October 2013

There are two ways of responding to an invitation from an American president. I recall that when Amory Lovins, the guru of market-oriented environmentalism, was asked about what was his main goal when invited to the White House to meet the president he responded self-assuredly: ‘To be invited back.” That is, be sure to say nothing that might so disturb the high and mighty to an extent that might jeopardize future invitations. A positive reading of such an approach would point out that Lovins was just being realistic. If he hoped to have any influence at all in the future he needed to confine his present advice to an areas situated well within the president’s comfort zone. A less charitable interpretation would assume that what mattered to Lovins was the thrill of access to such an august portal of power. Never receiving such an invitation, I had a lesser experience,...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Diplomats at the UN were amazed last week when Saudi Arabia did the unthinkable and turned down the seat it had just won on the Security Council. The ten rotating seats – that join those of the Permanent Five (the US, UK, France, Russia and China) – are regarded as the most prestigious spots in international diplomacy. Saudi Arabia had badly wanted that seat. But the moment it got the votes that handed it to it, it stepped back. The BBC reported that this created “shock and confusion”. The Russian Foreign Ministry called it “bewildering”. No state has done this before. Saudi Arabia accused the UN of “double standards”. It pointed to the Security Council’s failure “to find a solution to the Palestinian cause for 65 years”. It also criticised the UN for its “failure” to rid the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction, including Israel’s nuclear weapons....

60 years of peace theory and peace practice can be summarized in EQUITY x HARMONY PEACE = ________________________ TRAUMA x CONFLICT Four theory foci, four policy tasks, and four education topics. Any true education should prepare for practice, guided by general theory. Moving from denominator right to numerator left, this means: * mediating acceptable and sustainable conflict solutions; * conciliating parties locked in traumas from the past; * empathizing with all parties divided by social/world faultlines; * building cooperation for mutual and equal benefit. Mediation is verbal, based on dialogues with the parties, but the four tasks are very concrete, practical. For doers not only talkers; for practical people like officers. Hence the Big Question: is peace theory-practice-education compatible with the military mind – however defined, and there are many military cultures in the world–or not?

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one US chamber to put millions of people inside and outside the US at livelihood risk for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead. And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted NO in the end, only 87 YES. Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.

Recently I read On Western Terrorism: from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, published in 2013 by Pluto Press here in London, and consisting of a series of conversations between Chomsky and the Czech filmmaker, journalist, and author, Andre Vltchek, who is now a naturalized American citizen. Vltchek in an illuminating Preface describes his long and close friendship with Chomsky, and explains that these fascinating conversations took place over the course of two days, and was filmed with the intention of producing a documentary. The book is engaging throughout, with my only big complaint being about the misdirection of the title—there is virtually nothing said about either Hiroshima or drone warfare, but almost everything else politically imaginable! Vltchek, previously unknown to me, consistently and calmly held his own during the conversations, speaking with comparable authority and knowledge about an extraordinary assortment of topics that embraced the entire global scene, something few of...

By Farhang Jahanpour* With the progress of the talks in Geneva between Iran and the six world powers (the so-called P5+1) on 15 and 16 October, there is growing optimism about a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear program and to the resumption of relations between Iran and the United States after 34 years of estrangement. After an hour-long power-point presentation by the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, which he called “closing unnecessary crisis, and opening new horizons”, Michael Mann, the spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton who is leading the talks for the P5+1 group, described the Iranian proposal as “very useful” and said: “For the first time, very detailed technical discussions took place.” (1) The exact choice of words was also repeated by a senior US official taking part in the talks. After the formal talks between the two sides, there was another US-Iran bilateral meeting...

Two apparently related and revealing incidents have turned public attention briefly back to Libya just after the second anniversary of the NATO intervention that helped anti-Qaddafi rebel forces overthrow his regime. The first incident involved the infringement of Libyan sovereignty by an American special forces operation that seized the alleged al Qaeda operative, Abu Anas al-Libi (also known as Nizah Abdul Hamed al-Ruqai), on October 5, supposedly with the knowledge and consent of the Libyan government. The second incident, evidently a response to the first seizure, was the kidnapping a few days later of the country’s prime minister, Ali Zeidan, while he lay asleep in his hotel lodgings in the center of Tripoli. He was easily captured by a squadron of 20 militia gunmen who arrived at the hotel around 2:00 am and proceeded without resistance from security guards to carry off the head of the Libyan state. Such a...

Background If the politics of deflection exhibit the outward reach of Israel’s grand strategy of territorial expansionism and regional hegemony, the politics of fragmentation serves Israel’s inward moves designed to weaken Palestinian resistance, induce despair, and de facto surrender. In fundamental respects deflection is an unwitting enabler of fragmentation, but it is also its twin or complement. The British were particularly adept in facilitating their colonial project all over the world by a variety of divide and rule tactics, which almost everywhere haunted anti-colonial movements, frequently producing lethal forms of post-colonial partition as in India, Cyprus, Ireland, Malaya, and of course, Palestine, and deadly ethnic strife elsewhere as in Nigeria, Kenya, Myanmar, Rwanda. Each of these national partitions and post-colonial traumas has produced severe tension and long lasting hostility and struggle, although each takes a distinctive form due to variations from country to country of power, vision, geography, resources, history,...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The US Senate – usually the Republican members – reject multilateral treaties as if it were a sport. Others it rejects through inaction – the Law of the Sea Treaty, for example, negotiated under President Jimmy Carter and fruitlessly pushed for ratification by every president since. Republicans justify their blocking tactics by arguing that such treaties are a threat to sovereignty. However, after almighty struggles – it takes only one third of the Senate to block a treaty – the important nuclear arms’ treaties with the Soviet Union and Russia – were ratified. So was the Convention against Torture which Republican president, Ronald Reagan, successfully fought for but which President George Bush junior illegally ignored, without a word of protest from Congress or the press. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, became torturer-in-chief and should have been arrested by the incoming Obama Administration. But Obama, wanting a peaceful life with Congress...

Keynote European Center for Peace and Development, Beograd, Two basic facts stand out in the world economic development, leaving aside military, political, cultural and social development: * The BRICS – an acronym becoming a social fact–are emerging; * The USA-EU are declining; not only as markets, also as producers. Another way of saying this is that the West has been outcompeted, not by the Rest but by – so far – a select part. The world market is not constant but increasing sum, but much demand may be met by domestic production, not by import-export. As part of the story. The West got the definition of development wrong, still clinging to economic development = economic growth (measured by annual GNP/capita increase). The BRICS understood development differently, adding economic distribution (measured by the ratio in acquisitive power between the top and bottom 20%, and between the CEO and average worker salary;...

Keynote, European Center for Peace and Development, Beograd The Balkan integration process within, and the global framework without, are both parts of the story of empires that come, leave deep and bloody faultlines within and without, and then decline and fall. Thus, the Balkans were doubly divided in the 11th century by the schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox in 1054, following the 395 split between the Western and Eastern Roman empires, Rome vs Constantinople; and the declaration of war on Islam by Pope Urban II on 27 Nov 1095. The two dividing lines intersect in Sarajevo, the Bosnia and Herzegovina-BiH Ground Zero for Euro-quakes. The Hapsburgs from Northwest annexed BiH in 1908, and a shot followed in 1914. The Ottomans from Southeast defeated the Serbs in 1397 and were defeated in the 1912 Balkan war, leaving Slavic and Albanian Muslims. A little later, 1918, the Hapsburgs also went...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> At the time of the “Cuban Missile Crisis” in 1962 when the Soviet Union secretly shipped into Cuba nuclear weapons and the US, under President John Kennedy, threatened to bomb them, the world came as close to nuclear war as it ever has. Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defence, wondered if he would ever see another sunset. At universities students marched. The crisis ended when Kennedy agreed – with only a handful of his inner circle knowing this – to remove US nuclear missiles in Turkey which, with their short flight times, threatened Russia as much as the Cuban missiles threatened the US. Many years later in June 1982, after only modest progress in mutually reducing nuclear weapons on each side, around three-quarters of a million demonstrators gathered in New York’s Central Park demanding a freeze on nuclear weapon production. The New York Times reported that “it was...