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LONDON – Like its counterpart, the Northern Ireland conflict, the continuation of Basque nationalist terrorism seems too polarised, too fuelled by historical sentimentality and myth on one side and by narrow-minded authoritarianism on the other, for easy settlement. But Northern Ireland has found a peace of sorts and the lion is lying down with the lamb and even sitting side by side in the same cabinet room in Stormont castle in Belfast. Yet Basque militancy, in the form of the guerrilla army of ETA, continues its ferocious policy of assassination and intimidation, out of step not only with the rest of western Europe, not just with the majority mood of the rest of the country, but also with the majority mood of the Basque country itself. This is the clear reading of last week’s regional elections in the Basque country. The radical leftist party, Euskal Herritarrok, widely considered to be...

LONDON – There was a time when it looked as if America and Libya were set on a dead-end course whose destructiveness was all but self-defeating. Its nadir was President Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1986 to bomb Libya, attempting to kill Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi, and in the end killing his adopted daughter. Libya’s withering response was to blow up in mid air a Pan American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, for which crime a Libyan intelligence agent was found guilty in a special court four months ago Yet the two countries have managed, very slowly, to repair their antagonistic and fruitless relationship. Outsiders may consider that they have taken an unnecessarily tortuous road to get there but, nevertheless, where they are today is a different place than a decade ago. This is an achievement worthy of note. War, always a possibility, was avoided. Yet still the antagonism lingers, on both sides....

LONDON – Space being space can go in all sorts of directions- Tito’s pleasure trip to be followed by Richard Branson’s floating hotels. But it could, if the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has his way, be filled with anti-satellite weapons, as the Pentagon makes sure it is in total command of not just the land beneath but also the sky above. Rumsfeld chaired two important commissions whilst he was out of office. The first, now well known, came up with the argument that the threat of a ballistic missile attack on the U.S. was “evolving more rapidly” than had been previously thought. The second, which received much less publicity, warned that the U.S. may someday face a “Space Pearl Harbour” with a sneak attack on all America’s precious communication satellites orbiting the planet. Space warfare has become “a virtual certainty”, Rumsfeld argued. His conclusion, reiterated in his news...

På EU:s toppmöte i Göteborg ska en integration av EU och NATO klubbas igenom. Vi är djupt oroade. Med slutet på Kalla Kriget och Warsawapaktens upplösning blev det svårt att rättfärdiga NATO:s existens och Sveriges invasionsförsvar. Hur förklara deras uppgift, hotbild och resursförbrukning när fienden hade kollapsat? Det militäre försvarets berättigande var hotat eftersom människorna i Europa förstod att säkerhet handlar om väldfärd, jämlikhet, miljövård och förtroendeskapande. Kretsar som saknar fantasi till att föreställa sig en värld med mindre upprustning, våld och vapenhandel använde i det läget en gammal klassisk militär strategi: Angrepp är det bästa försvaret! Alltså: hitta nya fiender varje månad – Castro, Kim Il-Sung, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, Khadaffi, narkotikatrafik. Och tala om för medborgarna att nya faror, t ex “etniska konflikter” lurar runt varje hörn. Den andra strategin var att accelerara västlig kontroll: utvidga NATO:s territorium österut, ge den USA-ledda militäralliansen större resurser, göra kärnvapnen än mer...

LONDON – As if his Star Wars initiative wasn’t enough President George Bush is already considering his next provocative move – the expansion of Nato right up to Russia’s borders. The world is now in real danger of spinning off its geopolitical axis. Even a defeated, militarily moribund, Russia will feel compelled to respond, at whatever cost of sweat, blood and treasure better spent on development at home, and the consequences of this will be felt the world over. It will confirm the leaders of China in what they are already suspecting, that the U.S is going through a new period of imperialistic expansion. And anything that Beijing decides to do reverberates into Japan, Taiwan and the Koreas and, further afield, into India and thence into Pakistan. The initial expansion of Nato in 1999 that took in the former Warsaw Pact members, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, was in fact...

LONDON – So in the end the Bush Administration decided it was not going to approve the sale to Taiwan of the much-touted Aegis-class destroyers and their state-of-the-art missile tracking system. The deciding reason was political, although there is evidence a-plenty they wouldn’t have done Taiwan that much good in the military arena either. They wouldn’t be delivered for another seven or eight years and it that time China could have deployed enough missiles to easily overwhelm their capabilities. Simply put, they would be nothing more than a political provocation – a hint of other defensive systems to come- the anti-ballistic missile shield around America and theatre missile defence around Japan and Taiwan. All of which in the end will be similarly self-defeating, as China builds more nuclear-tipped rockets to overwhelm them. Along the way the political relationship would deteriorate from “strategic partner” (Clinton) to “strategic competitor” (Bush) to “enemy” (future)....

Bush d.y. (en mann som ikke ble valgt men blir utvalgt av en Hoeyesterett delvis utpekt av faren er ikke president) har hittil gjort åtte feil med tunge konsekvenser for USA og resten av oss: 1. Fortsatt bombing og sanksjoner mot det noedlidende irakske folk, med sterke reaksjoner i alle arabiske/islamske land; 2. Sanksjoner mot et av verdens fattigste land, Afghanistan fordi USA har problemer med en person de en gang stoettet (bin Laden). Som Chalmers Johnson papeker i sin briljante Blowback (Hevn) er terrorisme som regel hevn for amerikansk statsterrorisme, og den er det mye av, altsa stadig oekende terrorisme i kommende år. 3. Veto mot observatoerer i den kronisk betente Israel-Palestina situasjonen, stoettet av feige allierte som “avholder seg”. Til varig erindring: FNs Sikkeretsrad har fire kristne og ett konfusiansk medlem, intet av de 56 muslimske land er med. Hvordan vile vi ha reagert pa fire muslimske land, og Kina?...

LONDON – The arrest of the greatest European war criminal since Hitler could change the world. Significant though the arrest of Pinochet was in London two and a half years ago, in comparison that was dealing with a dead duck. This arrest is next to catching the bird on the wing. Milosevic only lost power a matter of months ago. His party still wields much influence in Serbian affairs. Yet the pressure to bring him to trail before the UN-created ad hoc criminal court for Yugoslavia has been strong enough to precipitate his arrest by the Serbian authorities. It is only now a question of time, although he may first stand trial in his home country on lesser charges, before he is arraigned before the international tribunal on a charge of genocide. For some time now the so-called Pinochet effect has been at play – encouraging authorities in many parts of...

LONDON – After ten years of Balkan sectarian madness the outside world thought it had caught its breath. The hard-line nationalist president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, died in 1999. Last year the ruthless Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic resigned due to old age. Most marvellous of all in October Slobodan Milosevic, who began the Balkan wars, was finally voted out of office. Yet as the new fighting in Macedonia abundantly makes clear the forces of disintegration in the region remain stronger than those of integration. It takes a quarter of a million Nato soldiers to hold the ring and still there is no peace. The issue posed by President Boris Trajkovski of Macedonia hangs in the air, imperfectly answered. “We cannot redraw borders and boundaries, making smaller units of ever purer ethnic states. We cannot survive as a region if ethnicity becomes the sole defining justification of statehood.” But why not?...

LONDON – It is hard to watch the most sensible foreign policy of the Clinton Administration being crumpled before our eyes. Particularly so when it is being done for the most malevolent of reasons- to resurrect an enemy that had decided to make its peace with America, so that the advocacy of missile defence for America could be seen to be based on a real rogue missile threat rather, than as hitherto, a make believe one. President George Bush is being given the benefit of the doubt with his new hard line policy towards North Korea, even as he overrides his more far-sighted Secretary of State, Colin Powell. General Powell had tried to get it on to the record, before the Gang of Two, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, could bend the novice president’s ear back towards the dark ages, that the Bush Administration intended “to pick...

LONDON – Nothing could have been more revealing of the ambiguities at the heart of western policy towards China than when, in March 1997, the annual vote came up at the UN Human Rights Commission to condemn China’s record on the treatment of its dissidents and minorities. Denmark, with strong support from the Netherlands, had tabled a critical motion. The Chinese lobbyists went into overdrive. Denmark was told by Beijing that its criticism would be a “rock that smashed down on the Danish government’s head”. Several Danish contracts were cancelled and, as Chris Patten, now the European Union commissioner responsible for foreign affairs, wrote in his book, “East and West”, “And what did anyone do? Nothing. What in particular did members of the EU do? They looked the other way”. In 1998 Europe went one step further or, as Human Rights Watch described it, “a major step backwards”. Rewarding China for...

LONDON – The revolutionary past of Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister may be about to catch up with him if it turns out it is true that he lied about some aspects of it during the recent trial of an old friend/ terrorist from that turbulent period of 1968 to the mid 1970s. If it does it should not be just the end of an interesting period of German government but perhaps a time to ask what did all that turbulence do for the Western world? Is the only mark it left a black one? Has it bequeathed, as the great commentator on the era, Mel Lasky, asked many years ago in his journal de combat, Encounter, “powerful, moving, and possibly profound ideas”? It seems not. The only memorable and lasting hand-me-down of that era was not the “revolution” itself, but what was its trigger, the American black civil rights movement....