Archive 1986 – 2017

By Jan Oberg and Annette SchiffmannMarch 20, 2009 March 20 marks the 6th anniversary of the US-led invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq – coming upon 12 years of the most cruel sanctions history has witnessed. About 2 million innocent Iraqi citizens have died as a consequence of those Western policies. About 4 million out of 24 million are either displaced inside the country or refugees abroad. In a country where more than half the entire population is well under 20, hundreds of thousands are clinically traumatized. At the same time Western media – part of the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – give wide publicity to a BBC opinion poll that shows that “security” has improved in Iraq. It is going so well, isn’t it? The West has now – at what is likely to be only the beginning of worldwide economic breakdown and environmental decay – secured the majority...

LONDON – When two years ago I talked about the Taliban to the now fallen military president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, and suggested he talk to them more and fight them less he reacted as if the thought had never passed through his head before. “Well, I have never thought of doing that, but you have given me a good idea!”, he said, suddenly sitting up in his chair. David Goodhart, the editor at Prospect magazine for whom I often write, dryly observed that Musharraf was trying to flatter a rather naive journalist. Thank you David, but in my naivete, after over 40 years of being a foreign correspondent, I didn’t read it that way! And now, the last six months, as the Taliban seem to be winning the war, everyone – Americans, NATO commanders and ambassadors on the spot and, not least, the Pakistanis – are falling over themselves to...

Bush decided unilaterally to de-alert all bombers, 450 of the deadly accurate city-destroying Minuteman missiles and the missiles in 10 Poseidon submarines (enough with one launch to destroy Moscow, Leningrad and every city in between). Gorbachev, taking the cue, deactivated 500 land-based nuclear-tipped missiles and six submarines (enough in total to reduce the most populated parts of the U.S. to ashes and dust). Moreover, this wasn’t the cosmetic de-alerting talked about today. Silo and submarine crews actually had their launch keys taken away from them. This is why President Barack Obama (if the New York Times has got the story right) has made a big mistake in his opening move following the pressing of the famous “reset button”. His letter to President Dimitri Medvedev, suggesting that the U.S. was open to discussion on the dismantling of the anti-missile site now being constructed on Polish soil if Russia would lean harder...

March 4, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Each year, over the ages, at Passover time, religious Jews have intoned the prayer, “Next year in Jerusalem”. Until the twentieth century few really believed it any more than most Christians truly believe in the Second Coming. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 the Jews were thrust into the outer world – many into Arab countries, later to become Muslim, where they were extended protection and tolerance, and later into the Roman and then Christian world where they were accepted for many centuries, with outbursts of truly virulent anti-Semitism centuries apart. Over two millennia many big tribal groups have been dispersed – the Slavs, the Moguls, the Bantu, the Tamils, the Celts – the list is a long one – but only the Jews have had an idée fixe about where they want to go back to. During the...

, which left behind a raging civil war in Afghanistan, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taliban, who in turn gave a home to Osama bin Laden. In 1986 I visited Peshawar in north east Pakistan, close to the Khyber pass. The town even then was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs – Pathan chiefs who had escaped with their people from the war in Afghanistan had built huge well defended compounds to house the refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality that Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pathans was storing up trouble ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism. The Americans and the Saudis were engaged at that time in bolstering these Pathans with money and weapons to fight the Red Army. All of it was funded through Pakistan’s notorious secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate....

LONDON – Everyone knows Keynes’ witticism, making fun of the economics profession’s ability to take the long, long view, no matter how much suffering there may be on the way. “In the long run we are all dead”, the world’s greatest economist sagely observed. Less well known are the arguments that come from his path breaking book, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, written in midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the most important is that while in a time of recession it might seem good for individuals to save against a rainy day, it is bad for rescuing the national economy. What is needed is a fiscal stimulus from the mass of consumers spending almost up to their last penny. It has been the fashion since Keynes died for many economists to deride him – not least the school of monetarists led by...

February 10, 2009Jonathan Power LONDON – A range of people from cardinals to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, have told the pope, or communicated to the press, their profound unhappiness at what he has done lifting the excommunication of an ultra traditionalist British bishop, Richard Williamson, who has questioned the extent of the Holocaust and denied the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. The notorious interview on Swedish radio was only broadcast last month but a Google of the bishop reveals that he has long held these views. In June 2006 during a visit to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz the Pope seemed to pass over the culpability of ordinary Germans in what happened then. Only four months later he made his supposedly major speech in Regensberg in which he seemed to tar the whole of Islam with the the violence of one long forgotten aggressive Muslim...

February 3, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Quite right – the Obama administration is gearing up to pressure the Europeans to put more men in boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Quite right – the Europeans don’t want to engage in a war of attrition à la Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s or as the U.S. in Vietnam a decade and a half before. There is nothing worse than having to pull out with your tail between your legs and confront the electorate for thousands of needless deaths of your brave young. The answer to this paradox is that the Europeans, using their nouse as well as their soldiers, should confront the issue of the Afghanistan poppy crop, the one that is 90% responsible for all the heroin sold in Europe and the one that funds over 80% of Taliban activity. This brings me to a memorable conversation I...

January 27, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – It is rapidly becoming a truism that all the Middle East problems are so intertwined that they must be all negotiated into tolerance and disarmament at more or less the same time – not sequentially as before. Still, it is better in an analysis such as this to single out Iran, because if Iran can be got right then a lot of the other dominoes will be easier to fit into place. It is Iran that Israel fears most. It is Iran that has much influence on Hamas. It is Iran that can contribute significantly to peace in Iraq and the Lebanon. And to discuss Iran we must talk about Libya. Libya only a few years ago had many of the same problems as Iran tod ay. Not only was it on the cusp of producing nuclear weapons it was a terrorist state...

he penned an article in Foreign Affairs which caused almost as much shock as his previous “The Clash of Civilizations”. “In the past few years the U.S. has attempted unilaterally to do the following: prevent other countries from acquiring military capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority; enforce American law extra territorially in other societies; grade countries according to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and religious freedom; apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these issues; promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets; shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies to serve the same corporate interests; intervene in local conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; bludgeon other countries to adopt economic and social policies that will benefit American economic interests; promote American arms sales abroad; expand NATO; and categorize certain countries as...

January 19, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Perhaps after all, the healthy ones among us in the Western world and the middle class in the Third World have a chance of living for ever. Already, according to the World Health Organisation, a child born today has a 50% chance of living until 100.But by the time they reach 100, medical science will have continued its immense strides forward and they could easily make 200. In fact for those who will make 95 without Alzheimer’s the same goes. Look at the graph of medical discoveries, life saving drugs and surgery, the graph is geometric. Over the next 100 years it will become vertical. What can stop it? – AIDS or an epidemic of universal flue or some malign reaction to a drug like Thalidomide? Look at this graph and they are just minor blips. So why haven’t the great professors of...

allowing the prosecution of citizens who commit torture overseas. (Taylor was born in the U.S. But then moved to Liberia to join his father.) Is there now one law in America for those who commit torture overseas and those who commit it at home with the authority of government? Perhaps for not much longer. In a television interview last weekend President-elect Barack Obama said that the attorney general would investigate whether some senior members of the Bush administration should be prosecuted for their part in torture, although he said that his belief was that “what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future”. Also last week he said that he had given his new appointees to top intelligence positions a clear charge to restore the U.S.’s stance of human rights. “Under my administration the United States does not torture.” Obama should also have reminded his audience...