The Syrian Conundrum

“I guess you killed 7,000 people there,” a Lebanese businessman once said to Rifaat al-Assad, the younger brother of former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, referring to the Hama massacre of 1982. Rifaat was the commanding general of the Hama operation in which Syrian troops, under order from President Hafez, massacred scores of people to quell a Sunni rebellion against the Baathist regime. Normally a politician will play down such a ghastly incident. But Rifaat’s response was rather surprising. “What are you talking about, 7000?” He said to the businessman. “No, no. We killed 38,000.” This conversation, cited in Thomas Friedman’s award-winning book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, offers a complete picture of how President Hafez put down the rebellion in Hama. http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/TheSyrianConundrum_sjohny_140212

The Unending Iranian Nuclear Crisis

If anybody thought that a change of talk in the Bush administration’s Iran policy would be enough to induce the “isolated” Tehran to give up its intransigence and toe the western line, the July 19 meeting proved him or her wrong. Before the Geneva meeting between Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the US sent feelers to Tehran. In a clear indication that Washington was prepared to change its belligerent stand towards Tehran, the Bush administration announced that William Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, would attend the meet. In addition, unconfirmed reports said the US was planning to open a diplomatic post in Tehran for the first time since relations were severed during the 444-day occupation of the American embassy in Tehran nearly three decades ago. http://www.idsa.in/idsastrategiccomments/TheUnendingIranianNuclearCrisis_SJohny_250708

A Decade of Wars, Crises and Rises

In international politics, decades are important tools that help us understand and interpret history better. The major developments in the past often come to our mind with tags of decades – the economic crisis of 1920’s, the wars of 1930’s, the reconstruction of 1950’s, the Lost Decade, and so on. Now, standing at the starting point of a new decade, how do we analyse the bygone one (2000-10)? According to British historian Andrew Roberts, the first ten years of the new century, or the Noughties, were full of troubles. It witnessed two major wars, one of the gravest financial crises in decades, a number of natural disasters including Tsunami, and changes in global power dynamics. At the beginning of the century, not many might have forecast such a troublesome first decade.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-decade-of-wars-crises-and-rises/16868

Why India should continue engaging Iran?

Both the summit and its host have historically been important for India. Keeping up with that importance, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh embarked on a four-day trip to Iran on Tuesday to attend the 16th summit of the 120-member non-aligned movement (NAM). The gathering at the Iranian capital assumes greater significance because it is happening at a time when Iran is being isolated by western countries, led by the US, for its controversial nuclear programme. The West has recently imposed a slew of sanctions on the Islamic Republic aimed at scuttling its nuclear programme, which, they say, is attempting to build bomb. On the contrary, Iran has long maintained that the programme is for peaceful civilian purposes. http://www.pragoti.in/node/4757

Barbarism of our times

On April 19 this year, the 62nd Independence Day of Israel, US President Barack Obama reiterated his country’s “commitment” to protecting Israeli’s security. The US, Obama said in a White House statement, shared an “unbreakable bond” with Tel Aviv and was confident that the ties “will only be strengthened into the future”. This Bush-style statement came from a President who had promised a “new beginning” for the Muslims amid reports that Israel’s blockade of Gaza had caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Barely one-and-a-half months later, Israel stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza strip, killing at least nine people. President Obama called the incident “tragic”, but stopped there.

Even while expressing concern over the “loss of lives” in Israeli raid on May 31 of the aid ships in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, the President was cautious to avoid any harsh words against Israel. No direct criticism, no moral outrage!

What Obama said was that such acts (read killing of those who want to help the Gazans) would not serve the long term security interests of Israel. He further said Israel has “legitimate security concerns” as it’s living under the “threat” of missiles from Gaza (fired by Hamas). In the UN Security Council, the US blocked an anti-Israel resolution and helped the passage of another that doesn’t even name Israel, but just condemns the “acts that led to the nine deaths”. Going a step further, Vice President Joe Biden defended Israeli Premier Binyamin Netanyahu, who supported outright the military onslaught against the aid workers. Israel has “absolute right” to defend its security interests, Biden said on June 2. “It's legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don't know what's on that ship. These guys are dropping eight – 3,000 rockets on my people,’” he added.

If the US can’t condemn Israel now, then when will it do? One might ask after seeing these direct and indirect efforts the Obama administration has taken in defence of Israel. Most of the world leaders came strongly against Israel’s “act of war” against the six-ship flotilla – three cargo and three passenger ships. The ships, sent by the Free Gaza Movement, an international coalition of activist groups, carried tonnes of cement and other aid materials for the blockade-hit Gaza.

The blockade imposed by Israel doesn’t allow any ships to reach the Gaza coast. Israeli troops have also sealed all entry points of the Gaza, a small strip of land that houses around 1.5 million people. Israeli forces even restrict the movement of people to and from Gaza. Israel’s point is that the Hamas is posing a serious threat to Israeli’s as the Islamic resistance movement fires rockets and short range missiles into the Israeli territory. The international community (read the US) failed miserably to persuade Israel to lift the blockade. Instead, the top administration officials of Obama repeated time and again about the so called security concerns of the Jewish state. Even Obama, who pressed Netanyahu for a freeze of new settlement activities in the West Bank, did not annoy Israel by raising the Gaza blockade issue.

Gaza is now more or less a prison camp, or the world’s largest concentration camp. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) launched a lethal offensive against the Gazans in George W Bush’s last days in office in January 2009. Obama was the president-elect. He did not utter a word when Israeli forces massacred around 1,500 Palestinians. Since then, Israel turned Gaza into a hell on the earth. Since the blockade started in 2007, the economic infrastructure has been virtually dismantled. “Mass unemployment, extreme poverty and food price rises caused by shortages have left four in five Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid,” says a report published by the Amnesty International on June 1, 2010. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the number of refugees living in abject poverty in the Gaza Strip has tripled since the blockade began. It adds that more than 60 percent of households are currently “food insecure”. A veteran Indian diplomat, who had lived almost three decades in the Middle East, told this author last month that even the science labs of all colleges in Gaza have been shut as no chemical is available in the strip due to the blockade. “The science students are nowhere. They can’t continue even their studies,” he said.

Is it this Gaza that poses a “genuine security threat” to the mighty Israel? Bibi Netanyahu might say yes. So does the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington. The Obama administration, which invoked hope at its early days in office, has disappointed all peace loving minds in the world. President Obama doesn’t have the strength at least to criticize Israel even after such a horrible act. The international community never goes beyond issuing statements when it comes to Israel. The UNSC is dysfunctional whenever Israel mocks at the international law. It seems peace is a strange word in the Middle East. The barbarism is set to rule forever. And the US interests, irrespective of who is sitting in the White House, will never antagonize that barbarism. (Zeenews, June 7, 2010)

Single-Pointed Khomeinism

Ayatollah Khomeini was one of the most influential political personalities of the past century. His interpretation of political Islam had the revolutionary zeal to topple a regime which enjoyed unequivocal support of the American empire. After three decades of the revolution, Khomeini’s legacy still lives in Iran and beyond. Con Coughlin, the best selling author of “Saddam: His Secret Life”, is taking a detailed effort to understand this legacy in his latest book, “Khomeini’s Ghost”.

What legacy did Khomeini bequeath to his heirs? For an independent historian, this is a complicated question as the ayatollah still remains perplexing subject. He was a puritan, but an anti-imperialist to the core. At the same time, he stood for empowering his people, and built a comparatively stable political system and undertook radical income distribution. For Coughlin, however, Khomeini’s legacy is single pointed. “Following his death in 1989, Khomeini bequeathed a legacy to his heirs, a legacy of militant Islam that is the cause of so many of the challenges the world faces today, whether it is the potential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme or Iranian funded and trained Islamist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza.” He says even Iran’s quest for atom bomb was the “central part of Khomeini’s legacy.”

Through this biographical work of Imam Khomeini, Coughlin is actually trying to understand ideological underpinnings of the Iranian regime and how it’s related with Khomeinism. The ayatollah “accomplished his lifelong ambition of creating an Islamic state based on the strict interpretation of Shariah law,” writes Coughlin in an apparent effort to portray Iran as a conservative, rigid religious state. Despite being a theocratic state, it should not be forgotten that the Iranian constitution provides for an elected legislature and declares that the country should be run on the basis of “public opinion”.

The book is divided into two parts – Origins and Legacy. In the first part, Coughlin discusses Khomeini’s early life, his rise as a major critic of the unpopular Shah regime, life in exile and the eventful return to Tehran in 1979 February. It’s in the second part, Coughlin tries to define Iran black-and-white terms, saying it’s a rogue sate still led by the fundamentalist ideas of Imam Khomeini.

For the author, Iran is a state which helped al-Qaeda, trained terrorists in Iraq and militants in Lebanon and Palestine. Coughlin writes that Tehran masterminded the escape of operatives fleeing from Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden’s son Saad, and provided them safe haven. “The presence of such prominent Al Qaeda militants in Iran . . . was yet another issue that would undermine Khatami’s attempts to improve relations with the West,” he says. But he forgets to write that Iran offered help to the US during the Afghan war and the Khatami government actually hunted down Taliban operatives escaped from Afghanistan.

Khomeini’s Ghosts is an easy read. It is rich with historical facts and discusses the nuances of the Islamic revolution in detail. But it looks a one-sided anaylysis of Imam Khomeini, one of the most influential personalities on the Islamic street. Coughlin’s key argument that Khomeini’s doctrine “has made to the radicalization of the Muslim world” is untenable. There are different streams of Islamic radicalism in the world. Well before the Islamic revolution, the Brotherhood had inspired millions of Muslim youth across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) to organize on religious lines. Khomeini’s principles were based on the Shiite world view, while most of the Islamic radical groups of present era are Sunnis. So, Khomeini’s ghosts do not seem to be as dangerous as Coughlin says.

Con Coughlin, “Khomeini’s Ghosts”, Pan Books, 2009 (Reviewed for Purple Beret)

War and Peace in Asia

Doest the 21st century belong to Asia? Many economists, strategic experts and world leaders think so. The growing clout of Asian countries in the present international system, the strategic importance of Asia to the super powers and the relative escape of China and India from the global financial crisis have emboldened the view that Asia holds the key in an evolving multi-polar world in the new century. But at the same time, Asia faces several security challenges – both inter and intra-state challenges. “The Future of War and Peace in Asia”, a compilation of essays edited by N.S. Sisodia and S. Kalyanaraman, is looking into this strategic dimension of an emerging Asia.

As Sisodia, the director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), India’s premier strategic research think tank, notes in the preface, the impact of the global slowdown on Asian economies has “accelerated the shift of economic power to Asia”. The coming decade will see Asia becoming a principal theatre of international politics and security. One of the major challenges Asia will face in its rise, according to the book, will be intra-state conflicts. “Asia is the main theatre of action for jihadist groups, which among others, include the al-Qaeda and its franchises, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, Pakistani groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Jamaat ul-Mujahideen and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami in Bangladesh, Jemaah Islamiyah in the Southeast Asian countries, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” writes Kalyanaraman, a research fellow at the IDSA, in the introduction.

But the “security problematique” is not limited to intra-state conflicts. There are multiple actors -- Asian and non-Asian – who have security and economic interests in the region. Apart from India and China, the two countries often dubbed as key Asian powers in the coming decades, the US, Russia and Japan also have interests in the continent. The roles these five major and emerging powers play in the continent are crucial for “ensuring and maintaining long-term peace, stable balance of power, economic growth and security in Asia”.

The 18 chapters of “The Future of War and Peace in Asia”, divided into five key parts, discuss the changing face of war in the region and its geopolitical implications. The first part, “The Changing Face of War”, addresses the issue of “irregular warfare”, its manifestations in the Af-Pak region and West Asia and the challenges it poses to modern states. The second part, “Preparing for War”, explores how militaries in the region are modernizing themselves and preparing to face the existing and forthcoming security challenges. Will the technological advancements change the nature of war in Asia? What changes the space technology and missile defence are going to bring in the military doctrines of major Asian powers? Part three of the book, “Star Wars in Asia”, addresses these issues. The last two parts, “Asian Geopolitics” and “The Emerging Asian Order”, are mainly focused on the geopolitical angle. It also discusses the interests and interventions of big powers like the US and Russia in the Asian continent.

It is now a widely accepted view that the East is rising. Its economic clout is fast increasing in a world shaken by the collapse of western capitalism. But this rise could not be sustained unless the East prepares itself to face up to the security challenges. “The Future of War and Peace in Asia” brilliantly analyses the security dilemma of Asia countries and the geopolitical implications of the emerging Asian order. The editors have cautiously selected chapters so that the book can give a comprehensive understanding of conflicts and tensions in Asia and also the dynamics of power shift.

N.S. Sisodia and S. Kalyanaraman (Eds) (2010), “The Future of War and Peace in Asia”, New Delhi: Magnum Books. (Reviewed for Purple Beret)

Taliban’s Chaos Theory

“You need three qualities today if you want to fight the terrorists. Number one, you must have the military with you… Number two, you shouldn’t be seen by the entire religious lobby to be alien. The third element: don’t be seen as an extension of the United States.” These words of Parvez Musharraf, uttered a few weeks after the death of Benazir Bhutto in January 2008, show the kind of politics he espoused during his tenure as Pakistan’s president. Musharraf was a man who knew the presence of jihadist outfits in his country could be used to enhance Pakistan’s “strategic importance in Western eyes”, writes Ahmed Rashid in “Descent into Chaos”. And the General did the same, like other allies of the US in the “region” (Pakistan, Afghanistan and the five Central Asian Republics). For Rashid, author of the best selling “Taliban”, the region is “vital for global stability”. But the misguided “war on terror” of the US and the inability of the Western powers to contribute to nation building in these countries, particularly in the post-9/11 Afghanistan has created nothing but chaos.

Who made things worse? Rashid says even the Clinton administration bears some responsibility for the present chaos. It was during the Clinton presidency, the Taliban mobilized resources, consolidated power in Afghanistan and grew in strength in the region. But the Clinton administration failed to foresee the lurking dangers and come up with a vision to fight Taliban. George Bush, who actually started a war against Taliban, eventually played it into the hands of the same Islamic fundamentalists, thanks to the strategies of Defence Secretary Ronald Rumsfeld. It was Rumsfeld who insisted the inclusion of tribal warlords in the Afghan cabinet, says Rashid. Moreover, Bush’s defence secretary was against the idea of expanding the western-backed security system beyond Kabul, a strategy which later proved to be a blunder.
President Bush, who opened another war front in Iraq before accomplishing his “mission” in Afghanistan, made things complicated. The mounting military challenge in Iraq diluted the US engagement in Afghanistan, which eventually helped the Taliban regroup with the help of ISI. Though Pakistan, which supported the Taliban when it was in power, had to change its position in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the country’s controversial spy agency, the Inter Service Intelligence, continued its dubious policies, writes Rashid. President Bush thought Musharraf was “indispensable” in his war on terror. This was a strategic limitation for the US. The Bush administration, finding itself in a catch-22 situation, completely gave up its efforts to push for political reforms in the military-ruled Pakistan and the Central Asian dictatorships and continued to pumping millions of dollars to support these regimes in the name of the alliance against terror.

What should have been down? “Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways sand listen to their alienated and poverty-stricken citizens…The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education, which it ignored for too long,” writes Rashid. But nothing of these happened. The al-Qaueda and Taliban became more powerful, Afghanistan fell into deeper chaos, Pakistan, though the military rule came to an end, is now fighting itself and the Central Asian republics are as bloody as ever. Understanding the existing complexities and dangers, Rashid urges the international community to “face up to our collective future”.
“Descent into Chaos” is a well-written, detailed description of what happened to the War on Terror in the South-Central Asia. The analysis of Rashid, who has covered the region extensively as a reporter, looks stunningly authentic and his style of writing ensures an enjoyable reading. Still, it lacks the in-depth analysis of an academic. Rashid’s admiration for leaders like Hamid Karzai and Benazir Bhutto may not go down well with many readers. Blaming only Musharraf for Pakistan’s problems may not a proper diagnosis.

Ahmed Rashid (2008), “Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”, Penguin: London. (Reviewed for Purple Beret)

The Race in the East

China and India, according to many, are two major pillars of the global market economy and potential “trade super powers”. Once enemies, these Asian giants that house two-fifth of the world’s population turned to economic reforms almost at the same time, though the pace of its implementation was not same. However, these reforms, writes Jonathan Holslag in his recent book, ‘China and India: Prospects for Peace’, changed the contours of the bilateral relationship between the two countries. The transformation from closed socialist economies to liberal market economies also marked the transformation of India and China from enemy states to “trading states”, argues Holslag.

This change is a radical departure from the “zero-sum thinking that was predominant during the cold war” and led to “new opportunities for cooperation” between the two countries, which had fought a bloody war in 1962 and seen near-war scenarios at least five times ever since. In China, the post-Mao leadership was conscious not to repeat the “failures of the Great Leader”, while in India a reform-minded prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, laid the foundations for “constructive nationalism”, rejecting his mother’s and grand father’s “negative nationalism”. This shift is what set the stage for India and China to emerge as trading states and to enhance cooperation.

Since the opening up of the economies, there is a remarkable improvement in the bilateral cooperation between India and China – trade boomed over the last three decades, the number of top level visits rose, discussions on contentious border issues have been held frequently and cooperation at the global level, bet it WTO or climate talks, also strengthened. The talk of war has been “put to one side”. Euphoric Western liberals lost no time to praise free market economics, claiming more trade will spawn more interest groups, which will lobby for “broader and deeper relations” with other trading states. Did that really happen in Indo-China relations?

Holslag agrees that there are visible changes. But did the enhanced economic cooperation helped India and China put aside the historic rivalry and become ideal trading states? Like many other rational India-China watchers Holslag retains his apprehensions about the claims of “neofunctionalist liberalism”. He discusses in detail why these steps toward a comprehensive partnership between India and China “will not succeed”. According to him, the existing “complementarity between India and China will disappear once they achieve their economic ambitions”. The traditional rivalry will likely spread to the economic sphere as well, challenging the concept of “Chindia”. The still unresolved border issues, the military security dilemma and the suspicion in public perceptions about the “other” power are the other major impediments India-China ties face with. The economic drivers are too weak to reverse these challenges. “In the short-term, we will therefore observe a continuation of the great power contest,” writes Holslag.

The 234-page book is rich with historical facts, economic data and diverse perceptions of experts from India and China. The 13-page bibliography underlines the authenticity and seriousness of the research Holslag undertook to write this comparatively small book. His key argument that strategic rivalry would continue to dominate Indo-China relations irrespective of the improvement in economic cooperation looks rational given the complex history of bilateral ties between the two countries. Holslag could have placed this hypothesis in the larger geopolitical context. The race for influence in Asia is going to be the race for world domination in a changing world. How the love-hate diplomacy of India and China is going to influence international politics? Unfortunately, Holslag leaves this untouched.

Jonathan Holslag (2010), “China + India: Prospects for Peace, Columbia University Press: New York (Reviewed for Business World)

Is Google Greater than God?

It is difficult for 81 million web-browsing Indians even to imagine a life without Google. Indians, like billions of other web users around the world, are so addicted to Google that it is actually difficult for them to replace the search engine giant in their online expeditions. If John Lennon, who unleashed an uproar by saying, “Beatles are more popular than Jesus”, was alive today, he would have sung ‘Google is Greater than God’. But for the godless Chinese, Google is just a search engine.

Now it’s almost certain that the US Internet giant will shut its Chinese search engine, Google.cn. Though the company has not confirmed its pullout from the world’s largest Internet market, China’s state-controlled official media have reported that it will happen in April. Whether Google will shut its entire China operations or just pull the plug on Google.cn and let its other operations continue is not yet clear. The search engine is expected to unveil its plans on March 22.

The crisis started two months back when Google threatened to pull out of China, a market of around 400 million web users, accusing Chinese hackers backed by the government of attacking its email system. The US internet giant, which launched Google.cn to provide censored search services for Chinese users in 2006 said it detected “highly sophisticated” attack on its email services originating from China. These attacks and the Chinese government’s attempts to “limit freedom of speech on Internet” led Google to adopt a “new approach” to the Dragon, the company’s chief legal officer David Drummond wrote on his blog on January 12.

China rejected the allegations, but defended its censoring, saying Google has to obey the rules of the land. The US soon seized the opportunity to score against its global rival and asked Google to refuse “politically motivated” censoring. Rights groups around the world once again deplored the “Great Firewall of China”. Well, what will happen if Google pulls out?

Lose-lose scenario
According to analysts, it would be a lose-lose scenario. "If Google leaves, it`s a lose-lose scenario, instead of Google loses and others gain," Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, a Beijing research firm, told Associated Press. China sans Google will stand increasingly isolated in a rapidly expanding web world. Popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and Google’s Youtube are already banned in China. It’s still unclear how China’s educated, outward looking middle class youth would respond to the disappearance of the “all-loving” Google in their web space.

Google’s withdrawal will also hit the Chinese mobile market, which is highly dependent on the search engine. China Mobile Ltd, the world’s largest telecom service provider with 527 million subscribers, uses Google for mobile search and maps. Google’s android operating system is also popular among mobile phone users in China.

So what will China do? Despite this expected setback, the Chinese authorities appear to be defiant in dealing with Google. The reason, many think, is the (over)confidence that the local search engine, Baidu, would be able to rise up to the occasion if Google leaves. China has developed domestic equivalents of all the major popular internet companies -- Baidu for Google, Taobao for eBay, Renren for Facebook, QQ for instant messaging, games and social networking. The Economist magazine, a severe critic of China’s web censoring policies, admits these companies “are doing well”.

On the other hand, the end of operations in China will lead to a sharp fall in Google’s net revenue. Therefore, according to reports, Google will likely shut only its Chinese search portal and continue other services, leaving some options on the table for a possible future reconciliation. Apart from its search and mobile phone applications, the US firm has two research and development facilities in China and is running a popular music portal.

The Chinese government’s tough stand vis-à-vis Google is also a strong message to other companies operating in the country. If the Communist Party-led government is not ready for an inch of compromise on “sensitive issues” like censoring with a giant like Google, other companies will be thrown out of the mainland even without a negotiation if they avoid Beijing’s diktats. Most of them are more interested in the vast potential of Chinese market than the so-called liberal principles. Google was also not different till January 12, 2010.

Will China survive the departure of Google, the God of the Web World? Well, that could be the most interesting question of coming years.

Consistent Inconsistency

The Suez crisis of 1957 marked the beginning of a new era in the US’ Middle East policy. The British debacle in the Suez and President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to have deeper engagement with the Middle East seemed to bring in changes in the political landscape of the region. However, that did never happen. Despite being the largest power in the post-war world, the US has never shown strong will to bring in peace into the region even as the policy makers in Washington seemed to have obsessed with the security fears of Israel, the most reliable Middle Eastern ally of the US, writes Patrick Tyler in his book, “A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East”. Tyler, an experienced journalist, who has covered the Middle East politics for years for the New York Times and Washington Post, writes in rich details in the over 600-page book how the “inconsistent” US policy in the Middle East was caught between Washington’s aspirations for a higher position in the Muslim World and its ideological commitment towards the Zionist state.

The book covers the US involvement in the Middle East during 10 presidents – from Eisenhower to George W Bush. According to Tyler, Washington’s policy towards the Middle East, a strategically important region for the superpower, was “consistently inconsistent”. President Eisenhower had pragmatic vision about the region. He wanted peace between the Arabs and the Israelis and more prosperity and development in the region. But he could not make any effective move towards those goals after an intelligent intervention during the Suez crisis. But the successive presidents did not share this vision. President Lyndon Johnson did not do anything when Israeli’s occupied Palestinian land during the Six-Day war and Henry Kissinger’s pro-Israeli policies did harm in the long term to the US interests in the region. During the Yom Kippur war, President Nixon sent Kissinger to Soviet leader Brezhnev with a message, calling for a joint super power action to end the war and find a “just” settlement for the Palestinian issue. However, Kissinger, in pursuit of an entirely different outcome to the Middle East conflict, dumped his president’s message. A joint super powers’ intervention, writes Tyler , would have left Israel with a less powerful position, making it easier for world powers to seek peace in the region. However, Kissinger tactfully undermined this move and even encouraged the Israeli leadership to violate the ceasefire terms to better its military position. Nixon’s statesmanship was further battered by the Watergate scandal.

Jimmy Carter’s Middle East policy was more peace-oriented than his predecessors. He even secured peace between Israel and Egypt. But the Iranian revolution and the subsequent US embassy siege destroyed the Middle East policy of the Carter administration. In a radically changing Middle East, Washington had to make policy priorities to secure its own interests. Iran, one of its trusted allies in the region till the other day, turned out to be the worst enemy. When Iran-Iraq war broke out, Reagan supported Iraq, a country against which his successor George Bush launched a major offensive. President Clinton tried for peace in the Middle East, but he lost focus after the Levinsky incident and did not use his firm hand to make the Israelis compromise. And George W Bush made everything worse.

Tyler says Washington was not singlemindedly supporting the Israeli lobby always. There were clashes of interests and hard maneuvers within administrations. It was this contradiction that made the Middle East policy of the US inconsistent. If the occupants of the White House could think beyond Israel while taking key policy decisions, the US’ position in the Muslim world would have been better.

Tyler version of history is largely based on personal interviews and declassified documents. While Tyler keeps the sharpness of a journalist in narrating incidents that shaped the US Middle East policy in the post-war world, the in depth analyses of an academic is missing. Though the security of Israel is one of the key driving factors of the US foreign policy, from the US’ point of view, the strategic importance of the Middle East is beyond Israel. All presidents except Bush Junior gave utmost importance for America’s relationship with the friendly countries like the Gulf monarchies and there was a continuity in this “friendship”. Above all, the civilisational angle plays a key role in the estranged relationship between the Middle East and the US. This was evident during the George Bush II presidency.

The book ends abruptly. The last chapter deals with the policies of Bush II, whose unwise and unimaginative moves made the US-Middle East relationship complicated than ever. The fact that President Obama had to start his Middle East venture with a confidence building speech in Cairo underscores Tyler’s analysis that Washington has to seek a new paradigm and build trust to deal with a changing Middle East. More errors will make things more complicated. Good luck, President Obama.

Patrick Tyler (2009), “A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East”, London: Portobello Books, Pages: 638 (Reviewed for Purple Beret)

China: The new economic hegemon

When it comes to economics, the last thing the Chinese rulers will do is boasting. They usually avoid rhetoric while making key policy announcements, and set lower-than-expected targets for coming years. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s annual speech in the Great Hall of the People Friday was not different. "We must not interpret the economic turnaround as a fundamental improvement in the economic situation," said a cautious Wen to nearly 3,000 party-appointed members of the National People’s Congress (NPC). He further set a target of 8 percent growth rate for the current year.

Many experts feel Chinese economy can grow much faster than the government projection. Contrary to what Wen told the NPC, there are fundamental improvements in the Chinese economy. The country has seen 8.7 percent growth in 2009, a rate beyond the imagination of many advanced developed countries. According to most analyses, the unique economic model of China has helped the country weather the global economic crisis effectively and it is set to become the second largest economy in 2010 surpassing the crisis-struck Japan. Its exports, after 13 straight months of fall, started growing again from December, making the country the world’s second largest exporter.

Beijing Consensus
China is among a few countries that weathered the global economic meltdown. Despite embracing free market policies three decades earlier, the unconventional approach of the state towards the economy helped country decouple itself from the great collapse of the global finances. Joshua Cooper Ramo, the former editor of Time Magazine, calls this unconventional policy making “Beijing Consensus” -- a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention.

Will the Beijing Consensus prevail? The history of China’s economic expansion shows this approach has had astonishing results. Ever since China started opening up its Socialist economy in 1978, it has grown at nearly 10 percent every year. China’s per-capita GDP is now 12 times greater than it was three decades ago. It’s now the world`s second-largest recipient of foreign direct investment. According to Goldman Sachs, China will overtake the US as the largest economy in the world by 2027. Renowned British thinker Martin Jacques writes in his latest book, ‘When China Rules the World’, China is on its way to replace the US as the world’s greatest super power. Robert Fogel, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Price for Economics in 1993, recently wrote in Foreign Policy magazine that China “goes from a poor country in 2000 to a super rich country in 2040”.

It seems everybody except the Chinese leadership is busy forecasting where China would stand some 20-30 years from now. China’s speedy recovery from the Great Recession even when the entire Europe is still battling has prompted many to rethink about the prospects of the Dragon. The crisis has indeed left China more powerful and relatively stronger than many other Western powers, which till the other day were considered key players in global politics. It may be ironic that China, a country ruled by Communist dictatorship, stands tall in a world where Communism’s death was celebrated years ago.

The Bliss is missing
But the bliss is missing in Beijing. The policy makers remain wary even when the whole world says China is rising. It’s true that Chinese economy has spawned miracles, set new standards and proved many predictions wrong. But it all came with riders. The Chinese Communist Party is still suffering from a “deficit of legitimacy” in a world where liberal democracy is considered the ideal governing system. The Beijing Consensus has been under attack from within as the social balance of Mao’s China was disrupted with the rise of a new super rich class in the supposedly socialist society. China is now a country with the largest rural-urban income disparities.

This is one of the utmost concerns of the government, which still claims to be Socialist. If the rich-poor divide gets widened, the very claims of socialism from which the state draws legitimacy will be in trouble. The government’s efforts to spread the fruits of development to inner areas were hit by several limitations. Moreover, China’s decision to keep its currency’s rate fixed against US dollar – a move to help its crisis-hit exporting community -- has drawn flak from many quarters. This has prompted Paul Krugman, a severe critic of neoliberal economics, to write that “China is not behaving as a great power”.

So far the coastal areas are the most developed regions in the mainland China. Many fear one of the end results of the Beijing Consensus is this widening disparity. Stratfor founder George Freedman writes in his latest book, ‘The Next 100 Years’, that this widening contradiction will lead to the eventual collapse of the Chinese state in 2020s.

So, there’s no cakewalk for China, as many of us think, to the super power’s slot. Of course the Dragon is rising, but its challenges are too.

Eastern Dominance

Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy… Trade freely with China and the time is on our side," said George W. Bush in November 1999, a year before he was elected the 43rd president of the United States. Economic relations with between China and the United States zoomed to new highs during the Bush presidency as the Asian giant accelerated its market reforms. Thanks to those reform initiatives, China emerged as the third largest economy in the world and, according to Goldman Sachs, is set to overtake the biggest economy, the United States, in 2027. Will this economic transformation bring in changes in China's Communist Party-ruled system as many Western liberals predicted? Most unlikely, says Martin Jacques, a well-known journalist and once the editor of Marxism Today, in his new book, "When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World".

China's economic liberalisation was hailed by many in the West. The disciples of liberal political scientist Francis Fukuyama strongly believed that the world has been converging on Western liberal democracy ever since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The neoliberal economic development would accelerate this transformation, they argued for decades. So, China would either end up opening up its polity for a more participative system or collapse due to its internal contradictions like what happened to the Soviet Union. But Jacques challenges both these claims in his book. "Economic change, fundamental as it may be, can only be part of the picture," he writes.

The post-1978 reforms, initiated by President Deng Xiaoping, helped China modernise itself at a greater pace than many western countries did in the 18th and 19th centuries. But China's modernisation, according to Jacques, is not western. It is distinctive and "rooted and shaped by its own history and culture". Therefore, expecting China to follow the western political and cultural values would be erroneous. China is not a conventional nation-state, an ideal unit in the post-Westphalia international order. Rather, it is a "civilisation state" that kept the "essence" of Chineseness unbroken over millennia despite undergoing several political and economic transformations. "It is this civilisation dimension that gives China its special unique character." When it was down, a pragmatic China was ready to get integrated into the international system and reconcile itself to being a nation state. "It was a compromise borne of expediency and necessity," writes Jacques. "But as China arrives at modernity, and emerges as the most powerful country in the world, it will no longer be bound by such constraints and will in time be in a position to set its own terms and conditions."

When that time will come? Jacques believes the West is in the decline. The credit crunch that started in the United States in 2007 followed by the collapse of the Wall Street investment firms including the Lehman Brothers in September 2008, marks the beginning of the end of the deregulated neoliberal capitalism. The distinctive Chinese economy, in which state plays a major role and controls the flow of capital, which is an antithesis to the very concept of neoliberalism, weathered the crisis. China's relative power is rising post-meltdown at a time when the United States and other western economic power houses are struggling to manage their respective economies.

Such a rise would bring in a politico-cultural shift in international politics. For over five centuries, western values were global values. When the United States became the super power after the Second World War, only the power centre shifted from Europe to across the Atlantic. The values, ideas and culture remained the same. But the rise of China does not provide any such opportunity to the West, according to Jacques. "China will act as an alternative model to the West, embodying a very different kind of political tradition - a post colonial developing country, a Communist regime, a highly sophisticated statecraft and an authoritarian, Confucian rather than democratic polity".

Jacques presents his arguments after a detailed analysis of Chinese history and civilisation and connects them to the present-day developments in international politics. China's triumph as a non-capitalist market economy and its rising cultural "smart power" persuade us to believe Jacques' claims. But the author, seems obsessed with the rise-of-civilisation idea, fails discuss the strategic angle in detail. The hard power had played a crucial role in the ascendancy of both Britain and the United States. But how strong is China vis-a-vis the present-day hegemony the United States? How the hard power is going to help China in its quest to transform the world? That link is missing in Jacques' otherwise brilliantly written book.

Author Profile: Martin Jacques is a journalist and academic. He is currently a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre and at the National University of Singapore. Jacques previously edited Marxism Today and co-founded the think-tank Demos in 1993. He also writes columns for the New Statesman and Guardian. (Reviewed for Business World)

A Decade of Wars, Crises and Rises

In international politics, decades are important tools that help us understand and interpret history better. The major developments in the past often come to our mind with tags of decades -- the economic crisis of 1920’s, the wars of 1930’s, the reconstruction of 1950’s, the Lost Decade, and so on. Now, standing at the starting point of a new decade, how do we analyse the bygone one (2000-10)?

According to British historian Andrew Roberts, the first ten years of the new century, or the Noughties, were full of troubles. It witnessed two major wars, one of the gravest financial crises in decades, a number of natural disasters including Tsunami, and changes in global power dynamics. At the beginning of the century, not many might have forecast such a troublesome first decade.

The Noughties followed a decade that the saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent emergence of the US as the sole super power in the world. The successful tests of American hard power in the Balkan and the Middle East in the late 1990’s underscored the opinion that the new century would be an American century. President George W. Bush, who assumed office in 2001, vowed to accelerate American style free market capitalism and expand the military capabilities of the country. Everything looked set for paving the way for the US to reshape and lead the global order without major hindrances. But the path of history often lies beyond the scope of prediction.

Wars
The beginning of sweeping changes of the decade started on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Centre, the tall symbols of America’s economic might, was attacked by a few terrorists. The attack became a reference point of the decade, if not of the century. In the same month, president Bush declared America’s “war on terror” and the US started this war on October 7 by bombing Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The US could drive the Taliban out of Kabul within weeks of bombing, and set up a puppet government of Hamid Karzai in the capital city. But the war did have ripple- effect across the Muslim Middle East. The war on terror was interpreted by many political Islamists as an “imperial crusade” of the West against Islam. This notion gained currency when Bush opened another war front in the Islamic world in 2003. Accusing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq of supporting al-Qaeda in the region and mobilising weapons of mass destruction, the US declared war on the Baathist country in March 2003.

Two months later, president Bush declared victory in Iraq. Saddam Hussein went absconding, the regime was toppled and a provincial government was established, which was followed by a bloody resistance by Iraqis against the occupation. Saddam was captured in December 2003 and hanged on December 30, 2006.

According to many reports, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration wanted to expand the war to Iran, and further to Syria as part of their plans to reinforce America’s hegemony on the entire Middle East. But the Iraqi resistance bogged America down for years. When things started returning to a new normal in Iraq, the economic catastrophe limited America’s military possibilities.

Crisis
If America’s hard power faced fresh challenges in the first half of the decade, its unique economic model was nearly destroyed in the second half. The unregulated capitalism, which the US championed for years, drew flak from all corners when Wall Street investment banking giants like Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, plunging the entire world into an unprecedented liquidity crisis. The woes of the financial sector soon expanded to the real economy, leaving most of the advanced developed countries in recession.

The new president of the US, Barack Obama, in complete realisation that his country was not in an advanced position to cope with the world’s problems, came forward to formulate a new cooperation mechanism with the emerging economies including China and India. Many countries, including the US, put caps on the flow of capital, implemented fresh regulations and expanded the scope the government to fight the crisis.

The Rise of China
Another major twist of the decade is the rise of emerging powers, including China, India and Brazil, onto the global stage. Of these, China stands out. According to many analysts, the this century is China’s. British academic Martin Jaques says the stage is set for China to rise as a counter power to the US and radically overhaul the international system. China’s escape from the global slowdown nearly unhurt has forced many analysts to take a more positive view vis-à-vis the Asian giant. China is the fastest growing economy in the world and is set to overtake Japan as the second largest economy in 2010. It is also a fast rising military power and a regional hegemonic state in Asia.

The new decade will see China further expanding its economic influence and making efforts to convert that into political clout. According to Goldman Sachs, China will move past the US as the largest economy by 2027. If the trend of Noughties continues in the new decade, it will have radical effect on the existing global order, so far dominated by the West. So, gear up to live in a rapidly changing world.