Archive 1986 – 2017

January 6, 2009Jonathan Power LONDON – Just what Barack Obama needs as he prepares to take his oath of office as the 44th president of the USA – another Israeli/Palestinian war inflaming passions anew all over the Arab world and much of the Muslim world outside too, from Iran to Indonesia. What will his middle name “Hussein” count for in this intense firefight? Well, maybe something, but only if he moves fast to change the long time American emphasis on supporting, by both word and deed, the Israeli side at the expense of the Palestinian. It is as simple – and as complicated – as that. After the Bush years, during which the “clash of civilizations” became the de facto interpretation of American, and to some extent European, policy in the region, the West quickly needs to de-escalate its fixation with what it often sees as the rabid policies of...

Jerusalem, Wednesday 31 December 2008 Vicky Samantha Rossi On the fifth day of Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, 374 Palestinians and four Israelis had been killed according to BBC. The number of Palestinians injured was estimated to be 1,600. These figures for the dead and injured rose in the days subsequent to this interview with Ramiz Younis and his wife Sarah, who managed to get out of Gaza on the third day of bombing thanks to the intervention of the United Nations. Ramiz is Palestinian. He has been working, in Gaza, as a Programme Coordinator for Save the Children (Sweden). Previously, he worked for eight years for the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights. Ramiz obtained a Presidential Scholarship that enabled him to complete an MA in International Policy Studies in the US. His specialisation was human rights and conflict resolution. His wife Sarah is an American national, who works for the Food and...

December 30, 2008Jonathan Power LONDON – “Is the state an opponent?”, I asked one top Gothenburg lawyer, Christina Ramberg, a former academic and now working in a prosperous private practice. “No it’s a friend”, she replied, although she never votes for the Socialists, the supposed authors of Sweden’s top heavy welfare state. Another, Alexandra von Schwerin, an aristocratic businesswoman paying high taxes, said “No, it’s a father.” Not even Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, leader of a conservative coalition that two years’ ago replaced the habitual governing party, the Social Democrats, is much against the state. He has dropped the old right wing mantra of calling for lowering taxes and wants to see only “a more efficient and less conformist state and society”. In an interview just before Christmas he told me that “We are not asking for a different system, just for better results.” The sense of equality goes deep...

December 23, 2008Jonathan Power LONDON – Whatever Paul McCartney, says or does is news, sometimes big news. In September, when he went to give a concert in Israel – making up for the Beatles concert that the Israeli government forbad at the last moment, forty three years ago – he was slashed at by some pro-Palestinian critics for “singing to the enemy” (1). No matter the “enemy” audience was perhaps 20% Arab, that he also used his trip to visit the West Bank not only to see Jesus’ birth place but to call in on Edward Said’s music school. When he sang he also in his trademark low key, non-preachy, way pointed his audience in the direction of compromise and healing. One of the prices of the fame he has is to see his honest words and honest thoughts twisted almost out of recognition. I saw this happen close up...

December 15, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – However tense becomes the relationship between India and Pakistan the government of Manmohan Singh is highly unlikely to initiate or participate in a nuclear war with Pakistan. That would go against the deeply held moral beliefs of the prime minister. Both he and Congress Party chairman, Sonia Gandhi, have told me privately that they both are utterly repelled by such an act. Nevertheless, Singh has had few qualms about supporting the build up of India’s nuclear deterrent, regarding it as an inevitable process given India’s place in the world – and has been a passionate advocate of the new nuclear deal with the U.S., that has resulted in Washington lifting its thirty year-old embargo on nuclear supplies for India. Although, immediately after the Mumbai atrocities, tough talk seem to billow out of quarters of India’s military and foreign affairs establishment, Singh quickly fanned...

he demonstrated his roguish side. Yet even many of his opponents in Pakistan will concede that since he deposed Nawaz Sharif and assumed power he has been largely a benevolent dictator. Compared with last days of the Shah- and many in the American foreign policy establishment are falsely comparing what happened then with what is happening today in Pakistan- the country remained until this assassination rather stable, except in its lawless frontier provinces that border Afghanistan, a problem area even in British colonial days. Until now Musharraf has rarely cracked the whip. His riot police act with relative moderation. His jails are not full. Executions are rare and never for political offences. When one sits down and talks with Musharraf one get answers rather than bluster. Pakistan today is not Iran of yesterday, neither in the type of leadership nor in its degree of religious fervour: the Islamist parties have...

December 3, 2008Jonathan Power LONDON – “Those whom the gods destroy they first make mad.” There is a madness about the triangular relationship between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. They all have resented and often hated each other, made alliances against each other, worked together when it was opportune, supported or, at least, turned too much of a blind eye to terrorists in each other’s countries and became profoundly angry if terrorism was unleashed against them. These cleavages have their roots back to the days of the Great Game of the nineteenth century, the British-Russian struggle for supremacy in Afghanistan and central Asia. But ever since the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and was finally defeated by the Taliban aided by American, Saudi Arabian and Indian arms and training, the intensity of the Game has been ratcheted up and extended step by step to now frightening proportions, worsened by America’s...

November 26, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – For readers under 35 this will probably be news: from the time of President Richard Nixon to the end of the presidency of George W. Bush the consuming, most visible, foreign policy passion of successive governments, including both Democratic and Republican, was nuclear arms control – attempts, sometimes successful, for modest mutual cuts in nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But since the days of President Bill Clinton the passion has totally ebbed. Apart from the fact this is not a good reason to make such an intimate Clintonite as Hilary Clinton secretary of state, it also reflects a lethargy among the big nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, the U.K, France and China, that comes to us all when passion dies and routine takes over. The Cold War is dead and out. And whatever the clashes today between the West...

LONDON – ”Consensus, compromise and commerce”. These should be the loadstars for president-elect Barack Obama as he prepares himself to take over the misshapen and counterproductive policies of his predecessor towards Iran. Years of hostile diplomacy, reaching back to the hostage crisis under the presidency of Jimmy Carter , through to the rebuff by President Bill Clinton of Iran’s president when he suggested a serious dialogue, to the ”axis of evil”, in-your-face non-diplomacy of the Bush years, have all angered Iran. Moreover, it has had the serious side effect of depriving international markets of the full abundance of Iranian oil, which has been a major contributor to higher than necessary oil prices. The pedigree of hostility suggests that it not just Iran’s perceived pursuit of nuclear weapons that upsets Washington and its European partners but the whole stance of Iran to the world since the pro-Western Shah was overthrown and a...

with President Wilson’s aim to create a League of Nations. He failed not because of his idealism, or his commitment to solving disputes without major war, but because his tactics with regard to Senate ratification of the treaty were unnecessarily stubborn. Wilson also decried the European balance of power system (a favourite geopolitical cause of Henry Kissinger): “Now, revive that after the [First World] war is over and, sooner or later, you will have just such another war.” We can go even further back, although not many commentators do, to the time of Theodore Roosevelt. He successfully mediated the Russo-Japanese war, for which he received the Nobel peace prize. It was he in fact, not Wilson, who was the first president to propose a league of nations. He called it the “World League for the Peace of Righteousness”, a title which would have him laughed out of court in today’s...

A sort of global election and enthusiasm This historic victory by Barrack Obama is the first truly global election that has been celebrated by people around the world as if they had been voting participants. The reelection of George W. Bush in 2004 was also a national election with global reverberations, but it only aroused widespread feelings of fear and resentment around the world, and no sense of participation. What we are slowly learning is that the United States is the first global state, and as such, its elections become a global, as well as a national, event. From this perspective it is not surprising that peoples throughout the world follow American presidential campaigns and either cheer or lament their outcome. What may be still unappreciated is that for many societies these American elections seem to generate more interest and enthusiasm than do elections in their own country. Barrack Obama’s landslide victory...

LONDON – If only Martin Luther King could wake from the dead! And his faithful deputy, Ralph Abernathy. And Bayard Rustin who organized the Great March on Washington in 1963 that roused American public opinion to push for the landmark Civil Rights Act that abolished Southern segregation. And the militant Stokley Carmichael who led the students, both black and white, to knock on every black door in the small towns and byways of the South to mobilize them to vote. And, not least, President Lyndon Johnson who, putting his own racist past behind him, used his formidable political energy to push through Congress both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. If only they could rise up what would they see? Would they believe that one, Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African, educated as a small child in Indonesia where he was registered in school as a...