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When Saddam Hussein ruled in Baghdad, Iraqis who spread out their newspaper to read on a café table were careful not to spill any of their coffee on the front page which invariably carried a picture of the Iraqi leader. They feared that such an accident might be misinterpreted by omnipresent informers as a sign of disrespect or even opposition to Saddam, with dire consequences for themselves.
Fast-forward to the US today, where the US administration this week secured an indictment against the former head of the FBI, James B Comey, against whom Donald Trump has long pursued a vendetta in revenge for Comey investigating him for illicit links to Russia. Comey is charged with threatening the life of the President and transmitting that threat across state lines.
Even by Iraqi judicial standards, evidence for the alleged assassination threat is far-fetched, based as it is on a photograph Comey took when he was on holiday on the North Carolina coast. His picture showed seashells on a beach arranged in the shape of the numbers “86 47”. When he posted the picture online, the administration claimed that “86” is a code for killing or eliminating someone, in this case Trump, who is the 47th President of the US. In other words, the charge is that Comey was knowingly calling on somebody to assassinate the President.
In reality, “86” is a short hand commonly used by staff in restaurants, bars and hotels in the US to indicate that a customer is not to be served, most usually because he or she is unruly. Whoever arranged the seashells on that North Carolina beach, conceivably somebody in the hospitality business, may simply have meant that Trump was an unwelcome customer.
Saddam’s Iraq was sometimes called “the Republic of Fear”, a title earned by its merciless repression of real or imaginary opponents. Its defenders claimed that only a dictatorship unrestrained by law could hold together a much-divided country with a powerful tradition of violence. But the US has no such excuse as, on the 250th anniversary of America establishing a republic based on fundamental rights, Trump appears to ignore or manipulate the law underpinning those rights in the course of establishing his arbitrary rule.
Grotesquely excessive punishment for minor or fictional dissent – such as a coffee stain on the leader’s image or an arrangement of seashells on a beach – may appear bizarre, but they are important in stoking a feeling of dread. The message sent is that nobody is safe, however trivial or non-existent their offence.
Trump has his predecessors in the fascist dictators of Europe and the caudillos – strongmen – of South America. Yet the accelerated speed with which the USA is ceasing to be a lawbound society is astonishing. The nearest parallel I have witnessed was in Turkey after the abortive coup in 2016, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan took advantage of the crisis to bring under control all judicial, military and media power centres. In a sort of coup d’etat from above, Turkey turned into an autocracy in which courts routinely jail the opposition. Much the same is now happening in the US, leaving the rest of the world shell-shocked, unable to respond adequately to the destruction of American democracy.
European leaders consider themselves rather daring in periodically criticising US actions, but their punches are invariably pulled so their pathetic bleats of dissent come across as confessions of weakness rather than assertions of strength. To drive this impression home, the White House doubles down in its contemptuous abuse.
Sir Keir Starmer boasts of keeping Britain out of the Iran war and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says that the US is being “humiliated” by Tehran. But a measure of their feebleness is that they see nothing strange in their inability to affect the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, much though it impacts the vital interests of Britain and Germany. Their excuse is that they need American support against Russia in Ukraine, but the Russian army has not advanced significantly in four years. A more plausible reason is simply that they are running scared of Trump and an America they no longer know how to cope with.
While Europe dithers, holding embarrassingly pointless meetings about the Ukraine and Gulf wars, the rules-based global order is shuffling towards the exit. Always biased towards the US and the West, it still, if spasmodically and hypocritically, restrained unbridled and violent competition between nation states.
The shattered remains of that order are all around us, signs of the destructive energy Trump has put into abolishing it. One of the most striking features of this is the American campaign against the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in retaliation for them issuing an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes in Gaza.
Kimberly Prost, a Canadian ICC judge targeted by Washington because of a shelved ICC investigation into the actions of US soldiers in Afghanistan, described to The New York Times how sanctions had affected her daily life. “You lose immediate access to all the main credit cards that go through the Swift system, which is controlled by the US,” she said. “My Amazon and Google accounts were closed. You cannot pay for your utilities, your subscriptions. You’re completely crippled when it comes to booking hotels, trains, flights. You can’t buy dollars because your name is flagged.”
Trump seems to relish such persecution. But he is the symptom as well as the cause of the shift towards a crueller, less co-operative world, as international support ebbs for human and democratic rights and for aid to countries facing famine and destitution or devastated by natural disaster. Such humanitarianism was biased towards American and Western interests, but the benefits were real.
To a degree seldom appreciated, this concern for the political, social and economic health of other countries was not altruistic but an outcome of the Cold War. The confrontation between communism and capitalism, the blocs headed by the US and the Soviet Union, was fought out on many fronts from Bolivia to Cambodia.
Aid was weaponised, as was human rights, focusing much on evil-doing in rival states, but unavoidably also establishing standards of international morality. A strong motivator for the granting of civil rights for black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s was Washington’s knowledge that racial discrimination in the US damaged it in its competition with the Soviet Union. An attitude of shocked concern at the failings of the other side might have been hypocritical, but it was also beneficial.
No such rivalry exists today. Vladimir Putin’s Russia does not, for very good reasons, present Russia as a role model for the rest of the world. China seeks international influence, but is a strong supporter of a status quo it so successfully exploits.
Reports exposing torture and mass detention by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both estimable organisations, are increasingly seen as radicalising threats to an established order – whose zeitgeist is force and fear.
Further thoughts
Official visits are an exasperating time for resident diplomats and foreign correspondents. The causes of their anxiety differ but are interrelated. Diplomats worry because they know that all their hard work arranging the visit of some dignitary will be taken for granted by the media and their bosses back home, but any snafu will be front-page news.
During the King’s visit to Washington, this happened when the UK ambassador, Sir Christian Turner, had his commonsensical remarks to sixth-formers in February about the US and UK leaked. Curiously, nobody seems to criticise the sixth-former who secretly recorded a private conversation and passed it on to the press. Blips like this get maximum publicity because official visits are dull affairs, and the press reporting them pounce on anything vaguely newsworthy and give it top billing.
Official events involving Donald Trump are easier for journalists and more difficult for diplomats because invariably the President says or does something undiplomatic and outrageous so as to dominate the daily news agenda.
He never tires of throwing these verbal firecrackers into some banal press conference with a tight-lipped foreign leader. Notorious examples include the visit of the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi to the White House in March, during which he compared the surprise US-Israeli attack on Iran the previous month with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. Another was his public row with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Diplomats take these upsets too seriously, but they are gold to journalists, who are otherwise reduced to making bricks without straw by hyping carefully scripted exchanges of amity and common purpose. Press packs accompanying the visiting dignitary usually bond to a degree with him or her, while resident foreign correspondents grind their teeth when they see something that has been said a dozen times being hailed as a breakthrough – though they have no option but to go along with the fiction.
Beneath the Radar
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US army never found a way of combating mines planted by insurgents in or beside the roads. Detonated mostly by a command wire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were deadly and unavoidable.
Analysis by the Military Times shows that of the 5,413 US soldiers killed in operations in the Iraqi and Afghan wars, some 2,614 of whom were killed by IEDs, 52 per cent of all US military fatalities in Iraq and 48 per cent in Afghanistan. Many died when travelling in vulnerable military vehicles. The Pentagon spent some $40bn trying to develop an armoured vehicle which could survive an IED explosion, but never succeeded in doing so.
What the IED was to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone and short-range missile is to the US-Israeli war against Iran. Americans and Israelis have total superiority in sophisticated weaponry, the US launching 13,000 air strikes on Iranian targets in five-and-a-half weeks against limited air defence. Trump and his weird Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, boasted of destroying Iran as a military power. “Never in recorded history has a nation’s military been so quickly and effectively neutralised,” said Hegseth absurdly, ignoring the fact that Iran shows no sign of being defeated.
Yet, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, what has frustrated the US military are cheap mass-produced weapons – mostly drone – against which the Pentagon has once again had no effective antidote. Trump and Hegseth rant about their splendid victory, while the Strait of Hormuz remains shut and US Arab allies on the south side of the Gulf know their oil facilities and desalination plants may be blown up in any renewed war.
Why has this happened? The Pentagon and the US defence industry has never been interested in cheap mass-produced weapons, simply because they are inexpensive and easily made, reducing the profits of the manufacturers.
And all this was readily foreseeable: Iran was specialised in drone and short-range missiles as far back as 2005. By 2019, Western experts were describing Iran as “a drone superpower” after it hit Saudi oil facilities, briefly cutting the Kingdom’s oil production in half in a surprise drone and missile strike in 2019.
A measure of the extensive damage caused by drones and missiles in the Gulf oil states is the savage punishment meted out to those who film it on their phones. In Bahrain, for instance, 25 people have just been convicted of “supporting and endorsing Iranian terrorist attacks” by filming them. Where destruction is undeniable, Gulf governments prefer to pretend it was caused by debris from missiles that had been shot down, though closer investigation often showed this not to be the case.
Cockburn’s Picks
The King’s visit to Washington and the interplay of journalists and diplomats prompted me to look again at Caviar & Cornflakes, hilarious film made by Richard Denton for the BBC focusing on myself, as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, together with the British press attaché, Donald MacLaren, in the days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The British embassy and the Foreign office took much unnecessary umbrage at the film, but it has worn well as a portrait of journalistic and diplomatic life at the time.