Eric Margolis

RIGHT THIS WAY TO THE GUILLOTINE, LORD BLACK

NEW YORK - I’ve been reading the fascinating, six-volume, memoirs of France’s hereditary executioners, the Sansons, published in Paris in 1862. The Sansons beheaded France’s most famous condemned personalities, including Louis XVI, Danton, and Robiespierre.

Public torture, known as `suplices,’ and executions by sword, ax, and later the more humane guillotine, were a favored entertainment for the Paris mob.

These macabre memoirs make a perfect reading companion to the current legal and media torment of Conrad and Barbara Black.

Since foreign affairs and politics are more normal beat, I hadn’t planned to write about Black’s Chicago trial. But US prosecutors’ lurid accusations, the deluge of spiteful slander poured on the Blacks by the envious Madame Defarges of the media, and the whole ghastly spectacle impelled me to speak up.

I was aghast to hear US federal prosecutors brand Conrad Black, whom I have always known as a brilliant businessman, gentleman, and historian, branded a thief, fraudster, and robber, and actually charged with `racketeering,’ something I had believed was reserved for the Mafia and Colombian drug barons.

I’ve known Conrad and Barbara for decades. I never had business dealings with Lord Black nor wrote for his papers. But we share a deep, passionate interest in military history in general and warships in particular. We have enjoyed many an evening discussing such arcane topics as armor belts on WWII Italian battleships, the Second Punic War, and concrete thickness on the Maginot Line forts.

Like many other notable men, Black’s memory is prodigious and comprehensive. We also heartily but amiably disagree over the Mideast and aspects of US foreign policy. Our politics were very different. Barbara Black, who signed me on when she was editor of the Toronto Sun, has thundered for decades that I should be banned from writing about the Mideast. In fact, we have argued about the Mideast since the day we met.

While I met most of the defendants in the current Chicago trial, I am certainly not competent to comment on the intricacies of who told what to whom on the Hollinger board. Accusations that Black misled his board form the core of government accusations of fraud.

However, I find it hard to believe prosecutor’s allegations that Black and his associates blatantly stole $60 million from his company and somehow gulled a board made up of very smart people. To me, extraction of these funds from Hollinger was more likely a tax avoidance scheme( in Canada, non-compete agreements were tax-free at the time) than fraud. If Black had wanted to loot his own company, there were far more subtle ways to do so, such as slowly moving funds into offshore investments and foreign newspapers he owned.

Nor did Barbara Black’s shopping habits, however vivacious, drive Conrad to loot his company, as covens of media witches now claim. He had ample personal funds and delighted in Barbara’s glamorous appearance. It is also particularly distressing to see many of London, New York, and Palm Beach’s great and good, who paid court to the Blacks and eagerly drank their champagne now avoiding them and speaking ill of the beleaguered couple. The British leftwing press has been disgustingly vicious and just as bloodthirsty as the Paris mob.

Other charges leveled at Black range from trivial items to murky issues of corporate governance. They recall 1930’s Soviet show trials where all sorts of irrelevant minor infractions were used to discredit the innocent. Barbara Black’s $2,600 handbag may seem hair-raising to Midwestern mall shoppers, but I wonder when these prosecutorial Illinois Savonarolas last priced $12,000 handbags at Hermes in New York. These petty charges suggest a weak case. Though how the Chicago jurors, many from humble backgrounds, will react is anyone’s guess.

Ditto Black’s private jets. These days, almost every corporate bigwig and many politicians fly on private jets paid for by shareholders or contractors. Conrad and Barbara were indeed living large, as most chairmen of multi-national companies do. Their high profile, occasional haughtiness, and unabashed enjoyment of wealth made them lightening rods for envy. Black’s lording it up, and using $5 dollar words, is not a crime. He should be commended for promoting good English.

As for flaunting his wealth, as I heard the late Sen. John Connelly reply when accused of being rich, `to my poor friends I’m rich. To my rich friends, I’m poor.’

Black’s use of corporate funds and perks should at worst have been settled in a quiet civil lawsuit. Instead, the government, of which Lord Black was formerly and ardent supporter, chose to turn a business dispute into a lurid criminal show trial and then sought to seize his assets to deprive him of funds to mount a defense.

The Chicago circus is yet another dismaying example of the politicization, rawness, and capriciousness of the flawed US justice system. Black at least can fight back, unlike so many accused who can’t resist the awesome power of the US federal government and are forced to plead guilty.

It is doubly dismaying to see government prosecutors, who serve an administration that counterfeited fraudulent `intelligence’ and lied the US into a calamitous Mideast war that has wasted nearly $700 billion and countless lives, spending millions to `defend’ Hollinger shareholders. Who speaks for America’s shareholders?

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

INDIA AND PAKISTAN HEAD IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

NEW DELHI - This week, India’s feisty press was gleefully speculating that Pakistan’s embattled President Pervez Musharraf, better known here as `Mush,’ was about to be kicked out by his erstwhile patrons in Washington and replaced by another senior general deemed even more responsive to US policy.

There is indeed growing anger at Musharraf in Washington. The Bush Administration, stuck in an aimless war in Afghanistan, blames Musharraf for its problems and for not crushing Pashtun resistance in Pakistan’s tribal belt. But he has already pushed Pakistan close to civil war in an effort to answer US demands. It’s getting hard to tell who is angrier at the beleaguered general, his own people or Washington.

This week, in an amazingly obtuse move, Musharraf sacked his nation’s respected chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, for daring to inquire into the fate of political prisoners. This disgraceful act, and new press restrictions, ended any democratic pretenses by Musharraf’s regime and left Pakistan looking like a banana republic. It also stood in glaring contrast to India’s vibrant democracy, free press and independent judiciary.

High level sources here tell me Indian PM Manmohan Singh’s able government feels there’s little point conducting serious negotiations with Musharraf over divided Kashmir since he is on the defensive and in deep disfavor with the US. In any event, India has no intention whatsoever of acceding to Musharraf’s latest idea for some sort of autonomy in its portion of Kashmir.

India already has what it wants in Kashmir and sees no reason to negotiate it away. With Musharraf and Pakistan now in the US dog house, Delhi is even less inclined to offer meaningful concessions to Pakistan beyond more confidence building measures and making the Line of Control more porous to trade and travel.

Significantly, Delhi has also concluded that the US and NATO war to dominate Afghanistan has failed. The western powers will withdraw their troops, sooner, think Indian strategists, than later.

India should know. It has hundreds of agents from its intelligence agency, RAW, inside Afghanistan and has spent nearly $1 billion there for `reconstruction,’ a euphemism for renting influence with anti-Pakistani Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.

Interestingly, in spite of thawing political relations between Delhi and Beijing, Indian military sources still harbor deep concerns over China’s steady expansion of military, economic and political influence into Pakistan, Burma, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean. India’s military vividly recalls its sharp defeat by China in their 1962 mountain war.

By contrast to backsliding Pakistan, old rival India is full of pep and optimism. Its still-to-be confirmed strategic alliance with the US, and George Bush’s blessing of India’s hitherto `rogue’ nuclear arsenal, was greeted by Indians as their coming of age as a world power. China met the news with quiet anger and concern. The US has made plain that old ally Pakistan will not be accorded the same preferential treatment given to India.

Right on cue, the new Delhi-Washington alliance produced glowing stories about India in the US establishment media. India is the latest gold rush site for western businessmen and a must-go for trendy tourists.

But behind all the media hoopla over India, this vast continent remains two distinct nations. The smaller one is the vibrant, westernized urban India. The other is still a vast collection of disparate peoples, faiths and languages that remains mired in rural poverty. Nearly 400 million of India’s one billion people subsist on less than $1 daily, and another 200 million are only slightly better off. Health care and education are a shambles. India’s $728 per capita income ranks just above sub-Saharan Africa.

Bollywood, space programs and nuclear Viagra notwithstanding, India cannot advance as far and rapidly as it desires until it solves the awesome problems of rural poverty, dilapidated infrastructure, and the malign, ingrained caste system which relegates darker-skinned Indians to a life of serfdom, malnutrition, abuse, and widespread child labor.

China conquered its social ills by enforcing drastic reforms and is way ahead of India by most measures – except in democracy and personal freedoms. India’s democratic governments struggles to advance reforms through a morass of squabbling federal and state politicians and armies of nasty petty bureaucrats.

Fortunately, India’s recent governments, both Congress and BJP, finally ditched 1950’s British socialism and crippling regulations that hobbled this great nation for so long, releasing India’s latent economic power and productivity.
Small wonder Indians are feeling so confident these days while Pakistanis are down in the dumps.
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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

'THE MIDEAST MAY SOON FEEL INDIA’S GROWING POWER'

The Bush Administration’s serial blunders in the Mideast have not only seriously undermined American influence over the region, they have opened the way for new, emerging superpowers to vie for its energy resources.

Energy security has become the primary and most immediate strategic concern of Asia’s two rising giants, India and China. The Middle East will soon feel the full force of this growing competition.

China’s and India’s blazing 9% plus economic growth rate has pushed them well beyond their original estimates of energy needs, and is even causing tightening supplies in certain sectors. As a result, alarm bells are ringing in Delhi and Beijing and an urgent, often unseemly scramble for new sources of oil is under way.

Last fall, I attended the Chinese-African summit in Beijing, the culmination of a masterful campaign by China to lock up a large chunk of Africa’s energy and mineral resources. China, which efficiently integrated its energy and military policies, used financial and military aid, and a lot of flattering personal diplomacy, to secure oil concessions in Africa and Asia.

Indian officials in Delhi and the business community here in Bombay/Mumbai are deeply worried China may soon have secured all available remaining oil supplies not already controlled by the United States. They are clamoring for action to secure energy supplies for India to assure its continued economic growth and expanding military power.

India’s modest domestic oil production has been waning, forcing it to import 70% of its oil. India’s imports account for 3.2% of world oil imports; China’s 7.6%; the US 25%; and Europe 26%.

India, quite clearly, is being left way behind in the stampede to secure energy supplies. Its oil imports will need to double by 2030 from the current 2.4 million bbls daily to sustain growth. By that year, China’s imports will also double and reach 12 million bbls daily.

Since most of this oil will originate from the Gulf or Indonesia, both Asian superpowers are rushing to deploy deep water naval forces to protect their oil lifelines, just as the US has done since World War II.

China is building a fleet of modern attack submarines, some of them nuclear-powered, adding missile-armed surface combatants, and extending the range of its land-based naval aviation. The People’s Navy has gone from being a weak `brown water’ coastal force to a true `blue-water’ navy that could even challenge the US 7th Fleet in a clash over Taiwan.

But China is unable to project naval power westward through the Strait of Malacca into the vast Indian Ocean and to the Gulf due to its lack of bases and air cover. Here, India holds a major advantage.

India’s modern aircraft carrier, long-ranged shore-based aviation, and modern, Russian-supplied attack submarines and frigates armed with deadly cruise missiles will give India maritime dominance over the entire Indian Ocean from the coast of East Africa to Australia. Only the US Navy could challenge India’s sway over the Indian Ocean.

But China’s securing of port rights in Burma, warm relations with East African states, and expanding influence in energy-rich Central Asia, worries India. At the same time, India’s surging naval power has deeply alarmed Pakistan, whose oil lifeline through the port of Karachi could be quickly severed by an Indian naval blockade.

Having come late to the Monopoly-like game of grabbing as many key oil properties as possible, India is now racing to make up for lost time. Being a democracy prone to debilitating party politics and infighting, India cannot operate with the ruthless strategic efficiency and speed as Communist China, but it knows time is running short.

What this means is that some time soon, India’s strategic energy and political interests are going to start actively competing, if not openly colliding, in the Mideast with those of the region’s hegemon, the United States. In fact, it is surprising that India has been so slow to recognize that its national security will demand a deeper involvement in the Gulf and greater Mideast. While India’s strategists are well aware of this fact, its politicians have been slow to understand just how dependant their growing economy will become on imported oil.

India’s surging economy and military will need access to Arab and Iranian oil which, after all, is almost next door. Thanks to Washington’s self-destructive Mideast policies, this door is now open to India.

The five -way contest between the US, India, Japan, Europe and China for Asia and Africa’s energy resources promises to be fascinating. Welcome to the new Great Game.

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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007