Author Archives: Alex Harrowell

About Alex Harrowell

Alex Harrowell is a research analyst for a really large consulting firm on AI and semiconductors. His age is immaterial, especially as he can't be bothered to update this bio regularly. He's from Yorkshire, now an economic migrant in London. His specialist subjects are military history, Germany, the telecommunications industry, and networks of all kinds. He would like to point out that it's nothing personal. Writes the Yorkshire Ranter.

A political group obituary

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As nobody who hasn’t been living in a Faraday cage on Ellesmere Island for the past four days no longer knows, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director and probable next president of the French Republic, has been charged with attempted rape and has been remanded in custody of the New York police. I’m sure the AFOE Whole Control Inter-Macro Economic Soul Patrol will have some thoughts about the future leadership of the IMF in due course. For mine, I’m tempted to think that rudderless confusion is probably the least harmful condition for this organisation, but I know not every reader will agree.

Anyway. What about French politics? That’s bound to be more fun.

The most important fact here is that DSK was predicted by national polls to beat all the other candidates in the next presidential election. The Socialist leadership has been something between a soap opera and a French movie about self-torturing neurotic dread of action for years, but basically everybody expected that once he decided he was going to run, not only would he win the primary, but he’d also take out the general election. The facts are pretty simple – President Sarkozy has the worst poll rating of any French president ever. The extreme-right leader, Marine Le Pen, is doing better than ever. But DSK was both the top pick out of the Socialists, and also the polls’ pick for the big gig.

In fact, there was widespread speculation that the horrible experience of May, 2002 might be reversed. Rather than the extreme Left splitting the vote and leaving a run-off between the extreme Right and the Gaullist Right, the extreme Right would split the vote and leave a run-off between the extreme Right and the Socialists. This scenario was a little like a nuclear attack on Manchester destroying Old Trafford and Maine Road. A lot of people would think it a terrible disaster. But quite a lot of the people most concerned would have to mourn through gritted teeth to keep from laughing with pure schadenfreude.

Who was DSK? An academic economist and long-time Socialist, from a well-off family, one of those men who always seem to come up lucky. He was an effective minister of Finance, Economics, and Industry in the Jospin government, and he presided over possibly the first time the IMF ever thought wages should go up. I remember him wanting to know why the British let General Electric buy the division of Amersham International plc that at the time made practically all the world’s DNA sequencers. I still haven’t heard anyone answer that.

In French politics, he was very much parallel to his contemporary Peter Mandelson in Britain. Both ran economic ministries with some success, and did likewise as international civil servants. Both were considered dangerously foreign to their own parties for a mixture of reasons to do with ideology and with style – both liked the company of the rich and enjoyed good tailoring and better travel. They were certainly both well to the right of their parties, but it was DSK who was responsible for the 35 hours law in France, and the British Labour Party is now rediscovering how little it likes Conservative government in general. They were also both disliked for appearing clever, visibly enjoying cleverness, and repeatedly winning in micro-political squabbles with the journalists who hated them. As is the way with people who are genuinely clever and effective and look like they enjoy it, they were both hated and indispensable to the leaders of their respective movements.

It is probably worth pointing out that they are both Jewish and – much as everyone involved would deny it – this does look like a role grounded in stereotype.

Mandelson collected a lot of fairly horrible abuse from the cheaper end of the British press because (and again, everyone involved will now whine about this) he’s gay. DSK was regularly written up as a stereotypical French ladies’ man, a Latin lover for whom it was all both indivisible from his personality and from the sheer style of politics.

It seems, in the absence of a coup de theatre to blow the theatre roof off, that only one of these statements was true. Women are already turning up who claim that he raped them years ago – most shamefully, one of them was apparently told by her mother to shut up. Her mother is a relatively important official in the PS’s regional organisation for Paris, DSK’s power base throughout his career, and someone who could perhaps have expected favour if and when he was back in power. This week’s Canard Enchainé is likely to be an explosively sordid document.

It would seem that the whole story is the classic one of an abuser protected by his friends, family, and colleagues. The network would say nothing, and indeed would influence others to say nothing, until the day when he pushed his luck outside its zone of influence. At this point, it is usual for a whole lot of people to have sudden and wholly unexpected fits of principle. I would not be surprised if skeletons tumbled from many other French politicians’ cupboards in the next few weeks. If I sound pissed off, well, how many other people were convinced that he was a decent man?

So far, the party and specifically the Ile de France regional federation seems to be…well, check out the list. It is to be expected that a lot of the people named will rapidly forget that the whole thing is a plot against them because Sofitel is a French company. (Surely, had he stayed at the Hilton, that would have been even more suspicious?) I hear that this tone of denial is quite widespread among people who certainly ought to know better.

Upshot? It seems unlikely anyone will be more satisfied with Sarkozy as a result. In fact, only a revolution of opinion would be enough to help much. And Sarkozy’s personal style – all yachts and executive jets and watches and models – is rather like DSK’s. It will probably give Marine Le Pen a little more.

Inside the PS, expect yet more neurosis. DSK’s supporters skew to the right of the party, and he has a particular beef with Laurent Fabius (who in any case isn’t going to win). In the absence of other factors, they’d probably be spread roughly equally between Ségoléne Royal, François Hollande, and Martine Aubry. But there are other factors. Royal and Aubry have defined geographical power bases, Royal from being president of Poitou-Charentes, Aubry from being mayor of Lille. If you had to pick, you’d probably take the second for an intra-party fight. DSK’s support is localised in Paris – it was the only PS federation not to vote for Royal as candidate last time out. Hollande’s base is in the party organisation, from his years as first secretary and therefore chief organiser. It’s fair to say that a lot of his people are also based in the capital, so he might claim more of a bonus than anyone else. He has recently been enjoying an upward trend in the polls.

It is possible that this is an end of an era, or at least a significant moment in moral history. As I said above, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were more disgraces in short order, and that the general tolerance-level will have been reduced to a more defensible value.

Also, the style of French politics is changing. Mitterand is dead, Jacques Chirac is gone. Sarkozy is the least popular president on record. DSK, Laurent Fabius, Charles Pasqua, Simone Veil, Edith Cresson, Rachida Dati, a whole series of enormous and often enormously flawed personalities have left the scene in one way or another. Dominique de Villepin and Alain Juppé hang around, but will either make any impact?

The new style is understated and in fact quite dull. On the Right, there are people like François Fillon and Christine Lagarde – a gang of grey managers. On the Left, people like Hollande and Aubry – solid town hall politicians. Marine Le Pen’s unique selling point is that she makes fascism boring. Her party’s thuggish stewards have been ordered by party headquarters to dispense with their shiny boots and paramilitary trappings, and are said to be exploring British football-casual style for the future. So much the better for the Italian textile sector, so much the worse for Leicester. But perhaps dull is good. It’s worth remembering that dull is great news in the long term of European history. They said Clement Attlee was dull.

And now, for the IMF…

A question that will probably not be answered

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Via Nick Pearce at the IPPR, a fascinating chart of where the recovery ended up.

Germany's recovery: fuelled by sunshine

There’s clearly a fair amount of sunshine in the chart for Germany, although it’s very hard to be optimistic about the UK. But will anyone present anything like this chart for the Portuguese economy? And when people like Volker Wissing talk about imposing their adjustment, what is their estimate for the reduction in the German trade surplus? Take it away, Herr Bofinger:

Anyone who sees this as a virtue must ask themselves whether Germany’s export successes would have been possible if other countries had behaved as “virtuously” as we have. It says a lot about the level of the debate that such simple and fundamental insights are apparently difficult to get across in Berlin.

See also J. Random Weblog.

Die Debatte heute ist für mich an Scheinheiligkeit, Zufriedenheit, und schlichte Verlogenheit kaum zu überbieten.

War aims

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Would it be too cynical to say that, with yesterday’s French close-support air mission, Nicolas Sarkozy’s war aims in Libya have been fulfilled in their entirety? After a string of false starts – such as re-announcing the Union for the Mediterranean, having to dispose of his foreign minister, and sending the amphibious-assault ship Mistral to pick up Egyptian refugees who turned out to have already left by air – he’s finally managed to assert himself. And the Libyan rebels certainly benefited from the air support, probably more than the 110-odd Tomahawks last night. Further, specifically European will and capability have been demonstrated. It’s probably worth noting this UK-French air exercise last week, which may have been a final rehearsal or just as well, a final warning.

Intended, unintended consequence

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Some comic relief. So Viennese property developer Richard Lügner had to face his big decision of the year – who to invite to the Opera Ball. He picked Karima el-Mahroug, the woman who kicked off the latest Berlusconi scandals, herself. Hilarity, of a painfully hypocritical Austrian kind, ensued. Apparently he got on better with her than he did with Grace Jones, who stood him up and went to the U4 nightclub at 222 Schönbrunner Straße instead.

(Consider this a rare AFOE gossip column post.)

Libya: European navies update, and links

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Information Dissemination is worried that the norsouthern shore of the Mediterranean is now “ungoverned territory”. This is surely odd – Egypt and Tunisia have entirely functional governments. Surely it’s Libya that’s gone anarchic? It does tell you something about the rules-of-the-road some people have internalised. If it’s not our dictator it doesn’t count as government, and the answer is a US carrier group.

But it’s not as if the Europeans weren’t active, even though there is hardly a foreign secretary on the continent who isn’t dripping with egg on their faces. NATO’s headquarters in Naples, the former AFSOUTH, is the coordinating authority for Operation Atalanta, but it is also responsible for the NATO Response Force, a sizeable fleet led by a Spanish admiral. An impressive European naval force is already in the area, including two of Italy’s San Giorgio-class assault ships, with the French Mistral due to pass close by on her way to the Indian Ocean – you wouldn’t bet on her making the voyage as planned. Two of Spain’s powerful Galicia-class LPDs are with the NRF and may join at any time.

The danger, of course, is what Adam Elkus describes as the temptation of “discrete military operations”, often prompted by moral shame. (There’s plenty of that to go around.) We already seem to be seeing the effects of Clausewitz’s notion of friction
– the Dutch Lynx crew and, if rumours are accurate, an SAS patrol, have got into trouble, although the problem for the British seems to be diplomatic rather than anything else. It does, however, point out why these operations shouldn’t be lightly undertaken, no matter how long you’ve been planning.

Meanwhile, in order to help keep things in perspective, Libya was reported to be on the brink of civil war over how to execute Gaddafi.

A very special relationship

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One of the defining features, looking back, of the revolution in the Middle East – or will we call it the Southern Mediterranean? – will be just how ugly the relationship between EU and other Western governments and the dictators was. This post from the UK TUC’s policy blog sums it up nicely:

It heralds the collapse of the old EU strategy for the EuroMed region, characterised at the meeting as a mixture of privatisation and migration, or supporting neoliberal economic reforms in ‘stable’, autocratic regimes.

Privatisation and migration – that cuts both ways, of course. The South Mediterranean elites were very well served by this strategy, while an enormous class of underemployed youth built up. On one hand, emigration was a safety valve, reducing the amount of actual violence and repression they needed to use. In that sense, it was a policy that many Mediterranean nations would recognise only too well, especially Italy. But it wasn’t as if the North Mediterranean governments were especially pleased about absorbing the emigrants. While the economic relationship was built on privatisation and migration, the power-political relationship was built on migration and terrorism.

Terrorism is the obvious one – the Southern Med’s security agencies successfully marketed themselves as defenders against an otherwise inevitable take-over by Al-Qa’ida and therefore natural allies for European partner agencies keen to demonstrate their usefulness and alliance commitment to the United States. Migration is less so, but it was another way in which police forces on each side of the Mediterranean cooperated – although it was recognised that people would migrate, the EU was not keen on them coming here, and projects like FRONTEX and NATO’s Operation Atalanta (which straddles both counter-terrorism and migration) put a very significant emphasis on building up military-to-military and police-to-police links.

FBI files are turning up amidst the piles of Viagra, condoms, and firearms in Egypt’s ransacked spook centres. The only conclusion is “Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy night”, as the inevitable, awful revelations start to pour in.

We’ve already had a few, concerning not so much the structure of cross-Mediterranean relations as the personalities. But the personalities and the gossip are an index of the underlying realities. When Michéle Alliot-Marie, successively France’s defence, interior, and foreign minister, spends her holidays with Ben Ali’s crown prince, this should tell us something about the politics of it, and why she made her astonishing offer to help out with those irresponsible rabble outside the Tunisian interior ministry. Tony Blair was perhaps the ultimate exponent of this, supping regularly with both Hosni Mubarak and his North Mediterranean mirror image, Silvio Berlusconi, and encouraging the London School of Economics to do its very best for Gaddafi’s son.

Clearly, it wasn’t just a question of brutal realpolitik, although it was all that. Is it telling that the countries whose governments were most friendly with the South Mediterranean dictators were also the ones with the biggest housing bubbles and – with the exception of the French – the biggest commitment to Iraq?

Now, of course, it’s all become very different.

Panning back to Egypt…

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A couple of weeks ago, the big question had ceased to be “Will there be a revolution in Egypt?” and had become “Will it matter?” The revolutionaries had demonstrated that they could endure, could divide the Army from the government and the security state, and had eventually succeeded in chasing the president out of power. But would this mean lasting change? Wouldn’t it just imply the creation of a new ruling elite, or a permanently-temporary military junta? The grey lineup detailed here were in charge, issuing statements about going back to work. This piece from David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal sketches it out, and reveals far more than it means to.

It’s easy to sketch the scenario in which Egypt blows it. The army could maintain control behind a façade of democracy and protect elites who benefited from the growth produced by significant economic reforms that Mr. Mubarak blessed. Four things have to go right for Egypt to seize the moment.

First, the young protesters of Tahrir Square have to keep the pressure on the military. A lot depends on which way they go. If they’ve been soured by privatization that engorged the cronies, will they demand the security and subsidies of the state over the risks, competition and dynamism that comes with a vibrant private sector? In short, do they want government jobs? Or a shot at being hired—and maybe fired—by an entrepreneurial company?

Of course, the policies those elites benefited from are precisely the ones he goes on to advocate, and the ones that the IMF recommended and Mubarak implemented. Wessel alludes to this further down the piece but never quite manages to say that the Egyptians hated them so much they overthrew the state. Also, although he compares Egypt with Poland after communism, he doesn’t seem to be aware that a major factor in Poland’s revolutions (1981 and 1989) was that the state got huge international loans it couldn’t pay back.

Anyway, so that was one scenario – the military guarantees some constitutional change but keeps the political economy and the power-structure Mubarak left.

It doesn’t seem to be working. Mohammed Fadel has a good rundown of the Army’s (and the Muslim Brothers’, and the 2005-era middle class dissidents’) efforts to put pressure on strikers, their eventual failure, and some of the economic ideas circulating among the revolutionaries. Apparently, the military has eventually been induced to open talks with the real trade union movement as opposed to the yellow unions that were part of Mubarak’s system. You can read their negotiating position at guess who’s.

But perhaps the best news of all isn’t economic. Here’s some incredible reportage of an incredible and very significant event – the crowds take over the headquarters of Central Security in Alexandria, and start salvaging the secret files the spooks were trying to destroy.

I wouldn’t bet on the holy-of-holies in Cairo lasting much longer – Hossam el-Hamalawy has already been down to his local station with his Canon EOS 5D and his angry mob. Guess what, that’s full of files as well.

In 1989, something similar happened – when it looked like the post-Wall East German government might be stabilising, and that it felt confident enough to tell the public that it was going to retain the Stasi although under a new name, people invaded the organisation’s offices to secure the key assets of any secret police force, the files. It was the end, really; there could be no more hoping for some sort of patched-up afterlife for the basic structure of the DDR. This time there was much more violence, and the spook toys included a sinisterly large stash of Viagra – the Stasi did a fair amount of drug dealing as part of its efforts to raise hard currency, but nothing with those implications.

There probably weren’t many documents like this one in the files at the Normannenstraße either.

The upshot includes the resignation of Mubarak’s last prime minister. In an almost uncanny echo of East Germany, he went on TV not long before the crowds moved into the secret police stations, to defend the institution of Central Security. Just like Hans Modrow did, and with exactly the same effect. His exit was announced via the Egyptian Army’s facebook profile.

His replacement is profiled here – Essam Sharaf, significantly, is both a candidate endorsed by the revolutionaries and a participant in the revolution himself, as well as apparently enjoying a good reputation with the workers’ movement as far back as 2006.

And it’s one jet airliner, for ten prisoners…

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One thing that is perhaps being overlooked by people discussing whether or not it would be wise to impose a no-fly zone over Libya is exactly what such a zone would set out to prevent. When it was first suggested, it was inspired by the general horror that the Libyan government was having crowds of civilians strafed by its Sukhoi 22 close-support aircraft. However, especially since several Libyan Air Force crews defected to Malta and to the revolution, air activity has turned out to be much less significant in what is beginning to look like a classical West- or Central-African civil war, based around Toyota pickups and 23mm Russian anti-aircraft guns and mercenaries paid with the money from exporting some mineral or other. You know the one.

It’s fairly well known that Libya sponsored several of the key warlords of 90s West Africa – Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, and several others originally met up in Libyan-funded training camps. Interestingly, not only did one of the versions of Jetline International base itself in Tripoli and trade aircraft back and forth with two of Viktor Bout’s companies, but Gaddafi’s government maintains an impressive airlift capacity. As well as the two flag-carrier airlines, Libyan Arab and Afriqiyah, whose names track the changing priorities of foreign policy, the Air Force operates a semi-commercial cargo wing, Libyan Arab Air Cargo, with a fleet of Ilyushin 76 and even two enormous Antonov-124s, some of very few such aircraft owned outside the former Soviet Union.

I’ve put together a Google spreadsheet of transport-type aircraft with Libyan operators, sorted so that currently active aircraft are at the top, and generated URIs to look them up on Aerotransport.org, for subscribers, and on JetPhotos.net, in the two right hand columns.

There are a total of 180 airframes, of which 118 are active. It’s probably worth noting that there was a report that top managers at Afriqiyah had resigned rather than take part in Gaddafi’s war effort, and constant rumours of mercenaries being lifted into airfields in the southern deserts.

The upshot of this is that logistics, rather than tactical air power, might be the most important factor in Gaddafi’s efforts to defeat the Libyan revolution/win the Libyan civil war. Rather than engaging in combat, the aim might instead be blockade, as a complement to the international financial sanctions already in place. (A ship has recently been stopped in British waters carrying large quantities of freshly printed Libyan currency.)

On the other hand, it also adds complexity and risk to the whole issue. There are still plenty of people who want to leave Libya, and British government-chartered airliners are ferrying some of them from Tunisia to Egypt. It would be a bad business, to say the least, to shoot down an Il-76 full of refugees. It could be better to try to cut off the supply chain at source by grounding Libyan aircraft elsewhere in the world, although this requires the cooperation of those states who are still willing to let them recruit on their territory. Further, imposing a blockade also implies a responsibility for the survival of the civilian population. Sending aid to eastern Libya has already been suggested, of course.

For a little extra, the Russian Demography blog, venturing well out of its usual beat, notes that the Libyan Government’s Dassault Falcon 900EX business jet, 5A-DCN, took a trip to Minsk recently. Its ICAO identifier, useful with virtual-radar sites, is 018019. There are various things the regime might find useful in Belarus – mercenaries, again, small arms (although they don’t appear to be short of them), and perhaps least disturbingly, impunity. (Hat tip.)

(Cross posted from TYR)

épuration, crowdsourced

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I’m not sure what either Ethan Zuckerman or Evgeny Morozov would make of this, but this is quite the revolutionary web crowdsourcing project. Piggipedia is an effort by Egyptian Flickr users to pool their photos from the revolution and identify the plain-clothes cops and private thugs responsible for the worst of the violence, with a view to prosecuting them or failing that, just ostracising the hell out of them. I presume this is also going to be a rare deployment outside China of the human flesh search engine. If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does.

The most useful article you’ll read on Egypt this week

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Is here. How did we get to the position where the red flag and the desert eagle were suddenly back ahead of the star and crescent? How do the Muslim Brothers and other Islamists interact with the Left? Where did those people come from?

As a Revolutionary Socialist member who was active in the 1990s recalls: “We were a kind of leftist the Muslim Brothers hadn’t met before. They couldn’t quite figure us out at the beginning. Anyway, we were still too marginal for them to bother with. We were only a few individuals.” This began to change in 1999. On a few occasions in that year, as one socialist remembers, the Muslim Brotherhood students at Cairo University allowed the Revolutionary Socialist students to speak at rallies held on campus against the US airstrikes on Iraq. The socialist students took this unprecedented opportunity as a sign of the Muslim Brothers’ recognition that they were a force that had to be given a place on the political stage. It was a step in a long, slow process of building trust.