Archive 1986 – 2017

By Jonathan PowerAugust 18, 2009 LONDON – Let’s exaggerate. Iran has been singled out for persecution over its alleged nuclear bomb making programme because in 1979 its Revolutionary Guards took the staff of the U.S. embassy hostage, causing outrage in America with even the esteemed Walter Cronkite ratcheting up the tension, putting up on the screen, as he read the nightly news, the number of days they had been incarcerated. The sitting U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, was deposed, tarred with the brush of utter failure. Something of an exaggeration that this was the sole or even the most important factor in building a pro bomb lobby in Iran. Still it has a grain of truth: Iran has been singled out unfairly. The West and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a...

Rudyard Kipling’s 19th century ‘great game’ played by British India and Imperial Russia to gain access to India and the warm waters of the Arabian Sea continues. There are  many new players and few new issues. US Involvement in the Area As far as the United States is concerned, there was little involvement in the area during the 19th century. Participation by proxy followed in the 20th century. This indirect US presence took the form of CIA links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and covert arms supply for Afghan mujaheddin to “give Russia its Vietnam” as stated by Zbigniev Brezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration. Following the events of 11 September 2001, the United States became the lead actor in shaping international policies for Afghanistan during the 21 st century. Circles of Conflict In 2009 the deepening crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan plays out  over a wide geographical...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 11, 2009 LONDON – Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Israel, Fatah and Hamas have the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. For once we can see whether the work of imams, rabbis and priests can bare fruit. The secular politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the three great deistic religions who have been charged from above to exert their mandate to teach compassion, goodness, tolerance and brotherhood. These traits of virtue, as common to them all as is their God, is being tested in the hottest of fires....

3rd August, 2009Jonathan Power LONDON – It goes back to the French revolution of 1789. At the Revolutionary Convention the most radical of the insurgents decided to seat themselves on the left side. “Why not on the other side, the right side, the place of rectitude, where law and the higher right resided, when man’s best hand could be raised in righteous honour?” wrote Melvin Lasky in Encounter. “Anyway they went left, and man’s political passions have never been the same.” When Oskar Lafontaine, the West German finance minister, broke with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in the early days of the last Social Democratic government, he explained it was “because my heart beats on the left.” The right could never say that, even David Cameron. When Humpty-Dumpty insisted on his own “master-meanings” he reassured Alice, “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it...

July 21, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Subject: Russia, Europe’s other half. Date: July 21st, 2009. Read it for yourself, and don’t dismiss it, as most western commentators have. The Pan-European Security Treaty, proposed by Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, is worth a read. (Here his 2008 prelude to it with 5 basic principles). Doubtless it can be modified, improved and ambiguities removed. But it makes a lot of sense, and it would be another step forwards to what the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, urged – the creation of a “European house”, that contains Russia as one of its inhabitants. Only those “with one foot in the Cold War”, to quote President Barack Obama on the eve of his recent visit to Moscow, should find it objectionable. Indeed, play down Bolshevism and the Cold Wa r- a period of only 70 years in Russia’s long history – it is a...

July 15, 2009 Gunnar Westerg Perhaps we had expected too much? There had been so many promises. In his speech in Prague in April, President Obama had said: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. That is, Obama had chosen the Road to Zero nuclear weapons. Did he discuss this with the Russian President  Medvedev? No sign of that. Another chance: “… to cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons”. Russia and the USA are here basically in agreement. Obama and Medvedev could  have scored an easy point: We will cooperate and make this reality. President Obama  further promised in Prague: “Today, I am announcing a new international effort to secure all vulnerable...

that McNamara “bled inside for what he’d done in Vietnam”. Ward was cross with me for using this quote, understandably so as this was the first time that an intimate friend had gone on the record with McNamara’s inner feelings. She went on to say that over time people would judge him more by what he was initiating in his relatively new job as president of the World Bank. Judging from last week’s obituaries she was wrong about that. Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis and his changing attitude to nuclear weapons dominate present day memories. Yet it is true that what he did at the World Bank is worth remembering, especially his efforts to turn aid in the direction of small farmers. Under his tenure the World Bank spent 30% of its budget on helping small Third World farmers be more productive. Today, as before McNamara, it spends about 10%....

July 6, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – At the summit meeting that opens in Italy on Wednesday the leaders of the G8 are expected to announce a “food security initiative” – an effort to reverse “the tendency of decreasing official development aid to agriculture” and, instead, to increase investment in Third World food production. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Washington spends 20 times more on food aid in Africa than on long term agricultural programmes to develop local food production. A similar bias exists in the policies of the European Union which believes that in food aid it has a good way of dumping its surpluses. Nothing may come of the new promises, as nothing came of the big hoo-ha at the G8 summit four years ago when a massive increase in aid, especially to Africa, was agreed. But if it did happen it is just what the...

Voltaire described Europe as “a kind of great republic, divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if it is divided into several confessions. They all have the same principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world”. In a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn and Gladstone, the early advocates of European unity, could only dream, a united Europe has become a reality with half a billion members. War, time and time again, has interrupted the pursuit of that objective. Continued civil war across the continent, across the centuries, has pitted the French against Germans, British against French, Czechs against Poles, Spaniards against Spaniards, Gentiles against Jews, reaching its dreadful climax in the Second World War. Of all the continents, over the millennium, Europe has been the most warlike. As...

Recent developments in North Korea have been the subject of much speculation in Western media. In the West, we do not know a great deal about what goes on within the leadership of DPRK: the information we receive is unreliable and we hear little from the North Korean side. This article is based on information received from open sources from both North and South Korea, the USA, as well as experts with some direct access to the discussions in the DPRK leadership. In summary, the article makes the following points: The nuclear weapon During the Korean War, US General MacArthur threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea. Korean prisoners of war who had experienced the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came back telling of this terrifying weapon. These two factors are said by North Koreans to be the reason the Great Leader Kim II Sung decided to start a...

June 9, 2010 Jonathan Power The International Criminal Court is coming out of its first review conference with its head held high. Over a hundred nations attended its meeting, which will end on Friday, in Kampala, Uganda. No country – at least publically – wants to see the back of it, apart from Sudan, whose prime minister is under indictment. Those African countries – DR Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Kenya – which have asked for the ICC to intervene, help arrest and try alleged war criminals from their countries (in Kenya the ICC is still at the investigation stage) have set an example to show how this new world judicial system can bite with teeth. We should not be surprised. Africa has been the scene of too many of the world’s recent wars and produced leaders whose cruelty has been in the same league as Hitler, Stalin...

On Wednesday 6th May President Barack Obama met with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai to try to find a solution to the fast deteriorating situation in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and to develop his strategy towards those two countries. After the meetings, President Obama praised the two leaders and said that the three of them would work together on a long-term basis to defeat terrorism. This is despite the fact that a few days earlier, in a speech on the occasion of his 100th day in office, President Obama had poured scorn on the Pakistani president’s “very fragile” government, which lacked “the capacity to deliver basic services” and did not enjoy “the support and the loyalty of their people”. Nearly eight years after the start of the war in Afghanistan not only has that country not been turned into a functioning democracy, Afghanistan’s much larger...