February 2010

February 24, 2010 Jonathan Power Amnesty International seems to be going downhill as fast as they do in Vancouver. If the crisis over Amnesty’s support for Moazzam Beg, ex Guantanamo Bay internee and alleged Taliban supporter is not dealt with by Amnesty quickly coming to its senses Amnesty will have lost its credibility – and a good number of its supporters – for a long time. (Begg’s defence is that his post-release visit to Afghanistan was to visit his family.) The tragedy is that Amnesty’s leadership doesn’t seem to see it. The organization is so used to being omnipotent and protected from the world outside by its unique membership structure whose dues allow it to be totally independent. This is usually to its good. But the protective fence of independence could lead to tragedy. The whistle was blown by a senior staffer, Gita Sahgal. She was suspended for raising the...

February 17, 2010 Jonathan Power Graham Greene’s great novel “The Comedians”, set in the Haiti of the dictatorship of Papa Doc, gives some support to the artist’s pious hope that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.” How else to explain how this half of a quite small Caribbean island gets more press than it deserves? It is, indeed, in part the legacy of Graham Greene who, as I am too, was often drawn to the island because of its idiosyncratic but rich culture and, not least, its lurid shades of darkness and light that permeate the political spectrum. Greene, whilst capturing the ugliness and horror of the gangster Tonton Macoutes, also draws a careful portrait of the civilized and caring Dr. Magiot. However, the outside world’s fascination with the forces of darkness represented in...

Does anyone know where the U.S. is up to in its long, endless, negotiations to persuade North Korea to give up the bomb? Does anyone care? Does the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee? Does the United Nations? Do the European countries? Does most of Asia? Try and find one creative word that anyone has said since the election of President Barack Obama and you will have to Google the subject until your eyes are sore. Yet there they all whipping up a storm over Iran which is a long way from being able to build a bomb, and which if it came into being could threaten no one. Israel might persuade itself that it was under the hammer but in fact Iran would have no means of miniaturizing a bomb so it could fit on a rocket. For that the technology is less easy to master than actually building a...

February 3, 2010 Jonathan Power Britain’s official public enquiry into why the UK joined the U.S. in going to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq grinds on with the interrogation last week of the former prime minister, Tony Blair. But whether it grinds small enough is the question. Last week, sporting his usual sharp advocate’s brain and bottomless charm, he seemed to walk out of the hearing’s doors with his head held high. He conceded very little to his critics. Yes, he did more or less admit that he’d given the then U.S. president, George Bush, a blank check to invade Iraq, long before the U.S. set about trying to convince the world with “irrefutable evidence” that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction (including a nuclear weapon). But all British prime ministers as long as one can remember have done such. Total support of America in matters of national security...