August 2009

LONDON – Six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, President George W. Bush declared that the capture of Osama bin Laden was his prime objective. “I want justice”, he said, “There’s an old poster out west that I recall that said “wanted dead or alive”. He also said that the purpose of going to war was to “smoke him out”. The U.S. and the U.K. then unleashed their bombs all over Afghanistan, killing far more innocent Afghans than were killed on 9/11. It did no good at all, and it certainly didn’t touch bin Laden and his team who were safely hidden in caves in the impenetrable mountains of Pakistan. Not long after Bush turned his attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Less and less was spoken of the need to hunt down bin Laden. None of this made sense. Afghanistan is now in a mess. The U.S....

. And it adds that there will be a significant increase in the number of malnourished children. It also says that there will be between 30,000 and 50,000 more infant deaths each year until 2015. But does this mean that over the last 20 years we have not made progress and that it will now get worse? First the one billion figure for the hungry is an invention of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation and the G8. It appears to be based on nothing more than a back of an envelope calculation. There is no hard evidence to support it. Indeed, the number of hungry may have already peaked and is on its way down again. It is true that in 2007 and in early 2008 there was a fast rise in food prices and a fall off in food stocks. It was this that panicked the rich country...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 18, 2009 LONDON – Let’s exaggerate. Iran has been singled out for persecution over its alleged nuclear bomb making programme because in 1979 its Revolutionary Guards took the staff of the U.S. embassy hostage, causing outrage in America with even the esteemed Walter Cronkite ratcheting up the tension, putting up on the screen, as he read the nightly news, the number of days they had been incarcerated. The sitting U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, was deposed, tarred with the brush of utter failure. Something of an exaggeration that this was the sole or even the most important factor in building a pro bomb lobby in Iran. Still it has a grain of truth: Iran has been singled out unfairly. The West and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a...

Rudyard Kipling’s 19th century ‘great game’ played by British India and Imperial Russia to gain access to India and the warm waters of the Arabian Sea continues. There are  many new players and few new issues. US Involvement in the Area As far as the United States is concerned, there was little involvement in the area during the 19th century. Participation by proxy followed in the 20th century. This indirect US presence took the form of CIA links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and covert arms supply for Afghan mujaheddin to “give Russia its Vietnam” as stated by Zbigniev Brezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration. Following the events of 11 September 2001, the United States became the lead actor in shaping international policies for Afghanistan during the 21 st century. Circles of Conflict In 2009 the deepening crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan plays out  over a wide geographical...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 11, 2009 LONDON – Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Israel, Fatah and Hamas have the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. For once we can see whether the work of imams, rabbis and priests can bare fruit. The secular politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the three great deistic religions who have been charged from above to exert their mandate to teach compassion, goodness, tolerance and brotherhood. These traits of virtue, as common to them all as is their God, is being tested in the hottest of fires....

3rd August, 2009Jonathan Power LONDON – It goes back to the French revolution of 1789. At the Revolutionary Convention the most radical of the insurgents decided to seat themselves on the left side. “Why not on the other side, the right side, the place of rectitude, where law and the higher right resided, when man’s best hand could be raised in righteous honour?” wrote Melvin Lasky in Encounter. “Anyway they went left, and man’s political passions have never been the same.” When Oskar Lafontaine, the West German finance minister, broke with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in the early days of the last Social Democratic government, he explained it was “because my heart beats on the left.” The right could never say that, even David Cameron. When Humpty-Dumpty insisted on his own “master-meanings” he reassured Alice, “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it...