Uri Avnery on the blockade of Gaza

Once again, Uri Avnery nails it:

"It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place."

"The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair."

And on the "defence" of Sderot:

"WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.

What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.

Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.

A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations and the blockade.

Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?

Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.

Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas - because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance - than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence."

Read the rest here. And see also Tony Karon's "Hamas Blows a Hole in Bush's Plans"

Friday Quiz

Folks, its the Democrat's Diary Friday quiz.

Q. Which radical leftist, anti-Israel, probably anti-semitic apologist for Islamofascism made the following abhorrent statements yesterday?

(a) Israel's siege of Gaza is "wrong" and "...illegal. Targeting a civilian population is prohibited by international law: there is no debate to be had about it";

(b) The attempt to isolate Hamas should end immediately, Hamas should be brought back into a power-sharing government with Fatah, and the two should both participate in talks leading to "a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with east Jerusalem as its capital"; and

(c) "Only when that is achieved should Hamas, and all Arab countries, be required to recognise Israel – an Israel with fixed borders, not the moving frontiers it keeps pushing into occupied Palestinian land." [my emphasis]

A. Why, it was the radical leftist, anti-Israel, anti-semitic, Islamofascist-apologist ...er.... Financial Times of course.

Hmmm, those radical leftist, anti-Israel, anti-semitic, Islamofascist-apologists get everywhere don't they?

Hey, maybe...

...oh, never mind.

Israel defends itself

The spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London says that his government's blockade of the Gaza strip is justified on grounds of self-defence.

By what obscene moral logic does he believe that it is possible to starve children in ‘self-defence’?

Gaza: collective punishment is a serious crime

Last month, the UN reported on the tragic and deteriorating situation in Gaza, which is under blockade from Israel, backed by the US and the EU (which of course includes us in the UK).

Here's a short summary of the key points.

"[The blockade is] having devastating consequences for the population and local economy and the livelihoods of the people of Gaza"

"[Since Israel intensified the blockade in June 2007:]

• More Gazans than ever need food and direct assistance
• Fuel shortages have threatened essential services and water supply
• Life-saving treatments are not available in Gaza’s hospitals
• Baby milk, medicines, and cooking oil are increasingly scarce
• Hundreds of businesses have gone bankrupt due to ban on imports/exports"

"If the closures are not eased, the UN predicts the need for food and direct assistance will sharply rise above and beyond the current level of 80 per cent of the population."

"anything other than the most basic goods and foods [have been put] beyond the buying power of a large portion of the population"

"All sections of the population have been affected by a reduction in fuel supplies which undermines the delivery of essential services"

"[the World Food Programme] estimates that only approximately 41 per cent of humanitarian and commercial food import needs were met between 1 October and 4 November 2007"

"of the 62 per cent of households who stated a drop in spending, 93.5 per cent cut back on food buying overall"

"eight out of ten households [live] below the poverty line [compared to 63.1 per cent before Hamas came to power and the blockade began]. Of these, 66.7 per cent of Gazan households are living in deep poverty, i.e. on less than 1,837 NIS or US$474 per month"

"The standard of healthcare in the Gaza Strip is deteriorating rapidly. The majority of diagnostic laboratory equipment, for example MRI and x-ray equipment, at Ministry of Health facilities are no longer functioning"

"The Palestinian economy has been .... heading towards collapse since January 2006, following the economic restrictions imposed on the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the election of Hamas to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC)."

"More than 75,000 workers out of approximately 110,000 employed by the private sector have been temporarily laid off because of the impact of the closures"

"Nearly 90 per cent of all industrial establishments (3,500 out of 3,900) have shut down since mid-June 2007, either temporarily or permanently, including the most significant factories located at Karni Industrial Zone"

"Nearly all public infrastructure and maintenance projects including foreign aid projects, private constructions and ministerial and municipal projects have been halted due to the closure of factories and the lack of building materials. The construction and maintenance of roads, water and sanitation infrastructures, medical facilities, schools and housing/re-housing projects are on hold. The combined value of UN and private sector construction projects presently at a standstill is estimated at more than US$370 million, with tens of thousands of contractual labourers put out of work"

"For the last six months, virtually no agricultural exports have been allowed out of the Gaza Strip. The sector provides permanent and temporary jobs for more than 40,000 Gazans (representing 12.7 per cent of the labour force) and generates livelihoods for a quarter of the Gazan population"

All this is the intended result of Israeli policy, backed by the US and the EU. The policy is collective punishment, a war crime under international law, as Juan Cole notes.

That is to say that when Gazan infants go without baby milk, its part of Israeli government policy. When sick Gazan children die preventable deaths due to the denial of treatment or medicine, its part of Israeli policy. When Palestinian mothers are reduced to scouring rubbish dumps to find enough food to feed their children just once a day, its part of Israeli policy. Israel is responsible for the predictable consequences of its actions.

Israel says the blockade is a response to Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. But those rockets aren't fired by children, babies, mothers, the elderly, the sick and infirm, i.e. those who are bound to suffer the most from an economic blockade. Israel knows this very well. Israel is responsible for the predictable consequences of its actions.

The UN notes that "between 1 January and 30 November 2007, 1204 Qassam rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, resulting in 96 Israeli injuries and two Israeli deaths." Well in just the past week the Guardian reports that "nearly 40 Palestinians have been killed ... , at least 10 of them civilians" by the Israeli military.

And setting aside Israeli violence, how many Palestinians have died, been injured or otherwise suffered serious physical consequences since January 2006 as a result of the poverty, the lack of food and medicine caused by the blockade? A blockade, lets not forget, put in place initially because of an election result - that is to say, legitimate non-violent political activity.

The killing of Israeli civilians is 100 per cent unjustifiable. But it is obscene to use those 2 deaths and 96 injuries as a rationalisation for the systematic crushing of 1.4 million people, the vast majority of whom are innocent of any crime.

Moreover, it is naive at best to suggest that these Israeli atrocities are merely a response to Palestinian behaviour. These Israeli actions fit into a long established pattern of collective violence against the Palestinian people. As the Observer notes, "Israel's policy [in response to the Hamas election victory] was summed up by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, earlier this year ['06]. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' he said. The hunger pangs are supposed to encourage the Palestinians to force Hamas to change its attitude towards Israel or force Hamas out of government."

Yes, Palestinian babies must feel "hunger pangs" - or rather, suffer acute malnourishment - so they will know better than to have parents who vote for people that the Israeli government doesn't like. (By the way, how does the Israeli government know if the malnourished child's parents voted for Fatah?)

As for Weisglass' disingenuous suggestion that these actions were "not to make them die of hunger", it would be interesting to know what results a scientific survey into excess deaths in Gaza since the January 2006 elections might produce. According to UNICEF, almost a million Iraqis (around one in 25 of the population) were killed by sanctions in the 1990s, most of them infant children. Its hard to image that the Iraq sanctions were any more punitive in effect than the current regime imposed on Gaza. One twenty-fifth of the Gazan population equals around 56,000. Not a scientific calculation by any means, but chilling that we can even credibly consider such numbers.

One can go back further. In the 1970s, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan said that since Israeli rule over the territories is "permanent", Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the territories "that we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads". The fact is that the Palestinians have always been treated by the Israeli government as sub-human pests, complicating the grand project of a Jewish state. The current atrocities, though sickening, are hardly shocking when placed in the historical context. This is not a "response". It is standard Israeli practise.

The reason to focus on Israeli crimes is not an abstract one. When our governments back Israel in its crimes then those crimes become our crimes as well. Our first task therefore is to address our own complicity. A British government that was serious about human welfare, human rights, the rule of law in international affairs - let alone one with the remotest conception of basic standards of morality - would do the following, at a minimum:

• suspend arms sales to Israel immediately;
• pledge direct aid from the UK to aid agencies in Gaza. Work internationally to secure other donors;
• use its position in the EU to push for a withdrawal of all support for Israel's blockade of Gaza;
• summon Israel's ambassador to the Foreign Office and tell him in no uncertain terms that there will be a steady escalation of consequences in respect of downgrading trade and diplomatic links so long as these atrocities continue; and
• raise the subject of Israeli atrocities immediately at the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, leading an effort of international pressure on Israel.

The siege of Gaza is one of the West's great international crimes of the moment. More needs to be done to publicise its realities and put pressure on Israel and its supporters in the West to end the blockade.

Guardian coverage of Venezuela: time for a change

The following is an email sent to the International Editor of the Guardian.

**********

Dear Harriet [cc:Rory Carroll]

I'm writing to express some serious concerns about the Guardian's coverage of Venezuelan politics over the past year.

My concerns are not necessarily due to your correspondent's obvious personal dislike for the Caracas government - he is of course entitled to his views - but for his consistant failure to put those views to one side and provide the straightforward and balanced representation of the facts that we are otherwise generally used to seeing on the Guardian's news pages.

For example, in his latest report ("Cheap and cheerful: Venezuelans cling to right for petrol at 42p a tank" - 18/1/08) Rory Carroll offers one quote from a Venezuelan citizen saying that "If it gives us nothing else, at least the government lets us have our own petrol this cheap". Carroll surely knows that the Venezuelan government has used oil revenues to provide free healthcare and education, as well as subsidised food, to the poor of Venezuela. But this is ignored, and the claim that the government "gives us nothing" goes unbalanced.

Indeed, it has to be said that (apart from in the case of recent inflation) Carroll's reporting has focused remarkably little on the situation of the poor in Venezuela, preferring his dispatches to instead consist of tiresomely regular sideways glances at the personality of the President.

For example, Chavez is repeatedly referred to as a "self-styled" revolutionary, leading a "self-styled" revolution. Those who know Venezuela describe the Caracas government as the product of a broad and deep grassroots social movement born of the iniquities of Venezuela's history. I would hope to learn something about such phenomena in the Guardian. Instead, one is given the impression that the 'Bolivarian revolution' is simply the transient and unfortunate product of one man's eccentricities.

Carroll begins his 18/1 report by juxtaposing the 'real world' (1st para) with Venezuela (2nd para), which is very much of a piece with a regular theme of his; that the government (particularly Chavez) is slightly loopy. The intellectually defective nature of the government would perhaps explain Chavez's "already dwindling support", as described by an expert that Carroll quotes. The expert provides no evidence for this assertion, but we do know that a recent Latinobarómetro poll gave the Venezuelan government an approval rating of 66%, ranking the country 1st in Latin America, where the average was 39%. It seems strange that Carroll let the expert's comment stand without mentioning this.

Stranger and perhaps more troubling, is an episode last year where in two articles Carroll told readers that Chavez (a "self-described communist" - report dated 11/1/07) planned to turn Venezuela into a traditional Soviet state, and claimed that Chavez had publicly "declared himself a communist"(report dated 15/1/07).

I emailed Carroll to ask for a direct quote on this latter point and he suggested I'd find one in a transcript of the Presidential inauguration speech. I found the transcript. No quote. When challenged with this in a subsequent email, Carroll insisted that Chavez had called himself a communist “on television” and that “millions of Venezuelans” heard him. Yet still couldn't summon up a quote.

Then a few months later, in an article on Che Guevara co-written by Carroll (4/9/07), we were quietly told that these days "Not even Mr Chávez, the reddest tinge in the pink tide, advocates communism". Interesting that just a few months previously Carroll had repeatedly insisted in print and in correspondence with me that Chavez had publicly "declared himself a communist" and that “millions of Venezuelans”, and Carroll, had heard him.

Needless to say that I found this episode puzzling, to put it generously.

Whatever one thinks of what is happening in Venezuela, we can at least agree that it is interesting. The democratic government of a third world country - in Washington's self-claimed "backyard" - is openly defying the economic and political demands both of a superpower and of the western style of "globalisation" more generally. It is also making an undoubted effort to seriously tackle poverty, achieving some notable successes. One would hope that the Guardian, of all papers, would take up such an important story in an substantive, critical and balanced fashion. Sadly, only one of those elements appears to be in play at present, and not even in a way that one can take entirely at face value, apparently.

This is a great shame, and I do hope that something can be done about it.

With best wishes

David Wearing

Gaza: the casualties of propaganda

If you were to rely on the Western media you would think that Israel's recent military attacks on the Gaza strip had been "precision strikes" on "militants". The importance of the corrective that can be offered by taking a glance at the non-western media is striking. In this powerful and vitally important report, Al Jazeera makes the simple point, ignored in the west, that it is impossible to launch "precision strikes" on one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Civilians - women and children - will inevitably be maimed or killed, and those ordering the strikes do so in the full knowledge that this will happen.

You might also think, if you were relying on the Western media, that Israel was simply "responding" to Palestinian terrorism, the standard portrayal of the conflict. Tim Llewellyn, BBC Middle East correspondent for 10 years, is clear in his view of the coverage:

"In my judgment as a journalist and Middle East specialist, the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is shown, most especially on mainstream bulletins, as a battle between two 'forces', possessed equally of right and wrong and responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.

That 37 years of military occupation, the violation of the Palestinians' human, political and civil rights and the continuing theft of their land might have triggered this crisis is a concept either lost or underplayed. Nor are we told much about how Israel was created, the epochal dilemma of the refugees, the roots of the disaster."

Llewellyn cites "hard evidence to support these views, gathered by Greg Philo and his Glasgow University Media Group, who have monitored and analysed four separate periods of BBC and ITN coverage between late 2000 and the spring of 2002. [They make] the scientifically based case that the main news and current affairs programmes - with the rare exception, usually on Channel 4 - are failing to tell us the real story and the reasons behind it. They use a distorted lens.

The result is that the Israelis have identity, existence, a story the viewer understands. The Palestinians are anonymous, alien, their personalities and their views buried under their burden of plight and the vernacular of 'terror'."

I'm going to quote this at length because its crucial to our understanding of what's happening now in Gaza.

"Cause and effect, the Philo team finds, are misreported. Why does the 'cycle of violence' start, for example? In October 2002, the BBC repeatedly referred to the killing of the Israeli tourist minister as the reason for Israeli army reprisals against Palestinian towns and villages. It did not mention the fact that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had killed the minister in reprisal for the Israeli assassination of its leader.

As Philo shows, the cycle is always shown as Palestinian attack and Israeli reprisal. Broadcasters consistently fail to suggest that it might be the military occupation that engenders armed resistance, or that Israeli actions may be such as to provoke Palestinian violence. The study finds that the daily despairing and degrading consequences of living under military occupation are rarely reported.

And while there is constant reference to Israeli security and Israel's right to exist, there is little mention of Palestinians' security or their right to exist.

A former news agency bureau chief, based in Jerusalem, sums it up: '[British TV] cover the day-to-day action but not the human inequities, the essential imbalances of the occupation, the humiliations of the Palestinians.' He also quotes a BBC journalist, who tells him TV centre does not want 'explainers... it's all bang-bang stuff'"

The results are predictable:

"...of groups of British students interviewed in 2001 and 2002 only about 10 per cent knew it was Israel that occupied Palestine - most believed the Palestinians were the settlers and it was they who occupied Israel. In 2002, only 35 per cent of the British students questioned knew that the Palestinians had suffered far greater casualties than the Israelis.

This ignorance among people who rely on TV for their information about the world is not surprising: Bad News reveals that between 28 September and 16 October 2000 BBC1 and ITN devoted 3,500 lines of text to the crisis in Israel/Palestine - 17 of which were devoted to the history of the conflict."

We collectively ‘forget’, therefore, that it is Israel that is the aggressor, and that the root of the conflict is Israeli theft of Palestinian land, Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Israel's serial and extensive abuse of the Palestinian civilian population as a whole. Instead the story is reversed. Israel's ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, is able to say with a straight face that Israel is a "democracy under attack", even as his government starves the people of Gaza (women, children, everyone) as punishment for voting the wrong way in an election.

As long as this distorted picture holds sway, and the British media effectively aids the Israeli propaganda effort, Britain can continue to provide military, diplomatic and political support for Israel's brutal crushing of innocent people - support that I do not believe could be provided if people in this country understood the reality of the situation. The costs of the misinformation is paid, not by us, but by the people of Gaza. In September 2006, just 9 months into the blockade, the Independent reported that Palestinian mothers had been reduced to scouring rubbish dumps to find enough food to feed their children just once a day. Can we begin to imagine what has been endured by those families - families like ours - in the 16 months that have passed since then? The extent to which they continue to suffer and die under Israel's boot will largely be determined by the extent to which the media continues effectively aid the Israeli propaganda effort, and misinform western publics about the reality of what we are responsible for.

Did the US aim to make Iraq a democracy?

The following is an email to Helen Boaden, director of BBC News, and "Newsnight" diplomatic editor Mark Urban. It discusses Urban's saying on "Newsnight" that the US invasion was in part about spreading democracy in the Middle East, for which Urban has drawn criticism from some in the anti-war movement. The point I wanted to make below was that, yes, Washington planners probably did, in their own minds, take the view that they were "democratising" Iraq, but the reality of US policies meant that in practise they were doing the opposite. Bottom line: the Iraqis were being made subjects to a new master, not being liberated to act as free agents.

**********************

Dear Helen and Mark

I've followed with interest your recent correspondence with viewers regarding the question of whether or not the US aimed to export democracy to Iraq. In my view its a shame that the debate has been reduced to a question of either/or since that tends to obscure the important issues at stake here. I think the real point is that one needs to acknowledge the problematic nature of the US claims, and some of the nuances involved, rather than saying the claims were either utterly true or utterly false.

You're right to acknowledge that the US planned to leave in place an Iraqi government that was legitimised by some form of electoral system. But the bottom line was that this government should be friendly to US strategic interests. The US therefore set about engineering a "democracy" that would lead to this outcome. Of course you don't need me to point out that there's a dissonance between this and the idea of democracy that you and I have; i.e. where the population governs its affairs according to its own wishes, without the manipulations of a foreign power.

Mark in particular will be aware that, shortly after the 2003 invasion, forms of local government, often democratic, began springing up all over Iraq, and that these were systematically stamped out by the CPA, which was alarmed to see Iraqi self-rule evolving under indigenous control in a way that might not suit US interests. Michael Knights and Ed Williams touched on this briefly in their report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy entitled "The Calm Before The Storm"[pdf].(see pg 12).

Many gains for genuine democracy and popular sovereignty were actually prised from Washington's hands by the Iraqis themselves. For example, it was Sistani - backed by huge demonstrations in January 2004 - who insisted that any permanent Iraqi constitution should be written by people elected to do so, and that all future Iraqi governments should be elected on the basis of one-person one-vote. The US had been planning all sorts of stage-managed wheezes - like caucuses hand-picked by the CPA - to ensure that the process of "democracy-building" could be as US-managed as possible. Bush was apparently furious about having to give in to Sistani's demands, but faced with popular anger in Iraq he was left with no choice.

Consider also that under US plans, Iraq's principle source of revenue would be tied up in production-sharing agreements with Western oil firms, and that its army would be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US military, which would retain massive permanent bases around the country. Then there's the fact that the US is building the largest embassy in the world - nearly as big as Vatican City - in the heart of Baghdad. You have to ask whether Iraq can be truly sovereign under these circumstances, how much less sovereign it would have been if Washington had kept its grip on the political process, and whether a country that - at the behest of a foreign power - is only allowed the formal trappings of sovereignty can be called "democratic" in any meaningful sense of the term.

I have no doubt that Washington planners sincerely believed that what they had planned for Iraq could accurately be described as "democracy". But clearly that judgement - that conception of democracy - was a highly questionable and unfamiliar one. It seems that no one in Washington contemplated an Iraq that was 100 per cent owned by the Iraqi population and completely free to make its own choices irrespective of how these may impact upon US interests. Washington's plans were to make the new Iraq a subject nation; not a free one. That much is plain.

Of course, its hard to express this in a sentence, as you must when filing your reports. All I ask is that you don't simply say that the US aimed to make Iraq democratic, since obviously that gives the viewer the sense that the US intended to make Iraq a free country, and that is a good deal less than true. There needs to be an acknowledgement of the reality of the US role; of its aim to assume de facto sovereignty over Iraq in pursuit of its geo-strategic interests. That's the essence of the whole Iraq story, as far as the US aims are concerned. And I think its certainly true that the BBC has not reflected this well in its coverage, sad to say.

Thanks to you both for taking the time to read this. I do hope it influences how you approach this story in the future.

Very best wishes

*****

For more on this topic, see my "Iraqi Democracy and the Limits of Western Idealism" from March 2006.

***********

Postscript - 22 January 2008.

Just received a belated response from Helen Boaden. Simply reads "Thank you for this thoughtful email", which is nice. Remains to be seen whether my thoughts will influence future coverage, but one lives in hope.

Bhutto and Pakistan: moderate martyrs and other myths

Reinhold Niebuhr - a man who in his time beat that well-worn intellectual path from the authoritarian left to the authoritarian right - argued that since "rationality belongs [only] to the cool observers", "the stupidity of the average man" meant that the former should spoon-feed the latter with "emotionally potent oversimplifications" to render the dim proletarian docile and pliant. To this day, the Western power-centres to whom Niebuhr gravitated employ those same "emotionally potent oversimplifications" in shaping public discourse to suit their interests. Understanding and challenging power means being able to identify and pick apart those rhetorical devices wherever they arise.

Reacting to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that the Pakistan People's Party leader had been "assassinated by cowards afraid of democracy" adding that "terrorists must not be allowed to kill democracy in Pakistan". US President George Bush said "The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy". French President Nicholas Sarkozy said that "terrorism and violence have no place in the democratic debate and the combat of ideas and programmes". The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh said that "the subcontinent has lost an outstanding leader who worked for democracy and reconciliation in her country". A simple narrative was affirmed and reinforced through repetition by one august commentator after another: Bhutto = moderation and democracy, as opposed to its evil antagonist "extremism", which much not be allowed to prevail.

Brown was of course right to say that "Benazir Bhutto was a woman of immense personal courage and bravery. Knowing as she did the threats to her life, and the previous attempt at assassination [she had nevertheless returned to Pakistan]". Bhutto's killing can only be lamented, for the tragedy of the loss of her life and those others killed in the attack, for the tragedies of those deaths that followed in the ensuing violence, and for all the resulting suffering that has yet to come. But the simplistic presentation of Bhutto as a martyr to liberalism, "moderation" and democracy, who died fighting "extremists", cannot be accepted. For one thing it is, at the least, an extremely problematic oversimplification. But more importantly, since we in the West are active participants in Pakistan's ongoing crisis, misunderstandings of this situation on our part will continue to result in policy choices that negatively impact on the people of Pakistan in the future. It is no exaggeration therefore to say that lives depend on us dispensing with "emotionally potent oversimplifications" and instead turning our attention to the facts.

The moderate vs extremist dichotomy obscures far more than it explains. William Dalrymple notes that the grip on power exerted by the feudal landowning classes of which Bhutto was a member has done as much as religious extremism or the role of the army, if not more, to undermine democracy in Pakistan: "real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge". Dalrymple quotes "writer Ahmed Rashid [saying that]: 'In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.'"

"Benazir was the person", Dalrymple continues "who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy, really a form of 'elective feudalism', into disrepute [which in turn] helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists....[who] successfully depict [the feudal elite] as rich, corrupt, decadent and Westernised...During her government, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, widely known as 'Mr 10 Per Cent', faced allegations of plundering the country. Charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts."

From the highest offices of desperately poor Pakistan, hundreds of millions were apparently swindled. While most of her compatriots languished in destitution (between 1995 and 2000, 38 per cent of Pakistani children under 5 were underweight), Bhutto - "a feudal princess with [an] aristocratic sense of entitlement" - lived in the vast surrounds of "a giddy, pseudo-Mexican ranch [where] crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room", quoting Dalrymple. For himself, Zardari acquired a £4.3 million estate in Surrey, which could no doubt have bought one or two square meals for the malnourished infants of Pakistan.

In power, Dalrymple notes, "Amnesty International accused [Bhutto's] government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture". More sinister still are allegations made by many, including her niece, and detailed in Tariq Ali's recent article for the London Review of Books, that Bhutto was involved in the murder of her own brother, who had become a political rival.

Nor should it be forgotten that it was under Bhutto that the Pakistani military and intelligence services helped bring the vicious Taliban government into power in neighbouring Afghanistan, as an exercise in Pakistani power-projection. Bhutto's was one of only a handful of world governments to recognise the "extremist" regime. All in all, the picture of Bhutto the moderate democrat - a latter-day martyr to secularism and modernity - begins to look a little thin under close examination.

As Barnett Rubin - a leading expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan - noted earlier this week: "The Bush administration [and this also applies to many other Western governments, intellectuals and commentators] has decided that in the "Muslim world" a battle is going on between pro-American "moderates" and anti-American "extremists." According to them, the "Muslim world" has a two-party system organized around how Muslims feel about America. In Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf is a "pro-American moderate." Benazir Bhutto is a "pro-American moderate." Therefore it is only logical (and in U.S. interests!) for the U.S. to realign Pakistan politics so that the "moderates" work together against the "extremists.""

In reality, it is these very "moderates" whose venal, corrupt and amoral behaviour creates the conditions - poverty, disenfranchisement and a government in the pocket of foreign powers - that fan the flames of extremism to begin with. Certainly it is more than a little rich for the Western leaders who have enthusiastically backed a military dictatorship in Pakistan since 1999 to talk of their desire to see democracy flourish in that country. Bhutto's return had been a Western-sponsored attempt to prettify the tottering despot Musharraf by engineering an unseemly and decidedly non-democratic power-sharing accommodation between the two. This clumsy attempt to put lipstick on a pig descended into grim farce as Musharraf attempted to minimise his losses by enacting a state of emergency; ostensibly to crack down on extremists but which in fact targeted members of Pakistan's genuinely democratic opposition. As Musharraf sacked the judiciary and replaced them with his own lackeys, the West could only mumble disapproving platitudes (perhaps privately welcoming the resulting strengthening of their pet "moderates"). For Bhutto's part, the Guardian's leader writers commented that "her resistance to Mr Musharraf's attacks on civil society was equivocal. Her demands for the release from house arrest of Pakistan's former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudry were tempered by the knowledge that if the supreme court were restored to its pre-emergency rule state, the amnesty she had obtained from Mr Musharraf would be up for judicial review."

Undermining extremist forms of Islam and terrorist groups whilst bolstering democratic governance are plainly urgent tasks for Pakistan. A yet more urgent task is to deal with the principle obstacles to achieving these goals. One of these is the military/security complex - an institution whose own corruption is epic, whose extensive involvement in nuclear proliferation could yet have catastrophic consequences, which has inflicted dictatorship after dictatorship on Pakistan, which was the perpetrator of the bloodbath in East Pakistan .... and on, and on...and which has enjoyed strong Western backing throughout. The other is the oligarchical/kleptocrat class - hailed as "moderates" and "liberals" by clueless Western governing elites - of which Bhutto was a fully paid-up member.

The current collapse of the West's Pakistan policy shows that there are factors other than our own actions that influence events. But the responsibility to at least do no harm still remains upon us. Forcing our governments to withdraw their support from feudal rule and military despotism will not guarantee that Pakistan is able to find democracy, stability and security. But the effect of our governments' actions to date suggest that a policy-reversal might just give the people of that country a better chance of seeing a way through the current crisis and into a better future. That reversal will not come because democracy and liberty are under threat in Pakistan: the lofty ideals claimed by the West can, quite clearly, not be taken entirely at face value. Only when the power and interests of our governments' are threatened will the course be changed. It therefore falls upon us to raise the political costs of the current policies. Challenging "emotionally potent oversimplifications" and drawing attention to the reality of our involvement in Pakistani affairs, and the real nature of our allies, is an essential first step along that road.