contexploration

Tony Blair said in his speech: “[T]he rule book of international politics has been torn up. Interdependence - the fact of a crisis somewhere becoming a crisis everywhere - makes a mockery of traditional views of national interest. You can't have a coherent view of national interest today without a coherent view of the international community.” I agree, but the world needs supranational alliances between like-minded liberal democracies to make this possible. Unfortunately - considering the British attitude towards European integration - other European countries have political leaders better qualified to take part in this discussion than the British PM.

IRAQ Qubad Talabani, representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington D.C., writes the following: “Similarly, equal rights for women should be a given in any democracy. Sadly, that is not the case in Iraq. Despite the best efforts of the U.S., the Kurds and the Iraqi left, certain groups want to relegate women to second-class citizenship. The imposition of an undefined Shariah law in Iraq would place an unelected clergy in charge of Iraqi society, a recipe for disaster and a betrayal of civil liberties.” From the article “What the Kurds want.”

Read this story of hope from Baghdad of how Iraqi soldiers managed to stop an abduction attempt: “Although I should worry that a new kidnapping wave has reached the neighborhood, I feel that there is still some hope. Iraqi soldiers proved that they are working well. By the cooperation of the people, we will defeat all the enemies that turned our country into rubble. I am proud of A, my neighbor who proved that there is nothing impossible and that there is always a way to defeat the enemy.” writes the Iraqi writer of the blog Treasure of Baghdad.

THE BRITISH LEFT AND MILITARY INTERVENTION Norman Geras (University of Manchester/Euston Manifesto) examines the geography of the British left in the Guardian: “The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that [anti-war demonstration held in London on] Saturday on February 15 2003 from which one would never have known that Saddam's Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily papers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George Bush.”

For a background article on Tony Blair’s foreign policy, read Oliver Kamm’s piece in Progress, the Labour modernizers’ magazine. Kamm writes: “What overcame communist totalitarianism in eastern Europe was partly collective security involving alliances and military preparedness. But, at root, it was the power of an idea: the appeal of an open and liberal society, as opposed to a closed and sclerotic one. The task of western governments against a new totalitarian threat – though a very old, atavistic totalitarian idea, in Islamist fanaticism – is similarly to implant the notion of freedom.”

I just finished reading former UN high commissioner for refugees Sadako Ogata’s book The Turbulent Decade, in which she makes the case for armed, humanitarian interventions in light of the 1990s failures in Rwanda and the first part of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Today the American and European public is disillusioned by the Iraq project. Some commentators, like Caleb Carr in the Washington Post recently, even want an effective disengagement from the world – as if the current humanitarian conflicts would vanish if the international community just stopped focusing on them. Reading the Ogata-memoirs was refreshing, and it is a reminder that the world was not a peaceful oasis back in the old days when Saddam Hussein was dictator of Iraq, George W. Bush was governor of Texas and the threat posed by a man named Osama bin Laden was not on top of president Bill Clinton's national security agenda.

CENSORSHIP: The British journalist Nick Cohen has written an important comment in The Observer. The London exhibition of the art work of Indian Maqbool Fida Husain has been closed after threats from religious fanatics, in this case Hindu fundamentalists. The Asia House gallery sided with the fanatics instead of the artist. As with the cartoon controversy, many Europeans are more than willing to succumb to threats of violence from superstitious thugs. Nick Cohen writes: “What is depressing is that, apart from a letter to the Guardian […] the closure of a major exhibition by fanatics has passed without comment. British troops are fighting against forces motivated by the religious fervour of the ultra right. British police officers arrest suspects they claim are inspired to kill because they, too, have a psychotic religious mission. Yet every week, comedians, art gallery owners, TV producers, newspaper editors and Home Office ministers give in to religious extremists. This is no way to win a war.”

NORWEGIAN LINKS The Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv has a new piece of brilliant journalism by Lars Backe Madsen in this Saturday’s edition: “Pengene bak FrP”. The story details the South African apartheid regime’s hand in financing the establishment of the Norwegian right wing Populist Party Fremskrittspartiet in the 1970s, a part of Norway's political history that I was completely unaware of. South African archives show that a considerable amount of 180.000 Norwegian crowns was distributed to Fremskrittspartiet’s leader Anders Lange from a secret South African fund before the 1973 parliamentary elections. (The Populist Party was at that time named “Anders Langes parti” and the leader was a supporter of apartheid, according to party veteran Thor Petter Krosby.) As detailed in former disinformation officer Eschel Rhoodie’s book “The Real Information Scandal,” the South African secret service hoped to influence Norwegian politics by supporting Anders Lange. Fremskrittspartiet did well in the elections. Rhoodie writes: “To our great surprise we [the South African secret service] ended up with four representatives in the Norwegian parliament.” The Norwegian shipping industry provided the South African apartheid regime with 40% of its oil deliveries through ships owned or controlled by Norwegians businessmen. Only in 1986 did the Norwegian parliament outlaw such deliveries.

The financial daily Dagens Næringsliv’s Saturday edition once again manages to provide high quality insight into politics, economy and labour. Of course, I would have wished that leftist newspapers like Klassekampen or Dagbladet’s Memo could have been able to produce such impressive investigative journalism. In March Dagens Næringsliv also printed an excellent 16-page supplement on European labour migration: “Europa i bevegelse” The story had numerous perspectives: Legal labour immigration, illegal immigration, statistics, the effects of emigration on labour markets in Poland and other Eastern European countries, a report from the Eastern European community of migrants in Dublin, Ireland. It was a first-rate informative piece of work, which I still keep handy whenever writing about Europe.