Part of life is to plant trees that other people will sit under. Somebody planted a tree for me long ago in the form of an educational institution and I sat under that tree, metaphorically. The same happened in one area after another in my life. (Warren Buffett)

Is the US ambassador the only confidant of Indian politicians and bureaucrats?

wikileaks
The Call Of The American Demarche
Does India really follow the US lead as blindly as the Wikileaks cables seem to suggest?
Pranay Sharma

A Few Views Through The Cablegate

Cable 162458 July 17, 2008: Claims Congress MP Satish Sharma's aide, Nachiketa Kapur, confided to an embassy official that RLD MPs had been bribed Rs 10 crore each and showed him two chests containing Rs 50-80 crore for bribing Opposition MPs before a no-confidence vote against UPA-I.

Cable 195165 March 4, 2009: Home Minister P. Chidambaram confides to FBI chief that the constitutional status of the National Investigation Agency is debatable.

Cable 220281 Aug 11, 2009: US ambassador Timothy Roemer is told by NSA M.K. Narayanan that he differs with PM Singh on his policy to engage Pakistan.

Cable 206814 May 13, 2009: BJP leader L.K. Advani says his party, if it were to come to power, would rethink its decision of opposing the nuclear deal.

Cable 243925 Jan 15, 2010: M.K. Narayanan tells US ambassador Roemer that Chidambaram needs someone “to check him and put a bit in his mouth”. Congress leader Digvijay Singh says Narayanan had to leave because of his turf war with the home minister.

Cable No 215357 July 7, 2009: Quotes India's PR to the UN Hardeep Puri saying his “clear” brief from New Delhi is to seek “a greater degree of convergence with the US” in the UN.

Cable No 205168 May 1, 2009: Cites joint secretary (Americas) Gaitri Kumar saying that the US should convey to the MEA any complaint about Puri's functioning in the UN.

Cable No 149884 April 15, 2008: An MEA official informs the US about the Iranian president's visit to India even before the information is made public or conveyed to other government agencies.

Cable No. 64794 May 19, 2006: Indian deputy PR Ajai Malhotra criticises his boss, Nirupam Sen, for opposing the US in UN, says his brief is to oppose him.

Cable 225053 Sept 14, 2009: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wants to know about finance minister Pranab Mukherjee's ideological orientation, and why Montek Singh Ahluwalia wasn't given that post.

Cable 40501 Sept 13, 2005: Ambassador David Mulford asks Condoleezza Rice to tell Manmohan Singh that India's decision to not vote on Iran in the IAEA could have an adverse impact on the nuclear deal.

Cable 51088 Jan 30, 2006: Mulford hails the sacking of Mani Shankar Aiyar from the petroleum ministry, and says the cabinet reshuffle has an "undeniable pro-America tilt".

***

As Parliament stalled repeatedly over the sensational Wikileaks cables and the nation was left aghast at the seemingly unfettered access American officials have to the corridors of power in New Delhi, you’d have thought the Indian officialdom had been warned about the perils of rubbing shoulders with all those whose calling cards mention the Embassy of the United States of America. Yet, indifferent to the shock and awe The Hindu-Wikileaks cables generated, a government luminary had the chutzpah to accommodate in his breathless schedule a meeting with a middle-rung American official, to brief him, of all things, on the functioning of his department. It was a gross violation of protocol—the Indian official’s rank meant he met none other than the American ambassador.

Last week also saw a leader of a coalition partner of the UPA government desperately seek from the US embassy a special slot for a visa interview for his son, in the hope of helping him circumvent long queues. Imagine the scenario before the little Wikileaks bombs exploded so dramatically? Secretary-level officials of different ministries readily furnish their mobile numbers to US embassy officials and provide appointments to them without going through the Union ministry of external affairs (MEA). In fact, all those who matter in New Delhi—from politicians to industrialists to opinion-makers—vie with each other to have a one-to-one meeting with the Americans, sharing information and gossip, and unwittingly articulating, often highlighting, the American point of view on sensitive issues.

There are simply too many Indian tongues whispering into the American ear, spilling, as the Wikileaks cables (see infographic) bear out, sensitive aspects of Indian foreign policy, relations between top politicians, their ideological inclinations, even their machinations, and their propensity to strike strong anti-America poses only for public consumption. So then, are we America’s chamcha, a lackey willing to do its bidding? Is America’s penetration of the Indian system worrying?

Take the cable that quotes an American official saying he had been shown two chests of cash by Congress MP Satish Sharma’s aide, Nachiketa Kapur, who claimed the money would soon be utilised for bribing Opposition MPs to vote against the no-confidence motion against UPA-I. A school of thought argues that the money was perhaps America’s, supplied by an intelligence operative, and Kapur was only accounting for the cash to the official who had come calling on him. “What was the need for Kapur to otherwise show the cash to the official? It proves America has become a player in our system,” says one diplomatic source.

A tad exaggerated perhaps. Yet, Kapur’s candour illustrates vividly the confidence an aide of an important MP reposes in the Americans. Says former foreign minister and BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, “Since the US hasn’t spoken about the authenticity of the cables, these are therefore deemed genuine. It’s an invasion by the Americans into the Indian system.” Endorsing Sinha is former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh, who was miffed to discover that his parleys with Myanmarese leaders during his 2005 trip to Yangon had been relayed to the US, quite obvious from a Wikileaks cable. “How many moles do we have? The American penetration of the Indian establishment is alarming indeed,” he said, adding that the controversy shows the Manmohan government in “poor light”.


Waltzing to whose tune? A US embassy party in New Delhi. (Photograph by Sanjoy Ghosh)

A clutch of cables pertaining to the United Nations bolsters the theory about America penetrating the Indian system. One cable quotes India’s Permanent Representative in the UN, Hardeep Puri, as saying that his specific brief is to seek a “greater degree of convergence” with the US, in contrast to his predecessor, Nirupam Sen’s. Another cable has an Indian official criticise Sen’s ‘anti-US’ approach. But the former diplomat asks of his detractors: “Since I was perceived by at least some American diplomats in an adversarial light, how was I able to continue there for another two years after retiring on March 31, 2007?” Sen wasn’t willing to provide the answer, but MEA sources say he was given an extension at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, who wanted to correct UPA's pro-Washington tilt.

Yet, the pro-America lobby in the UPA-I regime felt emboldened enough to scuttle a fundamental change in the UN that Sen had initiated, only to please the Americans. This pertained to the choice of a candidate for the post of UN secretary-general. Under a 1946 resolution, described as 11/1, the US and other P-5 members of the Security Council (SC), along with the support of four non-permanent members, send only one name for the approval of General Assembly (GA). This practice had once led Sen to remark that the UN secretary-general acted more like a “secretary to the P-5” and a “general to the General Assembly”.

Sen and some members of the GA, therefore, proposed that it be made mandatory for the SC to shortlist at least three names for the post of secretary-general. South Block, sources say, initially tried to dissuade Sen from pursuing this course, but he remained steadfast saying he needed a written order before he could retract from his position. It was then that South Block turned wily, writing a new script that, sources insist, was truly Machiavellian—and aimed at pleasing the Americans.

What was that script? In 2006, Shashi Tharoor threw his hat in the ring, not as an official Indian candidate, but as an ‘independent’ who, straw polls indicated, enjoyed tremendous popularity in the UN and was supposed to give the SC (read the US) nominee a run for the money. Sources say a nervous US asked New Delhi to endorse Tharoor as its official candidate. The announcement sowed seeds of doubt among the GA members who perceived Sen’s attempt to alter 11/1 as a ruse to win for India the post of secretary-general. The GA became badly divided, provoking many of its members to abandon the plan of rewriting 11/1—and diluting the powers of P-5.

Yet another example of the craven behaviour of Indian officials towards America is borne out by the experience of Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, whose divestment of the petroleum ministry portfolio is celebrated in a Wikileaks cable. The Americans thought Aiyar was anti-America, a charge he dismisses outright. “I was disappointed (at the divestment),” says Aiyar, “but I don’t believe it was because of pressure from outside.”

But what rankled Aiyar was that then US ambassador David Mulford declared in a public speech that Murli Deora was better informed about the petroleum ministry than Aiyar. As he told Outlook, “While Mulford was perfectly within his rights to send secret cables to his government about us, to make a public statement comparing two ministers was an act of gross impropriety. I objected very strongly to it, and conveyed my protest to the foreign secretary. But instead of a public expression of deep displeasure, the foreign secretary preferred merely to whisper in the US ambassador’s ear. I thought it was inadequate.”

The love for America is a trait the BJP too shares with the Congress. One cable has the US embassy complaining to Washington that the NDA government gave them better access than the UPA. Again, BJP leader L.K. Advani was initially opposed to the idea of sending Indian troops to Iraq, but a 2003 trip to the US and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to his hotel room saw him accede to Washington. Ultimately, Indian troops weren’t sent because of prime minister A.B. Vajpayee’s opposition. Says Sinha, “There is no denying that there were elements even in the NDA who were very close to the US, but you should judge us by our actions.” He says it is well-documented that the BJP-led NDA warded off American pressure to sign the CTBT and the nuclear deal, believing these militated against India’s interest. (Analysts, however, say the NDA would have agreed to the nuclear deal had it been voted to power in 2004.)


The aggrieved Both Aiyar and Natwar Singh have bones to pick

What has enabled the Americans to make deep inroads into the Indian system? To begin with, the Indian middle class, to which the elite belong, has made an ideological shift to the US. Every middle-class family seems to have a member working in the US. It is the land where parents wish to send their children for education, and seasoned bureaucrats are keen on short-term courses in the American universities. Visas have granted the US embassy an unprecedented clout and reach. In addition, bureaucrats have seen three successive governments, beginning 1999, tilt away from Russia and inch closer to Washington. This shift has transmitted a message to the officialdom that America is the flavour of the season, engendering hopes in them of advancing their careers by taking a pro-US line in consonance with that of their political masters.

There’s no denying that America’s support to India has given it a considerable heft in the international arena. Says an Indian diplomat, “We have used the US as a stepladder.” Has the climb up the hierarchy of global powers compromised India’s sovereignty? And though a country’s interests keep shifting, and there’s always give-and-take in diplomacy, New Delhi can’t be seen to have bartered on possible gains of the future for America’s support, other than on Iran.

Iran remains a contentious issue among foreign policy wonks. Former foreign secretary Shyam Saran insists it was in India’s interest to have voted along with the US in the IAEA in 2005 (see interview). Again, Aiyar pursued the India-Pakistan-Iran (IPI) gas pipeline on the basis of a cabinet decision. Substantial progress was registered on the issue in the first two years of Aiyar’s departure from the petroleum ministry. But the pipeline subsequently got stalled because of the instability in Pakistan.

Perhaps the Wikileaks cables are a timely warning to India to draw certain lines in its relationship with the US. As Aiyar says, “My only suggestion to our ministries is to exercise greater discretion in their exchange with foreign diplomats. Do not retail gossip, be more disciplined.” Perhaps the furore over Wikileaks cables is a reminder to Indians to not be unduly enamoured of America, to not sacrifice their self-respect, to introduce a certain balance in its conduct of foreign policy.

Teach history warts and all

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: March 25 2011 23:10 | Last updated: March 25 2011 23:10

“Time to head off!” wisecracks the hooded executioner on the cover of Even More Terrible Tudors, one of the popular titles in the Horrible Histories series. “I’ve got a mammoth brain!” grunts a caveman on the cover of The Savage Stone Age, holding up the dripping organ in question, while his family, sitting in the background, cooks the rest of the mammoth. History-minded schoolboys buy these books – written or co-written by the Englishman Terry Deary and aimed at presenting “history with the nasty bits left in” – by the dozens.

The idea that the history of one’s own country should be as exhilarating to young readers as, say, cars exploding or ladies in bathing suits is a peculiarly British one. When Michael Gove, education secretary, told Conservatives at their party conference last October that the narrative of children’s history courses could stand to be a bit snappier, he started an argument that has riled British historians ever since. If people are uninspired by the country’s past, Mr Gove says, “we will not properly value the liberties of the present”. Mr Gove is nationalistic to say so, but he is right. If defending one’s rights requires knowing where they came from, then learning one’s own history is indispensable.

The argument is over how best to breathe life into a mass of facts and dates. For Mr Gove, the missing element is a strong narrative, built of real protagonists facing big challenges. The government enlisted as its history adviser Simon Schama of Columbia University (and the Financial Times), who has found a way to make European and British history enthralling, both in books and on screen. Mr Gove and Mr Schama have their detractors, however. The University of California historian of Britain, James Vernon, believes teaching works best “not by turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically”. Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian of Germany, is not hostile to the narrative lines dear to Mr Gove and Mr Schama, but warns us against getting swept up in them. In a recent London Review of Books essay, he urges scepticism towards sources and warns students “not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with”.

This is the point on which Mr Schama and Mr Evans are most likely to agree. Mr Schama, too, has described history as a force for challenging orthodoxies, as the “greatest, least sentimental, least politically correct tutor of tolerance”. And yet, this may be the point on which classroom teachers have their deepest doubts. The intellectual independence that Messrs Schama and Evans extol characterises only a minority of published historians – why should we expect it from A-level students? Should we even want it? There are, after all, problems with teaching scepticism. The questioning of authority is indispensable and often heroic, but one needs a certain “feel” for a subject matter before one can carry it out. Until that point, scepticism is little more than a truculent contrarianism and a waste of other students’ time. It is most tellingly applied to the things one knows best. Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down.

One wonders whether this is not Mr Gove and Mr Schama’s real gripe. Mr Evans accuses them of “confusing history with memory”. But maybe memory is what young people need to be taught before they can be taught actual history. An example of this memory/ history distinction comes from Black History Month, as it is taught in US grade schools. Children spend every February either learning or rehashing the achievements of African-Americans – always in a morale-boosting way. As history, such courses have little to recommend them. To treat the deeds of the 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth in greater detail than those of George Washington, which is the inevitable end-result of a dedicated month, is to perpetrate a distortion.

But as memory, Black History Month has been a striking success. Children, and not just black children, quite like it. The reasons are paradoxical. Probably no pedagogical innovation was ever carried out for reasons more political, but Black History Month is the least politically correct corner of the grade-school history curriculum. You always know who the good guys are in Black History Month and their struggles are taught with an old-fashioned, un-nuanced moralism that makes Our Island Story look like Hamlet. The results are plain to see. In 2008, education professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland released a survey of 2,000 11th- and 12th-graders (high-school leavers) who had been asked to name the 10 most significant Americans, excepting presidents. Three mainstays of Black History Month – Martin Luther King, the anti-segregationist protester Rosa Parks and the escaped slave Harriet Tubman – ranked one, two and three, well ahead of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

By about the age of eight or 10, children should have a simple, logical and non-cynical narrative of their country to carry around for the rest of their lives as a net to catch knowledge in. Non-cynical, because children cannot build such a net if teachers are running down the credibility of what they impart. That is the problem with teaching young people: there is a line on one side of which a teacher’s duty is to promote credulity and on the other side of which it is to promote scepticism. Errors are inevitable. But they will be self-correcting, to some extent. By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and “distance” as any educator could wish.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

African Dissent on No-Fly Zone Counts

By M K Bhadrakumar

"Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For, from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition."
- "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" speech by Martin Luther King Jr, April 4, 1967, New York

At the height of the Egyptian uprising, well-known American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview with al-Jazeera that the United States had a "Plan B" in the event of Hosni Mubarak stepping down. According to Hersh, it was none other than Amr Moussa - "whether he knows or not". There is nothing so far to show Moussa doesn't know.

He's far too well connected not to know - career diplomat and foreign minister for over 45 years and secretary general of Arab League (AL) since 2001. He hopes to succeed Mubarak as Egypt's next president.

Moussa delivers ...
Moussa's bid got great fillip by the AL decision Saturday to recommend imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. His star has risen far above Mohammed ElBaradei's. Two major Arab countries opposed the AL statement - Syria and Algeria - but Moussa rammed it through, thanks to the AL heavyweights clamoring for democracy to succeed and autocracy to end - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan.

What bizarre drama! The plain truth is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) commanded AL to speak since they need a fig leaf to approach the United Nations Security Council.

The EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, was in Cairo on Saturday by Moussa's side to ensure America's "Plan B" delivered. And he did. Promptly, the US, Britain, France and Canada "welcomed" the AL statement. NATO will meet on Tuesday to tone up its stance on Libya.

Britain and France, who spearhead the breathtaking campaign to mobilize Arab "support" for NATO intervention in Libya, have had a dream run. British Prime Minister David Cameron and newly-appointed French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe visited Cairo to explore how far the military junta could take charge of the oil-rich eastern Libyan province of Cyrenica.

... but Africa dissents
The Western powers had earlier mentioned the AL and African Union (AU) in the same breath as representing "regional opinion". Now it seems the AU isn't so important - it has become an embarrassment. African leaders are proving to be tough nuts to crack compared to Arab playboy-rulers.

Unsurprisingly, there is a virtual media blackout on the AU's activities on Libya. It is, therefore, useful to recapitulate. "The [AU] council reaffirms its firm commitment to the respect of the unity and territorial integrity of Libya, as well as its rejection of any form of foreign intervention in Libya," Ramtane Lamamra, AU commissioner for peace and security stated in Addis Abbaba. The AU's 15-member peace and security council decided to "put in lace a high-level ad-hoc committee" to monitor the Libyan crisis.

The leaders of South Africa, Uganda, Mauritania, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Mali would form the ad-hoc committee. "The ad hoc committee was set up ... to engage with all parties in Libya, facilitate an inclusive dialogue among them, and engage the African Union partners ... for the speedy resolution of the crisis in Libya," the bloc said. Lamamra said events in Libya needed "urgent African action" to bring about an end to the hostilities.

Most important, the AU "took note of the readiness of the government of Libya to engage in the path of political reforms. The council expressed the solidarity of the AU with Libya, and stressed the legitimacy of the aspirations of the Libyan peoples for democracy, political reforms, justice, peace and security as well as economic and social development".

Specter of disintegration
The paradox is, if you accept the principle of ascertaining the "regional opinion", then the AU's opinion becomes, arguably, more important to know than the AL's. Libya is as much an African country as an Arab country - if not more. The narrative of Libyan developments as a template of "Arab awakening" overlooks that reverberations and after-shocks of what happens are going to be felt deep inside Africa. As prominent Russian scholar on the region Yevgeny Satanovsky recently said:
It [unrest] won't be limited to the Middle East and North Africa ... The region will go through what Europe experienced in 1914-18. These processes always take a long time ... In Europe, the shooting started in 1914 and didn't stop until 1945 ... We have not seen what would happen to the other Gulf monarchies. We have not yet seen the end of the unrest that has gripped North Africa and the Middle East.

Algeria could still follow Libya's suit and Morocco might do the same. In January we saw Sudan split peacefully, but separatist elements have not been extinguished there. Former colonies tied together in unnatural conglomerates in the past by the English or the French never became integrated states. If this is so, we may still see disintegration of Nigeria, Kenya and other African countries.
Therefore, the British Foreign Office is opportunistic when it says the AL statement "is very significant and provides important regional support" for the idea of a no-fly zone. Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia, Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Qaboos Bin Al Said of Oman, Abdullah II of Jordan - these autocrats cannot be hailed as stakeholders in Libya's march to democracy.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regimes are tottering on the abyss and themselves hoping NATO will salvage them. Their rulers keep their personal wealth of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars hoarded in Western banks and the umbilical cord cannot easily be broken.

Scarred memories
But, how is it that African states are different? First, when they hear Cameron or French President Nikolas Sarkozy or NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen speak of military intervention in North Africa, it rings a bell in their collective consciousness - of scarred memories of imperial domination, the horrendous crimes that the British, French or Dutch perpetrated on African people. They know how difficult it will be to get a NATO army to vacate its occupation of Africa. (Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday: "I would like to ask NATO and the US with honor and humbleness and not with arrogance to stop their operations in our land. We are a very tolerant people but now our tolerance has run out.")

Africans know NATO will eventually slither its way into the heart of their resource-rich continent from the North African beachhead. So, the AU faces an existential problem - unlike the GGC client states or Jordan, which have no conception of national liberation. The only "Arab revolt" Abdullah or Abdullah II ever knew is what British intelligence and Lawrence of Arabia financed in the debris of the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago.

Besides, what dreads the AU countries is that Libya has a history of disunity. It was only in 1951 that King Idris unified the three autonomous provinces of Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenica. In the wake of the current strife, centrifugal tendencies have quickly resurfaced. Libya has dozens of tribes and Muammar Gaddafi knit together a tenuous alliance of some tribes but tribal feuds are common. The African countries share similar experience.

To be sure, Western intervention in Libya will necessitate at some stage involvement in "nation-building' - interference in the domestic affairs in the post-Gaddafi period. The native peoples will resent this involvement. And in the fullness of time, only the Islamist forces stand to gain. The stunning political reality of Libya is that Islam is the only unifying factor for the tribes and provinces of that fragile nation.

African leaders are genuinely nervous that the US is being myopic about the complexities involved. President Barack Obama should get to know them better, call them up from the Oval Office, reach out to them and consult them and ascertain whether they will accept NATO intervention in Libya. They are the real "stakeholders" - not the playboy kings, sheikhs or sultans from the bleached Arabian deserts. King would be pleased.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
rica,

What Will You Do, If Libya Repeats Itself In USA?

By Frank Scott

09 March, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Imagine This:

Armed Tea Party militias attack government facilities in several American cities, threaten to deport the president and abolish congress, and claim a new day for democracy. What would be the reaction from our corporate government and media? Great praise for the second amendment and the right of the people to bear arms and overthrow the government? Organized passive and non-violent resistance by the military involving prayer, meditation and chanting to disarm the rebels? Yes, if we believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and a free market. Yet, the reaction of mind management here has been that the Libyan government response to armed assaults on its power is somehow unthinkable to civilized people, subject to revulsion by all citizens of nuclear weapons armed nations, and an excuse to add to the death tolls by having America and its servant NATO powers get involved. In the cause of humanitarian justice achieved by murdering, of course.

Unconfirmed reports mostly from the rebellious Libyan groups claim air attacks and threats of genocide – the “g” word comes up almost every time anyone dies violently, anywhere – are repeated and embellished with charges of war crimes and threats to civilization. These near hysterical charges approach those hurled at Iran, regularly said to be planning to wipe out Israel, Jews, America, McDonalds, Christianity, puppies, kittens and all our shopping malls.

And this while our states and municipalities continue cutting public budgets on behalf of private wealth and corporate finance, and military expenditures and warfare increase even as surreality TV news reports tell us of alleged budget cuts, to take place at some future date.

And we are supposed to believe the leadership of Libya is insane?

Khadaffi may well have lost contact with reality in the often-quoted way that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But his alleged mental illness, commonly addressed by government officials here whose own sanity should be seriously questioned and whose ravings a public under continuous mental assault accepts, contrasts with the material status of the Libyan people. That not only compares favorably with most of the developed world but also is actually better than that of a majority of the world’s nations. There clearly are people, groups and elements in Libya tired of his rule and desirous of significant change, but exactly who are they and what is their economic and political base? Are there any foreigners involved, as in many of the color-coded “revolutions” assisted if not organized by outside infiltration to bring about governments more acceptable to “the international community”, a collection of national lap dogs and corporate financed NGOs controlled by the USA and Israel?

Such questions need to be asked before we rush into even more stupid, if not totally insane actions that support a global system which may be in process of breaking down naturally, if unnatural acts by perverse rulers can be controlled by democratic action of the people. While steps in that direction have begun speeding up in the Arab world, Europe and even in the USA, this present threat of backsliding could become a menacing blowback to what began as a very positive program for humanity, and not just the Arab world.

The urge for democratic rule of the people, even if still at a primitive level of organization, is an unmistakable emotional, spiritual and physical force in the world. Given the rapid changes taking place, many of them possibly beyond the understanding of the groups undertaking them, the rule that has brought us to this point is desperate and approaching a madness that makes Khadaffi look benign, progressive and harmless by comparison. Those nuclear-powered world “leaders” are near desperation and cannot be counted on to act rationally, as evidence clearly indicates. What are people to do when the information they rely on comes from the very sources striving to maintain the crippled, failing system?

Be very careful, wary and suspicious of all authority and what it tells us, remembering that its main duty is to maintain the status quo in substance even while changing the style in which it operates – see Obama and company - and be very critical of what alleged opposition to that authority tells us, too.

Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears in print in The Independent Monitor and online at the blog Legalienate

Arab revolt reworks the world order

By M K Bhadrakumar

India, Brazil and South Africa have put a spoke in the American wheel, which seemed up until Tuesday inexorably moving, turning and turning in the direction of imposing a "no-fly" zone over Libya.

Arguably, the United States can still impose a zone, but then President Barack Obama will have to drink from the poisoned chalice and resurrect his predecessor's controversial post-Cold War doctrine of "unilateralism" and the "coalition of the willing" to do that. If he does so, Obama will have no place to hide and all he has done in his presidency to neutralize America's image as a "bully" will come unstuck.

New Delhi hosted a foreign minister-level meeting with Brazil and South Africa on Tuesday, which was to have been an innocuous occasion for some rhetorical "South-South" cooperation. On the contrary, the event soared into the realm of the troubled world order and shaky contemporary international system. The meeting took a clear-cut position of nyet vis-a-vis the growing Western design to impose a "no-fly" zone over Libya.

All indications are that the US and its allies who are assisting the Libyan rebels politically, militarily and financially have been hoping to extract a "request" from the Libyan people within a day or two at the most as a fig-leaf to approach the United Nations Security Council for a mandate to impose sanctions under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Libyan rebels are a divided house: nationalist elements staunchly oppose outside intervention and the Islamists among them are against any form of Western intervention.

'Unilateralism' only option on table
NATO defense ministers held a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to give practical touches to a possible intervention by the alliance in Libya. That the meeting was attended by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was indicative of the importance attached to the run-up to the alliance's proposed intervention in Libya. Gates missed an earlier informal NATO defense ministers' meeting on Libya held on the outskirts of Budapest a fortnight ago.

United States-British diplomacy was moving on a parallel track drumming up a unified position by the Libyan rebels to seek an international intervention in their country and specifically in the form of a "no-fly" zone. The Arab League and the African Union also maintain an ambiguous stance on the issue of such a zone.

Obama's calculation is that if only a Libyan "people's request" could be generated, that would in historical terms absolve him and the West of the blame of invading a sovereign member country of the United Nations - from a moral and political angle, at least - as well as push the Arab League and African Union into the enterprise.

Being a famously cerebral intellectual also, Obama is a politician with a difference and can be trusted to have an acute sense of history. His predecessor George W Bush would have acted in similar circumstances with "audacity", an idiom that is ironically associated with Obama.

Obama's tryst with history is indeed bugging him in his decision-making over Libya. Robert Fisk, the well-known chronicler of Middle Eastern affairs for the Independent newspaper of London, wrote a sensational dispatch on Monday that the Obama administration had sought help from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for secretly ferrying American weapons to the Libyan rebels in Benghazi, for which Riyadh would pick up the tab so that the White House would need no accountability to the US Congress and leave no traceable trail to Washington.

The moral depravity of the move - chartering the services of an autocrat to further the frontiers of democracy - underscores Obama's obsessive desire to camouflage any US unilateral intervention in Libya with "deniability" at all costs.

Now comes the body blow from the Delhi meeting. The three foreign ministers belonging to the forum that is known by the cute acronym IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) thwarted Obama's best-laid plans by issuing a joint communique on Tuesday in which they "underscored that a 'no-fly' zone on the Libyan air space or any coercive measures additional to those foreseen in Resolution 1970 can only be legitimately contemplated in full compliance with the UN Charter and within the Security Council of the United Nations".

Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio de Aguiar Patriota told the media in Delhi that the IBSA statement was an "important measure" of what the non-Western world was thinking". He said, "The resort to a 'no-fly' zone is seen as expedient when adopted by a country but it weakens the system of collective security and provokes indirect consequences prejudicial to the objective we have been trying to achieve." Patriota added:

It is very problematic to intervene militarily in a situation of internal turmoil, Any decision to adopt military intervention needs to be considered within the UN framework and in close coordination with the African Union and the Arab League. It is very important to keep in touch with them and identify with their perception of the situation.

He explained that measures like a no-fly zone might make a bad situation worse by giving fillip to anti-US and anti-Western sentiments "that have not been present so far".

Equally significant was the fact that the trio of foreign ministers also penned a joint statement on the overall situation in the Middle East. Dubbed as the "IBSA Declaration", it reiterated the three countries' expectation that the changes sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa should "follow a peaceful course" and expressed their confidence in a "positive outcome in harmony with the aspirations of the people".

A highly significant part of the statement was its recognition right at the outset that the Palestinian problem lay at the very core of the great Middle Eastern alienation and the "recent developments in the Region may offer a chance for a comprehensive peace ... This process should include the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ... that will lead to a two-state solution, with the creation of a sovereign, independent, united and viable Palestinian State, coexisting peacefully alongside Israel, with secure, pre-1967 borders, and with East Jerusalem as its capital."

'P-5' loses shine
Israel will be hopping mad over the declaration. That apart, does it matter to Obama and NATO if three countries from three faraway continents stand up with a common stance on a "no-fly" zone? Who are these countries anyway? But, it does matter. Put simply, the three countries also happen to be currently serving as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council and their stance happens to have high visibility in the world's pecking order on Libya.

The indications in Delhi are that at least one more non-permanent member of the Security Council is their "fellow-traveler" - Lebanon. Which means the "Arab voice" in the Security Council. In short, what we hear is an Afro-Asian, Arab and Latin American collective voice and it cannot be easily dismissed. More importantly, the IBSA stance puts at least two permanent veto-wielding great powers within the Security Council on the horns of an acute dilemma.

Russia claims to have a foreign policy that opposes the US's "unilateralism" and which strictly abides by the canons of international law and the UN charter. China insists that it represents developing countries. Now, the IBSA stance makes it virtually impossible for them to enter into any Faustian deal with the US and Western powers over Libya within the sequestered caucus of the veto-holding powers of the Security Council - commonly known as the P-5.

Therefore, the IBSA joint statement, much like the Turkish-Brazilian move on the Iran nuclear problem, is virtually mocking at the moral hypocrisy of the P-5 and their secretive ways.

Ironically, Delhi adopted the IBSA communique even as US Vice President Joseph Biden was winging his way to Moscow for wide-ranging discussions on the future trajectory of the US-Russia reset. Any US-Russian tradeoff over Libya within the ambit of the reset would now get badly exposed as an act of unprincipled political opportunism.

China's predicament will be no less acute if it resorts to realpolitik. China is hosting the summit meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in Beijing in April. Three "brics" out of BRICS come from IBSA. Can the BRICS afford to water down the IBSA joint communique on Libya? Can China go against the stance of three prominent "developing countries"?

On balance, however, China may heave a sigh of relief. The IBSA position may let the US pressure off China and delist the Libyan "no-fly" zone issue from morphing into a bilateral Sino-American issue. China cooperated with last week's Security Council resolution on Libya. It was an unusual move for China to vote for a resolution that smacked of "intervention" in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.

Western commentators were euphoric over the shift in Chinese behavior at the high table of world politics and were egging on the leadership at Beijing to finally shape up as a responsible world power that is willing to work with the West as a "stakeholder" in the international system - like Russia does.

Clearly, China is being cajoled to go a step further and jettison its other red line regarding a "no-fly" zone. There is no indication that China is about to concede its red line by succumbing to flattery. But, now, if China indeed does, it will be in broad daylight under the gaze of the developing countries. And it will be very difficult for Beijing to cover up such "pragmatism" with the veneer of principles. In a way, therefore, pressure is off China on the "no-fly" zone issue.

India regains identity
An interesting thought occurs: Is India forcing China's hand? Delhi has certainly taken note that the Libyan crisis provided China with a great opportunity to work with the US in a cooperative spirit that would have much positive spin-offs for the overall Sino-American relationship. The "no-fly" zone issue would have been turf where China and the US could have created an entirely new alchemy in their relationship. Beijing knows that Obama's presidency critically depends on how he acquits in the Middle East crisis.

All the same, Delhi's move cannot be dismissed as merely "China-centric". In geopolitical terms, it constitutes a highly visible slap on the American face. And there will be a price to pay in terms of Obama's wrath. That Delhi is willing to pay such a price - when so much is at stake in its bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council - makes the IBSA move highly significant. Indeed, it is after a very long time that Delhi will be refusing to stand up and be counted on a major American foreign policy front.
It is much more than a coincidence, too, that the declaration vociferously supported the Palestinian cause. India has taken the calculated risk of incurring the displeasure of Israel and the Israel lobby in the US. Besides, there are other signs, too, that Delhi has embarked on a major overhaul of its Middle East policies and the IBSA is only one template of the policy rethink - and, possibly not even the most far-reaching in the geopolitics of the region.

Even as the IBSA adopted its stance on Libya and the Middle East situation staunchly favoring Arab nationalism, India's National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon, a key policymaker of high reputation as a consummate diplomat and who works directly under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was engaged in an engrossing and meaningful conversation elsewhere in the Middle East - with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

Away from the glare of television cameras, Menon handed over a letter from Manmohan to Ahmadinejad. According to the statement issued by Ahmadinejad's office, the Iranian leader told Menon:

Iran and India are both independent countries and they will play significant roles in shaping up the future of the international developments ... The relations between Iran and India are historic and sustainable. Iran and India due to being [sic] benefited from humanitarian viewpoints towards the international relations, should try to shape up the future world system in a way that justice and friendship would rule.

The ruling world is coming to its end and is on the verge of collapse. Under the current conditions, it is very important how the future world order will take shape and care should be taken that those who have imposed the oppressive world order against the mankind would not succeed in imposing it in a new frame anew ... Iran and India will be playing significant roles in the future developments in the world. Our two nations' cultures and origins are what the world needs today.

Menon reportedly told Ahmadinejad:

New Delhi is for the establishment of comprehensive relations with Iran, including strategic ties ... many of the predictions you [Ahmadinejad] had about the political and economic developments in the world have come to reality today and the world order is going under basic alterations [sic], which has necessitated ever-increasing relations between Iran and India ... The relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of India are beyond the current political relations, having their roots in the cultures and the civilizations and the two nations and both countries have great potentials for improvement of bilateral, regional and international relations.

Nothing needs to be added. Nothing needs to be said further. In sum, this sort of Iran-India high-level political exchange was unthinkable until very recently and it highlights how much the Middle East has changed and Iran's role in it, and Delhi's perceptions and the Indian thinking regarding both.

Most important, Menon's arrival in Tehran at the present tumultuous juncture on a major path-breaking political and diplomatic mission to energize India-Iran strategic understanding also underscores the growing recognition in the region that the era of Western dominance of the Middle East is inexorably passing into history and the world order is not going to be the same again.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

'No-fly zone' is a euphemism for war. We'd be mad to try it

Cameron's urge to dust himself in military glory may be strong, but he should not interfere in the Libyan rebels' cause


* Simon Jenkins
*
o Simon Jenkins
o The Guardian, Wednesday 9 March 2011

Happy days are back for the sofa strategists and beltway bombardiers. After the miseries of Iraq and Afghanistan, a Libyan no-fly zone is just the tonic they need. If you zero in from carrier A, you can take out the Tripoli air defences while carrier B zaps the mercenary bases and carrier C zooms with special forces to secure the oilfields. You might tell the Americans to go easy on Leptis Magna after what they did to Babylon. Otherwise, let rip. You can sense the potency surging through Downing Street's veins. This is how wars begin, and beginning wars is politically sexy.

Last week saw a brief but fading moment of sanity from the White House and Pentagon. Both counselled caution against trigger-happy comments from Capitol Hill and Downing Street. US defence secretary Robert Gates pointed out that no-fly-zone is euphemism for war. It requires the elimination of air defences by bombing, and total cover thereafter. Since the explicit purpose is to help rebels bring regime change to Libya, the inducement to deploy ever more force if that fails will be irresistible. Hence the caution.

We now learn that a no-fly zone is back on the menu, with added adrenaline. All the familiar phrases are heard. Nothing is "off the table", and "all options are under consideration". Should the UN fail to offer a licence, there would be a "coalition of the willing". The only requisite justification for attack is a tear-stained girl pleading over the corpse of her brother on TV, or a car-load of civilians hit by a strafing fighter, or just a mob anywhere howling for help. Nobody likes being bombed.

So far the west's response has been tempered by possible counter-productivity. It is hard to imagine anything more calculated to please Osama bin Laden and jihadists around the world than the USS Enterprise, with British tugboat in support, steaming speedily towards the Middle East. For this reason cogent Libyan rebels have been pleading for the west to stay out of their conflict and not lend credence to Gaddafi's claim that the west wants Libya's oil.

No concept seems to carry less weight in military circles than that of counter-productivity. It is left to diplomats. If Nato knew the meaning of the word it would stop drone killings in Pashtun villages, shooting up buses, trucks and wedding parties and flattening Helmand villages. Counter-productivity appears to be a concept that gains currency only when a war is lost. The Americans in Vietnam knew massacring villages turned the rural population over to the enemy. They still did it.

While I have sympathy with William Hague in what must have seemed a low-risk covert operation that went wrong, it is odd that a specific rebel request not to put "boots on the ground" was so wilfully disregarded. We must assume that at SIS headquarters the James Bond urge simply overwhelms any consideration of counter-productivity.

Libya strategists are said to be torturing themselves over timing. Barack Obama says he "needs" Gaddafi to go, and David Cameron's position is much the same. Why this need is so pressing when, just months ago, Gaddafi was a dear ally and patron of western scholarship is a mystery. But in Cameron's statement on no-fly zones last week, Britain appeared to assert its right in international law to remove Gaddafi, as it did the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

In this ambition he was supported by the leftwing international lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, who claimed to have found a right for "states to render assistance to innocent civilians battling for their lives" wherever that might be. This right apparently "emerges or crystallises" not from any democratic decision but from "state practice, conventions, writings of jurists and dictates of collective conscience". To this is added the bizarre claim that a "responsibility to protect" the underdog in a civil war "devolves on to the security council" and, if not, on to any Tom, Dick or Harry. In other words, military aggression is anything you can pay a lawyer to justify. It is the Bush-Cheney theory of zero national sovereignty, and could be used to justify every aggressive war by Washington or Moscow over the last 50 years.

This legal cobbling-together of "rights" to justify military intervention is an invitation to global mayhem. But if Cameron has persuaded himself that Gaddafi must go because he is being beastly to his own people, what is he waiting for? Liberal interventionism nowadays is self-legitimising and self-authorising. Why hold back? Libya is a tinpot country of just over 6 million people, within easy reach of air bases in Cyprus, Crete and Italy. Britain occupied Suez in a matter of days in 1956. The longer Britain and America wait, the more likely is Gaddafi to build his defences and win other Arabs over to resisting "western imperialism".

The answer, of course, is that nobody wants to go that far as yet. Politicians want to "send a signal", offer vague support to rebels, and aid humanitarianism. There will be no mission creep. But what happens if the no-fly zone proves ineffective? It did not topple the Taliban or Saddam. That needed ground troops. Mission creep is the result of halfheartedness and imprecision in the initial stages of intervention. Eventually the aggressor is drawn into ground attack. Failure becomes "not an option", and a new nation must be built and expensively supported.

The craving of politicians to dust themselves in military glory is as old as the hills, embedded in leadership psychosis. However daft a war may be, however illegal, however unwinnable, politicians seem helpless before the sound of trumpets and drums. Considerations of prudence, economy or overstretch are nothing. That Britain has been fighting and not winning two wars already in Muslim countries seems to teach nothing in Libya. Jingoism never dies.

There is no point is repeating that Libya is not our country or our business. It was always going to be bloody one day. I find it incredible that Labour ministers, as they simpered in Gaddafi's presence, could have thought he would lie down like a lamb should his people rise against him. But unless we redefine words, he is not committing genocide and his brutality is hardly exceptional. If the rebels win it should be their victory, emerging from a new balance of power inside Libya. If they fail, they must fight another day. There is no good reason for us to intervene. However embattled they feel, Obama and Cameron should find other paths to glory.