Tom Streithorst
Iraqi oil auctions: does economic power trump military force today?
George Galloway and Alan Greenspan agree: the war in Iraq was all about oil. But perhaps they were wrong.
In last weekend’s Iraqi oil field auction, US companies were almost utterly iced-out, despite their government’s 100,000 boots on the ground. Russian, Chinese, Dutch, Angolan, and Malaysian oil companies all won rights to exploit the massive Iraqi oil fields, and none of those countries had to go to the trouble to invade. If America, in conquering Iraq had been able to actually steal its oil reserves and move them to say Michigan’s Rust Belt, the war might have made some sense, but unfortunately for America in the modern world, military force no longer automatically translates into economic advantage.
For most of human history—from Neolithic hunting bands, up until the Franco-Prussian war—the military was a massively profitable enterprise. Genghis Khan’s soldiers were just poverty stricken pastoralists until they got on their ponies and sacked more civilized folk. The Roman invasion of Egypt won the tribute of grain that fed the city for over 300 years. The return on capital for William of Normandy’s crossing the channel, for Hernan Cortez’ conquest of Mexico, must be close to infinite.
Read more »
Philip Bobbitt
ABOVE: Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao
A year is a short time, and the problems of foreign policy that the Obama administration has inherited are both chronic and acute. They did not develop over months, but decades, and it is absurd to think that they will be solved in such little time. Three observations can be made, however, even at this early juncture. First, Obama has taken up a number of obvious initiatives, grasped them quickly and made them his own. Second, he has made excellent appointments. And third, his initial energy appears to have outrun the administration’s planning, so that he now finds himself confronting much more difficult choices with much less self-assurance.
Barely two days into office Obama ordered the closure of Guantánamo Bay and prohibited the use of torture in interrogations. A month later, in February, he announced the termination of the combat mission in Iraq, so that by the end of August 2010 US forces will be confined to training and advising Iraqi security forces; action which maintained fast-ebbing political support for the war. Next came a new strategy to defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan—and the order that an additional 21,000 troops (almost a 50 per cent increase) be sent to the region—followed by a second strategy to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and begin reductions in US and Russian nuclear stockpiles.
A series of addresses followed. The first, at the Persian new year, came in the form of a video message to the Iranian people in which Obama proposed negotiations with the Iranian government without preconditions. The following month, in Prague, he outlined a new strategy on nuclear proliferation, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In June, in Cairo, he pressed Israel to stop new West Bank settlements, emphasising that the “situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”
Read more »
Jonathan Power
Osama bin Laden: too little was done to track him down
Six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, President George W. Bush declared that the capture of Osama bin Laden was his prime objective. “I want justice,” he said. “There’s an old poster out west that I recall that said ‘wanted dead or alive’”. He also said that the purpose of going to war was to “smoke him out.”
The US and Britain then unleashed their bombs over Afghanistan, killing far more innocent Afghans than the number of people killed on 9/11. It did no good at all, and certainly didn’t touch bin Laden and his team who were safely hidden in caves in the impenetrable mountains of Pakistan. Not long after Bush turned his attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Less and less was spoken of the need to hunt down bin Laden. None of this made sense. Afghanistan is now in a mess. The US and its allies are in as deep as the previous Soviet invaders were, with the Taliban as apt at keeping them on the defensive and wearing them down by a war of attrition as the Mujahedeen were 25 years ago.
Today the Western powers say their aim is to change the nature of Afghanistan society—ending Islamic militancy, liberating women via educating, building clinics and roads. But are we there to refashion a conservative society? That, surely, is not our business.
Read more »
Alistair Horne
Gazing up at me from the jacket of one of his own massive volumes is Henry Kissinger. I have been living with this face for the past five years. That was how long it took me to write the story of a single year in the life of America’s 56th secretary of state. It says, I hope, more about his restless activity than my indolence.
I share at least one attribute with Kissinger: we were both refugees from Hitler, although rather different ones. As Jewish refugees, he and his family fled Germany in 1938; I was sent from England as a “bundle from Britain” to school at Millbrook, NY, in 1940. He joined the US army in 1943, the same year I returned home to serve in Britain. We were both demobbed in 1947: he as a sergeant, I as a captain.
I first met Kissinger in 1980, when I was writing the official biography of Harold Macmillan. My research took me to the US where I was asked to act as host to Macmillan at an evening event. By chance I was seated next to Kissinger. He was out of office at the time. Macmillan, then in his late eighties, looked terrible. Over dinner Kissinger asked me in a guttural whisper: “Do you think the old man will die before he speaks?” “No, he always looks like that,” I replied. “Once he’s spoken he’ll be completely rejuvenated, and keep us up all night.” And so it came to pass. The old actor-manager’s wit and erudition, his ability to evoke tears when speaking of the lost generation of 1914-18, held a hardened Washington audience spellbound. At the end, Kissinger turned to me and said “You were right,” and invited me to breakfast. It proved to be the beginning of a friendship, more spasmodic than close.
Then in 2004, my British publisher George Weidenfeld proposed that I write Kissinger’s official biography. I had just finished three books on the history of France and was in a state of depleted afterbirth. The proposition was tempting. But I felt deterred by the amount of work: Supermac measured his archives in feet, but it was rumoured that Kissinger’s totalled 33 tons. I declined as gracefully as I could.
Immediately I regretted it; how could I turn down an offer to write about one of the most significant men of our times? I flew to New York to see Kissinger. We lunched and
I came up with a counter-proposal. Perhaps I could write about just one year? “Which year?” “1973?” To my surprise he said “That’s a great idea.” A deal was struck and I started shortly after.
Why 1973? It was the big year. In October, the world was rocked by the Yom Kippur war. The previous month, in Chile, President Allende had been overthrown by General Pinochet. It was the year of the pact to end the Vietnam war, détente with the Soviet Union, and Watergate. And Kissinger both won the Nobel peace prize and became secretary of state.
The terms of my engagement with Macmillan and Kissinger were similar. Both promised full access but neither would read my manuscript. Macmillan, well into his eighties when we started, attached the proviso that the biography was not to be published in his lifetime. (“That will make it easier for both you and me, dear boy!” he said.) Kissinger, concerned about his place in history, encouraged me to publish the book as quickly as possible. He was generous enough to assure me of his continuing friendship, whatever I wrote.
Macmillan housed most of his papers in his chilly house at Birch Grove, Sussex. I would work in a freezing cell known as the “muniments room.” There we would spend afternoons taping his responses to the questions I had prepared. His memory was prodigious, and we filled some 40 tapes. Every once in a while he would pause, prod the recorder with his stick, say “turn that machine off a minute,” and relate a scurrilous anecdote. But the best conversations were over dinner, fortified by whisky, when he would discourse on anything from the origin of the Guards’ bearskins and Hardy versus Kipling as stylists, to the Victorian empire-builders and sexual repression. Fearing it would be bad form to record at the table I made secret notes and transcribed them afterwards.
Kissinger was similar. He would suggest meeting in New York or in his office in Washington. But my visits to his country hide-out in the depths of upstate Connecticut were the most agreeable. Occasionally there would be sightings of black bears in the woods; one hard winter a neighbour’s pony was eaten by one. I sensed that Kissinger, if cornered, could resemble one of those creatures. But I only felt it once, when a paw lashed out after I had indiscreetly given an interview to New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd in 2007, which Dowd twisted to poke fun at President Bush’s reading ability.
When visiting Connecticut I lodged in comfort in the guest house. From jelly beans to Imodium, every possible requirement was catered for by Henry’s wife Nancy. Yellow sticky notes even indicated which way the lights switched on. Mid-morning I would amble half a mile through the woods for a session. Kissinger’s office lay at the top of the main house, accessible by a terrifyingly steep staircase. The room was packed with videos and memorabilia, along with signed photographs of the Queen and the Pope. Most prominent was a spoof poster, made by the exhausted press team on his diplomatic shuttle flights of 1973, saying “I’m Henry, fly me to Damascus.” Often he would be watching baseball, his favourite sport, on a vast screen. I said that I found it an incomprehensible sport. “But it’s not a sport!” he interjected, “it’s a science—a mathematics: that’s why it fascinates me.” He told me once he found few men imposing, but that the baseball star Joe di Maggio, along with Chairman Mao, were among the very few who could “fill the room” as they entered.
Kissinger refused to use a tape-recorder; perhaps memories of Watergate were too vivid. So I relied on handwritten notes, transcribed later on. More difficult were the breaks that took place in the ferociously heated salt-water swimming pool. Just as Macmillan became more lucid late at night, so some of Kissinger’s best thoughts emerged from the depths of the pool: recollections of Brezhnev in Moscow, Israel’s Golda Meir, or his hero the Egyptian President Sadat. It was, though, difficult to record his thoughts underwater.
After a swim we would often lunch with Nancy, who as a young woman had worked on the staff of Governor Rockefeller of New York and had received a thorough grounding in politics there. I came away impressed by the depth of affection that bonded this somewhat physically incongruous couple and their manifest devotion to each other. It made for a happy atmosphere in which to work.
Following our evening sessions the house would often be filled for dinner by a miscellany of locals, writers, doctors, academics from nearby Yale, New York gallery directors and so on. It was always convivial. Henry loved good conversation. By contrast, the final years of Harold Macmillan were lonely and austere. His life seemed to me a part tragedy; the last act being the medical error which led him to resign in 1963, leaving him with 23 years of what he called “life after death.” After his official retirement in 1976 Kissinger too was condemned to such a life, one that has now lasted 30 years. Yet his is still crammed with interest and action. In private he quietly acts as a consultant to political and business leaders. He was even called in by the Bush administration and asked for his views during the most difficult stages of the Iraq war. This was after Bush had asked Kissinger to lead the official investigation into 11th September, a role he had to give up a month later because of concerns over potential conflicts of interests with his consultancy company, Kissinger Associates, which had clients in the middle east.
Just as secret diplomacy was his hallmark in 1973, today he remains inscrutably discreet about his activities. Although a loyal Republican supporter, he has a high opinion of President Obama and of Hillary Clinton, who followed in his footsteps as secretary of state. I would be surprised if he were not now working actively for the Obama administration in “back-channel” operations. Although 86 in May, his wanderlust is still formidable. In one month this year, for instance, he flew to Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo in swift succession. In Beijing, where he is revered as the elder statesman who brought China in from the cold, he knows everyone that matters. In Moscow, he has an open door to President Putin, who has come to trust him. And he has even now things he wants to accomplish in public life. He is a longstanding campaigner on nuclear non-proliferation, and I think that he would like his legacy to embrace new moves to end the scourge of nuclear weaponry. This is certainly a target that preoccupies his thoughts, perhaps more than any other.
During our many sessions Kissinger was always available, but how open was he? His successor as national security advisor Brent Scowcroft warned me “Henry could tell the same story ten different ways to ten different people and never fib!” As his German biographer, Evi Kurz, discovered, he could also be opaque on questions about his personal life. And only after four years of interrogation did he reveal details of his experiences during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Did I like him? Yes, unashamedly, and more as I came to know him better. And as I became aware of the problems he faced in 1973 I admired his achievements all the more. Far removed from the image of the cold practitioner of realpolitik, I came to discover in Henry a highly emotional being and a soft heart. In office he was a tough taskmaster; yet all but a tiny number of his staff remain affectionately loyal, many continuing to work for him. In 2008, when I was knocked sideways by a triple heart-bypass, Henry would ring my wife almost daily with kind advice. (He, of course, was one-up, having had a quadruple.)
I asked him if he had regrets. “Yes,” he replied, “the failure to achieve peace in Vietnam.” Perhaps the harshest blow fate dealt him was to award him the Nobel peace prize in October 1973 for his role in the Vietnam peace negotiations. After North Vietnam breached the peace accords and invaded the south, the honour swiftly turned to ashes in his mouth. In April 1975, after the fall of Saigon, he offered to return the gold medal, having never accepted the money. To my mind, however, Watergate was as much to blame for that defeat as Kissinger’s efforts in peace negotiations. And if the Scandinavians had hung on for longer, history should have recognised Kissinger for achieving peace after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, convincing Israel to hand back some of the land it had won and paving the way for negotiations with Egypt.
Kissinger is sensitive about his position in history. And not without reason. He remains a controversial figure; in America people either love him or hate him. Some writers—most vocally Christopher Hitchens—want to see him indicted for war crimes over the overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile, or the bombing of Cambodia. My research largely refutes the former charge: Kissinger had specifically instructed the US ambassador in Santiago against involvement in the coup. On Cambodia, my criticism would be that the bombing was strategically ineffective, as well as being morally questionable.
One of Kissinger’s past biographers accused him of being “strong on realpolitik, but weak on human rights.” (To me he once rebutted this with a laugh—“America has to be the only country where reality isn’t a virtue!”) His record says otherwise. In 1973 alone, he helped to bring peace to a middle east crisis and got the Soviet Union out of the region, while preserving the détente between east and west. I believe future generations will view him as one of the outstanding statesmen of our times. And I, for one, shall miss living with Henry.
Jonathan Power
McNamara's agrarian policies have unwisely been dismissed
Barbara Ward, the distinguished writer for the Economist and a close friend of Robert McNamara, told me back in 1972 that McNamara “bled inside for what he’d done in Vietnam.” Ward was cross with me for using this quote, and insisted that over time people would judge McNamara more for his (then relatively new job) as president of the World Bank.
Judging from last week’s obituaries she was wrong about that. Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis and his flip-flopping on nuclear weapons dominate contemporary attitudes to McNamara. Yet it is true that what he did at the World Bank is worth remembering, especially his efforts to turn aid in the direction of small farmers. Under his tenure the World Bank spent 30 per cent of its budget on helping small third world farmers be more productive. Today, as pre-McNamara, it spends about 10 per cent.
McNamara argued that there was enough knowledge available to raise the output of small farmers by 5 per cent a year—far in excess of population growth. If that had been done, it is probably safe to say that today there would be no significant poverty or hunger, as most people in the poorer third world countries still live on the land.
Instead, as the G8 said last week, the number of hungry is up near the one billion mark and too much of western budgets is spent on food aid not long term rural development. The G8 said they were committed to reversing that.
Read more »
Jonathan Power
The key to US-Russian relations?
Precise quid pro quos are not good in marital or romantic relationships. Neither are they good in big time politics. If made too precisely, they suggest that the other side is not to be trusted unless there is a “deal.” When there is conflict, with friends or indeed with enemies, the great need is to change the atmosphere: to restore a sense of trust so that opinions and arrangements can be freely traded. One good step by one side encourages, but does not demand, a good step by the other side.
At the end of the cold war, we saw such magnanimity. And we, the peoples of American, Russian, Europe and the rest of the world, benefited immensely from it. Two great presidents were responsible for this: George Bush senior in the US and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. In 1991, Bush decided unilaterally to de-alert all bombers, 450 of the deadly accurate city-destroying Minuteman missiles and the missiles in 10 Poseidon submarines (enough with one launch to destroy Moscow, Leningrad and every city in between). Gorbachev, taking this as his cue, deactivated 500 land-based nuclear-tipped missiles and six submarines (enough in total to reduce the most populated parts of the US to ashes and dust). This wasn’t, moreover, the cosmetic de-alerting talked about today. Silo and submarine crews actually had their launch keys taken away from them.
This is why President Barack Obama (if the New York Times has got the story right) has made a big mistake in his opening move following the pressing of the famous “reset button.” Although apparently warmly received, his letter to President Dimitri Medvedev—suggesting that the US was open to discussion on the dismantling of the anti-missile site now being constructed on Polish soil, if Russia would lean harder on Iran to halt any programs that would lead to nuclear weapons—was misconceived.
What it should have said is simply this: “President George W Bush made a policy that the US no longer stands by. We want to reopen discussions with you that will lead to our abandonment of the project”. Full stop. Period. The rest would then follow.
Read more »
Read 3 comments »
