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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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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P.J. O’Rourke is America's premier political satirist and has more citations in The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any other living writer. In this live appearance for Intelligence Squared he’ll be discussing his new book, Don’t Vote – It Just Encourages the Bastards, a brilliant, hilarious and ultimately sobering look at why politics and politicians are a necessary evil—but only just barely necessary. Moving from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman to a late-night girls’ boarding school game called Kill-F*@k-Marry, O’Rourke will explore the nature of the social contract. For him the essential elements are power, freedom and responsibility: the people like the freedom part, politicians like the power part, and hardly anyone wants to hear the responsibility part. This leads him to postulate the “Death, Sex and Boredom Theory of Politics.”
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Posted in religion, United States on Oct 29th, 2010 Comments
The Crystal Cathedral, a 10,000 plus mega-church in Orange County, California, filed for bankruptcy this week. The Crystal Cathedral was the original tele-evangelical church, and its "Hour of Power" television show is broadcast all over the world. Last month, the Reverend Eddy Long, star pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, who preaches family virtues and has been feted by George Bush at the White House, was accused of sexually harassing three young men. Ted Haggard, who disbanded the massive New Life Church of Colorado Springs when a gay prostitute revealed their rapport, briefly became an insurance salesman before announcing this summer that, cured of his homosexuality, he was starting again.
The mega-church movement is closely associated with the rise of American evangelical styles of worship in Latin America and Africa. When the Chilean miners emerged from the mine two weeks ago, they were wearing T-shirts sent to them from a megachurch in Georgia. Evangelical churches have been credited with - or implicated in - re-building the grass-roots of the American right over the past 15 years, with the Tea Party being the latest vehicle for that coalition.
The evangelical movement has a globally influential role, and the megachurches are an important element of it. They have huge congregations with inspirational, charismatic pastors. They are run like businesses and, it might seem, often with rather business-like objectives of raising funds and satisfying customers.
In this Skype debate which brings together a London audience and speakers from the US, we wanted to hear from insiders to American Protestantism. This is not a debate about the rights and wrongs of religion, but rather a very specific debate from within Protestant Christianity about the form of worship found inside the megachurches.
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As scientists continue to debate the severity of the Deepwater Horizon spill and the likelihood of lasting damage to ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico, questions are being asked about how politicians have responded. Some have accused Barack Obama of wild over-reaction to the spill, and of using it as a vehicle for anti-corporate propaganda. They argue that he was playing to the gallery in order to win back some popularity ahead of the mid-term elections.
The finger has also been pointed at green groups who, some say, are deliberately playing up the scale of the spill in order to discourage us from using oil at all. Others argue that it was a huge catastrophe, and that the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana coastline have been devastated by the spill, and will continue to be so for years to come.
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In light of America's involvement in controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American government's use of torture and rendition, the panel question America's moral authority.
Speaking for the motion are Professor John Gray, Matthew Parris and Will Self.
Arguing against the motion are Simon Schama, Martin Amis and Howard Jacobson.
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There is no arguing with the fact that America is the global superpower of recent times - but does the 'American Empire' perform a vital role as the 'World's Policeman', or pursue an aggressively imperialist policy to protect its own interests? And does the 'American Empire' even exist?
Arguing in favour of the motion are William Shawcross, Anne McElvoy and Bernard-Henri Levy.
Arguing against the motion are Charles Glass, Clyde Prestowitz, and Sir Samuel Brittan.
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