May 2019

On Monday, 13 May 2019, the New York Times posted an article with the title “White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War”. Besides the aircraft carrier and other naval forces already sent to the Persian Gulf, plans include sending as many as 120,000 US troops to the region. There is a great danger that an attack on Iran might be sparked by a Gulf-of-Tonkin-like false flag incident involving Saudi oil ships. On Sunday, 19 May, Donald Trump tweeted: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”. He did not specify how or when Iran had threatened the US. Why is the possibility of a military attack on Iran especially worrying? Such a war would completely destabilize the already-unstable Middle East. In Pakistan, the unpopularity of the US-Israel-Saudi alliance, as well as the memory of...

Brexit grabs the attention of much of the world, not least because Britain once had an Empire and ruled a great part of the world’s peoples. And it’s the caretaker of the English language, the Empire’s most important legacy. Add to that the BBC, the world’s favourite and most trusted radio and TV station, its top universities, its production of pop music, its numerous top-flight classical orchestras, its permanent membership of the UN Security Council, it being the world’s fifth largest economy and, alas, its possession of nuclear weapons. In terms of its soft non-military power, depending on which measurement is used, Britain is first or second in the world. It remains partly a mystery why something around half the electorate want Britain to leave the European Union. It’s mainly older people who voted that way in the referendum of three years ago. The very old who lived through World...

HE Secretary-General of the United NationsAntónio GuterresUnited NationsNew York NY REGARDING: Request for action in accordance with the UN Charter Article 99 to seek to prevent war between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The relation between the USA and Iran has been tense for many years. After the abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the stifling sanctions imposed by the USA on Iran, the hostility has increased to a dangerous level. The President of the USA has repeatedly threatened Iran with military action, even talking about the total destruction of the country. These threats must be taken seriously. Even if a war is not started intentionally, a misunderstanding could lead to an escalation and finally to war. The situation in the Middle East is very complicated and other parties than Iran and the USA might contribute a sparkle to start the...

Ukrainian priests lead a commemoration ceremony for Maidan activists or “Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred” killed during anti-government protests in Kiev this time last year. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA By  Ivan Katchanovski May 24, 2019 The new Ukrainian government is faced with reopening an inquiry into evidence of an organized mass killing in Kiev that Poroshenko stonewalled. Ivan Katchanovski investigates. Five years ago, the Maidan massacre in Kiev, Ukraine, of Feb. 18-20, 2014, was a watershed event, not only for the politics and history of Ukraine but also for world politics generally. This mass killing in downtown Kyiv set the stage for the violent overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine and a new Cold War between Washington and Moscow. Therefore, it is remarkable that five years after this massacre shook the world, no one has been sentenced for any of the Maidan killings. This was the best-documented case of mass...

By Chandra Muzaffar May 16th, 2019 The Belt Road Initiative (BRI) also known as the One Belt One Road (OBOR) project could well emerge as the obor (the flame in Indonesian or Malay) that will blaze the trail in the evolution of a new epoch in history. Chinese President Xi Jinping must have sensed its historical significance when he announced OBOR in 2013. Essentially an infrastructure development endeavor it seeks to initiate and support the construction of roads, railways, ports and bridges in at least 65 other countries spanning four continents. With a commitment of over 900 billion US dollars, OBOR is the biggest infrastructure development project ever undertaken in the history of our planet. Originally posted on Transcend Media Service on May 1st, 2019 here It is more than infrastructure in the conventional sense. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor  (CPEC) for instance which connects China’s Xinjiang province with Gwadar port in Pakistan’s...

Amnesty International reported this week that an Iranian lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, has been sentenced to 38 years in jail and 148 lashes. She has dedicated her life to defending women accused of removing their hijabs in public. The persecution of human rights dissidents in Iran appears to be getting worse. It makes it harder to feel sorry for Iran, even if President Donald Trump is wielding the heavy stick against it, and even though Trump has sabotaged the Agreement to freeze Iran’s nuclear research and uranium enrichment carefully negotiated by President Barack Obama’s team, the EU, Russia and China. However, Realpolitik demands us to stand up for this Agreement but who can be happy stepping into the ring to defend the honour of such a regime? Iran executes more people each year than any other country bar China. If Iran wants more enthusiastic outside help it must put its own...

Trump’s statement amounts to a de facto declaration of war on Iran. Objectively speaking, it is a lie that Iran threatens the US. It is a lie that the US sends aircraft carriers to the region in self-defence. It’s lies as blatant as the one about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. You may think that this is just psychological warfare and positioning. It is not. Because: Over time, this type of statements develop its own dynamics and the US will not be able to back down from what it threatens to do without loosing face. President Trump’s statement is a blatant violation of international law, the UN Charter’s Article 2.4 which states:“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” In...

Maybe, after all, there is an argument for saying that the world needs more violence not less if we are to make its societies more equal. This is one conclusion one can derive from Walter Scheidel’s new book, The Great Leveler. He starts from what we all know by now: the richest 62 persons in the world own as much net wealth as the poorer half of humanity. This is the number that could fit inside a London double-decker bus. This inequality appears to get worse by the year, although if we go back to 1929 it was then about the same. Two thousand years ago in Roman times the richest had fortunes about 1.5 million times that of the average citizen, roughly the same ratio as Bill Gates and the average American. Plato, writing in the fourth century BC, was vexed by the fact “there were not one but...

Former president says peaceful China ‘ahead of us in almost every way’. By Brett Wilkins May 13, 2019 The only US president to complete his term without war, military attack or occupation has called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” During his regular Sunday school lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter revealed that he had recently spoken with President Donald Trump about China. Carter, 94, said Trump was worried about China’s growing economy and expressed concern that “China is getting ahead of us.” Originally published at commondreams.org Carter, who normalized diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979, said he told Trump that much of China’s success was due to its peaceful foreign policy. Carter then referred to the US as “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” a result, he said, of...

They hadn’t realized they were living in a world, as Barack Obama once said, is the best time to be alive in human history. Yet the bits and pieces of this information had been around for a long time and I’ve drawn on them in many of my columns. But the fact is that human beings have what Oxford Professor Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney call a “negativity bias”- “A subconscious predisposition that humans exhibit whether or not they are aware of it”. Their thesis explains a lot, especially in international relations- threat inflation, the outbreak and persistence of war, the neglect of opportunities for cooperation, and the prominence of failure in institutional memory and learning. In modern times the worst example of this was the threat inflation launched by President George W. Bush in tandem with Prime Minister Tony Blair on the danger posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. They...

There is much diversity.  Let us praise that mega aspect of our world as multipolar, passive but peaceful, coexistence of civilizations: Anglo-American; Latin American-Caribbean; Islamic; African pre-, post-colonial; European from Ireland to Russia Far East; West Asian Islamic; with Israel Jewish; Iran Persian; South Asian, SAARC, Hindu and Islamic with India; Southeast Asian, ASEAN, Buddhist, Christian, multi-cultural; Northeast Asian daoist-shinto with China and Japan; Asian-Pacific, multi-cultural, with Maoris, Aborigines, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians from one rim to the other. 14 civilizations.  Others stop counting at 8, 10.  Around that. What a wonderful, diverse, polyphonic world!  Not monophonic US or European all over, as they both have wanted and maybe still want. It should be celebrated as part of a formula for endurance and duration. The other side of this is symbiosis.  Man-woman diversity is fine; the other part is man-woman symbiosis – that is probably celebrated in half of world literature?...

Traditionally old men have sent young men to fight the wars they have started. Today it may be somewhat different. Old men may be shying away from war while young men are still beholden to it. The world, as never before, is becoming demographically lopsided, with older people concentrated in rich countries and the young in not-so-rich countries. These older societies are becoming less warlike, as the influence of the experienced and the wise filters down into the body politic. There are a number of well-regarded studies that show how so-called “youth bulges” contribute to violence and conflict within states. Countries that have a high ratio of people aged 15-24 among the adult population have an increased likelihood of domestic terrorism and civil war. A new study takes this further. In the latest issue of Harvard’s “International Security”, a group of academics examine whether “youth bulges” alter the probability of...