Выявление функций эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ

Таким образом, употребление эвфемизма с сужающей денотацией «recovery» - «выздоровление», вместо заменяемого слова «renewing» - «обновление, возобновление» приводит к смягчению влияния мирового экономического кризиса на экономику стран. Функция эвфемизма «recovery» - смягчение информации о негативных экономических факторах, в частности о последствиях мирового экономического кризиса.

8. Следующая статья выпущена 30 марта 2009 года газетой The Times. Статья называется «General Sir Richard Dannatt says MoD Took Eye off Iraq as Afghan Instability Grew». Автором данной публикации является Майкл Эванс. В этой статье генерал британской армии рассказывает о войне в Афганистане. Он говорит о том, как развивались события до настоящего времени и какие планы у британского командования на будущее. Вспоминая то время, когда в Афганистане начались нападения на британских солдат, Ричард Дэннат, называет войну в Афганистане кампанией, то есть использует эвфемистическую замену «campaign» вместо прямого наименования «war».

Attacks on British soldiers in Iraq rose dramatically in 2005 after military chiefs, under orders from Tony Blair, switched their attention to a new campaign in Afghanistan, the head of the Army has told The Times.

Сравним значения слов «campaign» и «war».

Таблица 17

Campaign	War
1) a connected set of actions intended to obtain a particular result, especially in politics or business [43;177]. 2) a number of operations carried out with some special purpose [45;169]; 3) an organized course of action to achieve a goal [42]; 4) a number of military operations connected with one another and having a special purpose [45;169]; 5) a connected set of military actions forming a separate part of war [43;177].	1) fighting between two or more countries or groups that involves the use of armed force and usually continues for a long time [43; 1378]; 2) a state of competition, conflict or hostility [42]; 3) a sustained campaign against something undesirable [42]; 5) a situation in which countries, organizations or businesses compete with each other in order to gain economic advantage [49];

Из анализа значений данных слов видно, что значения 2) «a number of operations carried out with some special purpose», 3) «an organized course of action to achieve a goal» эвфемизма «campaign» совпадают со значением 3) «a sustained campaign against something …» слова «war», кроме того значение 1) «a connected set of actions intended to obtain a particular result, especially in politics or business» слова «campaign» совпадает со значением 5) «a situation in which countries, organizations or businesses compete with each other in order to gain economic advantage» слова «war». Также следует отметить, что значения слова «war» являются более узкими, конкретными по отношению к значениям слова «campaign». Следовательно, слово «campaign» является эвфемистической заменой с расширительной денотацией лексемы «war». Употребление эвфемизма «campaign» вместо лексемы «war» позволяет сокрыть реальные действия и намерения британских властей по отношению к Афганистану. Также наблюдается смещение прагматического фокуса в направлении - аморальное поведение - благородный мотив/достойная цель.

Функция эвфемизма «campaign» - сокрытие информации о агрессивных военных действиях Великобритании в отношении Афганистана.

Анализ эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе британских СМИ показал, что основной функцией эвфемизмов здесь является сокрытие информации. Функция сокрытия информации составляет 54%. Эвфемизмы в политическом дискурсе американских СМИ, в большинстве случаев, выполняют функцию сокрытия агрессивных военных действий. Функция смягчения информации составляет 46%, при этом преобладающей является функция смягчения информации о негативных экономических последствий.

Выводы по главе II

Мы исследовали эвфемизмы в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ. Целью нашего исследования было выявление функций эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе. Мы пришли к следующим выводам:

1) в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ наблюдается тенденция употребления эвфемизмов.

2) некоторые эвфемизмы являются контекстуальными, то есть являются эвфемизмами только для данного контекста.

3) при употреблении эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ происходит смещение прагматического фокуса в таких направлениях, как глобальный характер проблемы - частный случай проблемы, аморальное поведение - благородный мотив/достойная цель, глобальный характер проблемы - частный случай проблемы, незаконность - законность действий, потеря для объекта - выгода для объекта, намеренность - случайность нарушения социальных норм, принуждение - свободный выбор, неравный статус - равный статус, насильственность - естественный ход событий, я/мы- ответственность - они-ответственность. Доминирующим является смещение прагматического фокуса в направлении - глобальный характер проблемы - частный случай проблемы.

4) эвфемизмы, используемые в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ, выполняют определенные функции.

5) функциями эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и СМИ являются: смягчение информации о негативных экономических факторах, дискриминации людей по социальному статусу; сокрытие информации об агрессивных военных действиях США, антигуманной политике государства, незаконных действиях властей; искажение информации об агрессивных военных действиях США в Ираке, неспокойной обстановке в отдельных регионах.

6) функциями эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе британских СМИ являются: смягчение информации о негативных экономических факторах, а именно последствий мирового экономического кризиса; сокрытие информации о негативных экономических факторах, а именно последствий мирового экономического кризиса, агрессивных военных действиях Великобритании в отношении Афганистана, неспокойной обстановке в отдельных регионах мира,

7) доминирующей функцией эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе как американских, так и британских СМИ является функция сокрытия агрессивных действий властей.

Заключение

В данной выпускной квалификационной работе были изучены и выявлены функции употребления эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ. Исследование проводилось на материале англоязычных британских и американских СМИ.

В ходе работы мы изучили и проанализировали лингвистическую и другую научную литературу по данной проблеме, выявили особенности дискурса, политического дискурса, его основные и отличительные черты, изучили особенности эвфемизмов, сферы их употребления. Также была изучена проблема употребления эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе.

Под «дискурсом» мы понимаем «связный текст в совокупности с экстралингвистическими - прагматическими, социокультурными, психологическими и другими факторами; текст, взятый в событийном аспекте; речь, рассматриваемая как целенаправленное социальное действие, как компонент, участвующий во взаимодействии людей в механизмах их сознания (когнитивных процессах)».

Политический дискурс мы рассматриваем, как «вербальную коммуникацию в определенном cоциально-психологическом контексте, в которой отправитель и получатель наделяются определенными социальными ролями согласно их участию в политической жизни, которая и является предметом коммуникации». Политический дискурс как вид институционального общения располагает системой конститутивных признаков и наделяется рядом функций.

Политический дискурс, наряду с рекламным, приспособлен для того, чтобы приукрашивать действительность и скрывать истинное положение дел. Поэтому одной из прагматических закономерностей функционирования политического языка является тенденция к эвфемизации.

Эвфемизмы - эмоционально-нейтральные слова, выражения, употребленные вместо синонимичных им слов или выражений, представляющихся говорящему неприличными, грубыми или нетактичными

Под политическими эвфемизмами мы понимаем «слова и выражения, употребляемые в языке политики вместо нежелательных слов и выражений с целью скрыть, смягчить или исказить смысл освещаемых событий и явлений».

Во второй главе мы исследовали статьи американских и британских СМИ и выявили в них функции употребления эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе. В ходе исследования мы выяснили, что функциями употребления эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ являются: смягчение, сокрытие, искажение информации о негативных экономических факторах, антигуманной политике государства, агрессивных военных действиях, незаконных действиях властей, последствиях военных действий, неспокойной обстановке в отдельных регионах, дискриминации по социальному статусу.

Выделение функций смягчения, сокрытия, искажения информации о негативных экономических факторах, антигуманной политике государства, незаконных действиях властей, дискриминации по социальному статусу связано с тем, что мы рассматривали статьи, опубликованные в период с осени 2008 по весну 2009 года, во время пика мирового экономического кризиса. Это время, когда происходит спад продаж, производства, время массовых сокращений и увольнений персонала.

Кроме того, в этот период проходят встречи глав государств США и Великобритании, на которых ведутся переговоры об обстановке в таких странах, как Афганистан, Грузия, Ирак. В статьях, посвященных данной тематике, мы выделили функции смягчения, сокрытия, искажения информации о незаконных действиях властей США и Великобритании, агрессивных военных действиях США и Великобритании в отношении Ирака и Афганистана, последствиях военных действий в Ираке, неспокойной обстановке в отдельных регионах.

Доминирующей функцией эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ является сокрытие агрессивных военных действий США и Великобритании в отношении Ирака и Афганистана, что подтверждает гипотезу нашего исследования.

Результаты исследования, полученные в данной работе, могут быть использованы в дальнейшем при изучении проблемы функционирования эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ.

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Приложение 1

Виды денотативного искажения	Функциональное значение
	Смягчающие	Скрывающие	Искажающие
	денотат	Языковой знак	денотат	Языковой знак	денотат	Языковой знак
Синонимическая денотация	poverty	Low income	Before the event, after the event	Pre-situation, Post-situation
Неточно-ориентирующая денотация	False cheap flattery, expensive flattery	Inoperative stroking, puffing	Wiretapping scandal	Electronic surveillance incident	Bombing criminal activities	Air support intelligence operation
Расширительная денотация	Crimes wrong	Serious abuses inappropriate	Government sponsored crimes bugging smb's telephone	White House horrors intelligence gathering	Casing the joint	A vulnerability and feasibility study
Сужающая денотация			The War department	Department of Defence
Ложная денотация			Breaking and entering	Intelligence -gathering operation	Burglary Burglars prisons	Bizarre incident plumber correctional facilities

Таблица дается по: Темирбаева, Е.К. Эвфемизмы в языке политики и в художественной литературе// Слово в словаре и тексте/ Под редакцией Ю.И. Сусловой [Текст] / Ю.И. Суслова. - М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1991. - 198с.

Приложение 2

Функции эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских и британских СМИ

Функции	Примеры
1. Смягчение информации о: - негативных экономических факторах	эвфемизм	Заменяемое слово
1.	Abyss Recession Uncertain times Ailing Revive Recovery	Crisis Crisis Crisis Declining Reinforce Renewing
- антигуманной политике государства	Commitment	Obligation
- агрессивных военных действиях	Ally	Troop
- незаконных действиях властей	Obtain Elect	Seize Appoint
- дискриминации по социальному статусу	Well-off	Rich
Сокрытие информации о: - негативных экономических факторах	Difficult times Seizure Irresponsible	Crisis Crisis Extravagant
- антигуманной политике государства	Contribution	Tax
- агрессивных военных действиях	Conflict Mastermind Manpower Firepower Campaign Topple Involvement Forces	War Agent Troops Weapon War Kill Power Troops
- неспокойной обстановке в отдельных регионах	Unstable	Aggressive
- незаконных действиях властей	Demise	Murder
- последствиях военных действий	Exhausted	Destructed
- Искажение информации о: неспокойной обстановке в отдельных регионах	Erratic	Restless
- агрессивных военных действиях	Tutelage	Power

Приложение 3

Функции эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе американских СМИ

Приложение 4

Функции эвфемизмов в политическом дискурсе британских СМИ

Приложение 5

Глоссарий эвфемизмов политического дискурса американских и британских СМИ

1) Abyss - crisis

2) Action - aggression

3) Ailing - declining

4) Ally - troop

5) Bribery - money politics

6) Campaign - war

7) Capital punishment - retribution

8) Collateral damage - murder

9) Commitment - obligation

10) Conflict - war

11) Contribution - tax

12) Defense Department - War Department

13) Demise - murder

14) Difficult time - crisis

15) Elect - appoint

16) Erratic - restless

17) Exhausted - destructed

18) Firepower - weapon

19) Forces - troops

20) Guest workers - migrant workers

21) Seizure - crisis

22) Incursion - invasion

23) Involvement - power

24) Irresponsible - extravagant

25) Manpower - troop

26) Mastermind of the surge - agent

27) Mission -war

28) Obtain - seize

29) Operation - war

30) Opposition research - Watergate

31) Pacification - destruction

32) Recession - crisis

33) Recovery - renewing

34) Revive - reinforce

35) Topple - kill

36) Tutelage - power

37) Uncertain times - crisis

38) Unconvincing - suspicious

39) Unstable - aggressive

40) Visual surveillance - spying

41) Well-off - rich

Приложение 6

From The times

March 4, 2009

Obama promises better days, calls for nation to pull together Richard Burden

WASHINGTON - President Obama, tempering the series of grim economic diagnoses he has delivered in recent weeks, sounded a new note of optimism last night, vowing that "America will emerge stronger than before" from the Wall Street meltdown and mortgage crisis that has sent the country into a deep recession.

"The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation," Obama said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress. "Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more."

The remarks - while not officially a State of the Union address, since Obama has been in office only five weeks - had all the trappings of one: a national television audience, the walk to the rostrum through glad-handing lawmakers, the ordinary Americans sitting in the gallery and pointed out as living examples, and the series of standing ovations.

Obama used the occasion to explain the steps he has taken to revive the economy, and also to lay out a broader agenda, including a healthcare overhaul, improvements to education, and energy independence - campaign promises that have been subsumed by poor economic news."Now is the time to act boldly and wisely - to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity," he said. "Now is the time to jump-start job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like energy, healthcare, and education that will grow our economy." Obama also touched on the wars in Iraq, where he plans to withdraw most US combat troops by the summer of 2010, and Afghanistan, where he is dispatching 17,000 more troops this spring. But the ailing economy was a dominant theme in Obama's address, with the president urging worried Americans to unite to get through a crisis he said would eventually abate.

"The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere. But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama said to resounding applause.

Obama still faces a reluctant and energized GOP minority, which has emerged from two devastating elections to form a determined and unified front against Obama's economic agenda. The president's $787 billion stimulus plan passed without a single House Republican vote, and garnered just three aye votes from Senate GOP moderates.

Delivering the official Republican response to Obama, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal accused Democrats of "irresponsible" spending that would leave the next generation in crippling debt.

From The Times

March 3, 2009

MoD keeps powder dry as Nato awaits President Obama's plea for troops

Michael Evans, Defence Editor

Military options for sending more British troops to Afghanistan are being studied across Whitehall in preparation for an appeal by President Obama for every Nato member to deploy additional manpower and firepower there.

The US President, however, is not expected to make any personal appeal to Gordon Brown when the two leaders meet in Washington today and the Prime Minister has not taken with him any British pledge of reinforcements.

The Prime Minister and the President appear to have agreed to defer the issue of whether Britain will add to its 8,300-troop presence in Afghanistan until the matter is raised within the Nato alliance at its 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg on April 3.

Whitehall sources said that Mr Brown and Mr Obama were expected to make a joint statement after today's meeting in which they would underline the efforts the US and Britain have taken together against the Taleban in Afghanistan.

There would also be a focus on the need for greater participation by civilian specialists to increase the level of reconstruction in the country.

Military options are being drawn up by the Ministry of Defence in consultation with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This is because of the expectation that Mr Obama will use the Strasbourg summit - his first opportunity to address the alliance directly - to emphasise the importance of the mission in Afghanistan and the need to increase the number of combat troops serving in the most unstable areas.

Amid reports that Taleban groups based in Pakistan are planning to join forces and confront Western troops, military commanders involved in the Afghanistan campaign have urged the alliance to send more soldiers. Mr Obama is expected to make an appeal to all Nato members to raise their contribution, either with more manpower or increased investment.

One senior source said that although the Prime Minister was not planning to talk about extra British troops in Washington, options had been drawn up.

The Prime Minister caught Whitehall off guard last year when he announced during a visit to Baghdad that some British troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by Christmas. This led to some confusion, and in later clarifications it emerged that the troops would not begin to leave until later this month.

Military options include two additional deployments that have already been approved by the MoD: the seven Merlin helicopters currently in Iraq are to be transferred to Afghanistan, although it will cost Ј50 million - and take up to four months - to modify them; and about 300 explosives experts are to be sent to deal with the growing threat from roadside bombs.

Britain's contribution to Afghanistan is to be increased on a small scale in October when Major-General Nick Carter takes command of Regional Command South headquarters.

From The Times

March 3, 2009

Gordon Brown travels in hope of new special relationship

Philip Webster and Tom Baldwin, Washington

Gordon Brown sought a decisive break with the Bush-Blair era by heralding a special relationship that places economic harmony ahead of military cooperation. Before flying out of Britain for a meeting with President Obama today, he said: “Past British prime ministers have gone to Washington to talk about wars. I'm going to talk about stability for the future.”

Mr Brown will use a speech to both Houses of Congress to warn that protectionist tendencies -as held by many senior Democrats in his audience - risk making the recession worse. He will offer strong backing to Mr Obama's green agenda in the teeth of fierce domestic opposition.

He is the first European leader to visit the President and hopes to use the opportunity to secure a global response to the economic crisis before next month's G20 summit in London.

Praising Mr Obama's economic stimulus package, the Prime Minister said: “If America and Britain did similar things for the economy then the effects would be magnified.”

He acknowledged public concerns that the invasion of Iraq had damaged the transatlantic partnership. “I want to talk about the renewal of our relationship for new times,” he said.

In an interview with talkSPORT, he hinted that the stiff reserve he displayed towards George Bush on his first visit to Washington as Prime Minister had been replaced by warmth for a President he sees as a fellow progressive: “I think the impression he has given of America to the world is transformative. I think people's view of America is changing as a result.”

He will support Mr Obama in efforts to reduce dependence on foreign oil and achieve a low-carbon economy that could, he says, create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the world and drive economic recovery.

Mr Brown will also call on countries to renounce protectionism as one of the six key elements of a “global new deal” at the G20 summit on April 2. Mr Obama is under pressure to protect jobs by putting up trade barriers.

Other items on the agenda today will be Afghanistan, the Middle East and climate change, plus an attempt by Mr Brown to get Mr Obama's commitment to the goal of universal access to primary education by 2015.

Tony Blair will be in Washington for a climate change conference but is not expected to meet his successor.

From The Economist

Nov 27th 2008 Iraq

Is it really coming right?

IT SHOULD be momentous. In Baghdad in the middle of this week, after fierce debate and protests on the streets, Iraq's fractious parliament at last voted to approve a withdrawal agreement with the United States, under which all American troops will leave the country by the end of 2011. And yet the mood of this exhausted country is far from jubilant.

In Mosul, 320km (200 miles) north of Baghdad up the Tigris river, the governor of Nineveh province, Doraid Kashmoula, furrows his brow, fiddles with his worry-beads in one hand, stubs out yet another cigarette with the other and reels off a litany of woe in his dankly curtained office. The scion of a prominent Sunni Arab family, he took the job two years ago after his predecessor, his cousin, was assassinated.

Since then he has survived half a dozen murder attempts. His son, a brother and four cousins have been killed by insurgents. His house has been burnt down. He is protected both by the Kurdish guerrillas, who control the eastern half of the city and a clutch of fortified government buildings in the western half, and by the Iraqi army and police, with American forces at their shoulder, when he ventures farther afield.

“Security is slowly getting better,” he says, without much conviction. At present the insurgents carry out about ten attacks a day in his province, including car bombs and ambushes, mostly in the vicinity of Mosul. In each of the past four months, more than 100 civilians and about a score of army and police have been killed, according to official figures.

The provincial council's chairman, another Sunni Arab, tells a similar tale. From a drawer in his desk he takes a sheet of paper displaying 12 coloured photographs of “martyrs”: four brothers and eight cousins, all murdered because of their kinship to himself. A councillor representing the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), a long-established Sunni outfit which heads the main Sunni block in the national parliament and is led by one of the country's two vice-presidents, Tariq al-Hashemi, says that 420 of his party members in Mosul have been killed in the past two years. Nineveh's deputy governor, a Kurd, says that 1,600 of his people in Mosul have died at the hands of insurgents since the American invasion--as have “many more Arabs”.

Nobody knows how many insurgents operate in the area. Maybe 5,000, says the council chairman, describing a spectrum from al-Qaeda fanatics to secular Baathists. “Plus a million supporters,” he adds, with a mirthless laugh. As the Americans and their Iraqi army allies successfully hunt them down elsewhere in Iraq, many have gravitated to Mosul. It is close to Syria, from which foreign jihadists still infiltrate. The city has a history of Baathist loyalty to Saddam Hussein and hostility to the Shias, who count for barely 5% of its people.

Iraq's multiple fault-lines are especially visible--and occasionally bloody--in Nineveh and Mosul. Some towns in the province have a record of Shia-Sunni enmity. Nineveh has Iraq's largest minority of Christians, themselves divided into various sects, some speaking Aramaic, the language of Christ. In a northern arc dwell the Yazidis, more than 500,000-strong they claim, who follow an ancient religion that reveres a Peacock Angel; many Muslims damn them as devil-worshippers. Then there are the Shabaks, who claim descent from Persians and follow various brands of religion, including Islam. There are also the Turkomens, stay-behinds from the days when Mosul was the capital of one of the three Ottoman vilayets (administrative regions) that were crudely lumped together to form Iraq when the Turkish empire collapsed after the first world war.

Perhaps the biggest and currently the scratchiest division is between Arabs and Kurds, who control most of the east and north of Nineveh, and account for about one-third of its population. Most of the Sunni Arabs, the province's largest group, boycotted the last elections in 2005, so the Kurds ended up with a disproportionately large chunk of the provincial government (31 out of 41 seats in the council) and hold sway over the hapless Mr Kashmoula and the council chairman, whom the insurgents curse as puppets and traitors.

But this may soon change dramatically because the Sunnis are set to contest provincial elections due on January 31st, when they may well oust the Kurds from local power. To minimise their expected losses, the Kurds are bent on ensuring that all the non-Sunni minorities, such as the Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks, vote for a Kurdish-led list of candidates.

Many people from these small minorities, together perhaps more than a tenth of the province's people, say that the Kurds, who control the territory where most of them live, are trying to intimidate them into voting their way. The Kurds, they say, are even attempting to frighten them into fleeing east into areas more firmly controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) from its headquarters in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

In Sinjar, west of Mosul, some Yazidis, who predominate there, say the Kurds want to force them to vote for the Kurdish list. Not only would that mean increasing the Kurds' chances of holding on to the provincial council. It would also strengthen their case to have such places as Sinjar, which are technically part of Nineveh, eventually transferred formally to Iraq's Kurdistan region, whose area the Kurds seek to widen as much as possible.

The Christians have been hammered, in Nineveh as in the rest of Iraq: their numbers throughout the country are said to be down from 800,000 in 2003 to around 250,000 today. Earlier this year the archbishop of the ancient Chaldean church was abducted in Mosul and murdered. In October, some 10,000 Christians fled into Kurdish-held areas from close to Mosul after a dozen of them had been killed. No one is certain who the culprits were.

In any event, tension is rising across the ethno-sectarian board: between Kurds and Arabs; between Sunnis who have co-operated with government and the larger number who have not; between Kurds and minorities; and within the minorities themselves. “If we [Christians] had guns we'd kill each other too,” says a prominent Chaldean Christian. “If Mosul was peaceful, we'd want to stay in Nineveh,” says a leading Christian businessman in the town of Bartulla, just east of Mosul. “But if it isn't, we'd like to be part of Kurdistan.”

But there is a gleam of hope that in Nineveh, as elsewhere in Iraq, the coming provincial elections may shift the dynamic of Iraqi politics, pave the way for more genuinely representative government and make it harder for the insurgents to hold the loyalty of the disgruntled. The key is that, unlike last time, the Sunni Arabs are expected to vote en masse. If Nineveh's council took on a Sunni nationalist hue, the insurgents might be in trouble.

Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's Shia prime minister, is said to be reaching out to Sunni politicians, military men and tribal leaders in the hope of widening his narrow base in the Islamic Dawa party. But Iraq is entering an even more frenetic political phase than usual. The provincial elections should point, for the first time in three years, to whom the Iraqis want to run their country.

The poll will also serve as a dry run for a general election due at the end of next year. Moreover, under the tutelage of an energetic UN team in Baghdad, the system for the provincial elections provides for open lists, whereas last time they were closed. This time parties will win representation on a proportional basis in each of the 18 provinces (bar the three Kurdish ones and the disputed Kirkuk province, where elections will not take place), but voters will also be able to mark their order of preference for individual candidates on their chosen party list. Some 400-plus parties have been registered, more than 150 in Baghdad alone, with more than 14,600 candidates and 36-odd coalitions.

The main shift will be towards much stronger representation for Sunni Arabs, who have been sorely under-represented since Saddam's demise. A battle is brewing between the established Sunni parties and an array of groups emerging out of the tribal councils that have played so crucial a part in beating back the insurgency, including al-Qaeda, especially in the western province of Anbar and along the Euphrates valley north-west of Baghdad.

A fight for supremacy within the new Shia establishment has also begun. A striking development is the emergence of Mr Maliki as a would-be strongman. Despite his wooden persona on the dais and on television, he has surprised everyone by his increasingly ruthless determination to tighten his grip. He was boosted by his success, earlier this year, when he personally directed the Iraqi army to sweep the Shia militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric, out of Iraq's then chaotic second city, Basra. The army promptly replicated that success in the hitherto lawless Shia slums of Baghdad, known as Sadr City. Mr Maliki is also interfering with senior appointments in the armed forces: the new divisional army commander in Mosul, for instance, is said to be a brother-in-law.

He has also gained ground, even among Sunnis, by his increasingly acerbic attitude towards the Kurds, who many Arabs think have overreached themselves in the past few years. In August he sent Iraqi army units into Khanaqin, a mainly Kurdish district that is controlled by the Kurdish authorities but falls within Diyala province. He and Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, who heads the KDP, one of two rival parties that jointly run Iraqi Kurdistan, are increasingly rude to each other. Mr Barzani is said to have recently told Mr Maliki to his face: “You smell like a dictator.”

And he is rattling a lot of fellow Shias with his powers of patronage and purse. His own Dawa party has split, with his predecessor as prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promoting himself as a stalking horse for the Sadrists, whose party has been barred from the lists. The other leading Shia party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, led by the ailing Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, is equally worried by what it sees as the prime minister's authoritarian bent. In particular, Mr Maliki's assorted rivals have complained about his setting up of “support councils” among various tribes, both Sunni and Shia, to help his party get out the vote--by means of bribery and intimidation, according to his detractors.

Competition among the Sunnis is no less fierce, especially in the tribal movement known as the Sahwa (Awakening) and the Salvation Front, which are bidding to oust candidates tied to the largest Sunni block in parliament, the National Accord Front, or Tawafuq, whose leading party is the IIP. Here too Mr Maliki has been weaving controversial alliances, backing one group against another. The political emergence of the tribes, many of which had previously supported the insurgents, is part of a new dynamic that has seen al-Qaeda and other rebel groups beaten back if not completely defeated. Mr Maliki has also been accused of having hundreds of IIP members arrested, especially in the mixed-sect Diyala province.

No one knows what the new electoral picture will be like. Some say that Mr Maliki's Dawa will do badly, whatever the advantages of incumbency. The Sadrist movement, internally divided like so many others, is widely thought to have lost ground yet still commands the sympathy of hordes of poor Shias in such places as Sadr City and in the southern provinces. The tribal parties have never been tested.

Mr Maliki will naturally take as much credit as he can from the withdrawal agreement with the Americans. He, or so it will be claimed, has nailed down the occupiers and made them promise to leave within three years. Under the agreement, American forces, now about 146,000-strong in Iraq, will withdraw from the cities by the middle of next year. All military operations will require the assent of Iraqis. Americans will be barred from using Iraq as a launch pad to attack other countries.

There is, in fact, considerable wiggle-room in the agreement. The timing can be extended by mutual consent. Even the requirement for American troops to withdraw from city centres may be open to an elastic interpretation. The Joint Security Stations, where American troops are entrenched in mini-forts scattered across the cities, have been an essential part of the military surge which, since early last year, has stanched the terrible sectarian bloodletting, especially in Baghdad. Already they are jointly manned by Americans and Iraqis. Iraq's generals may well be loth to remove the Americans, perhaps relabelling them as “advisers”.

The Iraqi army and national police (a kind of gendarmerie) have improved out of all recognition in the past two years and at last count numbered 266,000, alongside 257,000 local police, 36,000 border guards and more than 100,000 “Sons of Iraq”, the militias formed by the mainly Sunni tribal councils. But even their best units still rely heavily on the Americans for air support, not least the helicopters that are crucial in counter-insurgency, and for other technical skills, including communications, intelligence and logistics.

Despite the continuing horrors in Nineveh, bitter fighting in parts of Diyala, rising tension between Arabs and Kurds, and a continuing if less frequent cycle of bombs in Baghdad, the violence overall has greatly subsided from its level of two years ago. In the second half of 2006, violent civilian deaths, mostly in Baghdad, amounted to around 20,000, counted in morgues and hospitals. The latest estimates put the monthly figure at under 500 a month, still a shocking number, but an eighth of what it was. Fewer than 50 Iraqi soldiers and police were killed in October compared with 300-plus in April last year. The American military death toll has dived from 126 in May last year to 14 last month; the total since the invasion in 2003 is nearing 4,200.

But 20,000 out of Iraq's 34,000 doctors have left (after 2,000 were murdered) and few of the 2m-plus Iraqis now living abroad (many of them middle-class professionals) are yet willing to return. In the past few weeks, suicide-bombers have killed people at the checkpoints into Baghdad's international zone, on the road to the airport, by one of the main bridges and outside the Ministry of Trade, where eight female employees were killed. The country still offers nothing approaching a secure environment where foreigners can come and do business. A number of foreign companies, especially in the oil sector, have signed big deals. But no major foreign banks or businesses have thought it feasible to set up shop in the open in Baghdad. Though safer than it was, Baghdad is still the most dangerous capital in the world.

In any event, as the recently departed American mastermind of the surge, General David Petraeus, repeatedly said, the gains remain “fragile and reversible”. The coming elections at the beginning and end of next year will give a vivid picture of Iraq's political balance of power. But a potentially devastating lack of consensus among the main political groups and their leaders still prevails. Corruption is rife. Many ministries are still fiefs of patronage. Family and tribal ties are what count in getting jobs. Intrigue and deceit seem to dog the management of just about every political party. No culture of tolerance or pluralism has yet emerged.

A fundamental three-way split still prevents Iraq from coming together as a country. Though it is hopeful that the Sunni Arabs, probably some 20% of the population, seem set to be drawn back into the heart of parliamentary and provincial politics next year, few of their leaders seem willing yet to acknowledge that they have lost the power that they had always held.

A former deputy prime minister, a Sunni, insisted last week that his fellow Sunnis represent “at least 50% of Iraqis, by God!” Some of the leading Shias, who by most calculations represent more than 50% of the total population, seem prepared to reach out to the Sunnis, especially the biddable tribal sheikhs, provided they accept their new position as second fiddlers. But most Shias still regard the Sunnis with suspicion. “Maliki's worst nightmare is still waking up to find a Sunni general in charge of the country again,” says a seasoned Western observer in Baghdad.

The Kurds are enjoying a golden age of near-independence that they have never had before. Their region still feels the perkiest and safest in Iraq, though its leaders have yet to acquire truly democratic instincts. But the Kurds remain loth to make the sort of compromise over the bitterly disputed mixed Arab-Kurdish-Turkomen city of Kirkuk and the surrounding province which might in turn allow them to have more say over the oil in the area they control. Both Shia and Sunni Arabs habitually refer to the Kurds with ill-disguised contempt. American and UN diplomats fear that the Kurdish leaders, wary of being outflanked by each other on such issues as Kirkuk, are in danger of overplaying their hand--at a risk of losing much that they have already achieved.

In short, the new establishment of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds sorely needs to build a sense of nationhood. The withdrawal agreement means that it will soon be for the Iraqis alone to define their destiny. For the next few years the Americans may yet find themselves holding the ring. But once the occupiers have left, the chances that the Iraqis will entrench and cherish a stable, federal, pluralist democracy must still be rated at less than even.

From The Economist

Nov 27th 2008

The rich are the new whipping boys of British politics.

But they are less friendless than they seem.

Steeve O'Braien

A LOT of energy is expended by British think-tanks and sociologists on identifying the poor. Less attention is paid to classifying the rich. Public policy has haphazardly offered some pointers, by setting thresholds above which Britons are considered undeserving of state support, vulnerable to inheritance tax and so on; but hitherto these signals have not added up to a clear definition of richness. Most well-off people instinctively resist the idea that they are rolling in it: the rich are always different, elsewhere, someone else. So perhaps it is helpful of Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, to have offered a clear typology of wealth in his emergency budget on November 24th.

You are very rich, the chancellor implied, if you earn more than Ј150,000 ($230,000) a year. You are still rich if you earn more than Ј100,000. He told the very rich--around 400,000 taxpayers, roughly 1% of earners--that from 2011 they will pay a new top rate of income tax of 45% (the current top rate is 40%), on earnings above Ј150,000. Both groups--around 800,000 people altogether--will pay more tax from 2010, through the erosion of their tax-free allowances. Meanwhile, anyone earning over Ј40,000 is, in the government's view, comfortable enough to cough up a few pounds extra in national-insurance contributions (though according to a rival arithmetic, Ј20,000 marks the real cut-off between winners and losers under the new arrangements).

Two questions arise from Mr Darling's delineation of this hierarchy--and the jettisoning of New Labour's iconic pledge not to raise income tax, a promise that has helped to win it three general elections. First, does it make sense for the exchequer?

The government's case, though Mr Darling didn't put it quite like this, runs as follows. Britain is broke; in the medium term, taxes have to rise. In a country where median full-time earnings are Ј24,900, people making four times that much or more ought to help fill the fiscal abyss. And although this is the first lift in the top rate of income tax for more than 30 years, it is scarcely a confiscatory levy like the legendary rates of the 1970s, when Old Labour dinosaurs roamed the Treasury.

The trouble with this argument is that the hikes will raise barely any money. The 45% rate will yield little according to the Treasury, and practically nothing according to some analysts, because of dodges and disincentives. Rather than budgetary pragmatism, the changes seem to be the fiscal equivalent of a firework set off during an earthquake--the earthquake being Mr Darling's staggering debt projections, his Panglossian growth forecasts and a public-spending squeeze of a kind Labour once excoriated. It is fair to conclude that the real motive is diversionary and political.

Thus, the second question: is pinching the rich quite as politically clever as the government evidently believes? Pinch yourself

The political calculation seems to be that, after 11 years in office, Labour is no longer dogged by memories of the vengeful taxes and fiscal incontinence of its previous stint in power, historical anxieties that constrained its tax policy until now. That hunch may be justified: many young voters are more likely to associate Labour with persistent inequality than with IMF bail-outs. But another part of the gamble is that the country has changed too: that the incipient recession has fostered a new mood of social solidarity, a yearning to “share the pain” of the downturn--particularly if the pain is aimed at bankers and other much-loathed “spivs and speculators”. Satisfying this mood with token raids on the rich, Labour reckons, will win more votes than will be lost by severing its already frayed bond with the City. The hikes may cost it a few marginal seats in the stockbroker belt of the south-east, but they will firm up ratings farther north.

Mr Darling, and his boss, Gordon Brown, are not alone in sniffing a new political atmosphere. Even before this week's emergency budget, some in the Conservative Party, no less, muttered about proposing a new supertax and using the proceeds to cut rates for the middle classes. The Tories now say that should they win the next election (more likely than not), and have scope for tax-cutting (rather less likely), the first beneficiaries would be businesses and those on low and middle incomes; reversing Mr Darling's higher-rate changes would “not be a priority”. The poor rich are suddenly friendless.