Columnist article

I have spent eight months now in the glorious city of Kolkata. You wouldn’t think it is glorious from those who still pedal the story of “The Black Hole” and quote Kipling. Paul Theroux, an exceptional novelist, in his new book, “A Dead Hand, A Crime in Calcutta”, continues the myth. The city “went on growing, yet it still looked rickety and ruinous, and in areas of faded elegance and dramatic misery a bad smell lingered, haunted and human”, he writes. But it is glorious in many ways. At its centre is a park larger than New York’s Central Park, full of boys and men playing cricket, and gardens with well tended flowers. In the midst of it sits the Victoria Monument, one of the finest buildings built in the nineteenth century that housed the central government of the British Asian empire. Right through the city are fine mansions. Some...

Assuming for the sake of argument that Iran builds itself a nuclear weapon what should the U.S. do? Two senior members of the top foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, James Lindsay and Ray Takeyh, have no doubts. In Foreign Affairs magazine, they write: “Washington should be explicit in what it demands of Iran: no initiation of conventional warfare against other countries; no use or transfer of nuclear weapons, materials or technologies; and no stepped up support for terrorist or subversive activities. It should also make it clear that the price of Iran violating these three prohibitions could be U.S retaliation by any and all means necessary, up to and including nuclear weapons.” It is difficult to believe that this could be written in today’s post Cold War world. Tell this to President Barack Obama and you would be pushed out of the door. Under no circumstances...

The passage of the health reform bill has immediately transformed the perceived growing weakness of President Barack Obama. He is now master of his own house and can perhaps out achieve Lyndon Johnson and even Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda of domestic reforms. Foreign policy can also purr ahead. Very soon there will be a major nuclear arms accord with Russia, but one whose ratification would quickly be bogged down in the Senate if he’d failed to muster the votes to approve health care. It gives him more room to manoeuvre and compromise with Iran, North Korea and the Taliban. Above all it should give him the muscle to push the Israelis to deal productively with the Palestinians. This is a Sisyphean task that has defeated all his predecessors. Since the misconceived Balfour Declaration that gave the Jews a homeland right bang in the middle of someone else’s, peace has been negotiated...

The Israeli government’s slap on the face of visiting American Vice-President Joseph Biden has heightened the perception that the foreign policy of the Obama administration is not going well. The problem, some argue, is that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Besides Biden there are the powerful secretaries of Defence and State, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. There are the special trouble-shooters for the Middle East and Afghanistan, George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke. There is the president’s own intimate staff. The National Security Advisor is supposed to keep all these lions in harness. That’s what Henry Kissinger did during the Nixon and Ford presidencies, what Zbigniew Brzezinski did during the Carter presidency and what Brent Scowcroft did during the presidency of George Bush Senior. This is not to say the present incumbent, General James Jones, is a weakling. He is not. It is just that the coterie...

We appear to have been battered to a submissive intellectual pulp by the pro climate change lobby, although it was only 35 years ago, when I interviewed the world’s principal climate experts for the Washington Post, the consensus was that the earth was cooling. Today some of these same scientists rubbish those who hold the previous hypothesis. Within as short space of twenty years they had fundamentally changed their minds. But 20 years is nothing compared with the very slow evolution that they were looking at. How could they argue the reverse of what they thought it was such a short time before? When has scientific discovery moved so fast? The climate warming lobby started with a handful of then maverick scientists and in a few years gathered speed as the media hyped their research and funding agencies, who rarely know a lot about what they are giving money to,...

February 24, 2010 Jonathan Power Amnesty International seems to be going downhill as fast as they do in Vancouver. If the crisis over Amnesty’s support for Moazzam Beg, ex Guantanamo Bay internee and alleged Taliban supporter is not dealt with by Amnesty quickly coming to its senses Amnesty will have lost its credibility – and a good number of its supporters – for a long time. (Begg’s defence is that his post-release visit to Afghanistan was to visit his family.) The tragedy is that Amnesty’s leadership doesn’t seem to see it. The organization is so used to being omnipotent and protected from the world outside by its unique membership structure whose dues allow it to be totally independent. This is usually to its good. But the protective fence of independence could lead to tragedy. The whistle was blown by a senior staffer, Gita Sahgal. She was suspended for raising the...

February 17, 2010 Jonathan Power Graham Greene’s great novel “The Comedians”, set in the Haiti of the dictatorship of Papa Doc, gives some support to the artist’s pious hope that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.” How else to explain how this half of a quite small Caribbean island gets more press than it deserves? It is, indeed, in part the legacy of Graham Greene who, as I am too, was often drawn to the island because of its idiosyncratic but rich culture and, not least, its lurid shades of darkness and light that permeate the political spectrum. Greene, whilst capturing the ugliness and horror of the gangster Tonton Macoutes, also draws a careful portrait of the civilized and caring Dr. Magiot. However, the outside world’s fascination with the forces of darkness represented in...

Does anyone know where the U.S. is up to in its long, endless, negotiations to persuade North Korea to give up the bomb? Does anyone care? Does the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee? Does the United Nations? Do the European countries? Does most of Asia? Try and find one creative word that anyone has said since the election of President Barack Obama and you will have to Google the subject until your eyes are sore. Yet there they all whipping up a storm over Iran which is a long way from being able to build a bomb, and which if it came into being could threaten no one. Israel might persuade itself that it was under the hammer but in fact Iran would have no means of miniaturizing a bomb so it could fit on a rocket. For that the technology is less easy to master than actually building a...

Why is the most densely populated state in India, which also suffered the greatest famine in India’s history in 1943, now the third largest economy in the country with a very rapid growth rate that is the third fastest among all the states, a power infrastructure that is the best in the country, soaring agricultural yields and a crime rate that is half the national average? It is mainly down to its governing communist-led front that is the world’s longest running democratically elected government – since 1977. Although in next year’s state elections it is likely to be ousted, partly out of the electorate’s boredom with it and partly because of its corruption (although its opposition, an offshoot of India’s ruling Congress Party, is also corrupt) No one epitomized communist rule more than its long time former leader, Jyoti Basu, who died last week at the age of 96. Television...

Who knows? For all we do know Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua may be half dead. He has been ailing from a kidney illness for the last two months in a Saudi Arabian hospital. Now, at home, the chorus of those who believe he should step down has reached a crescendo. His vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, stands prepared in the wings. Meanwhile at home all major decisions are held up and his most crucial achievement – the winning of a truce with the Niger delta militants who have have knocked 25% off Nigeria’s oil income – hangs in the balance. The militants are becoming impatient for the truce to be firmed up and its promises delivered. The world cannot afford to ignore the happenings in the country that holds one third of the world’s black population. Nigeria gets a bad press. Despite its immense steps forward from the time of the...

Last week the Indian minister for home affairs, P.Chidambaram, surprised many when he said that the year 2009 was remarkable for its lack of terror attacks. His statement came just over a year after Pakistani terrorists attacked Mumbai’s great hotel, the Taj Mahal, and killed more than 160 people. What he didn’t add was that this was the moment that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said he was waiting for before he signed up for a peace deal with Pakistan over the disputed northern province of Kashmir. Kashmir has been torn in two ever since India and Pakistan won their independence from Britain in 1947. Independence provoked a mass exodus of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India resulting in a massive carnage of both. At independence the ruler of Kashmir announced that the state would be part of India even though the large majority of its people were Muslims....

December 24, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – The American president, Barack Obama, has made the greatest speech ever uttered by a government leader in the twenty first century. Even comparing him with the great orators of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler he comes out in the top five- and that is just for delivery. As for content he is alone in the top place. Very few papers have published the full text and even less television programmes have run the full speech, which suggests that editors do not know their history and cannot perceive its significance. For the head of state of the one remaining superpower, whose military spending dwarfs the sum of all the world’s militaries combined, to talk of “the law of love” between peoples, to conjure up the examples of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, quoting the former...