26/12/2015 Dateline London

Hello, and welcome to Dateline London's Review of the Year

2015 - a year dominated by fears and failures over terror

and immigration, moves to end the conflict in Syria,

and Russia and the United States making common cause

against so-called Islamic State - well, sort of.

It's been a year of economic troubles in China and the Eurozone,

and in Britain, a year in which David Cameron won

the British general election and Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership

Our top team of reviewers are: Ned Temko, who is a writer

Let's begin who writes on Middle East affairs,

started very good for them. They managed to expand, capturing Palmyra

in Syria. But I believe the end of the year is completely different.

They are abusing a lot of territories now. I believe the

Maddie could fall to the hands of Iraqi forces any day now. -- Ramadi.

The area is congested with drones, everything. It seems they are having

a very tough time nowadays in particular. I don't believe the next

year will be a rosy one for them. It will be a struggle. I think the

start to lose start to lose some of their

sharpness or their image as a victorious state, as they call it.

But the problem is, we do not have an alternative for it. We know, we

have war planes, drones, troops on the ground, the Kurdish

countries fighting the Islamic State. But the problem is, suppose

we actually get rid of it tomorrow, which I doubt- what will

the problem. We can say, yeah, from what we are breeding,

reasons, people are getting disgruntled with them -- from what

we are reading. But say we do manage to get rid of them in Ramadi or

Raqqa. How then are you going to prise away the people for whom their

support or capacity with Islamic State is not ideological, it is

practical, financial? So then what do you do? How do you make sure that

Islamic State or more stew not have the capacity to come back, because

there is still a vacuum? -- or works. I don't want to make it to a

intellectual, because they are awful. The lesson from Kobani is a

few push back from Islamic State... Every time you push back, they

cannot fight back, because they are weaker than we are. The problem is

the shape shifting. Before there was Islamic State, there was Al-Qaeda in

Iraq. You can destroy Islamic State, but you will not destroy the

ideology that draws people in. And the traditions that give it rich.

That might give it route. Somewhere in Britain a kid is sitting at his

desk saying, look, 100 nations to take on 30,000 fighters for the

caliphate. I want to join the caliphate. It is not as though we

have really been fighting them. The only reason the western states are

taking them seriously know is because they have become a terrorist

threat to Europe. The problem has been for the past year if not longer

that the proxies, the agents who are concerned with Islamic State, they

are more interested in serving their own interests in the region than

they are in getting rid of Islamic State. If I can make a broader

point, because I think we will come back to it when we discuss British

politics in the political year that has just passed, there is a

dichotomy between the ability to diagnose what is wrong, which we all

understand, which usually do long-term strategy, and the

interrogation for some simple panacea. I think one thing

policymakers often forget about the Middle East is a really congregated

place, and this stuff is difficult, and it takes time. -- a complicated

place. It requires good governance, and one thing that is not popular

that it requires is positive engagement and not isolationism from

the rest of the world. I want to come back to you because you have

written books about this and so on. I wonder if in the West in

particular we get hung up on names, Al-Qaeda or in this case Islamic

State, Daesh. We'll is actually the phenomenon and the ideas behind it,

the problems behind it, economic problems, are not being addressed.

So all you were going to change if the names of the people. -- all you

are going to change is the names. If you want to understand the

phenomena, this man is the most popular man in the Middle East. Time

magazine chose him. There are seven words. First, humiliation. Then

frustration. Underestimation. We underestimate the strength of the

Islamic State. Then marginalisation. There was a marginalisation of the

Sony in Iraq because of the American occupation at that time. -- Sunni.

Then we have social media which is playing a big part in the fever of

Aslan act states. We must understand this phenomena. -- Islamic State.

There is an economic side, but the political side, the religious side,

the marginalisation - we have to look at the whole region. We can't

save the region. We are already meddling. Even if everybody withdrew

and wasn't meddling, there would be meddling from Turkey and Saudi

Arabia into Syria. And Iran. We are talking now about the ideology and

can it be defeated, but there is also this listing, which is an

unprecedented disintegration of the state, a nation state, that is

comparatively young. All Western policy seems to be based on, we will

get everyone round the table in Vienna, Geneva, wherever with nice

hotels, and should we invite the adult competence on the ground? No,

we will invite the de facto Syrian Government. -- the combatants on the

ground. Does the map of the Middle East even make sense any more? How

can you begin to address all of the chaos in which Daesh, Al-Qaeda in

Iraq prior to it, are able to flourish, until you get a better

handle on, just what is the nation state any more in the Middle East?

Syria is disintegrating at such a pace, how can be reconstructed? The

other big practical thing on the ground is the agreement saying, this

is Iraq, this is Syria, this is Lebanon. This is nonsense now. It

just doesn't exist. Rachel, we previewed this. You can

shake your head... We disagree on everything. If you, as I did, lived

in Beirut during the civil war in the late 1970s, you realised then

that is one of the great challenges and one of the temptations to stick

with people like a brutal dictator with a stable Government was that

this drawing of Allianz -- lines on a map by British and French imperial

powers ignored what where real divisions of tripe, ethnicity,

religion, and those are important. # Tribe. I just want to say I

disagree with anything Rachel says. LAUGHTER

You can counter. The problem is you following to this assumption of the

Middle East is just there is a weirdo bundle of sectarian ethnicity

is like obligations, let's just let them be sectarian. Maybe there was a

colonial line in the sand, but since then both nations and peoples have

existed as nations. -- those nations. The Iraqis wouldn't say

they are Sunni or sheer, they would say, we are Iraqi. To say to them

know you have no national identity, I find that really patronising and

unhelpful. It would be, but no one has said it. That is kind of what

you just said. I am surprised we do use the terminology, Daesh. Why

can't we say Islamic State? Island of France says Daesh -- Francois

Hollande. David Cameron says this. We get hang-up on these baddies,

that is the point. The British should know about anybody else, in

Northern Ireland, you banned one organisation, it changed its name to

something else. Exactly. It shows how they do not understand the

region. By seeing Daesh, you are not belittling it, you are pushing

people to it. -- by saying Daesh. Can I move on to a slightly

different area, which is... We will get to Britain in the end. So-called

Britain. LAUGHTER

Or the United Kingdom, as some say. Russia. Good year for Putin or

badger? -- bad your? Probably a better year for him than for people

who colluded in making it easier for

him. I would say the prognosis is not good. For one thing, the

economic situation year, is at least uncertain. And

second of all, his predators is probably should have discovered in

Afghanistan, there is no such thing as a cost free military

intervention. -- his predecessors. I'm not sure he really understands

what he is getting into. Rachel will disagree. The law of averages. One

year ago, everybody hated him because of the Ukraine. Now he has

pulled away from the Ukraine, and there is a lot of people having

grudging respect for Vladimir Putin. If Balmer says A, everybody else

says Z. -- Barack Obama says. Putin has come in and forced

from America, but didn't happen at all Russia went all in. Russia isn't

all in fighting Islamic states, Oracle in supporting Assad and

killing other rebels. -- VR all in supporting Assad. Every time Russia

gets involved in some kind of conflict in the Muslim world, one

daily wake up and we have got blood up to their ankles and it is Russian

blood. Do you think it has been a good year, if you can say this, for

Assad? Because he will at least be there for a while. In the sense that

what he was seeing in the beginning, that he is fighting a violent

extremist terror movement, has now become true and has become what we

are all seeing, then yes, he has one, if we can use that term for

somebody who has been so murderous and caused his people to leave the

country. He has won the narrative. I do agree that in some says Russia

has forced the issue. I am surprised it took them that long to engage and

protect their interests. We always knew they were going to and that the

logic of the Syria war was a proxy war on top of the Civil War. That it

would just keep escalating. The fact that Russia did not get involved as

Galvan used -- galvanised the West into taking it more seriously. Why

is America retreating -- while America is retreating from the

Middle East, Putin is consolidating his presence in the middle east. He

has three pieces in Syria. Now he managed to impose his well in

Vienna, later in New York. The last resolution of the security council,

to 254 - he did not mention any words about the future of Bashar

al-Assad. You manage to assassinate one of the strongest militia in

Syria -- he managed. It was very obvious, he said, I did it. A very

well-known fact there. So he is imposing his will. Yes, he will face

problems, because the price of oil is dropping from $120 per barrel, to

less than $22 per barrel. But his enemies in the Middle East will also

suffer. Also, they aren't 90% dependent on oil revenues. -- they

are 90% dependent. He is they are now, and has imposed his will. He

emerged as a strongman and is very popular in certain parts of the

East. Definitely he has a huge majority there. -- the Middle East.

Let's have a look at Britain, because if one year ago someone had

offered me reasonable odds as to whether David Cameron would win

outright in the general election and Jeremy Corbyn would lead the Labour

Party, would I have taken it? And none of us really thought that would

have predicted it. David Cameron was one of the few things I have ever

gotten almost right on this very programme. I was on right after the

Israeli election, and remember we laughed, saying camera would be the

same thing, but it would be Scots instead. -- Cameron. I think that

was partly a surprise. It was a conventional election, however.

Because I think fundamentally, not enough voters trusted Labour on the

economy and not enough voters could envisage seriously Ed Miliband in

number ten Downing St. And the Scottish national party factor. I

think what has changed profoundly is that all over the world, from Donald

Trump to hear Jeremy Corbyn, to a certain extent in Spain, the

remaking of the political landscape there, in Portugal it is happening

now, Marie Le Pen in France, there is this sense we hate all

politicians and the political establishment, which may have been

true in the past. But the combination of this perfectly

short-term medium where you can call yourself into thinking this is the

real world, this is how you govern states and how it politics is done,

is potentially hugely destabilising. I think what we are seeing, and it

feeds into what is happening in the Middle East, the migration crisis,

is a sort of Castle and it is Europe wide, and it is over what kind of

Europe we wanted be. I think the rise of the far right and the rise

of the left is anti-of territory. You do not get a rise of the far

right just because of an economic crisis. You get it because of cuts.

-- it is anti-austerity. It creates the momentum where people feel they

have to battle over resources that are structuring king. We have to

accept it is cuts that have caused the rise of the far right. --

resources that are shrinking. I think what we are seeing across

Europe, including in the UK was Corbyn, is an anti-austerities

narrative taking hold, a rupture, linking up and trying to find an

alternative to what are necessary, ideological cuts. This is really not

profoundly about policy. It is about something else. We are almost there.

We have to step back and mention refugees. The response of Europe to

the refugee crisis has been pretty abysmal. It has been a terrible year

for the European Union in general. It is not good at making decisions

because it is set up to have some respect for national sovereignty.

The thing is, they can barely get it together to deal with them economic

crisis, and they haven't done that. When you have a geopolitical crisis,

as used with the Bosnia conflict, no with refugees coming in from Syria,

Iraq and Afghanistan, there is never going to be a consensus. Is

happening against this background of the world economy that no matter...

You can put certain numbers out that say, we are in recovery. But if

you're just an ordinary person who works for a wage and know that any

week you could you lose your job and could be months, years until you

find another one, the fear in society allows space for ideological

parties of the right and left to make space. This new thing, you

don't have to read the newspaper any more but just sent a tweak to

someone who agrees and reinforces your role through. -- a tweet. There

is an exaggeration about the refugee problems. In Lebanon, 10,000 square

metres. Lebanon has have a million three alone. Jordan has 2 million, a

small country. The West sent warplanes, drones to Syria, and then

went 100,000 of them coming for shelter, for protection, even for

jobs, they say, no, do not come to us. This is unbelievable, to be

honest. We have to be ashamed of ourselves, because we are not taking

them. 2 million in Jordan, 1.5 million in Syria. The politicians

have been horrendous across Europe. Their response has been, we will

just fortify our borders and harden our hearts. But the popular response

has been completely different. The grassroots response. Not everywhere.

No, not everywhere, but if you look at people who have chosen to spend

their Christmas holidays in the jungle in Calais. That has been...

We have two minutes left, and I cannot let it pass without asking

you to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon. That fits into this. It

is somebody who says, until we figure out what is going on, we

needed to ban Muslims from the United States. Donald Trump is not a

Pied Piper putting thoughts into people's heads. He just knows, he

has a feral sense of what people's fears are, a certain large

minorities's fears are in America. And people agree with that. I just

don't know what to say any more. Seriously. The Republican party is

one of the two parties in America's 2-party system. The idea that this

person can in some way be leading the field, it should tell everyone

about the state of American society. It is a media society. He is a game

show host, essentially, and because he is making every issue as a

demagogue,... The problem is, the politics of fear is spreading in the

United States and Europe. The year of Muslims. To ban a family of

Muslims with kids from visiting the United States. This is not Trump, it

is the American Government. I am banned from the United States.

Imagine that, simply because they do not like my politics. I'm not sure

this programme is going to help with that. The politics of fear are

spreading now, and they are using immigration, Muslims, anything to

attract voters. This is the problem. We will lead 2015 there.

That's it for Dateline London for this week -

You can comment on the programme on Twitter - @gavinesler.