Viernes, 24 de agosto de 2007

MundoAmérica

Es bien sabido que el modelo que George Bush considera digno de imitación, por encima de todos, es Jesucristo, pero que Winston Churchill le sigue muy de cerca. El presidente de EEUU, quien ha comparado Irak con la II Guerra Mundial, admira al ex primer ministro británico hasta el punto de que tiene «un busto de mirada severa» suyo en el Despacho Oval. Reflexioné muchísimo en torno a Churchill cuando trabajaba en mi libro Troublesome Young Men [Jóvenes incordiantes], un relato acerca de un grupo de parlamentarios británicos que se opusieron a la política de Chamberlain con Hitler, obligándole a presentar su dimisión en mayo de 1940 y que contribuyeron a convertir a Churchill en su sucesor.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

Sólo las grandes expectativas de cambio que genera un régimen totalitario de medio siglo explican la buena recepción internacional que ha tenido el discurso de Raúl Castro el pasado 26 de julio en Camagüey. Es tanta la necesidad de creer en el ambiguo eslogan de "algo se mueve en Cuba", tanto el deseo de ver el comienzo de un proceso de reformas, varias veces postergado en las dos últimas décadas, que cualquier indicio, aunque sea un mero desplazamiento en la retórica o el estilo de los gobernantes, puede ser leído como el punto de partida de una transición democrática en la isla.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaElecciones

Estamos en una situación curiosa a pocos meses de las elecciones. El Gobierno afirma que todo va bien, la oposición afirma que si bien ciertos temas van bien, aunque podrían ir mejor, hay muchas cosas que van fatal. Y mientras, mucha gente en España no ve reflejadas sus preocupaciones ni por unos ni por otros. Seguramente, lo que está ocurriendo es que aumenta el número de personas que son cada vez más invisibles para las instituciones públicas. Desde mi punto de vista crecen los procesos de dualización social en España, y esa preocupante situación no tiene quien la canalice políticamente de manera adecuada.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaSocial

Actualmente, se exige, como algo obvio, libertad absoluta para expresarse en público. Pero haremos bien en pensar de dónde nos viene tal derecho. A mi entender, tenemos derecho a pedir libertad para expresarnos porque somos seres personales que crecen abriéndose al entorno y creando formas de vida comunitaria. Esta condición personal-comunitaria nos exige colaborar al bien común. De aquí se infiere que ejercer el derecho a la libertad de expresión para dañar el desarrollo personal de otras personas constituye una contradicción flagrante. Ese daño podemos hacerlo de múltiples formas: deteriorando injustamente su imagen ante la sociedad, o confundiendo a la opinión pública con declaraciones contundentes sobre temas que no conocemos a fondo.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

Maybe Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should just enter our primaries next year and Americans could vote up or down on whether he should remain in office.

The surest sign of how bad our choices in Iraq have become is the eagerness of both of our political parties to blame the entire mess on the man American officials helped install in his job. After all, it was taken as an American victory back in April 2006 when Maliki replaced Ibrahim al-Jafari, who faced many of the same criticisms as prime minister that Maliki does today.

Now, Maliki is the problem. Among Democrats, both Sens.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.

Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president.

It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history, spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments against him and the Republican Party.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.

In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

One sexual predator, when interviewed by the FBI, described his experience with foreign child prostitutes this way: "It's like being a star. They want to try my food. They want to see what clothes I wear. They want to watch my television." Such "stars" are the global consumers of innocence, exercising a particularly brutal form of power over the poorest, most vulnerable children on Earth.

About 25 percent of sex tourists targeting children are from the United States, traveling to Latin America, Asia and Africa in search of abomination on the modified American plan.

Another predator told the FBI that he shouldn't be prosecuted because the girls he used were professionals.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

On many early mornings in Tehran, my uncle Ali would bang on our door to deliver large heaps of mammoth mushrooms from the mountain of Shemiran. Every summer and early autumn when I saw thunderstorms gathering in the sky, I knew we would have giant bunches of wild, tasty mushrooms the following day. My uncle believed that the storms pushed the mushrooms up from beneath the mountain’s numerous stones. Mushroom hunters like Ali would wake up early the next morning to go after those fresh, juicy mushrooms and cut off their heads.

As a journalist and writer in Iran, I have often compared myself, and many of my colleagues and friends at other Iranian newspapers, to those mushrooms.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

The death toll from last week's staggeringly brutal attacks by suicide bombers on two small-town communities in northern Iraq has crept up above 500, making it by far the worst atrocity since the 2003 invasion. No other mass killing has come within even half that total.Why did four truck bombers make these people their target? The mind struggles for an answer. The Yezidis are one of Iraq's smallest religious minorities, who follow an ancient cult unique to themselves. They wield no political or economic power. They live in an area that is remote from the key cities at the eye of Iraq's recurring hurricanes.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesDemocracia

As protesters gathered recently outside the Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello, Quebec, to confront George Bush, Felipe Calderón, the Mexican president, and Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, Associated Press reported this surreal detail: "Leaders were not able to see the protesters in person, but they could watch the protesters on TV monitors inside the hotel ... Cameramen hired to ensure that demonstrators would be able to pass along their messages to the three leaders sat idly in a tent full of audio and video equipment ... A sign on the outside of the tent said, 'Our cameras are here today providing your right to be seen and heard.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Simon Jenkins raises many important issues about the challenges of building a modern state in Afghanistan (It takes inane optimism to see victory in Afghanistan, August 8). But his central premise that this is a British "post-imperial spasm, a knee-jerk jingoism" is plain wrong.I have visited Afghanistan a number of times and there is no doubting the international community's common view of the task ahead, nor the fact that the overwhelming majority of Afghan people reject the Taliban and their brutal tactics. Afghanistan has suffered 30 years of despair and conflict. It remains one of the poorest and least developed countries on earth.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

Why did he do it? Why conjure up unquiet ghosts? Why now? Vietnam is not only, as President Bush rather flatly put it, “a complex and painful subject” for Americans. The V-word is lodged in folk memory as an unwinnable war that America should never have fought, that wasted blood and treasure, and that, most woundingly, bitterly split the nation.

Vietnam, even today, is a powerful political toxin. Probably the only American politician who can talk about Vietnam without risk is the war hero John McCain. John Kerry tried the “veteran who wants out of Iraq” line in the 2004 presidential elections; the unwanted effect was to remind the nation of his career as an anti-Vietnam protester.…  Seguir leyendo »