LastSuperpower

Former US attorney general Ramsey Clark has joined the team of Jordan-based lawyers defending Saddam Hussein.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-30

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Forced out of Baghdad for security reasons, Osman and his colleagues continue to collaborate with working journalists. He has worked in several local Kurdish newspapers as "training editor" - teaching editors and following their work for a week....... But IWPR’s main aim now is to train a generation of new journalists untainted by the bad habits of the former Iraqi regime.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-30

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In a move set to vindicate Iraqis in their suspicions of rigged elections in January, Washington officials are looking to add Sunnis to the 275-member national assembly, even if they lose to non-Sunni candidates.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-28

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One day ahead of a meeting with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair, PLO Chairman Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen) on Tuesday recommitted the new Palestinian Leadership to peace as the strategic option and to late Palestinian leader Yaser Arafat’s legacy as the “Palestinian guide” for the next stage of national struggle.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-24

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At their meeting in Washington in November, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair agreed to mobilize international support behind a plan to ensure that the Palestinians have the political, economic, and security infrastructure they need to create a viable state.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-23

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Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has made a fundamental and strategic change that is almost unexplainable and therefore very difficult to understand and to believe. After 37 years of the humming the same mantra: settlements=security and territorial control=security, Mr. Sharon is singing a new tune using words like occupation as being the antithesis to security. Once stating that Netzerim is equal to Tel Aviv now telling us that the sooner we leave Netzerim the more secure Tel Aviv will be.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-20

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It is too early to know. Yet there is no doubt that things are moving, on both sides of the Judean hills. For Sharon to quarrel with his own party, lose his parliamentary majority and have to turn to Shimon Peres's Labor Party to save his disengagement plan — and his own government — is certainly a set of circumstances unforeseen by most observers even a year ago. That it is now Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak who tells the Palestinians that "only Sharon can deliver" shows how far the tidal waves of history occasionally mock conventional wisdom and what appeared just yesterday as plain common sense.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-18

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There is almost universal consensus that this uprising has not born the fruits as its predecessor did..... The first Intifada was characterized mainly by two attributes that made it irrefutable. Firstly it constituted an uprising involving a ‘levee en masse’ popular uprising. The first Intifada was a show of national discontent with the occupation involving most of Palestinian society.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-18

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The 9/11 attacks demonstrated that the root cause of Islamist terrorism was a dysfunctional political order that succeeded only in producing unpalatable dictatorships, stagnant economies, and militant ideologies. For a brief moment, the administration was transfixed by a vision of using US power to remake the Middle East. But a crestfallen America entangled in Iraq seems to have abandoned its idealistic aspirations to the point that it now favors working with the same unsavory regimes that promise the chimera of stability.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-16

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The harmony and adroitness displayed by the Palestinian leadership in reaction to the dramatic events of the past several weeks, including the death of Yasser Arafat, has been impressive and unexpected. There have been few, if any, important missteps.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-16

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The second fascinating political development in the expanding Arab reform industry this week was the blunt statement by the United Arab Emirates defense minister and Dubai crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, who hosts a three-day gathering in Dubai called the Arab Strategy Forum. In his comments opening the meeting Monday, he spoke directly to his "fellow Arab leaders," and warned them that if they did not change, they would be changed. He said: "If you do not initiate radical reforms that restore respect for public duty and uphold principles of transparency, justice and accountability, then your people will resent you and history will judge you harshly." The very explicit warning was that lousy leaders would be changed, presumably by their own people, but, in view of recent American military moves in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps also by well-armed and interventionist foreign powers.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-16

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"I am expecting turnout of between 70 and 80 percent in Kurdishareas and 80 percent in south, but I fear it will be 10 percent orless in other areas like Al-Anbar province," said Pachachi.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-16

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If a phrase like "the liberation of Iraq" strikes you as ironic, chances are most of what you know about the situation there comes from the mainstream press. After all, a tidal wave of journalism has been portraying Iraq as a chaotic mess more or less from the moment US troops entered the country. The drumbeat of bad news is inescapable: looting, insurgency, terrorists, kidnappings. And, always, the grimly mounting toll of Iraqi and US casualties. This is liberation?

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-16

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News Analysis brought to you by the Iraqi Prospect Organisation. The Iraqi Prospect Organisation is a network of young Iraqi men and women promoting democratic values in Iraq.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-15

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All Australians should be on notice that the commitment we have given to the "war on welfare dependency" is not a cause from which we will be diverted merely out of sensitivity to those who would confine Aboriginal people to the status of victim forever. It is also very important that the notion of "mutual obligation" is not trivialised.

• Posted by keza
• Published: 2004-12-15

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