Cav > Books: middle-east‎ (58)

"...They’re coming from scholars, policy research institutes, journalists, and commentators, and they stem from two convictions: One is that the present world order, led by the United States and the West, has by and large been a good thing, preventing major wars and allowing for international trade, economic growth, and a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. Two is that the rise of the non-Western nations and the emergence of an alternative to the familiar American-led world order will be frightening, unpredictable, and almost surely a change for the worse. For the West at least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a stark warning about the dangers of the breakdown of the American-led world order and its replacement with a kind of Putinesque law of the jungle, a breakdown aided and abetted by an ever more powerful China."

"Would the end of US and Western dominance really be so bad?
In this book, I argue, contrary to much elite opinion, that it need not be, especially over the long run. This is not because the West’s fears about the rise of non-Western powers, including China and Russia, are always exaggerated, although sometimes they are, due to the loss of power and prestige. But it is because Western supremacy has itself contributed to plenty of instability, injustice, and disorder that might be eased by its decline. More importantly, centuries of dominance have led the West to a kind of arrogance and ignorance about the rest of the world, overlooking the ideas and contributions of other civilizations to stability and progress throughout history. We have forgotten that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West, and that many of the ideas we assume are Western inventions actually originated in other civilizations. Mechanisms and values that are central to world order—such as diplomacy, economic interdependence, freedom of seas, principles for the protection of people in war and peace, preservation of the environment, and cooperation among major powers, to name a few—emerged over millennia across the globe."

"...The morning of October 7, 2023, was just such a moment. That morning air-raid sirens went off all across Israel. This was no unusual thing in itself.
Certainly not in the south of the country that had for seventeen years been within rocket range of Hamas. Nor in the north of the country into which Hezbollah had fired rockets since the 1980s. But in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the sirens sounded too. People woke up that Saturday morning to the realization that something very unusual was happening."

"By late in the day on October 7, it was already clear that these acts included burning people alive, shooting innocent people, cutting off people’s heads, and raping men and women. Sometimes before killing them. Sometimes after.
Israel is a country with a population of just 9 million people. America is a country of some 333 million people. To put it in perspective, the death toll on October 7 was the equivalent of some 44,400 Americans being killed by terrorists on a single day. Or around fifteen 9/11s. The kidnap toll if it had happened by ratio in the US would have been almost 10,000 Americans taken from their homes as hostages. It would be the equivalent of some 5,000 Canadians being killed in a single day and a thousand taken hostage.
Or 8,400 French or British people being slaughtered in a single day and another 1,750 taken hostage..."

"Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than “Sieg heil” is a phrase that simply means “Hail victory.” Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an “intifada” against the Jewish state. The First Intifada (1987–93) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005) were among the bloodiest periods in Israel’s history. During those periods Israelis could not board a bus without wondering whether a Palestinian terrorist was going to detonate a suicide vest and turn the vehicle into a charnel house. Terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis for years. They often targeted people of the same age as those who spent the aftermath of October 7 calling for just such a thing."

"...That early period of Western anti-Zionism is important for many reasons. One is the light it shines on what has happened in much of the West since October 7. But perhaps the best way to understand it is to go back to postwar Germany and the generation that grew up after 1945...
...the generation that grew up in Germany after World War II had pretty much only one guiding political principle by which to orient themselves. Essentially that was Don’t be Nazis. Don’t be like our parents’ generation...
...The German left that grew up in the 1950s and ’60s assumed that they were going to be able to hold fast to this principle. They were of the left, after all...
...the most interesting development was the movement’s adoption of the Palestinian cause. In the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel, something crucial shifted in the international left’s attitudes toward the Jewish state. From 1948 until 1967, Israel had broad sympathy and support from the international left. In part this was because of the leftist origins of the state itself including the kibbutznik movement. Time spent working on a kibbutz in Israel was almost a rite of passage for leftists in those days...
...Leftists supported Israel for a number of reasons, but one that has often been a baseline of leftwing politics was support for the perceived underdog. From 1948 to 1967, Israel was the plucky underdog in the Middle East. Its neighbors had attempted to wipe it out but the Israelis had seen them off.
Then in 1967, and even more so in 1973, something changed. If Israel had been David up until this moment, a number of its supporters now saw it as having transformed into Goliath. The fact that Israel was still a tiny country with a tiny population in comparison with its neighbors was not the point. It now came to be seen by many as the overdog.
The change came about in part because Israel had won those two wars with relative ease...
...At the same time the idea grew that the Arabs who lived in Israel were not to be referred to as Arabs, like their brothers and sisters in Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, but rather as “Palestinians” with a unique and long recognized identity of their own. With the turning of the Arabs into Palestinians it was now the Palestinians who were the beleaguered minority and the Israelis who were seen as the oppressive majority. So the Palestinians became the new Jews, with the Jews becoming the imperialist, brutish overlords..."

"Inside Gaza I visited the tunnels that Hamas had constructed during their eighteen years in power. One was a tunnel that had an opening within walking distance of the Erez crossing. It had been constructed by Sinwar’s brother and had become famous, in its own way, because of footage showing Sinwar himself traveling along the tunnel in a military vehicle.
When people think of a tunnel network many think of small scurry-holes. In fact, besides being longer than the entire London Underground, the network was also much more elaborate. In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas spent its years in power constructing over 350 miles of tunnels, with around 6,000 different tunnel entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilian houses, mosques, hospitals, and other nonmilitary buildings. Like storing weapons in such places, this is a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which are meant to preclude an army hiding military infrastructure in civilian buildings. Doing such a thing obviously puts civilians at risk. But this was one of Hamas’s tools of war. Where most countries would seek to protect its civilians, Hamas always had a stated aim of using them as human shields. They knew that no country would be able to tolerate the buildup of rockets and other military infrastructure to be used against it, but they also knew that whenever Israel targeted a “civilian” facility in which Hamas had put its infrastructure, the world would condemn Israel."

"An American by birth, Major “Y” went to Israel immediately after the 7th to use his expertise. What he had seen in the months since the IDF went into Gaza had shocked even him. Stories that had already emerged in the international press about Hamas explosives being found smuggled inside children’s toys were just the start. By two months into the war his estimate was that somewhere between every two to every three civilian homes in Gaza had military weapons, including AK-47s, grenades, and rocket launchers, or tunnel entrances in them. From very early in the conflict he and his team had worked out where to search whenever they entered a civilian house. If they were looking for weapons, rockets, or tunnel entrances they no longer searched the main rooms, the kitchens, or the parents’ bedroom. They now went straight to the children’s bedrooms, since that was where tunnel entrances and weapons were generally located— including under kids’ cots. While Israeli families built safe rooms to protect their children from rockets, these Gazan families actually used their families to protect their rockets..."

"...For more than a year, Soviet leaders rejected pleas from the Afghan communist government to send troops to help put down rebellion by the rural population protesting the regime’s merciless modernization programs. After Moscow did invade, it found itself locked in conflict—essentially, a civil war—it could barely comprehend. While it cannot be said that Afghanistan triggered the Soviet collapse, it did project an image of a failing empire unable to deal with a handful of bedraggled partisans in a remote part of its southern frontier."

"The Brezhnev regime’s great gamble brought devastating consequences on an epic scale. While the official figure of Soviet war deaths is around 15,000, the real number is believed to be far higher, perhaps even as high as the 75,000 cited by many veterans. Conservative estimates put Afghan deaths at 1.25 million, or 9 percent of the population, with another three-quarters of a million wounded..."
"...Some 620,000 Soviets served in Afghanistan. Officially, 13,833 died—although that number is still the subject of debate between various Russian government agencies—plus some 650 from affiliated units. Another 469,685 were sick or wounded; 10,751 of them became invalids. But many who fought in Afghanistan believe the real number of those killed was closer to 75,000. Among the equipment lost were 118 jets, 333 helicopters, 147 tanks, 1,314 APCs, 433 artillery pieces and mortars, 1,138 communications vehicles, 510 engineering vehicles, and 11,369 trucks. Even the unofficial figures are tiny compared to the Afghan deaths the conflict caused, along with a society left in utter ruin by the decade of bloody warfare.
Few in Moscow truly believed Najibullah would be able to hang on without Soviet military support. It would be an irony of history, or another lesson about the unintended consequences of using force, that his regime would outlive the Soviet Union that was convinced it had a duty to teach the world how to think and live."

"...Instead of escorting captured mujahideen to military bases for interrogation and imprisonment, they often threw terrified captives out of the aircraft to their deaths. When he was flying a peasant loyal to the government to a mujahideen base in his northern village that he’d agreed to identify, the man admiringly pointed at his own house as the helicopter approached. Before the interpreter had a chance to translate, the chopper’s gunner destroyed the little structure with rocket fire. The Russian soldiers were amused as the Afghan clutched his head, then saved themselves the trouble of an explanation back at their base by shoving him out.
The mujahideen were no less cruel to their captives. One of their favorite tortures was skinning Soviet soldiers alive by slitting them around the waist, pulling their skin above their heads, and tying it there, leaving the doomed to suffer excruciating deaths."

"We often, bizarrely, hear the claim that American history is taught mostly from the political right—and that it presents our nation as bucolic.
In fact, many of the best-selling social science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the “real” history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath. A short list of influential texts of this kind would have to include Marxist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, the New York Times–originating recent bestseller The 1619 Project, and . . . well . . . James W. Loewen’s 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me. This entire body of work draws from and ties into the modern American obsession with racism."

"...But this brings us to a key point, which serves as something of a central theme for this book.
Modern American morality is an aberration. If we don’t understand that, then history will be nothing but one long shock to our naive systems."

"Users on X had already started to refer to the day as “Black Saturday,” and the term was being picked up by Israeli media, which also used “Black Shabbat.” Black because it was objectively the darkest day in Israel’s history, the largest surprise attack against the state since its founding. And the fact that it occurred on a Saturday—the one day during the week that Israelis have their guards down—held grave significance for the Jewish people. Sabbath: a day of rest. A day to reflect and spend time with loved ones. A day so important that observant Jews are forbidden to work or travel on that day. Most religious Israelis won’t even turn on a light switch after the sun goes down on Friday night..."

"So at 5:35 a.m., I put up photos of me with Hamas militants; with Israeli special forces; with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and with a former leader of Islamic Jihad. I wrote: Over the past few years, I’ve embedded with both the Israeli military and Hamas fighters. I’ve interviewed leaders from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the Israeli Prime Minister. This previous reporting is critical for you to understand the context of what is unfolding now.
I wanted to establish my voice with the new audience watching my reports—to have them understand that I take no sides in this conflict. I am not pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. I am pro-truth. I speak with all sides to get a clear picture of what is unfolding, in any news context."

"Hamas gunmen were going door-to-door, systematically executing civilians. In some homes, grenades were thrown into living rooms and bedrooms. In others, children were shot in front of their parents, their bodies disfigured. Terrified residents clung to their bomb shelter doors as militants fired on the handles. When they were unsuccessful at breaching the rooms, Hamas burned houses down, reducing the people inside to ash after they suffocated from the smoke. Those not immediately killed were kidnapped and taken hostage into Gaza."

"...For more than a year I’d bided my time, waiting for the right moment to escape. I was eighteen years old and scared to death that my carefully laid plans might backfire. But my heart was full of rebellion against the constant fear, cruel rules and ancient customs that stifle and sometimes kill girls like me in Saudi Arabia. And it soared when I imagined a life away from them.
I had my phone, but my passport was with my eldest brother. Getting it and hiding it so I would have it when the time came to run was key. I was trying to be cool, trying to look like the dutiful daughter packing for a holiday, trying to calm the waves of anxiety as I watched from my bedroom the family prepare for departure and then gather for lunch before setting out for Kuwait."

"More than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control.
Once the regime’s sword was lifted, Communist parties crumbled quickly; if the sword remained, the party did too.
Nor, for that matter, was the emergence of Communist governments in the twentieth century in the first place preordained by some Hegelian- Marxist law of history, however much Karl Marx and his acolytes would have wished it so. As we will see in the pages ahead, the emergence of Communism in Russia, China, and their satellites required a series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions of angry and impressionable young men. Despite the party’s claim to speak for the proletarian masses of humanity, and several much ballyhooed near misses, Communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box."

"To promote Beijing’s entry into the WTO at the turn of the millennium, Washington politicians promised Americans that opening China for trade would moderate Communism. As Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, put it, “By entering the WTO, China committed to free itself from the ‘House that Mao Built,’ including state-run enterprises [and] central planning institutes,” leading to “more institutions and associations free from Communist party control.” Nothing of the kind has happened. Instead of Communist China converging on Western liberal norms, Western technology has allowed the Chinese government to ratchet up surveillance of its citizens. It uses data mining made possible by US internet search engines, tracking features on smartphones, and the like to keep tabs on people’s movements and activities in the most invasive “social credit system” in the world. Dissidents are denied access to jobs, travel, and credit cards. With “Zero COVID” contact tracing and forcible house quarantining, the CCP under China’s increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, carried out population controls the KGB could only have dreamed of..."

"...It sets their stories against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s past as a battleground for outside powers, including the legacy of Britain’s 19thcentury colonial invasions, the Soviet occupation during the Cold War and America’s role in backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. And it interweaves their journeys with my own, as an outsider who spent two decades working and living in Afghanistan. In my work as a reporter, I was focused on the war. But in my day-to-day life, I was witness to a country changing and growing in spite of it. So this is also my perspective on that other side to Afghanistan’s story."

"Calling Afghanistan the graveyard of empires overlooks the fact that it was itself the foundation of empires, including that of its own 18th-century Durrani dynasty. The term is also inaccurate. While both Britain and the USSR were badly mauled in Afghanistan, that wasn’t the reason their two empires came to an end. Most important of all, the term ignores the reality that it is Afghanistan rather than its invaders that has always paid the heaviest price, becoming a graveyard for its own people. And that pattern continued after the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989."

"...This is not to say that flying in these magnificent monstrosities provided me with some sort of spiritual moment or religious exaltation. This is to say that to be on a gunship, to carry out its mission, is to feel as powerful as any deity from the pantheons of old. But these gods, like all gods, are not interested in creation. To use the 105, a gun that is loaded with forty-five-pound bullets, a gun that, when fired, causes the 155,000-pound plane it’s mounted on to buck so far to the right that the pilot must actively correct the flight path, is to be Zeus hurling Hephaestus’s bolts. To fire a Griffin missile from an altitude so great that the men on the ground could only know of it in the same moment that it kills them is to be Mars flinging his spear."

"Being a DSO in Afghanistan meant making life and death decisions (and not or). We could decide who lived, and who died. When we had flown a mission, and done our job right, it was no lie or even an exaggeration to say we had done something that very few other people were capable of doing.
When I did it, I was one of only two DSOs who spoke both Dari and Pashto; there was only one other person on Earth who had received the training I had, who could do the work I did.
Because I experienced all of the things I did in the Air Force at a young age, it might have been impossible for them to be anything but formative.
Because very little else that followed was imbued with the same amount of life and death, other things will always pale in comparison. Or maybe it really was the most important thing I’ve ever done, or will ever do. And so, though everything in this book is true, and most of it is about me, it is not a memoir, as I don’t know how to tell you who I am. Nor is it a war book, as I don’t know how to make you understand war. All this book can do—all I can do—is show you what I was.
I was a DSO.
And this is what I heard."

"The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention. Ballooning Pentagon budgets are sacrosanct. While there can be heated disagreement about how, where, and when the United States should engage in war, the prerogative of military intervention is scarcely questioned in the mass media.
Even when conventional wisdom ends up concluding that a war was unwise, the consequences for journalists who promoted it are essentially nil.
Reporters and pundits who enthusiastically supported the Iraq invasion were not impeded in their careers as a result. Many advanced professionally. In medialand, being pro-war means never having to say you’re sorry. Journalists who have gone with the war program are ill positioned to throw stones from their glass houses later on; the same holds true for media outlets.n Strong challenges to the status quo of U.S. militarism rarely get into mainstream media."

"The “war on terror” became—for the White House, Pentagon, and Congress—a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries, rarely seen, much less understood.11 Whatever the intent, the resulting carnage often included civilians.12 The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds. As years went by, it turned out that the point wasn’t to win the multicontinent war so much as to keep waging it, a means with no plausible end; the quest, in search of enemies to confront if not defeat, made stopping unthinkable. No wonder Americans couldn’t be heard wondering aloud when the “war on terror” would end. It wasn’t supposed to..."

"In media frames, the routine exclusion of people harmed by U.S. warfare conveys that they don’t really matter much. Because we rarely see images of their suffering or hear their voices or encounter empathetic words about them, the implicit messaging comes through loud and clear. The silence ends up speaking at high volume: Those people hardly exist. They are others. They are not our concern. They don’t particularly matter, while our country is causing their misery."

"Before we deep dive into it, let me share with you what I did and bdidn’t do. The primary source of data for this book is the seven years of research I did between 2016-2023. I conducted interviews with over a hundred people in London, San Francisco, New Zealand, Hungary, Germany, Portugal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. In the beginning, these were very ordinary interviews as I didn’t have any knowledge of dating cultures – I was in the dark.
However, as I started to gain more and more awareness, these interviews got a lot deeper and more personal. For this reason, whenever people shared their experiences with me, I promised them anonymity. Consequently, following best practice in qualitative social science research, all the names of those whose stories I tell are pseudonyms.
To expand my reach beyond those cities, my assistant, Maria Nosyk, did an outstanding job helping me. She gathered information from all around the world through several Facebook groups. She collected hundreds of quality responses – many of which you will find throughout the book. Without her dedication, this book would not be where it is today. Huge thanks to Maria and everyone who contributed with their valuable feedback!"

"Tomorrow I may be blown up by a rocket. Maybe an IED punctures the armor of my Hummer and rips my kidney apart. If I’m not wearing a colostomy bag at the end of the day, it’s a win..."

"In a military deployment, the first thing you’re told are the Rules of Engagement (ROE). Not here. We’re told through the grapevine we don’t have any because our mission is transporting diplomats by any means necessary.
Platitudes of not making enemies arise but if we get in trouble, Blackwater will get us out and claim diplomatic immunity. This is backed up by the State Department passports we have.."

"Contractors are stuck in a precarious position. They carry scars of war, but aren’t afforded public support given to military veterans. Yet contractors became critical in the Iraq war because no one planned for a protracted conflict.
Blackwater filled the void. With limited supervision and no repercussions, we became the epitome of mercenaries: highly paid men with a mission but no rules of engagement—Guns, Girls, and Greed drove us. Erik Prince stated repeatedly that we conducted over forty thousand missions with only two hundred shots fired. What he doesn’t report, and likely never knew, is the carnage we wreaked by smashing into cars and the actual number of shots we took because we never reported them.
I don’t blame Prince or Blackwater for how contractors acted, but future wars can’t be fought using unsupervised PMCs. The repercussions for local populations are too severe. This is not to say private security contractors don’t have a place in combat, but DoS and DoD need to get out of their ivory towers, get in harm’s way, and be part of missions. Until then, private security contracts will be a net negative."

"Do private contractors belong in combat? I doubt anyone entertained the idea until the US handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government, because we didn’t want to be seen as occupiers. The toppling of one government with replacement by a hastily-created, propped-up interim government created a gray area where no one understood where wars end and diplomacy began. To fill the leadership gap, we threw money at the problem with private security companies happy to profit. Blackwater wasn’t the only PMC—though it got much of the blame... ...My position is PMCs should never be in a place where US troops are not. If the government doesn’t have the balls to commit troops, they shouldn’t’ wage war by PMC proxy."

"US Government agencies, including private military contractors, must be held to strict standards and accountability in combat zones just as US Military forces are, as their conduct reflects US foreign policy and national defense.
There are PMC’s in Syria, Ukraine, and at the US / Mexico doing jobs no one has defined. This illustrates PMC’s have become a federal government line item with zero oversight. Nothing has changed in 22 years of the GWOT. It’s time for accountability."

"...My Bosniak driver believed the ethnic conflict in his country was horrific and exceptional, but he was only partly right: it was horrific—but utterly unexceptional. Collectively, ethnic conflicts around the world, from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, have killed more than ten million people since World War II.
Many Americans reflexively tune out news of these conflicts. In the words of one satirist, it’s just the “unspellables” killing the “unpronounceables”—peoples too distant or inexplicable to pay attention to. But as Americans, we need to pay attention, not just for the sake of the millions around the world suffering from ethnic division, but for our own sake. We must deepen our understanding of what it takes for diverse ethnic groups to get along and share a country, for America is rapidly becoming vastly more multiethnic..."

"...Thus, as the United States has veered from melting pot to multiculturalism, there has been little serious discussion about how similar course changes have worked out in other countries. The reality is that both the melting pot and multiculturalist models have been tried many times in history. In some cases, societies have shifted from one to the other. It’s worth examining how it has worked out for them; perhaps we can distill some useful lessons from their experiences. That is what this book endeavors to accomplish."

"After considering the terrible consequences of ethnic divisions in countries like Bosnia and Sri Lanka, it is disheartening to see Americans advance the same types of policies and rhetoric that promoted and toxified those divisions. America has a regrettable past of racial and ethnic discrimination, but if the examples in this book teach anything, it is that the solution to past segregation is not even more segregation. The answer to past racial discrimination is not even more racial discrimination. Two African countries demonstrate this best.
While it was a British protectorate, Botswana endured extensive white racism. Yet it managed to recover quickly to become one of the developing world’s outstanding success stories. It achieved this not with compensatory preferences and racial payback but by completely eliminating racial and ethnic distinctions and by fostering botho, the Batswana version of asabiyah. It also followed the melting pot model, which has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness since the time of ancient Rome.
In proportional terms, Rwanda’s genocide stands out as one of the worst racist crimes of all time. Although the genocide occurred only a few decades ago, Rwanda has managed to recover spectacularly from it. Like Botswana, Rwanda accomplished this by “erasing race” and adopting the melting pot model. Rather than instituting ethnic preferences like affirmative action, it outlawed racial and ethnic distinctions altogether. Rather than dividing people into groups, it has sought to unify them with institutions like umuganda. Rather than brooding on past injustices, it has cultivated the shared asabiyah lauded by Ibn Khaldun.
The path taken by Botswana and Rwanda lies open to America. It starts with resolute and unwavering commitments to principles like those made by Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot and by the children in Rwanda’s Nyange school:
There are no groups. We are all Americans."

"As Russian forces advanced toward Kyiv and other cities, massive numbers of women, children and the elderly began fleeing their homes, and in many cases their country. By the beginning of July 2022, an astounding 5.5 million Ukrainians were new refugees or exiles, while about 7.7 million were displaced inside Ukraine. Altogether, about 30 percent of Ukraine’s people had fled their homes..."

"Ukraine responded to the Russian invasion by declaring martial law and a “general mobilization” of all men between the ages of 18 and 60, preventing them from leaving Ukraine with their families. It banned 11 opposition political parties (though not Svoboda or other extreme right-wing parties) and, like Russia, it shut down all independent TV channels to enforce a “unified information policy” via state media.
There were early indications that this might be a short war. Some predicted that Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine and install a pro-Russian government. That did not happen, due to the fierce resistance of Ukrainian forces.
The media portrayed this resistance as an outpouring of sheer nationalist fervor by inexperienced but passionate fighters. They usually neglected to say that, for eight years, the U.S. and NATO had been building up an experienced fighting force with classes, drills, and exercises involving at least 10,000 troops a year. NATO and its members helped get Ukrainian forces ready for a war with Russia—and had used the conflict in Donbas as a testing ground."

"Before the invasion, the Biden administration framed the threat of sanctions as a tool to deter Russia from invading Ukraine. But Russia invaded anyway. In the wake of the invasion, Biden reframed the purpose of the sanctions as “inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine.” But the sanctions didn’t stop the Russian tanks and shells from devastating Ukraine, and instead inflicted pain on millions of Russians, as well as millions of the most vulnerable people around the world—people who had no role in this conflict except as innocent victims..."

"However this war ends, it has underlined the continuing imperative for nuclear disarmament, and no amount of residual hostility can be allowed to prevent the resumption of serious international efforts to forever ban nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth..."

"...I headed home and started typing. What has resulted is, I hope, not one story, but three. The first is my own tale of being kidnapped. The second is the wider story of the Somali pirates, whose activities I had originally gone to Somalia report on. And the third is the story of Somalia itself, and why it has fallen into such a state of anarchy that such outlaws can thrive in the first place.
This book does not claim to be an exhaustive account of either Somalia’s piracy or its politics. It is intended more as a snapshot of what remains a complex, disputed and ever-changing picture. This is partly due to the ongoing difficulties of reporting on the ground. Somalia remains as dangerous for foreigners as ever, and pirates, like most people in organised crime, do not generally welcome scrutiny of their activities.
I have also focused on those parts of the country of which I have some direct experience; inevitably, this means ignoring others. This book does not for example, discuss the rather happier picture in Somaliland, the breakaway region of north-west Somalia that has now been largely peaceful for two decades, and which wants its independence recognised by the outside world. Nor, contrary to the practice of many outsiders who write books on Africa, is this a book that tries to highlight the ‘good side’ – the virtues, decency, and courage-under-fire of the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants. Instead, it is about the villainous minority, the bandits, crooks and warlords who have so often enjoyed the upper hand in recent years. On which note, I should point out that for legal reasons, the names of a few of the people I have come across have been changed."

"There was, however, one important difference between the pyrates of old and the pirates of new. Whereas the storybook buccaneers of my youth would steal a ship’s treasure and make its crew walk the plank, today it was the opposite way around. Somali pirates weren’t really interested in the ship’s cargo. A 50,000-tonne consignment of cement or mineral ore was impossible to ship ashore in their small launches, never mind to find buyers for. Instead, they were after the ship’s crew, whom they would take as hostages for ransom. That effectively made the pirates professional kidnappers rather than robbers, and, for obvious reasons, therefore a risky interview prospect.
Our aim was to try to meet one, and tell the story from his point of view. That point of view might be, though, that a pair of Western journalists would make far better hostages than a few Filipino deckhands..."

"My brother and I against my father. My father’s household against that of my uncle’s. My father and uncle’s households against the rest of the clan. The clan against other clans. And our nation against the world."

"Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and casting whomever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader."

"These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust. They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars."

"...Upon hearing any mention of slavery, the mind of the average person in Britain or America turns unbidden, and as a matter of course, to the Atlantic slave trade, by means of which many black Africans were transported from their native continent to America and the islands of the Caribbean. For most of us, this is simply what slavery was; the historic mistreatment and exploitation of black people. It is widely accepted that anybody talking or writing about slavery must adopt this peculiar world-view and ensure that the central focus remains firmly upon black Africans. When we see a book in a library or bookshop called The Slave Trade, we have no doubt that when we open it, we shall be seeing graphic descriptions of the horrors of the so-called ‘Middle Passage’, which saw millions of men, women and children transported across the Atlantic Ocean in atrocious conditions. It is that grammatical feature, the definite article, which indicates what we are to expect. The word ‘the’ gives the game away..."

"To understand the subject of this book, which is of course slavery, properly it will be necessary to bear in mind that across the world slavery has been an accepted and unremarkable institution for thousands of years. It has been widely practised throughout the whole of human history, right up to the present day. According to the United Nations, there are currently somewhere in the region of 25 million slaves in the world (UN News, 2019). It is notable that even in the earliest mentions of slavery, dating back 4,000 years, there is no suggestion of novelty about the practice, which indicates that by the time people began recording their history in permanent form, slavery was already a long-established tradition. It is clear that almost without exception, early civilizations regarded slavery as simply a convenient way of ordering societies which were, in the main, hierarchical..."

"As late as the Norman Conquest in 1066, a tenth of the people in England were slaves and even 600 years later, slavers were routinely raiding the shores of the British Isles. This aspect of the country’s history has, in effect, been airbrushed away. A similar process has taken place in other European countries, where it is now felt tactful to avoid discussing slavery for fear of inflaming old divisions within the European Union and inciting racism against newcomers, many of whom are Muslim. It might help to set both the Atlantic slave trade and also the trade which saw Europeans being transported to Africa over the centuries in their proper perspective, if we look at the overall picture of slavery in history and examine its origins."

"It was in the Roman Empire that slavery reached such vast numbers as to dwarf the Atlantic slave trade and allow us to see it in its proper perspective. In the early years of the Roman Empire there were perhaps 10,000,000 slaves at any one time, which was between one-fifth and one-sixth of the entire population (D’Arms & Kopf, 1980). The same source suggests that more than half a million new slaves would have been needed every single year. If these numbers are accurate, and they are taken from the proceedings from an academic conference on Roman commerce, then the implications are startling. In the city of Rome alone, there were, during the reign of Trajan, an estimated 400,000 slaves, a third of the city’s population (Davison, 1992).
A quick calculation reveals something which may come as a shock to many readers. It has been estimated that in the three and a half centuries after Columbus first reached the Caribbean, between 8,000,000 and 11,500,000 black slaves were transported across the Atlantic Ocean before the end of this particular trade (Everett, 1997). This figure is sometimes adduced as evidence of the uniquely awful nature of the triangular trade; over 10,000,000 people snatched from their homes and carried off into involuntary servitude.
Let us now compare this with the situation at the time of the Roman Empire. The life expectancy of a slave in the Roman Empire was quite astonishingly low. Males could expect, on average, to live to the age of 17.2 years and females 17.9 (Harper, 1972). By way of comparison, the life expectancy of a slave on an American plantation in 1850 was 36 (Fogel & Engerman, 1974). Because life expectancy for Roman slaves was so low, it meant that the only way that a constant population could be maintained was not by relying upon natural increase, but rather by constantly seizing new land and capturing those living there. For this reason, it has been suggested that around half a million new slaves would need to have been seized every year (D’Arms & Kopf, 1980). This would amount to 12,500,000 people in just 25 years. The figure for the slaves transported in the course of the Atlantic slave trade indicate that this number were taken from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean in 350 years. In short, the Roman slave trade in Europe and the Middle East was probably more than ten times as extensive as that which was carried out across the Atlantic, between Africa and the New World..."

"We have in this book looked at slavery as it has been practised in many countries. It was observed in the Introduction that there is a common feeling that people in Britain should feel exceptionally ashamed of their country’s association with the slave trade and that this ties in with attempts to ‘decolonize’ the curricula of schools and universities. It is very interesting in this connection to examine the record of other countries and their own dealings with slavery and the slave trade. Just to remind readers, Britain and America led the world in abolishing the slave trade. Both countries made the importation of, or international trade in, slaves illegal in 1807. As soon as the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, Britain sent warships to West Africa to enforce this ban. The ownership of slaves lingered on in the British Empire until 1833 and in the United States for another 30 years after that. Since Britain is today constantly invited to feel guilty for taking so long to abandon the trade in and ownership of slaves, it is curious to see how long it took some other countries; countries which have escaped censure on these grounds.
We have looked in detail at the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the slave trade. This was not ended by law until 1908, a century after the British halted the practice. In Morocco, slavery was not abolished until 1922 and slaves in Kuwait had to wait until 1949 to be freed. Astonishingly, it was to be 1961 before Saudi Arabia reluctantly freed all the slaves in the country, but it was by no means the last country in the world to do so. We saw earlier in this chapter that Oman was very enthusiastic about slavery, especially in Zanzibar. It was 1970 when slavery was finally brought to an end there. There was still one country which showed a marked reluctance to put an end to slavery and the slave trade and this was the African country of Mauritania, a Muslim state. In 1976, they became the last country in the world to accept that slavery was morally wrong and to abolish it. One cannot help but wonder why there have never been demands for the Muslim countries who hung onto slavery and the slave trade for so much longer than Britain, to admit their own culpability and perhaps issue some kind of mea culpa. After all, their own prosperity was founded upon the slave trade every bit as much as was that of Britain..."

"We have in this book traced the institution of slavery from ancient times, in various parts of the world, and found that it is the nearest thing to a universal custom or practice. Almost all cultures, on every continent, found the idea of human beings being owned and traded as commodities to be perfectly normal and acceptable. This was the case in Europe as in Africa, Asia as in the Americas. Slavery in Europe was found to be far more extensive and cruel than that associated with what we have now come to term ‘the’ slave trade; the transportation of black African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean to North America and the islands of the Caribbean. This leaves us with something of a conundrum or puzzle. Why is it that today any mention of slavery is automatically assumed to be a question of racial exploitation of black people by white Europeans or Americans?"