Category: AA ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATES

The great Syrian deal

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By Jonathan Power

One way of measuring the success of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in forging a plan with Russia to rid Syria of chemical weapons is to think how the scenario would have been conducted if George W. Bush were still president. He wouldn’t have taken the issue to Congress. He would have distrusted any Russian initiative and not delayed his timetable for an imminent military strike. Strike first, talk afterwards, is how he would have seen it.

This makes President Obama look good. But not as good as he might have been. From the beginning he made it clear he would neither wait for the UN on-the-ground inspectors’ report or the approval, which he knew he would not get, of the UN Security Council. At the same time he made no convincing case why the US should ignore its solemn commitment to the UN Charter, opening the way for Russia, China or anyone to ignore it when they had, in their own opinion, reason to do so.

He also never answered the conundrum of why Read More »

A crisis averted: Now time for serious work to bring peace to the Middle East

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By Farhang Jahanpour

The “framework document” (1) agreed by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Saturday 14 September has averted an imminent crisis and has provided hope for the eventual resolution of the Syrian civil war by peaceful means. The document stipulates that Syria must provide a full inventory of its stockpile within a week, all production equipment being destroyed by November, and all weapons being removed from Syria or destroyed by mid-2014. This certainly is a positive development compared to the alternative that entailed a military attack on Syria with all its unpredictable consequences.

Both Russia and Iran played the leading role in persuading the Syrian President Bashar Asad to get rid of his chemical weapons. President Barack Obama and President Vladimir Putin welcomed the agreement. China, France, the UK, the UN and NATO have also expressed satisfaction at the agreement. This agreement has clearly a number of winners and losers.

The Winners of the Kerry-Lavrov Agreement

1- Clearly, the greatest winner has been the cause of peace and common sense. In 2007 when running for office, the then candidate Obama said that the President “does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” (2) Yet now, President Obama was insisting that he had the authority to attack Syria even without Congressional approval. However, a military attack, even if it had received the approval of the Congress, which seemed unlikely, would have been illegal, would have compounded the problems, and would have portrayed the United States as an aggressive country.

The Kerry-Lavrov accord has changed the pattern of behaviorRead More »

Syria: Three conflict levels – and the solutions?

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By Johan Galtung

There seem to be three levels to the Syrian conundrum.

On top is the conflict over who is to rule Syria, the Assad minority Shia, 13%, mainly Alawite – or Baath rather, more secular, socialist–dictatorship respecting other minorities – Christians, Armenians, Assyrians, Druze, Kurds, Turkoman, or a majority Sunni, 73% dictatorship with no such respect. Both groups fight with brutality, the list of crimes on both sides is long, and the world is watching the unbearable suffering of the Syrian people, even from nerve gases.

Then, in the middle, is the usual geopolitical game of states and regions. In the background are huge alliances, the 28 mainly small NATO countries against the 6+ SCO-Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries with two enormous members. The five veto powers of the UN Security Council are openly involved – USA, UK, France, Russia and China, and Turkey, for their economic, military and political interests, paralyzing the UN Security Council (like the USA blocking a UNSC resolution after the February 2013 Damascus bombing).

And then, at the bottom, feeding into it all, two cultural, religious fundamentalisms. Read More »

Resolving the Syrian chemical weapons crisis: Sunlight and shadows

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By Richard Falk

The Putin Moment

Not only did Vladimir Putin exhibit a new constructive role for Russia in 21st statecraft, spare Syria and the Middle East from another cycle of escalating violence, but he articulated this Kremlin initiative in the form of a direct appeal to the American people. There were reasons to be particularly surprised by this display of Russian diplomacy: not since Nikita Khrushchev helped save the world from experiencing the catastrophe of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 by backing down and agreeing to a face-saving formula for both superpowers, had Moscow distinguished itself in any positive way with respect to the conduct of international relations.

For Putin to be so forthcoming, without being belligerent, was particularly impressive in view of Obama’s rather ill-considered cancellation only a few weeks ago of a bilateral meeting with the Russian leader because of Washington’s supposed anger at the refusal of the Russian government to turn the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, over to the United States for criminal prosecution under American espionage laws; and finally, considering that Putin has much blood on his hands given past policies pursued in relation to Chechnya and in the autocratic treatment of domestic political opposition, it was hard to expect anything benevolent during his watch.

And so Putin is emerging as a virtual ‘geopolitical black swan,’ making unanticipated moves of such a major characterRead More »

Nukes are nuts !

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By David Krieger
Krieger is one of the three TFF Associates nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize

When asked by a reporter why nuclear weapons are useless, Colin Powell, former US secretary of state and four-star general said: “Because they’re such horrible weapons. And so no sane leader would ever want to cross that line to using nuclear weapons. And, if you are not going to cross that line, then these things are basically useless.” In other words, one could say, nukes are nuts.

There are innumerable global security issues that need to be addressed, some of which are poverty, terrorism, the climate crisis, pollution of the oceans, loss of biodiversity and forest depletion. Not one of these issues can be addressed with nuclear weapons. In fact, nuclear weapons draw much-needed resources away from solving these global problems. Nukes are nuts.

Nuclear weapons are justified by their possessors for nuclear deterrence, but nuclear deterrence is only a hypothesis about human behavior. Read More »

Syrien – hvad kunne være gjort og hvad kan stadig gøres?

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– Eller: Sådan har vi svigtet Syrien

Publiceret 13 september 2013 på Ræson online

Af Jan Øberg, docent

Hvis det er fred, verden vil have, er det et ynkeligt spil vi har set, mener fredsforskeren Jan Øberg, medstifter og direktør for den Transnationale Stiftelse for Freds- og Fremtidsforskning i Lund – www.transnational.org

Gad vide hvor mange mislykkede krige vi endnu skal igennem før især politikere og medier opdager det indlysende faktum at der findes et temmeligt bredt spektrum af handlingsmuligheder mellem at gøre ingenting og at smadre et land når konflikter dukker op?

Det spektrum hedder konflikthåndtering og tilhører et fagområde der undervises i rundt om på verdens universiteter. Det kræver at FNs medlemsstater etablerer ”styrker” af uddannede konfliktanalytikere, facilitatorer, mæglere, områdeeksperter, forhandlere og forsoningsterapeuter, der kan rykke ud endnu hurtigere end de kan sende krydsermissiler og F-16 fly.

For at dette spektrum kan blive inddraget forudsættes endvidere at regeringer ikke direkte ønsker krig under foregivende af at have gode og ofte humanitære motiver hvor de i virkeligheden har rå interesser.

Med andre ord, man kan gøre noget ved den manifeste konfliktanalfabetisme, der først søger militære løsninger og – som en række danske politikere – hurtigt tilsidesætter folkeretten og FNs fornemste normRead More »

TFF nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

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TFF PressInfo, September 12, 2013

Summary

The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), founded on September 12, 1985 – today 28 years ago – is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2013 and so are three TFF Associates:

• Richard Falk, professor in international law at Santa Barbara and Princeton, the UN S-G’s envoy for the Occupied Territories;
• David Krieger, founder (1982) and president of The Nuclear Age Foundation devoted to nuclear abolition;
• Jan Oberg, co-founder and director of TFF.

Background

World renown expert on the Nobel Peace Prize, Norwegian lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl*, says:

– Nobel dedicated his prize to “the “champions of peace” (not to “peace” in general). Not that many of those we know from open sources are nominated this year are qualified, but a select few are eligible, like the American Professor Richard Falk, Norwegian Ambassador Gunnar Garbo, American David Krieger of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the former Director General of UNESCO Federico Mayor, Spain, Swedish peace scientist and organizer Jan Oberg, as well as American Professor of peace education Betty Reardon.

– These clearly are the kind of “champions of peace” described in Nobel’s will, working for global disarmament based on global law.Read More »

Caucasus leaving the Cold War

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By Johan Galtung
Writing from Tbilisi, Georgia

With Georgia (4.5 million) a client of the USA (314 million), fighting its war in Afghanistan; Armenia (3.3 million) leaning towards Russia (143 million); and Azerbaijan (9.2 million) in a bitter conflict over the Armenian enclave Karabagh on much of its territory (less so over the Azeri enclave Nakhichevan on Armenian soil), the stage is set. Add the Russian cultural enclaves in Georgia–Abkhazia and South Ossetia–recognized by few, but some, as states, and visits to Caucasus were a time machine trip back to the Cold War.

But that is not all where Georgia is concerned. There is also the Muslim Adjara enclave bordering on Turkey, and Azeris, Armenians and others, living in the very multinational Georgia, some with strong territorial attachments. People of at least 28 nations live among and around each other in the Caucasus. But modernity demanded clear state borders, also in what became in 1922 the Soviet Union. The state system did not fit the nation system, but states there must be, all over, subjecting dozens of minorities to dominant nations that create illusions by imprinting the three states with their names.

Same as in Europe. Read More »

The US has no credibility dealing with chemical weapons

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By Stephen Zunes

This is an updated and expanded version of the article “The US and Chemical Weapons: No Leg to Stand On,” originally posted in Foreign Policy in Focus on May 2, 2013.

Had the United States pursued a policy stemming the proliferation of chemical and other nonconventional weapons through region-wide disarmament, when it was proposed in 2003 by Syria, it is likely there would be no apparent use of such ordnance and no present rush to war on that basis, says Zunes.

The Syrian regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilian areas on August 21 constitutes a breach of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, one of the world’s most important disarmament treaties, which banned the use of chemical weapons.

In 1993, the international community came together to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), a binding international treaty that would also prohibit the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, and transfer or use of chemical weapons. Syria is one of only eight of the world’s 193 countries not party to the convention.

However, US policy regarding chemical weapons has been so inconsistent and politicized that the United States is in no position to take leadership in any military response to any use of such weaponry by Syria. Continue reading at TruthOut

Mankind’s lifestyle in the year 2250

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By Jonathan Power

In 1776 Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations” which has guided economists and political thinkers ever since. It marks the start of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and then spread throughout most of the world. That was 237 years ago.

It is not that long ago – only 4 life-spans or so, the time of your great, great, great, grandparents. Where will we be 237 years hence? Presumably just as today we listen to Mozart, born 257 years ago, and watch or read Shakespeare, born 439 years ago – they have survived all changing tastes and spread well outside their original orbit of European culture to countries as varied as Japan, China, Argentina, Tanzania and South Korea – we can be sure that generations to come will have much the same cultural interests.

In all likelihood in 2250 we will probably still enjoy tastes picked up from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – perhaps the Beatles, Picasso, some of the outstanding Nigerian and Indian novelists writing today or the pristine recordings of the magnificent Chinese classical violinists and pianists now emerging. We won’t have better artists – who can ever rival Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy or Shakespeare?- but a handful who are as good.

Our religions will persistRead More »