Post Election Angst

My last post focused on the allegations that Russian hackers influenced the US Presidential election. Even before I posted that, there were further allegations that Donald Trump had behaved badly in Moscow in 2012, and he was now susceptible to blackmail. So, what do we make of that?

One of the main allegations was that Trump had taken the same room in a hotel that President Obama had used previously, and he did this to defile it by bringing in prostitutes, and thus indirectly he defiled Obama. First, the allegation that Trump used the same room as Obama. I believe that, but not for any sinister reason. President Obama would probably warrant the best room in the hotel. Why shouldn’t Trump want the best room in the hotel? It is not as if he is short of cash. Further, there may well be only one really luxurious room because the demand for rooms at that price is probably low. So, quite simply, I am happy to accept the allegation that Trump used the same room, and I say, so what?

Then there is the issue that Trump brought in prostitutes. I suppose one cannot exactly rule it out, but really, it sounds ridiculous. I rather fancy that if he wanted a woman, there would be a number available, but people who go to Russia know that surveillance is rather common, and if you behave badly, there may well be consequences. Russian law, particularly to foreigners, is not quite the same as everywhere else. I recall advice given to me when I was young and I was driving in Poland, when it was behind the Iron Curtain: if you have an accident, it is your fault because you are a foreigner. Whether that was true I don’t know, but I certainly drove with more care through cities. (The countryside was different, as the chances of having a collision were negligible because the roads were basically empty but for a few trucks, and in one afternoon, a military Division heading for the Czechoslovak invasion.) I have also been to Moscow when it was part of the USSR, and the warnings from my embassy were clear: you will be watched. So if Trump really wanted to have business dealings with Russia, surely he would follow basic common sense? The basic evidence we have is that Trump really values a deal and would not sacrifice one for an hour of stupidity.

Which gets to my real issue. These allegations were made by one person who was paid to find dirt, and he has since disappeared. There is no supporting evidence whatsoever, and the author of the report cannot be made to answer or explain. In my book, the more important the allegation, the more important it is to have strong supporting evidence. What we need are facts, and the only fact we have is that one person who was paid to find dirt has reported finding dirt and has disappeared without leaving any evidence whatsoever of such dirt.

The next question is, suppose it were true? This requires someone to have recorded what happened in 2012. Why would he do that? To blackmail a businessman is a possibility, but surely whoever had the evidence would use it. Again, Trump is rich, and he might well have paid to have something go way. All the evidence is there was no such blackmail. To keep such evidence in the bottom draw in order to blackmail the future President of the United States verges on the bizarre. If they were so sure he would be President back in 2012, the more obvious move would be to take out some long-term bets. The odds back then should have been very high. Sorry, but I think the most likely story is our trusty dirt-digger went to Moscow and announced he was looking for dirt. For a suitable envelope full of euros, dollars, pounds, whatever, I am sure someone would supply whatever was desired, except, of course, evidence to back it up.

So what should happen next? I would like to think that the opponents to Trump and his policies should focus on the policies. So far, what he has done was announced in his campaign, for example he has cancelled Obamacare and the TPP. You may or may not agree with that, but they were announced policies and Trump won the election. In a representative Republic form of government, this is what is supposed to happen, the losers have to accept it and those who did not vote deserve what they get. Wild accusations against Trump are just that, and should stop. They will achieve nothing, except possibly give Trump a siege mentality, in which case he will stop listening to the thing that might have improved the effects of future action on is part. Either put up evidence or shut up.

One final and personal comment. I put a very simple version of that argument on a social medium site and some of the responses I got were quite vituperative. I was accused of supporting a Hitler, and being all sorts of things we need not state here. For me, this shows up something ugly coming into the political scene. People are so used to “fake news”, aka lies, that they think anything you state stands for your views on some side of an argument. They think everyone makes up their “news” to support their view. Just to be clear, you cannot read any political view into the above. My argument is simple: if you want to accuse someone of something publicly, put up the evidence. If you haven’t got any, shut up!

Advertisement

Russia hacks the Democrats??

One other piece of news that filled up the holiday period was that allegations sprang up everywhere stating the Russians hacked the Democrats and led to a change in the election result. My attitude is when something as serious as this arises, there needs to be evidence to support it. That evidence needs to be in sufficient detail to be plausible. “Fred assures me that there was,” is not evidence.

There are really two separate issues here. The first is, did the Russians hack the Democrats? A sub-question is, if yes, was it a Russian government agency, or just some private Russians? To answer the main question, we need to see evidence of when who was hacked, from where? The US Government might be a bit cagey about this, because if it announces when who was hacked from where, it starts to tell others what its capabilities are, and it may not want to do that, but if it does not, then it should have kept quiet in the first place. In WW II the British Government gave no warning to the people of Coventry that a raid was coming because they did not want to let the Germans know their enigma code was broken. That was a lot more serious than advertising that they tracked a hack on the Democratic National Congress. However, who was hacked, and with what security, is an important question because we know that Hillary Clinton had about 600,000 emails copied to the Weiner server. That should be more easily hacked, and any number of people, including but not restricted to, Russians, could have done it. For that matter, a number of industrious Republicans could have hacked it. To make this allegation stand, the details of the hack must be known.

There is one document on the web that claims to give the US government position (http://documents.latimes.com/read-us-…) Now intelligence gathering is difficult, but forming an opinion of what happened is just that; it is not evidence. Quoting: “Some analytic judgments are based directly on collected information others rest on previous judgments.” See the problem? The next problem arises when we consider the sources of the information. Quoting: “Many of the key judgments in this assessment rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.” In short, sources for many of the judgments came from “the behavior of Kremlin-loyal political figures, state media, and pro-Kremlin social media actors”. To me, the social media are not exactly reliable sources of facts. You might recall that the US Intelligence community, in public statements anyway, were sufficiently convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that they unleashed a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. For me, the problem is the reputation for reliability was shot then.

Interestingly, while the CIA and the FBI had “high confidence” in these assessments, the NSA had only “moderate confidence”. The NSA should be the expert in this field. The FBI asserted it had “high confidence” that Russia tried to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but then, a week out from the election, FBI Director Comey effectively torpedoed her campaign. Prior to Comey’s comments, Clinton had a 10% lead in the polls I saw, and in the next few days, the lead vanished. If Comey had such high confidence that Russia trying to destabilize Clinton’s campaign, and it concerned him, why did he do that? My final comment on that document – there are about three pages describing what could have happened, including allegations that a Romanian hacker was really the GRU, and the far more pages criticizing the balance of RT (Russian television). Yep, RT probably is biased, but is it as bad as Fox News? And just because RT may be biased, what has that got to do with hacking? And why cannot a Romanian hacker be just that?

Am I prepared to believe Russia hacked the Dems? Yep. I have little doubt the Russian Security Service is busy hacking whatever it can. As an aside, the US does this too. Recall Angela Merkel caught them out hacking her computer, and Germany is an ally. If the US does this to its allies, why would Russia be exempt, and if Russia found out the US was spying on it, why would it not do the same? Even if it did not know about US spying, that would not stop it from spying. So to summarize, I am happy to accept that Russia was prepared to spy on the Dems, but I would expect they would stay quiet about it. Other individual hackers, including Russians may not have been so quiet. So, for evidence we first need to know what exactly was hacked, and exactly who was it that did the hacking? Details. We need details.

The second allegation is more serious. This is that as a consequence of the hack, the Russian government altered the outcome of the election. This requires even more detailed evidence. What we have so far is the allegation that the Russians provided details that would be embarrassing to the Dems to Wikileaks. For that to alter the election, either the contents then became highly public, or alternatively the voters in the swing states are avid readers of Wikileaks. Personally, I feel the latter is ridiculous. I suspect the average rustbelt voter really has little or no interest in Wikileaks.

But let’s suppose that could be wrong. This implies there was something in these Wikileaks that was so sensational that it swung the election. What was it? Why haven’t I heard of it? But let us suppose I have been asleep at the wheel. It would not hurt to publish this series of embarrassments, after all the allegation is asserting that it is in the public domain. Then there is the question of who provided this information to Wikileaks. It is alleged that it was the Russian government, but Julian Assange denies that, and he should know. Now it is true that Assange could be lying, but if so we need evidence that is convincing. The problem is, this all looks more like the Democrats, and Democrat-appointed officials, having a general whinge at their loss.

Also interesting is that there have been no protests against the FBI Director Comey, whose allegation a week before the election that Clinton was under investigation almost certainly would lose her votes. There is firm evidence this occurred, but nobody seems to be particularly interested in it. The question is, why not?

Is there a solution to the Palestinian question?

Back from a quiet time, and look at what happened? The first was that at the end of 2016, New Zealand co-sponsored a UN resolution “demanding” that Israel stop building settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank. This generated a surprising amount of heat, if not much light. For those who have read my fiction, I have advocated logic as a way of analyzing problems, and it seems to me this question is suitable for such an approach, not that it is likely to succeed.

We start by acknowledging where we are. Israel is a Jewish state, and it occupies by military force the West Bank, which was largely populated by Palestinians, many of whom were forced out of the rest of Israel. The two sides have been very antagonistic towards each other, and the objective is to try to find a solution where both can live in peace. The question is, what are the conditions that might lead to that outcome? In my opinion, the options are:

1. Move the Jews out of the area. However, the Jews have such an invested infrastructure this option is not a starter.
2. Move the Palestinians somewhere else. The problem is, where? People say Jordan, but Jordan is already overrun by Syrian refugees, and in any case, why does someone else have to pay the price? While most of the Jews came recently, the Palestinians have been there for a very long time. Whoever advocates this solution can do their own bit, by accepting a Palestinian family, providing them a home and jobs, and a guaranteed income until they can fend for themselves. In short, put your money where your mouth is. I bet there will not be sufficient takers to make a difference.
3. Incorporate the Palestinians into Israel, with full citizenship, and enough money to make a start to life. That is a non-starter because Israel is a Jewish state, and a Muslim majority would be non-acceptable.
4. Have a two state solution.

In my opinion, only (4) has any hope, but here the problem is the West Bank is not exactly large, and it is covered with a pox of Israeli settlements. Some people say, they are only 3% of the area. Before addressing that, we must ask, are the settlements legal?

When the first settlements were being considered, the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry was asked whether international law permitted civilian settlement in the occupied territories. The reply: that would contravene the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The settlements are illegal because international law forbids an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The territory is under military occupation, and it is for that reason the Arabs who live there do not have to be integrated into Israel.

Here is the legal dilemma from the Israeli point of view. Granting citizenship to the Palestinians would mean either Israel ceased to be a proper representative republic, or it would cease to be a Jewish state. Not granting such citizenship meant they were under military occupation, and international law should apply.

In this context, it seems that everybody who keeps asserting Russia violates international law and should be punished are strangely quiet on Israel. Instead we have the rather bizarre situation where the people of the West Bank fall into two subsets: settlers enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizens, while the Palestinians are still under military occupation and have essentially no rights. The question then is, how long will this go on? Obviously, the hard right of Israeli politics seems to think, forever. Whatever else they have, compassion for the Palestinians is not one of them.

Returning to the 3% problem, the area of the settlements is not the issue. The settlements are all connected to Israel proper by roads controlled by Israel that slice up the West bank. The settlements all demand water, sewage, electricity, and other services. All of these services are controlled by Israel, and are unavailable to the Palestinians, and worse than that, Israel would not let the Palestinians cross their fixed infrastructure, because they would expect it to be damaged.

If there is to be a two-state solution, the Palestinians have to go some way. They have to accept the right of Israel to exist, not because it is right but because there is no alternative. Incidents such as the recent one where a Palestinian drove a truck through some Israeli soldiers have to stop. First it is not right to kill people, and particularly those who are not directly responsible for your problems, and second it is counterproductive, because it just firms up Israeli opinion about them. The Palestinians have been severely wronged, and everybody should acknowledge that, but the Palestinians cannot progress by living in a morass of moaning about wrongs. That does not mean that others should not do something to help, though. When the United Nations voted to form Israel, they gave away that which they did not own. In the Naqba, about 700,000 Palestinians were displaced, and their property taken over by Israel. Of course, following the UN resolution, the Israelis could say they had no choice. Maybe, but if that was what the UN wanted, they should have purchased the Palestinian properties and given them to the Israelis. The fact of the matter is that Israel was founded on promises (Lloyd George offered the concept to Jews to help raise money for the war effort, which probably did not help the attitude of a certain Austrian corporal.), terrorism (it is the one shining example that proves that sometimes terrorism does work) and military force. One of the great ironies is that the Jews sent to Palestine in the late 1930s from Germany, organized by a certain Reinhardt Heydrich, set about terrorist activities against the British during WW II, while Heydrich was busy organizing the mass murder of Jews in Europe. The fact that the Palestinians and other “Arab” countries tried military means to right the wrongs done to the Palestinians is also irrelevant, although through their lack of effectiveness it has obviously made the problem worse.

But the past is irrelevant. We are here. If we accept that the two-state solution is the only possibility for civilized peace, then both sides must make serious concessions, and more to the point, the rest of the world that voted to create this problem has to come to the party with serious investment to make Palestine at least a plausible state. If you vote to give away that which you do not own, then you should be prepared to pay for it, to give the Palestinians some hope. The alternative is that the Palestinians live in perpetual military occupation, with no rights, and subjugated by a military force that does not like them one bit.

The recent example of a soldier who saw a Palestinian lying on the ground, and because he believed that Palestinian had injured an Israeli, he shot him. The Palestinian was subjugated, and would have been taken away for trial, but this soldier simply executed him. If you see interviews of Israelis, a large number (including some right wing rabbis I saw interviewed) seem to think the soldier was right. Sorry, but that is not civilized, it is not legal, and it most certainly is not helpful.

So if neither side is interested in reaching a solution, how does this end? I confess I have no idea, except I cannot see it ending well