The bottom of your shoe, not the fish. The fantastic trend of protesters showing their disdain for dictators and other official criminals by tossing a shoe (or two) at them continues in Britain, as an as-yet unidentified “European” man hurls his footwear at Chinese PM Wen Jiabao.
I recognize the advances China has made in freeing its economy and improving its treatment of its citizens, but a show of dissent is always welcome. If you agree, become a Facebook fan of the latest shoe-thrower!
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says — and he should know — there is no difference between the policy of “absolute support” for Israel between Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
Obama’s own spokesman Robert Gibbs affirmed that, as under Bush, “all options remain on the table” with regard to Iran.
A recent executive order from the new president allows the CIA to continue to operate its “safe houses” — possibly a torture loophole.
Even President Obama’s massive stimulus plan continues the print-and-spend insanity preferred by the former administration.
And depending on whom you ask, Obama might want to ramp up military activity in Afghanistan — one area where Bush’s policy wasn’t quite forceful enough for the new president.
Don’t forget Obama’s new Homeland Security appointment of a “cybercrimes expert” as general counsel. You know, instead of abolishing Bush’s gargantuan Homeland Security bureaucracy altogether.
So aside from closing Guantánamo Bay in an extremely literal sense — after all, many of the detainees will remain such — what “change” have we witnessed thus far?
This might just be the Miami in me (Castro is dead…now! …nnnnow! …nnnnnnnow!), but Zimbabwe suddenly nixing price controls and allowing foreign currency to be exchanged freely, with mea culpa from the finance minister and no comment from the 85-year-old dictator himself, makes me think he is either finally deposed or dropped dead. This will help a lot of common Zimbabweans, and erode the state’s grip on the economy. But maybe, as a friend pointed out, though this seems to be against Mugabe’s interests, “they don’t call them acts of desperation for nothing.”
But really, I hope he’s just dead.
Likud Party leader and well-known soothsayer Binyamin Netanyahu has predicted that if Israel doesn’t have total control over Jerusalem then al-Qaeda will blow up the Holy Sepulchre, sparking “an escalation of religious conflict” we can’t even envision.
It seems to me that either the once and future Israeli Prime Minister or al-Qaeda is dramatically over-estimating the importance of the Holy Sepulchre to modern Christianity, its claims to being “Christianity’s holiest site” notwithstanding.
1,000 years ago (actually it’ll be 1,000 years ago to the day on October 18) the Fatimid caliph destroyed the previous Sepulchre, and that did indeed spark a series of Crusades (ok… so it look 70 years for the Crusades to get going, but news traveled more slowly in those days). Yet it seems to me that Christianity has matured somewhat since the depths of the dark ages, and as eager as some in the west remain for any excuse to start a major war, I’d like to think the bulk of Christendom really isn’t so hung up on some 11th century building in Jerusalem.
I predicted when the Ethiopians rode into Mogadishu in January, 2007, that the minute they fled with their tails between their legs, the Islamists would swarm back in to retake their place of power. I was right, but the time period was off — only because the occupiers, and the “Transitional National Government” they propped up, stayed far longer than anyone expected.
It’s been barely two years, but in that time span, Somalia’s economy and civil society has been gutted as if by fire — and in many cases, the literal sense applies. Of course, many things have changed since early 2007. Some of the more radical Islamists have gained strength after hardening as an armed insurgency. Half of Mogadishu’s population has been displaced by the fighting between the “transitional government” and the Islamist factions.
The tragedy is even more bitter because this is not par for the course in Somalia. Over the 15 years from 1991 after the end of the civil war, Somalia went from famine to having a functioning economy. Somalis enjoyed services such as schools, hospitals, multiple competing electricity, phone and internet companies and even a Coca-Cola bottling plant. It wasn’t Belgium by any stretch, but Somalis did for themselves what decades of foreign intervention never accomplished in any other country. All this despite the United States’ funding and arming of warlords — to “fight al-Qaeda,” of course — who continually threw off any peaceful equilibrium that might have been reached through economic stability. Those warlords now make up much of the foundering “government.”
The pirates that the world has been sweating lately do not exist in a vacuum — Somalia’s slide back down into the pit of poverty at the hands of its UN-installed “government” has forced the toughest among them to make a living where they can. Most of them would surely rather return to making money in another, less dangerous trade.
The Islamist groups have been fighting each other in recent weeks, but even this hasn’t kept one faction or another from snapping up bits of former “government” property and power. It seems the more moderate factions and tribal militias are fed up with the brutal tactics of the al-Shabaab group and are trying to finish them off before the “transitional” regime is officially routed.
I don’t know how this situation will end, except that it’s clear that forcing a state on authority-averse Somalis didn’t work the first 15 times, and likely won’t again in the future. The big question is, why wasn’t that obvious to “the international community”? Or — don your tin foil — maybe it was all along.
I guess this is breaking news on which I hope to have more to write later (I have a deadline on reporting Obama’s greenhouse-related announcements today), but I just confirmed that Elliott Abrams, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs since December 2002 and Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy since 2005 will begin work as a Senior Fellow at the new Washington offices (one block away from his old one) of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in mid-February. Abrams, the highest-ranking neo-conservative left in the Bush administration when it finally decamped last week, served, along with help from Dick Cheney’s office, as the bureaucratic foil for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s to give some momentum to the Annapolis peace process; tried to persuade the Israelis to widen their 2006 war against Hezbollah to include Syria; and no doubt steadfastly encouraged the Olmert government to pursue its Gaza war as vigorously and as long as possible. To the extent that U.S. influence in the Middle East has diminished, Abrams can claim a good share of the credit. And his strategy to spread democracy globally (and especially in the Middle East) appears to have prospered in a similar fashion.
