection to the particular photos that are the subject of this FOIA request. An important distinction when it comes to journalistic accuracy but one that's no difference at all when it comes to the far larger question of US cover-up of crimes. It simply begs the question of how much else we haven't seen from Abu Graib yet, as well as what might be in these pics that is so bad it can't be released for fear of Iraqis rising up in a general killing spree of US troops.

Thers at Whiskey Fire:

I think it's gotten to the point where it's clear the "worst" images exist -- and one way or another, they're bound to appear, sooner or later.

The issue now is how they are going to appear. Will it be with full disclosure and a transparent commitment to accountability? Or a leak, a scandal, and an embarrassing attempt at a legalistic explanation for what's inevitably going to look like a coverup -- because, good intentions or not, that's what it will be?

I'm not unsympathetic to the argument that a release will put troops in danger, but I also think we're past that point. Taguba said the pictures exist, somewhere. I don't think he's lying. I don't think they can be forever suppressed. Best to expose the shame and show justice was done. If doing so would pose too much danger to the troops, then the troops should be immediately sent home, because then it's not at all clear what they're fighting for, anyhow, something that's already pretty goddamn murky enough. Are Americans who we say we are, or not? That's the question.

Meanwhile, today the Telegraph's bloggers are kicking up a snowstorm, trying to redirect the story into being about Gibb's unwarranted attack on the British press as a whole. But the truth is fairly simple there: Britain's tabloids - the Sun, Daily Mail and the rest - have only a passing aquaintance with the truth. The Telegraph, staffed by rejects from the Daily Mail and a core of hardline neocon shills, likewise. The Pentagon knows this because it's used the Telegraph as a plausibly deniable outlet for agitprop to be imported back to the US often enough in the past. But the rest of Britains broadsheet newspapers - the Guardian, Indie, Herald, Scotsman and even Murdoch's Times - are as accurate, as ethical, as prone to stenography and as partisan as any of America's great newspapers. Gibbs was off base, Whitman was dead on.

"Apparent?"

By BJ Bjornson

From the BBC:

Canada politician eats seal heart

Canada's governor general, Michaelle Jean, has helped to butcher and eat a seal in an apparent act of solidarity with hunters.

Ms Jean used a traditional Inuit knife to help gut the animal then ate a slice of raw heart.

Trust me, unless you've been raised on the stuff, you don't chaw down on raw seal for anything short of real solidarity.  I've been up here for better than twenty years and I still have trouble with the taste, even if it is a lot better for me than cattle meat.  (Granted I tend to be a picky eater, but near as I can tell, the aversion is widespread amongst those not raised on the east coast diet.)  I do love the fur though, particularly for mitts.  The recent furor is over the European Union's decision to ban the import of Canadian seal products because of the commercial hunting methods, which happen to be far less distasteful than most farming practices they turn a blind eye to.  Cattle, pigs, and chickens just aren't as cute as seal pups after all.

Inuit exemption or not, the EU ban is already having a negative effect on traditional hunters in the region, which is why GG Jean is up here trying to bring some attention to the issue.   Just for the love of dog, don't be comparing her to Sarah Palin.

Yes, Obama Threatened Britain Over Torture Evidence

By Steve Hynd

Glenn Greenwald has the actual text of the letter the Obama administration sent to the UK government, threatening to halt intelligence co-operation if the details of Binyam Mohammed's torture were publicly revealed by the UK High Court. No, this wasn't some holdover from the Bush administration. The threat was clear and simple. And, recall, Obama sent a second letter to the British government thanking it for capitulating to those threats!

Glenn writes:

In other words:  if you let your courts describe how we tortured Mohamed -- even if your laws compel such disclosure -- we may purposely leave your citizens vulnerable to future terrorist attacks by withholding information we obtain about terrorist plots.  Smith re-iterated to Lake what he told me last month:  that the Obama administration's actions in issuing these threats in order to hide  evidence of torture is itself a criminal act:

"What they are doing is twisting the arm of the British to keep evidence of torture committed by American officials secret," said Mr. Smith, a U.S. citizen. "I had high hopes for the Obama administration. I voted for the guy, and one hopes the new administration would not continue to cover up evidence of criminal activity."

The Metropolitan Police of London is investigating whether Mr. Mohamed was tortured when he was in American custody.

Mr. Smith said that by attempting to keep evidence of Mr. Mohamed's "abuse" secret, the U.S. official who communicated the threats to the British Foreign Office was in breach of British law, specifically the International Criminal Court Act of 2001.

"The U.S. is committing a criminal offense in Britain by seeking to conceal this information. What the Obama administration did is not just ill-advised, it is illegal," he said.

Independently, Article 9 of the Convention Against Torture requires that "States Parties shall afford one another the greatest measure of assistance in connection with civil proceedings brought in respect of any of the offences referred to in article 4, including the supply of all evidence at their disposal necessary for the proceedings."  If the U.S. were a country that adhered to its treaty obligations -- rather than systematically ignored them whenever the mood struck -- that, too, would be significant.

Which leaves only one question: do progressives feel it's still OK to support someone who is complicit in torture when he does other stuff they agree with, or does the enormity of the crime of covering up torture and helping torturers evade justice overshadow anything else that man might do?

The same question also needs to be asked in the cases of other senior Dems, like Pelosi, who have increasingly threadbare excuses for why they didn't speak up about Bush's criminal torturing when they first found out about it.