The Washington Post (Continuación)

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

Did Syria and Israel conduct secret talks in 2010 about a possible peace treaty involving a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights? Recent news items — aimed at influencing Israel’s January elections — assert as much. But such discussions, usually secret and indirect, were going on for a long time.

In the four successive Israeli governments in which I served from 1996 to 2005, proposals were floated for giving up the Golan, or most of it, in exchange for peace with the dictatorial Syrian regime. As a rule, right-leaning governments stressed the need for Israel to maintain a position on top of the cliffs overlooking the Sea of Galilee, while left-leaning ones were prepared to settle for a few hundred feet of land along the eastern shore.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

As documented in the recent Post series “The Permanent War,” the United States increasingly relies on drone strikes as a principal and permanent component in fighting global terrorism. This is effective at killing terrorist leadership and is relatively painless politically at home, as it does not require massive military engagements or put U.S. soldiers or pilots at risk. There appear to be no short-term consequences.

Yet as necessary as some drone strikes have been — and will be in the future — over-reliance on drones raises problems. In establishing a long-term approach, a good rule of thumb might be that we should authorize drone strikes only if we would be willing to send in a pilot or soldier to do the job if a drone were not available.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

How is an American president to handle an ideological, seemingly irrational adversary that may be on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons even as it continues to stir up trouble in a region pivotal to U.S. interests?

One could be forgiven for assuming this conundrum describes only President Obama’s difficulties with Iran. As tonight’s presidential debate on foreign policy will make clear, the question of how to respond to the possibility of an Iranian bomb may be America’s most pressing international challenge.

Obama has declared that a nuclear-armed Iran could not be contained and must be prevented, but he deliberately has been vague about the lengths to which he would go in preempting such a threat or how long he is willing to pursue the negotiation track.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

Americans haven’t lost a war in so long, we’ve forgotten what doing so looks like — and what it costs. The only war that we undeniably lost was the Vietnam War; thrown out of the country literally under fire, we abandoned our allies to a horrific fate and left behind a legacy of terror in the region, breaking our Army in the process.

Despite the miasma of discontent with the effort, the United States and its many allies are not losing in Afghanistan. The spate of “green on blue” killings of U.S. soldiers by members of the Afghan security forces — some Taliban infiltrators, but mostly disgruntled or frustrated Afghans after a decade of foreign occupation — is a serious threat to our partnership strategy.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesIslam y Mundo Árabe,

The targeting of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girl shot nearly two weeks ago by a Pakistani Taliban assassin, brought back memories of my teenage years in Tehran, where theocratic zealots were similarly in control. The words of the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, had a chillingly familiar echo in my ears. A bullet had Malala’s name on it, he explained to the news media, because “she has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it.” He also called her “the symbol of the infidels and obscenity.”

The zealots of my era, circa 1982, prowled Tehran’s streets in khaki-colored Toyota SUVs and stopped girls and women of all stripes, ages and ethnicities, warning them if their scarves had slipped back.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaEuropa,

It should be a marriage made in heaven. Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are quiet, pragmatic politicians less interested in grand gestures than in results. Merkel gives Washington someone to call when Europe is in crisis. Obama gives Europe the longed-for U.S. leader willing to invest in multilateralism and multinational institutions.

So why does a widening divide between Berlin and Washington threaten the entire Western alliance?

A fundamental shift in interests and outlook is leaving the United States and Germany with potentially irreconcilable differences.

U.S. grand strategy relies not just on diplomats, soldiers and sailors but also on trade negotiators. But economic initiatives serve geopolitical goals.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalEconomía,

Here’s a prediction: The political party that controls the White House after January could, four years later, be out of power for a generation. The economic challenges are that daunting.

I’m not talking just about the fiscal cliff or America’s “budgetary crystal meth” habit, as financier Bill Gross recently described Washington’s inability to contain today’s exploding debt.

The risk stems from something more fundamental: The globalization model of the past 30 years is cracking up. And there appears to be no new model to replace it.

Since April, an ugly economic world has turned uglier. The annual growth rate of total global exports has collapsed.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

In March 2011, as she had done every Friday afternoon for years, Jenny Poche Marrache held court at her 16th-century compound in the heart of Aleppo’s sprawling ancient market. Wearing a fur-lined leather coat to ward off the spring chill, the tiny 72-year-old regaled visitors with stories of this city’s cosmopolitan past. When her great-grandfather — a Bohemian crystal merchant — arrived here two centuries ago, Aleppo had already been a hub of East-West trade for half a millennium. Carpets from Persia, silks from China and high-quality local textiles filled the warehouses and stalls. Even at the height of the Crusades, Venetian agents exchanged timber and iron for Indian spices in the city’s souks.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

At an international press-freedom event in Jordan 12 years ago, I was impressed with government officials’ words about the new king’s desire to promote the Internet as a means of free communication. I decided to set up an Internet radio station.

AmmanNet.net started as an electronic media experiment. It was created with support from the Open Society Institute and was sponsored in its first year by UNESCO and the city of Amman. Initially our online broadcasts were barely followed in Jordan. By collaborating with a Palestinian FM radio station, we were able to bypass government restrictions on radio broadcasts; the Palestinian station rebroadcast our signal into Jordanian air space, using our Internet Webcast.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

Recently, red lines both figurative and — since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s prop-assisted speech to the United Nations two weeks ago — literal have come to dominate the Iran policy discussion. While Netanyahu was as explicit as possible in his delineation of Israel’s red line regarding Iran’s nuclear status, President Obama has been reluctant to draw one. Instead, he has offered different, even contradictory, messages to two audiences: To Israel, he has pleaded for patience; to Iran and reluctant U.S. allies, he has warned that “time is not unlimited.”

Problem is, neither audience seems to believe him. To address this, he should communicate clearer limits on American forbearance by setting his own red lines for Iran.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

The uptick in insider or “green-on-blue” attacks by members of Afghan security forces against their U.S.and NATO counterparts has seriously undermined NATO’s trust in its Afghan partners and is straining the U.S.-Afghan military relationship. Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, recently told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that he is “mad as hell” about the attacks, adding, “We’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign. But we’re not willing to be murdered for it.”

Such attacks have killed more than 50 allied troops this year, including 30 Americans, up significantly from the 2011 toll. These episodes underscore a growing threat and a challenge to the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

More than 60 years after its founding, the state that David Ben Gurion and other Israeli founding fathers built still does not know peace. Longtime enemies such as Egypt have laid down their arms, but Syria remains defiant, and in Lebanon, Hezbollah wages an on-again, off-again, low-level war. Most troubling, Israel rules uneasily over the West Bank and is in a state of near war with Hamas-led Gaza. The lack of resolution to the Palestinian problem is increasingly making Israel an international pariah.

Patrick Tyler, an eminent journalist who has reported for The Washington Post and the New York Times, offers a provocative explanation for Israel’s constant insecurity: Its leaders, particularly its security elite, are unable and unwilling to turn their guns into ploughshares.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

The close relationship that President Obama has built with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has provided the United States with a key Muslim ally in the Middle East. Washington and Ankara have worked closely to stabilize Iraq. Yet a storm awaits them in Syria.

Turkey announced Thursday that it has authorized military operations in Syria following Syrian shelling of Turkish areas this week. As the crisis in Syria has deepened, the White House has appeared willing to wait for the demise of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. For Ankara, the crisis has become an emergency.

As turmoil in Syria has grown over the past 18 months, Ankara has presumed that the United States and Turkey were on the same page regarding regime change.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

The administration of Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took to the public airwaves last month with a four-minute attack on Grupo Clarin , the largest media company in Argentina. This was the latest in a long string of abuses. Unlike in previous attacks, the message wasn’t that “Clarin miente” (Clarin lies), or that there is “no such thing as an independent press” — as Fernández claimed in her speech Wednesday at Georgetown University.

This time, during a commercial break of a widely watched soccer match, the government declared Grupo Clarin a threat to Argentina’s democracy and announced that the company will be forced to auction off a large segment of its operation on Dec.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

This was a big week in China. Former top senior official Bo Xilai, whose wife gained notoriety for arranging the death of a British expatriate, has been expelled from the Communist Party and faces myriad charges from corruption to philandering. The dates for the Party Congress, at which China’s new leadership will be announced, have finally been set. And Vice President Xi Jinping is back in public after a recent two-week absence. With these issues behind them, China’s leaders hope to end all the speculation about political paralysis and move on with governing.

Unfortunately, their moves raise as many questions as they answer.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

Recent revelations from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has both continued and expanded its uranium enrichment activities have focused attention anew on U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic — and what more can be done to stop Iran’s march toward the bomb.

This is, necessarily, a conversation about sanctions. Given the advanced state of Iran’s nuclear program and the growing possibility that third parties — namely, Israel — might resort to force to stop it, it stands to reason that the full arsenal of U.S. economic and financial sanctions would be deployed against the Iranian threat. Yet it has not been.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Saudi Arabia, our uneasy ally by virtue of its most significant export, is a country that remains shrouded in mystery for most Americans. Not on most people’s itineraries as a tourist destination, heavily segregated by gender and renowned as the home country of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, it is not a place that invites favorable impressions. While “On Saudi Arabia” is not likely to change anyone’s mind about the kingdom, it will certainly deepen our understanding.

In this fascinating study, Karen Elliott House, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, has drawn on 30 years of reporting on the oil-rich monarchy.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

After a patently sham trial, a Turkish court on Friday handed down lengthy jail sentences to more than 300 military officers convicted of planning a coup, code-named Sledgehammer, in 2003.

Turkey’s courts have been working overtime to throw government opponents of all political stripes behind bars. Since 2007, the government has run a series of trials against an alleged ultra-nationalist terrorist organization called Ergenekon, charging lawyers, politicians, academics, journalists and military officers with plotting to overthrow the government. In separate cases, thousands of Kurdish politicians and activists are on trial — nearly 1,000 among them detained — for alleged links with terrorist activities.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Reporting about violence in the Middle East often focuses on Islamic extremists, and this is increasingly true for much of the coverage of Syria’s uprising. But in the Syrian political opposition, Islamic extremism is truly the exception that proves the rule. The vast majority of Syrian opposition activists, according to a new, systematic survey of more than 1,000 of them, express relatively moderate views about Islamic issues. They also voice support for many key democratic values — and most look to the West and other democracies for inspiration and protection. These findings offer support for the view that mainstream Syrian opposition fighters merit the increased aid that would enable them to defend themselves, defeat Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship and restrain any extremists infiltrating their movement.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalONU

In his new memoir, “Interventions,” Kofi Annan jokes that “SG,” the abbreviation for his title as U.N. secretary general, carried a second meaning around the organization’s headquarters that more aptly described the role of the world’s top diplomat: scapegoat.

During a four-decade U.N. career, including 10 years in the top job, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate shouldered his share of blame for some of the world’s worst human rights calamities. As the undersecretary general for peacekeeping in the 1990s, Annan bore responsibility for U.N. missions in Bosnia and Rwanda, where peacekeeping forces failed to stem the slaughter of civilians under their watch.…  Seguir leyendo »