21st Century Vision

Loud sing cuckoo

Because they bear so strongly on Britain's role at the United Nations and in international affairs more generally, we have often given prominence here to issues of legality and indeed morality as regards the conduct of the West Asian wars. Unless we are pacifists, however, we must also recognise that there are other considerations:  the political goals must be supported by the military strategy and that in turn by the tactics adopted and the means to implement them. We recently reported General Sir Richard Dannatt's forthright reservations as to the overall aims of these wars (13th October). Now, in an interview in last Sunday's Observer (29th October), his predecessor as Chief of the General Staff, General Charles (now Lord) Guthrie adds his pennyworth. Here are extracts from the paper's summary.

"Tony Blair's most trusted military commander yesterday branded as 'cuckoo' the way Britain's overstretched army was sent into Afghanistan. The remarkable rebuke by General the Lord Guthrie came in an Observer interview, his first since quitting as Chief of the Defence Staff five years ago, in which he made an impassioned plea for more troops, new equipment and more funds for a 'very, very' over-committed army.

The decision by Guthrie, an experienced Whitehall insider and Blair confidant, to go public is likely to alarm Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence more than the recent public criticism by the current army chief Sir Richard Dannatt. 'Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan - anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known] - to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going on in Iraq is cuckoo,' Guthrie said.

In an unprecedented show of scepticism towards Blair, he said the Prime Minister's promise to give the army 'anything it wants' was unrealistic. 'I'm sure he meant what he said. He is not dishonest. But there is no way you can magic up trained RAF crews, or trained soldiers, quickly. You can't magic up helicopters, because there aren't any helicopters,' said Guthrie. Britain was 'reaping the whirlwind' for assuming too great a 'peace dividend' after the Cold War and risks being ill-equipped for a whole new set of dangers.

He also cast doubt on suggestions of an early pullout from Iraq, saying that Britain could not afford to leave a 'bloodbath' behind.  'We have to stick with Iraq not least because in international terms the price of failure is far greater than in Afghanistan'. Iraq could cause problems in the region for years, he said, with implications for Jordan and Turkey, as well as for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states."

Last year the UN General Assembly recognised for the first time a collective "responsibility to protect" civilian populations against manifestly oppressive governments, including by military means should peaceful means be inadequate.  The interventions of Guthrie and Dannatt demonstrate not only poor political thinking as regards Iraq and Afghanistan, but more generally how far we are from any realistic ability to play a part in future UN protection operations.

Read the Observer's story in full

Climate Change - A Warning

The European commission has just reported that many member countries are falling drastically short of their targets in reducing carbon emissions and cutting greenhouse gases.

The European commission said that, based on current measures and policies, the emissions of the EU's original 15 members will be just 0.6% below 1990 levels by 2010. The EU-15 countries are committed under the Kyoto protocol to an 8% cut on 1990 levels by 2012. And this is far short of the target that some believe is necessary to avert global disaster – a cut of 90% in carbon emissions by 2030!

At the same time on Monday a report by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank warned that climate change could push the global economy into the worst recession in recent history.

Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, said this week that the Stern report showed that "if no action is taken we will be faced with the kind of downturn that has not been seen since the great depression and two world wars".

These findings come ahead of the UN conference on climate change in Nairobi early next month. Radical measures will have to be taken there and targets will have to be made binding to avert global chaos. At the moment, the 25 governments have set targets of up to 30% cuts by 2020 and 80% by 2050, but not made them binding.

American Support for the UN is Strong

A large majority of Americans believe in a strong United Nations and continue to support active U.S. engagement with the UN. According to a poll we released yesterday, 78% of Americans believe “it is in America’s best interest to continue to actively support the United Nations.” Americans are also aware of the key role the UN is playing on international security issues, with 76% of those polled believing “recent events prove we need to make the United Nations stronger so it can do more to address problems like terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”

Key Findings include:

78% of Americans believe “it is in America's best interest to continue to actively support the United Nations.” (% Agree: 61% GOP/78% IND/91% DEM)

76% of Americans believe “recent events prove we need to make the United Nations stronger so it can do more to address problems like terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.” (% Agree: 69% GOP/71% IND/85% DEM)

74% of Americans believe “ t he U.S. needs the UN now more than ever because we cannot bear all the burden and cannot afford to pay to go it alone around the world.” (% Agree: 59% GOP/75% IND/86% DEM)

74% of Americans agree with the following statement: “ The U.S. right now has the power to influence what happens at the UN and make sure America's interests are protected through its position on the UN Security Council. It would be a mistake for the U.S. to withdraw from the UN.” (% Agree: 61% GOP/71% IND/87% DEM)

73% of Americans agree with the following statement: “ The United Nations was created after World War Two to help put an end to global warfare. It is frustrating, but it works. There have been no world wars since then and the United Nations has played a critical role because it provides each nation a forum to air grievances and to work out problems to help stop major conflicts. That is a role no other organization plays and it is a role that is more important than ever today.” (% Agree: 56% GOP/73% IND/87% DEM)

Read more ….

The politician's dilemma

To save his job or to save the planet?

Tony Blair is as aware as anybody that climate change is a huge threat to civilisation and perhaps even to the continued existence of the human race. He has said so - in slightly more compromising terms - several times. So have several of his ministers, most notably Margaret Beckett since she took over as Foreign Secretary.

But if he starts to take the drastic action necessary to save us all from disaster (assuming it's not too late already), he calculates that he will lose votes, and - worse! - he will lose corporate donations. The aficionados of cheap flights, the motoring lobby and the oil industry will rise up together and smite him hip and thigh. Why this should bother him when he is going to be stepping down within the year anyway I do not understand, but it does. I also happen to think his judgement is wrong. A substantial proportion of the electorate is getting very worried about climate change and are looking for a governmental lead; they would follow him if he were brave enough to make the case and follow through - and he's good at making cases, having had lots of practice with much worse ones than this. There would certainly be plenty of opposition, but also much relief. In any case, his big concern now appears to be his legacy, and "The man who led us down the road to catastrophe" doesn't have quite the ring I think he's looking for.

The crunch, though, for anyone, politician or otherwise, is what do you do when you perceive that inaction spells certain disaster for many while action may mean personal sacrifice? When the disaster is planet-wide and possibly species suicide, and the personal sacrifice is a job you will only have for a short while longer anyway, to fail to act is quite monumentally, staggeringly cowardly.

Yet Mr Blair continues to promote airport expansion and road building. He has resisted for as long as he could the introduction of a Climate Change Bill. Having now apparently bowed to the inevitable in the face of the signatures of over 400 MPs on an early Day Motion, he seeks to emasculate it by holding out against statutory year-on-year targets. We've seen what happens to long-term, non-statutory targets with the failure to meet the minimal aims he set himself at the time of Kyoto. It is fine to have long-term goals, but you also need to keep checking as you go along: are we in line to meet the targets? That means you need to know where you should have got to at any given time, and that's where year-on-year targets come in. When you miss one - and you will, after suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, even if you are doing all you should - you know to try a bit harder next year.

Mr Blair is a strange mixture: so impervious to public opinion over Iraq, so scared of it over climate change. And maybe that's the comparison that gives it all away. His Master's Voice does not want anything to do with tackling climate change, so neither does the faithful poodle.

What can we do in the face of such intransigence? We could wait to see what that other faithful poodle (maybe more the whipped cur, baring its teeth behind the master's back) Gordon Brown does when he finally slips the leash, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Anyway the problem is too urgent to wait. A first step is to join the National Climate March from Grosvenor Square to Trafalgar Square on Saturday week, or the I-Count mass rally in Trafalgar Square with which it will join up. See the Campaign Against Climate Change or Friends of the Earth for details. Ther'll be plenty of organisations there competing for your support if you want to do more.

There are events happening that day and the following Saturday around the world to coincide with the UN Climate Talks in Nairobi from Nov 6th to 17th. Click here for details of those.

Read the Independent's report on the state of play on the Climate Change Bill, or the Times' version. Check whether your MP has signed the EDM calling for a Climate Change Bill with teeth.

Business as usual?

Longstanding critics of the West's military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon might be forgiven a certain degree of schadenfreude as the true horror of the war party's position becomes apparent - even to them. As this blog has pointed out, many of the predictions made by the anti-war movement - the dubiety of the case for Iraqi possession of WMD, the likelihood of an increased rather than diminished terrorist threat, the unreality of the idea of "implanting" democracy by the gun - have been more than borne out. There is a temptation to indulge in a bout of self-satisfied "We told you so, listen to us next time."

That however would be to play the game of business as usual. OK, perhaps the House of Representatives will fall to the Democrats next month, perhaps the Senate too. Maybe Labour will be slaughtered in next May's local elections. Goodness, Donald Rumsfeld might be replaced, and - most extreme "business as usual" possibility of all - Mr Blair might let slip that he will leave office two weeks earlier than originally planned (whenever that was). But should we allow those who brought about this debacle to choreograph their departure from the scene, reputations and all the trappings intact?

Let us pause for a moment to consider some of the casualties of these wars -

• Many hundreds of thousands of civilians dead - often children, often in abominable agony with no access to medical care
• More coalition troops killed than died in the attack on the World Trade Centre
• Tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds worth of damage to hospitals, schools, roads, power systems and sanitation, with reconstruction funds often syphoned off by corrupt interests
• A flood of cheap heroin heading for a street near you

And then there are the less tangible casualties. In Britain these include -

• The spectacle of an executive which deceived and dissembled to make the case for a war that few officials actually believed in, in short systemic professional collapse
• The exposure of a media which - with the honourable exceptions of the Independent and the Morning Star, and some columnists in other papers - largely failed to question the mendacity of a government not subject to significant constitutional constraint
• A profound attack on civil liberties, including the acceptability of evidence obtained through torture
  
• And then there is the Labour Party. Again with honourable exceptions (though after you have mentioned Robin Cook it gets harder to name them), it has revealed itself to be governed by a venal pursuit of preferment which would have shamed members of the unreformed Commons of the eighteenth century

And in Iraq another casualty has been the effective destruction of democratic - but not knee-jerk pro-Western - forces, through assassination and emigration.

And what of the UN? In the way they began these wars, and in the way they apparently propose to end them, the US and Britain have treated the Security Council as a cab rank from which to hire international "cover" when required. True the UN baulked at the attack on Iraq, but went some way to endorsing the occupation nonetheless (SCR 1483, para 4).  It now appears the US and the UK are contemplating withdrawing with none of the stated objectives for governance and economic reconstruction achieved and even the territorial integrity of the country fatally compromised. These states, together with their fair weather allies, have undermined the effectiveness of the UN and tainted its legitimacy.

This is not a time for business as usual. It is a time for ensuring that vainglorious and posturing leaders can no longer unleash havoc unchallenged - at home or in New York.

A True Hero

The Nobel Prize Committee have made one or two eyebrow-raising decisions in awarding the Peace Prize over the years - the award to Henry Kissinger stands out - but their decision to award this year's prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded is spot on.

Yunus was not the first to give microcredit loans, but he seems to have been the first to work out a reliable methodology and to use that methodology on a large scale. His insight was to stand normal banking on its head. When he is asked about the philosophy of Grameen, his usual reply is "Whatever normal banks do, I did the opposite: if they lent to the rich, I lent to the poor; if they made large loans, I made small loans; if they wanted collateral, my loans were collateral-free; if they lent to men, I lent to women; if they needed lots of paperwork, my loans were illiterate-friendly; if they made borrowers come to the bank, I went to them".

The whole thing started in 1974, during a famine in Bangladesh. Yunus, then an economics professor at Chittagong University, started to feel uncomfortable that the neat economic theories he was teachung bore no relationship to the human disaster happening in the surrounding countryside. He walked to the nearest village, Jobra, and found a poor woman making beautiful bamboo stools, but unable to rise out of poverty. He discovered that she had no money to buy the bamboo, so was forced to borrow it from a money-lender, who also forced her to sell the finished stools to him - he could set the price and the interest-rate so that she was left with just barely enough to live on. Yunus set his students to scour the village for other women in the same boat, and they found 42. The total amount they needed between them to escape the clutches of the money-lenders was $42. Yunus lent the money from his own pocket, and an idea was born. Within a few years Yunus was the head of a bank (Grameen) lending millions of dollars to poor people, 95% women, a few dollars at a time, and getting a 98% repayment rate - at a time when commercial banks were getting 10%. By now, Grameen has lent $5.7 billion and has 6.6 million members. The idea works through groups of five women, each of whom supports the others in keeping their businesses going and repaying the loan. It works: estimates are that 200,000 Grameen borrowers leave poverty every year.

Worldwide over 92 million poor families are now benefitting from microcredit which, assuming five family members per family, makes close to half a billion people. Muhammad Yunus has also been at the forefront of efforts to get the message out to that wider audience, helped by the international advocacy group Results, and it was in a Results meeting as long ago as 1988 that I first heard about the Grameen Bank and its charismatic founder. Four years later I had the privelege of meeting him for the first time at the Bank's Dhaka headquarters. He is as modest and unassuming as one could wish one's heroes to be.

Microcredit is a powerful tool for bringing people out of poverty, and the Nobel Committee have recognised that the provider of such a tool makes as great a contribution to peace as any negotiator of a ceasefire, probably greater. The world needs more Muhammad Yunuses.

You can hear an hour-long 2004 interview with Yunus by clicking here, or check out the Grameen Bank here.

A pig of truth

In the last few days the efforts of the Blair government to contain the truth about the Iraq war have resembled nothing so much as a man trying to catch a greased pig in a dark entry. The frightened beast rushes from one end to the other. It can't get away, but neither can the man hold on to it.

The pig of truth first charged on 24th September (see our 25th September blog below), when the American press published last April's US National Intelligence Estimate, stating quite clearly that "the Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world". If the trend continued, "threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide." The man lunged, but too late: the greasy pig had slipped through his desperate grasp and the truth was out.

Then came Bob Woodward's devastating State of Denial (6th October blog), alleging that the US Administration was both lying to the public about Iraq and refusing to recognise realities. It had even deceived the man himself, "hatching a scheme to hoax the British into believing they were being kept fully informed"! This time the man hadn't seen the pig coming, and it ran straight between his legs squealing loudly enough for all to hear.

Soon afterwards The Lancet (12th October) published a research report from Johns Hopkins University in the US which extrapolated from extensive empirical research in Iraq to the conclusion that probably 650,000 Iraqis had died directly and indirectly as a result of the coalition invasion. That's one person in 40 across Iraq as a whole; in Britain it would mean 1,500,000 people. These sound like statistics from a nuclear war, and are undoubtedly the result of "mass destruction". What could the man do? Muttering "implausible" and "methodology", he simply aimed a vicious kick at the protesting pig as it darted past him again.

But why, you might ask, was the animal so terrified? Because, as a pig of truth, it well knew what was intended: destination abattoir.

Then, with the increasingly disoriented man thinking the pig was at one end of the entry, it charged him from the other. No less a person than the Chief of the General Staff (can we say that again: the Chief of the General Staff, Britain's top military officer) stated that Britain must withdraw from Iraq "soon" or risk serious consequences for Iraqi and British society (13th October blog). Our presence there "exacerbates the security problems". This time the man could do nothing but pretend to be a pig himself, claiming to agree with everything the general said. By now the real pig's squeals sounded more like hysterical laughter.

Next day the pig got more slippery still, thanks to an Oxfordshire coroner, who found that ITN journalist Terry Lloyd had been "unlawfully killed" by US troops in Iraq in the early days of the war. He would be writing to the government to demand action to bring the killers to justice. The pig was now making so much noise that everyone was complaining. Something must be done, or its squeals of truth would deafen them all.

But deafness, in fact, is exactly what seems to have happened. While the press flits from today's story to tomorrow's, we have no mechanism to hold the man to account. He will never catch the pig, but he need hardly worry. His friends in parliament have seen to that.

We Should Leave Iraq

The presence of UK armed forces in Iraq "exacerbates the security problems" and they should "get out some time soon", the head of the British Army has said.

Sir Richard Dannatt who is Chief of the General Staff told the Daily Mail that the military campaign fought in 2003 had "effectively kicked the door in".

Echoing what many believe and documented in the latest book by Bob Woodward, Sir Richard also said that initial planning for the post-war period had been poor and that planning for what happened after the initial successful war military offensive was "poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning".

In his interview, Sir Richard added that any initial tolerance "has largely turned to intolerance. That is a fact". He explained that "We are in a Muslim country and Muslims' views of foreigners in their country are quite clear. "As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren't invited certainly by those in Iraq at the time." 

He added: "Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance."

Various UNA events

There are a number of UNA events coming up which local members may be interested in:

1. We have a street collection in Palmers Green on Saturday Oct 21st. Let Jack Piachaud know at [email protected] if you can help.

2. There is a lobby of Parliament on Tuesday Oct 24th. Information will be in the next issue of New World - let's hope it arrives before then!

3. Also on the 24th, UNA Westminster have their AGM at Portcullis House (opposite Big Ben) at 6.30, followed by two guest speakers (Joan Ruddock MP and Dr Shatha Beserani, founder of the Iraqi Women for Peace and Democracy Campaign) on the subject of "Women, peace and security: What progress since UN Security Council Resolution 1325?"

4. On Monday Oct 30th, at 7.30, the Golders Green and Hendon branch are hosting a lecture by their President and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Martin Bell on "The UN and UNICEF in the Troubled World" at the Trinty Church, Hodford Road, Golders Green.

5. The London and SE Region has its AGM at Croydon Town Hall on Saturday Nov 4th at 12.30. Lunch and refreshments provided. See their website for details of the agenda.

6. Westminster UNA again, and they are organising a UN Documentary Film Festival on the Millennium Development Goals at the NFT on Saturday Dec 2nd, with 22 films (some of them very short) over 4 sessions. See their website for details and timings.

Korean Atom - Far Eastern Atom

The Korean peninsula is that bit, by northern China, sticking out like a thumb towards Japan, just below the Russian eastern seaboard.  It is far away, almost the other side of the globe, but it has a sinister relevance for us here in the UK.  The question is not, Where is North Korea? but, Why is North Korea? 

This peninsula is home to an ancient civilisation over 4000 years old.  In 676 AD the Kingdom of Korea was formed and remained intact, apart from occupation, until 1945, when it was split by the Americans and the Soviets as they both coveted its strategic importance.  In the 1600s it had been briefly occupied by the Manchurian invasions that took over China, then for 200 years isolated itself from foreign contact. At the end of the 1800s Japanese expansion took increasing interest and annexed Korea from 1910 till the end of WW2, with stories of brutal suppression during this occupation.   

In the period post WW2 the North was strongly supported by Russia, with whom it shares a short northern border, and in 1950, it suited Russian strategic interest to allow the North to invade the South, under the banner of liberation and unification, driving out the US influence.  This lead to the first proxy war between the nuclear superpowers; although US and Chinese troops were heavily involved, Soviet input was “advisory”.  The UN came in to support the South.  There was serious risk of WW3 and use of nuclear weapons. Over 2.5 million people died, including an estimated 11% of the North Korean population; for every death in war there are at least 3 people injured.

After seeking some support from the Soviets and from China, then loosing out in the Sino-Soviet fallout, North Korea pursued a policy of isolation and independence. But after the 1973 oil crisis its industry began to decline.  In December 1985, North Korea signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) under pressure from the Soviet Union.  In 1991 the U.S. withdraw its 100 tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea, but in 1998 the US military were carrying out a simulated nuclear strike against N Korea and the 2001 US Nuclear Posture Review identified North Korea as an "immediate contingency" that sets requirements for U.S. nuclear strike capabilities.

So after 200 years of isolation Korea is brutally occupied by Japan, is then split apart by Russia and the US, is manipulated by Russia, the US and China and tears itself apart in a bloody war and then develops two paranoid states, one of which became increasingly isolated, the other rescued by large amounts of international aid.

N Korea is pressed to work out its problems within the group of six, being the very group of countries that have so destroyed it; Russia, China, Japan, US and S Korea. 

Of these, three are nuclear states, the other two have defence treaties with the US, including the “nuclear umbrella”.  In 2004 the IAEA criticised S Korea for secretly enriching Uranium; the country has 19 power reactors and one of the biggest nuclear programs in the world.  Japan, which has enriched uranium and plutonium stores, is reported to have nuclear technology amounting to being a "paranuclear state”, with no material or technological difficulties in making nuclear weapons. Where are the mediators in this group.

As Iraq and the Middle East oil conflicts are a legacy of WW1, so Korea is a legacy of WW2.  Born out of killing on a dreadful scale, a paranoid a-social state has formed.  The solution is obvious, look after it, give it resources and make it enagaged again – this is the solution which worked for the South. But instead it will continue to be denied, blamed, bullied and harried, which is a dangerous thing to do with paranoia.

Last week the Vatican accused the world of sleepwalking to nuclear proliferation.  They are wrong.  It has been a deliberate choice of the Nuclear Weapons States, to hang onto their weapons and develop new ones, in flagrant breach of the NPT.   This has been a long time coming and could have been avoided.  It still can be avoided if the carrot is big enough and the stick is not the only tool of diplomacy.