… is already taking shape. 298 days to go.
The Pakistani election is a significant milestone, with a changed approach being signalled to the US envoys who visited there this week and to Bush himself:
Yesterday the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said he warned President George Bush in a phone conversation that he would prioritise talking as well as shooting in the battle against Islamist extremism. “He said that a comprehensive approach is required in this regard, specially combining a political approach with development,” a statement said.
Although his remarks about Pakistan itself weren’t helpful, Barack Obama actually signalled something with his “talk to your foes” thing (bluntly rejected by Hillary in her tough pose). Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who was a strong supporter of the Iraq war back in the day, has drawn parallels between the back channel Blair sought to create with the IRA Army Council and the necessity of eventually engaging even Al-Qaeda itself. Not everyone would go that far, by any means, but there’s an increasing recognition that there should be a recognition that not all Islamists are the same, and that the running sore which has fundamentally distorted both foreign policy and exacerbated the mess in the Middle East is the lack of a Palestinian state. Our own Gareth Evans in an op/ed yesterday suggests engaging Hamas.
Of course, opportunities could be lost, and former Israeli official Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation, in an astute piece of analysis, warns that even a Democratic presidency could slide into neo-conservatism with a liberal veneer. Levy has some suggestions, which would have appeared radical only a few years ago, but now appear feasible:
Continue reading ‘The world post-Bush’
It’s a bit weird in a way that if you bought the dead tree edition of The Australian today, almost the entire review section or whatever it’s called was devoted to the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War (the topic of earlier discussion here on two threads). Weird because as far as Australian domestic political debate goes, the Iraq War is off the radar - as Foreign Minister Stephen Smith observed in Question Time on Thursday, Brendan Nelson has claimed that John Howard would have pulled Australian troops out this year, and all the rhetoric about “a great victory for the terrorists” from the Coalition disappeared on November 25 2007. Since, with the exception of revelations (interestingly timed) about Saddam Hussein’s regime’s plot to assassinate Martin Indyk (about which Indyk himself appears unconcerned, and which if you read the fine print, appear to be about low level flunkies rather than Saddam and his acolytes) and the killing of an Australian aid worker in the Kurdish region of Iraq in 1993. there’s no actual news, you’ve got to wonder what all this ideological posturing is in aid of.
But we get a reprint of Christopher Hitchens’ article from Slate, and the usual raving and name dropping from Greg Sheridan, and even Geoff Elliott’s article which is quite critical of the current US stance gets christened by a subbie with the headline “Noble fight to depose a monstrous dictator”.
Continue reading ‘The terrorists are were coming to get us!’
Shlomo Benizri, an Israeli politician from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, has blamed a recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, liberalising laws regarding homosexuality.
Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.
One wonders whether Mr. Benizri’s words have come to the attention of certain political and religious forces in the countries neighbouring Israel, or certain other political and religious forces in Israel’s main supporter, the US. If so, the mind boggles at the possible responses the next time a big one hits either California or Iran.
What is, objectively, the greatest threat to Israel’s right to exist?
If you answered Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Syria, Iran, Tanya Plibersek, Julia Irwin or Trotskyist students, you are wrong. According to Israel Jewish environmentalists and scientists, the correct answer is global warming.
Recognition of this reality casts an interesting light on a report in the latest edition of the Bulletin quoting prominent figures in Australia’s Jewish community expressing concern at supposed anti-Israel sentiment in the Federal ALP and heaping praise on the Federal Coalition government.
Continue reading ‘Save Israel from its friends’
The Prime Minister has set himself, in the language of current Government policy on global warming, an aspirational target of retiring some time in his next term of office, with his likely successor being Peter Costello.
Costello’s fitness (or lack thereof) to hold the office of Prime Minister of Australia was displayed in an egregious slur on trade unions and TEH LEFT in an interview published in the Australian Jewish News, and reported in today’s GG:
Voters know that the Labor Party is much more susceptible to influences from the Left and they also know that many of the unions that comprise the Labor Party are quite hostile to the Jewish community.
Continue reading ‘Unfit to be Prime Minister’
I’ve just finished reading Gwynne Dyer’s The Mess They Made: The Middle East after Iraq:
As Gwynne Dyer argues in The Mess They Made, the Middle East is about to change fundamentally, and everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking-orders within states, even national borders themselves are liable to change without notice. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, a Muslim cold war between Sunnis and Shias, almost anything you care to imagine.
Dyer’s book is important because it’s one of the few books on the topic I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) to really make the effort to place the current conflicts in their long term historical perspective, and to speculate on a future beyond the immediate political and strategic context (although he nevertheless documents the now familiar litany of disasters that has characterised the Iraq War). He does, however, extrapolate from that context to a conclusion which I think is becoming inescapable - much as the Democrats, either through lack of courage or political calculation, might be prepared to maintain US forces in Iraq until the 2008 election, it’s almost certain that the “implosion of public support” for the war will see troops leave when a new President, of either party, is sworn in. Dyer adds his voice to those scholars and analysts who’ve seen the US war in Iraq as a monument to its decline, not a sign of its growing power. Further, he argues that it’s likely that the US will walk away from the Middle East in toto, and he suggests that may not be an undesirable outcome.
Continue reading ‘Leaving Iraq The Middle East’
I haven’t seen any discussion in the Australian press or the blogosphere about the implications of the Israeli Labour Party primaries for the possibilities of a peace settlement. Via Matthew Yglesias, here’s a very informative post from Daniel Levy:
Barak is in many ways the father of unilateralism, having promoted the “no-partner� narrative following his electoral defeat to Ariel Sharon in February 2001. Ayalon largely rejected the unilateral mantra and notably launched a political initiative together with Palestinian professor, author, and activist Sari Nusseibeh, in which they produced a 6-point set of principles for Israeli-Palestinian peace, around which they then gathered the signatures of members of the Israeli and Palestinian publics. The Ayalon-Nusseibeh principles are quite decent and realistic and you can read them here. In general, Ami is being seen as the candidate who could most breathe new hope and life into the prospects for peace. Akiva Eldar, in this article, explains in more details the reason why.
Following up on suz’ post about Blair’s retirement intentions.
The Times is reporting that Tony Blair will establish an interfaith foundation. Sounds like he’s trying to put just a bit of distance between him and what Bill Clinton does, while reserving the right to do what Bill does. Anyway, no doubt it’s a worthier project than going to work for Murdoch.
Blair’s often been compared to Gladstone as a liberal internationalist. That’s a bit unfair on Gladstone, who hated war and also laid down some of the earliest markers for international humanitarian law. Blair seems to be the reverse, though with a fair bit of rhetoric laden on to claim otherwise. The commonality, actually, is probably the zealous Christian “civilising mission” attitude - in Blair’s case a very British disease quite unlike Bush’s crazed manicheanism.
Continue reading ‘Blair’s journey’
There was a very good, but also very disturbing doco on sbs tonight, essentially following the journey of a British reporter through the middle east seeking some answers to what influence warporn propaganda videos made by Jihadists had. Not very much, he found, with many young people in countries like Syria using the net more for cyberdating than consuming the hateful snuff films of Al Qaeda and a host of other Jihadist sects and groups. There was much to reflect on, not least the parallel that the production values and style of the warporn mirrors some of the triumphalist warporn that first started showing on CNN in Gulf War I, and the ubiquity of the use of the technological standards of the intertube generation, Microsoft software and YouTube, for intentions far removed from the utopian dreams of those for whom “information wants to be free”. But the show concluded that it was more the constants of death and destruction on the satellite tv stations rather than the efforts of Jihadists which reinforce the implication of war and everyday life and culture in the middle east. There again there were mirror effects - people ranting and raving at each other on Al-Jazeera in a format straight out of Fox News. Perhaps most confronting were the images of war and children shown on a Syrian satellite tv’s kids program. It’s as if Play School were reporting from the front. But, then, the death of children is a reality in places like Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. One other theme was the diversity of opinion that the interviewees had. All within a particular frame, but then, what else would you expect?
Continue reading ‘Unspeakable horrors’
This morning’s Melbourne Age carries a disturbing report on bad behaviour by members of ultra-leftist groups towards Jewish students in the context of recent on-campus debates about the situation in the Middle East.
The behaviour includes instances of unequivocally anti-semitic abuse of Jewish students, and vilification of democratic leftist student leaders (notably Rose Jackson, National President of the National Union of Students and a member of the ALP Left) for criticising extreme and hateful behaviour and statements by the ultra-leftists.
Continue reading ‘Has Ultra-Left Anti-Zionism Morphed Into Anti-Semitism?’
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