Forum

LONDON – One should always read the small print. William Perry’s alert was in the left hand bottom corner of page 4 or the right hand bottom corner of page 6, depending on the paper you read. On July 16th the former U.S. Secretary of Defence warned us that the situation with North Korea “was manageable six months ago if we did the right things….But we haven’t done the right things” and he concluded that the U.S. could be at war as early as this year. Do we blame ourselves or do we blame our editors for being so insouciant about a war that the Pentagon warned Bill Clinton could take the lives of 52,000 American soldiers and god knows how many South Korean lives? Or do we simply blame Kim Jong Il and his vile regime in North Korea for building up an army of over 1 million men, pre-positioning artillery...

Former UN Under-Secretary-General with special responsibility for peacekeeping operations TFF associate August 20, 2003 YRINGHAM, Mass.- Ralph Bunche was born in Detroit 100 years ago today (August 7, 2003). His passionate determination to get results did not extend to seeking credit for them, so his work is better remembered than he is. Of all his many accomplishments – civil rights pioneer, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, chief drafter of two chapters of the United Nations charter, negotiator of the armistices that ended the first Arab-Israeli war – Bunche said he was proudest of developing what came to be known as peacekeeping. Setting up the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Palestine in 1948, Bunche formulated the principles that have governed peacekeeping operations ever since. In the 1956 Suez crisis, working with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and Lester Pearson of Canada, he organized the first peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force...

LONDON – Whatever happens in Liberia, whether President Charles Taylor really goes or stages a come back, whether American marines land or stand off shore, the damage has already been done. It has been done to the weakest and most vulnerable of its people, its children. The country, amongst all its many woes, has become a major recruitment centre for the small child soldiers who like to be photographed with the big man size guns. It is the same, indeed much worse, in the Congo to the south, where there are 40,000 abandoned children and adolescents running amok, ready to attach themselves to any gunslinger who gives them a meal. We have no choice if we want a Saddam-free, bin Laden-free world tomorrow but go into overdrive to do something very serious about this terrible legacy of Africa’s post colonial civil wars. They may not become the leaders, but they are...

STOCKHOLM – Find me a Swede who is holidaying abroad this summer and I’ll eat my newspaper. The Swedish prime minister, Goran Persson, for one, cycled round the countryside with his new girlfriend, appropriately enough the head of the country’s government-controlled alcohol monopoly that runs the system of wine and beer shops that makes sure the average Swede can’t just decide to have a drink and easily reach for one. This is the European country that along with France loves itself the most, is comfortable in its old ways, is wedded to its welfare state that produces an ultra healthy population that claims more sick leave days than anybody else’s, that invariably manages, as it does today, to pull handsome economic growth out of a hat in spite of dire predictions of creeping sclerosis, which heads the Western divorce rate league, accepts late teenage sex unblinkingly and yet, as the other above...

LONDON – For many years we have been blinded by news about immigration. Hardly a day goes by when we are not told some provoking item – yesterday, black Africans in a small boat taking in water in a wild sea trying to reach Europe. And this past month we have been swamped by stories about the slow down of population growth and the ageing population of Europe, with often the corollary – the argument that the Europe of the future cannot survive without opening the immigration gates wide. But, as Walter Lippmann once wrote, news and truth are not the same thing. Into this ill-informed, news-fed, maelstrom in Europe has stepped all manner of bombastic opinion making- from Jean-Marie Le Pen on the anti-immigrant right in France, who gained 17% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election last year, to the sophisticated writer Oriani Fallaci who,...

MIDDLE EAST ILLUSIONSAv: Noam ChomskyRowman & LittlefeldLanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford 2003. USA har motiverat tre stora krig efter varandra med moraliska argument. Bombningarna av Jugoslavien 1999 kallades en “humanitär intervention”. Kriget mot Afghanistan två år senare motiverades till slut med att man ville krossa den förhatliga talibanregimen. Och bombningarna av Irak i år gällde ju inte bara de massförstörelsevapen (som inte verkar ha funnits) utan i lika hög grad en misshaglig regim. I alla tre krigen fanns på köpet män som i propagandan personifierade “ondskan”, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Ladin och Saddam Hussein. Krigen framställdes som de goda krafternas krig mot de onda. Bedriver USA krig efter krig mot “de onda” för att upprätthålla respekten för de mänskliga rättigheterna? Nej, knappast, konstaterar Noam Chomsky i sin senaste bok, “Middle East Illusions”, en samling texter om Mellanöstern och särskilt USA:s politik gentemot regionen. Bokens första del behandlar åren 1968 –...

Diana Johnstones “Fools’ Crusade”, (“Dårarnas korståg”) är det hittills mest ambitiösa försöket att kritiskt granska den västliga bilden av de jugoslaviska krigen, skriver Sören Sommelius. FOOLS’ CRUSADEYugoslavia, NATO and Western DelusionsAv: Diana JohnstoneMonthly Review Press, New York Det Jugoslavien som för femton år sedan var ett välmående sydeuropeiskt land slets sönder av krig efter krig under ett blodigt 1990-tal. Hur kunde det ske? Vad var det som egentligen hände? Medan krigen pågick misslyckades våra medier med att göra det som skedde begripligt. Det talades ofta fördomsfullt om urgammalt hat mellan folk och om en ond man i Serbien, Slobodan Milosevic. Balkans folk delades in i onda och goda. Värst framställdes serberna. Inget av det var sant. Fortfarande är allt som skedde de här dramatiska och destruktiva åren inhöljt i tjocka dimridåer av både halvsanningar och uppenbara lögner. Diana Johnstone, amerikansk författare och debattör sedan länge bosatt i Paris, har nu...

Boken: COLLATERAL LANGUAGE. A User’s Guide to America’s New WarAntologi utgiven av John Collins och Ross GloverNew York University Press De “nya krigen”, bombningarna av Jugoslavien och Afghanistan och det senaste – men knappast sista – USA:s krig mot Irak, har föregåtts av ny politisk retorik. Ett nytt politiskt språk har kommit till användning, för att mobilisera folkligt stöd och rättfärdiga det “goda” och “nödvändiga” kriget. En term förknippad med “de nya krigen” är “collateral damage”, oavsiktlig skada, särskilt då civila dödas utan att det varit den direkta avsikten. Efter den elfte september har värdeladdade ord som frihet, rättvisa, feghet, ondska och terrorism använts flitigt. “Collateral language”, som jag fritt skulle vilja översätta med “Det krigsskadade språket”, är titeln på en antologi om de nya krigens politiska retorik. I fjorton essäer tar en grupp amerikanska forskare, där många arbetar på St. Lawrence University, upp olika aspekter på ämnet. Titlarna är enkla,...

LONDON – It is unlikely that the judicial enquiry now set up by British Prime Minister Tony Blair following the apparent suicide of David Kelly, the senior expert on weapons of mass destruction, will get to the bottom of why Dr Kelly chose to die. The assumption that he was angered on the one side by a BBC report that erroneously overstated what he had said to one of its reporters or, on the other, that he felt he was being made a fall guy by the government doesn’t add up. He clearly had doubts about the government’s case for going to war, but even inside the ministry of defence he was no lone voice – many of the generals advised against going to war. As for the BBC, at worst the reporter “sexed up” what Kelly told him, a hazard anyone who deals with the press even occasionally is acutely...

LONDON – When six years ago the British lowered the Union Jack on their last remaining important colony, Hong Kong, Chris Patten, the governor, buried his face in his hands, for the entire world to see, and felt the profoundest sentiment a proud and ambitious politician could experience – failure. It was indeed a personal failure to be added to his other great misfortune, the timing of elections back home in Britain that made it impossible for him to become prime minister. But on that damp evening it was the people of Hong Kong, those who knew him well could tell, that pierced his conscience. The British had let them down. They were giving up a colony having unaccountably failed to bequeath it with a functioning democracy. In every country except Palestine in 1948- when the top British officials literally dropped the keys to their secretariat on the steps of the...

LONDON – By now it is fair to say that only the economists and newspaper headline writers are still in love with GNP (Gross National Product) as a way of measuring progress. Everyone in any country that has experienced rapid economic growth, whether it be a mature economy like the United States or Sweden or an up and coming one like Taiwan or Brazil knows from their own bitter experience that it doesn’t tell you that much about a society. It gives a kind of useful bench mark of aggregate economic momentum. But, beyond that, the more one looks at it the more misleading it can become. For most people health, security and love are the three important things in life, and how many people can put their hands on their heart and say they are sure that in their own lives these three things are eternally spoken for. Besides, income...

LONDON – The crisis in the Congo, and to a lesser extent in Liberia, throws into relief an issue that has long lain at the doorstep of the United Nations – whether or not to authorize the use of an almighty force and a civilian occupying administration. It is not just the Americans who have shied away from going all the way. At various times countries from all the four corners have given it short shrift. “Peacekeeping” with lightly armed troops was the compromise, which worked well when both sides arrived at the point (often after a lot of fighting) when they wanted a neutral middleman, as in the Middle East or Cyprus (where it averted a Bosnian type Christian/Muslim war), but less well where things were still on the boil, as in the Congo in the early 1960s and Rwanda in 1994. The question pressed by the widening civil wars...