Peace

By Jan Oberg There could have been a deal with Iran today – to the benefit of everybody – if the nuclear issue had been approached in a fair, principled and visionary manner from Day One. If there will be no deal later, one of the most important possible agreements in contemporary international history will have been lost, the risk of war will increase and the Iranians will suffer. And the United States and the EU (here France and Germany) will move further down in terms of relative global power and up in terms of self-isolation. On the day of no deal, perhaps the Five Ps + Germany should spend a moment on self-reflection: What could we have done differently? To the trained conflict- and peace-making eye, 99% of the Western commentators have failed to point out the benefits of a deal and, instead, devoted their creativity to find all...

By Jan Oberg The elections taking place in Burundi are no elections. The African Union, the European Union, NATO, BRICS and everybody else must know that by now. They are all turning their heads, pretending they just don’t see. When it comes to Burundi, the much celebrated Western concern about human rights and democracy is conventiently put aside. However, since April developments in Burundi have taken only one direction: towards dictatorship and civil war and, in the worst of cases, a new genocide. If Burundi avoids that it’ll be by miracle and I shall be happy beyond words to be proven wrong. Had this country had oil, important minerals or a significant strategic position – or had Burundi been situated in Europe – I am in no doubt that NATO countries would have conducted a “humanitarian” intervention already. Now when a genuine humanitarian intervention is urgently needed to stop the...

and punished for years for not having nuclear weapons?

What a gift to humanity, this Pope! To choose global climate change as a major theme of his papacy is in the spirit of the times. What is revolutionary, and he uses that word often, is the focus on the poor. Climate change–including the long trend global warming over and above some lulls and local variations–has a clear class address, goes beyond making him the spiritual world leader. The Pope talks about filth covering the earth, and about greed stimulated by corporate capitalism and consumerism as major causes underlying the technicality of CO2 release. The Pope also mentions the freshness of the gospels, including the unambiguous stand of Jesus for the poor in Matt 6:24–God vs Mammon–Matt 13:12–our economic system, and Matt 19:20-24 about giving one’s riches to the poor. Pope Francis follows in his footsteps. Simply beautiful. But there is more to it: a general theological discourse from the...

By Gareth Porter In the final phase of the negotiations with Iran, the US-led international coalition is still seeking Iran’s agreement to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit any military facilities it deems suspicious and to interview a selected list of Iranian nuclear scientists. Such measures are not necessary to ensure that Iran is adhering to its commitments under the agreement, but they are necessary to manage the political threat from the pro-Israel extremists in the Senate to sabotage the whole agreement. To fend off that threat, the Obama administration made the spurious claim that it had succeeded in getting Iran to agree to the demand for IAEA inspection of any site it found suspicious. In fact, Iran had agreed only that IAEA would have “enhanced access through agreed procedures” – as reflected in the wording of the joint statement of the P5+1 and Iran on 2...

America even at its best is a strange place, alive with contradictions, a Teflon political culture that has an unshakable faith in its innocent and virtuous national character and its overall impact on the world, impervious to the ghosts of slavery and of ethnic cleansing of native Americans that should be tormenting our sleep and darkening our dreams, comfortable with its robust gun culture, and with its promiscuous reliance on rogue drones engineered to kill on command and on the brutal happenings that take place in black sites immorally situated in countries whose leaders agree to avert their gaze from the dirty work taking place. Looked at from a short distance this is not a pretty picture. Yet there are still those rare moments when this unsavory national profile seems not to be telling the whole story. For instance, I felt heartened by a recent news item reporting that the...

Lecture at World Congress of Faiths, Annual General Meeting, London School of Economics, University of London, May 20, 2015 Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today, and for giving me the opportunity to share with you my journey for the common good, a journey which I began many years ago, when as a young man I left Iran for England in 1972 in my search for life’s bigger picture. Friends, I very much like to set the scene by reading a short statement, giving you a brief background to my presentation, my abstract, if you will: First: This presentation is dedicated to the youth of the world, our children and grand- children, who are the unfolding story of the decades ahead. May they rise to the challenge of leading our troubled world, with hope and wisdom in the interest of the common good to a better future...

Af Claus Kold Kampflys opgaver Hvis vi i Danmark står over for en anskaffelse af nye kampfly til omkring 40 milliarder, så må man gå ud fra at forholdet mellem det købte og opgave vejer tungt, og at dette forhold er blevet grundigt undersøgt. Det virker imidlertid ikke sådan. Nok er flyenes teknikker blevet grundigt diskuteret, men hvor er diskussionerne, om kampflyene passer på de opgaver, som fremtidens væbnede konflikter udgør? Krig mellem stater – symmetrisk krig Argumenterne for at anskaffe nye kampfly hviler på en bestemt stats- og samfundsmodel, med nogle tilhørende antagelser/faktorer. Disse faktorer er så at sige bygget ind i flyenes teknik, men de diskuteres som teknik og ikke som antagelser/formål. I denne tekst vil jeg derfor tage udgangspunkt i denne tænknings egen logik, da det samtidig er den, der er herskende i Folketinget, i Forsvaret og i store dele af dansk sikkerhedspolitisk tænkning, og se om...

By Gunnar Westberg The 2015 Review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended Friday May 22 in New York without a final document being accepted. Up till the very end it seemed that the conference would produce a non-committal final document. The outcome which a majority of the states desired, a plan for a total ban on nuclear weapons, as there is for chemical and bacteriological weapons, was unacceptable to the nuclear weapon states. Consensus means in the NPT that the nuclear weapon states decide. They wish to keep their capacity to exterminate mankind for generations ahead. The American government had told its allies, the NATO states, Japan and others, not to support a ban on nukes, and the allies obeyed. However, the Friends of Nukes did not have to take the blame for blocking a final document. Instead the blame fell on Israel, a country which is not even...

Violence is to harm and hurt body, mind, spirit, even lethally, suicide, homicide, genocide (“cide”, from Latin “caedere”, falling). The focus here is on body violence, “sui” standing for Self, “homi” for Other. They do not exclude each other, they can be combined. We have in mind US shootings-killings in recent decades, often at schools, spraying Others with bullets, in the end also Self, at his own hand or somebody else’s, with a gun. The killing by somebody else may or may not have been expected, but exposure to such extreme risk makes intention likely. In short, homicide and suicide. Both-And. Hitler sacrificed millions of Germans and committed suicide. We are used to seeing suicide as the consequence of life being intolerable: “I am better off leaving this world”; and homicide as other(s) being intolerable, “the world is better off without you”. These tragic, aggressive outcomes of double frustration may...