Still On Track In Basra
By Des Browne, defense secretary and David Miliband, foreign secretary of the United Kingdom (THE WASHINGTON POST, 31/08/07):
Recent weeks have brought a lot of misplaced criticism of the United Kingdom’s role in southern Iraq. It is time to set the record straight.
The question some people have asked is: Have British forces failed in Basra? The answer is no.
Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the international community recognized, through a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions, the need to help the Iraqi people forge a better future for themselves. The people of all coalition countries know the sacrifices involved on…
Thinking Beyond Maliki
By Charles Krauthammer (THE WASHINGTON POST, 31/08/07):
The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has had more than 15 months to try to pacify the Sunni insurgency by offering national accords on oil-sharing, provincial elections and de-Baathification. It has done none of these. Instead, Gen. David Petraeus has pacified a considerable number of Sunni tribes with grants of local autonomy, guns and U.S. support in jointly fighting al-Qaeda.
Petraeus’s strategy is not very pretty. It carries risk. But it has been effective.
The Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, however, is not happy with Petraeus’s actions. One top Maliki aide complained that they will leave Iraq…
Abandoned at the Border
By Joseph P. Hoar, a retired Marine general and commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991 to 1994 (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 31/08/07):
FOR more than a year, men and women in our armed forces have been urging the United States to bring to safety the Iraqi translators and others who have worked beside them and are now the victims of retaliation. A Marine captain, Zachary Iscol, said he owed his life and the lives of his men to his Iraqi translator. “Just coming to work was an act of heroism and courage on his part,” Captain…
There is an eerie familiarity to this 100-year-old pact
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft (THE GUARDIAN, 31/08/07):
For years past, international affairs have had an uncanny feeling of a time warp, a loop playing endlessly over and again, what goes round comes round. Ninety years ago there were British troops in Basra, and bloodshed between Jews and Arabs would shortly break out in Jerusalem. A hundred years or more after the Salisbury and Campbell-Bannerman governments, we have been dealing with just the same problems as they faced, from Ulster to South Africa, while even the conflicts in the Balkans have often seemed like the old Eastern Question writ new.
And an important anniversary also…
Secular Turks will settle for nothing less than a truly liberal society
By Mehmet Karli, who is studying for a PhD at Oxford and is a former president of Oxford University Turkish Society (THE GUARDIAN, 31/08/07):
Your leader (Islam and democracy, August 22) is correct to state that a military intervention to defend secularism in Turkey would be “bad for the military itself, … bad for Turkey and, indeed, bad for the rest of the Muslim world”. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that it was the Turkish army that prepared the fertile ground for the development of political Islam. The military coup of 1980 cleared the way for political Islamists by crushing…
We are pushing and pushing to save the Darfuris
By Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, prime minister of the United Kingdom and President of France, respectively (THE TIMES, 31/08/07):
There has been important progress on Darfur in the past two months. In July we agreed on the deployment of a robust UN/African Union (AU) force and the start of peace talks. But the situation remains completely unacceptable. In the coming weeks and months, we commit as leaders to redouble our efforts to make further progress.
At the end of July the UN agreed to our plan. UN Resolution 1769, passed –– for the first time –– unanimously, was the culmination of intense…
Bush’s Lost Iraqi Election
By David Ignatius (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/08/07):
Ayad Allawi, the former interim prime minister of Iraq, hinted in a television interview last weekend at one of the war’s least understood turning points: America’s decision not to challenge Iranian intervention in Iraq’s January 2005 elections.
“Our adversaries in Iraq are heavily supported financially by other quarters. We are not,” Allawi told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “We fought the elections with virtually no support whatsoever, except for Iraqis and the Iraqis who support us.”
Behind Allawi’s comment lies a tale of intrigue and indecision by the United States over whether to mount a covert-action program to confront…
A Deregulator in Paris
By George F. Will (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/08/07):
“We,” the finance minister says, “have a terrible past.” She also says: “In a way, we’ve had it too easy.” Christine Lagarde is correct on both counts.
Her first “we” refers to Europe, the second to France. Both Europe’s cataclysms and France’s comforts condition the context for reforms.
Lagarde, 51, has a more informed affection for America than anyone who has ever risen so high in this country’s government. She was an exchange student at a Washington prep school and a Capitol Hill intern during the Nixon impeachment proceedings. As a partner in a large law firm based…
The Washington Clock Runs Down
By Kyle Teamey, a former Army officer who served in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2003 and 2004. He is a co-author of the military’s counterinsurgency field manual (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/08/07):
In early 2005, Americans still seemed interested in the war in Iraq. If I mentioned that I had been a soldier there, they wanted to learn more about the country and how our troops were faring. By the end of 2005, as the violence continued to rise, they began to seem less interested, and by mid-2006 nobody wanted to talk about the war.
Regardless of their feelings about the troops or the…
The need for an old foe
By Sir Basil Markesinis, professor of common and civil law at University College London (THE GUARDIAN, 30/08/07):
Nearly 40 years after the Americans escaped from the rooftops of Saigon, this great country may be on the verge of a second retreat, this time from Iraq. To be sure, this exodus has not begun yet, and President George Bush’s recent speech on the “lessons from Vietnam” suggests that he is in denial. How superficial the parallel was that he drew has been noted by many. The consensus is that the speech was little more than spin, preparing official reaction to the publication…
No milk, no madeleines
By Agnès Poirier (THE GUARDIAN, 30/08/07):
I had sworn never to fall into an anti-globalisation rant but, let’s face it, globalisation is a bummer. And I’m not saying this because I’m French. All of us watch the daily turmoil in the financial markets with fear and little understanding; wake up in a gut-wrenching panic about the imminent housing property crash; suffer devastating floods and unprecedented heatwaves (don’t tell me there is no link between globalisation and climate change). And soon we’ll be struck by an even bigger crisis. Globalisation is going to strike us where it hurts most: in our stomachs. Some…
Despite the rhetoric, Iran is amenable – up to a point
By Bronwen Maddox (THE TIMES, 30/08/07):
There is no foreign country that matters more to Iran than Iraq (except perhaps the US). The puzzle is why the US imagines that Iranian involvement in Iraq will melt away if it protests angrily.
Yesterday’s skirmish, in which the US arrested eight Iranians in Baghdad and then let them go after consulting the Iraqi Government, was trivial and irrelevant to the broader clash between the two countries. However, it is another small sign that Iraq’s Shia-led Government is prepared to side with Tehran against the US, if only to avoid antagonism.
There is no reason – although…
The Visa Barrier
By Janusz Reiter, Poland’s ambassador to the United States (THE WASHINGTON POST, 29/08/07):
Congress’s recent changes to American visa laws will be of little comfort to people in Central Europe who wish to travel to this country. Citizens of these countries will continue to undergo visa application procedures whose rules they do not understand and which they consider to be anachronistic, unjust and even humiliating.
American visa policy is driven by two concerns: fear of unwanted immigrants and concern about U.S. security. These concerns are reasonable, but it’s difficult to understand why they should create a barrier against people from Central Europe.
Those who…
Who’s the Real Sectarian?
By Harold Meyerson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 29/08/07):
Nobody loves Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. In his own country, the Iraqi prime minister heads a government of, by and for fractious Shiites, against which enraged Sunnis, among others, have taken up arms. In our country, which sustains him in power, both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans call for his ouster. A National Intelligence Estimate finds his administration utterly incapable of settling the differences that are pulling his nation apart.
The bill of particulars against Maliki is long and convincing, but it all boils down to this: The prime minister has done nothing to reconcile Iraq’s warring populations…
A Saint’s Dark Night
By James Martin, a Jesuit priest and the author of “My Life With the Saints” (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 29/08/07):
THE stunning revelations contained in a new book, which show that Mother Teresa doubted God’s existence, will delight her detractors and confuse her admirers. Or is it the other way around?
The private journals and letters of the woman now known as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta will be released next month as “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” and some excerpts have been published in Time magazine. The pious title of the book, however, is misleading. Most of its pages reveal not…
Victory for democracy marks a break with Ataturk’s vision
By Bronwen Maddox (THE TIMES, 29/08/07):
The success of Abdullah Gül in becoming Turkey’s new President is a victory for democracy. But it is a blow for secularism, in that it accurately reflects the new strength of the conservative, low-key Islamic voters from the heart of Anatolia at the expense of the secular cities.
At the expense of the army, too. Despite the threats on Monday from the head of the armed forces that he saw “centres of evil” trying to undermine Turkey’s secular character, the scale of popular support for Gül’s AK party, and its big majority in parliament, has given the…
Payment for ancient debts
By Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey (THE GUARDIAN, 28/08/07):
Foot and mouth disease is devastating to livestock, but rarely affects humans. The ability of a virus to cause disease in one host but not another is a poorly understood but common phenomenon. Scientists have recently found the remnants of a virus present in the genomes of chimpanzees and gorillas but absent in humans. Humans, it appears, evolved resistance to this virus millions of years ago. Paradoxically, however, the evolution of resistance to that now extinct virus may have made us more susceptible to HIV today.
Monkeys and…
Pandemonium of a forest fire
By Jonathan Rendall (THE TIMES, 28/08/07):
The first fires of the present Greek catastrophe were started on Mount Penteli, a towering slope of forest 30 kilometres north of Athens. I grew up there in my teenage years. At the turn of the 1980s it was an idyllic place to be.
The country tracks were not tarmac. You could walk up through the forest paths to the shepherds’ huts, and wander through the glades. If I’d been able to paint I’d have taken my water colours out, or at least a guitar to serenade the landscape that Byron said was too melancholy to write…
Instructions to troops in Basra: keep fingers crossed
By Anthony Loyd (THE TIMES, 28/08/07):
The clock is nearing midnight for the withdrawal of the beleaguered British troops from their base in the palace in Basra. The date at which the 650 soldiers will retire from their position to join their 5,000 comrades at the airport outside the city is imminent. In the two months since they arrived in Iraq this battle group has been under virtual siege, its palace quarters subject to the highest rate of incoming mortar and rocket fire anywhere in Iraq. Little surprise, then, that they have already suffered the worst casualty rate of any British unit…
Congress’s Ill-Timed Iran Bills
By Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (THE WASHINGTON POST, 28/08/07):
This month, the Bush administration tightened the screws on Iran yet again. Its move to formally designate Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization is the latest in a wave of state, federal and international efforts to pressure the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into reconsidering its nuclear weapons program and increasingly aggressive sponsorship of terrorism throughout the Middle East.
Five bills are pending in Congress that would encourage divestment and eliminate loopholes in the Iran Sanctions Act, among other things. At the state level,…
