Seumas Milne's Blog, page 17

Iraq war: make it impossible to inflict such barbarism again | Seumas Milne

The US and Britain not only bathed Iraq in blood, they promoted a sectarian war that now threatens the region

If anyone doubted what kind of Iraq has been bequeathed by a decade of US-sponsored occupation and war, today's deadly sectarian bomb attacks around Baghdad against bus queues and markets should have set them straight. Ten years to the day after American and British troops launched an unprovoked attack on a false pretext – and more than a year since the last combat troops were withdrawn – the conflict they unleashed shows no sign of winding down.

Civilians are still being killed at a rate of at least 4,000 a year, and police at about 1,000. As in the days when US and British forces directly ran the country, torture is rampant, thousands are imprisoned without trial, and disappearances and state killings are routine.

Meanwhile power and sewage systems barely function, more than a third of adults are unemployed, state corruption has become an institutionalised kleptocracy and trade unionists are tried for calling strikes and demonstrations (the oil workers' leader is in court in Basra on that charge tomorrow). In recent months, mass protests in Sunni areas have threatened to tip over into violence, or even renewed civil war.

The dwindling band of Iraq war enthusiasts are trying to put their best face on a gruesome record. Some have drifted off into la-la land: Labour MP Tom Harris claims Iraq is now a "relatively stable and relatively inclusive democracy", which is more or less the direct opposite of reality.

Tony Blair – treated with media reverence but regarded by between 22% and 37% of Britons as a war criminal – accepts the cost of invasion was "very high". But the former prime minister claims justification in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, while insisting that a popular uprising against his regime would have triggered a worse death toll than in Syria. That avoids the fact that the US and Britain controlled Iraq's airspace from 1991 and could have prevented aerial attacks on rebels. It also blithely ignores the scale of the bloodbath for which George Bush and he are directly responsible.

Whether either is ever held to account for it, global opinion against the Iraq war is long settled – including in Britain, the US and Iraq. The invasion was a flagrant act of aggression against a broken-backed state, regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion.

The onslaught triggered a death toll which certainly runs into hundreds, rather than tens, of thousands: estimates range from the Iraq Body Count's minimum of 173,271 up to 2012 (acknowledged to be an underestimate) through the Iraqi government and World Health Organisation's 223,000 and Lancet survey's 654,965 "excess deaths" in the first three years, to the ORB polling organisation's estimate of more than a million.

The occupation was a catastrophe for Iraqis. It destroyed the country's infrastructure, created 4 million refugees, reduced cities like Falluja to ruins – littered with depleted uranium and white phosphorus as cancer rates and birth defects multiplied – and brought al-Qaida and its sectarian terror into the country.

That wasn't the result of mistakes and lack of planning, as the US and British elites like to tell themselves. But as with the armed resistance that mushroomed in the aftermath of the invasion, they were foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of what by any sober reckoning has been a reckless crime.

Saddam Hussein "created enormous carnage", Blair said today – which was certainly true in the years when his regime was backed by Britain and the US. But that is exactly what Bush and he did in their war to overthrow him. The biggest improvement in Iraqis' lives thereafter came as a result of the lifting of US and British-enforced sanctions, estimated by Unicef to have killed half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s.

Ten years on, the US still has a powerful presence in Iraq – now starting to resemble a sort of American-Iranian condominium – with thousands of military contractors, security and intelligence leverage and long-term oil contracts. But it's a long way from the archipelago of bases and control its leaders had in mind.

Iraqi success in preventing a permanent occupation is down to resistance, armed and civil, Sunni and Shia. But that achievement was undermined by the eruption of sectarianism in the aftermath of the invasion, fostered by the occupying forces in the classic imperial divide and rule mould.

The evidence is now indisputable that this went far beyond the promotion of a sectarian political carve-up. As the Guardian reported this month, US forces led by General Petraeus himself were directly involved not only in overseeing torture centres, but also in sponsoring an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads (known as "police commando units") to undermine the resistance.

One outcome is the authoritarian Shia elite-dominated state run by Nouri al-Maliki today. His Sunni vice-president until last year, Tariq al-Hashimi – forced to leave the country and sentenced to death in absentia for allegedly ordering killings – was one of those who in his own words "collaborated" with the occupation, encouraging former resistance leaders to join Petraeus's "awakening councils", and now bitterly regrets it. "If I knew the result would be like this, I would never have done it," he told me at the weekend. "I made a grave mistake."

The sectarian virus incubated in the occupation has now spread beyond Iraq's borders and threatens the future of states across the eastern Arab world. But the war hasn't only been a disaster for Iraq and the region. By demonstrating the limits of US power and its inability to impose its will on peoples prepared to fight back, Iraq proved a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies. For the British state, the retreat of its armed forces from Basra under cover of darkness, with their own record of torture and killings, was a humiliation.

There's little prospect, given the balance of power, of those most responsible for torture and atrocities in Iraq – let alone ordering the original aggression – of facing justice, or of the reparations Iraqis deserve. But there should be a greater chance of preventing more western military intervention in the Middle East, as Blair and his friends are now pressing for in Syria and Iran.

"Damn us for what we did," a British Iraq veteran wrote today. Far better would be to make it impossible for the politicians who sent them there to unleash such barbarism again.

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Alexis Tsipras: Greece could be the spark for defeating austerity across Europe - video interview

Greek opposition leader Alexis Tsipras says Syriza, leading in the polls, offers a real alternative to Europe's failed neoliberal order

Seumas MilnePhil MaynardAndy Gallagher

This isn't self-determination. It's a Ruritanian colonial relic | Seumas Milne

The vote for British rule in the Falklands referendum dodges the point. It's time for a negotiated settlement with Argentina

Whenever there's a 99.8% yes vote in a referendum, it's a pretty safe bet that something dodgy's going on. And despite David Cameron's insistence that the North Korean-style ballot in the Falkland Islands – or Malvinas as they're known in Argentina – should be treated with "reverence", that rule of thumb clearly fits the bill in this case.

Which is not to suggest that the ballot boxes were stuffed. No doubt 1,514 island residents really did vote in favour of continued British rule. The only surprise was that three islanders dared to spoil the rousing choruses of Land of Hope and Glory by voting against.

It's that the poll was a foregone conclusion and designed to miss the entire point of Britain's dispute with Argentina over the islands – which began 180 years ago when one of Lord Palmerston's gunboats seized them and expelled the Argentine administration.

What other result could conceivably be expected if the future of the islands is put in the hands of the tiny British settler population, most of whom weren't born there but are subsidised to the tune of £44,856 a head to keep them in the Rhodesian retro style to which they are accustomed?

By giving the colonists a veto on any change in the islands' status, the British government is trying to pre-empt the issue at the heart of the conflict. But it won't be recognised by Argentina or Latin America, or Africa, or the UN – which regards this relic of empire as a problem of decolonisation – or the US, which is neutral on the dispute. All call for negotiations on sovereignty, which Britain rejects.

But surely the islanders have the right to self-determination, it's argued, even if they're 300 miles from Argentina and the other side of the world from Britain. They certainly have a right to have their interests and way of life protected, and to self-government. But the right of self-determination depends on who is deciding the future of what territory – and since the dispute is about whether the islands are part of Argentina or not, it's also about who should exercise that right.

Self-determination requires a recognised and viably independent people, which is why the UN has rejected its application to the islands. Clearly the residents of, say, the Wallops in Hampshire, with a similar-sized population to the Falklands-Malvinas, can't exercise such a right. Nor can forced colonisation of other people's lands legitimate self-determination – otherwise Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank would have the right to decide the future of Palestinian territory.

In fact, British governments only developed a taste for self-determination after they had been forced to abandon the bulk of their empire and saw a way to hold on to colonised enclaves of dependent populations in places like Gibraltar and Northern Ireland.

But it's always been a pick and mix affair: there were no self-determination ballots for the people of Hong Kong or the Chagos Islands, expelled by Britain four decades ago to make way for an American air base in Diego Garcia. There are different rules, it seems, for white people.

Even so, successive British administrations were quite prepared to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands-Malvinas – including the islands' sovereignty – from the mid-1960s until 1982. But since the Falklands war, its legacy has entrenched an unsustainable £75m-a-year Ruritanian absurdity in the south Atlantic.

The junta's defeat helped free Argentina from a vicious western-backed dictatorship. But military success was a disaster for Britain, rescuing Margaret Thatcher from the depths of unpopularity to unleash devastating neoliberal shock therapy, and rehabilitating overseas military adventures (complete with little-reported war crimes, such as the killing of Argentinian prisoners).

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges famously dismissed the war as a "fight between two bald men over a comb". A generation on, the discovery of potentially large oil and gas deposits around the islands, development of fisheries and growing importance of the Antarctic sea lanes have changed the picture.

Received political wisdom has long been that after the 1982 war, in which more than 900 people were killed, no British politician could afford even to hint at compromise on the Falklands. But Argentina's hand is stronger than might appear. To exploit the islands' hydrocarbon deposits on a significant scale would depend on access to the Argentinian mainland – as would serious development of the islands' economy.

Britain's refusal to negotiate with a democratic Argentina – when it was happy to talk to the country's dictators – has no significant international support: least of all in Latin America, which has been booming for a decade, while Britain's and Europe's economies are on their backs.

The options for compromise have been canvassed for many years, including joint sovereignty, co-administration and leaseback. A negotiated settlement is in the interests of Britain, Argentina – and the islanders. The sooner time is called on the emperor's new clothes saga of the Falklands, the better for all of us.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

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Politics Weekly podcast: Iraq war legacy, Hugo Chávez and 'Cameronomics'

Britain's involvement in the 2003-2011 war in Iraq was one of the most controversial foreign policy decisions in modern history. For some, it was not merely a mistake but a war that was entered into on deliberately false pretences. We hear from Chris Ames, who has spent years chronicling the Iraq inquiry and the search for a "smoking gun" that would prove Tony Blair's intent to deceive.

The war split opinion on the left at the time of the invasion, and arguments continue to rage over whether liberals should intervene against dictatorships like that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The debate is not merely academic: next week marks two years since the first uprising in Syria against the Assad regime. Is Britain's offer of "non-lethal" equipment to the rebels justified and is it enough?

On the panel this week we have Guardian columnists Anne Perkins and Seumas Milne and the Observer's Nick Cohen.

Also this week, a bit of pre-budget freelancing from Vince Cable reiterated his own desire for a change of pace on the government's austerity policy. And with pressure from within the Tory party for more radicalism in this year's budget, will there be a rabbit out of the hat? Osborne himself is under pressure to avoid a repeat of last year's statement, which was widely derided as an "omnishambles".

Plus: we look back at the controversial 14-year rule of Hugo Chavez, who died this week aged 58. The Venezuelan "commandante" presided over a steep drop in poverty rates - but according to Rory Carroll, he leaves behind some serious economic and social problems.

Leave your thoughts below.

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Women are now to the left of men. It's a historic shift | Seumas Milne

Austerity has set female voters against Cameron, but that's only part of a global change shaping the politics of the future

David Cameron has long had a problem with women. From the early days of the coalition most have balked at his government and its austerity programme that hits women hardest – along with the prime minister's patronisingly tin-ear "calm down, dear" gestures. But just as the coalition struggle over plans for yet more budget cuts is reaching fever pitch, that problem is becoming critical.

Labour's lead over the Conservatives among women has now hit 26% (51% to 25%), according to the most recent ICM/Guardian poll, compared with a 7% lead among men. No wonder Tory strategists are panicking. Some pundits have played down the ICM figure as a rogue result based on small samples.

But women have been backing Labour over the Tories by margins well into double figures since last autumn. And it's not just in party support that there's a glaring gender gap. On a wide range of issues – from cuts in pensions, benefits, health and education to tax increases on the rich – women in Britain are not only strongly opposed to coalition policies – they're often significantly more hostile to them than men.

While both men and women back a mansion tax, for example, two-thirds of women support it, compared with 57% of men. And it is not hard to see why. Women are bearing the brunt of the coalition's austerity onslaught. In the week of International Women's Day, which was set up to campaign for women's rights and freedoms, these are being undermined and reversed by Cameron's coalition.

It is women, who make up 65% of the public sector and over three-quarters of the workforce of the NHS and local government, who are taking the full force of what is now planned to be more than a million public service jobs cuts by 2018. That will also widen the gender pay gap, which is seven points bigger in the private sector.

Women are losing out disproportionately from pay caps and freezes, tax credit, maternity pay, legal aid and benefit cuts, and make up 98% of those hit by January's child benefit cut. As the Fawcett Society puts it, together these changes spell a "tipping point for women's equality". This government is making women pay above all for the bankers' crisis.

But the shift in women's attitudes goes far beyond a reaction to the assault from Cameron and George Osborne. Women in Britain are now significantly to the left of men – and more socially liberal – on most key political controversies of the day. They are not only more committed to public services, the welfare state and progressive taxation, they are also on average more egalitarian, less racist and homophobic, more committed to the environment, and much more hostile to British war-making. Only a quarter backed the invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, compared with a third of men, while most women also opposed British military operations in Libya and Mali – against a minority of men.

It wasn't always like this. Women have been more anti-war than men for decades. But for most of the past century they were consistently more conservative than men – and regularly helped put the Tories in power after all women finally won the vote in 1928. In the 1950s, the Conservative gender gap was 14%.

But over the past generation there has been a sea change. Women have moved to the left almost across the board and have now leap-frogged over men. The differences might seem relatively small (though on issues of war and peace they're usually around 20%); women tend to identify less with political parties; and the shift is offset by the fact that women live longer, and older people tend to be more conservative.

The direction of travel is, however, unmistakable – and it's far from restricted to Britain. The trend for women to shift leftwards has been clear longest in the United States, where a higher proportion of women than men have voted Democrat in presidential elections since 1980, and where Barack Obama was re-elected with 55% of the overall women's vote.

The same pattern was already evident across most advanced industrial economies a decade ago. As the academics Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart found, while men's politics had remained pretty stable, women's had moved left from the 1990s onwards – and they were also far less likely to vote for parties of the far right.

Crucial to the shift has been the growth of women's employment (often segregated in low-wage and public sector work), and the decline of the traditional family and churches in Europe – but also the rise of the women's movement and the influence of feminism.

The importance of paid work in changing women's politics is one reason why there hasn't been a parallel shift in much of the developing world. In Britain women now make up half the trade union movement and have played a central role in recent industrial action, from the mass pensions strike of 2011 to cleaners' walkouts on the London Underground.

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George Osborne hasn't just failed – this is an economic disaster | Seumas Milne

Coalition austerity has delivered depression and a lost decade. Labour has to avoid locking itself into more of the same

It would be comic if the consequences weren't so grim. There is no economic failure, it turns out, which cannot be hailed by George Osborne as a vindication of the policies that brought it about. Faced with the decision by the credit agency Moody's to scrap Britain's AAA rating, the chancellor declared it was yet another reason to stick to austerity – and the "clearest possible warning" to anyone who might think of breaking with it.

No evidence from the real world, it seems, can divert Osborne and David Cameron from their chosen course. The pronouncements of agencies such as Moody's, which gave the US investment bank Lehman Brothers a ringing endorsement just as it was about to bring down the global financial system five years ago, shouldn't be taken too seriously in themselves.

But for Osborne and the coalition, safeguarding Britain's credit rating has been a central justification for the most swingeing programme of cuts and tax increases for 90 years. Along with slashing the deficit, cutting borrowing and bringing down debt within five years, it was a central test of market confidence that Osborne and the coalition set for themselves.

And they have failed on every single one. The structural deficit and debt targets have had to be abandoned, as austerity plans have been extended to 2018. Borrowing is now forecast to be £212bn higher than planned over this parliament. Moody's downgrade report gives a clue as to why that might be: "sluggish growth" is now expected to "extend into the second half of the decade" with a consequent "high and rising debt burden".

In other words, Cameron and Osborne have failed in their central goal of cutting the deficit and debt precisely because their austerity policies – combined with a refusal to get a grip on the banks, falling real wages and the boomerang effect of the eurozone crisis – are squeezing the life out of the economy.

"Sluggish growth" is a polite way of putting it. Britain isn't just facing the possibility of a triple-dip recession, after the economy shrank in five out of 10 quarters since the summer of 2010. It's now in a fullblown depression. We're no longer talking about the risk of a Japanese-style "lost decade". The country is in the middle of one, and it stands to be worse than Japan's in the 1990s, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility's own projections.

The economy is stagnating at best, delivering the second-worst performance of the G7 economies in the past two years – after Italy. There has already been a fall in living standards unmatched since the 1920s, with the average worker losing around £4,000 in real terms over the last three years. On current forecasts, real wages will still be at their 1999 level in 2017.

Now the falling value of the pound will intensify that squeeze, with little chance of the benefits for exports in a hollowed-out industrial economy where investment is still 15% below its pre-crash peak. That failure to invest, by corporations sitting on a £777bn cash mountain, has also fed into an alarming drop in productivity.

In these conditions, a fall in unemployment to 7.8% is treated as good news. But that has depended both on a sharp increase in involuntary part-time working and the productivity slump, which threatens to entrench lower living standards in the longer term – while the much-vaunted "rebalancing" of the economy has yet to materialise.

When you add in the cuts to core public services, tax credits, housing and disability benefits that will hit the poorest hardest, this isn't just an economic disaster. It's a human one measured out in blighted lives for years to come, delivered in the service of a programme that has already failed in its own terms – while shrinking the state and cosseting the corporate sector.

The Tories and their Liberal Democrat allies naturally still blame their predecessors' profligacy. New Labour must of course share the blame – along with the entire City-bedazzled political class – for promoting a deregulated, private debt-fuelled financial system which crashed and burned across the western world. But the claim that its own spending (with a deficit of less than 3% when the crisis hit) caused the crisis itself is an absurdity.

Polls show most people in Britain realise that, and increasingly oppose the government's reckless austerity. But without the unequivocal promotion of a decisive alternative, the risk is that falling living standards and deteriorating privatised services come to be seen as the new normal.

The shape of that alternative is clear enough: a large-scale public investment programme in housing, transport, education and green technology to drive recovery and fill the gap left by the private sector, underpinned by a boost to demand and financed through publicly-owned banks at the lowest interest rates for hundreds of years.

There's no evidence that extra borrowing for growth – as opposed to increased borrowing to pay for contraction, which the bond markets have barely blinked at – would lead to a confidence crisis. And the government already owns controlling stakes in two of Britain's biggest banks that it could use right now to boost lending and finance expansion.

Instead, ministers are arguing about how to sell off the 82% public stake in RBS, when even Margaret Thatcher's former chancellor Nigel Lawson wants it fully nationalised. Meanwhile the restive Tory right is pressing for still deeper cuts. Osborne is expected to announce some new infrastructure spending in next month's budget just as tax cuts for the richest and the corporate sector are about to kick in.

None of that is going to turn round the scale of the coalition's economic failure – which leaves Ed Miliband with a crucial choice. Even if growth picks up in the next couple of years, there's no prospect of a full recovery under the coalition. And after years of falling living standards, Labour's chances of re-election are clearly growing,

So far Miliband has backed a limited stimulus, slower cuts and wider, if still hazy, economic reform. Given the Cameron coalition's legacy and the cuts and tax rises it's planning well into the next parliament, the danger is that Labour locks itself into continuing austerity in a bid for credibility. As the experience of its sister parties in Europe has shown, that would be a calamity for Labour – but also for Britain.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

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Think there's no alternative? Latin America has a few | Seumas Milne

Not only have leaders from Ecuador to Venezuela delivered huge social gains – they keep winning elections too

Ever since the crash of 2008 exposed the rotten core of a failed economic model, we've been told there are no viable alternatives. As Europe sinks deeper into austerity, governing parties of whatever stripe are routinely rejected by disillusioned voters – only to be replaced by others delivering more welfare cuts, privatisation and inequality.

So what should we make of a part of the world where governments have resolutely turned their back on that model, slashed poverty and inequality, taken back industries and resources from corporate control, massively expanded public services and democratic participation – and keep getting re-elected in fiercely contested elections?

That is what has been happening in Latin America for a decade. The latest political leader to underline the trend is the radical economist Rafael Correa, re-elected as president of Ecuador at the weekend with an increased 57% share of the vote, while Correa's party won an outright majority in parliament.

But Ecuador is now part of a well-established pattern. Last October the much reviled but hugely popular Hugo Chávez, who returned home on Monday after two months of cancer treatment in Cuba, was re-elected president of Venezuela with 55% of the vote after 14 years in power in a ballot far more fraud-proof than those in Britain or the US. That followed the re-election of Bolivia's Evo Morales, Latin America's first indigenous president, in 2009; the election of Lula's nominated successor Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2010; and of Cristina Fernandez in Argentina in 2011.

Despite their differences, it's not hard to see why. Latin America was the first to experience the disastrous impact of neoliberal dogma and the first to revolt against it. Correa was originally elected in the wake of an economic collapse so devastating that one in 10 left the country. Since then his "citizen's revolution" has cut poverty by nearly a third and extreme poverty by 45%. Unemployment has been slashed, while social security, free health and education have been rapidly expanded – including free higher education, now a constitutional right – while outsourcing has been outlawed.

And that has been achieved not only by using Ecuador's limited oil wealth to benefit the majority, but by making corporations and the well-off pay their taxes (receipts have almost tripled in six years), raising public investment to 15% of national income, extending public ownership, tough renegotiation of oil contracts and re-regulating the banking system to support development.

Many of the things, in fact, that conventional "free market" orthodoxy insists will lead to ruin, but have instead delivered rapid growth and social progress. Correa's government has also closed the US military base at Manta (he'd reconsider, he said, if the US "let us put a military base in Miami"), expanded gay, disability and indigenous rights and adopted some of the most radical environmental policies in the world. Those include the Yasuni initiative, under which Ecuador waives its right to exploit oil in a uniquely biodiverse part of the Amazon in return for international contributions to renewable energy projects.

But what is happening in Ecuador is only part of a progressive tide that has swept Latin America, as social democratic and radical socialist governments have attacked social and racial inequality, challenged US domination and begun to create genuine regional integration and independence for the first time in 500 years. And given what's already been delivered to the majority, it's hardly surprising they keep getting re-elected.

It says more about the western media (and their elite Latin American counterparts) than governments such as Ecuador's and Venezuela's that they are routinely portrayed as dictatorial. Part of that canard is about US hostility. In the case of Ecuador, it's also been fuelled by fury at Correa's decision to give asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who faces sexual assault allegations in Sweden, over the threat of onward extradition to the US. In reality, the real anti-democratic menace comes from the US's own allies, who launched abortive coups against both Chávez and Correa – and successful ones in Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay last year.

Of course, Latin America's left-leaning governments have no shortage of failings, from corruption to crime. In Ecuador and elsewhere, tensions between the demands of development, the environment and indigenous rights have sharpened. And none of these experiences yet offer any kind of ready-made social or economic alternative model.

There is also a question whether the momentum of continental change can be maintained now that Chávez, who spearheaded it, is expected to stand down in the next few weeks. His anointed successor, the former trade unionist Nicolás Maduro, is in a strong position to win new elections. But neither he nor the charismatic Correa is likely to be able to match Chávez's catalytic regional role.

Latin America's transformation is nevertheless deeply rooted and popular, while a discredited right has little to offer. For the rest of the world, it makes a nonsense of the idea that five years into the crisis nothing can be done but more of the same. True, these are economies and societies at a very different stage of development, and their experiences can't simply be replicated elsewhere. But they have certainly shown there are multiple alternatives to neoliberal masochism – which win elections, too.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

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Michael Gove is not just a bungler, he's a destructive ideologue | Seumas Milne

Tories will forgive their education secretary's failures so long as he backs privatisation and 1950s theme park schooling

By any normal reckoning, Michael Gove is a walking disaster-zone of chronic political incompetence. His ministerial career has been a litany of blunders and apologies. It began in his first months as education secretary, when he botched the coalition's scrapping of Labour's school building programme. Last year, he was at the centre of the GCSE regrading fiasco and the scandal of selling off school playing-fields in the year of the London Olympics.

And last week Gove outdid himself with a string of multiple U-turns. Having been compelled to drop his wheeze to reintroduce O-levels and a two-tier school exam system, he was forced to abandon his fallback plan to replace GCSEs with an English baccalaureate and introduce a single exam board for each subject. He even felt obliged to broaden school league tables to include supposedly "soft subjects", like art and music.

Naturally, he was all self-deprecating humility at the dispatch box. He had "made an error", he declared – even asking for other offences (such as the school building programme) to be taken into account, and conceding he may have tried to cross "a bridge too far". It had been a similar story last month, when Gove grovelled to a Commons select committee about the "incredibly poor performance" of his department in dealing with parliamentary questions.

Disarming critics with politeness is a vital part of Gove's armoury – just as his equally incompetent fellow rightwinger Boris Johnson deflects attacks with jokes and bonhomie. And changing direction when you're wrong is clearly better than the alternative – though if you make a habit of it, it can start to look careless.

But charm isn't the main reason Gove is considered a Conservative success, despite his multiple failures. The education secretary is an ideologue in a government whose Tory base chafes at the constraints of coalition, a neoconservative who believes the Iraq war was a "proper British foreign policy success" and a Thatcherite traditionalist itching to give for-profit companies the right to take over state schools.

Which is why Gove is lionised by the Tory right and Conservative press as a true believer, prepared to transform English education in their own image. While Gove is courteous, a praetorian guard of apparatchiks does his dirty work, seeing off educationalists' resistance to their permanent counter-revolution and running web campaigns against recalcitrant critics.

So after his humiliation over ditching GCSEs, there was no sign of the scorn that would normally meet such backpedalling. Instead, it was only a "tactical setback", the Times insisted, while the Spectator's Fraser Nelson reassured Telegraph readers that Gove might have "lost a skirmish, but he's still winning the war".

They're mainly right. Gove has had to drop his baccalaureate scheme but he's forging ahead with plans to ditch modules and controlled assessment in favour of more traditional exams and 1950s-theme park rote learning. And his new draft national curriculum is a Daily Mail dream.

Out goes most European and world history and critical thinking, for instance. In comes what Gove calls a "clear narrative of British progress with a proper emphasis on heroes and heroines" – Nelson, Wellington, and "Clive of India" to the fore. Imperial barbarity is largely airbrushed out and we're left with what the historian Richard Evans damns as "regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era".

Meanwhile, despite his GCSE climbdown, Gove shows every sign of discouraging students from taking music, art or even economics at A-level in favour of core "facilitating subjects". The education secretary likes to present his reforms as designed to boost the chances of working-class children failed by the system, even quoting the Italian communist Gramsci to support his case.

But it's fraudulent posturing. There's no evidence that disadvantaged children will benefit from Gove's reforms either to the curriculum or management of schools. But there is to show the drive to turn local schools into freestanding academies outside local democratic control is fuelling social segregation, while schools in poorer areas also risk being damaged by the scrapping of teachers' national pay scales.

For Gove, academies are the key to his "supply-side revolution": a huge expansion of the role of private companies in education to match the privatisation of the health service. For-profit firms such as the US-owned K-12, which has funded Tea Party candidates in recent elections, are among those already involved in academies.

Now a leaked memo from Gove's department has revealed that ministers are considering "reclassifying academies to the private sector", allowing them to be profit-making, to deal with the impact of the runaway costs of the academy and free school programme.

No doubt Gove and his supporters are convinced that marketisation and privatisation are the route to transforming English schools for the better, though it must help that a whole "educational services industry" is also gagging to benefit.

But most of all, championing traditional teaching and the breakup of the country's education system offer a powerful boost for Gove's career. When David Cameron is finally unseated, the battle for the Tory succession could yet come to a fight between the incompetent Gove and Johnson. It's a chilling prospect.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

Education policyMichael GoveGCSEsSchoolsExamsBoris JohnsonSeumas Milne
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Mali: the fastest blowback yet in this disastrous war on terror | Seumas Milne

French intervention in Mali will fuel terrorism, but the west's buildup in Africa is also driven by the struggle for resources

To listen to David Cameron's rhetoric this week, it could be 2001 all over again. Eleven years into the war on terror, it might have been Tony Blair speaking after 9/11. As the bloody siege of the part BP-operated In Amenas gas plant in Algeria came to an end, the British prime minister claimed, like George Bush and Blair before him, that the country faced an "existential" and "global threat" to "our interests and way of life".

While British RAF aircraft backed French military intervention against Islamist rebels in Mali, and troops were reported to be on alert for deployment to the west African state, Cameron promised that a "generational struggle" would be pursued with "iron resolve". The fight over the new front in the terror war in North Africa and the Sahel region, he warned, could go on for decades.

So in austerity-blighted Britain, just as thousands of soldiers are being made redundant, while Barack Obama has declared that "a decade of war is now ending", armed intervention is being ratcheted up in yet another part of the Muslim world. Of course, it's French troops in action this time. But even in Britain the talk is of escalating drone attacks and special forces, and Cameron has refused to rule out troops on the ground.

You'd think the war on terror had been a huge success, the way the western powers keep at it, Groundhog Day-style. In reality, it has been a disastrous failure, even in its own terms – which is why the Obama administration felt it had to change its name to "overseas contingency operations", until US defence secretary Leon Panetta revived the old title this week.

Instead of fighting terror, it has fuelled it everywhere it's been unleashed: from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen, spreading it from Osama bin Laden's Afghan lairs eastwards to central Asia and westwards to North Africa – as US, British and other western forces have invaded, bombed, tortured and kidnapped their way across the Arab and Muslim world for over a decade.

So a violent jihadist movement that grew out of western intervention, occupation and support for dictatorship was countered with more of the same. And the law of unintended consequences has meanwhile been played out in spectacular fashion: from the original incubation of al-Qaida in the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, to the spread of terror from western-occupied Afghanistan to Pakistan, to the strategic boost to Iran delivered by the US-British invasion of Iraq.

When it came to Libya, the blowback was much faster – and Mali took the impact. Nato's intervention in Libya's civil war nearly two years ago escalated the killing and ethnic cleansing, and played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. In the ensuing maelstrom, Tuareg people who had fought for Gaddafi went home to Mali and weapons caches flooded over the border.

Within a couple of months this had tipped longstanding demands for self-determination into armed rebellion – and then the takeover of northern Mali by Islamist fighters, some linked to al-Qaida. Foreign secretary William Hague acknowledged this week that Nato's Libyan intervention had "contributed" to Mali's war, but claimed the problem would have been worse without it.

In fact, the spillover might have been contained if the western powers had supported a negotiated settlement in Libya, just as all-out war in Mali might have been avoided if the Malian government's French and US sponsors had backed a political instead of a military solution to the country's divisions.

French intervention in Mali has now produced the fastest blowback yet in the war on terror. The groups that seized the In Imenas gas plant last week – reportedly with weapons supplied to Libya by France and Britain – insisted their action was taken in response to France's operation, Algeria's decision to open its airspace to the French and western looting of the country's natural resources.

It may well be that the attack had in fact been planned for months. And the Algerian government has its own history of bloody conflict with Islamist movements. But it clearly can't be separated from the growing western involvement across the region.

France is in any case the last country to sort out Mali's problems, having created quite a few of them in the first place as the former colonial power, including the legacy of ethnic schism within artificial borders – as Britain did elsewhere. The French may have been invited in by the Malian government. But it's a government brought to power by military coup last year, not one elected by Malians – and whose troops are now trading atrocities and human rights abuses with the rebels.

Only a political settlement, guaranteed by regional African forces, can end the conflict. Meanwhile, French president François Hollande says his country will be in Mali as long as it takes to "defeat terrorism in that part of Africa". All the experience of the past decade suggests that could be indefinitely – as western intervention is likely to boost jihadist recruitment and turn groups with a regional focus towards western targets.

All this is anyway about a good deal more than terrorism. Underlying the growing western military involvement in Africa – from the spread of American bases under the US Africa Command to France's resumption of its post-colonial habit of routine armed intervention – is a struggle for resources and strategic control, in the face of China's expanding economic role in the continent. In north and west Africa, that's not just about oil and gas, but also uranium in countries like Niger – and Mali. Terrorism has long since become a catch-all cover for legitimising aggressive war.

The idea that jihadists in Mali, or Somalia for that matter, pose an existential threat to Britain, France, the US or the wider world is utter nonsense. But the opening of a new front in the war on terror in north Africa and the Sahel, accompanied by another murderous drone campaign, is a potential disaster for the region and risks a new blowback beyond it.

The past decade has demonstrated beyond doubt that such interventions don't solve crises, let alone deal with the causes of terrorism, but deepen them and generate new conflicts. More military intervention will bolster authoritarian regimes – and its rhetoric further poison community relations in the intervening states. It seems the price has to be paid over and over again.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

MaliAfricaAlgeriaMiddle East and North AfricaMilitaryDavid CameronSeumas Milne
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There is a problem with welfare, but it's not 'shirkers' | Seumas Milne

This economic model isn't delivering jobs or decent wages. The real scroungers are greedy landlords and employers

The glee and class contempt with which Britain's Tory leaders have set about this week's onslaught on welfare has been an object lesson in the cynical venom at the heart of David Cameron's coalition. To force through cuts in the living standards of the poorest people in the country, demonisation and division have been the order of the day.

The Conservatives back workers not shirkers, the prime minister declared, as George Osborne pictured an honest shift worker passing the closed blinds of a skiver "sleeping off a life on benefits". Tory MP John Redwood insisted betting firms target deprived areas because the poor have too much "time on their hands".

Having softened up their audience with a press campaign of tales of "scroungers" and fraudsters, the Tories couldn't have been clearer about their purpose: to turn the low paid against the unemployed, just as they've tried to set private sector against public sector workers – and the Victorians separated the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Having drawn their toxic dividing line, the game has then been to put Labour on the wrong side, in the scroungers' camp. Hence the Conservative poster campaign in advance of yesterday's Commons vote on the coalition plan to make the first general real terms benefit cuts since the 1930s, declaring: "Today Labour are voting to increase benefits by more than workers' wages."

But the signs are that the skivers versus strivers talk has been backfiring. Even Cameron's dog-whistle spinman, Lynton Crosby, has been getting worried about the tone. So no wonder Nick Clegg, who claims to be on a journey to "the centre ground", wants to dissociate his Lib Dems from the nakedly nasty party.

As the impact of this year's benefit squeeze hits home, the backlash is likely to grow. Far from targeting "shirkers", the three-year benefit and tax credit cap doesn't even mainly target the unemployed. More than 60% of those who will lose out are in work.

Among the "scroungers" Cameron will be clamping down on are 300,000 nurses, 150,000 teachers and 40,000 soldiers. The real terms cut will hit the poorest, lone parents, the disabled and women hardest, according to the government's own assessment. It will increase inequality and help tip hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

Just as 8,000 millionaires are about to get an average tax cut of over £107,000 and food banks are booming, the coalition is driving through a benefit squeeze that swamps the rise in tax allowances and targets the most vulnerable – already subject to a string of other cuts and new charges, from disability allowances to council tax.

Ministers claim the end of child benefit for the better-off in some way balances the attack on means-tested benefits. But not only is child benefit set apart in being paid overwhelmingly to women: like all universal benefits it helps to create a common social interest, can be offset with progressive taxation and becomes far easier to hack away at once restricted to the lower paid.

Of course, these cuts are being made in the name of deficit reduction. In reality, even if the logic of the coalition's austerity programme is accepted, there are plenty of other ways to find the savings made from capping benefit and tax credits (even the Blairite prince over the water, David Miliband, today denounced the cap and floated lower rate pension tax relief instead).

But austerity is failing and the underlying deficit growing. Even the IMF has now admitted it underestimated the disastrous impact of austerity programmes on growth and jobs. And cuts in the incomes of the poorest in any economy will only depress demand when the opposite is urgently needed – including to shrink the deficit.

The Tories feel safe attacking social security because a long-running media campaign has fostered a wildly inaccurate welfare mythology. On average, people think 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, when the government's own estimate is 0.7% – or around £1bn, compared to an estimated £70bn worth of tax evasion. Most payments go to pensioners, and, far from soaring ahead of wages, unemployment benefit has fallen to 11% of average earnings, compared with 22% in 1979.

That's not to say there isn't a problem with welfare. It just isn't the one the political class and media mostly claim it is. Central to the sharp increase in social security costs over the past generation have been rising joblessness and stagnating wages. Since 1980, unemployment has averaged more than three times the postwar rate, while the proportion of those in low-paid jobs has doubled to over 20%.

In other words, welfare has become a prop for the failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver jobs or decent wages. In Britain, the prop has partly taken the form of subsidising poverty pay through New Labour's tax credits, and exorbitant private rents through a massively expanded housing benefit bill.

That model has now crashed and the costs of systemic failure have ballooned: long-term unemployment has increased by 146% since 2010. What Cameron and Osborne are doing is to kick away props, not from bad employers and greedy landlords – the real welfare scroungers – but from the most deprived when they're needed most.

Labour is right to oppose real benefit cuts and support publicly backed work programmes, but wrong to endorse real terms cuts in public sector pay and private minimum wage schemes. If politicians are serious about cutting the welfare bill – instead of driving claimants deeper into poverty – there are obvious alternatives.

A crash council housebuilding programme, backed with northern European-style rent control, would slash the £21bn a year from the housing benefit bill. A living wage across the economy, combined with strengthened workplace rights, would cut the tax credit and other benefit bills. And both, combined with a public bank-driven national investment programme, would boost growth and shrink the dole bill.

Since this government will be doing nothing of the kind, expect instead the social unrest predicted by northern council leaders in response to plans for 30% cuts in local authority budgets. Polling suggests public opposition to the benefit squeeze will also spread as people find out more about who will bear the brunt. Even the Tories may come to regret their war on the poor.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

WelfareDavid CameronConservativesBenefitsEconomic growth (GDP)EconomicsEconomic policyHousingCommunitiesHousing benefitSeumas Milne
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