THE current international debate on Iraq is dominating the world media. The important thing about it is that the western world is split after a very long time over the prudence or otherwise of waging a war against Baghdad. It reminds one of the Suez episode in 1956 when the French and the British tried to go it alone against Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and ended up in the dumps.

At that time President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to join in an ill-advised Franco-British Suez adventure. Why did they do so? The reason was that Eisenhower was in the middle of deciding to seek a second term as president and therefore he could not afford to become involved in a war alongside the French and the British as it would not be politically expedient or suit the dominant interest of the then US administration which was to ensure the incumbent president’s re-election.

The point is that even age-old allies can be ditched in an hour of dire need. The current Euro-American split is based on a very strong European public opinion that does not quite share the American president’s perceptions of the Middle East — and of the Muslim world generally. In America itself, where I spent more than three months recently, I found opinion considerably divided on the question of going to war against Iraq.

Most people in the United States of course feel that Saddam Hussein is indeed a bad guy but are not quite sure whether he is the only bad guy around in world politics. There are lots of people in America who think that George W. Bush is not such a good guy — that in the first place he should never have made it to the presidency and having made it that far, he should definitely not be allowed a second term in the White House.

Last May having had the chance of sitting through a seminar on “The Apocalypse and Violence: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives” at the Yale University in New Haven, I had the experience of listening to a spell-binding speech by Prof Bruce Lincoln of Chicago University who read out and compared para by para the rhetoric of Bush and Osama bin Laden in their speeches of October 7, 2001, (the first day of military action in Afghanistan) detailing their similarities. His conclusion was that there was not much of a choice between the two of them and that henceforth the world was bound to be a high tension-ridden place and therefore troubled for a long time to come. That of course was the view of a university professor because in a democracy everyone is entitled to his viewpoint and it is respected by all and sundry. That America is still very much a bastion of freedom of thought and expression one is left in no doubt about. But there are lots of people in the United States who have begun to question the wisdom of successive US governments, particularly in the realm of foreign policy formulation. The old adage that politics stops short of the seaboards no longer holds true any more in America.

The internal ethnic mix in the United States has altered so much over the years that it no longer remains a Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) monopoly. If the Wasp view of things is still very much strident, the other ethnic groups are also beginning to make themselves felt. In 1980 an old friend of mine who lives permanently in New York told me that in 20 years the Wasp hegemony over the United States will be surviving only with the help of the system of government and institutions that has an in-built protection designed for the original settlements of European colonists in America. That 1980 observation has since come remarkably true.

The United States is indeed undergoing a metamorphosis and a reconsideration of its policies and its role in the world. But George W. Bush is unfortunately intellectually too much of a midget to be able to even size up the racial and religious extremism and intolerance taking place in his country, which, regardless of who the president is, remains a great country with great values and traditions bequeathed by its founders.

The last presidential election in 2000 has in many ways contributed to the sowing of a deep discord in American society. The rather mysterious Florida state happenings and the US Supreme Court’s handing down of the presidency through a skewed verdict made possible by loyal appointees on the bench showing their party bias has indeed left a bad taste in the mouth that lingers on.

The basic problem faced by George W. Bush today is how to get re-elected in the year 2004 which may appear to be rather far away to some. But before he gets into 2004 he feels that he better do something spectacular in 2002. And what better can he do than to re-establish his Republican Party’s control over the Senate and the House of Representatives and also to get as many Republican governors elected in this coming November’s mid-term elections? How does he do that? He thinks he needs do an Afghanistan — one every year if possible. So he is on the look-out for easy-game sort of countries which American might can subdue easily in the shortest possible time and with the barest minimum of casualties on the US side — or, if possible, with no casualties at all.

The only thing that a US president truly dreads is the arrival of body-bags because it is then that US public opinion usually takes a 180-degree turn over the cries of bereaved widows, parents and relatives across the land. So one is not surprised one bit that in order to go in for an electoral victory George W. Bush needs a military victory over a beleaguered country like Iraq. Afghanistan has been such a pushover that President Bush’s appetite has got further whetted. He, therefore, in his bid to jack up his presidency, is indeed preparing for another war this autumn which in effect will take good care of the internal opposition to his leadership.

He is positioning himself as the saviour of what nobody really knows. His old alliance in Texas has always been with the Christian right-wing which is feared more in the United States than outside. The likes of Billy Graham and the son Phil Graham have been his bosom political pals. He himself is a born-again Christian. Of course, there is nothing wrong about being that. But the fact is that the United States was born as a secular state and remains so as it has no state religion as per its constitution, and as far as one can make out, the people of the United States will hardly ever allow any religion to acquire a dominant place in its scheme of things.

Most of Bush’s votes came from the Bible-belt of the mid-west granary states. That is why the agricultural subsidies in the United States cannot be discontinued, whereas the advice tendered to the rest of the world, including the European Union, Asia and Africa, is to discontinue their respective agricultural subsidies. One of the most thought-provoking comments I came across was from an American who had lost heavily in the Wall Street crash in July. He summed it up rather pithily by saying that America had uptil now never got involved in a religious war but this Afghanistan business and now the Iraq possibility have made it hard for the American economy to continue its prosperous march.

He also remarked that he cannot see America coming out of its current recession unless American policies are shifted away from the waging of wars with a religious fervour. George W. Bush may have made the cardinal ‘slip of the tongue’ when he used the word ‘crusade’ in his first speech after 9/11. Whether he meant it or not, literally or figuratively, the political damage had been done and made irreparable. Furthermore, he finds himself surrounded by the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Ashcroft who for varying reasons find it convenient and advantageous to push Mr Bush on a course of extremism in international matters.

The Congressional opposition led by the Democrats who have a thin majority in the Senate and a substantial minority in the House of Representatives, tried their best to initiate a Congressional inquiry into the prelude to the 9/11 happenings relating to the intelligence failures of the FBI and the CIA but were unable to pull it off as both feared landing up in the dock themselves. In order to politically survive in an atmosphere of anti-terror hysteria that has been whipped up in the United States by the Christian right wing, they had just about to give up on their demand for such an inquiry as if such a probe would help the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

But now the Wall Street corporate mess has come in handy to the opposition and has created a serious threat perception for the Bush government. The malfeasances committed by the various company managements of Worldcom, Imclone, Enron, Tyco and the likes are no different from those that took place under the stewardships of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in Harken and Halliburton, respectively. In short both the president and the vice-president feel that with the possibility of the proceedings in the Securities and Exchange Commission closing in on them, they and their government need to do something spectacular to deflect it.

So what better pre-emption can be devised for the legal protection of the president and the vice-president than to mount a so-called pre-emptive strike on Iraq or, for that matter, on any other country. The basic objective, as in 1956, is to stay in power but this time by obfuscating things by resorting to a short and swift war against a suitably unequal adversary, thereby altering the domestic political landscape to the advantage of the sitting government. That is how a second presidential term is proposed to be hijacked for George W. Bush — so that he can be a Reagan and not a Bush Senior in the history books.

THE much-feared increase in electricity rates has come about along with a package for an upward adjustment of rates to account for varied inflationary factors.

The National Electric Power Regulatory Authority has authorized the KESC to increase power rates by an average of 27.23 paisa per unit or 6.5 per cent. Domestic consumers will have to pay twenty-eight paisa per unit.

But the fact that the consumers will have to pay less than the industrialists who will pay 35 paisa more per unit or the agriculturists who will pay 55 paisa more per unit does not bring real relief to them. The fact remains that ultimately all the enhanced rates will be paid by the consumers directly or indirectly, beginning with high transportation charges as oil prices go up which is the real reason for the power rates to rise now.

The rise in the prices of oil has a multiplier and cascading effect on prices. As oil prices rise the people who use various modes of transport — bus, taxi or aeroplane — have to pay more. Eventually the goods carried by trucks come to cost far more.

Prior to that the agricultural production will cost more and the prices of fertilizers and pesticides may also rise. Pumping water too for agricultural purposes will cost more.

When such goods are transported to the factories as industrial raw materials or brought back to the market by trucks, their cost rises and when they are carried to the ports from distant production centres, the cost of exports rises and the government has to give more refunds to compensate for that.

The commercial rates of electricity are among the highest and when they too are raised, their increases are passed on to the consumers. All these have a multiplier effect on prices of other items and the cumulative price rise tends to go up all the time despite recessionary conditions.

NEPRA has also allowed an inflation price rise for power on a quarterly basis for seven years taking into account three major factors including (1) the fluctuation in the price of fuel oil, (2) changes in the price of power supplied by the private power producers (3) changes in the operation and maintenance cost of the system as reflected in the consumer price index of the government.

In fact, these three factors are supposed to account for only fifty per cent of the price rise, and the other fifty per cent is accounted for by theft and loss of power and other factors beyond the control of the KESC.

The KESC had in fact asked for a sixteen per cent upfront increase in tariff and a ten-year inflationary cushion which will also take into account handsome returns for the investors after privatization. But the NEPRA has agreed to only a seven-year concession while maintaining that privatization is the only solution for KESC’s problems. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank which have been funding the KESC have also strongly supported KESC’s demand for a sixteen per cent rise in the rates along with a ten-year inflationary cushion.

What is striking is that while the consumers will be bearing the burden of ever-increasing rates, the net gain to KESC from the latest rate rise will be only 2.2 billion rupees and the KESC will be left with a deficit of five billion rupees a year which will have to be made up by the federal government. If the government does that, it will only be giving up a small part of the total gains this year of 60.5 billion rupees from the petroleum and natural gas surcharge revenues.

Instead of the surcharge going down following the rise in world prices of oil, it has been going up and up in terms of rupees along with the rise in world oil prices. If the revenues from petroleum surcharge were Rs 18 billion in 2000-2001, it was Rs 39 billion last year against the budgeted Rs 32 billion and this year the revenues will rise to Rs 45 billion and the total petroleum and natural gas surcharge would peak to Rs 60.5 billion.

These revenues are based on the percentage of oil prices and as the oil price rises the government collects larger revenues in rupees. This is a grossly unfair attitude towards the consumer. A healthier policy demands that the surcharge is reduced as the world oil price goes up. But in Pakistan oil consumers are consumers of its derivatives or subjected to a double squeeze, one by the oil exporters and the other by the CBR with its iniquitous surcharge formula.

But the government feels encouraged to adopt this imprudent course as the World Bank, IMF and the Asian Development Bank support it. For them macro economic balance along with a low budget deficit is far more important than considerations of humanity or the hardships of the consumers.

In a country where more than forty per cent people live below poverty line, when world oil prices rise the people have to pay more for it but they need not pay higher taxes as well along with that as the surcharge is fixed at the high percentage of the price of the oil imported.

For all that, the surcharge revenue which will be 60.5 billion rupees this year is not being treated as tax but shown as a surcharge and the people are taunted by saying they are paying too little as tax and deserve to be taxed more.

The only mercy shown to the consumers is that the price of petroleum is not raised still higher in the wave of the falling rupee and rising dollars as it is the dollars which have fallen in our market and not the rupee.

In spite of the hardships of the consumers, the kunda users and those who steal power in other ways have no problem. In fact they feel the compulsion to steal more and the KESC officers too are immune to rise in power rates as they get 999 units free and that free gift is not affected by the rise in power rates in any manner.

The real solution to the problem lies in a massive crackdown on power theft which is now around forty per cent after it had peaked two years ago to sixty per cent. As long as the consumer pays not only for himself but his neighbour who steals power, the electricity rates will be high and the losses of KESC will be very large. But three years of military management of KESC has brought no real relief from massive theft which is often done in collusion with the KESC staff.

So on the one hand the World Bank and Asian development Bank are talking of reducing poverty and on the other they are supporting policies which tend to increase the cost of living and raise the price of the essentials particularly the utilities.

The Middle East may be in a state of boil for long now which could mean higher oil prices, if to add to that the government taxes petroleum heavily, the consumers in Pakistan will continue to be in real distress.

DOES Iraq have nuclear weapons? Last week, Britain’s authoritative International Institute for Strategic Studies issued a study that concluded Iraq had the ability to produce a few nuclear devices but lacked the enriched uranium or plutonium to do so.

The Institute’s report was clearly timed to provide more justification for a US-British attack on Iraq. The US and British governments as well as world media made use of the report to intensify claims that Iraq was a grave nuclear threat.

As a long-time member of the Institute, I was disappointed that it would so easily yield to pressure from the British government by producing a report that was misleading and sensational. Instead of supporting ‘regime change’ in Baghdad, the IISS might do better to review its own weak leadership at London HQ.

Iraq has no nuclear weapons or fissionable materials. This fact has been certified by the UN’s nuclear inspection agency. As to the IISS’s claim that Iraq has the capability to produce nuclear devices, so do more than 40 nations. Making a nuclear weapon is relatively simple. Take 4-9 kilos of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, surrounded with a specially shaped shell of high-explosive lenses, and detonate.

The recipe is available on the internet. The trick is acquiring highly enriched uranium or plutonium. This process requires hugely expensive, laborious separation and enrichment using banks of centrifuges, as well as expertise in fusing, and shaped-charge explosives.

In the 1980s, Iraq was indeed working on a crude nuclear weapon. Saudi Arabia secretly funded this top secret project in order to counter Israel’s large nuclear arsenal, believed to number over 200 devices. Iraq acquired uranium from South Africa in exchange for oil. South Africa, which produced eight nuclear devices, secretly obtained its nuclear weapons technology from Israel. Ironically, South Africa later sold the Israeli uranium enrichment technology to Iraq.

When Saddam Hussein stumbled into the trap laid for him by George Bush senior by invading Kuwait in 1990, his scientists were within a few years of producing a primitive nuclear test device. During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq’s total nuclear and, in fact, total national industrial infrastructure, were pulverized by massive US bombing. Before the war, Iraq had been the most technologically developed and best educated nation in the Arab world. After, Iraq was reduced to pre-World War I level, with even its water and sewage systems wrecked by America’s ruthless air campaign.

However, Iraq still retains a cadre of about 10,000 trained nuclear scientists and technicians. Unless they are all shot, Iraq will in theory be able one day to build a nuclear weapon, provided it can obtain fissionable material. Once the crushing blockade of Iraq is lifted, Baghdad might be able to produce 1-2 nuclear warheads within five years. But having warheads and delivering them are two different things. Iraq currently lacks aircraft or missiles to deliver nuclear weapons beyond 70 miles range.

Iraq is a leading Arab nation with the Mideast’s second largest oil reserves. Unless the US succeeds in implanting and maintaining a compliant regime in Baghdad, such as it has done in Kabul, whatever brutal general that succeeds Saddam will eventually seek nuclear weapons. Why?

First, to counter Israel’s nuclear monopoly. Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iraq and Iran with nuclear weapons, and is considered a mortal threat by the Arabs and the Iranians. Second, because Iraq fears neighbouring Iran, which has three times its population. Interestingly, every Iraqi leader since the 1920s has vowed to invade Kuwait and reunite it with Iraq. Why, in fact, should Iraq not have the right to possess nuclear weapons to protect its vast oil reserves?

President Bush claimed this week that an attack on Iraq was justified because it had refused to bow to UN resolutions and had weapons of mass destruction. Bush could just as well have been talking about Israel which ignores scores of UN resolutions and refuses to admit UN nuclear arms inspectors. Or of India, which also ignores UN resolutions on Kashmir, and is developing a very large nuclear arsenal with Israeli aid, that includes nuclear-armed ICBM missiles that will soon be able to reach the US.

The original 1990 UN resolution authorizing military action to evict Iraq from Kuwait had a little-noticed article that called for the Security Council to immediately begin a process of regional nuclear arms control and disarmament. This provision was totally ignored, yet it offers a key to the Iraq problem.

Instead of Bush threatening a purely aggressive war against Iraq the US, EU, and Canada should begin an intensive campaign to rid the Mideast of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Regional disarmament cannot be accomplished until all nations, including Israel and Iran, are thoroughly inspected by impartial specialists — the Canadians would be ideal. There must be no repeat of the 1990’s, when many UN inspectors in Iraq turned out to be the US and Israeli spies whose job was to target Saddam Hussein for assassination. Mr Bush might even begin this overdue process by getting rid of a lot more of his own weapons of mass destruction. —Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2002

IT’S actually half the size of Belgium, but the countries get bigger as you go east across Europe so it looks very small on the map.

Legally, it’s just another region of Russia — the home region of President Vladimir Putin’s wife Lyudmila, in fact — but several hundred miles (kilometres) of foreign territory lie between it and the rest of Russia. It has no economic or strategic importance, and yet, as Putin said after the last Russia-European Union summit in May, “our overall relations with the EU depend on how this issue of vital importance to Russia is solved.”

The territory is Kaliningrad on the eastern shores of the Baltic, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. Koenigsburg, as its main city used to be known, was a medieval jewel founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1255, but by the time the Royal Air Force and the Red Army finished with the city in 1944-45 there was little left of value or of beauty. At the end of the Second World War, as part of the carve-up of German territories in the east agreed by the Allied leaders at Potsdam in 1944, it was handed over to Stalin, who promptly renamed it Kaliningrad after one of his cronies.

The million Germans who used to live there having all been killed or deported, a million Russians were shipped in instead, and for the next forty years the city became a Soviet military centre closed to all foreigners. It was rebuilt, after a fashion, but its one-horse economy, wholly dependent on Soviet military spending, went into a steep decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Thirty percent of the population now lives below the poverty line, and nobody really cares about the place — yet it is destabilising one of the most important relationships on earth.

The problem is that when Moscow annexed the territory in 1945, it did not attach it to Lithuania, the only Soviet republic that actually bordered on it. Instead, it made Kaliningrad part of Russia proper, far to the east.

The Soviet Union was always the Russian empire in disguise, and the Kremlin saw it as a symbolic reward for Russian sacrifices in the war. This made little practical difference so long as the Soviet Union remained intact and you could move freely between the member republics. It didn’t matter all that much even after 1991, when all the non-Russian republics got their independence. Russians travelling between Kaliningrad and the rest of the country now had to cross foreign territory, but nobody put obstacles in their way. However, now that Poland and Lithuania, the only two countries with land borders with Kaliningrad, are both joining the European Union, it matters a lot, for the EU is a bit obsessive about its borders.

There’s a reason for that. The Schengen agreement allows free travel between most EU member states without any formalities, but the corollary is that the EU’s external borders with the rest of the world must be guarded with great care. So if Poland and Lithuania want to become EU members in 2004, then they have to control all these Russians moving between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia. In fact, Brussels is demanding that Russians get a visa every time they cross the EU territory that will soon separate Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia.

The Russians, understandably, are furious at this change in the rules, and have begun to talk about a ‘blue curtain’ descending across Europe (the EU’s flag is blue). Nevertheless, Putin’s government is trying to find a way out of the confrontation, since it hopes one day to join the EU itself, so last week it suggested that special sealed trains and buses should run between Kaliningrad and Russia proper. The passengers would undergo stringent security checks, but would not require visas. Unfortunately, Brussels didn’t budge.

The only concession the EU seems willing to offer is a verbal fudge whereby the visas would be called ‘passes’ — but they would still be issued (or withheld) by an EU bureaucrat. —Copyright