France: Mr Normal Takes Charge

By Gwynne Dyer

“My true adversary does not have a name, a face or a party,” said Francois Hollande, France’s next president. “He never puts forth his candidacy, but nevertheless he governs. My true adversary is the world of finance.”

No other leader of a major power would dare say such a thing. If Hollande, who will be France’s first Socialist president in 17 years, simply defies “the markets”, they will certainly punish him and France severely. However, it remains to be seen how he plays his hand.

Hollande still has one hurdle to cross before he is officially president-elect, but he beat the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, even in the first round of voting last Sunday, when ten candidates were running. In the run-off vote on 6 May, the polls predict that he will trounce Sarkozy by a margin of 14-16 percent.

Hollande is a shoo-in because in the second round his centre-left party will collect almost all the votes of parties to the left of the Socialists, and also most of the votes of the centrist candidates. Sarkozy leads a centre-right party, but he has to pretend to be much harder right than he is for much the same reasons as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the United States.

If Sarkozy does not spout anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric, he will not even win over the 18 percent of French voters who backed the far-right National Front last Sunday. If he does talk like that, he will lose the swing voters in the centre – and he may still not get the endorsement of National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who reckons that if Sarkozy loses the presidency his party will disintegrate, making her own party the dominant force on the right.

So it will be President Hollande, who recently said that “if the markets are worried (by my policies), I will tell them here and now that I will leave them with no space to act.” Tough words, but what does “no space to act” actually mean? Does it mean anything at all? The markets don’t think so, which is why they did not go into meltdown as soon as Hollande’s election became a certainty.

Hollande is certainly tougher and smarter than the “Mr Normal” who he claims to be. His calm, modest manner presents a striking contrast to the hyperactivity, bad temper and sheer bling of Nicolas Sarkozy, but he graduated from France’s most respected post-graduate school for high flyers, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and he has been in politics for more than thirty years.

For over a decade he was the leader of the famously fractious Socialist Party, and was nicknamed “Meccano-builder” for his ability to bridge the endless personal and ideological disputes, a process he once likened to picking up dog turds. And he has not promised French voters the moon.

What Hollande has actually promised is slightly less austerity than Sarkozy. He will balance the French budget by 2017, rather than 2016. For symbolism’s sake he will introduce a new 75 percent income tax band for people who earn more than a million euros, but he understands that bringing the budget deficit under control must be accomplished mainly by cutting spending, not raising taxes.

The markets will not have it any other way, and they have France in a corner. In order to cover the interest on its existing debt plus this year’s budget deficit, France must borrow almost one-fifth of its entire Gross Domestic Product this year, and the same again next year. Most of that enormous sum must be borrowed from foreign lenders, so Hollande cannot afford to frighten them by radically changing the austerity policy he inherits from Sarkozy.

He says what he must to get elected, but in office Mr Normal is likely to conduct business as usual – or at least, that is what the markets think. It may be too simplistic a view. Hollande doesn’t agree with the current European orthodoxy, because it has put the eurozone (the 17 out of 27 European Union members that use the euro “single currency”) into an economic death-spiral.

Germany’s huge and healthy economy gives it the whip-hand in the eurozone. Berlin insists on savage austerity measures by EU member governments to bring their budgets back into balance, but if the austerity is so extreme that it kills economic growth, then the budgets will never balance. Hollande argues that growth, especially in the form of big infrastructure projects, must be stimulated by easier credit even while budgets are still in deficit.

Many European leaders agree, as do outside observers like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who said recently that Europe would “commit suicide” if it did not add reflationary policies to strict budget discipline. Hollande will not start printing money right away, because the euro means he cannot, but he is certainly going to argue for “quantitative easing” (as we now call reflation).

Without openly defying Berlin, he is likely to become a rallying point for Europeans (and there are a great many of them) who believe that the eurozone will never solve its crisis without economic growth in other countries besides Germany. “Change in France will allow Europe to shift direction,” he says. He may be right.

____________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 5. (“Hollande is…right”)

I’ll Have a Slice of Clitoris, Please

By Gwynne Dyer

Let’s suppose that you are an artist who knows you have to shock people if you really want to get on in the trade. And not being Damien Hirst yet, you should probably justify your shock tactics by claiming that they serve some good cause or other. So which cause will it be?

Children of war? Taken. AIDs victims? Even Benetton has done that. Well, then, how about female genital mutilation?

That’s more promising: FGM offer possibilities for really shocking images, if you want to go down that road. And our artist certainly does.

To work, then. Obviously, an anatomically correct sculpture of a woman about to undergo this ordeal would be ideal, but not a tedious conventional sculpture made of metal, wood or papier mache. This is high art, CONCEPTUAL art, so how about we do it as a cake? Then we could eat her afterwards. Nice symbolism.

Our aspiring artist (let’s call him Makode Linde) decides that his cake-woman should be black. And since he doesn’t want to be left out of the picture, he decides that the cake-woman should have a life-size body but no head.

Instead, Makode Linde will poke his own head up through a hole in the table that the cake lies on, just where the cake-woman’s head would be. He’ll be in cartoonish black-face, of course. And he invites the minister of culture to the event, in the confident knowledge that (this being Sweden) the poor fool will actually come.

Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth rolls up to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, accompanied by several of her ministerial entourage, and is invited to be the first to cut the cake. Not just anywhere, though: she is told to cut a slice from the cake’s “clitoris”. As she does so, Makode Linde screams loudly. Then, laughing at the surrealism of it all, Liljeroth feeds some of the “clitoris” to the blacked-up artist. He laughs, too.

You will have realised by now that I am not making this up. It happened in Stockholm last week, and you can see several videos of it on YouTube. And it didn’t make me any happier when I found out that the artist himself is black.

Well, not black, actually. Linde is mixed-race, with a Swedish mother and a West African father, and he has lived in Sweden all his life. But the fact that all the participants in the event knew he was “black” made it all right for them. Well, sort of all right: if you look closely at the crowd of white Swedes in the background of the video, they’re laughing, but it is distinctly nervous laughter. They know there’s something wrong here.

Indeed there was. This event has unleashed a torrent of self-criticism in Sweden, together with a great deal of abuse from foreigners about the “racist” Swedes. The smarter Swedes suspect that they have been tricked into looking worse than they are by Makode Linde, but they’re not sure quite how he did it. So let’s help them.

Linde claims to be an “Afromantic”, whatever that means. “I’m revamping the black-face into a new historical narrative,” he explains unhelpfully – and adds that he had made this cake because the Artists’ Association of Sweden had put out a call for artistic cakes to mark its 75th anniversary. But what he’s really doing is distorting FGM into a racial issue, because racial issues are his artistic stock-in-trade.

The sub-text of Makode’s little game is that black Africans are the victims of female genital mutilation, and that somehow it is the fault of white people. That’s why he appears in the sort of extreme, caricatured black-face that was used by white comedians about a century ago.

Except that the victims of FGM are not particularly black. The ones in Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria are, but the last time I looked Egyptians were not black, and 97 percent of Egyptian women have suffered “female circumcision.” It is generally done by the mothers and grand-mothers of helpless little girls, so the perpetrators of this atrocity are almost always of the same ethnic group as the victims.

They are usually of the same religion, too. The great majority of FGM victims are Muslims, but the custom is clearly pre-Islamic. (It was already being done in Egypt under the pharaohs.) It is common all over the northern half of Africa, but its roots are in the north-eastern part of the continent, where the Christian majority in Ethiopia and the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt practice it as enthusiastically as their Muslim fellow-countrywomen.

FGM is an agonising procedure (usually done without anaesthetic) whose main purpose is to deprive women of the possibility for sexual pleasure so that they will not be tempted to stray from the beds of their husbands. No amount of cultural relativism can excuse it, but this is not the right context for that discussion. The question here is: why did Linde create this ugly and deeply misleading event?

The answer, alas, brings us full circle. He thought it would have shock value, and he wasn’t going to let a few facts get in the way. See above.

_________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 14. (“Linde…trade”; and “They…countrywomen”)

Afghanistan Lies

By Gwynne Dyer

In the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on Sunday, a journalist called the British embassy for a comment. “I really don’t know why they are doing this,” said the exasperated diplomat who answered the phone. “We’ll be out of here in two years’ time. All they have to do is wait.”

The official line is that by two years from now, when US and NATO forces leave Afghanistan, the regime they installed will be able to stay in power without foreign support. The British diplomat clearly didn’t believe that, and neither do most other foreign observers.

However, General John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, predictably said that he was “enormously proud” of the response of the Afghan security forces, and various other senior commanders said that it showed that all the foreign training was paying off. You have to admire their cheek: multiple simultaneous attacks in Kabul and three other Afghan cities prove that the Western strategy is working.

The Taliban’s attacks in the Afghan capital on Sunday targeted the national parliament, NATO’s headquarters, and the German, British, Japanese and Russian embassies. About a hundred people were killed or wounded, and the fighting lasted for eighteen hours. There was a similar attack in the centre of the Afghan capital only last September. If this were the Vietnam war, we would now have reached about 1971.

The US government has already declared its intention to withdraw from Afghanistan in two years’ time, just as it did in Vietnam back in 1971. Richard Nixon wanted his second-term presidential election out of the way before he pulled the plug, just as Barack Obama does now.

The Taliban are obviously winning the war in Afghanistan now, just as North Vietnam’s troops were winning in South Vietnam then. The American strategy at that time was satirised as “declare a victory and leave,” and it hasn’t changed one whit in forty years. Neither have the lies that cover it up.

The US puppet government in South Vietnam only survived for two years after US forces left in 1973. The puppet government in Kabul may not even last that long after the last American troops leave Afghanistan in 2014. But no Western general will admit that the war is lost, even though their denial means that more of their soldiers must die pointlessly.

“It’s like I see in slow motion men dying for nothing and I can’t stop it,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, a US Army officer who spent two tours in Afghanistan. He returned home last year consumed by outrage at the yawning gulf between the promises of success routinely issued by American senior commanders and the real situation on the ground.

To be fair, none of those generals was asked whether invading Afghanistan was a good idea. That was decided ten years ago, when most of them were just colonels. But if they read the intelligence reports, they know that they cannot win this war. If they go on making upbeat predictions anyway, they are responsible for the lives that are wasted.

“It is consuming me from inside,” explained Lt-Col Davis, and he wrote two reports on the situation in Afghanistan, one classified and one for public consumption. The unclassified one began: “Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and the American people as regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.”

Col Davis gave his first interview to the New York Times in early February, and sent copies of the classified version to selected senators and representatives in Congress. But no member of Congress is going to touch the issue in an election year, for fear of being labelled “unpatriotic”. So American, British and other Western soldiers will continue to die, as will thousands of Afghans, in order to postpone the inevitable outcome for a few more years.

It’s not necessarily even an outcome that threatens American security, for there was always a big difference between the Taliban and their ungrateful guests, al-Qaeda. The Taliban were and are big local players in the Afghan political game, but they never showed any interest in attacking the United States. Al-Qaeda were pan-Islamist revolutionaries, mostly Arabs and Pakistanis, who abused their hosts’ hospitality by doing exactly that.

It was never necessary to invade Afghanistan at all. Senior Taliban commanders were furious that al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks had exposed them to the threat of invasion, and came close to evicting Osama bin Laden at the Kandahar jirga (tribal parliament) in October, 2001. Wait a little longer, spread a few million dollars around in bribes, and the United States could probably have had a victory over al-Qaeda without a war in Afghanistan.

It’s much too late for that now, but al-Qaeda survives more as an ideology than as an organisation, and most Afghans (including the Taliban) remain profoundly uninterested in affairs beyond their own borders. Whatever political system emerges in Afghanistan after the foreigners go home, it is unlikely to want to attack the United States. Pity about all the people who will be killed between now and then.

_______________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 12. (“The US…pointlessly”; and “It’s not…that”)

The Falklands and All That

By Gwynne Dyer

International human rights campaigner and occasional actor Sean Penn, whose well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize continues to be delayed for mysterious reasons, was the first famous foreigner to lend his support to the cause. “The world today is not going to tolerate any ludicrous and archaic commitment to colonialist ideology,” he told Cristina Kirchner, the president of Argentina. He was speaking, of course, of the Falkland Islands.

This was music to the ears of Kirchner, who has marked the 30th anniversary of the Argentine invasion and British recapture of the islands with a high-profile nationalist campaign to “recover” the Falklands (or rather Las Malvinas, as Argentines call them). Penn then went home to California, but it wasn’t long before Fidel Castro weighed in too. Unfortunately, Castro hadn’t read the script.

Kirchner’s chief talking point was an accusation that Britain was “militarising” the South Atlantic by sending an “ultra-modern destroyer” to patrol the waters around the islands. (It replaces an obsolete, leaky destroyer, we must suppose.) But Castro unhelpfully mocked the British, claiming that “the English only have one little boat left. All the English can do is send over a destroyer, they can’t even send an aircraft carrier.”

One could make a meal of this silly quarrel – “The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb,” as Argentine poet and essayist Jorge Luis Borges once said – but it wouldn’t be a very nourishing meal. A more useful approach would be to consider why it is so fundamentally silly.

It’s not that the history of the rival claims is silly (although it is: first French settlers in 1764, then British in 1765, then the French hand their share over to the Spanish in 1767, followed by half a dozen more changes of ownership or control until the islands finally fall under permanent British rule in 1833). Nor is it that the islands are now worth considerably more than a comb (though they are, with seabed oil and rich fisheries surrounding them).

It’s just that you are no longer allowed to shift control of territories from one country to another by force. That was the way the world was run for thousands of years, but after the Second World War the nations of the world changed the rule and in effect froze all the borders where they were at that moment. They did that not because it was just, but because most wars were over territory, and wars had got too big and destructive to fight any more.

Argentina can claim that the brief presence of Argentine colonists in the island at one point before 1833 gives it an eternal right to the islands, and Britain can insist that the wishes of the present, English-speaking residents, who want to remain British, must be respected, but neither is really relevant. The Falklands will remain British because we now define any attempt to change borders by force as “aggression”.

This is the point at which the frantic protests about British “colonialism” usually erupt. They come from Argentina, where the European settlers dispossessed the aboriginal inhabitants. They come from Sean Penn, whose house sits on land that was part of Mexico until the United States conquered it in 1846. They come from everybody who want to draw a line under history just after the situation that favours their interests came to pass.

But the line was actually drawn in 1945, and it has proved remarkably robust. When new African countries got their independence, they got it within the existing borders, even though those were originally drawn by the imperial powers with little heed to ethnic realities. When the old Soviet Union fell apart, all fifteen successor states accepted the administrative divisions of that empire as their new national borders.

And whenever somebody who hadn’t got the message tried to change their borders by force, pleading historical justice, ethnic similarity, or geographical tidiness, they were firmly rebuffed by almost everybody else. Indonesia seized and annexed East Timor in 1975, but eventually had to give it its freedom. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, but was driven out by an international army after only a few months.

And Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982. It was driven out by a British force, not an international one, but the United Kingdom would never have fought such a difficult war over islands then seen as almost valueless if it had not had international law on its side.

Argentina’s action was privately seen as inexcusable by almost every other government, even if its Latin American neighbours did not say so in public. The generals who ordered the invasion were ignorant men who didn’t understand that the world had changed, and they lost power in Argentina as a result of the war. More importantly, the law was upheld.

And that is why Alsace-Lorraine, after changing hands a dozen times in its history, will remain French. California, similarly, will remain American however much the Mexicans dislike it. As for Kashmir and the West Bank – but that’s a subject for another day.

______________________________

To shorten to 700 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 12. (“Argentina…aggression”; and “Argentina’s…upheld”

Assad Wins, Syria Loses

By Gwynne Dyer

“We, the undersigned armed terrorist groups, hereby promise to stop all violence in Syria and surrender all our weapons to the Syrian regime. We will no longer carry out the orders of Israel, the United States, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who have been financing our campaign of armed terrorism against the Syrian people. Love, the terrorists of the Free Syrian Army.”

As soon as Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria gets “written guarantees” from the “armed terrorist groups” to surrender, announced the Syrian foreign ministry on 8 April, it will comply with its promise to withdraw its tanks and artillery from rebellious Syrian cities. Sorry, no, there’s more. The regime also wants “guarantees of commitment by the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to stop financing the armed terrorist groups.”

The United Nations and the Arab League thought they had a deal. The Syrian government had promised the mediator, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that it would remove all its heavy weapons from urban areas by 10 April, and accept a complete cease-fire by the 12th. But then Damascus announced that the international community had been “mistaken” to think that it was really going to pull its troops out.

“Kofi Annan has until now not furnished to the Syrian government written guarantees about the acceptance of the armed terrorist groups to stop violence in all its forms, and their readiness to surrender their weapons so that state authority can spread on all territory,” the statement said. In other words, as soon as the pro-democracy side surrenders unconditionally, “peace” – i.e., the tyranny of the Baath regime – will be restored.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations and the Arab League were doing the best they could, but with no member country willing to use military force against Syria they had no leverage whatever. If Bashar al-Assad really pulled all his troops out of Syrian cities, they would then immediately fall into the hands of the opposition, so he wasn’t going to do that.

The senior people at the UN and the Arab League who approved the deal were hoping at least to put an end to the Syrian regime’s use of massive force against civilians. Assad was obviously not going to meekly give up power, but many innocent lives would be saved if he could just be persuaded to stop using tanks and artillery against cities. He would probably continue killing his opponents on a retail basis, but the wholesale killing would stop.

However, Assad only agreed to the UN proposal in the first place because Russia and China needed some diplomatic cover if they were to go on vetoing any action against Syria by the Security Council. But it turns out that no country is willing to pay the price in lives of a military intervention in Syria anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what the Security Council says – and moving to a lower-profile strategy would have a significant cost for the regime.

Suppressing the uprising one murder at a time, with the regime’s intelligence services and “special forces” operating in hostile urban areas, would cost them a lot of casualties. The regime calculated the likelihood of foreign military intervention, concluded that it was zero, and reneged on the deal.

It was worth trying to de-escalate the conflict, but it isn’t going to happen. Shelling cities with tanks and artillery is a highly inefficient way of restoring government control over them, but it keeps the casualties down on the regime side.

So has the Assad regime won despite the deaths of 9,000 protesters? Probably. Non-violent resistance to tyranny is a powerful tool, but no political technique works every time without fail, and Syria’s Baath Party was always a hard target.

It is a single-party regime that is dominated by and mainly serves the interests of a minority, the Alawites (only 10 percent of the population), who fear catastrophic revenge by the majority if they lose power. However, it also has significant support from other minorities, notably the Christians and the Druze.

Most of the people in these groups have swallowed the guff about “armed terrorist groups,” and they are all terrified of majority rule, which they are convinced would hand power to the Sunni Muslims (70 percent of the population). That was not the goal of the original protesters, who genuinely believed in a non-sectarian Syrian democracy, but the Assad regime is adroit at the game of divide-and-rule.

The prospect of a non-violent transition to a democratic Syria that commands the loyalty of all the country’s religious and ethnic groups has vanished. The people who tried to make that happen were astoundingly brave, and they kept their protests entirely peaceful for seven months despite extreme regime violence, but now most of them have either been killed, or they have taken up arms.

The remaining options are both bad. If Assad succeeds in suppressing all resistance, Syria will be an even more oppressive and unjust place than it was before. If he only partially succeeds, it will open the way to an all-against-all civil war like the one that devastated Lebanon in 1975-1990. There is no plausible third option.

Am I saying that an Assad victory is Syria’s best remaining option? No, I cannot bring myself to say that. But I think that I am writing the epitaph of Syria’s attempted non-violent revolution.

________________________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7, 8 and 12. (“However…deal”; and “Most…rule”)

Democracy in Burma?

By Gwynne Dyer

“It is never easy to persuade those who have acquired power forcibly of the wisdom of peaceful change,” Aung San Suu Kyi once remarked. But the leader of Burma’s main pro-democracy party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), never wavered in her belief that it was possible. Now it may actually be happening.

In last Sunday’s by-elections in Burma, the NLD won at least 40 of the 45 seats at stake. Burma is still far from being a genuine democracy, but the outcome was so encouraging that NLD official Myo Win said: “The army has changed and is now more lenient. So there is more of a possibility that Aung San Suu Kyi can become president in 2015.”

“The Lady”, as most people call her, is finally free after 22 years of political repression, most of them spent under house arrest. It’s hard to believe that she may be peacefully elected president of Burma in three years’ time – but it was also hard to believe that Nelson Mandela would be elected president of South Africa only four years after he was freed from 27 years in prison in 1990.

Not only is Aung San Suu Kyi free, but she is now a member of parliament. She boycotted last year’s general election, the first since 1990, because she distrusted the regime’s intentions, but she has now joined the political game. She had to, because otherwise the game would probably have ended quite soon.

The army has monopolised power in Burma for the past fifty years, ruthlessly suppressing all dissent and leaving the country the poorest in South-East Asia. Now a former general, Thein Sein, has persuaded his colleagues that it is time for the army to let go, but many of them are just waiting for him to fail. He has been president for a year now, and he badly needed a success.

Whether the outcome of these by-elections is quite the kind of success he needed remains to be seen. The army’s original idea, after all, was to open up politics just enough to end foreign economic sanctions and deflate domestic pressure for change. The new constitution of 2008 gave serving soldiers one-quarter of the seats in the new parliament, and in the elections of 2010 the regimes’ puppet political party won a huge majority of the seats.

It was probably the spectacle of the “Arab Spring”, with non-violent revolutions overthrowing decades-old Arab regimes that were just as cruel and corrupt as Burma’s, that subsequently persuaded the army it had to go further. Last August, President Thein Sein met Aung San Suu Kyi for the first time. What promises he made remains secret, but it was enough to persuade The Lady to rejoin the political process.

From the army’s point of view the recent by-elections, held to replace 45 regime supporters who gave up their seats upon being appointed to posts in the new government, seemed an ideal way to start the opening-up process. Even if the NLD did well in them, it would not shake the regime’s overwhelming majority in parliament, and the next national elections are not due until 2015. But the NLD may have done too well.

The pro-democracy party’s nearly clean sweep in these by-elections will remind many generals of the 1990 elections, and that is not a happy thought for them. Having drowned a non-violent protest movement in blood in 1988, the army held a general election in 1990 to legitimise its rule, confident that it could guarantee the right outcome.

It was wrong: the NLD won 80 percent of the seats. It was a political disaster for the military, who only preserved their rule by ignoring the election results and jailing the opposition leaders. That gave them another two decades in power, but their rule was clearly illegitimate and the regime became an international pariah.

Now we have another election outcome in which the NLD wins over 80 percent of the seats. It will already have occurred both to the soldiers and to Aung San Suu Kyi that if the NLD had not boycotted the national elections in November, 2010, it would have won them despite all the regime’s attempts to manipulate the results. And it virtually guarantees that the NLD will become the government in 2015, if those elections are ever held.

The Burmese army’s choice is now stark: it must either accept that outcome or halt the whole democratisation process. President Thein Sein seems committed to the process come what may, but some senior generals will certainly prefer the latter option, particularly because an NLD government might investigate how they got so rich. So it would be a good idea for the NLD to promise an amnesty for all crimes committed by the military regime.

The coming year will be a tricky one, and it could end in disaster if Aung San Suu Kyi overplays her hand. However, the past 22 years have taught her patience, and she clearly understands that Thein Sein needs her help in staving off the pressure from the more hawkish generals.

The rest of the world can also help him, by ending sanctions and allowing investment to flow into the crippled economy. And with luck, Burma will be a democracy three years from now.

_________________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 7. (“Whether…process”)

Global Zero

By Gwynne Dyer

We have just had the second Nuclear Security Summit, in Seoul. It got surprisingly little attention from the international media although 53 countries attended. For the media, nuclear weapons yesterday’s issue, because nobody expects a nuclear war. But a nuclear weapon in terrorist hands is the defining nightmare of the post-9/11 decade, and that’s what the summit was actually about.

“It would not take much, just a handful or so of these (nuclear) materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and that’s not an exaggeration,” said President Barack Obama on his way home from Seoul. “There are still too many bad actors in search of these dangerous materials, and these dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places.”

Keeping bomb-grade nuclear material out of the wrong hands requires a high level of international cooperation. Some progress was made on this issue in Seoul, in terms of coordinating police and intelligence operations, but the real problem is that there are far too many nuclear weapons in the world.

Nobody has ever come up with a plausible scenario in which a terrorist group creates a nuclear bomb from scratch. Mining uranium, refining it to weapons-grade material, and constructing a bomb that will actually produce even a 20-kiloton explosion (like the Hiroshima bomb) are tasks that require the scientific, technical and financial resources of a state.

What terrorists need is a ready-made bomb, or at least enough highly enriched uranium or plutonium that the only job left is to assemble the bomb. The only plausible source of a terrorist bomb, therefore, is the nuclear weapons programmes of the various states that own them. And the bigger those programmes are, the greater the chance that either a nuclear weapon or a large amount of fissile material will fall into the wrong hands.

Now, it may be true (or it may not) that the US nuclear weapons establishment is so efficient and experienced that there is little risk of anybody stealing American bombs or fissile material. But American security also depends on everybody else’s nuclear establishments being well protected – and this explains why Obama is a strong supporter of the “Global Zero” project.

No other US president except Ronald Reagan has called for a world with zero nuclear weapons. In 1984 Reagan said: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in (the US and the Soviet Union) possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” Obama seems to share the same goal, but his support for “Global Zero” is more nuanced.

From a high of 65,000 active nuclear weapons in 1985, the world’s stock has declined to about 8,000 active warheads now, 95 percent of them under Russian or American control. There are an additional 14,000 nuclear weapons in storage, all of them Russian or American – and those may be an even greater danger for nuclear terrorism, since they are not under hourly supervision.

The world will probably never fulfill Ronald Reagan’s dream and abolish nuclear weapons, but it would be a much safer place if there were fewer of them around. Not because that would make a nuclear war less horrible if it happened: a hundred nuclear warheads, dropped on major cities, is quite enough to destroy any country. But because the more weapons there are, the greater the risk that some will fall into the hands of terrorists.

So getting the number of active nuclear weapons in American and Russian hands down to 1,000 each, and dismantling all of the “reserve” and stockpiled weapons, is probably Obama’s real goal. The “Global Zero” rhetoric is mainly useful for bringing the old peace movement along for the ride. (And why would they complain? The essence of any political strategy is finding partners to ride with you at least part of the way to your destination.)

However, to get Russia to sign up to a mere 1,000 nuclear weapons, Obama will have to give up on ballistic missile defence. The Russians are hugely inferior to the Americans militarily by every other measure, so they cherish their nuclear parity. Effective US missile defences, if they could ever be made to work, would fatally undermine that parity.

Of course they never have been made to work reliably, even though the United States has deployed them in a couple of places. But the Russians have a childlike faith in (or rather, fear of) American technological prowess, so ballistic missile defence systems have to go.

Abandoning them would involve Obama in an immense battle with the Republican right, and he’s not going to start that battle in an election year. But that is what President Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, the outgoing Russian president, were really talking about in Seoul when they were caught on an open mike.

Obama told Medvedev: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved but it’s important for [incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin] to give me space. … This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” And so he may.

________________________________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 9. “Nobody…state”; and “The world…terrorists”)

Symmetry of Slaughter

By Gwynne Dyer

After Mohamed Merah died in a hail of French police bullets last Thursday, people who had known him talked about “a polite and courteous boy” who liked “cars, bikes, sports and girls.” His friends had trouble believing that he had murdered seven people, including three children, in a ten-day killing spree in the city of Toulouse, and none of them believed his claim to be a member of al-Qaeda. “Three weeks ago he was in a nightclub,” one said.

The following day, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was charged with murdering seventeen Afghans, including nine children, in a lone night-time attack on sleeping civilians in two villages near Kandahar two weeks ago. “I can’t believe it was him,” said Kasie Holland, his next-door neighbour in Lake Tapps, Washington. “There were no signs. It’s really sad. I don’t want to believe that he did it.”

There are startling parallels in these cases, right down to the fact that Mohamed Merah held a little girl by the hair as he shot her in the head, and that Robert Bales allegedly pulled little girls from their beds by their hair to shoot them. And there is, of course, the underlying symmetry of the motives: both men were responding, in confused ways, to the “war on terror” that former US president George W. Bush launched after the 9/11 attacks.

In Bales’s case, the trigger may have been a fourth deployment to a combat zone after three one-year deployments in Iraq since 2003, during which he suffered concussion and lost part of a foot. He also had money problems, but it was Afghans he shot, not bankers. In his mind it was Afghans, Muslims, whatever, who were causing his problems.

Both men had had run-ins with the law: Bales for assault in 2002, Merah for stealing a woman’s handbag in 2007. But Merah spent two years in prison for the mugging, and while there, as is often the case with teenage Muslim thugs, he was converted to the extremist Islamic ideology called Salafism.

Mohamed Merah videotaped his attacks, so we know that just before he shot his first victim, an unarmed French paratrooper, Merah told him: “You kill my brothers, I kill you.” He was an unemployed small-time criminal with delusions of grandeur, and he wanted to “bring the French state to its knees” in retaliation for French participation in America’s war in Afghanistan. His claim to belong to al-Qaeda, however, was probably just a private fantasy.

Predictably, Marina Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front, called on French voters to “fight…against these politico-religious fundamentalists who are killing our Christian children, our Christian young men.” (She is running in next month’s presidential election, after all.) The incumbent right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says much the same thing, but less bluntly.

Yet two of the three French paratroopers Merah killed were Muslims. The other dead soldier, a Christian of West Indian origin, just had the bad luck to be in the street with two Muslim comrades when Merah found them. (He was deliberately targeting French Muslim soldiers as traitors to his cause.)

Merah was hunting another Muslim soldier when he found himself outside a Jewish school and seized the chance to murder a young rabbi, his 5- and 3-year-old sons, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsonego. It was a monstrous act, but in his disordered mind he believed that he was taking revenge for the Muslims who had been killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s no excuse, but it is an explanation. And the more relevant fact is that only one out of perhaps two million young Muslim French males has committed such an atrocity. What happened is appalling, but it is statistically insignificant. It should also be politically insignificant, but that may be too much to ask in the midst of a presidential election campaign.

The United States is also heading for a presidential election this year, but the only role that the war in Afghanistan has in the campaign is ritual accusations by Republican candidates that President Obama is “soft on terror.” (On the contrary, he has become the willing prisoner of the Washington foreign policy consensus that still defends the profoundly misconceived Afghan adventure.)

As for the Bales atrocity, it is already being written off by the American media and public as a meaningless aberration that tells us nothing about US foreign policy or national character. Not so. It tells us that the character of American soldiers is no better or stronger than anybody else’s, and it is a reminder that ten years occupying a foreign country will make any army hated from without and rotten within.

The army will become even more demoralised and undisciplined if it is a professional force that rotates the same soldiers through repeated combat tours with no visible success on the horizon. Recent instances of American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters and burning Qurans are symptoms of the same malaise that finally drove Bales around the bend. Obama should not wait until 2014. It’s time to go home.

_________________________________

To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 11. (“Mohamed…Salafism”; and “The United…adventure”)

Global Civilisation: The Options

By Gwynne Dyer

Reporter: “What do you think of Western civilisation, Mr Gandhi?” Mohandas Gandhi: “I think it would be a good idea.” The quote is probably apocryphal, but if the Mahatma didn’t say it, he should have.

Now we have something close to a global civilisation: most of the world’s people work in similar economies, use the same machines, and live about as long. They even know most of the same things and have the same ambitions. So we need somebody to ask us the same question. Do we really think a global civilisation is a good idea? And if so, have we any plans for keeping it going beyond a few generations more?

History is full of civilisations that collapsed, and often their fall was followed by a Dark Age. In the past these Dark Ages were just regional events (Europe after the fall of Rome, Central America after the collapse of Mayan civilisation, China after the Mongol invasion), but now we are all in the same boat. If this civilisation crashes then we could end up in the longest and worst Dark Age ever.

Our duty to our great grand-children is to figure out how to get through the 21st century without a collapse. We have all the rest of history to get through, but we cannot even imagine what the problems and opportunities of the 22nd century will be, so let’s concentrate on what would constitute interim success by 2100.

Interim success in 2100 would be a world in which a recognisable descendant of the current civilisation is still thriving. The global population might be heading back down towards the current seven billion by then, having peaked at several billion higher, but it won’t fall faster than that unless billions die in famine and war, so it must be a future in which a very big population is still sustainable.

Unfortunately, the way we are living now is not sustainable. We have taken too much land out of the natural cycles in order to grow our own food on it. We are systematically destroying the world’s major fish populations through overfishing and pollution. We are also driving most of the larger land animals to extinction.

This is a “six-planet” civilisation: it would take six Earth-like planets to sustain the present human population in the high-energy, high-consumption style that is the hallmark of the current global civilisation. Not all of the seven billion have achieved that lifestyle yet, but they all want it and most of them are going to get it. And for the foreseeable future we will have only one planet, not six.

That’s the real problem we must solve if we are to reach 2100 without civilisational collapse and a massive dieback of the human population. All the other stuff we worry about, like global warming, ocean acidification and the “sixth great extinction”, are really signals that we are not solving the basic sustainability problem. Nor will we ever solve it by just using less energy and eating less meat. Not at seven billion plus, we won’t.

So we really have only two options. We can go on in the present patchwork way, with a bit of conservation here and some more renewable energy there, in which case we are heading for population collapse through global famine, and probably civilisational collapse as well because of the attendant wars, well before 2100.

Or we can try to float free from our current dependence on the natural cycles. Use the scientific and technological capabilities of our current civilisation to reduce our pressure on the natural world radically. Stop growing or catching our food, for example, and learn to produce it on an industrial scale through biotechnology instead.

Just achieving food independence would greatly reduce our vulnerability to climate change, but we need to stop global warming anyway. Otherwise much of what we call “nature” will not survive, and half the world’s big cities will be drowned by sea level rise.

Given how much excess carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere already through burning fossil fuels, that will probably require direct human intervention in the climate system: geo-engineering, in other words. We must also stop burning fossil fuels and move to alternative sources of energy as fast as we can, but we almost certainly won’t move fast enough to avoid runaway warming without geo-engineering.

The more romantic environmentalists hate this stuff and insist that there is a third option. They think we can avoid disaster just by learning to “live lightly on the planet.” That would be nice, but it can’t be done with seven billion people, even if they all lived like Gandhi. That option disappeared at the latest in the 1960s, when we passed the three-billion mark.

This civilisation is the distilled essence of a ten-thousand-year human fascination with technology. It will live or die according to its ability to solve by new technologies the problems it has created by its own past technological successes.

If we want our great-grandchildren to be happy in 2100 – if we want them even to be alive – then we have to start managing some of the planet’s systems (like the climate system), and to remove ourselves entirely from some of the others. There is no third option.

Sarkozy’s Last Stand

By Gwynne Dyer

Faced with renewed allegations that Muammar Gaddafi had poured up to fifty million euros into his presidential campaign in 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally lost it. “If he did (finance my election), I wasn’t very grateful,” he snapped on prime-time television.

Sarkozy, after all, was the prime mover of the bombing campaign that brought Gaddafi down, while the man who made the original accusation during that war was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late Libyan dictator’s son and hardly an impartial witness. It was mainly a measure of how much Sarkozy is disliked in France that he had to go on major French television channels once again last week to deny the eight-month-old story.

Plausible or not, many people want to believe the story because it provides a rational basis for their loathing of the man. And Sarkozy’s own behaviour, as he flails around with growing desperation for some new policy that will bring the voters back to his side, is equally unattractive.

His latest proposal, made last Tuesday, was to cancel the Schengen Agreement, the treaty that provides for freedom of movement within the European Union. Unless the EU as a whole agrees within a year to cut drastically the number of foreigners allowed to settle within its boundaries, he said, France will leave the treaty and reimpose its own border controls.

Sarkozy, whose own ancestors were Hungarian and Greek immigrants, was aiming this policy directly at France’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim voters, but it is unlikely to woo them away from the real neo-fascist party in the country. Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, immediately replied by promising to cut immigration by 95 percent, and for good measure added a promise to quit the common European currency, the euro.

Meanwhile Francois Hollande, the Socialist leader, cruises towards what seems like an inevitable victory in next month’s presidential election despite the fact that he has never held any high government office. Everybody agrees that he is a very nice man, but he would never have got the Socialist nomination if Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the World Bank, had not ruined his chances by getting caught up in several sex scandals.

It’s odd that the polls should be predicting that Hollande will win the election, given that he is an old-fashioned tax-and-spend socialist in a time of financial crisis when most French voters, rightly or wrongly, think the solution is spending cuts and balanced budgets. Being a lifelong party apparatchik doesn’t win him many points either. The only rational explanation is that he is benefiting from the anybody-but-Sarkozy mood of the electorate.

Sarkozy can be cruel about Hollande, comparing him to a sugar cube: it looks solid, but put it in water and it will dissolve to nothing. But that’s no more cruel than the French public’s assessment of Sarkozy himself. He is generally seen as a flashy, fast-talking salesman who lacks the gravity to be president, and whose promises to make France a more competitive, more prosperous society have all come to naught.

A fair person might argue that Sarkozy’s inability to transform France is not really his fault, since he entered office just before the financial collapse of 2008 wrecked everybody’s big plans, including his. But politics is not about fairness, and in the popular view his administration has been a failure.

Then there’s Francois Bayrou, a perennial presidential candidate whose main attraction is that he is none of the above. Every party he ever led – and he has led quite a few in his career – eventually collapsed because he couldn’t get along with the members. He’s pro-European, orthodox in economics, but with a social conscience – the ideal centrist. But he has never won more than 18 percent of the popular vote, and this time he’s sitting at 13 percent.

Marine Le Pen, for all her success in softening the image of the National Front, is only predicted to win 16 percent of the vote in the latest poll, so it comes down to a two-horse race: Hollande vs. Sarkozy. They will be the top two candidates who go through to the all-important second round on 6 May – and then Sarkozy will almost certainly lose.

In the first round of voting, a four-way race, neither Sarkozy nor Hollande is likely to get more than 30 percent of the vote. (Currently, each man is predicted to win 28 percent.) But when every other candidate’s votes must go to one of the two leading candidates in the second round, Francois Hollande wins hands down. No opinion poll this year has given Hollande less than 54 percent of the vote in the run-off, and some have given him as much as 60 percent.

Nicolas Sarkozy is a formidable campaigner, but this is a gap that is almost impossible to close in the time that remains. France is going to have a Socialist president for only the second time in the history of the Fifth Republic.