February 2008

February 20, 2008 Jan Oberg Do you believe that freedom of opinion, diversity, fairness, impartiality, basic knowledge, and research should be defining principles behind the news YOU get? Then read the press release from TFF below which contains a fairly unique background story. It was mailed to about 400 journalists and editorial offices in Scandinavia and over 1000 worldwide, specialised in international affairs. We got about the response we expected: 3 – CNN International, Radio Netherlands and Voima in Finland. 1397 chose to cut and paste telegrams from exclusively Western bureaus or write without relying on external expertise or research. So, routine-routine and politically correct – they repeat what for instance George W. Bush, Javier Solana, Nikolas Sarkozy and other Western leaders say interspersed with “angry” Serbs torching a border station on the Kosovo-Serbia border and “defiant” Belgrade – allied with the Russians so we know what to think about them – may...

LONDON – Just how emancipated are we white westerners? What is the acid test? – Electing a black man as president of the U.S., or smiling weakly at the doctor who we have just been told is going to perform a complex surgical manoeuvre on our heart and who turns out to be a big hulking black man? I suspect many of us may be ready for the first, but not so sure about the second. It doesn’t seem that long ago that flying to India I walked up to the cockpit to see if it really was brown men flying that great big 747. These days I fly all over Africa with all black crews and only worry when I’m in Nigeria, not because the pilots are black but because the airline industry imposed no safety standards until recently. Nevertheless, the fact that Barack Obama is now the frontrunner...

By Jonathan PowerFebruary 8, 2008 LONDON – I interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and now foreign policy mentor to Barack Obama, before the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was published. But it did not go into print until this month (in World Policy Journal in the U.S., Prospect magazine in Britain, Global Affairs in Russia and the Arab News in Saudi Arabia, among others). I asked Brzezinski if he wanted to re-write his apocalyptic scenario for Iranian-U.S. relations. He didn’t. “Some people with good reason fear an Iranian-US military clash before Bush leaves office in 12 months time”, he says. “There are still some people in the Administration of Neo-Con persuasion who seem to be tempted by what I believe is a suicidal inclination to compound the Iraqi problem by some sort of military action against Iran.” Brzezinski’s fear is that the Iraqi war instead of winding...

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