The initial news from Iraq is very encouraging: media reports are talking about a turnout of more than 70 percent. This would be an excellent step towards a representative government in Iraq. I very much hope the elections in Iraq do turn out to be as successful as these reports suggest, and that the new Iraqi assembly builds on this mandate by creating a genuinely inclusive constitution which enables all the people of Iraq to be represented. But even if the elections are a success, this does not vindicate the actions of the UK and US Governments. It was no part of their case for war that the purpose was to bring free and fair elections to Iraq. Their argument was that Iraq posed a real and imminent danger and that a war was a legitimate act of self defence. (A war to bring democracy to another country without a Security Council resolution would be unambiguously illegal under the UN Charter: the only possible case for war without a Security Council resolution is self-defence.) The claim that we were acting in self-defence was false, and has been shown to be false. Article 51 of the UN Charter reads:
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
If the elections go well, we should be pleased that something has gone right, at last, for the people of Iraq; but our governments should not for a minute think that it absolves them from responsibility and accountability for their misjudgement.
The US Government published new dietary guidelines on January 13, 2005. These guidelines are updated every five years.
The Government did not take on the sugar industry by recommending that people should eat less sugar. Instead, the pitifully vague conclusion is that we should choose foods with "little added sugars or caloric sweeteners". It even dropped the advice in the 2000 guidelines that people should “moderate sugar intake”.
The complacency of this recommendation is alarming. There is growing evidence that consumption of sugar is a main cause of a serious epidemic of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, in both developed and increasingly in developing countries.
It is quite clear that the massive increase in our diets of refined sugars, added by the food industry to make the food cheaper and more addictive, are a major cause of this epidemic.
I have looked carefully at the scientific literature about the effects of eating sugar, and written a summary of it which you can read here.
Even the US Government’s own scientific advisory committee, which produces the background advice on which the advice is based, draws attention to some pretty damning evidence, though it reaches much more tentative conclusions:
A major concern with increasing postprandial glucose and insulin levels is that there may eventually be a diminished insulin response that could lead to diabetes. … … The findings from epidemiological studies indicate a possible relationship between the propensity of diets with a high glycemic load to raise blood glucose levels and increase in the risk of type 2 diabetes. … .. A followup study within the Nurses' Health Study confirmed the association between glycemic load and risk of type 2 diabetes. …
None of this finds its way into the final guidelines, which are little changed from the 2000 guidelines. While they do highlight the problems with artificially added sugar, they do not recommend an overall reduction in sugar consumption.
2005 guidelines on carbohydrates Eat fiber-rich whole fruits and vegetables and whole grains often. Eat and drink little added sugar or caloric sweeteners. 2000 guidelines on carbohydratesChoose a variety of grains, especially whole grains, and a variety of fruits and vegetables daily. Choose food and drinks to moderate sugar intake.
The failure of the US Government to highlight the well-documented dangers of sugar should not be surprising. In 2003, the sugar industry took offense at The Expert Consultation on Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases by the World Health Organization. This said that sugar additives should constitute no more than 10 percent of a person's daily energy intake. The industry lobbied Congress to withdraw U.S. funding from the WHO unless this statement was removed. The Department of Health and Human Services tried to persuade the World Health Organization to remove the recommendation. They did not succeed, though the final recommendation was heavily downplayed in the publicity surrounding the report.
How is the industry so powerful? Well part of the explanation is that the sugar industry gave $2.9 million to US federal candidates and parties in the 2004 election alone. This is the worst sort of collusion between the interests of big business and government.
There is significant evidence that we are being systematically and cynically poisoned, on a grand scale, by the agribusiness, sugar and processed food industries. It is increasing clear that the sugar that they add to our foods is addictive and harmful to our health.
And yet Government stands by and lets it happen.
We went to see Hotel Rwanda – a film about a hotel manager who saved more than a thousand people during the Rwanda genocide, by sheltering them in the Hotel Mille Collines. It is a very good film: both moving and, as far as I know, reasonably accurate in its account of what happened in Rwanda. Most of all, it is a reminder that the rich countries of the world stood by and did nothing as a million people were slaughtered. You can read more about what happened on these excellent websites:
The book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch, is also an excellent and moving account of what happened.
It is happening again, right now, in Sudan. See today's news, for example, about a village bombed, apparently by Sudanese Government airplanes.
Interestingly, three quarters of Americans believe that the UN should “step in with military force and stop the genocide in Darfur.” Only 17% are opposed. So the public is willing to intervene; but there is no political expression of this desire.
The world stood by and let people die in Rwanda. I left the cinema asking myself what I can do to stop it from happening again. The answer is that it is happening again, right now, and there is very little I can do to stop it.
In case you wonder why we like living in California (as if), the following two pictures may help to explain.
Yesterday in Times Square, New York |
The Ferry Building in San Francisco, today |
See more photos from today's bike ride. With warm thoughts to those living on the other coast …
John Naugton has a very interesting story about Dick Crossman, the great Labour politician and writer; who apparently insisted that one of the death camps be filmed as it was liberated, because
some day people will deny that this ever happened.
It was a cool, sunny day: perfect for joining the KStars running club for one of their regular Saturday morning runs in the Golden Gate Park. (The KStars was co-founded by our friend, David Hoatson.)
Apparently, lots of other people thought it would be a good day to go running with KStars, which had a record turn out today.
Whatever you think of the outcome of the election, the inauguration of the President is a special moment. The ability of a country to hand power peacefully from one administration to the next is one of the most important defining features of democracy. The US should be proud of its history of doing so successfully every four years since John Adams was sworn in as the second President by Chief Justice Ellsworth in March 1797.
George W. Bush described his speech yesterday as “the liberty speech”. As inauguration speeches go, it is not a bad speech (though Bush is, clearly, no John Kennedy). As someone who has written speeches for my own Prime Minister (albeit rather more mundane ones), I admire the superficial quality of craftsmanship of the speech. This is a testament to the work of Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, who suffered a heart attack at the young age of 40 in mid-December and who returned to the office just two weeks later to work on the speech.
But look deeper, and there is a profound logical flaw in the argument. The essential argument of President Bush’s speech is this:
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
The US Government is, patiently and subtly, trying to persuade its own people and the world that the terrorist acts of 9/11 provide a reason for it to intervene in other countries in the name of freedom.
Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. … Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. … Our goal … is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.
Let us be clear: terrorism is a bad thing; and so is tyranny. Liberty is a good thing. But there is apparently no relationship between the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 and undemocratic government. Al Q’aeda is not a tyrannical government, nor does it depend for its existence on the support of such governments.
As far as I know, Osama Bin Laden has never once criticised the arrangements that America makes for choosing its government, nor expressed any views on the liberties that America rightly cherishes. On the contrary, his argument is that America’s policies abroad reduce the freedom of others. If you read the transcript of his video message of October 2004, his complaint is about the impact of American policies abroad on freedom in those countries:
No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation … oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy.
The whole of President Bush’s speech is built on the false premise that lack of democracy in foreign countries is a direct or indirect cause of terrorism against America. There is no evidence to support this claim.
This argument for intervention has evolved as the previous arguments for war in Iraq – that it possessed or intended to possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, and/or that it posed a direct threat to the United States – have crumbled.
My own view is that there is a case for democratic nations being more willing to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, to put an to end to humanitarian disasters and to protect basic freedoms (including the freedom to choose a Government). But we need an architecture of international law and institutions to carry out this function: a stronger and more active United Nations. By pretending that this is, in some sense, a policy of self-defence against terrorism, the Bush administration is seeking to give itself the power to act unilaterally to intervene in the affairs of other countries. As well as being illegal under the Charter of the UN, the experience of Iraq should have taught them that intervening without the support of the international community, and outside agreed international rules and process, is a recipe for failure and building greater hostility.
There is a direct contradiction between the desire to support liberty around the world, and the US approach to its so-called “war on terrorism”. The US has strengthened its relationship with undemocratic countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It has resorted to detaining suspected Al Q’aeda sympathisers without trial in Guantanamo Bay. And most importantly, it has done nothing to put pressure on Israel to find a lasting, long term solution to the Middle East. These are not the policies that can be defended in the name of spreading liberty around the world.
Let us, with President Bush, declare that, When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you. But let us choose this because it sustains and supports the ideals on which the United States was founded, not because of a bogus claim that tyrannical governments have any part in the threat of terrorism against the US and other western countries.
Millions of people are living through catastrophes in places that are never mentioned on the evening news.
The NGO Medicins Sans Frontiers has compiled the top ten stories of 2004 that you should have heard of.
The 10 stories highlighted by MSF accounted for just one minute of the 14,561 minutes on the three major US television networks' nightly newscasts. In contrast, 130 minutes were devoted to Martha Stewart and 18 minutes to the indecency fine levied by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against the National Football League because of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction".
Go figure, as they say here.
Here is a great collection of all the covers of Private Eye.
I think this may be the best Private Eye cover of all time, back from 1966, on the assassination of the South African Prime MInister, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd
My Dad reproduced this very funny spoof letter in his blog – see it here. Every time I read it, it seems funnier and funnier.
We spent the weekend in Pennsylvania. You can see the photos here.
Philadelphia was the venue for the meetings which lead to the drafting of the US Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution – documents (esp the Declaration of Independence) which are, even today, inspiring and radical. It is difficult to conceive of such a group of people coming together today.
Lancaster County was beautiful. The life of the Amish people (the subject, in part, of the movie Witness) is fascinating. I was touched that the reason for the lifestyle they choose is not a sense of biblical injunction, but a set of choices about how best to preserve the family at the centre of their lives.
On the way back to Washington, we stopped, almost accidentally, in Gettysburg, the site of the most decisive battle of the civil war. The battlefield museum vaut le detour if you are passing by. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is, of course, one of the great pieces of political oratory. It was interesting to see where it was delivered, and learn a little about the background to it. (Read the Gettysburg Address here.)
I have the greatest sympathy for the family of Charlie Bell, the Chief Executive of McDonalds who died on Sunday of cancer of the colon at the age of 43. That is a tragically young age for a man who should have had a great future. It is all the more saddening because it follows the death from a heart attack of his predecessor, Jim Cantalupo, who died aged 60 last April. It may seem distasteful to mention this, but you can’t help wondering if the premature deaths of these two men are related to their product. In American business circles you often hear companies say that they should "eat their own dogfood". I wonder if that is advice that the senior executives of McDonalds would do better to ignore.
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune… to lose both seems like carelessness." The Importance of Being Ernest, Oscar Wilde
A request has flooded in for the figures for my previous posting ("Is America stingy with aid?"). So I have worked out league tables for the industrialised countries which rank countries according to:
- public and private giving measured in total dollars (the US is ranked 1st of 22)
- public and private giving as a percent of national income (the US is 21st out of 22)
- public and private giving per head of donor population (the US is 12th out of 22)
You can see the league tables here. You may also want to look at this Center for Global Development briefing note about current aid figures, and at the Center for Global Development Commitment to Development index which adjusts total aid flows according the quality of that aid.
There is an interesting discussion going on about whether the US is "stingy" in the amount of aid it gives. US official aid is 0.15% of national income. But some commentators are claiming that this understates American generosity, because of substantial flows of private giving. See, for example:
- Replublicans and Conservatives Blog
- Bruce Bartlett’s article
- This article by Susan Raymond on the onPhilanthropy website
The facts are collected by the OECD – you can see them here.The offiical figure for US foreign private aid is $6.3bn (table 13 line 26). This means that US foreign assistance, public and private, was about $22.6 billion in 2003, which is about 0.21% of national income, or one fifth of one percent. In dollar terms, this is by far the largest amount of any country. But as a share of income, only Italy provides a lower amount; and the US is tied with Japan and Greece for second-to-last among the industrialized countries. (The figures quoted by Bruce Bartlett are wrong because they include all US financial transactions including investment, bank lending etc). I am grateful to my colleague Steve Radelet at the Center for Global Development for pointing out that the claims about private giving are overstated.
Grethe and I have, at last, got around to writing an account of our cycling holiday in Ethiopia in 2002. You can read about it here. Ethiopia is a wonderful destination for a holiday. It has a fascinating history, spectacular and varied countryside, open and engaging people, and a very pleasant climate. Ethiopia needs income from tourism. Please consider choosing to visit Ethiopia for your holiday.
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