Walden Bello | ukwatch.net

Derail Doha, save the climate

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:14:12 +0000

There’s something surreal about the ongoing World Trade Organization talks in Geneva, which aim at coming up with a new agreement to bring down tariffs in order to expand world trade and resuscitate global growth. In the face of the looming specter of climate change, these negotiations amount to arguing over the arrangement of deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking.

Indeed, one of the most important steps in the struggle to come up with a viable strategy to deal with climate change would be the derailment of the so-called “Doha Round.”

Global trade is carried out with transportation that is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. It’s estimated that about 60% of the world’s use of oil goes to transportation activities which are more than 95% dependent on fossil fuels. An OECD study estimated that the global transport sector accounts for 20-25% of carbon emissions, with some 66% of this figure accounted for by emissions in the industrialized countries.

Global Trade: Deeply Dysfunctional

From the point of view of environmental sustainability, global trade has become deeply dysfunctional. Take agricultural trade. As the International Forum on Globalization has pointed out, the average plate of food eaten in Western industrial food-importing nations is likely to have traveled 1,500 miles from its source. Long-distance travel contributes to the absurd situation wherein “three times more food is used to produce food in the industrial agricultural model than is derived in consuming it.”

The WTO has been a central factor in increasing carbon emissions from transport. A study by the OECD done in the mid-nineties estimated that by 2004, the year marking the full implementation of free-trade commitments under the WTO’s Uruguay Round, there would have been an increase in the transport of internationally traded goods by 70% over 1992 levels. This figure, notes the New Economics Foundation, “would make a mockery” of the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory emissions reduction targets for the industrialized countries.

Transportation: More Fossil Intensive than Ever

Ocean shipping accounts for nearly 80% of the world’s international trade in goods. The fuel commonly used by ships is a mixture of diesel and low-quality oil known as “Bunker C,” which has high levels of carbon and sulfur. As Jerry Mander and Simon Retallack point out, “If not consumed by ships, it would otherwise be considered a waste product.”

Aviation, which has the highest growth rate as a mode of transport, is also the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, with its consumption of fuel expected to rise by 65% from 1990 levels by 2010, according to one study cited by the New Economics Foundation. Other estimates are more pessimistic, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting that fuel consumption by civil aviation is going up at the rate of three percent a year and could rise by nearly 350% from 1992 levels by 2050. Note Mander and Retallack: “Each ton of freight moved by plane uses forty nine times as much energy per kilometer as when it’s moved by ship….A two-minute takeoff by a 747 is equal to 2.4 million lawn mowers running for twenty minutes.” In support of trade expansion and global economic growth, authorities have by and large not taxed aviation fuel as well as marine bunker fuel, which now account for 20% of all emissions in the transport sector.

Along with fossil-fuel-intensive air transport, fossil-fuel-intensive road transport has also been favored by the expansion of world trade, instead of modes with less emission intensities like rail and marine traffic. In the European Union, for instance, the focus on building up a road transport network led an OECD study to comment that “the way in which the EU liberalization policy has been implemented has favored the less environment-friendly modes and accelerated the decline of rail and inland waterways.”

Decoupling Growth and Energy: a Panacea

There has been talk about decoupling trade and growth from energy or shifting from fossil fuels to other, less carbon-intensive energy sources. The reality is that the other energy sources being seriously considered are either dangerous, like nuclear power; with deleterious side-effects, like biofuels’ negative impact on food production; or science fiction as this stage, like carbon sequestration and storage technology. For the foreseeable future, trade expansion and global growth will fall in line with their historical trajectory of being correlated with increased greenhouse gas emissions.

A sharp U-turn in consumption and growth in the developed countries and a significant decrease in global trade are unavoidable if we are to have a viable strategy against climate change. This will set the stage for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, including from the energy-intensive transportation sector. The outcome of the Doha negotiations will determine whether free trade will intensify or lose momentum. A successful conclusion to Doha will bring us closer to uncontrollable climate change. It will continue what the New Economics Foundation describes as “free trade’s free ride on the global climate.”

A derailment of Doha won’t be a sufficient condition to formulate a strategy to contain climate change. But given the likely negative ecological consequences of a successful deal, it’s a necessary condition.

Environmental Groups Slam G8 Leaders

Ellie Keen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:40:20 +0000

In Japan, world leaders at the G8 summit have announced they would work toward cutting carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050. The White House hailed the declaration as a major step forward, but environmental campaigners criticized the lack of a commitment to midterm targets. Global warming ties into other big themes, such as soaring food and fuel prices, being discussed at the three-day summit. We go to Hokkaido to speak with Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South.

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AMY GOODMAN: G8 leaders say they will set a global target of cutting carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by the year 2050 in an effort to tackle climate change. In a statement released during a summit in northern Japan, the Group of Eight leaders agreed they would need to set midterm goals to achieve that “shared vision” by 2050 but gave no numerical targets.

The White House hailed the G8 declaration as a major step forward and said it was a validation of President Bush’s global warming policy. But environmental campaigners slammed the lack of a commitment to midterm goals. Greenpeace International called it a “complete failure of responsibility,” and WWF said the target date of 2050 was insufficient and the lack of progress “pathetic.”

Global warming ties into other big themes such as soaring food and fuel prices being discussed at the three-day summit. Leaders from the G8 nations—Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States—are being joined by counterparts from some fifteen other countries. The gathering is taking place at a plush mountaintop hotel on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where 21,000 police have been mobilized. Despite the crackdown, protests have been occurring for days in the lead-up to the summit.

RENATO REYES: We’re here in solidarity with our Japanese friends who are standing up against the G8. We feel very strongly about this issue, especially since the poverty happening in the Philippines right now is really bad. The oil crisis, the fuel crisis and the war on terror has really affected many of our countrymen.

KIM HEUNG HYUN: [translated] What I’d like to say most is that food should not be used as a political tool. If you allow it to happen, food could eventually be a weapon. The important thing is for each country to maintain agricultural self-sufficiency.

MASUYUKI TOMITA: [translated] This is a meeting by world thieves. They, the G8 countries, are causing all the current problems, such as environment destruction and food crisis. That is why I am against them.

AMY GOODMAN: The G8 summit wraps up Wednesday. We go now to Japan to speak with Walden Bello, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South. He joins us on the phone from Hokkaido. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Walden.

WALDEN BELLO: Hi, Amy, yes. The line is a bit choppy, but I hope I can hear you and you can hear me.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe what is happening? First, your response to the stated set of goal, 2050, to cut carbon emissions by 50 percent?

WALDEN BELLO: Yes, I think that, you know, this has been sold as a big thing, but it’s really not, and it’s, in fact, quite backward, because the US in fact killed the efforts to have in the declaration in Bali last—during the summit over, that, you know, 25 to 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions should be cut by 2020. And the consensus right now is that you have to have at least an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. So this is really a low target. And this was really an effort to basically please the United States. And the thing about this also is that the US is subverting the UN process, because he’s put this within the context of another rival grouping called the Major Economies Meeting, which is a US effort to parallel the Kyoto UN framework process. So this is bad news.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, can you talk about the activists who tried to get in? There are 21,000 Japanese police there.

WALDEN BELLO: Could you repeat that, Amy? The line’s a bit choppy here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the difficulty of activists trying to get in to protest the G8 in Japan?

WALDEN BELLO: I—wow, you know, that really didn’t come across. The difficulties of what now?

AMY GOODMAN: Of the protesters getting into Japan, getting to Hokkaido?

WALDEN BELLO: Oh, wow, I can’t—I couldn’t get that. I couldn’t get that. I’m terribly sorry. It came up as very, very unclear.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll have the producer ask you the question. We’re talking to Walden Bello, senior analyst, Focus on the Global South, joining us on the line from Hokkaido. We’ll go to a break, and we’ll come back, and we’ll clear up the phone line. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back now to Walden Bello. He’s speaking to us from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. He’s senior analyst at the Focus on the Global South. And we hope the phone line has cleared up. Walden Bello, I was asking about the difficulty activists had of getting to the G8 summit.

WALDEN BELLO: Oh, yes. Well, they’re following the example of Singapore, which is to really screen people and not admit people that are, you know, people who have been longtime activists in these issues. And, you know, like it’s—these twenty-four Koreans who were here, they were held for about, you know, over twenty-four hours and then sent back. And many others did not receive their visas on time. And, of course, many of us who came through already had visas, we were pulled aside and subjected to heavy questioning. So this is what we call really the—Japan following Singapore’s policy of really, you know, restricting the entry of people associated with social movements. And this is a very, very bad precedent, because, in fact, in terms of—I’ve been in quite a number of summits of the G8, and I would say that, in terms of border controls, this is the worst so far.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the people who were actually prevented from getting in, like Susan George?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, Susan George, you know, was able to come in, and—but she was questioned for about, I believe, four hours in a small windowless room. And so, this—and Lydinyda Nacpil of the Jubilee South, for instance, the anti-debt coalition, was questioned for about three-and-a-half hours. And basically, this is—you know, this is harassment. So, you know, this is Japan on sort of a security footing that is really quite a departure from previous policies with respect to the entry of activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, can you talk about the food crisis?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, you know, it’s said to be—the agenda here is said to include the food crisis, but people are not really expecting anything to come out, because the G8 countries really don’t—or the G8 governments really don’t know how to deal with this problem, because, you know, it’s been something that’s been caused by their policies. Now, certainly the diversion of corn to biofuel production from food is a cause, one of the causes, of the sharp rise in food prices. But we’ve got to see this in a longer-term perspective, that basically the policies of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment and WTO-, World Trade Organization-mandated liberalization basically destroyed the capacity of so many developing countries to be self-sufficient producers. It turned them into net importers of food, and then they were made into dumping ground for highly subsidized food commodities from the European Union and the United States. So this is the sort of already weakened agricultural economies in which the biofuel diversion took effect. So the weakening of these economies really began with G8-supported free market structural adjustment policies.

So, this is why the G8 governments really don’t have, you know, a solution for this, except platitudes, to say that they’re going to help increase food production. Some of them have been talking about supporting a new green revolution based on genetically modified organisms, seeds, in Africa. You know, so it’s all these real techno fixes, which are dangerous in the case of so-called green revolutions on genetic engineering. So this is really the wall, you know, that the G8 faces. They—it’s a problem of their creation, and they don’t really have any solutions for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, we reported yesterday that The Guardian newspaper obtained an unpublished World Bank report that found biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent. The report apparently was finished in April but reportedly not published in order to avoid embarrassing the United States, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent. The report found biofuels have distorted food markets by diverting grain away from food for fuel, encouraging farmers to set aside land for its production and sparked financial speculation on grains.

WALDEN BELLO: Yes, definitely. I think that is a very critical report, and I think this just goes to show how the World Bank essentially follows, you know, the concerns and lead of the United States here. So, I mean, if it were a really transparent institution, they should have come out with that.

And what I’m—I guess what I’m trying to say is that the weakening—you know, the biofuel diversion has certainly been a very big factor behind the food crisis, but that this occurred within the context of already weakened economies that had been destroyed by the imposition of free market policies. So we’ve seen that over the last twenty to twenty-five years, from Africa to Latin America to Asia, self-sufficient economies have been turned into import-dependent economies. And it is those countries that—for instance, like Mexico, you know—that have become—made dependent on corn imports from the United States. They are the ones suffering now very greatly the impact of this diversion of corn from food to biofuel, because they’re dependent on corn imports from the US. Now, that dependency was created in the first place—and this is the sort of total context, this is the sort of comprehensive view that we need to have in order to be—to really understand the causes of the agricultural crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, I want to thank you for being with us, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, speaking to us from the Japanes island of Hokkaido, where the G8 are meeting and thousands of activists have come out to protest.

Humanitarian Intervention - Evolution of a Dangerous Doctrine

Alex Doherty — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:26:19 +0000

“Humanitarian intervention,” defined simply, is military action taken to prevent or terminate violations of human rights that is directed at and is carried without the consent of a sovereign government. While the main rationale for the invasion of Iraq by the United States was its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, an important supporting rationale was regime change for humanitarian reasons. When it became clear that there were in fact no WMD, the Bush administration retroactively justified its intervention on humanitarian grounds: getting rid of a repressive dictatorship and imposing democratic rule.The show trial of Saddam for human rights violations now taking place in Baghdad is part of this retroactive effort to legitimize the invasion.

Iraq: Dead End of Humanitarian Intervention

Iraq shows the dangers of the humanitarian rationale. It can so easily be used to justify any violation of national sovereignty to promote the interests of an external force. Yes, under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi people were subjected to systematic repression, with many people executed and jailed. Yet, most of us, at least most of us in the global South, recoil at Washington’s use of the humanitarian logic to invade Iraq. Most of us would say that even as we condemn any regime’s violations of human rights, systematic violation of those rights does not constitute grounds for the violation of national sovereignty through invasion or destabilization. Getting rid of a repressive regime or a dictator is the responsibility of the citizens of a country. In this regard, let me point out that not even during the darkest days of the Marcos dictatorship did the anti-fascist movement in the Philippines think of asking the United States to do the job for us.

Now, for some people in the North, who belong to states that dominate the rest of the world, national sovereignty may seem quaint. For those of us in the South, however, the defense of this principle is a matter of life and death, a necessary condition for the realization of our collective destiny as a nation-state in a world where being a member of an independent nation-state is the primordial condition for stable access to human rights, political rights, and economic rights. Without a sovereign state as a framework, our access to and enjoyment of those rights will be fragile. So long as nation-states remain the prime political collectivities of human beings, so long as we live in a Westphalian world-and let me say emphasize that we are not in a post-Westphalian world-our defense of national sovereignty must be aggressive. And absolute, for imperialism is such that if you yield in one case, it uses that as a precedent for other, future cases.

Are we exaggerating our case? No. The Iraq tragedy is a result only of the American Right’s drive to place US power far beyond the reach of any potential rival or coalition of rivals. The way to Iraq was paved by the actions of liberal democrats, of the very same Clintonites that currently criticize the Bush administration for its having plunged the US into a war without end. In other words, the road to Iraq would have been more difficult without the humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. As one conservative writer so aptly put it, George W. Bush, in invading Iraq, simply took the “doctrine of ‘democratic engagement’ of the first Bush administration, and that of ‘democratic enlargement’ of the Clinton administration, one step further. It might be called ‘democratic transformation.’”

Kosovo, Realpolitik, and Intervention

Kosovo has been called, along with the US troop landing to put Jean Bertrand Aristide in power in Haiti in 1994, a classic humanitarian intervention. But rather than be emulated, the Kosovo military intervention is something we cannot afford to repeat. Let us look at the reasons why.

First of all, it contributed mightily to the erosion of the credibility of the United Nations, when the US, knowing it would not get approval for intervention from the Security Council, used the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the legal cover for the war. NATO, in turn, was a fig-leaf for a war 95 per cent of which was carried out by US forces.

Second, the humanitarian rationale was undoubtedly the purpose of some of its advocates, but the operation eventually mainly advanced Washington’s geopolitical designs. The lasting result of the Kosovo air war was not a stable and secure network of Balkan states but NATO expansion. That is not surprising, since eventually that was what the air war was mainly about. Milosevic’s moves in both the earlier Bosnian crisis and in Kosovo, according to Andrew Bacevich, “called into question the relevance of NATO and, by extension, US claims to leadership in Europe.” If it did not successfully manage Slobodan Milosevic, the US could not have supported its drive for NATO expansion. For the Clinton administration, such expansion would fill the security vacuum in Eastern Europe and institutionalize US leadership in post-Soviet Europe. In Washington’s view, according to one analyst,

“NATO enlargement would provide an institutional framework to lock in domestic transitions under way in Eastern and Central Europe. The prospect of alliance membership would itself be an “incentive” for these countries to pursue domestic reforms. Subsequent integration into the alliance was predicted to lock in those institutional reforms. Membership would entail a wide array of organizational adaptations, such as standardization of military procedures, steps toward interoperability with NATO forces, and joint planning and training. By enmeshing new members in the wider alliance institutions and participation in its operations, NATO would reduce their ability to revert to the old ways and reinforce the liberalization of transitional governments. As one NATO official remarked: “We’re enmeshing them in the NATO culture, both politically and militarily, so they begin to think like us-and over time-act like us.”

A major aspect of the politics of NATO expansion was securing the Western European states continuing military dependence on the United States, so that the European governments’ failure to follow through on an independent European initiative in the Balkans was quickly taken advantage of by Washington via the NATO air war against Serbia to prove the geopolitical point that European security was not possible without the American guarantee.

Third, the air war soon triggered what it was ostensibly meant to end: an increase in human rights violations and violations of international treaties. The bombing provoked the Serbs in Kosovo to accelerate their murder and displacement of Albanian Kosovars, while doing “considerable indirect damage” to the people of Serbia through the targeting of electrical grids, bridges, and water facilities—acts that violated Article 14 of the 1977 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Convention, which prohibits attacks on “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.”

Finally, Kosovo, as noted earlier, provided a strong precedent for future violations of the principle of national sovereignty. The cavalier way in which the Clinton administration justified setting aside national sovereignty by reference to allegedly “overriding” humanitarian concerns became part of the moral and legal armament that would be deployed by people of a different party, the Republicans, in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the right-wing thinker Philip Bobbitt saw it, the Clinton administration’s actions in Kosovo and Haiti served as “precedents” that “strengthen the emerging rule that regimes that repudiate the popular basis of sovereignty, by overturning democratic institutions, by denying even the most basic human rights and practicins mass terror against their own people, by preparing and launching unprovoked assaults against their neighbors-jeopardize the rights of sovereignty, including the inherent right to seek whatever weapons a regime may choose.”

From Kosovo to Afghanistan

When the invasion of Afghanistan took place in 2001, there was relatively little opposition in the North to the US move to oust the Taliban government. Washington took advantage of sympathy for the US generated by the Sept. 11 events and the image of the Taliban government sheltering Al Qaeda to eliminate negotiations with the Taliban as an option and throw international law out of the window by invading Afghanistan, with little protest from European countries. But to strengthen its position, the Bush administration not only used the rationale of bringing the perpetrators of Sept. 11 to justice. It also painted its move into Afghanistan as a necessary act of humanitarian intervention to depose the repressive Taliban government—one that was justified by the precedents of Haiti and Kosovo. Invoking the humanitarian rationale, states belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization like Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands also eventually sent armed contingents. And in this connection, it must be pointed out that many NGO’s-including many liberal organizations-supported the US intervention for the same reason.

Like the Kosovo air campaign, Afghanistan soon showed the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention. First, great power logic soon took over. Hunting for Bin Laden yielded to the imperative of establishing and consolidating a US military presence in Southwest Asia that would allow strategic control of both the oil-rich Middle East and energy-rich Central Asia. Moreover, Afghanistan was seized on by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as what one analyst described as “a laboratory to prove his theory about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with air power, to win decisive battles.” The Afghanistan invasion’s main function, it turned out, was to demonstrate that the Powell Doctrine’s dictum about the need for a massive commitment of troops to an intervention was obsolete-a view that skeptics had to be persuaded to accept before they could be convinced to take on what emerged as the Bush administration’s strategic objective: the invasion of Iraq.

Second, the campaign soon ended up doing what its promoters said they would eliminate: the terrorizing of the civilian population. US bombing could not, in many cases, distinguish military from civilian targets-not surprising since the Taliban enjoyed significant popular support in many parts of the country. The result was a high level of civilian casualties; one estimate, by Marc Herrold, placed the figure of civilian deaths at between 3,125 and 3,620, from Oct. 7, 2001 to July 31, 2002. Third, the campaign ended up creating a political and humanitarian situation that was, in many respects, worse than that under the Taliban.

One of the fundamental functions of a government is to provide a minimum of order and security. The Taliban, for all their retrograde practices in other areas, were able to give Afghanistan its first secure political regime in over 30 years. In contrast, the regime of foreign occupation that succeeded them failed this test miserably. According to a report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “security has actually deteriorated since the beginning of the reconstruction in December 2001, particularly over the summer and fall of 2003.” So bad is basic physical security for ordinary people that one third of the country has been declared off limits to United Nations staff and most NGO’s have pulled their people from most parts of the country. The Washington-installed government of Hamid Karzai does not exercise much authority outside Kabul and one or two other cities, prompting UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to state that “without functional state institutions to serve the basic needs of the population throughout the country, the authority and legitimacy of the new government will be short-lived.”

Worse, Afghanistan has become a narco-state. The Taliban were able to significantly reduce poppy production. Since they were ousted in 2001, poppy production has shot up, producing a record crop in 2004 and earning Afghanistan the dubious honor of supplying close to 80 per cent of the world’s heroin supply. Some 170,000 Afghans now use opium and heroin, 30,000 of them being women. Government officials are involved in 70 per cent of the narcotics traffic, with about a quarter of the 249 recently elected members of Parliament linked to the drug trade. One estimate in a study conducted for the independent Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit concludes that at least 17 newly elected MPs are drug traffickers themselves, 24 others are connected to criminal gangs, 40 are commanders of armed groups, and 19 face serious allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses. For these people, who dominate Afghanistan’s political life, “insecurity,” according to Kofi Annan, is a “business” and extortion is a “way of life.”

Can one really honestly claim that this life is an improvement over Taliban rule? Many Afghans would say no, saying that at least the Taliban were able to provide one thing: basic physical security. Now, this argument may not cut any ice with upper and middle class people in the North that live in safe suburbs or gated communities. But talk to poor people anywhere, and they put great value on ridding their shantytown communities of criminals and drug dealers.

Oh yes, what about the impact of NGO humanitarianism? Well, on the heels of the US troops came a veritable army of NGO’s of different kinds, all seeking to help the Afghan people with hundreds of well-funded projects. Indeed, like the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster and that wrought by Hurricane Katrina in the US, raising money for “helping the Afghans” soon became a profitable operation that made humanitarian-related NGO jobs among the most desirable in local economy. How positive these projects have been is another story, since like the military campaign, there were many badly thought out and badly executed projects whose main effect was to stoke resentment in the local population.

The Case against Humanitarian Intervention

Popular among certain elite circles in the US and Europe in the 1990’s, humanitarian intervention has earned a bad name, especially in the South. Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq underline the bitter lessons of humanitarian intervention. To repeat:

1. Humanitarian intervention seldom remains the dominant rationale for long, with geopolitics quickly becoming the driving force of a military operation.

2. Humanitarian intervention ends up doing what its proponents say they are out to prevent: instigating increased human rights violations and violations of human rights and related international accords.

3. Humanitarian intervention sets a very dangerous precedent for future violations of the principle of national sovereignty. Kosovo opened up the road to Afghanistan, and both led to the tragedy of Iraq.

All this does not mean that states and international civil society should not make use of all the moral and diplomatic means at their disposal to isolate repressive regimes such as the Taliban. Indeed, when one can be certain that their impact will be felt mainly by the regime and not the people, economic sanctions are valid and useful in certain circumstances. Sanctions had a positive role in apartheid South Africa but they had a very negative on ordinary people in Iraq, but that is a topic for another discussion.

But we must always draw the line when it comes to the use of force by one state on another. Forcible regime change is not only wrong. It has far-reaching destabilizing consequences for the whole international state system. Once it has managed to get the green light from significant others in one case, you can be sure that the hegemon will resort to it again and again, driven by the imperative of increasing its power and accumulated advantages within the international system. You begin with a Haiti or a Kosovo, and you end up with an Iraq.

In international relations, there is a distinction made between “status quo powers” and “revisionist powers.” Status quo powers seek to maintain the structure and distribution of relative power within the system. Revisionist powers seek to change the structure and distribution of power. Ironically, the US is today a revisionist power-that is, it seeks to achieve a balance of power in its favor that is even greater than that it enjoys today. By going alone with its earlier “humanitarian interventions” in Kosovo and Afghanistan, many states and civil society organizations must bear some responsibility for creating this unrestrained hegemon.

We must forcefully delegitimize this dangerous doctrine of humanitarian intervention to prevent its being employed again in the future against candidates for great power intervention like Iran and Venezuela. Like its counterpart concept of “liberal imperialism,” there is only one thing to do with the concept of humanitarian intervention: dump it.

Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based research and analysis institute Focus on the Global South and professor at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

Humanitarian Intervention

Alex Doherty — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:16:27 +0000

The following is a revised version of a speech delivered at the Conference on Globalization, War, and Intervention sponsored by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German Chapter, Frankfurt, Germany, January 14-15, 2006.

As war clouds gather over Iran, the topic we are focused on in this conference is very timely: great power military intervention in the affairs of sovereign states for humanitarian reasons.

Humanitarian intervention, defined simply, is military action taken to prevent or terminate violations of human rights that is directed at and is carried out without the consent of a sovereign government. While the main rationale for the invasion of Iraq by the United States was its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, an important supporting rationale was regime change for humanitarian reasons. When it became clear that there were in fact no WMD, the Bush administration retroactively justified its intervention on humanitarian grounds: getting rid of a repressive dictatorship and imposing democratic rule.The show trial of Saddam for human rights violations now taking place in Baghdad is part of this retroactive effort to legitimize the invasion.

Iraq: Dead End of Humanitarian Intervention

Iraq shows the dangers of the humanitarian rationale. It can so easily be used to justify any violation of national sovereignty to promote the interests of an external force. Yes, under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi people were subjected to systematic repression, with many people executed and jailed. Yet, most of us, at least most of us in the global South, recoil at Washingtons use of the humanitarian logic to invade Iraq. Most of us would say that even as we condemn any regimes violations of human rights, systematic violation of those rights does not constitute grounds for the violation of national sovereignty through invasion or destabilization. Getting rid of a repressive regime or a dictator is the responsibility of the citizens of a country. In this regard, let me point out that not even during the darkest days of the Marcos dictatorship did the anti-fascist movement in the Philippines think of asking the United States to do the job for us.

So long as nation-states remain the prime political collectivities of human beings, so long as we live in a Westphalian worldand let me say emphasize that we are not in a post-Westphalian worldour defense of national sovereignty must be aggressive. And absolute, for imperialism is such that if you yield in one case, it uses that as a precedent for other, future cases.

Are we exaggerating our case? No. The Iraq tragedy is a result only of the American Rights drive to place US power far beyond the reach of any potential rival or coalition of rivals. The way to Iraq was paved by the actions of liberal democrats, of the very same Clintonites that currently criticize the Bush administration for its having plunged the US into a war without end. In other words, the road to Iraq would have been more difficult without the humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As one conservative writer so aptly put it, George W. Bush, in invading Iraq, simply took the doctrine of democratic engagement of the first Bush administration, and that of democratic enlargement of the Clinton administration, one step further. It might be called democratic transformation.[1]

Kosovo, Realpolitik, and Intervention

Second, the humanitarian rationale was undoubtedly the purpose of some of its advocates, but the operation eventually mainly advanced Washingtons geopolitical designs. The lasting result of the Kosovo air war was not a stable and secure network of Balkan states but NATO expansion. That is not surprising, since eventually that was what the air war was mainly about. Milosevics moves in both the earlier Bosnian crisis and in Kosovo, according to Andrew Bacevich, called into question the relevance of NATO and, by extension, US claims to leadership in Europe.[2] If it did not successfully manage Slobodan Milosevic, the US could not have supported its drive for NATO expansion. For the Clinton administration, such expansion would fill the security vacuum in Eastern Europe and institutionalize US leadership in post-Soviet Europe. In Washingtons view, according to one analyst,

NATO enlargement would provide an institutional framework to lock in domestic transitions under way in Eastern and Central Europe. The prospect of alliance membership would itself be an incentive for these countries to pursue domestic reforms. Subsequent integration into the alliance was predicted to lock in those institutional reforms. Membership would entail a wide array of organizational adaptations, such as standardization of military procedures, steps toward interoperability with NATO forces, and joint planning and training. By enmeshing new members in the wider alliance institutions and participation in its operations, NATO would reduce their ability to revert to the old ways and reinforce the liberalization of transitional governments. As one NATO official remarked: Were enmeshing them in the NATO culture, both politically and militarily, so they begin to think like usand over timeact like us.[3]

A major aspect of the politics of NATO expansion was securing the Western European states continuing military dependence on the United States, so that the European governments failure to follow through on an independent European initiative in the Balkans was quickly taken advantage of by Washington via the NATO air war against Serbia to prove the geopolitical point that European security was not possible without the American guarantee.

Third, the air war soon triggered what it was ostensibly meant to end: an increase in human rights violations and violations of international treaties. The bombing provoked the Serbs in Kosovo to accelerate their murder and displacement of Albanian Kosovars, while doing considerable indirect damage to the people of Serbia through the targeting of electrical grids, bridges, and water facilities—acts that violated Article 14 of the 1977 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Convention, which prohibits attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.[4]

Finally, Kosovo, as noted earlier, provided a strong precedent for future violations of the principle of national sovereignty. The cavalier way in which the Clinton administration justified setting aside national sovereignty by reference to allegedly overriding humanitarian concerns became part of the moral and legal armament that would be deployed by people of a different party, the Republicans, in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the right-wing thinker Philip Bobbitt saw it, the Clinton administrations actions in Kosovo and Haiti served as precedents that strengthen the emerging rule that regimes that repudiate the popular basis of sovereignty, by overturning democratic institutions, by denying even the most basic human rights and practicins mass terror against their own people, by preparing and launching unprovoked assaults against their neighborsjeopardize the rights of sovereignty, including the inherent right to seek whatever weapons a regime may choose.[5]

From Kosovo to Afghanistan

When the invasion of Afghanistan took place in 2001, there was relatively little opposition in the North to the US move to oust the Taliban government. Washington took advantage of sympathy for the US generated by the Sept. 11 events and the image of the Taliban government sheltering Al Qaeda to eliminate negotiations with the Taliban as an option and throw international law out of the window by invading Afghanistan, with little protest from European countries. But to strengthen its position, the Bush administration not only used the rationale of bringing the perpetrators of Sept. 11 to justice. It also painted its move into Afghanistan as a necessary act of humanitarian intervention to depose the repressive Taliban government—one that was justified by the precedents of Haiti and Kosovo. Invoking the humanitarian rationale, states belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization like Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands also eventually sent armed contingents. And in this connection, it must be pointed out that many NGOsincluding many liberal organizationssupported the US intervention for the same reason

Like the Kosovo air campaign, Afghanistan soon showed the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention.

First, great power logic soon took over. Hunting for Bin Laden yielded to the imperative of establishing and consolidating a US military presence in Southwest Asia that would allow strategic control of both the oil-rich Middle East and energy-rich Central Asia. Moreover, Afghanistan was seized on by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as what one analyst described as a laboratory to prove his theory about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with air power, to win decisive battles.[6] The Afghanistan invasions main function, it turned out, was to demonstrate that the Powell Doctrines dictum about the need for a massive commitment of troops to an intervention was obsoletea view that skeptics had to be persuaded to accept before they could be convinced to take on what emerged as the Bush administrations strategic objective: the invasion of Iraq.

Second, the campaign soon ended up doing what its promoters said they would eliminate: the terrorizing of the civilian population. US bombing could not, in many cases, distinguish military from civilian targetsnot surprising since the Taliban enjoyed significant popular support in many parts of the country. The result was a high level of civilian casualties; one estimate, by Marc Herrold, placed the figure of civilian deaths at between 3,125 and 3,620, from Oct. 7, 2001 to July 31, 2002.[7]

Third, the campaign ended up creating a political and humanitarian situation that was, in many respects, worse than that under the Taliban.

One of the fundamental functions of a government is to provide a minimum of order and security. The Taliban, for all their retrograde practices in other areas, were able to give Afghanistan its first secure political regime in over 30 years. In contrast, the regime of foreign occupation that succeeded them failed this test miserably. According to a report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, security has actually deteriorated since the beginning of the reconstruction in December 2001, particularly over the summer and fall of 2003.[8] So bad is basic physical security for ordinary people that one third of the country has been declared off limits to United Nations staff and most NGOs have pulled their people from most parts of the country. The Washington-installed government of Hamid Karzai does not exercise much authority outside Kabul and one or two other cities, prompting UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to state that without functional state institutions to serve the basic needs of the population throughout the country, the authority and legitimacy of the new government will be short-lived.[9]

Government officials are involved in 70 per cent of the narcotics traffic, with about a quarter of the 249 recently elected members of Parliament linked to the drug trade. One estimate in a study conducted for the independent Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit concludes that at least 17 newly elected MPs are drug traffickers themselves, 24 others are connected to criminal gangs, 40 are commanders of armed groups, and 19 face serious allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses.[11] For these people, who dominate Afghanistans political life, insecurity, according to Kofi Annan, is a business and extortion is a way of life.[12]

Oh yes, what about the impact of NGO humanitarianism? Well, on the heels of the US troops came a veritable army of NGOs of different kinds, all seeking to help the Afghan people with hundreds of well-funded projects. Indeed, like the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster and that wrought by Hurricane Katrina in the US, raising money for helping the Afghans soon became a profitable operation that made humanitarian-related NGO jobs among the most desirable in local economy. How positive these projects have been is another story, since like the military campaign, there were many badly thought out and badly executed projects whose main effect was to stoke resentment in the local population.

The Case against Humanitarian Intervention

Popular among certain elite circles in the US and Europe in the 1990s, humanitarian intervention has earned a bad name, especially in the South. Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq underline the bitter lessons of humanitarian intervention. To repeat:

1. Humanitarian intervention seldom remains the dominant rationale for long, with geopolitics quickly becoming the driving force of a military operation.

In international relations, there is a distinction made between status quo powers and revisionist powers. Status quo powers seek to maintain the structure and distribution of relative power within the system. Revisionist powers seek to change the structure and distribution of power. Ironically, the US is today a revisionist powerthat is, it seeks to achieve a balance of power in its favor that is even greater than that it enjoys today. By going alone with its earlier humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, many states and civil society organizations must bear some responsibility for creating this unrestrained hegemon.

We must forcefully delegitimize this dangerous doctrine of humanitarian intervention to prevent its being employed again in the future against candidates for great power intervention like Iran and Venezuela. Like its counterpart concept of liberal imperialism, there is only one thing to do with the concept of humanitarian intervention: dump it.

Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based research and analysis institute Focus on the Global South and professor at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

Notes:

[1] Philip Bobbitt, Better than Empire

[2] Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: the Reality and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 163.

[3] G. John Ikenberry, Mu.ltilateralism and US Grand Strategy, in Stewart Patrick and Shepard Foreman, eds, Multilateralism and US Foreign Policy (Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 2002), pp. 134-135.

[4] Michael Mandelbaum, A Perfcct Failure, Foreign Affairs, Sept-Oct 1999, p. 6.

[5] Bobbitt, ibid.

[6] Richard Clarke, quoted in Seymour Hersh, The Other War, New Yorker, May 12, 2004 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040412fa_fact.

[7] Herrold, cited in Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), p. 130

[8] Amy Frumin, Morgan Courtenay, and Rebecca Linder, The Road Ahead: Issues for Consideration at the Berlin Donor Conference for Afghanistan, March 31-April 1, 2004) Washington: CSIS, 2004), p. 22.

[9] Secretary General, United Nations, The Situation in Afghanistan and its Implications for International Peace and Security, A58/742/S2004/230, p. 4.

[10] Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, A Harvest of Treachery, Newsweek, p. 30.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Quoted in Secretary General, United Nations, The Situation in Afghanistan, p. 16.

The Real Meaning of Hong Kong

eddie — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 16:47:56 +0000

What was at stake in Hong Kong was the institutional survival of the World Trade Organization. After the collapse of two ministerials in Seattle and Cancun, a third unraveling would have seriously eroded the usefulness of the WTO as the key engine of global trade liberalization. A deal was needed, and that deal was arrived at. How, why, and by whom that deal was delivered was the real story of Hong Kong.

A Real Deal, not a Cosmetic One

The Hong Kong deal has been characterized in some reports as a minimum package that mainly functions as a life support system for the WTO. This is hardly the case. The deal extracted substantial concessions from developing countries while giving them hardly anything in return.

The stipulation of a Swiss formula to govern Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA), which would cut higher tariffs proportionally more than lower tariffs, would penalize mainly developing countries since to build up their industrial sectors via import substitution they generally maintain higher industrial and manufacturing tariffs than developed countries.

The specification of a plurilateral process of negotiations in the services text erodes the flexible request-offer approach that has marked the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) negotiations, injects a mandatory element, and will corral many developing countries into sectoral negotiations designed to blast open key services.

What the South got in return was mainly a date for the final phase-out of export subsidies in agriculture that nevertheless left the structure of subsidization of agricultural subsidization in the European Union and the United States largely intact. Even with the phase out of formally defined export subsidies, other forms of export support will allow the European Union, for instance, to continue to subsidize exports to the tune of 55 billion euros after 2013.

In sum, this was an agreement with teeth, but the bite will be felt principally by the developing countries.

The contours of the deal were already evident before Hong Kong, and many developing countries went to the ministerial determined to oppose it. Indeed, there were occasions, such as the formation on Dec. 16 of the G 110 by the G 33, G 90, and ACP (Asia Caribbean Pacific countries), that seemed to promise that developing country unity might yet emerge to derail the impending deal. Yet, in the end, the developing country governments caved in, many of them motivated solely by the fear of getting saddled with the blame for the collapse of the organization. Even Cuba and Venezuela confined themselves to registering only reservations with the services text during the closing session of the ministerial in the evening of December 18.

The Dealmakers

The reason for the developing countries collapse was not so much lack of leadership, but leadership that brought them in the opposite direction. The key to the debacle of Hong Kong was the role of Brazil and India, the leaders of the famed Group of 20.

Even before Hong Kong, Brazil and India were prepared to make a deal. For Brazil, the bottom line was the specification by the European Union of a date for the phase-out of agricultural export subsidies, and this was an item that Brazilian negotiators and many others expected would be delivered by the EU at the ministerial, though for negotiating purposes the Europeans would not reveal it till the last minute. Brazil also came to Hong Kong willing to accept a Swiss formula in NAMA and the plurilateral approach in services. India, for its part, arrived in Hong Kong with its positions well known. It would accept the plurilateral approach in services negotiations and the Swiss formula in NAMA and follow Brazils lead in agriculture. The only question for many was: would India press for developed country concessions in Mode 4 of GATS that is, get the US and EU to agree to the entry of more professionals from developing countries? As it turned out, it decided not to press Washington on this.

The Prize

It is a matter of debate whether the final agreement will result in a net gain for Brazil and India, though if the balance ends up with a net loss, this would likely be smaller than for the less advanced developing countries. However, the main gain for Brazil and India lay not in the impact of the agreement on their economies but in the affirmation of their new role as power brokers within the WTO.

With the emergence of the G 20 during the ministerial in Cancun in 2003, the EU and the US were put on notice that the old structure of power and decision-making at the WTO was obsolete. New players had to be accommodated into the elite. The circle of power had to be expanded to get the organization back on its feet and moving. The EU and USs invitation to Brazil and India to be part, along with Australia, of the Five Interested Parties (FIPs), was a key step in this direction, and it was agreement among the FIPs that solved the impasse in the agriculture negotiations, which led, in turn, to the Framework Agreement at the General Council meeting in July 2004.

In the lead-up of the Hong Kong ministerial, Brazil and Indias new role as power brokers between the developed and developing world was affirmed with the creation of a new informal grouping known as the New Quad. This formation, which included the EU, US, Brazil, and India, played the decisive role in setting the agenda and the direction of the negotiations. Its main objective in Hong Kong was to save the WTO. And the role of Brazil and India was to extract the assent of the developing countries to an unbalanced agreement that would make this possible in the face of the reluctance of the EU and US to make substantive concessions in agriculture. Delivering this consent was to be the proof that Brazil and India were responsible global actors. It was the price that they had to pay for full membership in new, enlarged power structure.

It took a lot of lobbying before and during Hong Kong, with both governments putting their reputation as leaders of the developing world on the line, but they succeeded in getting everybody, though not without some grumbling, to assent to a bad deal. It was no mean feat for it involved:

- getting the least developed countries to agree to a development package that consisted mainly of a loophole-ridden provision for the duty free and quota free entry of their products into developed country markets and a deceptively named aid for trade deal that would consist partly of loans to enable them to make their economic regulations WTO-consistent, increasing their indebtedness in the process;

- cajoling the West African cotton producers to accept a deal whose main content was giving the US a whole extra year to eliminate export subsidies that it should have eliminated a year and a half ago, following a WTO decision against these subsidies, and which totally ignored their demand for compensation for the enormous damage these subsidies had inflicted on their economies;

- coaxing the holdouts in the services negotiations Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa, Venezuela, and Cuba to give up their opposition to Annex C of the draft declaration, which stipulated plurilateral negotiations; and

- neutralizing the more dissatisfied members of the so-called NAMA 11, (of which Brazil and India were themselves members) which wanted to tie the Norths demands for a fast pace of liberalization in industrial and fishery tariffs to the Norths concessions in agriculture.

Mutual Admiration Club

The final G 20 press conference in the late afternoon of December 18 was notable for its lack of substance and for its symbolism. As if to preempt hard questions on whether the ministerial text represented a good deal for developing countries, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim repeatedly claimed We have a date, referring to the 2013 phase-out date for export subsidies. Then Amorim and Indian Commerce and Industy Minister Kamal Nath engaged in a round of backslapping, congratulating one another for doing a great job in coming out with an agreement that protected the interests of developing countries. Then, with so many of those in attendance poised to ask questions, Amorim hurriedly cut short the press conference and quickly left the room with Kamal Nath, ostensibly for another meeting but obviously so as not to be on the line of fire from skeptical reporters and NGO representatives.

At the closing session of Sixth Ministerial, Pascal Lamy, the director general, said that in Hong Kong, the balance of power has tilted in favor of developing countries. The statement was not entirely cynical and untrue. The grain of truth in his statement was that India and Brazil, the big boys of the developing world, had become part of the big boys club that governs the WTO.

Paradox

It is paradoxical that the G 20, whose formation captured the imagination of the developing world during the Cancun ministerial, has ended up being the launching pad for India and Brazils integration into the WTO power structure. But this is hardly unusual in history. Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian thinker, referred to history being the graveyard of aristocracies that took a hard line against change in power relations. To Pareto, the most successful elites are those that manage to coopt the leaders of the mass insurgency that set out to remove them for power and enlarge the power elite while preserving the structure of the system. Though divided on agriculture, the US and the EU had as a common priority since the collapse of the Cancun ministerial the survival of the WTO, and they successfully managed a strategy of cooptation that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Hong Kong.

Before the events in Hong Kong, the most striking recent cases of cooptation involved the Workers Party-led government of President Luis Inacio da Silva in Brazil and the Congress-led coalition government in India. Both came to power with anti-neoliberal platforms. But in power, both have become the most effective stabilizers of neoliberal programs, with both enjoying the support of the International Monetary Fund, the transnational corporate lobby, and Washington. It is not unreasonable to assume that there is a connection between the domestic record of these governments and their performance on the global stage in Hong Kong.

Nothing to Gain, Everything to Lose

Alex Doherty — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:56:44 +0000

The negotiations leading up to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial in Hong Kong are apparently getting nowhere. The draft ministerial reports on the state of negotiations in agriculture, non-agricultural market access, and services are out, and while all try to put a positive spin that there is a movement toward “convergence” there is very little of that. A close examination of the document shows that there is agreement only, on at the most, 10 per cent on key negotiating points and divergence, indeed, wide divergence on 90 per cent. When the draft ministerial declaration does come out, it is likely to be what the WTO secretariat calls a “heavily bracketed” document like the draft declaration for the Seattle ministerial.

Defensive Warfare

Since the “July Framework” was rammed through at the General Council meeting in late July 2004, the developing countries have been engaged in what might be characterized as defensive warfare at the WTO. In the three key negotiating areas, services, non-agricultural market access (NAMA), and agriculture, they have had to defend their markets from aggressive efforts to further liberalize them by the developed countries led by the United States and the European Union. In two of these, NAMA and services, owing to their much higher tariff levels than developed countries in manufacturing and industry and preferential treatment for local service providers, they had everything to lose and little to gain by liberalizing. In agriculture, they were also on the defensive but at least they could relieve pressures for further liberalization of their markets by mounting a counterattack on the massive agricultural subsidies that have enabled European Union and United States agricultural interests to dominate and distort global markets.

In the three sectoral negotiations, the most immediately threat, from the point of view of developing countries, is the services negotiations. Here, there has been a strong move on the part of the developed countries to replace the flexible request-offer approach with one that has a mandatory element. Let me explain briefly: the negotiating practice in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is that a government is free to request another to open up several service sectors but the requested government is also free to offer only those it is willing to open up or even not to make any offers at all. In the current negotiations, “complementary approaches” such as “benchmarking” and “numerical targets” have been introduced to force developing countries to “improve the quality” of their offers, meaning they must agree to open up more services than they have so far put on the table in the current negotiations.

In the current draft ministerial text issued by the chair of the Council on Trade in Services, while the more threatening approaches of “benchmarking” and “numerical targets” are not mentioned, at least explicitly, the text endorses a complementary approach whereby one government or a group of governments may make a specific request to another government or group of governments to open up one or several service sectors and the latter would have to “enter into plurilateral negotiations to considers such requests.” As developing countries have rightly perceived, mandatory negotiations is the first step on the slippery slope to mandatory liberalization.

In NAMA, there has been wide divergence, and the Chairmans Progress Report on the negotiations issued 22 November, 2005, reflects this. Neither a formula for liberalizing non-agricultural tariffs nor the differential coefficients for developed and developing countries to plug into such a formula (that would take into account the underdeveloped status of the industrial and manufacturing sectors of the developing countries) has been agreed. One disturbing note in the text, however, is its implying that members have agreed on a “Swiss Formula” for cutting tariffs, that is one that would require higher proportional cuts from higher tariffs rather than a “Uruguay Round” formula that would mandate an average tariff cut but leave a member with the flexibility to spread that average cut discriminately across the tariff lines, with tariff cuts for sensitive products being less than for others. Since many developing countries maintain higher tariffs on many manufactured and other non-agricultural imports than developed countries, they would be the main losers whichever Swiss formula is adopted. And this is the reason why, contrary to the impression left by the text, many are resisting a Swiss or any Swiss-type formula.

As we have noted, in services and NAMA, it has been largely defensive warfare for developing countries, with few handles for an offensive strategy except perhaps for mode 4 in services, which has to do with the movement of “natural persons” that provide services, like highly skilled professionals. But even with mode 4, the position of the developed country governments that they have hardly any “flexibility” for political reasons (read anti-immigrant sentiment) has severely limited the possible gains in this area.

EU and US Intransigence in Agriculture

In the agricultural negotiations, however, it has been a different story. Despite the advantage given to them by the terms of the July Framework, differences in offers of subsidy reduction among the developed countries and the ability of the developing countries to keep the focus on developed country subsidies and market protection have put the EU and the US on the defensive.

Intransigence in the developed countries negotiating positions helped sink the Cancún ministerial in 2003. It has now become the main sticking point in the lead-up to Hong Kong. Although the EU is a bad boy — as the US tried very hard to get other governments to believe at the recent Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan, Korea it is not the only one. The USs much publicized offer to cut its overall subsidization of agriculture by 60 per cent was all smoke and mirrors. It was a cut from allowable levels of support, not from actual, current levels. It would not only have allowed the current level of government support to continue but provided space for it to rise!

Moreover, the US proposal would leave the system of subsidization virtually untouched, if not expanded. There were no concrete commitments to cut food aid, which is really a dumping mechanism; reduce export credits, which are really a form of export subsidy; or to significantly trim the “green box” subsidies. And, indeed, the US continues to press for the expansion of its “blue box” to accommodate the new round of subsidies for farming interests legislated by the Bush administration under the 2002 US Farm Bill. These two “boxes”, which were institutionalized during the Uruguay Round, exemptfor specious reasons—various kinds of dumping-promoting subsidies from elimination or significant reduction.

Why are the US and the EU finding it so hard to make serious offers? Because the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) was never meant to promote fair trade in agriculture but to regulate the monopolistic competition between the US and the EU to dump their goods in third country markets while making cosmetic cuts in domestic support to legitimize the process. The main aim was to open up and regulate dumping in developing country agricultural markets, never to end developed country subsidies. So even if the US and EU were now to make “better” offers than those they have tabled, it is very unlikely that these would make any but the slightest dent on their systems of massive subsidization.

Kabuki?

So with no movement in agriculture, are we caught in a stalemate leading up to Hong Kong? I wish this were so. But what many fear, in fact, is that the EU-US competition on who can make a better offer is nothing but a finely choreographed kabuki play that will end with them coming up with a compromise formula at the last minute. The parallel some draw is with the agricultural negotiations in the last phase of the Uruguay Round when the US and EU went to the brink, from which they drew back at the last minute by coming up with the current Agreement on Agriculture, which they then tossed to other countries. Take it or leave it, they said, but if you refuse it, youll be responsible for scuttling the round.

A similar scenario can unfold, warns economist C.P. Chandrasekhar:

“It is precisely [the same] act that is being replayed. Expectations that the EU would move a little further from its second offer are high. However, this would ensure that its agricultural interests would be well looked after and still further demand that developing countries make major concessions in non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and services. If they resist the latter demand, the burden of wrecking the round would be shifted at the last moment onto the shoulders of developing countries.”

And the danger, he notes is that “in the scramble to get as much as they can without being forced to shoulder that responsibility, countries like India and Brazil would make large concessions that hurt not just their own producers but those in Africa and elsewhere.” Indeed, many are worried that the Brazilians could sell the store with a commitment from the EU on an explicit schedule to phase out export subsidies and the Indians for a commitment from the US to marginally increase HB1 work visas for Indian high-tech specialists.

There is, in fact, now talk of stretching the deal-making process beyond Hong Kong to ensure that there will be an agreement and a triumphant conclusion to the so-called Doha Round. As Celine Chevariat of Oxfam describes it, what influential actors are talking about is a “one-third of an agreement in HK and four month postponement for final conclusion of modalities” in another ministerial before the middle of 2006. In my view, the “one third” agreed in Hong Kong could well be a services agreement that endorses the “plurilateral” approach, with the two thirds, mainly agriculture and NAMA, concluded later in the second ministerial.

Indeed, even if the only outcome of Hong Kong or a “Hong Kong Plus” process is an agreement based on the current services draft, that would already be a big win for the trading powers and a big setback for the developing countries. Aileen Kwa of Focus on the Global South warns that the plurilateral approach legitimized by a services agreement could be easily turned into formal sectoral negotiations with a strong momentum for liberalization that could begin immediately after Hong Kong, much like the negotiations on telecommunications and financial services were quickly formalized into sectoral negotiations after talks on a plurilateral basis in these sectors were endorsed in 1997.

In short, to sum up the state of play in the WTO, developing countries have everything to lose and nothing to gain with a new WTO deal, whether that deal is concluded in Hong Kong or a more protracted, extended “Hong Kong Plus” process.

The Bigger Problem

But the problem lies not only with the current negotiating process that has been imprisoned within the so-called July Framework. The problem is more fundamental: the WTOs structure, rules, and processes are systematically biased against the interests of developing countries. It has taken developing countries 10 years to learn them, but there are four reasons why the WTO, to borrow the title of the Focus on the Global South video, is really bad for the global South:

First, trade liberalization is the raison detre of the WTO and it is increasingly evident that greater economic liberalization has had exactly the opposite results to those predicted by free traders.

After 20 years of structural adjustment and other radical pro-market policies in the developing countries, there are more poor people in the world today than in 1985. There is much more inequality both within and among countries. The areas of the world that adopted pro-market policies most wholeheartedlyLatin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and Eastern Europesaw their numbers of poor people increase significantly. Indeed, massively in the case of the former poster boy of neoliberalism, Argentina, where 53 per cent tumbled below the poverty line, with 25 per cent defined “indigent”, following the economic collapse of 2002.

A reduction in poverty was mainly registered in East Asia, where integration into the global market was managed by strong states like China and South Korea that, in most instances, applied an anti-free trade formula protectionism at home and mercantilism abroad. But even in this region, there were countertrends, as in Thailand and Indonesia, where International Monetary Fund (IMF)-supported capital account liberalization provoked the massive Asian financial crisis that drove more than one million Thais and more than 21 million Indonesians below the poverty line in the space of a few weeks in the summer of 1997.

Second, the rhetoric of the WTO may be free trade, but its key agreements promote corporate monopoly.

If negotiations in agriculture have ground to a halt, it is because, as we have detailed above, the AoA was never meant to liberalize global agricultural trade, but to allow the EU and US to manage their monopolistic competition to dump highly subsidized goods on third country markets while conceding cosmetic cuts in subsidies to gain legitimacy for the arrangement.

Like the AoA, there is nothing faintly connected to free trade in the WTOs centerpiece accord, the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs), which is meant to give US and other high tech corporations monopoly over technological innovations through the imposition globally of draconian patent laws patterned after those of the United States. Indeed, so brazenly monopolistic in intent is TRIPs that the free-trade partisan Jagdish Bhagwati has questioned its inclusion in the WTO. This is not to say that we prefer corporate free trade to monopolized trade (for free trade is also profoundly subversive of developing country interests), but to make the point that this fundamental contradiction between ideological principle and corporate interest that runs like a fissure through the WTO has been a central reason for its loss of legitimacy among developing countries.

Third, the WTO is anti-development.

Stampeded into signing on the dotted line in 1994, it took some time for the developing countries to realize that the TRIPs agreement practically guaranteed that the traditional route to industrialization, industrialization-by-imitation, is a thing of the past; and that the Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) Agreement, by outlawing development tools such as local content policy, made it well nigh impossible to use trade policy as an instrument of industrialization. For most developing countries, the “Doha Development Round” is a malicious misnomer since it marginalizes the negotiating areas of greatest concern to the developing countries: reconciling trade and development, implementation of trade liberalization commitments made during the Uruguay Round, and special and differential treatment for developing countries.

Fourth, global trade does not need the WTO.

The indispensability of the WTO to the expansion of global trade is one of those lies that, as the Nazi propagandist Goebbels put it, takes on the status of truth when repeated often enough. A corollary to this is the claim that global trade would fall into anarchy were the WTO to cease to exist.

Let us set the record straight: global trade did not need the WTO to expand eighty six fold, from $124 billion in 1948 to $10,772 billion in 1997! That expansion took place took place under the old GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), complemented by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The flexible GATT-cum-UNCTAD framework permitted the development-oriented trade policies that enabled Latin American countries to industrialize from 1950 to 1970 as well the state-led protectionist/mercantilist strategies that Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) of East Asia used to rapidly transform their economies between 1965 and 1995. In other words, the GATT-cum-UNCTAD multilateral framework allowed developing countries a significant amount of “policy space” a phenomenon reflected in Robert Pollins finding that, excluding the special case of China from the equation, the overall growth rate of developing countries in the era of development (1961-80) was 5.5 per cent, compared to 2.6 per cent (1981-2000) in the neoliberal era.

So why, if it was functioning reasonably well, was the GATT-cum-UNCTAD framework superseded? The reason the WTO was established and its continuing raison detre has been to serve the interests of the transnational corporations (TNCs) that today dominate the global economy and are constantly seeking to open up markets. To be more specific, it was the US and its corporations that pushed the creation of the WTO. With its corporations becoming more dependent on the global economy by the 1970s, the US led the effort to replace GATT with an organization with a more formidable trade dispute-settlement mechanism to tear down protectionist policies; forged an agricultural trade agreement with the EU that would manage their dumping in developing country markets; pushed an agreement that would open up the services of developing countries to TNC exploitation; lobbied for a TRIMs agreement that would outlaw developing countries use of trade policy to industrialize; and rammed through a TRIPs agreement that would consolidate the US advantage in cutting-edge, knowledge-intensive industries.

Pushed by their own globalizing corporations, the EU and Japan went along with the US agenda, while the developing countries were largely bystanders, preferring as they did the relatively development friendly framework of GATTS cum UNCTAD.

Yes, the WTO is indispensableto TNCs. For developing countries, it has been – to borrow an image from Max Weber – an iron cage that has robbed them of development space. For them, the last ten years has been a harrowing experience of being constantly on the defensive as the WTO process inexorably subordinated development to corporate trade. To defend their interests, they were forced to establish blocs such as the G20, G33, and G90, which contributed mightily to the derailment of the WTO ministerial in Cancún. If the current negotiations are stalemated, it is because the developing country blocs have successfully blocked the USs and EUs asymmetrical negotiating strategy of conceding cosmetic cuts on their massive agricultural subsidies while demanding damaging concessions from developing countries in terms of greater market access to their agricultural, non-agricultural, and service sectors.

Making a virtue out of necessity, partisans of the WTO have now seized on the emergence of these groupings to argue that that they enable countries to negotiate on more equitable terms under the WTO umbrella. The reality is that the deep anti-development bias of the WTO allows developing countries very limited space to defend their interests. Certainly, it is not a framework within which they can pursue a positive development agenda. Indeed, the one good thing to emerge from their experience of defensive trench warfare at the WTO is that the developing countries have begun to realize that they need to come together to create altogether different institutions of global trade governance from the WTOinstitutions that subordinate trade to development.

The Sixth Ministerial of the WTO may well collapse in Hong Kong. This will, however, be a positive development. Contrary to the self-serving doomsday scenarios painted by its corporate supporters, there is life after the WTO. Its demise would create not anarchy but policy space for development.

Dracula and the Developing World. The Final Act?

Let me conclude by borrowing an image from one of my favorite authors, Bam Stoker. The WTO is like his immortal character Dracula. Every time you think youve killed him, he resurrects. Following the collapse of the Third Ministerial in Seattle in 1999, the WTO came back to life with its successful ministerial in Doha, Qatar, in November 1991. The Doha triumph, however, was followed by the unraveling of the Fifth Ministerial in Cancún in September 2003. Cancún was followed by the institutional coup of the WTO General Council in July 2004, which rammed through the draconian July Framework. Thus the stakes in Hong Kong are high. Hong Kong may consolidate the WTO as the engine of global trade liberalization. Or it may prove to be stake that is driven through the heart of this profoundly anti-people organization and finishes it off. Permanently.

Blair and the Bombings

Alex Doherty — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 10:18:27 +0000

The ceremony beside the National Gallery at Princess Street was simple and somber. Thirty seven candles were lit, marking the number of men and women who died in London earlier in the day, and the speeches that followed were brief and eloquent. The same theme was sounded by most of us: it was a horrible, inexcusable crime, and our hearts went out to the families of the dead and wounded, but it would be wrong for Britain to follow the road of vengeance that the US did after September 11, a path that led to Afghanistan, Iraq, Madrid, and, now, London. It would be tragic if the result were the curtailment of civil liberties and repression directed at the country’s Muslim minority. Now, more than ever, it was urgent to pursue the path of peace and justice in order to avoid future Londons and future Iraqs .

What Tony Blair had almost successfully expelled from the G 8 meeting, the Live 8 Concerts, and the Make Poverty History Marchthe British participation in the occupation of Iraq asserted itself savagely as the summit in Gleaneagles began. But not in a way desired by any of us. When he made his statement at midday, with his line about the British people’s determination to preserve their way of life outlasting the terrorists’ determination to impose their extremist values on them, one could not help but marvel at the depths of the man’s hypocrisy, at his seemingly effortless attempt to conceal the fact that his policies were, in great part, responsible for the carnage. This was about Iraq , about his leading a country to a war that the vast majority opposed. He had blood on his hands, not only that of innocent Iraqis but now also that of innocent British men and women.

But could he pull it off? Throughout the day, I talked to people, probing to see if Blair’s Churchillian pose would somehow succeed in pulling the wool over their eyes. I ended the day with more confidence in the British people than I had in the morning. As the receptionist of the hotel I was staying in told me, This is about Tony Blair.

Yes, this was about Tony Blair. So even as we mourn the dead in London , even as we condemn the people that perpetrated the bombings, let us not forget the steps Blair took that helped lead to their tragic end. Let us review the record in detail, using the facts presented at the recent World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul .

Fabricating Evidence

The recently revealed Downing Street Memos show that as early as April 2002, the Labor leadership was aware that 1) the Bush administration was keen to invade Iraq; 2) that it was determined to do this on the issue of Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction; and 3) that the evidence of Saddam’s ability to develop weapons of mass destruction was tenuous. As one Foreign Office memo dated March 22, 2002, addressed to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw put it, The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. It continued: But even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile, or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.

Despite the fragility of the evidence for the existence of weapons of mass destruction, however, Prime Minister Tony Blair beat the drums for war on the WMD argument. At around the same time that the Downing Street memos were questioning the WMD evidence, Blair told the House of Commons on April 10, 2002 : Saddam Hussein’s regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked.

On September 24, 2002, again contradicting the lack of evidence, he declared: It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated in 45 minutes, including his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

On February 25, 2003 , in the lead-up to the invasion: The intelligence is clear: (Saddam) continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. In the same speech, he asserted: The biological agents we believe Iraq can produce include anthrax, botolium, toxin, aflatoxin, and ricin. All eventually result in excruciatingly painful death.

Then on the very day of invasion, March 20, 2003 , Blair said: If the only means of achieving the disarmament of Iraq of weapons of mass destruction is the removal of the regime, then the removal of the regime has to be our objective.

It now appears that concerted effort by the Blair government to produce evidence of Iraq ‘s possession of WMD led to the doctoring or, as the British Broadcasting Corporation report put it, the sexing up of the British intelligence services’ 50-page dossier on Saddam’s alleged WMD program released in September 2002. This dossier served as one of the key British government documents to make the case for war. Caught in the crossfire between pressure from the government and the slimness of the evidence, senior government scientist Dr. David Kelley, a former WMD inspector in Iraq , revealed to the press his strong doubts about the dossier’s allegations, particularly the claim that Iraq could activate WMDs within 45 minutes. This apparently triggered government pressure on him that eventually led to his suicide in July 2003.

Regime Change: the Real Rationale

The Downing Street memos also indicate that even as the WMD evidence was thin or nonexistent, the Blair government was strongly for invading Iraq to institute regime change, though that was not something it could trumpet publicly for that would come across as advocating a clear breach of international law. Indeed, as early as March or April 2002, a time that the Blair government and the Bush administration say they were not engaged in war planning, they were already at an advance stage in the process. While the British government was not convinced of the threat of WMD, the memos reveal that it shared the Bush administration’s desire for regime change through military means.

One memo in mid-March 2002 details a letter from Christopher Meyer, then British Ambassador to the United Nations, on a lunch discussion he had with then US Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. We backed regime change, he wrote, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe .

At the same time, British officials knew that regime change per se could not be invoked as an objective for invasion. As a March 8, 2002 memo sketching out options for dealing with Iraq noted, an invasion for the purpose of regime change has no basis under international law. The dilemma and the solution to it was stated over two weeks later by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw: Regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of any strategy, but not a goal, he said. Elimination of Iraq ‘s WMD capacity has to be the goal. Not surprisingly, the Blair government embarked on a course of manufacturing a nonexistent threat, culminating in the infamous September 25, 2002 dossier that became the key document propagated by Washington and London to justify the impending invasion of Iraq .

War Crimes

In addition to its role in planning the war, the British government’s conduct of the war in Iraq clearly reveals its disregard for international law and universally recognized human rights. As commander in chief, Blair must take full responsibility for these acts.

The invasion of the country was preceded by a bombing campaign that began approximately 10 months before, in May 2002. Jets of the Royal Air Force joined United States Air Force jets in what were called spikes of activity designed to goad the Saddam Hussein regime into retaliating and thus providing the pretext for war. These actions, which were justified by US officials such as Allied Commander General Tommy Franks as necessary to degrade Iraq ‘s air defenses were not authorized by any United Nations resolution. Indeed, as the leaked Downing Street memos reveal, the British Foreign Office provided legal opinion in March 2002two months before the intensification of the bombing—that asserted that allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations and had no authority to put pressure of any kind on the regime. This illegal activity was further intensified at the end of August 2002, following a meeting of the US National Security Council where its purpose was revealed to be that of making Iraq ‘s air defenses as weak as possible for a possible invasion.

Since the invasion took place, Britain has sent some 65,000 British troops, or almost a third of the armed forces, to participate in an illegal war unauthorized by the United Nations. About 8,761 were stationed there as of March 2005.

The main assignment for the British troops was to secure the southern sector, notably the city of Basra . That campaign was marked by the deaths of scores of Iraqi civilians. Some of the deaths were caused by the use of cluster bombs, known to be deadly to civilian populations. Although officials at the British Ministry of Defense initially pledged not to use the weapons in and around Basra , Human Rights Watch documented several strikes using cluster munitions in the neighborhoods of that city. At the height of military operations in March and April 2003, British forces used 70 air-launched and 2100 ground launched cluster munitions, containing 113,190 submunitions. Total US and British use came to 13,000 cluster munitions and 2 million submunitions in that period.

Human Rights Watch also accused British military authorities of failing to secure large caches of abandoned Iraqi Army weapons, resulting in civilians being killed or wounded. Basra ‘s al-Jumhuriyya Hospital was receiving five victims of unsecured ordnance a day, leading Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth to declare: Britain failed in its duty as an occupying power to provide security to local civilians. Its inability or unwillingness to secure abandoned weapons made a dangerous situation even more dangerous.

Foreign occupation invites systematic abuses of human rights. This has been the case of the US Occupation in central and northern Iraq . Abu Ghraib prison has become a synonym for violations of the Geneva Convention, torture as a policy, and systematic sexual abuse, while the American retaking of Fallujah in November-December 2004 has become a contemporary version of the implementation of the harsh Roman order Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed.)

The British occupation of the Basra and southern Iraq , while being less in the glare of publicity than the US occupation, has also been marked by violations of basic human rights. One year of occupation yielded numerous cases of the killing and wounding of civilians by British troops. Amnesty International reports that as of early March 2004, British authorities admitted that UK forces had been involved in the killing of 37 civilians. They acknowledged, however, that the figure was not comprehensive. In a number of cases investigated by Amnesty, UK soldiers opened fire and killed Iraqi civilians in circumstances where was apparently no threat of death or serious injury to themselves or others. Amnesty found that the British Royal Military Police (RMP) was highly secretive andprovided families with little or no information about the progress or conclusions of investigations. Moreover, the process of gaining reparations by families of victims was grossly inadequate, plagued by inconsistencies, over-bureaucratic, and practically inaccessible to poor Iraqis.

Torture and sexual abuse of prisoners have been another black mark on the British Occupation. In January 2005, photos were released in the national press depicting torture and systematic abuse of Iraqis by soldiers belonging to the lst battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. As described in one report, One of the photographs showed a grimacing Iraqi civilian bound tightly in an army cargo net being suspended from a forklift truck driven by a British soldier. A second depicted a soldier dressed in shorts and a T-shirt standing on the bound and tied body of an Iraqi civilian. Other pictures showed two naked Iraqi men being forced to simulate anal sex and two Iraqis forced to simulate oral sex.

The soldiers were court-martialed, leading to a jail sentence and expulsion from the army of some of them. There was a grave miscarriage of justice at the trial, however, since evidence from the victims was not allowed in court, which could have led to harsher sentences or the implication of many more soldiers, including higher-ups. The evidence included that of the Iraqi in the forklift incident, Hassan Abdul-Hussein, who said that he was tied and strung up when he refused to sever another Iraqi’s finger with a knife. Why was the evidence inadmissible? The aim was, as in the case of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, damage limitation. As Phil Shiner, a lawyer who has followed the case, has asserted, Here there is the clearest evidence that the military are incapable of prosecuting and investigating themselves. If they are allowed to, all we get is a whitewash and a few bad apples thrown to the dogs. Clearly, here something as gone badly wrong, officers were involved and a whole lot of people were abused.

With British soldiers themselves participating in the abuse of civilians, it is not surprising that they failed to provide security, as they were required to by international law. Like other parts of the country, Basra and other sites in southern Iraq have witnessed scores, possibly hundreds, of peopledeliberately killed by individuals or armed groups for political reasons, including for perceived moral infractions such as selling or buying alcohol. However, virtually no investigation or prosecution of these killing had occurred as of early 2004. Thus Amnesty considered the UK military authorities as in breach of its international obligations under Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which mandates the UK as an occupying power to provide protection for Iraqis, especially from threats and acts of violence.

With the occupation provoking the rise of an armed resistance in 2003 and 2004, British troops were dragged in to support US military operations in central Iraq . The most notorious instance of indirect British support for US efforts to crush the Iraqi people’s resistance took place in November 2004, when the 850-strong Black Watch Regiment was moved from southern Iraq to the Babil Province, south of Baghdad. The redeployment followed a request from US military authorities who wanted to use the US military units freed up for the assault on the city of Fallujah that was to be launched after the US elections. The move provoked former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook to speak about the suspicion that we sent a third of the British army to Iraq not in pursuit of our own national interest but in support of the White House’s political agenda. This latest twist to the tale confirms the perception that it is Washington that calls the shots and Britain that jumps to attention. It is equally obvious that the request was the product of US politics. The ensuing US assault on Fallujah was marked by hundreds of civilian deaths, thousands of people injured, routine violations of human rights by American soldiers such as the killing of wounded prisoners, and massive destruction of property. By redeploying British troops to release American soldiers for the savage attack, Mr. Blair must take some responsibility for the ensuing war crimes.

Blair: an Accomplice in the London Bombings

When all is said and done, it is clear that it was Tony Blair, against the wishes of the vast majority of the British people and a significant section of his party, that brought the United Kingdom to the war. Why? Some commentators say that he really did believe in the morality of externally imposed regime change, which makes him, like Bush, a very dangerous man indeed. Others would discount morality and say that Blair was in fact motivated by cold realpolitik. My sense is that, along with a warped morality, this is a likely motivation: that is, the desire to put the British government at the center of global power alongside the United States . As he once asserted, It’s my job to protect and project British power.

It is on the altar of British imperial power that Blair has sacrificed not only the lives of thousands of Iraqis but now also those of ordinary Britons.