Australian diplomat, academic and expert on international affairs

In the 1960s, the Australian international affairs expert John Burton, who has died aged 95, mounted a radical challenge to the conventional wisdom of power politics and deterrence. A diplomat turned academic, he was concerned not only with the causes of conflict, but also with the conditions necessary for a lasting peace. He rejected a conventional historical approach, based on studying archives dealing with past crises. From his own practical experience, he felt that they told neither the whole truth nor reflected the fears, hopes, perceptions and feelings of the players at the time. Burton contended that to get to the heart of a conflict, he would need to bring the present leaders in a current conflict together in a process of controlled communication.

Burton's first exercise, in 1965, brought leaders from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore together while there was still armed fighting between the first two on Borneo, where they both held territory. He had sufficiently strong contacts to get the respective heads of state to send high-level representatives to workshops in London with the team of Anglo-American academics that he led; Harold Wilson, the then British prime minister, was informed and gave his blessing. These meetings usually lasted for a week. They proved to be a success not only for the academics, who could test their theories on the real situation, but also for the practitioners, who were able to explore the nature of their conflict, test their perceptions of other participants and explore likely outcomes in confidence. A number of political factors, including the shift in power from Sukarno to Suharto, led to Indonesia abandoning its attacks on Malaysian Borneo in 1966. Burton's workshops can have contributed only positively to this.

Others from Burton's group soon tried their hand, such as Herbert Kelman, who took the idea to Harvard and promoted contacts between leading lights of Israel and the PLO. However, the birth of "second-track" diplomacy, outside government institutions, owes most to Burton, who was well suited to leading workshops through his previous experience in international problem-solving.

A native of Melbourne and the son of a Methodist minister, Burton studied at Newington college, Sydney; gained a degree in psychology at the University of Sydney; and, in 1942, a doctorate at the London School of Economics. From 1943 onwards, he was involved in planning for postwar reconstruction, and in 1945 attended the UN charter conference in San Francisco. He became the permanent head of the Australian ministry of external affairs in 1947, and together with his Labor minister, Bert (HV) Evatt, he helped to create Australian foreign policy – almost literally, since it had previously been handled by a small section in the prime minister's office, and largley shadowed that of Britain.

Evatt and Burton declared Australia's independence from Britain in foreign affairs. At the UN San Francisco meeting, Australia played a leading role among the small countries, including opposition to the veto. At the same time, Australia began to take a greater interest in its immediate environment. Under Evatt and Burton's leadership, it played an important role in aiding Indonesia's independence. Moreover, Australia challenged the received wisdom about the future orientation of the People's Republic of China, which was that it was tied inextricably to the Soviet Union. Burton was particularly active in asking awkward questions about the outbreak of the Korean War and the mutual provocation on the 38th parallel, and espoused the philosophy of non-alignment. When a Liberal-Country party coalition came into office after the 1949 Australian election, this activity came close to costing him his job.

After leaving the civil service and failing to gain a seat in the 1951 election, he became a farmer and undertook research at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 1963 Burton joined the staff of University College London (UCL) and quickly became a fully-fledged academic.

Indeed, he was one of the two or three genuinely international academic figures in British international relations in the 1960s and 70s. His books were translated into several languages and were the subject of debate at the highest level, not least in the US.

Burton was not just a critic of conventional wisdom, but had a new framework with which to replace it. If International Relations: A General Theory (1965) was a critique of power politics, then Systems, States, Diplomacy and Rules (1968) and World Society (1972) amounted to a statement of an alternative way of explaining how the world works, namely the cobweb model, with many players at many levels transcending national frontiers.

At the end of the 1970s, Burton embarked upon a new tack, putting great emphasis upon human needs by arguing that each individual would pursue such needs whatever the circumstances. Drawing on the work of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, Burton argued that such needs constituted navigation points for governments. The only restraint on individuals was that constituted by legitimised relationships. Burton was now looking at conflict in holistic terms and arguing that all conflict had, at its roots, the search for and denial of basic human needs. The individual therefore became his basic unit of analysis. He developed his ideas in a series of books, beginning with Deviance, Terrorism and War (1979).

Burton's work has had a great impact upon the study of international relations. That many of the aspects of his world society approach are now in the mainstream is a tribute to his forward thinking, while his approach to conflict underlies a major school of conflict resolution, for both theorists and practitioners.

The Centre for the Analysis of Conflict that Burton established at UCL in 1966 moved to the University of Kent in 1979. Three years later, he left Canterbury for the US, where he held a number of posts.

In 1992, Burton retired to Australia, where a new generation of historians has set about exploring his role in developing an independent Australian foreign policy. He married three times, and is survived by his third wife, Betty, and by two daughters and a son from previous marriages. A daughter predeceased him.

• John Wear Burton, international relations expert, civil servant and academic, born 2 March 1915; died 23 June 2010

Politician, activist and writer of the left

Ken Coates, who has died after a suspected heart attack, aged 79, was one of the most perceptive minds and eloquent voices of the radical left. From the mid-1960s, for four decades he was a major influence in seeking to renew and give greater coherence to militant left politics. He was the leader of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation during the anti-Vietnam war campaigns and was the key animator of the Institute for Workers' Control, founded in 1968, during a period of major confrontations between the trade unions and the Labour government of Harold Wilson.

Ken was born in Leek, Staffordshire, to Eric and Mary Coates, and was brought up in Worthing, in West Sussex. When called up for national service in 1948, he refused to be drafted into the army, then fighting communist and nationalist guerrillas in Malaya. He opted instead to work for eight years as a miner in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield, during which time, inspired by the trade unionists he worked with, he developed a lifelong commitment to the cause of organised labour.

Coates's political career was punctuated by clashes with authority. As a teenager in the 40s, he joined the Communist party, but fell foul of the party leadership as a result of his opposition to Stalin's 1948 denunciation of Tito. He was subsequently a strong supporter of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Moscow rule, which in some ways prefigured his work in the 80s as a founder of European Nuclear Disarmament, with peace movement activists in both western and eastern Europe.

In the aftermath of 1956, Coates, with a handful of comrades, was an active supporter of the Trotskyist Fourth International organisation. Influenced by the Belgian economist Ernest Mandel, one of the leaders of the Fourth International, Coates helped relaunch an organisation of British supporters that later evolved into the International Marxist Group.

Coates did not respond well to the strictures of orthodoxy and preferred to work in broader leftwing initiatives. He was active in the New Left movement in the late 50s, with EP Thompson, Ralph Miliband and Michael Barratt Brown. He served for a period on the editorial board of International Socialism magazine in the early 60s. By this time, he had a scholarship as a mature student at Nottingham University, gaining a first class honours degree in sociology. He went on to tutor in adult education at Nottingham (and was made special professor in continuing education, 1990-2004).

Coates first emerged as a significant political figure on the left after the launch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966. His work with Russell had begun in earlier campaigns against nuclear weapons. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organised some of the largest political demonstrations seen in Britain, at the height of the US war.

Two years later, the launch of the Institute for Workers' Control coincided with an upsurge in rank-and-file trade union militancy and attracted the support of large numbers of shop stewards, as well as influential trade union leaders such as Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers' Union and Hugh Scanlon of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Coates's focus on achieving reforms designed to increase the role of workers in running their enterprises – including the Bullock Report on industrial democracy of 1977 – attracted criticism from more orthodox Marxists. But those years saw a remarkable flowering of "workers' plans" for alternative production to meet social needs. The best known of these was the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards' proposal in the face of plant closures; they prepared detailed plans for converting from arms production to a range of "socially useful products", which included portable kidney machines and hybrid road/rail buses.

Coates's influence in the wider Labour movement was a cause of growing concern to the Labour and trade union establishment. He was expelled from the Labour party for a period in 1965, while he was president of the Nottingham Labour party. Their anxiety grew when he was elected as a Labour member of the European Parliament in 1989.

He won great respect during his 10 years as an MEP, not least for his work as chairman of the human rights sub-committee and his initiatives for an EU-wide Pensioners' Parliament and Disabled People's Parliament, and a Convention for Full Employment, bringing together trade unionists and unemployed workers' organisations. Coates was a strong supporter of closer European integration, including adopting the euro.

The emergence of New Labour represented a serious setback for everything Coates stood for. His relations with the Labour leadership in London went from bad to worse when he voiced trenchant criticism of New Labour's turn to the right. This eventually led to his expulsion and that of his friend and fellow MEP, Hugh Kerr, from the party in 1998.

In later years, he maintained an intense workload as editor of The Spokesman, journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and in adding to his list of books and pamphlets about economic and political issues. He took immense pleasure in his family, the Derbyshire countryside and his network of friends and comrades, drawn to a man of great humour and culture as well as profound commitment.

He is survived by Tamara, his wife of more than 40 years, three daughters and three sons.

• Kenneth Sidney Coates, politician and writer, born 16 September 1930; died 27 June 2010

In this July 30, 1965 file photo, President Lyndon B. Johnson uses the last of many pens to complete the signing of the Medicare Bill into law at ceremonies at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, July 30, 1965, with former President Harry S. Truman at his side. At rear are Lady Bird Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and former first lady Bess Truman.

Rarely does the government, that big, clumsy, poorly regarded oaf, pull off anything short of war that touches all lives with one act, one stroke of a president's pen. Such a moment now seems near.

After a year of riotous argument, decades of failure and a century of spoiled hopes, the United States is reaching for a system of medical care that extends coverage nearly to all citizens. The change that's coming, if Sunday's tussle in the House goes President Barack Obama's way, would reshape a sixth of the economy and shatter the status quo.

To the ardent liberal, Obama's health care plan is a shadow of what should have been, sapped by dispiriting downsizing and trade-offs.

To the loud foe on the right, it is a dreadful expansion of the nanny state.

To history, it is likely to be judged alongside the boldest acts of presidents and Congress in the pantheon of domestic affairs. Think of the guaranteed federal pensions of Social Security, socialized medicine for the old and poor, the civil rights remedies to inequality.

Change is coming, it now appears, but in steps, not overnight. The major expansion of coverage to 30 million people - powered by subsidies, employer obligations, a mandate for most Americans to carry insurance, new places to buy it and rules barring insurance companies from turning sick people away - is four years out.

In contrast, on June 30, 1966, after a titanic struggle capped by the bill signing a year earlier, President Lyndon Johnson launched government health insurance for the elderly with three simple words, as if flicking a switch: "Medicare begins tomorrow."

Obama practically needs a spreadsheet to tell people what's going on and when.

Yet if the overhaul goes through, he and LBJ will share a distinction: the only two presidents to succeed with a transcendent health care law.

You can be sure Obama, a student of history, is aware of how LBJ captured the moment when Medicare became law with his pen. That happened in Independence, Mo., in the presence of the very first American to sign up for the program: Harry Truman. The ex-president had ended a world war but could not achieve national health insurance in his time.

"Care for the sick, serenity for the fearful," Johnson promised that day. "In this town, and a thousand other towns like it, there are men and women in pain who will now find ease."

Said Truman: "I am glad to have lived this long."

Ted Kennedy lived long enough to see a goal of his lifetime take shape but not long enough for it to happen. His death last summer was almost the death of the whole plan because a Republican won his Senate seat, changed the voting balance and left despondent Democrats in search of a second wind, which they found.

Why is this so hard? In part, because self-reliance and suspicion of a strong central government intruding into people's lives are rooted in the founding of the republic, and still strong.

The colonial insurgents who dumped British tea into Boston harbor inspired the name and agitating spirit of today's tea party protesters, who rolled a taped-together health care bill up the Capitol steps like toilet paper to show their disdain. "Grandma's not Shovel-Ready," said one of their signs last week, playing off a fear the aged will see their care rationed away.

In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a national mental health bill on the basis that it would be unconstitutional to treat health as anything but a private matter that is none of the government's business.

Seventy-five years later, the American Medical Association denounced proposals for organized medical services as an "incitement to revolution" at the hands of "Medical Soviets."

And that wasn't even about government-run health care. The AMA's fierce opposition to collectivism included objections to private health insurance, the norm today, and the pooling of doctors into what became health maintenance organizations decades later.

No wonder would-be health reformers were thwarted one generation after another even as they made deep imprints on the nation in other ways.

Teddy Roosevelt couldn't do it - and he's carved into Mount Rushmore.

Franklin D. Roosevelt rewrote the social compact with his job and retirement security and regulatory expansion, all in the jagged teeth of the Depression, then took the nation to war. He made national health insurance a second-tier priority and it eluded him.

Even so, social responsibility for medicine grew.

In 1930, citizens paid nearly 80 percent of the nation's medical costs from their own pocket. Government at all levels covered a mere 14 percent, with industry and philanthropy picking up the few remaining crumbs. Insurance was barely in the picture.

Federal and state programs now cover half the cost of health care purchased in the country and are expected to go over 50 percent in the next year or two, even absent Obama's plan. By that measure, the government takeover of health care that opponents warn about is happening regardless of what's about to happen next.

Why the creep of government in health care? In part, because individualism isn't the entire American story. The idea of watching out for each other is also in the nation's fabric.

Besides, as much as Americans hate overbearing government and higher taxes, give them a federal benefit and then just try to take it away. Today's hot potato becomes tomorrow's cherished check.

That's one reason government programs grow - and why Democrats dared to push for a less than popular package mere months from congressional elections, when people were telling their leaders to create jobs instead.

Johnson, full of beans after his Medicare victory, realized all of this.

"The doubters predicted a scandal; we gave them a success story," he crowed a month after the law took effect, as hundreds of thousands of patients entered hospitals for treatment covered by the government and some 6 million children and needy adults began getting benefits.

"Where are the doubters tonight?" he asked. "Where are the prophets of crisis and catastrophe? Well, some of them are signing their applications; some of them are mailing in their Medicare cards because they now want to share in the success of this program."

Obama can only hope for such a first-blush reception. He took on the cause of universal coverage after a campaign in which he did not promise it, intending only to secure insurance for all children and shrink the pool of uninsured adults. His health care ambition grew in office, quickly.

More than a quarter century before, Ted Kennedy came close to the prize with none other than the Republican president, Richard Nixon, who embraced ideas that mainstream Republicans today cannot tolerate. Nixon was ready to force businesses to provide health insurance to their workers or pay heavy penalties.

Sound familiar? It will.

At its core, Nixon's proposal is a pillar of Obama's plan today. Nixon's willingness to subsidize coverage for the working poor is also seen in the plan, though writ larger.

Back then, Kennedy's union and liberal allies gambled that by spurning Nixon, they'd get something better later. They didn't. In similar fashion years after that, President Bill Clinton aimed high and crashed hard.

Clinton no doubt drew on his own failure when, in December, he advised Democrats to pass what they could manage and not make it an all-or-nothing fight. "America," he said, "can't afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

Obama absorbed these lessons.

For him, a system with government as the sole or principal payer of everyone's medical bills was a nonstarter, nice for the ideologues and other countries but not the American way. He would have liked the option of a government-run plan competing in the marketplace, but didn't need it.

For months he stood so far back from the legislative nitty-gritty that it was hard to tell what he stood for.

In the end, he stood for more than the incremental steps that succeeded in the past, and for less than the towering ideas that failed.

President Barack Obama finishes speaking about health care reform at the Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Friday, March 19, 2010.

President Barack Obama greets the audience after speaking about health care reform at the Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Friday, March 19, 2010.

President Barack Obama speaks about health care reform at the Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Friday, March 19, 2010.

Review By Loyd E. Eskildson

Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong: A Life (Penguin/2006) provides an interesting, short summary of Mao's life and rule. However, overall the material is vague about various programs launched by Mao and usually violent and/or disastrous.  Fortunately, various Wikipedia articles on China fill in those weak spots, and read together, provide a good overview of how Mao unified a vast country that had suffered from years of weak leadership, Japanese invasion and occupation, and civil war, and then subjugated it to more disasters. Millions suffered and died due to famine and more violence. Only old age and weakness brought him down.
 
Mao was born in late 1893 when the Qing dynasty was falling apart after 250 years. China's new navy was quickly obliterated by the Japanese 1894 and its army also suffered heavy casualties. The Japanese also took territory in southern Manchuria and annexed Taiwan. By the end of the century the Germans, British, and French had also seized territory. During this period Mao was a young child and began working on the family's three-acre farm (eventually expanded to four acres) at age six, and enrolled in school at age eight, where he stayed until age 13. Mao later continued his education, studying current events, old Chinese classics, and new thinkers such as Marx and Lenin. He became an early Sun Yat-sen supporter in opposition to the Qing throne - then occupied by a six-year-old. The Qing collapse began with a massive 1911 army mutiny (dissatisfaction with the government's ability to restrain outside powers, and its domination by the minority Manchus, and widespread corruption) - soon afterwards (1912) another mutiny fomented by local businessmen and the military killed China's new leaders.
 
Much earlier, China's Lord Shang (390-338 B.C.) established centrally-appointed governors that replaced the former feudal leaders, and a rule that those aware of a crime that didn't report it would receive the same punishment as the perpetrator. Implementing this involved dividing the country into groups of five or ten households, linked in mutual surveillance. Shang also stripped the nobility of land rights - assigning them instead to soldiers according to their military successes. Farmers were rewarded for exceeding quotas and punished for failing to meet them, and multiple children were encouraged to ease a shortage of labor. Country over family was the ruling precept. Mao admired Lord Shang's actions, even as early as his middle-school years, and followed some of them later.  Mao was also impressed by one of his teachers who had been abroad and espoused equality for women, including the cessation of arranged marriages - Mao implemented this early in his leadership.
 
Eventually Mao began organizing workers' unions, and by 1927 Chiang Kai-shek and the warlords were alarmed over their growing power --> a mass roundup and executions, including Mao's first wife. Military pressure forced the Communist forces to undertake the 'Long March' from southern to northern China. About 86,000 began, only 7-8,000 remained at the end. (Some left to follow other leaders, the rest died in battle or of starvation and cold.) Mao became leader en route due to dissatisfaction with the failing military strategies of the Russian-appointed leader, Otto Braun. (Mao preferred guerrilla tactics over Braun's frontal attacks.)
 
At this point China was not only subjected to a Japanese invasion and occupation, but a civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. Mao wanted to unify with the Nationalists against the Japanese; Chiang refused but changed his mind after being taken hostage by a warlord he was negotiating with who also wanted unification. Nationalist forces then took the brunt of losses vs. the Japanese because of their location closer to the Japanese. Meanwhile, Mao acquired an assistant trained in Russia to help in his forming support among other Chinese who had been to Russia for training in land reform, government structure, use of state-controlled newspapers and radio for ideological consistency and control, disarming civilians, state ownership of industrial plants, etc. By 1943, Mao had maneuvered to become Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Obtaining that position required taking advantage of the Nationalist's focus on beating the Japanese while Mao solidified his control through the Yan-an Rectification Movement in which thousands were imprisoned and killed. 
 
Near the end of WWII the Russian army, freed by Germany's surrender, helped liberate Inner Mongolia and Manchuria and turned all captured weapons over to Mao's forces - an enormous help. Mao, upon taking control of new areas limited his initial actions to retribution for for traitors, and building popular support vs. the Nationalists through rent reductions and wage increases. The CCP cause was also aided by civilian resentment over rampant inflation. By December, 1949, it was over - Chiang Kai-shek was ousted to Taiwan and China had a new government. Meeting with Stalin in Moscow, Mao told him that China needed peace to rebuild its economy after nearly 40 years of constant fighting and occupation. That was not to be, however, as China entered the Korean War the next year - despite opposition by Mao's advisers.
 
After taking control of the whole of China, Mao implemented land-reform nationwide that gave the land to the peasants, gave women equal rights (allowed women to initiate divorce, ended arranged marriages, ended 'foot-binding' and polygamy), banned religious meetings and replaced them with political meetings and propaganda sessions, made Mandarin the official language - reinforced by state radio, TV, and schools, and set all clocks to Beijing time (except Tibet). Heavy industry was also revived.
 
Mao then tightened control in 1951-52 with his 'three-anti' (corruption, waste, bureaucracy) and 'five-anti' (bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, cheating on government contracts, stealing state economic information) campaigns to eliminate corruption and enemies of the state. Thousands were trained and employed as propagandists and to spy on business affairs of Chinese citizens; criticism letters were encouraged from employees - 210,000 were received in Shanghai alone in just the first month. Hundreds of thousands of 'suicides' resulted, as well as fines.
 
Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign (1956-67) then encouraged a variety of views and proposals on national issues. At the time, the Russians were similarly rethinking Stalin's dictates. However, after responses became increasingly critical and difficult to control, Mao ordered a halt in the campaign. During the Anti-Rightist Movement (reportedly organized by Deng Xiaoping) that followed, over 550,000 people identified as "rightists" (intellectuals who appeared to favor capitalism) were humiliated, imprisoned, demoted or fired from their positions, sent to labor and re-education camps, tortured, or killed. By 1958 private land ownership was abolished. The total death toll in the 1950s up to this point is estimated to be as high as one million.
 
Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' then dominated China from 1958 to 1961. Giant farm communes (about 5,000 households each) and new agricultural practices were mandated and supposed to increased production and economies of scale; similarly, communal kitchens, laundries, and child-care were implemented. The result was catastrophe - about 30 million died of the ensuing famine, or torture for failing to meet quotas. (Enemies of the state - religious leaders, rich peasants, former landowners, were given the lowest food rations and died in the greatest numbers.) The plan had been to acquire agricultural output at little cost, sell it, and use the proceeds to industrialize. (Opponents wanted to industrialize first so that appropriate machinery would be available to cultivate the large farms.) One early agricultural program was the 'Great Sparrow Campaign' to drive away and kill sparrows because they ate grain - by 1960 it was recognized that sparrows actually did more good than harm by also eating insects. It was too late however, and swarms of locusts resulted.

Other agricultural mandates included following the new Russian practice of over-seeding crops in the belief that yields would increase (yields actually decreased due to stunted growth), deep plowing to 1-2 meters (reduced yield by burying the topsoil), and taking moderately productive land out of production to concentrate fertilizer on the most productive land. Floods and drought brought additional problems. At the same time steel production was supposed to also double in the first year, mostly through backyard steel furnaces. The output, however, consisted of low-quality lumps of pig iron. Unfortunately, the many agricultural workers diverted to steel production also meant that crops sometimes rotted in the field due to lack of harvesters; melting down essential farm tools for 'steel production' didn't help harvests either. Nobody was going to protest, however, after the recent Anti-Rightist Movement, agricultural production reports were inflated by a factor of 10  times. (Many officials were later executed for giving out misinformation.) Mao himself learned of the problems, but decided not to reverse the mandates because it would supposedly dampen the populace's enthusiasm for change. Instead, backyard steel production was quietly abandoned the next year. Meanwhile, China exported grain despite internal starvation.
 
At the 1959 CCP meeting, Defense Minister Peng Duhai, worried about the effects of the Great Leap Forward on China's army, personally delivered a letter to Chairman Mao pointing out the need to change policies. Mao distributed copies to the leadership, challenged them to accept his approach or Peng's, and stated that if they accepted Peng's he would raise another army and restart the guerrilla wars. Peng lost that vote, and his position as well.
 
More upheaval followed - the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Mao declared that liberals were permeating society and the CCP while supporting capitalism. Problems began in 1963 when a group led by Liu Shoqui wanted to depose Mao for his Great Leap Forward fiasco. Mao responded with his 'Four Cleanups Movement' to cleanse 'reactionaries' from politics, economics, ideas, and organization. Shoqui et al became obvious targets. This initial purge evolved into the Cultural Revolution, led by Mao's new Minister of Defense Lin Biao, and Mao's wife Jiang Qing. Large public posters enlisted students and peasants to abolish old customs, cultures, habits, and ideas. Authorities were prohibited from stopping the violence. Liu Shoqui and Deng Xiaoping were sent to detention camps; Liu died. Deng's son was thrown out of a 4th-story Beijing University window and left paralyzed. Lin Piao was named Vice-Chairman and Mao's successor. Local official and army leaders were purged. 'Young intellectuals' (recent middle-school graduates) living in cities were ordered into the countryside - in part a means of moving Red Guards from the cities to the countryside where they would cause less social disruption. Mao's "Revolution is not a dinner party" quote repeatedly encouraged the spread of violence throughout China.

Much economic activity was halted, countless artifacts and ancient buildings were destroyed, the education system was essentially brought to a halt and many teachers were eliminated or fled, people were encouraged to question their parents - forbidden per Confucian tradition, Muslims and Tibetans particularly suffered, and even planned cannibalism occurred. It is estimated that as many as three million died, and some believe its memory helped fortify the 1989 Tienanmen Square demonstrations. Only a handful were ever punished for Cultural Revolution excesses, and the overall topic is taboo even today.

Meanwhile, Lin Biao became frustrated at Mao's refusal to give Lin more power. Attempts were made to assassinate Mao, the army was purged again, and Lin attempted to flee to Russia in 1971 but died when his plane crashed. Mao's wife (part of the Gang of Four) then tried to enhance power through attacking Premier Zhou Enlai's status and the newly rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Mao responded by ordering Deng to write self-criticisms lest his pro-unit stance be seen as repudiation of the Cultural Revolution.
 
Zhou died in 1976, the relatively unknown Hua Guofeng was appointed premier, people began expressing their disapproval of the Gang of Four and demonstrated in Tienanmen Square - supposedly at Deng's behest. Deng was again stripped of all power and placed under house arrest. Later that year, after Mao's death Hua became Chairman and with the army's backing, had the Gang of Four arrested. The Cultural Revolution and nearly a century of turmoil were over. Hua's goals were to bring peace to Chinese politics, reverse the damage of the Cultural Revolution, and continue with Soviet-style planning. Fortunately, Hua found that Deng was needed and brought him back into upper leadership. Within a year Deng took over and began China's economic miracle.

Bottom-Line: China now benefits from competent, fast-acting, but highly authoritarian leadership aimed at improving citizens' lives. Mao's earlier leadership, however, paralleled Stalin's - rooted in political philosophy and self-preservation. Both Mao and Stalin caused the death of millions through starvation and purges, and show the extreme downside of authoritarian government. 5 Stars

Jonathan Spence has written several books on Chinese history, including The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Treason by the Book, and The Death of Woman Wang. His awards include a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.

2015: China Soon To Boast The World's Largest Economy?

Loyd Eskildson is retired from a life of computer programming, teaching economics and finance, education and health care administration, and cross-country truck driving.  He's now a reviewer for Basil & Spice.

Copyright © 2006-2010, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved.

The Indian government has plans for large-scale electricity generation projects, and is moving to allow an increased role for private companies, domestic and foreign, in the nuclear energy industry. But it is doing so without strengthening the legal framework covering compensation, liability, classaction and the ability to deal complex tort cases. The failure of litigation attempts properly to call Union Carbide to account for the gas tragedy at Bhopal suggests lessons that need to be learned if a legal framework is to be created which will be able to address the possible eventualities arising out of the use of nuclear energy. 

India originally used nuclear energy for various social applications including energy generation through the framework provided by the Atomic Energy Act, 1962. Initially, the Atomic Energy Act provided exclusive government control. The concept of public participation was introduced later, and there are now plans gradually to open up the nuclear energy generation sector to full private participation.

Implementation of the Indo-US Joint Statement of July 18, 2005 ended India's isolation over the peaceful use of nuclear energy. It also served to turn the spotlight away from major loopholes in the Indian legal system such as environmental protection, rehabilitation, liability and compensation and transparency.

Now the Indian government has decided to introduce in the Union Parliament’s Budget Session a piecemeal legislation called “Nuclear Liability Bill’ to cap the liability from potential accident. This article examines the legal issues raised by the Indo-US Nuclear Cooperation Agreement and the ability of the Indian legal system to address the issues associated with nuclear energy in the light of the experience gained from the Union Carbide (Dow Chemicals) Disaster at Bhopal.

Why Legal Framework?

A legal framework is important for the following reasons

1)      Domestically a well developed legal framework covering the peaceful use of nuclear energy will foster development as well as address the problems raised by the industry especially those affecting the public.

2)      Internationally it is a prerequisite for engaging in nuclear cooperation and technology transfer.

It will be beneficial to analyse the legal framework in United States and France with which India entered into Nuclear Co-operation Agreements. The gradual operationalisation of the agreements allows nuclear firms from these countries to operate without an adequate legal framework in India, while their activities are highly controlled in their home state. This brings about a situation akin to that which opened up for multinational corporations when the World Trade Organisation was established to exploit the availability of cheap labour, rich resources and inefficient legislative, legal, administrative and enforcement mechanisms. The impact of any potential hazard from the nuclear industry to the public and environment will be much higher. This in itself highlight the need to provide a legal framework covering all aspects of peaceful use of nuclear energy.

The legal framework in the US and France, unlike that in India, covers all aspects of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, especially through liability and compensation, public participation and transparency. The Price Anderson Act, for example, which was an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act, 1954 provides a unique system of nuclear liability coverage for power plants as well as for the transportation of nuclear materials to and from such facilities. It covers all losses of third party bodily injury and property damage off the site of the nuclear installations. Beyond the insurance cover and irrespective of fault, Congress, as insurer of last resort, can decide how compensation is provided in the event of a major accident. The 1966 Amendment to the Act provided for the establishment of an Extraordinary Nuclear Occurrence (ENO) for liability and also the concept of precautionary evacuation. The National Environment Policy Act (NEPA) and the Alien Torts Act further strengthens the legal framework.

The French Nuclear Programme, unlike that of the United States, is based on substantial involvement by the government in both the development and production of nuclear power. It has a liability cap and uses a single reactor system design for uniform safety systems. The liability constraints in France are based on a variety of international treaties. France adopted and modified both the Paris and Brussels Conventions in its Law on Third Party Liability in pursuant to the Paris Convention, Brussels Convention and Additional Protocols of 1964 and 1982. The major areas covered by the Act include summary procedure for getting compensation and a special tribunal with power given for emergency measures to the Public Prosecutors and The Examining Magistrates.

Another peculiar legislation is that concerning the democratisation of public enquiries and environmental protection to inform the public and obtain its comments, suggestions and counter proposals. The 1987 Act clarifies the pre-existing system of assistance, organisation plans and emergency plans to introduce more information about major risk with increased obligation to the operator for safety and risk. Article 1384.1 of the Code Civil provides an escape from liability only if the accident occurred due to force majeur or unforeseeable circumstances.

Legal Framework for the Use of Nuclear Energy in India

The Constitution of India includes the subject of atomic energy and its mineral resources in the Union List providing the Central Government exclusive control over nuclear energy. The Atomic Energy Act was enacted in 1948 and replaced in 1962 with an Act which empowers the Central Government and in turn to the Atomic Energy Commission, to do all things associated with the use of nuclear energy.

The Atomic Energy Act does not specifically deal with the question of compensating nuclear damage. Section 29 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 provides that; “No suit, prosecution or other legal proceeding shall lie against the Government or any person or authority in respect of anything done by it or him in good faith in pursuance of this Act or of any rule or order made under.”

This provision seems to confer immunity from legal action. In the case of a nuclear incident causing radiation exposure to the public and environment the Government will resist a claim of compensation and liability. With the approval of private firms in this area, the present legal framework’s ability to address these issues becomes yet more important.

Rhetorically it can be said that judicial activism in the field of Article 21, Constitution of India has expanded the concept of right to life and personal liberty. The Indian judiciary was able to develop compensatory jurisprudence based on Article 21 and principles like the absolute liability principle.

Developments related to Article 21 of the Constitution of India will limit the application of section 29 of the Atomic Energy Act conferring immunity on the government. But this must be considered in the light of the justice rendered to the victims of the Union Carbide Tragedy at Bhopal. This highlight the weakness of the present legal framework to provide liability, damages and even to bring those responsible for trial. Under the present legal framework, the impact of a major nuclear incident will be catastrophic. It will raise complex tort litigation which could take decades.

Union Carbide Gas Tragedy: Unsettled Issues

The Union Carbide tragedy at Bhopal remains an outstanding example of the failure of the judiciary, government machinery and certain sections of the civil society to provide justice to the victims as well as to future generations due to inefficiency and the lack of a proper legal framework.

The experience gained from the aftermath of Union Carbide Tragedy becomes increasingly important as India enters the nuclear foray without a proper legal framework and with an underdeveloped compensation and liability regime.

Union Carbide opened its Bhopal Plant in 1968. On the night of December 2nd -3rd 1984, methyl isocyante, hydrogen cynide and other toxic gases began to leak in substantial quantities from the pesticide factory of Union Carbide India Limited (“UCIL”) in Bhopal, India. Though government figures are lower, it was estimated that around 8,000 people died in the course of 3 days of leakage. The effects were profound on the surviving population.

The Indian government passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, 1985 making itself the exclusive representative of the Bhopal victims and filed "unprecedented" claim in the United States Court against Union Carbide Corporation, the majority shareholder in UCIL. The case was unique, since India; a sovereign republic representing thousands of indigent victims was asking the United States judiciary to determine the liability of a Multinational Corporation. The Indian claim was to hold the parent corporation absolutely liable for foreign harms regardless of whether it was a subsidiary or head office that caused the harm, since the Multinational Corporation was in the best position to prevent those harms in its profit making enterprises.

Moreover India also argued that its laws were not developed to handle this mass tort litigation and the legal argument was based on three situations. Namely that 1) Indian legal system is inadequate for the litigation, 2) Union Carbide by its control of UCIL was responsible for the acts of its subsidiary and 3) there is overwhelming American interest in encouraging American multinational corporations to protect the health and well being of peoples throughout the world.

Union Carbide requested the US court to dismiss the action on the ground of Forum Non Conveniens, pleading that India was the appropriate forum.    The district court hearing the consolidated action resulting from these suits ultimately dismissed the case under the doctrine of forum non conveniens. This was upheld by the second circuit, which effectively denied the plaintiffs an opportunity to vindicate their legal rights in the U.S. federal courts. The decision by Justice Keenan reasoned that the dismissal would best serve US public interest factors.

After the case was dismissed in the U.S, the Government of India brought a $ 3 billion claim against Union Carbide in India. In the mean time the assets in India were sold and the money donated to build a hospital to treat victims. With regard to the liability of Multinational Corporations for the actions of its subsidiary, the interim order reached by the Bhopal District Court and the Madhya Pradesh High Court needs special emphasis, as it deviated from the perceptions held in Judge Keenan’s decision.

When the issue came before the Supreme Court of India, it failed to acknowledge the established legal principles. It also failed to pick up on the novel concept of treating businesses tightly interconnected as a single entity by piercing the corporate veil which was advanced by Judge Seth of Madhya Pradesh High Court. The Indian government agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $470 million USD in February 1989 as the full and final settlement of all civil liability.

There were cases challenging the constitutional validity of the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act 1985, which gave the Indian central government exclusive power to represent the victims in all legal proceedings on the grounds that it made no provision for a hearing violating natural justice. Even though the Court upheld the constitutional validity of the Act, it does not clearly distinguished the validity of the Act and the settlement judgement.

The settlement order was challenged in a review petition. On review, the Supreme Court upheld the settlement but reinstated the criminal charges against UCC, UCIL and several officers including UCC Chief Executive Officer Warren Anderson. None of the accused appeared before the Bhopal courts to face criminal trial, even though before the US District Court the UCC showed its submission to Indian Jurisdiction.  The court declared UCC, UCIL, Warren Anderson and other indicated officers as absconders from justice. But no creative step like extradition proceedings were initiated, as was the case with the extradition of the "Natwest Three" from England to face charges in the US  regarding the collapse of Enron. This demonstrates the inability of the Indian Judiciary and Government to deliver justice to the victims.

The Union Carbide never provided the information regarding the composition of the leaked gases or its impact on human and environment. The factory was abandoned leaving behind large quantities of toxic waste causing health hazards to the population around it, birth defects to even second generation of children and groundwater pollution. In 2001 Union Carbide merged with Dow Chemical making Dow Chemical the largest chemical company in the world. Dow has refused to accept the moral responsibility for the actions of Union Carbide in Bhopal. In the US there are cases still ongoing regarding its legal responsibilities. Meanwhile, the local population of Bhopal continue to suffer the contamination left behind by the disaster.

Recently the Bhopal District Court has issued an order asking U.S.-based Dow Chemical Corporation to explain why it should not be required to have its subsidiary, Union Carbide, appear to face pending charges in a criminal case relating to the 1984 gas explosion which killed thousands of Bhopal residents. To escape from the issues of legal liability the Dow Company is now trying for an out of court settlement regarding the cleaning up the UCC’s abandoned Bhopal plant, while at the same time distancing itself from the UCC’s liability.

The leakage at Bhopal provides three points namely 1) the absence of legal framework for dealing multinational corporations as it was not subject to the law of its home state (United States) or its host state (India) or to international law 2) the inability of the Indian judiciary and legal profession to handle complex tort cases and 3) the extreme delay in providing justice (in its fullest sense). Moreover it also highlights the ability of the multinational corporation to escape civil and criminal liability and at the same time its ability to lobby the government machinery for escaping from cleanup costs and to continue its business. .

Conclusion

Currently it is difficult to bring class actions under civil law and the law of torts is underdeveloped when compared with position in other states using nuclear energy. Moreover together with other issues like delay in deciding cases, restrictive approach of courts towards compensation amount, ability of the Indian legal profession to handle complex tort cases, difficulty in access to the Indian Judicial System and the need for scientific and medical evidence makes litigation in the area of nuclear damages virtually impossible for an average Indian.         

The Indian government’s approach presently focuses only on maximalising the use of nuclear energy through commercialisation. Private firms are being added into the equation without any legal framework to deal the eventualities arising out of the use of nuclear energy.

An updated legislative framework is required to accompany the policy change regarding the increased use of nuclear energy together with the entry of private companies, both domestic and international. The present plans to introduce a bill in parliament to cap the liability from potential accident does not address the other issues connected with the peaceful use of atomic energy. 

The only way the government can allay public fear regarding the use of nuclear energy is for it to introduce a comprehensive legal framework relating to the use of nuclear energy. This must meet issues of liability regime, compensation, public participation in decision making, waste disposal and environmental protection and relief and rehabilitation. Other wise the common man will be left to suffer the consequences. In the long term, the result would be violence and the kind of collapse of law and order which has resulted from opposition to mining and industrialisation in the eastern states of India.

Russian prime minister rules that mill can resume production 15 months after being closed down on ecological grounds

Environmentalists today rounded on Vladimir Putin after he amended legislation to allow the pollution of Russia's Lake Baikal, home to one-fifth of the world's supply of fresh water and unique plants and animals.

Putin ruled that a pulp and paper mill on the shores of the Siberian lake could resume production 15 months after being closed down on ecological grounds.

His decree appeared to be a favour to Oleg Deripaska, the plant's billionaire owner and the Russian prime minister's favourite oligarch.

For decades, environmental groups have attacked the Baikalsk pulp and paper mill, which bleaches paper with chlorine and discharges its waste water into the lake.

Putin allowed the factory to reopen after a visit to Baikal last summer, when he went to the bottom of the lake in a submersible mini-submarine.

Today, Greenpeace said it was deeply concerned by Putin's decree, adding that it had written to the president, Dmitry Medvedev, to ask him to cancel it.

It described the Soviet-era paper mill as an "ecologically dangerous enterprise" and claimed Russia was flouting its international commitment to protect the lake, a Unesco world heritage site.

"The impact of the mill has been discussed many times not just by environmentalists but also by scientists," Roman Vazhenkov, Greenpeace Russia's Lake Baikal campaigner, told the Guardian.

"I think we can be sure it [the mill] will never kill Baikal, but it can significantly spoil the southern part of it.

"The area of impact is several dozens of square kilometres. It covers quite a big part of southern Baikal – not just the water, but the shore as well."

Vazhenkov said there had been a "huge die-off" of Baikal's indigenous seal or nerpa population – one of only three entirely freshwater seal species in the world – during the 1990s.

The lake also boasts its own fish, the omul, 1,085 species of plants and 1,550 animals.

Scientists found the seals had died of disease, but also discovered chlorine substances in the creatures' fatty tissues and weakened immune systems.

Sulphur compounds from the mill have damaged lakeside forests, Vazhenkov said.

The Russian media questioned why Putin had given preferential treatment to Deripaska, whose struggling aluminium and auto empire has already benefited from billions in state handouts.

"Judging by the number of presents Deripaska has got from the government over the past crisis year, it must be love," the opposition Novaya Gazeta paper said.

The Kremlin-supporting Moskovksy Komsomolets was also critical. "The fact that Putin has signed this legislation shows that the interests of oligarchs and Deripaska are far more important to him than the interests of nature in this country and Baikal," Aleksey Yablokov, an ecologist and Russian academy of science member, told the paper.

Opponents suspect a decision to allow the factory to restart was taken several months ago.

After returning from the lakebed last summer, Putin said he had found nothing untoward.

"As far as Baikal is concerned, it's in good condition," he said. "There is practically no pollution." He added that he had found "a lot of plankton and small creatures".

The Russian government has been trying to help the country's troubled monogorods, single-factory towns devastated by the economic crisis.

The Baikal mill employs 2,000 people, and is the main employer in Baikalsk, which has a population of 17,000. It also includes a heating complex that warms the town.

Critics said Putin's decision would damage Baikal's future as a tourist destination and scare off potential investors.

Many of those thrown out of work when the mill closed in October 2008 have already found new jobs, they added.

The factory, built in 1966, was earmarked for closure in 1987 but survived because of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The new legislation comes into effect on 25 January and also allows for the dumping of waste, including radioactive material, on the shores of Lake Baikal.

Putin previously reacted to public pressure in 2006 when, as president, he routed an oil pipeline away from the lake.

"This is a major national scandal. There is huge opposition in Siberia. It's also a PR disaster for Russia internationally,' Vazhenkov said.

Asked why Putin had signed the decree, his first legislative act of 2010, he said: "The factory is economically unprofitable. I simply don't know."

Oksana Gorlova, a spokeswoman for the paper plant, said it "doesn't represent, and hasn't represented, a threat to the lake or its ecology".

"The ecosystem hasn't changed over the past 45 years, and the environment ministry's annual reports confirm this," she added.

She said Deripaska had wanted to close the loss-making factory, but had agreed to reopen it to prevent a social crisis under state pressure. It was the only way of saving the town, she claimed.

French philosopher and leading figure in the events of 1968

The French philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, who has died aged 63 of cancer, was one of the most gifted Marxist intellectuals of his generation. In 1968, together with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he helped to form the Mouvement du 22 Mars (the 22 March Movement), the organisation that helped to detonate the uprising that shook France in May and June of that year. Bensaïd was at his best explaining ideas to large crowds of students and workers. He could hold an audience spellbound, as I witnessed in his native Toulouse in 1969, when we shared a platform at a rally of 10,000 people to support Alain Krivine, one of the leaders of the uprising, in his presidential campaign, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR).

Bensaïd's penetrating analysis was never presented in a patronising way, whatever the composition of the audience. His ideas derived from classical Marxism – Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, as was typical in those days – but his way of looking at and presenting them was his own. His philosophical and political writings have a lyrical ring – at particularly tedious central committee meetings, he could often be seen immersed in Proust – and resist easy translation into English.

As a leader of the LCR and the Fourth International, to which it was affiliated, Bensaïd travelled a great deal to South America, especially Brazil, and played an important part in helping to organise the Workers party (PT) currently in power there under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. An imprudent sexual encounter shortened Bensaïd's life. He contracted Aids and, for the last 16 years, was dependent on the drugs that kept him going, with fatal side-effects: a cancer that finally killed him.

Physically, he became a shadow of his former self, but the intellect was not affected and he produced more than a dozen books on politics and philosophy. He wrote of his Jewishness and that of many other comrades and how this had never led him, or most of them, to follow the path of a blind and unthinking Zionism. He disliked identity politics and his last two books – Fragments Mécréants (An Unbeliever's Discourse, 2005) and Eloge de la Politique Profane (In Praise of Secular Politics, 2008) – explained how this had become a substitute for serious critical thought.

He was France's leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talkshows and writing essays and reviews in Le Monde and Libération. At a time when a large section of the French intelligentsia had shifted its terrain and embraced neoliberalism, Bensaïd remained steadfast, but without a trace of dogma. Even in the 1960s he had avoided leftwing cliches and thought creatively, often questioning the verities of the far left.

He was schooled at the lycées Bellevue and Fermat in Toulouse, but the formative influence was that of his parents and their milieu. His father, Haim Bensaïd, was a Sephardic Jew from a poor family in Algeria and moved from Mascara to Oran, where he got a job as a waiter in a cafe, but soon discovered his real vocation. He trained as a boxer, becoming the welterweight champion of north Africa.

Daniel's mother, Marthe Starck, was a strong and energetic Frenchwoman from a working-class family in Blois, central France. At 18 she moved to Oran. She met the boxer and fell in love. The French colons were shocked and tried hard to persuade her not to marry a Jew. She was bound to get VD and have abnormal children, they said.

With France occupied by the Germans and a bulk of the country's elite in collaborationist mode with its capital at Vichy, the French colonial administration fell into line. As a Jew, Daniel's father was arrested, but he managed to escape from the PoW camp, and rashly decided to go to Toulouse, where Marthe helped him obtain false papers. Armed with a new identity, he bought a bistro, Le Bar des Amis. Unlike his two brothers, who were killed during the occupation, he survived, thanks largely to his wife, who had an official Vichy certificate stating her "non-membership of the Jewish race".

In his affecting memoir, Une Lente Impatience (2004), Daniel noted that these barbarities had taken place on French soil only a few decades prior to 1968. Le Bar des Amis, he wrote, was a cosmopolitan location frequented by Spanish refugees, Italian antifascists, former resistance fighters and a variety of workers, with the local Communist party branch holding its meetings there too. Given his mother's fierce republican and Jacobin views (when a relative, after a French television programme on the British monarchy, expressed doubts about the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Marthe did not speak to her for 10 years), it would have been odd if young Bensaïd had become a monarchist.

Angered by the massacre of Algerians at the Métro Charonne in 1961 (ordered by Maurice Papon, chief of police and a former Nazi collaborator), he joined the Union of Communist Students, but soon became irritated by party orthodoxy and joined a left opposition within the union organised by Henri Weber (currently a Socialist party senator in the upper house) and Alain Krivine. The Cuban revolution and Che Guevara's odyssey did the rest. The dissidents were expelled from the party in 1966.

That same year, Bensaïd was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Saint-Cloud and moved to Paris. Here he helped found the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR), young dissidents inspired by Guevara and Trotsky, which later morphed into the LCR.

The last time I met him, a few years ago, in his favourite cafe in Paris's Latin Quarter, he was in full flow. The disease had not sapped his will to live or to think. Politics was his lifeblood. We talked about social unrest in France and whether it would be enough to bring about serious change. He shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but we carry on fighting. What else is there to do?"

• Daniel Bensaïd, philosopher, born 25 March 1946; died 12 January 2010

"Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones."

Obama 2 (speaking for himself):

Whatever mistakes we have made.... the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.

If President Obama had been the least bit serious about combating the threat of global warming--potentially the greatest threat ever faced by the human race, and a grave threat to the future peace and security of America and the world (OL diary here)--he passed up the best possible opportunity to rally support for the kind of dramatic action that needs to be taken at the Copenhagen Summit in his Nobel Peace Prize Speech (transrcipt). Of course, there were two good reasons for doing so. First, he has absolutely no intention to push for such desperately needed action to combat global warming. Second, he was far too busy justifying war to think much about anything else.  (The word "peace" appeared 32 times in his speech.  The word "war" appeared 35 times.) Repeating one of his favorite lies from his Afghanistan War speech, he said:

Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden, not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest, because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.

Rather than repeat myself (Afghanistan and Obama's lies--a further note), as Obama has done, and parse his claims in detail once again, why not just look at one part of this claim--that "the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms."

Instead of picking one decade at random out of our past, to see how freely we intervened in other countries, let's first take a look at the period Obama referred to, and then take a step back to look at his speech in context.

On the flip is a list of post-WWII interventions.  Just take a look, and ask yourself, is this what global security looks like? Or is it a confused mish-mash best explained not as a defense of freedom and global security, but as the unaccountable workings of empire?  Remember, not a single one of the interventions listed on the jump was authorized by a congressional declaration of war--the legally prescribed process under the Constitution.  UN Security Council approval--required under international law, which is also binding under the US Constitution--has been almost as rare, meaning that virtually everything listed below is a specific collective national act of lawless violence, carrying with it countless individual acts of violence as well.  But this is the record of 'underwriting global security' that Obama blithely claims as justification for yet more of the same lawless violence in the name of 'peace.'
Killing Hope

Here' the table of contents from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II by William Blum:

1. China - 1945 to 1960s: Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?
2. Italy - 1947-1948: Free elections, Hollywood style
3. Greece - 1947 to early 1950s: From cradle of democracy to client state
4. The Philippines - 1940s and 1950s: America's oldest colony
5. Korea - 1945-1953: Was it all that it appeared to be?
6. Albania - 1949-1953: The proper English spy
7. Eastern Europe - 1948-1956: Operation Splinter Factor
8. Germany - 1950s: Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism
9. Iran - 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings
10. Guatemala - 1953-1954: While the world watched
11. Costa Rica - Mid-1950s: Trying to topple an ally - Part 1
12. Syria - 1956-1957: Purchasing a new government
13. Middle East - 1957-1958: The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America
14. Indonesia - 1957-1958: War and pornography
15. Western Europe - 1950s and 1960s: Fronts within fronts within fronts
16. British Guiana - 1953-1964: The CIA's international labor mafia
17. Soviet Union - Late 1940s to 1960s: From spy planes to book publishing
18. Italy - 1950s to 1970s: Supporting the Cardinal's orphans and techno-fascism
19. Vietnam - 1950-1973: The Hearts and Minds Circus
20. Cambodia - 1955-1973: Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism
21. Laos - 1957-1973: L'Arm?e Clandestine
22. Haiti - 1959-1963: The Marines land, again
23. Guatemala - 1960: One good coup deserves another
24. France/Algeria - 1960s: L'?tat, c'est la CIA
25. Ecuador - 1960-1963: A text book of dirty tricks
26. The Congo - 1960-1964: The assassination of Patrice Lumumba
27. Brazil - 1961-1964: Introducing the marvelous new world of death squads
28. Peru - 1960-1965: Fort Bragg moves to the jungle
29. Dominican Republic - 1960-1966: Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy
30. Cuba - 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution
31. Indonesia - 1965: Liquidating President Sukarno ... and 500,000 others
   East Timor - 1975: And 200,000 more
32. Ghana - 1966: Kwame Nkrumah steps out of line
33. Uruguay - 1964-1970: Torture -- as American as apple pie
34. Chile - 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child's forehead
35. Greece - 1964-1974: "Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution," said
   the President of the United States
36. Bolivia - 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d'etat
37. Guatemala - 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized "final solution"
38. Costa Rica - 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally -- Part 2
39. Iraq - 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work
40. Australia - 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust
41. Angola - 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game
42. Zaire - 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven
43. Jamaica - 1976-1980: Kissinger's ultimatum
44. Seychelles - 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance
45. Grenada - 1979-1984: Lying -- one of the few growth industries in Washington
46. Morocco - 1983: A video nasty
47. Suriname - 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman
48. Libya - 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match
49. Nicaragua - 1981-1990: Destabilization in slow motion
50. Panama - 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier
51. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching communists what democracy is all about
52. Iraq - 1990-1991: Desert holocaust
53. Afghanistan - 1979-1992: America's Jihad
54. El Salvador - 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington style
55. Haiti - 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
56. The American Empire - 1992 to present
Notes
Appendix I: This is How the Money Goes Round
Appendix II: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945
Appendix III: U. S. Government Assassination Plots
Index

Stupid Wars

Obama owes his entire career as a national politician to one speech, his speech in which he came out against the invasion of Iraq, framed in terms of opposition to "stupid wars."  He was not against "just wars" he explained--invoking America's classic "good wars", WWII and the Civil War.  But he was against "stupid wars."

Then.  But not now.

Now he's all het up on fighting in Afghanistan.  He brought it up again in this speech:

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.

But in fact, the vast majority of world public opinion opposed a military response to 9/11.  People rightly saw that it was a monstrous crime, that its perpetrators were ciminals, not warriors, and that they should be treated accordingly.  And the people were right.  The invasion of Afghanistan did not lead to the capture of those responsible for 9/11.  And once Obama and his top aides escaped, there was no serious effort to go after them.  Now, less than 100 al Qaeda operatives are said to be in Afghanistan.  Obama's escalation there simply has no credible rationale.  It's the very definition of a "dumb war", since it only makes matters worse by increasing al Qaeda's recruiting pool, not only in Afghanistan, but around the world.

Obama's rationale has been utterly discredited, as is made plain, for example, in two recent pieces by Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist, author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, the first, "The Taliban - Al Qaeda Schism" in Counterpunch and the second, "Obama Had Rejected His Own Speech's Surge Rationale", for the Inter Press Service.

In the first, Porter went into some detail about the reasons why expert observers see a fundamental  schism between the Taliban and al Qaeda, which is why I quote at some length:  

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen argued in Senate Testimony Wednesday that the 30,000-troop increase is necessary to prevent the Taliban from giving new safe havens to al Qaeda terrorists.

But that argument is flatly contradicted by the evidence of fundamental conflicts between the interests of the Taliban and those of al Qaeda that has emerged in recent years, according to counterterrorism and intelligence analysts specializing in Afghanistan....

It is well known among government officials working on Afghanistan and al Qaeda, however, that serious tensions between the two organizations emerged after the attack on the "Red Mosque" in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad in July 2007. Western intelligence quickly discovered the attack was an al Qaeda operation, and that it marked the beginning of an al Qaeda campaign calling for the overthrow of the Pakistani government and military.

That created a serious conflict between al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to specialists who followed the issue closely. The Taliban leadership, which is based in Quetta, Pakistan, had been depending on assistance from the Pakistani military to increase its military capabilities and did not look kindly on that al Qaeda policy.

Despite widespread confusion over the two, the Tahreek-e-Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group that has been an umbrella organization for the military campaign against the Pakistani military, is not related to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Pakistani group, which has now changed its name, is a close ally of al Qaeda, but does not see eye to eye with the Afghan Taliban....

Two former counterterrorism intelligence specialists who followed the Taliban closely until earlier this year told? me this week that the facts do not support the portrayal by Gates and Mullen of the Taliban and al Qaeda as ideologically united.

"We make a serious mistake in equating the two organizations," said Arturo Munoz, who was a supervisory operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center from 2001 to 2009 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Munoz called the Taliban "a homespun Pashtun, locally-based revolutionary movement with a set of goals that are not necessarily those of al Qaeda".

"It is well known that deals have been made between the Taliban and Pakistani commanders," said Munoz. "Obviously the Quetta Shura [the top Taliban leadership organ] is located there because of a deal with the Pakistani government."

But al Qaeda's view has been different. "The more fanatical al Qaeda types say 'let's tear apart Pakistani society'," he observed.

Veteran specialist on counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan Rick "Ozzie" Nelson agreed that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban that has evolved in recent years is very different from the one they had up to 2001.

"The Taliban is a nationalist organization, which wants to govern Afghanistan under Sharia law, not attack the United States," said Nelson, who was on the inaugural staff of the National Counter-Terrorism Center's Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2007.

Nelson directed a Joint Task Force in Afghanistan until early 2009 and is now in the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"The Red Mosque was a big deal," Nelson recalled. The al Qaeda-directed assault on the mosque and subsequent Taliban reaction to its jihadist campaign in Pakistan were what convinced officials that "their goals have become more divergent", he said.

More recently, counterterrorism analysts have noted that the gap has widened even further, as the Taliban leadership has gone public with a "nationalist" line that openly departs from al Qaeda's global jihadist stance.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar's Sep. 19 message for Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, called the Taliban a "robust Islamic and nationalist movement" which "wants to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect".

I would go even further, and argue that this split in thinking was always present, although submerged by circumstances prior to 9/11, circumstances that were deeply intensified when we recklessly chose the path of war and invaded Afghanistan in November, 2001. But be that as it may, it's quite clear that there's a fundamental split in place today, and Porter's second article points out that Obama himself knows this--and that's the reason he resisted the push for escalation for so long:

President Barack Obama presented a case Tuesday for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security....

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.

....

Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that "senior administration officials" were saying privately that Obama's national security team was now "arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States".

That "shift in thinking", as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.

One of the senior officials interviewed by Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that "does not express ambitions of attacking the United States". The Taliban were aligned with al Qaeda "mainly on the tactical front", said the official.

A second theme introduced by the official was that the Taliban could not be eliminated because it was too deeply entrenched in the country - quite a different goal from that of the counterinsurgency war proposed by McChrystal....

Porter goes on to discuss how Obama's foreign policy team argued against his position--a battle that raged over two months, before he retreated.  Still Porter notes:

Although Obama bowed to pressure from his major national security advisers to agree to the 30,000 troops, his conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan.

Obama's speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to U.S. security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago.

So, in short, Obama knows he's just announced the escalation of a stupid war, and the sole reason for doing so is that he's on the inside now, and thus is committed to doing all the stupid things he claimed to be against in order to get where he is.

Which brings us directly to our next level of hell section.

Delusion? Or Collusion?

David Mizner's quick hit, "Obama's Delusion" quoting from David Bromwitch in the London Review of Books has attracted a flurry of comments.  The graph he quotes is this:

Delays in the passage, first, of Obama's 'stimulus package' to strengthen the economy after last September's financial collapse, and, second, of his healthcare bill, have been due in large part to his public pauses to wait for Republicans to lend these measures a bipartisan glow. A few came along, at a high price, to vote for the economic stimulus. None has taken up the offer on healthcare. The Republicans stand in place, and give no sign, and watch as the president's stature dwindles. His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one's enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?

But I fear that Bromwich's analysis doesn't cut nearly deep enough.  In his very first paragraph, he writes:

It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don't: the past is part of the present. Reduced to a practice, the slogan meant that Obama would rather not bring to light many illegal actions of the Bush administration. The value of conciliation outweighed the imperative of truth. He stood for 'the things that unite not divide us'. An unpleasant righting of wrongs could be portrayed as retribution, and Obama would not allow such a misunderstanding to get in the way of his ecumenical goals.

This isn't wrong so much as it is incomplete: his "ecumenical goals" just happen to exclude precisely the very foundation of his national political career--his outspoken opposition to "stupid wars".  He was against them, before he was for them.  Unfortunately, he was against them when he was virtualy powerless to do anything to counter them, and he's for them when he is virtually unfettered in waging them.

Indeed, it's now quite clear that Obama's main reason for not prosecuting Bush officials was not a desire to avoid conflict with Republicans.  It was because he wants to continue those very same practices himself, and completely normalize them.  Warrantless wiretapping.  Stupid wars.  Secret prisons.  Corporate-friendlywritten legislation.  Adopting the Nazi's Nuremberg Defense as official US policy. This is not delusion.  It's collusion. And it has absolutely nothing to do with peace--except, of course, for the peace of the dead.

Adopting the Nazi position on war crimes is the most clearly despicable aspect of this collusion agenda.  Jonathan Turley made this quite clear in a blog post this week, Nuremberg Revisited: Obama Administration Files To Dismiss Case Against John?Yoo:

John Yoo is being defended in court this month by the Administration. Not the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration. As with the lawsuits over electronic surveillance and torture, the Obama administration wants the lawsuit against Yoo dismissed and is defending the right of Justice Department officials to help establish a torture program - an established war crime. I will be discussing the issue on this segment of MSNBC Countdown.

The Obama Administration has filed a brief that brushes over the war crimes aspects of Yoo's work at the Justice Department. Instead, it insists that attorneys must be free to give advice - even if it is to establish a torture program....

The Obama Administration has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions. The third of the twelve trials for war crimes involved 16 German jurists and lawyers. Nine had been officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, the others were prosecutors and judges of the Special Courts and People's Courts of Nazi Germany. It would have been a larger group but two lawyers committed suicide before trial: Adolf Georg Thierack, former minister of justice, and Carl Westphal, a ministerial counsellor.

They included Herbert Klemm, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and served as minister of justice, director of the Ministry's Legal Education and Training Division, and deputy director of the National Socialist Lawyer's League.

Oswald Rothaug received life imprisonment for his role as a prosecutor and later a judge.

Wilhelm von Ammon received ten years for his work as a justice official in occupied areas.

Guenther Joel received ten years for being an adviser (like Yoo) to the Ministry of Justice and later a judge.

Curt Rothenberger was also a legal adviser and was given seven years for his writings at the Ministry of Justice and as the deputy president of the Academy of German Law

Wolfgang Mettgenberg received ten years as representative of the Criminal Legislation Administration Division of the Ministry of Justice,

Ernst Lautz (10 years) had been chief public prosecutor of the People's Court.

Franz Schlegelberger, a former Ministry of Justice official, was convicted and sentenced to life for conspiracy and other war crimes. The court found:

'...that Schlegelberger supported the pretension of Hitler in his assumption of power to deal with life and death in disregard of even the pretense of judicial process. By his exhortations and directives, Schlegelberger contributed to the destruction of judicial independence. It was his signature on the decree of 7 February 1942 which imposed upon the Ministry of Justice and the courts the burden of the prosecution, trial, and disposal of the victims of Hitler's Night and Fog. For this he must be charged with primary responsibility. 'He was guilty of instituting and supporting procedures for the wholesale persecution of Jews and Poles. Concerning Jews, his ideas were less brutal than those of his associates, but they can scarcely be called humane. When the "final solution of the Jewish question" was under discussion, the question arose as to the disposition of half-Jews. The deportation of full Jews to the East was then in full swing throughout Germany. Schlegelberger was unwilling to extend the system to half-Jews.'

It was the "ideas" that these lawyers advanced that made the war crimes possible. Other officials were tried but acquitted. All of these officials used arguments similar to those in the Obama Administration's brief of why lawyers are not responsible for war crimes that they defend and justify. Bush selected people like Yoo to justify the war crime of torture. If they had written against it, the Administration might have abandoned the effort. The CIA director and others were already concerned about the prospect of prosecution. The Obama Administration's brief revisits Nuremberg and sweeps away such quaint notions. Indeed, the brief for Yoo could have been used directly to support legal advisers Wolfgang Mettgenberg, Guenther Joel, and Wilhelm von Ammon.

If successful in this case, the Obama Administration will succeed in returning the world to the rules leading to the war crimes at Nuremberg. Quite a legacy for the world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner. [Emphasis added]

Make that the Nobel War-Is-Peace Prize winner.

Colourful rightwing politician who toppled Helmut Schmidt

Count Otto Lambsdorff, who has died aged 82, was one of the most colourful and influential politicians in Bonn before German unification. He brought down chancellor Helmut Schmidt's left-liberal coalition, thus enabling Helmut Kohl to take his place – and was then convicted of tax fraud in West Germany's biggest corruption scandal.

Lambsdorff made his career in the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the minority liberal party that nevertheless made and broke coalition governments, the tail that wagged the governmental dog. In 1966 the FDP was the only opposition in the Bundestag when the Grand Coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) took power under chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU). In 1969 the FDP under Walter Scheel helped the SPD to oust the CDU, enabling chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD) to lead a social-liberal coalition which won a famous victory in 1972, the year Lambsdorff was elected to the Bundestag.

When Brandt made way for Schmidt (SPD) in 1977, Lambsdorff was appointed minister of economics. Tension mounted in the coalition as the count pursued his old-style liberal belief in an untrammelled free market, challenging trade union power and what he saw as an overweening welfare state. Even a social democrat as moderate as Schmidt found this difficult to live with.

In 1980 a portentous "Lambsdorff paper" set out his uncompromising rightwing views. In hindsight the document was renamed the "divorce paper" because two years later he fell out with Schmidt over the budget and led the FDP ministers out of the coalition, forcing Schmidt out of office. As an astute politician, Schmidt saw to it that the FDP took the blame for the break-up, bitterly describing them as "traitors", but this did not prevent the FDP from switching allegiance to the CDU, enabling Kohl to take over as chancellor. Lambsdorff stayed on as minister of economics, in a much more sympathetic cabinet.

Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr (baron) von der Wenge, Graf (count) Lambsdorff, the full version of his ancient title, was born in Aachen, Westphalia, and educated in Berlin. The family, though German, had spent centuries in the service of Russian tsars, but Otto's father fled the revolution and went into business in the ancestral Rhineland after the first world war. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht as an officer-cadet in 1944, the 18-year-old Lambsdorff was badly wounded in an allied air attack, which cost him his lower left leg. Despite a prosthesis, he never lost his heavy limp, but was always impeccably turned out in expensive suits: the walking stick he had to carry always had a silver handle.

He matriculated as a British prisoner of war and went on to study law at Bonn and Cologne. For several years he worked in private banking and insurance and practised as an attorney. He joined the FDP as a student and worked for the party in North-Rhine Westphalia, the state he began to represent in parliament in 1972. Before long, he made his name as an unusually gifted speaker, combining charm with sardonic wit. He was immediately elected to the party's national and parliamentary leaderships and was its economics spokesman until he joined the first Schmidt cabinet as minister.

Lambsdorff stayed on at the economics ministry under Kohl, but only for two years, until 1984. In June that year an indictment was issued implicating the giant Flick concern and senior FDP figures, including Lambsdorff, in tax evasion. Secret donations had been made by the company to the FDP as part of Flick's policy of "tending the political landscape" with handouts to all parties.

Flick, which started in coal and steel before the first world war and prospered under the Kaiser, the interwar Weimar republic, Hitler and the West German economic miracle after the second world war, became a conglomerate with holdings in 330 companies, despite the conviction for war crimes of leading executives at Nuremberg. The "Flick affair" became West Germany's biggest political scandal and Lambsdorff was convicted on lesser charges, incurring a fine of DM180,000. This did not prevent him from being elected chairman of the FDP for five years from 1988. He stayed on as economics spokesman until 1998, when the party was ousted from government for the first time since 1969 (it bounced back in its tail-wagging role this year when it replaced the SPD in the second coalition administration of the present chancellor, Angela Merkel of the CDU).

Even though his party was sidelined in 1998, the then chancellor, Gerhard Schröder (SPD), chose Lambsdorff to negotiate with the US administration on a compensation scheme for victims of Nazi forced labour. A settlement involving billions of dollars was achieved.

Lambsdorff married Renate Lepper in 1953: they had two daughters and a son. In 1995 he married Alexandra von Quistorp.

• Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von der Wenge, Graf Lambsdorff, politician, born 20 December 1926; died 4 December 2009.