Image from ForeignPolicyCamp.

So, perceptive readers, you may have noticed that a brief break in your regularly scheduled programming is at foot, and we have the explanation for it: it’s summer, and we’re on vacation.

Yes, its true, even bloggers need breaks sometimes – and because our bloggers are those exceptionally busy types who are always doing many things at once (while writing from locations all over the world), we felt that it was important to give them a bit of ‘time off’ too.

No fears however, as we will be continuing as a team in the fall, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of new international issues to debate with you about. We thank you for your continued support (and always-interesting comments and discussion) and look forward to seeing you again in the fall! In the meantime, feel free to share topics you’d like us to cover in the comments section.

Mc Chrystal smiles at a public event. Image via armybase.us and warisboring.com.

The Taliban seem to be in a confident mood following the departure of American General Stanley McChrystal. The general was busily commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan until he was suddenly relieved of command last week, in the wake of a Rolling Stone article that recounted some unflattering comments by him and his staff about the civilian leadership in Washington. Afghan Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid put matters quite succinctly:

“We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?”

It’s interesting to look at what those differences in the ranks of the enemy might entail. The Rolling Stone article, as others have commented, is a terrific piece of journalism that describes McChrystal’s struggle against “the wimps in the White House”.

The media, in reporting the fallout, have tended to focus on a few mildly salty quotes from McChrystal and his aides: US President Barack Obama “didn’t seem very engaged” during a meeting with McChrystal, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke was “like a wounded animal”, and so forth. Beyond personality clashes, however, the article hints at a more substantive conflict between the “counterinsurgency” (COIN) approach favoured by McChrystal and the demands of political expediency. The article describes COIN as follows:

COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps.

That requirement for years and decades probably struck the civilian leadership as a problem, given Obama’s promise to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2011. Worse yet, the COIN approach hit a stumbling block earlier this year in the Marjah region of Helmand Province, where sending in troops and attempting to rebulid governance singularly failed to prevent re-infiltration by the Taliban. The Rolling Stone reporter, Michael Hastings, concluded his piece by saying that victory in Afghanistan did not really seem possible.

The most charitable reading of the Obama administration’s decision to dismiss McChrystal would be that Obama and his circle felt that a more confrontational strategy and a faster exit were needed, and simply used the Rolling Stone article as an excuse to get rid of a commander whose strategy they profoundly distrusted. However, this interpretation seems untenable. McChrystal’s replacement is General David Petraeus, a noted COIN adherent (and exponent, in Iraq) who apparently feels that the current strategy in Afghanistan requires only “tinkering and tweaking”. In accepting McChrystal’s resignation, Obama explicitly said that there was no “difference on policy” between him and the general.

Obama also said that he had not made his decision because of “any sense of personal insult”, which might be true as far as it goes. However, the lack of any clear strategic change implies that Obama got rid of McChrystal for reasons that were more theatrical than substantive. Whether it was sheer pique, a brittle Harper-esque insistence on “message discipline”, or a ham-fisted attempt to assert civilian control over the military – which of course was never in doubt anyway – it’s hard to disagree with the BBC’s John Simpson that:

Only a government as nervous as President Obama’s about seeming weak and indecisive would have reacted so fiercely.

However, I would feel rather more secure in sneering at Obama’s pettiness if the commander of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard, had not been replaced for even more trifling reasons in May. Ménard “was removed from command following allegations he had an intimate relationship with a member of his staff”, falling foul of what sounds like an absurdly puritanical ban on fornicating with one’s comrades in arms. Soldiers, after all, have been getting it on in war zones since the days of Achilles and Patroclus. I fully agree with George Jonas, whose crusty, gritty perspectives I seem to appreciate more and more as I get older:

[D]epriving the country of a good soldier for nothing more than an extramarital fling with a subordinate means picking Mrs. Grundy’s priorities over Wellington’s priorities. For Canada’s military, it’s a damn poor choice.

Getting rid of McChrystal was probably an equally poor – or at least equally needless – choice for America’s military, and for the wider effort in Afghanistan. Just as well, I think, that we’ll be more or less out of there by around this time next year.

Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico (NASA, International Space Station Science, 05/04/10).

As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico from a well owned by the multinational oil company BP, albeit at a reduced rate now that some of the outflow from the well is being captured, an odd transatlantic spat has developed around the fact that the initials BP used to stand for “British Petroleum” but now stand for nothing at all. US President Barack Obama referred to BP as “British Petroleum” at one point, and this left his ambassador to the UK scrambling to explain that this was not intended as a slight against Britain. Nevertheless, some UK commentators – notably Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher – were quick to take offense, and even to suggest that some deeply rooted hostility towards Britain was coming to the surface.

Although it’s true that Obama has displayed few signs of wanting to maintain a “special relationship” with Britain, I tend to agree with Mary Ellen Foley that his administration’s outrage over BP’s incontinent well has little to do with the company’s national origins. However, I do find it a little unsettling that BP has become a meaningless acronym, as if to epitomise the idea of a nebulous corporate entity that comes from nowhere, is accountable to no one, and is interested in nothing apart from the bottom line. A meaningless acronym is also, of course, a blank canvas onto which people are free to project their own impressions. In the wake of the accident in the Gulf of Mexico, BP might as well stand for Bloody Prats, Betrayed Principles, Bountiful Profits, Bungled Penetration, Barracuda Patrol, Big Problems, Bringing Pain or Better Pray.

I’m being unfair, of course. While it’s true that BP has a poor safety record and a reputation for rushing in where many oil companies would fear to tread, it’s also true that the corporation has been fairly cooperative with respect to the necessary steps of capping the well and arranging a compensation fund for the people whose livelihoods have been affected. Though I hesitate to put too much faith in anything written by Lawrence Solomon of the National Post, his suggestion that US government protectionism has been excluding European (and especially Dutch) resources and expertise that could help the clean-up effort certainly deserves a careful hearing.

The chorus of condemnation that has been directed at BP in recent weeks also strikes me as unreasonable in three respects. First, it seems more than likely that Obama and his lackeys have been levelling unpersuasive threats of ass-kicking at BP as much because the company makes what one article called “a useful political foil” as because of any genuine sense of outrage over the damage to the environment. Second, the media have been quick to condemn BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s “PR gaffes” – the infamous quote about wanting his life back, for example – almost as if correct PR were virtuous and praiseworthy in itself. This strikes me as an incredibly sinister development.

The third and most important point, though, is that BP has in a sense become a scapegoat for a much larger problem: the fact that we really are starting to run out of easily obtainable oil. However severe BP’s deviations from whatever “best practices” are normal in the industry, they are superimposed on the inherent risks of deepwater drilling. And if demand for oil cannot be drastically reduced, deepwater drilling is one of a rather limited range of options for keeping the stuff flowing as more easily accessible oil fields come to produce less and less. At least in the near future, the world’s economies may have to rely on oil extracted from places like the Gulf of Mexico, with an inevitable risk of begrimed seabirds and immolated turtles.

One obvious alternative source of energy, though, is Canada’s tar sands. While extracting oil from the tar sands is an inefficient process, energy-intensive in itself, there’s at least no inherent risk of spewing vast quantities of oil into the ocean. The world will eventually need to become far less dependent on oil in general, because of global warming and because even “alternative” sources like deepwater drilling and the tar sands will only keep us going for so long, but we (as a species) have no realistic option other than to keep finding and exploiting oil deposits in order to keep our economies going during the early stages of the transition.

Right now, the tar sands look like they may be a somewhat better bet than deepwater drilling. In the short term, Canada’s political leaders should encourage development of the tar sands, and Michael Ignatieff in particular should stop agitating against plans to export tar sands oil on tankers from Kitimat, B.C. In the long term, the government should be promoting construction of environmentally friendly infrastructure and research into alternative energy sources.

The colourful vuvuzela, a sonic weapon of mass annoyance. Fortunately for me, this is not Beijing. Image provided by Dundas Football Club under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence.

Just a quick vignette from Beijing, where I live and work. Yesterday evening I was walking to my usual Mexican restaurant, through streets that were a little busier than usual because it was the first day of a three-day holiday marking the festival of Duānwŭ Jié. Duānwŭ Jié is sometimes known as the Dragonboat Festival, and indeed dragonboat racing is one of the traditional activities associated with the festival; another is eating zòngzi, which are sticky rice dumplings that are normally pyramidal in shape and wrapped in bamboo leaves.

Anyway, I was on my way to the Mexican restaurant when I heard a strange, prolonged, foghorn-like blast of noise very different from the automotive honking that you hear all the time in Beijing. Looking around, I realised that the sound was coming from two or three people wielding what I recognised from descriptions in news reports as vuvuzelas, the uniquely loud and obnoxious plastic horns that are driving some people to distraction at the World Cup in South Africa. Inside the Mexican restaurant, the Netherlands were handily beating Denmark live from Johannesburg as the occasional vuvuzela-groan wafted in from the street. So there I was, eating a burrito in China as two European soccer teams battled it out to a distinctly African soundtrack.

The standard response to cultural juxtapositions like this is to extol them as characteristic of our wonderfully vibrant emerging global civilisation. They’re supposed to represent the positive side of globalisation, as opposed to the negative side that involves factory workers being driven to suicide by the demands of faceless corporations. The juxtapositions can certainly be amusing and intriguing, but you have to wonder if we’re in the early stages of a fundamentally destructive process that will eventually turn the whole world into an incoherent, geographically homogeneous, and ultimately dishwater-dull blur of vuvuzelas, burritos and dragonboat races. The biggest Canadian cities have probably gone as far down this road as anywhere in the world, and to me it seems shallow to regard the change as entirely for the better.

I don’t want to see either burritos or vuvuzelas banned from the streets of Beijing, or anywhere else. But I’m rather glad that, for the moment at least, not all of China or even Beijing is a plausible setting for experiences like the one I had yesterday night. The Mexican restaurant is over in Sānlĭtún, the expatriate-friendly part of the city where most of the embassies (including Canada’s) are concentrated and where there are lots of establishments that cater to foreigners. Just a few blocks away, despite the near-universality of Western dress and the ubiquity of Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the evolving fabric of Chinese culture seems very much intact.

Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney.

I haven’t been following the debate over reforms to Canada’s refugee system with any particular closeness, but it’s encouraging to see Immigration Minister Jason Kenney at least attempting to do something about the issue. Any reasonable policy for processing refugee claimants would aim to balance two opposite risks: that genuine victims might be rebuffed and sent away to face persecution or worse, and that opportunists might slip through and succeed in taking up residence in Canada. Unfortunately, Canada’s system appears to have been designed by people who lay awake worrying that we might accidentally send away a deserving claimant, but didn’t much care how many undeserving ones made it through. As a result, the balance has been upset in spades.

The problem is a long-standing one, and is perfectly well-documented. Back in 1992, the Liberal politician and former Immigration Appeal Board member David Anderson called a newly constituted version of the board “a wretched monster that’s out of control”, and commented acidly that the rule of law was being “subverted” by acceptance of false claims. He also noted that Canada’s acceptance rate for refugee claims was 64% – more than triple Britain’s, and more than nine times Australia’s. Since then our acceptance rate has dropped off to some extent, but remains relatively high. Data provided by the Canadian Council for Refugees imply a rate of 54.8% in 2008.

The real scandal, however, is that a negative decision does not necessarily lead to deportation. The Fraser Institute put it rather delicately in a 2004 study:

Even failed refugee applicants have a significant possibility of securing permanent residence and citizenship through various immigration categories. At the end of the process, relative to other countries, Canada’s effort to remove failed refugee applicants appears to have been given a low priority.

The Montreal Gazette was more precise:

We have a backlog of 60,000 claimants waiting for decisions. It now takes on average 19 months for a claimant to get a first hearing. When refugee status is not granted, final resolution of a case can take five years. Some 15,000 rejected claimants are “awaiting removal” from Canada. Another 38,000 have simply vanished. The average case costs taxpayers about $50,000 to resolve. It’s a shambles.

Canada’s traditional refugee policy could almost be described as a non-policy: just show up, make a claim, and you’ll probably be able to stay, without the government’s having much of a meaningful say in the matter. The practical consequences of this situation are mixed. Canada is not exactly being flooded by spurious refugees: the annual number of claimants has varied from about 20,000 to about 44,000 over the past decade. However, surges of claimants from specific countries represent a perennial concern, and one that the government generally deals with by imposing a visa requirement on the country in question.  After all, the thinking presumably goes, they can’t claim asylum if they can’t get to Canada in the first place. It’s an extraordinarily passive-aggressive approach – in effect, we’re so dysfunctionally incapable of saying “no” to a refugee claimant that we go to great lengths to avoid being asked in the first place. And because foreign governments are understandably annoyed when Canada decides that their citizens need visas, our bilateral relationships suffer.

Against this background, Uncle Jason’s efforts to reform the refugee processing system have been laudable. The thrust of his original plan was to take the obvious steps of speeding up decisions and improving deportation enforcement. The general idea clearly enjoyed broad political support, but one detail – a plan to deny refugees from designated “safe” countries access to a new Refugee Appeal Division if their claims were rejected – aroused the ire of the opposition parties.

A compromise has now emerged, but in my opinion the politicians who dug in their heels over the safe country list were being little short of perfidious. It’s perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that some foreign countries protect their citizens at least as well as we protect ours, and accordingly that claims of asylum originating from those countries are likely to be unfounded. In fact, I would prefer a bill that went even further and did not permit claims arising from safe countries to be heard in Canada at all. While persecution can happen anywhere, many potential victims have ample recourse to their own governments, and it’s silly for Canada to try to take up slack that barely exists. Uncle Jason should be commended on a good start, but our refugee system still has some way to go before that vital sense of balance is restored. Meanwhile, it would be nice if the opposition parties would stop behaving as if the amiable little custom of admitting refugees were some kind of sacred duty or vital national interest.

Bob Rae in Israel. Photo taken from Rae's official Flickr site.

While I’ve been amusing myself with the adventures of the “Freedom Flotilla”, important things have been happening in a part of the world much more important to Canadian interests at the moment, namely Afghanistan. The five-day visit to that country by members of the parliamentary commission on the Afghan mission is probably as good a place to start as any. The chair of the committee is Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson, but committee member Bob Rae seized the media spotlight in the wake of the visit by suggesting that it might be worth continuing the military aspect of the mission after our theoretical exit date in 2011:

“We have an obligation to see this thing through,” Rae said. “The door is open to serious discussion in Canada — and between Canada and NATO — about what the future looks like.”

It was left to the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson to ask the obvious question:

Just what is this “thing” that must be seen through? A military defeat of the Taliban and its allies? A peaceful, democratic Afghanistan? A regional settlement? A demonstrably rising standard of living? A diminution of the poppy trade?

Simpson is right on target here. The vagueness of the “thing” that must be accomplished has been the problem with NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan all along. Marching off to war without any real objectives beyond (somehow) helping the Afghan people and (somehow) finding and thrashing people who might want to hurt the West was always going to be a recipe for… well, not disaster, exactly, but certainly aimlessness and eventual disillusionment.

If Rae had an answer to the question of what “thing” he was talking about, I haven’t seen it reported. To be fair, Sorenson did provide a broad answer, saying that the Afghan police and military “are going to have to increase capacity if they’re going to be able to secure their own country, and Canada may have a role in that”. Committee member and NDP defence critic Jack Harris, however, had a different and somewhat more vague answer about “humanitarian concerns and institution-building concerns”. This kind of thing won’t, or at least shouldn’t, cut it with the Canadian public. If our soldiers are going to stay, it should be a for a clear, sensible, sharply defined purpose.

Harris also said that “Canadians do not want to see the sacrifice that has been made be for naught”, which opens up a whole other can of savage Afghan worms. Harris seems to be envisioning a tipping point beyond which it will become apparent that progress (however defined) in Afghanistan is not just substantial but actually irreversible, so that we can pull our troops out in the knowledge that their sacrifices won’t have been for naught. A major problem, of course, is that of recognising the tipping point.

Other recent developments in Afghanistan have implications for the future of the mission. More than 20 NATO soldiers have already been killed this week, including Sgt Martin Goudreault of the Edmonton-based 1 Combat Engineer Regiment. The most spectacular incident was probably the downing of a helicopter on Wednesday, which killed four Americans. Just today, a suicide bomber killed at least forty male guests at a wedding in Kandahar – the women were celebrating elsewhere – and the Taliban staged an ineffectual attack on the “peace jirga” that Hamid Karzai staged in Kabul in early June. It’s hard to say whether these latest examples of insurgent activity represent a continuation of the “spring offensive” I wrote about previously, but they certainly constitute a reminder of the Taliban’s determination to fight. Continuing the Afghan mission beyond 2011 will mean continuing to take casualties.

The dominant theme of the peace jirga seems to have been the possibility of reconciliation with the Taliban:

“My dear Taliban, you are welcome in your own soil. Do not hurt this country, and don’t destroy or kill yourselves,” Mr. Karzai said. “Make peace with me and there will be no need for foreigners here.”

It is particularly significant that Berhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president and Tajik warlord who warned Terry Glavin back in February that rapprochement with the Taliban was fraught with danger for non-Pashtuns in Afghanistan, addressed the jirga and spoke about the need for peace. If even Rabbani is now in a conciliatory mood, then perhaps an agreement with elements of the Taliban is not far off. And if this leads Karzai to insist that the “need for foreigners” has passed, even as visions of an extended mission dance in the heads of Sorenson, Rae and Harris, Canada may be on a collision course with the very people our troops are supposedly in Afghanistan to help. On balance, I hope that Harper sticks to his guns regarding the planned end of the military mission in 2011.

The MV Rachel Corrie, the last ship of the Freedom Flotilla to be seized by Israel. Image posted by Wikimedia Commons user Peter Kuiper under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Share Alike Generic Licence.

The saga of the “Freedom Flotilla” attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza ended today with a tiny little whimper, as Israeli soldiers boarded the last ship in the Flotilla and took it to the port of Ashdod. The eleven Malaysian and Irish activists and nine crew members on board the MV Rachel Corrie offered no resistance, a decision that was almost guaranteed to preclude any sort of grand finale.

The people aboard the Rachel Corrie, by all accounts, weren’t really a fighting bunch. The Northern Irish Nobel laureate Máiread Corrigan-Maguire (or simply Máiread Maguire, in a lot of the coverage I’ve seen) was the most prominent among them, but other significant figures included the former UN Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday, the Malaysian MP Mohd Nizar bin Zakaria, and an interesting character called Matthias Chang. The Free Gaza website describes him as follows:

Matthias Chang Wen Chieh is a Malaysian of Chinese descent. He is a Barrister of 32 years standing and once served as the Political Secretary to the Fourth Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. He is the author of three bestsellers, “Future Fast Forward”, “Brainwashed for War, Programmed to Kill”, and “The Shadow Money-Lenders and the Global Financial Tsunami”, published in the US and in Malaysia.

I was intrigued to see Chang’s name because a couple of his books once caught my eye while I was browsing in a bookshop in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. I know that one should never judge a book by its cover, but they gave the impression of being full of the wildest speculations about Zionist conspiracies, partly because of the company they kept – they were practically next to Henry Ford’s notorious The International Jew. In my opinion Chang’s involvement in the Flotilla underscores Terry Glavin’s point that some of the participants were motivated as much by hostility to Israel as sympathy for the Palestinians of Gaza. It’s easy, of course, to see how the two feelings could reinforce each other.

Anyway, everyone aboard the Rachel Corrie is apparently going to be deported from Israel, the Malaysians going through Jordan because of a lack of direct diplomatic relations. As with the rest of the Flotilla, the Israelis are promising to deliver the aid on board the Rachel Corrie, although whether this extends to construction materials – badly needed, but normally excluded from Gaza because they might be used for bunkers and smuggling tunnels – is unclear as usual.

The opinion pages of the National Post, as might have been expected, have filled with such intemperate expressions of support for Israel that it’s hard not to wonder which country the word ‘national’ in the name of the newspaper really refers to. Top prize for overheated rhetoric goes to Conrad Black:

The reports of Israeli military inefficiency, especially after the bungled attack on Hezbollah in 2006, are disconcerting, but the West must stop hedging and havering. Israel has the greatest claim to legitimacy of any country except the five official founders of the United Nations. It has made mistakes but has persisted nobly and has been shamefully persecuted by morally inferior regimes. Those who attack Israel must be responded to as they were by Ariel Sharon: two eyes for an eye and two teeth for one, until the persecution stops.

I suspect that Black’s idea of “hedging and havering” is basically my idea of sensibly detached and balanced Canadian foreign policy. I don’t view Israel as having any more “legitimacy” than the average nation-state, and I certainly don’t view its enemies as morally inferior. I don’t blame Israel for attempting to maintain both its territorial and its demographic integrity, but equally I don’t blame the Palestinians for trying to take back some (or even all) of the land they lost in the 20^th century. If Canada has a role in this intractable conflict, it’s certainly not to help Israel knock out Palestinian eyes and teeth, but rather to encourage both sides to leave some room for negotiation and compromise alongside the inevitable violence.

Apart from diplomatic engagement, however, I think Canada should leave the Israelis and Palestinians to work things out – violently or otherwise – by themselves. It’s simply not our fight, and even the most extreme outcomes conceivable would have little effect on Canada’s security. Turkey’s seeming realignment with the Middle East is potentially more serious, and I actually agree with Conrad Black that Turkey should be expelled from NATO if this goes too far. This is an argument, perhaps, that Canada could begin to quietly advance. Turkey was never really part of the West, although it was sometimes a building block in European alliances against Russia. Now that any danger posed by Russia is much diminished, there is no need to treat Turkey by default as an honorary Western power.

Having already written a couple of posts about Israel’s interception of the “Freedom Flotilla” off the coast of Gaza (here and here), I suppose I’ll continue to cover developments until (1) interesting things stop happening or (2) I get bored. (If you, dear reader, are bored and think I should be writing about something else instead, do let me know.)

So… the confirmed death toll is still nine, including eight Turks and one US citizen of Turkish origin. Needless to say, the Turks are not amused. Although at least some Turkish pundits are calling for a measured approach, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc condemned Israel’s “barbarism and oppression”, and President Abdullah Gul insisted that relations between the two countries would “never be the same”. That sounds suspiciously histrionic: Canada-US relations eventually recovered from the War of 1812, and nine dead activists on a boat is pretty trivial by comparison. However, it’s certainly true that relations could worsen even further. There’s now said to be “talk in Istanbul of the Turkish navy escorting another humanitarian convoy to Gaza”, which would raise the stakes considerably.

Farooq Burney, one of the Canadian citizens who was aboard the six captured ships and has now been deported by Israel, has given his version of events to the Globe and Mail. If he is to be believed, the attack on the ships started with smoke bombs, followed by the descent from helicopters of two or perhaps three (his account was a bit inconsistent) Israeli commandos. Large groups of activists on board the ship overpowered the commandos with their bare hands, and imprisoned them “in a room”. The Israelis subsequently began shooting from the helicopters, and then boarded in force. This would seem to contradict statements from Israel that the commandos were “ambushed” with clubs, knives and even guns when they first tried to board, although Burney did acknowledge that some activists had fought the boarding party using “things that were at hand”.

The blogging MP Glen Pearson seems quite sure that the laws of the sea allow a blockading navy to enforce the blockade in international waters, as long as this doesn’t “bar access to the ports of neutral states”. This should strengthen Israel’s legal and diplomatic position with respect to the incident, although of course there’s still room for argument over whether the force used was proportionate.

Israel tried to deliver some of the aid that had been aboard the six ships, only to be rebuffed by Hamas:

According to officials in Gaza, Hamas has said it will not permit the supplies to enter the besieged territory until all detained activists are released and Israel agrees to deliver all aid consignments, including construction materials.

This sounds like a case of Hamas cutting off its nose (or perhaps the noses of ordinary Gazans) to spite its face, but the fact that Israel is withholding the construction materials that were aboard the Freedom Flotilla is telling. The Israelis have been insisting that the Flotilla was needlessly confrontational to head directly for Gaza when Israel would have delivered the aid anyway, but it now seems likelier than ever that the construction materials would not have got through had the Flotilla accepted this offer.

Much of the commentary on the interception of the Flotilla has been a predictably polarised shouting match between defenders and detractors of Israel, but I’ll highlight a couple of articles I’ve seen that have made interesting points about wider patterns that Canadians should be paying attention to. One George Burger is terribly worried about Turkey’s behaviour: he sees Turkey making “a calculated move to take over leadership of the Islamist [he probably meant Islamic] world”, and even shifting towards “classic Islamo-fascism”. There’s at least a grain of truth to this, since Turkey’s current leadership is much friendlier to Islam than the staunch secularists who were in charge for most of the twentieth century ever were, but cries of Islamo-fascism hardly seem justified. Turkey is a long way from either fascism or Islamism, and it’s hardly surprising that a Muslim country with strong historic ties to the Middle East would shift back in that direction eventually.

Terry Glavin warns that Turkish and Malaysian groups backing the flotilla are full-fledged enemies of Israel, rather than cheerful humanitarians. I suspect this is basically true, but it doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother Glavin. The world is full of such enmities.

Weirdest and most wonderful of all is an article by David Goldman, accusing the activists of the Mavi Marmara of being equivalent to suicide bombers and fretting over the West’s “susceptibility to horror”. This fits in with some of my own preoccupations, so I’ll address it properly later – but for now, it’s a fun and provocative read.

The death toll, as far as I can tell, is still “at least nine”. Four of the dead seem to be Turks, but Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is already holding out the possibility of resuming normal ties with Israel “once the Gaza blockade is lifted and our citizens are released”. Lifting the blockade may be a tall order, but the Israelis are promising to release almost all of the Flotilla activists they took into custody. (The organisers of the Flotilla are indignant about the only apparent exceptions, four Israeli Arabs who have been remanded for a week.) Two of the three Canadian citizens who were detained have already been released, although the status of the third is unclear. Apart from Kevin Neish, nominally the subject of my earlier post on the Freedom Flotilla, the other two Canadians are Rifat Audeh and Farooq Burney.

Audeh claims to have been beaten by the Israelis, and is a “self-styled activist” and eloquent if overwrought writer. He is also the co-founder of Michigan Media Watch, an organisation that describes itself as “promoting accurate, factual and balanced coverage of the Middle East”. Burney, for his part, directs “a group dedicated to promoting freedom of learning for students in Gaza and the West Bank”. He also seems to have a few dubious Islamist connections.

Meanwhile, the UN  Security Council has called for an inquiry into the interception of the Freedom Flotilla. The United States, quietly backed up by Canada, is already insisting that the inquiry should be led by Israel itself. This hardly seems like a recipe for impartiality and credibility.

I don’t know exactly what this proposed inquiry is supposed to inquire into. Perhaps it will try to establish the exact sequence of events during the interception of the Flotilla, and no doubt there will be an earnest attempt to apportion blame for the bloodshed. Thing is, I’m not really sure there’s much blame to be apportioned. The people aboard the Flotilla were determined to either reach Gaza or force a spectacular confrontation, a reasonable set of goals given their broader objective of easing the blockade. The Israelis were determined to stop the Flotilla from reaching Gaza, a reasonable goal given their broader objective of keeping Hamas weak and isolated. A clash was inevitable, and at some point blood was going to be spilled unless one side backed down – if not during this particular confrontation between the Free Gaza crowd and the IDF, then during the next one or the one after that.

It’s hard to see how an inquiry could do much to resolve the conflicting agendas that exploded into violence off the coast of Gaza. Patient diplomacy and negotiation might do the trick, but the process would have to be slow and incremental. One plausible proposal, from Liberal MP Glen Pearson, is that “an internationally respected group or country” might take on the role of inspecting and delivering aid shipments intended for Gaza, circumventing both Israel and Hamas. “Is this a role Canada could effectively play?” Pearson asks, perhaps rhetorically. The answer is probably not, given that we have moved (for no discernible reason other than Stephen Harper’s temperament and electoral strategising) from some semblance of balance in our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a clear alignment with Israel. Setting up a delivery service for Gaza hardly sounds like a sensible Canadian priority in any case, but it might be nice to at least have the option of doing something neighbourly and constructive.

The hundreds of people aboard the six ships were a motley crew of activists from many different countries, accompanied by journalists and a smattering of notable figures including the Swedish writer Henning Mankell and the Northern Irish peace activist (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Máiread Corrigan-Maguire. Some have already been voluntarily deported, but most remain in custody “in detention centres across Israel”.

In the middle of all this are three Canadians, although the only one whose identity has emerged is Kevin Neish of Victoria. Neish, 53, is a veteran activist who was aboard a Freedom Flotilla ship called the Challenger II. Before setting out, he described his role in the Flotilla as that of a human shield, and was rather matter-of-fact about what that might entail as he explained to a University of Victoria radio station what might happen if the ships were raided:

“I can’t really say about much as to how we’re going to react – well, basically it’s a human shield, it’s non-violently getting in the way. And they’ll have to deal with me getting in the way non-violently.” [The IDF must have been shaking in their boots when they heard that dire threat.]

I’m sure Neish made a worthy obstruction, but neither his “non-violently getting in the way” nor the more spirited resistance aboard the Mavi Marmara was sufficient to fend off the Israelis and get the Flotilla’s 10,000 tonnes of aid into Gaza. One reading of events would be that the organisers of the Flotilla (a group called Free Gaza) always knew things would turn out like this, and simply wanted to create an incident to draw attention to Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and present the world with yet another example of what could be spun as Israeli brutality.

A couple of further details are consistent with this interpretation: the Israelis say that they allow 15,000 tonnes of aid into the Gaza Strip every week, and that they would have also been willing to “transfer humanitarian aid” on the Flotilla’s behalf. That makes the Flotilla’s cargo sound like a drop in the bucket, and a drop that could have reached its destination in any case if the Flotilla had been willing to cooperate with Israel.

However, I think there’s actually a bit more to the story. For one thing, Free Gaza has been sending ships to Gaza in defiance of the blockade since 2008, and the Israelis have allowed some of them to get through. The organisers may have hoped that the IDF would be reluctant to interfere with an operation as large and well-publicised as the Freedom Flotilla. Also, discussing aid only in terms of tonnage obscures the fact that Israel’s blockade allows some individual commodities into the Gaza Strip while prohibiting or severely limiting others. In particular, building materials are hard to obtain in Gaza, and the Freedom Flotilla made a point of carrying cement and prefabricated homes. Both would probably have been very welcome in Gaza, and it’s not at all clear that Israel would have delivered them. This makes the Flotilla seem a bit more serious, and less theatrical.

Accordingly, I don’t really blame Kevin Neish for taking his place aboard the Challenger II. I don’t share the idealism, or whatever you want to call it, that led him to take to sea to fight perceived oppression on the other side of the world, but I can respect people who have strong convictions and the courage to act on them. However, it’s too soon to tell what effect the interception of the Flotilla will have on the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although Israel seems to be attracting a fair bit of opprobrium over the incident – especially from Turkey, a country it can ill afford to alienate further. Canada, for the moment, is clearly giving Israel the benefit of the doubt.