Occupy Planet Earth: Resisting the Militarisation of the State

Published on Counterpunch

Viva L’Occupation

The Occupy Movement is currently the most vocal manifestation of public resistance and civil disobedience to hit the West since the 60s. In turn, it has elicited a concerted and in some ways unprecedented militarisation of state violence. In the US, the deployment of tear gas, pepper-spray and rubber bullets has deliberately brutalised peaceful, civilian protestors – purely in the name of restoring ‘civil order’. More than ever, the insistence by people on reclaiming public spaces in the name of opposing the injustice and inequality meted out by the proverbial “1 per cent” is unpeeling the mask of the democratic state, to reveal the unrestrained monopoly of wealth and weapons on which its power is premised.

Unlike previous twentieth century protests, the Occupy Movement is distinguished by its genuine spontaneity, its leaderless dynamic, and its organic global proliferation through the streets of major industrial cities in the North. The driving force of Occupy, however, is not just the escalating global economic recession, although the latter’s role in galvanising grievances shouldn’t be underestimated. Rather, the determination of citizens to occupy strategic public spaces is inspired by a convergence of public perceptions.

The majority of people now hold views about Western governments and the nature of power that would’ve made them social pariahs ten or twenty years ago. The majority are now sceptical of the Iraq War; the majority want troops out of Afghanistan; the majority resent the banks and financial sector and blame them for the financial crisis; most people are now aware of environmental issues, more than ever before, and despite denialist confusion promulgated by elements of fossil fuel industries, the majority in the US and Britain are deeply concerned about global warming; most people are wary of conventional party politics and disillusioned with the mainstream parliamentary system, due to the continuation of scandal after scandal. In other words, on a whole range of issues, there has been a massive popular shift in public opinion toward a progressive critique of the current political economic system. It is, of course, largely subliminal, not carefully worked out, and lacks a coherent vision for what needs to be done – but there can be little doubt that this shift has happened, and is deepening.

People are increasingly disenchanted with prevailing socio-political and economic structures, and they are hungry for alternatives. Yet they see none readily available, no existing mechanism which allows their voices to be truly heard – what left to do, then, beyond simply occupying public space in an effort to, somehow, reclaim power?

Civil Contingencies: State-Preparations for Counter-Insurgency

Yet as the global economic recession began to kick in since 2008, the “1 per cent” – or elements thereof – were well aware that one of the immediate consequences would be citizens taking to the streets. And they were preparing for it.

In late 2008, an internal client memo from US bank and Federal Reserve member Citigroup, authored by chief technical strategist Tom Fitzpatrick, warned unequivocally of “continued financial deterioration, causing further economic deterioration, with the risk of a feedback loop.” This will “lead to political instability… Some leaders are now at record levels of unpopularity. There is a risk of domestic unrest, starting with strikes because people are feeling disenfranchised.”

What to do? One answer to that question was put out by the US Army Strategic Studies Institute in December that year, in a report urging the US military to prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse”, “loss of functioning political and legal order,” or “purposeful domestic resistance and insurgency”, among other threats. The report warned that Department of Defense resources may need to be put “at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquillity” – including “the use of military force… against hostile groups inside the United States.” The noble aim of such state militarisation is, of course, to “restore public order and protect vulnerable populations” – from themselves, it would appear.

Similarly, in the UK since 2004 the government has held extraordinary emergency powers granted under the little-known Civil Contingencies Act. The Act paves the way for the rise of totalitarian state power. Under the powers enabled by the Act, the government can unilaterally decree a state of emergency at its own discretion without public consultation or parliamentary approval. Once a state of emergency is declared, all manner of powers can come into play. Ministers can introduce new laws, “emergency regulations”, by Royal Prerogative without recourse to parliament. These laws can include anything from destroying or confiscating property, banning protests and public assemblies of any kind, instituting curfews, prohibiting travel, deploying the army on British soil, sealing off whole cities, shutting down websites, censoring media, and so on. Worse still, the state could classify whatever it wants as new criminal offences.

“CIVIL CONTINGENCIES ACT” CLIP FROM THE UPCOMING DOCUMENTARY ‘THE CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION’:

The problem is that the Act has nothing to do with responding to real emergencies. According to the journal of the British Association of Public Safety Communication Officials, the government has “no clear direction or dedicated budget and a complete lack of Act-specific assessment” relevant to actually preparing the country for concrete national emergencies or disaster scenarios. They rightly ask, “If the Government is truly committed to protecting the nation, why are Ministers not using the powers provided by the Civil Contingencies Act to proactively monitor the true state of preparedness across the country?”

The New Transnational Class War

This is a good question, because the bulk of Western government preparation for ‘civil contingencies’ has focused overwhelmingly on centralisation and consolidation of state military and police powers.  Why is this? For an idea of the kind of hopelessly regressive thinking that takes place at defence establishment level, a few excerpts from this choice Ministry of Defence report from 2007 are worth contemplating. The report, drawn-up by planners at the MoD’s Defence Concepts and Doctrines Centre – a supposedly advanced military think-tank which plans for future trends – points out that by 2035, world population is likely to grow to 8.5 billion, with less developed countries accounting for 98 per cent of this growth. The report acknowledges that this massive population growth will occur in the context of massive global stress related to simultaneous environmental, energy and economic crises.

Intriguingly, the report focuses on a “youth bulge”, with some 87 per cent of people under the age of 25 inhabiting the less developed South. In particular, it notes that the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 per cent, and of sub-Saharan Africa by 81 per cent. These are predominantly Muslim regions. Hence the report warns of a danger that escalating global crises will fuel a rise in Muslim militancy: “The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in these regions] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment… are unlikely to be met.” Growing resentment among the rising numbers of young people in these regions toward their undemocratic regimes will be channelled through “political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces.” But the report doesn’t stop there. It goes further in pointing out a danger of radicalization not only in the South, but also in the North, and warns of a global middle class revolution: “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” This could occur on a transnational scale, due to an increasing global divide between a super-rich elite and the middle classes, as well as the rise of an urban underclass, in which case: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Curiously prescient – if a little off in terms of dates (24 years off, to be precise).

Let’s take a step back for a moment and reflect on this extraordinary document. It not only problematises population growth amongst particular religious and ethnic groups – it demonises all forms of potential resistance to prevailing global political economic structures across racial, national and class lines. And it does this because it is symptom-oriented – it offers a reactionary militarised response to certain surface symptoms rather than root structural causes related to the organisation of the global system.

The End of History is Nigh

The subliminal, unstated ideological assumption of this sort of analysis is simply this: the current global political economic order must be sustained, maintained, perpetuated at any cost; it cannot be permitted to undergo deep-seated structural reforms, because it is already perfect – we have already arrived at Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, the “unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism” in the West, and “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”, discounting all possibility of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, resistance against the neoliberal system is illegitimate, and deserves to be crushed without remorse.

But Fukuyama was dead wrong. We are currently facing not simply one crisis, but a converging multiplicity of global crises – the global financial crisis, the global water crisis, the global food crisis, the crises of terror, war & militarisation – each of which is merely an interconnected symptom of a deeper Crisis of Civilization. Even the International Energy Agency now warns that we have a maximum of five years before we enter an unpredictable era of dangerous, irreversible climate change heading toward an uninhabitable planet, driven by a global industrial machine which privileges unlimited economic growth for the benefit of a tiny elite minority, against the needs of the vast majority of the human population.

The Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Occupy Movement across the West are, in this context, populist outbursts of resistance against planetary-level human suicide; the beginnings of the death-throes of an overarching civilizational form that is simply not working. The very nature of our civilization – given its accelerating trajectory toward ecological and economic self-destruction – is now in question; its ideology of nature and life, its value system, and how these are inherently linked to its socio-political, economic and cultural forms.

Yet what we are facing is not simply a process of civilizational collapse, but more fundamentally, a process of civilizational transition, the outcome of which remains to be seen. For the first time in human history, we face a civilizational crisis of truly planetary proportions. With it we are witnessing the self-destruction and decline of an exploitative, regressive and harmful industrial civilizational form within the next few decades, and certainly well within this century. With all this, we have an unprecedented historic opportunity, as this regressive civilizational form undergoes its protracted collapse, to push for alternative ways of living, doing and being – economically, politically, culturally, ethically, even spiritually – which are potentially far more conducive to human prosperity and well-being than hitherto imaginable.

That can only be done if we galvanise the energy and excitement of the Occupy Movement to develop firstly, coherent critical diagnoses of the true nature of the problem; and on that basis, coherent alternative frameworks of action. We need to work concertedly to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of alternative social, political, economic, cultural, and ethical models of life. Not only do we need to develop our thinking and action on this, we need to develop innovative ways to show-case these ideas, to popularise them, and to educate communities and institutions. Most critically, we need to explore how communities, particularly those who are most marginalised and disenfranchised, can act on these models now, to begin creating real change at the grassroots, from the ground up. How can we work together to develop more participatory forms of economic exchange? How can we pool local and community resources to become more resilient to energy shocks – by becoming more self-sufficient in decentralized renewable energy production? How can we learn new skills so that we can grow our own food and be less dependent on the unequal and temperamental international networks of industrial agribusiness? How can we build new community-level political and cultural structures that render top-down state-military structures increasingly irrelevant?

Taking to the streets and occupying public spaces are important seeds of direct action, but from them should blossom the models of social transformation and empowerment that the 99 per cent can begin exploring, in open dialogue with one another, and even with the 1 per cent whose monopolies we are protesting. For it is imperative to ensure that these popular energies develop accurate diagnoses of our predicament, so that our activism can be pointed in the right direction – not just at the 1 per cent, but at the wider political, economic, ideological and ethical system which enables their very existence, and which thus empowers the dysfunctional pathway on which we’re currently heading.

Check out our new film, based on my latest book: The Crisis of Civilization

Burning Britain: Riot Fever as a Symptom of Systemic Failure

Warzone

The rioting, looting and plunder that started in Tottenham on Saturday has now spread like wildfire throughout the capital. Shops were broken into, properties vandalized, and flats and vehicles set alight by gangs of mostly young men in Croydon, Clapham, Brixton, Hackney, Camden, Lewisham, Peckham, Newham, East Ham, Ilford, Enfield, Woolwich, Ealing, and Colliers Wood. Trouble was also reported in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Nottingham.

Described by witnesses as a ‘warzone’, these are the worst riots to hit London in decades. Over the next few nights, groups of young men, some armed with make-shift weapons and petrol bombs, overwhelmed suburban areas in what was essentially a spontaneous ransacking spree. The chaos has disrupted the lives of thousands of people, rendering them homeless, destroying their businesses, and endangering their livelihoods.

On Monday, at about 4pm, I was talking on the phone to my friend Muddassar Ahmed, CEO of Unitas Communications, while he was driving about town in East Ham where he lives. We were chatting about our plans for a meal round his place to celebrate Ramadan. Suddenly, he said, “Oh my God. There’s a group of, like, 50 young guys and they’re running straight towards me!” Fortunately they ran passed his car, but they continued onto Ilford Lane, which they’d barricaded using crates and boxes.

On Tuesday morning, my dad and stepmother who live in Croydon, where some of the worst violence occurred, told me over the phone how they’d watched as the previous night a gang of about 20 lads smashed their way into the Staples opposite their house and emptied almost the entire superstore. Indeed, many of the images of the carnage captured by journalists have also been revealing – apart from the stealing of expensive luxury items like flat screen televisions and hi-fi systems, a lot of the pillaging has focused on clothes and food.

Police Brutality

So it would be gravely mistaken to assume that the rioting and violence erupting throughout London was motivated fundamentally by opposing police brutality exemplified in the killing of Mark Duggan. Police brutality almost certainly played a role in sparking the initial rage. Early inaccurate media reports claimed that Duggan had fired first at the SO19 police officers who were tracking him, and that the officer who was hit was only saved by the bullet lodging itself in his radio. Forensic analysis later confirmed that the bullet was in fact police-issued, throwing doubt on the whole story.

Semone Wilson, Duggan’s girlfriend, said: “I spoke to him at about 5pm and he asked me if I’d cook dinner. He said he spotted a police car following him. By 6.15 he had been gunned down. I kept phoning and phoning to find out where he was. He wasn’t answering. I rushed down to where it happened. They let me through the police lines but they wouldn’t let me see his body.”

According to eyewitnesses, Duggan had been disabled by police and was lying on the ground when he had been shot. “About three or four police officers had both men pinned on the ground at gunpoint”, said one who was at the scene. “They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor.”

Pending further disclosure, the jury is still out on what exactly happened, but at the moment the available evidence does not lend confidence to the original version of events put out by anonymous police sources.

To add insult to injury (or this case, murder), when a 16-year old girl amongst the protestors who had gathered in Tottenham on Saturday approached the police to ask questions, the officers “set upon her with batons”, according to one resident interviewed by the BBC.

Confusing the Issues

Then the fires started. What began as a peaceful but angry demonstration against Duggan’s killing by members of Tottenham’s local community was quickly overrun and overtaken by hundreds of youths, who exploited the circumstances to cause havoc and loot local businesses. The scale of the violence on Saturday alone, and the inability of police and emergency services to respond and contain it effectively, was instrumental in inspiring youths all over London’s suburbs to mimic the violence and, quite literally, use the opportunity to take what they wanted.

Unfortunately, some activists have been confused by these events. Jodi McIntyre described the riots as an “uprising”, and suggested it should “continue in an effective manner” with better “organisation” – “Random looting”, he explained, “is not going to overcome police injustice. But until then, the language of the unheard will continue to be spoken.” But to what end should such admittedly pointless random looting therefore continue? How does exhorting its continuation in any way fit into a genuinely progressives agenda for the inclusive, community-led, radical systemic transformation necessary to overcome our converging social, political, economic and cultural crises?

Responding to criticism for expressing support for the riots, McIntyre wrote: “If it is a question of where my solidarity lies, and the options are M&S and Footlocker versus young people in the streets, then there is only one answer.” To be fair McIntyre expressed “sympathy” for those who had their “homes or cornershops damaged” and noted he has never supporting looting or arson – but ultimately, his comments illustrate a serious lack of understanding of what had happened.

There is no binary moral choice between support for the ‘corporate establishment’ and ‘young people’ – as if the riots somehow manifest young people challenging corporate power in a genuinely progressive way. The riots, the looting, the plunder, did not in any way constitute an “uprising” against corporate or even state power. On the contrary, the violence represented the most regressive manifestations of corporate and state inculcated values of crude materialist, market-driven hedonism. The looters and vandals were not politically-motivated, let alone progressively-inspired. On the contrary, what precisely illustrates the entirely self-destructive nature of this phenomenon is that its main victims were not the government, nor large corporates shielded by the promise of insurance pay-outs – but simply ordinary working people. If this was an uprising, it ended up targeting the very communities from which these young people came, even if these are communities from which they feel ostracized.

Boiling Point

McIntyre is right about one thing, though, when he says, “Inequality is at the heart of this.” Indeed, the violence is a disturbing symptom of the protracted collapse-process which industrial civilization now finds itself in.

The vast majority of perpetrators were young people, both men and women although mostly men. Young people in Britain have been hit hardest by the impact of recession. Unemployment in the UK is now at a staggering 2.49 million, having risen steadily over the last decade – increasingly so since the 2008 crash – with 1.46 million claiming jobseekers allowance. Across the country, one in five 16-24 year olds – just under a million young people – are unemployed.

Figures released just this summer showed that the economic gloom was deepening particularly across the capital, with 20 people chasing each available job in 22 of London’s 73 parliamentary constituencies. In other areas, such as Peckham and Hackney which were also sites of major rioting, the number of people going after each job is over 40. And in almost every seat, this measure has worsened in the last few months.

It won’t get better soon – this year will see unemployment rise to 2.7 million. And young people will face the brunt of it, as they already have. In the quarter to May 2011, the employment rate of working age men in London was lower than the national average, and underwent a “dramatic fall of 0.9 percentage points, while the national rate remained the same.” Almost a quarter of working-age Londoners are economically inactive – 1.3 million people, and of these 397,000 people are aged 16 and over.

And there is an unmistakable race-dimension to class inequality. Black and ethnic minority (BME) groups face the brunt of the impact of economic crisis. Across the UK, BME groups have the highest rates of income-poverty, and in London, more than half of people living in low-income households are from ethnic minorities. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 70 per cent of those in income poverty in inner London are from minority ethnic groups, as are 50 per cent in outer London.

There is an interplay between the wider racial contours of social inequalities and institutional police racism. Despite commendable progress in significant areas, black people are still seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white. Asians are twice as likely to be stopped and searched as white people. More than 30 per cent of all black males living in Britain are on the national DNA database, compared with about 10 per cent of white males and 10 per cent of Asian males. Black men are about four times more likely than white men to have their DNA profiles stored on the DNA database.

Meanwhile, the British government’s flagship ‘Big Society’-inspired policy to support young people amounts to nothing less than ruthlessly slashing youth services, and hoping the ‘market’ – which of course brought us into this economic mess – will magically take care of them. “One in four of England’s youth services face catastrophic cuts of between 21-30 per cent – three times higher than the general level of council cuts”, reports Kerry Jenkins, operations officer of Unite the Unions – a merger between two of Britain’s leading Unions, the T&G and Amicus. “Many authorities intend to get rid of their youth services completely, while 80% of voluntary organisations providing services for young people have said programmes will be cut. Local authority chiefs predict that youth service budgets will be slashed by £100 million, leading to the loss of 3,000 full-time youth worker jobs.”

Indeed, the government was warned. Less than a year ago, Sir Paul Ennals, Head of the National Children’s Bureau, predicted that the combination of unemployment and cuts to services would lead to young people becoming “progressively disengaged from their own communities in a way that we are seeing in France”, which has already seen riots and social unrest “driven by young people who are alienated from their community.”

And as late as 2^nd August – less than a week before the riots – criminologist Professor John Pitts, an advisor to several local authorities on violent crime and youth culture, warned that government cuts would lead to an increase in violent crime this summer.

The Failure of Neoliberal Capitalism

The unprecedented economic crisis, linked to the global political economy’s fundamental breaching of ecological and energy limits, has already generated outbreaks of civil disorder all over the world in different regional and socio-political contexts. In the Middle East, we have seen the Arab spring, triggered by rocketing food prices, driven by a combination of environmental, financial and energy factors. In Europe, we have seen protests and rioting in Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Turkey and France, fuelled by the devastating impact of the global recession. It is only a matter of time before these crisis-conditions catch-up with the United States mainland.

In the UK, converging energy, economic and environmental crises are being refracted through the lens of a deeply unequal, yet vehemently consumerist, society. As Professor Pitts argued in a later interview directly about the riots: “Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future.” Widening social exclusion has pushed these young people onto the margins of conventional morality – “Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.” Entrenched structural inequalities thus generate a sense of justification for looting: “They feel they can rationalise it by targeting big corporations. There is a sense that the companies have lots of money, while they have very little.” Simultaneously, the rioting and violence lacked any progressive content whatsoever – driven by conventional neoliberal values of excessive consumerism, most looters used the opportunity not to challenge capitalism, but to indulge manically in its most materialistic values by simply stealing the items they could not normally afford: “Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all.”

The young people involved in this spate of violence are beyond the conventional alienation of repressed labour. Instead, they suffer from a deeper, more dangerous alienation of being utterly surplus to capitalist requirements, irrelevant and ostracized, and thus doomed to subsist on the margins, functionally illiterate, without hope or aspiration. That is a mode of being which is no longer capable of recognizing ethical constraints or boundaries, precisely because the state has already breached its contract of citizenship to them. The shooting of Mark Duggan, and the underbelly of class and race inequality it followed, was merely a match to a flame that has already burned for too long.

However the government chooses to now respond to the escalating violence, there can be no doubt that the episode represents a fundamental turning-point for British society, in a world that has already passed the tipping point on a whole range of interconnected systemic crises. The danger is that the authorities will offer the traditional, knee-jerk, business-as-usual response of maximizing police state powers, rather than addressing the root causes of our predicament. Of course, robust measures are clearly necessary to contain the violence and hold those responsible accountable. But we are already on the slippery slope of intensifying state-militarization – and we won’t be able to get off as long as we refuse, as societies, to take responsibility for the systemic crises we all now face.

When Innocence is Not Enough: Talha Ahsan and the Rise of the (In)Security State

Published in Ceasefire Magazine

Three days ago was the six year anniversary of the London bombings. The anniversary passed relatively quietly – except for the appalling revelation that News of the World journalists had hacked into the phones of relatives of the 7/7 victims. Curiously, Scotland Yard seemed to have known about the hacking long ago, according to Graham Foulkes, whose son David was killed in the attacks. Further revelations that up to five Metropolitan Police officers had received bribes totalling £100,000 from the paper underscored the extent to which police corruption had facilitated the scandal

Ten days from now comes another anniversary – much less well-known, but nevertheless worthy of our attention – the five year anniversary of the detention without trial of a young British Muslim, Talha Ahsan. I first learned about Talha’s case around 2007, when I went to pick up my father and stepmother from their friend’s house in South London. It was late Friday evening, but I’d managed to find parking near the house.

When the front door opened, I was greeted by a mild-mannered elderly gentleman, Mr. Ahsan. He led me upstairs to where my dad was already seated with his wife, and I was offered tea and a delectable assortment of Indian sweets by Mrs. Ahsan. My dad introduced me as an author and mentioned my then-new book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006), in which I had challenged the British government’s account of its policies before and after the 7/7 terrorist atrocities. The topic immediately struck the interest of our host, and I quickly learned all about what had happened to their son Talha.

Read the rest at Ceasefire...

Water, Oil and Demographics: The Middle East Triple Crisis

Originally published at Europe's World policy journal

Unless Arab governments invest much more in health, education and citizens' rights, warnsNafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the pressures of water scarcity, oil depletion and population growth will spell their downfalls

One in five people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, so it is undeniable that we already face a global water crisis. But water scarcity is not just about its physical availability, it is also about power, poverty and inequality. Japan and Cambodia, for instance, experience about the same average rainfall of 160cm per year – yet while the average Japanese consumes nearly 400 litres per day, the average Cambodian uses only about a tenth of this.

As it is, the converging effects of population growth, climate change and energy depletion look set to make the physical scarcity of water a greater problem than ever. The Middle East and North Africa are particularly vulnerable, accounting as they do for 6.3% of the world’s population but only 1.4% of its renewable fresh water. And three-quarters of the region’s available fresh water is in just four countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Twelve of the 15 most water-scarce nations in the world – with an average of less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person per year – are also to be found in this region, namely Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine. And in eight of these countries, available fresh water is less than 250 cubic metres.

Water consumption in the region is linked overwhelmingly to industrial agriculture. From 1965 to 1997, Arab population growth drove demand for agricultural development, leading to a doubling of land under irrigation. In countries with less agriculture or industry, like Kuwait, water is largely used for domestic purposes.

But demographic expansion in all these countries is set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, a third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women either are or soon will be reaching reproductive age. The Ministry of Defence in the UK has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will have increased by 132%, and that of sub-Saharan Africa by 81%, generating an unprecedented “youth bulge.”

The Water Sector Assessment Report on the Gulf countries expects that the availability of fresh water is likely to halve because of these demographic pressures, and the risk is that this will exacerbate the danger of inter-state conflicts over declining freshwater supplies. Competition to control water has already played a key role in the region's geopolitical tensions, for instance, between Turkey and Syria; Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority; Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia; as well as Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan. A halving of available water supplies due to population growth over the next 20 years could all too easily intensify these tensions and turn them into open military hostilities.

A recent study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) suggests that water scarcity would also trigger social unrest within national borders, because of water’s important cultural and symbolic function in underpinning the social contract in the Arab world. Underground water supplies are being heavily depleted by their use in irrigating deserts, a situation which could exhaust them completely as local populations double or more in size. While economic growth, accompanied by greater urbanisation, migration to urban areas, and higher per capita incomes has been translated into greater demand for freshwater, the population movements that have resulted are now exacerbating local ethnic tensions.

“If the water goes away, then suddenly the whole deal that holds the government together goes away”, warns John Alterman, the CSIS Middle East director. He adds that this could undermine state legitimacy, radicalise ‘identity politics’ and lead to civil disorder and even state-failure. “It is a fundamental problem", he says, "for these governments and the people who live under them.”

Climate change and energy depletion are likely to further amplify these dangers. Many of the region’s irrigation systems are already under environmental strain because of salinity or over-exploitation of groundwater. From 1974 to 2004, the Arab world experienced rises in surface air temperature ranging from 0.2C to 2C, and forecasting models generally project a hotter, drier, less predictable climate that could produce a 20-30% drop in water run-off in the region by 2050, mainly due to rising temperatures and lower precipitation.

As early as 2015, the average Arab will be forced to survive on less than 500 cubic metres of water a year, a level defined as severe scarcity. Shifts in rainfall patterns will certainly affect crops, particularly rice. A "business-as-usual model" for climate change suggests global average temperatures could rise by 4°C by mid-century, and this would devastate agriculture in the Middle East and North Africa, with crop yields perhaps falling by 23-35% with weak carbon fertilisation, or 15-20% with strong carbon fertilisation.

The worldwide cost of infrastructural development capable of responding to the intensifying water crisis could amount to trillions of dollars, and even then the creation of this new infrastructure would itself be energy intensive and would therefore only mitigate the impact of scarcity on richer countries.

Hydrocarbon energy depletion is due to complicate matters even more. In its latest "World Energy Outlook" for 2010 the International Energy Agency (IEA) argued that conventional oil production worldwide most probably peaked in 2006, and is now progressively declining. This conclusion certainly fits the latest production data, which shows that world oil production, has been undulating but gradually declining since around 2005. Yet the IEA also argued that the shortfall will be made up from greater exploitation of unconventional oil and gas sources, albeit at far higher prices because of the greater environmental, energy and extraction costs.

The bad news is that the IEA’s optimism about unconventional sources could be fundamentally misplaced. The six biggest Middle East oil producing countries officially hold around 74bn barrels (Gbs) of proven oil reserves between them. But British geologist Euan Mearns of Aberdeen University notes that published reserve data puts the most likely size of these reserves at only around 350 Gbs. And the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, found in a study for Energy Policy that official world oil reserves had been overstated by up to a third – implying that we are on the verge of a major ‘tipping point’ in oil production. Other studies by Sweden's Uppsala University, Reading and Newcastle Universities in the UK and Boston University in the U.S. suggest that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) of unconventional oil and gas sources, even accounting for technological advances, will be too small to mitigate peak oil.

All this means not only that the era of cheap oil is over, but that within the next decade or so major oil producing countries will increasingly struggle against costly, below-ground geological constraints.

If that proves to be the case, then by 2020, perhaps as early as 2015, the contribution of Middle East oil to world energy consumption could become negligible. That in turn would mean a catastrophic loss of state revenues for what are now the major Arab oil producing countries, rendering them highly vulnerable to the converging impacts of existing water shortages, rapid demographic expansion, climate change induced-droughts and declining crop yields.

This worst-case scenario is not inevitable, but there is only a very short window of opportunity for policies to change the situation. Revising water conservation, management and distribution efforts that have been neglected can reduce water consumption and increase efficiency, but these need to be combined with radical efforts to speed the transition away from oil dependence to a zero-carbon renewable energy infrastructure. Furthermore, concerted investments in health, education and citizens' rights, especially for women, are the key tools for alleviating population growth in the region, and unless Arab governments pursue these policy measures urgently they are unlikely to survive beyond the first quarter of this century.

Diversity Does Not Breed Terrorism - Cameron's Multicultural War (Unabridged Version)

This is the original, unabridged version of my oped published today by the Independent on Sunday

Cameron’s recognition that we should acknowledge the dangers of extremist ideology, and the need to tackle it head-on, is welcome. His call for a social vision that young British Muslims can feel part of, to overcome the sense of rootlessness which can make a minority of them vulnerable to extremist recruitment, makes eminent sense. And his condemnation of the divisive impact of segregated communities, along with state support for groups with backward ideas about women and society, is certainly important – though hardly groundbreaking.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the details. By pinpointing the root cause of terrorism as an amorphous “state multiculturalism”, Cameron reveals that his government’s understanding of the problem is as simplistic as his predecessors.

The actual background of those already convicted on terrorism charges undermines his suggestion that the government should attempt to crack-down on 'non-violent extremists' – an undefined category that could include anyone from climate protestors, to student dissidents, to civil liberties campaigners. Over a third of terrorism convictions between 1999 and 2009, and every single major terrorist plot in the UK including 7/7, were linked to the extremist network formerly known as al-Muhajiroun. Yet despite being proscribed, the network has never been fully investigated by police. Many of its leaders roam free despite a track record of flagrantly inciting to violence, while its spiritual leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, was allowed to escape to Beirut despite confessing to having advanced warning of al-Qaeda plans to bomb London. Worse, the court records of the fertilizer bomb plot trial showed that another individual Mohammed Quayyum Khan, also known as ‘Q’, was an al-Qaeda ‘go-between’ who recruited the leaders of that plot and the 7/7 mission – yet inexplicably remains at large.

As former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus has noted, the fact that al-Muhajiroun had disturbing links with British security services in the Balkans during the late 1990s, as well as with repressive Western client-regimes abroad such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, among others, may well explain this reticence. Our links with militant Islamists during this period was motivated by the desire to use them to access strategic oil supplies in Central Asia and elsewhere, according to whistleblowers like former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds – whose testimony before the 9/11 Commission and U.S. Congress is so embarrassing for the U.S.-led ‘War on Terror’ it has been retroactively classified.

These links are compounded by an interventionist foreign policy programme that has been heavily disfigured under the influence of short-sighted (and self-interested) U.S. geostrategy in the Muslim world. As both internal Home Office and Joint Intelligence Committee reports have conceded, Britain’s unquestioning allegiance to U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and Central Asia has been counterproductive. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, the radicalization of the insurgency has accelerated in direct proportion to NATO’s troop surge, and ceaseless civilian casualties from indiscriminate U.S. airstrikes have inflamed local grievances, while failing utterly to meet even the most elementary requirements of the national interest.

Our U.S.-hijacked foreign policy has also poured fuel on the fire for extremist recruiters at home, who point to our interventionism abroad as ample evidence of an anti-Muslim agenda; which is then made worse by domestic policies that reinforce the structural problems prevailing in many British Muslim communities.

For instance, Cameron overlooks how government policies have intensified British Muslim social exclusion. The dogmatic adherence to neoliberal principles pursued by both Tory and Labour governments, continuing under the coalition regime, have widened inequalities in the UK with debilitating consequences for the working class from both white and ethnic minority communities. Consequently 69 per cent of British Muslims of South Asian background live in poverty, compared to 20 per cent of white people. Meanwhile, questionable and sometimes institutionally racist local authority housing policies have systematically housed white and ethnic minority communities in segregated areas of the same cities. The upshot is that Muslims in Britain are now overrepresented in poor housing, unemployment, low educational achievement, and in prisons.

But Cameron has already been warned that his own economic policies will make this sense of exclusion even worse. As was revealed by equalities secretary Theresa May’s letter of June last year to Chancellor George Osborne, senior ministers are well aware that the coalition’s cuts would likely widen social inequalities, such that “women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and older people will be disproportionately affected.”

Of course, poverty by itself does not cause extremism, but on this scale feeds the sense of a separate identity. Crucially, this even afflicts more upwardly-mobile groups who often remain painfully aware of the unresolved problems in their wider communities. This was revealed in the path-breaking research of Quintan Wiktorowicz – now the White House senior director for global engagement at the U.S. National Security Council. Even more surprisingly, Professor Wiktorowicz, a former academic and author of the book Radical Islam Rising, found from his hundreds of interviews with British Islamists – many linked to al-Muhajiroun – that religious identity is not the root cause of violent radicalization. On the contrary, while very religious Muslims were the most resistant to radicalization, he found that those who did not have a strong grounding in Islam were most at risk of being attracted by Islamist extremism.

Perhaps even more counter-intuitively, despite entrenched social exclusion, studies show that British Muslim communities are largely integrated into British social and cultural life. A 2009 Gallup poll found that while only half the general British population identifies strongly as British, 77 per cent of Muslims in the UK identify very strongly as British, with 82 per cent affirming themselves as loyal to Britain. Although employment levels for British Muslims are at only 38 per cent, British Muslims have a higher confidence in the judiciary than the general public, and 67 per cent of them want to live in a neighbourhood that has a mix of ethnic and religious people – compared to 58 per cent of the general British public

The danger is that by blaming “state multiculturalism”, Cameron is not simply barking up the wrong tree, but undermining the good-will on both sides of the fence. As economic inequalities deepen under the impact of the coalition’s ill-conceived economic prescriptions, social cohesion will be challenged. Meanwhile, his speech will be exploited both by militant Muslims to vindicate their claims that the state is the avowed enemy of Islam, and by far-right extremists to legitimize their vendetta against minority and Muslim communities. Rather than dealing with the root causes of terrorism, this only makes our predicament far more volatile.

By blaming our longstanding celebration of diversity – a uniquely British value that stands us out from our European neighbours – Cameron is targeting precisely the principles that make our country strong. If he really wants to deal with the scourge of Islamist extremism, he would do well to focus on encouraging the authorities to investigate and prosecute individuals linked to groups like al-Muhajiroun who remain at large despite breaking the law; on re-evaluating a U.S.-centric foreign policy that has empowered Islamists abroad who support extremists at home in the name of oil and geopolitics; and on addressing the social problems that working class communities of all ethnic and religious backgrounds are experiencing due to the bankrupt economic policies of successive British governments.

The Great Unravelling: Tunisia, Egypt and the Protracted Collapse of the American Empire

As first published at The Learning Machine

The toppling of dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia in the wake of mass protests and bloody street clashes has been widely recognized as signifying a major transformation in the future of politics and geopolitics for the major countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There is little doubt that the Tunisian experience triggered the escalation of unprecedented protests in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. The question on every media pundit’s lips is, ‘Will events in Tunisia and Egypt have a domino effect throughout the Arab world?’

The potential fall of Hosni Mubarak is serious stuff. As The Economist points out, Egypt is “the most populous country in the Arab world”, viewed by the U.S., Britain and West as “a strategic pivot” and a “a vital ally” in the ‘War on Terror’. No wonder then that activists across the world are holding their breath in anticipation that one of the world’s most notorious dictators, and one of the West’s most favoured client-regimes, might be overthrown.

What is happening in Tunisia and Egypt, however, is only a manifestation of a deeper convergence of fundamental structural crises which are truly global in scale. The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices. As of mid-January, even before Ben Ali had fled Tunis, riots were breaking out in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen and Jordan – the key grievances? Rampant unemployment, unaffordable food and consumer goods, endemic poverty, lack of basic services, and political repression.

Global Food Crisis: 2011

In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the FAO in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production – correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990-2007, compared to 1950-1990.

This year, global food supply chains were again “stretched to the limit” following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.

Climate Change

So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10-20 per cent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent due to climate change alone.

But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern US, east Asia and northern Europe – as the rate of Arctic summer sea-ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El-Nino/La-Nina oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El-Ninos are “plausibly the result of global warming.”

Energy Depletion

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005 – and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises – inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.

Post-Peak Egypt

Indeed, Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 per cent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues. But as Egypt’s oil revenues have steadily declined due to increasing domestic consumption of steadily declining oil, so have food subsidies, leading to surging food prices. Simultaneously, Egypt’s debt levels are horrendous – about 80.5 per cent of its GDP, far higher than most other countries in the region. Inequality is also high, intensifying over the last decade in the wake of neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ reforms – widely implemented throughout the region since the 1980s with debilitating effects, including contraction of social welfare, reduction of wages, and lack of infrastructure investment. Consequently, today forty per cent of Egyptians live below the UN poverty line of less than £2 a day.

Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the MENA countries, now lies on the fault-lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises – and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure. The Empire is crumbling. The guarded official statements put out by the Obama administration only illustrate the disingenuous impotence of the U.S. position.

Imperial Surrogate

While Vice-President Joe Biden insisted that Mubarak is not a dictator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama lamely condemned “violence” and voiced moral support for the right to protest. The slightly muted response is understandable. For the last 30 years, the U.S. has supported Mubarak’s brutal reign with economic and military assistance – currently providing $1.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The U.S. Congressional Research Service reports that additionally:

“Egypt benefits from certain aid provisions that are available to only a few other countries. Since 2000, Egypt’s FMF funds have been deposited in an interest bearing account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and have remained there until they are obligated... Egypt is allowed to set aside FMF funds for current year payments only, rather than set aside the full amount needed to meet the full cost of multi-year purchases. Cash flow financing allows Egypt to negotiate major arms purchases with U.S. defense suppliers.”

The U.S. also happens to be Egypt’s largest bilateral trading partner. It is “one of the largest single markets worldwide for American wheat and corn and is a significant importer of other agricultural commodities, machinery, and equipment.” The U.S. is also the second largest foreign investor in the country, “primarily in the oil and gas sector.”

Perhaps Biden’s denial of Mubarak’s dictatorial qualities are not that difficult to understand. Since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, Egypt has officially been in a continuous “state of emergency,” which under a 1958 law permits Mubarak to oversee measures unnervingly similar to the USA Patriot Act – indefinite detention; torture; secret courts; special authority for police interventions; complete absence of privacy; and so on, ad nauseum. Not to mention the fact that inequality in the U.S. is actually higher than in Egypt.

Friends of the Family

Yet ultimately, the U.S. administration cannot absolve itself. Successive State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Egypt, while still conservative, catalogue the litany of routine police-state repression inflicted on the civilian population over the last decade by Mubarak’s security forces. When asked about the shocking findings of the 2009 report, Clinton herself downplayed the implications, describing Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.” So it is not that we do not know. It is that we did not care until the terror became so unbearable, that it exploded onto the streets of Cairo.

Egypt is central among a network of repressive Arab regimes which the British and Americans have actively supported since the early twentieth century to sustain control of cheap oil “at all costs”, as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd noted in 1956, as well as to protect Israel. Declassified British Foreign Office files reviewed by historian Mark Curtis show that the Gulf sheikhdoms were largely created by Britain to “retain our influence,” while police and military assistance would help “counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves” – particularly from “ultra-nationalist maladies”. The real danger, warned the Foreign Office in 1957, was of dictators “losing their authority to reformist or revolutionary movements which might reject the connexion with the United Kingdom.”

Protracted Collapse

No wonder then that the chief fear of Western intelligence agencies and corporate risk consultants is not that mass resistance might fail to generate vibrant and viable democracies, but simply the prospect of a regional “contagion” that could destabilize “Saudi oil fields.” Such conventional analyses, of course, entirely miss the point: The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unravelling – not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable – already in overshoot of the earth’s natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population.

The solution in Tunisia, in Egypt, in the entire Middle East, and beyond, does not lay merely in aspirations for democracy. Hope can only spring from a fundamental re-evaluation of the entire structure of our civilization in its current form. If we do not use the opportunities presented by these crises to push for fundamental structural change, then the “contagion” will engulf us all.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He is author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), which inspired the forthcoming documentary film, The Crisis of Civilization (2011).

Radio Ecoshock Interview

My interview with Radio Ecoshock, the web's premiere ecologically-oriented radio show, about my new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010). Listen to it here - my bit starts around 30 min in.