Best practice risk management for RI banks
Best practice risk management for RI banks
Anthony Brent Elam Managing Director Bank Central Asia Jakarta
2. Power -- Can we avoid an Iranian bomb? 2 x 21
Europe, U.S. must rethink their strident stand on Iran nb: "waived" and "waiving" should be "waved" and "waving". See bolding below
Jonathan Power Columnist Istanbul
No country prevaricates so much unless it has something to hide. The more the Iranians dodge and weave the clearer it becomes that an important faction in its divided ruling class wants to keep open the option to build a nuclear weapon. Yet at the same time it is also apparent that another powerful faction regards this as a mistaken policy that will set back all the enormous effort that has gone into mending fences with both Europe and America.
It takes no great effort to understand that Iran has reasons for wanting nuclear weapons. Not least because Israel has them. It is not so much that Iran believes it could engage in nuclear brinkmanship to force Israel out of Palestine. Nor does it believe it could use its own nuclear armory to neutralize Israel's and then seek to engage it with conventional forces.
All these would be too risky strategies. It is more a simple question of international standing. It is to be able to claim that it is the one who most faithfully supports Palestinian Muslims. It is the one that dares goes nose to nose, at least theatrically, with the regional "bully" Israel.
Then there is Iraq. If Iraq had nuclear weapons during its war with Iran, 1980-1988, it may well have used them. After all it did use chemical weapons and at the time hardly anybody protested.
The arguments against further proliferation are immensely strong yet there has always been something unpersuasive in the stick being waived should be "waved" by an America that continues to develop the sophistication, if not the numbers, of its immense nuclear arsenal. Moreover, it is joined in its Iranian quest by a Europe which has two nuclear weapons states, both of which have great intellectual difficulty in explaining why in a post Cold War world they hang on to their armories.
Over the decades western policy towards proliferators has been ambivalent, indecisive and inconsistent, none more so than towards Pakistan whose nuclear weapons arsenal is now accepted (as long as the government keeps it out of the hands of Taliban sympathizers). But in April, 1979, the attitude in Washington was almost as harsh as it now is towards Iran.
The Carter administration, convinced that Pakistan was secretly building a nuclear weapon, suspended military aid in a move mandated by Congress's Symington amendment. However, when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December of that year, the Administration persuaded Congress to overrule the amendment and a large arms aid program was started up again.
For the next decade, in return for Pakistan's help in building up the anti-Soviet mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan, who later went to work for Osama bin Laden, Washington turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear bomb efforts. Only in 1990 with the Soviets driven out of Afghanistan did President George Bush senior decide to cut off military assistance.
Once again this was reversed under his son, President George W. Bush, as America wooed Pakistan for help in defeating the Taliban and hunting down Al Qaeda members. Not only is the bomb tolerated, not much fuss was made last year when the U.S. discovered that Pakistan was acquiring missiles from North Korea.
Likewise, Washington's long refusal to acknowledge what it knew since the early 1960s about Israel's secret nuclear reactor and weapons plant in the Negev desert has cost it dear. Israel with the U.S. behind it has never lacked an adequate conventional defense. Its nuclear weapons program has been as much an unnecessary provocation as its settlements policy.
Credibility and consistency are necessary and important allies in the war against nuclear proliferation. But the same solemn international agreement that the U.S. and Europe are now waiving should be "waving" at Iran, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is the very one in which the nuclear-haves solemnly promised to make rapid progress in getting rid of their nuclear weapons in return for most of the rest of world remaining signatories. All this dissembling and double talking lowers the bargaining strength of the West at this critical moment.
Yet the last thing the world needs is an Iranian bomb or Iran to be within a screwdriver turn of having one. One more accidental launch or opportunity for nuclear theft waiting to happen have to be avoided.
The U.S. and Europe need to rethink their increasingly strident stand. Offer Iran all the civilian nuclear cooperation it can swallow in return for open books and regular intrusive inspections. Offer to end all political and economic estrangement (a policy turnaround long overdue). And, not least, set a better example in their own nuclear disarmament programs. There is no good reason why if the West played its cards well it couldn't help Iran become another Turkey, democratic, pro Western, militarily strong if it so wants, but bomb free.
3. Pro -- Just say no to Bush 1 X 48
Just say 'no' to Bush on his unilateralist agenda see correction (bolded in white below)
Joseph E. Stiglitz Professor of Economics Columbia University Project Syndicate
For three years, America's president has pursued a unilateralist agenda, ignoring all evidence that contradicts his positions, and putting aside basic and longstanding American principles.
Take global warming. Here Bush is conspicuously absent without leave (AWOL in military jargon). Time and again, he questions the scientific evidence. (Of course, Bush's academic credentials were never very impressive.) Bush's position is more than wrong; it is an embarrassment.
Indeed, when asked by Bush to look into the matter, America's National Academy of Sciences came to a resounding verdict (the only one they could honestly reach) that greenhouse gases are a menace. But America's automakers love their gas-guzzlers, and Bush's oil industry pals want no interference with their destruction of the planet's atmosphere. So no change in policy.
In Iraq, Bush again pursued a unilateralist agenda, saying that there was incontrovertible evidence of a link with al-Qaeda, and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Even before the invasion, there was overwhelming evidence that Bush was lying. Detection technology made it clear that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, as chief UN inspector Hans Blix pointed out. It's possible that Bush read those reports, but that they were beyond his comprehension. It is also possible that he did not believe what he read. Whatever the case, American policy was not based on evidence.
Since the Cold War's end, America is the world's sole superpower. Yet it has failed to exercise the kind of leadership needed to create a new world order based on principles like fairness. Europe and the rest of the world are aware of this; but they don't vote in American elections. Even so, the rest of the world is not powerless. Instead, the rest of the world should just say no.
America has not won the hearts and minds of those in Iraq; indeed, it has lost them, just as it has lost the hearts and minds of much of the world. The U.S. wants to retain control of the occupation, but it wants others to receive the bullets now mowing down American soldiers. UN soldiers should not bear the consequence of America's failure to manage the occupation, so U.S. cries for financial help should fall on deaf ears.
What sympathy does the U.S. agenda deserve, when President Bush has ladled out tax cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest people in the world. It was not long ago that a Republican Congress held up US$1 billion of UN dues, and threatened that it would only pay what it owed if the UN satisfied a raft of conditions. America's unwillingness to provide small sums to wage peace contrasts sharply with the huge amounts Congress quickly granted to wage war.
Advocates of a softer approach say that if the UN stays on the sidelines, it will become irrelevant; by participating in Iraq, it will build trust with America, so that the next time a dispute such as this arises, America will turn earlier to the UN. Nonsense. Those in the White House today believe in realpolitik. They don't believe in loyalty or trust.
If history matters, it matters most significantly in this: Those who have shown that they can be pushed around will be pushed around again. If there is a next time, the U.S. will make its judgments on what is in its best interests, regardless of what the UN does.
I normally write about economics, not politics. But in the new world of globalization, there is greater economic interdependence, which requires more collective action, rules and institutions, and an international rule of law. Economic globalization has, however, outpaced political globalization; the processes for decision making are far from democratic, or even transparent. In no small measure, the failures of globalization can be traced to the same mindset that led to the failures in Iraq: Multilateral institutions must serve not just one country's interest, but all countries'.
At the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Cancun, the developing countries put America -- and Europe -- on notice that this system can no longer continue. In that case, Europe was as much the culprit as America. Europe has no trouble seeing the dangers of unilateralism in America's actions, in everything from abandoning Kyoto to its refusal to join the International Criminal Court.
But Europe should also reflect on its own practices, including trade policy, where the EU works systematically to unbalance the global trade regime against developing countries, despite promising that those imbalances would be corrected in the current round of trade negotiations.
Here, Europe acts like America, which has long talked the rhetoric of free trade, while its actions have long ignored the principles. Forget about America's rhetoric of upholding fairness and justice; in trade negotiations, the U.S. ignores the pleas of the poorest countries of the world to eliminate the cotton subsidies that have had so devastating an effect on them.
If we are to make the world politically more secure and economically more stable and prosperous, political globalization will have to catch up with economic globalization. Principles of democracy, social justice, social solidarity, and the rule of law need to be extended beyond national boundaries. Europe and the rest of the world will have to do their part--abiding by these principles themselves, and giving each other, and America, a shove in the right direction. Right now, this entails "Just Saying No" to President Bush.