Terrorism (state and retail)

After baseless allegations from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that the Russian government was behind a hack of the DNC’s emails, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sarcastically quipped that he hoped Russia would find and release the deleted emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server from her time as secretary of state. The New York Times failed to note the sarcasm and treated the comments as evidence of high crimes against the state.

The Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in fact, served as the Hillary Clinton Coronation Organizing Committee, operating, step by step, to ensure that the front-runner would become the party’s nominee.

When it comes to voting red or blue, there is an optimism that compels us to approach presidential elections like a football rivalry between two teams. And, equally as bad, there is a cynicism that makes fueling our two-piston political engine seem logical—not because it is optimal, but simply because it runs. But if neither optimism nor cynicism are on our side at such a critical juncture in the timeline of our democracy, what can we do?

I visited Iraq in 1999. At the time, there were no so-called ‘jihadis’ espousing the principles of ‘jihadism’, whatever the interpretation may be. On the outskirts of Baghdad was a military training camp, not for al-Qaeda, but for Mojahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian militant exile group that worked, with foreign funding and arms, to overthrow the Iranian Republic.
At the time, the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used the exiled organization to settle scores with his rivals in Tehran, just as they, too, espoused anti-Iraqi government militias to achieve the exact same purpose.

But if they incline to peace, you (also) incline to it, and (put your) trust in Allah. Verily, He is the All-Hearer, the All-Knower.
— The Noble Qur’an, Al-Anfal, 8.61

Jihad
The most excellent Jihad is that for the conquest of self.
The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.
– Sayings of the Prophet

To initiate a war of aggression…, said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

The banners and placards outside London’s Queen Elizabeth 11 Conference Centre – where the findings of the seven year awaited Chilcot Inquiry into the Blair government’s illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq were to be revealed – reflected an anger undiminished since maybe two million people marched against the war in the city on February 15th, 2003. Thirty six million are estimated to have demonstrated across the world.

Photo courtesy of Judith Gilles
On October 10, 2015, over 100 Turkish activists were killed by twin explosions at a peace rally in Ankara, the country’s capital. Three months later, 10 were killed in a popular tourist area in Istanbul. Then 28 in a military convoy. Then 37 in a public square. Then 4 in Istanbul. Then 11 in Istanbul. Then 45 in Istanbul.

The Chilcot report’s “findings” have virtually all been part of the public record for a decade, and it avoids key pieces of evidence. Its recommendations are essentially to continue using war as a threat and a tool of foreign policy, but to please try not to lie so much, make sure to win over a bit more of the public, and don’t promise any positive outcomes given the likelihood of catastrophe.

The much-edited Chilcot Report finally arrived and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has issued a pretty-sounding apology for his party’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. He called it the most serious foreign policy calamity of the last 60 years and “a stain on our party and country”.