Category: Jonathan Power

The UN Arms Trade Treaty is not perfect

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By Jonathan Power

US presidential candidate Jimmy Carter described arms sales as a “cancer”. But once in office Carter achieved little in controlling them.

In President Bill Clinton’s first term Amnesty International questioned the US government about the use of American military helicopters and armoured vehicles involved in human rights abuses in Turkey. Under pressure from Congress the State Department compiled a report on human rights violations by the Turkish armed forces. It concluded there was “highly credible” evidence that US-supplied arms and jet fighters had been used to subdue Kurdish villages.

Later, in 1996, the US temporarily suspended the sale of advanced attack helicopters. But two years later there were fresh reports that hundreds more armoured vehicles had been sold. The US Defence Secretary visited Turkey and reportedly lobbied on behalf of American companies wishing to co-produce advanced helicopters there. In that same year an American company sold 10,000 electric shock weapons to the Turkish police.
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Who is left? Who is right?

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By Jonathan Power

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 Britain’s intellectual monthly, 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, prime minister of Britain, who likes to make out that he is liberal, at least on the environment and foreign aid. 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 extra…….”

Those who want to study the ambiguities and contradictions of intellectual leftists Read More »

Middle East economies are unable to shift into top gear

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By Jonathan Power

Dateline: Doha, Qatar.

It has always been one of the mysteries of history why it is that the Muslim world of the Middle East was once so far ahead of Europe in science, medicine, astronomy and mathematics yet by the 16th century started to fall behind.

Not only did most of it never industrialize, if it hadn’t been for nearly all its countries having oil in abundance they would still be living in the poverty and torpor that was their lot at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even today as modernism takes over and cities are built like this one and its neighbours, reaching for the sky, the foundations are industries of the newer kind – tourism and banking. According to the UN’s annual Human Development Report most of them, Abu Dhabi apart, compared with countries of equal income per head, are low down in the world rankings on education, health, scientific prowess and the status of women.

But why did the Muslim world lose its momentum? If it had kept going at the pace it did in the first millennium after Mohammed it would now be one of the world’s leaders.Read More »

The Arab Spring struggles in the Gulf states

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By Jonathan Power

Dateline: Doha, Qatar

By the lights of many in the Western world the monarchies of the small states that line the Persian Gulf – Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman – are governed by autocratic and anachronistic regimes. The Arab Spring has barely touched them. Their oil remains critical to the outside world and funds their own splendour – Qatar has the highest income per head in the world.

At various times the obituaries for these states have been written, only to be quickly forgotten. Today, in the wake of the upheavals of the Arab Spring, they seem to be bastions of stability – favoured by Western governments. With their small indigenous populations they have found it easy to make citizens economically and socially comfortable, the burdens of life shifted to immigrant workers (who are too often maltreated or underpaid). Nevertheless, hydrocarbon reserves are gradually shrinking and their indigenous populations growing fast, producing young people who find it hard to get the kind of jobs their self-image demands.Read More »

Thailand – Asian tiger prowling

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By Jonathan Power

Dateline: Bangkok

“Thai politics is a cross between Venezuela and Italy”, observed my Thai journalist friend. “Chavez and Berlusconi rolled into one is what we have.”

Deposed prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who lives in exile in Dubai, still manages to pull many of the strings of Thai politics- as does Berlusconi when not actually in office. His sister, Yingluck, is now prime minister and she provides the Chavez-style charisma for the family. Young, energetic and attractive she has wooed the voters to her side in a less divisive way than her brother.

Thailand is the only country in south-east Asia to have never experienced colonial rule. Buddhism, the monarchy and the military have been the principal shapers of its evolution from peasant society to a modern industrial power house that has seen its economy almost in continuous boom (with a a big collapse in 1997 and short pause 3 years ago) for two generations. Between 1985 and 1996 it was the world’s fastest growing economy, averaging a phenomenal 12% a year. It is expected to be 7.5% this year, the same as China.

Democracy is relatively new to Thailand. Read More »

Cambodia leaves the darkness behind

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By Jonathan Power

Dateline: Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 5th 2013

Cambodia has lain for too long under the black umbrella of its past. But Cambodia is waking up, has looked the evil one in its eye and, re-born, found its strength.

Cambodia has been to hell and back – 2 million of its people killed out of population of 8 million, with 500,000 of them executed, the consequence of a fanatical communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot and a group of henchmen now being tried in the UN War Crimes Court. (Pol Pot himself is dead.)

The Khmer Rouge violently took power in 1975 and fell in 1979. They wanted a classless society. They abolished money, property and religious practices. Family relationships were criticised and people were forbidden from even showing the slightest affection. The work day in the fields was 12 hours long without pause. Torture and the bullet were the instant punishment for deviance. Anybody educated was singled out for death.Read More »

What’s The Problem With Iran?

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TFF PressInfo 1-2013

On Tuesday February 26, in Kazakhstan, a new round of negotiations are due between Iran and the Five Permanent UN Security Council members + Germany. We’d like to bring the following expert statement to your attention.

Contacts for interviews as well as analytical sources below the statement.

Summary

The problem is not nuclear weapons, essentially. It’s strategic interests such as control of oil and gas and that requires a change of Iran’s ‘obstinate’ and ‘defiant’ regime.



The present US/NATO/EU policy is based on escalating threats without an exit strategy. This increases the risk of war, whether intended or not. If that is not the deliberate purpose, an entirely new Western policy vis-a-vis Iran must be developed.

The Transnational Foundation in Sweden – an independent think tank with 27 years of experience – provides you with the diagnosis, the prognosis and the proposals for improved relations built on trust.
 (See below.)Read More »

Cambodia’s War Crimes Court at snail pace

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By Jonathan Power

Dateline: Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

At the end of World War 2, when the three allies, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union, were considering what to do with the top German political and military leaders, Winston Churchill had no compunction in saying they should be taken out of their cells and shot. Franklin Roosevelt persuaded him that a trial was more in order. Stalin went along with this.

A trial it was with judges from the three powers – the first war crimes’ trial in history. It tried 23 of the German hierarchy and it took only 13 months to complete the trial.

The trial in Cambodia, organised jointly by the UN and the Cambodian government, has had only five people in the dock but has taken 7 years and is not likely to finish before the end of the summer or even early next year. (One was convicted in 2010 and one, the only woman, has been released on health grounds.) I asked senior Western diplomats and two of the judges on the court why so long and they all found it difficult to answer. Some talked about the investigation part of the trial taking too long, yet the evidence was growing on trees.Read More »

Pope Benedict, good or bad?

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By Jonathan Power

Dean Acheson, the distinguished US Secretary of State who coined such phrases as “Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role” also once said: “Moral talk is fine preaching for the Final Day of Judgement, but it was not a view I could entertain as a public servant.” No wonder he could justify the use of the nuclear bomb on Japan.

The last four Popes, including Benedict who has just announced his retirement, would never have supported the Hiroshima bombing. Neither did they support the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. They believed in moral talk here and now.

“Moral talk” led Pope John Paul to wage a long and successful fight against communism in his homeland, Poland. Indeed, many say that victory was the catalyst for the fall of communism in the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.

“Moral talk” led to Pope John, the great reformer, to use his position to tell President Lyndon Johnson to his face that the Vietnam war was immoral.

Benedict is cut of the same cloth, with some interesting shades of emphasis. Read More »

Iran and the Cuban nuclear missile crisis

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By Jonathan Power

It’s always better to talk than be super-tough. But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayotollah Ali Khamenei, last week firmly rejected the US attempt to resume negotiations over its suspected nuclear bomb making.

This is nothing short of disastrous. The Ayotallah must know that now Barack Obama has been re-elected not only has he got much more room to compromise but he has effectively seen off the attempt of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to persuade the US to attack Iran.

The Ayotallah probably thinks by going eyeball to eyeball with the US he is going to win more than even Obama is prepared to give. This is nonsense and the attitude of both sides reminds me of the negotiating tactics of President John Kennedy and Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1963 which nearly brought the superpowers to a nuclear war.Read More »