Archive 1986 – 2017

LONDON – That bar, the Red Star, on the far side of eastern Europe is closed. So why is the Black Star on this side still open, and even extending its drinking hours? Once the Warsaw Pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping NATO going. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Let the European Union take the strain, by trade, investment, diplomacy and political intimacy, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot, whilst America has led its quest for influence by application of the Bush doctrine of “preventive war”. As Mark Leonard, the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform wrote in his clever, little book of three years ago, “the contrast between the two doctrines is stark. The Bush...

LONDON – Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi Peninsular. All of them disputed territories but only one, the last named, a sizable oil-rich wedge of land lying between Nigeria and Cameroon, has been taken to the International Court of Justice (World Court) for adjudication. Why not the others? There is no good reason, apart from, in the latest situation, hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian side, partly because America has encouraged this. Six years ago Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, confronted with growing tensions with neighboring Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsular, long ruled by Nigeria, decided to resist the advice of his minister of defense, who pushed for a military solution, and to turn the dispute over to the World Court. Newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo, public opinion was nationalistic, but he held his course and did so even when the court ruled in Cameroon«s favor....

August 8, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Irony of ironies. The U.S., which under President George W. Bush “unsigned” its membership of the International Criminal Court and then waged a ferocious campaign to persuade other countries to promise to exempt the U.S. from future prosecution on pain of having their military aid withdrawn, is now emerging as the behind-the-scenes flag bearer of the court. The country which has a long history of refusing to ratify treaties – the League of Nations for one – or just forgetting about them – as it did with the Genocide Convention for 40 years – or contravening them blatantly as it has recently with the Convention Against Torture, whose ratification President Ronald Reagan steered through the Senate, last week fought a lone battle at the UN Security Council which in effect was pro ICC. It refused to vote for a watered down version of...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 1, 2008 LONDON – The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years – two secretaries of state, a national security advisor, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time/Warner, the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate, congressmen and congresswomen, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and on, and perhaps later this year it will be capped by the election of a black president. What a difference from as recently as the 1960s when only sport, the arts and preaching were open to ambitious blacks. Even in the 1970s, as I long ago documented in Encounter magazine, (few believed me), middle class professional blacks in sizable numbers were beginning to roar ahead, closing the gap with their white peers. Thank you, Martin Luther King! But like America’s...

July 22, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Whoever wins the American presidency in November will come up hard against what former president Dwight Eisenhower described as the “military-industrial complex”. After the military build up of the Bush Administration, which now makes the U.S. armed forces greater in size than all the other militaries of the world added together, the vested interests in the military-industrial complex have never been so formidable. After years of stupendous growth of everything from tanks, to rockets, to aircraft and ships the providers of such do not want to see the upward rise of their business stymied by a new president. They have their ways and their means of influencing any president. A president that tries to cut them down will find himself under a sophisticated public assault from members of Congress with large defence industries in their constituencies, a sizeable section of the press that...

By Jan ObergJuly 7, 2008 If you want all the facts and a wealth of sources to back them up about the incredibly violent and resource-wasting system called market-cum-monopoly capitalism, this is the book you should plough through, require your students in political science and international relations to read and work to have translated to all the world languages. Professor Emeritus Pilisuk and doctoral student Rountree leave no stone unturned in their empirical analysis of the US foreign policy system, global militarism, empire, lies and violence. The stockpiling of evidence against the world’s so-called leading democracy is devastating, their outline of the Western values on which it is based and the “delusional megalomania” we see in practise so crushing that it is difficult, if not impossible, to lay down this book without a deep sigh and a sense of hopelessness. Their honest, meticulous research is the strength of this book...

July 4, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Manioc, cassava, yucca, Ever ‘eard of it? Don’t be shy to say you haven’t. Rice, wheat and soya grab today’s headlines. Conferences are called, politicians opine. There is a general panic about one more major source of inflation. Food shortages have hit the urban areas of the Third World and in some countries provoked food riots. Developing countries “defend” their domestic market with export tariffs on grains. Maybe the solution is not in our stars, our esoteric debates or conference resolutions, but right there – under tropical and subtropical soils. Cassava – to use its most popular name is a half-discovered crop, a woody scrub on the surface, a tuber, six times larger than the potato, beneath. In Nigeria, where it grows in profusion, it is tolerant of drought, adaptable to poor soils and can be stored in the ground. Moreover, it is...

“It’s clear a long-term success in Afghanistan will require significantly more troops and we welcome those additional troops, no matter what the source”. So said Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon when seven people were killed, earlier this year, in a bomb attack on the luxury hotel in Kabul which housed the Australian embassy. Strengthening the Nato-led “International Security Assistance Force” would be an “essential ingredient”, the Minister went on, in defeating terrorism in Afghanistan. What to make of this proposed remedy? Well, it depends on how we diagnose the problem. And Fitzgibbon was pitching his statement into a media narrative for the Afghanistan story which constantly reiterates a simple proposition – ‘these evil men are out to get us’. Go back to the reports in the Australian press from the day of the attack, in mid-January, and search them for the six vital pieces of information that journalists are supposed...

LONDON – Governments have their head in the sand about immigration – and this is as true for the U.S. as it is for Western Europe, the Middle East or South Africa. The riots and horrible street murders in South Africa vividly portray what happens when a country pits a foreign sub-proletariat against a resident proletariat, especially at a time when the economic pie doesn’t seem to be expanding fast enough. The main trouble is that modern capitalist-inclined governments rather like it – immigration keeps down wages. (I’m not talking about the immigration of professionals – and how governments like to mislead the public by often conflating the two!) It provides an underclass who live on the margins of established society. They may not pay income taxes, (although they pay VAT and every other kind of consumer tax) but this is made up for by their willingness to do dirty jobs, night...

May 24, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Osama bin Laden has made Al Qaeda’s position crystal clear in his latest tape released on May 16th. He said the fight for the Palestinian cause is the most important factor driving Al Qaeda’s war with the West and that was the primary reason for 9/11. It sounds topical enough given the amount of attention that Washington is presently giving the Israel/Palestinian peace quest. But in truth bin Laden may well be behind the curve. A two state solution can no longer be a viable political goal, because: a) in terms of the demographics a Muslim majority in Israeli-controlled territory is less than a decade a way, b) the Israelis have effectively created a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians. To all intents and purposes it imitates the South Africa of apartheid days, a unitary state with a minority group attempting to rule...

May 17th, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Finally, a voice from the UN is saying something sensible about the world food crisis. John Holmes, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, is asking UN agencies to cool some of their dire rhetoric about the impact of high food prices. By the yardstick of the last big food crisis in 1974, that had U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger running to an emergency UN conference in Rome to pledge that “within a decade no child should go to bed hungry”, it is not such a severe event. In terms of real prices the price hike is not so high as it seems; in terms of the rise of consumer buying power over the last 34 years it is not biting so deeply. Moreover, take wheat and rice out of the equation and many food prices have not risen so significantly – millet and barley...

LONDON – Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of Al Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association. U.S. presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism”. And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington’s treatise, “The Clash of Civilizations”, the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM”, he wrote. Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seems to overlook Hitler’s early speeches calling on Catholic principles)....