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      Taiwan president to visit Latin American allies with stops in US

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      Taiwan’s president will visit diplomatic allies Guatemala and Belize next week while also making stopovers in the United States, as it aims to shore up ties in Latin America.Tsai Ing-wen will depart Taiwan on 29 March for the 10-day trip, stopping in New York and Los Angeles while en route to and from the Central American countries, the island’s ministry said on Tuesday.Belize and Guatemala are two of just 14 countries that officially recognise Taiwan over China, and Tsai’s trip comes after Honduras said earlier this month that it would be switching recognition to Beijing.China views self-ruled, democratic Taiwan as part of its territory, to be retaken one day – by force if necessary. Under its “One China” principle, no country may maintain official diplomatic relations with both China and Taiwan.During her trip, President Tsai will meet her Guatemalan counterpart Alejandro Giammattei and Belize’s prime minister Johnny Briceño, the foreign ministry said.Asked if Tsai would meet US House speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles, deputy foreign minister Alexander Yui said only that her “transit itinerary is being arranged appropriately with the US side”.McCarthy said earlier this month that he would see Tsai in his home state of California.On Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin reiterated his country’s opposition to Tsai meeting with US officials.“We firmly oppose any form of official exchanges between the US and Taiwan,” he told a press briefing in Beijing. “China has made solemn representations to the US in this regard.”In Washington, state department spokesman Vedant Patel downplayed the significance of Tsai’s transit and said it was normal for Taiwanese dignitaries to meet members of Congress or hold public events while on US stopovers.“Transits are taken out of consideration for the safety and comfort and convenience and dignity of the passenger and are consistent with our One China policy, which also remains unchanged,” Patel told reporters.Washington is one of Taiwan’s key global allies and its largest arms supplier, despite itself switching diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979.In August of last year, a visit by McCarthy’s predecessor Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan drew condemnation from China, which conducted massive military drills around the island in response.McCarthy has vowed also to visit Taiwan but the stopover could give him an opportunity to sidestep a potentially explosive trip.Tsai’s trip comes at a critical time for Taiwan, after the Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, said last week that her country would establish “official relations” with China.Latin America has been a key diplomatic battleground for China and Taiwan since the two split in 1949 after a civil war.Honduras’s move – which would result in the severing of longstanding official ties with Taiwan – followed negotiations between it and China on building a hydroelectric dam in the country.It continues a trend in the region, with Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica all switching diplomatic recognition to Beijing in recent years. More

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      Birchers review: how the Republican far right gave us Trump and DeSantis

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      Out of sight but not forgotten, the John Birch Society is a husk of its old self. Still, its penchant for conspiracy theories courses in the veins of the American right. A mere 37% of Republicans believe Joe Biden beat Donald Trump legitimately. “January 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime,” says Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News.Back in the day, the society trashed Dwight D Eisenhower and his successor as president, John F Kennedy. That Ike and JFK were war heroes made no difference. They were suspect. Eisenhower attempted to navigate around the Birchers. Kennedy used them as a foil. Dallas, where JFK was assassinated, was a Bircher hotbed.“Birchers charged that President Eisenhower abetted the communists, distributed flyers calling President John F Kennedy a traitor, and repudiated Nato,” Matthew Dallek writes in his in-depth examination of the society’s rise, fall and continued relevance.Dallek, a professor at George Washington University, is the son of Robert Dallek, a legendary presidential biographer. Under the subtitle How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Dallek’s book is quick-paced and well researched. However troubling, it is a joy to read.Dallek argues convincingly that despite the end of the cold war, amid which the Birchers were born, its antipathies and suspicions continue to animate and inflame, a reality Trump and his minions remember and Democrats forget at their peril.Dallek looks at how the Birchers’ ideas came to pollenate and populate the Republican party. It didn’t happen randomly or suddenly. The society never disappeared and nor did its ideas and resentments. The “quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq” coupled with the “financial crisis and Great Recession” breathed fresh currency into isolationism, nativism and scorn for elites.Founded in 1958, at a secret meeting in Indianapolis led by Robert Welch, the candy manufacturer, the group took its name from a missionary and intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communists in China. Birch’s Christianity and the circumstances of his death were central to the society’s message.Original members included Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries and father of Charles and David, the hard-right political activists and billionaire donors.“In the 1930s [Fred Koch] had helped build oil refineries, first in Stalin’s Soviet Union and then in Hitler’s Germany, and his brushes with both regimes shaped his cold war philosophy,” Dallek writes.“In the USSR, he knew people who had been purged by Stalin … In contrast, he liked what he saw when he inspected his refineries in Nazi Germany.”Fascism came with the trappings of prosperity. These days, the Koch-funded Quincy Institute takes a dim view of US and western assistance to Ukraine.The John Birch Society is now obscure yet basks in undreamed-of success. Instead of railing against fluoridated water and embracing laetrile (an apricot derivative) as a cancer cure, the Birchers’ intellectual heirs dump on the Covid vaccine, roll the dice on polio and worship ivermectin as a miracle drug.Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and Trump mini-me, is all in with his nonstop attack on modernity and vaccination. Trump no longer reminds voters of Operation Warp Speed, the great success in combating the latest plague.The mortality gap between precincts populated by red and blue America says plenty, but Republican animus to vaccine mandates appears baked in. Fringy need not mean down and out. Just look at Ginni Thomas and her husband, Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice.Ginni Thomas, a longtime far-right activist entangled in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election up to and including January 6, grew up nestled in comfort. As Dallek points out, many in the Birchers’ ranks possessed a firm foothold in the middle and upper-middle classes.“A childhood neighbor recalled that Ginni Thomas’s parents were active in a losing 1968 referendum campaign in Omaha to ban putting fluoride in the water supply,” Dallek notes.“My Republican parents, who knew them well, certainly considered them Birchers,” the journalist Kurt Andersen recalls.Dallek reminds us of the bookstores opened by the society and the role played by female Birchers. Phyllis Schlafly, the great hard-right crusader, was a Bircher as well as a Harvard grad. She opposed the Voting Rights Act, wrote Barry Goldwater’s 1964 manifesto and successfully opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a non-Birch conservative and the mother of William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, encouraged an acquaintance to establish a society chapter. Buckley eventually – and circuitously – came to stand against the Birchers. Welch heaped praise on his mom.Race was always near the surface. The society attacked Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court decision which held that de jure racially segregated schools were unequal and unconstitutional. The Birchers, as Dallek recounts, branded the decision “procommunist”.Even now, Brown sticks in the craw on the right. Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump supreme court appointee, refers to Brown as inviolate super-precedent but Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network both attack its underpinnings.Decisions such as Brown, they wrote after the confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump-picked conservative justice, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.“May”? Let that sink in.Another Republican primary is upon us. Trump again leads the way. The furor over his dinner with Ye, the antisemitic recording artist formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, recedes. DeSantis loses ground. Authenticity and charisma matter. The governor parrots Trump and Carlson on Ukraine, flip-flopping in the process.Yet no other Republican comes close. The John Birch Society is still winning big.
      Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette More

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      The Guardian view on Iraq, 20 years on: the costs of war | Editorial

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      It did not take long for anyone to realise that the Iraq war was the disaster that many had predicted; not much longer than it took to confirm that it was launched on a lie and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Whatever relief or joy was felt by Iraqis at the fall of Saddam Hussein’s violent and oppressive regime, it was soon subsumed by the horror of what followed. The body count and wider damage have not stopped rising since. When the 10th anniversary arrived, Islamic State (IS), birthed by the war’s fallout, had yet to make its frightening rise to establishing a “caliphate”. Two decades on from the beginning of the war, with the “shock and awe” assault of 19 March 2003, we are still fathoming the impact of the US-led and UK-backed invasion.The toll has been felt most of all, of course, within Iraq itself. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the violence that followed. The Costs of War project estimates that several times as many may have died from knock-on effects. More than 9 million Iraqis were displaced. Thousands of coalition personnel, mostly American, were killed. Trillions of dollars that could have been spent on improving lives were instead squandered destroying them. Much of the Pentagon spending went to just five huge corporations.The catastrophe was compounded by the failure to plan for what came next. Iraqis watched as power stations and national treasures were looted, while American troops guarded the oil ministry and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, glibly dismissed the turmoil: “Freedom’s untidy”. The security vacuum and de-Ba’athification strategy fomented sectarianism not only in Iraq itself, but far beyond its borders – and fuelled terrorism that has proved not only most deadly in the region, but has taken lives in the west, too. Later decisions such as support for Nouri al-Maliki made matters worse.The invasion curtailed hopes of stabilising Afghanistan, by drawing away attention, resources and troops. It strengthened and emboldened Iran. It reinforced North Korea’s conviction that it was essential to acquire and defend WMDs. It hastened the end of the brief unipolar moment and undercut visions of a rules‑based global order. A military adventure conceived by many of its players as a brash reassertion of US supremacy in the wake of the September 11 attacks only weakened and undermined the country – all the more so after the horrors of Abu Ghraib and wider brutality against civilians. Russia and China took note. So did the global south, hindering efforts to garner support for Ukraine. It was hardly the first time America’s foreign policy had clashed with its declared ideals, but it had not been so public and inescapable since Vietnam. Liberal interventionism was badly discredited. The refugee flows produced by regional instability, along with IS-led or -inspired attacks in Europe, contributed to growing ethno-nationalism and fuelled support for Brexit.Iraq currently appears relatively calm. But US troops are still present due to the ongoing battle against IS. Though there is now a government, following a year of deadlock after elections and an outburst of violence in Baghdad, the state remains unable to keep the lights on or provide clean water. Politicians and officials have pocketed billions.More than half of Iraqis are too young to remember life under Saddam Hussein. Some now aspire to a society and government that looks beyond sectarianism and towards a brighter future, as the 2019 Tishreen movement, and the re-emergence of participants in 2021’s elections, showed. Yet the low turnout underscored that others have given up on democracy, thanks to those who boasted that they were bringing it to justify their war. It may be many more years before we fully reckon the effects of the catastrophe unleashed two decades ago. More

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      Leo Varadkar meets Biden after apparent Clinton-Lewinsky joke

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      Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has apologised for making an apparent joke about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, during an event in Washington on the eve of St Patrick’s Day celebrations.Varadkar’s comment on Thursday risked overshadowing his meeting with Joe Biden at the White House on Friday for the traditional handing over of a bowl of shamrock to the US president, the most important day in the Irish-American political calendar.The taoiseach departed from a prepared script on Thursday when speaking to people involved in the Washington Ireland programme, which teaches career skills to young people. Reminiscing about his stint as a US House of Representatives intern in 2000, the last year of Clinton’s presidency, Varadkar said it was a time “when some parents would have had cause for concern about what would happen to interns in Washington”.The comment was widely viewed as a reference to Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky while she was a White House intern in the mid-1990s. Hours earlier, Varadkar had shared a stage with Hillary Clinton at a separate event.A spokesperson for Varadkar apologised on his behalf.“He made an ill-judged, off-the-cuff remark which he regrets. He apologises for any offence caused to anyone concerned,” they said.The taoiseach is to meet and share platforms with the Clintons when the couple visit Ireland next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Biden also plans to visit.Senior Democrats this week urged Democratic Unionist party (DUP) figures visiting Washington to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland in the wake of the Windsor framework, saying it had addressed the party’s concerns over post-Brexit trading arrangements.Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, expressed hope that the Stormont institutions would be swiftly revived. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said the DUP should “get to the people’s business, the business of power-sharing and self-governing”.The DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, rebuked Schumer, telling Sky: “I would urge the senator to read some history books. Maybe he’d learn a little bit more about what really happens and the reality of the situation.”Hillary Clinton increased the pressure on the DUP when she urged assembly members who opposed the Windsor framework to resign and allow others to revive Stormont.On Friday, Varadkar met Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, at her residence in Washington. Varadkar’s apparent gaffe over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was not mentioned but the Windsor framework was.The agreement, the taoiseach said, “has the potential to restore very good relations between Ireland and the UK and to restore the relations and institutions of the Good Friday agreement” while opening a new chapter in EU-UK relations.“We’re not quite there yet,” Varadkar said. “But I think with good faith on all sides, we’ll have that and the help of our … friends here in America.”Varadkar also thanked Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, for hosting him and his partner, Matthew Barrett. They had been “inspired”, he said, both as doctors and members of the LGBTQ+ community, by Harris’s advocacy for marriage equality as a California prosecutor and senator, and now as vice-president.Varadkar said: “From Stonewall [the riots in New York in 1969 that sparked the modern gay rights movement] to Sacramento to San Francisco, America has led the way when it comes to LGBTQ+ equality. I don’t think I would be here today were it not for what America did.”From there, the taoiseach went to the White House to meet Biden.Before the Oval Office meeting, the president sent out a St Patrick’s Day tweet in which he proudly introduced himself as “the great-great-grandson of the Blewitts of County Mayo and the Finnegans of County Louth who boarded a coffin ship to cross the Atlantic more than 165 years ago” and as “the proud son of Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden”.Coffin ships were vessels that took Irish immigrants to America during the Great Famine of the 1840s, so called, in the words of the writer Philip Hoare, “because so many of their human cargo died of disease or malnutrition en route, or shortly after arrival”.In front of the press on Friday, Biden referred to a recent meeting in San Diego with Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, saying: “I very much, very strongly supported the Windsor framework, which I know you do too.”Varadkar thanked Biden “for your help and support and understanding for our position on Brexit in recent years”, which he said “really made a difference.“And we’ve got to a good place now, I think, with the Windsor framework where we can have an agreement that lasts, which is important for Northern Ireland, and also important for British-Irish and European relations.” More

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      We Iraqis had survived Saddam Hussein. It was the US invasion that destroyed our lives | Balsam Mustafa

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      Twenty years ago, around this time, the US-led military operation to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime finally seemed inevitable for Iraqis. With it, the idea of leaving started to sink in.By leaving, I do not mean fleeing the country. That was not even an option. After the 1990s Gulf war, and the international sanctions that followed it, Iraqis were isolated from the rest of the world. For many, there was no exit. Leaving meant departing schools, universities or workplaces, saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, and moving to relatively safer places within the country, away from the areas targeted by strikes and bombings. But my parents decided to stay at home in Baghdad. “If we were meant to die, it would be better to die at home” – that was our logic.The neighbourhood where I spent my childhood, adolescence and youth turned into a ghost town when most of our neighbours left. It felt empty and lonely, but we thought it was temporary. Everyone would come back when the war was over, and the scary idea of permanently leaving would dissipate, we told ourselves. We did not anticipate the trajectory that Iraq would follow after the invasion. We shared some cautious optimism about a better future despite our mixed emotions towards the war.This optimism evaporated quickly. And we gradually started to realise that, sooner or later, leaving the country would be one of two options for many Iraqis. The other? Keeping silent to avoid repression. Herein lies the biggest contradiction: many of those who had endured the dictatorship, wars and economic sanctions and stayed in Iraq would be forced to leave after Saddam was gone. The Americans and their allies seemed to have a plan to eradicate the Ba’athists rapidly and efficiently, based on lies and disinformation about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Yet they had no plan for, or interest in, rebuilding the country and the state afterwards. “Mission accomplished,” they said in May 2003.The terrible outcome was indisputable. Iraq quickly fell prey to chaos, conflict and instability, experienced an uncountable number of deaths and displacements, and the erosion of health, education and basic services. Behind the statistics, there are untold stories of agony and suffering. The structural and political violence would spill into social and domestic violence, affecting women and children. With every life lost, a whole family is shattered. From day one, the conditions were forming for the emergence of terrorist groups and militias.The same expat politicians who opposed Saddam and the Ba’athists have since established a system that keeps them in power through an ethno-sectarian network of patronage, corruption and militias. Throughout the years, they have resisted change by designing a rigged electoral system that maintains their positions and self-interest, benefiting from the support of the religious leaders and tribal networks.It is now a cliche, but an Iraqi phrase captures a profound new reality: “Saddam has gone, but 1,000 more Saddams have replaced him.” I recall two encounters, pre- and post-2003, that reflect this sense of continuity. Nearly four years before the US-led invasion of Iraq, the head of the university department where I studied threatened to move me to a different department because I refused to join the Ba’athist party. He yelled in my face: “Our seats are for Ba’athists only. You have taken a seat that does not belong to you.” Then, amid the sectarian conflict of 2006-07, I was once ordered by a militiaman to leave the lecture theatre because there was a religious occasion to observe. I was at first hesitant but decided to end the lecture for my students’ safety.The repeated failure to address Iraqis’ concerns has triggered cycles of protests since 2011. Each time, the demonstrations were met with repression. Yet it was what happened in 2018, and later in 2019 in response to the Tishreen uprising, that finally debunked the myth of Iraqi democracy. Young men and women, chanting for their fundamental rights, were met by a lethal state response. More than 600 were killed, and many more were injured, kidnapped, arrested or forcibly disappeared – to the international community’s indifference.As we approach the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I am reminded that there has been no accountability or justice for the victims and their families. The people abroad and at home responsible for the widespread misery that characterises Iraq are in denial. Meanwhile, the government only recently adopted a series of measures further cracking down on free speech and personal freedoms, resonating increasingly with the authoritarian policies of the Baathist regime.This month, Iraqi politicians and officials met with policymakers, academics, journalists and other representatives from around the world at the 7th Sulaimani Forum, held at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. At the same time, protests erupted in Dhi Qar province, one of the centres of the Tishreen uprising, over water scarcity, echoing the main driver for 2018’s Basra protests.At the forum, the journalist Jane Arraf asked the current Iraq prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, what “reasons” and grounds for hope he could give to young Iraqis so they would stay in the country. In his answer, he did not address the root causes of suffering; he instead acknowledged his government’s inability to provide young people with jobs in the public sector owing to “financial conditions”, and spoke about the “Riyada” (entrepreneurship) initiative for development and employment, via the private sector.Is that it? Will this ensure that Iraqis stay in their country and live with dignity? What about women and children, who remain marginalised in government rhetoric or policies, suffering under the patriarchal norms echoed in laws and legislation?One of the chants of the protesters three years ago was Nureed watan, meaning, we want a homeland – free from foreign interference, whether from the US or Iran. Twenty years after the invasion, Iraqis are still giving their lives for a place to call home.
      Balsam Mustafa is a Leverhulme early career research fellow at the University of Warwick and author of Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives

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      Will UK follow US in demanding TikTok be sold by its Chinese owner?

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      When asked this week whether the UK would ban TikTok on government phones, Rishi Sunak’s response signalled a change in stance: “We look at what our allies are doing.”Previously ministers had seemed sanguine, even saying that whether or not the app stayed on someone’s phone should be a matter of “personal choice”.Not any more. The UK’s allies are turning against TikTok and it was when Sunak said he was watching their actions closely that a government ban became inevitable. The US, Canada and the EU’s executive arm have already decided to strip the app from official devices. It is now a matter of geopolitical choice.TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance. The fear among its critics on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Chinese state can access data generated by its more than 1 billion users and manipulate its recommendation algorithm in order to push a China-friendly point of view to unsuspecting users.There is no hard evidence this is the case and TikTok says it would refuse any data request from the Chinese government, although the UK government cited concerns about “the way in which this [user] data may be used” for the ban on Thursday. But tensions over Taiwan, concerns that China will supply weaponry to Russia, the shooting down of a spy balloon that hovered over the US and warnings of state espionage have created a toxic backdrop to those denials. And on Monday a refreshed integrated review of UK defence and foreign policy described China as an “epoch-defining” challenge.TikTok’s reputation was severely damaged last year when ByteDance admitted employees had attempted to use the app to spy on reporters.TikTok will be concerned that Sunak will match each upward ratchet in pressure from his counterparts. On Wednesday the Biden administration demanded the platform’s Chinese owner sell the app or face a complete ban. Will the UK ultimately threaten the same?If geopolitics is the leading factor in these moves, as opposed to hard proof that TikTok poses a security threat, then it is likely every deterioration in relations between China and the west will push the app further along the road to a complete ban or forced divestment from its owners in the UK and elsewhere. Indeed, a forced sale in the US – if the Chinese government lets TikTok’s owners do so – could lead to TikTok being peeled off from ByteDance in its entirety.The shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon off the east coast of the US last month was followed by reports that negotiations between TikTok and the Biden administration over a deal to resolve security concerns had stalled, while this week the White House gave its support to a Senate bill giving the president the power to ban TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTikTok’s attempts to assuage those concerns – for instance announcing plans to store US and European user data on third-party data servers – seem to have failed with the current American president in the same way they did with his immediate predecessor, who also tried to force a divestment of TikTok’s US business. The backstop used by TikTok’s critics is the existence of Chinese laws that could force ByteDance to cooperate with Beijing authorities, including the national intelligence law of 2017, which states that all organisations and citizens shall “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. For many, this is enough evidence.Perhaps eliminating the concerns over Chinese interference by selling TikTok to non-Chinese investors is the only way to quell the critics. But there are plenty of other aspects of the Chinese tech industry – from Huawei mobile phones to other electronic devices – that are just as capable of eliciting similar fears. Without strong supporting evidence there is no way of knowing how proportionate the UK government is being – and the same could be true for moves against other Chinese tech interests. More

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      in Elections

      More than a quarter of Republicans approve of Capitol attack, poll shows

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      More than a quarter of Republicans approve of the January 6 Capitol attack, according to a new poll. More than half think the deadly riot was a form of legitimate political discourse.The Economist and YouGov survey said 27% of Republicans either strongly or somewhat approved of the riot on 6 January 2021, which Donald Trump incited in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.Nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides, have been linked to the attack. More than 1,000 people have been arrested and hundreds convicted.The longest sentence yet handed down is 10 years in prison, to a former New York police officer who assaulted Capitol officers. The statutory maximum sentence for seditious conspiracy, the most serious convictions yet secured, is 20 years.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted. The House January 6 committee made four criminal referrals regarding Trump to the Department of Justice. The federal investigation continues.The Republican party itself has called the riot legitimate political discourse.In February 2022, a Republican National Committee resolution said Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans on the January 6 committee, were pursuing the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.A Democratic committee member, Jamie Raskin, said: “The Republican party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression.“It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at.”More than a year later, the Economist/YouGov poll said 54% of Republicans thought rioters “participated in legitimate political discourse”. Among all voters, that total was 34%.The poll also said 8% of Republicans strongly approved of the takeover of the Capitol and 19% somewhat approved.Among all respondents, 19% approved of the riot “to stop congressional proceedings”. The figure for those who did not approve was 65%, leaving 15% “not sure”.Asked about Trump’s responsibility for the riot, 49% of Republicans said he had some, from a little to a lot. Among all voters, that figure rose 68%.Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and leading most polls, despite facing legal jeopardy over January 6 and on many other fronts.Respondents to the Economist/YouGov poll were also asked about the decision by the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, to hand more than 40,000 hours of Capitol security footage to Tucker Carlson.The Fox News host has used the footage to show a highly partial version of events on January 6, arguing most rioters were peaceful and claiming without discernible irony the attack has been taken out of context for political purposes.McCarthy has been widely criticised. He has said other networks will have access to the footage.Among Republicans in the new poll, 61% approved of McCarthy’s decision to release the footage to Carlson and Fox News. Among all voters, 42% did.Republicans under McCarthy, including the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, plan to stage an official visit to individuals jailed over January 6.Trump has recorded a charity single, with a choir of prisoners. More

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      How the Iraq war altered US politics and led to the emergence of Trump

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      Twenty years ago, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski was working as a desk officer in the Pentagon, when she became aware of a secretive new department called the Office of Special Plans.The OSP had been set up to produce the kind of intelligence that the Bush administration wanted to hear, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Kwiatkowski, then age 42, saw first-hand how the disastrous war was confected.“I had this huge faith in my superiors, that they must be there for a reason, they must be wise and strong and all of these fairytale type things, but I came to find out there are very incompetent people in very high positions,” she said.Kwiatkowski, who became a Pentagon whistleblower over the war, is now a farmer, part-time college professor, and occasional political candidate on the libertarian end of the Republican party in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She says she was somewhat cynical about war and politics even before she was seconded to the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department in 2002. But seeing America’s governance subverted up close dramatically deepened her disillusion.“There’s a crisis of faith in this country,” Kwiatkowski said. “As always, when you have these crises of faith you see populist leaders, and the emergence of Trump certainly was a response to a crisis in faith. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next, because Americans have a lot less to be proud of than we think.”On the whole, she believes the experience of the Iraq war has imbued Americans with a healthy scepticism about what they are being told by the establishment – but not nearly enough.“I could go into the Walmart right now and ask everybody about WMD in Iraq and probably three out ten people, maybe more, will swear that it’s all true,” she said. “Our public propaganda in this country is supremely good.”Polling figures over the past two decades suggest that overall attitudes towards foreign policy are fairly stable. When the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asked Americans whether “it will be best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs”, 71% supported activism in 2002 and 64% still supported it in 2021.More generally, the Iraq invasion coincided with a collapse in public trust in government which had very briefly recovered from its post-Vietnam slump after the 9/11 attacks. Data from surveys by the Pew Research Centre, show the post-Iraq malaise is deeper and more enduring.“It said first and foremost to young people that the government can’t be trusted,” John Zogby, another US pollster, said. “It also said that the American military may be the strongest in the world but it has serious limits, and it can’t impose its will, even on smaller countries.”He added: “Americans will go to war, but they want their wars to be short, and they want them to make a positive difference.”There are still US soldiers on counter-terrorist missions in Iraq and Syria. The Authorisation to Use Military Force that Congress first granted to the Bush administration in the run-up to the 2003 invasion has yet to be repealed by the Senate, and has been cited by the Obama and Trump administrations in justifying operations in the region.Coleen Rowley, an FBI whistleblower who exposed security lapses leading to the 9/11 attacks, wrote an open letter to the FBI director in March 2003, warning of a “flood of terrorism” resulting from the Iraq invasion. She says now that two decades on, nobody has been held accountable for the fatal mistakes.“I think the real danger is that their propaganda was very successful, and people like Bush and Cheney have now been rehabilitated,” Rowley said. “Even the liberals have embraced Bush and Cheney.”The terrible mistakes made leading to and during the Iraq war forced no resignations and neither George W Bush nor his vice-president, Dick Cheney – nor any other senior official who made the case the war and then oversaw a disastrous occupation – have ever been held to account by any form of commission or tribunal.However, the taint of Iraq arguably altered the course of US politics by hobbling those who supported it.“In some ways you can argue Iraq is what led to Obama being president as opposed to Hillary Clinton,” said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher school of law and diplomacy at Tufts University. “I don’t think Obama wins the 2008 Democratic primary if Hillary hadn’t supported the war.”The war also opened a schism in the Republican party, strengthening an anti-intervention faction that eventually triumphed with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.George W Bush and his former vice-president have drawn some positive liberal press for their low-key opposition to some of the excesses of the Trump era, but Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East and military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, they paid a political price by becoming marginalised within their own party.“The system has punished those people. If you were a Bushie, if you were a neocon, you’re no longer welcome to the party,” Pollack said. “I would say there has been a lot of accountability, but it’s been accountability in a traditionally American way.”Those excluded included traditional conservatives with less extreme domestic social positions than Maga Republicans. The drive to war was fueled by partisanship – the Bush administration was contemptuous of Democrats and all opposition – but it also served as an accelerant to the extremism that led to Trump and the 6 January insurrection.“It’s very hard to say how much Iraq was responsible for that, but it does seem to me that it was an important element in making our partisanship worse,” Pollack said.Pollack is a former CIA analyst and a Democrat who backed the invasion, believing the evidence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD and supporting the humanitarian argument for ousting a dictator.Pollack jokes that he is the only person to have since apologised. It is not entirely true as a few other pundits, like the conservative commentator, Max Boot, have also been contrite, but there have been no public expressions of remorse from former senior officials who took the fateful decisions. It is one of the important ways in which the US has still not had a proper reckoning for the war.Pollack, who has stayed in touch with several of the Bush team for a forthcoming book on the US and Iraq, said that some express private regret for specific decisions and choices, but others remain unrepentant.“I’ve heard it said to my face that: ‘Nope, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d do everything all over again the exact same way’, which I find shocking,” he said. “I don’t see how you look at American behaviour during this period and not have regrets.” More