Columnist article

Six years ago after we had talked about all manner of jihadists for an hour – jihadists in Kashmir attacking India, jihadists in Afghanistan attacking America, jihadists infiltrating India and jihadists in Pakistan attempting to kill President Pervez Musharraf – I asked the American ambassador in Islamabad, “don’t you feel that you spend all your time just picking up the pieces for the wrongheaded policies when the West supported the jihadists as a tool against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan?” He sighed, nodded and replied, “That’s right”. Driving away from that conversation I was convinced more than ever that the various terrorist movements unleashed in this corner of the world over the last twenty years have their origins in the policies of Jimmy Carter, that most pacific of all post war American presidents who, prodded by his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, decided to undermine and repel the Soviet invasion...

If the Jews of Israel want to go back to their memories of their war against the Arab nations after they had been attacked following the handover of the British in 1948; if they want to go back to the Holocaust; if they want to go back to the anti-Jewish violence, the first so-called “pogrom” in 1819 when the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt was ransacked; or to twelfth century England when began the libel that the Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover, then they should recall some equally important other events. What about the welcoming of the large numbers of Jews by the Moslem Turks when they were expelled from Spain in 1492? What about the long period up to the 12th century when Jews lived unpersecuted for the most part in Europe? What about the centuries up to the...

the Lateran Council condemned torture as cruel. From the fifteenth century onwards the common law of England (which is also the original common law of America) adamantly set its face against torture and the admission of evidence procured by torture. The judges who presided over these decisions pointed to the inherent unreliability of the evidence in confessions procured by torture since a person subjected to unbearable pain will say anything to get it stopped. Voltaire, who lived in London for three years, wrote of how he admired the English attitude. Nevertheless, the special Court of the Star Chamber could issue torture orders, but one of the very first acts of the Long Parliament in 1640 was to abolish this court and since then no torture warrant has been issued in England. In Prussia torture was abolished in 1740, in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1847. In 1791 the...

If Latin America disappeared into thin air tomorrow what would it be remembered for? Historically for the decimation by the Spanish Conquistadors of the great civilizations of the Incas and Aztecs, for the twentieth century plunder of the Amazon, for the worst income inequalities in the world, for the highest crime levels of contemporary society anywhere and for giving house room to the drug mafias.   And the pluses? – the near absence of major interstate wars and the concomitant achievement of relatively low expenditures on arms, its nuclear weapons free zone, the first of its kind (not including the one for Antarctica), its lack of institutionalised racism (although there is plenty of discrimination) and the non-existence in any period of  its history of Jim Crow laws, its outlawing of capital punishment long before the rest of the world got round to it, and now home to some of the...

June 25, 2010 The World Cup, now being played out in South Africa, is not a mirage. It is succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Not only has the game thrilled its adherents all over the world, the new infrastructure has not failed to impress visitors – from the amazing stadiums, to the new roads and the high speed rail link to the airport. All was completed on schedule, testimony to the country’s growing expertise in management and sophisticated technology. The “crime wave” foreseen by many has not occurred. But for those who can take their eye off the ball, think not of football but of the African continent as a whole. It is beginning to roar. As the tigers have growled in South East Asia the last three decades, with an almost stratospheric rise in economic growth and living standards, the roaring African lions seem intent on emulating their Asian...

June 16, 2010 Jonathan Power Memories are short when it comes to realpolitik. President Barack Obama says he was only a boy when the Vietnam War was going on so it is not imprinted on his consciousness. I wonder if he, or indeed any of the current youngish Western leadership, recalls that the US helped the deposed dictator of Iran, Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, get Iran’s nuclear research underway, with no caveats about enriching uranium? Does Obama know that after the Shah’s overthrow and the mullahs took over that initially Iran was allowed to buy uranium fuel from the US but that soon after the US stopped the deal, but didn’t give Iran its money back? Does Obama know how it came to be that the US turned a blind eye to Israel’s creation of the atomic bomb? Has President Nicolas Sarkozy fully absorbed the implications of the French nuclear aid...

The unprovoked and murderous Israeli commando attack on the peace flotilla is the Selma of the Arab/Jewish struggle for the land of Palestine. Selma, a small town in Alabama, was where Martin Luther King based his campaign to win the voting rights for disenfranchised blacks. Attempting to march to the state capital, Montgomery, the marchers were set upon by baton-wielding police as they tried to cross Pettus Bridge. It provoked a nationwide outpouring of disgust and anger. The march continued, joined by tens of thousands of people from all over the United States, until it reached Montgomery. When King spoke it resonated around the world. Shortly after, President Lyndon Johnson rammed through Congress legislation ensuring there would be no longer impediments to blacks voting. The election of Barck Obama as president can be directly traced to that legislation. Will the creation of a two state solution to the Palestinian conflict...

. Nevertheless, true to Tennyson’s poem of the Crimean War, “Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do and die”, the top officers went along with obeying the orders they were given. The big question now is how to withdraw “with honour” from Iraq. That is important to the soldiers. President Barack Obama has promised to be out by next year. How he sees it today, given the post election infighting in Iraq, is unclear. When he was a senator he told a Congressional hearing that if the US wanted to totally eliminate Al Qaeda from Iraq and have a solid Iraqi state they would be there for decades but “if our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo, but there’s not huge outbreaks of violence, there’s still corruption, but the country is struggling along but it’s not a threat to its neighbours and is not an Al Qaeda...

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in the process of reaching out to the Palestinians, was murdered by an extreme Jewish militant. Although there was an outpouring of grief there were a good 30 to 40% who thought and even said “good riddance”. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak went to the Wye plantation outside Washington DC and negotiated face to face with Yasser Arafat and President Bill Clinton the media hailed an agreement as nearly done and then tore into Arafat for scuppering it. But the fact is Barak could not have won Knesset (the parliament of Israel) approval for what he conceded and, indeed, he raised the bar on Arafat so high that he must have known that Arafat would not make the great final leap. Maybe it was all just a masterful piece of public relations meant to get America off Israel’s back and to undermine Arafat’s standing. The latest...

say that if the nationalist drum roll reached a certain crescendo public opinion would welcome an Indian nuclear attack on Pakistan, totally careless of the consequences. Today also there is the insurgency of the Maoists in eastern India, fuelled by the deep poverty of India’s tribal peoples who rarely live beyond the age of forty. Yet there is a strong other side of India. There is the Gandhian tradition of non-violence and the value of the worth of the individual which suits the world’s largest democracy well. There is the continuing success of democracy, a functioning if very slow legal system and a free press that are much more than just a safety valve for anti-government anger. They are sophisticated instruments for the pacific settlement of disputes and resentments. There is the influence of the fast growing middle class which is educated enough to understand the futility of violence and...

The lies and misrepresentations by the British ex-prime minister Tony Blair led the nation into the long and destructive war with Iraq. Now we all know that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The evidence that he had was bent almost out of recognition to the true facts. The cost in lives torn asunder in Iraq was immense, and only a handful of Iraqis thought they were better off with the war than without it. There may have been a dictatorship that was cruel to those that opposed it but most people, if fearful on occasion, had a peaceful life, law and order, food in the shops and functioning schools and a health service. That unnecessary carnage is on many people’s minds as Britain prepares to vote in its general election. Blair led the charge but his cabinet (with one major exception, Robin Cook, the leader of the...

One of the troubles with all the current emphasis on health care and nuclear weapons in American politics is that other issues are being given less attention. Human rights, supposedly one of President Barack Obama’s copper bottomed commitments, has taken if not a back seat at least one far from the front. And don’t ask the Europeans to take over the show. In the current general election campaign in Britain human rights abroad rarely gets a mention, even though the country is the birth place of Amnesty International. Quite a few European countries got badly compromised by the Bush Administration’s policy of rendition – sending a terrorist suspect off to a country which didn’t have scruples about harsh interrogation techniques. Even today, when you think they might be hanging their heads in shame for this outrage, there is not much effort to respond to Obama’s plea to take in released...