https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/08/22/theres-only-one-way-for-the-taliban-to-hold-power/

Successive governments in Kabul, including the one led by the group in the 1990s, have failed to share power, spelling their doom.

Welcome to Afghanistan. Not the Afghanistan of the Western imagination. The real Afghanistan. 

This is not to say that the Taliban are “authentic” or more representative of Afghan society or culture than any other group of Afghans. Plainly they are not, and huge numbers of Afghans are horrified and terrified to see these vicious extremists back in power.

But it means that the manner in which the Taliban have returned to power and, conversely, that the US-backed government and military simply evaporated in a few days, reflect the traditional Afghan way of war and dynamics of power.

Afghanistan is a complex patchwork of numerous identity groups, cultures, ethnicities, tribes, regions and traditions. It has almost always resisted top-down rule by a strong, centralised and homogenised far-off national government. Power-sharing and a due deference to local mores and interests, and the dignity of local leaders, has, by contrast, produced long periods of tranquility.

Whenever a heavy-handed force, whether Afghan or foreign, tries to set up a centralised national government in Kabul to rule the country – especially when local sensitivities and leaders are not treated with sufficient respect – uprisings are virtually inevitable and often successful.

Viewed from this perspective, more than the familiar anti-colonial narrative, the American project in Afghanistan was doomed to failure because it was attempting to create a virtual impossibility. The US even decided to try to create a miniaturised version of the US military, as well as a familiar, western-style government. The past two weeks have demonstrated the overwhelming failure.

Yet this is an equal opportunity problem. The Taliban themselves fell into the same trap when they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, in a harsh manner, which prompted a potent armed opposition.

When US special forces and intelligence services joined the Northern Alliance (officially called the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan) after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Taliban rule collapsed remarkably quickly as well. The campaign began on October 7, 2001. On November 13, the Taliban fled Kabul. By the end of that month, virtually the whole country was in the hands of their enemies and most of the Taliban had fled to Pakistan, although remnants held out in Kandahar.

In short, in 2001 the shoe was on the other foot. It was the Taliban whose forces evaporated and fled. And it was the Northern Alliance that were suddenly in control of all the key cities.

And yet, by 2003 a new Taliban insurgency had coalesced, and by 2006 it became a significant threat.

This seems to be a consistent pattern in Afghan history. A dominant power can control the cities, but if it does not share power and accommodate the diversity and complexity of Afghan society, an armed insurgency will almost certainly develop. Events can, as they just have, lead to the conquest of the cities by what had been a largely rural guerrilla force. This is exactly what has happened as the Taliban and the US-backed government have, with great rapidity, simply changed places.

In Afghanistan, the historical approach to war, generally, does not resemble the western idea of a zero-sum, binary, fixed and straightforward affair. Changing sides is common, and very frequently the side with the momentum will use negotiations, bribery and amnesties to ensure that the formerly empowered losers simply dissipate, handing over areas, and even the main urban centres, without many pitched battles.

And now, from its traditional redoubt in the Panjshir Valley, the old forces of the Northern Alliance have announced the formation of a new insurgency. If the Taliban try again to rule without accommodating diversity, over time they will surely face growing armed opposition. If, on the other hand, they engage in power-sharing negotiations, and govern with a lighter touch, they might be able to sustain power in relative calm. It’s up to them.

A key factor in their recent victory was an effective outreach campaign to tribal and village elders, many of whom had reportedly been alienated by the previous administration. Now that they have won, this apparent openness to other perspectives will be seriously and quickly tested.

And this time they will try to rule a population that, especially in the cities, has become used to a remarkable degree of freedom and western influence. These populations and the Taliban will meet for the first time in coming weeks and it is unlikely to be pleasant.

This whole experience has come as a terrible shock to the US, but there is really no excuse for that. The West, and especially the English-speaking world, has had ample opportunity to learn this lesson. After the first British fiasco in Afghanistan ended in total annihilation during the retreat from Kabul in 1842, the army chaplain in Jalalabad, Rev G R Gleig, summed up the experience.

It was, he wrote, “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated”.

The same could have been said about the Soviet Union’s debacle there in the 1980s and the American fiasco today.

The second Anglo-Afghan war in 1878-1880 was more successful, because the British ended up simply supporting a new ruler, Abdur Rahman Khan. In exchange for political support and money, Britain directed his foreign policy and blocked the expansion of Russian influence, which was the primary purpose of the campaign. But both Britain and the ruler allowed local Afghan tribes to continue governing themselves relatively independently.

When Britain was eventually driven out of Afghanistan entirely in 1919, the country still served as a buffer against Russian ambitions. So, not all political projects in Afghanistan, even by outsiders, are doomed to failure. There is a lesson here, repeated time and again in Afghan history. It’s too late for the Americans, at least for now.

Yet, will the Taliban understand this better than they did in the 1990s? And will they avoid once again following the country to serve as a base for Al Qaeda terrorism? Early signs are not all promising, which suggests that the struggle for power in Afghanistan has taken a dramatic turn but the real “endless war” will continue, with or without the Americans.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/08/15/the-most-dangerous-words-used-in-us-foreign-policy/

Afghanistan yet again shows the idea that Washington can install viable new governments wherever it likes is irrational and unattainable.

The phrase “and then we install a new government” should be permanently banned from any US foreign policy planning meeting. Installing and propping up an artificially contrived government is what the US tried to do in South Vietnam following France’s failure there. Now the same scenario is repeating itself with grim predictability in Afghanistan.

At least since the Second World War, it has simply not been possible to create a new state and polity in another society from the outside at what most Americans would consider an acceptable cost and timeframe. Great powers can have success by siding with existing, and already strong, domestic groups – whether government or opposition – to help determine the outcome of a struggle.

Russia and Iran’s intervention in Syria is a good example that this can be done effectively and relatively inexpensively, albeit in that case ruthlessly. But the American instinct is always to want to leave something “trustworthy” behind, meaning allies and institutions that are recognisably tolerable from a US perspective. In almost all cases, that effectively means attempting to impose a revolution from outside. And that simply does not work.

Overturning existing systems and creating new ones, combined with an influx of cash, goods, weapons and other support, is an irresistible invitation to corruption. There will always be civic-minded patriots who labour for the best of reasons. But it’s an irresistible smorgasbord of goodies for the unscrupulous, the selfish and the corrupt.

When a truly new order is being imposed, unless the occupying power micromanages a process that is extremely time-consuming and expensive, there will be a frenzy of what Marxists call the “primitive accumulation” of power and wealth. There’s practically no way around that, especially in developing economies where political authority depends on substantial political patronage and jobs for many constituents. People need to live, and they need help.

So, unless an outside force were to stumble on an unheard-of assemblage of saints, corruption is virtually built into the process.

In Afghanistan, corruption rapidly became the defining feature of life. Video of the Taliban ransacking one of former vice president Abdul Rashid Dostum’s homes last week reveal it to be a minor monument to decades of corruption. And he’s hardly the worst. The government’s lack of popularity and viability are amply demonstrated by its sudden meltdown.

The collapse of the US project and the imminent takeover of most if not all of the country by the Taliban is an inverted pyramid of fiascoes and deficiencies.

At the bottom are the soldiers and mid-level commanders of the Afghan military, who are largely refusing to fight and simply handing over regional capitals to the Taliban as soon as the fanatics can drive there. Many were simply looking for a job, and are chronically under- or unpaid and undersupplied. And who is going to be willing to fight and die for someone else’s grift?

Many aren’t even serving in their own local areas and therefore don’t feel they are protecting their families. Washington and its Afghan allies have notably failed to nurture an ideology, or national or social consciousness that is functional, let alone able to trump the religious passion of the Taliban, among the Afghan people.

At the next level up the pyramid are the military commanders. Their army is much smaller than reported because many senior commanders have made a fortune by reporting countless non-existent troops and pocketing pay and supplies. Vast sums, well in excess of $83 billion, have been poured into the Afghan military, much more than neighbouring Pakistan has spent on its large and more effective forces during the same timeframe. But rather than creating an effective fighting force, some commanders have spent most of their time taking what they can before the US withdrawal.

Expect a massive rash of defections to the new authorities at all levels of the military and political structure in coming days.

Another step up the pyramid are Afghanistan’s political leaders, many of whom have been inept, unresponsive, cut off from the public, self-serving and self-dealing.

Finally, towards the top of the pyramid of fiascos, are successive US governments.

Barack Obama inherited an impossible mission from his predecessor, George W Bush. But he made the misguided decision to try to create a vast, sprawling Afghan military along US lines, with all the equipment and logistics required for such a force. Instead of succeeding, that infusion of support simply sent corruption to new heights.

Mr Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, made an indefensible agreement with the Taliban, agreeing to completely withdraw US forces in exchange for unenforceable and insincere commitments from the extremists.

Now Joe Biden has rushed to implement Mr Trump’s agreement and timetable, but in the most slapdash and hasty manner imaginable. He is literally having US troops run away from key installations, such as Bagram Air Force Base, overnight.

But at the very peak of the pyramid of ignominy is without question the Bush administration, which certainly had to act forcefully against the Taliban and Al Qaeda after September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Yet, instead of crushing those groups, and making clear to all Afghans that any association with international terrorism would result in the uncompromising return of massive American force, his administration decided to try creating a new state and new polity in A society they didn’t understand and to which it wasn’t in the least suited.

In other words, somebody said: “And then we install a new government.”

The devastating impact of this latest catastrophe, and similarly in Iraq, is the stigmatisation of all but the most unavoidable use of force in most US thinking, especially among the public, and the return of an isolationist trend on the far left and the extreme right, increasingly acting in coordination with each other.

A great many Americans are traumatised by these quixotic debacles – now derided as “endless wars” – and therefore ARE seized with a malady known as “kakorrhaphiophobia”, the irrational fear of failure, regarding the use of power.

The next time any senior American official says “and then we install the new government”, not only should the meeting be immediately terminated, so should that official’s employment.

Hubristic, quixotic and unattainable state-building projects on the other side of the world must, at long last, be excised from the US foreign policy playbook.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/when-they-say-they-want-kill-you-believe-them/619724/

The hyperbolic posturing of Trumpist extremists, repeated often enough, will have deadly consequences.

Decades of living in, studying, and writing about the Middle East have taught me that whenever a political faction becomes obsessed with violent rhetoric and fantasies, brutal acts aren’t far behind. And while there’s always been a strain of militancy on the American right and left fringes, there is something unmistakably new, and profoundly alarming, about the casual, florid, and sadistic rhetoric that is metastasizing from the Republican fringe into the party’s mainstream.

For sheer pornographic sadism, it’s tough to beat Jesse Kelly’s encomium to murder and torture published by the right-wing website The Federalist. Kelly doesn’t make any real arguments, other than declaring liberals terrible authoritarians. Instead, in language that the Islamic State would envy, he describes the visceral, almost orgasmic, joy of scalping a dying enemy:

Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands. I don’t mean cradling his skull as you thousand-yard-stare at his lifeless face. I mean a real scalp, Indian-style, of some enemy you just killed on the battlefield; somebody you hated and who hated you back.

You killed him, won the day, carved off the top of his skull, and now you’re standing over him victorious on the now-quiet field of battle, with a quiet breeze blowing through your hair. Your adrenaline is still pumping with that primal feeling of victory and the elation of having survived when others didn’t.

Kelly hastens to add that he is discussing “not a real scalping, but a metaphorical one.” But he concludes the essay by warning readers that when they are stuck in a “liberal utopian nightmare,” they will want to know that before the leftists prevailed, they “rode out onto the plains and made them feel pain.”

Again, the unmistakable lesson from the modern Middle East is: When people keep saying they’re fantasizing about how great it would be, and feel, to kill you, believe them.

Most Republican leaders still don’t personally indulge in bloodthirsty reveries. But, with equal consistency, most are going out of their way to tolerate them. There’s no question that the right’s Overton window, which establishes what ideas a constituency will regard as legitimate, regarding political violence dramatically expanded during Donald Trump’s presidency and, especially, after his defeat by Joe Biden.

There was already a racial and cultural panic on the far right in the run-up to Trump’s election. In a notorious essay for the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016, “The Flight 93 Election,” the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton described the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency as so dire that Americans needed to back a candidate as manifestly unfit and unstable as Trump. “Charge the cockpit or you die,” he wrote, because “if you don’t try, death is certain.”

Anton never said why and how the election of Hillary Clinton would mean national suicide. But he inveighed against “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” and in the eighth year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the racial subtext was clear.

Trump’s indulgence in violent rhetoric, threats, and fantasies has been amply documented. He urged his supporters to assault protesters, police to brutalize prisoners and shoot demonstrators, and soldiers on the border to shoot migrants. He frequently voiced his admiration for, and even envy of, the brutality of foreign despots. Trump used the bully pulpit to preach the gospel of bloodshed like no other American president in history.

During his four years in office, and especially since the defeat he preposterously describes as “the greatest crime in history,” Trump’s own sanguineous impulses and visions have been migrating into Congress and the Republican mainstream, and spurring his followers to try to outbid one another in their vicious and gruesome pronouncements.

Trump once darkly hinted about “Second Amendment people” taking some unspecified actions, implicitly murderous, to protect gun rights if he lost to Clinton. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia now warns that if the government sends health-care workers door-to-door to encourage more Americans to get vaccinated, they will find that southerners “love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door … they might not like the welcome they get.”

Before she was elected, Greene once liked a Facebook comment that said to remove Nancy Pelosi from office, “a bullet to the head would be quicker.” On tour with Greene, her Republican ally Representative Matt Gaetz declared, “We have the Second Amendment in this country and I think we have an obligation to use it,” helpfully adding that the amendment’s purpose is “maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government.”

The former Trump-campaign chair and White House strategist Steve Bannon suggested that Anthony Fauci should be beheaded. And the Trump-friendly lawyer Joseph diGenova urged that a senior federal cybersecurity official be “taken out at dawn and shot.”

These politicians and pundits are playing the familiar political game of outbidding, always taking rhetoric to the next level in order to gain attention and become the champion of a passionate group. Another lesson from the Middle East is that words always matter.

What begins as hyperbolic posturing, when it is persistent and repeated, will eventually be taken seriously. And then not only will its proponents be stuck in a never-ending cycle of radical outbidding, but eventually some of their audience members—most of whom don’t know they’re not supposed to take any of this seriously, let alone literally—will act on it.

What are spirited patriots to do if they genuinely believe this rhetoric about the “end of America” brought about by the oppressive domination of a cabal of evil leftist authoritarians? Violent resistance is a plausibly rational response to such an existential threat. The reality that this supposed threat is merely the possibility that other Americans with different opinions might win some election is elided by the rhetoric of panic.

The past few years have seen numerous mass shootings and terrorist acts committed by radical adherents of this paranoid worldview, but none provided as terrifying a preview of where this all might be going as January 6 did. Trump knew exactly what he was suggesting when he told the crowd that day to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. His lawyer Rudy Giuliani specifically called for “trial by combat,” which is precisely what followed.

Mainstream Republican leaders initially condemned the violence, but in the subsequent seven months, most have decided it either wasn’t that bad after all or the country simply needs to move on. The congressional GOP was relatively united in trying to block any serious investigation. Meanwhile, Trump and his most ardent supporters are now openly celebrating the rioters as heroes, lauding Ashli Babbitt as a martyr and mocking police officers’ testimony about the trauma of being attacked and nearly killed by their fellow citizens, some of whom bore patriotic paraphernalia, including pro-police and U.S. flags.

Those few Republicans who are actively working to prevent any repetition of the events of January 6, including Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, find themselves marginalized, reviled, and, in Cheney’s case, ousted from party leadership.

So it’s no surprise that one recent survey found that 39 percent of Republicans agreed that if political leaders will not protect America, ordinary people should employ political violence; and that in another, 47 percent said that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” These numbers are unprecedented and alarming.

While there are certainly some violent leftists, nothing remotely comparable to this level of violent rhetoric exists among major Democratic figures; nor does the party base embrace violence to anything close to this degree. Democrats are stubbornly clinging to their center while Republicans drift ever closer to right-wing extremism.

There isn’t much anyone outside the GOP can do to stop that drift. Immediately after the January 6 riot, senior Republican figures, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, condemned Trump and his allies precisely because of the riot and the introduction of violent rhetoric and action into the American system. But since that brief spasm of criticism, almost all of them have fallen back in line.

The “woke” progressive left has a problem with intolerance and rigid ideological orthodoxies, and so does the right, especially at the state level. But the political right, including significant parts of the Republican Party, has developed an affinity for political violence in both word and deed.

Since 2015, Republican leaders like McConnell have plainly been hoping that Trump’s movement and its violent rhetoric would somehow just go away. They ignored, and thereby effectively condoned, it. But it didn’t go away. Instead, it ripened into actual violence on January 6 and seems ready to burst out again in a far more savage manner during some future confrontation.

The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/08/09/what-will-biden-and-raisi-do-if-the-iran-nuclear-talks-fail/

For all its limitations, the JCPOA is still the best short-term solution by far.

With Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi sworn in on Thursday, the impact on efforts to revive the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement will quickly become clear. Time is running short to reach an understanding and avoid further, and possibly greatly escalated or even devastating, confrontation.

Under his lame-duck predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, talks made little progress. Mr Rouhani has reportedly said that he was “not allowed” to make an agreement by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his close allies. That’s either because Iran’s leaders don’t want to make a deal or didn’t want Mr Rouhani get any credit for the sanctions relief that Iran desperately needs. It will soon become obvious which attitude was driving whatever obstruction he faced.

In theory, an agreement ought to be attainable. Both sides say they want one. They even agree that it should be on the basis of compliance-for-compliance with the JCPOA text signed years ago. So, what Washington and Tehran are really negotiating is what constitutes compliance on both sides, and how and when measures to restore that compliance on both sides would be taken.

Timing is a key issue, as ever with the JCPOA. Iran’s responsibilities are fairly clear, though an agreement about how quickly they would roll back prohibited activities and what monitoring would be required is necessary. US sanctions are more complex, but the Biden administration appears willing to ensure Iran gets all the economic benefits it received from the 2015 agreement.

All that may not sound like a particularly heavy diplomatic lift, but politics ensure it very much is.

There is, and always was, strong opposition on both sides to any such accommodation. Many of Mr Raisi’s allies were harsh critics of the agreement. But he has repeatedly stressed he wants to restore it.

Making matters worse from the American point of view, the 2015 agreement was a chronological gamble, providing Iran with significant sanctions relief and securing nuclear limitations that expire between 10-15 years from “implementation day” on January 16, 2016. The countdown towards the expiration of Iran’s nuclear restrictions under the deal has been moving forward ever since.

So, this same agreement is going to be a lot less attractive in 2022 than it was in 2015, because it is all based on deadlines that have been expiring the entire time. However, the costs of failure are also becoming increasingly evident.

A year after former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and began a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, Iran launched a low-intensity warfare response of “maximum resistance” against US and US-related targets in the region.

The grey-zone conflict between the US and Iran eased somewhat when the indirect talks began after Joe Biden assumed the US presidency. But Iran continues to flex its muscles, particularly in an intensifying series of reciprocal attacks with Israel.

Israel is alleged to have been responsible for a wide range of explosions, fires and other sabotage in key Iranian facilities in recent months, including its main nuclear facility at Natanz. Iran’s responses have recently included a deadly drone attack against an Israeli-operated merchant tanker travelling from Tanzania to Fujairah which killed two crew members.

Iranian tensions with the US reached a boiling point in January 2020 when pro-Iranian militias in Iraq unleashed numerous attacks against US targets and the US killed one of Iran’s most powerful commanders, and important leaders, Gen Qassem Suleimani, as well as the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Unit, Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis.

That didn’t lead to a US-Iranian war, but it certainly got too close for comfort. And, even while tensions are somewhat eased, that recent history and the ongoing shadow war between Iran and Israel amply illustrate the alarming scenarios that could well develop out of a diplomatic collapse in Vienna.

Given the impasse under Mr Rouhani, and questions about Mr Raisi’s sincerity and authority, serious consideration is being given in Washington to how to manage a post-JCPOA future, especially if Iran makes a dash for nuclear weapons capability.

The West has always understood it might have to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, as it does with North Korea, but has also recognised that doing so would require a tougher, more disciplined and thoroughgoing regime of containment. That won’t be easy, and could be very risky. And because it is such an unattractive proposition, some are suggesting radical alternatives.

Israel has launched repeated attacks against pro-Iranian militia groups in Syria and Iraq, and has made it clear that Hezbollah in Lebanon, too, faces serious redlines. Last week, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz said his country might be willing to strike Iran directly if Tehran and its proxies continue to attack Israeli targets.

A former senior US official, Dennis Ross, suggested that if the talks fail, Washington should supply Israel with the fearsome GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (also known as “the mother of all bombs”), a massive 14,000-kilogram bunker-buster weapon.

They “could be used to destroy [Iran’s underground nuclear facility at] Fordow” and other deeply hardened sites, he writes. He claims Iranians might doubt the US’s willingness to carry out such an attack, but not Israel’s. He also suggests such a weapons transfer could be a negotiating tactic, inducing Tehran to come to terms. But it takes very little imagination to realise that any such attack would probably unleash a maelstrom of regional violence, if not all-out war. And if Tehran is absolutely determined to develop nuclear weapons, eventually it will – such attacks and any other pressure notwithstanding.

For all its limitations, the JCPOA is still the best short-term solution by far.

One major stumbling block is that both sides plainly think they are operating from stronger positions than they actually are. And both are hoping to secure at least a little advantage over the other to fend off political criticism.

Now that Iran has a new president, progress will be required sooner rather than later. The US has said the Vienna talks cannot go on indefinitely. That is putting it mildly. The clock has been ticking since 2015, and the hands aren’t moving any slower.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-04/on-its-anniversary-the-beirut-blast-further-ruptures-a-fractured-country?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

An  FBI report says only a fraction of the chemicals delivered to the hangar exploded. What happened to the rest?

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the devastating Beirut port explosion, perhaps the worst non-nuclear blast in a heavily populated area in human history. A large stockpile of ammonium nitrate stored at the port ignited in a devastating eruption that left much of the city shattered.

The anatomy of the disaster, one of numerous calamities that have befallen Lebanon over the past two years, sums up all the essential dysfunctions destroying the country: corrupt and incompetent administration; a complete absence of transparency, accountability and justice; and the willingness of powerful forces to place the entire society in extreme jeopardy for their own narrow, selfish purposes.

The official explanation of how the chemicals, which can be used as either fertilizer or explosive material, arrived in Lebanon was always implausible and now appears beyond ridiculous. In 2013, a Moldovan-flagged vessel arrived at the port, supposedly en route to Mozambique. Eleven months later, the dangerous cargo was offloaded to hangar 12, where it remained until the explosion that killed at least 218 people and injured thousands.

But according to a 2020 FBI report completed shortly after the catastrophe, of the original shipment of 2,754 tons of ammonium nitrate, only 552 exploded. Lebanese authorities quietly agree with that assessment, according to Reuters.

There are two obvious conclusions. If the full amount had still been in hangar 12 and exploded, most of the city would have been wiped out and the death toll unimaginable. Second, while the ammonium nitrate was supposedly being stored at the port, in fact most of it was being used, and almost certainly not for agriculture.

It’s not absolutely impossible that most of the ammonium nitrate didn’t explode but was instead blown into the sea. But in the broader context that strains credulity.

It is likely that these dangerous chemicals were brought to Beirut to be used in explosives. Ever since the blast, many Lebanese have cast suspicion and blame on the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and its close ally, the Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. It would not have been the first time these forces have used the Lebanese state and society as a cover and vehicle for their nefarious activities, for which the Lebanese people have again paid an exorbitant cost. (Hezbollah has denounced allegations it was to blame.)

But there will be no accountability. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, authorities promised a quick and thorough probe. That was never going to happen. The first investigative judge was summarily fired after he sought to question key officials. His replacement has been completely unable to secure testimony from security officials and members of Parliament, or to lift the lawmakers’ legal immunity to get at the facts.

If it were merely a question of protecting incompetence, or even corruption, some semblance of an investigation could be possible, even in Lebanon. But a real inquiry can’t be allowed because it would more than likely reveal that the Mozambique cover story is fiction and that the chemicals were, in fact, destined for Beirut from the beginning. Eventually, it would uncover what really happened to the missing 2,200 tons and, most importantly, who is really responsible.

But the Lebanese state is in no position to hold Hezbollah and the agents of the Syrian regime accountable, or even admit to much of their activities. The irony is that the Lebanese government institutions that seem so helpless, and even hostages, to these forces are the only real alternative to the domination of Hezbollah and its allies. Calls in the U.S. to stigmatize the Lebanese government and deny it badly-needed aid will only strengthen their grip on the country.

Even targeted sanctions can backfire. U.S. Treasury Department sanctions, richly deserved on the merits and imposed in 2020, against Gibran Bassil, the son-in-law and would-be heir to Lebanese President Michel Aoun, mainly had the effect of hardening the Lebanese political gridlock that has prevented the country from reaching a desperately needed bailout agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

The port explosion and its wretched aftermath do indeed illustrate everything that is wrong with Lebanese realities, and institutions. But if the rest of the world is rightly disgusted with the corruption, unaccountability and hijacking by extremists of Lebanese institutions, the answer is to help strengthen — not to shun — them.

The sudden devastation at the port a year ago is mirrored by a more slowly unfolding, and far worse, social and economic calamity. In both cases, the only reasonable answer is to help the Lebanese rebuild and restructure. Turning away or penalizing Lebanon will only make the tragedy, and the problem, worse.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/08/01/the-republicans-unsurprising-response-to-the-capitol-hearings/

Republicans have adopted a range of positions from overt support for the insurrection to calculated indifference.

Riveting US congressional hearings have been a staple since the end of the Second World War and the introduction of live television. But it has been decades since any testimony was as spellbinding as that of the police officers, who were attacked by the pro-Donald Trump mob that violently sought to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

It was the first time in US history, including during the Civil War, when the losing side attempted to prevent the winners from accepting their obligations.

Four police officers who were attacked by the mob that assaulted Congress on January 6 testified at the first hearing of a House Select Committee last week. At least 150 officers were injured and one was killed.

It was the most powerful congressional testimony since the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s, eclipsing contentious Supreme Court confirmations, impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton and, twice, Mr Trump, and even the Iran-Contra arms scandal during the Reagan administration.

Yet not only have the hearings been thoroughly politicised, so has the event itself.

The facts were well understood at the time and are being systematically confirmed. Yet most Republicans are responding with denial and derision.

Many are dismissing it as “political theatre,” calling the officers “scripted, rehearsed and phony,” and viciously mocking their emotions.

A noted Republican activist labeled one officer a “crisis actor,” meaning an impostor, and Fox News’ Laura Ingram called them all “political actors.”

Yet Republicans are in a difficult predicament.

Immediately after January 6, most key Republican leaders expressed horror at the attack. Many spoke out forcefully against the riot and especially, Mr Trump, whom they held responsible.

Soon enough, though, Senior Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy capitulated to Mr Trump’s leadership. And because Mr Trump cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the January 6 violence, perforce they must defend him and, by extension, the violence itself.

Yet Republicans are profoundly divided.

The most extreme among them express passionate support for the riot, vilify the police, and make a martyr out of the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt. Mr Trump, and representatives Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Marjorie Taylor Green, among others, (several of whom have been implicated in planning the attack by a self-proclaimed insurrection leader, Ali Alexander) are key examples.

The biggest Republican camp, particularly among House leaders, including Mr McCarthy and his deputy Elise Stefanik, effectively treat the attack on Congress as if it were a decontextualized act of nature. The real blame, they insist, belongs to the Democrats and especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

They claim Ms Pelosi had advance warning of the potential for violence and did not do enough to prepare or train the Capitol Police. But Ms Pelosi is not the commander of the Capitol Police force, and most of the missing law enforcement firepower was effectively under the control of the Trump administration.

Many centrist Republicans take the amazing position that January 6 is no longer relevant; that whatever happened then doesn’t matter and we must all move on and simply debate the Biden administration.

Most, like Mr McConnell, scorn the hearings as a “partisan exercise”.

Yet immediately after the insurrection, Mr McConnell angrily declared Mr Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the carnage at Congress. Ever since, he has effectively refused to discuss the matter further, including claiming to know nothing about the committee hearing.

Republicans had designated a respected colleague, John Katko, to negotiate an agreement for a bipartisan and independent commission and then rejected his deal with the Democrats.

In truth, they were never going to co-operate with any probe.

Yet, there are two Republican members on the House Select Committee – representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. So, even though Republicans did their best to block any bipartisan process, they purport to be outraged that Ms Pelosi is exercising the sole authority that they forced on her.

Nonetheless, she invited Mr McCarthy to appoint Republican members, which he sought to use to create a partisan spectacle. Two of his five nominees, including Jim Jordan, are vocal supporters of the rioters and major proponents of the lie about the “stolen election”, and could possibly be participants in events or at least are likely material witnesses. Ms Pelosi rightly refused to appoint them to the committee and the three other Republicans boycotted the proceedings. She then appointed Ms Cheney and Mr Kinzinger

Mr Jordan and the others should be subpoenaed by this committee, along with many Trump administration officials, including the former president.

With every passing week, it becomes increasingly evident that Mr Trump’s efforts to overthrow the election results were more far-reaching and insidious than previously known.

He had at least dozens of newly discovered conversations with state leaders and election officials across the country to try to undo the outcome. He also pressured his own government agencies to intervene without cause.

On December 27, he reportedly called senior Justice Department officials and told them to “just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me” and unnamed congressional allies.

Fortunately, they told him there was absolutely no basis for such a statement and flatly refused.

To this day, he and his supporters, including Mr McCarthy, continue to either say or imply that he is still the legitimate president and, by unavoidable implication, that US democracy is a sham.

Democrats are certainly motivated by partisan interests, but in this case the facts are almost entirely on their side. That is only likely to intensify as the hearings proceed, including questions regarding police preparation.

But that is where the process may become more politically dangerous for the Democrats.

Republicans have adopted a range of positions, from overt support for the insurrection to calculated indifference, that all paint the subject as an egregious, opportunistic and ideological vendetta.

As long as tens of millions of Americans believe some version of that, even a full explication of the truth may not break the illusion.

The hegemony of lies has become so pervasive, especially on the right, that Americans may, in this generation, never be able to develop a shared narrative about one of the worst assaults on their own political system in history.

And most alarmingly, that could become a welcome mat for another, more calculated and competent, effort to overturn a free and fair US election with a large measure of popular support.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-28/why-tunisia-s-democratic-experiment-must-succeed?sref=tp95wk9l

It is a vital test of whether secular groups and Islamists can coexist in a constitutional order.

The major constitutional crisis in Tunisia once again raises a key question at the core of contemporary Arab political dispute: Do Islamist parties have a legitimate place in the public square? The apparent autogolpe by President Kais Saied may have been precipitated by widespread protests over government corruption and ineptitude, but it can also be seen as an attempt by the forces of traditional republican authoritarianism to undermine political Islam, here represented by Ennahda, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and the country’s largest party.

This is a battle that has played out repeatedly across the Arab world. When the old authoritarian order is toppled by a pro-democracy mass movement, it is usually the Islamist groups — better organized and less tainted by the former regime than most secular rivals — that rise to power. But they quickly alienate the population by ideological overreach and administrative incompetence, which creates an opening for the return of the secular authoritarians.

The quintessential example of this is Egypt, where popular protest in 2011 brought down the dictator Hosni Mubarak (just days after Tunisians had overthrown their own tyrant), leading to elections won by the Muslim Brotherhood. But the undemocratic policies of President Mohammed Morsi led to even larger protests two years later, which brought General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to power.

Mainstream Arab attitudes towards Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood are bookended by two rival small and wealthy Gulf states: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE champions a strict separation between religion and politics, and holds that relatively moderate groups like the Brotherhood are the thin end of the wedge: Give them space in the public square and it will soon be overrun by more radical and violent Islamist groups. (This argument draws power from the fact that extremists such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State do indeed derive much of their worldview from Brotherhood sources.) Better to eliminate the somewhat milder forms of political Islam before the more dangerous strains take hold.

Qatar, backed by its more powerful partner Turkey, argues to the contrary: That the Islamism of the Brotherhood is the only plausible corrective to more violent extremism — and is, moreover, broadly representative of popular socio-political sensibilities in Muslim communities.

The UAE, with its deep pockets and often backed by Saudi Arabia, has tended to back secular authoritarians such as Egypt’s Sisi against Islamists. The Qataris, hardly lacking in resources, have been generous toward the Brotherhood and its offshoots and use their considerable media clout to implausibly conflate Islamists and Arab democracy.  

But in Tunisia, Ennahda seemed to be pointing toward a third way, a model for post-Islamist Arab politics. Its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, whom I have talked to at length, is no liberal — but he does appear to be a pragmatic constitutionalist. And there are genuine democrats high in the party’s ranks. Since 2011, Ennahda has sought to demonstrate that it is no longer revolutionary, conspiratorial or internationalist.

Ghannounchi accepted the 2014 Tunisian constitution, even though it went against the Islamist grain by empowering an elected president rather than the mainly parliamentary system favored by the Brotherhood. The party abandoned its secretive character to openly participate in electoral politics. And it distanced itself from other Brotherhood offshoots elsewhere in the Arab world, focusing instead on purely Tunisian issues.

Given the party’s history as an underground movement, it is no surprise that many Tunisians doubt the sincerity of its conversion. But if it is a pretense, Ghannouchi and other Ennahda leaders have kept it up for a decade. In an open, parliamentary system, there is every chance the party will eventually become what they say it is, whatever their private beliefs. And even if Ennahda’s transformation is incomplete or insufficient, it does offer a model for incorporating religious conservatives into constitutional Arab democracies.

Seen in that light, Tunisia’s democracy is rather more than the sole success story of the Arab Spring uprisings: It is also a crucial test of whether Islamists can evolve into normal social and religiously conservative parties and coexist with secular groups in a constitutional order.

If the answer is “No,” that portends a long, potentially violent twilight struggle in many Arab countries. It is extremely important that the answer turns out to be “Yes.”

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/27/the-row-over-selling-ice-cream-in-the-west-bank-is-a-big-deal/

Israel needs to maintain an illusion of normalcy even though settling occupied territories is a massive human rights abuse.

You would think a little melted ice cream would be the last thing to alarm one of the world’s major regional powers, with its cutting-edge technology, an OECD economy and a powerful military including its own nuclear arsenal. But the meltdown by Israel’s leaders and advocates over an ice cream company’s marketing decision indicates how vulnerable they feel to criticism or a cursory examination of the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Vermont-based ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s recently announced that they are no longer willing to sell products in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. This policy is principled and justified, as well as nuanced and limited. It is also symbolic and will have very little, if any, real impact on Israeli society.

But the Israeli government and its global allies have reacted with thunderous outrage. It reached a crescendo when Israeli President Isaac Herzog described this ice cream cold-shoulder as “a new form of terrorism”.

Israel-supporting politicians in the US are threatening to invoke state-level anti-boycott of Israel laws to punish Ben & Jerry’s. If they do, they will succeed only in exposing that much of this legislation is flatly unconstitutional. But it probably won’t come to that.

This dust-up is taking place entirely at the rhetorical and symbolic registers. And in that sense, Ben & Jerry’s announcement is indeed threatening to Israel, particularly with regards to US perceptions of Israel, its occupation of Palestinian lands and growing drive towards eventual annexation of much of the West Bank.

For most of the world, Ben & Jerry’s new policy will make perfect sense.

Israeli settlements are a black-letter violation of fundamental international law, specifically Article 49, paragraph six, of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This crucial bedrock of international law was adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Unlike the earlier Geneva Conventions, which dealt with the conduct of war between combatants and treatment of prisoners, the Fourth Convention was designed for the protection of civilians during times of war.

It is the quintessential international human rights document.

As the International Red Cross Commentary of 1958 explains, paragraph six was “intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonise those territories”.

In other words, using civilians to settle occupied territories is a major human rights violation. Article 49 clearly establishes that civilians living under military occupation have a right not to be colonised and have their lands taken away from them and given to somebody else.

Yet, that is the essence of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank. Far beyond any other ostensible purpose, it enables a project that has implanted more than 600,000 Israeli civilians and counting into occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

It is only reasonable for anyone to decline to encourage such human rights violations and therefore refuse to do business with Israeli settlements. This stance is growing in Europe, and even creeping into US society.

Yet, many Israelis are scandalised whenever this happens. They have convinced themselves that what they are doing is normal, reasonable and within their rights.

Israel’s leaders know it is essential that the rest of the world view the occupation and the settlements as, if not normal, at least no big deal. These are not occupied territories, they say. They are “disputed”. These aren’t colonial settlements. They are “Jewish towns and neighbourhoods”.

It is particularly important for them that the illusion of normality be maintained in the US. Few Americans – at least outside of fundamentalist parts of the Christian evangelical and some religiously Orthodox segments of Jewish communities – are likely to see it that way if allowed to think about it too closely.

So, for Israel’s leaders, who understand the importance of their country’s “special relationship” with the US, settlement boycotts are, if anything, even more dangerous than generalised boycotts of Israel (which are vanishingly rare in the West).

The Israeli state maintains the fiction that there is, in effect, a mobile, fluid Israel that extends into the occupied territories wherever an Israeli settler, or possibly soldier, happens to be, leaving an undefinable, unresolved reality everywhere else. That’s completely indefensible.

But since continued occupation and eventual annexation have become a virtual consensus within the Israeli political elite, any time the illusion is shattered, and this shell game is exposed as a fiction, the jig is effectively up.

It must be especially alarming that Ben & Jerry’s was founded and led by two liberal and politically engaged Jewish Americans. It is yet another sign that many Jewish Americans are becoming increasingly sceptical about the Greater Israel project embodied by the settlements. This explains the imperative to police Jewish American criticism with particular determination.

An Israeli state committed to a two-state solution would be at pains to distinguish itself from the settlements. But one that is committed to territorial expansion via occupation will instead feel threatened by whatever reinforces that distinction, exactly as Ben & Jerry’s has done.

So, this seemingly ridiculous kerfuffle over the marketing of one of scores of major international ice cream brands to a few hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank is actually, politically, a big deal.

Israel’s leaders and other supporters of the emerging Greater Israel realise that any effort to distinguish between the Israeli state and its settlements, or that calls attention to its policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territories, is a mortal threat. Not to Israel as such, but to the Greater Israel they seem so determined to establish.

That project requires the rest of the world, especially Americans, not to think about, or look too carefully at, the occupation and the settlements.

The illusion of normality is absolutely essential.

Anything, even a seemingly minor brouhaha over a little ice cream, is so threatening to this ruse that it can indeed be called, with a straight face no less, “a new form of terrorism”.

For, in truth, the underlying reality is literally terrifying.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/19/why-so-many-republicans-are-anti-vaxxers/

A budding authoritarian cult on the US right needs it acolytes to be willing to die for the cause, and many seem to be.

Does former US president Donald Trump really want his voters to die? Can Fox News really want its viewers to perish in large numbers from the coronavirus?

These sound like ridiculous questions. But under current circumstances in the US, they have become unavoidable.

As the world struggles with Covid-19, the US is in what should be the most enviable position: a large country, geographically and demographically, that has, rapidly, been able to make effective vaccinations available to all adults.

Yet, the US won’t reach herd immunity, largely because a substantial percentage of the population is refusing to accept these free and easily available vaccinations. The main reason is that much of the right-wing echo-sphere is working overtime to create doubts, sow fear and in every possible way reduce participation.

But why?

That this is coordinated and systematic is clear. Pandemic misinformation and, yes, disinformation have a long history on the American right, going back to Mr Trump’s notorious news conferences where he insisted the virus was under total control and would soon vanish, touted various ineffective remedies, and suggested the introduction of light and even bleach into the body.

Yet, when he was in office, Mr Trump and his allies trumpeted the development of the vaccines as his greatest accomplishment. With Joe Biden in the White House, that’s thrown out of the window.

Now, Mr Trump is casting a shadow on people’s judgement, unwilling, except on one lone occasion, to urge people to become vaccinated and declining to admit how extremely ill he was with the virus or that he and his entire family were early beneficiaries of the vaccine.

It’s even worse on Fox News. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, received the inoculation as early as December. Yet, Fox’s most potent programming is working overtime to convince Americans not to get vaccinated under any circumstances.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Its most fervent anti-vaccine propagandist, Tucker Carlson, refuses to discuss whether or not he is vaccinated. If the answer were no, he would surely want to say so. Yet, he continues to fulminate against the vaccines and all efforts to get Americans vaccinated, and provides an exceptionally high-level platform for the worst kind of anti-vaccine propagandists.

Fox’s other major primetime star, Laura Ingram, was all in favour of the vaccine when she was touting it as Mr Trump’s major accomplishment. But since his defeat, she has become passionately opposed to any efforts to vaccinate Americans.

It should come as no surprise that almost all of the currently reported US hospitalisations and deaths from the pandemic are occurring among unvaccinated persons, and that outbreaks are generally concentrated in states that are heavily conservative and Republican, with high numbers of unvaccinated citizens.

Indeed, the Republican Arkansas state legislature has just banned all public and private entities, including hospitals, from requiring their workers to have Covid-19 vaccines. Why would anyone ever encourage their followers to take such risks, or prohibit any requirements that they don’t, even in hospitals?

Obviously, this is partly just anti-Democratic Party and anti-Biden. For many, including Mr Trump, as long as he was president the vaccine was a great accomplishment. Now, it’s a mortal peril. It also feeds into a familiar set of resentments, against expertise, science and government, with alienated, resentful, less-educated and anti-establishment sentiments all being heavily stoked.

In the end, the ‘noble cause’ embodied by the Great Leader demands your death, if it comes to that

It certainly plays into anti-government and libertarian impulses, as well as small-government and anti-authority ideals. But none of that is really enough to explain this incredible phenomenon. The answer certainly lies deeper in the individual and collective human psyche.

With some of the leading protagonists vaccinated – and this is, at heart, understood by the targets of this strange propaganda – then something else is definitely afoot.

It has all the hallmarks of an authoritarian cult. In the final analysis, the tribe and the noble cause, embodied by the so-called Great Leader, demand sacrifice. If need be human sacrifices. If need be, yours.

The process here is easier because only a small percentage of coronavirus victims will actually die. And mitigation, including masking and distancing, was already heavily stigmatised by some Republicans during the Trump presidency.

It’s obvious that tribalism of this variety is all about aggression turned outward, against the other: the minority, the immigrant, the foreigner, or the outsider. The inevitable corollary is that aggression often flips back and turns inward, and violence against others can become expressed in violence against the self.

Suicide bombers of Al Qaeda and ISIS are the most obvious examples. But the inclination to turn aggression inward, as a central feature of affirming in-group cohesion, is constant in human history. Self-sacrifice is the most powerful myth of commitment, patriotism and nobility.

The dying Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for instance, is known for its slogan “Patria o Muerte!” – homeland or death. The message underlying such all-or-nothing nihilism is, die for me.

Authoritarian systems inevitably demand the highest sacrifice. They fetishise authority, submission and death – whether, ideally, for the other, or, if need be, from the self.

In the end, the “noble cause” embodied by the Great Leader demands your death, if it comes to that. And it must be given willingly, as proof of its essential validity. That’s true any time a political movement acquires fundamentalist overtones on left or right, religious or secular.

Does Mr Trump want his supporters to die? Does Mr Carlson want his viewers to die? Or do they need them to be willing to die? What could they be doing other than asking for that? Many of their adherents enthusiastically want to be willing to die for them, in the so-called Great Cause.

One of the most revealing recent reports is of an ardent Trump supporter, a former marine called “Randall”, who, though extremely ill, refused a test for the virus lest it might make his leader “look bad”.

That’s the ideal follower of this cult, someone willing to die to keep the fantasy alive.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/11/wheres-the-us-headed-in-next-years-crucial-midterm-election/

The vote will see ‘culture wars’ face off against pragmatic, pocketbook concerns.

“Divided America” may be a cliche but its political impact is deepening. As Democrats and Republicans prepare for next year’s crucial midterm congressional elections, the two parties are not just offering different answers to similar questions, they are talking about completely different aspects of reality.

Parties often want to focus on different matters. But the extent to which Democrats are preparing to run on governance, the economy and recovering from the pandemic, while Republicans are laser-focused on culture and grievance, is remarkable.

Republicans will – if need be – talk about the economy and attribute the post-pandemic boom that is already underway to tax cuts under former president Donald Trump. But unless there is a sudden downturn or inflation scare they are likely to avoid the topic.

Democrats will tend to claim credit for all economic progress. But they will also highlight the supposed benefits of their big plans for the US economy, especially if they can pass another major spending bill before November 2022.

Even if they can’t, President Joe Biden is seeking to engage the US government with the economy to an extent unknown in recent decades, primarily through executive orders that do not require congressional approval.

The White House “Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force” is the centrepiece of a plan to revive US manufacturing. Claiming to have learnt from crises during the pandemic regarding medicines, personal protective equipment, ventilators and other core medical requirements, Mr Biden wants to ensure that the US becomes independent of international suppliers in manufacturing such key products without relying on a complex global supply chain.

It’s part of the Biden version of “America First” economic nationalism. Rather than rely on tariffs, as Mr Trump did, and ignore the reality of complex global supply chains, Mr Biden hopes to revitalise manufacturing by insisting that the US needs to be self-sufficient on broad categories of items.

That is all probably too detailed for much of the electorate, but most of the public, including many Trump-supporting Republicans, want the government to play a major role in overseeing economic growth and securing large numbers of well-paying jobs.

Democrats are going to run on that issue and they will easily link it to the striking success the Biden administration has had in making Covid-19 vaccines available to all adult Americans in very short order.

Many Trump supporters and others are refusing vaccinations, which is the only reason the project has stalled just short of the stated goal of 70 per cent national inoculation by now.

Some Republican House members may try to run on an anti-vaccination and anti-mask platform. But most will avoid the issue altogether, save to again credit Mr Trump with having overseen the development of the vaccines in his last year in the White House.

Instead, Republicans are now focused on three cultural issues in which the federal government is sometimes barely, if at all, involved, but that certainly have a long track record of efficacy.

They will stress their categorical opposition to illegal and even legal immigration, with appeals to both anxieties about low-skilled wages and more cultural and racial xenophobic sentiments. Of the three, that’s the only genuinely federal issue.

Republicans will also point to rising crime rates, attempting to link that to Democratic control of most large cities and falsely painting Mr Biden as leading an agenda to “defund the police”.

There is almost always a strong racial component to such language, with violent crime invariably, if sometimes implicitly, attributed to African-Americans and Latinos.

But perhaps their biggest bet is on a “culture war” motif with “Critical Race Theory” serving as the main target. CRT has come to mean many different things. But it now frequently serves as a synecdoche for “woke progressivism” that is perceived to be, and sometimes can indeed be, an overly aggressive and even irrationally doctrinaire, hard-liberal approach to racial and, more controversially, transgender issues.

Despite the prevalence of QAnon and other bizarre conspiracy theories, and the near ubiquitous personality cult around Mr Trump, within their own ranks, Republicans will try to paint Democrats as the ones who have “gone crazy,” and been taken over by a radical, illiberal and oppressive “cancel culture” ideology.

All that has little to do with Mr Biden’s policy agenda, but Republicans are probably right that it is their biggest opportunity to make gains with a public that is otherwise likely to welcome more competent, expansive and ambitious governance on issues like the economy, infrastructure and climate change.

What is often being attacked as America-hating CRT is simply the public and academic unpacking of the reality that no society can impose centuries of slavery and mandate almost 100 years of segregation and racial discrimination without it leaving deep structural and institutional imprints and lacerations.

Fortunately for Republicans, liberal activists sometimes overplay their hands, and come across as power-hungry ideologues demanding conformity to their, often highly debatable, identity-based assertions. That inevitably alienates many people, and even alienates several African Americans and Latinos, not to mention many committed liberals and traditional leftists.

The irony is that Republican state legislatures across the country are by law mandating a countervailing political correctness which, for example, in Florida, effectively prohibits an honest discussion in schools about the role of racism in American history and present day society.

Such controversies are perennial and cyclical in the US. The cultural battle over race and identity peaked in the late 1960s, the mid-1990s and are again a focal point today. The explosion of anti-racist sentiment following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year virtually insured that the right would launch an organised “anti-anti-racism” pushback, which is the core of this controversy.

It’s ironic that the Republicans’ best allies in this debate are precisely some of the most zealous, hyper-progressive identity liberals, much to the dismay of many traditional class-oriented leftists.

The midterms will be about how much traction “culture war” issues can gain against an impressive commercial comeback under Mr Biden’s ambitious economically oriented agenda. The midterms appear set to pit emotional impulses against pocketbook concerns – and symbolic and cultural anxieties against pragmatic interests.

So, November 2022 will indicate whether the US national economy, manufacturing and jobs are more important than ethnic and cultural morale among the still-dominant white American constituency.