Columnist article

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 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...

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...

I was among a handful of people worldwide who criticised the Nobel Committee’s choice of former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and characterized it as a scandal I had two main reasons. I consider his work as “peace mediator” – a term used repeatedly – in Kosovo incompatible with peace and with Alfred Nobel’s three criteria, but I deliberately did not mention his work in Aceh or Namibia of which I have no knowledge myself. Kosovo and other parts of former Yugoslav have been something I have tried to understand since my first visit there 34 years ago. Independent Kosovo is the result of a military-based conflict management or, rather, mismanagement. It militates against two of Nobel’s criteria in that it has not lead to fraternity between peoples and it has not reduced armaments in the world. Kosovo declared itself independent in February this year (probably one reason...

North Korea – the long way round October 14, 2008 LONDON – One small step forward by North Korea and the U.S ; one large step for mankind. The political fight to persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear bomb making activities seems at last, in the dying days of the Bush presidency, to be entering a serious phase. The U.S. has finally bowed to the North Korean request to remove it from the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism- which will enable the renegade state to become eligible for international loans and sundry other economic benefits- in return for the North agreeing to re-allow inspections to verify a North Korean promise to freeze its nuclear activities, as it undertook last year and then withdrew from. After nine years of erratic U.S. policies- met by equally erratic and bellicose Nort h Korean ones- the negotiations have ended up almost where...

, said the way to U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to declare victory and get out. Having declared victory in 2004 and not got out, it is too late for President George W. Bush or his successors to do that now. But Aiken had a riposte for that contingency too. A few years later, when it was impossible to declare victory, he was asked how to get out of Vietnam. “In ships”, he replied. Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are moving towards the only solution that will work – leaving. In Iraq, surely this is what Barack Obama, if president, must do, despite all the heavy advice trying to persuade him to drag it out until……until a miracle happens and the killing stops, the legal system functions and the ‘democracy’ works. But the killing in this very disturbed society will go on for decades. U.S. tallies of the...

LONDON – As said Mr Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, nought and six, result misery.” If you can get past the Dickensian way of counting then there is a message for the U.S. today. It no longer has the financial wherewithal to do what it wants to do. If Barack Obama wins the election he has pledged to bring in a major reform of the health services and he has promised to cut the tax rate for the middle and work ing classes. He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan. If John McCain wins he wants to keep in place the tax breaks for the rich, fight to “victory” in Iraq, expand the war in Afghanistan and challenge Iran in such an assertive way that it could well lead to another war. There is no...

LONDON – How far is downhill? Well, that’s like asking how long is a piece of string. But whatever the answer, the American/NATO military effort in Afghanistan, triggered by 9/11, seems to have all the marks of a quick descent. In Barack Obama’s phrase, American public opinion doesn’t get it. How could they when Obama himself, supposedly a fresh eye on the international scene, bangs the drum for more troops and yet more force? Does European and Canadian opinion get it? Apart from the Canadians, who have had the good sense and the foresight to give a date for the withdrawal of their troops, public opinion appears to be asleep at the switch. Their young men are dying for a method of attack that the older men have devised without ever being challenge d to think it through. The policy, made within hours of the atrocity of 9/11, seemed to be...