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WORLD VIEW
The resignaTion of The iraqi prime minisTer may noT halT The proTesTs
independent/ Patrick cockburn
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PROTESTERS in Iraq have won their first big success by forcing the resignation of the Iraqi prime minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, after the killing of 45 unarmed protesters by the Iraqi security forces in a single day. As the news spread, the crack of celebratory fireworks replaced that of gunshots in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which has been the centre of demonstrations since they began two months ago. The impending departure of Mahdi is a symbolic victory for the protests, but too many people have been killed for it to quell what is close to a mass uprising by the majority Shia community. He had proved an ineffectual leader and the entire ruling elite in Iraq is probably too corrupt and too determined to hang on to power to make the radical reforms demanded by the protesters. The announcement that the prime minister was stepping down came after 36 hours in which the security forces had switched from killing individual demonstrators to massacres on a larger scale – with as many as 50 people shot dead on a bridge in the southern city of Nasiriya – bringing the number killed to 408, as well as thousands more wounded, since 1 October.
Compare this horrific casualty list over eight weeks with that in Hong Kong, where just one protester has been killed and one has died accidentally since protests started six months ago. Compare also the vast and sympathetic publicity given to the Hong Kong protests with the limited interest in the savage and unprecedented government clampdown in Iraq. Probably the world has got used to Iraqis being murdered in large numbers, whether it is by Isis, Saddam Hussein or the US air force, so it is no longer considered news. The violence is seen as only affecting Iraqis, but it has the potential to reshape the politics of the Middle East. Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, one of the most powerful political and military forces in the region has been the increasing strength of Shia communities under Iranian leadership. Over the last 40 years, this coalition has outfought and outmanoeuvred enemies such as the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and, above all, in Iraq.
The importance of the Iraq-Iran alliance is so great because two-thirds of Iraq’s 38 million population are Shia and it has a 900-mile-long border with Iran.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq has had a Shia-dominated government that usually acted in unison with Iran. Iraqi Shia differ in many respects from their Iranian co-religionists, but they have seen them until recently as an essential ally in the struggle with Isis.
But in the last two months, this victorious, Iranian-led Shia coalition has been fractured as pro-Iranian sections of the Iraqi security services and paramilitary groups repeatedly shot down Shias protesting about the lack of jobs, inadequate social services and pervasive corruption on the part of Iraq’s ruling elite. These protests were initially on a small scale and only gained momentum because of the government’s overreaction to what was at first a very minor threat.
From the first, there was little effort to conceal the role of Iran in masterminding the repression. Reports surfaced at an early stage that General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force –the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran – had decided that the protests were part of a foreign plot and the best way to deal with them was with “a whiff of grapeshot”. Many generals in history have thought the same thing and, through violent but failed repression, have turned limited expressions of discontent into open revolts. In the Iraqi case, the
protesters became virulently anti-Iranian. The outcome of the counterproductive and futile attempts by pro-Iranian forces in Iraq to crush the protests may be the beginnings of a sea change in the politics of the Middle East. The previously triumphant alliance of the Iranian and Iraqi Shia – a coalition that had seen off the US and its allies – may be irretrievably broken. The Iranians and their Iraqi allies have done more to break the link between the two countries in the last eight weeks than Washington and Riyadh succeeded in doing in years of trying. Why did Iran overreact? President Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran has not proved very successful, but it has made the Iranian leadership, always paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories, nervous and likely to exaggerate anything that looks like a threat. Paradoxically, this feeling of vulnerability on the part of Iran is linked to a sense of hubris born out of its repeated victories in proxy wars in the region.
But these successes produced a new weakness in the Iranian-led Shia coalition: it acquired an interest in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria in maintaining the political status quo, however unjust, corrupt and incompetent it might be. In Iraq, for instance, the predominantly Shia ruling class might once have been heroic opponents of Saddam Hussein, but they have
long since transmuted into a dysfunctional kleptocracy that is hostile to reform.
Shia leaders rebuffed critics of their failings by appealing to communal solidarity against existential threats from alQaeda-type groups, but that excuse lost traction in the last few years as Isis was defeated. In Iraq, the discontent goes particularly deep because much of the Shia population – the Sunni and Kurds have kept out of it – wonders why they are without jobs, water and electricity in a country that earns $7bn a month from oil exports. The departure of Adel Abdul-Mahdi as prime minister is unlikely to defuse the protests, because the Iraqi state is probably incapable of reforming itself. An alternative for the government is full-scale repression: trying to stamp out dissent by killing or arresting protesters. But that option has failed so far because the protesters have shown heroic resolve in continuing to demonstrate despite being shot down and without taking up arms themselves –though most Iraqi families own one or more guns. The protesters can see that militarisation of the crisis would be much in the government’s interest, because it could then justify its use of lethal force. But this self-restraint will not last forever and there have already been so many deaths as to “plant hatred in the hearts” of many Iraqis that will not disappear.
With growth this bad, India needs more than luck
BloomBerg daniEl Moss
With India’s growth tumbling to 4.5% from 8.1% in little more than a year, you’d be surprised to know that Shaktikanta Das has one of the easiest jobs in central banking. He just has to keep doing what he’s been doing since becoming governor of the Reserve Bank of India last December: cut interest rates. Fortunately, political will is on his side. That’s an enviable state of affairs for a central banker these days. Just look at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has become a constant target of President Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades. It’s also facesaving for Das that politics and economics are pointing in the same direction. He took up this post under a cloud of question marks about the RBI’s independence. Das’s immediate predecessor, Urjit Patel, quit abruptly almost a year ago, just as the government was ratcheting up pressure for the institution to hand over some of its reserves to free up fiscal spending.
The troubling state of Asia’s third-largest economy makes Das’s task uncomplicated. The pace of growth is slowing dramatically; government numbers Friday showed India’s expansion slipped in the third quarter to its weakest clip since 2013. Many big economies have been stalling, but it’s hard to think of another where growth has come down to earth this quickly. Expectations have diminished so radically that even a slowdown of this magnitude was in line with economists’ projections.
For Das to even contemplate taking his foot off the monetary
pedal now would be a mistake. He should look past the recent uptick in inflation last month, largely attributed to vegetables such as onions, a staple of Indian cooking. Those price gains helped push the measure beyond the RBI’s 4% medium-term target. More important is the slide in core inflation, which strips out volatile commodity prices.
Das says policymakers will keep cutting rates until growth revives. The five reductions he’s overseen haven’t given the economy back its groove; so the mission is clear going into next week’s meeting, when the central bank is expected to cut again. His global peers may have done well to adopt the same approach. It’s clear from the Fed’s retreat that the hikes in 2018 went too far in the face of anaemic inflation. The European Central Bank had barely curtailed quantitative easing before it had to start all over again. Lest Das be tempted to sail through, there’s the iceberg of India’s banking industry to consider, which is saddled with one of the world’s most dangerous loads of bad debt. The trouble is, about 60% of the financial system is controlled by state-run banks that report to the government, so Das’s ability to influence them is constrained. At some point he may well have to challenge entrenched political interests.
The other hurdle is that India’s broken financial system hinders the ability of rate cuts to flow through the economy. Shadow banking, a big source of weakness, was also a major source of lending. That spigot appears to have largely dried up.
I wrote in February that Das was lucky: Economic need trumped the political circumstances surrounding his first rate cut. But luck doesn’t last forever. It wasn’t too long ago that economic aspirations for India echoed China’s. Now this young country of 1.4 billion people is looking more like Indonesia, Malaysia or the Philippines — that is, just another middling emerging market. At this rate, Das will need more than rate cuts and a good reputation to fix things.
Henry Kissinger gets it... US ‘exceptionalism’ is over
Strategic culture Foundation Editorial
For all their faults, at least people like Kissinger and Brzezinski were motivated by practical goal-orientated policy. They were willing to engage with adversaries to find some modus vivendi. Such an attitude is too often missing in recent Washington administrations which seem to be guided by an ideology of unipolar dominance by the US over the rest of the world. The current Washington consensus is one of hyper-ideological unrealism and hubris, which leads to a zero-sum mentality of antagonism towards China and Russia.
At times, President Donald Trump appears to subscribe to realpolitik pragmatism. At other times, he swings to the hyper-ideological mentality as expressed by his Vice President Mike Pence, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defence Mike Esper. The latter has labelled China as
the US’s “greatest long-term threat”.
This week President Trump signed into law “The Human Rights and Democracy Bill”, which will impose sanctions on China over alleged repression in its Hong Kong territory. Beijing has reacted furiously to the legislation, condemning it as a violation of its sovereignty. This is exactly the kind of baleful move that Kissinger warned against in order to avoid a further poisoning in bilateral relations already tense from the past 16 months of US-China trade war.
One discerns the difference between Kissinger and more recent US politicians: the former has copious historical knowledge and appreciation of other cultures. His shrewd, wily, maybe even Machiavellian streak, informs Kissinger to acknowledge and respect other powers in a complex world. That is contrasted with the puritanical banality and ignorance manifest in Trump’s administration and in the Congress. Greeting Kissinger last Friday, November 22, during a visit to Beijing, President Xi Jinping thanked him for his historic contribution in normalising USChina relations during 1970s. “At present, Sino-US relations are at a critical juncture facing some difficulties and challenges,” said Xi, calling on the two countries to deepen communication on strategic issues. It was an echo of the realpolitik views Kissinger had enunciated the week before. While sharing a public stage with Kissinger, the Chinese leader added: “The two sides should proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the people of the world, respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, pursue win-win results in cooperation, and promote bilateral ties to develop in the right direction.” Likewise, China and Russia have continually urged for a multipolar world order for cooperation and partnership in development. But the present and recent US governments refuse to contemplate any other order other than a presumed unipolar dominance. Hence the ongoing US trade strife with China and Washington’s relentless demonisation of Russia.
This “exceptional” ideological mantra of the US is leading to more tensions, and ultimately is a path to the abyss. Henry Kissinger gets it. It’s a pity America’s present crop of politicians and thinkers are so impoverished in their intellect.
