| 20 July 2004 | Tuesday | 02 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425 |
Pyongyang's bomb and media hype
All in good faith
Iran in a quandary on nuclear issue
Without much strategic thinking and without serious forward planning several important trading nations in the developing part of the world reached the conclusion that they will have their weight felt in the Doha round of trade negotiations. The round is already almost five years too late in being launched.
It was supposed to be inaugurated at the trade ministerial meeting at Seattle in the fall of 1999 when it ran into vigorous opposition by the forces that opposed globalization.
They turned Seattle into a battleground of the larger war against globalization. Faced with this unexpected onslaught, America and Europe retreated from Seattle and put on hold the launch of a new round of trade negotiations.
The anti-globalization forces assembled in Seattle pursued many different agendas that ranged from the nihilists who saw any attempt to organize governmental institutions, whether at the national or international levels, as anathema for their belief in total individual freedom.
In this they were joined by the libertarians, a remarkably large force in the United States. On the other side were the environmentalists and those who sought to protect workers' rights, particularly in the developing world. They were bothered by the way the transnational corporations (TNCs) were changing the global production system.
By bringing together different points of view under one anti-WTO umbrella, the Seattle protesters were remarkably successful in scuttling a major international economic effort.
This was the first time that forces such as these had succeeded in seriously disrupting a carefully worked out agenda and timetable on an international issue of great concern to the officialdom of the world's major economies.
The trauma of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 on the United States created an opportunity for the major trading nations to make another attempt to restart a new round of trade negotiations.
They chose a site in an area of the world that would not be easily accessible to the forces of anti-globalization. Doha, the capital city of the tiny sheikhdom of Qatar on the Persian Gulf had the means to keep out the people it did not consider desirable.
The Qatarians succeeded and anti-global agitators were kept away from the site of the Doha meeting of the WTO ministers in November 2001. Ministers from the developing world were also in a more pliant mood.
Nobody wishes to play around with an injured lion and it was in that mood that the United States, the world's largest economy and trading nation appeared at Qatar. The rest of the world was not inclined to provoke it the way it had done at Seattle.
The Doha discussions were successful in that the WTO members took the decision to launch another round of negotiations. The major trading countries in the world were also prepared to grant some space to the developing world.
They accepted the argument put forward by poor nations that the promise of the Uruguay round which had launched the World Trade Organization had not delivered its promise to structure international trade in a way to benefit them. To assuage that impression, the WTO ministers agreed to launch the new round with the explicit objective of promoting economic development.
Only those who occupy the extreme left and right of the thinking on economic development would argue against the proposition that trade does not promote development in the developing world or that, properly conducted, it does not contribute in alleviating poverty. This case was made obligingly by institutions such as the World Bank and a number of western think tanks.
The arguments advanced in this context had three components. One was the contribution trade makes to economic growth. The data published by the World Bank when juxtaposed with those provided by the World Trade Organization seem to suggest that the sharpest increase in global GDP occurred at the time that the increase in international trade reached record levels.
In the nine year period between 1995 and 2004, global GDP increased by close to three per cent a year while global trade expanded by 6.2 per cent a year. There was, in other words, an elasticity of close to two between trade and GDP increase.
It can be argued that a two per cent increase in international trade contributed to a one per cent growth in global output. In China, for instance, exports increased by 17 per cent a year between 1993 and 2002 while the country's GDP grew by eight per cent.
Once again a ratio of 2 to 1 manifests itself. The next sharpest increase in exports was in East Asia, not counting China, of 12 per cent a year in the same period. The East Asian economies' average rate of growth during this period was only four per cent a year.
This period encompassed that of the Asian financial crisis which pulled down the rate of growth of the region. One could say it was because of the opportunities for exports provided in the rapidly expanding American market in the latter part of the 1990s - the boom years - that made it possible for East Asia to come out of the economic trough into which it had fallen as a result of the financial crisis.
In South Asia the relationship between exports and GDP growth was much weaker, about one to one. These relatively closed economies were not drawing benefits from international trade expansion that had become available to other parts of the global economy.
South Asian exports in 1995-2002 increased by only five per cent a year while its GDP expanded at an average rate of 4.7 per cent per annum. The slowest growth in exports was in Sub-Saharan Africa.
These are real numbers. The Washington and Geneva-based multilateral institutions and a number of think-tanks around the world have also estimated the benefits to various parts of the world as a result of the successful conclusion of the Doha round and consequent expansion in global trade. A World Bank study has estimated the gains from free trade for developing countries at $350 billion a year by 2015.
However, a significant proportion of that would come from their own liberalization, as much as $265 billion. The most gains would be for low and middle income countries, about $270 billion in 2015 at 1997 prices.
Of these, about $110 billion would be from what analysts term static gains - the gains that would have been made even without dynamic liberalization in trade that the successful conclusion of the Doha round should produce where initiatives for trade promotion are taken by the countries within the developing world.
However, if liberalization by all trading regions is added to this calculation, the absolute gain by 2015 will increase to $340 billion. Liberated trade between low and middle income countries on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other only adds $70 billion of additional trade.
The conclusion that leaps out of this analysis is that it is much better for this group of developing countries to work towards liberalizing trade among themselves than to rely on an expansion of total international trade that may result if the Doha round came to succeed.
The same conclusion can be reached from the trade data for high income developing countries. By liberalizing among themselves, they add only $105 billion of additional trade by 2015.
This increases to $150 billion if liberalization with the entire world is added to the picture. Trade liberalization with the rest of the world adds only $45 billion a year to the exports of this group of countries.
Therefore, for low and high income developing countries rewards are much higher if liberalization is first undertaken among themselves rather than between themselves and whichever groups of countries happens to be more developed. This is one reason why regional trading arrangements have become so popular. They usually involve countries at more or less the same level of development.
Instead of making a great deal of effort to arrive at a general agreement on trade among all countries represented in the WTO, a more manageable policy might be to set up a framework within which different regional arrangements were worked out.
This would lend some coherence to the construction of these blocs. It would also make it less cumbersome to negotiate trading agreements among the blocs. Such an approach would mean a clear departure from what was done in the past but it may be the only way forward given the slow progress that is now being made in the context of the Doha round.
This way of handling trade talks would essentially split the world into three parts: rich countries, high and middle income countries, and poor nations. It would then make sense for America, Europe and Japan to look at their agricultural sectors and the agricultural policies they pursue.
At the same time the world's least developed countries should be able to work on an arrangement to increase the flow of goods and commodities among themselves. The same would be true for the countries in the middle.
In this way the most favoured nation rule would not apply when these trading blocs are put together. The concessions that Bangladesh gives to Nepal, for instance, would not have to be given by them to the United States and the European nations.
With regional trade becoming the focus of trade talks, the WTO nations could spend their time resolving inter-bloc issues. Two of these have taken up a fair amount of time already and are not near solution.
One is the question of patents for drugs used for Aids. In a recently concluded conference on Aids held at Bangkok, the UN Secretary-General implored the United States to spend as much effort on fighting Aids around the globe as it is doing on international terrorism.
Even France's Jacques Chirac has jumped into the fray accusing America of "blackmail" and of undermining a WTO agreement concluded last year which would have authorized poor nations to override drug patents when obtaining essential medicines.
The US, claimed France, was doing this in the context of bilateral trade accords with a number of developing countries in which the signatories were asked explicitly to strengthen protection of intellectual property rights.
Translated, this means that the US was putting more emphasis on drug companies being able to enforce patent rights on drugs including those critical for treating AIDS.
The second issue concerns turning the Doha round into a development round, designed specifically for benefiting poor countries. This issue has two further components: that of reciprocity and that of concessions by relatively better off developing countries to those that are less advantaged.
According to Prof Joe Stiglitz, the Doha round must incorporate a true development agenda - "trade negotiations must begin from the premise that the less developed countries are deserving of special and differential treatment, both because they have been disadvantaged in the past and because of differences in their current circumstances.
This will entail a movement away from the principles of reciprocity and bargaining. It will entail unilateral concessions by the developed countries, both to redress the imbalances of the past and to further the development of the poorest countries of the world."
Pyongyang's bomb and media hype
The main thing we've learnt so far about the Bush administration's self-proclaimed ambitions to curb nuclear proliferation is its all too obvious ability to influence how the press treats the issue. If it wanted to whip up hysteria on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" the press was a willing, if now rueful, victim.
If it wants to blow hot about North Korea's ambitions to have a nuclear-armed rocket that can strike Alaska it can do that too. It can also do cold. Watch it right now as it moves, after three years of outright hostility to North Korea, to start using the soft touch in time to meet the imperatives of the electoral calendar when it wants to be crisis-free.
Too much of the media (European too) follows its given cues as meekly as a well trained circus dog. The latest round of talks with North Korea, when for the first time the Bush administration offered negotiating concessions, was thriftily covered.
Yet the North Korean bomb has not gone away. And North Korea's bomb research is much more advanced than it was when Bush first characterized the regime as part of the " axis of evil".
Nuclear bombs are a good scare story--when the administration wants it to be. It plays on fears we all have. I'm embarrassed to say that years ago I wrote a column saying if North Korea got a nuclear weapon it should be bombed.
When the CIA first spooked president Bill Clinton with its carefully leaked revelation that North Korea had a nuclear weapon he had Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates on his back telling the press loudly that the North's stock of spent fuel rods should be bombed before they were reprocessed into plutonium.
But none of them could provide an answer what to do if in retaliation North Korea made use of the nuclear bombs they said it already possessed. And when Clinton, all wound up and ready to order an invasion of North Korea, consulted the Pentagon he found that war might lead to the deaths of 50,000 American soldiers and the obliteration of Seoul, he too pulled back.
Then ex-president Jimmy Carter, briefly seizing the headlines, bravely ventured into Pyongyang and mapped out with the old dictator Kim Il Sung a trade-off between nuclear armaments and economic aid. Clinton happily grabbed the deal, and then the press largely went quiet until when, years later, Bush ratcheted up the rhetoric and confrontation.
And today the press seems content to be spoon-fed the lie pushed by the Bush administration that it was the North Koreans who broke the trust of Washington when they reneged on the undertakings made to Carter/Clinton and admitted (in 2002) that whilst they closed down its plutonium-based bomb producing line they had opened up an alternative uranium-enriched one.
In fact the trust - that precious ingredient of all deals - was broken long ago. The 1994 agreement was clear: the North agreed to close its plutonium plant and seal up the cooling rods from which weapons grade plutonium could be extracted. In return the US with Japan and South Korea agreed to build two modern, non-plutonium producing nuclear power stations to be in production by 2003.
Also the US agreed that it would end its economic embargo and help the North with food, oil and electricity. Militant Republicans in the Congress managed to sabotage the implementation of the American side of the bargain, pushing the administration to slow food supplies and oil deliveries on a number of occasions.
There was a successful effort in the Congress to break the promise of ending sanctions, delaying action on this until 1999 when they were finally but only partially lifted. Not least, was the slowdown on the building of the new reactors, with the prospect of them being completed five years behind schedule in 2008.
Then when George Bush came to power the US leant on South Korea to slow down its so-called "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation. It also refused to talk about other sources of electricity supplies and prohibited South Korea from honouring a promise to send electricity to the North. Later, after the North's "confession", it froze both oil supplies and reactor building.
Given the reflex hostility of both the American government and media it should not surprise us that North Korea returned to its "bad old ways." Confrontation, Pyongyang reasoned, was the only way to get results.
And, after three years of it, it is indeed producing results. Bush is ready to negotiate, but quietly. And the press has gone quiet in lockstep. Yet still North Korea has the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq didn't.-Copyright Jonathan Power
All in good faith
Two committees examining the same body of information have come out with different conclusions or, perhaps, couched the conclusions in such a way that one is damning and the other a clean bill of health.
The US Senate committee looking into the intelligence that was used to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and constituted an imminent threat came down very hard on the evidence and all but accused the CIA of fabricating it. Said Senator Jay Rockefeller that had Congress known what it knows now, it would not have authorized the war on Iraq.
Lord Butler, who is a former civil servant and is, therefore, inclined to be cautious - his daring only creates ripples rather than makes waves - is mildly critical of systems and procedures but says that Tony Blair acted in good faith and even has praise for John Scarlett, the chairman of the joint intelligence committee who accepted authorship of the dossier that claimed with absolute certainty that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction but an on-going programme for nuclear weapons.
The intelligence provided had some caveats and no doubt, due to some clerical error, these caveats were not included in the dossier which was brandished as the smoking-gun.
In his press conference, Lord Butler even disclosed that his committee had come across a photograph of an Iraqi fighter-aircraft that was buried in the sands. It seemed to be a totally irrelevant observation though he did mention that the Iraq survey group was still looking for weapons of mass destruction and Iraq was a big country.
I think that it is now widely accepted that the intelligence was politically driven and the second part of Senate committee report has been withheld till after the US elections and this will establish that the intelligence agencies " played ball " with the politicians.
If the intelligence is flawed or scrappy so too will be the political judgment unless going to war was for altogether different reasons and in which case the public in both the United States and Britain was taken for a ride.
Both Bush and Blair continue to harp that Iraq is now a better place without the brutal and murderous Saddam Hussein and the war is being justified because it brought a regime change.
It is also now being claimed that the Iraqis who have regained their sovereignty are on course for a bright and democratic future. The reality on the ground is something else. The death toll continues to mount.
The US and coalition forces have lost slightly more than a 1000 lives and the number injured would probably be more than that. The Iraqi death toll is, of course, higher but this is of little concern and as Tony Blair said in the parliament that the Iraqis were being killed by the Iraqis, an obvious reference to the insurgents and by implication that there was no blood on his hands.
A lot of media attention is being given to hostage-taking. Some hostages have been beheaded which seems or sounds barbaric and medieval. As someone who is opposed to capital punishment, it is barbaric but so too is the guillotine that is a mechanical way of beheading people.
The end-result is the same as indeed as the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber and the lethal injection. There is a corpse at the end of the line. I have heard television commentators referring to beheading as Islamic justice but not other methods of capital punishment as either Christian or Jewish justice.
Terrorism is being seen in religious terms and in the perception of much of the western world the war on terror is a holy war. It is the Muslim communities that are kept under surveillance and even the head of the British Nationalist Party, which is an out and out fascist organization, is now claiming to want to cleanse Britain of Islamic elements, an additional objective to wanting to get rid of all coloured immigrants.
The BNP may not be one of the mainstream political parties but its goons and thugs pack a street-power punch and have engineered many racial riots and managed to terrorize many Asian communities.
Are they now proposing to turn their attention to Muslims? The climate of fear is there to be exploited. The Pakistanis are in double danger, for being Pakistanis and for being Muslims.
The world has not only become a more dangerous place but an irrational one. That may be the real price for the war on terror which is being fought so thoughtlessly. A final word on an unconnected subject.
Private television channels have been reporting on the closing down of some theatres in Lahore on the grounds that the plays they have been putting on are deemed to be "vulgar."
I am not going into this though I have always believed that vulgarity is something subjective and it is in the eyes of the beholder. But I had completely forgotten that there is some law or regulation on the books that makes it mandatory for those wanting to put on plays to have the script vetted by somebody or ministry who decides whether the play is suitable or not.
It is not clear to me what special qualifications the individuals concerned have to pass judgment about the suitability of a play. Are these men and women chosen for their rectitude and their insight that they can decide what the people should see or not see? It is a huge responsibility.
There are, of course, many manifestations of vulgarity and obscenity. Why are we so obsessed that we see it only in sexual terms? This amounts to pre-censorship and in this day and age, it serves no purpose. It may also explain that while I have tried my hand at writing short stories and novels, sub-consciously I have never tried to write a play.
Iran in a quandary on nuclear issue
The July 13 announcement by Iran's top national security body to resume nuclear talks with Britain, France and Germany later this month indicates that Tehran has decided to avoid a showdown over its nuclear programme.
The supreme national security council, headed by Iran's top nuclear policy maker Hassan Rowhani, widely considered leading presidential candidate in the next election, has, however, given no indication as to where the talks will be held and, even more importantly, at what level.
To begin with, officials from the two sides are likely to attend the talks and, in case Iran is willing to make more concessions to the international atomic energy agency (IAEA), the level of talks will be raised to ministerial-level negotiations.
Last October the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany struck a deal with Tehran to secure its cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA. Iran agreed to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment activities, allow tougher IAEA inspections and file a comprehensive declaration of its nuclear activities in return for trade relations that Iran desperately needed.
But since then the deal has been under severe pressure, with inspectors discovering omissions in Iran's declaration, inspection visits unduly delayed and Tehran backing away from a pledge to suspend all enrichment related activities.
It may, however, be observed that Europe's big three - Britain, France and Germany - are not ready to break off cooperation with Iran despite damning new revelations from the UN nuclear watchdog.
The IAEA board of governors unanimously passed a resolution last month that sharply rebuked Tehran for not cooperating fully with a UN investigation of Iran's nuclear programme.
Iran retaliated to the IAEA's criticism by announcing that it would resume making uranium centrifuge parts, thus breaking an agreement it had struck with Britain, France and Germany a few months ago.
In view of increasing tension, the Iranian defence minister announced recently that his country would abandon its commitments to the UN atomic watchdog if its nuclear installations were attacked. The United States and Israel accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons.
The IAEA began investigating Iran after an Iranian exile group reported in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a massive uranium enrichment facility and other sites from the IAEA. Without proper access, the IAEA cannot judge the merit of such charges. Moreover, uranium enrichment is hard to detect without knowing where to look for.
The central issue confronting the IAEA is whether Iran has disclosed all its uranium enrichment activities or not; if not, then it must provide full answers within months to questions relating to the extent of its nuclear programme.
Recently, IAEA chief Mohammed EI Baradei expressed concern over the detection of traces of low-enriched and highly-enriched uranium at some sites in Iran and over Tehran's work with advanced P2 centrifuges. These are used in the process of enriching or purifying uranium for use in an atomic reactor or in a nuclear weapon.
On top of it all, information provided by Tehran to IAEA on its P2 programme has been "changing and sometimes contradictory", claims the IAEA chief. He has further observed that it is essential for the integrity and credibility of the inspection process that Iran fully cooperates with the IAEA and comes clean on its nuclear programme.
Some questions are indeed intriguing for the UN watchdog. For instance , it wants to know why Iran produced uranium metal, not needed for its planned nuclear reactors, but handy for making nuclear weapons.
And why did it build a heavy-water research reactor, used in making bomb-usable plutonium, when Iran's energy plans depend on light-water reactors? The UN nuclear watchdog has been keenest to probe Tehran's claim that it is building a sophisticated uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz - a pilot plant and a much larger production-scale plant - without ever having done tests with uranium gas to prove its centrifuge machines work.
These can produce low-enriched uranium for reactor-fuel, or highly-enriched uranium fit a bomb. Iran is obliged to report to the IAEA either sort of work but denies flatly it has done any.
Iran, on the other hand, has its own point of view. It wants the IAEA to give it credit for the information it has disclosed to date and warned that failure to give it due recognition will affect future co-operation with the IAEA.
Its chief delegate Hossein Mousavian claims that his country is providing full cooperation, supplying all the information requested and narrowing down the range of outstanding issues.
In Tehran the mood appears to be equally sombre. The newly-elected hard-line law-makers have threatened not to ratify a UN protocol allowing snap nuclear inspections, which Iran signed last year and has so far been implementing. They have made it clear that if western governments impose extreme demands , the Iranian parliament will not approve the protocol.
Sometimes one finds contradictions in Tehran's policy on the nuclear issue. This is perhaps due to the deep internal division between the hardliners and moderate reformers in the Iranian power structure which affects all aspects of Iranian policy and sometimes complicates its stand on the nuclear issue.
However, Tehran insists that there is no difference of views between the unelected conservative clerics who still control key levers of power and the government officials dealing with the nuclear programme.
It may be observed that control over nuclear and weapons development rests in the hands of the clerics who have often threatened to end all cooperation with the IAEA.
US ambassador to the IAEA Kenneth Brill recently stated that the members of the UN nuclear watchdog were interested in knowing whether Iran had received "nuclear weapons design material" from a Pakistani-led nuclear smuggling network as did Libya. Iran vehemently denies it intends to acquire nuclear weapons. It claims that its nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful purposes.
The IAEA, on the other hand, says that its nuclear weapons inspectors have found in Iran blueprints for an advanced uranium enrichment centrifuge, the G2, that Tehran failed to declare even as it claimed to have provided full information on its atomic energy programme. Enriched uranium is used for nuclear reactors but can also be used for making nuclear bombs.
There is no doubt that the US has serious concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions. Bush has said in unambiguous terms that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an intolerable threat to peace in the Middle East and a mortal danger to Israel.
"They will be dealt with, starting through the United Nations", says the US President. But the stand-off comes at a time when the US policy in the Middle East is in trouble.
After a quarter-century of hostile relations, starting with the toppling of the Shah and the 1979 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the US and Iran find themselves in a vicious circle.
Too much of national pride is involved on either side to let them leave the beaten track and explore new ways of solving their problems. As the IAEA chief EL Baradei suggested in his meetings in Washington last month, a dialogue between Washington and Tehran could lead to a deal on the nuclear issue in exchange for the US move towards normalization with Iran.
John Kerry has made it clear that, if elected, he will hold direct bilateral talks with Iran and North Korea. After the debacle in Iraq, George Bush should be the last person interested in another foreign military adventure. Therefore , the odds are that, if he is re-elected, he may give green signal for direct talks with Tehran.
The writer is a former ambassador.