Intelligence Squared

President Jimmy Carter is a Nobel Prize winner, author, humanitarian, professor, farmer, naval officer and carpenter. In this special Intelligence² interview with Jon Snow from Channel 4 News at the Royal Festival Hall, President Carter will talk about his career as president, and the past three decades as a senior statesman and ambassador for the Carter Center.

Jimmy Carter was U.S. President from 1977 to 1981. His administration's main foreign policy achievements include the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. After stepping down, he decided to establish the Carter Center along with his wife Rosalynn in 1982 to wage peace, fight disease and build hope worldwide. He was a pioneer in what has now become the widespread practice of putting prestige and status to good use in the world. The Center’s programmes have operated in 76 countries to resolve conflicts, advance democracy, human rights and economic opportunity, prevent disease, improve mental health care and teach farmers to increase crop production.

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We assume that democracy is what every country should have. But what has democracy done for India? Easy. It has stimulated corruption on a massive scale, and if you want to get rich in India the most direct way is to run for parliament and reap the payoffs businesses are obliged to make to the local MP. Caste, that Indian curse, becomes more entrenched as politicians exploit caste allegiances to win votes. Bombay may be booming but it’s hardly Shanghai. A country that is striving to be an economic powerhouse is being pulled down by its political system. Democracy is India’s Achilles’ heel.

So say the pundits but what would they put in democracy’s place? Would they prefer India to be ruled by a Mubarak or an Indian version of the Beijing politburo? Democratic politics is always messy and often corrupt but it is the inevitable price of seeking the will of the people, which will always be preferable to the will of the dictator.

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Let’s face it, Al-Qaeda was never a proper enemy. It was and is a terrorist organisation, not a nation state, and the right way to deal with terrorists is vigilance and high-grade intelligence. Declaring war on them only fuels the flames of hatred and violence. That’s the standard charge laid against the administration of George W. Bush.

But it neglects the realities of 9/11, which was itself a declaration of war. And besides, Al-Qaeda had essentially merged itself with a government – the Afghan Taleban – and its capacity to disrupt the muslim world was and remains a threat that requires aggressive counteraction, not a bunch of policemen back home looking at screens. For all the cost in money and lives, the Iraq invasion toppled a tyrant and brought its people democracy, however imperfectly. Left alone in their hiding places in Pakistan and Yemen, the militants of Al-Qaeda will continue their training and plotting and America is quite right to be stepping up its drone and jet attacks against them.

That’s what the defenders of the war on terror say. Come to the debate and see if you agree.

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Ten years after 9/11 a new era of beginnings and endings is upon us. The Arab Awakening and Bin Laden’s death, the rise of China, the perils of Pakistan and emergence of Africa, the power of social media and the promise of a new global order all herald a world remade.

In this special Intelligence² event, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband and other leading experts from Oxford Analytica, the global strategic analysis and advisory firm, will chart the tumultuous path since September 11th and show how it will shape tomorrow’s volatile global order.

Why did the hunt for Osama bin Laden take so long? Is counterterrorism counterproductive? Have the “Wars of 9/11” been worth the money and lives expended? What has their effect been on the Middle East and the Muslim world? How have Russia and China responded and, in Beijing’s case, managed to strengthen its geopolitical standing during the decade following the attack?

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"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" So wrote William Wordsworth at the start of the French Revolution, and that spirit of euphoria still broadly infects the young people who massed in their tens of thousands in Egypt and Tunisia to oust their hated rulers. But in countries with no tradition of democracy, where corruption is entrenched and jobs are scarce, the political and economic aspirations of these youthful revolutionaries are likely to be disappointed. Add to that the fact that the Islamists are far better organised than the liberal groups and are set to come out on top in the forthcoming elections, and things begin to look very gloomy indeed.

But is this view all too pessimistic? The fundamental barrier of fear has been removed and the new democrats are mobilising themselves to make sure that the benefits of change trickle down to all. There's even talk of a possible split amongst the Islamists between the reactionary old guard and a more open-minded younger generation. As one of the two young Egyptians taking part in this debate will argue, if their demands aren't met, "the Egyptian masses know their way back to Tahrir Square!"

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Citizens of Britain, be afraid. Be very afraid. On May 5th we risk committing a grave crime against our democracy. We are being asked in a referendum, to ditch the system of voting – First Past the Post – that has served us so well as a democratic nation, and to adopt the system known as the Alternative Vote, that will allow MPs to be elected to parliament even if they are not the first choice of the majority of their constituents. Instead it will be the second and third preferences of those who vote for no-hope or extremist parties – “the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates", as Winston Churchill put it – which will in many constituencies determine whether or not an MP gets in. By thus giving an outlying group of voters what is essentially a second chance to vote, AV will kill the hallowed principle that each person’s vote is of equal weight.

That at any rate is the view of 26 eminent historians (Professors Niall Ferguson and Antony Beevor included) expressed in a recent letter to The Times. But in a subsequent letter, their view was given a good kicking by 20 eminent lawyers (including Baroness Kennedy QC and Michael Mansfield QC) who argue that it is precisely because your vote is so seldom given equal weight in practice, that we need AV. Look at all those MPs who, under First Past the Post, regularly get well below 50% of the local vote, yet still get returned to Westminster even though a majority of their constituents don’t want them there. AV will create genuine contests for seats that sitting MPs at present take for granted as “theirs” – a situation that empowers a few thousand voters in "marginals" to decide elections. Is that the hallowed system you really want to keep?

So are the academics right? Or the lawyers? Or – whisper it quietly – is it all a lot of fuss about very little?

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Conventional wisdom tells us that a new star will rise in the East and over the past decade all eyes have been looking towards China or India to witness the emergence of the 21st century’s new superpower. But on 22 March 2011, the IQ2 debate challenged this assumption and suggested that we look to the West. Quietly, the economies of South America have also been transforming themselves, only in their case unburdened by the dead weight of caste politics or communism. It is they, the motion suggested, that will emerge as the Superpowers of the 21st Century.

Parag Khanna asked why it was that South America has been so perennially excluded from the conversation of geopolitics? This came down, he suggested, to the naïve assumption that hegemonic power moves in cycles from East to West to East again. To the view of South America as predominantly a resource provider rather than a resource deplorer and to the continent’s historic subservience to the United States. The US has realised that South America is ‘its turn-key solution to it’s two greatest challenges: energy security and economic competitiveness’. What is more, Asia – the world’s crowded arms bazaar – is turbulent and wracked with divisions along national and ethnic fault lines. The advantage of South America, explained Roberto Jaguaribe (Brazil’s Ambassador to the UK), was that we are ‘living in the most extensive, cohesive, and homogenous region of the world’. The region is prospering, much like the US was in early 20th century, in a context of splendid, (safe and stable) isolation.

Alright, conceded the other side of the panel, progress in South America has been spectacular, but we must recognise the weaknesses that plague the continent. After all, explained Bill Emmott, ‘Argentina is usually one president away from its next default. It is the world’s champion sovereign debt defaulter. Anyone looking for worries about the Euro and future models for how you do a sovereign debt default always reaches for the file marked “Argentina” in their file.’

What is more, suggested Gideon Rachman, while we might regard Brazil as the ‘cuddly BRIC – the one that everybody likes and they give all the tournaments to,’ we mustn’t ignore the drug wars raging in Mexico and the questionable Human Rights record in Venezuela. Take no comfort from the fact that Hugo Chavez was the 2009 winner of the Muammar Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. ‘That’s not one that you want to keep on your mantelpiece.’

Rana Mitter and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera took the debate to the question of culture. Mitter, against the motion, pointed to the permeating influence of Mandarin and the ‘universalising cultural phenomenons’ of Bollywood and Japanese Manga anime. He suggested there simply wasn’t a South American equivalent. What about Shakira? shot back Guardiola-Rivera.

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Taking on the Arab tyrants: Is it any of our business?

The democratic convulsions now rocking the Arab world have forced us to confront anew the key question driving western foreign policy: how far should the West be involved in the democracy promotion business?

Perhaps the lesson of the Arab Spring is that toppling oppressors is better left to the oppressed. Maybe Iraq would have had its own Arab Spring if we’d just let Saddam be? But then what about Saudi Arabia? Little sign of an end to autocracy there. Do we just keep cosy with the Saudi king, or do we take steps to push him to democratise?

And once the dictator is falling or has fallen… what then? Do we just stand back and hope that democracy will flourish in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere? If not, how should we intervene to promote the spread of democratic ideals and institutions?

These are some of the questions that two of the sharpest debaters on the subject – Rory Stewart and David Aaronovitch – will be crossing swords over this Thursday. Why not come and join the fray?

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Listen to what President Ahmedinejad of Iran says about Israel: “The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime.” Here he is on the West: “We thank God that our enemies are idiots.”

Does this man sound like a serious threat? The Islamic regime in Iran loves to bare its claws and snarl, but isn’t this all just am dram posturing? It may suit Israel to portray Iran’s sabre-rattling as an existential threat and it may suit the US to play up that threat. But even if Iran does acquire a nuclear strike capability won’t it be primarily for exhibitionist reasons? And won’t that threat be dwarfed by the far more sophisticated weaponry that Israel and the US could muster in response?

That’s the argument of those happy to dismiss Iran as a paper tiger. But have they got it horribly wrong? Would Arab governments really have beseeched the US to bomb Iran – as revealed by Wikileaks – if its regime were no more than a duff joke? Could it be that a nuclear-armed Iran is every bit as bad as the scaremongers say it is?

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/iran

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Tony Curzon Price interviews Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University and author of The Arabs.

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