Archive 1986 – 2017

To intervene or not to intervene in Libya, that is the question. Indeed, the next two lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy are also apposite: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against the sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” The way the civil war is raging it is becoming clear that, as James Clapper, director of US National Intelligence, said last week, “Over the longer term the regime will prevail.” Only outside intervention can save the rebel cause. But, as the US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, has pointed out, anyone who advocates a third large scale army military intervention in Asia “needs his head examined”. Iraq and Afghanistan are a full enough plate. Moreover, both show up as living examples the dangers of intervention even thought at the onset it all looked so right- to end the...

March 2, 2011 Jonathan Power An important legal milestone has been crossed, almost as difficult as crossing the Rubicon or the Red Sea. On Saturday in the Security Council the US voted unanimously in favour of a French and British resolution to forward an indictment of Muammar Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court otherwise known as the Court for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. This was the first time the US had done this. However, during the tenure as president of George W. Bush it did abstain on the vote to do the same with Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir. Early in his tenure Bush had bitterly opposed US membership of the War Crimes Court, withdrawing America’s signature from the treaty founding the Court and conducting a savage arms twisting with many signed up members. Later it saw the value of the Court and quietly helped push for indictments. Under the...

Non-violence works! This is one of the important messages of the revolution in Egypt – just as it was when the Soviet bloc collapsed, just as it was when Indonesia threw off its dictatorship and just as it was when Gandhi drove the British out of India. Yet for thousands of years violence has too often been the tool of politics and political change. All the major religions of the world have accepted war and violence but it is Christianity, whose founder besought us “to turn the other cheek”, that has the worst record of going to war. Moslem countries haven’t gone to war as half as much. Islamic countries have never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism and communism. The Christian countries spawned all three. Today countries with a Christian heritage have the most violent crime, the Muslim the least. Of course it is true that that the Arab world...

By Jonathan PowerFebruary 1, 2011 The late Walter Lippmann, the greatest of all American newspaper columnists, mocked America’s efforts to broadcast overseas. The broadcasts, he wrote, “were no more than singing songs, cracking jokes, entertaining the kiddies”. No influential voice, to my knowledge, has made such a criticism of the BBC’s World Service. No one has derided it as an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth”. It has evolved over the years as an institution that, while not promoting an official ideology, has been able to project to the outside world the best of British journalistic talents – informed analysis, variety of comment and sharpness and accuracy of reporting. It entertertains too, with discernment. We can see it at its best now, covering the events in Egypt and Tunisia. Along with its television counterpart, BBC World, it is reporting the turbulence with a detached but well informed eye. Unlike Al-Jazeera, the ebulent,...

Israel allows its settler movement to go on and on claiming more of the West Bank. Is there nothing that can be done? The might of America, combined with the influence of the European Union and the Arab world, have not been able to halt the territorial growth of Israel. Most American Jews, according to polls, don’t like what is happening, but are seemingly helpless before the shrewd lobbing of long time pressure groups which have built up over decades a disproportionate influence on Congress. They make sure that the large US aid program to Israel continues. In effect, it liberates funds for Israel to build roads and defences for the settlers pushing deep into Palestinian territory. Yet even if the aid were withdrawn, even if the US stopped vetoing UN resolutions that criticize Israel, nothing is likely to change. Israel has the upper hand and will ruthlessly make sure...

By Jonathan PowerJanuary 5, 2011 Aid to Third World countries, some totally mired in poverty like Afghanistan, Bolivia or Upper Volta or some, more economically advanced but with poverty-stricken hinterlands like Nigeria or India, has a bad name. With reason? Yes, but more emphatically, no. At the moment the “nos” have it. According to a recent BBC report, “The US government has spent about £55 billion on rebuilding Afghanistan since 2001 but cannot easily show how the money was spent, a US government watchdog says.” It adds that “record keeping has been so poor that most of the money has not been properly recorded.” Afghanistan is riven with immense corruption and incompetence, as the above figures suggest. Moreover, in many areas it is just too dangerous to do development work. Nevertheless, there are plenty of parts where the war barely touches and non-governmental organisations as well as foreign government aid...

A commemorative blog for Håkan Wiberg, Peace researcher, philosopher, sociologist, and mathematician. https://hakanwiberg.wordpress.com

Rudyard Kipling, one of the truly great Victorian writers, wrote in 1915, following the death of his only son in the misbegotten World War 1, “If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied”. During the Vietnam War someone coined the phrase: ‘old men sending young men to die. How should we put it today in Afghanistan? No one yet has come up with a pithy line or two. They will. President Barack Obama has been conducting a promised review of the war, yet his generals have long been pre-empting him, doing what General Douglas MacArthur did with President Dwight Eisenhower at the time of the Korean War, trying by public comment to steamroller the president into the policies he wanted. Even after the president fired MacArthur the generals were not quiet for long. Eisenhower said in a secretly taped conversation with newspaper publisher, Roy Howard, “I...

The Idea Imagine living in a healthy environment, in peace and justice, with social conditions, work and production developing creatively, arts blooming, people realizing their potencials. 99% of humankind would prefer that, right? So how can we optimize our efforts to get there?One strange thing is that although every good physician knows that treatment of the patient must complete diagnosis and prognosis in order to get well again, the „physicians“ of the world seem to mostly lack the treatment part.Where do we find constructive thinking, where do we see the stories of success, where do we find the images of a better world, the ideas of what might be possible? Media as well as research and public debate seem to be in love with criticism of the status quo and warnings of the breakdown of the world – and yes, both is clearly neccessary. We definitely need the diagnosis for...

“One small step forward by North Korea and the US, one large step for mankind. The political fight to persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear bomb making activities seems at last, in the dying days of the Bush presidency, to be entering a serious phase.” Yes, I was able to write that three years ago. But since then we have plunged from optimism to the darkest pessimism. North Korea has been threatening war against the South, and the US and the South Korea have been upping the ante by holding military exercises close to North Korea. After seven years of erratic US policies under President George W. Bush – met by equally erratic and bellicose North Korean ones – the negotiations ended up almost where they started following the highly fruitful diplomacy in the last days of the Clinton Administration that transformed North Korea from total intransigence to a...

Daily, thousands all over the world read, benefit from and use what we at TFF publishes at our “home”, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Many tell us that we contribute to a less-bad, perhaps even a better, world. Some write us to tell that they don’t know what they would have done had TFF not existed and been a constant voice of criticism of elite power, violence and injustice. Quite often our 70 Associates – indisputably some of the world’s most distinguished experts – have produced early warnings and early proposals in conflict zones and other matters, such as UN reform.  That’s good to hear – particularly since we do not know of anybody else who produces as much as we do exclusively on the basis of people’s donations, around € 20.000 or $ 26.000 per year – only possible because we are all volunteering for the cause of peace! That’s how it has always been....

By Jonathan PowerDecember 15, 2010 Last night I went to bed feeling like a frozen corpse. I was up in the Himalayas, not dressed for the occasion. Fortunately, the little hotel in which I lodged, built simply of cold concrete, provided its guests with duvets almost half a metre thick. Once asleep all was forgotten- and once awake in the morning all was forgiven. I was in the Ganges valley in the foothills of the Himalayas. From where I stood it was a mighty drop to the river. I was spellbound. The river was a turquoise green, something I, and I suspect you, have never seen. I was told it was because of the absolute purity of the glacier-fed river and the colour of the rocks beneath. In this forbidding environment cultivation is almost, if not quite, an impossible task. I came to see a project run by my favourite...