Month: May 2018

Decimation is not a model for fixing the world

Posted on by Martin Newman

Power shifts in the Middle East are rarely subtle (often they’re accompanied by large explosions), but their true motivations are usually complex and, quite often, well-concealed.

We’ve got used to disruption and death in that part of the world. We shouldn’t have.

There has been an unconscionable meddling in the affairs of countries in the Middle East, but there is also the danger those tactics will be expanded elsewhere.

One of the most sinister propositions yet has been the US talking openly about the ‘Libyan model’ in reference to North Korea.

It refers to regime change by force, leaving a shell of a country to fight among itself, rebuilding by foreign contractors (lining their pockets), little aid and less attention.

“That was a total decimation,” US president Donald Trump said candidly yesterday.

Before the violent unseating of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Libya was the most prosperous country in North Africa and by most measurements stable.

With attacks by foreign-backed rebels it descended into what the West was quick to label “civil war”, but was actually Libya fighting a small insurgency in one pocket of the country.

Claims by NGOs and rebels in 2011 that Gaddafi’s military was massacring civilians by shelling towns were ultimately proved to be untrue. But they provided the pretext for the US to push for a UN Security Council mandate enforcing a no-fly zone to protect civilians.

As a journalist working on a Fleet Street tabloid at the time I fielded many nightly reports from the ground of rebels breaking the ceasefire as the Libyan military stood back.

And yet it was the claims of the US government that Gaddafi was responsible that became the accepted narrative in the media.

The UN mandate was then cynically used by a coalition, led by the Americans, British and French, to bomb the Libyan army into submission and create a corridor for the rebels straight to Tripoli.

By the end of 2011 Colonel Gaddafi’s brutal, undignified murder by those rebels had been videoed on a phone and shared around the world, and Libya had descended into hell.

Today, the country is divided between two competing governments and a variety of Islamist rebel and tribal groups recognising no authority.

In other words, it is a compete mess. And for what?

The ‘Libyan model’ that Donald Trump and his national security advisor John Bolton speak of does not provide solutions, only worse problems. And a compliant and gullible media has done itself no justice by accepting unfounded claims as fact.

Take a closer look at how much actual evidence (as opposed to claims and unverified intelligence reports) has been presented that the Syrian government is responsible for chemical weapons attacks. 

It may surprise you.

Former US president Barack Obama has been pilloried for derailing a budding war on Bashar al-Assad, and allowing Vladimir Putin time to sneak in and provide a permanent and effective deterrent against any significant military action by the US.

But the truth is Obama’s defiance of his own State Department saved Syria from an even more bloody and pointless period of destruction than currently exists there.

Ousting Assad and leaving the Syrians to the fate of the jihadist groups that would fill the void would have created another Libya.

Whereas Obama’s policies sought to create more balance in the Middle East, a deal to stem Iran’s nuclear program balanced against the anti-Iranian alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Trump has ripped up the 2015 deal with the mullahs and given his material support to Benjamin Netanyahu.

The message to everyone across the region is the US is on the front foot in the Middle East. It has already shown with Syria it will push to the point of risking a fight with Russia.

So, the US’s canonisation of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital this week, while further stifling the hopes of an independent future for those incarcerated in Gaza and the West Bank, was really about ratcheting up pressure on Iran, where Bolton would also like to see regime change.

North Korea doesn’t need the ‘Libyan model’, nor does Iran, nor does Syria.

But is it coming? Stay tuned.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph. Screenshot of Colonel Gaddafi’s death)

Call the term ‘disruption’ what it really is – cheating

Posted on by Martin Newman

It’s a term that has been tediously shoved down our throats for the past few years like a mantra — ‘disruption’.

Like “innovator” or “agile”, it often accompanies ­descriptions of new tech start-ups shaking up the traditional system, but has also become a sort of shorthand for ignoring the rules.

This, we’ve been encouraged to think, is something we should be grateful for — lifting us out of our ­ignorant ways — rather than what it often is: a cheat.

Disruption is nothing new. It has always been a feature of business growth and of society’s evolution. We just didn’t call it that.

We knew it by other less dramatic terms, like best practice, change or improvement.

The repackaging of the word “disruption” as something new and radical is akin to the recent attempt by a Newcastle cafe to dress up Vegemite on toast as some kind of a la carte offering.

It’s like your coffee being more ­expensive because it’s served by an uncommunicative, apron-wearing bloke with a waxed moustache.

Hans Christian Andersen nailed it back in 1837: The Emperor’s New Clothes.

It is nothing more than what university professors might describe as a postmodern deconstruction of what occurs in the business world everywhere and always has.

When you can get away with it.

Because the main benefit for the businesses reaping enormous profits on the back of the ideology of “disruption” has been to bypass the usual rules.

The disrupters of the world, from Uber to the firms responsible for all those discarded bicycles in your street and clogging up waterways, have used loopholes to bamboozle authorities into accepting a system of reduced or vanquished standards.

So while the poor Luddites of our taxi industry, constrained by regulations designed to both ensure public safety and keep the taxman happy, are having the values of their business slashed and their livelihoods diminished, Uber merrily undercuts the market to drive out the opposition.

Despite grabbing a lion’s share of the world taxi business by “disrupting” traditional services with lower fares and untrained “citizen” drivers, studies show Uber X drivers earn half the minimum wage.

For a company that has never been in profit (it lost $4.5 billion last year) you can bet fares will rise once it has no one left to compete with.

This week the House of Representatives voted to ban Lottoland, a “synthetic” lottery that, rather than having a cash jackpot at its disposal, bets on the outcome of big lotteries and uses insurers to pay off whatever large wins (effectively losses) it incurs.

It is based in the tax haven of ­Gibraltar and, unlike existing lotteries that help fund charities, it pays no tax.

While it lists donating to charity on its website, most of those “donations” are actually sponsorships whose primary purpose is to advertise Lottoland.

At the same time newsagents, ­already under strain from diminished sales, have lost revenue they would get through traditional lotteries.

In less than 25 years Amazon, the e-commerce juggernaut, has made its founder Jeff Bezos $112 billion and the richest person in the world.

It is a new arrival here, but in America, where the company made $5.6 billion last year, it paid no tax at all.

Social networks meanwhile have used “freedom of speech” as a way to dodge responsibility for removing inappropriate content, while at the same time harvesting our data for profit and manipulating the information we receive.

Tuesday night’s Budget foreshadowed a raft of new measures to stop companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple from shifting profits offshore and shirking paying tax here.

With barely a complaint from a public mesmerised by their shiny ­offerings, these companies have raided the retail landscape like plundering Vikings.

I’m all for progress and not for maintaining institutions that don’t work, but I’m also pretty sure when the smoke clears we are going to find we are paying the same and getting less, and a few shrewd companies will have made a mint at our expense.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph)